Insurrecto Read online

“You were hallucinating,” Magsalin points out. “Do you know what was really in the heirloom apple compote in your mother’s castle in the Catskills? You know—too much limoncello has been known to go directly to the brain. In any case, the whole thing just sounds, well, lame. An unearned case of white guilt. I’m sorry if that is offensive.”

  “Oh. No worries. No offense taken.”

  Professor Estrella Espejo’s papers on Balangiga, “The Unintended: A Consequence,” parts 1, 3, and 6, were on kirjasto.com, on two WordPress blogs by the same tenure-track assistant professor in San Diego, and on a remote server that, when clicked upon, apologized for the inconvenience but due to copyright questions, et cetera, et cetera. Chiara’s efforts to find the scholar’s contacts were fruitless until she found an exchange in a Comments section on inq7.net involving Espejo and Magsalin.

  “Wait a minute,” Magsalin demands. “When was this?”

  Chiara takes out a leather-bound notebook from her huge Hermès bag.

  “August 15, 2000. You likened the, quote unquote, bitter, essentializing determinist, Professor Estrella Espejo, to the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, saying, quote, like Wile E. Coyote you keep setting your traps though it is only you who bites, unquote.”

  “That was in reference to her loony-tunes theory that Juan Luna, the Filipino painter, could be Jack the Ripper, you know, like Juan the Ripper, just because he was also in Europe, like the Ripper, around the same time Juan Luna killed his wife, Paz Chiching Luna. She thinks that the death of Paz Chiching Luna is the last Ripper death. Estrella Espejo is insane. For one thing, Luna killed his wife in Paris, not London.”

  “You had another run-in with her in 2004.”

  “She gets these history worms in her head and won’t let go.”

  “It was about my father’s film.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “You read closely the scene in which Tommy O’Connell shoots a woman and her daughter, who are hiding something in a rickshaw.”

  “They were hiding a book.”

  “It was a diary. You noted that the camera panned over a few quick words, meant to be in French, or maybe Vietnamese.”

  “It was supposed to be the diary of the woman’s dead husband. It was supposed to be a list of his descriptions, his affecting trifling observations of his kid, the girl Tommy has just orphaned. The kid rides a merry-go-round; the kid won’t get out of the swimming pool; the kid creates a pun, on the words moon and comb. There are receipts that fall from the book, there are photographs. And it is clear that the now dead mother and her child had only been trying to keep the father’s personal possessions intact. That is what Tommy reads, in the sentimental scene that follows his murder of the kid’s mother. Tommy had shot her in her gesture of self-defense, as mother and child tried to save the dead man’s papers. In my view—that scene is the crux of his story. And onscreen, the actual words of the page in the dead man’s journals, if you stopped the frame, are in Waray, my language—the language of Leyte and Samar.”

  “Your idea was that the sentences in my dad’s film were actual pages from a diary of a revolutionary soldier in Samar in the Philippine-American War.”

  “In truth, no such diary has ever been found. The extant published records of the Philippine-American War are, as you know, in the words of the colonizer. But yes, I imagined your dad was alluding to the other war and making a connection. I wondered then why the Philippine diary, a red herring in his text, was so repressed in his film? Why was it that in his press conferences your dad made no references to the 1901 incident in Balangiga at all? I mean, as I said, look at the names in his movie: Smitty Jakes, Tommy O’Connell. Read The Ordeal of Samar and you have your dad’s movie right there.”

  “I did.”

  “Read The Ordeal of Samar?”

  “I got the Joseph Schott book, yes. It was disturbing, but not in ways that could make a good movie.”

  “So you cheated way more. You went off the Internet and read an actual book.”

  Chiara laughs. Then she asks: “So I want to know. Are you Professor Estrella Espejo?”

  Magsalin almost topples off the stool. She starts coughing. The waitress offers her water and a napkin.

  Magsalin takes a long sip.

