State of War
Page 39
ITEM: Eliza Hansen’s body washed ashore four days after the Festival. The fishermen who found it waited twenty-four hours. When no one claimed the body, they poured gasoline over the decaying flesh and set it afire. The village children watched from the safety of coconut trees fringing the coastline. They smiled at the flames. And waited for the fire to die and the high tide to rinse the sand of the scorch mark. The bones they gathered and took home, to be split and carved into wind chimes which would hang at windows and doors. It was said that the remains of the Festival’s tribute to the sea brought good fortune.
ITEM: Colonel Alejandro Batoyan fell ill a month later and succumbed to a systemic disorder that saw his organs attacked by chemicals his own glands produced. Liver, lungs, spleen, kidneys, and heart, particularly the heart, disintegrated at a terrific pace in the toxic broth flushed through the body by the veins. The heart’s rate of breakdown fascinated his doctors, who couldn’t know that the colonel was a true romantic. He had striven for the possession of beauty in his own awkward way and having sojourned briefly in its glory, found it impossible to live without it.
ITEM: Guevarra was wounded and captured. Again. Nothing more was known. His friends resigned themselves to his absence. First, they said he was probably dead. Later, that he was dead. From the south, from one of the islands of the Central Philippines, came some comfort. A fledgling guerrilla group overran and destroyed a military base. The leader, a young man of few words, had named himself after a great man. He called himself Guevarra.
ITEM: Colonel Urbano Amor survived, minus his left arm. He completed a dissertation and was conferred a doctorate in the behavioral sciences. The labored-upon manuscript, a distillation of so much human pain, was read by the university examining committee whose members, it was said, were so horrified they waived its oral defense and abruptly passed the colonel. Then they had the manuscript microfilmed, destroyed the paper versions, and had the only copy placed among the restricted files of the library. Researchers of the future, when all this trouble is over, may perhaps discover it there, with its perverted truth. But considering the volume of materials under this code, it may lie there forever.
The loss of his arm having made him unfit for military life, Urbano Amor was appointed chancellor of the Academy of Man, a new institution generously endowed by government and dedicated to the study of perfection. At his investiture, Colonel, no, Chancellor Amor delivered a two-hour speech of great erudition, before two thousand hand-picked students who were all on scholarship. The speech dealt with the seven virtues of the Commander's Society, namely, patriotism, loyalty, integrity, intelligence, compassion, simplicity, and sacrifice. It was loudly applauded and praised. But students being students, and the young being young, the joke circulated later that the long-winded treatise could be reduced to a single sentence: “Man is a dog and has no right to happiness.”
ITEM: Anna Villaverde made it back to the Ever Loyal and Ever Noble City of Manila. She and Rafael managed to stay but a step ahead of the wolves unleashed by the Loved One. Perhaps it was grief over the loss of his arm; or perhaps, as some said, he had taken the attempt on the Commander’s life as a personal affront. .. No matter. Colonel Amor laid siege on the urban resistance, the most vulnerable link, cordoning off one district after another. One house of safety after another was hit in that phase of the war and nearly a thousand men and women were swallowed by the detention camps.
But Rafael matched the colonel’s anger. He guided Anna through the danger—a full month of scuttling between houses, from district to district—at the end of which, if Anna had bothered to make an accounting, she would have been able to say she had slept in nearly all the city’s neighborhoods.
It came to a finish, though—for the enemy’s actions were based on a momentary spasm of rage. Against this, the resistance poised infinite patience, a steadfast passion that knew full well the nature of both the enemy and time. The enemy saw the resistance as an irritant, a disruption in the normal conduct of its affairs. The resistance, on the other hand, saw only the enemy. It had no festivals to celebrate, no career to worry about, no property to protect, no manuscript to finish. It absorbed its losses, withdrew its people from exposed positions, clothed itself in anonymity. In due time, it saw the flagging of the enemy’s zeal, saw its attention waver and, at last, turn to other matters. Then, the resistance stirred and reached out.
In due time. Rafael and Anna were plucked out of the city. She was brought to a small village in Laguna. Rafael went somewhere else, though with the promise that he would always know about her, remember her, for he had promised Guevarra that. And who knew what would happen, the vagaries of war being what they were? Perhaps, they would meet again.
Anna’s arrival at the village, after two days of walking through hill trails to avoid the main roads’ checkpoints, was heralded by an odd, raucous sound—a cry that split the air and made her guide smile. “A labuyo,” he said. “I gotta set a trap.” As though to taunt him, the rooster crowed again.
