There was no helping it. She had to be turned over to the detention center proper. She was handcuffed, shoved into a jeep, and driven outside the city to a fenced stretch of land where long, low buildings stood. To call it the detention center was a joke, she found out; it was the stockade where errant soldiers had been kept. Barbed wires and gray walls; iron bars and dim rooms. Cool interiors. She gathered what clothes she had managed to bring and hobbled to her assigned bunk in a room of forty women. She did not look at anyone and when a doctor appeared, distributing vitamin pills -- Lord, he wanted the prisoners healthy --she asked for a checkup. He gave her an incredulous look but he was a fat and kindly fellow and, three days later, he took her to the clinic next door, escorted of course by three heavily armed guards. He cleaned her, tested her, treated her burns, douched her, counted out pills into her palm, and said she had suffered no permanent damage. She was glad, she said; she wanted to survive. She thanked him and he looked away, his eyes ashamed.
After a month, the doctor stopped his visits. She was grateful she had forced him and herself to go through that. Now, she could settle back in peace and wait out the days. The weeks. The months.
Days before his appearance, the center had hummed with stories about a man who had drawn the line with the very first question the Loved One asked. He had forced a life-and-death struggle over his name --only his name, which Colonel Armor wanted simply to keep his files in order. Guevarra -- for that was how he was known -- simply said “Guevarra” and, like a moronic parrot, had repeated that over and over again, maybe a hundred thousand times. The Loved One, said the rumor, was livid, stomping and yelling that Che was dead, who the shit was this man trying to fool? Anna, listening to the story, could only admire the man’s wisdom. In the Loved One’s domain where there were no rules and the only limits were imposed by the torturers ‘sweet satiation, it was easy to go from one answer to another, from compromise to compromise until betrayal was total. From one’s name to others’ names --it could be a short leap. But the man had remained silent, even when Colonel Amor had had the camp doctor dig out the bullet in his thigh without anesthesia.
When she saw him that day, coming into the mess room, carrying overhead a ridiculous cot and stopping by the guard so he could be untied from the stupid piece of furniture, she thought she was young again. He would remain tied to the cot for another month more, subject to the indignity of having to carry the thing around if he wished to move, to have his pants unzipped by the guards, his private parts laid open to view, each time he had to go to the toilet. But he never missed a meal, though the others offered to smuggle the food to him. Sometimes, as they ate, Anna would see him looking at her over the bowed heads of his companions and she would stare back with flat eyes, unwilling to let him see the hope she felt. Colonel Amor had been right about that; hope was painful.
Summer was ending when the Commander, by a strange quirk, suddenly decreed the nobility of work, of labor, and the prison inmates were gathered in the mess room one afternoon. The officer-in- charge said that, by the grace of the commander-in-chief who made the sun rise and the roosters crow, the back gates would be opened and the two hundred or so inmates of this center -- as in all other centers -- would spend three hours each day cultivating a rose garden, if they wanted to, so long as they were engaged in noble work.
The Commander’s Day of the Dignity of Labor did not begin auspiciously. The inmates, ordered to form two lines before the back gates, found themselves snaking through the corridor to the mess room, past the lavatories, the cells, and even to the building’s front gates. The soldiers paid no attention to their protests and issued them plastic garden tools, nothing with a keen edge to it, as they passed one by one to the backyard.
Sunshine. She had to blink. She could have sworn her clothes steamed with six months of dampness and that baby spiders scurried out of her hair. Around her, there was a muffled noise of joy as the inmates scattered like children. She scanned the yard. Her eyes were halted by fifteen-foot adobe walls festooned with barbed wires. She saw the guard towers; she forced herself to turn away, to look at the sunlight, the earth, and the impeccable green of grass. She would survive, she told herself; she had to. She had a burial to carry out.
