The Call of Cadiz

by Dominic Sy

First published in transit in July 2013. Click the arrow (>) to learn more about this piece.

The shot that killed Andres Novales, Emperor of the Philippines, was molded in a tower on the outskirts of Andalucia. The gun that fired the shot yields a better story. It was completed the day after the death of Napoleon, a few months before Mexican Independence. A week later the gunsmith was dead. His name was Miguel de la Cuesta y Bajo. He had come to Madrid before the war with a suitcase of reales and a degree from the University of Santo Tomas. In doing so, he had reversed the journey of his father, Antonio de la Cuesta, who had arrived in the Philippine Isles with a suitcase in his hands and a title just as empty. Both would be filled by Doña Fatima Asuncion, the most beautiful insulares of Manila. In their cataclysmic alembic, Miguel was raised with the pride of a Spanish Spaniard and the arrogant ambition of a creole. He grew into a young man with bold beliefs and a pair of gloomy eyes. In the hallways of the university, he discussed with his schoolmates—creoles, all—the shocking treatises shipped in from Acapulco. They debated fraternity and equality, reason and representation, republicanism and empire. In a letter to his cousin in Negros, a classmate described Miguel as “a nervous little boy with neither toughness nor charisma, but within whom the ideals of liberty have taken hold with more speed, more fervor, and more optimism than the rest of us.”

In 1806, Miguel left the archipelago to study law in Madrid. He survived the Iberian nights by huddling by candlelight with a copy of the Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de Indias. Within a year, he had joined a group of liberals led by the twitching poet Luis Rodrigo Valencia. Their mission was singular: the creation of a Spanish constitution. But their plans had to be set aside. On the 23rd of March 1808, French forces marched into Madrid and occupied the capital. On the second of May, the people revolted. The retaliation of Murat and the abdications at Bayonne sent the peninsula into war, and Miguel de la Cuesta y Bajo into the camps of the guerrillas.

Dedication and zeal do not determine success. In his first and last battle in the hills of La Mancha, Miguel was incapacitated. Six shots were fired: two burst into his stomach while a third smashed his shoulder. The fourth split a femur and the fifth a kidney. The last, molded in a tower beyond the Pyrenees, tore through his ear as Miguel de la Cuesta y Bajo fell into the mud.

His injuries precluded a return to battle. Instead, Miguel was asked to help the local gunsmith. His name was Antonio Casares, a wiry man who had fled Tolosa when the French swept through the North. In a little village in Andalucia, Casares taught Miguel how to mold the barrel and the flintlock, how to shape the muzzle and the ramrod. Ashamed that his friends were becoming martyrs, Miguel nevertheless found pride in his work. There were not enough muskets in Spanish hands, and demand only grew with the war.

In 1810, as the French pushed further South, Miguel and Casares answered the call of Cadiz. In that city by the sea, the director of the arsenal—half Anglophile, half aristocrat—gathered together hundreds of gunsmiths into assembly lines. Miguel was tasked with shaping the barrel and the barrel alone. The work numbed his mind as much as his hands, but the arsenal produced dozens of muskets a day, each of them a lifeline to the increasingly small, increasingly dire Spanish army.

Desperation is the bed of romance. On the 19th of March 1812, the court of Cadiz signed the Spanish Constitution. It established male suffrage, national sovereignty, constitutional monarchy… Throughout the night, the citizens of Cadiz roamed the streets, fornicating in alleys and downing their last reserves of wine. Miguel gave in to the revelry. Only two things crossed his drunken mind: the brothels of Cadiz and the Leyes de Indias. He set out for the former. He stumbled into a street by the Torre Tavira where the drunkards sang “Death to Joseph! Death to Napoleon!” At the edge of the plaza, a veiled woman sat before a candle. She had almond eyes and half a nose. As Miguel passed, she grabbed his hand and pulled him close. She traced the lines of his palm. She said that he would be in Madrid at end of the war, but that he would return to Cadiz to die. She said that his mother would drown in the Pacific. She said, finally, that he would spill the blood of a monarch, and then asked for two reales. Miguel yanked his hand back in laughter and returned to his search for the brothels. The following morning, the streets of Cadiz were littered with unconscious liberals, and Miguel de la Cuesta y Bajo woke with a spotty memory and a throbbing pain where his ear had been.

Five months later, the siege was over. Wellington and the British had stormed in from the sea, forcing the French out of Andalucia. Swept up by the turn of the tide, Miguel abandoned the arsenal and rejoined the guerrillas. On the 7th of October 1813 the British broke through the Pyrenees. On the 11th of December, Ferdinand the Desired, their exiled king, returned to the Spanish throne. A few months later, Miguel and his comrades walked into Madrid as Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, surrendered to the Sixth Coalition.

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Proclamations of peace bombarded the empire. Bloated by time and loneliness, Doña Fatima Asuncion wrote to her son to plead for his return. She said: “Your father is dying. I, too, am dying. If you do not return, my child, I will sail to Spain.” Miguel wept over his mother’s ignorance. He wrote that he no longer had the means to return and warned his mother not to come. “Not all is well in the peninsula,” he wrote. His letter reached as far as Acapulco, where the courier was killed by Mexican revolutionaries. At the end of year, in the East Pacific, the Manila galleon sank along with the bloated Doña.

