by Niyati Keni
Johnny Five Course sat by his stall reading a book. Even from a distance I recognised the cover: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Aunt Mary kept a copy in the sala for the amusement of the boarding-house guests. Books of quotations and anecdotes were the only things Johnny liked to read.
Johnny’s food cart was easily the most colourful stall on the street, and consequently was a magnet for foreigners. Johnny’s sign said in English: Five Corse Meals. Two Set Menues, Complimentry Tea and Coffee. Eat-In. Take-Out. Today, as nearly every day, menu ‘A’ was pinakbet, lumpia, pork and egg noodles, coconut curd and tea or coffee. Menu ‘B’ was pinakbet, lumpia, pork and egg fried rice, coconut curd and tea or coffee. There were no chairs and Eat-In meant sitting on the low wall behind the frangipani tree, the food laid out on a banana leaf in front of you. For Take-Out, Johnny served the pinakbet in a polystyrene cup and the rest wrapped up in waxed paper packets enclosed in another banana leaf. From the roof of the cart, a hurricane lamp cast its gauzy light over a row of open pickle jars and bottles of soy and fish sauce. A ring of flies circled lazily over the jars. Others clung to strips of fly-paper strung like forgotten Christmas decorations along the cart’s awning. All the while a small table fan taped to one of the posts arced uselessly from left to right and back again.
Johnny glanced up as I emerged onto the street. He looked pleased to see me and my heart fell; it meant he had news. He beckoned me over with his book. He looked different and he waited, smiling, while I appraised him. His hair had been teased into a quiff like the prow of a boat. I didn’t say anything. He closed the Bartlett’s and stood up, laying the book down on his stool. He smoothed his quiff with the palms of both hands like he was diving into a pool. ‘Hey Joe, how are you doing?’ he said. I wondered what response might result in the shortest conversation.
Johnny was full of schemes to make it out of Esperanza Street, out of Puerto, out of the Philippines. He was going places: ‘The Mississippi River, man,’ he’d say. He loved that name, stretched it out a long way. ‘The Meesseesseepee Reever.’ His dreaming made me feel empty. The week before he’d said to me, ‘Maybe I’ll do an MBA stateside.’ I didn’t know what an MBA was but I didn’t admit to it. Most of Johnny’s outside information came from Jaynie, his sister, who ran the Beauty Queen hair salon near the market hall. Jaynie and her colleague, Lady Jessica, whose real name was Jesiah, were the eyes and ears of Esperanza and their clientele included the ladies from higher up the hill who could afford to send their children to college in Europe or the States and still had money to fritter on manicures and hair perms.
Johnny lived with Jaynie and his father in a two-room apartment in Greenhills just behind the Espiritista chapel. They had their own tiny kitchen but shared an outside bathroom with four other families. Johnny got up every day before dawn to go to market and he’d rolled out his stall and was cooking over the butane gas stove before Jaynie was even up. He ate all his meals at the stall and when he got home he washed and slept and got up before dawn to do it all over again.
‘So now you’re Elvis?’ I said, pointing at last to his hair.
‘You think it suits me?’
I didn’t, but I said, ‘Sure.’
Johnny looked pleased for a second. Then he said, ‘It’s crazy about the Pope, eh?’
‘What about the Pope?’
He stared at me. ‘You work too hard,’ he said. He thrust his chin in the direction of Primo’s store, where a group of men and women had gathered at the doorway. Through the windows I could just make out the fitful, bluish light of Primo’s countertop TV. As if afraid I might be lured away by it, Johnny said quickly, ‘So how are the boys? Benny, Dub?’ Listing them as if I might be uncertain which boys he was referring to.
‘Fine.’
‘Eat my dust!’ Johnny had taken to this phrase, having seen it on the back of one of Dub’s t-shirts. Dub was fast becoming legendary around Esperanza. ‘Get the same shirt for America. She moves quick for an old lady.’
‘She’s a devil in an old lady’s body.’
