by Gina Apostol
“Yes,” Magsalin says. “This is my husband’s body. I left the country when he died.”
“It was too painful to remember.”
“Yes.”
“You could not return home even as your mother lay dying.”
“Yes.”
“So you began writing a mystery story instead, parceling out your pain into your characters’ lives. Is his name Stéphane, by any chance?”
“No. His name is Stig. Though it’s true—people always ended up calling him Steve. Even my mom. His name was Stig Alyosha Virkelig. He was a writer. He was in the middle of writing a novel when he died. It is unfinished.”
30.
Vespers
Bisperas han patron is the busiest day of a town’s year. At vespers the day before the patron saint’s feast, everything must be cleaned—the yard of litter, the head of lice, the kangkong of dirt, the fish of guts, the chicken of feathers, the goat and pig of hair and tusk, and the soul of sin. People do not wait until Angelus to go to confession, and Padre Donato hurries away after kissing Cassandra Chase on both cheeks, beso-beso, in the European way. He is in a hurry, clasping his hands in prayer as he runs, his speed implying the sanctity of his chores.
He never reappears in Balangiga.
In time with the Confiteor, animals outside the convent begin to die.
Fiesta is an ominous day for pigs, chickens, and goats, but especially pigs. The massacre of lechon, roast suckling swine, starts bisperas han patron. Guests in their finery should not see the unshaven carcasses, and it is profane on the day of the patron saint to listen to them die.
Cassandra is writing down the above details of fiesta customs for her captions, embellishing with a traveler’s fancy. It’s not a rule, for instance, that pigs are slaughtered the day before: you want pigfat fresh, since the best fat is liquid, not solid. Pigs, truth be told, are just as often slaughtered under homes the actual day of fiesta, and guests could care less if they hear the pigs squeal as long as the product is crunchy. Cassandra writes with devotion about the islanders’ faith. The errors in Cassandra’s captions will be translated into five languages, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and French, arrayed in italics on the cardboard back of the stereo card.
The pig in her second picture is vertical on a bamboo pole, all alone, nothing to denote scale, so at first glance you mistake it with its pointy ears for a flayed bat. She takes another view of it, with its legs tucked and the gaping void of its robbed and bloody flanks, slit clean to its muzzle, bereft of intestines and organs, the black hole staring at you in abstract design until the figural point of the portrait takes shape, a beautifully basted, still heaving carcass, tied with art in Manila twine. Her best is the one where the pig is slit at its belly, and the laborer, in the pose of Saint Anthony the Hermit, patron of pigs and skin diseases, has just begun the basting act, hemp and knife held aloft. Her sharp camera catches these odd, singular details—the flattened, wet gristle, the plaited, entwining rope, the glittering knife. She has studied the history of Western art. The details appear like those emblematic non sequiturs in Old Master paintings, in which the skull at Jerome’s feet implies a meditative life, and a pomegranate, rolling toward the viewer from a basket, offers resurrection.
33.
The Portrait
Caz sits before Freddo, the art director from Gubbio. Despite herself, she loves his stories. Italians and Filipinos are twins, he says; they are separated at birth. Your roscas, made of lard and anise, is a biscotto. Your lechon, the roast pig, is the first cousin of porchetta. You know porchetta? She knows he does it to make her feel at ease. Caz shakes her head, smiling. There—keep that smile. The Madonna of Monterchi has a smile like that, head down, please, yes: she looks shy, but do not be deceived. The Madonna is his only Virgin who undoes her clothes to share the secret of her body, swaddled in her soft under-linen—Piero’s Madonna gives you a little peek—it’s just her inner clothing, don’t worry, it is very tame, after all it is still only the Renaissance—so divine is her domestic gesture the angels around her applaud. It is Piero della Francesca’s homage to his mother. It is, of course, a gesture toward himself: he is the child in the swollen belly of the lady of Monterchi being applauded by all the pretty pastel-colored angels. Or maybe the madonna is really thinking of porchetta, and the anise and the fennel to season the meat, waiting to be done posing so she can go to the market and eat her fill of pig.
