John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Where you grew up,” he asks the Tarheel Lieutenant, “were there still Union soldiers in uniform?”

Manigault stops and gives him the frankest gaze he has ever received from the man, as if he were just pondering that very image.

“There were indeed,” he answers softly, “but my father instructed us to pay them no heed.”

They continue in silence, the burden of the heat robbing his limbs of their vitality, and he begins to feel sorry for the poor, obdurate devils sentenced to be born and die in this crucible. He does not wonder that the Spanish who ruled it slid so quickly into a mean-spirited decadence. As Mrs. Jefferson Davis and Senator Tillman of the anti-Imperialists so eloquently state it, the worry is not what shall we do with the Filipino, but what shall our association with him do to us . He writes the word decay into his notebook, underlining thrice, and then the Lieutenant halts again and spreads his arms.

“I believe this is it.”

There is no signpost, no marker, not one stone laid upon another to indicate a boundary, only the same fields extending on both sides of the road broken here and there by outcroppings of thorn-brandishing greenery.

“You’re certain?”

Manigault points across the planted rows to a structure at least a half mile away. “The house comes with it.”

They set off diagonally across the field then, the new proprietor fairly leaping over the shabbily cultivated rows, the Correspondent quite done in by now and staggering in the rear. The boots he purchased in San Francisco make a bully impression in photographs but are not equal to the terrain, and the white suit built in Hongkong is stuck to him like a second, repulsively slimy skin. His collar is a rag. There will be nothing cool in the basket when it is opened, no rum cock-tail with ice waiting at the hacienda . He has partaken only sparingly of the native cuisine since arriving, the spices overstated and the indiscriminate mixing of fleshes so favored by the Spanish — beef, fowl, and fish more than likely to cohabit the same dish — seems less than wise given the extremities of the weather. As for what is fed to the column on the march, the less said in print the better, the charges leveled at the much-maligned war secretary Root after the sickness that followed victory in Cuba still a sore point with Army censors. Home again, carving a slab of prime at Rector’s or enjoying the delectable ice cream at Louis Sherry’s establishment, he may confess to having eaten canned bacon, but at the moment the mere thought of that delicacy causes his insides to somersault.

The hacienda house is much larger than it appeared to him from a distance, a few outbuildings half-hidden behind it. It seems a rather stately pile to belong to the purebred Malays who Manigault has so colorfully described as being no distant removal from the “missing link.” Four massive posts support the tile roof over the two stories, the lower floor of bullet-scarred adobe masonry and the upper of wood. The façade of the lower is dominated by a huge door arched high enough to admit carriage and passengers, with a normal-sized rectangular door cut into it for pedestrian traffic. Vertical iron grilles cover the tall windows that flank the carriage gate, some sort of flowering creeper vine half-covering them.

A kind of gallery runs around the front and sides of the upper floor, repeating sets of wooden louvers opening to reveal sliding panels of hand-sized capiz-shell “windows” of the sort seen in the Walled City. Beneath the bottom sill of these runs what the Correspondent has been told is a ventanilla , perhaps a foot high, fronted with wooden balustrades, to allow the air to flow even when the larger openings are shut fast. Another opening just beneath the eaves serves the same purpose. If it were a boat, thinks the Correspondent, it would sink in an instant.

The hacienda compound is deserted when they arrive, not even one of the scabrous fowl that seem everywhere underfoot in this country gracing the yard. Manigault calls up to the living quarters, but there is no response. The pedestrian door, however, is unsecured, and they venture into the zaguan .

There are no partitions in this lower level. The space the family carroza would normally occupy is empty, as are bins that appear to once have been filled with grain, set upon large square slabs of stone flooring. Nearly half the room is piled with furniture, some broken, some appearing to be perfectly serviceable. An ornate stairway invites them to ascend.

“I imagine they’ve sacked the place,” says the new dueño , starting up, “but we’ll have a look anyway.”

The drawing room that greets them is remarkably intact, chairs and tables haphazardly placed but still present, a lovely design painted on the ceiling of stamped tin, and only a few of the somewhat garishly colored chromolithographs these people seem addicted to hanging on the walls. Large double doors draped with damask curtains open to the sala mayor , which seems to have hosted a dance party immediately before the departure of the former owners, the numerous rattan chairs all pushed against the walls. The floor is of a highly polished native wood held together with pegs, as these materials are generally impervious to nails. A frieze of intricately carved molave , reminiscent of the stunning altar of the Jesuits’ San Ignacio church in the Intramuros, crowns the walls, which are painted with gilt trimming and designs markedly Chinese in character. A massive upright piano dominates the near end of the room, Shubert’s A-minor Sonata still propped on the music shelf. The west wall sports two large oil portraits of the erstwhile hacienderos , a man and woman, in their late fifties perhaps, each in semi-profile facing toward the other. Though the features of the couple are what the Correspondent characterizes in print as thoroughly “Asiatic,” the effect of their bearing and European finery and the artist’s chiaro oscuro is of a Spanish grandee and his señora , a kind of Tagalo nobility.

“Most of my lands were purchased from the friars,” says Manigault, strolling around the room, careful to avoid the scattered leavings of some bird that has found its way into the house. “But Mr. Impoc here was evidently as afraid of the insurrectos as he was of our own forces, and decided, through my intermediaries, to take the most prudent course of action.”

“You bought this palace on a lieutenant’s pay?”

Manigault remains unfazed, smiling enigmatically and continuing farther into the dwelling, trailed by the Correspondent and the unhappy troopers.

The avian intruder has been even more destructive in the dining room, his presence recorded not only on the floor but on the long table and ornately detailed sideboards of red narra . The china and silver have been removed, of course, but the impressive cut-glass chandelier, though slightly atilt to the Correspondent’s eye, remains overhead. The privates slump onto chairs and begin to lay out the items from the picnic basket. The Correspondent wishes nothing more than to throw himself prone on an unsullied patch of floor while someone gets the punkahs turning. But his interlocutor is moving ahead to explore, and he, duty bound, must follow.

The kitchen seems also to serve as a laundry, a pair of flatirons left on the chopping block. There is an earthen oven shaped something like a beehive and a wooden rack hung from the tiled wall that must be employed for drying dishes. The Correspondent pushes a shutter back and a breeze suddenly whispers through the vertical bars in the minaret-shaped window that looks down on the azotea below, an aromatic, lushly planted hanging garden with stone benches and a pathway bordered by a split-bamboo rail that leads to an even greater collection of exotic flora.