by Gina Apostol
There were rumors, of course, but in such a minor key one never thought of them twice—that he was the biggest gun dealer in the country; that he whispered in the leader’s ear the occult plans for years of ruthless rule; that he was a foundling child, an orphan with a bloodlust—or was he the bastard son of a basket case? It was not clear. The mumbo jumbo of the times. What I knew was that he was the same age as my father. They had gone to school together.
As a child, I called him Uncle.
I used to interview him for social studies reports and once for an English assignment based on Studs Terkel’s book Working. He gave me a firsthand account of what he did day to day, just like the bank clerks and the bellhops in the book. He drank milk, signed forms, took naps. The fateful trip that Pa had taken, to scout the environs around San Juanico Strait, where Pa had first lain eyes on Queenie Kierulf, the rose-seller’s daughter, a sprite in a garden that was soon to be bulldozed for history, to make way for the “Longest Bridge in Asia!”—that trip had the mark of the Secretary on it. Not the least of the projects of the least of the provinces in the Republic of the Philippines did not know the cool, dry handshake of this nondescript man, the exact features of whose face already escape me: a clean, mild-mannered blur in the night.
7
ALONG ROXAS BOULEVARD, the women continued toward the concert hall, white-lit; I recognized them from my parents’ eternal dinner parties, from celebrity photographs in my mother’s magazines. They wobbled in tight ternos, butterfly sleeves sagging from the weight of stones. Powdered hags in satin, their foundation running. No one, not even the gods, could escape the ravages of Manila’s heat. The night moved quietly, the wind softly handled our stiff satin skirts. I noticed this red-haired lady—in tulle and jewels, she looked like a miscast ballerina, her tanned inordinate breasts bursting from her corset’s lace. With that skirt and her bust, she looked a bit like the letter R. Heaving, not rolling. She walked beside a man I recognized.
Jed’s father, the katsila Don Mariano Morga.
“Pa, that’s not Mrs. Morga, is it?”
“Of course not, darling, unless Prima De Rivera shrank and became a turd.”
My father swept forward on his lump of wit.
“Poor Prima,” whispered my mom. “No. That’s the newest one. You don’t know that one? Good—never listen to gossip, inday. I don’t understand Don Mariano. I mean, Prima De Rivera was Miss Spain—or was she Miss Shellane Propane? Anyway, she was a beauty queen. While that girl—that girl looks like a salesgirl from Shoemart—”
“Is she?”
“No. She’s the ex-mistress of the ex-mayor of the ex-capital of Bulacan. That’s what the gossip Zubiri de Zoroastre says in his column. Ha-ha. You know people won’t have his women in their homes, so instead they come to these events.”
She smiled brightly at them as they looked our way. Don Mariano Morga beckoned us to his group.
I waved to someone by the ticket booth. Mrs. Llano. Plump and amiable in her robes, she looked like a doleful, extralarge version of the Holy Child of Prague. She was gesturing to my mother, her old childhood friend. Tonight Reina Elena Soliman née Kierulf looked like the ethnic version of her namesake, the queen of Constantinople, Queen Helena of Byzantium herself, seeker of the Holy Cross. It was native costume night—originally plain, pliant dresses recast in rhinestone. My mother’s native camisa was devoid of décor, except for her jewels. She walked ahead of us. Lights warped under her glitter.
I saw Mrs. Llano’s welcoming smile freeze as my mother turned away.
Mrs. Llano used to visit our home in Makati. She always came with a church group to sing Christmas carols and ask for money for her causes. What a surprise and clamor whenever they saw each other, long-lost high school classmates. And now my mother walked straight ahead, without even bowing her head. I saw Mrs. Llano take her fan vigorously, stung into animated talk with the woman beside her, a tranquil nun who held her concert tickets tightly in her fingers while she beamed mutely at the world.
I turned away, following my mother.
Reina Elena had found her center, the group for which she reserved her charms. I recognized some people: politicians, a man who controlled an agrarian monopoly—pineapples or peanuts—a few choice foreign businessmen, diplomats, and generals. Don Mariano and his corseted lady were among them. I moved to hide behind my mother, but she introduced me once again to everyone.
