by Gina Apostol
Later, I felt that dread, that mild flush of death, when I saw the ammunition, a tidy, bunched pack.
“See this?” said Jed. “When this hits the flesh, it explodes in you, like metal batter. Let’s see: it’s called—‘the Winchester Silvertip.’ This one shatters your bones but lodges inside. This one can go right through you, if you had the right caliber. We don’t want them. They’re not the right ones; we can take one set, though, just in case. We need the ones for the machine guns, the ones that can shatter bulletproof cars. Look at these brand-new beautiful babies. You know, your uncle Gianni has the best goods among the private dealers. He really does. Did you know that? Excellent stuff. Look. Kiss that baby.”
He handled the wrapped metal with an eager gaze, an expression I recognized, that intense look he made as he pressed against my chest, for instance, his face breathing hard and finger pivoting. He caressed a loose muzzle. Watching him, his apparent thrill, was frightening, and I felt my own nipples shyly rising, a rash, favorable fit, the way I always responded to Jed.
A vague convulsion met us outside. We had to shield our eyes when we stepped out of the warehouse. As we walked out to the field, carrying our heavy bags, we heard that low, massed hum in the distance, a crowd in heat. I had to adjust a bit, coming from artificial glare into the bright sunshine of the tournament and the game’s loud abandoned noises. A deciding half was in full swing. One could tell from spectators’ cheers, vowels rising to follow this ball or that man. Our feet walked to the rhythm of their frenetic calls. The urgent expectation of victory roused the crowds (a flushed, sweetly tanned interracial mix, united by thrill) to that shrill frisson resembling passion: loud shrieks from a woman otherwise sedately dressed while she hissed, wanton moans when a ball grazed the post, and the mortal wounding notes when the enemy made its incursions, delicately balling the mouth of the goal. We stopped, dropping our bags.
Jed stood by and watched, as he had promised his friend; he became absorbed in the game, squinting and biting his lip. His large-bodied friend Pochie, blond hair now in a ponytail, was playing for Team Spain. He hogged the ball with agile greed, and then, by what seemed a trick, causing a groan in the crowd, he hit the ball into the far post—on an error from the Filipino goalie, whose chest spun on the ground, like a chagrined cow. Team Philippines lost, bad luck, the young prostitutes imported from Pasay said, shaking their heads; and the Filipinos had had control of the play for two halves, too bad; all they had needed was one lucky break, said Mang Munding. It was only Sir Pochie’s fair share, after all, muttered Al, who had bet on the man though he shook his head in disappointment, and the young women admired Pochie’s broad, bullocky thighs.
We stood there watching, Jed and I, our bags on the grass, and after a while I lay down, gauging the progress of the games from the noises of the crowd, while I closed my eyes beside Jed’s feet. I smelled the whiff of leather, grass, sweat.
There, that remnant moment, when unruly hopes still mattered and floated in the breeze, the air warm and sweet. The din was like a deep rocking, my head against our bags, wind rustling while I rearranged my shape to fit the bags’ awkward, metallic edges. That moment: hold it—a sense of utter expectation, a temporal vacuum, the act yet to be done, and our souls in pendulous sway. Nothing yet scratched on the coin of time.
I felt some febrile, exquisite contact, like a ghostly clitoral shiver: my taut breasts and soft, spread-eagled body tremulous and open to Manila’s sky. I imagine that I remember it—that lone, orgastic moment—when the future lay in wait, still innocent, eyes closed and mouth parted, breathing softly in the wind.
Part III
1
I HATE NEW YEAR’S. It’s the noise. I hate the noise. And the raucous monster celebration, the fatal sounds of the city—whenever I spent New Year’s in the city, it always depressed and enervated me: I locked myself up; I wouldn’t go out. It was as if the whole of Manila—this vulnerable, already volcanic, accidental place—were erupting into its revolution, its hoped-for radical transformation. Briefly, my heart thudding to the rage outside, I’d imagine that the grand, passionate bedlam scream, the ugly, stupefying rockets, torpedo-tortures, hand-damaging devices, et cetera, had some more momentous glamour. But, in fact, what is it? A mindless conflagration, a festive, retarded splendor—and each New Year’s debris moves Manila even more brazenly into its polluted, stupid demise. Nothing much to crow about.
