Insurrecto Read online

  Ludo notes the crowd’s crazy suspension of its disbelief.

  He stands up. He takes a picture with his Polaroid. Ludo is a showman. He envies mass hallucination.

  Something to study, he thinks.

  Ludo does not notice Virginie shaking, tottering. The women gasp. The spotlight turns back on. Virginie realizes it is a visual effect, not a snap in her brain, and she sees the man being rearranged, put back together by the strobe lights. A constructed and reconstructed figure, produced by his audience’s screams.

  And he becomes who he is—a fused, patched, and growling man breathing into a microphone—

  Now even Ludo is back up on his feet, by Virginie’s side. She clutches her husband’s arm as he brings his fingers to his lips, blowing through them a long, ardent hiss, whistling for Elvis.

  Is it her mind failing her, or is it her bad eyes? At the sight of a figure straining to become whole before the crowd that fragments him, she feels something crawling under her bones, the pain of a rip in her own shell: a snail-house disassembling, coming unglued from her skin.

  She thinks she will topple over, a dizziness not new to her, but strangely liberating just the same.

  What a show, says Ludo. He is drenched, wiping at himself—Don’t know how you can pimp yourself like that every night and not go goddamned crazy, he says.

  And Virginie feels she has been slapped.

  She freezes.

  She wishes to say to her husband, standing there wiping off his sweat—but she does not speak her thoughts—You think you’re so smart. You have no clue how people feel.

  It sounds self-righteous, improper, and dumb.

  Her response to Ludo, her lover, over this gyrating, growling stranger in a sequined costume, embarrasses her. Her aunts are right—the devil stands in ambush for hungry minds. It is a passing thing, her revulsion for Ludo, her shame for herself, that moment in Las Vegas. Ludo’s remark means no harm, and in time, though she remembers it, she forgets the point.

  She watches the same show eight more times during that stay in Vegas. Ludo sits in the casinos, reorganizing the index cards, figuring out his film. That is a craftsman at work, that is a showman, he speaks in approval to his wife who returns to him late at night every night the entire time they are in Las Vegas.

  The way she arcs her body toward Ludo, wanting herself to want him, makes her shudder even before she comes. The way she arcs her body toward Ludo, wanting him to want her, makes Ludo smile, I have married a child, he thinks, and a warmth comes over him, and he pretends she is a lion in a cage, and he is the tamer, and she screams as he snarls, clutching her at her wrists—she is unmovable—and he laughs as if he has invented the act that will follow and that, soon enough, swallows him. Virginie sits awake late at night, next to her snoring husband, who looks frail, hungry even in his sleep. And the next day, Ludo is recalculating his show’s purposes, shuffling his pliant cards. She does not quite know how to put it, this fragmenting sense of herself, except that it is the only way she can get at who she is.

  7.

  There Is Always an Alternate Story

  So Chiara’s search reveals.

  It turns out a Filipino scholar has written a paper linking the massacre of civilians in Balangiga, Samar, 1901, to the 1968 Vietnam massacre that frames her father’s film. As some viewers might recall, The Unintended is a memoir, or as the Guardian describes it, “a sterile mystery wrapped in spiral flashback,” about a teenage kid, Tommy O’Connell, who fails to be court-martialed for acts he has committed in a South Vietnamese hamlet, code-named Pinkville (the name of the actual village is never mentioned). The boy Tommy, along with his fellow soldiers of Charlie Company, razes the hamlet to the ground. He tells his story so that the world does not forget the horror he, Tommy, cannot leave behind.

  The Balangiga incident of 1901 is a true story in two parts, a blip in the Philippine-American War (which is a blip in the Spanish-American War, which is a blip in latter-day outbreaks of imperial hysteria in Southeast Asian wars, which are a blip in the infinite spiral of human aggression in the livid days of this dying planet, and so on).

  Part One: An uprising of Filipinos against an American outpost in Samar (the exposition here would be a fascinating movie in itself, though with too many local color details) leads to forty-eight American deaths, with twenty-two wounded and four missing in action.

