by Gina Apostol
I ran to my mother and was swept into her perfumed arms.
She took my head in her hands and kissed me over and over, so extravagantly you could mistake her exuberance for acting.
“Oh, inday, we’ve missed you so much.”
“How could you,” I said, “you’ve barely been home.”
“Oh, yes—we’ve been busy. But we have such great news!”
Pa folded me into his arms.
“Guess who’s here, Sol, guess.”
“I can’t guess,” I said. “I know.”
He was grinning, his arms open wide.
“Uncle Gianni!”
“Just in time, too,” Pa said, flicking invisible ash off his suit, his pinky delicately lifted. He had stopped smoking at my command, when I had learned of the evils of tobacco in Mr. Dreiser’s middle school wellness class.
My dad always followed all my wishes—how could I complain?
“Where are you all off to?” I asked, holding on to Uncle Gianni.
“He came in honor of you,” said my mother, kissing me again.
“No, he didn’t,” I said, wriggling away. “You all look dressed to kill.”
“We’re going to have lunch,” said Pa. “To celebrate your return home from this—place. I told Queenie—it was a mistake to send you, even if Don Mariano’s son is here, too. It’s full of demonyo. But I’m so glad you’re coming home.”
And he hugged me, a smokeless caress.
“Oh, shush, Frankie. You went to this university yourself, what are you talking about? And everything’s just fine, now she’s going to college in America! Inday, Uncle Gianni came just for your homecoming,” beamed Ma. “He will take you to New York himself in January.”
“I came to organize the soccer games,” Uncle Gianni reminded me. “Don’t forget. You have to help me, Sol.”
“But that’s weeks from now,” I said. “I thought you were coming for my birthday.”
“That goes without saying, carina. But will you come help me with the games?”
“Okay,” I said. “Same dates?”
“December 28, yes, Holy Innocents’ Day! To slide us into New Year’s cheer!”
Even Manong Babe, standing by with my bag, kept nodding at me as if at some prospect of a reversal, a happy turn in a plot.
“I thought you were abroad,” I said as we got in.
“I was,” said Uncle Gianni. “I came straight from Germany.”
“Is America dismantling bases?” I said.
“What do you know about that, inday?” said my mom, laughing. “You will stick to your studies in America, become a historical scholar, and leave us to our business. She thinks she’s so smart, Gianni. It’s all your fault.”
“How is your social studies group?” Uncle Gianni said. “Any new titles on the horizon?”
“All done,” I answered brightly. “Course completed. Moving on!”
I saluted the air.
“Too bad,” he said. “I bought you the best book.”
And he presented a volume I had never heard of before, Antonio Gramsci’s abridged prison notebooks, a beautiful book of analysis in leather binding, and he leaned out from the front seat to be kissed.
“Ciao, bellezza,” he whispered, in his extravagant way, as I kissed him on his scrofulous neck.
MANONG BABE TOOK us down Katipunan, along the highway and down the back roads of leafy streets into New Manila. After Diliman, this was the greenest part of the capital, shadowed by old acacias, splashed with bougainvillea. The road was still dirt in parts, and the dust in the noon heat caught the rays, so that it looked as if the light sizzled, then blinded.
“We’re going first on a quick detour, inday, before we get home,” Ma said. “We could not get out of the meeting. He wouldn’t change the date. I mixed up the calendar. I forgot it was your Christmas break.”
“Meaning—you put business first, Ma, and you forgot me again. That’s all right.”
“And oh, inday—you’ve met him. Colonel Grier. Remember him? At the concert?”
“The man with the coin collection,” I said. “The scholar of the Philippine revolution.”
“He said, Gianni, he could only give us thirty minutes,” said Pa. “The nerve.” But Pa all in white, holding up his empty luminous holder in the backseat, looked like a Cuban tango dancer, absolutely unconcerned.
“Hah. Let’s see who’s got the nerve. He doesn’t know what he’s dealing with,” laughed Uncle Gianni.
“He’s so new to the country,” Ma sighed. “He doesn’t know a thing.”