She chose the most inhospitable spot in the yard, thinking the thick cogon would shield her solitude. Squatting like a peasant woman, her skirt tucked between her knees, she wielded the trowel they had given her. She would clear the ground for her garden. But it seemed futile; though she whipped the trowel back and forth, the cogon merely bent beneath her blows and the scars she inflicted on the earth were shallow. After a while, as the sun touched her nape, she found herself hugging her knees, shielding her face with her hands, and crying. The tears came and ran down her cheeks though she made no sound and did not even feel like weeping.
A rustling in the grass. She uncoiled swiftly and raised the trowel but the man’s voice warned her. He had lifted his hands to protect himself and she saw raw wounds on old scars where the ropes had flayed the skin repeatedly. She lowered the trowel and said the first thing that came to her mind and in a tone she would use with a student, a slightly nagging maternal tone: “You should paint those cuts with iodine.” The next instant, she realized who he was and her tongue stuck to her palate.
“Why are you crying?” he asked
She shook her head. “Not crying. Just tears. Nobody weeps here.”
He was puzzled. “Why not?”
She could not answer. Her body was being shaken by tremors of happiness. Looking at his face, she found again the hope she thought she had lost forever that day Colonel Amor had said: “He’s dead.” In the silence, his face rippled. Was he blushing? She realized her own face had said too much.
That was how it was. She could no longer remember when exactly they started to speak to each other. But she could recall vividly the day her trowel struck something in the ground, something so unyielding that the tool had almost flown out of her hand. Guevarra, she called out and he was there, his fingers rooting at the soil with knowledge. It was a drainpipe. Their eyes raced along the ground, tracing its possible subterranean route, through the yard, under the seed beds, past the tomato plots, to the edge of the wall and underneath. Hallelujah!
A month later, two men, three women, and Guevarra picked the locks of their respective cells, broke the chains wrapped about the back gates’ bars, and slipped into the night of All Souls Day while a typhoon hovered at the edge of the city and the damp air sent candlelight’s sputtering in the town of the dead. They merged with the crowd, which preferred to face the dangers of the weather rather than the anger of the departed, and moved swiftly through what looked like a field of fallen stars. A limousine picked them up at the cemetery’s parking lot and drove them through the camp’s barriers. Only one of them returned--a labor organizer who had been betrayed by her brother. He had thought it better that she serve her time, so to speak, though she had had neither trial nor sentence. Later, when he found out what happened to her, he ran amuck, killing three policemen with a machete before the entire force of the Northern Police Command gunned him down.
It took eight hours for his sister to die. Her moans and delirium and the sight of her blood and matted hair and her nailless fingers and toes drove the women in their cells to lunatic rage and hysteria -- for the soldiers had dumped her without ceremony on the corridor floor. That was not as bad as the flies and her odor, three days after her death, when they refused to remove her corpse, the flies, dear God, the restless specks crawling over eyes, noses, mouths, breasts, pillows, bed sheets, the walls, while Anna hammered four food trays marked Made in U.S.A. bang against the floor one after another, discarded the twisted and bent in favor of an intact one as the others tore their pillows and mattresses open, smashed basins, and hurled spoons and forks, icons and rosaries or simply kicked the walls, banged on the walls with their fists or their heads -- doing anything at all, anything, to escape that smell.
That same day saw th
e rebirth of Guevarra who, in his twisting retreat toward his mountain stronghold, demolished three military outposts, crashed through half a dozen barricades of patrol jeeps, and left a trail of uniformed corpses smoldering in the aftermath of grenade explosions. He did not forget. Somehow a letter reached the camp commander, appearing mysteriously atop the man’s office desk. His life was forfeit, Guevarra wrote, if the officer failed to have the corpse removed and buried within four hours after receiving the note. The colonel had turned as gray as the ash of his cigars; there had been a terrible row, as intelligence men arrived to interrogate his own soldiers, but the corpse had been taken away.
