BRADSHAW'S TOMBSTONE
323
in which the loose floating threads of his life had been gathered into
a meaningful pattern. A modest, worrying man, given to self-ques–
tioning as
if
his own existence were contingent upon the outcome of
a debate, Bradshaw felt that at last he had received from life an im–
portant vote of confidence, The thing, he told himself, made a whole
slew of sense.
Bradshaw was a child of the '30s; for him that drab time was
hazed over with the quality of his own generous, uncalculating youth;
~hen
had come, like an unseasonable frost, the Cold War and Mc–
Carthyism and the conviction of Alger Hiss; now here at last was
this belated commission, a thing to test his wilting idealism-the
rehabilitation of a rotted province by the power of an idea.
The batwing doors of the EI Polar flapped behind
him.
The
barman slept with his head on the zinc; otherwise the place was
empty-a blue cave filled with murals of visionary icebergs and
what were perhaps intended to represent Eskimos and Arctic fauna.
Senor Orquienz was late again.
Bradshaw fumbled out some Kleenex and mopped first his pale
glistening face, then the stained oilcloth of a table near the window.
He was scrupulous not to give offense by such hygienic rites and he
glanced guiltily at the barman, but the Indian's black head lay in–
sensible. Insensible too was Bradshaw to the operatic charm of the
scene framed by the window; he saw instead history made visible in
a crude charade. There, under the unwinking sky was the square
with its church, San Rafael and All the Angels-a theater for out–
moded forces, grotesque, over-decorated, a standing affront, he would
have thought, in its opulent gildings to the centuries-old misery of its
worshippers. Across its fa<;ade sprawled a riotous jungle of carved
stone, but fissured across this rosy expanse with a great crack caused
by some earth temblor, plugged with a Jagged white streak of lime
mortar. There was none of the usual traffic of black-cowled women
in and out; Bradshaw wondered if the priests took their siestas in
the confessionals and was moved almost to pity for these Graham
Greene characters (as he thought of them) cooking in their little
black boxes like hams in a smokehouse. The square tilted sharply
seaward so that the bay was visible over the roofs of tile and cor–
rugated iron and between palisades of the Churrigueresque masonry
so offensive to Bradshaw's puritan eye. Curling into the glittering
