The Caprices (18 page)

“We have ice cream.”

“What kind?”

“Queso.”

Salas did not like cheese ice cream, but he figured this man
had something to offer in addition to dessert. He stirred his ice cream, watching it pool into itself. The man in the apron looked closely into Salas’s face.

“You were standing across the street.”

“I was.”

The proprietor nodded, satisfied. He handed Salas a folded newspaper. “This newspaper terrified him,” he said.

Salas unfolded the newspaper. He gazed in disbelief at the front-page headline.

“He saw you watching him,” said the proprietor. “He ran out of here the moment you left.”

Salas returned to his apartment with the newspaper tucked neatly under his arm. He sat on his couch for close to half an hour with his right hand resting lightly on his brow before he finally unfolded the paper. The headline took up one half of the front page.

DISCOVERED BUDDHA ACTUALLY BRASS
.

Brass. But this was impossible.

The newspapers had been running articles on the Buddha for weeks. An amateur treasure hunter, Rogelio Roxas, had unearthed the Buddha in Baguio, a city to the north, in a neglected tunnel of the Benguet mines. The cavern had been sealed with concrete, littered with human bones. This was the handiwork of the Japanese, who had looted every corner of Southeast Asia during the war. The gold had followed them to the Philippines. After the surrender in 1945, there had been many attempts to locate the hoard, the richness of which was impossible to calculate. The gold was said to be hidden beneath the streets of Manila, in the mountains of Baguio—even in the
Nachi
, a Japanese ship sunk in Manila Bay. This treasure had been labeled “Yamashita’s Gold.” Its existence was always disputed, shrouded in mystery—the stuff of legends and romantic idiocy. But Rogelio Roxas claimed to have found one of the caches. And he swore the Buddha was gold, hollow, and filled with jewels.

For a moment, Salas had no idea what to make of it. Brass? This confused him. Then he smiled, then he laughed. This was a puzzle, a deep, dark puzzle. The newspaper article went on to say that the statue was solid—which would make a jewel-filled cavity impossible. The statue was decidedly not Thai, but no possible origin was put forth. And this, yes, he understood. He understood Balmaceda’s fear, his not wanting to see him. And who knew what trouble Balmaceda was in? The origin of the
brass
Buddha was somewhere in the Philippines, probably Manila. Somewhere in this sullen city an artist in a windowless room sculpted, sprewed, and vented. He probably was laid out on the floor now with a bullet in his head. There was still black wax beneath his fingernails. The hair on his arms was singed from the casting. Brass indeed. Of course, it was a phony. Not even a copy.
DISCOVERED BUDDHA ACTUALLY BRASS
carried the subheading “There Is No Yamashita’s Gold Buried in the Philippines.”

Salas continued reading. Despite his disbelief, he could not put the paper down. Rogelio Roxas was said to have dug the Buddha out of the ground while on holiday in Baguio. The newspaper did not explain why Roxas was digging in this particular location, nor did it attempt to consider the profound implications of finding a Buddha in country overrun with Igorot headhunters and dominated by Roman Catholicism. Salas was amused. After all, the real Buddha was pure gold and definitely of Siamese design. He knew this for a fact, for he had seen it. The statue was twenty-eight inches tall and weighed about two thousand pounds. The head screwed off, opening a cavity filled with precious stones—sapphires and rubies—mostly uncut and definitely Thai.

The last time Salas and Balmaceda were together, Balmaceda was crying like a baby, squatting in a puddle deep enough to reach his ankles. They had been in the cave for a week. Their rice was rotten and the roof was too low to allow them to stand. The
Japanese had been vanquished and now, robbed of the role of conqueror, Salas and Balmaceda found themselves living as primitives. There were bombs exploding all around, shaking dust into Salas’s eyes. But that wasn’t the worst. Salas couldn’t even decide what the best-case scenario would be. He had never considered being taken prisoner. His mind would not even shape that thought. He knew why officers turned to their daggers, although he didn’t believe the noble way out was necessarily noble. Sometimes killing oneself happened because of a lack of imagination. When an officer was stymied, he could always turn to Bushido, the warrior code, to guide him, and this code heartily endorsed
seppuku
. But what was the noble way for Salas? In his possession were the maps of the caves, the charts giving the location of the gold. He had orders to return the maps to the Japanese, so that when Japan eventually triumphed, they could retrieve their spoils. But lately, seeing his countrymen stacked like firewood, he had been having a hard time believing that the Japanese would necessarily triumph, even in the long years to come.

