by Gina Apostol
For a month or so she had volunteered to take pictures of the islands as Governor William H. Taft made his inspections of the subdued towns.
Her camera’s eye was a curse.
—But your position is worse, don’t you think, asked Casiana Nacionales the trader, that time she met her in Giporlos.
—What do you mean, asked Cassandra.
—Surely your position as the governor’s guest, going along with his masquerade of peace, is a worse thing than your eye for art?
Something burned in the photographer at the impudence of the woman, but she kept quiet—after all, Cassandra was only a guest in her country.
Cassandra swings her parasol against the talahib path, following the carriers toward the plaza.
When she was a teenager traveling through Italy, her favorite pictures had been the gruesome ones. Her secret, growing up amid the world of glass traders and hemp speculators in New York, was that she bore a sense of horror that the world around her mocked—she was coddled from birth, showered with toys after all; but she felt this wound, a subliminal perception without root or reason.
And she found her interior illness strangely externalized in Catholic Italy.
Disemboweled Saint Erasmus with his pancreas in a jar. All the luminous torsos of so many Saint Sebastians. She wanted to examine each of these grotesques, limbs pierced with arrows and art, mutilated and comforting. Saints with their intestines strewn about their bodies, their gross guts looking like the things called rosaries that they held in their hands, flies feasting on their lips (she notes how Casiana Nacionales wears her rosary, like a noose at her throat). Above all, she had loved The Crucifixion and Apotheosis of the Ten Thousand Martyrs of Mount Ararat, a painting she had dutifully described in her notebook during her tour of the Accademia in Venice.
—I wish I could show you my sketches, Casiana, she had said to the young trader in Giporlos—but it is in the trunks I left with my father’s friends, in Malacañang.
—It would be a pleasure, polite Casiana answered, but please excuse as I need to boil the rice.
The bodies of ten thousand Roman soldier-converts hung naked from cypresses, leafless olive trees, rocks winding through a Calvary of bodies, all of which build to the vertiginous shape of their city, Venice. The morbid multiplication mirrors the infinite faith the painter hoped to reproduce, and in no other painting is this principle of divinity so well cataloged. The painter’s realism eternizes a fantastic trope—the hysteria of holiness. One body dangling from two forking branches is a calculated study of the cross, a vision both mechanical and awesome: a triumph of technique and symbolism, emotion and science. The golden age of perception, so the caption in her guidebook says. She is grateful for her travels—
And she glances back at the carriers with her bags, marching past Casiana’s hut in Giporlos. Even at this distance, she can see Casiana standing in the doorway like a Saint Elizabeth, waiting for the Christ, in her pañuelo and striped, jewel-toned skirt—haloed in the doorway, bowing over her ancient pot.
Still Life with Rice and Rosary, she could call it.
Sometimes, true, in the process of photography she feels transformed.
Her family considers her its black sheep, though her parents mail her checks to ensure the propriety of their name as at first she traveled with the governor-general through northern Luzon, then Bicol, then Cebu. The prim and proper Midwesterner, Helen Taft, in her journal of her trips of state, called their urbane companion “an eccentric woman no more foolish than Alice [Roosevelt]—and polite, for a New Yorker.” Cassandra still believes in property rights, good manners, and wearing the correct silks. She is no wild thing, no, not a Diane Arbus, not even a Frances Benjamin Johnston, who was vulgar in that she sought fame through her art.
She had felt agitated on her return to New York after Venice, the dull visits to old dowagers on Washington Square, the dances with the profiteering traders of her father’s world, who made money from dressing up troops in Cuba or speculating on Manila hemp. Her own father did glass and rope. When she took to photography, it was a shock to her peers but no surprise. Beset with unease but possessing no self-doubt worth mentioning, she did what she pleased. In this way, women especially found her repellent, but in a way that haunted them. Letters and diary entries by socialites of the time attest to the troubling memory of meeting her, that strange woman, that vagabond, that artist, Cassandra Chase.
