by Gina Apostol
“Cuckoo clocks,” said Mr. Dreiser, conspiratorially.
“Certainly some other things contribute to the lasting power of—goons, as you call them,” Mr. Fermi said.
“What do you mean?” Uncle Gianni smiled, raising his glass to his lips now, with only his index and thumb.
“Nothing,” said Mr. Fermi.
Mr. Dreiser interrupted: “Would you say, in your travels around the Philippines, with all these separate islands, is this a coherent country, with its different languages and fiefdoms—does it not seem a mere patchwork of incidental cultures, like Italy before Garibaldi?”
“No,” said Uncle Gianni abruptly. “Hollywood unites the world.” He walked over to the bar to get more wine.
He was his most reductive when waiting for a deal to close.
Mr. Fermi turned to Uncle Emmanuel, erect and silent to his left.
“So you are a business associate of Soledad’s parents?” said Mr. Fermi.
Uncle Emmanuel nodded, barely looking up. He seemed to be examining his hairy hands. He’d flown in from some desert to this meeting, and these civilian interlopers were not welcome. That’s what his silent face said.
“And what is your business?” Mr. Fermi continued.
Uncle Emmanuel shifted in his seat, his mouth moving into an uncomfortable smile. He raised his eyes swiftly up then down, with wryness. “Oh, all kinds of deadly business.”
Uncle Gianni over at the bar laughed.
My teacher raised his eyebrows but kept quiet.
Then he said: “So which of you sells the F-15s, the Phantom jets?”
Uncle Emmanuel was very quick to say: “Oh, no, no. You go to the U.S. government for those. That’s not our line.” Idiot, he seemed to be saying, sliding back into his seat, shaking his head.
“And to which—as your partner calls them—goons do you sell the products of, as you call it, your line?” Mr. Fermi held his drink casually.
Uncle Emmanuel turned red. That is, his pores did. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business,” he said.
“Now, Emmanuel, what’s the problem?” Uncle Gianni was laughing. He came back and reached over to clink his glass against Mr. Fermi’s beer. “Don’t mind him, sir. He’s jetlagged. We don’t want Sol here to fail in molecular biology just because this dumbass, pardon me, Emman, couldn’t sleep in business class.”
“Environmental science,” Mr. Fermi said. “That’s what I teach.”
“So, where are you from, Mr. Fermi? That’s an appropriate name for a science teacher. You know I met him once?”
“Enrico Fermi?”
“No less. In Cambridge at a lecture. My father brought me to see him. My father was a chemist. I grew up outside Boston, in Lexington. I understand you went to school in that area?”
“I went to Harvard, yes,” said Mr. Fermi.
“Ah, yes. The best place to learn to teach middle school ecology.”
Pa came in. “Look who’s here,” Pa announced.
It was Uncle Fred in an all-white suit, in matching fedora and shoes.
“Dinner’s served,” my mother said, peering out from the dining room screens.
“I did it,” Uncle Fred declared, almost skipping. “I have the contract—signed by the Secretary himself!”
“Good job, Fred—we were wondering what happened.” Uncle Emmanuel jumped to his feet. “We’ve been here hours—we’ve had to sit through whole centuries of Philippine history just waiting for you to get back!”
Uncle Fred was patting my father, hugging his shoulders. Pa was beaming. He had his right thumb up, for victory.
“And it couldn’t have been done without help from Frankie,” said Uncle Fred, grinning at my father. “The Secretary sends you his regards, Frankie. Golfing trip to Hawaii coming up, right? Now what would we do without Frankie? A toast, a toast.”
“Ssh, Fred, let’s talk business later. Now let’s eat.” And my mother winked at us, to show how informal and delightful this mixed assembly was, and we stood up to go to the table.
MY TEACHERS SAT together, opposite me. Uncle Gianni took the seat beside them, next to my father at the head of the table. I have run this dinner through my mind many times, some images in isolation, some in flashes. I suspect, at this point, every single detail I remember is untrue. Maybe Uncle Fred was in blue and not in the color coordinates of the powers that be, or Mr. Dreiser taught science and Mr. Fermi humanities, not vice versa, or that I misremember their names, culled conveniently from an encyclopedia. Maybe I imagined the conversation, and in truth all the boring company came up with was the usual exposition on expatriate vacations in the exfoliated Philippine isles.
But I remember the dinner as if it were yesterday.
