by Nick Joaquin
“Obet and I saw it all—no, Obet? We were on the patio last night giving his soapbox a tryout. And first the Vampires came and then the Vultures. This is a rumble, I said to Obet. So we ran to behind the church but it was only Pompoy and your brother Bobby, they were going to square.”
“Pompoy’s Vampire, Bobby’s Vulture,” gasped Junior, wide-eyed.
“It was no match, pare, but one thing I can tell you, your brother he did not run. You ask Obet.”
“And Pompoy, the Vultures they pushed him, and he fell down on Bobby.”
“And so the rumble?” gasped Junior.
“No, pare, too bad. Because then we heard the whistles and everybody ran. Obet he forgot his soapbox. We went back for it and it was still there but your brother was gone. Maybe they carried him away.”
“Maybe he’s deadball already,” gasped Junior, enraptured with horror, knowing now what Mr. Henson would be delivering at around eleven.
The bell to end recess rang and the grade-schoolers scattered in a spill of short pants.
“Deadball already, deadball already!” they chanted as they ran.
“And if not in the morgue,” said Inday to her washline crowd, “in the psychopathic hospital. Aie, he is crazy, that one. There will be more shootings in this house.”
“Naku these teen-agers. Nothing in their heads but shooting, shooting—if not guns, women. I pity the parents.”
“This Petra, she talks as though her son was not a teen-ager.”
“But how can I, a washerwoman only, have a teen-ager?”
“Petra is right! We who have nothing, our children are gangsters. They who have, their children are teen-agers.”
“Or juvenile what-is-it. This I can boast of: I may be only a washerwoman but I have children too and not one is a juvenile. Just let them try, hah. This Bobby, has he ever bothered you, Inday?”
“Aie, no, no. I do not tolerate that. Not even from the fathers. But yesterday I saw I might begin to have trouble with this Bobby. He was allowed to come down to eat but they made him carry out his plate himself. I was fetching a bottle of water and I saw him looking at me. Naku, I nearly shrieked. Really cracked, that boy. I said to him, ‘You look at me that way, Bobby, and see if your mother does not know right now. I am a woman who is not just-just a woman,’ I told him.”
“But has the father never really—”
“And if not with the father how much less with the son. The truth is, he does not seem to have that in his head anymore, the father. Bother me? What he wants now is just not to be bothered. My poor señora, she is still young, beautiful. Can you blame her if—”
Heads bending as the voice dropped covered this intersection of four fences but opened up again at the sound of a car on the Heredia’s driveway.
“Uy, here comes my señora now. Who is that with her? I must leave you, pañeras. They will all be climbing on my back again.”
“The washlines,” said Ineng Heredia, glancing up her driveway at the dispersing backyarders, “have been getting the latest bulletins from the home front.”
“Was that your maid or a kangaroo?”
“A maid, Menchu, and becoming as rare in these parts as kangaroos. But come in, come in, and behold the mansion I possess by the grace of God and mortgage.”
“I think it’s cute.”
The sala the sisters stepped into, where heavy curtains covered shut Venetian blinds, suggested hinterland dusk, because of the smell of bamboos on the front lawn, and seemed at first as desolate. Then they made out two girls on the divan sharing the telephone.
“Hang up, Sophie, and come and kiss your tita. Inday!”
“That my cake, Mommy? Oh Tita, what’s this?”
“Your happy birthday, of course, sweet. Gewgaws. Who’s your friend?”
Sophie introduced a shrinking staring Minnie; Inday vaulted in and bore off the cake box, aloft, on a palm, like a basketball about to be shot.
“Come and see my room, Menchu.”
“Mommy, Dad’s in there.”
“Oh, your auntie can stand that.”
Fully dressed, Totong Heredia lay across the coverleted bed, shoe’d feet just over the edge. Menchu stepped around to the farther side, bent down and kissed him on the mouth. He opened his eyes: “Oh, you.” Then he sat up and vaguely brushed off creases from his sport shirt. His wife, indulgently smiling, arms folded, watched from the foot of the bed.
