by Gina Apostol
“What is the matter with you, Sol?”
She waved her hand at me as she came forward, the other gesturing toward the maids as if she were puzzled, asking them to explain my words. It’s as if they all had been put on mute. A girl in a corner began shaking without words, and now even the gardener looked wan, at a loss. Reina Elena strode up to the stairs where I stood; as she came close, she looked as if she were going to hit me, her arm raised and face taut, her hair about my face. Instead, she hissed at me, whispering, her eyes flashing dangerously: “Servants are with us, Sol: are you mad?”
“That’s why I speak. Let someone hear!”
I was horrified by my mother’s question.
“You know who stole the guns from your warehouse, Ma. You know who took the guns away to New Manila. You know it wasn’t Manong Babe. He had nothing to do with it. Do you hear me, Manang Lita? Manong Armando? What did you do to Manong Babe, Ma? What did you do to him?”
I heard my voice sing horridly, a wild, vague pitch. I have never been good at confrontations.
“Leave her!” my mother announced to everyone. “She’s having a fit again. She’s going crazy again. It’s her old sickness. Call Doctora Varona, Lita. Armando, you tell Sergio to drive everyone to Babe’s house. I will follow. I have to call the doctor. Go, go, all of you. I’ll deal with Sol. She needs her medicine. I’ll deal with her.”
Some kept standing around, but Armando herded them out.
“Go!” said my mother. They scuttled out of the doorway except for Lita.
“You know who did it, Ma,” I wailed, my tears streaming. “You know who stole your guns. You know who killed the Colonel. They’re blaming all the wrong people, Ma.”
My mother slapped me in the face.
“Ingrata!”
I hobbled under her attack, and it was she who held me up. She shook me and I cowered as she moved again to strike my face. I stumbled on the staircase, almost falling against her as I did.
“Silence, Sol, silence! What will I do with you? Shut up! Idiot! Ingrata! After all we do for you, this is what I get? We work hard all our lives for you—and this is what we get? Lita! What are you staring at? Get away from here! I told you to get the doctor—get away!”
Lita looked frightened. She hurried from the room.
I watched Manang Lita retreat.
Now the massive Chinese vase alone witnessed our intentions.
I took a step down and in doing so tripped against my mother. She held me to her.
“Inday”—I heard her in my ear—“you have to leave us.”
My mother’s mascara had dribbled onto her cheek and on her shoulder. I felt on my arms her damp flesh and smelled the rich, enfeebling scent of her perfume. Her brittle hair brushed against me: a soft, scented scratch.
She was whispering, a wet, hot wind in my ear: “It’s the only way, Sol; you are safe right now. That’s what Pa says. But you have to leave us. They are looking. They have to go after them.”
“Who?”
“They have to go after the murderers. Your father knows most of the men in the investigation. I mean, he knows their bosses. Thank God for that. The Secretary is in charge. He knows you could not have been a part: he knows you had nothing to do with it. You did not go near the Colonel. Everyone in the house is a witness: you stayed in your room. You never went out. Everyone is a witness. But justice is needed, the Secretary says. The Colonel—he’s an important man, inday, you have no idea who he was. A Vietnam vet. An American hero. A P.O.W. The Americans need justice. That’s what the Secretary says. You have to leave. You are all packed away. Uncle Gianni knows where to go. Uncle Gianni will take you.”
“What did you do to Manong Babe?”
“If he became a witness against you, heaven forbid—if they ever got hold of him and he could say where you had been—”
“What did you do to Manong Babe?”
My mother looked like a child, a child hurt in the mud, her mascara clinging to her lips. “He told Pa everything. I don’t know—he told Pa.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“When?”
“When we learned the guns were gone!”
“But how did you know?”
My mother looked confused.
“I don’t know. Ask Pa. Manong Babe told him. He told Pa everything he knew.”
“He didn’t know anything,” I cried. “You know he didn’t know anything. He knew nothing, Ma. If you knew the guns were stolen, why didn’t you stop us? If Manong Babe told you about us, why did you let us do it? Why did you let us do it if you knew?”
