Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

The blue-eyed lieutenant conducted her past the ocher columns and under the flattened arch surmounted with the seal of the Republic. His demeanor was formal; his hand on her arm was different, his touch neither gallant nor brutal but strangely correct. It was as though to touch her any place but where he had in the car was distasteful to him.

Inside the Guardia’s building a half dozen corporals in fatigues were listening to the radio. An actor was addressing the nation, encouraging its continuing struggle for liberty. The Communist aggressor was defeated, he assured it, and was fleeing before the Guardia’s victorious arms, wielded in the name of civilization and Christianity. The Guardia corporals watched May come in; all of them had moustaches, which in the mountains were an emblem of white blood. Some smiled, others seemed uninterested.

They went beyond the outer office into a long room with bricked-over windows and a bad smell. Campos was there. She had known when they took her that he would be waiting somewhere.

“You shudder,” he said.

It was true. Her knees trembled. She could feel the blood leave her face. Her heart turned.

“I had her up the ass, so you’re too late,” the blue-eyed officer said. He was merry. He did a business with his finger, flourishing it under his nose, thrusting it before Campos. He laughed and May thought it odd to hear a human laugh and to be so utterly outside the laughter, as excluded from the impulse that quickened it as the lizards on the wall.

Then Campos touched her under the elbow, rather as the other officer had done, and drew her to an unpainted door that opened to a shed and a courtyard. Before her were lines of coffined dead in the uniform of the Guardia and beyond them, in the courtyard, the bodies of peasants stacked in piles, swelling in the sun, stinking and beset with flies. One of the bodies was that of the bookkeeper who had commanded for a while. She turned away.

“The dead,” he told her. “On account of you.”

As hard as she could, she tried to make herself speak, to shout, to answer, to give him the lie. But at the sight of the corpses she was so undone and her fear of him so great that she could not utter a sound at first. When she tried too hard, a sob broke from her throat and echoed in the stone room. She hated to hear it. It dishonored her. Yet she needed to hear it — a token of herself, a sound — even if it was her own crying. It was all of her that was there. The rest was Enemy. The blue-eyed officer threw back his head and softly made the howl of a wolf, in mockery of her. Then he went out and she was alone with Campos.

The sound of the radio carried through, very faintly, from the outer office. It seemed to catch Campos’ attention for a moment; he walked to the door that led to that office and opened it, standing with his head cocked to hear an exalted female voice complete an announcement. Then he closed the door and walked back to where she stood. She saw now what he plainly was and why she had always been so afraid of him. She saw that she would be spared nothing and that she must try to be ready.

When he began, she thought: I must do this, I must finish this, not him. She cast the compassing of her mind as high and wide as she could reach toward strength and mercy. She cried because, at first, there was nothing at all. Only the blows falling.

Though he beat her beyond fear, she kept trying. Until she was awash in all the shameful juices of living and she still kept on. Though she forgot in time who he was and what the pain was about she was able to think of the tears, the blood, and mucus and loose teeth in her mouth: these are not bad things, these are just me and I’m all right.

His electricity was shaking her loose of her bones. She never worried about screaming. The shocks blinded her, they were going to kill her.

“My dad would fix you, you sucker,” she said.

He had hurt her head somehow and closed off light. She knew it would not get better and that she would never come back. She reached out as she had to the unresponding sea in the empty afternoons of the past months and still there was nothing and she cried. She could only live between shocks and the time was so precious. She was no hero.

Sometimes the best I’m capable of, she told him, is a little quiet probity. Tried to tell him.

Once she saw her fingers moving and she knew the electricity must be moving them. Her ring was gone. Then something began to come and she did not recognize it. She asked herself what it was when she had the time, in between. Whether it was inside or out there. Whatever it was, there was hardly anything else. It was greater than electricity and electricity was strong. It was stronger than the strong, stronger than love. It seemed as though it might be love. She was too weak to bear it. Too tired for it.

You after all? Inside, outside, round and about. Disappearing stranger, trickster. Christ, she thought, so far. Far from where?

But why always so far?

“ Por qué? ” she asked. There was a guy yelling.

Always so far away. You. Always so hard on the kid here, making me be me right down the line. You old destiny. You of Jacob, you of Isaac, of Esau.

Let it be you after all. Whose after all I am. For whom I was nailed.

So she said to Campos: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

At dawn Tecan was only a wall of richly green mountains. Holliwell had never seen her in that aspect. The sight aroused in him something that was, against reason, like desire.

Lighted ships had been passing in sight of them all during the night, but never close enough to threaten or tempt them to shout in hope of rescue. Holliwell had found a flashlight in a gear locker beside the fuel tank and tried to signal; there had been no result. He supposed that the beam was too weak or that it appeared to be a coastal light. Now, under the radiant dawn, there was plenty of shipping about. Three small freighters were steaming northward, outlined against rosy clouds; none of them was more than a few miles away. In daylight, it seemed unlikely to Holliwell that one would stop, even if a lookout saw the whaler.

His companion, Pablo, seemed untroubled by their situation. Some private emotion was aboil in him. He lay spread out in the bow while Holliwell steered, his eyes fixed on the sky. Holliwell watched the young man for a while, then looked away.

The sea’s surface had turned a gentle aqua green; within minutes it would be the mirror of a burning sky. Holliwell felt for his sunglasses and found them in his shirt pocket. Miraculously, absurdly, he had preserved them unbroken.

“There’s so much stuff,” Pablo said. There was a small vial in his hand; he was preparing to take another of his pills. The pills had made him talkative during the night and Holliwell had pretended sleep. But he had listened well enough to be disturbed by Pablo’s talk and eventually to be frightened. Pablo, whoever he was, appeared to be crazy, constantly stoned and fired with indiscriminate violence.

“More stuff in the world than anybody could imagine, brother.”

“Indeed,” Holliwell said.

Pablo unfurled a daft threatening smile.

The morning sun came down on them like a blow. The wind and the ocean were gentle; a mild offshore zephyr kept them rolling slowly north by east without benefit of the engine. Holliwell turned from Pablo’s jeering face to scan the horizon for signs of shifting weather. By any auguries he knew, the sky portended nothing sinister.

“What do you think, Pablo?” Holliwell asked. “Good weather hold?”

He kept trying to start useful conversations with the youth, trying to discover an aspect in which Pablo did not seem demented and dangerous. He had not been having much luck.

“Yeah,” Pablo said carelessly. “Weather’s fine.”