The Caprices

by Sabina Murray

“Do you work here during the week?”

  The waiter shook his head. He was a student at Santo Thomas. He had a scholarship. Salas participated wearily in this accidental conversation, wolfed down his siopao, nodded hastily as he got up from the table, pressing a tip into the student’s hand. He headed for the door, having momentarily forgotten the purpose of his visit.

  Then, across the street, Salas saw Dr. Santos again. He was leaning with both hands on the back of the bench in exactly the same attitude Salas had on the day he sighted Balmaceda. Salas jumped into the street, this time confused into pursuit. A jeepney screeched to a stop, then was quickly bumped another half foot by a bus that had been following close behind. Salas was knocked down, although uninjured. He saw the back of the doctor’s head disappearing down the street, just slightly above that of the average-height man, but as he was now lying on the sidewalk, there was nothing he could do.

  When Salas returned to his apartment, a soldier was standing in the hallway and his door was open. He paused at the top of the stairs. Fernando, who was at the end of the corridor watching, shrugged apologetically.

  “What are you doing?” Salas inquired of the soldier.

  The soldier raised his eyebrows, then hissed through the doorway to alert the others to Salas’s presence. A man in a nylon sport shirt and white slacks walked casually into the hallway. He was wearing dark, square sunglasses. His shirt was tight across his belly. His skin was dark, nut brown and shiny, even though he was not sweating. He smiled broadly.

  “Do you like the apartment?” Salas asked.

  “Who are you?” the man replied. He was holding a handful of mail that Salas had left on his desk unopened. It was open now. The man sorted through the envelopes. “Salas? Is that your name?”

  “Carlos Salas.”

  “And you are from . . .”

  “Baguio.”

  “Baguio?” Here the man laughed. “I do not think you are from Baguio.”

  “I know what you’re looking for.” Salas walked past him and into the apartment, which had been thoroughly searched. Every drawer was overturned. The crash of papers reached him from the other room. A soldier who could not have been more than sixteen years old was slashing the underside of an upholstered chair. “They are not here.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I will give them to you, but not now, not here.”

  “Where then? When?”

  “Somewhere public.”

  “Plaza Miranda,” the man said. “Saturday night. Nine-thirty.”

  “The Liberal Proclamation Rally?” asked Salas.

  “Why not?” said the man. “I have business there anyway.”

  The man did not whistle to his men and leave. He set a chair upright and sat, then offered Salas a spot on the couch—the cushions were all slashed—across from him.

  “How did you get the maps?” he asked.

  Salas studied the man. He wondered how much he knew and which version of his past would be believed. “When the Japanese occupied Baguio, it was natural that they would need house help. I spoke a little Japanese—my father, a carpenter, was Japanese, although I was brought up Filipino. Catholic, of course.” The man responded to this with a smile. “I was in charge of keeping General Yamashita’s office. When Baguio was being liberated, there was chaos—many distractions. I stole the maps.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. Another servant helped me. His name is Pio Balmaceda.” Salas glanced up at the man. “I think you know him?”

  “Yes. He is staying with us.” The man seemed satisfied. “I am sorry if we have inconvenienced you,” he said. When he reached the doorway, he turned to smile at Salas. “Your friend, Balmaceda, has already confessed to being Yoshimi Akihiro, a private in the Japanese army.”

  But Salas had the last laugh. This man did not know everything. Balmaceda, or rather Yoshimi, was not in the Japanese army, but the navy. Yoshimi was not a private, but a commander, second in rank to a rear admiral. Salas knew because this was his rank. They had served together, side by side, with many men at their disposal.

  • • •

  On Salas’s twenty-eighth birthday, August 30, 1942, his appendix burst. He was in Manila at the time recovering from duty performed in the Solomon Islands. He had been in pain for a number of days. He thought he was suffering from an acute case of indigestion brought on by eating too much native food, which favored garlic and chili. When the appendix burst, the pain was intense to the degree that Salas could not scream—only moan. He moaned loudly for close to an hour before he finally managed to alert someone to his bedside. The Filipino servant was very distressed to see a superior bathed in sweat, shaking uncontrollably. He resisted the desire to run, finally crouching beside the bed so that Salas could whisper his condition into his ear, as best he could describe it.

