When the Elephants Dance (21 page)

After they left, Domingo appeared from the shadows. He refused at first to fall, staggering about until he collapsed a few feet from my tree. I have waited another hour, not daring to make a sound. The branches have torn my skirt, and my legs have gone numb. I feel as if the soldiers can hear every movement, from my stomach moaning to the sound of my breathing. My body is drenched in sweat.

New soldiers have come to relieve the first group. They watch with rifles slung across their backs. The captives still hang by their thumbs.

I was on my way home when I saw my brothers led to this field. I hid in these bushes to see if I could think of a plan to free them, but no plan ever came. I thank the Almighty for setting my brothers free. But I know it was not because of my prayers that they were saved. I think God is very angry with me. I have not been an obedient daughter. If I were, I would be home now.

I slowly inch my way down the tree. I let my legs drop first as I hang on to the branches, my body close to the trunk. The bark is rough edged and pulls at my shirt and scratches my thighs and face. The resin brushes against my skin and emits a fragrant aroma. I am terrified it can be smelled by the soldiers. There is no way out but to pass Domingo’s body. I take a deep breath. The twigs and branches crackle with each step. The sounds are thunder to my ears. The ground is dark with his blood. I move to step over him when his hand reaches up and grabs my ankle.

“Isabelle,” he gasps. “Help me.”

I almost scream. I try to shake his hand from my foot. “I—I cannot carry you. There is nothing I can do. I will get help,” I whisper.

“Bella, I will die.”

“No.” I pry his hand from my foot and fall back on my butt. His eyes will not let me look away; angry eyes filled with disappointment and accusation.
Selfish
, his eyes say to me. No different from the words my mother often uses. I look away from their glare. I step back into the shadow of trees. He cannot see me, but he knows that I am here. He has the ears of a predator; he watches the darkness surrounding me. He moans my name, asking for help. I put my hands over my ears and tell myself to go. I pity his wife and children. But I will not help him. How could I possibly carry him? The best that I can do is find help. His eyes focus in my direction, holding me captive with guilt.

“No,” I whisper fiercely.

He stops his moaning and listens.

I know I should feel compassion for him, but I don’t. He has brought this danger upon himself. He knows how I feel about guerrillas. They harm our people more, by bringing the wrath of the Japanese. Easy for them to perform their hit-and-run missions, while we, the civilians, must bear the repercussions.

The anger of his words cuts me. “Then go now. Go quickly, they will come soon.”

I scramble up and jump over his body. I run through the tall grass. My feet tangle and I fall through the ferns and land with my hands splayed out before me, skinning my knees. I can see the Japanese soldiers talking a hundred feet from us. They point in our direction. I look back at Domingo.

“Help me, or go. Do it quickly. You will get us killed with your indecision,” he orders.

I hate him. I hate him for making me feel guilty. What has he ever done but worry his wife and cast suspicion and danger upon our house? He is a guerrilla leader, yet for all the kindness my family has bestowed upon him, he risks our lives by hiding under our care. And now, now he is calling out my name like an imbecile.

I have a whole life ahead of me. As soon as this war is finished, I will be a doctor. Domingo has chosen this kind of life for himself. I have not. Yet even as my mind thinks this, my feet are running back to him. I pull his arm upward without thinking. Domingo grunts horribly and grits his teeth. He pulls himself to a standing position.

“Can you walk?” I ask.

“Go, I will walk.” His tongue sounds thick in his mouth. He leans on me heavily, and I push up to bear his weight. His feet are like pedals that will not
work. Shots are fired. Whether they are meant for us or for the other captives, I do not wait to find out. We hurry north toward home. We have many more kilometers to go, twenty-four kilometers, fifteen miles at least. We must pass through the city where the fighting is concentrated. We stick to the outskirts and keep moving.

