The Caprices

by Sabina Murray

  Intramuros

  1. The City

  Manila suffered during the war. How many times have I heard this? There are tales of the city weeping in the dead quiet that followed MacArthur’s triumphant entry and of her shame at the rubble that greeted him. She wept in pain as bombs blasted away the monuments that marked her time as mistress to the Spaniards and destroyed the infant democracy, a gift from when she bedded the Americans. She mourned for the loss of Chinese and Indian baubles, and for the surrender to the Japanese—her Malay features disfigured by a history of rape and failure. Why would she suffer this degradation?

  The image of Manila fleeing down the southern tip of the island of Luzon comes to mind. She bears great stone churches perched on her shoulders, universities in her arms, commerce belted about her waist, and a host of barrios tangled in the hem of her skirt. In pursuit are a plague of tanks and sword-wielding conquerors of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. I picture an indigena Lady Liberty warily dipping her toe into the South China Sea.

  A city does not suffer. A city knows no pain, nor can it shrink from it. She merely waits for someone to liberate her, and if the liberation is successful, the war recedes into the pages of history. I shall return Manila to her rightful place at the mouth of a great bay. She curls around it with an arm flung to the east. Her legs snuggle the southern coastline, her sorrowful gaze aimed toward Bataan and Corregidor—if a city could gaze, which it can’t any more than it can suffer. Walls are rebuilt, buildings constructed, people reenter the city carting the memories back, much as in the previous year they carted off the dead.

  2. Intramuros

  The Japanese did not march into Manila. They came quietly—more like the Chinese merchants than the Spanish soldiers. Intramuros—which was a neighborhood bound by stone walls, the legacy of the Spaniards—did not have a history of being hostile to outsiders. My family was of mixed blood; they ate the Chinese moon cakes and blasted firecrackers, learned Spanish, harvested rice in the provinces, and remembered all the pagan superstitions. They believed that the Jesuits were second only to Christ himself and were hospitable to the Japanese merchants who set up their bodegas in the Walled City during the twenties, side by side with the churches, mumbling their rolled l’s at the brown-robed friars who purchased soap and bags of sweets there. The old city, with its rat-infested canals and crumbling monuments, was such a mess of humanity that it would have been hard to single out the Japanese. They crept in like everything else and were patient and persistent, just like the succulent vines slowly tearing at the wall itself.

  3. My Grandmother

  There’s a story about my grandmother refusing to leave Intramuros. Most of her children had already been shipped off to Nueva Ecija, where the rice fields were. The Japanese had already occupied Manila, but she didn’t want to leave her house. She would stand in her kitchen looking at all the pots and pans, thinking, I don’t want Mr. Matsushita getting his hands on these. This is the Mr. Matsushita who probably sold her all the pots in the first place and one fine morning appeared on the doorstep of his shop in full military regalia. Long live the emperor and all of that. I wouldn’t want him to get his hands on my pots either. One day a Japanese soldier who was not much taller than my grandmother (and she was four foot eleven) informed her that the house was needed by the emperor. My grandmother didn’t much like the idea of her house being a collaborator, but the emperor’s representatives insisted that it was not her choice, nor the house’s.

  I picture her with one hand fixed firmly to the doorknob of the kitchen door (hand carved in the likeness of Saint Joseph’s face) and the other wrapped tightly around the wrist of her smiling baby, who can’t tell the difference between visitors and invaders.

  My grandfather, a sweet, irresponsible doctor who spoiled my mother to the point that she is still hard to live with, was standing knee deep in water in Fort Santiago with other members of the Philippine elite and his fourteen-year-old son. The Japanese had informed the doctor that he could not leave in much the same tone as they’d informed my grandmother that she could not stay. She and the baby, Elena, moved into the church, ate leaves, and occasionally ventured over to the American POW camp, where her father-in-law, a Texan left over from the Spanish American War, would pass her handfuls of rice through the bars.

