The Sympathizer (40 page)

This was also the only scene I had not seen filmed. The Auteur used no music, the agony unreeling with only Mai’s screams and protests, underscored by the VC quartet’s laughing, cursing, and jeering. The lack of music only made more audible the audience’s sudden silence, and mothers who had not bothered to turn away their children’s faces from the gutting, shooting, hacking, and decapitation now clapped their hands over the eyes of their babes. Long shots from the cave’s darkened corners depicted a human octopus writhing at the cave’s center, the naked Mai struggling under the backs and limbs of her half-naked rapists. While we saw glimpses of her naked body, most of it was obscured by the strategically placed legs, arms, and buttocks of the VC, with the flesh tones, the scarlet blood, and their tattered black-and-brown clothing rendered in a painterly Renaissance shading that recalled for me faint memories of an art history class. Alternating with these long shots were extreme close-ups of Mai’s battered face with its howling mouth and bloody nose, one eye so swollen it had closed completely. The most extended shot of the movie was devoted to this face filling the entire screen, her open eye wheeling in its socket, blood sputtering on her lips as she screamed

Mamamamamamamamamamamamamamamama!

I cringed, and when finally the movie cut to the reverse shot and we saw these red-skinned demons as seen from Mai’s eye, faces flushed from home-brewed rice wine, bared teeth crusty with lichen, squinty eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy, the only possible feeling burning in one’s gut was the desire for their utter extinction. This was what the Auteur provided next, in the gruesome finale of hand-to-hand combat, which could also double as a medical school training film in anatomical dissection.

By the movie’s last shot, of innocent Danny Boy sitting in the open doorway of a Huey helicopter ascending slowly into the clear blue heavens, weeping as he gazed over his war-ravaged homeland, destined for a country where women’s breasts produced not just milk but milkshakes—or so the GIs told him—I had to admit to the Auteur’s talent, the way one might admire the technical genius of a master gunsmith. He had hammered into existence a thing of beauty and horror, exhilirating for some and deadly for others, a creation whose purpose was destruction. As the credits began rolling, I felt touched by shame for having contributed to this dark work, but also pride in the contributions of my extras. Faced with ungraceful roles, they had comported themselves with as much grace as possible. There were the four veterans who played
VC RAPIST #1
,
VC RAPIST #2
,
VC RAPIST #3
, and
VC RAPIST #4
, as well as the others who had made their screen debuts as
DESPERATE VILLAGER
,
DEAD GIRL
,
LAME BOY
,
CORRUPT OFFICER
,
PRETTY NURSE
,
BLIND BEGGAR
,
SAD REFUGEE
,
ANGRY CLERK
,
WEEPING WIDOW, IDEALISTIC STUDENT, GENTLE WHORE
, and
CRAZY GUY IN WHOREHOUSE
. But I did not take pride in just my own. There were also all those colleagues who dedicated themselves behind the scenes, like Harry. This artist was sure to score an Oscar nomination for his fanatically detailed sets, his valuable work unmarred even by the minor incident involving his hiring of a local fixer to furnish actual corpses from a nearby graveyard for the finale. To the gendarmes who came to arrest him, he said, with genuine contriteness, I didn’t think it was illegal, officers. All was reconciled with the speedy return of the corpses to their graves and a substantial donation by the Auteur to the policemen’s benevolent association, otherwise known as the local brothel. I grimaced at seeing Violet’s name as assistant producer, but conceded that she had a right to come before me in the hierarchy of credits. I recalled fondly the unending sustenance supplied by the artisans of craft services, the dedicated care of the first aid team, and the efficient daily transportation provided by the drivers, although, to be frank, my services were more specialized than any of those. I do admit that perhaps my bicultural, bilingual skills were not as unique as those of the trainer who taught various tricks and commands to the adorable mutt playing the adopted native pet of the Green Berets, credited as
SMITTY THE DOG
, or the exotic animal handler who flew in on a DC-3 charter with a surly Bengal tiger in a cage—
LILY
—and who ensured the docility of the elephants,
ABBOTT
and
COSTELLO
. But while I admired the cheerful, prompt work of the laundresses—
DELIA, MARYBELLE, CORAZON
, and so on—did they merit appearing before me? The names of the laundresses continued their upward scroll, and it was only with the acknowledgments of the mayor, the councilmen, the head of the tourist bureau, the Philippine armed forces, and First Lady Imelda Marcos and President Ferdinand Marcos that I realized my name was never coming at all.