The American soldiers of Balangiga do hold the attraction of being shitfaced and obscene, like Renaissance goons about Golgotha. Cassandra takes her job seriously, designing the photos of troops benevolently assimilating in the tropics for the patriotic reasons that make wartime commerce so attractive. Anyhow, they are also the beasts carrying the white man’s burden, is not that right, she thinks as she walks the talahib path, Kipling being still widely quoted in 1901, and again and again she will make the soldiers pose for the edification of her nation.
Padre Donato is once again waiting for Cassandra in the plaza, his faithful masseur fanning him with anahaw. Cassandra positions him and then some laborers, this time against the backdrop of the church. The bells of Balangiga will be at the center, creating perspective. Then she includes soldiers arrived from bathing in the river. Plus her new friend, Sergeant Randles, who scowls authentically at Cassandra Chase as if because hidden she cannot see him (her head is obscured by the dark pall of her huge camera).
The group, in hindsight, is bizarre—the male prisoners with their spiritual look, rosaries around their wrists; their wives with their square laborers’ chins veiled to the mouth in stiff katcha, shy, muslin scarves, with their thick ankles and masculine calves hidden in wildly striped skirts, the satiny, semiprecious colors being the pious women’s single nod to lurid passion (though all will wash out in black and white); Americans in Victorian forms of beach undress beside venereal Randles in full US Army gear, including the Colt in his belt and the Krag with its bayonet; Walls, the cook, who, in a spontaneous yet artful touch, carries a wooden spatula, whittled flat for making salukara pancakes—a local tool that he wields like the icon of a proud guild—and last but not least, the luckless Prank Vitrine, he of the woodland escapade, recently jailed for going AWOL but back in business as sergeant at arms.
Prank Vitrine is caught in the camera looking off to the left, his profile brooding, staring at Casiana Nacionales (she is in the movie, though not in the picture). The hilot lounges in a heap nearby, picking his teeth with a stalk of grass. In the middle of the bivouac, like a shiny, displaced fish, Padre Donato’s oily face smiles broadly for Señorita Cassandra, Miss United States of the Americanos—a sunny day in Balangiga, bisperas han patron, the day of vespers for the Americans, captured for posterity and later sold, in New York souvenir shops, for two cents.
1.
She Rides along the
Coast toward a Historic
She has more armed guards than she has luggage. She has a sense of purpose even Magsalin admires. She rides along the coast toward a historic place and, by simply stepping on its soil, she will accomplish her duty. An homage to the dead, but not only for her benefit. Films, after all, have a sociality not even the most narcissistic can subvert. They require the possibility of observers. Thus consumers are significant to her story. For an inland, riverine town, this coastal road is invigorating. So much of this journey seems to be a start. Holiday goers pass by in a rented vehicle toward the surfers’ beach, advertised also on a store, then there is a truckload of rice sacks and pigs. A child sucking on a lollipop on the back of her father’s motorcycle waves cheerfully at the tinted Pajero. She has a frilled dress, a book bag, and curly hair. Chiara waves back, but that is so dangerous, to put your kid on a motorbike on the highway without a helmet. The father shouts at the kid to hold tight (Chiara thinks). Chiara holds on to the door handle as the Pajero jolts at the sound of the shots. Two policemen on motorcycles, riding in tandem, rev past them.
First it is a goat that appears on the road, then a pig. The Pajero twists and turns out of the way of the corpses. Then it stops.
“What are you doing, Gogoboy? We don’t stop here,” says Chiara.
For a moment, she is afraid.
She will not believe what she will witness.
She hears but does not see the men behind them, also on motorbikes, pulling alongside the Pajero. There is an inconsiderate lapse between vision and hearing that angers Chiara, as if injustice lies in this syncope, or some sound mixer were off duty. She keeps feeling sensory gaps, the tape keeps being advanced to the wrong moments, so that the bad cuts have the effect of miscommunicating the scene’s pathos. The sounds of the motorcycles before them are already erased, unheard, and there is no wailing at the sight of the bodies. Her gaping mouth is silent. It is no pig or goat.
