A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “One morning, El Caudillo arrives at his desk to find eight guys from the palace Guardia detachment on their knees in front of it. The palace commandant is his little brother Arturo and Arturo is wailing on these guys, yelling and carrying on and beating on them with the butt of his sidearm. It turns out they’ve been stealing the dogs’ steak, sneaking it home to their families. Arturo’s beside himself, making points with big brother. A breach of the President’s trust. Treason to the nation. A disgrace to the most honored branch of the service. And so on. One of the Guardia is already half dead from Arturo’s beating on him.

  “Now this is a thorny problem. These characters know all the security arrangements for the presidential palace. They know where all the bodies are buried—we’re in Tecan now, so I’m speaking literally. You can’t fire these men, you’ve got to shoot them or forget about it.

  “Amid the weeping and the dull thuds, El Hombre considers the scene and ponders deeply. Finally he tells Arturo to knock off and let them go. From now on he says, all the Guardia and their families get steak every night just like the dogs. AID will pay for it somehow. The Guardia crawl over to El Hombre, they cry on his cuffs, they lick his boots. He’s got their loyalty for life. They’ll all walk over their grandmothers for him.

  “All except the dude little brother’s been beating on too much. He’s too punchy to be properly grateful, so they shoot him.”

  Marie uttered a soft vibrating wail, indicating fear and loathing.

  “Life in Tecan,” she said.

  “But observe the craft,” Tom said. “Observe the crude but sound statesmanship. The bastard hasn’t been in power all this time for nothing.”

  “Have you been inside that palace?” Holliwell asked Tom.

  “Claro. Many times. Even partied there.”

  “The parties,” Marie said, “are ghastly. It’s like a Dracula movie but without the class.”

  “The last party I went to,” Tom said, “was after I’d been out to the islands, so I’d been peeling. I mean my skin was peeling from sunburn. Up to me comes Arturo—drunk out of his gourd, as is customary. He grabs a fistful of skin off my nose and calls me a gringo.”

  “You didn’t tell me about that,” Marie said. “What did you do?”

  “What did I do? I smiled and saluted. Is Arturo a sadistic little creep? Should I have cold-cocked him and rubbed him into the carpet? Claro. But I represent the flag, comprende? In my small way, I represent Policy. I had my dress whites on and two years in grade.”

  “He’ll get his,” Marie said.

  “Not if we can help it, my dear. If we can help it, he’ll be the next President.”

  “There must be someone better than that,” Holliwell said. “Someone acceptable.”

  “Well, Arturo’s a stopgap. While Policy decides what to do next. Mind you, Fat Frank really likes the guy. He likes the whole family. He thinks they’re American-type people.”

  “That’s a quote,” Marie said. “ ‘American-type people.’ Because they speak English to him.”

  “Fat Frank?” Holliwell asked.

  “Ambassador Bridges. Some people call him that.”

  “But not us,” Tom said.

  Bob Cole was staring out at the hills to their left. The desert ended where they rose toward the Sierra and the further hills showed dark green.

  “That’s coffee up there,” he said after a while. Holliwell thought that Zecca was glad to hear him speak. Cole’s silence had been making him uneasy.

  “That’s right,” Tom told him. “Good grade and low price, they tell me. But what do I know?”

  “Then there’s probably an insurgency in progress up there,” Cole said. “Given the situation.”

  “Yeah?” Tom Zecca asked him coolly. “Why do you say that?”

  “The way I understand it,” Cole said, “wherever you’ve got coffee in this country, you’ve got an insurgency. They go together.”

  “There’s a degree of truth in that,” Tom said.

  “Is there one going on up there?”

  “What do you hear?” Zecca asked him.

  “I hear there is. That it’s centered around Extremadura. Among the Indians there.”

  “Who says that?”

  Cole looked on Captain Zecca with a sagging smile, his mossy yellow teeth briefly displayed.

  “There was a piece in the international edition of the Miami Herald last week. It was off the AP wire—I think the dateline was San José. You must have seen it.”

