America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  It was the way Pol so easily said babaera that told Hero that Pol knew something about her, something Hero herself was only just starting to sense the shape of. It was just a feeling. Just the way he knew what to ask, what not to ask, how to skirt around a tender spot, which pronouns to avoid when he was speaking in English about some hypothetical lover of hers, and how to switch languages at the right point in a sentence in order to take advantage of the lack of pronouns in Tagalog or Ilocano.

  Soon after Hero entered high school, Pol got married and moved to Indonesia to open up a rehabilitation clinic for children with polio, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, and in all likelihood the good graces of the current president, who was the cousin of Pol’s new wife, a mestiza beauty from Ilocos Norte, sosyal in all the ways Pol had never been. Pol’s departure only heightened Hero’s desire to become a surgeon herself.

  Hero had heard the story: Tito Pol decided to become an orthopedic surgeon after the death of his mother from spinal tuberculosis. The kind of knowledge he’d acquired through his job was precisely the kind of knowledge that would have saved her. Hero’s famously beautiful tsinay grandmother, her namesake, the original Geronima De Vera, née Chua, was the descendant of upper-middle-class sangley mestizos, their ancestors Hokkien-speaking merchants who’d made their wealth in the Philippines during the colonial period. They’d remained, intermarried, became that curious new thing: the Filipino. Famously beautiful meant she was white-white-white, practically lavender, or at least she appeared so in the retrato of her that hung in the De Vera home.

  Once Hero got into UST, she only intermittently saw Tito Pol, finding reasons to skip the Christmases and Piesta dagiti Natay celebrations, avoiding her parents, with whom she spoke less and less. In the Philippines, she’d see him once, just once, after dropping out of UST. She’d needed a place to hide outside of Manila, before she went into the mountains for good. The first person who came to mind was Pol. The only person.

  In the middle of the night, Ka Eddie brought her to Tito Pol’s large house in Caranglaan, Dagupan City, close to Nazareth Hospital where he had begun working. A large house, but nowhere near as large or as imposing as the De Vera house in Vigan, or even the bungalow Tito Pol had bought in Quezon City, along Sampaloc Avenue, though by Hero’s time the street was called Tomás Morató Avenue. Hero didn’t know Dagupan or Pangasinan at all; she’d gone straight from Vigan to Manila for college, no real stops along the way. She wasn’t even sure if the address was right, and the narrow street offered no clues. But the minute they pulled up, Tito Pol opened the steel grating in front of his door, like he’d been watching from the window. Didn’t hesitate, didn’t even look at them closely, didn’t look around to see if they’d been followed, if he was in the sight lines of anyone. Just said, waving his hand like they were late for dinner: Come in, come in.

  When only Hero got out of the car, Eddie keeping his hands on the wheel, Tito Pol left the doorway to approach them, making to help Hero with her bags. There weren’t any bags. She put her hands in her pockets. Eddie had a look of visible shock on his face at the sight of Pol coming out to help, and not a maid or houseboy.

  By that point she’d only known Eddie for a year; he’d been the one to regularly accompany Teresa on her recruitment trips to the universities in Manila, her second-in-command. Hero had taken a liking to him right away. Eddie had been just a teenager when he’d joined the New People’s Army in Isabela. He’d grown up on a small island just off the coast of Palanan town, an area that the Agta people had designated as sacred and used for marriage rituals. When Eddie turned fourteen, the family of an important Isabela province politician purchased the island by pushing through legislation with the Bureau of Lands of the Regional Department of Environment and Natural Resources that declared the island alienable and disposable. Eddie and his family, along with nearly all of his neighbors, had paid taxes on their land for years, but they possessed no documents showing proof of ownership of the land there; Eddie’s parents hadn’t been able to read or write. The island was subsequently vacated, then renamed in honor of the politician’s family, who built private holiday cottages all along its coastline.

