by Gina Apostol
Eremita’s shoulders are shaking, and she hides her face from me.
“What’s so funny, Victoria? You are always giggling like that.”
Inocentes stares innocently at both of us.
“What’s so funny?” I repeat. “Are you laughing at me again, Victoria?”
“Ma’am Sol, no. No, I am not. It is just that you are calling him Inocentes again. His name, ma’am—his name is Pete!”
One of the nurses, a wiry Dominican, volunteers to take me. I let her. Anyhow, I do not drive. We drive to the station, toward the river. I am surprised to find it is there: the silver river from my picture window. I am happy, I am shaken by its generous welcome, by the way the water beckons to me.
I sit crying by the river’s brown bank.
The nurse takes me by the hand.
There, there, she said. It’s just the Hudson. You’ve seen it before.
Pretty, isn’t it? I love this train ride—a view of beauty, just for us, all the way into Manhattan.
I nod.
A man leaves the newspaper when he gets out.
That’s when I point to the picture.
Who’s that?
The nurse starts giggling in her seat, she cannot stop.
“Oh, Miss Sol,” she says finally, sobering up. “That’s the president. That is President Barack Obama. Don’t you remember we watched his inauguration?”
But he’s black, I say.
Isn’t that great? Change has happened in America.
But he should be careful, I say, concerned. He could be lynched.
Again, the nurse starts rocking in her seat, sputtering as if she cannot stop.
“Oh, Miss Sol. You are so funny.”
A wasp is flying right next to me, by my shoulder against the glass, its wings parallel to the Hudson. I watch its shadow buzz. Buzz buzz buzz, buzzing right beside me. My shoulders are stiff and alert, all the way into the city. Buzz buzz buzz. It keeps buzzing at me, its hairy haunches stuck on the glass.
WHEN WE GET to the city, I am confused, frightened. I feel dizzy. It is full of people. The nurse steers me to a waiting taxi, and we slam the door so I can sit in my darkness. I close my eyes against the city. I cannot breathe.
We go to the park. It is where we shall meet, Sally Vega and I. At the park by the carousel, she said.
I know it, says the nurse. First you pass the Balto dog, then you go through a tunnel, then you see a big playground, recently fixed. If you turn right, you will miss it, and you will be among the skaters.
But we will find it, she says confidently. I always visit with my niece.
If only it did not have any people, this park could be pretty.
I watch the city with my eyes half-closed, watchful of rising trees, tiring flowers, horrifying gigantic rocks. Is there nothing that this park does not shelter? Badminton games, naked women, squat squirrels and greedy chipmunks, random ducks and rolling dancers, an entire softball game on its moors? I stop in my tracks.
What is it, dear?
It is Jed. He is smoking a cigarette, striking a soccer ball against a rock.
Should I go up to meet him?
He turns to me and to my relief I am mistaken. It is just a tall Asian, with an odd birthmark on his cheek.
This is a roundabout way of finding a friend, I say, wandering about in a musical park.
A man in the tunnel plays a saxophone. He stares at me, wishing I were dead.
Here it is, the nurse clucks. See? I told you I would find it. You can tell the merry-go-round by the songs.
SALLY VEGA SAID she had found my address in a complicated way—but she had not intended to, she wrote. She said she thought of me occasionally, but she had not been looking for me.
“I’m amazed at what occurs through coincidence,” Sally had said on the phone.
Look for a big woman in the park in a furry pink coat, she warned.
When one meets people one once knew, it is tempting to imagine oneself in their eyes.
Sally, all in pink in a furry boa, stares at me, looking dubious.
She is sitting on the bench, watching children clamber up the painted horses.
She looks surprised to see me.
And so when I hold out my hands to Sally, I hide them, my browned, burnt wounds, tucked under my sleeves: my wrists’ keloidal stars.
No one must know about them, even the scurrying squirrels.
But Sally refuses to take my sleeve at all. She stands and hugs me to her tightly.
I am scared by this wild-looking fat brown woman in a pink boa coat. I look around for the nurse.
And we do the chica-chica, cheek to cheek.
