I lived forever until 1941. You weren’t there yet. You didn’t see me back when I was still immortal. These bones that you kiss so fiercely, they were once supple arms and shapely legs. These shrunken eyes you lose yourself in, they once shone like the night sky. Every year they crowned me Elena, queen of the Santacruzan, the rose of Flores de Mayo. They threw petals at my feet and clothed me in gold. It was enough to turn anyone’s head, and of course it did mine.

That is how I can still stand before you, so proud and strong even though I wear rags and smile with teeth stained from chewing betel nut all day. I know I used to be beautiful. I was Reyna Elena four years in a row. The Japanese can never take that away from me.

 

~*~

 

In December the bombs fell like rain. Our town went up in fire and ash and we disappeared into the forests. We had a radio and the clothes on our backs, and we wandered among the balete trees like lost ghosts. News crackled in with the leaves under our feet. Pearl Harbor, the radio said. Batan Island. Camiguin.

“Invasion,” the men muttered among themselves. “They took down Pearl Harbor first so that the Pacific would be left defenseless, and then attacked our shores. Invasion, invasion…”

“The United States will triumph,” some insisted. “They saved us from the Spaniards. They will save us now.”

“They bought us from the Spaniards, you mean,” I heard my mother say under her breath as she carried my sleeping brother on her back. I glanced at her in surprise and she winked at me. A woman’s wink, a woman’s secrets.

We marched on, not knowing where to go. The day we learned that the Americans had withdrawn their Asiatic Fleet, our mayor suddenly changed course, angling his body in the direction of the mountains. We followed him hesitantly. We were from the lowlands, from cobblestone streets and sunbaked plazas—what did we know about heights, about wilderness?

But the mountains were surprisingly gentle. We walked into them and they swallowed us up, as if they had been waiting all along.

This was before you. I’d much rather talk about you. You are interesting, and you make me angry most of the time. When I’m with you, I don’t remember my mother dying, cursing my name in the haze of her delirium. I don’t remember the Japanese bayonet plunging into my father’s chest and I don’t remember running with my siblings, running away from our small makeshift village in the middle of the night, running straight into the arms of the resistance fighters. When I’m with you, I’m no longer a brittle glass jar filled only with the smoke of memory—I’m alive in my skin again.

 

~*~

 

This is how I meet you: I’m kneeling on the ground digging for ube, prying the mealy purple tubers loose from the soil, when you come crashing through the undergrowth. At first I think you are some ephemeral being from another world—your hair is pale and shaggy, almost reaching your shoulders, and your features are delicate and just this side of translucent, and as white as milk. But you’re wearing dirty khaki breeches and an equally dirty, short-sleeved undershirt, dog tags hanging from your neck.

American soldier, I realize. And one who looks like he has just come up for air after a lengthy imprisonment.

You stagger forward. You collapse into my arms, mud-streaked and blood-stained, smelling of gunpowder and sweat. You’re much taller than I am and you catch me by surprise—I almost topple over. Almost. But when my mother’s strength failed her, she passed it on to me, and I steady both of us.

You look at me through trembling, impossibly long lashes. “Angel?” you grate out, and in that moment I know you’re asking me if you’re dead.

“No,” I reply, English heavy on my tongue. “Not yet.”

I bring you back to camp, your lean arm slung around my shoulders, almost deadweight. The Huks are angry, at first.

“We send you out for yams and you bring us a Joe,” they grumble, but eventually they let me drag you into one of the nipa huts and tend to your wounds and bruises. You are an American, after all, and the year is 1942 and most of us still believe that General MacArthur will keep his promise to return. My siblings watch curiously as I wipe your burning forehead with a damp cloth soaked in water and crushed guava leaves, as I splash lambanog on the gashes in your skin to stave off infection.

“He came from Mount Samat,” my brother declares with confidence. “He escaped the Death March.”

He’s right, as it turns out. I sit by your side the whole night and you talk to me with your eyes closed, your body painfully still on top of the hand-woven bariw-leaf mat. You’re at death’s door, but still the words spill from your tongue, as if you think you can avoid the shadow through the mere act of speaking. You tell me about the surrender I heard of on the radio; you tell me about how the Japanese made you walk for miles without food and water, how your comrades dropped all around you like flies before you finally decided to just run for it, come what may. You doze off at some point near dawn, and in your sleep you whisper names, the names of your friends, the names of those who fell.

 

~*~

 

You wake up two days later, early in the morning. My sister’s cracking jokes in English, trying to amuse me with her imitation of an American accent. I snicker, but I finally send her off to draw water from the well and she pouts and leaves.

