“Stupid. Why not just remove what’s causing all the other problems?”
“Oh, you’re too logical,” Eliza said, smiling at her fondly. “Look, ices!” Suddenly, the heat was unbearable, the sky and road blazing. They cut through the parade, made the other side of the street, and in a few seconds were queued up before the vendor’s cart.
Eliza found a five-peso bill in her pouch. “Leftover wealth,” she said laughing and asked for two mango-flavored shaved ice on cones. She handed one to Anna and, licking, they walked away, straight into a circle of mangy-looking children.
“There are too many of them,” Eliza said.
“And each one beautiful,” Anna said. She nodded at the nearest child, a girl, who hesitated before smiling shyly and extending a cupped hand.
“Now, you’ve done it,” Eliza said.
“Just one, just one,” Anna muttered, fumbling at her pouch and dropping a peso bill into the child’s hand.
“Quick, quick. Let’s go!” Eliza grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the crowd to escape the horde of children who, having witnessed the transaction, were preparing to besiege them. They ran past three soldiers clustered under a tree, each holding a rum bottle.
Licking ices happily, they walked through the Festival. The town decorations had not survived the first twenty-four hours of celebration intact. Some of the buntings were down, looping between rooftops; a bamboo arch had fallen and most of the flowers were withered. The nipa fronds had managed the heat though and glistening dark green, still rustled from electric posts and arches. The warriors, impassive as ever, kept their formation and marched round and about the plaza, in time to the drums, hurling war cries and chants at the crowd. A flock of transvestites passed, a dozen grinning soldiers trailing in their wake.
“You’re too clean,” a man said as the two passed the church. He stepped up to them and, before Anna could dodge, his hands had caressed her cheeks, leaving red and black streaks on her skin. “Tiger,” he said, grinning, and turned to Eliza who, shrieking, tried to escape his hands. But he clawed at her, staining her, arms, andinally her face. “Now you’re truly beautiful.” He bowed and walked away.
“Pest!” Eliza screamed.
“Adrian would love this,” Anna said.
Eliza shoved the last of the cone into her mouth, and chewed studiously while sneaking a look at Anna’s face. She had not expected her to bring him up now. But there it was. She wiped her fingers on her pant seat.
She inhaled. “Do you like Adrian, Anna?”
A pause. “Yes.”
She would get no more than that, she knew. She waited, gathering her courage. After a while, she said: “It would be nice to have a normal life.”
Another silence. Then, Anna’s voice, wistful, full of regret: “Ah, yes.”
Eliza’s eyes stung; her friend’s voice said with finality that it could not be, could never be. Sadness filled Eliza like water in a new-dug well. There was no escaping it, Anna’s voice had said. She flung an arm about Anna’s shoulder and drew her head forward, letting their foreheads touch. She looked into her friend’s brown eyes—paler than her own, certainly, but with the same heavy lids, the same hint of an upward curve at the outer corners, the same smoky fringe of eyelashes.
“What strange ways we’ve gone,” she said to Anna.
With her right hand, Anna patted her cheek. Eliza saw the two of them when they were young—Anna in a cool gauze blouse and blue jeans sitting in the wrought-iron chair of the dorm’s back terrace, herself in T-shirt and shorts also in a white wrought-iron chair, and, between them, on the glass-topped garden table, a plate of green mango slices, dewy with salt. Their chins and fingers itched with mango sap and spillovers from the Coke they were drinking as they played sungka, their hands scooping out tiny seashells from the carved hollows of the wooden board, swooping one by one over the other hollows, dripping seashells. The wind, the scent of azaleas, the delicate clink of shells—all that had spelled peace for two orphans those Sunday afternoons. What strange paths, indeed, they had traveled.
“We should at least dance,” Anna said in her gentle voice.
Eliza lifted her arms and as Anna clapped in rhythm to the drums, she danced. Heart, blood, limbs synchronized now. Careful, careful, she warned herself; instances of love were too few and far between, too fragile. A sudden gesture, a sharp noise, an unnecessary blink of the eye and banality returned.
