A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  Diosdado tries to strip his uniform tunic off but the buttons are too hot to touch. Luna insisted the officers keep them on for the raid—“So they know we are not tulisanes,” he said, “not a rabble of bandits but the Army of the Filipino Republic, saviors of the nation.” Saviors, Diosdado thinks as the shifting curtains of flame drive him one way and then another, of the very people whose homes we have put to the torch. He is afraid, more afraid than he was on the night the fight with the Americans started, buried in the wet earth as the shells burst above him, or at Caloocan trying to keep his face toward the enemy as he stumbled backward over the paddies, firing his pistol methodically till his ammunition was all gone, the huge Americans in their blue uniforms pausing only to chop and hack with rifle butt and bayonet at the wounded men he’d left behind, Diosdado finally turning and running to catch the ones still living and gather them back into some kind of coherent unit.

  The Lake of Fire. Every story Padre Inocencio terrified them with in the primario ended with the Lake of Fire and the agonies of the sinners cast into it, their shrieks of anguish unheard in Paradise, their flesh rendered from their bodies, limbs twisted with spasms of pain, bones blackened and cracking in the molten inferno but not dying, no, doomed to endless torment. Once he held Diosdado’s hand over a candle flame till the skin of his palm blistered, reciting the litany of tortures reserved for the damned and holding a scapular with the image of a woman engulfed in flames close to his face. “Imagine this pain a thousand times hotter, all over your body,” he hissed into the little boy’s ear. “Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, without hope, without release. This is Eternal Damnation.”

  Burning to death has always been his worst fear, the nightmare that wrenches him awake in a sweat. Diosdado drops his torch. The leather of his holster feels like it is melting, the metal butt of his pistol like a sizzling griddle as he forces his hand closed around it. I will not say a prayer, Diosdado thinks, cocking it. And if there is a Hell, Padre Inocencio will be there to greet me.

  He is lifting the pistol toward his head when Sergeant Bayani emerges from the black smoke, a torch in each hand, eyes gleaming with flame, a lunatic smile lighting up his face. There is vino on his breath as he shouts over the crackling of the nipa and the screams and the bells tolling everywhere and the rifle fire on all sides now, Bayani who threw Diosdado unconscious over his shoulder on the first night of the war with the yanquis and carried him halfway to Malolos, who was waiting for Diosdado with the survivors of the rout at Caloocan, dug in and ready to resist again, on the outskirts of Tinajeros, Bayani who the men say is insane and invincible, the anting anting sewn beneath the skin just over his heart protecting him from evil thoughts and enemy bullets.

  “This is one baryo,” he shouts gleefully, “that the Americans will not get to destroy. Sígame, hermano!”

  Bayani hurls his torches into the hottest part of the fire blowing toward them, then turns and strides again into the black smoke. Diosdado fights the urge to shout an order to him, any order, before holstering his pistol and hurrying after.

  He holds his breath and runs till they fall out of the smoke, coughing, eyes streaming with tears, into what is left of the mercado. Only charred bamboo uprights are left where the stalls once stood—shops gutted and roofless, a pile of cocoanuts blackened and cracked and oozing, chickens crisped in a cage no longer hanging, bundles dropped by the fleeing residents burst open and littering the street. Diosdado has been to Tondo only once when it wasn’t burning, a long drunken night in a rented calesa with Scipio and Hilario Ibañez from Santo Tomás, Hilario who wanted to achieve in epic verse what Dr. Rizal had in prose, improvising stanzas about the true soul of the nation residing in this hodgepodge of narrow, blighted streets along the fetid Canal de la Reina as its residents sullenly spit and muttered and moved aside to let their carriage pass. Bayani seems to know it, though, leading Diosdado at a trot through the smoldering maze till they reach the swampland to the north of the colonia, flattening themselves in the cogon grass to let a platoon of fire-addled yanquis, volunteers by their uniform, hustle by. They catch their breath, then struggle wordlessly through the bamboo thickets and mires and tangling brush, fat embers blown over their heads and settling in the tops of the cabonegro palms to glow like fireflies. They hear noises to the left, Bayani pausing to call in Tagalog and answered with a curse. It is Kalaw and Rafi Agapito, blackened with soot, and the four of them continue for an hour before anyone speaks.

