A Moment in the Sun (20 page)

“You’ll be back in no time,” smiled Scipio, helping him throw together his most essential belongings on the evening when the photographs appeared, pasted over government notices and decrees on walls throughout the Intra-muros. “Once the Americans declare war—”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then you’ll have to develop a taste for congee and carp.”

It was meant as a joke, but there are men, dozens of them, who have never been able to return, scattered around the world, pleading in their letters for news of progress, for any scrap of hope. And most of these are wealthy, with bank accounts and families who have the means to visit them in exile. Diosdado has only the one good set of clothes in his sack, with letters from the Committee to the Junta, coded in Tagalog, sewn in the lining of the jacket, and the little pile of silver Scipio passed on with the forged
cédula
and verbal contact instructions for his arrival.

The name on the
cédula
is José Corpus—born in Tarlac, four years older than Diosdado. The photo is his, though, cropped to conceal the school fencing uniform he was wearing when it was taken. There will be Spanish agents looking for that face when the passenger ships dock, standing by British authorities keen on preventing troublemakers from entering the Crown Colony. The hum of the engine changes pitch. One of the coolies appears beside him, poking his shoulder, and leads him through a maze of bananas back to the packing crate. He speaks in pidgin Tagalog, indicating that Diosdado has to crawl back in.

José Corpus, he thinks as the lid is placed over and pounded shut. Scipio must have known about this part.

The wooden lid is only inches from Diosdado’s nose. He is nobody in here, nothing, a tiny spark of consciousness shut off from the living world. Voices outside, movement, men shouting in Cantonese, and several times his crate is banged by workers hauling stems of bananas away, one even standing on top of it for a moment, the boards creaking. Diosdado tries to breathe evenly, to will his heartbeat slower. He doesn’t feel nauseous anymore, he feels—lost.

When the crate is lifted he is smashed onto his left side at first, then his feet go up almost vertically and the top of his head bears all his weight, sides of the crate cracking against the ladder and the hatch. He has been flipped onto his face by the time the crate is dropped roughly on what he guesses is the dock, one elbow twisted awkwardly under his ribs, listening with a mounting sense of terror at the bang of another crate being piled on top of his, then another—

“
Reflect that you are no longer Master of your body
,” he thinks. “
It belongs now to the Society
.” Unless the Society has marked the outside of this crate and are on their way, or whatever is supposed to be inside it is meant to be pulled out very soon, he will die in here. Diosdado has imagined dying for the cause, leading a throng of loyal followers in a charge over a corpse-strewn battlefield, uttering last words that will be engraved in marble, but not this. Not this helpless nothing.

Only time, which is not even time in the dark, nothing to mark its passing. Diosdado manages to wiggle into a slightly more comfortable position, maybe even sleeps. It is hard to tell. What sounds he hears are muffled, distant. He can breathe, for the moment. He tries whispering the Rosary to fill the void, the words coming back in their familiar rhythm—the
Pater Noster
followed by ten
Ave Maria
s and a
Gloria Patri
to complete each decade, then contemplation of one of the Mysteries before launching into the next. There are Joyful Mysteries, Sorrowful Mysteries, and Glorious Mysteries to choose from. Diosdado chooses to contemplate the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, a Mystery whose fruit is the virtues of purity and obedience.

There were no cigars or brandy when he was off to the Ateneo for his first semester and Don Nicasio wanted him to know about women. Specifically the ones who could be found at Doña Hilaria’s parlor, who were clean and honest and well-trained if not well-bred. Diosdado, a priest’s boy but no stranger to how animals reproduced on the
hacienda
, fought, cheeks burning, to hide his shock. If his father knew such things, he must have “relieved himself ” on his trips alone to Manila, and very likely in similar establishments in Hongkong, Macao, Madrid, and Yokohama before and after he was bound in Holy Matrimony.

“Young men,” said Don Nicasio, sending him on his way, “are driven by Nature. Fighting Nature leads to religious fanaticism and nervous disorder. Giving in to it without reservation is decadence. An accommodation must be made.”

