I got the tickets, she says.
14. The dossier Magsalin receives
The sheets of paper Chiara Brasi had offered to Magsalin look like a script. Are there also drawings? Magsalin shakes out prints of Samar in 1901, ordered from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs (the receipts fall out, too, from the envelope): index-card size pictures against yellowed boards – of banana groves, dead bodies in grey trenches, GIs in dress fatigues gazing down as if in regret at a charred battleground.
Each of the pictures is oddly doubled. Each index card is a set of thick, twinned prints, each identical print pasted, side-by-side, on stiff panels. All are roughly postcard-size.
Magsalin is familiar with the doubled photos, and they strike her cold.
They are late nineteenth-century pairs of stereo cards.
You look closely at the odd, twin pictures as if presented with one of those optical illusions that should come with a caption, Find What’s Missing! But there is nothing missing to find: the two pictures on each stereo card are identical.
On the Smithsonian website, www.loc.gov, search ‘Philippine insurrection,’ and you come across them. Archived stereo pairs from the years 1899 to 1913, the bleak years of US imperial aggression before the surrender of the last Filipino forces to American occupation. You may as well just copy and paste the gist. Soldiers wading across a shallow river; advancing through open country, et cetera. A group of men with crates of food on the beach, et cetera. A burned section of Manila. The burned palace of Aguinaldo. Firefighting measures. Artillery. Ducks swimming. Children wading. Soldier burying a dead ‘insurgent.’ Soldier showing off the barrel of his Colt .45. Et cetera.
Et cetera. A history in ellipses, too repetitive to know. Not to mention the words in quotes and not. ‘Insurgents’ are in quotes. Insurrection is not. History is not fully annotated or adequately contemplated in online archives. This troubles translators, scholars, and passing memorabilia seekers looking for cheap thrills.
The puzzling duplication becomes mere trope. Photographic captions rebuke losers and winners alike. ‘Soldiers,’ for instance, refer only to white males. ‘Burned’ does not suggest who has done the burning. ‘Firefighting measures’ is a generous term, given the circumstances.
Magsalin looks with impatience at the familiar photos among Chiara Brasi’s papers falling from the Manila envelope.
The passivity of a photographic record might be relieved only by the viewer the photographs produce. And even then, not all types of viewers are ideal. Photographs of a captured country shot through the lens of the captor possess layers of ambiguity too confusing to grasp:
there is the eye of the victim, the captured,
who may in turn be belligerent, bystander, blameless, blamed – at the very least here, too, there are subtle shifts in pathetic balance;
there is the eye of the colonised viewing their captured history in the distance created by time;
there is the eye of the captor, the soldier, who has just wounded the captured;
there is the eye of the captor, in capital letters: the Coloniser who has captured history’s lens;
there is the eye of the citizens (belligerent, bystander, blameless, blamed) whose history has colonised the captured in the distance created by time;
and there is the eye of the actual photographer: the one who captured the captured and the captors in his camera’s lens – what the hell was he thinking?
15. The photographer at the heart of the script
The photographer at the heart of the script is a woman. The infamous photographer of the Philippine-American war abandoned a restrictive, Henry James-type Washington Square existence (similar to 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. Her name, whether classical allusion or personal cryptogram is still forthcoming – Chiara has not yet made up her mind.
Venus, or Verushka, or Virginia.
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 lounging on his battleship Olympia, docked in Amsterdam. Months before, the Olympia had fired salvos at Spain’s pathetic ships on Manila Bay, thus claiming the new century for America. Frances Benjamin Johnson’s photographs of arresting domesticity on a battleship are celebrated in Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan – 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 Brasi reading Joseph Schott’s book, The Ordeal of Samar, stumbling upon the idea of the photographer on the scene of the atrocities in the Philippines, in Samar. 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 vocal witness, Sergeant John Day; and of the water-cure innovator, Major Edwin Glenn (the rest of the Americans of Samar went untried). America is riveted to the scandal, as pictures of the dead in Samar are described in smuggled letters to the New York Herald and the Springfield Republican. Propriety bans the pictures’ publication, but damage is done.
