Insurrecto Page 5

  Magsalin is aware of those scenes in Hollywood movies when, requiring an actor to speak in a conveniently alien tongue, the character starts speaking an inappropriate one, like Tagalog. The prayer of the Javanese man in The Year of Living Dangerously. The possessed woman hissing at Keanu Reeves in Constantine. Farm workers who chase the, as usual, somewhat psychotic Joaquin Phoenix far into a senseless desert in one of those unbearably tense movies by Paul Thomas Anderson.

  And, of course, the Ewoks scenes in Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi.

  In the trade, there are terms for those short-term projects.

  Inversions provide a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, do not require logical coherence. This is the case of the Bahasa-Indonesian prayer in Peter Weir’s movie. The Indonesian prays the “Our Father” in Tagalog, not Bahasa—that is, he need not be coherent. It’s the concept that counts.

  Inversions are opposed to obversions, that is, providing a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, are generally insulting. The Ewok dialogue in the Star Wars prequel, a few choice Tagalog epigrams, is a basic Filipino fuck-you to the universe.

  Diversions, like the irate Filipino farm workers in Stockton, California, in Anderson’s The Master, are plausible, though irrelevant in the overall scheme of things.

  What Magsalin expects is that Chiara’s script will require reversions: a set of matching signifiers that, if reversed, will portray the privileged language as in fact the other, and vice versa.

  Perversions, of course, produce scant good.

  Lastly, conversions, in which one exists like a vestigial body, a desiring corpus, occupied by the words of others, is the most difficult of these types of translations: Magsalin simply refuses to attempt them.

  What interests Magsalin most about Chiara is not the prospect of a job but the filmmaker’s likely disappearance. In her mystery novel, Chiara will leave Ali Mall by a wrong turn, through the plywood board tunnel, a sign announcing the mall owner’s promise of a new ali mall! coming soon!—put up ten years ago. The security guard, looking up from his cell phone, will give Chiara clear directions in English, but she will not understand his accent.

  Chiara has a sense of being lost amid the warped plywood, the tunnel is so spooky and haphazard it has the impression of not even being lit, though makeshift electrical wires become obvious once her vision adjusts. The tunnel spills into the harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs of the decaying merry-go-round outside, where tricycle drivers waiting for clients pick their teeth on ill-painted horses.

  Magsalin knows the area well from her days as a serial bookworm roaming Alemar’s and the vaster though soulless National Bookstore, when she went to school nearby. It occurs to her now that the details she has evoked in the last few sentences might bear traces of her memory’s obsolescence and Chiara’s plaintive future; therefore, her kidnapping by a pair of muscular, Ray-Ban-wearing goons is in fact set among details of a vanished world.

  Of course, the goons are dressed as clowns, in matching puffed-sleeve blouses and billowing striped trousers made of sad flour-sack cotton, their look of cheap improvisation a mark of the ongoing decline of Fiesta Carnival, the venerable old circus of Cubao, next door to Ali Mall.

  Chiara’s struggle will be unseen, though one might expect a stray schoolboy to be lighting a match nearby, polo shirt half on, the gothic logo of the band AC/DC, or maybe Metallica, partly visible on his muscle shirt (he’s actually a bit malnourished); but the irony is that the boy, smoking his last cigarette before he’s expected in gym class, will be looking at the comic book he has just bought with carefully saved change. Struggling into his shirt and reading his comic, he is in no state to observe a famous film director being shoved into a waiting tricycle, an ordinary passenger pedicab painted in the usual deranged Manila hues.

  11.

  Magsalin, on the Other Hand,

  Will Be Wandering

  Magsalin, on the other hand, will be wandering Ali Mall. Done with the exhausting interview with the filmmaker and feeling a bit nauseated amid the steamy cinnamon buns (the bakery smog was making her groggy), Magsalin clutches the thick manila envelope Chiara has given her and travels Ali Mall in a daze.

