She would love to have helped organize the papers of his incomplete mystery, or checked out his obsessive annotations of Lady Murasaki (his bedside reading—a surprise, as the Japanese woman of the Heian period has a languid, dreamy expansion opposite to his terse, epigrammatic style); but to be honest, she does not even know the date he died.
First she consults a virtual encyclopedia. Not yet owning an iPad or even a MacBook Air, good for traveling, she sits before her uncles’ clumsy, troglodytic iMac, the one that looks like an alien in the midst of an affecting lobotomy, its sweet bald head kind of droopy. But Magsalin cannot find the exact place and time of Réal’s death. She surmises that no reader has minded that void, hence its disappearance online. The more likely reason, however, is that she misspells his name. Anyway, Magsalin has no patience with Google, not to mention Bing, in these moments of idling before getting back to work.
It is not writer’s block. She is in writer’s pause, engine humming, anticipating a turn in the plot, unknown but expected.
1. The story she wishes to tell
The story Magsalin wishes to tell is about loss. Any emblem will do: a dead French writer with an unfinished manuscript, an American obsessed with a Filipino war, a filmmaker’s possible murder, a wife’s sadness. Her work is not only about writers who have slipped from this realm, their ideas in melancholy arrest, though their notebooks are tidy; later one might see the analogy to real-life grief, or at least the pathos of inadequate homage, if one likes symbols. Of course the story will involve several layers of meaning. Chapter numbers will scramble, like letters in abandoned acrostics. Points of view will multiply. Allusions, ditto. There will be blood, a kidnapping, or a solution to a crime forgotten by history. That is, Magsalin hopes so.
28. The photographer at the heart of the script
The photographer at the heart of the script Magsalin has been asked to peruse is a woman. The infamous photographer of the Philippine-American War abandoned a restrictive, Henry James–type Washington Square existence (similar to the filmmaker Chiara’s own, except with more Chantilly lace) to become a bold witness of the turn of her century. She is a disturbing beauty with a touching look that her otherwise embarrassingly pampered life fails to obscure. The protagonist’s name, whether classical allusion, theatrical trope, or personal cryptogram, is still forthcoming—Calliope, or Camille, or Cassandra.
It is 1901.
She is not alone.
The great American commercial photographer Frances Benjamin Johnson has already scooped the men of her day with her photos of Admiral George Dewey, the victor of Manila sailing leisurely around the world in semiretirement. Admiral George Dewey is lounging on his battleship Olympia, docked in Amsterdam. In 1898, the Olympia had fired the salvos at Spain’s empty ships on Manila Bay. Frances Benjamin Johnson’s photographs of arresting domesticity on a battleship a year after are celebrated in Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan. The way she tames war for her nation is superb—Admiral George Dewey with his lazy dog, Bob, sailors dancing cheek to cheek on deck like foretold Jerome Robbins extras, pristine soldiers in dress whites on pristine white hammocks, and the admiral looking at photographs of himself with the Victorian photographer in white Chantilly lace by his side.
It is easy to imagine Chiara the filmmaker reading Joseph Schott’s book The Ordeal of Samar, stumbling upon the idea of the photographer on the scene of the atrocities in Balangiga. It is the photographer’s lens, after all, that astounds the courtroom in the four courts-martial that troubled America in 1902: the trial of General Jacob “Howling Wilderness” Smith; of his lieutenant, the daring marine, Augustus Littleton “Tony” Waller; of the passionate and voluble witness, Sergeant John Day; and of the water-cure innovator, Major Edwin Glenn. The rest of the men who slaughtered the citizens of Samar were untried.
America is riveted to the scandal, as pictures of the dead in the coconut fields of Samar are described in smuggled letters to the New York Herald and the Springfield Republican.
They are like bodies in mud dragged to death by a typhoon, landing far away from home.
Propriety bans the pictures’ publication, but damage is done.
The pictures have no captions: Women cradling their naked babies at their breasts. A woman’s thighs spread open on a blanket, her baby’s head thrust against her vagina. A dead child sprawled in the middle of a road. A beheaded, naked body splayed against a bamboo fence. The congressional hearings on the affairs of the Philippine islands, organized in January 1902 in the aftermath of the Samar scandal, hold a moment of silence.
True, the photographer’s fame is split.
Senator Albert J. Beveridge, Republican of Indiana, the globe-trotting imperialist, calls Cassandra a traitor to her class.
She should highlight the Americans who are victims of slaughter, not their enemies!
She is a vulgar creature not fit to be called citizen, much less woman!
Senator George Frisbie Hoar, Republican of Massachusetts and nemesis of William McKinley, calls her a hero of her time.
Senator Hoar famously accuses his own party’s president in the aftermath of the Samar trials: “You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”
Save for a few points of wishful thinking, his words are blunt.
“Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries cannot eradicate.”
True that. (At least until 1944, and all is forgotten.)
It is easy for a reader to overlay this calamity with others, in which the notion of arriving as liberators turns out a delusion, or a lie.
