Insurrecto Page 10

  Glory to the newborn kiiiiiing!

  Teenage Meyer, the smooth-chinned bugler, smirks at the soapy, gleaming girls.

  Soon all you can see of Scheetherly are his raving eyes.

  The last time Scheetherly had gone nuts, they had found him obsessively swimming in figure eights in the river, for hours on end, unable to stop.

  Randles wants to take him to the hospital in Tacloban, but it is Bumpus, the lieutenant, who gets the job. Everyone loves Bumpus, he gets whatever he wants. Even the local chief of police, who keeps beating Bumpus at chess, has a soft spot. Captain Connell, you can tell, is a pushover. Bumpus went to Harvard. Connell did not. Bumpus’s parents are big shots in Boston. They are friends with the senior senator of Massachusetts, Senator George Frisbie Hoar of anti-imperialist fame. (Sadly, this exalted connection will not save Bumpus, soon to be hacked to death in his sleep.) Tall, lanky, golden-haired, and young as the lot of them, Bumpus has the feral charm of a black sheep. Drinks the locals under the table, so survivors remember. A Brahmin of bahalina tuba, claims a local historian always ready to wax lyrical over his homegrown wine. Valeriano Abanador, Balangiga’s chief of police, the most educated man in town after the parish priest, acts as if he merely tolerates that madcap Bumpus, but every day anyhow Abanador, known among locals and americanos alike as the Chief, invites him to his hut near the water, where the two play chess and discuss arcane military arts.

  At reveille, as Meyer the bugler walks back toward his post, Scheetherly is seeing reindeer, wise men, and snow. Griswold the surgeon shakes his head over Scheetherly’s sad shape. Bumpus takes the deranged Scheetherly on the boat to the big camp across the water, to Tacloban. Bumpus keeps his secret to himself, so as not to arouse the miserable men: Padre Donato the priest has said to Bumpus that in Tacloban he will find a surprise—the soldiers’ long-lost mail.

  For the arrival of Cassandra on the boat has buried the soldiers’ hopes—they have been dreaming for months of the mail steamer, but instead they get this silken pest in a canoe, a woman with no business being a photographer, a vulgar job unfit for women. In fact, she has no business having a job at all.

  She is also rich, as you can tell by her inability to see them, these desolate men standing in the mud and the carabao grass. Certain types of ladies have no reason to acknowledge they coexist with people like them, the soldiers in Balangiga, even though they meet on the other side of the world sharing a common unease, the unease of aliens. The men fail to catch Cassandra’s brief expression of distress, as she blushes at the ragged sight of the company she is to keep. They see instead the arrogant blue eyes barely glancing at them, the men of Company C, America’s military servants—disheveled, smelly, and demented. Still, the soldiers look across the riverbank with a hopeful air, gazing at Lieutenant Bumpus and his insane cargo in the distance.

  But beyond Bumpus’s disappearing boat, there is no mail boat, no other boat in sight.

  The men’s feelings of longing, of being adrift in an infernal solitude, dislocated from family, crazed by distance, heighten with the descent and portage of each steamer trunk and clothes chest and clanking camera and hatbox after hatbox disembarking from the imperious Cassandra’s bancas—one by one the baggage of extravagant displacement mocks the men’s sense of being marooned in this hellhole, this humpbacked paradise that is Samar.

  In addition, everyone at some point or another has had lingering pernicious malaria, or filariasis, or syphilis, or dengue hemorrhagic fever, and other wastes that go on for years.

  The men stare at their fearless leader, that pink-faced boy in the old-fashioned mohair collar who makes their lives wretched.

  Captain Thomas W. Connell, all of twenty-six years old, barely out of his West Point grays, watches Cassandra’s stance of self-sufficiency around the bancas. She has that smug look of completion and command that irritated him when he first saw her at a dance, at General Jakey Smith’s huts in Tacloban, one of those upper-class civilian soirees that offer reprieves to Connell as surreal as the war. To some he was a catch, but it was clear that to her, he was just some cog in a wheel.

  An imperialist’s stooge, she pointed out.

  —I beg your pardon, he said, wanting to smack her but keeping his hand on his chin, as if reflective.

