John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

It is perhaps too distant a metaphor. In Nacolcol the consensus was that the problems all sprang from that ancient negrito’s wife, who should have known better than to throw enchanted statues into a fire.

There is a dog, rat-tailed and underfed, making its way up the slope with its nose up, alert, and Diosdado notes that the air has shifted, a cold wind rolling down off the monte behind him. The dog slows a few meters away and sniffs at the edge of the copita bushes, stepping cautiously now, till it sees him. The cur’s head goes down, ears back, and a warning growl vibrates its scrawny chest. Diosdado tightens his grip on the bolo but does not move. The dog investigates, body stiff, bumping its wet muzzle twice against Diosdado’s face before stepping aside to lift its leg on a macaranda and trot back down to the village.

Only the alcalde has not yet taken a piss.

He lost a few men, deserters, when the news came that the silver-voiced Bryan had not won his election, that the Americans would be staying. And then they caught the supremo on the day before his birthday. Funston of Kansas and a handful of his junior officers marched as prisoners through the wilderness by Macabebes disguised as rebels, stumbling half-dead into Aguinaldo’s mountain retreat, and after being revived by the food and water and the respect due to captured warriors, able to pounce on the General in an unguarded moment. And the General, delivered back aboard the great ship of the White Admiral like a penitent schoolboy, called immediately for his followers to join him in compliance. Now even people like Scipio Castellano have become americanistas , declaring that anyone still in the field is no more than a bandit.

“This is not an insurrection,” Diosdado lectured his men, “it is not a revolution. It is all of us, patriotas humildes de las Filipinas , defending our homelands, our families. If the General is in their hands, so be it. Until the last man lays down his rifle, our cause is alive.”

It has been nearly three years since he took the head of Colón off with a blacksmith’s hammer. “Columbus” as the yanquis call him, the first European to claim their continent, another mercenary for the Spanish crown. When the Assimilation decree was posted, before the shooting war began, Diosdado was the one chosen to go to Cavite and wait until night and desecrate the Americans’ favorite statue. He felt more like a student on a prank than the avenging arm of the revolution.

The ground and the buildings have begun to take on color by the time Ignacio Yambao steps down the ladder from the platform of his house, walking in a surprisingly steady line toward the path to the letrina . He is singing very softly to himself, a kundiman from the party, in his beautiful tenor. Diosdado rises slowly from his crouch, legs burning with the sudden rush of blood, and angles down the slope with the bolo swinging loose from the thong around his wrist. If the alcalde turns to see him he will smile and keep coming and tell his story.

But no story comes to Diosdado as his bare feet, still tender, suffer over the jagged ground. Señor mio, Padre y Redento , he thinks, me pesa de todo corazón haberte ofendido porque me puedes castigarme con las penas del Infierno—

The Act of Contrition must come after the sin. The alcalde , Ignacio Yambao, is squatting with his pants around his ankles when Diosdado steps up behind him. The smell is awful.

He has practiced the stroke on the way to the village, a chopping backhand through green saplings and thick poles of bamboo, careful to resharpen the blade with his whetstone afterward, and knows he needs to use both hands. I studied anatomy with the Jesuits he thinks as he fixes on the back of the squatting man’s neck and raises the heavy itak to strike.

There is light now, enough to see details of the slaughter, but it will be a full hour before the sun peeks over the tip of the monte . Diosdado strides away from the trench, first carefully wiping the bolo clean on the man’s barong , leaving a dark stain behind.

Halfway up he comes upon a negrito man, naked but for a loincloth of pounded bark and a curved knife stuck in the drawstring, walking down. They always make him nervous, even the ones when he was a boy who lived in the rancherías and obeyed the priest. The man’s eyes are yellowish, as if he may be suffering from one of their mountain diseases, and he has patterns scarred onto his arms and chest. Un cortacabeza verdadero , as his father used to say, a real headhunter.

The men nod silently to each other, and go their separate ways.

They are moving again, marching out from Las Ciegas as part of a flying column, the sky behind them filled with smoke. Royal is sick, sick like at the end of Cuba, a little less fever in the hot spells and a little less bone-aching chill in the cold. The doctor in Long Island had said it might catch up with him, that there might be rough spells, and the men reporting queasy or fevered this morning have been told they have to march with the rest, that there will be no treatment or conveyance back to Manila till they reach Subig.

Right now he is burning, walking at the rear of the company with everything too bright and loud and even with the others warned not to talk there is the sound of them creaking, jiggling, breathing, the stampede of their footsteps on the hard-baked road, the sloshing of water in the canteens. Nobody noticed till it was too late, they said, but all the villagers, all the muy, muy amigos , disappeared from Las Ciegas just before the attack. Not a word, not a warning, just gone. They have not returned, and orders were to burn the village and move out to garrison another area the rebels are supposed to be operating in. At first he thought it was the flames making him burn but then the chills started in the middle of it, Royal in a cold sweat torching the off-kilter little hut where Nilda had been staying, where she must have gotten word and left with the others without warning them. Before starting the blaze the lieutenant had them round up what animals were left, the pigs herded screaming into the thorn-branch corral and butchered. The pigs were out on the Filipino dead the night after the attack and Royal wanted to shoot them then but the lieutenant said no more firing.

They walk up and down a series of hills through a forest of hemp, the towering plants seeming to provide no shade. The white fiber is hung out on long lines to dry, making a kind of fence, and if there are any workers meant to be out here they have all gone and hid.

The land flattens out then and Royal keeps his eyes fixed on Corporal Ponder’s back and puts one foot in front of the other, all of them wary of straggling now after Junior. It feels like his head is cooking under his hat but he knows he can’t take it off. The worst was last night with the fever dreams again and Jessie in them, calling to him from across a swift river too loud in its rushing to hear her voice. It feels like he couldn’t lift his arms if his life depended on it, that marching is possible only if he leans enough to fall forward and then manages to keep his feet in front of him. Hardaway alongside has something wrong with his stomach and is the wrong color. Sergeant Jacks drops back every now and again to look over the sick men and Gamble, who was hit in the arm in the attack, and tell them with his eyes that they need to keep up.

Maybe they were in with the rebels, some of them, the people in Las Ciegas, or maybe they weren’t. Just got wind of it and they didn’t want to be there when whatever happened started up.

“Make yourself scarce,” they always said at home, like when he was little and a colored man had cut a white man down on Dock Street. Make yourself scarce tonight, cause anyone colored and out on the street was an insult, was temptation for the rope and the torch, and even the tough sports at the Manhattan Dance Hall kept the lights low and didn’t play their music. You almost didn’t need words, just get a feel on the street and hurry to get behind a door somewhere. This is their country, the Filipinos, and they have that kind of feeling for it. They know where to go and wait till it is safe to come back again.