The Caprices Read online

  At first, Trinidad thought it was another of Miguel’s elaborate lies. She lived in the big house with her grandmother, Jose, and Auring and feared nothing but the Japanese. She had no cause to go to the basement, but as the weeks passed certain oddities began to demand her attention. Although Trinidad had no business down there, it seemed that Jose, her grandmother, and Auring did; Auring went down at eleven A.M. and in the afternoon around five. Jose and her grandmother were not so regular, but many times Trinidad had caught her grandmother sighing heavily as she ascended the stairs, and once she had seen Jose, bucket in hand, at the top of the landing eyeing her guiltily. One night, when Trinidad had awoken as the result of a bad dream, she heard a distant moaning coming from somewhere in the house. In her dream, Miguel had appeared to her without hands. She asked him where they were.

  “A Japanese officer cut them off,” he said. “He sent them back to Japan for a souvenir.”

  Trinidad was eased to hear her grandmother’s comforting footsteps on the stairs. She stumbled out to the landing in her bare feet.

  “Ija, why are you up?”

  “I had a bad dream. The Japanese will kill us.”

  “There is a good chance that will happen. The best thing you can do is go back to bed and pray for us. Pray for our souls.”

  “Even Jose’s?”

  “Especially Jose’s. He really needs it.”

  Trinidad went back to bed. She did not pray. She listened to that faint moaning, which was answered by her grandmother’s sweet whispers. Sometimes, when the wind was still, Trinidad could make out a few words. Once she heard her grandmother say, “I know you are lonely.” And once, “You could kill us all.”

  But when the wind picked up, Trinidad was not sure if she had merely imagined those things.

  One morning Trinidad followed Auring, who was carrying a bundle of rice and chicken wrapped in banana leaves, down the musty stairs. The air was moldy, damp and thick, but through this dull odor cut the acrid scent of urine—not cat piss, or rats; the smell was a distinctly human one. There was the door with the grating, as Miguel had said. There was the key on the nail. Auring, whispering softly, held the package up to the grating. Trinidad did not breathe. She watched in silence. A slender, white hand reached through the darkness, like a pale shoot pushing through soil. The nails were long and yellow. The hand took the small green package and slipped back into the mystery behind the door.

  “Auring, who is that?”

  Auring turned quickly, her hand held tight to her heart. “You will kill me,” she said.

  “Who is that?”

  “Your grandmother will be angry.”

  “Only if I tell her.”

  It is a sad story. This woman in the basement is Trinidad’s aunt. She killed a man, slit his throat with a kitchen knife. Mrs. Garcia hid her in the basement. She told the police that her daughter had escaped. This was in 1930. Since then, she has not left the basement.

  The woman is mad.

  Auring unwrapped the white handkerchief that was on her wrist for a bandage. There was a dark brown stain on the inside of the cloth. This was Auring’s blood. Trinidad remembered the suspicious scarf that her grandmother had started wearing.

  “She scratched me,” Auring said.

  Trinidad looked at the scratch. It was deep with ragged edges. The scab had dried in yellow, crystal-like crusts. Auring’s skin was thin, like onionskin Bible paper. Her veins were blue and prominent. Liver spots covered her arms in purples and pinks.

  “Aren’t you scared to feed her?”

  “What is a scratch?” Auring said. “One day she will escape and kill us all, if the Japanese don’t get us first.”

  “What is her name?”

  Auring seemed surprised at the question. Perhaps because it was so predictable.

  “Her name is Trinidad.”

  Shori thinks this village is hell on earth. It is only ten miles from Cabanatuan, the POW camp for American soldiers, which makes the natives surly. They know what goes on in the camp, and this constant proximity to cruelty and death has made them callous. He has the worst servants in the world. Their Japanese is terrible, and Shori, unlike some other officers, has learned no Tagalog. They are impervious to threats. Occasionally, he remembers that in Japan he had no servants and wasn’t much more than a civil servant himself. Last time this thought entered his head, he beat the maid about her head with a shoe. She did not seem to care. She thought he was going to kill her. When he didn’t, she looked down on him. But he did not kill her then. He would not do that for her, because her thoughts were of no consequence. Today he would beat her, because that was his whim. Tomorrow, he might decapitate her. He stands on the small balcony that extends out from his bedroom and looks over the street. He cannot sleep in this infernal heat. Some officers have the servants fan them during their nap, but Shori knows this is asking for a bolo in the gullet. He watches his maid go through the gate. What can she be up to? Shori yells to her.

  She bows her head there in the street. She does this reflexively, so that she is bowing to no one, just bowing to the road in the direction of the town square. A thin, dirty dog hobbles by.

  “Where are you going?” shouts Shori.

  “To my sister’s, sir,” she says, addressing the dirt.

  Shori remembers that he has given her permission to do this.

  “You must tell me everything that is said.”

  Shori realizes what he has ordered. Will she tell him of whatever it is that women discuss? Will she tell him about babies? About dresses? About shampoo?

  “I know that your sister is a guerrilla sympathizer!” he shouts after her.

