Cape Engaño

Cape Engaño, Chapter 2(2)

2008-09-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

Cape Engaño, Chapter 2(2)

THE WORLD WRENCHED from its hinges. Dr. Mikkis Madamba had groped for the description along the uneasy ride, and here it was, self-evident, as the grinning cowboy, wired brilliant, rolled the squealing iron gate open for his car.

Past the guardhouse, the electrified wire and the attack dogs of his own sector, distraught families in their best dress had pursued the last pedicabs rolling out. The faces of the children, sullenly fighting to stay moveless as their mothers jerked them this way then that, were hard and streaked. Their wilted plastic dolls tremored like epileptics. Subterraneans and Creeks had crawled onto the streets, and the early revelers, still dripping in the foul juice of their habitation, were making noisome bonfires of discarded tires: angry wreaths blooming with billows of black.

Like a door, the afternoon suddenly banged shut. The man glanced at the rear-view mirror to see the driver’s green glasses up quickly at him. The intermittent booming, rounder and fuller than the firecrackers, was recognizably ordnance, heavy ordnance. Above the filigree of the joy rockets, machine-gun tracers made long orange arcs in the smoky sky. Every once in a while, a .223 off to God-knows-where singed the air. The world unhinged, the guardian of the door zonked. Appropriately, this was the night of the New Year. The cowboys were going to spray the town red.

Yes, There’ll be a hot time in the Old Town tonight!

The man on the wheel, called Kato, stuck his thumb up at the reeling cowboy and eased the car along the steep driveway. Many vehicles were parked along its length, including two armored trucks leashed to the stand-by generators, already rumbling in operation. Large spotlights on elevated girders were trained at the villa from the lawn, so the megaron loomed larger and brighter even. The other drivers, mouths deep in their supper pails, turned to watch the car and wave.

Kato, who seldom removed his wasp-green cyclist's glasses, hopped out to open the rear door. Dr. Mikkis Madamba, Regional Representative, closed his eyes, curled his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and slowly tried to soften and breathe away the tension bunches clenched from foot to face. It was Old Three Hundred who taught him the breathing sequence, the movements, and the nonsense syllables recited to the dance. "It takes away the fear. It makes you calm," Old Three Hundred explained. Old Three Hundred, who would, by now, be dead. Dead with his gaming cronies, those softly gleaning Orientals at the fan tan club in Flushing, where Old Three Hundred used to take him - "Surrender me your money already, you packers! I can't packing lose! I have my good luck here, my anting-anting," he would announce to a welcome of many dialects, a rolling crinkle of eyes and metal teeth - to sit silent and obedient, sipping citron-scented tea, watching the groupers in the food tanks unravel their fins. They lost touch. One day Mikkis did not need him anymore, then the old man was no longer there. Mikkis did not visit, did not call, though sometimes he knew Old Three Hundred was one short block away, sprawled on the curb, propped up against the mailbox, merrily waving his paper-bagged fifth at the passing prowls. One day Mikkis simply turned the corner and let it go with the fast, chill wind. He then opened his eyes to Kato's luminescent glasses and blew out the last, silent ki-yay! of the exercise.

IT WAS THIS time of year, on that prophetically botched practicum in southern Egypt, that Mikkis was first allowed his ten minutes to anywhere. He signified he wanted to greet Ina in New York. When his turn came he was seated in front of the big monitor as the technicians set the dials. While Mikkis waited the earphones relayed Christmas carols. "Standby," the voice broke into the music and the jingle bells, "here she comes." Then his mother rose to the surface of the screen, resolved into colors, into movement, sound. She was artfully poised beside a studio fireplace with a real fire going - still the lovely woman. Mikkis imagined she framed the shot herself - it was a trans-Atlantic broadcast, after all - and perhaps draped some of her superfine stocking net over the camera lens to soften and make her elegant, high-style features younger.

"You're looking very well, Ina," Mikkis began. She had refused to lift her face, knowing no doubt how wonderfully well certain faces aged. Still her skin was drying closer to her bones, to line an early hint of the contours of her skull.

"You also," she said, and surveyed her audience.

She nodded beautifully at his pleasantries. Then, sensing he was eating up the time with prattle, she cut in to deliver her spiel to all, using her son as focus, in her luxurious, raspy voice, her well-versed off-Broadway phrasing, with unexpected pauses yawning suddenly between words, for the goodwill to come pouring into the spaces. As the rest of the station stood to applaud, Mikkis shook his head in affectionate admiration. Ina was an excellent actress: much too good for the commercials that were her - and for a long time, their - bread-and-butter. She did all the civic centers, all the little theaters, retirement homes and playhouses from Barber's Point to Bangor. She did the occasional feature or television film - playing Orientals, native Americans, Latinas, blacks. She was quite popular for the long-running Lincoln-Ford series where she was an abrasive Atlanta grandmother who knew everything about cars.

When Mikkis was a child, she towed him along in her rush for readings and auditions. It seemed to him then they were always running after time: chasing after busses and trains, rushing to meet appointments, schedules. Up elevators and ramps, their heels tattooing up and down the subway stairs. But she never forgot to leap momentarily out of the race, to look him in the face and create with her booming smile, a garden stillness. "Cheer up, baby," she would say and pinch his nose. "Cheer up!" Then she would bound onstage - coltish, tomboyish, incandescent - and declare, "Hi! I'm Lumen Madamba from the Philippines!"

But then, as now, she had absolutely no idea how to close. To Mikkis' embarrassment Ina asked the entire station to link hands in Christmas prayer, the singing of "Silent Night", including the dutiful service staff, all Muslims.

No, she never quite got the hang of the exit. At the end, Ina wanted to go on: the character poised for the light a flickering minute or two longer, a second longer, bowed for the applause, her heart heaving happily beneath the sequins. She had spells of painless clarity, when she would rush through detailed instructions and insist that Mikkis write them down. Once, she stopped to say, "I want to see another Christmas. I want you to give me my grandchildren!" She was playing spoiled child, and if she had been able, she would have stomped her slippered foot. Or given time, she would have demonstrated her versatility by doing several variations using exactly the same lines. Something TV sentimental, something kooky, something anguished and absurd from revived existentialist drama, fashionable again.

Mikkis did not know what to say, so he said, "Let it go, Ina. Let it go. You've had a good, good life."

He could have sworn he heard his palm on her face, for she reeled back, struck. "Oh, what do you know about life? A good life?" Her eyes brimmed over, and she turned away. "What do you know?"

Even now, even now, what do I know? Stepping idly into an empty elevator stall where the presence that wore her scent had ascended and gone, the voice and the cello that begins Villa-Lobos' Brasilieras for Bach, the smell of cinnamon or of newly-spread Sunday papers, or at the coffee shop in the morning, watching the hurrying umbrellas unfurl for the spring rain - Mikkis winced to suddenly remember. It was not guilt anymore, that was a long time healed over, but something like the lingering shame of presumption. Her pain alternated with numbness, and this she sometimes appeared to dread even more than the pain. Not to feel was to be dead. At the onset of those anesthetic episodes she would plant her thumb on the call button, hoarsely pleading for the nurse to pinch, to knead and pound at her bone-thin limbs, at the bone itself, for some ghost of sensation.

"We are not permitted, you know," Emma the nurse told Mikkis, tucking the ends of her short brown hair into her cap. "The doctors will know."

Night into dawn, Mikkis and Emma would watch Ina slip into sullen hollows of sadness. Into spaces where all that seemed to remain was the terror in her eyes. There would be random turns of self-protective bias, her reflexes functioning, but already disengaged from the arteries of need. Mikkis would accept the water cup and hold on to Emma's hand, and she would move forward to let him lean lightly on her breasts.

"Please," said Mikkis. "You must do something."

"Bruja!" Ina coughed suddenly. "Get your fucking hooks off my baby!"

They had walked the five blocks to Emma's apartment. She pressed at him from behind, kissed his ear and said, "This I can do." She kneaded the muscles of his shoulders and back. He was so tired, he could have gone instantly to sleep, but he forced himself back to critical attention, though she was in the shower for what seemed a long time. She came out to dry herself in front of him. She was big-boned and beginning to thicken in the buttocks and thighs. There was a noticeable darkening around her belly, above the brown pubic bush, and he imagined the coloration a childbearing mark. He avoided her mouth, so she, knowing, whispered she was healthy. He lay on his back and she rolled the condom down and mounted him. And it was only when she retreated below, her tongue barely perceptible on the skin of his belly, breathing small winds that briefly warmed the trace of her mouth, did she begin to sob.

"What?" he asked.

"Believe me," she giggled uncontrollably, "it did not cross my mind…"

"What?"

"We're Filipinos…" she bit her lip to keep her laughter low, and gave up. She fell on her back, convulsed. In the soft darkness, her eyes shone in tears of mirth.

He gathered the sheets about him. "I guess."

He had half-imagined she was Latina, though she was so fair. Her accent was Nebraska flat, where the framed diploma announced she had colleged. It was a big deal for some, Mikkis knew. Himself, he had always assumed something screwy about everybody else. In their case, old relatives in Flushing cackling up holy babel while cooking something secret, maybe criminal, during those hateful gatherings and holidays. He hated it when even Ina would dig in with relish, the sour fruit in vinegar, the innards, the blood dishes, the foul tidbits, the sauces noisome in ferment and rot. With the other horrified children near tears, Mikkis would try to force down the quarter-pounder, upon which the stink had settled. The old relatives perfumed the air thickly with Glade, because the stench disturbed the neighbors into calling the police.

It was at Ina's instigation that the old relatives had driven half-a-day upstate and back to get the young goat and smuggle it up the apartment. She wanted to concoct comfort treats for an uncle by vague affinity, just released from the loony bin. The uncle, young Mikkis heard, had been kidnapped by jungle Indians in Guatemala somewhere, had snapped and had tried to kill himself and others. Going into the bathroom to pee, Mikkis blundered on the kid hanging by a plastic rope from the showerhead, with torrents of blood and vinegar pooling in the bathtub. Old Three Hundred was sleeping off a drunk so the others did the job themselves. They wanted to show Old Three Hundred they could do it. The animal was butchered awkwardly, as it fought, jumping and kicking as it strangled itself. The relatives wanted the fresh blood in a basin, but the knife thrust to the throat brought on an unexpected torrent of bawling, bleating and feces. The relatives must have stabbed the goat a hundred times to quiet it. Then there was the anxious hour - everybody softly cackling! - listening for the police sirens, waiting to be deported.

Emma said, "We… smell different, you know what I mean. You know, under the soap, the perfume. Unlike anybody else." Then, brightly: "We smell better!" Mikkis was suddenly annoyed, unreasonably jealous and she sensed it. She took his hand to her breast again and said, "Don't be angry. Please don't be angry." He sniffed under her chin, her armpit. He breathed over her thick-haired cunt deeply, managed a small, hot whiff of her anus. But the difference was personal, as he knew. She was very fair, perhaps bleached. The brown hair was dyed.

IT WAS EMMA who found the deathwatcher in Newark and brought her back on the train. The girl carried her belongings, her dolls and rock-star posters in a tote bag from the toy store. She scraped her boot heels on the edge of the landing before entering. She was thirteen years old, and had arrived as a servant and companion to a rich Visayan lady, who came to die among her many, many children scattered all over America. When, word-of-mouth, the news of the deathwatcher spread, the girl discovered she could make big money almost every day of the year just by watching over her countryfolk transition to the other side. She was called Benny - Divinidad was the name on the passport - and she sat intense and sleepless on her watch, holding still the hands of the emptying old women and the alcoholic pensioners in the sure vise of certainty and connection, as they eased on. When they did, the girl too would be gone. She never came to the wakes or the funerals. The dead, Benny said, never disturbed her.

"This is not what I meant at all," Mikkis complained. "You know this is not what I meant."

"Listen," said Emma fiercely. "I don't know what else to do. She cries. Your mother goddamn cries all the time. The medication does not help. You know the sedatives don't help her. They help you more than they help her."

Mikkis turned to go. Emma touched his arm and said, "I'm sorry. Give it a chance. Sometimes it helps. All the hospitals use them. All of them have hotlines to these mumbo-jumbo people. You know, fakirs, voodoo. Anyway she's as close to authentic as you can get. So shut up. Sometimes it helps, believe me."

It was a thing the women of her family had always done. Benny's mother, her mother's mother before her. A family penance, a devotion, it was explained. As her mother deftly guided Benny’s hands on the wooden loom, she invested the little girl with the benedictions and the prayers, the nonsense vowels - the vowels of power and comfort dragged long and repeated over and over again like the lowing of calves in the grey evening - and the gestures, and the spun cotton threads patiently metamorphosed into the patterned cloth of another time.