Living minute to minute was bad enough. Salas found Balmaceda repulsive. The two had not been friends in any real sense. They had passed time together, thrown into the same cramped circles by the necessities of war. Together, they had supervised the digging of subterranean vaults at Fort Santiago, an arduous task that had allowed Salas more than enough time to learn about his fellow officer. All Balmaceda read was military history: Alexander, Genghis, Attila—even Patton. He memorized battle strategies that he would never use; he held Hannibal’s elephants in rigid admiration and hoped to one day do something similar, if there were elephants handy. His mind ran along its well-greased runners. His hair grew in an even, thick black carpeting. He bit his nails when he thought no one was looking, and blamed his copious tears on the poor quality of air in the cave. His intention was to survive the war with Salas, then await orders.

“What if they’re all dead?” Salas asked.

“Who?”

“The men who would give you orders.” Salas rather liked the idea of no one outranking him, but this depressed Balmaceda. “If we live, you and I, we will be rich men,” Salas said, to cheer him up.

Balmaceda hadn’t considered that.

They made their pact shortly afterward. Salas volunteered to hide all the maps—after all, such documents were very incriminating. He could be hanged just for having them. Balmaceda agreed. Sometime in the distant future, the two would join together. Some man somewhere would have an order for Balmaceda, and Salas and he would follow it. They would assemble a team of engineers and language scholars to decipher the maps’ difficult coding. They would hire a team of workers to rival those of Cheops. Balmaceda would not move without Salas. Salas would not move without Balmaceda. Since until then the two men had been united in a similar cause, trust was irrelevant—betrayal unthinkable. Balmaceda drew his sword. He held it ceremoniously extended, which was awkward in their cramped quarters.

“What’s that for?” asked Salas.

“A blood pact,” he said.

Salas shook his head. “The war is over.” The sword tip trembled. “I think enough blood’s been shed.”

Balmaceda let the sword drop and wept.

A month after they parted, Salas realized that one of the maps was missing. He assumed that Balmaceda must have it. Salas noted this fact calmly, even thought it to be an accident.

Now, he realized that map must have led Rogelio Roxas to the gold Buddha.

In the months that followed the Japanese surrender, Salas had too much on his mind to be concerned with the location of one
map or of Balmaceda. Being Japanese was no longer an option. To stay alive, he had to forget the maps, the gold, even himself. He had to realize that he would never see his family again, and that if he were lucky enough to reach his next birthday, it was because he had been the beneficiary of an unfair and capricious god. He had to invent himself as the least of all mankind, one who would not stand out, who was unworthy of any attention—positive or negative—and once he had achieved this barefoot, straw-hatted anonymity, he could consider himself lucky. It was time to grow accustomed to the different stars, a laughing destiny that was mutable and had tumbled him off his victor’s throne, stripped him of his garments, and delivered him—thick-tongued and thin-skinned—into the hands of barbarians.

Salas made his way to Manila as soon as he safely could. He thought living in a city would be safer and he was right. After the war, Manila was rebuilding itself, its people along with its streets. Losing oneself was easy. Not only that, but good help was hard to come by. Salas became a gardener, an expert on orchids and other flowering delights, and as he dug and potted, sprayed and tenderly wrapped the delicate blooms to the strong trunks of trees, he thought of the gold. All through the late forties and the fifties Salas longed to liberate the gold from its soft, loamy packing, to bring its brilliance back into the light of day. He thought of the tons of it, some in bars, the rest in jewels and works of art. Each brilliant bud recalled a more resplendent jewel, a tougher beauty, that was just waiting for its time to be liberated. The Cordillera Mountains, infested with headhunters, were also laced with the spoils of a brief and fallen empire. The cobbled streets of Intramuros delivered coded messages that would lead the informed hunter deep below the catacombs and caverns of the old city, whose wounds were slowly being stitched together with concrete and cinder block. Salas was obsessed with retrieval, but sometimes he wondered if this was more because of boredom than greed. The war had taught him about money and power.

