The Lord speaks in strange ways. This morning, He sent Brother Nestor another sign.
When the cook handed him the phone message at the refectory, he knew it was time to act. For hours he held the slip of paper while he prayed for guidance. He studied the name, the telephone number until they too became like a prayer in his head. He wondered how she had tracked him down after all these years. It is the river’s currents tracking all of them down, taking them home. No, it is the Lord restoring the river’s will, so it could take them home.
He has never met her, but long ago he heard endless whispers about her from the village and his usually taciturn comrades in the hills. Once even Kumander Pilar spoke of her. But only on that day when he found her mother with a basket of rotting guavas.
He was only fourteen, a wide-eyed rookie, the army’s lookout. He worshipped his Kumander. She cradled her AK-47 like a baby, she was a dead shot with a 45. Strange that this is how he chooses to remember her, along with her first words to him the day he joined her army: ‘Never speak of family in times of a revolution, lest your heart falters.’
His heart falters now. After vespers he will ring her sister back.
Three days later, Brother Nestor will not have lunch at the refectory. He will explain to Father Quintin that he was invited by the Catholic Women’s League for a fund-raising show. It’s a lie, of course. He cannot ring from the seminary, he needs to go out. He rushes back to his room, relinquishing his soutane for civilian clothes. In the mirror a clean-shaven man with grey hair detains him. How much will you tell her? Where do you begin?
Begin with an acolyte who carried the incense for Padre Biya during the Holy Week processions in Iraya. Begin with a boy who received gifts of fresh fish for the good Padre from the young Bolodoy Capas. Begin with peace and innocence.
Brother Nestor surveys his spare room: neat wardrobe, small but efficient study table and his computer, sink that has seen better days, narrow bed, a shelf of books and Christ crucified on the wall. Here is present and eternal peace, if you do not look over your shoulder. He sits on the bed, smoothing its creases. This is his vocation now, smoothing out creases, not creating them. But the creases are in his heart. It has faltered from one vocation to another since he was a boy: the church, the revolution, and the church again, and the quandary is not even over. To this day, especially when he grows passionate about the issue of moral responsibility in his Ethics class, his heart sidesteps the Divine, becomes secular. Takes up arms.
Once in a lecture he stepped out of line. ‘When we give food to the poor, they say we’re saints. When we ask why they’re poor, they say we’re communists. But we have to ask why they’re poor, so whether we like it or not, we’ll be branded as communists. We might as well become one,’ he argued. His chest felt constricted.
The next day he was summoned by Father Quintin who cautioned him against making ‘certain pronouncements’ in his class. ‘You see, Brother, we don’t espouse liberation theology … and young people are too impressionable.’ The soft-spoken prior was kind and wise in his old-fashioned way. ‘A worried student complained to me about your radical ideas. I’m worried too. The Order is too aware of your history and was loath to accept you into this vocation, if you remember, but I spoke for you when you were a young aspirant, ages ago … when will you take Him into your heart and never look back? … Uhmm … I know you are a good man, Brother. In this day and age, goodness is radical enough. Please don’t worry me again.’
His ‘history’ meant the year in the hills when he was smitten by the young Kumander and she never even knew. Later, during the intermittent years underground, he became a courier for the NPA. This secret fuels his quandary. Brother Nestor wants a heart that’s smooth, certain — now it falters again. Her sister’s phone number is in his pocket. He is rehearsing his lines, but they have little conviction. He can’t even believe them himself.
I knew your sister, the Kumander, and I knew your brother. But at different times, when my heart had no creases yet. But the heart is as vulnerable as the skin. Inside it has its own sun and rain, and it ages. We can only live with the creases. With our faith, with the Lord’s guidance.
To Brother Nestor, his lines sound like the opening of a sermon. But he will say them anyway, he will tell her. He moves towards the door, halts. He needs a sign from that other calling: the hills, the river … He opens his wardrobe, then the old suitcase with which he arrived in Manila. The frayed military fatigue pouch is still there. That he takes it out from hiding, that he airs it today does not surprise him. It is like airing his heart.
