State of War

by Ninotchka Rosca

  Mayang would love the garden—the most beautiful this side of the estero, all red roses and white St. Joseph’s Canes, and gardenias and orchid sprays hanging from the branches of the tamarind tree which had managed to survive the chaos of the distillery. By the time the garden reached its full magnificence, it would be nearly five years, Carlos Lucas had been felled by a stroke, all the mortgage payments were in arrears, and Luis Carlos, sitting on the stone bench under the tamarind, wore the Capuchin school’s uniform of white shirt and blue pants and blue necktie as he breathed gently into a recorder flute, the first of many wind instruments he would learn to play, and coaxed fishing tunes from its slenderness. Mayang, hearing the fragile music, would lean her elbows on the upstairs windowsill and look at her son, so small, so innocent. It would seem then that she had planted and cared for the garden for just this moment, when the sunlight grew to such robust gold and the canal boats passed in their stillness in the distance and the music wove itself as a silver brightness in the air. She would allow herself to think of her one great love, of the man of the brittle dance, who she knew lived in one of the thousand islands of the South, breeding grapes in the hope of wine, and answering to another name. The last piece of information had cost her the proceeds of the warehouse’s sale but it was worth it—this being able to whisper his new name at this instant, her lips and tongue shaping the syllables: Chris. Chris Hansen. The boy piped on.

  7

  The leaf-slim boats disappeared. Though the Binondo residents ransacked their memories, no one could say exactly when—last Tuesday perhaps or Friday of the previous week—they stopped coming. Suddenly, they were no longer there, probably hadn’t been for some time but because they were so much a part of the landscape, no one had remarked on their absence. Carlos Lucas, on his way to the tavern at six on a Sunday afternoon, was the first to be struck by the canal’s stillness—no eddies, no waves, only the momentary mud spurts of burrowing crabs and catfish at the bottom of the water aflame with the remnant orange light of the sun. His eyes pushed north to where the canal vanished in a bend and then south to where it stretched toward the sea. Nothing, nothing there. He couldn’t remember when he had last seen a skiff; yesterday, the day before, and all the days of his immediate past, the canal appeared to have been thus—still and empty, the leaf-slim boats gone.

  When he mentioned it at the tavern, as he was sitting down, his left hand cupping the top of his hat, it became a fact. Where could they have gone, what had happened, was the last boat sighted on a Monday or a Thursday, did they all sail to the heavens? The tavern habitues whispered about the omen, between gulps of rum and beer, and while chewing on slivers of dried beef, trying to recall when the last boat sailed by. One man recalled purchasing a blouse from the wandering vendors but when—Monday or Saturday—escaped him completely. Another had been at theestcro on a Sunday to watch the children swim between and among the boats—but which Sunday, heaven help him, he couldn’t say. There were enough canal recollections to weigh everyone with a massive headache, which fortunately could be cured by downing a glass of beer in honor of each lost dear and familiar boat. Carlos Lucas wept over a blue-painted skiff with the nameEstela on its bow; he had haggled with its master—a stocky, bare-chested, white-haired man—over a basket of unhusked oysters and a dozen blue crabs. A month ago, perhaps, or six weeks, he couldn’t tell. Suddenly, the canal was still.

  Because this was true sadness indeed, it had to be acknowledged with music. A girl started it, singing about the vanished boats, one of which—a blue-and-gold-painted skiff—set sail for a land of starlight, carrying the woman who tucked her skirts between her knees and said—here, the entire company joined in the refrain—no, no, she’d rather not, thank you but no . . . Carlos Lucas smashed a hand on the table, sending glasses jumping, and rudely ended the song. Because the worm of foreboding was writhing in his heart, he seized the battered hat ofT his knee, jammed it on his head, and having tossed a fistful of paper money on the table, rose to leave. He stopped for a second at the tavern door and turned choleric eyes on his friends. That was how they would remember him until they, too, lost their faculty for remembrance: as a stooped, graying old man, shoulders pulled down by his paunch, his hat low on his brow, his bloodshot eyes gripping the room in accusation. “Son-of-a-goat,” he said. “How can things happen without our knowing? Ignorant louts that we are.”In the silence, he peeled himself away from the light and the music and entered the dark.

