Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

On the morning of the third day out, they dropped the hook off Palmas and every one of them but Tino set about getting drunk. Their intemperance worried Pablo, who thought it unbusinesslike. They smoked a great deal of grass as well and tried to press it on him. Pablo had settled himself into three Benzedrines a day and he did not care for marijuana; it made him feel turned around. An indistinct notion presented itself to him: that the company’s undisciplined self-indulgence might eventually be turned somehow to his advantage. But for the moment he was content.

After siesta, on the same day, the lot of them held a conference in their improbable saloon space. Pablo was not invited. He had found that standing in the forward ice hold he was able to hear quite clearly everything that was said on the far side of the bulkhead, but he knew better than to employ this convenience prematurely.

When the afternoon passed and he was not summoned, he felt confident that they were satisfied with him. In the evening, he and Tino took the anchor in and lowered the stabilizers. Mrs. Callahan cleaned the kitchen. It seemed he was in.

In the years since the city’s history had caused the decline of the lakeside district, the most desirable section of Tecan’s capital was in the hills west of the center, on the only slope not occupied by squatters. Most of the embassies remained on the Malecón beside the lake but a few had moved to the hillside neighborhood; it was in this section of Tecan’s capital that the Zeccas maintained their pleasant house.

The slope section had always been known as Buenos Aires. Its central area of four blocks or so was the remains of a colonial suburb destroyed by a series of earthquakes and contained the remnants of a baroque church and a colonnaded building which had been a theater, a market, or the palace of the Inquisition depending on the books one referred to. A market was what it had become, and it had probably always been one.

The outer streets of Buenos Aires, between the colonial core and the new residential sections, had been set out in the nineties by a class of people who had been to Paris once or twice and remembered it imperfectly but fondly. Any foreigner taking a turn round the Buenos Aires district and attempting to pursue the promise of an isthmian Montparnasse would be disabused as quickly as a stroller among the flats and terraces of a production of La Bohème —but here and there, among the beggars and the Indian vendors, a streetlight, a gray stone high Renaissance structure, a mansard roof might bring a fleeting taste of some dead comprador’s lost city of light. The gentry responsible for this modest hall of mirrors were melancholy internal exiles. But they were also great dreamers, so it was impossible to be certain just how far, during the brief period of agrarian prosperity and large foreign loans, they had intended to pursue this fancy. Their greatest achievements in its realization were marked by the blighted lakeside barrio; Buenos Aires, like the Paris of Thiers, had been early aborted. But for reasons of recent history, that section had held its thin illusion more successfully. Squatters who tried moving into some of the empty buildings were summarily dealt with and sometimes murdered outright by the Guardia, an indication that there must be a continuing affection for the district on the part of a faction in the present regime, men of sensibility less taken with Houston and Atlanta than their colleagues and relations.

There were many religious houses in the area now, minor government offices and the chambers of professional men. The National University used a few buildings there, and there seemed to be a great many private language schools doubling as pensions whose brochures were available through foreign travel magazines. High on the slope, the President’s family were constructing a new, glass hotel.

Early on a winter morning, just after first light in the hour before the day’s heat descended on the inland sea, a young woman in jeans and a neat white blouse was walking downhill past one of the grander of the gray stone buildings, humming to herself and carrying a stack of books and a thin plastic briefcase. Obviously a student, her very presence, her books and high spirits, contributed to the decorous European veneer of the neighborhood.

She was at the point of entering another stone building a little further down the hill when she slipped on a worn marble step at the street entrance. She kept her footing but her books and the briefcase scattered over the pavement. Bending to recover them, she looked up to see a slight elderly man in a lightweight Italian suit advancing to help her. The man had just stepped out of a Fiat in the narrow street; as soon as he was out the door the car sped away.

The man was elegant and professorial, as he briskly gathered up the young student’s fallen books; he smiled in a dignified way and spoke to her softly to ease her embarrassment.

It was a charming incident in its contrast to the petty cruelties and palpable brutality that characterized so much of the street life of San Ysidro. The two, student and professor, looked like the kind of people for whom the Malecón and the Buenos Aires district had been constructed.

“What an opportunity,” the elderly man was saying. “In my youth one could always make the acquaintance of a pretty fellow student in this way.”

“One still may,” the girl said gaily. She was naturally pale, though blushing under the compliment. Her face was angular and handsome; in body she was a bit squat and not altogether suited to jeans. The old man carried her books as the two of them went into the building before which she had had her small accident. A worn brass plaque on the door identified it as a residence of the Christian Brothers.

Once inside they walked up a dusty flight of stairs and to the head of an immaculate corridor which had windows with lace curtains at each end. A European brother met them there, politely asked their names and told them that room five had been engaged for their seminar. The corridor had plastered walls and a wooden floor on which their steps reverberated.

In the room numbered five, five men sat at a polished round table. All five stood at the elderly man’s entrance; they seemed to strain toward him, wanting to touch him. He was the object of their happiness.

“ Compañeros ,” the elderly man said, “ salud. ”

The terseness and dignity of his greeting held them in place. They took their seats again.

With a courtly smile, the old man placed the stack of books he had been carrying on the polished table, and extended his hand to the young woman.

“I am Aguirre,” he told her.

The girl took his hand and held it. Her accident had in fact been the signal for his safe entry.

“We met once, Don Sebastián, but you wouldn’t remember me. When you left we were all afraid … never to see you again.”

“But here I am,” Aguirre said. “And I’m not Don Sebastián to you, compañera. ”

All in the room were smiling now. Aguirre himself was not well and was extremely tired. Within the past week he had visited foreign friends in several countries, had even made the transatlantic journey from Prague, a process which never failed to exhaust him utterly.

In Prague, in addition to business, there had been late nights with his old friends from the Spanish war — much spinning out of the past and hardly any talk of the future. Their relentless nostalgia discouraged and exasperated him and to his own grief he had found many of his old fellow soldiers — brothers and more than brothers from the terrible days of the defense of the University City — tiresome and redundant. Even more depressing to him than the burned-out nature of so many old comrades had been the occasions of his lack of communication with the young. These, fortunately, had been few — but they frightened him. His courtesy had served to conceal much impatience with empty nostalgia, rhetoric à la disco, self-indulgence and mindless bohemianism. He was relying on the same courtesy now, for few in the room had anything to tell him, in spite of his three years’ absence from Tecan. He was eager for action, for hard information that would complete his strategic assessment, that would move things forward. There was only one person in the room who could provide for his requirements in this regard and he had now to wait, benign and courtly, until the real conversation could take place.