18. The insoluble puzzle at the heart of the labyrinth is not Magsalin’s to bemoan
For the mystery writer, it is not enough to mourn the dead. One must also study the exit wounds, invite the coroner to tea, cloud the mind with ulterior motives, typically in triplicate. In addition, pay credit card bills for the grieving, if such bills are extant.
The translator and mystery writer Magsalin has undertaken (yes, no, pun) some of the above duties at previous incidents; but the insoluble puzzle at the heart of the labyrinth, the Icarian cry, is not hers to bemoan. That is up to the dead man’s kin, who are, fortunately or not, also dead. It is said, for instance, that the writer Georges Perec’s mother died in Auschwitz, his father of shrapnel wounds before the war even started. The writer Georges Perec had a wife. She is a widow. Her heart must be broken. (Magsalin cannot do that for her.)
For the mystery writer, there are the sheaves of paper, the umbrellas from James Smith and Sons (owned by the wife, shipped from Bloomsbury in London), the clippings of newsprint events of general interest, such as the Tunis-Marseille ship schedule, lottery numbers, and election results for mayor of the commune Ivry-Sur-Seine, 1979 (the winner is a communist). For the mystery writer, everything could be a clue, and a word has at least two meanings, both of them correct. And it is not right to jump to conclusions, especially when it becomes apparent that one’s sorrow is misplaced, in this case.
First, the writer has been dead for some time. Second, she has read only two of his novels. Third, he does not figure at all, except as premonitory prompt, a standby ghost, in this story of disappearance Magsalin is about to foretell as she slips a horde of facts into her handbag (leather, from Cleo and Patek, aubergine with olive handles, always admired by salesladies): the writer’s income tax returns, dental appointment cards, shipping receipts from James Smith and Sons Umbrella Shop of Bloomsbury, London, photographs bought from the Library of Congress, 3½ x 7 note cards that slip out from envelopes, a stash of library books the writer thought he would have time to return.
In Las Vegas in 1969, everything in the world is doubled – the chandeliers, the plush of the blackjack tables, the old women (in furs and mohair caps with rhinestone hatpins) swinging their sequin purses, the sheen of noiseless slot machines. Virginie is staring at an old woman clutching an empty pail in her hand, the name The Sands somewhat erased in a winding circle around the pail’s dull tub. She stares because she and the woman are wearing the same Schreiner brooch: a pink rose. It is a coincidence. The woman’s mouth opens in silent despair. But the only sound Virginie hears is the scratch of Luca’s pen (it is a 1940s Esterbrook, a miniature in pale green, one of hers). Her husband is so young. This fact touches Virginie, though she is six years younger than Luca. Virginie’s diplopia has the odd advantage of centring her focus only on the sound of Luca’s writing. She sees double but hears nothing but scratch. Scratch scratch scratch scratch.
Chiara Brasi affirms to Magsalin that she is the daughter of the director of The Unintended.
Magsalin confesses she saw the film several times in her teens.
At one point, memorably, she recalls watching it frame by frame in a muggy class along Katipunan Avenue, a course called Locations/Dislocations, about the phantasmal voids in Vietnam War movies shot in equally blighted areas that are not Vietnam. The disturbing web of contorted allusions, hidden historiographic anxiety, political ironies, and astounding art direction resident in a single frame, for instance, of a fissured bridge in the Philippines, in real life dynamited by the Japanese in 1943 and still unrepaired in 1976, and rebuilt specifically and re-exploded spectacularly in the film’s faux-napalm scene against a mystic pristine river actually already polluted by local dynamite fishers – the movie, for whatever reason, kept putting Magsalin to sleep, though she omits that detail before the filmmaker’s daughter.
There was something both engrossing and pathetic about it, about reconstructing the trauma of whole countries through a movie’s illusive palimpsest, and what was most disturbing, of course, was that, on one level, the professor’s point was undeniably true, our identities are irremediably mediated, but that did not mean Magsalin had to keep thinking about it.
Chiara seems unconcerned, however, by the scholarly implications of her father’s cult classic; at least she seems unburdened. She nods absently at Magsalin’s squinting recall, as if she, Chiara, has heard it all before, as if she needs another Adderall. What she really needs, Chiara says, almost upsetting Magsalin’s cup of chai, is someone to accompany her on a trip.
‘Where to?’ asks Magsalin.
‘I need to get to Samar.’
