Esperanza Street

by Niyati Keni

  America was asleep as I slipped across the kitchen. She stirred and turned over and I quickened my step till I was safe in my room. I sat on my bed, my back against the wall, and closed my eyes.

  ‘JeenPaulSarter. Aren’t you clever?’ I opened my eyes to find America leaning in the doorway, her finger poised at the centre of Guernica. ‘You want to tell me where you’ve just been?’

  ‘For a ride.’

  ‘I know that. Why?’

  I looked blankly at her. Her eyes were lined and red. ‘Just for a ride.’

  ‘Just nothing. What trouble have you found now?’ I fought the urge to pull my blanket over my head and shut out the sight of her. She sat down at the table, looked around distastefully at the walls, the tiny, shaded window. She shifted round in the chair to keep the passageway in view. ‘Anyone else brings you trouble and it’ll be you that has to carry it. You understand what I mean?’ I closed my eyes again. ‘I’m just saying,’ she carried on. ‘Course you think you’re a man now.’

  I slid down the wall till I was flat on my bed, studied the ceiling. I waited. America sniffed forcefully. She got up, making more noise, I thought, than seemed necessary. I watched from under my lashes as she pushed hard against the chair to stand, her other hand already reaching for the doorframe. She hesitated at the threshold and I thought she might have more to say but she cast a weary, ill-tempered eye over me and walked out.

  I got to my feet. Usually my door remained open, my room being too small and claustrophobic a space to be shut inside. But now I closed it and as I did so, I heard America’s footsteps pause in the passageway at the sound before continuing into the kitchen.

  ‌A Badly Placed Urn

  The hatch of the sari-sari store framed Missy Bukaykay’s face. A face which bore echoes of her daughter in the lines and angles that she’d handed down to her, but none of the beauty. Missy’s face had long since lost its plumpness, lost any trace of softness, if indeed it had ever possessed it. Her teeth were stained red with betel and in generally poor shape. Because she didn’t see me often and because she’d been so fond of my mother, she always smiled when we met and I, unable to pull my eyes away, bewitched by the inevitability of it, always looked straight at her mouth. She looked up now as I approached and grinned. I smiled back at her but I was disappointed that it should be her in the store hatch; I’d hoped for Uncle Bee, whose eyes were certainly less astute than his wife’s. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ Missy’s gaze levelled with mine.

  ‘Had to run an errand.’ My voice came out husky, thick.

  ‘Mary Morelos asks you to skip school for errands?’

  It was disconcerting to hear Aunt Mary’s name just then. ‘You won’t tell her?’ I said.

  ‘Sure I will. Next time I’m at the country club.’

  I thrust my hands into my pockets and looked up and down the alley.

  ‘Ah!’ Missy leaned forward over the counter. ‘You can talk in the street or you want to come inside, Meester Bond?’ She rocked back on her stool, twitching a finger in the direction of the stoop.

  I went round to the front of the shack. The door was open and the partitioning curtain had been drawn back to let the listless afternoon air circulate and provide Missy with a clear view of the front door. She watched me as I came in, raising an eyebrow as I closed the door behind me. Under her shrewd eyes, I moved awkwardly across the room to the stool she’d pulled out for me. I sat down heavily. Missy looked amused. She waited, her eyes on me as I gazed about at the shelves of jars, the vine-like strips of detergent sachets, the polished scales and brass weights. I studied her framed midwifery certificate, her delivery bag by the door. ‘You’ve come to borrow it for a movie premiere?’ she said.

  Now that I was actually inside, the opportunities for backing out seemed to evaporate in an instant and the necessity to speak, to act, grew suddenly pressing. I took a deep breath. ‘I know a girl,’ I said.

  Missy’s smile vanished. ‘You’ve got a girl in trouble?’

  I looked up, startled. ‘Not me.’

  She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t have figured you’d get into a mess like that.’

  I wasn’t sure how to take this. Sure, I wasn’t exactly handsome. I sat up straighter, tried to meet her gaze squarely, looked away again too fast. ‘What if she can’t keep it?’ I said. My voice sounded weak, childish.

  ‘Wait a minute! Is this about one of the Morelos boys?’ she cried suddenly.

