by Nick Joaquin
It was evening by then but bodies naked looked even worse in the night’s lights than in the day’s and he had found himself running, running through the streets, trying not to look, not to see, appalled by the ugliness of people which shadows now made scary—mean bodies, lewd bodies, diseased bodies, deformed bodies, decayed bodies, broken bodies; with sores, with palsies, with mendings, with animal hair, with erections, with holes, with tumors; crawling with bugs, oily with sweat, caked with filth, dripping with pus, stained with blood, scarred with suffering; on the go, in a slump, at a standstill, with the shakes, out of order, under a strain, beside themselves, and in despair. But they walked in public as if they were clean and happy and beautiful, believing nobody could see into their secret places, what they really were, and he felt the urge again to tell everybody what he saw they had but couldn’t stop running.
Running, he had only paused at shop windows to check on himself and gasped with relief each time he saw his reflection still clothed, still in the Beatles shirt, the beige trousers, the red socks, the cream boosters, the red jacket slung over a shoulder, but would begin doubting again as he ran on, running away from a world that didn’t know it was guilty of indecent exposure. He could not go home, he might never go home again, but out on the streets was just as terrible and then he remembered the one possible refuge from a world that had become, my God, repulsive. Grandmother’s house. So he jumped onto a bus and kept his eyes shut tight throughout the ride afraid he might throw up as all those awful naked bodies pressed all about him.
The lights were not on downstairs except in the dining room where the table was laid for two and old Sianang the cook had popped a head at the kitchen door. He had run upstairs and into his grandmother’s room but she was inside her oratory where the stiff-robed saints were. “Who’s that?” “Me, Grandmother.” “Bobby? I’m finishing my rosary.” He had not gone into the oratory but went down again to the sala and turned a light on and sat down on a rocking chair and listened to his motor stopping running.
Something always went still in him in this funny old house. As far back as he could remember this house had meant being outside what was routine. A week ended on Saturday and began again on Monday; Sunday was outside the week because Sunday was gathering here with all the aunts and uncles and cousins to eat Grandmother’s puchero or kari and spending the day yawning. A year was the life at home and in school but holidays were outside the year because they were Grandmother’s timeless rituals: her relleno on the Quiapo fiesta, her bacalao on Good Friday, her guinatan on All Saints, her boiled ham on Christmas. This had been, when he was a child, a sort of superhome, and We’re going home to your grandmother’s meant going back to something more permanent than the various houses they had lived through. They had been always moving, and always moving up, and this latest house in the suburbs with the white floor was surely not the top yet, but all the time they had been wandering Grandmother’s house had stayed where it was, and all through the time of the various houses that one by one stopped being home because they were no longer worthy of them, this house was always home and never changed in value. Now it was only when they came here he could feel them still a family; they all stopped overacting here, under Grandmother’s quiet eyes. His father became less nervous in this house where he had been little; Junior became just an ordinary boy; Sophie became more of a child; even his mother lost some of her edge. He had known as a child that his mother disliked this house. “How you can let your mother stay in that dump, with all that junk—” But now her attitude had changed; now she wanted the junk—all these old sofas and tables, and even this funny rocking chair he now sat still on, and the stiff-robed saints upstairs, and the big halo with gold rays all around the crucifix on the wall, and the funny thing beside the front door with a mirror on it and handles and holes where, Grandmother said, hats were hung and canes and umbrellas deposited in the old days. Whenever he saw it he thought of ladies with parasols and gentlemen with canes and whiskers and hats lining up to dump hat or deposit umbrella and look at themselves in the mirror. Wearing a hat in the old days made you out a gentleman; if you wore a hat today you were rugged, maybe a gangster.
This was now a rugged neighborhood in Quiapo where the house was, but once inside you knew nothing of what screamed outside affected it and once you saw Grandmother you knew nothing that screamed outside could ever affect her house. She was her house in a way they had never been any of the houses they had lived in, and certainly not this latest one with the white floor. She was genuine because she was rugged herself and you could beat her up until she was half-dead and she would just rise up afterward and brush away the dirt and be Grandmother again without even overacting all that. His father was her son; why hadn’t he got what she had? Or was he just imagining all this? Was what he felt here just overacting too? What if when Grandmother comes down I should see her just as naked and sick as the world outside? And he thought of himself this noon in bed feeling all alone and suddenly afraid and crying out Oh Dad, what shall I do? But he had not been totally alone and afraid then; there had been this house in the back of his mind all along, keeping him company, telling him that though everything else might crash it would stay where it was and never change in value. What if this last refuge, too, should be taken from him?
He had stiffened to hear a door close upstairs, and footfalls on the floor above, but when he heard the first step down the stairs he had jumped up and run out the door and down the dark alley and he hadn’t stopped running until he found himself back on Plaza Miranda.
