Some of the young natives Maya met seemed to think that the UNTA appropriation of the south was basically a good thing, as it began the countdown to action. She was quick to denounce such thinking. “It’s not them who should have control of the timetable,” she told them. “We have to control the timing of this, we have to wait for our moment. And then all act together. If you don’t see that—”

Then you’re fools!

But Frank had always lashed out at his audiences. These people needed something more— or, to be precise, they deserved something more. Something positive, something to draw them as well as to drive them. Frank had said this too, but he had seldom acted on it. They needed to be seduced, like the nightly dancers on the corniche. Probably these people were out on their own waterfronts on all the other nights of the week. And politics needed to co-opt some of that erotic energy, or else it was only a matter of ressentiment and damage control.