“We will have new things,” said the peasant leader of the unit, seeing Luis Carlos’s wet cheeks.
Then they fought their way through straggling lines of Japanese soldiers gone berserk, down to the lowlands, to meet the Yanqui forces and register their brave deeds. In the newness to come, it was important, they all felt, that a little of history remain.
Three weeks of the bloody walk, marching and fighting—for the entire Japanese force seemed to have become suicidal, rampaging through villages, killing everyone in sight—before they broke into the Yanks’ camp in their filthy and blood-spattered clothes, joining what appeared to be all the guerrillas in the world, coming down the mountains, dragging their rifles by the barrel, and singing a guerrilla's life is hard indeed; stuck in the mountains and the forests . . . They were making for an American sergeant, dazzling in his cleanliness, seated behind a makeshift table, paper and pencil at hand, listing down the names, units, and area of operations of each guerrilla who came before him. To his right, a mound of rifles grew as the young men—for they were all young men—divested themselves of weapons, dropping their warrior disguise, to become simply men again, now thinking of loves and homes and the future.
After Luis Carlos identified himself, he was handed two chocolate bars, a bath soap, and cigarettes. He gave away the last since he didn’t smoke, unwrapped the chocolate, and, sucking happily on the divine gift, asked for directions to the river so he could bathe. He was turning to leave, his thoughts already on the agreeable feel of water and soap, when he heard his name barked out by someone.
“Hey, hey, Louie! The Hun! Hey, Louie, the Hun!”
Pivoting, he confronted the oldest American he had ever seen, certainly the ugliest: a yammering death’s head at the end of a turkey neck protruding from the stiff khaki wings of a collar bearing a colonel’s insignia.
“Christ, you survived the war! Luis Carlos Villaverde! I knew your mother! I rented a room in her boarding house! I knew you as a baby! The Hun!” The man gestured for him to come close. “A guerrilla, eh? Listen, I need an aide. You’re drafted. Come along. War’s not over yet. Another one in the offing. But first, we have to go open the brewery. We need beer!” He laughed, winked. “Of course, the good ole general’s part owner of the goddamn brewery but that’s neither here nor there. The Hun, I can’t believe it. Play for me, son; play for me—all the way to Manila.”
That was how Luis Carlos returned to the city: playing “Skyboats” on a flute supplied by Mad Uncle Ed, as the colonel was known, the two of them in the back seat of a jeep driven by a drunk private, while the colonel ranted about all the things he had seen and done in the archipelago, from filling in the canal to filching gold anklets from savage tribes. Suddenly, Luis Carlos stopped playing and gaped; he had caught sight of Manila.
“But I can see the sea!” he shouted.
“Flat as a pancake, son. We always do a thorough job.” Mad Uncle Ed chortled.
The jeep stopped at what seemed to be the only extant house left, a house already crawling with Yanks and women. Here, Mad Uncle Fd gave him a three-day leave to search for his sister, warning him to stay clear of the debris and rubble for the Japanese had mined every inch, it seemed, of the land and the unwary were still losing legs and arms. Feeling helpless without his guns, Luis Carlos made his way to Binondo. He had to circle twice and start all over again, for all the familiar landmarks were gone; there was only the topography of devastation. He found families huddled among the ruins; potbellied children eyed him from beneath half-fallen house beams amidst the pungence of ripening corpses. After a while, he came to the canal, recognizing it because it still lay lower than the ground proper, though its surface was covered over with burnt wood, torn galvanized iron sheets, cement slabs, and loose slate tiles and bricks. From there, he traced the remnants of the streets to their house and found only the stairway thrusting upward amidst an impossible tangle of wood, slate, dismembered furniture, and half the roof.
“Is she dead, too?” he asked aloud.
“Lord, it’s Louie!” Clarissa shrilled behind him and he was caught in a spasmodic embrace, pounded on the shoulders by Pete’s fists, and, smelling the soot odor of his sister’s hair and clothes even as he caught sight of a naked, brown toddler standing behind her, his fist caught in the folds of her skirt.
“Our first,” Pete said, leading the boy forward.
Luis Carlos was speechless. For the first time, he added up the years: three and a half, all in all. Madre de Dios! He swallowed the dryness in his throat and said: “Mama died.”
“But we knew. One night the pots in the garden broke into two and fell apart,” Pete said, shaking his head. “We couldn’t replace them.”
The bad news out, the two now regaled Luis Carlos with their adventures. The carpet bombing had driven them out of the house, just in time, for the roof was stoved in by a terrific bomb while they were a mere block away. Along with hundreds, almost dead with hysteria, they had gone south of the Pasig River, to vacant lands at the city’s edge. Here, compelled by the instinct for survival, they had gathered planks and plywood sheets for a shack and eventually managed to fence off a garden. They returned to Binondo now and then only to salvage what they could: a chair, a lace curtain, serviceable wood and roofing, nails, a basket of fragrant and healing oils, plaster saints—which they loaded in a pushcart for their new home.
“They say there are still Japanese hiding in the ruins,” Pete said. “It’s not safe yet.”
“I will never return!” Clarissa snapped. “Those bombs! Live in the city! Never again!”