And it is easy for Chiara to overlay montages of her own childhood with that of her possible heroine: the baby among maids brought out for display at lunch parties on Park Avenue; the birthday girl whose abundance of presents includes her mother’s monsoon weeping. Objects of the heroine’s desire in silent parade: rosewood stereographs, magic lanterns, praxinoscopes, and stereopairs from the photographic company with the aptly doubled name Underwood & Underwood. Her souvenir snapshots from hotels around the world and an antique set of collectible prints captioned “nature scenes”: Mount Rush-more, waterfalls, black children, cockfights.
Her own aristocratic world can be seen as an easy stand-in, in sepia wash, for nineteenth-century Cassandras. The movie’s white-petticoated protagonist clutches the old Brownie camera that is Chiara’s prized possession.
The photographer will be one of those creatures beyond her time and yet so clearly of it, beloved of film and epic, with a commanding presence heightened more so by the backwaters in which she lives and oblivious of the trap in which she exists, that is, her womanhood.
The script, as Magsalin reads, creates that vexing sense of vertigo in stories within stories within stories that begin too abruptly, in the middle of things.
But Magsalin is a reader. She is the kind who takes five years to finish Marcel Proust, and by the time she is done her translation is out of fashion and the book has a different title; but the point is, she finishes. Every time she thinks of the book’s ending, Time Regained, the memory of the experience of reading it persists; it makes her happy. She is a dying and annoying breed, with a sense of obligation now somewhat obsolete.
She is confused by the manuscript, but she keeps track of her confusion, annotating each mixed-up scene a
s she goes, taking out from her bag an actual notebook, of course a Moleskine, and a fountain pen, bought from eBay. She includes in her notebook problems of continuity, the ones not explained by the hopscotching chapters; issues of anachronism, given the short life span of the subject (1940–1977); words repeated as if they had been spilled and reconstituted, splattered and jumbled up then placed on another page; an unexplained switch of characters’ names in one section; and, of course, the problem of lapsed time—in which twin (or is it quadruple?) simultaneous acts of writing are the illusions that sustain a story.
At times she hears rising up in her that quaver that readers have, her discomfort over matters she knows nothing about, as if the writer should be holding her hand as she is walked through the story.
But she rides the wave, she checks herself: a reader does not need to know everything.
How many times has she waded into someone’s history, say Gustave Flaubert’s Revolution of 1848 in what turns out to be a favorite book, Sentimental Education, and know absolutely nothing about the scenes, the background that drives them, and yet she dives in, to try to figure what it is he wishes to tell. It turns out her ignorance is part of her adventure. She calls those discomforting reader moments the quibbles—when she is stuck in the faulty notion that everything in a book must be grasped.
But still, against her quibbles, she scribbles her Q’s: her queries for the author to address later.
Cassandra Chase’s presence in Samar is a quandary for the military officers. The enterprise of the Americans on the islands is so precarious, perilous, and uncertain, that the burden of the traveler’s arrival in wind-driven bancas, rowed by two opportunists, a pair of local teenagers who hand off Cassandra’s trunks to the porters with an exaggerated avidity that means she has overpaid them, gives Captain Thomas Connell in Balangiga a premonition of the inadequacy of his new letters of command.
Who has jurisdiction in Samar if a mere slip of a woman in a billowing silk gown completely inappropriate to the weather and her situation flouts General Smith’s orders in Tacloban and manages the journey across the strait and down the river anyway on her own steam, with her diplopia and diplomatic seals intact, a spiral of lace in her wake, a wavering tassel of white, complete with trunks full of cameras, and Zeiss lenses, and glass plates for her demoniacal, duplicating photographic prints?
22. Magsalin does not get it
Magsalin shakes her head. Starting a movie with a voice-over by a society photographer who discovers her soul amid butchery will turn off local viewers. Antiimperialists are touchy people. And as a polite trigger warning, the device is risky.
In a movie about a Philippine war, why use a nineteenth-century Daisy Buchanan, some socialite photographer who, unlike the truthful shallowness of the Gatsby original, will turn out to have a bleeding heart? That idea is so 1970s, when politics mattered, and even the heiress Patty Hearst had a cause. Or that journalist in Reds, the Diane Keaton character who nurses the Yankee commie John Reed back to life in the Warren Beatty epic—sure, it is nice to have a woman’s voice in a time of war, but does she need to be so—white?
Whatever.
It is obvious that the upper-class WASP photographer, actually a mutated Ukrainian Jew, is a stand-in for the generic consumer being enticed to know the story.
And that soundtrack—Magsalin hates it.
It sticks in her head. We’re caught in a trap. I can’t walk out. Shove it up your nose. She has heard these songs, including the bovine marginal declensions—the wo-ow-wo-ow-wo-ows—all throughout her childhood.
A sad trick, this pop track.
That the soundtrack for the Philippine-American War is stuffed with bloated late Elvis, earworms of his crass decay, listened to over and over again in the benighted tropics—or at least, among her mother’s generation—disappoints her.
Elvis is from her uncles’ time.
Magsalin had never liked the songs, though it surprises her now how all the tunes she thought were absolutely Filipino, like “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” an annoying kundiman if she ever heard one, turn out to be Elvis. Except “My Way.” “My Way” is Frank. To sing “My Way,” you are not allowed to deviate from the Frankish phrasings, or you will die. But Elvis has this phenomenal stature among local drunks, and no matter how anyone mangles his desperate songs, they always bring tears to someone’s eyes.
