Insurrecto

  Copyright © 2018 by Gina Apostol

  All rights reserved.

  Jacket art: Woman with Fan, acrylic on canvas by BenCab,

  2001 BenCab Museum collection

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Apostol, Gina.

  Insurrecto / Gina Apostol.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-944-9

  eISBN 978-1-61695-945-6

  International PB ISBN: 978-1-61695-946-3

  I. Title.

  PR9550.9.A66 I57 2018 823’.914—dc23 2018027922

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Arne

  Grief is a nation of everyone,

  a country without borders.

  I roam the avenues of it

  out of habit. Summoned to testify

  on everyone’s behalf, I’m sticking

  to my story. It’s better not to talk

  about the wounded, or the moist remains

  of the disappeared. But there’s always one

  who can tell, in the packed

  amplitude of crowds.

  We are so many bodies, my friends.

  We all move in the same direction.

  As though someone had a plan

  from “DMZ” in Amigo Warfare by Eric Gamalinda

  “. . . neither a guest nor a host, neither a master nor a slave,

  neither a victim nor a victor in his relation to his own desire; as well of course being all those things.”

  from Becoming Freud by Adam Phillips

  Part One. A Mystery

  Cubao, Quezon City;

  and Punta, Santa Ana district, Manila

  20.

  The Insoluble Puzzle at the

  Heart of the Labyrinth

  For the mystery writer, it is not enough to mourn the dead. One must also study the exit wounds, invite the coroner to tea, cloud the mind with ulterior motives.

  The translator and mystery writer Magsalin has undertaken (yes, no, pun) some of the above at previous incidents. But the insoluble puzzle at the heart of the labyrinth, the secret within the secret, is not hers to bemoan. That is up to the dead man’s kin, who are, fortunately or not, also dead. It is said, for instance, that the writer Stéphane Réal’s mother died in Auschwitz, his father of shrapnel wounds before the war started. The writer Stéphane Réal had a wife. She is a widow. Her heart must be broken. (Magsalin cannot do that for her.)

  For the mystery writer, there are clues. Sheaves of paper with marginal notes, clippings of newsprint events of general interest, such as the Tunis–Marseille ship schedule, lottery numbers, and election results for the mayor of the commune Ivry-sur-Seine, 1979 (the winner is a communist). Everything could be a sign, and a word has at least two meanings, all of them correct. And it is not right to jump to conclusions, especially when it becomes apparent that one’s sorrow is misplaced in this instance.

  First, the writer Stéphane Réal has been dead for some time. Second, Magsalin has read only two of his books. Third, it turns out he does not figure at all except as premonitory prompt, place holder in this story of disappearance Magsalin is about to tell as she slips a hoard of facts into her duffel bag (leather, made in Venice, aubergine with olive handles, always admired by salesladies): to wit, the writer’s income tax returns, an unmailed box covered in pale blue whorls, doubled postcard-size photographs, books with slips of paper falling out, index cards slipping from loose envelopes, a stash of library books the writer thought he would have time to return.

  Her protagonist, what do you know, is female. The dead male writer that prompts the story waves goodbye. It turns out the woman is a filmmaker of moody artistry whose scandalous father precedes her fame. The woman’s name has an arbitrary Italian flavor—Chiara or Lucia, with the first C glottal and the last c a florid ch: she is Kiiiara, or Luchiiiia. Magsalin has yet to decide the name, an act that must occur without the reader’s noticing. Both names mean clear, or lucidity, or something that has to do with light, something vaguely linked to eyesight, hence to knowing, thence to blindness, or paradox.

  Choosing names is the first act of creating.

  2.

  At Ali Mall

  Magsalin gets the dossier from the filmmaker herself, who emails Magsalin. Microsoft Outlook warns: Mail thinks this message is Junk. Magsalin likes that her Mail thinks, but she doubts it. The subject line is intriguing.

  Translator needed, meet me at Muhammad Ali Mall.

