by Gina Apostol
Set like that, arrayed like posters in a shop, the group of pictures looked like a jumble of grays and blacks, and you wished it to remain so. You wished it to remain an optical mystery. That textured abscess, the dark abyss, for instance, could be the heart of a banana flower, or maybe a close-up recording of a narra’s gnarls. And the little roils of white and gray, raised and bracketed amid a blood-seeming dark flood, looked somewhat like a mother’s pregnant, triumphant skin, undulant flesh, which you discovered in slow motion. But then these volumes of gray moved and fluttered, like a riverbed losing its water as you watch, and the spatial matter of mud becomes more of a tint than a crevice, shadow rather than soil. Then it suggested a sea, a garbage facility, a severed hand.
A dark, terrifying head.
It was the severed head of a child. The darknesses (you began to note them with some calm) were maybe her eyes and mouth, grimed and bloody, one with the earth. The larger, bleeding blacks, you saw, were palm leaves or banana trunks—a domestic jungle. Coconuts and rocks and a hut loomed beyond the disordered limbs, the fantastic rot on her arms, her repose, separate, on the ground. A Nike shoe on her foot. Separate from her was a body with legs upended, like a woman in labor. Her skirt a clump above her waist. A private army aimed at her parts. I moaned. But I looked.
I could tell the other was a child because of the adults around her—full-bodied creatures lying silently aground, in the last gestures of their dying. One woman, all covered in dried mud, cradled the child’s still body, the way the sleeping woman in the cart in Ermita had held her son; except that in the black and white picture, the woman held one whose eyes were lost, indecipherable—her head had rolled away in the mud, toward me: foreground in the picture, the black heart of the abyss. It hovered in my vision, the missing head of a headless ghost.
I rushed up to leave. I rushed to the bathroom and stood above the sink, willing myself to retch.
A dry, heartless cough came out.
In the rusting mirror, I saw the child’s head, its wavering blacknesses, as if it gleamed in my dark eyes.
“Are you okay?” Jed asked when I came out.
I sat down.
“What are those?” I asked, barely able to ask. “Where did you get them?”
The three men were still, and except for Ka Noli’s coughing and the flap of Edwin’s coat, and the gasps of the fan that kept lifting the edges of a picture, disturbing it, like air in a helicopter’s wake, we made no sound or movement.
“That corner there, Sol. See that line, that shadow?” Edwin said.
I nodded, looking.
“That’s a gun: an automatic. Your parents sold it to the government, through the auspices of Don Mariano Morga, friend of the Secretary, who in turn fronts for the big fish—a long chain of trade, just buying and selling, that’s all. And that’s the trade’s trajectory: perfectly angled, toward that child.”
“There’s a drive to speed up arrangements for these new forces, the civilian militias. Every so often they visit a village they suspect protects the rebels. That’s the official gist. This is one of those operations. The government, of course, has its own reasons; your parents have theirs; the Secretary has his own. We have ours,” Edwin explained, like a teacher.
“They can be stopped,” Ka Noli said.
“We can at least send a message,” Ed said.
“This man,” Jed said. He plucked a piece of paper from his snare, the old newspaper photo of the general singing at Christmas, “this man is at the center of plans for the counterinsurgency. And this,” he pointed to the American colonel standing almost primly in a velvet jacket in the circled photograph, “this man executes the plans. He came to Manila specifically for this. To run training in the countryside.”
“Look at this, look at how neatly displayed they all are, the enemies of the people.” Edwin spoke in his deadpan way, taking Jed’s society pictures. He pointed to each figure as he archly labeled them, a facetious pose: “Feudalista. Burukrata-kapitalista. Imperialista. Look at that: all neatly gathered under one roof. It’s almost too neat, Sol.”
“From your point of view,” I said.
“We don’t blame you.”
“You’re part of the solution.”
“You can help us.”
“You don’t have to do it if you don’t wish,” Jed said, as if he were being kind.
“What do you want from me then?” I asked.
“Just some guns,” said Edwin. “They’re already in your parents’ warehouses.”
“We need the special kind, the brand-new ones.”
“Which warehouse?”
“You know,” said Jed. “And if you don’t, we’ll show you.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all?”
