A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “Patrick?” Holliwell heard him call. At first he could make no sense of the word.

  When Ocampo came back, he was carrying two glasses full of ice and a bottle of scotch. He made a small circuit of the room and rapped on the bedroom door with the bottom of the bottle.

  As Holliwell was taking his filled glass, a tall thin youth came out of the bedroom, brushing long light-colored hair from his face.

  “This is my friend Frank Holliwell,” Oscar said to him. “And, Frank, this is Patrick Ventura.”

  Holliwell held out his hand. The boy gave him a soft continental handshake. He was no older than twenty, Holliwell thought, and spaced out—as though he were drunk or on pills.

  “Where’s mine?” the boy said to Oscar. He looked at both of them in turns with a mannered wariness that Holliwell found distasteful. Oscar handed him the scotch bottle, and he disappeared into the kitchen.

  On the wall across from where Holliwell stood was a picture of Oscar and his sons, the boys on ponies, Oscar standing between, holding the bridles.

  When Patrick Ventura came back into the room, he held a water glass full of whiskey.

  “You’re from the States?” Holliwell asked him.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time in Hastings-on-Hudson,” the boy said, fixing Holliwell with the same sidereal coyness.

  Being suckled by wolves, Holliwell thought. He glanced at Oscar. Oscar was nervous and proprietary.

  “My mother’s family lives there. But I come from Chile.”

  “Ah,” Holliwell said. “Chile.”

  “Chile today and hot tamale,” Patrick Ventura said. “That’s what they say in Hastings-on-Hudson. The South American weather report. Have you heard that, Oscar? Chile today and hot tamale?”

  Oscar had never heard it.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “You were taunted with this?”

  “Like, constantly,” Patrick Ventura said.

  “It’s strange,” Oscar said brightly to young Ventura. “You and I have never spoken English before.”

  “Well,” Holliwell observed, “Santiago used to be a nice town.”

  “It’s still a nice town,” Patrick Ventura said.,

  “A lot of people have left. Or been arrested.”

  “Patrick is not political,” Oscar said.

  “Oscar used to be a Marxist-Leninist,” Patrick Ventura told them, “but now he’s a hippie.”

  Holliwell turned away quickly so as not to have to look at Oscar, and walked his drink to the full-length balcony window.

  “Well, that’s what you said to me, Oscar,” Ventura was insisting petulantly.

  Then they were in the kitchen, speaking in Spanish, fighting over the bottle. Oscar was cutting Patrick Ventura off. For his part, Holliwell hoped devoutly it could be done without some kind of scene. If there was one—if the kid went into some kind of fit—he would leave at once, he decided. He drank deeply of his drink.

  Oscar came into the living room holding the bottle.

  “We need this more than he does,” Oscar said. “Let’s go and sit outside.”

  The boy was leaning against the back of the sofa, his eyelids fluttering. Holliwell was afraid that he might fall. Oscar turned off the stereo and with the whiskey in his hand led Holliwell outside to the balcony.

  When they had settled in the lounge chairs, they heard the sound of glass breaking in the apartment behind them. Oscar did not turn around. The sun was down behind the peaks; edges of shadow softened in the picture-book street below them. Holliwell buttoned his jacket. Sounds of evening traffic drifted up from the distant Avenida Central.

  “I’m in a bourgeois crisis,” Oscar said. He poured them both another drink.

  “Well, you’re talking to the right man.”

  “That’s whom I live with now.”

  “You mean he’s your lover?” Holliwell understood that henceforward the ground would be uncertain.

  “My wife calls him my ‘catamite.’ ”

  Holliwell felt himself closely watched. He drummed on the arm of his chair.

  “You’re embarrassed,” Oscar said.

  “No, no. Only … you know me, Oscar. I’m a conventional man.”

  “You? Never!”

  “I hope you understand that I don’t think badly of you.”

  Oscar nodded. It had not been quite the right thing to say. Finding the right thing to say now would be difficult and saying too little would be resented.