  “I am dying,” he said.

  Perhaps it was the servant’s fear that he might somehow be held accountable for Salas’s death that made him suggest the Filipino surgeon, who was a prisoner at Fort Santiago. Of course, Salas (whose real name was Kamichi Ayao) would have preferred a Japanese doctor, but in retrospect the fact that none were immediately available probably saved his life: he did not need a leg sawed off nor a bullet tweezed from his buttocks. Salas remembered opening his eyes to see the doctor at his side. The doctor was thin from imprisonment. He had large, kind eyes. He palpated Salas’s stomach as gently as possible with hands that did not shake. Then he gave Salas a shot, and as he slowly faded from view whispered in his ear, “It is only the appendix. I have done this at least a hundred times.”

  This reassurance is what was rooted in Salas’s mind. The doctor, Dr. Santos, was a prisoner. He had to do what was asked of him, without questioning. His life depended on Salas’s survival, but his words were said in kindness. Later, when Salas was recovering from the surgery, he found a scrap of paper concealed in the pocket of his shirt. The shirt had been laundered, but somehow the message—although badly faded—remained legible. It said, “My son is Arturo Santos in Fort Santiago.”

  The doctor must have put it there.

  How many messages were enclosed in this one? It is hard to say. Definitely “Please save my child,” or “You can return my favor,” or “I have hope when there was none.” At the time, feeling munificent, Salas actually had someone look Arturo Santos up. Yes, he was at Fort Santiago. He was eleven years old. And that’s all. What else could one learn about an eleven-year-old boy? That he was short? That he was thrilled by cars? That he used his sleeve in place of a handkerchief?

  Salas was sure that he could have done something to ensure Arturo Santos’s survival, but war makes one negligent of lives, particularly those that are not useful in any way. The scar healed. Salas could tell women he’d received it in battle. Why not? He had earned it at the hands of the enemy.

  Salas forgot about the doctor. He forgot about his son. Years passed. The battle was no longer offensive, and now the unthinkable—surrender—was being planned in detail. Yoshimi and he were in charge of supervising the burial of a cache of gold bullion, reportedly the spoils of Yamashita’s march down the Malay Peninsula. Salas remembered Yoshimi’s boots that morning. For the first time ever, there were smudges on the toes.

  Digging had started on the caverns months earlier. Only a handful of officers knew what they were for. MacArthur was already in Manila. Perhaps MacArthur had expected the Japanese to throw up their hands in exasperation and start packing. Their presence in his old neighborhood infuriated him, but Salas and the other men were under orders. MacArthur began shelling Manila; the corpses—nearly all Filipinos—filled the streets. Dogs, who had not been seen to roam the city in months, suddenly appeared well fed.

  Yoshimi (now Balmaceda) was coordinating with the engineer and—strangely enough—the language scholar, who had been instructed to translate the maps into an obscure Japanese dialect that had not been spoken for over a thousand years. The scholar was a tall, thin man with large watery eyes. His
hands were large as well, and hung loosely on his wrists, as if they were a marionette’s. Salas couldn’t remember what the dialect was called, too obscure even for an educated man to be familiar with, but it was the bane of Yoshimi’s existence. There was no word for “mine,” “bomb,” or even “wire.” The treasure was to be booby-trapped by a complicated series of incendiary devices and explosives. The happy treasure hunter armed with nothing but a shovel would not get far; with a bulldozer he’d be blown sky high along with the surrounding city block. One needed the maps to have any success at all. In the end, the scholar translated that which was translatable—sometimes resorting to homonyms, sometimes approximating meanings. For example, since there was no word for “prisoner,” he substituted the word “slave.”

