White Turtle

by Merlinda Bobis

  “White white,” the chanter repeated, squatting before the child.

  “And beautiful?”

  “Beautiful.” She opened her arms towards the girl as if to embrace her, but she clung to her mother.

  “You’re all shy now, hey?” The mother laughed.

  “Beautiful,” Lola Basyon laughed, too, pointing at the daughter.

  For the first time since she boarded the plane from her country, the old chanter felt very relaxed. She was making a real conversation at last. She will tell her grandchildren just how nice these people are. And they saw the turtle, after all, they really saw it. Ay, I could sing for them forever.

  With her second glass of champagne and amidst this comforting company, the old woman was transported back home, close to the forest and the sea of her village, among her grandchildren begging for the old story, waiting for her to take them for a swim on the turtle’s back. All in a night’s chant.

  Ngunyan na banggi

  ipangaturugan taka ki pawikan;

  duyan sa saiyang likod

  kasingputi kang buto.

  Ngunyan na banggi

  ipangaturugan taka ki pawikan.

  The warmth in her stomach made double-ripples as she began to chant again, filling her lungs with the wind from the sea and her throat with the sleepgurgles of anemones. Her cheeks tingled sharply with saltwater. “I’ll dream you a turtle tonight—” she sang softly at first, then steadily raised her volume, drowning the chatter in the foyer.

  Three harmonising voices reverberated in the room with more passion this time, very strange, almost eerie, creating ripples in everyone’s drink. All book-signing stopped. People began to gather around the chanter. By the time the main door was pushed open from outside by a wave of salty air, the whole foyer was hushed. An unmistakable tang pervaded it—seaweed!

  “White white…oh, look…beautiful white!”

  The little girl saw it first, its bone-white head with the deep green eyes that seemed to mirror the heart of the sea and the wisdom of many centuries. It was as large as the four-seater table from where the three authors stared in bewildered silence. Taking in the crowd, the white turtle raised its head as if testing the air. Then it blinked and began to make turtle sounds, also in three voices harmonising in its throat and blending with the song of the chanter. Everyone craned their necks towards the newly arrived guest.

  Six voices now sending ripples through everyone’s drink. Hesusmaryahosep, the Filipina journalist muttered under her breath, a miracle! The mother and daughter, and the young man gasped as the immense creature came very close, while, at the other end of the room, the anthropologist stood riveted, all movement drawn in, pushed to the back of his eyes. A hundred white turtles somersaulted there.

  Whatta gimmick, a regular scene-stealer, Cowboy thought as he left the book-signing table and strode towards the very late guest, peeved but as curious as everyone. Meanwhile, the older writer, sideburns strangely tightening against his cheeks, peered from his spectacles and Oriole sensed the salt-sting behind her eyes. “Ohs” and “ahs” travelled the foyer while the hand of the woman who loved the kimona, flew to the pearls in her throat and the cobalt blue dress hugged itself, swaying to the chant. The skin around everyone’s ears tingled.

  As if in choreographed motion, all bodies began to lean towards the two chanters, arms stretched out, palms open, raring to catch each of the six voices. Even Cowboy had succumbed to this pose which was almost like a prelude to a petrified dive or dance. For a brief moment, everyone was still.

  “Can I pat it?”

  The girl had wriggled free from her mother. “Can I?” Her voice, in its foreign tongue and timbre, wove into the long, drawn-out vowels of the chant.

  But the mother heard her daughter distinctly above the alien ululations. She grabbed the eager hand and held her close, hugging her tightly. The dreams of dead children, the mother remembered, goosebumps growing on her arm. Why am I being so silly?

  “I want to pat it. I want to touch—it’s a good turtle, a beautiful, good turtle,” the child protested, beginning to cry.

  The spell was broken. Everyone started moving and speaking in unison, some in wonder, others with the deepest unnameable emotions, but a few murmured their doubts. Dreams? Dead children? Suddenly, they remembered the story. Funerals. One man contemptuously dismissed this foolishness and argued instead against cruelty to animals. It was probably flown all the way here. Part of the act? Just look at that poor, strange, beautiful thing, an endangered species, no doubt. But what if it had been smuggled in? speculated an elderly woman. It might not have even been quarantined—the crowd began dispersing. In the din, the turtle stopped singing and Lola Basyon swallowed her voice.

