State of War

by Ninotchka Rosca

  It was to be a journey of revelations, from the sudden crackle of the engine, its ridiculous noise, to the bone-wrenching rhythm of the car’s passage over the cobblestones of Binondo’s streets.

  “This thing will disintegrate,” Maya said, hearing her voice waver and quake with every bump. “We will be left on our backsides in the middle of the street.”

  “It will get better,” the driver yelled over the noise, “when we get to the asphalt roads.”

  “Bah! Asphalt is for roofs.”

  They wriggled out of Binondo’s narrowness onto wide roads and the run became so smooth, so fluid Maya found it necessary to complain about missing her horses’ trot. But she forgot her complaint immediately, for they were passing through the world’s most crowded spot, certainly, the massed, rhythmic movement of thousands of men and women was enchanting, reminding her of an infestation of swallows which visited the ricefields of her childhood.

  “So many, so many of them—of us,” she said and was glad, remembering how she had fished couples from behind sacks of berries and rye, turpentine barrels and demijohns at the distillery, to which hiding places they had been driven by the itch caused by the odor of fermentation. It had seemed but an instant ago when only swallows and women in mourning were left in the world.

  “This is downtown Manila,” the maid said.

  “That’s the Quiapo church, so it must be Quiapo.”

  “It’s called downtown now.”

  She tried out the word, shrugged, and said Quiapo was easier. In any case, both maid and driver should hold on to something because they weren’t sure yet this automobile wasn’t about to fall apart.

  “This is the Agrifina,” the maid said as they swung into a circular road.

  “Since when did we use Roman names?”

  “Not Roman. From agriculture and finance—those two buildings . . .”

  She looked. “They’re ugly. They’re new.”

  “They say the Americans build at every fart—excuse my language, senora . . .”

  “So—where shall we put our trees, our flowers, our grass? Oh, there’s the sea!”

  And there it was, filling half of everything available to the eyes— the vastness of it, the depth of it, the weight of it, clear blue, like a mirror to the sky.

  “This is Dewey Boulevard,” the maid said.

  “After the commodore?”

  “He became an admiral.”

  They pulled over to the street side and stopped. The driver disembarked and opened their door.

  She refused to move. “I want to go to Bagumbayan.”

  “This is Bagumbayan—or Luneta now. Over there is Rizal’s monument. And you can see the sea.”

  “Bagumbayan was a place for executions. Why are there so many crosses with wires?”

  “Electricity, senora; the Recollects and some American businessmen have formed a company to bring electricity to the city. “What is electricity?”

  “Uh—some fuel, senora. We don’t really know.”

  “Business and religion. Bah! Religion and business. We used to have only one devil. Now—”

  She allowed herself to be led to the seawall. Nothing had changed; only the shapes of the ships docked toward one side of the harbor were different. There was still the shadow of Corregidor in the horizon, that nondescript island no one save the Yanquis could find use for. She inhaled the sea, letting all its memories possess her bones. The sharp, briny smell brought her the words of her Capuchin monk, of his voyage halfway around the world, of the water and the waves and the terror of typhoons. Nothing remained of that, only a black marble marker at the altar’s foot at the Malolos church. No one even remembered who had designed and supervised the building of the old stone bridge spanning with grace the mighty Bulacan River.

  It was a kind of sin, certainly, to forget—but it was not easy to remember, especially when names changed, languages changed. A century-old name held that century; when replaced, a hundred years were wiped out at one stroke. Amnesia set it; reality itself, being metamorphic, was affected. “Soon we will forget everything,” she told the maid, “and if we forget, how are we to proceed?”

  The maid ignored her. She was busy with spreading a tablecloth on the wall top, anchoring it against the wind with bottles and jugs, and with emptying the picnic basket, laying out enamel boxes of food.

  Irritated, Maya called her a fool. “When the German inherits everything, where will you be?”

  The Chinese-Malay frowned over this. “Perhaps we should get the Don married.”