Luca pours out his dreams to her, and Virginie always restrains her own, as if hers should be checked so his can run free, though no one has established the rules. She knows it will be no honeymoon because he is still in the throes of thinking, a terrible condition, the way he renews his acquaintance with his demented plots: an epic about Rotarians; a love story involving Gus, the famous dying polar bear of Central Park Zoo (one of his weird obsessions); a musical about dwarves in space (a physicist’s dream); an Italian soccer fantasy film with himself in a cameo, of course, as a deaf-mute goalie; a murder mystery set in Vietnam but in fact about pyromaniac grief, gruesome and disconsolate; an adaptation of Tale of Genji in a World War II Japanese internment camp (also a musical). He always has a jungle of ideas from which he zooms into his desire – his obdurate cathexis: the four-leaf clover she has missed. It is admirable how his desire just cuts through the brush, when Virginie can barely figure out which pin to wear: the pink Schreiner rose, one of her fabulous fakes, or her mother’s choice, an antique pearl in an abstract coil.
The Colt .45 was invented to kill the Filipino juramentados, violent insurgents out of their minds, during the Philippine-American war. That much she is told. She has learned more than anyone will ever need to know about the Philippine-American war in the years she has been married to Luca. The genealogy of the genocidal Krag-Jørgenson rifle (Sweden, 1896), ignoble prop of a dirty war; the melancholy artistry of bamboo snares (Samar, 1899), useless prop of a hopeless war; the advent of stereoscopic photography (Underwood and Underwood Photographic Company, 1900), propaganda tool for the imperial wretchedness of this war. Luca keeps the gun on his desk as he researches, poring over maps he has ordered from the Library of Congress. As he shows her the trail they could take, using the gun to make his point, from the infernal streams of Samar’s interior to the mountain passes above the Caves of Sohoton, she wonders if her husband has imbibed it, the spirit of his juramentados. Still, she knows she will go.
Virginie, too, has a sense of the wild, though it is not apparent in her outfits. She is dressed in brocade and gold. She glitters like a sunfish. She wears the metallics and embroidered dresses that she wore in the days she had first met him. Her mother, Chaya Sophia Chazanov of Sosnitza along the Dnieper, Cassandra Chase to immigration authorities, and now Madame Rubinson of Rubinson Fur Emporium on Park Avenue, had always favoured old-world props, lace and lamé. Madame Rubinson was a former set designer who, not quite by intention, married rich. It was Virginie’s secret that she bore a sense of trauma that the world around her mocked – she was cosseted from birth, showered with toys after all; but she has this subliminal perception of a wound without root or reason, that not even she can see.
She had gone to the zoo that day in one of those bouts of ennui that took teenage girls like her, who had an excess of wit and indolence, into parts of the city that enthralled children and manic-depressives. It was September, 1958. She lived only a few blocks from the animals, the hippos and the polar bears and the penguins, but she had never seen them up close. It was not proper, said her aunts, to do things in solitude: the devil is on the lookout for lonely minds. And zoos were for the vulgar. Every day after school, passing the zoo as a child, she would hear the chime of its hours, tinkling in a sunlit, dying fall, like the charmed suspiration of the endless tedium that lay ahead of her. That day, playing hooky, she found herself next to the sea lion tamer, studying as if magnetised the sleight of hand with which he fed the animals their mid-day, gleaming fish. The act’s doubleness enthralled Virginie – the way she believed absolutely in the spectacle of beastly affection, at the same time that she saw the bait that fed it.
She needed to go out more.
In this way, she failed to see the filmmaker catching her figure, out of place in her sequined outfit and spotted leopard coat from Rubinson Fur Emporium. She had intruded onto his picture, but it was semi-neorealist anyway (i.e., done on the cheap). He was filming his pro-animal masterpiece, tentatively called Maniac in the Ark, about an insane killer who turns out to be a zookeeper (of course) who wreaks mayhem to extort funds from the Mayor of New York to find a cure for his great love (Gus the Polar Bear, of course). No distributor bought it, yet Luca still thinks of the plot fondly. Luca caught her like this, a truant in his mise-en-scène of dubious enchantment, and when he asked her to sign away her right to privacy, asking also for her phone number, she did not see the symbolism – the tamer at play with a hungry beast. She took his bait.
