State of War

by Ninotchka Rosca

  The task did not faze him. By incessant questioning, he learned from friends, first, what the reasonable price for the emerald was; second, the name of a reliable pawnbroker; and third, how to get to Bulacan. It took several weeks to work out but one Saturday morning, when only the youngest maid was up and about, he crept from his room fully dressed and told her he was off. None too soon as it turned out for Mayang, pitying her son, was about to ask for the emerald to see to the plot herself. But when she rose for breakfast, his bed was empty.

  In his absence, she felt his presence the more strongly. As she went about her chores, laying out Clarissa’s clothes, washing Carlos Lucas, her thoughts remained on him. He had been, he was, a happy child— not raucous, never noisy except with his flute, but happy nevertheless, as though he had discovered the secret of perpetual tranquility. He was the most reasonable of the children, despite having been spoiled shamelessly by her and the maids, who, one and all, were in love with his fragile good looks, his fair skin, gray eyes, and reddish-brown hair. He was still filling out, his bones stretching for their true height though he was already taller than most of his classmates. Still, the tentativeness of youth conferred an air of gentleness and consideration upon his movements. Once, at dinner, Clarissa had teased him about a friend of hers who had fallen under the spell of his lambent eyes. Luis Carlos had broken his silence to say only that there was but room in life for one passion. At which Clarissa had turned merciless, demanding to know who this was. But Mayang, sitting in Carlos Lucas’s chair, had understood—for the flute was on the table, beside Luis Carlos’s plate. It would take an impossible woman to come between him and music.

  As the day wore on, Mayang’s pride melted into fear and then into certainty that Luis Carlos had met with an accident. She questioned the youngest maid over and over again, lost her patience when she was given the same answers, and screamed at the girl.

  “Why didn’t you ask when he was coming back?”

  “He’s not my son, senora!”

  “Impertinent slut.”

  The girl flinched. “If I am, then I am,” she muttered, and without further ado marched to the back room and bundled her things.

  “Well, where are you going now?” Mayang asked when she reappeared in the living room with her reed suitcase.

  “Off to be a slut,” the girl said. “There are bars for Americans all over the city. I’ll get more money and less aggravation.”

  Clarissa broke into a wail. “My God, everyone will know we had a whore working here. Mama!”

  “Don’t say such words,” Mayang snapped. “Well, go—”

  The girl’s eyes swung between the front door and the kitchen. She inhaled, raised her chin, and took a step.

  “You can send my wages to my parents,” she said in parting.

  Clarissa shouted no but with a look Mayang held her to the rocking chair until the girl had reached the front door. The sound of bolts being drawn reached them. Mayang called the cook and gave her the house keys.

  “Open the gate,” she said, pitiless in her guilt, “let her go. Then lock it. I won’t have her back.”

  They watched from the living room window as the girl, thirteen years old, issued from the gate with the suitcase under her arm. She stopped for a second, her head turning this way and that; then, she moved westward, away from the canal, toward the downtown area.

  “It’s not going to be an easy life,” Mayang murmured, though she asked quietly whether what the girl had said was true. If so, how had she known it?

  The evening meal was dismal. The maids were subdued, Luis Carlos’s chair was vacant, and Mayang was well launched into a general condemnation of the times. In her youth, she declared, no one even dreamed of talking back to one’s elders and certainly not to one’s superiors. All this corruption came from watching the movies, thezarzuelas, and listening to the radio while not heeding the Church’s teachings enough.

  “That stupid Louie!” Clarissa muttered.

  “Who?”

  “Louie, your son.”

  “His name’s Luis Carlos and he’s your brother.

  “Luis Carlos, Luis Carlos, Luis Carlos, my ass. Even the priests call him Louie.”

  “Clarissa!”

  But the girl, gripped by some passion, yanked the napkin off her lap and slammed it on the table.

  “His classmates, his friends, everybody—he’s Louie to them. Sissy Louie, Louie the limp wrist. And if you don’t watch out, he’ll be wearing high heels when he grows up! Perfect Louie, the wimp!”

