by Gina Apostol
“Did they die?” I said, horrified.
“Probably just neighborhood boys,” said Pa. “Easy enough to fix.”
“You’re right,” the Colonel said, waving his hand in contempt, “the motherfuckers. Since then we raised the wall, of course; and we have more guards. But I check anyway. Over my dead body if I let some fucking Charlie get away with that kind of shit.”
My dad nodded in agreement.
“Did you shoot them?” I asked again.
“Of course not,” the Colonel said. “That’s not my job.”
The Filipino guard standing beside the car was grinning.
I looked at them, the Colonel and his guard. I imagined it was the piña colada rushing up my guts, this sudden, bittersweet nausea.
“I thought for a minute you were looking for a bomb,” said Uncle Gianni.
The Colonel looked scornful.
“Who would dare?” he spat. “They’d be sorry if they tried.”
AS WE GOT into the white limousine, I said to Uncle Gianni:
“Seems as if he got you. He won.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wouldn’t let any of you get a word in. About whatever new deal you want him to approve.”
“What deal, Sol? You know nothing about it,” my mother said.
“Oh that? I don’t know,” Uncle Gianni said thoughtfully. “Remember, Sol, the first trick of reconnaissance.”
“What?”
“You watch. That’s it: you just watch. You learn a lot from just looking.”
“What did you learn here?”
“Should I spell it out for you? Give me something you’ve learned, Sol, from this lunch. Come on. There were many, many things.”
“Such as?”
“Well, what does he do at three o’clock, rain or shine?”
I thought about that.
“He’s a very orderly guy,” said Uncle Gianni thoughtfully, “though he should vary his itinerary. I bet he’s never late for work.”
9
“NONSENSE,” MY MOTHER was saying. She was standing in my doorway. “Of course you’re attending the Christmas party. You have to be there—it’s a celebration of your birthday!”
“My birthday is next week.”
“Well, in celebration of your birthday, we’re exhibiting the portrait.”
I had forgotten about that—after the triumph of Madame Vera’s gallery retrospective, Ma was finally going to install Reina Elena, with Child, on the mezzanine.
“But we had to do it a week early, inday—Madame Vera, you know, she’s superstitious. She thinks the solstice is bad karma.”
“So good luck to me,” I said, “Sol for solstice.”
I’d rather die, I thought, than celebrate my seventeenth birthday with Madame Vera.
“Come on, darling. Get dressed. Of course you’re going. You’re the star of the show!”
I lay amid a spill of books. My head ached from lying down too much; I felt moisture in my arms, despite the central air. I was in a marooned waste of being, a sensual muck, the usual worthless surplus of Manila’s endless Christmas season—we were always let off earlier than everyone else in the world, even at the American School, which wasn’t Catholic. It seemed to me the whole world got off its carousel at Christmas, standing still to be harassed by carolers until Epiphany, January 6, the day of revelations that always marked the end of eternity for me.
Ma urged: “You know, the Colonel will be there. He asked about you when I called to remind him.”
“Which means,” I said, “he had to acknowledge remembering me when he didn’t have anything to say to you. So what’s happening to your deal with the Colonel?”
“Oh, inday, it has nothing to do with you. Our business has nothing to do with you. Just become a scholar of histrionics and go to Harvard School of Law. It is all I ask. But, inday, didn’t you talk about the coins? He invited you to see them. Why don’t you go and see his special coins?”
“What do you want with him?”
“Inday, he’s an educated man! You can learn from him. He’ll make general one day. That’s what they say. Especially with General Tom so ill. Although I do like our own General Tom better: Tom’s so much more simpatico.”
“But what do you want from him, the other one, the antipatico?”
“Oh, can you imagine, Colonel Grier wants us to make a bid? If he agrees to the plan, he wants a public bidding for the new equipment.”
“What new equipment?”
“Oh, you know, the plan. For national security. When the president lifts martial law, the country will need a new blueprint for its defense. But oh, it is none of your business, inday. He’s so new to the country, that colonel.” My mother laughed. “Uncle Gianni will fix him, don’t worry. Don’t worry your smart head about that. Well, you must come out of your room. Your vacation will soon be over, you’re going to leave us for America, oh, inday—and you still haven’t done a thing! You have not had one adventure! You can invite a friend to your birthday. Someone from school.”