  4. Granddaddy

  Granddaddy would not leave the Philippines. He’d left Texas at sixteen and never returned. The story is that he was riding his horse to buy a loaf of bread—something I’d like to believe, but it has the stamp of Filipino romanticism of the Wild West all over it—and never came back. Next he was in Houston. Next he was cooking huge vats of beans on a naval vessel bound for Manila. Then there was something about a railroad that has since mysteriously disappeared. Then he married, had a son, never left. He didn’t want Mr. Matsushita to get anything either. I’m not sure when Granddaddy switched residences, but I imagine the Japanese took him first. Finding him must have been a happy surprise for the sons of the Rising Sun: the enemy, drunk and old, wandering around in his house yelling obscenities. They stripped him naked, poked at him with their rifle butts, and had a grand old time.

  Granddaddy ended up with the Americans in Santo Tomas, where his son had received his medical degree in the twenties. Granddaddy would joke about it—son class of ’25, father class of ’45. Things were bad then. In fact, the only up side of internment seemed to be that you met famous men like General Wainwright, a cavalry man with a heavy limp, whom MacArthur had left to hold the fort. Granddaddy had some questions for the general—for example, “Is MacArthur returning?”—but the fall of Bataan seemed to have left Wainwright with little to say.

  Granddaddy would save his food and pass it through the bars to his daughter-in-law and granddaughter. He wrapped it in banana leaves. They ate the food. They ate the banana leaves. He would look at little barefoot Elena in disbelief—an angel shot out of the sky and stuck in hell. He would say, “Any news on Richard?” And my grandmother, with her hard, Spanish mouth and sad eyes, would simply shake her head. Granddaddy would watch them leave as they made their way back to the church. She was a brave woman, he thought, with a faith he envied in a God he didn’t understand. “Elena and I are safe,” she said. “We’re sleeping under the altar.”

  5. Uncle John

  One day, an American soldier named John Hachey was wandering through the old city carrying some important piece of paper, and a little boy ran up to him and begged him not to bomb the church because it was full of civilians. John Hachey ran through the streets like he’d never run before, his heart pounding and tears streaming down his face, and he reached the man with the maps and the authority and told him, “Don’t bomb the church!” Who would believe that John Hachey—with his southern accent and thinning blond hair that stood up like a wheat field—would return to Maryland and have a daughter named Mary, and that this woman would marry my Uncle Jappy?

  6. Uncle Jappy

  My Uncle Jappy survived the war, got a degree in medicine (Santo Tomas ’56), moved to the U.S., and began introducing himself as “Carlos.” I knew him as Uncle Jappy. The more Spanish-influenced in the family called him Tito ’appy. He was not Japanese, nor was he a collaborator, being a mere five years of age when the war started and hardly a man when it finished. His only guilt was in his genes, which expressed the Chinese blood of my family to a startling degree—he could have passed, perhaps, for Japanese. I cannot explain why the family thought it was a joke to call him Jappy during the war, and even more difficult to explain why they used that appellation with all the love and affection implied by nicknames when the war was over. We called him Jappy until the day he died, which was long after his father and brother had left this earth, escorted into the afterlife by the Japanese.

  7. Lolo Richard and Fernando

  My grandfather and Fernando, my uncle, lived out their lives in Fort Santiago. Who knows what happened? The records are murky. In fact, we only knew that they were in there because someone saw them. How coul
d anyone see them? So many collaborators in those days of hopelessness. Our city, their war. Survival is easy to justify. My Aunt Elena was then two. She’d made it out to the province where the rest of her siblings were crashing around, wondering when they’d have to go back to school. The story goes something like this: Everyone was in the dining room eating and Elena decided that she needed to pee, although her mother did not have time to attend to her. She got left in the bathroom for quite a while. When my grandmother finally got around to getting her cleaned up, Elena informed her that a man had come to visit her. He just stood there smiling and Elena was not afraid, even though she didn’t know who he was. He was wearing khaki pants and a jacket made out of similar stuff. He looked like her brother Jorge, only older, a lot older. He had just kind of disappeared and not through the doorway. That’s how my family found out that my grandfather, Lolo Richard, was dead. There is no way of knowing how much time he and his son were incarcerated.

