John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

WELCOME, PRESIDENT McKINLEY

— announce the sparkling silver letters below the portrait—

CHIEF OF OUR NATION AND OUR EMPIRE!

The Assassin sits drinking beer in Pascek’s saloon on Broadway, thinking about the stacking game. There are amusements of the cheaper sort just outside the Exposition grounds and he lingered at one after leaving today, watching to see if he was being followed. The sharper had built an elaborate house of tiles on his little table, balancing one upon the other till the structure was almost up to his chin. A spectator bet him a quarter against a five-dollar bill that he couldn’t place another without the toppling the whole edifice, and this he did. The next bet had to be fifty cents — only fair, as it was now an even more impossible feat — and then seventy-five cents and then a silver dollar to see another tile balanced, the structure beginning to wobble slightly even when he wasn’t touching it. The circle of spectators grew as the amount of the wagers rose, till one gent in a checked suit stepped forward and plunked down two dollars and fifty cents to beat the master architect. The sharper put on a long face, then, holding a tile with the very tips of the fingers of his two hands, lowered it gingerly toward the top of his mansion.

This is my bullet , thought the Assassin, this is my gift to the world .

And yes, that was the last straw, the tile that brought it all crashing down, spectators yowling with a mix of disappointment and glee depending on the direction of their side bets. It was a sign. Yes, the system had not fallen after the Habsburg Empress was eliminated, or the French President or even King Umberto. But the weight of each killing upset the balance of the edifice, undermined its foundations. One more, the right one, and there will be blessed release. If not, he will have done his duty, bringing the inevitable day that much closer.

The working men at the end of the bar begin to curse each other in Polish. “You filthy pig,” shouts one, “you filthy lying pig!” Stools are toppled. Only a moment ago they were quietly drinking themselves unconscious. “I’ll kill you!” cries the other man, the shorter one. The Assassin stands and backs away from the working men. The shorter one draws a knife and suddenly he is stabbing the other, again and again in the head and neck, shrieking all the while “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!” The bartender leaps over the counter and tries to pull him away, the taller man sliding silently to the floor, blood spurting from him like an obscene fountain.

“Get help!” yells the bartender to the Assassin in English. “Go get help!”

The Assassin runs out onto Broadway, turning to hurry back to his hotel. Two beefy patrolmen sprint past him, heading for Pascek’s. He slips his hand into his pocket to make sure the pistol doesn’t swing as he picks up his pace. It will be quick and clean, not like the hapless Berkman’s botched attentat on Henry Clay Frick, no, quick and clean and irreversible. The Assassin hears fireworks above, but keeps his gaze fixed straight ahead.

Nobody can drink that much vino and not have to urinate. Crouching hidden on the slope above the town, Diosdado has watched the fiesta of Ina Poon Bato, watched the headmen celebrating noisily afterward at the table set up in the plaza, banners of Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje still hanging overhead. It was not hard to follow the movements of the alcalde , the best-dressed of all in his barong with the crimson embroidery, the one with the braying laugh and the surprisingly beautiful tenor voice when they sang. He is a fanfarrón , this mayor, Ignacio Yambao by name, bragging of his good amigos the yanquis and all they have offered for his cooperation, bragging of his disregard for whatever deluded bandits may still be hiding in the mountains. Which is why Colonel San Miguel has ordered Diosdado to cause his disappearance.

Other men have staggered out of their houses, a few only pausing to irrigate from the rear platforms, most making the trip to the letrina on the other side of the bamboo stockade. One fellow veered far enough off the path that he was unable to find the gate and decided to orinar through the fence slats into a cassava patch. But so far no Ignacio Yambao, who, though alcalde of Taugtod, surely has no modern receptacle within his house of nipa and bamboo. It will be light soon, cocks already voicing their impatience with the night, and Diosdado has to wiggle his bare toes to keep his feet from falling asleep. He is dressed in the simple, soiled cotton of the kasama , his story if discovered that he has fled his mountain town because a band of insurrectos have taken it over. The yanquis are easier to fool than Zambal villagers, of course, having no local knowledge, and more than one of his boys when spotted has strolled grinningly up to the foreigners, rifle held useless at arm’s length, and thanked el Dios en el Cielo that the Americans are finally here to accept his surrender. Most have returned within the month, with many a story to tell and occasionally a better weapon than the one they turned in.

“ The yanquis recognize only two kinds of Filipinos ,” Bayani is fond of saying. “ The living and the dead .”

Bayani offered to do tonight’s business, naturally, insisted on it, but Diosdado is the teniente still, despite having left his uniform under a rock on a hillside near Bacolor, and it is not something he will order another man to bloody his hands with.

“Who have you ever killed?” demanded the sargento.

“I shoot when the rest shoot,” Diosdado answered. “Sometimes an enemy falls.”

“But close, close enough so you can look into his eyes?”

Diosdado did not ask if Bayani had killed men in this way.

“If I don’t come back in two days,” he told the sargento, “move the band to the escondite north of Iba.”

He has always been suspicious that it was the friars who made up the story of the Ina Poon Bato. A negrito man, years before the arrival of the first Spaniard, meets a beautiful, glowing lady in the forest. “Take me home with you,” she says. He protests that he already has a wife, and a jealous one at that, so she gives him a carved image of herself, a small wooden statue. As he walks back to his village he hears her voice, over and over, saying “You must take me home with you.” When he arrives his wife is immediately suspicious of the statue, and when he is not looking she hurls it into the fire. Their entire hut is immediately engulfed in flames, the couple barely escaping. But when they sift through the ashes later, the one thing that has not even been charred is that wooden statue, now stone, the Ina Poon Bato. It becomes a sacred object of their tribe, carried from place to place as they migrate through the mountains, bringing them peace and good fortune in their travels. But somehow the statue is lost, and food grows scarce, diseases strike their children, their enemies grow in power. The story of the lost statue remains in their minds, though, and so when the men with beards wearing long robes arrive from across the sea carrying their statue of the same beautiful lady, their Virgin Mary, it is cause for celebration, for the renewal of hope.

A fabricated legend maybe, but an enormously popular one in these mountains, and Diosdado has tried to use it to explain the war to the Zambals. “This fight will cause great destruction,” he tells them, “but at the end when we sift through the ashes, something will remain untouched, something pure and miraculous and as permanent as stone — a Filipino Republic.”