by John Sayles
“But your volunteers have finished their service.”
“So the General Staff informs us. The Regular Army is more than welcome to the travesty of a war we leave behind.”
They met in the hospital ward in Manila, both recovering from an overexposure to the sun on the day of the Zapote affair, the Lieutenant spouting his theories, many quite fantastic, and the Correspondent overcoming a vicious migraine to get it all down on paper.
“And your mission—”
“Has been fulfilled with honor and alacrity,” chuffs the Tarheel Lieu-tenant. “The Colorados, despite a handful of incorrigibles I have had to deal with sharply, have the blood of frontiersmen in their veins—it is their nature to contest the savage on his own ground, and to conquer him.”
The train slows, passing through an orchard that has been cleared back only far enough to give the troops on board the flatcars a clear field of fire at any snipers. The rains have stopped but the vegetation is still very green. He has tried hellish green and bilious green, only to settle on interminable green, although at this time of year it is often interrupted by splashes of death’s bed yellow. He tried jaundiced countryside during the first dry season but Cheltingham in New York has let him know his double entendre was blue-inked every time he wired it. Crane has a patent on red, of course, any journalist employing it suggestively (the bloodshot eye of the Tropics) mocked brutally by his cohorts. The Correspondent’s own strength is not in description, literal or baroquely impressionistic, but in his snippets of “overheard” dialogue, some of it actually transposed from interviews with the warriors themselves. That and a knack for the comical pidgin-speak of the natives, developed in his days as a cub enduring the exotic odors and sullen yellow glares of Pell Street.
He scribbles sullen yellow glare into his notebook.
“This land is a veritable cornucopia,” announces the Lieutenant, gazing moonily out at the fruit trees. It is gloomy inside the passenger car, the windows taped over with cardboard to discourage target practice by the locals, each mile of the railway bought with American lives and still vulnerable to sabotage, but Manigault has peeled one of these blinders away so they can admire the countryside. The two privates he has impressed to accompany them sit glumly in the seat behind, terribly dull souls who seem as resentful of each other as they are toward their officer.
Manigault is a bounder, of course, but except for the redoubtable and ever loquacious Funston, remains the most inexhaustible fount of material the Correspondent has discovered in the Philippines. And though the Lieutenant’s outbursts and observations retain a tinge of hysteria, he was pronounced fully recovered by the worthy médicos at San Juan de Dios and put on the street.
“Once we have opened it up for white men of boldness and industry—”
“But that pestilence you mentioned—” the Correspondent interjects in his not-for-the-record voice.
“The Anglo-Saxon brings many blessings on his march to glory,” winks Manigault. “Paramount of these is the concept of hygiene.”
“But the very soil seems to breed these scourges.”
The orchard gives way to a miasma of murky standing water and rotting plant life, the roots of the stunted trees writhing up from the ground as if in a desperate attempt to escape it before being wrenched under again.
“The soil responds to its master. Before the War, my people were in tobacco,” proclaims the Lieutenant for the hundredth time, and the Correspondent can only picture these ante-bellum Manigaults lying in a warehouse, dried and rolled in enormous leaves of white burley. “They could expectorate on an anthill and raise a cash crop from the result.”
The Lieutenant waits for him to finish writing, the mark of a born newspaper source.
“Unless my presence is urgently required back in Wilmington,” he says, staring unimpressed at the festering swamp without, “I shall embellish my new properties with that tradition.”
The Correspondent attempts not to snort. “Have you seen any of it?”
“As of yet, only in description. But this,” and here he waggles a much-folded survey map in his hand, “though only recently liberated, should prove the most developed of my holdings.”
Cheltingham has been cabling that the subscribers are not so much bored with the conflict as confused, “Why are we there?” rapidly deteriorating into “I don’t care to read about it.” It was no problem after the treacherous attack in February, the Tagalos begging for chastisement, but as the fury of battle has dissipated into the grinding trudge of skirmish and evasion, a chess game where the opponent has only pawns and hides them under the table, the purpose of the adventure falls further into question. The Indians had at least their Fetterman massacre, their Little Big Horn, ambushes of a scale and barbarity to rouse the public’s sporting blood, but this—
Not that he is wishing slaughter on American patriots.
