America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  No. Teresa had never wanted anything like that from anyone. The things Teresa wanted from people were easy to know, easy to give: a working knowledge in Ilocano and any of the indigenous languages in the north, but especially Ibanag, considering where they were; a quick study in the use of old Armalite and AK-47 rifles, American-made M-16s or M-14s, sometimes the rare Russian-made one, sometimes even a pilfered Garand circa World War II; the ability to put a knife in the chest of a mayor or landlord on a regional bus and walk away with no injuries, minimal witnesses; a personal archive of good jokes, creation myths, local folklore from your particular town or village, or at least your parents’ local town or village, since sometimes there would be a cadre from suburban Manila who barely even knew the basic myths of Apolaki and Mayari; a commitment to being, not brave, not even honest—Teresa was neither naive or cruel enough to expect bravery or honesty from people, not all the time, not even some of the time—then, accountable. Responsible.

  Hero had never known that such a thing could be attractive, even desirable; she’d long had the feeling that she had to hide that quality of hers when she was with other people her age, especially when she was with people she hoped would like her. At UST that was the case, drinking and fucking around, chary of being thought of as a stick-in-the-mud, as people often said, in exaggerated American English. Growing up, it had been one of the reasons she’d never gotten along well with her cousins.

  But Teresa liked sticks-in-the-mud; liked people who thought twice, considered the consequences, worried at a years-long knot of fear deep in their chests, and still acted. Hero began to learn that there were all kinds of responsible people, not just stick-in-the-mud types like her. There were people who told lewd jokes from morning to night and gave the impression of being utterly unreliable in every aspect and yet threw their free arm over your body at an abrupt stop on an unlit road, seeing a Scout Ranger’s jeep passing, reaching for an M-16, telling you to unlock your door and get ready to run. There were people who, even completely drunk after a successful raid, everyone high and horny from the victory, still jumped back when their calloused hand brushed yours, eyes blurry and unseeing, mumbling, Sorry naman ha, I didn’t mean to, are you—and even when you pushed for it, more than willing, lonely between your legs, said things like, I’m too drunk, you’re drunk, it’s not, not—right.

  Teresa’s father was a journalist; disappeared first. Her mother was a lawyer representing a farmer’s union in the Sierra Madre; gone a few months later. By that time, Teresa had graduated from college, had been working in Manila as a journalist herself. When she understood that she wasn’t ever going to recover her parents’ bodies, she stopped writing and resumed contact with a group of ex-Huk rebels who’d known her mother, two of whom had been her godparents. It was out of the anti-Japanese Hukbahalap rebellion that many peasants, not necessarily Huks themselves, but sympathizers, informally began the process of land reform. They’d toiled on the same land for generations without any hope of owning it, but the rebellion empowered them. In the tumult of war, many were able to seize property and depose tyrannical landlords, beginning one of the first distributions of wealth in the nation’s history. Some of the landowners had already run away to Manila long before the Huks and peasants arrived on the scene, collaborating with Japanese occupiers in exchange for safety and lifestyle upkeep—when the war was over, there would be time enough to return and wrest back their birthrights.

  It was the U.S. Armed Forces in the Far East, together with the Southwest Pacific command of General MacArthur, who saw in the Huks not an ally in the fight against an Axis power, but a significant Communist threat in itself. After the war, the Huks were ordered by the American military to relinquish their weapons and cease contact with each other altogether. One of the first stories Teresa ever told the cadres was a kind of NPA origin story, about the massacre of over a hundred former Huk fighters in Bulacan; intercepted on their way home to Pampanga, they’d been detained and then summarily executed by Filipino and American forces. U.S. intelligence helped draw up further lists of prominent Huks around the country, who were eventually murdered or imprisoned. Those who weren’t captured fled into hiding: in Zambales, in the Cordilleras, in the Sierra Madre. In Isabela. Two such ex-Huk leaders who’d fled were a married couple. Teresa’s godparents.

