by Gina Apostol
“But now you do. The insurrecto. Casiana Nacionales.”
“Maybe it is enough to know it, the past,” says Chiara. “Maybe change lies outside the story, in the countries we are still making up. I mean, can the exchange of our stories be a way of redemption?”
“No.”
But Magsalin smiles. Maybe one day she’ll like her, this spoiled brat.
“I also failed,” says Chiara.
“It was a valiant attempt,” concedes Magsalin. “Your story made me sad. I mean, in some parts.”
“I tried to understand why my father did not follow us when we left Manila, choosing to start a new project instead of saving his marriage. I tried to see him from the lens of the villagers who had witnessed his obsession with his film. I tried to imagine a grown-up world, the world of messed-up people making films, because my memory of him is so childish. About my father, I only remember the state of my being absolutely loved.”
“But that is a gift, is it not?”
“I wanted him to be resurrected, but in my script my father still dies. I am not even sure if in the final version I should just tell a lie—maybe, say, his death was an accident. Sometimes I imagine he died from the despair I have, the horror of not knowing him. In the end, I guess, everything is just self-portrait. I could not create a portrait of my father. There is only what I wished. I even put in my anachronisms, my own obsessions that I wanted to share—I guess with him. The details of Gus, the Central Park bipolar bear—what a weird story, I was obsessed with it in my teens. My limited memory of going to school with those Chinese toddlers while he was making his film in Lubao, Pampanga. My discovery is, writing my script—I should let him rest. No one will know why my father died. He kept his secret. Let him be.”
“I am sorry.”
“At least I tried. I was only six, after all, when he died.”
“I didn’t know you were so young when your father took his life.”
“He was young. He was thirty-six.”
“But your story is about you, isn’t it, your mourning?”
“I guess so. My mourning, my mother’s—they’re braided together, they’re twisted in a spiraling knot. In the very beginning of my script, I tried to imagine her, Virginie, my mother, in New York, in Las Vegas. I gave her mourning to the schoolteacher in the script. But she will take her stories to the grave. She never speaks of him.”
“But you have clues?”
“A few photographs, Polaroids of concerts, my parents at premieres, a package shipped from Manila, stuff like that.”
“And the Brownie camera?”
Chiara sighs.
“As the writer,” Chiara says, “can you at least give me that? To have something from him, my last gift from my father?”
“I will give you that, as the writer,” says Magsalin. “A wish is still a thing.”
Chiara is silent.
Magsalin asks, “So did you figure out why he died making his last film, out there in Samar?”
“Oh no. He didn’t die in Samar. My father never got to Samar. That is just my story, my script. He died in our home in the Catskills. When he came back from the Philippines, after finishing his film. He was alone. In the middle of writing a new script. It is unfinished.”
“I see,” says Magsalin. “So to write the story you were back at the place where he died.”
“That continuity is still a problem,” says Chiara. “In my version, I must believe that his death was unintended. That in a different moment, he would have lived for me.”
“It is correct to imagine so.”
A burst of song crashes through the dark as the door opens to admit Magsalin’s uncles Nemesio, Exequiel, and Ambrosio, all red from drink and from their maniacal insomnia, heedless of the sleep of their household help and the goodwill of their neighbors. They turn on the lights in the dark mahogany room, the karaoke machine behind them, and they stride toward Chiara and Magsalin.
They are caught in a trap, they can’t walk out. Because they love you so much, baaaa-by!
Clearly, the three brothers are well versed. They have sung this song too many times. Ambrosio is the leader. Ambrosio’s improbably silken voice, a haunting, high baritone, reveals the reason for their musical habits. They are good at it. They have two okay tenors and one singer who has been compared to Elvis throughout his life (which has not been good for his vanity or the peace of his barangay). Ambrosio, who otherwise sells fish at Punta Market, has a rich, honeyed liquid in his diaphragm that draws out from his listeners a coil of pain. His favorite is Ave Maria, but deep at night he chooses variety, and even in his stupor, when it is his turn, he will stand erect, as if offstage adoring Elvis, and his voice elicits a gravitational pull that surprises the director, Chiara. She lifts a hand, stops Magsalin from editing the scene, and she listens.
The silence seems like a flourish.