  “Hell, no,” Magsalin says, putting down the glass. “I wouldn’t be caught dead being Estrella Espejo. She’s a lunatic with astasia-abasia tied up in IV tubes on an island in the South China Sea. I mean the West Philippine Sea, depending on your disposition.”

  She stares at the filmmaker, daring her to contradict.

  “Yeah, I know,” says Chiara. “Estrella Espejo is something else. She told me to get in touch with you if I wanted to go to Balangiga. She said she could not help me because she’s on an IV drip and unstable.”

  “You can say that again. Did she give you my email?”

  “And cell.”

  “She’s a shit.”

  “Pardon?”

  “She makes things up in her head and won’t let go. Take the details of your father’s film. First, Charlie Company: the third company in every goddamned battalion is called Charlie. Or Charmed. Or Chicken. Anyone who took Citizens Army Training, as Espejo did, since she lived under Marcos’s martial law, knows that. C Company just means third! It’s not significant. Second, Smitty Jakes, Jacob Smith. Okay, sounds like. Tommy O’Connell, Thomas Connell—the similarity of the names is convincing. Clearly, one text is lifted from another. And she goes on and on making a case about names. But the point is not the coincidence of the naming, or even their intentional equivalence. The one-to-one correspondence between history and fiction is not so interesting. It’s a logical fallacy to mistake the parallel with the important—it is not yet clear that God, you know, exists between parallel lines. I mean, if you are going to steal my idea, at least make something useful out of it. The question, it seems to me, is how to keep the past from recurring. I mean, what the fuck is the point of knowing history’s goddamned repetitive spirals if we remain its bloody victims?”

  “Do you think there are parallel universes and we are stuck in the one made up only of the bad movie plots?”

  “I wonder if we are stuck in the bad movie plots we make ourselves,” says Magsalin.

  “I think we are stuck in someone’s movie,” says Chiara.

  “Pardon?”

  Magsalin looks hard behind Chiara Brasi’s Chanel shades. Chiara will not take them off, even when she accidentally gets butter on them from the cinnamon buns. Now that Chiara has already buttered the pan de sal, she starts buttering the cinnamon buns, which are already buttered.

  “I think we are stuck in someone’s movie,” says Chiara, “and the director is still laying out his scraps of script, trying to figure out his ending. He does not have an ending. Everything around him has the possibility of becoming part of his movie, his love for his wife, that seventies song, the fly over there licking the sugar on the bun, the clown in the corner playing with a knife, a moment in a mirror store in New York when he sees himself replicated through his camera lens in all the mirrors, except he cannot see his eyes, that schoolboy folding carefully a white shirt and tucking it neatly into a brown paper bag lying on a bench, an anxiety attack he has in 1975 when his movie is still not done, when it has a beginning and an idea but no end, and two million feet of unedited film, with takes, retakes, and other duplications. That is what we are: hundreds of thousands of feet of unedited film, doing things over and over, in a recursive spool, and we are waiting for the cut. But who is the director? What is our wait for? I would like to make a movie in which the spectator understands that she is in a work of someone else’s construction, and yet as she watches, she is devising her own translations for the movie in which she in fact exists. It seems as if The Unintended were constructed out of the story of Samar, but the reverse is also true. The Unintended also produces, for us, the horror of Balan
giga. We enter others’ lives through two mediums, words and time, both faulty. And still, one story told may unbury another, and the dead, who knows, may be resurrected. At least, that is the hope. Recurrence is only an issue of not knowing how the film should end.”

  “So it’s a zombie flick?” Magsalin asks.

  “Well,” Chiara hesitates, “it is not as meaningful as that.”

  Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the first Big Question:

  “But is it about knowing how a film should end or not knowing its shape?”

  “A film has no shape if it does not know its end.”

  Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the second Big Question:

  “But is it about knowing how a film should end or that its end could be multiple, like desire’s prongs?”

  “Touché.”

  Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the third Big Question:

  “Why does a film persist at all?”

  “A film exists only when it has an observer.”

  Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the fourth Big Question:

  “Do you know that a clown is going to kidnap you?”

  “In a mystery, clowns are always significant.”

  Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the last Big Question:

  “What is in the manila envelope?”

  “If you take it, you will see.”

  9.

  The Thrilla in Manila

  “Okay,” says Magsalin, taking the envelope. “I’ll see what I can do. I know some people. At the very least, maybe they can help you get to Samar, if I will not.”

  “Thank you,” Chiara says, in that shy, nasal voice that is so annoying. “How do you get out of here?”

  “Just follow the signs. There are detours for the exits. They’re renovating, you know.”

  “Are you leaving too?”

  Magsalin thinks she will take her up on it, on the forlorn implication in Chiara’s little-girl voice that she would like some company, that Chiara is scared of Cubao and her impulsive clueless spiritual adventure to get to Samar, an idea that only people as rich and thoughtless as Chiara suddenly get in their heads and then stupidly follow through; and yes, Magsalin will lead her to the exit and get her safely through Cubao and then onto Roxas Boulevard (formerly Admiral George Dewey) straight down the length of the ancient bay to Chiara’s rooms in the MacArthur Suite at the Manila Hotel.

  “I want to take a spin around the mall,” Magsalin says. “I’ll hang around here a bit. Here’s my address and phone, if you need me. Or I can see you sometime later at your hotel.”

  The waitress offers the check. Chiara offers her a credit card to pay. The waitress shakes her head. Magsalin takes out her non-Hermés bag, aubergine and olive, made in Venice.

  She unzips the duffel and, carefully fishing around corners of the pale blue box that takes up too much space, she finds her wallet.

  “I like your bag,” Chiara says. “I have one exactly like it.”

  Sure you do, thinks Magsalin.

  Magsalin pays with cash.

  “Thanks,” Chiara says.

  “No problem.”

  They both stare at the poster of Muhammad Ali, sandwiched between sandwiches, as Magsalin waits for her change.

  “My father saw that fight, you know. Ringside. They used to watch all those shows in the States, in Las Vegas. My dad liked boxing. My mom preferred Elvis Presley.”

  “You know, Ali and Elvis were friends. I think. I read that somewhere. Elvis gave Ali a sequined robe so they would look like twins when Elvis watched Muhammad Ali in Las Vegas.”

  “The robe said people’s choice,” says Chiara.

  “I know! But Ali was People’s Champ,” says Magsalin.

  “I remember my mother sobbing when Elvis died,” says Chiara.

  “Everyone’s mom sobbed when Elvis died. Even in Manila,” says Magsalin. “You know, a woman journalist once met Muhammad Ali at an Elvis concert, and she asked him, so what are two African Americans like us doing in a concert like this, and Ali said, what are you talking about, I’m from Louisville, Kentucky—we listen to this music all the time! So, you know, you never know where the borderline of your own life is, the journalist said. Elvis could be in you.”

  “Sounds like a good thing,” says Chiara.

  “Actually, come to think of it, it was a Johnny Cash concert, not Elvis. Ali grew up with country. He listened to Johnny Cash.”

  When the waitress comes back with her change, Magsalin is not sure about the protocol, about when and how she can leave the filmmaker.

  At Ali Mall, is she, Magsalin, the guest, or is it Chiara?

  Magsalin clears her throat. “Um, it’s amazing, though. What a thrilla that your parents saw Ali-Frazier in Manila in 1975.”

  Chiara perks up.

  “Yeah. The Thrilla in Manila. At the time, we lived nearby in—let’s see. I have it here in my notebook. Magallanes Village.”

  “That’s in Makati, not Quezon City.”

  “Oh. The Internet was wrong.”

  “Figures.”

  “The Thrilla in Manila,” Chiara repeats, and then she gets up, just like that, leaving Magsalin and the pan de sal shop without any warning.

  Bitch.

  Chiara is in the dark hallway, and Magsalin has to follow behind. The filmmaker is blocking Magsalin’s exit and gazing, as if mentally noting its pros and cons as a film location, at the boarded-up space beyond Philippine Airlines, the scaffolding that might be a promised escalator or remnant of someone’s change of mind.