  Early on Hero had remarked that she and Eddie shared a similarly brutal and deflating sense of humor, which expressed itself in contrary yet complementary ways: whereas Hero would speak gruffly, unadorned, Eddie had a deliberate, flamboyant way about him, rakish and bitchy, pointing randomly at students sitting cross-legged on the floor of a common room in Hero’s UST dorm and picking on them to SPEAK UP, BATCHOY, I can’t hear you! Years later, Eddie told her that he didn’t believe in student recruitment; he doubted the sincerity of the kids who’d been inspired by the First Quarter Storm, by martial law. Most of the people in Isabela were people who’d been part of the resistance long before Marcos ever happened on the scene. Eddie let Hero know, grinning, that she was by no means an exception to his suspicion.

  Of all the people she’d lived with in her time in Isabela, it was Eddie who made her feel what it might have been like to have an older brother. Eddie, singing Trio Los Panchos songs, understanding only the lyrics, not the language. The band had visited Manila in the late fifties and early sixties, performing in Araneta Coliseum; Hero had asked Eddie if he’d been there himself, and he’d only laughed at her. Nobody dared to confront Eddie for singing in Spanish, but even if they did, Hero knew what Eddie would have said: the trio were from New York, from Puerto Rico, from Mexico. That meant they were practically Filipino. For so many nights, it was Eddie’s voice that lit the way home for her, climbing up a cut of the mountain with burning thighs and hearing him sing Filipinas by Trio Los Panchos, the high ironic flourishes of his warble never quite masking the low filial murmur of his hum.

  Tito Pol leaned over the half-rolled-down driver’s side window. Salamat, pare, he said.

  Eddie swallowed, shook his head. He said in Tagalog that Hero knew was usually so polished, so full of flourishes, self-taught just like his near-perfect literary English, but which now was staccato-shaky and nervous—that he had to go.

  Pol intimated, also in Tagalog, You don’t need a place to—?

  Eddie shook his head. He didn’t move his hands from the wheel, as if he thought that looking too long at Pol, or even talking to him, might be contaminating.

  I have a place to stay for tonight. It’s better if we’re not together. We’ll pick her up at dawn, Eddie said.

  Once inside the house, Hero recognized Pol’s taste everywhere: the paintings of cockfighters and pastoral mothers holding children, a print of an Amorsolo and probably an original Paco Gorospe, heavy molave chairs, a burnay jar from Vigan, abel table runners, a wall packed with books. A screen door creaked open; it was one of the maids, entering the house from the outdoor dirty-kitchen where all the food for the household was cooked.

  Good evening, sir, good evening, ma’am, she greeted in English. Good evening, Hero murmured.

  The maid’s face asked silent a question of Pol. Are you hungry? Pol asked Hero.

  Hero shook her head. The maid approached, searching for the bags she would help carry. Pol told the maid in Ilocano that Hero didn’t have any bags.

  It was almost completely dark in the house; Hero could barely see Pol’s face, standing in the doorway. She couldn’t tell if he’d aged or not. He smelled the same.

  Do you want me to call your parents, Pol asked, in Ilocano.

  Hero shook her head. They won’t want to talk to me.

  All her life she knew her Ilocano had an odd accent; it was the side effect of her mother having never really made the effort to speak or even learn her husband’s language. Hamin and Concepcion had met at a party in Manila, and she’d charmed him by insulting Ilocanos with a cliché—her very first words to him were: You’re Ilocano, so that means you’re stingy. She’d dared to use the word that followed Ilocanos around wherever they went: kuripot. It rattled and stung the a
ustere pride of the rest of the De Veras when they heard the story later, but apparently it’d worked for Hamin.

  Hamin was by far the most taciturn of the three brothers, the least capable of living up to the De Vera name, lacking entirely the aura of charm that Melchior and later Pol built up around their family. Hamin was the sibling least suited to his family’s grandeur and thus became most zealous about upholding its reputation. But perhaps only in his choice of spouse had Hamin been honest with himself: He’d have preferred to be a manileño. He’d have preferred to be born to other people. It was inevitable, then, that Hamin and Pol would be alien to each other: the idea of wanting to be from Manila, the idea of wanting to be anything but what they were, was anathema to Pol, who stood outside his family but never stood apart from it.

