Insurrecto Read online

  18.

  In Punta

  In the taxi from Manila Hotel, Chiara reads the email attachment from the translator.

  She barely registers Magsalin’s pleasantries, how nice it was to meet! etc. She reads online in the cursory way she was never taught at school—in school she had to annotate, then look up words in the O.E.D., then give a synopsis of her incomprehension. School drove her nuts. Slow reading is an art, her teachers kept saying, but their catechism was no insurance against her unraveling. School gave her migraines: teachers kept telling her to expand on her thoughts when she had none that merited expanding. Her brain was a ball of hair in a bath drain, as miserably dense as it was inert. A mess. She did not regret dropping out. True, she more or less went on a drug trip punctuated by luxury tourism and psychiatric disaster. The result was her first movie, Slouching toward Slovenia, a study of apathy and melancholia that became an indie sensation, though all she wanted was to portray a certain patch of light on a beach in Ancona, against the Adriatic. Her success was called precocious by some, nepotistic by others, but Chiara understands the stability her enterprise provides—only in making films does she have clarity: there is nothing outside the lens.

  Chiara scrolls through the attachment, barely reading the words but taking in without question the insult she is meant to feel—the normal way one reads on the Internet. Libel suits are a hazard of fast reading. She begins typing furiously on her iPad as the taxi careens. After all, Chiara has a right to be angry. After all, she is already a crime statistic in Manila’s traffic bulletins. The last few hours of rest at the Manila Hotel have not eased her feeling that the city of Manila wants her dead.

  Chiara barely acknowledges the taxicab driver’s deep bow as he pockets her tip. Her presence at the front door of Magsalin’s home in Punta has the same substance as her online tone: unapologetic, admitting only of intentions relevant to herself.

  If Chiara were not so tiny, wide-eyed, looking a bit troubled in her skewed, though still faintly perfumed tank top (you see, the maid catches Chiara’s naked expression of distress despite the arrogant blue eyes’ barely glancing at her, the servant, who could shut the door on her face), the latecomer would never have been welcomed into Magsalin’s home—the home of the three bachelor uncles from Magsalin’s maternal line: Nemesio, Exequiel, and Ambrosio, inseparable in their diaspora.

  Midnight in Manila is no comfort for strangers. Servants in this section of Manila are justly wary of knocks on the door. Corrupt barangay chairmen harass them for tong, doleful bandits pretend to be someone’s long-lost nephew, serial drunks keep mistaking the same dark, shuttered home for their own. And of course, now in this drug-war world of tokhang: toktok-hangyo: knock-knock, plead-plead, or so Magsalin translates the glib coinage of this new regime—the drug-war policeman will knock on your door, and whether you open or do not open, you are doomed.

  Chiara does not notice at first that the address Magsalin had scribbled on the bake shop’s napkin is a haunted avenue in leafy, cobblestoned disrepair, full of deciduous shadows, aging tenements of purposeless nostalgia amid wild, howling cats, and the occult strains of stupid disco music.

  Chiara registers that the location has a disjoint familiarity, like a film set in which she has carefully restored elements of a childhood by dispatching minions to gather her recollections, so that her memory becomes oddly replete, though only reconstructed through the inspired empathy of others. Such is the communality of a film’s endeavor that magic of this sort never disconcerts Chiara. Life for Chiara has always been the imminent confabulation of her desires with the world’s potential to fulfill them. So while the street and its sounds have an eerie sense of a past coming back to bite her, Chiara also dismisses the eerie feeling. She steps into the foyer of the old mahogany home without even a thank-you to the maid, who against her better judgment hurries away at the director’s bidding to fetch the person she demands, Magsalin.

  “I did not give you the manuscript in order for you to revise it,” Chiara begins without introduction.

  “Pleased to see you again, too,” says Magsalin. She gestures Chiara to the rocking chair.

  “I’m not here for pleasantries.”

  “You are in someone else’s home, Miss Brasi. My uncles, who are still awake and, I am warning you, will soon be out to meet you and make you join the karaoke, would be disappointed if I did not treat you like a guest. Please sit.”

