A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “Watch him dance,” says the haciendero, louder now that the ceremony has entered its active phase.

  And dance he does, Fecundo Magapuna, the cheap shoes stomping and scraping, digging in at the heel then kicking out as far as the shackles will allow, twisting at impossible angles till one works its way off the man’s foot entirely, lying still on the platform while Diosdado snaps and winds, no worry now of the others hearing, caught up as they are in the buckings and writhings of the man’s torso, body thrashing like a panicked goose clutched at the neck and the verdugo turning the crossbar slowly, stolidly, a man adjusting a valve. The condemned man’s legs might come out a blur, thinks Diosdado, but the executioner will be still in the photograph, and the capitán and his two soldiers and the praying Franciscan and even the shrouded head of the condemned Magapuna, cocked at an unnatural angle and cinched to the board by the tightening collar, all frozen together in tableau.

  There is an audible crack! of the star-nosed bit through the condemned man’s vertebra as Diosdado triggers the shutter. The Franciscan raises his voice in supplication, Padre Peregrino softly speaking the Latin words in tandem with him, savoring their weighty euphony, and Diosdado secures the camera under his coat while another man, a doctor, is brought out to verify the act. The executioner, secure of his handiwork, steps down. The doctor lifts the hood from the man’s face, places a small mirror under his nose. Blood spreads downward from the nostrils, staining the man’s lip and chin, pooling in the cleft of his neck. The doctor removes the mirror, says something to the capitán, then steps quickly out of the sun-baked courtyard. Benítez the lawyer notes the exact time. Diosdado can hear but not see the buzzing flies around the soaked earth at the man’s feet. The foot without the shoe on it is clad in a dark blue stocking, three toes protruding obscenely through a hole in its tip.

  “I suppose if the verdugo kept on turning,” says the haciendero, “the head would pop right off.”

  Diosdado sees the woman waiting as they leave the Cuartel de España and pass through the Royal Gate. She stands at the foot of the bridge across the moat that separates the Intramuros from the Luneta, waiting by a bullcart with a rough wooden casket lying on it, the chino porter squatting in its meager shade with his eyes closed. She is small, pretty, dressed in what passes for Sunday finery in the baryos up north. She is the widow, he is certain, and if the two officers weren’t still just behind him bragging about horses they’ve owned he would stop and take another photograph. There must still be several exposures left on the roll, and it seems wrong to waste such magical potential, like leaving food on the plate, something his mother ranked even above blasphemy in her catalogue of sins. Diosdado wonders how it would have felt to witness the ceremony with his eye pressed to the sight, to see it through the filter of lens and mirror, to shrink the man’s death into that leather-covered box. He looks across to the field of Bagumbayan, where they shot Dr. Rizal. The little man facing the Bay, priests and soldiers on either side, military band trilling through La Marcha de Cádiz, then the order and the bark of rifles.

  It is not too late. Merely chemicals on a strip of celluloid, not yet a “graven image” as Padre Peregrino would call it, an arrangement of molecules remembered in silver that, if allowed to, will develop into—

  He has only to open the box and the sun will do the rest.

  Diosdado turns to register the familiar sights—the vendors and the strollers, the frisky carriage ponies of the families making their paseo around the beautiful, lamp-lined rectangle of the Luneta as the Govenor General’s favorite ensemble plays a sweet rondalla in the ornate bandstand, young men not unlike himself staring reflectively, perhaps romantically, over the sea wall, all the color and noise of a Manila afternoon—then adjusts the Eastman Bullet under his arm and walks stiffly toward the safe house in Malate where the Committee is waiting.

  Nilda Magapuna waves flies away from her face and stares without seeing at the activity on the green. They say the body will be out soon. She holds a rosary in one hand, fingers slack on the beads.

  FIREWORKS

  Carnaval was invented by spies. There is no other explanation—an entire week when one is allowed, no, expected, to traverse the city behind a mask, one among thousands of dizfrazados, black and white, rich and poor, attending gilded balls or singing in processions or just noisily decorating the streets of La Habana. The gaslights are on now, the breeze blowing ever so slightly out into the Harbor as Quiroga strolls along the Malecón. It is a calm night, waves caressing rather than assaulting the sea wall, and the few lights left burning on the big ships anchored not so far away rise and fall in a gentle rhythm. Quiroga wears a simple domino and his dress suit, only a lector de fábrica down from Florida for the holiday. Nobody to worry about. There is tension, yes, and he heard footsteps behind when he left the hotel this morning, but with so much life on the street, so many crowds to lose himself in, Quiroga is certain that his sombra has been lost as well.

