IN THE LARGE rented room, upstairs of the tavern Todos Contentos Y Yo Tambien, the six Metaphysicals waited for the seventh. This was middle-March in the morning, and from the windows opened wide to relieve the humidity and the heat, it seemed everywhere else pleasant and
breezy: the bay of the
“Do you remember when we were here last?” asked Katsuo, the sixth. The Metaphysicals who were awake raised their heads together at we.
“I’m afraid I do not,” answered Grito de Patalim. He always spoke courteously, almost diffidently to Katsuo, reflecting the Oriental’s formality and manners. “I’m sure these guys don’t either. Three hundred, four hundred years, more or less, I guess. But Kurtz’s the one to know.”
From the back of the room someone said, “You ask Kurtz something like that and he’s likely to pull the file. Read the goddamn minutes.”
“From his black bag…”
“… where they tell he keeps the souls he’s stolen!”
“Talk his fool head off, that one!
“Oh, yes. No stopping him!”
“So don’t you start!” They laughed fondly.
Grito de Patalim shook his head and smiled at Katsuo. He said, “Kurtz is interested in things like that.”
“I like Mr. Kurtz. Very straightforward. Very funny,” said Katsuo, picking a cigarette from the heavy silver case and stroking it straight a few times before lighting. The lid of the case had been the handguard of a sword, with the low relief of almanders, centauries and cardoons worn round with age. At the center of the handguard was a rectangular slit where the blade of seven blood-drenched laminations once passed. The Oriental stroked around the slit with his forefinger and exhaled a metallic blue haze. “He and I have the same name. Our families may have been related.”
“Does Kurtz know that? You should tell him. That should make him very happy,” said Grito conspiratorially, his palm against the offered cigarette. The deep scar on his cheek bent into a scimitar, whence his name. “Relationships calm his nerves. Relationships make him happy.”
“It’s an obsession, actually,” one of the sleepers said, yawning, tapping at his nose to shoo away the flies. Sol Amaluriq cleaned about his opened mouth with his fingers, then groomed the frayed beard that bushed out like age-worn bristles on a barber’s brush. “ A perverse obsession, if you know what I’m saying.”
One of the assistants – black tie, sweat-soaked white short sleeves, exactly like a door-to-door missionary – walked in with a small electric fan. Sol Amaluriq wanted to know if the fan was extra.
“Have we checked with the airport?” Katsuo asked. “Or isn’t that done?”
“Hell, we don’t know his name.”
“Damn!”
Grito de Patalim padded over to the breeze of the fan. The floor of the room was wide planked deep-jungle wood, pocked badly with boot scuff and spurs. On the walls to one side were the marks where the partitions had been removed: private alcoves, dining cubicles with saloon-style swinging doors where the eaters once loosed their carved leather belts in secret, to be received into the mouths of the whores.
Grito dipped into the water glass and moistened his face. “So we don’t know his name,” he said, shaking his head.
“No,” Sol Amaluriq agreed, clucking. “It pleases Kurtz to annoy us. It pleases him to annoy us.”
"Amen!"
ONCE THE TODOS was a rather fashionable Chinese restaurant, accessed through the deserted, tree-lined road winding up the mountain. There the charros took their sweethearts for the late supper that began the night of love. Coming behind the hill with the moon on the last curve up, they would blow their automobile horns to fire the lights and rouse the mariachi already dozing on the tables. The musicians would scramble up for their instruments and hats. Cursing merrily, they would tuck their week-soiled frilly shirts into their tight pants, burrow into their jangling jackets, and suck on cigars to scent their breath for greeting. The high lead was the Filipino singer Ruben Balbenta, imported from a music club in
Ruben Balbenta surprised the Mexicans by speaking a barely intelligible patois, sentences spangled with island provincialisms and idioms from the time of conquest.
‘Ay Murus en la custa!
Ruben Balbenta played the jarana left landed, but did not bother to restring the diminutive guitar. He merely turned the jarana upside down by the neck and proceeded to tear its guts out: mortally wounded riffs, the tropical surf, the sound of bugles, or drums, or eagles. Some nights the screeching of the dangerous birds would alert the duen de la casa, then Ruben Balbenta and his manileños, perfect as violons, would falsetto improvisations on Heitor Villa-Lobos’ homage to Bach.
As they sang they followed the silken lovers eating and drinking and dancing from table to candled table, the boisterous strings, the violins and the solo trumpet tracking the arc of the moon and the stars into moonset. Then the silken lovers would swirl gracefully back to the east, to begin again, unmindful of the mosquito bites that mottled their gleaming, passionate hands and faces, or the dewy stubble on the sweet lady’s flaunted armpits, this time in celebration of the dawn blooming over Acapulco’s bay and the cradling hills.
On weekends the guilds and families came to the all-you-can-eat Sunday lunch, to marvel at the giant groupers, each five monster feet long, starring back from the bottom of the glass aquarium. The saltwater cases were large, densely detailed - sea plants, seahorses, shells, starfish and blackamoor teeth, tubes and bubbles – as the Tlaloc’s underwater grottoes, visited in trance by the curanderos. The groupers, in pacific languor, raised slow clouds of white sand with the billow of their fins.
But this was before the Indians returned. First, from the southern highlands of the
In the evenings the young, long-haired Coyotes of the Tarahumara, armed with blowguns, lay in ambush for the automobiles bearing the lovers up for Chinese dinner – abalones, oysters, bull testicles in a thick, hot soup of tomatoes and chiltipiquines – and an aphrodisiac frisson raised by the turgid groupers and Ruben Balbenta’s La Paraguayita, La Malagueña Salerosa and the painful La Pubri-hing Alindahaw the singer had slipped surreptitiously into the menu. The Tarahumara had arrows tipped with construction nails or sharpened cable wire. And in the beginning the young warriors were quite content to bring the automobiles nose-down to a dusty, flopping halt, tires pincushioned with arrows, hissing – the Coyotes guffawed – fart.
Responding in spirit, the charros of Acapulco de Juarez welded steel shields over their tire-wells, so their carapaced Fords and De Sotos resembled the armored sea turtles crawling from the sea. The charros took to patrolling the mountain road armed with heirloom tejanas, vintage cowboy revolvers; or with up-to-date escuadras, Colt automatics in legal .38 Super caliber – and met the ambushers with their yip-yip-yahoo! bull-baiting cries and gunfire.
By unspoken agreement the charros shot as close as possible over the heads of the attacking Indians. Not only the Coyotes of the Tarahumara now, but a league of all the gangs and the tribes. Vaqueros y indios! Romanos y Cartagos! Cristianos contra Muros! Soon the charros were riding in costume, in dark brocades, in silver-studded ranch jackets and sombreros. The lonesome warriors reciprocated by painting their faces with old, ritualistic designs, and sticking turkey, duck and chicken feathers in their hair.
Which was how, in Acapulco de Juarez – though clavadistas performing for tourist dollars on the casino side of the ridge may protest – the Easter Week ritual of the Javelino began, that ended with a great prancing procession of all the antagonists, the war-painted Indians and the charros pistoleros, their families, partisans and supporters. Magdalenas from Mother Aster’s, but today only, gave freely of their wares in love, in penance. They came on horseback, on donkeys and mules, Fords and De Sotos, all bedecked in paper flowers, feathers, ribbands, antlers and horns. All followed the mad priest of the chapel of the tribes down bolson and barranca, and up the cliffs from where the annual celebrant, chosen by communal inspiration and called the Javelino, was flung into the rocks and the sea below. Once that was certain death, but the Mexicans in short shrift mastered the trajectory of the outward heave, learned to time the plunge perfectly to the lift of the oncoming wave, so that the Javelino struck where the sea was momentarily deepest and safe. Thus was the Javelino borne shoreward, resurrected in glory, in the luxuriant lace of the foam.
