The Caprices (22 page)

I imagine my grandfather with his arm around his son, holding him close, while young Fernando’s heavy eyes looked to him for an answer. “The general said he was coming back” is all that he can say. He wonders if his wife is all right, whether her obstinacy has worked for or against her. He wonders if his father is still alive and prays that the other six children have made it out to the province.

8. Uncle Lou

Uncle Lou and Uncle Jorge escaped Manila in a truckful of Japanese soldiers headed for Cabanatuan. At first they were confused by the generosity, but after a soldier insisted that they were to stand at the back of the truck and stay visible, they saw that they had earned the ride. Two mestizo teenagers were more than a good-luck charm against guerrilla attacks and American snipers. Cabanatuan was where the Americans who weren’t at Santo Tomas were imprisoned. Gapan, the town where the family kept the provincial home, was less than ten miles away.

My Uncle Lou worships MacArthur. My Uncle Lou thinks he’s a hero. Uncle Lou left the Philippines for the land of MacArthur shortly after the war. Granddaddy took him on a ship away from his country, just as he’d taken him from my grandparents’ house when he was a baby, determined to make him as American as he had once been. Granddaddy returned to Manila. Uncle Lou never did. He joined the all-new American air force. He married his blond, blue-eyed sweetheart. He joined the John Birch Society. He ran for congressman on the Libertarian ticket. He’s so American that I—who am half American—cannot comprehend him. “MacArthur,” says Uncle Lou, “defines glory.” As far as I’m concerned, “glory” is “gory” with an
l
.

MacArthur’s at the battle of Bataan facing fully armed Japanese troops, gets all the Filipinos together—most of whom are farmers and don’t even have shoes—arms them with sticks, tells them to go into battle and then gets mad when they break rank. Some didn’t break rank and that was a far greater bungle. Bravery and stupidity are not the same thing. I have another theory—Americans pronounce “Bah-tah-ahn” as “B’tan,” which sounds completely different. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the Filipinos got confused and went somewhere else.

9. Tio Jack

If they did, they were lucky. My great-uncle Tio Jack (Joaquim was his real name) was in the wrong place at the wrong time and soon found himself being marched north with a bunch of American GIs. This stroll through the countryside is now known as the Bataan Death March. I’ll bet they were cursing MacArthur, imagining the Aussie steaks and fried eggs he had for breakfast every morning. Survival was improbable. A man stooping to sip water from a dirty puddle usually found himself face down in it and on his way to the afterlife. The only choices that presented themselves seemed to be modes of death: shot in the head, dehydration, decapitation, or starvation—you make the call. Dizzied with sickness and exhaustion the prisoners made their way, teetering a hundred miles along the edge of the grave. My Tio Jack somehow managed to sneak away. He lay down hidden in a boat and some villagers, with little thought of their own lives, managed to secrete him away. In later years as Tio Jack—a jovial octogenarian—recounted the tale, he would say, “Others escaped. They learned the Japanese were crazy about staying clean. They threw you know, you know, you know at the guards.” In my family, three “you knows” means shit. “So these GIs just pitch it at them, and the Japanese, who would take a grenade in the face for the emperor, go running and screaming. You should have seen it, it was so damn funny.” Tio Jack was a great man. He could tell you about the Bataan Death March and make it funny. All of his stories were funny, even though half of them weren’t.

10. Benito

A lot of them were about the war, and since he spent the majority of the war with his cousin Benito, a lot of them were about Benito.

Benito, who was not known for his stellar intelligence, is
hanging out in front of this building that has been “liberated” by the Japanese, and the locals are busily “liberating” it of everything of value. Benito lucks out. He gets a bicycle. He stands there, full of pride, watching all the guys leaving with typewriters (no ribbon has been available for the past three years), banker lamps (same thing goes for electricity), and other junk—files, paperweights, rubber stamps. He thinks he might want a rubber stamp, or a dried-out inkwell. Listen, he wasn’t too bright. He sees this man standing by him, pleasantly smiling in his direction, a realm of focus that not only contains Benito but also the bicycle. Benito did not question the man’s generosity when he offered to watch the bike while Benito went in to get more stuff . . . Somehow, this story is only funny when told by one of my relatives over sixty. Or maybe only people over sixty find it funny, although I found it funny the first thirty times or so I heard it. What I think is odd is that I find myself telling that story, often to people who don’t really understand the war or the Philippines or Benito and therefore have a slim chance of finding it amusing. I’ve decided that there must be some kind of “Benito story gene” that expresses itself randomly yet powerfully throughout my family members. I find myself telling that story to my mother, whom I inherited it from in the first place.