“So, did you go to school, Tong darling?”
“School?”
“I mean Bobby’s. Did you talk to them?”
“Yes.”
“Everything’s all right then?”
“I don’t know.”
He rose and walked to the dresser, stooped, propping palms on the edge, and looked at himself in the mirror. They heard him groan. He picked up a comb and brought it up to his hair but apparently thinking better of it dropped the comb and sailed out through the open door. But he came back at once. “Hello, Menchu,” he said, “how are you?” And out he sailed again. They heard him in the bathroom, running water, then in the sala, drawing curtains and pulling up blinds.
“The Martians,” said Ineng Heredia to her sister, “have landed. I have one in the house.”
“He doesn’t look too Martian.”
“And they say life begins at 40.”
“Oh, we all have to stop for inventory—see if we’re still as good as the next one and can keep up.”
“I’m afraid it’s worse than that. This one’s asking why he has to keep up.”
“He’s just going through a phase.”
“The effect on the children, Menchu, that’s what I’m worried about. Like Bobby now . . . What time have you got?”
“Almost eleven. How about the effect on you, Ineng?”
“Ah, you have heard them talking. No, nothing, Menchu. Nothing at all. I’m too upset to itch. But I suppose a woman like me now, she gives off heat waves. So everybody assumes—”
“As they assumed with me then, you know. And I was enraged. But here I am now —a divorced woman, an expatriate—”
“I’m not you. Oh Menchu, I’m sorry!”
“Don’t take over too much, kid. Makes you feel up to anything. That’s where the danger starts.”
“Someone has to hold the fort. There, it’s eleven at last.”
To the sound of the clock striking they walked out of the room, along the corridor, down the three steps and back into the sala, where noon glowed now from stripped window and white marbled tiling. The two girls were sharing the telephone again, this time on the floor. Slumped in the middle of the divan sat Totong Heredia, drinking beer from the bottle. The women sat down on either side of him and talked across his annoyed face.
“Do you want a beer, Menchu? Or what would you like? I have vermouth, I think, and scotch. Inday!”
“When I went away, people just brought them in, the drinks, always cokes. I come back and everybody’s asking what will you have: sangria? martini? I’ll have a beer.”
“Yes, so much has changed. Two beers, Inday, choose the cold ones. We really weren’t drinking yet when you went away?”
“Mid-1946, no. I don’t remember there were teen-agers then either.”
“Now they’re a public calamity. The mystery is why. I can understand it happening to the rich, people with money enough for their kids to run wild on. But people like us . . . This house isn’t paid for yet. Totong drives a four-year-old car. I do my own marketing and cooking. Not a stick of furniture in this house we’re still not making payments on; but ever since he became an executive we have to have façade, always a bit more than we can afford. We couldn’t spoil the children if we wanted to.”
“Still, they do have more than you and I did at their age.”
“Were we ever teen-agers? What were we when we were their age?”
“I,” said Totong Heredia suddenly, and suddenly smiling, “was Mickey Rooney. I duck-waddled when I walked, I wore balloon pants, I had a tuft of hair standing up on my head, I talked from the side of my mouth like Andy Hardy, and I used expressions like swing it and holy cow.”
“All I remember,” said his wife, beginning to smile too, “is the boogie, and dancing to a portable phonograph on Dewey, and those everybody’s parties during the war—with calamansi juice for drinks!”
“I was a bit ahead of you two,” smiled Menchu. “The early 1930s. Still the jazz age. The real jazz age, in fact, over here. I bobbed my hair and used make-up, which only vaudeville artists did before. And I wore my skirts up to here and danced the carioca. Flaming youth we were, smart, modern. Our favorite words. No stuffy alta sociedad for us—Club Filipino or Columbian or the Nucleos. We were the first to go night-clubbing. Trocadero, Tom’s, the Ronda. Legazpi Landing for breakfast. And Butch”—her smile did not waver; Butch was the divorced husband—“when we were in college, he drove a crazy topless flivver with things written all over it, like And How and Ask Me Another.”
