“How’re her feet?” Luis Carlos said after a while.
Mystified, Pete answered: “They’re still bandaged.”
“My daughter’s? Who did that? Take it off at once.”
“No, your wife’s. Your daughter’s feet are fine. Small.”
“Holy bananas, she’s inherited—”
“No, no, no,” Pete cut in, “they’re tiny. She’s only a baby. She can’t have full-size feet.”
“Oh my poor, poor, poor—”
“No, her feet are fine! Five toes, good arches!”
“—anachronism.”
A silence. Pete realized Luis Carlos was crying.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked gently after a while.
“What? What the hell does one do with a corpse? Bury it. Wait. You know any Chinese?”
“Tons. All the corner stores are owned by them.”
“Ask one—ask one to help you. My poor, poor—. Pete, buy her a plot in the Chinese cemetery, a good one. I’ll send you the money. I’ll send you all my money. I don’t need anything anymore. Is she pretty?”
“A little pale. The undertaker hasn’t worked on her yet. But she will be, with makeup and lipstick.”
“No!” Luis Carlos shouted. “My daughter. My baby. Is she pretty?”
Pete hesitated. “Uh—yes. No. Can’t tell yet. She’s newborn. All wrinkled and with tiny hands and feet.”
“Oh, the poor thing. And I can’t leave, I can’t—”
“Clarissa wants to name her Maya.”
“No. No. Something else. Let’s see—first letter, A. Anna. Anna. Maybe she’ll be the start of better things. Anna. The poor, poor—” He hung up. Pete, who had borrowed a neighbor’s telephone, for phones were still scarce in the city, walked home bemused by Luis Carlos’s question. Was she pretty or not pretty, this Anna? In his simplicity, he made straight for the crib, bothered by his inability to answer Luis Carlos’s query, and checked. The baby lay quiet, with eyes closed, fists clenched, and toes curled. It had been an obstinate birth, sixteen hours of labor wracking the slim bones of the Chinese girl, while the hapless midwife, whose presence had driven the girl into the most horrible screams, tried to staunch the blood seeping between the girl’s thighs, soaking the newspaper wads under her buttocks. To make matters worse, once out, the baby refused to cry, despite the many whacks on her haunches, merely frowning in anger and jerking her arms and legs. Finally, the midwife had given up. The child was breathing normally and, having dressed her in the delicate little silk shirt and diapers Luis Carlos had bought, the midwife laid her down on the crib. “What dreadful stubbornness,” she said to Pete.
But was she pretty? They would never find the correct answer, both yes and no being too imprecise, in the years to come, even to the last day when she left them, cradling her father’s saxophone, for her husband’s home. And because they couldn’t quite define her, they forgot her even as she was growing up, cared for by a nanny paid by Luis Carlos and left to her own devices in the garage which Pete had refurbished as a nursery. It was not that Clarissa or Pete neglected her. It was more like the child saw to it that nothing beyond necessary attention was given her. From the very beginning, contrary to the elusive answer to Luis Carlos’s question, she was a creature of precision, crying at specific hours, give or take a few minutes, for her food, sleeping in between.
Such self-will in a baby bothered Pete. He bought her a radio which every morning he would turn on, keeping the volume down, and turn off at night. He did not know what good that did her, though, after a time, Anna’s nanny reported that the child seemed to rest better whenever she tuned in to the Spanish broadcast in the morning, the English one in the afternoon. She herself spoke only Tagalog, of course, and busied herself with cleaning the room, washing Anna’s clothes, and helping Clarissa with her increasing brood.
Pete checked on the child at least once a day, taking note as well of the garage’s contents, for it would not do to have anything stolen. Not that there was anything of value among the remnants of the Binondo house. Nothing at all. Even the Chinese girl’s treasure box had contained junk jewelry. He had taken the precaution of having two pearl necklaces appraised but they were simply paste, of all the rotten luck. Thus, assuming the same for all, he missed the diamond- and-emerald earring which would catch Anna’s eye when she was but ten years old and which she would secrete away, until in her twenty- seventh year she had a sudden need to purchase something from Hong Kong and pawned the jewel.
As it was, the years passed calmly, with Pete doing both magic and surgery, Clarissa getting pregnant and giving birth with tedious regularity, and Luis Carlos’s checks arriving every first of the month. There was a tense moment when Pete had considered joining the army because there was a war overseas in which all good men were supposed to join, but Clarissa had a fit and there was no helping it, he stayed at home. In due time, that disturbance calmed down as well, though another war was brewing, but Pete had no inkling of it and by the time it became full blown he was too old to be a warrior.
