Insurrecto

by Gina Apostol

  It was the signal for the Chief’s shout.

  Sulong, Balangiga!

  That bumbling oaf, that mumbling linguist, that chess nut and arnis grandstanding master, Valeriano Abanador, the Chief—what an actor! He had tricked them all with his sheepish ways for two whole months. He came howling with his sundang in one hand, in the other a bolo, to lead them, a thousand strong, bands of men headed for their jobs—men to hack at the barracks, men to hack at the mess hall, and the best men to go after the officers in the kumbento. They hacked them, hacked them, hacked them.

  Bumpus the lieutenant with his poor weapon in his hand, a candlestick stuck in a zinfandel bottle, and letters from home scattered on his bed. Shot with a Mauser, beheaded by a sundang. Knifed to death by the vice-mayor, Andronico Balais, a softspoken man.

  Griswold the surgeon, dreaming of Yosemite National Park, Tuscaloosa Pig Festival, the pineapple gardens of Hawaii, scenes from his placid stereo cards, which Dong Canillas pocketed in a hurry after he hacked him, hacked him, hacked him (but the young man forgot the prize, the Holmes viewer).

  Connell the captain, praying his novena to the Virgin. Who did not give a damn about him. It was the Chief who found Connell, oddly childlike in his undershirt, his naked, vulnerable thighs the first to show blood. But it was the fifteen-year-old Nemesio, that sleepy misfit, that narcolept, who stabbed him, stabbed him, stabbed him. Then his guts spilled out, and swear to God—that bloody Chief, that villain of arnis, that master of native military arts, reached in and grabbed the heart.

  There is a void in the captain’s body where his heart should be.

  Swear to God.

  Not a single officer survived.

  Sergeant Gustav Randles, kalabera nga layaw, Corpse at Large—felled while eating saging na saba.

  They say it was a woman with a Krag bayonet, rosary beads around her neck.

  The teenage musician, Meyer the bugler with the smooth face of a butiki, a lizard—killed as he drank fresh buko. Shot by the son of Felisa Catalogo, a boy also in his prime.

  Markley the orderly defended himself with a fork against Benito Nacionales.

  Markley died.

  Prick and Prank, wounded in the barracks—though one escaped.

  Walls the cook, thrown into his pot by Nancio Balasbas the pious bell ringer. Who chopped him, chopped him, chopped him like stew, like a malunggay tree, with a bolo knife.

  While rushing and shrieking and hollering Kapitan Abayan, no longer deaf and dumb, ran about the plaza crowing like a just awakened rooster in a skirt.

  As the people of Balangiga, the prisoners and the laborers and the washerwomen and churchgoers and the cooks slashed them, slashed them, slashed the americanos.

  Damn damn damn the americanos, cock-eyed, kakiac ladrones, underneath their starry flag, civilize ’em with a Krag, and return us to our own beloved hoooomes!

  Turn them over—they were done.

  Forty-eight American lives lost.

  It is the worst incident in the annals of the Unites States Army since the Battle of Little Bighorn!

  Barbarians! Deceivers! Beasts!

  Didn’t you know why there were no women in town? Didn’t you see how they had all escaped to the mountains at vespers the day before, taking even their pots and pans, leaving only their skirts? The men pretended to be women, that old guerrilla trick, so no one would be the wiser in the morning when they all massed up at church, crossing themselves for their sins!

  Even in your pictures—did you not see those women were not women—they were men costumed in their wives’ holy habits!

  They are women, not men, Cassandra says, they only look like holy warriors.

  How could you not know?

  I was busy looking at their art, Cassandra says.

  Cassandra Chase slept so peacefully in the hut on the edge of Giporlos that when survivors of the uprising come upon her in her rented hut near the home of the vanished rosary bead rebel, that insurrecto—Casiana Nacionales—of course the Americans arrest the photographer.

  Her deep sleep alone is complicit, they say.

  —Casiana is no insurrecto, Cassandra corrects the man who arrests her.

  She looks at his name, a soldier who survived.

  Sergeant Frank Betron.

