Close to the main road, the path grows wider, the houses less impoverished. A substantial looking bungalow displays a brand new Toyota parked behind iron grills. ‘A middle-class fortress only a few metres from sheer wretchedness,’ Tony once said. ‘You see this everywhere. This is what we’re fighting against, this unequal distribution of wealth in a country so rich in resources. Have you seen the Smokey Mountain, the community that lives on a garbage dump? See it and see Forbes Park or Dasmariñas Village, and you’ll understand. You’ll learn compassion then rage.’
Earnestness, gullibility. Occasionally these held Matt’s attention if not sympathy. He and Tony became friends, or Tony thought they were best friends. Matt found the man too ensconced in the vertical pronoun; no space for the stories of anyone else. Even the Total War revolved around him, his own outrage. Tony sought him out. There were after-work drinks, intermittent dinners, regular phone calls, mostly despairing. Tony spoke about how his friends and family back home seemed so self-absorbed now, compared to this wretched life.
‘I was lonely there,’ he intimated, ‘and always looking for a reason for it. My intense family and friends, you know them, don’t you — we were painfully philosophical, all attempting to balance the equation. We demanded that the world account for our loneliness. So we credited it to the wife who packed her bags, the boyfriend who went astray, husbands that keep on leaving, the marriage that never was, all those relationships, commitments gone awry. Yes, the balance sheet made sense for a while, until we figured out the inherent debits in our own souls, there from birth to defy all lifetime accounting. But perhaps I can outwit this bind. I have found my angel and I am going home.’
He could really turn it on, sometimes eloquently, Matt thought, during those after-work drinks at the Australian Embassy. Tony spoke about his beloved guerrilla, his dream to take her home, that is, if he was not rambling about his war novel in progress and the well-connected patron who facilitated his research trips and provided contacts among the military, because you need to know about the other side of course. And there was The Cause, which he wore like a badge in his travels around the islands. Then he disappeared for the first time in September 1987. Matt was almost anxious. The ceasefire was over and the government was purging the NPA, which was purging its own ranks.
Three months later, Tony rang. He couldn’t say where he was. He ranted about a family tragedy in Sydney, then a disappearance, a possible salvaging in the hills and his heart being cut in two, that he must do it right this time and find her, that he would never be able to go home. He apologised copiously as if he had aggrieved the whole world.
‘In the hills I did not find the cause, Matt. Just myself. Would you begrudge me of that?’
Tony’s last words were coherent, resigned. He said he was sending Matt tapes for safekeeping, that he might leave the country for a while, that he was afraid. It was the last time Matt heard from him.
Later, on a short trip to Sydney, Matt learned about Patricia McIntyre’s suicide — so that was the family tragedy. By then the news was a year old. Matt tried to contact Tony, but he never found him. Around the Manila pubs, where Tony used to hang out with other expatriates, he asked about the Australian writer, for that was how Tony had introduced himself. But the only available information was a name in San Mateo Street. A British national said that Tony visited an ex-soldier there after he returned from the hills.
Chapter 67
Door shut at last. Panting, Minyong hangs the torn piece of corrugated iron on a nail above ‘the window’. Complete darkness. He drags himself on his stump back to the hammock, resting for a second. Then he tips it towards him and slowly lifts his dead other leg onto it with one hand. Still bearing down on the stump, he half raises himself until most of his hip slips onto the army canvas, now swinging. He is half on, half off, gasping in pain. He calms down only long after the hammock is still.
He closes his eyes. Peace, except for rats and cockroaches scuttling. They only come out in the dark to keep him company. If they disappear, he’d miss them for sure in this always damp hole, haven, home. In this neighbourhood where hardly anyone sees him come out, except when he needs to relieve himself. The old woman next door used to bring him food for some cash. Last year she died and his resources ran out. It is her daughter who brings him food these days, but only when she remembers. He can no longer pay.