A lady gushed, the wife of a purveyor of palm products: “I recognize your daughter exactly from her portrait in the exhibit: Madame Vera, you did an excellent job. What a likeness.”
I tried to ignore Madame Vera, who was dressed in dramatic scarf and matching Moorish robes, gurgling her usual gnomic curses like some zombie from nomad land.
Creeping away from the sight, I bumped into Don Mariano.
“Ah, hija: so how is university life?”
This man, Don Mariano Morga, always looked happy. I had last seen him at my dorm when my parents had registered me on that first day: no matter where he was, he charmed—at a residence hall or a society banquet, he had a knack for making you feel he had just been thinking about you.
“Have you seen my son?” Don Mariano asked.
I looked around, surprised: “Is Jed at the concert?”
“No, no,” he said hastily. “I mean, at your college. Haven’t you seen him at college?”
“No. I mean, yes, he’s in my dorm. I—yes, I’ve met him.”
“Jed is his own person,” he said, almost wistfully. I kept noticing the chatter of the woman by his side—a low, lazy voice talking about clothes. “But he has a good heart,” Don Mariano said.
I wondered what exactly Don Mariano knew about me and Jed. I stared at him, daring him to tip his hand, to reveal his spies and sources.
I had no illusions that Jed would speak to his father about me.
Don Mariano continued: “I only wish him to be happy: do you think he’s happy?”
I thought it was a strange question, given the circumstances. I listened to the drone of Don Mariano’s mistress, nattering on about shopping like an empty-headed wife in her own right. “I very rarely see him,” said Don Mariano. “He’s so busy with his studies, you know. He was at the top of his class at the American School. But of course, you know that: you were at his high school, isn’t that right, hija? He’s a reader; he takes after me. But I’m a boastful man, am I not? When I talk about my son, it’s just to talk about myself. Jed is always telling me that. Anyway, come, let’s join the party. Have you met Colonel Grier?”
Don Mariano patted the arm of the man standing next to him: “He’s a soldier and a scholar.”
My mother had caught up with us: “Yes, darling, I told the Colonel: my daughter would love to meet you. He’s an expert on Roman stamps, darling. And Philippine historiographics. How eccentric, don’t you think?”
“Yes, very eclectic,” my father intoned. He liked to correct my mother, though he, too, had dropped out of college at the right age.
Ma pouted and wrinkled her perfect nose, making her small, heart face seem even smaller. Next, I knew, my father would touch her button nose and laugh. It was their trademark exchange.
They had found their man. It was a family business, our friendly art. I knew, on these occasions, they always had a specific target. Ma and Pa fluttered from one person to the next, as if to allow some time for their prey to relax and think itself out of danger.
“Coins, actually,” said the American. He was very bald; a chandelier shone on him with unadvised relish. He was fidgety in his barong, a gossamer shirt in tune with the occasion, appropriately appliquéd with insect wings.
“From Connecticut or Colorado,” Don Mariano intoned.
The Colonel’s taut, pink-skinned body, like a sorry piglet in piña fiber, uneasily filled his dress shirt’s transparent gauze. I was afraid the piña would split, destroying the shirt’s fine filigree.
“Byzantine coins, really,” he said. And he bowed his head at us, l
ooking briefly at my mother, and, I don’t know if I imagined this: as if with a look of loathing. But he introduced us to the lady beside him, his wife, as they waited for us to move ahead.
My mother wouldn’t budge. She nudged me.
“Do you collect them?” I asked. “Solidi, I mean. Pardon: is that the plural form of the word?”
I noticed the young wife looking away; I thought she was not that much older than I, except that, if you looked again, you’d notice the waist and arms of a woman who had just had a child—a wide-eyed blonde thickening into womanhood. Her face was red from the heat, and she looked, in her wrinkled linen clothing, as if she had just come from a swamp, already sweating before the evening had begun, and without even a maid to wipe off the calamity. She was wearing the wrong clothes: linen wrinkled easily, and its creases caught sweat. She had not gotten the memo about Filipino dress.