  —She is an insurrecto, she is part of their plot, she stole my—keys!

  —If she is part of their plot, says Cassandra, she is no insurrecto. She is a revolutionary.

  Much later, the woman’s prepared testament is a rant, so the senators in the congressional hearing only skim it.

  —We told them we would free them from Spain. We lied. We took the islands for ourselves. We commit the crimes we say we abhor. We outdid the savagery for which we claim a just war. We reconcentrated their villages. We penned them up like cattle. We jailed their men for no reason they can fathom. We gave their people the water cure. We burned their crops. We burned their villages. We burned their pigs. We burned their children. O what a tangled web we weave—this damned plait of abaca rope we have braided ourselves—this war, this benevolent assimilation, this Manila hempen hell. When first we practice to deceive—we deceive ourselves first—can’t you see? Have you not read Mark Twain?—

  But to Frank Betron, she was brief.

  —It is their country, sergeant. You only hold the keys.

  In the end, her evil tongue almost kills her but her connections save her. She is the black sheep of her family, but she is also a Chase. The Chases of New York are friends, after all, with the new president (they sold glass with his dad, and as a child Cassandra once had dinner at his grandfather’s place, near Union Square, and they visit him in summers in Oyster Bay). She carries a wrinkled note in the hand of the old undersecretary of the navy—good thing, because now he is in charge of the world.

  Anyway, she’s only a woman, with no business being a photographer, a job for the vulgar. In this way, Cassandra remains in the forest, an itinerant artist in Samar, as the Americans retaliate for the harrowing of Captain Connell and his men by the people of Balangiga.

  35.

  An Apotheosis

  Cassandra Chase’s pictures of the dead villagers in Samar cause a sensation in 1902. America is riveted, as pictures of dead Filipinos in coconut fields are described in smuggled letters to the New York Herald and the Springfield Republican. They are like bodies in mud dragged to death by a typhoon, landing far away from home. An apotheosis of ten thousand. Figures hanging from trees like crosses, their scrupulous realism shaping a vertiginous city, some shining city on a hill.

  Propriety bans the pictures’ publication, but damage is done.

  The pictures have no captions: Women cradling their naked babies at their breasts. A woman’s thighs spread open on a blanket, her baby’s head thrust against her vagina. A dead child sprawled in the middle of a road. A naked girl running toward the viewer in a field, her arms outstretched, as if waving. A beheaded, naked body splayed against a bamboo fence. A child’s arms spread out on the ground, in the shape of a cross. A woman holding the body of her dead husband, in the pose of the Pietà. The congressional hearings on the affairs of the Philippine Islands, organized in January 1902 in the aftermath of the scandal, hold a moment of silence.

  True, the photographer’s fame is split.

  Cassandra Chase gives her oral testimony before the senators, but it is in camera, because the witness of a woman, such a base story from a lady with her good name, is too vulgar to repeat in public. Her unpatriotic display ruffles even the thundering anti-imperialist, Senator Hoar, and her blistering delivery of the facts of conquest, painted as it is with irrelevant asides on Renaissance art, shocking talk of venereal diseases, frank portrayals of insanity among the Americans, plus a long list of useless names—Puring Canillas, Dolores Abanador, Delilah Acidre, and above all, she says, that Geronima of Balangiga, that Casiana—she o
f the noble name, she repeats—Casiana Nacionales—so many names no one need pronounce correctly—

  You must remember her name.

  In truth, her story gets on all of their nerves, Republican and Democrat alike—Beveridge of Indiana who storms out of the room twice in protest of her language, Culbertson of Texas who listens with his one good ear, the right-wing one, Allison of Iowa who interrupts her twenty-four times, Burrows of Michigan who contradicts her count of the dead, Proctor of Vermont who asks her to repeat the name Balangiga twelve times, then asks her to spell it, then continues to mispronounce it, prolonging the agony of everyone in the room, Rawlins of Utah who listens kindly, Patterson of Colorado who debates Burrows’ count of the dead, and Lodge of Massachusetts who says not a word then suddenly pronounces, you have said your piece, now that is enough, be off or we’ll kick you downstairs!

