Insurrecto Read online

  From his jumble of ideas he zooms in to his desire—his stubborn cathexis, a four-leaf clover that, on her part, she overlooks. It is admirable how his desire just cuts through the brush, when Virginie can barely figure out which pin to wear: the Schreiner rose, a fabulous fake, or her mother’s choice, an antique pearl in an abstract coil.

  The Colt .45 was invented to kill the Filipino juramentados, violent insurgents out of their minds, during the Philippine-American War. That much she is told. She has learned more than anyone will ever need to know about the Philippine-American War in the years she has been married to Ludo. The genealogy of the genocidal Krag-Jørgensen rifle (Norway, 1896), obsolete prop of a dirty war; the melancholy artistry of local bamboo snares (Samar, 1899), makeshift prop of a hopeless war; the advent of photography (Underwood & Underwood Photographic Company, founded 1881), propaganda tool for the imperial wretchedness of this war; the terms for the enemy (katipunero, juramentado, nigger, insurrecto), interchangeable names in a confusing war. Ludo keeps the gun on his desk as he researches, poring over maps he has ordered from the Library of Congress. He litters the desk with his doubled cards, sepia tones in disarray. His mute histories on pasteboard. As he shows her the trail they could take, using the gun to make his point, from the infernal streams of Samar’s interior to the mountain passes beyond the Caves of Sohoton, she wonders if her husband has imbibed it, the spirit of his juramentados.

  Still, she knows she will go.

  Virginie, too, has a sense of the wild, though it is not apparent in her outfit. She is dressed in brocade and gold. She glitters like a sunfish. She wears the metallics and embroidered clothes that she wore in the days when she had first met him. Her mother, Chaya Sophia Chazanov of Sosnitsa, near the Dnieper, Cassandra Chase to immigration authorities, and now Madame Rubinson of Rubinson Fur Emporium on Park Avenue, had always favored old-world props, lace and lamé. Madame Rubinson was a former set designer who, not quite by intention, married rich.

  It was Virginie’s secret that she bore a sense of trauma that the world around her mocked—she was coddled from birth, showered with toys, after all; but she has long had this subliminal perception of a wound without root or reason, which not even she could see. She had gone to the zoo that day in one of those bouts of boredom that took teenage girls like her, who had an excess of time and indolence, into parts of the city that enthralled children and manic-depressives.

  It was September. She lived only a few blocks from the animals, the hippos and the bears and the penguins, but she had never seen them up close. It was not proper, said her aunts, to do things without companions: the devil stands in ambush for lonely minds. Anyway, zoos were for the vulgar. Every day, once school started, passing the zoo, she would hear the chime of its hours, tinkling in a sunlit, dying fall, like the charmed suspiration of the endless tedium that lay ahead. That day, playing hooky, she found herself next to the sea lion tamer, magnetized by the sleight of hand with which he fed the animals their midday fish. The act’s doubleness struck Virginie—the way she believed absolutely in the spectacle of beastly affection, at the same time that she saw the bait that fed it.

  She needed to go out more.

  She failed to see the filmmaker catching her figure, out of place in her sequined outfit and spotted coat from Rubinson Fur Emporium. She had intruded onto his picture, but it was semi-neorealist anyway (i.e., done on the cheap). He was filming his pro-animal masterpiece, tentatively called Maniac in the Ark, about an insane killer who turns out to be a zookeeper (of course) who wreaks mayhem to extort funds from the mayor of New York to find a cure for his great love (Gus the Polar Bear, of course, dying of the loss of his own great love, Ida, another polar bear). No distributor bought it. Ludo still thinks of the plot fondly. He likes its themes of civic duty matched with violent redemption. Ludo caught her like this, a truant in his mise-en-scène of constructed magic, and when he asked her to sign away her right to privacy, also asking for her phone number, she did not see the symbolism—the tamer at play with a hungry beast.

  She took his bait.