I spent those days after the tournament almost tranquilly, if you could call that thoughtless, heavy torpor tranquil, in which I rarely ventured from my room and read a lot of books, one paperback after another. One green book I closed with heavy, sweating arms, with sluggish hollowness. I found these penciled words on the book flap, which I turned when I reached the end: a bland vocabulary list. “Jejune, oleograph, grisaille, Duchess of Malfi, scrofulous, milieu”—all carefully scribbled using different pens, in a terse, optimistic row. I didn’t recognize my own handwriting. I hadn’t realized that I had read the book before. I was taking books from the bookcase, one after another, and reading them with mindless passion. Briefly, looking at the list and recognizing, with a near pang, my academic, childish hand, I stopped. The pious diligence of my younger self looking up those words, “scrofulous,” “jejune.” I wondered at it, how that time was so distant—I shook my head. I took another book, and I lay there, sunk in the uncommitted rapacity of my reading, my dense soothing indolence.
It was the way it would be if one were trapped on a desert island, hard-pressed to find relief from the minute-by-minute hope of rescue, the daily distress in looking constantly for signs on the water, sounds of arrival above the trees; haunted by expectation, sure to be concluded any minute; if you could know exactly when and how and if; but instead there’s the deadly wait, and you take up a book, an object of time in itself, a measure of duration. A book holds the fitful infinity of time miserably passing.
And yet it was soothing. On the other hand. A lulling, desperate state, but comforting, the way the extreme inactivity forced on us by illness has a morbid, feculent pleasure, the drowsy miasma of languor: there’s that sensual garb, this state of malaise—a faked proximity to death—but who am I to speak of comparisons?
AT FIRST, JED said my deed was done, my part was finished. Others would take my place.
“Right now I really wish you’d stay away,” he said that day of the tournament.
Jed repeated, answering the protest on my face: “Go home with Manong Babe. Stay there. It’s best if you don’t see us after today. Do you understand? In fact, you should leave the country sooner than you planned. Aren’t you supposed to go to school? Go to school in America?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But don’t go out of your house. Stay home.” He sighed. “It’s better, really, Sol, if you leave the country.”
And then I asked, a small, petulant mistake, my voice scratchy and shrill, to the tune of the crowd’s cranky din.
“So where will Soli be in this?” I squeaked. “Will you now be seeing Soli and not me?”
I heard the pitch in my voice and was ashamed at the squawking self-pity.
I had these embarrassing visions. I understood things were coming to a head, and I had begun to have dreams—of phosphorescent snaky couplings, forest writhings. Soli and Jed, Jed and Soli. If he were not going to be with me, where would he be? I had stark, fantastic notions.
I trusted jealousy because it was always there, a sure nagging omniscience, a delicate nerve that ran parallel to the best impulses of love; in a way you could not understand, I longed, too, for my friendship with Soli, the thought of her rigid, straight back as she had left me that last day on her uncle’s jeepney still weirdly haunted me, sometimes, when I was with Jed; and at the same time I had these carious, jealous twinges, like a bad tooth I lived with and had begun to caress with pleasure. The thought of Soli, my old rival, my Doppelgänger: the first person I had envied—the thought made me miss her and hate her both.
Jed shook his head at me. “Jesus: you think only of yourself, Sol.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’ve already talked about that,” he said.
“But I don’t remember. Tell me again.”
“No,” he said harshly. “She has no idea about what we’re doing. She’s in the provinces on vacation. I told you. She has no knowledge at all. If you want to know, Soli thinks I’m an idiot. A lightweight. But she is wrong. She made clear a while ago that she wants nothing to do with me at all.”