  “I saw it,” Zecca said. “Might be something to it.”

  “Well,” Cole said, turning his gaze back toward the hills, “I’m thinking of going up there.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Zecca said.

  “You oughtn’t to,” Marie told Cole. “I’ve been around there. If I were you I wouldn’t go up there right now.”

  “I’m just doing my job. Like you folks are. Like Mr. Holliwell.”

  What job? Holliwell thought. What does he mean?

  “If I know you’re up there,” Zecca said, “I’m going to worry about you. The Atapas don’t like strangers around in the best of times and they’re not nearly as tranquil as they look. Especially these days.”

  “Do you suggest I register my presence with the embassy in San Ysidro?”

  “Honest to God, Mr. Cole,” Zecca said, “I don’t know what to suggest. Except that you not go.”

  “I understand,” Cole said.

  They drove on in silence over the dusty plateau. The coastward volcano was abreast of them, a second, larger rose ahead. To Holliwell, they seemed freakish mountains; only malignant gods could inhabit or inform them. They rose solitary out of featureless tableland, bare, without harmony, unbeautiful enough to appear exactly what they were—burst excrescences on Tecan’s pocked dusty hide. A geology lesson, he thought. They communicated a troubling sense of the earth as nothing more than itself, of blind force and mortality. As mindlessly refuting of hope as a skull and bones. The landscape was a memento mori, the view ahead like a dead ocean floor.

  “Scary,” Holliwell said.

  Tom and Marie laughed.

  “We thought it was only us,” Marie said.

  “The Tecanecans are very big on their volcanoes,” Tom told Holliwell. “They’re on the flag and the national seal. They run up and down the country along a fault. First thing a local will ask you when you come in-country is whether you’ve seen the volcanoes or not.”

  “Key-to-the-country kind of thing?”

  “I never had it put that elaborately,” Tom said. “I don’t think anyone here thinks they’re the key to the country. They’re just big things for turistas to gawp at. I mean they’re there and they’re huge and uniquely Tecanecan, so the Tecs are proud of them. It’s their duty to be.”

  “What does the national poet say? Is he on about them?”

  “They don’t have a national poet to speak of. They never had a Rubén Darío in Tecan. Never saw the need of one.”

  “There’s a verse about the volcanoes in the national anthem though,” Marie said. “I can’t remember how it goes. It’s pretty trite.”

  “The first movement of Brahms’ First,” Tom told them. “That’s the national anthem. Moving as hell. In the old days before the Marines came the Tecanecan Army could goose-step to it. The Marines made them knock it off.”

  They began to pass more buses on the road. The number of dirt roads with signs indicating villages off the road increased.

  Tom slowed down, wary of children and cattle on the highway, sounding his horn at turns to warn the burro carts that appeared more and more often now as they approached the capital. From time to time, they passed a lone Indian bent under a load of firewood. People looked down at the dirt as the car sped by them.

  “What I wonder,” Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, “is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do.”

  “I’m just a soldier,” Zecca said. “But I think the answe
r to that is no. It sounds too simple to me.”

  “But it’s not a simple question,” Marie said brightly. “It’s a really complicated one.”

  Cole turned to Holliwell.

  “How about you, sir? You’re something of an expert. What do you think the answer is?”

  “I have to confess,” Holliwell said, “that I haven’t figured that out. There are lots of gaps in my expertise. I don’t know what the answer is.”

  “We have to believe it’s no, don’t we?” Cole asked. “We couldn’t face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration—what does that make us?”

  “It makes us vampires,” Holliwell said. “It makes us all the cartoon figures in the Communist press.”

  “What if you found out it were true?”

  “Me? What I do doesn’t matter. I’d go on doing what I’m doing.”

  “How about you, Captain?”

  Zecca took one hand from the wheel and turned partway around toward Cole. Marie kept her eyes on the road.

