by Gina Apostol
His mouth full of their oaths and his eyes wide open.
His belly will bloat, he will drown in his tears.
This water is no cure, it is a curse.
Captain Coño, she said.
Let him go. I will do it.
The smell of the smoke was so strange and unknown to the people of Balangiga that the women came out from their huts, looking about for its source, its scent. They gazed out toward the edge of the forest, to the granary of the family Nacionales.
The strange scent of burning trailed the riverbanks down Balangiga, toward San Roque, out by Guiuan and Giporlos. The news spread through their noses, this sweet and terrible smell, this news that was not benevolent, the news of burning rice.
And the smog and the scent billowed over Balangiga as Casiana burned.
Burned it, burned it, burned it, burned the rice.
And though it was not yet Angelus, people stopped in their tracks as they hacked at wood, set the table for their absent men, fed their pigs. They stopped, crossed themselves, and mumbled the prayer.
It sounded like insurrection.
What kind of a devil burns the rice?
And after she did it, she watched her friend the red man Frick and Markley, the orderly, bear her father away from his ordeal in Samar, from their bamboo buckets and their water cure.
In this noon heat, she watches her father take his bolo knife from the sentry. Benito Nacionales accepts his own farm tools from the American arsenal of confiscated weapons without complaint. He will never be the same. All day, for weeks, laborers hack at the grass, clean up the yards, make fences, cut down palm trees against the beach.
For what?
So insurrectos will be visible if they attack. So insurrectos will starve because they will not have rice. Damn damn damn the insurrectos. It occurred to Casiana, who had always believed it a mere story, a separate thing, this revolution that was a plot beyond their lives, it meant nothing to her—
But that’s it, she thought. That is who we are.
Insurrectos.
That is how she explained it to the women.
We are the insurrectos.
There is no one else to do it but us.
How strange it is to understand finally who she is.
Insurrecto.
And they agreed.
And why is this goddamned man’s hands always up his dick?
When the laborers stop to rest, Randles watches the women come out from the huts to offer their men their merienda. No day is proper without the mid-day snack—coconut pastries, brown jellies in banana leaves, caramelized custards that attract flies, rice cakes with their melting carabao cheese. The men drop their knives and eat with their hands. Casiana watches Puring Canillas waft the bibingka about the twitching lips of Mister Sergeant Bigote, Calavera nga Layaw. It is like another facial organ, Randles’s mustache, a stiff limb with involuntary moves. Delilah Acidre has an almost visible rump, hitching her basket of salukara up her thigh. No sergeant can resist Delilah, and she used to always have her husband, Ambrosio, right where she wanted him—but what good is that now that he has been in jail since August, working for the americanos around the outhouses? Tasing carries her nigo of morón around—the chocolate delicacies—with her husband, the mayor Kapitan Abayan, nowhere in sight, deaf and dumb out among his chickens. Marga Balasbas, a bandehado of rambutan balanced on her head, smiles at Randles, Corpse at Large—sweets for the sweets one, she practices her English, winking as Casiana trudges by.
Randles wants all of it, he has the urge to just grab all the cakes—jams of purple yam and lightly crusted rice treats with the soft fillings and flat egg-white pancakes lathered in lard and served with dark sugar. He would stuff all of them up his nostrils and then down his pants, warming his dick, if he could. The scent of roasted coconut meat—the smell of the Philippines—he wants to devour it, keep all the home cooking to himself. Randles cannot account for this phantom hunger, the way nothing soothes him, this burning itch up his flesh.
As always, the women keep carrying their straw plates to the sentry. It is their custom to share their food. Randles is aware of his stench and their immodesty. Their eyes laugh at him when he refuses. He is glaring at the spot between their breasts and the cakes. They are teases who cannot take no for an answer. Flirts. And the next time they offer him a rice bun, he moves his hand from his crotch to grab his Krag.
The women draw back.
He is on duty. He cannot fraternize with the locals.
Anyway, to them he is just a dirty bastard. Who smells of sweat and blood of lice.