The life of a filmmaker is one of scraps of plots sandwiched between the lack of means to fulfil them. The life of a woman in the fifties is one of scraps of plots sandwiched between the lack of means to fulfil them. It is hard for Virginie to grasp that she has agency, just as in those old films of femmes fatales dying in grisly circumstances (Garbo in Camille, or Garbo in any other role), the viewer starts shouting at the doomed woman who fails to grasp that she has agency – don’t fall for that lousy count, you nincompoop! – and so she dies of consumption or jumps in front of that speeding train anyway. Eloping with a bearded artiste she meets at the zoo does not strike Virginie as a cinematic cliché. It seems like freedom. In the dark of the screening room, she watches the shreds and patches of the scene he has filmed. She clutches his hand in the scene of murder in the Arctic cages, as the killer raises his bloody axe. She screams. He tells her – look, it is just sleight of hand. All of your terror lies in the cut. No penguins were harmed in the filming of this movie. She does not look. But she keeps watching him rolling his film, feeding his gleaming reel.
He stops and starts and cuts and discards, including her scene with the sea lions (he says the metaphor is sublime but the lighting is not). And the power of that – the certainty of his director’s vision – gives her invidia: a disease of empathy. It’s that envy of the artist that arises in certain readers: a visceral connivance with his dreams matched only by the desire to kill him for fulfilling them.
Virginie’s first trip with Luca to Las Vegas is that date in 1969. They are still childless. She hates leaving Manhattan but wishes to appreciate her husband’s way of life. Luca prefers the Grand but she chooses the Hilton. There are lines of women in beehives and stilettos. It distresses and pleases her, to see herself as if in a mirror, to see so many women looking like her, all in a line to see a show. The rows of women give Virginie this rush, this thrill that comes over her in discordant places. The fact is, she is scared of crowds. She hides behind her husband’s new fame, his monstrous vitality; in the photographs, she always strikes this sub-alar pose, like a puffin cub taking cover. She hates going to premieres. She discovers too late that she hates the movies, a detail that amuses her husband: the visual effects strain her nerves. She cannot help it. She imagines, as the train rushes straight at her, that she will fall with the hero into the abyss.
This neurological defect in Virginie draws her husband to her. Her sense that fantasy is never an illusion and that the purpose of art is hypnosis, a form of body snatching, arouses in Luca both tenderness and calculation. She is the ideal viewer for whom he makes his thrillers, but that does not mitigate the convenience of marrying a reliable investor.
It might be fun to see the shows, she says on the spur of the moment. Sure, Luca says, why not. Grist for the mill. Luca can write anywhere. But truth be told, he prefers the casinos. By the baccarat tables, he likes to spread out his 3 x 7 note cards, ruled. Security and waiters leave him alone. They are used to oddballs with money. He ponders a sequence then he shuffles, inserts a note card into a middle set, moves a top card to the second column, recording his rearrangements on a yellow legal pad, ruled. He’s an orderly man and scratches his reconfigurations of the plot in a neat list of rejumbled numbers with corresponding new scenes. The arranging of movie scenes via numbered index cards is like playing solitaire with a set of laws that he is inventing. He is improvising, second-guessing. He can see the scenes coming together then he doesn’t. The end is always elusive. His wife taps him on the shoulder.
I got the tickets, she says.
The sheets of paper Chiara Brasi had offered to Magsalin look like a script. Are there also drawings? Magsalin shakes out prints of Samar in 1901, ordered from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs (the receipts fall out, too, from the envelope): index-card size pictures against yellowed boards – of banana groves, dead bodies in grey trenches, GIs in dress fatigues gazing down as if in regret at a charred battleground.
Each of the pictures is oddly doubled. Each index card is a set of thick, twinned prints, each identical print pasted, side-by-side, on stiff panels. All are roughly postcard-size.
Magsalin is familiar with the doubled photos, and they strike her cold.
They are late nineteenth-century pairs of stereo cards.
You look closely at the odd, twin pictures as if presented with one of those optical illusions that should come with a caption, Find What’s Missing! But there is nothing missing to find: the two pictures on each stereo card are identical.
On the Smithsonian website, www.loc.gov, search ‘Philippine insurrection,’ and you come across them. Archived stereo pairs from the years 1899 to 1913, the bleak years of US imperial aggression before the surrender of the last Filipino forces to American occupation. You may as well just copy and paste the gist. Soldiers wading across a shallow river; advancing through open country, et cetera. A group of men with crates of food on the beach, et cetera. A burned section of Manila. The burned palace of Aguinaldo. Firefighting measures. Artillery. Ducks swimming. Children wading. Soldier burying a dead ‘insurgent.’ Soldier showing off the barrel of his Colt .45. Et cetera.