  Not looking at it, Chiara takes the ancient rocking chair, the one called a butaka, with its grotesquely extended arms, made for birthing. It creaks under her weight, but Chiara does not seem to hear the sound effect, a non sequitur in the night.

  Now Magsalin is towering over the director, whose small figure is swallowed up in the enormous length of the antique chair.

  “I did not revise the manuscript,” begins Magsalin, knowing she must choose her words carefully, “I presented the possibilities of translation. A version, one might say.”

  “I did not ask for a translation.” Chiara looks up at her. “I gave you the manuscript as a courtesy. It is the least I can do for the help you will give me.”

  “I have not yet offered that help.”

  “But you will.”

  “I have a few conditions.”

  “Co-authorship of my script?” asks Chiara. “Unacceptable. How dare you even imagine.”

  “You will admit though. My perspective offers an advantage.”

  “A translator is not a writer.”

  “A filmmaker is not infallible.”

  The chair creaks.

  The faint disco sounds are coming nearer.

  “How do you know that your perspective does not distort the story?” asks Chiara.

  “How do you know that yours has not?”

  “No filmmaker would accept such a demand,” says Chiara. “You are replacing the story. It’s not a version. It’s an invasion.”

  “Oh no. That is not my intention. A mirror, perhaps?” asks Magsalin.

  “A double-crossing agent! An occupation!”

  As a filmmaker, Magsalin thinks, shouldn’t Chiara expect such a reversal?

  19.

  In the Last Novel by Stéphane Réal

  In the last novel by Stéphane Réal, a textual mystery engenders clues that resolve a murder of colonial proportions; that is, a writer dies. He dies in a vaguely political way, in the way in a colonized country only the political seems to have consequence. Otherwise, deaths are too cheap for witness. Does it matter, Magsalin wonders, if one day a world-famous film director disappears in a derelict, tree-laden street in Punta in the Santa Ana district in Manila, to the strains of Elvis Presley singing “Suspicious Minds”?

  And if anything happens to her protagonist, who would be to blame?

  Part Two. Duel Scripts

  Balangiga, Samar

  22.

  Tristesses

  To understand Magsalin, it may be useful to note the allusion to Stéphane Réal. French-Tunisian writer of opaque novels, or opaque writer of Tunisian-French novels, Réal was a member of a club of cutups that emerged during the second half of the last century. They bought typewriter ribbons, wrote notes in cursive, sometimes cutting out a letter, e or f, and lived in the banlieues of Paris instead of those benighted sections of Malate favored by literary drunks.

  Magsalin, succumbing to her fate in a Third World order, had grown up with a surplus of academic desire. It does not help that her adolescent streets included Harvard, Cubao, and New York, Cubao, twin cartographic jokes that, as is often the case in the Philippines, are also facts. Poststructuralist paganisms, the homonymic humor of Waray tongue-twisters (which descend, as always, into scatology), Brazilian novelists, Argentine soccer players, Indonesian shadow puppets, Afro-Caribbean theorists, Dutch cheeses, Japanese court fictions, and mythopoeic animals in obscure Ilocano epics indiscriminately gobbled up her soul. It is not an un
common condition, this feeling of being constructed out of some ambient, floating parts of a worldwide emporium (so glum scholars of the Anthropocene appraise this unsettled, hypertextual state). Typical of her sort in Manila, her passions were global (maybe because her options seemed slim). Her grad-school scholarship to Cornell was almost predictable. Some of her youthful attachments were fetishistic, while others were just symptoms of malnutrition.

  She adored the concept of signs, without acknowledging the need to understand it.

  As she reads, Magsalin keeps track of her confusions, annotating each mixed-up chapter as she goes, taking out from her bag an actual notebook and a fountain pen, a pale green Esterbrook, bought on eBay. In the notebook, she includes problems of continuity, the ones not explained by hopscotching chapters; issues of anachronism, given the short life-span of the male subject (1940–1977) contrasted against the women, who have superpowers: longevity and dispassion; words repeated as if they had been spilled and reconstituted then placed on another page; a stage set of interchangeable performers with identical names, or maybe doubles or understudies as they enter and exit the stage; an unexplained switch of characters’ names in one section; and the problem of lapsed time—in which simultaneous acts of writing are the illusions that sustain a story.