  She stood up so abruptly her chair overturned. For a terrible moment, Mayang and Clarissa looked at each other. Clarissa’s face was dead white at her own effrontery. Mayang shuddered. How ugly her daughter was—with a bump for a nose and fat, quivering cheeks, a chin which eased back too soon, and narrow shoulders that sloped with perpetual dejection. How such an ugly daughter could have been born to her was certainly one of the world’s great mysteries.

  Clarissa turned away and walked toward her room. Mayang took a deep breath, ordered the maid to prepare a tray for the girl, and followed. She found Clarissa snatching clothes out of the bureau drawers, tossing them to the floor.

  “But what are you doing?” Mayang asked.

  “You don’t have to send me away. I’ll go. I’m sorry. I’ll leave— like—like . . .”

  She burst into tears. Mayang smelled danger and, wrapping her daughter’s plump body in an embrace, pulled her to the bed. Rocking back and forth, caressing her tangled hair, Mayang poured reassuring words while her mind searched for the roots of this disturbance.

  “She was a maid,” she said, “You’re my daughter. Don’t be silly. I’ll never send you away.”

  At last, when the girl had calmed enough to fall asleep, Mayang retrieved the scattered clothes and began returning them to the dresser. That was how she found the dozen signed photographs of azarzuela matinee idol tucked under sheets of terrible love poetry, smudged with tears, in Clarissa’s hand.

  “Holy cow,” she murmured, “she had to choose a handsome devil!” The last photograph was of Clarissa and the young maid standing under the marquee of the Teatro Ideal. The two had connived to escape her vigilance. No doubt Clarissa, with the maid in tow, had been inside the dozen or so theaters downtown. Mayang sighed as she returned Clarissa’s secret to its hiding place.

  At midnight, the cook who slept in the garage was awakened by a banging at the gate. With many whispered curses at the pain in her bones and complaints about the tactlessness of neighbors, she hobbled out. “What d’you want—we’re asleep!” she rasped out.

  The thin old man outside waved familiarly, whispered her name, and grinned. It was Luis Carlos, mission accomplished, though his hair and eyebrows had been whitened by road dust.

  He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t even sit, until he had entered Carlos Lucas’s room and waved the rolled-up title to the burial plot before the Don’s open eyes. With great tenderness, he placed it on the pillow, near his father’s right ear.

  “There you are, Papa. All signed and sealed. It’s all yours. Ready for you.”

  A quiver of contentment washed over the Don’s body; all his doubts about Luis Carlos were leached out of his bones by the affection in that voice. Carlos Lucas closed his eyes and surrendered himself to his memories, closing his senses one by one, departing the house even before he was dead. He joined Juan Itak once again, in the mornings of his childhood, when the very river smelled fresh and everything was new and in its proper place, the world still all broad lines and color and tiny sounds, and not yet insane with details. Slowly, through the weeks until his death six months later when he was curled so tight about his memories he was the size of a fourteen- year-old, he sank deeper and deeper into the universe of his past, vision and odors returning with such clarity he could believe he was still a child: the earth’s wet scent in July, the pungence of tamarind, the tobacco odor of Maya’s skirts, October’s roasting corn, and through it all, antiphonal, that seducer,
the perfume of hot cocoa.

  As Luis Carlos ate his belated dinner, his eyes misting over with sleep, so fatigued was he from the journey, Mayang inspected him, Clarissa’s words still in her ears.

  Go to sleep, Mama. It’s late.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  The examination puzzled Luis Carlos and he felt in his mind for what, if anything, he had left undone. He had gone to the parish priest, walked with him to the cemetery, pointed out the plot, determined the landmarks, and while the title was being prepared had even found a bunch of wildflowers for his grandmother’s grave. He had paid and . . .

  Oh!” he said. “Oh. I forgot.”

  He dug into his pocket, took out a wad of bills, and pushed it across the table.

  “You should have reminded me,” he said. “It didn’t cost that much.” He found a few coins in his shirt pocket, his bus fare change, and gave them to Mayang.

  She accepted the money without interest.

  “Your friends call you Louie?”

  Surprised, he was quiet for a second. “All the time. There’s an American teacher at school. He called me that—uh, I don t remember when. And everyone sort of took it over.’’

