“Sssh,” Luis Carlos warned him. “Not a sound. Quickly. Downstream. They went back to the village.”
The boy wept then. “My mother, my sister,” he said between sobs. He glanced at the river. “My father.”
“There’s no helping them now. Go quickly. To the next village and warn them.”
Shivering, his skin peppered with goosebumps, the boy nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I will do so, sir.”
“Don’t use the road. Go through the fields.”
“Yes, sir. But why? Why, sir?”
Luis Carlos shrugged. “Some war. The landowners returned with the Yanks. I don’t know. Wait. What’s your name?”
The boy hesitated. Then smiling suddenly, his eyes focused on the name tag on Luis Carlos’s uniform. He was committing it to memory: Villaverde. “1 am Ismael,” he said softly. “Ismael Guevarra.” He ran then—a supple animal cutting across the open cogon field toward rows of sugarcane. Minutes later, he was gone and Luis Carlos could look innocent when Mad Uncle Ed and his driver, a jar of sugarcane wine between them, returned.
He would have abandoned this crazy war right there and then— were it not for the thought of Pete and Clarissa and their brood who lived on his salary. Mad Uncle Ed insisted on their driving to Angeles City to meet his newest counterinsurgency expert. It was Jacobo Montreal, incipient wrinkles on his forehead and under his eyes, a cane in his left hand to make up for his wooden right foot, and an arm around a swarthy, very pregnant woman.
“Jake!”
The sight of Luis Carlos appalled him as much. But he was older now, quicker to recover. He swept the arm off the woman’s shoulder and extended a hand to his enemy.
“The Hun! You survived the war!”
He shifted the cane to his right hand when Luis Carlos, frozen by an incredible surge of hatred in his body, didn’t move. Three bells rang a warning in his ear, followed by three harp notes, and it was the latter that drew his eyes to the men in the room—men as still as snakes. Luis Carlos shivered but could not bring himself to be even vaguely polite to the traitor.
Jake waved his men nearer, introducing them to Mad Uncle Ed. “This one—a real viper,” he laughed, pushing forward by the shoulder a slim, wiry young man with jet-black hair. “Funny thing’s he’s got a beautiful name. Amor. Urbano Amor. Good enough to be a musician’s, eh, Louie? He’s my favorite.”
Uncle Ed had tossed a swift glance at Luis Carlos, catching the tension. “You knew each other?”
“Even before the war.” Jake grew expansive. “We served in the same guerrilla unit. But an ambush wiped us out. I lost my foot then. Louie, though, was luckier. He was chasing a wild rooster for our supper. Not even a scratch. Lucky devil!” He joined in the sudden laughter.
Luis Carlos was helpless before the man’s temerity. The foot had been lopped off by a Japanese sword, his only reward for having betrayed his companions. That and his life. But Mad Uncle Ed had already brushed aside his suspicions and yelled for his driver to bring the sugarcane wine. Sitting at the only desk in the room, pouring the brew into glasses the men held out, he outlined his plans for the rice lands: crop burning, dawn raids, and death. “Death, death, death,” he said. “A festival of death. This is a war of attrition,” he said. “All possible supplies to the guerrillas must be destroyed.”
Luis Carlos left the room. Outside, the sun was a murderous white ball in a sky one could swear was the bluest God ever made. In the distance, the sole mountain, Arayat, abode of spirits, hoisted its immense bulk out of the horizon. Luis Carlos’s eyes misted and he slid down, folding his knees, his back against the barracks wall, and hugged his legs. The bells rang: silver notes of danger.
That night, he took pen in hand and, in his confusion, composed a letter to Clarissa. There's no understanding this war, he wrote, I thought it was over but it seems that just as it had no beginning, neither shall it have an end. Find me a band, sister, and I will play again. I don’t like having to kill children to feed your children. I don’t like having too many murdered men in my dreams. He couldn’t know that Clarissa, with the letter in her hand, would revile her brother aloud for the spoiled sissy that he was, being so ready to lose chocolate bars, a good salary, a military rank, and an important connection. It was Pete who would take the letter and hide it among the oil miniatures, yellowing photographs, scorched letters, and odds and ends rescued from the Binondo ruins and now stashed away in the garage of their one-and-a-half bungalow, a neat, middle-class home paid for by Luis Carlos. He kept Luis Carlos’s letter, ignorant of that moment in the future when it would reduce the musician’s only child to such pity that she would swear never ever to become involved in any war at all, big or small, just or unjust; never, never at all. Neither did Pete know, when he began willy-nilly to ask about job possibilities for Luis Carlos, that he was starting the process by which the latter would be permanently exiled.
