by Gina Apostol
A childhood in charmed places—summers in Boston and springs in Bruges, wherever it was my parents held their meetings or met their globetrotting suppliers—this was the least of my rewards. As a child, I looked forward most to those pure days of pleasure when we met up with Uncle Gianni, in Venice, Dublin or Virginia. He had no children and had no clue how to raise me. He bought me masks scary enough to meet the Red Death there at the spotless atelier of a mustached mascarero above the Rialto. He haggled over the price of an Islamic prayer rug for my own amusement in Riyadh, and at the Grand Hotel in Rimini he offered me my first and only whiff of opium (a sickly sweetish stench that made me sleepy; I was eight). Everything was permitted: more gelato, more jewels, more shoes, more toys. When he wrapped me up, in that windy Oxford pontoon, prissily wiping off the splashing water from my summer calves; when he fussed over my Spanish mantilla before the march of the Feast of Fallas, one spring in Valencia, tightening the corset and smoothing the lace on my springtime chest; when he patted me on the head like a puppy, danced with me like a Gypsy, or put me to bed like my dad—I felt these odd sensations, of replenishment, of completion, of a confused sense of guilt and love.
I loved him with the absolute devotion of one who would always be loved back, no matter what she did.
Uncle Fred looked like the expansive one—stout, white-bearded, round-cheeked—and Uncle Gianni looked morose, with shadows about his cheeks like some archfiend in William Blake’s depressing engravings of the Inferno. But it was the lean one who was jolly and the fat one who rarely spoke.
Uncle Fred was late.
Instead, my two teachers were seated on the couches, Mr. Fermi and Mr. Dreiser, science and English, respectively.
Between them, on the wicker seat, Uncle Emmanuel already sat. He was younger than the others, the upstart in the business, an Israeli who dressed like a New York banker; he always wore a Brooks Brothers suit, three-piece even in the tropics, with a dull tie. It was strange one evening to see him dancing the cha-cha with my mother, celebrating a deal, overdressed to kill. He was sweaty and red-faced when he danced; but he was always sweaty and red-faced.
At the time, it was my mother’s policy to invite all my teachers every year, in one swoop, usually at Christmas. Her new campaign to make me middle school valedictorian had a hospitable side. She invited my teachers to our house as if to subdue them with the glory of our gilt mirrors, authentic chinoiserie, and melancholy carved mahogany screens—the usual cultural clutter the Makati matron favored. She was the kind of hostess who imported everything. Sweet potatoes, a basic root crop of the country, was shipped in canned from Ohio. Asparagus, plentiful in Baguio, was ordered from western Massachusetts. She’d serve Spam if it were expensive enough. For Uncle Fred, she always had the “pink paper,” weekly football scores of the English First Division. To ingratiate herself with a spate of Indian teachers in my grade school, she once engaged a Bengalese dancer for the evening, so that the expatriates could witness the authentic gestures of a culture that wasn’t, it turned out, their own: all the Indians were Catholics from Calcutta.
She had connections, associates in low and high places who could get her anything she needed. It was only a matter of timing and organization, she said, as if she were an overachieving secretary. Dinner parties were the immediate expressions of her art. Every dish was a showcase, the way, at a Renaissance dinner, one could trace a ship’s exotic route and a merchant’s cleverness by the presence of certain side dishes at the table.
I had greeted my teachers and led them into the sala. I did see the surprise on their faces, their quick, serious look about the mirrors, the gigantic chandelier and towering vases.
Uncle Emmanuel was already in his chair, drinking his sherry.
It was a not so incongruous mix, if you think about it, three Americans, a Brit, and an Israeli. Allied citizens, a solid cold war front. In any case, no one would know my father’s name unless you were some German operator on the military black market, a Pakistani with the right connections, or some American trader with a fetish for Third World wars.
I guess I should beat my breast, retreat into an ashram, join the crucifers of Pampanga and lash my body against a bloody cross, at the mere sound of my father’s name. But as a lecturer in Soli’s group had once denounced: I am a coward. I do not have the imagination to possess affection. To be honest, I have never been able to envision society as a creature with genuine warmth or pumping heart. I act by impulse, by the inarticulate suggestions of my errant sensations. I have a cadaverous soul. In short, I am a member of the damned burgis—in my case, the comprador bourgeoisie, with links to feudal lords, if you believe my father’s claim that every Soliman is heir of the lost sultan long ago trounced by Spain. Whenever I think of my father’s work, source of privilege and horror, I believe it is with conflicting purposes and incoherent intentions, when, in fact, I should never speak of it at all.