But Benny had not gone into the cave, though the plot of land above it, from where the visitants from all the towns and islands used to begin their annual descent, had belonged - her mother claimed - to their family. Her mother claimed it was a great grandmother and her wild, strong sons who received approval from the spirits there. The great grandmother and her sons came by dugout canoe across the rough strait, out of the old fields now planted to cruel cane and corrupted beyond remembrance, fleeing famine and conscription, and rumors of enchantment and possession. The great grandmother honored the spirits of the new land with sacrifices and songs, and was allowed a wide swath of wilderness between two rivers and the sea to burn for clearing. Then the great grandmother walked a full day along the coast to town, silencing the yapping dogs that met her with a mad look and a pointed finger, to the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman sitting on her blue-and-white jar of treasure, who loaned, against the great grandmother's mark, the implements, the animals, the seed-corn from the trading store.

For a while the family almost prospered there, on their patch of green amidst the harsh dust of drought. They had good corn, with big ivory kernels grinning within the brown beards. They had sugar melons, bitter melons, watermelons, guavas and star-apples, gourds and squashes. Feeding deer and wild pigs had to be chased away from the jackfruit and the lychee trees that fruited low on their trunks. The rivers had catfish, mudfish, frogs, lizards and eels. There were fruit doves, pasture doves, rails and snipes. They ate well enough, so the stories began again to be whispered about. How the great grandmother blessed the fields with her menstrual blood. How she lay with unseen lovers on the furrowed ground, at dawn on the day of the seeding of the corn. It was even said that the great grandmother bartered a witching spell for a child - the lot's runt - of the remontados, to be decorated, then hacked open to summon the long-awaited, sudden rain.

The guards bound the great grandmother and took her on the trail to town. Along the way, the guards reported, she jumped into the river and drowned. It was days before they found her body, face down in the sea, broken by the river rocks and the rafts of mountain trees that had escorted her downstream. When they poled her out, her tattooed arms had swollen over her fetters. Her naked legs were clenched apart, as if she birthed the swarm of blue crabs there emerging.

The wild, strong sons understood this magic was the doing of the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman, who applied to take possession of the farm in default of the unredeemed seed, the animals and the implements. The wild, strong sons refused the offer to become tenants, claiming they were freemen, timawa, and that the debt had been paid many times over through the years. So instead the wild, strong sons burned the huts, the granaries, the dry corn stalks. They butchered the carabao, the hogs, the turkeys and the chickens to honor the woodland spirits, and held a feast for all the relatives and the neighbors before they fled to join the remontados in the mountain.

One moonless night the wild, strong sons sneaked back into town and stole the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman away in a sack. At their mountain hideout they commanded her - as she valued whatever remained of her wretched, thieving life - to lay for them one single basin-full of gold, in recompense for all the misfortune she had caused them. But the Chinawoman was tough and mean, and refused for weeks to go. She bit and clawed and tried to kick at them with her deformed, black feet. Spitting and cursing, she ate the boiled corn and the pullet eggs, slurped the water flavored with citrons and brown sugar, but she refused to go. Among themselves, the wild, strong sons despaired. "She will eat up everything," they said, and agreed to kill her and take the loss. This she may have heard, for she finally went, groaning murder in the bushes. "It's shit!" the wild, strong sons ruefully recognized, fingering the few bloodstained turds, hard as pebbles, knocking about the bottom of the basin. "We're lucky we did not step on it!"

That plot of land, like all the land around, was titled, fenced, planted to cane. It became part of the great farm, a farm larger than a kingdom, long before Benny's own mother was born. The small cove and the cliff were developed with Japanese partners, who built cottages, a diving facility, a golf course and a skeet range. But Benny's mother spoke of the cave often, her eyes fired by the oil lamp and the awesome image she breathed. The tiny entrance lay among the boulders where the sheer cliff crashed into the sea. It was gained only when the tide was low, through a suffocating tunnel scarcely larger than the body of a man, that suddenly rose into a cold upper chamber that was wide and high as the night sky. As you lifted the torches you could discern the niches on the cave wall, and within, the slack-jawed dead in their hundreds, among their tools and pots, crumpled in the sleeping posture of the unborn. Once, traveling by boat to the next town, Benny's mother showed her the cliff, careful to use only her head and her pursed mouth to point. The outrigger pump-boat skirted an exaggerated distance from the shore, as the constabulary and the guards had orders to keep the local people away, and a fisherman had been killed by tourists shooting sharks from one of the yachts anchored in the cove. On top of the cliff, the developers had raised a complex of receiving dishes and antennae, a tall, concrete cross, a statue of the Buddha in meditation.

To the deathwatcher, for the first time since delirium, Ina began to speak phrases in the island languages. "Oh, but I know that cave," Ina whispered, delighted, rising weakly from the bed into the Greek conceit.

"The dead," Ina saluted, sensing her spectral consort suddenly attentive about her. “The dead!” Her hand on the bedside table found her discarded spoon, and she began to ring the water glass, feebly as from faraway, but approaching surely, so that the girl straightened her dress to rise in salutation. All the bells and the flutes, the wind-whistle fifes, the hunting-horns and the bullroarers were sounding in the joy of the torches.

"Oh, the dead! The pure, oracular dead here wombed.
Mynthos of the serpents scatters the bones in shivers,
Casts each lot. Their empty eyes behold tomorrow.
A wind of bats exhales from the mountain's mouth.
Beware! Beware! Hold fast the earth, refuse to be reborn!"

Benny clapped her hands softly as Ina bowed and slumped back on the pillows, panting. "You are so good," Benny gushed, helping Ina take a sip of water from the glass. "I wish I had seen you on stage! You're a rock star!"

Ina moved her face from the napkin Benny was holding to dry her mouth. She said, "My own grandmother told me almost the same story." Then, lowering her voice, "Maybe the same story. Maybe we are relatives. Maybe you should marry my son. You go marry my son. Make it your Christian duty to save him from that ugly, cruel bruja."

Once, Mikkis and Emma entered the room to see the girl rocking Ina's grey, sleeping head. "Sleep my darling baby," the girl was crooning, "Mother is not far away…"

MIKKIS WAS BACK in Africa when Ina finally died. One of her theater friends wrote him how she would have loved the ceremony, the thanksgiving mass and the cremation. Everything perfect, with impeccable sensitivity and taste. He gauged the wind and slowly scattered the envelope of her ashes on the surface of the Turkana, in older maps still labeled Lake Rudolf. "My mother," Mikkis explained to the boatman coughing politely in the spray of dust.

"Bomama," the boatman waved his gnarled hand over the muddy water in acknowledgement, his head, his eyebrows grey with ash. "Bomama. Our mother."

Mikkis lay drinking his duty-free whiskey on the station cot that smelt faintly of illicit love and insecticide. A white jeep rolled dustily into the compound, driven by one of the interpreters. In the back seat, arms around the two whores, was the Minister-In-Charge. He too, in his impeccably tailored European suit and diamonds in his fingers, glimmered lavishly by starlight. Seeing Mikkis on the doorway of the guest cottage, the Minister gently backhanded the suit a few times, then waved.

"'Alo, monsieur," the Minister baritoned deeply, dangerous, releasing the dust and the whores to the sudden stillness. "Bonsoir!"

"Do not forget to wear your rubbers," commanded Mikkis sternly, saluting back by touching the whiskey glass to his brow.

The Minister froze, and then unlocked. "But of course," he rumbled, deep as drums, through his pitiless teeth. "Je suis un table!"

Mikkis listened to the laughter from the Minister's cottage, laughter that melded into screams, and the whip whistling into flesh over and over again, like startled flights of harvest birds. "Je suis un table! Je suis un table!" The whores cried like foghorns. The picture flashbulbs from the cottage lightened his room like a storm. Inexplicably, Mikkis began crying for his father, whom he never met. He strained to decipher the watermark glyphs on the high ceiling. He listened to the faintly echoing commotion as the last wild lions mauled the crocodiles on the shores of the lake. The bone-diggers in their battery-lit tents listened also, then resumed brushing off the stone of time from the bits of bone whence all of them had sprung. Ina and the deathwatcher, Old Three Hundred, the Minister and the whores. And though he had as a boy promised her he'd never be frightened of her ghost, in Mikkis' dream his mother tried to take him down with her as she sank unblinking beneath the surface of the primordial lake, with the algae beginning to bloom profusely on her and her ashen bed.

At the Center, Mikkis watched the line of cadaverous Africans who stank like tin cans of evaporated milk a week in the sun, and thought it quite remarkable - ironic, fair - that life could not be bought. Everyone, without exception, allowed only one. If there had been a way he knew he could have picked up a few for Ina at a bargain from this line. He could see it in their eyes. They were suffering life, they had made the decision, and it was ending soon. Surely, if life could be bought, here, this foul, fly-scourged, vermin-eaten row of the diseased and starving, their dirty plastic jugs and begging bowls by rote uplifted, at the edge of the lake where man was born - this was the supermarket.

Consultant on Population Development was his title, his first disastrous encounter with the multi-national, inter-agency bureaucracies. He landed with his planeload of condoms and pills, his Pleasurable Techniques of Contraception leaflets printed, somehow, in Portuguese. On the ground he found old-fashioned cholera, dysentery, TB, STD, malnutrition and war doing quite well without his help, thank you, in reducing the human density table of the Sudan. Reading the laminated ID card pinned on his jacket, they made him dump the leaflets and the contraceptives in the relief warehouse and whisked him to the refugee feeding center, to the clinic. He debated when to admit that the "Dr." was of the archeology of Greece. It had been a light-hearted college resolution to always use the title overseas, as doctors were preferentially treated everywhere, and nurses put out.

Scouting, Mikkis shared coffee and muffins with the unpromising, haggard Filipina nurses. Then, masked, noosed with a borrowed stethoscope, he walked into the crowded ward. He was blindsided by a steaming wall of stink. They were hemorrhaging into the soiled sheets from all their orifices, drooling liquid and sadness through their resigned, red eyes. Blood seeped under the loose skin from the rot within, to congeal in dead-black patches. To his horror, the dying stretched their bony fingers out to touch him, asking - said the embarrassed, giggling interpreter - for a little more life.

Immediately, Mikkis rushed to the clinic administrator, a Benedictine nun for confession. Her steely-eyed Teutonic fury slowly waned into disappointment and resignation - and when she glanced out of the window, into wrinkled webs of hysterical laughter. As the two of them watched, the people around the clinic made foodfires of his Portuguese leaflets - quickly foraged from the warehouse - munched critically on fistfuls of his synthetic progesterone pills, and the starving children made breath balloons of his planeload of prophylactics.

"You have brought us," the nun shrieked, "food, fuel, toys!"

Mikkis took that as absolution.

WHICH WAS HOW the Count's megaron was decorated, with a dazzle of balloons that seemed, by the spotlights and the torches, to lift it higher above the central command region, prostrate below, exploding randomly in pustules and the tire-fires of the Subterraneans. For a while Mikkis paused there, pretending to admire the balloons and the body-in-state, but that was when, briefly, he allowed the thought that he should turn away and run. As fast and far away as he could. From the corner of his eye he saw the lights of his car zigzag away then around as Kato maneuvered to confront the cowboy of the gate with the car's ramming grill. Parada tulisan, Kato had explained: the car angled and aimed at the opening, prepared for the quick, emergency exit. But his nervous feet took Mikkis unexpectedly into the glare where they collected the raffle stub from his invitation and the Count's bare-chested, softly nattering servants trained the cameras on him.

The Count himself, who had to shake his great, perspiring head mightily to find his guest's name, greeted him with a huge embrace. "Dr. Madamba - Mikkis - how good of you to come!" This evening's surprise was the gold doubloon for the eyepatch. The eyepatches changed, and the eye beneath. It depended on the portents of the day, or the theme of the occasion.

"Come now," said Mikkis Madamba, hearing a hint of his mother's seductive, theatrical rasp in his own voice. Wishing he had not quit drinking, he added, "Come later."

"Ho-ho!" intoned the Count, in mock shock, pointing. "Well done! Well done!" The Count excused himself heartily, and with the servants and the cameras turned away to the next arrival, a political commentator with a popular midnight show.