When we are alone, I glance in your direction and your eyes are open, staring at me.

“Hey, Joe,” I say, curious about what your reaction will be. Some of you laugh it off when we call you that; others frown in annoyance.

You do neither. Your brow creases, and, slowly, you say, “Your name is… Ate?”

You pronounce it uh-tay, and I try not to roll my eyes. “Ah-teh,” I correct, the e sharp at the end. “Ate. It means ‘older sister.’ So only my little siblings can call me that.” Actually, other people can, too, when they want to be polite, but I figure such nuances are beyond a foreigner who has just recovered from a gruesome ordeal.

“Where am I?” you ask.

“Hukbalahap camp.”

“Huk… balahap,” you repeat, testing the syllables on your tongue. “The Nation’s Army.”

“You’ve heard of them?”

“On the wireless. Guerilla fighters. We cheered for you, back on Mount Samat.”

“Them,” I correct. “Not me. My siblings and I are refugees. They took us in.”

But I cheered for you, too, is what I don’t say, as I spoon thin gruel into your mouth. For three months I prayed novenas and listened on the radio as you held the Orion-Bagac line. I think everyone in this camp wept the day the Voice of Freedom broadcast told us Bataan had fallen. What happened, Joe? I thought you were America the Invincible. I thought you could deliver us.

~*~

 

This is how we first fight: my brother’s zooming around the hut, recounting MacArthur’s prowess in battle. He’s speaking in Tagalog, but the name tumbles out every few sentences. MacArthur, MacArthur, MacArthur, enough for you to pick up on it, enough for you to be irritated by it—tight-assed, bedridden grouch that you are.

“MacArthur is not coming back,” you snap. “He is hiding in Australia. He will not return to this wasteland.”

My brother’s hands drop to his sides. A growl of rage escapes from my throat, and I hurriedly shoo my siblings out the door. And then I turn to face you, blood pounding in my ears.

“You can’t tell him that!” I yell. Wala kang karapatan, is what I want to say, you have no place, you have no right, but I don’t know the words in English.

“It is the truth,” you sternly insist, hauling yourself into a sitting position on the mat. You must have heard the men’s loud conversations outside, the hopes, the plans to welcome the general back, and it must have simmered in you, like water coming to a boil. “The sooner your people accept that, the sooner you can concentrate on fighting-”

“They fight because of it!” I retort. “It’s all they have. My brother can still smile because of it. How dare you take it away!”

You study me intently, and I realize for the first time how blue your eyes are, how glassy and bright. “Do you believe that he will come back?”

I gesture wildly to the world beyond the bamboo walls. “I believe that everyone out there believes. That’s enough.” It has to be.

You lie down again, your gaze drifting to the thatched ceiling. “Very well.”

 

~*~

 

“That Joe is creeping me out,” my sister declares as we gut fish for supper. “He’s so pale. As if there isn’t a single drop of blood in his body.”

My brother waves a palm leaf in the air, swatting away the buzzing flies. “Maybe he’s a tamawo.”

“Oooh.” My sister shudders.

“You’re both being ridiculous,” I say.

Mother used to tell us stories from the province where she grew up. The tamawo are beautiful tricksters, slender and white-skinned, their charming smiles luring you into the balete trees where their shadowy kingdom waits. Later, I sneak surreptitious glances at you, your skin like ivory in the moonlight, your hair like gold in the glow of the oil lamps, and I think that perhaps it’s not so far-fetched, after all. Otherworldly. Spirit of the forest, stealer of the dead. My ethereal wanderer, my fairy king.

 

~*~

 

Once you’re back on your feet, you argue with me all the time. I suppose it was too much to expect a little gratitude for saving your life. You accompany me when I forage in the woods, the basket slung over your arm as I gather yams and milk-fruit, preaching about how the camp’s facilities could be vastly improved. You hold my hand when we cross rivers, our feet slipping on the wet rocks and water darkening the hem of my saya, and we debate whether my country’s national hero should have been Bonifacio or Rizal. You turn your haughty nose up at my offerings of green mango and bagoong, and one time I end up flinging the plate’s contents at your face, one time I end up pushing you into the river, one time I end up smashing half a yam on top of your head.

“The two of you are so silly,” my sister quips, watching you stomp away picking bits of yam out of your fair hair. “It’s cariño brutal, isn’t it?” The violent kind of love.

“Shut up,” I say, my cheeks flushing.

