by Glenn Diaz
I pushed my chair back gently.
“Are you going to sleep now?” Mama asked.
“What else will I do, Ma?”
“Alvin.”
“Ma.”
A tired smile thinned her lips. “Have a good sleep.”
In my room, I collapsed to my bed after splashing water on my face and stripping to my boxers. On my back, I reached out for my laptop from the side table and propped it almost forty-five degrees against my raised lap. I opened a folder marked “Readings,” going straight to an old favorite, a two-hour clip called “Men of Israel.” I clicked randomly on the time bar to get to a good part, and the title screen cut to two Arab-looking men, one rugged and hairy, the other boyish, both on their knees, undressing each other. Under a flimsy drape that blew with the wind, they reclined on a laid-out rug in the middle of a craggy surface that, upon zoom out, turned out to be a cliff that overlooked the sea (the Dead Sea?). The scene cut to another crag, from which another man, half-naked for reasons unknown, watched the tryst. I lifted the laptop and balanced it on my chest, the monitor probably a foot above my face. With my free hand, I pulled my boxers down.
I felt the weight of the laptop leave my chest moments later. One second it was propped up with my hand, the next, it was crashing to the floor. My mother was outside my door in five seconds asking about the loud thud.
“I thought you were going to sleep! What was that? Is it the TV? The coffeemaker? I told you not to put it there.”
“It’s OK, Ma,” I called out.
“Is it the cabinet? That cabinet is older than you. Don’t tell me you’ll replace it. Just because you’re earning doesn’t mean you can do—”
“Ma!” I yelled, and she stopped. I prayed that I had locked the door, because how to explain the combination of the wrecked Acer on the floor and my right hand dripping with the filmy fluid.
The following week, Marie came for a visit. She brought grilled chicken, fresh lumpia, relyenong bangus, beef caldereta, and, for dessert, ube halaya and leche flan. I was supposed to meet Scott before my shift, but I told him my sister had shown up at the door with a guilty feast.
“Hey, why don’t I come over?” he said on the phone. “Say hello to Mama and Ate?”
“That’s not going to happen, Scott.”
“I know where you live, Alvin. It’s that bungalow with the unfinished second floor. Red gate, left side of the road.”
Once, Scott showed up at our doorstep hours after a big fight. “Alvin!” Mama’s hushed voice filled my room, freshly flooded with light. “There’s a Kano downstairs looking for you! Should I call Tito Jimmy? What is this? What did you do?”
I might have caught the tiniest hint of Scott’s woodsy aftershave in the air; my chest was thumping before I opened my eyes. When I got to the door, the white man slumped against the doorframe was drunk and barely lucid, but the series of events had been quick, because five minutes or so hence, Scott, Mama, and Marie were having instant coffee in our sala, while I was sent to the nearby 7-Eleven to buy ensaymada for our suddenly sober, delightful guest. That night, I found out that Mama had fumed over the “overacting” senators who voted to close down the US Bases in Subic and Olongapo. She had always been for the idea of the Philippines being the fifty-first US state, but maybe a better exchange rate for the peso could first be negotiated? Those two awkward hours extended my relationship with Scott for another two months, mostly because I was reeling from the surprise outing.
Sophia had a ready smile for her errant mother now, although that baby could muster the same cheer at the sight of the nice, toothless Ilocano woman from whose cart Mama got her pinakbet ingredients every morning.
“How’s work?” Marie asked.
“It’s OK,” I shrugged. “Nothing exciting.”
“He doesn’t get enough sleep,” Mama offered.
“Ma,” I said.
“We all have problems,” Marie said, scooping spoonfuls of minced ubod swimming in golden peanut sauce.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Sophia!” Mama cried, dropping her spoon and fork. Sophia, on Marie’s lap, had knocked over her plastic feeding cup, spilling water on the table. Marie pushed her chair back and pulled a wad of tissue. She proceeded to wipe the table, Sophia’s knees, her own lap. Dinner was stalled as she did this; Mama clutched her cup of chamomile, not quite used to commotions that she didn’t handle herself.
“So,” Mama said, “what you been doing lately?”