THE WAILING OF the Indians, the drums and the wind-whistle flutes wafted faintly into the room upstairs of the Todos Contentos Y Yo Tambien.
“That racket kept me up all night,” complained Sol Amaluriq.
The Oriental shyly ventured a joke. “God is dead,” Katsuo said hopefully. But nobody laughed, not even Grito de Patalim.
“We never know his name.”
“He never plays by the rules!”
“He does it to annoy us!”
“Senile old shmuck is lost again, I bet,” said Grito.
Which finally roused the other sleeper, Caspar XII. “How much?” he groused.
Grito de Patalim closed his eyes to the wind of the small fan. The lids were so thin and pale you could make out the black of his eye zigzagging nervously beneath the skin and the delicate green veins. The line of the scar turned down at the ends. “Well,” he began thoughtfully, quietly, as he did not want the others to hear. “How does twenty thousand red talents sound to you?”
“How about fifty?” countered Caspar XII, dropping his voice also.
But too late. “A wager!” Sol Amaluriq accused.
“A wager! A wager!” the others chorused.
“This,” Caspar XII hissed primly, “is between Grito and myself!”
“Unfair! Unfair!”
Grito de Patalim now stood up. He looked at Caspar XII, who was rubbing his eyes angrily. Grito then turned, shrugged his shoulders, and pacified the others with his upraised hands. “Okay, okay,” he surrendered. “Might as well while we wait. It’s the hour, the minute that Kurtz walks in that door. Closest time without going over. One ballot each. All ballots into the hat. One hundred thousand red talents.”
They summoned the assistant with the cashier’s bell. The young man nervously folded a sheet of white writing paper, tore along the folds and handed each Metaphysical a slip. They then shuffled to different parts of the room, to ponder their timepieces and the
“Fucking Kurtz is senile,” announced Sol, wetting the tip of the pencil with his tongue. “Fucking Kurtz is lost.”
FILIPINO RABAGO, TUMESCENT with morning and urine, opened his eyes to the sun-blanched curtains and kicked up from his cot. He had slept a full two hours and was late. He grabbed the large welcome placard he had pentelled before he slept and in minutes he was out of the warehouse, in the car, acid fizzing in his guts, and into the dawn streets.
All his life almost, except for the brief time he was married, Fil had slept in cots. As a boy, he had an American GI issue beech-and-canvas cot selected from the army surplus rack at the market where, like resting bats or vampires, they decorated the galvanized roof, rattling with rain, of the vespertillian cavern. Later, in the bed-and-board lodgings while he schooled, on alloy frames with sharp, cutting edges where Fil left the vague mold of his recumbent, dreaming form – half-a-cast, half-a-cast – on the shiny weaves of black and red, plastic mimicking reed exactly, even how it frayed.
Young Fil Rabago sanded off the sharpness critically, acknowledging with his fast-learning eye the cost implications of the additional operation to radius the edges. Even then he saw the minor modification to bypass the obvious procedure and produce frames you could test with your palm, with no fear of injury; if anything, with pleasure. That idea was going to make him comfortably off someday, he thought. But he was sidetracked away to sea, to sleep on ships’ cots on the third-class deck. To sleep on travelers’ cots, field cots in the bunkhouses, cot-beds for “visitors on assignment” that deprecated invisibly into the efficient corners of the temporary shacks in the workmen’s camps. Beds for transients. Pilgrims’ beds.
The call came at two in the morning. Fil had been lying down, reading, listening absently to the drunken drums and the wailing of the Indians tumbling down from the hillsides. He allowed the downstairs phone ten demanding rings – a wrong number – for Fil was sure there were no messages reaching for him in the dead of night. The ringing stopped, then began again.
Fil Rabago had been one of the first to go. Rather, one of the first in the wave that lifted out with war’s end, on the heels of the newly inducted sailors that embarked away from the American naval facility at Sangley. But long before Fil was the Tapiro, pursued by sad love and the sheriffs, who stowedaway out of the bay on an English tramp, with its prow on the evening star. This restless, bachelor granduncle was discovered off the coast of
On the top deck were an American couple and their infant child, whose amah had been struck senseless by the heaving of the ship. The Rev. Par Haglund was a missionary to the hill tribes, the Kankan-ay of the
Even then, while the McCullough saluted their victorious champions with foghorns and huzzahs, the young corporal’s private exultation had been tempered with unease. Wooden ships! Dead in the water, it was a picture-book fleet their navy had destroyed, and decrepit. An eighteenth-century play armada encountered lately only in those large colored drawings that illustrated pirate tales in boys’ magazines.
There, said Duece Haglund to his mates, folding the telescope and pointing. The Marines followed his finger to the far edge of the bay where the night lingered with the smoke and the rain. Through their own spyglasses, passed from pale hand to quivering hand, they saw the German warships, steel and ghostly grey, their large guns bulging under heavy tarp, communing with flags and the staccato flash of their electric, signaling lamps.
There! Duece Haglund repeated happily, his teeth chattering in fear, there is the worthy enemy!
In the hold of the McCullough, the Marines quartered an Indian chieftain they were returning from exile back to his tribe, to open a second, inland front and hold the Spanish against the sea. The scuttlebutt was that this Indian had personally killed over a hundred of the Spanish in the violence before the truce. He was a small man, a tiny man really, smooth and still, who walked the deck with a distracted expression, bowing and saluting as the incredulous Marines sauntered by. Now, roused from his bunk by the noise and the cacophony of the La Paloma improvised by the boys of the ship’s band, the chieftain dressed himself up in his army’s pathetic gala dress. The uniform was sewn from the coarse, grey-stripped cloth sold in wholesale bolts on the Hongkong sidewalk, that was the standard lining for the cheapest European suits. Tailored in exact imitation of the Spanish officer’s parade tunic, the uniform was studded with plated buttons scavenged from a woman’s blouse. So dressed nattily to the nines, his Japanese cap held between his stubby hands in the manner of servants, the chieftain clambered up and appeared to reel at the sudden sight of the sunken fleet. The Marines thumped their rifle butts on the deck and pointed him down. Marshalling dignity, forcing up that perennial juju grimace of appeasement, the chieftain slunk back below.
The young Duece Haglund was to see hundreds of variations on that broken juju face, that tempted cruelty by declaring the bearer somehow unworthy of cruelty. His own savage response surprised him. As a sergeant at the captured navy yard, then with the volunteers shoving and elbowing the rag-tag, thieving horde away from the blockhouses and the trenches, he itched to give them hurt and waited for excuse. Every morning his Marines gasped awake airless, for the flap of their pup tents would be plugged solid with jostling juju, who had sneaked in past the sentries, watching and giggling, their rags immaculate though they squatted on mud. The objects the Marines hurled at them the juju retrieved and returned: the shoes toweled, the Bibles wiped clean, the canteens filled with cloudy river water. Later, the native marching band would blare through the tents, flanked by vendors and dogs. Their officers would promenade through the American camp, lifting the tent flaps with their canes, pointing, explaining, while their ladies and their brats respectfully nodded and ah’d.
