Manolo adjusted the rim of his hat, swatted a fly from his shoulder blade with a snap of his shirt. He leaned further into his new walking stick, watching his wife’s advancement into the throng, comparing this perspective of her to the semblance of a ghost.
Several days after he’d followed her, the images he’d seen and the sensations they evoked still made him sour.
Dark had set in by the time he returned home from his last appointment. Light from the windows brightened the familiar path to his front door, promising a welcome return. Instead of going in directly, he proceeded to the back of the house for a smoke under one of the many shadows offered by the yard’s abundant plants and trees. For the past few days, the smallest interactions with his wife had made him edgy. Ever since he’d seen Tala in the marketplace, hand in hand with a beggar, then cavorting with a common albularyo who played at healing, he’d fought to contain a torrent of questions. Every conversation with her since that day had become an opening for confrontation. Did she know how much the albularyo’s trade belittled his training? Or did she buy into the witch doctor’s spells, more so than his vials and prescriptions? Did his wife have something in common with these people? Tala had come home clutching the red box in both hands. He recalled again the albularyo, the bristles of her hair barely long enough to show beneath the yellow bandanna, the intensity of her demeanor, something so familiar. . . . It frustrated him all the more that he couldn’t ask Tala his questions because she’d offered nothing of her whereabouts that day, except for the usual nonsense about the birds, rocks, and something about bananas and pistachio nuts.
A dog howled in the distance, echoing loneliness, and the crickets began a scattered melody. The moon stood halfway between the earth and sky, resting on the dark silhouette of a nearby mountain. Manolo let another woman’s face occupy his mind. Somehow, his patient’s look had infected him, fueled whatever disappointment Tala’s recent behavior provoked.
This last call had been for an unexpected delivery. The woman’s husband had sent for him after combing the entire province for her midwife. When the midwife did not answer her door, the husband had wandered from neighbor to neighbor, then a bit farther, beyond neighbors to acquaintances, and farther still, beyond acquaintances to strangers.
The husband told Manolo that reports of the midwife varied: She was away, delivering a baby in Mahanao, some said. Others said she was keeping her distance to avoid an unhappy family, whose child she had delivered stillborn. Still others reported she had been kidnapped by ghosts. In the end, when her midwife could not be found, the pregnant woman refused a substitute. “Get a doctor,” she had said to her husband. “Doctors treat every patient like a stranger. I’ll be no different from his regulars.”
The woman was almost fully dilated by the time Manolo arrived, her contractions only three minutes apart. Soon after her waters rushed forth, the baby followed, paddling with his arms and legs, still hoping to swim in the warmth that had enveloped the whole of his existence. After the birth, the woman’s attitude toward Manolo changed. Holding her infant, she thanked him with unmistakable reverence in her eyes.
Manolo was accustomed to being treated well. His patients sent him home with gifts, seeing him as the intermediary between themselves and a higher power to whom they prayed nightly for strength and healing. That night, he knew he did not deserve the credit. This woman had done the work on her own, only needing him as a witness to her glory. But at the moment when their gazes met, Manolo interpreted gratitude. Long after he had forgotten her, she seemed to say with her eyes, she would remember his hands lifting her son into the world.
This brief encounter, a silent understanding between doctor and patient, was not the look that lingered in his memory now. Instead it was a second look that preoccupied him, one he had stolen just before leaving the patient’s room. The woman sat up on the bed, propped up against a small stack of pillows, with the baby asleep upon her chest. Every movement of her arms and fingers, of her head and neck, was slow and deliberate. She was mindful of everything she touched. Her eyes were at once alert and completely at peace. It could have been the quiet after the pain. But Manolo realized it was much more—a transformation particular to a newly anointed mother. He realized too that the reverence he had seen in her eyes a moment before was not for him alone, not for him at all.
Just then, the back door yielded, accompanied by the shuffle of the old ones’ footsteps. Manolo put his present thoughts aside. He nearly coughed out a cloud of smoke and scattered it with the flap of his hand, then extinguished what remained of his cigarette. He saw Mother’s trim silhouette first, followed by Father’s round gait.
