by Robert Stone
“You be good to your mother, hear? She needs you to be real good to her.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said.
At Miami Airport, Holliwell had a change of planes.
Inside he found the Gateway to the Americas number in full January ripeness. It was not a gloomy scene; the crowds of tourists were cheerful enough. There were abrazos and reunions, an unselfconscious flaunting of native pottery and palm straw hats. But under the fluorescent vaults, Holliwell began to sniff out the old curse, to see around him the gathering of a world far from God, a few hours from Miami.
He spied it in small things. A purple jewelry bag lying among butts and spittle in an urn ashtray. A Cuban checking the wall clock against his Rolex. Actual fear in the eyes of a chic South American woman, as she clutched at the sleeve of her plump young son, to the pocket of whose preppy blazer a Parker pen was neatly clasped.
Of course it was all in the mind. He was tired and anxious. But as he made his way through the crowds toward the Aerochac desk, the brightly lit corners began to reek of poverty and revenge, the drawling Spanish in the general din to sound of false-bottomed laughter.
On the wall behind the Aerochac desk was the mask of a Mayan rain god, unsoundly engineered into a pair of wings. The desk was deserted. Holliwell set his bag down and turned to face the passing crowd.
He was seeing the lines go out, past the carved coconuts and the runways, from the Gateway to the lands of stick shack and tin slum, to the small dark man with the hoe, upon whose back, as in a Mayan frieze, Miami Airport rested. To the contrabandist and the grave robber, the mule, the spook, the esmeraldo, the agent.
On the edges of the crowd, hippies with yellow eyes passed—and raw-faced contractors, up for toothpaste and the dog races. Beside a litter bin, some sport had dumped his pennyworth of moldering funny money. The soiled notes lay faded red and blue, each one displaying some full-jowled exemplary of the Republican ideal in braided uniform and tricorn hat, on each obverse some arcane fit of Napoleonic heraldry—the National Bird, Aborigine, Volcano. Thirty cents’ worth of bad history, waiting for a black man with a broom.
When the Compostelan clerk appeared and confirmed his reservation, Holliwell carried his bag to a changing room off the toilets and changed from his Stateside clothes into a seersucker suit and a navy sport shirt. His carry bag repacked, he went to the bar and sat in its midday darkness drinking bloody marys.
The bar he had chosen was filled with Swedes and from such of their conversation as he could make out he surmised that some of them had been to Cuba. They were talking about Havana and Matanzas and sugar. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw that the Swedes sneered a great deal at what was around them—great equine Nordic sneers that distended their fine nostrils. They addressed the Cajun waitress in Spanish and ordered juicy fruit booze concoctions. Holliwell drank beside them until nearly plane time. The drink encouraged him.
His frisk at security made him think of Tecan.
By the time he had settled into his seat in the compartment of Aerochac’s hand-me-down DC-8, he was pleased to be under way. The compartment smelled of duty-free perfume and bug spray. The stewardesses fingered their eye makeup and phonetically recited their English greetings and instructions. The other passengers were Compostelan ladies returning from their shopping trips, a few young tourists and bankers—there were always plenty of bankers traveling to Compostela.
Flying out over the Keys, Holliwell had another bloody mary and went to sleep; somewhere between the Gulf and the Belizean coast, he had a dream.
The dream took place in a house that was large and old, a cold northern house in which there was only one lighted room. He himself was standing in a shadowy hallway and beside him was a woman colleague with whom he had once had an affair and who had killed herself in Martha’s Vineyard nearly five years before. They were whispering together; they were afraid and guilty as they had been in fact.
In the lighted room was a fireplace where no fire burned and on the mantelpiece above it a metal letter file full of opened envelopes and the letters that had been inside.
“What is there to be afraid of?” Holliwell asked the woman beside him.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
As they watched from the dark hall, a middle-aged black man in a postman’s uniform walked into the lighted room and began leafing through the letter file.
Holliwell walked forward; he felt cheerful, amused, almost high.
