John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Triumfante y luminosa

Recostada sobre un palanquín

The caballeros smacked their hands together and the girls squealed with laughter and even Señora Divinaflores gave a bitter smile before she swallowed another glass of jerez .

Later on, after he had used her and lay curled up with his hand on her stomach like a small boy, Rodrigo Valenzuela began to cry. “I’m going to die,” he said. “I’m going to die in this hoyo de mierda .”

The war was still being fought when Ling-Ling started to feel sick all the time, like she had on her first voyage at sea, and her body started to thicken.

“Drink this,” said Doña Hermanegilda when the ama called her in to consult. “There is still time.”

These hierbas made her sweat and have cramps and feel sick in a different way, but her bleeding had stopped and nothing else came out and then it came into Ling-Ling’s head that the being inside her was determined to live.

“She’s just getting fat and lazy,” Señora Divinaflores said to Lao, who came to collect money for Mr. Wu. “I think you should send her on to Singapore.”

Ling-Ling still had to entertain, so many new soldiers being sent to Manila from Spain to fight the insurrectos , and most did not even notice or care when her stomach began to push out. Dr. Apostol examined her for the disease and said she was at least a month away.

“Doña Hermanegilda is coming today,” said the ama the next morning. “She can make it come out sooner. The sooner it comes the sooner you will be able to go back to work to support it.”

The old lady came and began to lay out her needles and Ling-Ling saw Sargento Robles and one of his guardia very pointedly lounging out in front of the house in their lacquered hats, smoking cigarettes and telling jokes and looking as if they would be there till it was finished.

“Hermanegilda is an abortista , not a partera ,” said Eulalia, so she and Dionisia and Keiko, who were already awake, made a rope of sheets that they wet and knotted and lowered Ling-Ling down on in the back, waving but not calling as they watched her hurry through the alley to Calle de Alejandro.

The man at the cigar factory next to the church in Binondo said that they did not hire chinas , pregnant or not. The mestizas who sold cloth from their narrow stalls said they needed no help and even the woman who hired for the lavandería by the barracks inside the Walled City said there was no work for her, that she should go back to her own neighborhood north of the river. Ling-Ling knew that if she tried to sell mangoes or milk or dulces on the street the guardia would soon arrest her, a vagamunda with her photograph on a card, not living at the house where she was registered. She spent the first night crouching under the Puente de España, not sleeping, and the next day was told they would not hire her at the fábricas in Tondo and Meisic, not hire her even to wash the long tables at night after the cigarreras went home. It was late afternoon when Ling-Ling passed through the Parian Gate and talked her way into the hospital, saying she had come for her examination this time to save a dollar. When they forgot her on the waiting bench she left and wandered the long hallways till she saw a sister wearing the cornette, and asked for Sor Merced.

“ Soy puta y pagana, y eso es hijo de quién sabe ,” she said to Sor Merced, touching her swollen belly, “ pero pido su ayuda .”

“Every child is a child of God,” said the sister, and found her a bed to lie in.

It was mostly poor Filipinas in the ward, women who did not care to talk with a puta china , but Lan Mei did not mind. The doctor said there was something bad in her blood and that she would have to lie flat on the bed and not get out of it even to pee or make dung. She had never lain in bed so long with nothing to do, nobody to entertain, and relieving herself in the cold pan the nurse slipped under her was difficult at first. After about two weeks Eulalia found her. She had Ling-Ling’s money from the jewel box in a sack and the little idol, attached now to a thin golden chain.

“You have to wear this now,” she said, hanging the idol around Mei’s neck. “But the money — I’m afraid one of these sinverguenzas will steal it while you’re asleep.”

“Sor Merced will keep it for me.”

“As long as she doesn’t show it to any fucking friars.” Eulalia moved close to whisper to her. “They’re looking all over for you. The guardia and the people from Mr. Wu’s Society.”

“I am safe here, I think.”

Mei’s friend embraced her before she left.

“If it’s a girl,” she said, “think about naming her Eulalia.”

“Do you know why they did that to Him?” asked Sor Merced when she came to sit by Mei and saw the icon on the chain.

“He must have disobeyed the authorities,” said Mei.

“Yes, He did that,” smiled Sor Merced, who had a similar icon, carved in white stone. “And why do we wear this around our necks?”

Mei held her icon close to look at it, turning it this way and that, the man’s body twisted, spikes driven through the palms of his hands and both of his feet. “It is a very good warning,” she said.

When it was her time, the hurt was worse than anything she had ever felt before, and she thought then that women were given the icon to remind them that some men suffered almost as much as they did. Mei refused to cry out, though, holding on to Sor Merced’s plump arm as if it was a lifeline, as if she would drown if she let go. Her life was not nothing, it was the raft on which her child, whoever it was, would be borne above the waves. Sor Merced was shaking the whole time, praying and shaking and trying to keep her face averted from whatever the doctor was doing behind the curtain that hung over Mei’s swollen breasts.

It was a boy baby, and she told the oficial his name was Lan Bo, son of Lan Mei.

The Mother Superior arranged a job for Mei when she was well enough to walk, wearing rubber gloves and a mask and boiling the metal cups and bowls used to feed the patients infected with malaria or typhus or smallpox or cholera or tuberculosis or diseases the doctors had no names for. With this job came a little room behind the laundry, and, during Mei’s work shift, a niñera —a sweet-natured woman named Paz who had lost a leg to diabetes, and who stayed with Bo and the other babies of poor mothers who were recuperating.

The war was over for a while but there were still the Sick and the Poor for the sisters to care for, always the Sick and the Poor, and even if he had gorged himself on Paz during the day Bo would take some from Mei’s breasts when she came back to the little room, looking up at her with his hand resting on her throat. She slept with him on her chest at night, loving the weight of him, the warmth, and each morning she would bundle him up and carry him out through the gate of pariahs to greet the sun, its first tentative rays like gold thread on the surface of the Pasig.

The war started again after a year or so, thunder of cannons in the bay and then some very bad days inside the walls while they were under siege from the insurrectos and then the americanos too and suddenly there was no more water to boil the metal in or mop the floors with or to flush away the dung of the patients or even to make a bowl of tea.

“If this keeps up,” said Paz, who somehow remained fruitful through it all, “I’ll have half the city at my tetas .”

Mei could no longer bring Bo out through the Parian Gate because people were throwing their dung over the wall and into the moat beside it and because there were snipers outside and every evening she knelt with the Daughters of Charity to pray for Spain’s deliverance from this menace, to pray for the poor Filipinos whose souls would surely be lost along with the islands. On the last day, when there was thunder from the bay again and shooting over the walls, Mei helped the sisters with the wounded men who were carried in, blood staining the clothes that Sor Merced had given her, clothes that had belonged to a poor local woman who had joined the Order and was sent to Mindinao. Mei searched for Rodrigo Valenzuela but didn’t see him, only dozens of young soldiers who looked like him. It was dark when the first of the yanquis came into the hospital, candles lit because the electricity and the gas had both been cut, an officer with a yellow bush on his lip and four soldiers carrying rifles. None of the doctors and none of the Daughters of Charity spoke any English and the officer had not a word of Spanish or any of the Filipino tongues.