by Gina Apostol
“I’m not interested.”
“But it’s important. You’ll see. Come see us. We would like you to see us. I saw your picture in the papers. You’re looking great, Sol. I want to see you.”
“With whom?”
“Just me. I’ve missed you.”
The last is perhaps my addition, wishful thinking.
I knew where I’d find him anyhow.
It didn’t seem to matter, by then, that I didn’t trust him. Anyway, he’d wear you down with his charm, which lay precisely in the fact that he didn’t use it—it hung in reserve, like a beautiful cloak, worn regretfully, knowing its power.
I asked Manong Babe to drop me off at a shopping center.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Where are you going? Are you walking?”
He sounded horrified at the thought.
“You sound like Ma,” I laughed.
He grinned at me, his right eye disappearing under his mole. “I can pick you up,” he said. “Just tell me the time and place.”
“No, Manong Babe. I’ll get home by myself.”
I looked back before I went a few more paces. Cars were honking at Manong Babe.
I walked back toward him.
Manong Babe rolled down the window.
“Don’t you dare follow me,” I commanded. “Go on now. Those jeepney drivers will kill you if you don’t move. Go!”
At that, he moved with the wave of traffic, which was driven into frenzy by the crackling signal from the holiday traffic announcer, a woman in a neon police outfit carrying a violent megaphone.
WHAT WOULD I have done without Manong Babe? Once, when an unexpected squall marooned us in Marikina, and the jeeps and the tricycles could not get to the canals of Soli’s uncle’s home, I told the group I would call Manong Babe and ask him to pick us up. Soli said, sure, but Jed dissented. He always thought ahead. He said: It’s too conspicuous—think of all your uncle’s neighbors wondering about the white limousine. It would be so easy to trace that car, he said, and figure out who had been where. And so we waited for the rain to stop in her uncle’s crowded home.
And when Manong Babe once drove us all in the car—the day that we had a session at my house in Makati—Jed, too, had his misgivings. But it was a lark, a great adventure, and everyone wanted to see my home. Finally even Jed gave in.
Manong Babe was in his element that day, asking all the kids their names and where they were from: Taguig, Ozamiz, Tagbilaran. We were all from so many different parts, myself the lone kid from Makati (Jed was absent). Manong Babe and Soli shared a bond—they were both from Leyte, my mother’s province.
“Tacloban? Really? What’s your family name?”
“Soledad,” Soli said. “My father was a professor. Of engineering. At the university there.”
“Ah. My father was a fisherman—at the other university there! Ha-ha. Soledad, ha? From Housing—on Mountainside?”
“Yes,” exclaimed Soli. “We lived in Housing when my father was alive—on Mountainside, by the children’s playground.”
“I used to drive a jeepney there—binulan.”
Soli was delighted: “Who knows? I could have ridden your jeep when I was little—and look—here we are!”
“It’s a good car, huh?”
“You take good care of it,” said Soli.
He beamed with pride.
“We call it the other Babe,” I said. “Manong Babe’s baby!”
He laughed, the gray hairs on his mole trembling.
“And I know your family, the Kierulfs,” Soli added.
“What?”
“I know all about them,” Soli told me. “Queenie Kierulf, who married a rich man and went off to Manila. Everyone knows about Queenie Kierulf, daughter of the flower-sellers. We used to buy our Maytime roses from your grandmother’s gardens, in Cabalawan, where they built the bridge.”
“Who else lived on Mountainside?” said Manong Babe, “I used to drive the children of the Cubilla Delgados—on your side. Are they still there?”
I WAS NOT SURE Manong Babe would leave me alone—so I walked in the opposite direction. Jed had ingrained these little precautions—the apartment was our secret, he said, and no one needed to know. Our pestilent Eden. Nuestro peste Eden.
When I arrived at the place, opening it with my own key, he was reading. He did not stir as I approached. I watched him. For a moment, I gazed at his missing figure, a long athlete’s body in messy clothes.