I sat on the side, next to my mother at the head of the table. She served my teachers first, her fluttering gestures mitigated by an ironic pout, her signature expression of amiable condescension. There was that give-and-take of mutual hypocrisy—exemplified by the powerful bouffant of my mother’s hair and matched by the stiff, splayed tendrils of Mr. Dreiser’s fibers—and this careful artifice among people who have no other occasion to be with each other but at a dinner party, mumbling platitudes about New Zealand beef, settled over us while I cut the red meat.
I was seated before Mr. Fermi, whose face even in class would have this absence residing in it; he’d look out the window, with a gaze of melancholy or stupor, you couldn’t tell which, as we did our lab reports and took our tests. At dinner, he contemplated his bloody steak, then looked at the other guests with this same vacancy, as if taken by reverie. There were girls who had an ongoing argument on whether he was or was not handsome; the verdict was that, though his eyes were nicely green and his long, wavy black hair had its merits, the bridge of his nose was too high for glamour. Anyway, he often looked preoccupied, as if figuring out a puzzle too complicated for our measly brains. Or as if imagining a long-dead, corny love. That fascinated my vacuous peers.
I don’t know why I still dwell on these men, Mr. Dreiser and Mr. Fermi, and what they thought and saw at the dinner table, what they whispered between themselves at dessert when my mother left to check out the crème de menthe. They were nothing to me then and are nothing now. They’ve gone off to their farms in Iowa and postings in Hanoi, to their irritable wanderlust and homesick enterprise.
Disgusting.
That was Mr. Fermi’s word. I dawdled behind them, not on purpose. I was greedy. Mint gelato, streaked with stracciatella, was my favorite dessert. My father had taken his colleagues into his study for a brief chat: so sorry, business, you know. My mother had left us in a rage. The maids had brought out the wrong things, wineglasses instead of liqueur flutes, or something like that, and I stayed behind with the whispering pair.
By the dividing screen, my teachers politely waited for the other guests. They spoke in low tones.
“Absolutely disgusting,” Mr. Fermi repeated.
They were facing the Ming vase in the foyer, beside the giant good-luck Buddha.
I was picking at my last bits of mint, a fresh mist melting in my mouth, and I overheard, and I nodded, looking at the ugly Buddha. I, too, had never liked Mr. Kow Lung’s feng shui choices—his muddled ethnographic messages needed editing, I had always thought.
“Well, you know, it’s not the child’s fault,” Mr. Dreiser said, almost sighing, his whisper like a bumpy skid of stones from his larynx. “It’s her parents’ business, not hers.”
“I wonder what the kid knows. If you knew that your parents sold arms that prop up your country’s military dictatorship, what would you do?”
“I’d keep eating my mint gelato,” Mr. Dreiser whispered with a suppressed snort, laughing.
“Yes, it’s an interesting ethical question. To have blood on your hands, without having done a single thing.”
“Oh, come on now, Dick: that’s too much.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Mr. Fermi decidedly, crossing his hands tightly across his chest, as if trying
to use up as little space in the house as possible.
“It’s a business,” Mr. Dreiser intoned, the sigh from his larynx gasping for air. He respired with difficulty, as if with some regret. “Although—it’s low on a good trader’s list of products. He-he-he. Uh. Uh. Even the worst won’t touch two things: drugs and guns. That’s what traders say. And guns are at the bottom even of that. But can you believe the way they live? I mean—Louis Quatorze, meet The King and I. Chintz! Honestly, I wouldn’t care about their money if they did not waste it on such crap.”
Mr. Fermi shook his head. “Oh, Harry. You know that’s the least of it.”
I RETREATED FROM THE dining room the other way, through the hall of Chinese prints and Italian vellum books and my father’s lacquered faux-ancient Singaporean opium den.
I locked myself upstairs in the bathroom.
Blood was in my underwear, bright, a strawberry stain. The sight surprised me. At first, I tried to figure out where it had come from. I stood up and realized what had happened. I was surprised by the color: I thought it would be more like batik dye, dark and dripping. Instead it looked like something in store-bought pie, only thinner.
As I stood still, the blood ran down my thigh with haphazard goal, the temper of gravity.
The rest of my thoughts you know.
Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will also regret that.
I stood still to see if there might be any pain. There wasn’t. My body was as good as new. What a strange thing to change and not be transformed. To be exactly as I was and yet not so.