  I felt the heat shoot up to my face. I looked down at Missy’s feet. She wriggled her toes, like someone might drum their fingers on a table. ‘No,’ I said. I heard her snort.

  ‘What are you lying to me for? You think I can’t tell?’ she said peevishly. ‘Well, I can guess which one. Anyway, what does the girl want?’

  I spoke quickly. ‘I was just asking. You know, I thought, if it’s early and if there are some herbs. I mean, they’re just herbs, they wouldn’t make her really sick, right?’

  ‘They put you up to this?’

  ‘I’m not a kid.’

  Missy glared at me. The room felt hot, closed in, and I fought the urge to dash to the door and wrench it open. The sound of a coin rapping on the counter of the sari-sari store broke into the room. Missy got up. She jabbed a finger at my stool, anchoring me to it. She slipped behind the partitioning curtain, pulling it closed behind her. I heard her greet someone loudly, cheerfully, and shortly the sound of boxes scraping, things being shoved aside. I looked around at the shelves again, at the herbs and pastes in relabelled jam and coffee jars. Uncle Bee had catalogued their contents for me once. I tried to replay his voice. He had intoned as if he were reciting a poem, or perhaps that was just how I remembered it. Kataka-taka, angelica, for toothache, boils and burns; Niyog-niyogan, Burmese creeper, for intestinal worms. Nuts and seeds and roots, for body odour, dandruff, hair loss; for pains in the head, teeth, eyes and joints; for piles and for snake-bite. Remedies for a broken heart or to make a person fall in love with you. Or for girls in trouble to get rid of their trouble before anyone could ever guess, before the trajectory of their lives changed forever. But though I could almost feel again the grain of that morning, the details remained hazy, unreliable. I reached out and ran my fingers along a line of jars, up and down, my fingertips marking out the level of their contents. How easy it would have been to take what I needed had I even known what it was. My hand dropped to my side again.

  Missy swept back through the curtain and sighed throatily at the sight of me, as if my presence brought to mind some tedious chore momentarily forgotten. She stared at me, her eyes unexpectedly soft, ignoring the jars behind me. It wouldn’t even have occurred to her that I might have tried to steal what I’d come for and, at the thought, a feeling of gratitude almost like a physical weakness washed over me. Missy walked through into the kitchen, returning quickly with a glass of water. She held it out to me. ‘Drink,’ she said. ‘It’s a hot day. You don’t look so good.’ The glass was beaded with condensation, the water chilled from the Frigidaire. It felt good in my hand. I took a sip. My mouth was dry and the water had a pleasant sourness to it. ‘All of it,’ Missy said. ‘Or you’re waiting for a little umbrella and a straw?’ I gulped some down. ‘You want to help anyone, you help yourself,’ she continued. ‘You don’t have to fix other people’s troubles for them. I said the same to your father.’ I reddened at the mention of my father. I looked up at Missy but her face had an obstinate set to it.

  The sound of another customer came from the store hatch but Missy, calling out to them, stood over me as I finished drinking, her arms crossed, brows stitched into a frown. I made a show of draining the last drops noisily, holding the glass up for her to inspect. She smiled, her mouth closed.

  ‘You have any more errands or it’s back to class now.’ She said it flatly, a statement not a question. I started to get up, then sat down again lightly, perched on the edge of the stool. I’d been too easily dissuaded, I thought. I looked up at her. ‘No,’ she said firmly, as she turned aw
ay. ‘You care about that girl at all, you tell her to come talk to me. Now, you get straight back to school and I might forget I saw you.’

  She seated herself again at her store hatch, looking out over the alley. In the slanting yellow light that filtered into the dark interior, the back of her head had a stubborn solidity.

  I hurried away along the alley, eager now to be out of sight. On reaching the corner I glanced back and caught the slightest movement within the lean ellipse of Missy’s face. She’d stuck out her tongue at me. She leaned forward over the counter and waved before settling back to be obscured at last by a fan of Mr Chips packets.

