Banana Heart Summer

by Merlinda Bobis

  He took the can of Target out of the bag, still grinding a grain of rice in his mouth.

  How could meat melt on the tongue like this! Father prepared it for dinner while Junior and his siblings watched. This would be their first American meal. All gasped when Father opened it easily with a key that he hooked to the side of the can and rolled round and round—it was magic! They had never seen anything like it before. Then another gasp when the meat came out, not as a rough slab but beautifully molded and proud-looking. Father said it could also be eaten raw, but that it’s better like this: sautéed with one onion and one tomato. His cooking flavored the whole house, even the ceiling. They thought Mother would come rushing down to marvel at the new dish but she skipped dinner that night.

  It could also be eaten raw, Junior remembered, and of course the key sat on top of the can. In the dark like this, it will be just like magic. He would open it only a little bit and dig out some of the meat with a fork, then he would restore it to its old shape and return it to its brown paper parcel. Mother wouldn’t find out, because it was Father who’d cook it anyway.

  The next day, an army of ants was discovered trailing across the floor, up to the wall and into the cupboard. Mother followed the trail easily. That was the story of how my brother earned the welts on his back.

  forty-one

  Escabeche: sweet and sour

  Deep sea bream, its head almost the size of his plate. The fish eye had fixed on him an inquiring stare: What brings you here, Ralph McKenna? It was impossible to return the stare. He felt queasy in the stomach, but he tried to smile his crooked smile. “Well, thank you, folks. Very kind of you to give me the best part.”

  “Try the jaw first, it’s the fleshiest,” Mrs. Adela Valenzuela advised before she made a little mound of rice, a mouthful, with her fingers.

  “And the eyes, very creamy—you have to suck it…uhmmm,” her husband added, winking at him.

  The queasiness threatened to rise to Ralph’s throat. He attempted his usual laughter, but it came out flat. “I’m sure, I’m sure—but this is too much for me. How about you, VV, would you like to share?”

  But VV was barely eating, keeping her eyes to her plate. “Huh? Ah, no, thanks.” The yellow housedress accentuated her loss of color.

  “And you, Nining, our little cook—perhaps you should do the honors instead.”

  Back home, we loved fish head. Mother could do wonderful things with it. I weighed Ralph’s tempting offer, but felt the eyes of my employers on me, so I graciously demurred.

  “She’s a very good cook.” Mrs. Valenzuela patted my hand across the table.

  I could see that Ralph’s face was competing with the color of his hair again, and there were splotches under his arms, but bravely he forked a morsel from the jaw and brought it to his mouth, while trying to catch my señorita’s eyes. I had been watching him since that fateful day when his hand got stained with the limonsito berry. I wondered whether my employers noticed at all that it was not the fish and its knowing stare that was causing him extreme discomfort but my ghost of a mistress at the end of the table. He forced himself to swallow, while checking for her approval from the corner of his eyes. “Very nice, yes, thank you,” then took a large gulp of the Coca-Cola at his side.

  He didn’t like my fish escabeche? Perhaps he preferred a peccadillo—I remembered my employers talking about him weeks before he arrived.

  Dr. Valenzuela was laughing now. “Turn on the fan, Nining, it’s so hot tonight. Hey, that wasn’t too bad, Ralph, was it? Just wondering whether you could eat like a Filipino. Tit for tat. Remember, I could barely swallow the half-cooked rice salad you forced on me at your mum’s—rice in a salad, Adela, my God!”

  “Andy!” his wife scolded. “What a terrible host you are.”

  Ralph squirmed in his seat, but laughed with his friend anyway. Of course he remembered the young Filipino exchange student hosted by his family in Oregon. He weathered all the little pranks that Ralph played on him then and ate everything that his mother dished onto his plate, down to the last morsel. Tit for tat indeed. Suddenly Ralph felt about the same age as that young man, but without the spirit for pranks—“his spark,” Andy said. VV’s haunted look, which presided over the table repartee, made him feel inadequate and tired.

