State of War

by Ninotchka Rosca

  “Awkward and slow,” Rafael said, “but will do. Come, come.” He was already untying the thongs from about his leg. “Will it fit in your waist pouch? No? Your arm, then. Up with the right sleeve.”

  He closed the knife and settled it against her arm, measuring. He stopped when the three men came in. Without a word, two picked up the icebox while the third signaled with his fingers to Rafael.

  “Got it,” Rafael said, and the three walked out of the room. “We have to wait. Check if the knife will snag.”

  Anna brought down her hand. She jerked her wrist against the thong. The knife, its blade nestled within its hilt, slid into her palm. She nodded.

  “Now, the proper blow,” Rafael said, bending his head slightly and tapping his nape. “Right here. You know it?”

  She nodded. “Manolo taught me.” She could still hear his voice: through the skin, straight to the medulla oblongata, severing the s.o.b.’s motor nerves. Quiet and efficient and wholly unexpected.

  “Good. We wait now.”

  She sat on a crate, crossing her legs.

  “Nervous?”

  She nodded.

  “I wouldn’t take you if the others were . . . You have papers?” Again, she nodded.

  “Good. We’re lovers—off to see the common festival. There are two on this island. One by day which you saw; one by night which the poor folks see.”

  “All right.” She wished he would stop talking. She wanted to probe the edges of what she was feeling.

  “Now,” he said, getting up.

  She was surprised. Nothing had indicated it was time. But she knew better than to question him.

  “We’re going this way,” he said, indicating a closed door. Then he pinched the light wick and it was dark.

  She followed his shadow. All the lights in the house seemed to have been doused. But Rafael did not hesitate. He found another door which opened to the smell of the sea.

  The jeep was parked a few yards away. There was no one about. She had to wait under a roadside tree while Rafael approached. She came running only when he had gunned the motor. As soon as she was in the passenger seat, he shifted gears and let the jeep move. But it was still some five hundred yards before he switched on the headlights.

  They hit a checkpoint an hour later. As he braked the jeep to a stop, Rafael inexplicably said: “You don’t see such stars in Manila.” She had to peer at the sky where stars blazed, winking in and out of the mist of the Milky Way.

  Two soldiers peeled themselves off the shadows along the road. They approached, careful to keep the jeep between them. Rafael leaned out. He said something in a low voice. Anna kept still, watching the man on her side of the road. He was cautious.

  “Good evening,” the soldier on Rafael’s side said.

  “At ease,” Rafael said. “I’m going to get my wallet so you can check my i.d. Okay? I’m on a reconnaissance mission.”

  “Yes, sir.” For some reason, the soldier’s voice had an undercurrent of laughter.

  Rafael felt at his back pocket. Anna froze as the soldier on her side leaned into the jeep. But Rafael was already straightening up, opening his wallet, extracting a card. He hesitated, felt in the wallet again, and came up with a fifty-peso bill. He wrapped it about the card.

  “Happy fiesta,” he said.

  The soldier grunted. He slipped the money off and studied the card. “CIS, sir?” he asked after a while.

  Rafael nodded. “I have some men waiting out there,” he said, “otherwise, I’d leave you some beer. But the—you know—should get you some, no?”

  The soldier smiled, gave back the card, stepped back, and saluted. The other soldier fell away.

  “Nice evening, sir. Have a good time.”

  Rafael guffawed obscenely. “Carry on, men!” He shifted gears and steered the jeep to the middle of the road. “Carry on!”

  After a while, he said: “You can breathe now.”

  Anna exhaled. “What are you doing with a Constabulary Intelligence Service card?”

  “Pretty good, no? I made it myself. Hell, how many soldiers have seen one, anyway?”

  “Why was he laughing?”

  “He thought I was taking you to a gang bang. Don’t get angry, now.”

