Breathing hurt her. As she inhaled, exhaled, fire raced in her chest in tiny spurts. She tried to keep her chest as still as possible, breathing as shallowly as possible, so as not to disturb the broken thing within her. When she bent to pick up a dry twig, flames filled her chest. The ground spun like a toy top and, for a second, she was on the brink of fainting. But she pulled herself back and discovered that if she knelt, very carefully, she could just reach down to pick up odds and ends of wood on the forest floor. Once, she coughed and spat and saw a drop of red in her sputum.
Despite all her precautions, she grew weaker by nightfall. Luis Carlos, alarmed by her silence, studied her pinched face by the campfire’s light. She seemed distant, as though listening to the bells which pealed solemnly now, one by one. But whenever he asked her what the problem was, she merely smiled and shook her head. He took the blue cloth off the saxophone and, ignoring her protests, wrapped it about her shoulders. Then, still uneasy, he unbuttoned his shirt and laid it over the palm fronds and banana leaves they had gathered for bedding.
“Sleep here,” he said, stretching out on the ground a few feet away. This way, he could hear the rasp of her breath in the darkness.
When he opened his eyes to the pale-green dawn, she was already up, sitting with her back against a tree trunk. He was so surprised he nearly cried out. It was a young woman who smiled at him with such eager love. She had thrown the blue cloth over her hair, like a peasant, and her skin, beneath the mantle, was so smooth, so clean, that Luis Carlos had to blink to convince himself she was Mayang. He rose and hurried to her, dimly aware that the others were still asleep. He bent to touch her. Suddenly, her body convulsed with a horrible cough, her face puckering into a mask a thousand years old. Horrified, Luis Carlos seized her hands. They were cold.
“But what have you been up to?” he cried out, feeling her forehead at the same time.
She was burning. She saw him through a haze of flames, exactly as she had seen Clara, though he was no youth but a man. Flames licked at his feet, his elbows, his hair, and she understood that the vision of long ago—so very long ago—had not been of her child in hell but of her own death. She held on to his hand, feeling a wail rise in her, in a hundred different voices, clamoring for the bequeathal of knowledge. But his skin was too harsh, his mind too closed. He was a man. Regret touched her briefly at the absence of Clarissa who, for all her stupidity, would have been transparent to the touch of centuries. She would have learned this way, the only way to knowledge, flesh to flesh.
They carried her in a blanket slung between two stripped acacia branches, setting off in their desperation for any place at all. If Mayang had qualms about her status among these young men, they were stilled. Even Jake was subdued, now and then peeking down at her as though about to ask a question. After two hours, one of the two scouts who had raced ahead returned. A kilometer to the east, he said, lay what seemed to be refugee huts. Without a word, Manny gestured for him to lead the way.
It was nearly noon when they reached the lean-tos. Luis Carlos parlayed with the head of the three families which had joined forces in their new life as forest dwellers. In exchange for news and for his two daggers, the man agreed to Mayang’s being left in his care. Thus, she was laid gently on a mat on the shack’s slat-wood floor though she shook her head and called Luis Carlos’s name again and again. A peasant woman came, felt her forehead, and said, “She has a fever.” She hurried out to prepare a poultice.
Luis Carlos sat beside her for a few minutes. “We’ll be back, Mama,” he said, pushing back stray hair from her cheeks and chin. “You’ll be well by then and come with us.”
“Leave the saxophone then,” she answered, smiling. “Just to make sure you return.”
He thought at first she was kidding, but no—. He nodded and set the instrument by her side. “We’re leaving now,” he said.
“So be it.”
When he left, she pushed gently at the wall until her head was near the doorway and she could peer out. There they were, marching in single file, already a distance away, their rifles slung on their shoulders. Their voices rode the wind through the cogon grass as they sang the guerrilla marching song. She listened, trying to catch Luis Carlos’s voice, and automatically heard the song in three languages. Difficult indeed was the guerrilla’s life; always in the mountains and forest; at stake our lives, all for our country’s sake; often, we have to fight; with machine guns, rifles, and grenades . . . She nearly laughed out loud. The day the guerrillas had a machine gun, she thought, would be the day they won.
