by Niyati Keni
‘Everyone feels they can judge me. That’s why I stayed away.’
‘Mom, no one’s judging you. Shall we just eat?’
But Lola Lovely was not to be placated now and she said, looking at Benny, ‘Fine! You’ve already proved you’re a better person than I am. Are you happy?’ Aunt Mary gave her mother a warning look.
‘Why were you looking at me?’ Benny said. ‘Is this about Aunt Cora?’
‘Aunt Cora!’
‘Well, what else am I supposed to call her?’
‘I suppose it’s accurate enough.’
‘She’s doing ok now. She’s not a bitter person.’
‘Even you have an opinion about it! Why, you’re just a child.’ Benny made as if to respond but closed his mouth again, looked at his mother. ‘And your mother with her feminism and her activism,’ Lola Lovely continued. ‘Seeing my terrible example and determined not to make the same mistake with you!’
‘Mother!’
Lola Lovely threw down her spoon. ‘We can’t even be together one day without a fight.’
‘Mom?’ Benny looked lost.
But she said, ‘Benito, would you finish your dessert in the kitchen?’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’
‘Well, she’s hardly going to dismiss me, is she?’ Lola Lovely said shrilly.
I stepped forward to take Benny’s glass but he shrugged away my help. I looked at Aunt Mary. Her face was dark, lips pressed tight. I followed Benny to the kitchen but he didn’t stay there. He left his half-eaten dessert on the kitchen table and went to his room, closing the door behind him.
America helped me clear the dining room and then took me out into the yard to eat. ‘She’s not at all like her mother, is she?’ I said.
‘Mrs Lovely wasn’t born into money,’ America said casually. I was intrigued but feigned disinterest and America, seeing through it, tossed me a few grains anyway. Lola Lovely, the daughter of a hospital porter, a girl without the benefit of a university education, had somehow managed to land a man like Jimmy Lopez and had climbed into his unfamiliar world. ‘Until he gave her a ring,’ America said, ‘she wouldn’t even let him see where she lived. She made him stop at the corner of the block so that he had to follow her in secret.’
America and I took our time eating and by the time we returned Lola Lovely had retired to the sala, where she sat at the piano fanning herself. I asked if she required a drink and she shooed me away. ‘Just see if my daughter’s finished yet,’ she said without looking at me. The door to Benny’s room was shut, and from behind it I heard the rhythm of Aunt Mary’s precise, melodic sentences. I slipped quickly past the sala to avoid Lola Lovely on my way back to the kitchen.
America regarded me severely. ‘You better not have been listening at the door,’ she said. ‘You make as much noise as a whole herd of carabao.’
‘Is it about Benny? Is he Cora’s boy?’
She started laughing. ‘You’d better not start pecking at my head. You think people have nothing better to do than to explain every last thing to you?’
‘You enjoy knowing things I don’t.’
It was a mistake. I’d forgotten that America, too, was pricklier during Lola Lovely’s rare visits. Her face soured and she said, ‘Let that boy learn his own story without you crowding in on it.’ And with that she barely spoke to me for the rest of the afternoon, except to tell me what to do.
Bobble-Headed Jesus
Eddie Casama sat in the sala at the Bougainvillea, in the centre of the settee, his arms stretched out in both directions along the back of it, shirt sleeves rolled up. Close up, he was younger and softer-looking than I’d imagined. He looked like the kind of man who’d let his kids ride on his back at weekends.
He’d brought another man with him: Cesar Santiago, Pastor Levi’s brother. Cesar was a lawyer and, though he ran a public practice, everyone knew he worked almost exclusively for Eddie, leaving any other cases to his junior partner. Cesar at least was familiar; the Santiagos weren’t rich, but their family had been in Esperanza for three generations so everyone knew them.
Cesar sat in an armchair under the window. The blinds were high and the light on his face was revealing. He smiled wanly at America when she came in to ask what the gentlemen might like to drink. America nodded back at him but, unnerved by the presence of Eddie Casama, she returned briskly to the kitchen, pulling me with her. She sent me back out quickly enough with calamansi juice, soda water and peanuts. ‘Take your time,’ she said.