  “And this is why your brother-in-law is threatening you?”

  Oscar shrugged and raised his hands.

  “What about you, Frank?” Ocampo asked after a moment. “Have you never had a homosexual experience?”

  Now he’s keeping score, Holliwell thought. In spite of himself, he blushed at the question. He was careful not to laugh.

  “Never.”

  “Never in your life?”

  Holliwell began to understand that Oscar would never forgive him for receiving this confidence. He himself hated losing friends. In his regret he veered in the direction of plain candor.

  “Look, Oscar—do you want me to tell you I’m homosexual too? I’m not, as far as I know. I haven’t had such an experience. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  Holliwell finished his drink.

  “I guess I could have picked a better time to come down.”

  “Why?” Oscar asked.

  For Christ’s sake, Holliwell thought.

  “Isn’t it a little difficult to try and entertain me while you’re dealing with all these upheavals in your life? Don’t you need … something other than people visiting?”

  “I need a friend,” Oscar told him.

  And so he did. There were few people in that country to be a friend to him now. Everyone knew everything there. Oscar himself, Holliwell thought, in spite of his aestheticism was a thorough Compostelan, a man of the mountains, a cowboy. In his own circle, the most educated circle in the country, he would be surrounded with contempt. In his deepest self, he would share that contempt.

  “Then I’m glad to be here,” Holliwell said. “I’m proud to be your friend and I’d like to remain your friend.”

  Oscar’s face looked somber and blank to him. It was an Indian face again, and he could not read it. He’s off, Holliwell thought, he’s closed down on me and gone off to God Seven with our cultural reference point. Instant abyss, veil of centuries. If people are always doing that to us, he thought, surely we are always doing it to them?

  He had meant what he had said. Maybe it had been patronizing. Maybe it would have sounded better in Spanish, or in proto-Mayan. In the dim light, he saw that Oscar had begun to cry.

  “Thank you, my friend,” Oscar said.

  “I wish I could help you,” Holliwell told him.

  “You know, Frank—he’s very difficult, my Patrick Ventura. He gets drunk. He takes all kinds of pills. It’s very tough on me.”

  “He’s just a kid,” Holliwell said. “Christ, he can’t be over twenty, right?”

  Oscar had not heard the question. He was staring over the opposite rooftops with a fond expression.

  “Do you know the German film Der blaue Engel?”

  “Christ,” Holliwell said, writhing. “I mean … sure I know it.”

  He stared down at the tiles of the balcony floor; he was reflecting on the fact that he was about to hear a Central American intellectual compare himself with the professor in The Blue Angel. More of the dynamics of contrasting culture.

  “Sometimes I feel like the old professor in that film.”

  “Movies are movies, Oscar. This is your life.”

  He finished his drink. “This is your life,” he had said.

  “Because it costs me very much to manifest my love for him. But there is more to it than sexuality, Frank. This boy is very beautiful—not only in the physical sense. But he is also spiritual.”

  Holliwell shakily reached out for the bottle beside Oscar’s chair. Whe
n he looked up, he saw that Oscar had closed his eyes.

  “ ‘De que sirve la hermosura,’ ” Oscar was reciting.

  “ ‘cuando lo fuese la mía

  si me falta la alegría

  si me falta la Ventura.’ ”

  Oscar opened his eyes and there were more tears there.

  “ ‘Si mi falta la Ventura,’ ” he repeated.

  “I don’t know it,” Holliwell said.

  “Calderón,” Oscar told him. “El principe constante.” He lifted his glass and drank from it. “Spoken,” he said, smiling sadly, “by the beautiful but melancholy Fénix, spoiled princess of Fez.”

  Holliwell smiled back and shook his head.

  Oscar watched him. “A strange turn of fate, eh? For me?”

  “Very strange, Oscar.”

  “Frank, I want you to see some of the poems he’s written. I want you to see that side of him. Will you read them?”

  “All right,” Holliwell said.