  You like it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s shorter. I don’t mind.”

  “How come your friends never visit you?”

  By this time, he was completely mystified.

  “We never—I don’t know. I don’t visit their homes either.”

  “Do you have female friends?”

  He picked up his glass, took a gulp of water.

  Clarissa again? “I’m just a kid, Mama. I’m too young.

  Mayang lost control. “At your age, I was already married. You should have some interest in women.”

  He rose from the table. “So I’ll be as stupid as Clarissa? She chases that actor all over the place! Hasn’t been to school in weeks!”

  “Santa Maria!”

  “Sure,” he went on as he edged away. “It’s the talk of the town. Fat Clarissa’s nuts over an actor’s mustache.” He laughed, threw her a measuring look, and said he had to go to the bathroom. Mayang was speechless.

  The next day, as she laved Carlos Lucas’s feet with warm water and dried the skin between his toes, she prayed for him to rise from the bed. “Carlos, my heart, what am I to do? Clara’s dead, Clarissa’s panting after an actor, and Luis Carlos—oh, he’s too young to fight a duel over his sister’s honor. Which he’ll certainly have to do if I don’t do something. Or you don’t do anything. Can’t you go to the theater and inquire what this man’s intentions are? Carlos, Carlos, honored spouse, husband, wake up. It’s bad enough they sing about us all over the place—though how the devil they found out about that, I’ll never know—”

  But the Don heard Mayang’s voice as the complaint of a hungry mosquito and, sighing, he lost himself deeper in the green fathoms of his past. Mayang rolled the Don to his side, checked the suppurating sores on his back, lanced a few bad ones, and covered them with a poultice of macerated guava leaves on a sheet of gauze. There was no helping it, she thought as she carried towel, basin, linen, and the Don’s dirty clothes from the room, she would have to confront the man herself.

  Dressed in her best black silk dress, a black lace shawl across her shoulders, her feet choking in black patent leather pumps, she took her cook’s arm—the cook being the most senior of the maids—and made her sally to theteatro. She was bumped and elbowed so many times in the course of the journey that by the time they reached the Ideal, she had lost all her self-confidence and was clinging with desperation to her maid. A stream of rebuke accompanied their passage, for the cook, even more used to their monastic existence than Mayang was, steadily decried the loss of, first, the horse and caleche, then the car . . .

  “We shouldn’t have sold them, senora,” she said gloomily, as they inched down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians. “The instant we lost them, the times changed.”

  At the Ideal, Mayang summoned enough courage to inquire at the ticket booth for the actor. She couldn’t see behind the window, though, so that the reply reached her as a disembodied voice and confused her even more. “Autographs after the matinee,” the voice said, “back stage. If he’s feeling good.”Two tickets were thrust out, followed by fingers which waved demandingly. Mayang, frightened silent, held out a peso bill which was snatched rudely. As she turned away, the tickets in her own hand, the voice called out:“Hoy, your change!” She took back the few coins and murmured at the miracles of science, that it could make a ticket booth speak and rubber hands move.

  The theaters interior was even more awesome. She and the cook could only stare open-mouthed at the oversized chandeliers, the velvet carpet and curtains, the friezes on the wall which were a repeating pattern of the masks of tragedy and comedy.

  “No wonder there’s no money left; they used it up here,” the cook muttered, shielding her eyes from her exaggerated sense of the chandeliers. A subtle noise, restless and excited, rose from the seats. They managed to find their seats and, still clutching at each other’s arms, sat down.

  “What do we do now?” Mayang asked.

  “Beats me,” the cook answered. She felt her brow. “I’m getting a fever.”

  A crash of cymbals, horn toots, spasms of music shook the theater. Mayang held on to her maid, certain that the ceiling would cave in. Instead, the lights dimmed, the curtains parted slowly, and in the space of a heartbeat she was in a different world. For three hours solid, she wandered among cardboard coconut trees and a waterfall, agonized over a love born, defeated, and finally triumphant amidst the cacophony of an off-stage war as the breathlesskundiman,the love aria, became a duel of passion between the slight, bare-shouldered heroine by the name of Esperanza and her handsome lover, Bayani. The wedding scene finale, held while the hero was as yet bleeding from wounds at the hands of the villain he’d dispatched in the great sword fight of Act III Scene IV, found Mayang’s eyes streaming with tears, the cook hiccupping into a corner of her shawl, while all over the theater cheers erupted and cries ofbravo! thundered. As the curtain fell, Mayang applauded, smacking her thin hands together until her palms hurt and, tremulous yet with the emotional bath of the operetta, she turned wet eyes to her cook.

