Читать книгу The Descartes Highlands - Eric Gamalinda - Страница 8

the little toil of love

—because this time of day the crows leave them alone. Nothing else is moving, except these two dogs. Been watching them trying to get it on for the last half hour, me & the guy with the Uzi & Eddie the rapist. The bitch finally gives in. The male’s got his dick locked inside her now. They’re like conjoined, spastic twins. Eddie bets a peso it’s going to take another 30 minutes before the male can pull out. The head of a dog’s dick pops open like an umbrella when it’s fucking, he says. Once he’s in, it’s even harder to get out. We’re supposed to be picking vegetables some guy planted last summer. Then the guy was shot in the back of the head & he’s been fertilizing them since. The eggplants & bitter melons are scrawny but the tomatoes are ripe & about to burst. It’s November. The air is cool. It’s one of those days when you feel so doped out you don’t even want to move.

Now Eddie’s dropped his spade & starts heckling the dogs. The guy with the Uzi’s getting bored. The lieutenant bellows a stream of curses from inside the barracks. He’s been taking a siesta to sleep off a hangover. Even he is in no mood to keep order around here.

The guy with the Uzi gets up, a machete dangling from his hand. The dogs are in too much heat to notice him approaching. The male’s tongue is hanging out, a thick red flap. He’s drooling all over the bitch’s back, yellow spume dribbling on tufts of mangy brown fur. The guy with the Uzi yanks the male by the scruff. With one swift stroke he cuts its dick from the bitch. There’s a long, ear-splitting squeal. The dogs scamper apart. Jets of blood spurt from the male’s mutilated dick. He doesn’t know what’s happened to him. He runs amok, howling helplessly. He stops & curls up to lick his balls. Now he’s spinning round & round, now he’s dragging his butt on the ground, yelping madly, leaving a black circle of mud on the earth.

The guy with the Uzi is laughing & yelling curses at the dog. Eddie’s cheering wildly, shouting to make it spin faster, howl louder. He picks up a rock, hurls it at the dog. It misses, landing in a small explosion of dust just an inch away.

* * *

It’s 1972. It has been for the longest fucking time.

There are roughly 3.86 billion people living on the planet. Five of them are caught trying to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters at a place called Watergate in DC. Another 8 have killed 11 athletes at the Munich Olympics. And 8,000 others in Uganda are being deported by 1 person, a fuck-up job called Idi Amin.

My name is Andrew Brezsky. My name. Andy. A. A plus. Or A minus, depending on who you talk to. I have to remember my name. I have to remember what year it is. What happened before I got here, the dark heart of nowhere, some hardscrabble ghost town on an island in the Central Philippines, Archipelago of the Absurd, Little Brown Brother of Big Old Uncle Sam. Must. Remember. Everything. If I don’t I’ll forget that I’m still here. Still hoping, like everyone else in this Pearl of the Fucking Orient Seas, still looking for a way out.

* * *

There’s me, & Eddie, & a student who’s been here a couple weeks earlier than me & Eddie, & who refuses to reveal his name. Every day the lieutenant & the guy with the Uzi take him away. When he comes back, something imperceptible has been damaged in him. It’s as if his body’s being annihilated, one part at a time, with the ultimate aim not of death, but a long, drawn-out disabling.

Last week they burned his nipples with a cigarette. A couple days later they stuck a barbecue skewer through the hole of his dick. Last night they attached live electric wires to his testicles. No evidence is visible unless he’s naked. No one can tell unless he talks about it. But Eddie & I, we can tell.

They don’t want anything from him now. Even his name’s no longer relevant. He’s told them about as much as they can use. But they’ve done it so many times, over & over, Eddie thinks it’s pointless to ask why anymore. Even the student, when Eddie does ask about it, always gives the same reply—that’s just the way it is. He seems hostile to any show of concern from Eddie or me. Once he staggered to the toilet bowl & pissed blood. Eddie pretended to look away.

There’s another reason he doesn’t want to talk about it, but it’s pretty obvious. Always the act is sick & dark & sexual. What normally gives pleasure is nothing now but a source not just of pain, but of shame. The more sexual the punishment is, the less likely he’ll talk about it. Torture deprives the body of making sense of itself. Eddie says it’s the same thing with people you rape. He’s gotten off the hook so many times because no one just damn wants to talk about it.

You see it happen all the time. Pretty soon you realize that’s just the way it is. They have a phrase for it: Bahala na. God willing. Even the freaking Communists believe this. God can drive a stick up your ass, & you’ll bleed, but God knows what’s good for you. Trust him. Bahala na.

