Body Count

Body Count was written in Manila in 1988.

It's the gym you want, not the health club with carpeted floor, gleaming stainless steel racks, junior executives of multinational corporations, wives of air force officers, guests at five-star hotels. The gym is a stretch of dusty ground on one side of Luneta Park and a shed where the rusty bars and weights are stored. It opens at five o'clock in the afternoon, when to get there you have to inch your way by jeepney through the streets full of workers packed in buses and trucks. That is when the shed is unlocked and the bars and weights hauled out, for them, men who work in factories and live in slums full of muggers and gangs and knives. And recruits from the barracks, with tough bodies and no schooling, from the rural areas, who will never be anything but soldiers without rank. Under the trees tangled in dusty vines the bars and weights are the antitropics. Rigidity and weight against the monsoon-sodden decay.

The young factory workers and soldiers lift barbells in the field. None of them has massive pecs, biceps, and thighs; their bodies are not packed but tough. Under their thin and hairless skin, they are turning their flesh into leather. They loiter a lot, between sets, the grins of satisfaction and comradery animating their faces as they contemplate their pumped muscles. Easy grins that include the Joe. If this were the health club, the walls would be lined with mirrors, justified by the need to refine

and modify the daily discipline so that mass develops proportion and delineation. The intellectual need not have feared exposing his scrawny frame to derisive glances of these rutting males; the glances do not notice his frame but only his eyes, more mirrors the young males put around their hardness, their heat, and their pleasure.

"I am sorry," one said with military courtesy, "I thought you were looking for me."

"No, just leaving."

"Going back to your hotel? The Hilton?"

"No. Doesn't the Hilton have its own Health Club?"

"I thought I saw you yesterday behind the Hilton. Somebody that looked like you. He said he would look for me here after my workout today. Many foreigners walk along the beach behind the Hilton."

"Do you work there?"

"My base is there, do you know it, the big marine base at the harbor?"

"No, I am staying at the Aloha, it's on the other end of the Bay."

"Come, I'll take you, I have a motorcycle."

The motorcycle, a model whose name and manufacturer had long flaked off in the rust, jabbed through the traffic. At the hotel he unhooked the chain he wore about his waist and padlocked the motorcycle to the grill at the corner of the parking lot. Then, as though as a matter of course, he came also into the building. The security guard came up before the elevator arrived, viewed the brutal cut of his features and the hard arms and chest under the sweat-soaked black T-shirt, and asked him something in Tagalog.

"I am a friend of this guest, who invited me to his room," he replied in English.

The security guard turned skeptically to the hotel guest. "I am sorry but it is a matter of security regulations."

The guest ordered, "Please send two beers up to my room, Room 635."

"One beer and one milk," the other corrected.

The once cream walls of the Aloha have not been painted or washed for dozens of monsoons, and the bedsheets have been washed hundreds or thousands of times, but the rooms have big windows that look out upon the Bay. He assessed the room, the books and the camera on the table, the locked suitcase next to it, as he slowly strode to the window. The sun had set and the sky was still smoldering over the glazed pollution of the Bay.

"Do you see that ship out there," he said, "the black one? It is the prison ship. Honasan is there. Yesterday I saluted him. My Colonel. I am a sergeant in the marines. It was my duty to be on guard in the ship."

"Honasan? Gregorio Honasan, the one they call the Gringo? The Colonel that led the two bloody coup attempts? The young Turk who wanted to overthrow Aquino before her elected Batasaan took office?"

"Honasan is pure." He pulled off his black T-shirt and moved up close and flexed his right arm. Around his throat there was a gold chain with a heavy crucifix. On top of his arm there was a tattoo, a red dagger in a black circle. "The Shield," he said. The Guard pledged in blood to Honasan.

There was a knock on the door. He quickly turned and sprawled on the bed and undid his belt buckle. It was the room service waiter, with the beer and the milk. The security guard was with him, and stepped into the room. The waiter took the signed bill and the ten-peso tip and both withdrew.

"Were you in the coup?"

He sat up from the bed and his face was hard. "Almost all of us in the officer's barracks at the harbor wear this tattoo. Honasan had assigned the assault on the television transmitting building to us. He worked out all the details himself, and we swore with our blood. But you know every coup, every coup in history, is always expected, there is always someone who knows when it will happen. They knew our loyalties; during the night they sent tanks to seal us in our barracks."

He got up and walked to the window. A few lights glinted on the tar-basin Bay. "They captured him six months ago; they do not dare kill him," he said. "The generals do not know what to do with us."