I didn’t know what got into Mr. Fermi, usually soft-spoken and tolerant in class, even to Thornhilda Singh, my classmate who had steel wool for a brain—I don’t know why he decided to get Uncle Emmanuel’s goat.
Education is a banal thing; you receive no merit in your afterlife, and it gains only in inconsequence as you age. My schoolteachers, let’s face it, were the trash bins of my self-regard. If not for this event, who knows if I would have managed to conjure the name or face of a single sorry adult from those obsolete times. Mr. Fermi may have been in his twenties, barely out of school, with a graduate degree in idealism. Mr. Dreiser was older: a celebrated being. His fame came from children’s notions of adult mysteries, their terror about growing up. He looked like a fiftyish spinster, a prim adult of a Saxon hue. His face had a carnivore ruddiness. And though he had bland features and murky gray eyes, as if filmed with mucus and the cobwebs of his dreams, his face is imprinted in my mind. He had dry skin on top of his beefy complexion: he seemed ragged by some wilderness. But what most fascinated students was his mutable wig. It was a blatant cap of fiber and dried sweat, dull brown like a washed-out coin, plastered awkwardly to his head in an arbitrary wistfulness, a kind of sad accident. My classmates tittered when it waggled dangerously on his scalp, and then I would feel for my own hair, what I would look like when I grew old.
Uncle Gianni, sitting down, immediately began to speak, never at a loss for a topic, facing Mr. Dreiser, who even in class was partial to elegance—in manners, diction or fashion.
“Now think about it,” said my uncle, hitching up his silken slacks. “America was discovered by accident. And Manhattan was Hudson’s error—a funny thing that happened on the way to China. What about Magellan—do you think he found the Philippines on purpose?”
“Does it matter?” murmured Mr. Dreiser. In class, his sounds had a smoker’s tardiness, vague vacuoles in his speech, so that our lessons on Australopithecus or the Precambrian Age seemed to have appropriate, winded gaps.
“It does,” nodded Uncle Gianni. “It does very much for Manila.”
Mr. Dreiser’s legs, pressed together with his hands between them, faced Uncle Gianni’s fervor in demure passivity, and Mr. Dreiser was smiling at my uncle’s polished profile with a benign, womanly admiration.
Uncle Gianni continued: “I think the Philippines was, unfortunately, founded on love. Yes, Magellan came upon these islands, and strangely, very sadly, as you know, fell in love. He had been here before.”
“I read somewhere about that,” said Mr. Dreiser, still murmuring. “That he had been to these parts even before. Under the rule of the Portuguese king.”
“Yes, he had been to these parts before; certainly he had been in Sumatra, but maybe he had already known these other islands, with its painted chiefs and enchanted language, in an earlier trip. When his loyal friend, his slave Enrique, came out to meet the pintados, and he and the natives understood each other, it was then Magellan knew he had triumphed: that he had circumnavigated the world.”
“You are wrong,” Mr. Fermi, a precise scientist, wa
s shaking his head. “Magellan had been to Indonesia, not the Philippines. Enrique, his slave, was not Filipino. He was Sumatran.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport, sir. Let’s play this game with factless arguments. It’s more fun.” And he leaned toward Mr. Dreiser: “So why is it important? Why is Magellan’s softness in the head when he came upon the islands important to this country?”
Uncle Gianni stood and walked up and down the room, pacing back and forth.
Uncle Emmanuel sat back, all scrubbed like a schoolboy and looking just as insolent, impassively watching Uncle Gianni.
Uncle Fred was late, and both of my parents’ colleagues, Uncle Emmanuel and Uncle Gianni, were nervous. Loquacity and silence were the by-products of their agitation.
Mr. Dreiser was smiling, his head gazing up at Uncle Gianni, so I thought his hair might slide over, in a dangerous tilt of reverence. “I have no idea,” Mr. Dreiser said.
