by Nick Joaquin
“He’s-s-s-s stowaway,” explained Pete.
“And I never wanna go home!” he heard himself shout.
“Oh my God,” said Mrs. Henson. “Darling, put on clothes and call up Mrs. Heredia.”
Then they both went away.
He was puzzled and carefully put his perplexity into words:
“Why—does—your—father—have—to—put—on—clothes—to—telephone?”
“Has-s-s to go nes-s-s door. We no have telephone, s-s-see?”
Then Mrs. Henson came back with a basin and began to towel his face and he had slumped away until he was lying on the floor.
When he opened his eyes he was in the lower half of a double-decker and he knew he was upstairs in the Hensons’ apartment. This room was where all the children slept, six or seven of them, though there was no sign of them now. The other room across from this he could see through the open door would be where Mr. and Mrs. Henson slept. He had seen them dressed; that could only mean they had nothing to hide. And he felt at ease in this narrow cluttered room. It didn’t pretend to be other than it was. Pete didn’t call his parents Daddy, Mom or Mamá, Papa or even Itay, Inay. He called them by their nicknames. He said that was how they wanted it.
Sunshine from the window at the head of the bed looked late morning and everything in his head was also light but clear, no fuzzy ache at all, and as he lay at ease in this room where Pete slept he had begun to hear Pete and Mr. Henson in the other room.
“So how’s it now, boy?”
“I’m all right.”
“I wish you had told me before you did it.”
“I just went ahead. I’ve had enough of the teasing.”
“Didn’t I bring you up to be above the crowd?”
“But I don’t want to be different.”
“Alas. Since it’s your decision I must respect it, but I had wanted to liberate you from the customs of the tribe.”
“I can’t be always you.”
He had stopped listening, had turned over on his other side till he heard Mr. Henson calling to Mrs. Henson as he went down the stairs and then Pete coming into the room, when he had turned around again.
“You awake, Bob? How you feeling, pare?”
“Okay. Did you get it from your old man? I heard you and him.”
“That wasn’t about last night.”
“Yes, I know.”
“My old man has some crazy ideas. I wish he was more normal, like your old man.”
“Oh Pete, I like your home.”
“Hell, I wish we lived in a house like yours.”
He saw now that what Pete had done, getting circumcised, was his way of giving his old man a failing mark after believing for years he was smarter than the faculty. Was calling your parents by their nicknames as much overacting as calling them Mommy, Dad? He now felt uneasy in this house, which Mr. Henson called liberated because he could not do better.
“Get up, Bob. He wants to talk to you, about going stowaway.”
“Oh, he doesn’t have to, I’ve decided to go home.”
He couldn’t help a shudder at the thought of how Mr. Henson would word the talk. There would be, as usual, the sarcastic remarks about the Village and the ideals of the herd and how if your parents wanted to give you the better things in life the least you could do was be a good herd member like them, and not question anything, especially if you, too, believed the better things in life were cars and refrigerators and all those gadgets. He had thought Mr. Henson the most interesting of the barkada’s fathers and had enjoyed hearing what he now shrank to hear. The words would be like glass now through which you would see poor Pete saying I wish we lived in a house like yours. If you were poor and just didn’t have it in you to climb up in the world, well, that was just luck and fate and too bad, but did you have to justify it by pretending to be so superior and above gadgets? And did you have to tell your children not to want them either because you were afraid if they did and tried for them they might not fail like you did but succeed?
When he went downstairs he knew he would see them naked, and they were. In Mr. Henson nothing had receded, like in his father, because you could see nothing had ever pushed out; and Mrs. Henson’s body was one high brow wrinkling with worry. He had quickly said he was sorry to have been a trouble and thanks for everything and goodbye now: “I’m going home.”
“I’m taking you home,” said Mr. Henson.
“But I can just go home by myself.”
“Oh no, no, Bobby. I promised to deliver you to them. So sit down and eat breakfast and then we’ll go.”
