A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “Instructions specify Israeli weapons wherever possible.”

  “Well,” Ortega said, “in that respect instructions are wise. Everyone knows the Israelis handle supply for the gringos here to see to the Guardia’s needs and Israeli weapons for the most part are what we’ll use. If they’re captured we can say we got them from the Guardia.”

  “Bravo,” said Sebastián Aguirre.

  “Now prior to the main thrusts we have a diversion on the Caribbean coast.”

  “Interesting,” Aguirre said, “but it’s proverbial they don’t care to fight down there.”

  “Forget proverbs. It’s going to be a good test. We’ll hit the foreign property there and we’ll kill some notable sons of bitches. The Yanquis are convinced things are safe there, they think it’s a little apolitical paradise and they want to use their property to build resorts now. We shall disillusion them and upset the digestion of their guests. Maybe we can capture a Club Med, eh, Sebastián?”

  “Very bad for our fighters’ morale,” Aguirre said drily. “And what would the French say? Did Golz’s man Godoy organize this?”

  “To his credit, he did. He arranged for excellent weapons from the old-time smugglers there, so the enemy will be badly outgunned, at least in the beginning. It will frighten the gringos, move troops from the real theater of war and politicize the population. Godoy also cultivated the active support of some progressive missionaries.”

  “An effective man, for sure.”

  “No doubt of it. Now we can’t depend on success here—the methods are primitive, the Guardia may intercept our weaponry, we may not prevail. But nothing is lost if we fail here and it’s a traditional region of exploitation. We owe our people a front there.”

  “One word of advice,” Aguirre said. “Don’t leave Godoy running a diversion. He’s too good, especially with the Indians.”

  “I agree. While the southern Atapas are fighting under a la Torre, we’ll have Godoy with the Atapas in the north. A former Guardia officer, an Atapa, will be in military control.”

  “It’s going to work,” Aguirre said finally.

  “Clearly. The mountains are the key, the Atapas. The roads and the rivers closed, the coast unsafe, insurrection everywhere! Every night rockets in the capital. Within ten days we’ll have Tecan. San Ysidro falls as an epilogue.”

  “Abroad,” Aguirre said, “they’re afraid of the North Americans.”

  “This is shortsighted of them, with all due respect. They, of all people, should be aware of how it’s going in the world. For one thing we have a most moderate non-Marxist manifesto prepared and the North American embassy will be among the first to get copies. More importantly, a lot of gringo asses got kicked forever in Vietnam and Congress will never authorize any intervention on behalf of this present government.”

  “Very good,” Aguirre said. “We can give the Yanquis the stick and the carrot—their own favorite method. We’ll be killing off their lousy spies while we’re reassuring them. They’ve got that coming for their own murders.”

  “Precisely,” Ortega said. “And what can they do—destabilize us? Destabilize Tecan?”

  The two men laughed together.

  “I want a drink,” Aguirre said. “I want to drink to this now in case I die tomorrow.”

  “Only one, compadre,” Ortega said. “You’re a living treasure of the nation at the moment and I want to keep you that way.”

  “A piss-poor treasure.”

  “Nonetheless,” Ortega said, walking toward the door, “you are hereby nationalized. Later I can lay flowers on your monument—now I require you alive.”

  During the time that Ortega was out of the room, the beating of Sebastían Aguirre’s heart made him clutch his breast. He felt nearly pulverized with excitement at the prospect of victory yet terrified as he had never before been of loss. Someone had said that the second-saddest thing in the world was not to achieve one’s life’s ambition and that the saddest was to achieve it. Who had said it? A Frenchman? Clemenceau? No, no. Oscar Wilde. He sat looking through the curtained window at the pseudo-Parisian facade on the building across the street.

  After a few moments, Ortega returned carrying two glasses and a bottle with a few inches of Spanish brandy. He poured out the liquor and handed a glass to Aguirre.

  “Salud,” Aguirre declaimed, and drained his glass. Ortega was amused and touched at the antique chivalry of his style. He returned the toast.