The cameras were the Count's long-running prank. He had cameras in every corner of the villa. Regular visitors had learned to expect the delivery of a tape soon after whatever celebration. Before the water ran out the tape may show them hurled fully clothed by earlier guests to the pool, to trash about the jumping floats of flowers and candles. It may show them wiping the seat of the toilet bowl before squatting down, or making out with one another in the rooms, in the garden pavilions, or in the lawn. Or the tape would show them passed out on the chairs, the floors. Sometimes the tape would contain a full hour of themselves unconscious, their eyes half-open, their heavy chests straining irregularly under that party's load of alcohol and drugs, groaning, farting loudly and often, with thick strands of spit or vomit dribbling from their mouths.

But the shabby, rag-tag group, called the Diplomatics, kept coming back to the Count's. Mikkis circled them slowly, keeping himself close to wall, nodding. Except for some of the military attaches, none had the remotest real connection with the embassies. They were, most of them, freebooters, stringers for the fly-by-night commercial houses. They had commissioned off the reconditioned machinery: second and often third-hand busses and trucks that had worked it seemed all the rest of south Asia, the obsolete computer systems, the power barges, the bulldozers and helicopter gunships. They had dealt in condemned bulk pharmaceuticals and surgical implements. And they stayed on in the confusion, with no more prospects nor destinations, no product presentation kits nor samples. No representation. They now spoke in the re-issued colloquialisms of cowboy-and-indian movies. They had, they said, "turned injun!" Those with local wives and families they called "squawmen" and the breeds - the children of the squawmen - swayed shyly, their backs against the work calluses on their mothers' knees, like a ring of fawns.

There were the freelancers, in their drab, multi-pocketed, foreign correspondent vests, pretending to interview the commanders. They ran a modest black-market - among themselves in the main - in drugs, in small arms and accessories. Where they dug up the stuff, nobody knew. Ice and acid, dung mushrooms, digitalis. Or hideout China, Danao and Afghan guns painstakingly handmade in imitation of Walthers, Roth-Steyrs, Astras and Stars. And green ammunition that had not been in manufacture for a hundred years.

There, lithe as dancers, were the ronin, young thugs in black silks who covered their exploration for meats and veggies as involved searches for the stragglers of ancient adventurism. The ronin, they claimed, were searching for the great grandchildren of the jungle samurai, a generation sweetened with tropical tenderness. The silken thugs did not have far to look, for the children and their mothers encamped in long lines leading to the verification centers. Those the ronin claimed as their own they bathed and deloused, and boated off in troops, boys and girls in white paper caps decorated with the red sun, singing, waving their tiny flags, Sayonara, Japanese good-bye.

There were the beer-bar owners, already rowdy, who brought the truckload of boys and girls with up-to-the-instant health certificates for the regular shows and the raffle. There were the Count's numerous business partners from his days on the south China coast - "llamas cortas," the Count winked - whose bosses on the topmost rungs of the ladder supervised the movement of veggies and meats. The cortas ran the cover companies: the printing presses, the luxury car dealership, the film studio. They sat with the party girls, the prettiest prostitutes being launched into careers in the movies, with their newly uplifted bosoms and behinds, their straightened teeth and noses.

"Mosey up, doctor," called one of the squawmen from the boneheap. "The natives are fucking restless."

"You got it," answered Mikkis. There were two or three empty liquor bottles on the table. Mikkis popped a piece of roast into his mouth and was surprised at how his saliva seemed to hiss around the meat.

"Party!" grunted Nestor, one of the disheveled older men, garrulous in drink. His contribution to the festivities was to read - while the Count sobbed into his handkerchief - something obscure and sweet from Recto or Rizal or Nick Joaquin. He collected his honorarium in whiskey, and stumbled about the middle of the floor, pugnacious in nausea and need, while the others milled earnestly at the verge of the lights. Directors and ministers in trembling threadbare, as the wives - sweating in their short, flowered Caribbean skirts - fanged the anaconda of the conga. Ta-ta-ta, who? Ta-ta-ta, who? they inquired in dread. The Diplomatics grasped the Caribs from behind, cupping their breasts, thrusting their hard-ons onto the flowers.

"Is he coming?" Mikkis, for want of something to say, yelled into Nestor's ear.

"Count sort of implies that every time," laughed Caramba, the voice of the midnight. "It's the intimidation factor."

"No, he's coming," Nestor insisted, hotly.

"They tell he's very sick. They say he's dead," one of the freelancers volunteered.

"Shhh!"

"They say the north sector has negotiated another contract. He's very mad."

"No," Caramba agreed. "They do not share, and he cannot collect. Maybe they funnel up a little, every once in a while, for appearances sake. But certainly nothing like before. I do not think he insists anymore on verification."

"How can he?" Nestor asked. "It's another country."

This is another country, Mikkis thought.

"But seriously," said Caramba, "you ask the Count for a copy. He has one, I'm sure. You have to see it for yourselves. They have armored vehicles. Sure, most of them they welded up themselves and decorated like jeepneys. You know, nickel plated horses and carabao. Multi-colored antennae. Buntings and ribbons. Giant speakers booming. And those cowboys are on some really heavy stuff!"

"I can imagine," Mikkis laughed.

"But they have big guns," Caramba continued. "Really big guns. Cannons, rocket launchers. Flags. All kinds of goddamn flags and uniforms. They run the games. They bring in the ships. They distribute the veggies and meats. Some people are getting very rich!"

On cue they looked up to see the Count approaching.

THEY ALL KNEW how the Count made his wealth. Meat and vegetables became prophetic foreknowledge, became bullion and jewels, turned into the coinage and currencies acceptable to the trader barons of the China coast - and to the vague speculares, Confucian and communist, in the mist behind. Almost to a man, or woman, they came to loiter around the Count's table for change to fall. They knew the Count had warehouses stuffed bursting with staples, and also hoarded delicacies from another time. When generous he would send his guests off with baskets of food, a drum of diesel fuel, generator parts, solar watches, Swiss knives. His alliances with the successful commanders stretched back - well maintained well-greased connections. Each was compadre, each mistress comadre. And the meat and the veggies moved. It was whispered that the Count and his protectors had island rancherias and plantations all over, and large factories churning out killer synthetics.

The Count had based himself in Manila long, but nobody except the maintenants and fellow gourmets in the deep holes knew of him then. He was not a mere count either, but an authentic marquis. Marques de Ispegui was his hereditary title, won and confirmed in bitter war by his foredoomed, bloodthirsty forebears. Though outsiders themselves, they were relentless against the surly tribes of the regions and the colonies, and the last military Ispegui soldiered far past the end, into court martial and disgrace. He was beaten, the Marquis spat out in scorn, not by the enemies of his adopted, beloved Spain, but by his own murderous protégés. Right at the hour of victory, and from behind. The Count's own impoverished father later returned to Manila, determined to break the curse and drink himself to death, on the desperate rumor that rightfully inherited property may there be claimed. But the Count's father found the partnerships dissolved through outrageous forgeries and the collusion of the ministers. Where the companies and the factories remained, the stocks had been watered down to almost nothing. Where the lawyers saw opportunities to recover, the Count's father found it impossible to deliver the grease required to ease the long, legal process along.

But up a maze of narrow, spit-stained stairs, through rusted iron gates protected by guards wielding heavy ceremonial swords, the Count's father finally found the finely wrinkled, tiny Chinawoman sitting on her blue-and-white jar of treasure distracted and uncooperative. You do not look like the Marquis at all, she may have judged disapprovingly, for her head shook side to side. The Marquis was a beautiful man. A beautiful, manly man.

"He said," began the Count's father, then coughed to catch the tremor in his throat, "to come to you if ever I needed help here."

The guards received his worn manila envelope bulging with papers and drew out the brittle, yellow documents for her. She brought the papers up to her face to examine and sniff - the faded inks, the dusty wax on which the vainglorious seals and rubrics were impressed - shaking her head and snarling softly at each page.

Her terms, relayed in whisper to the guards, so outraged the Count's father that the veins in his temples and jaw began to boom. He would have leapt across the room to break her bony neck, but the guards knew, and signaled with their swords they knew.

The Count's father stayed at a boarding house for single, elderly Europeans, and to pay his rent he rode the huge beer truck on its route, counting bottles and cases, and writing down how many of the empties were broken. On his days off he would make his round of the lawyers, the ministries, the trading houses. To his dismay he found even the titled solares sequestered by pintados, who made their rude encampments right up the crumbled walls of the city, as they had in the time of Simon de Anda, when pintados of the palm marshes and the llanos of the north came to aid the besieged of Manila. As before, they appeared intoxicated and entranced, bearing battle swords and shields, bows and spears. But these savages owed the Spanish no loyalty or friendship, and the Count's father had to escape in his taxi through a hail of arrows and stones.

"Rosal! You murdered Rosal!" the pintados screamed.

"No, they do not like your kind around here," commiserated the taxi-driver, grinning. “You’re lucky those windows don’t open anymore.”

"No, your Excellency, they do not like us here," agreed the mad priest, who was taking the Count's father on a tour of the conquistador graves within the church. "Begging your indulgence, I personally think they have every right to dislike us. We mistreated and continue to mistreat them much."

So this is where we threw them, the Count's father glanced up sharply. Here is where we have always thrown them.

"From even the poorest," continued the mad priest, hurrying now, for he had sensed the visitor's sudden scorn, "we continue to exact - well - not quite the tithe, but the tribute. The wave of change waits on the wisdom of our superiors. The Pope himself commanded us to divest ourselves of our banks, of the solares we rent out - slumlords that we are - where the poor crowd in misery and destitution. We wait. That was many decades ago, when the Pope's word was law. We ourselves are vowed to patience, and are comforted, where the poor apparently are not."

"To lie here, so far from home…" said the Count's father glumly. "Among their enemies."

"The tombs are empty," chuckled the mad priest. "Where they are, only God knows. The English and their mercenaries ransacked the graves for treasure, threw away the bones."

"Terrible."

"I myself think it does not matter that much. The Indians fought a magnificent rear-guard action, covering the retreat of those who did not want to surrender. Yielding up their lives to buy them time."

"Their women are all prostitutes. So are all their children," said the taxi-driver seductively. Ferrying the tormented through the night for so long had sharpened the taxi-driver's sense of when to lightly lean against the final ounce of hesitation. Sometimes he could even apprehend the nature of the need before it was stutteringly confessed. So it was when the Count's father asked the taxi-driver to arrange a visit with the pintados in the night. "They are all prostitutes, and their children too," the taxi-driver repeated.

They parked the battered taxicab under the huge ficus tree that twisted from the wall of the city. While the driver parleyed with the savages, the Count’s father perspired inside the cab and drank from his flat bottle of rum. For all his anger of the English, he allowed himself a large swallow in their honor. One dram of rum per day per English soldier - that was how they won the world! One dram of rum per day per redcoat! If only the Spanish fueled their own troops on sweet, sweet rum! Things would have turned out so differently! Arriba, Rhum Caña! Tumbando, Rhum Caña!

The taxi driver returned with two grinning pintados smoking cigarettes and embracing themselves. The Count’s father opened the cab door and was stabbed by the sharp stink of their bodies.

The roots of the great tree separated into rooms and cubicles roofed with cardboard and tarp. Each cubicle was lit with a beer bottle with a rag for a wick. So this is where the bottles go, the Count’s father recognized, as he sat on the salvaged mattress. The savages led the solemn, rancid little girl in, all skin and bones under the thin T-shirt.

Her face was animal-dumb, the angles sharp and wrong. But when she lifted her shirt over her head, her eyes on him were frank and brazen. Keeping her arms up, she made one full turn for him to see the tiny breasts with the swollen nipples, the boy-buttocks, the bony ankleted leg, the sparse fuzz in her armpits and belly. When he turned her again with his palm, her skin was hot and completely dry.

Afterwards he held the little girl’s throat, the size of his wrist. The Count’s father felt her pulse mocking there, and began slowly to squeeze. Feeling her sudden jerk of alarm and her tiny fingers clawing at his arms, he released her and fell back on the pallet weeping, vomiting warmly on himself. Aloft, above the smoky soot and the heedless tears, in the moist breeze of the evening, two dim figures fluttered slowly into the desperate light. Among the ficus leaves was the Virgin and her Child.

Bloodless, he bolted upright, doomed. But it was only the tatters of a cinema advertisement, painted on the canvas roofing, the figures arranged in imitation of a long vanished Murillo. Still, for an instant the Count’s father knew it was – miracle of miracles! - the Murillo itself, faded away and begrimed by war and the centuries, the castaway queen and her son among the painted savages, with the great primitive tree for castle and for church.

