Insurrecto Page 6
Still, one can learn from it.
The anticipatory anxiety arising from a vulnerable woman’s presence in the plot dissipates with the Aristotelian double plot arrangement of kidnapping plus rescue. Any viewer of Disney is wise to the poetic function of such opening scenes. Magsalin admires how the filmmaker accurately predicts the rescue scene’s place in the drama, saving her life in the bargain, no mean feat. The episode marks pathos then dissolves it, allowing the viewer time to attach—and then forget. A writer plots even how we forget.
16, also 26.
The Model for the Photographer
Maybe it is Virginie’s posture—always a bit slouched, though not quite awkward—that makes her seem unaware of her power. Even in sleep upon a wicker butaka, cheeks checkered by abaca twine, or vigorously gardening in the tropics with her mouth open, red bandana fluttering against monsoon winds that make wild commas of her hair, Virginie has a touching look that her otherwise embarrassingly pampered life fails to obscure.
She is inept rather than thoughtless—those dashes across the ocean, for instance. She is quick to the draw and always has cash. She leaves and comes back to Ludo in his studio, who is rearranging his index cards, reading a book. What is it you want, what is it you want? He gives her a camera, a tripod. She leaves and comes back. How many times has she carried her baby, four-year-old Chiara, in an Igorot blanket onto private, chartered planes? Chiara would find herself all alone in a hotel suite in Hong Kong or Macau, staring at the scarily erect arrangement of three cattleya orchids triplicated in the mirrors, with her small curly head in triple counterpoint to the infinite trinity of her father’s absence.
Magsalin lines up with care the vertiginity of the triptych impressions.
Those midnight migrations in grandiose and sterile rooms would haunt Chiara’s childhood, though now her memories are blurred, and her mother, emerging in a white bathrobe from her suite and offering her a guava, Chiara’s favorite fruit, taste acquired in the tropics, looks for all the world as if nothing were the matter. Virginie’s image in white bathrobe and silver stilettos—Virginie looks vaguely like Gena Rowlands, or Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (an involuntary resemblance—but the cheap trick that pop culture plays on her daughter happens to the best of us)—her image burns in Chiara’s mind, a warning: her beautiful mother of the bedlam rests, sleeping so deeply after a long day of gardening and watering orchids, slumped with mouth open in that awkward rocking chair in Magallanes Village, in Makati, not Quezon City. If it were not for the occasional spasm of Virginie’s slim foot dangling from the creaking butaka, little Chiara would imagine her mother dead.
17.
The Dossier Magsalin Receives
The sheets of paper look like a script. Are there also drawings? Magsalin shakes out prints of Samar in 1901, ordered from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (the receipts fall out, too, from the envelope): index card–size pictures against yellowed boards—pictures of banana groves, dead bodies in gray trenches, GIs in dress fatigues gazing down as if in regret at a charred battleground.
Each of the pictures is doubled. Each card is a set of thick, twinned prints, the prints pasted side by side on stiff panels. All are roughly postcard-size.
They are late-nineteenth-century stereo cards.
You look closely at the twin pictures as if presented with one of those optical illusions that should come with the caption, Find What’s Missing! But there is nothing missing to find: the two pictures on each stereo card are identical.
Only a slight time lapse, undetectable, indicates difference.
Difference produces perspective.
On the Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov, search “Philippine insurrection,” and you come across them. Archived stereo pairs from the years 1899 to 1913, the bleak years of US imperial aggression before the surrender of the last Filipino forces to American occupation. You may as well just copy and paste the gist. Soldiers wading across a shallow river, advancing through open country, et cetera. A group of men with crates of food on the beach, et cetera. A burned section of Manila. The burned quarters of rebel president, Aguinaldo. Firefighting measures. Artillery. Ducks swimming. Children wading. Soldier burying a dead “insurgent.” Soldier showing off the barrel of his Colt .45. Et cetera.
Et cetera. A history in ellipses, too obscure to know. Not to mention the words in quotes and not. “Insurgents” are in quotes. Insurrection is not. Rebel is a problematic term. History is not fully annotated or adequately contemplated in online archives.
The puzzling duplication becomes mere trope, a cliché. Photographic captions rebuke losers and winners alike. “Soldiers,” for instance, refer only to white males. “Burned” does not suggest who has done the burning. “Firefighting measures” is a generous term, given the circumstances.
Magsalin looks with impatience at the familiar photos among Chiara Brasi’s papers falling from the manila envelope.
The pictures of the dead Filipino bodies and the burned Filipino towns are remarkably precise.
But they are hard to see.
The passivity of a photographic record might be relieved only by the viewer the photographs produce. And even then, not all types of viewers are ideal. Photographs of a captured country shot through the lens of the captor possess layers of ambiguity too confusing to grasp:
there is the eye of the victim, the captured, stilled and muted and hallowed in mud and time;
there is the eye of the victim, the captured, who may be bystander, belligerent, blameless, blamed—though there are subtle shifts in pathetic balance, who is to measure them?;
there is the eye of the colonized viewing their captured history in the distance created by time;
there is the eye of the captor, the soldier, who has just wounded the captured;
there is the eye of the captor, the Colonizer who has captured history’s lens;
there is the eye of the citizens, bystander, belligerent, blameless, blamed, whose history has colonized the captured in the distance created by time;
and there is the eye of the actual photographer: the one who captured the captured and the captors in his camera’s lens—what the hell was he thinking?