In the sala, Aunt Mary was leaning forward in her armchair. ‘My son Benito is at the same school,’ she said as I came in.
‘Antonio says he’s tall,’ said Eddie. ‘A basketball player.’
‘Just one of his obsessions. And how is your wife? I believe I met her at a school concert.’
‘Oh, Constanza. Eating my head about what this person or that person said to her. She thought the world of you, though.’
I looked around the room to find somewhere to put the tray, but Eddie’s cigarettes and lighter were on the side table.
‘On the piano will do, Joseph,’ Aunt Mary said.
I balanced the tray with one hand and with the other moved the photographs of Uncle Bobby off the cutwork cloth, laid them gently aside. I set down the tray and poured out mixers of juice and soda, taking care not to let any spill onto the rich, glossy wood of the piano. I glanced at Aunt Mary but she looked pointedly at Eddie. I knew how things worked and, though I wondered about giving Cesar a drink first because he’d smiled at America, I brought the tray to Eddie, who took a glass without looking up.
‘Calamansi and soda,’ he said, ‘freshly prepared. Nothing better.’ He took a sip. ‘This is probably the best I’ve tasted.’
‘Absolutely the best,’ Cesar said.
They were exaggerating of course but Aunt Mary accepted the compliment, though she was too European in her ways for imprecision and said, ‘Joseph made it this morning.’ Eddie looked surprised, as if he hadn’t noticed me up till then.
‘Excellent,’ he said, appraising me without interest, looking away again quickly.
Eddie Casama had been elected barrio captain several years ago, holding office for three years before standing down. In those days, he’d been a small-time businessman running a bakery near the basilica but, even then, he was heading for a laundromat, a chain of dry goods stores, a nightclub, a cockpit, an apartment for his mistress and a 24-hour café at the passenger-ferry terminal. Things had gone well for him, and when he stood down it was to concentrate on business.
When anyone talked about Eddie Casama, it was with a tone that implied he was meant for big things, bigger than whatever the rest of us had in store and, what’s more, that it was inevitable he would get there. It was another constant in the neighbourhood, like Abnor’s tea-stall or the mischief of the jetty boys. There was a rumour that he’d been born clutching an amulet that would guarantee him success in everything he did. Back then I believed it, too, believed that our fates were already decided, that some were simply meant to succeed and others to fail. It was a way of thinking that was deeply ingrained. My mother’s voice had always dropped at the mention of such things, as if even the words held power. My father, claiming greater rationality, had extolled only the power of physical work and a Catholic God, though after my mother died, he turned his back, for a while, on the latter. I wish I could have talked about these matters with Aunt Mary, for I’m sure that she would have been, with her overseas education, level-headed about it. I didn’t see then how these beliefs provided an excuse for inaction, though of course the amulet rumour might also have been about not having to give a man like Edgar Casama his due.
Eddie was quiet for a moment and then, afraid perhaps that he hadn’t finished with all the niceties before he got down to business, he asked after Dub and even Lola Lovely, whom he’d been told was visiting. Satisfied with the answers, he put down his glass and said, thoughtfully, ‘Progress is impossible without change, do
n’t you think?’
Aunt Mary said, ‘That will be all, Joseph.’
‘Anything else to eat, ma’am?’ I said. Aunt Mary looked at each man in turn. Eddie Casama raised his hands to decline.
‘America will need some help,’ she said firmly to me. And to Eddie, ‘It’s one of our foreign guest’s birthdays. He’s asked for a Filipino feast.’
‘Have you warned him he’ll be eating for a week?’ said Cesar. Aunt Mary smiled.
In the kitchen, America was standing in the slanted light from the window, like a woman from a painting in one of Aunt Mary’s books. She’d been deseeding a pumpkin and thin orange threads quivered from her fingertips. ‘So how are things in the corridors of power?’ she said. I repeated what Eddie had said about progress and change. ‘That crook,’ she said. She cupped her hands and moved over to the sink. She rinsed her hands briskly. ‘He’s up to something all right. Whatever it is, his kind always land on their feet.’ She uncovered a filleted milkfish that I’d left on a dish beside the sink, ran her finger lightly along its flesh, feeling for bones. I’d deboned it earlier with an old pair of tweezers and I knew she wouldn’t find any. She nodded and covered it over again.
