by Gina Apostol
Soli’s life, on the other hand, remains a mystery to me. I caught bits of its outline in snatches. She was not one to elaborate, though a few of the facts were enlightening. Soli’s father, a civil engineer from Leyte, was obsessed not with holy reginas but with a doomed revolution, the fateful tragedy of the Filipino rebels of 1896. Throughout his life he wrote op-ed letters with the rambling sincerity of the autodidact, polishing his wistful theme—the loss of the bells of Balangiga, formerly of a church in Samar, now at a G.I. fort at Cheyenne (“Why Oh Why, Wyoming?” was the title of one of his plaintive screeds). Sadly, in the end he bequeathed only one lasting footnote to his precious war, the naming of his kids. He died young, of literary thrombosis—strike that, a congested heart.
Thus merely by her baptism Soli had earned a pedigree of angst. As a kid, she lapped up the hagiographical picture books of Filipino heroes, scarlet tales of scurrilous pimpernels during the French Revolution, painful rhymes in galloping tetrameter of the midnight antics of Paul Revere. For a time growing up, she told me, she believed she was Jewish, so profound was her longing for Zion, adapted from an education in the novels of Leon Uris that she had found on her late father’s shelves. The diary of Anne Frank was a killer, so deep was her identification. And in the seventies, she fasted for the hunger-strikers of Belfast and held her own protest, a backyard bonfire, for Biafra. When Soli was awarded a scholarship to Philippine Science High, she wasted no time being tutored in underground Maoist poetics. And so she pledged allegiance to the Kalashnikov flag by the age of fourteen.
She came across, let me put it this way, like an ember. I have always wondered if it were my own need to burn that made her seem, at this remove, incandescent. As I said, her caramel skin had an illusory sheen, as if something fired her from within. Perhaps her father’s unrequited pathos, mournful Quixote of a lost cause, kindled the bonfires of her young compassion. Her conviction was contagious, her views explicit and extreme. I understood how Jed could not withstand her, because in her presence I felt exactly the same.
She was the first, and perhaps only, person I have envied, and maybe because of this I remember her in a skewed dimension, a haze of idolatry more lasting, and just as mistaken, as the impression of those I’ve loved.
It turned out we were block mates—she and Edwin and I—in that lockstep schedule that kept freshmen in line; but even in June she was already circling in another orbit. She’d come to class to take exams, and it got my goat that while I ground out my heart in calculus, she’d just sail in and ace the tests. She had the gift of clarity. Edwin called her cleverness a passionate reductiveness—but for me, her lucidity was startling. As I said, it’s possible I aggrandize her in recall for my own paltry reasons. At the dorm, she was everywhere. A tribe of malcontents, a motley study group of sorts, followed her about. There’d be question-and-answer, history lessons, stupid debates in the dining hall about the labor theory of value, whether it was evident in our culinary choices (was the union chef’s surplus value relevant in both delicate leche flan and cheap powdered nonegg omelets?), and did a change in consciousness in the Chinese peasantry after Mao count as a material condition or sheer unprovable casuistry?—all before everyone else left to play basketball. I met Vita, a lean girl who liked to spit on the floor. Francis “Kiko” Not-Coppola, a kid obsessed with Apocalypse Now. Buddyboy Something-something, Beatlemaniac and gun enthusiast. And Sally Vega (yes it was she—not quite unrecognizable from the person she is now)—who always gave money but never marched. None of them liked me. Only Soli kept asking me to join the marches or cornered me in the lobby to give me a book. Some coverless leaflet on political economy. A heavily annotated manifesto. Mao’s Little Red Book, a cliché cloaked in another, the love poems of Neruda. It was only when I came to the lobby one day, hauling out this beautiful volume, a facsimile manuscript of El Filibusterismo in Jose Rizal’s hand, after a self-righteous discussion of the hero’s failures, that I somehow became part of the group.
