“Where to?” asks Magsalin.
“I need to get to Samar.”
5. WHY SAMAR??!!
Chiara has vague but pleasant memories of the times she spent with her father in the tropics. Specifically, she was in Quezon City and in Angeles, Pampanga, but she would learn that only later, online. She was four in 1975. She remembers a skating rink, being crowned Miss Philippines in games with tiny beauty-contest-obsessed girls who always let her win, and getting lice from goats owned by a visiting tribe of mountain people.
Chiara has a fractured memory of one night in Manila during the city’s seasonal rains. Her mother, usually all nerves, a Ukrainian Jew brought up on stories of pogroms, who turned to Christian Science then hatha yoga after the divorce, is agitated, sitting down and getting back up to protect a flickering flame. Oddly, the Philippines drove her mother’s persecution complex underground, and she lives in almost Buddhist calm amid the lizards on the ceilings, monstrous cockroaches in the toilet, sewer animals in the garden, and nubile prostitutes promenading all around the seedy American military bases. This is significant, as Chiara’s mother is, quite frankly, a millionaire. Her mother is spoiled and used to getting her way. She had given her husband his Hollywood start. But it is as if the desperate indignities of living in a perpetually fallen state, among lives she shares and witnesses with a perplexed gaze, has lent Chiara’s mother peace, a converse calm, that she has not regained since.
Perhaps this explains Chiara’s sense at times that a vulnerable world could be an oasis.
The shadows of her mother’s single candle and the sounds of a gecko on the wall are the night’s only cartographic points. Otherwise, she and her mother and her father are suspended, the only people in a universal void, rocking in a gigantic cradle hanging above Manila’s awful monsoon winds. Chiara is happy. Chiara is lying with her curly four-year-old head on her huge, sweating father’s lap. The famously methodical director is picking lice, one pinch following another, a rich rhythmic tug mauling her tender scalp, each tug pleasingly soporific, a victorious bloodbath on her father’s hands. She doesn’t remember her father cursing every time he finds a pest and crushing it with his purple thumb, though her mother has pointed out those gross details. It is the most pleasing memory of her childhood, that blackout night, her father picking out lice from her hair until she falls asleep: it is pleasing to recall her dad, busy with formidable things, determined to rid her of all the bugs he can find, to use his director powers to seek out her vermin, to squash the blood out from the pests’ abominable veins, as if he is crushing the concentrated frustration arising from the calamities of his unsteady enterprise, the making of his cursed monumental film.
Chiara was Googling idly, with nothing on her mind, in her mother’s mansion. Then she went Oedipal. She Googled her father’s film, The Unintended, and the year production began: 1975. She never thought she would find an item of interest, nothing memorable, not even an inch of a pitch for a horror script or a jotting for her sundry journal. But on pages twenty-four through thirty in the search results, she started clicking. Muhammad Ali’s historic match against Joe Frazier on October 1, 1975. Miss Universe Amparo Muñoz has become a soft-porn star and is stripped of her crown. The bells of Balangiga, some religious items stolen from a Philippine island, remain missing. The first multilevel shopping mall in the Philippines rises in tribute to Muhammad Ali’s victory. Another article on the ambush in Balangiga of American soldiers of the 9th US Infantry Regiment on an island called Samar in 1901. What the heck was going on?
Online, an unrelated catastrophe was ambushing her father’s film. Balangiga, Samar, kept coming up, neck and neck with Muhammad Ali.
6. AN ALTERNATE STORY
It turns out a Filipino scholar has written a paper linking the massacre of civilians in Balangiga, Samar, 1901, to the 1968 Vietnam massacre that frames her father’s unfortunate film. As some viewers might recall, The Unintended is a story about a teenage kid, Tommy O’Connell, who fails to be court-martialed for acts he has committed in a hamlet, code-named Pinkville, that he, along with his fellow men of Charlie Company, razes to the ground. Tommy tells his story so the world does not forget the horror of his experience.
