A Flag for Sunrise (17 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Holliwell declaimed, “esteemed colleagues.” Who in hell, he wondered, are these people? He looked helplessly down at his laborious espanished address and paused.

“I see before me,” he told them, after an awkward moment had passed, “I see before me, imperfectly, the notes which it had been my purpose to deliver in the language of this country. I must tell you that to put it back in English as I speak seems a very daunting business. I think it is an impossible business.”

He looked at Nicolay, who was sitting in the last row and was recognizable to Holliwell only by his dark complexion and iron-gray hair. As he looked, his Compostelan colleague appeared to undergo parthenogenesis; two Dr. Nicolays looked up at him, their grave expressions only to be imagined. In the blurred faces of the audience, he presumed to read geniality and patience.

“Allow me to share, as we say in my country, this experience. The sharing of this experience will constitute an inter-American, intercultural act. In performing together an intercultural act, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues, we may capture the workings of culture in vivo. On the hoof.”

There was a little uncertain laughter.

“The address I have here,” Holliwell announced, “as I consider retranslating it into English, seems very portentous. Culture, as we know, is very much a matter of language and the language before me seems at the moment to be operatic and mock-Ciceronian and absurd. Looking at it, thinking about speaking it, makes me angry. Not,” he hastened to assure them, “that I find Spanish itself mock-Ciceronian and absurd, because I yield to no one in my affection for the tongue of Cervantes and Lorca and the immortal Darío. Only my thoughts, my circumlocutions, my artfulness, seem so in that language.”

Someone slapped his palm against a leather armrest. There were sighs of obscure significance.

“Another dissatisfaction, friends, another dissatisfaction for me is that the subject of this address was to be Culture and the Family or vice versa or the Family in Culture or some construction of that sort. I tell you in sincerity that I am not the man to speak about such things. I know nothing about families—certainly no more than anyone else here tonight. For a large part of my life I had no family at all. The word ‘father,’ for example, was an abstraction to me. I associated it only with God.”

A single Spanish word he could not make out echoed against the polished surfaces of the room. It was answered with a guffaw. Holliwell did not look up. A sadness descended on him.

“When I learned about families—The Family,
La Familia
—I found only that it was an instrument of grief. That’s all I can tell you about The Family and I assume you already know that much. Moreover, in my culture, we are doing away with grief, so the future of the family there is uncertain. As a consequence the topic may not be relevant, and relevance, surely, is what we require here this evening. In this intercultural exercise of ours.

“But seriously … seriously, my friends …” He paused, stunned for a moment at the wreckage he had piled on himself. “I can certainly
talk about culture. It’s my bread and butter and I have no hesitation in talking about it. For example, popular culture is particularly fun. In my country we have a saying—Mickey Mouse will see you dead.”

There was silence.

“There isn’t really such a saying,” Holliwell admitted. “My countrymen present can reassure you as to that. I made it up to demonstrate, to dramatize the seriousness with which American popular culture should be regarded. Now American pop culture is often laughed at by snobbish foreigners—as we call them. But let me tell you that we have had the satisfaction of ramming it down their throats. These snobbish foreigners are going to learn to laugh around it or choke to death. It’s in their gullets, it’s in the air they breathe and in the rich foreign food they eat. They better learn to love it.”

Someone called Holliwell by name but he affected not to hear. A party of Americans in one of the forward rows stood up to leave.

“Our popular culture is machine-made and it’s for sale to anyone who can raise the cash and the requisite number of semi-literate consumers. Compostela is one of the progressive nations that have been successful in this regard.”

People in the back were hissing him.

“Bear with me,” Holliwell begged his audience. “I don’t mean to sentimentalize the various popular cultures that ours has replaced. You can be sure that in their colorful ways they were equally mean and vulgar and trashy. They simply didn’t have what it takes.”

He stopped again, dry-throated, to watch the brisk traffic toward the door.

