As Iolana prodded at the eggs that sizzled in the frying pan and Andres rummaged around for a can opener, as Manolo crumpled the Manlapaz Bulletin to straighten the words on the column he was reading, Tala would pad into the kitchen barefoot with a fresh bouquet to grace the table. Kidnapped from their roots and still wet with dew, the flowers posed with defiant beauty. Upon completing the task and reminded of her vanity, Tala excused herself to comb her hair, freshen her mouth, and slip on a pair of padded house slippers that she loved to wear indoors. In her absence, Manolo would peek at the flowers from behind his paper, a twinge of guilt assaulting him. He’d recently made a comment, half in jest, about the empty vases accumulating dust, and soon afterward, the morning bouquets had reappeared like clockwork. He told himself that when Tala returned to the table, he would remember to express his appreciation for the vibrant colors and shapely petals, responding to her efforts with a break from his reading to brush his fingers against the bouquet, lingering for a moment on the curl of the stem, the prickle of leaves, or the flowers’ soft velvet.
On the morning of her absence, he’d only had time to butter a slice of toast, let alone concern himself with table decor. A patient who complained that her dentures prevented her from feeling her food when she chewed had once again gotten a fish bone stuck in her throat. As the smell of coffee brewing filled the house and the ceiling fans spun a soft whir, already in motion against the day’s pending heat, Manolo had passed the front window and was not surprised to find his wife outside, facing the short, brown fence at the end of the cul-de-sac, an assemblage of blossoms already in her grasp. What he didn’t expect was to see Tala talking, though neither Father nor another soul breathed in her vicinity. He could not hear her from behind the window or from such a distance, but he could see that her mouth gesticulated as though engaged in conversation, with stops and starts and there, a barely perceptible shake of the head.
For the rest of the morning, Manolo had not been able to discard the feeling that something was off. When he returned home for lunch, Father was out front with the gardening shears in his hand, and Manolo hoped he hadn’t gone to extremes with the trimming. Once, Father had attempted to create animal shapes out of all their shrubbery, as he had seen on the pages of a fancy architectural magazine, but after all his mistakes and efforts to repair them with a few extra snips, the greenery had practically been reduced to twigs. It had taken over a year for it all to grow back.
“Have you seen the three girls playing in the old maid’s yard?” Father had asked as Manolo drew closer.
“What girls?”
“They try to keep their voices down, I think, because of the old maid. I imagine she must be uptight, unaccustomed to people. She’s used to being alone, in complete control, and along come three girls with minds of their own. Two of them on the cusp of womanhood—very pretty. Very pretty and no doubt, with minds of their own.”
Manolo had been summoned to examine the old maid once, a year or so before meeting Tala. During that visit he’d confirmed she was twenty years his senior, as he’d guessed from the few times he’d seen her, an unrepentant hermit, determined to pass the remainder of her days as far away from human contact as possible. She was obviously a woman of the indoors; her yard looked almost dilapidated, with overgrown weeds and a medley of chipped or rusting items strung about—old potting containers with dying plants here, several unwashed cat food bowls there. But inside, the house was clean, comfortable, pleasant. The sunlight filtered in evenly through light bamboo shades. Solid blocks of neutral colors kept one from being overwhelmed, while the flash of a turquoise mug or a carefully placed orange rug pleased the gaze. There were no photographs or memories on the wall to make one wonder about her past or secrets. The wooden kitchen table had an aged quality, like something from an enchanted cave. He’d reacted to the space with a physical sensation—of wanting to sink into one of her silky-soft armchairs and spend the afternoon napping.
