by Gina Apostol
Brown-dotted seashells, like turtles’ backs, were scattered about, embossed with faded ink—beach souvenirs on the brink of some revelation. The green sofa had sketchy palm drawings on its arms. The curtains had coconuts. The lamp stand was a bamboo monstrosity, with watercolor bamboo shoots grimed into its sides, more like mold than paint. The lampshade, a ghastly, now-unanimous version of puke, was meant to portray bright parrots amid jungle cover, but the fabric had worn out and all you saw were vague traces of the birds’ casques and the watery smudge of parrots’ plumes.
“He’s a specialist in jungle warfare,” Jed was saying, walking to the window. “He’s a Vietnam veteran. A decorated POW. His is an interesting story—if you’re on his side. He spent forty-nine months in captivity in North Vietnam. One of very few—only around thirty or so—to escape his captors. He’s a celebrated guy. Now he’s an expert in guerrilla tactics; he teaches men how to encircle villages, how to kill specific targets. Specialist killings, torture. He’s a specialist in methods of counterinsurgency: infiltrating cadres, extracting confessions, inspiring surrender. He comes from teaching at Fort Bragg.”
“The School of the Assassins.”
“Yes. The government is beefing up its military forces. It’s setting up CAFGU: you know what that is.”
“The paramilitary groups. They are turning private armies into special forces.”
“The government is using private armies for its own purposes. How do they think that won’t rise up to bite them? The new militias—it’s all in the papers now.”
“Of course. I’ve read about it. I’m not dumb, even though I quit your movement. It looks like a positive sign, for the communist rebels. The government is taking them seriously.”
“Sol. You’re nuts. Is that how your father explains his deals?” he asked.
“So the U.S. and the Philippine military are assembling forces against the communists, the New People’s Army,” I said. “It’s just one murderer going after another.”
He shook his head at me, almost sadly.
“It’s even bigger than that, who knows,” he said slowly. “The communist rebels are small fry. They’re inconsequential.”
“What do you mean?”
“These men—your father and his friends—they are always thinking ahead. For them, there’s bigger game than ragged revolutionaries. Do you think they care about us, I mean, really? They see the big picture. Everyone knows the rebel army has no teeth, no guns. I mean, the rebels collect goddamned copper five-centavo coins for bullets. The rebels will not make a move even if a million peasants are killed in Manila. But these men—they just need a good reason for a deal. Commies in the countryside are just fodder. Small fry.”
I looked at the clippings.
“This was a party to clinch it,” Jed pointed to the pictures.
“I don’t think so. No. My parents are not certain they have a deal.”
“Or maybe the deal is on the way.”
“Here he is,” I said. “That’s a better picture of the general, without his mask. General Tom. He came as Frankenstein, you know. Oddly enough. He’s a sick man. He has an iron lung. Or a metallic heart. Or something. Our Tom, as my mom calls him. He’s an old friend. They like him.” I looked at another picture of Tom singing a ballad with Uncle Gianni. Their features were almost unrecognizable, blurred by their straining gestures as much as by the paper’s cheap pulp. The old American general’s shadowy figure, singing into the mike, was circled in blue ink.
“Why is he circled?” I asked. “The colonel’s circled, too.”
“They’re important guys,” Jed said.
11
THERE WAS, IN fact, a peaceful prelude. A day or so. Before the feverish fortnight of activity, we took these long walks, avoiding the holiday crowds if we could. We talked about books, about random, neutral sights. (I pointed out the street, Elcano, the oddly placed name in cramped Binondo of the false circumnavigator, the one who took the spoils of the dead Magellan—“what funny bits of knowledge you have,” he said, kissing me on the brow. He knew of a beggar, a wispy child on U.N. Avenue, who looked like a replica of our erstwhile comrade, Buddyboy Wong, the Beatlemaniac, and he always passed by to give the look-alike kid some coins). Sometimes, it’s true, Manong Babe drove us; but most of the time we traveled by ourselves.