“Think about it, after his months and nights at sea, after those disgusting and inhuman places, peopled by grunting giants and women who mutilated their vaginas, really, those Patagonians were barbaric creatures, and then, of course, that miraculous affair, Magellan’s long, dreamlike crossing over the Pacific—he came to this. And what were these islands? Just think. Imagine them as lands of memory: an extension of some delirium. Because he thought he’d seen them before, known their women, their words and their music. Pigafetta says as much in the journals. How Magellan on these islands was bedeviled—by a curious tenderness. How suitable for a fanciful man to find memory in alienation, a kind of longing—for that’s what familiarity becomes—in a strange place, in this case the Philippine islands. Weirdly, think about it, this man’s heart softened in the Philippines. His guard fell. Remember, Magellan was not a kind man. He had butchered sailors, dismembered a mutineer, marooned his king’s traitors. He had watched his men die of fever and suicide. And so the Italian chronicler, Pigafetta, noted a change in Magellan—an emotional conversion in Limasawa. It’s in the diary. Check it out. And to mark it, his heart’s strange movement, his epiphanic moment, Magellan took them, the Philippine islands, the way he hadn’t taken those others—”
“Because they were already owned by Portugal,” said Mr. Fermi.
Uncle Gianni took no notice. “He took them in the name of the Spanish crown, certainly, but in his heart, when he placed the cross by those sands and gave the Filipino queen the statue of the little Jesus, he did it for himself, for his own heart’s stirred blood, for the power of memory coursing through it. Passion tricked him, the kind some of us may feel when we find a strange place so terribly plausible, so happily joined with our own longing. And so it was that a country was founded on delusion: on Magellan’s misrecognition. Because, as you say, sir: he had never been to these islands. He had been in Indonesia.”
Mr. Fermi said, his mouth curled: “A charming romance. Fancy dress-up for the evils that occurred in the colonizer’s name. And it is not even true. Surely there was more to the beginning of empire than heartfelt moments of miscast memory. The Spanish conquest of the Philippines was cruel, rapacious, and ignorant.”
“Malignant, systematic, forethought.” Uncle Gianni waved his hands, as if sorrowing over history’s adjectives. “All of the above. That’s the sadness of the Philippines. It was raped by plan. Of course, the Spanish already had a blueprint of governance in Mexico. So the rapacity was lockstep, well-developed, despicable. In this case, then, novelty might have been less barbarous than Magellan’s cruel, misplaced familiarity.”
“Well said, but—” Mr. Fermi, a man careful with words, tried to interrupt.
“The pity is that the Philippines was not colonized by Italy,” Uncle Gianni continued.
Now Uncle Gianni was on a hobbyhorse, a tired spiel. He had a requited romance with Italy, his adopted country—the way orphans who threw off their parents’ memory greedily attached to chosen savants. The great thing about Italy, Uncle Gianni always said, was that no matter how much your passion squeezed it dry, there was always something—an obscure pregnant Madonna in the unlikeliest town, Monterchi, or the way a pedestrian wore a startling yellow rose while shopping for clams on the street—that somehow returned your soul back to you, fairly unharmed.
But I knew at that point when he got to his Italian theme, he was taking old funds out of his war chest of curmudgeonly sayings. “Think of it—the cuisine, the arts, the exile of sugar from their diet! Sugar in pasta sauce! For this barbarity alone, Spaniards should have been tortured before the Inquisition.”
“So, you think, like the Filipinos do, that the Philippines got all of its bad habits from Spain?” asked Mr. Dreiser.
“No, only its bad tastes.”
“Oh, come on,” said Uncle Emmanuel, chuckling and leaning forward. “Your own country, America, had its share in the matter, Gianni. They ruled this country for fifty years—and more.”
“Ah,” Uncle Gianni said, “but my grandfather, the brute from Abruzzo, only settled in Boston out of—well—I think he had some agita disorder, like many other immigrants. He couldn’t stay in one place, but he always longed to be back home. My theory about America? Hah. It has been settled by people with short attention spans.”
“You’re right,” said Mr. Dreiser, fingering his embroidered vest. “It should have been colonized by Italy. Filipino fibers and Italian style—good match.”
“Or colonized not at all,” Mr. Fermi said into his drink.
“Yes—Italy or not at all,” said Uncle Gianni laughing, pretending not to understand.
