EASTMAN BULLET

The screw is supposed to sever your spine at the base of the neck before you are choked by the collar.

Of course no one has ever survived to report whether this is true, and the official document lists judicial asphyxiation as the cause of death. Maybe the man who turns the crossbar, the executioner, knows, standing just behind the condemned—maybe he can hear a crack of bone, perhaps sense the moment when the desperate message from the brain is cut short, sense the sudden slackening of convulsing limbs.

Diosdado files onto the balcony that overlooks the courtyard of the Cuartel de España with the others—two militares, a choleric haciendero over from Mindoro, Benítez the defense lawyer from the Ministry of Justice, and Padre Peregrino. There is another fraile waiting in the courtyard below, a round, red-nosed Franciscan, knotted rope taut around his stomach, waiting to deliver the sacrament. Diosdado moves to the extreme left, with the box, hidden under his coat, pressed against the balcony rail. He is sweating as much from nerves as from the heat. When the Committee asked him to do this he agreed at once—he has been among the witnesses before, his political sympathies not yet known to the authorities, and he was able to ask to be invited without arousing suspicion. It was only some hours later, after they had given him the box and made sure he knew how to operate it, that the consequences fully dawned upon him. Once the photograph is copied and distributed there will be no doubt as to who has taken it, and his enviable life in Manila will be ended forever, or at least until a better day.

Men must have felt the same way in ’96, when Bonifacio told the crowd to rip their cédulas to pieces. With this act, thinks Diosdado, I not only tear free from Spain, but destroy my own identity. The Committee has given him a new, forged cédula personal that displays his face with a different name, and have promised to wait till he wires from Hongkong, safe with the other exiliados, before they spread copies of the photograph across the country.

“For murderers and thieves we admit the public,” says the Comandante to his visitors as they settle in, “but with the políticos, these days, a bit of discretion must be observed. No use stirring everybody up for nothing.”

“An occasional blood-letting does a body good.” The general is a tall, pox-scarred man with an impressive moustache. “Blood that is never spilled can only fester, eh Padre?”

Padre Peregrino frowns. “I have never cared for the public ones,” he says. “A dying man should be alone with his God.”

“If he has one,” grumbles the haciendero.

“If he accepts his Lord,” corrects the padre. “Believers or not, we are all his children.”

“I could do without all the moro-moro.” The haciendero is wearing a coat that looks fresh from the tailor, paid for that very morning. He points at the device below with a silver-tipped cane. “Making a solemn ceremony of it, proclamations, witnesses—it lends them a dignity they don’t deserve.”

“You’d shoot them in the streets like dogs,” smiles the Comandante.

“And perhaps leave them lying there a few days, as a lesson to the others.”

“We must have law.”

“Of course,” snorts the haciendero. “That’s the point of it. Make it against the law to move the body from where it lies for a week.”

“And what do you think, young man?” the Jesuit asks.

They are all looking at him. Diosdado has angled his body slightly, better to hide the box when it has to come out, and turns only his head to answer.

“I think we have to balance what is instructive,” he says, “with what is sanitary.”

The men laugh.

The condenado is led out from the holding cell then, and Diosdado is spared their attention. This one has shoes.

The one whose execution he witnessed two years ago had been barefoot, just another young Juan Tamad from Bayombong who had been swept up by the movement, joined the Katipuneros, been captured and then chosen to be executed as an example here in Manila. He was a long-legged boy who before they put the saco over his head had worn a tentative expression, looking around as if afraid to betray his ignorance of protocol in the presence of his betters. When the moment came his toes had splayed apart, had curled and clutched like fingers, had clawed a frenetic design into the dust at the foot of the stool.

This one has shoes. Cheap ones, scuffed and lusterless from the weeks of his incarceration, but shoes nonetheless. He is a gambler, the Committee told Diosdado, an indio with more audacity than sense who wandered down from the north to match wits with the Chinese, as if anyone can equal them at the dice. Not a patriot at all, really, till he was destitute and willing to risk his life itself for a palmful of gold. Valdevía, operating under a false name, hired him to post the edict throughout Binondo, an exploit requiring stealth and speed but no great intellect. The boy he brought along to carry water and paste managed to escape, though shots were fired. But this one—his name is Magapuna, Fecundo Magapuna—possessed no more luck at subversion than at cards.

He has been interrogated, no doubt, and no doubt tortured when his ignorance of the authors of the edict, of the call for resistance, struck his captors as dissimulation. And when the authorities were satisfied that he knew nothing, or were perhaps merely impatient to get on with it, the brief trial and sentencing had taken place. The Committee, of course, did not provide an advocate, and hapless Fecundo was represented by Benítez here, the aptly nicknamed “butcher’s assistant” who has never missed the garroting of one of his clients. He leans over the balcony railing now, eyes bright with excitement.

They’ve chained the condemned man’s ankles very close together, and as he is led, no, pushed toward the device, he shuffles with short hopping steps like a chino carrying one end of a pallet on Rosario Street. With him are the capitán encargado and two soldiers, and, walking with measured dignity some paces behind them, the stocky executioner.

“This one looks like a pimp,” says the haciendero.

The condemned man has longish black hair, oiled and combed straight back from a broad forehead. His mouth is twisted in a bilious sneer, as if his last meal has left him disgusted. One of the soldiers turns him by the shoulders and guides him onto the stool as the other stands by with rifle at port-arms. The condemned man, Magapuna, does not resist as the soldier pushes him back flat against the board and fastens the collar. They are on the little raised platform that makes it easier for the public to follow the ceremony, when the public is allowed, and there is noise from the street beyond the wall. The wheels of a calesa that need to be oiled, horse hooves on hard dirt, vendors selling mangos and lanzones. Within the cuartel, ringed with barracks and stables built around the remnants of the old Colegio de San Ignacio, only a few off-duty cazadores glance out at the preparations, then drift back inside to their card games. Dr. Rizal was tried in here, away from plebian support and a stone’s throw from the killing ground. Diosdado eases the box out from under his coat and rests it on the balcony railing, hidden from the others by his body.

