America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  Your mom won’t be mad at you forever, Hero said. She’d never sounded so stupid in her life. She forged on. She loves you. Really. A lot.

  Roni’s gaze went glassy and vacant. Could you move? I can’t see.

  Hero shuffled clumsily to the side, then remembered the show wasn’t even running. There wasn’t anything to watch; the only view she was blocking was of the bald man’s dying smile, garbled with gray pause scratches.

  Nimang, Pol called from the kitchen. Come here, tell me how much egg you want in yours.

  Hero stood up. Roni had curled up even more into herself on the couch, knees drawn up, hand clutching the cup to her chest, still chewing on noodles. Her eyes were fixed on the screen.

  When Hero approached Pol, he was in the process of peeling a boiled egg.

  Paz is working night shift tonight, he said.

  Paz rarely worked night shift; she said herself she couldn’t handle it, was more suited to working from six in the morning until midnight than the other way around, even if the shift was shorter and paid more.

  Hero didn’t ask about it. She held her hand out. I’ll peel the egg.

  Pol didn’t hand it over to her, continuing to thumb the shell off the white egg flesh, slowly, deliberately, in one single strip. Then he took a knife, cut the the egg in half. It was boiled perfectly, no gray around the edges. The yolk was smaller and paler than the ones she ate in Vigan, but then, they’d often used duck eggs. He cut the halves into quarters. The Styrofoam cup of noodles was waiting, its paper lid sealed over, no steam escaping.

  She reminds me so much of you when you were younger, Pol said.

  Hero went very still. Pol picked up another boiled egg, cracked it on the counter, fatter side down, so the small air pocket there shattered easily. Started peeling it.

  Hero dared to glance back in the living room. Roni still hadn’t moved.

  I think she’s much stronger than I was at her age, she said.

  Pol smiled down into his chest. The sulfurous, bodily stink of too many peeled boiled eggs was starting to fill the air. No. You were like that, too. Both of you. Tangken tabungáw.

  Hero hadn’t eaten a tabungáw since leaving Vigan as a teenager. Manileños called it upo, she remembered. When she was a kid, there were still people who hollowed the gourd out, dried it, used it as a hat from the rain, made musical instruments out of it. Some political ally had given Hamin a gift of it once, a decorative bowl made from dried tabungáw rind, handpainted, beautiful. Concepcion scoffed at it, said the gift was an insult to good taste, and gave it to her driver for Christmas. Bottle gourd, hard as wood on the outside, even when it was ripe. And on the inside: melting, mushy-sweet. When someone said, You’re hard as a tabungáw, it was a gentle rebuke, a way of turning a hardass over to expose her underbelly, remind her of her thin-furred and woundable parts.

  The last person to call her that was Amihan. Amihan, crossing her arms while they stood together at the entrance of a sinanglawan they’d stopped off to eat at on their way back from buying supplies at the botica in Ilagan City. Waiting for the heavy rain to pass before they could drive safely back up the mountain, the first time they’d ever been alone together, only a few months after her arrival in Isabela.

  Amihan had been adopted by an ex-Huk farming commune over in Tarlac. Her own parents had been tenant farmers; first they’d witnessed the arrival of the Japanese, whose attempts to liberate Filipinos from the colonial Western stranglehold that had deformed their true Asian culture mostly consisted of taking the lightest-skinned women away to abandoned shacks and repeatedly raping them. Amihan still remembered her mother rubbing both of their faces with charcoal and dirt, praying for Our Fickle Lady of Ugliness to have pity on them, not knowing that there was no such goddess, no such safety. Then they’d been liberated yet again by the Philippine army, who behaved more or less the same as their predecessors, but now in a language they could understand. By the time Amihan was born, an older sister had already died of pneumonia, leaving just Amihan and two younger brothers, twins. Keeping all three children wasn’t an option, so like most farmers in the area who couldn’t afford their own families, they put one child up for adoption.