Doña Hilaria charged four pesos per accommodation and allowed you to amass a debt, within reason, on that and on liquor consumed in her parlor.

“I give all my new boys the same lecture,” she explained the first time Diosdado ventured there, with Romeo Mabayag and Bobong Antuñez. “When you have reached your credit limit, you must pay within the month or my representative will visit your parents with a detailed accounting.”

They did not argue much on his few visits home. His grades remained satisfactory—well above average, in fact—and he asked polite questions when Don Nicasio offered insights on the operation of his modest empire. Diosdado allowed Trini, who had served at the table since before he was born, to cut ripe mangos into bite-sized pieces for her beloved Dadong and present them with a dash of lime juice. His mother related to him the plot of the latest Carlota Brame novel she had read and informed him that she prayed daily for his soul, but gave no indication that she knew just what peril it was in.

“Philosophy, languages, the history of ancient Greece—these are all fine things to know, I am certain,” said his father, who always claimed to have been educated “at the University of Saint Survival.” “But a few more practical subjects would not be unwelcome.”

“The Jesuits’ aim is to develop the man,” Diosdado replied, carefully draining his voice of all irony, “not his ability to become wealthy.”

“Easy for a priest to say, with what they get away with.”

“
Jesús, María, y José
,” his mother ejaculated, her reflexive response to Don Nicasio’s criticism of the church or its minions.

“I’m only saying the Lord has provided very well for them on these islands. The rest of us have to scratch for what we eat.”

Diosdado was polite and remote on these visits, and his father, who was not stupid, knew that something had changed between them.

“Now there is a sensible young man,” he announced when General Aguinaldo and the Junta accepted the Spaniards’ financial inducement to go into exile. “Get the
indios
to die for you, then escape with the treasure.”

At the station in Tarlac, after the last visit, he took Diosdado’s arm to draw him near and look deep into his eyes. “These are dangerous times,
mi hijo
,” he said. “You must step carefully.”

“I know, Father.”

“So,” said Don Nicasio, laying a thick hand on his shoulder, “we understand each other?”

Scraping and banging of wood above him. Diosdado says another
Ave Maria.
The man who finally flips over the crate and levers it open is Chinese and does not even speak Cantonese, only hissing and flapping his arms for Diosdado to hurry, and then scurrying away into the night.

It is hard for Diosdado to straighten his legs at first, to stand. He is not on the dock but on a barge loaded with similar crates anchored nearly a hundred yards out from the shore, several shabby-looking sampans and junks and smaller boats floating in between. It is very quiet, perhaps a curfew in effect, in which case he has to find a new place to hide very quickly. He looks around for the man who freed him—gone. There are some electric lights lining the Praya, and only a few gas lamps still shining, scattered up the slopes that back the city. It must be very late. Diosdado brings his knees up and down several times to get the blood back into his legs, then ties his sack to the back of his belt and starts for the shore, stepping as carefully as he can from boat to boat, the flimsier craft threatening to slide out from under his feet as he makes each transfer, grabbing on to anything he can for balance and trying to look as if this is his usual route, something normal. He stops, crouching in one very tippy rowboat, to rest and to rehearse his lies, both the ones the Committee has given him and the ones he has invented on the journey. José Corpus, if anybody inquires, is here in the Colony pursuing business opportunities, hoping to find buyers for the iron ore from his home province. He is in between residences at the moment—is there a clean, relatively inexpensive commercial hotel he should know about? And right at the moment he has to get to the dock without drowning.

Diosdado slips the rowboat from its painter and paddles with his hands to bring it bumping gently against the side of a junk, able to stand precariously and grab the higher gunwale with both hands to haul himself up. There are people on the deck, dozens of them, fast asleep. He steps cautiously over and around them, not a one stirring, till he reaches the port side. There is a lower sampan tied next to the junk, only a short jump across and down, but he freezes for a long moment, staring anxiously at the open spot where he wants to land. Someone coughs behind him and he makes the leap, a little too forcefully, his momentum sending him bouncing off the far side of the prow of the smaller boat and into the water, the splash rousing what must be dozens of geese held in cages under the sampan’s awning, flapping and honking an alarm that could wake the souls of drowned sailors. Diosdado swims frantically then, dog-paddling from moored boat to moored boat, finally finding the bottom rung of a weed-slimed metal ladder leading up to the wooden dock.

