1993 - The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  My tone took him aback and he looked startled. “Udo told me,” he said. “Annaliese used to write to him once a month until he died.” He paused, remembering. “The bishop annulled our marriage very promptly. Then Udo told me she had married an American called Fischer, a coir importer, from Los Angeles. When I got there it wasn’t hard to track him down. Or you.”

  “What about Hugh Paget?”

  “I know nothing about any Hugh Paget.”

  I felt the weight of my dissatisfactions descend on me, a sensation of living a personal history concocted of half truths and opportune fictions. Now other uncertainties and key ambiguities of Carriscant’s story rose up to nag at me, making me fretful and ill at ease. In many ways Carriscant had been as honest and as unsparing as anyone I could imagine. He seemed to have held nothing back, providing me with details and intimacies I would never have asked for myself. But in the end it was his story and he was free to emphasise and ignore what he wished, to select and choose, shape and redirect…

  I sipped my coffee, looking at him over the rim of the cup as his quick eyes scanned the busy room. He turned to meet my gaze and smiled it me, raising his cup in salute. He was in a good mood.

  “Thanks for everything, Kay, I think tomorrow we—”

  “Who killed Ward and Braun?”

  The question blurted from me, unplanned, spontaneous, as my mind sifted through the tale he’d told me. Carriscant didn’t flinch: he thought about it, tugged at an earlobe, and set his cup down in its saucer without a rattle. He shrugged.

  “Your guess is as good as mine…Who do you think? I told you everything I know.”

  “So you say. But that can’t be true. There must be things you forgot, or didn’t think were relevant.”

  “Of course.” To my vague surprise I seemed to sense a pleasure in him now, as he settled back in his chair, a kind of mischievous delight at the line my questioning was taking. “Look, I told you the story you asked me to tell—about me and Delphine—why we were making this trip. But who knows?” He paused, a tolerant smile on his lips. “You may find the answer to other questions. Everything’s there if you know where to find it.”

  This intrigued me. “What? You mean like clues?”

  “Yes and no. It applies to both of us. I’m sure that in telling you what happened there are connections I haven’t spotted. Got to be. Maybe we can force them out. Two heads are better than one, and all that.”

  This seemed to me to be an oblique challenge. I wished I had my notes with me, but, as I began to reflect, certain hints, certain omissions began to reveal themselves.

  “Think, Kay, think hard. What’ve I forgotten? Now you know the whole story and can look back, what seems significant?”

  I thought for a while before I came across something. A completely innocuous remark early on, the sort of casual parenthesis that at the time seems quite unremarkable.

  I looked at him closely. “You said at one stage that you had seen Sieverance before. Before you met him that day in the Ayuntamiento.”

  He frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “No I didn’t. I said I wondered if we had met before. He reminded me of someone.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s a long story. It happened a good while before I met Delphine. I don’t know if it has any bearing on all this.”

  “Why don’t I be the judge of that?”

  “All right.” He looked at me shrewdly, and then signalled to the waiter to renew our coffees. I ordered a glass of port for myself. When in Rome…

  “You remember when I visited my mother in San Teodoro…I hadn’t seen her for some time, not since my last visit, which had been, I think, in February 1902. I went to her because I was worried about what was happening in the southern provinces, in South Luzon. The war was still going on. After Balangiga the fighting—”

  “What’s Balangiga?”

  “It’s a place. Forty-eight American soldiers were massacred there, on the island of Samar, by insurrectos. General Smith issued an order that all Filipinos capable of carrying arms who did not surrender were to be shot.” Carriscant gave a tired smile. “General Smith worked on the assumption that any male over the age of ten was capable of carrying arms.” He spread his hands. “It all got out of control. People assumed once Aguinaldo had been captured the war was virtually over. Not at all. The early months of 1902 were a bad time, the worst in some ways. Not for us in Manila, of course, but in South Luzon—in Cavite, Batangas, Tabayas—there was a lot of fighting. There was a fine insurrecto general there, Esteban Elpidio—”

  “Pantaleon’s uncle.”