“She’s moody waiting for Manolo to come home. What could they be bickering about? Are they already tired of one another?” Mother asked.
“Surely, no. I’m old, not blind. Our son and his wife are in love.”
“Sometimes I wonder if Tala isn’t to blame. Don’t look so surprised, husband of mine. A woman knows these things. She seems so young and inexperienced. I worry that underneath the innocent demeanor, she knows more than she seems to about how to manipulate men.”
Manolo stiffened at his mother’s words. He was irritated and confused by Tala, but not enough to hear a word of criticism against her. Particularly not from his mother, who showered Tala with unsolicited praise on a daily basis and who did not know a thing about the source of his irritation or confusion. Perhaps Old Luchie, the maid, with her arthritis and sagging chin, who avoided everyone as often as she could—perhaps she was the only honest female he knew. Manolo shook his head, denying the possibility.
He had forgotten that his parents sat in the yard to talk after dinner and hoped to be spared from eavesdropping much longer.
“I can’t help but worry about him, you know, because of what happened before. He never got over what Dalaga did to him. And to think that their wedding was the next day. She didn’t even come home for Palong’s funeral.”
Before their conversation could drag on further, Manolo stood reluctantly to announce his presence. They would probably discover him soon and pester him with questions. But Father’s next suggestion forestalled the need.
“The past is the past, my love. Our son has moved on, and so shall we. But let’s go back in,” Father said. “Manolo should be back any second. I want to see how they get along when he gets home. Just beyond newlyweds and already bickering, such a shame. Besides, I smell smoke. I’m afraid to know what’s lurking in the trees.”
“You smell it too! It’s a kapre for sure. I sense an evil spirit nearby.”
He saw Father straighten the edge of Mother’s skirt, which had wrinkled and folded over slightly when she sat. She thanked him by removing a crumb from the corner of his lip. After they had disappeared into the house, Manolo sank into a crouch and looked up at the acacias, the palms, the fruit-bearing trees scattered in the yard. On such a hot evening, there was a windless calm in the treetops, and only starlight illuminated the leaves. Still, Manolo could see the tips of each leaf quiver. He dared to imagine what his parents had, that the kapre’s breath blew upon those leaves as he exhaled from his pipe, smoking from a giant’s height, invisible to the eye.
Manolo climbed to the top of the highest palm tree, determined to be eye to eye with this giant, this kapre. At the top, Manolo called out to the kapre and realized he had only reached the giant’s kneecap. He heard the rumble of laughter in the clouds. With the flicker of a fingertip on the tree trunk, the kapre shook the palm fronds into a frenzy. Manolo scrambled back to earth and stifled the urge to scream into the night. To run wild beneath the trees. To burst into the house, grab Tala by the shoulders, and shake her until she cried.
Instead he stared hard into the back of the house, through paint, plaster, and cement, as if he could see Tala through the walls. What he saw was the image of her wings, hidden away behind the panel in his closet, and even now, pulsating, pulsating against his skull.
There was no way those wings coul
d be still. They never stopped beating, even in his dreams. Manolo could follow his wife in secret all their lives and never come to understand their mystery. The places from which she’d come and the places to which she might wish to return, at any given moment. He wanted the wings to be still. Manolo returned to the tranquility and glow of his patient’s face. To the sense of assurance she had of existing in the world. And in that moment, he knew why her face had haunted him so. It was a look she gave that Tala had never given him. But she would. Tala would one day look at him with the same reverence, and when that day came, the reverence would be real. He had the power to instill life in her, make her round like the moon, to prove that even in his mortality, he was something of a god after all.
4. Openings
These were lazy, slow-moving days for Luchie, when she dusted for the show of it, swept for the show of it, and showed up for the show of being a housemaid, knowing she was really just a ribbon on the doorknocker, a gesture of love for a prized wife.