  And the three volumes of Affairs in the Philippine Islands, US Senate Hearings of January 1902, do not include her witness, for after all she is only a woman, and her pictures will be redacted, and no one will be the wiser, and the people of Samar, after all, need to rest in peace.

  Ora pro nobis.

  After the hearings, history does not hear much from Cassandra Chase. Who knows if her story is also a mirage. Is it wishful thinking that the enemy might be a reliable witness? The troubling, doubling quality of her Tru-Vision prints goes out of fashion, and the world moves on to other fare—praxinoscopes, Brownie cameras, moving pictures—in her world’s search for a way to view itself whole, given the limits of human stereopsis.

  1.

  The Women Give Each Other

  In the Pajero, the women give each other their rightful bags. In each, of course, is a script.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” says Chiara.

  “You do not need to get to Balangiga.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I could have told you that from the start.”

  “I am done. I know the ending,” says Chiara.

  “Good for you,” says Magsalin.

  “I am tired,” says Chiara, suddenly feeling the need to weep.

  “It’s okay. I am also tired. I know my ending, too,” says Magsalin.

  “We can turn around now. Let us just turn and go back.”

  And so the Pajero goes back over the whole trip, doubling back along the coast as the vespers bells ring and the sea is memory and the sense of a ghost across the strait on the way to Balangiga in the days of the habagat—that secret, metastasizing thing—the story she wishes to tell, an abaca weave, the warp and weft of numbers—traces the need to forget. Its molting spirals move along the smooth, unscathed road down Maharlika Highway, across Samar, past Allen into Matnog, and down through the Bicol region toward Southern Luzon Expressway, with the coastal breeze growing fainter and the habagat receding as they drive in the dawn past decrepit, cramped cement blocks of shops, into the insoluble puzzle at the heart of the labyrinth, the secret within the secret, the untold grief, toward Manila.

  35.

  Sorrow Is a Weave,

  a Sinuous Braid of Manila Hemp

  They keep moving. All over the place. New York. The south of France. How was she to know the denouement? She leaves and returns. She expects to see him in his studio, rearranging his index cards, reading a book. She cannot stay in one place for too long. Memory suffocates her, she says. She has dizzy spells. Their child keeps missing her father. They live in hotels. She hates remembering. Hotels are her way of forgetting. She has this thing now—about embracing the present. One must embrace the present, Chiara—it is all we have! She will try Buddhism, hatha yoga, even the optimistic premises of Catholic resurrection. When they receive the package in Antibes, addressed to the child, it is the mother who opens it.

  A picture of the couple in Las Vegas, the woman in her brocade frock and stiletto heels. A fur stole on a chair. A blurry, too far away figure of a man in a white suit on the stage, a wavering tassel of white—one of those concert snapshots that fails to register the thrill of the moment. A curly headed child on a beach, holding up a pink toy trowel. Another picture of the child, going around on a painted carousel, eating her gelato.

  And a wrapped box, a package within the package.

  There is a card on it. It is in Ludo’s hand.

  For Chiara, her mother says.

  It is for you.

  She will bury the facts of his life’s script the way he has stuck in details of the biography of Gus the Polar Bear, his unmade movie, into his colossal, subsequent films—curious details of desolation with resonance only to him. The secrets of her life with him she will also carry to her grave, with perhaps some details peeking through in rough spots, she can’t help it, but her choice is to be that life’s only reader, because what does anyone else have to do with it? It is nobody’s business. Not even the creator can know her part, that mystery writer Magsalin who draws her thin characterization—a rich widow in the South of France with unstable vision whose vagrancy is the mark of her sorrow, though such lingering unease, she thinks, is surely a weave, a sinuous braid of Manila hemp that sneaks through human lives. It must weave through all of us, this sense of horror, this solitude, the secret within the secret, and it is no one’s business to know.

  Maybe she had found it this time, in a corniche in France, swerving toward the Mediterranean; maybe she had found it in that hotel in Hong Kong. She has no need to explain why a woman would want to seek her place of peace.