It had only been an exaggeration, Clarissa would later admit; how was she to know that the heavens had taken note and would see to the truth of it? None of them had objected. Pete dove into the ruins to ferret out their old life’s leftovers while Luis Carlos, galvanized by this reunion with his family, ascertained the exact location of their shack and hurried back to Mad Colonel Ed. Having mollified the crazy colonel with twenty minutes of the saxophone, playing “When the Saints Come Marching in,” he got permission to raid the headquarters’ supplies and use the jeep to boot. In haste, before anyone changed his mind, Luis Carlos loaded chocolate bars, tins of corned- beef hash and milk, cigarettes, bath and laundry soap, two blankets, vitamins, and whatever he could take away safely, including candles and an oil burner, for the city was still without electricity. All went into the jeep and he drove recklessly through the bombed-out streets until he reached the vast refugee camp where Clarissa, Pete, and their child were. It was a tangle of clapboard houses, but at Luis Carlos’s arrival the residents poured out, mistaking him despite his tan and because of his gray eyes and reddish-brown hair for an americano.
“Joe, victory Joe! Don’t be stingy, Joe!” The voices hammered at him as he waded through a forest of raised palms. The maimed, the wounded, the dying rose to their elbows, as though he could instantly cure their injuries, and cried out in that bird whine: “Victory, Joe!”
“Shit,” he muttered, shooing them away from the jeep. For a moment, he considered batting them away with the axe he had brought for Pete.
Fortunately, the commotion drew Clarissa. She screamed at the sight of her brother set upon by beggars. “Get away,” she shouted, “that’s my brother! You shameless thieves!”
“How come he doesn’t look like you? Your mother slept with a ‘Cano’?
“Your’s slept with a monkey. Get away from there.”
She was more than a match for all of them and cleared a path for I.uis Carlos while Pete, with two young men who had been promised cigarettes, carted the jeep’s treasure into the shack.
The visit raised Pete’s standing in the community. He had direct access, he would boast, to the American command’s kitchen pantry. As a result, his patients doubled, for he had become a healer now, deftly opening this man’s or that woman’s belly with his thumbnail, extracting white stones and bits of knotted tissue, sealing blood vessels and the skin so magically that, afterward, when a
wet rag was passed over the wound, wiping away the blood, not a sign of the operation could be seen.
Luis Carlos watched with his mouth half open. Later, in the quiet of the kitchcen, when the last patient had finished slobbering his gratitude and had left his payment of a piece of bread, a velvet skirt rcscued from the ruins, or a woven mat for the floor, he asked Clarissa: “It’s all sleight-of-hand, of course.”
Clarissa’s smile, by the candlelight, was enigmatic. “He’s done wonders for the sick.”
“Holy cow,” muttered Luis Carlos, “I have a saint for a brother-in- law.”
Clarissa giggled. “Oh, he’s not that at all.”She patted her belly and it was only then he noticed the slight swell of it. For a dizzying moment, he imagined the whole shack—the whole city!—peopled by Pete’s miniatures; he grew faint at the thought of the army of children he would have to support for he was sure now that Pete would always be this way, at society’s periphery, picking a living off scraps of superstition and the people’s impossible need to believe in magic. It made up for their helplessness.
“I have to go back now,” he said.
Thus it was that, immersed in the task of meeting their requirements of survival, they forgot all about the Binondo house while Luis Carlos drove from one Yank camp to another, salvaging what he could of the soldiers’ rations, Clarissa roamed the streets, her swollen belly swaying, and sifted through ruins for usable items, and Pete did marathon operations on twelve to sixteen patients each day. By the time they all sobered enough to think of rebuilding in Binondo, it was too late. A barbed-wire fence cut off five blocks of the district including a length of the canal.
“A sign said Property of the Banyaga Estate,” Pete reported.
Not even Mad Uncle Ed, to whom Luis Carlos appealed, could recover what had been stolen.
“All the records went kaput!” he said, “and the Banyagas laid claim to the title. They are connected.”
Clarissa spent a whole day weeping, blaming herself for having brought about this new calamity. But there was no helping it. Luis Carlos, twisting his mouth at the vile taste on his tongue, gathered odds and ends of clothes and other gear and made ready to leave with the colonel for central Luzon, a place he thought he would never see again, now that the state of war was over.
13
The ambush was well planned. The neat rows of marching men, five abreast, fell in a confused mass of heaving bodies as machine gun bullets rained down from the land rise on both sides of the dirt road. Mad Uncle Ed laughed and laughed, slapping his right knee as he watched from behind the second machine gun nest, his Army jeep nestled under the trees ten meters away. The parade’s tail had shattered into individual men running for shelter, and Luis Carlos, standing four feet from the Yanqui officer, could see that they were peasants—or guerrillas who, after surrendering their weapons, had reverted to being peasants. Shivering, not knowing what this new war was all about, he wondered if he had known any of the dying and the dead down there—a good two hundred men, still sunburnt and brawny from the four-year War of Resistance against the Japanese, spilling blood, urine, and vomit on the golden dust.
