Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

When they had settled in the lounge chairs, they heard the sound of glass breaking in the apartment behind them. Oscar did not turn around. The sun was down behind the peaks; edges of shadow softened in the picture-book street below them. Holliwell buttoned his jacket. Sounds of evening traffic drifted up from the distant Avenida Central.

“I’m in a bourgeois crisis,” Oscar said. He poured them both another drink.

“Well, you’re talking to the right man.”

“That’s whom I live with now.”

“You mean he’s your lover?” Holliwell understood that henceforward the ground would be uncertain.

“My wife calls him my ‘catamite.’ ”

Holliwell felt himself closely watched. He drummed on the arm of his chair.

“You’re embarrassed,” Oscar said.

“No, no. Only … you know me, Oscar. I’m a conventional man.”

“You? Never!”

“I hope you understand that I don’t think badly of you.”

Oscar nodded. It had not been quite the right thing to say. Finding the right thing to say now would be difficult and saying too little would be resented.

“And this is why your brother-in-law is threatening you?”

Oscar shrugged and raised his hands.

“What about you, Frank?” Ocampo asked after a moment. “Have you never had a homosexual experience?”

Now he’s keeping score, Holliwell thought. In spite of himself, he blushed at the question. He was careful not to laugh.

“Never.”

“Never in your life?”

Holliwell began to understand that Oscar would never forgive him for receiving this confidence. He himself hated losing friends. In his regret he veered in the direction of plain candor.

“Look, Oscar — do you want me to tell you I’m homosexual too? I’m not, as far as I know. I haven’t had such an experience. I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

Holliwell finished his drink.

“I guess I could have picked a better time to come down.”

“Why?” Oscar asked.

For Christ’s sake, Holliwell thought.

“Isn’t it a little difficult to try and entertain me while you’re dealing with all these upheavals in your life? Don’t you need … something other than people visiting?”

“I need a friend,” Oscar told him.

And so he did. There were few people in that country to be a friend to him now. Everyone knew everything there. Oscar himself, Holliwell thought, in spite of his aestheticism was a thorough Compostelan, a man of the mountains, a cowboy. In his own circle, the most educated circle in the country, he would be surrounded with contempt. In his deepest self, he would share that contempt.

“Then I’m glad to be here,” Holliwell said. “I’m proud to be your friend and I’d like to remain your friend.”

Oscar’s face looked somber and blank to him. It was an Indian face again, and he could not read it. He’s off, Holliwell thought, he’s closed down on me and gone off to God Seven with our cultural reference point. Instant abyss, veil of centuries. If people are always doing that to us, he thought, surely we are always doing it to them?

He had meant what he had said. Maybe it had been patronizing. Maybe it would have sounded better in Spanish, or in proto-Mayan. In the dim light, he saw that Oscar had begun to cry.

“Thank you, my friend,” Oscar said.

“I wish I could help you,” Holliwell told him.

“You know, Frank — he’s very difficult, my Patrick Ventura. He gets drunk. He takes all kinds of pills. It’s very tough on me.”

“He’s just a kid,” Holliwell said. “Christ, he can’t be over twenty, right?”

Oscar had not heard the question. He was staring over the opposite rooftops with a fond expression.

“Do you know the German film Der blaue Engel ?”

“Christ,” Holliwell said, writhing. “I mean … sure I know it.”

He stared down at the tiles of the balcony floor; he was reflecting on the fact that he was about to hear a Central American intellectual compare himself with the professor in The Blue Angel. More of the dynamics of contrasting culture.

“Sometimes I feel like the old professor in that film.”

“Movies are movies, Oscar. This is your life.”

He finished his drink. “This is your life,” he had said.

“Because it costs me very much to manifest my love for him. But there is more to it than sexuality, Frank. This boy is very beautiful — not only in the physical sense. But he is also spiritual.”

Holliwell shakily reached out for the bottle beside Oscar’s chair. When he looked up, he saw that Oscar had closed his eyes.

“ ‘ De que sirve la hermosura ,’ ” Oscar was reciting.

“ ‘ cuando lo fuese la mía

si me falta la alegría

si me falta la Ventura. ’ ”

Oscar opened his eyes and there were more tears there.

“ ‘ Si mi falta la Ventura ,’ ” he repeated.

“I don’t know it,” Holliwell said.

“Calderón,” Oscar told him. “ El principe constante. ” He lifted his glass and drank from it. “Spoken,” he said, smiling sadly, “by the beautiful but melancholy Fénix, spoiled princess of Fez.”

Holliwell smiled back and shook his head.

Oscar watched him. “A strange turn of fate, eh? For me?”

“Very strange, Oscar.”

“Frank, I want you to see some of the poems he’s written. I want you to see that side of him. Will you read them?”

“All right,” Holliwell said.

He stood up and went back into the apartment; Holliwell half turned to look inside. Oscar stood for a while over the sofa, leaning on the back of it. Patrick Ventura’s bare feet were crossed in repose over the armrest.

Holliwell turned back toward the darkening street. In the downtown distance a red neon sign flashed on. He could see lighted windows in his hotel miles away, on a floodlit hillock.

The extent of Ocampo’s ruin became clear to him. He had lost more than even his family — his wife’s connections had kept him employed and out of trouble, so that in all likelihood he would presently be out of his job and on the police shit lists. But his political days would probably be over too. Because his self-respect was gone; he saw himself as a maricón, mariposa , crowing clown and princess of Fez. And no clown, no mariposa , could be a true revolutionary.

Holliwell fingered the edges of his whiskey glass. The man was a corresponding associate of Marty Nolan’s friends in Compostela. He was destroyed and dangerous. A desperado.

In a few minutes, Ocampo came back to the balcony with a thin sheaf of papers in a tan binder. He switched on the reading light beside Holliwell’s chair.

“Here, Frank,” he said, thumbing through the sheets. “Read only a few, they’re all short. Start with this one.”

Holliwell took the binder and looked at the page to which it was opened.

The first poem there was called “Belvedere Fountain.”

BELVEDERE FOUNTAIN

Drums of love

And hate

Drive the tambourine man

To spread ebony wings

And my claws too

Clutch

Sweet Puerto Rican bodies

Swing with mango sweetness

The rich weed makes my brain

A slave

To the torn toms beat

And so I dance

Footless Footloose

Eye less in Gaza

There was a second poem.

ECSTASIS

Ecstasis isn’t static

It’s not advertisements

And it’s not the news

Ecstasis can be little and

Bound in a nutshell

Or big enough to fill even me

My zodiac, my milky way

Decans of time imploding

“What do you think, Frank? Publishable?”

Holliwell eased the folder gently down to the floor. He kept his eyes fixed on a potted plant near the sliding door.