BRADSHAW'S TOMBSTONE
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bility, integrity, a job well done, or as his ancestors would have put
it, grace through works- these might justify the otherwise inadmis–
sible feeling of superiority to the sloth-stunned townspeople. The guilt
- the guilt of
being
superior- needed a subtler exorcism. "The siesta,"
he had told himself, "is a nutritional phenomenon rather than a re–
gional institution"; and he had incorporated this remarkable phrase
in the report he was engaged in composing. For Bradshaw, this re–
port had been a talisman against the odious reality of San Rafael
ever since, like a visitation from another planet, a small charter plane
had set him down, shaken and airsick, on the tussocky landing field.
The report flapped against his leg like a scabbard- heavy with por–
.tent; its neatly typed eloquence encompassed, in its historical sections,
the operatic past of the place (piracy and massacre) and moved
through the hopeless immobile present, the lamentable economy
(ruined sugar and banana plantations), health (a statistical scandal),
housing (too much and too early), people (the touchy and malarial
Latin-Indians) into the future where, under the guidance of experts
in soil, sanitation and government, a decent way of life could be
engineered out of the ruins.
Thus Bradshaw, a responsible and imaginative official, moved
as an evangel through the alien town. Yet a colonial Englishman of
his class and generation would have seemed less exotic here than this
young American; a touch of raffishness, of self-deprecating bohemian–
ism expressed in length of hair, age of garment or negligent dentistry
might have been expected among even the higher echelons of the
once-Empire; there would have been some implied kinship with this
region of ruined tragedians. Bradshaw wore an air of spruce inno–
cence-as out of place here as an accountant on the stage of Carmen.
The young clothes suggested with narrow lapel and tightish trousering
a stripling outgrowing
his
last year's suit, and the
en brosse
hair
(which suggested however to the local barbers not "crew" but a
German or a recent inmate of the
peni)
added a touch of the absurd
and anomalous as if this crypto-sahib were hiding his serious inten–
tions behind a false age. All this expressed a confidence which his
British "opposite number" (had there been one) would not have had;
Bradshaw was a believer, from a race of faith.
Passing through the square, Bradshaw renewed within himself
the vision he had been accorded so many weeks ago at the beginning