One man broke away from the chaos and ran for the hill com manded by Mad Uncle Ed. Luis Carlos almost heard the man’s fingernails snapping off as he scrambled for a handhold, his body squirming like a worm, his bare feet clawing the earth. He nearly made it; indeed, his head rose nearly to the level of the colonel’s feet but Mad Uncle Ed, eyes so huge they nearly ate his face, drew his service pistol and aiming carefully, shot the man between the eyes. Luis Carlos saw the back of the man’s skull fly off, specks of brain and flesh staining the earth below before the body completed its arch through the air to plop on the road’s edge. Mad Uncle Ed laughed and laughed.
“It is the best kind of war,” he roared later, as he sat in the jeep and was driven toward the camp.
“What kind?” Luis Carlos asked politely.
“The kind against your own kind.” The colonel pursed his lips obscenely, as at an inordinately saccharine taste. “I shall teach you to make war on your kind.”
“But the war is over.” Luis Carlos knitted his brow against a headache.
“Not yet. Your peasants are restive.”
“That will pass.”
“Perhaps, yes; perhaps, no. But I don’t have the time to wait, son. There are fortunes to be made. I grew rich on this land and so will others. Mark my words and know which side your bread is buttered on.” Mad Uncle Ed laughed.
Luis Carlos raised the flute to his lips. The pan de sal, he thought, was a fist-shaped bread; one slit it open with a knife and buttered it inside. The thought soothed him. He played “Killer Joe” for the colonel.
Thus it was that he would wend his way through central Luzon, weaponless except for his flute, sitting in the jeep behind Mad Uncle Ed and puzzling the whys and wherefores of a war treading on the heels of a just-concluded war in a country of beginnings. The old Yanqui, his boss, had been reactivated to deal with an incipient insurgency, his genuis at dealing with skittish natives being well known even in the Pentagon. And indeed, despite bouts of nausea,
Luis Carlos could bow to the old man’s inventiveness. He treated his own men well, turning their weakness into strength, their perversions into military tactics. To this end, he established an elite battalion, called the Nenas—a pampered, much publicized unit of handsome and photogenic soldiers. Privately, though, Mad Uncle Ed laughed his head off at official adulation of his unit, for the word Nena (he had to remind Luis Carlos who had forgotten along with the rest of the country) was Tagalog slang for faggot.
Set loose upon villages barely recovered from the Japanese occupation, the Nenas’ passage was a swath of terror and destruction. They would dress in civilian clothes, knock on peasant homes, pretend to be guerrillas, and kill whoever received them kindly. A chance meeting with peasants on the dust roads ended with the latter losing their heads to the axe that the Nenas’ captain preferred. Through it all, Mad Uncle Ed laughed with approval and hummed along with Luis Carlos’s music which, as the months passed, grew more and more strained.
It was in Floridablanca that the depths of Uncle Ed’s madness made itself known. The Nenas caught a seventeen-year-old peasant fishing in the river. The lad, stuttering with fright, was brought to Mad Uncle Ed who ordered him worked over with rubber hoses. “Until 1 say stop!” he said. He never did and, seven hours later, the lad was dead, though without a mark on what had been a sturdy, deep-brown body. But he did not die before implicating everyone, from the eighty-year-old elder to a ten-year-old boy, in his village. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Mad Uncle Ed had the entire unit hunt for a bat: “Just one! I need just one!”
When the rodent was caught, Uncle Ed stabbed the corpse twice in the neck with an icepick. He wrung the bat’s neck and ordered the men to take corpse and bat to where roads from four villages converged.
“Spread him there,” he said, “and put the bat on his chest. Scraps of superstition! We’ve never changed you, you people. You still believe there’s something stronger than money and bullets. Obligations and spirits, honor and monsters!” He grinned at the corpse sprawled on a jeep’s back seat, the bat on its lap. “That should scare everyone out of his mind.” To Luis Carlos, he muttered: “A panicked town won’t think of self-defense.” Laughing, he headed for his tent. “We march at dawn.”
For the first time in many months, the bells stirred in Luis Carlos’s ears. But there was no helping it; at dawn, he was in the colonel’s jeep, trying to soothe the old man’s hangover with flute music. He was still playing when the soldiers kicked hut doors open, roused all the inhabitants, dragged out the male residents, and, with gun-butt blows, herded them to the river. Here, they were lined up on the bank while the Nenas, four at a time, practiced their marksmanship. They marched to a spot a hundred yards away, wheeled to face the agog peasants, fell smartly to their knees, brought their guns up, and shot the unfortunate villagers one by one. The bodies t
oppled back into the river and Luis Carlos, still fingering his flute, tried to close his eyes to the scene. But all he could see was a red river aswarm with brown crocodiles.
Afterward, Mad Uncle Ed and the men returned to the village. “For some sport,” he said, grinning. Luis Carlos begged off, saying the heat was getting to him, and thus he was by himself, near the river, when one of the bodies stirred, swam ashore, and hoisted itself out of the water. For a moment, he thought his vision of crocodiles had come true. But it was only a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, and he gave a cry of despair when he caught sight of Luis Carlos. He would have thrown himself back had not Luis Carlos, bending over quickly, seized his forearm.
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