“I got a job in Pagudpud,” she said, standing up to throw away the sodden ball of tissue.
“All the way up there?” Mama asked. “What kind of job?”
“I’m kind of all around at this resort. Assistan t to the manager, sometimes receptionist, I tutor the owner’s youngest daughter twice a week—”
“Wait, isn’t Rey from there?” I asked.
“He’s based in Taguig now,” Marie said.
“Care to give us a free night’s stay at the resort?”
“Alvin,” Mama looked at me.
“I can probably work something out,” Marie said, grabbing Sophia’s right hand just before it toppled the bowl of gravy. “Let me know when you’re going. Are you still together with that white guy? I’m sure he’ll feel right at home there.”
“Marie.” Mama looked at her.
“What?” Marie asked.
“That white guy has a name,” Mama said, indignantly, before turning to me, “Steve, right?”
“Scott,” I told her and, to Marie, added, “That was a long time ago.”
“Oh yeah, Scott,” Marie said. “Small face, shaggy hair. Why couldn’t you make it work with him, Alvin?”
“You of all people, Ate—” I began.
Mama let out a laugh so shrill Sophia turned to her in drooling censure. “Sorry,” she mumbled, standing up. “Ketchup for the relyeno?”
“You need help with the expenses around here?” Marie asked. “I don’t earn a lot, I mean, I’m sure you earn more than me, but I suppose if you want to get a yaya—”
“We’re OK, Marie,” Mama said.
A stubborn piece of bangus got stuck in my throat and I had to cough it out.
Marie noisily put down her spoon and fork on her plate. “If you want to say something, Alvin—”
I reached for a glass of water.
Sophia sniggered, a lonely sound amid the rhythmic clinking of spoons and forks on ceramic. From outside, the bombastic recitation of the primetime news drifted in the air.
“Just a couple more months,” Marie said.
Mama and I looked at each other.
“I mean it this time,” she added.
Mama waved away a non-existent fly.
“I didn’t want to ask Ma,” Marie said as we walked to the main road an hour or so later. “But has Rey ever shown up?”
“No, Ate,” I said. “We’re still breathing as you can see.”
She smiled. “My phone’s bugged again.” She looked up to the dishevel of black cables, which seemed to frame every open space in the city. Scott had complained about them once, said he couldn’t take a decent picture in Manila without the tangle of wires. “But maybe that’s the point, ‘no? Our attempts at connection coalescing—” I interrupted that train of thought and told him that the lines used to be neat, a sign of progress, until they swelled beyond control, around each other, in every angle imaginable, an instant Rorschach everywhere you turned, until the unsightly webs grew beyond any visible unravelling.
“It’s why I haven’t visited,” Marie said.
“OK, Ate,” I told her.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t say OK when it’s not. Don’t do that. You’re turning into her.” A jeepney stopped in front of us. She waved it away. “I thought you understood.”
I raised my hand to alert a passing cab, which she also shooed away.
“OK,” she said, smiling, “tell me how I can make it easier for you.”
“Maybe instead of a yaya, you can get us a bodyguard—”
She looked up at the cables again.
“Doesn’t it get lonely, Ate?”
“Ha?”
“Moving from one place to another, meeting people then saying goodbye to them. Then meeting new ones again. Being, you know, placeless.”
“Placeless?”
“It’s this thing of Scott’s.”
“I thought you’re no longer seeing each other?” She raised her hand. “Listen to what I will say, OK? Are you listening? OK. Until someone leaves you and then you have to work as a toll booth operator in the middle of SLEX at 3 o’clock in the morning, you don’t know—you have absolutely no clue—how it feels to be lonely.” She patted me on the head before disappearing into the backseat of a cab.
Alone in the street corner, I examined again the whirl of cables overhead. The traffic light counter jumped from thirty seconds to three, then straight to zero, turning red and causing a sixteen-wheeler to brake at the last second, setting off furious honking from the vehicles behind. Shouted curses, a passing conversation, the grumble of sky. The lady next to me looked up then opened an umbrella in anticipation.