But times weren’t always lazy. Or slow.
There had been a long sweep of years when everything was frantic, the last of them under Manolo Lualhati’s employment. She would wake up by accident on the mornings when Manolo expected her, an hour earlier than she needed to, sometimes sooner, convincing herself back to sleep, praying even, to rest just a little longer. It was always in vain. Because as soon as her eyes met the dim outline of her room, ordinary objects pushed visions of sleep into regions of the forgotten, grounding her back to life, and there was no going back to the comforting swaddle of dreams. As she shifted into alertness, she gazed at her wooden dresser and the extra clothes folded on top, the single photograph on the wall, and her red shopping cart beside the bed.
In those days, her wakeful mind was a nervous mind, particularly on the mornings she needed to get up for work. There were no fresh starts for Luchie. Even before the day had a chance to begin, she thought and worried, questioning whether or not she was meeting Manolo’s expectations, mulling over the trivialities his family depended on her for.
This fever lasted throughout the day, so that her shoulders grew tense and she had to remind herself to relax her jaw. Her legs, spongy in the thighs and narrowing to spindles, felt disjointed from the rest of her body, as if they led her from place to place with a memory of their own. On the bus ride into Manlapaz, she worried she wouldn’t arrive on time, wishing she could enjoy the view of the countryside at that hour, when only the birds were awake and bustling, the fruit doves and the sparrows, woodpeckers and bee-eaters. She would remember nothing of the walk from the plaza to Manolo’s house, except for the sensation of her legs moving, left then right, swing step swing, brittle, stiff, with a memory of their own. Then, on the bus ride home, she went over everything she had or hadn’t straightened or scrubbed and imagined who might notice.
Their house was always painfully clean.
Manolo had not given her instructions, assuming, she believed, that a maid’s job was straightforward enough. He was rarely home when she was there. Or he spent hours on end holed away in his clinic at the end of the hall, emerging only to escort his patients in or out or to gulp down a quick meal. The women were too distracted with themselves to outline her duties clearly, so Luchie discovered on her own that there were places in the house where she wasn’t invited. From there, she forged safer pockets of work to keep her occupied.
She soon realized, for instance, that Iolana was a jealous woman. Twice Luchie tried to take Andres’s plate following his afternoon merienda, and each time Iolana intercepted, placing her hand over Luchie’s, like a secret handshake, then peeling Luchie’s fingers off one by one. One morning, Iolana followed Luchie into the couple’s bedroom, wordlessly reclaiming the socks and briefs Luchie had picked up from the floor. That was when Luchie stopped picking up after Andres.
She assumed that Tala followed Iolana’s example, dutifully cleaning up after her husband, because Manolo’s life was perfectly ordered. He left no clutter or mess, no articles of clothing, not even a dent to re-fluff in the sofa cushion—not a trace of him lingered about where he wasn’t supposed to. Every sign of his existence was neatly folded or tucked away, safe in drawers and closets. Luchie realized that aside from his paying her on time, she had no idea what kind of man Manolo really was, nor did she care.
Then there was Tala, always smiling-smiling. She made Luchie uncomfortable with her intensity. Luchie assumed she was a young wife, restless and bored. Restless because she was young, bored because her husband spoiled her. In the beginning it felt as if Tala, like her, was feeling out her place in the house, probing Luchie as a way to gauge her own sense of belonging. She was the type of girl who wanted to know how Luchie was doing, smiling-smiling and wanting to talk. But Luchie wasn’t the smiling, talking type. She came to work and sought approval without becoming her bosses’ friend. She didn’t know how to relax in their home, on the job, let alone in their close company, and so avoided Tala whenever she could.
Luchie spent most of her time hand washing and hanging laundry, what little of it there was, and never underpants. In other homes, she had regularly scrubbed the menstrual blood off panties, the sex from sheets. There was nothing to hide from a maid. Luchie thought it funny and odd, even a little flattering, that the Lualhatis kept these facts of life to themselves.
