The Caprices (2 page)

The ring is heavy platinum set with a pale blue emerald-cut diamond. He wears it on his left ring finger. The ring is rightfully his. He was the officer in charge of possessing the house. He took the ring, looted by Corporal Miwa, back in Intramuros last year; yes, it is true that Shori waited outside. The killing of civilians is distasteful to him, especially in the city, where one finds elegant paneling in the living rooms, German crystal in the cabinets, grand pianos that are perfectly tuned . . . No, he could not go inside. This was the house of a lawyer with pro-American sentiments, Spanish ancestry, and most likely a radio. The locals looked up to him.

Shori remembers taking the ring from Miwa. There was blood on the band which had just started to dry and flake. Miwa said that the ring had been on the lawyer’s pinkie finger. It was stuck. Miwa had cut the lawyer’s finger off. A girl had cried out. She must have been the man’s daughter. She was gone, swallowed in the mayhem. Miwa had killed two people in that house—first the lawyer, then his wife. Miwa laughed when he remembered the woman running at him with her fists.

Shori looks at the ring. Inside is an inscription. He can read the letters, but he does not know what they mean. He does not
even know that the words are in Latin:
Semper Fidelis
. He can only point out
S
and
F
. Shori is a schoolteacher, not a scholar.

Trinidad throws her doll down at Jose, who is picking over a tray of rice.

“In Manila, we would have drowned you right after birth. We would have slid you out of your mother and straight into a bucket of soapy water. Slip.”

Jose smiles at her. He is handsome with fine regular features and soft, straight hair. His eyes are lighter than most, more amber than brown. Jose has the face of an angel, they say, and the body of the devil himself. What a curse. Better to be ugly and understand your lot. Better to be miserable than dissatisfied. “Aren’t you too old for dolls?”

Trinidad grabs back her doll. “Aren’t you too mouthy for a halfwit,
deformado
servant?”

Jose laughs. In a way, he likes Trinidad, who takes herself so seriously. “Go away, little girl. I have to cook.”

“Now?” It’s only five and Trinidad wants to harass him. Jose cooks this meal every day at the same time. Trinidad has figured it out, but still the others persist in pretending she does not know.

Before the Japanese invaded, Trinidad and her brother spent long hours together. Their parents had forbidden them to leave the house. On this particular day, Miguel, who hardly ever bothered to speak to Trinidad, was telling stories. He laughed at Trinidad when she said that she couldn’t wait to leave Manila. Why weren’t they in the province, where it was safe?

“Safe? You think the house in the province is safe?”

“But Miguel, the Japanese are cannibals.”

“Just listen.” Miguel grew serious, which was a novelty. “About four years ago we were all in the province for the feast of San Isidro. I was running around with Jose. Anyway, he tells me that all the desserts for the big dinner are in the basement. He says
they’re hiding them there. But I know that they keep the basement locked. Even the stairs to the basement are always locked. But Jose knows where the key is. So he gives me this candle, and tells me to knock myself out.”

Trinidad urged her brother to continue.

“I’m pretty excited. Jose lets me in at the top of the stairs. I go down to the basement. The key’s hanging by the door and I have my candle. There’s this huge padlock on the door, kind of a little grate section at the top, like a prison. So I put the key in the padlock.” Miguel shuddered, then smiled broadly. “I’d rather deal with the Japanese.”

“What happened?”

“So I’m down there, looking around in the dark, with my little candle, and that’s just lighting up my stupid hand and nothing else, and it sure as hell doesn’t smell like cake down there. It smells like a sewer, and I can hear water trickling, because I guess the creek runs by there, and I’m getting scared, because, as you know, I’m terrified of rats.”

“Rats?”

“No, Trinidad, this is not a rat story.”

“Cakes?”

“There sure as hell wasn’t any cake down there.” Miguel began to roll a cigarette, and Trinidad noticed that his hands were shaking. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . .” he said to himself.

“So you’re in Grandmama’s basement . . .”

