by Robert Stone
“Too damn many of them,” Heath shouted to him. “That was your company’s policy in the old days—the more of the bastards, the merrier. They’re regretting it now.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why? Because they’re a pack of reds. Why shouldn’t they be? They don’t work for a living like you and me. I’m assuming you work for a living.”
“I teach,” Holliwell said.
“Ah,” said Mr. Heath, and he fell silent for a while.
“It isn’t religion they need down here,” Heath declared after five minutes. “They’ve had plenty of that. It’s the Pill. If this coast had half the population it has it would be in damn fine shape.”
Heath was speaking at the top of his voice, conceding their driver only the virtue of some necessity. The couple in the front seat stirred and half turned round in embarrassment.
“Then who would pick the fruit?”
“Hardly any fruit to pick these days. Less than half the crop there was ten years ago. We package coffee and bananas now—we’ve lost most of the bananas to blight. The next thing we need to package is tourism and we don’t need all these imported Jamaicans for that. The other way round—we need less of them.”
The couple in the front seat cringed visibly. The driver, one arm resting on the back of his seat, looked with an amiable countenance at the track before him.
“In the old days,” Heath said, “when the bananas had a few bad years the pickers moved on. No more. The sensible thing for us to do is to airlift the lot to the Pacific coast where we’re bloody crying out for pickers. It’s the sensible thing, so naturally these psalm singers are determined to stop us doing it. They turn the people against us and against the government. They’re masters of propaganda.”
“Really?” Holliwell asked.
“God, yes. Down here they’re meek and mild. Lambs. Then they go abroad and thunder for blood and revolution. They’ve got powerful friends, you know, and they use them to the hilt. Dignity of man,” Heath said sourly. “Where I stand a man’s got dignity or he hasn’t, rich or poor the same. You can’t bestow it on him. You can’t send it to him in a CARE package.”
“I don’t really know the situation,” Holliwell shouted back. “So I can’t say.”
“Fair enough,” Heath told him. “You’re one among many.”
The hotel called Paradise was neither as transcendent nor as banal as its name. It consisted of a number of simple wooden bungalows around a well-tended garden. At some distance from the bungalows was what appeared to be a disused airplane hangar but which revealed itself on closer inspection to be a terraced dining room, open to the beach. Where the tool shops might have been there was a kitchen and a crescent-shaped bar; an old nineteen-forties jukebox stood at the edge of the large cement floor between the bar and the decks of tables, blasting Freddy Fender’s rendition of “El Rancho Grande” into every square foot of covered space. At the water’s edge was a dock with a couple of numbered boats tied up to it and a shack with a diver’s flag painted on the roof.
Not paradise but nice enough. In the office bungalow a hefty Spanish woman registered the guests and dispensed keys to the bungalows.
Holliwell stowed his bag in the plain bungalow and took a cold shower, the only kind available. When he had changed clothes, he poured himself a drink and went outside to sit in the shade of an arbor of bougainvillea.
After he had been sitting for a while, a dark-skinned young man came up from the bar, where he had been drinking a beer with the driver, and asked Holliwell if he wanted to go diving.
Holliwell looked at the young man and then at the placid ocean. The question aroused in him a thrill of fear and also a longing for the depths, for the concealment and oblivion of blue-gray light at sea level minus seventy.
“It’s been a while,” he said.
“If you want,” the young man said, “we run you through a checkout in the morning. Bring it back. You been certified?”
“Yeah,” Holliwell said. A reliable-looking kid, he thought. Undersea images flashed in his mind, fans and parrot fish, silvery barracuda. Things being what they were, why not?
The young man gave him a card with the diving package rates. Holliwell put it in his pocket. As the young man walked back toward the dive shop, Ralph Heath came by carrying a glass of white rum and soda.
“Going diving, are you?”
“I’m thinking of it. I haven’t in a long time.”
“Nor have I. I got thumped on the head in Bogotá eight years ago and I haven’t been able to dive since. Only wish I could.”
“Did you ever dive around here?”
“Oh, yes. Here and in Jamaica. Malta. Yap in Micronesia. I was very fond of it.”
“How did you come to get thumped?” Holliwell asked.
“Accident,” Heath said. “I’ll tell you—Playa Tate’s a good place for a dive. That’s about six miles south of here. There’s a reef close inshore—then she drops off about three quarters of a mile out. It’s a wall—a real chiller-diller, that one. Grand Canyon.”
“Many sharks?” Holliwell asked sheepishly. It was a question one was not supposed to ask.
“Well,” Heath said, “this is the eastern Carib, chum. You’re likely to see the odd shark out there.”
“I suppose,” Holliwell said.
“Another good place is near there. By the American Catholic mission. There’s one reef that starts in about eight feet of water, then slopes down to forty, then flattens out and drops a mile out. Good snorkeling there as well.”
“How’s the shop here?”
“Quite good actually. Sandy’s a good boy. I used to dive with his father ten years or so ago. Nice family they are. Head and shoulders above the rest of them around here.”
“I think I will go out,” Holliwell said. “I’ll go look up Sandy in the morning.”
“You’ll have a jolly good time, Holliwell,” Heath said.
