by Gina Apostol
Caz and the townspeople wait for the signs. Donato, the cockpit boss, bets on the skinny one to go first, the hyperactive druggie, a long-haired actor who attempts to climb the coconut trees the way Valeriano the tuba maker does—with his bare feet. The demented man whoops on the way up, hollering a Christmas song, hark the herald angels siiiing!, all the way up while cameras roll, though the crew is on break. A few grips, their heads wrapped in T-shirt cloth completely covering their faces except for their orificial totems, which reek a sweet soporific fume, start clapping, puffing on their weed—the smell of their weed is the most prominent feature about them.
The kids tug at Caz’s skirt, Ma’am, ma’am. Their hands gesture toward the sky.
When the invaders had first arrived, Caz made a point of never passing by them, taking the interior route instead to her home. She takes the long talahib path to her father’s inn by the lagoon that embraces the caves with their ancient stalagmites like tonsils hanging from the depths of a halimaw’s jaws. She grew up slipping and sliding on mossy ledges while her dad led tourists through stalactite caverns he could draw in his sleep. She is ashamed of her neighbors—the way everyone has given in. It is true that her hometown had always been a damned tourist attraction, even during the Spanish time, because of the natural creepiness of its caves, her childhood haunts, a marvel of limestone sculptures and supernatural bats. The famed revolutionary battle that drums up local visitors and some ghosts of war during its anniversary is remembered only at the annual reenactments on makeshift stages that local teenagers pelt with tiny guavas, if they stick around to watch their history at all.
Her father had not been the worst of the tour operators, but he was close. His inn had catered to the thrill seekers—Germans and Japanese and nudist Dutchmen sunbathing on rocky banks after emerging from the advertised, spooky caves. Then they came complaining to her father that the experience was nowhere near the orgasm his brochures had described. Her brother had hated their family’s business. He told his father that he was just a dumb comprador who collaborated with the enemy, those lazy beach bums, not quite the running dogs of capitalism, but obscene enough. Her father—whose open, generous, yet poker face was excellent for a tour operator, so used to the haggling of the trekkers but never budging from his price—just raised his hands, letting Francisco go on, his broad smile reaching ear to sun-scorched ear. He had those wide cheeks, which stretched even wider when he smiled, but he would not budge even for his son. Still, he always let Francisco do whatever he wanted. And so Francisco did, leaving her to take charge of the house, though it was she who had straight As at school and won the scholarship to the university. All the time she was at college, she felt guilty for being away.
Her father would have kicked himself—to have died before this bounty arrived, these moviemakers raining dollars on the town.
Caz returned from the university when their father died. She had grown up hating her hometown, its unbearable picturesque stasis, the cursed beauty of its waterfalls and coves; but with her father gone, she found herself unable to leave her home. She had no wish to go back to the city. She, too, like Francisco, had joined the rallies, the midnight raids on Malacañang palace, or at least the palaces’s gates at Mendiola, where they taunted the dictator—which was as far as the students could go. But she was tired of marching. She was tired of being angry. At the president, at the generals, at the constabulary soldiers who hunted the farmers and the students, the workers and the rebels, at her brother for making her feel guilty for not joining him in his cause, up there in the mountains. The whole world was falling apart, in Uganda, in Nicaragua, in Biafra, in Iran—what does her marching do but infect the streets with her useless despair? When the time is ripe to bomb the palace, call me, she told Francisco—but before that, leave me alone.
Caz keeps to herself in the forest, closing the inn’s frontage, leaving its privileged, direct path to the caves unweeded, living behind her childish garden of dense anahaw, gumamela, and bougainvillea, watering the orchids, listening to the radio, reading novels, planting root crops. She bores herself to tears.