I waited for Aunt Mary to call me back into the sala but she didn’t. It wasn’t until Lola Lovely came in through the front door with Benny in tow, tired from a trip downtown, that I had the excuse to go back out. Benny stayed by the door as he was introduced but slipped away quickly, loping through to the kitchen to see what he might take to eat in his room. Lola Lovely stood just inside the threshold of the room and eyed the men expectantly. They rose to greet her. She appraised Cesar, her eyes narrowing, and said, ‘You look familiar. Are you a doctor?’ She cupped a hand under the elbow of her plaster cast.
‘A lawyer, ma’am. Cesar Santiago. It’s nothing serious, I hope?’
Lola Lovely waved the cast impatiently, said ‘Oh, it’s nothing. The Santiago brothers. The lawyer. Ah, yes.’ She looked impressed.
‘Mrs Lopez,’ Eddie said, holding his hand out. ‘I’ve never had the pleasure. Edgar Casama.’
Lola Lovely smiled at him. ‘Mr Casama. Are you from round here?’
‘Greenhills born and bred.’
‘A Manila man!’
‘No, ma’am,’ Eddie laughed. ‘Greenhills, Esperanza.’
Lola Lovely looked alarmed, ‘How can that be?’
‘I was born behind Colon Market.’
‘But there are no proper houses there.’
‘There are houses, most certainly. Not as elegant as this one.’
Lola Lovely looked perplexed as she took in Eddie, the Rolex on his wrist, his expensively cut jacket, which he had declined to let me hang up and had now discarded carelessly over the armrest of the settee. She studied him, trying to place him correctly in her world. ‘You’re a friend of my daughter’s?’ she said, and I saw Aunt Mary shift forward in her chair, ready to intervene. ‘She was always interested in the other side,’ Lola Lovely continued. ‘A social reformer at heart.’ Aunt Mary cleared her throat.
‘Then of course Mary will know that the key to social change is opportunity!’ Eddie beamed.
‘Why, yes,’ Lola Lovely looked doubtful. She never seemed entirely at home with other people’s politics.
‘Take me for example,’ Eddie’s tone was almost flirtatious. His eyes shone at her. ‘Why, I didn’t attend school beyond tenth grade.’ I thought how he gave just enough away to seem vulnerable, certain now that Lola Lovely was no threat to him. Lola Lovely allowed herself to be charmed.
‘We knew such difficulties during the war too,’ she said. ‘I had to live in a village with my husband’s foreman and his family. Our house here was stripped by the Japanese. I took what valuables I could carry and we left in the night on an ox cart. Can you imagine it? Mary was just a little girl.’
Eddie laughed. ‘You must have dazzled the entire village,’ he said.
Lola Lovely threw her hands up, delighted. ‘I had to learn how to milk a cow. I had to put my hands down there!’
‘Madam, there is such dignity in working with ones hands,’ Eddie exclaimed. Of course, he spoke like a politician; who could be sure what he really thought? Still, I liked the sound of it.
‘Will you stay for some food?’ Aunt Mary said, though she knew they would hardly have done so at such short notice, and so by asking she gave them their cue to leave. Lola Lovely looked disappointed as Eddie declined.
The men lingered in the hallway for maybe another fifteen minutes saying their goodbyes, edging towards the door with each exchange – last minute queries, mostly from Lola Lovely, about school grades and health, which couldn’t be answered briefly – until eventually Cesar, who had stood gripping the door handle for several minutes already, turned and stepped out into the late-morning sun, moving aside almost immediately to allow Eddie to precede him.
Lola Lovely followed the men out onto the verandah and looked on as they climbed into the back of Eddie’s Mercedes. She waved as the car pulled out of the driveway, a tiny plastic Jesus nodding his endorsement through the back window. ‘How unexpected,’ she said loudly as she stepped back inside. ‘A Greenhills man and quite refined.’
