by Gina Apostol
But, of course, Odysseus returns.
She misses him. He will not be back.
1.
The Blood
No one wipes the blood. No one solves the problem of the father and child on the highway, with the culprits, the speeding motorbike with the men riding in tandem, who had shot them, shot them, shot them, gone with the breeze of the habagat, and the two policemen have lost the prize ransom they will not make from the two weird women, chattering over a box. The stocky one is spooked by the discovery anyhow that he had been holding the ground bits of a dead body, he did not know it could have that texture, he had never held it, a body made of a handful of dust. Bodies were rotting, soiled, and waiting for his percentage, at the funeral parlor, at the drug war scenes. He is a Christian man, that is not a Christian body. He crosses himself with his good arm then begins to take notes, writing out descriptions of the child—tongue, purple, lollipop, cherry, arm, broken. He has all the words. But he keeps feeling it on his phantom palm, his hand that cannot feel—the pebbly grit of a human soul, pulverized into nothing. A bunch of dust. A sudden, tight pinch seizes him, in his testicles, it runs to his nipples, it is a sexual arousal—the way realization comes to him, his erotic lash of knowing. This is who he is, Sergeant Bernardo Gustavo Randols, believer in God and the president. A handful of dust. How strange it is to understand finally who he is. He is a small, festering body of a thing, a nothing, he can already feel his bones in his palms: crumbling under his wrinkling skin. He feels the women’s eyes upon him, bearing down upon his dead arm as he takes his notes.
“Officer! Hoy! Hoy! Mister Police!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He is looking down, being busy.
“I want them to have a good funeral,” says Magsalin. “I want you to give them a casket. I want you to buy them flowers. I want you to get their names.”
Chiara reaches into her Hermès bag.
“I don’t know,” says Chiara under her breath. “I don’t know if this is the right way to do it. I prefer justice.”
“I know,” says Magsalin, pulling the director to her side, her whisper coming out in a hiss. “But do you think you will exact it in the middle of the road in a town where no one knows you, a woman in short shorts and bloody platform sandals, with even your continuity in question, do you think that is your role right now, to be the avenger in a time that does not give a fuck?”
“No,” says Chiara.
Magsalin motions to Edward.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You will remain behind, here in Samar, Edward.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You will take the money from Chiara. You will make sure it happens as I say. You will do the best for the father and child.”
Edward’s smile is shy but proud.
He lifts his Uzi to attention.
Magsalin stares at the blood on it, at the wax square of blood on the rifle’s butt like bits of a candle, and pebbles stuck into its flattened design.
She stares at the tableau of return behind him, clutching the box.
She feels in her that uselessness, that cry, so deep it cannot be excavated, and it is so familiar, the weeping in her body, its slack sick weakening, the way her limbs feel like a hot wind has rushed through them, and she is harrowed and hollowed—this familiar, involuntary scraping of the body, a scythe through the blood.
She is so tired. It is never gone. This untold grief.
“Yes, ma’am,” says Edward, “I will do everything for the father and child. I will do it! I will do my best!”
31.
The Fabulous Portage
Silent rivalry over who should take over the fabulous portage, the sacks and bundles from the boats—there is a brief exchange of glances between lieutenant and captain.
Bumpus gestures to the grinning boys carrying the mail.
Bumpus salutes the captain.
—Mail, sir! It arrived in Tacloban last night. Padre Donato told me about it, and I kept it a surprise.
—You know it was wrong not to let me know, lieutenant. Imagine the relief I could have given the men.
—Captain, they would have died from waiting if they knew. They’re loony enough as it is.
—No one is loony here, lieutenant. Mind your speech. What is the news on Scheetherly?
—Scheetherly is all right, sir. The doctor, too, says he is not loony, sir. It is only a state of being on the islands. So says the medico. The harvest of the war in the shape of thousands of sick and wounded and insane wrecked in body and mind. It is only the state of being on the islands. Scheetherly will be transported to a hospital in Manila. He is still singing about Christmas, the fucker. They will ship him back home, the lucky duck. Here are the orders.