  The mall is now quite modern, practically Singaporean; at the same time, its familiarity is distracting. There is a schizoid confabulation between the new upscale fixtures, such as the shiny escalators and neon in the Food Court, which now looks like a strip club, and the ratty hair accessories wrapped in dust-holed plastic that seem to have been in the Cardam’s chain of shoe shops since they opened in 1976. What is true perhaps is that, after the vertigo of listening to the story of Chiara Brasi, Magsalin feels unreal, and the world has an illusory aspect, part memory, part script, the split state of a spectator awkwardly providing her own unpaid translations in a movie in which she in fact exists.

  25.

  Its Molting Spirals

  At the hotel in Hong Kong, unknown to her daughter, Virginie sees visions. She is looking for ice. Down the hotel corridor she follows the curls of the carpet’s tracks neatly along its molting spirals—once, when she looks back, she is startled to see the zoological humps of her footsteps’ former map disappearing at her glance. The whorled carpet behind her has turned white, or fogged. It must be her dizziness (her vision troubles her, but she refuses to wear her glasses), a trick of her strained eyes. She shrugs the vanishing off. As she turns and weaves along the serpentine trail of the carpet’s dragon-tail design, tottering along the amphisbaena spines in her insomniac stilettos, Virginie follows the spiral toward the sign that says ice, in English, then in Mandarin. She has been having these visions, she tells her doctor. It is up to her to contain them, he says. He means, she explains to Ludo, she must patch herself up on her own, without anyone’s help. But what’s a doctor for? Ludo is perplexed. If you are seeing visions, does your doctor not have a cure? Ludo does not agree: why shouldn’t he, her husband, help? Because, she thinks, you are already whole, you will not understand, but she does not tell him that.

  She sees the man, in his fractured tassels, all in white, like some specular void slowly transforming, a sweating beast. He is filling up a silver bucket, and behind him, dreamily, she waits in line.

  12.

  What Chiara Does Not Reveal

  Is what Magsalin does not reveal to Chiara—

  13.

  A Motif of the Postmodern

  A motif of the postmodern, renovated Ali Mall is a series of commissioned portraits of the boxer framed in glass at strategic points, like altars. The reflexive signifiers, several of them ugly, are not tongue in cheek. They are serious gestures of commercial veneration. One portrait has a wilted flower on its ledge, left by an admirer (candy wrappers and cigarette stubs also decorate the shrine). The corporate intention of co-opting The Greatest in order to shill shoes is obvious. But the populist beauty of the display—the portraits that modify the mall and the mall that is an appositive of the portraits—is attractive. Sheer presence confounds purpose.

  The portraits do make Ali as absurd as the corporation that hopes to promote meaning from public displays of dumb idolatry. But at the same time, passing by the Muhammad Ali altars, at first in horror, at several points laughing out loud, Magsalin is increasingly attached. She spends the afternoon searching the mall for all the altars. One, a giant billboard, painted in painstaking flatness, makes Ali’s nose as big as the letter A in the word CHAMPION. It has graffiti all around it. But when you look close, expecting obscenity, instead you find sincere compliments, some of them mistaken: ali is da greatest! I saw the HBO, THRILLA! r.i.p. Muhammad Ali, floats like a butterfly, sings like a bee. At this point, though in the future it will change, Muhammad Ali is still alive. In these scrawls, even the errors count. In another, a cubist Ali in a relaxed pose, bold and allusive, looks like Pablo Picasso in an early self-portrait, the one in which he is wearing a striped camisa. Another illustrates
a Filipino pantheon of assorted black idols, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the kid from Diff’rent Strokes, one more idolized basketball player—Magic Johnson, Diana Ross, of course, then Gloria Gaynor of “I Will Survive” fame, and their forefather, Muhammad Ali, descending in order somewhat like Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, but not. To pan on each of these is a slice of time, precious in a movie, so the viewer does wonder at their meanings, juxtaposed as they are with a kidnapping that has been left hanging.

  14.

  The M.O. of Clowns

  Chiara understands that a kidnapping in the open air in a busy city like Manila has many risks. Plus, the country has become an icon of extrajudicial horror, a dystopia of brazen exterminations even in broad daylight, an international emblem of criminal slaughter by fascist police.

  Clowns add an awkward design to this brutality.