  By the time he reached theestero, the last cloud had passed on to the sea and a double moon—one above, the other its reflection—transformed the canal water into silver milk. Momentary thoughts of mermaids and nymphs, of the Pasig River muse who cast her silk net each midnight to harvest star droppings came to Carlos Lucas and he felt himself held by an unbearable longing. But the next instant, he had to blink his eyes, for it seemed to him that the water in the canal was less than before, that its surface was a good foot beneath its usual level and that the scuttling of crabs and catfish at its bottom was panicked. As he watched, the water level fell again. A giggle rose, distinct and obscene, from the gray and silver houses on the opposite bank.I’m losing my mind, he muttered and, enraged, aimed a kick at the canal’s edge. His foot slipped; for a second, he rocked back and forth with one leg in the air and was almost on this side of safety. Alas, he was too old, too stiff, and had drunk too much this night of all nights. There was time only to let go of a fearful yell before he toppled over in slow motion, his eyes transfixed by the sheen of water rising to meet his face.

  In his child’s bed, Luis Carlos awoke to a terrific clamor of bells. Church bells, trolley bells, ice cream bells; bells big and small. They rang out—on and on as he lay frozen, his eyes on the open window which seemed curtained by the October moon’s brilliance. In the strong light, the acacia tree’s leaves, snagged by the moon, looked like slim boats, miniaturized by distance, sailing the skies. He lay stiff and frightened, listening, wondering what had provoked the bells. He whispered his mother’s name; a wave of relief washed over his body. His fingers touched the flute which was always in his bed at night. He grasped it and, compelled by a terrible foreboding, lifted it to his mouth and was soon sitting up, searching through the instrument’s thin wail for the roots of his sudden sadness.

  Mayang, who slept in the next bed, reached him first. She called his name once, twice, not daring to touch him as he improvised a song of nostalgia, down to the last note, before lifting his eyes to her face.

  “Now, we must look for Papa,” he said calmly and put the flute down.

  Such was the understanding between them that Mayang did not hesitate. She called the servants, set them to gathering torches, candles, and storm lamps, and saw them off to trace Carlos Lucas’s route to and from the tavern while she and the children, bundled in flannel blankets, waited in the living room. At dawn, the servants returned, carrying Carlos Lucas, soaked to the skin, his flesh blue and cold, in a blanket sling. He had drifted nearly five hundred yards downriver, helpless and drowning, until his hand had scraped against a crack in the canal wall. An impossible salvation—but Carlos Lucas, with the strength of desperation, wedged his right hand into the opening, dug his fingertips into whatever hold he could find, and held himself there, alternately vomiting and swallowing water until help could arrive.

  In the foyer, as Mayang bent to check his breathing, Carlos Lucas opened one eye, spat a bubble of saliva, and rasped: “Fire them all; they came too late.” Then, he turned his head aside and convulsed. He never spoke again, though he tried as he lay on his bed like an upended crab for many, many months, working his lips in an effort to warn them of the disappearing water. But this was weeks later, for lie was immobilized first by double pneumonia and a series of small strokes, with his right hand in a cast, his huge body transformed into a crumple of mounds and valleys under a bedsheet, his breathing a constant rasp that distressed the house until it became familiar noise, receding into the background along with the children’s vo
ices singing Ferdinand Magellan, the crazy old coot, took five ships and circumcised the globe . . .

  “No, darling,”Mayang would say to Luis Carlos,“circumnavigated—”

  “It doesn’t fit, Mama,”was Luis Carlos’s reply. He tried it on his flute but the tone stumbled.

  “It is the right word.”

  "But what is circumcised?”Clara asked in her innocence.

  “Well—well, you’ll know when you’re old enough. And so will Louis.”

  “When will I be old enough?”

  “When you’re twelve.”

  “But, Mama,” Clarissa said, “it really doesn’t fit.”

