Insurrecto Read online

  Whatever.

  It is obvious that the WASP photographer, actually a mutated Ukrainian Jew, is a stand-in for the generic consumer being enticed to know the story.

  But that soundtrack—Magsalin hates it.

  It sticks in her head.

  She heard these songs, including the bovine marginal declensions—the wo-ow-wo-ow-wo-ows—all throughout her childhood.

  A sad trick, this pop track.

  That the soundtrack for the Philippine-American War is stuffed with bloated late-Elvis, earworms of his crass decay, listened to over and over again—at least, among her mother’s generation—will not do.

  Why start with Elvis?

  Elvis is from her uncles’ time.

  She marks the script: scratch scratch scratch scratch.

  Magsalin had never liked the songs, though it surprises her now how all the tunes she thought were absolutely Filipino, like “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—an annoying kundiman if she ever heard one—turn out to be Elvis.

  Except “My Way.” “My Way” is Frank. To sing “My Way,” you are not allowed to deviate from the Frank-ish phrasings, or you will be shot.

  The karaoke murders of “My Way” singers are a badge of honor in some fastidious dives.

  But Elvis has this phenomenal stature among local drunks. No matter how anyone mangles his desperate songs, they always bring tears to someone’s eyes.

  He was inescapable in her childhood, but at the time, Magsalin had no clue. She grew up innocently with her uncles’ drinking bouts in Leyte, in which the songs seemed to spring from the bamboo groves, and grown men sang soulful versions of creepy ballads while sopping up bahalina tuba, their local wine. Her uncles in Manila still bring in fresh gallons of this wine from cargo ships that look as if they had known the days of Magellan, and in Manila they translate their provincial guitar fests into insomnia-inducing, mechanical nights of karaoke.

  It strikes Magsalin that the congenital link between drunkenness and song in her uncles might be an ancient tumor, a fever of the islands beyond anyone’s control, so that Elvis and Frank are daemons, or maybe cancers—forms of visceral necrosis, a genetic malady, and not necrotizing corporations.

  She turns the page.

  Scratch scratch scratch scratch.

  It was a shock when she arrived in America, and she recognized that the culture she had thought was hers to sneer at was, all along, not really. The corny songs were claimed by others. That made her sad. Worse, her own culture, of the fermented coconuts and demented singers, was not visible at first in New York—except maybe in the vagabond diesel from hotdog trucks that gave off the whiff of jeepney smog, but even that missed the necessary attachment of the smell of fishballs.

  “Sweet Caroline” was the Boston Red Sox song, not Tio Exequiel’s signature karaoke anthem. No one, not even Tio Exequiel’s oldest brother, Tio Nemesio, clearly a better tenor, was allowed to sing it. But it was also owned by this humongous sports fandom, an arena of phenomenal passion.

  In America, she kept confronting these doubles, cultural puns—repetitions of details from her homeland that have reverse or disjoint significance in this simultaneous place, as if the parallel universes of Elvises and Neil Diamonds in both the Philippines and America were a dark matter of the cosmos that eludes theorists of the world’s design.

  That she has Elvis in her bones, a secret, metastasizing thing, just as she has nipa huts and the crazy graphics of jeepney designs, occurred to her as a blow. And once, on a visit to Nashville, when all she heard in this museum she stumbled into—which contained only Elvis’s cars—was all Elvis, all day, all the time—as if she were still stuck in some fiesta guitar-strumming session with her uncles, amid palm trees with no way out—the idea struck her—oh gee, what if—

  Manila is necrotized in America, too—scar tissue so deeply hidden and traumatized no one needs to know it. One is in the other and the other is in one, she thought, feeling ill in Nashville. Her self overdubbed, multiplied, intercut, and hyperlinked, but which is to be master, she wondered, feeling dizzy, about to fall (she also had too much Kentucky bourbon).

  These realizations of différance comprise her surrender to her new world of signs.

  She does not mourn her dumb recognitions, though she curses the fact that it is her lot to note them.