  Already, with her director’s eye, Chiara is noting all the problems that will occur in the editing room. Any viewer might mentally record the taxi drivers on the idle carousel as possible witnesses of the initial event: a clown shoving the film director into a passenger pedicab, then following her in. Chiara, trapped in this cramped cab appendage both flimsy and baroque, notes that the slow, clunky spasms of the pedicab indicate that it has no care in the world, as speed makes no money in the city. And the stupid, voluminous clown costume crowding the interior interferes with the position of a knife blade in the clown’s hand, which she suddenly feels, jostling at her exposed shoulder.

  Then what the hell?

  Sitting on a seat she would never have mistaken for one, a padded bump parallel to the driver, perpendicular to Chiara and facing the street—there is a second clown!

  Where the fuck did that clown come from?

  The spatial logistics in a passenger pedicab in metropolitan Manila are too absurd to bear.

  The second clown grabs her Hermès bag.

  Magsalin has to decide on the spot whether the driver, too, is integral to her mystery, or only a pathetic bystander worried about making boundary, his daily bread. Whereas Chiara, obviously more experienced at exploiting suspense, sizes up the driver’s irrelevance, accomplice or not, and knows she has only a split second—though in the actual footage ideally there should be several camera angles to consider despite the singleness of the decisive moment—and she ups the ante.

  Chiara fights for her bag.

  It is, after all, an Hermès.

  It also contains her notes.

  This is not the right thing to do.

  Fighting for your bag usually kills you. Self-defense classes always tell you to give everything up, no questions asked. Magsalin, a paranoiac, expecting trouble at the unlikeliest moment like every alert, vulnerable woman in a city, does not even consider it in her story. However, Chiara’s desperate gestures catch the attention of a passenger about to get off a bus on a crosswalk on EDSA. Up on the bus, the tired employee of the Commission on Audit happens to have a bird’s-eye view of the blonde girl in the tricycle grabbing back her bag.

  You see—and the crime statistics in Manila are no mere trope in this mystery, though it is clear Magsalin has overlooked these facts, having been gone for so long—this incident has happened to the government employee before.

  Many women riding public transportation in Manila know the m.o. of clowns.

  It is one of those miracles that still occur in an overcrowded city, a city of twelve million—give or take the numbers in dawn-versus-dusk traffic, plus the rising death rate in this beleaguered place—where coincidences are just as likely as not. The hyperactive (atypical) policeman at the curb gives chase on the tip from the eagle-eyed woman who has just gotten off the Monumento–Quezon Avenue express. The woman follows the policeman. She is that kind of busybody, always wanting to know the denouement.

  Then crowds of extras swell the scene—jeepney riders who impulsively change their minds and decide to catch the next one, vagrants, passing salesmen, fugitive drug addicts, cigarette smokers who always stop for a quick light before taking a bus, sign painters, child flower sellers in the grip of crime syndicates, a pregnant woman, of course, and all of Manila’s bystanders who every day dream of being on their favorite detective show, CSI.

  They are frustrated in their expectation of a chase because of the traffic. The pedicab gets stuck amid a diesel dragnet of belching buses.

  An ominous motorbike with two men riding in tandem weaves a remarkable path through the cars, vehicles waving the motorbike through as it beeps an onomatopoeic tokhang tokhang tokhang, and the motorbike whizzes away.

  But the clowns are trapped.

  Needing only to take a few quick anticlimactic steps, the policeman taps the pedicab driver on the shoulder as he is making an illegal move. Three traffic policemen at the corner of Quezon Avenue are now also on the scene, only to discover no one has handcuffs. The clowns understand their game is up, and they try to rush out the cab, but the crowd is up in arms, happy to be saviors, not the salvaged this time, and taxicabs are honking, and the tricycle driver is explaining to the police—there he was, just sitting on this merry-go-round outside of Ali Mall, waiting for customers, when two clowns entered his cab.

  In the melee, Chiara is forgotten. Umbrellas, folded newspapers, fragrant sampaguita leis, policeman’s batuta, they all rhythmically go up and down in the narrow frame of this thrilling crowd scene, pounding on the hapless clowns, and momentarily one’s empathy falls on the criminals, if one is that kind of viewer, until someone, a smartass film buff, recognizes Chiara Brasi and diverts everyone’s attention.

