Free A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone

impossible, she thought, that he had not heard.
    “I’m going to close us down and go home. I’m tired of arguing with the order and I don’t believe we’re getting anything done.”
    “It’s a shame you had no support. It must be difficult.”
    “Yes, it’s difficult to make a fool of yourself to no good purpose. But of course it’s a lesson.” She was beginning to grow quite irritated with Godoy. “Yet another goddamn valuable lesson.”
    “I have to tell you,” the priest said as he watched the little girl serve his dinner and their beer, “that I’m very sorry to hear that you’re closing.”
    “Really?” Justin said impatiently. “Why, thank you.”
    He’s downright super-serviceable, she thought.
    “Please excuse me,” Godoy said. “I haven’t yet eaten today.”
    “Please go ahead,” Justin said. She decided that he was dandified and vain. Frightened of, and therefore hostile to, women. For a long time it had seemed to her that Godoy had a difficulty in comprehending plain English that went beyond any unfamiliarity with the language.
    “You know,” Godoy said, tasting his shrimp, “I think you stayed this long because I wanted you to.”
    “Are you kidding?” Justin demanded.
    “Just a superstition of mine.”
    “If you wanted us to stay you were very subtle.”
    “It wasn’t only because I like you,” the priest said. “And not because I thought you were the very model of a Yankee missionary. Obviously you are not that.”
    The bluntness of his language startled her. “Then why?” she asked.
    “Because I know how you think. I know your attitudes. I even know the books you own.”
    Justin watched him delicately take his shrimp.
    “Then everyone must,” she said. “So I’m probably in trouble.”
    He shrugged.
    “You are North American and that protects you. The Archbishop in his way protects you.”
    “Campos,” she said.
    “Don’t worry about Campos for now.” He kept his eyes on his plate as he said it.
    “Really,” Justin said, “it was stupid of me to try to keep the station open.”
    Godoy gave her a quick amused glance.
    “I don’t know what you were thinking of. But I admire you for it. And I sympathize.”
    “I was being naïve as usual.”
    He looked up from his plate again and held her with the look.
    “You were never as naïve as I was,” he said, “and I was born here. You think you’ve failed? Of course you failed. There’s nothing but failure here. The country is a failure. A disaster of history.”
    “That’s very hopeless talk,” Justin said.
    “It’s where we begin,” Godoy said. “We start from this assumption.”
    His meal finished, the priest took a sip of beer and lit another Winston. The beer seemed to bring a faint rosiness to his pale pitted cheek.
    “When I was in the Jesuit college here I wrote a letter of which I was very proud. I wrote to your President Eisenhower.”
    “Good Lord,” Justin said. “To dear old Ike.”
    “Yes, to Ike himself. And I sent the same letter to the leader of our opposition—his name was Enrique Matos, of the great Liberal Party. In this letter—which I covered with tears—I told them that if the free world was to conquer Communism it must not follow the way of greed and narrow self-interest but the way of the Great Redemptor. He whom we saw dead tonight.”
    Godoy crushed his Winston out in an ashtray and put another in his mouth.
    “I told Ike and Matos—I was only a kid, you understand—that their leadership must be spiritual. Also that they were overlooking the evils of our country, that we were suffering because of the government and the rich and the North American attitude.
    “In the same week my father disappeared. Not for long and he came back alive. You see, he was a watchmaker in the capital, an immigrant from Spain. He wasn’t hurt badly but he was very frightened. He told me not to write any more letters.
    “A little later there arrived a message from the White House in