A noted scholar, Professor Estrella Espejo, points out online that the Samar incident also implicates a Charlie Company (though it was of the wrong regiment, the 11th Infantry, not the 20th or the 23rd Division). As in Vietnam, only one or two American officers are tried for the Philippine affair. The 1901 court-martialed counterpart of the Vietnam War’s Colonel Calley (a shadowy figure in her father’s movie, unnamed for legal reasons) is the infamous General Jacob Smith, who ordered the Filipino deaths by making memorable staccato statements: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me.” There is also the general’s resonant phrase, which made his name: “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.” According to Professor Espejo, the repulsive yet fascinating Smitty Jakes, the Kilgore-like lieutenant whose pathological patriotism is the most troubling yet truest aspect of Luca Brasi’s film, is a nod to the butcher of Balangiga. Lastly, the movie’s hero, the guilt-ridden wraith, Tommy O’Connell, Espejo says, as if resting her case, is clearly the West Point — educated commanding officer of the Samar outpost, twenty-six-year-old Captain Thomas W. Connell, a moralist whose meager ethics measured in full the absurdity of the American cause.
Magsalin does not know what to make of Chiara’s globe-trotting story. For one thing, it is past one o’clock, and outside the truant boys are shrugging back into their white polo shirts, the uniform of all the Catholic schools that dot EDSA, done with their lunch-hour video games, and the circus men are winding their way out of the mall like blind mice, every clown in deep-black Ray-Ban knockoffs, wiping off rice grains and chorizo oil from their greasepaint lips, and still Magsalin does not get exactly why Chiara is globe-trotting.
What puts Magsalin off at the pastry shop is Chiara’s voice. It is nasal. Her monotone does not help, a bored flatness, even in the most interesting parts, that keeps Magsalin, or the pastry shop waitress, or anyone else willing to listen amid the humid baking scones and moist pan de sal, at bay, as if an invisible wall, maybe socioeconomic, exists between Chiara’s indifference and Magsalin’s attention.
Magsalin’s taxable occupation is to translate, hence her professional name: Magsalin. (It means to translate in her maternal grandfather’s tongue, Tagalog.) Perhaps the envelope Chiara has offered Magsalin contains the rough draft of the script that Chiara wrote on a lethargic April afternoon in a mansion in the New York mountains. Maybe Chiara’s next project is an art house political film, á la Costa-Gavras’s Z, to be shot on location in the actual country in which the plot occurs, a film of dizzying unheard-of realism, hence the need for translations into the actual language of the hapless citizens in the process of being killed by the occupation forces. Who knows?
Magsalin is aware of those scenes in Hollywood movies when, requiring an actor to speak a conveniently alien tongue, the character starts speaking an inappropriate one, like Tagalog. The prayer of the Javanese man in The Year of Living Dangerously. The possessed sibyl cursing out Keanu Reeves in Constantine. And, of course, the amusing scene of the nasty, tiny Ewoks in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
In the trade there are technical names for these short-term projects.
Inversions provide a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, does not require logical coherence. This is the case of the Bahasa-Indonesian prayer in Peter Weir’s movie. The Indonesian prays the Our Father in Tagalog, not Bahasa — that is, he need not be coherent; it’s the concept that counts. Inversions are opposed to obversions — that is, providing a set of unmatched signifiers that, if understood, are generally insulting. The naughty Ewok dialogue in the Star Wars film, a set of pungent Tagalog epigrams, is, of course, a basic Filipino fuck you to the universe. What Magsalin expects is that Chiara’s script will require reversions: a set of matching signifiers that, if reversed, will portray the privileged language as in fact the other, and vice versa. Perversions, of course, produce scant good. Lastly, conversions, the most difficult of these types of translations, Magsalin simply refuses to attempt.
What interests Magsalin about Chiara is not the prospect of a job but her likely disappearance. In Magsalin’s mystery novel, Chiara will leave Ali Mall by a wrong turn, through the plywood board tunnel, a sign announcing the mall owner’s promise of a NEW ALI MALL! COMING SOON! put up ten years ago. The security guard, shutting off his cell phone, will give Chiara clear directions in English, but she will not understand his accent. Chiara has a sense of being lost amid the warped plywood, the tunnel is so spooky and haphazard it has the impression of not even being lit, though makeshift electrical wires become obvious when her vision adjusts. The tunnel spills into the harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs of the decaying merry-go-round outside, where tricycle drivers waiting for clients pick their teeth on illpainted horses. Magsalin knows the area well from her days as a serial bookworm at Alemar’s and National Bookstore, in the years 1976–1980, when she went to school nearby. It occurs to her that the details she has evoked in the last few sentences might bear traces of her memory’s obsolescence, and Chiara’s plaintive future, therefore, her kidnapping by a pair of muscular, Ray-Ban-wearing goons (of course, they are dressed as clowns) is set among details of an obsolete past.
Chiara’s struggle will be unseen, though one might expect a stray schoolboy to be lighting a match nearby, polo shirt half on (he’s a bit malnourished); but the irony is that the boy, smoking his last forbidden cigarette before he’s expected in gym class, will be looking at the comic book he has just bought with carefully saved change. He is in no state to observe a famous film director being shoved into a waiting tricycle, an ordinary passenger pedicab painted in the usual deranged Manila hues.
Magsalin, on the other hand, will be wandering Ali Mall. Done with the exhausting interview with the filmmaker, and feeling a bit nauseous, still unsure what has brought her here, not just to Cubao but to her country, Magsalin clutches the thick manila envelope and travels Ali Mall in a daze. The mall is now quite modern, practically Singaporean; at the same time, the familiarity is distracting. There is a schizoid confabulation between the new upscale fixtures, such as the gleaming escalators and neon in the food court, which now looks like a strip club, and the ratty hair-accessories wrapped in dusty plastic that seem to have been in the Cardam chain of shoe shops since they opened in 1976. What is true perhaps is that, after the vertigo of listening to the story of Chiara Brasi, Magsalin feels unreal, and the world has an illusory aspect, part memory, part script, the split state of a spectator providing her own unpaid translations in a movie in which she exists.