by Gina Apostol
My actual attention for the business at hand—the struggle against forces I could barely conceive—was, clearly, incoherent.
I don’t think I ever got my priorities straight.
Ka Noli asked us to give ourselves different names, the entire affair a festival of duplicity, as if we were spies or Mafia killers. I called myself Victor. Victor Eremita: Kierkegaard’s pseudonym in one of his books—fear and trembling, the sickness unto death.
Even incognito, I was a literary snob.
Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will also regret that.
I was a two-faced vermin, worse than a rat.
Jed called himself Simoun—from the book he had borrowed from me, the Fili, which he never gave me back.
Soli, our P.O., as she was called, has no name that I can offer. It doesn’t matter anyhow: my wit’s diseased.
For those after-school teach-ins, we’d take jeeps and buses in dirt darkness to get to homes where people used staircases as bookshelves and floor mats as beds. They hung nets around their straw beds to hide from mosquitoes. The sweet homeowners, someone’s schoolteacher father or innocent uncle in the civil service, helped us spray Baygon pesticide over everything, even the sweating plastic of their sofas—but nothing we did could keep away the roaches and the rats. It was as if, as the island of Luzon kept keeling into the Philippine Sea, all the vermin of its vegetation also kept rising from the wreckage to survive. Thus, Manila is this precarious ecology of pests and people merely treading water before extinction. I was always getting a bug in my ear or a dead spider in my espadrilles, and I was ashamed that these disturbances kept me from concentrating on revolution. No one else seemed to be concerned.
Once, they requested a meeting in my house, and I obliged. It was not a good idea. We were polite and well behaved, as prescribed in Mao’s Little Red Book, and they even took off their slippers at the front door, to my consternation, so that Manang Maring, my half-blind yaya, seeing them in medias res (but in medyas, no) began shouting in alarm at the ragged barefoot tribe I had brought home with me. But the questions they kept asking me that evening, about what my parents did, where I had been in this picture or that, made me uncomfortable, and though I answered, lame lies, I knew I could never invite the group back. They questioned the portraits in my rooms’ hallway (Lola Felma, the scared child with the sausage curls; the headless poet Emily Dickinson’s floating white kerchief dress). They oohed and aahed at the vellum in the vestibule and the statues by the stairs. Briefly, they met Reina Elena, on her way out to a dinner party (she and Soli exchanged pleasantries about the hometown they shared). I was annoyed more than distressed by her chatty fascination, my mom with Soli; and Soli, who examined everything with her usual clinical amusement, did not say much on the way back to the dorm but looked at me, I thought, in understanding. The group never met in the house again.
WATERLOGGED TILES IN typhoon homes. A citrine moth tangled in Jed’s slip-ons and then alighting in camouflage on his lit-up hair. I was relieved, when finally, after those months of secrecy and delirium—finally, we held a dirge that first week of December, an uncannily wilting time of the year.
Jed and I were finally denounced, for S.A., or D.O., or some other abbreviation for, what the hell, you goddamned fuck.
At the meeting, I learned the name for my sin. Sexual opportunism. S.O. was the plebeian term. So. So. It was out in the open. I guess we were betrayed through some astrologer’s gaze. It was odd to hear the clean-cut verdict, the moral purity of the group’s outrage.
I agreed with them absolutely, but I sobbed without control.
I was relieved but not absolved.
It was an orderly affair, blame squarely placed, love easily denounced. Jed, admitting all, apologized. In their patriarchal way—the movement had this chauvinist streak, just like the Church—Jed had recourse to a higher court, some assembly of dark lords with goblin wings.
Whereas I had nothing but their denunciation.
I was surprised to be told by the group that they regretted having me in their midst.
Looking at their mournful glances, wide-eyed fixtures of reproach, I was mortified by my tardy recognition. I saw in their eyes the person they saw: an obsequious tool, a confused sympathizer with a nice library, carrying an ignorant rattling can of coins. Fucking the boyfriend of Saint Catherine of Siena.
