Insurrecto

by Gina Apostol

  Not a unitary, disfiguring delusion closing in on his mind.

  She would like to imagine him at work, doing what he loved.

  But why should that kill him?

  The dull, heavy gun is so antiquated, symbolical even, that for a moment the coroner says he has an eerie feeling in that mansion in Magallanes, falling back to the age when the death of a white man in the city was a monumental act and not, as these bloody facts in his medical report suggest—just a sick case, with a godless end.

  Fuck you.

  So help me God, the coroner ends his story as he signs the guestbook at the wake.

  A scientist trained by Jesuits, he lifts the pen and crosses himself, unprofessionally.

  Caz wants to grab it and stab him with his goddamned Bic ballpoint pen.

  But she keeps her hands crossed before her, smiling at the guest.

  The day after the wake, as Caz attempts to write down her thoughts, even she knows that what she is saying is bullshit.

  She is beset by fallacies arising from her own desire.

  Hagiographical décor, windows of truth without a ledge, hopes grounded on partial knowledge.

  For the survivor of suicide, everything is possible and nothing is true.

  A locked-room puzzle.

  His end is shocking because it is so unlike him, say the news reporters who had once noted his exuberance for living—even the way he ate, gorging on his spaghetti alle vongole, so described an interviewer in Time, was a sight “as if the sensory claim of mere victuals were a matter for enlightenment.” His manner of death gives pause, produces hopeful delusions in both friends and strangers. Communists—the Urban Sparrows of the New People’s Army—intruded on the foreign filmmaker, one Manila tabloid screams. It was the dictator’s own men, bunglers out for vulgar cash, because they could, say political philosophers, pretending to be in the know.

  But it is an immaculate room in which he is found.

  The pious coroner ad-libs: there were no invaders but flies.

  And one obsene dead cockroach, like an upturned boat with frail masts.

  She understands that if she allows herself to dwell on it—the ambiguity will kill her. Unlike the haunted men in the house of Usher, for her no ghost comes back to explain the tale.

  A jumble of numbered note cards in a rubber-banded package, a sketchy map, an unfinished script, a trip not taken.

  A plot about a crime of history that no single vision can redeem.

  All of the clues are viable, none hold weight. Postcards with twin pictures, spilling out of their plastic cases. An unmailed gift in a box covered in pale blue whorls, with its signed card.

  Death had no observer.

  It is only later that she will discern the cunning of surviving. She will focus on small things. His amusing mimicry that could retell the Odyssey in different voices, the way he could talk forever about sundry matters to the banca pilot until the sun set and she knew their journey will therefore never be made, his perfect Waray accent when he spoke Tagalog, saying puydi for puede, he was such a mimic, his way of cackling over her trilingual puns, Waray, Tagalog, and English, as if they were original, the terrible grunts he made in bed, at which she never had the heart to laugh.

  Memory was her focus.

  Knowing is beside the point.

  But that is a thought she articulates only years later, with the benefit of distraction. There will even be an afternoon when, sitting at the university, a writer with two books to her name and a third, a mystery, on its way, she will mention his name in passing, as if practicing, and strangely her voice will have no recoil, and a scholar will say how selfish it is for anyone to die that way, with a six-year-old child to boot, and she, Caz, will note the critic’s understandable but mistaken view; that is how her pain is renewed in the moment, but it does not diminish the tenderness she will feel. She knows, despite the cliché, time is not the healer. Her pain lasts, debilitates, but (at least at that moment) it will not kill.

  In the meantime, she keeps packing. Income tax returns. Books with slips of paper falling out. Index cards slipping from loose envelopes. A stash of library books he thought he would have time to return.

  1.

  Across the Strait

  “Over there,” Magsalin says, pointing across the strait.

  There was nothing to see, Chiara notes, but the expanse of water and the faint line in the distance of what must be coconut trees—what else?

