State of War

by Ninotchka Rosca

  The peasants’ uprising wound and rewound itself through four provinces of Luzon, spewing from its miasma of blood and death, noise and smoke, a thousand and one legends—of warriors who found the lostanting-anting of ancient priestesses, amulets which rendered them invulnerable to bullet and steel; of fanatical disciples of a crypto-priest who descended upon towns as swiftly as smoke, overran American garrisons, and vanished just as quickly; of women generals more ferocious than their male counterparts. Tales brought to the city by refugees who fled poverty and artillery, cramming themselves, their wives, and their children into sweltering slums and finding, in the Ever Loyal and Ever Noble City of Manila, no relief at all, no relief. The factories remained closed, workers were marching beneath union flags, and discontent was general.

  Because the slums were now nudging the southern perimeter of Binondo, strangers could be seen in the afternoons, standing by the canal’s lip, watching the mud bake, and flicking sidelong looks over their shoulders at the nearby houses. Mayang had the gates double-barred, the front door locked. She kept the keys in a massive keyring tied to her waist and herself opened the gates in the morning, when two of her servants would leave for Quiapo, bearing bundles of cut roses for the retail vendors who lined the sidewalk near the church. This was now part of the house’s ritual, for aside from leasing white roses to the Chinese Mayang had expanded her business to delivering flowers wholesale.

  She had, in her garden, two hundred pots of roses, twenty-five of which were white (she reserved those for the Chinese), fifty orchid sprays, twelve varieties of ferns, and assorted plants of the more banal species, in addition to the tree in the front yard and the tree in the back. Because they bloomed in turns, seemingly determined not to fail her, she could harvest the flowers in rotation, rising at dawn and wielding her heavy shears even before breakfast, cutting and pruning ever so carefully, checking leaves and stems, while two maids wrapped the long-stemmed blossoms, some the color of blood clot and just as fragile, with fresh banana leaves and craft paper, tying them into manageable bundles with green ribbons. Mayang let the maids haggle with the vendors over the price of the flowers, by the dozens or by the bundle, her instructions limited to a minimum amount for the lot. She never knew whether the maids remained honest or cheated her, outrageously or in small ways, for the truth was the business pained her, this decapitation of plants, this stripping of the garden she had built so meticulously for the return of her faraway love. It sufficed that there was enough to cover the expenses for food and the maids’ pay.

  The maids returned at mid-morning, bearing provisions they had purchased at the market. At their knocking, Mayang opened the front door and the gate, let them in, and relocked the gate once more, noting how the number of strangers by the canal increased each day. Dusky men in straw hats and slippers, in ill-matched shirts and pants, their hands in their pockets, staring dully at the empty canal on which work had stopped. Mayang would mutter a short prayer, a plea for the house’s safety, before she withdrew and locked the front door.

  In the kitchen, as the cook gutted fish and poultry, crushed ginger and garlic, the two maids emptied their pockets, laying wads of bills and change on the table, along with abused pieces of paper on which they’d done their tallies. They maintained an incessant chatter, mixing their accounts of the flower sale with stories picked up from vendors and at the market, stories about the uprising, about the slums, about the city, about movie stars, until Mayang was caught in the paradox of feeling herself an eyewitness to events even as life passed her by.

  Through the maids, the slums reached her—a vast maze of desolation, with its sun-bleached wooden walls, its roofs of rusting corrugated iron, its rooms built upon rooms, boxes on boxes, an impossible tower of existence where a packed humanity eked out the impossible lives of rats, feeding one another with dreams and hallucination. She heard about a couple who, driven mad by the transfer from the calmness of open fields to the city’s frenzy, convinced themselves of their own children’s metamorphosis into monsters. They committed the unspeakable crime of killing their own brood—two girls and a boy, all below the age of ten—by cutting their throats, draining the blood from their bodies, and stuffing their orifices with crushed garlic to prevent their rise from death. Mayang shuddered but the younger maid assured her that everything was in order; the parents had been seized and a trial was to be held, all in accordance with the law, at which the murderers were to be prosecuted by a brilliant new lawyer by the name of Adrian Banyaga.