When the river calls, he always takes it out, but only to look at. He accepts he is a sentimentalist. He cannot bear to throw the pouch away. Here’s another world, another time, perhaps another heart. He never opens it, but he knows they are still there. Mao Tse-tung’s little red book and a letter from Kumander Pilar to her sister Estrella, in laboured handwriting as if by a child not yet intimate with her alphabet. He was the courier of this yellow paper folded into a tiny square — how many years ago? He chose not to deliver it, then it was too late. When the river calls, he justifies his action. Did she not say that family must never be spoken of in times of a revolution, lest your heart falters?
Chapter 71
‘She has written herself into our history from which she abdicated long ago. But of course you don’t know these things, Mr Baker,’ she says, laying the manuscript like a demarcation line between them. Two piles: Beloved. Iraya.
‘Call me Matt,’ he says to Profesor Inez Carillo who finally agreed to meet him. Last year he found out more about the river murders in 1987, then he found her husband’s human rights newsletter. Federico Carillo was pushing to re-open the case with a public inquiry, saying that the government’s fact-finding commission had been ‘bought into silence’.
Matt’s quest for the missing Australian was not meant to be rekindled by the new information, he convinced himself. But was there ever a flame in the first place? And it simply petered out? Maybe he had become too comfortable. He studied the lawyer’s case, he wove it with all the narratives that have walked in and out of his head all these years. Yes, there was and is a flame, and it burns in a circuit. Once burned, you become as vulnerable as those who burned before you.
He wrote to Federico Carillo, inquiring about his case, whilst keeping his own under wraps. No response. He wrote a second letter about Tony and the river, his on and off ten-year-old quest. Still no response. He sent him the manuscript, saying he was returning to Manila and could they meet. After a month the lawyer answered with a cryptic email saying ‘yes’, but without any details on where and how. He simply asked for Matt’s contact number, for when the right time comes, he said. But it never came. Carillo disappeared, allegedly salvaged in the river with his associate.
It is his wife who sips her mango juice before him now with incredible calm. She collects the two piles into one, flicks through it. ‘Whose Beloved? Whose Iraya? Mr Baker, this is not even written for us,’ she says, pushing the manuscript towards him, voice flat, seemingly disinterested. For a while, silence. She looks out to the water as if there she could find her next words.
At Harbour View this late hour is for lovers. The restaurant is a long ramp stretching onto Manila Bay. Mock torches, complete with fake smoke, sprout from the water. Lighting is dimmed for romance, for shadowed assignations. Fairy lights grace the ceiling. The waiters come and go in fluoro tangerine.
Matt fidgets in his seat. In ambience and décor, this is not meant for conversations such as theirs.
‘Have you ever seen a salvaged body, Mr Baker? Its smell takes you to your own grave.’
‘I’m sorry about your husband, Professor … ’
‘She wrote this story about us from her safe paradise, addressed to a white man. The longest love letter in the world, hah! You must be so taken by this … for you to come all the way here.’
‘There were other stories before this, that’s why I’m here.’
‘So you believe this.’ She runs a hand over the face of the manuscript. Matt imagines her erasing the title Beloved. He thinks of her husband, of the body that she never saw. In the dim light he cannot place her age. A tall woman, extremely composed. She reminds him of his lover Nenita. Same bearing, the quiet dignity, but unlike Nenita this woman is flat in voice and manner, as if her passions were always reserved for another day.
‘So what do you want from me, Mr Baker? Let me guess, you want me to help find your missing friend. He’s a writer too, isn’t he? Came here to tell stories about us, then disappeared, or so you and this manuscript say. Are you sure he did disappear in our sense of the word? He could be back in your country, who knows, or travelling the world, documenting other wars.’
He feels like her student, a fool, like when he showed the manuscript to his boss at the embassy. He suspects it languished in his unread file.
