Insurrecto by Gina Apostol

Author:Gina Apostol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2018-09-18T19:56:24+00:00

26.

Padre Donato Feels the Heat

Padre Donato, who rarely sweats in his soutane, feels the heat in a way he has never done before. He has always welcomed the days of the habagat. When he was a boy, the gales released him from summer’s suffocations and the boredoms of Lent (a deathless monotony that turned the weak-willed against God)—he’d lie in wait for the cool winds, oddly welcoming, unlike the June monsoons. The habagat, westerly winds that gently ruffle the seas now graze the lady’s petticoats. The gusts reveal the sea-gray lace billowing under Cassandra’s skirts. The gangrened soldiers ogle the skirts, the womanly sight freeing, for the moment, clouds of pent desire hanging over the americanos of Balangiga.

Even the priest pities them, these smelly Gullivers with their devouring eyes.

It is clear from the close-up of Captain Connell that he is completely aware of the lady’s windy disarray, but Cassandra passes him by after the exchange with the padre and cuts him from her vision, just like that.

As she passes, the captain stares at the river, at the ripples scalloping the surface against the low-tide mud. He notes a tadpole, or is it a sea slug, that vile tripang, trying to make an impression in the slime, a quick, wriggling shape just barely visible, bubbling up then burrowing away from sight. A plop, a nonentity. He feels an obstruction in his throat and tries to clear it.

At the strangled sound coming from the americano, the priest assumes a pose of gravity. The priest spits in solidarity with the captain’s gurgling, as if his thoughtful saliva were settling a theological quibble beginning in the captain’s throat and his meditative spit were thus giving the pair summative consequence in the awkward moment before the lady.

In this scenario, a lady clearly holds some aces.

The captain does not stir. This filthy islander habit of public expelling, no matter how holy, disgusts Connell, and the priest’s salvo hits a spot on the captain’s well-shined shoes. But Connell is hoarding the phlegm in his own throat. Bouts of acid reflux have been troubling him ever since he and his men hit the island—since August 11, to be exact. He keeps his thoughts and phlegm to himself as he stares at the bubbles in the mud.

The captain is a meticulous diarist, and he will later note even the saliva, the stain on his leather boot, the furtive pests in the mud. When his notebook is recovered, miraculously untainted by the copious squibs of movie-ish blood, the effect of his minute descriptions is destabilizing, the way reality seems, in retrospect, not really credible.

Cassandra gestures to the porters, and they proceed to her adoptive home, a grass-hut shelter owned by the family Nacionales out in the forest beyond the farms. Cassandra, a literary woman, like many of her home-schooled class, considers it a symbolical name, Nacionales, worthy of the country’s noble hopes.

Cassandra’s romantic imagination, fired by Tennyson, “Lochinvar,” and George Gordon, Lord Byron, especially his death by revolution though not

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