12
After the war, Luis Carlos would burrow thrice through the jungle in search of Mayang’s grave. It was so vivid in his mind, so unmistakable as to detail, that each time he set out to look he was certain he would find it: the crude wooden crucifix a hundred yards to the lean-to’s side, past a clump of wild ylang-ylang, near a tree of immense proportions which assuredly had contributed its branches to the grave’s marker. But he never did. Perhaps the peasants, at war’s end, had dismantled their lean-to; perhaps, a Japanese straggler had killed them and erased all signs of their existence to hide his crime; or then, again, perhaps the forest had simply swallowed everything, lean-to, crucifix, and all, the way time nibbled on memory, rendering imperfect what had been precise. In any case, after his third failure, Luis Carlos had to reconcile himself to his mother’s resting apart from Carlos Lucas and Maya. What he couldn’t accept was his inability to create a song for her, which he blamed on the loss of the harp, because only harp notes, he thought, could sing of Mayang’s quiet courage. He couldn’t know that her song had been composed and sung many, many years ago, and the harp actually made music only for a German scholar.
He had known the exact moment of her death, for the bells rang out then—a knell of alternating high and low single notes, one brass, one silver. Despite Manny’s objections, they had abandoned a raid on a Japanese patrol and instead half walked, half marched through the forest, with Luis Carlos, guided by the bells, leading them through the maze of trees and vines, until the lean-to had hovered in sight, dancing in summer’s heat waves. He smelled her rain scent at once and, nearly weeping with missing her, burst into the peasant clearing to the raucous crows of an insane labuyo. She was dead, dying to the minute the bells had begun. She had grown worse, said the women, as soon as the guerrillas had vanished from sight—coughing out blood, sinking into a delirium. Still she had lingered, completely out of her mind, conversing in Spanish with someone only she could see. She had seemed happy. But on the last day she had recovered her senses and, calling to the man who spoke for the families, she had made him swear, on his children’s heads, that the saxophone would be kept in a safe place and returned to Luis Carlos.
So, they gave him the instrument.
“There’s no helping it, panero,” Jake broke in, “one goes when it’s time to go.”
The eldest of the children, a boy of fifteen, offered to show him the grave. To his relief, Manny held back the others and allowed him to go alone. On the way, Luis Carlos stared so intently at ready landmarks that the boy grew wary and edged closer. Shrubs, Luis Carlos was thinking, tree, and, a half-mile away, a pointed rock of reddish hue. Abruptly, it was there, the rude crucifix, and he shivered.
“Strange thing,” said the boy, “but once I saw a man here. My mother said I was dreaming.”
Preoccupied, Luis Carlos barely heard the words.
“In a black coat. Like in the old books Very tall. Looked American but I can’t be sure. Didn’t see his face. Know what I think? He was an American pilot, his plane downed. We could have hidden him—” He grinned.
“Loco,” Luis Carlos said. “It will take a long time before they come back. A long time.”
He shooed the boy away and knelt at the grave. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he said, unconsciously repeating his words to Carlos Lucas. “But there’s no helping it.” Suddenly, the boy’s words rang in his ears and a vague memory of his old nanny’s chatter surfaced in his mind�
� about a man who’d lived at the Binondo house before his birth, a man who resembled him, Luis Carlos. His heart turned over. With a forefinger, he poked at the heaped earth. “Well, Mama,” he said, “I hope he’s with you.” He rose, renewed by this discovery of his origins, and rejoined the guerrillas.
He thought he would be with them to war’s end and, indeed, they would go through a hundred and one adventures, zigzagging from village to village, burying their dead, treating their wounded, recruiting new comrades, and always watching, watching the skies for the promised airplanes. The time came when Luis Carlos, looking at the faces by the campfire, saw only Manny and Jake of the old group, all the rest being newcomers. He himself, despite being a veteran, had not even been nicked, for the bells warned him on the eve of each battle, ringing so consistently he had learned to tell whether the danger was his or someone else’s. He could not always forestall the other’s fate, but whenever the bells rang for him he was very careful. Once a peasant commented on this, saying Luis Carlos must have a virtud, a quality that made the gods protective. Jake, irritated, snapped that it was simply the unit’s superior training, that was all there was to it.
Once in a while, they would meet another unit and exchange news. But it was the same all over: hard times in the lowlands and no sign of the Yanks. The enemy’s noose had encircled the archipelago and was choking it to a slow but sure death. Famine, disease, and war casualties. In some towns of Luzon, the guerrillas had won, securing territory against the Japanese and, now, villages were run by peasant leaders. This made Jake uneasy.
“This war will turn us into a country of peasants,” he muttered.
Luis Carlos had to laugh. “We are a country of peasants, panero. You and I are aberrations.”
