by Gina Apostol
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “It’s an old story,” he mused, closing the now damp review upon the spine of his limp umbrella. “L’education sentimentale. Clearly. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Arguably. Bertolucci, in his prime, beautifully. They played your movie last week at the Film Center. Before the Revolution. And then there’s Simoun, in El Filibusterismo. Definitely.”
“Simoun? What do you know about Simoun?” I demanded.
I should have known there was something suspicious about Ed. His snotty book reports were a goddamned pain in the ass.
“Simoun was the hero of Jose Rizal’s second novel, El Filibusterismo. The Fili. The one after the Noli. Geez—haven’t they lectured you on the country’s history already? Isn’t that the first thing the Maoists do—set you straight about the past in order to correct the future? Simoun’s revolution was a failure, if you need to know. That’s because Jose Rizal never understood Hegel. Not to mention Marx.”
“Oh. You mean the work of fiction,” I said, relieved.
“What else could I mean?” Ed said, laughing.
“You mean Simoun, the hero in that work, the novel of the national hero Rizal?”
“Yes.”
And Edwin spouted on.
Coca-Cola philosopher.
Bla-bla blather.
“The plot of failed radicalism as doomed romantic fervor is so late-nineteenth-century. A populist fictional criticism not of revolution but of romance.”
Bla-bla baloney.
“Id est: Nikolai Stavrogin in The Devils. Was Dostoyevski denouncing the Decembrists or denouncing Goethe?”
Bla-bla blowhard.
“For the world to progress, it is best to choose the latter. Solipsism has its uses, Sol, don’t worry. Soul-searching is its good stepsister. But really, there are more interesting ways to save the country than marching in the streets.”
13
WHAT WAS I thinking? I was unhealthy, recovering from a malignant internal tract, hepatitis E, F, or G, when I had arrived at the university during those June monsoons. The dorm was not what I expected, though granted, my hopes were uninformed. I met Don Mariano, a surreal figure in his Stetson hat, trying to keep face in the lobby while mosquitoes ransacked his ruddy cheeks. Flies crawled all over my rank, suffocating skin. A diseased organ, a distract gland, kept my head woozy but my sensibilities alert, and so when I met Soli that first day, I was both addled and hypersensitive, eager for novelty but frayed at the nerves. I felt alien. I felt lost. Even the language everyone spoke I understood in fragments, in unforgiving hallucinatory code. Like everyone else who had gone to school, I had grown up with English, and I had diligently studied French and Spanish and Italian, but of my own languages, my mother’s Waray or my father’s Tagalog, all I had were accidental bits, gaps and abominable indifference. I felt, in those first days, that I had betrayed someone, but I could not tell whom. It was awful to recognize that when Soli first addressed me I had no idea what she was talking about, and all she was saying was hello.
“I said, how are you,” she said in English. “We’re tokayo,” she said.
“What?”
“Tokayo!” she shouted, as if I were deaf. She pointed to my name tag. She pointed to hers. “Same as mine.”
“What?”
“Tokayo. We have the same name.”
I looked at the tag.
“Ah. You’re my eponym,” I said, like an ass.
“No,” she countered. “You are mine.”
“Solidaridad Soledad,” I read slowly.
“So-le-dad So-li-man,” she mimicked. “We rhyme without reason, ha-ha.”
I held out my hand.
“Sol,” I said. “Just call me Sol.”
She said something I could not understand. Then she said in English:
“Soli. As in the revolution. You know.”
I had no clue what she was talking about.
“Soli, Noli, Fili. You know. The holy trinity. The sacred texts of the revolution. La Solidaridad, the journal of the propagandists of the 1880s. No? Noli Me Tangere? Rizal’s first novel. Fili was the second. What? Does not ring a bell? You do not—?”
I shook my head again. I was feeling sick, and the letters of her winding name collapsed under my falling vision, a nonsensical repetition of syllables, solosolosolosol, and she was repeating a nonsensical rhyme, filisillywillynilly, like Humpty Dumpty, except that she looked like a dark polished legume with wild unlikely curls, not a cantilevered egg, and she was pointing a finger at me, pointing at my name, saying nothing.
