A Flag for Sunrise (16 page)

“What’s the matter, Pablo?” Callahan asked. “You feeling O.K.?”

“I don’t know,” Pablo said. “Sometimes you get the idea all anybody’s interested in down here is money.”

Mr. and Mrs. Callahan looked at him pleasantly.

“Well,” Callahan said, “that’s because it’s such a materialistic society down here. They don’t have the same kind of spiritual values we have up home.”

“Right,” Mrs. Callahan said, “one gets caught up in it.”

Pablo smiled and stood up, thinking that he might have trouble with these people. “Hope to see you at five,” he said.

On the way out he said so long to Cecil.

When Pablo was on his way, the Callahans drank another round.

“Jesus, it’s depressing,” Mrs. Callahan said. “They’re all such creeps. And what we really need is an extended family.”

“The only question these days,” Callahan said, “is, will they turn on you? It’s sad but that’s the way things are.”

“I think I’ve just decided,” Mrs. Callahan said, glancing toward the bar, “that I don’t like him. I think he’s Cecil’s idea of a gag.”

“He’s a deserter,” Callahan said. “Those guys are usually a good bet.”

“Maybe we’re supposed to think he’s a deserter. Maybe he’s a Fed.”

“He’s too fucked up to be a Fed. I mean, they’re just not that good.”

“Maybe we can get by without him?”

“I don’t think so,” Callahan said.

They sat in silence for a while.

“Look, Deedee, on the level of instinct I go for him. I think he’s the best man we’ve seen. I think he knows how to take orders. I’m sure he doesn’t like it much—but I think he takes them.”

“I don’t like him,” Mrs. Callahan said.

“There’s three of us and one of him—and he can’t really navigate. But I’ve got to get his passport and check him out. Cecil probably knows where it is.”

“It’s your decision,” the woman said.

“I used to like it,” Callahan said, “when the baddest thing around these parts was me. These days I’m just another innocent abroad.”

Mrs. Callahan finished her rum and lit a small thin cigar.

“It’s really scary,” she said. “People are getting to be a disgrace to the planet.”

Callahan smiled dreamily.

“We’ve been lucky, kid. We’ve met some dingalings but we’ve met some sweethearts, too.”

Mrs. Callahan waved the cigar smoke away from their table.

“Don’t get me going,” she said. “I’ll start to cry.”

Six stories below Holliwell’s window, a French teen-ager and her mother were playing in the swimming pool. The women were fair; their bodies were tanned and charged with the sunlit sensuality of fruit in the softening afternoon light. The daughter was doing laps and even within the confines of the Panamerican’s pool it was apparent that she was a fine swimmer. At each length, she performed a racer’s turn while her mother watched her with a brown arm resting on the tiles, shading her eyes from the sun and sipping lemonade from a tall iced glass. Tame parrots wandered among the plants before the poolside suites. Beside the wall that divided the hotel pool from the Compostelan street outside, two Indians in braided uniform jackets hosed down the garden, looking neither at the guests nor at each other.

Holliwell was sitting on his pocket balcony watching the Frenchwomen when it occurred to him that, against safety and reason, he felt like going to Tecan after all. The Corazón Islands stood off her Caribbean coast, enemies to winter and the emptiness that awaited him at home. Tecan was what it was, but it was also, like Compostela, the sweet waist of America. A seductress,
la encantada
, a place of pleasure for the likes of him.

Beyond the snow bird’s impulse was his mounting curiosity about the Catholics there. It would be strange to see such Catholics, he thought. It would be strange to see people who believed in things, and acted in the world according to what they believed. It would be different. Like old times. He owed nothing to anyone; he could go or not. What he might do and what he might see there would be no one’s business but his own.

He put away the thought and drank more and the pool below him surrendered to shade. He had stayed in his room in the expectation that some sort of social invitation would come from the university, that someone there would at least call to welcome him.

No calls came, however, and he suspected that it must be because of Oscar. Perhaps they imagined that they were being preyed on by a faggot cabal.

Fuck them, he thought, pacing the tile floor drink in hand. They would despise his address. Leftists and rightists alike would find it so much gringo decadence.