‘Jessica describes herself as a woman in a man’s body,’ he said, which stalled the conversation as both of us tried to imagine it. I looked away again in the direction of Primo’s store. ‘Still going strong,’ Johnny said cheerfully, waving at Abnor who sat as always at his tea-stall in front of the store. For some time now Johnny had had his eye on Abnor’s pitch, which was a short distance from the Espiritistas and the Redemptorist church. Perhaps he imagined himself ready to nourish the congregations as they emerged from communing with the dead, or meditating on moderation and self-restraint, the money burning in their pockets. Abnor waved back. I raised my arm to wave too and Abnor patted the stool next to him in invitation. Johnny wasn’t quite ready to let me go. ‘Salon might have to close,’ he said.
‘Jaynie’s place?’ I was surprised. Like his and Abnor’s stalls, it was part of the fabric of the street.
‘That bastard Eddie don’t want to renew the lease.’
‘Isn’t his wife in there every week?’
Johnny pushed his jaw forward, lowered his eyelids and, holding his arms out as if he were a politician delivering a speech, said in an exaggerated mimicry, ‘Change is inevitable.’ I didn’t know if he was pretending to be Eddie. I stared at him blankly. ‘Forget it,’ he muttered.
I looked back at the Bougainvillea. ‘Aunt Mary likes the gate closed by now,’ I said.
Johnny picked up his ladle and pushed the pinakbet roughly round the pan. ‘There are no tyrants where there are no slaves, man,’ he said. ‘Rizal.’ I was pretty sure Rizal hadn’t said man but I didn’t correct him. Johnny picked up his book again and for a moment I thought he might be about to assail me with another quote, but he shrugged and sat down.
I turned to leave. Across the street, Abnor hooked a stool out with his foot and started wiping down a cup with a rag. He set the cup down firmly. I started over to him. He’d poured out a tea for me before I’d even reached his corner. Winking, he stirred in an extra spoonful of sugar and handed me the cup. I wasn’t used to sweet tea anymore – Aunt Mary preferred it made without – but I took the cup without hesitation. Abnor never let me pay so I tried not to drink his tea too often, which was a shame because I enjoyed sitting here.
Abnor had roots in the same village as America and they flirted affably whenever they met. For no other reason than that, I trusted him. Abnor’s tea-stall had got all of his younger siblings through school, two through college, and then married. They were long since grown and gone but still Abnor stayed put, sleeping under the wooden wings of his stall in all weathers until Primo put down a folding bed for him in his store room. Now every evening after closing up shop, the two of them sat side by side on Abnor’s wooden stools, sharing tea and cigarettes and watching the street like a television.
Today, Primo’s doorway was still open, the windows unshuttered. A group of men and women stood at the threshold, more sat on the floor inside the store. I heard the brusque, urgent music of a news programme. Primo leaned back against the glass of his shopfront, blowing on his tea.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
Abnor raised an eyebrow. ‘The Pope’s been shot. He’s in hospital. It’s been all over the news.’ He crossed himself. Behind him, Primo fiddled with the cross around his neck.
I cast a glance across the street at Johnny, said apologetically, ‘Aunt Mary’s not so keen on TV. It’s sometimes on for the guests in the evening, but we’ve been quiet.’ I stood up and craned to see the screen. The Filipino anchorman, a fair-skinned mestizo, sounded almost American. He looked nothing like any of the people who had gathered to watch. The footage was a few months old: on a tour of the country earlier in the year, Pope John Paul II reminded the sea of people who had come to see him not to use contraception.
‘It’s a bad thing,’ Abnor said, ‘the way the world is.’ He shrugged.
I sat down again, sipped my tea. I looked more closely at the people clustered in the doorway, gri
ef painted on their faces, a grief that seemed scenic somehow, distant, because I didn’t feel it. The Pope being shot, like most things, seemed like a matter for everyone else but me. Abnor watched me. I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘They think he’ll be all right, though?’
‘It’s up to Him,’ Abnor said. He pointed up at the sky and despite myself I looked up. ‘At least he’s in His good books.’
‘You hear about the salon?’ I said.
Abnor’s voice dropped and he frowned as he intoned like a movie hero, ‘A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.’ He jabbed the air with a finger like he was conducting an orchestra, emphasising alternate syllables.
‘Man,’ said Primo quietly.
Abnor leaned in to me. ‘Martin Luther King!’ The two men laughed softly. I glanced guiltily across the street at Johnny. His head was back in his book of quotations. The sight of it made me smile suddenly, but only because the incline of the pages was in the same plane as his quiff. It would have made a good photograph. Abnor patted me on the shoulder.