"Do the Filipinos support Honasan? Aquino had organized elections, a year after Marcos was overthrown. There were international observers, the people elected their candidates."

"The elections are the curse you put on us!" he said coldly. "There are five thousand islands in the Philippines, did your observers go there? On every island there is somebody who, when he speaks, children are born dead and people die of strange diseases."

"How can anything be done for the country, for the people in the rice paddies and the sugar plantations and the logging camps, if the system breaks down in violence that never stops?"

He spun around and strode to the table and picked up his milk. "There are five thousand islands in the Philippines," he said slowly, as though explaining to a child. "On each island there is one man who owns the port, controls the harbor. Nobody ships out rice or sugar or timber without his knowledge; nobody raises

rice or sugar or goes to cut timber when the rice fails without his permission. It is he who calls in the troops when they meet in the church at night and burn one of his warehouses. It is one of his sons that is elected to the Batasaan in Manila."

Without waiting for acquiescence he went to the toilet and closed the door. Below, under the street lights there were men shooting craps; on the other side of the boulevard the lights covered with mercury-vapor blankets men and women in vague embraces on the ground.

He came back toweling his face and chest. He untied his shoes.

"Were you born in Manila?"

He laughed. "Nobody is born in Manila. I come from Cantawan. It is in Negros Oriental. The sea is very beautiful there. Foreigners go there, to do scuba diving in the reefs."

"Was your father in the navy?"

"My father was a fisherman."

"How many are in your family?"

"I have six sisters and five brothers."

"Fishermen?"

"They work in the resort. You can't fish in the reef anymore; the government made the reef into a park for the scuba divers. My sister has a motorcycle too now," he said sourly.

"Is she in Manila?"

He turned and grinned. "Didn't you hear about the election in Danao City, in Negros Oriental? Ramon Durano is Congressman of the first district since 1941. He is sugar milling, mining, real estate, public utilities, dock services, printing and paper products. He is 83. Emerito Calderon his son-in-law represents the fifth district, his cousin Manuel Zosa the sixth, Calestino

Sybico Jr. and also his son-in-law represented the seventh. His wife Beatriz is mayor of Danao, his daughter Maria Luisa the Cebu delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Now despite the backing of old man Ramon, son Jesus Durano, fifty-one, running for governor is, according to the polls, heading for defeat. Jesus withdraws from the race. Ramon Durano himself takes his place. Another son, Ramonito Durano, takes the old man's place running for Congressman of the first district. Jesus reappears as the old man's running mate. The opposition candidate is Thaddeus Durano, Ramon Durano's son and Jesus Durano's brother. Who won? Halfway through the counting of the votes, Jesus Durano shoots Thaddeus Durano with an AK-47. They proclaim him governor without finishing the counting."

He roared with laughter. He swung about the room, the room booming with his laughter. He glared at the large mirror that hung on the wall and turned his flexed arms into it, then raised his arms over his head and contemplated the contours of his splayed chest. He took no notice of the other in the room. He pulled off his trousers and studied his mirrored thighs and calves. Then his legs and his fists clamped and he sprung back and forth, his black eyes watching the blows of his fists in the mirror bursting at him.

There was a knock on the door; he threw himself again on the bed. It was the waiter who had come to pick up the glasses and asked if he should bring up some more beer or milk. Behind him was the security guard, who looked at the hotel guest, who slowly closed the door on them.

"Will there be another coup? Ordered by Honasan from that ship? Are you . . .?"

He sat up and then lay back on the bed again, his arms folded behind his head. "No," he said. "The generals are constitutionalists. Do you know what happened that night when Marcos ordered them to march on Camp Crame—where Enrile and Ramos had mutinied in support of Aquino? The military attaché to the embassy spent the night on the telephone. He phoned every general in the army and air force, every admiral in the navy, one by one. They had been trained in Clark and Subic Bay, West Point and Annapolis. They had equipped their men with uniforms and arms supplied by the Pentagon. They are old men, with salaries of $ 450 a year and fine houses in Makati and bank accounts of millions of pesos. When Marcos ordered them to march their troops to Camp Crame, all but one obeyed the embassy."

"But Honasan will not obey the embassy. And you will obey Honasan?"

He was silent and shifted wearily on the bed. "After the coup failed Aquino gave the officers what Honasan had demanded," he said. "The officers were given amnesty for all court-martial cases of human rights violations. The salary of the men was tripled. It used to be a hundred pesos—eight U.S. dollars—a month. I send my mother in Cantawan some money every month."