My godfather had found it in Kalamazoo, I said. They began giving me lists, eclectic and opportunistic. “Theses on Feuerbach,” a slim essay (found). The Bolivian diaries of Che Guevara (nonexistent). The Art of War by Mao Tse-Tung (available anyhow at Popular Books). Teenage rebels were just shameless freeloading bookworms. Did I think it odd that I asked Uncle Gianni, on his stopovers from visiting military republics, to get Marx’s Theory of Revolution: State and Bureaucracy? I think he thought it was funny, an intellectual diversion before I went on with my life. Oh, a dissertation of demonyo, my dad said. My dad began to say that he couldn’t wait until the term was over and I got better, and I was shuttled off to college in Boston or New York—with all that demonyo just crawling around the university, like swamp monsters. And my mom would present me the gift books without much comment, or maybe clue. But Uncle Gianni, I think, was having a laugh.
Anyway, mine was not the kind of family that questioned what children did—my job was to be petted and indulged, as long as I followed in everything else. And so Uncle Gianni unearthed the complete twenty-book edition of The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, by Blair and Robertson, identical to the set in the stacks at the Library of Congress; the letters of Rizal to Blumentritt, two volumes in mediocre binding; Memorias de un estudiante de Manila, autobiografía escolar inédita, 1861–1881, a frail impression by an impressionable youth; and for good measure, a bunch of rare French travelogues from the 1870s: Guillaume le Gentil’s opus on the Indian Ocean, the findings of a Parisian naturalist in Palawan, and the Duc d’Alençon’s terse and romantic Luzon and Mindanao. I showed Jed his erstwhile ancestor’s chronicle, Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las islas filipinas, not the Hakluyt edition in English, but the Spanish one with Jose Rizal’s notes. Jed was the only one among us who spoke Spanish. He returned it to me without comment. He borrowed the Fili instead.
That year I read in earnest the history I had not been taught as a child. I remember my anger at the outlandish racism of one Brit journalist, Francis St. Clair, a clericofascist, as Soli called him, reporting on the rebels of 1896 in a joke of a book called, without disclaimer, The Katipunan. And as I said, I carried about for months the instructive chronicle of the strategic massacre in 1901 of American soldiers in Balangiga, the town for whom the bells do not toll, in The Ordeal of Samar, a Pyrrhic battle narrated, as always, through the enemy’s lens.
I discovered that our books of history were invariably in the voice of the colonist, the one who misrecognized us. We were inscrutable apes engaging in implausible insurrections against gun-wielding epic heroes who disdained our culture but wanted our land. The simplicity and rapacity of their reductions were consistent, and as counterpoint to Soli’s version of the past, these books provided, as I admitted to Soli, the ballast for my tardy revolt.
Soli reproved me. Why do history books persuade you but not the world around you? You live in a puppet totalitarian regime, propped up by guns from America, so that we are no sovereign country but a mere outpost of foreign interests in the Far East. She said this with such conviction, I could barely reply. But, I countered, the military-industrial complex, as you call it, does it not suggest not only an economic order but also a psychiatric disorder? It occurred to me that it was a system of oppression that spurred both of our delusions—hers (to save the nation) and mine (to save myself).
Soli nodded, disarmed at the thought, but in the end she disagreed. Obscurantism, she said, does not serve change. The therapeutic couch may be necessary—at least for some, she said pointedly. But it is not the place for action. Next time you drive home to Makati, she said, look around: all you need is to look out your limousine’s window to know that it is a problem to be living the good life in such bad times.
JED HELD THE banner over Soli’s curls, like a matrimonial veil, and I walked behind them, not quite understanding the slogans, much less myself. Why had I tagged along that day? Soli had mentioned it to me in passing, and I had come. My first march, a June demonstration at the start of clas
s. Activists never held rallies during school vacation—otherwise no one would come. She was surprised to see me among the crowd, I could tell. She looked at my dumb shoes, a patent pump with a pilgrim buckle (vintage Vivier, but I’d stripped off the label). I told you to wear lace-ups, she said, already mourning the loss of my pretty shoes—you might need to run. But she hugged me to her and whispered: I’m glad you came.