  Salas was in charge of organizing the POWs into functioning work crews. Most of the men were sick, and in other circumstances probably would have been impossible to move. But the sound of shells exploding all over Manila gave these walking cadavers hope. “Dugout Doug” had actually returned, as promised, and they were not going to compromise their chances at freedom at such a close juncture. Americans, Australians, and Filipinos lined up side by side. The hollow look was gone. They shouldered their shovels in the war’s twilight, much as they’d borne arms at its start. Salas could feel the stifled excitement, the hope. He remembered an Australian soldier whose eyes actually twinkled in his gaunt face. His shirt had rotted to a comic effect: all that was left were the sleeves and the collar, held by a narrow strip of reinforced fabric that laced them together across his shoulders. As he passed Salas, entering the mouth of the hole, Salas heard his thought, “Last thing I’ll do for a Jap.” And it was.

  The first day’s digging went without a hitch. All the prisoners were shot at the end of the day, as Salas had previously decided. The following day, one of the bombs went off, killing a Japanese officer. The engineer was furious, but didn’t explain his anger to anyone. He left to make another bomb, and the Japanese officers waited and waited. Three days they waited in Fort Santiago. The smell of rotting corpses lay over the entire city in a thick smog. Everyone was sick. MacArthur’s bombs exploded with the thud thud thud of a beating heart. Salas got used to it. Finally, the engineer corrected the problem and presented Yoshimi with a lovely bomb, but when Salas sent the POWs back down into the ground, the gas from the rotting corpses of the men he’d killed the first day made them ill, and they could not dig. Yoshimi pulled him aside. This was Salas’s responsibility. The prisoners were sitting in rows at the mouth of the hole. They looked at Salas with pouchy, alien eyes as if they too were admonishing him for failing to complete the work. At the end of one of the rows, carefully wrapping another man’s foot in a rag, was Dr. Santos.

  Perhaps it was the fact that Salas hadn’t slept in over seventy-two hours, but the thought of facing that man bothered him deeply. He would rather have faced MacArthur. Salas was feeling unfamiliar pangs of guilt. He knew the war was lost, and now, no longer secure in the role of victorious naval commander, he had been considering his worth as a man. Salas watched unnoticed as the doctor wrapped the wound, which was badly infected—swollen a dark purple and wet with pus. The injured man, another Filipino, waved flies from his eyes in a passive way. He shook his head, which the doctor did not see. Salas took this to mean that he knew that tending his injury was hopeless, but still appreciated the doctor’s gesture. Then suddenly, without warning, the doctor looked up. Quickly, he averted his eyes, but Salas knew he had been recognized. From the pain in the doctor’s eyes, Salas also knew that his son had died.

  • • •

  Why had the doctor appeared to him? Salas pondered this thought. His years of living among Catholics had taught him something about notions of divine retribution. Maybe as long as Salas had lived the loneliest of lives, the most degraded of existences—someone living as someone else—the doctor had slept in death. But now, had Salas’s new hope awoken the doctor? Did he feel the need to remind Salas that despite his great wealth, he would never escape having allowed the death of an innocent child? This was unbelievable and stupid. Salas chastised himself for such thoughts, which came from living long years with sentimental and superstitious Filipinos. More likely, his tension had unhinged him, shaken up the ghost not from his burial place but from some dark corner of Salas’s mind. And in a way, hadn’t Salas even envied the doctor? Before, he had not admitted it, but the doctor’s deep love for his child was something that Salas had never known. Love in his life had always been superseded by duty and the need to survive.

  Salas had the taxi drop him a couple of blocks from Plaza Miranda. He held a briefcase in his left hand, which contained the key to the safe deposit box and a piece of paper with the box’s location. All had been carefully arranged. Salas heard a singing in his ears that he hadn’t heard since the old days when, on the deck of a beautiful ship, he’d marked the time between heartbeats hoping the torpedo would miss, that the plane would be plucked from the sky. Now he was merely crossing a street. Salas smiled. He had always thought that singing was his concern for his men. Now he realized it was concern for himself. He took a seat on the park bench indicated in his instructions and began to wait. The figure agreed upon was five million pesos, which was but a fraction of the worth of the maps. Salas had agreed because the gold had become useless to him.