They lived simply, preferring to forget the past, and even the strange child fitted into that simplicity. Until, of course, one morning, as Clarissa stood in the kitchen, debating whether to plug or not plug in Luis Carlos’s most recent gift, the first-ever electric stove in the city, not sure she would not be electrocuted, die on the spot, and burn the house down to boot—she had the plug in her hand and was inching it toward the wall socket when she felt a most unnatural silence fall on the house, light itself turning diaphanous, and everything—wall, kitchen counter, window, and sink—was suddenly bathed in a nacreous shimmer, so that Clarissa thought she had awakened into a dream moment, a moment filled with this presence, a presence that stood behind her and watched as her hand advanced, pulled back, advanced again with that ugly plug and its equally ugly diagonally striped black-and-white cord. She whirled around, nearly pulling the stove off the counter. In the doorway was the child and Clarissa was suddenly guilt-stricken at the thought of how they had neglected her, not exactly neglected, but paid no attention, so that they had even forgotten to have her hair trimmed, letting it grow undisturbed since her birth, that blue-black hair falling in successive curls to the child’s hips as she stood there, in her tiny denim overalls and bare feet, one hand on the wall as though she did not trust her sense of balance yet. Then, to Clarissa’s utter fright, the child, who had been so silent for so long they suspected she was retarded, opened her mouth and said:
“It was morning when the Spanish long boats sailed from Cebu to Mactan.” She paused, looked thoughtful, and went on: “Everything in this country happens in the morning.”
Shocked, Clarissa could only ask: “Why?”
And the child replied: “Because it is a country of beginnings.” She giggled while the strength went out of Clarissa’s knees and she oozed to the floor.
That was how they discovered that between the radio and the stock of memorabilia in the garage, Anna had taught herself to speak and read Spanish, English, and Tagalog. More than that, by prodigious deduction, she had learned the identities of everyone in the oil miniatures, old photographs, and unfinished sketches. She could name Maya, and Mayang, Carlos Lucas and Luis Carlos, the child Clara, and even a hitherto anonymous oil of a Spaniard dressed as a Capuchin, though she insisted that one portrait was missing or had never been done and thus the family line was incomplete. Pete was delighted and considered letting her join his show, suspecting she could tell the future. Futile hope, alas; she knew only the details of the past and could prattle endlessly about the Four Roses Gin and the wedding at Casa Espaiiol but went mute whenever she was confronted with questions about the morrow. This phase lasted many months until one of her cousins, a girl of eight, hating the excitement about this strange girl, the sight of her at the dinner table under the scrutiny of Pete and Clarissa, slipped into the garage while Anna’s nanny was helping with the laundry in the backyard and, seizing the girl by the hand, hissed into her face
to shut up about grandmothers and grandfathers and boats in the sky, and shoved her into a closet.
They did not find her until four hours later. Those hours of darkness must have traumatized the poor soul, for since then, though Clarissa and Pete bombarded her with questions, she could only repeat:
“Everything in this country happens in the morning.”
The Book of Revelations
1
The tally, by the second day of the Festival, was twenty thousand bottles of beer, five thousand bottles of gin (the Archangel), a thousand-odd bottles of wine, whiskey, rum, etc., consumed, along with a veritable lava of food, not to mention rooms occupied, souvenirs purchased, plane and ship fares paid. The number ricocheted back and forth, across the governor’s dining room, over steaming cups of coffee, platters of ham, bacon and eggs, and bread slices—numbers which were doubled and tripled by accountants on both sides of the table, the governor’s and Adrian’s father’s; which didn’t help his headache any nor the conviction that he had misplaced half of his mind the previous night. Speculations of wealth this early, premised on the construction of the resort, were not to Adrian’s liking.
He had awakened to sunlight behind the lace curtains of french windows in a strange bedroom. He was naked beneath the sheets. The discovery was unsettling enough to make him keep still, his eyes scanning the room for his clothes, a familiar object, a clue perhaps, but finding only the disquieting pattern of the curtains’ greenish shadows on the floor, on the edge of the bed, and on the back of his left hand. He knew this wasn’t an altogether strange situation; enough tales from his male friends told him that as much could be expected after all-night binges and while it had been hilarious in the telling, it was no longer as amusing now that it was happening to him. He had belched, his stomach muscles bunching painfully, and tried to dredge up an image—any image—of what had transpired the night before. Then, this girl had materialized in the doorway, breakfast tray in hand, and he had to search his memory for a name to fit the face framed by bangs, hair cut so short it slithered away whenever she inclined her head, showing off her cheekbones. When she laid the tray on the dresser bench, pushed it toward him, snatched a pack of cigarettes off the vanity, shook one loose, and lit it with a silver lighter, he knew he did not know her at all. Laughing, she had informed him she was the governor’s daughter, this was her bedroom, and their betrothal—Adrian’s and hers—was being worked out in the dining room below, between his father and hers. Adrian’s headache had started then. He had shooed her away, found his clothes, and dressed, nursing his tender belly. Then he had made his way downstairs.