WHO KNOWS, MAYBE it did happen a week later, on a quiet night before I went to bed, in the bathroom after a sleepy dinner—my faulty memory merely a menarcheal disorder, as my doctors deemed my subsequent malaise. I remember Mr. Fermi’s articulated disgust through a whispering screen, like a dart, a punctuated clarity; and I caressed the spot where it clung, something ingrown, an infected thing.
It happened when I was twelve. After this followed a series of distressing incidents, depressions without reason during luxury vacations, collapses in oases of summer instruction. My teachers standing there by the dark screen, whispering, like a sparse Greek chorus.
Disgusting.
Later that evening, Uncle Gianni became more reckless with wine.
He spoke loudly to my teachers after dinner: “Academics, intellectuals, Harvard men! You cannot stand expat business, repulsed by its costs. You men think you have no filth. Where do you live, for whom do you work? Grubbers like the rest of them—you do not escape history’s brush. You think you don’t mess with the real, the destructive world. Whereas we—we stink in it, you think. We wallow in it like pigs.”
“Oh no,” said Mr. Dreiser, a kind man and unhappy with this distinction. “No, no. We don’t think that.”
Uncle Gianni sank into the sofa with his Tuscan bitter, playing air piano on his thigh.
“What’s this?” said Uncle Fred. He settled with a cup of tea; ever since he had had his first heart attack, he had stopped drinking. He was a gun dealer with healthy habits. In my hands, I held the twelfth soccer ball he gave me—a red and blue affair, made in Indonesia.
“Ah—” said Uncle Emmanuel, waving his hand away impatiently, “it’s nothing. Gianni’s going to talk about that Frenchman next.”
“Yes: my favorite compatriot. An expatriate like all of us. The first great businessman in America—a great trader. We are, of course, nowhere in his league. Far from it. He was an intellectual like you, Mr. Fermi; in fact, if I remember right, he was a good friend of the great French scientist. Labbatoir.”
“Lavoisier,” said Mr. Fermi. “Lavoisier was a chemist.”
“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Fermi. As you well know, science is necessary for certain endeavors. The marvels of the Renaissance, the discoveries of Billy Bacon.”
“Francis—” began Mr. Fermi. “Oh, never mind.”
“—And the history of sulphuric acid and nitroglyceride—all of a piece. Who was it who said that? In a movie? A book—Sol here loves books. She’s my soul mate. Sol-mate. What was that book, Sol? No matter. This is what tickles me about my Frenchman: the moral side to him, the great radical philosopher. A leading light in the French Revolution. Man of principle. He was a progressive, a freethinker. Good friend of one of the Thomases—Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine. Think of it: a French revolutionary, an Enlightenment intellectual, Mr. du Pont, built the first great business in America. Égalité, liberté, and munition.”
Uncle Gianni said the last in his French accent, drunken and white-faced by this time, paper-white: his red flush ran out after reaching a peak, leaving him with his death mask.
Mr. Fermi shrugged: “I’m not surprised. Live free or die, as they say in my home state.”
“Who was this? Was it General Lafayette?” asked Mr. Dreiser.
“It is Mr. Éleuthère Iréneé du Pont,” exclaimed Uncle Emmanuel. “Of DuPont chemicals. He started his business manufacturing gunpowder.”
“His name doesn’t matter,” Uncle Gianni said. “This is the thing. It was said that in his factories he kept escaped French revolutionists on staff; they were his forgers, smiths, smelters. Enlightened thinkers of the revolution. Men of adventure. Anarchists and radicals. A commune of freethinkers worked for DuPont’s labs. I like that, you know. He took fraternité to heart.”
“There’s humanity in your story,” said Mr. Fermi. “Is that what you’re getting at?”
“There’s humanity, barbarity, comedy, love, irony, happiness, mild manners, stupidity, cupidity, passion—”
“Death,” said Mr. Fermi.
“Death: all the demands of opera, in fact. We didn’t invent these things.”
“Yep,” said Uncle Fred placidly. “We only supply the goods.”
“We didn’t invent human beings,” said Uncle Gianni, slumped now in his chair. “We didn’t invent war, bloodshed, pettiness, rivalry, nationalism, tribes, dictatorship—”
“You only supply it.”
“We’re middlemen,” Uncle Fred nodded. “And Gianni here, he has the best goods: he doesn’t even deal in secondhand anymore. He’s one of the best.”
