The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Since well before her teens Dulce had been involved in nearly every village activity which required music, especially in the school and church hidden among the palms. By the time she was twelve she was also the best guitar player in the village, which gave her a curious and faintly uneasy status. The fact was that women didn’t play the guitar. There was no law or taboo against it – they simply didn’t do it. As most of the village’s guitar playing went on at the men’s nightly drinking sessions it would hardly have been a seemly activity for a teenage girl, so the men continued to play badly for each other and were probably too drunk to care. However, the idea of a girl playing the guitar was all right as long as she did it for the choir in church or something similar, so it became generally agreed that Dulce was religious – might even have lapsed out of her native Catholicism into some sort of evangelism. Weren’t the Born-Agains famously given to sing-songs with guitars and suchlike, wholesome ditties about walking tall with Jesus?

  But Dulce wasn’t religious. Or, if she were, she remained a Catholic. No, she just loved singing and had skills whose outlet was in the local musical activities, most of which had religious roots such as the youth choirs sponsored by the diocesan council. By fifteen she was much in demand and spent a good deal of her time going with Father Ben’s group to sing for a christening here, a wedding there, for confirmations and masses and speech days and convocations and Holy Week retreats and youth festivals in towns and villages up and down the coast. ‘Everyone loves a musician,’ Father Ben said more than once. ‘Music will make you friends wherever you go.’

  ‘Music, my arse,’ her brother Noriel would gibe affectionately. ‘Boy-mad, more like. As long as they’ve got half a voice and the price of a Coke. Aruy!’ as a plastic bottle of Green Cross rubbing alcohol glanced off his shoulder. Dodging, he called out: ‘What’s his name? The skinny one? Perfecto? Ay, Pecto, Pecto! Wow legs!’

  But that wasn’t true, either, as Noriel well knew. Dulce had no lack of suitors and in fact was spoiled for choice, being both talented and pretty. Deftly she played them off one against the other, committing herself to none while somehow managing not to acquire the reputation of being a flirt. Again, she probably achieved this by being so obviously preoccupied with her music, her singing, as to leave little time for mundane adolescent activities.

  ‘She’s young yet,’ her mother would say defensively to the other women as they crouched in the river shallows with their skirts hitched up, working through piles of washing and gossiping. ‘Dulce’s going to go far.’

  ‘Not in the husband stakes, unless she wakes up.’

  ‘I expect my daughter’ll marry when she’s good and ready, Sita. She’s barely sixteen. At least she’s not so hungry she’s reduced to being a vegetarian.’

  Howls of laughter from the others greeted this riposte since it referred to Teresita’s own daughter who, according to rumour, had recently strayed down to the beach with her basket of bitter cucumbers where some youths were busy digging sand for hollow blocks. To her hawker’s cry of ‘Bitter cucumbers!’ Tino had famously replied ‘Try my sweet one, darling’, and there wasn’t a washerwoman in the village who didn’t believe that later, under cover of darkness, she had.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Teresita agreed, ‘when you say Dulce will go far. All the way to Japan, probably, as a Japayuki.’

  These morning sallies, accompanied by the echoing blows of wooden paddles on sodden lumps of washing together with screams of laughter, greatly invigorated all concerned and made the time fly. Fickle conversational currents of enmity and alliance swirled around as the river slid placidly past, carrying away eroding floes of suds to the sea. Yet jokes and gossip often had a curious habit of fulfilling themselves, of becoming true as much from an unsuspected accuracy as from the power of spite. Within a month or two Dulce found herself drawn to Perfecto, who was by no means as skinny as her brother had said. The more she became involved in the music of the diocese, the more she saw of him. He lived in the town six miles away, a serious, quiet boy who could be relied on to sit up all night by candlelight copying out song sheets for the choir when the only Xerox machine for miles had broken or run out of toner. He was said to be thinking of going into the Church and spent a good deal of his time with Father Ben. One day when he and she were planning the next month’s rehearsals she asked him one of those questions that only the very young can ask without banality.

  ‘What do you want, Pecto? In your life?’