  They were the ones who reached out to her first; they’d heard about her parents’ murders in the newspapers. Teresa never told Hero about the early days of her own recruitment into what would later become the NPA, but she did say that she’d been around Hero’s age. Those godparents, Renata and Efren, were no longer alive. Hero had never asked, but it wasn’t difficult to infer that Teresa’s predecessors had been killed; that she’d been forced to inherit her position as kumander upon their deaths.

  By the time Hero arrived in Isabela, the New People’s Army had its operating principles, the rules by which Hero would eventually come to live ten years of her life, embedded inside them like the tang of a blade within a hilt. No gambling and no drinking were two of the early rules, though Teresa was especially lenient on those two when she saw how good Hero was at cards, and how much it bonded everyone else to try to beat her.

  The other rules were straightforward enough. To speak politely. To pay fairly for all purchases and to offer fair prices for all things sold, from the most gnarled kamote to the least-rusty semiautomatic. No brawls or physical abuse; woman-beating in particular would merit immediate expulsion from the ranks. Anything damaged had to be either repaired or paid for by the person who’d done the damaging. Avoid destruction of crops, even during skirmishes. Humane treatment of prisoners, even if they’d harmed a comrade. All sexual relations had to be undertaken between consenting adults.

  There were three capital offenses for which the punishment would either be execution or expulsion—the latter simply a prolonged form of the former, for many cadres. The first offense was informing on the movement to state forces; self-explanatory. The second offense was rape—abuse of women is class exploitation, Amihan would spit out, her voice diamond-hard. The third offense was recidivism: if you kept stealing from other cadres or local farmers, if you kept harassing female comrades; if you proved you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn.

  There were sometimes tensions between cadres and locals—often when a local had been beaten or tortured by AFP officers in an attempt to smoke out an NPA camp or cadre, or when one of the local militant groups that had been armed by the government to act as a counterinsurgency would kill off some other rival group out of personal or political bad blood, blaming the murder on the NPA. The latter happened more often than anything else. Whenever a local businessman would hire men to raid a rival’s warehouses, or a local politican would kill an election opponent, or some regional oligarch’s mansion was looted by false friends or disgruntled former employees, the easiest way to write off the crimes was to blame the New People’s Army.

  Beyond the small, daily work they did as local enforcers, especially in villages where people had already been bitterly taught to mistrust the police, Teresa and Eddie made a point of putting larger regional grievances front and center in their resistance strategies, which served the group’s political beliefs, while also pragmatically helping to avoid civil conflicts by proving their loyalty to the people. Chief among them was corporate logging, which by the time of Hero’s arrival was slowly reaching the peak of its boom in Isabela. Logging roads had been cut throughout the Northern Sierra Madre, all through Cagayan Valley. Marcos declared all public lands in a forty-five mile radius around Palanan as the Palanan Wilderness Area, supposedly to protect the forest’s resources, as well as give the government a strategic advantage in the fight against the mountain’s most dangerous inhabitants—us, Teresa said, when she explained it to Hero the first time, smiling.

  When Amihan and Jon-Jon arrived in Isabela, one of Jon-Jon’s major projects was confronting the corruption between the logging industry and the government, both
local and national. Government forestors regularly turned a blind eye to regulation violations in exchange for bribes and personal favors, and the rapacious, unchecked logging such corruption permitted would only lead to more devastating consequences, Jon-Jon insisted. The scale of deforestation was so dramatic that post-typhoon floods would almost certainly be able to flow unimpeded, where the trees might have once provided a barricade. Instead, Jon-Jon said the unimaginable would eventually become the inevitable: whole villages would be buried in mud, worlds swallowed up in minutes. The loss of life would be catastrophic. The year before Hero had been captured, the principal project of the group had centered on plans to wage a large-scale attack on one of the largest forest concessions in the Northern Sierra Madre, near Maconacon, with the intention of burning a major industrial sawmill to the ground. Hero didn’t know if the operation had ever taken place.