“They started yelling and screaming upstairs. I could hear them, Tatay in particular. They were yelling for me. And I’m thinking, It’s just cake, and Tatay’s yelling, ‘Miguel, get out of there. Get out of there,’ and I think I’m going to get the beating of my life, so I blow out the candle. I say to myself, ‘I’ll just sneak out, then say I was somewhere else.’ So it’s completely dark and I’m edging my way to the door, and they’re all running around upstairs, boom boom boom, and down the stairs, boom boom boom, and I can see Tatay’s silhouette on the wall because he’s
holding a candle. Now he’s whispering my name, ‘Miguel, please come out. Come out slowly and quietly.’ And I’m thinking, When did he get so smart? But I’m smarter. So I stay hiding there, then I hear this shuffling near me and I think, Jesus, that has to be the biggest rat in the world, because it sounds like a person, then I think, That’s no rat, that’s a ghost, so I start screaming, and Tatay rushes in and grabs me . . .”

“And?”

“It wasn’t a cake and it wasn’t a rat.” Miguel shook his head. “And it wasn’t a ghost.”

Shortly after Miguel told Trinidad that story, he disappeared. He sneaked out a window—said he needed a chocolate bar—and never came back. Sometimes Trinidad thinks he joined the guerrillas. He was fourteen, which isn’t that young. Sometimes she knows better. She knows the Japanese and what they can do.

Jose puts on a clean T-shirt. He combs his hair, watching his distorted reflection. The tin back of the mirror is rotting. He is accompanying Mrs. Garcia on the bus today. Jose makes her feel safe. Jose is not scared of the Japanese. He is only scared of pain. “They torture,” the other villagers say. “They rip off your fingernails. They fill your belly with water, then jump on you.” These Japanese are an imaginative bunch. When Jose thinks of the pain they might inflict, the hair rises on the back of his neck. His lower back feels cold, wet chills. He fears the pain. He cannot associate it with the Japanese, like the others. He does not imagine Shori’s face hanging golden in the sky as he faints away. But only the sensations of pain. How could the other villagers know what it is like? Were they born with the blueprint of self-torture in their genes? Do their bones rebel against them, twisting and pulling in the night, trying to flex themselves and correct their knotted bodies? When they go to sleep, do they fear waking to a nightmare cramp that strangles from the neck to the ankles? In a
year or two, they will wake from the nightmare of war, and he, Jose, will only be delivered into another.

At first, Trinidad thought it was another of Miguel’s elaborate lies. She lived in the big house with her grandmother, Jose, and Auring and feared nothing but the Japanese. She had no cause to go to the basement, but as the weeks passed certain oddities began to demand her attention. Although Trinidad had no business down there, it seemed that Jose, her grandmother, and Auring did; Auring went down at eleven
A.M
. and in the afternoon around five. Jose and her grandmother were not so regular, but many times Trinidad had caught her grandmother sighing heavily as she ascended the stairs, and once she had seen Jose, bucket in hand, at the top of the landing eyeing her guiltily. One night, when Trinidad had awoken as the result of a bad dream, she heard a distant moaning coming from somewhere in the house. In her dream, Miguel had appeared to her without hands. She asked him where they were.

“A Japanese officer cut them off,” he said. “He sent them back to Japan for a souvenir.”

Trinidad was eased to hear her grandmother’s comforting footsteps on the stairs. She stumbled out to the landing in her bare feet.

“
Ija
, why are you up?”

“I had a bad dream. The Japanese will kill us.”

“There is a good chance that will happen. The best thing you can do is go back to bed and pray for us. Pray for our souls.”

“Even Jose’s?”

“Especially Jose’s. He really needs it.”

Trinidad went back to bed. She did not pray. She listened to that faint moaning, which was answered by her grandmother’s sweet whispers. Sometimes, when the wind was still, Trinidad could make out a few words. Once she heard her grandmother
say, “I know you are lonely.” And once, “You could kill us all.”

But when the wind picked up, Trinidad was not sure if she had merely imagined those things.

One morning Trinidad followed Auring, who was carrying a bundle of rice and chicken wrapped in banana leaves, down the musty stairs. The air was moldy, damp and thick, but through this dull odor cut the acrid scent of urine—not cat piss, or rats; the smell was a distinctly human one. There was the door with the grating, as Miguel had said. There was the key on the nail. Auring, whispering softly, held the package up to the grating. Trinidad did not breathe. She watched in silence. A slender, white hand reached through the darkness, like a pale shoot pushing through soil. The nails were long and yellow. The hand took the small green package and slipped back into the mystery behind the door.

“Auring, who is that?”