  His host clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m such a bad friend, I know. Relax, Ralph—here, give me that head, I know you don’t want it.”

  Ralph tried to smile. In this country, they even ate dog—during the fiesta, the standby boys offered him some pulutan, dog stew that goes with the gin, they said. Poor Spot, poor Lassie. Dog and fish heads, and they clunked their spoons, but what lovely people.

  “I’m sorry, Ralph, I didn’t mean to embarrass you. The other parts of the fish are actually—manageable.” The doctor’s teasing quelled his little aversions. “And it’s good to sweat when you’re eating, it means you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “Thanks,” Ralph said as I spooned a filet onto his plate.

  “Add some more sauce, Nining,” Mrs. Valenzuela said, and I did, and Ralph almost relaxed. I could see the flush receding from his cheeks and he began really eating. “Yes, it’s very nice, Andy, very tasty in fact.”

  “I told you so,” the doctor said, relinquishing his cutlery. “And best eaten with the fingers. Follow Adela—c’mon, eat natural, be more adventurous, Ralph,” he continued, breaking off the jaw and biting into it. “Uhmm, nothing like fresh fish.”

  Mrs. Valenzuela efficiently gathered a little bit of rice, a little bit of fish, a little bit of the two other vegetable dishes into a ball and put it into her mouth. I could see Ralph was impressed. Even I was impressed. No one ever managed it as neatly as she did.

  Finally our guest was getting enthusiastic with the filet in sweet and sour tomato-ginger sauce, with the zing of peppercorns. “Escabeche is a Spanish dish, right, VV?”

  “Maybe,” she answered without his enthusiasm.

  Her parents grew quiet for a moment, studying their guest who was glancing at their daughter’s wan face, then at her near-empty plate.

  I felt I had to save the situation. “I should have cooked your favorite, señorita, the chicken with papayas, but maybe next time.”

  “It’s all right, Nining, you’ve done very well today,” Miss VV murmured, managing something close to a smile.

  I smiled back. With me, she always tried her best to be good-humored. I wanted to feel pleased with myself but ended up with the need to confess. I put a lot of effort into this dish for Ralph’s sake because he’s actually nice, señorita. You know he watched you singing onstage for the whole night, and he watched you break the limonsito in your mouth, and he’s watching you now, can’t you see?

  Much as I loved my mistress and worried about her in those days, at that meal my loyalty was swinging towards the American. His red hair, his cheeks that flushed and grew pale at intervals, his peripheral glances at my mistress, his crooked smile, his colorful shirts (royal blue this time), and now his very adept use of only his fork. I relinquished my spoon discreetly, trying to use my own fork like a shovel on the soupy escabeche—ay, how does he do it?

  For a while, my mistress’s mood stole all conversation in the room. All I could hear was Dr. Valenzuela sucking the fish eyes and the little bones in a manner both impassioned and neat.

  Perhaps like falling in love, eating is passion wearing a semblance of decorousness, when delicacy is out of reach because the palate has just been ambushed into helplessness. The American was all thumbs throughout the meal, even if, in all propriety, he did not dare eat with his hands.

  Ay, dae lamang kinutsara—and it was not even spooned. This was our exasperated comment on passions or words allowed to run wild and messy. I imagined Father did not mind such a mess, but Mother, grim as ever, might have kept pushing a spoon at him during his own season of feverish side glances, for surely he had his own early days. Like now, when a middle-aged man hung on to his cutlery perhaps to allay an old feve
r sneaking up on him—and he thought its shelf life was over after a punishing divorce, that he was safe. Then, suddenly, this ambush.

  “Would you like Nining to make you something else, VV?” Mrs. Valenzuela broke the silence.

  My mistress looked even more pale, wretched. She was sweating with extreme discomfort, and one hand suddenly rose to her mouth.

  “You okay, VV?” her mother asked, feeling her cheek. “Ay, Dios ko, cold sweat—now, this fish is fresh, of course—Nining, are you sure?”

