A Moment in the Sun (96 page)

“A pity,” Niles muses as he turns the revolver over in his hands. “They’ll probably confiscate this now that your
indios
have gone on the warpath again.”

Ocampo moves, as always, to put his body between the customer handling the merchandise and the door to the bustling Escolta. “Is yes a pity. You wan to buy him now?”

“We would be in violation of the decree.”

“This is true.”

“But if purchase is out of the question,” says Niles, sighting the .45 at a panther crouched to spring off its pedestal, “perhaps an exchange of gifts might be arranged.”

“Gifs?”

“Tokens of friendship. There are many things which we in the military have in abundance, which, due to the vagaries of the present conflict, the average citizen lives in want of.”

The proprietor is mute with calculation for a moment, staring at the pistol and trying to gauge its equivalent in various commodities.

“This might happen, yes.”

If his company were assigned the provost it would be simple. A search for contraband up and down the street, Ocampo eagerly giving up the Webley to avoid too thorough a going-over of his premises. As it is, a crate of tinned beef, to be delivered within the week, is equal to the task. Niles slips the pistol into his empty holster, stuffs the proffered ammunition into his pockets, and bids the Spaniard a good day.

He steps out into the fetid press of the Escolta at noon.

It wasn’t long after New Year that Madame Qing said some of them were going to be sent to Manila. The
karayuki-san
, who had been there, said this was a city on an island across the sea, full of
yang gweizi
with black hair and dark eyes and little brown Monkey People, and only one section where all the China people were crowded together. When Ling-Ling was picked among those to go Radiant Star hugged her with tears in her eyes.

“Don’t worry, sister,” she said. “Soon you will know the poems of the Monkey People.”

But once she was out of the house, riding down past the Victoria Barracks among the real people, she couldn’t be Ling-Ling anymore, only Lan Mei, who was a disgrace to her poor dead mother and to all the Lans who had gone before, a wicked woman who could be sold or traded like a sack of salt.

Mei and the other ones being sent to Manila were brought up onto the steamship after all the coolie-brokers had loaded their men into the hold, the sisters herded into a cabin by two of Mr. Wu’s friends. There were other people on the deck, China people and
yang gweizi
, and one man dressed all in white who didn’t seem to be in mourning and held the hand of a little girl with beautiful hair and a lacy white dress. When the little girl saw Mei’s face watching her from the round window of the cabin she smiled and waved.

In the morning the sun was out and Mr. Wu’s friends brought the sisters onto the promenade deck, one standing guard at each side of the little group, and they watched the flying fishes from Roderick Hardacre’s poem. Mei had thought he’d made them up, like the jabberwocky in one of his other verses. These were creatures that could not decide whether they were birds or fish, but were in a hurry to get somewhere, speeding in a pack parallel to the big ship, skipping from swell to swell with their wings held wide.

The swells began to rise then with the wind, and the sun was swallowed in black clouds. The sisters and everyone else on the promenade were herded back below as the deckhands scurried around tying things down on the wildly tilting deck and then breaking waves began to heave over the sides of the ship and slam against their cabin, only Mei standing at the round window still, holding tight to a side rail and then she knew that the steamship was not so big when tossed on an angry sea, that it was a paper toy, it was nothing, and her tiny life inside of it was less than nothing.

Even Mr. Wu’s rough friends, one of them the man with the pictures inked on the backs of his hands, were crying when the ship listed to one side and did not right itself and a man from the crew wrestled the cabin door open to shout that the ship was going down, that their only hope was to get into the lifeboats.

Mei tried to remember one of the
sutras
that Ma used to chant but the words would not come, so she only repeated My life is nothing, my life is nothing, my life is nothing as they held a rope and moved along the storm-battered deck, two of her sisters knocked off their tiny lotus feet and swept over the rail into the sea.

My life is nothing.

There were rope ladders to climb down onto the lifeboats, which were being smashed against the hull of the sinking ship and some people were falling and some were jumping and Mei had the quick thought that she saw none of the coolies and wondered if they had been locked in the hold. Hands grabbed her and yanked her into a boat and she saw the little girl a ways down in it but without her father. The men in the long boat pulled their oars to row away from the ship then, the ship that was about to roll on its side, that disappeared from sight whenever they slid into the trough of a swell. The men rowing shouted and cursed at each other, disagreeing on which way the nose of the boat should face and then they were swamped from the side and Mei saw the little girl go over and because her life was nothing Mei rolled into the sea to find her.

