Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“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.

“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.