That lone, magically quiet Sunday in Ermita, when the sidewalks were empty except for trash, cats, and the liquid dreaminess of morning light, we kept walking. There were makeshift homes of sleeping families parked on the sidewalks, the first time I had come across them close enough to look. Jed stopped at one dwelling, an open cart, peering through the structure at the barely constructed furniture, the mundane details of disrepair, while the family, a mother, father, and sons, slept softly, their dreams offered to us. Jed’s face was serious, without pity, his brow, shorn of his curls, looking oddly bereft; I stopped to wait for him, and he turned back to me, again saying nothing.
Maybe Jed’s subsequent actions had in them the same humanitarian resolve as his pitiless expression; I would like to make excuses. My head aches, recalling those weeks, so knotted and tangled have they become.
I remember that walk down spaghetti streets and closed restaurants, through an eerie, sleeping city. So spookily beautiful was Manila’s rare silence, but inconvenient and disappointing, too; we couldn’t get into the bookstore we looked for. It was closed.
And in the climax of the morning, we were stopped for a traffic violation.
Jed’s sheepish face as he looked at me, his ears red as the policeman approached, was amusing. He was flustered. I’d never seen him lose his calm, and he ended up overpaying the bribe, I noticed, handing over one hundred pesos in his confusion. He looked at me, his embarrassed, half-turned gaze bright, and all I could do was laugh.
I remember that, walking the streets, my hand in his, I felt luminous, inwardly, in his presence; maybe it was because of his own glowering, glowing figure—the heat of his pale cheeks and burnish of his hair. In that day’s limbo, he went with me everywhere I wished. The warmth it generated in me (a silly, respondent giddiness that surprised me, always) when I glanced at him, at Jed’s pettish, distant gaze, walking quietly beside me, was a constant thrum. Disappeared now, lost, traces legally unknown. Gone. The word itself seems abandoned, a stripped, unfinished syllable. But at the time, he was by my side, a man hunched by thought, with squinting eyes gazing wistfully at the pavement. I sometimes felt awkward, too ready with speech, beside him.
Our wandering had enough language for shared recall: “Remember that night we painted a sign by what turned out to be a guava tree?”
“The fruit was raw and bitter; we threw it away with our paint.”
“I didn’t,” I said, “I kept it and ate it. I love guavas.”
“Remember how, as children, we could just sit in the gazebo and hide from everyone and make our plans for justice and democracy, with G.I. Joes and fighter planes? I did that.”
“I didn’t,” I said, “we were never children in gazebos together, Jed. Though that’s a pleasant thought.”
“I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world and I didn’t know what I would do without her, when I was a boy; I used to have dreams about losing my mother to cannibals and outlaws.”
“I have dreams about finding things. Hairpins. A book.”
AND WHEN JED asked me to go and meet them, finally I did. Walking to the shop with Jed, I felt a woozy creep, I must admit—the onslaught of my recidivating sickness, a glut gathered in my gut. There was also the way being a pedestrian full-tilt in the city’s mob still dazed me. All my life, I’d been taught never to cross a street. To get to a shop up ahead on the other side, my mother would call up Manong Babe from his dungeon in the hotel parking lot and wait for him to stop at the curb, and so, if she could help it, I never walked through traffic.
But in those days, we walked and walked; an endless parade of our anonymous selves, mingling with the city. I f
elt that slow slush in my loins, my legs hurt. Beside Jed, his footsteps longer than mine, I skipped along and then stopped keeping up. By the shop, he waited for me, then he came over, shaking his head.
“You keep walking behind me,” he said. “Is that a habit or an accusation?”
He took me by the hand.
We stepped up to the shop and looked around.
“There he is,” Jed muttered. “Come on.”
Together, we moved toward the man in the corner, indistinguishable in the crowd of shopworkers, salesmen, idlers and commuters, people who seemed to come from nowhere and make up the city. In the city’s daily maelstrom, everywhere this bustle of everyday acts, eating, walking, shopping, spitting, staring at women, crossing a street—all of this did make Manila seem wonderfully alive, maybe even significant, but at the same time improbable and illusory to me. The multiplication of so many mundane gestures in so many lives compelled thought to shut down. And walking like that, I’d feel that Jed and I, hands clasped, were the only warm, living creatures in this swamp of humanity. Or maybe it was the other way around: they were alive, and we were the city’s ghosts.
