by Nick Joaquin
Sid’s watchful eyes caught no flicker of cognizance between the woman and Mrs. Banaag. The latter’s blank look now included both him and the intruder.
“What happened? I got shoved a card: somebody’s schedule of appointments.”
“What an anticlimax!” laughed the intruder, rolling her eyes.
“Oh, there was more,” said Sid. “I was kidnapped, stripped, almost beaten up.”
“And all at the sign of a toothbrush,” chortled the woman.
“No,” said Sid. “At the Sign of the Milky Seed.”
This time he saw Mrs. Banaag start. But the sari’d woman at his side was still chortling.
“That sounds like a health bar,” she snickered, “or an ice-cream parlor.”
“It sounds to me,” said Sid, “like something else.”
“Hey, what’s all this!” cried Etoy Banaag, sitting up. His wife was doubling over, clasping her hands. The Jing Tuasons frankly stared.
“It sounds to me,” said the sari’d woman, “like a very shaggy dog story. And look what you’ve done, Mr. Estiva; reduced your audience to stitches.” She bent over Mrs. Banaag. “It’s not that bad, girl. I’ve heard worse.”
Mrs. Banaag lifted her face. The two women looked at each other, the intruder smiling as she straightened up and drew back, Mrs. Banaag staring.
“What’s with you, hon?” asked Etoy Banaag of his wife.
She coughed, shook her head.
“Too much to drink, I guess. Excuse me.” She smiled at the company. “I have to go to the little girl’s.”
She rose, sped headlong across the room, bumped against an edge of table, and sank to the floor. The sari’d woman was first at her side, lifting her head up, whispering in her ear. The chorus of squeals had brought Adela to the doorway.
“What’s the fun in here?” she asked eagerly, with her hostess smile.
Etoy Banaag had raised his wife to her feet and was now helping her toward the doorway, the sari’d woman hovering solicitously on the other side.
“Don’t tell me someone else has passed out!” laughed Adela, hurrying forward and enfolding both the Banaags in her arms.
Watching from in front of his father’s picture, Sid Estiva mused that Adela was of the North indeed: she never lost her head.
• • •
Santiago Ferrer, with jacket doffed and tie loosened, still looked as correct as when smiling attendance on his guests, the last pair of whom he had just seen to their car. Sid now found the courtliness focused on him. The hired bartender, as he folded up his tent on the piazza, was bidden to mix Mr. Estiva a nightcap, which the host himself carried to Sid in the living room.
“No, cuñao, I know little of your friends the Banaags. He teaches, writes a column for one of the weeklies, is said to be a fervent nationalist. She also teaches and, I suppose, follows her husband’s ideas.”
“How about that Moro lady?”
“But she is not a Moro lady, cuñao. She is a distinguished businesswoman, she runs a travel agency.”
Adela came in and shooed away the servants picking up plates and ashtrays from the floor.
“Santiago, sit down. Put away that drink, Isidro, and listen.”
“Are you going to scold me about the Banaags?”
“Goodness, why? I liked them. No, we have to talk about Guia.”
“My dear,” said her husband, “at this time of the night?”
“Tomorrow, she may have arrived. She’s in the provinces now, with that group of hers, evangelizing I suppose.”
“Let me tell him, my dear,” interrupted her husband, “what I told her the last time she was here.”
“Yes, do that.”
“I told her, if she really had a vocation, here was this community willing to accept her as postulant. I warned her that if she continued with this group of hers, which is not recognized by the Church, and I doubt it will ever be, she may find the door of every convent in this country closed to her. But your little sister, cuñao, is hard-headed. She believes this group of hers will in time win ecclesiastical approval, which is madness.”
“Why, what’s wrong with her group?”
Brother-in-law Santiago pressed thin lips together and darted eyes upward.
“Heaven forbid,” said he, humorously enough, “that I should ever speak against the Holy See. But it seems to me that the Vatican Council has only wrought confusion. At Mass now, nobody knows when to stand, when to kneel. Everything has been disarranged. Only yesterday a young man came to me at the bank; I almost fainted when I found out he was a priest: he was dressed in the style of a teen-ager. And with permission. Now what is happening here, I ask you.”