The Balangiga incident of 1901, on the other hand, is a true story in two parts, a blip in the Philippine-American War (itself a blip in the Spanish-American War, which is a blip in outbreaks of imperial hysteria in Southeast Asian wars, which are blips in the infinite cycle of human aggression in the dying days of this dying planet, et al.). Part one: an uprising of Filipino rebels against the American outpost (the exposition here would be a fascinating movie in its own right, though with too many colorful local details) leads to the deaths of thirty-six Americans, with twenty-two wounded and four missing in action. Part two: The US commanding general demands in retaliation the murder of every Filipino in Samar above ten years of age, and blood bathes the province. Americans savage—“kill and burn” is the technical term—close to three thousand Filipinos, men, women, and children, in a vengeful massacre of such proportions that the subsequent court-martial of the general, Jacob H. “Howling Wilderness” Smith, causes a sensation in the American press when the events become public in 1902.
A noted scholar, Professor Estrella Espejo, points out online that the Samar incident also implicates a Charlie Company (though it was of the wrong regiment, the 11th Infantry, not the 20th or the 23rd Division). As in Vietnam, only one or two American officers are tried for the Philippine affair. The 1901 court-martialed counterpart of the Vietnam War’s Colonel Calley (a shadowy figure in her father’s movie, unnamed for legal reasons) is the infamous General Jacob Smith, who ordered the Filipino deaths by making memorable staccato statements: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me.” There is also the general’s resonant phrase, which made his name: “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.” According to Professor Espejo, the repulsive yet fascinating Smitty Jakes, the Kilgore-like lieutenant whose pathological patriotism is the most troubling yet truest aspect of Luca Brasi’s film, is a nod to the butcher of Balangiga. Lastly, the movie’s hero, the guilt-ridden wraith, Tommy O’Connell, Espejo says, as if resting her case, is clearly the West Point–educated commanding officer of the Samar outpost, twenty-six-year-old Captain Thomas W. Connell, a moralist whose meager ethics measured in full the absurdity of the American cause.
7. TRANSLATIONS
Magsalin does not know what to make of Chiara’s globe-trotting story. For one thing, it is past one o’clock, and outside the truant boys are shrugging back into their white polo shirts, the uniform of all the Catholic schools that dot EDSA, done with their lunch-hour video games, and the circus men are winding their way out of the mall like blind mice, every clown in deep-black Ray-Ban knockoffs, wiping off rice grains and chorizo oil from their greasepaint lips, and still Magsalin does not get exactly why Chiara is globe-trotting.
What puts Magsalin off at the pastry shop is Chiara’s voice. It is nasal. Her monotone does not help, a bored flatness, even in the most interesting parts, that keeps Magsalin, or the pastry shop waitress, or anyone else willing to listen amid the humid baking scones and moist pan de sal, at bay, as if an invisible wall, maybe socioeconomic, exists between Chiara’s indifference and Magsalin’s attention.
Magsalin’s taxable occupation is to translate, hence her professional name: Magsalin. (It means to translate in her maternal grandfather’s tongue, Tagalog.) Perhaps the envelope Chiara has offered Magsalin contains the rough draft of the script that Chiara wrote on a lethargic April afternoon in a mansion in the New York mountains. Maybe Chiara’s next project is an art house political film, á la Costa-Gavras’s Z, to be shot on location in the actual country in which the plot occurs, a film of dizzying unheard-of realism, hence the need for translations into the actual language of the hapless citizens in the process of being killed by the occupation forces. Who knows?
Magsalin
is aware of those scenes in Hollywood movies when, requiring an actor to speak a conveniently alien tongue, the character starts speaking an inappropriate one, like Tagalog. The prayer of the Javanese man in The Year of Living Dangerously. The possessed sibyl cursing out Keanu Reeves in Constantine. And, of course, the amusing scene of the nasty, tiny Ewoks in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
In the trade there are technical names for these short-term projects.
Inversions provide a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, does not require logical coherence. This is the case of the Bahasa-Indonesian prayer in Peter Weir’s movie. The Indonesian prays the Our Father in Tagalog, not Bahasa—that is, he need not be coherent; it’s the concept that counts. Inversions are opposed to obversions—that is, providing a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, are generally insulting. The naughty Ewok dialogue in the Star Wars film, a set of pungent Tagalog epigrams, is, of course, a basic Filipino fuck you to the universe. What Magsalin expects is that Chiara’s script will require reversions: a set of matching signifiers that, if reversed, will portray the privileged language as in fact the other, and vice versa. Perversions, of course, produce scant good. Lastly, conversions, the most difficult of these types of translations, Magsalin simply refuses to attempt.
