A Flag for Sunrise
Praise for
ROBERT STONE’S
A Flag for Sunrise
“One of the best books of the year.”
—
Time
“At once a high-tension adventure tale, a densely plotted political novel and, at its heart, a meditation on the availability of God.… Robert Stone writes as if announcements of the death of the novel had not reached him;
A Flag for Sunrise
shows narrative confidence, criss-crossed motives, a moral sense and sustained inventiveness of an amplitude we have almost given up expecting from fiction.”
—
Newsweek
“[Robert Stone is] one of the most impressive novelists of his generation.”
—
The New York Review of Books
“[
A Flag for Sunrise
] has the pace and suspense of a first-class thriller.… It catches the shifting currents of contemporary Latin American politics … [and] shows, among other things, the human condition driven to extremity by Americans.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“The romantic and moral elements of [this] novel recall Hemingway …
A Flag for Sunrise
offers splendid description of primordial landscape and ocean.… [Stone’s] tone and vision have the purity of ice and something like the cruelty of truth.”
—
Saturday Review
ROBERT STONE
A Flag for Sunrise
Robert Stone’s first novel,
A Hall of Mirrors
, won a William Faulkner Foundation Award.
Dog Soldiers
received a National Book Award, and
A Flag for Sunrise
won both the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of
Children of Light.
His other honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the John Dos Passos Prize for literature, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Both
A Hall of Mirrors
and
Dog Soldiers
were made into major motion pictures. His most recent novel is
Outerbridge Reach.
Mr. Stone lives with his wife in Connecticut.
ALSO BY ROBERT STONE
A Hall of Mirrors
Dog Soldiers
Children of Light
Outerbridge Reach
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 1992
Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1981 by Robert Stone
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1981.
Portions of this book have been previously published in
American Review, Harper’s
, and
TriQuarterly.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stone, Robert.
A flag for sunrise / Robert Stone.—1st vintage international ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81418-0
I. Title.
PS3569.T6418F59 1992
813’.54—dc20 91-50278
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
v3.1
for Deidre
Contents
Father Egan left off writing, rose from his chair and made his way—a little unsteadily—to the bottle of Flor de Cana which he had placed across the room from his desk. The study in which he worked was lit by a Coleman lamp; he had turned the mission generators off to save kerosene. The shutters were open to receive the sea breeze and the room was cool and pleasant. At Freddy’s Chicken Shack up the road a wedding party was in progress and the revelers were singing along with the radio from Puerto Alvarado, marking the reggae beat with their own steel drums and crockery.
As Egan drank his rum, his inward eye filled with a vision of the Beguinage at Bruges, the great sculptured vault overhead, the windows inlaid with St. Ursula and her virgins, the columns gilded with imperial red and gold. It had been many, many years since he had seen it.
The Coleman lamp cast the shadow of his desk crucifix across the piles of books, bills and invoices that cluttered the space around his typewriter. He took a second drink of rum and considered the cruciform shadow, indulging the notion that his office space suggested the study of some heterodox doctor of the Renaissance, a man condemned by his times but sustained by faith in God and the Spirit among men.
The work on which Father Egan was engaged would fail of imprimatur, would be publishable only by a secular house. When it appeared he would be adjured to silence. He would resist, appeal to Rome if only to gain a wider hearing. When Rome thundered condemnation, he would turn to the Spiritual Church, the masses so hungry for comfort in a violently dying world.
It was the composition of this work that had led to Father Egan’s intemperance in drink. For over thirty years as a Devotionist Father
he had been a moderate man in that regard—but writing was hard for him and the cultural deprivations of his voluntary mission posting had rendered his life difficult by the day. He had rewritten the work six times and had reached the point where he could no longer endure it without alcohol. Yet without the work, he had found, life itself was not endurable. As for his faith—it was in a state of tension, the dark of his soul’s night was such that he could not bring it to bear. And if that faith seemed moribund, he could only hope that it had returned to the seed to grow, to be transmogrified, dried and hardened in the tropical sun, destined to rise like a brilliant Tecanecan phoenix from Pascal’s fire.
He had put by him the thought of a third slug and was halfway back to his desk when he heard the sound of a jeep’s engine on the beach below the mission buildings; he stopped to listen as the jeep drew closer. At length, he heard the brakes squeal and the engine die, and then a man’s ascending step on the stairs that led from the beach to his veranda.
“Oh my fucking word,” Father Egan said aloud.
He quickly took the bottle of Flor de Cana, put it in his shower stall and drew the curtain that closed off the bath. Then, popping a mint candy in his mouth, he stepped outside to the veranda.
It was the night of the full moon and the ocean before him was aglow. The tips of coral along the reef, the wind-driven whitecaps beyond were edged in silver shadow, the very grains of sand on the beach sparkled faintly. In the dispensary wing, an oil lamp burned behind Sister Justin Feeney’s bamboo shade.
At the foot of the steps a jeep had been parked, and a man was climbing toward the main house, humming along with the music from Freddy’s. He climbed very slowly, putting both feet on each step and shuffling to the reggae beat. On the last step, he raised both hands above his shoulders in a little flutter of stylized ecstasy and lurched onto the veranda. When he saw Father Egan in the moon-swept darkness, he stepped back, startled.
The man wore a white
guayabera
and dark trousers. There was a holstered pistol on his hip, hanging from a webbed guard belt which he had buckled casually over his loose shirt. His hair was combed slickly across his skull; he was not a man of the coast, but a mestizo from the interior. Egan saw that it was Lieutenant Campos, social
agent of the Guardia Nacional, uncharacteristically out of uniform and thoroughly drunk. Recognizing Campos, he drew his breath in fear.
“Holy Father,” Lieutenant Campos said. He crossed himself and kissed his fingers as though Egan were an object of veneration. “Bless me, Father,” he said in Spanish. “Bless me, for I have sinned.”
Egan, having coiled a sentence of greeting, released it without enthusiasm.
“Good evening, Lieutenant, my friend. How may we help you?”
“Yes,” Lieutenant Campos said. “And now you have to come with me.”
Father Egan recoiled, in spite of himself. The words froze his heart. Campos was staring at Sister Justin Feeney’s lighted window. The two men stood bathed in the unrelenting moonlight, both of them swaying slightly with drink. At Freddy’s Chicken Shack, the beat went on.