There were too many soldiers. Appearing singly or in pairs at various doorways, their presence seemingly accidental, their inspection of the scene within casual. But Adrian would feel their eyes rest on his being, inevitably, at the end of an arching glance about the room. Too many soldiers, in combat uniform, gun belt, ammo pouches, M-i6s. Now and then, a man in white showed up with them; his eyes, too, reached for Adrian—an intent, studying look that always ended when he looked back.
Abruptly, he pushed his chair back, ignoring the startled faces of the others. He walked to the windows—more curtains—and catching hold of a fluttering, serrated cloth edge, drew it back. Instantly, his eyes closed. The light was too strong. He blinked, eased himself back before looking again. In the distance, leaf-slim boats sailed a sea of molten gold and sapphire. It was morning yet. The thought broke over him, a wave of joy. There was enough time. Time enough to find Anna and end the Festival.
She was as snagged by morning as he was, seeing the town roofs fluted with gold, the yellow flash on a seagull’s wing. Morning; her hand in Eliza’s hand. Eliza whose beauty as usual drew its own audience. Children this time, open-mouthed, now and then bending their heads to take counsel with each other, wondering who she was—a movie star, perhaps; a town official’s wife. Their voices, snatched by the wind, carried to her, though they maintained their distance. Tiny gurgles of laughter, small mouthfuls of words. Quite clearly now, she heard herself as she had once sounded, her own child’s voice, clear as harp notes: It was morning when the Spanish long boats sailed from Cebu to Mactan. And another voice, older but still a child’s: forget! What was there to forget, she asked the other. It was nothing more than a fact, learned by rote if not by heart. The long boats did sail from Cebu to Mactan on a morning of beginnings.
Just like the morning she stood among the wreckage of her home, thinking she had awakened to step into another dream, the living room, the broken furniture, the smashed vases and ashtrays bathed by a nacreous light so intense she was convinced nothing was solid, everything was color and shadow. No more. Even the soldiers who poured in through the doorway, past the door hanging half off its hinges, were no more than a pattern of forest shadows pouring in, splitting into two, surrounding her. The sense of unreality was such she had to stretch a hand to the sofa, expecting her fingers to go through the blue upholstery. But another hand, hard, skeletal, intercepted her hand. She was caught. Terror drew one sharp gasp from her. That was all. It was morning again and she was at the Festival, her hand stroked by Eliza.
With an effort, she brought her mind back to Amor. If she could find the house of the gun shipment, find it, trace Rafael, she could— she jerked her hand from Eliza’s grasp.
“I have to find—”
“—Adrian!” Eliza cut in. “We’ve forgotten him. We have to find him.”
She pulled Eliza down, seating her on the grass. “Stay,” she said. “I’ll find him. You wait here. Wait.” And ignoring her friend’s protest, she walked away, stepping carefully among the dancers lying on the grass, felled by tiredness and the sun’s heat. A few waved, called, asked her to stop by and share a drink but she ignored them. She jumped over the low cement hedge separating the lawn from the sidewalk and plunged into the Festival.
Two hands wrapped themselves immediately about her waist. She was lifted off her feet, arched in the air, and set down again. She had barely time to bow her thanks to the stranger before her right arm was hooked and she was dancing, borne along by the current and the drums. “Drink, love,” said a young man with bloodshot eyes, his mustache quivering. “Drink.” She sipped at the bottle, handed it back, and found six more being offered. Not to give offense, she took a sip from each, shutting her mind to the taste. Beer and gin and rum and Coke and whatnot. She would round the plaza, keeping an eye out for anything remotely familiar. A doorway, an alley, a gap between the houses.