  “My mother lived over there, in the province across us, by the water, in barrio Nula-Tula, near SOS Children’s Village. My playmates were the orphans. I think my mother liked the comfort of groups,” Magsalin says, “her high school students, the orphanage where she volunteered, her mah-jongg crowd. She was a busy woman, always among friends. And strangers. I think she lived a full life.”

  “You are still in mourning,” says Chiara. “Is that why you came with me to Samar?”

  “You think I have no wish to help you?”

  “No,” says Chiara, “I know you don’t.”

  “But let me tell you, I don’t want you dead,” says Magsalin.

  “No, you do not. But your reasons for keeping me alive remain obscure.”

  They are strolling along the beach after lunch.

  “You know, Chiara, that it is all a trick of the eye,” says Magsalin. “This whole place is only made to look like a town. That flagpole, the statue, the hollow hut with the hilot in his muu-muu outfit, the fake arnis fighting competition—just tired old beach resort come-ons.”

  “Like a film set,” says Chiara approvingly. “But that basketball rim is real. And the free-throw markings on the cement court. The hibiscus blossoms.”

  “Gumamela,” says Magsalin.

  “The gumamela blossoms. The mosquitoes. That gun.”

  “What gun?”

  “On that man, out by the beach.”

  “You have a good eye,” says Magsalin.

  “It’s my job to observe,” says Chiara.

  “Are you sure you want to keep going on to Balangiga today?” asks Magsalin. “We can stop here awhile.”

  “I want to keep going.”

  “I think the driver, Gogoboy, is tired. I think he has an illness. Charcot foot disease. It comes from diabetes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Research. For a mystery novel.”

  “Right.”

  “Actually, I asked him. It’s sad. He will lose his job if he amputates his foot.”

  “I guess a lame soldier is—”

  “Pretty lame.”

  “You’re right, it’s sad,” says Chiara. “But if we get to Balangiga today, wouldn’t that be better for all of us, including Gogoboy? He can rest while we work.”

  “You know you can stay as long as you want in Balangiga. I need to leave you there a few days while I get to my mother’s home.”

  “You’re leaving me?”

  “I have contacted people to help you—historians and scholars. They are waiting for you in Balangiga. They’re very good—they will give you everything you need. I will meet you in Basey or Catbalogan, on your way back to Manila.”

  “But you’re my translator.”

  “Chiara, everyone there will speak English.”

  “But you said your mother is dead.”

  “She’s in a graveyard, you know. I can still visit her graveyard.”

  “But why be in such a hurry to get there now when you waited all these months?”

  Magsalin stops as they reach the edge, facing a man pissing into the water against the limestone rocks, holding his gun with his free hand.

  “You really know how to hit where it hurts,” Magsalin says.

  “I am sorry,” says Chiara. And for a moment there, Magsalin believes her. “But it’s my job to observe.”

  27.


  Noon

  The breeze of the habagat provides a false sop against Balangiga’s heat. In addition, the kumbento’s location against an inland river gives the men of Company C a daily noontime reprieve. You have to be nuts to get up at the height of day to trudge toward the water. Siesta, according to Filipinos, meets the rational demands of the islands’ weather. The laborers about town are released every morning from their jail to hack at trellises and random fruit trees—hemp-wrapped jackfruit that look like ugly, swaddled infants; fragrant fruits with the texture of sand, called chicos; and that prickly fruit that always looks deformed, with buboes, the atis, and when you scrape its insides, it is like everything else in this island, deceptive. Atis looks demonic but tastes like Eden. It is the custard of paradise. The men look sullen in the blinding swelter, but everyone on the island looks put-out anyhow.

  Randles the sergeant hates this part of his job, babysitting docile mutes in the wilderness.