Jed looked up in the dark from what he was reading but stared straight, his hands on his chin, with that melancholy profile, looking offhand, briefly, like his mother.
He hadn’t noticed me, or pretended not to.
His vaguely neurasthenic, glassy look of solitude. Papers fell from his fingers. I imagined he had not been expecting me, but I doubt it. And for a moment, that still image rips through a raw core: his ripe mouth and blue absent eyes. His ears looked funny, with his hair cut short, his curls shorn from his temples.
He wore a military cut, an ugly buzz.
“Your hair!” I exclaimed.
“Sol!”
He looked sheepish, rubbing his naked neck.
“You don’t like it?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“It’s none of my business.”
He grinned, shaking his head.
“Sol for solitude,” he laughed. “I vant to be alone.”
Newspaper articles were strewn on the bedside table, and paper fluttered to the floor as he rose from the bed. He had already had coffee; when he got up and walked over to kiss me, I smelled it on his breath. Without thinking, I kissed him, cheek against cheek, the way I did with my mother’s friends.
He made a face.
“I’m not such an old Makati matrona, you know.”
I sat down on a chair across from the bedside table.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have.”
“I kept hoping you would.”
I looked at the paper in his hand. It was a page of scenes from my mother’s party.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s you,” Jed pointed. “Nice dress.”
I took the paper and looked at myself, a dark, gawky figure.
“That’s Prima,” I noted: “That’s your mother.”
He nodded, staring at her. “Yes, it is,” he said.
“Your dad was supposed to come.”
He nodded. “They had a fight.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“About what? That my family’s a mess?”
“But your mother—”
“Married my father knowing who he was,” Jed said. “He’s always been that way. He is who he is. She knew he would never change. I guess no one can believe he’s been a good father to me. He is. But he has absolutely no scruples as a man.”
“I’m sorry. She looks so sad.”
“She’s sick. But she won’t get help. But it’s not my problem now. I cannot be her keeper.”
But in spite of himself, Jed looked sad, looking at his mother.
I noted a newspaper face, circled in blue ink.
“That’s Colonel Grier,” I exclaimed. “That’s him—the Colonel I told you about, the one I met at the concert.”
“Who cares?” Jed reached across the picture-strewn table and took my hand. “I’ve missed you, Sol. How’ve you been?”
“I’m well,” I answered. I withdrew my hand but then placed both again in front of me, clasped, so that they were beside his long fingers, his palm half-open, and he leaned forward. His thumb was downcast, near my wrist, large beside my small bones.
“Do you want some coffee?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“That’s right.” He smiled. “You only take it in the mornings.”
“Well, what was it you wanted to tell me?” I asked.
I watched his thumb on the table, the way absently it moved against his index finger, along the length of his carpal hollow. �
�What is it, Jed?”
“Would you like to go out for a while, watch a movie?”
“No,” I said, “not that.”
I SUPPOSE I WORRY Jed’s figure in my mind, almost afraid that it might stir. I was a sorry person. Do I remember any terrible discipline in his mental habits, do I recall with fondness what he liked to read, did I debate whether his purposes were good or evil? There was something—muddy, I must admit, a kind of murky tenor, a sump of silt in my love. When something sinks in me, stupidly like an ache, what my recall poorly finds in the depths is not some noble emotion, a fine substance—but murk. The mess of the body. Soggy things. It distresses me. The last things that surface, in this distinctly unhealthy reverie, are gross farm animals and such, perhaps appropriate in this view of the Hudson Valley, the oleographic grime of the farms in this distance, beyond the river. My thoughts revert to muddy matters, cows, animals stupidly savoring cud, and nearby maybe is some pig, snorting in a hovel.
“WHAT’S THIS?” I looked down at what we had cast off to the floor, with our pants and shirts and shoes. The apartment was musty but clean—it had a visual sense of decay, but an actual surface tidiness. On the floor, I found these aberrant bits of newspaper, gray, almost incoherent pictures on the clean, vacuumed rug.
