A Moment in the Sun (13 page)

There is an audible
crack!
of the star-nosed bit through the condemned man’s vertebra as Diosdado triggers the shutter. The Franciscan raises his voice in supplication, Padre Peregrino softly speaking the Latin words in tandem with him, savoring their weighty euphony, and Diosdado secures the camera under his coat while another man, a doctor, is brought out to verify the act. The executioner, secure of his handiwork, steps down. The doctor lifts the hood from the man’s face, places a small mirror under his nose. Blood spreads downward from the nostrils, staining the man’s lip and chin, pooling in the cleft of his neck. The doctor removes the mirror, says something to the capitán, then steps quickly out of the sun-baked courtyard. Benítez the lawyer notes the exact time. Diosdado can hear but not see the buzzing flies around the soaked earth at the man’s feet. The foot without the shoe on it is clad in a dark blue stocking, three toes protruding obscenely through a hole in its tip.

“I suppose if the
verdugo
kept on turning,” says the
haciendero
, “the head would pop right off.”

Diosdado sees the woman waiting as they leave the Cuartel de España and pass through the Royal Gate. She stands at the foot of the bridge across the moat that separates the Intramuros from the Luneta, waiting by a bullcart with a rough wooden casket lying on it, the
chino
porter squatting in its meager shade with his eyes closed. She is small, pretty, dressed in what passes for Sunday finery in the
baryos
up north. She is the widow, he is certain, and if the two officers weren’t still just behind him bragging about horses they’ve owned he would stop and take another photograph. There must still be several exposures left on the roll, and it seems wrong to waste such magical potential, like leaving food on the plate, something his mother ranked even above blasphemy in her catalogue of sins. Diosdado wonders how it would have felt to witness the ceremony with his eye pressed to the sight, to see it through the filter of lens and mirror, to shrink the man’s death into that leather-covered box. He looks across to the field of Bagumbayan, where they shot Dr. Rizal. The little man facing the Bay, priests and soldiers on either side, military band trilling through
La Marcha de C
ádiz, then the order and the bark of rifles.

It is not too late. Merely chemicals on a strip of celluloid, not yet a “graven image” as Padre Peregrino would call it, an arrangement of molecules remembered in silver that, if allowed to, will develop into—

He has only to open the box and the sun will do the rest.

Diosdado turns to register the familiar sights—the vendors and the strollers, the frisky carriage ponies of the families making their
paseo
around the beautiful, lamp-lined rectangle of the Luneta as the Govenor General’s favorite ensemble plays a sweet
rondalla
in the ornate bandstand, young men not unlike himself staring reflectively, perhaps romantically, over the sea wall, all the color and noise of a Manila afternoon—then adjusts the Eastman Bullet under his arm and walks stiffly toward the safe house in Malate where the Committee is waiting.

Nilda Magapuna waves flies away from her face and stares without seeing at the activity on the green. They say the body will be out soon. She holds a rosary in one hand, fingers slack on the beads.

FIREWORKS

Carnaval
was invented by spies. There is no other explanation—an entire week when one is allowed, no, expected, to traverse the city behind a mask, one among thousands of
dizfrazados
, black and white, rich and poor, attending gilded balls or singing in processions or just noisily decorating the streets of La Habana. The gaslights are on now, the breeze blowing ever so slightly out into the Harbor as Quiroga strolls along the Malecón. It is a calm night, waves caressing rather than assaulting the sea wall, and the few lights left burning on the big ships anchored not so far away rise and fall in a gentle rhythm. Quiroga wears a simple domino and his dress suit, only a
lector de fábrica
down from Florida for the holiday. Nobody to worry about. There is tension, yes, and he heard footsteps behind when he left the hotel this morning, but with so much life on the street, so many crowds to lose himself in, Quiroga is certain that his
sombra
has been lost as well.

