Esperanza Street

by Niyati Keni

  Dub studied the flyer, his full spoon poised near his lips. ‘He calls it a prayer meeting but people will have to pay to go,’ he said softly, cautiously.

  ‘You’d pay to see any doctor,’ she said hotly.

  Dub started laughing. ‘But he’s not a doctor.’ BabyLu’s eyes glittered at him. He shot me a look but I stayed quiet.

  ‘Well, I will be going! Eddie has promised to take me.’

  Dub opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it. BabyLu turned to me and said, ‘Julio Orenia. His name sounds like a proper rock star. And he’s coming here, to Puerto. Imagine this little place for a man of his reputation.’

  Dub flushed. I looked back at BabyLu guiltily, searching for something to say. ‘I’ve never thought of Puerto as a little place,’ I said at last.

  She stared at me for a moment and then unexpectedly she started to giggle. It was my turn to blush; seeing it, she laid a hand on mine and said, apologetically, ‘I guess I try to think of everywhere like a place in a book. That way I don’t miss it if I leave.’ My hand felt hot under hers and my skin prickled with the weight and softness of her touch. Dub glanced at her hand and then away again.

  BabyLu got up and started to gather the plates together. I stood up to help. ‘Are you planning to leave?’ I said.

  ‘Sure, why not? Unless I find a reason to stay.’ She fixed her eyes on me as she said this, but I was sure it was only so that her eyes wouldn’t find Dub. I helped her carry the dishes through to the kitchen but BabyLu wouldn’t let me wash them, slapping my wrist lightly as if telling off a child. She walked back into the main room, where Dub was still sitting at the table. She handed him the sponge. ‘I’ll talk you through it,’ she said mischievously.

  I stayed in the sala, browsing her collection of books, my thoughts punctuated by the splash of water, by their laughter. They took a long time to wash a few dishes. I became anxious to leave. When they emerged, they were still laughing. The front of Dub’s t-shirt was sodden. I said awkwardly, ‘Aunt Mary will be wondering.’ The sound of his mother’s name seemed to sober Dub suddenly; he’d had enough explaining to do before we even came up here, but now the street was dark and dinner at the boarding house would be over.

  We waited by the door as BabyLu ran her fingers along the bookcase and pulled out the book I’d picked up when we first entered the flat. She held it out to me. ‘Dub can drop it back when you’re done,’ she said. Then, looking at him askance, she added, ‘That’s ok, isn’t it, Elvis?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said lightly.

  She stayed in the passageway, half lit by the light from her apartment, till the elevator doors closed. ‘Jesus,’ said Dub as we were carried downwards, but it was all he said.

  Out on Prosperidad I waited for him to retrieve his bike from inside the garage where earlier he’d locked it away, but he surprised me by starting towards the boarding house on foot. Perhaps he wanted to prolong the evening as much as possible, for he certainly walked leisurely, and of course while I walked beside him holding her book some connection to her remained. Whatever his reason, I was thrilled. Strolling along as his companion, comfortably silent together, I felt older, broader, more substantial.

  As we came onto Esperanza a gold Mercedes rolled down the hill from the direction of Salinas. I watched as it slowed down and turned onto Prosperidad. In the back, his face in profile, was Eddie Casama. He stared blankly ahead, oblivious to life on the street. The Mercedes pulled up in front of BabyLu’s building. Eddie, I thought and the thought was like ice. I looked back towards the apartment and she was there on the balcony watching us, watching Dub, walk away. I thought about all of the food we’d just eaten. Because of us, however briefly, Eddie Casama would once again, after so many years, face an empty plate. I quickened my step, quelling an urge to tug at Dub’s arm, and he laughed softly at me, at my impatience.