  He stood up and went back into the apartment; Holliwell half turned to look inside. Oscar stood for a while over the sofa, leaning on the back of it. Patrick Ventura’s bare feet were crossed in repose over the armrest.

  Holliwell turned back toward the darkening street. In the downtown distance a red neon sign flashed on. He could see lighted windows in his hotel miles away, on a floodlit hillock.

  The extent of Ocampo’s ruin became clear to him. He had lost more than even his family—his wife’s connections had kept him employed and out of trouble, so that in all likelihood he would presently be out of his job and on the police shit lists. But his political days would probably be over too. Because his self-respect was gone; he saw himself as a maricón, mariposa, crowing clown and princess of Fez. And no clown, no mariposa, could be a true revolutionary.

  Holliwell fingered the edges of his whiskey glass. The man was a corresponding associate of Marty Nolan’s friends in Compostela. He was destroyed and dangerous. A desperado.

  In a few minutes, Ocampo came back to the balcony with a thin sheaf of papers in a tan binder. He switched on the reading light beside Holliwell’s chair.

  “Here, Frank,” he said, thumbing through the sheets. “Read only a few, they’re all short. Start with this one.”

  Holliwell took the binder and looked at the page to which it was opened.

  The first poem there was called “Belvedere Fountain.”

  BELVEDERE FOUNTAIN

  Drums of love

  And hate

  Drive the tambourine man

  To spread ebony wings

  And my claws too

  Clutch

  Sweet Puerto Rican bodies

  Swing with mango sweetness

  The rich weed makes my brain

  A slave

  To the torn toms beat

  And so I dance

  Footless Footloose

  Eye less in Gaza

  There was a second poem.

  ECSTASIS

  Ecstasis isn’t static

  It’s not advertisements

  And it’s not the news

  Ecstasis can be little and

  Bound in a nutshell

  Or big enough to fill even me

  My zodiac, my milky way

  Decans of time imploding

  “What do you think, Frank? Publishable?”

  Holliwell eased the folder gently down to the floor. He kept his eyes fixed on a potted plant near the sliding door.

  “ ‘Ecstasis isn’t static’ isn’t bad.”

  “He is creative as can be, Frank. The most thoroughly, the most purely artistic of souls.”

  Holliwell nodded gravely.

  “We can’t stay here. If we were in the States everything would be different. He could get himself straightened out. He could get into school. Also it would be better for me. Here it’s impossible.”

  Holliwell felt in his pocket for a cigarette.

  “Oscar—before I came down I had a call from a man named Marty Nolan. He mentioned you. He said you were in touch.”

  Oscar looked past him.

  “I know who he is,” Oscar said. “But I’ve never met him.”

  “That hardly matters, Oscar.”

  “I’ve examined my conscience,” Ocampo declared. “I don’t like them—you know I don’t like them. But what choice do I have?”

  “What choice?” Holliwell asked. “I don’t know.”

  “They say they can help me. Frank—I must have a job up there. And there are hardly any jobs today—you know it yourself. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “They can’t help you as much as you think. They may tell you they can.”

  “Ah,” Oscar said, “you’re naïve, Frank. You don’t know how your own government works. They can get anything done.”

  “Even if they got you a job you could never come back. You’d never see your kids again. You’d be compromised everywhere in America. Those guys have no secrets.”

  “Frank, listen …” Oscar put out his hand and closed his fingers over his palm as though he were crumpling a piece of paper. “They have me.”

  “They’re paying you?”

  “Yes. Discreetly.”

  Holliwell lit his cigarette and shook his head.

  “I’d ask you what you’re doing for them,” he said, “but I suppose I don’t want to know.”

  “You worked for them,” Oscar said suddenly. “In Vietnam you worked for them.”

  “You know I worked for them in Vietnam. I know you’re working for them here. That’s how discreet they are, Oscar.” He put the cigarette out and leaned forward to pick up the bottle. “I went to school with Marty Nolan. And Vietnam was a long time ago.”

  “I can do this without compromising anyone. I can turn it to my advantage and no one will get hurt.”