What about my jobs, I said, my paint cans and the copper centavos? Who will do my jobs?
It was an absurd exclamation. Someone laughed. I wailed.
It was odd how it was Soli who comforted me, smoothing hair from my damp face, propping up my shaking frame.
When I should have lain myself at her feet, anointing her with pathetic oils.
“It’s all for the best, Victor,” she soothed, patting my mouth, my cheek, tenderly, absentminded. That was her gesture: absentmindedness. “You can’t even tell us what your parents do, Victor. Do you understand? If you cannot see yourself clearly, it’s hard to see the revolution with clear eyes. It is better for you to go to America.”
I stared at her: “I already told you what my parents do: my parents are traders.”
“Traitors?” one girl asked, as if uncertain about what I said.
“Traders!” I wailed.
“In what goods?” Soli asked.
“Cuckoo clocks,” I said. “They sell cuckoo clocks.”
Soli stared at me. She shook her head.
“It’s all just—weird, Sol—there’s something dishonest—just like—.” And she blushed, staring away from me and Jed.
Jed did not look at me, and I had nothing to add.
Why was I so hurt when even to me it was no surprise?
Jilted by the proletariat.
There I was thinking it was I who was going to quit the group, but it turned out no one had ever wanted my allegiance. Or something like that. I was told I was no comrade anyhow until I handed in the T.B., the talambuhay: my reckoning of my life.
Which I would never do.
Spitting out the lukewarm. Just like that.
If I ever told him (of course I never did), Uncle Gianni would have laughed.
You have not written your talambuhay. You have not done your class analysis. You cannot express your class relation to the masses. You cannot envision society as a creature with genuine warmth or pumping heart. We do not believe you can tell us truthfully who you are. You are a coward. A moral void lies in you, large as a copper coin—but a hole nonetheless. You do not have the imagination to possess affection. You have a cadaverous soul. You have not yet read the PSR. Comrade: one day, we’ll meet again. Change is possible—after all, it is what we believe. We hope one day you will be a part.
Ka Noli, the lecturer, did not say things quite like that: I got their drift. I was dishonorably discharged, so to speak, and in this way my time in Manila was done.
6
ON THE STEPS, the last of the kids who had been waiting for their rides home, smoking a cigarette before their parents came, were already gone. Soli, too, had gone home for Christmas. She left in a rented jeepney stuffed with pillows, buri bags, cookie cans and colored baskets. Soli did not even have suitcases. A crowd of nephews waved at me from the jeepney—we had held a teach-in once at her uncle’s home in Marikina, and her uncle’s two preschool boys, precocious perverts, had peeked in on me in the bathroom, and I had shrieked. Now I saw one of the talented voyeurs, a cheeky kid with big ears, waving at me happily and calling out my name. Solosolosolosol. Disconcerted, I waved back.
Before she left, Soli kissed me goodbye on the cheek, a polite holiday hug.
“Be good in America,” she said.
“See you,” I said, though I knew I would not.
My semester was over. By the end of the country’s Christmas season, after Epiphany, in fact, a month from the day, I would be going off to college in New York or New England—someplace new.
The university was a dreary place without people—just a mess of trees a
nd fading buildings. I stood alone for a while, waiting for Manong Babe. I carried a large shoulder bag, which rattled when I moved. Throughout the last weeks, I had been packing my life in a frenzy, and only a few goods were left behind. I did not know what to do with the rattling can. Then for some reason I decided to keep it, the rectangular tin of Fox’s Glacier candy holding the coins and the pamphlets and the notes and the drafts of my talambuhay, the life Ka Noli had asked me to write. The copper coins kept rattling as I moved.
I KEPT COLLECTING THE coins during those last days before Christmas break, out of habit, though the group itself I avoided in the dining hall, in the lobby. I was unable to look Soli in the eye. But whenever I found a five-centavo coin, I kept it.
