Insurrecto Read online

  The boy bends his elbow, pretending to take out the illusive knife from his empty scabbard.

  Edward taps his Uzi.

  Edward wins.

  The boy lopes back to the cabins, holding on to his paper-thin hat.

  Their rest cabins are airy, stand-alone huts with a view of the plaza on one hand, with its statue of the hero, and the beach on the other. Magsalin realizes the abnormal configuration once she sees the water. The beach has invaded the poblacion, the town proper. No self-respecting town has a plaza without a church nearby and the principal houses, the priest’s kumbento included, within the sound of the bells. A beach resort right next to the town plaza, without church or bells, destabilizes Magsalin’s compass.

  This town lacks gravity.

  But as she leaves the hut to take the path to the open-air restaurant at the end of the plaza, she understands her error. It is a fake plaza: the statue in its center is not of the hero, the traveling poet in his European cloak. It is a cement whale shark, a standup butanding. Even the flag on the pole is a trompe-l’oeil: the yellow sun in the middle is a fried egg on a tapsilog. The waitresses in their striped outfits, camisa, pañuelo, and patadyong skirt with the same checkered décor as the tablecloths, greet them posed like tinikling dancers without the required sticks on the ground snapping at their feet. The ring and middle fingers of each of the maidens’ hands are stuck together in glued grace, in constant motion, making winding figure eights about the dancers’ earlobes as if warning of a buzzing Chiara and Magsalin cannot hear.

  As she passes through the restaurant’s puka-shell entryway, Magsalin notes that the women are in fact skipping to the authentic kuracha beat of the karaoke in the background. An old man dressed in contemporary Philippine clothing, a Lakers jersey and a Miami Heat cap, has a microphone in his hand, ready to sing “Horse with No Name.” The pleasure of being amid the random kitsch of the country’s props animates Chiara. She is hungry, and she eats up the pork liempo, lechon kawali, dinuguan, crispy pata, chicharon, and all other matters of pig, along with the cookies shaped like guns and roses, also pork-full—of lard.

  But all Magsalin wants is saging na saba—the kind of plantain her mother first boiled then simmered in a block of molasses.

  “Bimboy!” Private First Class Gogoboy whistles to the youngest porter. “Sab-a!”

  Sure enough, the treat comes to the table: a display of kalamay-encrusted fingerlings arranged around the plate like petals, a corolla of carbs.

  Edward watches intently as Chiara takes a bite.

  “Do you usually have that viand,” Edward asks, “in your country?”

  “Ba-yand magiliw!” Gogoboy sings. “Edward—ba-yand is meat! That is dessert!”

  Chiara eats up an entire fingerling of sugared banana.

  “No,” she says, “this viand has no translation in my country. There is no translation for saging na saba.”

  “Like malunggay,” says Edward with satisfaction, “only the Philippines usually has malunggay and saba.”

  Private First Class Gogoboy spits on the restaurant’s dirt ground.

  “Pweh,” he says to Edward, “that is a stupid reason not to take the construction job in Saudi!”

  “What?” asks Magsalin.

  “He will not go,” says Gogoboy, “because only the Philippines, he says, has malunggay and saba!”

  “Usually,” says Chiara.

  “You could probably get malunggay in Saudi,” says Magsalin. “It is called moringa, a miracle herb.”

  “No, ma’am,” Edward vigorously shakes his head, “only the Philippines usually has malunggay. I cannot live in a country without malunggay.”

  Magsalin gives Edward a high five.

  “Aprub!” she says.

  “Me, too, I approve!” says Chiara, “stick to your principles!”

  Edward’s smile is shy but proud.

  “It is not my principles, ma’am,” he says, “It is usually my stomach.”

  Private First Class Gogoboy nods.

  “He is a delicate—that one,” he explains, “always having gastroenteritis!”

  26.

  Padre Donato Feels the Heat

  Padre Donato, who rarely sweats in his soutane, feels the heat in a way he has never done before. He has always welcomed the days of the habagat. When he was a boy, the gales released him from summer’s suffocations and the boredoms of Lent (a deathless monotony that turned the weak-willed against God)—he’d lie in wait for the cool winds, oddly welcoming, unlike the June monsoons. The habagat, westerly winds that gently ruffle the seas now graze the lady’s petticoats. The gusts reveal the sea-gray lace billowing under Cassandra’s skirts. The gangrened soldiers ogle the skirts, the womanly sight freeing, for the moment, clouds of pent desire hanging over the americanos of Balangiga.

