The Caprices (21 page)

Salas had the taxi drop him a couple of blocks from Plaza Miranda. He held a briefcase in his left hand, which contained the key to the safe deposit box and a piece of paper with the box’s location. All had been carefully arranged. Salas heard a singing in his ears that he hadn’t heard since the old days when, on the deck of a beautiful ship, he’d marked the time between heartbeats hoping the torpedo would miss, that the plane would be plucked from the sky. Now he was merely crossing a street. Salas smiled. He had always thought that singing was his concern for his men. Now he realized it was concern for himself. He took a seat on the park bench indicated in his instructions and began to wait. The figure agreed upon was five million pesos, which was but a fraction of the worth of the maps. Salas had agreed because the gold had become useless to him.

More and more he had been thinking of Señor Ocampo and his plantation on Negros. That was the life that Salas would now
pursue. He would become a gentleman with land, serfs, and position. This briefcase that held the location of the maps was the last vestige of his Japanese identity. By ridding himself of it, he would be washed clean, truly born anew. He was older, but not old. Maybe he would even find a pleasant young woman to pass the time with. He pictured himself on a broad veranda with a clear view to the sea, the palm trees bowing gently in his direction. He sat at a table playing cards with this woman, who had her hair pulled up in a tidy bun. Maybe there would even be a child. Why not? A little round-faced boy with a perfect shelf of bangs falling right above his brow. Kamichi Ayao, once the naval commander, would now be Carlos Salas, the gentleman plantation owner.

Plaza Miranda was a large, tidy field of trim grass, worn to mud in places, and rimmed with trees. A stage was set at the southern end. An arc of high-backed wooden chairs awaited the invited guests. A crowd had already begun to gather around the stage—students mostly, it seemed, earnest in bell-bottom pants. Salas found them amusing, then realized that at that age, he had been in charge of a thousand men. He sighted a man across the park standing by a tree in studied nonchalance. He was wearing a jacket, although it was very hot. One of the president’s thugs, thought Salas. He looked around, wondering which of the liberal hopefuls was scheduled for execution. No one was on the stage except for a youthful man in jeans, who gave the microphone a few silent taps, then shrugged his shoulders to an invisible technician. Salas was halfheartedly searching for the technician when Balmaceda appeared almost magically by his side.

The years had not been kind to Balmaceda. He had never been handsome and now—at this proximity—Salas saw that he was yellowed and sick. Balmaceda gave Salas an almost imperceptible nod and the two men shook hands. Balmaceda sat down next to Salas. He rested a briefcase by the bench, which would be switched with Salas’s briefcase.

“Would you like to check the contents of my briefcase?” Salas said.

Balmaceda shook his head. He was fretting. Salas caught him looking at the man standing across the park. The man had his hand inside his jacket.

“Ayao, leave,” Balmaceda whispered. “You definitely will not leave with the money, but if you’re quick, you might leave with your life.”

Salas looked down at his shoes. “My name is Carlos Salas.”

Balmaceda looked over at his countryman in disbelief. He nodded again, so slight a motion that only one who knew him could read it as an intended gesture. Balmaceda got up, taking Salas’s briefcase with him. He did not seem to want to leave. In his eyes, Salas saw the years of loneliness and confusion that separated this meeting from their last. “You have found men to give you orders,” Salas ventured, half smiling. He actually meant it as a joke. Balmaceda took the insult silently, but presented his back to Salas. He left with small hurried steps.

Salas inched off the bench, but he was too tired to get up. Then he caught sight of a yellow balloon floating just above the heads of the crowd. Someone had tied the balloon firmly to the wrist of a little boy, whose large black eyes were fixed on it. The balloon bounced spiritedly, tugging at the string, a prisoner of the boy’s slender wrist. At this moment, the balloon rivaled the moon and the stars and all the orbs spinning and spitting in the deep blue folds of night. It captivated him as he had not been captivated in a very long time. Then the little boy was staring at him; his free arm was raised to point at Salas and his small mouth was open in a gesture of wonder. Salas saw the father grab the boy by the shoulders and begin to drag him away.

Salas wanted to protest, but he did not know why. He was feeling queer and the sound had drained from the landscape in a way that awed and terrified him. Something was wrong. Salas felt a throbbing pain in his abdomen, a pain he had not felt in years.
Could this be his appendix? But his appendix was gone. This was merely the ghost of it. He patted his stomach and his hands came up covered in blood. The man in the jacket was standing a mere twenty feet away. Salas had been shot. Soon he would be dead and there was nothing he could do about it.