  The De Veras descended from a tangle of Spanish landowners, Hokkien merchants, and, most thickly and undeniably, native Ilocanos. Prospective brides always weighed the appealing wealth of De Vera men against their less appealing darkness. Despite all the Tabac and three-piece suits, they couldn’t shake or spend away that unmistakable, mutinous look of the indio. It was a look that reproduced itself defiantly throughout the generations, no matter how many button-nosed and auburn-haired mestizas were ushered into the family. The order of the De Vera siblings went: Aurora, Melchior, Benjamin, Escolastica, Remedios, Rosalina, Apolonio, Soledad. Or rather: Orang, Mel, Hamin, Ticay, Reme, Rosa, Pol, Soly. After Rosalina, there had been another daughter, Apolonia, but she’d died not long after birth. They’d lost the girl, but saved her name.

  Pol was the family’s youngest and therefore most indulged boy. Yet, contrary to his position, he often became more, not less, commanding in Hamin’s presence, playing the older brother to his older brother. It was another reason they’d never really gotten along. Pol liked to cultivate his image as a debonair, intellectual Don Juan de Ilocos, pomaded and rakish in surgeon-white, slipping into a Fiat with the top down. Yet around his brother, the mildest discussion of money or religion would make Pol lose the slink of his hip, and suddenly he was shrewd and unsubtle, rejecting some catechism of Hamin’s and quoting Bertrand Russell.

  We’ll make them talk to you, Pol was saying.

  Hero shook her head again.

  Pol paused, considering his words. Nimang. Are you sure?

  Hero knew that he wasn’t talking about whether or not she was sure that she didn’t want to speak to her parents. She looked down at the floor, the cold lacquered tiles she could feel but not see, the gleam a temperature more than a look. They weren’t in Vigan, so the tiles weren’t Vigan terra-cotta tiles, not exactly; but they were close enough. She knew their kind. The feet that tread on them, the world they held up. Pol was in all likelihood still going to parties at Malacañang Palace.

  I’m sure.

  Tito Pol didn’t say anything for a long time, and then: You always have a home with me.

  Hero wiped a hand over her face, just to do something with her hands, with her face.

  That was answer enough for Pol. Get some sleep, he said. I’ll wake you up when they arrive.

  In the morning, Teresa and Eddie came to the house, just as scheduled. Tito Pol gave Hero a leather wallet, lightly used. She didn’t have to open it to know there were several thousand pesos in it. It was too big to put in her pocket, so she held it behind her back, awkwardly.

  Eddie was watching the conversation, or the wallet. Teresa was smoking, flicking ash out of the window, gaze averted. Wanted to look like she wasn’t watching or listening, but the feline direction of Teresa’s ear gave it away.

  Pol put a hand on Hero’s face, drew her into his arms. Tabac, faded. He hadn’t reapplied any cologne in the morning. His hair was still neatly parted, but looser, a strand falling over his forehead; he hadn’t reapplied his pomade, either. He’d stayed up, maybe waited by the window. He’d smoked, more than once.

  Apo Dios ti kumuyog kenka, he intoned.

  It was an ancient thing to say, rare, formal, embarrassing. She opened her mouth to joke her way out of it, but Pol pulled back and held her face in his hands. Then, with the gravity of a prayer as uttered by one who knew that a prayer could also be an important kind of lie, he said to her, in English: You’re a De Vera. You always will be.

  Milpitas

  When it came to Roni's eczema, Paz and her mother had given up on doing the healing themselves. Roni’s case was too advanced for a bruha of Grandma Sisang’s modest caliber, chicken blood or not. Paz’s mother started calling in all of her contacts and all of her favors, all the faith healers and bruhas she knew, or knew of, in the Bay Area.

  The first faith healer who called back lived in Hayward. She was only available at two-thirty in the afternoon on a Thursday, just after Roni’s school day. Pol would still be sleeping at that time, and Paz didn’t get off her first shift at the Veterans Hospital until four, and she then went straight to the nursing home, which left Hero to take her.

