by Janice Law
In this way, they became great friends, and when her husband was away, Amelia would often ask Dwayne to help her pick the flowers or else she would come out to work in the potting shed with the old man, for, as she confessed the house virtually ran itself.
But when her husband was home, Señora Amelia was never seen outside except by the pool. They never heard her singing in the garden or saw her perched on the terrace to eat lunch in front of her portable television set.
One day even after Señor Barber had departed for Bangkok or Buenos Aires or Abijan, Amelia did not appear in the garden. Señor Rodas frowned and seemed anxious and irritable, although normally he took no notice of the comings and goings of his employers. “It is none of our business,” he would remind Dwayne, if his apprentice mentioned that old Señora Rothstein had an oxygen tank or that Señor Burns had dented his car again.
The following day, there was still no sign of Amelia. She did not even wave from the terrace or send Felice out for flowers, as she’d done when she had the flu a couple of months before. Señor Rodas shook his head and looked so concerned that Dwayne took fright. When he went up to water the flowering plants on the terrace, he began to sing, very softly so that Old Rodas would not scold him, a little Tagalog song he’d learned in the camp.
He had not finished the second verse before he heard her feet on the flagstones. He did not look round, but kept on watering until she said, “You are mean to call me when I did not want to come out.” He turned and saw her bruised face and the blotches on her golden arms. Señor Barber had betrayed her trust, and her loyalty was about to be transferred. Dwayne understood that deep in his heart, in the same compartment that had recognized her true nature. But, consciously, all he felt was a stunned anger, a rage against the universe. “What happened?” he asked.
When she told him, he said, “You must run away. You must leave.” Paperless himself, his mind was dominated by the idea that she had documents, that she was legally married to a citizen, that she was a free agent. But there were complications.
“My sisters,” she said. There were five other children, three of them girls. The family was desperately poor, and her parents, she said, did not see the sense of keeping girls in school when they could be earning good money.
“In the bars,” Dwayne guessed.
“In the brothels,” she said brutally. “I need money. He provides— but only a little at a time.”
So there it was. She walked in the paradise garden the next few days and studied the cactuses with Señor Rodas as if nothing had happened. But on Friday night, she stopped her little white sedan in front of a convenience store where Dwayne was waiting, nervous in a new blue and white shirt which he had bought in the strip mall after work. They purchased a take out from the Manilla Express, a hot, spicy taste of home, drove to the beach, and ate their picnic on the sand, watching the great Pacific rollers beach themselves at the edge of the continent. That was the start of their affair, the affair of a shy scholar incognito and a disguised warrior princess.
After three weeks, Señor Barber returned for a couple of days. Once again, Amelia disappeared into the big silent house, but, this time, it was Dwayne who was nervous, so nervous that Señor Rodas shook his head. “Be careful of them,” he said. “Be careful of Señor Barber. He is not to be trusted.”
“And her?”— he’d almost slipped and said “Amelia.” “What about Señora Barber? Is she not to be trusted?”
Señor Rodas’ seamed and wrinkled face grew sad. “It is for the Señora to be very careful,” he said, but the cautious gardener was not moved to speak further. Meanwhile, the two young people had a period of happiness, for Señor Barber, as was his custom, left again abruptly.
During the following weeks Dwayne found it remarkable— although it confirmed his apprehension of her nature— that his beloved never showed the slightest fear of discovery. When he asked her one day, she shrugged. “All he requires of me is obedience,” she said. “And his only order is not to open his office closet.”
“His office closet?”
“He has an office at home,” she said. “There’s a closet where he stores valuable papers. Or so he says. He works in the office a lot. It even has a television set, and I think he watches movies there when he wants to be alone.”
Dwayne thought of the bruises and asked, “And do you go into this closet?”
She seemed genuinely shocked. “Never. I’ve never even set foot in the office. Why should I do such a thing when my husband orders me not to?”
“But he has beaten you,” Dwayne said.
“That is what frightens me. Whenever he comes home, he asks me if I have been in his closet. I have not and he should see that the room is untouched, but he does not believe me. And after a day or so, he convinces himself that I am lying. It’s as if he really wants me to open that closet.”
“Yet he has ordered you not to,” Dwayne said.
Amelia shrugged. “Either way, I must be beaten, for being innocent or being guilty, because there is some subtle thing he wishes, but I cannot determine what it is.”
When Señor Barber broke her hand on his next visit home, Dwayne felt his mother’s madness leap within him. He was ready to kill the Señor and damn the consequences, but Lennart Barber had already departed for Chicago, en route, Amelia said, for South Africa. He would be gone two weeks; she had seen his tickets. Still, she would not leave. There were her sisters. Simone was particularly pretty. “The most beautiful girl in Manilla,” Amelia said with at touch of bitterness. “I must keep her in school another year so she will be able to get a decent job. Another year.”
In despair, Dwayne put some of this before Señor Rodas the next afternoon as they worked in the gardener’s own little nursery. “Another year,’ she says! What will happen to her?”
“In another year, she will be dead,” the old gardener said. “She is not the first.”
Dwayne stopped pouring perlite into the pot he was preparing. “What do you mean?”