She said, her eyes suddenly gleaming, as if the information would give her more credit in my eyes: “It was your Uncle Gianni—”
“What?”
“He said, he said—”
“What?” I felt a low, bunched fever in my gut: a keening in my womb.
“Why, the Colonel had to go, of course,” my mother exclaimed. “One way or the other, Gianni said, he had to go. He was not following the plan.”
I stared dumbly at my mother.
“He had to go. He was bad for business, Gianni said. He had to go.”
I looked at her.
“You used us,” I said. “You knew about us all along.”
“No, inday. No. I did not know. I did not know what you were doing.”
“Pa knew?”
“When I learned what had happened—I did not know what to do. Gianni knew. Gianni knew what we should do.”
“So who picked up Manong Babe?”
“I don’t know, inday. Events were so quick—”
“Who picked him up?”
“He knew too much. He told Pa everything when Pa confronted.”
“No, he didn’t. He knew nothing.”
“Pa said. He could be picked up—he’d give everyone’s name—the Americans could get hold of him—Gianni said—Pa said. You know Babe always followed you, everywhere you went. That was his job. And Babe—Babe told Pa everything he knew. Events moved so fast—inday, they had to decide—they did not know if they should let him go or make him—”
“But he was innocent.”
“I know.”
One can imagine how one weeps, keening and choking and rocking—like the wild, old river itself—against my mother, who held me to her, as in the old days, my gangly body in her lap.
“I want to know what happened to Soli, Ma. Find Soli, Ma. She’s missing.”
My mother was crying, holding me tight in her arms, rocking me back and forth, whispering, sobbing: “I didn’t know what to do, Sol. I really didn’t understand. I kept thinking, night and day, every day, ever since it happened: we have to find a way. I thought I should go mad.” She whispered: “They found her at the scene of the crime, Sol.”
“No they didn’t, Ma.”
“She was there. She was part of the plot. She was with Jed.”
“She didn’t know where they were, Ma. I gave her the wrong address.”
My mother hugged me, softly moaning.
“You know where she is, Ma. You know what happened to Soli.”
My mother whispered: “They have picked her up in Cubao. She has papers on her, incriminating evidence. She is a ringleader of the Urban Sparrows. She has books, everything. Notebooks and money. She is full-time in the underground. They have found out all the clues.”
“In a rattling can.”
“They have evidence. She is part of the plot.”
“No she isn’t, Ma, you know she isn’t, Ma.”
“They also know about Jed.”
“What happened to Jed?”
“Don Mariano took him away. Don’t worry. He’s safe. He’s gone away. His father made him go.”
“Jed is gone?”
“He wanted to go to jail, you know—he was going to turn himself in, the fool—but Don Mariano organized everything. Thank God for Don Mariano. He knew exactly what to do. He acted fast, before they could come for Jed. You have to go. T
hey could get you, too, even though they are not looking for you. They know you were not a part.”
“But Soli?”
She rocked me on the stairway, and faintly on the green sheen of the Chinese vase I could see our vague, rustling reflections, an inextricable pattern of faint, moving shadows.
“They need justice,” said my mother, murmuring. “They need suspects. They need Soli. She’s so obvious. So perfect. Don’t you see? Because even the police—even the police are confused. Because, inday,” she whispered, as if she could barely speak it, “even the police keep confusing your names.”
10
WORDS HEAP UP, descriptions. Rumor.
Vicious terrible news.
A shootout. A hunt for the killers, the Sparrow Queen. Found dead in an ambush. In a hideout among cadres in the countryside. All part of the plot. Jubilation in the papers: The suspects all accounted for. The missing found.
But what were the rumors?
The city whispered in the event’s wake.
Examination of suspect’s body revealed—. Rubber, paper, grass, glass—. A ruptured womb. Metallic trash—.
Stop.
