State of War

by Ninotchka Rosca

  For a year after the funeral, the Binondo house settled into the routine of accomplishing in her absence what Maya, in life, had ordained. The business flourished; the Four Roses Gin was sold in three standard amounts: the personal half-pint, the pint for duo drinking, and the formidable quart for parties. Carlos Lucas installed a bar in the upper-floor living room and there mixed drinks for his friends who filled the Friday evening air with chatter and laughter, disturbing Luis Carlos who, fair-skinned and auburn-haired, lay face-down in his crib in Hans’s former room. It seemed to Carlos Lucas he was proceeding complacently to old age, his fortune secure, his lineage indestructible. He ate and drank, puttered about in the distillery, met with politicians, and winked at priests. He had only to order his own cemetery plot to feel that everything in the world promised to be in its proper place.

  One afternoon, as Carlos Lucas was preparing his reply to the Federalistas’ invitation to join the party’s political slate, a military jeep parked before the house gates. A uniformed Malay entered and, having sought him out with respect, handed him a summons to the American High Command. Instantly, he had no wish to visit anyone and would have demurred except no one said no to an American official. Having assured the sergeant that he would follow, he called the Chinese-Malay maid and ordered a change of clothes. He took a bath, lingering in that dim chamber, and came out only when a sudden sneeze warned him of dangers to his health. As his car carried him to the old summer palace of the Spanish governor general, now occupied by the Yanquis, the worm of foreboding stirred in his heart. He had intended to refuse both the Federalistas and their opponents, to live his life in peace, having his dinners with his friends, raising his children, and preparing for his return to Bulacan in his old age, so that he could be buried beside his mother, in the cemetery shadowed by the massive Capuchin church.

  He was ushered in by white-suited Malay flunkeys, into the central banquet room with an oversized coffin-lid ceiling and massive chandeliers. He wondered briefly how many indios, or, for that matter, half-breeds, had stood in this inner sanctum in the three hundred years the Spaniards had stayed in the archipelago. Probably none, he thought and savored its luxury. But the flunkeys were already opening a side door and before he could collect himself, he was in a smaller room, furnished as an office, with a mammoth desk to one end, the American flag at a corner, and on the walls photographs of a Yanqui president and legislature no one had ever seen.

  To his surprise, the American official was flanked by two Capuchin monks—Father Don Jose Saavedra and Father Don Luis Rigodon. Carlos Lucas crossed himself at the sight. The two friars smiled. The high official gestured to the chair before him and, without preamble, as soon as Carlos Lucas had seated himself, read in flawless Spanish from a sheet of paper on his desk. Quite politely, even elegantly, the words told Carlos Lucas to cease and desist from manufacturing the Four Roses Gin, aforementioned product being considered a hazard to the health of all who imbibed it, and totally unworthy of a marketplace run under the aegis of the great North American nation, since it caused injuries to the brain, the kidneys, and the bowels.

  Carlos Lucas half rose from the chair, his hat sliding from his knee to the floor.

  “Understand, this is a direct order,” the American said, “a private one. It could be made public—in which case you would be exposed. Who will protect you from those you have harmed?”

  “There is no proof!” Carlos Lucas shouted.

  The monks smiled. One drew out from the folds of his robe three familiar notebooks. Carlos Lucas stammered, saliva spraying on his chest. Dimly, he went over the faces of his household. One had betrayed him to his father’s brood. Maya, Mayang, the Chinese- Malay, the maids, the distillery workers, the children. . .

  Father Don Luis shook his head. “Your own notes on the effect of turpentine on blood vessels. We’ve made our own tests, of course. . . ”

  Father Don Jose flipped open one of the notebooks. “Oil of turpentine. No wonder it knocked out the peons quicker than beer. Tut-tut, Don Carlos, you know your countrymen’s taste buds better than we do.”

  The American official rose. “We don’t have to discuss this anymore. Your distillery will be sealed, of course, and all leftover stock confiscated. Beyond that—well, let’s try to contain the scandal.”

  Carlos Lucas gathered himself together. He sighed. “How much did they offer you?”

  The American official raised an eyebrow. The monks smiled.

