Banana Heart Summer

by Merlinda Bobis

  Mother’s tongue did not need any cleaning (she was a pristine woman), and she never begged for green mangoes. But I had to steal them for her as a peace offering. The voice of the grimmest cook from that rice disaster day had branded me: I was my mother’s shame and sorrow. I had stolen so much of her dignity, she often said. I needed to compensate for my crime with another act of theft.

  My business had not concluded after all. I was not yet my mother’s best girl.

  Stealing the mangoes was easy. Close to my guava roost, there was the mango branch that reached out like a bridge; there was an invitation to trespass. I took it.

  I made sure I was alone, with no twins rolling their eyes to heaven. I made sure it was a Saturday, siesta time. Señorita VV was singing at Mr. Alano’s jam session, and Dr. and Mrs. Valenzuela were in the lounge talking about an American who was visiting soon. The talk was punctuated with yawns and words slipping away, because they had eaten too much of my chicken adobo. Soon they were snoozing longer than usual in their room. Perhaps the bay-leaf-flavored stew induced somnolence; even its fat slept, coagulated.

  So I found myself looking down from my guava roost, sure I was alone. Through the mango tree leaves, through all the edible shrubs and vines, I spied for that flash of paleness. Boy Hapon was nowhere to be seen.

  Now this mango bridge was sturdy, and tried and tested. Perhaps too many times. That was what did it, I must say. You walk all over something too many times, you wear it down, it snaps. I never snap, I only fall from the sky—but who would ever think that I had foretold my fate?

  With a bunch of green mangoes, I fell straight into the arms of the palest man I’d ever seen. A vacant pale, like paper that you want to quickly write on. We stared at each other, and I held my breath. No, he was not a young boy as we had suspected from his name. I took in the lined, longish face with high cheekbones, the eyes that sloped upwards and the very big ears.

  “You’ll h-have long life,” I stammered.

  He chuckled and gently put me down. Now, why did I say that? Because big ears mean long life.

  “You want long life?” he asked.

  I was suddenly fearful. This wrinkled man whispers, this man is “not quite complete in the head,” this man has no father or mother or siblings and such, this man did not come from anyone. This man is a ghost.

  “I—I’m sorry—accident, just accident…” My voice trailed away. I stared at the mangoes at my feet, debating whether to pick them up and whether to run away after picking them up.

  “If you want, ask.”

  I could barely hear him. He had already left me before I understood what he’d said. He speaks after he leaves: I made a mental note. Maybe this is how ghosts make conversation. I felt a sudden chill despite the summer heat. The green forest, dominated by so much frowning fruit, was closing in on me. Once it was sweet and not frowning. I picked up the mangoes and broke into a run for the gate.

  “If you want, ask.” I heard it again, and he wasn’t even there. I stopped, deliberated, and felt ashamed of myself. Even ghosts must be thanked.

  I walked back, holding my breath, past the sitaw, bataw, patani, pechay, kalunggay, mung bean, yam, tomato, onion, garlic, lemongrass, cassava, sweet potato, radish, squash and other gourd things, all incredibly robust and watered with human blood and harvested under the full moon when witches were abroad and dogs were howling as if someone had just died…By the time I reached the green, hairy animal that was his hut, I had already told myself a ghost story.

  I found the ghost sitting in a one-room affair, smaller than ours, made even smaller by piles and piles of Mills & Boon romance books where five chickens roosted.

  twenty-one

  The flavored tale

  Perhaps the chickens crowed according to the flavor of the tale. From three to seven in the morning, when Boy Hapon could no longer sleep, perhaps he read to this huddled mass of feathers and beaks. Perhaps their crowing was an exclamation of pleasure, of wonder, of anxiety or despair, or of whatever leap in the chest occurs when you’re rapt in a love story. I knew about Mills & Boon then. I often saw Tiya Viring reading this stuff while munching a sweet or a sour snack, whichever was suited to the flavor of the tale.

  Every story has its own taste. Every storyteller has her own taste; so does every listener. So when I speak in a particular flavor, I know my words taste differently on your tongue. While it is the ear that receives a story, the main event happens in the tongue repeating it, a contention that was proven right among the guavas and bananas.