“Are we out of bounds, Jed?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who else in the group knows about it? Is it against the rules, what we’re doing?”
“So what if it is?” he said. “We’re doing our part.”
“But for what, Jed?”
“For the country.”
AS I SAID, I kept to my rooms, dreading there would be news in the papers, some leak; but for a sinking, bookbound eternity, there was no news. Perhaps, in fact, nothing would happen. I wallowed in my bed; I didn’t get up. I kept scanning the papers. Instead, there were reports on New Year’s Eve balls; 172 dead in firecracker incidents, with the numbers rising; shopworkers in Cubao threatening to go on strike, but who cared after the Christmas binges?; proclamations of peace in the countryside, a holiday truce, with a rare endnote on a raid somewhere in a far-off village, no names mentioned. The country was in that holiday quietus of restive calm, a citizenry suddenly, almost despondently aimless, the streets still reeking of the cheap sulphur of New Year cheer. Even on my glassed-in patio, the solarium, I could hear the muffled thunder of some tail-end thrills.
I kept reading my books. I put down the volume I was reading, Evelyn James, Henry Waugh. I could barely sleep. I don’t think it was quite dawn when my phone rang. It was still dark out. Despite everything I knew, my heart fell: Would they start out so early? I lifted the phone, and I was pleased, an instant, instinctive warmth waylaid me, when I heard her voice.
“Soli? Soli, is it you? How’ve you been? It’s so good to hear from you. It’s so—so wonderful to hear from you.”
“Good. I’ve been good.”
“Where are you? Where have you been?”
“I just got back from the province. I’ve been on vacation. But, you know, I’ve been busy. There’s a strike in Cubao—you know. Stuff. But I wanted to call. There’s something—Can we see each other, Sol?”
“When? Sure. Today?”
She gave me the time and place.
“Well, actually—.” I hesitated. “I might be busy today.”
“I have to see you now. Today.”
“Then I’ll see you. Right now.”
Before we hung up, I said: “It’s so good to hear from you, Soli.”
“It is, Sol. It’s good to hear your voice. Well, I’ll see you then.”
Almost immediately after I hung up, the phone rang again.
MANONG ARMANDO STOPPED me in the garden. In the glimmering day, he was sweeping debris off fragile earthworms in the dirt path.
“No driver today, Ma’am Sol,” the gardener said. “Manong Babe still not here.”
“That’s okay. I thought you were off for the holiday? I’m just going for a jog.”
It would take days to clear away the black haze, the collected tar in the acid sky. Even now, this early in the morning, some triangle bombs boomed, like a giant’s throat clearing; it seemed to come from the village opposite, or from the tardy, abundant crop of the feeble crackpot right next door. Then a concatenated spark, rat-tat-tat-tat of the firecracker, Sinturon ni Hudas, the curt machine-gun fire of a grown-up at play. It followed me as I walked to the village’s gates. So did the rancid smell of burning rubber, favored form of ignition for homemade New Year’s bombs. New Year’s always ended with this deserted, damaged feel of war. I left the gate to descend on the rubble of the village’s backside, where a bunch of grimed kids tried to spook me with their leftover watusi, a tepid hiss that made me jump just the same. The street kids laughed and ran away when I looked behind me. Beyond the gas station, I jogged to Ah Me! Kitchenette, a shack near the highway. Lightheaded, tensile and brittle from my lack of movement during the past days, I was still trying to recover from the timorous surprise of that dumb watusi as I ran, my long-dormant, static nerves now stirring into exaggerated, jangling action. I breathed in the pungent foulness of the air, a thick clump that tickled my throat, and I coughed; simply by strolling out, one risked ingesting the temper of the city.
2
AH ME! KITCHENETTE was an open-air stall facing the highway that had only a bench before a linoleum table. Ami, the owner, I presume, bustled about plying fried bananas and boiled cakes. Dried mackerel and fish balls. Pungent takeaways I could not stand. Soli sat on the bench in full view. She waved at me, drinking 7-Up from a straw in a transparent, plastic bag.