8
I REMEMBER THAT AVENUE in sheer light—the haze of dust motes rankling the air. In recall it is purely sensual, a number of distinct elements—dry, friable leaves, with a kind of muffled crackle, a static spark as they decomposed; the simmer of gardener’s hose, the way water fell on earth so hot it vaporized when it touched ground, so that there was a curious smell of boiling on the block. Strangely, dimly, I recall the hiss of firecrackers. A sulphurous smoke, the skittish demeanor of light—even the street seemed nervous in spirit, its san francisco leaves quivering, smelling of flame. Our progress had telltale smoke in its wake, the omen of New Year’s cheer.
VICTORIA EREMITA WAS taking away the snacks, the pictures on the table. She made such a commotion I almost fell from my rest in the rocking chair.
She began straightening up the boxes and the crates.
“No!” I shouted.
Startled, she stopped in her tracks, bent over some neat stacks—cartons tied up in strings.
“Ma’am Sol, I am just trying to clean—”
“No,” I said quietly. “Do not touch.”
I knew it must be there somewhere—the rattling can of memory.
THE STREET OF entry was full of gardeners, caretakers, drivers—underdressed, pacific men. Who were the witnesses? A Metro aide with her scudding broom. A startled, somnolent houseboy? Some anonymous gaze.
On the street, someone was always watering a garden, and the suppressed sense of heat, that raised muggy moistness, overlays my vision, like the vague blue rinse of a blank canvas. At the corner before you reached the street was the empty gas station with its festering weeds. Grass and dirt still clung against its cement base, growing through its cracks. A cement wall near the gas pump was overgrown with trash—like a place unsettled, though this business must have moldered there for years. The earth, it seemed, was only a few years removed from jungle, from swamp. Transient attempts at trade, a corrugated shingle here or there, had the forlorn trace of foiled ambition. Everywhere there dwelt that smell of hydration, even on the pavement. Frying vapor. When you reached the store with the lame man at a door and a fervid monkey by the window, you turned to the right on Third Street. Those musky gardens of the British Council met you.
“My favorite library,” I pointed out when we passed it.
“Nice mansion,” said Uncle Gianni.
We drove straight on and turned another corner. In front of a long, tall gate, Manong Babe stopped the car.
A guard came up, and Manong Babe gave him his license.
The guard, unsmiling, took it, then looked at us.
Ma waved at him, but the guard was unmoved.
A second man came over and gazed at the papers, at Manong Babe’s face, then he peered at us inside.
He went to the guardhouse and buzzed the gate open.
As we drove in, the guard saluted, an abbreviated gesture.
“Unfriendly guy,” I said.
“Don’t blame them,” said my dad. “People picket them every week, it’s disgusting.”
My mother looked at me inquisitively, caressing my fingers on her lap; she frowned at my dad. “Honey, why bring that up at all?”
A uniformed servant with a walkie-talkie came to meet us at the house’s entrance.
It was a meandering bungalow with garden chairs set out on the patio that faced us.
The lawn was carpeted in deep green: you noticed that instantly.
Grass from Kentucky. But the splotched leaves of common san francisco, stained lime and purple and tooth-yellow, lined the garden’s edges, just as they did in those dirt yards I’d seen in the provinces at those teach-ins with the group. Various Filipino common flowers, gumamelas and yellow bells, were dispersed among a profusion of roses. Arching toward the eaves, brilliant bougainvilleas hung like thick, clustered bracelets on the bungalow’s low limbs.
“We’ve been here before,” I said.
“It’s the headquarters of LOTUS,” my father said.
“Didn’t someone celebrate a birthday here?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Pa said.
Ma went up to meet the uniformed men. My dad and uncle hung back.
“Remember the parties we used to have here? Bourbon all over the place, people acting like baboons. That was fun,” Uncle Gianni said.
“No more of that,” said Pa, speaking low. “This new guy’s different.”
“He must be unpopular,” said Uncle Gianni. “I mean, this place was Animal House.”
“I’ve been told he scares the shit out of everyone. He has more war experience than all of them put together, even the general. But I’m sure you’ll find the opening, Gianni. You’ll crack the shell.”