The truth was Pete would save Luis Carlos, for the day following his meeting with Jacobo Montreal a deadly duel commenced, masked by a seemingly friendly competition for Mad Uncle Ed’s favors. Luis Carlos was at a disadvantage. Jake had the constant protection of his men who, singly and together, made him understand that his presence was not at all welcome. The opening salvo of the struggle came from Jake, as Luis Carlos expected. His water canteen was tampered with. But at the last minute, in the midst of an encounter with stray guerrillas, his throat parched with disgust, fear, and summer heat, as he raised the canteen to his mouth, a bullet had zinged through the air, punching a hole right through the thing. Smoke rose from the few drops that sprinkled his trouser leg while, on the ground, the spilled water hissed and steamed. It was battery acid and would have eaten away his lips, his tongue, his palate, his throat. The cruelty of it stunned Luis Carlos.
Jake’s tent was always guarded by Amor, whose dog-grin flashed each time Luis Carlos passed by, on his way somewhere else it would appear, though the truth was he was waiting to catch the man by himself, to deliver that deadly chop to the nape’s base he had learned years ago in the Saray forest. But no, neither in sleep nor awake was Jake ever alone. Two or three of his half-dozen men were always by his side. On the other hand, though it would have been an easier solution, Luis Carlos could not bring himself to lay the matter before Mad Uncle Ed. Not even when his tent was peppered with holes one rainy night or when his rations appeared dusted over with glass shards, or when he was set upon by two men the night he was careless enough to pee in the field outside the camp’s perimeter. He kept counsel with himself, watched his back, and listened to the bells.
No one was more surprised than Mad Uncle Ed when a guerrilla unit they had thought demolished looped through the fields and assaulted the Nenas. Because the season’s first typhoon, blowing in from over the Pacific, was in full fury, they had battened down their tents for the night and were already huddled in their regulation olive-green blankets when the whoomph of a mortar shell hitting the makeshift kitchen threw them to their feet. Luis Carlos, shirtless in his cot though still wearing his boots, lunged for the Coleman lamp, knocked it off its perch on his army duffle bag, and in the sudden darkness found his gun and his dagger. Crouching, he slipped out, pinpointed the general direction of the colonel’s jeep, and slowly, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the intermittent flashes of explosions and lightning, began a careful half crawl, half run for the vehicle. He heard exuberant shouts and knew the guerrillas had pierced the temporary barricade of sandbags and barbed wire the soldiers had strewn about the camp that afternoon. In a few minutes, they would be overrun. Over the whine of bullets and soldiers’ curses, he heard the kick of a motor and deduced that the colonel had reached the jeep. Bad luck for him. He had no recourse now except to make for the open fields and hope he survived long enough to be plucked by reinforcements. Still crouching, he pivoted and nearly keeled over when blue light burst overhead. A dozen paces to his right, a soldier spun three hundred sixty degrees before dropping, assuredly dead, face-down on the mud.
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br /> To his surprise, sandbags at the camp’s rear had been pushed aside, the wires cut to make a passage. He hesitated, cocked his head for the bells, but there was only silence. Still careful, with the least noise possible, he slipped through and inched along on his haunches—a trick he had learned in his guerrilla years. He breathed easier when he felt the first sugarcane stalk before him. But something else was there—moving with thick animal gasps, stumbling among the sugarcane, frenetic in its haste. Not a guerrilla, he decided at once; they usually moved like greased shadows. Still, he was not prepared, when another lightning bolt came, for the sight of Jake hopping stupidly on one foot, his hands clutching wildly at the cane stalks. The man had lost his prosthesis and his walking cane. A single silver note echoed in Luis Carlos’s ear and as he mulled over this incredible coincidence, wondering whether it was right to do in a helpless man, both wind and rain died abruptly, the storm’s eye slid overhead, and to his stupefaction an orange moon, misshapen and strange, drenched the field with light. It was now or never. Almost automatically, his body poured forward, all tensile grace, in the learned reflex of his war years.
