by John Sayles
It wasn’t long after Ling-Ling arrived in Sampaloc that the Comisaria de Vigilencia man came along with Señora Divinaflores’s lover, who was called Sargento Robles, to tell them that they had to be registered and inspected. They were brought to the Office of Public Hygiene and their photographs were taken. When the oficial asked her name she said Ling-Ling, just Ling-Ling. She was given a card that had writing on it and her photograph in the corner, and the Comisaria kept an identical card. Ling-Ling had never had her photograph taken before and did not like to look at the girl in the picture. At least it was only from her shoulders up and did not show her feet.
Twice a week they were supposed to either go to the hospital or let Dr. Apostol look inside them when he came by on his rounds through Sampaloc. It cost a Mexican silver if you went to the hospital or two if you waited for Dr. Apostol, money taken out of your pay by Señora Divinaflores.
They were paid in this house in Sampaloc, though after their food and lodging and hierbas and clothing and now medical examinations were taken out very little was left. The Filipina girls bought themselves things, sweets, pretty things, things you could buy on the street or from vendors who came calling under your window and would send your purchase up in a basket. Keiko gave her coins to a Dwarf Bandit man who came by once a week and who, she said, was sending it home to her parents. Ling-Ling kept hers in a wooden jewel box Eulalia had given her and never counted them. Eulalia had given her some gold earrings, too, and an ivory comb and a small icon, carved out of black stone, of a naked man with his hands and feet nailed to crossed planks. Ma had had something like that but one night when Baba was drunk and angry at the yang gweizi he threw it deep into the fire and wouldn’t let her reach in to pull it out. Sometimes in the mornings when Ling-Ling was lonely and sad Eulalia would come into her bed and hold her. Eulalia always smelled of cinnamon and cocoanut oil and gave Ling-Ling sarsaparilla wine to drink.
“The hierba tea only protects you against babies,” she said. “This will keep you from being infected.”
But even though they always drank a small bottle of it to make their mouths forget the taste of Doña Hermanegilda’s brew, one week Dr. Apostol said they had to go with Carmen to the Hospital San Juan de Dios to be cured. They were marched there by Sargento Robles and one of his fellow guardia and locked in a ward full of infected girls from all over Manila.
They had to lie on their backs three times a day and pour a cup of something that stung into themselves, holding it in till they could hold it no more and were allowed to run to the bench full of holes and pee it out. There was not much else to do and sometimes there were fights between the girls.
“Stay away from that one,” warned Eulalia, pointing to a hard-faced mestiza across the ward. “I was in Bilibid with her once. She hides a razor in her hair.”
“Why were you in prison?”
Eulalia raised her shoulders. “I argued with the ama at the house I was in before I came to Señora Divinaflores and she had me arrested. And even before that, on Thursdays and Sundays they let visitors into the cells, so we would go and entertain the prisoners who had money but no wives.”
In the evening the Daughters of Charity came in with their white hats spread out like the wings of flying fish, to pray for them and remind them that they were wicked women. The only one Ling-Ling liked was Sor Merced, who was young and would sit by her with her hands folded inside her robe and ask in Spanish what life was like for North China people. The robe was bluish-gray, the exact color of the cloth that Ma had woven so skillfully when she was still able to work a loom. Sometimes Sor Merced would tell stories about the life of San Vicente and sometimes even stories about herself when she was a girl and had a different name that Ling-Ling never asked her to reveal.
“Your sickness,” Sor Merced said, “is God’s warning that you are in peril. If you wish to lead a different life, perhaps I can help you.”
The Daughters of Charity were supposed to help the Poor and the Sick, and Ling-Ling was both of those. “But Sister,” she said shyly, “I am a pagana.”
Sor Merced looked at her for a long moment. “That does not mean I won’t help you,” she said.
But they were only at San Juan de Dios for a week when the doctor said they had been cured and something was written on the registration card with her photograph on it, both on hers and the one they kept, and she and Eulalia and Carmen were sent back to Señora Divinaflores.