“Well, then, maybe Guia is right to hope.”
“Oh no, no, cuñao—with her group it is different. Yes, on the surface, it may look like one more of these modernizing movements. Making Christ meaningful to our times, relating the faith to the world of today. Yes, that is how they talk, her group. And they protest that theirs is not a formal order, not a congregation, not even a cofradia yet—merely an informal club of the devout. But such are the rumors about it that the ecclesiastical authorities have deemed it wise, though also informally, to conduct an investigation. We suspect this is not really a religious movement but a nationalist one. They have rented that old nunnery turned into a bodega in Intramuros and made it their headquarters. I visited it with the commission. They have a kind of chapel. The images there are like Igorot carvings, like primitive pagan art. I saw, let me tell you, a figure of the Virgin pregnant, like those figures dug up in Batangas and Mindoro.”
“I am not,” Sid laughed out loud, “shocked!”
“Wait, cuñao, wait. These people never applied for a chaplain, but we hear they are being served by a defrocked priest who sings a Mass to which they dance.”
“Dancing in church,” Sid was still shaking with laughter, “is not exactly new to Philippine Catholicism.”
“Do be serious, Isidro,” cried Adela. “Oh, all this is your fault. When Guia asked to have her own apartment I was for her staying under my roof but you sided with her.”
“She had turned eighteen.”
“She is my and your ward until she turns twenty-one and should be living with you or me.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fossil, Adela.”
“Well, look what has been happening since she went off on her own. One crazy thing after another. This weird New Christian group is just the latest. First there were those awful young writers, then a beatnik gang, then she went into advertising and all those media people, and afterward oh all for nationalism. And now religion. I do not for one minute believe she has any vocation. She just likes fads. I didn’t mind the other phases; she made do with her allowance, rarely pestered me for more. But this now is serious, this now is a crisis. That’s why I cabled you. And you’re to blame, Isidro—egging her on instead of trying to put some sense into her. Now what are we to do? Papa put us in charge of her. Are we to abdicate, declare her of age, turn over the estate to her as she now demands, though we know perfectly well she’ll only turn it over to that crazy sect of hers?”
“I’d have to talk to her first.”
“But she’s in the hands of adventurers, Isidro.”
“How did she get mixed up with them anyway?”
“In that world she has run off to, it was inevitable. That’s where all the queer birds fly: artists, radicals, beatniks, charlatans, and heaven knows what else. I may be a fossil but I didn’t interfere, though the things I heard. Let her live her own life, I told myself, as you bade me, but she’s not living it, she’s ruining it. Well, I do think this prodigal daughter has had a long enough holiday from the real world. Two years. She has had her fling. Now I am putting my foot down. She is not to dissipate her inheritance. She is to come back to this house and stay here, learn the duties of a wo
man, associate with normal folk, go out with nice boys, marry and have children and a home. Carlota Jones has long had her in mind for her eldest boy, and still does, despite this bohemian silliness, and I am for pushing the match. I can’t be at peace with my conscience till I’ve seen her settled down. She has always been more of a daughter than a sister to me.”
“My dear, not so fast,” put in her husband. “If the girl is going through a mystical phase the kind thing to do is let her get it out of her system. Which is why I advise putting her in a regular congregation. If the life is not for her she will get out fast enough and then it will be easier to marry her off.”
Guia, thought Sid, shouldn’t have happened to such a couple as the Ferrers. Looking round the room, he wondered if more than a party had laid it waste. But amid the disorder sat Adela and her husband, side by side on a sofa, alike faces turned to each other, sensibly and politely arguing: she for a quick marriage, he for a temporary veil. Sid smiled at the old-fashioned sense of their expedients, yet marveled that they could remain so practical in the glare of underworlds from which (or so he had heard that night from the party’s mothers) no home today was safe. At any moment might suddenly appear at the door, for children “of the best families,” a policeman with a warrant of arrest.