When he rose in Jake’s path, cutting off his escape, the man yelled. But he was armed; Luis Carlos had not anticipated that, and for a minute the universe went still as he stared at the black hole of the gun barrel’s mouth.
“Leave me alone, monster,” Jake shouted, saliva spewing from his mouth, “my wife’s about to give birth.” Then, he grinned.
The silver note rang out again. And as the dagger’s tip left Luis Carlos’s fingers, its weight perfectly balanced in a flight straight and true, homing for Jake’s neck, he felt a tremendous blow on his shoulder, a blow that snapped his body back. He was suddenly looking at the sky while somewhere near him a giant snake thrashed and writhed, snapping sugarcane stalks, crushing, it would seem, the very earth underneath. Luis Carlos lay back, and looked at the impossible moon. Sudden relief cocooned him, the same he had felt once before, when his hands, reaching upward, had touched the opposite banks of a warm black river through which, with a knife clenched between his teeth, he had swum stark naked. “I don’t know why men kill,” he said almost dreamily, addressing the body that still heaved, “nor why they betray. But if your child’s you, then your fate is his as well.” There was no helping it, he sighed to himself, and promptly lost consciousness.
It took a month for his bones to set though the round scar on his chest and back marking the bullet’s passage would remain. Mad Uncle Ed had given him up for dead and, indeed, Luis Carlos would have perished in the storm had not a peasant boy, already called Guevarra by his friends, found him. Whatever he thought of the scene he came upon—the corpse with the knife in its gullet, Luis Carlos covered with blood, his clavicle broken—he kept to himself. It sufficed that he bound Luis Carlos’s wound and with the help of reluctant friends, all young orphans like him, he had constructed a makeshift stretcher on which they had taken turns dragging him, none too gently for he was still a soldier, to the highway where they flagged down a bus and convinced the driver to take the wounded man to Angeles City’s military camp. Here, Mad Uncle Ed, his own body threatening to disassemble at any minute, accepted the delivery and hustled him off to the camp hospital. Later, it was all Luis Carlos could do to dissuade him from searching for the kid or kids—“to do them justice,” as he said. Jake was dead and would be buried with full honors. His woman had disappeared. “She wasn’t married to him, anyway,” the colonel said, “not entitled to his pension.” He winked.
It was at the hospital that Pete’s letter found him and Luis Carlos wept with gratitude at the news of a job possibility. When Uncle Ed came again, hurrying him to get to his feet, Luis Carlos asked to be released from his commission. “I want to attend to my life,” he said and Mad Uncle Ed, exasperated at his stubbornness, finally agreed. The guerrillas were on the run, anyway. The rebellion was broken and it was time for young men like Luis Carlos to enjoy themselves. “Make yourself some money, son,” he said, as he heaved himself to his feet. “Though I don’t know what for, you die just the same. Well, Amor can ride in the jeep with me.” He patted Luis Carlos’s right shin and left.
Thus it was that one afternoon, with his bags and his saxophone, flute, and clarinet cases, Luis Carlos stood on a Manila pier and gave Pete, Clarissa, and their three children farewell kisses. Docked behind him, waiting it seemed for this severing of his ties to the city, was a luxury liner, on which he and his fellow band members would make music as it plied the shipping lanes of the Pacific. Luis Carlos gave a last look at the Manila skyline, the melody of “Lovely Stranger” in his head. Already, new buildings shielded the war’s relics and, even as he watched, trucks carting away rubble rushed toward the city dump. Nothing, it seemed, not even a spasm of memory, would bring those terrible years back.
“Don’t forget to write,” Clarissa said. “And come for Christmas and Lent and—whatever.”
He nodded. In that instant, all the remaining church bells rang out, the city hall clock struck six, and the ship belched thrice. Luis Carlos picked up his bags and embraced his sister a last time, certain that, as he would never write another song again, neither would he return to the Ever Loyal and Ever Noble City of Manila.