W
E HAVE BEEN
hiding for several hours. We are just south of our hometown of Santa Maria in Bulacan province, maybe eight kilometers away. Yet our town seems hundreds of kilometers away. Domingo wishes to head farther northwest, toward his camp in the Zambales Mountains. Our clothing is damp from the evening downpours. We are cloaked behind a large grouping of ferns and climbing vines with purple flowers. It is not a very good hiding place, but Domingo cannot move any farther. He will die, I think. Twice now, Japanese patrols have marched by on their way south to Manila, and twice they have overlooked us. I fear our luck will soon come to an end.

Our beautiful city is burning. The scent of broken churches, charred flesh, and a fallen people carries like ashes in the wind. They are burning great fires, and the evening sky mingles with the heat and flames a blood red. A bad sign. This is the story at the end of the Bible. This is Judgment Day.

The ground shakes continuously from the sound of the Amerikano tanks. Overhead, the Amerikano planes buzz by, great birds swooping down with a vengeance. But who is winning? I cannot imagine the Amerikanos will win. How can they? They have lost once before, and how will they resupply themselves when their country is so far away? The Japanese need only jump north and they will be home. How I wish they would both go home.

“Isabelle,” Domingo whispers hoarsely, “leave me now. I will make contact with my men.”

His eyes are drained, void of their usual fire.

“Napápagod na ako,”
he says. I am weary.

I do not argue. I do not think he will make it through the night. “You will be all right here?” Such a stupid question. I beg him silently to tell me that he will. I look at him. He does not look so threatening now. But when he was in good health, and his eyes burned with that ferocity, he became something else. He has grown a beard, a full one, and his hair is long and wavy, touching his shoulders. Few people know that he is a senator’s illegitimate and unacknowledged child. His father is a Japanese sympathizer. My father is more of a father to him.

Domingo’s bleeding has stopped for now. He has deep cuts, one near his
hip, one on his thigh. A long gash starts below his right ear and continues winding to the nape.

“I am lucky,” he says, seeing my concern.

“I thought you were dying.”

“It only appeared that way. Because of the blood. It is not so bad. I have been in worse situations,” he tells me.

“What about the bullet?” I ask. “I saw them shoot you.”

“When they shot me, their aim was bad. I twisted and they only managed my shoulder.” He winces. “A flesh wound. Nothing more.”

I am still not convinced. He has lost a lot of blood. When I move him too quickly, the one on his left leg starts again. I have seen horrible things this day. I have seen babies; oh, I cannot describe it. Little babies, in a ditch, some of them half-alive, with their tiny fists reaching for absent mothers. Domingo saw them, too. We tried to save one who was still breathing, but when I picked it up, I realized it would soon be dead.

I watch as he presses his hand down on his shoulder wound. He glances up at me, his eyes drained. “I will manage. Make your own trail. Stay away from the roads.”

I look toward home. I wait for him to thank me, but already he has closed his eyes. I get up uncertainly and mumble, “Good-bye.”

“Thank you,” he breathes.

I hesitate.

“Go,” he orders.

I jump at his words and crash through the ferns. When I am a few meters away, I look back and see how flimsy a hiding place it is. If one looks closely, Domingo’s sandals can easily be made out. I keep moving. I remember what he has told me, and I cross to where the trees are thickest, away from the well-traveled roads, always careful not to make any noise. My eyes scan everything, the thick vegetation, the hanging vines as thick as my arms that entangle me from the shadows, the baby tree that my eyes mistake for a solitary soldier. I am dizzy from it all.

After an hour I come to a clearing, and with the help of the red moon I see a definite path. I hurry in the opposite direction. I come across a running stream. I fall down on my knees and throw water onto my face. I drink and drink; the taste of the water is so good. Something brushes against my leg, my schoolbag. In my bag is a tin cantina.

~

W
HEN
I
RETURN
, Domingo is clutching his knife. I have frightened him. He looks at me incredulous, angry.

“I found some water,” I explain.

He grabs the cantina. “Stupid girl,” he says.

I feel the anger rise in me at his words. “I could have—”

“Sit down before you give us away.” He studies me grudgingly. “Sleep, I will keep watch.”