Salas was for all intents and purposes a vassal, one of an army of houseboys, butlers, washerwomen, cooks, nannies, and maids. The garden sprawled out, intensely manicured in places, in others neglected with tangled vines on the wall and crumbling fountains overrun with toads. The main house had pillars like the White House and was a monument to fawning and bad taste. Salas only approached by the back door, which was unremarkable and less offensive to his aesthetic sensibility. He said little, which was blamed on his general lack of charm and his inability to speak good Tagalog; his employer and fellow employees assumed he had grown up speaking some Igorot dialect in Baguio. He shared a room with a ripe-smelling chauffeur and a house-boy. The houseboy had a guitar and the chauffeur had a drinking problem. This combination resulted in bad folk singing and loud renditions of movie pop songs. Sometimes there were girls outside the door to their room, sashaying back and forth on broad hips, their necks weighted down with cheap, heady blooms. Salas slept on a mat on the floor.

In the daylight, maids and washerwomen would slink back to work, their flowers dead, the bards of the evening revealed as the boors of the day. Salas worked with mister and pruning shears. His wards, the orchids, yawned lazily in his direction. He understood. Time passed slowly for him as well. Late at night, when his roommates had finally quieted, Salas would enter a deep meditative state. Below the earth’s gentle crust, the jewels and gold bars waited, like patient bulbs in an eternal early spring. “Let them sleep,” Salas whispered into the night, but what he really wished for was an end to his insomnia.

One particularly hot evening (the heat had sent him to his orchids for an evening misting) Salas noticed a bright light in the guardhouse. Salas stopped to watch. No doubt, something was wrong. No bulb or candle flame would beat so brilliantly against the walls. Suddenly the security guard darted out. He was burning, lit up, flaming, and his appearance was so stunning that Salas
found it impossible to help him. The guard took three springing steps across the lawn. The flames whooped and snapped. He made it to the edge of the fountain, turned to Salas (who extended his mister to him), then disappeared, with a smoky hiss, into the lilies. It was as if the earth had swallowed him.

The following morning Salas found himself weighted by a dark mood. The other workers were all buzzing about the events of the previous night guard, of how Estanislaw, the security guard, had lit himself on fire.

“He was drunk,” said the chauffeur. “He was reading comic books using a candle. The bottle spilled and then he must have knocked the candle over trying to get the rum.”

“Is that all?” asked Salas.

“No,” said the chauffeur. “When they went into the guardhouse, they discovered the boss’s missing watch. The security guard has been stealing things.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Salas.

“They’re going to search our things, the maid heard the boss’s wife saying . . .”

“When?”

“After lunch.”

Salas packed his things. There was nothing to directly incriminate him. There was the good-luck scarf written over with Japanese characters, a gift from a well-meaning village, but he could easily argue that this had been lifted off a dead Japanese officer. He could conceal the information to the security box, where he had placed the maps for safekeeping, but the idea of having his belongings rifled through bothered him deeply. Any scrutiny did. Besides, he was now old. He had already wasted much of his life as a servant. This was a sign to move on. He passed Estanislaw—who was bandaged like a mummy, glumly being questioned by the boss’s eldest son—and caught a jeepney downtown.

Salas found work at a multinational corporation that made
shampoo, soap, and toothpaste. He spoke Japanese and was, therefore, useful.

Salas awoke early on Saturday morning, the day after he had seen Balmaceda. Salas sent his servant, Fernando, a handsome boy with feet like a duck, to buy the paper and some pan de sal. Other than Salas’s eagerness for the paper, this was all routine. As Fernando descended the steps, he no doubt thought that Salas had started on his careful straight-edged shaving. After that, Salas would choose a short-sleeved shirt, find weekend socks to match, finish off with light trousers, then head in slippers for his small balcony to tend his small orchid garden. Fernando did not expect to be accosted on the steps when he returned. Standing in the dim light of the stairwell was a tall, dark-skinned man who, despite the heat and the shadowed light, was wearing sunglasses and a long-sleeved jacket and tie, American style.