John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The shops here are mostly operated by Spaniards, with the occasional Frenchman or Hindoo, shelves bursting with European goods arranged behind the only glass windows Niles has seen on the island or spilling out onto the walk in front of the stores, laid on the ground or displayed on mahogany tables and desks looted after the fall of the Dons, awnings overhead affording some shade on the east side of the street. A pair of native lotharios, resplendent in white and deep in conversation, approach in the opposite direction, each with a carved walking-stick in hand and straw boater tipped on the head. The recent hostilities seem not to have affected this strata of the local gentry, Niles resentfully aware of their lack of either gratitude or deference. He looks through them and strides down the center of the walk, the gesticulating niggers acknowledging his presence only in time to veer awkwardly to each side, the one stumbling off the curb into an unfortunate encounter with a hustling rickshaw artist that sends the dandy ass over teakettle onto the cobbles. Niles takes a few more steps, then very deliberately halts to unsheathe his camera and photograph a gang of bare-chested coolies transporting a medium-sized piano perched upon a pair of thick wooden poles.

The pistol he has his eye on is in a curio shop — telescopes, old sailing charts, stuffed lizards and fruit bats, carved bookends of various exotic materials, forbidden etchings shown on special request. The proprietor, a Señor Ocampo, claims that it has only recently come into his hands from a Spanish officer of exalted lineage with a particularly avaricious mistress in Santa Mesa. It is a gleaming “Chinese” Webley, displayed in a velvet-lined box that Ocampo, forbidden now by the Occupation Authority to sell firearms of any sort, pulls from behind the counter.

“A pity,” Niles muses as he turns the revolver over in his hands. “They’ll probably confiscate this now that your indios have gone on the warpath again.”

Ocampo moves, as always, to put his body between the customer handling the merchandise and the door to the bustling Escolta. “Is yes a pity. You wan to buy him now?”

“We would be in violation of the decree.”

“This is true.”

“But if purchase is out of the question,” says Niles, sighting the.45 at a panther crouched to spring off its pedestal, “perhaps an exchange of gifts might be arranged.”

“Gifs?”

“Tokens of friendship. There are many things which we in the military have in abundance, which, due to the vagaries of the present conflict, the average citizen lives in want of.”

The proprietor is mute with calculation for a moment, staring at the pistol and trying to gauge its equivalent in various commodities.

“This might happen, yes.”

If his company were assigned the provost it would be simple. A search for contraband up and down the street, Ocampo eagerly giving up the Webley to avoid too thorough a going-over of his premises. As it is, a crate of tinned beef, to be delivered within the week, is equal to the task. Niles slips the pistol into his empty holster, stuffs the proffered ammunition into his pockets, and bids the Spaniard a good day.

He steps out into the fetid press of the Escolta at noon.

It wasn’t long after New Year that Madame Qing said some of them were going to be sent to Manila. The karayuki-san , who had been there, said this was a city on an island across the sea, full of yang gweizi with black hair and dark eyes and little brown Monkey People, and only one section where all the China people were crowded together. When Ling-Ling was picked among those to go Radiant Star hugged her with tears in her eyes.

“Don’t worry, sister,” she said. “Soon you will know the poems of the Monkey People.”

But once she was out of the house, riding down past the Victoria Barracks among the real people, she couldn’t be Ling-Ling anymore, only Lan Mei, who was a disgrace to her poor dead mother and to all the Lans who had gone before, a wicked woman who could be sold or traded like a sack of salt.

Mei and the other ones being sent to Manila were brought up onto the steamship after all the coolie-brokers had loaded their men into the hold, the sisters herded into a cabin by two of Mr. Wu’s friends. There were other people on the deck, China people and yang gweizi , and one man dressed all in white who didn’t seem to be in mourning and held the hand of a little girl with beautiful hair and a lacy white dress. When the little girl saw Mei’s face watching her from the round window of the cabin she smiled and waved.

In the morning the sun was out and Mr. Wu’s friends brought the sisters onto the promenade deck, one standing guard at each side of the little group, and they watched the flying fishes from Roderick Hardacre’s poem. Mei had thought he’d made them up, like the jabberwocky in one of his other verses. These were creatures that could not decide whether they were birds or fish, but were in a hurry to get somewhere, speeding in a pack parallel to the big ship, skipping from swell to swell with their wings held wide.

The swells began to rise then with the wind, and the sun was swallowed in black clouds. The sisters and everyone else on the promenade were herded back below as the deckhands scurried around tying things down on the wildly tilting deck and then breaking waves began to heave over the sides of the ship and slam against their cabin, only Mei standing at the round window still, holding tight to a side rail and then she knew that the steamship was not so big when tossed on an angry sea, that it was a paper toy, it was nothing, and her tiny life inside of it was less than nothing.

Even Mr. Wu’s rough friends, one of them the man with the pictures inked on the backs of his hands, were crying when the ship listed to one side and did not right itself and a man from the crew wrestled the cabin door open to shout that the ship was going down, that their only hope was to get into the lifeboats.

Mei tried to remember one of the sutras that Ma used to chant but the words would not come, so she only repeated My life is nothing, my life is nothing, my life is nothing as they held a rope and moved along the storm-battered deck, two of her sisters knocked off their tiny lotus feet and swept over the rail into the sea.

My life is nothing.

There were rope ladders to climb down onto the lifeboats, which were being smashed against the hull of the sinking ship and some people were falling and some were jumping and Mei had the quick thought that she saw none of the coolies and wondered if they had been locked in the hold. Hands grabbed her and yanked her into a boat and she saw the little girl a ways down in it but without her father. The men in the long boat pulled their oars to row away from the ship then, the ship that was about to roll on its side, that disappeared from sight whenever they slid into the trough of a swell. The men rowing shouted and cursed at each other, disagreeing on which way the nose of the boat should face and then they were swamped from the side and Mei saw the little girl go over and because her life was nothing Mei rolled into the sea to find her.

Mei did not know how to swim and her clothing dragged at her but she thrashed with her arms and legs and her head stayed up enough to gasp a breath of the air that was full of whipping water and then a wave smashed the little girl against her, Mei ducking under so the girl could ride her back, arms around her neck almost choking her, Mei thrashing with her arms and legs with no thought of salvation only that this little girl should not die alone, nobody should die alone, and then they were smashed against a boat, Mei clawing for it and catching hold of a trailing rope that she pulled on hand over hand, a strong girl, almost a man from wrestling crops out of the stingy ground, and got her shoulders lifted out of the water, the wind roaring full of rain and no sense to keep shouting when she couldn’t even hear herself, and when she felt the little girl’s arms weaken around her neck Mei clamped her teeth around the little wrist and held on that way, like Ling-Ling used to do when they would play in the ditch beside the sheng-yuan ’s fields.