  The life of a filmmaker is one of scraps of plots sandwiched between the lack of means to fulfill them. The life of a woman in the fifties is one of scraps of plots sandwiched between the lack of means to fulfill them. It is hard for Virginie to grasp that she has agency, just as in those old films of femmes fatales dying in grisly circumstances (Garbo in Camille, or Garbo in any other role), the viewer starts shouting at the doomed woman, who fails to grasp that she has agency—don’t fall for that lousy count, you nincompoop!—and she dies of consumption or jumps in front of that speeding train anyway. Eloping with a bearded artiste she meets at the zoo does not strike Virginie as a cinematic cliché. It feels like freedom. In the dark of the screening room, she watches the shreds and patches of the scene he has just filmed. The polar bear swims in despondent figure eights, over and over again, a whitish impression of unrest. She clutches his hand during the scene of murder in the Arctic cages, as the killer raises his bloody axe. She screams. He tells her—look, it’s just sleight of hand. All of your terror lies in the cut. No penguins were harmed in the filming of this movie. She does not look. But she keeps watching him rolling his film, feeding his reel.

  He stops and starts and cuts and discards, including her scene with the sea lions (he says the metaphor is sublime but the lighting is not). And the power of that—the certainty of his director’s vision—gives her invidia: a disease of empathy. It’s that envy of the artist that arises in certain readers: a visceral connivance with his dreams matched only by the desire to kill him for fulfilling them.

  5.

  Chiara Crafts a Movie Script

  It turns out Chiara is a member of a group of Hollywood types who gather every few years or so in the Catskills. In a woodsy agricultural setting, Chiara’s group plays parlor games and captures ghosts in séances and commands lunar apogees and exhibits all sorts of megalomaniac tendencies, in small and unreported doses, usually in April, the cruelest month only if you are a poet, not a millionaire.

  At one of the revels, Chiara’s cabal gathers for lunch at the giant liver-shaped kitchen table in the eighteenth-century manse owned by Chiara’s mother, a dreamer in constant convalescence whose absence from her mansion goes unremarked. The artist guests spontaneously carry in their arms, as if lifting ritual Byzantine icons, their identical fifteen-inch, quad-core, silver MacBook Pros.

  People barely look at each other or even check the wine list (one of them has been in AA since age fourteen). Instead, they all begin typing memos or searching the difference between heirloom or heritage apples or opening their email at the same audible incredible momentous freaky time! Snapping her head up at the moment when everyone else understands that the room has just exploded into one eerie propulsive click, all together, twenty-first-century robots come to life—Chiara laughs.

  They begin to eat the free-range duck confit with organic pea shoots and Roxbury Russet compote (heirloom, not heritage) and drink the local cabernet franc, which has no sulfites. But a pall comes over the afternoon, though no one mentions it.

  Perhaps only Chiara had this recognition that something terribly gauche had just united them, wistful, emerging auteurs. After dessert, still sipping espresso, the group comes up with a parlor trick. It occupies them for the next few days, in between yoga and once again watching Mulholland Drive.

  Each moviemaker chooses a search term, and from information produced by a single Google search—from the Web’s constraint—each will write a movie script.

  6.

  Why Samar??!!

  By the time the game starts, Chiara is drowsy, and the lethargy that seems to accompany feelings of nonexistence, as if she is only borrowing her body and sometimes floating above it, uncomfortable feelings that have plagued her, off and on, since she was six, wash over Chiara.

  So she takes the easy route and goes Oedipal.

  She types
in the name of her father’s most celebrated film, The Unintended, and the year production began, 1975.

  She has never done this before—looked up her father online.

  Her childhood was in analog.

  For a long time, in her teens, she had made an effort to forget.

  But Chiara has pleasant memories of the times she spent with her father in the tropics. Specifically, she was in Quezon City, then in Makati, then in Angeles, Pampanga, but she will learn that only online. She was four in 1975. She remembers a skating rink, being crowned Miss Philippines in games with tiny beauty-contest-obsessed girls who in excessive gestures of companionship always made her, the white girl, win, and getting lice in her hair from goats owned by a visiting tribe of mountain people.