In his corner, Ka Noli in rubber slippers, with dry, uncut hair, face oily and growing a mustache, sparse like slivers of rice in early season, looked pretty much like the men around him, drinking coffee and reading People’s Tonight.
He looked up and acknowledged us by offering a cigarette. I took a seat in a cramped space between the counter and another occupied table. Jed, his legs too long for the chairs, looked out of place at first. How would a guy like Jed ever disappear in the countryside, looking like that? But when he lit up the cigarette, hunched in a denim jacket like the others, bending low to the table, pale-faced and dumbly smoking, he looked like anyone else, a tired pedestrian in a pastry shop.
We sat for a moment, exchanging greetings; they ordered coffee. Ka Noli was high-spirited. It was the first time I had seen him outside, in broad daylight. I always saw him at the teach-ins hidden in a corner, lost in shadows and obsessive about doors; he liked to sit facing doors. He still had that doomed cough, so that his chronic clamor punctuated, in my mind, the progress of the country’s history.
He spoke in a dexterous mix of Tagalog and English, street talk, and on his tongue it seemed more vigorous than either language; he made stray comments, mostly jokes, in the way, among Filipinos, an easy familiarity arises among people who see someone again to whom they are related, though they barely know them.
Ka Noli’s lightness made me feel at ease.
“Did you get the pictures?” asked Jed.
“Cool ka lang,” Ka Noli said, waving a hand at him. “Cool it, makulit.” He chided Jed. “Let’s have coffee first. Relaks.” He slumped even more in his chair, turning to me: “Can he save the world by hurrying? Like White Rabbit, you know. Hello, Alice. In Wonderland. Be careful of this guy: tarantado yan. Coffee here’s da best.” And he took a sip. The place was called Da King Donuts, a miserable pun. We watched the shoppers coming in with their bags and carrying out boxes of cakes by the dozen, a steady flow of unsteady pastry.
“You know what I want for Christmas?” Ka Noli said. He spoke in clear English.
“What?” I asked.
“A skateboard. I wonder where the kids at Luneta get them? They sniff rugby, then they skateboard. Galing. Yan ang trip!”
“Imported from Saudi,” I said.
Ka Noli made a whistling sound. We turned our heads to see what he was looking at.
“Hah,” I said, “look, it’s Edwin.”
Edwin Cardozo was walking toward us, looking like a painter down on his luck, wearing a ponytail and trench coat, without his umbrella. The two men nodded when he reached us. Standing before us, he took one hand from his pocket and waved at me. When he smiled, I saw that he looked changed, but I couldn’t quite place why.
I laughed: “Fancy seeing you here. Have a seat, Ed. I thought you’d be home in Samar.”
“Christmas makes more sense in the city. You need a nice, vulgar commercial setting for Christmas,” Edwin said, smiling broadly.
That’s it, I thought: Edwin had finally gotten rid of his braces.
Edwin sat down, taking the chair nearest the counter, all white-toothed. He was even smooth-shaven, as if newborn.
“So, what’s up?” I asked. “Small world, huh?”
“Sorry I’m late.”
Ka Noli nodded: “That’s okay. Jed just got here.”
“You know him?” I asked Ka Noli. I looked at Jed.
Edwin was very amused. “Not at all, Sol. What do you think?” he asked.
“You know Ka Noli,” I stated in confusion. “But you were never at his lectures.”
“The world is small, Sol,” Jed said, patting my hand. “They’re actually long-lost brothers.”
“We’re twins,” said Ka Noli. “He’s the ugly one, I’m the good-looking one. Separated at birth. We just found each other.”
Edwin was beginning to giggle.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I thought you knew I was with the group,” Edwin said. “I thought you were just pretending not to know. Give me five, man.”
Jed stood up and slapped his hand.
“I had my suspicions,” I said. “Don’t get bigheaded. It was pretty obvious: you protested too much.”
“It was a good disguise, don’t you think? Coca-Cola philosopher. He’s good at pretending to be the exact opposite of who he is,” Jed said, settling into his chair, still chuckling.