Exequiel and Nemesio sing out the doubling chorus, their lovely tenors in wavering pitch, one of them, the eldest, Nemesio, trying to out-tremolo the youngest, Ambrosio. But Ambrosio’s power will not be denied. The flushed trio stands in the sala, in this harshly lit house on that shadowy street in Punta—a fishmonger, a smuggler, and a pharmaceutical salesman beaming at their homecoming niece and her underdressed friend arrived too late to choose their own song.
The three stand in a row belting out the ending, their hands folded before them in practiced pose, not quite Piero della Francesca angels, in their undershirts and ismagol, their boholano-smuggled slippers, and their faces with that grave piety that always comes over them when they sing Elvis. Their smiling faces, weathered by wine and the troubles of a sad republic, are garishly lit under the fluorescent bulb, so that pieces of their cheeks jerk and make them look unhinged instead of, as Chiara thinks they are, charming. Chiara wishes to adjust their lighting.
We can’t go on together—with suspicious minds!
The song is over, and Chiara speaks.
“It’s odd,” she says, “how neither of us needed to make a script.”
“Why,” asks Magsalin.
Woe-ooh-wooooe!
Magsalin groans. Elvis’s song will never end. She sees the words on the karaoke reappear on the shaking wall that is their screen, and Nemesio, Exequiel, and Ambrosio are at it again. They are belting out sideways now, in the doo-wop mode of national singing competitions, in which clearly they are also well rehearsed.
“What do you mean he said everything already,” says Magsalin, her voice above the machine. “Do you mean—to both colonizer and colonized?”
But Chiara is already dancing.
Chiara and Magsalin join the song.
The End
Notes
Magsalin went on to publish a brief monograph, “Fragments of Film, Fragments of Transnational Dysphoria: The Wild, Wide Lens of Cassandra Chase,” in Structure of the Postcolonial Unconscious, Not Really a Langue or a Parole, ed. Dr. Diwata Drake (Oxford University Press). Only a few more pages, and her mystery novel will be done.
Stéphane Réal wrote twelve novels, 7,200 lists, and sixteen manuals on various topics, including the swimming habits of bears, hunting for truffles, and orchid planting. His last book, Two Minutes, condenses the entire seedy French colonial history of an unnamed African country into the time it takes an assassin to gun down the protagonist, a mystery writer, also named Stéphane Réal. The clues to his death are found in the mystery Stéphane Réal is writing, but he never finishes it. Coincidentally, Stéphane Réal (the real Réal) also dies before finishing his mystery. Mourns his editor: he should have written about winning the lottery.
Chiara Brasi is on location on an island somewhere in the West Philippine Sea.
Muhammad Ali is the Greatest. He received a sequined robe from Elvis Presley in 1974 emblazoned with the words people’s choice. An error, as Ali was People’s Champ. Ali was a saint for r
efusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War, saying: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” He also said, “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor black people, babies and women? Just take me to jail.”
In the build-up to the Thrilla In Manila, 1975, Ali said, “Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an Uncle Tom.” This makes Joe Frazier mad because, after all, he had secretly given Ali cash during the time Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title and lost his living because he refused to go to war in Vietnam.
After the Thrilla in Manila, Joe “the Gorilla” Frazier never forgave Muhammad Ali. When Ali lit the Olympic torch in 1996, Frazier said, “It would have been a good thing if he would have lit the torch and fallen in. If I had the chance, I would have pushed him in.” In his biography, Frazier said of Ali, “I’ll open up the graveyard and bury his ass when the Lord chooses to take him.” But the Lord took Frazier first. Frazier died of liver cancer in 2011. RIP, Joe Frazier! You are still loved, even by the fans of Muhammad Ali!
The traffic hellhole that is Cubao in Quezon City, Philippines, is at the intersection of the MRT and LRT lines, partly privatized trains that have ruined the sanity of working people and destroyed their faith in progress. The management of the railways is marked by incompetence, blatant graft, and criminal negligence, all of which harass commuters daily; hence the traffic hellhole that is Cubao. Used to have good bookstores, though.