  In short, Magsalin became interested in alternity, to the misfortune of her friends in Queens, who hate to listen to her pontification at their historic ethnic dinners, at which, with exaggerated gestures as they pick up mounds of rice, they like to eat in peace with their hands.

  The alter-native.

  Magsalin regrets the pun but has no willpower: she does not resist it.

  Anyhow, she proclaims to her peers at one of their utensil-deficient dinners as she strokes a mangled piece of pork with her thumb and forefinger—“Everybody is messed up and occupied by others! Even if you are not Filipino! We are all creatures of translation, parallel chapters repeating in a universal void!”

  Dead silence amid pigsblood and the dregs of cow marrow.

  Then they all go on scraping up dinuguan and bulalo, in clumsy silence, for after all, none of them is any good at being indigenous out in Flushing—they order all the wrong soupy wet things for their monthly pleasure of eating without forks or spoons.

  Unquote.

  She will call the altered ego—her own version of the heroine Casiana Nacionales—Caz.

  Caz Intahan.

  Caz Abwat.

  Caz Alanan.

  Caz Angkot.

  Caz Saysayan.

  Caz Inungalingan.

  In the script, Caz is clutching an envelope, a thick manuscript, at the start of the film. In Caz’s overture, there will be no voice-over, no soundtrack, no song lyrics. The montage of the pampered wife in Chantilly lace, in glitter, in lace and lamé, in Vegas, in Manila, in the south of France, freezes and dissolves. Caz will be a schoolteacher in Giporlos, Samar, or maybe Oras, Bicol, or better still, a doubling site—Sorsogon, Sorsogon, or Bulacan, Bulacan. She is a slight, brown woman the color of her rocking chair—a butaka of soft fruitwood that cracks in dry weather. The awkward man, deliverer of the packet, does not take the chair offered to him. To himself, he calls her by that name.

  The Intended.

  Rocking by itself the chair already looks haunted. The messenger watches her agitation. Caz is trying to hide it, her tears.

  1.

  By the Time They Pass Oras

  By the time they pass Oras and Sorsogon, in Bicol, Chiara has slept through the eternity of traffic down Quezon province and Camarines and even the city of Legazpi, by which she could have glimpsed the perfect cone, preternatural landmark for old galleons arriving from Acapulco, that receding volcanic view, the beauty of Mayon that resists trivialization even as it makes of this hinterland a tourist trap. But she is asleep, and by the time they are passing the Bicol region, Chiara has lost the sense of intimacy, embarrassing to be sure because she knows it is unwarranted, that she had felt when she first entered the Pajero.

  The car looks like a bank vault on wheels, tinted, over-air-conditioned, and enormous, but maybe it is the accouterments, the two soldiers, one in combat fatigues (echoing her safari suit), the other in casual wear, who offer her the jolt of nostalgia. One is fat and the other thin, a specious duo of contrasts. For Chiara their gazes in the mirror give her back this recall, the way for her as a child everything was reflected through cameras and strobe lights: and through the sunny refractions of the tropical sets she observed the many sweating men lugging electric posts and exotic furniture specially carved for The Unintended’s colossal dinner scenes. A whole country of men doing her father’s bidding, with a dignified intensity no one questioned. What were they like when they returned home? Edward, the boy with the Uzi, looks like he is twelve. She imagines Edward seeking his position in a city where his lost,
provincial status gives him this stiff-backed solitude, he and his Uzi upright behind her in the mirror of the Pajero. What is the condition of a soldier? To be far from home.

  For a stretch on the road, Chiara keeps feeling like a child, the way her safety used to be given over to armored vehicles and helicopters at hand and paid interpreters amid a palm jungle. At any point, she thinks, she will come across a classroom of Chinese toddlers and not be surprised that she recognizes each one of them, her classmates in the forest—a dream. In this way she has déjà vu feelings when she wakes up amid the farms of the Bicol peninsula—the sight of chickens sleeping in trim triangular thatches, a poultry bivouac of pup tents all in a row in Barangay Lovey-Dovey; the indifferent gaze of the carabao that nevertheless looks up and stares straight at her; the schoolchildren walking on dust roads who, no matter which town they’re in, wave at the passing tinted car in excitement, as if a Hollywood star were in it, which happens to be true in this case, but still.