What interests Magsalin about Chiara is not the prospect of a job but her likely disappearance. In Magsalin’s mystery novel, Chiara will leave Ali Mall by a wrong turn, through the plywood board tunnel, a sign announcing the mall owner’s promise of a NEW ALI MALL! COMING SOON! put up ten years ago. The security guard, shutting off his cell phone, will give Chiara clear directions in English, but she will not understand his accent. Chiara has a sense of being lost amid the warped plywood, the tunnel is so spooky and haphazard it has the impression of not even being lit, though makeshift electrical wires become obvious when her vision adjusts. The tunnel spills into the harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs of the decaying merry-go-round outside, where tricycle drivers waiting for clients pick their teeth on illpainted horses. Magsalin knows the area well from her days as a serial bookworm at Alemar’s and National Bookstore, in the years 1976–1980, when she went to school nearby. It occurs to her that the details she has evoked in the last few sentences might bear traces of her memory’s obsolescence, and Chiara’s plaintive future, therefore, her kidnapping by a pair of muscular, Ray-Ban-wearing goons (of course, they are dressed as clowns) is set among details of an obsolete past.
Chiara’s struggle will be unseen, though one might expect a stray schoolboy to be lighting a match nearby, polo shirt half on (he’s a bit malnourished); but the irony is that the boy, smoking his last forbidden cigarette before he’s expected in gym class, will be looking at the comic book he has just bought with carefully saved change. He is in no state to observe a famous film director being shoved into a waiting tricycle, an ordinary passenger pedicab painted in the usual deranged Manila hues.
Magsalin, on the other hand, will be wandering Ali Mall. Done with the exhausting interview with the filmmaker, and feeling a bit nauseous, still unsure what has brought her here, not just to Cubao but to her country, Magsalin clutches the thick manila envelope and travels Ali Mall in a daze. The mall is now quite modern, practically Singaporean; at the same time, the familiarity is distracting. There is a schizoid confabulation between the new upscale fixtures, such as the gleaming escalators and neon in the food court, which now looks like a strip club, and the ratty hair-accessories wrapped in dusty plastic that seem to have been in the Cardam chain of shoe shops since they opened in 1976. What is true perhaps is that, after the vertigo of listening to the story of Chiara Brasi, Magsalin feels unreal, and the world has an illusory aspect, part memory, part script, the split state of a spectator providing her own unpaid translations in a movie in which she exists.
8. CHIARA’S MOVIE
That is the effect Chiara wants for her next movie, she says. It will have an emptiness at its heart: a war movie not unlike her father’s, but without its coherence. A secret will lie in its structure, like a dumb grenade. It will be set in 1901, the inverse of ’68, but no one will be the wiser. Anachronisms, false starts, scarlet clues, a noirish insistence on the pathetic pursuit of human truths will pervade its miserable (quite thin) plot, and while the mystery will not unravel, to a select few it will provide the satisfaction of an unfathomable rage.
This is the part when, to Magsalin, as Chiara tells her story, the filmmaker drops her guard. Chiara gains a hint of, let’s say, embodiment, losing that slightly offensive appearance of tactful sedation. She becomes animated, finally munching on the proffered pan de sal, buttering it up on all sides, crust and filling both, and her straight blond hair is getting caught in her gleaming, jutting, expensively symmetrical upper teeth.
She explains why a visit to Samar is necessary. A spiritual journey.
“You know that is not a normal thing to say about Samar,” Magsalin says.
Chiara ignores her.
She had a conversion online, she says. She had a conversion into the world of the Filipino rebels of 1901. It was as if, she explains to Magsalin, she had entered a portal and become the body of a Filipino farmer disguised as a devout Catholic woman carrying a machete inside his billowing peasant skirt, hoping to kill a GI.
“You were hallucinating,” Magsalin replies. “Do you know what was really in your mother’s heirloom apple compote in the Catskills? What were you drinking?”