  I made as if to walk uphill in the direction of the school. But a few steps on from the corner, hidden by Primo’s store, I stopped and turned again seawards to where, in the distance, the afternoon sun picked out the whitewashed planes and roof thatch of Jonah’s office. Idly I imagined chancing upon Uncle Bee as he stepped out of a jeepney or browsed for herbs under the eaves of the market hall. Beyond the jetty, the fine blue cloth of the sea was studded with boats, white lines of surf trailing from them like pulled threads. Dotted about in the shallows, the jetty boys were at work. Involuntarily, I found my eyes searching for my father and, though from this distance I couldn’t have been certain that the dot I recognised was really him, just the knowledge that he was among them disheartened me, as if he might, even from so far away, fathom what I was up to and disapprove. I turned once again to face uphill but I was far from resolute.

  I cast a final look into the mouth of the Espiritista alley and at that moment I saw the figure of Missy Bukaykay step off her stoop and manoeuvre around a deep rut in the track before heading off briskly in the direction of Colon, midwife’s bag in hand. I stood and watched till she was out of sight. I almost wished I hadn’t seen her leave. When she was gone I walked back to the Bukaykay shack, uncertain, even as I neared it, of what I was going to do.

  The store hatch was closed and the front door shut. I sat down on the stoop. There were people about as always but I kept my eyes down, inspected the blistered turquoise rectangle of the step framed by the dry brown skin of my feet. The sun was hard and the texture of my skin was as clear as wood grain. In contrast, my thoughts were like fragments of conversation heard through water. I stood up and tried the door. It was locked, and the relief that coursed through me left the crown of my head prickling. The act of standing and the warm metal of the door handle seemed to bring me back to the surface of things. The noise of Esperanza boomed again. I felt sick. My hands were sweating. I rubbed them on the legs of my shorts and sat back down. I looked up at the door. It was hardly sturdy enough to withstand me for long if I was determined, I thought. The shack, like most of the neighbourhood, depended as much on the proximity of other dwellings, on being overlooked, on the renown of its inhabitants, as it did on locks and bolts for its security and I suppose it was so rarely left empty. I’d have time enough to look through the shelves, read labels, find something, anything, that might trigger a memory – or take a handful from each jar, work out what I needed later on. I tried to imagine doing it, but the Joseph in the image seemed flimsy, like a sketch or a cartoon. I wondered why, when I had no trouble imagining a more substantial Joseph driving Suelita around in a red American convertible of the kind I’d seen in one of Aunt Mary’s photographs. Niagara! I stayed on the stoop. People passed in front of my eyes first one way and then the other, a few glancing incuriously at me and, though there was probably no suspicion in those glances, their eyes made me feel ashamed. Yet I was also a little excited. I’d never stolen anything in my life and for now I indulged myself with the possibility of it as I sat, cradling my head in my hands, palms over my eyes as if preparing for the moment I might act without hesitation.

  ‘Jeez-us. Are you praying?’ Suelita’s voice was disdainful. I looked up to see her in front of me in her school uniform, her weight thrown onto one leg, school bag propped on her opposite hip, like a woman might carry a child. I hadn’t even heard her approach. She regarded me coolly, the same eyes as her mother’s. ‘You want to wait inside, or you’d prefer to sit out here like a badly placed urn?’ Her arm swept a glamorous curve through the air like a movie actress flaunting a cigarette holder, and she fluttered her eyelids, smiling as if she’d said something smart. I stared at her. The gesture was ill-suited to her. If she’d been BabyLu, I thought, or even Lola Lovely, it would have been convincing.

  For a few seconds she held her posture, her hand poised in its arc like a hovering gull, awaiting a response which was slow in coming. Until, discomfited by my silence, her smile grew stiff. Seeing it, I snatched at something to say. ‘Where exactly would a well-placed urn sit?’ I cast my eyes about the stoop for show. I’d intended to put her at ease, perhaps by providing her with another clear shot at me, but I’d miscalculated, for when I looked up again, her expression was combative. She rearranged herself, throwing her weight onto the other leg. The action snagged her skirt and drew it up by a fraction on one side. It took some effort not to look at the extra centimetre of skin. She smiled again, and the icy bow of her mouth suddenly made me want to grip her wrist and pull her roughly to me. I’d never allowed myself such a thought in her presence before. What might she have said, I wondered, if she’d known that only a moment ago I’d been thinking about breaking into her home and stealing from her parents? I stood up, a feeling like electricity in my fingertips. Her smile widened. She had dimples. I’d forgotten how good they looked. My hands dropped to my sides. She stepped forward to climb the stairs of the stoop, brushing past me, the cloth of her sleeve rasping against my shoulder as she passed.