  “Where in the world,” Aguirre asked presently, “did you find a la Torre? The man makes me tremble.”

  Ortega laughed.

  “Yes, a la Torre was a find. A fierce one, no?”

  “It isn’t his ferocity,” Aguirre said, “it’s his essence, his life. The man is history. The personification of every Marxian insight. Everything I’ve ever believed about socialist humanism—it’s true in this man.”

  “So true,” Ortega said, “as to be a vulgarization.”

  Aguirre laughed in spite of himself.

  “Compadre, we are all vulgarizations of history. We have to live it out by the day—life, unlike sound philosophy, is vulgar.”

  “Indeed. And you approve of Golz? And Godoy?”

  “Golz, yes. For this stage certainly. And even more of Godoy, although I know you dislike him personally.”

  “You’ve rarely met the man, Don Sebastían.”

  Under Ortega’s disapproving eye, Sebastían Aguirre poured himself another small brandy.

  “I’ve never met a la Torre until this morning, still I approve of him because of what I know. Now let me tell you something about the Godoys of our world.”

  We’ll be off to Spain, damn the place, Ortega thought. Always Spain. Why not Algeria? Why not Angola, Vietnam, China?

  “In Irún we faced the Carlists. I can tell you, my friend, they were superb fighters and they had great conviction. In a way, they were the most reactionary of all the Fascist troops. We called them Fascists too but they were not really such. They were fighting a jihad.”

  Ortega nodded politely.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever heard me speak against the Spanish Republic,” Aguirre went on, “but between ourselves there were some rather sordid bourgeois elements active within it. Some of these thought to act progressively and enrich themselves at the same time through the seizure of church lands in the north. Madre de Dios, what a storm this produced. In the name of Juan Carlos, this fugitive from a Velázquez, led by their priests and by mounted artistocrats—the real thing, Emilio, not like these ratones here but men who spoke their language and their dialect—they turned out to destroy us in the name of Jesus Christ.”

  “Like the Cristeros in Mexico,” Ortega suggested.

  Aguirre made a sour face. “The Cristeros were the stage of farce. An imitation, a primitive caricature.”

  Ortega felt the first surge of sympathy he had ever felt for Cristeros. Farce to the gachupín Aguirre because they were brown Americans and not men of Holy Spain.

  “These Carlists were in the grip of a metaphysical politics from which grew baroque mutant fruit. There arose such arabesque absurdities as anarcho-Carlism—all men would be equal and all political organization rooted in the sky. The preposterous Carlos would be king-surrogate for Jesus Christ himself, who would be the true, directly responsible King of Spain. Under His reign there could be only virtue and honesty, liberty, equality, fraternity based on the Sermon on the Mount. Imagine it, Emilio, we found ourselves fighting creatures out of Engels’ history, men who in their hearts believed much of what we believed, who should by rights have been shoulder to shoulder with us, but were fighting us to the death. Well, we could never say so in those days and circumstances but many of us admired them.”

  “Courage and conviction are always to some degree admirable,” Ortega said with a shrug.

  “And you, Emilio, say ‘so what?’ And I agree. But let me tell you that I think that Godoy is a bit like those men. I think he fights for the peasants and the Indians becaus
e whether he knows it or not, he deeply desires the just rule of the Lord. Probably, he will never realize this—certainly we must hope not, for his sake. I’m sure he sees himself as a humanist and a student of Marxism. But I think unconsciously it is the kingdom of God he fights for. Emilio, the best revolutionaries, the first Communists may come from among such men!”

  “This must be what I don’t like about him,” Ortega said, smiling. “I admit only that he’s good at his job and for now that’s good enough for me.”

  “Ah, yes,” Aguirre said archly. “UCLA. He fights for Christ and you for John Dewey.”

  “Tell me, Sebastián,” Ortega said, pouring out a brandy for himself, “what shall we do about our late comrade, Morelos? In fact,” he told the old man, “I’ve already decided. But I should like your opinion all the same.”