  She was nonplussed. They drove on in silence. Suddenly, the tree shadows alongside the road disappeared and a clearing stretched out before them, dark wings spreading to the horizon, its slopes covered by tiny points of light. Anna thought they were driving through a portion of the night sky, but the next instant she saw the fallen stars were oil lamps. There were hundreds of men and women in the clearing—sitting on stools, lying on mats, standing near their water buffalo carts. Their faces were turned to the sky.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Rafael had stopped the jeep and was eyeing the roadside. “Do we dare?” he muttered. “Better not. Might get stuck. Don’t know the land here.” He turned to Anna. “The poor folks’ festival. Down there are the island’s peasants—coconut workers, actually, but peasants still. This is their festival. They call it the Procession. They believe angels parade up there”—he peered at the sky through the windshield— “with their own candles and torches.”

  She was amazed. “Does it happen?”

  He shrugged. “They don’t talk about it. They come here and wait for lights to cross the sky. From horizon to horizon. That’s what I was told.” He shifted in his seat, restless, uneasy.

  Up ahead, more carts were coming, drawn by water buffalos whose horn tips glinted in the starlight. Each cart had a little lamp on the seat beside the driver and its light swayed with the rhythm of the water buffalos’ lumbering gait. One by one, the carts turned off the road into the clearing, to the left or right of the dust road. But a steadfast one came down, almost to the jeep.

  “That’s it,” Rafael said when the cart stopped a few meters away.

  Rafael was already climbing out of the jeep. Anna followed, keeping her eyes on the cart. There were two men and a woman with a baby in the cart.

  “We’re too exposed,” she muttered to Rafael.

  “Sssh,” he said. “Wait.”

  A boy suddenly sat up in the cart, gave a shout, and crying “Uncle! Uncle!” jumped to the road and came running. He threw his arms about Rafael.

  The two men came forward, clapped Rafael on the back, and loudly asked how the Festival had been and where’s the beer and what took him so long . . . Slowly, they edged toward the jeep and were soon reaching in for the iceboxes. Anna remained by the roadside and saw three meteors fall.

  Then the silence was shattered by the distant cough of a motor. Rafael glared at the direction of the noise. A motorized pedicab appeared. It stopped, a Caucasian climbed out. Shouting “all right, thass all right,” he paid the driver. The pedicab arced across the road and turned back. In a few seconds, it was gone while the Caucasian swerved for the jeep.

  “A tourist,” Rafael said quietly. “Better move fast.”

  The two men hauled out the first icebox. But before they could carry it to the cart, the tourist was upon them. “Beer, beer, I buy, I pay . . . Lurching, he brought out a wad of money. The two men glanced at Rafael. Anna stepped forward, grabbed the man’s hand, and tried to pull him away.

  “Dance, Joe,” she said, “dance?”

  When the Caucasian scooped her up, she saw Rafael signal to the two men who promptly lowered the icebox to the road. Then the Caucasian was pawing her shirt front. She let herself go limp, her right arm falling as though in consent. The knife slid out; she heard the double click of the hilt’s opening and closing. Now, her attention shifted. She could feel his heart thumping and, bringing up her left hand, she placed it gently on his chest, pushing him back a little to give her the leverage she needed. The blade, she thought, should slip between her thumb and forefinger which marked the man’s heartbeat.

  He let go suddenly, springing for the icebox. The two men did not move. They waited until he had pried open the top, felt the beer, felt
something else, and with a “hey!” was about to leap to his feet when the shorter man pivoted and, bending without effort, shoved the knife blade into his nape. Six inches, Anna thought, of recast ball bearings, right through his medulla oblongata. Requisat in pace. The Caucasian slumped to his knees, fell back, and sat down on the road.

  “He’s drunk!” Laughing, the two caught his arms and pulled him to his feet. They draped the limp arms about their shoulders and dragged the tourist to the cart.

  “Don’t worry, Joe, we’ll take care of you. Sleep in our hut tonight, Joe. Don’t bother our brother. He’s got his girl with him. There, there, Joe. There, there.”

  “Unlucky, that one,” Rafael said. He had stepped closer to her. “I thought you would. Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t have the courage.” She sighed.

  “Stupid foreigner. Doesn’t half-know half of what’s going on.” He sighed. “We must look pretty silly to them. Small and quiet and smiling. Always smiling.”

  “Someone should tell them our teeth are simply on edge.”

