A Moment in the Sun (98 page)

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.”

Hod slips tins of sardines under his pillow. “What’s the news from the world, Alfie? When are we going home?”

Runt gives him an exasperated look. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“What—?”

“McKinley says we’re holding on to the joint.”

Hod feels a twinge in his testicles. If you let it go too far, the doc says, your testicles get inflamed. “Manila?”

“The whole shebang. They posted the Proclamation this morning. The googoos aren’t too thrilled.”

“How can he do that?”

Runt grins. “God told him to. ‘Benevolent Assimilation,’ he calls it. He says he got down on his knees and petitioned the Lord for guidance—”

“It would be easier,” Blount interrupts, “for a camel to pass through my urinary meatus than for a Republican to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“A Bryan man.”

“Me too,” says Hod. “As far as voting goes. Free Silver!”

“Free Silver Nitrate!” echoes Blount. “Venereals of the world unite!”

“They got the volunteers putting out brushfires all over the islands, chasing after Aguinaldo, challenging every
amigo
they meet on the road,” says Runyon. “The order is ‘shoot on suspicion.’ ”

“Suspicion of what?”

Runt shrugs. “Suspicion of not assimilating benevolently.” He stands to pose with his hand over his heart—

Ride with an idle whip, ride with an unused heel

—he recites—

—But once in a way there will come a day

When the colt must be made to feel

The lash that falls and the curb that galls

And the sting of the rowelled steel!

An orderly comes around then with the rolling table and Hod and Blount drink their hourly glass of water.

“Sometimes they put a little sandalwood oil in it,” Hod tells his visitor. “Improve the taste.”

“Manila water,
Christ
,” says Runt. “They trying to kill you people?”

The
convento
is just a bit farther east along the Pasig, attached to one of the less ostentatious of the Catholic churches Niles has seen here. A barefoot boy leads Niles past the sacristy and up the polished wood stairs to the living quarters. Brother León is playing billiards.

“A superior pastime for developing the mind,” says the Franciscan, laying his stick on the table. He is tall, with a narrow, hawklike face, only a trace of the Spaniard in his diction. “It requires steadiness, concentration, and the ability to foresee the consequences of one’s actions.”

“I prefer cards.” Niles lifts the satchel onto a table that has tiny wells to hold gaming chips at each station. The friar steps over to watch as he opens it. On closer inspection, the cloth of his brown robe is not so rough as Niles imagined. Brother León’s face registers disappointment as he sees the medicines in the wooden box.

“I cannot do anything with these,” he says.

“Merely to acquaint you with my end of the transaction,” says Niles. “You are familiar with An Chao’s emporium?”

“Of course.”

“He has a dragon. Emerald green with red-tipped scales—”

“I know it.” The Franciscan’s eyes narrow shrewdly. “If I have learned one thing in this dark corner of Our Lord’s domain,” he says, “it is the unwavering value of precious stones.”

Niles wonders which of the three knots on the friar’s rope belt designates poverty. “And you would accept it as recompense for a sizable parcel of your land?” he inquires.

Brother León places the lid back on the wooden box. “You have me at a great disadvantage.”

The religious corporations have petitioned the military authority to return the lands and privileges usurped by the native filibusters, but no promises have been made, and given the average American’s distrust of papists, none are likely to be forthcoming. All over the city Spaniards are offering for a song that which they cannot carry with them, and the holy men are no exception.

“We adjust to circumstances,” says Niles, smiling politely. There is a portrait of the order’s namesake in his rough garb hung on the wall, a sparrow perched on one shoulder, a wolf curled peacefully at his feet, a lamb, unafraid of the predator, tranquil under his open hand. “Where exactly—?”

“Pampanga. North of here, not far from the rail.” Brother León crosses to a rolltop desk and extracts a folio of papers. “Your troops have yet to occupy this area, but given your superior force and the volatility of the situation, it is inevitable.” He lays the folio on the billiard table in front of Niles.

“And if Mr. McKinley loses heart and chooses to leave these fair isles to their natives?”

The friar smiles now, hawklike. “We adjust to circumstances.” He hands Niles a pair of deeds. “Much of the land still belongs to the order, of course, but the properties described here are in my brother’s name.”

“Your brother—”

“Who does not exist.” León wiggles his fingers. “His signature is amazingly similar to my own.”

Niles has already considered using Harry’s name for some of his acquisitions. “Pampanga is mountains, if I’m not mistaken.”

“With a broad plain at their base. Hemp, sugar cane, rice, mangoes—”

“My people were in tobacco before the War,” says Niles. The first deed is for 150 acres situated near the city of San Fernando. “We understand how to operate a plantation.”

An underdeveloped land, a soon-to-be advantageous labor situation—a man could do quite well for himself.

“I’ll need to have these gone over,” he informs the friar.

“Naturally.”

The art of commerce, he muses, lies in recognizing desires and seizing opportunities. There are countless citizens who need medicine and have been denied their usual access. There are the suddenly deposed, such as Brother León, who wish to recover some value from what they will be forced to leave behind. There are those like An Chao and Niles, who assure that the flow of goods and services continues despite the uncertainties of the present situation.

And suddenly, there is a Filipino in the room.

Well-dressed, nose in the air, nervously tapping his walking stick against the floor as he glares at Brother León. A
mestizo
, the term they apply to their half-breeds, from the look of him.

“Ah, Ramiro—”

The young man says something in Spanish to the friar. Niles closes the satchel and lifts it off the table. If he hurries his lawyer friend at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank will be able to verify the deeds during his tiffin and set the affair into motion.

“This is Ramiro, my
sacristán
,” says Brother León. “I have known him since I arrived from Gibraltar, since the day of his First Communion.”

Niles recognizes the young man, who is glaring at him now with undisguised resentment, as one of the sepia dandies he forced off the sidewalk on the Escolta.

“He is also, when we come to that moment, our notary.”

Niles offers the sullen googoo an ironic bow. “How very convenient.”

When Mei comes down from the wards at night Bo is waiting, squirming to be out of Paz’s arms and into hers, and if the sky is clear she takes him out away from the walls and she points to the stars and tells him stories about them. At first she wondered if they should be Chinese stories about the Three Enclosures or the
yang gweizi
stories about hunters and flying horses that Roderick Hardacre told her, but decided that nobody knows what takes place in the heavens, or how the world works, that even the most powerful are only guessing at how one thing is connected to another, pointing at dots in the distant sky and making up stories about them.

“Do you see those over there?” says Mei, pointing, talking the talk of the North China people to her little boy who starts to shake with happiness whenever he sees her, who calls her Ma and hugs his arms around her neck so tight it almost chokes her. “See those ones that make the head, and then those three, that are the tail? That is called Ling-Ling, the Brave Dog, who once saved a little girl from a wolf, and tried to save another from drowning—”

ADVANCE OF THE KANSAS VOLUNTEERS

All yesterday they were at it with shovels, the boys digging and Jubal hauling it off in a wagon. He ask why don’t they just pile it up in front like the real soldiers do but Mr. Charles who is Mr. Harry’s boss says it would get in the way of the volunteers and spoil the shot. So they dig it deeper and carry the dirt away, and Jubal can just see over the top when he stands tall.