But my sister has long since stopped automatically doing what I tell her to do. War has made her a little meaner than she used to be, and I can’t begrudge her that for it’s done the same to me as well. She shakes her head over the shirt that she’s mending. “You carrying on with an American. Our grandfather is turning in his grave.”

It stops my breath. It rises up my tongue like bile and stifles the air between us, that bitter history. Our grandfather had been a young man in 1901 when American troops marched across his home island of Samar in an attempt to subdue those rebelling against what the U.S. called its benevolent assimilation. They cut off supply lines to the towns, destroyed houses, and shot farm animals and every Filipino male over the age of ten. Grandfather had survived by pretending to be dead—by jumping into the freshly-dug pit just as the bullets started flying behind his back, by letting the bodies of his friends and relatives pile up on top of him there in the soft, damp earth, by crawling out of that mass grave once it was dark and the soldiers had moved on.

He only ever told that story once in his life—to his daughter, who in turn told it to her children. Who are left to grapple with the shape of it in the light of these new days.

“It’s not as though I’ve forgotten,” I say quietly.

My sister shrugs. “Maybe I’m making it personal when it shouldn’t be. It’s just odd to me how a nation’s memory works, that’s all. It wasn’t that long ago when the Americans were killing us, and now we’re pinning our hopes on them.”

My gaze returns to the basket of ube that I’m peeling. “It’s either the Americans or the Japanese, don’t you think?” I ask as my pocketknife makes quick work of severing skin from flesh.

“What a choice!” She tosses back her hair. It’s as dark as the night, flowing gracefully over one slim shoulder. “If I had it my way, I would pick us.”

~*~

 

The balete trees scare you; I can tell. Oh, how frantically you bat away the hanging roots that stroke your face, how suspiciously you frown at the dark hollows within the trunks! My brother’s stories don’t help, either. When the evening shadows curl into our nipa hut like a wash of spilled ink, he tells you about the aswang, who can change its shape and likes feasting on human hearts and livers; the manananggal, who is a long-haired woman, who leaves half her body behind and flies into the night on bat-like wings, dragging her torso along rooftops; the tikbalang, the horse-man, who can lead you astray if you’re not careful. All of these creatures, my brother says in his hushed and mischievous voice, lurk in the balete trees. This is a land of monsters.

And you clear your throat to disguise your whimper, and I smirk in the darkness and feel bad about it the next day.

 

~*~

 

You and I are listening to the radio when Corregidor surrenders, marking the end of the last stand. Rosary beads drip between my fingers and your knee bounces up and down. When I at last fall silent, when the broadcast fades into static, you remark, with a hint of surprise, “You pray in Spanish.”

“So?” Spain was first, little Joe. She came to us from across the sea and stayed for centuries. My grandparents grew up speaking Kastila and they had to learn English when the Amerikanos came. They died before they had to learn Nihongo.

You shrug. “You really believe in God?”

I scoff. “Have you heard me speak to God? I pray to Mary.” The Blessed Virgin is easier to talk to—she has a face, she has kind eyes. The Lord is too busy for us women, hija, my mother used to say, but Mary listens. She understands. She is mother to us all.

Mother, mother mine, my Nanay, who carried my brother on her back through the balete forests, who died from an infected wound when the bolo slipped in her hands as she hacked her way through the thick vines, who did not recognize me on her deathbed, who called me a witch, the Devil, Santanas, who I murmured Hail Mary over until she breathed her last. How often do I think about her now? Dios te salve, Maria, llena eres de gracia.

Deliver us.

 

~*~

 

The Huks decide you have to earn your keep. The Philippines has officially surrendered to Japan and Jose Laurel’s puppet government now sits in Malacañang—it’s guerilla warfare from here on out. The night before you go on your first raid, you ask me to cut your hair. I run my fingers through the silky locks and I do the best I can with a small knife, while you sit quietly with the world nothing but shadows and candlelight and the two of us. Somehow my hands soon become occupied with tracing the elegant lines of your face, scraping my rough palm against your chin, learning your strange texture through touch. My caresses begin to take on the rhythm of the candles as they throw our flickering silhouettes on the bamboo walls and you tense, sucking in a sharp breath.

“Stop that,” you say, grabbing my wrist, stilling my hand in mid-stroke. I expect you to release me right away but, instead, your thumb draws circles on the flesh of my inner wrist, feeling the veins there.

“You stop that,” I retort, raising an eyebrow.

You frown, and suddenly I can’t bear the thought of you marching off at dawn, rifle on your shoulder and heading straight into enemy territory. You move your hand down my forearm, cupping my bones with your long fingers, and I let you, I let you, I let you, until the candles burn low and what little light we have is nearly gone.

