by Gina Apostol
6
WHEN THE NEWS was splashed in the papers, the household saw nothing amiss. I had sat in bed for days reading books and speaking to no one; and I believed that when my mother saw my mood, she announced in her prim, moderating way, her lips pursed: “You know, it’s a good thing you are going to America. Maybe you should leave right now, right this minute. That university was never a good place for you.”
Or at least that’s what I think she said through a drowsy din.
Surreptitious activity had been going on in my rooms. People were still packing me away. As I read one book after another, I knew that, in the background, action was in full swing—stacking, buying, delivering, whispering. They were crating me off at last into the world of my mother’s choosing. All the details of my person—my wits, clothing, desires, sports equipment, books—were being arranged and assembled for dispatch abroad, all of the things my mother determined I wished to carry. A new life was on order, a whole catalog of freedoms. I knew there was something amiss in this, I couldn’t put my finger to it. I was too preoccupied, impotent and distracted, to find out what it was. Old Manang Maring was out, emerging from the caverns of her retired rooms, hobbling about with her obliterated, white eye for remnants of my closets, knickknacks and accessories, all of which people were trying to sneak out from beneath my glassy gaze—with all the stealth of dump trucks. Ever since Manang Maring had gone in her middle age to Saudi, to try her bad luck abroad, she’d been displaced from her position as my yaya; but on her return, damaged in one eye, her superfluous presence led to these inconvenient attentions, her blind fawning over me.
To compensate for her role in my departure, Manang Maring strictly followed my old daily routine—the routine of my childhood. As if receding into the past would keep my spirits up. In the morning, toast, fruit and orange juice on a breakfast table lay outside my room. Milk. Stuffed animals propped on my bed. Coffee and cookies at eleven. Manang Maring gave my final schedule the exacting touches of a distinct farewell—offering my meals with the silence and respect given to condemned prisoners. Newspapers had been added to the breakfast tray early on in my career as house brat, as well as selected book reviews and magazines. And I read the papers she offered, dismissing the loyal old woman with hardly a wave.
I was riveted, holding on to the news, orange juice in hand and head stiffened toward the portent of what I read; the slightly intolerable acidic aftertaste of the juice nicked at my gorge, and I felt that critical bitterness curl up my gut, a citric burp. I don’t think my hands shook, but neither did my brains work, except to exhale solemnly and read. I read the news and can’t say I was horrified; although I felt, strangely, a kind of surprise: in the mundane way the completion of a story, no matter how predictable, has in it a gross, goose-bump value. And at the same time I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t see it: the congruence between what we had planned and the gory surplus of this story. Drinking orange juice, back in my pajamas, I didn’t see the chain of these events, what I knew versus what I read, as coherent and clearly following. And then, devouring the papers and looking for word in the evening news, I slowly came to this revelation.
It had nothing to do with me.
In my bustling, unseeing house, against the pillows of my raised, flowered bed, my Roald Dahl wallpaper and velveteen toys, I didn’t have any hand in it, I had no signature in this grisly, premeditated evil. Not the smooth down of my sheets, nor the comforting silence of the air conditioner, nor the careful imprint of my initials all across my beautiful walls, nor the pulp of fresh, peeled fruit held any witness or connection to the pocked, shattered glass, the riddled bulletproof saloon, hubcaps spattered but all in place, and the inert body barely visible in the report, next to the square inset photograph of the murdered man in better times, bulb-nosed and younger, fat-cheeked, unsmiling, and wearing a Yankees baseball cap.
And so it was that as I discovered more and more about the case—the vicious caliber of the guns, which the Americans themselves knew (so it was reported) could overpower the not-so-dependable panels of their cars (the windows were bulletproof, but the car’s body was not, knowledgeable kibitzers said, without providing sources); the unique awful boldness of the enterprise (“the first direct attack against an American official in the Philippines since the Filipino-American war!” yelled a yellow editorial); the atypical character of the arms (brand-new Western-bloc weapons in a country with proliferating second-rate arms); the apparent youthfulness of the suspects; the lack of reliable witnesses (an incoherent Metro sweeping aide; a mute monkey); the arcane, complicated details of the American operation LOTUS that seeped into the arena of public consciousness—(“created under the RP-US assistance pact on March 21, 1947, paid for by the Philippine government to advise the armed forces on military matters,” the foreign agency, in its turn, had “a reputation for excellent beef, imported cigarettes, wine, chocolates, and bingo where dollars were at stake”—a kind of “Animal House of a diplomatic home,” with “real-live dirty dancing”)—the more I read, the more I recognized my separation and distance, the improbability of my connivance with the event. I was not a part. I was, as Edwin prophesied, irrelevant; events rumbled on without any hint of my aspect in them, no sign of my acts.