The blood poured out of his side and onto the packed mud around the bench. I am dying, he thought to himself. I am dying my second death. He looked at the awed faces of the crowd and raised his bloodied hands to them. “My name is Carlos Salas,” he whispered. But bullets had begun sputtering by the stage and then there was the explosion of grenades. The president’s thugs had started a massacre. The protesters were scattering to the far edges of the plaza, running from the rain of bullets. They did not care about rubies or gold. They did not care about the man dying by the park bench. And all around were parents gathering their children in protective arms, finding places to keep them safe.

Intramuros

1. The City

Manila suffered during the war. How many times have I heard this? There are tales of the city weeping in the dead quiet that followed MacArthur’s triumphant entry and of her shame at the rubble that greeted him. She wept in pain as bombs blasted away the monuments that marked her time as mistress to the Spaniards and destroyed the infant democracy, a gift from when she bedded the Americans. She mourned for the loss of Chinese and Indian baubles, and for the surrender to the Japanese—her Malay features disfigured by a history of rape and failure. Why would she suffer this degradation?

The image of Manila fleeing down the southern tip of the island of Luzon comes to mind. She bears great stone churches perched on her shoulders, universities in her arms, commerce belted about her waist, and a host of barrios tangled in the hem of her skirt. In pursuit are a plague of tanks and sword-wielding conquerors of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. I picture an
indigena
Lady Liberty warily dipping her toe into the South China Sea.

A city does not suffer. A city knows no pain, nor can it shrink from it. She merely waits for someone to liberate her, and if the liberation is successful, the war recedes into the pages of history.
I shall return Manila to her rightful place at the mouth of a great bay. She curls around it with an arm flung to the east. Her legs snuggle the southern coastline, her sorrowful gaze aimed toward Bataan and Corregidor—if a city could gaze, which it can’t any more than it can suffer. Walls are rebuilt, buildings constructed, people reenter the city carting the memories back, much as in the previous year they carted off the dead.

2. Intramuros

The Japanese did not march into Manila. They came quietly—more like the Chinese merchants than the Spanish soldiers. Intramuros—which was a neighborhood bound by stone walls, the legacy of the Spaniards—did not have a history of being hostile to outsiders. My family was of mixed blood; they ate the Chinese moon cakes and blasted firecrackers, learned Spanish, harvested rice in the provinces, and remembered all the pagan superstitions. They believed that the Jesuits were second only to Christ himself and were hospitable to the Japanese merchants who set up their bodegas in the Walled City during the twenties, side by side with the churches, mumbling their rolled
l
’s at the brown-robed friars who purchased soap and bags of sweets there. The old city, with its rat-infested canals and crumbling monuments, was such a mess of humanity that it would have been hard to single out the Japanese. They crept in like everything else and were patient and persistent, just like the succulent vines slowly tearing at the wall itself.

3. My Grandmother

There’s a story about my grandmother refusing to leave Intramuros. Most of her children had already been shipped off to Nueva Ecija, where the rice fields were. The Japanese had already occupied Manila, but she didn’t want to leave her house. She
would stand in her kitchen looking at all the pots and pans, thinking, I don’t want Mr. Matsushita getting his hands on these. This is the Mr. Matsushita who probably sold her all the pots in the first place and one fine morning appeared on the doorstep of his shop in full military regalia. Long live the emperor and all of that. I wouldn’t want him to get his hands on my pots either. One day a Japanese soldier who was not much taller than my grandmother (and she was four foot eleven) informed her that the house was needed by the emperor. My grandmother didn’t much like the idea of her house being a collaborator, but the emperor’s representatives insisted that it was not her choice, nor the house’s.

I picture her with one hand fixed firmly to the doorknob of the kitchen door (hand carved in the likeness of Saint Joseph’s face) and the other wrapped tightly around the wrist of her smiling baby, who can’t tell the difference between visitors and invaders.

My grandfather, a sweet, irresponsible doctor who spoiled my mother to the point that she is still hard to live with, was standing knee deep in water in Fort Santiago with other members of the Philippine elite and his fourteen-year-old son. The Japanese had informed the doctor that he could not leave in much the same tone as they’d informed my grandmother that she could not stay. She and the baby, Elena, moved into the church, ate leaves, and occasionally ventured over to the American POW camp, where her father-in-law, a Texan left over from the Spanish American War, would pass her handfuls of rice through the bars.

