A Kind of Compass

by McKeon, Belinda; Rahill, Elske;

  She barely acknowledges the taxicab driver’s bow as he pockets her tip. Her presence at midnight at the front door of Magsalin’s home in the Paco district has the same substance as her online tone: unapologetic, admitting only of intentions relevant to herself.

  If Chiara were not so tiny, wide-eyed, looking a bit troubled in her skewed, though still faintly perfumed tank top (you see, the maid catches Chiara’s naked expression of distress despite the arrogant blue eyes’ barely glancing at her, the servant, who could shut the door on her face), the latecomer would never have been welcomed into the Magsalin home – that is, the home of the three bachelor uncles from Magsalin’s maternal line: Nemesio, Exequiel, and Ambrosio, drunkards all.

  Midnight in Manila is no comfort for strangers. Servants in this section of Manila are justly wary of late-night knocks on the door. Corrupt barangay chairmen harass them for tong, doleful bandits pretend to be someone’s long-lost nephew, serial drunks keep mistaking the same dark, shuttered home for their own. Chiara does not notice at first that the address Magsalin had scribbled on the napkin from the bake shop in Ali Mall is a haunted avenue in much too leafy, cobblestoned disrepair, full of deciduous shadows, aging tenements of purposeless nostalgia amid wild, howling cats, and the occult strains, somehow, of stupid disco music.

  Chiara registers that the location has a disjoint familiarity, like a film set in which she has carefully restored elements of a childhood by dispatching minions to gather her recollections, so that her memory becomes oddly replete, though only reconstructed through the inspired empathy of others. Such is the communality of a film’s endeavour that magic of this sort never disconcerts Chiara. Life for Chiara has always been the imminent confabulation of her desires with the world’s potential to fulfil them. So while the street and its sounds have an eerie sense of a past coming back to bite her, Chiara also dismisses the eerie feeling. She steps into the foyer of the old mahogany home without even a thank you to the maid, who against her better judgment hurries away at the director’s bidding to fetch the person she demands, Magsalin.

  ‘I did not give you the manuscript in order for you to revise it,’ Chiara begins without introduction.

  ‘Pleased to see you again, too,’ says Magsalin. She gestures Chiara to the rocking chair.

  ‘I’m not here for pleasantries.’

  ‘You are in someone else’s home, Miss Brasi. My uncles, who are still awake and, I am warning you, will soon be out to meet you and make you join the karaoke, would be disappointed if I did not treat you like a guest. Please sit.’

  Not looking at it, Chiara takes the ancient rocking chair, the one called a butaka, made for birthing. It creaks under her weight, but Chiara does not seem to hear the sound effect, a non sequitur in the night.

  Now Magsalin is towering over the director, whose small figure is swallowed up in the enormous length of the antique butaka.

  ‘I did not revise the manuscript,’ begins Magsalin, knowing she must choose her words carefully, ‘I presented a translation.’

  ‘I did not ask for a translation,’ says Chiara. ‘I gave you the manuscript as a courtesy. It is the least I can do for the help you will give me.’

  ‘I have not yet offered that help.’

  ‘But you will. You will get me to Samar.’

  ‘Yes, that is true. I have decided to help you get to Samar. But not without extracting my pound of flesh.’

  ‘Co-authorship of my script?’ snorts Chiara. ‘That is unacceptable. You are only a reader, not an accomplice.’

  ‘Permission to make of it as I wish, seeing as my perspective offers its own matter.’

  ‘And desires that distort,’ says Chiara.

  ‘Possibilities and corrections,’ murmurs Magsalin.

  ‘Misunderstandings and corruptions,’ retorts Chiara.

  ‘A mirror, perhaps,’ says Magsalin.

  ‘A double-crossing agent,’ snaps Chiara.

  ‘Yes. The existence of readers is your cross to bear.’

  17. In the last novel by Georges Perec

  In the last novel by Georges Perec, a mystery of texts engenders the clues deciphering a murder of colonial proportions; that is, a writer dies. He dies in a vaguely political way, in the way in a colonised country only the political seems to have consequence. Otherwise, deaths are too cheap for witness. Does it matter, Magsalin wonders, if one day a world-famous director disappears in a derelict, tree-laden street in the Paco district of Manila, to the strains of Elvis Presley singing ‘Suspicious Minds’?