People were kind to me in the meeting’s aftermath. Maybe it was the fact of imminent departure, the way some people think better of you when you are leaving, as if departing were the same thing as being dead. Even Vita, the gastric girl with the abundant phlegm, who had seemed to hate me the most at first, asked me how I was doing; but maybe she had ulterior motives because she still had my copy of the selected works of P. G. Wodehouse. For some reason, she liked Jeeves. I let her keep it. And then in a confused confounding of the season’s depressions, John Lennon died. We heard the news in the lobby, and shock united all of us freshmen in unspeakable despair. We could not keep straight our anti-imperialist agitation from our profound horror, and Buddyboy the Beatlemaniac, clutching at his red bandanna, howled, literally, like a mutilated calf. In the last couple of days, in the spirit of peace, he kept asking me to listen once again to Revolver, his favorite album, if I liked. I declined. I said I hated Paul’s voice even more now that John was gone, and Buddyboy nodded and solemnly shook my hand—comrades once again. Francis “Kiko” Not-Coppola, a shy kid, traded a bootleg copy of his favorite movie, Apocalypse Now, for a copy of Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” (he had many bootleg Betamaxes of the film in his bedroom anyhow).
“When you are homesick,” Kiko told me helpfully, giving me his gift, “you can watch Apocalypse Now. It’s the best movie about our country.”
“I will,” I said. “When I’m homesick for Manila, I’ll watch Apocalypse Now.”
But I kept to myself that last day—packing with a sense of finality, as if leaving a hospital and wondering what to do with all of my clothes that did not fit.
Above all, I did not wish to see Jed.
“YOU’VE BEEN AVOIDING me.”
He was staring down from an amused height.
“No,” I said.
“Let’s talk. Why won’t you talk to me?”
He lowered himself. He sat on his haunches at my feet. The heels of his sandals were raised from the ground: they were worn out now, the heels ground up.
How long had it been—six months?
June to December.
I had lived an entire life in an interim universe, and it was odd to see it whittled down like this, easily measured by the stumps on his shoes.
“Talk to me,” he said.
I looked away, at the door, at the burnt, bored guard, then I stared at him.
“Remember,” I said, “that night. When the police officer came and you took out your wallet and showed him your name. Remember?”
He took out a cigarette and started twiddling with it.
“We got lucky,” he said.
I shook my head.
“That’s when I knew.”
“What?”
“That I could not be a part.”
“Of what?”
“That I was playing a game. That I was not honest. I don’t mean about us. About my part in this country. That I could never be like Soli. I could never really join.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He saluted you, Jed. Don’t you see? We live outside of the country’s rules. We can do whatever we want. We can commit crimes. We can even play at revolution. We could kill people, for all we knew. And then in the end we will always get away. We’re cockroaches. It’s we who are the problem, Jed. Don’t you see?”
“Speak for yourself. I’m no cockroach: I’m going to be part of the solution.”
“No, you’re not. Your fucking family has fucked this country up. You and your family and your goddamned hold on the countryside. I mean, you guys own goddamned Bukidnon or something. You will never be a part. You will always be the problem.”
He crushed the empty packet, and he took out the matches for his cigarette. His hands were absolutely sure of their gestures—he stroked, burned, lit. He spoke amid the smoke.
“Does it matter anyhow where we come from if we end up on the right side, Sol?”
“Sol for solipsism. That’s what Edwin says.”
At that, Jed smiled; he touched my cheek, blowing his smoke the other way.
I shook my head away from him.
“No, Sol,” he said. “Don’t you see. Sol for solution. Don’t you see the role we can play? I know it will always be easy for us. The policeman couldn’t even arrest us. But he was an idiot. Don’t you think I don’t think about it every fucking day? That we could have been caught and it would be my fault? What is our country’s history, what has happened again and again: what was the failure of Simoun?”