“They’re all home in the provinces.”
“I don’t mean that school. I mean the American School. How about Don Mariano’s son? That melancholiac boy, Jared.”
“Jed.”
“Jed, Jared, Jiminy, Jack. Ha-ha. Why don’t you invite that boy Jared, Jack? Don Mariano should take him along, what do you think?”
I shrugged. “Do what you want.”
THE CHRISTMAS BALL was a signature event, for which the house was turned upside down in preparation for a costumed hell.
My mother always imported the chef, a monumental German who had once dominated the country’s foremost hotel. He was rumored to have served General MacArthur himself (a slander he failed to correct—as he said to me once: I’d have poisoned the man if I’d lain eyes on him, Deutschland über alles; during the war, he confided, I was only thirteen and breeding Hitler’s mustache—it was the fashion). The chef was now retired and owned an island off Zamboanga; but occasionally, with totally superb disdain, he would leave his fiefdom to enact favors for valued old friends. The sight of this man (name withheld, a policy I reserve only for him, a magnificently nasty character) threw the maids into fits and completely silenced Manang Lita, my mother’s chief cook, who treated him without rancor as a god. Manang Maring, my old blind yaya now retired from her duties, didn’t dare emerge from her domestic cave while the German was in residence.
Guests were already arriving at the house in droves. Fancy women came with their housemaids and powerful men with their mistresses. Everyone arrived with guards. I kept watching out for Don Mariano, just in case. I remember the discomfort and hollowness of it, waiting to see if Jed would arrive. In my high heels, I felt groggy and listless from lying in bed, from the vertigo of so much sleep. I tottered about my mother’s party with boredom and a dim verge of tears. It was bad enough that the people at the party, expatriates, ambassadors and businessmen, had nothing in common with my inertia. People were in kinetic Christmas cheer, fueled by drink and other excellent traders’ goods. A Frenchman fell into the pool, bringing his lovely transvestite companion with him. If he weren’t a consul, my mother would have thrown him out of the house when she saw him arrive with two tarts, one chocolate, the other Cambodian, a gorgeous boy in velvet and feathers. The two men floated in the warm water, like large fowls dipped for plucking. I watched their beautiful sequined clothes rise like bedraggled wings; their slender calves acted like ballast before they went under. When they emerged, heads up, they had their tongues in each other’s mouths, a well-rehearsed act, and people clapped. Another couple took pictures of themselves atop the Gothic gargoyles sculpted on the marble fountain. A man and a lady took turns chuting through the grassy slough from the pool to the garden, yodeling Christmas songs all the way down.
Everyone came. Bumbum Esdrújula and the Secretary, dressed as Antony and Cleopatra, with the midget and her towels trailing along, bearing the suicide asp (plastic) for theatrica
l effect. Zubiri de Zoroastre, the gossip columnist, with his cohort of lensmen, muscle boys with bare chests and Kodak cameras. The Colonel and his mammary wife, dressed as Dorothy of Oz: “Actually, I really am from Kansas!” she kept explaining to sundry transvestites, who couldn’t care less. General Tom arrived as Frankenstein: a nice pun on his twitchy face; for a man whose doctors had been saying for months he was going to die, he had a sense of humor. A slew of bodyguards enclosed him, not so out of place in the masked mix. Movie stars met sugar tycoons, and gigolos and justices waited their turn at karaoke.
Before dinner, my mother emerged on the mezzanine, a marble balcony above the banquet, to gather people for the big event. People cheered, and Madame Vera, dressed this time in a matador’s costume, an affair in black and gold rickrack epaulets, swept up a dusty cape and took her bow, sending revelers around her into asthmatic fits.
I was standing near the door, as far from the upstairs crowd as I could get, when a woman entered the lobby. I froze, my heart stopped.
“Prima!” someone called out from the living room, where the more orderly and catty had taken up space, watching the gate-crashers.