“I think that’s my mail,” he told the postman.
“Is this your house, too?” the man asked him.
Holliwell became annoyed and confused. He denied that it was, but he felt uncertain.
“Talk to that man,” the postman told him.
The man to whom he was directed to talk was not in sight, but Holliwell knew who it would be. A navy cook he had seen in Danang; he remembered the man’s apron and service hat but the face was a blank. He had a great reluctance to talk to that man, or even to see him. He was afraid.
Somewhere in the house a dog began to bark.
“They think I’m a Communist,” Holliwell called to his friend.
“Of course they do,” she said. Alive, she had a habit of smiling in exasperation when people did not understand something she considered obvious.
The dog kept barking
“If they raid the place,” Holliwell said in alarm, “they’ll shoot the dog.”
Then he woke up and they were circling Belize City, preparing to land. From the air, the city looked much more pleasant than it actually was. The sea beside it was a gorgeous light green; the sparkling beaches down the coast were crescents of summery sunlight.
Holliwell frowned out at the tropical abundance, recalling his dream. It was a variation on one he had been having, intermittently, for several years. It always felt the same.
At the airport, the Union Jack flew over the terminal building; shirtless, red-necked gunners lounged beside emplacements covered with camouflage netting. When the cabin door was opened a warm wet wind sifted through the compartment—and looking out at the palm trees and the guns and the lines of parked deuce-and-a-halfs it was impossible for him not to think back. But of course it was not at all the same, only the comic rumor of a war that would never be fought between the Sherwood Foresters and a phantom army of Guatemalan conscripts.
Two men with fishing-rod cases got off at Belize. The DC-8 took off again and the sea fell away behind it; it climbed over a floor of rain forest and cleared the wall of the cordillera—range after range broken by sunless valleys over which the clouds lowered, brown peaks laced with fingers of dark green thrust up from the jungle on the lower slopes. And in less than an hour—in a slender valley refulgent and shimmering—the white city of Compostela, on twin hills, walled in by snow peaks and two spent volcanoes.
From the air, the city was one of the great sights of America, but it was a frightening place to fly into if one knew the stories and the statistics. There was a sign at the airport that marked off the number of days since the last fatal accident. The Compostelans meant it to be somehow reassuring; they were always picking up North American-type public relations notions and getting them slightly wrong. On Holliwell’s last trip down the sign had marked off one hundred and eight days.
He stepped off the plane into what felt like June sunlight; the air was clear as sweet water, the sky mountain blue. Three-thirty in the afternoon at seventy degrees.
The customs search, under the guns of young Indian soldiers in blue fatigues, was long and wearying. It reflected the American AID training of the inspectors modified by local conceptions of official dignity and foreign vice. There was a man in his dotage who asked everyone, banker, missionary, elderly tourist, if they had any marijuana. There was a young madman, someone’s unemployable relative, who wore extremely thick glasses, talked to himself during the inspection and laughed openly at the contents of people’s suitcases.
Compostela was an odd place. It enjoyed
a reputation for progressive politics which alarmed conservatives in the United States. Local malcontents, if they were naïve enough to be confused by the official rhetoric into any form of organized activism, were quickly dissuaded, sometimes terminally, by the police or by mysterious, widely deplored auxiliaries with names like the Knights of Mary or the Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost.
Occasionally, the government voted against the United States at the UN and entertained a Bulgarian vice-premier. The octogenarian national poet was periodically dispatched to Havana for cigars. But the Compostelan honchos were hustling arrivistes for whom a buck was a buck; the rest was bullshit and Bellas Artes. The foreign business community regarded their government as sound.
Compostela’s reserve of international goodwill was funded mainly by the fact of its contiguity with Tecan, where, as even the most flint-hearted Compostelan cacique would gravely admit, everything was perfectly dreadful.
The porter who carried Holliwell’s bag from customs stood by while he waited at the currency exchange counter. The notes in Compostela were yellow and brown and were officially called grenadas although the people called them pesos, sometimes morenos. The singles carried the picture of a Negro doctor whom the Compostelans claimed had discovered the quinine treatment for malaria.