My sister gone, I wondered whether I should sleep for a couple more hours before preparing for work or just stay up and maybe watch some television, finish what was left of the ube. From the living room, I heard the TV being switched on, then a perky male voice saying something unintelligible amid loud cheering and psychedelic ding-ding-dings. I peeked into the sala from my room.
Clutching the same cup of tea, Mama was parked on one side of the couch, eyes fixed on the TV. “Ma?” I called out. Nothing. I tiptoed to the sala, on the way sneaking a peek inside their room where Sophia was asleep. As I got closer, I called out to her again. Still nothing. On the TV was what looked like a game show on an Indian channel.
I elbowed her. “Oy.”
She turned toward me. “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m your mother.” From stern, her expression softened, the standard meek look inspired no doubt by the countless telenovela heroines she had cried with in sympathy. “Why is your Ate like that, Vin?”
My laughter drowned the celebration onscreen. She shushed me, pointing to their room.
“Sorry,” I said. “What do you mean, Ma?”
“Why can’t she stay put?”
“You and I know the reason why she can’t stay put .”
“Even before Rey, I mean, she had always been like this. Even when your Papa died, she didn’t stay home. She went to school then stayed over at her classmate’s house for two weeks. I mean, I tried to get her, but everyone told me it was her way of grieving. Is she grieving, still? But look at you. You’re so stable. You don’t show a lot of feelings.”
“Ma—”
“Now we see her four, five times a year. And why go to Pagudpud? Is she crazy? Rey’s from there. Does she want to make an orphan out of Sophia?”
The last time Marie visited, she had been working as a waitress in a seaside resto-bar in Bacolod. Before that, she was a tour guide in Banaue, a tollbooth operator in SLEX, a teacher in Ormoc. I wasn’t sure if there was a connection among these jobs, a Lemony Snicket series of events in which one thing had led to another. Was she in a lifelong scavenger hunt? Who did her taxes? I didn’t know where to begin asking. Her life seemed to be a Pandora’s Box of uneasy revelations; it was better for everyone if things just stayed inside.
When she was pregnant with Sophia, a knock at our gate at two in the morning had stirred the house into mute panic. We knew something was wrong because Marie had come home earlier looking like she just killed someone. She looked dazed. She wouldn’t answer our questions. Also, Mama found a blood-soaked kitchen knife inside her bag.
Tita Fe’s late husband Tito Jimmy, an army reservist, answered our door. From where I sat in the bedroom, I heard two men in our doorstep. Outside, Mama said, two more stood beside an owner-type jeep whose engine noisily ran.
“Good morning po,” I heard one of the men said, in drunken sing-song. “If it isn’t too much of a bother, we’d like to talk to her.”
By “her” he meant my sister, who was in my mother’s room, one hand resting atop the swell in her midsection. She would tell us months later, during a rare noche buena dinner on Christmas Eve, that she had the bloodied kitchen knife within reach, on the side table behind a picture frame coddling a yellowing Polaroid of Papa. In the photo, he was in a barong, standing under a church portico. He had two-year-old me in his arms and a smirk, no doubt congratulating himself for not living long enough to witness this.
“Please leave,” Tito Jimmy said.
The men chuckled, probably amused by the combination of Tito Jimmy’s wanton courage and slight build. I chuckled, too, in my mind imagining Paquito Diaz and Jess Lapid outside our door, exchanging henchman banter.
“Sir,” the same man said. “We don’t want any arguments. Colonel Tupaz is in the hospital because of what she did. Poor guy. The Australiana left, then this. No more kids in his future, can you imagine? We just want a word with her. Ask her why she did it. Maybe scare her a little. Come on. We’re all adults here.” The two looked at each other and shivered. “It’s cold out tonight, ’no? You know Ernie Baron said we’re having a crazy October—”
“Go,” Tito Jimmy said. “And don’t come back.”
He shut the door in the men’s faces. The house, for a second, was so still and quiet that the creak of the floor, I imagined, was Marie shifting her weight in preparation for an assault. Then, from outside, a swift kick to the door, rattling the house and us and Tito Jimmy, who took a step back and quickly grabbed the unseen firearm inside his army jacket. My mother, eyes shut, clung to a nearby wall and made another frantic sign of the cross.