  I imagine my grandfather with his arm around his son, holding him close, while young Fernando’s heavy eyes looked to him for an answer. “The general said he was coming back” is all that he can say. He wonders if his wife is all right, whether her obstinacy has worked for or against her. He wonders if his father is still alive and prays that the other six children have made it out to the province.

  8. Uncle Lou

  Uncle Lou and Uncle Jorge escaped Manila in a truckful of Japanese soldiers headed for Cabanatuan. At first they were confused by the generosity, but after a soldier insisted that they were to stand at the back of the truck and stay visible, they saw that they had earned the ride. Two mestizo teenagers were more than a good-luck charm against guerrilla attacks and American snipers. Cabanatuan was where the Americans who weren’t at Santo Tomas were imprisoned. Gapan, the town where the family kept the provincial home, was less than ten miles away.

  My Uncle Lou worships MacArthur. My Uncle Lou thinks he’s a hero. Uncle Lou left the Philippines for the land of MacArthur shortly after the war. Granddaddy took him on a ship away from his country, just as he’d taken him from my grandparents’ house when he was a baby, determined to make him as American as he had once been. Granddaddy returned to Manila. Uncle Lou never did. He joined the all-new American air force. He married his blond, blue-eyed sweetheart. He joined the John Birch Society. He ran for congressman on the Libertarian ticket. He’s so American that I—who am half American—cannot comprehend him. “MacArthur,” says Uncle Lou, “defines glory.” As far as I’m concerned, “glory” is “gory” with an l.

  MacArthur’s at the battle of Bataan facing fully armed Japanese troops, gets all the Filipinos together—most of whom are farmers and don’t even have shoes—arms them with sticks, tells them to go into battle and then gets mad when they break rank. Some didn’t break rank and that was a far greater bungle. Bravery and stupidity are not the same thing. I have another theory—Americans pronounce “Bah-tah-ahn” as “B’tan,” which sounds completely different. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the Filipinos got confused and went somewhere else.

  9. Tio Jack

  If they did, they were lucky. My great-uncle Tio Jack (Joaquim was his real name) was in the wrong place at the wrong time and soon found himself being marched north with a bunch of American GIs. This stroll through the countryside is now known as the Bataan Death March. I’ll bet they were cursing MacArthur, imagining the Aussie steaks and fried eggs he had for breakfast every morning. Survival was improbable. A man stooping to sip water from a dirty puddle usually found himself face down in it and on his way to the afterlife. The only choices that presented themselves seemed to be modes of death: shot in the head, dehydration, decapitation, or starvation—you make the call. Dizzied with sickness and exhaustion the prisoners made their way, teetering a hundred miles along the edge of the grave. My Tio Jack somehow managed to sneak away. He lay down hidden in a boat and some villagers, with little thought of their own lives, managed to secrete him away. In later years as Tio Jack—a jovial octogenarian—recounted the tale, he would say, “Others escaped. They learned the Japanese were crazy about staying clean. They threw you know, you know, you know at the guards.” In my family, three “you knows” means shit. “So these GIs just pitch it at them, and the Japanese, who would take a grenade in the face for the emperor, go running and screaming. You should have seen it, it was so damn funny.” Tio Jack was a great man. He could tell you about the Bataan Death March and make it funny. All of his stories were funny, even though half of them weren’t.

  10. Benito

  A lot of them were about the war, and since he spent the majority of the war with his cousin Benito, a lot of them were about Benito.