“Yet I would like to take you into my confidence in one regard, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues—and here I address particularly those of my listeners who are not North Americans—we have quite another culture concealed behind the wooden nutmeg and the flash that we’re selling. It’s a secret culture. Perhaps you think of us as a nation without secrets—you’re wrong. Our secret culture is the one we live by. It’s the one we’ve beaten into wave upon wave of immigrants who have in turn beaten it into their children. It’s not for sale—in fact it’s none of your business. But because we’re involved in this inter-American intercultural exercise I’ll tell you a little about it tonight.”

A general stir, of hostile ambiance, had taken possession of the room.

“Allow me to recite for you the first poem ever printed in what became the United States of America. It goes like this:

“ ‘I at the burial ground may see

Coffins smaller far than I

From death’s embrace no age is free

Even little children die.’

“Friends, children in the English-speaking colonies of North America didn’t go to heaven to become
angelitos.
What became of them was terrible to ponder. The pondering over what became of them is part of our secret culture. Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It’s a wonderful thing—or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it’s not for sale, ladies and gentlemen. Let me tell you now some of the things we believed: We believed we knew more about great unpeopled spaces than any other European nation. We considered spaces unoccupied by us as unpeopled. At the same time, we believed we knew more about guilt. We believed that no one wished and willed as hard as we, and that no one was so able to make wishes true. We believed we were more. More was our secret watchword.

“Now out of all this, in spite of it, because of it, we developed Uncle Sam, the celebrated chiseling factor. And Uncle Sam developed the first leisured, literate masses—to the horror of all civilized men. All civilized men—fascists and leftist intellectuals alike—recoiled and still recoil at Uncle Sam’s bizarre creation, working masses with the money and the time to command the resources of their culture, who would not be instructed and who had no idea of their place. Because Uncle Sam thought of nothing but the almighty dollar he then created the machine-made popular culture to pander to them. To reinforce, if you like, their base instincts. He didn’t think it was his job to improve them and neither did they. This debasement of polite society is what we are now selling you.”

Again Holliwell paused. Voices were being raised but he was not being shouted down. He could make himself heard.

“I have the honor to bring you hope, ladies and gentlemen and
esteemed colleagues. Here I speak particularly to the enemies of my country and their representatives present tonight. Underneath it all, our secret culture, the non-exportable one, is dying. It’s going sour and we’re going to die of it. We’ll die of it quietly around our own hearths while our children laugh at us. So, no more Mickey Mouse,
amigos.
The world is free for Latinate ideologies and German ismusisms … temples of reason, the Dialectic, you name it …”

He became aware of a more substantial disturbance and was compelled to face the room. At the rear, across the heads of those remaining, stood a young man in dark glasses wearing a black shirt and a Richard III haircut. The young man had risen to confront him.

“Is not this facile nihilism, Mr. Holliwell, a screen for Communistic theory?”

A guerrilla of Christ the King, Holliwell thought. The White Hand. He had an instant’s inward vision of his corpse rolling from a speeding car onto the lawn of the Panamerican.

“Isn’t nihilism, sir, a way of discrediting our Western Christian culture which the Communists seek to displace?”

“You can’t be serious,” Holliwell said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” the young man said, with a hint of unpleasant laughter. “Quite serious.”

Stricken by the recklessness of his conduct and reminded of where he was, Holliwell lamely sought a route back toward pedantic convention.

“Do you think that as a replacement for anything lost, I’m proposing Marxism? Do you think that despair leads me to cast envious eyes on Latvia or Kirghizstan?”

“Perhaps you feel for our people,” the young man suggested. “Perhaps you feel that
we
should look to Latvia or Kirghizstan.”

“What I feel is that I’ve offended you and you’re getting me back. I regard Marxism as analogous to a cargo cult. It’s a naïve invocation of a verbal machine.”

“But heroic? Perhaps inevitable?”

Idiotic as their exchange was, Holliwell considered, he had had it coming. It would teach him. But he was still drunk enough to be angry.

“Sure,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a funny world, son.”