Colonel Grier, when you glanced more closely at him, had a formidable presence, despite his smallish height. He had a frame like a shuttered bungalow—a rectangular bulk with massive shoulders. He looked as if his body had armor plate. His arms were crossed against his chest.
I couldn’t help it: I stared.
His gauzy barong revealed a crisscross of keloids, a jungle of scars all along his biceps’ raw length.
I looked at his face: “I suppose the most common coins might come from the time of Anna Comemna, during the reign of her father Alexius I. He changed the Eastern monetary system, I believe.”
“You’re talking about Late Byzantium,” he said. “You’re right.” The Colonel looked surprised, as well he might. I always thought my forms of knowledge were a kind of autism, the sign of my indifference to more important things. I collected bits and pieces of useless information: biblical parables, grammatical games, a flotsam of historic details, a rattling can of artistic arcana. It endeared me to no one. He leaned toward me: his round pink nose was inches from my face. The impression of his power began in the shoulders—a broad box of constrained muscle. His stolid body did not match his glance: a whiskeyed softness of the features, especially around his bulb-like nose. He had sad eyes.
His physical parts began to cohere, but the tenor of his interests confused me.
“You know your history, I see. Are you one of those feminists who wants to raise Anna Comemna from the grave?”
“Oh, no, sir, I am not,” I said. “I am researching the Byzantines. For a project in history. I’ve always liked them. They’re weird.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” he said, straightening up. “I like Anna Comemna. Have you read the Alexiad? No—my coins are not as valuable as that.”
“From the reign of the Asiatic emperor, the child-king? Elagabalus?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said the Colonel. “No coins from Elagabalus: I’ll have nothing to do with Oriental freaks.” He smiled. “Anyway, I’d need to quit my job if I got one of those—”
“What a shame that would be,” said my mother, “you have just taken up an excellent position here in Manila. Inday, he’s with Tom at LOTUS. With our own General Tom.”
“—it would be a full-time job guarding a rarity like that,” the Colonel continued. “So—you have a mind for ancient history.”
“Only pieces of ancient history, I’m afraid,” I said. “Obscure little things. Useless knowledge.”
In the humid heat, amid the masses straining to get into the concert, I was beginning to feel withered myself—my usual sense of suffocation.
“Oh, you don’t know my daughter, Colonel Grier: she wants to be a historical scholar, would you believe,” said my mom.
She took my shoulders and held me before her, so that I was walking beside the Colonel like a puppet being moved, and I let her. For a minute I was pleased to lean against my mother’s firm hands.
As if at a signal, the gowns and diamonds rustled toward the concert hall in reluctant clusters. The interlude before the show, when one stands for public inspection in the spotlight of the lobby, seems to be the heart of the occasion—the reason for coming. It’s disheartening, after all, to be in full-jeweled array and have to sit in the dark, permitting someone else to take the spotlight, usually a plebeian, some artist who sings for her supper. On this occasion, it was a Visayan, a pianist. The concert was his debut at home after winning an award abroad. To honor his talent, he got to be the star at the birthday concert for the dictator, organized by the dictator’s loving wife.
People had been waiting for something. By the bulge of the crowd in the far corner of the lobby—a kind of rippling that predicted a greater requirement of space somewhere else—you could tell that it had finally arrived.
“Well, the band’s all here,” said Colonel Grier. “Shall we move on?”
And in the mob of bodies, I believe I gathered his version of history.
“It’s not useless knowledge,” he said. “You never know what one can do with knowledge of the past, given the chance. As a prisoner in Vietnam, I can tell you I used it to my advantage. My knowledge of history. I can show you my collection. I have many Filipino coins. I studied it, you know, your history. The Philippine insurrection against the Americans. An interesting affair.”
“You mean the tail end of our revolution, the Filipino-American War, in 1899,” I said.