It was a farmers’ rally, men in slippers and ragtag groups marching past me in the heat. I didn’t see the shields and truncheons until the crowd stood at a halt, an impasse in the shouting—then the bullies ranged before us, in a kind of lockstep rage. I was certain I heard gunfire—it was not just my heart. It all happened so fast, I still do not know how I managed to run, losing sight of Jed and Soli. I was caught in a crush of bodies, shrieks and shouts and groaning: and I remember that rush in my head, like a crazed revelation: this is it, I will die, and what will Helen of Constantinople say? In the end, all I did was lose a buckle: the left pilgrim, of course. And like many subsequent actions, it was anticlimactic—students ducked into alleys, peasants atomized toward their havens: cul-de-sacs, storefronts, friendly roadside restaurants.
It was Jed who came back for me, bright-eyed in his red bandanna, a look of exhilaration as if drunk. The way danger turned him on. I was shuffling down some wretched street, my Vivier pumps a vintage wreck, when I saw him—towering above the mixed crowd, shoppers shielding the dispersing peasants. Bedraggled, in my useless Belle de Jour shoes, I saw him turn the corner—I’d recognize him anywhere—and I felt relief and a strange gratitude. Like a found princess. And I understood it to be so right that he would come out of nowhere, just to look for me.
I wobbled toward him, waving.
“Soli,” he yelled at me, “over here!”
“Sol,” I corrected, speaking to the merging masses. “My name’s Sol.”
SOL AND SOLI. Soli and Sol. In the dorm, we were twinned in people’s eyes. Solidaridad Soledad. Soledad Soliman. Our chiasmic names were some cosmic joke, or perhaps a sloppy choice in a careless novel. People could not get us right. I guess I exploited it, imagining myself less freaky than I was, since now I had a twin with an identity that seemed better than mine. On the other hand, I was just the girl with the imported books, asking stupid questions. It made me uncomfortable to be called Soli, the one, I thought, who had all the answers.
After the fiasco of the farmer’s rally, Soli took me to Monumento, at Caloocan.
The hero Andres Bonifacio’s tragic monument was now a hawker’s squall, merchants spilling the guts of the economy on the highway itself—plastic chairs, pots and pans, bundles of cheap cotton clothes in baskets. I watched the progress of the city from the jeep, and a melancholy wash, a stab of something beyond my witness, something wordless, came over me. A slight man carried on his scrawny back large metallic basins, one heaped over another, while on his shoulders were also laden a bunch of spatulas strung like vegetables and sheaves of underwear stacked like books. Sights like this crowded the open highway near Monumento—this was the harvest of the cry of Balintawak. Aluminum spoils on a spit-grimed street. The undelivered hopes of mundane lives. It was easy to see how this had once been a swamp, in which the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century had lain in wait for signals and gunshots; but I found it hard to see the revolution. Instead, I thought about worms. Walking around in my brand-new, open-toed leather sandals, I thought you could get all kinds of poxes instantly on your feet, germs invading the skin, lacerating your cuticles.
Soli was right: I always wore the wrong shoes.
The funeral home was bare—it had a mottled floor and gray, undeveloped walls: by one coffin, a steel pediment peeked from the cement, like a rusty snake.
Five young farmers and one child had died at the rally.
There had been gunshots: I was correct. I was incorrect to think it was normal. It was one of many planned marches, with permits, and peaceful, organized exits guided by megaphones. But it was a march pierced by the mandate of a new militia, Soli said, and the city was in shock. Instant outcry in the papers, revulsion among the middle classes. All this was news to me. I preferred, you know, to read the Literary Review, or the (London) Times Literary Supplement. Urban military acts in broad daylight were not normal even in revolutionary times (extrajudicial deaths, I was told, of course happened out of sight).
I passed one coffin after another and felt this pain in my ears and the odd sensation of falling apart, though I was walking about looking whole.
Death was a bazaar, multiplied like the merchandise around Monumento.
I felt that stifling in my chest, a familiar horror not quite guilt, not quite sorrow: a numb, hollow, blanketing despair. A falling sickness, the world pulsating, out of whack.