11. Some Family History

She’s a war story in herself. All that crap in the basement, drawings from when I was five, every doll, every toy I ever owned—even the ones I never liked. Childhood pictures that I’d like to have, but that she’ll never let go. Clothes that haven’t fit me since I learned to walk. School uniforms bearing the monograms of religious orders that only have two living members left. Three-pronged adapters to convert currents to levels acceptable only in Australia. Betamax machines acceptable nowhere but Manila. Moth-eaten sweaters that have crossed the Pacific four times,
never worn at any port. Shoes with buckles. Shoes without buckles. Shoes that ought to have buckles but lost them twenty years ago when I still wore a children’s size eleven. Even the boxes—proud “Mayflower” relics from the first move, when we left Pennsylvania in 1969. Dust and dirt, ghostly smells, odd chills rising when a neglected box is disturbed. Monument upon monument to the past reminding one of nothing more than how very dead the past is. My sister and I discovered recently that we both got insomnia over thinking about all that junk; late at night we think about that mountain of memory and wonder what we’ll do when our mother dies. Morbid, maybe, but this happens in families where those absent by untimely deaths play as much of a role in day-to-day existence as the living. Death, among my people, is the inability to disagree.

12. Angela

My mother tells me sometimes of the beautiful dolls that her father bought her—Shirley Temple, the genuine article, with real golden curls; the eyes closed when you laid her down and they hadn’t forgotten anything, not even the dimples. Where was Shirley now? Where was my mother’s beautiful sharkskin dress with the pleats—very tailored, not like a little girl’s dress at all. Her father had bought her a paper doll one day. Over the course of my childhood I received about fifty. And guess what? They’re all in the basement. My father has trouble with the basement—he says it’s a fire hazard—but I don’t really expect him to understand. From what I gather, his experience of war was Ping-Pong parties in his basement and blanketed windows around Boston.

I think of my eight-year-old mother and of that jeepney. It was headed for Nueva Ecija, the provincial home. My grandfather stood with her and Fernando, surveying the interior. There
was just one space for a child. He did not see the gravity of his decision. How could he know when he waved my mother on board that he was consigning his beloved son to a fatal companionship? My mother did not want to leave her father and her brother. She did not want to make the journey without them, but my grandfather said, “Angela, you go. If Fernando goes with you, the two of you will fight.” They never fought after that. I think, in all sympathy, that people tend to feel the most guilt over things for which they are not responsible. My mother ended up in the country, far from the staccato of the rifles and booming mortar.

13. Her Daughter

When I was little she would tell me of this time when she would wander in the peaceful garden singing a song. It went something like “I can’t stop blowing bubbles . . .” and she’d waltz around the bushes, beneath the shade of the tamarind tree with her head full of Gregory Peck and Vivien Leigh. Thinking about that now, watching this scene played out from twenty years ago when I, a big-eyed, black-haired child smiled as she danced, I get an odd chill, as if I’m watching a scene out of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
with an Asian Bette Davis. I hate myself for all the times I’ve been angry at her.

14. My Lola

For some odd reason, I can’t remember my grandmother telling any war stories even though she lived it in the old city shoulder to shoulder with the Japanese. From listening to her, you’d think the war had been one big diet.

“Granddaddy was very, very fat. Then he got very, very skinny.”

“General Wainwright was big, then he got skinny. They called him Skinny Wainwright.”

“I was not so fat, but I got skinny. Very skinny.”

Then she would say, “
Ija
, why are you so skinny?”