There was music all about them; the crowd was singing. Snatches of a thousand songs mixed, segueing into one another’s melody yet fitting exactly with the drums’ rhythm. Anna took her hand and danced down the length of the plaza, across its width, up its other leg, and in front of the town hall—a peregrination through memories. The whole phantasmagorical Festival shimmered in heat rays; men and women writhed, twisting their bodies like snakes reaching for the sun. Eliza’s hand tightened about Anna’s; she drew her friend closer, saw wisps of hair escape from the tight knot at her nape.
We will—WILL—crush you—CRUSH—smash you—SMASH!
Oh, the anger, the hatred even in the laughter.
SMASH—smash—TEAR—tear you—APART!
“What does Amor want?” Eliza whispered, when Anna floated near, eyes half-closed, body given over to the music.
“Innocence,” she said. “But he can’t recognize it, the fool.”
Eliza laughed. She stomped, arms akimbo, around Anna. She was a warrior now, showing off her courage.
“And Adrian?”
Anna shrugged. “A life to live,” she said and breathed audibly. “As though someone could give that to him.” She whirled away.
And because she was warrior of the moment, Eliza asked her last question, teasing her friend, who had linked arms with a stranger. “What does Anna want?”
Anna raised her face to the sky. “A burial,” she said through gritted teeth. “An end to a story.” She traced a pattern on the ground, a series of steps done over and over again, like a bird tied to a stake.
Eliza’s heart contracted with foreboding. She saw herself caught like her friend, dancing in circles without beginning, without end. As she danced, the drums intoned: four hundred years of action without achievement; of movement without distance. She heard a cry—a sharp birdcall of distress. Anna had stopped and was staring over the heads of the crowd, her fists rigid by her side.
Eliza looked in the same direction. There, there, there. In a second- floor balcony of black wrought iron, his forearms on the rails. Colonel Urbano Amor, in his khaki uniform, faced the crowd, faced the plaza, and, Eliza knew with deadly certainty, watched her and Anna.
A hiss broke from her lips; her arms rose without her knowing it; her hands hooked like talons. She felt her mouth stretch as though she would bare fangs; Lord, the misery of not having fangs at all. She turned her head. Anna was still frozen. Eliza pounced, grabbed her right forearm, and started dragging her away toward the crowd’s center. They could hide there, among the hips and backs, shoulders and elbows of the anonymous. But Anna resisted, digging her heels into the ground, twisting her head to look back. She was an impossible weight and Eliza finally had to use both hands to peel her away from the snare of the Loved One’s eyes.
Then suddenly, they were running, Anna knocking aside everything in her path to scramble across the plaza for the shelter of the tree covens on the other side. They did not stop until the shadows closed over them. Anna leaned her back against a tree trunk, catching her breath, hands gathering strands of her hair from her face. Eliza bent over, gasping, right hand pressed against her chest, trying to quiet the pounding of her heart.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“You brought him here,” Anna shouted.
“Whoa, hold on there,” Eliza shrilled back, but Anna had turned away, her nose in the air.
“You can’t be trusted, you drunken—!”
“Anna!”
Silence. Anna’s face did not relent. She threw a glance of disgust at Eliza, who bit her lower lip
. What could she say? It was true enough. The Loved One had followed her spoor to the Festival. She waited, willing herself to be calm.
After a while, Anna sighed. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s finished. It’s gone.
Eliza saw she was crying. She moved to her and took the shuddering body in her arms.
“He can’t touch you,” she said. “He’ll never touch you. So help me, God. I swear to you—”
“Sssh.” Anna broke away. She dug her knuckles into her eyes. “I wish I understood. I wish I knew. How, why, who, and what for.”
“I tell you—”
She jerked back impatiently. “You can’t tell me anything,” she said harshly. “You don’t know. I don’t know. Too many things, too many details. . She slid down and squatted at the base of the tree.
There was nothing for Eliza to do but to sit beside her. Silent, they watched the parade, the milling throng. A soldier passed by, his eyes a dark mask. Then, two more. Then five. Six. Rifles slung about their shoulders or dragging behind them. In khaki or olive uniforms. Bareheaded and capped.
“There are too many soldiers,” Anna whispered. “Too many. It’s finished.”
Eliza kept quiet, feeling she was on the brink of a great discovery.
“I never loved Manolo, you know,” Anna said suddenly. “I married him because I felt safe with him. Hah! I could not keep him on this side of safety. I can’t do anything at all. Can’t even bury him. I’ve failed at everything I set out to do.”
