Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

They turned south well short of the coastal mountains and came in sight of a town centered on the copper dome of a basilica and surrounded by green irrigated fields.

“That’s Zalteca,” Bob Cole said to Holliwell. “Where you and I get our visas for Tecan.”

“Zalteca de las Palomas,” Tom Zecca said.

Before long they were passing the gates to fincas and little wood and adobe villages.

“This is another place known to sportsmen the world over,” Zecca said. “Here it’s the annual dove shoot.”

“Yes, it’s very big,” Cole said.

“Every year,” Zecca explained, “the doves migrating south pass through this valley. The Global Fishfinder types and similar sportsmen come down to shoot them. And all the villagers outside of town bum down their houses.”

“Why’s that?” Holliwell asked.

“Well,” Zecca said, “it goes like this. We’re out in the brush with our fowling pieces popping away at doves when suddenly this distraught granny appears. We don’t understand a word she says but she’s really upset. She shows us this column of smoke and leads us to a heap of burnt-up shit that she claims was the home of her ancestors. If we try and ignore her she gets whinier and nastier and louder and presently a crowd of locals appears. They’re wearing machetes, they smell of cane juice and they’re looking at us in a most unfriendly manner. So we say — what the hell? We’re all mogul Fishfinders out for a good time, we all own condominiums somewhere, we kick in twenty or thirty bills apiece to buy granny a new spread. Let’s say there’s six or seven of us. The old woman gets a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred. If she’s lucky she can find another bunch of blasting-away gringos and do the same number on them. When the season’s over everybody throws together a new bunch of sticks to live in and has a party.”

“They’ve been doing it so long,” Marie said, “that it’s taken on a religious significance.”

Zecca laughed. “As an anthropologist you should be interested in the cultural layers. A little crude insurance arson. Gringo baiting. Renewal.”

“And the auto-da-fé,” Holliwell said. “Perhaps a subconscious reference to Martínez Trujillo.”

“You could do a paper,” Bob Cole said.

“I could indeed,” Holliwell said. “I’m working on a multi-volume study of mankind called The Aesthetics of Horseshit. I want to beat the sociologists at their own game. I’d happily include a chapter on Zalteca.”

Tom Zecca had begun to sing “ Cu cu ru cu cu, paloma. ” His wife joined in briefly.

“You don’t sound as though you take much satisfaction in your work,” Bob Cole said.

Ah, Holliwell thought. The representative of history.

“That’s not true at all,” he told Cole. “I’ve been temporarily sidetracked. But I go to bed every night with a profound sense of satisfaction.”

“Really?” Cole asked.

“Oh, yes,” Holliwell said. “I live for my work. Every day is different.”

Cole nodded thoughtfully.

“How about your work,” Holliwell asked. “Are you getting off on it, as we say?”

“Well,” Cole said, “I suppose I’ve been sidetracked too.”

“It’s very hard to fix one’s eye on the Big Picture,” Holliwell said. “Don’t you find that?”

“Yes,” Cole said.

They were driving through the cobbled streets of town. Small boys ran beside their car offering threats and guidance.

The central square was nearly empty under the afternoon sun. A man lay asleep at the foot of a eucalyptus tree with a tray of chewing gum beside him. There were a few wrought-iron park benches that looked as though they might have been imported from Paris a hundred years before by some local philanthropist of means; they were covered with parakeet shit, and mongrel dogs lay asleep beneath them.

Zecca parked his car in a space beside the basilica; the church’s dome was held together with wooden scaffolding. The boys who had been following the car approached across the deserted square in an attitude of movie-hoodlum confidence. Zalteca was used to gringo tourists. Tom Zecca engaged the largest boy to watch over the car.

Walking wearily, they made their way down the street of public notaries and public letter writers to the Tecanecan consulate. After several rings of the outsized doorbell, a teen-aged girl admitted them to a parlor filled with tropical plants and girded by whirring electric fans. In the adjoining room, prosperous-looking children were watching dubbed Yogi Bear cartoons on a color television set.

The consul’s wife appeared after a while; in her tight sheath skirt she had the appearance of an attractive woman turning gradually into a caricature from a Rivera painting. The consul’s wife led them into an office where there were still more fans and a monumental ebony desk with an Olympia typewriter in the middle of it. On the wall behind the desk were a crucifix, a portrait of Tecan’s celebrated President and a tintype of William Walker’s last defeat.

There was some difficulty about the visas for Holliwell and Cole; between the lady’s drawling Tecanecan and the whirring of the fans its nature was obscured to Holliwell’s ear. The difficulty had to do with its being Sunday, with its being siesta, the consul’s absence, the proximity of Lent, the configuration of the planets and the phase of the moon — whatever it was, it got away from him. He stood obstinate and uncomprehending while Cole nodded sympathetically. When the woman, with a melancholy smile, had finished her elimination of possibilities, Holliwell simply began over again — citing the necessity of his immediate departure for Tecan, the misfortunes that would befall both him and the country if he failed to arrive in time, hinting at the displeasure in high places that would be the result of his delay in Zalteca. Zecca, responding, came to his aid, producing a U.S. passport with a red cover. A diplomatic passport, Holliwell supposed.

It turned out to be a matter of money. Travelers who insisted on crossing the border in the face of the many difficulties at hand paid twice the rate for their visas. Twelve dollars instead of six.

He and Cole set their twenty-four U.S. dollars on the consulate desk. The lady, without glancing at the money, seated herself, typed out the visas and stamped them in the two passports. The children in the meantime had torn themselves away from Yogi Bear and were gathered in the office doorway, watching their mother work. As the Americans left, the consul’s wife shooed them away and back to the screen. The twenty-four dollars stayed where it was, on the desk.

When they returned to the central square and their car, Holliwell and his company found the boys gone but their hubcaps in place. Zecca opened the hood to see that the battery had not been stolen. All was well.

On their way back to the Pan-American Highway, a little boy of hardly more than six ran toward the car, demanding to guide them. Zecca avoided running over him with some difficulty.

“Well, that’s Zalteca, folks,” Zecca said.

“Not such a bad town really,” Marie said.

“No,” Holliwell said. “Not really.”

“When you’re in Tecan,” Zecca said, “you’ll think about it fondly.”

They stopped at a filling station on the edge of town, filled the tank with the highest-grade gasoline and drank Coca-Colas.

South of Zalteca the land flattened out altogether; the line of the coast range disappeared and only fulsome clouds marked the proximity of the ocean. It was desert, the barest of cattle land, brown grass, dust. East of them the Sierra petered out into a low regular slope that seemed to be covered with a jungle of thorns.

Within half an hour they were in sight of what appeared to be the border, a cluster of kiosks of different colors, a line of trucks, and most incongruously in this empty landscape, lines of people blocking the road.