By the time the sound track and film stock credits had passed, my grudging acknowledgment of the Auteur had evaporated, replaced by boiling murderous rage. Failing to do away with me in real life, he had succeeded in murdering me in fiction, obliterating me utterly in a way that I was becoming more and more acquainted with. I was still steaming as we left the theater, my emotions hotter than the temperate night. What did you think? I asked Bon, silent as usual after a movie. He smoked his cigarette and waved for a taxi. Well, what did you think? He finally looked at me, his gaze a mix of pity and disappointment. You were going to make sure we came off well, he said. But we weren’t even human. A rattling taxi pulled to the curb. Now you’re a movie critic? I said. Just my opinion, college boy, he said, climbing inside. What do I know? If it wasn’t for me, I said, slamming the door shut, there wouldn’t even be any roles at all for our people. We would just be target practice. He sighed and rolled his window down. All you did was give them an excuse, he said. Now white people can say, Look, we got yellow people in here. We don’t hate them. We love them. He spat out the window. You tried to play their game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

We spoke no more for the duration of the ride, and when we got to our hotel, he fell asleep almost right away. I lay in our darkened room with an ashtray on my chest, smoking and contemplating how I had failed at the one task both Man and the General could agree on, the subversion of the Movie and all it represented, namely our misrepresentation. I tried to fall asleep but could not, kept awake by the blare of horns and the unnerving sight of Sonny and the crapulent major lying on the ceiling above me, behaving as if they always passed their time thus. The monotonous squeaking of bed springs next door did not help, the squeaking going on for such an absurdly long time that I felt sorry for what I assumed was the poor, silent woman enduring it all. When the male involved squawked his battle cry, I was relieved it was all over, although it wasn’t, for when that concluded, his partner uttered his own deep, protracted, appreciative masculine mating call. The surprises just would not end, not since the General and Madame came to see us off at the airport, he in a herringbone suit and she in a lilac ao dai. He had presented us four heroes with a bottle of whiskey each, taken a picture with us, and shook each of our hands before we passed through the ticket gate, myself coming last. With me, however, he held on and said, Just a word, Captain.

I stepped aside to let the other passengers board. Yes, sir? You know Madame and I look on you as our adopted son, said the General. I didn’t know that, sir. The look on his face and Madame’s was grim, but that was the same look my father usually gave me. How could you, then? said Madame. I was used to dissembling and I manufactured a look of surprise. How could I what? Try to seduce our daughter, the General said. Everyone’s talking about it, said Madame. Everyone? I said. The rumors, the General said. I should have seen it when you spoke with her at the wedding, but no. It never occurred to me that you would encourage my daughter in her nightclub pursuits. Not only this, Madame added, but the two of you made a spectacle out of yourselves at the nightclub. Everyone saw it. The General sighed. That you would attempt to defile her, he said, was something I could hardly believe. Not after you lived in my house and treated her as a child and a sister. A sister, Madame emphasized. I am sorely disappointed in you, said the General. I wanted you here by my side. I would never have let you go except for this.

Sir—

You should have known better, Captain. You are a soldier. Everything and everyone belongs in his proper place. How could you ever believe we would allow our daughter to be with someone of your kind?

My kind? I said. What do you mean by my kind?

Oh, Captain, said the General. You are a fine young man, but you are also, in case you have not noticed, a bastard. They waited for me to say something, but the General had stuffed the one word in my mouth that could silence me. Seeing that I had nothing to say, they shook their heads in anger, sorrow, and recrimination, leaving me at the gate with my bottle of whiskey. I wanted to crack it open then and there, for the whiskey might have helped me spit that word out. It was stuck in my throat and had the taste of a woolen sock sodden with our homeland’s rich mud, the kind of meal I had forgotten was reserved for those who ranked among the meanest.

