John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

He pauses by the wall to light a puro , cheaper here by a few pennies but considered superior to the product manufactured in Ybor. He is no judge, though, the cigar only part of his contact signal and perhaps the poorest element in the elaborate construct that has been explained to him. Any Spaniard trained in espionage, he believes, will be instantly aware that Quiroga is not a smoker and have his suspicions aroused. Quiroga takes enough of a puff to keep the thing burning, then turns his face out to the placid sea.

There is a sudden thickening of the air, felt more than breathed.

The drums.

A comparsa , a twisting, writhing creature of more than a hundred chanting negros, winding down Calzada de Infante toward the Malecón to the racket of a dozen men flailing with their bare hands on what they call a conga or tres golpes —elongated, barrel-staved drums hung from the shoulder of the player with their bullskin heads just above the man’s hip. Barefoot urchins without masks run alongside the aggregation, some dancing wildly to the noise, others leaping and screaming whenever the spirit enters them. Authorities have banned such displays at times, even on the Día de los Reyes , fearing, in the not-so-distant epoch of slavery, that the cabildos might use the anonymity afforded by the occasion to perpetrate atrocities upon their masters. But with Emancipation the African societies have lost much of their power, and the Spanish understand that repressing Carnaval will engender more mayhem than it will prevent.

As they approach and are illuminated by the gas lamps Quiroga recognizes the celebrants as the Abakuá , dancers wearing their colorful, horned diablito masks, legs and arms fringed with thick rings of grass and palm fronds, whirling and leaping and shaking their torsos and limbs as if driven epileptic by the music. The secret heart of Cuba, he thinks, beating to an African pulse. Their sound envelops him before their bodies surround him, the hammering of the congueros complex yet insistent, and yes, he thinks, this is the force that drove the great Maceo and his mambís into battle. This is the very life-blood of revolt.

Quiroga stands with an unsmoked puro in his hand and the Havana moon peeking through the clouds over the Harbor and smiles as the masked tribesmen gyrate, circling, within inches of him. He feels honored rather than mocked. His exile is a voluntary one, merely an economic decision, but an exile nonetheless. Every canción he hears in Tampa is a song of longing.

The comparsa continues riotously down the Malecón, but one diablito stays behind. The mask is Abakuá, but the man wearing it is not even a negro, a man in a white sack suit and mesh-topped spectator shoes. He waits for the thunder of the drums to recede somewhat before he speaks through the mouth-slit cut in the elongated, red-and-black máscara .

“These clouds,” he says, looking out over the vessels, great and small, that bob in the vast Harbor, “portend a storm from the North.”

Quiroga has always disliked the passwords, the codes and secret handshakes, smacking of boys at play, and contends that they are as likely to entrap one as to mollify fellow conspirators. But it is a formality that must be honored.

“We could do with a stiff wind,” he says, “to clear the air.”

They stand side-by-side, looking out over the water. Quiroga thinks he may recognize the voice behind the mask.

“You have the documents?”

“Not on my person,” Quiroga answers, annoyed. “I have been at this since Martí was in Guatemala. I am not feckless.”

“I was not inferring that. I merely—”

And then the night erupts before them.

Quiroga’s puro flies out of his hand and his hat is blown off his head in the initial glass-breaking bang and flash, the concussion thumping him in the chest like the kick of a mule and then a more brilliant display in the sky and at the waterline, each blinding airburst accompanied by a ground-shaking explosion, vessels in the harbor illuminated for a moment so brief that the images are like separate photographs — immense, lucent, terrible. It is the American battleship that is ablaze, the first third of it seemingly gone and the rest tilting into the sea as huge, twisted shards of debris plummet sizzling into the water around it. Between the pop and whine of ammunition set off by the fire he can hear the cries of burning men.

Quiroga smells sulfur.

The man beside him has pulled his mask back to see more clearly — as he suspected it is Camilo Gotay, who taught natural sciences at the University until his sympathies became too well known. Each new volley of detonation splashes red light upon him, eyes glowing, his pox-scarred face more devilish without the mask than when hidden behind it.

“They can’t be this stupid,” says Quiroga, his mind racing to find an explanation as sirens scream all over the city. The presence of the American gunship has been an insult, yes, and the Spaniards are stupid in their arrogance, but this slaughter, if a deliberate provocation—

“Not even Weyler at his most obdurate—”

“And it can’t be us,” adds Gotay, though with a note of uncertainty. “I would have been informed.”

Men are rushing toward the pier, on foot and in carriages, lanterns lit, boats starting away toward the ship which is quickly settling on the seabed with the tops of its remaining stacks jutting above the waterline. The running lights have been lit on every other vessel in the Harbor.

“This will be good for us,” says the professor, tears in his eyes, “won’t it?”

Bells are ringing on the Alfonso XII now, Spanish sailors rushing to lower their boats and rescue those who have not already perished. There is another airburst, one of the larger shells exploding, and in the quick-fading light Quiroga sees men swimming away from the burning wreck, dozens of tiny bumps on the rolling surface of the water. Cocoanuts, he thinks. At this distance they could be cocoanuts floating with the tide. A pair of guardia rush past them on the way to the dock.

De Lôme’s letter is nothing now. A hundred thousand Cubans may die, tortured, hanged, shot, starved to death as reconcentrados , but give us one apple-cheeked Sailor Jack, one blue-eyed American martyr for the yellow press to canonize — yet how can this chaos, this Hell on the water, be good for anyone?

Quiroga smells sulfur, sulfur and hot metal.

“I see the hand of God,” he says, turning his back on the sea wall, on the burning ship, on the desperate swimmers. “But we will blame it on the Spanish.”

The art of it lies in what first strikes the eye, and what that in turn stimulates in the mind of the reader. A screaming head is just that — information shouted across the track at a railroad station as the train is pulling out, steam blasting, whistle shrieking, with only the most vital, most incendiary of the words understood—

USS MAINE EXPLOSION CAUSED BY

BOMB OR TORPEDO?

If you bother to haul out the brass type it had better cause a sensation—

SPAIN’S WAR

AGAINST THE JOURNAL

CONTINUES; CORRESPONDENTS JAILED, DEPORTED

Heads sell papers. The Editor has a look at everything that goes into it, but reserves the front page, its public face and clarion cry, for himself—

CRISIS AT HAND

CABINET IN SESSION; GROWING BELIEF IN

SPANISH TREACHERY

If the Editor cannot squint his eyes at a front page twenty yards away and feel his heart jump, there is something seriously wrong with the head—