  “Yes. There was a punitive expedition sent out, led by a young general, Franklin Bell. People were concentrated in military zones, all food outside these zones was destroyed. Whenever an American soldier was killed a Filipino prisoner was chosen by lot and executed. When they finally caught Elpidio in April the war was effectively over, but in February there were still many problems…”

  So Carriscant told me about the trip he made south to visit his mother. He had gone in his carriage with supplies of food, driven by Constancio. The journey down to Los Banos on Laguna de Bay was quiet. When they turned inland to San Teodoro they entered one of the areas under military control where the curfew was enforced. They reached the village before nightfall and Carriscant was safely in his mother’s house by the time the curfew fell at 8.

  The next morning however none of the household servants arrived and his mother, alarmed, asked him to return to the village to investigate. She was particularly concerned because her major-domo, Flaviano, was infallible. And if he had been ill his son, Ortega, would have come to the house with the news.

  San Teodoro was completely deserted when Carriscant arrived there with Constancio. Cooking fires had been lit for breakfast and two or three market stalls had been set out beneath the old acacia tree in the square, but apart from hens and nosing pie dogs, there was no sign of the inhabitants.

  Then they found an old lady hiding behind the wooden church. She told them that the Americanos had come at first light and had herded together everyone in the village—men, women and children—and had taken them up the track towards the river, the road to Santa Rosa.

  Carriscant left Constancio with her and set off up the track. He knew that it crossed a small creek that flowed into the Laguna. He had been walking for ten minutes when he heard the first shot. Then two more. Then there was a pause of a few seconds before there was another shot. He left the track and circled through the undergrowth towards the direction of the noise. On the way he counted another five reports. Nine in all.

  He came to a break in the trees, at the edge of the clearing where the track crossed the wooden bridge over the small river. Here, huddled together, were thirteen men and young boys guarded by several dozen American soldiers, big men, bearded, in their stained blue shirts and their dented wide-brimmed hats. Some way off, on the bridge were three other American soldiers. Below the bridge the river widened into a dammed pool and around this were gathered the female members of the village, a few very old men, and the children below the age of ten. In the pool nine bodies floated at the lip of the dam.

  From his vantage point in the trees above the clearing Carriscant watched as one by one the men and boys were led out on to the bridge. The officer levelled his pistol at the prisoner’s head and called in a clear voice “Remember Balangiga!” and shot him. The body was then heaved over the parapet by the other two men and was carried gently down the stream to join the others bobbing at the edge of the dam, budged together by the sluggish current, like soft logs.

  The atmosphere was strangely calm. The sun shone in a milky, hazy sky and the calls of the birds were silenced by the noise of the guns. There was a faint moaning from the group gathered by the pool and some of the littlest children were crying. But the men and boys waited silently to be selected, their heads bowed, saying nothing. While the officer reloaded his pistol, the other two men took over. And always there was the same
cry, “Remember Balangiga!”, before the sound of the gun going off. This went on until all the men and boys had been shot, then the Americans shouldered their rifles and packs and marched off down the road to Santa Rosa. Both Flaviano and Ortega had been among the victims. Carriscant learned later that the column had been shot at the previous night while it was bivouacking about a mile from San Teodoro and two men had been killed and four wounded. The assault on the villagers was their act of reprisal. Twenty-two men and boys had been killed.

  Carriscant related all this to me in an even, unemotional voice. We sat there in silence after he had finished as I tried to take in the implications of all this.

  “Do you think,” I asked him, “that the officer was Sieverance?”

  “I don’t know. Certainly Sieverance reminded me of him. That officer was bearded, but fair like Sieverance. Something about his posture too. I couldn’t be sure. I asked Delphine if Sieverance had ever served in Batangas but she said she had no idea.” He shrugged. “There was a likeness, but I was quite far away, forty, fifty yards.”

  “Was it Sieverance’s unit? Do you know the name of the unit?”

  “No.”

  “Did you report it?”