But Jake didn’t like that at all, not at all, and, from that instant, what had been a mute transformation since they had abandoned their Saray base became obvious. Once, Luis Carlos, as they were walking to yet another camp, reached out to tap him on the shoulder. A companionable gesture, usual between them, but Jake dodged and such an angry glance shot from beneath his brows that Luis Carlos withdrew his hand. From then on, Jake kept counsel with himself, always five feet away from the others. His eyes turned shy, avoiding the others’. Luis Carlos suspected he was having death omens. But even news of other guerrilla victories failed to relieve Jake’s dark mood.
It only lightened when Manny agreed to loop back to Saray, in an effort to get at their cached supplies. Jake was sure the sentries had been withdrawn and that troubles elsewhere had caused the Japanese to pull back. “It’s such a flea village,” Jake argued, “they wouldn’t bother holding it when they’re getting clobbered in central Luzon.” In the ensuing argument, Manny, exhausted by their day’s march, threw down his rifle and snapped: “Verify, verify, verify. Have you forgotten the Wang Chai’s instructions? Verify information. If you can, then we’ll go.” He stripped off his shirt, wriggled out of his pants, and proceeded to swim in the creek they had found. “God, I’ll never be clean again,” he muttered as he clambered up the bank. Luis Carlos and the others laughed while Jake’s face closed up in anger.
Two days later, returning from his usual marketplace foray and bearing, to the guerrillas’ delight, nearly two kilos of rice and three cans of sardines—“donations,” he said, “from the parish priest!”— Jake claimed he had found a Saray trader who had confirmed his suspicion. The prospect of having medicine at last, for their arms and legs were pocked by ulcerating sores from insect bites, convinced the guerrillas to try for it. Only Manny and Luis Carlos were reluctant; the first because of the memory of the bag-masked man and the latter because of the stirring of the bells. But Jake forced a vote and there was no helping it, they were to go to Saray.
That night, as they ate the incomparably rich dinner, smacking their lips at the sardines’ tang, Luis Carlos busied himself, between mouthfuls, with checking his weapons. Rifle loaded, guns loaded, ammo belt filled, his grenades and new daggers easily released. Around him, the others were in high spirits, their stories of war mingling with bells in Luis Carlos’s ear. He heard them like distant artillery, dull and ominous. Madre de Dios, he thought and crossed himself awkwardly. Jake caught sight of this and eyed him intently.
“Is something wrong, panero?" he asked. “You’re not eating enough.”
“I’m not used to such fare anymore. Sticks in my gullet.” Luis Carlos averted his face.
“Try to keep it down. You’ve got to eat to survive. And that’s our primary duty: to survive.”
Luis Carlos made a noncommittal sound.
Jake became expansive. “When we get to Saray, ay, such living we shall have. No more dysentery, no more—”
“The war’s not over yet,” Manny broke in.
“I was just dreaming,” Jake said with a giggle. “Just dreaming.”
“I hope this Saray thing’s no dream, panero.” Luis Carlos couldn’t help the words.
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “We’ll have to watch you. You’re losing your balls.”
In the sudden silence, the hard butt of the gun he had just checked dig into Luis Carlos’s palm. All movement had stilled. With his peripheral vision, Luis Carlos saw the others staring open-mouthed at Jake. After a while, the eyes swung to Luis Carlos. It was an iron rule never to question a man’s courage. Even Manny stirred uncertainly. Jake, suddenly aware he had gone too far, looked sick; he gave Luis Carlos a sheepish smile.
“Everyone does, now and then,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything.” He stretched out his arms to show he had no weapon.
Luis Carlos nodded and the tension broke. Everybody spoke at once, Manny berating Jake for going about unarmed. Luis Carlos veered away. He had lost his standing among the group. But the bells had warned that this was no moment of reckoning.
It took them a week to reach the foothills of Saray and, by this time, the bells had petered out to silence. Luis Carlos, though still uneasy, heaved a sigh of relief. Perhaps, the danger had abated. Nevertheless, a heaviness remained with him; something, a worm perhaps, writhed in his chest, a foreboding of further sadness. He would have liked to play the saxophone but instinct warned him against encumbering his hands.
They were nearing their first cache—a small natural cave snuggled against an abrupt rise of the mountainside, hidden by ferns rooted on boulders—when leaves rustled, and a strange sound came.
“Look at that son-of-a-bitch,” Manny cried out.
A labuyo stood to one side of the path, atop a boulder, preening its wings and cocking its head now and then, the better to inspect the men with a glistening, dark eye. It was as iridescent blue as a peacock, though its tail was shot through with red-orange feathers. Jake drew his gun but Manny stopped him.