  And she proceeded to lecture him, asking him if he had ever heard of the speeches and writings of that editorializing mountebank, that despicable radical Mark Twain—which he hadn’t, he explained, as he was off fighting a war.

  The violence of his sense of injustice before this woman kept his lips tightly pressed. And at the dance he had that feeling of incompetence, of unstable consequence that still rules over him in passing moments of civilian life.

  —Well, you should read his essay, “To a Person Sitting in Darkness,” captain, she had advised, with that earnestness that to him added to the unseemliness of a woman’s thoughts, her passion confirming she had too hastily subscribed to them—It was a sensation in North American Review! Every American should read it: he is like Hamlet, he is our own Shakespeare: Twain holds a mirror up to our nature!

  —Ouch, snorted that busybody Bumpus, passing by—I had no idea of the darkness in which we sit, here in this sunny paradise, Tacloban.

  But Bumpus was nothing if not a charmer, and he eased the captain aside at Jakey Smith’s salon, teasing the woman as he approached.

  —But if you dislike this war so much, what are you doing here with us? grinned Bumpus.

  —You need an observer, she said, touching the young red-faced lieutenant on his epaulet with her lace fan.

  Clearly Bumpus’s blond good looks gave his equally disagreeable views a pass in this shapely harridan’s eyes. And called upon to return to her friends, a bunch of sweltering Filipinos in three-piece suits—americanas, they called their uncomfortable wear, without irony—she bowed to them both, giving her farewell with that nasal turn on the word gentlemen that Captain Connell recognized: he had once lived among the striving classes in Manhattan. Her voice was the mark of her stature and of his diminution, he with his accent of a nobody from Buffalo, from the wilds of upstate New York, a town as beastly in her mind as its name.

  So Connell thought.

  That morning on the riverbank in Balangiga, the captain has the pursed look of a parish priest that even the parish priest does not have. Padre Donato waves and smiles at the elaborately dressed señorita with her phalanx of glass and mirrors as if he, the token brown man in the scene, is playing the role of the good cop in this tribunal by the banks, while the soldiers and their captain, watching the incidental woman’s progress along the talahib path, after the mad adventure with Scheetherly, are the evil ones out to get her.

  Cassandra goes straight for the parish priest.

  In the first stereo card of this encounter, Padre Donato looks like a dwarf in scale, an elfin miniature amid vertical, unsmiling shades. But even all by himself, the padre looks like a badly drawn, joyful comic of himself. His pate is flat, like the hammerhead shadows that darken the archipelago’s waters, so that the children call their squashed-looking priest Butanding while he pats them on their heads anyhow. Padre Donato is a short, fat bundle in a surplice, a happy sack of juvenile carne, piglet or veal, wrapped in a soutane.

  The captain, on the other hand, is a superfluously moody figure in a dress shirt so neat it looks fake, art-designed against the palms (so it is, with the prop master studying military manuals and historical costume books of American wars, from the Civil War to the Sioux plains to the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898). Captain Coño, the locals call the head of the garrison, though they claim not to understand the translation of his name. Connell has the rigid posture of a man pretending he doesn’t sweat, though he must be dying in his woolen shirt. His furry collar itches. He has summer’s white cotton dress in his quarters, but he won’t wear new clothes out of delicacy. Some of his men still wear the blue rags they wore in M
ay to fight the bantamweight Boxers of China. Oh these forgotten men of the Military Order of the Carabao! Not only minds but clothes have gone amok in the hurly-burly of the sea crossings, from Hawaii to Manila to Pekin, all the dirty little wars that are now sadly America’s burden, though it need not be so, for invasion is only optional. The captain has not known a woman since their departure from Manila. But just in case, he keeps his clothes tidy.

  In the stereo cards, the captain does look as if he has a stick up his ass.

  Connell’s expression gives nothing away.

