Manila Noir Page 3

  We stand and walk out of the Greenbelt Chapel, make our way home.

  It will not detonate. Fake things never do. Instead of explosions there will be mass panic and hysteria, which we will read about in discarded newspapers, or on the Internet, if Alejandro will let us onto his computer again. The Greenbelt Mall authorities will call it a hoax, a false alarm; they will promise the people there is nothing to fear. Still, the damage will be done. We will have created unease here, severe emotional distress, a disturbance they will not soon forget. And when they do, we will strike again, in ways we ourselves have yet to know.

  A HUMAN RIGHT

  BY

  ROSARIO CRUZ-LUCERO

  Intramuros

  "Casa Manila,” the docent announces, pushing the massive double doors twice before they give way. His memorized spiels are in impeccable, if textbook English. “Notice the furniture and appurtenances.” The nervous young thing is obviously new to this job, though Isabel would guess, by his robotic accent and tone, that he’s had a stint as a call center agent. But the quaintness of his jargon keeps with the whole design of Intramuros, the walled “city within the city.”

  Isabel smiles at him encouragingly and he smiles back.

  “This replica of a nineteenth-century Hispanic house was actually built in 1979.”

  Ah, Isabel thinks, another of Imelda Marcos’s “cultural projects,” meaning the epitome of kitsch.

  “… Spanish-Filipino baroque,” he continues. “The antique furniture and trappings that fill up these capacious rooms are authentic and collected from other houses.”

  “Confiscated, you mean,” says a pudgy, dark-skinned little man. He looks every inch Filipino, but speaks with a drawl from the American South that seems to hang between Liverpool and Boracay. One of those who’d fled the country, Isabel concludes, at the height of the Marcos dictatorship. And still bitter about it.

  Isabel detaches herself from the group and walks ahead to the next room. It’s enormous, and she is delighted to see that there is an open window taking up the whole length of the space. In broad daylight, this would be the cheeriest room in the house, but the late-afternoon sun has cast shadows on the pillars and walls.

  Isabel gazes out the window and discovers that she is actually facing out the back of the house. With all the large doors, the room partitions, the mirrors, she hadn’t realized till now that she’d lost her bearings. From this window, she sees, across the gray roofs, Intramuros’s ramparts, with a watchtower at one end and a sentry box at the other. Across the faux-cobblestone road is the mass of shanties known as Barrio Santa Lucia.

  Informal settlers. Slum dwellers have their own euphemism too, Isabel thinks in amusement. One more exhibit for the tourists of Intramuros, who can see the cross-section of Manila life without the muck and stench and, most of all, the dangers.

  A man stands at the entrance to the shantytown. Isabel leans forward to take a closer look—the man’s profile is distinctive: the high forehead, the sharp cheekbones, the corner of the mouth sloping downward so that it gives him a perpetually somber look, the curly black hair growing close to the scalp.

  “Elias,” Isabel mutters under her breath. A scar cutting an eyebrow would make her more certain, but she can’t see it clearly from this distance.

  He suddenly glances up, as if he has heard her thoughts. He continues staring, with that familiar somber expression she remembers from—how long has it been?—eighteen years ago. Isabel jerks away from the window. Not nervously, nor surreptitiously, but because the docent’s voice has startled her back to her surroundings.

  It’s five o’clock, the docent says. Closing time. Only then does Isabel notice that the Casa Manila has gone all quiet.

  She hurries out, hoping to find the man she thinks is Elias. A motorcycle engine zooms somewhere to her right and a horse pulling a calesa clip-clops to her left. She peers into the alley leading toward the barrio, but inside it’s pitch-black, the crush of shanties perpetually shutting out the sun. She guesses the people who reside there are used to living in the dark.

  Elias is gone, of course. Elias, her father’s killer.

  It couldn’t possibly have been Elias, of course it couldn’t, Isabel had protested at first, that day ten years ago back in Davao. Her mother had handed her the police report and declared flatly, “It was a DDS execution. And it was Elias who did it.”

