A Moment in the Sun (132 page)

“Are there women in the story?” asks Kalaw.

“Not the kind you like,” the sargento answers. “These are the kind that will cut your
pinga
off.”

“Then I’m not listening.”

“When I left San Epifanio,” says Bayani, turning his head to the side to stare at the countryside, “I fell in with a group of
tulisanes
, not so different from our glorious Filipino army today—only when we robbed and kidnapped we had no great cause to excuse it.”

Diosdado’s men are expressionless, exhausted as they listen. They have all heard the rumors, legends almost, about their sargento, but he has never spoken of his past to them before.

“We told ourselves at first that we would only take from the rich, because we hated them and because they have more to steal. But it is always less dangerous to steal from the poor. One of our band was captured by the
guardia civil
, and he betrayed me. I would have done the same to him, I suppose, because when I was given the choice of swinging from the hemp or fighting for the Spanish, I made the coward’s decision.

“They treated the
disciplinarios
like the scum that we were. I don’t know how they treat their own men, the
jóvenes pobres
who join or are conscripted back in Spain, but five of our company were shot during the first week. One of them complained too loudly about an order to march when we were tired and the capitán stepped up and put a pistol bullet through his brain, which stayed on all of us, in small pieces, for the rest of the march. Many of us were killers already and by the end of our training we were organized, disciplined killers. They called us their
tigres
, and somehow I felt proud to be a member of this brigade.

“We were sent to Mindinao and barracked at Fort Pilar in Zamboanga. There were no women, of course, the
moro
girls afraid to even meet our eyes in public lest they be beaten or even killed by their men, and the
vino
we brewed there was very bad.

“ ‘
Muchachos
,’ said our alferez, because he always called us his
muchachos indios
, ‘we are here for one purpose only. To kill
moros
.’

“There was an old
datu
in the interior, Datu Paiburong, who was the devil’s own servant. The tribes along the coast were afraid of him and the ones who spoke
chabacano
and had come to Christ were terrified of him and it was he and his people we were sent to destroy. You know how once their
kris
is drawn from their belt in anger it must not be replaced before blood has been spilled? Datu Paiburong drew his when he was a young man and never put it away.

“For almost a year we raided the stockades his people lived in, but whenever we came the men would be gone. Some of our own were ambushed and some fell into the man-traps the
moros
dug and were killed or lost a leg, so we began to tear the stockades apart, to burn them to the ground. But they would rebuild almost overnight. The next time we raided and there were no men the alferez looked the other way and some of the women were violated. There were men among us who had done these things before. We knew that this was the same as murdering the women, that even if their lives were spared and they did not kill themselves they would be filth in the eyes of their people until the day they died. And after these violations one of our men was captured and tortured and when we found him his intestines had been pulled out of his stomach and tied to a tree and he had been forced to walk around it many times, wrapping his insides around the trunk and then left for the tree ants to eat him. They wrote on his chest in his blood—they wrote
Each of you shall die like this
.

“ ‘There you have it,
muchachos
,’ said our alferez. ‘It is a Holy War that we are fighting.’

“The order came down then to herd all the people who followed Paiburong—this is the time of General Weyler—into one guarded area where we could keep them under control. But they knew. Sometimes we thought the birds of the forest were in league with them, because whenever a new campaign was ordered they knew almost before we common
soldados
did, and this time when we came to the stockades they were deserted. Not a hen living, not a mouthful of food left. So we began to track them, farther and farther in from the coast, deep into the jungle, and by the time we started to climb we were exhausted and short on supplies, eating nothing each day but a tiny
puñal
of rice and beans mashed together and cooked in our own drinking cans and a man was bitten by a
víbora
and died screaming. The capitán and the teniente and the alferez no longer called us their boys, they called us
indios hijos de puta
or
malditos criminales
and kept their weapons ready all the time, afraid we would mutiny.

“Datu Paiburong’s men laid ambushes for us on the way up the old volcano. They are excellent shots, the
moros
, even with those ancient muskets they use, and our men who were hit in the first volley almost always died. And then they would be gone, and it was time to climb again. We could not pause to bury our dead, so we wrapped them in ponchos and tied them with
mil leguas
vines into the branches of trees and hoped to be back before the ants and the
jaguares
got to them.”

The men all sit close to Bayani now, listening. When he breathes in there is a wheezing sound, but his voice is calm, steady.

“The colonel broke us into three parties, each climbing from a different direction. We were to meet at the top in the evening.

“When we reached the part of the mountain where there were no more trees our buglers signaled and the
moros
fired at us from the rim and we had to charge up over the bare ground. We had started with a half-dozen field pieces but they’d been left behind so we could keep up with the chase. So we had only our rifles and they killed many of us as we charged up the slope, hating them, hating them for murdering our friends and for the jungle and the heat and for the
oficiales
cursing at our backs and because they were
moros
, though we were not, in fact, the truest of Christians.

“By the time we reached the top they had retreated down into the old crater. The crater was deep and so old that a ways down inside it there started to be trees again, and soil, a little round valley within the mountain.

“We had suffered many
bajas
, but it was the whole battalion and we had them outnumbered and had better rifles and knew they must be nearly out of ammunition. We had no fires that night, but they did, two huge fires where they cooked and sang and chanted and then, very late, the women began to shriek. It drilled into your soul, the noise they made. One of our guides said the singing was to their god, telling him they would soon be at his side, but he had never heard the women shriek like that. You could see their shadows, moving around the fires, but the colonel said to save our bullets for the morning.

“ ‘They’re halfway to Hell down there,’ said our alferez. ‘Tomorrow we send them the rest of the way.’

