He let her hand go. She flexed her fingers, closed them, flexed them again.
“Amazing,” he said. “You react instinctively. Checking functions at once. No tears. The pain already behind you. Amazing. But that won’t save you.”
“I’ll find out tonight,” she said evenly; in her head, a sinkhole swallowed her cries of pain. “It’s difficult to talk. The Festival—”
“Ah!”
“I’ll meet you tomorrow.”
“I was right, then. He’s here. That’s why she’s here.” He smiled, folded his arms.
“You’re right,” she lied. “He’s here. But where—I don’t know. Tomorrow. When the Commander arrives, I’ll slip away from the confusion. I’ll meet you at the—the . . .”
“The belfry. Built by the Spaniards. A proper place to sell one’s friend.”
“Spaniards! By natives you mean, supervised by Spaniards. Possibly conscripted.”
“How sharp you are!” He considered for a moment. “Right. Six o’clock. No, six-thirty. I have to meet that tiresome old fool. Here, ha? Maybe, I’ll let him take the Commander.” He laughed. “Then, I’ll take him.” He dropped back, motioning for her to go on. “The belfry,” he said.
The transvestite had promised to be there as well. On the morrow. Six-thirty. With a rifle. In case she failed. She slipped the gun under her pillow, along with Batoyan’s radiogram. A weight slipped off her shoulders. For all his cruelty, Amor was stupid. Cruelty was stupid.
In the dining room, the guests were on their feet, necks stretched out the better to see the fireballs rising from the island.
“To the deck,” Adrian said. “Let’s go. It’ll only last for a short while.”
With the two women in tow, he dashed out, calling to the steward to save their dinner. Anna shivered as the sea wind boiled about her, threatening to unpin her hair. But she made it to the rails, and with Adrian’s body shielding her from the cold, she could lean her arms on the salt-encrusted bars. In the distance, beyond the moon-touched waters, the town lights glimmered, the double string of lamps at the pier distinct while over the darkness of the plantations globules of white light floated upward, skimming coconut fronds. The peasant’s festival.
“Swamp gas,” Adrian said. “Or something as mundane.”
“It’s beautiful,” Eliza breathed.
Anna smiled, remembering the luminous parade in the sky. The island now, with lights below and lights above, seemed to float in a silver sea, like a monstrous leaf-shaped boat, stirring white foam in its wake.
“One could almost believe,” Eliza said, “there are, uh, things beyond”—she shrugged—“beyond now.”
“Swamp gas,” Adrian said. He was wondering if those were the souls his grandfather spoke of, the wandering dead who manned mountain passes and laid a question on each mortal who came by.
“Ghosts?” Anna teased Eliza.
“Why not?”
“Logical,” she said. “Before the Spaniards came, nothing in these islands went away. Our ancestors’ spirits were supposed to continue roaming the forests.”
“You mean I could’ve met my grandfather?” Eliza laughed.
“More likely, your grandmother. The women were the intermediaries then. The—priestesses. What an ugly word.”
Adrian shivered in mock horror. “I don’t want to meet my grandmother.”
The passage door opened and the steward stuck his head in the wind. They had to finish their dinner, he called out; the hall was to be cleared for dancing. There was no helping it. They turned away from the island with regret and returned to the dining room.
By a coincidence, they all decided to retire early, in preparation for the Festival’s last day. Though Eliza hesitated, casting covetous glances at the band tuning up, she had barely made it through dinner, yawning between bites of broiled milkfish. Anna definitely wasn’t dancing anymore. She went to her cabin and, stretching out on the bed, sifted through Guevarra’s cryptic message.Be happy, he’d said, it’s preordained.
“But what does that mean?” she had asked Rafael, finding him at last perched on a stool in front of a corner store. He had a Coke bottle in his hand. His eyes had warned her away—a warning she ignored, walking straight up to him to thrust her face toward his face. Amor’s here, she had whispered, tell Guevarra to call it off.
But he had merely nodded. “Yes. We know. The pendejo is here.
So don’t forget. The cemetery. Beside the chapel. Inland. There’s only one road so you can’t—”
“Call it off.”