Turns out the serenade songs, the kundiman that men used to sing to virgins in their gauzy camisas looking out from capiz-shell windows in thatched-roof trappings, nipa huts idealized as symbols of authenticity, of the genuine Filipino-ness of their lives, in the TV love dramas of the time—turns out all of the kundiman harana songs her uncles loved to sing were Elvis.
Or based on Elvis.
He was inescapable in her childhood, but at the time Magsalin had no clue. She grew up innocently with her uncles’ drinking bouts, in which the songs seemed to spring from the bamboo groves, and grown men sang pitch-perfect versions of creepy ballads while sopping up bahalina tuba, their homegrown wine. Even now, her uncles in Manila bring in fresh gallons of this wine from cargo ships that look as if they had known the days of Magellan, and in Manila they have translated their provincial guitar fests into insomnia-inducing, mechanical nights of karaoke.
It strikes Magsalin that the congenital link between drunkenness and song in her uncles might be an ancient tumor, a fever of the islands beyond anyone’s control, so that Elvis and Frank are daemons, or maybe cancers—forms of visceral necrosis, a genetic malady, and not necrotizing corporations. It was a shock when she arrived in America, and she recognized that the culture she had thought was hers to sneer at was, all along, not really. It was claimed by others. Worse, her own culture, of the fermented coconuts and the demented singers, was not visible at first in New York—except maybe in the vagabond diesel from hot dog trucks that gave off the whiff of jeepney smog: but even that missed the necessary attachment of the smell of fish balls.
“Sweet Caroline” was the Boston Red Sox song, not her uncle Tio Exequiel’s signature anthem. No one, not even Tio Exequiel’s oldest brother, Tio Nemesio, clearly a better tenor, was allowed to sing it. But to her confusion it was also owned by this humongous sports arena of phenomenal passion. In America, she kept confronting these doubles, repetitions of details from her homeland that have reverse or disjoint significance in this simultaneous place, as if parallel universes of Elvises and Neil Diamonds were a dark matter of the cosmos that eludes theorists of the world’s design.
That she has Elvis Presley in her bones, a secret metastasizing thing, just as she has nipa huts and the crazy graphics of jeepney designs, occurred to her as a blow. And once, on a visit to Nashville, when all she heard in this museum she stumbled into—which contained only Elvis’s cars—was Elvis, all day, all the time—the idea struck her—oh gee, what if—
What if Manila is necrotized in America, too—scar tissue so deeply hidden and traumatizing no one needs to know about it. One is in the other and the other is in one, she thought, feeling ill in Nashville. Her self overdubbed, multiplied, intercut, and hyperlinked, but which is to be master, she wondered, feeling dizzy, about to fall (she also had too much bourbon). These realizations of différance comprised her surrender to her new world of signs. She does not mourn her dumb recognitions, though she curses the fact that it is her lot to note them.
In short, Magsalin became interested in alternity, to the misfortune of her friends in Queens, who hate to listen to her pontification at their historic ethnic dinners in which, with exaggerated gestures as they pick up mounds of rice, they like to eat in peace with their hands.
The alter-native.
Magsalin apologizes for the pun but has no willpower: she does not resist it.
Anyhow, she proclaims to her peers at one of their utensil-deficient dinners—it is a thought that strikes her as she strokes a mangled piece of pork with her manicured pinky—“Everybody is messed up and occupied by others! Even if you are not Filipino! We
are all creatures of translation, parallel chapters repeating in a universal void!”
Dead silence amid pig’s blood and the dregs of cow marrow.
Then they all go on clumsily scraping up dinuguan and bulalo, for after all none of them is any good at being indigenous out in Flushing—they order all of the wrong things for their homesick performance, this renegade act of eating without spoons.
Unquote.
18. Chiara meets the translator in Punta
Chiara in the taxi reads the email attachment from the translator.
She barely registers Magsalin’s pleasantries, how nice it was to meet!, etc. She reads online in the cursory way she was never taught at school—in school she had to annotate, then look up words in the OED, then give a synopsis of her incomprehension. School drove her nuts. Slow reading is an art, her teachers kept saying, but their faith was no insurance against her indifference. School gave her migraines: she kept being told to expand on her thoughts when she had none that merited expanding. Her brain seemed more like a ball of hair in a bath drain, as miserably dense as it was inert. She dropped out without regret to go on a drug trip occasionally punctuated by luxury tourism. The result was her first movie, Slouching toward Slovenia, a study of tedium and apathy that became an indie sensation, though in truth all she wanted was to portray a certain patch of light on a beach in Ancona, against the Adriatic.
She scrolls through the attachment, barely reading the words but taking in without question the insult she is meant to feel—the normal way one reads on the Internet. Libel suits are a hazard of fast reading. She begins typing furiously on her iPad as the taxi careens. After all, Chiara has a right to be angry. After all, Chiara is already a crime statistic in Manila’s traffic bulletins. And the last few hours of rest have not erased her feeling that the city of Manila wants her dead.
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