  At times, she feels discomfort over matters she knows nothing about, and Magsalin hears rising up in her that quaver that readers have, as if the artist should be holding her hand as she is walked through the story.

  But she rides the wave, she checks herself.

  A reader does not need to know everything.

  How many times has she waded into someone else’s history, say the mysteries of lemon soaps and Irish pubs in Dedalus’s Dublin, or the Decembrists’ plot in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, or Gustave Flaubert’s Revolution of 1848 in what turns out to be one of her favorite books, Sentimental Education, and she would know absolutely nothing about the scenes, the historical background that drives them, the confusing cultural details, all emblematic, she imagines, to the Irish or the Russians or the French, and not really her business—and yet she dives in, to try to figure what it is the writer wishes to tell.

  She calls these reader moments the quibbles—when she gets stuck in the faulty notion that everything in a book must be grasped.

  Why should readers be spooked about not knowing all the details in a book about the Philippines yet surge forward with resolve in stories about France?

  Against her quibbles, she scribbles her Qs, her queries for the author to address later.

  On a blog, now deactivated, Magsalin sadly annotates a past paved with sacral relics of bookish bones merged with atrocities of “daily praxis” (a kind of evil, undefined).

  I will list here only a partial list of her old Tumblr tristesses:

  The retirement of Franco Baresi, sweeper, of A.C. Milan, in 1997 (she used to follow Serie A before the referee scandals and the monopoly of the sport by SkyTV);

  Random apostrophes on giant Nestlé Powdered Milk advertising billboards that dominate the ride from Manila’s airport;

  The death of Wilfrido Nolledo, author of But for the Lovers, his Philippine masterpiece reissued too late by Dalkey Archive Press and out of print, of course, in his home country;

  Brutal attacks by nice fellow writers at international writing workshops in Iowa, after which she drinks warm Bud Lights with the neoliberal fuckers filled with postcolonial melancholia anyhow;

  Readers who declare you cannot truly understand the works of the novelist Jose Rizal if you read him only in translation—a bullshit excuse for not knowing him at all;

  Bloggers who keep announcing the end of print books while deploring their extinction;

  Finding the mismarked grave of Antonio Gramsci (the map said Giacometti) under the shade of outcasts in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome;

  The word praxis;

  Readers who ask, Why do you always bring up history that no one knows anything about?

  Good writers, even white males, who are prematurely dead.

  Hirsute, looking practically flammable on his book jackets, the hybrid-continental Réal died, so to speak, in medias script. One imagines the last sight of him was his demonic beard, a fey salt-and-pepper affair, the color of pumice or a crosswise shard of culvert (like those abstract tarred bits lying for months off of Cafe Adriatico, still unswept after the June rains). In the shape of a scudetto, the beard, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, is the last to disappear. A number of his works, jottings, diaries, juvenilia, are illuminating, in a haphazard way. Réal’s last novel, a mystery, remains a puzzle. It is unfinished.

  There is a sense that in her youth, Magsalin, a poor and underfed student from the provinces (Tacloban in Leyte to be exact), would not have minded a ticket from Manila on Air France or Emirates, straight to Nice or Cap d’Antibes, where she would first lie on the beach for a day, the sun being the best antidote to jet lag, then rent a cheap car to traverse horseback-riding campsites and haut corniches through the vals and valses of the middling Midi and on down the horrible French nuclear scenery into the bowels of Paris. She would stop off at Père Lachaise, with the help of the TomTom® App for Finding Dead Writers Who Are Still Members of the Group Blank-Blank-Blank, and she would genuflect before his jar of ashes (or columbarium, as it is called in Wikipedia), in between staring at the not-so-subtle winged sphinx of Oscar Wilde’s last riddle and Gertrude Stein’s soothing but pebbly grave.

  She would love to have helped organize the papers of Stéphane Réal’s unfinished mystery or checked out his obsessive annotations of Lady Murasaki (his bedside reading—a surprise, as the Japanese woman of the Heian period has a dreamy expansion opposite to his terse, epigrammatic style); but to be honest, she does not even know the date he died. She had read him a while ago.