The noise on the plaza was deafening, a campaign miting was going on, the politicos were lined up naked on a stage but the crowd that cheered or jeered was just as naked, and he could feel they were aware all right of each other’s nakedness but pretended to see something else and covered each other’s shame with flattery, the people on the stage saying the crowd was great, the crowd was holy, when all he could see, my God, was muck in armpits and lice in hair, and the crowd hailing the people on the stage as knights and heroes, but his stomach had turned at that line-up of big soft rumps and bellies and balls wagging every which way as their owners violently orated; and he had wondered what if grown-ups could really see each other this way would that be the end of their politics, would they frankly turn away from each other in disgust because, my God, how could you call anybody a savior if you could see that tuft of caked hair hanging down from their hole behind? Maybe everything would be more honest if people had to deal with each other on the basis of frank disgust instead of flattery; anyway they would surely have to stop using all those overacting words; the people on the stage wouldn’t call this lousy, scratching, belching crowd holy but just make a face and hold their noses, as they probably wanted to do even now, and the crowd would just die laughing, my God, if anybody called any naked waggling rump a hero.
And he had felt himself aching to be with his own crowd, with the barkada, with whom there couldn’t be this kind of disgust, because their overacting was not wicked, their nakedness was familiar, and even their dirt was somehow clean. So he had hopped a jeepney back to his suburb and gone looking for the guys. They were at the Elvis Billiard Hall and right away he knew he was right to have come here and he heard, as at his grandmother’s, the steamy motor inside him stopping running. Pete and Willie and Rene were playing rotation and Pete had the last ball but hit it for scratch and then he leaned hands and chin on the cue stick and looked serious and said: “I got to talk to you, Bob.” And he said: “Feed me first, guy. I’m broke and starving. I’ve gone stowaway.” So the guys looked into their pockets and pooled what they had but it came to only two pesos and some cents after they had paid for the table.
They went to the Chinese restaurant next door and he had a bowl of hot mami and a leg of adobo’d chicken and two servings of rice and the guys watched as he ate. Then, over cigarettes, Pete said he’d just have to make up with Pompoy and they were already arranging it. “I don’t want an arreglo,”
he had told them.
“Don’t be so siga, Bob,” said Pete. “It’s two months now the Vampires and the Vultures have made peace and formed an alliance, thank God. You want to destroy all that? You want them to declare war again? I’m sick of those goddam rumbles.”
“Look, I’m not going to say sorry to Pompoy Morel. I can’t even stand to see him.”
“What did he do to you?” said Willie. “What was all that shooting about?”
“Nothing! I don’t want to talk about it!”
“See? So you were just detonating. You’re in the wrong here, guy.”
“And what about us?” said Rene. “You involve us if you let what happened this morning turn into trouble with the Vampires. Okay with us if there was some real trouble. But you just wanted to make an explosion. So now admit it and be with us. Pakikisama, guy.”
“Pompoy’s behaving better,” said Pete. “He’s willing to meet you and talk this over.”
“That’s just a stroke of Pompoy’s and an old stroke. He just wants a chance to stab me in the back. He’s double-faced.”
“We’ll be there beside you, ready.”
Leaning back till the chair tipped back, feeling the food filling up his stomach and the ache of tiredness dulling in thigh and foot, he had looked at the guys and loved them, loving them all together, seeing them not as funny or sickening or frightful as they huddled naked around the table but rather as the only clean things left in the world, and he had shrugged and dropped his head back and blown smoke up to the ceiling:
“Oh, all right. You guys do what you want.”
So Pete and Rene went off to tell the Vampires and he and Willie had gone back to the billiard hall and played carambola and then Pete and Rene came back and said Pompoy wanted the peace meeting behind the church and would be with four Vampires and Bobby was not to bring more than four Vultures. So they told Ricky Gardula to come along and when they got to behind the church, where it was as dark as hell, the Vampires were there already. There was some shouting between the two groups as they stood at first bunched far apart but drawing closer as the taunts and threats became ribbing and laughter and then they were pushing at him and Pompoy to move up and shake hands and forget what was past. So he and Pompoy stepped forward and the moment he saw Pompoy’s face, and the smirk on it, he had seen his mother naked and Pompoy looking at her and he had with all his might shoved a fist into that mean, stupid, smirking face and Pompoy had hit back and sprung at him and then he was on the ground and Pompoy was all over him and he had seen Pompoy’s fist as big as all the world coming toward his left eye and then the whole world had crashed down on him.
Next thing he knew he was in the back room of the billiard hall and Pete was slapping water on his face but when he opened his eyes Pete stood up and moved away, joining the other Vultures in the room, and they talked among themselves with their backs to him and you could see they were disgusted. His head whirled when he sat up on the bench and he had bent over and buried his face in his hands. He had never been this beaten up, never so beaten he had blacked out, and now just the memory of it loosened his knees and panicked his pulse and all he wanted to do was run home and jump into bed and cover himself up and not go out for the next 359 years. He clenched the hands pressed to his face but couldn’t control his body’s trembling or the sob in his breath and all the while the guys were there talking in low voices and their backs to him and he was wondering how he could sneak out without them knowing and escape and be safe home and in bed, with the door closed. But they stood right in the doorway. And suddenly he had sprung up and walked right at them and shoved them aside and strode out of the room and out of the billiard hall.
Pete had run after him and tried to pull him back by an arm.
“Where you going!”
And he heard himself say:
“I’m going to look for Pompoy.”