I fell at Soli’s feet.
I imagine that my parents were still talking to Don Mariano Morga—with his brown bulimic bimbo somewhere else—having found to their relief one of their own amid the crowd, and Manong Babe must have been putting my suitcases away in my blighted prison cell of a dorm room. No one was around to help. The surprise she must have felt when my weight descended, and then the disgust when I puked on her lap. It was the heat, the unfamiliar lack of air-conditioning, the dreadful dinginess of that pestilent place, the shrill and alien tongues, her good humor, my gradual horror. I don’t know where it came from, my awful self-regard. Insects were buzzing at my lips before I even lost it, as if savoring my sickness in advance. I apologized; she was efficient; she led me to the bathroom. And in the Girls’ Annex on the day I met her, I poured out my guts in front of Soli.
I WAS IGNORANT OF everything on that campus—the jokes, the allusions, even the forms of public transportation. I had never even ridden a jeepney, to my useless shame, and my mother threatened to keep Manong Babe and his limousine on campus for my disposal, until I told her I would never visit her again if she did. Still, I’d witness Manong Babe loitering about the university sometimes, trailing me in the limousine, on orders from my mother. It made me feel like a freak, and I pretended I had no idea who he was. But I admit sometimes I’d look out for him, for his familiar figure, his mole distinct even at a distance. He’d weave by in the anomalous car as if he’d just driven by in distraction. (I confess that I’d feel a rush of childish emotion at the sight of Manong Babe, through the corner of my eye, absently polishing his spit-clean shoes in the rain. He was a neatnik and a worrywart, and sometimes I wanted to go up to him, if only just to tease him, to say, hey, go away, I’m doing all right. I never did, though I wish I had.)
I had grown up a stranger in my country, living in my parents’ landscaped cocoon in Makati since our return in the seventies from America, and my discovery at the university of my potent and irrefutable dislocation from it, when I could not respond to even the most ordinary of moments in what should have been my native tongue, sickened me. It sickened me even more, I thought, than my lingering illness—or was it that the recidivism of my internal glands was the abject correlative of my infirmity, my incurable sense of who I am.
The state of the country was enough to condemn me, of course: I did not need Soli’s discourse to know that, under a military dictatorship, guns, goons and gold were not just tired devices in a slogan but a percussive note that, in my case, dogged my every domestic good—my books, my souvenirs, my clothes, my home. And it was not the first time I had felt this nausea, an elemental eruption: this split in my soul.
Part II
1
BARELY OUT OF puberty, with his voice acquiring subtle changes even as his old troop ship cruised along the Pacific, so that the experience of crossing the continents had about it the disconcerting sense of an inner demarcation, a bodily mutation, as much as a geographical change—Uncle Gianni’s young father had shipped out to Leyte during the 1940s war and experienced adolescence in the jungle, and the island’s unfinished landscape seemed to mirror his uncertain age. He saw boys who could make gadgets for every possible need, such as a contraption made of folding plywood and a handful of nails. He stared at it with an almost hair-raised terror, only to find it was a device for opening beer. Women smelled of oceans, and trees provided al
cohol as well as leafy plates, hats, and rough-hewn flutes. Many children loved him. The boy soldier showed them his tricks with disappearing bullets. He made friends with a cow. Uncle Gianni’s father, in his old age, mostly remembered the ordinary: a stretch of mangrove, alternately familiar and unreal; the tense look on the face of a child who, when the young GI saluted him, burst out in humiliating laughter; the framed, too-intimate view of jungle sky; and the sight and sound of a large, odd-billed bird in a thick tree.
Uncle Gianni’s father had been planning a journey with old companions, a nostalgic trip cum tropical vacation, when he fell down dead a few weeks before his flight, on the carpet of his one-bedroom home in Lynn or Lexington, Massachusetts: and so it was that instead young Gianni, an orphan at loose ends, took his father’s place for the celebratory occasion.
