She bore the priest seven sons and saw six of them scatter throughout the world, sailing with the ships plying the route between Acapulco and Manila for the lark of braving the typhoons of the Pacific and measuring with their own eyes the breadth and depth of the ocean that surrounded the archipelago and kept it in perpetual isolation. Unknown to her, one of them would jump ship in Mexico and, with six other indios, make his way to Louisiana to establish the first-ever Malay community in North America. He never returned.
The other five roamed Europe and in a parody of the legend of Martin de Goiti, who razed a Moslem city to erect the Ever Loyal, Ever Noble Spanish City of Manila, rutted among the languorous maidens of France, Spain, Italy, and other places which had borne the same name for ages, leaving olive-skin descendants whose Malay genes were explained away as Moorish. They never returned.
The son who remained, the youngest, Carlos Lucas de Villaverde, was loved with such fierceness by Maya that he was assaulted forever more by the need to escape the cloying power of her affection. From the age of two, he’d felt her as a vine entwined about his soul, much like the balete that began under the shadow of a mature tree and slowly but inexorably wrapped itself about its trunk and branches, letting down roots shaped like gigantic penises, until the tree died of exhaustion in its embrace, withered away, and thebaletetook its place, already fully formed. In his efforts to free himself, Carlos Lucas caused his father’s death—for there was only one way he could forget Maya, the tobacco stench of her faded laces and gold-embroidered velvet saints’ skirts, her witch’s eyes of wet coal which summed up every cut, every scratch on his fair skin, every inch of growth of his cells. He found his refuge among the peasant males who ran theencomienda for the friars, especially in the company of Juan Itak, the bamboo man whose duty and livelihood were to invade the mountain groves and chop down the sinuous yellow boles which, dried and varnished, held up the peasants’ nipa huts until they were disassembled by the year’s first typhoon. Juan Itak, it so happened, was Carlos Lucas’s unrecognized brother, being the son of the priest’s encounter by the river bank one diaphanous morning years ago. Except for a slightly aquiline nose, his Iberian genes had left no trace, having been thoroughly defeated by the robust Malay chromosomes of his mother.
Nevertheless, Juan Itak found Carlos Lucas congenial company and initiated the youth of fourteen into many mysteries, including forty- two ways of self-indulgence, a few so subtle they fell within the loopholes of the code of sins the friars had made up for the natives. It was Juan Itak who, one morning, proceeded to teach Carlos Lucas the way to forget, hauling from its cool storage in the river a demijohn of rice wine. Unfortunately, the priest happened to be at the church belfry that particular morning, scanning the land with a pair of binoculars. The sight of Carlos Lucas thoroughly drunk and stark naked, and going through the motions of one of Juan’s cruder ways of self-indulgence, drove the priest to such an apoplectic rage that he lost his footing on the belfry’s planks, fell through the trapdoor amidst a mad clanging of bells big and small, and broke his neck on the landing below. As he had more than three hundred pounds on his six-foot frame, no one thought it odd that he should die this way.
Maya and Carlos Lucas were evicted from the monastery and their precarious status decided their fate. They moved to Manila, which was in the throes of breaking out of its cocoon to become the first truly cosmopolitan city of the Orient. Here, in the graceful district of Binondo, they made their residence, buying a cavernous two-story house, with a garage for coaches on the ground floor and curving steps at its left flank leading to the upper living quarters, a house whose backside balcony of fluted iron overhung one of the city’s main canals. The Binondo estero, it was called, and it served as source of water for both bathing and laundry while functioning as a thoroughfare as well, with dozens of slim leaf-shaped boats paddling upstream and downstream, carrying wares of wine, flowers, vegetables and fish, strange tribal handicrafts, and jewels.