There had been no escaping Mr. Henson’s talk and it was just as he thought it would be—about the Village and the herd and the gadgets and how if you were not a liberated person the best thing to do was stay with the herd, and he had seen, as he forced himself to swallow the fried egg and the rice, poor Pete standing in a corner and silently writhing. Then Pete, who didn’t have classes till noon, was sent to call a taxi.
“But, Mr. Henson, we could just walk across.”
“Bobby, people like me cannot walk into your Village.”
It was Mrs. Henson this time that he saw squirm.
In the taxi Mr. Henson had continued being sarcastic but he had stopped listening and looked instead at the Village, wondering why it made Mr. Henson so mad. It looked corny enough, my God, all those tin roofs and exposed plumbing, and certainly like nothing you had been accustomed to in the movies. Then Mr. Henson had said something he heard.
“Your dad’s waiting for you.”
“Dad is never home at this time.”
“He’s there now.”
And then he knew why Mr. Henson had been so set on delivering him in this condition, his clothes soiled and his face a mess and this stupid tape on his eyebrow, and he had hated Mr. Henson for wanting him to be seen this way, by his father, before he could be cleaned up and straightened out. But glancing around and seeing that little naked body that could only hump with malice, like a cat, he had thought wearily: Oh, what the hell . . .
But when they reached his gate he couldn’t help being malicious himself.
“Here we are, Mr. Henson. Do come down a moment.”
The little naked body had balled up. “No, thanks, Bobby. Mission accomplished. I’ve delivered you. So long.”
“Oh, do come down, Mr. Henson. Mommy and Dad will want to talk to you.”
And he had laid a hand on Mr. Henson’s arm and had felt the man shrink.
“No, really, Bobby. I have to be at the office.”
When everybody knew he was jobless again; he just went from office to office.
After Mr. Henson and the taxi had fled he had hurried up the driveway, eager to be with people not different the way Mr. Henson was, but had slowed down on the porch steps remembering he had been set up as judge of the people waiting inside the house, dreading again to see them exposed, though he now felt he could live with the truth about them and get over this revulsion. Still, he had measured his steps up the porch and into the doorway, stopping there and keeping his eyes cast down, delaying as long as possible the moment of seeing, the moment of judging. But when he looked up there was nothing to judge.
Another layer had dropped off what clothed people and more than a nakedness of the flesh was naked before him in the living room.
• • •
What he saw was, he supposed, what pictures in medical books showed: the human anatomy with brain, bone, artery, nerve, ligament, joint, and the internal organs exposed. He had seen many such pictures of the body with the skin off, but what he saw now was like those pictures and yet different because in motion. Movement gave what he saw the look of machines—like a running watch with the case off or a throbbing car stripped down to its chassis.
He could recognize vein and brain, bone and tissue, and the various orga
ns, but only now realized how closely all these together resembled an engine and he saw them as coiled springs, wheels, axles, cogs, tubes, cylinders, valves, ball bearings, pistons, nuts and bolts, wires and batteries, even the dark blood veining the mechanism looking for all the world as practical, as unemotional, as gasoline. And wheels turned, wires flashed, mainsprings whirred, valves pumped, pistons swung back and forth, and the motor throbbed running because that was the effect produced by the different parts of the machinery and not because of love or hate, goodness or sin, or being wise or stupid. The motor might run too fast or too slow or suddenly break down but whatever it did would not be overacting. Machines were rules.
He could make out some six machines in the living room, four big, two small. Three of the big machines were fitted to the divan, one stood upright beside the table. Of the small machines, one was propped against a window, the other was folded on the floor.
Surprised but delighted to find here, instead of the scandal of human nakedness, which would have to be judged, the precision of machines, which used no morals, he had yet in the next moment blenched. Some of those machines were his family—but who was who? All the machines were faceless and sexless.