Uncle Gianni’s father, by his son’s account, had died a taciturn chemist, a discreet, conservatively suited servant of industry to the end. But he had this obscure notion of his prime time on the Philippine islands, a life he squinted at in his memory, his eyes narrowed, aiming at a better reception. Uncle Gianni, on the other hand, did not quite know what had taken him, a boy of nineteen, to Leyte, seeing as he had come to commemorate a war that was not his own.
A talented pianist with a bright future, Uncle Gianni had made the pilgrimage in the name of his father; but he finished it with a flourish of his own. The old soldiers on the stage in Tacloban made him play a song in honor of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, celebrating October 20, 1944, the day MacArthur fatefully returned after having abandoned us to the Japanese. The boy, who was still unclear why anyone would return to this backwater in particular, obliged.
And it was there on the stage, playing Verdi with feeling, that my parents and the townspeople first saw Uncle Gianni, a lean figure slanted passionately over a piano. He baffled them with the strains of the march people in Tacloban played only at graduations. The wedding march from Aida, his late father’s favorite opera.
Then he had pleased people by staying. He dazzled everyone with his correct manners, his elaborate fashion sense, his ability to speak two languages, English and American-twanged Italian, and then Waray with a musician’s magic way with sounds, as if playing a tune by ear: with disarming errors and confident, charming improvisations. He fell in love with several women. He was invited to everyone’s home. Hostesses fought over him. He became my father’s friend.
By then Uncle Gianni had decided to give up music, not even bothering with the occasional seduction of Traumerei upon impressionable girls; he was growing to be a man, beyond the stage of mere artistry. And unlike my father, who was a full decade older, Uncle Gianni had more than bravado and luck: he had vision. He knew people of industry in Massachusetts, he said. My parents, for their part, knew people in power.
This is my father’s version of Uncle Gianni. His fondness for his friend is rooted in my godfather’s youthful clairvoyance. Uncle Gianni’s own telling of this matter ends in more piano-playing, riffs from pieces he’s long unlearned to play in their completeness—a bright tune here and there, like colored feathers drifting off from an impatient bird.
One must imagine the trio’s tact. It was a carefully orchestrated chain; a little syncopation and the deals were off. But my mother had this advantage: she spoke the language of power, Imelda’s mournful Waray. My mother knew the nuances of dirt-floor debuts, flowers on birthdays, the paraphernalia of longing in the town she and the First Lady shared. She knew the topography of small-town desires, the soft spots where the rose thorns pricked, over and over again. She could tell the balm for ancient bruises: the devils’ forks of mangled, unacceptable pasts. She knew the demons and the pleasures that most taunted and tricked, right down to the tender turn of the foot’s naked arch, that hit the spot: the bull’s-eye of loss, of abandonment.
The art of a trader is the careful science of empathy, intimacy’s terrible skill.
Or so I must surmise.
But to be honest, it could have been quite simple. My mother had the goods—the best she could get. This is true. Uncle Gianni saw to that.
2
I SAW THE BLOOD dripping from my thighs, thick like wax. I discovered the blood in the bathroom. Before I did anything, I watched to see how far the blood would drip, down from the pubis, through the thigh, veering over flesh to run crooked above the knee, thinning and grinning about the kneecap, then in a bright vein narrowing to a hair-width, which trickled down my calf. It didn’t quite reach the ankle.
“Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will also regret that.”
It was a calm violence, and I giggled, already lightheaded, at the sight of my fresh blood. In the living room, I had left five of my mother’s dinner guests. Three of them I had known from childhood, my parents’ old colleagues, Uncle Fred, Uncle Emmanuel, and my godfather, Uncle Gianni.
That evening, Uncle Gianni had saluted me in the entryway.
“Ciao, bellezza.”
I smiled and tiptoed to be kissed. I took the flowers and a wrapped gift.
“Volume Two? You found it?”
“I ordered it. So, where are those thugs?”
“In the living room. Uncle Fred is late. Ma’s a mess.”
“So what else is new?”
“She also mixed up her dates. So you’re having dinner with my teachers.”
“What?”
“She booked you and my teachers on the same date.”