Professor Estrella Espejo’s papers on Balangiga, “The Unintended: A Consequence,” Parts 1, 3, and 6, were on kirjasto, a WordPress blog by the same tenure-track associate professor in San Diego, and a remote server that, when clicked upon, apologized for the inconvenience but due to copyright questions, et cetera … Chiara’s efforts to find the scholar’s contacts were fruitless, until she located an exchange in a comments section on inq7.net involving Espejo and Magsalin.
“Wait a minute,” Magsalin demands. “When was this?”
Chiara takes out a notebook from her huge Hermés bag.
“August 15, 2000. You likened the bitter, essentializing determinist Professor Espejo to the coyote in the cartoon about the Road Runner, saying, quote, like Wile E. Coyote you keep setting your traps though it is only you who bites, unquote.”
“That was in reference to her loony-tunes theory that Juan Luna, the Filipino painter, must be Jack the Ripper, because Luna was also in Europe at the time of the Ripper. You see, Juan Luna had killed his wife. She thinks that the death of Paz Chiching Luna is the last Ripper death. Estrella is insane.”
“You had another run-in with her in 2004.”
“She gets these history-worms in her head and won’t let go.”
“It was about my father’s film.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You read closely the scene in which Tommy O’Connell shoots a woman and her daughter hiding something in a rickshaw.”
“They were hiding a book.”
“It was a diary. You noted that the camera panned over a few quick words, meant to be in French.”
“It was supposed to be the diary of the woman’s dead husband, a murdered rebel. A list of his descriptions, his trifling observations of his kid, the girl Tommy has just killed—and the now-dead mother had only been trying to keep his personal possessions intact. But on screen, the actual words, if you stopped the frame, were in Waray, the language of Samar.”
“Your idea was that the sentences in my dad’s film were actual pages from a diary of a rebel soldier from the Philippine-American War.”
“I imagined your dad was alluding to the other war and making a connection. I wondered then why the Philippine diary, a red herring in his text, was so repressed. Why was it that in his press conferences your dad made no references to the 1901 incident at all? I mean, as I said, look at the names in his movie: Smitty Jakes, Tommy O’Connell. Read The Ordeal of Samar and you have your dad’s movie right there.”
“I did.”
“Read The Ordeal of Sa
mar?”
“I got the Joseph Schott book, yes. It was disturbing, but not in ways that could make a good movie.”
“So you cheated. You went off the Internet and read an actual book.”
Chiara laughs. Then she says: “So I want to know. Are you Professor Estrella Espejo?”
Magsalin almost topples off the stool. She starts coughing, stuff is coming out of her nose, and the waitress offers her water and a napkin.
Magsalin takes a long sip. “Hell no,” she says, putting down the glass. “I wouldn’t be caught dead being Estrella Espejo. She’s a lunatic with astasia-abasia tied up in IV tubes on an island off the South China Sea. I mean, the North Philippine Sea, depending on your disposition.”
She stares at the filmmaker, daring her to contradict.
“Yeah, I know,” says Chiara. “Estrella Espejo is something else. She told me to get in touch with you if I wanted to go to Balangiga. She said she could not help me, because she’s in the hospital and unstable.”
“You can say that again. Did she give you my e-mail?”
“And fax.”
“She’s a shit.”
“Pardon?”
“She makes things up and won’t let go. Take the details of your father’s film. First, Charlie Company: every third goddamned company is called Charlie. Anyone who took Citizen’s Army Training, as Espejo did since she lived under Marcos’s martial law, knows that. Second, Smitty Jakes, Jacob Smith. Okay, sounds alike. Tommy O’Connell, Thomas Connell. Sounds convincing. Clearly one text is lifted from another. She goes on making a case about names. The point is not the coincidence of the names, or their intentional equivalence. The one-to-one correspondence between history and fiction is not interesting. It’s a logical fallacy to mistake the parallel with the teleological—it’s not clear that God exists between parallel lines. I mean, if you are going to steal my idea, at least make something useful out of it. The question, it seems to me, is how to keep the incident from recurring. I mean, what the fuck is the point of knowing history’s loops if we remain its bloody victims?”
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