  These prisoners look harmless enough, as agile with bolo knives as the chief of police with his sticks—and under his eye, the men at their hacking are energetic and careless, nimble and inept, but Randles does not give a fuck. Randles the sergeant would regret what had got him here if this shithole offered him the refuge to remember. His butt is full of maggots and his prick has a rash. Pimples rot his face. His pale pink flesh is eating him alive. His limbs look swollen. Sometimes the sores appear in his nostrils, sometimes around his balls. His fingers look like baobabs, pustular skin swelling about his death’s-head rings like botanical knobs around his infested scars. This is his reward for his courage in China (consisting of guarding the Temples of the Gates of Heaven of the Empire of the Sun, another skull-numbing job)—the diseases of the whores of Tientsin, Pekin, or maybe Nagasaki, who knows—this unrelieved sensation. Every orifice in his body is corrupt. It does not matter that the rashes also occurred in Indiana, before the wars, and in Fort Warren, before the trenches. Memory anyhow is no aid to his wounds.

  His short-lived days in Malacañang Palace were his only solace: for some reason, his squad’s station at the mansion in Manila had calmed his crotch, when for two days he had guarded Fighting Fred Funston’s meek prisoner, the tiny, shocked general of the bandits—his insurgent person already divested of all signs of revolution (many souvenirs—medals, combs, and spoons—had already been looted by Fighting Fred’s men, so Randles’s only spoil was one of the man’s sorry, blood-spewn spittoons). As he had stared at the miniature martyr, General Aguinaldo of the Palanan jungles, Randles could only think he looked like a Chinese doll he had once seen abandoned in a yard in Taku. Those two days against Manila’s river, the Pasig, had soothed Randles, as if the chilly air that swathed the inert captive were an omen of his own sufferings’ finality, though Griswold the surgeon says his body’s sense of reprieve is just his imagination. At no season in Manila is the air ever “chilly.”

  It does no good to wash every day (these neatnik people here love their baths, which they take shamelessly in the open air like babies). Any form of cleansing makes his scabs tingle, opening up fresh pains. Rot from his dried pus sticks to his clothes. It embarrasses him to give his underpants to the women, washerwomen are all gossips anyway, and in private Randles washes his clothes himself. Still, to his mind, a smell of rat, sewage, and humid blood always clings to his breeches. But when he falls into this pit of self-pity, he must remember that he came here across the stupid seas to save these sons of bitches. He is a vessel of God. Though what that preaching woman in a uniform, that captain-slash-pastor Tommy Connell, knows about his dumb-fuck soul, he could care less. Cocksucking cunt. Pardon my Chinese. Captain Connell coddles the natives. Laws against touching the women, laws against drinking the wine. Beware of fraternizing with the locals—what the hell was a good fuck anyway but goddamned benevolent assimilation? Randles starts giggling to himself, lifting one hand to his handlebar mustache to keep it in its greased place, his eyes smarting as involuntarily his hand feels up his pants.

  Fucking prick.

  It hurts.

  He giggles so much he is shaking, his woolen body a blue blur in the steaming sun.

  This squalid man who looks like a walking mop with bald patches—kalbo nga sip-hid nga yawa nga naglalalakat-lakat, waray didto waray dinhi! She hates having to go near him—she thinks clumps of skin might fall off him if she merely breathes by him, and then his putrid flesh might rain upon the air, like the ash of kaingin. Some parts of his face look like the crinkled skin of roasted pigs—the popped, crunchy parts with bubbled fat. The children call him Calavera nga Layaw—Corpse at Large. That’s no wonder, but to be honest, he looks worse.

  Kalooyi: have pity on us, Frank used to say.

  And once upon a time she did.

  It annoys Casiana Nacionales that Frank’s voice muddies things up.

  He’d repeat her words and say them, like yawa, and bugas, just so she might laugh. Her words in his mouth had a childish joy. She had never disliked his people, she said to him, until you actually showed up. But isn’t it good, Frank said, we are teaching you English, we are putting up the telegraph wires?

  The better to tell us what to do, the better to spy on why we do it, she said.

  She told him—

  There are consequences to your desires that you will regret, no matter how much you imagine your evils are unintended.

