Eliza had taken her hand, led her out of that room, out of the barbed wires and gray walls, and, once near the white car that seemed to become a chariot of liberation, she had surrendered to her impulse and thrown her arms about Anna, causing her to drop her bags and spill the paraphernalia of her imprisonment: dresses and slippers, soap and toothpaste, a washcloth . . .
“I moved the very day I received your friend’s call,” Eliza had whispered hurriedly, her voice breaking. “But it couldn’t be done sooner.”
Anna had raised her head and peered into her eyes. “What call?” she had said. “What friend?”
The cold truth of it had seized Eliza then. She had had to lean against the car door. The infernal Amor, he whom the outside world called the Loved One, had known about her and Anna, had indeed made the call himself and was after something that Eliza had, something she valued.
She would have to kill him—certainly, no doubt about it, she said aloud and to confirm this bit of wisdom, she looked at her dance partner. But he was gone; she had lost him. Instead, a soldier stood before her, awkward in his combat uniform and heavy boots, his M-16 banging against his knee. He grinned. “You and I will do so, my love,” he said in a sepulchral voice. He jumped; his fingers raked the sky. “You and me. Bang. You and me both. Bang.” He pranced around her, his knees jerking almost to his chest. “You and me!” he shouted. “Bang! Bang! Bang!”
4
“Message,” Rafael said, panting as he ran beside Anna. She had to detach herself from a circle of six dancing women, bidding them good-bye with a hand wave. She whirled with Rafael, pretending to dance.
“Pest!” she said. “We were trying for a record. We’d gone six times around the plaza, nonstop.”
“Fuck the Festival. It’s insane. What do you thinkIwas doing when the message came? It wasn’t even forme! But for you! For you!”
“All right, all right,” she said quickly. “This thing’s getting to us. Where do we go?”
With his chin, he indicated an alley. Swiftly, they walked away from the crowd, stopping first at a corner store where Rafael bought a Coke. He was dying of thirst, he said, and had been offered nothing but Archangel Beer and gin. “The biggest cash crop for a nation of alcoholics,” he added wryly. “Want one?”
She shook her head. “And what were you doing?”
“Flirting with a transvestite.” He grinned. “We’ve lost our minds. Remind me never to go to another fiesta.” He paid for the Coke, took a big swig, and resumed walking.
She trotted at his heels. “The message, the message.”
“Will need time,” he said. “Time. Come.” He pointed now at the end of the road. It was the beach—a rough section of it, the sand studded with pebbles and bits of coral.
“Should dissuade anyone from trying to listen,” he said. “Also the surf’s loud. You’ll be sorry you refused a Coke. National drink, this one.”
When they reached the sand, he squatted down.
“He wants the rest of the story,” he said without preamble. “You promised him. Tale for tale.I don’t know why he’s so interested. I find it boring.”
“What about his? I haven’t received anything.”
Rafael shoved a hand into his T-shirt, brought out a plastic- wrapped package. “Two tapes,” he said. “In code. His voice. You’re such trouble. History, you say; history. Leche! You keep one eye on history, one eye on your enemy, and you get wall-eyed. You are the pest. Come, give.”
She was unperturbed, knowing his roughness was a mask. She crossed her legs, placed an elbow on a knee, leaned her chin on her hand. “How come he gets to tape his story,” she asked, “and I have to tell you mine?”
“Because he doesn’t want me to know his,” he replied. “I don’t know why not. If he could trust you with it— In any case, I have eidetic memory. And would probably never talk. Also, you don’t have to work with him; I do. And your tale is harmless while his— Will you tell me someday? When everything is over? Or half over? Or before I die?”
Anna laughed. “I promise. What can be told of it.”
“He saved my life once,” Rafael said. “Now, give. I have to spew details into his ears, about your late husband, especially—if we are to find out what happened to him.”
“His favorite word was amazing,” Anna said.
“You think he called himself Commander Amazing?” Rafael asked. “Don’t laugh. The underground has had weirder names.”