  Señor and Señora Jose Fabella, the report read, were getting out of their car in front of their residence when a lone gunman on a Honda Wave motorcycle had stopped two meters away and shot Señor Fabella several times, first in the side, then in the neck, twice in the head—in the middle of the forehead and in the right cheek—and then in the chest. Then the gunman took off. Señora Fabella, who was stepping out curbside, and the family driver, who was helping her, were left unharmed.

  The police were sure the killer was Elias Raga, a.k.a. the Datu. The MO was that of the Davao Death Squad, or the DDS, of which the Datu was a well-known but elusive leader. One of the Fabellas’ servants had peered through the window when the shots rang out, and later told the cops that the gunman was wearing jeans and a black jacket; a baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes. The generic look of DDS killers. But what pointed to Elias as the prime and only suspect was that he knew more about the victim than any other DDS member. He had lived in the Fabella home for a few months at the age of thirteen. He knew Señor Fabella’s routine. And he was familiar enough with the gated Village to know how to get in and out of it without arousing suspicion.

  Despite its humble name, the Village, where Isabel and her family lived, was the enclave of Davao’s richest families. There were about a hundred mansions, guarded by a private army that made regular rounds and kept strict tabs on every car, bike, and pedestrian entering and exiting through its steel gates. A church, a park, a school, tennis and basketball courts, and a swimming pool—all for the exclusive use of its residents—made up its hub. A thick cement wall ran along the Village’s whole perimeter, with glass shards embedded along its top.

  The police report went on: Regrettably, none of the Village guards could be of any help in identifying the culprit. They had all vanished by the time the investigators had come—whether from fear of reprisal for their criminal negligence or fear of DDS execution if they testified was anyone’s guess. Or, it was just as likely that the Village guards were themselves in cahoots with the DDS. Anything, the report concluded, was possible.

  It was the classic conclusion to any case involving the DDS.

  Isabel didn’t believe it at first, not the part about her father’s brutal murder being a DDS execution. Everyone knew that the DDS was a vigilante group that targeted young delinquents— only small-scale drug dealers and petty thieves. But her father was a respectable member of the Davao community and in his midfifties when he was shot. And DDS killers always operated in twos, sometimes threes. This had been a solo operation. Yet Isabel finally had to concede that the killer might have been— probably was—Elias the Datu, DDS leader, carrying out his own personal mission.

  While the DDS were killers, they did set limits; it was a sort of code of honor, and by breaking it, the Datu had turned himself into a DDS target. Everyone knew that too. Now Elias was on the run.

  Señor Fabella’s coffin remained closed throughout the threeday wake and funeral. The widow wept intermittently during the wake and broke into a long wail as the coffin was lowered in the grave. No one saw Isabel weep.

  More people are gathering in the streets now. There is a bustle of activity, the buzz of voices, the zooming of motorized tricycles. But the noises are more muted here than they would be in Extramuros, the real city just beyond the fortress walls. There seems to be a tacit agreement among everyone who comes here that this strained replica of nineteenth-century Spanish Manila should not only be respected but protected, because it is so brittle.

  Most of the buildings here have been turned into offices or schools, so hardly anyone is a permanent resident in I
ntramuros anymore. Except the informal settlers. And the priests who run the churches, of which there are only two remaining, after American warplanes decimated this walled city with aerial bombs more than sixty years ago.

  Just beside the slum is a school for seamen—seafarers, Isabel’s editor would assiduously write over her copy, because in their line of work, being precise, he would remind her, is a matter of life and death. The students are coming out in waves, a few pausing at the top of the stairs to light a cigarette, barring the way for the others behind them.

  A woman emerges from the barrio’s dark alley. Isabel wonders if she is one of those who make a living at night. She wears a flowery dress, showing more of her slim legs than most Filipinas her age would dare, the area around her eyes painted with black and purple shadows, and her fuchsia lipstick spilling over the natural line of her lips to achieve the bee-stung look. She walks toward the school, where the young men are milling around outside.