The women would be puzzled and threatened, they would turn to their husbands for explanation. The husbands would explain about gringo decadence. That professor, they’d say, smacking their lips, he’s a friend of Ocampo’s, he’s a
maricón.
It’s no surprise he feels that way.

But hasn’t he a wife? the women would ask.

It proves nothing with them, the men would say. Believe it, he has little boyfriends like Ocampo. The wife undoubtedly has lovers.

Then their poor children, the women would say.

And the men—whether of the left or right would say—
Mujer
, the children—you can see them for yourself. They come here all the time. Look at their mouths and their eyes. The boys all look like women. They can’t satisfy the girls. All of them are addicted to drugs.

How bitter he had become, Holliwell thought. His own venom startled him.

So be it. If the Autonomous University would not give him dinner, he would come back to the hotel after the lecture and take his dinner there. Perhaps Oscar would join him.

With a drink beside him, he took up his Spanish-English dictionary and worked over the address for a while.

Within the hour there was another bout of hide-and-seek with the hotel phone. He found himself in conversation with a man from the Cultural Affairs section of the American Embassy named Vandenberg. Vandenberg regretted that the Cultural Affairs section had not been able to sponsor his address. He regretted further that he himself would not be able to attend although he understood that there were people from the embassy community who planned to go.

Holliwell explained that it had all been set up very suddenly,
through friends; he understood that there had been no time to arrange official sponsorship.

Vandenberg said that everyone was very happy all the same.

“Keep us in mind,” he told Holliwell.

Holliwell assured him that he would indeed.

By six o’clock there were no further calls. Holliwell had a shower to sober himself and then drank more, as though that would further the process. Going along the hallway to the elevator, he observed that his steps were unsteady. On his way across the lobby, he stopped at the bar for a drink, spreading his address out on the polished mahogany before him. He drank two
escosses
and listened to the voices of the men at the table nearest him; there were four, speaking together in accented English. Turning casually in their direction, Holliwell surmised that two of them were Compostelans. The others, from the pitch of their English and their starched white open-necked shirts, he decided must be Israelis. They were too far away and spoke too softly for him to determine what it was they talked about.

Holliwell gathered up his speech and strode out into the gathering darkness, walking the length of the hotel path to stand beside the policemen who stood at the gate to fend off beggars and shoeshine boys. When a taxi pulled up at the curb, he caught it and set off in a peel of rubber for the Autonomous University.

The palm-bordered blocks of the Central Avenue were deserted as Holliwell’s taxi sped along them. At one intersection, the cab halted to let a column of youths march across the roadway and at first Holliwell mistook the procession for some sort of demonstration. But as the column emerged from the verdant gloom of the dark traffic island, he saw that it was flanked by policemen with carbines and that the boys and the few girls among them marched ten abreast in a quasi-military step, silent and expressionless. Most of the boys long-haired, the girls in jeans. There were couples among them going hand in hand. The policemen marched them on across the right-hand lanes of the avenue and up a darkened side street.

When the cab was under way again, Holliwell asked his driver who they were.

“
Jipis
,” the driver said. “Youth without morals.” The driver seemed to be something of a philosopher, an elderly Spaniard with clerical steel glasses.

“What will be done with them then?”

The driver shrugged. “No harm.” Then he turned in his seat and smiled. “Perhaps haircuts
a la policía.
”

At the floral clock, the driver plunged cursing into the maelstrom of rotary traffic. Holliwell held his breath.

“Still,” he suggested to the driver when they had cleared the rotary, “it’s a free country.”

“
Claro
,” the driver said. “Ever since the Reform.”

At the edge of the university complex, there was a monument to the Reform that had made Compostela a free country. Once past it, they drove among the floodlit fountains and concrete lawns until they had pulled up before the House of the Study of Mankind.

“So here,” Holliwell offered, as he paid and overtipped the driver, “it’s not like Tecan.”

The driver looked shocked.

“No no no,” he said with passion. “It’s not free there. And it’s very bad for the poor.”