  “Did you see any of the others?” Diosdado asks when they stop to rest, Bayani scouting ahead.

  “Once or twice in the fire,” says Kalaw. “There were so many people running. And I saw the sargento.” He lowers his voice as if Bayani might be near. “He was in front of a liquor warehouse he set fire to.”

  “Drinking.”

  Kalaw shrugs. “It would be a sin to let it all go to waste.”

  “I saw Ninong Carangal get shot.” Agapito has a sandal off, poking at his bleeding foot. The bamboo poles towering over their heads knock together in the early-morning breeze, and there is distant gunfire. “He ran out with an ax to cut the fire hose and the Americans saw him and shot him dead.”

  Sargento Bayani reappears and squats by them, his manner completely sober now, calculating. “Our battalion is just ahead at Balintawak, but there’s trouble.”

  “Yanquis?” asks Agapito, wincing as he pulls his sandal back on.

  “Worse. Filipinos.”

  They step out of the bamboo forest to find four companies of Caviteños seated on the ground by the side of the road, disarmed and under guard, while Colonel Román tries to convince General Luna it is a poor idea to fire a bullet into the skull of their capitán.

  “He’ll be punished, he’ll be made an example,” says Paco Román, his long criollo face tight with apprehension, speaking as calmly as possible. “But not here, General, please. Not now.”

  Luna’s men, rifles leveled at the Caviteños on four sides, look more frightened than the sitting troops. Diosdado and his survivors halt a few yards away, Kalaw and Rafi Agapito looking from officer to officer with anxious incomprehension as the Ilocano general and the kneeling capitán argue in Spanish.

  “There is a gap in our line of attack,” says Luna, spitting his words. “I need to reinforce it.”

  “My men will go nowhere unless I lead them,” says Capitán Janolino, so Spanish-looking his friends call him Pedrong Kastila, his voice strained but his gaze steady.

  “I’ll have them all shot!”

  “Whatever you do,” says Janolino, “it is not as my commanding officer.”

  There is a battle raging to the west of them, rifle fire steady and deep from the Springfields of the yanquis, higher and more ragged from the British Mitfords and captured Mausers of their own troops, and suddenly the whistle of shells overhead and the solid whump! as they reach their killing ground in the Binondo cemetery.

  Luna gives the capitán’s head a final shove with his pistol and then lowers it to his side. Luna stood firm throughout the day at Caloocan, exposed to the murderous fire, running forward to protect the wounded till they could be carried away, coolly sighting and firing his pistol as if it was one of his target-shooting exhibitions. It was thrilling to fight beside such a leader, and then, as the church was shelled to ruins and the rice fields plowed with explosions and the yanqui horde advanced, it was suicidal—General Luna determined to fight to his death and expecting the same of the men around him.

  “Take a company,” he barks to Colonel Román, “and march these traitors to Malolos.”

  He turns then, and there is fury in his eyes as he discovers the torch-men.

  “Who are you people?”

  Diosdado salutes. “Incendiary squad, mi general. One dead, seven unaccounted for.”

  “Tondo?”

  “Tondo is burning. Santa Cruz and San Nicolas are burning.”

  “There are two hundred of our people entrenched by the bridge, waiting for the yanquis,
” adds Sergeant Bayani. “And all the chinos have gone to hide in their embassy.”

  Luna grunts. Behind him one hundred forty scowling Caviteños are rousted to their feet and herded into formation.

  “Grab a weapon and join us,” orders the general, jerking his head toward the stacks of rifles Janolino’s companies are leaving behind. “There are plenty to choose from.”