 

~*~

 

You return in the afternoon, and I am happy that you return although I will never admit it. But you’re angry; you stomp into the camp while my sister and I are winnowing rice, tossing around piles of uncooked grain in our baskets to remove the chaff, to remove weevils. You stalk into our hut, and, when I am done with my work, I follow. You’ve kicked off your boots and you’re sitting on your mat and leaning against the wall, glaring into space. You don’t even look up when my shadow blocks the light seeping in through the doorway.

“There was a… disagreement,” you mutter. “Over certain strategies.”

“And?” I prompt. When you don’t say anything, when you instead choose sullen silence, I crouch down in front of you so that we are level. I go on to chastise. “The Huks know this land better than you ever will. The Japanese have yet to wipe them out, while your people have long withdrawn. They know what works and what doesn’t.”

Your deepening frown suggests that I’ve hit too close to home. And how do I know that? How do I even have any idea about what happened? How is it possible that I can read every twitch, every line of your face?

Is this what it means to nurse someone back from the dead? To be the angel to the ghost? To have spent all those long days and sleepless hours in a place where it was only us and remembrance, where the trembling underneath your pale eyelids was language?

“And another thing,” you say, somehow managing to ruin a moment that you didn’t even know was going on inside my head, “they kept calling Sita he.” You’re referring to one of the women fighters, a gray-haired veteran who remembers Spanish ships sinking into the deep blue waters of Manila Bay. “He will attack from the left. Give him the gun. Things like that. It was odd.”

I stare at you. I breathe out the first flares of my temper, banishing them. “The Huks,” I tell you as slowly and as calmly as I’m capable of, “speak English around you because we think that’s polite. But in Tagalog we don’t have those words—‘he’ and ‘she’ is siya. ‘Him’ and ‘her’ is kanya. So when we use your language, we sometimes confuse the pronouns.”

Quietly, you turn this information over in your head, your eyes shifting like the tides. And then you ask, “You learned English in school?”

I nod. I am a child again, shaping unfamiliar vowels in my mouth, shakily writing strange words on the chalkboard. Dog. Apple. Sun.

What is an apple? my classmates and I asked, frowning at the strange picture in our American textbooks.

A kind of fruit, the teacher said.

And now we both belatedly realize that, in your unabashed interest, you have leaned in too close. The color returns to your face, the tops of your cheekbones slightly flushed—is that the red of apples? “I think I like your language better,” you say. “It’s fascinating.”

Just like that, I’m annoyed again. “Well, why don’t you start speaking it?” I snap, leaping to my feet. How like a Joe, to glorify the mundane, to marvel at something and then shake it off and get back to their lives.

~*~

 

But you surprise me by not shaking it off. You ask me for words in my father’s tongue and I offer them—grudgingly, at first, but I learn to love your earnestness and respond to it. You believe in things, my fair-haired Joe, and it’s hard not to get swept away by that.

“Damo, langit, ilog,” I say, pointing at each one. Grass, heaven, river.

“What’s ‘beautiful’?” you ask.

I laugh. It feels strange to laugh. My mouth is unaccustomed to the movement. “Maybe next lesson.”

Four times a week, you go off to war with the other men. Four times a week, you come back with bruises and the blood of the dead. But you remain unwounded and this scares me when it should have brought relief, because it’s like God is saving you for something.

I learn to listen for the sound of your footsteps. I learn to pray for your safe returns. My brother tells you ghost stories at night, and you shiver when the wind hums through the balete trees.

 

~*~

 

This is how you first kiss me: it’s monsoon season, and we are caught in the rain. As we run to the hut, you slip, fall face-first into the flooded rice paddies, and I laugh even as I try to help you up.

You pull me down with you, your hands smearing mud all over my bare arms, and you stifle my outraged shriek with your lips. You taste like rainwater and salt, and when we break away from each other I can swear by the Holy Trinity that the blue in your eyes is all I see.

“Maganda,” I say, the word almost drowned out by the howling wind and the torrential downpour. “Beautiful.”

 

~*~

 

This is how I lose my sister: the Japanese ambush our camp at the crack of dawn, but some of us manage to escape into the forest. However, once we slip through the wall of trees, I realize I’m no longer holding on to her hand.

I turn back, but you wrap an arm around my waist and use your other arm to pick my brother up, preventing us from running to her. I sob, I see her through the spaces between the tree trunks, struggling in the grip of the soldiers.

“Do it,” I beg you. “Do it, please.”

You look conflicted. “I might give away our position.”