“We had one try to break free,” says the Comandante, still smiling. “The spectators got quite a show that day. As if there was anywhere for him to go. As if those extra few minutes, running like a chicken before the slaughter, falling over his chain into the dirt and having to be carried back, were worth the bother.”

“Every moment is precious to a dying man.” The Jesuit is smiling as well, as if he is encouraging a joke in progress.

“Was he making a speech?” asks the haciendero. “No matter how ignorant they are, no matter how little of any interest they have to say, put the irons on them and they all become orators.”

“He kept shouting ‘I don’t want to sit down!’ ” says Benítez.

They laugh again, all but Diosdado, who uses the noise to mask the click of the shutter. The laughter draws a sharp look from the capitán encargado below.

“Decorum necesita est,” says Padre Peregrino softly, and the men bring their faces to order. Before Diosdado moved on to Santo Tomás, Padre Peregrino was his mentor at the Ateneo, teaching Classics and History. He is a stirring lecturer, passionate about the struggle for Christianity and the martyrs it has produced. His favorite is Saint Perfectus, who was decapitated and hung upside-down for display by the moros when they ruled Córdoba.

“He raised his chin to the sword,” the padre will say, tears gathering in his eyes, “and cried ‘I come to You, my Lord!’ ”

Diosdado did not tell the padre he had been a witness before when he requested the invitation. “I’ve been thinking more about the nature of death,” he said, trying to sound more philosophical than pious, because the padre knows him well. “I need to look it in the eye.”

“Or at the least peer over its shoulder,” the Jesuit replied. Peregrino is the most liberal of the masters at the Ateneo and a fountain of enlightenment compared to any of the Dominicans at Santo Tomás, encouraging the young ilustrados to visit Madrid. “So you’ll have something interesting to confess,” he likes to say. He even admitted once that Dr. Rizal’s ideas had some merit, but that he had been criminally irresponsible in disseminating them to the rabble.

He is the best of the enemy, but the enemy nonetheless.

The hood is slipped on, just a white linen sack really, and the portly Franciscan leans close, the scapular hanging out from the rolls of his neck, to intone in the condemned man’s ear.

Diosdado’s fingers are wet against the leather of the box as he steadies it, winding surreptitiously to the next exposure. The platform and device are far enough away to guarantee they will be in the photograph even if they are not centered perfectly. There are cameras for sale in Madrid with a viewing sight on the top, but this one, an Eastman Bullet, is what the Committee had at hand. Scipio was very thorough, very scientific, pacing off the distance measured and assuring that the focus would be sharp. A new cartridge was inserted. It would be best, Scipio told him, if the condemned man’s face is recognizable in the first photograph, best to treat the public to human features, a man with eyes, ears, mouth like their own, rather than just an anonymous form, choking in a sack.

“If we cannot have a Christ,” Scipio told Diosdado and the Committee, that tiny pucker of self-love denting his cheeks as his voice rose poetically, “then give us Barabbas. If we cannot have another José Rizal—” and here he indicated the leather-bound cube in Diosdado’s hands, the “instrument of emancipation” as he liked to call it, “—then give us Fecundo Magapuna.”

“Qué fragancia,” mutters the general.

The condemned man’s bowels discharge the moment the executioner’s footsteps ring out on the platform behind him. The Franciscan is several feet away now, lips moving rapidly, Bible opened close under his riotous nose, the soldiers standing at attention on either side of the device, eyes forward, feigning no reaction to the puddle forming between the condemned man’s feet. It is a sharp smell that reaches them in the balcony, feces and urine intermingled, and the man’s body is trembling now, trembling all over as a dog not trained for hunting will tremble at the blast of a shotgun or a crack of thunder. The links of the chain binding his wrists rattle softly and the capitán looks to the executioner and says “Ahora.”

Diosdado forgets to cough as he triggers the shutter and it sounds like a cannon-shot to him but not one of his companions looks over, watching intently, their arms resting on the balcony rail, leaning forward toward the moment.

The verdugo has thick, muscular arms, as one would expect, though the task is not a particularly strenuous one. Padre Junípero explained the principle of Mechanical Advantage in class for them, enumerating the use of simple machines in everyday life—the lever, the pulley, the screw. This device is a classic variation on the Spanish Windlass. A combination of the lever and the screw, tightening the collar around the condemned man’s neck, the cloth of the sack huffing in and out now as he fights for breath, the executioner’s face fixed in concentration like any good craftsman at his work. The verdugos are always condemned men themselves, murderers, who have agreed to do the government’s killing in exchange for a pardon and sixteen pesos per neck.

“Watch him dance,” says the haciendero, louder now that the ceremony has entered its active phase.

And dance he does, Fecundo Magapuna, the cheap shoes stomping and scraping, digging in at the heel then kicking out as far as the shackles will allow, twisting at impossible angles till one works its way off the man’s foot entirely, lying still on the platform while Diosdado snaps and winds, no worry now of the others hearing, caught up as they are in the buckings and writhings of the man’s torso, body thrashing like a panicked goose clutched at the neck and the verdugo turning the crossbar slowly, stolidly, a man adjusting a valve. The condemned man’s legs might come out a blur, thinks Diosdado, but the executioner will be still in the photograph, and the capitán and his two soldiers and the praying Franciscan and even the shrouded head of the condemned Magapuna, cocked at an unnatural angle and cinched to the board by the tightening collar, all frozen together in tableau.

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 Cádiz, 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.