  Even the priest pities them, these smelly Gullivers with their devouring eyes.

  It is clear from the close-up of Captain Connell that he is completely aware of the lady’s windy disarray, but Cassandra passes him by after the exchange with the padre and cuts him from her vision, just like that.

  As she passes, the captain stares at the river, at the ripples scalloping the surface against the low-tide mud. He notes a tadpole, or is it a sea slug, that vile tripang, trying to make an impression in the slime, a quick, wriggling shape just barely visible, bubbling up then burrowing away from sight. A plop, a nonentity. He feels an obstruction in his throat and tries to clear it.

  At the strangled sound coming from the americano, the priest assumes a pose of gravity. The priest spits in solidarity with the captain’s gurgling, as if his thoughtful saliva were settling a theological quibble beginning in the captain’s throat and his meditative spit were thus giving the pair summative consequence in the awkward moment before the lady.

  In this scenario, a lady clearly holds some aces.

  The captain does not stir. This filthy islander habit of public expelling, no matter how holy, disgusts Connell, and the priest’s salvo hits a spot on the captain’s well-shined shoes. But Connell is hoarding the phlegm in his own throat. Bouts of acid reflux have been troubling him ever since he and his men hit the island—since August 11, to be exact. He keeps his thoughts and phlegm to himself as he stares at the bubbles in the mud.

  The captain is a meticulous diarist, and he will later note even the saliva, the stain on his leather boot, the furtive pests in the mud. When his notebook is recovered, miraculously untainted by the copious squibs of movie-ish blood, the effect of his minute descriptions is destabilizing, the way reality seems, in retrospect, not really credible.

  Cassandra gestures to the porters, and they proceed to her adoptive home, a grass-hut shelter owned by the family Nacionales out in the forest beyond the farms. Cassandra, a literary woman, like many of her home-schooled class, considers it a symbolical name, Nacionales, worthy of the country’s noble hopes.

  Cassandra’s romantic imagination, fired by Tennyson, “Lochinvar,” and George Gordon, Lord Byron, especially his death by revolution though not his life by amorous indiscretion, casts upon everything, but especially names, an emblematic mystery. How is she to know that in 1849 the official, random distribution of villagers’ surnames is the colonizers’ tactic against their pet peeve: tax evasion? But Casiana Nacionales, a trader Cassandra had met in her riverboat rides around the Visayas, has an intriguing boldness that anyhow would make her memorable, no matter her name. Cassandra would love to study the wildlife and customs of her town, she had said to the trader Casiana, relating that she, Cassandra, had also been to Panay, Cebu, even Siquijor (a deliciously creepy place, full of aswang—powerful, shape-shifting women who wander at night and are partly dead; Cassandra notes in her diary—the phantoms are likely actual women deranged from their miscarriages).

  She wants to see everything in the islands, she says to Casiana the trader, including all
the exciting but also the most boring parts.

  —Then you must come to Balangiga, Casiana Nacionales says (she is such a joker)—We will bore you to death!

  Captain Connell has the power to detain Cassandra Chase, command her to remain within the military detachment and not live among the farmers, beyond the poblacion, the town proper.

  But what would be the reason for Cassandra’s arrest? For fraternizing with the locals?

  Morale among American soldiers is so low opinion is divided even over punishment for desertion. Soldiers have gone AWOL and returned with baskets of mangoes to no one’s great regret. And he knows her answer will cut him down to size. She had sent the military garrison her letters of commendation in advance, an official one from the governor, that fat Judge Taft, and a cordial message from a family friend, a much-creased note, now obsolete, signed Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. She knows him from Oyster Bay. Salvos of privilege precede her arrival, and all the captain can do is accept it, her presence. He watches as the bearers of her goods march, one of them his own servant, the young Francisco, past his men who are already feeling the queasy residue of their finale with that mad Scheetherly by the riverbank.