Et cetera. A history in ellipses, too repetitive to know. Not to mention the words in quotes and not. ‘Insurgents’ are in quotes. Insurrection is not. History is not fully annotated or adequately contemplated in online archives. This troubles translators, scholars, and passing memorabilia seekers looking for cheap thrills.
The puzzling duplication becomes mere trope. Photographic captions rebuke losers and winners alike. ‘Soldiers,’ for instance, refer only to white males. ‘Burned’ does not suggest who has done the burning. ‘Firefighting measures’ is a generous term, given the circumstances.
Magsalin looks with impatience at the familiar photos among Chiara Brasi’s papers falling from the Manila envelope.
The passivity of a photographic record might be relieved only by the viewer the photographs produce. And even then, not all types of viewers are ideal. Photographs of a captured country shot through the lens of the captor possess layers of ambiguity too confusing to grasp:
there is the eye of the victim, the captured,
who may in turn be belligerent, bystander, blameless, blamed – at the very least here, too, there are subtle shifts in pathetic balance;
there is the eye of the colonised viewing their captured history in the distance created by time;
there is the eye of the captor, the soldier, who has just wounded the captured;
there is the eye of the captor, in capital letters: the Coloniser who has captured history’s lens;
there is the eye of the citizens (belligerent, bystander, blameless, blamed) whose history has colonised the captured in the distance created by time;
and there is the eye of the actual photographer: the one who captured the captured and the captors in his camera’s lens – what the hell was he thinking?
The photographer at the heart of the script is a woman. The infamous photographer of the Philippine-American war abandoned a restrictive, Henry James-type Washington Square existence (similar to Chiara’s own, except with more Chantilly lace) to become a bold witness of the turn of her century. She is a disturbing beauty with a touching look that her otherwise embarrassingly pampered life fails to obscure. Her name, whether classical allusion or personal cryptogram is still forthcoming – Chiara has not yet made up her mind.
Venus, or Verushka, or Virginia.
It is 1901.
She is not alone. The great American commercial photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnson, has already scooped the men of her day with her photos of Admiral George Dewey lounging on his battleship Olympia, docked in Amsterdam. Months before, the Olympia had fired salvos at Spain’s pathetic ships on Manila Bay, thus claiming the new century for America. Frances Benjamin Johnson’s photographs of arresting domesticity on a battleship are celebrated in Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan – Dewey with his lazy dog Bob, sailors dancing cheek to cheek on deck like foretold Jerome Robbins extras, pristine soldiers in dress whites on pristine white hammocks, and the admiral looking at photographs of himself, with the Victorian photographer in white Chantilly lace by his side.
It is easy to imagine Chiara Brasi reading Joseph Schott’s book, The Ordeal of Samar, stumbling upon the idea of the photographer on the scene of the atrocities in the Philippines, in Samar. It is the photographer’s lens, after all, that astounds the courtroom in the four courts-martial that troubled America in 1902: the trial of General Jacob ‘Howling Wilderness’ Smith; of his lieutenant, the daring Marine, Augustus Littleton ‘Tony’ Waller; of the passionate and vocal witness, Sergeant John Day; and of the water-cure innovator, Major Edwin Glenn (the rest of the Americans of Samar went untried). America is riveted to the scandal, as pictures of the dead in Samar are described in smuggled letters to the New York Herald and the Springfield Republican. Propriety bans the pictures’ publication, but damage is done.
The pictures have no captions, but Chiara makes an effort: Women cradling their naked children at their breasts. A woman’s thighs spread open on cogon grass. A dead child sprawled in the middle of a road. A naked body with blasted head, sprayed against a bamboo fence. The congressional hearings on the affairs of the Philippine islands, organised in January 1902 in the aftermath of the scandal, hold a moment of silence on seeing the photographs.
True, the photographer’s fame is split.
Senator Albert J Beveridge, Republican of Indiana, calls the photographer a traitor to her class. Senator George Frisbie Hoar, Republican of Massachusetts, nemesis of William McKinley, calls her a hero of her time.