Uncle Gianni grinned, his lips disappearing as if he relished the battle.
“We’ll see,” he said.
Ma came up.
“He’s waiting for us.”
It was a cool, shadowy place, a maze of halls paneled in hardwood, with walnut-like dark cuts in the wood, their centers like eyes. The uniformed man, his walkie-talkie buzzing all the while, led us across the hall, then down a staircase and into a cool basement-like area, with a view of a garden—a redesigned old bunker.
Some white men in plainclothes ate at a few tables, their expatriate presence transforming the tropical décor. These scenes of foreigners in vague military drag—wrinkled dress whites unbuttoned, camouflage khaki shorts hiked up—these random soldiers lounging amid the palms always looked like historical black and white pictures of the forties, during the time of the Commonwealth, as if the country had not moved beyond the past and were still ruled by American commandos, men in battle fatigues planning for war.
I almost didn’t recognize the man I had met at the concert. He’d become eerily tanned—a beet-red conflagration all about his body, as if he had an allergy to the tropics. His own men seemed to shy away from him, though he was talking with one of them, ignoring us. He sat by himself, while his men at other tables listened in desultory groups. He sat near the bar, one of those wooden, accordion-paneled affairs. A monotonous mahogany sheen cloaked the entire place.
Unlike the others, Colonel Arthur Grier was dressed in old-style gym clothes—a tight, faded pink tank and extremely brief nylon shorts. An old muscled Marine: he knew his body looked good, and he did not care if his nakedness was obscene or his clothes ridiculous. His pink, pumped flesh ripped out of his clothes’ seams. It’s true, he looked disgusting, but compelling—like some reptile that engendered this evolutionary response: my alert revulsion. In the months since I’d first met him, his face had turned tropical-leathery and tanned, and it was hard to tell if he were older than I thought or deceptively younger. His rank vigor overwhelmed judgment. He looked up, barely apprehending our arrival.
Clothes always mean something. The Colonel’s were an understatement, surely an insult. My parents were overdressed, a supplicant pair. Uncle Gianni, in his sheer dark La Dolce Vita suit, so fine it swayed when he moved, was unconcerned as always about his troubling effect, as if he were starring in his own production. He looked like an Italian cinematographer from Apocalypse Now, about to accept an Oscar.
The Colonel moved slightly when Uncle Gianni offered his hand, making a gesture as if he were about to stand up, except he didn’t. He motioned us to sit down, across from him at the mahogany bar. He didn’t speak.
“I had to pick up my daughter, Colonel, she’s just back for Christmas break—do you mind if she’s with us?” said my mother. Her voice, a shrill pitch, carried in the wood-lined room.
“No, not at all,” he said. I remembered those carved-out spaces in his speech. Connecticut or Colorado, something like that. “I remember you,” he said to me. “Defender of the insurrectos.” He didn’t smile.
“Whadja like to drink?”
All the grown-ups made their choices quickly. I ordered San Miguel beer.
My mother looked at me: “Soledad? Excuse me? She’s having wine. She’s joking,” she said. “She’s never had San Miguel in her life.”
“A beer drinker?” the Colonel said with approval. “That’s all I drink now, you know. It’s good for the heart.”
“Pretty soon, doctors will be recommending death to get rid of goiters,” Uncle Gianni said.
“Well, then you can have a beer,” said my mom. “Just one.”
“Are you making fun of me?” Colonel Grier said to my uncle, not looking offended.
“No, man,” said Uncle Gianni instantly. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said smoothly. “I wish the longest life for you.”
The Colonel laughed. Uncle Gianni saluted.
One to one, I thought. Each had scored a point.
In that way the lunch went; if you looked for openings and parries, there was a lot to watch out for. But it was all just silt and garbage—trash talk. Just lunch, after all. I looked at the keloids, the scars on the Colonel’s arms, and tried to imagine how they got there. I tried to imagine Colonel Grier as a victim in Vietnam. It was hard: he had the broad, wall-like body of a carabao; his muscles were alarming. He terrified me, frankly. I thought that easily his large hands could break my neck in two. I tried to focus on his story. To train soldiers in counterinsurgency, he said, he made them practice by beheading chickens with their bare hands; it was easy, he said, but messy. He got this idea from reading history books—the history books about the native peoples.