  ‌Girl under a Yellow Bell Tree

  Without warning, Aunt Mary was summoned to Manila by her mother. It wasn’t unusual for Lola Lovely to make sudden demands on her daughter but Aunt Mary seemed more preoccupied than she might ordinarily have been before the trip. She was nervous of ferries anyway, refusing to travel by some passenger lines altogether or to travel at night. She left early, breakfasting soon after dawn, eating little. I heard her reminding America for at least the third time, as they settled themselves into the taxi, to make sure the boys ate.

  America was to accompany Aunt Mary only as far as the jetty, where she planned to buy grouper and baby squid fresh off the boats. She preferred to run her errands early, before the sun grew strong enough to bring out her rash. With Aunt Mary gone, I knew she’d take her time returning. I’d noticed how she tired more quickly these days and had started leaving more of the work to me. The walls of the house seemed, she said, to want to close in on her, a feeling that only dissipated when she was outside. In the past month I’d come in more than once to find her in the yard, staring up at the sky. I didn’t mind if she wanted to stay out; there wasn’t that much to do. At dinner the evening before, our only guest had announced his plans to explore the backcountry for a few days on one of Earl’s hire bikes. The boys weren’t around either; Benny was at school and Dub had left early for the garage. So it wasn’t far into the morning when I found myself completely alone.

  I enjoyed the times when I had the house to myself; it was such a rare sensation of stillness and one that had been unknown to me before I arrived at the Bougainvillea. Even if the day was hot, if I found myself there alone I would shut the sala windows to dull the street noise and lower the blinds halfway so that the room yellowed. And then I’d sit at the piano stool and wait as every object around me, with nothing to intrude upon it, nothing to compress it back down, seemed to swell before my eyes until it occupied its space more fully.

  For a long while I pretended the house was mine, that I’d just bought it, and I surveyed the downstairs rooms as if deciding which furnishings, which colours would change; how I might rearrange things. When that game became a slightly bitter pleasure, I pretended instead to be a guest, newly arrived and soon to depart. And when finally I tired even of that, I took to inspecting the contents of Aunt Mary’s bookcases and then, more boldly, leafing through the family photograph albums that she kept in the sala.

  There were two shelves of albums, containing generations of the Morelos and Lopez families: Uncle Bobby and Aunt Mary as a young couple, his hand at her elbow steering her to face the camera; Aunt Mary in school uniform playing jacks in the garden, the sun bright on her head; the boys as babies; and many more pictures of long-dead, un-named relations. In some of the images, landmarks of Puerto could be seen that, though old and much changed, were still recognisable: the passenger jetty, the basilica, the gates of the naval college. Over the years, I had looked through every album. I was fascinated by the pictures, returning to them again and again. There were so many. I possessed only one photograph, which was of my mother. And, like me, America also had only one, a group portrait of her family in the village, which she kept with her at all times, though she appeared in Aunt Mary’s albums at least every few pages, usually with the boys as children. I hadn’t thought so much about history, or heredity, till I came to the boarding house and first encountered these albums. I knew of course that everyone had to come from somewhere, that everyone had ancestors, yet the power of these photographs, the solidity they conferred, was undeniable. Aunt Mary, occupying her own place in this photographic lineage, could never have doubted she was somebody. It was a guilty pastime. I felt almost as if I were eavesdropping, as if I’d pressed my ear to the door of the past, but to someone else’s past, not my own.

  There was one picture in particular that I sought out now, which unlike the others remained unmounted, having been slipped into the back sleeve of one of the albums, as if it were not for display yet couldn’t be discarded. I had found it quite by chance when I dropped the album at some slight noise, noticing as I picked it up again the protruding corner o
f the photograph and the slight ridge it made under the sleeve’s fabric. Each photograph, like everything in Aunt Mary’s house, had its place. Every album, every section, was dated. Many pictures were captioned: Bobby and I in Singapore; Mom and Aunt Elvie; Graduation; The De Souzas, London, 1972; Niagara! The exclusion of this picture meant that I couldn’t work out when it might have been taken, or whether it was someone Aunt Mary or Uncle Bobby had known when they were young, before even the boys came along. I imagined that I would come across the place left for it as I carried on looking, that I would restore it to its title: Girl under a yellow bell tree. It was an excuse, of course, to look.