The house cost them a fourth of the gold contents of the pirate chest, which together with the emerald necklace and Carlos Lucas’s family name were the only legacies of the priest. Maya swore to keep the necklace to her deathbed—a vow which Carlos Lucas, in his new role of man of the house, acceded to with an amused smile, commenting that, if things were to remain as they were, he would even see to it that Maya was buried with the jewel. To which, the wise witch replied that it was unnecessary since, sooner or later, her darling Carlosito would dig it up again and she had no wish to have her bones handled by careless grave robbers.
Thus they set up a pleasant existence and Carlos Lucas applied himself to discovering a career. As it happened, all his knowledge, aside from forty-two ways of self-indulgence, had something to do with inebriation. He cleared the house’s lower floor of furniture, set up a laboratory, and proceeded to mix and distill a vast array of liquors, from nipa wine to fermented sugarcane sap, causing the house to perpetually exhale a sweetish, drunken breath which floated over the estero into the poultry yards, the pigpens, and the stables of the houses on the opposite bank, driving cocks and hens, boars and sows, mares and stallions so crazed with desire they became a minor scandal of the city.
Maya took her son’s family name, becoming herself a de Villaverde, and passed herself off as an accomplished osteopath—one who could set broken bones with such precision that it would seem afterward no damage had even visited the affected limb—and as a masseuse who could stroke and caress women’s flesh back into an approximation of youth. She prefaced every curing mission by taking the short riding crop she’d hung on the wall over a St. Anthony icon and whipping the impassive saint about the knees and legs. Thus fortified by the saint’s submission, she sallied forth in her lace blouse and velvet skirt, and with her brown cigarillos, her dark, determined face still beautiful despite her fifty-odd years or so, Carlos Lucas being a child of her old age.
The Spaniard died at a fortuitous time, it would seem, for he, as the other ecclesiasts didn’t, would not have tolerated the new face of Manila, which buzzed from morning to morning, with taverns and pubs, and visitors from Britain, France, and even the old enemy, Portugal, brought thither by the mercantilism that blossomed in the wake of the construction of the Suez Canal. There were gentle festivals of beauty now, where women in gowns of the delicatc quality of dragonfly wings vied for titles, to rival the splendor of the rites of St. John the Baptist, the month-long festivities of the Virgin calledLa Naval de Manila,the cruel rituals of the Black Christ of Quiapo which increased its weight tenfold every January 9th so as to render more difficult the fulfillment of vows made by penitents who had to pull and push its massive wheeled stand through the city streets. No, the melancholic Spaniard wouldn’t have countenanced these, least of all the travels ofindios to Europe, from whence they returned with the language and knowledge of their masters, as well as with impossible ideas of turning the archipelago into a Spanish province with representation in the Spanish Cortes. Worse, they insisted on acquiring a name for the ridiculous mix of history that they were—Malay, Chinese, Arab, Hindu, Spanish, British—arrogating the name which hitherto had been reserved for pure-blooded Spaniards born in the islands. They called themselves Filipinos.
Carlos Lucas called himself Don Carlos Lucas de Villaverde and lived ensconced in the hallucinatory breath of his Binondo house, puttering with his Bunsen lamps and glass jars, venturing out only to search for and haggle over strange berries and fruits and sacks of malt and barley. These he would subject to a hundred and one chemical processes, noting each step in a notebook of fine linen paper, using a code based on Latin. He would not allow Maya into his laboratory and saw her only at breakfast and dinner which were served by the bastard daughter of a Chinese merchant and his Malay housekeeper, a tiny girl of ten, so quiet both Carlos and Maya forgot they were not alone in the house.
Maya added copper and silver coins to the pirate chest and always wore her necklace at dinnertime. She took the seat to Carlos’s right, yieldi
ng to him the table’s head as befitted the man of the household. Nevertheless, this did not prevent her from nagging him about finding work for himself and getting married. At peace, honorable again for no one in the city knew of their origins, they were quite content. Carlos Lucas no longer felt the stranglehold of thebalete about his soul, not while gentle dusk filtered through the open wall-to-wall windows of the house and the scent of the neighboring gardens’ jasmine vines fought with the alcoholic fumes of the ground floor laboratory. They would spend the next ten years this way, forever it would seem at dinner, with the soft clink of porcelain, glass, and silverware, and fresh sea wind blowing inland from the walled city of Intramuros where the Spaniards concerned themselves with saints, money, and a continent halfway around the world.