There is no time to sprawl and recover. Diosdado staggers quickly out of the range of the shore lights, the geese still hysterical behind him, finally settling behind a heap of wooden pallets next to a stone warehouse. He looks around, dripping and gasping to catch his breath. He is amazed to find that he recognizes the place—it is the old Pedder’s Wharf, where he disembarked with his father the first time Don Nicasio brought him along on a buying trip. They stayed at a beautiful hotel halfway up the slope on Ice House Street, and spent an afternoon at the Cricket Grounds watching Englishmen in white uniforms swat a hard round ball and run between two pegs.

Diosdado pulls his good clothes, soaking, out of the sack and twists the seawater out of them, draping them carefully over sections of pallet to dry. The geese are quiet now. He is in Hongkong, in the deep of the night, with a handful of silver and a head full of lies, and no idea if he’ll ever go home again.

By the time the sun is barely peeking over the harbor and Kowloon across the way there are already too many Chinese in Hongkong. The streets are choked with them, shouting, waving their arms, making deals from opposite sides of the street, peddling food from carts, the rickshaw boys swarming like hungry gulls if they see a white man who dares to walk. Diosdado makes his way through it all in his wrinkled, still-damp suit, navigating by memory and the muttered directions of Chinese men in too much of a hurry to look him in the eye.

There are Chinese in Manila, of course, thousands of them, the coolies in Binondo running ducklike under their burdens, the merchants haggling in their shops on the Escolta, the gamblers and opium dealers in Tondo luring the adventurous and weak of mettle into perdition. One of General Aguinaldo’s plans, when the Republic is established, is to limit the number of coolies allowed into the country as workers, hoping to leave more jobs open for the dispossessed Filipino
kasamas
who flock in from the provinces hoping to change their lives. It seems a hopeless idea, like building a sea wall capable of stopping a tidal wave. With decent leadership and a shared purpose, thinks Diosdado as he shakes off the trio of fan-tan parlor touts pulling at his arms, these people will rule the world.

Statue Square seems almost deserted by comparison. A broad open ground between the Hongkong Club and the various British administration buildings, narrow walks crossing the immaculately kept lawns, all leading to Victoria Regina’s elaborately canopied pavilion and its unobstructed view of the harbor. She is cast in bronze, a portly lady with fierce eyes sitting on an angular throne, ornamented pillars supporting the dome above her head, an outsized replica of the royal scepter sticking up straight from its crest like the spike on a Prussian’s helmet. There are no soldiers guarding the pavilion, only a few British clerks strolling past and a man who looks Indian trimming the grass in front of the Hongkong Club. Diosdado sits on the third step of the granite base as he has been instructed, the Queen behind him, and watches the harbor. The traffic in the water is no more orderly than that in the market district, junks and sampans and opium traders barely missing the rickety little fishing boats as they whip past, all in a seemingly random frenzy of activity. He sits below Victoria and watches, feeling his clothes dry out in the morning sun, hungry and tired and hoping he is not a day early or a day late. It is possibly the most exposed position in all of Hongkong. At least, he thinks, if someone is coming he will be easy to find.

Hours pass. Diosdado is able to pick out the Star Ferry boats, crossing to Kowloon and back, from the rest of the floating bedlam in the harbor. He sees the steamer from Manila, the one he is not on, ease up to Blake’s Pier and disgorge its passengers. The shadow of the royal scepter begins to lengthen across the Square.

It is Gregorio del Pilar who appears to sit on the step above him in the early afternoon, Goyo sharply dressed in white with a skimmer tilted on his head and a walking stick with an ivory handle.

“How was your voyage?” he asks.

“I survived it.”

Del Pilar smiles. “You were supposed to be here before those pictures were released. Somebody didn’t follow orders.”

Diosdado turns to look at his
hermano terrible
. “Do you know if it made a stir? What did the newspapers say?”