  “OMG! It’s Chiara Brasi! You know. She made Circular Ruins, about Stone Age fucking zombies! And Dr. Quevedo’s Columbarium, the sequel to The Urn Burial! You know. She made the videos for the punk group Dwarves in Space! And the last Ukrainian Eurovision entry, Chicks Kiev, a lively a cappella quartet clicking castanets!”

  Clearly he is one of those fond Filipino fans, glued to the Internet, connoisseur of the hip and the famous, K-pop stars, cult auteurs, and such, knowing the obscurest points of his idol’s IMDb page, including the minutiae embarrassing to the filmmaker. He instantly multitasks, text-messaging, trying to get her picture with his phone, but he’s low-batt, and his phone makes one of those desperate bleeps that announces it will soon shut down.

  Now the crowd has turned from the clowns to the filmmaker, including the policemen, and for a minute there it seems the point of the spectacle will be foiled and the goons will escape in the crowd’s stampede to get the celebrity’s autograph.

  But of course that does not happen. A bunch of urchins saves the day and sits on the costumed criminals, while a policeman comes back with the missing handcuffs to take the clowns in custody, and sundry bystanders look on with their makeshift weapons—tabloid journals and those old-fashioned lace fans that unfold to show watercolor scenes of Spaniards in hair combs and mantillas, doing flamenco dancing.

  Everyone is a bit out of breath.

  No one knows any of the films the hyperventilating buff is talking about (the elderly among them having spent their lives watching kung fu movies on the Sunday Chinese channels, and Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, during Lent), but it is clear that Chiara Brasi, rising out of the passenger pedicab, is one to whom the glare of the spotlight is as ordinary as stirring coffee or scratching an armpit. She steps out, her bronzed hair in her eyes, a wan and wavering figure, carrying her bag and a look of command. She stops a news photographer from taking her picture (GMA-7 is the first to arrive, since their towers are nearby), holding up an imperious hand that smartly also covers her face, and with the other she waves: “Taxi!”

  She is gone before the traffic cops can get their reward.

  15.

  The Need to Forget

  Magsalin admires Chiara’s plot choices as she watches them play out on the evening news.

  Ludovico Brasi�
�s Daughter in Streetcar Scuffle! Film Director Sends Off the Clowns in Cubao! If you witnessed the true-crime scene of vehicular drama, text 092172-050916 with your eyewitness account or send your cellphone video!

  That heroic gambit with the Hermès bag takes the lead on GMA-7, complete with actor simulations of the bumpy pedicab ride. On Channel 9, the woman eyewitness from the Monumento bus on EDSA narrates the foreigner’s trauma, basing the victim’s emotions on her own intimate experience with clowns. Technically, it is the eyewitness from the bus who provides all the quotes. She is flustered by the moment. She is the heroine.

  Chiara Brasi’s fuzzy, half-covered face, shiny hair falling across her vacant gaze (which Magsalin now understands is her regular expression, her RCF: resting celebrity face), shot by dozens of cell phones, flickers across the TV screen, giving legitimacy to the celebrity hour. The movie fan on the spot also counts off with satisfaction the music videos Chiara Brasi has made, adding to the mix the songs of the up-and-coming folkie/ska group, the Osmond Others, and the Muslim-American girl band Averroes’s Search (three gorgeous sisters discovered in a mosque in Detroit), and the music of several Nico wannabes, mostly pleasant Scandinavian art students.

  And of course, interspersed with the mugs of the bungling buffoons and shots of suspect pedicabs behind Ali Mall are iconic scenes from Chiara’s father’s famous movie, The Unintended: haunting shots of a lush, ravaged Philippine countryside in the seventies.

  It is just as well, Magsalin thinks, taking out the sheets of paper from Chiara’s manila envelope, as she stares at the computer screen. It is too early in the novel for the heroine to disappear. And the idea of a kidnapping by passenger pedicab is dumb. I mean, in the open Manila air! Transportation is the third most overlooked quotidian detail in mysteries (the two most overlooked: eating and going to the toilet). And tricycles are not allowed on EDSA. Plus, that was too much fun with clowns. Clowns are people, too.