John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

But it’s “Savior of his Country”

when the guns begin to shoot!

The biggest one looks embarrassed. “He does that. Right out of the blue.”

“We come up from Pueblo and he latched on to us,” says the middle one. “But they took us anyway.”

The sergeant comes out from the saloon then, a long man with a long moustache drooping off his face. He glares at his volunteers. “Have you been talking to these civilians?”

“They were asking about enlistment, sir,” says the Runt, eyes forward, chin tucked in, his scrawny body held rigid. “And I was explaining the opportunity.”

The sergeant turns to look Hod and Big Ten over. “I’ve got one deserted already and one lost to the clap shack,” he says. “You boys ready to take the trip?”

The Polish miner wasn’t a drinker, Hod remembers, just a steady, hard-working fella trying to keep grits on his table. He looked like hell, a ghost of a man out there alone in the rain. This is not Hod’s war, the plight of the oppressed Cuban a subject he has barely considered. But it had felt right, that one moment, marching with the Skaguay Guards, and there will be three squares a day and a chance to see the palm trees and it won’t be Soapy Smith or anyone like him running the deal. Hod, light in the pocket and blackballed from the mines, exchanges a look with the big Indian, who he can tell is also considering the offer.

“Where to?” asks Big Ten.

“Five blocks over to the Armory,” says the sergeant, “and then on to Glory.”

The Americans are there before the sun comes up. Just there , out in the bay, somehow passing the Corregidor batteries without a shell being fired.

“ Como Pedro por su casa ,” says the Spaniard next to Diosdado at the sea wall, a long-nosed ayuntamiento clerk wearing the yellow armband of his volunteer unit. It is first light and already there are hundreds lined up along the Malecón to watch, men only, though there are a few women among those fleeing behind them on the Paseo, the poorest with their rolled tampipis over their shoulders, the wealthiest trailed by barefoot coolies staggering under bulky pieces of furniture. This day has been known, has been inevitable, for weeks — what can they have been waiting for?

“Do you think they’ll bombard the city?” asks Diosdado. His orders are to gauge the mood of the people, both Spaniard and Filipino, and it has required a sociability he never thought himself capable of.

“That is the present subject of discussion,” the clerk tells him. “Do you see their light?”

At the bow of one of the still distant American warships a beam flicks rhythmically on and off. The clerk points across the road behind them, where a corporal and his capitán stand on top of the Baluarte de Santa Isabel, the capitán watching the signaling ship through binoculars and the corporal wig-wagging a pair of flags, one red, one white, in a complicated sequence.

“If General Augustín promises not to fire from the shore batteries,” the Spaniard explains, “their Admiral Dewey may agree not to level the Intramuros.”

“So you think no shells will fall on our heads?”

The clerk gives Diosdado a weary smile. “Leaving more available to murder our boys in the fleet.”

The fleet, if the less-than-a-dozen Spanish ships fanned out uncertainly in front of Las Piñas, escape route blocked by Sangley Point, may be conceded that name, has nowhere to go.

“What are they doing?”

The clerk watches the closer ships for a moment.

“One would hope,” he says finally, “they are making their peace with the Creator.”

This same bitter humor, this mix of exasperation and stoicism, has infused every conversation Diosdado has engaged in or overheard since the news arrived that the Americans were steaming away from Hongkong. Haunting the Escolta in his moustache and country planter’s outfit, in for a quick drink at the Tabaquería Nacional or La Alhambra or the San Miguel beerhouse, rubbing shoulders with the peninsulares , infantry, cavalry, volunteers — for every Spaniard between sixteen and sixty has been called to service — it has been the same shameful story.

“We have been abandoned,” said the teniente , said the merchant, said the cargo inspector. “The people in Madrid make speeches and wave their fists, but they send us no ships, no arms, no men.”

“They have the insurrection in Cuba to deal with.”

“An insurrection fueled by yanqui gold.”

“Nonetheless—”

“They have abandoned us. They have hooked a monster this time, have roused the interest of these overgrown Americans, and have decided to cut bait rather than endure the fight.”

“But we will fight,” they all add. “If only for our sense of honor. If only to stand as men, under our flag and God’s eyes, till the very end.”

And then, enraptured with their own tragic Iberian nobility, intoxicated with sentiment for their beloved archipelago, their Pearl of the Orient, each Spaniard will turn to lay a hand on Diosdado’s shoulder and speak as if to a brother.

“ Y tu, amigo —what will you do?”

They do not mean what will Diosdado Concepción do, or Idelfonso Ledesma, the name on the newest cédula the Committee has given him. They worry, they obsess, about what the Filipino people will do.

“So many of our prominent figures,” Diosdado reassures them whenever asked, “have sworn to stand with our mother Spain against these invaders. Look at those already leading volunteer battalions — Pio del Pilar, Buencamino in Pampanga, Paterno, Ricarte, Licerio Gerónimo, the Trias brothers—”

Diosdado has spoken to almost all those that Alejandrino, too well-known by the Spaniards to operate secretly, has not been able to reach. Hurrying about the provinces in his flimsy disguise, General Aguinaldo’s faceless envoy to those he hopes will follow him in a revived insurgency. They are all, perhaps with the exception of Ricarte, practical men, and have deduced that the safest position in the coming upheaval is at the head of a large body of armed men, preferably from one’s home province.

“But will they stand to the end?”

And because he is an imposter, with a radically different notion of what that end should be, Diosdado can look the Spaniards in the eye and say, honestly, “I hope so. With all my heart.”

He raises his binoculars as the American ships form a line, one behind the other, speeding past the Malecón now, the shore batteries silent. The lead vessel is within two hundred yards when the Spaniards begin to fire. One by one the American ships turn hard right and run parallel to the Spanish line, rapid-fire cannons delivering a continuous broadside, balls of smoke and then the booming report over the water. The Regina Cristina and the Don Juan de Austria charge forward and immediately begin to come apart. They are old, badly fitted, wooden-hulled relics facing gray-painted fortresses of steel. It is target practice. The Mindanao is on fire off Las Piñas beach, the Castilla is sinking, only its chimney stack still above water, and the Regina Cristina explodes with a concussion that jolts the solemn watchers all along the sea wall.

The clerk has the side of his hand in his mouth, biting down on it. There are men in the water now, some of them on fire, swimming away from the wrecks or rowing lifeboats, desperate to be out of killing range. The American ships each take a second, then a third and a fourth turn, as evenly spaced as a line of mechanical ducks at a shooting gallery, only they are the sportsmen and the thrashing Spanish marineros the prey.