Eh? Don’t worry, we will be done soon. It is lunch.
How can you so patently distort a portrait you obviously adore?
Caz grins. Her teeth show.
Uh. Please stop, he says. No smiling like that now.
She can see that Freddo loves Piero della Francesca the way boys adore their marbles, their jar of jolens—glassine suns, vermilion tears, and cerulean moons. But Caz understands that Freddo’s photos of her will be models for the sculpture of a terrible idol of the village Tommy Connell of Company C razes to the ground in Samar—the opposite of love.
The Madonna Freddo loves is the monster he is making.
It is Balangiga that Tommy Connell witnesses, but it is his fantasy that will be slain. A hallucination and a hoax, this wild tribe of island devils, and perhaps also a matter of opium—but none will be the wiser. Everyone in the movie will die.
She has seen the green-haired a.d. Fionnuala and her crew already practicing the scene of carnage with the orphans from SOS Village, imported from across the strait, from Nula-Tula in Tacloban. They have played dead for hours, lying along the riverbanks, in the talahib, in the muddy crevices of the winding trek to the caves, the batter of their blood stuck on their cheeks and limbs when they get back up to play their games—bulangkoy, jolens, tumba lata, Statue Dance. The baby ghouls are a bizarre sight though they have settled well enough in the forest. They hung around for days for their single scene, then played with the Chinese toddlers in their off hours.
Caz had watched these children, with their gashed skulls and battered eyes and hair matted with blood and mud, dancing and laughing in a circle as one boy with no brains, a rigged sop of organs dangling down the back of his neck, sang out—Stay-choo!
And the kids in the circle froze.
It was part of their game, Statue Dance, recess between the scenes.
But this eerie, frozen stance was also their pose in the forest as they lay down dead, with their mothers, their chickens, their brothers and their sisters and their household goods in the long scene of despair that would be their claim to fame.
It was odd to see them upright in the poses of their dying: cracked blood on their matted cheeks as they stood still.
When the people of her town first saw the scene of the massed dead children, Caz could see they were finally impressed. Their professional kibitzer’s calm was shaken. It took days to film the children: the idea of the single shot was to pile body upon body, legs and pigs and babies and carabaos and grass and goats, in a long pan of destruction in which the morbid multiplication would mirror the infinite spiral of historic slaughter, mimicking the exhaustive horror history has already cataloged. The scene would eternize a trope. The a.d. Fionnuala made one particularly nimble child, Estrella, climb up onto a tree, dangling from two forking branches, as if a storm had cast her there, her arms splayed, as on a cross. It was not clear if little Estrella was proud or petrified, but she was good at it. It was uncanny. The child had the capacity to be absolutely still. Caz had watched the villagers watch the scene of the children, the scene of the massacre of the reconcentrated villagers of Samar in 1901, and she thought how strange it was to see it dawning upon them, as they stood motionless, hands upon their open mouths, not even stirring to strike at the flies or berate the Chinese toddlers, that this was their history unfolding before their eyes.
Filipinos will slaughter forty-eight Americans, then Americans will slaughter thirty thousand Filipinos. Tit for tat. The ruinous hallucinoge
nic idol, a symbol, a giant windmill toppled by the maddened Tommy Connell, is a mirage, but it wreaks havoc enough. The toppling dissolve that dominates the screen, the nightmare of Tommy Connell, is the face of Caz mimicking the Madonna of Monterchi, mother of the precocious genius Piero della Francesca (born 1415) who dreamed into legend his own gentle birth.
With these guys, thinks Caz, everything always ends in self-portrait.
She grips the seat of the raised stool, with a feeling she is toppling over—and at that point she meets him again, in the eye.
Ludo is only passing, but the gaze is enough.