  Carriscant screwed up his face. “You’ve got to understand that fifty-four thousand people died in Batangas in those months. Killed or died from disease, starvation, cholera. My mother wrote to protest to General Bell, but received no reply. Such incidents were commonplace.” He paused, then said carefully, “The only person I told was Pantaleon.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to tell someone.”

  “Some American officers were tried for atrocities.”

  “And General Smith was even cashiered. Unfortunately I had no names, no information. And the San Teodoro massacre was small beer. In Batangas one group of thirteen hundred prisoners was systematically killed over six days after digging their own graves. It was a nasty little war.” He sighed. “In some ways it’s as well that the world has forgotten it.”

  We looked at each other, his face gave nothing away: his features were set, his eyes tired, as if the telling of his story had exhausted him.

  “Any the wiser?” he asked.

  “No. But you haven’t answered my question. Who killed Ward and Braun?”

  “I thought it was obvious. It must have been Cruz.”

  “Cruz? Are you serious?”

  “The man was mad. He hated Americans. He was obsessed with his heart operation. Remember he had deliberately made an incision in that man’s heart in order to make some cardiac sutures. I think Cruz was going slowly mad, anyway. The war, the loss of the colony. Even my presence at the hospital meant his reputation was in decline also. So he became obsessed with making his name in some way. And in those days the heart was the organ that most frustrated us. That’s the only explanation for the mutilations. I remember once he told me he needed European hearts, I don’t know why, some mad prejudice, I suppose. I don’t think he killed the woman though. That was random. A Tondo stabbing that confused the picture.”

  I sighed, uncertain, troubled by this shocking story. One sunny morning in San Teodoro…

  Carriscant leaned forward, his chin on the knuckles of his clasped hands, staring at me.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Kay. You’re an attractive woman, but you don’t want to get any stouter. Shall we go?”

  I sit in my room bathed, ready for bed, and write the names of the dead down. Ward, Braun, the unnamed woman, Sieverance. Then I make another list.

  Pantaleon Quiroga

  Dr Isidro Cruz

  Jepson Sieverance

  I am not sure why I am doing this, or what I hope it will achieve, my brain is fugged and sluggish after all this new information, but I need to write things down as they occur to me, almost as an exercise, simply to set some process of deduction rolling, to see if the name on the page, in stark black and white, will tell me something. I consider the options.

  Pantaleon—Paton Bobby’s suspect. He knew about the massacre, he knew about Carriscant’s suspicion about Sieverance. Were Ward and Braun the other two soldiers on the bridge? Perhaps Pantaleon’s connection with General Elpidio provided him with that sort of information. But I found it hard to figure Pantaleon as an insurrecto fifth columnist.

  Carriscant’s suspect was Cruz. Seeking strong American hearts for his experiments. But why dump the bodies at key sites of the first day of the war? Or was that just coincidence? Almost everywhere around Manila had some significance considered in the light of February 1899. Cruz did seem somewhat deranged, but I found it hard to believe that he would go so far in his need to make a name for himself.

  But Bobby clearly suspected him as well, why else raid his laboratory?…

  Jepson Sieverance was my idea. A notion I had. Carriscant told me that an official commission—the Lodge Commission—investigating the post-Balangiga atrocities was sitting throughout 1902. Sieverance, an ambitious young officer, might just have thought it worth removing his two accomplices. Or perhaps Braun and Ward were blackmailing him in some way? Assuming of course that the man Carriscant saw had been Sieverance in the first place, and Carriscant had never been fully convinced of this…On the other hand, Sieverance certainly didn’t commit suicide. But then we knew who killed him. Or did we?

  I seem to be achieving nothing. I write down one more name:

  SALVADOR CARRISCANT

  Tomorrow we go to pay a visit to Senhora Lopes do Livio. Let us see what revelations the new day brings.

  SUNDAY, 7 MAY

  We breakfasted in the dining room on small hard rolls and honey, washed down with a reasonable pot of coffee. Carriscant didn’t seem at all nervous and ate three of the rolls with a gourmandising enthusiasm, asking the waiter to confirm if the honey were clover, or from bees feeding on some other species of flower.

