When the Elephants Dance

Given his paramilitary background, Domingo leads the search party. He forges an uneasy alliance with Feliciano because, in order to find his son, he needs the Makapili’s knowledge of the locations of any Japanese camps. Although he cannot forget Nina and his life in the hills, he wants to be a part of his son’s life, unlike the tense relationship with his own father. Domingo recalls how he was a bastard, the unwanted product of an affair between his father, a Spanish barrister, and a local servant girl, and how he was given up to foster care. Domingo and Feliciano walk for miles until they spot their friends, all but Carlito, badly beaten and barely alive, in one of the Japanese encampments. Feliciano proposes a bold plan—he will lead Domingo into the camp at gunpoint and claim he has apprehended the notorious guerilla leader. Domingo goes along with the plan although he still does not entirely trust Feliciano.

The Japanese fall for the ruse. Feliciano opens fire and kills six soldiers. In the ensuing chaos, Domingo leads his son, Alejandro, and Roman to freedom. They return to the safety of the cellar, but that safety is short-lived. Japanese soldiers burst in and arrest everyone for harboring Domingo. They are led outside and join a long line of arrested Filipinos, a “caravan of walking skeletons” (229). They begin what turns into a grueling march in the torrid sun to Manila, more than two miles away. Overhead American planes relentlessly carpet bomb the city signaling the beginning of the push to take the capital. The captured Filipinos are taken to a large warehouse where they join hundreds of other terrified detainees stinking of dysentery and sweat. Domingo is determined to escape to the hills. Domingo’s wife, the long-suffering Lorna, begs her husband to stay with his family.

One of the neighbors from the cellar understands Domingo’s conflict and shares with him a story. The man had been born with magic powers, able to see specters, ghosts, witches, and vampires, what he terms “the twilight people.” As he matured, villagers, terrified by visitations from dead relatives, called on him to free their homes of these restless spirits. His gift brought him in conflict with Diagos, a huge horse-like creature who lived deep in the jungle and ruled over the spirits. He needed Diagos’ assistance to help a dying child, his cousin. In return for Diagos’ help, however, the man must agree to acquire as much land as he could from his friends and family to appease the creature. The family became wealthy but were widely despised. Over time, the man slowly lost his magical powers. His own sister died as he was powerless to intervene. For Domingo, the story’s lesson is clear: loyalty to the family first. The neighbor cautions him: “Leave this obsession to be a guerilla” (265).

The detainees are stunned when a bloodied Carlito is brought into the warehouse. He tells a harrowing tale of his arrest and how he killed a Japanese soldier who threatened to sodomize him. The friends and family admire his will to survive. Inspired by Carlito’s narrative, Tay Fredrico, a wealthy, elderly Spaniard, shares a story of colonial Philippines from decades earlier.

As a young man of wealth, Fredrico was a promising artist. On his 18th birthday, he and his friends ventured to the poorest Filipino neighborhood to visit a notorious brothel. Fredrico was strangely moved by his experience with the local women, sensing for the first time the implications of being born a Filipino (his mother was a native). He has long pretended to be Spanish. On an errand for paint supplies, Fredrico encountered a beautiful Filipina named Maricel. He was infatuated with her almond eyes, her olive skin, her lustrous hair. He yearned to paint her. As the sittings began, his family objected to his relationship with the peasant girl. Fredrico and Maricel, they argue, came from two different worlds: his a life of culture and privilege, hers of backbreaking labor and poverty.

When Maricel’s brother was arrested by Spanish authorities on the suspicion of being part of an insurrectionist plot against the Spanish, Fredrico intervened. He went to the prison to secure the man’s release by claiming the brother was one of his servants. Fredrico then learned of the brother’s alliance with a paramilitary group plotting to burn down the local Catholic church because of the friars’ complicity with the Spanish. When the church was torched, Fredrico can no longer see Maricel. Desolate, he went into isolation and painted portrait after portrait of her. He felt his soul had been freed. He painted bold canvases that captured life in the village as well as the lush beauty of the jungle itself, but he lost Maricel. Church authorities charged her with witchcraft and threw her off a cliff into the sea.

For Domingo the story justifies his decision to abandon his family in the warehouse and return to his compatriots in the hills. With the help of several guerillas, among them Nina, who were already working to free the captives, Domingo escapes and returns to the hills. Along the way he meets up with an American detachment closing in on the Japanese in Manila. They want Domingo to join them, but Domingo refuses. The Americans gift the guerillas with weapons, but Domingo still resists swearing allegiance to what he sees as just a different form of oppression.

That night, Domingo and Nina make love in a cave that offers protection from any Japanese patrols. Afterwards, they quietly share their dreams of a family, a farm, and becoming free Filipinos. The quiet is upended when a messenger arrives with news that the Japanese, with the Americans fast closing in, plan to set fire to the warehouse at dawn. Domingo waffles but finally decides he must try to rescue his family. Nina agrees to go with him. Before they get far, however, they hear rifle fire that indicates the Japanese ambushed the camp. Domingo and Nina are themselves intercepted by Japanese soldiers. In the ensuring gunfight, Nina is mortally wounded. Domingo knows what he must do: “Finish me, help the others” she moans (354). He shoots his lover point blank. He wonders now whether his indecision will cost the lives of his family. Tormented, he heads to Manila.