Odd Jobs (110 page)

The narrator of
The Signore
witnesses some of this horrendous carnage, and reports on the slaughter of the captured servants and children of a general who has defected from Nobunaga’s service, on the burning alive of ten thousand trapped inhabitants of a fortress, on the severed hands of drowned enemies that still cling “stiff and pale as if carved from stone” to the rails of Nobunaga’s fleet. Why does the Signore, with his pallid calm, his high-pitched voice, and his nervously twitching brow, persist in such butchery? Out of perfectionism and rationality, the narrator decides: “Among all the Japanese people I met during my stay in that land, I never knew one who believed as strongly as he that the greatest good was that all things should come about necessarily and reasonably.” He extols the Signore as “a man who possessed a will to seek the limits of perfection in the work he had chosen for himself.” With his own murders in his mind, the narrator goes on, “And it was in precisely
this kind of will … that I myself found the only meaning of our life here on this earth.” So austere a conclusion, perhaps, belongs more to a twentieth-century Japanese than to an Italian of the time of the Counter-Reformation; Kunio Tsuji, a Japanese with memories of modern war and Japan’s subsequent indoctrination in the virtues of peace, worries at the riddle of martial morality, giving it a religious tinge when he has the Signore think, “I was unwilling to mar the hallowed rites of battle with acts of kindness.… The only mercy in battle is to be merciless!” After the slaughter at Ishiyama, the Signore dismisses one of his own generals, “the scholarly Lord Sakuma,” for his “humanity and restraint in the final phase of the battle.” The novel quotes the edict, presumably authentic:

Mercilessness, then, is the swiftest route to merciful peace. The American reader, and presumably the Japanese author, can hardly not think of the two atomic bombs which, in a few blinding moments, killed more noncombatants than Nobunaga’s thirty years of systematic mayhem, but did open the way to surrender and recovery. As the Signore hacks his way through his enemies, peace prettily descends upon Kyoto:

On the mountainside of Azuchi the victorious Shogun builds his own castle, roofed in blue tile, and magnanimously decrees that the same
roofing material be used for the Christian church to be constructed near the castle walls.

Assuming a Westerner’s point of view, the Japanese novelist identifies with the fate of the precarious but thriving Portuguese Jesuit mission in sixteenth-century Japan, portraying the priestly leaders—Francisco Cabral, Luis Frois, Organtino Gnecchi-Soldi, Alessandro Valignano—and animating with particular warmth another historical Christian, the Japanese Brother Lorenzo, a virtually blind and lame convert who acted as translator and go-between for the missionaries. The murderous, rationalist Nobunaga and his allied
daimyos
extended to the Jesuits a degree of protection and friendship they would never again enjoy from the rulers of Japan. The reasons are not so paradoxical. The Japanese samurai admired in the Jesuit missionaries an austerity and discipline equivalent to their own. The Portuguese brought with them Europe’s trade and advanced technology, of which the military technology was especially valued—our Italian narrator’s intimacy with the Signore is based upon his expertise in arquebus manufacture and deployment, and in naval design and armor. The infant Christian community, which numbered close to three hundred thousand converts by 1600, at first posed no threat to the established social order, whereas the Buddhist monks and clergy, spearheaded by the militant Hokke sect, were among Nobunaga’s chief enemies. Further, as the novel tells it, the Jesuits fed the Signore’s thirst for rational knowledge and intellectual companionship, whereas the Buddhists were a force for obscurantism and stagnation. The alleged companionship is a bit of a stretch to imagine, and even the mediating device of the soul-searching Italian soldier does not quite make the Signore sympathetic. The sorrow on his “pale, sad visage” is repeatedly mentioned, yet we never feel sorry for him, or believe in him as a kind of Nietzschean superman, a martyr to “the loneliness that came of a determination to test the limits of human existence.” For all the historical blood and struggle it contains,
The Signore
makes a papery effect not much different from that of
Yucatán
—fiction at one remove, the characters dimmed by the intervening medium. Kunio Tsuji, coming the long way around by way of a European education and a European point of view, attempts to surprise into life a great name of his national heritage, and produces a stir of old pages.

As far as news—human activity given the immediacy of personal witness—goes, Jessica Hagedorn’s
Dogeaters
is the richest of our three
exotic novels. The Philippines, to be sure, are not exotic to those who live there, and have been no strangers to our newspapers, from the islands’ pious acquisition by McKinley, through their Japanese occupation and American reconquest in World War II, to the latest headlines concerning disastrous earthquakes, the perils of Corazon Aquino, and the trials of Imelda Marcos.
Dogeaters
begins in 1956 and ends with the unnamed Marcoses still uneasily in power. Ms. Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines, but has led a vivacious artistic life in the United States, as—the book jacket tells us—“performance artist, poet, and playwright.” The jacket elaborates: “For many years the leader and lyricist for the Gangster Choir band, she is presently a commentator on
Crossroads
, a syndicated weekly newsmagazine on public radio.” A member of Mr. De Carlo’s generation, she is thoroughly imbued with postwar popular culture, and her characters perceive the world through a scrim of movie memories and radio soap operas and try to act in tune with song lyrics and poignant cinematic poses. In the multicultural welter of impoverished Manila, however, the poses don’t always fit, and the movies, arriving some years later, don’t always make sense. Our young heroine and part-time narrator, Rio Gonzaga, and her bosom (and bosomy) friend and cousin, Pucha Gonzaga, are sometimes puzzled by the American movies of the 1950s: Jane Wyman seems to them too old for Rock Hudson in
All That Heaven Allows
(it should have been Kim Novak) and they are bewildered and bored by
A Place in the Sun
(it was “probably too American for us”). Yet some images hit home:

A world on quiet fire is arrestingly conveyed by Ms. Hagedorn’s episodic, imagistic collage of a novel. A borrowed American culture has given Filipinos dreams but not the means to make dreams come true. As in the novels of the Argentine Manuel Puig, we are reminded how ravishingly Hollywood cinema invaded the young minds of the Third World, where the moviegoers did not meet the corrective reality of North America upon emerging from the theatre. The popular culture in
Dogeaters
is consumed, like the constantly described food, with a terrible honest hunger.