“You don’t have to if you don’t wish,” Jed said.
“But I could do so much more,” I said.
12
THE COLONEL’S HOUSE was a choice location on Roxas Boulevard. Another trim, sweet lawn: the moist mulch of gardens. The smell of earth lingered with the waft of seawater in the marina beyond, a brief balm, and momentarily you forgot the diesel-plumed city. I was ushered into a wide, dark-floored living room in the colonial style: high-ceilinged, capacious, good enough for a minor ball. I heard a cry—a baby—as I passed a room. Then muted music in the background. Down a little corridor was the den. I entered a cubicle dominated by low glass counters set in velvet. There I found Colonel Arthur Grier, relaxed, politely dressed, already looking expansive. He was holding a glass of beer. He was expecting me.
I marked this day for him—the solstice. My birthday gift.
He looked older, softer in his home: as if at rest, he stopped holding in his tired age, that strenuous way he clutched his years, wild, unscrupulous birds, within his gut, his diaphragm and stiff shoulders; at home, he let them go, and the birds of his experience settled, soft flitting wings on his face, gaze and body, so that he looked what he was, a scarred fifty-eight-year-old man.
“Over here,” he said, getting to the point. “This will interest you.”
I moved toward the hoard at which he pointed: a pair of large silver coins, origin Acapulco, provenance Zamboanga, I believe he said. I was looking around the room, testing the layout in my mind, an interloper’s stealthy obligations toward furniture, fixtures, and roaming, muffled servants.
“See,” he said, “these are called the pillars of Hercules. The dos mundos, they call it. They have a literary history, if you must know.”
“Hm?” I said.
“These are the dos mundos, the kind mentioned in Treasure Island. Also mentioned in Melville.”
“Moby-Dick?”
“Yeah. Never read it myself. But that’s what they say.”
“The giant doubloon,” I said, impressed.
I looked again at his catch. The so-called pillars on one large ovate coin were overlaid by what looked like chicken scratches.
“Why are they—?”
“A whole real,” he continued with satisfaction, tapping on the glass. “I’m lucky I have a pair whole. They were cut into bits, you know, into half-reales and all that. Cut-up reales were legitimate tender. Literally, they were quartered. Quarters. See over there. Yes, I see what you’re pointing at. Even those scratch marks, they tell us something—”
I glanced at a servant entering with a tray. I watched a palm leaf swaying from a window, over the shoulder of the uniformed houseboy: a framed view across from the door. I tried to guess the lengths of spaces. How many footsteps would one need?
“Chinese traders made marks on the coins—like a merchant ledger—to check the silver. Chop marks. This type here: it was the most widely used legal tender of its time in the world,” said the Colonel, shuffling around in his slippers, putting his bottle of beer back on the tray and taking a new one from the boy. “What would you like to drink, child? Beer? Coffee?” With his other hand, he tapped again on the glass: “This was legal tender even in the United States; precursor of the dol
lar, did you know that?”
I turned to him. I nodded respectfully. I surveyed his plunder.
“What about this?” I asked, pointing to a coin with a ribbon attached to it.
“That’s an interesting one.” As he drank some more, I heard his heavy, slow breaths; he smacked his tongue against his lips, licking away foam. “It’s no coin. That’s a medal of merit,” he said. “You can see for which campaign.”
“The war of 1899.”
“The Philippine Insurrection. See? It’s a beauty. I got it in pristine shape. It was minted for the American soldiers of 1899. The Philippine campaign. Here, hold it.” He put down his beer, took a key from his shirt and lifted the glass. Gently, almost lovingly, with shaking fingers, he took the medallion from its velvet-laden case.
“I got this years ago, oh, in the late fifties. It was one of many designed just for that campaign. I was doing my thesis at the time, on leave from the army. My father gave this to me when I received my diploma. It’s not too expensive. I keep it for sentimental reasons.” He looked at me with a smile, as if I of all people, a student of history, should understand his pride. “We come from a long line of soldiers. My great-grandfather was in the Civil War. Do you know”—and he said this with narrowed, meditative eyes—“he was called on to join that Philippine campaign; he could have ended up in Samar, who knows: he could have been an actor in my thesis. Many veterans of the Civil War fought in the Philippines—Union and Confederate battled together bravely. They had a common enemy. But my great-grandfather Lieutenant Major Waller Augustus Grier died on the boat coming over to the Philippines. Isn’t that strange? This medallion—it was one of my father’s last gifts to me.”