  “Who?” Mayang asked, wrinkling her forehead.

  “Ay, senora, you’re so behind the news. He was the one who married Miss Estela.”

  “Miss Estela who?”

  The maids broke into giggles and gave up. Mayang unrolled the paper bills, separated fives and tens from ones, and ironed each with the palm of her hand before counting them. It was a tidy sum. She sighed.

  “When will it be over?” she asked aloud.

  The maids said soon, soon, but not before masses of people reached the city; the migration was going on, an eternal procession, it seemed, of buffalo-drawn carts on the highway. Appalled by this influx, the city residents could only transform the event into a celebration. Thus every twilight the Manilans packed dinner hampers and hied off to the city boundaries to watch the refugees enter.

  “It is a beautiful sight, senora,” the maid said, confessing to an indiscretion.

  How it came about, Mayang didn’t know, but plans were suddenly afoot for the whole family to witness the parade of refugees. She hemmed and hawed, putting it off week after week, making excuses as the maids pressed her gently, teasingly. One Friday, she could protest no more. The food was prepared and wrapped, the route back and forth by trolley and bus worked out, the children’s clothes prepared, and the task of guarding the house assigned. Clara, Clarissa, and Luis Carlos, returning from school in the afternoon, found themselves hustled out of their uniforms into everyday clothes and led out of the front door, through the garden, and out the gate by triumphant maids while Mayang, wearing a shin-length shirtdress and false pearls, brought up the rear with three other servants who carried the food hampers.

  Though the journey took longer than Mayang had expected, there was only the minor mishap of Clara throwing up on the bus. Luis Carlos tried to soothe her by playing her favorite melodies on the flute but the stink and sour taste of her own vomit had made Clara irritable. She spent the rest of the ride with her head on her nanny’s lap, whimpering into her skirt folds, while Mayang massaged her nape.

  Just outside the city, they passed a camp of six carts on the roadside. Luis Carlos stopped playing to stare at the men who were weaving rattan strips into chairs and tables. Mayang pointed to the makeshift stove to one side of the circle and reminded the maids of their luck. There were an inordinate number of toddlers, half-naked and barefoot, which caused Clarissa to sniff with disdain. “They will get worms,” she declared. But they were leaving the scene already and an astonishing spread of land was rushing toward them.

  A few minutes more and they reached the picnic site, recognizing it instantly from the cars parked by the road. They disembarked, walked self-consciously up the land’s rise, debated about the proper spot, and finally chose one that gave them a clear view of the road. Already, the first carts were visible, rolling in slowly with a side-to-side motion. The maids spread mats and unpacked the hampers, while the children, freed from restraints, burst into motion. Luis Carlos forgot his flute in his fascination with space and began to run to and fro, chased by his two sisters, their laughter sweet as birdcalls. For the first time in many months, Mayang smiled, her lip corners lifting. A maid, ladling food onto plates, caught her breath at this glimpse of the mistress’ past beauty.

  By the time they finished eating the sun had gone down, and in the purple twilight they saw, down the road, a trail of tiny lights, swaying, as though germinal stars had fallen to the earth. Luis Carlos found a melody in his head, one that mimicked the slight quiver of tho
se lights, and he raised his flute. The music rose in the stillness. Mayang watched her son fondly, with pride, in her own head a gentle remonstrance to Hans for his neglect. Flute notes ran down the hill and joined the rhythmic whoosh of the water buffalos’ breathing, their abrupt snorts, and the swish of their tails as they lumbered down the road, their swaying gait making the carts and the hurricane lamps hanging from their woven roofs dance. One after the other, in the soft dark, they came as though to sneak into the city.

  Clara gave a sigh and crawled to where her mother sat. She slid downward and laid her head on Mayang’s knees.

  “Don’t you like the carts?” Mayang asked.

  “No,” she said, “I’m cold.”

  And rising to her knees, she threw up again. Mayang shrieked. She had the terrible certainty she was about to pay for the past hours’ tranquility. Catching Clara in an embrace, she felt the fever in the child’s body. Too late. It had spread through her limbs, was now sucking at her bones and twisting her intestines into impossible knots.