  “You can’t match it,” Father Don Jose said, “because we offered nothing.”

  ‘Really?” He jammed the hat back on his head. “That will be the day hell freezes over.” He hesitated, weighing anger and helplessness. But he could not resist a last thrust at the American. “Sir,” he said softly, “a revolution happened here once. There’s no guarantee it won’t again.”

  The American laughed. “Don Carlos,” he said, coming from behind the desk to throw an arm around the distraught man’s shoulders, “no one would risk his supply of Coca-Cola! Really! I suggest you retire from business and enter politics. That’s where all the fighting’s taking place. With words and paper and insults. No bullets.”

  The monks tittered, the American laughed, and Don Carlos Lucas exited the palace with the echo of mockery in his ears. That night, when Mayang said once more she would rather not, he let loose a string of curses and knocked down the living room altar. That did not suffice. As Mayang knelt to mop the spilled water of broken vases, Carlos Lucas kicked her between the shoulder blades. She sprawled forward, landing on the mess on the floor, lacerating her upper chest and arms on plaster and crystal shards. What Carlos Lucas saw, when she rose painfully to face him, was a life-sized replica of one of the Church’s tormented and bloody saints. He yelped in fright and fled.

  That night, Mayang moved to Luis Carlos’s room, taking the bed once used by the putrid German. Carlos Lucas, staggering home at two in the morning, was too drunk, too heartsick, to care. Fully clothed, he dropped to his bed, collapsing the mosquito net, and fell asleep, only to be awakened by the commotion of soldiers breaking the distillery stills, demolishing the front shed, shooing all the workers home. He waited, his mouth working on the bitter film on his tongue.

  It was the Chinese-Malay who rushed in, cheeks shiny with tears, hands clutching the paper of the official order. Carlos Lucas found he couldn’t look at her, couldn’t even listen to her, as she called his name and asked one question after another. The old cow, Carlos Lucas said to himself, blocking her voice, the old treacherous murderous cow, my notebooks, the old cow, after all these years. . . He began to tremble from head to foot, thinking of Maya, her tobacco-scented lace and velvet, her shrewd eyes. She would know what to do, he thought and, so thinking, began missing her in a way he had not since he was ten years old. He saw himself by the Bulacan River, half a century ago, watching as the current bore away his fishing pole. Dread, anger, sorrow, grief at the loss. . . Buffeted by the wash of emotions, he could only think of Maya and her fierce affection. He forgot the Chinese- Malay who, despairing, tugged at his arm.

  “Don Carlos,” she said in her timorous voice.

  “Whore!” Carlos Lucas spat out. “Don’t touch me! Go rot with the Capuchins!”

  There. Carlos Lucas closed his eyes. An inordinate silence possessed the room. When he looked again, the maid was gone. He did not know she had fled downstairs, had watched the soldiers close the old coach garage’s gates whose unused hinges moaned, had gone on watching as they looped a stout iron chain through the curved door handles and snapped a padlock into place. When all was quiet again, she remembered the side door no one had ever used, recalled the key among the bunch Maya had entrusted to her. She dashed upstairs, pursued by the certainty that all the years and all the plans had gone awry. She plucked the keyring from the nail on her bedroom wall, ran downstairs again, found the little door just to the side of the stone steps, unlocked it, and stepped into the rancid air of the destroyed distillery. There, in the artificial tw
ilight of the shuttered garage, she tripped on a length of rope and instantly realized what she had to do. With a ladder, she managed to reach a ceiling beam, over which she threw one end of the rope and, tugging, pulling, ran it until it could be tied to a leg of the work counter anchored to one wall. The rope’s other end dangled six feet in the air. Carefully, she fashioned her hangman’s noose. She had to search for a high enough stool to reach the loop, eschewing the ladder for fear her hands would cling to its steps and betray her. There, now, she said, there, there . . . She was thinking of Maya when she pushed her head through the noose, thinking of Carlos Lucas when she bent her eyes to the floor that seemed so far below, and having thought of him, thought of Mayang now, the child she had borne just for the pleasure of witnessing a morning when the odors of eternity mingled with steam from a cup of cocoa, a morning that foretold a wedding, three births, and even this instant of death, and more besides, which couldn’t be foreseen since time’s end was as shrouded as its beginning. . . She smiled and kicked the stool away.

