John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

A city built on trade, thinks Diosdado, with the soul of a whore.

Junta activities in Hongkong emanate from the two houses on Morrison Hill Road in Wanchai. Don Felipe Agoncillo lives in the smaller one with his family and whoever spills over from the other. Diosdado calls to the boy when they reach the house, steps down, and reluctantly parts with a few coins. There is, of course, no more money from Don Nicasio, and the Junta can only spare a tiny stipend for its exiled patriots. But it wouldn’t do to arrive soaked in perspiration from the climb, not with the General back from Singapore.

It is Señora Agoncillo herself who answers the door, beautiful and gracious.

“Our young linguist,” she says, smiling and stepping back to allow him passage. “You must come out of the heat.”

He is ushered to the study, where members of the Junta and a few of the exiled government stand around a table, frowning over a drawing.

“I understand why the sun has a face,” says one, “but shouldn’t it be smiling?”

“In a Masonic triangle—”

“Just a triangle—”

“All triangles are Masonic. You can’t avoid the association.”

“The three points of the triangle represent Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

“The French—”

“The French have nothing to do with us.”

“I thought the three stars—”

“They represent Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao—”

“Wonderful. Mindanao. Why not a half-moon and a scimitar?”

“The moros are Filipinos, whatever their beliefs.”

“And the rays emanating—”

“Eight rays, eight provinces that rose in ’96—”

“You make eight?”

“Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Manila, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, and Tarlac.”

“You allow a more generous definition of revolt than I.”

“Blue and red, like the flag of independent Cuba.”

“You’re forgetting the white triangle.”

“Red, white, and blue—”

“Symbolic,” says the slender, large-eyed man who has been sitting quietly at the head of the table, “of our hopeful friendship with the United States.” He smiles shyly. “Or at least that’s what I told their Consul in Singapore.”

The men laugh. Diosdado has never seen the General in person before. He seems too slender, too gentle a man to be the strongman of Cavite, who outfought and then outfoxed the Spanish cazadores , who had the grit to order the execution of the Bonifacios and risk tearing the movement apart.

“He suggested that we have a new banner, to rally the people.”

The voice is soft, seemingly without irony. He didn’t order the executions, Diosdado corrects himself, he merely allowed them to happen.

“Do you trust them?” asks Mascardo.

“The hulls of their Great White Fleet have been painted gray for battle and they have been asked by the British, in the interests of neutrality, to leave the harbor. We can only hope that they are trustworthy.” The General turns and looks directly at Diosdado. “And what do you think, Argus?” He indicates the drawing. “About my design?”

The men of the Junta all turn toward Diosdado. He is speechless at first, that the General would recognize him, would know his code name, would ask his opinion.

“We are a complex nation,” he answers in Tagalog. “We deserve a complex flag.”

The General laughs. “You went to see the Hong man?”

Diosdado nods. “Not a single rifle.”

Malvar, who sent him on the mission, scowls, but the General’s expression does not alter.

“No matter,” he says. “The Americans have promised to sell us as many as we need.”

“When?” asks Riego de Dios.

“We are to wait here for their summons,” says the General.

“Our people are already fighting in the Ilocos.”

“There is little else to entertain oneself with in the Ilocos,” says Alejan-drino, and the men laugh again.

The General turns back to Diosdado. “We will be waiting here for the summons,” he says, “but you, young man, are to go immediately to Manila.”

Diosdado takes a deep breath, trying to appear unfazed by the order. Manila. He has been condemned there as a traitor, drawings of him, poorly rendered, circulated by the guardia . He thought he might never see the city again.

“And what is my mission?”

The General smiles. “To wait for our American brothers,” he says, “and embrace them when they step ashore.”

Leadville is a wound festering between the Mosquito Range and the Wasatch Mountains, a high-plains sprawl of new-built structures surrounded by treeless hills pocked with diggings, hills that at closer look are only piles of tailings excreted from the holes men have torn into the earth. Blasted rock spews from tipple chutes into ore cars that rattle and slam down tramways behind coal-devouring engines, wooden headhouse towers marking the mine portals where hoist cables screech lowering men crammed in steel cages down tomb-dark vertical shafts, tongues of candles flickering on their hats, oil lanterns in hand, dropping with stomach-shifting speed past the played-out silver, the abandoned tunnels, past Level Three, Level Four, Level Five, down four hundred feet more sucking air hammered into the ground by a compressor, Level Eight, Level Nine, then thunk to bedrock and the door clanging open and the men spilling out into the main chamber to face a half-dozen galleries. The newest of these, the rawest, leads back a thousand feet, only half that distance with track on the floor. At the end of it, in the nervous light of three candles, Hod braces himself in a narrow fissure and rams a seventy-five-pound stoper drill straight up into the stony roof above him, rock dust filling the crevice, filling his nose his mouth his lungs, ear-shattering trip-hammer roar as he drives the cutting bit into hardrock a thousand strokes per minute, vibration coursing through his chest down his backbone and out through his legs into the rock he is wedged in, muscles of his arms taut cables pushing the drill steel up, up, every part of him straining and concentrated on the shoot-hole above till Cap Stover reaches up to swat his leg. Time to change bits.

Sudden quiet.

Hanging rock dust.

Hod hands the drill down to the chuck tender, who twists the bar stock and pulls out the old steel, still hot to the touch. The edges of the star-shaped cutting bit have been hammered smooth. Cap jiggers in a new rod of drill steel, twists it to lock.

Grimes, the foreman, calls up through the winze from the level below. “You all right up there?”

“Changing steel, boss,” Cap calls down into the little opening.

“How’s it coming?”

Cap looks up to Hod, who shows him fingers. If he tries to talk it will start the coughing again.

“Three more to go, then you can shoot,” calls Cap.

“Keep on it,” calls the foreman, and then nothing.

Hod starts the tip of the steel into the shoot-hole, then guides the rod as Cap hoists the body of the hammer drill back up to him, unkinking the wire-belted cable that leads back to the compressor at the head of the gallery.

“Need a minute?”

Hod shakes his head, then braces himself again and muscles the heavy drill upward till the bit jams against the unyielding top of the hole. The air is almost clear now and he takes a big gulp of it and squeezes the trigger — shriek of metal cutting rock, vibration filling his body once again.

Maybe he’ll find her tonight.

One of the girls on the Row who recognized him from Skaguay said Addie Lee is in town, staying at the Crysopolis, but the desk jockey said there were no redheads upstairs and nobody going by any of the names Hod recalled her using. Hod drills and thinks how it would be to be with her, to hold her. He searched the town last night and the night before, she’d been there and gone, sure, happy to pass it on, what was his name again? Hod drills and concentrates on a single image, her cheek resting in sleep against his bare breast, the smell of her hair, her breath warm and steady against his skin. He’ll find her tonight, or she will find him.