Rio Gonzaga’s family is upper-middle-class and, amid country-club games and muffled adultery and anxious rumors from the society’s power structure, feels like many well-off households portrayed in the fiction of young Americans and Europeans. Filipinos, however, seem to take their roles rather theatrically: Rio’s beautiful mother, who tints “her black hair with auburn highlights, just like Rita Hayworth,” lives in mauve rooms with all the windows boarded up and painted over, the air-conditioner running twenty-four hours a day.
Her
mother, Lola Narcisa, is a small brown woman from Davao, in the south, who eats with her hands, walks with a stoop, has a childish giggle, and fills her room with the “sweet gunpowder smell and toxic smoke of Elephant brand
katol
, a coil-shaped mosquito-repellent incense.” Rio’s paternal grandmother, Abuelita Socorro, is a thick-waisted widow who lives in Spain with her effete son, wears a scrap of the Shroud of Turin pinned to her brassiere, prays before and after eating, and owns a miraculous rosary that glows in the dark. Rio’s maternal grandfather is an American, slowly dying in the shabby American Hospital, whose “melancholy American doctors” are, like him, “leftovers from recent wars, voluntary exiles whose fair skin is tinged a blotchy red from the tropical sun or too much alcohol; like his, their clothes and skin reek of rum and Lucky Strikes.” He and the family friends the Goldenbergs are among the few non-movie Americans in the novel; Americans are not villains in this novel, though the Philippine atmosphere is villainous, and the government slithers through
film noir
shadows. Among the Gonzagas’ network of upper-echelon friends is the charming “Nicky,” General Nicasio Ledesma, who turns out to be a conscientious torturer and to have as his mistress a drug-addicted actress, Lolita Luna, adored by millions but unable to realize her dream of emigrating to the United States, where she “can study acting and stop playing so much.” The interconnections in Manila society ramify as the novel ranges from the First Lady’s dreams to the squalid world of “shower dancers”—young men who lather up and get it up for the delectation of a homosexual nightclub audience.

Dogeaters
has a teeming cast of characters, and their multiplicity somewhat dissipates the reader’s involvement. The book, prefaced by excessive thanks for help in its composition, feels a bit boiled down, as though its scattered high-energy moments were edited from a more leisurely paced panoramic work. The Avila family, representing Manila’s liberal
aristocracy, especially seems skimped, though Senator Avila’s assassination is the book’s political climax, bringing a number of threads together, and his daughter Daisy’s triumph in a beauty contest is its most magic-realist moment. “Our country belongs to women who easily shed tears and men who are ashamed to weep,” the chapter called “Epiphany” begins. “During the days following her extravagant coronation, something peculiar happens to Daisy Avila.… Each morning, as Daisy struggles to wake from her sleep, she finds herself whimpering softly. Her eyes are continually bloodshot and swollen. The once radiant beauty cannot pinpoint the source of her mysterious and sudden unhappiness.” As the press and the beauty-contest sponsors clamor at the Avilas’ door, she finally wakes with dry eyes and agrees to be interviewed on television. In the course of the interview she “accuses the First Lady of furthering the cause of female delusions in the Philippines.” From this scandalous indiscretion it is a short step for her to marry a publicity-conscious English playboy who sees her on television. Without much delay, she separates from him, takes a rebel lover, and is captured by the government, interrogated, raped, and released; next, she smuggles herself back into the rebel terrain and is reborn as the heroic, dedicated Aurora. But her transformation takes place mostly offstage, glimpsed through a series of news items, and her surreal siege of weeping remains the image we treasure, a distillation of this sad land of beauty contests.

Ms. Hagedorn allows herself more space in the underworld of young male hustlers, and in her impersonation of the novel’s other narrator, the nightclub d.j., homosexual prostitute, and cocaine addict Joey. Piercingly she brings off his jaunty voice of cheerful bravado and wounded scorn. Joey’s father was a black American soldier, his mother a beautiful whore who drowned herself when he was small. He was adopted by, or had already been sold to, a petty crook called Uncle, who trained him as a pickpocket and arranged his sexual initiation at the age of ten. “I’ve had my share of women since, but they don’t really interest me. Don’t ask me why. To tell you the truth, not much interests me at all. I learned early that men go for me; I like that about them. I don’t have to work at being sexy.” During a week-long tryst with a German film-director brought to Manila by one of the First Lady’s ambitious art-film festivals, Joey’s interior monologue is a running illumination of how sexual traders scheme, fantasize, and suffer flares of desire and pity. Looking at the German, he thinks:

In the end, he steals his lover’s drugs and money, having already stoked up on a big breakfast: “Scrambled eggs over garlic-fried rice, side of
longaniza
sausages and beef
tapa, kalamansi
juice, and fresh pineapple for dessert. My last good meal for the next few days … The German is amused.”