By then Miguel had returned to Cadiz. He had come back bitter and penniless. In Madrid, he had woken up from the war with no books, no cash, and no hope of returning to the university. When the king repealed the constitution, Miguel abandoned the capital. He came back to that city by the sea—to that city where once the future, or something akin to the future, had seemed eminently possible.

Miguel found a dilapidated room near the Torre Tavira. He found employment too, again, at the Cadiz arsenal. He discovered, however, that much had changed since the siege. Casares was dead, and the arsenal no longer produced its own muskets. British guns were cheaper and sturdier, and had flooded into the country in Wellington’s wake. There was no longer any demand for Spanish gunsmiths—only Spanish repairmen.

One evening, in a tavern along the Cuesta de la Marga, Miguel was approached by a man with a twitching cheek. It was Luis Rodrigo Valencia. The poet had spent the war at the Torres Vedras, but he had rushed to Cadiz after hearing about the constitution. Now he was planning a revolt. Miguel leapt up and embraced his old friend. He accepted a drink and agreed to steal arms for the cause. In a month’s time, however, he had managed to steal only one. Ashamed, Miguel hid the gun beneath his floorboards and skipped their scheduled meeting.

That evening, a company of the guard broke into the house of Valencia and killed the twitching poet. The man who betrayed him fled for Madrid. Miguel, meanwhile, upon hearing the news, returned to the tavern along the Cuesta de la Marga and drank his phantom pains away.

Persuasion hangs on the finest of the details. That night, after a bout of rain, Miguel slipped into the streets. He inhaled the humid air and slid his soggy soles along the cobblestones. In the waves of the Puerta de la Mar, a tattered frigate flipped and flopped. Miguel walked along the seawall as a gust of wind hammered the city. At the end of the plaza, he turned. Before him stood the house of Luis Rodrigo Valencia, now empty. These were the ingredients that brewed in Miguel’s heart: his soggy shoes and the humid heat, the phantom pain of his ear, the cheek of the poet and dress of his mother, soaked with seawater, dragging her into the deep. Miguel gazed up at the house of Luis Rodrigo Valencia and his heart swelled with bitterness. He returned to the Torre Tavira and dreamed of almond eyes. He awoke at dawn to the wind banging the window. He resolved to kill the king.

He began his work in the spring of 1815. At first, he had thought to use the musket that he had stolen for Valencia, a symbolic act of retribution. But true justice, he realized, would never come from the British. It would only come from the barrel of a Spanish gun. It took months to build his first, months of learning where to steal supplies, of learning when and how to break into the arsenal in the dead of night. This first gun, a replica of the old Spanish army’s, was dismantled after only a week. It would not do. It was imperfect. Certainty was the priority, and in the decaying mind of Miguel de la Cuesta y Bajo, every dent, every mark, every scratch in the iron beget uncertainty. He began again, forty-eight times. He made barrels that were long and short. He made muzzles thin and thick. He experimented with rifling before returning to the smoothbore. He hid ammunition beneath his floorboards and dreamed of veils and almond eyes. Every night, he felt the breathing of the ceiling. He felt the walls were listening. For years, he worked in secret. After the revolution of 1820, he was working still. The liberals had imprisoned the king, but the man was still breathing. And if the man was still breathing, then the work was not complete.

On the 5th of May 1821, Napoleon succumbed to indigestion. To Miguel, it was a sign. One tyrant had died; the other would follow. The following night, he assembled the final gun—the perfect musket. He brought it back to his room and hid it beneath the floorboards. A few hours later, he dreamed that he had a seizure. He bit off the end of his tongue. In the early light of the morning, Miguel de la Cuesta y Bajo died, drowned in a mouthful of blood.

To pay off his debts, the landlord sold Miguel’s possessions. At first they seemed very little: some tattered shirts, a number of books, a few melted candlesticks. Beneath the floorboards, however, he found the musket and a journal. The landlord read the latter and panicked. He burned its pages and sold the gun to a friend. The friend, in turn, sold it to the local barracks.

Later that year, Mexico won its independence. In response, a regiment from Cadiz was shipped to Cuba to reinforce the colonies. The following June, the regiment was sent to Manila. A year later, Captain Andres Novales escaped from exile in Misamis. He led a company of creoles to Intramuros. At midnight, he was an outlaw, and at two in the morning he was Emperor of the Philippines. At five in the afternoon he was executed in a garden near the Puerta del Postigo. Six shots were fired: two burst into his stomach while a third smashed his shoulder. The fourth split a femur and the fifth a kidney. The last, molded in a tower in Andalucia, tore into his heart as Andres Novales fell into the mud.

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Dominic Sy’s collection of stories, A Natural History of Empire, won the Kritika Kultura / Ateneo de Manila University Press First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Philippine National Book Award.

Did you enjoy this piece? If you’d like to support the author, you can purchase a print or digital copy of his book, A Natural History of Empire.