  Silent now, the massive whiteness crawled towards the table where the books were displayed. Passing the snakeskin boots of Cowboy, it seemed to shudder and hesitate before moving on. The chair of the readings rushed out of the room to ring for help.

  When the police arrived, they found it nestling its head on the old woman’s lap beside the table of books. They were dumbstruck. What whiteness, what extraordinary, beautiful whiteness. Colour of bone. And with eyes full of understanding as they stared at the last two people in the room. By then, everyone had been asked to clear the area. Only Lola Basyon and the anthropologist were left behind.

  She wanted to explain to the men in blue that it did not mean to cause harm or any trouble, that perhaps it came to the reading because she did not have a book. Because the story that she chanted was written only on its back, never really hers. Only lent to her in a moment of music. She wanted to plead for them to be gentle with it. It was very tired after a long, long swim. But how to be understood, how to be heard in one’s own tongue.

  It blinked its emerald eyes at the police. It seemed sad, as if it were in mourning. Its white back stirred, then rocked like an inverted cradle. The anthropologist sensed the burial of dreams. Gloved hands steadying the creature, the police wondered about the unnameable emotion that stirred in their wrists, a strange, warm ripple of sorts. They lifted it with utmost tenderness as if it were a holy, precious thing. It was as large as the table, but oh so light.

  MacDo

  I am twenty-seven and this is my first time. It’s also my sister’s first time. She’s eighteen.

  “Good morning, ma’am. How are you today? May I help you?” chirps the young girl at the counter, in very well-enunciated English.

  “Uh-huh, what would you like, Rosa?” I nudge my sister.

  “Whatever you like—” She’s overtaken by severe coughing.

  “Okay ka?” I rub her back. I sense a hollow kick with each cough.

  “Just barking again, don’t worry” Rosa is hunched over her palms, trying to muffle the sound.

  The young girl steps back slightly, still smiling, and politely pursues our transaction. “So what would you like, ma’am?”

  “Uhmm…maybe, uhmmm, I don’t know.” I hear synchronised fidgeting from the long queue behind me. “What do you have?”

  She never loses her chirpiness as she enumerates the lot in singsong: “Big Mac, Quarter-pounder, fries, apple pie…” etc., etc.

  “Do you have a—a small Mac?” I fondle the two tightly folded hundred-peso bills in my pocket.

  “Small Mac?” The girl smiles overbrightly. “Not really, ma’am.”

  There is a slight titter in the queue.

  “We just want the simplest hamburger, please, no borloloy—” No frills, more like a sensible meal, yes, that’s what I mean.

  An impatient tut-tut behind us.

  “Well, ma’am, I think you’ll enjoy our regular hamburger then—”

  “How much?”

  “Fifteen pesos…actually, all the prices are up there.” Lisa indicates the large billboard. Her name-badge shines under the bright fluorescent.

  “One regular hamburger then and a Coke, no, make it two regulars and one Coke, no, make it two Cokes, I think?”

  “Yes, two re
gulars and two Cokes.” Rosa has recovered. She even finished the mental computation which I was trying to make in relation to our other expenses for the afternoon.

  “So, two regular hamburgers and two Cokes,” Lisa reiterates our order, as though we would deny it.

  A sigh of relief from the queue.

  Ms MacLisa hands me the change and beams in her very neat uniform. “Enjoy your meal, ma’am.”

  I can’t handle charm, so I simply shuffle out of the queue, my sister in tow.

  “Spoken-ing English—ma’am?” Out of earshot, I mock the language and demeanour of our sweet server. I’m not being fair; of course, she’s working with the nicest golden arches.

  “Spoken-ing dollar, ma’am.” A joke between Rosa and I—to speak English is to speak dollar. “Very high-class siyempre, ma’am.” Nose upturned, Rosa flicks her hands fastidiously before swooping at the grub.

  We both have a good laugh, while munching our very first MacDonald hamburgers.