Senator Hoar famously accuses his own party’s president in the aftermath of the Samar trials: ‘You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established re-concentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.’
Save for a few clauses of wishful thinking, his words were dudgeon enough:
‘Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate.’
True that. Though the final point lasts only until 1944, when all will be forgotten.
It is easy for a reader to overlay this historical calamity with others, in which the notion of arriving as liberators turns out a delusion, or a lie.
And it is easy for Chiara to overlay montages of her own childhood with the heroine’s: the baby among maids brought out for display at lunch parties on Fifth Avenue; the birthday girl whose abundance of presents includes her mother’s monsoon weeping; objects of her desire in silent parade – rosewood stereographs and magic lanterns and praxinoscopes and stereo pairs from the photographic company with the aptly doubled name, Underwood & Underwood – her souvenir snapshots from hotels around the world – and an antique set of collectible prints captioned ‘nature scenes’: Mount Rushmore, waterfalls, black children, cockfights.
Her own aristocratic world can be seen as an easy stand-in, but in sepia wash. The movie’s white-petticoated protagonist clutches the old Brownie camera that still remains Chiara’s prized possession, given to her by her father Luca, her fourth birthday gift, in Manila.
The script, as Magsalin reads on, creates that vexing sense of vertigo in stories within stories within stories that begin too abruptly, in medias res.
The photographer’s presence in Samar is a quandary for the military officers. The enterprise of the Americans on the islands is so precarious, perilous and uncertain, that the burden of the traveller’s arrival in wind-driven bancas, rowed by two opportunists, a pair of local teenagers who hand off Virginia Chase’s trunks to the porters with an exaggerated avidity that means she has overpaid them, gives the captain in Balangiga a premonition of the inadequacy of his new letters of command.
Who has jurisdiction in Samar if a mere slip of a woman in a billowing silk gown completely inappropriate to the weather and her situation flouts the general’s orders in Tacloban and manages the journey across the strait and down the river anyway on her own steam, with her diplopia and diplomatic seals intact, a spiral of lace in her wake, a wavering tassel of white, complete with trunks full of cameras, and Zeiss lenses, and glass plates for her demoniacal, duplicating photographic prints?
‘OK,’ says Magsalin, taking the envelope. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I know a few people who can help you.’
‘Thank you,’ Chiara says, in that shy, nasal voice that is so annoying. ‘How do you get out of here?’
‘Just follow the signs. There are detours for the exits. They’re renovating, you know.’
‘Are you leaving, too?’
Magsalin thinks she will take her up on it, on the forlorn implication in Chiara’s little-girl voice that she would like some company, that she is scared of Manila and her impulsive clueless spiritual adventure to follow the path of her lost and problematic father and get to Samar – a Freudian notion of travel only people as rich and thoughtless as Chiara suddenly get in their heads and then stupidly follow through; and yes, Magsalin will lead her to the exit and get her safely through the mall and then onto Roxas Boulevard (formerly Admiral Dewey) straight down the length of the ancient Bay to the Manila Hotel.
‘I want to take a spin around the mall,’ Magsalin says. ‘I’ll hang around here a bit. So I’ll see you tomorrow at your hotel.’
The waitress offers the cheque. Chiara pays with a credit card. The waitress shakes her head. Magsalin takes out her non-Hermès bag and pays with cash.
‘Thanks,’ Chiara says.
‘No problem.’
‘My father saw that fight, you know. Ringside. They used to watch all those shows in the States, in Las Vegas. Boxing. My mom preferred Elvis Presley.’
‘They saw Ali-Frazier in Manila in 1975?’
Magsalin is not sure about the protocol, about when and how she can leave the filmmaker. Is she, Magsalin, the guest or is it Chiara?
‘Yeah. The Thrilla in Manila. At the time we lived nearby in – let’s see. I have it here in my notebook. Magallanes Village.’
‘That’s in Makati, not here in Quezon City.’
‘Oh. The Internet was wrong.’
‘Figures.’
‘The Thrilla in Manila,’ Chiara repeats, and then she gets up, just like that, leaving Magsalin and the pan de sal shop without any warning. Bitch.
Chiara is in the dark hallway, and Magsalin has to follow behind. The filmmaker is blocking Magsalin’s exit and gazing, as if mentally noting its pros and cons as a film location, at the boarded up spaces beyond Philippine Airlines, the scaffolding that might be a promised escalator or a remnant of someone’s change of mind.