“Pest! Stop kidding. He said it over and over again, that time at Recto Avenue, and he would go on saying it through that year, the year when everything happened.” She shifted her eyes to the sea, inhaled, saw him again—a slight young man with black button-eyes. It had been an amazing year, she thought; by mid-morning of the day following the massacre at Recto, the first handful of hibiscus flowers had floated down to the street still littered with glass shards and oil and blood and the burned frames of buses. By that time, it had become known that twenty-seven students, three teachers, one worker, and an ice cream cart man had been killed and that nearby hospitals and clinics were clogged with the wounded. The hibiscus were followed by pink cadena de amor flowers, by daisies and lilies, by bougainvillea and a few luxurious red roses. . . Wreaths, bouquets, single blossoms came flying out of bus windows, jeepney windows, car windows, apartment windows, turning the cement road into a flowered carpet in memory and in defiance.
Manolo, watching the metamorphosis on television, said once again: but it is amazing . . . For days afterward, he went around with a holiday air. Later, Anna was to find out that he had gathered his friends, all science teachers, and had set up a Committee which had declared war on the Seven Pernicious Crimes: Arrogance, Banality, Corruption, Exploitation, Falsehood, Ignorance, and Nepotism. The Committee’s founding ceremonies had included a chanting of Einstein’s relativity equation and an oath never to surrender, come hell or high water. “Nothing,” said Manolo, “could be more serious than E equals mc squared!” And when Anna taxed him with the foreboding in her heart, he had explained: “This way, I can show what I’m made of. Otherwise, I will be a physics instructor all my life. Now, I have a good chance of being department head. Think of that!” Seeing him in the midst of a crowd, speaking into microphones, standing atop empty oil drums or van roofs, Anna could only shake her head. “Of all the bad luck in the world,” she muttered once, “I had to marry a rabble-rouser.”
He was happy. And seeing him happy, she laid a quieting finger on the worm of foreboding in her heart. In the first place, he made light of her fears, laughing and reminding her of how he had been in college. “I had no money,” he said, “remember? I was poor. I had a tiny scholarship, half of which I sent to my parents. Remember? And remember my hydroponic garden in the dorm bathroom? I survived on that for four years! And remember all that fresh salad I fed you. You married me for the greenest lettuce you ever had, for the juiciest tomatoes, for . .”She waved him to silence. She had married him for his nickname: Manolo, the Survivor. The other students had called him that and he had seemed to her indestructible, the kind of man who would be with her forever. And she had been alone all her life. “Don’t worry,” he said, resenting her silence. “If anything happens, you can always have a funeral for me.” At which, most gravely, she looked him full in the face and said: “You will have that at the very least.”
To herself, she said they were still young, that his current fancy with politics would pass, that the keel of their marriage would right itself again for a smooth, unremarked passage through the rituals of life—weddings, baptisms, fiestas, and funerals. It was a story she had woven for herself, this simple narrative—one which could not be found in her history books with their tales of epic battles and complex colonizations, of galleons and cannons, and the walls of Intramuros which had so drained Spain’s treasury that the King, El Rey, had demanded to see their shadow over Madrid, of the strangers from across a turbulent ocean called the Pacific who had broken through the barricade of typhoons into
a young world which had names only for virtue and none for property.
She had elected to ignore the warning printed in each page of her books, trusting instead in Manolo’s invulnerability.It seemed indeed that he had read the times correctly, for disorder was becoming general over the land and his name began to appear, more and more often, in handbills announcing this or that symposium, in news reports and magazines, for the Committee had managed to calculate the rate of profit of various corporations—including those of oil at every stage of the manufacturing process and had proven miraculously that prices everywhere should have been going down, not up. The Committee was hailed as the new center of the intelligentsia, leaders of a coming rational and scientific age, and there was a lot of talk about development and equality and so on and so forth. Once, she and Manolo awoke to find a man standing at the foot of their bed -- a man holding his black hood in deference, a bloated jute sack snuggled against his legs.
“Don’t be alarmed,” the man said, “I’m not a thief. That is -- I am, but I’m not stealing from you. I came to give you something.”