Hand-to-mouth rumor was all we had, impoverished, garbled stories. An inexperienced hangman. Newly trained recruits. Counterinsurgency gangs. What were they called? Alsa Masa? Bantay Bayan? Rough, untutored hands. As if that explained horror. The glutinous grays of the newspaper photographs. Gnarled narra hands, the color of mahogany. Soiled wrapper of dead fish. Rumors, like a drug, roaming with all the openness of strangers, of people who didn’t know her. Details wandered, like bad dreams, by word of mouth, striking listeners pale, inducing insomnia, miscarriages, despair.
My mother crying in the green glaze, the sobs that shattered a porcelain vase.
Stop.
HULLABALLOO IN THE hallway. A stampede of servants. The knives were sharp, but they had no feeling. They did not hurt, and I watched the blood ooze, a dark batik dye, and I was surprised. Hang yourself, you will regret it. I slashed it again to feel the pain. I felt none. I cut my flesh. Again and again. There was nothing. Nothing I could feel.
11
UNCLE GIANNI MET the girl at Nice Airport. A cold day: early January. He held her hand as light bulbs flashed. Revise that: not hand. By the sleeve. He held her by the sleeve, gently. On closer inspection, one might note her slightly discordant figure. Something awkward about her arms. Bandaged, gauzed lump of hands. The girl does not raise her head.
A cordon held curious onlookers at bay, and a film crew, Gallic and impervious, skinny, tilting men in black, strode about the cleared path. The girl, dark and gawky, a lanky adolescent, moved along the cleared-up space of this orchestrated welcome, following the straight line of a utility rope. A blond gaffer on his knees, a gofer pulling tape from the floor. “A commercial,” Uncle Gianni muttered. She shivered as a door blew open. A lightbulb blinded her. A murmured rush toward something behind—a lady walking a dog, or a lame man with a parasol? Her myopic eyes distinguished someone’s fleshy elbows; or was that a leash? Uncle Gianni tightened his grip and, almost dragging her by an armpit, moved quickly along. And in a cutting room somewhere, freeze-framed, on the margins of a black-clad crowd posing to sell condoms or perfume, the girl’s stricken face looks down, denying evidence of its arrival, gaunt-cheeked and hollow-eyed.
No questions asked, no thoughts pursued. Olive groves are medicinal. I walked the wharf, noting names and origins, boats from Guernsey and Oporto. One was a namesake: blue and sunless Sol. Evenings we walked around the town, up the Haut Castelet, where a writer had pursued a novel in exile. It was my second escape. I wished to live.
In those endless hours, we waited for news of final reprieve, waited for some nameless storm to pass, an impasse beyond my grasp—and the daily spell of the light of France followed our false steps. By a town’s rocky, leisurely ramparts we caught the Mediterranean, true and changing and pensively woven by the sun that favored it. The light of Antibes. It lay at the corner, it lies in my eye—at the end of a tunnel, it beckons. It was at the end of my walk down the cobbled streets, dog shit mingling with the sea breath of mussels and the vagrant malingering herbs; and at the end, the ancient light welcomed us, the harrowing, gentle hue of France. Beauty for its own sake is said to be terrible: and I strode under it, its blind-eyed benediction, its luminous and golden myrrh.
12
I’M THE SAME size I was when I was a teenager; I take after my mother in that way. Downstairs, they are installing a new gym—hauling out the trash in the basement, dismantling the ancient bowling alley. A thing I slightly regret. But my mom says, you need a new gym, inday. Endorphins. Exercise. She has a new guru, a yogini, from Canberra or Katmandu. One day, I think I would like to jog to the river. I would like to volunteer as a docent at the local museum. I have stopped playing soccer. My doctors say my body is healthy, aerobic, but my mind—it has a mumbling sense of time. Even now I fancy taking courses, maybe special topics in art history, some day. One day I hope to pursue a degree—but something in me fails. I have a fickle brain. Infrequent bursts of interest—in obscure, petty corners of history, in languages, in numismatics, in entomology. I have a string of names on my tongue. Pigafetta. Elagabalus. Magellan. I have many bits of knowledge, like little red ants up my sleeve. But my mind turns. I lose interest, my attention dribbles. I get headaches. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes, I dream. My dreams are innocuous. Nothing fancy. He sits at a table, drinking coffee. Or I see his figure walking toward me, that detached gaze. In one dream, we talk about gazebos.