No sooner had he thought this than a maid came in to say a policeman was at the door, asking for Mr. Estiva. Brought in, the policeman admitted to having no warrant of arrest. Mr. Estiva was merely being “invited” to headquarters, to answer a few questions. “I’ll come with you,” said Santiago, already getting into his jacket. Sid stared as Adela, smiling hostess again, offered the policeman a saucer of olives.
“I’ll call up Attorney Arranz, Isidro, and send him after you,” she said.
“Do that,” said Sid before he could think.
In the police jeep he felt himself the Kafka hero, being borne to judgment for he knew not what crime. But I know what my crime is, thought Sid. That goddam toothbrush (what was happening now was, of course, its latest repercussion) had been waved as a banner of non-involvement. If he traveled without luggage it was because buying clothes at the other end was less fuss than opening up to Customs and explaining. If he lived abroad it was because being alien committed you to nothing local. You couldn’t read a newspaper at home without upping your blood pressure; abroad, newspapers read like anthropology. Even his job at the UN agency involved him in nothing, save in his group’s illusion of being useful: present as relief wherever the world hurt. But the benevolence was magic by remote control: papers moving from office to office, a figure in a report, a line on a graph. And at the other end the recipients of benevolence were statistics. Because he would bypass Customs he had traveled bearing only a toothbrush, had come home with no gifts for Adela and Guia, for kith and kin, and for that crime was now being harassed by the native gods of custom.
“Don’t say anything,” said brother-in-law Santiago when the jeep stopped at headquarters. “I’ll do the talking.”
The first thing Sid saw when he entered the police station was a frayed sombrero resting on knees: the old man of the white undershirt and khaki pants cut at the knees sat patiently on a bench, dignity still intact at that late hour in this criminal porch. Then he saw Mrs. Borja advancing on him, a Mrs. Borja smiling apologetically, as if this were still Adela’s party and she were coming in late.
“Sid, oh Sid . . . Hey, now I’ve seen you with your clothes on.”
“Not yet, these aren’t mine—what are you doing here?”
“Oh, Sid, I had to tell them where you were.”
“What’s it all about?”
“They haven’t told you?”
“No, nothing.”
“That taxi you took at the airport—the driver has been murdered.”
• • •
The driver had been shot from behind, in his taxi, at the wheel, when just about to drive away from that clearing in the woods of the proto-suburb. A constabulary patrol had come upon the body; the summoned police had found their way to Mang Ambo’s hut nearby and Mang Ambo had led them to Mrs. Borja.
“I think they rather thought,” laughed that lady, “I was a gangster’s moll, Sid. Yours.”
She and Sid, released from their all-night ordeal after giving statements and the promise to be available, stood beside the tragic taxi, in the taxi company’s yard. The taxi had been washed inside and out. Sid had searched the back seat in vain: the card was not there. Now they waited while an employee fetched the boys who had washed the car.
“Your homecoming hack, Sid.”
“No, my getaway car.”
“Toyota ’65. Jap invader number two.”
“I was trying to escape as usual.”
“Do we look unwashed: your crumpled baro, my crushed coat.”
“Because I didn’t follow through a kindly impulse—return that goddam card—a man died.”
“Oh, Sid, we had this all out at breakfast: it was because they had slipped something in your beer.”
“No, it’s like I told you: I don’t like fuss, getting involved.”
“Who does?”
“You are enjoying this, Sonya. You like a happening. I don’t. Not to me anyway. I’m not curious, not adventurous.”
“How about that young go-go for old things?”
“The safely dead past. Kicks from icons. Yeh, man, we dig. Hah. Daring of me, wasn’t it? Besides, that wasn’t me really, only my father in me. He was a vulgar adventurer, the kind they say battens on experience. If anything scared me off, it was the thought of him coming back. Like, now, in my sister Guia. I think she’s the only one of us who’s our father’s child.”