“Not the first wife. Or the second, or the third.”
“He is old enough to have been married before,” Dwayne admitted. He did not want to take in all the implications of what Señor Rodas was saying.
“Certainly. And has been. But this is since I started to work in his garden. Three.” He held up three fingers for emphasis. “All like our friend, the Señora. Young, pretty, foreign. Poor girls, acquired mail order, postage due. Without friends. You understand what I am saying?”
“What happened to them?” Dwayne asked, his mouth dry.
“The first one— I don’t know. I had just started working for the Señor then. The garden was much neglected: cactuses dying from over-watering; damage of all kinds left unattended; weeds everywhere. And imagine the roses.” His expression was eloquent. “I never saw the young Señora, but when I heard she was dead, I went to pay my respects to him. He seemed surprised that I had spoken. Then unconcerned. It took him a moment to find the right emotion. You’ve known such people?”
Rather grimly, Dwayne allowed that he had.
“We have to learn to be human,” Señor Rodas said philosophically. “Cats have to learn to be cats; dogs to be dogs. Why should we be different? That day, I could see Señor Barber struggling to find sorrow, to find regret. Then he found them and his face turned sad. She died in a boating accident,’ he said. I told him I hoped God would comfort him.”
“And the second wife?” Dwayne asked in a soft voice.
The old man shrugged. “Disappeared. Went home, apparently. There was a quick divorce. Or so we heard.” He looked completely unconvinced. “As for the third wife, she was killed in a robbery.
“A robbery?”
“She disturbed the robber and was beaten to death. It seemed to be a professional job. No fingerprints, valuable things taken, security system wires cut. The Señor was away in San Francisco at a conference.”
“This robber was caught?”
“I don’t think that robber ever
will be caught. But you can see my point. The Señor is an unlucky man, who attracts unlucky women.”
“But none of them could have been as nice as Señora Amelia,” Dwayne burst out.
“Not the two I observed, anyway.”
“Any man could be happy with the Señora,” Dwayne said.
“But Señor Barber is not.”
In despair, Dwayne revealed that he knew more about the Barbers than he should have. “She says he seems almost disappointed by her obedience,” Dwayne concluded.
“She is clever,” said Old Rodas. “She sees it all, poor thing. He is tired of her now.” He thumped the pot smartly down on the table to settle the soil. “The Señor wants her to disobey him so that he has an excuse to kill her.”
When Dwayne repeated this to Amelia, she thought for a moment before her eyes darkened and she nodded.
“Either you must run away or we must kill him,” Dwayne said.
Amelia did not answer immediately but began pacing restlessly back and forth on the terrace. The little lights strung in the trees twinkled and paper lanterns big as pumpkins made artificial moons against the cloudy night sky. He had not been to the paradise garden after dark before, and his fear and desperation were sharpened by the beauty of the lights amidst the trees.
“There are my sisters,” she said. “And you have no papers.” So she had known that all along.
Dwayne felt a wave of nervous desperation, out of which came another idea.
“The closet,” he said. “There may be something important in the closet. Something that will give us power.”
She decided instantly and, gripping his hand, led him into the house. They walked down marble and tile halls past big, lavish rooms with the distant city lights winking through the windows. When they reached the office, she caught her breath, then turned the knob. “You see,” said Amelia as the unlocked door opened.
Inside, the room was perfectly ordinary, a rich man’s rosewood paneled version of Señor Rodas’ paper cluttered annex to the potting shed. But instead of the smell of fertilizer and earth, Señor Barber’s room had the sad, distinctive odor of musty, closed up places never intended for the light of day. There was a desk, files, a half empty bookcase, and, mounted on a cart, a large screen television set and a VCR.
Amelia looked around curiously. Dwayne, nervous, went directly to the closet and tried the door.
“He keeps it locked.”
“We will get a screwdriver to pry it open.”
“If you and Señor Rodas are right, there must be a key,” she said, and within minutes they found several, including one which opened the closet door. Inside was a set of shelves, some holding padded books and some with boxed video tapes.
“Porn,” suggested Dwayne.
She picked up several of the tapes and thought momentarily of the video shops, the flashy clubs, the crowded sidewalks of night time Manilla. Desperation and her beauty might well have taken her in that direction. “No labels,” she remarked. “And there are no pictures on the slip cases.”
“Maybe really nasty stuff.”
Amelia set down the tapes and picked up a pastel leather book. It was a wedding photo album, and she went pale when she recognized the bridegroom. “It is a Señora Barber,” she said, holding the book so that Dwayne could see one of the photographs. The bride was young with long dark hair and delicate East Asian features, enough like Amelia so that he was almost poisoned with fear.
“So there were more than three,” said Amelia, as she opened the other books. The earlier wives were blonde, pale Americans. In their wedding albums, Señor Barber looked young and handsome.
“Señor Rodas says that your husband has never learned human emotions.”
A shadow passed over Amelia’s face. “We should see what is on the tapes,” she said.