‘Eroticising violence, making our grief literary — and of course, valourising the writer on the page,’ she murmurs to herself, lightly patting the pile of paper, then orders another mango juice. He orders coffee. She is looking through him, all the way to the end of the emptying restaurant. All seem to look out to the water at this hour. Conversations are tucked into purses, like settled bills. It is time to go.
‘You don’t like writers — ’ he starts again.
‘I don’t like those who take because they can, because they don’t have to answer for the taking, or for whatever they’ve taken. Because they’re able to leave the source. The foreign writers who come to dirty their fingers for a while can go afterwards and publish to the world — but you know what, Mr Baker? The worst are our own expatriate writers, those migratory birds. First they abandon us to fly to a greener pasture, then return as vultures to feed on our despair. Then they take off again. Take, then take off. Just like that. A simple equation.’
Matt leans forward to hear her better, to catch any bitter inflection. It’s as if her words are passed through a sieve that has strained all emotion, and all that comes through are mere sounds, meaningless in their indifference.
‘Those who write about our suffering with such erudition must be congratulated. They have dignified, no, ennobled our oppression. And having done so after writing their spectacular dissertation, they believe themselves bathed in the glow of the same nobility.’
Matt squirms. He feels as if he were accused of angling for ‘that nobility’. He almost apologises, but only manages to say, ‘I — I actually want to know about your husband, the river… ’
‘No, you don’t want to know about my husband or all the other Filipinos who disappeared in our war. It is not your war. You’re interested only in the white man, one missing Australian. But should I blame you? You must take care of your own.’
All defences collapse. This is a waste of time, but Matt cannot bring himself to leave. It’s as if he must suffer this assault against the manuscript. The credulous reader can only be as guilty as the manipulating writer.
‘Do you know who you’re reading? One of those who might have cavorted with our deposed president in Hawai’i. Oh, you look surprised. But she’s left paradise now. Your writer has come home.’
‘You know her?’
‘Why don’t you also arrange a meeting with the writer, Mr Baker?’
Shortly after she will arrange this meeting herself. A too sudden change of heart that even she would not understand. Then she will take him to the river, her heart quietly comprehending the change and explaining it to herself only years later. But tonight she returns the manuscript, resting on both hands as if she were weighing it.
Chapter 72
Dinners have their own coda. The diners go for that final drink, just so they don’t end up twiddling their thumbs while waiting for a concluding line that will get them on their feet. But Matt does not want to leave. He needs to lay his speculations on the table, to see what she thinks or perhaps to get some emotion out of her, not this polite accusation, for it’s an accusation, is it not? But she’s now gathering her purse. It’s too late to plead for his own case, and too meaningless. The widow is making him feel small, diminished.
She calls for the bill, insists that she pay. ‘Your author is only interested in saving a white man, Mr Baker. I’m sure you’re aware that we’ve had too much of the white man in our history — the colonisers, the liberators, the kingmakers, the anti-communist crusaders come to the brown country to reconfigure our lives, our stories. With all the best intentions, of course. Have you ever wondered why her manuscript uses ‘Estradero’ rather than ‘Alvarado’ for her father? It’s their Hispanic colonial legacy, and she’s proudly declaring it.’
‘But — ’ He can’t quite find words to argue for a woman whom he has met only on the page.
The professor looks him over, also with a flat gaze. ‘At least you’re no white American.’ Then she adds, ‘I suspect even your author, this self-appointed Fish-Hair Woman, has turned white.’
What colour fixation! He eschews diplomacy this time. ‘But Estrella Capili’s story is bigger than the white man, the white man is no hero here, the white man is only a prop to tell her story. And he’s stereotyped, even ridiculed, so shouldn’t I then complain as a white man? I mean — this is not his story!’ For once, he reverses the lecturing tone. ‘This, Professor, is the story of a whole village, about someone’s memory — ’
‘About our memories appropriated. Mr Baker, have you studied the history of colonisation? Empires take land, water, air, bodies. In this devastating dispossession, just maybe, a people might survive. But when you take their story, their memory — this is the irrevocable devastation.’