  The message must be from a foreigner. No one in Manila calls the mall by that name. Some Filipinos do not even know that that seedy building in the traffic hellhole that is Cubao is named for the greatest—Muhammad Ali.

  Magsalin ignores the message.

  She is jet-lagged. She has just arrived from New York, on vacation in her birthplace, and she has no time for paid work. She is trying to unwind in Manila, hoping to continue a task that she believes has great spiritual payback, though the rewards are yet to surface.

  She has begun her mystery novel.

  She arrives with her baggage. A balikbayan box for her uncles, whose home she is visiting on this trip. The box is packed with vinyl records from bargain bins in a shop on Bleecker Street—Neil Sedaka, Ray Conniff and His Singers, the elegies of Karen Carpenter, and for good measure a new press of their favorite, Elvis, Aloha from Hawaii, still in cello-wrap, plus bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label that she thought might appease them. She has been gone for so long. All wrapped up in bath towels from Marshalls and stuffed with bags of Hershey’s Kisses in the extra spaces. Another suitcase, filled with books. In her duffel, aubergine with olive handles, a square box, covered in pale blue whorls.

  When Magsalin finally opens the email message, it only repeats its subject line, run-on included.

  Translator needed, meet me at Muhammad Ali Mall. Signed.

  The curtness of it, Magsalin thinks, is rude. She thinks the message is a joke, a hoax drummed up by her writer friends, a bunch of alcoholics hiding out in pork-induced stupor in Flushing, Queens.

  Not even her mother’s phone call had moved her to return home.

  “I cannot go home,” Magsalin had told her mother a long time ago.

  “Do not come home,” her mother had said on the phone. “If you feel you cannot do it, inday—do not return.”

  So she had not.

  The reasons for return need not be sentimental: they could be an intellectual project, a way to deal with writer’s block, or a respite during a cheap-airfare month. For a mystery writer, it is correct to return to soak in the atmosphere, to check out a setting, to round out a missing character, to find the ending.

  Later, of course, she searches the Web for the filmmaker’s name.

  The search results include an item only eighteen hours ago mentioning Chiara Brasi’s arrival in Manila. The report is an innocuous piece with a photo of the filmmaker at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, wearing huge shades and what looks like a safari outfit. Chiara is scouting locations for a movie, but no quote emerges from the director herself.

  Magsalin checks praxino.org, her website of choice for cultural curiosities. A Philippine tour operator reports in a news update that Tom Cruise was sighted in August at a resort in the Ilocos, sporting an ugly ingrown toenail revealed by beach flip-flops. Sandra Bullock did not buy her black baby in the area near the old US Air Force base in Pampanga. Madonna’s orphanage in Malawi is losing
money, its website hacked by teenagers. Eric Clapton’s late son’s former nanny, a Chabacano, is said to be in seclusion in Zamboanga, an island in the far South, near the pirates—she still mourns her single lapse. Once again, Donatella Versace did not slap her maid. A video of Chiara Brasi shows a wan and wavering figure, in one of those canned interviews to promote a project. This detail appears in FabSugar, the Emory Wheel, the Irish Times, romania-insider.com, the Kansas City Star, the Prague Post, gmanetwork, inq7.net, and Moviefone: at age five Chiara rode a helicopter over Manila with her father when he was filming his war movie about Vietnam. A fond memory, in 1976. Someone had unhinged the helicopter’s doors, and she looked out as if the sky were her vestibule.

  Magsalin goes back to the email message.

  She hits send.

  3.

  A Decrepit,

  Cramped Cement Block of Shops

  During the best of times Ali Mall is a decrepit, cramped cement block of shops hosting rugby glue sniffers, high school truants, and depressed carnival men in their off-hours. It was built in 1976, after the Thrilla in Manila. Ali Mall is across from the Araneta Coliseum in Cubao, site of the match that destroyed the career of the heavyweight champion of the world, Joe “The Gorilla” Frazier, and the source of our modern discomfort perhaps—a faint unease over earthly striving—whenever we remember the power and beauty of Muhammad Ali.