He snorted. “How? Dismantle the stage? You’re dreaming. The old man knows. That’s enough.”
“What old man?”
“Him. He. Now, leave me alone.” And he slid off the stool. She seized his arm then.
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me be, Anna.”
“Don’t. Please. Don’t just walk away.”
“All right, all right.” He looked around and jerked his head toward an alley. She let him precede her, following a minute later. He was there, haunches folded, drawing with a piece of stick on the ground. “What’s happening?”
“It’s Guevarra’s show. The first luxury he’s allowed himself. At least, as far as I know.” He peered at her. “Ever wonder why he was taken that time?”
She shook her head. “We never asked questions then.”
“Nor even later, it seems.” A pause. “His wife and son betrayed the routes.”
“Shit!”
“It happens. When you least expect, from where you least expect it: betrayal.”
She had nothing to say.
“Amor broke them. He turned the woman over to the soldiers and let the kid watch. And listen. A fourteen-year-old. I’d pulverize Amor myself.” He lifted the Coke to his lips. “But don’t repeat this or I’m dead. We only found out recently. Since then, Guevarra’s gone— deep. Submerged. Deep, deep.”
“What happened?”
“They were executed. Guevarra cast the first death vote. Nobody else would.” Another silence. “You’ve never seen an execution. Bullets aren’t wasted on informers. The men used a crowbar. Guevarra watched.”
She opened her hands helplessly.
“He had a message for you. Be happy, he said, it’s preordained. Don’t ask me what that means. He’s been into cryptic remarks lately.” “Like what? And what does that mean?”
“Time at his heels. Settling old debts. Mostly about time. And something about meeting everyone again and again through time. I don’t know. Once he said we knew one another before the war made us strangers; that we were all kin.” He shrugged. “We love him, though.”
“To be loved that way!”
“Be happy, he said.” He rose to his feet, stretching his torso with a pained grimace. “Remember: the cemetery.”
But it was Guevarra’s words—be happy—she held now, as Adrian walked into the cabin. He slipped into the narrow space beside her, his body’s curves fitting against hers. It was painless, easy, without doubt. She could trace in the clean lines of his young body the origins of his need—his grandfather spending a fortune on old records, searching for his name, rasping how impossible it was not to know one’s name, or even the name of the four-hundred-year war which couldn’t be won until its nature had been deciphered, baptized, understood, his wheeze an undertow in Adrian’s harsh whisper of his own dreams, nothing beyond the simple language of a home and work, “a house by the sea, Anna, which we’ll keep clean ourselves, without confusion, the hell with all these games, and you’ll heal there as I will. . Yes, Adrian, yes. Lulled by the waves, the ship’s rocking, she was almost asleep when he laughed suddenly, loud in that small room. “Whatever shall we do with my grandfather’s money?” he asked. She patted his head. “Give it to our favorite charity.” The corners of her mouth twitched. He’d be surprised to know what that was.
Thus, they slept, Eliza with the gun under her pillow, Anna and Adrian with their arms around each other, within the ship rocked
by a wayward current, and under the wakeful eyes of Colonel Urbano Amor who, standing well away from a barred window, the moon casting vertical shadows on his face, looked out to the sea, to the one ship among ships, and wished himself in possession of the most singular, most beautiful thing he had ever encountered in his life.
3
The Festival awoke to a Latin mass celebrated by three priests at the town’s main church. Bells, whistles, and drums. As the din rose over the town, the barbaric throng within the church swelled and spilled to the outside veranda, down the steps, onto the narrow strip of grass lying between the sidewalk and church property. It became impossible to line up before the altar for communion. The two assisting priests and their acolytes had to thread their way through the crowd, handing out the holy wafers. Thus, with forbearance and a long wait, all who wished for the sacrament received it: warriors and urbanites, transvestites, the malformed, the soldiers, the children. The odd congregation bent its head, fist striking the breast thrice in a confession of frailty.