Sometimes Sergeant Haglund would take his deck-sweeper, a short-barreled
When the anticipated hostilities finally began, Duece Haglund quickly received a wound of honor, a field commission, and the command of a native casco he converted into a shallow-draft, raiding gunboat. He armed his boat with a pair of Nordenfelt machineguns abandoned by the Spanish. While the ammunition lasted, the rapid-firing Nordenfelts harried the juju - their asses hanging down into the river - shitless, and lit them hopping madly from the reeds, clutching on to their hats, their trousers about their knees. Guided by the spatter and the dust, Duece Haglund would walk his shots up the church tower, then set the bells catenating, the bullets whinnying in all directions. When that show was over, breveted to captain, he sought assignment and was seconded inland, to the infantry of Bullard and Schwann, in the march south of
The young officers laughed.
The juju face was everywhere and up-close. On the prisoners and servants, the beggars, the idiots, the pimps and their prostitutes: sick, dog-faced women with huge piles of dry hair swarming with lice, whose few teeth and copious spit were constantly stained with blood.
It was on the face of the runt who suddenly bolted out of the bushes as Captain Haglund’s patrol tramped by. This was in the foggy mountains, away from the steamy coast and the seaside towns perversely celebrating their own capitulation, where the American soldiers found the pueblos abandoned, the hootches, the granaries, the grain the juju could not carry, torched. The juju had retreated deep into the jagged ravines and the jungle, and emerged at night to potshot the campfires or to take the sentries out with their reaping scythes. They also dug many leaf-hidden pits for the unwary, bristling with skewers of razor-sharp bamboo stakes laved in turds. One
They came upon the naked juju boy in the middle of the mountain trail, his upraised hand a fist enclosing an imagined spear. The Captain took that face off with a casual and unthinking shot. Through the smoke, the woman rushing behind the boy was instantly drenched in the fine shower of blood and brains: so much for so small a head! That same expression – hopeless, placid in hopelessness – under the boy’s invisible spear, was on their faces as the shamans danced so slowly atop the village earthwall, breathing chains of mist, years later in
Mrs. Mary Haglund was an ethnologist, who corresponded with Isabelo de los Reyes and Pedro Paterno, with Jagor and Blumentritt, who was writing and illustrating a book on the tribes of the
Bibi, bibi, the Tapiro repeated tenderly.
Thus, with the golden child burping on the primitive design of crocodiles slithering up her bib, did the Tapiro come to sail across the oceans of the world. He was continually surprised at the number of countrymen sailing the seas, aboard the clippers and schooners, the merchantmen and smugglers, the whalers and the fishing fleets. He saluted them in the seaports and the shanghai-bars, where he knew instantly among the Indians which were kinsmen. These far oceans reminded him of the yearly feast of the San Francisco of Malabon, when garlanded boats from far as
There was a reason why they were there, why he was here. The Tapiro intuited a lost story of adventure, a story of strong heroes with glad hearts and heroines of beauty and kindness. It is the tale of a great quest, a difficult journey over water on oared ships, of betrayal and murder, of dolorous monsters wrapped in ocean weeds that guarded the secret treasure. It is a long story, told and sang by the baylan over six consecutive nights in the midsummer, there in the pasture of the mountain kinsmen. The Tapiro crouched apart from the storytelling fire, too young and still uncircumcised, jealous of the laughter and fearful of the moment when the heroes and the ancestors suddenly fell upon the listeners, seizing their bodies and speaking through their mouths in broken, foreign voices. He could hear the words of the story, too, sometimes as he stares transfixed at the ocean, or in the pounding dreams he could not in waking recall. All the Tapiro could recover was the curse that concludes the story: Because of this that you have done, I shall each year in punishment, in perpetuity, take my choice of your dear children to the bottom of the sea. The Tapiro became convinced that whenever a ship went down, anywhere in God’s seas, drowning voices would shout for forgiveness in the heartbreaking dialects of the homeland.
Sucuru, Sinyur Panginoon! Saclulu!
THERE ALSO HAD been a literary uncle, Baraquiel – Mabarak! Mabarak! the angry cigarette factory workers hailed, wagging their uplifted placards and flags, demanding to be calmed again by one of his ravishing lyrics – who was born exactly with the new century and suckled in the sweet milk of what-might-have-been, and who resolved, in his words, to experience the
Mabarak jumped ship in
At the pier, with his secret dreams of personal heroism and his other purposes slung over his shoulder in his seaman’s canvas sack, Mabarak stopped to listen to the fort’s cannon boom in salutation. He walked with the crowd toward the sea and saw, first dimly then clearer with each shouted Viva!, the flotilla of sailing ships hove grandly in, on the wind of the African sirocco and another time. The long vanished time of empire, when the standards of the Spanish lords and knights fluttered in gracious triumph among the lances at
Cartagos! Cartagos! ‘Ay moros en la costa!
Mabarak ran ahead of the jubilant crowd, then turned to face them, dropping his seaman’s sack to lift his hands and shout, “No! No! Do not let them in! Do not let them back!” But the crowd surged through him, knocking him flat on his back and shredding his sack underfoot, his clothes and books disintegrating in the wave. The priest and his thugs began to stomp at him as he tried to regain his feet.
Anarquista! Comunista!
Anti-Cristo! Judeo!
So he fell again. Seeing the sky he laughed the blood and dirt from his mouth for he found it suddenly hilarious that they did not call him Indian, or Romany, but Jew.
Quos vult perdere Jupiter, prius dementat.
And there the madmen stood. Exactly as Rizal foretold. The cruel old men with ashes on their uniforms, on whose watch everything was lost. There, returning, the Marques de Ispegui himself, who was hostage to Aguinaldo and the mutinous Tercios of Cavite, now set to avenge his dishonor on the timorous of
This literary uncle wound up with the Internationals, with the Brigada Simon Bolivar, with volunteers from the former colonies, in the service of the Republic, for the cause of liberty, autonomy for the proud and loyal regions. If noble Rizal were alive, surely he would serve with the Bolivars!
But to his dismay, Mabarak found himself segregated apart from the intellectuals, the ideological firebrands and zealots. With other Indians, mules and half-castes he was assigned to push-pull the caissons across the muddy ground, to bear the ammunition boxes, the sacks of potatoes and rice, among the riffraff of the Yaqui, Chamorro, Zambal – who came to Spain not for any ideal of human brotherhood, but for the chance to continue slaughtering the Spanish, as they had done, they contemptuously whispered, since the beginning of time. Mabarak asked in his wanderer’s pidgin of English to be transferred to the Brigada Abraham Lincoln, with the communists and the Negroes.
That night, no matter how hard the two of them tried, he could not get it up. Artillery fire was crackling in the distance and, closer, the chatter of machine pistols. Downstairs, the Negroes of the Brigada Abraham Lincoln snapped their long fingers and harmonized, their eyes wide and round. The spirit is moving all over this land! Cockroaches flitted across the cigarette-tortured, dusty mat. Certainly, she was skinny, careworn, her breath when she coughed acrid with raw iron and tobacco. Not at all like the glowing chulas in the pictures by Luna. But she tried. She stroked his penis, spindled it in her dainty pink spit, and even when he had finally given up in shame and rolled on his trousers, she was giving it one more try. From below she sniffed at it and licked it, fondled the tense scrotum in her hands, and when he looked he was startled at how black he was against the consumptive pallor of her face. Slowly he gorged, purpled. Feeling it nudge against her nose, she looked to see her savage lengthen dumbly up toward her fever-sparked, happy eyes.