  It was a week after the mango incident and I was having an unexpected tryst with my sister Lydia who, at my departure, had summed up her hoped-for routine: “I vithit, you vithit, I vithit—” “Of course we’ll both visit,” I had agreed. But none of my siblings were allowed to visit.

  She had probably slipped out of our house unnoticed. There was no following recall of the truant—psssssssssssssst! A cross between a hiss and a screech, loud enough to be heard throughout the whole street. I often wondered how the mouth could have so much authority, how it could cause so much dread. Psssssssssssssst! This was how Mother called us back, if we suddenly slipped out to “gallivant,” with her whip of sibilants that sent us running home, a scared thump-thumping in our chests.

  But Mother was not home that day. I was sweeping the Valenzuelas’ garden when I saw Lydia walk past. The fraying green shirt (Claro’s shirt, but a midi dress for her) tentatively stopped among the hibiscus, then walked on again to our territory. She had seen me, she had allowed herself to be seen by me, but did not call out. I followed her. I did not call out either.

  We went past the guavas and ended under the canopy of banana leaves, their hearts in various stages of bursting: a purple skirt lifted here and there, a yellow filigree exposed like some lacy slip, a row of flowers uncurled like diminutive legs. This is how hearts open, often shamelessly.

  “You promith vithit,” Lydia said, her tone accusing, though without the full authority of the sibilant. She had squatted an arm’s length away. She was folding and unfolding the hem of her green shirt, her eyes on the ground.

  “I did visit, didn’t I?” And I brought adobo, smoky coconut chicken, and even palitaw one time, as Basilio Profundo had not yet lost heart.

  Now a next-door visit is always done with pleasure. To go neighboring is to bring good tidings, especially if we’re celebrating something, say a birthday or a christening. We drop by with portions of our feast. Or we just pass that hot plate across the fence, saying, “Taste some of my special so-and-so, because so-and-so turned ten today.” Usually the receiving neighbor feels embarrassed about returning a clean plate, so it must be filled with her own cooking.

  We took neighboring seriously in our street. My mother, even more so. I sensed how she cringed whenever a plate was passed over the fence by Miss VV, because of some occasion or other. Mother smiled too brightly as she said her thanks. I always returned a clean plate.

  “I did’n thee you,” Lydia said, face and fringe askew. She was right. She did not, could not see me. Mother made sure of that. “You did’n vithit.” Her eyes threatened me with siren wails.

  I looked up, I made her look up. “Ay, Lydia, there’ll be hundreds of bananas here before summer ends, see? I’ll cook some if you want—what dish would you like?”

  She grew serious, looked about then looked at me, still worrying the hem of her shirt. “You bad,” she sniffled, then breathed deeply, as if drawing strength from her lungs for the next accusation. “You thteal…Mama theth.”

  There was hardly any strength there, but my sister kept at it: You steal, Mama says. I did not know how to decry my mother’s judgment.

  “You thteal?”

  The act of retelling has more clout, more truth, than the act of hearing. Told again, a tale in fact gains conviction, the belief that it is worth telling and that the telling is worth our while.

  “You…bad?”

  “Of course. I can steal all those hearts if I want t
o.”

  “Ay, I tickle!”

  “And I want to.” I tickled her armpits again, her nape, the little dip on her back, sending her squealing.

  “I tickle, I tickle, ay-ayyyyy!”

  It was like old times. I could smell her still-baby smell and we were suddenly back on our mat in the ceiling, my red with black ridges next to her smooth aquamarine, then the grey, the magenta, the ocher…I missed the sleeping together.

  “You thmell nithe…uhhmmm…”

  I smelled of my employers’ kitchen, of cooking, of abundance. Ay, this perfume of food. My sister sniffed my hands, my cheeks. It was the closest thing we got to kissing. Feeling awkward, I turned away. “Is Father working now?”

  She shook her head. She grew serious, we both grew serious. We looked up at the green canopy and their bursting hearts blocking the summer light, keeping us cool.

