John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Then I’m not listening.”

“When I left San Epifanio,” says Bayani, turning his head to the side to stare at the countryside, “I fell in with a group of tulisanes , not so different from our glorious Filipino army today — only when we robbed and kidnapped we had no great cause to excuse it.”

Diosdado’s men are expressionless, exhausted as they listen. They have all heard the rumors, legends almost, about their sargento, but he has never spoken of his past to them before.

“We told ourselves at first that we would only take from the rich, because we hated them and because they have more to steal. But it is always less dangerous to steal from the poor. One of our band was captured by the guardia civil , and he betrayed me. I would have done the same to him, I suppose, because when I was given the choice of swinging from the hemp or fighting for the Spanish, I made the coward’s decision.

“They treated the disciplinarios like the scum that we were. I don’t know how they treat their own men, the jóvenes pobres who join or are conscripted back in Spain, but five of our company were shot during the first week. One of them complained too loudly about an order to march when we were tired and the capitán stepped up and put a pistol bullet through his brain, which stayed on all of us, in small pieces, for the rest of the march. Many of us were killers already and by the end of our training we were organized, disciplined killers. They called us their tigres , and somehow I felt proud to be a member of this brigade.

“We were sent to Mindinao and barracked at Fort Pilar in Zamboanga. There were no women, of course, the moro girls afraid to even meet our eyes in public lest they be beaten or even killed by their men, and the vino we brewed there was very bad.

“ ‘ Muchachos ,’ said our alferez, because he always called us his muchachos indios , ‘we are here for one purpose only. To kill moros .’

“There was an old datu in the interior, Datu Paiburong, who was the devil’s own servant. The tribes along the coast were afraid of him and the ones who spoke chabacano and had come to Christ were terrified of him and it was he and his people we were sent to destroy. You know how once their kris is drawn from their belt in anger it must not be replaced before blood has been spilled? Datu Paiburong drew his when he was a young man and never put it away.

“For almost a year we raided the stockades his people lived in, but whenever we came the men would be gone. Some of our own were ambushed and some fell into the man-traps the moros dug and were killed or lost a leg, so we began to tear the stockades apart, to burn them to the ground. But they would rebuild almost overnight. The next time we raided and there were no men the alferez looked the other way and some of the women were violated. There were men among us who had done these things before. We knew that this was the same as murdering the women, that even if their lives were spared and they did not kill themselves they would be filth in the eyes of their people until the day they died. And after these violations one of our men was captured and tortured and when we found him his intestines had been pulled out of his stomach and tied to a tree and he had been forced to walk around it many times, wrapping his insides around the trunk and then left for the tree ants to eat him. They wrote on his chest in his blood — they wrote Each of you shall die like this .

“ ‘There you have it, muchachos ,’ said our alferez. ‘It is a Holy War that we are fighting.’

“The order came down then to herd all the people who followed Paiburong — this is the time of General Weyler — into one guarded area where we could keep them under control. But they knew. Sometimes we thought the birds of the forest were in league with them, because whenever a new campaign was ordered they knew almost before we common soldados did, and this time when we came to the stockades they were deserted. Not a hen living, not a mouthful of food left. So we began to track them, farther and farther in from the coast, deep into the jungle, and by the time we started to climb we were exhausted and short on supplies, eating nothing each day but a tiny puñal of rice and beans mashed together and cooked in our own drinking cans and a man was bitten by a víbora and died screaming. The capitán and the teniente and the alferez no longer called us their boys, they called us indios hijos de puta or malditos criminales and kept their weapons ready all the time, afraid we would mutiny.

“Datu Paiburong’s men laid ambushes for us on the way up the old volcano. They are excellent shots, the moros , even with those ancient muskets they use, and our men who were hit in the first volley almost always died. And then they would be gone, and it was time to climb again. We could not pause to bury our dead, so we wrapped them in ponchos and tied them with mil leguas vines into the branches of trees and hoped to be back before the ants and the jaguares got to them.”

The men all sit close to Bayani now, listening. When he breathes in there is a wheezing sound, but his voice is calm, steady.

“The colonel broke us into three parties, each climbing from a different direction. We were to meet at the top in the evening.

“When we reached the part of the mountain where there were no more trees our buglers signaled and the moros fired at us from the rim and we had to charge up over the bare ground. We had started with a half-dozen field pieces but they’d been left behind so we could keep up with the chase. So we had only our rifles and they killed many of us as we charged up the slope, hating them, hating them for murdering our friends and for the jungle and the heat and for the oficiales cursing at our backs and because they were moros , though we were not, in fact, the truest of Christians.

“By the time we reached the top they had retreated down into the old crater. The crater was deep and so old that a ways down inside it there started to be trees again, and soil, a little round valley within the mountain.

“We had suffered many bajas , but it was the whole battalion and we had them outnumbered and had better rifles and knew they must be nearly out of ammunition. We had no fires that night, but they did, two huge fires where they cooked and sang and chanted and then, very late, the women began to shriek. It drilled into your soul, the noise they made. One of our guides said the singing was to their god, telling him they would soon be at his side, but he had never heard the women shriek like that. You could see their shadows, moving around the fires, but the colonel said to save our bullets for the morning.

“ ‘They’re halfway to Hell down there,’ said our alferez. ‘Tomorrow we send them the rest of the way.’

“The women came in the front. The sun rose and we heard them all making that noise with their tongues, high, like when the cicadas in the trees are singing their last notes because the day is dying, and then they came running up the side of the crater toward our positions, their faces painted and a dagger or a sword or some only with a sharp rock in hand and the men right behind, some with muskets and the rest with their kris drawn for the last time. They are beautiful people, the moros , their long hair, the colors they wear — beautiful. Beautiful targets as they ran up the side of the crater to us and we fired in volleys and then at will, hardly needing to aim, the men climbing over the bodies of the women as they fell and we were told to fix bayonets as they kept coming, muskets fired and thrown aside, screaming as they climbed up the steepest part where there was no cover and tumbling backward. Only a few survived for us to run the steel through. One of these was the old datu , who had some bullets in him and eyes like a cat and managed to hack one man in the arm before he was killed. We lifted him up on bayonets and marched around and all the men left in the battalion cheered till the colonel said to lay him down, we were taking the body back to Zamboanga for display.