There was a time when ample supplies knocked at his door, even begged to be let in. The first Australian was generous. Tony McIntyre brought canned meat and sardines, bread, rice and good whiskey, even chocolates. Minyong did not care much for the chocolates, but there were always cigarettes. He was thankful for the cigarettes and the cash. The Australian left some each time he visited, four times with his tape recorder and too many questions. 1987. The stump was still a fresh wound then.
Wanting to be grateful, Minyong told stories to placate his guest. But was it really gratitude? It was more like playing a game, so the Australian would return. Stories soothed both of them. It was the drone …
‘In river fireflies so fat, shine like gold. Fishes so fat, but people no eat. No moon so she bring fireflies … and long, long hair.’
Tony McIntyre endured what to him were tall tales, warm up exercises for the truth. After several tapes spooled out, he manoeuvred the stories towards his usual questions. ‘Off the record, just between the two of us. What really happened in Iraya?’ And the big words spilled out. Hamletting. Strafing. Torture. Salvage.
Minyong rubs the blisters on his stump. They itch and smart. Some days they fill with pus, like today. The pain makes him sweat. The newspaper that the Australian brought sticks to his wet back. The news will brand him. History has branded him, history gnaws at his stump. The doctor is back from America but he can’t drag him to the past, he’s peaceful now. Even if, today, where the leg was blown off aches as if the wound were fresh again.
‘I’m sorry about that … What’s its story?’ Minyong remembers the concern in McIntyre’s voice as he asked about the missing leg.
He responded with a story: ‘Once upon a time, farmer planting peanuts. Not doing special, jus’ planting peanuts. Three men come to farm, so he call wife, “Luding, you finish planting.” Three men say they from people army in the hills. Take farmer for questions. Farmer no come home. Two sons find him in tall grass. Throat cut. Sons see many-many ants. Eyes hurt like ants bite them. Second son very angry, join militia, fight NPA. Mother crying-crying everyday, so first son stay home, keep planting peanuts.’
‘That’s very sad, I’m sorry,’ Tony said. He had turned on the recorder again. ‘You tell stories in a roundabout way.’
Then listen so you do not waste your breath on kind, roundabout accusations, Minyong wanted to retort. Do you know that your government used to send aid to our national defence, so we could fight the insurgents in the hills? So we would know more about ants?
‘Where ants go, there stories … ’
‘What about your leg, Minyong?’
Again the tape spooled another time.
‘Planting peanuts no good job. Mother old no plant peanuts no more. If first son die in hills, mother get nothing. Hills very far to visit grave. But if die with government, mother get pension, mother get son back in box.’
‘And the stump?’ Tony turned off the tape to inspire the soldier, to make him less reticent about the actual combat.
‘First son his two legs good once upon a time. He no angry like brother. He jus’ want job, he jus’ get mother pension.’
‘And how did this young man — you — get to the river?’ Tony was growing impatient with this third-person narrative.
‘No go river … no go there.’
So the Australian’s second visit ended far from the water. Then he did not come for almost three months. When he returned for the last time, he was a changed man. He had lived with the river, he said. He came without his tape recorder and ample offerings. He came with underwater shadows. Minyong had never seen a white
man cry before except in the movies.
‘No cry for true. You no get true.’ He cannot remember now if these were his exact words to the Australian who begged him for the truth about the river. That last time, Tony was ready to believe even the tall tales.
‘They said the army caught the Kumander in the river …and there was this sergeant with red eyes … he took her they said. Surely you could find out for me … you were in that village, your platoon was stationed there at that time … please help me, tell me what you know … listen, I could take you out of here … you could start a new life, come home with me, Australia is a beautiful country … she was coming home with me.’
‘I home.’
A rat scurries across his crotch and darts towards the stump where the blisters are. Minyong pounces, he misses. They’re too quick for him now.
Chapter 68
Matt Baker is a man unlikely to pursue a cause but he was snagged by history, and history is bound to a multitude of causes.