  Even the food at the stops—the buko juice she is offered straight from the awkward orb of the newly hacked bowl of a coconut shell, the stained red eggs, the rice cakes flaked with cheese—has the slippery texture of memory’s sap. Each stop has its own delicacy, the leaf-wrapped cakes and the peanut brittles and the local versions of biscotti, and this effulgent sensation, as she takes in the peddlers of straw fans and woven slippers and breathes in the familiar, dry whiff of abaca baskets, drives her into sleep. For such a famous filmmaker, Chiara’s snoring, with its slight gleam of spittle, is mundane.

  Magsalin knows she keeps giving the trip her lapsed childhood glimpses. The old farm roads used to be rutted and endless, with wild camote and malunggay and guava trees in sight, and anahaw mats of unhusked rice grains spread out right on the roadway’s shoulder, prey to dust and pebbles. Everyone used to wave at the buses when they passed, as if each passenger vehicle were some thrilling distraction from a vast boredom, so that Magsalin always felt she was leaving something behind, her significance, as she moved away from the waving children toward her destination.

  But now this track down Luzon’s southern expanse has lost its dust lanes. The cutting trip to Samar, a journey of stops and splices, now glides through national roads with impersonal numbers and generic names, like C-4 or SLEX, and the road’s distance from the familiar farms and the inland rivers with the washerwomen and the kids who bathed for pleasure, not for coins, the highway now wracked by posters for whitening creams and Western jeans, measures once again for Magsalin the distance in time. Private First Class Gogoboy tells them they can rest in Legazpi City, if they wish, but if they keep going, he says, they will be in Samar by dusk. Such is the power of these twenty-first-century roads: her old childhood sense of an endless voyage is foreshortened, as in a fast-forward spell, and before she can dream up Chiara’s next perfidy or accident, the Pajero has reached the island’s southernmost edge, Matnog on the butt end of Luzon, and the Ro-Ro is waiting to take them to Samar, so Private First Class Gogoboy announces.

  “Ro-Ro?” Chiara murmurs, not quite awake.

  “You know, like ro-ro-row your boat, gently down the stream!” says Magsalin though she has no idea, too, why Gogoboy calls the vessels Ro-Ro. She imagines it is another pun, maybe a historical one. “You know Filipinos were taught YMCA camping songs by Thomasites, American teachers, in the beginning of the 1900s. The teaching of English was part of the articles of war under McKinley. First, soldiers were made to do it. Then paid emigrants in Victorian clothes. Clever form of pacification. Very smart. It stuck, you know. Camp songs are the backbone of my education. I learned the song ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ in nursery school. I sang in English before I wrote in Waray. Actually, I never learned to write in Waray.”

  “And I sang your anthem in Tagalog before I spoke my own country’s pledge of allegiance.”

  “Oh, yeah,” remembers Magsalin, “I heard you singing that on YouTube.”

  “It was my mom who filmed me. I still know the words. Bayang magiling, perlas ng sinungaling!”

  The two guards are gawking at the foreign passenger.

  Edward, the malnourished one, claps.

  “Good voice! Good job!”

  “Hehehe!” says Private First Class Gogoboy, plucking lint off of his bandaged foot as he whistles: “Beri gud!”

  “But you have the wrong words,” says Magsalin. “The word is magiliw, not magiling.”

  “What does that mean,” asks Chiara.

  “Giling means grind—I mean, magiling sounds obscene. But magiliw means loved: oh beloved country, the song is saying. Oh country I love.”

  “So Barangay Lovey-Dovey is magiliw.”

  “And the word is not sinungaling. It is silanganan. That means east, or orient. Pearl of the Orient. Sinungaling means lies.”

  “Oops, my bad,” says Chiara.

  “I mean, you sang, Obscene country, Land of lies.”

  “I could have sworn that was what my teacher taught me.”

  “That is also likely,” says Magsalin. “Everyone’s a joker. Anyway, don’t worry about it. No one ever gets that song right.”

