Banana Heart Summer

  I would never see my friends again. They would die before they turned twenty. I would always remember them in that afternoon before they flew off, tails linked together, to where the sun set behind the volcano.

  Any minute now and they would be here. I burrowed my toes into the drenched earth, feeling more than hopeful. I was set on my own fiesta; I was the host. I looked at the five pesos in my hand and did my sums, then went off to buy ten Lab-yus, two bags of galletas patatas and three packets of Fat & Thin from Tiya Miling’s, then waited under the guava trees.

  One by one, my siblings slipped out of our house and joined me, even Junior, whose main object was the free snack and the possibility of tiling-tiling’s ice drop, which would come much later. Junior didn’t like the twins. “Too girlie, too hungry,” he used to chant, as if he were above hunger. I noticed that since I left home, he had grown surly and he took more risks with my mother. He answered her back, Lydia had told me, or rather, mouthed the answer behind her back, if he was not shaking a fist at her, also behind her back. He had become a wicked little man with the habit of squinting and biting his upper lip.

  I watched my siblings troop towards me, their bodies not quite certain at first, still half-angled towards our house, waiting to be recalled. Lydia’s hair now reached the small of her back and Nilo had grown an inch taller. Claro was learning how to manage his snot and Elvis could say his full name, Elvis Rodriguez, without eating the last syllable. Quickly they spotted the feast stacked on a crook of a guava tree, and advanced with more purpose, grinning as if their faces would split like little pods.

  I could not tell what it was, but there was a strangeness about them, well, with me. A kind of awe. They gaped and smiled with pleasure, the way they did at the last morsel on a plate. “You fat,” Lydia said, pinching my cheeks and giggling. I must have filled out, I must have grown too. “Fat,” Elvis echoed, also claiming my cheeks. I hid my face on his little shoulder, feeling as though I had a cold.

  “Okay,” I clapped my hands, playing the eldest in control again. “We’re having a party for Chi-chi and Bebet, because they’re going away.”

  “You don’t even have Coca-Cola. How can you have a party?” Junior snorted, biting his upper lip.

  “Hoy, don’t be mean.”

  “Why are you feeding those girls? You should just feed us.”

  “You greedy little thing.”

  “And you rich and all that.”

  “I’m not!”

  “And it’s your fault!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing…” He released his lip, then turned away.

  Nilo sneaked behind him and pulled up his shirt. I saw welts. “Junior!” I cried, rushing to him.

  “Aw, don’t be such a girl!” he grumbled, brushing off my hand.

  It was then that the twins arrived, shuffling their feet. Their faces hung to their chests and they held hands as if anytime they’d flee and be done with it. I felt I’d made a big blunder, forcing them to face up to a loss. Farewells are soupy, yes, or moist, like when you have a cold.

  I wanted it so much to be right that afternoon, yet we had grown suddenly awkward, even tense, with Junior getting more surly by the minute. I opened my packets to save the moment. Shortly, Lab-yus melted on tongues and lips turned white with the very salty melon seeds and the crisp galletas patatas crackled in the air, and some spirit was restored. Then, as if to complete the restoration, the tiling-tiling rang from a distance, and ears perked up, and I said, “Yes!”

  Everyone rushed to the approaching ice cream vendor, the tiling-tiling, the bell. It tinkled, it teased, telling us how hot it was and how lovely to cool our throats and tongues with an ice-cream cone or an ice drop. All preferred the latter, a milky ice bar molded with strips of coconut meat and a sprinkling of cheese and raisins, so I used up the last of my borrowed money. Shortly we were squatting under the trees, fervently sucking our ice drops, our tongues growing slightly numb, our throats cooling, and we thought of monsoon and rivulets of rain between our toes, even as steam rose and rose from the earth. The moistness quickly disappeared.

  Then, I don’t know why, I said, “If you always leave rice in the pot, even a single grain, then there’ll always be something to eat in the house.” I had broken the spell. Chi-chi was frowning at her ice drop, as if there she had read her retort: “But what if there’s nothing to leave, Nining?”

  I had blurted out a folk saying, my going-away advice, which sounded more like insult added to injury. I didn’t answer her, just kept my mouth around the ice drop, freezing my tongue.

