The man took the last bite of his grilled pork and threw the empty skewer into the street. He squatted down to inspect the intricately folded leaves Inday had worked on the previous evening, and Baitan could see each prick of stubble on the man’s chin, the pindrop of barbecue sauce on one corner of his thin mouth.
“Did you make these all by yourself?” He licked his fingers before picking up a grass doll, holding its makeshift hands in his fingertips and dangling it from side to side in a silent, helpless dance as he finished chewing.
“I help my mom make them. She’s getting us some lunch. She’ll be back any second now.”
“It’s late for lunch. Getting close to dinner now. You must be hungry.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Here, have this bag of turon. I was saving it for dessert. Go ahead . . . take it. That’s right. It’s good, huh?” He patted Baitan on the head. “Remember, if you see the girl who calls herself Tala, tell her that her brother is looking for her.”
But Baitan had not seen Tala in weeks. He knew where she lived, could still envision her yellow house with white curtains, the tree in the front yard bearing starfruits, the brightly dressed neighbor fanning herself on her front stoop, the nutty smell of kare-kare drifting out of someone’s open window. He’d walked her home before, as far as the edge of her cul-de-sac, helping her carry a grocery bag most of the way then waiting until she was safely inside before turning back. It may have seemed superfluous, in broad daylight, to consider Tala unsafe until she was indoors, but something about his friend seemed vulnerable and worthy of protection. This part of Tala seemed just as much of a child to Baitan as he was, and because of that fragility, whether actual or imagined, he could easily forget she had him by more than a decade. When they’d walked through the market, he often pretended that she needed him there, like he was a bodyguard, only half her size.
Baitan considered the fact that the albularyos, Tala’s sisters, were gone. He could not be sure that their disappearance was related to Tala’s recent absence. He had to tell her about the albularyos, in case she did not know. And he had to tell her about the man who said he was her brother.
The next day he walked to Tala’s when the sun was still new, when the strange man’s face was reduced to a blur in his memory and Baitan could focus on Tala instead. How she could forget herself while talking about Manolo, describing her husband’s quiet passion, dedication to his patients, strong but peaceful hands—traits Baitan could not fully grasp or appreciate except for the fact that they made Tala happy. Happy—the word suited Tala precisely and was perhaps the reason she seemed so fragile in Baitan’s mind. He had not come across anyone of her carefree nature before. It did not seem to belong in this world, at least, not in his world, where only the tough or numb or criminal could get by and every passing happiness had weight, imbued with the substance of those hardships overcome or temporarily forgotten. She was either naïve or precious. He’d decided on precious.
At her house he dared not knock, so he lingered outside in the hopes she would appear. She did not, but others did. Two old grandmothers who probably stayed home all day, married to their routines, sensing novelty in the wind like the first prick of rain on the skin. From this monotony they observed his presence immediately, finding him through the window, a woman with long silver hair and another with a fat face and dark mole on her chin. The curtain flickered, changing places with their faces. Only one came out to greet him when the front door opened. She and a pear-shaped grandfather wearing a white Fruit of the Loom tee that bulged at the waistline.
“Hoy, you there,” the old man said.
Baitan told him what he’d come for. To let Tala know a man was looking for her, and that he said he was her brother. To tell her that the albularyos were gone.
The man returned to the mat every day for the next three days, and Baitan discovered he had a name—Charo. Each day Charo brought him a treat in a greasy paper bag. Inday disliked Charo from the get-go, told him to take his bags and stuff them with his bullshit someplace else. She warned her son against such strangers, certain from their walk and talk alone they were up to no good. But Baitan’s stomach grumbled all day no matter how well he’d eaten, and the grease on the bags appealed to him with its promise of something deep fried and delicious, so he sought Charo out to ask for his snack. In addition to the food, Charo offered the boy beer and cigarettes. He tried a puff each time, but it always made him gag. He drank the beer until he hiccuped. He preferred the food, but appreciated being treated like a man.
Charo informed Baitan that he’d seen Tala and had had dinner with her family. He reported that his sister had asked after him and sent him a message that she was feeling ill from pregnancy, but would see him in the marketplace soon. With this news, Baitan’s suspicions toward Charo subsided somewhat. He listened more readily to Charo’s stories of the big city with its buzzing port, where opportunity was abundant and available for the reaching. Charo had been impressed by Baitan’s run of the market, but told him there was still far more to learn. The streets of the city were like a video game, he coaxed, and he could teach Baitan not only how to play, but to win. He described the air-conditioned malls and the fountains bursting throughout the outdoor shopping centers, ten times the size of the Manlapaz market. He described the exotic cuisine from all over the world, sizzling on heaping plates for the price of a dime. The crowds on the sidewalks were so thick they held up traffic for hours at street crossings. He would see street performers from the circuses of China and the alleyways of India beside the seaport, alongside American jugglers and Brazilian stilt walkers. He would have a maze of rooftops to jump across, his own pedicab to shuffle him to every part of the city. He offered to bring Baitan along, take him in as a boarder and employ him as an errand boy for his thriving business, and with the money he earned from tips alone, his mother would have enough to own a proper stall and have breakfast, lunch, and dinner twice. Baitan wavered—she would not be happy, not with him so far away. Then Charo told him about the candy, and Baitan’s ears perked up like antennae. A big stuffed bag of toffees, jellybeans, caramels, imported chocolates, and pastillas waited for him in the car, globs of sweetness ready to appease him en route to the other side of the mountain.