OTHERWISE, I KEEP to myself. I write things down when I get news. Despite the lack of change in my looks, people who have known me might stare. They might not be able to place me even though I look the same.
I keep to myself in the room with the oriel window. It has a view of the glittering river. The river is framed by stucco pomegranates against a marble ledge. I keep in a pile the drafts of the past, copies and revisions. I am still looking. I still search for it, the rattling can of memory.
I keep asking them, my doctors: how can it be anterograde amnesia when I have recalled with words everything—absolutely everything that has happened, including the terms for herbs and the shine of someone’s shoes?
The senile doctor looks down, for his misplaced shoe (he’s taken it off, as he does when he pretends to listen, and I can see it peeking under the Persian carpet’s tassels, but I do not bother to help). He looks up at me, bringing a hand to his mouth as he clears his throat.
Uhum, he says. Uhuh.
His throat hoards phlegm, his entire body is a miserable sac of endless sputum, and I watch him, his throat-clearing and his shoe-hunting, the geriatric maneuvers of his jerky limbs.
Repetition—he repeats—casting his blind foot about—repetition—
Yes, doctor, I know. Repetition is the site of trauma.
Your memory, he coughs—and his foot at last finds his target, in tandem with one tremendous spume.
He completely loses it, spazzing into his papers.
I wait patiently as he settles back into his sedate wingback chair, pretending nothing has happened.
Uhum, he croaks.
I twiddle my thumbs. I watch a pale moth in the room, the color of a croissant, resting on a notepad, like a parchment shadow.
“You have a great memory for the past, Sol,” the doctor says. “But remember, it is the present tense we are working on. For years, you have fully elaborated your past in your work with me, telling your story in so many words; but I hope you have finished, I am glad you have put that story in a box after all these years. You have been working on a long-ago six-month period—a traumatic episode consisting of one hundred ninety days—and you have persisted, quite valiantly I must say, remembering what is obviously painful to recall. But you perseverate. You circle around a sore, the same incidents, the same scenes, the same details. You hover around your scars. We have gone through this before. Your amnesia, as you know, is
of the anterograde type. You recall only trauma. It is a mental self-punishment. You do not exist productively in the present.”
I am looking at my thumbs. My clasped hands cradle them against my chest. They are going around and around, chasing each other and not touching, around and around against my chest.
“Sol! Are you listening?”
The moth on the notepad, crouching, does not stir.
“Language, for instance, Sol—you found a way to tell your story—with all those words—but do you see? It has mired you in your trauma. Your story is a poison pill—do you understand? And you keep eating it up—your toxic trauma. It is true, Sol, that language is all we have to tell our story. That may be so. But you can see where the tragedy lies. It is a paradox at the heart of our human mystery perhaps. Words are all we have to save us, but at the same time, they are not enough to make us whole.”
My thumbs are stuck. The right, moving clockwise, is now raised above the left, moving counterclockwise, and each is in its frozen current, waiting for the signal.
“Sol! Do you hear me? You must try to move forward, instead of backward, in time. Your present tense is uncomplicated, lacking in intuition and insight. You do not relate to yourself or to others in the present. Only the past has meaning. Which is sad. You must try harder, Sol, to find peace.”
And the doctor drags out the rest of his hiding shoe, puts his foot into it, then snaps his notebook shut.
The moth flies away, and my thumbs rest.
LET ME TELL you. I have the fortune to receive some news.
My old acquaintance, Sally Vega, has found me. She is a famous artist. She wrote me some weeks ago, and then she telephoned. She is in Manhattan, she said, for a show.
I tell Eremita my news calmly.
I am taking a train to the city, I say.
Inocentes, the wise one, shakes his head at the thought.
“Ma’am Sol,” he says, “are you sure?”
“You are a dwarf, Inocentes: that is why the city scares you. I am not the same as you. My health has returned. I am well now, you know.”
The stunted man, his beard always stubbly in the morning, beams and raises his thumb, for victory.