The world has lost all its standards.
She dabs, delicately, white foundation against a brown cheek, with a single hand. Careful, now. One must apply the product perfectly, else an imperfection will ruin the whole effect – any blemish is a mark against one’s public face.
She sits, straight-backed, prim, sternly facing herself in a faded grey mirror (spotless, but at least fifty years old) and mercilessly inspects her own face. Marina de Alcanta does not yet know if she will be going out. Her granddaughters are excited; they rave and babble happily about a day in the park – a new garden is to be unveiled today, full of many colourful exotic flowers – but Marina de Alcanta is not sure if she will go.
It does not do a lady credit to show too much excitement about such things. Restraint is the mark of class.
Her room is large, carpeted by a plain rug, dimly-lit; gold and wood furnishings decorate a king bed (half unused since Tito…many years ago) and Marina de Alcanta is applying makeup to the sonorous sound of a college band practicing outside, somewhere in the streets. They are playing a classical air, a slow ballad, and repeating a few bars, trying to stay in time…slower, slower…they begin again, at the regular speed, and it seems the conductor is satisfied, as they continue further into the stately, sad march, and Marina de Alcanta applies her makeup alone, inside her bedroom. She feels the music is apt, and it draws her heart right out of her, into the drawing room, and she mechanically continues patting her face with a single dainty hand as she feels her soul fly through the window and dance among the invisible imagined players. They are young, young men and women, fresh-faced and full of hope and nervous vigour; the music paints their faces and Marina feels a sense of deep loss; she feels as if she has been sitting at her table all her life, and feels as though her life is very long, all of two minutes long, two minutes ago she was an infant in her nurse’s arms and the family was still talking about going to ‘Spain the motherland’ – although they were by then gone – the deep tracks they’d trod remained. She is two minutes old; in two minutes she will die: life is very long. Not literally, of course-she is in good health-but…Life is very long. Marina de Alcanta, feeling herself lost in reverie, focuses again on the present.
Yesterday, her children were talking about something called the ‘Internet’ and saying that in the centre of the city it was possible to go to special ‘cafes’ to use it. For a fee, of course. They said they had exchanged letters with her sister in Australia instantly – without the need for a ship or plane or even a humble postman to deliver anything. It had all been done by the computer.
When she was a little girl, the country did not even really exist. The Americans had been here. They were always ‘setting up’, back then. ‘Setting up’ this and that – courts and banks and gaols and markets and squares with statues – and by the time they left in the forties Marina de Alcanta was twenty years old and she was married to Tito Hector Callos the enterprising young banker.
She attended a private school in Manila.
Her parents had hated the decision to marry Tito, but she – inspired by him and by the…atmosphere of the day, she supposed – had taken responsibility into her own hands.
She was lucky enough to speak Tagalog, Spanish, English; she and Tito went to America to pursue higher education. They returned in 1950, as after the Second World War the country seemed to be returning to normal. Their gamble paid off: Tito was able to find a position in a major bank earning over P500,000 a month, and they started a family of their own – moving, when it suited them, between their home in Manila and in the country.
As time passed, they spent less and less time in the country, however: social tensions forced them into some awkward situations. Marina remembered the discussions her uncles and cousins would have at dinner about the rise of the Communists in Vietnam and in China; some of the family seemed to sympathise with them, and when a sceptical uncle asked the more enthusiastic cousins how they’d fare without the family fortune he seemed on the verge of starting a terrible quarrel. Marina de Alcanta remembered feeling faint as she saw the looks on their faces, felt the tension in the room; and when Tito had pretended exhaustion arising from the journey from Manila, and pleaded departure, it took a great and sudden effort not to betray her relief.
They did not socialise with the family for several years, claiming work and the children kept them busy: in fact, Marina de Alcanta wanted to avoid talking to Joseph Alcibiade, her first cousin. He had been by far the most belligerent of her family concerning the social upheavals at their last gathering; and shortly after she and Tito had departed and returned to Manila, she had read a newspaper which claimed he’d been arrested for a few weeks for revolutionary activities, and Marina wanted nothing to do with him. Tito’s high position made them vulnerable enough. In a strong wind, the tallest trees were the first to be blown over.
Does she regret her attitude now?
Marina de Alcanta pauses, her hand now adjusting stray locks of hair that have fallen over a dark, perfumed, painted face.
After 1986…well, after 1986, everything had become a little more colourful.
There had been martial law. Marcos had tried to enforce discipline – it had been the right thing to do at the time. They had read the news, in American papers, about the horrors of Communism, so close by, in Asia, almost on their doorstep – the only thing to do was guard against it, protect the old standards. So she had thought, and had supported the way things were.
But supposing Joseph Alcibiade had been right?
It wasn’t a question of history. Things turned out how they did due to pure luck, due to God’s random interference; Marina knew that. What she didn’t know was who had been right in the first place.