The pictures have no captions, but Chiara makes an effort: Women cradling their naked children at their breasts. A woman’s thighs spread open on cogon grass. A dead child sprawled in the middle of a road. A naked body with blasted head, sprayed against a bamboo fence. The congressional hearings on the affairs of the Philippine islands, organised in January 1902 in the aftermath of the scandal, hold a moment of silence on seeing the photographs.
True, the photographer’s fame is split.
Senator Albert J Beveridge, Republican of Indiana, calls the photographer a traitor to her class. Senator George Frisbie Hoar, Republican of Massachusetts, 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 re-concentration 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 clauses of wishful thinking, his words were dudgeon enough:
‘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 can not eradicate.’
True that. Though the final point lasts only until 1944, when all will be forgotten.
It is easy for a reader to overlay this historical 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 the heroine’s: the baby among maids brought out for display at lunch parties on Fifth Avenue; the birthday girl whose abundance of presents includes her mother’s monsoon weeping; objects of her desire in silent parade – rosewood stereographs and magic lanterns and praxinoscopes and stereo pairs 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 Rushmore, waterfalls, black children, cockfights.
Her own aristocratic world can be seen as an easy stand-in, but in sepia wash. The movie’s white-petticoated protagonist clutches the old Brownie camera that still remains Chiara’s prized possession, given to her by her father Luca, her fourth birthday gift, in Manila.
The script, as Magsalin reads on, creates that vexing sense of vertigo in stories within stories within stories that begin too abruptly, in medias res.
The photographer’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 traveller’s arrival in wind-driven bancas, rowed by two opportunists, a pair of local teenagers who hand off Virginia Chase’s trunks to the porters with an exaggerated avidity that means she has overpaid them, gives the captain 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 the general’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?
13. The Thrilla in Manila
‘OK,’ says Magsalin, taking the envelope. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I know a few people who can help you.’
‘Thank you,’ Chiara says, in that shy, nasal voice that is so annoying. ‘How do you get out of here?’
‘Just follow the signs. There are detours for the exits. They’re renovating, you know.’
‘Are you leaving, too?’
Magsalin thinks she will take her up on it, on the forlorn implication in Chiara’s little-girl voice that she would like some company, that she is scared of Manila and her impulsive clueless spiritual adventure to follow the path of her lost and problematic father and get to Samar – a Freudian notion of travel only people as rich and thoughtless as Chiara suddenly get in their heads and then stupidly follow through; and yes, Magsalin will lead her to the exit and get her safely through the mall and then onto Roxas Boulevard (formerly Admiral Dewey) straight down the length of the ancient Bay to the Manila Hotel.
‘I want to take a spin around the mall,’ Magsalin says. ‘I’ll hang around here a bit. So I’ll see you tomorrow at your hotel.’
The waitress offers the cheque. Chiara pays with a credit card. The waitress shakes her head. Magsalin takes out her non-Hermès bag and pays with cash.
‘Thanks,’ Chiara says.
‘No problem.’
‘My father saw that fight, you know. Ringside. They used to watch all those shows in the States, in Las Vegas. Boxing. My mom preferred Elvis Presley.’
‘They saw Ali-Frazier in Manila in 1975?’
Magsalin is not sure about the protocol, about when and how she can leave the filmmaker. Is she, Magsalin, the guest or is it Chiara?
‘Yeah. The Thrilla in Manila. At the time we lived nearby in – let’s see. I have it here in my notebook. Magallanes Village.’
‘That’s in Makati, not here in Quezon City.’
‘Oh. The Internet was wrong.’
‘Figures.’
‘The Thrilla in Manila,’ Chiara repeats, and then she gets up, just like that, leaving Magsalin and the pan de sal shop without any warning. Bitch.
Chiara is in the dark hallway, and Magsalin has to follow behind. The filmmaker is blocking Magsalin’s exit and gazing, as if mentally noting its pros and cons as a film location, at the boarded up spaces beyond Philippine Airlines, the scaffolding that might be a promised escalator or a remnant of someone’s change of mind.
‘Muhammad Ali Mall. What an interesting tribute.’
‘Ali Mall,’ Magsalin corrects, wondering if Chiara will ever budge from the door. ‘That’s what people call it. It’s name is Ali Mall. Yeah, it’s dumb.’