Sometime before dawn the weary Abraham Lincolns took up their rifles and their packs and trudged down the road to defend the next light under the gun. The progress of sunrise, perhaps, the change of seasons. A gathering of the illuminati in faraway
“Pardon me, comrade,” the old woman said shyly, through the smoke of her cigarette. “What nation are you from?”
Mabarak moistened the tip of the pencil with his tongue. “I am Filipino, comrade,” he answered.
“Of course you are.” A bright smile rippled across her broken mouth. “I knew you were. I recognized you.” She turned as if to go, then stopped. Something – a girlish, passionate memory – moved beneath the oyster milk of her blind eye. She then said, “I was the wife of your father. When I was young I was the wife of all your fathers!”
A few lines of that poem survive, scrawled on a piece of lined schoolpaper, brittled by folding and unfolding time, and the penciled script is fading, as to a distance.
If among the Colchian Lords
Our fateful Company blaspheme
Thy Shining Name, impress
Our sacred memories of Love
For honor and for Zagreus gain –
Exact Thy Holy Vengeance as Thou must
And judge by the manner that we fall
Which was poet and which not.
WHEN IN HIS TURN Fil left, his hometown of Lakambaga turned out to see its young engineer off to change the ravaged face of the world. They came to the new airport – so hastily hammered together! – in a caravan of rebuilt long jeeps, the vegetable truck, formerly a GI weapons carrier, crammed with the brass band in gala uniform and all its instruments. All the children were released from school to join the aunts and uncles, the mountain kinsmen, the postman who was the jueteng collector. By dispensation of the mad priest they carried the San Miguel – whom they privately addressed as Juan Bato, as the grandfathers did, it was told – his spear upraised, who guarded the communal granary. Luzviminda Peredo gave him her handkerchief, embroidered with frail red florets, scented with her talcum powder and her tears. They all posed for the photographs that reached him half a cheerless and cold year later, the handkerchief worn to nothing, for he had forced his eyes shut, gilt himself in the frail florets and spurted nightly there, in the camp up the wind-raked Koppeh Dagh, the dull grey mountains of Iran, on the Russian border, where they endeavored to tame the Atrak with a dam.
The pictures were with a packet of letters from relatives and friends, some written on their behalf by the town letter-writer, wishing him health and happiness, announcing needs, illnesses, births and deaths. They were B&Ws, 10 x 15s for framing, with the lovely Lubi Peredo four people to his right. Fil was in his shiny, black, dancing suit, the envelope of his x-rays tucked under his arm. His eyes and hers are shut, it seemed, against a blow. Peering out of the window - where, through the surveyor’s 12X telescope, he once spotted a solitary bear or lion, or perhaps the last of the long-maned Caspian tigers – Filipino Rabago felt the breathtaking gorges of the barren mountain gouge sharply, suddenly his heart.
He counted ten more rings.
And, again as in times before – in
Fil Rabago, no longer young, no longer a builder or engineer but warehouseman, dutifully catfooted downstairs, jangling with his keys. He felt a faint amusement at the shamelessness of his melodrama as he lifted the office phone. He said Hello in his kindest voice, the voice he had made many years ago, painstakingly by the recorder, in readiness for this fantasy of responsibility. Of course, as far as he knew, no one he loved in the islands remained alive, and on the phone it was only the boss, Obregon Li, already angry.
“Fil,” Obregon Li said. “One of our
“Yes sir, Mr. Li. I can do that,” said Fil. Then he asked, “Is this the usual courtesy?” Meaning, should the supplier be taken to Mother Aster’s?
“No, no!” said Mr. Li. “It appears that their Mr. Cortes is no longer young. And not very important. Head office did not even schedule a briefing. I suppose we’ll have to take him to lunch before he goes, though.”
Fil was relieved. “Where shall I take him?”
“No instructions. They made their own arrangements. You’ll have to ask him yourself.”
“I’ll take care of it, Mr. Li,” said Fil.
“By the way…”
“Yes, sir?”
“Head office says keep everything simple. Low key. No one wants to tempt the kidnappers. It blows the premiums sky high. Use the service. Mr. Cortes will understand.”
Fil Rabago took a plastic wastebasket into the garage and removed the litter from the service vehicle, an old German Ford, pretentiously named after the idyllic mountains. The gas gauge read almost empty. He cleared the cab and trunk of the boxes and the molt – bits and pieces of the car that had fallen off through the years – and felt under the mat for the spare. It was soft. He took a can of air freshener and sprayed the cab and trunk, sprayed – as a finishing flourish – under the hood.
The Taunus chug-chugged sluggishly before the engine turned over into a refined hum that made Fil smile. During his idle time he had worked the old engine himself. He took everything down and apart, and carded and cleaned every part that could not be replaced. He re-bored, re-wired, re-lined, re-timed. He adjusted and re-adjusted the wings of the diaphragm, so the engine inhaled its air deeply as a bawling baby. Now, Fil swung the car out into the moonlit night. At the streetcorner, a small party of warriors had put together a makeshift altarage. They were Coyotes of the Chol, tending a small fire and saluting a tusked, hirsute image of the Javelino they had nailed to the post. Their faces and hair glistened in pig-fat and urine mud. The lights of the car interrupted their prayers, and they stood up cheering, waving their slings and blowguns. “It’s
The guard at the gas station was southern Yaqui. He was grumpy with drink and sleep, and muttered darkly at Fil’s accent. Twenty years and still the island Indian! The drunken Yaqui looked up and listened to the hillside drums. He ignored Fil’s request to check the battery fluid and the oil. “No acid, no oil,” he said, replacing the gas nozzle. “Everything’s gone. Gone to hell!” Fil himself squirted the tires and the spare with air.
He thought he should circle the streetcorner Indians, but it was a long ways to go around, a route that would take him to the territory of the Lacandon. These Coyotes of the Chol, at least, remembered him from the time he had blundered absentmindedly right into the middle of Vaqueros y Indios. They declared a truce at once and thanked God for delivering the Javelino. With much merry-making they forced his mouth open for liquor, hauled him up the cliff and threw him into the sea. For a long time afterwards the Indians were almost friendly, and in that first year nothing was stolen from the warehouse, the display cases or the yard.
On the other hand Fil knew that among the other tribal gangs, none were worse than the Lacandon, who sang of how they had followed Chapata himself – a Chalazar, part Lacandon on his mother’s side – on the dusty road to certain ambush. The Lacandon said they were genuine and original Chapatistas before that became newsworthy and fashionable. On their turf, people had been robbed and murdered. Even the odd tourist or two who had wandered off the beaten path.
So Fil snugged the car windows tight, hunched himself behind the wheel and drove back the way he came. The streetcorner was dark, the campfire trampled to smolder, the crucified image adumbrated.
Fil stepped on the brake, reverse geared, but it was too late. The brake lights lit the Coyotes of the Chol running silently, crouched, toward the car. He flicked the stickshift to first and the Coyotes disappeared. Then Fil heard the war-whoops and the steel-tipped arrows thudding low against the back of the car. They were aiming for the tires. He gunned forward and as he slowed for the turn he felt the tires collapse at once. The Coyotes were laughing. Fil slowed, began to crawl gimpilly forward on the tire rims. The Indians began to sing something tuneless and sad to the twanging of their bowstrings, their wind-whistle flutes and the makeshift drums.
Adiós Emiliano, adiós!
Adiós Emiliano Chapata…
Burchiguiz cordobano
Y’espuelas de Oro
Adelante del Mar de Plata!