  Part Two: The US commanding general demands in retaliation the murder of every Filipino male in Samar above ten years of age. Blood bathes the province. Americans savage—“kill and burn” is the technical term—close to thirty thousand Filipinos, men, women, and children, in a rampage of such proportions that the court-martial of the general, Jacob H. “Howling Wilderness” Smith, causes a sensation when the events become public in 1902.

  The scholar, Professor Estrella Espejo of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, points out that the Samar incident also implicates a Charlie Company (though of the wrong regiment, the historic US Ninth Infantry, the Manchu Fighters, a glamour brigade). And as in the Vietnam incident (and in other similar times, e.g., in Afghanistan and Iraq), barely a handful of Americans are tried for the homicidal affair.

  The infamous General Jacob Smith ordered the Filipino deaths by making memorable staccato statements: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me.”

  The general’s resonant phrase made his name: “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”

  According to Professor Espejo, the repulsive yet fascinating Smitty Jakes, the Kilgore-like lieutenant whose pathological patriotism is the most troubling yet truest aspect of Ludo Brasi’s film, is a nod to the butcher of Balangiga.

  The movie’s hero, the guilt-ridden wraith Tommy O’Connell, Espejo concludes, resting her case, is clearly the West Point–educated commander of the Samar outpost, twenty-six-year-old Captain Thomas W. Connell, a moralist whose meager ethics measured in full the absurdity of the American cause.

  24.

  The Monsoons of Manila

  The monsoons of Manila give Virginie a thrill. Frogs from the garden leap onto her soaking carpet and into the borrowed house’s Chinese vases. The rain traps her in the sala. Catfish swim toward her shoes. Her baby daughter’s Wellingtons come splashing down from the dusty ottoman while the feral cat, a castaway, casually invades the kitchen. Virginie thinks a tadpole is tickling her toes, but she does not dare to look. The cat, Misay, is completely dry, like the perfectly coiffed maid in the corner cutting up the mangoes with utter calm. She is staring at Virginie’s legs. “Ma’am,” she says. An obscene dead cockroach, its genitalia splayed out for the world to see, is coming and going in waves, like an upturned boat with frail masts. Virginie looks. She screams. The cat pounces. The baby claps, and the maid bustles about. The cat almost has the cockroach in its grasp, but the maid swipes at the cat, who runs off, and she sweeps the dumb flaccid bug easily into the dustbin, with a nonchalance that her mistress’s embarrassment observes. It is odd that it is so sunny outside, Virginie thinks, when for all she knows the world has turned upside down. It is a sinking ship that was once a home. Her toes are cold.

  Virginie does not know what to do with her time in Manila while Ludo is off in Pampanga. It rains for weeks on end. Now it escapes her why she allowed herself to leave New York. With a baby. To live in this drowning city. But she remembers that feeling she had when she had stepped out onto the tarmac in the oppressive heat, as if she were conquering something, as if despite her blindness, under the dazzle of the sun, she had been given this gift of vision, a vista into a strange world she would one day know.

  That feeling of anticipation, of something about to happen, comes upon her as she watches the crowd outside the windows of her car, driven by the chauffeur. It is after the storm. The storm had shuttered their lives because Magallanes Village is its own oasis, alert and
alive and intact because of its obscenely anxious regard for itself—the way it exists at the expense of others. As she leaves McKinley Road, she watches children swimming in and out of a culvert, paddling through submerged streets. She thinks—how far away I am from home. The city is a vast and bulldozed wreck of upright palms and floating goods and moving, haunting homes that have survived. It is a city of survivors. (It turns out it looks that way even after the rainy season.) She feels unmoored. And in a sort of kindness toward herself, the thought strikes her—her isolation is deserved. This thought is a comfort.

  She is going to buy shoes for her daughter. The shoe store is an apocalypse of boxes. It is a cement atrium of stacked shelves and smiling saleswomen before glass cabinets that also contain lace fans, shell trinkets, and embroidered handkerchiefs under lock and key. Are the items sheltered for their cost, or for their fragility, or for their propensity to catch dust? She wishes to know things but is also bored. People speak English to her as if she were a child, as if she does not understand their language. They take extra care with their vowels and sound out their diphthongs with precision, saying the sound ste-re-o.