  With her death, Carlos Lucas discovered her identity. Mayang, cradling her mother’s body, screamed the old honorific—Inay! Inay!—again and again, her mouth twisted by sobs and syllables. Ashamed, Carlos Lucas would have spent gladly for a splendid funeral but the Church would not allow a suicide to be buried on hallowed ground. Carlos Lucas had to purchase a plot in the Chinese cemetery, at the city’s edge, and there the tiny cortege wound up on a Sunday morning. The silver gray coffin with the body was shoved into a rectangular crypt. Two men sealed the grave by cementing a black marble slab with the maid’s name (Liwayway—dawn) and death day into place. Carlos Lucas, Mayang, and the children watched in silence, Carlos now and then checking the sky for rain clouds. It remained clear and blue, intensifying the heathen cemetery’s air of exile.

  Mayang never returned to Carlos Lucas’s room. In the gray pall of her mother’s death, she and Carlos Lucas reached an understanding. A new routine was imposed on the household. Mayang, being undisputed senora, searched frantically for someone to take her mother’s place. She hired and fired a succession of servants, liking them at first sight because of some ineluctible quality, disliking them intensely when the month’s bills with their steadily increasing totals came. Carlos Lucas, on the other hand, slept until noon, got dressed, had his breakfast, and hied himself off to the taverns, returning past midnight. A vast indifference caused his eyes to glance away from the faces of his wife and children who seemed no more than a play of color and shadow in his path. He reserved his life for the taverns where strange, dark-skinned men breathed into his ear, along with alcohol fumes, the strategy and tactics of war, the superiority of one gun over another, and promises of unlimited manpower for the second revolution. Each of them lurched away with a share of Carlos’s money, leaving him barely enough to pay for the drinks but delirious with thoughts of a coming chaos. The tavern waitresses winked at the men as they stripped Carlos Lucas of his wealth and themselves wrote down impossible sums on little squares of paper which were sent to

  Mayang every Sunday. Years later, when Luis Carlos opened an old pirate chest in his grandmother’s room, he would be puzzled by a mound of paper squares and their mathematics and would spend fruitless nights trying to ferret a code from what he took to be a secret language.

  Every end of the month, Mayang made for the streets of rented houses, a huge black purse slung over her shoulder. Before Luis Carlos was old enough to walk, he was already familiar with the route, for Mayang insisted on his being with her. Held by his nanny’s arms, later straddling her back, he trailed in his mother’s wake, from one greasy door to another, in her attempt to collect money from tenants who were invariably not home, or who met her with tales of the most impossible calamities.

  The taxi dancer suffered rapes and muggings every last week of the month; the dockworker had been on strike since his first day of work; the students just had to have money for this very last semester. Disaster struck everybody at the same time and without fail. Mayang, speaking in her most courteous Tagalog, was so overwhelmed by the tragedies of existence it was a relief to approach the twentieth door of the boarding house. Here, the lanky American always welcomed her with a cup of coffee and the month’s rent, a Coke for the maid, and biscuits for Luis Carlos.

  “Rest your feet, senora,” he would say and she had no reason to refuse such courtesy.

  The small room was always neat, the floor shiny with wax, the tiny table with its two chairs set with the wherewithals of an afternoon snack. The American spoke impeccable Spanish and was working on his Tagalog, which he practiced for half an hour with her. Slowly, the conversation veered toward her difficulties with the tenants.

  “But you can sell the houses,” the American said. “You don’t need the aggravation. You can deposit the money and live off the interest.”

  At first, she had shaken her head, saying no, that would be a betrayal of her dead mother-in-law, certainly not, but somehow, whenever they left one boarding house for the next, and the equatorial sun stamped the asphalt roads with its relentless rays, the idea was not as shocking. By the end of two years, it had become a ritual, this playing with the temptation, the American teasing her for her reluctance to be freed of burden.