Indeed, the priest died at a fortuitous moment—for among the flotsam ofindiosthreading their way among the warehouses and the piers of the harbor where the ships of the world docked prow to prow, a young orphan hawking walking canes and fans suddenly found himself able to understand Spanish and in possession of several books, including Hugo’sLes Miserables. In his evenings’ fatigue, with his mind in the grip of languages, he conceived the inconceivable and saw the Castilians driven back the way they had come, the archipelago once more a pristine Malayan one. The imprimatur to this dream was made in blood as the clandestine Society of the Sons of the People sprang into being, each oath of allegiance inked in red, the thin white scar of the healed wound on a man’s left arm serving as his badge of membership.
Maya Villaverde would remember to her deathbed, though she forgot so much else, the day knowledge of the Society reached her. A boy servant had appeared at her door, asking that she come see one of her customers, a young woman who lived across theestero,though a visit had not been scheduled. Said young woman was suffering from a nervous attack which, having deprived her of sleep for three nights running, left her bones feeling full of water. Maya dressed for the street, gathered her scented oils and scapulars, and, because she was in good humor, merely slapped St. Anthony’s face twice. As she stepped out of the doorway, she noticed a peculiar quality to the sunlight, a tremulous feel to the air. She could not have known how this was merely a repetition of a morning which had twisted her destiny and left her with Carlos Lucas. Theestero boats seemed to float an inch or two above the water; the houses on both sides of the street were unreal enough. She felt she could, had she so desired, push a palm through their adobe walls. The blue, clear sky leaned overhead, so near its breath ruffled the hair on the top of her head. Suddenly, the worm of foreboding awoke in her heart and, made uneasy by successive omens, she drew the shawl tighter about her shoulders and hurried after the boy.
Her customer greeted her with red-rimmed eyes. With the curtains drawn in the living room, she stripped to her chemise and lay on her belly on the sofa. Maya poured oil onto her right hand, rubbed her palms together for warmth, and proceeded to work on the young lady’s shoulders. Suddenly, the woman burst into tears, heaving and retching into the pillows and confessed, in a rush of words, how she’d betrayed her betrothed by revealing to a Dominican friar his secret membership. Today, at this very instant, the priest was leading a squad of civil guards on their way to seize the hidden printing press of the Society, as well as all its records. Arrests, incarcerations, executions . . . the woman broke into wails.
But Maya had sealed her ears. She was thinking of Carlos Lucas, of his strange absences, his sudden quiet, the shy slyness of his eyes at dinnertime. As if to confirm her suspicion, the curtains billowed inward abruptly and as they whipped forward, sprang back, in a gust of wind, one panel snatched a little St. Anthony from its cantilevered altar against the wall and sent it tumbling to the floor. It was smashed into a thousand pieces. Maya capped the oil bottle, thrust all her paraphernalia back into her basket, and, without a word to the young woman, hurried out of the house.
She was still two blocks away from her house when the rumble of an explosion came down the street and she saw the front windows lift themselves from their moorings and sail to the neighbor’s yard. The basket dropped from her arm; her feet scissored with sudden vigor and she reached the front door before anyone had appeared. It was hanging from one hinge while white smoke spewed out of Carlos Lucas’s laboratory. Glass shards lay all over the floor while the tables, chairs, and demijohns had fallen sideways.
She said his name once, almost as a prayer, before stepping into the room, her old woman’s lungs screaming at the assault of pestilential vapors. She searched through the debris and found him, the last of her brood, lying behind sacks of barley. He was covered with soot, burnt in places, and moaning quietly, though he kept an iron grip around a six-inch vial filled with clear fluid.