At the garage Fil saw that all four tires were totally ripped. He left the arrows in the tires: Let Mr. Li see. He padlocked the doors, went to his room and slept.
All the roads were crowded with traffic. There were vehicles of all kinds, and walking throngs of devotees, flagellants and animals who impinged on the motor lanes and ignored the horns behind them. When Filipino Rabago reached the airport the 127, five-fifty from
Sr. Cortes, Aleph-Buitenveldert Construction, the placard read.
OLD KURTZ SAW the sign but he had, for the moment, forgotten his name. He fretted an hour at the airport, holding tightly on to his black leather bag where, mothers used to tell their children, he kept the souls he had stolen. The pimps, beggars and flimflam folk on the prowl looked him over. Finally, muttering under his breath, Old Kurtz boarded the airport shuttle bus to town. When the curandero raised the image up to the glass window of the passing bus, Kurtz remembered his name scrawled on the placard held by the panicked Indian in the airport welcome lounge. Kurtz decided it was their fault, let them stew. The day was pleasant and breezy, and he had not been in
At the restaurant in the lobby, Ruben Balbenta, on a five-day only gig, led a line of Indians called The Fastest Hands In Mexico in extorting a tinkly tune from the marimba boards. Kurtz absently indicated the almuezar continental. What did that mean? he thought, suddenly nervous, as the waiter walked off. When his order came he wanted to, but did not, say, This is not the continent I meant! No, this is not the continent I meant at all!
Wordless, Old Kurtz slowly sipped by turns the cold orange juice and the hot coffee. He took a deep breath before he shook the slices of ham unto the tablecloth. His disgust of pork was genuine, removed from superstition or symbolism. He had seen pigs eat their own feces with concentration, shaping the turds with their raspy tongues. He had watched boars gorge themselves on ripening corpses and was convinced this was not natural predatory behavior, but malice. Once, off
Old Kurtz gagged and shuddered. He quickly wrapped the buttered toast in the paper napkin, signed his bill, and strode out bag in hand. In the street hordes of beggar children crowded the tourists. Kurtz waved them off for a couple of blocks until only one Indian boy, sniffing at a small plastic bag, followed ten steps behind.
Old Kurtz walked toward the harbor, finding his way by the incline of the streets and by the breeze and the smell of the sea. The place had changed much. The streets were wide and crowded with Indians in ceremonial clothes. There was a somber band followed by a procession of images on the shoulders of women. They had made a style of these swarthies, Kurtz thought, everywhere those crazy Spanish went, black gods. Another misunderstanding between the dullard of the Sephardim and the equally inept magicians of
Old Kurtz lowered his head and walked away from the tourists taking photographs of the procession. Some of them were on the plane with him: retired people and many Orientals, but also attractive young men and women in dark glasses and tropical dress. Crossing the street he examined the objects in the flea market. Bells, candles shaped like crosses, dried things, beasts of wood and stone, weaves and jars and carvings. Many of the items were marked with firewheels and sundisks. The Indian was paying the white man back in trinkets.
The boy on Kurtz’ trail called softly to him.
Whose utterly, utterly outrageous move was that? Grito’s perhaps. Or Caspar XII’s? Maybe Amaluriq, that bloody, ill tempered nilly! Kurtz shook his head. Time may be taking its toll at last. The loss of memory, an impatience with records and facts. Convention. Rigidity. Repetition. Finally, Old Kurtz chuckled, predictability. But it happens. Habit, the very thing they had that giddy time foresworn at all costs to avoid. They rode capricious, uncertain omens, bad dreams, favorite numbers. Alexander and Sol. They had become predictable, at least to him, though of course he will not to their faces tell them. That seemed the point. Not to tell. So they would, in avarice and astigmatism, continue to favor the obvious odds. Oh!
Luck and wit, more wit than luck, and it was this town’s turn again – not Vallarta, but this old town – after three hundred years. The markers moved, a thousand black talents maybe, and here was Ava Gardner, Richard Burton – no, not the explorer – and Tennessee Williams, of course. Along with all those Indians summoned here, knowing nothing except that God, this afternoon, is dead. Kurtz wondered if poor Tennessee was still alive: so frightened he was that Hemingway would knock him down, at the Havana reception hosted by Castro, in the virgin blush of victory, while the fortunes of the sugar trade roller-coasted then dropped. “He’s going to hit me, I’m sure. Ernest hits people like me,”
“For one million pesos,” called the Indian boy softly, sniffing the salt green ooze back into his nostrils. “Fuckee-fuckee.”
Old Kurtz stopped, turned. “You are an unclean boy,” he said, barely able to contain the quaver in his voice, "and will die young.” He picked up a stone and lobbed it at the boy, who avoided it easily. The boy smiled idiotically and began to thrust his hips back and forth at Kurtz. The thrown stone clattered among the candles, the jars and the Indian women. Someone yelped, then the large, dark woman in the reed sombrero and mauve devotee dress scrambled angrily to her feet.
The large woman looked at Kurtz, who had half-turned to flee. She squinted her eyes then opened them wide. Crossing herself with her thumb she said, “This cannot be!” A volcanic tremor seized her under the devotee dress and knocked her down on her knees. Old Kurtz completed the turn and ran.
The other market vendors and the Indian boy – his hands quick for her wallet – tried to lift the large woman to her feet. She pushed them roughly off – a burst of sweat and sequins – stood up and fell again, this time on her face, weeping madly, thumping the ground with her fat fists.
“What’s happening? Help her!” cried the vendors.
“What’s wrong with her?” asked the young American woman.
“A lunatic,” answered her boyfriend, whose filtered cigarette was half-stuffed with sweet marijuana. “A witch.” He inhaled deeply and handed her the stick.
The band with their horns and drums shuffled forward to look. The women bearing the dark images followed the musicians, but seeing the stricken woman, drew quickly away. The tourists came closer again, this time to take pictures.
A young policeman dispersed them with a whistle. “It’s alright,” the policeman said. “It’s the heat. She’s fine now. Move along.”
“What was that?” the young American woman asked her boyfriend as they walked away.
“Big shit peyote. Big shit mescal.”
“That was Howard Hughes!” another American woman declared gaily to her husband, her face shining in inspiration. “I swear to God that was Howard Hughes!”
And that the young policeman heard.
AT THE AIRPORT Fil Rabago finally worked up his nerve and called Obregon Li, already in the office. “I do not understand how I could have missed him,” Fil said. “I was on time. I had him paged so many times they got quite angry. I walked for hours with the placard. He’s on the manifest, alright. He must have taken a taxi. I’m so sorry…”
“I mean, goddamn,” said Mr. Li, “how difficult can that be? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to pick up someone from the airport.” Whenever Mr. Li was angry, he would say something nasty about Fil’s engineering degree.
“I’m sorry,” said Fil.
“You can’t do anything right. I told you to take the service. If he’s been taken, you’re going to get it. Can you pay the goddamn ransom? You’d better hope he has insurance.”
On the other end, Fil Rabago bowed his head.
BUT OLD KURTZ had walked clear to the seafront. He no longer paid attention to the Indian boy, who found no money in the large woman’s wallet, only colored stones and dried leaves tied with thread in little bunches, that he immediately began to chew. Nor did Kurtz concern himself with the large woman, in the reed hat and devotee dress, advancing on him tearfully on her knees, farther back of the boy. In the small park Kurtz found himself a bench, wiped it with a rag he kept in his back pocket, and sat.