15. Shadows, Ghosts
They came down from the mountain, sleepless and haunted, the thirst for vengeance following them from dreams, tempered by memories of a previous life. With darkness as their accomplice, they traveled undetected by the sleeping villagers, save those who dared to linger after hours, only to forget their bravery at the first trace of unnatural scurrying in the grass—of night creatures waiting to steal their last breath for immortal wrongdoing.
Weeks after the city of tents had been dismantled and the parts returned to backyard sheds and empty closets, when the dust had settled over new paths made by recent wagons loading and unloading supplies and overheated kalabaw dragging their giant hooves, these same ghosts brought pickaxes and dynamite. They surveyed the mountain, diligently testing the strength of the rock face before lighting their explosives. The blast sounded in the night like a second earthquake, disrupting dreams and sending nocturnal creatures scurrying from their hiding places. It disintegrated the landslide to bits, finishing the work that the villagers had started and the government had ignored. By the time the military arrived with a bulldozer, enough space had already been cleared for passage by that monstrous machine, and the officials from the capital would snap photos alongside the absence of rubble and publicize them in black and white, taking credit for another mission accomplished on behalf of the people.
In the wilderness of the peaks, in the company of mosquitoes, wild pigs, and unbendable wills, they slept in felled trees, hollow with rot. They cleared miles of brambles with machetes and moved from mountain face to mountain face to avoid detection. Had they not been ghosts, frequent starvation, boredom, and unchanging hardship would have broken them. For now, the mountain was their camouflage in a silent, ongoing search for b
lood that left no one safe from indiscriminate eruptions of violence. They left Manlapaz in peace, though even Manlapaz, like other barrios of similar size and obscurity, could encounter fires, gunshots, death—repercussions of the vengeance against those who despised the ghosts and whom they, in turn, detested.
After the landslide had been cleared, they returned, night after night, leaving the security of dense leaves and untamed ground to walk the village with unusual frequency. They circled the mansion by the barrio square, where the photographers lunched and the military men boasted of their unmitigated sway over the simple residents of this good-for-nothing town. Contracts were signed (with endless amendments and clauses that rendered them useless) and money exchanged. The idea was for Manlapaz to receive a face-lift, just as they’d publicized in the papers: contractors hired, potholes resurfaced, broken fences repaired, and everyone would be happy. But even as they waved their pens and posed for photos, the officials from the capital knew where all the money would end up. The bureaucrat who lived in the mansion wasted no time drawing plans for expansion. A second wing would be built for a hot tub on marble flooring, with an adjoining banquet room boasting floor-to-ceiling gothic windows overlooking a secluded courtyard. As the weeks passed, signage throughout Manlapaz remained torn, and crooked streetlights continued to blink irregularly as they had done since a magnitude of 6.9 had rocked them. Plans for the hot tub moved forward; municipal construction came to a standstill.
The ghosts listened in on the short-lived government meetings that quickly became garish parties, watched through the harsh morning light as the bulldozers and chauffeur-driven cars with tinted windows made their way down the mountain once more. Then they surveyed the remodeling site as they had the face of the mountain, assessing the strength and solidity of the existing structure, counting residents, visitors, automobiles, bullets, sticks of dynamite. They itched to ignite their explosives and watch it all burn.
But they kept the fire burning within, storing up their hatred for another war, another time. Manlapaz sheltered a people with faith and reverence, who had suffered enough at the discretion of unseen forces, only to come together to fix the resulting messes on their own. For them, government promises held little sway compared to the helping hands of brothers and sisters, the comfort of a good meal, and the very real presence of mystery. This mystery had no connection to more formal habits of religion. It drove them to act in a manner that outsiders would have considered irrational. By daylight, they revered the same fascinating and immortal beings, neither gods nor demons, that they feared by night.
They uttered greetings like “Excuse me, sir” to the openings in anthills, avoided long stretches of dark, spoke to the swaying in the treetops. They hiked into the forest to tell the diwata their stories, sat on felled logs beside invisible companions, recounting memories of the dead. They left heaping plates of food in carefully designated locations to win favor or seek forgiveness. The ghosts, making their way to and from their furtive errands, hid in the underbrush and listened patiently, even when the monologues lasted for close to an hour. Then they sought the food, having memorized every drop-off spot. Warm or cold, they licked the plates clean of every crumb and dripping. The villagers, after returning for their tableware, went home appeased by the significance of empty plates, and every bite swallowed reminded the ghosts to surrender them to their peace.
Each girl clearly remembered the day she had arrived—the memories were different but the feeling had been the same for all six—like dying, without the freedom of death. They shared one room in Charo’s shoe factory, where they lived and worked accepting johns, and when they had a few hours’ peace to draw the curtains that hung between their beds to write in notebooks, listen to music, paint their toenails, and do the things that young girls do, they recognized the shadows in each other’s eyes, the same ones that ate into their flesh from the inside.
