A Flag for Sunrise (12 page)

He stepped off the plane into what felt like June sunlight; the air was clear as sweet water, the sky mountain blue. Three-thirty in the afternoon at seventy degrees.

The customs search, under the guns of young Indian soldiers in blue fatigues, was long and wearying. It reflected the American AID training of the inspectors modified by local conceptions of official dignity and foreign vice. There was a man in his dotage who asked everyone, banker, missionary, elderly tourist, if they had any marijuana. There was a young madman, someone’s unemployable relative, who wore extremely thick glasses, talked to himself during the inspection and laughed openly at the contents of people’s suitcases.

Compostela was an odd place. It enjoyed a reputation for progressive politics which alarmed conservatives in the United States. Local malcontents, if they were naïve enough to be confused by the official rhetoric into any form of organized activism, were quickly dissuaded, sometimes terminally, by the police or by mysterious, widely deplored auxiliaries with names like the Knights of Mary or the Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost.

Occasionally, the government voted against the United States at the UN and entertained a Bulgarian vice-premier. The octogenarian national poet was periodically dispatched to Havana for cigars. But the Compostelan
honchos
were hustling
arrivistes
for whom a buck was a buck; the rest was bullshit and Bellas Artes. The foreign business community regarded their government as sound.

Compostela’s reserve of international goodwill was funded mainly by the fact of its contiguity with Tecan, where, as even the most flint-hearted Compostelan
cacique
would gravely admit, everything was perfectly dreadful.

The porter who carried Holliwell’s bag from customs stood by while he waited at the currency exchange counter. The notes in Compostela were yellow and brown and were officially called
grenadas
although the people called them
pesos
, sometimes
morenos.
The singles carried the picture of a Negro doctor whom the Compostelans claimed had discovered the quinine treatment for malaria.

Holliwell put one in the porter’s hand—they were worth forty
cents. The porter grunted—times had changed—and left him to carry his own bag through the glass doors of the terminal and to dismiss the boys who sought to take it from him.

Oscar Ocampo was leaning against his little Toyota in the nearest parking row. Walking toward him, Holliwell saw that he had gone fat. There was a bulge of gut over his belt and under the green cloth of his tennis shirt. His hard Indian face was softened and blurred by jowl.

Holliwell threw him a salute, still marveling at how different he looked under the extra weight. Much more European; with his little pointed beard, like an Italian tenor made up for Otello.

He was smiling broadly as he reached out for Holliwell’s bag; he looked somehow relieved. When the bag was safely in the car, they embraced.

“How does it feel to be here again?”

“Good,” Holliwell said. The volcano and the glacial peaks above the town always surprised. They made a man smile to see them. “It always feels good.”

“
La dulce cintura de América
,” Oscar said. So Rubén Darío had called Central America, the sweet waist of the joined continents, every schoolchild there knew it, everyone recited it, often without irony. With Oscar it was always a little ironic, always genuinely felt.

“May we speak English?” Oscar asked.

“Sure,” Holliwell said. He would have preferred practicing his Spanish on a friend. His address to the university would be in that language.

“How are things?”

“With me,” he said, “pretty much the same as always. Everyone’s well, thank God.”

“Good,” Oscar said. “And they gave you tenure?”

Holliwell laughed at his question. In fact, it annoyed him.

“Oh yes. I have tenure in my life too. But I’m not sure it’s the right one.”

“Don’t complain to me,” Oscar said, starting up the car. “That’s a stylized demurrer. You’re very lucky.”

“How about with you?”

They drove off down the airport road and turned onto the stretch
of the Pan-American Highway that led to the capital. Oscar smiled straight ahead at the road.

“A long story. The moral is that nothing is free.”

Holliwell resisted an urge to ask him at once about Marty Nolan.

“Laura and I are split,” Oscar told him. “We are pffft.”

“That’s bad news,” Holliwell said. “Am I wrong?”

“I wish I knew,” Oscar said.

The Pan-American Highway took them past stock corrals and unfenced fields where lean cattle grazed. After a few miles they passed the steel-rolling mill, the flagship of Compostelan industry; there was a neat, trim government clinic beside it, then a village of square concrete houses and crate shacks.

At the edge of the city there was a floral clock surmounted by the statue of an Indian chieftain who had resisted the Conquest. Beyond that the
carretera
became the Avenida Morazón, an imitation of the Reforma and Compostela’s bright daydream of itself. On one side was the central park with its thousand eucalyptus trees, on the other the public buildings with Buck Rogers ramps and reflecting pools full of papaya rinds and mosquito larvae. Beyond the park was the National University, which had employed Oscar, and the Museum of Anthropology. To the left of the Avenida was a neighborhood of middle-class houses with small lawns enclosed by low cement walls; behind it one could see the shanty towns that climbed the inward slopes of Compostela’s twin hills.