27.
Elvis Is Polite and Longs for Love
On January 14, 1973, Elvis Aaron Presley is caught in a trap. He can’t go on, because he loves you so much, baby. He broadcasts via satellite Aloha from Hawaii, singing from the Honolulu International Hotel straight into the living rooms of women everywhere but most of all into the hearts of virgins and their mothers in Guam, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Australia, and Hong Kong. None of his biographies mention that he ever alighted in Asia after his stint in the Korean War, which he spent in Germany. But years later Aloha from Hawaii was bootlegged and smuggled into Colombo, Rangoon, Kandahar, Tehran, Kuala Lumpur, Thimphu. It is Elvis’s global smash. It breaks records. It excites Buddhist maidens of the Theravada and Mahayana persuasions alike. Modern Persians, before the revolution, dance to Elvis. Catholics in New Delhi and Christians in Kampuchea, in the silent attitude of prayer, also watch Elvis.
His stopover at the Hong Kong Peninsula, the finest hotel east of the Suez, is disavowed by the fact that Colonel Parker, that control-freak carny, his agent, refused to book him on foreign tours, ever, at all, for reasons still unmentionable. Though the Hong Kong Peninsula Hotel, with its gleam and its gold and its filigree, a corporate wet dream in marble, seems to have much in common with costumed Elvis, the fact is, Elvis hates the banality of hotels. He hates the lonesomeness of traveling. He sings at Vegas only because the women love him. It is love that energizes Elvis. And politeness. Elvis is polite and longs for love. To the benefit of Colonel Parker, he has no wish to disappoint.
The fan magazines show touching photos of the star clutching teddy bears to his chest, you’re oh, oh, oh, my Teddy Beaaar! Fans keep mailing him teddy bears, and
Elvis keeps them. Soon his mansion is filling up with teddy bears, but he does not have the heart to discard them. When he dies, no one knows what to do with them, the mounds of teddy bears. His heartfelt grin in movie magazines is both embarrassed by his sentimentality and aware of its effects. Elvis even in his stills expresses a double consciousness. He is both the woman seduced and the seducer. It is hard in the lyrics to tell him apart from his listener: You know I can be found, sitting home all alone! And to the women all shook up, he sings: My friends say I’m shakin’ as wild as a bug. Uhuhuhuuuu.
All he does is repeat their words.
He says what the hearers want: to be heard.
He is their voice, but also their looking-glass eye, panopticon of their desire.
Sensing the woman on the penthouse floor of the Peninsula waiting for his bucket to fill up, he tries to hurry the spigot by pressing on it, while his feet shake the way they always do, as if he cannot help it (he cannot), and his thighs, in absolute precise rhythm (in his head, Elvis can watch himself moving, a metronome pelvis ticking in his brain), moving just—so!—his thighs moving with the spill of the spigot while the ice slurs, clank, clank, clank, clank, clank, into his ice bucket.
Virginie stares at his shaking back, the man’s wavering tassels of white, 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 for her turn as he moves.
When she wakes up, her hand is still on her body, a warmth pervades her in the hotel in Hong Kong, despite the ice. The minute she had left Ludo out there in Pampanga, or Makati, or wherever it was he happened to be after The Unintended—the minute she left him, she missed him. In the dream, she does not know if she is coming in the dream or in her hands, and in this way, it seems, the moment of her coming goes on in infinity. Arousal for her is like this. She comes several times in her hands, and she comes several times in her dream, and it is an oddly comforting kind of vertigo, this chain, this superior sleep a woman can have, she thinks, the potential for multiple orgasms suggests that the superior sleep a woman can have lies in the possibility of orgasmic infinity, her eternal arousal, she is moving her hands over her body, her vibrant cunt, the way a vagina kind of buzzes, a tender undulant thing, so alert, so alive. This vagrant pleasure, controlled by her own hands. In the dream, she recognizes she is in a dream. She can feel the dream of her desire and its consequences reverberating, a concatenation, this infinity—the way she orgasms, a multiple chain of arousals, and it doesn’t matter anymore whether it’s dream or reality; her body is convulsing, warm and powerful and hers, she is depleted and sated, she shakes to her hands’ rhythms, she is replete. She sleeps.
21.
The Photographer at
the Heart of the Script
The photographer at the heart of the script is a woman, of course. Magsalin casts around for her adequate replica. No problem: there are enough white people to go around. The infamous photographer of the Philippine-American War abandons a restrictive, Henry James–type Washington Square existence to become bold witness of the turn of her century. She is a beauty with a touching look that her otherwise embarrassingly pampered life fails to obscure. Her name, whether classical allusion, cinematic alias, or personal cryptogram, is still forthcoming—Calliope, or Camille, or Cassandra.
It is 1901.
She is not alone.