When the seventh girl arrived, her eyes clear, the youngest girls fawned over her and the older ones waited bitterly for her eyes to become flat and dull, then flicker once more, with the dominion of the shadows they all shared. But this girl, of legal age and still a virgin, was being saved for a bigger payday. It took weeks for Charo to find the right overseas buyer, and from there, to get all his red tape cleared. In those weeks, her vision remained clear. She convinced the others to see once more with the eyes of the living, and if they could not, to imagine.
Her escape plan worked. It was as simple as stealing a key, waiting for the factory workers to clear out, the attendants to leave, and the pimps to pass out from drunkenness, heavy with the influence of the drugs, presents from the johns, that the girls had slipped in their drinks. They brought nothing but the clothes they wore and the money they’d hidden. Perhaps they succeeded because they bore no illusions to slow them down. Each girl accepted the shadows that bonded them as permanent fixtures. Rather than fleeing from the shadows, they dug deeper in, deep enough to get lost in the smoke and peer through to other side. The seventh, unlike the rest but equally beloved, had yet to reveal her own demons.
16. The Debt
Their walk from river to house was not the same as the one they had taken from house to river. There were three of them now, and the return with this new person at their side seemed to occur on a different day, in a different lifetime. Manolo’s first impression of Charo as a ghost had stuck, causing all the same premonitions he had gotten as a child whenever he played with malice. The feeling of their last game stayed with him and Tala both, the chill and the cold of pretending under a dark sky, the desire for home and for the warmth of their bodies huddled together for a tender night’s sleep. But on this walk, they did not feel the comfort of walking toward a warm bed. No one spoke. Charo smoked like a factory pipe, one Marlboro after the other inhaled into ash as Manolo savored his one. None of the darkness gathered between leaves, beneath cars, or peeking from behind the shadows demanded notice. All of it took shape in the bags of Charo’s eyes, the weight of visions he’d once glimpsed, and the secrets they held about Tala’s past. But his eyes and his walk were sleepy from drink, and his sway beneath its influence weakened him.
In that quiet countryside nook, the Lualhatis’ house was the only one lit at the hour of their return. Iolana and Andres woke to the sound of their voices, particularly the alluring new cadences of a visiting guest. Regardless of the time, Iolana could not resist bringing the kitchen to life for the occasion, frying thin slices of marinated beef, serving it with steamed rice and a salad of chopped tomatoes, onion, and pickled egg for the guest. She insisted that Tala make a sweetened beverage from grated cantaloupe, and if it weren’t for Andres’s gentle scolding, she would have had the energy to bake bibinka from scratch to go with the coffee she had brewing.
But Charo showed little appreciation for the efforts taken on his behalf, speaking little if at all, looking up primarily to watch Tala with no emotions showing on his face. He was forlorn and quiet, but not shy, shadowy, but always at the forefront of their attention. He did not inspire fear, but suspicion, suspicion that verged on the brink of anger. His appetite was bottomless, competing with the depths of night. Andres was the only one who joined him to eat, his saliva dripping instantly from the roof of his mouth at the first smell of food. But Charo took four bites for every one of his, and if Andres had had the room for seconds, Charo left him none. He wiped his mouth continually with the back of his hand in a sloppy manner, though his reticence kept him from being sloppy with words.
They assembled around the kitchen table with mixed expectations, a family brought together after midnight, improvising the steps of their reunion. Charo seemed more like a stranger than Tala’s brother. For Iolana, he was a source of endless fascination, even when that fascination came from a sense of disgust at something less refined than she. She coughed repeatedly at the smoke that filled her house from the man’s cigarettes, dangling at the edge of his plate right next to his food.
For Andres, he was something of the inevit
able, like corns on the bottom of a well-traveled foot, someone from Tala’s past who was bound to show up, for a girl that pretty had to have ugly relatives somewhere along the line to compensate. Charo was not necessarily ugly, though, just hidden, like a person without a face, with a face underneath a face you could not read. He peered at Charo’s gloomy attire, unshaven mustache and beard, and the long stringy hair that did not quite disguise such naked eyes. Eyes that could be spent or waiting. Andres did not attempt to solve this riddle. He basked in the perfect cup of coffee instead, thinking regretfully of the bibinka he’d stopped his wife from baking. Andres suggested that Charo drink a strong cup before leaving to wake himself up for the journey back to his lodgings.
After entertaining themselves back into fatigue, Iolana and Andres returned to their room, bringing the remains of their lukewarm coffee and saving their questions for the morning. Manolo and Tala did not wait long for the answers to their own questions.
“I’ve come to collect my due,” Charo said, bluntly stating the point of his visit. He pushed muddy shoes against the table edge, leaning back on the rear legs of his chair. He picked at the food between his teeth then resumed with his latest cigarette.
“What nerve you have coming into this house and eating at this table, then insinuating we owe you something!” Manolo’s spit flew in three directions as he spoke, as he struggled to maintain a civil demeanor. His heart was beating three times its normal rate; he could feel the flow of blood fill his head, hear it gushing in his ears.
The Hour of Daydreams Page 14