“Maawa ka.” Have mercy, I say, because the year is 1943 and there is only one fate for young girls captured by the Japanese.

You let my brother go and he falls on his knees, burying his face in the soil so he won’t have to watch. But I am her Ate, her big sister, I once twined santan flowers into the loops of her hair. This, too, is memory, everything flashing before my eyes, and I watch because I owe her that much.

Your grip around me tightens as you unholster your pistol; you aim and you fire, and she slumps. Not a good death, but as good as we could make it for her, better than what she would have endured alive. The Japanese look around angrily, and we retreat deeper into the forest. Ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

 

~*~

 

Separated from the guerillas, we come to an abandoned shack in the middle of the wood. My brother curls up into a ball in the corner and whispers, “MacArthur’s not coming back, is he?”

Neither you nor I respond, and tears drip down his gaunt cheeks and his shoulders shake. It’s not the usual tantrum of a ten-year-old boy. This is how my brother grows up; this is how he learns not to cry, but to weep.

I am in a daze for what seems like forever, but in truth must have only been a few days. I don’t speak at all. I look at you blankly when you try to coax me into eating, when you try to coax me into another argument. Several nights after we killed her, you crawl under my blanket and cover me with kisses. You kiss my mouth, my neck, my wrists, the backs of my knees, your mouth soft, your fingers gentle as they trace the bones of my ribcage. It’s time to come back, your every touch seems to say. Come back to me now.

I come back. I have to. You leave me no choice. The waves pull me under, but you drag me to shore, you bring me crashing onto the sand.

 

~*~

 

One afternoon my brother leaves to search for food, and that’s when the Japanese burn down the forest. The world becomes an inferno and you and I manage to escape into the open fields, and we never see him again.

 

~*~

 

“Where do we go now?” you ask, your fingers tangled in my soot-stained hair. We’re watching from one of the high caves as the balete trees blaze red and black and gold, crumbling into nothingness.

I don’t miss the significance of this question. You’re deferring to me, because this land is my own and you are merely lost in its wilderness. Your people colonized, but never conquered.

And neither will the Japanese. And even Spain, who was the first, never got rid of the monsters, never stamped out the dialects or the old gods. They turned my ancestors’ anitos from deities to demons, but they never stopped being our demons.

“We walk,” I say. My mouth tastes like ash. “We walk until we can’t.”

My father and my brother and my sister, will you hold me up? I carry you all in my heart. My grandfather, I will remember you even if the nation forgets. My mother, my Nanay, will you come for me before the very end?

 

~*~

 

This is how I lose you: a mosquito sinks its barb into your flesh, and soon you are shaking and vomiting, the swamp fever turning your ivory skin gray. How strange and surreal it seems to me, as you crumple to the ground and don’t get up, because I always thought that God meant greater things for us. I always thought we would get a more glorious goodbye.

I sit down and gently rest your head on my lap, my hand wiping the cool sweat from your brow.

“Stay with me,” you murmur, and I don’t know if you speak to me or to the long-lost friends your fluttering eyes see past the veil of shadows. “Damo. Langit. Mahal.” Grass. Heaven. Beloved.

“Be brave,” I tell you, because that is the only thing I can say to a boy dying far away from his homeland.

And you are brave. You are, you are, you are. You reach for my hand and press a kiss to my knuckles, and I look into your blue, blue eyes until they close.

I leave you and I stumble on through the undergrowth. Finally, when it’s dark, I reach a clearing, another settlement, and my knees give way. People surround me, the torchlight wreathing their heads like the halos of all my saints.

“Kababayan,” they say. Countryman, comrade. “Rest. Rest now.”

Before I drift out of consciousness, I swear I see the Blessed Virgin, her face cast in darkness but her veil on fire, holding out her hands.

Hail Mary, full of grace.

 

~*~

 

The year is 1944 and MacArthur returns to the Philippines. The radio buzzes with the news as he and his troops wade ashore to Leyte. All around me, people are shouting, are embracing, are weeping. We will be free from the Japanese, they cry. At last, at long last. And I am left to stand quiet and still amidst all the happiness, wondering what we will become, wondering what else is there to be taken away.

Someone asks me why I remain unmoved. I say, “I don’t owe the Americans any favors.”

Except you. Only you, my lovely, lonely Joe.

 

~*~

 

I like to believe that you really were an elf king, that the roots grew over your bones and the trees welcomed you home. I like to believe that you went into your shadow kingdom gladly and spoke in tongues of fire and earth and salt, that your skin is still porcelain and your eyes are stars.

I like to believe that, sometimes, you think of me.