The great commercial photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnston, has already scooped the men of her day with her photos of Admiral George Dewey, the victor of Manila sailing leisurely around the world in semi-retirement. Admiral George Dewey is lounging on his battleship Olympia, docked in Amsterdam (now on display, a floating historical gem, at Philly Seaport Museum). In 1898, the USS Olympia had fired the salvos at Spain’s empty ships in Manila Bay. Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photographs of arresting domesticity on a battleship a year after the famed battle are celebrated in Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan. The way she tames war for her nation is superb—Admiral George Dewey with his lazy dog Bob, sailors dancing cheek to cheek on deck like foretold Jerome Robbins extras, pristine soldiers in dress whites on pristine white hammocks, and the admiral looking at photographs of himself, with the Victorian photographer in white Chantilly lace by his side.
It is easy to imagine Chiara, reading a library book in the Catskills, Dewey the Defender or Neely’s Photographs: Fighting in the Philippines, stumbling upon the idea of the photographer on the scene of the atrocities in Balangiga. It is the photographer’s lens, after all, that astounds the courtroom in the four courts-martial that troubled America in 1902: the trial of General Jacob “Howling Wilderness” Smith; of his lieutenant, the daring Marine, Augustus Littleton “Tony” Waller; of the passionate and voluble witness, Sergeant John Day; and of the water-cure innovator, Major Edwin Glenn (the rest of the men who slaughtered the citizens of Samar are untried).
America is riveted by the scandal, as pictures of the Filipino dead in the coconut fields of Samar are described in smuggled letters to the New York Herald and the Springfield Republican. They are like bodies in mud dragged to death by a typhoon, landing far away from home.
Propriety bans the pictures’ publication, but damage is done.
The pictures have no captions: Women cradling their naked babies at their breasts. A woman’s thighs spread open on a blanket, her baby’s head thrust against her vagina. A dead child sprawled in the middle of a road. A naked girl running toward the viewer in a field, her arms outstretched, as if waving. A beheaded, naked body splayed against a bamboo fence. A child’s arms spread out on the ground, in the shape of a cross. A woman holding the body of her dead husband, in the pose of the Pietà. The congressional hearings on the affairs of the Philippine islands, organized in January 1902 in the aftermath of the Samar scandal, hold a moment of silence.
True, the photographer’s fame is split.
Senator Albert J. Beveridge, Republican of Indiana, globetrotting imperialist, calls Cassandra a traitor to her class.
She should highlight the Americans who were victims of slaughter, not their enemies who deserve their fate!
She is a vulgar creature not fit to be called citizen, much less woman!
Senator George Frisbie Hoar, Republican of Massachusetts, homegrown anti-imperialist, nemesis of William McKinley and then of his rash successor Theodore Roosevelt, calls her a hero of her time.
Senator Hoar famously accuses his own party’s president in the aftermath of the Samar trials: “You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”
Save for a few points of wishful thinking, his words ring:
“Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate.”
True that. (At least until 1944, and all is forgotten.)
It is easy for a reader to overlay this calamity with others, in which the notion of arriving as liberators turns out to be a delusion or a lie.
And it would be easy for Chiara to overlay montages of her own childhood with that of her possible heroine: the baby among maids brought out for display at lunch parties on Park Avenue; the birthday girl whose abundance of presents includes her mother’s monsoon weeping; objects of her desire in silent parade—rosewood stereograph
s and magic lanterns and praxinoscopes and stereo pairs from the photographic company with the aptly doubled name, Underwood & Underwood—her souvenir snapshots from hotels around the world—and an antique set of collectible prints captioned “nature scenes”: Mount Rushmore, waterfalls, black children, Hawaiian pineapples, Igorot men, cockfights.
Chiara’s world can be seen as an easy stand-in, in sepia wash, for nineteenth-century Cassandras. The movie’s white-petticoated protagonist clutches the old Brownie camera that is Chiara’s prized possession.
The photographer will be one of those creatures beyond her time and yet so clearly of it, beloved of film and epic, with a commanding presence heightened by the backwaters in which she lives and oblivious of the trap in which she exists, that is, her womanhood.
The script, as Magsalin sees it, creates that vexing sense of vertigo in stories within stories within stories that begin too abruptly, in medias res.
Cassandra Chase’s presence in Samar is a quandary for the military officers. The enterprise of the Americans on the islands is so precarious, perilous, and uncertain that the burden of the traveler’s arrival in wind-driven bancas, rowed by two opportunists, a pair of local teenagers who hand off Cassandra’s trunks to the porters with an exaggerated avidity that means she has overpaid them, gives Captain Thomas Connell in Balangiga a premonition of the inadequacy of his new letters of command.
Who has jurisdiction in Samar if a mere slip of a woman in a billowing silk gown completely inappropriate to the weather and her situation flouts General Smith’s orders in Tacloban and manages the journey across the strait and down the river anyway on her own steam, with her diplopia and diplomatic seals intact, a spiral of lace in her wake, a wavering tassel of white, complete with trunks full of cameras and Zeiss lenses and glass plates for her demoniacal duplicating photographic prints?