  Soon I heard it, indelicate and guttural, a gut turned inside out. Señorita VV was retching into her hand. She stood up and left the table in a rush, her mother close to her heels.

  forty-two

  Cosido: soup of the Immaculate Conception

  A hen clucking at dawn is a sign that an unmarried woman is pregnant? Rubbish. A hen clucking at dawn simply meant that, next door, Boy Hapon had begun reading another Mills & Boon romance. Rubbish. How some people regard Mills & Boon perhaps, because it’s too earnest, too simple and embarrassingly sentimental and melodramatic. Romance is not like that. But in this sweet crisis, why then the earnestness of our gut and its embarrassing asides, or when the sweetness turns sour, why the melodrama of our runs or constipations?

  Mr. Augusto “Gusting” Alano belched into his soup and wept. Thank God, we were in the outskirts of town and there was no other customer in that turo-turo, the “point-point,” our version of fast food: all dishes precooked, all you had to do was point. But it was long past dinner, in fact it was very late, and there was nothing much to point at but the cosido, a sour soup, and the fiery remains of Bicol Express. These and boiled rice made the last meal together of the bandleader and his singer, and me, of course. I was the chaperone.

  A grown man weeping was scary. It had sounds, as if there were a full orchestration in his chest. I thought of his tragic divas, their quivering voices, and wondered whether they also wept into their soup. Maybe they did or maybe Roy Orbison did, but not like this. Mr. Alano was looking worse for wear. He was sweating copiously, pomade running down his temple and mouth gaping like an open sore; I could see his gold tooth. His hands gripped the bowl before him as if to catch the tears. I swear I heard them fall, one by anguished one, salting the cosido.

  The cosido is a fish soup, thin and a little cloudy, because of the rice-wash base, and rosy if cooked with purple sweet potato leaves. Its main flavor is the little green lemons. There must be enough lemons to give it authority: it must be face-crumpling sour. No doubt the soup before us had more than authority; it had the mandate of heaven. Surely it was only God who could render grown-ups incapacitated in their grief. While Mr. Alano’s gaping mouth could not shut itself, my señorita’s face was frozen. She did not even bat an eyelash, or maybe she couldn’t, at the shock over her lover’s outburst.

  It happened too quickly. It was brought on by the remark, “I’m in nursing, I know what to do.” Or perhaps the main culprit was the talk about the Concepción Immaculada, the Immaculate Conception. This was when Mr. Alano’s mouth fell open first and his shiny face began to twitch. We all looked shiny, I knew that, what with the humid evening and the chili. But my mistress’s sheen was more of a glow; she always sweated gracefully, except when we had that escabeche, of course.

  “So, Gusting,” she began, then breathed deeply before whispering, “what do we do about this Concepción Immaculada?”

  His mouth fell, his spoon fell. It made a splash on his soup. “You mean—?”

  She nodded. He did not say a word after that, he did not even breathe.

  “So?” she asked, fumbling with the clasp of her bag. She held it in her hands the whole time, making me think we would leave any moment.

  He started to open his mouth, then looked at me; she looked at me too, as if expecting me to add to the table talk that was soon reduced to monosyllables.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  Her mouth tightened and she didn’t reply, then she lifted her bag from the table. I was sure we were leaving, so I tipped my bowl and began slurping.

  “But we can’t have that—that Concepción Immaculada, even if—” here, he looked at me worriedly, then turned to her again, voice hoarse, “if Saint Joseph loves Mary.”

  I could see the slight trembling of her lips, the film of sweat above them. I stopped slurping my soup. I stared at her, I stared at him, and wondered why it was upsetting them—the Concepción Immaculada, to the right of the church altar, I remembered. The Virgin Mary in blue and white: eyes raised to heaven, a half-smile on her lips, and arms slightly lifted from her sides with palms open in solemn expectation.

  “Gusting, I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “This—this is so sudden. Are you sure?”

  “You have to choose.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “Then we’ll end it.”

  “No! No, VV, give me time—I will—”

  “You will?”

  They’d been trying to speak in whispers with little success. I thought of my parents at night, their whispered altercations before Mother was hushed and Father started grunting as we tried to sleep.