  In Isabela, they’d moved around from sympathetic village to sympathetic village, rarely staying in one place for longer than a year, just to be safe; permanent camps made for convenient targets. NPA didn’t stand for New People’s Army, some cadres joked, but No Permanent Address. Or sometimes: Nice People Around. Teresa particularly liked that one. If AFP officers came to a village where they’d set up camp, locals could be relied upon to protect the cadres who’d been in their midst. After enough time, they’d determined that cadres were preferable to soldiers, those chicken thieves and brutos, who stomped into people’s homes, drank too much beer, groped the women, looked down on mountain people, and protected the interests of wealthy lowlanders and foreigners.

  From what Hero could remember, their encounters with AFP officers, typically at the borders of their chosen village, were minimal and perfunctory, the soldiers bored young men lounging with machine guns behind bulwarks of green sandbags. They rarely recognized an NPA cadre in civilian clothes, even if they were standing next to each other in the palengke, pointing at the same malaga. AFP officers left villages suspected to be NPA-occupied alone if there were enough armed cadres and supportive villagers to make an outright raid more trouble than it was worth. It was only when they thought that there was a valuable piece of information to be had, or if a person particularly valuable to the overall NPA and CPP infrastructure could be captured, that an attack became likely. But they weren’t particularly valuable, in Isabela.

  Hero had heard stories of more hardline Maoist groups, either deeper in the mountains or farther down south toward Manila, out of which often came rumors of purifications and purges, defections and coups. There were more powerful groups with clearly delineated hierarchies, whose leaders were often bigwigs in the main leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines itself. Sometimes they were rumors that those groups practiced the same tactics as the government—that they planted bombs in civilian spaces and planned attacks on public gatherings, framing the military as responsible, in an effort to incite the people over to the revolutionary cause. Teresa was firmly opposed to such tactics—Amihan was more ambivalent—but she also never confronted her fellow commanders about it during the leadership convocations she attended every year. The week before those meetings was the only time Hero ever saw Teresa openly grouchy, which, she later realized, was how Teresa looked when she was nervous.

  For years there was a rumor that Teresa had been asked to step up as the secretary general of the CPP, but that she’d turned the position down. Hero asked her outright if it was true and Teresa laughed it off by saying, Donya, would I turn down the spotlight? But Hero knew that Teresa would have done exactly that. For all her ebullience, Teresa liked being a big fish in a small pond. Liked small ponds, generally.

  What interested Teresa wasn’t power, or wasn’t only power. It was change. Not change in the grand or demonstrably transformative sense, but change in the tectonic sense; change in the tectonic duration. Teresa accepted the title of kumander but kept the parameters of the role loose, so that people had the sense not that they belonged to something that already existed and would exist without them, greater than their individual lives—but rather, that they belonged to something that depended on them every day to survive; something that they were also in the process of making, slowly and clumsily, on a small, small, practically imperceptible scale. A few pieces of cracked earth, side by side: rubbing, shivering against each other. An eternity or two later, you had a volcano.

  * * *

  Lola Adela didn’t keep them long. She asked to see Roni’s arms, asked where else on Roni’s body she had the eczema, if it itched more at night or in the morning, if it itched more after she ate certain foods or drank certain drinks. Roni said she’d never thought about it before.

  Adela had only half finished her plate of sampalok and smoked two Lucky Strikes by the time her questions were up. Her demeanor was lazy, easy, like the answers were important but not particular weighty, like nothing Roni could say would faze or disturb her, like she wasn’t even particularly interested in Roni or her disease beyond this conversation.

  During most of the conversation, Hero didn’t know what to do with herself, though Adela never made her feel as though she were intruding, and Roni didn’t seem to care whether or not Hero overheard the conversation. Still, she turned away to pay attention to the other customers, to the radio broadcasting the baseball game, and Lolo Boy listening intently to it. Only when she watched him listening did she realize it wasn’t a live radio broadcasting at all; he was listening to a taped recording. It was of a previous radio, or even television, broadcast. On the tape there were other ambient sounds: plates moving, people speaking in Tagalog, like he’d held a recorder up to the TV itself.