Eliza kept very still. The silence that lasted was long enough for her to become aware of the wind in the leaves overhead, of the chirping of a lone cicada. If Anna had failed, considered herself to have failed, Eliza thought, what could she say about herself? She had made a mess of everything, a fine, super deluxe, mess. The cicada sang on, oblivious to the commotion of the Festival.
Anna’s shoulders slumped; her head bent forward. She was staring at the earth between her feet.
“What are you thinking of?” Eliza asked timidly.
Anna looked at her and, quite unexpectedly, smiled. “Something stupid. I had an emerald-and-diamond earring once. Found it in an old jewel box. Among heaps of junk in the garage of my aunt’s house.”
“Where is it?”
Anna frowned. “I hocked it so I could send money to Hong Kong. I needed to pay for—never mind.”
“We’ll take it back,” Eliza said eagerly.
“No, I don’t want it. I was just wondering where it came from, what it was doing there among the relics in my aunt’s house. We never had money, were never rich—and yet there it was. I knew it was real the minute I saw it—half of a pair, the other one missing. And when I took it, not telling anyone, hiding it in the toe end of my shoe—why did I do that?—I had the strangest feeling. A touch, a memory of a story, not even a story, just the breath of one …
“Can’t you remember?”
Anna thought for a moment. She shook her head. “No. They monkeyed around with the language, Eliza, while we were growing up. Monkeyed around with names. Of people, of places. With dates. And now, I can’t remember. No one remembers. And even this”— she waved a hand toward the Festival—“even this will be forgotten. They will hide it under another name. No one will remember.”
Eliza exhaled loudly. She looked at the sky through the branches overhead, felt the heat come through like so many knives in search of flesh, saw the crowd jam the plaza roads like a snake biting its tail, heard the drums and the roar of voices saw the house roofs blaze like mirrors under the noon sun. She thought of what had happened, what was happening, and what would happen.
She took Anna’s hand in hers. “What strange ways we have traveled,” she said. If only there was an explanation for it all. Still, how could anyone forget?
The Book of Numbers
1
One summer day, a widow and a young man fell in love. Had the times been otherwise than what they were, which is to say that no state of war existed, the occasion would have inspired no more than a spattering of ribald jokes about a widow’s expertise and youth’s inexperience before it was swept away by the current of life in a tropical country of fifty million people and seven thousand one hundred islands—tucked away and forgotten in the infinite details of existence. No one would have remarked on the unbearable fragility of that particular morning, or on the look that passed, short and direct as a bullfighter’s sword thrust, between the two—he, worn out equally by ministering to her fever and to his love; she, freshly delivered from the swamps of her delirium and, in that clarity that came with the first touch of health, seeing past, present, and future laid out within the small boundaries of her lodgings, which inspired her statement of death.
Unknown to both, that morning’s shock of awareness was merely an echo, a duplication of a morning shrouded by antiquity, when a middle-aged friar, condemned by his melancholia to service in the heathen lands of the Far East, rose at dawn from an insomnia made worse by the sultry heat that had brooded over his bed’s mosquito net the whole night and still squatted like a monstrous presence in the room. Oppressed, his heart feeling the writhing of the worm of foreboding, the Spaniard had donned cassock and sandals and gone out of the monastery for a walk by the river. The land he passed through—from horizon to horizon—though still unnamed, was already owned by the Church, its tributes of produce and cash used to maintain the cathedral built by Chinese artisans and to sustain the Spanish priests’ need for capons and wine, as well as the Virgin Mary’s requirement of silk and lace, diamonds and gold. The friar, who belonged to the Capuchin order, measured the encomienda with his eyes, expertly calculating the coconut harvest, even as a monologue of despair went on in his mind. He saw himself dying in this forgotten corner of the world, this archipelago floating in an ocean which, to mock its name of peace, periodically unleashed the terror of typhoons throughout Southeast Asia. He would die, he thought, and be buried at the foot of the altar, his name engraved on black marble by slink-eyed barbarians, his saintliness unheralded, his sacrifice unknown. His bones would rot far from civilization and nothing would remain of his memory, despite all his efforts, for time was impossible in this country, existing in all the true meaning of eternity. Things fell apart with the heat and the rain, and the incessant mastication of insects, and he had no doubt that the great stone bridge he was building across the seasonally rampaging river would, at one time or another, encounter a torrent too strong to withstand and thus be swept away.