“We’re internationalists,” said Uncle Gianni. “Like you.” And he started humming a song, brazenly. He said again, repeating himself like a drunken man: “We supply everyone. But we did not invent human beings.”
3
I KNEW SOON ENOUGH they would find me—the nurses in starched uniforms, Victoria Eremita with the evening’s experimental soufflés. They will always find me. A stampede of feet, hullaballoo in the hallway. I felt it—the lump on my wrists. Keloids are not cathartic: but they have this comforting familiarity, a pound of flesh that will never go away.
If I were not careful, I’d feel that falling sickness, the drop to the floor and the heaving furniture, pulsating creatures flattening me to bone, to powder.
All around me was danger anyhow: in an opened box, a souvenir photo from a trip, myself at twelve, ungainly like the scaffolding before the tower of Pisa, my father with his ivory holder, smoking a nonexistent cigarette, and Uncle Gianni in my favorite shoes, two-toned, with the double monk strap, the color of a croissant. In another, I sit in a vaporetto with my lozenge lorgnette, looking like a Peggy Guggenheim, but the brown one, or some other demented heiress in Venice. A recuperative trip, that summer I lost control. Menarcheal hysteria, my doctors said. A hormonal imbalance. And though it seemed to me at times, while we moved from one stuccoed villa to another, that it was not so much that my body was a mess—it was a message—still the trip we took that summer, with Uncle Gianni taking charge as usual, a busybody with the concierges, the museum guides, the maître d’s—the trip that summer, though not completely soothing, was a salve. Between fits and train stops, fevers at wine festivals, I trembled in rented rooms, but I believe I emerged from the haze intact. I remember at a mountain town—was it Ventimiglia, some sleepy sliver parallel to France—a bear accosted me in a heated r
evel: a summer pageant not meant for tourists, though by then, after touring all those traps, it was hard for us not to imagine that every pleasure we came to was invented only for us. The animal twirled me around on its tippy toes, until I fell on its scratchy lap. It felt me up my belly. The cold plastic finger on my open midriff down to my crotch was a shock. It was Uncle Gianni who had been watching, watching me in my ruffled Provençal outfit spin and spin and laugh. What he did with the bear was magnificent: he punched it in its empty gut. It was as if it were a display—a spectacle created for my edification. It was so sudden—the way the bear sprawled on the ground, his costume distended, his face unmasked, so that for a moment he seemed to be licking his cheap medieval-circus fur. A girl, a tricolored peasant in a costume, screamed. A man in silver tights stumbled. And Uncle Gianni pulled me from the crowd’s confusion, toward my innocent parents checking out ceramic chickens in the town square.
That moment restored me. The wrath of Uncle Gianni, as he harangued the hairy creature in Italian—his funny mix of vulgar speech with perfect pitch—returned me back to myself. It turned out the bear himself was a passing tourist, an idiot in disguise. The Italians of Ventimiglia, serious men in tights, marched him to us to apologize.
“Sorry, man,” the bear implored, in the unmistakable vowels of a drunken American. “Please. Don’t let these bastards hurt me.”
I have no idea what Uncle Gianni said to the Italians, who took the bear away, still half-dressed as a beast. I never saw the man again. Throughout that trip, my organs, my body, my mind had this obscene soreness, and something in me was infected, a dart, an ingrown thing; but in the end, I had the comfort of my parents’ arms, loaded with glazed poultry, and the magnificence of Uncle Gianni, ready to catch me if he could.
I got well.
4
SOLIDARIDAD SOLEDAD WAS the eldest of three sisters. Each girl in her family was expected to be a boy, first Soli, then Noli, then Fili. An oddly literate triumvirate, true, but not so uncommon if you note that my mother, for instance, was named after the Byzantine king Constantine’s mom, complete with royal title. Reina Elena, i.e., historic Helen of diluvian tales. I knew my grandmother only from a portrait on the piano, a serious child in a white dress, blue sash and sausage curls. Lola Felma Kierulf, rose-seller and devout believer. In rural Philippines, as my mom explained, the figure of Reina Elena is the star of the yearly flower parades, the regal muse at the head of the summer Santacruzan processions simulating the medieval search for the True Cross. Growing up, Reina Elena, the rose-seller’s daughter, Americanized herself to Queenie, suitably following history—but still, the name was a cross to bear.