BEFORE THE FATHER finally croaked he married the Manila courtesan who bore the Count. The family seat was north of Valcarlos, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. La Manileña and the boy-heir arrived there with the certificates and the court orders to be stiffly informed all that remained were the few hectares planted to apple trees in brown blight, the farmhouse, the cider sill and a small annual pension. Royally, she pulled down her dark glasses and the magistrate lurched back two steps, for the revealed La Manileña had three eyes. The left eye had two blacks, the smaller one actually a congealed purple, if there was anyone in the mountain bold enough to stare. She then picked up the apple from the table arrangement, and cut it lengthwise in half with a knife. Triumphantly, she lifted the half at the magistrate to display the seal: at the apple's core, a five-pointed star. The magistrate, pale and trembling, clutched desperately at his bounding heart.

Using old bordello contacts, La Manileña supplemented their resources by smuggling Filipinos through Barcelona into France, into Sweden. Her nurses and servants muled methamphetamine across the mountain, guided past the checkpoints and the border guards by the young Count on his racing bicycle.

The young Count was one of the few aristocrats strong enough to ride on the training team of the legendary ONCE peloton. A merry caravan of cars followed, bearing the ladies and the champagne. The high Colombians supplied the stimulants, and on their advise the Count had his blood drained, the blood oxygenated, then injected back before the races.

La Manileña gave the apple orchard over to pasture the horses, retaining a fifth for the cider, that shortly became famous as a country prophylactic, gratefully called the witch's brew. She refurbished the farmhouse in Mexican rancho chic. It was turquoise, silver and whitewashed stone, encircled by large American cacti, and featured displays of life-sized saints and charro saddles. Ruben Balbenta flew over from Munich for the house blessing, to perform for the retired old whores and their husbands, lost in the homeland, after the factories and farms in the islands were taken over by the llamas cortas, their erstwhile partners.

The young Count was away racing the L’Enfer du Nord when the civil guard surrounded the farmhouse. They called on her to surrender, but La Manileña refused a long, drawn-out death in prison. It is said she reviewed her legal papers, the financial statements and the will while the civil guard deployed around the house. When she was finished she removed her reading glasses, brushed her hair back, and came through the front door firing.

She left many debts: blood, cash, consigned merchandise. So the young Count took over La Manileña’s affairs: running her refugees and mules, making the payoffs to the politicians, the gangs and the guards. His prodigious fondness for meats and veggies brought him to the catacombs, where underground business financed the shadowy Etruscans. To force the release of a small account held in escrow, to pay for gaming debts, to pay for the pick of the litter newly landed from Russia or Asia or Africa, the Count arranged for the Etruscans to stage his own abduction. This they performed at the opening gate of the Vuelta de San Sebastian. Two black Citroens rammed the rail to cut ahead of the Count’s bicycle, sending him soaring over the handlebars and into the track. The live television broadcast showed masked men running from the Citroens, waving their sub-machineguns, to pick him up and throw him into one of the cars.

The Etruscans proceeded to do variations on the operation. They asked the Count to lure other racing aristocrats – solvent royalty the next time – to be taken for ransom. But the guardia civil turned the Count around by slicing the lid off his left eye and using the naked eyeball for an ashtray. The skin about the eye squirted tears and blood to quench the burn, twitched desperately to close. The police boats headed off the power launches making for the open sea and the Panamanian freighter anchored there. The Etruscans then abandoned the boats. The guardia civil started shooting the drowning Etruscans. The fifty k’s disappeared.

The Count must have impressed someone important, perhaps even one the secret speculares, for they flew him to the Orient, to manage first one, then a fleet of glittering gambling junks anchored off the China coast where nightly, black-tie patrons on souped-up powerboats raced the patrol launches of the warlords. It was said that a famous Vietnamese pirate attempted to raise his protection percentage on the Count’s fleet, and that the Count lured the pirate aboard his junk and there killed him. The body the junk’s cook filleted into strips to bait skipjack tuna and wahoo.

In the old news videos you could make the Count’s figure in the background. Two hundred pounds lighter maybe – slim enough to stuff into a small Citroen’s trunk – while the victorious commanders toasted freedom and the peace.

MIKKIS ASKED FOR a large glass of quinine water, with plenty of ice. Then, glass in hand, he set out for the unpleasant ritual of circumnavigation. Half-way round, he had to swallow repeatedly and fight the impulse to head straight for the buffet table. Beef, real butter, canned asparagus. He hurried behind the signatories, the directors and the ministers, took a stool and gripped tightly at the bar, beside Sybilla Cumana, the fortune teller.

“Happy New Year, doctor,” said Sybilla, stirring her drink with her long, blue fingernails. She had been a popular favorite with the movie people and the political ladies, and had once advised the very powerful, who paid her well and ensconced her in a great house.

“Thank you,” Mikkis said with all the pleasantness he could command. “And to you also.” Her patrons were long gone, but not because they were not warned. Months before she sensed the knives over their heads, and told them. But, as was their way, they were selective in what among her stories they believed.

Mikkis glanced up at long mirror that ran above the bar, felt her straighten with him, and saw her reflected there, upside down. Just as he thought the words she startled him by saying “The witch of Endor,” softly, laughing. She looked up to confront herself. Beneath the Cambodian frost of runes and waves, the face was swollen and lumped with gin. “I amuse myself by counting those who catch the allusion.”

“And how many?”

“Just you.”

“Well,” Mikkis said, straining to catch someone in the distance to hail him away. “What say the stars?”

“About you?”

“No, no,” protested Mikkis in spite of himself. “In general.”

They both laughed loudly. Sybilla patted his hand, and left her hand over his. “It really scares you, doesn’t it?” At a party like this, she had spread the cards out for him and told him he was to be married very soon. The next week he was.

“Are we ever going to get out of this mess?” he asked after a while.

She signaled for another gin-and-tonic before saying, “You get the memos. You attend the briefings. You don’t need cards to know.”

“Tell me anyway,” said Mikkis, tapping for his refill.

“It’s going to get worse.”

From the yard, so it felt, came a large explosion. The wave shook the villa, rattled the chandeliers and set them swinging, and threw Sybilla into Mikkis’ stool. Immediately, the commanders were on their feet, calling for their aides and their radios. “Call them now,” said Gil Ruiz – the most famous of them all – striding up to the window and slapping aside the billowing curtains and the smoke. The commander was in his usual Sulu costume: black silk shirt, balloon pantaloons with tight leggings tucked into high cavalry books.

Mikkis helped Sybilla to her feet, then sat her down. “Why do you stay, then,” he asked her, with the hint of a taunt. “It would be easy enough to leave, I would think, with your connections.”

“A bomb!”

“Mortar!”

Por Dios y por santo!

The fortune teller laughed and signaled the bartender to replace the drink she spilled. “You are teasing me again, doctor. Why aren’t you trying to get out yourself? We both know you can’t run away from these things. Your Greeks found that out long ago.”

Mikkis shook his head in admiration. After all this time, someone somewhere was holding on to his dossier. Well good luck to you too, he smiled grimly, a lot of good that’ll do.

And now she laughed. “But I can tell you about yourself…” she said.

“Don’t we need cards for that?”

"Save the mockery, doctor. You are scared! Just look at your drink!"
He glanced down without thinking to see the glass of quinine water vibrating wildly and the ice-flakes zipping to melt. "Fear and heat." Mikkis looked up to meet her victorious smile. She said, "You are going on a journey. With someone wise."

"A journey," Mikkis snorted.

"A long journey. Over dangerous ground."

"God," said Mikkis. "Who's got the gas?"

"Francesca," named the fortune-teller, over his shoulder.

"The Witch of Endor has a visitant," said Francesca.

"Ah!" said Sybilla Cumana, shaking her head. "You two should get married."

FRANCESCA DE KEYSER, RADIANT as ever, drew forward to be kissed. "Mix," she breathed, "Mix…"

Reflexively, he slipped the tip of his tongue between her opened lips. She drew back very slightly.

Mikkis said, "Happy New Year, Chez."

Her eyes had that trained, sleepy sparkle. Her breasts surged under the sheer black blouse. "How's life?" she said.

How that used to disconcert him! But Mikkis was prepared this time. "Okay," he said. "How's business?"

Francesca stepped back one, surveyed him with sincere amusement. "Mix, Mix…" she taunted gently, drawing herself up to the bar where the bartender slid her bourbon-and-water across. They scarcely noticed when Sybilla Cumana vacated her corner and headed for the main room.

"I did not know you were in town," Mikkis began.

"Just came in. From Bangkok. You know Papa insists we Christmas together."

"Vacation?"

"No," Francesca shook her head daintily. "I was working."

"Another fuck film," he blurted without meaning to.

Francesca leaned over to kiss him again. This time he licked quickly inside her mouth, tasting lipstick and bourbon. "Grow up, Mix," she sighed brightly. "I'll catch you later. Papa asks about you. Go and visit him sometime. He's going and may remember to leave you something nice."

Mikkis first saw her on screen, astride the bounding blond man. She was harrying him to a vicious gallop, savaging him with a quirt, and when he arched up to come, she deftly lifted herself and withdrew his length from her glistening pubis. She shook it as it gushed sprays of semen and the camera closed in on her face, straight zoom, her mouth, where her clenched teeth drew blood from her dewy lower lip.

"I didn't see the cut," said one of the Diplomatics, bug-eyed. "That's blood." They were drinking in the screening room studio of one of the Count's partners, the movie producer Susumkorda, whose name had been stretched into multi-syllables to approximate something faintly Latin.

"She enjoys her work, doesn't she?"

"Or," laughed Mikkis, "she may be an actress."

MIKKIS MET HER RIGHT here, at the Count's. The water had failed again, and even the Count's huge pool was dry: siphoned off into the emergency tanks, filtered, chlorinated, stored. But the decorator had arranged the usual floats of flowers and candles in the floor of the empty pool. Mikkis walked across to where Francesca de Keyser held loud court. He elbowed his way in, caught her hand in mid-flight and said, "May I take you for a walk around the lake?"

She smiled to search his face, said "Yes", reached around his offered arm and jammed her rich breasts against his side.

"And who are you?" she asked.

She was surprised he was American. Mikkis said that his parents were Filipino, but himself he was a New York fellow. She told him she was an actress for the international films, but she knew he knew that already. She said her father was the sculptor, the national treasure. She herself painted, secret and private watercolors. Now, she acted, but in time she wanted to produce and direct meaningful films, serious and boring films. Mikkis told her of summering in Michigan, in the farm area north of Detroit where Muhammad Ali had his retreat. He told her of Ina, the Greeks, of Old Three Hundred, of being captured by terrorists in the Sudan, and of the German nun.

So they walked, circling the pool twenty times or more, talking and laughing and touching. After a while, the other guests noticed and then the Count led them in clapping their hands and singing. Mikkis scarcely heard, though Francesca paused to lift her hand and smile. The applause circled the empty pool in waves, the dead candles there and the orchids.

Later, after the dancing and singing, Francesca confessed she had a little too much to drink, and would Mikkis be so kind and drive her home. The Count, smiling, said she would take care of her car, a completely re-built second-edition Mustang.

But once inside his vehicle, the blue flag flying over its hood, the woman drew herself apart, pressing herself quietly against the door. As they drove through the dark streets, Mikkis would glance at her silhouette. Once he tried to reach for music, but she stayed him with a soft shake of her head. He saw the hard glint of her teeth hard at her lip. Finally she said, "I hope you do not think me a tease, or something, but may I please be taken home?"

"Sure," Mikkis said thickly. He was surprised he was not disappointed at all. Oddly, he felt relieved. "Point me the way."

Though the curfew sirens had long blown, his headlights lit on the moving shine of the plastic balloons on the faces of the Creek and Subterraneans scurrying among the rubble. Some nights the cowboys patrolling on their war-jeeps would test their night-vision riflescopes by firing at them. There had been dawns when Mikkis would be on the road early enough to catch the salvage wagons and the prisoners loading them up. The Diplomatics said the commanders had a factory for the disassembly and packing of the spare parts: hearts, kidneys, corneas - for the lower end of the east European market.

Mikkis turned into the hot beam of the checkpoint and applied the brakes. She lurched forward in inertia, and he brought his arm up to keep her from the dashboard. Her breast flowed into his hand, stayed. The reeking cowboy beamed a light into the cab.

"Turn the thing down," said Mikkis. He had been taught the authority voice was the first line of defense. "What is it?"

The cowboy lit Francesca, Mikkis' hand still on her breast.

"Doctor ambassador," grinned the cowboy, eyes drug-bright, the sweat running down his face. "We're sorry. There's an alert out. Bombs. Assassins. Luchandos."