The foyer of the House of the Study of Mankind had murals on its walls by a celebrated Compostelan painter, an imitator of Orozco and a habitué of the Brasserie Lipp. The murals contrasted awkwardly with the neo-Florentine design of the building but they did portray mankind in a variety of transcendent postures. The foyer, as Holliwell entered it, was crowded with students who had gathered in conspiratorial groups along the wall. They spoke watchfully and eyed Holliwell as he passed. Many of them appeared to be youth without morals and there were some with the
pistolero
style. There was a great deal of laughing among them, but it was not pleasant to hear. It echoed in the dead space of the windowed Italianate dome high overhead.

There were two exhibit halls at either end of the foyer, both of them closed off behind gates of metal grill. In one was a diorama portraying the history of the Republic with an emphasis on the treachery of her neighbors and her sufferings at the hands of the church. The Catholic university, in another suburb, had one very like it which recounted the Neronian martyrdom to which the church had been periodically subjected by her ungrateful Compostelan children. The hall on the opposite side of the foyer was a museum, a dull affair of feathered rattles in glass cases. Both halls had been secure behind their grill gates for nearly ten years.

Beyond the entrance hall was a patio with native plants and a Spanish fountain; Holliwell displayed his invitation to a university guard in order to pass. It was a pleasant place, the patio, and Holliwell entered it gratefully, seating himself along the fountain’s edge to listen to the broken rhythm of the water and student voices in the hall outside. He had not sat for longer than a moment when he saw a gray-haired man come down one of the stone stairways from the upper story to approach him. The man was extending his hand but there was a faint posture of disapproval in his manner. The fountains, Holliwell supposed, were not to be sat beside.

“Professor Holliwell?” the gray-haired man inquired.

Holliwell stood up. His stance was unsteady.

“Claudio Nicolay,” the man said, taking Holliwell’s hand. “Associate rector for the discipline of sociology. Welcome again to Compostela.”

Nicolay had the face of the Field Marshal von Paulus, colored in brown.

“I’m very happy to be here,” Holliwell told him. “I thank you for inviting me.”

“Ah yes,” Nicolay said, in what Holliwell thought to be a strangely ambiguous manner. “Will you follow me, please?”

They climbed the stone stairs which Nicolay had descended and walked along a mezzanine lined with open classrooms that exuded a scent of old wood and mold repellent. But the room to which Nicolay finally led him was constructed of bright stainless synthetics and lit with fluorescent ceiling fixtures. There was a podium up front; thirty or so people sat on straight-backed wooden chairs facing it. The audience stirred and turned toward Holliwell as Nicolay conducted him halfway down a side aisle and then leaned against the wall to face him.

“We have expected,” Nicolay said, “that you would speak in English. This will be quite O.K. Our group tonight is for the most part English-speaking.”

“Well,” Holliwell said, “I prepared it in Spanish. I thought …”

Nicolay interrupted him.

“You may give your address as you like. My opinion is that English would be preferred.”

It was all, Holliwell had come to realize, extremely brusque. Even
if Nicolay had decided that he was drunk and was resentful, even if he were trying to be informal and Stateside in manner—the whole business smacked of rudeness. People were not casually rude in Compostela.

Holliwell shrugged. “As you like, Doctor.”

“So you will speak and then maybe there will be questions. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

“It was thought afterwards to have cocktails on the terrace. We hope you can stay.”

“Thank you again,” Holliwell said.

“As for your payment—it’s been arranged.”

“That’s fine,” Holliwell said. He was determined not to be made uncomfortable.

“Whenever you’re ready then, I’ll introduce you.”

“Go right ahead,” he told Nicolay.

The professor doctor conducted him to the dais and he looked over the house. More than half of his audience were women. At least a third appeared to be North American. Their faces were indistinct under the fluorescent lights. Holliwell owned a pair of reading glasses which he used on occasions when innovative lighting or his own intemperance baffled vision; he had left them in his hotel room, beside the scotch.

Nicolay’s introduction was as suitable for Holliwell as for anyone else and when it was concluded there was polite applause.