  The picture was of a young woman, at most a year or two older than I was now. She stood under the dappled shade of the yellow bell tree in the boarding-house yard. The picture had been taken at an angle, as if the photographer had knelt before her, so that about her face was a halo of blooms just starting to turn with, here and there, small seed pods already forming. She wasn’t dressed up for the occasion of the photograph yet her attitude seemed formal, an obeisance to the camera. She held her arms stiffly, without grace or purpose, by her sides. She was pretty with an open brown face and long black hair that had been swept to one side to lie flat against her shoulder like a curtain. She wasn’t smiling and looked, if not exactly unwilling, at least uncertain, unable to refuse. She didn’t look like a Morelos or a Lopez; her eyes lacked the self-assurance of the other portraits. Rather, she looked like any other pretty village girl with clothes slightly too big for her, her likeness snatched without ceremony. There was only the one photograph of her and I knew exactly which volume it was hidden in. I went straight to it now. I remembered details like that easily; it was me who Aunt Mary asked to fetch things she couldn’t find.

  I was inspecting the girl’s picture when the sound of a key in the front door cracked the soft, still ochre of the room and, startled, I made to push it under a seat cushion. America walked into the sala. She took in the albums stacked on the piano, the one open on my lap, my hand sliding out of the upholstery. ‘Haven’t I enough to do without you making more of a mess?’ she said sulkily. She dropped the bag she had been carrying, pointed to it on the floor. I picked it up and carried it through to the kitchen. The bag smelled of fish. I unwrapped the grouper and baby squid and slipped them into bowls, covering them over with water. I left the bowls on the counter next to the sink. I was drying my hands when America burst through the kitchen door. ‘Have you any business at all looking at these, Mister?’ she said with unexpected ferocity. Her voice made me jump. ‘Where did you find it?’ She thrust a photograph at me, jerking it away again as I reached for it. The girl under the yellow bell tree. ‘The boys see it?’ I shook my head. ‘Tell the truth now!’ she shouted.

  ‘They haven’t been home all morning.’ My voice sounded wheedling. America glared at me. She stalked over to the Frigidaire and placed the photograph on top of it, pushing it as far back as she could. She had to stand on her tiptoes to do it. I looked away before she turned round again. She moved over to the counter and tossed the baby squid roughly into the sink. She turned the tap on full. Water spattered her blouse. I lurched forward and turned the tap down, retreating again quickly. America grabbed a knife. One by one she stabbed each squid between the eyes and squeezed out the ink, plunging them into the water to rinse them before dropping them back into the bowl. When she was done she moved away. I slid a plate over the top of the squid to cover them.

  ‘Who is she?’ I ventured.

  ‘I’ll tell her I caught you snooping,’ America said tautly without looking up. I didn’t repeat my question. America carried on working in silence, clattering dishes once or twice when I glanced over at the Frigidaire. Pretty soon I stopped looking, though I remained conscious of its white bulk as I moved round the kitchen during the afternoon.

  In the morning, when I checked the top of the Frigidaire, the photograph of the girl under the yellow bell tree had gone. I looked, of course, through the albums a few days later, expecting to find it back in one of the sleeves, expecting that switching albums might represent the limits of America’s ingenuity. But I’d underestimated her, for there was no trace of it.

  ‌A Ride through the Backcountry

  With his mother gone, Dub was scarcely to be seen at the Bougainvillea in the evenings. At first, America sent me out nightly to fetch him, but more often than not when I arrived at the garage it was locked, the windows dark. If Earl was still about, he’d profess ignorance even as he frowned up at the building opposite. At those times, I looked up at the balcony of BabyLu’s flat and usually the doors were open, a light on, sometimes music floating out into the evening.