  Paul Anka, ma’am? Barry Manilow? Art Garfunkel? Neil Diamond?

  The shoe store sells everything, including albums of Christmas carols and plates with touching epigrams: sweets for the sweets one, one dish setting says, its tender affection unedited twelve times. She thinks she stands out, with her wild hair and her cheeks sweating under sunglasses then freeze-drying in the air conditioning, and she wishes she were shorter. She is glad to stoop down over the sneakers presented to Chiara.

  Chiara is in love. With the display and plenitude of the shoe shop, this cavern of merchandise, also unedited, and she touches everything she sees—the ceramic pigs with bobbing heads, the satin dots on the bows of the salesgirls’ uniforms.

  It turns out, wherever she goes, soon everyone crowds around Chiara. Virginie’s beauty is problematic, people politely turn away from it as if embarrassed to be observers. She has a movie star face, a white woman’s profile that creates a stir, registered to her only as discomfort. But the child is like a magnet to the tidy, starched women with straight backs and exquisitely made-up faces and prim hair stretched tight into neat buns. Their stiff, smiling poise turns into abandon around four-year-old Chiara, their hairpins loosened, stockinged heels separating a precarious inch from their pumps as they bend on tippy toes and leave their positions in their departments, at Beach Sandals or Charles Jourdan, to bend down to the height of the child, looking for all the world as if they are falling over laughing, as they come cooing around the girl.

  “So pretty, ma’am,” they say, and they brush Chiara’s fat cheeks and touch her light-filled hair.

  “Are these real?” they ask about Chiara’s curls. “They look like a munyika’s, a doll!”

  Virginie marvels at her daughter, how at ease she is in the world, as if everything is her due, sometimes answering the salesgirls’ questions, sometimes not, running off to pull out from the Disney display a plush toy, a cat.

  “Misay!” Chiara returns with the animal, calling out the name of her cat, and the salesgirls think this is so funny it is difficult for them to get back to work and look for other sneakers that fit the child, they keep repeating the word Misay and laughing.

  “Wow, she’s Visayan,” says one.

  “She speaks Waray,” giggles another.

  Virginie frowns, not understanding, then she gets the joke.

  The name of their cat Misay means “cat” in that language, Waray. A Wonderland world, she thinks, where the names you give are jokes to others, and your ignorance is the moral lesson of the story.

  Finally her daughter chooses her pair of shoes. A pile of pastel sneakers lies spilled at her feet. The salesgirl takes the mother and child to the woman who peers into their chosen box, cataloging a number on her mimeographed sheet. Another girl stamps a receipt on the box. Then a girl takes her to a line to pay.

  Virginie is afraid.

  She is afraid of her freeze-dried mind in the air conditioning as she stands above the shopgirls, her spine straight. To complain is a sign of a small mind. Any minute she will scream, she will throw this bunch of tissue-paper money into the cashier’s smiling face, she will throw a tantrum in this labyrinth of inexplicably multiplying shoebox warrens.

  And no one will fault her for her rage.

  She is very tall; she has dominion.

  She is tired. Mainly she is tired of herself.

  Her knuckles are tight around her bag, her fingernails dig into her palm.

  So this is life, Virginie thinks. Her world in Manila is not so different from the terror of her girlhood, the life she had escaped when she married Ludo. She is taken from one shopgirl to another in a snaking, frozen tundra full of glass countertops and boxes. She cannot see her way out of the labyrinth of stations that comprise the paying of the shoes. The line of salesgirls playing with Chiara is growing longer. Then the cashier counts out the pesos Virginie offers with a doubtful air. Then the cashier in another line counts Virginie’s cash again. She gives the box of shoes to yet another girl. The other girl wraps the box. Virginie is following the sequence, moving with the box, she thinks she will go out of her mind.

  Where is Ludo?