She had no role in the kitchen, so she swept and dusted when she finished the laundry, always keeping busy. Always moving, working, thinking.
Then she came across it one day, a blinding hot day like every other, when everything was the same except for it—the box on the shelf, a square-shaped alteration to the previous day. A curiously red detour from a gray blur of worries, worries carried by brittle legs that hoarded memories like colors. She opened it.
The smell.
Luchie had to stop, arrested by the sensation of something so familiar, like childhood, impossible to recapture, but infinitely hers. She closed her eyes, breathing in deeply.
The smell.
Soft, creamy, velvet. Yes, the wood.
The fruity aroma of the wood—it was made from a kamagong tree, perhaps the very tree she played beneath before there was such a thing as work, or such a feeling as worry.
Luchie touched the pattern of faint lines and could almost see the natural ebony color of the bark underneath the red paint. She could taste the velvety tart of its fruit. The kamagong tree had another name—mabolo. Similar to Manolo. She thought of the way Manolo had reacted on the day she was to move in. I cannot live here after all, she had told him, not offering any excuses. Too much like living in an office, just a few doors from where your boss slept. She couldn’t bear the idea of twenty-four-hour surveillance. She had lived alone for too long, cultivating a preference for solitude, the only thing she inherited from a family she outlived and a son who disinherited her.
Luchie breathed in and out evenly, inhaling a forest of kamagong trees.
Instead of getting angry, she recalled, Manolo had been apologetic for her change of mind. Of course, of course, he assured her, as if the terms they’d both agreed upon during the interview were imposing, unrealistic even. They would not need her every day, he nodded, and her coming in three days a week by bus was a perfect arrangement, a good suggestion on her part.
She’d realized then, hadn’t she, what she could get away with at Manolo’s house?
The way he had looked at her, reminding her of her age, a woman nearing seventy, older than his mother. He must have hired her not to work. By then she knew how to recognize this built-in reflex for guilt, even for wrongs that didn’t belong to him. Yet after taking the job she toiled, afraid, minute by minute, toiling through that fear, when no one ever noticed the timid movements of her arrival, the quiet draft of her leaving. She had already spent years acting out of her own sense of guilt. Devoted to having a purpose, even if it was only to keep house, to scrub clean the menstrual stains for women who didn’t recognize how significant they were to her.
How si
gnificant she wanted to be to them.
Luchie had put down the box with its smell, its distinct velvet sweetness, ripe red fruit melting in her mouth. She decided then to have a seat, and she could probably count the number of times she’d gotten up since.
By now she’d slowed down long enough to watch their show, the Lualhatis, and there, Manolo loitering on the other side of the glass, looking in, not at work after all. That quickly, and the show had begun. Slow and lazy, her bones thanked her, brittle legs recalled a hint of warmth, sending colors back up her spine in a shiver. Aaaahhh. She still remembered how to smile, and felt at that moment, she was doing the job she was hired for.
It only takes a moment, she reflected now. To take a seat. Or get up and join the show, act it out at your own pace. Then one moment to the next, changing the course of a life from frantic to lazy.
Luchie had chosen then, or the moment had chosen her. To embark upon a slower era, when she dusted for the show of it, swept for the show of it, showed up for the show of being a housemaid, knowing she was really just a ribbon on the doorknocker, a gesture of love for a prized wife.
There are dreams that you dream, knowing you are asleep. Knowing you are dreaming. You are adventurous then. You fly, walk through walls, make love, move mountains. If you are brave, you don’t hold back; you make memories like secrets, not for the waking world to know.
Iolana was having just that kind of dream. In this dream, one object, a small red box, sat on the living room shelf, the key attached like a finger curling, inviting her in. Iolana hated the box, wanting it for herself, only for herself, jealous of whatever it contained. She felt the grip of nightmare and ecstasy, both. She rushed to the box, opening the lid with a shaking hand, a quiver between her legs. A rush of light enveloped her.
The Hour of Daydreams Page 4