Sally is a celebrated woman. She is a photographer. She is chatty. She looks like Gertrude Stein in that portrait, the one painted by Picasso. Like me, she is still the same size, and we recognize each other.
Sally talks and talks. She confides everything that has happened through the years, and I let her go on and on, surprised by my lack of interest. I get distracted by all the insects. The ladybug, the moth. Her art, her awards, her past. Her widowed father, the government minister. Her mother, the famous adulteress, now dead. I swear it is a cicada, gobbling a piece of lint. Dates and events and incidents. Rebellions, presidents, elections. I cannot follow. I have a headache. The entomology is overwhelming.
I look for the nurse, but I see she has gone to throw bread crumbs into a duck pond, feeding some lame ducks.
The music of that carousel would drive anyone nuts.
“I met one of my parents’ old friends in Germany, of all places,” Sally is saying. “I was in Berlin for an arts festival. Postrevolutionary stuff—lots of East Europeans. I was the lone Asian, since a Cambodian guy, the one who makes collages of genocide victims, stayed home on a hunger strike. My parents’ friend was Mrs. Grimes? Miss Grapes?”
“Mrs. Grier,” I say automatically.
“Hey, right! You have a good memory. You were always the one for detail, Sol. I always thought you and Soli were so bright. Brighter than all of us. Twins! Now this woman had figured in that tragedy, you know, the assassination of the American.”
“Colonel Arthur Grier.”
“Yes. Good one, Sol! Remember how you used to talk about the smallest details of ancient history, as if they had happened only yesterday? So sharp! Anyway, it was sad. Her late husband. What a fate. I remember she and her husband went to parties with my dad when he was in government, and she introduced herself. A platinum blonde, interested in Asian art. She lives in Germany now. She asked me who I was, where I lived. She asked me about obsolete places in Manila. I told her of the changes—the malls of Fort Bonifacio, the public bidding to sell the LOTUS grounds in New Manila, now that the American bases are gone. She is married to a consul now; they live in Berlin. She asked about this and that, about people she knew. She knew your parents. Frankie and Queenie. She wanted to know about them, and Bumbum Esdrújula, et cetera. She’s a resilient woman, you have to say that for Mrs. Graves. Anyhow, I told her all about my parents, and about your parents, too. About all the new palaces being built in Alabang. Quite the showcase. How happy your parents are now: just about the cream of the crop, in the new regime under the new president. Your mother had joined the streets for justice and reconciliation after all—years and years ago. She gave a lot of money to the democracy movement, the yellow ribbon crowd. Mrs. Grimes was enthusiastic, she said, about the new, wonderful order in the Philippines. Not so wonderful really, I said. It’s a goddamned mess now, decades after 1986.”
“What happened in 1986?”
“Oh, Sol, you’re so funny.”
“I remember when John Lennon died. Even the commies cried.”
“Wow. That was way before. Way before the rebellion that kicked out the dictator in 1986. We were babies when John Lennon died.”
“He died on December 7, 1980. Manila time,” I said. “We were seventeen.”
“That’s what I mean. We were babies! Anyway, I said to Mrs. Green:
that’s so nice of you to think kindly of the Philippines, after your husband’s death. I thought it might be safe to mention, after all these years. But she kind of teared up. I think. I felt bad that I mentioned it. Anyway, guess what? I got your mother’s phone number from her, the one I called, here in New York.” And there was a delicate lift in her eyes: or was that the sun’s glare. “And then, can you believe it, I saw Jed.”
“What?”
“You know, that fat-faced guy with glasses?”
“Jed was tall, lean, light-haired.”
“Well, then it wasn’t him. I remember his name was Jed.”
“Ed,” I say. “Edwin Cardozo.”
“Yeah, him. Now that guy is doing very well for himself.”
“Really?”
I am faintly interested. I am trying to keep up with an ant, clambering down the bench to a glazed nut, right by the tongue of my silver shoe.
“I saw him in Berlin. He procures things. For his boss. He’s a consultant for Secretary Esdrújula.”
“So he is still around.”
“She. Secretary Bumbum Esdrújula. The newly appointed head of the Department of Culture.”
