Insurrecto Read online

  “I prefer your Bananas story.”

  “Everyone does. But it is true, though—I did watch Take the Money and Run and Vittorio De Sica’s Sunflower, with Sophia Loren, over and over again. In the seventies, when I was a kid. The TV stations in the provinces were taken over by the dictator’s men, with no live programming for months. Later I understood. In emergency situations, the stations reverted back to old habits. Some joker from the Ministry of Public Information probably had long overdue rentals from Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center, or the British Council, and just slotted them in. Old habits die hard.”

  24.

  Days of the Habagat

  And the priest crosses himself with a dramatic reach across his shoulders and a pious coupling of his palms, bowing toward the lady.

  The impression he gives is that he is a bit of a dolt.

  Nevertheless, that afternoon Cassandra Chase takes pictures of him for Hudson Valley Stereographic Company, the Tru-Vision arm of Underwood & Underwood, budding conglomerate of the budding century. Padre Donato will keep his pose as Cassandra gathers more extras, the soldiers and the laborers and the washerwomen and the town officials, deaf and dumb Kapitan Abayan with shy Balais, his mild-mannered vice-mayor with the classical name, Andronico, in a composition she holds in her head, lifted from battle scenes in Paolo Uccello or mystical groupings of onlookers in lives of the saints.

  Cassandra loves hodgepodge, mixing knight and animal, soldier and martyr. Especially she is struck by those Italian pictures about peripheral scenes in dramatic moments, such as the sleeping guards at the Resurrection of Christ or the bunch of chatty town burghers who do not notice the centurions in the background, torturing a man wearing a crown of thorns. She keeps adjusting, but her groups are never quite right. She switches the smooth-faced bugler, who is too tall, for the sullen laborer, who is too lean. She spies the Chief and the surgeon ambling beneath the palm fronds, and she waits for them.

  What she aims for is awkwardness in symmetry, an aesthetic principle and uneasy weight as she travels through the islands. The idea might be good for the Renaissance, but who knows if it works in postcard-size 3-D. Sometimes, she frets, the effect she produces is just of forlorn, too crowded congregations who have come together in a palm jungle without rhyme or reason, squinting at the sun.

  As the nineteenth century turns a corner, imagining itself into perspective, the wonders of stereopsis have taken hold. The illusion of depth is a fetish. The rosewood stereograph, also known as the Holmes viewer, is a precursor of such toys as the twentieth-century Baby Boomer’s View-Master, with its seven-pair color reels showing pictures of Popeye eating spinach in six moves, or the Seven Wonders of the World, or the adventures of animated mice—one pair of frames at a time in seven circular 3-D clicks. But instead of a fourteen-picture disc, the product of Cassandra’s rectangular art—the Holmes viewer’s stereo card, 3½ by 7—is an elegant, sepia-toned twofer.

  Griswold the surgeon is walking along with the Chief to pose for the New York lady just arrived in their swamps. He is a fan of her machine. A propos of her charms, he confesses how he carries with him from Albany to Honolulu to Manila his treasured stereo cards of doubled tourist shots of the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Tuscaloosa Pig Festival, pineapple gardens of their new possession Hawaii, and the wild horse passes of Yosemite Park. In fact, the sets of cards had given Griswold, a doctor with a placid practice in Plattsburgh, New York, his itch for adventure. First, he had signed up to be a surgeon in Cuba. Instead, he was assigned to Niantic, a stone’s throw from his birthplace in Connecticut. He tried again, and he advanced a few yards, to Fort Warren. Finally, he scored, sailing first to San Francisco, California, on his way to the Philippines. It was not Cuba, but goddamn, it was war.

  In Balangiga, Griswold the surgeon keeps his Holmes viewer in its original box at night, a velvet-lined crypt, right by his bedside. His stereo cards are meager but much perused.

  None have survived.