Paltugan-a! From behind the light his companions called, Paltugan-a!

But the cowboy waved his companions down, saluted the car, conducted the barricade up. He waved the car through with his rifle, finger on the trigger, and Mikkis winced at the sight of the dark bore momentarily centered on him.

"Luchandos?" said Francesca.

"There aren't Luchandos anymore," Mikkis said, sure.

Francesca directed him through a labyrinth of sidestreets, and then they were running up a winding road Mikkis did not remember. At the top of the knoll she asked him to stop the car. When he flicked off the lights and killed the engine, a great silence came with the darkness. Outside the car there was a wind that carried the hint of things burning. They lay on the grass and faced the far, faint stars. She lit a marijuana cigarette, but did not volunteer to share.

For a long time they lay there, while the world rustled around them and the wind brought them burnt wisps of former things, fluttering down like mayflies, and the scent of ashes.

Mikkis said, "Maybe we should have gone to my place…"

Francesca said, "Shut up."

She kissed as politely as a gracious host, tasting his face and giving compliment with small, deep exhalations. The perfume on her neck and breasts left a thin coat on his tongue. She was thickly wet and open, but refused his head or his hands. He went slowly, counting, and chuckled loudly once at the foolishness of being on strange, itchy grass, with the insects, the cowboys, the Subterraneans and Creeks, and his pants pulled down to his knees. At three hundred precisely he let it go, and she received him generously, with a perfectly performed sucking spasm and a shudder. He pulled up his pants quickly, looked at his watch.

He thought she slept, but then Mikkis heard her softly almost sing: "Ursus, Signus, Cassiopeia the Chair…"

Then she laughed, very distant suddenly, among relations. "Draco, Perseus, Arcturus…" Under her quiet voice he heard something like music.
And when he opened his eyes once more, nervous for the time and the Cowboys, he saw her slim arms upraised, fair against the night, her fingers pointing joyfully into the glittering chasm she - they - were stumbling onto.

"Regulus, Capella, Polaris of the North…"

Francesca rolled away from him, and after a while her breathing regulated into calm. But when Mikkis placed his jacket over her, she spoke. "If you want to marry me," she muttered dreamily, slurred, "you'll have to ask my father."

And in the day he did.

UNDER THE BURNISHED lead of the dawn sky the de Keyser house by the sea seemed surrounded by a cemetery. The wide, sandy yard was lined by rows of rough-hewn gravestones in vague order. Farthest from the house were the simple rectangular slabs, elaborating into sun-discs, flowers and crosses. Right by the sprawl of the house and the workshop, like a palace guard, were the cherubs, the grieving mothers, the loose-hipped archangels resting on their swords and lances. The Maestro, long awake, was limping absently among the markers.

Francesca said, "That's his business. Making gravestones."

"And how's business, do you know?" Mikkis smiled.

"Not good, I imagine," Francesca smiled back. "After all, who's got the bread?"

Even after she greeted and kissed him, the Maestro did not recognize her. He seemed to take them for admirers, for the idle curious, perhaps prospective customers. "You walk heavily, young people," the old man stammered, shy at having to repeat the sales spiel. "But you carry your grieving well. How may I be of service?" Francesca laughed in affectionate delight.

It was minutes before his face brightened to apprehend. Francesca explained that no, it wasn't the onset of senility. The Maestro claimed he had the moments long as he could remember, when he was temporarily lost to enchantment. When he was younger, it caused him discomfort and some terrifying adventures, but he learned to deal with it and make it a joke by the time he grew into a man. The Maestro's happy explanation was that he carried a curse. That in his youth he had been lost at sea and had floundered up the pavilion of the sea-queen, who loved him and lamed him, and who waited, disconsolate, for him still in the caverns of the ocean.

Mikkis was introduced an international diplomat with important medical responsibilities, and as an expert in Greek antiquities. With a quizzical frown, the Maestro asked, "Where are you from, Dr. Madamba?"

Mikkis said New York.

"But before New York?" the Maestro insisted.

"My mother's family was originally from Cagayan, Maestro. My father was Caviteño."

"Cagayan, yes," beamed the old man. "Surely you must be related to Lumen Madamba."

"I am her son," Mikkis said, suddenly flushed.

"Look at that!" the Maestro laughed. "How wonderful! Lumen Madamba. Now, that's the actress! But Chez wouldn't know." He glanced brightly at his daughter, on the phone now to the Count's house, giving directions where to deliver her car.

Chez, Mikkis smiled. She walked towards them and clasped his hand.

"We saw your mother on stage," continued the Maestro. "In fact, in New York. A production of Chekov. Irina Nikolayevna, if I recall correctly. She was wonderful. She just cut through the experimental claptrap and delivered with marvelous sympathy and presence. Chekov, I imagine, would have agreed. I hope the lady is well."

"She's dead. She's close to five years dead."

"Terrible, terrible, " said the Maestro, leading them toward the house with his cane. "And very young. Much younger than me, anyway. I'm so sorry." Then he remembered. "Lumen Madamba's son. I went to school with - oh, I don't know how you are related - an uncle of yours."

With his cane, the Maestro tapped them to their places on the breakfast table that overlooked the sea. Francesca leaned over to blow on Mikkis' ear. "I know - oh, I know - where this is leading to. It will turn out that you and Papa are relatives. That we are cousins."

The Maestro asked, "What time did you come in?"

"Early, Papa, " Francesca's eyes twinkled happily. "Early."

There was salt fish, tomatoes, garlic, and last night's leftover soup of chicken, young fruit and chili leaves.

"I believe his name was Rabago," continued the Maestro. "An engineer. A cousin of your father, I think."

Only then did Mikkis remember that distant uncle's name, for whom the goat was butchered. "Yes, of course. He came to visit us when I was a boy."

"In New York?"

"In New York, yes sir. I remember he was very sick. Then he died."

The Maestro said, "I hope I'm not being insensitive to remember. This does not embarrass you, of course?"

"Whoa! What's this?" giggled Francesca, hand on his knee. "A scandal!"

"No, no longer, Maestro," Mikkis replied. "That was a long time ago. They are all dead now." All that time, no one had ever referred to his parents. To Francesca, he said, " The family secret. I understand it was in the gossip columns. I could tell you, but I know so little. I was a boy, and my tidbits aren't at all juicy."

"This boy's father was the hero," the Maestro told Francesca, suddenly serious. He clapped Mikkis' back and asked, "Do you still have family here?"

"I believe so, Maestro. But I have not really looked. My mother and my father were not married."

"I'm shocked!" laughed Francesca.

Her car, driven by one of the Count's servants, wheeled into the yard. Francesca stood up to shower, and returned to offer him the taste of toothpaste and mouthwash.

Before he could protest she said, "Be friends. Talk to Papa. I'll see you in a while." They returned her wave and the Mustang screeched away in a sandy cloud.

AFTERWARDS THEY FOLLOWED the workmen filing into their places. The old man held Mikkis' arm and walked him through the shop. "For as long as the dead," beamed the Maestro, "do not bury the dead, we have some usefulness and an income." But the workmen sat and idled. Aside from a pair of small white gravestones, it seemed there wasn't much to do.

Mikkis and the Maestro came out of the door that lead to the beach and walked on. Streaks of black oil lined the sand. Returning fishermen lifted their small catch for sale. "Sometimes," the old man continued, turning the fishes and the crabs over in his rough, scarred hands, "it still disturbs me though. As if, somehow, we take advantage of the bereaved. An advantage quite close to contempt. Of their foolishness and sentimentality. Their despairing messages, the going-away tokens and gifts. Their guilt and fear." He smiled and struck Mikkis' lightly on the center of the chest. "But you are," the old man said, striking again, "by definition, a despoiler of graves and must know these things much better than us."

Mikkis laughed, light-headed in sleeplessness. "Truth is it has been a long while since I poked around the cemeteries."

"A pity," commiserated the Maestro. "There's much to learn among the dead!"

"That was the theory," Mikkis agreed, "and the practice. Maybe it still is. I was a squeamish gravedigger. Maybe that's why I drifted off to here."

For a while the old man stared vacantly at the fishes and the crabs, their shells and the gills smeared with oily slime. Then he said, "Good stone."

He said, "Good stone is the hardest thing we can commonly afford. Good, hard stone against time and guilt, is it not so? Myself, if I had the choice, I would choose to rot in the branches of some dead tree, in the air and the seasons, you know. Like the burials of the old Negrillos and Zambals. With the great birds - may there be great birds! - and the insects cleaning you to your bones…"

"Like Picasso cleaning the fish with his mouth."

"Exactly!" the Maestro said happily. "Picasso, that old buzzard! To decompose, to burn. To be sundered to the elements. To be returned anonymously to God knows whence we came. That was what Rizal wanted, did he not? Well Rizal did not get his wish and neither will I."

"No, he didn't," Mikkis said.

"That's what Francesca threatens. A state funeral with bands and speeches. Perhaps an honor guard of soldiers. The President even, though the malicious say he is no longer there. But ministers and directors certainly. And generals and commanders. She says dying is for the living, and of course she is right. So I surrender. I say, do with me as you will. I shall be beyond caring."

They walked on. The Maestro handed Mikkis the bundle of fishes and crabs. He then squatted gingerly down to pick up a ball of soft pitch, then another, until he had a handful. He began to shape the mass into a turgid penis, arched hard, veins popping. "We eat it, Dr. Madamba. First, traces. Then in ever larger portions. Filth. Oil. The venom in the mussels and the clams. Some organism dormant from the beginning of the world that we had roused by our reckless need to exist, to breed. To call attention to ourselves. It will kill us soon enough, I guess. But the preview is horrible. Horrible pain before merciful paralysis. What does the rest of the world survive on?"

The old man leaned himself up with his cane. "That was what we were taught, were we not? We were taught we came into this dominance because, much more than anything else, we adapt spectacularly to change. Well, as usual, we are adapting. Adapting even to this … thing. Perhaps, " the Maestro laughed with mischief, threatened the smiling children by waving the black penis from his crotch, "we are evolving…"

The Maestro heaved the penis into the sea. After turning the catch over to the workmen for cooking, he led Mikkis up the house again, and parted the sailcloth curtain on the large room that was his studio. It was a jumble of large, unhewn stones and rocks, that seemed to have fallen carelessly from some sky, and among them, the forms becoming. On the side of one wall was a series: the nude Francesca metamorphosing up each station, from clay infant into a magnificent Venus in bronze, that filled Mikkis with unease. The Venus appeared at first sight to be classically realistic, but Mikkis frowned to note it had in places been stretched off slightly, just enough to disconcert.

"You like sculpture, Dr. Madamba," said the Maestro, coming at Mikkis silently from behind.

"It's Mikkis, sir, yes sir, " said Mikkis. Regaining himself he added, "But some things still frighten me a bit. I'm more comfortable with the easier things, the lighter things. I mean the whimsical pieces, the jokes."

"Ah, yes, " said the Maestro. "A typically Filipino response. Of course you are not offended that I forget and call you Filipino."

"No Maestro," Mikkis said, feeling his face redden. "Of course not. I am Filipino as everybody else."

"Yes, good. Well, I too like the abstractions, the constructions. The wit, the novelty, the plasticity of the new materials. But I couldn't understand, couldn't love them enough to work them. I am first to admit it is a weakness, perhaps a personal failure. But we are what we are. There were many who hooted when they gave me the prize. I was, I am, a throwback I guess. That's what they said I was: a modernist."

Nervously, Mikkis joined the Maestro in laughter. The old man cleared his throat and continued. " Oh well, " he harrumped, "that's another matter altogether, isn't it? You, I imagine, first encountered those overbearing mausoleum pieces - there in the yard - you must sort of bow your head to. So why not? Most of them are awful, awful! Well they serve, or served, their purpose. But we are evolving, are we not?"

The Maestro laughed again, louder. But when he spoke again, his voice was almost serious. "It wasn't always that way with us, you know. We were like everybody else in that particular anthropological stage. A stage that for us lasted long. Very long. Almost to our, I mean, my own time. Our old people lived quite healthily among statuary. You know: all the three dimensions, then perhaps more. Those full-breasted, wide-hipped goddesses. The totem animals. The guardians of the boats and the granaries. Those old, squat lordlings with their voyaging finery and their spears."

"I," said Mikkis, hesitant, "have seen things I was instantly comfortable with."

"Aha, the Greeks!" said the Maestro, pointing. "I know what you mean. You know our Rizal once wrote a letter - very proper, very polite - but clearly disappointed at how the Greeks he met looked. Not at all like the stone Hellenes of the museums. Rizal's Greeks would be, what? Albanians, Magyars, Romanys…"

"Turks," added Mikkis.