  That’s deep, he said.

  She sighs, thinking of Prank Vitrine, as the Chief calls him—her lubberboy. He’s not a bad man, just an unconscious one.

  Casiana Nacionales prefers her venom pure, like the water she carries to her father. She had always been the fierce one as a child—though maybe that is no distinction among the Nacionales clan. Even the Chief, when he has doubts now about the tactics, consults her. She looks down at the rosary against her neck. She must remember to list the details of the breakfast operation for the Chief one more time—the keys that will be stolen, the bells that must be rung, the costumes men should wear. Wait for her signal with the rosary beads. A good number of men must go for the barracks. A good number must go for the mess hall. But the best men must go for the officers, the captain, the lieutenant, the surgeon—they all need to die.

  Count them, count them, count your men, she keeps telling the Chief.

  You need to have enough. Get more. Call in laborers from the other towns. Explain it to the captain—he needs more workers to sweep up his camp. And when the captain refuses, keep pretending you don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, you’re good at that, then go on and do it anyway—that is always a good trick.

  The officers are the key—leave them for the best of your men. With the head gone, the Americans lose their spirit, and our people will leave no one alive. She keeps repeating the plan. Sometimes the Chief forgets the details. But in truth, he is soft-hearted. For instance, Bumpus, that alcoholic, the Chief says—he’s so nice. He likes Bumpus because the Chief can beat him at chess. And the doctor, the Chief says, is a good man who just likes to talk. He’s a harmless chatterbox. Susmaria, Casiana thinks—men have the hearts of babies if you do not keep them in line.

  So she keeps repeating the details to the Chief.

  The women must be told so they can escape ahead of time. The pigs must be sacrificed. The fiesta strategy must not be suspected—anyway, easy to indulge these drunkard americanos in their gluttonous ways. Lastly: disguise your men. The americanos will be suspicious if they see no women at mass in the morning! I will make sure the wives leave their skirts behind!

  So many things to think about, and the Chief, that chess nut, is her lone confidant. The mayor Kapitan Abayan is still pretending to be deaf and dumb with too much conviction and just keeps petting his chickens when she goes near. Even the priest looks a bit distracted when she gives him the lowdown, though he was in on the idea from the start. He’s threatening to leave when the going gets tough, but that’s a man of the church f
or you.

  And so it is up to them, the women.

  Casiana hates having to carry the heavy tubes of water up to the plaza, where the town used to hold the fiesta dances and now the americanos have taken up the space. She wishes she could just scrape this occupation away and all these men like the snot of silot across a cracked coconut. Or like the sins from her chest—the way Padre Donato says she should just wipe her bloody, sinful thoughts away with prayer.

  Her father is in their prisons. For being a man, for having two hands that can work, that can hack at his land. Two jails that fit a dozen, but with eighty-two men packed in. Every morning, when they are released from their massed misery, she looks out for her father. He has those wide cheeks, which stretch even wider when he smiles. His smile before the americanos came used to be so broad, it reached his sun-scorched ears.

  He has lost it.

  Sometimes she does not recognize her father, looking like all the others, skinny, grave, and beaten. He has worked so hard on his lands that his rice fields once stretched to the edge of the forest, almost to Giporlos.

  The captain had commanded him to burn his granary.

  “A blasphemy against God!”

  Benito Nacionales refused.

  Susmariosep, Casiana crossed herself at the mere shadow of the expression of the thought.

  Burn the rice.

  What kind of a devil, demonio nga yawa nga iya iroy, commands the unmentionable act, then goes to church the next day?

  She saw them take her father, hands tied behind his back.

  She saw them carrying their water containers and their hemp ropes for their cure. They spread out his arms and his legs, they tie him up on their contraption, a metal crucifix, they put a stick in his mouth and a gauze cloth over his face.

  They pour water over the thin cloth mouth, the stick cracks his jaw open as he cries.