But Dolores Abanador and Felisa Catalogo have already come and gone from the Sibley jails. Their sons, Exequiel and Nemesio, lie asleep, their depression having reached an advanced narcoleptic stage. The boys, when they are out at work, at the captain’s orders, look like wraiths sleepwalking amid the talahib, as they cut the grass and hack even more trees from phantasmal groves. For their malaise, they are confined to jail, even for the hour of merienda. Dolores Abanador and Felisa Catalogo bring bamboo water carriers to Nemesio and Exequiel. Thirst is a complication in the heat. And the boys swiftly take the women’s bamboo tubes into the Sibleys. The last sight of them is their hands, outstretched to take their mothers’ goods.
The shift to birds’-eye view is instructive, as the high-angle frame can catch the entirety of the crowd scene—the way, in the nosebleed seats in the opera, one has a sense of omniscience as the small, antlike human figures go about their tragedy on the stage. The choreography of the women’s actions becomes clear. One sees from this angle how the dance of the flirtatious Delilah around Sergeant Randles deflects the sight from the glinting knives hidden in the bamboo water tubes that the mothers give to the sleepy boys, and the chatter of the trio, Puring, Delilah, and Marga, distributing their sweetmeats and whispering in their men’s ears, are cover for the men to know their attack positions at the coming fiesta, to hear the coded instructions for the women’s plot of cross-dressing revolution—a susurrus of sopranos that indicates subversion must be at hand.
Plotted by the insurrectos—the whispering, smiling women of Balangiga.
Operatic heroines of coordinated gestures and can-can kicks, while Mister Sergeant Bigote, Randles the Corpse at Large, Calavera nga Layaw, sentry of the americanos, stands in place amid the swirling skirts and clutches his dick, the dumb fuck at the center of the moveable parts of this crowd scene—a man of misery, who witnesses all and sees none.
Randles watches the old men, the ones so useless they do not need to be jailed, coming out from their midday stupor to pile leaves into heaps for the afternoon kaingin. Everyone greets each other as if there is no tomorrow. Just a few days ago, the old men had been jammed together in the two stinky Sibley jails, smelling each other’s armpits and asses and unable to stand up or kneel—the captain had made them all familiar enough with each other, until he released the infirm and whiplashed the strong.
Backslaps, handclasping, ringing voices. The old sluggards are all roused out of their homes. After siesta it’s a goddamned reunion of the sloths. Then the screaming of the pigs. A 150-year-old man, Mr. Methuselah of Samar, P.I., carrying a pole and a rope, reminds Randles—the man’s aged hand is as limp and creased as the curled hemp in his grasp—hey, Joe, it is fiesta tomorrow!
Hey, Joe, it’s the feast of San Lorenzo Martir, the patron saint!
My name is Gustav, not Joe, Randles thinks, but his mouth sores hurt, and he is silent.
The Chief, that easygoing bum, had asked the captain to give all the workers a reprieve, just for the holy day.
Oh yeah. Big deal, you woolly mammoth, thinks Randles.
First siesta then fiesta, your cycle of life.
And this is the life of Randles—a Hoosier from the Wabash jaded at age twenty-four, sold by his father at nine to work in the mills around Muncie, whose own
war of independence is to become a soldier in the US Army and, first, kill the ghost-dancing Indians in the Dakota plains and beat up the strikers on the Pullman rails, then, second, sign up for Cuba in 1898, without ever once seeing a map. His first sight of the open sea is on the deck of the ship Zealandia, which takes him from Honolulu to Guam and, third, Manila Bay (not to mention, fourth, a detour to China)—and here he is, fifth, stuck in Balangiga, where the sounds of dying pigs are the only echo of his miserable childhood, and he has the urge to squeal, in unison with the familiar pigs, from the sudden, acrid flaring in his fucked-up dick.
1.
Not Even Her Mother’s Phone Call
Not even her mother’s phone call had moved her to return home, though Magsalin could imagine how terrible it must have been for her mother, a vain woman like everyone else (not just vainglorious Warays), to be losing her hair, her eyebrows, her fingernails’ sheen, not to mention her peace of mind, and Magsalin heard with clarity and dread the toxic language of her mother’s cocktail of Taxotere plus Cytoxan, a precise pharmacology that her mother, a word nerd, repeated in full like the Greek names of rhetorical devices that she liked to teach to her students in Tacloban. Magsalin had looked up the words, Taxotere and Cytoxan, and she noted the side effects. Apart from stress-induced alopecia, there were neuropathy, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), and depression.