“I thought you hated rallies,” I said.
“I do,” Edwin said. “That’s not my business.”
“You pretended to be a book-lover at the British Council,” I said.
“No,” said Edwin. “I was not pretending.” He grinned, his newly liberated mouth gleaming. “I like books.”
“You were stalking me all over Diliman.”
“Not really. I was just following orders.”
“But why? How long have you been part of the group?” I asked.
“Since high school,” Edwin said. He was serious now. “Since I was at Science High. I recruited him.”
Jed nodded. “He recruited me. In the dorm. At chess.”
“I thought Soli recruited you.”
“I introduced Jed to Soli.”
“So you pretended to be a jerk, you pretended you only wanted to play chess.”
“We really did play chess,” Jed revised. “It’s just Edwin was very bad at it.”
“Ed’s one of our best,” Ka Noli said. “At least, in your area. One of the best recruiters.”
“I’m very disappointed,” I shook my head. Ed began grinning again. I reached across the table and started punching him in the shoulders.
“Stop,” he said, moving closer to the counter. “Stop!”
“That’s what you get,” I said. “Commie.”
“Sssh!” Ka Noli said.
Edwin’s chair toppled to the floor, and he fell with it. I bent to the floor to get at him.
“Let’s leave,” Ka Noli announced, looking around at the shoppers. “Hoy, tama na yan!” He strode off.
Jed picked Edwin up from the floor, then put the chairs and table in order, and, running to the door, we followed the smoke of Ka Noli’s figure.
“NO,” I SAID. “Don’t even think of it. Don’t you dare ask me again.”
Jed sat on the bed. He shrugged his shoulders, looking at Ka Noli.
Ka Noli was by the window, the one that looked out onto another dark, unpainted concrete slab, framed by the rotting curtains.
Edwin orbited the bed, his raincoat still on, hands in his pockets.
“It’s just a thought,” said Ka Noli.
“Is that why I was recruited in the first place?” I asked.
“No. This has nothing to do with that,” said Edwin. “That was a different—sector.”
“This is very different work,” said Ka Noli.
“I would say it is. How do y
ou know you can trust me? You’re crazy.” I looked at them. “You think you can get away with a plan like that? There would be goons with guns on you in a minute. You’d be swimming in the Pasig with dead dogs, no questions asked.”
“Changes in the political arena require tactical reconsiderations.”
“We’ve planned it all out, we have ideas.”
“We’ve been on the lookout,” added Edwin. “We know what can be done.”
I shook my head.
“It is just a request,” said Ka Noli. “An exploration. We shouldn’t have bothered with you.”
“Don’t mention it,” I said.
Jed looked with warning at Ka Noli. He sat closer to me on his bed.
“Forget it, Sol,” Jed said. Ka Noli moved impatiently at his gesture. “Forget we mentioned it. I just thought—”
“You don’t,” I said. I put my hands on my face. “I can’t believe—”
“How about this?” Edwin asked.
“No,” Jed said. “Look, guys, she said no. I thought she would.”
“Then why did you bring us here?” asked Ka Noli.
“I hoped otherwise,” Jed said. “I’m sorry.”
“Look, maybe if I show her what I have,” Edwin interrupted. “Maybe she’d like to see these.”
Edwin stopped wandering, and I looked up. He stood before me, by the coffee table. He lifted something from his coat, what he had been hiding, and from beneath his shirt, clumsily, he took out a large Manila envelope, the cheap kind used by messengers, with that fuzzy surface, a crumpled embrace in his palms.
Carefully, he shook something into his hand. Slowly, it eased out of the envelope. On the table, he placed an eight-by-eleven sheet in front of me. The wayward gust from the fan ruffled it. He placed one of the spotty seashells on the picture’s edge.
I looked at it and shook my head; I covered my eyes with my hands and sat still. No one moved or talked.
Then Edwin said: “There are others. I have many more like it. All different, all the same. These—” and I heard paper settling in front of me, a thick, soft flutter, “these are all from one village. There are others. And if you like, you can visit the place itself.”