Photos of diplomats in drunken poses.
I moved off the bed to look at one picture. I put on my shirt to get the photograph. Jed laughed at me. He, on the other hand, like a dumb colossus, lay around naked, a sweaty beast atop unironed sheets.
“That’s Uncle Gianni.” I picked up the article. “What are you collecting, a society album?”
Jed held a cigarette, ashes trembling against the wheezing, hyperventilating fan.
“You know, the others would like to see you,” he said, his face screwed up as he spat out smoke. He coughed.
I stood up to open a window.
A snaking light fell on him, a gold, uneven thread.
“Don’t,” Jed said. “Pull the curtain down.”
“Why are you guys all chain-smokers?” I asked. “Does the revolution require emphysema?” I did what he told me. Looking at the sooty cloth, I saw faded coconut trees stamped on the curtain, with serial leaves arranged between each printed tree, like patterns in a math lesson.
I can still see, with eyes closed, everything about that room.
Sometimes, I think, I still walk in it—I am locked in that parallel, inescapable place. I have disoriented moments. Snatches of furniture distend—palm-printed lamps attaining the heft of Greek pillars, creepy creeping fixtures. Bamboo and baobab visions. Strange dislocation: objects shifting while I stay, stunted, in place.
“Didn’t you think it was funny,” I said, looking surreptitiously out the window, clutching the curtain, then staring back at Jed, “those cloak-and dagger-confessions at our meetings with the group, the false names?”
“No,” Jed said, shaking his head. “Not at all. In fact, I wish you’d come back—come back to the university. Don’t leave for America yet.”
“How’s Soli?” I asked.
“She’s fine. She’s leaving school for good after Christmas. You know she dropped out of school?”
“I’m not surprised.”
“She made the decision to work full-time in the movement.”
“Have you seen her since?”
“No,” he said. “They say she’s happy. She’ll be organizing factory workers in the city. It’s what she wants to do.”
“She’s throwing her life away.”
“No, she’s giving it.”
“Her form of soul-searching, I guess,” I said.
“Not everyone is in an existential crisis, Sol.” His body turned upon the bed. “Some people choose clear-eyed what they want to do.”
He stared at me. When a male body is unaware like that, and it seems to lose its consequence, its old terrible hold, one wonders how on earth this absurd bastard, hoary ball of hair and limp bedraggled lump, ever held one’s attention at all.
I started giggling at his look of gravity while his penis drooped.
“Stop it,” he said.
“Your prick looks funny.”
“I know. It always looks better on you.”
He adjusted himself and blew smoke across the fan, which, in the afterthought of its wheeze, blew smoke back to him. He coughed again.
“Well, Jed, you should have come to that party, if you were so interested in it. I look hideous in these pictures, my God.”
Jed came to stand beside me. He looked at the news pictures in my hand.
“Who’s that?” he asked. His flat, pink nail pointed to a face in a group.
I peered closely. “I think that’s the general. Tom. He’s been in Manila for quite a while.”
“With the LOTUS military group,” Jed said.
“Yeah,” I said, “LOTUS. That American operation. You know what? Their headquarters are just around the corner from here. You can walk to it. Beyond the British library.”
“I know. And him?”
“That’s the Colonel. The one I told you about. An educated man. He says he did a master’s thesis on the Philippine-American War.”
“Really? And what was his thesis?” Jed held his cigarette unaccompanied on his mouth, idly moving his hands.
His cigarette clamped to his mouth like that, he looked like a boy playing a game, his eyes narrowed.
“You look funny,” I said.
“So what was his thesis?”
“I told you. He studied the tactics of the Samar rebels, you know, in the last years of the Philippine-American War, and explained how the American containment, their methods of war—”
“The retaliations in Balangiga, after the rebel massacre,” Jed said. “The American atrocities during the war.”
