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expanse was the harbor mole. A beached gunboat rusted in the shal–
lows under "Admiral" Penton's round tower, and the mole itself,
built at God knew what cost of forced labor was broken at the spine,
but, unlike the church, it had not been repaired. For the harbor, so
suitable for a pirate's nest, had proved inconvenient to the needs of
the great fruit company whose ships had once loaded bananas from
his port. Someone, Bradshaw reflected bitterly, some tough old shark
sitting alone in a big room
in
New York, had shuffled through some
papers, scrawled his name and condemned the place to death.
It was one of the things that fed his indignation- the indifference
of the Rafaelanos to this obvious clue to their ruin. Indeed, the very
morning of his arrival, as he checked into the Gran Hotel Penton,
he had made conversation on this topic with the unshaven, collarless
patron. Was there (knowing the .answer) any plan or proposal to
restore the harbor for commerce? The man, grossly fat, had answered
with overt and deliberate insolence that perhaps the
N orteamericano
could provide the dollars. This with a slow, sly gesture-a fondling
of the coat lapel. Thus baited, Bradshaw had answered in his Har–
vard-Berlitz Spanish that yes, there were stranger things in all the
world than that he should do precisely that.
Bradshaw had sat in on a course with the Point IV people which
had warned him of
«
dignidad";
he was annoyed that in his first en–
counter with these people he should have stumbled so easily into so
crude a psychological pitfall. The course had been concerned with
something called "culture shock" which was supposed to afflict offi–
cials stationed in "underdeveloped" regions; Bradshaw, however, had
easily made his way through its simple tests .and passed out officially
accredited free of chauvinist taint and fit for service in the mission
field, and with his record checked thus: "Attitudes: Mature. Re–
sponsible. Well-adjusted." It was thus with shame for his slight but
unmistakable case of culture shock that Bradshaw walked out of the
hotel into the blazing town.
Soon, Bradshaw's face took on what his wife liked to call "the
Skinner look"-the mask of moral indignation from which his great
ancestor Nathaniel Skinner had issued
his
awful sermons. For here,
at every turn, lay the substance of his mission. Here, the noseless pare–
tic; there the glaucoma in the eye, the mendicant crone, the brown
conical breast on which flies crawled.