In the distance the band and the marimbas clashed in discord, and grudgingly, into one of the seasonal set pieces. Old Kurtz recognized a faint coplas from the deguello, the terrible war-dirge that was brass bells, bowstrings, tambours and Berber voices before it became Spanish – and a
No, Old Kurtz shook his head. That was not the way it happened. Like most other things it passed, untidy, and no one noticed. Once the mist parted, they rushed at each other, yelling maniacally, humping in desperation and anastamosis. The gene pool coming back together, coming to breach reproductive isolation and maintain singularity of specie.
Nevertheless the music continued to move Old Kurtz to tears.
In one corner of the park a bronze plaque mounted on a slab of Aztec granite commemorated the
One of whores had tears in her eyes, and goose bumps running down her neck and arms.
“You’re crying,” the other girl noticed. “Why are you crying?”
“It is,” whispered the first whore, her eyes glinting in wonder and awe, “exactly as she foretold.”
“What? Who?”
“Exactly as the baylan saw it. Remember what she told us? She said, You will travel abroad! You will marry a foreigner!”
That afternoon, two Mixtec slaves unloading the ship slipped off the plank and broke the precious Chinese honey jar in its cocoon of reeds. While waiting for punishment the Mixtec stuck their fingers into the honey to lick, but the drowned bees had returned to life – some passing curandero had spoken the solstice vowels over them – and the bees rose to sting the faces of the slaves. In the evening, both of them were dead. Death from the ships. The Curse of the Felipenas.
Here, once, pearls, musk, fragrant woods and silk, loaded on wagons to Vera Cruz on the Atlantic through a coast-to-coast gauntlet of Indians, then on to
The Indian boy moved quickly. Halfway to Kurtz’ mouth, the boy snagged the bread. He then ran backwards smiling broadly, rolled his bony shoulders and pointed at Kurtz. “You!” the boy laughed, and began to run. Kurtz yelled. The large Indian woman rose to her knees. But the young policeman had stationed himself on the boy’s path. He clotheslined the running boy with his nightstick, so that the boy collapsed, coughing out the magic stones he was sucking. He gurgled hoarsely, more in surprise than pain. The policeman struck him once more on the head. This time the boy blanched instantly to white, the blood gushing from his mouth. The policeman rolled the boy over with his foot. He looked at Kurtz, his boot still on the boy’s chest, and smiled. Kurtz dog-smiled back. The policeman unsnapped his Sam Brown drill holster, drew his revolver, pointed it at the boy’s head and fired.
AT THE POLICE station the commandant, El Alacran, finished off his glass of Pepino Cuervo – the good, golden stuff – to head off the murderous, every-afternoon headache. He had devised a lunch table from his desk. He had beans in tomatoes, fish and chicken. Bottles of carbonated sweet water, a case of Dos Equis, a bottle of Torres brandy. A photographer was summoned, and he sat on the bench with the passed-out drunks and the prisoners. Old Kurtz hesitated at the back seat of the jeep, and El Alacran, having twisted up the ends of his black, pomaded mustaches, waved at the sleeping drunks and the prisoners, came out to say, “Por favor?”
The commandant escorted Kurtz to the lunch table, sat him down and said, “I am sorry for the trouble. We found narcotics in his possession.”
“Maria Juana, yerba mala, tolohache,” confirmed the young policeman, offering Kurtz the wallet, as if for evidence.
“Indians,” El Alacran shrugged his shoulders, showed his palms to heaven. “What is a man to do? All they do is make is trouble. They give the city a bad name. Thieves, they all are, and try the patience of angels. Apologies. A thousand apologies. We will fix everything. I hope this unfortunate incident does not spoil your visit to our beautiful city.”
“I,” said Kurtz, “think you mistake me for someone else.”
“As you say, as you say,” said El Alacran, winking cheerfully at the young policeman. But his eyelid stayed shut and the commandant massaged it frantically before the lid popped back open. “I understand perfectly.” The commandant pretended to scrutinize the passport and the business cards, though the lead-based ink he used to color his mustache had, over the years, raised a tumor in his brain, and made him halfway blind. “Mr. … Cortes?”
By a subtle movement of his head the commandant invited Old Kurtz to regard, above the marksmanship trophies of his early days, the pictures on the wall. There was El Alacran, frame after frame, side by side with the great ones of this world. There he was, not yet comandante, but snake thin and eagle eyed in murderous promise, between Ava Gardner and Richard Burton. There, in the ten-gallon Stetson atop the spangled Shelby Cobra, with Michael Rockefeller. With Rocky Marciano, Audie Murphy, Dag Hammersjold, Buddy Holly. No, he did not expect his reluctant guest to know the other ones, equally powerful and important, but self-effaced, lesser known, guarded, secret.
“I want please to make a telephone call,” said Kurtz.
“Of course, Mr. … Cortes,” El Alacran winked again. “But a small lunch first. Perhaps a brandy?” The commandant poured two glasses full and waved one across the table. Kurtz looked at his glass a long time before he took a sip. El Alacran focused on his own glass, slowly slid both elbows back on the armrests of his chair. Then, as on a signal audible to him alone, the commandant snapped up the glass, drank in one gulp, lowered the glass and grinned. “Very good,” he said. The young policeman handed Kurtz the telephone on its long chord. Old Kurtz turned his back to dial. El Alacran smiled crookedly now, and cleared his throat. “If you will not be tempted to lunch, perhaps a photograph? You and I, and this fine officer who saved your life. A memento. A souvenir.”
“No photographs,” said Kurtz’ back.
The commandant struggled to maintain his twisted and dangerous smile under the toxic mustache. He spun the cap from the bottle and took a long swallow. He said, “What was that you said?”
Kurtz swiveled to face him. “No photographs, please.”
El Alacran burned in Cuervo and shame. The young policeman quickly gazed at the floor to avoid meeting the commandant’s dimming eyes. But the commandant was shamed not only because the young policeman watched, but because the people in the pictures watched also: important people, rich people, people of influence. There, with the trophy desert ram, ovis candandensis mexicanus, was the legendary gunfighter, Col. Cuss Edwards, that first killed a man with the .44 Remington Magnum out of the equally new long-barreled revolver from Smith and Wesson. The magnificent pistol in its Gonçalo Alves presentation case was shipped with a thousand rounds of newly-minted hollowpoints to the Joint United States Military Assistance Group in
The unfortunate was to be a Huk pachuco, captured by Col. Edward’s rangers in the swampland of Candaba, north of the city. The colonel exploded the gook’s head with a perfectly mushroomed hollowpoint to the throat, the bullet liquefying neck and bones to red mist, then ranging up, popping both eyes off the man’s head before blowing a hole the size of a white man’s fist through the top of the flying skull. Col. Edward’s rangers discovered there were a few thousand pesos on the decapitated head. The barrio fiesta featured forty-four goats, thirty-six Class A whores.
“Why thirty-six?” Col. Cuss Edwards demanded.
“Sir,” answered the blushing ranger, “they were all we could find.”
Yes, it was the man himself, in broken and slurred border Spanish, who told El Alacran that story. Col. Edwards was drunk and was still drinking, seated alone on the rifle bench in the evening of the big, Pan-American Metallic Silhouette championships, where the contestants had shot their hunting rifles at life-sized steel cutouts of gallina, borrego, guajalote and javelino, five in a line, out to a far five hundred yards. El Alacran coughed politely, sombrero in hand. Col. Edwards gestured him to seat. After a while, El Alacran ventured to inquire about the colonel’s long-avowed and loudly-proclaimed preference for the big revolver, now that the new crop of young guns seemed to be proving the escuadra superior as a short-distance fighting weapon.