“Don’t waste meat!” And compelled by a freak sense of humor, he pointed to Luis Carlos. “Go get him, Louie. That’s our supper!” The guerrillas broke into laughter. Luis Carlos, with his weapons and his saxophone, was the least agile of them.
He sprinted for the cock, though, and felt the wind of its sudden flight between his fingers. Behind him, the guerrillas laughed again.
“Don’t come back without it,” Manny yelled.
“Come on, come on. It’s just a stupid bird,” Jake said.
Instead of disappearing into the forest, the rooster stopped fifty feet away and crowed. Luis Carlos circled warily, legs and arms wide apart, his torso in a half crouch. To his amazement, the rooster lowered its head and dove straight for him, a comical bullet that zoomed between his feet, leaving a long, curving feather in his hands.
“Jesus,” he said in surprise, “a suicidal chicken.”
Two yards away, the labuyo stopped once more and eyed Luis Carlos, as though waiting for him to follow. Luis Carlos did and the rooster led him into a merry dance, farther and farther away from the others, teasing him with its nearness until, sweat-soaked and raspy- breathed, he cornered it in the crotch of twin boulders by a spring.
“Got you!” he said, grabbin
g its body. He caught its frenetic legs and turned it upside down. “Dinner!”
In that instant, a terrible fusillade erupted, the noise shaking loose dead leaves and sparrows from trees overhead. Luis Carlos threw himself to the ground. The rooster escaped and, with one last trumpeting crow, lifted its wings and soared. He barely caught the magnificence of its flight, one befitting the king of birds who served as the ancient priestesses’ sacrificial offering to ancestral spirits, before it was gone and silence descended. He heard the bark of a foreign language and nearly wet his pants. Then, a familiar voice came, pleading, saying one had escaped, go search for him, only to be met by guttural laughter and the swish of a descending sword. Jake screamed.
Then followed the nightmare of his flight through the forest, his steps haunted by an imagined battalion of enemies, from dream monsters to Japanese patrols. He had never been alone. To be alone was madness. He crawled, walked, climbed, waded rivers, dimly recognizing places where he, Mayang, and the rest had camped a long, long time ago. At night, using his dagger, he hollowed out a nest in the earth and curled in like a fetus, not daring to slap feeding mosquitoes off his body. He was saved only by his rage, a deep-seated hatred that would well up, like a lazy spring, to overwhelm his thoughts, his body, and end with an explosion of curses and the vow that, someday, Jake’s debt would be settled, if not on him then on his brood, for assuredly such a snake could only breed asps.
Without knowing it, he crossed the boundary to the next province and it was here that another guerrilla unit found him, licking dew- drops off leaves. They fed him, questioned him, and comforted him at the loss of his companions. He stayed with them throughout the war and was partially healed of his sadness, for they were a peasant unit, kind and warm-blooded. He served them faithfully until the moment dawn broke with a thunderclap and, rising from their sleep, they saw row after row of black bird shadows, already in their downward sweep toward the city, and heard the shrill whine of bombs as they fell, and the roar of an injured earth—hundreds of them, mother of God, row after row of airplanes, latticing the sky from horizon to horizon, with more crowding in, dropping their unspeakable cargo on a defenseless city, while black smoke boiled upward and Luis Carlos felt his eyes water at the thought of Manila burning, the Binondo house burning, the cluster of American bars, the Eurasian beauty’s elegant parlor, the Capuchin school where he had sat in classrooms and memorized the English alphabet, the San Augustin church, the cathedral of the dawn masses at Christmastime, the bamboo stalls selling steamed mashed purple yams with grated coconut toppings, the public faucets where women gathered to scrub and rinse clothes, the cobbled walks, the walls of Intramuros, the gas lamps glowing at twilight, just when Mayang, in her velvet needlepoint upholstered scat, drew the harp closer to her body, as though to warm it with her heat, her hands caressing the nearly invisible strings so that they, Clara, Clarissa, and he on the floor, Carlos Lucas in the doorway to the dining room, were drenched with the cool sound of rainfall, rain falling, though no rain would suffice to quell that monstrous fire eating now at the city, chewing up houses, boats, and buildings, one by one, scenting the air with the smell of blood and roasted flesh, mocking I ,uis Carlos with the truth that, though he and everyone on the seven thousand one hundred islands rebuilt with ferocity, they would never have that same grace again, never again the grace that only came with antiquity.
State of War Page 31