Auring turned quickly, her hand held tight to her heart. “You will kill me,” she said.

“Who is that?”

“Your grandmother will be angry.”

“Only if I tell her.”

It is a sad story. This woman in the basement is Trinidad’s aunt. She killed a man, slit his throat with a kitchen knife. Mrs. Garcia hid her in the basement. She told the police that her daughter had escaped. This was in 1930. Since then, she has not left the basement.

The woman is mad.

Auring unwrapped the white handkerchief that was on her wrist for a bandage. There was a dark brown stain on the inside of the cloth. This was Auring’s blood. Trinidad remembered the suspicious scarf that her grandmother had started wearing.

“She scratched me,” Auring said.

Trinidad looked at the scratch. It was deep with ragged edges.
The scab had dried in yellow, crystal-like crusts. Auring’s skin was thin, like onionskin Bible paper. Her veins were blue and prominent. Liver spots covered her arms in purples and pinks.

“Aren’t you scared to feed her?”

“What is a scratch?” Auring said. “One day she will escape and kill us all, if the Japanese don’t get us first.”

“What is her name?”

Auring seemed surprised at the question. Perhaps because it was so predictable.

“Her name is Trinidad.”

Shori thinks this village is hell on earth. It is only ten miles from Cabanatuan, the POW camp for American soldiers, which makes the natives surly. They know what goes on in the camp, and this constant proximity to cruelty and death has made them callous. He has the worst servants in the world. Their Japanese is terrible, and Shori, unlike some other officers, has learned no Tagalog. They are impervious to threats. Occasionally, he remembers that in Japan he had no servants and wasn’t much more than a civil servant himself. Last time this thought entered his head, he beat the maid about her head with a shoe. She did not seem to care. She thought he was going to kill her. When he didn’t, she looked down on him. But he did not kill her then. He would not do that for her, because her thoughts were of no consequence. Today he would beat her, because that was his whim. Tomorrow, he might decapitate her. He stands on the small balcony that extends out from his bedroom and looks over the street. He cannot sleep in this infernal heat. Some officers have the servants fan them during their nap, but Shori knows this is asking for a bolo in the gullet. He watches his maid go through the gate. What can she be up to? Shori yells to her.

She bows her head there in the street. She does this reflexively, so that she is bowing to no one, just bowing to the road in the direction of the town square. A thin, dirty dog hobbles by.

“Where are you going?” shouts Shori.

“To my sister’s, sir,” she says, addressing the dirt.

Shori remembers that he has given her permission to do this.

“You must tell me everything that is said.”

Shori realizes what he has ordered. Will she tell him of whatever it is that women discuss? Will she tell him about babies? About dresses? About shampoo?

“I know that your sister is a guerrilla sympathizer!” he shouts after her.

The maid bows in the street again. She thinks that her fate and the fate of the whole village rest in the hands of this halfwit. Shori glares at her. How dare she think such thoughts. Luckily, he is too important to mind what she is thinking.

Trinidad will have to work efficiently. She does not even know what kind of man this Shori is, or what exactly she will say to him. She wonders if what the American said—if every Filipino killed one Japanese, the war would be over—is true, since he was hallucinating and half dead anyway. And he didn’t kill any Japanese, but he sure as hell killed a whole houseful of Filipinos. All those Orosas dead. She remembered when the Japanese found out. They dragged the American into the street. The neighbors looked at each other’s faces—the eyes—to see who the collaborator was. That was the first time Trinidad saw Shori. That was the first time she saw the ring.

The American begged Shori to let the Orosas go. He was so skinny, so close to the grave, it didn’t seem worth killing him. The children had been joking about the American all week. “How did he get through the fence at Cabanatuan? He walked.” Which was some local variation on the old “He’s so skinny that when it’s raining, he doesn’t even get wet.” They explained away the fact that he hadn’t been shot with the same clever joke.

It wasn’t Shori’s sword that lopped off the American’s head.
And Shori didn’t kill the Orosas, although he did order that they be taken away—all of them, even the baby. But Shori is in charge in this small town. Every man, woman, and child bows to him. Every horse, house, and field belongs to him. Every dog shits because Shori has wished it, every fly buzzes because Shori allows it. Trinidad knows all of this, just as she knows that today the house will be empty. But she needs to be patient.