  “Juth little bad,” she said, trying to decide how little was little in the space between her thumb and forefinger. Then, “Thith little,” she finally said, drawing her fingers together so only a sliver of light could pass through.

  In my ear, her toothless declaration had the flavor of sweet things, or of things only about to be sweet, like bananas before they are fully born.

  twenty-two

  Stillborn banana fritters

  I went neighboring with little success. Mother cringed each time I came with a plate from the Valenzuelas. I couldn’t stay long enough to see my siblings, because she asked too many questions. How she preached without looking at me, her eyes at the door as if she were already leading me out even before I had laid down my offering. Do my employers know about this plate? Am I sneaking out food from their cupboards? Should I not concentrate on my work and stop playing truant? Were they not paying me for my time? “Work with dignity, girl, and stop gallivanting!”

  “A gallivanting whore!” Her family’s bruising admonition when she fell pregnant by a mason. She never got over the bruising. She remained pale even in the hottest summers.

  She used to tell this joke about paleness or about melons, whichever way you heard it, and her lips would curl but not in a smile.

  A melon farmer, passionate about his melon reputation, was hawking his produce around a village. One sweaty midday, this reputation was severely tested. He had just declaimed about his sweetest-reddest melons (“unlike those pale pink run-of-the-mill ones”), but someone had doubts and thus chose one for too long a time, knocking at each fruit, putting it close to his ear as if the green rind promised an oracle only he could divine. The farmer grew impatient. After a good fifteen minutes, the customer chose the tiniest melon and haggled for a mean bargain. The farmer was angry by this time, but eventually gave in. Just as he was leaving, he heard a horrified cry. The melon had fallen on the road and had split in two. No, the horror was not from the accident, but from the treachery that met the customer’s eyes—the melon was a very pale pink inside! Not red as the farmer had promised, and possibly not sweet at all, oh no. So the customer demanded his money back, but coolly, the farmer replied, “Believe me, sir, I only grow the sweetest-reddest melons, but if it was you who had fallen, wouldn’t you grow as pale?”

  After a fall, one can bleed inside. But some do worse than bleed. Their blood is scared away instead, along with its sweetness, and they remain pale for the rest of their lives. They lose color in this strange internal bruising.

  Mother never got over it. She fell pregnant and fell out of her family’s favor. I suspect she never wanted the pregnancy, but my earnest young father knew that a baby would make sure she couldn’t leave him, and she never forgave him or me. Her shame, her sorrow.

  Nowadays I often wonder whether I scared her blood away, and whether, for the rest of my life, my true business is how to coax it back. And whether, once, she had also wanted to scare me away. Whether she had bound me as tightly as her seventh fruit.

  But on that Sunday when I went neighboring, she had already allowed herself to show and we had other fruits on our plate. I was bringing her the stolen green mangoes, she was peeling sugar bananas. Cobbled green with black warts and plucked before their time. Ugly, stillborn.

  I wanted to ask where they came from and whatever could she do with them, but remembered I was there to make peace. I held out the mangoes instead. But her eyes refused to leave her chore. She was peeling with some difficulty; the bananas were mostly all skin. So I laid my offering on the table and asked, “They’re upstairs?” I moved towards the ceiling, but she stopped me.

  “Your siblings are resting, don’t disturb them.”

  “And Father?”

  She laughed, derision evident. “Somewhere dreaming for a job.”

  “He tries.”

  Again she laughed, saying, “I know.”

  “He does…I do…” I whispered to myself.

  Tomorrow, I’ll win her back. Tomorrow.

  Her hands labored. The knife cut through each thick, cobbled skin and found only hard fruit inside.

  I stared at her back. As a younger child, it was my favorite pastime. Studying her back, memorizing it, especially how beautifully her nape swept to where her hair began when she had it up. How pale the skin, how smooth like white cucumber. But that day, I noticed how lower down the smoothness was marred by the bump of—was it the bone? Mother was so thin and so pregnant.