* * *

There’s one window in the cell, high above where no one can reach it. If I stand at an angle a couple of feet off the wall, I can see the sky checkered against the steel bars. The full moon passes right through it in a nearly vertical arc.

Eddie’s on his steel-spring cot, lying on a black stain of sweat on a mat of woven palm. He says he finds me strange, writing all night & never seeming to sleep.

The cot sags & forms a hammock, I tell him. It makes my back sore.

He wants to know what I find so fascinating about the moon.

I tell him it never turns its back on us. You only see one side of it, anywhere you go.

It’s kind of like people, then, he says. I bet the good side is on the far side, the one you never see. But if you can’t see it, who the hell cares?

I tell him it’s much brighter in this part of the world. Bigger and brighter.

It’s the only one I’ve ever seen, he says. I wouldn’t know the difference.

* * *

By the time they’re brought here, Eddie & the student have already been tempered earlier, passed on from camp to camp. We’re in the middle of nowhere, a ghost town, the fields scorched black, burnt spears of bamboo jutting out of the ground where a few huts used to be. At night bats swoop from a mountain cave close by, clouding the sky like a storm & filling the air with the stench of guano. They’re bloodsuckers, they’ll tear apart anything in their path. Even the lieutenant stays indoors when they wake, rabid with an ancient & vicious hunger.

Eventually we’ll be shipped to Manila, where Eddie says the privileged ones go. In Manila they won’t touch you so much, because people will know. Reporters, Amnesty International, that whole shit.

I’ve seen scars where other soldiers cut them up or burned them, bumps in their arms & legs where bones have broken & healed. At some point they’ve confessed everything these guys want them to confess.

Things are slower now. They’re no longer useful. Nothing more will be taken from them.

Neither one talks about it much, but the damage has been done: they’ve already betrayed a father, a brother, a friend.

* * *

Once in a while Eddie’s jacking off & we can hear it & the student whispers, Knock it off, & Eddie whispers, Why don’t you try it, faggot.

I think they’re both about as old as I am. The student was picked up the day the president declared martial law. Before he came here, his life was pretty normal, cramming for an exam, going to a movie, getting to first base with a girl. He & Eddie talk about it all the time. The stories are all the same after a while. They’ve run out of new things to say. When something new happens, like the dog & the bitch & the soldier hacking the dog’s dick off, they talk about it for days. Pretty soon the story gets exhausted, neither of them wants to hear about it anymore. They don’t say it, but I think they know that in the act of telling, something is always given up. Something withers away.

* * *

Rain patters everywhere, drumming on the tin roof of the barracks. It sounds like something enormous has crashed through the atmosphere, & its wrecks are falling over our heads.

“And life is not so ample.”

I’ve been trying to remember that poem but the rain jumbles the words in my head. If only I can remember it, I’ll be all right. Tomorrow, this afternoon, in a couple of hours, someone will come. This is not happening. & suddenly I’m okay. My entire body is changed. I feel a kind of lightness I can’t explain.

Then the hours pass, the days pass, & I dread the prospect of tomorrow. I force myself to recover that buoyancy. Sometimes I succeed. I’m also aware that this emotion is tenuous, even phony. One single word, one unguarded moment, will send me crashing back to earth.

* * *

Some newfangled thing called the compact disc is predicted to change the way we listen to music.

Somebody’s invented “electronic mail,” but whether people will actually use it remains to be seen.

A first-class postage stamp is still necessary, & costs 8 cents. That’s how much it cost the US government to serve John Lennon & Yoko Ono their deportation papers in New York City.

John & Yoko, no one’s going to step all over you. You will live forever. We are not all fucked-up assholes. Trust me.

“We’ve got a few things to learn about the Philippines, lads. First of all is how to get out.”

That’s John Lennon in 1966. The Beatles had a rough time here that year. Lennon said he wanted to drop a hydrogen bomb on it.

But 6 years on, nobody talks about how bad the Beatles had it. Not here. There’s a constant effort to erase memory. No day is connected to the next. No event is caused by another. Everything is taken as it comes.

Bahala na. It is God’s will. This is how everyone survives.

* * *

All through the scorched fields the wind sends a long, inconsolable howling. No ammunition, no dictator, can challenge a typhoon. You sit out its rage for as long as it takes. You stay still while the entire world spends its fury. You respect what is stronger than you.

The typhoon’s trampled everything in the vegetable plots. The guy with the Uzi brings our food, a muck of rice & salted fish dumped in a pail, from which we scoop our share. We drink tap water brought in a plastic bucket. Flies float on the water. Eddie can endure anything, but not this kind of shit. They beat the crap out of him until he simmers down. Eddie’s tantrums always work. After he calms down the guy with the Uzi shares some of their food. Eddie gobbles it greedily, & with his cheeks stuffed with food he mumbles, We’re not dogs, we’re people just like you.

