Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

He looked up from his plate again and held her with the look.

“You were never as naïve as I was,” he said, “and I was born here. You think you’ve failed? Of course you failed. There’s nothing but failure here. The country is a failure. A disaster of history.”

“That’s very hopeless talk,” Justin said.

“It’s where we begin,” Godoy said. “We start from this assumption.”

His meal finished, the priest took a sip of beer and lit another Winston. The beer seemed to bring a faint rosiness to his pale pitted cheek.

“When I was in the Jesuit college here I wrote a letter of which I was very proud. I wrote to your President Eisenhower.”

“Good Lord,” Justin said. “To dear old Ike.”

“Yes, to Ike himself. And I sent the same letter to the leader of our opposition — his name was Enrique Matos, of the great Liberal Party. In this letter — which I covered with tears — I told them that if the free world was to conquer Communism it must not follow the way of greed and narrow self-interest but the way of the Great Redemptor. He whom we saw dead tonight.”

Godoy crushed his Winston out in an ashtray and put another in his mouth.

“I told Ike and Matos — I was only a kid, you understand — that their leadership must be spiritual. Also that they were overlooking the evils of our country, that we were suffering because of the government and the rich and the North American attitude.

“In the same week my father disappeared. Not for long and he came back alive. You see, he was a watchmaker in the capital, an immigrant from Spain. He wasn’t hurt badly but he was very frightened. He told me not to write any more letters.

“A little later there arrived a message from the White House in Washington. I can tell you that it was an occasion of terror in my house, my parents were quite unsophisticated in some ways. It was a perfectly amiable letter. It thanked me. It was signed by an assistant. A typical letter.”

“A form letter,” Justin corrected him.

“Yes, a form letter.” He lit his Winston and blew the smoke upward. “Under that government people often disappeared. When our great hope Matos became President it was the same. It’s the same now. When Matos was President there was a man from your country in the capital — he was the head of your intelligence here and Matos’ great friend. Last year his name was in the papers a little because of the scandals in Washington. We believe now that he knew a great deal about who disappeared and why. It was strange to read about him in the newspapers. He seemed a foolish, trivial man, almost likable.”

Justin said nothing.

“I’ll call you Justin,” Godoy said.

“It’s been my name so long,” she said, “I guess it’s my name.”

“If you tell your superiors that you agree to leave — how long can you keep the mission station?”

“Well,” Justin said, “it’s company property to start with and they’ll take it right back. There are medicines there and furniture, so I guess they’ll reoccupy it and we can be out in a week.”

Godoy shook his head in exasperation.

“No good,” he said. Before she could ask what he meant he asked her: “What will you do in the States?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to laicize anyway. I suppose I’ll look for a job.” She touched her hair in confusion. “I’m afraid to think about it.”

“I want you to keep the station open. For a month anyway. You can stall. Say that Father Egan is too ill to travel.”

“Father Egan will die if he stays.”

“All right then, send Egan back. But keep open any way you can. I’ll help you to keep open.”

“But why?” she asked him.

“Because,” Godoy said, “I have friends who are doing illegal work. They are going to make a foco in the mountains. They need a place on the coast for a while.”

“They’re going to fight?”

“Not here. But not so far away. You see, for years it’s all been smoke.” He permitted himself a quick smile. “But it’s time now.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Justin said. Her heart soared.

“So we need you if you can help us. If you want to.”

“Thank you for asking me,” Justin said. “For trusting me.”

“I have good reasons to trust you,” Godoy said, “and it’s easy to ask.” He watched her, and she knew that he was measuring her hesitation.

“It’s not only for the use of the station. We need you too if you think you can help. If you feel you can’t — well, I understand.”

“I will,” Justin heard herself say. “I’ll help you any way I can. Not only with the station. There’s nothing I want more.”

“I don’t try to seduce you in this,” Godoy said. “You have to make your own decision.”

“I have no family,” Justin told him, smiling. “No special home. Where people need me that’s where I go. See, I’m lucky that way.”

She could not read his look. Suddenly she wanted him to reach out and touch her in some way, clap her on the shoulder, shake her hand, give some human token of what they had entered into. But he did not move and neither did she.

“This is work of armed struggle, so people may get killed. I won’t deceive you.”

“I don’t come from a pacifist tradition,” she said. Immediately it struck her as a cold and pedantic thing to say. She kept wondering how she must appear to him. That he would ask, that he would say that she herself could help — it meant he must esteem her. Surely, she thought, he must.

Godoy looked at his watch.

“We’ll go,” he said.

She walked beside him toward the dark square; somewhere beyond it there was music, uncertainly amplified, and the noise of a crowd.

“Maybe,” he said as they walked, “we can arrange your status within the church if you stay. It would be better.”

“Whatever you think.”

“We won’t talk about it anymore now. During the week — we can meet and talk further.”

Justin nodded; she felt lonely again, and frightened.

As they started across the plaza, Godoy stopped and turned to her.

“In the work we’re doing,” he said, “one has to change a little. You develop and you become a slightly different person. It’s hard on the ego but it’s for the best.”

“I understand,” she said. She understood thoroughly. His message was the one she had been receiving all her adult life, the one she had always lived by.

I’ll be right at home in this outfit, she thought. It would have cheered her up to say it aloud to him but she did not — because it would be boastful and presumptuous and because he would not have understood her. As far as she could tell, he was without humor.

Immediately, she reproached herself for reflecting on his lack of humor. It was judgmental and perhaps a little racist. Look to your own seriousness, she told herself.

They found the little fun fair on the far side of the church, behind the ruined eighteenth-century wall. In the space between the old church wall and the river, a traveling carnival from the capital had parked its bright machines. There were two carousels, a small loop-the-loop with pink and purple cockpits and a whirly ride called the Carretera de Fortuna. Two ice-cream sellers had brought their wagons up from the square, there was a man with balloons, a man with a fortune-telling parrot and an Oriental in a kimono demonstrating karate strokes to an audience of teen-agers and cane cutters. A stand sold soda and beer and black or white rum.

The Syrian’s sound truck was parked beside a mobile generator with its sale signs still aloft but it was empty and silent. The carnival machines made their own music as they turned, music as peeled and rusted at the seams as the machines themselves. The fairground was surrounded by colored lights and around each bulb was a little cloud of insects drawn from the riverbank.