  A million other teenagers would have said something like ‘Oh, happiness, I suppose.’ ‘True love.’ ‘A good job, some land of my own and a family.’ Perfecto replied ‘Truthfulness.’ Just that.

  ‘Truthfulness?’

  ‘Accuracy, then. In everything, I mean. I hate it when things are blurred. Like in choir when someone’s not sure of the part and the harmony’s not quite clean.’

  ‘And your motives, Pecto? Are they quite clean?’

  He turned away in confusion, lashes lowered.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Dulce said hurriedly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you’re quite right. You truthfully wanted to know and already I’m failing my own standards. I admit it. My motives are blurred. My faith is blurred. My singing is blurred.’

  ‘Too hard on yourself,’ Dulce told him affectionately. From then on they became closer, walking along the beach together after school but only while it was still light enough to provoke chaffing rather than rumour.

  ‘I love your voice, Dulce,’ he said. ‘It’s the sound of your own truthfulness because it expresses you so well. You can only become a singer, can’t you? I mean, you’re already a singer. I wish I were, but I’m not. I just sing.’

  ‘You sing very well, Pecto.’

  But he gave her an impatient look as though he couldn’t be bothered with the muddiness of social nicety. Within months Father Ben had been posted eighty miles away and Dulce was officially appointed choirleader. A girl in charge of the choir … It was unheard of. Now she and Perfecto were constantly in each other’s company, organising, practising, copying, singing, confiding; especially confiding. (‘We’re too young for romance,’ Dulce would tell herself at night, lying on her bed and staring up at the thatched roof faintly lit by the tiny glow of a wick stuck in a mayonnaise jar of oil. From under the stairs came Noriel’s snores; from outside sudden outbursts of barking as the village dogs prowled and marauded, and in the silences the call of a gecko, the ocean’s gasps.) But even as she thought it she knew she wasn’t too young at all, while having to admit she couldn’t imagine Pecto lying awake six miles away worrying that he might fall in love with her. Confiding was right. You felt you could tell him anything, things too private for one’s best friend or mother or elder sister. Yet he managed to be intimate without being romantic. It was because he was going to be a priest, she thought. It’s a priest’s mode. Absolute sincerity, absolute secrecy, oddly unjudgmental. He confided in her, too, even quite intimate confessions of jealousies and fears, putting himself into her hands in a way she thought of as erotic until she realised there always remained something he wouldn’t tell her. A part of him stayed closed, as if he had no words to express it; you sensed it there even when he was being honest to his own detriment, as if its hidden presence was exactly what gave him the freedom to confess to anything else. This, Dulce imagined, was what it meant to be deeply religious.

  – Dulce, Dulce, – said her Guardian Angel one night after a year. – There is nothing to happen. There are many different kinds of love. His is different entirely. –

  ‘It’s time to go,’ she thought, suddenly both miserable and excited.

  – I didn’t say that – said her Angel in alarm. – Dear Dulce, don’t do anything rash. You’re safe here, and loved. –

  ‘Too safe, and not enough loved,’ said Dulce bravely, and within the month had announced to her family that she had written to Cousin Lita to ask if she could stay with her in Parañaque while looking for a job in the city. W
hen she told Pecto his eyes filled with tears.

  ‘You too,’ he said, and she knew he meant Father Ben. ‘I can’t stop you. Even if I could I’d have no right to. But you’ve no idea how I’ll worry about you. Manila’s so dangerous, Dulce. Every day you read – but you know all that.’

  ‘I’ll be careful, Pecto, I promise. I don’t want never to see you again, my family, my village, my friends.’

  ‘But you can’t go until after Flores de Mayo.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she laughed, thinking there was scarcely a season of the year when it would be timely to go, there was so much to be sung. Suddenly she had an insight into what she was leaving, the cultural orderliness of provincial life, and felt panic.

  ‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said in his earnest way, speaking more to the horizon than to her. ‘“I’m going to Manila”, you said, and just four words make everything else unravel. If you hadn’t said them everything might go on for ever like this.’ He gazed at the beach, at the sea breaking aslant over the coral heads offshore as the tide wandered in. ‘But now you’ve said them all sorts of other things feel overdue for ending. What will the choir be without you, Dulce? Your village? Even me?’