“I didn’t mean—I mean that the colonizing of the islands—it’s not the most savory chapter in history. It shouldn’t have happened at all, if the fates had been kind in any way.”
“Should, would, did, had: be my guest. They’re all the same to the conquered,” said Uncle Gianni.
“A crude way of putting it,” said Mr. Fermi.
“We live in the world,” Uncle Emmanuel pointed out, “not in the classroom.”
Mr. Fermi turned dark red.
Uncle Gianni shook his head at Uncle Emmanuel and moved to bend toward my teacher, saying in a low voice, turning his back on his friend: “I didn’t mean it crudely. Please don’t misunderstand. I meant it in all the severity of the phrase: it is all the same to the conquered. Our ‘shoulds’ are just fretful and useless: do we, foreigners here, have a right to comment on this country’s history? We can’t redeem ourselves, we can’t repent, we can’t even look the people in the eye.”
His domestic way, the way he held onto you with maternal interest, contrasting with the silken splendor of his parts, confused you when you confronted Uncle Gianni.
Mr. Fermi looked up at him warily, holding onto his beer.
“So what is there to do?” asked Uncle Gianni, gripping the scientist in the knee with a fiery gaze. A cranial nerve throbbed at his gaunt temple grown red from drink.
And he concluded, slapping Mr. Fermi on the thigh, so that my teacher almost spilled his drink: “Why, rob them blind, of course.”
And he laughed. I shook my head at Uncle Gianni. He laughed out loud, his face growing so red I thought maybe I was right—Uncle Gianni was ill. Maybe he had a travel bug.
“Ha-ha. Rob them blind,” Mr. Dreiser chuckled. “If you can’t look them in the eye, rob them blind.”
Mr. Fermi, still in my uncle’s grasp, did not laugh.
Uncle Emmanuel took an urbane sip, the red nub of his chin oily with sweat.
Uncle Gianni sobered up. “I’m sorry,” he said. He straightened up and looked at no one. “Words have a way of taking away feeling. What I really mean”—and he released the stiff scientist and turned toward us, as if we could supply him with dull alternatives—“is that, as foreigners in the Philippines, we get deluded by our reasons for coming. The land is so welcoming, so generous. We lie to ourselves and imagine we are not only businessmen but also redeemers. The bullshit with which we cover our asses. Unlike Magellan, or McKinley, or MacArthur for that mat
ter, I wouldn’t have bothered with a grand scheme, benevolent assimilation, whatnot. Hogwash. Bullshit. Stick to business, I would have said to Magellan. I’d have checked the place out for the best goods, then I’d have moved on, to receive my prize in Sevilla for my goddamned expert circumnavigation. I mean, for a genius who figured out how to circumnavigate the globe, he was dumb. See what happened to Magellan—murdered with his own petard.”
“Hoist with it,” murmured Mr. Dreiser, a rasp of a giggle rising from his diseased lungs. “Damned petard.”
“Hoist, hung, and poison-darted!” laughed Uncle Gianni. “Smart men, those damned petards of Mactan. The cunning Filipino killers of Magellan!”
I waited for the signal for dinner and stood by the stairs, so that I could see the quick shaking of Mr. Fermi’s head, the taut torso of Uncle Emmanuel, his stiff pose of polite scorn, and the little dramas in gestures and limbs. I stepped in, not waiting for Mr. Fermi to speak: “But Uncle Gianni, didn’t Italy become a country only a few decades before the Philippines started its revolution?”
“Ah, Sol—my precocious historian. Come over and interrupt us.”
“Your soupy historical plots,” I said, snuggling into his shoulder and kissing him on the cheek.
My teachers were silent, staring at their drinks.
They, too, had not expected this meeting.
I could see my father in his study, on the phone. As for my mother, it was her job to reel in this conversation; but she was in the kitchen, bossing the maids.
Uncle Gianni rambled on: “Both countries have come into the insight of their union too late to reach a lasting stability. This is why Italy is run by gangsters and the Philippines by goons. The notion of nationhood in each is too modern.” At this point, he seemed saddened by his dumb generalizations, or maybe just tired from entertaining unexpected strangers. But then, more brightly he added: “But that’s why both are more interesting than, say, the Swiss.”