It seemed that someone had broken into the Securities and Exchange Commission and had hauled off a sack-load of documents, thinking they could be sold. But it was no go; they were only paper-- signed and stamped, sure, but of no value. The King of Thieves, for there was one, had gotten interested, had looked over the documents and struggled with their English and figures and names, and, in exasperation, had decided to send them to Manolo Montreal who was, at that instant when the King was agonizing over his decision, a guest on a television talk show. The King had caught sight of his face and had pointed his beautiful pliant forefinger at the television screen and said that was him, yes, certainly; Manolo was the one. Henceforth, the man said, all Manolo had to do was sort of say something in public like “I wonder what’s going on at such-and-such an office” and the King would send someone to jimmy locks and cart away documents. Because, the man had said, there was no helping it; we were all in this thing together, having only one country and nowhere else to go.
The thieves turned out to be a rich lode. Manolo dug into the papers and read and read and read. “I shall die here,” he told Anna once, “buried underneath these papers and still not be through.” After sorting out the documents, he took them to his Committee which promptly set up a research-and-study group of some fifty students who, after thirty days, unveiled an awesome chart of interlinked corporate executive boards, all controlled by a dozen men and women, all relatives of the Commander’s wife. “Holy shit,” Manolo murmured, “from steel to coconuts!”
Anna, terrified, stared at the chart. “You can’t go public with that.”
“It is not the worst,” Manolo said, his voice sad for sack-loads of documents had appeared every day at their back door since the thief’s visit. “They’ve worked out an even bigger chart--from housing subdivisions to gin. And the fifty families who control everything and anything are shown to be interrelated, by blood or marriage. They have been since the turn of the century. The whole population serves one gigantic clan.”
Anna dropped her face into her hands. Two days after the publication of the first chart, the Committee and practically everyone they knew were on the run. Manolo was not at home when they came: two jeeploads of soldiers, bristling with M-i6s, side-arms, and even a grenade launcher. Stomping through their house, they smashed all the crockery, ripped up chair seats and the sofa fractured all the lamps, and trampled books and papers underfoot.
When Manolo arrived, he found Anna bundling together three pairs of pants, five T-shirts, two changes of underwear, three physics books, and all the money in the house. Tears streamed down Manolo’s cheeks as he tried to piece together their first-ever conjugal property— a cheap, clay vase.
“It’s embarrassing,” he finally admitted, dumping the clay shards into a trash can. “They only found things to destroy, nothing to steal. It’s terrible to be poor.”
“They will be back,” she said, handing him the bundle. “Go. They said that in a list of five thousand names, yours had only two digits.”
“Really?” He was flattered.
Outside, a jeep waited. Anna kept her eyes away from the driver and offered her cheek to Manolo’s kiss. He leaned over her, pulled her close, and whispered.
“Take this,” he said hurriedly, thrusting a piece of paper into her hand. “Memorize it. Never give it to anyone. If anyone should have need for armaments-- oh, no more. Just guard it well. Let no one have it.”
She closed her eyes. “Never,” she said, bitterly. “Don’t take a field wife.”
He kissed her then. “My Anna.My quiet Anna. I will see you soon.”
Liar, liar. How could a man be so terrible? When the jeep was gone, she took out the piece of paper and committed the Hong Kong address to memory. She tore the paper crosswise, lengthwise, burned half in an ashtray, the other in a bonfire in the backyard. Liar.
Oh but they were so stupid, she would whisper to his memory, so stupid indeed that it took them weeks before they realized what the one thing of value in the house was. When they returned, they had to step carefully over the relics of the destruction they had wrought for she had refused to clean the house again, deeming it already lost. Everything was lost. Schools were closed; radio and television stations were shut down; there were no newspapers. The house was lost, for the bank foreclosed on their mortgage. There was only the constant news of arrests and more arrests, more and more each day.