  She has a memory of one blackout night during what she now understands are Manila’s seasonal, spectacular rains. Her mother, usually all nerves, a Ukrainian Jew brought up on stories of pogroms, who turned to Roman Catholicism then hatha yoga in the aftermath, is agitated, sitting down and getting back up to protect a flickering flame. Oddly, the Philippines has driven her mother’s persecution complex underground, and in the Philippines she lives in an almost Buddhic calm amid the lizards on the ceilings, monstrous cockroaches in the toilet, sewer animals in the garden, and nubile prostitutes promenading all around the seedy areas near the American military bases. Chiara’s mother grew up spoiled. She is used to getting her way. She gave her husband his Hollywood start. But it is as if the desperate indignities of living in a perpetually fallen state, among lives she shares and witnesses and attends to with a perplexed gaze, has lent her peace, a converse calm, that she has not regained since.

  Perhaps this explains Chiara’s sense at times that a vulnerable world could be an oasis.

  The shadows of her mother’s single candle and the sounds of a gecko on the wall are the night’s only cartographic points. Otherwise, she and her mother and her father are suspended, the only people in a universal void, rocking in a gigantic cradle hanging above Manila’s awful monsoon winds. But Chiara is happy. Chiara is lying with her curly four-year-old head on her strong, sweating father’s lap. An athletic man in soccer shorts and blue and yellow rugby shirt. The famously methodical director is picking lice, one pinch following another, a rich rhythmic tug mauling her along her tender scalp, each tug pleasingly soporific, a victorious bloodbath on her father’s hands. She doesn’t remember her father cursing every time he finds a pest and crushing it with his purple thumb, though her mother has pointed out those gross details. It is the most pleasing memory of her childhood, that blackout night, her father picking out lice from her hair until she falls asleep: it is pleasing to recall her dad, a man busy with so many things, determined to rid her of all the bugs he could find, to use his magical director powers to seek out the vermin touching her body, to squash the blood out from each creature’s abominable veins.

  True, it is as if the concentrated frustration arising from the calamities of his unsteady enterprise, the making of his cursed monumental film, has bubbled forth, you know, and he is crushing his fate as much as he is crushing the Filipino goats’ lice.

  “Lice do not come from goats,” Magsalin interrupts. “They come from people.”

  Chiara ignores her.

  Wikipedia, IMDb, praxino.org, Rotten Tomatoes, reviews from the usual sources, the New Yorker, Asia Week, the Guardian, Time, come up in quick succession in her Google search.

  It occurs to Chiara that the world of her childhood might be compressed in this single click, a mass of news and memory with not even a rough cut.

  She keeps scrolling.

  Chiara does not click on the obvious items.

  She has read them before: reviews of her father in newsprint, cutout items in her mother’s boxes.

  She thinks she knows his ephemera by heart.

  Once, she had tried to search him out, her father. She had studied his movies, gone through boxes in her mother’s home in the Catskills, full of books and files and note cards, and read through his scripts. Even his last, his unfinished one.

  She had carefully read that.

  But the effort to find him during an unstable time, how old was she, eleven?, was a confounding quest—a shambles—a heap and a mess and a horror—the horror—that led only to tailspin, collapse, her inability to retrieve herself. Without medication, asylum, or retreat.

  She came through by a huge effort of will. She pats herself on the back mentally for that fact. She is proud of herself. Rising up by her bootstraps—and her mother’s money. She keeps talismans—a few of her father’s effects, a camera, snapshots, a bunch of library books he never returned, stuffed in a box in her mother’s home.

  But she never went back to his films.

  She made her own.

  Art is her asylum.

  She has hubris, that afternoon in the Catskills, scrolling through Google.

  Maybe she thinks she can traverse it—the Googling of her father’s name—she can seek him out now, after all these years, with no pain attached.

  And it is true: there is something comforting about it.

  This Oedipal fix.

  Chiara keeps scrolling.

  The piracy sites, the Cyrillic pages, the Chinese message boards, the links to Paypal to download the movies for free, these boxing matches that keep coming up.

  Chiara thinks she will never find anything of interest, and she will surely lose her group’s game.