And it came to him that the nakedness of the flesh that so sickened him was yet the shape of the person. Mr. Diaz with a rose in his rump, Mr. Calalang with a bell for balls, Mr. Quison with his mutilated manhood were horrid to see naked but that very horridness helped to identify them as, respectively, Mr. Diaz, Mr. Calalang, and Mr. Quison. If you stripped the skin from a person what remained was anonymous machinery. The big wart on the face of this man made him this man; scars and wrinkles and mendings and tumors and all that could mar flesh marked out a character, an identity, this life, this soul.
Oh, they were wrong, he saw now, oh, they were all wrong. The soul was not anywhere inside—not in the mind, not in the heart, not in the spirit, but here upon the seen flesh that they called carnal: this dirt-prone flesh, this bug-bitten flesh, this animal-hairy flesh, this sexual flesh. The ugliest nakedness was still a holy nakedness because flesh was soul and soul was flesh and if it wasn’t there all you had were machines you couldn’t tell one from the other.
And he dug hand into pocket, feeling himself, wanting to be himself, wanting to be now not Cándido but Bobby, with Bobby’s particular growth of hair and shape of eyes and build of nose and curve of mouth and crop of pimples; wanting intensely to be Bobby in color and height and form, in shoulder and arm and breast and belly and genitals and rump and legs and foot size. He gazed in panic round the machines in the room begging them to be souls and persons, to take on flesh again, however horrid the flesh.
And as if in answer to his appeal, two of the machines on the divan lumbered up and rolled toward him—wheels turning, wires flashing, mainsprings whirring, valves pumping, pistons swinging back and forth, and the motor running—and looking, my God, like those robot toys that walk on sidewalks during the Christmas season.
Who had wound them up or switched on their batteries? Was some invisible giant child playing in this room with those toys? Or were they, like space ships, radio-controlled? Was that what God was: the space scientist at the controls? It seemed silly now to have been judging people when they were only machines being turned on and off, moving mechanically. Like poor Mr. Henson, who thought himself so liberated—how could you blame him for not having the guts to compete? That would be like blaming a bicycle for not being a jet plane. And these two robot toys now jerking toward him—whatever emotion they thought had made them rise from the divan and roll across the room was just their imagining because the real push came from outside: the Scientist had pressed a button.
But as they approached they made a sound that flooded him with relief: a human sound, an emotional sound, a sound made by the flesh of lips.
“Bobby.”
From the pitch he realized there might be trouble, there could be a fuss. It was they who were worried, it was they who were appealing to him to recognize them. He recognized them all right from the sound they had made. The machine in high gear at the left was his mother; the one in low gear at the left was his father. He took the hand out of his pocket and waved to them, to dispel their alarm, but saw that more was needed. He would have to communicate. But they would understand only Bobby’s language.
He heard his body making Bobby’s old sounds:
“Mommy, Dad.”
Sparks seemed to fly from the two toys as they rolled closer and now the other machines behind were also making noises that identified them—Sophie at the window, Inday by the table, and on the divan his Tita Menchu, whom he had seen only twice: when they met her at the airport and at a family bienvenida. Only the small machine on the floor remained unidentified. It couldn’t be Junior; it seemed to be weeping.
He heard his mother’s voice:
“Aren’t you going to say hello to poor Minnie?”
The machine on the floor unfolded and sped toward him, the mother and father machines drawing apart to let the Minnie machine through.
As he watched it coming he heard himself praying desperately: Minnie, be flesh again, however nursery, however bathroom-smelling. Minnie, be Minnie again, the Minnie I enjoyed fondling.
But as if to mock his prayer the wheels, axles, cogs, tubes, cylinders, valves, ball bearings, pistons, nuts and bolts, wires and batteries, began falling off poor Minnie—he could almost hear them clinking and clattering to the floor as she approached—until nothing was left of her but a frame of bone, but a small skeleton lifting a death’s-head up to his face as though to be kissed.