  Aguirre was taken aback and impressed. He felt justly chastened. Ortega had terminated the anecdotes and the levity with talk of treason and its consequences. It was calculated, brutal and to the point; it reminded Aguirre of the Old Man. The Old Man might have done it the same way. How right he himself had been, Aguirre thought, in deciding that Ortega must lead.

  “Do you think me sentimental?” Aguirre asked his young leader. “Do you imagine I would plead for him?” Only once in his career had Aguirre opposed an execution for reasons of friendship and his advocacy had nearly cost him his own life at the hands of André Marty and the NKVD clique. Only Stalin’s intervention had saved him. Never again had he undertaken to defend one condemned and though he had suffered in his conscience as a result, further reflection had always convinced him that the policy of unyielding severity was ultimately correct. In the case of Morelos it was not in question. There could be no mitigating circumstances to regret here.

  “Perhaps I’m sentimental,” Ortega said, “because my first instinct was somehow to spare him. For his long service and his gray hairs. I thought we might dispatch him abroad with his ten favorite classics in the presidential airplane. Or wrap him in ribbons for the Yanqui embassy.”

  “But now you think otherwise?”

  “Tomorrow, when our people here are underground and you and I are in the mountains with First Brigade—Senor Morelos will be arrested by the Guardia as a proven Communist. Then you may be sure he’ll howl for the gringos and he’ll learn whether they retain any interest in him after he’s no use to them.”

  Aguirre finished his brandy.

  “This,” he said, “is only simple justice.” He would not himself have handled it with such studied harshness. But he was not made to be a leader.

  “Now let me tell you something, Don Sebastián—pardon me for addressing you so—we are fighting for a new Tecan with a new leadership. The leader will not be John Dewey and he will certainly not be Jesus Christ. Not Bolívar, or Jefferson or the ghost of Pope John. Not, as we say, the People. Nor even the Party, because all of these entities are either dead or not yet truly formed.”

  “Who then?”

  “With permission,” Ortega said, “and with your invaluable assistance—me!”

  “Am I to take this for cynicism, Emilio?”

  Ortega looked away from him and out through the curtained window.

  “Cynicism? That I—a plain man, a mediocre artist, perhaps even a mediocre fighter—take it upon myself to bring justice to our accursed suffering country? To bring health to her children, dignity to her desperate poor? To replace her absurdity in the eyes of the world with pride—to make housing, hospitals, schools for her masses of ignorant? To leave sound philosophy and engage life which we both know to be so vulgar? To dispense life to some and death to others in the name of a form of humanity which for all we know may never exist?”

  The old man listening to Ortega rose from his chair. Ortega turned his back on him.

  “Hombre,” Ortega said, “there is no Jesus Christ. There is no philosophy in a shack or in the gutter. There is not yet even such a thing as the People. There are only poor creatures like you and me, my comrade—and we propose to bring these things about. We propose unto death.”

  Ortega turned toward Aguirre again. “Cynicism? I would have to be mad, would I not, to cherish all this cynically—in the name of my own glory? Perhaps I am mad to propose these things at all. Yet, as an act of faith, I do propose them.”

  Aguirre fixed his eyes on Ortega and took a step toward him. The old man spoke truly of himself when he said that he was not sentimental. He had heard such words from the cynical and the mad. He had seen much of war and executions, death and cruelty. He raised his palsied hand in a fist.

  “I don’t know,” he said to Ortega, “whether one may thank History. She’s a cold bitch. But I thank her now. I thank her with love that I’ve lived to see you and this day. I beg her to allow me to see the days that are coming. You are my son, Ortega …” The old man laughed with pleasure and to cover his emotion. He could say no more and advanced no further. It was a time to refrain from embracing. Perhaps, later.

  Ortega returned his salute with a smile. He was embarrassed at having run on. He supposed that the suggestion of his cynicism had provoked him; moreover he was an artist, a man of temperament.

  “And you, my father,” he told Aguirre. “Without you—nothing. I thank you.”

  If the gringos could see us here, he thought, it would amuse them. “So,” old Aguirre said. “Death in one eye and dishonor in the other, eh. We shall have a drama.”

  They raised nearly empty glasses to each other.