  And if anything happens to the protagonist, who would be to blame?

  22. The monsoons of Manila

  The monsoons of Manila give Virginie a thrill. Frogs from the garden leap onto her soaking carpet into the borrowed house’s Chinese vases. The rain traps her in the sala. Catfish swim toward her shoes. Her baby daughter’s Wellingtons come splashing down from the dusty ottoman while the feral cat, a castaway, casually invades the kitchen and observes. Virginie thinks a tadpole is tickling her wet toes, but she does not dare to look. The cat Misay is completely dry, like the dark-skinned maid in the corner cutting up the cantaloupe with utter calm. She is staring at Virginie’s legs. ‘Ma’am,’ she says. An obscene dead cockroach, its genitalia splayed out for the world to see, is coming and going in waves, like an upturned boat with frail masts. Virginie looks down. She screams. The cat pounces. The baby claps, and the maid bustles about. The cat almost has the cockroach in its grasp, but the maid swipes at the cat, who runs off, and she sweeps the dumb flaccid bug easily into the dustbin, with a nonchalance that her mistress’s embarrassment observes. It is odd that it is so sunny outside, Virginie thinks, when for all she knows the world has turned upside down. It is a sinking ship that was once a home. Her toes are cold.

  23. The model for the svelte photographer

  Virginie Brasi is a slim, disturbing beauty who, even in sleep upon a wicker butaka, cheeks checkered by abaca twine, or vigorously gardening in the tropics with her mouth open, red bandanna fluttering against monsoon winds that make wild commas of her hair while she tends her wilting camote, has a touching look that her otherwise embarrassingly pampered life fails to obscure. Maybe it is her posture – always a bit slouched, though not quite awkward – that makes her seem unaware of her power. She is inept rather than thoughtless, therefore her whims are pardonable – those dashes across the ocean, for instance, on suspicion of her husband’s infidelity as he falls deeper into the abyss, the monstrosity of his enterprise in the jungles of the Philippines. Thrice she carried her baby, four-year-old Chiara, wrapped in an Igorot blanket, onto a private, chartered plane. Chiara would find herself all alone in a hotel suite in Hong Kong, staring at the scarily erect arrangement of three cattleya orchids triplicated in the eerie mirrors, with her small curly head in triple counterpoint to the infinite trinity of her father’s absence.

  Those midnight migrations to grandiose and sterile rooms would haunt Chiara’s childhood, though now her memories are blurred, and her mother, emerging in a white bathrobe and offering her a guava, Chiara’s favourite fruit, taste acquired in the tropics, would look for all the world as if nothing were the matter, nothing mattered, though tomorrow she will cry herself to sleep in her daughter’s arms.

  Virginie’s image in white bathrobe and silver heels haunts her daughter, though Virginie also looks vaguely and mistakenly like Gena Rowlands, or Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (an unfortunate, involuntary resemblance – but the cheap trick that pop culture plays on her daughter happens to the best of us). Virginie’s image burns in Chiara’s mind, a warning: her mother of the bedlam rests. She remembers her sleeping so deeply in that awkward rocking chair in Magallanes Village during that time of her childhood, in Makati, not Quezon City. If it were not for the occasional spasm of Virginie’s slim foot dangling from the creaking butaka, the rocking chair made for birthing, for the optimism of creation – if it were not for that occasional twitch of Virginie’s cold toes, little Chiara imagines her mother d
ead.

  1. The story she wishes to tell

  The story Magsalin wishes to tell is about loss. Any emblem will do: a dead Frenchman with an incomplete manuscript, an American obsessed with a Filipino war, a filmmaker’s disappearance, his wife’s sadness. This work is not only about writers who have slipped from this realm, their ideas in melancholy arrest, though their notebooks are tidy; later one might see the analogy to real-life grief, or at least the pathos of inadequate homage, if one likes symbols. Of course the story will involve several layers of meaning. Chapter numbers will scramble, like letters in abandoned acrostics. Points of view will multiply. Allusions, ditto. There will be blood, a kidnapping, or a solution to a crime forgotten by history. That is, Magsalin hopes so.