  Then she starts clicking.

  Muhammad Ali’s historic match against Joe Frazier on October 1, 1975. Miss Universe Amparo Muñoz is stripped of her crown and becomes a soft porn star. The bells of Balangiga, some religious items stolen from a Philippine island, remain missing.

  More piracy sites, more voodoo video games that have nothing to do with anything.

  The construction of the first multilevel shopping mall in the Philippines rises in tribute to Muhammad Ali’s victory. Then another article on the ambush in Balangiga of American soldiers of the Ninth US Infantry Regiment on an island called Samar in 1901.

  What is going on?

  Her father’s film is being ambushed online by an unrelated disaster.

  Balangiga, Samar, keeps coming up, neck and neck with Muhammad Ali.

  23.

  Before the Weeping

  In 1969, they are still childless. Virginie hates leaving Manhattan but wishes to appreciate her husband’s way of life. In Las Vegas Ludo prefers the Grand, but she chooses the Hilton. There are lines of women in beehives and stilettos. It distresses and pleases her to see so many women looking like her, all in a line to see a show. The rows of women give Virginie this rush. She is scared of crowds. She hides behind her husband’s growing fame, his vitality. In the photographs, she always strikes this sub-alar pose, like a puffin cub taking cover. She hates going to premieres. She discovers too late that she hates the movies, a detail that amuses Ludo. The visual effects strain her nerves. She always imagines, as the train rushes straight at her, that she will fall with the hero into the abyss.

  This neurological defect draws her husband to her. Her sense that fantasy is never an illusion and that the purpose of art is hypnosis, a form of body snatching, arouses in Ludo both tenderness and calculation. She is the ideal viewer for whom he makes his thrillers.

  Also, a reliable investor.

  It might be fun to see the shows, she says.

  Sure, Ludo says, why not. Grist for the mill.

  Ludo can write anywhere.

  He prefers the casinos. By the baccarat tables, he likes to spread out his 5 × 8 note cards, ruled. Security and waiters leave him alone. They are used to oddballs with money. He ponders a sequence, then he shuffles, inserts a note card into a middle set, moves a top card to the second column. He’s an orderly man and scratches his reconfigurations of the plot in a neat list of rearranged numbers with corresponding n
ew scenes. Like playing solitaire with a set of laws that he is inventing. He can see the scenes coming together; then he doesn’t. The end is elusive. His wife taps him on the shoulder.

  I got the tickets, she says.

  When she thinks of it years later, she wonders—was that it? She stood among the crowd, a well-shod woman with a starving look, cigarette in thin hand, staring entranced but also distracted (as one can see in a brief pan over the concert crowd)—was it then that in a flick of his white, flashing tassels her life turned?

  She remembers standing up to watch the singer, mesmerized.

  To get a better view.

  Ludo sits bemused by the rhinestone-and-sequin world of Las Vegas, because, after all, he would always be an immigrant kid from Cutchogue, some no-name town on Long Island, indifferent to the material world, even annoyed by its requirements—suits and ties and matching shoes.

  At dinners on Park Avenue, with the Rubinsons, Ludo has a hard time keeping a poker face among her parents’ friends until the theater people arrive, Madame Rubinson’s Broadway crew, their old-lady musk and antique-store sweat bringing back their lost world—fashioning muslin toiles or quilting woolen bouclé suits with silk charmeuse linings, their painstaking manual labor for others’ sleights of hand—and Ludo can sit listening to their music-hall gossip all night long.

  Magsalin can see in this couple their shared solitudes.

  Chiara can see in this couple a daughter’s loyalties: divided.

  The man bends down to the concert floor to do his karate-move dancing. The precarious sight of a grown, sweating man in white, sequined suit slowly splitting in front of Virginie’s eyes—becoming two people at once, straining to seduce this crowd that has no need for such attention (a mere glance from the white-robed singer is all the screaming women want)—the world blacks out for Virginie.

  That stage effect—the sudden dramatic darkness before the lights turn back on—is so corny that any thought beyond stupor does not flash through anyone’s mind.