I held it in my hands. It was heavy, with that curiously lush patina of rust, a green-flecked wine color that settles on old metals, as much part of the beauty of collecting as the coin itself—the witness of time. And it was, at the same time, heavy in my hand, a barbaric weight, and my fingers trembled. I had to tighten my hold on it to look at it closely. And I felt it, a rude gush in me, a weeping rumble in my womb, at the sight of this souvenir so precious to Colonel Arthur Grier.
It had a raised, absurd palm tree, with unnatural coconuts hanging below its crown of leaves like scrota, and on the medallion’s sinister half, its heraldic left, was a set of scales—“for justice and democracy,” said Colonel Grier—and beside the scales was a lamp, for freedom. A wreath of letters garlanded the coin: “Philippine Insurrection 1899.”
I felt my legs trembling, in that weakness that seemed to have nothing to do with the world around me but seemed allied to it nevertheless, these physical flashes before a dark, harmful swirl. I felt in me the bend of a river, a brooding, phosphorescent stream. I clutched the medal in my palm; my fingers could barely fold over its broad sides.
“Yes,” I said, “I’d like some coffee.”
The servant glided over and handed me a cup. He smiled a broad, childish grin when I thanked him. I watched the boy as he left, his soft, shuffling footsteps sliding away in the hall.
“Careful,” said Colonel Grier, “it’s very hot. Sugar?”
“Yes,” I said. I looked for a chair. I sat on a desk, still holding the medal, its stiff ribbon hanging down the curve of my thumb. I sat down, agitated. I put the coffee on the desk. My other hand tugged at the ribbon.
As the Colonel leaned over and gave me the sugar, I hefted the medallion again, testing its width. I took the sugar from Colonel Grier, poured some in my coffee and stirred. Then I dipped the medallion into my burning cup. Carefully, slowly. Vaguely, I remembered something from my traps of reading, how certain chemical mutations occur on rusted metal, especially on aging coins, especially in steaming water. I stirred the coffee with Colonel Grier’s medallion, stirring and stirring the dull stream. I watched with curiosity the dark liquid’s slow, thick swirl, its calm vortex of memory, of long, old years and weeping children, men and women, from both sides of the ocean, then and now, this almost dilatory reverie as I spooned more sugar into the coffee, stirring with the Colonel’s precious, loudly clinking medallion.
“What the fuck—what are you doing—That coffee’s acidic, goddamn—you’re destroying my medallion! Motherfuck—Give me that, you bitch!”
I see my figure scampering, like a cat. Or was that a calculated stammer, my swift departure from the room. I walked out of Colonel Grier’s mansion as fast as I could. I startled the houseboy, who met me in the hallway with a kind of happy, unspeaking look of camaraderie, of kinship, maybe because he was a kid like me, and I ran past the bedrooms, sprinting as if I had a ball at my feet. I’m a winger after all, and I raced. I almost bumped into a lady, a loose-haired, humming blonde, from Kansas, and I raced past the lazy windows of swaying palms, through the lawn to the limousine, where Manong Babe was waiting for me, as always. Always ready for me, whenever I happened to need his help.
THAT WHITE HOUSE on Roxas. The bougainvillea headquarters in New Manila. His gym. Golfing jaunts at Mandaluyong. Even the soccer tournament before New Year’s. Possibilities were perused, responsibilities declared. Amid ugly cigarette smoke, the hoary clank of the beastly fan, within the decaying walls of the apartment, we argued, and it seemed to me, as I said, that even the objects in the room attained a nervous refinement. Their outlines trembled in my eye, as if the room itself had gained this hypersensitive awareness of life, a troubled vitality.