“I kept your beds for you,” the ama told them. “You are in debt to me.”
Then there was a war between the government and the insurrectos, who were all Filipinos from Cavite, said Eulalia, who was from Ilocos, but after the very beginning it didn’t come too close to their house in Sampaloc. On the night before they were to be sent to fight, Rodrigo Valenzuela and many of his fellow junior oficiales de fusileros came to drink and sing and be entertained. Before he went to the room with Ling-Ling he pulled her out in front of the others.
“We have a wager,” he said. “A wager between caballeros. They say there is no china capable of this, that I am only a braggart and a fabulist.”
Ling-Ling stood looking down at her clown-feet, never happy to be the focus of so many eyes.
“Go ahead, querida. You know which one.”
And then Ling-Ling raised her head and covered her heart with her right hand and recited, trying to say the words with exactly the tone and exactly the rhythm that Rodrigo Valenzuela had taught her.
A mi alma enamorada—
—she cooed—
Una reina oriental parecía
Que esperaba a su mante
Bajo el techo de su camarín—
—the caballeros standing with their mouths hung open like carp in a too-small bucket—
—O que, llevada en hombros
La profunda extensión recorría
Triumfante y luminosa
Recostada sobre un palanquín
The caballeros smacked their hands together and the girls squealed with laughter and even Señora Divinaflores gave a bitter smile before she swallowed another glass of jerez.
Later on, after he had used her and lay curled up with his hand on her stomach like a small boy, Rodrigo Valenzuela began to cry. “I’m going to die,” he said. “I’m going to die in this hoyo de mierda.”
The war was still being fought when Ling-Ling started to feel sick all the time, like she had on her first voyage at sea, and her body started to thicken.
“Drink this,” said Doña Hermanegilda when the ama called her in to consult. “There is still time.”
These hierbas made her sweat and have cramps and feel sick in a different way, but her bleeding had stopped and nothing else came out and then it came into Ling-Ling’s head that the being inside her was determined to live.
“She’s just getting fat and lazy,” Señora Divinaflores said to Lao, who came to collect money for Mr. Wu. “I think you should send her on to Singapore.”
Ling-Ling still had to entertain, so many new soldiers being sent to Manila from Spain to fight the insurrectos, and most did not even notice or care when her stomach began to push out. Dr. Apostol examined her for the disease and said she was at least a month away.
“Doña Hermanegilda is coming today,” said the ama the next morning. “She can make it come out sooner. The sooner it comes the sooner you will be able to go back to work to support it.”
The old lady came and began to lay out her needles and Ling-Ling saw Sargento Robles and one of his guardia very pointedly lounging out in front of the house in their lacquered hats, smoking cigarettes and telling jokes and looking as if they would be there till it was finished.
“Hermanegilda is an abortista, not a partera,” said Eulalia, so she and Dionisia and Keiko, who were already awake, made a rope of sheets that they wet and knotted and lowered Ling-Ling down on in the back, waving but not calling as they watched her hurry through the alley to Calle de Alejandro.
The man at the cigar factory next to the church in
Binondo said that they did not hire chinas, pregnant or not. The mestizas who sold cloth from their narrow stalls said they needed no help and even the woman who hired for the lavandería by the barracks inside the Walled City said there was no work for her, that she should go back to her own neighborhood north of the river. Ling-Ling knew that if she tried to sell mangoes or milk or dulces on the street the guardia would soon arrest her, a vagamunda with her photograph on a card, not living at the house where she was registered. She spent the first night crouching under the Puente de España, not sleeping, and the next day was told they would not hire her at the fábricas in Tondo and Meisic, not hire her even to wash the long tables at night after the cigarreras went home. It was late afternoon when Ling-Ling passed through the Parian Gate and talked her way into the hospital, saying she had come for her examination this time to save a dollar. When they forgot her on the waiting bench she left and wandered the long hallways till she saw a sister wearing the cornette, and asked for Sor Merced.