It is the mangled length of a father and child.
The father lies face down on the asphalt road, his slim Suzuki motorbike still upholding a spinning wheel, and his arm thrown out. It had reached out to the child before its fall. The child’s blood darkens the highway. Chiara does not understand why there is so much blood. At the father’s chest, soaking his white T-shirt. On his child’s curly head, oozing onto her frilled dress. Her book bag has the odd shape of Chiara’s old pet Misay, a furry cat, lying flat on its back. It, too, is soaked. The daughter lies next to her father, her face sideways and her hand above her, suspended. Splayed, as on a cross or as if she is about to wave. Her posture is one of motion though she is absolutely still. Her small, pink mouth is open, and Chiara cannot tell if the stain on the tongue is the child’s blood, or is it the color of the lollipop. The lollipop is steeped in blood. The blood keeps seeping away from their bodies, a hyperbolic dark shadow, an excessive notation of their fall that soon will encompass all—palms, jungle, nation, ocean. Gogoboy’s bandaged foot is now stained by the spreading blood. Edward’s combat boots and the butt of his Uzi have a trace of blood, as the two men kibitz by the road with the policemen. It is a contagion that will soon touch the entire road, the ooze radiating outward beyond the bodies, as of an awkward halo drawn too wide. For a moment it seems to Chiara that an enveloping sea of blood has contaminated even the sunlight’s rays, a dark glistening that overflows her vision. How did Edward and Gogoboy jump out of the Pajero so fast? The spatial and temporal logic is jerky. Then she sees Edward moving onto the side of the road.
What is he doing?
He is vomiting out his guts.
He is always having gastroenteritis.
Only the policemen have squeaky-clean attire, practiced as they are in treading upon blood.
And where did these policemen come from?
Chiara tests her voice, a gargling sound, and she feels stupid in her short shorts.
She gets out of the Pajero.
She is glad that her platform shoes make her taller than everyone else.
She stands outside a pool of blood. It drains crosswise toward the palm trees on the shoulder of the road, toward vomit and grass.
“What is going on?”
“Ma’am,” says Edward, with his forlorn air, his face now a sickly shade of mourning, “police, o. They will usually check your bag.”
“What?”
“They are usually here to check your bag.”
“What are you talking about?
“Sorry, ma’am, it is the police,” says Private First Class Gogoboy, approaching them. “They say they want to check your bag.”
“Ma’am, good afternoon,” says a stocky policeman, practically a midget, his brow reaching her non-cleavage. Like Gogoboy, he has a bandaged limb—his hand. He holds up the shredded bandage of his arm as if to say, sorry, I cannot do the honors of shaking your hand, I am a diabetic, I have a Charcot hand, pardon me, then he continues, “It is reported by the man at the resort about your bag.”
“What man? What is reported?”
“I told him, ma’am,” says Edward mournfully, “you are photographer usually come to take pictures of the statues of the historical massacre in Balangiga. He is not listening.”
“The security at the resort. He reported about your bag.”
“Mister policeman, sir,” says Chiara, “your job is to deal with—with this scene. Oh my God, this blood! Why is there so much blood?”
She backs away in her platform sandals. But it is too late. Her sandals are touched with the blood pooling on the bodies, on the leaves, on the vehicles, on the trees, on the sun.
The blood of the child in a frilled dress.
The other policeman, in aviator glasses that obscure his eyes and both of his cheeks, so that he looks like a walking Ray-Ban without a face, walks over to the Pajero, wading through the blood.
He is just full of it.
“What are you doing?”
He pulls out her duffel bag from the back of the Pajero.
“What are you doing? Gogoboy, take my bag away from him.”
“Ma’am, they are the police.”
“But aren’t you the army?”
“But we are off duty.”
“What the hell? What’s the use of having armed guards if you just let bandits open up my bags with impunity? Edward, this is the time to use your stupid Uzi.”
But no one follows the director’s orders.
“Ma’am, what is this?”
The faceless policeman with the aviator glasses has ripped open the bag.
Triumphantly, he shows them all a square pale blue box.