  “But you must always scrub the pot clean, Mother says.” Nilo there, being literal.

  We nibbled at the strips of young coconut, we found the cheese and raisins with our tongues, we sucked the thinning ice bars, we swallowed conversations. I could hear our concerted slurps of pleasure. We squatted together for the last time, thoroughly occupied, until nothing was left in our hands but a stick licked clean.

  “You’re really leaving?” I asked.

  “Leave us in the pot,” Bebet murmured.

  “Yes, in the pot,” her twin echoed.

  thirty-nine

  Coconut kalunggay blues: “O come home, Tasyo, come home”

  Nana Dora said going away is like leaving the table after a meal. You go away, because you have had your fill. It would be too greedy to stay on. I wondered whether she meant my friends were greedy.

  “Say, in a fiesta, after the main dish maybe you go, even before dessert, because maybe the host doesn’t have any, you understand?” she asked, searching my face.

  I hated her strange speech in that soft voice. It added weight to the heaviness in my chest. I wished she’d be her prickly self again. I kept trimming the hibiscus hedge, but I didn’t look across the road anymore.

  Each cooking day, after Nana Dora had packed up her hut in two baskets, she caught the first JCM bus that came along. But today she had ambled towards the Valenzuelas’ instead, as if she were just passing by or dropping off some anecdotes about eating and “these people.” How could she talk about my friends, the orphans that she cared for, as though they were strangers?

  She set her baskets down and began fanning herself. “Too hot, too hot—now, Nining, maybe you should know these people a little bit more—here,” she thumped her stomach. “Then here,” she thumped her heart next, “here would be lighter for you.”

  A hibiscus blossom fell at her feet, then another, but I didn’t care. I kept snipping leaves and flowers alike, intent on shaping the hedge.

  She began fanning me. “And why should you call them back to the table anyway? The meal is finished,” she said, her eyes wandering across the road to the Chings’ construction, up to the fourth floor, then looking away. She fell silent. She fanned herself then me, then her again, as if willing the air to make conversation.

  How can I call them back, Nana Dora? I don’t know where their village is, fifty miles away. This morning, I went to ask them how far is fifty miles, but their house was empty. The door was open, as if they would return any minute, so I went in, but it was dark and smelled of sickness, and they won’t come back for that, will they?

  Nana Dora helped me to clean up the fallen leaves and flowers. “If, say, the husband leaves the house soon after a quarrel, the wife should hang his shirt over the stove and whip it several times, that way the husband is certain to come back. If he doesn’t, she must sing while she cooks, ‘Come home, Tasyo, come home!’ Then if she sits down to her first meal without him and she chokes, he’s remembering her from far away. Not that he’s coming back, really…”

  I stared at her. The fan was still, she was holding it close to her chest. “What, Nana Dora?” She had confused me with the folk beliefs that seemed to have afflicted her tongue. “Tiyo Anding didn’t quarrel with Tiya Asun…and he’s not coming back.”

  “The meal is over, that’s all,” she said, and flagged down the JCM bus that had appeared around the corner. “And there’s no
dessert,” she added, picking up her bags and boarding the bus.

  How could I know that Nana Dora was commiserating with me in her awkward way, with her own story of departure? I was twelve years old, literal and preoccupied with my own loss; I even forgot to ask about her Calcium Man. But before that summer ended, I would find out more about the man who was still negotiating for his heart with the estranged wife whom he had abandoned twenty years ago. Because her womb was as barren as soup without water and he so badly wanted to have sons. Three years after he walked out the door, though, Anastasio “Tasyo” Guerrero did come home, but her door was closed by then to his claims of love and regret. No dessert, the meal was over.