He has had his motorcycle longer than that. Did he earn it on the beach behind the Hilton?

He closed his eyes and his body softened like that of a child. After a while he yawned and turned his head. "You have a very fine watch," he said. "What is it, a Seiko?"

"No, I bought it in Italy."

"How many pesos did it cost?"

"I don't remember. It was lire."

He sat up on the bed. "Are you a Catholic?" he asked.

"I don't know. I was born Catholic, baptized a Catholic. I guess you could say I am a Catholic. Like Filipinos are Catholics."

"Do you follow the Catholic teaching?"

"Maybe whether people are Catholics or Protestants or Moslems or Hindus they still know what is the honest way to live. Maybe the guerrillas of the New People's Army too."

"I am a Catholic," he said. He held up the gold crucifix on the chain about his throat. He dropped it again, and his hand fell upon his thigh and stirred. "Maybe I should not say I am a Catholic," he said wryly. "Maybe I do not follow the Catholic teaching." He looked up. "Today is Sunday, and before I went to the gym I studied the Bible."

"The marines hold Bible classes for officers? After the coup?"

"I go alone to a man from Cantawan who lives now in Tondo. You know Tondo? The Smokey Mountain? The mountain of garbage? He is not a priest but he can heal with his hands, heal open wounds running with corruption, he can make the weak strong. He can make people die five hundred miles away." His eyes indicated the heavy crucifix gleaming on the bronze mounds of his chest. "It is a very strong protection," he said. "It can stop the communist bullets."

"It is very beautiful."

"It is from Negros."

"Your father gave it to you when you left?"

"No, the man from my village gave it to me after I studied the Bible with him for six months. Gave it to me today."

"You are very strong. How long have you been working out in the gym?"

"The fishermen in Cantawan are all very strong. But they are not bodybuilders, they do not have mass and proportion and delineation. I have been working out for six months." He rose from the bed and went to the mirror. He drummed his fists on the flat wall of his stomach.

"When will you go back to your village?"

"Oh, I am only thirty, the Marines want me for another twenty years."

"Do you like it? Do you like being here, like Manila?"

He contemplated his lean abdomen in the mirror, then turned around to answer. "You can go anywhere. I get only three hundred pesos a month. You saw how old my motorcycle is." He bent over, the crucifix hung free from his heart. "You can take me when you want to see the coral reefs at Cantawan. I can protect you from the guerrillas. I have lots of bullets," he laughed. "You paid for them."

"It takes a lot of our bullets! I read in the newspaper that a Pentagon cost-accounting team reported that in the Philippines it takes thirty-seven thousand bullets to kill one guerrilla. We have to be rich to pay for your soldiers."

His bent torso hardened and he looked up with wide eyes. "The Pentagon accountants complain that we officers should lead hunt-and-kill squads like in El Salvador, that don't go out in the woods in the morning and come back by night." He looked long out the window. "You go to the resort at Cantawan to gape at the fish, and Jesus Durano sits in the Batasaan squirreling away your money. He skims off a handful to pay us to go shoot the guerrillas for him." He stepped

back and stood erect, chest thrust out. His eyes were glazed over, his voice ran on stumbling over itself.

"The CIA says that we only kill guerrillas when it becomes vengeance for our buddies. They inform the guerrillas of our movements, so that we can be ambushed." He was silent awhile. "They say we officers take the men out in the woods to shoot thirty-seven thousand bullets at the trees and then get back to camp before sunset."

"Maybe the guerrillas can't be killed with bullets. Like Honasan can't be killed with bullets. Maybe the guerrillas can't be stopped by the men elected to the Batasaan. Maybe we outsiders can do nothing. Maybe they are too numerous for thirty-seven million bullets. Maybe there are too many Filipinos even if there are five thousand islands. Or maybe they are numerous enough to do something. You and your five brothers and six sisters."

"We can do nothing." He glared and repeated, "We can do nothing." He lay spread-eagled on the bed. "The men in the Batasaan can do nothing," he murmured. "It is the Americans who own the resort in Cantawan, the Americans who buy the sugar and the mills, the Americans who write arms contracts with the generals."

He sprung up and stood in the dark corner of the room and looked out the window. The light from the street dimly outlined him. "One day we will have to fight the Americans." He did not turn around. "The American is very big, and I am very small. He makes a bigger target for my bullet than I make for his."

He lay on the bed. The telephone rang, it was a woman from a tour agency, offering a special price for car rental. You said you were not interested, and hung up. You realized he was asleep.