“Hello, Bobby.”
And seeing the lipless grin on that small, white, smooth, hollow skull he could look into through the big holes of eyes and nose he started and cried out and averted his face and, moaning, fled across the sala and up the three steps and into his room, banging the door shut and leaping into bed. He had seen the ultimate strip.
• • •
“The doctor,” said Ineng Heredia, coming back to the lunch table where now only Menchu sat, having a coffee and cigarette, “still says he can find nothing wrong, except maybe a touch of flu coming on. However, I’ve decided he’s to go into a hospital tomorrow and be under observation. Dr. José says there’s a good psychiatric ward at St. John’s.”
She did not sit down at once, stood listening to Dr. José’s car being started in the driveway. At last it was off.
“Oh, that old quack. Why did I have to inherit him?”
“He sounded,” giggled Menchu, “very sensible indeed. ‘Oh, oh, what’s wrong with my poor boy, doctor, he did this and that.’ Sniff, sniff. ‘Nothing’s wrong with the boy, Irene. What he has is a hangover. He’s drunk.’ My goodness, Ineng, I nearly burst.”
“This is no laughing matter, you. All the things for the party tonight that are still to be done—”
“If you have to go anywhere I’ll stay and stand guard.”
“And that hapless Minnie Mota. I know she’s at that age when they’re most unattractive. But to offer to be kissed and get a look of horror instead, as though you were the young Morticia . . . Why, the girl could be scarred for life.”
“Should teach her not to offer, from now on.”
“If you’re staying, Menchu”—this was later, in her bedroom, as she dressed—“you might as well be comfortable. There’s a robe in the cabinet and if you can find my slippers—”
“Was the boy given a pill or something?”
“Dr. José said better not, with all that alcohol in him. But he should be sleeping. I’ll look in on him before I go.”
“You know what I think, Ineng? Your boy’s moving up from little girls to bigger ones. The way he squinted at me—The look that separates the girls from the dames.”
“No, he’s not sleeping.” They were now on the porch and Menchu’s driver was bringing the car around for Ineng to ride in. “But he�
��s quiet and he said yes, he was willing to chat with you. Now don’t confuse him more than he already is, Menchu.”
“I’ll be Charlie’s aunt, from Brazil—where the nuts come from?”
Returning to the sala the expatriate observed a difference between American and Philippine houses. Doors in American homes were always closed. In Philippine homes all doors were open, even bedroom doors, even bathroom doors. Bobby’s door, by being the only one closed on the corridor, bespoke anomaly. She rapped once, then stepped in. The boy was sitting up in bed, propped against pillows, his hands clasped behind his head, the sheet pulled up to the slope of his breast.
“Bobby? Your mommy said I could—”
“Hi, Tita.”
She was going to bend down but stopped herself in time, remembering Morticia. She pulled up a chair instead and sat down, pulling down her green skirt as she crossed her legs, shyly touching her jade jewelry.
“You and I don’t know each other very well, Bobby.”
“You sent me all those toys.”
“Oh, that was just to keep up connections. One must belong somewhere, you know, be part of something, especially families. I sort of ran away, Bobby, and cut myself off. Now that was a very wrong thing to do. But, as you can see, I have come home.”
“Was there something to come home to?”
“Oh, I should say so! I’ll tell you this, boy: I was dead all the time I was over there; here I have come alive again. I had forgotten there was so many people I love and who love me. And all that loving has made me feel young, vigorous, excited, lovely. You’re amused. I must seem the rock of ages to you?”
“No, Tita.”
“How do I look to you?”
She was smiling but the query was a quest and she leaned forward and searched his face, begging it to see her, in her green dress and jade trinkets, fearing she did not exist in that face, was not alive enough in those eyes, as indeed she was not, for all he could see was a jeweled skeleton on a chair, one kneeball propped on the other, the chair showing through the spaces between the ribs, and the teeth in the skull heavily clamping and unclamping.