At the end of this thought, he reached the river and surprised a woman leaving the waters—a dark, Malayan girl with an acacia tree’s sturdiness. Secure in the drowsy hour, she had taken off her clothes to bathe herself and managed to equally surprise the priest with an image of a brown Venus rising from the waves. There were no waves, of course, only the eddies of a summertime river, but the scene was close enough to the Spaniard’s European memories to cause him to bellow like a bull and hurl himself, cassock, cowl, sandal, and all, at the girl, catching her as he tripped on the hem of his skirts and overwhelming her with his weight. The girl, who was fourteen years old, knew enough not to resist the priest, having grown up surrounded by the gossip of elders and taken to heart the admonition that the tenderest of thighs, whether of chicken or of women, belonged to the friars. She yielded her virginity on a bed of pebbles and curled arms and legs tightly about the pain of the unholy entrance, bit her lower lip, and thought of how much all this silliness should cost the stupid priest.
He gave her a gold coin, stamped with the profile of a king no one had ever seen, and having made arrangements for her weekly visit to the church, he turned around, humming the “Ave Maria,” only to be struck by the enormity of his sin as he approached the shadow of the cross on the ground, laid there by the gold light of a morning of fragility with its cockcrows, scent of roasting corn, sparrow chirps, and all the musky smells of a land newly touched by the sun. He rushed into the church and woke his brother priest, an obese man of sixty, who received his confessio
n of a transgression against the flesh with a fit of laughter. He was given absolution and told it was the most common failing of friars in the whole territory, this incessant rutting among theindias who seemed to have the devil’s capability to incite and excite. Thus absolved, the young priest went his merry way, and six months later gave the girl enough money to go away. Her belly was beginning to swell. She was the first of a number of nubileindias who consoled the priest in his melancholia until, of course, a peculiar morning dawned again fifteen years later and the priest stumbled upon the wife of his cook in the monastery’s kitchen as he was yearning for a cup of cocoa and a bite ofpan de sal.
Her name was Maya and her blue-black hair fell to her ankles. Her exclusive use cost the priest two bags of gold coins. She lived with him openly, supervising the servants in the monastery, taking care of his mass vestments, fixing herbal potions to ease his dyspepsia, holding his hand as he lay in bed assaulted by heat or rain or other unspeakable climatic tribulations this land brought him. Living protected by his power and yet outcast by her status as a priest’s whore, she was both in the center of and yet outside the half-pagan, half-Catholic society of the bustling city of Malolos, in the province of Bulacan, one of the wealthiest in the archipelago with its superb rice lands, its fecund fruit trees, and its rivers aswarm with fish, shrimp, and rock lobsters. As a consequence, she became a character, driving her caleche herself, the reins of a beautifully matched pair of black horses in her tiny, callused hands. Because she borrowed odds and ends of clothing and jewels from the life-size Virgin Mary, her saunter through the city and its towns was often a spectacle to rival the interminable religious parades with which the friars occupied themselves. Perched on the driver’s seat of her caleche, her tiny hands with wrists of iron controlling the palpable power of her black horses, her small, hard body with its mahogany skin costumed in an extravagant embroidered blouse of woven pineapple fiber and a burgundy velvet skirt over lace petticoats, her neck weighted by a necklace of emeralds as big as hens’ eggs, her lips clamped about the lighted end of a brown cigarillo, she drew in her wake men, women, and children who stared at, ran after, and hailed her passing, calling her witch, whore, saint, patroness, insane. She would stop at intersections and accept rolled-up petitions from peasants, petitions which, for a coin or two, she promised to bring to the attention of the proper saint, prodding the statue with whip lashes every twilight until the request was granted. In the course of these rituals, the peasants somehow inverted her idea of coercing the holy powers and began flagellating themselves instead, in the hope that such a sacrifice of blood would appeal to the white gods whom they took to be as murderous and rapacious as the representatives of the Royal Viceroy of Mexico which ruled the archipelago. Thus, inadvertently, the priest’s whore invented the penitents’ practice which more than a century later would become standard spectacle during Lent and which her great-granddaughter Anna Villaverde would witness at a festival confused by time and history.
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