  Rosa is unusually thin. There are shadows under her eyes, giving her a wide-eyed look, as if she were anticipating the world to surprise her. I have a very pretty sister.

  “This is okay.”

  “This is different.”

  To say the least. We hardly eat out and, when we do, only if it’s my payday, we choose the smallest noodle stand parked among the hawkers in the market. Usual fare: only one bowl of noodles, and may we have an extra bowl and spoon, please, then one pork-bun plus a Coke to wash down the meticulously halved meal. Hating-kapatid—halved-for-sisters, meaning everything equally divided, the same soup-level in the two bowls and a couple of perfect half-moons out of the bun. Sometimes, I let Rosa cheat a little. She used to be hungry all the time.

  “Hoy, eat, eat up,” I say, seeing that she’s left half of her burger untouched. “C’mon, Rosa, no leftovers now.” We can’t shame our first MacDo—pronounced with a glottal stop in the “o”, as if your throat suddenly got clogged with fries, yes, something like that. MacDo. Local nickname for MacDonald.

  “I was hungry, but I’m not now—” she’s coughing again and knocking at her breast with a fist, as if chastising her own body.

  “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” I say, her mannerism irritating me.

  She laughs and covers her mouth with one hand, while waving the food and me away from her with the other.

  Loss of appetite, weight, sleep, plus night-fevers and coughing, severe coughing, especially at night. We’ve been careful though. We make it a point to sleep in opposite positions, her feet beside my head and vice versa, that sort of “safe” arrangement on the small bed in our rented room with the grilled window that looks out to a high wall, one can hardly see the sky. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the moon strays there.

  “Here, Manay, you eat my other half—no, maybe, you shouldn’t…” Rosa frowns at the ketchup-drowned specimen.

  We’re trying to play safe, as I said. We still don’t know the X-ray results, the final evidence. The doctor will declare his verdict later today and, maybe, I don’t have to sleep with feet next to my pillow after all. I must say, it’s not all that olfactory-friendly.

  “But it’s too good to be left uneaten.” I grab the remains of her cold burger and feed. “Don’t worry, I have the constitution of a bull.”

  “Thick hide,” she teases, while chasing her next breath.

  “Kapal-muks—” Thick-face, meaning no shame.

  I have none of that, but only when it comes to applying for continuous salary advances when times are hard. I don’t pretend to be more than a small-time clerk in a Catholic college.

  One of the lecturers, a strange guy who drives a new Lancer, must have smelled my poverty. He used to offer me his extra sandwich during lunch breaks. He’s extremely religious and, according to campus rumour, might even be contemplating to enter the priesthood. He often prays with a discreet ring rosary around the middle finger of his right hand, yes, zealously invokes all the holy mysteries even during class hours, so I trusted him, but only for a while, because, after weeks of free sandwiches, his full generosity was revealed. On Valentine’s day, he gave me a whole frozen chicken, offered me a lift, then tried to take me to the biglangliko, “the sudden-turn”, local euphemism for a short-time motel. It was quite a scene. I shoved the chicken’s ass at his face and said, no, thank you. He never gave me presents again.

  I wanted to tell the Dean, but couldn’t be bothered. Besides, I really musn’t offend anyone, as I’ll be a long time yet in that college. I do one or two night classes each semester for a course that will probably stretch for God-knows-how-long. My teachers say I’m too smart to just be a clerk, so I should stick it out, but, believe me, my sister is even smarter. I’m sending her full-time to the same college where I work. Both our studies are paid through my salary deductions which are never enough, so I request for advances regularly. The college Treasurer, a kindly deacon, always accommodates these “loans”, because he doesn’t want us to quit school. My sister and I always get more than average marks.

  “I think I have it.” Rosa’s tone is too flippant.

  “But what else can you have, tell me, when you have everything, brains, beauty—”

  “Ay, Manay, don’t make fun of me now…what if the X-ray’s bad…?”

  “On top of what you already have, kiddo, any extra ingredient won’t hurt—it’s curable after all.”

  “But too expensive…the medicines…check-ups…”

  “Aw, we just have to cut down on our MacDos.” I wink at the bright billboard of great American cuisine. Beneath it, young MacLisa is still slaving away with her canned niceness.