He was fierce in the daylight, face quivering in the haze, though maybe that was only a trick of the smoke about his face. “The hero of El Filibusterismo. A diabolical creature, just like us! Addle-brained member of the upper class. But Sol: even he was on the side of the good. He failed, but he tried. We do have a role to play. We simply have to make a choice. We must choose to be a part.”
“No,” I said. “We’ll always have our wealth, we will always have our names. There is something suspicious, dishonest, in playacting revolt. We’re cockroaches. We’ll outlast even our crimes.”
“We can give them up,” he said. “Our wealth, our names.”
“Will you? Will you give up your family? Your mother? Your home?”
“Well, no need to be absolutist. Give yourself a break, Sol. You know the world’s evils are not your fault.”
At that, I laughed.
He took my face in his hands.
“I was scared that night, when the policeman came.”
“You did not look it.”
“I was scared. For you.”
“Chauvinist bullshit,” I said.
He did not laugh.
“I was scared. I always knew it would happen. I knew I would do it.”
“Do what?”
“That one day I would get you into trouble, and you would do whatever I wanted.”
“No,” I said. “No, I won’t.”
I shook myself out of his hands.
I started moving away.
“Yes, you will, Sol. Sol for solution. I’ll see you during break.”
I turned away. I saw Sally—Sally Vega—coming out of the dorm.
“Sally!” I yelled. “Wait for me.”
“I’ll see you, Sol,” he said.
I grabbed my bags and sped out to the street.
Sally Vega, Sally Vega. I believe that was her name. Mystery woman of the dorm. She looked like Gertrude Stein in that picture of the artist looking like a Roman emperor. Claudius or Caligula. Sally Vega compounded her alienation from the world with neglect—her jowly flab and amphibious flesh, a desert patch of rosaceae roosting on her chin—she looked unhealthy, unhygienic.
“Why do you do what you do, Sally?” I ran to her. “Sally Vega. Sally Vega. Why do you donate money regularly to Soli’s group but do not join?”
Sally’s flaky cheeks seemed to extend in folds to her neck, as if her self-pity had turned her into a blob of desiccated blubber. I watched her cheek folds move as she talked.
“I hope my parents come,” she said. “I’d like you to meet them.”
I waited politely for more information, but as usual her walrus chin did not elaborate.
Once again, her mystery parents didn’t arrive—instead, a chauffeur in a black car picked
her up. She looked disappointed.
“I knew he wouldn’t come,” she said. “My dad’s always busy.”
She sat in the back and did not look at me when the car drove off.
Jed, too, had disappeared. He didn’t linger when he saw me with Sally Vega, as I pumped her with questions I knew she wouldn’t answer, just as long as I had the excuse to turn away from Jed’s certainty, that yes, I would succumb.
7
MY PARENTS ARRIVED in the white limousine. It looked more ridiculous than usual beside the withered banana leaves of the driveway; but my heart leapt when I saw it. Now even the flame trees looked alien—their leaves turned dull in December, like scabs in the sky’s kneecap.
Frankie and Reina Elena came out of the car together, holding hands, their faces shining. I was surprised at my emotion when I saw them: I was happy to be going back home.
Ma wore a flared pantsuit in silk chartreuse, with rainbow geometrics at her neck, like some wafting optical illusion. She was a walking patch of green powered entirely by Emilio Pucci. A jeepney braked, and passengers stared at her plumage. She wore wide dark glasses, like her idol, Gina Lollobrigida, a celebrated tourist in Manila.
The first thing I noticed about Pa were the white shoes with the woven pattern; the white safari suit, the straw Stetson, his figure all white, in his white suit and white patent loafers, white hat and white shirt. I always thought it must annoy the dictator, to see himself slavishly duplicated among his minions, as if his own figure were not excessive enough.
But I was a spoiled brat, a split soul.
I was happy to see them, even though watching them stride toward me, I had to admit I wished I were also not their child.
“Inday!” Gina Lollobrigida exclaimed, stretching out her hands.
Even the burnt bored guard turned.