  “What are you, Mr. Cole?” Captain Zecca asked. “Some kind of an agitator?” He asked the question humorously, with more of Toledo in his voice than he usually permitted.

  “Not at all,” Cole said.

  At the approaches to the Tecanecan capital of San Ysidro, the Pan-American Highway wound down in switchbacks from the high desert into a lush tropical plain beside a great lake. As they started the descent, the sun hung over the low hills of the coffee country and the contours of the two visible volcanoes softened to show Holliwell a more insidious menace. They were running late. After sundown, the inter-capital truck traffic would be on the road—a mortal risk.

  “When you were in Vietnam,” Holliwell asked Cole, “what did you do there?”

  In the expectant silence that filled the car, Cole seemed to force an answer.

  “I was in the Army,” he told them. “In the Army there for three years because I extended.”

  “Is that right?” Zecca said.

  “I started with an infantry platoon, a second lieutenant. Then I was on staff, with intelligence. Then later … I went back. With AID. And then I went back again as press, free-lancing.”

  “You must have liked it there,” Zecca said.

  “In a way,” Cole said, “I liked it very much.”

  The captain smiled thinly.

  “It held a fascination for you. A kind of moral fascination, am I right?”

  “Well …” Cole began. “Yes,” he said.

  “I can understand that very well. Right, Marie?”

  “Sure,” Marie said. “A lot of our friends were like that. We were a little like that too, weren’t we?”

  “We sure were,” Tom said. “And we were courting, so that lent color to our moral fascination.”

  “I never found time to go courting,” Cole told him.

  “Too bad,” Zecca said. “You find time to get laid? Or weren’t you interested?”

  “Sexist talk,” Marie hissed softly. “Jeez.”

  Holliwell asked Cole if he had been much in the delta. He had been. He had been out to the island and met the coconut monk.

  “He’s in jail now, that guy,” Tom said. “They locked him up.”

  “That’s a mistake if it’s true,” Cole said.

  “It’s true,” Holliwell found himself saying. “And they didn’t lock him up by mistake. They know what they’re doing.”

  “Fucking-A,” Zecca said.

  Holliwell asked Cole if he had been much in the delta. He had been. He had been out to the island and met the coconut monk.

  “He’s in jail now, that guy,” Tom said. “They locked him up.”

  “That’s a mistake if it’s true,” Cole said.

  “It’s true,” Holliwell found himself saying. “And they didn’t lock him up by mistake. They know what they’re doing.”

  “Fucking-A,” Zecca said.

  Cole only shrugged and looked more unhappy.

  Fields of bananas grew on the slopes above San Ysidro, introduced there from the east coast. The town below was a white seaport city with the lake doing duty as ocean. It was a lake twice the size of the Lago Azul but lifeless from four hundred years of ill use. Its surface was still and dark. The declining sun had passed over it.

  They drove past a summerhouse among the young banana trees, a pocket villa hung with Japanese lanterns. Below them, a mile or so from the foamy edge of the lake, was a reservoir, surrounded by a cement wall.

  “The Marines put that in during the nineteen thirties,” Zecca told them. “You can drink the water here. Only drinkable water between El Paso and God knows where.”

  “That at least,” Marie said. “So our presence here hasn’t been all bad news.”

  Cole stirred in his seat, his thoughts apparently fixed on the coffee country. Holliwell lit a cigarette.

  Entering the capital, the Pan-American Highway made a brief promenade into town, running along the lakefront past several blocks of crumbling, incongruously Victorian mansions and lit by cast-iron streetlamps of antique Parisian design. After less than half a mile of this, it broke up into unpaved narrow streets.

  San Ysidro, in its tuck of the lake valley, was losing the light. The cramped streets near the lake were suddenly dark, scantily lighted, but alive with the din of a half-seen crowd. Driving slowly, Zecca put his head out of the car window to see past the screen of dust and crushed insects that fouled his windshield.