  EXTREMADURA (UNTIL NIGHT FALLS)

  Kevin Barry

  The old dog is tied by a length of rope to a chain-link fence. Its hackles comb up a silent growl as I approach through the edges of the small white town and its eyes burn a high yellow like witch hazel oddly vivid in such a skinny and unkempt old dog. A dog that has known some weather, I’d say. There are no people anywhere to be seen – I am in the last slow mile after dusk and my calves are singing. There is a café up ahead but it is shuttered and dark. I have walked for many hours and in fact for almost fifteen years now. The dog eases into itself again as I come nearer and its flanks relax to this softer breathing and I crouch on my own hind legs by its side to converse for a while among the lights of our eyes.

  It’s as if I’ve known you for a long time, she says.

  But when I lay my hand to her there is a shiver of nerves again as if she has known the cruelties, too. The town is not entirely quiet. Somewhere tinnily bleating behind shutters there is the sound of a soccer game on the radio or TV. I used to be afraid of the dogs but they got used to me. Ever the more so as I walk I take on the colours and feelings of the places through which I walk and I am no longer a surprise to these places. My once reddish hair has turned a kind of old-man’s green tinge with the years and this is more of it. What the ramifications have been for my stomach you’re as well not hearing. I have very little of the language, even after all this time but the solution to this is straightforward – I don’t talk to people. This arrangement I have found satisfactory enough, as does the rest of humanity, apparently, or what’s to be met of it on the clear blue mornings, on the endless afternoons. We are coming out of a very cold winter in Extremadura which is a place of witches or at least of stories about witches. To be passing the nights, I suppose. The dog has a good part of an Alsatian in her and random bits of mutt and sheepdog and wolf probably and she tells me of a thin life and a harsh one in this cold-hearted, in this love-starved town.

  Go on? I says.

  The lamps above us catch now and buzz for a moment as their circuits warm and also to mark the sombre hour there is the hollow doom of the church bells – they lay it on heavily enough around these places still. Footsteps as the bells fade out to echoes and there is a girl of about sixteen years of age and she does not see me at all but mouths the words of a popular song, a song that is current, I believe it is a Gaga, I know it well enough myself from the cafés and the concourses – all the years I have doled out in that same old (it seems to me) estación de autobuses that exists at the edge of all these towns, I use them not for the buses but for sleeping – and she moves swaying down the road in a cloud of distraction (if sleep is what you could call it!) and she hums as she goes and she is not a pretty girl exactly but neither plain and what she has in truth is a very beautiful carriage – buenas tardes? She turns in surprise over the shoulder but there is not a glimmer, really, she just blinks and moves on, and the dog simpers and stretches; now there is the chug of a moto as it troubles its lungs to mount a rise in the road and a shutter is pulled inwards with a hard sharp creaking and the sound of the soccer game loudens; all across the silver hills in the east the cold spring night lovelessly descends. February is an awful fucking month just about everywhere. There is a waft of sweet paprika and burnt garlic from a kitchen somewhere. Still there is no life at the café. Whatever is going on with that place. Far away in the north my very old parents must be waiting for me or for word of me, at least; they are waiting for me still at the bottom of the dripping boreen framed by the witchy haw and the whitethorn. It’s what keeps them going, I’d say.

  I don’t know what people take me for as I pass along the edges of the roads. What money I have is by now so comically eked out and in such tiny dribs that my clothes are not good at all and as certain as the weeping callouses on the balls of my feet is the need for new boots or for a pair of good trainers at least. I sleep generally where I fall. In doorways sometimes or if the weather’s foul in the cheapest hostals run always by spidery old women in black or in the bus concourses, under the benches, or in the lee of buildings, or on the black sand beaches in the south if the winter is especially long and hard and I’ve turned down the road myself. At one time southerned was a very common word and southerning a practice. For the better of the lungs and so forth. Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere. Sometimes I feel as if my engines are powered on nothing at all but the lights of the cold stars that will emerge above us now. I can get by on almost nothing and it is conceivable that I might become very, very old myself and as spidery.