“We are all of us our fathers,” sighed Sonya Borja, “though we don’t know it.”
“My wife used to say I was like that Quaker who told his wife all the world was mad except him and her and he sometimes had his doubts about her. Now that wasn’t fair, as I tried to explain to my wife. But explaining was a mistake. After I had made it clear I didn’t object to other people’s being mad, she left me. She said it had become a strain: pretending Manhattan was a desert isle where only the two of us lived. Now she’s married to a Pinoy old-timer on the West Coast who raises horse feed.”
The employee came back to say the “washing” had found nothing.
“I always try not to be where the action is,” said Sid as he and Sonya walked out of the sunny, busy, dusty yard so heartlessly moving out its own traffic jams to the glut beyond, “so, now, I’m up to my neck in it.”
A greasy girl of about fifteen in shirt and denim pants suddenly blocked the sidewalk.
“Sir, ma’am, you are looking for something?” The accent was southern. “Maybe I found it.”
“Are you the washing?” asked Mrs. Borja.
“No, missis. I have a stall inside where they eat, the drivers. There at the back, where they wash the cars. Sometimes I look in the cars first, but not always, no—just to see was something forgotten. Sometimes a magazine, or a fallen coin. Very often, panties. Aie, por bida man guid, I would not touch those, no, not even if golden.”
“This taxi where the driver was shot—” began Sid.
“Yes, I looked inside but I saw nothing. Then I put my hand down the edge of the seat. Sometimes money drops in there. I found only waste paper. So I threw it away.”
“You threw it away.”
“Then I heard, sir, you were looking for something there. So I ran to where I had thrown it away.”
“Yes?”
“But they had swept the yard already.”
“Alas,” said Sid.
“This,” said Sonya, “is beginning to kill me.”
“So,” said the girl, “I ran to where they throw the garbage, and I searched and searched.” She paused, enjoying it, hands behind her back. “And I found what I had found.”
Sh
e held out a fist that opened to reveal a crumpled card. Sid picked it up and pulled it flat.
“Is that it, sir?”
“Yes, girl, this is it.”
The girl’s palm was still up. Sid glanced at Mrs. Borja. She laughed, opened her bag, fished out a peso that she clasped into the girl’s hand: “Thank you, Inday.”
In the coffee shop across the street they pondered the card together.
“My hunch is that they get at the women through a fortuneteller.”
“Milky seed . . . milky seed . . . Deck six . . .” mumbled Sonya.
“You getting warm?”
“And fortune-teller . . . Listen, Sid, there’s this prophet, and he’s supposed to cater to high society, who calls himself Melkizedek. Melki-zeed-dek.”
“Mrs. Banaag used that word: prophet.”
“And you said the other lady spoke of a big new building in Quiapo?”
“Deck six would mean a sixth floor. Are there many buildings now in downtown Quiapo six stories and over?”
“Only one that I know of, and right on Miranda.”
“Elementary, Dr. Watson. Shall we go?”
• • •
The elevator that took them to the sixth floor of that “big new building in Quiapo” surprised Sid by being an express. The process of elimination (all the other offices on that floor had names on their doors) brought them to Room 666, which had no name on the frosted-glass door, no lights inside.
“You wait here, Sid. I’ll get the building superintendent. He’ll open up for us. I’ve decorated at least two offices in this building.”
The superintendent garrulously opened up. Room 666, said he, had never had a name on the door, was leased to a Mrs. Cruz, who had moved out just the night before, leaving no forwarding address. Her people—to the annoyance, said the superintendent, of the watchmen—had spent the whole night emptying the suite. However, everything was in order. Mrs. Cruz had simply forfeited her rental deposit. The superintendent shrugged that, yes, Mrs. Cruz was most probably only a front; he had heard the real tenant was a magician.
The state of the suite—a reception hall and two inner offices—confirmed the hasty evacuation. The floor was littered with crushed newspapers and packing-case straw. But nothing had been left behind save one trash can into which someone had leaked on the ashes of burned papers.