‘Aren’t you conflating your arguments, Professor?’ He can no longer be polite. ‘Aren’t you missing the point? This story, this’ — and he thumps his fist on the manuscript — isn’t it also Estrella Capili’s story? This is as much a part of her life as it is yours. As much her heartbreak as it is yours!’
She has closed her eyes, her breast heaving, he thinks she might cry, he reaches out but checks himself, all thumbs now. ‘I’m — I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to — ’ Now what has he done?
But when she looks at him again, she is surprisingly calm. ‘Vindication, Mr Baker. This is a story of vindication. Your Estrella Estradero Alvarado, if you believe who she is, wants to be vindicated. Because she turned against her own family.’ She stands up and looks out to sea. For a while she forgets that he’s even here. Beyond the fake smoke, she sees herself studying with her best friend at their C desk, reading theology and literature, listening to her tall tales about her sister hunting in the hills, then she’s at her friend’s bedside, that long, long hair askew. She’s throwing up, her head feeling like it will burst open, she says, then again she’s rambling about her sister, the NPA Kumander exposed, coming to the high school, and getting arrested and tortured. Inez runs out to get the nuns. When she comes back, her best friend is gone. She will return, a distant stranger given to extreme headaches and rantings, but will leave again, just as suddenly, for her brother’s funeral. She will return one last time to graduate from high school, then will be gone for good. Off to America with one of the most corrupt governors of the country.
When Inez looks at Matt again, her lips are tightly drawn. ‘Your heroine turned against her family, her country, her heart — her own heart. Even the longest hair cannot trawl that back to her chest!’
He is suddenly moved by her speech, her voice almost passionate now. ‘Remember this: she wasn’t even here during our Total War. She left us all in the seventies, then wrote herself clean in this manuscript. She has written herself in the place of her sister, and in the place of a myth — you know, Mr Baker, in 1987 Iraya did believe in a Fish-Hair Woman. Despair makes you believe in anything. It fuels fervour, it is its own religion.’
‘The manuscript is true then, in a way — ’
&n
bsp; Her laughter is bitter. ‘You want it to be true? I’m sorry, Mr Baker, I can be of no use to you. I have no patience for women whose main cause is their men. In this country, there are more pressing concerns.’
Inez walks quickly to her car without looking back. She drives to the furthest point of the sea wall. She parks to weep.
My Iraya, if I were to keep this river alive in my heart, I must chant not the creatures that had fins and wings to escape, but those who came home to drown: Bolodoy, Pilar, Raymundo, Nonna, Berto, Maria, Alex, Molong, Anita, Jemino, Ben, Johnny, Divina, Rex, Remy, Ramon, Jesus, Tony, Nanette, Tomas, Andres, Jose, Nick, Teresita, Romulo, Ruben, Max, Floro, Lorena, Emanuel …
‘Federico, my Federico … ’ she adds his name.
She remembers that day. They had gone to Rodriguez to visit relatives, but her husband was there for something more urgent. It was a Sunday, just after mass. It was pouring rain. The old Minica’s back window would not shut, but it didn’t matter. He’d pick up his associate Paz he said, then head for Iraya in time for lunch. Someone would meet them at the turnoff, then the six-hour trek to the hills. He kissed her and their eight-year-old son goodbye. The meeting could be dangerous, but he had covered all safety measures. Even so, he made his point clear as he always did. He was not one to mince words.
‘Son, if I die, will you cry?’
‘Of course, Papa.’
‘For how long?’
‘A lifetime, Papa.’
‘No, son, you should cry only for three days — after that life goes on.’
Chapter 73
The hut is in darkness. Minyong refuses to uncover the ‘window’. He refuses to speak. The men listen to each other’s breathing and the creaking of the hammock, and the rats. It is three-thirty in the morning of the 25th of September.
Half asleep on his feet, Matt returned to the hut after sitting alone for hours at Harbour View, wondering why the hell that woman turned up anyway. He felt spurned after the meeting, as if she had told him he lied or that his intentions were less than honourable. He returned to San Mateo Street to disprove her. He did not forget the cigarettes.
Fish-Hair Woman Page 22