Holliwell put one in the porter’s hand—they were worth forty cents. The porter grunted—times had changed—and left him to carry his own bag through the glass doors of the terminal and to dismiss the boys who sought to take it from him.
Oscar Ocampo was leaning against his little Toyota in the nearest parking row. Walking toward him, Holliwell saw that he had gone fat. There was a bulge of gut over his belt and under the green cloth of his tennis shirt. His hard Indian face was softened and blurred by jowl.
Holliwell threw him a salute, still marveling at how different he looked under the extra weight. Much more European; with his little pointed beard, like an Italian tenor made up for Otello.
He was smiling broadly as he reached out for Holliwell’s bag; he looked somehow relieved. When the bag was safely in the car, they embraced.
“How does it feel to be here again?”
“Good,” Holliwell said. The volcano and the glacial peaks above the town always surprised. They made a man smile to see them. “It always feels good.”
“La dulce cintura de América,” Oscar said. So Rubén Darío had called Central America, the sweet waist of the joined continents, every schoolchild there knew it, everyone recited it, often without irony. With Oscar it was always a little ironic, always genuinely felt.
“May we speak English?” Oscar asked.
“Sure,” Holliwell said. He would have preferred practicing his Spanish on a friend. His address to the university would be in that language.
“How are things?”
“With me,” he said, “pretty much the same as always. Everyone’s well, thank God.”
“Good,” Oscar said. “And they gave you tenure?”
Holliwell laughed at his question. In fact, it annoyed him.
“Oh yes. I have tenure in my life too. But I’m not sure it’s the right one.”
“Don’t complain to me,” Oscar said, starting up the car. “That’s a stylized demurrer. You’re very lucky.”
“How about with you?”
They drove off down the airport road and turned onto the stretch of the Pan-American Highway that led to the capital. Oscar smiled straight ahead at the road.
“A long story. The moral is that nothing is free.”
Holliwell resisted an urge to ask him at once about Marty Nolan.
“Laura and I are split,” Oscar told him. “We are pffft.”
“That’s bad news,” Holliwell said. “Am I wrong?”
“I wish I knew,” Oscar said.
The Pan-American Highway took them past stock corrals and unfenced fields where lean cattle grazed. After a few miles they passed the steel-rolling mill, the flagship of Compostelan industry; there was a neat, trim government clinic beside it, then a village of square concrete houses and crate shacks.
At the edge of the city there was a floral clock surmounted by the statue of an Indian chieftain who had resisted the Conquest. Beyond that the carretera became the Avenida Morazón, an imitation of the Reforma and Compostela’s bright daydream of itself. On one side was the central park with its thousand eucalyptus trees, on the other the public buildings with Buck Rogers ramps and reflecting pools full of papaya rinds and mosquito larvae. Beyond the park was the National University, which had employed Oscar, and the Museum of Anthropology. To the left of the Avenida was a neighborhood of middle-class houses with small lawns enclosed by low cement walls; behind it one could see the shanty towns that climbed the inward slopes of Compostela’s twin hills.
A mile or so from the central square stood the Panamerica-Plaza hotel, its fifteen stories of steel and tinted glass defying Compostela’s unquiet crust, surrounded by parkland in which there were lawns and ceiba trees and tame parrots.
Oscar eased the car out of the Avenida traffic and into the Panamerica-Plaza’s driveway.
“I made a reservation for you here,” he told Holliwell. “We don’t have the house anymore.”
“Well,” Holliwell said. He had always disliked the hotel. It was a resort of the high rollers who had battened on the country; the shoeshine boys, the hustlers who lurked at the end of its palm-lined driveway made him feel ashamed. “Well,” he said, “I’ve never stayed here.”
When they had parked, Oscar took up Holliwell’s suitcase, and shaking off the doorman, advanced aggressively into the lobby with it. Holliwell followed him to the desk, where he was demanding evidence of Holliwell’s reservation in a peremptory manner. The reservation was in order.