  So the children went on singing their error, as children would, the same way that at street corners assorted brats swung jumping ropes to the rhythm of a historical error. Ferdinand Magellan. . . Clara, Clarissa, and Luis Carlos sang it sotto voce as they played in Carlos Lucas’s room, crawling under and all over the bed, transforming his inert body under a white cotton sheet into terrain for their games. On his broad stomach, aquiver with breath, Luis Carlos set his toy blue soldiers, his tiny artillery pieces, while Clara, propping up Carlos Lucas’s right leg, balanced her toy white soldiers and cannons on the gentle slope of his thigh. Clarissa claimed his shoulders and launched her attack down his breastbone.Fuego, fire, putok!!!After a good war, the children would pat his cheeks and murmur,good Papa, good Papa, and retrieve their demolished armies. Carlos Lucas worked his lips, in the anxiety of his news about the canal, the disappearing water, and the leaf-boats that had sailed to the sky with the woman who said no . . .

  The few times Mayang noticed the children’s sacrilegious game on their father’s paralyzed body, she brushed it away with the thought that it was good for him to be surrounded by such joy. The truth was she could barely spare him her attention. Times were difficult; for some inexplicable reason, factories were closing all over the city and the sale of rope and sugar, on which the country depended, had come to a standstill. It was as though no ships were sailing the world, none at least that required Manila rope, made of the finest, strongest hemp ever, famous for defying the sea’s teeth. As a consequence, the seven thousand one hundred islands were blighted by a hot wind of poverty.

  Fields lay fallow beneath the drought; peasants bundled their pots and pans, rolled up their mats, and, loading their buffalo-drawn carts, made for the city to escape the drought. Overnight, slums mushroomed, became bloated; the city’s sewers leaked from the impossible burden of carrying the refugee’s discards. Through her maids, the winds of foreboding reached Mayang. Water was contaminated and in the maze of the neighborhood of the poor, disease passed from one house to the other, touching men, women, and children with fever, issuing from their bodies in bloody, watery stools, snatching the hair off their heads, and wracking their limbs with convulsions until death itself was a relief. “As though I didn’t have enough to worry about,” Mayang muttered to herself, thinking of the money in the pirate chest, money that dwindled, even as she ordered the drinking water boiled, the food steamed twice, and the children guarded. She found these precautions inadequate, and had clothes and bedsheets boiled as well, the floors scrubbed daily with hot water and soap, until the whole house was fogged over by a warm mist of cleanliness and the neighbors gossiped about her venturing into the laundry business, the poor senora. All the commotion failed to allay her foreboding; she walked through the house, the haze and noise of the cleaning, with her left lip corner drooping with discontent, for the thought of the rapidly dwindling money gnawed at her. Not even the garden, with its magnificent white roses, could give her peace.

  One afternoon, as she stood under the lone tree in the front yard, a tree that carried the weight of half a dozen hanging pots of orchids, all in their full bloom of white, purple, and speckled yellow sprays, there was a soft knock on the gate, a hesitant scratching almost. She raised her eyes to a brilliant smile, a child’s painting of a sickle moon on a face. A man dressed in a dazzling white suit, impeccably pressed, stood there, his eyes nearly lost in the crinkle of the soothing, reassuring smile he was aiming at Mayang. At her look, he stepped back from the gate and folded his hands, one on top of the other, on his belly. Automatically, surprised and delighted, Mayang identified him: “A Chinaman!”

  How the Chinese learned of her predicament, she would never find out. Nor did she even think of her mother's blood legacy until she was herself old and dying, and the murmured legends of her time were pressing in on her brain for a last lick of memory, among them the iron truth, questioned by none, whether native or Westerner, that the Chinese cared after their own. It was only then, as she was dying, that Mayang realized that her mother had made provisions for her beyond the grave that she had made sure that Manila's Chinese knew of her daughter and her marriage to Carlos Lucas. On this afternoon, though, Mayang was simply enthralled by a visit from an alien and, moving quickly to the gate, she drew the latch herself and let him in. With quick, tiny bows, with many salutations and inquiries after her health and the household’s well-being, the Chinese explained his presence. The father of his father had died three days ago, may the world sing his praise, and he, as son of the son, was beholden to mourn his passing as magnificently as possible. His grandfather, he said, loved roses and to honor that lifelong dedication to living beauty, he would like to rent pots of white—the mourning color—roses, in full bloom please, for the wake and the internment. At a reasonable price, of course, he added, half down now and half to be paid at the end of the funeral when the plants were returned.