They might have been fooled if Señor Barber had taken the trouble to rewind his treasures all the way. They might have been deceived by footage of parties and trips and “cheesecake” shots of bathing beauties. But Señor Barber’s obsession had a cruder edge. The very first tape they played began toward the end with a grainy image of a woman’s torso laced with blood. In his shock, Dwayne did not at first recognize what he saw. The dark splotches seemed to distort the geography of the body, and for a disorienting instant he remembered the first video he had seen in the camp: an old American musical, wonderful and peculiar, as stylized as the dances known to his mad mother. Then he heard Amelia draw in her breath and knew this was real blood and that all his fears for his princess were well founded.
It did not take Amelia and Dwayne long to discover the fates of the other disappeared wives. Fast forward, sudden stops, an avalanche of horrors. “There is one left for you,” said Dwayne. He put in the last tape and felt the rising wind of madness, for there was Amelia, waving at the camera, climbing out of the pool in her bikini, sitting on a bed in a short nightgown. That this was happening here, in the lavish house, in the paradise garden, here, where there were not the excuses of war and hunger, somehow made everything worse. He could not endure to see any more.
“He likes pictures,” she said, not completely calmly. “He has no shame. He wanted me to see all this.”
Dwayne stopped the tape. Amelia’s image wavered on the screen, then faded to black. He hit the rewind button and rewound the tape. Then they pushed everything back into the closet and left the office, where they couldn’t breathe, where life seemed disgusting, where evil, like the devil in paradise, had presented them with the ultimate questions. They could not even think clearly until they escaped to the kitchen. They poured beer into Señor Barber’s thin, elegant glasses and washed the taste of blood and evil from their mouths. After a few minutes, Amelia turned on her little portable television and began to click nervously through the channels.
What to do, what to do? Neither of them thought of the police. They both knew that men with badges and guns must be approached, if approached at all, only through powerful intercessors. And they had none, not even wise Señor Rodas being right for a matter of this gravity. As for flight, there were the sisters and Dwayne’s lack of papers, and something else which Señor Barber would never have guessed: a kind of anger, a ritual madness, a thirst for battle. It took, perhaps, a man like Dwayne, raised to be the scholar-counselor of a warrior princess, to understand. Now he sat at the polished black stone kitchen table and sipped a Heineken and waited for the decision which he would help bring to fruition.
Amelia did not speak for a long time. She looked straight at the set, clicking the buttons on her remote one after the other. At home, Dwayne thought, they could have consulted an astrologer, someone wise in the ways of days and times. Or perhaps one of the chanting Buddhist priests whose yellow robes had gone shabby in exile. Or Father Peter Hernandez, who said mass in the camp and who, like Dwayne’s mother, suffered moments of madness. Since they did not know where to find similar spiritual powers in California, Amelia consulted the glassy square of the tv. Guns and screams and car chases suggested one course of action; cruise ships and airline ads and Serengetti lions, another. But there were always the sisters, Simone and Annamaria and Francesca, and dancing women with their hair flying and tough streetwalkers with long, unsteady legs suggested their fate.
Suddenly Amelia gave a cry of triumph. “There! It is the number!”
Dwayne saw it was the number 800, a good number because free. And the digits added up to 22: his very age: an auspicious number.
“The number for criminals,” Amelia said. “For reporting crimes. For telling the world.” She looked at him, her eyes fathomless. “And maybe for money,” she said. “Money for papers. And for my sisters.” She took a deep breath. He could see her trembling, then her gold armor began to glisten, and Dwayne heard the trumpeting of elephants, jeweled and painted, ready for battle.
Amelia picked up the phone and punched in the auspicious number.
Two days later, after he had lied to Señor Rodas for the first time so that he co
uld drive with Amelia to Los Angeles; and after she had disappeared, brave as a lion, into a big white building clutching one, but only one, of the tapes; and after all sorts of fears and a handful of cash money, part of which had already gone for a convincing new California driver’s license complete with his picture, the television people came to the paradise garden.
Their lights were hot and bright, a soundless bombardment; their growling trucks panted exhaust, and cameramen, loaded like infantry, rushed the building. Dwayne held the door for them. “Rodas Landscaping,” he said and answered questions in Spanish.
Sound technicians brought pole mikes and clear parabolas to catch the breath of souls, and cable strewn photographers muscled in video cameras. From the doorway, Dwayne watched Amelia, small and resolute, surrounded by big, red faced Americans with letters on their shirts, letters familiar from the tv. Dwayne wanted to be beside her as her lover, as her scholar advisor, but he knew that he must remain invisible to these men and women with their all-seeing cameras and curious mikes. He knew that much, so he thought of his father, the brave black Lieutenant, and tried to protect his princess with ferocious looks.
Now she was listening to the producer, a slim man in an open necked shirt. He gestured with his clipboard.
“You’ve got to search,” said the man. “You gotta make it look as if you’re just discovering everything.”
Amelia glanced back at Dwayne, who poured all his love and courage into one silent glance. She caught her breath and straightened her back: she was a woman in a million. Then she set off down the corridors of the big house, followed by the noise and lights of the television crew, who kept stopping, despite her urging, despite her urgent gestures, to photograph the huge living room and the sprawling bedrooms— deeper and deeper, down corridors of marble and rosewood to the office.