It was easy to distinguish the mourners from the kibitzers. The people who looked out of place, underdressed, wearing sneakers without socks, or plain rubber slippers, were closest in relation to the dead. The mothers and fathers and wives and children of the slain. While the kibitzers were more alert and canny and dressed accordingly, in Sperry Top-Siders and button-down shirts. In one corner, already littered by the props of the living—a coffee thermos on a stool, a comb and hand mirror on the floor—a foreigner was recording his conversation with a woman, while the rest of the family sat in a passive row. An expressionless wizened old man in slippers and a straw hat looked away from the proceedings. A little boy, dressed in underwear, watched the Australian with curious intensity, as if watching television; and a lady, maybe an aunt, kept interrupting the taped conversation, weeping after each of her revelations. The journalist himself looked uncomfortable. He kept wiping with a bare hand his sweating collarbone. And only the grieving woman, it seemed, was in command of the situation. She was a gray-colored lady with a tough pachydermal hide. She had a kerchief tucked into the back of her dress, a gesture of forethought against Manila’s heat, and she kept tugging at the piece of cloth, keeping it in place to staunch her sweat: and her brief agitation of the kerchief was the only thing about her, it seemed, that gave away expression. She spoke in a monotone, while a girl in blue eye makeup translated.
An excursion. With friends. She, the mother, didn’t know it meant this (vague sweep of fingers across the room, glance toward the coffin).
The military should pay, she said quietly, laying her hand back into her lap.
The girl with caked, blue eyelids dutifully translated, unconsciously imitating even the poise of the woman’s hand.
And at a question from the foreigner, the woman answered, promptly understanding him: “Kinse. Kinse anyos—” And she said something I did not get amid the Spanish I unearthed in my lost tongue.
The mother looked straight at the girl in blue eye shadow, as if the mother, too, needed a translation for the information she had just relayed.
That her child was only fifteen years old.
The translator shook her head, shifting out of character and waving her white hands: “Those goons. Who says martial law will be lifted? They’re sending the militia now into the cities—the CAFGU goons—the counterinsurgency forces have no place in Manila!”
And the aunt on the sideline began weeping again. When she saw Soli, she wept even louder. Soli walked to her and took her in her arms, holding her shaking shoulders. Then Soli picked up the comb on the floor and smiled at the other woman, the gray-eyed mother, who was looking intently at Soli, her poise unmoved.
And Soli started combing wisps of hair on the still mother’s brow.
At this point, the multiple coffins began to multiply even more, growing dizzy in my sight. I could not understand what people said—speaking in multiple, accusing tongues—the languages I had overheard all throughout childhood, and which I understood the way I understood the weather: a code beyond my need to comprehend, a sensory mist separate from me, a knowledge of myself I have never grasped.
I stood up, feeling the world spin. It seemed to me that the coffins were heaving against the wa
lls, like bands of trees growing sideways, bloating into horizontal, varnished baobabs, contracting space as they expanded. I felt faint in the windowless room, and the coffins began moving toward me, constricting my breathing. I thought wildly for a moment: All of these dead want me dead.
I passed the door that looked onto the inarticulate mass of the monument in Caloocan—Andres Bonifacio and the heroes of the revolution: farmers, petty merchants, smelters, printing press laborers, government clerks—their bodies in stone and bronze defaced by the city’s more tenacious dirt. I looked back at the crowd in the funeral hall. Among them, the mourners and the kibitzers, Soli walked about, her back straight, her stance always correct. She made mundane gestures of solace, completely comfortable among the living. Whereas I could not see my place at all, terrified by the dead.
5
BY AUGUST, I was attending lectures with this stringy-haired guy, Ka Noli, who looked like no Italian cookie. He’d appear in rubber slippers, with dirty hands and unshaved face, at sessions in the provinces, or amid the monsoon damp of nearby suburbs. Ka Noli was a political guide who intoned the doctrines of the PSR, a shortcut term for an analytic manual of people’s war. I still have no idea what those initials meant. Sometimes, I thought, I imagined I was there for comradeship. An escape from solitude. At others, I thought I was a slut, watching Jed with Soli, noting details of estrangement, irritation. My heart would leap when Jed looked at me. But Jed himself betrayed no obvious concern about his double life, one with Soli and one with me.