Gus, the famous polar bear of Central Park Zoo, died in New York in 2013 after three decades of celebrity. He moved from Toledo, Ohio, to New York at the age of three and thereafter needed a therapist. He had two loves, Ida and Lily (also polar bears). At the death of Ida, zookeepers observed him swimming in desolate figure eights, at one point for twelve hours straight. His therapist pronounced him “just bored and mildly crazy like a lot of people in New York.” A sympathetic businessman gifted Gus the polar bear an endless pool for his endless sadness. Even so, Gus the polar bear had to take Prozac. He became a symbol of the city.
Prozac, manufactured by Eli Lilly and Company, is a brand name for fluoxetine, an antidepressant that first appeared on the market in 1987.
The Colt .38 was useless against the magical people of Samar.
The Colt .45, on the other hand, was legend. Here is a description of the death of a Filipino in Muddy Glory: America’s Indian Wars in the Philippines: “. . . he was finally felled by a .45 slug through both ears . . . he had thirty-two Krag balls through him and was only stopped by a Colt .45—the thirty-third bullet.” Huzzah! The US Army replaced the useless Colt .38s and shipped new Colt .45s to the Philippines in 1902. Experiments on “both cadaver and livestock” to determine the best bullet were undertaken in 1903: “It is desired that the board [of ballistics experimenters] convene at the Springfield Armory . . . to draw up . . . a program of experiments and tests which it shall desire to make.” Turns out the minimum caliber acceptable on cadaver and lifestock was, of course, the .45. (Great thanks for the exacting, clinical research by John Potocki in his book The Colt M1905 Automatic Pistol! )
Juramentado, popular in the lexicon of Americans in the Philippines, comes from the Spanish word juramentar, to swear. Spanish priests coined the term for their Moro problem, the Muslim population in the south whom neither Spain nor America broke (or even the current Philippine government for that matter). Juramentados were Moros sworn to kill Christians invading their Moro lands, hence, juramentados were all Muslims, according to the priests. A similar misapplication arises with the term jihadist.
Colt .45 and juramentados go together. The United States Army shipped Colt .45s as the only weapon effective against the juramentados, i.e., all Filipinos, who were hell-bent on killing all Americans, et cetera et cetera.
The Krag-Jørgensen rifle was the subject of a jaunty tune sung among members of the Military Order of the Carabao during their annual Wallow, or convention, when they used to wear bow ties and dinner suits—and presumably take along their Krags. “Civilize ’em with a Krag!” was their anthem, a delightful hymn with resonant lyrics:
In the days of dopey dreams—happy peaceful Philippines!
When the bolomen were busy all night long!
When ladrones would steal and lie, and Americanos die
Then you heard the soldiers sing this evening song!
Damn damn damn the insurrectos!
Cross-eyed kakiac ladrones!
Underneath the starry flag, civilize ’em with a Krag!
And return us to our own beloved homes!
In 1900, at the Army-Navy Club in Manila, the Military Order of the Carabao was founded to lampoon a snobby bunch, the Order of the Dragon, officers who survived the Boxer Rebellion. However, carabao.org notes, “as with most jests, it contained a serious ingredient which gradually eclipsed the initial joke.” The Military Order of the Carabao “came to epitomize the camaraderie that grows among members of the armed forces who face the dangers and privations of extensive military service far from home.” You can apply for membership now to relive “those days of dopey dreams.” You can be Veteran Carabao if you served in the Philippines between May 1, 1898, and July 4, 1913, or between December 6, 1941, and July 4, 1946. Or you can be an Expedicionario Carabao, a status reserved for “those who served overseas in support of an officially recognized military campaign, such as Operation Desert Storm.” And so on and so forth, given the eternity of American wars.
The carabao is a beast of burden on Philippine farms. It was also used to figure out the correct caliber of bullets to kill Filipinos in the Philippine-American War. See Colt .45. Killing a carabao is just as bad as burning rice. See Burning Rice.
Professor Estrella Espejo’s penchant for history-worms has a new home, The Trials of Paz Chiching Luna, her Snapchat handle, but her sublime posts keep disappearing. Her essay, “Echolalia: Repetitive Spirals in Philippine History,” has been downloaded once on academia.edu.
Underwood & Underwood, maker and distributor of stereo cards and other visionary equipment, was founded in 1881 by brothers Elmer and Bert, not of Sesame Street but of Ottawa, Kansas. At one time Elmer and Bert were “the largest publishers of stereoviews in the world with ten million views a year.” See Brownie cameras and Holmes viewer.