  On the other hand, Padre Donato’s smiling Buddha face shines from the coconut oil streaming down his groomed hair and beneath his outlandish broad-brimmed straw hat, the kind no priest on the island wears (priest hats are wool, imported from Singapore). This priest in a peasant hat raises red flags to the knowing, none of whom includes the Americans. Padre Donato always has a hilot nearby to massage his temples and the small of his back, his solar plexus being a particular health concern, astrologically. The hilot, a peaceable charlatan, may be seen lounging under a coconut tree, shading his eyes with a peaked hat, the triangular kind seen in Vietnam War movies in bird’s-eye-view before all the rice-planting peasants die.

  Cassandra looks the priest in the eye and shakes his hand as if he were the leader of the isle, exclaiming:

  —Padre Donato, so good to see you again! You will get your picture taken today for me to send to New York, ha? You promise?

  —Ah, anything for you, Señorita Cassandra, Miss United States of the Americanos! Promise!

  29.

  The Intended

  “He left it behind. We thought you might want it, since you are the letter’s intended.” He speaks in a foreigner’s English, softly. Caz will not place it. She will not remember him, his voice, or his words.

  He gestures. His voice lacks confidence. He feels unbalanced. “It is your name,” he points. “On the envelope.”

  “Thank you,” she says, her mouth visibly shaking, and he is afraid. She stands at an angle away from him in her living room, half facing the dark. But he can see, the way her mouth opens in a cry, a crumpled anguish that has no sound, that she is deep in a place that has no entry anyhow, she is all alone in it, and it is a mistake to be a witness. He feels his neck growing warm, his brow and the back of his head and the parts of his body—that had been cold when he entered these rooms weathered by the habagat—feeling suddenly hollow, febrile. He feels it suddenly, the heat, beads down his cheek.

  She stands there, her arms wrapped around the manila envelope tied in rubber bands, her body bent over it in a bow. She does not touch the other package, the paper bag. Her posture does not invite consolation. He moves backward, as if about to leave, when she speaks.

  “You were there?” she asks. “You saw him—?”

  The messenger is at the door and turns toward her in the darkness.

  He speaks slowly, as if his words need measuring, as if he, too, is sorry to reveal it.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Oh, her mouth says, another crumpling, a silence.

  “No, ma’am. No one is there.”

  “So no one heard,” she whispers. “Who if he cried would hear him. No one saw. Can that be true?”

  “Pardon, ma’am?”

  “Can that be true—there was no observer?”

  The messenger stands still for a moment, as if trying to understand her question, as if needing a translation. The man’s thoughts on the matter of the film director’s death have been muddled, a burden of incomprehension new to him, a weight of horror and guilt and anger and sorrow. Mostly sorrow.

  He had witnessed her departure from the set months before, but the gossip on their breakup was hushed. It had taken him a few days to get her address, here in her new place by the Pasig, in Manila. Freddo made him do it. And he had only done it, he thought, because although the man was not of his country, the messenger felt he was of the director’s clan. The family of film. Even she, for a while, had been a part of it. They say the man was a genius. He, the messenger, was only a carpenter. He did not know him. He was surprised once when the man spoke to him in his own language, Farsi.

  He had learned it, the director had explained, in Denmark, where he had lived for a time in Christiania, he said, neighbor to a family of Persian immigrants.

  The man was also a foul-mouthed genius, the carpenter had discovered. He could curse like a devil in Farsi.

  But now that the messenger is here, at her home, he wonders at the futility of it.

  The director was gone. Just like that.

  His lips quiver.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says. “It is true. There is no one. No one is at home. There is no observer.”

  He uses the present tense as Filipinos do—he has been too long in these islands.

  “You know it does not exist,” she mutters.

  “Pardon?”

  He feels dumb. He keeps saying stupid words, as if his English is half forgotten.

  “It does not exist,” she repeats, looking at nothing. “The world does not exist without an observer.”

  Now I am alone.

  The messenger shuts the door behind him. He feels the cold beads drip down his cheek. He does not understand if it is a river of sweat or tears.

  1.

  MV Blanket

  MV Blanket powers toward Allen, Samar.

  Magsalin has followed Chiara up the deck of the ferry, watching the woman’s high-heeled strap sandals as she climbs. This is a professional. Not a hair out of place, not a speck on her camouflage-print safari-style Louis Vuitton suit. She perfectly intuits the measure of the stairway’s steps, ascending without waste of space or spiky heel dangling in the air.

