Insurrecto

by Gina Apostol

She will bury the facts of his life’s script the way he has stuck in details of the biography of Gus the Polar Bear, his unmade movie, into his colossal, subsequent films—curious details of desolation with resonance only to him. The secrets of her life with him she will also carry to her grave, with perhaps some details peeking through in rough spots, she can’t help it, but her choice is to be that life’s only reader, because what does anyone else have to do with it? It is nobody’s business. Not even the creator can know her part, that mystery writer Magsalin who draws her thin characterization—a rich widow in the South of France with unstable vision whose vagrancy is the mark of her sorrow, though such lingering unease, she thinks, is surely a weave, a sinuous braid of Manila hemp that sneaks through human lives. It must weave through all of us, this sense of horror, this solitude, the secret within the secret, and it is no one’s business to know.