Two Priests
Aunt Mary remained preoccupied for days after Eddie Casama’s visit and though America claimed to have interrogated her about it, we remained unsure as to why. Then, late one afternoon, I opened the boarding-house door to find Esperanza’s two priests side by side on our doorstep. Esperanza being such a populous barrio, it was unusual for the two men to make house calls together and so I was alarmed at the sight of them. The women of the household were at home, but the boys were out and, immediately, I imagined the worst. Father Mulrooney spoke hurriedly: ‘No calamitous acts of God, Joseph. We just wanted to talk to Mrs Morelos. Is she in?’
Father Mulrooney was in his forties but still had a boyish handsomeness about him that made the older women of Esperanza flirt kindly with him and enquire as to whether he was eating properly. He had an air of naivety too, the kind inevitable in men who had entered the seminary at seventeen and known no other life. His hair was coarse and tousled and sandy-coloured and his skin was of the kind of paleness that was ill suited to our sun and had a perennial tinge of redness to it. He had a slightly crumpled look – the sort of man who might in another life have been well advised to marry. Mulrooney was popular in the neighbourhood and well known, for twice a day without fail he walked out from his meagre convento, once before breakfast while the sun was still low and again before supper when the heat was abating. I liked to imagine that these times were chosen deliberately so that the sight of his flock and their uncertain circumstances might curb his appetite, for he remained of slender build.
Pastor Levi, by comparison, enjoyed his wife’s cooking. He was an earnest man, his face prone to smiling and deeply crevassed. He was younger than Mulrooney, in his late thirties. He had travelled a roundabout route through the Lutherans, the Anglicans and an agnostic period during which he had acquired a wife. He returned to Roman Catholicism, kept his wife, though he never completed any official Vatican paperwork on the matter, and carried on to father five children; Mulrooney was the youngest’s godfather. Although Father Mulrooney was officially Levi’s senior, the name of Pastor stuck to Levi: it had a good ring to it.
The two men settled themselves in the sala while I went to fetch Aunt Mary. Both had been to the house before but they, like many of our visitors, seemed not entirely at ease; the place was too impeccably tidy and the presence of the grand piano gave the room a kind of old-fashioned formality. Also, though Bobby Morelos had been dead for years, his presence persisted in the room; his graduation certificates were on the wall, photographs of him on the piano. I’d often admired the portrait of him in naval uniform as I dusted the piano, once I was trusted to do so, my fingers itching to press the keys but afraid of making a sound. In a certain tricky late-afternoon light that gave the present the texture of the past, it almost felt a
s if he might walk into the room at any moment.
Aunt Mary was upstairs at her desk. She wasn’t expecting visitors and she moved quickly on hearing that both priests were here to see her. I followed her down the stairs, heading to the kitchen to fetch water and iced tea, which I knew was Father Mulrooney’s favourite drink. I brought the drinks to the sala but before I could serve them Aunt Mary sent me back out again to fetch America.
‘It’s a terrible thing about the Pope,’ said Aunt Mary, as I came back in, as if she might have been talking about the men’s favourite uncle.
‘Yes. Thank you,’ Father Mulrooney nodded. No doubt he’d had plenty of practice by now with his responses. But he didn’t dwell; there was other business at hand. ‘I’m not at liberty to reveal my sources … ’ he enunciated carefully and, so saying, he blushed. Aunt Mary smiled at him encouragingly. Later in the conversation, on an unrelated matter, he wouldn’t be able to refrain from saying the same name aloud more than once: Jaynie. Johnny Five Course’s sister who ran the Beauty Queen salon. Eddie Casama’s wife was one of her regulars, though it was widely known that Eddie himself was no stranger to manicures. ‘Several days ago,’ Mulrooney continued, ‘I learned from my sources that Eddie Casama has submitted a planning application.’
‘As part of a consortium,’ Pastor Levi said. I looked at America who, like myself, uncomfortable with the idea of taking a seat next to the others, was leaning in the doorway. She looked bewildered; the language of our world had no need for terms like consortium.
‘He wants to build a shopping mall in Esperanza,’ Mulrooney continued. ‘My sources are facing eviction because their business is situated in the area earmarked for redevelopment.’ He flushed again. I pictured the Beauty Queen, squeezed in among the pharmacy, the noodle joints, the market hall and any number of places that were the body of Esperanza.
‘Father Mulrooney came straight to me when he heard,’ Pastor Levi said.