by Nick Joaquin
He was rolled over on his face and in simultaneous tugs was stripped of jacket and shoes, tie and socks, shirt and trousers, undershirt and shorts. He was naked but not being pressed down anymore and after a while made bold to lift his face from the grass. One of the two men was shaking his jacket by its hems and from the upturned pockets showered down handkerchiefs, cigarettes, match folders, aspirin, chewing gum, keys, and coins. The other man was crouched down on one knee intently sifting the spill. Among his underclothes on the grass lay Sid’s passport and plane ticket, Adela’s crumpled cable, that goddam toothbrush. The taxi driver stood apart, leaning against his car, smoking a bored cigarette.
The man shaking the jacket threw it away and walked over to where Sid lay. He shoved a shoe under Sid’s breast and heaved him over face up.
“Where’s that card, pare?”
The man’s thick shoe was nudging Sid on a shoulder.
“If it’s not there,” Sid heard himself saying, “I don’t have it.”
The shoe dashed against his jaw.
“Where’s that card, pare?”
The shoe loomed huge over Sid’s face, dangling from the sky.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” said the other man, the man on his knee in the grass. The huge shoe withdrew from the sky and Sid sat up and felt at his jaw. The two men stood whispering to each other. Sid began to breathe normally, and to itch. They were in trouble, not he; and he rose to his feet. The taxi driver flung away his cigarette and swore. The two men jerked heads as one toward the driver. From beyond the clearing drifted a sound of voices. The sound might have been a magnet yanking Sid bodily off the ground.
Joint and muscle, not thought, catapulted him from clearing to shrubbery. His body had become pure speed, unstoppable, crashing into bush and vine, rushing through undergrowth. His limbs acted by themselves, each dash or swerve spontaneous. This being was but movement, instinct, impulse, engine, and could have split a tree. Only when it had torn through a thicket into a second clearing did the brute energy, recovering mind, sputter to a halt, gradually embarrassed, knowing itself naked before people.
Staring at him staggering were a woman in a pink dress and a barefoot old man in white undershirt and khaki pants ripped off at the knees, frayed sombrero in hand.
“I was held up,” was all Sid could say. He waited, gasping, now utterly aware that he wore nothing but a watch.
“Well, but don’t just stand there,” laughed the woman, “cover yourself.”
Sid clutched at his groin.
“What happened?” asked the woman.
He told her only about being shanghaied by the taxi driver and stripped by the two men.
“Are they following you?”
He looked back over a shoulder, listening.
“I don’t think so.”
“Near here, sir, is a constabulary outpost,” gravely intoned the old man.
“Near here, sir,” giggled the woman, “is my car. Want to wait in the back seat for us?”
Vexed by her giggling, Sid coldly bowed at her and walked away with the dignity of one who rated a sir even with no pants on. The car was a small Jap coupé. Sid found newspapers in the back seat and spread them over his lap. The red x’s on his body were only scratches. The woman was still giggling when she and the old man got into the front seat.
“We’re taking you to the constabulary,” she announced.
“If you don’t mind,” he leaned forward as she started the car, “I’d rather you took me home.” He explained he had just landed and gave her Adela’s address. This sent the woman into another ripple of mirth.
“My God, I can’t drive you in there the way you are. That’s a posh village. Tell you what, mister—”
“Estiva. Isidro Estiva. I’m called Sid.”
“Oh, I think I know you well enough to call you Sid!”
“Please do. And whom have I the pleasure—”
“Mrs. Borja. Tell you what, Sid—I live just off the highway; we could stop there and make you decent. Unless you want us to go back to where you say you were held up and see if we can locate your clothes?”
“You think it’s only a story. I really don’t usually go around without my clothes on, believe me. But, no, we better not go back there. I won’t have you and your companion take the risk.”
She smiled at the old man at her side.
“Mang Ambo here takes care of my lot back there, Sid. I’m planning to build soon.”
“Isn’t it rather out of the way?”