  “Allow me to say,” Holliwell said, “that this is the logic of desperation.”

  “I am desperate,” Oscar said. “But I can be …” He paused to think of the word and when it came to him, he looked pleased. “Shrewd.” He pronounced the word as though it had an umlaut. “More shrewd than you believe.”

  Holliwell turned away from his friend’s boyish, unhappy smile.

  “You’d do better selling chacmools to tourists.”

  “I do,” Oscar said. “I buy from the huaqueros and I sell. Top dollar. I am also available through your hotel as a guide.” He stood up, walked to the balcony rail and leaned over the quiet street. “Every weekend I take your compatriots out to the ruins at Uxpan and I present to them Mayans. The wonderful thing about our Mayans is that they can be anything to anybody. I always try to give my gringos the Mayans I think they deserve.”

  “It’ll be you that gets hurt, Oscar.”

  Oscar shook his head wildly and took up the bottle.

  “It’s only a dialogue. An exchange of views. Gossip. I can make it up if I like.”

  Holliwell extended his glass and Oscar poured them both another.

  “I’m not judging you,” Holliwell said. “I’m afraid for you. The people involved are fighting a war.”

  “I wish there were no wars on,” Oscar said.

  “Amen to that.”

  “You think I’m only an informer for money. But I think that even in war there’s room for dialogue. I know my own poor country. I know your country also. If I make communication—what is morally wrong with that?”

  Holliwell smiled.

  “You’re not persuaded?”

  “Sure. But I’m easy to persuade.”

  “We require war,” Oscar said. “The advancement of society requires it. Art requires it.”

  “I’m going back to the hotel,” Holliwell said. “I’m out of it.”

  “They want me to go to Tecan.”

  Holliwell said nothing.

  “For years I’ve wanted to go down there to photograph the stelae on the north coast. These are very interesting stelae, you see, because they look very Mayan but they aren’t. We don’t know who the people were.
We think they may have spoken Mayan but ethnically they were something else.”

  “A cover.”

  Oscar shrugged. “There is a mission there. They want an opinion. A second opinion. You see—they’re not all stupid. They’re being careful.”

  “Do you propose to go?”

  “Before now I could never get a visa. The Tecanecan police know well my politics. Now the friends of Nolan say they’ll get me one.” He put his drink down and gripped the balcony rail with both hands. “But it would look all wrong and I told them that. Besides I’ve always hated priests and nuns. Since school.”

  Holliwell stood up and rubbed his face.

  “You’ll be at the lecture?”

  “I can’t, Frank. I can’t face them. And it wouldn’t be good for you.”

  “But you set it up.”

  “I’m sure they’ve forgotten that,” Oscar said.

  “Then meet me afterwards at the hotel.”

  “Yes, I’ll try.”

  Back in the apartment, Holliwell dealt with Oscar’s rash offer to drive him back and paced up and down beside the sleeping Patrick Ventura while Oscar telephoned for a taxi. It took quite a long time. Oscar walked him down the back stairs.

  At night the rear of the building looked like a fortress. There were tinted lights with wire guards around them along the walkways; floodlights shone on the high back wall.

  On the slope behind the house, television sets glowed behind the picture windows of an apartment block. Above, on the higher ground, kerosene lamps flickered among the tin shacks.

  They walked across the dry grass to the rear wall and Oscar unlocked a door that led through it to the pitch-black street beyond.

  “You condemn me,” Oscar said when they were out in the street. “There are things I could say to you that I won’t say. You don’t know how it works down here.”

  “I think it works the same everywhere,” Holliwell said. “Maybe I know more about that than you.”

  “Ah, yes,” Oscar said. “Vietnam.”

  A car turned into the street and slowly cruised the wall. As Holliwell stepped forward to hail it, he noticed that Ocampo had moved back from the roadway, as though seeking darkness. But the wall against which he leaned was thoroughly illuminated.

  The car was a five-year-old Chevrolet with a taxi sign on the windshield and a plastic Sacred Heart on the dashboard.