Mei did not know how to swim and her clothing dragged at her but she thrashed with her arms and legs and her head stayed up enough to gasp a breath of the air that was full of whipping water and then a wave smashed the little girl against her, Mei ducking under so the girl could ride her back, arms around her neck almost choking her, Mei thrashing with her arms and legs with no thought of salvation only that this little girl should not die alone, nobody should die alone, and then they were smashed against a boat, Mei clawing for it and catching hold of a trailing rope that she pulled on hand over hand, a strong girl, almost a man from wrestling crops out of the stingy ground, and got her shoulders lifted out of the water, the wind roaring full of rain and no sense to keep shouting when she couldn’t even hear herself, and when she felt the little girl’s arms weaken around her neck Mei clamped her teeth around the little wrist and held on that way, like Ling-Ling used to do when they would play in the ditch beside the
sheng-yuan
’s fields.

The sea was still furious, though, and tried to wrench her away from the boat and smashed her against its side and covered her head with water again and again, but Mei held on, held on with her two hands and her teeth because her life was not nothing, she was the raft this little girl was going to ride to safety.

Then the sea began to tire of its anger and the black clouds skulked away and left the sky purple and gray and ashamed at what it had done. People on the boat saw Mei then and strong arms began to pull at her, but she didn’t unclamp her teeth from the little girl’s arm till she was lying face-down across the laps of the men on the boat.

The little girl was not alive. She had drowned maybe or had her neck broken, they said, and thought Mei was her mother.

“I am so dreadfully sorry,” said an English man.

They spent the night huddled together in the boat, a dozen people with the body of the little girl wrapped in canvas, wet, freezing, the men bailing water out with their hands. When the sun came out of the water again there was another steamship in the distance and the men stood and peeled their shirts off and waved them in the air, shouting.

The people from the lifeboats that did not go under were gathered together in a warehouse on the dock in what they said was Manila, sitting on benches, wrapped in blankets. The officials,
yang gweizi
with black hair and moustaches and a few Monkey People, had not yet reached Mei when Mr. Wu strode in with two men in uniform beside him and walked along the benches looking into the faces of the women who had survived.

“This one is mine,” he said when he came to Mei.

Two of the port officials came over then and one of them tried several languages she didn’t know till he asked her in very poor South China talk, “Do you know this man?”

“My life is nothing,” she answered.

Niles stops at a bakery for a
buñuelo
and a cup of the hot liquid mud they sell as chocolate, watching the last of the chaperoned young ladies hurry to shelter themselves from the blaze of noon. They are flat-nosed, like a lot of the darky gals back home, and rather meager in the hindquarters. The cream of the city’s courtesans will become available, he suspects, when the last of the Dons are packed off, but by that time he may be relegated to the hinterlands with nothing but barefooted, betel-chewing peasant maidens for comfort. As he leaves the bakery a funeral procession rolls past, the brass band in the van playing a dirge-like version of
The Star-Spangled Banner
that they have no doubt picked up from the nightly military concerts on the Luneta, the driver of the wagon bearing the coffin dignified in top hat and bare feet, the pair of scrawny Filipino equines supplying the motive power barely coming above his hip. Niles uncovers and stands watching with hat over heart as the mourners’ carriages rattle by, trying not to smirk.

Many of the Celestials do without a siesta. Niles passes through the Plaza Moraga and onto the narrower confines of Rosario Street, John China-man’s bailiwick, and they are out in abundance, hawking, hustling, shouting at each other in their harsh singsong, a teeming yellow horde fairly crawling over each other in their frantic quest for sustenance. Shriveled roots that resemble mummified animals are offered at one stall, whether for food or medicine he does not dare wonder, while another vendor presides over arm-thick live pythons wrapped around poles, their heads bound to the bamboo with wire, and a third sends lung-splitting cries into the air as he waves a pair of flapping chickens like a signal corpsman wig-wagging his flags on a ship’s bow. Niles takes a deep breath and attempts to hold it all the way to An’s.

A sullen-faced Chinaman slouches with arms folded inside his sleeves next to the door, seeing all and reacting to none, a caution to any highbinders contemplating pillage within. The interior reeks of sandalwood and incense, walls laden with silken tapestries, the narrow space a forest of intricately worked statues and figurines in porcelain and rare stone, banners with Chinese characters in thick black strokes hanging from the ceiling. A small boy wearing only a shirt that barely covers his shame squats near the door, pulling the cord to operate a punkah fan overhead, and An, with his cold abacus eyes and billygoat wisp of chin hair, sits back on a carved throne of zitan wood he claims once cradled the posterior of the Ming Emperor.