  The day of the appointment, Hero was afraid she would find Roni fighting again. But the girl filed out of the classroom with the rest of her peers, speaking to two girls, one of whom looked Filipina, the other of whom looked maybe Mexican; Hero still wasn’t entirely sure how to tell where all the people she saw in Milpitas came from.

  Roni waved good-bye to her friends, then watched them join their parents. She waited in place for a few minutes; the girl cut a glance in Hero’s direction, just for a moment, before returning her gaze to her friends’ backs. Hero stayed put.

  The parking lot gradually emptied, as most of the children had been picked up. Only then did Roni relax her shoulders and begin walking toward the car.

  Hero understood finally that Roni’s aim was to avoid her classmates seeing her in the Corona. Once, when they were in the parking lot of the other large Asian grocery store in town, Lion’s, Roni even threw herself down into the footwell of the front passenger seat. What are you—Hero said, and Roni interrupted with an impatient, Just wait a minute, just wait a minute!

  Hero paused, hands still on the steering wheel, and watched a woman and a young girl exit the supermarket and put away their metal shopping cart. Hero vaguely recognized the girl from Roni’s school. They made their way into the parking lot, disappearing eventually among the cars. Roni slowly lifted her head, so only her bangs and eyes were visible above the window. Okay, she said finally. Let’s go.

  Hero found it all somewhat ridiculous—didn’t everyone know by now that the Corona belonged to her family? But maybe Roni wasn’t used to the Corona picking her up directly at school; after all, before Hero arrived in Milpitas, Roni was used to being picked up from school by aunts or cousins, or Pol only after he woke up, long after the rest of her classmates had left.

  It was strange to have respect for a child, and stranger still to lose respect for one. With all her toothsome pride, Hero would have expected Roni to be above that kind of embarrassment. That she wasn’t somehow irritated Hero.

  When Roni was folded into the footwell, she asked Hero, What’s up with your thumbs?

  Hero stiffened, looked down at her thumbs on the steering wheel, their positioning. From where Roni was seated, the angle of her gaze meant she could see the knobbled bones in the base of Hero’s thumbs.

  Roni continued: I saw them before. Are you double-jointed or something?

  Yes, Hero said, trying to sound easy, casual.

  Roni considered that for a moment, then extended her own small hand. Wiggled her thumb around, making the base joint pop freely. Me, too.

  Hero looked down at the child’s thumb, articulate and flexible. She couldn’t think of anything easy or casual to say about it.

  Your friend and her mom are gone now. As expected, Roni forgot all about Hero’s thumbs as she climbed out of the footwell and started chatting again.

  * * *

  In Hayward, the woman who opened the mosquito-screen door to them was about Paz’s
age, somewhere in her midthirties. Behind her, a small dog was shrieking. Elvis, quiet! Elvis, quiet! Then the woman smiled apologetically at Hero, then at Roni. Sorry, come in, come in.

  The furniture in the small home was covered with plastic. Figurines of elephants, all of them with their trunks raised, were placed all over the house; they came in different sizes. There was a large one next to the door, and a series of smaller ones, in gradually increasing sizes, perched atop the television. Some of them were made of wood or ceramic; one small one on a fireplace mantel looked like it was made of low-quality jade. On the walls there were portraits of the Virgin Mary everywhere: full-body, reaching out a hand to the viewer; on a cloud, hands folded, looking upward pleadingly; just her preternaturally youthful face, white and beloved. There was also one standard portrait of Jesus: long hair flowing over his shoulders, his red heart open, encircled with thorns and topped with a tongue of flame.

  I’m Melba, the woman said, holding her hand over her heart. Are you Paz?

  Hero shook her head. No, no, I’m Geronima, Paz’s niece. Roni is my cousin.

  Ah, okay, I see, Melba said. Now she turned her attention to Roni. And you must be Roni.

  Roni was looking at one of the elephant figurines with interest. The small dog was sniffing at her feet; she paid it no mind. She turned back to Melba, then nodded.