He’d expected her biological age to be at least ten years higher than her chronological age, for those in scarce contact with others generally tended to be weaker in the body, stronger in the mind. Upon closer examination, he was surprised to find her youthful—her arms and legs fleshy, in an appealing sort of way. She was plump but not sagging, her skin still tight and unwrinkled, so that if one were to look at her arms and legs, her breasts and bare belly, without seeing the more aged quality around her eyes and mouth, one might guess she was still in her thirties. She had a flushness about her as someone who’s just finished exercising or making love, and her hair was loose and tangled beneath her reclined pose, a far cry from the tight bun that she typically wore outside the house. Like a living blanket, it was incredibly long—she must have refrained from cutting those white-streaked tresses just as she ignored the baby blue eyes, celandines, cornflowers, and dog violets that erupted in hordes in and around her yard, unrestrained by the brown fence meant to establish order and division. She wore a panty but no bra beneath her housedress and showed no signs of modesty when pulling up her smock, revealing brown, virgin nipples around which he pressed the cold, steel ear. This was far from the uptight old maid he’d always imagined she would be up close, and he told himself it was this contradiction, rather than her level of appeal, that caused a hint of eroticism to pass through his breath and fingers when he examined her.
She complained of fever, chills, muscle aches. The aches and trembling made her fear for her health, she said, eyes wide and hands crossed on her chest, once again covered by her dress’s thin fabric. She told him she had done something completely out of character, leaving the house and walking for miles in the middle of the night, swimming with mermaids in a remote watering hole, and because her system had never been conditioned for that type of excursion, she feared that she’d contracted some horrible virus from the water or soil, or even from those nonhuman and potentially viperous beings with whom she had mingled. She had walked barefoot, swum nude, and nearly drowned. She had returned home alone in the dark, wet and in a daze, and it was a miracle she hadn’t been swallowed by a vampire swooping down to feast on her blood. After checking her vital signs he reassured her she showed no indications of bacterial infection and prescribed two painkillers every four hours until the aches subsided. Her immune system had been more vulnerable due to the exercise she wasn’t in the habit of taking, he explained. As a remedy and to keep her ever youthful, he recommended more regular excursions out of doors, in reasonable increments.
“Just stay away from the mermaids and the vampires,” he said, smiling.
Though he teased, he’d been impressed by her vivid imagination. At the same time, he felt a wave of pity for the woman, isolated from the world and left to the workings of the mind for entertainment. But the old maid must have grown tired of her fantasies and latched upon him as a vehicle of escape, or rather, a means of reentry into the actual world. She uncrossed her hands to clutch one of his, removing from his grasp the stethoscope he was in the process of repacking and leading him into the opening of her housedress, between wonderful, fleshy thighs and the soaked-through fabric where they met. He did not move and barely managed to breathe. Soft at first, then urgently, she pressed his hand, releasing a moan and moving her hips against the pressure of his fingers, still directed by her own. Caught unsuspecting, with one element of surprise building upon another, he’d been aroused instantly. Manolo took a deep breath and shivered involuntarily. He hadn’t been intimate with a woman since Dalaga. He could easily have lost himself kissing this woman’s supple flesh, starting with her neck, then caressing the length of her skin, the ample thighs, smooth belly, and ripe breasts, squeezing them tight between his fingers, tasting their salt with his tongue. But he had called on her as a doctor and professional, a code he would not violate, so wiping the sweat from his brow, he pulled reluctantly away and stood to go. He left abruptly.
The following nightfall, he’d returned, without the medicine bag. When she opened the door, he touched her hand
eagerly, fondling her fingers for an instant before she pulled back, a hiss on her lips.
“Doctor, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Her long hair was pulled back in its familiar bun, and her lips had shriveled in size, pulled in by wrinkles that lined the rim of her mouth. She seemed decades older.
“After all, I’m old enough to be your mother.”
But the old maid had taken his advice. He noticed that she left her house regularly from that day forward, hair pulled tight and conservatively dressed for an outing, returning sometime in the evenings. Where she went, no one knew. She did not call upon his medical services again, and he no longer associated her with the vigorous woman he’d glimpsed—the anomaly who could have been her true person behind closed doors, though he doubted this given the old maid she steadfastly embodied to the outside world.