  I moved closer, smelling banana sap and bereftness, hers or mine, how could I know, and my arms ached to encircle her and her seventh fruit, wanting to croon to it that everything will be all right and that we can coax it back, her blood, her look, her sweetness, but she flinched when I came too close.

  “I brought you green mangoes, Mama.”

  Later that night, while preparing green mango salad for my employers’ dinner, my stomach heaved upwards, threatening to replace my heart, to spare it from the nasty pricking that is what scares the blood away. After a fall from anyone’s grace.

  She accused me of stealing the green mangoes. She said I was a thief, a shame to our family; she sent my offering back. Perhaps what she meant was I shamed her own stillborn meal that day: the sinapot, the banana fritters.

  Sugar bananas sliced in thin halves and gathered in five slices for each fritter by a mixture of slightly salted rice flour thinned by water. Then each fritter set on a dried leaf of madre de cacao and deep-fried to a golden brown. Always urgently sweet and starchy to the smell and taste.

  Urgency perhaps, but none of sweetness and often compensated for by earnestness. I remember them now, my mother’s condiments. Ay, how she wanted all of us to eat and eat well, nagging each measly meal to multiply in her desperate hands. Even bananas that did not have any hope of bloom in them.

  twenty-three

  Hot coconut guava

  Is it a fruit, is it a vegetable?

  Of course, guavas are fruit, you might say. But not always. The nature of a thing is realized in the intent of its user, a principle that does not preclude human beings. For instance, I am only as good as my use to you, in this case as storyteller, as rambler of recipes, as reminiscer of sensations, as the older version of a bewildered child. But not quite old enough to escape this humbling state of bewilderedness, this daily ambush by life’s divergent exigencies. Is it a fruit, is it a vegetable?

  As fruit, guavas can be eaten half-ripe, crunchy and sour, with a bit of salt. Ripe, they will do plain, without salt, but watch out for the consequence of those rose-pink seeds, the sweetest part. “Ay, mahamis na Kalbaryo—a sweet Calvary!” Bebet once exclaimed. Because eating the sweetest part, especially too much of it, means an agonizing internal journey in the lower regions, like that mythical descent into hell. Such is the nature of constipation most dire.

  Too ripe, guavas are definitely much safer. It’s easier to chuck out the seeds. Then we decide how to eat it. As a sweet or a savory? A fruit or a vegetable? A jam or a chilied dish?

  If we choose the latter, again we must employ the proverbial coconut milk (my town couldn’t live without it) plus ga
rlic, shrimp paste and long, green chilies, the hottest that you can find, to prepare a perfumed savory—you see, guavas have a peculiar fragrance, strong and rose-pink. When I smell guavas now or imagine I smell them, I see rose-pink, that ball of countless tiny seeds inside the yellow-green flesh, that sweet conjurer of constipations. Imagine this scent countered by the pungent aroma of shrimp paste, also pink, but with the hue of bruises. Imagine a dish so hot, your mouth can burn.

  Chi-chi did not know about hot coconut guavas, though. How could she? She never allowed guavas to grow ripe. To her, the guava was first and foremost a fruit that must be plucked and quickly consumed. I was ashamed of her hunger, of the way her eyes rolled round and round and up to heaven, as they scoured the guava trees with the intent to plunder.

  But on that stickiest day of summer, her eyes were elsewhere and my eyes just followed hers.

  Across the road, in front of their red iron gate, Manolito Ching was dribbling his basketball, wearing a pair of navy blue silk shorts, white socks with blue piping and, of course, blue-and-white sneakers. The shorts were very short indeed, with a white number nine inscribed on the right hem. To us, the Chinese-Spanish mestizo still looked impeccably groomed, despite his sweaty bare chest. The golden highlights of his Beatles mop lit up even more. We ogled, he flashed his dribbling skills. Inside the gate, the five dogs of the almost mansion were as excited by the dribbling.

  “Ay, so guwapo—so handsome.” Chi-chi elbowed me. “Don’t you think?”

  I thought of the aborted halo-halo some weeks ago, of the ice on my back and the fan whirring above, sending my hair flying this way and that—“I’ve got to go, the rice would be just about cooked.”