  Three weeks later, Clara died, leaving behind such an unbearable memory of pain that Mayang, until the next war, wore only black.

  8

  It was Luis Carlos who explained everything to his father—the funeral, the canal, the buffalo carts, the stars on the road—when no one else dared, fearing the shock would lead to a double burial. On his own volition, one Sunday while the house was yet prostrate with mourning for Clara, he slipped into the master bedroom, his flute under his arm, and perched on the bed’s edge, close to Carlos Lucas’s chest.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” he said, “The bells gave no warning.”

  Carlos Lucas’s eyes blinked, ran over with tears.

  “Sssh, Papa, there’s nothing we can do,” Luis Carlos said, wiping the old man’s flabby cheeks with a corner of the bedsheet.

  And with his flute, playing with all the skill of his virtuosity, he wove for Carlos Lucas all the scenes of what had happened. The frantic sewing of funeral costumes, the household in black; Mayang terrible in silent grief, not daring even to weep lest the commotion disturb Carlos Lucas; the gray thing that had been Clara, wearing a white tulle gown, a perfect white rose in its clasped hands. The music brought Carlos Lucas the clear morning of the burial, when the small coffin was carried down the stone steps, through the garden, and out the gate to a black hearse while Mayang, swallowing the sounds of her weeping, fell down, first at the front doorway, then under the front- yard tree, then again outside the gate as they were loading the coffin. The hearse didn’t head for the cemetery. Instead, twisting through streets, it drove toward the San Lazaro Hospital, propelled it seemed by the hawk screams Mayang released at last this distance from Carlos Lucas’s bed, until it found the crematorium behind the main building and here stopped for the culmination of an agonized quarrel between Mayang and the new American health authorities. Despite the intervention of the Capuchins, the Americans had decided that burning was cleaner, safer for victims of the epidemic.

  For a long time afterward, Mayang’s knees would buckle and she would slump to the floor, until her knees and shins were mottled with bruises, whenever Clara rose in her memory. The child was always alive to her, walking in her white gown and lace gloves, her lip corners drooping in her usual dour expression, while flames licked at her bare feet, her elbows, her hair. Mayang thought she was seeing her daughter in hell.

  The household heroically resumed its daily routine, moving around Mayang’s intermittent falls. The maids cooked, cleaned, clothed the children, gossiped with neighbors, fed Carlos Lucas his pureed meals, and bore Mayang’s distress stoically. It was while watering the garden that the youngest maid discovered the cure for Mayang’s loss of balance. Running the hose out in the garden, as the morning still hung moist in the sky, wrestling with the sprinkler head that writhed like a snake and dousing herself in the process from head to toe, the maid was petrified by the sight of heaped petals on the ground. All the flowers had been stripped; only the stamen and pistil remained attached to the plants, ugly and naked. At the foot of each pot lay a scattering of red, yellow, white, and pink petals. Mystified, afraid she would be blamed for this new disaster, the maid wondered whether she had made an error while mixing insecticides or a strong wind had blown in from the South China Sea. But no, everything had been ordinary the night before. Shrugging, she marched into the house and announced a miracle.

  The flowers never returned. Mayang could ease her chagrin at the blasted buds that took their place—buds edged in brown, stunted, failing to reach full bloom—by saying that surely this was hint indeed of Clara’s welcome in heaven. She had to turn away her Chinese customers who, receiving no explanation, concluded that the household had no need for extra income anymore.

  On the contrary, Clarissa and Luis Carlos still attended exclusive Catholic schools, where fees increased regularly. They outgrew their clothes as rapidly as they were bought and in the case of Clarissa, the cost was tripling because she was gently but irrevocably becoming a young woman. Mayang dug deep into the pirate chest, often panicking at the meagerness of her resources, and finally, in despair at the price of a silk dress for Clarissa who was caught now in the school’s social whirl, she walked into the master bedroom, opened the wardrobe, and took out the emerald necklace.