  Amihan was almost a teenager when her parents gave her—later she would finally say, sold—to the landlord of a sugar plantation on the other side of the province, where first she’d worked as a housemaid. When she turned fourteen, ropy and broad-shouldered with hair she’d shorn herself, she started working as a day laborer on the plantation, cutting cane and learning how to curse. Less than a year later she would incite a small mutiny over wage increases and working conditions, burning a quarter hectare of cane to the ground in protest. The other farmers called her kuya even though they were older, which was acceptance enough. A group of ex-Huk laborers took note of her influence and daring; they invited her to their stronghold in the mountains of Zambales. By that point Amihan hadn’t seen her family for over five years, and knew that if she left, she would likely never see them again. She accepted. Sometimes in the streets she saw a pair of smiling twins and her heart would skip, but that was the extent of her homesickness.

  The ex-Huks maintained a formal Maoist training school in Zambales, which was why Amihan knew so much about Maoist and Marxist ideology even though she, like Hero, was skeptical and detached about the orthodoxy; more concerned with its effects, the structure it made visible. By the time she was twenty-one, the people who’d raised her in Zambales had evolved into little more than a sophisticated gang network, posing no substantial threat to the local government troops, with whom they lived in tense but mutually beneficial peace. They were led by Kumander Virgil, who established their urban base in Angeles City, near the Clark Air Base. The local economy was exploding with the increase in American forces stationed there on their way to or from Vietnam, and somebody had to cater to the twangy-voiced boys and their simple appetites—open up jueteng dens, open up undeveloped land, open up girls. Some of the American government forces even regularly hired bodyguards from the private security company operated by Virgil’s right-hand man, Tonio, the bespectacled chinito who’d introduced Amihan to the concept of mass base, taught her at fourteen to break the wrist of any man who touched her without permission.

  If Tonio had been like Amihan’s gruff older brother, then Virgil had been her adoptive father. Virgil, gold on his neck and fingers, a younger and younger sweetheart at his side, had been convicted of rape and financial opportunism by a party court-martial and stripped, for a few months, of his command. Not long after his conviction, however, he managed to get himself reinstated, largely because the party members who opposed him started turning up dead. Amihan saw stronger, battle-scarred men tremble in Virgil’s presence, and yet with her he’d always been patient and tender, never forgetting to remove his tinted sunglasses in her presence so that she could see the sun-spotted wrinkles around his eyes when she made him laugh. Later Tonio told her that Virgil had lost a daughter early on to meningitis. Amihan would have been the daughter’s age, if she’d lived. You don’t keep anyone, and everybody can be replaced: that was all Amihan knew about family.

  Amihan had become a district commander by the time she was twenty-four, had gathered her own gang of intimates and loyalists, along with a small, but not negligible, amount of turf. As the years passed she became something between a treasured daughter and a thorn in her adoptive family’s side; she’d never been good at hiding her displeasure with some of the practices that had become routine under Virgil’s jurisdiction. What protected her for the time being was that she was a woman—more important, a daughter—but she knew in her bones that it was possible that she, too, might turn up in a dumpster behind one of the American bars, shot cleanly in the head, body untouched, a sign of paternal love. One day Virgil instructed Amihan to stop supporting a group of farmers being evicted from their lands to make way for a Voice of America transmitter. She refused. Not more than a week l
ater, her second-in-command was beaten to death in a jueteng den, right in the heart of Amihan’s turf. His face was unrecognizable, the silver ring on his pinky finger and the childhood bolo knife scar on his arm the only identifying marks. That was Jon-Jon’s older brother.

  What happened between her departure from Angeles City and her encounter with Teresa, Amihan never divulged, but Jon-Jon was the only one left of her gang still with them in Isabela. She didn’t say what happened to everyone else, or if she did say it, she didn’t say it to Hero.

  Amihan was often mistaken for the real kumander of the group, but she always corrected new recruits, and denied it when people said she would make a good kumander one day. Hero always had the feeling it was because she was afraid she might one day turn into Virgil—that more power would trigger some heretofore untapped potential for greed, planted in her early education and waiting for water.