  Isabel thinks maybe this is the kind of woman who her husband—ex-husband, she corrects herself—had wanted her to be when he’d complained that sex with her was like thumbing through an encyclopedia—not just a volume of it, but a whole set. (A man with brains would find that exciting, she’d wanted to reply, but she was still trying to save the marriage then.)

  The woman is now in the midst of the young men, who quickly part to get out of her arm’s reach, some scurrying back a few steps up the stairs again, the rest hopping off the curb onto the street. Still, they are more respectful than one would expect, because they aren’t hooting or heckling her. Instead they call out, “Hello, Ana!” and, “Nice dress, Ana!” She puts one hand on her hip and flicks her other at the men in dignified delight.

  She is taller than all of them, even if she were to take off her shoes with the stiletto heels. She crosses the street toward Isabel, who is now pretending to read the Intramuros guidebook. Clearly the person named Ana relishes all the attention, because she could’ve crossed the street as soon as she’d emerged from the slum, instead of walking toward the young men first. It isn’t until she stops barely a foot away from Isabel to adjust her bra-line that Isabel notices the shadow beneath the thick makeup.

  “Hi,” Isabel says, smiling, curious to hear the woman’s voice.

  “Hello,” comes the husky reply. Ah.

  Isabel was ten when Señora Fabella had come home from her charity work at the penal colony with Elias and his mother in tow. Elias’s father had been serving out a life sentence, which had been cut short by a bullet in the head. A guard, the local paper said, had mistaken him for a wild boar that had wandered into the inmates’ farm lots. Elias and his mother had been staying in the family quarters in the prison compound but now had nowhere to live. “The woman’s a good cook,” the prison chaplain had said to Señora Fabella. “And the boy’s no trouble. Quiet. Small for his age. Thirteen. But very bright.”

  After a few minutes’ resistance and his wife’s gentle persuasion, Señor Fabella decided to give Elias and his mother a trial run. “A month in the plantation,” he said to his wife, in their presence. “These Bagobo natives are the most treacherous tribe of all. Prone to criminal behavior, like the name suggests.”

  He would share his real misgivings with his wife later, in the privacy of their room. “For all you know, that Bagobo could’ve actually provoked the shooting,” Señor Fabella said to his astonished wife. “He was a tribal chief, remember. The woman looks all right—she seems meek enough. But the boy!” Señor Fabella shook his head. “That’s Bagobo blood running in his veins right there.”

  Yet Señor Fabella enjoyed playing both sides. After all, he’d be proven right either way. “You see?” he’d say. “I knew it wouldn’t work.” Or if it went the opposite way, he could say, “You see? I knew there was something beneath the obvious.”

  Isabel decides that there’s still enough light for her to take a walking tour of Intramuros by herself. The guidebook has a foldout map in it which she had studied the night before, after she’d checked in at the Intramuros Hotel. She has highlighted the places she wants to see on the map in orange and green neon. She has also highlighted the numbered items in the legend on the bottom half of the map with the same colors.

  Elias used to tease Isabel about her obsessive reliance on maps. “Look, just follow the pathways—they also divide the fields from each other,” he had said impatiently that summer eighteen years ago. Isabel was spending her long break from school on the family plantation, an hour’s drive from Davao City. She had brought the map of their sixty-hectare plantation because she wanted to explore it herself, this time without her father by her side. Now she was turning it around, trying to match Banana Field 27 on the map with the real one.

  Her father was grateful that Isabel showed such interest in the plantation; not every daughter did so. But her mother sent Elias after her anyway, just in case she got lost or needed anything, though Elias didn’t tell Isabel this. Instead he ran after her, calling, “Hey, let me come with you.”

  “The fields all look the same,” she said, bewildered. “They’re all uniformly square.”

  “Yes, they are,” Elias said, “and you don’t need a map to tell you that.”

  “But this one,” Isabel waved her hand at the banana trees closest to them, “how come this field doesn’t match the shape of the one on the map? Look.”