  Even at noon Ali Mall is creepy. The circus is nearby, and a cranky carousel rounds out a tiresome concept of eternity. Magsalin enters by the basement annex through the Philippine Airlines office toward the Botak shop and a trinket store selling Hello Kitty barrettes. A security guard is texting by some plywood boards. A clown stands by, also holding a phone, his fingers in the act of reply. Magsalin heads straight to the bakery selling cinnamon buns and pan de sal.

  Magsalin notes, like a skillful detective, that the woman, her likely protagonist, is wearing a felt-banded panama hat and tan wedges. It is the incognito look. But the designer shoes (Clergerie) and her giant shades (also French: Chanel) are amateurish, and even an idiot knows she’s rich. Magsalin does not live in New York for nothing. People exist there only to shop, and everyone develops a third eye for noticing the fashionable cut of a stranger’s pants, or someone’s too-youthful chukka boots. Some are tourists, frantic and passing by, but worse are the residents, a candid lot who will demand the make, the time, and the place you bought your bag, which Magsalin clutches, that aubergine and olive duffel, made in Venice.

  She pats the square contours of the pale blue box inside her bag.

  The duffel is clunky, and Magsalin feels foolish, like a tourist, unable to leave her valuables behind.

  This woman at the counter, drinking bottled water and eating no bread, has the luxury of looking underdressed. Magsalin would not be caught dead in a tank top in Manila. It is indecent, so her uncles say. Chiara is slightly naked but no-nonsense. She’s flat-chested. She is clutching an envelope. Chiara is muckle-mouthed. An errant grimace mars her beauty, rendering her ordinary at disarming moments, despite the glamour fame reports. In fact, Chiara has a fugitive charm, now you see it, but then it passes. Her shyness makes you uncomfortable. At least that is what Magsalin feels until she recognizes that the faraway gaze (obvious even behind Chanel), the averted angle of her chin, the awkward pose on the stool, the determined and surprisingly uninteresting monotone are signs of indifference.

  Magsalin considers leaving. How dare this filmmaker in too-short designer shorts ask urgently for her help online but in person look so apathetic about her reply?

  But then, Magsalin thinks, the woman also looks sedated, stoned.

  What does she know? Magsalin’s own buzz of choice is cheap Chilean pinot noir.

  Anyhow, Chiara’s past is full of shady anecdotes. At least, her father’s is. Magsalin did not need to Google the details. There was a time newspapers in Manila were full of Ludo Brasi’s escapades. His famished look belied his monstrous appetite. Even in preproduction, traveling around southern Luzon for his film, he was notorious, expending not just cash but also his spirit in wastes of shame. Oliver Stone, coarse-mouthed and demanding, shooting Platoon in the rice fields of Laguna, was a saint compared to Chiara’s father. So reported foreign bums around Olongapo whose claim to fame was being Dead Body Number 2 or Long-Haired Soldier with Venereal Disease in The Unintended. Wasn’t it in Lubao, Pampanga, that Ludo Brasi had an affair with both a costume designer and a local props woman, or was it a schoolteacher, during the filming of his Vietnam War movie, now more or less forgotten, though at one point it was thought The Unintended would challenge the genius of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—except be less commercial? He and Coppola are practically the same age; both grew up in New York. But while the one has a genial, paternal aura, even in the documentary by his faintly bitter, long-suffering wife, the other is satyric, greasy, saturnine, and unstable. Unlike Coppola, after his film’s triumphant premiere, Ludo Brasi disappeared. The initial reports were muddled. Was it an accident? Was he killed by rebels while on location in the wild? His disappearance, a critic said, made the existential weariness in his film, The Unintended, even more burdensome.

