Chiara is muckle-mouthed. Her charm is furtive: now you see it, now it seems only dreamed. She is shy. That is what Magsalin thinks, until she recognizes that the faraway gaze (obvious even behind Chanel), the averted angle of her chin, the awkward pose on the stool, the surprisingly uninteresting monotone are in fact indifference. Magsalin considers leaving. How dare this stranger look so self-assured? But then, Magsalin thinks, the woman also looks sedated, drugged.
But really, how is Magsalin to know? Her own buzz of choice is cheap Chilean pinot noir, hardly a peril.
Anyhow, Chiara’s past is full of shady anecdotes. At least, her father’s is — and the newspapers used to be full of Luca Brasi’s escapades. It was in Lubao, Pampanga, that he had an affair with both a costume designer and an electrician during the filming of his Vietnam War movie, now more or less forgotten — though at one point it was thought The Unintended would challenge the genius of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, except be less commercial. He and Coppola are practically contemporaries; both grew up in New York. But while the one has a genial paternal aura, even in the documentary by his faintly bitter, long-suffering wife, the other is satyric, greasy, saturnine, and unstable.
It is no wonder that his daughter has the off-putting temperament of someone only intermittently aware.
Chiara affirms she is the daughter of the director of The Unintended. Magsalin confesses she saw the film several times in her teens. She recalls watching it frame by frame in a muggy class along Katipunan, called “Locations/Dislocations,” about the phantasmal voids in Vietnam War movies shot in equally blighted areas that are not in fact Vietnam. Within the disturbing web of contorted allusions, hidden historiographic anxiety, political ironies, and astounding art direction resident in a single frame, for instance, of a fissured bridge — in real life dynamited by the Japanese in 1943 and still unrepaired in 1976, and rebuilt specifically and reexploded spectacularly in a filmic faux-napalm scene against a mystic pristine river actually already polluted by local dynamite fishers — the movie kept putting Magsalin to sleep, for whatever reason, though she omits that detail before the filmmaker’s daughter. There was something both engrossing and pathetic about it, about reconstructing the trauma of whole countries through a film’s illusive palimpsest, and what was most disturbing, of course, was that, on one level, the professor’s point was undeniably true: our identities are irremediably mediated — but that does not mean Magsalin has to keep thinking about it.
Chiara seems unconcerned, however, by the scholarly implications of her father’s cult classic; at least she seems unburdened. She nods absently at Magsalin’s furrowed approximations of her memory, as if she, Chiara, has heard it all before, as if she needs another Adderall. What she really needs, Chiara says, almost upsetting Magsalin’s cup of chai, is someone to accompany her on a trip.
“Where to?” asks Magsalin.
“I need to get to Samar.”
Chiara has vague but pleasant memories of the times she spent with her father in the tropics. Specifically, she was in Quezon City and in Angeles, Pampanga, but she would learn that only later, online. She was four in 1975. She remembers a skating rink, being crowned Miss Philippines in games with tiny beauty-contest-obsessed girls who always let her win, and getting lice from goats owned by a visiting tribe of mountain people.
Chiara has a fractured memory of one night in Manila during the city’s seasonal rains. Her mother, usually all nerves, a Ukrainian Jew brought up on stories of pogroms, who turned to Christian Science then hatha yoga after the divorce, is agitated, sitting down and getting back up to protect a flickering flame. Oddly, the Philippines drove her mother’s persecution complex underground, and she lives in almost Buddhist calm amid the lizards on the ceilings, monstrous cockroaches in the toilet, sewer animals in the garden, and nubile prostitutes promenading all around the seedy American military bases. This is significant, as Chiara’s mother is, quite frankly, a millionaire. Her mother is spoiled and used to getting her way. She had given her husband his Hollywood start. But it is as if the desperate indignities of living in a perpetually fallen state, among lives she shares and witnesses with a perplexed gaze, has lent Chiara’s mother peace, a converse calm, that she has not regained since.
Perhaps this explains Chiara’s sense at times that a vulnerable world could be an oasis.
The shadows of her mother’s single candle and the sounds of a gecko on the wall are the night’s only cartographic points. Otherwise, she and her mother and her father are suspended, the only people in a universal void, rocking in a gigantic cradle hanging above Manila’s awful monsoon winds. Chiara is happy. Chiara is lying with her curly four-year-old head on her huge, sweating father’s lap. The famously methodical director is picking lice, one pinch following another, a rich rhythmic tug mauling her tender scalp, each tug pleasingly soporific, a victorious bloodbath on her father’s hands. She doesn’t remember her father cursing every time he finds a pest and crushing it with his purple thumb, though her mother has pointed out those gross details. It is the most pleasing memory of her childhood, that blackout night, her father picking out lice from her hair until she falls asleep: it is pleasing to recall her dad, busy with formidable things, determined to rid her of all the bugs he can find, to use his director powers to seek out her vermin, to squash the blood out from the pests’ abominable veins, as if he is crushing the concentrated frustration arising from the calamities of his unsteady enterprise, the making of his cursed monumental film.
Chiara was Googling idly, with nothing on her mind, in her mother’s mansion. Then she went Oedipal. She Googled her father’s film, The Unintended, and the year production began: 1975. She never thought she would find an item of interest, nothing memorable, not even an inch of a pitch for a horror script or a jotting for her sundry journal. But on pages twenty-four through thirty in the search results, she started clicking. Muhammad Ali’s historic match against Joe Frazier on October 1, 1975. Miss Universe Amparo Muñoz has become a soft-porn star and is stripped of her crown. The bells of Balangiga, some religious items stolen from a Philippine island, remain missing. The first multilevel shopping mall in the Philippines rises in tribute to Muhammad Ali’s victory. Another article on the ambush in Balangiga of American soldiers of the 9th US Infantry Regiment on an island called Samar in 1901. What the heck was going on?
Online, an unrelated catastrophe was ambushing her father’s film. Balangiga, Samar, kept coming up, neck and neck with Muhammad Ali.
6. An alternate story
It turns out a Filipino scholar has written a paper linking the massacre of civilians in Balangiga, Samar, 1901, to the 1968 Vietnam massacre that frames her father’s unfortunate film. As some viewers might recall, The Unintended is a story about a teenage kid, Tommy O’Connell, who fails to be court-martialed for acts he has committed in a hamlet, code-named Pinkville, that he, along with his fellow men of Charlie Company, razes to the ground. Tommy tells his story so the world does not forget the horror of his experience.
The Balangiga incident of 1901, on the other hand, is a true story in two parts, a blip in the Philippine-American War (itself a blip in the Spanish-American War, which is a blip in outbreaks of imperial hysteria in Southeast Asian wars, which are blips in the infinite cycle of human aggression in the dying days of this dying planet, et al.). Part one: an uprising of Filipino rebels against the American outpost (the exposition here would be a fascinating movie in its own right, though with too many colorful local details) leads to the deaths of thirty-six Americans, with twenty-two wounded and four missing in action. Part two: The US commanding general demands in retaliation the murder of every Filipino in Samar above ten years of age, and blood bathes the province. Americans savage — “kill and burn” is the technical term — close to three thousand Filipinos, men, women, and children, in a vengeful massacre of such proportions that the subsequent court-martial of the general, Jacob H. “Howling Wilderness” Smith, causes a sensation in the American press when the events become public in 1902.