“The women came in the front. The sun rose and we heard them all making that noise with their tongues, high, like when the cicadas in the trees are singing their last notes because the day is dying, and then they came running up the side of the crater toward our positions, their faces painted and a dagger or a sword or some only with a sharp rock in hand and the men right behind, some with muskets and the rest with their
kris
drawn for the last time. They are beautiful people, the
moros
, their long hair, the colors they wear—beautiful. Beautiful targets as they ran up the side of the crater to us and we fired in volleys and then at will, hardly needing to aim, the men climbing over the bodies of the women as they fell and we were told to fix bayonets as they kept coming, muskets fired and thrown aside, screaming as they climbed up the steepest part where there was no cover and tumbling backward. Only a few survived for us to run the steel through. One of these was the old
datu
, who had some bullets in him and eyes like a cat and managed to hack one man in the arm before he was killed. We lifted him up on bayonets and marched around and all the men left in the battalion cheered till the colonel said to lay him down, we were taking the body back to Zamboanga for display.

“I was among the men who were ordered to go down into the volcano. On the way we finished the ones who were wounded. I finished a girl, a beautiful young girl, who was shot in both legs. She looked into my soul and cursed it and I shot her in the heart. At the bottom we found the children, the ones they thought were too little to fight, with their throats cut like lambs. The women had been shrieking by the fires while the men killed their children. They were laid out on flat stones, stuck to them with blood. I was afraid that the mountain would wake when it understood what had been done in its heart, that God or Satan would melt the rock and drown us in fire.

“The
moros
had thrown the last of their food into the fires so we would not get any of it. We pulled the jewelry off all the dead except for the
datu
and started back for the coast. All the men who had been wounded became infected and died. A man in our company who had worked in a bank in Manila and stole money from it went crazy and said he would walk no more and was left behind without his rifle. We took turns carrying the body of the
datu
, who was sewn up inside the canvas of a tent, two men at a time. He didn’t weigh much but he smelled like something from Hell. There were mosquitoes everywhere and no water left that was drinkable and nobody spoke except to abuse the Lord’s name or give an order. We knew we had been cursed.

“ ‘At least,’ said our teniente, ‘we left all that heavy ammunition behind in the
moros
.’

“When we came to the field pieces, there were lizards living in the barrels. None of the bodies of the ambushed men were where we had left them, or else we weren’t on the same path. The officers would compare their compasses to be sure we were heading in the right direction, but it took two days longer to come down from the mountain than it took to get up it, and a third of our battalion was gone.

“They hanged the body of the
datu
from a crane arm in the port, with his beautiful clothes and jewelry still on him, but the
moros
there, even the ones who had hated and feared him in life, only came to kneel and touch their foreheads to the ground. Honoring him. After a few days of this the
gobernadorcillo
had him taken down and stripped and thrown into the harbor for the fishes to eat.”

Bayani closes his eyes. The men are silent. A flock of birds twists over the cassava field across the road, changing shape, threatening to break apart and then flowing together.

“If we had that kind of unity,” says Diosdado after a while. “If we believed like the
moros
—”

“You miss the point of the story,” says Bayani from his stretcher. “You always miss the point. They believed. They believed so much that they slaughtered their own children. But they were outnumbered and outgunned and so they all died.”

Diosdado scowls. The valley is very lush now, crops growing as if there is no war. “It doesn’t matter how you die, or when,” he says. “It matters how you live.”

Bayani sighs and there is a rattle in his chest. “Say that when you are down inside the mountain,
hermano
. Say that when you are where I am now.”

They walk through the valley, crossing
petsay
bean and corn fields, and then come to his father’s vast
huerta
, mango trees as far as the eye can travel. These first ones are the
abuelos
, a hundred feet to the crown, the dark green spear-shaped leaves nearly a foot long, the trees full and round-topped and laden with hundreds of
carabaos
, fat and green and just about to turn. The smell, sweet and resinous, makes Diosdado’s mouth water. His mother would chop the young leaves for salad with tomatoes and onions, would shred the unripe fruits and serve them with
bagoong
, the salt of the shrimp paste cutting the sour of the green mango, and him out climbing the sturdy branches with the sons of the
trabajadores
till it was time for his lessons.

They are halfway through the orchard, in the section where the
picos
and the tiny
señoritas
are mixed in with the
carabaos
, when his father’s workers surround them. Diosdado is suddenly aware that he is dressed in rags like the rest of his men. He recognizes a few of the dozen
trabajadores
but not their leader, who points a shotgun at his belly.

“What are you doing here?” asks the man in Zambal.

“We are soldiers of the nation,” answers Diosdado. His men are ready to fight, even at such a disadvantage, but there should be no need to. “We have a wounded man.”

“This land belongs to Don Nicasio,” says the foreman. “You are not welcome here.”

A few of the workers have rifles, the rest bolos. One clutches a rusted cavalry saber. They are better dressed and better fed than Diosdado’s men, and know loyalty only to their
patrón
.

“We will walk with you back to where his lands begin,” says the foreman.

“Put your fucking weapons down,” snaps Bayani, whose fists are clenched against the pain once more, “and go tell Don Nicasio that his son is home.”

The plantation house is, like his father, solid and implacable, built of stone on both stories and buttressed for an earthquake that has not yet come. Don Nicasio does not embrace Diosdado when he receives him in the
despacho
. Nothing has changed in the room, the smell of leather and ink, the map from the shipping company displaying its myriad routes still covering the wall behind his father’s desk. The desk was Diosdado’s favorite forbidden playground when he was small, its dozens of cubbyholes and sliding panels and secret drawers revealing their treasures—a magnifying glass, a flask of Scotch whisky, the heavy pistol he was afraid to even touch.