“Yes, the Samar massacres—the howling wilderness. His thesis was that, in many of its details, the war with the Philippines foreshadowed Vietnam. But he saw it only through a military lens. He claims he’s apolitical. Who knows? The idea wasn’t so original, he says. Anyway, Francis Ford Coppola had thought the same thing.”
“You mean Joseph Conrad,” Jed said.
“Hah! The Colonel wrote it in the early years before he was drafted into Vietnam, he said. His point was that knowledge of indigenous tactics would be useful in a modern war, in similar terrain. But his focus was on Filipino methods, on the ruses of tropical guerrillas during the Phil-Am War. He’s interesting. He was introduced to me as a scholar. He’s a smart man who looks like a redneck. He invited me to see a collection of his: he collects coins.”
“Why don’t you?” said Jed.
“See his coins?”
“You should,” said Jed.
“That’s funny. Ma says the same thing. You know, he kept using those old colonial terms—the language of old history books about the Philippines. It was like being in a time warp, especially after the lectures with the group: going back to the days of 1899, the Spanish-American War chronicles, stuff like that—the racist speech of ancient times.”
“Not so ancient,” Jed said, “if it’s still walking about. Wasn’t that strange, talking to that man after the lectures with Ka Noli?”
“How do you know that?”
“You just said,” he said.
“Yes. It was strange.”
“You know what your parents are doing with that colonel, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you know what your parents are doing with Colonel Grier?”
“They’re trying to get him to approve a shipment, a big contract of military equipment. Expensive brand-new arms. It’s a multimillion-dollar deal. Really. Big bucks. You have no idea. They need his word, his go-ahead.”
“And why is that?” Jed said.
“You know, the Philippine-U.S. military pact. The Philippine government buys matériel for its army at the discretion of the Americans. One of the colonial conditions for independence was the signing of the 1947 pact that created the Joint U.S.
Military Assistance Group. With LOTUS as its administrative arm, the pact remains in effect. It won’t go until the U.S. bases go. Which means never. The hand of God couldn’t make them go, who knows. It sets—I mean it advises on—Philippine military supplies, army training, and so on. President Manuel Roxas signed it, but what choice did the guy have? Anyone could see that it is a good way to remain in power: keep on the good side of the Americans, whose businesses in turn rake in millons from the arms trade with anticommunist states. The cleverness of the colonizer was that it gave us independence, but it kept its hold by controlling the material fact that keeps a government in power—its military.”
“Very good,” said Jed. “Are you sure you haven’t read the PSR?”
“Ha-ha. You don’t need the PSR to know—just watch my parents. They are upset with the Colonel. They’ve always had their way with the old guy, General Tom, but Tom is sick. It seems the Colonel’s a stickler. He wants public biddings, transparency, et cetera.”
“He just wants his own people to have a slice of the pie. That’s all.”
“No. I don’t know if he’s interested,” I said. “As I said, he doesn’t seem political.”
“Everyone’s political, Sol.”
“I mean, he just doesn’t seem interested in my parents’ concern. The Philippine army uses secondhand arms, old stuff. We don’t really bother with new guns. We cannot afford them. That’s what my Uncle Gianni says. The new deal my parents want is a new era—a big military boondoggle. They swear the insurgents are moving from the countryside into the city, and new arms are needed, a new policy. They want, I think, an exclusive contract. I don’t know if the Colonel is even interested in dealing with that issue, buying new matériel or not; but my parents want him to okay their deal.”
“Very good,” Jed said again, smiling approvingly. “Good girl. But I don’t care about your parents’ deal,” said Jed. “That’s their business. You know what Colonel Grier’s real specialty is, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Counterinsurgency.”
“I guess.”
“He came specifically to Manila to train militia groups. The rest is not my concern.” He moved away to stub out his cigarette on a tin ashtray, shaped like a volcano. Dust motes floated in the cracks of light, mute indivisible creatures. The room itself, I now remember, was organized rather unconvincingly around that theme: a dreary tropical motif.