  “Wasn’t that silly?” she asked.

  The cook, rearranging her face back into its usual smirk, nodded and wiped her cheeks and chin. “Quite silly, senora. I didn’t understand everything that was going on, so much noise— who was the young man

  Mayang shook her head. “Neither did I. We’ll have to come back, get better seats, and really find out what all the furor’s about. Clarissa might marry an actor and...”

  “Oh, senora! Not that one, not the—”

  She nodded.“That one! The scandal of it!”

  There was no chance of it, the actor told them firmly. Mayang and the cook, confused and bedazzled by the light bulbs of the dressing room, taken aback by the fact that the actor was so much smaller, so normal away from the stage, though his glorious voice remained the same, cringed at such forthrightness. They had been ushered in immediately, for the actor had recognized the family name of the chairman/president of his dozen fan clubs and at once understood the danger he was in. Seated on a battered sofa, entranced by the globs of cold cream the actor was smearing on his face, Mayang could only haltingly express her trepidation, her fears of the ruin of a girl—one who came from an honorable family—by the ephemeral attractions of the theater . . .

  “There’s no chance of that,” the actor interrupted her.

  Mayang was taken aback. In her surprise, she dropped both her English and her indirection. “But you’ve been seen all over the place.”

  “Not all over, ma’am. Certainly not. I’ve taken her out once or twice, only in the afternoon and only to the ice cream parlor.”

  “The what? For what?”

  “To eat ice cream,” the befuddled actor said. “She’s too young for alcohol. We have an ice cream cone apiece and I than
k her for her work on my behalf. All those fans, those letters . .

  “But you’re betrothed,” the cook cut in.

  “I am—to my heroine.”

  There was dead silence. The women didn’t dare look at each other.

  At last, feeling sorry for Mayang, who was flushing as red as his sofa, the actor explained gently: “She’s too young, ma’am. And also, also”—he gestured delicately—“she’s not exactly, well, you know, attractive. At least, not yet. When she grows up, maybe, who knows—?”

  Only by a miracle, Mayang thought as she gathered herself for an exit. I’ll kill that benighted— she couldn’t complete the sentence.

  But the actor went on: “Perhaps she’ll lose fifty, thirty, maybe ten pounds. She’s still chunky right now.” Then hurriedly, for the cook’s face had contorted beyond description: “But you, madame, ten years less and I’d fall on my knees before you and beg you to elope with>me.”

  Later, on the bus, Mayang said dreamily: “Someone in that profession—well, you know ...”

  “Senora?”

  “—he would know real beauty.”

  The cook snorted and pushed a curl off her forehead. She was sure he had been talking to her.

  “At least, at least, we can rest easy about Clarissa. He was right. She’s not very attractive. Charming but not—not—”

  “Yes, senora.”

  “Nothing will happen to her.”

  And so she forgot all the dangers attendant to her daughter’s sex; she lost her fears in the noise and light and music of the theater, its many plots and adventures, its impeccable heroes and heroines, and its bloodless wars—stories which she remembered aloud as she washed and fed Carlos Lucas, hardly seeing him, until of course the day the sponge bath, the linen and clothing change, and the operetta were finished, all at the same simultaneous moment, which was also when she noticed he was dead, had not breathed all throughout the procedure, and must have died sometime that strange, diaphanous morning, perhaps at the instant she appeared in the doorway, her salt- and-pepper hair still loose and tickling her ankles. She forgot Clarissa’s perils in the complexities of the funeral, of her move back to the master bedroom, of the sale one by one of the emeralds until only two were left, such forgetting becoming an impossible guilt the day Clarissa did elope with a half-breed magician. But that was after war rumors were rife again and Luis Carlos had already fallen in love.