Pablo leaned idly on the rail as they cleared the harbor, the rubber work gloves still in his back pocket. His want of a bath was bothering him acutely now and he wished that he had asked them about it while the boat was still hooked up to a dockside water line. If there was a woman aboard, he reasoned, the Cloud must have a head and shower somewhere.
No harm in asking, he thought after a while; there might be enough water from the evaporators or a fresh-water supply somewhere aboard. They seemed to have everything else. He went forward to the wheelhouse and leaned his head through the hatch. Negus and Callahan were in the cockpit chairs.
“If we got some time now and there’s water enough, could I clean up? I ain’t shaved nor showered for a while.”
Negus looked from Pablo to Callahan.
“There’s enough,” Callahan said. “Right behind the galley. Knock first.”
He went back to the lazaret to get some fresh clothes and his toilet kit and then up to the galley. Behind it was the door to the dim compartment into which Mr. Callahan had earlier disappeared with his drink. He knocked twice on it.
“Hello,” called the voice of Mrs. Callahan.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Come on in.”
He opened the door just as Tino, out on deck, was hauling away the hatch covers that closed off the windows of the compartment from the outside. As the space filled with light he saw that the compartment had the same dark paneling as the forward passageway, that there was a striped chaise longue, some captain’s chairs with brightly colored cushions, even a bookcase. In the center of the stateroom was a round table with metal studs, an electric fan resting on it. Mrs. Callahan was sitting in one of the captain’s chairs under a lighted wall lamp, a book on her lap.
“On your right, Pablo,” she told him. She pulled the terry-cloth robe she was wearing a little farther down over her tanned thighs. It was all she had on, Pablo thought.
“I’ll go easy on the water.”
In the pocket of Mrs. Callahan’s robe, Pablo espied a bottle of pills. There was a smal
l swelling distorting the patrician contour of her high cheekbone and long jaw.
“Yes, do,” she said.
Pablo had him a shit, shower and shave; his thoughts were carnal. Soaping down, he sang to himself.
“I ride an old paint
I ride an old dan
I’m going to Montana for to have a hooly-an.”
The water was warm, hand-pumped out of an overhead pipe through a rubber nozzle. He shaved slowly and deliberately, his shoulder propped against the bulkhead beside the mirror, riding with the slow roll of the boat, still singing.
When he came out, Mrs. Callahan was watching him, leaning her head on an elbow, her hand covering her mouth. When she took her hand away, he saw that she was smiling.
“Do you play the guitar?” she asked him.
“No,” Pablo said, feeling surly and put down.
“What a shame,” Mrs. Callahan said.
He climbed out of the fancy compartment, the kit and soiled clothes under his arm, and went out on deck. Low even seas slid westward under the light wind, over the horizon was a thin line of cloud, nearly pink in the fading light. Big bitch thinks I’m comical, he said to himself. She thinks I’m the fucking entertainment.
Tino was checking out the net’s chain line as Pablo tossed his things down into the lazaret.
“Callahan bring his old lady every trip?”
“Mostly does.”
It was not his custom to speak of white women with dark people but resentment and desire made him uneasy and perverse.
“She spread it around any?”
“Lister engine,” Tino said, nodding toward the casing of the outrigger’s auxiliary motor. Pablo watched him drop the chain line on the deck and walk over to slap the top of the casing. “You can work it from right here or from the cockpit. Can haul it up by hand on the windlass if you needs to.”
Pablo fixed his eyes on the tall St. Joostian and leaned against the upright outrigger. He was being turned around again. He watched the other man’s eyes and thought of the den tided palm.
“We ain’t fishin’ tonight,” Tino said, “but I tell you in case like. Over dere—” He pointed to a rolled-up smaller net against the port rail. “Dat’s de tri-net. We haul her up every half hour maybe on a lay line. You ever been shrimping before?”
Pablo only stared at him.
“Well,” Tino said, meeting his stare, “you best be told so you know what you doin’. Got to know what you doin’ out here.”
“Is that right?” Pablo asked him.
“Believe it,” Tino said, and picked up the chain line again.
“That’s real good of you, Tino.”
“Para servile,” Tino said softly.
During the next two days, the Cloud ran the coast of the Isthmus. Most of the time they were out of sight of land, in the seas between the Swan Islands and Serrana Bank. Pablo watched and listened, made himself useful and kept his nature to himself. It was like a breakdown cruise; they were testing the electronics gear and the auxiliary diesels; making plans to which he was not party. Mainly, he realized, it was he himself that they were observing. Tino, Negus, both of the Callahans would engage him from time to time in strained quiet conversations that varied in nature according to their several styles. He made it his business to be pleasant, incurious and resourceful in small matters. He had a turn at the wheel, he replaced a Raytheon tube and sunned himself on the hatches. Once, when they were anchored off Gracias a Dios, he had a skinny dip and was confirmed in the conviction that Mrs. Callahan had eyes for him. The swim also gave him a chance to study the boat’s dynamics from the business end, and although he was no engineer he could see that even in basic construction the Cloud was not what she appeared. She had what the Coast Guard would call a false hull; a squat duck of a shrimper at first and even second glance above the waterline, her lines were modified to make her capable of formidable speed with the diesels engaged. A contrabands, as he had assumed.
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.