“Ah. The Secretary’s wife.”
“The Senator’s,” she says. “He’s a presidential candidate, you know. And who knows? He certainly has enough money to win.”
“So,” I murmur.
“So I saw Jed. Ed. He procures things.”
“Munitions,” I guess.
“No. Museum pieces. He came to Germany for some Rizaliana, in Heidelberg. He was looking for a statue the hero had described in one of his letters. He’s a scholar. Educated at Cornell. Something like that. He’s a learned man. Isn’t that a scream? He used to be this creepy guy in a dirty ponytail, always hitting me up for money for his causes. Now he’s a government consultant. I guess it’s only fair—it’s happening everywhere—the recurrence of the past in odd ways. We talked briefly, in the crowd. He was leaving for America that afternoon, he said. I gave him your number in New York. And then guess what?”
“What?”
“He sent me your address: see? You had given it to him a long time ago, he said. More than twenty years ago. And he kept it. Just in case. That’s what I have to tell you. Weird, huh. So did he come? Have you seen him?”
“No.”
“Anyway, I had both your phone number and your address, from two different people. I thought it was fate, so I got in touch. Isn’t that strange?”
“Not really,” I say. “You know there is something amateurish about reality.”
The little ant has found its goal. It is laboriously shouldering its sticky prize.
“Let’s go,” she says suddenly. “Let’s take a picture of us on the carousel!”
My head is so dizzy just looking at the crazy horses, I clutch the pole, my scars cold against the metal. I have to shut my eyes. She takes my picture on one of the musical painted horses, going around and around.
IN A LETTER to me, Sally types: “You’re right. I was wrong. It wasn’t Jed in Berlin; it was Ed. He gave a lecture the other day, at a new bookstore in Makati. We did the chitchat, the reminiscence of old times. We had coffee. He gave a run-through of where they were. Item: Vita Tupas, remember her? I called her Miss FQS. She’s married with five children, to a banker in Pasig. She works with a woman’s cooperative, fundraising. Five children: can you believe? Item: Esmeraldo, the Fourth Ism, is still in the hills. Ka Noli, he used to be called. He never surrendered. The last Maoist in the world. Maybe I’ll go out and try to photograph him, too: for my new series, Geishas and Guerrillas, contrasting portraits of socialites and rebels. An analysis of the present through the past, or vice versa. Edwin only laughed at me. Item: Buddyboy Wong, the skinny, hyperactive basketball player, is now a skinny, hyperactive chef—owner of the best Chinese restaurant in Caloocan. He’s expanding into the north, Edwin says—he’s just waiting for the roads to improve. They see each other often, he says, at karaoke bars—you know Ed. He was a Beatlemaniac. Item: Kiko de Quirico. Remember, Francis ‘Kiko’ Not-Coppola? He’s a stocks analyst. Very rich. He’s still a geek, though—spends his money funding indie films that never get an audience. Movies about debt collectors and cockfight wardens. Lowlifes who come to sad ends. Too depressing for Filipinos. But you should see them—they’re moving. Sometimes they are at the MOMA. Item: Jed, that war freak, the adventurist? The one they said had been a lookout for the assassins. The driver or the messenger, something like that? He wanted to make his name as a hero for the revolution. Soli’s old boyfriend. They said he did it for her. He wanted to kill the American to impress Soli. Red freak. Well, he’s alive and well in Mexico or Texas, Ed is not sure. As he puts it, somewhere out there, in a town between E and X. And as for Soli: we both felt sad, we had a moment of silence, when we remembered Soli. Some new details have surfaced. Do you know? A guilty soldier came out of the woodwork. What a story. He went to her family home a few years ago. He told them where to find her body. Somewhere in Batangas. Buried, not gunned down. There had been no shoot-out. The rumors were right. She was mutilated, tortured, as the rumors always said. He could confirm it, the man confessed, because it was he—he was a torturer. A CAFGU soldier. He wanted to come out in public with the truth, he said, because it was the right thing to do. Can you believe? How many stories like this will be coming out of the woodwork from those times?
“Her face, the soldier said, it haunted him every day.