  A year of whipping his shirt by the stove, another of singing before her cooking, and all along feeling as if her solitary meals were not chewed enough, that they clogged her throat and were always too painful to swallow. Then in the third year, she threw all his shirts away, stopped singing, grew prickly, but she never choked on her meals again. She perfected the art of eating alone. Then she grew into the habit of cooking herself little treats every afternoon after her siesta, dishes that heightened their flavors at each meal, blessing her tongue. Her turon became crispier, sweeter, her biniribid more sticky and succulent, her rice cake with candied coconut stuffing more delicate, and all her native concoctions became too good to keep to her plate alone. So she sent them neighboring—a plate of coconut-smothered palitaw for the kids across the road or a bowl of gingery-sweet ginatan to the old seamstress next door. Soon her neighbors longed for a regular helping from her kitchen, so they urged her to open a small business of snacks in her town. The business thrived, but with a regular irritation that made her grow prickly as each day passed. Tasyo kept “coming home,” on the pretext of buying a snack. She always refused to sell him any: you’ll never taste the labor of these hands again. Soon they both grew old and tired of the drudgery of coming home and refusal—what predictable rhythm. She moved her business to our town, our street, and years later he followed her, daily hawking his own wares, but never found the courage to plead with her again.

  I did plead, then I purged (in my dreams at least), but with little success at home. So how to know when to stop? I never had the conviction of Nana Dora.

  “O come home, Tasyo, come home!” she pleaded over her kalunggay in coconut milk. Her song took on the rhythm of her grating coconut, of her squeezing it for milk, pressing harder when she sang the last syllable of her husband’s name, as if this too could be squeezed for its withheld affection. The pleading-wishing ritual humbled her, but never mind. She stirred the milk in her wok, with shrimp paste and dried fish heads, garlic and chili, while singing “O come home” in different keys.

  Perhaps a wish needs to be tested in different keys. This allows us to test out the act of wishing in our mouth, our ears. Thus we are able to check ourselves, certain one moment, ambivalent the next: how does this taste, how do I sound, is this what I want, and how desperately so?

  Then when the milk simmered, she added the kalunggay leaves and her stirring stopped; so did her wishing. She must not stir the leaves at this point or else the dish would grow bitter. She must not persist with her pleas, otherwise she might turn out as bitter. Humility is only a stone’s throw away from humiliation.

  But not in other households. For years, Señora Ching pleaded in her red turret, which never opened again after a body flew down to the driveway. The Chings closed their books on that tragedy and bought the flying man’s house, so their construction could breathe and expand. But the señora found that breathing made her weary as she hung her heart on the red gate, hoping for her son’s return. “O come home, Manoling, come home!”

  It echoed in my breast, sometimes.

  Manolito Ching had decided to live in the city. Later he moved to Manila, away from his mother’s madness and his father’s affiliations with the corrupt mayor. The señora’s wish could not bring him back, because it never ventured beyond her turret, remaining constant and contained.

  It was different for Tiya Miling. Yes, she too hung her heart on the door and in her offal breath chanted her own longing, but this was bearable. It was not constant; it was made impure by anger. It ebbed and flowed with her son’s favorite Beatles songs, played on a brand-new jukebox. Her new acquisition outdid Mr. Alano’s phonograph; it inspired the standby boys to gather, jingling their coins for the next song. They now drank at her store, which prospered without any competition. Much later, she opened a hairdressing salon in what used to be Tiya Viring’s store. She bought her rival out, hoping that someday her only son would come home alone.

  forty

  American corned beef sautéed with onions and tomatoes

  Mother also hung her heart on the door, like a key as impotent as her wish to leave. Then for all her daily needs and negotiations, she armed herself with spleen, especially against Father’s professions of love in the furthest corner of the ceiling, as he gasped over her face and she gasped into the tiny vent. At the other end of the mat, I used to hear them. I wondered why my parents were so desperate for air.

  With me gone, perhaps it was Junior who woke up in the middle of the night and listened with dread in his heart. What if it came out twins? Then we’d be eight and there’d be less gruel for each plate. He trusted his ears: if there was too much gasping each night, a baby would come from the armpit. But now that such eventuality was certain anyway, could more gasping mean they’d make it two?

  The sleeping arrangement had changed. Junior slept in my old place; he was the eldest now. From where he lay, he heard scraping and shifting. He fumbled the fraying edge of the mat between his thumb and forefinger, in time with the rhythm at the other end. “I love you, Maring, I love you,” he heard Father whisper at each gasp. Junior, his fingers suddenly still, waited for Mother to answer. She didn’t. Then his fingers were fumbling again in time with Father’s grunting, the grunting speeding up, then the gasp, the big one, the last one, and then the sigh, lengthy and drawn out, as if trailing his relief from end to end of the ceiling.