  Maya was surprised; her chinita had been mulling over the problem. She looked at the maid closely. The ten-year-old girl underwent a metamorphosis on the spot. She was no longer a girl; she was a woman, taller than average—or had Maya shrunk through all these years?—with the heavy breasts of her Malay mother and the slim bones of her Chinese father, sheathed in a severe dark blue cheong- sam. But Maya noted the sadness settling about the woman’s mouth and understood she was no longer young.

  “I should have married you to him,” she said on impulse and was shaken to see the maid’s eyes brim over. So, she had loved Carlos Lucas—the reason for her constancy, her devotion to the household, her years of residence there broken only by a year’s leave to care for her dying mother and by summer and Christmastime vacation. Moved, Maya took the maid’s hand and patted it. “Too late now. He needs sons.”

  To her surprise, the maid fell to her knees on the ground and since Maya was seated on the seawall, it was easy for the Chinese-Malay to press her forehead to Maya’s lap. Awkwardly, knowing she would reject the maid’s desire, Maya stroked the woman’s smooth hair and noted how gray mingled with its black strands. Then, from that bowed head, the impossible words came.

  “My daughter celebrates her fifteenth birthday next month.”

  Maya’s hands flew up; she felt she’d touched live coal. “Your what?”

  The maid lifted her head and with her eyes upon Maya’s face, repeated the words.

  “But—who?”

  She named a former worker at the distillery, long gone now. Maya was scandalized.

  “He was a boy—so young!”

  “So was I,” the maid shot back. “Besides, one takes solace wherever one finds it.”

  Maya’s heart creaked. She counted the years of pain the maid must have gone through. And neither she nor Carlosito had known; they hadn’t even known her name. Still—

  “She is a bastard,” Maya said, forcing the words out, deeming a direct attack the best possible move.

  “Not so. I married a peasant from Laguna. I bought his name for her. She is legitimate. Baptized.”

  “But untutored! Barefoot!”

  “She has lived with the nuns of Calamba since she was five. She speaks three languages and plays the harp. Her embroidery is so exquisite the nuns auction off her work.”

  A moment of silence. Then, because she could not help it, Maya guffawed.

  “Convent bred! So that’s where all your money’s gone. Well, well, well. Of course, she has no money and no connections but—what the hell? I was a servant, too, in the house of Carlosito’s father.” She chuckled. “We are a hardy lot, you and I. You must have planned this for years. You carry your father’s genes well.”

  The maid smiled, rose, and dusted her knees. “I thank you, senora.” “How soon can she come?”

  “In three, four days’ time.”

  “It has to be before the fool Carlos meets with his lawyer.” She accepted the plate of rice and chicken curry the maid held out. “You understand, of course, we can only propose this thing. Half of the doing of it rests with Carlosito, the other half with your daughter.” She let the maid spread a napkin on her lap. “It is perfect, of course, for you have been raised after my own image. You can carry on after me. But—so much is uncertain in this enterprise, you understand?” She felt around in her head for the source of her trepidation. “Tell me, is she beautiful?”

  The maid went on ladling foo
d for the driver who waited by the car but a knowing smile played about her lips. Then, she gave the reply that decided the matter once and for all.

  “Her name is Maya.”

  Her blue-black hair had not been trimmed since birth; her skin was as brown as the swallow whose name she carried but, because her blood was confused, a sheen of gold overlaid that earth hue, as though she bathed in pollen. Maya was struck speechless, though she had been prepared for such an apparition, having sensed the tension in her maid throughout the day, even through the evening meal hour and the after-dinner tallying of accounts when the two of them were left in the dining room. She had begun the session in the usual manner, mumbling that “someone has to attend to money in this house,” and taking the head seat while the Chinese-Malay sat to her right. She had opened the cash box, counted out the distillery take, the houses’ take, and all the crumpled and filthy paper money distributed by the Yanquis, the silver peso and quarter coins, snapping out numbers which were translated into a strange dance over the abacus by the maid’s fingers. As usual, despite her paper and pencil, Maya entangled herself in her calculations and the correct total had to be read from the alien instrument that her maid used. She ended the process still in the usual manner, saying “that’s that, what we’ve sowed, we shall reap.” But as she snapped the box closed, the maid had placed a hand on her arm and murmured “wait.” Maya had waited, watching as the maid left the room, watching the empty doorway even as she sensed a kind of fate coming toward her; she had waited until the maid was there, leading by one hand an exquisite creature.