But even beyond that (the no-less-dire footnotes, on the op-ed pages, of blame and suspicion and paranoia), there was that curious mental distraction that I felt: like a vehicle careering mindlessly, without brakes or rear-wheel drive, on a guileless track, dangerously unconnected to the pavement. Instead, I read with an outsider’s calm and even with a thrill for ghastly happenings, the Metro Manilan’s lust for squalid detail.
Predictably, on television, in a repetitive, irritating refrain, the commander in chief, generals of the armed forces, the minister of defense and other individuals proclaimed the urgent investigation of the horrific case. The Secretary, in a rare national appearance, declared: “The killing has brought a new dimension to the guerrilla war!” People asked, looking at Mr. Esdrújula, “And who’s he?”
Most important: vigilante groups with brand-new guns were mobilizing toward the city, in preparation for an urban war. A massive arms movement was beginning, shifting government priorities from peace escapades to wartime plans. Before the Colonel’s blood was dry, the president demanded money for counterinsurgent funds; and no doubt lawmakers would rubber-stamp his cry.
The next day, letters to the editor demanded speedy results; parliament made terrifying promises. Of course, out came from their prehistoric lairs squawking pro-America hacks and Christian charlatans who denounced the perfidy of fellow Filipinos, the soullessness of the decade and even of the millennium, and our failure thus to win the honor of becoming the fifty-first American state—an embarrassing chorus of hysteria.
On the other hand, in equally raucous, dyspeptic tones, sibilant voices in a left-leaning daily gloated over this just murder of a murderer, as they called him, tit for tat in the tide of time, a surprising but suitable casualty in the increasingly brutal war against insurgents; and on their part they denounced the military and the dictator for their share in the blood, while editorials and feature articles explored in jubilant detail the ironies in the death of an American warmonger.
Colonel Grier had posthumous fame as a schizophrenic man. On one hand, his general, speaking from the hospital where his mortal frame was wearing him out, his frail, plaster-of-Paris heart, said, his head shaking in grief: “And to think he had come to help the Filipino people in their efforts to defend democracy.” The U.S. military attaché spoke in a ceremony: “He was a brave man who served his country well.” A wealthy expatriate, a suntanned Italian, offered the reward of a $200,000 watch for information on the crime.
On the other hand, a list of the Colonel’s talents was alleged in the press. “Sponsored low-intensity conflicts . . . an instructor at the School of the Assassins in Fort Bragg . . . projects sowing confusion and conflict in rebel-taken areas . . . CAFGU was his brainchild . . . proposed and trained head-hunting vigil
antes . . . Alsa Masa, Bantay Bayan . . . troops that gouged the eyes of children after they were killed . . . littered the countryside with Garands and carbines . . . dead women . . . dead children, their severed heads . . .”
There was a deadlock in opinion. A public relations strategic stalemate, so to speak.
No one was surprised when, two days into the investigation, names of suspects cropped up in the news like so much grain separated from chaff—unpolished, raw grains of facts, for sure, with earth and moldering aphids still fresh on them, so that the actual ripeness of the details was unclear, and maybe, who knows, they had just popped from a rash mill of evidence and incrimination; but the names were published nevertheless. No one was surprised at the swift results. Everyone knew that the police, when they wished, could ferret out any sort of criminal with just the right push and shove; it had long been said that, for the constabulary, Metro Manila was such a tightly knit community that each criminal and civilian barely bore the proverbial six degrees of separation.
However, as I said, the released names seemed more like bait than the result of careful investigation. And in fact, in the news stories, they may as well have been lines of dirt, for all they mattered to the public; there were no figures, no human notations to the names. No one cared much about the details. Shock was all.