A commotion behind her. The crowd parted for twelve young men, marching, bottles in hand, boisterous with a newly invented song. Ferdinand Magellan, the crazy old coot; took five ships and circumcised the globe . . . On and on, the refrain winding through the story of the sea of typhoons, rhythm stamped out by feet pounding the asphalt as the men pranced first on one foot, then the other, yelling about the boats and ships and the men on the shore one morning. Anna laughed, couldn’t stop laughing at the mangled history. She remembered: visions given her by printed words, by sensuous chants, women’s voices wailing in her sleep to the tinkling of gold anklets. One morning a long, long time ago. She pressed the young man’s arm against her body, raised a bottle to her lips, forgot the action, and looked at the sky instead. The sun entered her eyes. The Spanish long boats did sail from Cebu to Mactan, one early morning when the archipelago’s song was just beginning, in a still-young world of uncharted seas where already the possession of seven thousand one hundred islands was a passion which would not yield even tiny Mactan, though the Portuguese Magellan, with his Spanish flags, threatened and stomped his feet in rage; the young chief Lapu-lapu wouldn’t allow such a travesty and in the heat rush of blood that was the archipelago’s song, he lined the shores with half-naked men and dared the Spanish cannons, fighting desperately, with the rage of his love, until he skewered that poacher-vagabond Magallanes (she shivered; death at the beginning) while typhoons scattered Spanish expeditions and sent men scurrying into monasteries to esca
pe the terror of memory, the sea of storms, until the Spanish king tricked Fray Andres de Urdaneta out of church walls and threw him aboard another ship, this time with Miguel Lopez de Legaspi and Martin de Goiti who burned Manila’s palisades, erecting forever in this part of the globe the memory of the good ship Victoria and the eighteen men who survived the Magallanes expedition, the first to circumnavigate the earth, while De Goiti impregnated women of the northern shores and more besides, in punitive excursions inland, into the legendary kingdoms of Luzon, and his offspring would grow up, through four hundred years, to become the most beautiful women on earth, blood confused, diluted with the semen of all races, Chinese, Malay, Indian, British, not to mention the norte americano who came, led by Commodore George Dewey, with cannons blazing, sending to the sea bottom of its own hallucinations the Spanish fleet, where it still lies, visible through blue-green fathoms with the sea like a piece of glass from a cathedral window. So it began—the islands’ confusion over language and memory, so that in this Festival of commemoration there remained no more than this mangled song, as ridiculous as those tiny English classes where little brown boys, their minds stuck between the pages of the English-Pilipino-Spanish dictionary, stood up and announced to their New England Baptist teachers, a gift from Arthur MacArthur, a man whose forefathers were so besotted with themselves they had to name him with his name twice over, boys standing up to announce that the melancholy Portuguese-Spaniard had circumcised the globe, that son-of-a-goat; making no distinction between the girding of the earth and the girding of one’s instrument of manhood which every full-blooded son of the archipelago underwent in the twelfth summer of his life, with the old man herbalist choosing a guava branch for chopping board and spitting chewed-up leaves and roots on the bloody wound while the boys twisted their faces against the pain, minds flashing through a litany of curses in half a dozen languages, and could hardly keep still for the splat of poultice on their tools before rushing off to the river, there to wash themselves in some recollection of a baptism at the font which in turn was another recollection, going back to the river Jordan, and before that, much much older, going back to immersion in the river Ganges. Thus it was that one entered maturity through pain, the boys with their wounds, the girls jumping down steps to set the duration of their blood cycles, young minds already twisted by the many histories to be learned, beginning with the barangays, large canoes which brought the first exiles to the archipelago, Malays fleeing persecution, their boats hugging the shores of peninsular Southeast Asia to reach these islands, known now in English as the pearl of the Orient seas, pearls, my ass (she muttered, giggling), if pearls were green, possibly, in a blue sea, that sea where the children, sometimes girded about the loins, often naked, called out for coins tossed by the visitors aboard ships cruising the tamed sea; they would dive, true as fins, after the shimmer of money, catching coins with their teeth, bobbing up again like buoys, the coins flashing in their hands in triumph. Or where there was no sea, up in the mountains, they stood at the edge of precipices, calling for money, no, not really money, but for a chance to exhibit their loveliness, their swift, sharp grace, their precise eyes as they marked where the coins fell, thrown by tourists who raised cameras in anticipation as the children plunged into the abyss, leaping from rock to rock, toes prehensile as monkeys’, bodies held from death by sprigs of fir and tendrils of cadena de amor. How wise and beautiful were those faces, eyes brown enough to seem black, heads of hair bleached red-brown by the sun, truly beautiful even when they were just staring at the city while resting atop the gapped walls of In- tramuros, watching men and women promenade through the rebuilt romance of another age, through the Gate of Isabela, to cobbled walks and gaslight where the air was a compound of seawind and jasmine breath and perfume, how Manilans loved perfume, the city covering itself in all the world’s odors, a trace of yesterday in the scent of horseshit, today in carbon monoxide, and tomorrow in the gaseous spit of the stars, their simultaneous presence a testament to the existence of possibilities, where one could choose one’s own amiable time, even such a time when the world was young and women were named Maya, or Miss Estela, women so loved that an embrace of them went beyond the body, went beyond even the now, and, understanding all through a four-hundred-year-old song, accepted all, past, present, and future, and the seven thousand one hundred islands of a fractured history.
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