The captain takes the papers.
What Connell really wishes to do is take a mailbag from the porters and snatch at the piles until he finds his name.
But he restrains himself.
Bumpus can be silent no longer:
—Sir! Captain! I also bring bad news.
Captain Connell stares at Bumpus, who is holding out a newspaper.
—McKinley has been shot.
Bumpus, suddenly the oracle, kind of enjoys his role.
The captain looks at the headline before him. It is almost a month old.
Oh my God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph. God protect us on these islands.
Captain Connell crosses himself.
Bumpus shakes his head.
—Of all the ways to go. To be shot by a loony, an anarchist in Buffalo.
—Don’t be impertinent, lieutenant. I am from Buffalo.
—Oh, I am sorry, sir! Captain! I am sorry for your loss.
32.
Casiana Nacionales
She has staked their place in the forest with their names.
Fra + Cas.
Cas ♥ Fra.
But he finds her by her smells—the incense of fruit, of mangoes, atis, guavas, and pomelos, that lingers everywhere this lady goes, also bahalina tuba, coconut fritters, and marmalade. She sells everything but bestows her smiles only on a few. Poor Benton Prick, her discarded one. He had returned with his cheeks red, but such chastening will only make him a better soldier, serves that Cherokee right. So Griswold the surgeon smirks. Her fracasos had only emboldened Frank. It means anyone can try. Try and try again.
Cassandra Chase is amused by the temerity of Casiana Nacionales. We can learn from her, she thinks. She sees the couple, a fused shadow through the grassy slats of her window out there in the clearing by Giporlos. The picture she wishes to take she would call The Vespertine Pair, in which the viewer, tricked by the light of dusk, would not be able to discern the wooer from the wooed. The photographer loves the boldness of the idea, the composition, but she understands her audience might not see the logic of it or even be able to imagine that there might be other ways to conceive of love.
Casiana takes him into her carefully, mindful of his trembling. First she had divested him of his foreignness, his hat, his kersey shirt, his gristly shorts. Then she had taken the heaviness out of his pockets—the coins, his flat whistle, a set of prison keys—then she lightened him of his sad underpants and socks. What a hairy thing is a man, so noble if seasoned, so infinite in faculties, in sounds and moving, how pathetic. He heaves, grunts, pulls at the talahib, growls at the ants, mimics a hundred owls. His absurdity makes her feel tender, as if she had made him, after all, in her image, a roiling, disingenuous, shaken thing. A penis. A man. Then she moves, and moves, and her own body, a warm agitator, surprises herself—her ruse is, to her astonishment, twice blessed. Then thrice and quadruply. The multiplying anarchy of her body is a pleasant detour, a secondary matter—a funny collateral of war. But at one point, there it is, it is all that matters, to both Prank Vitrine and Casiana Nacionales, these two orphans of history—a simultaneous assault, one
upon the other—but who is to be master? It is a rocking, sighing braid of a shadow, a beast of a snake with twin heads, back and forth, back and forth in the talahib. And then the strangled salutation, a dull heave, and they lie, a heap of coiled hemp, on the grass. Who is to be master? Sleep unites the breathing pair, but Cassandra hears an odd movement, then a jingling sound, and there is a slip of a hand, a slit in a pocket, and the sheen of metal. It is gone.
The vespertine women pass like shushed dusk—a shuffling of slippers on grass and rocks, muffled words under the hesitating moon.
—You got them? asks Felisa Catalogo.
—I left the men two stews, dinuguan, and some bulalo soup, reports Tasing Abayan—Hope they have a good fiesta. Haha!
—Tell the men to bring me back my caldero, reminds Inday Duran—It will be good to have it in the mountains.
—Pssh. You talk about your rice pot in a time like this?
—I hope Nemesio fits my blouse, says Puring Canillas.
—You think my Ambrosio will be able to pin the corchetes on my skirt when he can barely take it off me, asks Delilah Acidre.
—Hahaha, laughs Yoying Delgado.