  The vessel, MV Blanket, arrives into the pier belching smoke from its behind like a dragon in reverse.

  “That ship looks like no gentle thing,” says Chiara.

  Private First Class Gogoboy pipes up, “Ro-Ro, ma’am, it means Roll-on, Roll-off. See? Trucks and buses roll on and roll off from the ship! It is very modern. It can take ten Philtranco buses or twenty Pajeros in one trip!”

  “Funny name for a boat,” says Chiara. “MV Blanket.”

  “It is the youngest child of Michael Jackson,” volunteers Edward. “It is the smallest Ro-Ro among the Speedy-Cat Lines. Too bad we did not get MV Prince Michael. That one is usually the biggest and the best!”

  23.

  Cassandra Chase’s Presence in Samar

  Cassandra Chase’s presence in Samar is a quandary for the military officers. Their enterprise on the islands is so precarious, perilous, and uncertain that the burden of her unexpected 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 the officers in Balangiga a premonition of the inadequacy of their letters of command.

  Who has jurisdiction if a mere slip of a woman in a billowing silk gown completely inappropriate to the weather and her situation flouts the general’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 immunity 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, duplicitous photographic prints?

  On the other hand, the men of Company C enjoy watching their captain squirm. He’s a greenhorn, this Captain Connell, a fancy-pants Easterner from New York. He is not one of them. Most of the men are farmers’ sons, cow milkers, cheese genies, and cornhuskers eased off their lands by the brutalities of the market, the shifting economic priorities of their experimental republic. William Jennings Bryan, Democrat of the Corn Belt, imagines he is their voice. But they have no idea who the hell William Jennings Bryan is. For one thing, their mail is delayed. The mail’s tardiness is driving the men of Company C insane. The Americans in Balangiga are at war in the Philippines for no reason they can express, but what they feel is powerful enough.

  They are homesick.

  Homesickness makes them mad.

  Stories of dementia among the americanos are legendary.

  A set of filmic wipes follows, showing hairy scenes of cinematic lunatics, mostly stolen from B movies by Samuel Fuller.

  Americano mucho malo, chant the Filipinos.

  And quite right, that.

  Americano mucho enfermo—that is also the case.

  Thoughts of home eat the
soldiers up like the soothing rot of cavities. Some men, conspicuously losing their wits, disappear in the jungle, abandoned to the mercies of local witchcraft. The famous black soldier, Fagen, is up in the jungles of Mount Arayat, defected to the insurrectos. Damned traitor will get his, but who can blame him? The tropics have the mystifying effect of making memory insufferable. Seward Scheetherly wakes up thinking it is Christmas in Schenectady. Seward Scheetherly runs amok, howling in the rain toward Balangiga river, screaming Hark the herald angels siiiiing. What the fuck do harking angels have to do with shooting up cassava patches on Balangiga’s riverbank? His Colt revolver scares the washerwomen, who are slapping the army’s scratchy felt blankets against the rocks.

  Meyer the bugler and Randles the sergeant chase Scheetherly to the riverbank. Markley the orderly and Irish the corporal of the guard follow. Bumpus takes up the rear, smoking a cigarette. It takes four men to wrest away the Colt, wrap the howling Christmas caroler in a pup tent, and tie him up in abaca rope. It is September. Fiesta is near. So say the locals. Scheetherly looks like a pig ready for basting, and the washerwomen, still slapping things on the rocks, emphasizing their vigorous notion of hygiene, this time on the sheets, cannot help it.

  They giggle.

  Randles leaps, raising a fist at them. Irish, though, is quick. He drags Randles away from the washerwomen. The girls are backing away from Randles, a sweating, red-faced man with an adolescent simplicity whose one sign of maturity is the handlebar mustache curling in halves like two sides of a sharpened machete, both sides ridiculous. The girls are backing into the water, leaving the army’s sheets afloat and lifting their lacy patadyongs as if protecting their clothes from the mud—though their thin cotton camisas are already wet from their exertions, sudsy and foamed and revealing their limbs. They tuck their bunched, bubbling skirts between their glistening thighs, mutely watching as Scheetherly sings.