The Catholic school refuses her application. She laughs at the excuses of the principal, her own uncle, who makes noises about the terrible consequences of the acts of her brother Francisco bla bla bla. He’s doing it for your country, she reminds him. Her uncle shuts his door in her face. Fine, she says, I’ll teach the Chinese. So she works at the school for Chinese toddlers. She becomes a fixture in town, with her red bandana and self-sufficient look, which people take, correctly, for arrogance. Caz does not care. One drunk from the next town, which does not speak their language, mistakes her lonely figure for a chance at passing romance, and for his pains he gets the barrel of an ancient revolver, rusty but impressive, stuck in his stupid face.
The white woman, a thin, nervous lady in a silken suit, anxious and immaculate, arrives with her blonde, curly-haired child in September, and with no effort the golden-haired girl fits in with the group. It’s the child’s capacity for joy that is charming. Granted, she has a charmed life. All the toddlers love Chiara because she looks like the Santo Niño, they say, the Holy Child. They love to make her sing their imperfectly memorized songs—“Abakada,” “Bayang Magiliw,” “Bahay Kubo,” et cetera. The children are fascinated, they stare with amazed silence, whenever they hear Chiara speak the songs in Tagalog, as if their speech were a miracle in her mouth. They make her do it again and again. The toddlers are demanding. Chiara does it with gusto. The child takes in the world.
Language is witchcraft, a transformation. Chiara’s childish mnemonic talent, her ability to mimic, is uncanny, though she wishes she could remember when she used to speak those words. If there had been no video of her singing “Lupang Hinirang,” taped by her mother, Chiara would have no memory of her life with the Chinese toddlers. The script uses passing sights of street games to provide local detail. Chiara learns bulangkoy, a kind of soccer, a game of the feet, but with a metal washer, not a ball. She freezes like an expert at Statue Dance, a contest with music, and learns not to giggle when the music stops because when she does, all the kids fall over, screaming with laughter, and then they can’t play the game. She plays tumba lata, throwing a slipper with deadly aim at a makeshift target, a Carnation condensada can or a rectangle of Spam.
Good eye, Chiara yells whenever she makes a hit.
They let her win all the games, and even that seems natural.
Good eye, the kids yell, guday! Guday-puday! the kids rhyme.
She loves the sound of the words, the way things sound more lyrical in Waray.
For Chiara, everything is a thrill—plastik bubble, a kind of balloon candy she is not allowed to swallow but she does anyway (it tastes like snot); kropek crackers, a taste pretending to be shrimp; her favorite cookie, roscas, shaped like a gun. Chiara plays guns with the kids, clutching the fat trigger of the roscas cookie, which is like an Italian biscotto but humongous, with the crumbly barrel pointed like a finger, a cookie of guilt, at everything she sees. Bang, bang, bang. Insurrectos! I’m a juramentados, can’t you see!
And the kids giggle in Chiara’s wake, eager to please her. They let Chiara play the villain, while they play dead.
What these scenes wish to do, says the script, is capture it—that time she was six when she felt absolutely loved.
Chiara vanishes just as suddenly as she arrives.
Caz has no way to console the kids. Now when Caz takes the children on field trips—to watch hermit crabs shrug off their homes, or to make watercolor sunsets—the kids look out for the return of the changeling child, imagining they see her strange curls in the forests, one of the disappearing duende. But she does not return, nor does her nervous mother.
That day, the children are in the grove to gather leaves to make palm-frond pipes—slim shards of primeval design. But the primitive white man in his underpants shinnying up the coconut tree is more interesting than the du
mb reeds Caz wants them to make.
Who can blame them? The filmmakers are a trip.
Her next-door neighbor, the barangay captain Donato, also cockpit operator, is striking it rich providing bloody cockfights in his sabong for the big spenders. Cures for San Miguel beer hangovers, mosquito repellents, advice about the bats: everyone has a niche. Women dream of pink, blue-eyed babies, scions of the GIs all over the place. They’re extras, Caz wants to tell the women—layabouts they must have picked up in Olongapo and Angeles, without a cent to their name. But who is she to call anyone a fool? Tell us about your brother Francisco, Delilah the fruit seller says, and we’ll give up on the GIs. Francisco is setting up a business in Cebu, Caz retorts. Right, says Delilah, flashing her rump—and the nice people around, his New People’s Army, they can kiss my butt! Criminals! Communists!