  Dub brought back more of her books for me, his eyes eager as he dropped them onto the kitchen table in the mornings before he left for work, waiting till America was out of the room. He told me how BabyLu put them aside in a pile near the door so she wouldn’t forget, as if he wanted me to think well of her even though we both knew she was Eddie Casama’s mistress. I was flattered by the books, by the knowledge that she thought of me at all, though I also knew they meant he always had an excuse to return to her.

  With better claims upon his time, Dub’s bike grew dusty and even America remarked on the dulled chrome, the encrusted paintwork. She grew weary of worrying about him. She left it later and later before asking me to look for him, and then after a while she didn’t ask at all. The last time she sent me down to the garage neither of us expected I would actually find him, but when I arrived he was on the forecourt cleaning down the bike. It looked like its old self again. He smiled when he saw me and shot a glance across the road and up to BabyLu’s balcony. I followed his gaze to where she stood, watering her plants. ‘She wants me to take her out on it,’ he said. ‘She wants to feel what it might be like to leave town, even if it’s just to come back again later.’

  I watched him work. He was careful with the machine, as he was with his guitar. I thought about how often Aunt Mary scolded him for shoving aside the antique figurines she’d brought back from Europe to make room for his drink, his keys, his helmet. I wondered how he was with BabyLu, whether he treated her as if she were fragile, irreplaceable.

  We watched as BabyLu’s balcony doors closed and her curtains were drawn. A minute later she emerged from her apartment building and slipped quietly across the street. She had on jeans and a light jacket and her headscarf. She looked like an American movie starlet. Dub laughed when he saw her and reached out to pull at the knot of her scarf. I was startled by the familiarity, as was she. She jerked her head away and reproached him with her eyes, glancing along the street. But she was smiling as she removed her scarf and pushed it into her pocket to grasp the helmet he held out to her. She fiddled with the straps for a while and then, giving up, winked at me as she lifted her chin to let Dub fasten them, his fingertips as delicate as if he were picking out splinters. ‘Bye-bye, Jo-Jo,’ she trilled as she climbed on behind him, her voice cloying and comical, childish. I watched them ride away, waiting till they’d disappeared from sight before I started back to the boarding house.

  The following day, Dub recounted how their evening had unfolded. He had taken her along the coast road as far as Little Laguna. She’d pulled faces at him in the rear-view mirrors all the way. At Little Laguna they’d taken a rowboat out to a floating bar to sip cocktails while the sun set over the water. When they returned to shore, they’d continued down the coast before cutting through the backwaters to ride through the villages back to Puerto. They’d stopped a few times for a cold drink at a roadside shack or for her to take a picture or disappear into the bushes to relieve herself. Afterwards they’d sat together for a while on the wall of a bridge to watch carabao carts laden with sugar cane or bamboo roll by and, in the distance, people walking across rice fields towards narrow plumes of smoke that rose from behind the treeline. I wondered if he’d glimpsed BabyLu the village girl then, however fleetingly, but of course it was too tender a question to voice. Du
b’s first account of their evening stopped there and I thought he was simply being discreet. What he didn’t say then was that when they returned, as the bike cruised into Prosperidad, they saw Eddie’s Mercedes waiting in front of her building.

  ‌Street Vendors

  The sun, long depleted of its vigour, at last drew its uppermost edge down behind the buildings on the opposite side of Esperanza Street, its final glow outlining them thinly against the descending dusk. From the gate, I watched the street turn to velvet and everything become rich, convivial. In a line stretching from the brow of the hill down to the jetty, the lamps came on in clusters, their yellow light seeping through the smoke that layered upwards from the braziers. Into this haze, the night flowers had already started to release their scent. Behind me, the house lay quiet. It was time to close the gate for the evening but I lingered there thinking, as I often did, about how the falling light smoothing over the boundaries of the street endowed the scene almost with the illusion of freedom. I didn’t want to go back inside just yet, and of course today there was no one to mind if the gate closed a few minutes late: Aunt Mary was still in Manila with her mother and America had already retired. Still, I hesitated, if only for a moment, before slipping out onto the sidewalk.