“Correct,” he smiled. “That small matter in the Spanish-American War. A side dish, you might say, to a more significant feast.”
His ironic salute melds into a stereographic double of iconic Americans in my academic memory: governor-general of Manila, Arthur MacArthur, and his returning swashbuckling son, General Douglas; William Howard Taft, the first and fattest gringo governor of the Philippine islands; William McKinley, presider over the American invasion, aptly assassinated by anarchists.
The American provoked me into pedantry, and I found a tone in my voice that I hated in others.
“That was no insurrection, Colonel,” I answered. “We were fighting a war against your enemy. You said you came to help us. In the name of democracy—to free ourselves from tyrannical Spain. Instead, you invaded. In the Treaty of Paris you paid twenty million dollars to buy our islands from the already vanquished Spain. We resisted you. Your army killed six hundred thousand Filipinos from 1899 to 1902, a war worse than Vietnam. That was no insurrection, Colonel. That was our war of independence.”
“Which you lost,” the man grinned at me. “We won. You forget that point.”
And the American moved on before I could gather the wit to reply.
My mother’s hands on my shoulders steadied me where I was. I was trembling. We were positioned to be in full view of the arrivals, but Colonel Grier was already proceeding toward the doors. My mother was divided between following him and greeting her compatriot.
The wave bulged deeper and reached us. They came: security men in blue shirts, a flurry of mean-looking people with walkie-talkies. The security men had pitted faces, as if chosen for their physical defects, so that the terrors of acne acquired deep meanings in a debased society. And then came the celebrants themselves. It was almost too late to follow Colonel Grier and his wife. My mother was beside herself, standing her ground amid the leaning bodies in order to greet the arriving pair, do the cheeks, beso-beso, but at the same time she was also anxious not to lose her man.
The tension of state procession is heady, a sharp, combustible affair. The couple proceeded in glacial motion, like the Israelites before Moses’ parted waters. Even without signals from the guards, people stepped back to create a path, an invisible cordon of their awe. The couple came closer, the slow, shorter one first in his everyday heels, white heavyweight platforms; he was dressed all in white, with his dull upswept gleam of hair. I was always surprised at how red-cheeked the president was, as if someone had vigorously scrubbed his face before he came into view. I had been told it was the steroids, or whatever nourished the systemic incubus, his disordered kidney and wasted spleen. People in the know said that a machine in the Palace kept him alive (my dad, in
public, kept refuting this vile gossip, though in private, he shook his head over its damnable truth), so that in effect the country was becoming a lupus archipelago, a codependent in synch with the man’s gradual demise.
Then came the woman, sailing behind like a vinta—a brilliant coloring of Islamic silks (the war in the south was on everyone’s mind).
The Lady approached us.
My mother stepped forward, as if to offer her sweet cheek. Her patroness walked right past. I felt—I did not see—my mom’s frozen smile. The Lady barely nodded her head at Reina Elena Soliman neé Kierulf, moving on as if brushing off some crumpled moth. The last time I had seen them, they had kissed each other in an affecting reunion. The Lady had eaten churros and drunk chocolate at the house in one of those midnight revelries that do not make the papers. They had danced and squawked together, old high school classmates, a pair of genuine warmhearted Warays.
This time, the Lady floated straight into the theater, a giddy mast with a ballast of hair. At that point, I saw Mrs. Llano amid the surge of people who had stepped back to let the couple pass. The towering, powdered vinta stopped and waved at Mrs. Llano, her high school classmate, amid the masses.
She was, after all, the First Lady of the people.
Realizing she had been singled out, Mrs. Llano gave a curtsy, smiling broadly. People stared at Mrs. Llano, who started to fan herself, the fan saying, “Yes, yes, uhum, we are bosom friends.”
Beside me, I saw my mother’s lip curl. But it was all Queenie Kierulf could do.
After this, people started milling in, and my mother and I barely avoided being swept away from the doorway into Manila’s humid dusk.
We found my father already standing beside Don Mariano. Colonel Grier had gone to a front-row seat. He and his wife were standing beside his general.