  The maid bows in the street again. She thinks that her fate and the fate of the whole village rest in the hands of this halfwit. Shori glares at her. How dare she think such thoughts. Luckily, he is too important to mind what she is thinking.

  Trinidad will have to work efficiently. She does not even know what kind of man this Shori is, or what exactly she will say to him. She wonders if what the American said—if every Filipino killed one Japanese, the war would be over—is true, since he was hallucinating and half dead anyway. And he didn’t kill any Japanese, but he sure as hell killed a whole houseful of Filipinos. All those Orosas dead. She remembered when the Japanese found out. They dragged the American into the street. The neighbors looked at each other’s faces—the eyes—to see who the collaborator was. That was the first time Trinidad saw Shori. That was the first time she saw the ring.

  The American begged Shori to let the Orosas go. He was so skinny, so close to the grave, it didn’t seem worth killing him. The children had been joking about the American all week. “How did he get through the fence at Cabanatuan? He walked.” Which was some local variation on the old “He’s so skinny that when it’s raining, he doesn’t even get wet.” They explained away the fact that he hadn’t been shot with the same clever joke.

  It wasn’t Shori’s sword that lopped off the American’s head. And Shori didn’t kill the Orosas, although he did order that they be taken away—all of them, even the baby. But Shori is in charge in this small town. Every man, woman, and child bows to him. Every horse, house, and field belongs to him. Every dog shits because Shori has wished it, every fly buzzes because Shori allows it. Trinidad knows all of this, just as she knows that today the house will be empty. But she needs to be patient.

  So much of war is waiting.

  This afternoon Mrs. Garcia is taking the bus with Jose to the neighboring town to visit her cousin Lourdes. She does this every Friday. Now that she has Trinidad to care for, keeping up the Friday trip gets harder and harder. But she is the only one who visits the old woman. Imagine. She herself an old woman, visiting another. All the men are gone. She’s lucky to have Jose around. He too would leave, crawl into the mountains, become a guerrilla, but he is too deformed to be of much use, even though he is clever. Jose is looking out the window. A group of Japanese soldiers are wading through a rice paddy, rifles r
eady. They flash by so quickly that Mrs. Garcia isn’t even sure she saw them.

  “Did you see that?” asks Jose.

  “Don’t let them see you looking.” She says this more as a constant reminder than in response to current danger.

  “An American must have escaped.”

  Mrs. Garcia did not want to leave Trinidad. She’s worried about the child, but this is the same reason she doesn’t want her on the bus. Who knows what she might say and who might hear it? When Trinidad first came to the province, she wouldn’t speak. Now she speaks all the time, crazy stuff. What do you expect? Intramuros had been emptied of everyone she knew, and there she was—little Trinidad, wandering around. No one knows where her parents are, or Miguel, or what happened to the house. Mrs. Garcia pushes a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand. She grimaces when she does this, as though dust has irritated her eyes. Yes, her stupid son probably was keeping a radio. All those years of law school down the drain.

  Shori hears banging on the metal gate. Will he never be able to take his nap? He peeks out of the door. He hears his houseboy’s voice. “Important that sir sleep.” But curiosity gets the better of him and he steps onto his balcony. There are two soldiers.

  “What brings you here?” asks Shori.

  “An American has escaped.”

  “Have you alerted the guard?” “Woken up” would be better. That fat ass sits in the pillbox all day. He should drink. That would be better than this nameless, compulsive sloth. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Shori has told the guard to keep the natives on their toes. The guard has interpreted this creatively. Shori has seen a woman creep into the pillbox. He has seen her creep out, her hands bulging with cigarettes. He wanted to say something, but was worried. That guard knows that Shori spends all day in his house. He probably senses that Shori just wants the war to be over, that he is thinking, If the Americans invade, I can go home. Shori must pluck out this ugly thought time and time again, as if it were a stubborn weed. Better not to stir the guard. Better to leave him sedated with food and aboriginal sex. How sympathetic everyone would be if they only knew how hard it is to govern.

  Trinidad pushes open the gate. She looks up and down the street. No one is about, except for a lame dog hobbling along. He stops to sniff at some garbage. Trinidad wonders why no one has eaten him yet. She slips through the gate, pulling it shut behind her. She is wearing her good patent leather shoes with the shiny buckles. Some sense of occasion has made her do this. She has plaited her hair; the right braid is perfect, but the left has ridged bumps rising out from the part. No matter. She has more important things to think about. The woman in the basement is angry; her moaning kept Trinidad up all night. But Trinidad’s mind is still clear. She walks quickly, not looking to the right or left. She would like to get there before people start waking up from their siestas.

  Mrs. Garcia massages her cousin’s legs. High blood pressure. Poor Lourdes. And she no longer has her medicine.

  “How does that feel?”

  “Good, of course,” says Lourdes.

  “This war is bad for all of us.”

  Lourdes laughs, sticking her tongue through the gap where her two front teeth once stood guard. She laughs, poking her tongue through this space, making a hissing sound. “War or no war, I am supposed to die. I am an old woman with a bad heart. No injustice there.”

  Mrs. Garcia’s eyes fill with tears, but she catches herself just in time. Her eyes are wells, but no tears fall.