—Stop it, Yoying, says Dolores Abanador—Stop it, or you’ll choke yourself laughing to death.
—I am sorry, Mana Dolores, I just can’t stop imagining him, my Dionisio, wearing my camisa’t saya. He has skinny calves, you know. He looks like a heron in a lake in his shorts.
—Aaaiiieeee, says Tisay Abanador.
—Stop crying, Tisay, says Dolores Abanador—What are you crying about, it has not started yet.
—I can’t stop imagining him, my Exequiel. They will notice his hairy legs in the church, and it will be enough to kill him.
—Estupida! says Dolores Abanador—Did I not give my son the knives from our bamboo water carrier—will he not find a way to defend?
—Who will ring the bells?
—I told my Balê to get your Nancio to do it, Marga, and your son Dong, Puring, says Dolores Abanador.
—Ay, Jesusmariajosep—Nancio knows how to ring a bell—says Marga—I told him, he better not sleep in and forget his job, or he’ll be ringing none of my bells again.
—Haha, Marga, that is just what I told my Ambrosio—
—Sssh, says Dolores—That will be enough, the two of you, Marga and Delilah! My God, all you can think of in a time like this!
—I hear the children are up in the mountain now, every single one.
—They are with Mayet Cañetes—off to pick some guavas for fiesta, reports Tasing Abayan—Mayet told everyone, including her boyfriend, that young one Meyer the musician.
—Ah, the teen-edger, Meyer the butiki, the one with the smooth face of a lizard.
—Yeah, she told him so no one will miss them.
—You got them, Casiana? whispers Felisa Catalogo.
—I have them, says Casiana—Don’t worry. It will be done. I will be back in town to hand them to the Chief.
The women rustle like migrants into Egypt, mice scuttling through the forest leaves, up toward the mountains beyond Giporlos.
33.
The Keys
Frank Betron cannot find his keys. He knows where he had them last. In the forest. He will not tell the captain, who has sent him to seek the priest. Frank looks for the padre in the dim church with its recessed shrines to peeling saints. Casiana had taught him the lives of her saints. San Antonio de Padua. Santa Teresa de Avila and San Martin de Porres, who both look shamefaced. The blackface of San Martin is graying with time and weather into albino shards. How sweetly she once showed him the relics—but he must keep a lid on it, don’t think of that. Santa Teresa’s stern gaze has battled with heretical rains, erasing her views of unspeakable acts. Only San Lorenzo Martir, the patron saint, yet to be burned in his Roman pot, looks comfortable, painted in fiesta garb.
The bell ringer Nancio has not seen the priest, nor has the priest’s helper, that cool cucumber, his amiga, Casiana Nacionales.
Silent as the saints, the bell ringer and Casiana stare at Prank Vitrine.
Frank Betron looks her in the eye when he asks the question. She is no wilting lily, that Casiana. Whatever happens in the forest remains in the forest. Fuck you, gecko, get out. She is smirking at his military demeanor, his official pose. She watches him clutch the Krag’s bayonet dangling from his belt.
—Ah. Un heroe, Prank Vitrine.
—My name is Frank. You know it. Can you tell me where the padre went?, he asks again.
Both Nancio and Casiana shake their heads.
—Come on, Casiana. Mi amiga. Remember the tree, what you carved—oh don’t be like that.
—I am no one’s amiga, laughs Casiana—Who told you that? I am enemiga. That is what I am.
—The captain wants a word with the padre. There are rumors women are wandering in the woods. Do you know why?
—Aswang, she says—witchcraft. But that is an old wives’ tale. Don’t believe anyone when they say you can find women in the forest with their split bodies, one for sleeping and one for flying, and if you find one of them in your dreams, you die of bangungot. Men do not die of dreams. Do not believe those women!
—Also, I can’t find—I am also missing—did you find it last time—I mean—
It is Frank Betron who blushes, while Casiana holds his glance, not quite a Piero della Francesca angel, hands over her chest, hanging on to the rosary at her neck.