“Listen,” Oscar said, “when you finish here I’ll take you over to the apartment for a drink. Would you like that?”
“Sure,” Holliwell said. “That’ll be fine.”
“Good. Then I’ll wait down here for you.”
Waiting for his key, Holliwell watched Oscar drift across the pale gray lobby. The lobby of the Panamerica-Plaza had a fine banana tree at the foot of its mezzanine stairway and a fetching interior waterfall. Beyond that, it was a spiritual extension of Miami Airport.
Oscar had gone to the desk of a tour agency beside the gift shop and was in conversation with the man behind it, a tall man in a lightweight Italian suit who appeared to be a European. As Holliwell watched, they both took a quick look at the area around them—and then Oscar slipped a parcel across the desk. The tall man examined its contents beneath his counter. Oscar sauntered off in the direction of the door and lit a cigarette.
While Holliwell and the hotel bellman rode up to the sixth floor, the elevator played the theme from The Godfather for them. The bellman smiled unceasingly.
He was shown to a pleasant balconied room over the pool. When the bellman had set his bag down and turned on the air conditioning, Holliwell gave him two grenadas. Two turned out to be enough.
Ocampo was waiting by the elevator.
“I don’t like it here,” he told Holliwell as they walked to the car. “Not at all.”
“Did you think I did? Never mind,” he told Oscar, cutting off an apology. “It’s comfortable. It’s different.”
Oscar got behind the wheel. Holliwell gave the hotel lackey who opened the door for him a grenada.
“Look, I’m mortified by this,” Oscar said. “My place is small and I’m not alone there.”
“Come on, Oscar. It’s fine. And you have more important things on your mind.”
It was strange, he thought. Laura Ocampo had put up with so much for so many years. Was there female consciousness raising even in Compostela? Had she someone else? It was all so un-Compostelan.
They drove past the cathedral square. Beggars and lottery vendors swept by the car. Holliwell patted his vest pocket, checking his wallet.
“What about the kids?”
“The kids are with Laura. Th
ey won’t let me see them.”
“Who won’t?”
“Her family. My brother-in-law threatened to shoot me.”
“Obviously they’re taking this very badly,” Holliwell said.
“Claro,” Oscar said. “Very badly.”
His apartment was in an old and elegant section of the city, on the lake side of the hill called Colucu. It was a neighborhood of cobbled streets and colonial houses with mahogany gates and barred windows. Here and there were new apartment buildings in the California style and Oscar lived in one of these. It was a nice building, three stories of dark wood that blended well with the ancient houses around it. Oscar parked his Toyota in a garage behind the building and they went up the back stairs. In the rear of the building was a garden with fig trees, but it was enclosed by a wall like a prison’s.
Inside Oscar’s apartment, a stereo was playing Purcell; there was a smell of whiskey about. Everywhere there were stacks of books, some still in boxes. There were also a great many pre-Columbian pieces around the apartment—more than Holliwell had ever seen in Oscar’s possession. In the little dining area off the kitchen, clay statuettes from the Pacific coast were lined up like toy soldiers beside rows of jade animals. Against one wall there were bone carvings that appeared to be Mayan, opal grave ornaments and three unbroken chacmools of varying size—the largest a full two feet in length, from the recumbent god’s elbows to his toes. The groupings had a businesslike lack of decorativeness that made it unlikely they were reproductions.
In the past, as far as Holliwell knew, Ocampo had always been very scrupulous about the antiquities that passed into his possession. He had never maintained a collection of his own, only kept the odd piece of jade, or a small necklace for his wife or a girlfriend to wear abroad.
Holliwell stood looking at the ranks of artifacts as though by doing so he were being polite. Oscar seemed to be looking for someone in the apartment.
“Frank,” he said suddenly, “have a drink.”
“With pleasure,” Holliwell said.
Oscar went to the kitchen doorway and stood in it for a moment.