  The two men returned. They shrugged, opened their arms helplessly, apologetically. Rafael made a dismissing gesture. The men picked up their pace and soon had the three iceboxes transferred.

  “Well, have a good time,” they said. “We’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for the beer. And don’t worry.” In a lower tone, one muttered: “May the Festival’s tribute be just.”

  “Amen,” Rafael said and embraced them one by one.

  At that moment, a sound rose from the clearing, a collective sigh. Rafael pointed to the sky. Four, five meteors streaked toward the horizon. Then two more. Three. Quick as the blink of an eye, a shower of fire was upon them. In the clearing, the peasants picked up their lamps and held them aloft, greeting a star, flashing blue and white, as it moved from its post at the apex of a tree. A red-orange star detached itself from a cluster. It followed the blue-and-white one. Now six more appeared, describing a slow parabola across the sky. From the clearing, the voices came, floating singly, in twos and threes, some faltering over half-remembered words but rushing on nevertheless, until all the men and women were singing and a river of melody flowed between sky and earth.

  8

  Adrian fled from Colonel Urbano Amor through a terrain that mirrored his own anxiety. Beneath his bare feet, the steaming ground of compacted ash burned colder than ice; his lungs labored with gulps of air that was not air but an exhalation of tar pits. The motile earth quivered and shifted, breeding mountains and rocks, while from the horizon jagged cracks crawled into his path, yawned into fissures filled with gray magma in which familiar objects—the debris of some existence—floated and stirred with heat currents: a blue bundle, an old boot, a cat’s head, a rosary of giant beads, toy boats of sardine cans, bottles of wine, trophies, medals, and bankbooks ... As he ran, his heart tremulous, Adrian tried to keep all he saw straight in his mind, numbered and itemized like an inventory list, for Colonel Urbano Amor was but a breath away, stepping in his footprints nearly as fast as he made them. Adrian’s throat was parched, the blood pounded in his temples, but the colonel walked cool and inviolate through the soot of that undiscovered country. He wore a white ship steward’s uniform and an upended chamber pot on his head, and bore a lance that was a four-foot syringe with a monstrous needle. From his open mouth, a transparent ribbon issued, undulating like a wave and breaking into foot-long sections that rode the thick air. One floated to Adrian’s feet. Stenciled on both sides, like etching on glass, was the word remember. When he saw that, such a grief possessed him he had to cower, his hands cupping his naked genitals, and weep. On a crag above him, a woman leaned her elbows on a low wall. She waved, gesturing for him to come up to safety, and her concern was so visible that Adrian’s tears mingled copiously with the sweat on his cheeks. By her hair, he knew her and tried not to look, for the colonel was marching down the trail, his eyes searching the mountain ramparts for enemies. From an eagle’s nest suspended from a mast that was no mast but the huge barrel of a rifle, a man in white lifted a hand and pointed to Anna’s den. Adrian shook his head no but it was done, the colonel was marching forward, his needle-lance down and aimed at the wall that protected Anna’s home.

  But it was no wall at all, merely books piled atop one another, volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which Adrian had ordered for her one summer day. He tried to explain, running about the colonel whose lower limbs had extended to become the body of a horse and who now, hooves pawing the earth, made ready to charge up, the mountain trail. Adrian scurried about him, saying wait, wait, try to understand. She had five dresses exact and wanted no more; two pairs of shoes, exact, and wanted no more; a handbag, exact—and all she could think of wishing for was the last half of the encyclopedia, from R to Z. She had never managed to read it, she said, and had always wondered what it contained, since her twelfth birthday when her uncle had given her the first volumes from A to Q, saying there, if you can’t be beautiful, try to be intelligent. All her cousins had guffawed at the remark but she hadn’t minded at all and had taken the books, setting them against one wall of her room above the house garage. She had read them one by one, whenever she had the time, often during dinner, the book propped up by bottles of vinegar and banana sauce. But she had not seen the last volumes of the set—not until that afternoon Adrian had them delivered, himself following shortly after to find her bemused, barefoot, and in blue jeans, in the middle of her living room, surrounded by the entire, complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ta-ran!!!