Ami offered me a 7-Up, pouring another botttle into plastic before I could speak, and I was left there, my arm arrested, holding the murky bag.
We sat with the rumble of the highway gathering its potential on this groggy morning: motorcycles sputtered in the distance. Our feet dangled over the street’s neatly swept trash. No one else was around. We seemed the only people awake that morning in sulphurous Makati.
“I don’t see him anymore. I don’t know where he is,” I said. I crossed my fingers behind me, sweat rising, I thought, from her question. I watched the 7-Up slosh in my dangling hand.
“But where does he live? No one seems to be able to tell me.”
“You really don’t know?” I asked.
Soli shook her head.
I gave her an address. Pasay. Punta. Something like that. Places we never went.
“I’ll look for him if you won’t,” she said. “I can’t believe the stories.”
“Then they’re probably not true,” I said.
I felt like a fool, waiting for her revelation.
“I hope so. I hope it’s just a rumor. It’s so ridiculous, Sol. I couldn’t believe the idea. It can’t be sanctioned at all. I heard rumors when I got back. It must be just gossip. It’s a plain, criminal act. Sheer adventurism.”
“What are you talking about? What’s the rumor?”
“Nothing is clear. I think Jed is planning something—something stupid. People used to laugh about it—his adventurist streak. I used to worry. The story going around is: He’s hanging out with the wrong people. They call them red freaks. The people I know think it’s a joke. But you know I’ve been thinking—my God, he’s going after the Secretary, his father’s friend.”
“The Secretary?”
And I dropped it. I dropped the bag.
I watched with relief as it broke open in a puddle on the street.
Soli knew absolutely nothing.
“Do you know anything about it?” Soli demanded.
“The Secretary? No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I hope you have no hand in anything Jed’s doing.”
I didn’t speak.
She sighed. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“What?”
She looked at me, smiling at me in her old maternal way: “‘What?’ You’re always saying ‘what?’ I shouldn’t have recruited you. That’s what.”
“It wasn’t you,” I said. “I went to the meetings on my own. It was my decision. I wanted to be a part.”
“At first, it was Edwin’s idea,” she went on, seeming not to listen, looking at her still-life hands. “When I told him who you were, a gun dealer’s daughter, the daughter of Queenie Kier
ulf Soliman, a famous lady in my hometown, he thought it would be smart to know you. Just in case you could be useful. I saw your name on the roster, next to mine, and I told him who you were. Jed, you know—well, he corroborated my rumor. Anyway, Edwin thought it would be good to get to know you. And so I sought you out. And when I began to know you, I liked you. You listened so seriously to Ka Noli. You asked the right questions at the lectures. You took it all in. And I honestly thought it was worth it for you—the lectures, the study, seeing more of the countryside, thinking about history. It’s important that everyone should understand—even people like you. Sorry to be so blunt. That’s what I think. I don’t agree with the narrow-minded bullshit of the cadres. Everyone should be on our side. We can all join in our own ways. I thought it was good for you: to see other kinds of people, know how they lived. I mean, you didn’t even know how to use public transportation! Edwin told me not to recruit you, in the end, but I disagreed. I thought I was right. But I guess I wasn’t.” She caught how I was staring at her. “It’s okay if you hate me,” she said.
“Hate you? It’s I who should ask forgiveness.”
“For seeking you out like that—”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry,” I said suddenly. “I’m really sorry about Jed.”
I finally said it. I said it in a burst, an exhalation.
She shook her head. “No. No. No. It’s all right. All under the bridge. You know, of course, I didn’t feel like this then. Though it’s funny: I never blamed you.”
“Yeah. I’m too dumb to even think about.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be silly.” She raised her eyes: “If I could just know for sure that it isn’t true—that the story I hear is wrong—”
“I wanted to be a part,” I said.
“Useful fool.” She sighed.
“What?”
“U.F. Useful fool. It’s a term they used.” Soli shook her head. “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have sought you out.”