‘Muhammad Ali Mall. What an interesting tribute.’
‘Ali Mall,’ Magsalin corrects, wondering if Chiara will ever budge from the door. ‘That’s what people call it. It’s name is Ali Mall. Yeah, it’s dumb.’
‘Dumpy,’ Chiara turns to face her, smiling, but not moving, ‘but not dumb. I think it’s sweet. I like tributes. I’ve read all the books about that fight, you know. I guess because I see it through the lens of my childhood. After my father finished The Unintended, you know, after Manila my parents separated. It was not his choice. It was my mother who filed for divorce. I lived with my mom. We kept moving. All over the place. New York. The south of France. She could not stay in one place for too long. Memory suffocated her, she said. She had dizzy spells. I kept missing my father. I think she did, too. For a while, we lived in hotels. She hated remembering places. Hotels were her way of erasing memory, maybe. She has this thing – about embracing the present. One must embrace the present, Chiara – it is all we have! The last time my mother, my father, and I were all together was in Manila. The Thrilla in Manila. I’ve watched that match over and over again, you know. On DVD. Round 6. When Ali says to Frazier –’
‘They tol‘ me Joe Frazier was all washed up!’
‘And Frazier goes –’
‘They – told – you – wrong!’
‘Hah!’ Chiara claps her hands. ‘You do a mean Frazier.’
‘Thank you. Were you for Ali or Frazier?’ Magsalin asks.
‘I love Muhammad Ali.’
‘Do you think he is real?’
‘More real than I,’ says Chiara. ‘He’s The Greatest.’
Magsalin smiles.
Just for that, Magsalin thinks, she’ll do whatever this spoiled brat says.
‘I am sorry about your parents,’ Magsalin says.
‘De nada. It is my life. When I think of the world around me –,’ and Chiara’s gaze does not wander, does not look at the world around her, ‘how can I complain?’
‘Myself, I liked Frazier,’ says Magsalin.
‘Really? But why?’
‘Because he wasn’t really an ugly motherfucker. He was no gorilla. Except Ali, the director, made him up.’
At the hotel in Hong Kong, unknown to her daughter, Virginie sees visions. She is looking for ice. Down the hotel corridor she follows the curls of the carpet’s tracks neatly along its moulting spirals – once, when she looks back, she is startled to see the snail-back humps of her former map disappearing at her glance. The carpet behind her has turned white, or fogged. It must be her dizziness (her vision is troubling, but she refuses to wear her glasses), a trick of her strained eyes. She shrugs the vanishing off. As she turns and weaves along the serpentine trail of the carpet’s dragon-tail design, tottering along the amphisbaena spines in her insomniac stilettos (a woman who came of age in the fifties, Virginie has never worn flats: she grew up believing sneakers are a crime), Virginie follows the spiral toward the sign that says ICE, in Mandarin and English. She sees the man in his glittering suit, a spiral of lace in his wake, a wavering tassel of white, the singer in his fabulous garb, the one she had once seen in Las Vegas, so long ago. Virginie experiences no shock because after all she is in the Orient, which has the curious effect of disorienting her. He is filling up a silver bucket. Behind him, she waits in line.
Chiara in the taxi reads the email attachment from the translator. She barely registers Magsalin’s pleasantries, how nice it was to meet!, etc. She reads online in the cursory way she was never taught at school – in school she had to annotate, then look up words in the OED, then give a synopsis of her incomprehension. School drove her nuts. Slow reading is an art, her teachers kept saying, but their faith was no insurance against her indifference. School gave her migraines: she kept being told to expand on her thoughts when she had none that merited expanding. Her brain seemed like a ball of hair in a bath drain, as miserably palpable as it was inert. She dropped out without regret to go on a drug trip occasionally punctuated by luxury tourism. The result was her first movie, Stumbling into Slovenia, a study of melancholia and apathy that became an indie sensation, though in truth all she wanted was to portray a certain patch of light on a beach in Ancona, against the Adriatic.
She scrolls through the attachment barely reading the words but taking in without question the insult she is meant to feel – the normal way one reads on the Internet. Temper tantrums are a hazard of fast reading. She begins typing furiously on her iPad as the taxi careens. After all, Chiara has a right to be angry, to be rude. The last hours of rest at the Manila Hotel have not erased her lightheaded feeling that this city wants her dead.