  Right on schedule, their stomachs are rumbling.

  The americanos have occupied Balangiga town’s entire plaza, including the kumbento, the church compound (it is the only building made of stone), for forty-eight days. Sullen hands are counting. Five hundred seventy-six livid chickens; two thousand twelve prime fingers of saba; fifty-three buko per day, two thousand five hundred forty-four silot in all wrangled direct from the prickly palms and hacked in two for their silvery juice, every goddamned morning for seventy-four insatiable men (only a few follow regulations and stick to the US Army ration of canned goods, though the records state otherwise).

  And that’s only breakfast.

  All around the islands, the wilderness of Samar included, the foreigners’ appetites empty the pigsties, cash out the camote crop, hike the price of sugar. The americanos used to delight the comerciantes, women like Casiana, who came in rowboats along the riverine trail to Balangiga selling pearls, Chinese slippers, rice cakes, coconut wine, fans, and straw mats. With the arrival of the garrison, the selling has stopped, but the devouring has not.

  The soldiers have come to cut the supply of goods to rebels who must be hiding out beyond the storm-battered coconut trees. The laborers, the able men of the town, are now hacking down those trees, which have just recovered from the great typhoon, on orders from the captain.

  The soldiers agree that the sweet saba, the boiled banana, which the locals cut fresh from the plantain trees, tastes nothing like its fleshy counterpart, Idaho potatoes. And the damned strings of that banana starch keep clinging to the teeth, like Iowa’s summer corn way past its season. Buko juice gives them acid reflux. Guavas are killing their insides, curdling their fragile gastric juices and churning their slushy shit into shitty grit. And is it their imagination, or do the coconuts of the buko man, Dong Canillas, begin rotting in their bellies even before the men start sipping their juice in the beastly sun? And that local delicacy, the sea slug, that vile tripang, is no gastronomic treat—it’s a nasty trick. Malunggay soup, the people’s universal panacea, is no cure. Reaping the rewards of Samar, they agree, is no picnic. Those straw goods—mats, flutes, fans—are as flimsy and useless as the women traders’ thin, gauzy blouses (about which nonetheless they have recurring dreams). The traveling wine, welcome as it is, lingers, a tannic toxin, on their tongues. It creates a fuzzy residue viscous as the islanders’ cloggy spit, fit for ungrateful swine, not men.

  And yet they keep taking it, the islands’ produce.

  After all, what are they in power for?

  Following Cassandra in her wake, the men leave the red herring of her arrival to return to their breakfast in the open air. They imagine they hear mad Scheetherly in the distance, but it is only the tolling of the bells. The bells of Balangiga ring for ritual matins as the men march back from their morning adventure by the river—a comforting sound anyway for those like Captain Connell, a devout Catholic who discovers kinship with the strangers when he arrives on their islands. The joke is on him. His own servant, a ten-year-old orphan, chants uncannily the names of Mary, virgo veneranda, rosa mystica, as he stitches chevrons on the captain’s shirts. Even surnames sound like pious sermons: San Juan Bautista, Angeles de los Santos. Connell came to civilize the barbarians only to discover that they share his Roman, rosary-loving God.

  And it is no surprise, this early in the morning, for the men to see the Chief, Valeriano Abanador, strolling about for his chats with the officers—Connell, then Bumpus, now Griswold. The Chief is so skinny and dark that in the pictures one first mistakes him for a shadow. In one of the pictures, he looks directly at the camera, standing with his arms crossed among the men of Company C—their sullen amigo, beanpole mascot of their will. The soldiers march beside his too casual stride, this useless busybody and absent-minded mediator between the captain and the locals.

  The locals, the Chief has been warning them, have been grumbling over the captain’s orders—to dig up their camote, cut their malunggay, chop down the palms that screen the sentries’ view of rebel marauders on the beach, and worst of all, burn their rice! There are rumblings about destroying their own trees that have just sprouted again after the terrible storm of 1897, nga maugo! And yet, the Chief reports, despite these complaints, the locals will obey, of course, the captain’s orders. Except for burning the rice. Over their dead body. But otherwise, the men of Balangiga will follow.

  He, the Chief, will see to that, siempre. That is his job.