  The only person Amihan really respected in the group was Teresa, and that was because the first time she’d met Teresa, Amihan had been in police custody, getting her breasts felt up, and Teresa had approached the constabulary, panyo covering her hair, pretending that she was lost, before elbowing him in the trachea then shooting him in the gut. That was the kind of thing you had to do to win Amihan’s loyalty.

  Hero still had no idea what it was in her that had first drawn Amihan’s surly, lingering gaze, but after a couple of years they were groping at each other in the back of Jon-Jon’s jeep when Hero was supposed to be stocking up on supplies at the larger botica in Ilagan, hands shoved down each other’s pants, Amihan scowling even in orgasm. Afterward, Amihan stalked off like they’d just had a fight, like she didn’t want to ever see Hero’s face again, and that lasted until the next time they saw fit to feel each other up.

  Amihan, who cut through people’s naiveté with the rusted-over elegance of a bolo. Amihan, who had a particular way of laughing that Hero still remembered in her dreams: one high-pitched bark, then a machine-gun firing of tinier ones, each increasing in force. Hero didn’t know what it said about her that she’d found that laugh sexy.

  Amihan, who said to Hero, right before muttering Tangken tabungáw under her breath at the entrance of that sinaglawan, weeks before they’d started sleeping with each other, without looking Hero in the eye as if she were impatient with herself for even caring, as if it had never occurred to her that the words could also apply to herself: Teresa says you’re not as hard as you look.

  * * *

  Roni’s suspension was unremarkable. She moped around the house while Paz and Pol were at work, opening cabinets in the kitchen to look for food, then closing them without retrieving anything, no hunger in her, just a listless need to do something with her hands. Hero still had the videotape of The Castle of Cagliostro, but neither of them were mentioning it; perhaps Roni knew what Hero was thinking, which was that she wasn’t sure if it was all right to let Roni watch the movie if technically she was being punished. Hero busied herself with cleaning, sweeping the floor in the kitchen and wiping at the countertops and the greasy stove, doing the dishes, drying plates individually instead of letting them air-dry in the broken dishwasher as usual, working until her hands had to tell her to stop. Then she moved to the living room to watch the bad daytime television she was slowly starting to enjoy, letting it pass through one ear and out the other. All the while Roni moved between the kitchen and the living room and the bathroom like a restless ghost, rattling at random doorknobs along the way, never meeting Hero’s eye, passing her on a parallel but never-intersecting track.

  When the phone rang late in the afternoon, they both jumped at it, grateful for the interruption.

  Hero got to it first. Hello?

  Hello? Pacita?

  No, this is—her niece. Geronima—

  Nn, nn. Geronima, it’s Adela. From the other day.

  Hero could hear the sounds of a busy restaurant over the phone, plates, a strain of music. Yes, I remember.

  I’m calling to talk to Roni, see how she’s doing. Nandyan ba siya?

  She’s here. You want to talk to her?

  Please.

  Hero turned to Roni. It’s Lola Adela. From yesterday. She wants to talk to you.

  Roni, who was looking in the kitchen cabinet for the hundredth time that day, poked her head out. Okay.

  When on the phone, she stood up straighter, as though Lola Adela was watching. Hi.

  Hero listened to Roni’s side of the conversation: Um. Okay. Um, I don’t think so. I have to ask my parents. They’re at work. No. Well. I can ask Ate Hero. Okay.

  Roni looked up, moving her mouth away from the receiver. Lola Adela wants to know if we can come to karaoke tonight.

  Hero was one hundred percent sure that they could not, in fact, come to karaoke tonight. I don’t think that’s a good idea, Roni.

  Roni relayed the verdict, said: Okay. Uh-huh. See you next week. Yeah. I’ll give it to her. She handed the phone back to Hero. Wants to talk to you.

  Hero picked up the phone. Hello?

  You can’t come tonight? Adela asked without preamble.

  It’s not a good day. Roni’s in trouble. She’s grounded.

  Adela didn’t respond right away; she sounded like she was listening to someone talk, someone in the room with her, whose voices Hero couldn’t make out.

  Tell her yourself, Adela said, but she wasn’t speaking to Hero.

  Uh, Hero ventured. Hello?