  She didn’t even sigh.

  Father felt proud each time Mother fell pregnant. Many times I saw the slight change in the way he walked. He threw his shoulders back, his chin lifted and his shuffle became a stride, cocky, happy, pelvis slightly forward and feet with a half skip sometimes. And he loved our mother more, bringing her flowers picked from the road or someone’s garden. He always looked radiant and his hand or his ear always wandered to her belly twice a day with much affection. While Mother grew more miserable, slow and “overheating,” Father glowed, as if he were the one bearing “the promise of joy,” for that was how he described it. As if joy were never present but was always in the offing. And nightly he gasped even more.

  Junior hadn’t been sleeping well since I left. Each time he listened to the predictable breathing at the other end of the mat, he dreaded its consequence, then he felt suddenly hungry, so when all was calm and quiet again, he sneaked downstairs to find something to nibble. Usually there was nothing, so he opened the can where we kept the uncooked rice, took out a pinch, and ground each grain between his teeth, growing more worried by the minute.

  Mother said my first brother was born worried. He couldn’t sleep each time Father lost his job. Daily he checked the dwindling level of rice in the can, he fretted that he’d never go to high school or that his feet would grow too quickly and we’d have to buy a new pair of shoes for school, which was of course impossible, plus so many other worries besides. Mother said he had a deep crease on his brow when the midwife handed him to her.

  Tonight he worried about the possibility of twins and he grew hungrier than on those other nights, and it was hotter and he felt angry, though he didn’t know why. He curled himself, knees touching chin, trying to press down the noises in his gut, but it wouldn’t behave, as if his intestines were having a long-running argument. When Father began to snore, he crept downstairs and did his usual ritual with the pinch of rice, but it left
him even hungrier, so he tiptoed to the cupboard where he had seen Father leave the brown paper package that afternoon.

  This was a story that he would tell me years later in his weary letters, which always asked whether I could send the family “a little bit of help.”

  The brown parcel was Target corned beef, all-American. Mother said it was an extravagant, stupid whim.

  “How could you, Gable? Every cent of your daughter’s hard-earned labor is not for you to splurge on this stupidity!”

  “But it was a bargain, very cheap, two for the price of one, and I thought—I thought, for once, our kids can taste something from America.”

  “So your taste has gone ambitious? Because your daughter is slaving away?”

  “Ay, Maring, just a little pleasure.”

  The little pleasure was bought from an underground warehouse, managed by Mr. Ching but rumored to be the mayor’s. The warehouse was stacked with foreign aid; the victims of the eruption had been taken care of earlier. They had received cheap local sardines and small packets of rice, which were distributed by the mayor’s bodyguards with a promotional leaflet for the next election. The imported goods had been exchanged with local ones. “As if poor people don’t know how to eat imported,” Father had thought to himself, so he made sure he brought home his share of the foreign aid.

  “For the kids, Maring, don’t you understand?” he said. “Just a little pleasure.”

  “You and your little pleasure—look where it got us,” and she started hitting her belly.

  “Don’t, Maring, please,” Father said, gathering her from behind in an embrace that pinned her arms down. “Not this way, not to our promise of joy.”

  “Whose joy, Gable? Whose promise? And when did you ever keep your promises? Ay, how I hate the lot of you!” she screamed, and freed herself, retreating to the ceiling.

  Of course, my father’s response was eaten by the devil. Silently, he set the corned beef down, still two cans at that time, and avoided his children’s eyes. Their little spines were pinned to the wall, pushed there by Mother’s fury. Junior grew worried, then hungry, then surly. He was convinced this turn of events was all my fault, or the fault of my hard-earned labor, my “getting rich.” I found out that the twenty pesos that I had laid out on our table soon became the object of my siblings’ speculation and hope. So much money! Nining will feed us for the rest of our lives. But Junior resented this: I had left him behind, I had become a grown-up.