  She waited in the open doorway, her eyes shadowed now by the eaves. ‘Why are you here, anyway?’ she said. For the shortest instant I imagined asking for her help. She waited. ‘Did an owl peck your tongue out?’ she said at last.

  ‘Everyone knows you’re smart. So what?’

  Neither of us had expected my response. Suelita’s cheeks pinked and she pursed her mouth. She considered for a moment before she said, ‘I skipped history. I waited on the other side of Esperanza till I saw her leave.’ Her eyes were on me as I took this in. ‘If you’d been Rico, you wouldn’t have waited before you tried the door and then you wouldn’t have sat down again.’

  I felt hot suddenly, the sun ruthless on my head. ‘He’s a hero,’ I muttered.

  ‘He’s a jerk.’ But she looked about as she said it. I felt a brief flare of pleasure.

  Suelita shook her head and the movement seemed to leave a void that I spoke quickly to fill. ‘First time in a long while I haven’t seen him here. He’s almost worn the bench thin.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I guess he hasn’t got what he’s hoping for yet.’

  She pouted at me. ‘If guys were trains, he’d be the one heading for the broken bridge.’ She leaned back against the doorframe and looked out across the alley. I turned to follow the line of her gaze, took in the dismal alley with the traffic of Esperanza flowing across its mouth. She’d have been greeted by this same vista every day of her life. ‘You’re all the same.’ She sounded bored again. ‘I listen out for long enough and eventually I hear the dud note. With him at least it was straight away.’ She looked directly at me as she said this. I had a sense of things dropping away from me.

  We stood for a long moment without speaking. We might only have been a couple of inches apart. ‘Why is it,’ she said at last, softly, ‘that Fidel never had to learn to cook but I did?’ The question felt almost too prosaic for the moment, though of course she was right to ask it.

  ‘If I was a train … ’ My mouth refused to form the rest of the sentence.

  Suelita started to laugh, her teeth flashing, mouth open, the moist rose of her tongue as fascinating and remote as a sunset. ‘You want to come in anyway?’ she said. I wished she hadn’t said anyway.

  I thought about it long enough that when I finally gave my answer her eyes were intent on me. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘S
uit yourself.’ But she sounded surprised.

  I was smiling as I walked away but with neither pleasure nor amusement. I had cut short with a single word the only time we might ever be alone together. I imagined her eyes on my back as I moved through the alley, but when I looked back from the brink of Esperanza, the door of the shack was closed and she was gone.

  ‌Sea Blue, Blood Red

  My father leaned forward, his forearms resting on the pew in front. He stared up at the life-sized wooden Jesus on his cross. Jesus’ paint was peeling and his robes, which had once been a blue the colour of the sea out over the reefs, had faded to early-morning sky or, in places, chipped away altogether to reveal the grain beneath. It had been a while since my father had brought me here and I hadn’t rushed to remind him. He’d been quiet all the way from the jetty but, looking at him, I was sure he had something to say. There was no one else here now. He’d waited for the last person to leave and still he glanced anxiously at the door, fingering the bamboo pendant about his neck – another cross with a minuscule Jesus on it, which I remembered playing with as a kid, hopping it up a mountain of peas that my mother had asked me to shell.

  ‘Missy says you asked about … some girl.’ He said the last two words delicately. I felt my skin bristle. I should have realised she’d go to him. He waited and when I didn’t say anything he added, ‘You don’t have to fix anyone else’s mistakes, Joseph.’

  He watched me as he said this and though I knew I shouldn’t have, I said, ‘Why is everyone so sure it’s not my mistake?’ The question rang out louder than I’d intended in the close air of the chapel. My father’s face grew livid. His grip tightened on the wood of the pew till the skin over his knuckles was stretched and pale. He looked up at Jesus, his eyes apologising for his son.