Junior steps forward smart and stands with his eyes locked ahead. Junior is not so filled in as the others they picked, chicken-chested with skinny pins, but his clothes are nice and he’s lighter complected and carries himself high.
“You been to school, Lunceford.” The soldier says it as a fact.
“Yes sir. Hampton Institute and then half this year at Fisk.”
“Anything you learn there, you gone have to forget it.”
There is something in his friend’s eyes Royal has never seen before, hesitating before he speaks.
“Yes sir,” says Junior in a quiet voice. “I’ll try to do that sir.”
“You call me Sergeant.”
“Yes Sergeant.”
“Get back in line.”
Junior steps straight back two steps without looking and ends up square with the other four. Royal wonders if he’s practiced that too.
“I am Sergeant Jacks,” says the dark man evenly, the man with the stripes on his arm. “And you sorry niggers have the good fortune to be selected to join the 25th Infantry.”
Royal jumps off the branch.
IN THE TEMPLE
In the last few years it has been the Italians, Guglielmo Tell mostly, or Un Ballo in Maschera, or something new by Puccini. Diosdado stands smoking with a group of his classmates outside the Teatro Zorilla, slightly rumpled in their white linen as students are expected to be, positioned to watch the daughters of the wealthy and their dueñas alight from their closed carriages, each one opening like a box of bombones to reveal the delicacy within, girls in satin and taffeta and silk and the occasional butterfly in a balintawak, sleeves like delicate, transparent wings, their hair shining with oil and up in combs, bestowing their glances and smiles like the most precious of gifts. Then the ilustrados with their European suits and gold watches endlessly consulted to show them off and the españoles with their air of disdain and condescension — yes, they’d rather be in Madrid but duty entails sacrifice and this sort of event, though unavoidably second-rate here in the Colony, is such a good influence on the indios—the men all lingering in front of the ornate, circular temple of culture until the orchestra is well into the overtura. Diosdado searches over their heads for Scipio, who said to meet him here. But Scipio never makes an entrance — he just appears.
“A well-placed infernal device,” says Hilario Ibañez, eyeing a phalanx of Spaniards talking rather more loudly than the orchestra within, “would do the nation a great deal of good.” Hilario is a poet and given to morbid flights of imagination.
Diosdado shakes his head. “And destroy the best along with the worst?”
He is careful to always seem the conciliator in public, the gradualist in questions of politics. A debater who can argue either side of a question, moderate in opinion and passion. It is a role he is beginning to despise.
Kokoy flicks the butt of his cigarette to the ground, sighs wearily. “We’re needed inside, gentlemen.”
They move, careful to maintain an air of indifference, to the back of the balcony where the smoke from the oil lamps in the chandeliers collects, with the scattered rainbow of young beauties below them and time for a quick flurry of tsismis concerning the romantic lives of the performers, the Italians (or the French, for that matter) eugenically destined for scandal, with the conduttore turning to count empty seats and the Manila fire department, opera lovers all, standing at the top of the main aisle, doors flung open behind them with the hose in hand and ready for service. The ushers shoo the little street girls selling roses and gardenias out of the building and the din of Filipino society in full flower begins to abate and then there is applause as the curtain is drawn and the first notes cut the air. Diosdado smiles to himself, thinking of how he loves it all, loves it as only a boy raised on cockfights and the occasional scabrous traveling puppet show can, a haciendero’s son from the wild coast of Zambales who spent his first year in the great city pretending he had seen it all, that he was not impressed, that he, provincial imposter, belonged there. And usually at this point, lights dimmed to hide him from his cohorts, he would let his guard down and allow the singers to carry him to Paris or Thessaly or ancient Egypt.
Tonight it is the Tell, in a mercifully abridged version, the audience silenced immediately by the stirring overture, lederhosen and dirndls barely able to disguise the uncomfortable parallels with the present situation — a despotic government, an insurrection in the bundoks, blood feuds complicating the political situation, love and honor—
But tonight the music is only background to his own drama.
“They want you,” said Scipio.
This in the Jesuit library, with the late-day sun slanting through the windows and the other colegios absorbed, unsuspecting, in their texts. Diosdado felt the building move a little, as it did during the medium-sized tremors common within the Intramuros.
“Why now?”
Scipio smiled. “Because you’re the best liar in Manila.”
He had hoped they would need his talents as a linguist. Zambal, Tagalog, Spanish, Latin, English from his year in Hongkong, even a bit of Cantonese, all these valuable as the revolt proceeded through its stages. But lying—
“They want me to be a spy?”
“For now. We each serve in our own way.”
Diosdado had guessed for some time that his best friend was a member of the Katipunan, but Scipio would never admit it. “I am a patriot,” he would say, lifting an eyebrow, whenever Diosdado asked to be sponsored into the Brotherhood, “but not a suicide.”
“What do I do?”
“Tonight at the Zorilla,” said Scipio, smiling, and then was gone.
But at intermission, the apple successfully bolted from son Walter’s head and Tell imprisoned by the haughty Gessler, Scipio has still not appeared. Diosdado shuffles downstairs in the throng, shoulder to shoulder with a butcher of a militar, a uniformed capitán de cazadores whistling the rousing call to arms that closed the first act.
“Elíxer para el alma,” says the Spaniard, smiling and catching his eye, and Diosdado muses that if the oppressors do in fact have souls, then music must be good for them.
He follows the university boys across the street for buñuelos and chocolate and talk of music, theater, women, all the things young irresponsible students should be preoccupied with, the militares at the next table laughing a little too loudly as always and both groups pretending to ignore the fact that there is a revolution in progress not so far from Manila, that in a few months, a year at the most, they may be trying to kill those other hijos de puta.
“I wonder how many will stay, after it is done?” says Kokoy, careful as always to remain vague, in public places, about the exact nature of it.
“The ones from Madrid or Barcelona will go home,” says Epifánio Cojuanco, who has spent a year studying piano in Spain. “But some of those places, in the bleak mountains — why would you bother?”
“They’ll have to give up their privileges, of course.” This from Kokoy, who has a manservant who waits outside the classroom door in case his dueño should desire anything.
“I long for the day,” says Hilario Ibañez. “To breathe our own sweet air again, to walk unburdened on our own fertile soil, among free men.”