Now a middle-aged American was on his feet, encouraged by
the young fanatic. Faced with revolt, Holliwell increasingly regretted his folly.

“I’d like to apologize to all the Compostelans here,” the American said. “And I want to ask you a question, Holliwell. Did the United States government pay for the display of bad manners you’ve just treated us to?”

“That’s correct,” Holliwell said.

“Well, I’m tired of apologizing for all the so-called experts who come down here on the taxpayers’ money and give the States a bad name. The only time I hear this kind of garbage is when I come to an event like this.”

“Once upon a time,” Holliwell told the man, “there was a chartered aircraft carrying American businessmen and their wives over Japan. The businessmen were insulation dealers from the northern Midwest. They were on a cultural tour of the Orient.”

“What do you bet,” the American asked someone who was with him, “that this little story has an anti-business moral?”

“How can I give you your money’s worth,” Holliwell said, “if you won’t listen to me?” The man sat down in disgust.

“Well, sir,” Holliwell continued, “these folks were being rewarded with this trip for having sold great quantities of insulation. But just as their plane flew over Mount Fuji it broke apart and all the dealers and their wives fell out. They and their plastic cups and their Kodachrome slides and their wallets full of pictures of the folks back home fell onto Mount Fuji. On the slopes, their bodies were collected by Buddhist monks and the monks laid them out and burned incense over them and that was how their cultural tour of the Far East ended. Now,” Holliwell said to the American, “is there a lesson in that or not?”

Dr. Nicolay was approaching him.

“I see no point in continuing,” Nicolay said. “I think you should go and rest, eh?”

Before Holliwell could respond, a red-haired woman with broad shoulders and a sad smile rose in the center of the diminished audience. “What about God?” she demanded in an Australian quaver. “Is there a place for God in all this?” Holliwell realized gratefully that she must be as drunk as he.

“There’s always a place for God, senora. There is some question as to whether He’s in it.”

Dr. Nicolay glowed with a smiling revulsion that Holliwell imagined must be Central European. He was at the point of allowing the doctor to supervise his removal when he saw that a honey-haired Compostelan lady had come down along the side aisle and was poised to address him. The lady was striking and her aspect amiable. He waited.

“I could be forgiven, Dr. Holliwell, could I not, if I inferred from your manner and the tone of your remarks that your attitude toward my country is ambiguous?” Her smile was demure, conventual and unthreatening. Holliwell blushed.

“My attitude is friendly,” he said. “I’m sincere.” He had already set in motion the processes by which he hoped in time to forget utterly the evening behind him. It was not pleasant to be compelled to a defense. “I thought I would improvise. I was after a deeper seriousness that I may not have … If my countryman hadn’t already done so I’d consider apologizing.”

“No need for that, sir,” said the smiling young woman. “But isn’t this stylized despair an excuse for immorality? Doesn’t it explain away all duty? Don’t you think your attitude reflects the decadence of your own society?”

“Shall I answer in any particular order?” Holliwell asked.

“The libertine and the Communist are the one hand washing the other!”

It was the young blackshirt, who was lounging by the door in a
pistolero
’s crouch. There were several men with him who also favored dark shirts and tinted glasses.

“I’ve tried to answer your political objections,” Holliwell said evenly. “I’m not a political man.”

The
politiques
left looking unhappy. A whiff of Spanish menace, like cordite and jasmine, hung in the air. Holliwell, sobering up, was more and more driven into confrontation with the heedlessness of his demonstration.

The beautiful Compostelan lady in the aisle continued to smile on him.

“You were saying, Doctor?”

Holliwell looked at her blankly for a moment.

“The answer to all your questions is probably yes. Everything that’s known is someone’s excuse for something.”

The woman sat down in a chair that had been vacated. Holliwell was completely taken with her. He permitted himself to wonder if the debacle might not be turned around, if instead of waking up hung over and humiliated in his overpriced hotel room … it might be otherwise. Not a chance, he thought. Not this woman, not in this country. And not with him. He became once again aware of Nicolay, who was still beside him.