A penis is funny. At rest it has the look of a raised scab, an overlay of rotted fish, or wrinkled flesh, thin-skinned. It is sad. If you wave your fingers above it, not even touching, it will follow like a headless puppet. It has a mind of its own, but no brain. Even the penis of an internationally famous movie director salutes you like a sad private. Caz takes it in with a witchlike cackle because it pleases her to fake it. Acting allows her to be herself, to be pleased. She wishes to be an idol, a monster, a madonna, a stranger. She likes this pleasure of being the mistress, the anonymity of one who does not ask the questions or need to weep when she is alone. She loves the freedom of not needing to know who he is, though she loves his stories. Her father is dead. Her brother is in love with his endless war. She is an orphan. She screams with pleasure.
Caz soaps routinely, without thinking—the inside of thighs, then shins, calves, and ankles. What is it about him that she misses? She cannot even recall moments of her anger, why she had left. She left because it kept raining while the movie was on location. She left because he had everything to do, a movie, while she had the sight of monsoon destruction in her fern and anahaw garden. She left because she wished she had something to do, like the seamstresses, the pot sellers, the cameramen in his movie. So many months later she can call her recall nothing—not nostalgia, not memory, not even sorrow. She has no words, they hold emptiness. Her friends at university, the ones who were not ashamed of her affair, say, it is normal: of course, she is numb. But in one sense, she does not miss Ludo, not the entirety of him, not his presence as a person, a human being walking, his loves and fears and ambition. It is hard to keep him alive in her head. As if he were an exercise in memory, and not its point.
The figure of the loved one in his wholeness escapes her.
It was she who had left him. But the minute she left, she missed him.
Her brother Francisco had visited—don’t you dare preach to me how to live my life, she told him, but he preached to her anyway.
It’s a movie, Francisco, not a passion play of your impossible angst and self-righteousness, she told him.
They are orphans, Caz, he said. Not figments of his egotism and self-regard. How could he do that to children? Make those children replay tragedies they cannot soothe or erase for themselves? Children who are already haunted by grief—who knows what they have already witnessed, being so abandoned?
Has it ever occurred to you that the children in replaying trauma might find a way to express their own? That the simulacra of grief, distanced from us, mediated from our own, artificial as they are, allow us to gain a foothold, however tenuous, on the deep-seated horrors that claw at us but to which we do not give names?
Excuse me, Caz, but I, too, have read Aristotle’s theory of mimesis. I am talking about actual children, not Ancient Greek stupid drama—how could you watch it all happen, as if the scene, the time, the history has nothing to do with you?
At that, she hit Francisco, who knew better than to respond, and she walked away. He did not follow.
But after that, she left Ludo. She closed her father’s house and just walked out on the movie. She did not tell him where she went. She went back to the university. She started reading Proust. She kept rereading a particular moment, the scene of Madame Guermantes and her red shoes, in the third volume, when Marcel recognizes the depths of the Duchess’s cruelty in a chapter about making a choice between wearing red or black shoes. In this way, back at the university, she was absorbed, though not happy.
34.
How Could She Know
How could she know the denouement? She did not know the plot. And even his end—how can she put it as she understands it? No matter how terrible it is to recognize the truth, because it establishes her irrelevance in his life, though she was his lover, no matter how terrible it is to recognize it, in the end, Ludo’s act, no matter how much she turns it over in her mind’s eye, spinning it about until meaning collapses—his act is his.
She thinks, I thought he was whole, a monstrously complete and vital being, and we all were the fractured and fragmenting audience, prey to the director’s totalizing gaze.
What she had believed was that the director of a movie commands the world’s will.
But he was also a man fused, patched, and growling, so clearly a constructing and reconstructing figure, produced, maybe, by others’ needs.
How odd to think—he, too, was unfinished.
But it bothers her though—how she never noticed.
A snap, a wish.
She wished she had noticed it, why he wished to die.
Who knows?
Even her scattershot thoughts, of a woman who loved him, are obscene.