Punctuation is an ongoing online dilemma. Tacky exclamation marks provide rudiments of etiquette Chiara forgoes. She also scorns emoticons, stand-alone uses of colons with single parentheses, and illiterate shortcuts, such as u for you. She is an Internet prig in a world of online junkies. It is a black mark on her generation that the mindless adoption of the signifier lol, an insufficient proxy for the vagaries of the human voice, happened in her lifetime. She never uses it. Even with friends, she fails to sign off xoxoxo, as if her denial of trite, reciprocal affection were a mark of superiority.
She never considers the signs of courtesy she has omitted in her texts and is not bothered by the affection she fails to convey.
She barely acknowledges the taxicab driver’s bow as he pockets her tip. Her presence at midnight at the front door of Magsalin’s home in the Paco district has the same substance as her online tone: unapologetic, admitting only of intentions relevant to herself.
If Chiara were not so tiny, wide-eyed, looking a bit troubled in her skewed, though still faintly perfumed tank top (you see, the maid catches Chiara’s naked expression of distress despite the arrogant blue eyes’ barely glancing at her, the servant, who could shut the door on her face), the latecomer would never have been welcomed into the Magsalin home – that is, the home of the three bachelor uncles from Magsalin’s maternal line: Nemesio, Exequiel, and Ambrosio, drunkards all.
Midnight in Manila is no comfort for strangers. Servants in this section of Manila are justly wary of late-night knocks on the door. Corrupt barangay chairmen harass them for tong, doleful bandits pretend to be someone’s long-lost nephew, serial drunks keep mistaking the same dark, shuttered home for their own. Chiara does not notice at first that the address Magsalin had scribbled on the napkin from the bake shop in Ali Mall is a haunted avenue in much too leafy, cobblestoned disrepair, full of deciduous shadows, aging tenements of purposeless nostalgia amid wild, howling cats, and the occult strains, somehow, of stupid disco music.
Chiara registers that the location has a disjoint familiarity, like a film set in which she has carefully restored elements of a childhood by dispatching minions to gather her recollections, so that her memory becomes oddly replete, though only reconstructed through the inspired empathy of others. Such is the communality of a film’s endeavour that magic of this sort never disconcerts Chiara. Life for Chiara has always been the imminent confabulation of her desires with the world’s potential to fulfil them. So while the street and its sounds have an eerie sense of a past coming back to bite her, Chiara also dismisses the eerie feeling. She steps into the foyer of the old mahogany home without even a thank you to the maid, who against her better judgment hurries away at the director’s bidding to fetch the person she demands, Magsalin.
‘I did not give you the manuscript in order for you to revise it,’ Chiara begins without introduction.
‘Pleased to see you again, too,’ says Magsalin. She gestures Chiara to the rocking chair.
‘I’m not here for pleasantries.’
‘You are in someone else’s home, Miss Brasi. My uncles, who are still awake and, I am warning you, will soon be out to meet you and make you join the karaoke, would be disappointed if I did not treat you like a guest. Please sit.’
Not looking at it, Chiara takes the ancient rocking chair, the one called a butaka, made for birthing. It creaks under her weight, but Chiara does not seem to hear the sound effect, a non sequitur in the night.
Now Magsalin is towering over the director, whose small figure is swallowed up in the enormous length of the antique butaka.
‘I did not revise the manuscript,’ begins Magsalin, knowing she must choose her words carefully, ‘I presented a translation.’
‘I did not ask for a translation,’ says Chiara. ‘I gave you the manuscript as a courtesy. It is the least I can do for the help you will give me.’
‘I have not yet offered that help.’
‘But you will. You will get me to Samar.’
‘Yes, that is true. I have decided to help you get to Samar. But not without extracting my pound of flesh.’
‘Co-authorship of my script?’ snorts Chiara. ‘That is unacceptable. You are only a reader, not an accomplice.’
‘Permission to make of it as I wish, seeing as my perspective offers its own matter.’
‘And desires that distort,’ says Chiara.
‘Possibilities and corrections,’ murmurs Magsalin.
‘Misunderstandings and corruptions,’ retorts Chiara.
‘A mirror, perhaps,’ says Magsalin.
‘A double-crossing agent,’ snaps Chiara.
‘Yes. The existence of readers is your cross to bear.’