‘Dumpy,’ Chiara turns to face her, smiling, but not moving, ‘but not dumb. I think it’s sweet. I like tributes. I’ve read all the books about that fight, you know. I guess because I see it through the lens of my childhood. After my father finished The Unintended, you know, after Manila my parents separated. It was not his choice. It was my mother who filed for divorce. I lived with my mom. We kept moving. All over the place. New York. The south of France. She could not stay in one place for too long. Memory suffocated her, she said. She had dizzy spells. I kept missing my father. I think she did, too. For a while, we lived in hotels. She hated remembering places. Hotels were her way of erasing memory, maybe. She has this thing – about embracing the present. One must embrace the present, Chiara – it is all we have! The last time my mother, my father, and I were all together was in Manila. The Thrilla in Manila. I’ve watched that match over and over again, you know. On DVD. Round 6. When Ali says to Frazier –’
‘They tol‘ me Joe Frazier was all washed up!’
‘And Frazier goes –’
‘They – told – you – wrong!’
‘Hah!’ Chiara claps her hands. ‘You do a mean Frazier.’
‘Thank you. Were you for Ali or Frazier?’ Magsalin asks.
‘I love Muhammad Ali.’
‘Do you think he is real?’
‘More real than I,’ says Chiara. ‘He’s The Greatest.’
Magsalin smiles.
Just for that, Magsalin thinks, she’ll do whatever this spoiled brat says.
‘I am sorry about your parents,’ Magsalin says.
‘De nada. It is my life. When I think of the world around me –,’ and Chiara’s gaze does not wander, does not look at the world around her, ‘how can I complain?’
‘Myself, I liked Frazier,’ says Magsalin.
‘Really? But why?’
‘Because he wasn’t really an ugly motherfucker. He was no gorilla. Except Ali, the director, made him up.’
23. At the hotel in Hong Kong, unknown to her daughter, Virginie
At the hotel in Hong Kong, unknown to her daughter, Virginie sees visions. She is looking for ice. Down the hotel corridor she follows the curls of the carpet’s tracks neatly along its moulting spirals – once, when she looks back, she is startled to see the snail-back humps of her former map disappearing at her glance. The carpet behind her has turned white, or fogged. It must be her dizziness (her vision is troubling, but she refuses to wear her glasses), a trick of her strained eyes. She shrugs the vanishing off. As she turns and weaves along the serpentine trail of the carpet’s dragon-tail design, tottering along the amphisbaena spines in her insomniac stilettos (a woman who came of age in the fifties, Virginie has never worn flats: she grew up believing sneakers are a crime), Virginie follows the spiral toward the sign that says ICE, in Mandarin and English. She sees the man in his glittering suit, a spiral of lace in his wake, a wavering tassel of white, the singer in his fabulous garb, the one she had once seen in Las Vegas, so long ago. Virginie experiences no shock because after all she is in the Orient, which has the curious effect of disorienting her. He is filling up a silver bucket. Behind him, she waits in line.
16. Chiara meets the translator in Paco
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 like a ball of hair in a bath drain, as miserably palpable as it was inert. She dropped out without regret to go on a drug trip occasionally punctuated by luxury tourism. The result wa
s her first movie, Stumbling into Slovenia, a study of melancholia 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. Temper tantrums 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, to be rude. The last hours of rest at the Manila Hotel have not erased her lightheaded feeling that this city wants her dead.
Punctuation is an ongoing online dilemma. Tacky exclamation marks provide rudiments of etiquette Chiara forgoes. She also scorns emoticons, stand-alone uses of colons with single parentheses, and illiterate shortcuts, such as u for you. She is an Internet prig in a world of online junkies. It is a black mark on her generation that the mindless adoption of the signifier lol, an insufficient proxy for the vagaries of the human voice, happened in her lifetime. She never uses it. Even with friends, she fails to sign off xoxoxo, as if her denial of trite, reciprocal affection were a mark of superiority.
She never considers the signs of courtesy she has omitted in her texts and is not bothered by the affection she fails to convey.
A Kind of Compass Page 7