"Turks!" the Maestro roared. "As Nick Joaquin used to say, tan turco-turco!"

After a while Mikkis confessed. "It was sculpture that lead me to the Greeks."

"Explain?"

"I may have been ten-eleven. I walked into the Greek room at the Met. In the corner was an Aphrodite in white marble…"

"Headless, armless. Sliced somewhere above her knees," said the Maestro, removing his spectacles and rubbing them with the hem of his shirt. "The Ananaitha of Delos."

"You know the piece."

"I know her of course. Of course. But you go on." The Maestro replaced the glasses on the bridge of his nose. He was brown, burly, Indian.

Mikkis scanned about for some clue to the source of Francesca's Italianate beauty. There were no pictures of the old man's wife in the room, far as he could see. He said, "I do not know what it was. I mean I was just looking. Mind clean. No desire. But I rose in salute. Ten years old, in salute."

"In worship!" roared the Maestro, whooping, coughing, tapping Mikkis with his cane. "In worship! A worshipper! You'll do well for a son-in-law!"

WHEN IT BECAME clear the Maestro would insist on lunch Mikkis phoned his office. The old man's boat was moored fore and aft to a makeshift pier of coconut timber and bamboo, and there the workmen set up the meal. The wind had fallen and the Maestro, agile despite the limp, monkey-swung from the pier to the deck. His arms remained strong from the chiseling and hammering, Mikkis reasoned, as he took them for steadiness and balance.

Unidentifiable things in various stages of rot floated against the boat. Though the tide was out and the sea shallow, Mikkis could not make out the bottom. There was a small formica table nailed to the fore-deck, under a wide shade of woven thatch. Bright, tiny pinlights arched on to the table and the deck through the shade, flowing like constellations.

The two men ate the lunch of the fishes and the crabs. The meat tasted faintly of fuel. Great green flies buzzed about their faces. The Maestro ate methodically, eating his fishes bone clean, pulling each whisker-thin barb through his pressed lips for the last of the meat, then depositing the soft bones into the upturned carapace of the crab. Afterwards he collected the mess, his and Mikkis', and hurled it into the sea. He moistened a towel in seawater and cleaned the table top.

The old man brought up a bottle and glasses. "Are you are drinking man, doctor?" he asked, wiping the inside of the glasses with the same towel he used to clean the table.

"Not like before," Mikkis answered. "I can no longer take as much. What is it?"

From his pants pocket the Maestro drew a Tanto knife, the single-bladed fighting variety. He pried the blade out and cut himself a sliver from the mast to pick his teeth. The bits he picked he swallowed. "Don't worry about it," he admonished. "We learn to eat anything, don't we? We learn to drink anything."

It was brandy of the river palm, roughly distilled, and it stung Mikkis into tears.

"Don't cry, doctor," grinned the Maestro, clapping his back. "It's early and there's time enough later to be maudlin. It's not that bad, is it?"

"No, no," cried Mikkis. "It's actually rather good. I'm not used to it, that's what."

The old man flicked the black sun shades over his eyeglasses. "Ergot," he declared, drinking heartily.

"Sir?"

"This is ergot," whispered the Maestro, regarding his empty glass through the black lenses. "Or, more precisely the thing that makes you crazy drinking this stuff is ergot. At least that's what they assured me, a long time ago. Perhaps they said it to ease me into the kinship circle. Out of generosity. To make me comfortable in their company. They said what they ate and what I drank was the same. Acid. Ferment. Ergot."

"Ergotine," said Mikkis, "is deadly poison."

"So it is," the old man smiled sweetly, "so it is. We found out. We did. They insisted there was a trick to it. A secret, proven sequence. Whenever someone went insane or died they said the poor sap never bothered to learn the routine. Didn't know how. You had to know how. If you knew how, they said you got a free pass. They said black flies made small mounds of ergot to feed the wanderer."

"Manna," said Mikkis, breathing the heavy, wet air frantically.

"Exactly! A precise, minute amount to scour the mind. The tiny pinch of poison to take you slightly past the door. And you had a little time. Sometimes enough to let your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. So you could watch out for relatives and friends. Or celebrities!"

"This they believed?"

"Or perhaps they pretended. They said you had to believe certain things to make substance from hallucination," said the Maestro sadly.

Mikkis said, "To make nourishment of hallucination."

"As we are doing."

After a while, the Maestro fetched and opened another bottle. The wind cooled and the sun prepared to set. Along the shore the house lamps were lit. The words in the grumbling conversation of the workmen came to them singly, blown off sequence and sense by the rising wind. The boat began to roll, thumping against the pier, over the thick water that stank of corruption and bitumen.

When next he spoke the old man's voice had pitched up against the wind. "In our youth," he screamed, "it was fashionable to declare yourself. To declare your intention to solace the world. Save the world. Comfort the nature of the world, that was what I think they said. I, I thought them naive. Stupid. Sentimental. Arrogant in their ignorance. Save the world, indeed!"

One of the workmen lifted himself on deck with a battery lamp, but the Maestro waved him away back to the darkness. "What presumption!" he snorted, tottering over to the side of the boat. The old man gauged the wind, then proceeded to urinate over the side. He left his pants unbuttoned, his penis crumpled among the gray hair.

"Who knows the nature of the world?" the old man panted as he sat. To Mikkis surprise the Maestro appeared to masturbate, gently shaking the soft penis. "I had no idea then, and I haven't learned anything since. What I know is that it is the height of impertinence to second-guess God's intention. To say, as you might to a bond-servant or hireling, your work is finished. You are dismissed. This is the Sabbath and you are free! Go away, I make you free!"

"I did not think of it that way," Mikkis said, suddenly laughing.

"Aha!," cried the Maestro, as if he had won a wager. "How many species large and small have died to bring us here and now. Two drunks here and now, how many?"

"Since when?"

"Since the beginning of time of course, you idiot!" the Maestro boomed triumphantly to the sea.

"I don't know. I don't know. In the millions, I guess…"

"In the hundreds of billions! In the thousands of billions! Not mere cities or continents but worlds! Worlds and universes! All gone," the old man declared, lifting a hand to the sky. "All gone!"

Mikkis began to laugh, and he didn't know why.

"Whirlwind, cancer, volcanoes! Killed off by environments that alter, that change. Killed off by asteroids a hundred miles across!"

Mikkis felt the acid spurting from the pit of his stomach and lurched for the railing, but was late. He spat out the hot mouthful of soggy rice and gagged on the long, thick strands of sticky saliva.

"God the shaper," the old man whispered, one hand outstretched, feeling about him like a blind man. "God the shaper. Insomniac, manic, delirious! Stumbling around with his turpentine rag, erasing all. Or almost all. In malice, leaving a smudge, a stain. Begin again!"

The old man was quiet for a while, breathing. Then he said, "And here's what: surely there is no way to exclude the human species from the rest of them. Surely you can see that human madness, like the wind, is also a natural force."

"Madness and sadness both."

The limp penis never stood, but it appeared that the Maestro came, for he shuddered and sighed. He wiped his hands against his pants. He reached for the tin of water and seemed to wash himself. He threw the water into the sea. Mikkis ducked the wind-borne spray, sick and stone-cold sober.

"What was it, doctor, that Michelangelo said?" and here the old man beamed drunkenly. "The form that lives within the matter?"

From far inland a few joy rockets were fleetingly reflected on the Maestro's glasses. Somewhere deep in the ocean something large and powerful stirred and the boat tossed heavily. The old man caught the mast and savored the slow, sullen swell, nodding his head as if he had been verified. "The form within the matter. The purpose within. God the shaper is whittling off, chiseling off, sanding off everything superfluous. The no-longer necessary…"

"Necessary for what?"

"Aha," clapped the Maestro. "We will not know, will we? We will not live long enough to know…"

The rocking of the boat finally delivered Mikkis into the small dizziness that announces the meditative state. He rolled his tongue onto the roof of his mouth, closed his eyes, and began to breathe his mantra. Little tremors moved through his muscles. He breathed out trouble, illness and confusion. He breathed in peace and power, cupping them below his navel before gradually releasing them aloft into his heart, his mind. He began to lift and he let himself go, sundered into long, soft bursts of fine-whiskered, wind-borne seeds.

When he opened his eyes the Maestro's face was barely a foot away. He had removed his dark glasses. Almost lost in the old man's burly fist was the knife, the killing blade glinting.

The Maestro, lips curled back like a bear or lion in mid-charge, placed the tip of the knife on Mikkis' throat and whispered, "I know why you are here. I know why you've come back. I know who sent you."

Good God, thought Mikkis, moving gingerly back against the knife, please tell me if you know!

From the shadows the workmen gently pinioned the old man's shoulders. One of them deftly pried the Tanto from his hand. They lay him carefully down on the deck, now compliant as an infant, and soothed him with moist cleaning towels. The old man whimpered. To Mikkis the workmen said, " He's like this sometimes. He gets lost. But he wouldn't harm anybody. He won't remember when he wakes up. Don't worry about it."

When Francesca arrived she had the workmen roll the Maestro off the deck and into a hammock. They were bearing the old man home when he awoke momentarily, lucid, and made out Mikkis following by lantern light. "Doctor, " he called. "Evil is a force of nature also."

"What was that about?" asked Francesca, kissing Mikkis, her perfume dissipating the chaos and the dark.

NOW THE FLURRY OF servants clued Mikkis that the entertainment was about to commence. Mikkis wandered hurriedly through the corridors, testing the knobs on the doors, but the bathrooms were all locked. The door that opened was a small, darkened library or reading room, and the tossing, bare chested conga lady on the desktop, rising towards the flung door, reined hard on Commander Gil Ruiz' fez and hair. The commander withdrew the bronze lela from the trashing flowers and turned, but Mikkis had stepped back and closed the door.

Mikkis rushed to the side garden and found a wide-leafed night plant in the shadowed nook. He then slowly worked his way under the large lamps, near to the stage where the band mikes were set up. His chair was right behind the Count's, who sat between two commanders. An aide scurried up to them and saluted. The aide said, "The captain of the battery says one of his cowboys mixed a live shell with the blanks by mistake. I have placed them both on report."

"Bullshit these drunks," said Gil Ruiz, dismissing the aide with a wave. He turned to see Mikkis and winked.

"I swear," said the other commander, "I don't think we should take it anymore. They're shameless and greedy, and will not honor arrangements!"

"They will deny everything too. We have no proof, the judges say. No proof except if we take the ship."

"It is a big ocean," said the Count, glancing at Mikkis.

"A very big ocean," the commander agreed, grinning. "Sometimes I wish we could go up there and give them the trashing they are begging for."

Once, Mikkis was told, the old regional command of the Llanos allowed a consortium of Pampango and Vietnamese money the use of a condemned cement mine and its loading pier. But the consortium second leased the mine to another party with international resources. The phantoms delivered, so they say, perhaps a thousand container vans. The central command would not have been the wiser but for the earthquake that ran quite unexpectedly through the fault. The badly sealed containers broke in the eruption and leaked the color-coded warning smoke. For days the children of the plains danced in delight at the awesome, sky-full rainbow of blazing oranges and reds that descended slowly on them. Those whole enough to head south were slaughtered by civilian militias at the wire on the river. Still, enough may have survived to start the outrageous popular legend of the Zambals, who roamed the gray, arid plain, and whose pale, pustuled corpses sometimes floated down the river.

"You're not going to trash anybody," laughed the Count.

"No, we won't," agreed Gil Ruiz. "Not if we can help it."

"We are like that," said the other commander, "that's all. We lack the killer thirst of, say, those Indonesians. My God, those Indonesians! Or the Indo-Chinese. Or the Chinese for that matter. It embarrasses me sometimes. Put a bunch of us together, some veggies and meats, and suddenly we are cousins!"

They all laughed.

The Count leaned over and asked, "Explain that, Nestor."

Hunched over, desperate, Nestor gathered himself and began, "We are island Indians." But he had lost the Count and the commanders. "This is the nature of island Indians," Nestor said aloud. His hopeful eyes lit on Mikkis. But Mikkis turned away too.

Exactly on the hour the Count rose, picked up one of the mikes, rapped it vigorously to quiet the applauding house, coughed and intoned, "Thank you, thank you!"

Take-it-off! Take-it-off!

"My dear friends, my dear, dear friends!"

The guests took up the cry: Take-it-off! Take-it-off!

The Count shook his perspiring head seductively.