  Griswold the surgeon is explaining the history of the Holmes viewer to Valeriano Abanador, the police chief in charge of the town since the Spanish days and an eager listener of foreigners’ tales since time immemorial, that is, for three eternal years, including this endless revolution, first against Spain, then against America. No idiot wants to be chief in these conflicting times. These days of amigo warfare are not good for the Chief’s bowels. Amigo by day, revolutionary by night. The man did not drop out of San Juan de Letran de Manila just to come home to this. It gives him diarrhea. The burden of a chief of police is to live at cross-purposes with dual bosses, the demands of the invader and the loyalties of the insurrectionist, and constantly the Chief feels a pain in the pit of his stomach, no matter what he does.

  But Valeriano Abanador, the Chief, takes up his burden, a man of duty. He turns his face to the doctor. A philosophical man of leisure who once led a desultory life until his goddamned people made him chief of police, Abanador speaks four languages (plus posturing Latin for special effects)—to wit, Spanish, Waray, Tagalog, and English, the last with a note of doubt, a speculative hesitancy. He is just learning it. His halting words often end in a raised, questioning pitch. This endears him to his audience, who becomes talkative and gains confidence in his inarticulate presence. In this way, the officers of Balangiga take pity on the bumbling chief in this sorry town, including him in general remarks whenever he is in their hearing, and the Chief’s good humor coupled with his bad English lull the men into never questioning how it is that he understands everything they say while they have no clue what he is saying to everyone else.

  1.

  Settling Finally onto Samar

  What is she doing anyway, Magsalin asks herself, as the Pajero rattles down the plank, roll-on, roll-off, settling finally onto Samar, and Chiara rolls down her window to the unexpected sea air.

  Magsalin remembers no coastal road. The way to Balangiga used to be an inland trail on pocked paths without pavements. Even she is unsettled by the beauty of this novelty, the ocean vista on the road to Eastern Samar.

  “Beach resorts,” says Private First Class Gogoboy. “It is now full of beach resorts on the way to Balangiga. So now we have the beautiful road by the sea. The Maharlika Highway. Marabut, Full of Haven, Tubabao, Calico-an. Surfer dudes, GI Joes, German nudie people. They love Eastern Samar! The hitchhikers and the money-honey tourists.”

  “Wow,” says Magsalin, “back to business after the supertyphoon, too.”

  “Yes, yes,” mourns Edward, the boy with the Uzi, “all this, along Maharlika Highway, was usually destroyed after the supertyphoon Yolanda.”

  “Haiyan!” says Private First Class Gogoboy, explaining to Chiara, “what you call our typhoon—Haiyan!”

  “Yes, yes,” says Edward, “all the houses gone. Even the coconuts—look. Kalbo. You know, bald. Like Gogoboy! The coconuts—they are usually destroyed after the typhoon Haiyan. But not so many dead because the Balangiga people—they usually evacuated, yes they did. They know where to go up in the hills.”

  “But the money-honey, they are back in business,” says Private First Class Gogoboy. “The beach resorts—they advertise the cultural paradise, the natural resources—and the money-honey tourists, they come.”

  “And the New People’s Army, who used to have the run of the hills?” asks Magsalin.

  “They are now just directing the illegal logging in the forests.”

  “The Philippine Army and the communist rebels in Samar,” explains Magsalin to Chiara, “have been going at it for decades. No love lost between them.”

  “Surely privates first class Gogoboy and Edward have reasons for thinking badly of their enemy,” says Chiara.

  “Everyone has reasons.”

  Whom does she wish to impress? Why turn the image so she looks not at herself but awry, through a lens not her own? Why follow Chiara through her private labyrinth when her own reasons for return give
her nausea?

  The humidity on the deck of MV Blanket has turned into a salty, swampy breeze on land, and momentarily, before the air conditioning revs, Magsalin feels her armpits turning into some sort of soup, though the feeling of heat in the wind gives her that pleasurable inertia of summer vacation. Chiara, on the other hand, leans back like a model for Vogue, and the folds of her silken suit are arrayed with casual art about her limbs.

  Does the woman not sweat?

  25.