In 1988 he received a letter from Hawai’i, inquiring about Tony McIntyre and telling stories. Tall tales, he told himself. Perhaps they were meant to shake his comfortable cynicism about a country that he was always trying to keep at arm’s length, always wanting not to love, but failing in the end.
He thought it was a crank letter; there was no name or return address. It came with a manuscript about Tony’s disappearance and a woman with twelve-metre hair, and a cursed river that flows from the hills. The tall tales stayed in his dreams, and he wondered about Iraya, where is it? But given the government’s declaration of Total War all over the countryside the year before, it could have been any village that Tony visited in his forays into the revolution. Matt convinced himself that here was Tony mythologising his brief excursion in the hills, and having him on. His friend was alive.
He reaches the corner of San Mateo and Dapitan Street. The street lamps are lit. He buys a Coke from a store playing Sinatra’s ‘Jingle Bells’. And it’s only September. The jeepneys belch generously and the need for a shower is even more urgent. Sweat and diesel, sweat and diesel. Even the only tree across the road can do with a good soak. In its dark coat it rises from the pavement like a new species.
Taxis are all taken at this hour. The girl in the store commiserates with the wilting white man and offers him a stool. He sips his Coke and waits.
A short block away, at a hotdog stand, two men are also having a Coke. They are a pair of quaint mannerisms. One is given to winking, the other to shaking his head. They are watching the Australian who is oblivious to the scrutiny. He is rapt in history.
Finally he received a name from Hawai’i and he thought it was an even bigger joke: Estrella Capili, the ‘Fish-Hair Woman’, in search of Tony. Then came her series of poetic letters, desperately making a case about Tony’s disappearance. He was snagged for good, so he began to investigate. What if Tony was indeed a casualty of the government’s purge in the countryside? He researched the Total War, and found out about Iraya and the old Spanish family of the Estraderos, and their heir, now an Alvarado, who was one of the most corrupt governors of the country in the seventies. Finally he learned about Iraya’s famous amazona who was linked to the Australian writer. So, this is the connection. But new doubts sneaked in, and more questions. If Kumander Pilar was Tony’s lover, why this Estrella Capili? Ah, they’re sisters, well sort-of … so? But Estrella in Hawai’i in 1987? When her sister and Tony disappeared?
Please, where is he? She asked the same question again and again, in passionate outbursts, and he succumbed to them; he played into her story and they corresponded. He tried to ask her questions, which she ignored. Her letters were meant to inquire or to raise alarm, not to respond. Then suddenly she stopped writing. By then he was inextricably caught in the search for the disappeared man. Snagged by that ever-growing hair, like all of them. He resumed his own inquiries among the Australian expatriates and their Filipino friends who listened, commiserated. Their verdict: a disappearance in the 1987 Total War, in that village could only be a salvaging. So he visited San Mateo Street.
How do you convince anyone about a murder from a manuscript?
Matt’s ‘investigation’ of Tony McIntyre’s disappearance embarrassed his superiors at the embassy. He was asking too many questions, making fantastical allegations about a river that a local fact-finding team was investigating. The embassy started getting calls from certain Philippine officials. Mr Matthew Baker, ‘a neophyte human rights activist’ was becoming a ‘diplomatic pain in the ass’. So they sent him home. These days, sometimes Matt feels a little guilty niggle. Perhaps it was not Tony, nor the gravity of any human rights issue that inspired his cause to search for the missing Australian. He had been shamed by a system that painted him as a fool; the system must be embarrassed in turn. We all have our own causes after all.