15. Uncle Jorge, S.J.

My Uncle Jorge, the Jesuit, visited us in Maine last summer. He stayed for a month. He was on sabbatical. He and my mother regressed to the point that at different times I wanted to say, You cut that crap out, or you’ll have hell to pay. If he’s bugging you, why don’t you just go into the other room? Et cetera. They talked about the different maestras who had shown up in the prewar years to teach them Spanish. They talked about Fernando, who had been an angel his whole life and who, as far as they knew, was doing the same thing, only in a better place. They talked about those Japanese shopkeepers who had slipped them pieces of candy in the thirties, then taken their father in the forties. Then one day, during this odd summer of reminiscence, my mother spun around from the sink, where she was up to her elbows in suds, and said, “Remember the heads?” And my uncle nodded for a few seconds. His eyes crinkled at the edges, and little nervous laughs began escaping his mouth. My mother got hit by the same wave. She squatted down in front of the sink so overcome by laughter that she was silent other than the sharp sound of her inhalations. I walked around them both, going, “What?” After my sixth
what?
went unanswered, I gave up and starting laughing too. I laughed for so long that not only did I feel like I was about to have a heart attack, but I had to go to the bathroom. When I came back, neither of them was laughing; in fact, they both looked a little disturbed. The next morning, over a cup of coffee, my mother informed me that the heads had appeared shortly after the Americans plowed through Manila. They were hanging from every public building, decorating every tree. They were the
heads of the Japanese. You learn to laugh, she said. She was not apologetic and I understood.

The Japanese, she told me, would not surrender. To be a prisoner of war meant that you didn’t have the courage to die for the emperor, you were less than a dog. The idea was to keep fighting and never to ask why.

16. A Japanese Soldier

This sounds an awful lot like MacArthur.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
. If you were a soldier and not of that opinion, he would help you on your way to glory whether you liked it or not. Such a disposition was good for MacArthur because it gave him insight into the Japanese warrior.

What about the last Japanese soldier? You know the one. He was wandering in the jungles of Mindanao all the way into the sixties, carrying his gun and the love for his emperor, and these two things along with some grubs and wild banana had kept him going. Then they found him and sent him home, maybe with a stack of old newspapers—a lot of newspapers. Never mind, he must have had a good deal of reading time in the hospital. That’s a myth actually—not the soldier, but the fact that they found him. If they were looking, they would have found many more people. I know that jungle well. Somewhere, behind a clump of bamboo, are Granddaddy and Tio Jack. In a dark cave are my grandmother, my mother, some uncles and aunts. And if they’d bothered to look at all, they would have found me, because we’re all in that last stronghold of the Pacific Campaign or the Co-Prosperity Sphere, as much a part of the jungle as that Japanese soldier or a banana plant or a mosquito. And the jungle is a part of my family. The war lives and breathes like a congenital virus manifesting itself when one is weak. Some of us are less susceptible than others.

17. My Tita Meli

I will use my mother’s eldest sister as an example. In her mind, people die and that’s okay. During the war, lots of people died, which wasn’t okay, but they would have died anyway. In addition to that, we’re all Catholic, so aren’t we supposed to want to die? Don’t we envy the dead their proximity to God? Besides, the more of the family who are dead, the more people there are to intercede on our behalf.

I’m not sure what Tita Meli was doing during World War II. If her behavior now is any indication, she was probably dispensing wisdom and making sure everyone had something to eat. She married shortly after the war when she was eighteen years old. The man she married—a mestizo doctor—was forty-three. He built her a house, far from the rubble that had once been Intramuros, with a fountain and a garden and graceful Corinthian pillars. He took her to Spain where she bought the chandeliers that hang in the sala. He commissioned their life-size portraits that hang in the drawing room. She lived with her mother-in-law, Feliza, and Granddaddy, who spent his final years in a sprawling apartment in the basement of Tita Meli’s house. Tita Meli and her husband, Tito Jaime, prospered. Or they squandered. It’s hard to say, but they never seemed short of anything. They had five children, the youngest of whom died of a kidney ailment in the sixties. Tito Jaime died five years ago. He was in his eighties. His death had nothing to do with the war, but was caused by a stomach cancer, which, true to the nature of stomachs, consumed from within.