  AN EXECUTION

  The officer walks rather casually before the others. He doesn’t look Spanish. They march out of the trees, parallel to the abandoned building, till the Spaniard gestures and the prisoners, four of them, are halted and told to face the stone wall. The prisoners are all dark-skinned men, in motley combinations of clothing. Insurgents. The officer draws his sword as the firing squad, four soldiers, fix their man in place with a hand on the left shoulder, then step back five paces. The officer runs across in front of them and stands parallel to their row, then brings his sword down. A crackling volley from the four rifles—smoke fills the air, and the insurgents drop to the ground.

  Harry looks over to Mr. Heise, who nods and steps away from the Beast.

  “You can get up now!” Harry calls, and the sprawled insurgents roll slowly to their knees, grinning at each other and at their executioners.

  “That’s it for today,” says Mr. Heise to Harry. “We can pull the film back at the shop.”

  Harry signals to a pair of the colored boys and they come trotting over from the wall, swatting dust off their clothes.

  “I hold my breaf just like you tole me to,” says Zeke, smiling.

  “You looked perfect, all of you.” Harry nods to the wagon. “Time to pack the instrument up.”

  He supervises as the boys lift the heavy camera on the carry-boards they have rigged up and stagger back to hoist it onto the wagon bed. Stempl back at the shop is the one who started calling it the Beast, though never if the Wizard is close enough to read their lips. No wonder that Paley’s mission to Cuba was a fiasco. With the camera weighing as much and requiring far more maintenance than a field-artillery piece he managed only a few shots of swimming mules and one scene of a very small horse suffering under the enormous General Shafter before rain fouled the apparatus and tropical disease forced his return.

  “My people see this, they gone get a start,” says Zeke, still excited by his acting debut. “Aint noner them ever been in no photograph, movin or not.”

  The movement, of course, is an illusion. Inside the Beast there are cylinders that move in concert with other cylinders, celluloid coated with chemicals cranked on a spool and held in its groove by a claw mechanism, and passed, hopefully at a consistent rate, in front of an aperture that allows a finite flash of light to hit it before being wound back into darkness. The image borne by that light and captured in the chemicals is only a photograph, as still as any other. But rolled in succession with the other photographs caught on the strip of film, the human eye is fooled—

  “They gone think this real? I mean the other people who don’t know me that sees it?”

  Harry helps guide the body of the Beast as they slide it forward on the wagon bed.

  “That depends on who displays it,” he says. “We’ll send this out as a facsimile, but as to how it is presented in the halls—” he spreads his arms. “It looked very real.”

  “That’s what I was thinkin,” says Zeke, securing a rope around the camera body. “They was just a second there, before the man yell ‘Fire!,’ where I got to feelin they might be real bullets in them rifles.” He touches his chest. “Made my heart skip a beat.”

  “You were very convincing.”

  Zeke nudges the other boy with his elbow, winks. “Skeeter here done wet his nappies when they shoot.”

  It is not so different in principal from the Gatling gun, Harry thinks, though one device makes itself repeatedly vulnerable while the other deals out lead with precision. At the moment of the execution volley he had been struck by the notion that if Heise’s arm were quicker, four cranks per second perhaps, or the instrument driven by a dynamo with sufficient speed, one could capture motion faster than the capacity of the human eye. One could slow down time itself. The bullets could be seen in their deadly trajectory, the instant of their penetration into the skulls of the insurgents—but of course that would give away the illusion. There were no bullets, only the wadding from blank cartridges, and there was no smashing of bones, no spilling of brains.

  When the equipment is secured Harry joins Mr. Heise and Mr. White in the coach to take them back to the shop. The old stone house, windows missing, overgrown with creepers, is quickly left behind them.

  “The Spanish-atrocity theme is wearing a bit thin,” says Mr. White. “Given the turn of events.”

  Before this the only view they’ve let Harry take part in was Did Somebody Say Watermelon?, and that had been done in the Black Maria with Skeeter and another of the boys from today.

  “One of them moved,” says Mr. Heise. “One of our insurrectos. After he was shot.”

  “The throes of death.”

