Gun Dealers' Daughter: A Novel Page 5

  No.

  It was Soli’s approval that I craved.

  I had met Jed and his dad that first day at the dorm, and Jed was as grumpy and worthless as I remembered him, a beautiful creature wrapped up in vague martyrdoms. True, he had graduated valedictorian from my high school, a prize I had coveted, but I thought he had received it with rude grace, walking onstage in leather slip-ons and a t-shirt.

  Jed was a millionaire who dressed like Saint Francis and acted like Saint Jerome; increasingly his temper was waspish and gloomy, as if he spent days starving himself in the desert, transcribing the words of the Lord. Everybody at the high school had adored him, his growing rage against the Philistines, and all the girls wanted to be his Mary Magdalene. When he spearheaded the food drives and the orphan visits, the boys on his soccer team went along, their hearts not quite bleeding; the girls on my soccer team were ready to anoint his cleats with oil, plus myrrh and frankincense. But when he made that speech at graduation, denouncing our imperial education to a crowd of imperial scum, no one was amused.

  As I said, I did not begrudge Jed and Soli their conspiratorial gravity or cuckoo activism, as my dad had called Jed’s evil valediction. In fact, Jed’s meekness and modesty at the university dorm were new. From campus loudmouth, he became this mute nonentity, obscuring his beauty in red bandannas and hanging around with lumpen louts and morbid people, all similarly sandal-shod. Jed followed this girl around, that creamy betel nut of a radical, Solidaridad Soledad, my tokayo, my provocative eponym. He stood behind her at rallies and demonstrations, helping her organize late-night lectures, fetching chairs, lifting megaphones, and at the first event I went to, I saw him holding a banner over her head, like a matrimonial veil, at this farmers’ strike to which Soli had made me tag along.

  Yes, I know—I too became a recruit in Soli’s student army. Don’t ask me why or how. To put it in Soli’s terms, I was just a well-mannered bourgeois with unspoken misgivings about my own desires. And yes, I’d be the first to say that recalling the idiocies of teenage days has the tinge, inescapably, of a young-adult novel—the irritatingly unexamined opinions of unlived lives. Touché.

  In dumb pumps and op-art clothes, I looked radically ill advised, not chic. But even when I joined Soli and Jed on their rainy marches through the potholes of Manila’s streets, I did have the feeling of being left out, though who knows if my sense of abandonment was my own fault.

  It was hard in the early days not to feel, in Jed and Soli’s presence, that the rest of us were out of the loop. In those first days he hung about her like an idiot Romeo, as if her every word were some aphorism or lambent epigram, and his rapt look created the disturbing force field that foolish lovers make. To Soli’s credit, she took it like no Juliet. She was flattered but did not simper, amused, not stupefied, by love. I admired her coolness, her romantic tact.

  When they visited me that weekend in Makati, and they grinned at my childish books (Winnie the Pooh, Willy Wonka) among my Uncle Gianni’s slew of other recommendations (Graham Greene, Anthony Powell), I did not take their comradeship against them. I was pleased they had dropped by.

  “What are you doing here,” I said.

  “Just passing,” Jed said, as if his neighborly visit were a habit. “I told Soli you lived across the street from my mom’s, probably home on a weekend leave, and Soli insisted we stop by.”

  “Are your parents home?” Soli asked, looking around at the gilt Versailles mirrors of the foyer. I thought she’d soon be choking on some French pastry allusion or powdery Sun-King sally. “Can we meet them?”

  “They’re at the Palace,” I said to Jed. “Didn’t your mom go?”

  It was September, that day after the Manila Bay concert: the president was celebrating his actual birthday with a bash my parents never declined.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jed said.

  I was sorry I said anything.