On the floor, having run out of friends to call up, Sophie and Minnie listened to their elders in amazement, now and then exchanging helpless looks. Their glances said: Grown-ups are mad.
“And to be young,” chanted Totong Heredia, sitting up and raising the beer bottle as though toasting, “was very heaven.”
Then, with a glance to either side of him, he collapsed again. Any moment now he would be expected to measure up again. But how could he cope who was himself a mess? When Bobby appears in that doorway can I say to him: Come in, son, and be domiciled, be domesticated? He and I are equally struggling. But he is on the verge, being drawn in; I am on the outskirts, being pulled back. What could I say to him that wouldn’t be treachery there where he is or here where I am? This too-white marble room which the untamed Inday bringing in beer rocked with her rudeness was monument to domestic male, at once his trophy and his tomb. But should one knock what one had still not finished paying for?
A car stopping outside at the gate stopped the breaths of three adults and one child in the room. Only Inday, to whom nothing her betters did could anymore be a surprise, and Sophie, who knew the world revolved only for her, were undisturbed enough to do what was natural. Inday, having crashed tray on table, straightened up and frankly stared at the open doorway. If this was where she came from the mother would have rushed out and grabbed the culprit by an ear while the father shouted gratitude or abuse at whoever the boy was with. Here they just sit and pretend not to be waiting. Rising from the floor, Sophie walked not to the doorway but a window, where, looking out, she felt herself looked at: the scene had become hers; the waiting was now for what she would say.
“It’s Bobby all right,” she announced, over a shrugged shoulder, “in a taxi, with Mr. Henson.”
“Is Mr. Henson,” her mother asked evenly, “coming down?”
For answer there was the snort of the car driving away.
The quick steps they heard on the driveway lagged on the steps of the porch. They thought: Now a shadow will fall in the doorway. But no shadow fell. This was noontime; sunshine outside might be the overflow of brightness from this white room; and the boy suddenly there in the doorway stood in total light, illuminated in front and behind, impaled by clarity, like a statue floodlit in a park.
He was his generation in heralding a new racial structure: tall and leggy and framed bigger, though currently shooting up so fast he might be a swatch of cartilage being stretched as far as it would go and showing the strain. Tension was drilling out a face that would be sharper than his father’s—the nose keener, the upper lip not so bulgy nor the mouth so butted out, and the thrust of the jaw more pronounced, though the brown eyes still slanting to a fold in the outer corners remindingly pointed to pedigree. An X of tape on his left eyebrow marked the spot where the body failed. Atop the brow tottered a fat roll of hair, the teen-ager’s panache; behind, the thick mop would be cut in a straight line very low on the nape. The boy had just outgrown a taste for sideburns and ducktails.
He was in a light-gray Beatles shirt with red pipings on collarless neck and sleeve; tight cuffless beige trousers; red socks; and cream-colored boosters. A rag of red jacket streamed from his left hand.
He stood with right hand thrust into trousers pocket and eyes cast down; and when he finally looked up and at the people in the room, the three adults on the divan, who had, at his coming, multiplied the motions of pouring out and drinking beer, just caught his blink of wonder. Whatever he had been steeling himself to see he had not seen. He gave the impression of rubbing his eyes. But the askance look was succeeded by very evident consternation. He stared, and stared around in panic, apparently unable to recognize a face there. This brought Ineng and Totong Heredia to their feet, and stumbling forward with hands held out.
“Bobby,” they cried as one.
The boy’s face recorded a third happening inside him: a wave of relief that washed all over him, untensing his figure, uncrumpling his face.
He pulled the hand out of his pocket and waved vaguely.
“Mommy, Dad,” he said.
He had come such a long way home it didn’t seem strange he should not quite be sure this was home.
• • •
Halting in the hot doorway, watching what he now knew to be his parents moving toward him, Bobby Heredia prepared for speech. Mommy, Dad were not words. He had not spoken them. His body had only made those sounds to avoid fuss and announce itself, as one snaps a knuckle or stamps a foot. He had heard that prisoners recognized one another by how they rapped on walls. Mommy, Dad were such rappings. They were Bobby’s sounds and now outgrown, but he had to use Bobby’s old sounds to be understood at all.