As the script notes, the setting is a Third World dictatorship, propped up by American guns.
Even the town mayor, Kapitan Abayan, has given up his concrete home to live in a makeshift hut (made originally for his maids) while the film is on location. The mayor is making ten times more than he gets on pork barrel from Manila, Donato spits: Sonomagun! Children are learning English from the Italians—buona notte, fanculo, tagliatelle.
Her charges squeal and shriek and beg to stay, then they settle down to watch the show. Caz sits and waits it out, resigned to one more spectacle, the moving picture of her hometown.
Ma’am, ma’am, the kids tug at Caz’s skirt. Their hands gesture toward the sky.
Sure enough, the long-haired man—drug-addled, drunk, self-medicated into joy, with a suspicious itch up his ass—waves his triumphant arms on top of the coconut tree. Not waving, but flailing. Filipinos sit in the shade—watching from the shadows of their homes, or from the shade of balete trees, from wide-brimmed hats after siesta—smiling and gracious and counting on their fingers the minutes before he falls.
Usa, duha, tulo.
Smug bets among the knowing. Pigafetta, Magellan’s scribe, had counted their ancient numbers in his traveler’s alphabet, but at the time no one had any use for his erudition.
The actor is grunting now, grasping at the coconut balls, then the not so feathery fronds, the smooth trunk—and when he slides from the tree, then falls, it is the Filipinos’ turn to clap.
Upat, lima, unom.
One down, too many more to go.
Valeriano the tuba maker feels bad, that is clear; he gets right up to the top of the trunk, up in the sky, an acrobat, cuts down a few silot and, in lightning movements, on earth, hacks at a young coconut for its juice and offers it to the fallen man, all in a trice.
It is not a hard fall, just a stupid one.
The actor looks dazed, the juice dribbling down his mouth.
He faints.
The camera crew, the hairdressers, the caterers, the makeup men, all gather around, giving the actor even less air to breathe. At this instant Caz notices the gaunt, curly-haired figure in cheap pants made entirely of patched-up rice sacks. He is wearing a blue and yellow rugby shirt and rubber slippers, the ones she still calls ismagol, though the boholano smugglers who used to sell them have long set up a stable business in town. His brow is his best feature, after his eyes: it remained smooth, so delicately sculpted, like a baby’s, as if it had just been formed, shaped like the half of a heart—that is, until they turned it, his cheek, one day, and as she stared at his dead body in the funeral home, at that angle she flinched: he was unrecognizable.
The man’s lofty hair is a fantastic, gnarly bird’s nest hovering fairly a foot above his slightly hunched frame. He has this habitual stooped pose of attention. His curls stick up in the air, unwashed. He looks like a life-size figure of one of his daughter’s toys, a Danish troll.
The world parts for him.
Ludo is gawky, leaning forward, one foot ahead, as if about to fall. All eyes are on him. His broken glasses, bandaged with tape at the sides, enlarge his glare. He cares for art, sex, and food in that order, and has no use for minor details, like shoes or matching clothes. His wife had always thought his inner life was well adjusted, but on location his exterior was a shambles.
He has just arrived on the scene—too late to watch the denouement, the coconut tree catastrophe. The mongering men scamper away.
His hand on his waist, elbow poised as if eternally cradling a megaphone (his studied pose—he knows the uses of authority), he berates the crowd, then bends toward the man on the ground.
The Filipinos, grinning among themselves, shake their heads as the crew disperses.
Another one bites the dust.
Donato says: I knew it. Give me five, Frank.
Betron, a loser on the countdown, gives him exactly five silver pesos from his rigged-up piggy bank, a gasoline canister cut in half. Others rush up to the crew with their woven anahaw, fanning the loiterers. Some offer drinks: twenty pesos each, criminally overpriced. Another offers a man a ceramic pig, its head bobbing for no good reason.