But still, Magsalin told her mother: I cannot go home.
“Do not come home,” her mother had said on the phone as she lay dying. “If you feel you cannot do it, inday—do not return.”
28.
What She Wants Is the Sense of a Ghost
“How dare you,” he hears the words as if from his dream.
It is in Randles’s language, nasal, a monotone, but English, though the sounds occur in pieces, unarranged. He puts his hand back on his gun. He smells her fragrance—a mix of river breeze and roses—before he turns around to see.
“How dare you imprison the Filipinos and cram them in tents like animals and then put them to labor without informing them of their crime? Do you know of the writ of habeas corpus? You know the writ is not suspended in these islands, Mister Sergeant. I insist on seeing your captain.”
Randles is confused—but relieved, too, that her object of contempt is not his groin, his dirty hand.
In close-up the woman is framed in the camera at first out of focus, a reddish scarf (not really suggesting the blood to come) accenting her pallor, cheekbones checkered by the shadows of the tall fronds in her line of vision (chosen by the obsessive-compulsive art director, Freddo from Gubbio, Italy), mouth slightly open and only slowly appearing, so that the sense of flesh, of moist ripe fullness, is delayed, and fringes of hair on her brow are tossed as if carelessly, though the dresser has gelled them just so, to appear at first in sensual abstraction, like commas in the wind.
The director says that what she wants in this shot is a sense of a ghost rising from a river, a whitish impression that at first seems like sea foam, or maybe the shadow of a despondent creature moving in figure eights in a man-made pond, or a fluttering flag of surrender.
But of course it turns out to be Cassandra’s flesh. Her whiteness establishes the frame.
It’s hard to do white like that and get contrast, grumbles Freddo from Gubbio, who do you think I am, God? But he does it anyway, using dry ice and some fog machines (but to be honest, in the end he makes it all look as he wishes it to look—like the mystical air of damp spring mornings on his native Monte Pennino, near Perugia).
In the next, a dolly shot as Cassandra strides toward the man, Cassandra Chase’s stance, hand on her hip, has an imperial look next to the pathetic soldier. A reversal of perspective. He with his red, pimpled face and the absurd mustache that punctuates his youth, in dissolve, and she with her magnificent, though careless, beauty, in focus. Maybe it is her posture—slightly slouched, though not quite awkward—that makes her seem unaware of her power, as if she is costumed in voluminous Victorian lace only from a sense of decorum that weighs upon her.
Her look of command, of a woman complete and whole in the frame, now occupies the scene.
“I demand to see your Captain Connell—Sergeant—?”
She looks down upon him, at his sleeve.
Up close, Cassandra Chase is taller by a full head.
He looks down at himself and is conscious that his chevron is tatted on his faded blue kersey cloth in uneven cross-stitches. He feels what he is—a syphilitic drudge who does not even have the strength to sew his patch back on with a steady hand.
“Sergeant Randles,” he says, then adds uncertainly, “ma’am.”
“And why can’t you just accept their midday snacks, Sergeant Randles? What’s the harm in eating a bibingka? Why should every second of your presence in these islands be a humiliation of its people?”
“I am on duty, ma’am. Miss. It is not my job to fraternize with the natives. And—sorry for the inconvenience. It is not your right to question the regulations of the United States Army, the commander of these islands. Miss Cassandra. I mean, Madame. Ma’am. Miss.”
“Oh, hush. The US military governor is now under civilian authority, and a civilian, Governor Will Taft, commands these islands. Your General Elwell Otis is out. So is your lousy Arthur MacArthur, slashing and burning to kingdom come, who told him he was Mister General Sherman of the Central Luzon plains! Or didn’t you know? The War Department is no longer in charge.”
Randles’s eyes widen.
“Excuse my blasphemous words,” she says, “but it is so.”
She sighs.
“I suspect you do not get the news here in Balangiga.”