  First she consults a virtual encyclopedia. She sits before her uncles’ clumsy, troglodytic iMac, the one that looks like an alien in the midst of an affecting lobotomy, its sweet bald head kind of droopy. But Magsalin cannot find the exact place and time of Réal’s death. She surmises that no reader has minded that void, hence its disappearance online.

  1.

  The Story She Wishes to Tell, an Abaca Weave, a Warp and Weft of Numbers

  The story Magsalin wishes to tell is about loss. Any emblem will do: a French-Tunisian with an unfinished manuscript, an American obsessed with a Filipino war, a filmmaker’s possible murder, a wife’s sadness. An abaca weave, a warp and weft of numbers, is measured but invisible in the plot. Chapter numbers double up. Puzzle pieces scramble. Points of view will multiply. Allusions, ditto. There will be blood, a kidnapping, or a solution to a crime forgotten by history. That is, Magsalin hopes so.

  At her uncles’ home, she props her legs up on top of the ancient Betamax machine as she settles down with the manila envelope. Who should she call to help that brat get to Samar? Magsalin is a sucker for anyone interested in the ruins of what she likes to call her home, though the country disavows her affection. Her uncles do not question her reasons for visiting them. However, their silence is off-putting. They welcome her to their rambling house in Punta, amid the reek of the Pasig River, in a section of town where goons sleep on mats with their guns stuck in their flip-flops right next to them on the floor, so that they breathe metal, Johnson’s Floor Wax, rubber, and foot ache in their sleep. Fortunately for Magsalin, her uncles have modern beds, though they prefer their old straw mats on the floor. It is good for their spine, they say, but in truth, Magsalin thinks, at night the return to childhood comforts them. They have deep friendships with petty thieves and drink with police. They are friendly with all the barangay captains from Tutuban to Paco: in the wisdom of gamblers, it’s the local chiefs who count. Their wives are in Jordan dry-cleaning the gowns of royalty and in Italy nursing right-wing Catholic buffoons. Her uncles leave Magsalin alone. Theirs is a community of men: tolerant of one another’s error, foolh
ardy, and as ready to corrupt their neighbors as to save their souls. They cherish the material world. Every day they tell her to stay indoors and listen to their well-kept vinyl records of John Denver and Burt Bacharach and, wrapped in mite-bitten plastic from sooty shops along the Avenida, Elvis, of course. Her gifts from Bleecker Street now have prime space on their altars to the seventies. They cook her special breakfasts made from their long-hoarded Spam, and they tell her to watch the noontime shows starring nine-year-old drag queens and twitch-perfect lip-synchers of Mariah Carey and Adele.

  Just stay home with us and sing the karaoke, every night after dinner, her uncles tell her, wait for us when we come home from work and relax and take up our microphones and sing.

  No, no, no, they say—do not go out. Do not bother to go to Samar.

  Why Samar?!

  They themselves left their province, Leyte, long ago for Manila—for their jobs on the docks or as guards in the banks or selling at the wet markets. It is an honor to survive in the city’s jungle. Everyone leaves places like Leyte and Samar, they repeat, even its governors and mayors, who are supposed to live there. During those first few days, Magsalin sits obedient in her uncles’ home watching their TV. She knows it is an affective fallacy to feel the sublime in the exuberant precision of a scrawny kid who can copy Michael Jackson, just so, exhuming the dead singer in an eerie display of late homage—how beautiful is imitation, she thinks, when its vessel breaks the heart.

  Her uncles own these faithfully preserved Betamax tapes of bootlegged boxing matches and duets of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. Their home is filled with antiques from the globalization age: Walkmans with Eagles cassettes still in them, a TV with an antenna and no remote, two pre-iPhone Sony videocams, clunky and clunkier. She takes one Betamax tape out from the bottom, a scratched but well-dusted one, the single word Thrilla handwritten with care on its spine. She pushes it into the machine. It’s a tape of a tape, and for a moment she thinks she hears her mother’s voice in the background mocking her three brothers for filming the match they were in fact watching on TV.