  The Ordinary Miracle of Stereopsis

  A stereo card is slipped into a wire stand on the stereograph’s rosewood slide, says Griswold the surgeon as they walk among the palms—this flat piece of wood jutting from the lens of the Holmes viewer. It is our nature, Chief, you see, that the ability to see depth is a trick of the mind. Depth is only an impression, a mathematical calculus! says Griswold, trained in eye, ear, nose, and throat diseases in Bellevue Medical College of New York City. He has a generous spirit, especially for sharing his knowledge, which goes on and on. He even carries around his teaching implements. Our vision is imperfect, only surmise. A disparity exists between the sight observed by the right eye and by the left. Notice. In order to see correctly, the mind must compute. Oh do not misunderstand, Chief. Not like a machine. Our mind imagines. That is how we see. Through illusion. But look here, try this. See. Move it until—

  Aha!

  In the Holmes viewer, the calculation of the illusion of depth is manual, not just mental. Your hand adjusts the two-picture stereo card on the slide to create the ordinary miracle of stereopsis, that is, our everyday way of seeing with our two imperfect eyes.

  With one mechanical flick, here, a flat photographic world in doubled mirror images, there, turns into three dimensions, see! Voila!

  The miracle that is sight!

  The flat world is round again.

  Ojo! interjects the chief of police, looking into the stereoscope the doctor carries: Eyyyyeee—! Can see! A coconut!

  Yes, you can, the doctor exclaims. You can see! You have a new eye.

  A very American—what is the word—trick? says the Chief, placing the instrument carefully back in the doctor’s hands.

  Yes. It is a very American invention, nods Griswold: We have manufactured how to see the world.

  Ah, but doctor, grins the Chief, knocking his knuckles against his head, but I can see that coconut with own eyes already—I can see that coconut with my own coconut!

  And he keeps knocking at his skull, grinning.

  Sure, you can, says Griswold the surgeon, but I do not think you are getting my point.

  I get it, says the Chief, you have the coconut in the picture and the coconut in Balangiga—you americanos, you just want all of the coconuts!

  A mania for reality took hold among hobbyists in Griswold’s late nineteenth century. Photography is only one of the means that makes possible the fantasy of Tru-Vision. (A historical survey unfolds on the screen in a sequence of irised stills, silent-movie style.) William McKinley’s world has a firm lease on the dream. Stereo cards of McKinley himself are sold everywhere, and he had the distinction of becoming the first celluloid president, through the graces of Thomas Edison. In the moving film by Edison’s company, McKinley has a look of banality that suits him. In Griswold’s Holmes viewer, he is distractingly plump, with a cadaverous gaze. You look into the intimate, tender frame of the stereoscope, and his eyes’ emptiness pops out, as if his sad future were already upon him, the assassin’s gun pointed at his vacant eyes.

  Citizens are eager to buy the spoils from William McKinley’s war. Stereo cards of serene views of the ruined battleship Maine by Guantanamo Bay, of Admiral Dewey on the deck of Olympia after his victory in Manila, of soldiers advancing on Havana, riders up San Juan Hill; picture books bearing titles with resonant pronouns, such as Our Islands and Their People; and albums of naval ships en route from San Francisco to Hawaii to Guam, another novel possession. Of course, also the postcard sunsets of Manila Bay, along with infantrymen amid cogon grass in Tondo, and above all, the grainy brown dead in bamboo trenches all around Luzon. Every stereo card is a propaganda coup. (Theodore Roosevelt, that interfering assistant secretary, is especially proud of the pictures of his Navy.)

  Tru-Vision, Stereoscopy, Praxino Pictures, Panorama Moving Effects, Keystone View Company. Underwood & Underwood, Cassandra Chase’s employer, is one of the prime capitalists of the new venture. The word movie has yet to be invented, though Thomas Edison’s minions come up with an exciting word, kinetoscopy! Sadly, unlike his other geeky coinages, gramophone and such, that word will not take. The world is in such a state of wild invention that the names of things are still in flux. The dream of the peripatetic photographer Cassandra joins with the curiosity of her sedentary consumer to line the pockets of the seers, the bright men of Wall Street.