“Soy puta y pagana, y eso es hijo de quién sabe,” she said to Sor Merced, touching her swollen belly, “pero pido su ayuda.”
“Every child is a child of God,” said the sister, and found her a bed to lie in.
It was mostly poor Filipinas in the ward, women who did not care to talk with a puta china, but Lan Mei did not mind. The doctor said there was something bad in her blood and that she would have to lie flat on the bed and not get out of it even to pee or make dung. She had never lain in bed so long with nothing to do, nobody to entertain, and relieving herself in the cold pan the nurse slipped under her was difficult at first. After about two weeks Eulalia found her. She had Ling-Ling’s money from the jewel box in a sack and the little idol, attached now to a thin golden chain.
“You have to wear this now,” she said, hanging the idol around Mei’s neck. “But the money—I’m afraid one of these sinverguenzas will steal it while you’re asleep.”
“Sor Merced will keep it for me.”
“As long as she doesn’t show it to any fucking friars.” Eulalia moved close to whisper to her. “They’re looking all over for you. The guardia and the people from Mr. Wu’s Society.”
“I am safe here, I think.”
Mei’s friend embraced her before she left.
“If it’s a girl,” she said, “think about naming her Eulalia.”
“Do you know why they did that to Him?” asked Sor Merced when she came to sit by Mei and saw the icon on the chain.
“He must have disobeyed the authorities,” said Mei.
“Yes, He did that,” smiled Sor Merced, who had a similar icon, carved in white stone. “And why do we wear this around our necks?”
Mei held her icon close to look at it, turning it this way and that, the man’s body twisted, spikes driven through the palms of his hands and both of his feet. “It is a very good warning,” she said.
When it was her time, the hurt was worse than anything she had ever felt before, and she thought then that women were given the icon to remind them that some men suffered almost as much as they did. Mei refused to cry out, though, holding on to Sor Merced’s plump arm as if it was a lifeline, as if she would drown if she let go. Her life was not nothing, it was the raft on which her child, whoever it was, would be borne above the waves. Sor Merced was shaking the whole time, praying and shaking and trying to keep her face averted from whatever the doctor was doing behind the curtain that hung over Mei’s swollen breasts.
It was a boy baby, and she told the oficial his name was Lan Bo, son of Lan Mei.
The Mother Superior arranged a job for Mei when she was well enough to walk, wearing rubber gloves and a mask and boiling the metal cups and bowls used to feed the patients infected with malaria or typhus or smallpox or cholera or tuberculosis or diseases the doctors had no names for. With this job came a little room behind the laundry, and, during Mei’s work shift, a niñera—a sweet-natured woman named Paz who had lost a leg to diabetes, and who stayed with Bo and the other babies of poor mothers who were recuperating.
The war was over for a while but there were still the Sick and the Poor for the sisters to care for, always the Sick and the Poor, and even if he had gorged himself on Paz during the day Bo would take some from Mei’s breasts when she came back to the little room, looking up at her with his hand resting on her throat. She slept with him on her chest at night, loving the weight of him, the warmth, and each morning she would bundle him up and carry him out through the gate of pariahs to greet the sun, its first tentative rays like gold thread on the surface of the Pasig.
The war started again after a year or so, thunder of cannons in the bay and then some very bad days inside the walls while they were under siege from the insurrectos and then the americanos too and suddenly there was no more water to boil the metal in or mop the floors with or to flush away the dung of the patients or even to make a bowl of tea.
“If this keeps up,” said Paz, who somehow remained fruitful through it all, “I’ll have half the city at my tetas.”