Those old sounds, he now saw, had started this. First there was the becoming aware that they were offkey; there was discord between the sounds and what they were supposed to refer to, making them false notes that more and more jarred on his ears, until it seemed to him that his life had, like a school year or a basketball game or a combo dance engagement, a first and second half. There was all the time he had accepted the sounds without thinking; and there was the time he stepped back and listened critically.
He had caught himself doing this more and more half a year ago, when he turned seventeen, his father long back from the hospital but still acting sick, and himself, aware of a pause at home, standing back to watch it like a movie. And they had begun to sound like people in movies. Why did they say Mommy, Dad when other children said mama, papa, or inay, Hay? Only children in movies said Mommy, Dad and he had started feeling like some awful Canó movie child actor whenever he made those silly old sounds. He never used them outside home; outside home parents were ermat and derpa.
Then there were the names. Everybody he knew was called Bobby or Willie or Boy or Rene, and Susie or Maggie or Tess or Mari-something. All the children he knew had the same names their parents had picked because those were the current “society” names. He had heard that in the old days you got whatever name was on the calendar the day you were born. That had struck him as cleaner naming. No fuss. No nonsense. A la suerte. You got what you had to have. It was yours truly and exclusively dedicated.
But parents who picked your name loaded it with wind. The name was not you; the name was your parents and what they thought they were or had got and whatever else they wanted. A boy named Bobby had to be the sort of boy a boy named Bobby would be. The name was not clean, being sticky with stuff like what kind of house you had got and what kind of complexion and what kind of accent when you spoke English. He had come to hate being called Bobby. When he turned seventeen he had looked up in the calendar what he should have been called. Cándido, martir. And from that day he had felt that the real Bobby was named Cándido. Whenever he stepped back now to watch he would think: Cándido would find that offkey or Cándi
do would call that overacting.
Overacting had been the word in his crowd at that time and he had made it his grading mark. If he now felt uncomfortable at home it was because he saw they all overacted by saying Mommy, Dad and having names like Bobby and a white floor instead of the usual wood. He could do nothing about home but he had been eliminating in himself a lot of things he now saw were overacting, like sideburns and ducktails and pants you had to be zippered into and that hung way above your ankles. Pants should be tight but when skintight were overacting. Hair should be long but the Beatles bob was overacting. Red shirts used to be a badge of courage but were now just overacting, and so were shirts and socks that matched if it was some lurid color like purple or mustard but this was something he still did at times, match sock and shirt, though he knew it was overacting and made Cándido wince. Scooters were fun but motorcycles were overacting, especially if you dressed up for it in goggles and helmet and black leather jacket. Drinking was being a man but asking for scotch on the rocks at a swanky place was overacting. Stick to beer, man; the true drink was gin and a mixer. Passing out could happen to anybody but being drunk movie-style reeling about and talking funny was overacting. Boogie was basic, the twist was standard, but everything else, especially the mau-mau, was overacting. Alone with Junior was biology but doing a group race was overacting. Streetcorner talk like diahe and tepok and ayos na and ’lis d’yan was natural but Canó slang idiom like get lost or real gone or dig that was overacting. Girls on the telephone, girls in the dark, girls at basketball games, girls riding pillion on scooters, and girls who smoked or squealed at combos, or wore shorts to bowling, jeans and a shirt to the movies, were overacting. Even ponytails were now overacting. Anything you wore or did that yelled “I’m a teen-ager” was overacting and so was the word teen-ager itself. And vests were overacting; cowboy boots were overacting; Baguio in summer was overacting; the NCAA was overacting; riding piled up in a car with the top down was overacting, especially if you drag-raced on Dewey; and participating in TV teen-age shows was so hopelessly overacting it was okay to do it for laughs and he and his combo had once blackened out their front teeth and combed down their hair and gone on Teeners Canteen under funny names to do some really corny songs like “God Knows.”