“When I first built off the highway I was a voice in the wilderness. But it’s too crowded for me now. So off to a new frontier.”
They came to where the memorial park billboard marked the mouth of the trail. She stopped the car and repeated instructions to the old man before he got out. He bowed toward Sid: “I commiserate with you, sir. Whatever help is in my power—” They left him bowing at the corner, the car turning left to join the thicker late afternoon traffic on the highway. Sid slid lower on the seat, pulling the newspapers up to his neck. Where the highway ended she turned left on another road, then right into a side street that seemed to be one motel after another, with names like Saratoga, Windsor, Biarritz, Versailles. “One reason I’m moving out,” muttered the woman at the wheel, nodding toward something called the Taj Mahal Motel.
They stopped before a gate painted in quadrangles of different colors; she sounded her horn; a girl came running to open the gate; and they drove up to a low-slung house cresting a wave of lawn. She stopped on the carport and looked round at him.
“I’m afraid I can only lend you teenage clothing, my son’s.”
“I’m smaller than your husband, or bigger?”
“I don’t have my husband’s clothes.”
He hesitated.
“Are you a widow?”
“No.” Then she added, as she got out: “We just don’t live together anymore.”
She left Sid in the car. When she came back she was carrying mustard-colored dungarees and a shirt-jac in bold black and orange stripes. “I’m afraid I can’t do anything about shoes.” She inspected the shrubbery along the driveway while he dressed in the car. The shirt-jac was too broad in the shoulders for him but he had to squeeze his legs into the tight trousers. Neither shirt-jac nor trousers would button at his waist. Crippled by the trousers, he limped out of the car to show Mrs. Borja the mid-riff gap between man and boy.
“I’ve sent the maid for a taxi,” she was giggling again. “You haven’t developed a phobia about them?”
“Is the younger generation really built this way? How old is your son?”
“Fifteen.” That would make her around 35, thought Sid. “There’s a telephone,” she said, “if you want to call up your sister.”
“No need, I think.”
They were standing where the driveway and a piazza merged and the junction was marked by a bit of rock garden built against a corner of the house. On top of the rocks was an old wooden image of a saint; above it hung a capiz-shell lantern. He glanced toward the piazza; instead of the usual wrought-iron art were wicker chairs with lyre backs in the antique manner, a perezosa, even a round marble table with a clawed leg.
“You look surprised, Sid.”
“Very. Is the past really this much in fashion?”
“How long have you been away?”
“Ten years. When I went away one was sick if one looked back at stuff like that.” He nodded toward the termite-eaten saint on the rocks.
“Oh, everybody’s collecting them now. Why, did you look back?”
“And got jumped on the neck for it. I thought I was a poet then, or maybe an artist. And I was rather fascinated by old things—folk fiestas, icons, the décor of the past. But being interested in that sort of thing was supposed to be unhealthy, reactionary.”
“Well, Sid, you’
ll be happy to learn that what was reactionary then has become very avant-garde. Do you know we actually organize expeditions now to see old fiestas? I must read what you wrote.”
“It wasn’t much. And I stopped long ago.”
“Because they jumped on your neck?”
“Not entirely. I think I got scared. If you go back into the past it could come back.”
“How do you mean?”
“People who said that sort of interest was unhealthy were not wholly wrong.”
“And so you gave it up to become—what?”
“I’m with a UN agency, in New York.”
“Oh—to save the world.”
“But it has come back.”
He was staring at the saint on the rocks.
“Stop it, Sid. You trying to scare me? And there’s your taxi.”
They moved down the driveway together.
“If you need help,” she said, “I’m in the book. Look under interior decorators. Sonya’s. That’s me and mine. But you’ll be shy about us meeting again?”
“Oh, I want you to know me with my clothes on.”