This was to become the Four Roses Gin, distilled, bottled, and marketed by Carlos Lucas himself, with a label designed by Maya which showed a doe-eyed woman wearing four blossoms in her hair. All through the three years of insurrection that gripped the islands, the gin sold—hawked by couriers through battle lines, carried by train, by horse, by water buffalo. It was said to have the ability to instill courage, to cool the spirits when the going was hot, to heat the blood when the nights were cool, and, when worse came to worst, it also served as a terrific incendiary when corked with a wick of rags, lighted, and thrown with precision.
The house along the Binondo estero became a distillery with a dozen men working the stills and a dozen women painting labels and corking bottles. There were eternal comings and goings as the factory’s demand for bottles increased—used bottles, washed and rinsed, bought from Chinese merchants who sent a seemingly endless line of men staggering into the yard, on their shoulders bamboo poles balancing the weight of huge baskets filled with the bottle harvest of the day. Carlos Lucas, walking with the wide strides of a rooster through this disorder, never discovered that one of those Malay boys haggling angrily with his foreman was the son of Juan Itak, who’d been killed in the first volley of the Revolution—a pubescent youth with calluses on his shoulders and the worm of foreboding in his heart, a not quite man who’d been given by the nuns of an orphanage in Bulacan the rather surprising name of Adrian Banyaga. Carlos Lucas’s nephew, actually.
2
All things considered, Carlos Lucas de Villaverde was to say to his new partner, the German chemist Hans Zangroniz, after everything was over, the twentieth century blew in with what seemed like half a dozen wars fought simultaneously and one after another, so that one couldn’t tell whether the dead died for this or that cause, whether they belonged to this or that faction, or whether they gave up the ghost because they simply got fed up with living in such confusion. First, of course, the insurrection that burst out of the alleys of Manila spread like a seasonal flood until eight provinces were in uproar over a full-scale Revolution and artillery pieces were hauled hither and thither, by horse, by water buffalo, by peons, and the cursing Spaniards found themselves cursed back with due elegance and the proper Castilian accent by voices from fortifications, trees, cliffs. All the young men, it seemed, had returned from Europe and were busy shooting, digging war trenches, getting drunk on Four Roses Gin, and writing poetry. Then all the drunken young men from Europe got into a fracas with all the serious young men who’d stayed at home—so the war now had two fronts or were there two wars, no one knew. In any case, the young hawker of walking canes and fans was murdered and his followers, if not killed, were scattered all over the land.
Carlos Lucas recounted this at dinnertime, as was his wont— though dinners now were affairs of thirty people, the strangest assembly ever, as Don Carlos himself would admit. There were mad inventors and their women, crazed herbalists and their women, European stowaways, sailors who’d jumped ship, one lanky American who introduced himself as an anthropologist. Everyone spoke Spanish, even Maya de Villaverde enthroned in a rattan peacock chair and wearing her icons’ clothes and emerald necklace. She had learned the language in a year’s time, forcing herself to confer genders on inanimate objects—a wor
ld view that offended her sense of the intimate unity of the universe. She had difficulty with male/female pronouns and was surprised that such distinctions should exist based solely on sex and not upon class, status, aura of dignity, and respect, which were the criteria for pronoun distinctions in her native language. But there was no helping it; everyone above thirty was using Spanish -- perhaps in defiance of the new colonizers --though as all acknowledged, it was too late, the children’s voices in the street were already singsonging one-two, bato; three-four, bapor . . . Thus, with a feeling of doom, with great resentment at her own abrupt realization of what she, as female, was in this decaying world, she sat in the rattan peacock chair and brooded over Carlos’s assembly, her dark witch’s eyes jumping from face to face, studying, ferreting secrets, asking herself what else they had hidden from her all her life.
State of War Page 16