He never caught it—at least, not in the week that he stayed, seeing to Anna’s getting settled. She had a task now. She was to teach the children. So many of them, even in this flea-sized village: dark and sturdy, small because of the food but with eyes like polished onyx. The villagers built a shed for their use, touched by the resistance’s gift. Already, they were calling her maestra—teacher—and from their poor homes brought her odds and ends: a stool and a table for her own hut, a mat, woven blankets, pots and pans. Her offer of money embarrassed them and, after a while, she learned to accept and let her pleasure be gratitude enough. They would not take payment, not even for the batteries they brought, whenever one or the other went down to the town. They never forgot the batteries for her radio/tape recorder. She found a way to repay that, though, carrying the thing to the corner store at dusk and leaving it so they could gather and listen. To music sometimes, to the news often, and, even oftener, to a soap opera where the heroine was always named Esperanza and had to go through a million and one threats to her integrity and chastity.
She taught the children in the morning. With the mountain sun soft on the windowsill, the children’s faces a garden of flowers before her, she was almost happy as she listened to their singsong: It was morning when the Spanish long boats sailed from Cebu to Mactan. In the forest, the wild rooster let loose its cry of triumph.
At noon, she ate her frugal meal before walking to the corner store, picking up her radio/tape player, and hiking to a nearby spring. Here, she played Guevarra’s tapes, taking pleasure in his voice. “My name is Ismael Guevarra.” He had no identity except for that name which he had screamed out, over and over again, in the Loved One’s romance room. No one had believed him. “The problem with Amor and his men,” said Guevarra, “is that they can’t distinguish the true note from the false. Thus, they conferred heroism on a simple man. Which was good, for the times needed heroes, no matter how illusory.”
She heard him speak of her father, not knowing who he was; the music and that act of kindness, never forgotten, in the midst of cruelty. They were, Anna thought, ordained to meet each other again and again, through time, reenacting stories of love, of abuse, of kindness, of betrayal. But of kindness above all, which enabled them to survive, which in turn allowed the archipelago to keep on dreaming its history.
A rustling among the leaves. The labuyo—iridescent shape among the shadows. It preened itself, grooming its feathers while she held still, letting Guevarra’s voice meander through its tale. How, still a child, he had gathered the remnants of the army of the poor, those who had survived the years, and carried on the war which was no less ferocious for its being invisible. On and on, to the trial of his wife and son. “It was with pride that I cast my vote. The rules were clear. Death to the traitor. I looked at my wife. Once, long ago, she had helped me in my loneliness. But she was old now, tendons standing out on her arms, spatulate fingers restless under my scrutiny. I looked at my son. He was merely another barefoot, filthy
child littering the landscape, lost in ignorance. He had absorbed all the ugliness of my flesh. No nobility there. I had been away from the two of them too long.
“The rules were clear, are clear. I could give a hundred unassailable reasons for my verdict of death. None would be any good at all. No good at all. I had no answer to my own questions. I still don’t. For no man acts according to rules but simply, according to the dictates of his heart. When I looked at them, didn’t I—but for a moment, true, just as it was true that the thought had been there—wish for a better wife, a better son? What woman, what child, came to my mind then? Was my verdict heroic or base? I have no answer. We begin as accidents and end as the sum of accidents. The rites of this land seize us by the hair and force us into a design begun a long, long time ago.” A shy laugh. The labuyo stirred. A cloud moved in the sky and, from the village, the voices of the children rang out, chanting Ferdinand Magellan, the crazy old coot; took five ships and circumcised . . . Anna sat up slowly, for silence had fallen, bird and insect calls gone now. She shivered in a sudden cool breeze, while the children’s voices went on and on, and bushes, tree leaves, and water trickling from the spring shimmered with a nacreous light. She thought she had fallen asleep and was waking now, stepping into yet another world of dreams. She rose to her feet, her joints slipping smoothly into place; the wild rooster stopped, inclined its head sideways, and studied her. As in a dream, she felt her own hand touching her neck, the space between her breasts, her belly, her navel. And she knew. Instantly. She was pregnant, the child was male, and he would be born here, with the labuyo—consort of mediums and priestesses—in attendance. He would be nurtured as much by her milk as by the archipelago’s legends—already, she was tucking Guevarra’s voice among other voices in her mind—and he would be the first of the Capuchin monk’s descendants to be born innocent, without fate . . . She knew all that instantly, with great certainty, just as she knew that her son would be a great storyteller, in the tradition of the children of priestesses. He would remember, his name being a history unto itself, for he would be known as Ismael Villaverde Banyaga.
Time passes.
THE END