And Pete had shouted to the Vultures that were coming running:
“This guy’s gone mad!”
They had piled up on him but he had fought loose.
“Haven’t you had enough for one night?” they cried.
“Don’t any of you guys try to stop me again!”
And he had strode on, the Vultures following at a distance.
Pompoy was at neither of the two bowling alleys, nor in the lobby of the Village Theatre, nor in front of the Ritz Supermarket, nor in Sally’s pinball parlor, nor among the rollerskaters on the cement of the Village Gasoline Station, nor in any of the beer cantinas, nor up on the mezzanine of Mrs. Lim’s sari-sari where one swigged gin, nor in the crowd at the Crossing where there was also a miting, nor inside the Stag Barber Shop where they were showing sex movies, nor with the stambys at the street corners of the Village’s downtown section which he patrolled till past midnight, the Vultures still tailing him.
He could hear the cry running through the night:
“Bobby Heredia’s hunting Pompoy Morel.”
At around one o’clock he was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the closed-up Ritz, dabbing at the cut on his eyebrow which had begun to bleed again, his handkerchief a bloody rag now, and Pete Henson had approached.
“Give up, guy. Pompoy’s gone home.”
“Pompoy never goes home this early.”
“He did tonight. He heard you were after him.”
“Hah.”
“But they say he said he’s going to gate-crash Sophie’s party.”
“If he lives till tomorrow. Where are the guys?”
“Joey Perez and some fellows went joyriding and dog-hunting and they caught a good one. They’re going to roast it in the vacant lot behind the Gatdulas and they have a fine collection of longnecks and cuatro cantos. The barkada’s there. Come on, let’s go too. Everybody wants to see you, Bob, everybody’s awed at you. Believe sila. They say this has to be your celebration because you’re stowaway and hunting Pompoy and really going for lost.”
So he wrapped the red jacket round his head and over the bleeding eyebrow and he and Pete went to join the guys in the vacant lot. It was talahib jungle but in the center was a clearing where the guys were. They greeted him with cheers—“Here’s the patapon!”—because anybody for whom life had become just something to throw away had graduated from siga to genuine rugged. A fire had been got going and the dog, a white one, practically a puppy, had a rope round its neck and whined like mad as Rene Luna pulled at the rope. Then Joey Perez whacked it on the skull with a crowbar; Ricky Gatdula slit the throat with a kitchen knife; Willie Veles caught the blood in a bowl; Pete Henson poured gin in, and everybody had a gulp of the bloody stuff, which was warm and bubbly and salty. Then they burned the hair off the dog and each one cut off his own piece and toasted it on a stick or just threw it into the fire and dug it out as soon as it began to smoke black.
The rum, gin, beer, and coke had been mixed up in a basin with a block of ice in it and because this was Bobby’s celebration he was made the tasador and he filled up the single glass with a dipper and handed it now to this guy, then to the next, and so on around the ring of dog-eaters giggling under the stars and huddling over the fire as the dark dampened and dew fell and a wind blew cold through the tall weeds in the vacant lot. It was a good dog all right, the meat white and tender and unfatty, and they stripped it right down to the carcass, by which time the sky was brightening and they were all vomiting, some had passed out, two guys had quarreled and were groggily slugging it out on their knees, and he himself was reeling about, still turbanned with the red jacket, and talking funny, quite aware that all this was overacting but thinking what the hell, there are no rules anymore, life is a discard and so am I.
Then Pete Henson was pulling him by an arm and his arm was being slung over Pete’s shoulder and he and Pete were staggering out of the clearing and out of the vacant lot and out of the Village and across the downtown section to the other side, because Pete live
d on the other side, where there were “apartments” instead of houses, and he remembered his mother murmuring at those apartments: “An accesoria by any other name . . .” Pete’s family had one of the middle doors, not even a corner door, in a barracks-like apartment building, and they had managed to get inside quietly enough but once inside they had bumped into one thing after another, my God, until something really came crashing down. Then steps came clicking down the stairs, a light was turned on, and there he was, there they were, he and Pete, sitting on the floor, a fallen bookcase at their feet, Pete’s parents hovering above—and they were (surprise!) dressed: Mr. Henson in complete pajamas, Mrs. Henson in a long white gown.
“I miss-s-judged the dis-s-tance,” Pete was gaily explaining—and in English yet! “I thought this-s-s was the stairs already and we were trying t-to climb the b-bookcas-s-se.”
“Where have you been?” he heard Mrs. Henson say.
“Just happy-happy. Where were we, Bob?”
“It’s the Heredia boy,” he heard Mr. Henson say.
“Is that blood on his face?” asked Mrs. Henson.
“He was-s-s in a fight,” he heard Pete explaining. “He’s-s-s gonna kill Pompoy Morel.”
“And so he’s wearing red on his head,” said Mr. Henson, crouching down. “Listen to this, Bobby Heredia. Without knowing it you reverted to the etiquette of the race. Our ancestors proudly wore a red band around their heads to proclaim they had killed. And you’re still them though you live in that snooty Village of yours.”
“Does his family know where he is?” asked Mrs. Henson.