  Carlos Lucas’s eyes were open and he saw how, with a kitchen knife, she pried off a stone, leaving the setting blind. In the vast silences of his body, he realized suddenly that this was not the first time she had opened the wardrobe. His eyes brimmed over; he wept, begging forgiveness of the Chinese-Malay maid, and finding her in the labyrinths of his memory, also found his mother in the cemetery and realized he had failed to reserve the plot next to her tomb.

  The thought galvanized him enough to struggle with his body, willing his mouth to form words. Words. Clarissa, entering the room with his midday soup, was so startled by a volley of snorts and gasps that she dropped the tray and rushed out, shouting her papa was dying. Mayang and the maids came running, and clustered about the bed.

  “He wants something,” Mayang declared.

  “He’s dying,” Clarissa countered, “and you still in black! Call the doctor.”

  “No, he wants to say something.”

  The truth was Mayang had conceived such an antipathy for doctors since Clara’s death she had vowed never to let one attend her family. They were all ignorant, she thought, and worse, they wouldn’t admit it.

  “Well, what are you going to do?” Clarissa shouted finally.

  “We’ll wait for Luis Carlos.”

  “For Louie?”

  “For Luis.”

  “He’ll be stiff by then. On your head be it!”

  Luis Carlos arrived at twilight, skipping innocently through the gate a maid held open and up the stairs toward the front door. He had good news, gathered from his friends. The war was over; a dozen peasant leaders were in jail while the rest had returned to the fields which held promise now, what with storm clouds forming over the Pacific. He was midway up when a cry slammed onto his chest and he froze. The cook grabbed him and pushed him toward the master bedroom.

  “What now?” he demanded as he caught sight of the six women ringing Carlos Lucas’s bed.

  “He wants to say something,” Mayang replied.

  “He’s dying, imbeciles,” Clarissa snapped.

  Luis Carlos calmly bent over his father and noted the blinking of his eyes.

  “Hush,” he said to the old man who calmed down immediately. Then, turning to the women, he shooed them away. “Go, go. He needs air.”

  Obedient to the male voice, they made for the door, even Mayang who threw a backward glance at her son, a stripling yet whose slim ankles thrust out of the pants he had outgrown. His authority was already undeniable. She sent an unvoiced remonstrance to Hans for his indifference. Luis Carlos, she thought, was such a beautiful child, true son of a true love.

  The women’s obedience, more than anything else, made Luis Carlos aware of chan
ges in himself. He no longer asked what circumcision was, having undergone it the year before, choosing his own herbalist and river, and the forked guava branch over which his foreskin had been drawn, and going through the procedure without Mayang’s knowledge. He had managed even to reach the house without howling in pain though with an indescribable grimace to Mayang’s fright and Clarissa’s disdain that he would be so stupid as to risk infection. But as he smoothed the bedsheet over Carlos Lucas’s stomach and hips, he felt the household roost on his shoulders and knew he would never be a child again. He gave his father a wry smile.

  “Sorry, Pops,” he said in the new manner of speaking he had picked up from his friends, “women are so hysterical. I have a new tune for you.

  And he played a popular song, one that resounded now from the houses along the canal, from women washing clothes at public faucets, though the bands and professional singers hadn’t caught on to it yet. A song about a boat in the sky bearing a woman who said no, she’d rather not, thanks but no . . . Silent laughter ran through his body as the risque words thrummed in his head. That he should be playing this for his father!

  The tail of another melody thrust into the song and Luis Carlos couldn’t help but follow it, in its loops about itself, its twirls, its rise upward, as though it were smoke in the wind, curving toward a place where Carlos Lucas, healed and in white ducks, waited, sitting on a strange tomb in a strange cemetery, a fishing pole at his feet. The old man nodded knowingly and threw a glance over his shoulder at the name on the tomb. That was how Luis Carlos learned of the Don’s wish for a burial plot in Bulacan.

  “Well, buy it yourself,” Mayang snapped, not believing but insulted nevertheless by her husband’s desire to creep back to his mother.

  She marched into the bedroom, opened the wardrobe, and without ceremony pried out another emerald, leaving the necklace twice blind. She dumped the gem into Luis Carlos’s palm, challenging him. The youth raised his eyebrows, curled his fingers about the green stone, and withdrew.