Our quarters—the single bed, our corny props (the jungle metaphors of the furniture), the lusty vibrations of the fan—have this dreadful clarity, like those surreally factual Dutch paintings, in which even light is nailed down and shadows are carved in place, just so. It seemed that places and objects, physical matters, gained a strident existence; while my own motives and purposes, the soul, as it were, of the matter, have this lank, depressed substance, an unfleshed state.
I was aware that Manila had shapes, sounds and pigments that had not occurred to me before, my senses tuned to its excitable parade, its pendulous rains, the mint, bellyish look of its sky, rash, wounded people walking at a tilt, and the different cries of grass—the clamorous insects I never noticed in the cracks on the streets. The Christmas season gave all this a nightmarish velocity as our hushed speeches and the loud spirit of the times seemed to swell a Manila envelope of tragedy.
I remember listening to Edwin, that limp, owlish boy, and how I forgot to marvel at the things he said, his tense abstraction (I discovered it was his salient numbing vice) inserted in our heated conversations. It was as if, stripped of his dilettante disguise, he’d turned into the vitriolic essence of the ideologue.
“Foreign monopoly capitalism and the comprador bourgeoisie hinder the growth of industry: they must be opposed by the people’s democratic revolution.”
Saliva still rained through his unbraced mouth, oddly enough.
“The foreign policy of the bourgeois Philippine government is dictated by U.S. imperialism and internal reactionary classes: they must be opposed by the national democratic state.”
“Just kill the fuckers,” Jed said from the bed, lazily.
IT WOULD BE too much if I could recall our exact phrases. I know I could crib mendaciously from the group’s published Bylaws and Programmes and still be true to the spirit of Edwin’s spit, his ponderous bile. And Jed’s laconic venom might have, as you suspect, this improvisational, slapdash aspect, just to keep the plot along: a significant dash would do just as well, a violent aposiopesis on the page. It was Jed who was the calming figure, a center of repose and introspection but with an adamant intensity, that smoked concentration. And should I talk about Ed and Ka Noli’s gradual disappearance, how they fairly vanished as the days progressed, so that by the end Jed and I were mostly on our own, and I am left to imagine their furtive, paranoiac presence at our few encounters, the way it seemed each was suspicious even of the dust holes in the walls.
I wonder now if I have made their presence up.
As for me—I can barely tolerate the memory of it,
my pathetic figure. I don’t mean the act, the plot itself. Newspapers, pundits, sociologists and even psychics have already made hay of its stink.
No: I mean my inexplicable bloom.
I felt that the world suddenly seemed clarified; and in this incandescent room, I, too, began to glow. My role in it all was a gradual unfolding—I had always longed to be a part. It was as if, oddly, I had finally discovered myself. I had found my voice and my value and my purpose. In making plans for the day, the time, the victim, I acquired, if I recall right, an almost offensive insight, a scary, concise reasoning, and confidence. It’s true. Plotting a murder built self-esteem.
In hindsight, our self-importance was predictable—but depressing. We had this increasing notion of ourselves, as if this seedy, pat vengeance gave us dignity. I do not even talk of glamour, something shallow, tabloidy. No, I talk of self-respect, honor. An inflated notion of virtue infected our brains. Or maybe it kept us going like the target object (a nail, a mold on the wall) that you need to stare at in prayer in order to keep from losing concentration and feeling like a fraud.
I suppose it’s true of anyone whipped into the eye of a busy, seething project (let’s call it), no matter how it was one got there. You feel your confidence level is up—then that superman, Nietzschean, egomongering stuff comes later. Especially if there’s any slightly (okay, let’s say frankly) diabolical aspect to it—a hellish, Raskolnikov factor.
The fact is, if I may state so, I am demoralized, remorseful now (tepid, tepid word, but we’ll let it pass), as I find language, roaming images for my recall. My own heart lurches—as in a slim, shaky step, the airy, uncomprehending slip before the avalanche—when I think of it—this abyss, this fall from the travertine ledge—into which I have launched.
But I can’t help it, I am also amused. In this sick way, like a secret laugh beneath a hand. I’m amused by our approximal, jejune dialogue (that is what we were), our morbid, fanatical lines, the loud, ludicrous intensity of my mind’s movie, even as I note, with the background crescendo of a disheartening bass in my chest, the amoral progress of those off-kilter, off-putting scenes.