  Oakland A’s vs. Boston Red Sox, Adela said.

  It took Hero a minute to realize Adela was addressing her, and not Roni.

  It’s the Oakland A’s vs Boston Red Sox game last month, Adela repeated. Ninth inning. You like baseball?

  Not. Really, Hero replied.

  We made it to the World Series this year, Adela lamented. But. You know.

  Hero didn’t know, but Lolo Boy overheard his wife, and shouted back in English, Next year!

  Adela smiled tolerantly. Then she turned her attention back to Roni, sipping at her half-smoked cigarette, eyes trained on the girl. I’m gonna get some more sampalok. You want some to take home? Maybe your parents want some? You like tamarind?

  Roni nodded. I like it. It’s sour.

  Adela smiled. Okay, you wait here. She got up, passing Lolo Boy, brushing her hand on his shoulder in greeting, then disappeared into the kitchen.

  Hero looked down at Roni. They were silent for a few minutes, then she finally asked: Okay ka ba?

  Roni nodded. I like her.

  Before Hero could ask why, Adela came back out, carrying a Tupperware of tamarind candy. So you come again next week, ha? Same time? What day is today?

  Thursday, Lolo Boy called, though he was behind the counter. Hero wondered if he’d been listening this whole time.

  Thursday, Adela repeated. Come Thursday afternoons. Okay?

  Okay, Roni said. The door chimed again.

  Hero turned to see Rosalyn walk in, already looking at them. You’re still here! she gasped in mock horror. It must be serious then. Roni bounced up in her seat and waved.

  We’re almost done, Adela said.

  Hero blinked. As far as she had seen, they hadn’t done anything.

  You guys should stay for karaoke tonight. It’s fun.

  Roni stopped bouncing. I don’t like karaoke, she said, slumping back in her chair. I hate karaoke.

  Sorry, I must have heard you wrong, I thought you said you don’t like karaoke.

  I hate karaoke!

  Rosalyn turned beseeching eyes to her grandmother. Hold up, you’re not finished, this kid needs serious help—

  Okay, okay, Adela said, gesturing for Rosalyn to calm down. Then, to Hero: You guys, stay for karaoke. Call your mom, tell her to come
after work.

  Rosalyn chimed in: It’s really fun. Lots of people come. Everyone. You don’t have to sing if you don’t want to. We’ll have a lot of food—

  Sorry, Hero interjected, sensing that talk of food was going to work not just on Roni, but on herself. We have to go home. She pointed at Roni. She got into a fight at school today. She needs to talk to her parents.

  Adela looked intrigued. Fight?

  Roni opened her mouth, pointed to the gap. Ah, Adela said.

  Hero got up from the table. Thank you for the food.

  She went to the cash register to pay. Behind her, she could hear Rosalyn saying to Roni, That gap you got now, why don’t you get a gold tooth put in like my grandma? That would be cool. And Roni replying, Don’t wanna. My mom had gold teeth when she was a kid and they all fell out. Oh, for real, Rosalyn murmured.

  After Hero paid Lolo Boy for the food, she turned around and said, Come on, Roni, let’s go.

  Yeah, go face the music, Rosalyn snickered. Your parents are gonna belt your ass—

  They don’t do that, Roni said, making her way over to Hero. Then stopped, turned around. Hey! The TV show.

  Rosalyn blinked. What TV show?

  It was a movie, Hero said. Her face felt hot again, the skin there too tight. Castle of something.

  Castle of Cagliostro? Jaime was watching Castle of Cagliostro in here again? Rosalyn made a wet sound in the back of her throat, mocking.

  He said to ask you to borrow it.

  Oh—yeah, sure. Rosalyn stood up, went to the TV and VCR. She ejected the tape, looked down at the label to make sure it was the right one. The Castle of Cagliostro. There you go. You gotta rewind it though.

  Cool, Roni said.

  Say thank you, Hero prompted.

  Thank you, Roni said, without looking up, still peering at the tape, the image of a man in a green suit on the label.

  We’ll return it to you when we come back next week, Hero said.