Jared Tango, also known as Simon; Ching Byun Co, no alias; Soltera Solidum. In one report, the suspect was said to be Joaquin “Wack Wack” Mongo; in another, all three parts of his name were held out, as if manipulating the alphabet were a police tactic: Jet Migra, alias Riverside; in one, more cheekily, he was Jack de Morgue. They were curious, unsettling, these revelations. In my mind, he seemed to dart from one hiding place to another, an anagrammatic fugitive taking refuge under the finite resources of his name. And it was not clear, now or then, if this scrambling were journalistic error or an ingenious police tactic: if, somewhere in a piss-flavored precinct, the name had, in fact, already been conjured, and it was a curious, problematic puzzle. An actual Morga. Fancy that.
I didn’t think about this as much as I wished that the errors were, I hoped, providential—and so the interstitial Jed running through the phonemic gamble would not be caught. I began to look at the changing names and find in them clues to the investigation. I imagined that the early vagrancy of diphthongs was a good sign, “oa” interchangeable with “ue”; and I appreciated, with a lurch in my heart, the introduction of middling, superfluous syllables late in the game; as I read paper after paper, the uncorrected spellings and distracting vowels foolishly made me happy. As his name remained enigmatic and, in fact, receded in the limelight, as revelations and developments occurred, I felt justified in my pale fantasy of his safety, secure as Jed was in his obscurity, as far as I could tell—and, perhaps, we all could be truly absolved because the right morphemes of our names remained unknown.
I saw the fallacy of my belief—the cunning of the naming game. When events were replayed ad nauseam and holy masses were scheduled to be prayed, and I must admit I was not so clear-eyed or pronounced so healthy myself—the precise question that occurred to me was: why was it, of all the names, that these ones in question seemed changed so cleverly—so full of art?
In subsequent reports, the girl was said to be unknown; in others, she was called Sally; in many, she was not mentioned at all. In a torrent of factual fancy, in serpentine moltings of S’s, she was Selena, Semilla, Solidaridad, Sonrisa. And the last name’s vagaries had a certain wit. Soli-Man. Sole-Dad. But they never got it right.
However, even then I felt (admittedly under the influence of some medically noted wild glandular disease) that there was logic in the error—somehow, the rampant dysgraphia, the frank misnaming, held in itself a clue: though it was a lead I was better off not following.
AS I SAID, even as my thoughts wandered, developments occurred. Details jumbled out within hours. The papers gave a name to a suspected sect of left-wing bandits. Some clunky revolutionary acronym, based on variations of the terms “urban defense elite hit squads” or “miserable red adventurists with fancy, stolen guns,” depending on how you looked at it. Urban Sparrow Unit: fancy name for nameless fowls. Raids were made on different groups, including a church headquarters peacefully ensconced near the scene of the crime. A Catholic bishop denounced the police’s actions. Police surprised a bunch of students in a movie house. Arrests were made. A student was released; mistaken identity, it was proved; plus, her father turned out to be a congressman, and the student herself, an innocuous economics major with walrus cheeks, was only a dabbler in a campus rag. She’d never even joined a march. The police were clutching at straws.
Should I have laughed when I read the descriptions of the gang in the newspapers? They were “highly trained urban guerrillas, an elite group within the red army.” They had “planned the action months in advance,” patrolling the headquarters of LOTUS using unsuspicious lookouts such as an old Chinese chauffeur, Ching Byun Co, also known as—
Should I have laughed? When Manang Maring came in to work that day, she was in such hysterics that I thought her Saudi Arabian–induced injury had finally kicked in and shown its last, damaging blows. She was heaving and crying in spastic commotion, her blind white eye emitting tears that looked eerie, because they seemed rootless, pouring from a void. Her vast breasts shook in miserable, self-conscious despair, as she spoke in tongues, a mixture of Waray, Tagalog, English, and the gastric residue of her chorizo-and-garlic-rice breakfast.
“Calm down, Maria, calm down,” my mother said impatiently when we entered the kitchen to catch the reason for the excitement.
I had been startled away from my cup of coffee by the early morning noise. All the packing was done and epiphany was at hand: only one more day, and I was set to leave for America. I’ll be honest: at that point, I wished to go.
I climbed down to the kitchen—I had yet to finish my newspaper.