Individuals have disappeared mysteriously, especially here in the capital, and the arrival of the American armed cruiser has set the always fertile Cuban imagination afire. Quiroga would not ordinarily be needed, parties often transported to and from the island without involving the “sleeping patriots” up in Ybor, but this extraction is more sensitive than the norm. Ambassador de Lôme’s missive to Don José Canelejas of
El Heraldo de Madrid
, in which he describes the American president in decidedly undiplomatic terms, has somehow fallen into the eager hands of the
New York Journal
. Unsurprisingly, those worthies have published a copy of the original alongside a translation, and the yellow press are tumescent with outrage to see their leader portrayed as “weak, catering to the rabble—a low politician who desires to leave a door open to himself and to stand well with the jingoes of his party.” It is not an inaccurate assessment, mild compared to statements made daily by members of the Cuban Junta in New York or Tampa or even by American interventionists in the editorial pages of the self-same
Journal
. But de Lôme is not a wild-eyed revolutionist or ink-slathered provocateur—he is meant to be the benign, conciliatory face of the Spanish Crown in the United States. Very few persons must be in the position to intercept or purloin the Ambassador’s writings, and that nervy fellow, Quiroga assumes, is who he is meant to smuggle out of La Habana.

He pauses by the wall to light a
puro
, cheaper here by a few pennies but considered superior to the product manufactured in Ybor. He is no judge, though, the cigar only part of his contact signal and perhaps the poorest element in the elaborate construct that has been explained to him. Any Spaniard trained in espionage, he believes, will be instantly aware that Quiroga is not a smoker and have his suspicions aroused. Quiroga takes enough of a puff to keep the thing burning, then turns his face out to the placid sea.

There is a sudden thickening of the air, felt more than breathed.

The drums.

A
comparsa
, a twisting, writhing creature of more than a hundred chanting negros, winding down Calzada de Infante toward the Malecón to the racket of a dozen men flailing with their bare hands on what they call a
conga
or
tres golpes
—elongated, barrel-staved drums hung from the shoulder of the player with their bullskin heads just above the man’s hip. Barefoot urchins without masks run alongside the aggregation, some dancing wildly to the noise, others leaping and screaming whenever the spirit enters them. Authorities have banned such displays at times, even on the
Día de los Reyes
, fearing, in the not-so-distant epoch of slavery, that the cabildos might use the anonymity afforded by the occasion to perpetrate atrocities upon their masters. But with Emancipation the African societies have lost much of their power, and the Spanish understand that repressing
Carnaval
will engender more mayhem than it will prevent.

As they approach and are illuminated by the gas lamps Quiroga recognizes the celebrants as the
Abakuá
, dancers wearing their colorful, horned
diablito
masks, legs and arms fringed with thick rings of grass and palm fronds, whirling and leaping and shaking their torsos and limbs as if driven epileptic by the music. The secret heart of Cuba, he thinks, beating to an African pulse. Their sound envelops him before their bodies surround him, the hammering of the
congueros
complex yet insistent, and yes, he thinks, this is the force that drove the great Maceo and his
mambís
into battle. This is the very life-blood of revolt.

Quiroga stands with an unsmoked
puro
in his hand and the Havana moon peeking through the clouds over the Harbor and smiles as the masked tribesmen gyrate, circling, within inches of him. He feels honored rather than mocked. His exile is a voluntary one, merely an economic decision, but an exile nonetheless. Every
canción
he hears in Tampa is a song of longing.

The
comparsa
continues riotously down the Malecón, but one
diablito
stays behind. The mask is Abakuá, but the man wearing it is not even a negro, a man in a white sack suit and mesh-topped spectator shoes. He waits for the thunder of the drums to recede somewhat before he speaks through the mouth-slit cut in the elongated, red-and-black
máscara
.

“These clouds,” he says, looking out over the vessels, great and small, that bob in the vast Harbor, “portend a storm from the North.”

Quiroga has always disliked the passwords, the codes and secret handshakes, smacking of boys at play, and contends that they are as likely to entrap one as to mollify fellow conspirators. But it is a formality that must be honored.

“We could do with a stiff wind,” he says, “to clear the air.”

They stand side-by-side, looking out over the water. Quiroga thinks he may recognize the voice behind the mask.

“You have the documents?”

“Not on my person,” Quiroga answers, annoyed. “I have been at this since Martí was in Guatemala. I am not feckless.”