  Mayang dashed into the house after the transaction, clutching the money the Chinese had given her. He had brought a jeep along and carted away six giant and six small pots of roses, to be returned in a week’s time. To Mayang, it was incredible luck and the beginning of an enterprise that kept the household afloat through the depression years. For the white roses proved irresistible to the Chinese community and they came, one after the other, to lease the flowers. Pots of them stood guard about the biers of patriarchs and matriarchs; more were scattered about the mausoleums which the Chinese preferred to the simple above-ground crypts the natives used for their dead. Once in a while, Clara would find it disquieting that her roses—which were always returned in full health, along with full payment—were witnesses to rituals she herself couldn’t watch. But there was no helping it, these were hard times and the money in the pirate chest was ebbing quicker than the canal water.

  It ebbed. The canal dried up slowly, having been dammed upstream, even as bulldozers and trucks waited with landfill to erase its existence. The lanky American anthropologist, passing by one sweltering afternoon with his surveyor’s tools, explained and made her understand what a waste it was for water to be occupying prime real estate. His manners were so impeccable, his efforts at Tagalog so comical, that Mayang forgot her resentment at the loss of her own lands.

  “But how will rainwater get to the sea?” she asked in her ignorance.

  “It will find its way,” the American replied. Then, almost as an apology, he added: “It is a new age, senora.”

  After giving him the glass of iced water he asked for, she walked with him to the canal, listening to his exposition on the coming great times. But the sight of the panicked crabs and catfish moved her to tears, though the Binondo men were rolling up their trousers, preparing to lay siege on the silvery mass slithering on the canal’s muddy bottom. The American suggested she return home, as this was no happy vision. That evening, over the front gate’s top, a stranger delivered a brace of crabs and a dozen catfish to her youngest maid. “Compliments of theSenor Americano,” he said.

  A week later, Mayang awoke with the certainty that she was dreaming, that the ceiling’s rafters on which her eyes rested were merely a play of shadow and light, insubstantial as smoke; that her life had all been an illusion; that none of the things that had happened had really happened and time was at a standstill. She felt the sun in the blast of heat roasting the house and the unnatural sile
nce. Rising, she threw a robe over her shoulders, cast a glance at Luis Carlos, who slept like a soldier, straight on his back, his chin at a precise angle, and assured herself he was safe, singular issue of her singular love that he was. She had a sudden yearning for cocoa, as though that frangible morning of her destiny many years ago was back. She crept out of the room, past the closed door behind which Clara and Clarissa whispered, past the door of Carlos Lucas’s breathing. She glanced out of the living room windows, searching for the blue canal and the leaf-slim boats. Thick dismal mud lay there, between the cement walls, hurting the eyes. Downstairs, in the front yard, her youngest maid moved like a black shadow among the plants she was hosing, the hiss of streaming water accompanying her slight voice as she sang her grief for the men who were gone, along with the water and the boats, to yet another landscape of death.

  Mystified, Mayang sought out the kitchen maid and found her also in black.

  “What’s this? What’s happened?” she asked.

  “Another war, senora. The peasants have taken up arms.”

  She crossed herself. The maid offered her a steaming cup of cocoa and as she accepted it, slipping her forefinger into the cup’s ear, her left hand balancing the saucer, as she raised the cup and pursed her lips to blow on the hot liquid, the words reached her like an echo and she said them aloud, not knowing where they had come from: “Pray, then—everyone. And see that you all get pregnant. We’ll lose many, many good men.”