“Is that Prima De Rivera?” someone behind me whispered. “Qué pasó?”
The lady advanced through the mirrored foyer. I was the only one close enough to see. The curls, wide-spaced cheeks and pale brow looked anomalously like Jed’s. It was a precarious resemblance, disconcerting—Jed’s cheekbones and Jed’s light hair in reflection, simulated in perfect glass in the mirrors about the hall. It was clear from the hollow-eyed Prima how Jed’s looks were the fine result of a manic sowing of proper seed, for which foreign brides were imported for their coloring and chosen for their cheekbones. The Morgas through the centuries had long-established mating habits, like hummingbirds or iguanas. All the male Morgas went to Spain to find a wife. Don Mariano was the first Morga to marry a Filipino—the beauty queen and toothpaste model Prima de Rivera, Miss Caltex. Or Miss Shellane Propane. Anyway, some diesel diva. And although she was part Italian, part Spaniard, she was also somehow Ilocano, a sad mongrel. Sure, she was a mongrel of the type certain circles of Manila spawn and prize, like Argentine cattle or Alpine dogs, but Prima had unfortunately grown up in Makati, not Madrid, an ignominious start to their union.
Her still-lovely face, marred by confusion, a nightmared look, questioned her fractured sight in the Versailles mirrors. Eyes like smoke and ash, green-veined hands—she gazed at the shards of her reflection and smiled, an eerie multiplication. A torso pocked with scabs: punctured, cut open.
She was practically naked.
I tried not to stare at the purple blotches and drugged decay all across her arms.
Another door opened, and I looked. But it was only a maid, running after the runaway.
Prima De Rivera Morga stood in the gauntlet of the evening’s guests in her nightgown—a wrinkled silk camisa china. Her ghostly ankles were bare, and for a moment there, I thought she would totter into the giant Ming vase and shatter the house’s feng shui, splintering her bones along with the vase. But her scrupulous maid caught her skinny arm—the gentle maid put her shawl across her shoulders and steadied her backward, toward the door.
Standing sidewise across from her, near the screen door, I saw the slight tremble as Prima moved forward, her hands wavering as she held her Spanish shawl. I witnessed her son’s height and languor—a simulacrum that exposed the vigor she had lost. I felt a deep flush suffuse me as she stared back at me before she turned to move away. But I was mistaken: she was staring right through me, her vacant gaze spent. Her absent eyes, so empty in the glare they looked almost white, blind, gave one an awkward pain: a pang of guilt, from having witnessed this—this human dissolution. Wobbling, she looked at the vase in the hallway, then she kissed it, tonguing the ancient porcelain.
The room was silent. Musicians held their breaths and the waiters stopped in their tracks. People upstairs turned their eyes from the unveiling of the society portrait to watch its inverse version, a naked truth in the room below.
My mother was descending the staircase. At that moment it seemed hers were the only actions in Manila, click, clack, click, clack. Her high heels crushing a cracked bone, a breaking thing.
Finally she reached the woman. My mother tiptoed to reach up to kiss Prima de Rivera Morga on the cheeks, beso-beso. Everyone noted how admirably Queenie kept her composure. Prima bent a little, smiling shyly, as if trying to remember who my mother was. As Ma took her by the hand, Prima allowed herself to be led, towering over my mother; then Prima De Rivera Morga spoke into my mother’s ear, bending as she did so, her tall gaunt body, like a high arched C, a harpy or a harp, looming over Reina Elena.
“Hija de puta,” she whispered audibly to Reina Elena before the rest of Manila. “Joderse, que se joda.”
And giggling, she watched my mother’s stupefied face.
The shawl slipped inattentively, so that now everyone in the room could see her sad scars: splotches of gray all along her flesh, until they reached a gnarled entry at her wrists, the roots of her twig-like veins branched toward her apoplexed fingers. The kind of hand Madame Vera would render smooth as a rose petal, a fresh garland of dewy flesh.
Then a servant closed the door on Prima De Rivera Morga, who was shaking like a lunatic in her Spanish shawl.
Dinner was announced soon after.
And now, as if broken from enchantment, everyone charged into speech.