  It is no wonder that Ludo Brasi’s daughter has the aura of someone only intermittently aware, as if she has a learned disinterest in the questions people will ask. She could be thinking about a swatch of fabric she once saw in Umbria, or the time she smoked opium in Thailand with a famous pop star, a drug-addled childhood friend, the way she looks so distracted while she explains to Magsalin her semi-urgent business that brings her to this pastry shop in Cubao.

  21.

  Everything in the World Is Doubled

  In Las Vegas in 1969, everything in the world is doubled, the chandeliers, the plush of the blackjack tables, the old women in furs and mohair caps with rhinestone hatpins, the sheen of the noiseless slot machines. Even the song sounds like a broken record, a desperate loop. We can’t go on together! With suspicious minds!

  “It’s a comeback hit!” says the d.j. “The King is baaaaack,” the d.j. crows. Virginie has no idea what he is talking about.

  Virginie is staring at an old woman holding on to an empty pail, the name The Sands somewhat erased, its huge S an eroded snake, a molted shadow of itself. She stares because she and the woman are wearing the same Schreiner brooch: a pink rose. It is a coincidence. The woman’s mouth is open in silent despair.

  But the only sound Virginie hears is the scratch of Ludo’s pen (it is an antique 1940s Esterbrook, a miniature in pale green, one of hers).

  Her husband is so young.

  This fact touches Virginie, though she is six years younger than her husband.

  Virginie’s diplopia has the odd advantage of centering her focus only on the sound of Ludo’s writing.

  She sees double but hears nothing but scratch.

  As she watches her husband, she does not even hear the King.

  Scratch scratch scratch scratch.

  The woman sobbing in the elevator with her empty pail makes no sound for Virginie.

  4.

  Chiara Affirms She Is the Daughter

  Chiara affirms she is the daughter of the director of The Unintended.

  Magsalin confesses she saw the film several times in her teens.

  At one point, memorably, she recalls watching it frame by frame in a muggy class along Katipunan Avenue, for a course called Locations/Dislocations, about the phantasmal voids in Vietnam War movies shot in equally blighted areas that are not Vietnam. The disturbing web of contorted allusions, hidden historiographical anxiety, political ironies, and astounding art direction resident in a single frame, for instance, of a fissured bridge in the Philippines, in real life dynamited by the Japanese in 1943 and still unrepaired in 1976, and rebuilt specifically and reexploded spectacularly in the film’s faux-napalm scene against a mystic pristine river actually already polluted by local dynamite fishers—t
he movie, for whatever reason, kept putting Magsalin to sleep.

  But she omits that detail before the filmmaker’s daughter.

  There was something both engrossing and pathetic about it, about reconstructing the trauma of whole countries through a movie’s palimpsest, and what was most disturbing, of course, was that, on one level, the professor’s point was true, our identities are irremediably mediated, but that does not mean Magsalin has to keep thinking about it.

  Chiara seems unconcerned, however, by the scholarly implications of her father’s cult classic. She nods absently at Magsalin’s recall, as if she, Chiara, has heard it all before, as if she needs another Adderall.

  What she really needs, Chiara says, almost upsetting Magsalin’s cup of chai, is someone to accompany her on a trip.

  “Where to?” asks Magsalin.

  “I need to get to Samar.”

  22.

  Why Samar?

  Ludo pours out his dreams to her, and Virginie restrains her own, as if hers should be checked so his can run free, though no one has established the rules. She knows it will be no honeymoon because he is still thinking, a terrible condition, the way he pores over and picks through his scraps of demented plots before settling on the one: an epic about Rotarians; a love story involving Gus, the famous polar bear of Central Park Zoo (one of his obsessions), also known as The Bipolar Bear; a musical about dwarves in space (a physicist’s dream); an Italian soccer fantasy film with himself in a cameo, of course, as a deaf-mute goalie—a perfect life condition, he says, a state of pure passion!; a murder mystery set in Vietnam but in fact about pyromaniac grief, gruesome and unconsoling; an adaptation of The Tale of Genji in a World War II Japanese internment camp (also a musical).