  The summers don’t present much of a problem. You can always find cool places. The moto comes into the line of our vision, its engine turns off for the decline of the road and it coasts and a teenage boy steers and parks it beneath a tree across the way from me. He steps off and looks across and nods and lights a cigarette and he looks down along the road after the singing girl and she senses his glance and turns a look back to him – her thick black hair moves – and their glances catch for a moment but as quickly she turns from him and is gone; an old man appears as though from the dust and sits on a half-collapsed bench by a white wall that it seems clear to me was at one time bullet-riddled. Now we all watch each other closely and the sense of this is companionable enough. A heavy-set middle-aged man appears in just a flimsy yellow t-shirt that reads Telefonica Movistar – it’s all go – and he crosses the road to the boy with the moto – he mustn’t feel the cold – and he talks to him and they look down calmly together at the workings of the bike, each of them with their hands on their hips and their cigarettes at a loose dangle from their mouths, and they squint through the smoke at the little moto and its failing organs and the man reaches for it, turns the key, revs the handle, listens with his head inclined at an expert’s careful angle, and lets it dies again and shakes his head. Not long for the road by the looks of things. I crouch on my hind legs with the dog whose snout rests in the curve of my shoulder now and she whispers to me that the girl is named Mercedes and is wanted by not a few of the young louts around this place with big hands on them – these are country people – and she has already in fact given it to one or two of them. On Saturdays. The clocks must have stopped for them. Awful to be sixteen or eighteen and already your finest hour has gambolled past you like a grinning lamb and your moto is fucked also. The sky makes a lurid note of the day’s ending – there are hot flushes of pink and vermillion that would shame a cardinal. The chain link fence encases nothing but a crooked rectangle of dirt and dead tyres and stones – old chicken ground maybe – and it has an air of trapped misery.

  And more than that you’re as well not to know, the dog says.

  Dogs, I find, are much the same everywhere. Much of a muchness, as my father would say. They know everything about us and they love us all the same. My father when he wanted the sound of the television up or down would say highern it or lowern it. One time in Ronda I nearly fucked myself into the gorge there altogether. A thousand foot fall would have settled the question decisively. But I thought that might be a bit loud. I am not by nature a man who has that kind of show in him. No extravagances, please.

  The old man calls across to the pair by
the moto. It is a weak scratchy call like an injured bird would make. The pair by the moto ignore him utterly. Another shutter opens. Another TV bleats. The sky pales again as quickly as it coloured. As if somebody has had a Jesuitical word. That ours beneath this vaulted roof might be an austere church. There was a time when I tried to fill the sky with words. Morning and fucking night I was at it. In my innocence, or arrogance – the idea that I might succeed. But I walked out of that life and entered this one.

  The teenage boy kicks the back wheel of the fucked moto; the middle-aged man in the t-shirt laughs to make his belly rise and fall. A hunting bird moves across the acres of the sky in the last thin light of the day and a breeze comes up the road with quick news – a tree shakes out its bare branches and moves. There is a rancid olive oil on the air over the odour of stale dog. I’m sorry but there is no pretty way to say it. I wonder if I was to make off with you altogether? I could slip this rope from you as easy as anything.

  I’d love to go, she says, and yet I’d not go. Do you know that kind of way?

  Oh, I do. I’d love to go home again but I will not go.

  Imagine coming up the boreen in Roscommon with my tale of the lost years and my rucksack of woes and the little gaunt tragic sunburnt face on me? Wouldn’t they love to see it coming. I do believe they’re back there still – I believe they’re alive and that I’d know somehow if they weren’t. I stepped onto a train that night in Madrid and out of my life. Love? Don’t mention it.

  They must whisper their love to Mercedes as night falls. A hand cupped neatly to the shape of her groin. The question mark of it. The old man gets up from the bench and walks like a clockwork scarecrow by the side of the road. I stand again to stretch out my bones. If I looked hard enough, I’d find a café open someplace among these white-walled streets and hidden turns – I could have coffee with hot milk. But I have nearly had my fill of the cafés. There is only so much of that business you can take. And there is the danger always of the cerveza and the brandy. There are only so many times you can climb over that wall.