  Prima De Rivera Morga, a former fixture at all functions my parents attended, had gradually become that rare thing in Manila society: a hermit. She’d stopped going out, and rumor had concocted all sorts of despairs. Agoraphobic, alcoholic, anorexic; rumor cooked a full menu of maladies, but she appeared in the society columns always as “the lovely socialite.” I hadn’t seen her since she had moved across the street after leaving her husband’s home. When Jed moved into her home a few months later, ditching Princeton for the naked butt of the local university’s Oblation, I’d occasionally see his proletarian bike propped against the bonsai, or glimpse a Rorschach shadow of his curls in a tinted car. But he, too, avoided my parents’ company like the plague; and the sight of the recluse’s glamorous son in our house, I knew, would be causing commotion among the maids.

  I could see my driver Manong Babe, usually a man of decorum, gaping at Jed and Soli as they passed him picking his teeth discreetly by the stairs.

  I sent them both straight up to my rooms.

  Soli said she loved my wallpaper. What an ingenious design given the sad destinies of that orphan kid and his giant coconut. Jed found her view of Roald Dahl endearing. My own say in the matter, as the erstwhile curator of the room’s motifs at age ten, was, I guess, moot.

  “And look: my initials all over the wall,” exclaimed Soli.

  “It’s a copy of a Bauhaus print,” I said.

  “What’s Bauhaus again,” Jed said. “Nazi narcissists?”

  Soli laughed.

  “No. The opposite,” I said. “They were progressive. Designers and architects. Persecuted by the Nazis.”

  “And you have your own gym,” Soli said. “And a spoliarium: cool.”

  “It’s a solarium,” I corrected.

  “No,” she said. “Spoliarium.”

  “That is the arena of gladiator corpses in ancient Rome,” I corrected. “A solarium is a sunroom.”

  “The space of spolia,” she appraised it. “Spoliarium.”

  I looked at Jed.

  “Well, he has one, too, I bet. Bigger than mine,” I said.

  “And what did you think of the Colonel?” he asked.

  “What?”

  Jed repeated: “What did you think of the new man at LOTUS?”

  “How did you know I met him?”

  “My dad said you met him there.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “He’s an interesting dude,” said Jed. “That Colonel. He and your Uncle Gianni—Edwin tells me they’re fascinating guys.”

  10

  I MADE AN ERROR in that accounting: such things happen. Yes, right. Correct, erase, dismember. It is not true. Soli was not in my rooms with Jed that weekend of the concert by the Bay. A smell of gunsmoke and burning rubber—the sensational background of a New Year’s wake, the day she visited me in Makati. The air stank of New Year’s sulphur. No, this conversation happened months before, as I said: on the night of the president’s Virgo bacchanal.

  My parents were already at the Palace in their masks and decadent cheer, to sing ring-around-the-rosy about the dictator’s dialysis machine. And I was not surprised by the arrival in my home of Jed and his sidekick, that invertebrate kid in a trench coat, Edwin Cardozo.

  As tall as Jed but without his muscle, Edwin, in my memory, gives off the sense of someone unaccountably overlooked—a slightly mangled indistinct abstraction in an awkward draft that seeks the truth. Or maybe that is just the case of us all—what would I look like, to Edwin?

  It’s his fault. As far as I could tell, Edwin Cardozo was a wuss. Never quite part of the crowd, he failed to attend even the most innocuous protest marches (say, for the Education Act of 1980, a perfectly banal and proper cause); for the more dangerous ones, he cast us off as idiots, grinning as if he were some wise, ripened old Methuselah among an uncooked batch of juvenile Maos—though he looked younger than any of us, with his childish braces and baby fat. Bespectacled, his mouth pulled together by spidery webs, he leaned against a black umbrella most times, so that it seemed that he was
kept upright and walking and talking mostly by metallic accessories, rather than by actual bones or spine. His main preoccupation was an endless game of chess with Jed, played in the dorm lobby.

  Among all of the kids of those times, Edwin bugged me the most.