Truly, Guevarra was magnificent. All the inmates said that as they sewed their pillows and mattresses, bed sheets and towels, and gathered once more in the mess room now free of flies. Anna, of course, was taken once again to Colonel Urbano Amor who, this time, contented himself with questioning her and not letting her sleep for days on end. But they both knew it was an exercise in futility; she would not tell him anything, not even how she had thrown a fit for days when the prisoners’ committee had decided she could take the chance, she would be left behind. How she had railed at Guevarra, for it was she who had found the drainpipe after all; it was hers. She threatened to escape on her own, relenting only when Guevarra promised to find out what had happened to Manolo and promised as well, when she went on sulking, that he would tell her one day the most fascinating story she would ever hear.
“Satisfy my curiosity,” Amor had said once. “What is his name? It can’t harm him; he’s escaped.”
Anna had nearly laughed. “Guevarra.”
A foul word exploded from the colonel’s mouth. “His real name!”
Where did Manolo die? How did he die?” She looked at him flatly. “Where is his body? Name a province, just a province. I will look for it myself.”
He cursed again. “Are you proposing a trade-off? What is his name?”
“Guevarra,” she said sadly. It was such an ordinary Spanish name. The colonel had given up. She was returned to the center and there whiled away the weeks with learning how to sew, for the guards abruptly ended the campaign to dignify labor and all the vegetable seedlings in the backyard died of thirst. She went on as before, jealous of her solitude, resisting the efforts of the others to draw her into prayer circles, discussion circles, knitting circles. When the others were occupied, she would lay out a game of solitaire and plan and plan again how she would find him, how she would force them to tell her where he was. Then, she would bury him -- simply, quietly -- and thus establish her connection to the earth, this earth, into which she would descend happily at the end of, hopefully, a short and quiet life, God help her despair. And shuffling the cards, laying them atop one another, turning them over, she thought of what she would need outside, what would be needed to see to her plans, and reading the signs from the cards she created a mask, her other Anna, and worked on it, giving it all the virtues required to survive.
She used the mask to hide what she felt when the guard came with the news that she was to be released. It hid well her surprise and confusion when Eliza Hansen, still the beautiful creature she had known years ago, walked into the receiving room. And it hid her anger at the hitch in her plans when Eliza first took her to the apartment she had reserved in Anna’s name and then insisted that she see a certain Adrian Banyaga.
When Eliza asked about her husband, Anna saw that she had forgotten Manolo. She sighed with relief; she would not have to share his memory.
“Didn’t he leave you anything at all?” Eliza demanded.
“No. He died suddenly.”
“Young?”
“Twenty-seven? No, twenty-eight.”
Surprisingly, Eliza echoed her words. “Ah, what a rabbit. What did he die of?”
“Forty-two bullets, I think.”
“What a rabbit.” And there the matter had rested.
5
A phalanx of young men, legs scissoring, arms on one another’s shoulders, scattered the crowd near the Town Hall. Hala, bira! Hala, bira! Hala, bira! Hala, bira! On the sidewalk, a band of women ran alongside, one or two breaking off from time to time to dart across the street, daring the men to trample them underfoot. “Off, off,” the young men shouted in harmony, footfalls marking time, “get off the road! We’ll crush you! Hey! Smash you! Hey! Slam into you!” Safe on the other sidewalk, the girl-women fanned themselves with their fingers, chirped their excitement, and chased after the men, dodging and slipping through the crowd.
Sweat streamed down Adrian’s face, his chest, as, held by the vise of the next man’s arm, he marched along. He caught a glimpse of Eliza sitting at the sidewalk edge, her mouth open with laughter. Faces—young and old; brown, golden, and fair—swirled past him; the sky itself, blue with a relentless white blur of heat for a sun, seemed to pivot on its axis. Waves of masculine odor rose about him and he raised his voice happily, roaring with the men.Off, Off . . . Someone grabbed at his free arm. Adrian ignored the hand; lifting his knees, he tried to tear himself away but the man was already keeping pace with the group, his fingers tight about Adrian’s arm.