  I’m a bit jealous, really. Never had the Lisa-factor, that confident pleasantness, when I was young. And I was terrified of immaculate counters anyway. Back in our province long ago, my mother and I used to have arguments before she could force me to go to the bank and withdraw, too often, from the family’s dwindling account. My hands and feet would grow cold. Stage-fright at the bank! Once I felt a few drops of wee soaking my pants as I stammered to the teller who, I must say, was never as chirpy as our Lisa.

  “You never worry, no, you make light of all our worries.” My sister is unusually pale.

  “Worry won’t earn you a centavo.” I have learned that now. “You all right?” She really must eat.

  “I can stop college for a while if money—”

  “No, if things get bad, I’ll stop, and that’s the end of the discussion.”

  Because we always get by anyway. Like the time when our suburb had the worst ever monsoon flood and we couldn’t leave the house. We halved an orange for breakfast and a sweet potato for dinner. In between, we slept, because, when you’re asleep, you forget that you’re hungry.

  “Hoy, Rosa, you might like some fries instead or apple pie, you hardly ate, we need to have you looking fit for the doctor—”

  “Worry won’t earn you a—” Her retort concludes in frenzied coughing. She’s hunched over her Coke, both hands over her mouth.

  Times like this, I’m afraid her lungs might burst, and I won’t have enough salary advances to put them together again, but this scene passes, it always does, I know, as I rush to her side of the table, rub her back, give her a napkin, hold her hand, crack a bad joke about barking in English, she likes that as she’s been reading a lot on American imperialism for a Politics paper, while I sort of orate to her ear about how convinced I am that MacDo tastes okay, really, and she giggles and says, stop, you’re tickling my throat even more—

  “Ay, look what you’ve done!”

  I overturned her Coke, and mine as I tried to save hers. Two plastic glasses roll and the table becomes a sweet river, and all eyes turn towards the giggling-coughing girls.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry…” I continue my oratorical mode, addressing my sister, the staring diners and Lisa, of course, who suddenly appears at my elbow, efficiently armed with rag and mop.

  “It’s all right, ma’am, I’ll take care of it, it’s all right… is
she all right?”

  “Rosa, Rosa…you okay?” I feel her shaking against me.

  She’s laughing and coughing into the napkin while mouthing the slogan “Coke adds life”, she’s after each breath in desperate pursuit, she’s damp all over with cold sweat—

  “Maybe, you should take her out for some air, ma’am.” Lisa is fairly solicitous, helping me raise my wilted sister from her seat.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” Rosa keeps saying. The napkin falls from her hand—

  On the table, the confirmation is clear, more definite than the long-awaited X-ray result.

  Lisa sees it and draws back. My sister and I can only stare.

  The napkin is blood-stained.

  From a safe distance, Lisa looks shaken, worried. She keeps wiping her hands on the rag.

  “It’s all right, I’ll take it out with me.” I snatch the soiled napkin, but not before the diners at the next table have seen it. I hear the knowing murmurs. From the corner of my eye, I see Ms MacLisa mopping the spilled Coke off the floor with such ferocity.

  The Curse

  “Aloe vera and five novenas for Maria Magdalena.”

  “We don’t pray novenas for Maria Magdalena.”

  “But, maybe—”

  “Why her?”

  “Because.”

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  The smooth scalp absorbs their altercation and six kinds of sweet-smelling herbs gathered from the riverbank. Kulong-kugong, kadlum, verbena, artamesa…she’s wearing the river on her head and she’ll walk out of this room of potions and incantations to the streets of Iraya, holding up her bounty and calling out those names of sweetness. Then the neighbours will come out of their houses, sniffing her trail. They will say, hoy, come over, you hawker of fragrances. But she will not stop. She’s not selling. All these scents are her hair. And they will envy her, they with the black tresses.

  “Maria Magdalena—halat nguna, are you insinuating—?”

  “Dulce, Dulce, listen to me first.” Pay Inyo, the village medicine man, grave-digger and corner store owner, is losing his cool authority under this dear, fat woman’s unblinking scrutiny. She’s reading me till the secrets of my bones, he thinks.