  ‘You do exaggerate, Pecto,’ she said fondly.

  ‘Not by much. I don’t mean I shall collapse, any more than the village, although the choir might. I mean suddenly we’re all going to have to move on.’

  ‘Theological college.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you’ll graduate from high school. Your grades are excellent.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘No. What is it, Pecto? Really? You can tell me.’

  But still he couldn’t. They had walked up off the beach and across the narrow coastal road. Choir practice was in ten minutes. Dark was gathering among the palms. From a TV in someone’s house came the introductory music of Balitang Balita, the six o’clock news. Naldo’s doves were fluttering in to perch around their cote. For a moment one looked as though it were about to settle on Perfecto’s serious young head and Dulce was reminded of a picture in the cathedral vestry which showed the Holy Ghost hovering above Christ, or maybe John the Baptist. It made her laugh.

  ‘At least there’s no brownout tonight. We can use the Yamaha keyboard instead of your guitar,’ he said obliviously.

  ‘No brownout yet,’ she agreed, then impulsively squeezed his hand. ‘Oh Pecto, I’m going to miss you. Let’s make a pact before I go. I’ll come back, I promise. Say two years.’

  ‘No-one ever comes back,’ he told her solemnly. ‘If they do return it’s as a different version, hadn’t you noticed? Travel changes people. The precise person who leaves has left for ever. You and I will never see each other again, you know. We’ll be other people. “I’m going to Manila.” Four simple words, and everything changed for ever.’

  Yet sad though his delivery was, Dulce later thought he hadn’t really been speaking with her in mind. The weight of his melancholy was already too well established, too long since a part of him. As always, his words had an obliqueness about them. Their accuracy was immediate but their force came from elsewhere. Three months later she was in Manila, her family having scraped together the fare and a week’s rent for Cousin Lita. A month after that he replied to a brave, homesick letter from her with the news that he was leaving home to join Father Ben, whose absence had become unbearable. Perhaps because she was now in the capital the clamp of provincial thinking was eased and permitted her little mental leaps which made new sense of old puzzles. She thought all the more fondly of poor, troubled Pecto until it seemed that he, not she, was truly lost and cut off from home.

  *

  Bambi Bar was only one of many in Pasay that had benefited from the closure, by mayoral edict, of similar dives in the traditional tourist area of Ermita. To its largely local patrons were now added Australians and Pakistanis and Germans who tended to come alone and sit for hours, stunned by alcohol and made yet more torpid by the air-con and battering of decibels. Gradually Dulce recognised one of them, a baldish pinkish man of maybe forty (she wasn’t good at judging foreigners’ ages) whose round tub of belly pushed out a succession of gaudy Hawaiian shirts so their hems in front hung well clear of his belt when he stood up. She became aware of his attention, feeling his eyes fixed on her as she sang and seeing his hands applaud in the circle of light cast by the table lamp. A heavy gold signet ring gleamed up at her.

  ‘Ingat,’ said Rey the bouncer when he handed her a note as Dulce was snatching a rest in the dressing-room upstairs. ‘Careful. If old Porky gives you trouble I can sort him out, don’t you worry, Dulce. We stick together here.’

  She smiled gratefully at Rey and opened the note. The foreigner was genuinely impressed by her act, thought her voice unique, had a business proposition to make her. She looked up but Rey had gone back on duty downstairs. She showed the note to Danny who was doing a little grass up on the roof.

  ‘That’s what they all say.’ Danny handed it back. ‘He just wants pussy. Take my word for it, kid. Just freeze him out.’

  ‘But you don’t know that,’ she protested, unwilling to let a compliment fall so easily to dust.

  ‘I would if I was him.’ A cloud of fragrant smoke drifted off among the roof’s rusty clutter. ‘Joke only,’ he added. ‘But he’s a man and so am I, and we men really only want one thing.’

  ‘Is that so?’ she cried, thinking of Perfecto and allowing herself the reassuring warmth of memory. What wouldn’t she give to be home again at this moment! But what good would it do?