We didn’t move for about five minutes. As the sound of the jeep’s engine faded into the night, Tito Jimmy called out, “Auring? Marie? Alvin?” The idea of a family, it was never clear to me until then, in that dark sala, our names announced in sequence. That was the last time I touched my sister’s skin, in a half-embrace while clutching Mama’s still-shaking arms.
“I’m worried about your sister,” my mother told me now. She noticed the TV. “Ay, why are we watching this, puro bumbay.”
“Ma,” I said. “Marie can take care of herself. She always has.”
“And Sophia. I’m surprised Rey hasn’t come over to, you know, do something. Maybe we should think about moving.”
“You know, Rey’s actually a nice guy.”
“Ha? How do you know?”
“Basta,” I told her. “Besides, it’s Ate he wants. He doesn’t want anything to do with Pia.”
“What if he realizes she’s a good way to get back at Marie?”
I think I’ll try to sleep for a bit, I told her. In my room, I plugged my iPod to my speakers and set it on shuffle. I took my phone and set out the alarm to midnight, two hours away. I had started to drift to sleep, my legs and hands losing vitality, when the sound of howling tore at the stillness. The despair was instant, and I felt a profound rage at Mang Carding’s dog, probably still grieving for his owner and the now-always-delayed meals. I next heard the creaking of our gate, and the howling stopped. My last thoughts—gratitude, my mother, a deathly warmth.
I woke up a few minutes before midnight and hobbled to the sala. Mama was still up, the light from the TV bouncing around her still face, the tiled floor, the framed photos on the wall.
“Ma?” I called out. The TV was switched off.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” Mama said. “Don’t go back to sleep this time.” She yawned. “Leave some money for tomorrow’s groceries, can you?”
“OK, Ma.”
She walked back to their room.
I turned the TV back on and flipped through the channels until I saw Conan O’Brien. He was talking to a TV monitor with a photo of George W. Bush, whose mouth area was crudely replaced by real, moving lips. “Let’s talk about your meeting with the C
hinese prime minister,” said the host. “How was it?”
Bush’s plastered lips shaped the words rattled off by the presidential near-squeak, “It was rough going at first. He refused to apologize for Pearl Harbor.”
I laughed, in step with the chuckles and hoots from the show’s studio audience.
“Can you believe that?” the Bush voice continued. “These Chinese people are known to be very stubborn. It’s why they’re so good at math. They don’t give up when they see fractions like they’re supposed to.”
White guy humor, I thought, turning the TV off.
9
T o work, I’d often take nothing more than my phone, wallet, jacket, and a book, which tonight was a slender novella called Reunion , about two boys in 1930s Stuttgart. It had the usual: anti-Semitism, rise of Nazi Germany, looming world war. The sort of things that put problems like placelessness and insomnia in proper perspective.
The main road was a five-minute walk away from my house (it seemed longer than that these days—last week the department of public works had my street opened up like a festering wound, and the unearthed soil and rocks were like scabs piled sloppily on one side of the road, cordoned off by a sagging yellow tape). The many cabs ran swiftly at this hour, like prisoners out on bail. At Nagtahan Bridge, my taxi weaved around rampaging ten-wheelers on their way from the port to the plants and factories in the south. The Pasig River below was a black unmoving void that gleamed under moonlight, disturbed by the occasional slow-moving barge. Farther along Quirino Avenue, the grand façade of the Paco train station interrupted the landscape of wooden hovels on the roadside, still lit by spotlights despite being unused, an empty shell. Invisible were the piles of trash, the power lines, the crimes. Manila was beautiful in half-light.
From Quirino, we had turned left to South Super Highway—more ten-wheelers—when the pudgy driver shared, out of nowhere, that he once had a gay lover. In the universe of conversations with cabbies, the shift from a perfunctory question about your destination to a topic as odd as this was no longer surprising. When he was in his teens, the cabbie said, newly arrived in Manila from Abra, he found work at a garments factory. The supervisor was a gay man who let him stay in his house in Sta. Ana, right next to the race tracks. “I fit right in, too,” he said, grinning, “because I have something in common with the horses, if you know what I mean.”