“I don’t know what children you could be talking about, Father,” Manolo had responded. “As far as I know, the woman who lives in that house is called ‘old maid’ for a reason. Plus, I haven’t seen anyone coming to visit her in the last thirty years.”
“When you are a child and your elders point and huff and yell, all you can do is laugh at their seriousness,” Andres replied, without addressing his son’s confusion. “The harder you try to be quiet, the louder you burp or hiccup or snort with laughter fighting to get out through your teeth. The more they shush, the more you have to say in messier whispers, the clumsier you play and send the house colliding in pieces around you. I could see it in the girls’ faces the first time I spotted them through the overgrown shrubs, when they pointed at me and escaped in three directions.”
After lunch, Manolo asked Tala if she knew anything about the girls Father mentioned. She narrowed her eyes to convey her suspicion.
“There are no such girls,” she said. “I pick flowers next to that house every morning. I’ve seen and heard nothing but insects and the silence of neglect. Father is charming us once again with fantasies of youth.”
But when he approached Mother with the same inquiry, she wasted no time contradicting Tala and defending Andres. “Female voices carry. The younger the voice, the longer the trajectory. I tend to my garden every afternoon. The wind sent their voices in my direction, and I followed the sound to the old maid’s house. They had cornered a cat and were coaxing it from its hiding place,” his mother had said.
Puzzled, Manolo had returned to work for his last two appointments. He had not seen his wife since.
After searching for Tala for hours that evening, through the neighborhood, in the bar, and along the outskirts of their barrio and the empty square, tempering his desperation all the while, Manolo had passed the old maid’s house. Restless and forlorn, he’d peered into her dilapidated yard, listening for the voices of children and hearing nothing, wondering what deceitful ghosts had visited upon the lonely woman. He’d considered knocking, but the thought of doing so felt painfully awkward. He couldn’t imagine repeating the far-fetched reasons that would explain such a drop-by.
Manolo sat up in his room thinking many things and avoiding thinking of others. He knew the local authorities well and his parents had already filled them in on the details.
Tala also had a new arrangement with Luchie, who continues to do all the shopping, except for the eggs. After a bad egg had made her sick, his wife had insisted on hand-selecting them herself, consulting directly with the woman who picked the eggs, in order to protect the baby. This required a special trip to the market about once a week. She did not go on any particular day, nor did she tell anyone when she left to do so. When she returned, she’d simply proceed to whip up an omelet, as if that were the only explanation necessary for her sudden departures. Tala’s recent interest in the mail had been the subject of jokes between the two of them, but now, it was another clue, a possible explanation for her absence, like the flowers and the eggs.
She’d made it a game to check the mailbox before Andres did. Andres, who subscribed to half a dozen magazines, normally took pleasure in the small journeys to the mailbox to collect his reading supply. But lately he’d woken from his hammock with a shiny magazine on his belly, and not the one he’d fallen asleep reading. The new issue would have been procured by Tala, who timed the mail’s arrival each day, showing up at the line of mailboxes along the main road just as the postman pulled away with emptier sacks in tow.
Was it possible she had gone to these pains to communicate with someone, plotting . . . what? He dizzied himself with every possibility. It had been Luchie’s day off. After lunch, his parents had stepped out to the next town. When they returned and Tala was not at home, they’d assumed she was out shopping or collecting the mail.
Manolo nodded off once or twice, for about half an hour. When the morning sun lit his room the next day, he blinked in his bed alone, deprived of sleep, half of him believing Tala might be gone for good. She was back by breakfast, with a fresh bouquet and a profusely apologetic Inday.
The explanation came out in a jumble, sincere, full of urgency. She had stumbled upon Inday the day before, when she’d craved an omelet and was out buying eggs. Inday had been inconsolable, a hurricane rushing madly through the stalls, pulling clothes off racks and goods off shelves, close to attacking the other vendors when they could not produce her son. Inday interjected—it was true, she said, only Tala had been able to calm her and guide her home. The slimeball took him, Inday had babbled in the fever of night, repeating almost deliriously, he took him, and Tala explained that she could see the face that haunted the bamboo weaver’s nightmares, had felt somehow responsible for the mess he’d created as she’d comforted the stricken mother through the depths of a long and sleepless night that had separated her from home.