  Instantly, she saw herself as she must have looked that morning nearly a century ago, as she had stood barefoot in the monastery’s kitchen, a cup of cocoa in a slim brown hand, her lips pursed to blow cooling breath on the blistering liquid, her face half turned to look over her shoulder at a tall Capuchin monk who had materialized in the doorway. She had worn clothes like these and her hair had tickled her ankles, though to keep its wild strands away her eyes she had run about her forehead, behind her ears and knotted at her nape, a ribbon of intricately designed beads, one of those woven by then still savage tribes in the forest. At the same time, she understood that this was exactly how Carlos Lucas should find this girl—at a particular hour of a morning of fragility, barefoot and reckless, a cup of cocoa midway to her pursed lips, both he and she in ignorance of how this had happened before, so they could believe this strange instant to be their own invention.

  Maya wanted to weep but the years had not toughened her for nothing. She gestured for the girl to approach. The maid pushed her gently forward. She stood beside Maya, who swiveled in her seat and examined her: the high forehead, the wet coal-black eyes, the thin nose, the small mouth with its succulent slightly swollen underlip, the pointed chin with its tiny brown mole. Maya ran a hand over the girl’s right arm. It was as smooth and firm as a tree-ripened mango. “Show me your fingers.”

  The girl lifted her hands. They were small, the fingers tapering to close-clipped nails, each bearing a half-moon.

  “Show me your palms.”

  The girl turned her hands over. Suddenly, Maya struck out with her fists, pushing with all her strength against the smoothness of the girl’s palms. But she felt the tremor of strength run through the girl’s forearms as the latter’s wrists locked and resisted Maya’s downward push.

  “Wrists of iron,” Maya said, pleased. She nodded at the maid.

  “She sleeps with you tonight? For instruction?” the maid asked, expressionless.

  Maya hesitated. Her consent would set an irrevocable course for the household. She looked at the girl’s face again, saw her own morning of destiny, and at last accepted that she was to die soon.

  She nodded. “But let her come later. Let me finish my preparations first.”

  It was nearly midnight when the bedroom door opened and the girl carne in. She wore a thin cotton chemise and, as she slipped inside the mosquito net, she filled Maya’s world with the scent of wildflowers. She laid herself down beside the old woman, who rose on one elbow and felt her body, testing flesh and bones.

  When she was satisfied that nothing was lacking, Maya began to recite what Carlos Lucas was and wasn’t, what he liked and didn’t like, what the business was, what was expected of the girl if and when she became the new senora. But as she spoke, her heart thumped and writhed in protest; this wasn’t the lesson at all, not at all. Her mind divided between her litany and the wildness of her heart, Maya soon lost her way through her speech and drifted to silence and half-sleep, listening to the girl’s light breathing, smelling her odors. A calmness possessed her, inspired by the girl’s silence; she had the impression a length of time passed, with only the soft lapping of the canal waters audible in the room, its moist heat causing the mosquito net to sway gently, so that she began to think that she had boarded a skiff with her Capuchin monk, as they were wont to do, and the boat now floated on a wayward current while from the firetrees on the riverbanks rose the song of woolly caterpillars chewing on summer.