“The handsome lieutenant,” he observes, his accent that of a British tea merchant. “To what do we owe the honor?”

Niles lifts the satchel to his chest. “Western medicine.”

An smiles and rises from the throne, crossing to a beaded curtain, where he barks a few instructions in his native tongue. Niles caught a glimpse through the curtain on his first visit—Oriental gentlemen and at least one well-dressed Spaniard recumbent on divans, languidly sucking at hoses attached to smoke-filled globes. A scene he’d love to capture with a snap, but woefully under-illuminated.

An pulls a lacquered miniature pagoda off a table to make room and Niles lays the satchel on it. The Chinaman is silent as he lifts each of the vials to the light bouncing in from the street, reading the etiquette with a jeweler’s loupe.

“These might only be bottles filled with water,” he says.

Niles picks up a golden, ruby-encrusted scabbard. “And this may be nothing but paint and paste.”

“You distrust me?”

Niles bows slightly, lays the scabbard down. “I think you are a master of your trade. It amounts to the same thing.”

An smiles and carefully replaces the last vial. He writes a figure on a slip of paper, hands it to Niles.

“Twice this,” says Niles after a glance. “At the least.”

An looks over the medicines in their compartments, methodically clacking a pair of ivory mahjong tiles together in his hand. “I believe we can come to terms,” he announces finally, “but gold—”

“I can’t accept coins,” Niles avers. “And neither can my client.”

Paper money is distrusted, quite properly, at the moment, and nobody carries more than a few of the heavy Mexican cartwheels in their pockets, preferring to do business with letters of intent, coolies crisscrossing the streets with sacks of gold coins in wheelbarrows to settle the account at the end of each month, pistol-wielding guards trotting alongside them. Niles looks around the shop.

“Surely you have something of equal value but lesser magnitude?”

An strolls past a few of his display cases, clacking the tiles, before selecting an ornately carved dragon about the size of a ferret and holding it up for Niles’s inspection. It has a pleasing weight, a deep, translucent emerald color with reddish-orange highlights on its dorsal spines.

“Kingfisher jade from Burma,” says the trader proudly. “From the time of Han—when your Jesus Christ was alive.”

Niles bristles inwardly at the heathen’s mention of the Savior, but allows it to pass. He scratches at the dragon’s scales with a fingernail. “This will very likely do,” he says.

The
ama
of the house in Sampaloc was Señora Divinaflores and she did not ask Ling-Ling to demonstrate the use of the water closet. She was a moody woman even when she wasn’t drinking, and had a lover who was in the
guardia civil
who did not treat her well. There were only five other girls in the house—Eulalia, Dionisia, Carmen, Ynés, and Keiko, who was a
karayuki-san.
The Filipina girls all came from different villages far from the city and spoke at least three different languages as well as some Spanish, which Señora Divinaflores insisted they talk with the visitors, who were mostly from the army and the government, “
oficiales y caballeros
,” as she described them. These were more likely to sing than the English, and spent more time in front of the mirrors in the rooms, but they were only men. Ling-Ling opened herself up to their words, love words, some of them, and
joder
words, and to the words of their songs and poems and stories. There was one young man who was a junior officer of the
fusileros
named Rodrigo Valenzuela who always asked for Ling-Ling and came twice or three times a week, staying the night if the other visitors weren’t too noisy. He made Ling-Ling say his name over and over until she could pronounce it, but was not interested in learning the North China talk. The sisters were allowed outside at this house, a house like many others on the street, and if she woke early Ling-Ling would sit on the sill of the front window, underneath the huge red-and-yellow Spanish flag hung on the outside wall, and watch the coolie gangs hurry by on the Calzada with their loads. They looked like South China men, stripped to the waist, running with knees bent and poles that supported large and heavy objects in their hands or on their shoulders. She sat watching them pass for hours sometimes, but they never seemed to notice her, as intent on their next step as the oxen pulling carts they sometimes drove, whipping their massive flanks, running to their great meaty heads to splash water on them. She wondered if there was a South China girl for every one of them, waiting for her man’s contract to be up and for him to brave the ocean crossing with the gold he had won in his hands. To work like beasts and have no one to dream of, no one to suffer your labor for—she did not want to imagine it.