  More and more he had been thinking of Señor Ocampo and his plantation on Negros. That was the life that Salas would now pursue. He would become a gentleman with land, serfs, and position. This briefcase that held the location of the maps was the last vestige of his Japanese identity. By ridding himself of it, he would be washed clean, truly born anew. He was older, but not old. Maybe he would even find a pleasant young woman to pass the time with. He pictured himself on a broad veranda with a clear view to the sea, the palm trees bowing gently in his direction. He sat at a table playing cards with this woman, who had her hair pulled up in a tidy bun. Maybe there would even be a child. Why not? A little round-faced boy with a perfect shelf of bangs falling right above his brow. Kamichi Ayao, once the naval commander, would now be Carlos Salas, the gentleman plantation owner.

  Plaza Miranda was a large, tidy field of trim grass, worn to mud in places, and rimmed with trees. A stage was set at the southern end. An arc of high-backed wooden chairs awaited the invited guests. A crowd had already begun to gather around the stage—students mostly, it seemed, earnest in bell-bottom pants. Salas found them amusing, then realized that at that age, he had been in charge of a thousand men. He sighted a man across the park standing by a tree in studied nonchalance. He was wearing a jacket, although it was very hot. One of the president’s thugs, thought Salas. He looked around, wondering which of the liberal hopefuls was scheduled for execution. No one was on the stage except for a youthful man in jeans, who gave the microphone a few silent taps, then shrugged his shoulders to an invisible technician. Salas was halfheartedly searching for the technician when Balmaceda appeared almost magically by his side.

  The years had not been kind to Balmaceda. He had never been handsome and now—at this proximity—Salas saw that he was yellowed and sick. Balmaceda gave Salas an almost imperceptible nod and the two men shook hands. Balmaceda sat down next to Salas. He rested a briefcase by the bench, which would be switched with Salas’s briefcase.

  “Would you like to check the contents of my briefcase?” Salas said.

  Balmaceda shook his head. He was fretting. Salas caught him looking at the man standing across the park. The man had his hand inside his jacket.

  “Ayao, leave,” Balmaceda whispered. “You definitely will not leave with the money, but if you’re quick, you might leave with your life.”

  Salas looked down at his shoes. “My name is Carlos Salas.”

  Balmaceda looked over at his countryman in disbelief. He nodded again, so slight a motion that only one who knew him could read it as an intended gesture. Balmaceda got up, taking Salas’s briefcase with him. He did not seem to want to leave. In his eye
s, Salas saw the years of loneliness and confusion that separated this meeting from their last. “You have found men to give you orders,” Salas ventured, half smiling. He actually meant it as a joke. Balmaceda took the insult silently, but presented his back to Salas. He left with small hurried steps.

  Salas inched off the bench, but he was too tired to get up. Then he caught sight of a yellow balloon floating just above the heads of the crowd. Someone had tied the balloon firmly to the wrist of a little boy, whose large black eyes were fixed on it. The balloon bounced spiritedly, tugging at the string, a prisoner of the boy’s slender wrist. At this moment, the balloon rivaled the moon and the stars and all the orbs spinning and spitting in the deep blue folds of night. It captivated him as he had not been captivated in a very long time. Then the little boy was staring at him; his free arm was raised to point at Salas and his small mouth was open in a gesture of wonder. Salas saw the father grab the boy by the shoulders and begin to drag him away.

  Salas wanted to protest, but he did not know why. He was feeling queer and the sound had drained from the landscape in a way that awed and terrified him. Something was wrong. Salas felt a throbbing pain in his abdomen, a pain he had not felt in years. Could this be his appendix? But his appendix was gone. This was merely the ghost of it. He patted his stomach and his hands came up covered in blood. The man in the jacket was standing a mere twenty feet away. Salas had been shot. Soon he would be dead and there was nothing he could do about it.

  The blood poured out of his side and onto the packed mud around the bench. I am dying, he thought to himself. I am dying my second death. He looked at the awed faces of the crowd and raised his bloodied hands to them. “My name is Carlos Salas,” he whispered. But bullets had begun sputtering by the stage and then there was the explosion of grenades. The president’s thugs had started a massacre. The protesters were scattering to the far edges of the plaza, running from the rain of bullets. They did not care about rubies or gold. They did not care about the man dying by the park bench. And all around were parents gathering their children in protective arms, finding places to keep them safe.