I
WAKE WITH
my heart pounding; I look around, unsure of where I am. Domingo is sitting up, clutching his shoulder. His eyes are shut tight, and a look of pain covers his mouth. He has bandaged his wound with pieces of his trousers. I feel stupid for not thinking of it myself. I wait for his face to relax before I speak.

“Does it hurt much?” I ask.

“My men are waiting. You must leave, Bella.”

“Tell me where you are going and I will take you there. You cannot make it by yourself.”

“No, you must return home. Now.”

“I can’t,” I tell him. “It must be Father’s blood running in me. Whatever it is, I cannot leave an injured man behind.”

He looks at me for a long time. “Then we must go, now.”

We continue northwest, climbing gradually up the mountains until my home is just a small dot below.

Domingo’s neck has become infected. It has turned his skin into a patchy bright red. His cheeks fall inward, and he looks like a dead man who does not yet know he has died. We move slow as banana slugs. Domingo insists on walking on his own. It is amazing. He does it from pure willpower and the help of a thick branch he has found. We sleep for six hours in the safety of a hollow tree trunk, and at dawn we start again.

We stop to rest often, passing through thick trails in the forest, overgrown with ferns,
apitong, molave
trees, all competing for space. Rattan plants assault us with their long thorns. The great banana leaves bow down as we pass. They are sad, too. Lianas drape down as thick as my legs. Tiny
nik-nik
flies attack for blood. Now and then there are
waling-walings
, queen of the orchids, sprouting at the most unlikely places. I have to wave away the flying roaches that drop from the canopies and land on my hair.

We continue northwest, toward the foothills of Florida Blanca, below the
Zambales Mountains. He tells me we are searching for a cave. I point out various caves that I see or ledges that look as though they are the path to caves. But I already know that Domingo’s cave will not be anything like I imagined. I feel scared, and lonely, and proud somehow. And yes, stupid. Stupid for not going home when I had the chance. I think of my mother. What would she say right now? I can almost hear her.
Why did you wait so long to help him? Could you not see he needed your help?
She would not congratulate me for deciding to help. She would see only that I did not help sooner.
You are always so proud, Isabelle. You do not know everything. See what happens when I tell you to come home and you do not listen? See what happens when I tell you to be like me and you try to be yourself? When I tell you better to be a nurse, and do not reach so high and think you can be a doctor? You are wrong, Isabelle, always wrong. You do not know your own self. Look what has happened to you now. Do you even know where you are going?

I think of the things I said to her. I worry at the thoughts I have. At times I wish she were dead, but I don’t mean it at all. I guess what I wish is for all the fight she saves up for me to die. I wish I could be as close to her as Mica is to her mother. Mica’s mother plans things with her. She spends long moments in conversation with her.

I love Mama, but I cannot stand to be in the same room with her. She is always trying to smother me. She won’t let me do the things other girls my age get to do. Mama is always defeating my hope. Always stomping it out before it can even grow into a dream. Anything I begin to desire, I already know she will feel opposite about. And even though my father encourages everything that I do, Mama always finds a way to dissuade him and turn him against me.

Like the time that Papa said I could study abroad if I received good grades. Then, as the grades came each year, better and better, I know that Mama started to whisper in his ear like a little bird. She turned his support into fear, until Papa decided not to let me go. He said it was something he had thought hard on and had changed his mind about. But I know it was because Mama was the one who had thought long and hard. When she did this, I wanted to pull my hair out. I wanted to run outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and tell the neighbors what she had done, but I couldn’t even leave the house because she wouldn’t let me. “If you leave now, do not come back,” she said.

Mama responds to minor things in dramatic ways. I never want to be like her, such an actress. I strive to be like my father. He is always calm and happy. Mama worries about every little thing. She watches me closely, like a hawk circling for food. If I do anything out of the ordinary, she comes down to swoop
me away. She never lets me discover things on my own. Everything has to be done the way she was brought up.

For instance, I am not allowed to walk alone, I must have a chaperone. She has imaginary kidnappers waiting around every corner to pounce on me and take me away. When I tell her they wouldn’t want me because we are not rich, she simply grinds her teeth and tightens her jaw. I wish Mama would come around to the Western way of thinking.