  Benito, who was not known for his stellar intelligence, is hanging out in front of this building that has been “liberated” by the Japanese, and the locals are busily “liberating” it of everything of value. Benito lucks out. He gets a bicycle. He stands there, full of pride, watching all the guys leaving with typewriters (no ribbon has been available for the past three years), banker lamps (same thing goes for electricity), and other junk—files, paperweights, rubber stamps. He thinks he might want a rubber stamp, or a dried-out inkwell. Listen, he wasn’t too bright. He sees this man standing by him, pleasantly smiling in his direction, a realm of focus that not only contains Benito but also the bicycle. Benito did not question the man’s generosity when he offered to watch the bike while Benito went in to get more stuff . . . Somehow, this story is only funny when told by one of my relatives over sixty. Or maybe only people over sixty find it funny, although I found it funny the first thirty times or so I heard it. What I think is odd is that I find myself telling that story, often to people who don’t really understand the war or the Philippines or Benito and therefore have a slim chance of finding it amusing. I’ve decided that there must be some kind of “Benito story gene” that expresses itself randomly yet powerfully throughout my family members. I find myself telling that story to my mother, whom I inherited it from in the first place.

  11. Some Family History

  She’s a war story in herself. All that crap in the basement, drawings from when I was five, every doll, every toy I ever owned—even the ones I never liked. Childhood pictures that I’d like to have, but that she’ll never let go. Clothes that haven’t fit me since I learned to walk. School uniforms bearing the monograms of religious orders that only have two living members left. Three-pronged adapters to convert currents to levels acceptable only in Australia. Betamax machines acceptable nowhere but Manila. Moth-eaten sweaters that have crossed the Pacific four times, never worn at any port. Shoes with buckles. Shoes without buckles. Shoes that ought to have buckles but lost them twenty years ago when I still wore a children’s size eleven. Even the boxes—proud “Mayflower” relics from the first move, when we left Pennsylvania in 1969. Dust and dirt, ghostly smells, odd chills rising when a neglected box is disturbed. Monument upon monument to the past reminding one of nothing more than how very dead the past is. My sister and I discovered recently that we both got insomnia over thinking about all that junk; late at night we think about that mountain of memory and wonder what we’ll do when our mother dies. Morbid, maybe, but this happens in families where those absent by untimely deaths play as much of a role in day-to-day existence as the living. Death, among my people, is the inability to disagree.

  12. Angela

  My mother tells me sometimes of the beautiful dolls that her father bought her—Shirley Temple, the genuine article, with real golden curls; the eyes closed when you laid her down and they hadn’t forgotten anything, not even the dimples. Where was Shirley now? Where was my mother’s beautiful sharkskin dress with the pleats—very tailored, not like a little girl’s dress at all. Her father had bought her a paper doll one day. Over the course of my childhood I received about fifty. And guess what? They’re all in the basement. My father has trouble with the basement—he says it’s a fire hazard—but I don’t really expect him to understand. From what I gather, his expe
rience of war was Ping-Pong parties in his basement and blanketed windows around Boston.

  I think of my eight-year-old mother and of that jeepney. It was headed for Nueva Ecija, the provincial home. My grandfather stood with her and Fernando, surveying the interior. There was just one space for a child. He did not see the gravity of his decision. How could he know when he waved my mother on board that he was consigning his beloved son to a fatal companionship? My mother did not want to leave her father and her brother. She did not want to make the journey without them, but my grandfather said, “Angela, you go. If Fernando goes with you, the two of you will fight.” They never fought after that. I think, in all sympathy, that people tend to feel the most guilt over things for which they are not responsible. My mother ended up in the country, far from the staccato of the rifles and booming mortar.

  13. Her Daughter

  When I was little she would tell me of this time when she would wander in the peaceful garden singing a song. It went something like “I can’t stop blowing bubbles . . .” and she’d waltz around the bushes, beneath the shade of the tamarind tree with her head full of Gregory Peck and Vivien Leigh. Thinking about that now, watching this scene played out from twenty years ago when I, a big-eyed, black-haired child smiled as she danced, I get an odd chill, as if I’m watching a scene out of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with an Asian Bette Davis. I hate myself for all the times I’ve been angry at her.