  Chiara’s assistant prop makers, troops of Irishwomen with mops of hair in botanical, secondary colors, mint, tangerine, and grape—a summer fad—report to Chiara the many places they find scattered snapshots from Underwood & Underwood—eBay and other auction sites. At Strand Book Store in Manhattan, an enterprising intern, Fionnuala of the nationalistic, lime-green hair, finds stereo cards stacked in neat boxes in the Rare Book Room on the third floor. The men of Company C of the Ninth US Infantry Division in 1901, of the historic Manchu Regiment, survive in the troublingly mirrored images. One by one, she picks through the pile. Fionnuala the intern thinks (after all she is a woman with her own revolutionary history, being from the west of Ireland) that the cards multiply unnecessarily the error of the men’s position in Samar.

  In a stereo card of that day before the massacre, done at morning on the riverbank, Padre Donato T. Guimbaolibot, formerly priest of Guiuan, now of Balangiga, is the only one smiling. It is possible to view his clownish presence—the bowing toward the white woman is a bit excessive and not becoming of his actual sentiments, soon to be revealed—as par for the course in a war movie with amateur extras, as the stereo card fades into the film’s action. Viewers might pass over the details of his moving figure as trite, comic prelude for our modern times—the calm before calamity that audiences of generic action scenes have now learned to expect (though even Shakespeare had such expositions). Plus, butanding is not a hammerhead; it’s a whale shark (the young interns, checking only the Internet for local terms, and to be honest, mainly skimming Images and Videos, keep getting variable results). Historians of Balangiga, in fact, describe Padre Donato as “noble,” “tall,” and “revered.” Magsalin is uncomfortable with ahistorical humor in movies, sensing that it inscribes an unnecessary gap between commerce and art. It is said that tall and noble Padre Donato, tortured by Americans after the affair of Balangiga, retires to his hometown, Guiuan, with post-traumatic stress disorder (or na-stre-stress hiya, the citizens of Guiuan report): his heart rate changes whenever he meets a white man.

  But she has to admit that some of her own revisions—the coconut oil in the priest’s hair, the holy hilot waiting to massage his temples—seem like mere remnants from some beach vacation, details lifted from visits to island spas. The peaked straw hat that the charlatan masseur wears is a costume-design flaw, Cambodian, not Filipino, secondhand relics from other movies about a war yet to happen in a different, also misbegotten place.

  1.

  On the Way to Balangiga

  On the way to Balangiga, Private First Class Gogoboy stops at a beach resort. Six porters in red trousers and katipunero hats—with their straw brims turned over to show the insignia of the revolutionaries, embroidered also in red—appear, all studiously barefoot and bearing scabbards for their absent bolo knives. They rush to grab the luggage. They stare nonplussed at the guests’ sparse, identical cargo, the pair of green and purple leather bags.

  “But I thought we were supposed to go straight to Balangiga.” Magsalin asks, “What are you doing, Gogoboy? We don’t stop here.”

  Edward lo
oks sideways at Private First Class Gogoboy.

  “For lunch, ma’am,” says Gogoboy. “This is always the place for lunch before going to Balangiga!”

  Magsalin remembers how the buses that drove toward San Juanico Strait always chose the same rest stops, and the idea of trying a different eatery instead of the carinderia shown to you by the driver was anathema. No one ever thought of trying an alternate shop. It was like a mafia of luncheonettes dotted that highway.

  Magsalin waits for Chiara to move, but Chiara does not, so Magsalin sighs and gives the tip to the two porters who won the bags.

  “But wait,” says Magsalin, “how will we know whose bag is which? They are exactly the same. Let me put a tag on my bag.”

  But the porters have already gone ahead.

  “Before it used to be they usually carry knives. But the tourists complain,” explains Edward. “So now the porters, they usually now only wear the hats.”

  “KKK?” Chiara asks, her first sign of alarm.

  “I know, it’s weird,” says Magsalin. “Their hats have the initials of the secret society—the katipuneros who won the revolution against Spain, but lost to their frenemy, the United States.”

  “Kataas-taasang, Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan!” Edward raises his fist. “Sulong, insurrecto!”

  And he fake-kicks the last porter, a mere boy, about Edward’s size, still waiting for a tip though he has no bag to carry.