He arrived in Havana rather too previous for the fireworks, a terrible case of the sprue forcing him to return to New York and sit out the siege of Santiago in an isolation ward on Long Island. American shooting wars, and the opportunities for rapid advancement they afford men of print, are in short supply. The Otis angle has been fruitful, the Correspondent using the Tarheel Lieutenant’s pungent observations to hint, nay, to declare that swifter progress (and greater pyrotechnics) should be had if the general were replaced by a younger, bolder commander. And perhaps this plea to the American spirit of adventure and commerce, plus the suggestion that the next Klondike is festooned with palm trees, will reawaken their interest.
A paradise, he writes, waiting for Anglo-Saxon angels to reap its bounty.
The train slows, stops, and they disembark at what the freshly painted sign announces as San Fernando, taken two weeks ago by Hall’s flying column. The sun makes its sudden and cruel assault on the Correspondent’s epidermis and spirit, seeming to drill through the woven palm of his Panama to blister his cranium. They walk through the artillery-blasted stone buildings, the morose privates dragging behind them, to the stick-and-mud village beyond, the dwellings comparing unfavorably with his boyhood treehouse, the requisite coterie of louse-ridden canines harrying their steps (the poorer the man, the more dogs he is bound to own) as Manigault smartly salutes the garrison sentries. Filthy children abound, a few clothed only in Nature’s costume, and he witnesses one old woman entering the rubble-strewn, roofless shell of what was once a small church and pausing, even in the absence of holy water (or the basin that once held it) to sign her wrinkled forehead.
“Ninety percent of war is character,” says the Lieutenant, apropos of nothing. “Character and will. The googoo shoots badly because he is untrained, yes, but he remains so because training would be wasted on him. Your mongrel races do not possess the mental stamina, the powers of self-abnegation to apply themselves to any endeavor requiring concentrated effort and understanding. When faced with an enemy greater not only in stature but also in force of will and character, he senses the futility of direct resistance and either flees in panic or resorts to a more skulking, treacherous type of aggression.”
“So you do not esteem the insurrecto as an opponent?”
“Our chief opponents here are ignorance, superstition, and savagery. Where the lower races have polluted each other to the degree we have encountered here, their effect is legion. But we shall prevail.”
“ ‘Their silent, sullen peoples shall thank your God and you.’ ”
Manigault gives him a wry smile. “As your Mr. Roosevelt has observed, indifferent verse, but noble sentiment.”
The Correspondent smiles, never having thought of the bucktoothed Rough Rider as his before, and noting again that to a son of the South all yankees are as one.
It is early afternoon when they leave San Fernando, walking eastward toward solitary Mount Arayat, Manigault holding his survey map at arms’ length and turning it this way and that as he strides down a dried-mud thoroughfare much pitted by buffalo hooves, occasionally checking the unrelievedly flat hor
izon for some reference point while one of the privates, embarrassed, lets the woven basket holding their supper slap against his leg every other step. They cross a tiny stream, a trio of young women with the surly aspect of the Malay flogging wet clothing on the rocks while their offspring, barely old enough to walk, gambol in the listlessly flowing water, then rediscover the sorry excuse for a road. They pass vast grayish squares of harvested rice interrupted by desultory stands of banana trees or indigo, then one irrigated field in which a lone water buffalo, one of the ubiquitous carabao glistening like polished steel from its recent wallow, treads snuffling for edibles with an equally solitary white egret following after, feasting on the crawly things brought to the surface in the great beast’s footprints. That is me trailing the Tarheel Lieutenant, thinks the Correspondent, with the crawfish and cutworms replaced by quotables. The soggy patch gives way to desiccated plain, some sort of ground crop with a scraggle of green leaves planted on both sides of them. The few rustics they pass, out chopping at weeds in the vicious sun, studiously avoid taking notice of their procession. Thus it was for the conquering Roman, the Correspondent writes as he walks, perspiration burning his eyes, in all venues the focus of a dull hatred cloaked with indifference.