“No, ma’am. The mail ship is six weeks late.”
“So you don’t know that President McKinley—? Ah, never mind.”
“Ma’am, we have received no mail from home since we left Tong-ku harbor, in China.”
“Well, then. Get me the captain, and I will give him a bulletin straight from New York.”
“Ma’am, to be honest, we would prefer our news from our families instead.”
Cassandra laughs.
Should the blur around her eyes suggest sympathy? Choose the cut that does not sound condescending, or only pitying.
“Don’t worry about that, sergeant,” she says, her voice changing, but not unkind. She taps him on his threadbare patch. Her fingernail further unravels his skimpy insignia. “Your mail is arriving from Tacloban with Lieutenant Bumpus. I can promise you that.”
1.
The Sea Is Memory
And here she is, with only the San Juanico Strait between her and return. The sea is memory. It is mesmerizing. Its beauty is intolerable. What it buries is vaster than what it reveals. Every so often you get a glimpse of what you forget, or you wade in and something snags you, a broken shell or a sea urchin the fishermen missed. She hates jellyfish stings; she hates the water’s surprises. But she is an island girl: she loves the water. He used to laugh at the way she wore full body armor just to float on the waves. Swim cap, goggles, wet-suit shorts, flippers. There. A memory of him. She watches the waves, it rides the surf, it is gone. No waves speak with the same voice, though they share the same elements and motion, the regular beating of the surf, their rippling heaves.
The porters lug the bags out toward the Pajero.
“Bye,” Magsalin waves at Chiara, who already sits with her notebook in the front seat.
The porter tosses a bag into the back.
“Bye,” says Chiara from the Pajero.
The car has turned the corner toward Maharlika Highway, on the way to Balangiga, when Magsalin pats her duffel.
Magsalin realizes it is not hers.
Their bags are switched.
She tries to wave Chiara back, but the filmmaker is scribbling notes in the Pajero, head bent toward her script.
32.
The Monstrous Idol
It was not Ludo but the art director from Gubbio who had come knocking on her door. He was thinking of a model for the monstrous idol that was to dominate the set of the village. A gigantic Madonna of the Orient, an enormous gargoyle that would float on the lagoon. He was thinking of the murals of Umbria, the flat-faced Pieros of his hometown. The madonnas of Piero della Francesca, for some reason, look Asiatic to him, like dozing bodhisattvas that he had once seen carved in Dunhuang during an Italian tour through Marco Polo’s China—contemplative goddesses, eerily serene.
One of the Italians, a gaffer, had seen her with the children, who had run from their teacher at the sound of the military drums during a morning lesson. At first, with a break in her heart, Caz had believed her brother Francisco had found her, and he will make her leave town, for good, before he attacks it, his own village.
But it is only those deviants, the cameramen.
When she reaches her giggling charges, they shout—ma’am, the circus, the circus is in town!
Caz has tried to avoid the moviemakers, on this point agreeing with her brother: this wastrel spending to fulfill one man’s vision is a crime. Francisco goes on and on about its imperialist stink, bla bla bla, these escapist hatches of neocolonial cinema that cloud even his peasant soldiers’ dreams.
Caz thinks—his teach-ins must be the worst, once Francisco gets to cultural criticism.
The cast of hundreds had invaded one day in August. In the blinding heat of the noon sun, they work. In their khakis and jeans, their vests with pockets for their cigarettes and lenses, the carpenters with their crates and the masons in their lug-soled shoes, with their transistors, hairdressers, electricians, cookware, condoms, and penicillin, and a whole village of genuine orphans ready for their slaughter rented from the SOS Children’s Village across the bridge, from barrio Nula-Tula in Tacloban. They are a phalanx, a battalion, an army, a war; and they hire their own enemies and drag along their own dead. They have guns, ammunition, trucks. They have cranes with moving cameras, and a caravan of jeepneys filled only with canisters of film. They eat mangoes with their hands and speak through walkie-talkies. They love to ride the bancas, commandeering the riverbanks. They work like dogs at all hours, odd and off, and even when they rest it is strenuous, swimming miles down the river, hiking through the mangrove swamps, talking, talking, talking, talking about their film.