  She had risen to her toes and flung her arms about his neck and all he could do was mutter my goodness! The hours had seemed too quick, too short, between the end of office hours and the time he had to return home. Too swiftly did they fly though Anna and he never did anything except remain linked together, in bed, on the sofa, or, when the day was too warm, on a buri mat on the floor. They would sit face-to-face, arms about each other, the lunar sheen of her thighs about his hips until he began to feel that they were on a skiff, launched carelessly with the tide, to skirt shores of fire trees, yellow bell flowers, and woolly caterpillars munching on summer. Her face always had this detached, almost clinical expression, watching him try to absorb the unbearable blows of pleasure, and only his name escaping the quiver of her lips, Adrian, told him of how delicate ecstasy had seeped into the cracks of her soul. Her head on his shoulder convinced him, time and again, that this was the way his life was meant to be—to be set adrift thus, on a reed mat of a skiff, on a wayward current, to the songs of caterpillars.

  Being an honorable man, he wanted to make everything official, so to speak, and found a half-carat solitaire for her. On Saturday, their last before the Festival, he hid the ring in a bag of peanuts and met her in the park where they sat on a bench and watched the waves play with the sun. He waited in silence as she popped peanuts into her mouth. When she froze suddenly, her right hand still in the bag of peanuts, he knew she had found it and answered her accusing glance by beaming foolishly, innocently. She brought the ring out and studied it, turning it this way and that, making the diamond flash and sparkle. It was some seconds before Adrian realized that a low horrible sound was coming from her closed lips whose corners trembled up and down, up and down. She was laughing. A truly horrible sound. He realized then that he had never heard her laugh. A few seconds more and she was bent over, howling with laughter like one demented as Adrian, not knowing what to make of the spectacle, wrung his hands and looked around helplessly. She stopped eventually, her eyes and cheeks shiny with tears, and she brought the ring close to her nose and sniffed at it. It smelled, she said, like spring water. And as her face smoothed out, the last of her hilarity disappearing, she slipped the ring into his shirt pocket, stood up, and walked away.

  So, you tell me, Colonel—she was insulted, perhaps, because the stone was too small?

  Colonel Amor smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded. He was pleased, he said, that Adrian remembered so well. His smile widened, became a
slim crack through which a wet, purple orchid bodied forth, its petals trembling with the labor of its birth. The orchid bobbed before Adrian’s face and he saw it was held by the man in white, who had a gigantic stethoscope draped about his neck. Adrian’s heart, said the man, was doing fine; perhaps, it was time for another dose?

  At which a thunderclap filled the sky; a cliff cracked asunder and, to the sound of trumpets, Old Andy charged forward, his wheelchair spewing smoke like a dragon. You, he said, you! The man in white fled. The governor drifted down from the sky, feathered wings flapping at his shoulders, a pillow of cloud beneath his sandaled feet. Clasping his hands and rolling his eyes to heaven, he asked if Adrian, having remembered so well, would also forget.

  Old Andy was not put out in the least, not at all, he said as his wheelchair rocked back and forth, snorting flames and smoke. This was a revolution, he cried out. A sword materialized in his hand. In a terrible clang of metal, Old Andy met Colonel Amor’s thrust with the syringe. A pity, the old man said, that the real protagonists in this war never met, would never meet—the men behind desks, the men who signed papers, issued orders, summed up costs and profits. His attack repelled, Colonel Amor shrugged while the governor, wings flapping, hovered six inches off the ground.

  But Old Andy was rising from his chair, pushing his body up on thin arms and thin legs, and having made it to his feet, struck an operatic pose. This was the Revolution, he said again. His words echoed, re-echoed, nearly upending the governor. Adrian laughed. Old Andy was more than a match for anyone, he knew. You tell ’em, boy, the old man said, looking at Adrian fondly. I have told you often enough.

  Anxiety gripped Adrian again and, almost panting, he circled the colonel, words spewing out of his mouth. The colonel metamorphosed into a gigantic anthill with two eyes at its apex. Coldly, unimpressed, he stared at Adrian without blinking. But you must understand, Adrian cried out. He paced back and forth before the anthill, nearly stumbling on his own feet, so desperate was he that the colonel should understand.