  She was nearly asleep, lulled by this vision, when the girl moved and before Maya realized what she proposed to do, the girl loomed over her, stooped, and pressed her body against the length of Maya’s body, her hands on Maya’s hands, palm to palm, pinning them to the pillow. The weight, the glint in the girl’s eyes only two inches away from her own threw her into confusion and, before she could stop herself, she was back within the monastery, deep in the cellar, where among casks of Benedictine wine she and her monk had celebrated their alliance. She had dressed as the Virgin Mary for him, a blue mantle on her head; as St. Lazarus; and once, with a loincloth and a crown of stripped vines, as Christ with breasts, affirming through these fake visitations the Spaniard’s dream of sainthood. Her memories vomited her shame—both public and private; the shame that had driven her to lash saints and horses with equal cruelty and that which had driven her to embrace the priest’s corruption until he found himself unable to live without her contempt. She felt the pain of all her childbirths, equal to the pain of watching her six sons walk away from the monastery, each with a woven reed chest of clothes on his shoulder, on their way to unspeakable voyages so they could escape the recurrent sermons of their own father who, insidiously, condemned his own brood by repeating over and over again that the sins of fathers were visited upon their descendants even to the third generation. Her body confessed the source of her relentless affection for Carlos Lucas who, among all her sons, carried and expressed himself most like his father; confessed even her lifelong pleasure at his celibacy.

  Finally, she was back to the eve of her wedding to the peasant who would be monastery cook months later—that dark night of heat when she had lain with her own mother in exactly this manner, absorbing the older woman’s knowledge through this means, opening a channel to the past, and in the process, accidentally learning the moment when the woman beneath her would die. Through her mother’s flesh, she had met her own grandmother who was still raving against what the Spaniards had done, her voice joined by the voices of other women who spoke of a time when the world was young, the sea was simply the sea, and names were but newly invented, and when women walked these seven thousand one hundred islands with a power in them, walking in single file ten paces ahead of the men, their gold bracelets and anklets tinkling, warning that the women were in passage so that strangers could stay clear, for women then were in communion with the gods, praying to the river, the forest spirits, the ancient stones, pouring out blood libations in evening rituals, healing the sick, foretelling the results of wars, quarrels, couplings, and the seasons. They walked with wisdom, dressed simply in an ankle-length piece of cloth wrapped and knotted about the hips, breasts left bare—until the Spaniards infected them with shame and made them hide their strength beneath layers of petticoats, half-chemises, drawers, skirts, blouses, shawls, and veils.

  It must have been only a moment, this communion between Maya and the girl—a mere touch of the flesh, though it resonated
with eternity. Then, it was over. The girl slid to one side, leaving her with such vigor Maya thought herself young again. Her legs twitched. The girl sat up, sliding her feet outside the mosquito net. Her eyes were half closed; her mouth, satiated. Maya gripped her shoulder, holding her back for a second.

  “My death?” she asked.

  “Three years, two months, and a week hence.” It was said without mercy.

  4

  She bore Carlos Lucas two daughters and a son—or at least that was what the world knew—and she would cause the destruction of the precarious honor that the city’s anonymity had conferred on the Villaverdes. At the time of the wedding, though, no one could have foreseen this, despite Maya’s and the maid’s intense consultations with psychics and the I Ching. The seers could not be faulted, for in the two old women’s anxiety over this new alliance, though they provided the wise ones with all kinds of facts about Mayang, as the girl was called informally, and Carlos Lucas, the two forgot to mention the German. Whereupon, the stars, the turtle bones, and the book— standard instruments of prescience—failed to note an extra fork in the two’s fate lines and blessed the marriage.

  Because of the number of guests, fifteen hundred all in all, the Casa Espanol had to be leased for three nights, and Don Carlos Lucas and Mayang exchanged matrimonial vows thrice. Two and a half, actually;

  On the last night, Mayang was so worn down by the fever of the festivities, by her voluminous gown, the weight of the emerald necklace, and by the constant fussing with the wedding bouquet and the veil flowers, she fainted before she could say “I do.” This time even the worm of foreboding failed Maya, who had become preoccupied with another problem. She had noticed the absence of the Capuchins at the presidential table where the American High Command and the Superiors of Religious Orders sat. The Recollects, the Jesuits, the Augustinians, the Dominicans, and even the lay clergy bantered with the Yanquis who were all in dress uniform—but the familiar brown robe, sandals, cowl, and austere disapproval of the Capuchins were missing. She made her way to where her son sat with a group of businessmen and hissed into his ear. He laughed, brushed away her fears, and said they had not been invited.