“I think we are stuck in someone’s movie, and the director is still laying out his scraps of script, trying to figure out his ending. He does not have an ending. Everything around him has the possibility of becoming part of his mystery plot — his lost love for his wife, that fly over there licking the sugar on the bun, the clown in the corner playing with a knife, a moment in a mirror store in New York when he sees himself replicated through his camera lens in all the mirrors except he cannot see his eyes, the unanswered questions about a writer’s death, the unanswered questions about a country’s war, that schoolboy carefully folding a white shirt and tucking it neatly into a paper bag, a heart attack he has in 1977 when his movie is still not done, when it has a beginning and an ending but no idea, and twelve hundred feet of unedited stock, with takes, retakes, and other duplications. That is what we are: twelve hundred feet of unedited stock, doing things over and over, and we are waiting for the cut. But who is the director? What is our wait for? I would like to make a movie in which the spectator understands that she is in a work of someone else’s construction and yet as she watches she is devising her own translations for the movie in which she in fact exists. What is convenient about Balangiga is that it seems as if The Unintended was constructed out of the story of Samar’s parts, but it is also true that it’s the other way around. My father’s movie also produces, for us, the tale of Balangiga. This goes without saying. One story told may unbury another, and all the dead are resurrected. Recurrence is only an issue of not knowing how the film should end.”
Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the first Big Question: “But is it about knowing how a film should end, or not knowing its shape?”
“A film has no shape if it does not know its end.”
Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the second Big Question: “But is it about knowing how a film should end, or the fact that it has no end, or its end is multiple, like desire’s prongs?”
“Touché.”
Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the third Big Question: “Do you know that a clown is going to kidnap you?”
“In a mystery, clowns are always significant.”
Magsalin takes an index card and reads aloud the last Big Question: “What is in the manila envelope?”
“If you take it, you will see.”
“Okay,” says Magsalin, taking the envelope. “I’ll see what I can do about Samar. I know a few people who can help you.”
“Thank you,” Chiara says in that annoying nasal monotone. “How do you get out of here?”
“Just follow the signs. There are detours for the exits. They’re renovating, you know.”
“Are you leaving too?”
Magsalin thinks she will take her up on it, on the forlorn implication in Chiara’s little-girl voice that she would like some company, that she is scared of Cubao and her impulsive clueless spiritual adventure, which only people as rich or thoughtless as Chiara can suddenly get in their heads and then stupidly follow through; and yes, Magsalin will lead her to the exit and get her safely to her hotel.
“I want to take a spin around the mall,” Magsalin says. “I’ll hang around here a bit. I’ll see you later.”
The waitress offers the check. Chiara hands over a credit card. The waitress shakes her head. Magsalin takes out her non-Hermés bag and pays with cash.
“Thanks,” Chiara says.
“No problem.”
“My father saw that fight, you know. Ringside.”
“Ali-Frazier?”
“Yeah. The Thrilla in Manila. We lived nearby in — let’s see, it’s in my notebook. Greenhills.”
“That’s in Pasig, not Quezon City.”
“Oh. The Internet was wrong.”
“Figures.”
“The Thrilla in Manila,” Chiara repeats, and then she gets up, just like that, leaving Magsalin and the pan de sal shop.
Bitch.
Chiara is in the dark hallway, and Magsalin has to follow behind. The filmmaker is blocking Magsalin’s exit and gazing, as if mentally noting its pros and cons as a film location, at the boarded-up spaces beyond Philippine Airlines, the scaffolding that might be a promised escalator or a remnant of someone’s change of mind.
“Muhammad Ali Mall. What an interesting tribute.”
“Ali Mall,” Magsalin corrects, wondering if Chiara will ever budge from the door. “Yeah, it’s dumb.”
“Dumpy.” Chiara turns, smiling but not moving. “But not dumb. It’s sweet. I like tributes. I’ve read all the books about that fight, you know. I guess because I see it through the lens of my childhood. After my father finished The Unintended, you know, after Manila, my parents divorced. I lived with my mom. The last time we were together was in Manila. The Thrilla in Manila. I’ve watched that match over and over again. On DVD. Round 6. When Ali says to Frazier—”
“They tol’ me Joe Frazier was all washed up!”
“And Frazier goes—”
“They lied, champ — they lied!”
“Hah!” Chiara claps her hands. “You do a mean Frazier.”
“Thank you. Were you for Ali or Frazier?” Magsalin asks.
“I love Muhammad Ali.”
“Do you think he’s real?”
“More real than I,” says Chiara. “He’s the Greatest.”
Just for that, Magsalin thinks, she’ll do whatever this spoiled brat says.
“Myself, I liked Frazier,” says Magsalin.
“Really? But why?”
“Because he wasn’t actually an ugly motherfucker. He was no gorilla. Except Ali, the director, made him up.”
A motif of the renovated Ali Mall is a series of commissioned portraits of the boxer framed in glass at strategic points, like altars. The reflexive signifiers, most of them tacky, are not tongue-in-cheek. They are serious gestures of veneration. One has a wilted flower on its ledge, as if left by an admirer (candy wrappers and cigarette stubs also decorate the shrine). While the corporate intention of co-opting the Greatest in order to shill shoes is obvious, the beauty of the intertextual display — the portraits that modify the mall, and the mall that is an appositive of the portraits — is that presence confounds purpose. The portraits do make Ali as absurd as the corporation promoting meaning from dubious intentions. Passing them by her first time in amusement, at another in alarm, at several outright laughing, Magsalin spends the afternoon searching the mall for all the images. One, a giant reproduction like an advertisement, is done in painstaking flatness. Ali’s nose is as big as the letter A in the word CHAMPION. It has graffiti all over its wall. But when you look close, expecting obscenity, instead you find sincere compliments, some of them mistaken: ali is da greatest! I saw the HBO, THRILLA! r.i.p. Muhammad Ali, floats like a butterfly, sings like a bee. At this point, though perhaps in the future it will change, Muhammad Ali is in fact still alive. Oddly, even the errors count. In another, a cubist Ali in a relaxed pose, clearly allusive, looks like Pablo Picasso in an early self-portrait, wearing a white camisa. Another illustrates a Filipino pantheon of assorted black idols — Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the kid from Diff’rent Strokes, Gloria Gaynor of “I Will Survive” fame, and their forefather, Muhammad Ali — descending in order somewhat like Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, but not. To pan on each of these is a slice of time, precious in Chiara’s movie, so the viewer does wonder at its meanings, juxtaposed as they are with a scene in Magsalin’s story — a kidnapping left hanging.