The colonel unholstered the big Magnum and shucked the cartridges into his palm. The cylinder holes were large and deep as sockets on a holiday skull.
He then picked one cartridge, inserted it into a chamber, then spun the cylinder. He snapped the cylinder gently home. He raised the revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger.
“You see, amigo,” drawled Col. Edwards as El Alacran gathered himself from the floor, “the revolver is a wheel of prayer.”
“Por Dios y por santo!” El Alacran ejaculated, crossing himself twice.
“Exactly. A wheel of prayer. For the pure. For the devout. Observe: six spokes, one for each of the cardinals, for the horizontal and the zenith. See how death rotates counter-clockwise on the axis, as the soul moves by stations toward release. A wheel of prayer, and an instrument for divining God’s will.”
The colonel replaced the cartridges in the gun. He holstered the weapon, pressed the button on the safety snap. He said, “ A lifetime’s meditation on the wheel, on the objects it can touch and obliterate, and one day, together, you become upaya. You and your weapon become a fluidity, an eloquence that permits you to ask for immediate, instantaneous judgment. Not later. Not tomorrow. But right here. Right now. Samsara, upaya, Nirvanah.”
He poured himself a generous three inches of the whiskey and drank. “On the other hand, amigo,” the colonel smiled brokenly, made the motion of jacking an automatic’s slide back and sighted El Alacran’s head along the pointed finger of his moveless hand, “your escuadra has one absolutely predictable reply. Boom!”
El Alacran flinched against what he would swear was the blast and hit of the bullet. The colonel’s face cracked into laughter. El Alacran wiped his face, checked for permission, and laughed also.
The colonel said he used to shoot the Mexican course in the old days, when the targets were real animals – chicken, turkey, wild pig and horned desert sheep – tethered to the rocky ground.
“No es lo mismo,” whispered the killer hoarsely, his blue eyes watering in the Jack Daniels and the memory of all the men and animals he had slain. “It is not the same.”
So, “Fuck you,” El Alacran said, advancing toward Kurtz.
“What did you say?” demanded Kurtz, bringing his black bag to his chest.
“Fuck you,” repeated the commandant. He tore the black bag roughly from Kurtz’ hands and tossed it to the young policeman. “Illegal drugs. There are illegal drugs in this bag.”
The young policeman hesitated. The bag he caught felt empty. He sensed something horribly wrong was about to happen. He asked, “Are you sure? Are you sure we should do this?”
The station telephone rang to their rescue.
The young policeman held the receiver up for the commandant. It was
Preceded by the police photographer, Fil Rabago, still bearing his sign, stumbled anxiously in.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” Kurtz asked quietly of Fil, sniffing the inside of the car. “Where were you? What kind of car is this?”
“I do not know how I missed you there, sir,” said Fil, shaking his head. He looked at his passenger briefly through the rear-view mirror. “I was on time and I waited.”
“What is the accent?”
Fil Rabago forced out a small laugh. “I’m Filipino,” he said, groping for certainty, confidence. “ That’s my nationality and my name.”
“What do you find so amusing?”
“Sir?”
“You laughed.”
“No, sir, I did not. I’m sorry…” Fil’s voice was suddenly shaking.
“And your Mr. Li?”
“He is Mexican.”
“Of Chinese ancestry, of course.”
“That’s correct, sir. Of Chinese ancestry.” Fil was very dizzy. Then his foot cramped painfully on the accelerator. Please let this be over soon, he prayed.
In the upstairs room of the Todos Contentos Y Yo Tambien, the six old Metaphysicals played cards listlessly. They glanced at the drawn-out sunset, consulted their timepieces over again. The assistant in the door-to-door missionary uniform, who was watching the winding road, looked up from the binoculars. The road was still in the flare of afternoon but all the lights on the big Mercedes were on: high beam halogens and hazards. “I think this is him now,” the assistant announced.
The Metaphysicals walked over to the wide-open window, and stood there in a row. “That’s him alright,” declared Sol Amaluriq. “Count on him to come late and in style!” His eyes were on his watch as Kurtz, bag in hand, walked forlornly into the room. “It’s mine!” cried Sol. The attendant, holding Sol’s ballot, nodded in confirmation.
The assistant flicked the lights on. Old Kurtz walked around the devise, assembled in his absence, with unconcealed irritation. The contraption, which occupied most of the room, loomed glistening above them. It resembled a beast, wings and talons, from some fantastic time of terror. It was decorated in waves of disks and flags, firewheels poised to roll, latitudes and meridians, atmospheres and deeps – talents on the betting pool.
“Do not worry about it,” said Grito de Patalim, clapping Old Kurtz about the shoulders. “It’s clean. I saw to it.”
“I don’t trust you, guys,” said Kurtz flatly. “I don’t trust you.”
As Fil Rabago turned the big car around for the descent, his headlights illumined the large Indian woman on her knees, calling towards the upper room of the tavern. Her eyes shone resignedly, like the phosphorescent night eyes of coyotes and cats petrified in the middle of the highway, before the inevitable whump, spatter and roll.
Quetzacoatl! Fil thought he heard her cry. Lord Quetzacoatl!
The Metaphysicals thought they heard her too, and looked at Kurtz uneasily.
“Don’t mind her,” said Old Kurtz. “Let’s play.”
“Oh-oh!” said Sol, grinning now. “Old Kurtz’ mad and there’s hell to pay!”
FIL RABAGO unlocked the gate and drove the big Mercedes in. He walked back to lock up the yard. He was not hungry, and he went straight to the downstairs office and sat in the dark by the phone. He may have dozed. But when the phone rang he was wide-awake on it quickly, his hand shaking.
Obregon Li said, “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, sir,” said Fil Rabago. He heard his own death voice again. Coarse and kind.
“You know you have been good for us, Fil. Good for us for a long time. You know that. If there was any other way…”
Who’s us? thought Fil, but he said, “Thank you. I understand.”
“He must be extremely well connected.”
“I should have been more careful.”
Obregon Li breathed on the line a while, then said, “You have money forthcoming. Maybe it’s for the best. You are no longer young, Fil. You’ve been with us a long time. You should be thinking of retirement. Of enjoying yourself. Of going home.”
“Going home,” Fil echoed. A large, warm tear startled him by rolling down his cheek.
Circling aloft, above the cheering Mexicans, the last thing Fil remembered was the bit of overheard trivia: the suicide falling died of a heart attack before hitting. Plunging to death, his life neglected to flash before him. Instead, Fil insisted, he met a monolithic slab, a rough-cut gravestone or a block from one of those jungle pyramids, rising up to meet him. The rock read: That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do.
The flat slap of the water over his head sounded like a shot. He pierced the sea, mammal again, all orifices shut tight. He sank, slowed, stayed, then began to buoy. He sensed some strong, elemental thing race from the deep to catch him and root him. When his air was all gone, he opened his eyes and saw his ankles pinioned by seaweed and the sand. Circling him, where the lambent sunlight filtered down, were a pod of great fish, groupers, pursing their mouths continuously, desperate to convey a message. He felt the whole ocean push into his ears, thickly through his teeth, his breast to break - the final, obligatory resistance of his scream.
“What did you see there?” demanded the mad priest, panting, jealous, as the roaring river of the Mexicans lifted Fil up and ferried him away. “What did you fucking see?”
“Tlaloc!” thundered the Indians in contempt. “You know it!