“I was not inferring that. I merely—”

And then the night erupts before them.

Quiroga’s
puro
flies out of his hand and his hat is blown off his head in the initial glass-breaking bang and flash, the concussion thumping him in the chest like the kick of a mule and then a more brilliant display in the sky and at the waterline, each blinding airburst accompanied by a ground-shaking explosion, vessels in the harbor illuminated for a moment so brief that the images are like separate photographs—immense, lucent, terrible. It is the American battleship that is ablaze, the first third of it seemingly gone and the rest tilting into the sea as huge, twisted shards of debris plummet sizzling into the water around it. Between the pop and whine of ammunition set off by the fire he can hear the cries of burning men.

Quiroga smells sulfur.

The man beside him has pulled his mask back to see more clearly—as he suspected it is Camilo Gotay, who taught natural sciences at the University until his sympathies became too well known. Each new volley of detonation splashes red light upon him, eyes glowing, his pox-scarred face more devilish without the mask than when hidden behind it.

“They can’t be this stupid,” says Quiroga, his mind racing to find an explanation as sirens scream all over the city. The presence of the American gunship has been an insult, yes, and the Spaniards are stupid in their arrogance, but this slaughter, if a deliberate provocation—

“Not even Weyler at his most obdurate—”

“And it can’t be us,” adds Gotay, though with a note of uncertainty. “I would have been informed.”

Men are rushing toward the pier, on foot and in carriages, lanterns lit, boats starting away toward the ship which is quickly settling on the seabed with the tops of its remaining stacks jutting above the waterline. The running lights have been lit on every other vessel in the Harbor.

“This will be good for us,” says the professor, tears in his eyes, “won’t it?”

Bells are ringing on the
Alfonso XII
now, Spanish sailors rushing to lower their boats and rescue those who have not already perished. There is another airburst, one of the larger shells exploding, and in the quick-fading light Quiroga sees men swimming away from the burning wreck, dozens of tiny bumps on the rolling surface of the water. Cocoanuts, he thinks. At this distance they could be cocoanuts floating with the tide. A pair of
guardia
rush past them on the way to the dock.

De Lôme’s letter is nothing now. A hundred thousand Cubans may die, tortured, hanged, shot, starved to death as
reconcentrados
, but give us one apple-cheeked Sailor Jack, one blue-eyed American martyr for the yellow press to canonize—yet how can this chaos, this Hell on the water, be good for anyone?

Quiroga smells sulfur, sulfur and hot metal.

“I see the hand of God,” he says, turning his back on the sea wall, on the burning ship, on the desperate swimmers. “But we will blame it on the Spanish.”

THE DAILY OUTRAGE

The art of it lies in what first strikes the eye, and what that in turn stimulates in the mind of the reader. A screaming head is just that—information shouted across the track at a railroad station as the train is pulling out, steam blasting, whistle shrieking, with only the most vital, most incendiary of the words understood—

USS MAINE EXPLOSION CAUSED BY

BOMB OR TORPEDO?

If you bother to haul out the brass type it had better cause a sensation—

SPAIN’S WAR
AGAINST THE JOURNAL

CONTINUES; CORRESPONDENTS JAILED, DEPORTED

Heads sell papers. The Editor has a look at everything that goes into it, but reserves the front page, its public face and clarion cry, for himself—

CRISIS AT HAND

CABINET IN SESSION; GROWING BELIEF IN

SPANISH TREACHERY

If the Editor cannot squint his eyes at a front page twenty yards away and feel his heart jump, there is something seriously wrong with the head—

CONJECTURE THAT WARSHIP

MAINE BLOWN TO PIECES BY

ENEMY’S SECRET

INFERNAL MACHINE

The Chief will want to post one of his rewards for this one, no doubt, the engraver already preparing a plate to replicate the check. $10,000 is as high as he has gone in the past, but this wondrous catastrophe would seem to merit a greater offering. The Chief will decide when he arrives from the theater. Information, mostly from the sizable lunatic population of the city, will pour in, and the reward will never be paid. But even symbolic gestures demand proportion—