“I cannot fathom, I cannot imagine. It is still incredible to me, her story harrows the soul, does it not? Ed and I both agreed: she could not have been the Sparrow Queen. It is a lie. But it is one of those things. No one will ever know. No one will tell. There have been no more confessions. It’s horrible how we forget the past, just like that—we forget how war has killed the best of us. People barely remember her name, the names of those who fell to the dictatorship. The best among us have died. And it is the cockroaches who survive. I told Ed: somehow, it seems to me, we are all guilty of a failure of memory. Ed agreed.
“And then there’s us: U.F. Useful fools: that’s what we were, you and I, Sol. U.F. That was the term Pablo had for me—my erstwhile guerrilla love. I told Ed all about you, about our meeting in Central Park. How you looked exactly as you were all those years ago. You looked exactly the same. It’s a wonder how we all survived the eighties! Ed was happy to learn: he says hello.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel is for Arne, the book’s first reader.
I’d also like to thank the George Bennett Fellowship of Phillips Exeter Academy, where I first worked on this novel’s draft; and the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, which gave me space to write in the hills of Umbria, leading me to return to this book. I’d like to thank Charlie Pratt of Exeter and Dana Prescott of Civitella Ranieri, artists who support artists.
Twelve years span the novel’s beginning to its completion. I owe a lot. First of all, to the Tangherlinis: Frank and Jane, and Tim, Dan, Niels, and their families; Sam and Sandra Heath and their family: Aymara, Santiago, Mimi and Awaya; the Berrol-Youngs: Lisa, Skeff, Maya (the book’s first student reader) and Cedar; Ubaldo, Elisabetta and Brenda Stecconi; David Errington; Eric Gamalinda; and Lara Stapleton, for her faith always. I’m grateful to so many: Karina Bolasco and the people of Anvil; all my great colleagues at the Masters School who sustained me for twelve years; Caroline Dumaine, who gave advice, Darren Wood, an early reader whose intelligence never fails, David Dunbar, for his vast generosity and passion, and Pam Clarke; all of the students I have taught in Manila and the U.S.; my Filipino writer friends in New York, whose dedication to art is as steadfast as it is joyful; and my fellow artists at Civitella Ranieri, especially Michael Dumanis and Dora Malech, from either of whom I stole a phrase for this book.
Above all, my gratitude and love to my sisters Marie and Carol, and my brothers William, Tito and Dean, and their families; my aunt Tita Lully and uncle Tio Diony, last of a clan; and my cousins, especially Daryll,
a beautiful writer and reader, and Beng, whose home is always open.
None of my books would have been written without my sister Marie, who taught me how to read.
In preparing this book for publication, I trusted absolutely in the fabulous good taste of my editor, Denise Scarfi, and the wisdom of Kirby Kim.
And to Ken: for your patience and love, this book is not enough; and last but never the least, to Nastasia: loveliest reader of the tower of Babel, here’s another.
GUN DEALERS’ DAUGHTER
Gina Apostol
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R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E
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D I S C U S S I O N Q U E S T I O N S
Thematic questions:
1. Think back to the opening passage of Gun Dealers’ Daughter (p. 3):
Uncle Gianni met the girl at Nice Airport. He held her by the hand as lightbulbs flashed. Revise that: not hand. By the sleeve. He held me by the sleeve, gently. There was something awkward about my arrival.
My stooped, discordant figure—my bandaged, gauzed lump of hands.
A cordon held curious onlookers at bay, and a film crew, Gallic and impervious, skinny, tilting men in black, strode about my cleared path.
When you began the novel, what was your impression of the scene, of the narrator, and of the characters? What did you make of the author’s switching between third- and first-person point of view? What about the narrator’s instruction to “revise that”?
2. At what point in reading the novel did you begin to understand what was actually transpiring in that opening scene? Were you several pages in, at some point in the middle, or near the end? Can you recall the specific passage or scene that led to your understanding?
3. In the novel’s first chapter, Sol, the narrator, is recounting her arrival in Europe. She mentions several suicide attempts. What was Sol so desperate to escape through suicide? Remorse? Humiliation? Speculate on the psychological factors at play here.