  “It’s nothing but a piece of paper with a lot of lines.” Elias took the map from Isabel, folded it, and laid the paper in the middle of the footpath, then placed a rock over it. “We’ll pick it up on our way back. C’mon, race you.” With a whoop, he went running toward the hill that marked the edge of the field. Isabel sprinted after him. She couldn’t have understood, because she didn’t know, his exhilaration at being able to run in such wideopen space.

  Within a month at the rural plantation, Señora Fabella was chafing to get back to her charity work in Davao City. Elias, too, had passed Señor Fabella’s stipulated trial run. He was packed off to Davao with Isabel and her mother.

  It was Sardo, the family driver, who first took to calling Elias “Datu.” He’d say, “Hey, Datu, c’mere and help me wash the cars.”

  They’d been doing just that one morning when Sardo asked, “So, what were you in prison for?”

  “I wasn’t in prison,” Elias replied. He rubbed a speck of bird dropping off the windshield and stepped back to study his handiwork. Sardo had stopped wiping down his half of the car and stood waiting. Elias realized he might have to do the Fabellas’ whole fleet of cars by himself if he didn’t elaborate. “It was a penal farm. We weren’t behind bars or anything. My father had special privileges. My mother and I were allowed to live there with him, in the family quarters. And each family had a farm lot, so we could grow some cash crops.” He didn’t add that farm lots were for those who were there for the long haul.

  “Okay,” said Sardo, hunkering down to start with the tires. “So, what was your father in the penal farm for?”

  “He and his people were carrying spears and blowpipes that happened to get in the way of landgrabbers and their private army. And my father was the datu—the chief. What would you call that crime?”

  Sardo looked up from his scrubbing. He wasn’t sure if Elias was joking; but then Elias had never struck him as a joker. “Illegal possession of deadly weapons?” he suggested. “Conspiracy to commit murder?” At last all those episodes of Law & Order and its spin-offs were paying dividends.

  Elias smiled. “Rebellion. We’re IPs—indigenous people. That’s why we were in the penal farm, not jail.”

  “Oh well, that’s all over now. Señor and Señora were talking about you yesterday, in the car. They’re sending you to school, all the way to college. No point letting your brain go to waste washing cars, the señor said.”

  “Sure.” Elias wrung water out of his rag. “So that one day he’ll make me the head banana of the Fabella plantation. All this—” he indicated the Village with a sweep of his arm “—was Bagobo
land, you know. This was our forest, all the way to the foot of the mountain. And then your masters came and stole it all with a piece of paper.”

  Sardo looked around cautiously, although Elias had spoken in a soft, even tone. “That was a long time ago. They were kind enough to take you in. Be grateful for that.”

  They didn’t know yet then that in another month Elias would be gone.

  It happened on a Saturday. Isabel came home from reading in the park and the servants were chattering excitedly in the kitchen. “What’s going on?” Isabel asked.

  “Someone took the money from the secret drawer underneath the altar of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” the housekeeper, who was the mayor-doma, answered. The mayor-doma had discovered the theft, because she was in charge of household expenses. Her voice rose shrilly: “I’ve worked for Señora Fabella longer than any of these other servants, and nothing like this has ever happened before.”

  “Don’t worry, manang,” the upstairs cleaning maid said. “We’re all Christians here. Only a pagan would’ve stolen that money right under the eyes of the Lord Jesus.”

  The downstairs cleaning maid had the tact to nudge her with an elbow and shake her head in warning. Elias’s mother was cooking lunch at the stove and could hear what they were saying, though they could not see her face.

  Isabel left the kitchen to look for her mother. Señora Fabella was sitting on the patio, gazing forlornly at the garden. She told Isabel the rest of the story, the part that the servants didn’t know about. “Your father called Elias into the master bedroom.” When she saw the look on Isabel’s face, Señora Fabella quickly added, “Just to question him about the missing money. But Elias refused to admit to the theft.” She shook her head and passed her hand over her eyes. “One hundred pesos, taken from a sheaf of hundred-peso bills held together by a money-band. Elias—or whoever—didn’t take it all. All Elias had to do was admit to stealing the hundred pesos.”