  “What are you thinking of?” Lourdes asks.

  “Even without this war, you will die. I have no hope of keeping you around. I have already started to miss you.” Mrs. Garcia leans back to sit on the floor. She gives up her stoicism and lets the tears roll down her face.

  Lourdes starts to laugh again, in sympathy for her cousin. “At least I won’t have to live much longer under the Japanese.” She leans back in her rocker. “And to think, you’re just waiting for the Americans to return.”

  Mrs. Garcia looks at her cousin. She is right.

  “Why is it,” says Lourdes, “that every damned time one conqueror shoots at another, there’s some stupid Filipino standing in the middle?”

  Lourdes plants her crooked forefinger in the center of her forehead.

  This, finally, makes Mrs. Garcia laugh.

  • • •

  How can there be another person at the gate? And this time, Shori really was about to drift off. Dreams are the only escape from this place. Shori can hear the houseboy. It’s Tagalog. What business can a native have at his doorstep? Shori pulls himself up. He walks again to the balcony. Walking is like swimming in this heat. There is a girl at the gate.

  “Are you selling something?” asks Shori.

  The girl immediately bows her head. She is silent.

  “What does she want?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” says the houseboy. “She insists on seeing you. She says it is important.”

  “What do you want?” Shori asks.

  “American.” Trinidad is unaware of the lucky coincidence that day. Shori waves her inside. He was hoping that the American would surface in some other town. Who knows? Maybe this girl is lying.

  Jose is almost finished with the living room floor. Mrs. Aragon says that she is nearly blind and doesn’t care about the state of the floors anymore. But Mrs. Garcia insists. Every Friday Jose sets to working the red wax into the floorboards, polishing with the coconut husk beneath his foot. This takes him longer than most, but who else will do it? It is hot, but Mrs. Garcia is wearing a scarf. Earlier, when she thought Jose was not looking, she unwrapped it for Mrs. Aragon to see the deep scratches in her neck—five neatly spaced lines as though intended for music. And imagine. That little loca Trinidad asking him that morning what was up with the scarf. Why would her grandmother wear such a thing in this heat? Maybe she wasn’t faking. Maybe Trinidad really can’t remember. Jose picks a sliver of red wax from beneath his thumbnail. That would really be frightening, if she couldn’t remember.

  • • •

  Who would have known that in addition to the usual ills of the Japanese, this man was a pervert? It is Friday, and everyone knows that Mrs. Garcia takes the bus to visit her cousin Mrs. Aragon, that she takes Jose along with her, that the stately—although run-down—house, shaded by tamarind trees and hidden behind an imposing wall, is empty except for Trinidad. He does not know if he wants to be a part of this, even if he is just driving them there. He is just the kalesa driver, not the moral police. Diablo clops along at a steady rate with his head, as always, leaning to the left. It makes you think you’re headed in that direction, but no; Diablo’s head goes to the left, but his hoofs go straight. I am just a kalesa driver, he reminds himself. Then he sneaks a peek, pretending to check the sky for an improbable rain cloud. He processes his mental picture at leisure. Shori seems harassed. His hair is uncombed, which is unusual for him. The top button of his jacket is undone. Trinidad looks straight ahead. She is wearing her Sunday clothes. She seems very determined. What a serious little girl this Trinidad is. He wonders if what they say about her is true. Is she really demented? She must be. Why else would she be taking Shori to her house? But wait.

  “Americano?” asks Shori, doubting and threatening at the same time. He pulls at the collar of his shirt.

  “Americano,” replies Trinidad with a solemn nod.

  Is there an escaped American in the Garcia house?

  Trinidad sees the ring glinting on Shori’s finger. This has been much easier than she imagined. She did not know that an American had escaped from the camp. She was going to tell Shori’s houseboy that the American was a guerrilla sneaking out of the mountains, that he was injured and needed a place to stay for a few days. The houseboy could relay anything you needed to communicate to Shori, but Shori had come without any explaining on her part.

  Shori notices her eyeing the ring. He flexes his fingers in an effeminate way. This reminds Trinidad of a stretching cat. There is much of a cat about this
man. His whiskers sprout strangely from the sides of his face. His nose is small, upturned. His upper lip is soft and fleshy, plumping over the lower, and when he speaks she sees the tips of two triangular incisors extending down from the row of yellowed teeth. Not like a man at all, really. This morning Trinidad instructed Auring to leave the doorway to the basement stairs unlocked. Auring looked suspicious. No, more worried, but Auring will say nothing. Trinidad knows this with great certainty, although she is not sure why.

  Mrs. Garcia is cutting slices of bibingka for herself and for her cousin. Then she remembers Jose and cuts a piece for him, since it is his favorite sweet. Jose watches her cut the third piece out of the corner of his eye. Then. Then the knife falls to the floor. What has frightened her? Why are her eyes so wide with fright? Jose hurries to the kitchen, his crooked body swinging on its cruel axis. He feels the strain of speed pulling at his spine.

  “Ma’am. What is wrong?”

  She is shaking her head. She is pale as a ghost. He would like to hug her then, tell her not to worry. He would like to take her by the hand to sit her in a chair in the living room.