  I’d go off to play soccer at the scraggly university fields, and I’d note Edwin in my sweaty vision seated in the crummy bleachers, scrunched with his sketchy umbrella amid the litter and the crabby grass. I’d browse through the secondhand books in the open-air labyrinths behind Vinzons Hall, and he’d be swatting at the flies on the tolerant dust as he read some bothersome science tome. True, Edwin and I had the same schedule, because we were block mates; and the university is a small-enough space for freshmen who are clumped together in limited spheres: lobby, library, Palma Hall—we’d barely get to the Annex, stuck as we were in our predestined ruts down the flame-tree road from class to dorm.

  I recognized my relations with Jed and Soli and their group had begun deteriorating (one could put it that way) at some point in the detritus of that typhoon season—after the marches and the sit-ins and the countryside lectures, and the questions and the self-criticisms and the confessions. It was unnerving to keep finding Edwin Cardozo on the periphery of my lamest acts, burrowing in the library or brooding in a bookstall, as if killing time.

  There is the impulse to gloss over, to wallpaper certain moments with creatures of my design. Edwin’s flat face buried in a book at the British Council, sticking his nose in alphabetical savants—A. Brontë, C. Dickens, E. Forster—while I sat morose in a seat nearby. That library in New Manila became my particular obsession. I remember at one point I kept borrowing books that had the same incestuous signatures on the sign-out sleeves: and so it seemed intermarriages of paired sensibilities could be graphed by the names on a book’s stiff cards. Those odd couplings satisfied me.

  When I kept bumping into Edwin Cardozo at the strangest places, even outside the university walls, I felt they were stalking me—the sons of the people whom I was shamefully escaping—even though reason told me that Edwin Cardozo, cowardly nonmarcher, was not one of them. I remember once, when a shot rang through the dormitory lobby (it was only a drunken boy, breaking a bottle against a door’s glass), it was Edwin who dropped instantly to the floor, cowering as if revolution had broken loose.

  Coca-Cola philosopher, they called him. But the reason he never joined the marches was not just ideological. At heart, I thought, he was afraid.

  The book cards told me that like me he was a restive reader. He read Portrait of the Artist before I did, but I had my hands first on Sentimental Journey. We read in tandem the twin dust covers of the library’s duplicate copies of A Handful of Dust.

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing here,” I said.

  If the maids had not been around, waiting at the doorway, I would have pushed the pair out of the house.

  “Just passing,” Jed said, as if his neighborly visit were a habit. “I told Edwin you lived across the street from my mom’s, probably home on a weekend leave, and he insisted we stop by.”

  “Are your parents home?” Edwin asked, looking around at the gilt Versailles mirrors of the foyer. I could see he’d soon be choking on some French pastry allusion or powdery Sun-King sally. “Can we meet them?”

  Edwin, as usual, was carrying his dumb black umbrella on his shoulder like a Garand rifle.

  I stared at them from the staircase, unwilling to come down.

  “They’re at the Palace,” I said. I looked at Jed: “Didn’t your mom go?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The maids were coming in and out, staring at their visitor, the reclusive beauty queen’s son who hovered behind Edwin at the doorway, as if he, like me, wished only to escape.

  Even my driver Manong Babe, usually a man of decorum, was gaping at the pair as he picked his teeth discreetly by the stairs.

  I sent them both up to my rooms.

  “What,” grinned Edwin, “Juan and the humongous guava? What’s with the orphan theme?”

  “Those are scenes from Roald Dahl,” I corrected.

  “Your initials all over the wall,” Ed smirked.

  “They are copies of Bauhaus prints,” I said.

  “Nazi narcissists,” murmured Jed.

  “Quite the opposite,” Edwin said. “They were progressive. Designers and architects. Persecuted by the Nazis. Ah. And you have your own gym. And a solarium: cool.”

  “A spoliarium,” Jed said.

  “That is the arena of gladiator corpses in ancient Rome,” Edwin smirked.

  “The space of spolia,” said Jed.

  I stared at him:

  “Then you have one, too, I bet. Bigger than mine.”

  “And what did you think of the Colonel?” Jed asked.

  “What?”

  Jed repeated: “What did you think of the new man at LOTUS?”

  “How did you know I met him?”