Mei could no longer bring Bo out through the Parian Gate because people were throwing their dung over the wall and into the moat beside it and because there were snipers outside and every evening she knelt with the Daughters of Charity to pray for Spain’s deliverance from this menace, to pray for the poor Filipinos whose souls would surely be lost along with the islands. On the last day, when there was thunder from the bay again and shooting over the walls, Mei helped the sisters with the wounded men who were carried in, blood staining the clothes that Sor Merced had given her, clothes that had belonged to a poor local woman who had joined the Order and was sent to Mindinao. Mei searched for Rodrigo Valenzuela but didn’t see him, only dozens of young soldiers who looked like him. It was dark when the first of the yanquis came into the hospital, candles lit because the electricity and the gas had both been cut, an officer with a yellow bush on his lip and four soldiers carrying rifles. None of the doctors and none of the Daughters of Charity spoke any English and the officer had not a word of Spanish or any of the Filipino tongues.
“Goddammit,” said the officer, “what’s their word for surrender?”
“Entregar,” said Mei, without thinking. The officer looked at her as if she was a sniper.
“In Chinese?”
“Espanish.”
“And who the hell are you?”
“We need water,” she said, indicating the wounded soldiers laid out on the cots and on the blood-slippery floors. “Or alla these people die.”
When the sisters were told to come back home to Spain their Mother Superior said they could not bring a china caída and her bastard child with them, so Sor Merced had the only Filipino doctor, who was staying, tell the Americans to give her a job. Most of the Poor and Sick were gone by then, and the infected girls from all the houses were being sent to San Lázaro with the lepers, and the beds were filled with young American soldiers who were sick with all the same diseases or torn by bullets.
“She is clean and she speaks English,” the doctor told them, “and she bears no malice toward your flag.”
There are always things to boil in a hospital.
When Hod gets back to the ward Runt is sitting on his bed, oversized pistol and billy club lying beside him.
“Jeez, I feel bad about this,” he says, looking Hod over.
“I didn’t get it from you.”
“But I steered you to those girls.”
“And three of them were just fine,” says Hod, sitting on the wicker chair beside him.
My Son, if a maiden deny thee
—Runt proclaims—
—And scufflingly bid thee give o’er
Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward—
Get out! She has been there before
At the end of the fight is a tombstone
—Blount chimes in from across the aisle—
With the name of the late deceased
And the epitaph drear, “A fool lies here,
Who tried
to hustle the East.”
“What’s that?” asks Hod.
“What they’ll write over your grave if you go back to that parlor,” says Blount. “There’s not that many a rose that don’t have a thorn on it.”
“I brought some provisions,” says Runyon, pushing his glasses up on his nose and looking around for officers. He shakes a small cotton sack and there are metal sounds. “Sardines, crackers—real crackers, none of that wallboard they give us to march with—gingersnaps and a couple fruit I can’t remember what they call them. Fruit is supposed to be good for it, I think.”
Blount is staring at him. “They recruit in the grade schools in Minne-sota?”
“He’s from Pueblo.”
“No shit. You know Vern Kessler?”
“I worked for him.”
“Selling papers—”
“Writing for the Evening Press.”
“So did I,” Blount grins, “back when it had a little snap. Now I wouldn’t line a birdcage with it.”
“So where’d you get yours?” Runt nods toward the corporal’s crotch.
“A rather overdecorated establishment in Binondo.”
“Silk wallpaper with nymphs and satyrs?”
“You’ve been there.”
“We hit em all. Encourage the ladies to be examined, shut them down for a day or two—looking after the physical and spiritual welfare of our fighting men.”
“So you know where the best—”
“The best,” says Runyon, “is Nellie White’s on First Street, Pueblo Colo-rado.”
“The playground of my misspent youth,” smiles Blount. “But here?”
“I have ceased to be involved with the trade girls, having given my heart to Anastacia Bailerino.”
“A lady of some quality, no doubt.”
“Raven hair, skin like coffee and cream—”
“No itching or pain on urination yet?”
Runyon narrows his eyes at Corporal Blount. “If you weren’t a fellow newspaperman I’d demand satisfaction.”