  “He looked at the camera before he did it.”

  “We’ll cut it short. The view is over when they hit the ground. No use in being morbid about it.”

  They ride silently through the Jersey woodlands. There might be some great use, thinks Harry, in being morbid. If they’d been able to mount the Beast on some sort of runner or sled apparatus and push it forward to see the bodies of the executed men more closely at the end, or if the camera were not such a behemoth and could be thrown over the shoulder and transported, like a Kodak on a tripod, as easily as a rifle, think of what Paley, or perhaps an operator less portly, might have captured at Las Guasimas or Kettle Hill or in this new Philippine nightmare that Niles has gotten himself embroiled in. Harry thinks again of the image of a bullet leaving a rifle and followed directly to the spot between the eyes of its victim, a handsome Southerner with a constant smirk of self-love on his countenance—

  The ladies could not bear to view such a thing, of course, but ladies are not the advocates or perpetrators of war, and cannot be expected to be its aficionados.

  The coach passes the wagon bearing the Beast, and Harry leans out to look. To any other eye it is only a bulky and seemingly purposeless piece of furniture.

  “I thought our Dago capitán was awfully good,” says Mr. Heise. “Haughty and officious.”

  “And without a moustache to twirl,” smiles Mr. White. “Quite an accomplishment.”

  Harry’s mind is racing. If you staged it, he thinks, interrupting the wide view with a closer one of the condemned men’s faces, then sighting down the line of pointing rifles, perhaps a little stage blood to increase the impact of the sledding shot of the insurgents’ bodies—or if you could be there, be there on the actual battlefield to capture forever that horrible moment, one man murdering another in the name of the flag—how could they go on with it?

  If they want war, he thinks, first make them watch it up close.

  TURKEY SHOOT

  Mariquina has to go. Captain Stewart and Phillippi from Cripple Creek and Pynchon, the bicycle racer from Company K, and Maccoe and Danny Donovan killed in four different fights here and enough is enough. Hod trots with a torch made from a length of bamboo and a googoo’s abandoned shirt soaked in kerosene, touching it to the dry thatch roofs of the nipa huts that catch fire with a hiss like that’s what they’re made for. The church is already pouring smoke. This is how it goes, he figures, maybe not so many of the people in this town want to fight them but there’s ones who do who keep coming back and pretty soon the details don’t matter—if it shoots at you, you kill it and tear down whatever it was hiding behind.

  The people are all gone, run off into the hills around them, and tonight they will come back and dig for whatever they’ve hidden in the ground and maybe just the church steeple will be left standing and maybe not even that. Lots of the other boys are whooping, eyes bright with the blaze, throwing the wood stumps the locals use to husk their rice i
nto the burning huts and smashing their water jugs with the butts of their rifles and Tutweiler running in and out adding to his collection of statues and pictures of the Virgin and Grissom’s monkey tormenting a fighting cock that has been left pegged to the ground, its feathers starting to singe, but Hod is just trying to get the job done. The quickstep has eased off finally, but now he has the other problem, needing to piss all the time and when he does it’s like acid coming out. This Philippines is trying to kill him.

  It is the most beautiful place he’s ever seen, Mariquina, looking at it from the heights by the waterworks, set in between the dark green patches of trees and the lighter green of canefields and corn and rice and bananas and sweet potatoes and watermelons that the fellas would swipe and eat on the road after cleaning the insurrectos out of town yet again and now it is burning, burning—nothing to see from the heights if you were up there but black smoke.

  He comes upon Big Ten with nothing in his hand to set fire with, the Indian just standing in the middle of it all, watching moodily. The huts crackle and pop around them, black smoke blowing to the west.

  “Some party, huh?” he says to Hod, a strange little smile on his face. “All we need is the regimental band.”

  Later, back up on the hill, there is distant shelling, a hotter engagement just to the north, and the captain lets them stand and watch for a moment before they march off to help. Hod feels it coming and turns his back to the far-off battle and opens his fly and out comes a too-yellow stream of it.