Chapter 69
Dapitan Street can hardly breathe, each car kissing the tail of the one before it, all barely moving. Matt can wring his shirt and hear it drip. He thanks the girl for the stool then walks away from ‘Frosty the Snowman’ to the next intersection, where he hopes to try his luck for a ride. He thinks again of his new acquaintance, Luke McIntyre. New, because strangely, or perhaps not, the father never spoke of the son. Tony was overcome by more urgent affiliations in a country where ‘the heat erased the past, fizzled it in the air,’ as he once said. Thirteen years and barely a word from his father … poor Luke. A slight, surly boy poring over a manuscript that he knew too well. Jaw perpetually tight, mistakenly combative. Matt sighs, convincing himself that his reticence on the plane was necessary. He was in no position to ease the other’s affliction. Not yet. But he will keep his promise to Luke’s aunt who was worried sick about him taking that flight. ‘Please, watch out for him. It’s not exactly a safe country, is it, Matt?’
In Sydney her call came from out of the blue. Would he join them for dinner at Surrey Street, yes, the same place and the old gang would be there, remember them? ‘We’d love to catch up. Josh and I haven’t seen you for years since you took up your Philippines posting. And by the way, we’ve heard from Tony, and guess what, he’s in the Philippines.’
They were at university together, along with her husband, but Matt was not exactly of the old gang and Tony was three years younger than all of them. He and Matt got acquainted only in the Philippines, then the eventual discovery of past associations, tenuous but overcapitalised by Tony. He was a lonely man.
In Surrey Street, dinner turned out to be a bizarre investigative forum. Tell us about Tony and the revolution, about him who went truly troppo. Then the literary letters, especially ‘the longest love letter in the world’, were tabled for debate. So they were sent the manuscript too. Josh was particularly mocking. Matt kept silent about his correspondence with Hawai’i.
There was much lefty talk, all committed theorising about militarism and dictatorships. They checked their ‘theories’ with him, competing for accuracy. Tony fighting a revolution, Tony falling in love with a guerrilla, Tony dying in the islands. Recently he wrote us saying he’s very ill, he wrote to his son. He did? Yes, a sad, urgent letter. No, a herald of good news, Josh smirked. The prodigal is found!
He is found. Relief and doubt and more than ever, the resolve that he should return to Manila. On board the same flight as the son. He promised Therese he’d look out for him, and made it clear that this trip was imperative. If indeed he’s dying, Luke must fly, what if this is the last time … Matt was playing his part too.
He scans each passing taxi hopefully. He tries to dismiss the niggling worry, which won’t go away. Again he replays the ‘friendly abduction’ at the airport, convincing himself that the boy is safe, because the doctor will use him to whitewash his history. We all need the boy. He’s the wild card that will topple the deck. Of course.
Every taxi is taken. He waits, he drips, he wilts on his feet.
Meanwhile the two ‘gesturing’ men have walked away from the hotdog stand, heading to San Mateo S
treet. There is purpose in their stride.
When Matt finally gets his taxi, he is soaked, hungry and feeding on worry. He is responsible for the boy. He refuses to engage the driver who is too eager to chat up his ‘foreigner’. Occasionally the driver sniffs the air in his cab. Matt is hardly aware of the dog shit under his shoe.
Chapter 70
Had Matt directed his taxi beyond the railway crossing in Dapitan, he would have passed the University of Santo Tomas, home to the man who is desperate to tell the truth about the river.
It is this river that keeps Brother Nestor Ibay in a quandary. He is thirty-four years old, on his Final Profession at the University’s Seminary. He should have been ordained into the Deaconate last year, but always the river pulls him back from full commitment to the holy vocation. Perhaps the river currents intend to lead him astray, so the true stories can be trawled to the banks and vindicated. Should he swim against the currents, should he follow them? For almost a year Brother Nestor had prayed for a sign. Finally his prayer was answered yesterday. Perhaps this is a season for God’s heavy hand contriving connections, arranging narratives as a master author would, if only to get him back to the truth of the water.
He was making coffee in the Arts and Letters faculty room. A student from his Ethics class was discussing a proposed paper. Its argument was not yet framed and he was having family problems. Could the good Brother extend the submission date, please? The boy waved his lone related literature under his lecturer’s nose. It was a newspaper feature suggesting that the 1987 river murders in Iraya might finally have their day in court. Coffee had never tasted so strange.
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