Adela’s village was the other way up the highway and was entered through a sentinel’d gate, like a fort. The houses here all had low walls and chic front lawns and unbarred windows. Bidding the taxi wait, Sid Estiva hobbled on bare feet up the driveway to the front door, which was actually on the side of the house facing the driveway. Beside the open doorway was a prop on which stood a small ravaged old wooden Virgin. Sid stepped into the living room. Adela was parting the drapes at a window, to let in the last of the afternoon light. Sid planted himself in the middle of the room: bare-footed, boy-trousered, shirt-jac’d, arms akimbo—the returned native, escaped from the perils of passage.
“Ah, there you are, Isidro,” said Adela, looking around. “Plane got in all right?”
• • •
The guests that evening were mostly Adela’s crowd but she had dug up two of Sid’s old chums, Jing Tuason and Etoy Banaag, and their wives.
“But before you boys go off into auld lang syne,” said Adela, “Isidro has to meet everybody.”
Like most of the women there, Adela was in patadyong and kimona. The men were mostly in tan or faded-blue business suits. Sid was in a baro and gray pants borrowed from his brother-in-law. The brother-in-law, Santiago, Adela’s husband, looked antebellum in white sharkskin, small gold cross on lapel.
“I thought,” said Sid to a woman he had just been presented to, “everybody here now wore black suits at night?”
“To something informal?” The chill in her tone was for what she clearly assumed to be a New Yorker’s irony. “Only the very young or the very naïve maybe.”
Sid noticed how certain phrases recurred like refrains: fashion’s current passwords apparently. “Do that” or “Yes, do that” was what the ladies smiled if he said he would call them up or get them a drink or have to rejoin Adela. If he asked a man about the last election or the Vietnam war or any current event, the cheerful snap was “No comment!” and everybody listening roared with laughter as though something witty had been said. Sid supposed that a local significance he was unaware of had made the phrase funny and he felt himself an outsider after stopping feeling puzzled each time they laughed.
But he was impressed by the shine of the crowd. This was a middle-aged collection, not beautiful people really, but they moved with an ease fibered by money in the bank and food from supermarkets. Perhaps it was that which, making them beautiful in each other’s eyes, produced their collective aura. Sid was startled, as he circulated, to be told that his sister wore “famous clothes” and was a “glamour matron.” As far as he could see, Adela was as doughy and pudgy as ever—but her husband was a bank president and a Papal Knight. Still, Sid had to admit that the shine came from more than the mutual admiration of bank accounts. These were not the top nobs but they were clean, decent, reasonably honest folk: salt of the earth agleam. The prevalence of bald heads and paunches in the men coincided with the cantilevered masses of hair and bosom on the women, for whom couture and coiffure had rashly become architecture. They also now sipped at wine or booze; and Sid waited in some suspense until Adela announced that the buffet table was “ready to be raided.” She added that, in deference to the returned native, presumably famished for home cooking, the food was “barrio fiesta.” The buffet table offered a sopa de fideos, boiled lobster, stuffed boned bangus, a kari de pata with bagoong, pork and chicken adobo, a coconut-heart salad, and lechon. Remembering the steak and barbecue parties of the fifties, Sid felt he was heaping his plate with the culinary equivalent of the antique Virgin in Adela’s portico.
Candlelit tables had been set out on lawn and piazza but Sid found his old chums Etoy and Jing among the folk who preferred to eat indoors, in Adela’s den, where furniture from their father’s house environed a life-size photograph of the old man himself, in its old baroque frame, on a paneled wall.
“We’ve been admiring it,” said Etoy Banaag, putting an arm around his wife. “Picture of the Founder. He looks quite a fellow.”
“Vitality, he had it.” Sid waved a fork at the picture. “Born penniless, educated himself, became lawyer, editor, politico. Married three times, all heiresses. Had one child by each wife. Third time a widower when he died.”
“Mrs. Ferrer is not your full sister?” asked Mrs. Banaag.
“No, Adela’s mother was from Vigan. My mother was from Bacolod. And the youngest of us, Guia, the child of my father’s old age—her mother was from Ermita.”