We arose before the sun to a dark morning. After a breakfast where no one uttered more than a grunt, Claude drove from Bangkok to the camp, a day’s journey that ended near the border with Laos. By the time he swerved onto an unpaved side road and into a white-barked cajeput forest, dodging craters and dips, the sun was rolling on its downward slope behind us. A kilometer into the twilight forest we reached a military checkpoint consisting of a jeep and two young soldiers in olive-green battle dress, each with a protective amulet of the Buddha around his neck and an M16 in his lap. I smelled the unmistakable funk of marijuana. Without bothering either to rise from the jeep or to raise their half-lidded eyes, the soldiers waved us through. We continued on the rutted road, plunging even deeper into a forest where the skeletal hands of tall trees with their thin branches loomed over us, until we emerged into a clearing of small, square huts on stilts, the scene saved from total rusticity by the electric light illuminating the windows. Wigs of palm leaves thatched the roofs, and wooden planks led from elevated doors to the earth. Barking dogs had brought shadows to the mouths of the doorways, and by the time we clambered out a squad of those shadows was approaching. There they are, said Claude. The last men standing of the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam.

Perhaps the pictures of them that I had seen in the General’s office were taken in better times, but those stern freedom fighters bore little resemblance to these haggard irregulars. In the pictures, those clean-shaven men with red scarves cinched around their necks had been clad in jungle camouflage, combat boots, and berets, standing at attention under the forest’s filtered sunlight. But instead of boots and camouflage, these men wore rubber sandals with black blouses and pants. Instead of red scarves, the Rangers’ legendary emblem, they wore the checkered scarves of peasants. Instead of berets, they wore wide-brimmed bushwacker hats. Instead of clean cheeks, they were unshaven, their hair matted and untrimmed. Their eyes, once hot and bright, were dull as coal. Each carried an AK-47 with its distinctive banana clip, and the presence of this icon, combined with all the other features, led to an unusual visual effect.

Why do they look like Viet Cong? said the grizzled captain.

It was not only the guerrillas who resembled their old enemies, as we discovered when a dozen of them led us to the hut of their commander. On this hut’s thin lip of a porch stood a slim man backlit by a bare electric lightbulb. Isn’t that— said Bon, before stopping at asking the absurd. Everybody says so, said Claude. The admiral raised his hand in greeting and smiled a familiar, avuncular smile. His face was angular, gaunt, and almost handsome, the classic noble visage of a scholar or mandarin. The hair was gray but not white, thinning a little on top, and trimmed short. A goatee was his most distinctive feature, a neatly sculpted affair for the man of middle age, rather than the scraggle of youth or the long, flowing tuft of the elder. Welcome, men, the admiral said, and even in the gentle intonation of his voice I heard echoes of the newsreel on which Ho Chi Minh’s cultivated and calm voice was recorded. You have traveled a great distance, and you must be tired. Please, come in and join me.

Like Ho Chi Minh, the admiral referred to himself as uncle. Like Ho Chi Minh, he also dressed with simplicity, his black blouse and pants matching the garb of his guerrillas. And, like Ho Chi Minh, he furnished his quarters in a sparse and scholarly fashion. We sat barefoot on reed mats in the hut’s one plain room, us newcomers uneasy in the presence of this uncanny look-alike. Our apparition must have slept on the plank floor, for there was no sign of a bed. Bamboo bookshelves lined one wall, and a simple bamboo desk and chair occupied another. Over the course of dinner, as we drank the General’s whiskey, the admiral quizzed us on our years in America and we quizzed him in turn on how he had come to be shipwrecked in the forest. He smiled and tapped his ashes into an ashtray made of half a coconut shell. On the last day of the war, I was in command of a transport ship full of marines, soldiers, policemen, and civilians rescued from the piers. I could have sailed to the Seventh Fleet, like many of my fellow captains. But the Americans had betrayed us before, and there was no hope of fighting again if I fled to them. The Americans were finished. Now that their white race had failed, they were leaving Asia to the yellow race. So I sailed toward Thailand. I had Thai friends and I knew the Thai would give us asylum. They had nowhere to go, unlike the Americans. The Thai would fight communism because it was pressing up against their border with Cambodia. Laos, too, was going to fall soon. You see, I was not interested in being saved, unlike so many of our countrymen. He paused here and smiled once more, and none of us needed to be reminded that we were some of those countrymen. God had already saved me, the admiral went on. I did not need to be saved by Americans. I swore on my ship in front of my men that we would continue our fight for months, years, even decades if necessary. If we looked at our struggle from God’s eyes, this was no time at all.