  “But this is so typical of your people,” he would say, “Confess it. We haven’t really changed you, despite clothes and makeup. You’d rather carry on with suffering than move to rectify the order of things.”

  He was an anthropologist and spent his summer months in the mountains, among tribes which had remained marginal. Soon, he would finish his studies, write his book, and return in glory to his country. His dedication to an academic pursuit impressed Mayang so much she took to calling him Senor Doctor, over his protests. If she dared, she would have baptized him a doctor twice over, for his bravery and his daring.

  “The things I’ve seen,” he would whisper, thrusting his fingers through his faded cornsilk hair. “The tribes—they’d make your refined skin crawl, senora. They starve a dog for days and days, then give it soft rice. The poor animal. It would eat and eat and eat, half-mad with pleasure, not knowing what was coming. Of course, as soon as it could eat no more, wham! The pagans cut its throat and roasted it while they danced around a huge bonfire. And guess what the prized part was, the delicacy, eh? The intestines, with the halfdigested rice, fermented by stomach juices. Too strong for you, senora? Eh? But they love that and go on dancing, dancing, beating gongs, their gold necklaces, gold bracelets, gold anklets blazing. What a sight, senora! What a sight!”

  For a moment, he was back in the mountains, the glare of gold in his eyes, his mouth open with lust. Mayang shared that vision of barbarity and wealth and thought herself wise to have earned the trust of a man who was obviously on his way to success. She shifted in her chair, glanced at Luis Carlos, who was intent on his biscuit. Deftly, she brought the conversation to the houses and how difficult it was to collect rent.

  “But you don’t have to sell,” the American interrupted her. “You can mortgage them—not for full value, of course. Maybe half, or a third, so you won’t be saddled with debt. I know the manager of the Far Eastern Bank and he’d be happy to arrange it for you. The mortgage payments—well, they can collect the money from the tenants. Everything should be easy.”

  “But—”

  “Let me do this for you, senora, since you’ve been so kind to me. So I can repay my obligations to your household.”

  Put in those terms, the request could not be refused. Mayang smiled, said neither yes nor no, announced it was time for them to proceed, and had the nanny pick up Luis Carlos. But it was a lost battle, both she and the American knew it. Two months later, she signed the papers that mortgaged all four houses and the land they stood on; Carlos Lucas signed as well, mesmerized by the wad of paper money the American banker laid on the coffee table in the living room of the Binondo house. The same evening, he was back in the tavern, demanding whiskey and doling out the payroll to an imaginary ar
my.

  In the foolish belief that the pirate chest had magic of its own, Mayang decided to hide the cash there, under the household bills. She hummed happily as she set the bundles, each neatly held by a strip of yellow paper, at the bottom of the chest; she could not help imagining them breeding, turning into an inexhaustible supply of wealth, one paper bill identical to the next, each bringing its own brand of freedom. She would be a wealthy woman, was already a wealthy woman, and would never have to fear the future. So, the dream having become a certainty, she covered the money with bills and left the room to check on the household. As she passed through the living room, she glanced out of the windows and saw, as though it had never been there before, all the litter and chaos of the front yard, the pieces of the dismantled shed, the earth-encrusted bottles, bits of iron, old packing cases, and other relics of the distillery’s busy years. They were suddenly offensive to her eyes; she shouted for the servants and demanded that the yard be cleaned—now, at once. It seemed then, for that day and months after, that the Binondo house was to live again, what with the maids calling in their sweethearts to haul away the garbage, uproot the cogon grass, and prepare the soil for respectable plants. Not content with the bustle, Mayang exchanged her leather shoes for wooden clogs, grabbed a coconut-rib broom, and began sweeping, clearing debris away from the stone steps and setting such a pace that, now and then, a servant forgot herself and sang, letting loose a phrase or two of an old serenade song, about a woman who said she’d rather not, would rather not . . . until Mayang, scandalized, biting her underlip to keep from laughing, shushed the offending one. At twilight, the youngest maid appeared with a pail and half a coconut husk and proceeded to scrub the great stone steps, scattering soapsuds and water while the others, caught by the spray of her cleaning, screamed and laughed in protest.