  Someone in the restaurant cried out, Just—

  Adela sighed on the phone. Hello? Geronima? You’re there?

  Yeah, I’m—

  You can come alone, you know, Adela said. Even if Roni can’t. Everyone’s welcome. You’re not the one grounded, right?

  The possibility had never occurred to Hero. Ah, she said, trying to find a way to refuse without sounding like a, a—Teresa’s voice, warm, stick-in-the-mud—she flattened her lips, breathed out. Sorry. That’s very kind of you to offer. But I don’t think I can come tonight. Sorry. Next time.

  Next time, Adela repeated loudly, also not for Hero’s benefit. Okay. We’ll see you next week, ha? Okay.

  Adela had an abrupt, borderline rude manner on the phone, like the medium itself displeased her. Hero stumbled, I—sure, okay. Salamat, po—

  Okay, okay, bye, Adela said, and hung up, but not before Hero could hear her tsk-ing, exasperated, to someone in the room, Ikaw naman—

  * * *

  By the time they went back to Lola Adela’s next Thursday, things had returned to normal. Only Paz had become a little more withdrawn, more brittle than usual. Hero saw Paz change Roni’s bandages once more, inspect the wounds. They were healing, they must have been; they hadn’t been that deep to begin with.

  When Hero picked Roni up from school, she showed up on time, with the rest of her class. If she stayed a little longer, it was in the parking lot, where Hero could see her from behind the steering wheel; and it wasn’t to fight, but to talk with other kids in her class, not just the two girls Hero had seen with Roni before, but a gaggle of other kids Hero didn’t recognize, a couple boys, one of whom might have been the one who’d called Roni an Igorota. The fight—or maybe the suspension—had eased some of the strange tension around Roni, or earned her some form of respect. Not because she’d fought, but because she’d gotten in trouble; because they’d seen her injured. For that reason, she was starting to be liked.

  At the restaurant, Adela was waiting for them in the back, smoking a Lucky Strike and picking at a plate of jeprox. Boy was chatting to a group of men in the front of the restaurant, but tipped the bill of his baseball cap at Roni, then Hero.

  Kumusta ka na, kiddo, Adela greeted. You guys hungry?

  Roni nodded. You want barbecue again? Adela asked. Roni nodded more vigorously. Adela looked over at Hero, asked the question with her eyes. Hero nodded once. Okay, sure.

  Adela stood up, went over
to the corner. Placed the cigarette in her mouth so it hung loosely over her bottom lip while she filled two plates with white rice and barbecued pork. Hero watched the cherry of the cigarette grow longer and longer, waited for the ash to fall into their food, but it never did. When she returned, she didn’t sit down, but put the plates in front of them, then reached forward and flicked the cigarette’s long cherry into the ashtray on the counter.

  For a long time, Adela watched them eat—mostly Roni—while smoking and sipping at calamansi juice. Roni, unlike Hero, didn’t care if people watched her while she ate; Paz often made a habit of it. Sometimes, that was the only way Hero ever saw Roni and Paz spending time together; Paz would come home from work, late at night, bearing a large aluminum tray of food she’d either gotten from some of the nurses at work or picked up from Gloria on the way home. Roni would eat a bit of it, as her midnight snack. Paz wouldn’t eat at all, just leaning on her chin, looking at her daughter with tired, half-closed eyes. Murmuring: Ang sarap naman. It makes me happy, watching you eat like that.

  Hero put her spoon down, full. Roni was still going strong. Adela smiled at Hero.

  You want a cigarette?

  Hero blinked at the carton stretched out toward her. Uh. No, that’s okay. I—quit a while ago.

  Adela made a longing sound. Good for you. I wish I could quit. But you know.

  Hero did know. She’d been smoking since she was twelve or thirteen, like everyone else she’d grown up with. Hamin said he’d started smoking before he was ten; that he’d tasted his first cigarette before he ever tasted his first empanada, that he could more easily tell the difference between types of Virginia tobacco than he could tell the difference between cooked papaya and cooked tsayote. Purong Ilocano, Concepcion muttered, with her customary mixture of disdain and grudging sexual interest.