4. Granddaddy

Granddaddy would not leave the Philippines. He’d left Texas at sixteen and never returned. The story is that he was riding his horse to buy a loaf of bread—something I’d like to believe, but it has the stamp of Filipino romanticism of the Wild West all over
it—and never came back. Next he was in Houston. Next he was cooking huge vats of beans on a naval vessel bound for Manila. Then there was something about a railroad that has since mysteriously disappeared. Then he married, had a son, never left. He didn’t want Mr. Matsushita to get anything either. I’m not sure when Granddaddy switched residences, but I imagine the Japanese took him first. Finding him must have been a happy surprise for the sons of the Rising Sun: the enemy, drunk and old, wandering around in his house yelling obscenities. They stripped him naked, poked at him with their rifle butts, and had a grand old time.

Granddaddy ended up with the Americans in Santo Tomas, where his son had received his medical degree in the twenties. Granddaddy would joke about it—son class of ’25, father class of ’45. Things were bad then. In fact, the only up side of internment seemed to be that you met famous men like General Wainwright, a cavalry man with a heavy limp, whom MacArthur had left to hold the fort. Granddaddy had some questions for the general—for example, “Is MacArthur returning?”—but the fall of Bataan seemed to have left Wainwright with little to say.

Granddaddy would save his food and pass it through the bars to his daughter-in-law and granddaughter. He wrapped it in banana leaves. They ate the food. They ate the banana leaves. He would look at little barefoot Elena in disbelief—an angel shot out of the sky and stuck in hell. He would say, “Any news on Richard?” And my grandmother, with her hard, Spanish mouth and sad eyes, would simply shake her head. Granddaddy would watch them leave as they made their way back to the church. She was a brave woman, he thought, with a faith he envied in a God he didn’t understand. “Elena and I are safe,” she said. “We’re sleeping under the altar.”

5. Uncle John

One day, an American soldier named John Hachey was wandering through the old city carrying some important piece of paper, and a little boy ran up to him and begged him not to bomb the church because it was full of civilians. John Hachey ran through the streets like he’d never run before, his heart pounding and tears streaming down his face, and he reached the man with the maps and the authority and told him, “Don’t bomb the church!” Who would believe that John Hachey—with his southern accent and thinning blond hair that stood up like a wheat field—would return to Maryland and have a daughter named Mary, and that this woman would marry my Uncle Jappy?

6. Uncle Jappy

My Uncle Jappy survived the war, got a degree in medicine (Santo Tomas ’56), moved to the U.S., and began introducing himself as “Carlos.” I knew him as Uncle Jappy. The more Spanish-influenced in the family called him Tito ’appy. He was not Japanese, nor was he a collaborator, being a mere five years of age when the war started and hardly a man when it finished. His only guilt was in his genes, which expressed the Chinese blood of my family to a startling degree—he could have passed, perhaps, for Japanese. I cannot explain why the family thought it was a joke to call him Jappy during the war, and even more difficult to explain why they used that appellation with all the love and affection implied by nicknames when the war was over. We called him Jappy until the day he died, which was long after his father and brother had left this earth, escorted into the afterlife by the Japanese.

7. Lolo Richard and Fernando

My grandfather and Fernando, my uncle, lived out their lives in Fort Santiago. Who knows what happened? The records are murky. In fact, we only knew that they were in there because someone saw them. How could anyone see them? So many collaborators in those days of hopelessness. Our city, their war. Survival is easy to justify. My Aunt Elena was then two. She’d made it out to the province where the rest of her siblings were crashing around, wondering when they’d have to go back to school. The story goes something like this: Everyone was in the dining room eating and Elena decided that she needed to pee, although her mother did not have time to attend to her. She got left in the bathroom for quite a while. When my grandmother finally got around to getting her cleaned up, Elena informed her that a man had come to visit her. He just stood there smiling and Elena was not afraid, even though she didn’t know who he was. He was wearing khaki pants and a jacket made out of similar stuff. He looked like her brother Jorge, only older, a lot older. He had just kind of disappeared and not through the doorway. That’s how my family found out that my grandfather, Lolo Richard, was dead. There is no way of knowing how much time he and his son were incarcerated.