The band swung into a honky-tonk strip joint prelude, and the Count, feigning modesty began to dance, the sway of his great hips accented by the laughter, the drums and the cymbals.

Take-it-off!

The Count reached behind his head and slowly undid the gold chain that held the eye patch. Under the coin, bottomless darkness. The crowd roared.

After taking many bows the Count spoke to the microphone again. He said, "Despite our many difficulties, together we greet the New Year again. Let us raise our glasses in the hope that this year may be better!"

The guests and the servants shouted in assent, banged the tables, clanged their knives against the plates. Then Nestor, drunk as a dog, was pushed up by two servants into the mike. The servants played to the audience by rubbing up against him, cupping his crotch and humping his unsteady legs. But the Count stilled the laughter with an upraised arm. He then sat before the stage, bowed his head with a large handkerchief under his face. His huge shoulders shook as Nestor recited.

From the darkness
Of Time's black abyss
I rise, I rise!

I am the New Year
Come this hour to govern,
The New Year this hour to govern…

Soon the winners of the raffles were announced, Mikkis among them. He ate his two heaping platefuls quickly, hardly pausing to chew, as the music and the screams decibeled louder off the ceilings and the walls and onto his throbbing brain. Many of the guests were moving back to the food tables, but for Mikkis it was nearly time to go.

"I know, I know," the Count leaned back, acting a disappointment. "You are the wholesome, archaic Greek - progenitors of the Spartan - with no taste for our Latin debaucheries. Ah, but you're new and will come over in time. Aristotle supped quite heartily with the Macedonian, as you know. Veggies and meats! This may have been a night for epiphanies, for conversion. Anyway I have sent your gifts, and your prizes, to your car. I also found some parcels that belong to you. Books, magazines, some tapes and some discs."

"Well, thank you," said Mikkis, shaking the Count's huge hand. But he was not too new to know not to ask where and how the Count found his mail.

Francesca de Keyser came over to kiss him good-night. Briefly, Mikkis considered asking her to spend the night. By the sudden sparkle of her eyes Mikkis saw she knew. "Happy New Year," she said. "Go and visit Papa one of these days."

The headlights and the yellow beams on his car were lit, the engine running, the small blue flag up on the long hood. On the back seat, the two young women were smoking. "Your raffle prizes," Kato explained.

They were both breeds: one dark, one fair.

"You want them?"

Kato smiled under the wasp-green cyclist's glasses. Mikkis slid into the front passenger seat. Kato said, "Your other gifts are in the trunk. We have solar batteries, some Perrier water, a food basket. And your mail's there too."

"What are your names?" Mikkis turned to ask the breeds as Kato waved to the cowboy manning the gate.

"I'm M'aya. She's Nami-it. Those are stage names only." They giggled.

Kato slowed for the bank of bulbs in the middle of the street, but kept the engine rev roaring with the clutch. He flicked the auxiliary backlights on, then leaned forward and drew the pistol from the holster on the small of his back. He slid the gun butt forward between his legs, the slide secured under his thigh. Mikkis drew his own pistol from the spring-loaded devise concealed beneath the glove compartment and scanned behind the slowing car. Both guns were on Condition One, cocked-and-locked, as they had drilled. But the drunken cowboys in the checkpoint knew the car, the flag, and waved them on.

A hundred yards past the checkpoint a high velocity rifle round cracked over the car. On both sides of the street, the mounds of garbage and the bags were instantly transformed into running, jabbering clumps of Subterraneans and Creeks. The cowboys flicked the switches into full auto. Cannon and machineguns fired in volume. By the dash clock, Mikkis saw it was almost midnight.

Yes, there'll be a hot time in Manila tonight!

Past the sector guardhouse and the dogs, Kato flicked on the radio and punched the code sequence. He was back in good spirits as they came up to the house crackling under the joy rockets and the din of the explosions. All the security lights, powered by the solar rechargeables were on. As the gate swung open, Mikkis could sense the big machinegun on the roof trained on them. Over the radio, Caramba was on board - on tape? - beginning dawn watch, La Diane.

Mikkis and the breeds sat in the car - motor running, power beams lit -and talked softly as Kato disarmed the booby traps, unlocked the door, cleared downstairs and upstairs. He then proceeded around the house to shut off the auxiliary power. Mikkis waved the breeds in, quiet for a change but briefly, as Kato armed the traps again.

The women followed Mikkis into the upstairs bedroom. The fair one loaded a disc into the player and the dark one began to dance to the music.

Mikkis felt suddenly exhausted, and coughed long after a lungful of breath. He tossed the mail packages on the bed. Where does the Count get them? He stood and rummaged about the bathroom closet for the testing kit. He folded two of the papers and watched them spit daintily into the tubes.

M'aya. Nami-it. Both blue. Both safe.

Mikkis flushed the tubes down the bowl. He walked to the machine and pushed in the disc. The dark one danced beside him and said, "We want to smoke. May we smoke?"

Mikkis said, "Sure. Go ahead." They produced the sticks from their wallet and lit up. He sniffed as the rough smoke seethed around his tongue.

The color bars on the monitor faded into the face of beautiful black woman who smiled at him and began to speak. Mikkis lip-read her Merry Christmas. But the audio line was connected into the music output, and the woman on the screen appeared to move her mouth in sync with the old, honky-tonk bar song.

When he comes round
Will he kiss you
Warm as in the days before
And will he say his love forever
As if forever were today…

The fair one had found his nipple and was clicking on it with a wide warm tongue, her bright hair, perfume and smoke, bobbing up and down under his frightened face.

Will he say his love forever
As if forever were today…

Who are you? Mikkis inquired of the woman on the screen. The dark one, already naked, came from behind and unzipped him swiftly. He drew back as the teeth passed. She reached within where he was becoming hard. Who are you? he repeated.

Time enough tomorrow to find out.

Cape Engaño, Epigraph

2008-06-04T00:47:00.000-07:00

CAPE ENGAÑO

Erwin E. Castillo

In memory of Miguel.

This book was written with the kind help of Nick Joaquin, Franz Arcellana, Virginia Moreno, Georgina Cadileña, Concepcion Dadufalza, Ed & Edith Tiempo, Ding & Blanca Nolledo, Francisco Ferma, Francisco Aguila, Napoleon & Angelina Aure, Rafael & Adela Aure, Willy & Marite Sanchez, Recah & Fe Trinidad, Bubu & Jocel Castillo, Felix Angue, Sammy Tucay, Laura Legaspi Castillo and children, Fernando Poe, Jr., Bootsie Taylor Catala, Pedro Aure Alegre, Josefa Aure Roman, Marieta Castillo, Eugenio Escover, Luis Sol Jr., Atoy Fernandez, Micah & Yuko Valdes, Rudy Rodriguez & family, the Afable brothers, the Baesa brothers, Ben Balbenta, Pundok Sustento, Gerardo de Leon, Grexy Villaseran, Eddie Romero, Gabriel Elorde, Corazon Vidamo and children, Jun Urbano, Pepito Aguila, Danny Dalena, Cesar Aquino, Natividad Almanzor, George Dominado, Cris Michelena, Carlos Castillo, Sonny Yniguez, Jovita Kaw, Mel Gulfin, Richard Eusebio, Babes Sumpo, Vicenta Ferma Aure, Johnny Chiuten, Francis Llamas, Jose Modequillo, Jessie Bercilla, Miguel Castillo, Oscar Orbos, Jolico Cuadra, Diego Castillo, Rafael & Charito Colet, Horacio Morales, Shakespeare Chan, Virgilio Pinlac, King Nocum, Erle Castillo, Rizalina Claravall, Jun Tuason; David, Noah, Meagan, Juan Gabriel, Ringo, and most specially, Jarvis.

“…console ourselves
that the war of nature
is not incessant,
that no fear is felt,
that death is generally prompt,
and that the vigorous,
the healthy and the happy
survive and multiply.”

--- Darwin

…And with the Wind behind us that evening we distinguished the Form of the Luçones against the sunset of the Western Sea. We prepared to blunt the blow of the Advancing Tempest by tracking North along the Coast, though there below the wind the Ship was imperiled for the Treachery of the rocks. Sore for land we braved the deck Whence we observed the Cliffs and Jungles so Savagely unlike any we had in our lifetimes seen. The Wind and the Rain now blew with great Force, lifting the Jungle trees by their roots as if by cannon. The Earth gushed in Rivers of red mud and loosed the smell of a turning grave. Our ship rounded the Horn of the Luçones with much travail, then turned into the open sea once more and the full might of the Vendabal whose strength was undiminished by its rampage across the Horn. In the darkness the Island assumed the Visage and Attitude of Leviathan, lightning its teeth, thunder its voice, and our poor souls its prey. By first light we beheld the Promontory, seven leagues North of the line of the Boxeador, and the foot of the mountains sacred to the Heathen that we distantly heard above the Surf and Rain, belaboring their Infernal Drums, commanding us Sail on for there was no Value to Realize in that God-forsaken realm. Thereto for shelter we leed, imploring Our Holy Mother's merciful Intercession, while the Typhoon roared about us, the morning of the 5^th July, the Savior's Year of 1663, that we came upon the Cape of El Engaño.

--- Diego de Salcedo to Francisco Yçquierdo,
written at San Miguel de Manila, July 19, 1664.

Cape Engaño, Chapter 1

2008-05-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

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 harbor of Acapulco de Juarez, 16 51 N 99 55, was sprinkled with pleasure craft and sails. The Metaphysicals had removed their shoes, and only the sixth, who was youngest and Oriental, kept his summer jacket on. One or two, in their undershirts, were asleep, wheezing gently in the wicker chairs.

“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 Munich by way of Bangkok. Ruben Balbenta’s German repertoire was Mexican – well, at least South American – Edmundo Ros, the hat dance, the cockroach dance, the dance of the ring-necked doves and the cutlasses. He had the milonga, the samba, the cha-cha-cha, Trinin Lopez and Los Lobos. But, while the song lyrics were well inflected and sounded authentically felt,

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 Sierra Madre Occidental. Then from the outland. They came in their many hundreds, thousands – Zapotec and Mixtec, Quiche, Chol and Ximca, Nahuatl from this ocean clear across to the other ocean – converging to build the new Acapulco. They came from the secret villages, the camps, from beneath the rocks where they darted and stung the dragging tail of revolution. Pueblos and municipios well camouflaged from slave-trader and bounty hunter resurfaced mysteriously there. Mountain Indians, desert Indians, plains and jungle Indians. Even island Indians. As once they came to build the star-map pyramids and the temples, they appeared to labor on the hotels, the marinas, the casinos, the airport. Their shanty barrios, their hovels of grass and animal skin, discarded cardboard and tin – each burrow marked with the same firewheels, panthers and sundisks they etched furtively on the wet concrete of the highways and the hotels – soon terraced the hills that overlooked the spuming, effervescent bay.

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 Acapulco sky. Sol Amaluriq looked doubtfully at his wristwatch, shook it, brought it up to his ear and listened, though it was a solar Seiko.

“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 Cagayan, between the Bojador and the Engaño, and his pair of butterfly knives confiscated from him. The Tapiro was disciplined with cords weighed with lead studs and saltwater, was threatened by the prospect of the plank, of having to swim to landfall. But the tramp was shorthanded, so the Tapiro was impressed to work his passage in the galley. There, by lamplight he wrote a tear-stained letter, aghast, not at his own miserable adventure, but at the shock of Shanghai: how hundreds of dead-eyed people paddled out on rafts of rotting corpses buoyed by the gas of decomposition, to greet each arriving ship. In the dark ocean boiling with sharks drawn there, too, by the prospect of garbage, the skeleton men, the women and the children fought to eat the flung refuse of the tramps.

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 Mountain Province. But as a callow youth, he first sailed to the Far East as a Marine rifleman with the United States holding force in the Philippines. Corporal Haglund, nicknamed Duece, arrived that great day in the morning with two hundred other regulars, in their newly-issued white twill, tropical uniforms, aboard the transport ship McCullough steaming for the harbor of Cavite in the spray of the agua de Mayo: the light, silverine May-time rain. The Marines let out a frightful tumult when they espied, through the dimness, the masts of the sunken Spanish fleet piercing the surface of the dawn like so many forlorn crosses.

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 Winchester pump shotgun, loaded with No. 8, to lie in ambush behind a clump of buffalo grass, while his tent lay open, his goods exposed. But the sons-of-bitches wouldn’t take the bait.