  He is up in the sky over Pampanga, directing his new world.

  How does he describe it?

  —You look out, Virginie, he said to her on the phone, above Arayat—and it is as if the sky is your vestibule.

  The idea of Ludo ruling the world with his borrowed money—his loans and banks and her cash infusions causing him all sorts of headaches and euphoria, cash being the engine of his art—gives her a bloated, bruised feeling, of a tenderness in the offing, a wound of affection coming to the fore in this freezing place.

  The wrapping girl places the box of shoes into a bag. The stapling girl staples the bag shut. But when Virginie is shown the way to the next line, the salesgirls’ heels click-clacking on the cement floor, to one more glass counter where one more girl will take out one more receipt and stamp one more symbol onto the wrapped box of her daughter’s pastel shoes, Virginie begins to cry.

  The sound surprises even Virginie.

  She is wailing.

  She cannot help it.

  She is a monsoon wind that will never stop.

  Virginie’s hair is wet and hanging from her face, and her sunglasses are askew, and Chiara hears her mother cry—Aiiiieeeeee!—falling down into her rabbit hole, the cavern of boxes that is the mall.

  The salesgirls gather around the lady.

  Finally, they look straight at Virginie.

  They leave the child, they scuttle around, they open a glass cabinet, they fan her with the lace fans from the magic glass shelves, they cradle her head gently, they soothe her with their talcum breaths.

  “She’s so pretty,” they say, “like a munyika, a doll.”

  Later Virginie will smell that whiff, a mix of baby cologne and that odd ammoniac fragrance, Tiger Balm, on an airplane, and she will turn to the woman bearing the perfume, a complacent passenger staring at the airline menu, and ask the stranger: Do you remember me?

  Get me out of here, Virginie weeps to her daughter in the mall, get me out.

  The child combs the hair of her mother with a pearl-encrusted object, also from the magic glass.

  “Mamma,” Chiara remembers herself saying, “Mamma, it’s okay.”

  8.

  A Film with a Void at Its Heart

  Chiara says that a visit to Samar is necessary for her spiritual journey.

  “You know that’s not a normal thing to say about Samar,” Magsalin advises.

  Chiara ignores her.

  Chiara says she had a conversion online.

  This is the part when, to Magsalin, as Chiara tells her story, the filmmaker lets down her guard.

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sp; Chiara gains a hint of, let’s say, embodiment, shedding that slightly offensive look of tactful sedation. She finally takes the proffered pan de sal, buttering it up on all sides, crust and filling both, eating a lot, and her straight, bronzed hair gets caught in her shiny, jutting, expensively symmetrical upper teeth.

  That is the effect she wants for her next movie, Chiara says.

  It will be a film with a void at its heart.

  Emotion will lie in the film’s structure, like a silent grenade.

  It will be set in 1901, or maybe 1972, or maybe 2018, in any case not quite her father’s ’68—no one will be the wiser. There will be unapologetic uses of generic types, actors with duplicating roles. Anachronisms, false starts, scarlet clues, a noirish insistence on the pathetic pursuit of human truths will pervade its miserable (quite thin) plot, and while the mystery will seem unsolved, to some it will provide the satisfaction of unrelieved despair.

  After clicking on all the Balangiga items in her Google search, as far as page 102, Chiara says she cheated and began a new search. She finds fifty-seven articles by an Iranian journalist named Samar, and twenty more by her Jordanian counterpart also named Samar, before she narrows her search to “Balangiga Samar 1901.” It is embarrassing to note Chiara’s unscholarly search habits, but I imagine no one is unfamiliar with her process.

  She had a conversion into the world of the Filipino insurrectos of 1901, Chiara says.

  That is not the correct term, Magsalin says.

  What?

  They were revolutionaries, Magsalin says. It was not an insurrection.

  Chiara ignores her.

  It was as if, Chiara explains to Magsalin, she had entered a portal and become the body of a Filipino farmer disguised as a devout Catholic woman carrying a machete inside his voluminous peasant skirt and hoping to kill a GI.