“Where you grew up,” he asks the Tarheel Lieutenant, “were there still Union soldiers in uniform?”
Manigault stops and gives him the frankest gaze he has ever received from the man, as if he were just pondering that very image.
“There were indeed,” he answers softly, “but my father instructed us to pay them no heed.”
They continue in silence, the burden of the heat robbing his limbs of their vitality, and he begins to feel sorry for the poor, obdurate devils sentenced to be born and die in this crucible. He does not wonder that the Spanish who ruled it slid so quickly into a mean-spirited decadence. As Mrs. Jefferson Davis and Senator Tillman of the anti-Imperialists so eloquently state it, the worry is not what shall we do with the Filipino, but what shall our association with him do to us. He writes the word decay into his notebook, underlining thrice, and then the Lieutenant halts again and spreads his arms.
“I believe this is it.”
There is no signpost, no marker, not one stone laid upon another to indicate a boundary, only the same fields extending on both sides of the road broken here and there by outcroppings of thorn-brandishing greenery.
“You’re certain?”
Manigault points across the planted rows to a structure at least a half mile away. “The house comes with it.”
They set off diagonally across the field then, the new proprietor fairly leaping over the shabbily cultivated rows, the Correspondent quite done in by now and staggering in the rear. The boots he purchased in San Francisco make a bully impression in photographs but are not equal to the terrain, and the white suit built in Hongkong is stuck to him like a second, repulsively slimy skin. His collar is a rag. There will be nothing cool in the basket when it is opened, no rum cock-tail with ice waiting at the hacienda. He has partaken only sparingly of the native cuisine since arriving, the spices overstated and the indiscriminate mixing of fleshes so favored by the Spanish—beef, fowl, and fish more than likely to cohabit the same dish—seems less than wise given the extremities of the weather. As for what is fed to the column on the march, the less said in print the better, the charges leveled at the much-maligned war secretary Root after the sickness that followed victory in Cuba still a sore point with Army censors. Home again, carving a slab of prime at Rector’s or enjoying the delectable ice cream at Louis Sherry’s establishment, he may confess to having eaten canned bacon, but at the moment the mere thought of that delicacy causes his insides to somersault.
The hacienda house is much larger than it appeared to him from a distance, a few outbuildings half-hidden behind it. It seems a rather stately pile to belong to the purebred Malays who Manigault has so colorfully described as being no distant removal from the “missing link.” Four massive posts support the tile roof over the two stories, the lower floor of bullet-scarred adobe masonry and the upper of wood. The façade of the lower is dominated by a huge door arched high enough to admit carriage and passengers, with a normal-sized rectangular door cut into it for pedestrian traffic. Vertical iron grilles cover the tall windows that flank the carriage gate, some sort of flowering creeper vine half-covering them.
A kind of gallery runs around the front and sides of the upper floor, repeating sets of wooden louvers opening to reveal sliding panels of hand-sized capiz-shell “windows” of the sort seen in the Walled City. Beneath the bottom sill of these runs what the Correspondent has been told is a ventanilla, perhaps a foot high, fronted with wooden balustrades, to allow the air to flow even when the larger openings are shut fast. Another opening just beneath the eaves serves the same purpose. If it were a boat, thinks the Correspondent, it would sink in an instant.
The hacienda compound is deserted when they arrive, not even one of the scabrous fowl that seem everywhere underfoot in this country gracing the yard. Manigault calls up to the living quarters, but there is no response. The pedestrian door, however, is unsecured, and they venture into the zaguan.
There are no partitions in this lower level. The space the family carroza would normally occupy is empty, as are bins that appear to once have been filled with grain, set upon large square slabs of stone flooring. Nearly half the room is piled with furniture, some broken, some appearing to be perfectly serviceable. An ornate stairway invites them to ascend.