  “Victory,” Ortega said. “Patria o muerte.”

  The dark came down quickly after sunset. The lights of the coastal fishing boats grew dimmer and more distant abaft; eastward the evening star was rising, the wind steady. The Cloud plowed into its faint resistance making seven or eight knots. From the galley came the smell of frying steak.

  Pablo sat beside the after hatch, watching the wake in starlight. Freddy Negus came out on deck and called him forward for chow.

  Mrs. Callahan was leaning over the galley stove, a rum and tonic secured on a rack beside her. Strips of sirloin were warming on the pan, there was a huge pot of boiled greens.

  “She’s a good feeder,” Pablo said. He was cheerful.

  “Oh, you bet,” Mrs. Callahan said. “Get yourself a drink and go sit down.”

  Pablo helped himself to a moderate measure of light rum and took it down to the fancy paneled compartment. The crew’s lounge. Tino came down behind him, smelling of diesel fuel, and ducked into the head to wash.

  At opposite quarters of the mahogany table, drinks set before them, were Negus and Mr. Callahan. Pablo picked himself a chair and sat down. After a moment Tino came out of the head, ducked up to the galley to draw a Coke from the freezer and joined them.

  Pablo looked around at the men in the compartment; all of them were watching him. Callahan looked boozy and affable. Freddy Negus, scratching his ear, looked unhappy; Tino, sleepy-eyed now, expressionless.

  “What do you think, Pablo?” Mr. Callahan asked.

  Pablo smiled. “What do I think about what, Mr. Callahan? You got a nice boat here. She’s a good feeder. I ain’t even done any work yet.”

  Mrs. Callahan, in the galley, was humming “Amazing Grace.”

  “You will, though” Callahan said. “For example, can you handle an M-16?”

  “I don’t see ’em every day. But I’m familiar with the weapon.”

  “We may be dealing with unpleasant people and we may have to defend ourselves. How’s that grab you?”

  “That’s how it always is,” Pablo said. After a moment, he said: “I hope you’re not talking about the U.S. Coast Guard.”

  “Christ,” Negus said to him, “you think we plan to shoot it out with the goddamn U.S. Coast Guard? I was hoping you had more sense than that.”

  “We won’t be dealing with any U.S. authorities. We’re not working in their jurisdiction and it’s unlikely we’ll even see them. So don’t worry about that.”

  “Local-type cops,
maybe?”

  “Not too likely either. If we have that kind of problem we tend to run. We’re a lot faster than we look. Thanks to our engineer.”

  Pablo surmised that Mr. Callahan was referring, to Tino. He nodded.

  “It’s thieves I’m thinking about. We have a few exchanges to make with various parties that we’d like to see secure. Just so everybody keeps their side of the bargain.”

  Pablo sipped his rum with satisfaction. It was everything he might have hoped.

  “You got the right man, no shit, Mr. Callahan. I never backed out of a hassle in my life and I never let my people down neither.”

  “We your people?” Negus asked him.

  “You treat me right, you’re my people. Anybody that knows me knows that.”

  “We don’t let our people down either, Pablo,” Callahan told him solemnly, “and we’ve been in business a long time.”

  Pablo raised his hands, palms up.

  “Good enough!”

  Mr. Callahan rose to his feet. “Let’s have another drink, compañeros.… Deedee,” he called to the galley, “come and have one with us.” He started toward the single step that led up to the galley space and in climbing, tripped and staggered. Negus and Tino exchanged looks as he did so. For a moment, the Callahans whispered together in the galley, then returned; Deedee Callahan carried a tray with the bottles of rum and of tonic and some iced glasses. When she had settled herself in a captain’s chair everyone except Tino poured himself another drink. Then it seemed Mrs. Callahan was lighting a joint. She passed it to her husband, who passed it to Tino. Tino took two deep tokes and passed it on to Pablo. On this occasion he smoked some and passed the joint to Negus. Negus passed it back to Deedee Callahan without taking any. It went around again in the same fashion and then Mr. Callahan declined a third toke.

  “Das all for me,” Tino said.