  On corners, vendors sold roasted maize from pushcarts, barefoot families made their way along the damp walls, ready to press back against them as cars passed. At the intersection where there was a little light, groups of young men in bright plastic shirts stood together drinking rum, listening or singing to someone’s guitar. There was much music to be heard—but these streets were not festive or lyrical. The mood was restless—febrile, Holliwell thought—furtive. The songs were short on melody, driven and mocking, calling forth from those who listened a hard humorless laughter. Holliwell could not understand a word of the shouted, perversely inflected Tecanecan Spanish that went back and forth in the darkening streets as they passed. He and Cole were tense and silent.

  “Late at night,” Marie said, “these are bad streets.”

  Holliwell caught a whiff of marijuana on the air, something he had never experienced before in a public place in a Spanish-American city. From a nearby street, he heard what seemed to be screaming.

  “Pretty lively for this time of evening,” he said.

  Zecca pulled his head back in and steered carefully round a turn.

  “It’s always lively on this side of town. It’s one big bad party.”

  Someone fired a water gun at Cole’s closed window. Cole looked at the dirty water streaking down the glass beside him.

  “Hey, Cole,” Zecca said, “a lot of the people here are from Extremadura. You could find out a lot by checking it out over here, discreetly. In the daytime.”

  “I think I’d do better out there, don’t you? I mean, I’d feel kind of heavy-footed around here. I’d be drawing crowds.”

  “You’re gonna draw crowds anywhere,” Zecca said. It was uncertain whether he was speaking generally in reference to the country or of Cole.

  Holliwell began to notice that there were a surprising number of cars in the narrow streets, most of them American cars only a few years old. They drove along a block of open arcaded shops and came on a cathedral square centered on a monumental obelisk. The rotary around it ran its course like a mechanized feeding frenzy, a riot of oversized cars in every condition, bad driving and ostrich optimism.

  “Well, shit,” Zecca said, and drove the Honda into it. Marie clung to the back of her seat, her face on her arm. Cole and Holliwell held to the top of the car interior.

  They went halfway around the rotary and up a wide, park-sided avenue that ran between the cathedral square and another plaza, visible in the distance, where there
were neon signs and taller buildings—office buildings lit on every story.

  To one side of the avenue along which they drove was a forest of low trees, divided from the broad clean sidewalk by a high barred fence. On the other side there was more greenery. There, only the tops of trees were visible because the thick wire fence along the street was backed with a wall of cactus.

  “On your right here,” Tom Zecca said, “behind the wire and the cactus and the German shepherds is the palace of the President. Over there is the Central Park and the Zoo, famous for its three-legged cow.

  “There are about ten thousand people bedding down in that park now. They’re a lot worse off than the people back there in Mamalago. But the nearest shack is more than a mortar’s distance away from the Palace. That’s a trick we taught the President. Anything closer is patrolled by the Guardia. The cracks in that obelisk back there came from the earthquake ten years ago. The people in Mamalago moved into the park and some of them never moved back. Then more folks came down from the hills and took over the houses in Mamalago. If you’re in Mamalago it’s rough, but it’s better than the park. Mamalago and the park are better than the shanty towns on the west slope. If it were still light, you’d have got a good look at the cathedral and you’d have seen the Palace of Culture beside it.”

  “Where they have the midget wrestling,” Marie said.

  “What’s the obelisk for?” Cole asked.

  “Usual shit,” Zecca said. “Victory and independence and successful struggle. Tecan always wins. It won the Second World War.”

  It was a dead-hot city, sea level and without hope or promise of an ocean breeze. As they drove along the ceremonial avenue, the day’s heat welled up from the earth; the mixed smell of the jungle plants and of cheap gasoline threatened to close off breath.

  As they passed the palace gatehouse the smells, the sight of the sentry box in its well of light under the jacaranda, the brown sawed-off soldiers in MP’s helmets brought Holliwell such a Vietnam flash that he was certain that they must all be feeling it together. It awakened in him so potent a mixture of nostalgia and dread that in spite of the morning booze-up which was still fouling his blood, he began to feel like a drink.