Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

Decision then — hard but necessary. There were other battles and she had a life before her to fight them. She went into the office beside the kitchen where the small radio set was and sat down in front of it. She would have to call Sister Mary Joseph for help in closing, get a telegraph to the provincial, notify the consulate and the Ministry of the Interior.

She began to draft the appropriate messages in longhand, but after a moment she set her pencil down.

Campos. She had once had an erotic dream about him. His presence now bestrode her thoughts and as she thought of him a notion struck her that stayed and as it stayed, ripened into certainty. It was he who was killing the children! The notion was utterly without foundation but she felt sure of it. How could they have told her not to be afraid of him? If they had planned to kill him — she had surmised so much as long ago as her dinner conversation with Godoy but had put the idea out of her head from weak scruples — why had they not done so before? Now, from a tactical standpoint, it was too late. Or was it? Could there be some element of blackmail in the thing, could the Movement be somehow aware of his killings and consider him thus neutralized? Impossible, she thought, they were not cynical, not that way. But someone would have to do for Campos; if not, he would go on killing. Everyone, every mother and child on the coast was in his hands, living and dying through his sufferances. The torture and murder of children was something more important than even the establishment of revolution, surely. But was it not all of a piece — Campos on the coast, the President in his mortar-proof palace in the capital, the American interests that kept everything in place?

She stared down at the draft paper before her and leaned her forehead on her hands.

From outside, from the small plantain grove through which the creekside trail led inland, she heard voices. She went to the window, opened the shutter and saw the first groups of young foreigners heading for the stelae. They were mainly in couples, mainly fair, sunburned and bleached, in cutaways or sailcloth pants, in halters or bare-chested. They seemed to her incredibly innocent, vacant. But the oldest of them could not be many years younger than she herself. They passed like ghosts. None of them saw her.

Out on the veranda, Father Egan was still asleep on the hammock. His gut was swollen with sickness but his face was thinning, hollows beginning to show under his eyes and cheekbones. He had been hale and portly when Justin arrived in Tecan; now she saw for the first time his long chin and fine features. His face was a gray replica of what it might have been in his youth, the death mask of a handsome delicate young priest who could quicken a pious lady’s pulse with the resonance of First Corinthians.

She did not want to bury him here, she thought, under a twisted-wire cross. There was a stone vault for him under the lime trees in California, where he could sleep with all those other shadows who had worn down their steps on carpeted altars by candlelight. Broken their hearts, minds, sex and entrails in the imperfect service of their Holy One, their Hanged Man.

He woke and saw her looking down at him.

“What’s wrong, dear?” He sat up on the hammock and his belly hung down over his belt, almost to the hammock’s edge.

“You’ve got more of them coming,” she said.

He looked at her blankly.

“Your parish,” she said, “is assembling.”

Egan yawned. “You’re disapproving of me again.”

“Well, they have to go, that’s all. One of us has to tell them to move on. I’m trying to get the two of us out of here with a minimum of trouble and Campos is making a stink over them.”

“He was here today,” Egan said. “He never mentioned them. He asked about you.”

Justin shivered. “Asked what?”

“Vague questions — you know how he is. He asked me man to man if I thought you were a virgin. Man to man, he said. Then he asked me if you had ever been in California or in Paris.” He stood up and brushed the hair from his forehead. “It made me think.”

“And what,” she asked, “did it make you think?”

The priest went past her into his own quarters and began to pump up water for his shower. He spoke to her through the open door.

“About humanness. He asked me these strange questions and I began to wonder if he was human. Then I began to wonder if I was. And you, dear, whether you were. Then I thought: What do we mean by it? Humanness. Does it mean being real and in the world and not an animal? Is it running thin, so to speak? Whatever it is — is there less of it? And is that good or bad?”

The pumping stopped and she heard him move the bottle from the shower stall and turn the water on.

“Then I ran out of categories, so to speak. Meanings just faded. I thought — a word might as well be a little plant. I thought, well, silence will do. Not thinking will do. But I’m incapable of silence or not thinking.”

“You’re still capable of taking a shower, Charlie,” she said. “There’s merit in that.” He would not have heard her for the running water.

She stood for a moment looking at the blank message sheet by the transmitter and wandered into the kitchen. Immediately she saw that the stores had been broken into. The last sack of beans, which had been half full, was missing. The larder’s only padlock had been broken and half of the frozen fish was gone. And the biscuit tin.

“The useless sons of bitches,” she said aloud. On the next thought, she hurried to the dispensary; sure enough — a jar of codeine tablets gone, half of the Percodan. Her store of morphine was still intact, they had failed to find it.

In a rage she ran out to the edge of the veranda to confront Egan’s troops, shouting as she went.

“We have real pain here, you people! People suffer here, they get hurt!”

Three young men in turned-down white hats looked up at her as though she were mad, startled from their serenity. A couple behind them actually smiled at her.

“This is a medical dispensary!” she was shouting. “Our medication is not for you fucking rich kids to get high on!” At the height of her outrage, she found herself eye to eye with the peculiar young Mennonite she had been seeing around the place.

The strange young man only stared at her with his doll’s face. His eyes were blue and very bright. She could have sworn in that moment that he had painted cheeks. Justin’s angry words stuck in her throat. She held to the railing of the porch, turned her head away and then backed off. Out of his sight.

As she went back inside, his image stayed clear in her mind’s eye. And with it came a verse which she had always loved but which now filled her with revulsion.

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not …”

She felt overthrown. Why was there so much suffering? How was it she could never do anything? Tecan. It was an evil place. Accursed.

In his quarters Egan had finished with his wash and was dressing. Justin walked in on him, took a swig of Flor de Cana and sat down in his desk chair.

“I’m going crazy, Charlie. Like you. I think we’ll have to send up a rocket.”

Egan tucked the tails of a clean white shirt under his belt.

“You’re just afraid, dear. I know all about that, I can assure you. Remember how afraid I was?”

“I don’t scare easy, do I, Charles?”

“You certainly don’t.”

“What am I scared of?”

The priest went to the mirror and began combing his hair.

“There’s a great deal to be scared of here. I suppose mainly you’re scared of Campos. He’s after you, you know.”

Justin looked at him in the mirror. “Charles,” she said, “is he killing those children?”