A mile or so from the central square stood the Panamerica-Plaza hotel, its fifteen stories of steel and tinted glass defying Compostela’s unquiet crust, surrounded by parkland in which there were lawns and ceiba trees and tame parrots.

Oscar eased the car out of the Avenida traffic and into the Panamerica-Plaza’s driveway.

“I made a reservation for you here,” he told Holliwell. “We don’t have the house anymore.”

“Well,” Holliwell said. He had always disliked the hotel. It was a resort of the high rollers who had battened on the country; the shoeshine boys, the hustlers who lurked at the end of its palm-lined driveway made him feel ashamed. “Well,” he said, “I’ve never stayed here.”

When they had parked, Oscar took up Holliwell’s suitcase, and
shaking off the doorman, advanced aggressively into the lobby with it. Holliwell followed him to the desk, where he was demanding evidence of Holliwell’s reservation in a peremptory manner. The reservation was in order.

“Listen,” Oscar said, “when you finish here I’ll take you over to the apartment for a drink. Would you like that?”

“Sure,” Holliwell said. “That’ll be fine.”

“Good. Then I’ll wait down here for you.”

Waiting for his key, Holliwell watched Oscar drift across the pale gray lobby. The lobby of the Panamerica-Plaza had a fine banana tree at the foot of its mezzanine stairway and a fetching interior waterfall. Beyond that, it was a spiritual extension of Miami Airport.

Oscar had gone to the desk of a tour agency beside the gift shop and was in conversation with the man behind it, a tall man in a lightweight Italian suit who appeared to be a European. As Holliwell watched, they both took a quick look at the area around them—and then Oscar slipped a parcel across the desk. The tall man examined its contents beneath his counter. Oscar sauntered off in the direction of the door and lit a cigarette.

While Holliwell and the hotel bellman rode up to the sixth floor, the elevator played the theme from
The Godfather
for them. The bellman smiled unceasingly.

He was shown to a pleasant balconied room over the pool. When the bellman had set his bag down and turned on the air conditioning, Holliwell gave him two grenadas. Two turned out to be enough.

Ocampo was waiting by the elevator.

“I don’t like it here,” he told Holliwell as they walked to the car. “Not at all.”

“Did you think I did? Never mind,” he told Oscar, cutting off an apology. “It’s comfortable. It’s different.”

Oscar got behind the wheel. Holliwell gave the hotel lackey who opened the door for him a grenada.

“Look, I’m mortified by this,” Oscar said. “My place is small and I’m not alone there.”

“Come on, Oscar. It’s fine. And you have more important things on your mind.”

It was strange, he thought. Laura Ocampo had put up with so much for so many years. Was there female consciousness raising even in Compostela? Had she someone else? It was all so un-Compostelan.

They drove past the cathedral square. Beggars and lottery vendors swept by the car. Holliwell patted his vest pocket, checking his wallet.

“What about the kids?”

“The kids are with Laura. They won’t let me see them.”

“Who won’t?”

“Her family. My brother-in-law threatened to shoot me.”

“Obviously they’re taking this very badly,” Holliwell said.

“
Claro
,” Oscar said. “Very badly.”

His apartment was in an old and elegant section of the city, on the lake side of the hill called Colucu. It was a neighborhood of cobbled streets and colonial houses with mahogany gates and barred windows. Here and there were new apartment buildings in the California style and Oscar lived in one of these. It was a nice building, three stories of dark wood that blended well with the ancient houses around it. Oscar parked his Toyota in a garage behind the building and they went up the back stairs. In the rear of the building was a garden with fig trees, but it was enclosed by a wall like a prison’s.

Inside Oscar’s apartment, a stereo was playing Purcell; there was a smell of whiskey about. Everywhere there were stacks of books, some still in boxes. There were also a great many pre-Columbian pieces around the apartment—more than Holliwell had ever seen in Oscar’s possession. In the little dining area off the kitchen, clay statuettes from the Pacific coast were lined up like toy soldiers beside rows of jade animals. Against one wall there were bone carvings that appeared to be Mayan, opal grave ornaments and three unbroken chacmools of varying size—the largest a full two feet in length, from the recumbent god’s elbows to his toes. The groupings had a businesslike lack of decorativeness that made it unlikely they were reproductions.

In the past, as far as Holliwell knew, Ocampo had always been very scrupulous about the antiquities that passed into his possession. He had never maintained a collection of his own, only kept the odd piece of jade, or a small necklace for his wife or a girlfriend to wear abroad.

Holliwell stood looking at the ranks of artifacts as though by doing so he were being polite. Oscar seemed to be looking for someone in the apartment.

“Frank,” he said suddenly, “have a drink.”

“With pleasure,” Holliwell said.

Oscar went to the kitchen doorway and stood in it for a moment.

“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.