Holmes viewer was named for the great Bostonian, Fireside poet, philosopher, and eloquent scientist, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., not to be confused with the other great American, his son, Civil War general, chief justice, and member of the Metaphysical Club, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Apart from his essay extolling the wonders of the stereoscope, Holmes Sr. wrote such tracts as his great triplet set on the evils of Western quackery—his thunderous “Astrology and Alchemy,” which made him persona non grata among several scarved seers on Minetta Street; his scathing taxonomy of Occidental ignorance, “Medical Delusions of the Past”; and his most elegant screed, “Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions,” in which he called his subject a “mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice.” His work on hygienic prophylaxis, that is, the need for surgeons to wash their hands, was ahead of its time. He also invented the word anesthesia, an antidote to trauma.
Brownie cameras made Underwood & Underwood obsolete. Once even children could take their own photos of pineapples, unclothed women, and such, stock prices for the Holmes viewer went down.
The Caves of Sohoton are natural limestone bridges near the town of Basey, Samar, famous as a tourist landmark since the Jesuits started bothering the locals in 1565.
Ludo Brasi died in 1977 on an uncertain date in April: his body was found too late to de
termine the exact time of death. His obituary in Cutchogue Clammer’s Digest, clearly written by an anonymous childhood friend, privy to such minutiae (Peter Horn, is that you?), notes that he graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a major in History & Literature; his thesis, on terza rima in Dante’s Paradiso, linked the poet’s rhyme scheme to the infinity of hexagons and pentagons in a contemporary fútbol, a profane notion that makes his advisor, the world’s leading expert on the medieval poet, Dante Cancogni, sadly shake his head. As a graduate student in Baltimore, Ludo worked on a lengthy, heavily footnoted paean to the detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In his gap year, he traveled through France, Italy, Greece, and sneaked through what was then Yugoslavia, making friends mainly by mentioning names of soccer players, e.g., Ferenc Puskás or Alfredo Di Stéfano (though of the Real Madrid player he was no fan). He loved the city of Trieste, where he made his first film, a stop-motion animation masterpiece clarifying a moment in Ulysses regarding the mysterious recurrence of “the lanky-looking galoot over there in a mackintosh” in the chapter “Hades.” He favored stop-motion-animated Danish troll dolls in his early work. Everywhere he went, so the anonymous biographer adds, whether in Bhutan, Mount Athos, or Manila, he always found a pick-up soccer game. He liked swimming. He packed light. He is survived by his wife, a daughter, a number of animal-rights thrillers, an unfinished script of a forgotten war, and a cult classic, The Unintended.
Chaya Sophia Chazanov Rubinson, also known as Madame Rubinson, began in the New York theater world as seamstress then set designer Cassandra Chase, her nom-de-scène. She caught the eye of an investor in the 1933 Broadway flop, Mrs. Ida McKinley Gives Her Regards, a one-woman show. Synopsis: the epileptic widow of the fallen president gives a long and excruciating monologue while crocheting slippers as she talks to her dead husband, who is in paradise. An avant-garde performance, Mrs. Ida climaxed in an abrupt and completely unexpected seizure onstage, bringing down the house, as people left the theater to avoid the “stark, vulgar display of rabid melancholy and unbearably extended, high-pitched, squealing noises of mourning,” or so the Times reproved. Despite rave reviews from a few discerning people in Brooklyn, the show shut down after fifty-three days (to the relief of the ingénue actress, Sylvie Plato, who reported in an interview that “it was not just my vocal cords that were at stake, my fingers were getting numb from all that pretend-crocheting”). Cassandra Chase was in charge of producing the historic slippers Ida kept making until she followed her husband to his (one hopes cozy) grave. At the end of her life, visitors to her home in Canton, Ohio, marveled at how Ida McKinley’s rooms had too many crocheted slippers in them to shake a stick, or even a Krag-Jørgensen rifle, at. Cassandra Chase, on the other hand, married her true love, Hermann Rubinson, in 1934 and lived happily ever after. They had one child, Virginie Ida Rubinson. See Virginie Brasi.