That is the effect Chiara wants for her next movie, she says. It will have an emptiness at its heart: a war movie not unlike her father’s, but without its coherence. A secret will lie in its structure, like a dumb grenade. It will be set in 1901, the inverse of ’68, but no one will be the wiser. Anachronisms, false starts, scarlet clues, a noirish insistence on the pathetic pursuit of human truths will pervade its miserable (quite thin) plot, and while the mystery will not unravel, to a select few it will provide the satisfaction of an unfathomable rage.
This is the part when, to Magsalin, as Chiara tells her story, the filmmaker drops her guard. Chiara gains a hint of, let’s say, embodiment, losing that slightly offensive appearance of tactful sedation. She becomes animated, finally munching on the proffered pan de sal, buttering it up on all sides, crust and filling both, and her straight blond hair is getting caught in her gleaming, jutting, expensively symmetrical upper teeth.
She explains why a visit to Samar is necessary. A spiritual journey.
“You know that is not a normal thing to say about Samar,” Magsalin says.
Chiara ignores her.
She had a conversion online, she says. She had a conversion into the world of the Filipino rebels of 1901. It was as if, she explains to Magsalin, she had entered a portal and become the body of a Filipino farmer disguised as a devout Catholic woman carrying a machete inside his billowing peasant skirt, hoping to kill a GI.
“You were hallucinating,” Magsalin replies. “Do you know what was really in your mother’s heirloom apple compote in the Catskills? What were you drinking?”
Professor Estrella Espejo’s papers on Balangiga, “The Unintended: A Consequence,” Parts 1, 3, and 6, were on kirjasto, a WordPress blog by the same tenure-track associate professor in San Diego, and a remote server that, when clicked upon, apologized for the inconvenience but due to copyright questions, et cetera... Chiara’s efforts to find the scholar’s contacts were fruitless, until she located an exchange in a comments section on inq7.net involving Espejo and Magsalin.
“Wait a minute,” Magsalin demands. “When was this?”
Chiara takes out a notebook from her huge Hermés bag.
“August 15, 2000. You likened the bitter, essentializing determinist Professor Espejo to the coyote in the cartoon about the Road Runner, saying, quote, like Wile E. Coyote you keep setting your traps though it is only you who bites, unquote.”
“That was in reference to her loony-tunes theory that Juan Luna, the Filipino painter, must be Jack the Ripper, because Luna was also in Europe at the time of the Ripper. You see, Juan Luna had killed his wife. She thinks that the death of Paz Chiching Luna is the last Ripper death. Estrella is insane.”
“You had another run-in with her in 2004.”
“She gets these history-worms in her head and won’t let go.”
“It was about my father’s film.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You read closely the scene in which Tommy O’Connell shoots a woman and her daughter hiding something in a rickshaw.”
“They were hiding a book.”
“It was a diary. You noted that the camera panned over a few quick words, meant to be in French.”
“It was supposed to be the diary of the woman’s dead husband, a murdered rebel. A list of his descriptions, his trifling observations of his kid, the girl Tommy has just killed — and the now-dead mother had only been trying to keep his personal possessions intact. But on screen, the actual words, if you stopped the frame, were in Waray, the language of Samar.”
“Your idea was that the sentences in my dad’s film were actual pages from a diary of a rebel soldier from the Philippine-American War.”
“I imagined your dad was alluding to the other war and making a connection. I wondered then why the Philippine diary, a red herring in his text, was so repressed. Why was it that in his press conferences your dad made no references to the 1901 incident at all? I mean, as I said, look at the names in his movie: Smitty Jakes, Tommy O’Connell. Read The Ordeal of Samar and you have your dad’s movie right there.”
“I did.”
“Read The Ordeal of Samar?”
“I got the Joseph Schott book, yes. It was disturbing, but not in ways that could make a good movie.”
“So you cheated. You went off the Internet and read an actual book.”
Chiara laughs. Then she says: “So I want to know. Are you Professor Estrella Espejo?”
Magsalin almost topples off the stool. She starts coughing, stuff is coming out of her nose, and the waitress offers her water and a napkin.
Magsalin takes a long sip. “Hell no,” she says, putting down the glass. “I wouldn’t be caught dead being Estrella Espejo. She’s a lunatic with astasia-abasia tied up in IV tubes on an island off the South China Sea. I mean, the North Philippine Sea, depending on your disposition.”
She stares at the filmmaker, daring her to contradict.
“Yeah, I know,” says Chiara. “Estrella Espejo is something else. She told me to get in touch with you if I wanted to go to Balangiga. She said she could not help me, because she’s in the hospital and unstable.”
“You can say that again. Did she give you my e-mail?”
“And fax.”
“She’s a shit.”
“Pardon?”
“She makes things up and won’t let go. Take the details of your father’s film. First, Charlie Company: every third goddamned company is called Charlie. Anyone who took Citizen’s Army Training, as Espejo did since she lived under Marcos’s martial law, knows that. Second, Smitty Jakes, Jacob Smith. Okay, sounds alike. Tommy O’Connell, Thomas Connell. Sounds convincing. Clearly one text is lifted from another. She goes on making a case about names. The point is not the coincidence of the names, or their intentional equivalence. The one-to-one correspondence between history and fiction is not interesting. It’s a logical fallacy to mistake the parallel with the teleological — it’s not clear that God exists between parallel lines. I mean, if you are going to steal my idea, at least make something useful out of it. The question, it seems to me, is how to keep the incident from recurring. I mean, what the fuck is the point of knowing history’s loops if we remain its bloody victims?”
“Do you think there are parallel universes and we are stuck in the one made up only of bad movie plots?”
“I think we are stuck in the bad movie plots we make ourselves.”
“I think we are stuck in someone’s movie.”
“What do you mean?”
Magsalin looks hard through Chiara Brasi’s shades. Chiara does not take them off even when she accidentally gets butter on them from the cinnamon buns. Now that Chiara has already buttered the pan de sal, she starts buttering the cinnamon buns, which are already buttered. Magsalin does not detect irony in her monotone.
“You know that is only margarine,” Magsalin says. “It just looks like butter.”
Chiara ignores her.
Chiara lectures, moving her slim hands in geometric patterns, enunciating her vowels, at some points cocking her head to one side as if she is looking for the right word, her wide mouth pouted upward as she brushes her sleek hair off her shoulder, revealing her lack of cleavage. Magsalin once saw her on Inside the Actors Studio and feels the need to reach for an index card in case the filmmaker expects her to ask Big Questions.