“I imagine they’ve sacked the place,” says the new dueño, starting up, “but we’ll have a look anyway.”
The drawing room that greets them is remarkably intact, chairs and tables haphazardly placed but still present, a lovely design painted on the ceiling of stamped tin, and only a few of the somewhat garishly colored chromolithographs these people seem addicted to hanging on the walls. Large double doors draped with damask curtains open to the sala mayor, which seems to have hosted a dance party immediately before the departure of the former owners, the numerous rattan chairs all pushed against the walls. The floor is of a highly polished native wood held together with pegs, as these materials are generally impervious to nails. A frieze of intricately carved molave, reminiscent of the stunning altar of the Jesuits’ San Ignacio church in the Intramuros, crowns the walls, which are painted with gilt trimming and designs markedly Chinese in character. A massive upright piano dominates the near end of the room, Shubert’s A-minor Sonata still propped on the music shelf. The west wall sports two large oil portraits of the erstwhile hacienderos, a man and woman, in their late fifties perhaps, each in semi-profile facing toward the other. Though the features of the couple are what the Correspondent characterizes in print as thoroughly “Asiatic,” the effect of their bearing and European finery and the artist’s chiaro oscuro is of a Spanish grandee and his señora, a kind of Tagalo nobility.
“Most of my lands were purchased from the friars,” says Manigault, strolling around the room, careful to avoid the scattered leavings of some bird that has found its way into the house. “But Mr. Impoc here was evidently as afraid of the insurrectos as he was of our own forces, and decided, through my intermediaries, to take the most prudent course of action.”
“You bought this palace on a lieutenant’s pay?”
Manigault remains unfazed, smiling enigmatically and continuing farther into the dwelling, trailed by the Correspondent and the unhappy troopers.
The avian intruder has been even more destructive in the dining room, his presence recorded not only on the floor but on the long table and ornately detailed sideboards of red narra. The china and silver have been removed, of course, but the impressive cut-glass chandelier, though slightly atilt to the Correspondent’s eye, remains overhead. The privates slump onto chairs and begin to lay out the items from the picnic basket. The Correspondent wishes nothing more than to throw himself prone on an unsullied patch of floor while someone gets the punkahs turning. But his interlocutor is moving ahea
d to explore, and he, duty bound, must follow.
The kitchen seems also to serve as a laundry, a pair of flatirons left on the chopping block. There is an earthen oven shaped something like a beehive and a wooden rack hung from the tiled wall that must be employed for drying dishes. The Correspondent pushes a shutter back and a breeze suddenly whispers through the vertical bars in the minaret-shaped window that looks down on the azotea below, an aromatic, lushly planted hanging garden with stone benches and a pathway bordered by a split-bamboo rail that leads to an even greater collection of exotic flora.
Manigault finds the bird, a large, glossy-black crow, dead on the floor. He lifts it up by the tip of one wing.
“I’m afraid the intelligence of these creatures has been overrated,” he jibes. “This fellow managed to find a way in, but evidently forgot where it was.”
The back of the Correspondent’s neck begins to prickle, usually a presentiment of unfortunate events, and he turns to find the room filled with intruders, barefoot insurrectos with bolos in hand.
The Correspondent reels, dizzy, while Manigault’s free hand drops to the butt of his holstered Webley but freezes there as the one man wearing boots jams the barrel of his antiquated rifle against the lieutenant’s chest and begins to scream in one of their many confusing lingos.
The demon with the rifle gestures to the floor. Manigault gently lays the unfortunate bird on the painted clay tile before prostrating himself. The Correspondent keeps his eyes fixed on the blade of the nearest insurgent as he kneels, relieved to see no blood staining its edge. The voices of the men above as they argue with each other are high and nervous, like parrots screeching. He smells urine. The tile is cool against his sunburned cheek.
Dead or alive, he thinks as his heart gallops, unharnessed and wild in his chest, they’ll give me four columns at least.