“North, South, and Centre,” laughed Jing Tuason. “Hey, your old man was some sexual geographer. And sexual economist, too. Your sister Adela’s tobacco money; you’re sugar—Guia is real estate?”
“But we used to think,” said Sid, “that Guia was the Cinderella. Her mother’s Ermita property wasn’t worth much after the war, ruined and all. Now Guia could buy out both Adela and me.”
“I remember Guia,” said Jing Tuason. “That little skinny kid I kept thinking was your niece?”
“Well, Adela used to get so mad when I was mistaken for her nephew. There’s a decade between every two of us. Adela’s forty, I’m thirty, Guia is twenty. Adela has been resurrecting things. She used to think this sort of stuff was hideous—you know, the old Sun Studio life-sizes in gorgeous frames. Had this taken down from our sala and stored away. She said it was vulgar and scared off her boy friends. This was just before the war; I was seven: Father only laughed. Father’s having the last laugh, too.”
“High, high camp,” said Etoy Banaag. “Boy, to hang a life-size pic of yourself in your house, you’d have to have a lot of nerve.”
“Which,” shrugged Jing Tuason, “we don’t have.”
“But we don’t call it no nerve,” said Etoy, “we call it understanding.”
“Guia Estiva!” Jing Tuason’s wife suddenly cried. “Why, we were in the same school, I was a couple of grades ahead, but we were on one judo team together. Oh, you’ll never guess where we last met. At a fortune-teller’s.”
Looking around at Mrs. Tuason, Sid noticed that Etoy Banaag’s wife, nestling in her husband’s arm on the seat they shared, had sat up.
“A fortune-teller,” repeated Jing Tuason’s wife, setting her plate down on the floor and licking her fingers. “I don’t know what had got into me. This was last year, Jing—when the baby didn’t seem to be going right inside me and I felt so rotten? Well, there was this dame told me about this fortune-teller—for my peace of mind, she said. No, not one of those crummy joints in Quiapo where they spit on your palm. This was high-class; I was told the clientele included eminent society matrons. You had to make an appointment, like at the dentist’s, so the clients wouldn’t bump into one another, I suppose. One’s shy at confessionals. But that day there was a mix-up. Guia and I bumped into each other. Our appointments were for the same time. I told Guia
she could have it and scrammed. What a relief. I suppose Guia was doing it just for kicks. She was always rather far out, a kook.”
“You didn’t see the prophet himself?” asked Etoy Banaag’s wife.
“No, as I said I scrammed.”
“What did the place look like?” asked Sid. “The fortune-teller’s.”
“Like any reception hall in a plush office. Carpeted, air-conditioned. This was in that big new building in downtown Quiapo. High priest something, he called himself. Mystic Doctor of the East and all that jazz. Some fiesta-fair swami gone up in the world, I suppose.”
“Out of this world, out of this world!” groaned Jing Tuason, shaking his head at his wife.
“Out of this world,” said Etoy Banaag’s wife, in a careful voice, “could also mean from this world, in this world, of this world. The here and now, I mean—not anything fantastic.”
Sid became aware that a woman wearing what looked like a Moro costume—patadyong with a kind of sari—was interested in his group’s talk and had detached herself slightly from her own group to listen. She seemed to be trying to catch Mrs. Banaag’s eye.
“Oh, the here and now can be fantastic enough,” said Sid, raising his voice, on a hunch. “You folks should hear what happened to me at the airport this noon, and all because I waved a toothbrush.”
He was looking straight at Mrs. Banaag.
“A toothbrush,” she said, and waited. No expression at all. But Sid now found the woman in Moro dress at his elbow.
“A toothbrush, Mr. Estiva?”
“Oh, hello. Yes, just an old mangy green Prophylactic. Gather around, folks, and I’ll tell you the horrid story.”
“Yes, do that.” The woman smiled round at the group. “I must hear this. What happened, Mr. Estiva?”