It was undoubtedly true that discipline was required for individual success. Her long years of holding herself to a higher standard had proved it – Marina de Alcanta headed a large family, alone now, and she had remained unchanged all those years. To be a rock upon which others could build a church…it was first and foremost necessary to be a rock.
And how to cultivate discipline? She remembers her father telling her: “One should eat a little less than they want to eat, and should make their world a little bigger than they want to take on.”
And her mother, of course, had taught her the minutia: the rules of proper ladylike behaviour. Unflinchingly, unbendingly followed.
But her granddaughters now are like beech trees, and they are always playing about and bending in the wind, and they have long black hair they never tie up – they are free outlines, and they laugh.
Marina de Alcanta does not fully remember her childhood. She remembers the facts of it – the politics, the reasons she had done things, her family situation – but she has long since forgotten this sense of…so far as she could tell, frivolity, which she supposes must have been what others called innocence, which was so overabundant in her grandchildren.
Innocence and discipline do not, after all, mix. Innocence relaxes discipline, which requires an understanding of its basis to consistently function; and discipline tempers innocence, casting doubt on the child climbing the tree, striking fear into the heart of the little girl looking out the plane window…
She finishes applying the makeup, and sits still for a few moments. Light rain begins to fall outside. A slight breeze nudges the door ajar.
But there is a difference between personal discipline and totalitarian rule. One must cultivate virtue: it cannot be forced upon others. The individual situation must be accounted for, and virtue grown based on that.
And yet what was truly democratic about democracy? She remembered the Aristotelian critique: the most popular man is effectively the king, and the ballot box a demonstration of social power, not of suitability or even raw popularity. Only the most dishonest populists became powerful under a system that rewarded maximal attendance over every other metric. Marco had been right to do away with the system whereby those with no class, those in the wrong class, and those with no worthy claim to fame could become de facto kings.
And yet they had reformed in the eighties and her whole family had been much happier. Marina de Alcanta realised that she had been the only one who felt any misgivings about the new order of things. The “Mother of the Nation” was a demagogue, and a woman playing on religious fervour – to her detriment, in the eyes of the religious educated. Once one understood that her self-presentation as a secular Mother Mary was entirely intentional, the entire edifice and all its sincerity came crumbling down – she became another meaningless populist.
Everyone seemed to have lost their public standards, but Marina could accept that that was more a result of American imperialism than anything else. Of course, the Americans had not come back. But they had exported their technology everywhere, and Manila was connected to the rest of the world now in some kind of pernicious digital noose; the children she saw in the city wore American fashion and spoke like Americans and wanted to be Americans.
It was ridiculous – politics were supposed to entail a pendulum between discipline and liberality. Now, all possibility of discipline had been destroyed forever: there was no system of education separate from that of the American panopticon. There was no chance of regaining what had been lost. Which brought Marina back to the question she, with all her learning, had been trying to avoid looking in the eye:
Was she right to have supported the autocrat Marcos?
She had understood very well that he had been in it for himself, of course. This was an accepted rule of autocratic governments. The trade-off was that if his rule were as intolerable as everyone said it was, he ought to have been ushered off the stage – the system was designed to allow him to be replaced. It was not designed to have to be replaced in its entirety, nor was it, like democracy, designed and intended to welcome bad actors into perpetuity.
The economy had worsened. Tito had lost his job and died soon after of a cancer in the prostate. And, perhaps blinded by grief, fear, and discipline – or stubbornness? Marina had continued to support Marcos.
Of course things under him had been bad. But look at where they are now.
Now…
She looks at everything in the modern world and can find nothing to please her; nothing as in the old days, nothing pure and uncorrupted, and Marina de Alcanta purses tired riverbed lips in a weary frown.
Discipline may be an excuse for stubbornness, and may be the reason people cannot change. How to counteract it? No new experience can wash away a learned habit. No secular experience, in any case. It must be coincidental, transcendental, or it must be a reorientation of everything. Marina is too old to go looking for such things.
She thinks about a dance she loved as a child and practised often. It is a slow Spanish dance, and as she reflects on it, the youth orchestra outside play that same air again – and it is so similar to the dance she remembers that Marina de Alcanta’s recollections and doubts are swept away; the old Philippine woman recalls her tiny white shoes, the hardwood floor of the performance hall; she remembers tripping and eventually never tripping again; the piano player with the tiny moustache and the trim penguin-monochrome suit, and the orchestra a shining semicircle, like the Northern lights in silver and gold; she recalls the audience unmoving and mostly unmoved; the shadows of birds singing along with the flutes in the window; the face of her father, approving and stern in the audience, his face always perfectly shaven and her mother, so much younger…made up, still-faced, her eyes twinkling with a tiny, lovely light. Marina de Alcanta smiles as she finishes applying her makeup, and stands up from her table. She is two minutes old: in two minutes she will die.
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