  “You will?” VV asked again.

  “I wish I could,” he sighed, mopping his sweat with the paper napkin.

  My mistress stood at this point. I stood up too and found her hand; it was clammy and ice-cold. I got even more scared. I heard her say, “That’s all I want to know,” in a muffled voice.

  “No, wait, I mean it. Saint Joseph will always love Mary—but I’m sorry, I can’t, we can’t and you know that, but I told you to be careful, and you’re in nursing, you should know these things. Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean—but—but…” This time, the sweaty face was not only twitching, it began to sag, his inarticulate distress pulling it down to his chest.

  She stood very still, like a windless tree. Her hand felt stunned in mine. Finally she said, “I wish Saint Joseph were dead.”

  “VV!”

  In my heart, I too cried out her name, fearful for her blasphemy.

  “I’ll take care of it. I’m in nursing, I know what to do.”

  His face collapsed, his lips gave way. I heard the drops on the cosido as we walked off. No, he won’t finish that.

  forty-three

  Acharra (the art of preserving)

  Like any storyteller, I live on speculations, but always aligned with my gustatory desires. So I imagine that while I slurped my soup through visions of the Immaculate Conception, back in the stone house, Maria Corazón Alano shredded and soaked green papayas. She felt the sweat trickle between her breasts and make a little puddle in her navel. She could not even wipe herself; her hands were coated with papaya sap. It was now eleven in the evening, but still suffocatingly humid. Best to keep busy, she thought, rather than lie awake and sweat till the morning.

  Gusting had not yet returned. These days, each time he went for a drive in his old Ford, she was not quite sure whether he’d still come home. She never asked questions and she knew he found her silence unbearable. Ay, the art of preserving domestic harmony. She could almost hear the quandaries in his head: should I leave, should I stay, should I tell her, should I keep silent too and keep up this mad double life? Perhaps he wished she would protest, work herself into anger, chastise him or scream, and push him to confess or leave. Then it would be over.

  It was over for Corazón, but leaving did not interest her. And the art of preserving was not for his harmony; it was meant for her pleasure alone. Since she began experimenting with contrary tastes in her kitchen, she had developed an odd pleasure register. These days, the chili bite in her sponge cake thrilled her and even the way a bitter nut broke between her teeth when she ate her coconut muffin. There was always that tiny punctuation on the tongue, the left side; she wondered why. Then she’d take another bite, waiting for the sensation to repeat itself—ah, there it is again, still like a surprise even when she knew it would happen, even when
she had put it there herself. Once after a second helping, Gusting asked why she was smiling, then complained that the muffin tasted flat and needed more sugar.

  Corazón could no longer stand “just sweet” confections. Today she laid her old carving instruments on the kitchen table, then later ignored them, deciding against flowers and frills. She was making a new version of acharra, pickled green papayas, which was usually embellished with carrot or radish florets. She started on a carrot first, using an old penknife, and began carving an arrow, then a tail, a wing with a little dent, and finished with what looked like an ear. She popped it into her mouth; it cooled her tongue and she imagined a breeze picking up outside.

  This morning, she had prepared the pickling vinegar and, in an afterthought, some tuba, a wicked palm wine. Vinegar is the main preservative for savories, sugar for sweets. The acharra used both, but it could do with some wickedness. She would get it drunk, she chuckled to herself, letting the imagined breeze tickle her nape.

  When in her heart, a wife decides that she’s no longer one, not by her husband’s decree or imputation, then she becomes playful. Without leaving, she can be single again, a maiden, a girl. The sense of old self can be recovered and preserved, where it had been adulterated or diminished. Maria Corazón felt like Coring again, as her girlfriends and old flames used to call her, with that affectionate lilt in the last syllable. She took a swig of the tuba and smiled. She suddenly remembered what the girls, her bridesmaids, had whispered before she walked down the aisle. “Coring, eating too many papayas makes it go limp. Eating onions makes it do otherwise.” Then they took their places behind her, giggling in their frilly dresses.