Caz notes the strangely mixed responses of her town—skepticism and compassion, mercantilism and pity, mercy with laughter to spare. People watch, with toothpicks and toddlers, waiting for the wild gago to die, but just in case they will offer him bahalina tuba if he rises. Their attitude toward bad fortune is the same as toward good: a slightly removed sense of being, as if their bond with the material world is at best a borrowed thing, a trap. It’s a group that has long survived mainly through luck—their God-given waters and natural caves have provided them historical concessions. Random waves of war, disease, typhoons ruin them, oh well—life is chance. Their existential lucidity makes them extra observant (though their narrow conclusions attest to their hermetic world).
They are clear-eyed, philosophical, and ruthless.
Just as they expected, the white people have been falling like flies—fevered, hallucinating, emaciated from their labor. Kapitan Abayan, the mayor who has leased his rambling Spanish-era house to the director for an astronomical thirty thousand pesos per month, one thousand pesos a day, wonders aloud at the americanos’ ways. No Filipino worth his brains would be out in the sun when shadows grow short. Even chickens have the sense to retire, looking for a nipa roof. Benton Frick, the hilot with sad eyes, hums an old harana, fanning himself to sleep. Dogs lie like dead in the shade, and the townspeople, ancient logicians of immobility, follow suit. Whereas these millionaires shuttle about at the height of noon like mad chickens, always screaming Action, Action, when nature demands inaction.
Idiots.
Seward, you prick, get up!
As if at the sound of the director’s stern voice, the longhaired man moves. Caz watches it all happen—a miracle—the scruffy actor gets up, first onto his knees, and then he starts tap-dancing before the director, singing: Ta-da! Hark the herald angels siiiing!
Caz resists the urge to applaud. What she understands is that the director of a movie commands the world’s will, and when he says so, the dead are resurrected.
In that pose, with her mouth open in surprise, red bandana fluttering, cheekbones checkered by the shadows of planted fronds, framed in the sun’s haze, almost like a puzzle, Freddo the art director from Gubbio captures Caz with his tiny Rollei, an extra camera he keeps in his pocket, just in case. Like everyone else on the set, he is a workaholic, alert to the technical solutions chance provides.
29.
Stereovision
Her camera is the size of her largest hatbox, carried by the young Francisco, the captain’s ten-year-old servant, the orphan. The photographic lenses are borne separately by solemn adolescents awed by their charge, and they walk the way their fathers carry San Lorenzo Martir’s carromata in the town’s yearly fiesta parade, following an invisible line in lockstep. Her porters carry her goods around as she wanders the town, eyes alert to its possible compositions. Both aesthetic and pathetic fallacies cloud her judgment. She does not not
ice the lack of toddlers or their mothers in the dirt yard. The only women are a few old cooks with those staunch peasant calves and bowed heads and her young friend from her last visit, Casiana Nacionales, the lively trader and church lector, now also her hostess. Cassandra notices the numerous pigs out for slaughter—who could not?—but it is, after all, the day before fiesta, so Casiana tells her.
Bisperas han patron.
Cassandra Chase has no calendar on her, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, or the Catholic missal, to check the feast day of the patron, Saint Lawrence of Rome—San Lorenzo Martir—a date that falls in August, not September 28. So fate escapes her vision.
She notices instead the tranquility of the suffering workers in the heat. What strikes her in her tours about the country is that everything is heartbreaking and yet, she thinks, art-designed. This is cruel. The laborers who look like medieval martyrs (she cannot help her art-damaged perception) are exactly like the suffering figures of supernatural calm that she had studied in the churches and museums during her Grand Tour of Florence, Venice, and Rome. On one hand, she would prefer that the horror she witnesses throughout these islands be only what it is—a gross injustice. But even the burning of the towns in Central Luzon, by a man she would call Lucifer if she had a pulpit, even the terrible flames of the mahogany forests in Arthur MacArthur’s scorched Luzon were a technical problem of vanishing perspective.
How to focus given her distance, sitting as she did on the veranda of the itinerant governor-general’s home?