Other men have staggered out of their houses, a few only pausing to irrigate from the rear platforms, most making the trip to the letrina on the other side of the bamboo stockade. One fellow veered far enough off the path that he was unable to find the gate and decided to orinar through the fence slats into a cassava patch. But so far no Ignacio Yambao, who, though alcalde of Taugtod, surely has no modern receptacle within his house of nipa and bamboo. It will be light soon, cocks already voicing their impatience with the night, and Diosdado has to wiggle his bare toes to keep his feet from falling asleep. He is dressed in the simple, soiled cotton of the kasama, his story if discovered that he has fled his mountain town because a band of insurrectos have taken it over. The yanquis are easier to fool than Zambal villagers, of course, having no local knowledge, and more than one of his boys when spotted has strolled grinningly up to the foreigners, rifle held useless at arm’s length, and thanked el Dios en el Cielo that the Americans are finally here to accept his surrender. Most have returned within the month, with many a story to tell and occasionally a better weapon than the one they turned in.
“The yanquis recognize only two kinds of Filipinos,” Bayani is fond of saying. “The living and the dead.”
Bayani offered to do tonight’s business, naturally, insisted on it, but Diosdado is the teniente still, despite having left his uniform under a rock on a hillside near Bacolor, and it is not something he will order another man to bloody his hands with.
“Who have you ever killed?” demanded the sargento.
“I shoot when the rest shoot,” Diosdado answered. “Sometimes an enemy falls.”
“But close, close enough so you can look into his eyes?”
Diosdado did not ask if Bayani had killed men in this way.
“If I don’t come back in two days,” he told the sargento, “move the band to the escondite north of Iba.”
He has always been suspicious that it was the friars who made up the story of the Ina Poon Bato. A negrito man, years before the arrival of the first Spaniard, meets a beautiful, glowing lady in the forest. “Take me home with you,” she says. He protests that he already has a wife, and a jealous one at that, so she gives him a carved image of herself, a small wooden statue. As he walks back to his village he hears her voice, over and over, saying “You must take me home with you.” When he arrives his wife is immediately suspicious of the statue, and when he is not looking she hurls it into the fire. Their entire hut is immediately engulfed in flames, the couple barely escaping. But when they sift through the ashes later, the one thing that has not even been charred is that wooden statue, now stone, the Ina Poon Bato. It becomes a sacred object of their tribe, carried from place to place as they migrate through the mountains, bringing them peace and good fortune in their travels. But somehow the statue is lost, and food grows scarce, diseases strike their children, their enemies grow in power. The story of the lost statue remains in their minds, though, and so when the men with beards wearing long robes arrive from across the sea carrying their statue of the same beautiful lady, their Virgin Mary, it is cause for celebration, for the renewal of hope.
A fabricated legend maybe, but an enormously popular one in these mountains, and Diosdado has tried to use it to explain the war to the Zambals. “This fight will cause great destruction,” he tells them, “but at the end when we sift through the ashes, something will remain untouched, something pure and miraculous and as permanent as stone — a Filipino Republic.”
It is perhaps too distant a metaphor. In Nacolcol the consensus was that the problems all sprang from that ancient negrito’s wife, who should have known better than to throw enchanted statues into a fire.
There is a dog, rat-tailed and underfed, making its way up the slope with its nose up, alert, and Diosdado notes that the air has shifted, a cold wind rolling down off the monte behind him. The dog slows a few meters away and sniffs at the edge of the copita bushes, stepping cautiously now, till it sees him. The cur’s head goes down, ears back, and a warning growl vibrates its scrawny chest. Diosdado tightens his grip on the bolo but does not move. The dog investigates, body stiff, bumping its wet muzzle twice against Diosdado’s face before stepping aside to lift its leg on a macaranda and trot back down to the village.
Only the alcalde has not yet taken a piss.
He lost a few men, deserters, when the news came that the silver-voiced Bryan had not won his election, that the Americans would be staying. And then they caught the supremo on the day before his birthday. Funston of Kansas and a handful of his junior officers marched as prisoners through the wilderness by Macabebes disguised as rebels, stumbling half-dead into Aguinaldo’s mountain retreat, and after being revived by the food and water and the respect due to captured warriors, able to pounce on the General in an unguarded moment. And the General, delivered back aboard the great ship of the White Admiral like a penitent schoolboy, called immediately for his followers to join him in compliance. Now even people like Scipio Castellano have become americanistas, declaring that anyone still in the field is no more than a bandit.
“This is not an insurrection,” Diosdado lectured his men, “it is not a revolution. It is all of us, patriotas humildes de las Filipinas, defending our homelands, our families. If the General is in their hands, so be it. Until the last man lays down his rifle, our cause is alive.”
It has been nearly three years since he took the head of Colón off with a blacksmith’s hammer. “Columbus” as the yanquis call him, the first European to claim their continent, another mercenary for the Spanish crown. When the Assimilation decree was posted, before the shooting war began, Diosdado was the one chosen to go to Cavite and wait until night and desecrate the Americans’ favorite statue. He felt more like a student on a prank than the avenging arm of the revolution.
The ground and the buildings have begun to take on color by the time Ignacio Yambao steps down the ladder from the platform of his house, walking in a surprisingly steady line toward the path to the letrina. He is singing very softly to himself, a kundiman from the party, in his beautiful tenor. Diosdado rises slowly from his crouch, legs burning with the sudden rush of blood, and angles down the slope with the bolo swinging loose from the thong around his wrist. If the alcalde turns to see him he will smile and keep coming and tell his story.
But no story comes to Diosdado as his bare feet, still tender, suffer over the jagged ground. Señor mio, Padre y Redento, he thinks, me pesa de todo corazón haberte ofendido porque me puedes castigarme con las penas del Infierno—