  And sure, maybe her child will grow up, another desperate mimic, like her dad, to fathom a reason for why anything happens at all. Narrating too many scenes that do not count. When really, all one needs is to bring back the feeling of having once been absolutely loved. That is all. Love is the site of their wounding, these two women, mother and child.

  The child tears open the pale blue box.

  The child, only six, embraces the present. It is all she has.

  It is a Brownie camera.

  36.

  Finally, the Karaoke

  The karaoke strains at midnight are no surprise to the neighbors. The three brothers, Nemesio, Exequiel, and Ambrosio, have that good-natured carelessness that marks some drunks, but if you complain, bad things happen. The neighborhood tries not to rock the boat anyhow. Many are dockhands at Manila’s ports, smuggling all sorts of things that nearby merchants appreciate—televisions, rubber slippers, unbroken vases made in Japan. This makes friction in the area inconvenient, since anyone might squeal. Chiara’s realism is scrupulous, and she sends the prop girl Fionnuala to nearby shops before mentioning the above detail. Sure enough, the enterprising girl finds in the boholano stores ceramic pigs with bobbing heads; Danish troll dolls made in Macau; sextuplets of semiotic jade Buddhas, each cast in a different posture, a series of the soul’s semaphores; and those Chinatown lace fans that unfold to show watercolor scenes of Spaniards flamenco dancing, all under lock and key in the merchants’ glass cabinets.

  To be honest, late Elvis is not Magsalin’s style.

  “What is that?” Chiara asks.

  “Finally, the karaoke,” says Magsalin. “I warned you my uncles were coming to get you if you didn’t watch out. You know Chekhov’s rule—if you mention karaoke in the first act, you must turn it on at the end.”

  “Hah! The Filipino Chekhov’s rule! Not to mention Elvis.”

  “Ditto. If at first you mention Elvis, you must try and try again.”

  “That’s easy—his songs are earworms,” says Chiara. “I love that song,”

  “It’s the soundtrack of my life,” says Magsalin. “I hate it.”

  “Oh come on,” says Chiara, “‘Suspicious Minds’ is not the worst Elvis. Though it is atypical, the disco beat. At first he didn’t want to record it.”

  “Hah. Even Elvis thought it was corny,” says Magsalin. “That’s saying something.”

  “If you think it’s so gru
esome, then why make it the theme song for my movie—for Insurrecto? I mean, it’s prominent in your version, that rewrite you gave me of Insurrecto.”

  “I was haunted by a gruesome history.”

  “You mean the story of my parents’ marriage?”

  “I wasn’t making that connection. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t get it,” says Chiara. “In your version, you tried to understand your country’s history by taking on the point of view of someone you disliked. Why use a nineteenth-century Daisy Buchanan, some New York socialite photographer with no clue? The white savior story. I don’t get that.”

  “I did it for you,” says Magsalin. “It’s the only way you could have read the story.”

  The filmmaker falls silent.

  Then Chiara says, “You tricked me.”

  “I know very well whose story it is: I know whose story is being told.”

  Chiara falls silent again.

  “But you’re right,” Magsalin says, “I failed. It is terrible how grief is a glutton—it swallows everything in its path. History, revolution, bloodshed. I wanted to write in a voice strange and distant and foreign—I wanted to get outside of myself. A different lens. And I wanted to write about this unfinished thing—this revolution. A story of war and loss so repressed and so untold. But all I did was dwell on trauma that only causes recurrence of pain.”

  Magsalin’s voice is rising, and Chiara can see how this is a moment when the film should just run, then review the rush in silence.

  “In the end,” Magsalin says, “I could not even show the climactic horrific scenes she witnesses, the gruesome deaths of the people of Samar—which after all is the reason for the photographer’s story. I told, I could not show. The history of that war is beyond my powers to add or detract from the terrible pictures it left behind—those stereo cards in your manila envelope.”

  “But you’re right,” Chiara says. “It is Casiana who matters. Her story is the point. And history barely knows her name.”