He was wrong. Just once more, two years later, before his final voyage as ash and bits of bone in a porcelain urn, Luis Carlos came back, bringing a most exquisite creature, the last Chinese girl to be foot-bound in the world, sixteen years old and seven months pregnant with his child. She was a creature of despair, raised on hallucinations of the impending collapse of China’s new government and the return of the Manchu emperors, trained by her obsessed grandmother in the subtle but totally useless arts of a court lady. She spoke nothing but pure Mandarin, imperial in its precision of grammar and pronunciation. Her meeting with Luis Carlos had been heralded by a laughter of bells, the very last time Luis Carlos would hear them, as he strolled one late afternoon through a Kowloon side street with its unspeakable tenements and flea-sized restaurants, its scabbed she-dogs with teats grazing the pavement. She had fallen out of a narrow doorway into his arms, quite literally, in her panic and confusion as her grandmother lay felled by a massive thrombosis in the tiny room upstairs. How she had managed the stairs, Luis Carlos would never understand, but he had understood her cries, the mad music of her speech, for he spoke Mandarin by then, and, taking her by the hand, seeing her pitifully tiny feet, he fell completely and irrevocably in love.
He buried her grandmother in the old custom and married her, giving as his wedding gift the diamond-and-emerald earring another beauty had handed to him many years ago. He had found it intact in his old tuxedo’s breast pocket, where it had rested through all the war years—a garment Pete had carefully kept safe, believing Luis Carlos would find use for it again as a musician. It was fitting, this transfer of the artifact, from one beauty to another beauty—and though Luis Carlos did not realize that the stone had come from his grandmother’s necklace, a rare joy, as pure as any he had ever felt, touched him when his wife dropped the earring into her antique jewel box, her grandmother’s only legacy: a curious miniature Chinese pirate chest, inlaid with flowers of soapstone and filled with gold hair ornaments, pearl clasps and necklaces, combs studded with red and green stones, rings and earrings and even a gold shoe buckle. These were supposed to be the granddaughter’s implements for her assault on the Manchu court, if and when it reascended to power.
She had learned well, even Luis Carlos had to admit on his wedding night. Though he himself excelled, taking her nine times in twenty- four hours, it was she who led him to paths of exquisite tenderness, curving her body around and about him, her little sighs as murmurous as caterpillars’ songs, her fingers, the inner skin of her thighs, as fluid in their touch as water, until Luis Carlos could almost believe that the rest of the world had disappeared and the bed they lay on was a skiff adrift on a wayward current, floating between unknown lands of smells which, wafting round and about them, nestle
d between her toes, in the twin skinfolds under her breasts, and in her armpits. Lightly, to the singsong of her language, she stroked the calluses off Luis Carlos’s soul until he shivered in his nakedness and lying on her, beside her, under her, in her, he let loose his first-ever cry of happiness and passion.
They were never to be happy again. Her confrontation with reality failed to enlighten her, to Luis Carlos’s chagrin. Everything about it—the noise, the number of people, the speed of traffic, the abundance of goods and the cacophony of half a dozen languages—merely confused and frightened her, driving her deeper into her inherited dreams of order and ceremony. She would lie the whole day on the silk-upholstered settee of Luis Carlos’s apartment, her swathed feet on a pillow; with all the window curtains drawn, she would open her jewel box, would run her treasures through her fingers over and over again. When she became pregnant, Luis Carlos’s mention of a doctor so terrorized her that by the time he came home, he found her with her hands clinging to the settee’s back, as though she was about to be bodily dragged outside. It was an impossible situation. He had a month’s contract to play in Tokyo and could neither leave her to her devices nor abide her constant distress. Finally, he convinced her to sail with him to Manila, barely managing to do so by lying through his teeth, saying all the Emperor’s relatives resided in splendid exile in the city.
Clarissa, of course, was thrown into hysteria by the prospect of caring for a stranger who could not speak a single comprehensible word. “What do you expect me to do?” she shouted at her brother, thrusting her own swelling belly at him. Worse, her own loudness compared to the Chinese girl’s fragility scared her. She was convinced the girl would break in her hands somehow, like one of those painted, empty eggshells one didn’t dare hold too tightly. As usual, it was Pete who allayed her fears, and soothed the girl’s own panic by leading her to the sofa from which she would never stir again. He assured Luis Carlos that everything would be fine. The latter, relieved, stayed long enough to hire a maid for his wife, purchase a layette for his child, and check out the city’s nightclubs before taking a plane back to Hong Kong. Three months later, Pete phoned him for the good and the bad news: his daughter was fine but his wife had died.
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