From out back, a cockerel started up a ragged call. ‘I’m going to eat that bird some day soon,’ Abnor said. Primo kept a fighting cock in the yard behind the store. It had lived with him in his apartment until the neighbours complained about its noise. He crooned a soft pocking noise deep in his throat. The cockerel quieted. ‘That bird’s like having a wife,’ Abnor muttered. ‘Always wanting to talk.’
He took the cup from my hand, filled it again. He reached for the sugar. From inside the store, the news channel jingle came on again. The people at the doorway started to disperse and, as they passed, one of them bumped Abnor’s shoulder. ‘Oy,’ he muttered crossly as a shower of sugar crystals scattered over the rim of the cup, bouncing off the counter of his stall like raindrops. I watched him gather them together with the side of his hand, sweep them into his palm. And I remembered then, quite unexpectedly, the only time I’d ever seen Aunt Mary angry. Over dinner at the boarding house one evening, during the Pope’s visit back in February, she’d raged about the First Lady’s decision to build a wall in Manila along the route of the Papal motorcade to hide the slums. In her agitation, she’d knocked the rice spoon out of my hand as I served her. I went to fetch a dustpan and came back to find her picking the tiny grains of rice one by one from the pile of the rug with her fingertips, her other palm cupped to receive them.
‘God loves the poor,’ I murmured, testing the words. It was something Mulrooney often said in church. But coming out of my mouth, it sounded phoney. Abnor glanced at me curiously. He put the refilled cup in my hand. I looked down at it. I pictured the Greenhills children, sweeping the market for discarded fruit as the traders packed their stalls away, plucking snails from crevices. I lifted the cup to my mouth but didn’t take a sip, instead studying the two men over its rim. Abnor’s eyes were milkier than I remembered. Primo dressed like someone much younger than his years but, close up, the gap between him and Abnor diminished. It wasn’t just the effect of age, I thought. They both wore a kind of contentment which, now that I considered it, might just as easily have been resignation. The thought was so abruptly dispiriting that, though the tea was still hot, I drained my cup, burning my throat.
As I stood up to leave, Abnor said, as I knew he would because he’d said it innumerable times before, ‘Say Hi to my girlfriend.’
Halo-Halo Special
When Aunt Mary returned to the Bougainvillea, she brought her mother with her. I hadn’t seen Lola Lovely for three years. Twice a year, she summoned her daughter, and sometimes the boys, to Manila, rather than manage the journey to Puerto. It wasn’t a long trip, but Lola Lovely liked things to be a certain way and so tended to avoid travelling. She was in her late sixties, but she barely looked her age and she flirted in a desultory fashion with the taxi driver as he hauled her luggage out of the trunk. She looked over the façade of the Bougainvillea, pursed her lips at the boarding-house sign. Behind her, Aunt Mary’s demeanour was cool and I wondered if Lola Lovely had kept at her for most of the way with her demands: ‘Adjust this cushion, fetch a drink, call the steward.’
Lola Lovely lived by herself in Manila. The house was hers, left to her when Judge Lopez died; most of the rest of his estate went to Aunt Mary, who was courting but not married then. The Manila house was modern and much larger than the Bougainvillea – too large really for Lola Lovely, even with her maid and the houseboy, the only staff she was unwilling to do without. It had been designed by an architect who was an old family friend, a fraternity brother of the judge. I’d never seen it but had heard about its big spaces, the skylights that cut blocks of light over marble floors, the waterfall that no longer cascaded in the lobby. Lola Lovely chose to stay there after Mary and Uncle Bobby were married. She loved the arts, couldn’t bear to be too far from the pulse, she’d once said. The proper upkeep of her beloved home would have been covered by her allowance from the Lopez lands if Uncle Bobby hadn’t developed a passion, if not a talent, for poker. Still, Lola Lovely clung to the house, managing as best she could with the remainder of her inheritance. But each time Aunt Mary returned from seeing her, I’d hear her listing to America the latest signs of decay.
