Free A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone Page B

within the church if you stay. It would be better.”
    “Whatever you think.”
    “We won’t talk about it anymore now. During the week—we can meet and talk further.”
    Justin nodded; she felt lonely again, and frightened.
    As they started across the plaza, Godoy stopped and turned to her.
    “In the work we’re doing,” he said, “one has to change a little. You develop and you become a slightly different person. It’s hard on the ego but it’s for the best.”
    “I understand,” she said. She understood thoroughly. His message was the one she had been receiving all her adult life, the one she had always lived by.
    I’ll be right at home in this outfit, she thought. It would have cheered her up to say it aloud to him but she did not—because it would be boastful and presumptuous and because he would not have understood her. As far as she could tell, he was without humor.
    Immediately, she reproached herself for reflecting on his lack of humor. It was judgmental and perhaps a little racist. Look to your own seriousness, she told herself.
    They found the little fun fair on the far side of the church, behind the ruined eighteenth-century wall. In the space between the old church wall and the river, a traveling carnival from the capital had parked its bright machines. There were two carousels, a small loop-the-loop with pink and purple cockpits and a whirly ride called the Carretera de Fortuna. Two ice-cream sellers had brought their wagons up from the square, there was a man with balloons, a man with a fortune-telling parrot and an Oriental in a kimono demonstrating karate strokes to an audience of teen-agers and cane cutters. A stand sold soda and beer and black or white rum.
    The Syrian’s sound truck was parked beside a mobile generator with its sale signs still aloft but it was empty and silent. The carnival machines made their own music as they turned, music as peeled and rusted at the seams as the machines themselves. The fairground was surrounded by colored lights and around each bulb was a little cloud of insects drawn from the riverbank.
    As Justin and Godoy walked toward the fair, beggars crept out of the shadow of the church wall to intercept them. In the darkness, they were tiny, barely human figures, small wads of cloth appended to upturned palms, uttering soft wails. Justin handed out some ten- and twenty-centavo pieces, Father Godoy gave them nothing.
    One of the machines played “ La Cumparsita ” as the two of them strolled out on the little midway. The light there was fantastical, compounded of rainbow colors. Children’s faces were unearthly shades, the grass underfoot looked painted.
    The men in the crowd were drunk and somber but there were mainly women and children about. A few groups of teen-agers huddled beyond the light like predators around a camp, some of them smoking marijuana. In the darkness by the river, a drunk or a madman was screaming but his cries were drowned by the music.
    People greeted Father Godoy as he passed among them; stony Indian faces softened toward him, there was some quick whisking off and clutching of straw sombreros. Both he and Justin towered over the crowds.
    “A fair was a great thing once,” Godoy said. “There were a great many tents and tricks. Today it’s not so much because the movies come here now.”
    “It’s still a great thing,” Justin said.
    Four of Godoy’s schoolboys were waiting in line by the larger carousel. Justin watched him apprehend them and point to his watch. The boys waved little red ticket stubs up at him. He shrugged and then stood looking about him over the heads of the crowd. Justin thought of having a beer but decided it would not be right for her to approach the stand and the drunken men there.
    “I’m missing two,” Godoy said to her. “It’s a nuisance.”
    “It’s fine,” Justin said. “I’ll wait by the merry-go-round.”
    While Godoy combed the shadows, Justin found herself some space by the rail to watch