  “I can taste it, can’t you? The clover,” he said to me.

  “A fragrance, a stratum below the surface. But if not clover then lavender, or broom perhaps.”

  The waiter was unable to help him and to me the honey tasted of honey. Besides I was not hungry: I left half my roll, drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette rather earlier in the day than normal. I asked Carriscant if we should telephone ahead or send a note to explain who we were but he preferred to go unannounced.

  “Suppose it’s not her,” he explained. “We don’t want to waste their time. We’ll just turn up, much the best way. Bound to be in on a Sunday.” I let him do as he wished. His mood was calm, almost buoyant, whereas I felt a curious sense of foreboding, as if I were about to visit a doctor or specialist, on the point of learning facts about which I would rather remain ignorant.

  At about midday we rendezvoused at the hotel entrance and hailed a taxi. The day was fresh and sunny, and above our heads the strip of sky between the buildings was a perfect washed-out blue. Joao hurried out from reception with an umbrella which he insisted on our taking. “There will be rain in the afternoon,” he said with adamantine certainty. “Better to be prepared.”

  We asked the taxi to drop us outside the gates to the botanical gardens and we walked the short distance to Senhora Lopes do Livio’s address. She lived on the second floor of a large apartment block with ornately wrought balconies. A high arched doorway led through to a narrow cobbled courtyard; to the left was the entrance foyer where a stooped old porter stood on a strip of red carpet leading to the elevator. The walls were lined with a small collection of pots containing dusty undernourished ferns struggling to grow in the perpetual gloom. We decided to walk up the stairs to the second floor Carriscant’s suggestion. I think he was beginning to feel the enormous pressures of this encounter for the first time and the chance of delaying matters even for a few seconds was suddenly very desirable.

  I reached to press the bell—set beneath a worn and polished brass plate reading ‘Lopes do Livio’—but Carriscant’s touch on my elbow made me hesitate.

  “How do I look?” he sai
d. “Very good,” I said. “Very handsome and distinguished.” He smiled broadly at me, his pleasure manifest, and my heart went out to him. I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He was most surprised and his hand went instantly to the spot where my lips had touched him, as if I’d daubed him with paint or pricked him with a pin.

  “Bless you, Kay,” he said, moved. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” I said. “Look it may not even be her. We may be tramping around the sweetshops of Europe for a while yet.”

  I rang the bell and after some moments we heard footsteps and the door was opened by a young man, about my age. He was tall with unruly curly hair forced severely into an immaculate middle parting, and full rather pouting lips. There was a guarded, suspicious quality about him; he seemed to hold his body angled back slightly, as if pre-emptively fearful of some act of aggression.

  He said a few words to us in Portuguese.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked.

  “Yes I do,” he said, with a slight accent. “Are you English?”

  “We’re American. We would like to see Senhora Lopes do Livio, if that were possible.”

  “I regret. My mother is not well. She does not receive visitors.”

  I could sense Carriscant stiffen beside me.

  “I’m a very old friend,” Carriscant said. “I’ve come all the way from the United States to meet her again.”

  The man frowned. “She said nothing of this to me.”

  “She didn’t know I was coming. It took me some time to find her.”

  “I am not knowing if my mother had some friends in America…” His suspicion was acute, suddenly we were importunate salesmen, hawkers who had not used the tradesmen’s entrance.

  “If you tell her that Dr Salvador Carriscant has come to see her I’m sure she’ll grant me a moment of her time.”

  The tone of confidence and marginal hostility in Carriscant’s voice was sufficient to have us admitted even though the young man’s reluctance was palpable. He showed us into a large pale green sitting room, dimly lit, the shutters drawn half to. The style of the furnishings was old and the swagged green velvet drapes at the three long windows were threadbare. But the proportions of the room were elegant and the furniture of good quality, well chosen. Dark over-varnished portraits of whiskered and waxed military types hung on the walls. I wondered if these were the Lopes do Livio forebears. We took our seat on a gilded bergere, sitting primly, our hands on our knees like candidates waiting for an interview.