She was standing in the living room that twilight, wishing she could cry, when the front door’s hinges snapped apart under a blow. They had poured in even as the world became translucent to her eyes and she had the feeling that her hand would have gone through the sofa’s back had she dared touch it. Still calm, wondering why the objects about her had turned opaque, she watched them pour in through a door half-hanging off its hinges. They split into two streams of dark green and brown patches and hard black lines -- a pair of horns, it seemed, that stretched and stretched until its ends reached her, had drawn close to her. At that instant, she lifted a hand to touch the sofa, to see whether her fingers would go through the upholstery and the wood but something dark and hard clamped down on her wrist and when she looked, she saw a man’s hand holding her, the fingers bony and brown from too much sun. She did not scream.
They took her to Colonel Urbano Amor. He had her sit on the sofa, had a silver coffee service brought in and placed on the low table, and urged her to help herself. It was going to be a long night. She dutifully poured herself a cup of coffee, mixed in milk and sugar, raised cup and saucer, and leaned back on the sofa. As she was taking her first sip, Colonel Amor rose to his feet, towering over her, and dropped on the silver tray a dozen black-and-white photographs. Oh, Jesus, Manolo looked like a poor rabbit.A poor rabbit with his innards hanging out. The coffee spilled over her hands, her wrists to her lap and through her skirt to her thighs and she was grateful the liquid was so very, very hot.
It wasn’t her fault, she tried to tell the Loved One, not hers, not Manolo’s.Not theirs at all that the world chose to crack up just when she had thought everything had been settled.
“Did you really know him?” Colonel Amor asked.
“Quite,” she said, cursing herself for not having the wisdom of Peter who had denied Christ three times.
“You didn’t go with him.” His tone was accusatory.
“I wasn’t invited.”
“Did you say you wanted to go?”
“No.”
“Nothing more was said?”
“He said good-bye.”
“Just like that. No promises of return. No way of getting in touch? Of communicating? No meeting places? No names?”
“There was no time. For anything.”
“I wish you would stop lying,” he said sadly. “I really wish you would. After all, he’s dead.Dead.”
“Can I have his body?”
“Bah, who cares about bodies? His body!” His right hand
waved a dismissal. “Left to rot somewhere. Probably. I don’t concern myself with the dead. Bodies. Pah! Carcass, you mean. Stinking, putrefying carcass. Look at the photographs. They are the truth, the reality”
“Can I have them?”
“No. But tell me what he wanted.”
She thought for a moment. “He wanted-- he wanted to give his people hope.” Her voice broke.
Ah, the colonel said, that was a mistake. A mistake. Hope was too painful, too painful, for anyone. That was an error. Thus, properly sympathetic, he turned her over to two soldiers who stripped her carefully, attached electrodes to her nipples, and proceeded to crank a field battery to life. The current of pain stenciled the meaning of error into her cells. Screaming, arching her back and head in a parody of passion, Anna could see the tiny letters on the canvas sheath of the generator. It was an imported piece of equipment, blue seal as they would say, made in the U.S.A.A continent half a world away. Someone, she thought, must have made a joke because she could hear laughter bubbling through her screams.
Days, nights, disparate images.The lieutenant with the smelly armpits who subjected her to odoriferous love for who knew how many times and for how long.The fake doctor with his syringes. Pain was better.Blows, slaps, kicks. Cigarette burns. Her hair wrapped about some man’s hand and pulled again and again. But pain was better. Better than the lieutenant; better even than the Loved One’s questions-- the interminable questioning in his office during which, like an automaton, she would spill things on herself: sheaves of paper, Coke or coffee, glass of water ... It drove the colonel wild but, at the same time, a strange expression would dawn on his face until, finally, he asked if she was trying to baptize herself all over again. No, she had replied, truthfully enough; her body was anticipating the spill of her blood. Back to the romance room for lying, he stormed. He could not bear to be lied to. Sometime during those terrible hours she learned to create a sinkhole in her head -- a sinkhole that swallowed her tears and her screams. Toward the end, the most terrible of pain would only set her sighing. But pain was better --better than the Loved One’s prying and asking and peering into her life and Manolo’s life, sifting through every minute, every second, of their existence.It was exquisite rape, the colonel admitted when she told him this truth; unlike his men, he preferred to fuck the soul. After that, Anna let the sinkhole swallow her words as well. She only sighed and sighed and sighed.
State of War Page 6