  “Muhammad Ali Mall. What an interesting tribute.”

  “Ali Mall,” Magsalin corrects, wondering if Chiara will ever budge from the door. “That’s what people call it. Its name is Ali Mall.”

  “I like it,” Chiara turns and smiles at Magsalin. “I like tributes.”

  “I guess,” says Magsalin.

  “I once read all these books about the fight,” Chiara says. “After my father finished The Unintended, you know, after the movie was done, my mother left Manila. He had this idea for another film. But my mother left. She was always doing that, leaving, then coming back. I was always with my mom. When he died, we kept moving. All over the place. New York. The south of France. She could not stay in one place for too long. Places suffocated her, she said. She had dizzy spells. I kept missing my father. I think she did, too. We lived in hotels. Hotels were her way of erasing things, maybe. She has this saying—about embracing the present. One must embrace the present, Chiara—it is all we have! I have never blamed my mother, you know. She did not know the ending of the story. How could anyone know? The last time my mother, my father, and I were all together was in Manila. The Thrilla in Manila. I’ve watched that match over and over again. On DVD. Round 6. When Ali says to Frazier . . .”

  “‘They tol’ me Joe Frazier was all washed up!’”

  “And Frazier goes . . .”

  “‘They . . . lied!’”

  “Hah!” Chiara claps her hands. “You do a mean Frazier.”

  “Thank you. Were you for Ali or Frazier?” Magsalin asks.

  “I love Muhammad Ali.”

  “Do you think he’s real?”

  “More real than I,” says Chiara. “He’s The Greatest.”

  Magsalin smiles. Just for that, she thinks, she’ll do whatever this spoiled brat says.

  “I am sorry about your parents,” Magsalin says. “I am sorry about your father—”

  “Di niente. It’s my life. When I think of the world around me”—and Chiara’s gaze does not wander, does not look at all at the world around her—“why should I complain?”

  “Myself, I liked Frazier,” says Magsalin.

  “Really? But why?”

  “Because he wasn’t really an ugl
y motherfucker. He was no gorilla. Except Ali, the director, made him up.”

  10.

  Translations

  At first, what puts Magsalin off at the pastry shop is Chiara’s voice. It is nasal, and her monotone, a bored flatness, even in the most interesting parts, keeps Magsalin, or the pastry shop waitress, or anyone else willing to listen amid the humid baking scones and moist pan de sal, at bay, as if an invisible wall, maybe socioeconomic, exists between Chiara’s voice and your attention.

  It is past one o’clock, and outside, the truant boys are shrugging back into their white button-down polo shirts, the uniform of all the Catholic schools that dot EDSA, done with their lunch-hour video games, and the circus men, on break from Fiesta Carnival, are wending their way out of the mall like blind mice, every clown in deep-black Ray-Ban knockoffs, wiping off rice grains and chorizo oil from their greasepaint lips.

  And still Magsalin does not know what she has to do with Chiara’s trip to Samar.

  Was Chiara clutching the rough draft of the war-movie script that won her the prize among her peers that April afternoon in her mother’s Catskills mansion?

  Is Chiara’s next project an art-house political film, à la Costa-Gavras’s Z, to be shot on location in the actual country in which the plot occurs, a film of dizzying, unheard-of realism, hence the need for translations into the actual language of the hapless citizens in the process of being killed by the occupation forces?

  It is clear to Magsalin that Chiara is on a quest. Her elaborate Google search is suspect, a ruse, and the expository setting, the rural mansion of filmmaking bots, even if true, has the feeling of a patch over the real story.

  Her arrival in Manila did not arise only from a ludic pastime, this play on her father’s name.

  In Samar, Chiara wishes to unlock a key.

  About her father? About her script? About herself?

  But what does Magsalin care about that?

  Magsalin’s taxable occupation is to translate, hence her professional name: Magsalin. (It means to translate in her maternal grandfather’s tongue, Tagalog.) Her English-language website, translationsforhire.net, says as much.