Read Online A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone - Free Book Online Page A

transfixed faces, dazzled the old men in their wicker chairs in the Syrian’s shop and the lounging Guardia, electrified the posters of Death Wish in front of the cinema. It made the whores’ beads sparkle, shone on the balloons and patent-leather shoes of the better-off children and on the slick flesh of the banana plants. As it whirled, the crowd screamed and applauded.
    The beam came finally to rest on the steps of the church, centering on a glass-and-mahogany coffin which four men in the purple robes of the Brotherhood had carried out during the display. Prone in the coffin was the figure of Christ, which was the occasion of Puerto Alvarado’s rejoicing.
    Christ wore a burial shift of waxy linen and worn lace; his hands, clutching a lily, were folded across his chest. Around his brow was a crown of thorns and his long hair was matted with blood. Both the hair and the blood had the appearance of reality and Sister Justin, who had seen the figure many times before, had always wondered about them. The eyelids were also quite authentic; one felt they might be pulled back to show dark dead eyes beneath.
    A hush settled as the light fell on the dead Christ—but only for a moment. As the plaza beheld its murdered redeemer, a murmur rose from the crowd that grew louder until it drowned out the dirge of the band, swelled into moans and cries of women, hoarse Viva el Cristo’s , drunken whoops of devotion.
    As he lay under the light in his glass box, he looked for all the world as though he had died the same day, in Tecan, of meningitis like the overseer’s daughter who went at Christmas, of an infected scorpion bite, of undulant fever, of a knife on the docks. So the crowd began to cheer, the children of the early dead, the parents of perished angelitos , secure in their own and their children’s resurrection—cheering the sharer and comforter of death.
    Around Justin there were people on their knees. Some steps away, a woman holding a balloon in one hand and her infant daughter’s hand in the other was weeping for the deceased—out of courtesy perhaps, or habit.
    Justin turned to Godoy and in the shadowy light saw a look of patient detachment on his face. When he realized that she was looking at him, he said: “See, it’s all done with light. Like the movies.”
    She thought that it was something very like what she might say, although what she felt at the moment was very different. It made her wonder whether he said it only for her benefit, from embarrassment for his country.
    After a few minutes, the searchlight was turned off and the encoffined savior carried inside and placed at the side altar where he reposed except during procession days and Holy Week. A number of people stood chatting in the church doorway, and among them Justinrecognized Father Schleicher, an Oblate Missionary from the Midwest. The other clerics there were two Tecanecans, or rather Spaniards—one the vicar of the cathedral and the other a monsignor from the capital, a representative of the Archbishop.
    “We should go up there,” Father Godoy said, when they had done a round of the square. “I have to at least.”
    Together, they climbed the church steps, and while Godoy made his obeisances to the senior clergy, Justin endeavored to converse with Schleicher and a young Tecanecan woman who was with him.
    Father Schleicher was young, and was said to be politically engaged. Sister Justin had heard also that he had unofficially purchased a colonial press edition of the Quixote from a clerk at the Catholic university in the capital and that he paid plantation workers to bring him such pre-Columbian artifacts as they might find. Although none of this was quite illegal, although it was practically innocent hobbyism and a mark of his cultivation, Justin held what she heard against Schleicher’s account. She disliked him; he was chubby and blond, and it seemed to her that his face was set continually in an expression of thick-lipped