He takes it out of the green and purple duffel and hands it to his crippled partner, who gently shakes the box.
Everyone stares at the square box, decorated with pale blue whorls, that the stocky one handles with his free, unbandaged hand.
“What is that?” says Chiara. “Who put that in my bag?”
The policeman lifts the cover off the pale blue box, and he extracts a plastic bag full of gray dust, the plastic bag limp in his wounded hand.
“Aha,” says the effaced policeman, his sunglasses in victory slipping almost to his chin, “just as it is reported. Shabu!”
“What?”
“Drugs, ma’am,” mourns Edward, shaking his head. “You have drugs in your bag.”
“See,” says the policeman with the bandaged hand, “it is even marked on the box: S.A.V. Must be a new chemical, they are now making all new kinds of shabu.”
“What the hell is shabu?”
“What is it called in America?” Private First Class Gogoboy asks the policemen. “Fentanyl?”
“No. Meth,” says the bandaged policeman, the one who seems to be in charge, “meth crystal. Also known as cracks.”
Chiara laughs. “Are you out of your mind? That is not crack. That is the wrong texture. Meth is fine and bright, like powder. That is gray and pebbly, like coral beach sand!”
Now everyone is staring at Chiara.
“I am sorry, ma’am, you are under arrest,” says the stocky one with the bandaged arm, “for transporting shabu to Samar.”
“So you will arrest me for trumped-up drug possession, you will put me in jail instead of investigating which of your motorbike-riding colleagues killed this child right in front of our eyes? My God! Someone killed a child. We saw that shooter riding in tandem behind the driver on the motorbike, just like yours! I bet he was one of you. So you will hide your colleagues’ crime by arresting a foreigner, a bystander? You’re criminals. You’re bandits.”
“No one is seeing a motorcycle riding in tandem. Did you boys see a riding in tandem?”
And the faceless man in aviator glasses turns to Edward and Private First Class Gogoboy.
“The father is a drug addict, that is usually for sure,” grieves Edward. “That is usually the reason why they die.”
“Usually?” says Chiara. “Will you stop saying usually, Edwar
d? You are driving me nuts! You know very well that is not the reason why people die. These policemen are usually the reason for these deaths!”
“Now it is you who are saying usually, ma’am,” mourns Edward.
“But you have shabu in your bag, ma’am!” the stocky policeman declares. He points to the bag in his open, unhurt palm. He puts it back in the box and shakes the box before Chiara. “That is right in front of the eyes!”
“That is not shabu, you idiots!”
And now they all turn to see who has come upon them.
“Cut! Cut! Cut!”
It is Magsalin in a pedicab bearing a duffel bag and her rage.
She leaps out, hands Chiara the bag she carries, and snatches the pale blue box from the policeman’s arms.
Magsalin cradles the box against her body.
Magsalin, holding the box and staring straight out at the father and child, has begun to weep.
She cannot help it.
She is wailing.
It is a monsoon wind that will never stop.
It is a perplexingly rational sight to see the image of a woman bending in sorrow before the scene of carnage on the road, silhouetted against the morning light, swaying and wailing before the bystanders, the soldiers and goons and the foreigner on the periphery—though in truth she is wailing for a box instead of for the dead that lie before her eyes.
No one moves, frozen in this game of Statue Dance, listening to Magsalin.
“Ah,” says Chiara, “just as I thought. I knew it. I’ve been trying to piece it all together. Those are his remains. You have been carrying them around with you from Tacloban to Manila to New York and back. You carried it with you in Cubao. You carried it with you on the ferry to Allen. It has been your mission on the road to Samar. You are carrying your husband’s body, whom you hope to bury with your mother across the strait, in Tacloban.”
Chiara mentally notes problems of film, even of costume design: how did a pedicab get here so quickly? Why is she, Chiara, wearing short shorts? Who gave her platform shoes? Why will justice never happen? Who in their right mind would mistake cremains for crack? And will Magsalin ever just mourn, without plots and stories and gestures that distance sorrow?