21. The Mourning Lover
Manolo knew that she’d promised Inday, and herself, that she’d confront Charo about Baitan—it was the least she could do. She could not even wait to check into a hotel before leading Manolo to a bar called the Hideaway—a front for Charo’s dirty business. They walked through the gurgling belly of the city she knew by heart to find it, the dense air tainted by dumpsters along one bend, by exhaust from a running motor on another. Horns honked around them, a thumping disco song escaped from a nightclub, voices of every pitch ascended and faded, and one could only guess at the errands curious wanderers pursued in their determined strides through empty streets that cut into the shadows. It was dark, but they couldn’t imagine the setting around them dressed in anything but the deep pitch of night. Tala concluded that daylight must not exist—not here.
Their destination was so inconspicuous they almost missed it altogether. When they entered the little hut-like structure, a large man on a small stool nodded at them to come in. The lighting was dim and the hanging bulbs emitted a buzz. There was just a handful of painted wooden tables in the joint, spaced far apart on a hardwood floor, with bare walls around them, the worn paint unable to disguise all the dents. A jukebox stood silent in one corner. Seated at the bar, the man held a newspaper with one hand, helping himself to a plate of food with the other. On a far table, a couple sat isolated from the rest of the world, conspiring in whispers. Their faces nearly touched, so at first glance Manolo thought he saw one head with two bodies. Manolo noticed the remaining patron last of all, even though he’d been sitting at a center table with his legs crossed, a toothpick in his mouth. The toothpick swirled from side to side, a prop to engage the tongue, and he imagined this man who did not speak kept a bundle of toothpicks at the ready in his pocket, never going through a day without one twirling in his mouth. Facing the door, this man stared them down without apology, eyes sweeping over both their faces. He wasn’t a patron.
She told him they were looking for a little boy named Baitan. And she asked to see Charo, her brother. The toothpick man seemed to expect them. Without a word, he led them from entryway to entryway, through bizarre outdoor foyers and little courtyards that connected a series of buildings. After a few turns, Manolo looked over his shoulde
r, unsure how they’d find their way back if they were forced to try. But Tala walked determinedly on, unruffled and confident. They found themselves in a modest office, papers cluttered on a desk, a chair tucked behind it. Manolo did not notice another door until they walked through it to a warehouse, packed floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. The boxes were arranged in rows, with narrow hallways of space between them to navigate through. Their guide wound them along the passages, and at the end of one Manolo noticed an open box filled with smaller ones. Shoeboxes. They were in a small factory. Around them, the people were sorting, piling, sewing, snapping, clasping, and boxing. White-haired grandmothers and young children barely old enough to pour their own cereal. Dull and sluggish; half-asleep, half-alive. Their arms and legs moved, but their faces did not, aside from the mechanical blinking of the eyes. The sound was eerie, too, so much bustling and bumping around and a machine’s steady hum as the sneakers went down the line for emblems and packaging. The children never chattered.
Sneakers, and most of them counterfeit. Would she be able to recognize the difference—between the real and the fake?
They kept on walking, down a hallway, through a door.
“Oops. Wrong door,” the toothpick man announced.
They moved farther along a smoky hallway, where they were asked to wait, catching a glimpse of the room the toothpick man had entered. Four men gambled around a table, two others stood watching, and a third sat on an upturned crate against the wall.
The toothpick man emerged with tidings on Baitan. He was not at the factory. He was out in the field with Charo—on-the-job training, learning the ropes and the lay of the land.
“No idea when they’ll be back. Don’t worry, he’s in your brother’s hands.”
The Hour of Daydreams Page 17