  “Oh my God,” screams Chiara up on the top deck. “What is that!”

  Passing all of them by, eating up the expanse of their ocean view, is a giant head of the Virgin Mary.

  The statue’s two eyes stare past them like enormous Sohoton caves.

  The gargoyle, a gigantic white shadow, would perturb the most rational agnostic.

  “It is the Virgin Mary,” says Magsalin.

  “The Statue of the Risen Christ!” explains Edward. “A masterpiece of the Samar artisans. See. It usually floats on the water. An engineering feat!”

  “Oh,” says Chiara, “it is—usually fantastic.”

  For a moment, their thoughts pass, until the entire dream, in slow motion, moves on toward Catbalogan.

  “I guess it is like that scene in Fellini—E la nave va—a film unjustly neglected by critics,” Chiara says, regaining her high-heeled poise, the habagat’s torpid air on the ship’s deck making no impression on her sharp suit.“My dad made me watch it. There’s this huge ship that blocks the town’s view of the water, sitting there, when the movie begins. It gives you claustrophobia. You feel you’re going blind—there’s too much mystery. Your entire left sight line of what should be water is erased by the ship. That movie made me phobic. Since then I’ve been scared of huge, unnecessarily bloated things, like air mattresses, or blimps. And Jeff Koons sculptures. And that thing. That Virgin Mary.”

  “Lots of people are turned off by Jeff Koons sculptures. I don’t know about the Virgin Mary,” says Magsalin. “That is a pretty dramatic effect of one film. My favorite scene in La nave va is when the journalist interviews the Grand Duke about the dead opera singer, and the entire scene is a quarrel over the translation of ‘edge of the mountain’ versus ‘mouth of the mountain.’ So funny.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” says Chiara. “But yeah, I like that scene. That is my favorite Fellini.”

  “It’s the one about the funeral of an artist, isn’t it? The ship is on its way to blow the artist’s ashes out to sea.”

  “And what kind of a name is Allen?” Chiara says.

  “Why are you changing the subjec
t?”

  “Who is that town, Allen, Samar, named after?”

  “Whom,” says Magsalin.

  “That’s not nice.”

  “Sorry,” says Magsalin. “I was raised by a grammar Nazi. Come to think of it, my mom was probably trained by one of those American Thomasite teachers. An entire colonial school system for fifty years mainly training people to be the police of English grammar. Not the best formula for educating a nation.”

  “So who is that town named after?”

  “Woody,” says Magsalin, “You know the movie Bananas? In the early days, when TV was just starting, commercial TV in Manila had no live programming, and the TV stations just borrowed films from the foreign embassies. I used to watch Take the Money and Run and Bananas every day for months, over and over again. I thought all movies were about madcap existentialism and comic revolutionary plots. That town is named after the guy who made Bananas. You know, where Woody Allen dresses up like Fidel Castro and drives out a dictator also dressed like Fidel Castro.”

  “My favorite scene in Bananas is when the South American translator translates the words in English of Woody Allen into English,” says Chiara. “So funny. Turns out the translator is insane, just escaped from a lunatic asylum, and there’s a chase scene of his doctors trying to catch the crazy translator with a butterfly net.”

  “Hey, that’s my favorite scene, too,” says Magsalin.

  “I know,” says Chiara. “I think I need a butterfly net. So really, who is the town named after?”

  “Guy named Henry T. Allen. Some American who probably gave the water cure to a bunch of rebels, and so of course he gets a town named after him. He was really good at getting his amigos, the Filipinos, to turn into US Army scouts. He organized the Philippine Constabulary—which is what Marcos also called his martial-law goons—the PC—history in this case seems to be mainly just kind of an extended epilogue. The policing and counterinsurgency in this country are all inherited from the genius of Henry T. Allen. The tortures and killings by the police have a long history—extrajudicial is kind of traditional. But Henry Allen outdid himself. Eventually, his brand of bureaucratic genius killed three million Filipinos, mostly civilians, by 1913. Counterinsurgency broke the Philippine revolution. And hunger, of course, as the Americans starved out the guerrillas by burning rice and farmlands and farm animals, killing the carabaos and such.”