Since that drowning, Fil had known, sooner or later, this night was coming. He made no preparations because, the way he figured, he had bought the time. Time to make amends, to reconcile. To clarify again the certainties. What he was there – and now here – to do. True, they no longer remembered, and in truth neither did he, but for a time the Maxatec pointed him out as the man who had seen the face of God. And true, he had escorted more and more signatories to the bordello in the slums, but was still genuinely puzzled when Mother Aster slipped him another few thousand pesos.
“Consider it a gift,
Fil glanced at the strippers dancing to the music of Ruben Balbenta, who was slow to keep pace with the tourists’ changing tastes and had fallen on hard times. Two of the strippers were Visayans, sisters. Trapped, Fil waved at them, and both girls broke routine in perfect sync, thrusting their spangled crotches to acknowledge the greeting. Ruben Balbenta was holding the high A-rooy! A-rooy! his face pursed shut in pain.
“If this offends you,” Mother Aster said, casually laying the tip of the
internment.
Long ago there were nights when he would, weak with excitement, unroll the blueprints for the gadgets, the inventions, the solutions. He would waken his wife to tell her, here, this is the way we’re going to do it. Here are the tools and the implements. Oh, this must be a world of fools, for it is here – they are here! – so simple and obvious and elegant, and God knows I’m not too bright! To build spans across the void, across the empty nothingness. Long bridges and roads of connection detonating through the mountains. His rising voice would sometimes cause their infant child at his crib to stir.
She was one of the secretaries, an Armenian, in the work camp on the Atrak. She was not the prettiest, but like him, she loved to dance. On Sunday nights they mamboed and boogied with the other foreigners. Her name was
They had been gone a long time, Meggie and the boy. Perhaps, with them, that sureness of purpose and destination, the halo of night light that confirms the harbor. Instead there was the note, hissing with cruelty, and the empty cabin with the empty drawers and in the yard, like entrails of the disemboweled, towels, toys, records and books. Three times she said, “I am oppressed!” He had also then sat and wept, and remembered that afternoon picnic by the Rudolf. They were quarreling as usual and Meggie did not speak to him. The boy skipped stones across the water. On the edge of the lake, there was an old Turkana, his fishing spear poised over the still, malevolent deep, who had turned, for all the world’s concern, into stone. Into a startlingly familiar figure of dark mahogany that held the satanic underworld at bay. Only when the sun set, pure yellow over the lake, did the monument stir.
Fil took the photograph lit by the sunset: his wife, his son, and between them the African, his neck a long tower of copper rings and tribal badges. Handing the Turkana the American dollar, Fil asked why the man had staked the day, and who knew? – Fil’s hair fizzled at the thought – perhaps an entire lifetime, over that single, solitary spot. “Why did you stay?” Fil asked earnestly, about to cry. “Why did you not move on and try your luck somewhere else?”
He headed off the cry by burying his face in the towel and was instantly lost in the highland wood of his irrecoverable youth: small, pale flowers against the brooding green of the coffee trees, everywhere wanton in perfume. The trees and the flowers were veiled by a fog, and there were patches where the sun gilt the veil with soft gold, and the cool scented wind carried the morning call of the birds. Faintly, from a distance, Fil could hear the faint, slow drums of the enchanted, the inquiring who? of the ancestors who had spent the night searching for him. Fil lifted his head to answer. But it was only the dead leaves clinging crisply to his towel, exhaling the corrupt sickness of decay.
The Turkana, embarrassed by the foreigner’s ignorance, laughed and told him gently, as to a slow child: “This is the place of my inheritance. Here is where, if this be God’s time, I shall meet with God’s surprise. For now,” and here the old Turkana waved the dollar and laughed again, heartily, delighted at the thought that surfaced, suddenly apparent, in articulation. “For now, here is the reminder that God does not forget.”
Fil, Meggie and the boy laughed together the last time.
Now, among the cassettes, Fil Rabago fetched the one Lubi Peredo mailed with one of her letters. It found him in
Kumusta ka sa Guatemala?
Kumusta ang giliw ko …
How hard that made him laugh, the first time he heard it. How are you in
So now again Fil Rabago turned the music loud as it would go, crackling out into the moon-drenched night. That was the night the famous curandera of the Lacandon, in her reed sombrero and mauve devotee dress went howling from hill to hill to summon her lost Coyotes. The warriors followed her whimpering, wagging off sleep and drunkenness. They stopped awhile at the roadside cantina and by lamplight she noticed her pack had picked up an unfamiliar straggler. "And whose poor puppy are you?" she sniffed the man wearily.
"Once upon a time," one of the Chol volunteered proudly, "he was the man that saw the Tlaloc."
"Soy
"It doesn't matter," sighed the curandera. "They say in the olden days your people swam off the ships here to teach us to make river-palm beer."
"Good people," said the Maxatec. "Good beer."
The Coyotes lifted their heads in assent.
The curandera bade them eat the dried desert mushrooms, the last of the season. Then, drowned and entranced, they trekked back to the sierras of the revolution.
That was the night the tourist-season paramedics found the station commandant and the young policeman propped up against an electric post, where the Indians had hung the image of the Javelino, skewered with more than a hundred arrows, each arrow marked by the archers' secret names. In the desert the oil pumps creaked in agony as the level of the wells ebbed precariously down.
Mangako kang hindi magba-bago
At kailan ma’y maghihintay ako
Kumusta ka sa Guatemala?
Kumusta ang giliw ko …
IN DISTANT
“Tell me what you think,” asked the first recruit shyly, “I’m going to ask him for the numbers. What’s to lose?”
“He has no more luck,” the other huffed. “He has ran out.”
“He had plenty,” said the first, disappointed.
“Ah, it’s up to you. But don’t involve me. His luck has turned and you will catch it.”
“You’re right,” said the first recruit, shaking his head sadly. “But he had so much. Even now, more than you or me.”
The guard unlocked the barbed-wire gate. The building exhaled rags and ammonia. The officer-in-charge, cigarette in mouth, shuffled the cards. He did not look at the recruits.
“He’s inside,” said the officer. Then, as an afterthought he added, “Do it quickly. Do not hurt him.”
The cell door was open. Under the weak light, Col. Francisco Diego, hero of the revolution, sat on the cot. He was wearing a white T-shirt, yellow basketball shorts, red Japanese rubber sandals. He had a small San Miguel medal hanging from his neck on a thick, black shoelace. He had lost much weight. Not too long ago he was on television shows, on the cover of magazines, flashing his devil-may-care smile, his altered-for-celebrity jungle uniform festooned with dummy frag grenades.
“Let’s go,” said the second recruit roughly.
Col. Diego looked up and forced the recruit’s eyes down.
“Sir …,” said the first.
“Don’t let him scare you!”
On their way out the officer-in-charge stood to attention and saluted.
At the base of the high wall, the recruits turned the prisoner around and felt, to their relief, that he was also shaking. His shorts were wet with rain and urine. The recruits rack-cocked their rifles in unison.
Then, as if it counted for something, the colonel said, “Children …” He called softly, not quite a plea, but a recognition.
This startled the recruits. “We are not your children, you son of a bitch!” said the second recruit, but his mouth was dry and his voice broke.
“Children,” the man said again.
The recruits flipped the levers to automatic, dug in their heels, and triggered a quick burst, sending the man rolling, instantly dead, against the wall in a shower of pebbles and mud.
Only then did the white, smoking beams from the watchtower blast the darkness, and the sirens sound.