In the last novel by Georges Perec, a mystery of texts engenders the clues deciphering a murder of colonial proportions; that is, a writer dies. He dies in a vaguely political way, in the way in a colonised country only the political seems to have consequence. Otherwise, deaths are too cheap for witness. Does it matter, Magsalin wonders, if one day a world-famous director disappears in a derelict, tree-laden street in the Paco district of Manila, to the strains of Elvis Presley singing ‘Suspicious Minds’?
And if anything happens to the protagonist, who would be to blame?
The monsoons of Manila give Virginie a thrill. Frogs from the garden leap onto her soaking carpet into the borrowed house’s Chinese vases. The rain traps her in the sala. Catfish swim toward her shoes. Her baby daughter’s Wellingtons come splashing down from the dusty ottoman while the feral cat, a castaway, casually invades the kitchen and observes. Virginie thinks a tadpole is tickling her wet toes, but she does not dare to look. The cat Misay is completely dry, like the dark-skinned maid in the corner cutting up the cantaloupe with utter calm. She is staring at Virginie’s legs. ‘Ma’am,’ she says. An obscene dead cockroach, its genitalia splayed out for the world to see, is coming and going in waves, like an upturned boat with frail masts. Virginie looks down. She screams. The cat pounces. The baby claps, and the maid bustles about. The cat almost has the cockroach in its grasp, but the maid swipes at the cat, who runs off, and she sweeps the dumb flaccid bug easily into the dustbin, with a nonchalance that her mistress’s embarrassment observes. It is odd that it is so sunny outside, Virginie thinks, when for all she knows the world has turned upside down. It is a sinking ship that was once a home. Her toes are cold.
Virginie Brasi is a slim, disturbing beauty who, even in sleep upon a wicker butaka, cheeks checkered by abaca twine, or vigorously gardening in the tropics with her mouth open, red bandanna fluttering against monsoon winds that make wild commas of her hair while she tends her wilting camote, has a touching look that her otherwise embarrassingly pampered life fails to obscure. Maybe it is her posture – always a bit slouched, though not quite awkward – that makes her seem unaware of her power. She is inept rather than thoughtless, therefore her whims are pardonable – those dashes across the ocean, for instance, on suspicion of her husband’s infidelity as he falls deeper into the abyss, the monstrosity of his enterprise in the jungles of the Philippines. Thrice she carried her baby, four-year-old Chiara, wrapped in an Igorot blanket, onto a private, chartered plane. Chiara would find herself all alone in a hotel suite in Hong Kong, staring at the scarily erect arrangement of three cattleya orchids triplicated in the eerie mirrors, with her small curly head in triple counterpoint to the infinite trinity of her father’s absence.
Those midnight migrations to grandiose and sterile rooms would haunt Chiara’s childhood, though now her memories are blurred, and her mother, emerging in a white bathrobe and offering her a guava, Chiara’s favourite fruit, taste acquired in the tropics, would look for all the world as if nothing were the matter, nothing mattered, though tomorrow she will cry herself to sleep in her daughter’s arms.
Virginie’s image in white bathrobe and silver heels haunts her daughter, though Virginie also looks vaguely and mistakenly like Gena Rowlands, or Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (an unfortunate, involuntary resemblance – but the cheap trick that pop culture plays on her daughter happens to the best of us). Virginie’s image burns in Chiara’s mind, a warning: her mother of the bedlam rests. She remembers her sleeping so deeply in that awkward rocking chair in Magallanes Village during that time of her childhood, in Makati, not Quezon City. If it were not for the occasional spasm of Virginie’s slim foot dangling from the creaking butaka, the rocking chair made for birthing, for the optimism of creation – if it were not for that occasional twitch of Virginie’s cold toes, little Chiara imagines her mother dead.
The story Magsalin wishes to tell is about loss. Any emblem will do: a dead Frenchman with an incomplete manuscript, an American obsessed with a Filipino war, a filmmaker’s disappearance, his wife’s sadness. This work is not only about writers who have slipped from this realm, their ideas in melancholy arrest, though their notebooks are tidy; later one might see the analogy to real-life grief, or at least the pathos of inadequate homage, if one likes symbols. Of course the story will involve several layers of meaning. Chapter numbers will scramble, like letters in abandoned acrostics. Points of view will multiply. Allusions, ditto. There will be blood, a kidnapping, or a solution to a crime forgotten by history. That is, Magsalin hopes so.