Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

As he pretended to listen to young Comrade Rodo present her report on the student situation in the capital, he used his time as valuably as he could trying to read in the faces of the men around him, in their manner and demeanor, some record of the three years he had lost of Tecan. Of course, they in their turn were seeking out the reverse side of the record in watching him. The concentration that seemed focused on Rodo’s assessment, as she shuffled her coded aides-mémoire, was profound.

Across the table from Aguirre sat an Atapa Indian called a la Torre. Taller and more broad-shouldered than most Atapas, he was otherwise physically typical of them. The Atapas were a Malay-like people, and even their artifacts resembled those of Southeast Asia. During the conquest, the Spaniards had thought of the Atapas as docile, although in the period before independence they had come to learn otherwise.

A la Torre himself was a small landowner and while it would be unfair to speak of him as vicious, he was, drunk or sober, feared by Indians and whites alike. A kulak, the Russians might call him. But their social designations did not apply well in Tecan.

Several attempts had been made on a la Torre’s life by both gentry concerned with mineral rights and ultra-right fanatics. Each had failed and some had occasional mortal consequences. He was the unquestioned leader of the southern group of Atapas, in spite or because of the ways in which his life differed from most of theirs. In his youth, he had been converted to Adventism by North American missionaries, but his enthusiasm for the gospel and its evangelists had evaporated during his two years at the National Technical College, obviated, it seemed, by his discovery of the Republic and the machine.

His experiences had left him with a curious and volatile variant of the Protestant ethic. He was an unstinting and indefatigable worker of strong ambition and great physical strength. His small holding, given over to scarce and hence relatively valuable vegetables and a small dairy herd, had been cleared from scrub jungle by his own muscle and sweat. When he had occasion to hire the labor of his fellow Atapas he paid them as generously as possible and supervised their work through terror. Yet his society had forced him to see his own and his people’s work as a humiliation, surrounded and dominated as he was by those who did none or lived off that of others.

All work to a la Torre was physical work. Doctors and teachers he recognized as necessary, but they were not workers. Making reluctant exceptions for these professions, he was consumed by a serious and quite personal hatred for large groups of people whom he saw as living without working. The rich and the priests did none and he hated these most of all. The bourgeoisie did none. Nor did the gringos, the gachupines , the soldiery. Their existences consisted in living by trickery off the work of others and he was prepared to kill them in good conscience as he would those he caught stealing or cheating him at cards. He was thoroughly honest and a leader, not cruel but unyieldingly just in accordance with his perception of justice, which owed something to that of the Adventist God.

Looking covertly into his black Tonkinese eyes, Aguirre shuddered. The man was so thoroughly the emotional product of social forces as to pose a dilemma, one that Aguirre might find the energy to discuss over good Pilsener with his old comrades in the Charles Square. In terms of socialist humanism, a la Torre was almost too good to be true. That history has provided us in our poor country with such treasures, Aguirre thought gratefully! And que huevon , the old man thought. Invincible!

Seated beside the formidable Atapa — owlish, effervescent with wise humor and contained intelligence — was another personified dilemma, Héctor Morelos de Medina, one of the few surviving members of the old Communist Party of Tecan and one of Aguirre’s oldest friends. Ironical, learned, the best of company and, most rare in San Ysidro, a true wit — Morelos ran a bookshop in the Buenos Aires neighborhood. For many years as a Communist in Tecan he had led a terribly dangerous life, endured exile, acted with the greatest bravery in the face of torture and excruciating sacrifice. Now, like Aguirre’s other old friend in Compostela, Oscar Ocampo, Morelos had become a North American spy. Intelligence abroad had not identified the motive for his defection but it did not seem to be ideological. Presumably it was banal like Ocampo’s. Aguirre had always been close to Morelos; certainly he preferred his company to that of Stakhanovites like a la Torre. On the other hand it could not be said that he was profoundly shaken. He had known many defectors in his lifetime and plenty of them had construed for themselves the best of motives. Sometimes the nature of their treason was objective only. It was disagreeable and regrettable for Sebastián Aguirre to now consider his friend Morelos an enemy in war, but it was certainly not impossible.

Señorita Rodo finished her report and everyone nodded. She was Urban Youth, Studentdom, Woman; an essential. A good-hearted rich kid who might or might not have a mean streak for good or ill when the time came. No question of guts; she was risking interrogation by the Guardia. Aguirre gave her his choicest approving smile.

Beside Rodo — the moderates. Agustín Baz, a manufacturer of soap, a mestizo of poor origin who had worked his way to enlightened wealth and been rewarded with sharp dealing and extortion at the hands of the ruling clique. He was also in competition with foreigners. Most of the local capitalists endured and took what they could for themselves; Baz had the gift of resentment and more balls. He preferred facing revolution to being openly cheated. Baz was as honest as a la Torre and ran the clandestine organization in San Ysidro effectively. He had moments of tactical brilliance. Yet, he would not go the distance, Aguirre thought. The man was no traitor and no weakling but they were simply not fighting for the same things and Baz would finish in Miami, embittered, a gusano , as the Cubans said. He himself had not the remotest idea that this would come to pass, but Aguirre, listening to his report on the state of the nation’s finances, felt fairly certain of it. Naturally, he was always ready to be proven wrong.

Next, inevitably, the priest — at the moment another essential. Monsignor Golz was of partly Swiss origin, another honest man conversant with and not unsympathetic to Marx. Inspired by the example of Calles, a disciple of Gustavo Gutiérrez, he thought of himself as an intellectual. Aguirre, as much a connoisseur of engagé priests as he was anticlerical, thought him fatuous. But there was no question in his mind of the necessity of having Golz, and in his portly, priestly way, Golz was a fanatic. Aguirre was much more certain of Baz’s ultimate desertion than of Golz’s. His fanaticism might take him either way — one could never be sure with priests.

The moderates, Baz and Golz, were ill at ease. They were aware of the patronizing and faint scorn of nearly all the other participants, and the monsignor, as he described conditions on the Caribbean coast, was particularly aware of the distaste and distrust with which the terrible a la Torre watched him. Even young Rodo curled her lip as she listened. And of course Morelos, the CIA stool pigeon, was least able to dissemble his amusement at this ecclesiastical presence.

Listening carefully to Golz’s report, and giving no evidence of any suppressed contumely, was the man whom Aguirre had come to see. He was a man in his middle thirties, dark-skinned and massive, with a face not easily forgotten. His hair was thick and straight, he was bull-necked and broad-faced and down the length of his broken nose from brows to nostrils was a jagged crooked scar, showing the red imperfectly healed flesh of a deep wound. The coarseness of his features and the disfiguring mark of violence seemed to sum up the fortunes of a Tecanecan campesino ; in fact the young man’s origins and career were in no sense proletarian. His father had been a botanist at the Institute of Sciences and he himself had degrees in art and in art history from the University of California. For years he had been a moderately successful painter, spending most of his time in New York and in Mexico City; presently he was chairman of the Art Department at the National University. He was on social terms with the families of several presidential henchmen and with quite a few Americans in the diplomatic community.