  Individuals have disappeared mysteriously, especially here in the capital, and the arrival of the American armed cruiser has set the always fertile Cuban imagination afire. Quiroga would not ordinarily be needed, parties often transported to and from the island without involving the “sleeping patriots” up in Ybor, but this extraction is more sensitive than the norm. Ambassador de Lôme’s missive to Don José Canelejas of El Heraldo de Madrid, in which he describes the American president in decidedly undiplomatic terms, has somehow fallen into the eager hands of the New York Journal. Unsurprisingly, those worthies have published a copy of the original alongside a translation, and the yellow press are tumescent with outrage to see their leader portrayed as “weak, catering to the rabble—a low politician who desires to leave a door open to himself and to stand well with the jingoes of his party.” It is not an inaccurate assessment, mild compared to statements made daily by members of the Cuban Junta in New York or Tampa or even by American interventionists in the editorial pages of the self-same Journal. But de Lôme is not a wild-eyed revolutionist or ink-slathered provocateur—he is meant to be the benign, conciliatory face of the Spanish Crown in the United States. Very few persons must be in the position to intercept or purloin the Ambassador’s writings, and that nervy fellow, Quiroga assumes, is who he is meant to smuggle out of La Habana.

  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 epil
eptic 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 DAILY OUTRAGE

  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—

  CONJECTURE THAT WARSHIP

  MAINE BLOWN TO PIECES BY

  ENEMY’S SECRET

  INFERNAL MACHINE

  The Chief will want to post one of his rewards for this one, no doubt, the engraver already preparing a plate to replicate the check. $10,000 is as high as he has gone in the past, but this wondrous catastrophe would seem to merit a greater offering. The Chief will decide when he arrives from the theater. Information, mostly from the sizable lunatic population of the city, will pour in, and the reward will never be paid. But even symbolic gestures demand proportion—

  SPANISH AMBASSADOR

  DE LÔME

  FLEES COUNTRY

  AFTER TENDERING RESIGNATION

  The Editor’s ultimate test of a split head is to imagine it shouted by one of the pack of newsboys who peddle their wares by the hackney stand where he hires his ride home, particularly the jaundiced little street Arab who bellows every word over 20 points high as if the fate of the world were in balance—

  AMERICAN GENERALS WANT

  INCREASE IN TROOPS IF WE ARE

  TO FIGHT SPAIN

  The correspondents will file their copy, succinct narratives peppered (never, they argue, laden) with whatever facts they might stumble upon. Facts, however, are complex, facts are often inconclusive or contradictory. The reader who buys on the street is not looking for information about a crisis, he wants guidance as to how he should feel about it—

  WAR? SURE!

  The facts will take care of themselves.

  THE MARCH OF THE FLAG (I)

  A crowd of men have gathered in front of the Mondamin, listening to Jeff Smith up on a barrel of nails. Hod sees Smokey standing a few feet back from the throng, nervous.

  “Our boys asleep,” says Smith. “Defenseless. Then the furtive approach, the infernal device installed at water level, the fuse ignited—”

  “What happened?” Hod whispers.

  “Seattle papers come in,” says Smokey. “This is bad.”

  “Then the dormant city shaken by a terrible explosion!” Jeff Smith has his hat over his heart now, a tear in his voice. “Our brave lads blown to smithereens. Dismembered. Horribly burned. Drowned in the unforgiving waters.”

  “They gone blame this on me,” mutters Smokey, shaking his head.

  “Bodies float to the surface.” Smith
is using his soap-selling voice, dark eyes burning with indignation. “The malefactors feign innocence.”

  Hod is confused. “What do you have to do with it?”

  Smokey looks around at the red-faced men, steam rising from their mouths and noses, jaws clenched in anger. “Cause I’m the closest thing they got to a Spaniard in this camp.”

  “But will Americans countenance this treachery?” Jeff Smith raising a fist in the air. “Will we quail and run? Will we falter before the swarthy Dago assassin?” The men shout No! to each tremulous query. Smith spreads his arms wide and smiles. “I knew it in my heart. Our country needs us, gentlemen. I have wired the Territory requesting commission. Any red-blooded American among you—” and here he points with his hat toward a tent that has been set up in the middle of the street at Broadway and Seventh, “—may strike a blow for liberty by signing on with the Skaguay Guards! God bless America!”

  There is cheering and fist-waving and then the band from the Garden of Joy steps out to play The Stars and Stripes and most of the crowd, townsmen and busted stampeders alike, hurries to enlist, loudly describing the beating the wicked Spaniards are about to suffer. Jeff Smith hops down and crosses to Hod and Smokey.

  “Most of them are hoping Uncle Sam will provide free passage back to the Outside,” he winks. “Let’s see how bold that reform outfit been nippin at my heels is when I’ve got my own army.”

  “We gone to war?” Hod hasn’t looked at a newspaper since he’s been in the Yukon. It all seems very far away.

  “We will, son, soon enough.” He claps Hod on the shoulder. “I’ll expect you to join the roll, of course. Sergeant McGinty.”