As the bells signaled the mass’s end, men and women plunged through the church portals and threw themselves back into the Festival, dancing even without the drums, their music human shrieks and laughter. Anna, Adrian, and Eliza, borne by the celebrity tide, found themselves arm-in-arm with strangers, pounding the earth with their heels. Jump, step, jump, dance away a little. They passed a clump of young men, beer bottles in hand, bawling lustily to an old man’s guitar. Anna caught the song’s lyrics: woman in black, shrouded by her own black hair, walking the darkness. She recognized it at once, the words appearing in her mind as wriggling black ink on yellow music sheets: “Lovely Stranger.” Something survived, she thought; something real survived. To her surprise, Adrian himself was singing the lyrics, stamping his feet in rhythm, his voice collapsing into trills of laughter. To her right, Eliza picked up the refrain—woman in black with blue-black hair, searching for a black shroud for her grief— and bent the melody into a faster beat, turning it into a silly excuse for dancing. On and on, about the plaza, the drums now joining them, they whirled, feeling the plants wriggling through the earth’s layer, the globe itself wearing down a track in space, the galaxy turning on its axis.
They passed Rafael once. Perched on top of a garbage bin, he favored Anna with the sight of his tongue, sticking it out as she went by and then looking away, ignoring her pointedly. She was so surprised all she could think was how obscene, really, that organ was—red, slick, and wet, not meant to be exposed to dry air. Automatically, she tensed her right arm against the “toy”—a hardness against her skin.
They circumnavigated the plaza thrice, until Adrian, panting, yelled “halt!” and jerked them suddenly and efficiently out of the crowd. He ignored Eliza’s protests and herded them to the marketplace, a vast temporary shed, inadequately lit, with aisles narrowed by piles of woven baskets, wooden gods flung carelessly in grocery cartons, bead necklaces redolent of plastic, black whistles.
“Pah!” Eliza said. “Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy.”
But she tried on a brass corset with a fringe of bells and laughed with pleasure.
“Oh, perfect,” she shouted, picking up a headband of boar teeth. “I look barbaric. Primitive when I meet—” She seized a comb of seashells, shaped like a peacock’s crest, dyed blue and green. Holding it against her head, she turned to the two. “How do I look? How do I look?”
“Beautiful, Lord,” Anna replied.
“I’m scared to look at you,” Adrian said.
Eliza was pleased. When the storekeeper drew near for the payment, she batted her eyelashes at Adrian, pretending to charm him. He laughed; picking up a necklace of tiny skulls—carved wood, painted white—he threw this over Anna’s head. “In memoriam,” he said.
“I don’t want it,” Anna said, retreating one step, looking at the skulls nestled between her breasts.
“It’s not nice!” Eliza shook her head.
But Adrian was already counting the money onto the storekeeper’s palm. Eliza preened; arching her fingers, she stalked down the aisle.
“Make way, make way,” she intoned mockingly, thrusting her head forward. “Make way for the matriarch. I am the protector. Protect- mg!
The vendors shrieked with laughter. Anna, walking slower, lifting the necklace away from her chest, squinted at the sunlight. “It’s too bright,” she said.
“Too hot,” agreed Adrian. “And it’s morning yet.”
“Hey, you mortals, hurry up!” Eliza waved.
They stirred reluctantly, drawn despite themselves by the commotion in the streets. A fat man wearing diapers and an oversized bib rattled by in a cart drawn by a goat. He sucked on a huge wine bottle capped with a rubber nipple.
“What’s that?” Eliza screamed and, reaching over, patted the creature on the head. The fat man gurgled and lunged, his teeth snapping inches away from her fingers. Eliza veered away, laughing.
“Yummy, yummy,” the fat man said as his cart moved on.
The heat was terrific. Jostled, shoved this way and that, they wandered through the Festival, feeling the sun sucking at their strength. Adrian stripped off his shirt again and wound it about his head. He wished the Festival were over, that they could leave for Manila, resume old routines, carry out new plans. Now, in its last hours, the
Festival was dragging, though the dancers leapt higher, the drums played with greater frenzy, and the warriors marched with more bravura, brandishing spears now, and chanting hala, bira! Hala, bira! while wine bottles traveled the route of the plaza. It was the energy of desperation.