“Really?” Uncle Gianni fixed his Venetian tie clip in the mirror, a dolphin clip I had given him in deep blue Murano, or was it Burano, glass. I was the kind of tourist who always bought two of each. I had an identical dolphin—on a ring. “I get to have dinner with old ladies and talk about Levantine architecture in complex sentences. How horrible.”
“They’re both guys.”
“Oh well, so I’ll have to charm them with my brawn,” he said, comically flexing his arms. “I need to talk to your dad. So Fred’s not back yet? That’s odd.”
“No, he’s not. Uncle Emmanuel’s waiting for him in the sala. She tried to call them about it—my teachers. But they couldn’t change their plans. I told her it was all right. Being salutatorian isn’t so bad. I mean, I’m doing really well at school.”
“You better stop that,” he said. “That’s so old-fashioned.” And he touched my cheek with his livid hand—it smelled of alcohol and lemon.
Did I notice that he seemed leaner, aged, or was I more conscious of the body, now that my own seemed to be some mutant, morphing daily into a frightening thing? Uncle Gianni took my hand the way he had when I was little, and he paraded me into the living room. I always got dragged along by Uncle Gianni, all throughout my childhood—to soccer matches, communion rails, national parks, museums. Every summer I was in his hands, and I was happy.
Already, I felt better. In Uncle Gianni’s world, nothing ever changed. I would always be a kid, his special harmless pet, not this hormonal monster molting putrid skin.
Did his flesh seem slack in his sleek suit—bonier, draped in it rather than fitting? We used to worry about what we called his noble qualities—a finicky attitude toward the world that none of us understood. Uncle Gianni, a slim man with a hound face, had the aspect of a starving gourmand, true, but it was only because the world as he knew it could never attain the perfection he demanded.
His skin was taut and smelled of citrus, a fading scent of cleanness. You could smell that all over Uncle Gianni: the masculine smell of fastidious men. He was not so much tanned but burnished, as if he had just spent days on a soccer field, soaking up Manila’s sun, and he had this tendency, in drink anyway, to blush soul-deep, so that he gave the impression of giving his heart to you. I know it was something of a joke—how he always affected the dark silk suits, even in the heat, of a star in La Dolce Vita, like an anorexic Marcello, though to be honest Uncle Gianni had the voracity, the nervous curiosity of the other one, Paparazzo. On the inside he was not cool, like a hero, but nerdy, li
ke a butler. I always thought anyway that Paparazzo was more likable than Marcello Mastroianni.
Uncle Gianni did have a thin sneer of a mouth, an upper lip that turned white or invisible in speech, so that my godfather at times seemed canine. And with that aristocratic nose, so admired by the maids and Manila’s socialites, and the troubling thinness of his elegant bearing, my uncle did have the air of something mixed: of something maybe feral and human: a whippet, a wonderfully domesticated beast.
He already had that warm blush on his face, coming in as he did, whenever he was in town, from one dinner date to another. Entering the room, he went straight for his colleague.
Absent Uncle Fred was an old associate, a Brit with a snippy accent and a miner’s complexion: sooty and sunless. He had two soccer-crazy boys, turnip-skinned and bracken-eyed, both with their dad’s maniacal glint; he had a house with a manicured English garden and a wife who spent her time catering to irrigational systems on their property in Devonshire, fussing over her broom, her buttercups, and other Anglophiliac botanical things. I knew all about them, receiving their pale-faced Christmas cards every year, but I had never met them. Every time I saw him, Uncle Fred gave me a soccer ball; in his forgetful way, he showed affection. He had taught me the most useful thing I know—how to head the ball when it came at me from a certain angle, a trick that had endeared me to all my coaches.
But I liked best Uncle Gianni’s game, running down the field with the ball at my feet. I liked the run of play, not my clunky attempts at goal, Uncle Fred’s header.
I think now of those soccer tricks, how I used to play one-on-one with Uncle Gianni, his agitated, wiry legs absurdly bare, in his tight, old-fashioned shorts, and myself as a child: tentative and serious in the humid New England glare, amid the fainthearted green of summer grass (Uncle Gianni hated to mow his lawn: he was the enemy of his neighbors). And I watch myself circling in the festering light.