“Oh, Madame, Madame,” Manang Lita the cook, always the reasonable one, looked at us with her grave, wide eyes, her stare cluing us in on the degree of the tragedy. The more serious the matter, the less emotion registered in Manang Lita’s eyes.
Manang Maring was still gibbering, whispering names and sorrows. Servants were huddled around her, a few with charged, red-eyed sentiment, going to and fro, from the medicine cabinet to the refrigerators, fetching and carrying things.
“Lita, what is it?” my mother said sharply. “You tell us. Is Maria having a stroke? Should she see a doctor? Why did she come to work if she needed to see a doctor? I told her not to go to that Saudi, but does anyone listen to me? It has damaged her brains. Not that there was much to destroy. Maring never listened to me. I told her what would happen if she ever worked in Riyadh. What is going on? Lita, you tell me.”
All of us, the maids and the houseboys and the gardener and the other driver and I, waited for Lita, who calmly wiped Maring’s face, ordering a girl to return a bucket of ice to the cooler as she did so. When Maring was calmer, reverting to sighs and sipping a glass of water, she looked almost satisfied by the attention. Lita spoke to us.
“It’s not about her,” Lita said finally. “It’s not about Maring. It’s about Manong Babe.”
“About Babe?” my mother said. “They found him then?”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
My mother continued: “Well, if he’s back, then what is she going on about? What’s the problem with Maring?”
Maring started sighing again, falling apart on someone’s shoulder. She started to wail. One of the kitchen maids giggled. The gardener Armando, on the edge of the crowd, silenced the girl with a rap on her scalp. Another woman started moaning, turning away from the rest.
Lita said: “She was with his family this morning. They finally found him.”
My mother was listening, nodding her head.
“So where did he go? Did they find him drunk somewhere?”
“Babe doesn’t drink,” piped up the gardener.
“Ssh,” they all said to him.
“No, Madame,” answered Lita.
“So tell us, Lita. Come on. Why is she shaking like that?”
Servants were holding on to Maring, who moaned dramatically at this point in the story. The others stood by watching, some sniffling with a distinct choral fade, and all listening with my intentness and curiosity, ranged before me with the look of my own stupefied face.
“Madame, he is dead.”
At this Manang Maring shrieked, wailing: “I saw him, I saw him, I saw him, I saw him.”
“Manong Babe?” I said. “But I just saw him.”
“No, I saw him, I saw him,” contradicted Maring.
“But I just saw him a few days ago. At the tournament. He took me there and drove me home.”
“Ma’am Sol, that is more than one week ago,” explained Armando. He started counting: “Día de los Inocentes—’Cember twenty-eight, thirty—eight days ago. After that day, he has disappeared. I also saw him too. When he drove you back: it is the last day of his appearance.”
“You haven’t been out of your room since then, Sol,” my mother said. “You’re leaving for college tomorrow. Everyone knows that. You locked yourself in your room since the last day of the tournament. Isn’t that right?”
The servants nodded.
“Everyone here has been witness. You never left your room. We have been packing your bags for your departure for America. We have been planning your departure. Everyone knows that, isn’t that right? But Manong Babe sadly disappeared. Didn’t you know, Sol?”
“No one told me.”
“And you know, his name has been in the papers. I wondered about that. Do you know that, Lita?”
Lita shook her head.
“See, no one noticed,” my mother said triumphantly, as if that fact meant something. “It doesn’t mean anything, maybe,” she said hurriedly. “But his name was in the papers yesterday, you know, in that horrid news about the Colonel, God bless his soul. Not that I thought it was Manong Babe, any Chinese person could have the name Co, Ching Moon Co. But you know he’s been missing, and it occurred to me, but I knew it must be a typogrammatical error, no one can trust those journalists, they’re illiterate. And you know what, inday, I thought I saw the name of your friend, the dark one with the kinky hair? Sally. Sally Soledad. I thought it was her name. It’s sad. She’s an activist. And who knows who those foolish, crazy devils are who killed the Colonel, God have mercy on his soul, but Manong Babe could not have been part of their plot. Still, it was a sad coincidence, I thought about it just the same. To see his name in the papers. But the police know, sure they do. They’ll get to the bottom of it.”