“The Ordeal of Samar?” I asked. “Have you read that?”
He shrugged.
“Perhaps.”
“So why has the U.S. Army not returned the bells of Balangiga? I mean, why oh why, Wyoming?”
Everyone stared at me as if I were insane.
I almost giggled.
Colonel Grier turned his leathery back to me.
In the tropics, he told my uncle, what you need to do is terrify your enemies.
“Somehow that works,” he said. “You know what the Filipino rebels would do to American soldiers in the 1899 war?”
“What?” asked my dad, all eagerly polite.
“Filipinos liked to pour sugar concoctions, syrups and jams, on the wounded men’s heads, tie them to a pole in the sun, and let the ants eat them up.”
“Sweet,” said Uncle Gianni.
The Colonel snorted. “Saccharine’s more like it.”
“Sucrose torture,” laughed Uncle Gianni.
“Ant cure,” said the Colonel.
“But how horrible,” said Ma.
The Colonel nodded. “Got to admire them for that—they used all the weapons they had. All the pests in their arsenal. It’s good to learn from the natives. That’s how you win. Kill the cockroaches with their own demons.”
“Hoist them with their own petard! Damned petards!”
You could tell Uncle Gianni was in his element. He had met his match, and he could not stop grinning.
“Well, young scholar,” Colonel Grier suddenly turned to me. “Would you like to see my coins? Not the Byzantine ones—they’re in a safe,” he explained. “But the American pieces. I like to take them out—it’s like holding history in your hands. Lincoln cents and Latin doubloons. I’ll show them to you, if you wish. Including my Philippine hoard. A minor branch of my Americana.”
And you know—honestly, I could not tell if the Colonel was laughing at me or dead serious: it’s hard to tell with guys like him. Their ambiguity is their weapon.
IN THE END, my parents looked vanquished. As far as I coul
d tell, they never took the offensive. Their agenda was unsaid. The only concession they could get was that Colonel Grier promised to see them again, at their Christmas party or the soccer tournament hosted for expatriates on Holy Innocents’ Day, December 28, by Uncle Gianni, to usher out the old year and launch the new. Into New Year’s cheer! The meeting ended with frilly piña coladas in our hands. I held the piña colada and kept sloshing the ice in it, stirring with the cheap little umbrella, holding on and not looking up. My mother’s laugh, as talk subsided, rang about the murmuring room, rising toward the whirring fans.
Colonel Grier stood up. At his move, we rose, too.
“Time for the gym,” he said. “Three o’clock sharp.”
“You’re a regular?” said Uncle Gianni.
“As regular as anyone can get. My wife tells me I’m obsessed. I go everyday at three o’clock, rain or shine. It’s a habit you get from captivity, I think. You hang on to routine. That is my experience.”
“You’re a regular guy,” said Uncle Gianni.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a very orderly person. I like orderly people.”
The Colonel walked ahead, not bothering to acknowledge my uncle.
Nothing resolved. Going down the stairs, I couldn’t help noticing the Colonel’s thighs, like blocks, the iron grip he had on his body. He looked invincible, though dressed in a pink tank top. A car was waiting by the curb. The Colonel strode up to it. The guard saluted the sockless man in his running shoes, his underwear apparent under his tight shorts. We watched, waiting for our own car, as the Colonel bent down to pat one of his front hubcaps. In this way, politely we stared at his wedgie, contemplating his oblivious ass. Then he straightened and walked to the other side of his car, staring at the wheels.
The uniformed man remained silent beside the car. We watched, not quite sure what to make of it, then Colonel Grier looked at us. “They’re all there,” he said.
“Anything wrong, Colonel?” Uncle Gianni asked.
“Some crazy native tried to steal my hubcaps: right in the compound. From that wall over there,” he pointed to a gauze of bougainvillea in the corner, “they climbed in through that gap. Arrogant son of a bitch. Right in the heart of the bunker. Fuckers. They’d die for hubcaps.”