“Your father wants you,” Julius’s voice reached him. From the corner of an eye, Adrian saw his friend’s face flushed with the heat.
“Your grandfather called,” Julius went on, panting slightly.
Smash you, crush you, slam into you . . .
“I’m having fun!” Adrian yelled above the noise.
Julius hung fire for a moment. The group passed the road’s midpoint; now, the church hulked on the horizon.
Smash you . . .
“You could call your grandfather,” Julius said.
Off, off the road . . .
“You are a pest,” Adrian said. “We’re trying to set a record: six hours nonstop about the plaza.”
Crush you . . . !
“There’s a telephone at the shipping line’s office.”
“Oh—!” Reluctantly, Adrian pulled away his arm, dropped out of the parade, and, to the women’s taunts, followed Julius through the crowd.
“It took a while to find you,” Julius said, stopping to regain his breath.
“Adrian exhaled in exasperation. “I can’t even be away from the family for three days,” he said.
“Your grandfather’s not feeling well.”
Adrian snorted. Old Andy, after whom he was named, hadn’t felt well in twenty years.Maybe, more.No one knew exactly how old he was or how his mind worked. He was already a wizened monkey in a wheelchair when Adrian, at ten years of age, went to live with him. It had seemed a perfect arrangement; he was the only grandson and his own parents were busy with overseeing the expansion of their various businesses. The old man, on the other hand, lived by himself in a mansion on ten acres of prime real estate, in an exclusive millionaires’ housing subdivision.
But no one could have prepared Adrian for the confusion of Old Andy’s house, with its labyrinths and corridors, its cavernous library, art and collection rooms, and the forty-two servants who exercised the half-dozen horses in the grounds stable by riding them and dashing through fruit trees, jasmine vines, and gardenia bushes. The clip-clop of horses’ hooves had gone on interminably during his first weeks in the mansion. After some time, though, he divined that a mad sort of schedule kept the household operating.
Here, grandfather was simply Old Andy to visitors, servants, and family members alike. He had been called “old so-and-so,” he assured Adrian when the latter had demurred, since he was fourteen or fifteen or even older—who the hell cared?—when he ran away from an orphanage in Bulacan, after painting Spanish cuss words in turd on the convent walls. He hoped the Castilian nuns had been properly scandalized. In any case, he was still “old so-and-so” when he surfaced at the Parian, the Chinese district in Binondo and hired himself out to a melancholy celestial as a used bottle collector and buyer. “Old so-and-so!” the young maids of Intramuros would call out from the wrought-iron balconies of their masters’ h
ouses. Being farm girls conscripted from plantations around Manila, their thighs were plump with the sun’s sap—a virtue they made sure he noticed by lifting their skirts and pretending to fan their lower limbs, moving their petticoats to and fro. Old Andy would curse beneath his breath; he knew that they knew that for him to swing up the trellis vines for the balcony without the owner’s permission was certain death.
“I was poor then,” Old Andy said to the discomfited Adrian, chuckling. “And since you’re rich now, you should never neglect women, when you’re the proper age.”
He’d picked up “Andy,” on the other hand, from another master, a norte americano who had swum into Manila in the wake of Commodore George Dewey’s flagship, that vessel of war which surprised the Spanish armada as it lay hallucinating at the mouth of the bay of sunsets. With merciless efficiency and paying no respect to daydreams, the American commodore had riddled the ships full of holes, thus ending a war begun in Cuba. The Castilians surrendered the city and sold the entire archipelago, all seven thousand one hundred islands, for twenty million dollars. Or to put it crudely, the Americans paid two silver dollars for each native head, considering the islands’ population at the time. The “monkeys without tails,” as the indios were referred to mockingly, already skittish with thoughts of revolution and independence, turned pale at this terrible insult and threw themselves into a suicidal war, though the last one was not over yet, and in the amber afternoons, towns sank into silence as all the males disappeared into the hills and the women began a strange set of calisthenics: squat, stand, squat, stand.
State of War Page 7