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 Manila, to devastate Aguinaldo’s own lair and tribe, the root of the tree and the nest of the viper - Aguinaldo, who turned out bloodthirsty and desperate as his reputation. “I swear to you boys I had that fucking nigger in my sights,” Captain Haglund told the newly landed junior officers, lowering his cocked, long-barreled Army Colt on the ashen face of the Tagal bootblack soliciting the tents. “I had him right…” – and the hammer clanged on the empty chamber – “…here!”

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 Iowa boy, an apprentice to the muleskinners, had stumbled thigh-deep into a leaf-hidden poisoned pit. For three nights the Iowa boy ran a delirious fever, and died mad. Captain Haglund assembled a hunting party for some revenge before breakfast.

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 North China when God finally guided that little boy’s spear into his heart. Major Haglund testified he heard the twirl coming from a great distance and rose to accept the piercing with an incredible gush of gratitude. Then he fell twitching and weeping in the blood-mud among the bodies his Marines had bayoneted and clubbed to death in that hamlet of Boxers, autumn in Tiensin.

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 Cordilleras. The baby girl was big and ruddy, her blue-eyed face framed with bright ringlets of sunshine yellow. At first, the ship’s captain would not hear of it, but Mary Haglund assured him she and the baby had in fact lived among practicing headhunters and maneaters in the wilderness. Reading the Rev. Haglund’s little nod, the captain relented, released the butterfly knives to the clergyman's custody, and the Tapiro became the infant’s fiercely protective nanny, testing the warmth of her bottled milk on the blue firewheels, sundisks and beasts tattooed on his arms. The baby’s eyes, slightly crossed, regarded the Tapiro curiously.

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 Palawan and the Ilocos gathered on the bay for the benediction of the saints, the Seven Archangels and the Tuan Batu holding up the decorated harpoon with which he slew the deep-ocean She-Devil. On deck, on moonlit nights, the Tapiro would watch the blinking lights of the steamer bounding away into the wild darkness and know there was, somewhere in the ship’s maw, a barque of countrymen, singing together while slinging coal into the mouth of hell.

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 Europe of his heroes and illusions. This was confessed in the letter addressed to his wife and small children, a letter he had slipped under the image of the San Miguel the morning of his escape, on the family altar where Mabarak, who no longer believed, led the brood in evening prayer. But the letter lay undiscovered until a year later, when Mabarak’s wife, tormented near to madness by the creditors and the rumors, died – scattering the orphans.

Mabarak jumped ship in Barcelona to ferret out distant relatives: sea scruff that had washed ashore and become streetsweepers, grooms and servants, and who lived among the ruffians, the cyclists, the radicals, painters without talent and the retinue of the bullfighters in the hard slums of the Barrio Chino. If the afternoon was warm and the northern sky clear, Mabarak would sit on the roof and cry for his dead wife, his lost children, and for France across the mountain: the farm drenched with flowers and sunlight where, under the chestnut tree, Luna read Marx and hesitantly, painstakingly, became a human being again. Mabarak imagined visiting with the survivors of 1898, to toast with them the novel, the custombristas, and the early death of Mariano de Lara; the poetry of Sully Proudhomme; the exhortations of Morayta and Pi y Margall. To salute the workers’ Republic, the fragile present and the glorious past. To walk – Mabarak later wrote – the high hill Rizal had walked from the blue womb of the Mediterranean, tottering to martyrdom under the burden of his letters, books and convictions, to the prison fort of Montjuich and death now looming.

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 Breda. The time of the English and the Dutch. Of the heretics Tomas Condes and Olivero Van del Norte. When Francisco Draculo, Vampire, terrorized the coast.

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 Spain. Down the gangplanks of the ancient ships stumbled the sun-scorched, seasick children the old madmen had twisted into the whip of their revenge: the grim, young Falangists with their Mausers and their buccaneer flags. Overhead, a German bi-plane sputtered in circles, disgorging clouds of white petals, leaflets luminescent in blood-soaked skulls and bones, that descended like pink snow upon the roofs.

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 Madrid, a city so aloof it may have been a Moorish or a Romany superstition. A huge sulfuric boulder suspended mile-high in the sky above the mountain, unnoticed by the hag-ridden citizens, their robes and faces billowing. Mabarak tarried and sat and began to write the poem. He glanced up to see the gray, toothless hag watching from the doorway, old and tall as the rolling-block Remington she carried. She was backlit by the blue morning, but Mabarak could see one of her eyes was milky white.

“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 Iran, in Kenya, and after the divorce, in Guatemala – Filipino Rabago came to imagine the urgent news of a death in the family. They were calling to lean on his strength, to comfort in a loan from his hard-won cache of wisdom and money. Someone that was dear, in the islands he no longer remembered, islands made and remade over, on the cot that was his raft to elusive sleep, so they in dreams were glazed with a soft, sweet light, where Lubi Peredo, her cheeks still flushed with youth and mountain shyness waited for the man, negative x-rays under his arm, that once was him.

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 Amsterdam suppliers is coming to town tomorrow morning. You will pick him up from the airport. A mister Cortes. Mr. Cristobal Cortes. He will be on 127, five-fifty from New York.”

“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 Guatemala,” they hooted, for the Indians of Mexico had always named strangers after their songs. “He’s going again to Mother Aster’s! Hey, Guatemala! You can’t have meat tonight, judeo!”

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 New York had disembarked its passengers. Fil nosed the big Mercedes into the parking lot, raced up the escalator holding his placard aloft.

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 Acapulco, or Mexico for that matter, in ages. As the shuttle bus turned into the driveway of the Los Armas, the entire building let loose an audible oh! to greet the electric brownout. Old Kurtz specified the least expensive single, which turned out to be right beside the standby generator, so that the room vibrated roughly, and his eyes watered in the diesel fumes. The room reminded Kurtz of a boat, of a cheap cabin below the waterline, near the boilers. “This will do quite well, thank you,” he coughed to the bellboy, a Maxatec with twenty confirmed automobile kills.

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 Brunei on the saltwater river, he fell asleep on the wet floor of the shallow canoe and woke with his trailing hand on the snout of the swimming boar. He leaped up shouting, as the Sulu boatmen roared with laughter, steadying the dugout with their long bamboo poles. From the river to the sea, a thousand streaked pigs in full, grunting migration, under a moving, prickly cloud of stink.

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 Salamanca. In early desert script, the words “black” and “wise” are written almost exactly the same.

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! China – endless, deathless China – silver, coffee, cocaine. Go with internecine war, energy sources, electronics, oil, the subversion of paper currencies. “Let’s do away with the gold standard!” “What a devilish idea!” Sine sponsione nihil! Blockbuster, besotted events lacking cleverness or imagination, and the same shaky denouement. The same theories, forgotten for being useless, reinvented. The same theories, paid for a thousand times over, and which still will not work. Chances are, and here Kurtz grinned in appreciation, it was himself. He knew all along it was himself, though he made a note to consult the records.

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,” Tennessee blurted, so nervous he could not knot his tie. But, the way Kurtz heard it, Hemingway had not started his fifth, and was most charming and polite. Hemingway bowed to shake hands, said, “Con permiso…”and reached out, deft as the hangman, to loosen and snug Tennessee’s tie. Tennessee sucked in his breath: the man was so close! just below his burning face. Kurtz heard Hemingway said nice things about Tennessee’s work, about Streetcar Named Desire.

“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 Dahomey lullaby before that. Kurtz was weepy over sixteenth century music. Lost, beyond hope, with the sea exploding towards heaven from the ship, or in the outraged churches, ring-around-the-roses in the green, among the sparrows in the choirlofts and the taverns; or in the desert passes to keep the courage up through the time of waiting; or under the verandah where troverre melodies coaxed open the lady’s quivering quim – a puff of odor that instantly fills the mouth with spit – the music seemed to acknowledge an emerging revision of context – dawn! – a reunion forthcoming, when Babel’s far-flung and estranged would meet again, having lost all memory of each other; except, oncewhile, when sanctuary is breached, the hatch battered down to reveal the child’s crib within, or the idol – half-man, half-beast – a scatter of javelins; or words, the names of animals and ideas, from one end of the world exact in meaning and nuance to those of the other end; a softly arched brow or scimitar; the glorious breasts of the hundred-breasted Mother dewy with young milk; and then the Name in a moan of vowels surging from the mouth of stone, this hour of the solstice day. It was coming! they would bow and curtsy, perhaps even embrace and dance – Brothers! Sisters! – and then, in a festival of a year and a day, present for each others’ wonderment and for trade the glories devised apart while the world, like never again, was sundered and cleft.

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 Manila galleons. Here, once, the tantalizing omens of the Orient and the setting sun, the brazen beauty of the honey-spun Filipina whores, in their gay dress and parasols, acknowledging the cheer of the dock hands with waves and blown kisses.

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 Europe through another ambuscade, this time by the Golden Fleet. Someone had markers on the English, the Hollanders, and the Dutch Yndia Company in Amsterdam, 52 21 N 4 54 E, metamorphosed into a bourse.

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 Manila, where the colonel was adviser to the Rangers, and in command of an elite, personal fighting unit. In ballistics evaluation, the 245-grain .44 Magnum bullet had gone through bear, lion, elephant, and had blown engine blocks to pieces. But it was a race to kill the first man with the new gun and cartridge.

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 Mexico City, long distance. The commandant took the telephone, listened, hawked loudly and spat on the floor. He handed the phone back to the young policeman, then strode clanging out of the room.

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! Guatemala saw the Tlaloc!”

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, Guatemala,” Mother Aster grinned goldenly, slicing the citron with his large Texas knife and sucking half, seeds and all, through his mustache. In his wayward youth, looking for trouble, Mother Aster had drifted north, over the border, to wrangle for the remudas filming westerns in the Los Angeles mountains. He fell grandly off the horses, costumed as Mexican or Indian, but at night he trucked in the girls for the crews, sometimes even the actors. Mother Aster was acting again now, acting the menace, and the man across the table swallowed and blinked.

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 Texas knife on the bone on Fil’s chest, “then deliver it to the poor. Donate it to the church. The mad priest will take it, I can assure you.” Fil walked under the red bulbs among the Magdalenas to take his fee in kind, in the torrid pubic entrances loosened and smeared by the come of the signatories. And, but for the weight, he hardly noticed how many more keys there were in his warehouseman’s ring, to doors locked behind the obsolete and broken, returned to less than the worth of its parts, one-year’s grace before

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 Megara, Meggie, smooth and warm under her jacket and dress, with large nipples one roseate shade darker than the skin of her breasts. Lunchtime at the engineers’ office he would unbutton his trousers, sit on the edge of his table. He was not half as large as the Persians and the Arabs, but they barely lengthened when provoked, and their erections did not reach horizontal. On the other hand he grew parallel to his belly, straight up, absolutely stiff, stiff as a horn, and for long. She would, after glancing about, lift her dress to tease him with a glimpse of her brown-furred belly. She would bend her knees to adjust her hot cunt to him. He would sometimes free her breasts from the dress, so they rocked in front of him, sometimes together, sometimes apart. She would look at his face, her upper lip beaded with fine hair that became visible with sweat, and snarl, “You like that, ha? You like that!” The son, who would be a grown man now, was fair as Meggie, and only when the boy scowled could he trace his own face there, and the stern faces of his grandfathers who had gone away to the mountain, to the sea.

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 Guatemala, passed-over for promotion, malarial, despondent, in the silver mine on one of the feeder streams of the Amatitlan. For a while the childhood sweethearts resumed their correspondence. Lubi Peredo had lost her husband, and Fil half-suspected she had also lost a screw. She sent a tabloid clipping that announced how the Japanese had perfected a surgical procedure for restoring the hymen. The tape was her singing to an awkward guitar, a three-chord accompaniment that was, in spite of himself, touchingly innocent, something made up on the tune of Glocamora.

Kumusta ka sa Guatemala?

Kumusta ang giliw ko …

How hard that made him laugh, the first time he heard it. How are you in Guatemala? he asked himself. And then he cried. Through the years, when burdened, he would play the song and sing mercilessly along, so the Coyotes of the Acapulco slums jeered and called him “Guatemala”, following the Indian formula of naming strangers after their songs.

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 Guatemala, el Filipino."

"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 Manila, 14 35N 121 00E, a wispy rain fell, taking almost everyone delightfully by surprise. The summer earth breathed. Quiet lightning crept incandescent across the sky, dimming the moon, so that a hundred poets false and true, painters, composers, “I” viewpoint columnists who wrote socio-political commentary were simultaneously inspired. At the detention complex the radios cracked in static. Telephones jangled and went dead. Two army recruits, newly integrated from the irregulars in Mindanao, ran with their rifles from building to darkened building.

“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.