  The soldiers know that it is the captain’s threat of curtailing the coming fiesta that keeps the people in line, not Abanador’s work ethic.

  The Chief, though pleasant enough, is ineffective.

  The Chief was up early today for the melee with Scheetherly with that maddening alertness he does not display for his actual duties, such as corralling the laborers Captain Connell needs to clean up the town before the inspector general arrives from Tacloban. Or for keeping the peace during cockfights. Or for separating the maidens from the men. Brawls that arise over the presence of comely women who keep appearing all around town, bearing laundry and water jars on their heads, never break the Chief’s deep siesta. If locals gang up on a soldier, such as on the hapless sergeant, Prank Vitrine, God bless his wandering soul (though one day he will return, predicts the Chief), the Chief strolls along after his nap to tell the captain the same thing.

  It is always the americano’s fault.

  The women are simply going about their business, the Chief cannot stop them from husking rice, plucking chickens, drying their budo, their salted fish, carrying their bamboo water containers to the river, and feeding pigs while wearing their skimpy clothes that they have been wearing since the Jesuits came to catechize the islands in 1581! The Chief knows his island history, and if you have enough time, he will tell you all about it. My God, señores, we have been living in peace in our underclothes for generations. You foreigners are molesting the town’s fair women, and you are blaming it on the women’s outfits! Jesus Maria! Not even the Spaniards, who molested women in the name of God, were so foolish in their logic.

  And why would you not, anyhow, the Chief says philosophically, his quite tanned character giving nobility to the film’s enterprise, and the actor who plays him must have the gravitas of James Earl Jones plus the wisdom of Bruce Lee—the worst thing about going to war, the Chief says, is you still have a penis, but you don’t get a medal if you keep it in your pants, though you should! You should get a medal, the Chief exclaims, for purity. Purity is a brave man’s last stand!

  Upon this, the Chief and the captain wholeheartedly agree. The captain listens to the Chief because he is the only one who responds to his schoolbook Spanish. The Chief breaks the news of the americanos’ stupidity with th
at shrug of his shoulders, the way he gestures when the lieutenant Bumpus takes a pawn or when an opponent in the art of arnis grazes him with a bamboo spear before he knocks the dumb man to his knees.

  He has been telling the captain no one in town believes anyway in the innocence of that soldier Prick, for instance, the adjutant once seen going toward Giporlos with Casiana Nacionales—so the captain need not make an example of the man’s disappearance as a sign of the treachery of the Filipino people, our sin verguenza style of friendship! Sure, sometimes Casiana returns from trading, arriving with the boats of alimango from Basey and the baskets of gaway from Guiuan, at the same time that sightings of the disappeared Prick crop up along her trade routes, but her rumored aiding of his desertion is no clue to Prick’s pure intentions the day he took that long walk in the forest. He was a man of reflection, unlike you, I must say, captain—curious about the world around him, that Prick. Into whose snare he was caught that he did not reappear is Prick’s own business—oh, yes, it is better to believe that red man Prick went nuts, not AWOL, deserting the benevolence of your kind, but that is your own look-out!—oh, and do not come crying to us about the madness that has come over your soldiers in our jungles—no one asked you to come!

  His name’s Frick, the captain says, not Prick. Benton Frick. And he came back with his own stories to tell. He did not desert. He was tricked.

  Sure, sure, that Prick was tricked, says the Chief. And then there is the case of Prank Vitrine.

  Frank, the captain says. His name is Frank Breton. And you better give us back his lame-ass body, or you will be sorry.

  It is clear that the captain is unconcerned about the fate of Prank. Everyone knows he will turn up after some orgasmic time, with Casiana or Paciana, who cares; and he will be summarily punished, for sure, but who can blame him?

  Sure, sure, Prank Vitrine, says the Chief. He is a good man, pobrecito, that americano, that sad lubberboy, that Prank.

  In these conferences with the captain, whether discussing the fate of the eighty-two laborers jailed by the captain for three days now or pointing out the virtues of the martial art of arnis, that is, whether discussing matters of import or impulse, the Chief always has a slightly rueful look, conveying facts as if they are beyond his ability to understand them.