* * *

Bobby Fischer has defeated Boris Spassky for the world chess title. Remember this.

Pink Floyd has started recording their 8th album. It’s going to be called The Dark Side of the Moon.

Apollo 16 has brought back rock samples from the Descartes Highlands.

Remember, remember.

Because no winds blow on the moon, the tracks left by Apollo 16 are going to be visible for another million years.

* * *

Eddie doesn’t know that his people fought us at the turn of the century. All he knows is that we liberated them from the Japanese, & that Americans have lots of money.

The student tries to educate him. We share the same space, at least for now, but we’re still divided by our histories, our countries’ politics, everything that would have divided us even as free men. It’s no use.

Eddie picks up a few big words from the student but he has no idea what they mean. He tells me, candidly: It’s good to know even imperialists can be jailed by our president. What do you know, Americans aren’t so special after all.

* * *

It’s not always hostile. The student wants to know what I’m doing here, where I come from. He wants to know what kids are really doing in America. If people really like Nixon. If we really think we’re going to win the war in Vietnam. He wants to know what I’m scribbling all day & all night in my notebook, what I say about them. For all his suspicion & vitriol against me & what I represent, he’s still concerned that what I say about them doesn’t make them look bad.

* * *

May 1970, demonstration to protest the draft, 4 students killed at Kent State University.

June 1970, the US sets voting age at 18.

End of June 1970, I arrive in Manila. I’ve just turned 18.

Soon after, a typhoon hits the country, flooding rice paddies & villages & killing thousands of residents. Aid is sluggish & slowed by government corruption. Hundreds die of hunger & disease. Students storm the president’s palace. Police arrest demonstrators during riots in Manila. Things get so fucked Marcos & his family are forced to flee in a helicopter, only to come back when the army finally gets everybody out of the way.

If things go well around here, credit is given to God. If things go bad, a lot of people get blamed, but lately it’s us Americans. They don’t really say it to your face, & even the Communists follow certain rules of courtesy. Americans are an abstract concept, like God. But I’ve learned one thing living here for the last 2 years. Everything I say has to be sugarcoated, a form of flattery. Anything less will be too American, therefore offensive.

So this is what I tell Eddie & the student. What we the youth in the US failed to do, the students in Manila are about to achieve. This country is on the brink of a full-scale revolution.

The student stops bugging me after I say that. My words have created a temporary truce.

When I think about it now, I think I really meant it. Only Eddie, who doesn’t give a damn, remains unimpressed.

* * *

I’m standing naked in the middle of the room. The lieutenant’s sitting at a table, sucking on a cigar. He’s had this one cigar for weeks, but he doesn’t ever light it. He just sucks on it. He has this beady stare, a junkyard dog stare.

The guy with the Uzi’s inspecting my jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. There’s a long, uneasy quiet as he scrutinizes every inch of my clothing.

The lieutenant puts his booted feet up on the table. Finally, he lights the cigar. He blows the smoke out in one steady stream, his lips puckered, his eyes shut to savor the sensation. He’s got a large dark face & his skin is tough & greasy, like the skin of roast pork. He looks at me in a way that seems both bored & snide. I’m one more in a list of endless chores.

You, Yankee boy, touch your cock.

I don’t understand what he says. So he says it again. Show us how big it can get. Americans have big dicks, right? You proud of that, right? Go on, touch it, masturbate.

You a homo? I ask him.

The lieutenant’s face turns red. His eyes bulge. He looks like he’s going to explode. He glances at the guy with the Uzi, who looks away. But he tries to help the lieutenant save face. He says, There’s plenty of time to deal with that, he’s not going anywhere.

The lieutenant isn’t letting it go. He’s decided they’re keeping my clothes. Then some kind of argument begins. They fight over who keeps the jeans, who takes the T-shirt, who gets the sneakers.

The lieutenant takes his feet off the table, unlaces his boots, & yanks them off. Then he stands up & takes his T-shirt off. There’s a tattoo of a crown of thorns on his chest, right over his heart. He pulls his fatigue pants down. He throws the T-shirt & pants at me. They stink like shit.

We like Americans, he says. You & us, we’re friends for life. No matter how much you fuck us, we still like you.

I put his T-shirt & fatigues on & the guy with the Uzi leads me out of the room.

As I leave, the lieutenant says, In this country, revolution is a bad word. You say it again & you’re going to get really fucked.