He had driven her to drugs. Or was it drink? Anyhow, her husband had a kind of disease, someone added. Satyriasis. It was social philanthropy, someone tittered: he did it only with the masses. Giggles, snorting and guffaws. Another provided an explanation: “She’s haunted by the spirits of the graves she’s robbed.” The accusing mystic held up her scapular for good measure. People smirked at the nutty peanut in the gallery. “It’s true: she has robbed ancient graves for their vases, for their porcelain!” You should see her house, someone digressed: she has the best collection of ancient Chinese pottery in the country. She used to have a sharp eye, the person said. Grave-robber, said the woman with the scapular. That’s not the point, another person countered: you can be rich and own foolish things, like, you know. Someone laughed. And Prima’s collection of Spanish-era documents, they’re invaluable: I’ve seen them, a historian said. Rivals those of Secretary Esdrújula—and that’s saying something. Is it she who owns the only manuscript extant of Noli Me Tangere? Nitwit. Gaga tonta. The National Library owns that. But someone stole it! It was returned, you retarded bookworm, two decades ago! When she used to host dinners, someone said, it was better than dining at Malacañang Palace.
Prima de Rivera Morga lived a charmed life, another agreed, if it weren’t for the fact that marrying Don Mariano had turned her into a nervous wreck.
And so it was that poor Prima, by word of mouth and speculation, was transformed from ghoul to gastronome, klepto to connoisseur, in the short span between hors d’oeuvres and the first meats.
THE HEIGHT OF the evening? Of course, on such an occasion, she came. It was no surprise. The tension in the kitchen weeks before the event foretold her coming. The lordly German’s sweating carcass permeated the kitchen for a week, brutish portent of the guest to come.
She arrived with her retinue, a cascade of ladies in blue. Her hair in its upsweep, her laugh in its glory, the Lady kissed my mother in the way of old friendship—a fiction they each achieved with grace. I understood my mother’s reasons for her idolatry, but on her side, the Lady’s motivations for attending, I have no clue. However, the kiss’s effect on the party was electric—it was as if, finally, everyone was ready to dance. Scream and murder. Her arrival was the beginning of a beautiful evening. Power has that effect. No wonder the transvestites had a ball.
10
COMMODUS, THE SON of Marcus Aurelius, did not turn out well. He liked to club cripples with a lion’s pelt, pretending he was killing giants, and fought butt-naked in gladiatorial combats. Of course, he alway
s won, since he was emperor. His tendency to believe he was Hercules, going about beating up dumb animals, annoyed the Romans so much they assassinated him. His dead father, the bookish emperor and stoic philosopher, meditating on his heir Commodus mauling to death an awkward giraffe, perhaps said in his grave, No comment.
Caligula, on the other hand, had a clever successor, his uncle Claudius, the famous I of legend. Though Claudius, too, liked to slay dumb animals, for example killing a whale in a public spectacle, he was a man of learning, the last king who spoke Etruscan and a writer of histories, including eight volumes on the lost history of Carthage, as well as a statistician of dice. Claudius had cerebral palsy or Tourette’s, which explains his reputation as an idiot; however, history was not fooled.
Thus a man of learning begat a beast while the monster Caligula ushered forth a scholar.
I had a lot of time to myself that Christmas. I understood that I did not have to be tied down to my fate as a daughter. I could cast my own light, maybe, I hoped, scratching out a few possible lives—pondering instructive examples of the reversal of genetics and diverted destinies. There was no reason that I could not spend the rest of my days living productively, annotating annals of late Roman ironies or perusing the voids of contemporary lives. I was leaving for an education abroad—yes, to live in comparative luxury, but that did not mean I could not contemplate with care the patterns of the past. As my mother said, I should become a scholar of histrionics and spend my life researching ancient history with a focus on understanding family ties. I could leave the Philippines and never come back: to eke out volumes from its tragedies through my craft or sullen art. As for Jed, who knew what he was going to do?
I was startled when I heard his voice; I had been mulling over the party, thinking about his mother.
“Are you there?” he said again on the phone.
“Yes. Where are you?”
“We’d like to see you, Sol.”