Who is to be master?
Answer: a woman.
—I mean, maybe we can talk it over tomorrow? Casiana —no—don’t be like that—
—I guess, she says—sure. Tomorrow is another day.
The Chief arrives at the confessional booth: Prank Vitrine is no Holy Ghost, in his kersey trousers and foreign hat.
—No padre here, the Chief says. He shoos him away from the church—Padre no hay aqui.
Casiana holds up before Frank the secret in her clasped hands. But it is not the keys to the men’s jails that he is looking for. He sees her rosary. She is mouthing words, as if in prayer. She shakes her head and bows solemnly toward her palms raising the white beads, an amulet, a warning, she is smiling, santa maria an im’ iroy ka nga dios nga yawa ka, she’s an imp, that Casiana, he should have never gotten involved, but he was so lonely, really, and really she could be very nice to him, that Casiana.
Betron backs away at the display, whether it is mockery or devotion he can’t tell, after all, he does not know her, though he wishes to. Tomorrow is another day. And he lopes back to the plaza, his boots spraying dirt, marking a path from church to bivouac that the men of Balangiga will retrace.
He does not see Casiana’s look as he walks away, the way she stares at him, her rosary in her hand, watching him go, memorizing his pale kersey shirt, the same dissolving color of his eyes—the way his absurd hat fell over his face, so that she had this urge to pull it back with a sorcerer’s hand, so she could see his face again, she remembers years later in Balangiga.
The priest is not in the sabong, where the fighting cocks are being groomed for the evening affair, when the roasted pigs and the dinuguan and the pancit will be eaten and the men will be dumb with wine. Under the guise of a piss or a smoke, his men will leave camp at night, such is the looseness of duty in the tropics, Frank knows. Frank Betron passes a party going on at Dong Canillas the tuba maker’s hut. The fiesta day of their saint has given the penned laborers from the surrounding towns a reprieve. They raise their cups before Frank Betron: “Tagay, Joe!” Back at the plaza, Bumpus calls on Sergeant Irish for more candles so he can keep reading his mail.
—No can do, Irish shakes his head. He raises his own unread letters—Even I will have to wait till tomorrow.
Sitting in darkness, the soldiers read the ghost messages they have already memorized, then they turn in to their dimmed bunks. When the sentry passes,
their shadows rise to meet up with their hosts, to leave camp for fiesta, the stuck pig, and the dark wine.
34.
Breakfast in Balangiga
Of course, there is no tomorrow. The next day, at breakfast, they all die. Except for a few survivors, who get the message. The people of the Philippines want them dead. During the official investigation, what the Americans ask Cassandra is how could it be that the photographer had no clue. She rents the hut of that insurrecto, that Geronima of Samar, Casiana Nacionales.
That instigator, the rosary bandit.
Out there in the childish garden of dense anahaw, gumamela, and bougainvillea, Cassandra spends her days watering the orchids, watching the sunset, and so on, and putters about in her petticoats at dusk, a vespertine maiden, in her tropical artist’s retreat.
How could she not know?
Did she not witness how Casiana had the keys that unlocked the laboring men’s jails?
Were the screams of the American soldiers a dream?
The soldiers, hung over from the fiesta feast, eager in the morning light to read again their letters from home, are slaughtered at breakfast. It is the only time in the day that the Americans carry no guns.
The men of Balangiga are already gone from their jail, released overnight.
The men had rushed off to the convent to dress with the other ones, the hired men of Guiuan, San Roque, Lawaan, Giporlos come to help the Chief and the captain for the garrison’s inspection by General Jakey Smith. So the Chief had explained their presence to the captain.
They all came for the cleansing of Balangiga.
The men massed together in the church, dressed in women’s skirts and wielding bolo knives and, later, the Krags stolen from the garrison.
They attack at the sound of the bells.
A woman, they say, stood outside the church. At the sound of the bells she raised her rosary. She waved it over her head, like a lasso, the prayed-for noose of the Americans. And she waved her holy lasso and began whooping like Geronimo.