  “I told him you would meet him there,” Edwin said, head bent as he wandered about my room, checking out the books. He did not bother looking up: “I told Jed to go to the concert himself.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “He’s an interesting dude,” said Jed. “That Colonel. He and your Uncle Gianni—fascinating guys, aren’t they, Edwin?”

  Edwin came up to us, holding a book.

  “Can I borrow these,” he said.

  The Sickness unto Death. The Ordeal of Samar.

  I stared at him.

  11

  MUCKING THROUGH THIS part of the story discourages me, but I might as well go through with it. I’ve been told Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death is only a bodily malfunction, a glandular lack. Maybe this throb of incompleteness is the same. In my mind, the event has the anxious compass of something yet to be averted—a sordid, unsatisfying suspension. I keep pushing it down, stomping on it, this heft of my expectancy, my wish to resurrect him, again.

  I had these jobs in Jed and Soli’s group—we each played a role in our small ways. Mine was to collect copper five-centavo coins—solid centavos with a naked man on the obverse and a smoking volcano in the distance. I was a treasurer. I have no idea why we collected the five centavos—and not the pesos or the twenty-fives. They told me to collect them and I did. Every time I saw one, I’d put the coin in this rectangular tin of Fox’s Glacier candy, a rattling can I carried around, like some beggar’s bounty. Another of my jobs was to run errands, buy material for meetings, stuff like that. For instance, apart from the copper coins, I gathered goods for night ops. Of night operations, you saw the results every day, washed off then resurrected, painted over, painted back—red slogans on monuments and bridges.

  It was my job to buy the Dutch Boy paint. Color: dripping blood, with a can of thinner to maximize our outlay. Other people, “warm bodies,” cadaverous kids from the university belt, did the graffiti. My job was to get the cans and sometimes help mix the paint. Afterward, those of us left behind used to sit on a windowsill at the Annex. The domestic wreckage would lie before us, poster cloth, newspaper backdrops greasy with thinner droppings, brushes and rollers and someone’s paint-splattered shirt on the floor. To relax, sometimes we’d walk over to the astronomer’s tower. We took a beaten path beyond the Arts and Science buildings throttled by goats and wild grass. We’d go up and talk to the astronomer on duty. We pretended to recognize some constellations.

  At the time, Jed was building some kind of fame in the narrow corridors of our imaginations.

  Jed led lightning rallies—daredevil streaks after midnight. He looked for confrontations with police. He enjoyed the kinds of work, even drudgery, that led to danger. I’d go to the student council office at the Annex and note him among his insomniac pals, bony heirs of Bonifacio, tooling with their banners. He was an intense being with a dreamy look, a gaze skittish and grave at the same time. He and Soli were still a thing. I could not tell exactly how love happened among the radicals—they c
alled courtship a programa, a romance of rules and guidelines the absurdities of which I failed to fathom. To be honest, at this point it did not look too different from love anywhere else. Soli complained Jed was impulsive and a narcissist, and Jed agreed so she would shut up.

  Night ops, for instance, trivial as they were, appealed to Jed, though Soli pointed out they weren’t his job. He’d come back from those chores looking drunk. The jobs gave him a rush, and when he returned, he had the irritable passion of a child. He couldn’t sit still. He wouldn’t return to the dorm. Instead he wandered around the campus with the stray dogs and the pensive goats. Once he slept by the tower.

  The night I remember, the night-op painters had arrived, and Jed went with them. Mob, he liked to shout, organizing the kids like their boss—let’s mob! Mob meant mobilize. He loved the jargon. I thought even the abbreviations gave him a hard-on, but he didn’t mind it if people laughed. We liked to mimic him as he exited with his troops. The rest of us tramped to the tower. One by one, the group left, and I remained. I wound up alone, leaning against masonry; I sat there on the ground. When a shadow loomed, I jumped.

  “Hello,” Jed said, his white figure fluttering above me. I saw his face, his flickering teeth and incremental hair. I had only a faint light to snare him by: it was the earth that lit him up. He leaned against the masonry, his arm outstretched. “Where did the rest go?”