  ‘Ah, come on, baby.’ She noticed that the more he smoked the more he took on a fake Californian identity. ‘You’ve been here six months now, right? There’s only just so much mileage in being an innocent from the sticks. I mean you’ve got to swim with the tide.’

  ‘Oh, you mean you would if it was you he was sending notes to?’

  ‘Hell, no. There are tides and tides, sister. Got to be a bit choosy.’

  But suddenly seeing him there, cross-legged on the mat in his stage gear and ponytail, she thought it probably wouldn’t bother him at all, that there was nothing Danny mightn’t do in his own interest. His heart was as involuted and insubstantial as smoke. Plastik talaga. She could see him as a faith healer or a hired killer, as the author of ingenious scams or as an eternal keyboard player in a lifetime of Bambi Bars.

  ‘Just be careful of old Lettie,’ he added. ‘She doesn’t take kindly to her girls messing with clients. She doesn’t care about your virginity but she sure as hell cares if you’re poached.’

  Lettie Tan was Bambi Bar’s owner, a powerful middle-aged Chinese mestiza with all the right connections in the underworld, police and judiciary to give her the required immunity to operate at a profit and do much else besides. Gossip said Lettie had her fingers in all sorts of pies, a scrubby bar in Pasay being so marginal to her real business interests it could only have been a convenient front for some racket or other; but Dulce had never wanted to know more. It was bad enough explaining to herself (let alone to her family back home) how it was that after half a year in this city she still wasn’t the new Lea Salonga in a global smash hit which made Miss Saigon pale by comparison. She instinctively felt that the more she found out about her workplace, her employer and her fellow performers the further she would slide into their world and be unable to climb out. She decided to ignore the fat man’s note, but he came again the next night and wrote her another which insisted that his motives were genuine.

  ‘Sure they are,’ Danny agreed when again she showed it him. ‘Genuinely malibog.’

  This vulgarity gave her the small shock required for another of her insights, which was that Danny might well be jealous. He wouldn’t want to see her getting ahead, less because he would begrudge her success than because it would mean he was being left behind with the shades of Pasay closing in around him, condemned eternally to a world of strobe lighting, mud wrestling, beer fumes and shabu dealers. At a quarter to midnight, w
hen her admirer was still sitting at his table, Dulce walked past him and smiled. Tired from two hours’ singing, she stood on the pavement outside where the damp heat was strangely refreshing after the club’s bacterial chill, the traffic noise reassuringly dull and vague after Danny’s fortissimo pounding on the keyboard, the bludgeoning of the electronic drum-set. The pavements were still busy with people looking for a good time, a fruitless search which would occupy most of their three score years and ten but which the streets of Pasay appeared to suggest was at last within their grasp. Outside the doors of the various clubs stood blue-uniformed security men on a strip of stained carpet, often at a little desk with a ledger on it. They and the hostesses who came out for breathers would do their best to entice the passers-by inside, hospitably throwing open a door and releasing a waft of frigid air, a blast of music, a glimpse of shimmering ultra-violet costumes and flesh and suggestive darkness. Dulce couldn’t imagine how the strollers made their choice; the clubs all offered much the same thing although each was tricked out with its own neon motif or gimmick, just as Bambi Bar girls were revealed by its opening door as wearing pert little scuts of nylon fur on their bottoms and not much else.

  ‘I meant what I said.’ The fat man was standing beside her, towering above her, mountainous. The crossed palm trees and orange suns printed on his shirt stretched to every horizon. The thing was the size of a tent, she thought irrelevantly. Imagine trying to wash that in the river. The others would die laughing, holding up their husbands’ threadbare T-shirts beside it like so many handkerchiefs. ‘Name’s Carl.’ His hand engulfed hers. ‘I just had to see you. You’ve a fabulous voice, did you know that?’ His accent was difficult for her; her own English was mediocre. She became acutely conscious of her stage costume, knowing that to any passerby she would look like just another tart being picked up by some foreign slob. She smiled uncertainly and glanced at her watch. ‘I know you can’t talk now,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘I just wanted to ask if you were interested in a job down under.’