I opened the door and took the bags into the house. Lola Lovely smiled anxiously at me. When Benny came down the stairs, she looked relieved and said ‘Ah!’ She had draped a shawl over one arm and made no move to give it to me. When eventually she put it aside, I saw that her arm was in plaster up to the elbow. ‘My wrist,’ she explained irritably to America. She was not the kind to accept without resistance the encroaching signs of frailty.
America had prepared lunch and I’d laid it out in the dining room by the time Lola Lovely had settled herself in. ‘Sheets of music everywhere in one room, sketching paper everywhere in another. You boys inherited your untidiness from your father,’ Lola Lovely said to Benny as she sat down at the table.
‘I’m sure they’d have tidied up if they thought they were due an inspection,’ Aunt Mary said.
‘It’s only me. Their old Lola.’
She waited for a moment and it was America who said, ‘You look just as young as the last time, ma’am.’
Lola Lovely looked pleased. ‘I should take you back to Manila with me,’ she said. America laughed off the invitation uneasily.
Lola Lovely ate carefully with her free arm, concentrating on her plate. She picked at her main course, but when I brought the halo-halo out she smiled and sat forward in her chair. After a while, she said, ‘So why is that boy working in a garage? Shouldn’t he be off to college?’
‘He’s not made any set plans yet.’
‘You give them too much freedom,’ she waved her sundae spoon at her daughter. ‘I’d have threatened to cut him off.’
‘He wants to be a musician,’ Benny said. ‘He doesn’t need college for that.’
Lola Lovely started laughing. ‘He should study law like his grandfather. Make some proper money.’ Lola Lovely looked at her daughter and said, ‘It’s fine to encourage these things when they’re young.’
‘Not everyone wants money,’ Benny persisted.
‘Of course everyone wants money! Even Marcos started off with ideals. But power corrupts!’ Lola Lovely said this with a sudden glee; I’d forgotten how she enjoyed holding court, enjoyed proclamations. ‘It’s that wife of his. She’s twisted him. Women shouldn’t meddle with their husband’s politics.’ Aunt Mary’s spoon hesitated on its way to her mouth. Lola Lovely continued, ‘You know, your father always had an eye on the Senate. He’d have made it too, but then of course that scandal—’
‘Aunt Cora said all politicians have mistresses and no one blinks,’ Benny said. His mother stared at him, startled.
Lola Lovely looked stung. ‘It may be gossip for her, but it was my life,’ she said.
‘It was her life too,’ Aunt Mary interjected softly, a look on her face as if she recognised a danger. Lola Lovely looked at me warily and I turned to leave. She needn’t have worried; the
whole barrio knew the story. Cora Sanesteban who, along with her husband, Ignacio, ran the Coffee Shak and the Baigal Bakery two blocks down the hill from the Bougainvillea, was Aunt Mary’s step-sister. Cora’s mother, the mistress of Judge Lopez and a mere filing clerk at his office, had died when her daughter was six, after which Cora and her older brother – for the judge had fathered two children with this woman – came to live in the Lopez household. The judge would not, could not, have turned them away, but Lola Lovely had plenty to say about it and after a while the two kids were made to sleep in the garage, when even the servants slept in the main house. They stayed there for several years. Then the judge died and they inherited just enough to be asked to leave and make their own way in the world. Aunt Mary was a child herself, ten years old, when Cora and her brother came to live with them, and maybe if she’d been older, things might have been different.
Now at least there was a kind of peace. Aunt Mary owned the freehold on both the Coffee Shak and the Baigal Bakery, the only freeholds that Bobby Morelos hadn’t gambled away, but – against the family lawyer’s advice – she refused to charge the Sanestebans any rent.
As I turned to go, Aunt Mary gestured to me to wait. Perhaps she hoped my presence might deter her mother, but Lola Lovely said, accusingly, ‘I kept you safe, didn’t I? When the Japanese were everywhere?’
‘Mom, please.’ Aunt Mary set down her spoon.
‘He comes back from the war, different. Acted as if I couldn’t possibly understand. As if we hadn’t been through hell as civilians too. Did that woman understand him any better than I? A filing clerk! And she could barely spell. And then, just when I think we’ve got our lives back, he presents me with her offspring. I had to think of the effect on you,’ Aunt Mary sighed. ‘They were just children then. They didn’t know about any of that.’