Let him keep them, as he wished to keep them—let him keep his secrets to himself, in his dumb, pale blue columbarium of a box, his secret within a secret.
Eternity, it turns out, is simply this—privacy.
But sometimes the message comes to her like a phantom. She takes it out of the envelope. She opens his letter. He has changed his mind, he says in the letter; he has turned back from the dead, and he will be outside the door, standing by their bookshelf in New York, near the titles P to R. Perec to Réal. He was mistaken, he says, and now he has returned. And how good it feels to know that Time, in a reversal of expectation, can in truth turn back.
Then she wakes up.
Semantic recall. Unconscious prompts. It’s her limbs that have intelligence: they know when to lift a coffee cup, when to brake the car at street corners. Her wet hands move from face to neck; and once again her gestures reprove her. She has been soaping her body twice over, four arms, four kneecaps, another elbow. She should turn off the shower. She is done.
There is that dissolve on the screen—a splash. Virginie feels that first stirring, when she moves to turn off the tap. She takes a step, thighs parted, so that she opens up to gushing water as she turns—and swiftly, for some reason (the angle? the time of month?), an uncalled memory gathers. That long-dormant pleasure—that clitoral gap. It is the body’s memory that moves her: nothing else, apart from dreams, is as strong or real. Not lost conversations, not thinking, not rushes on the monitor, the sudden flash of a man in action, his face just missed, an animal swimming in the water, over and over again, in endless figure eights. No sign contains it. Language does not speak it: this grief that lies every day in her body, involuntary, carried by memory in her skin.
How odd that now, this instant, is the first time she feels that, yes, she remembers Ludo. How absurd, she thinks, her eyes in the mirror strangely looking surprised, how absurd it is to forget that this—this is the core of memory. The body roused. This is grief.
In the stories of widows, they are allowed no vaginas, though everything else has its place. Bernarda Alba has her casa, but no cunt. Novenas, anniversaries, Thank You notes to funeral well wishers that you can buy at Hallmark stores. The library cards go back in the books’ card pockets, and she mails his last books to their home. She keeps his jade figures of semiotic Buddhas, each cast in a different posture, the soul’s semaphores haggled for at a night market in Bangkok; his mysterious sketch of a jungle trail in Sohoton; this box of index cards with scrambled numbers that she thinks has a code, but he kept it; and the last shirt he wore before he stepped into the bath, a rugby shirt in blue, whit
e, and yellow, with the scuffs on the collar, left in a heap by the tub.
It is a shirt with faded blue and yellow stripes. It used to hang on his thinning frame whittled to nothing in the tropics. He used to leave it untucked over the sheer butt of his white soccer shorts. In the tropics, he liked to play keep-away with the soccer ball while figuring out his movie’s scenes. They had bundled up the clothes in a paper bag. They gave it to her, the wife, the first of kin. It was too early in the aftermath, and no one knew what to throw away, the messenger, a shy man, said. Without thinking, she had taken out the shirt from the bag. Its cotton collar was worn, dulled to dirt gray at frayed ends, and frayed, too, were the cuffs of his sleeves. It was not his favorite shirt, she thought. Just a convenient one. But now it is a symbol. Anyhow, he never bothered with minor details, his clothes or matching shoes, though there was one scarf he favored, a pale blue tissue-thin thing. Now she wonders where it is.
What struck her was that she had never noticed it.
That his shirt was frayed.
It’s these matters—these posthumous signals of her ignorance of him (ordinary enough if he were alive)—that challenge the hubris of a wife. Her arrogant belief that she knew him turns her body warm, as if her life were a lie.
The other things are packed, taped into a box, and shipped off.
She takes her toes in hand and pats them. She dabs at her calves, then thighs. A naked woman weeping in a bathroom has no epic counterpart or remedy. In the Odyssey, it takes time before some readers believe that Odysseus will come back, despite the prophecies of the gods, because Penelope’s mourning for his death is so convincing.