Anna, too, was touched by that sadness—a grief as stealthy as the rush of waves, a quiet, remote, and yet insistent noise trickling into the silent spaces of the Festival. She danced on leaden feet, never missing a beat for all her hesitancy. An automaton making merry. Beside her, Eliza, arching her neck to the sun, whispered, asking what was happening, what was wrong. But she danced nevertheless, in her loose blue peasant blouse, blue jeans, and blue sneakers. All three were in one color this day—blue all the way—quite by coincidence, though they had bantered about their uniform throughout the boat ride from ship to shore. Blue they left, thought Eliza, and just as blue would return at the setting of the sun.
Thus, they spent the day, hurled by the Festival from one mood to the next, until the sun lay low enough to be speared by the town’s roofs and shadows slanted across the plaza's lawn. Anna awoke to the time of danger quite abruptly, seeing the plaza with inordinate clarity: church and municipal hall, facade of houses, the central spread of grass with six desultory trees, the kiosk. Northward, beyond the eastern intersection, a side street had been barricaded, a temporary stage erected. This was where the Commander, flanked by the island’s officers, would give the salute to the Festival.
“It’s just a speech,” Eliza said, “probably four hours long. Boring, boring, boring.”
“True,” Anna agreed. “We should find a friendly house and proceed to dinner.”
“But I want to see him,” Adrian said.
“In which case,” Anna countered, “we should stay right there!” She pointed to the church steps. “He’ll pass by, in his car.”
“It’ll be too quick. His car never stops. It just goes—zoom!”
“Not in this crowd. Not possible. How do you clear the road? He’ll go by very slowly. It will be a promenade. It’s supposed to be lucky.” Anna laughed.
“Oh? How?”
“Add five years to your life.” Anna shook her head. “He’s superstitious. Won’t be able to resist that.”
“In that case,” Eliza jumped up, “so am I! I’m making my promenade.”
“Hey, hey!”
Adrian grunted. “Let her go. But come, I want to look at the stage.” Anna shook her head. “Just look. I swear. We’ll be at the church steps by the time he gets here.”
He began walking toward the intersection. Anna cursed and followed quickly. She wore no watch and the town hall clock was permanently set at six o’c
lock. Adrian was walking too fast, dodging the crowd which was moving southward, in anticipation of the Commander’s appearance. She could not keep up with him. As they neared the boundaries of the plaza, a loud, wordless roar swept toward them. A minibus appeared at the far end of the short road, inching through a rush of bodies, ignoring hands raised to its tinted windows. Impossible to tell whether noise and gestures were in greeting or in rage. Now, Anna could see the soldiers—six rows deep, eight abreast—who preceded the bus, M-i6s at ready, held low, at the waist. More soldiers on foot behind the bus, followed by a military jeep with a machine gun. There were more—still lost among the narrow back streets that fed the plaza’s main road.
When she turned to Adrian, she saw he had reached the intersection. She was about to dash across when a phalanx of men came out of the side street. They were all in immaculate clothes and garlanded with purple flowers. She recognized the governor, the mayor, the provincial commander—those who had done their promenade the previous day. But with them was another man, one who gestured imperiously and called out “Adrian!” Adrian, Adrian. The group stopped and now, as one, looked at Adrian who himself stopped moving. Adrian, Adrian. “Adrian,” the man called, “come here. The governor—” Adrian’s head turned slowly, his eyes finding Anna and there was that plea. Understand, the eyes said, not in public; one couldn’t shame one’s father in public. Anna caught the contempt that the older man flicked her way—a careless whip of a look. She swayed, stunned both by that look and by the anger surging through her body. But she was already suppressing it, automatically, keeping an eye on the minibus and the crowd, men and women passing between the vehicles, ignoring the soldiers, forcing the two vehicles to spread farther and farther apart. Adrian shrugged and half turned toward the group. Adrian, Adrian. “Hurry,” she called out, “come back quickly. I’ll be by the steps.” And watched him join the group as it disappeared in the direction of the stage.
She was counting. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. The minibus continued its snail pace. Thirty. The military jeep had entangled itself in a knot of people at the road’s head. The soldiers on foot brandished guns, shooing the crowd back, but the young men and women merely gestured amiably, shook their heads, linked arms, and danced about the soldiers.
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