I listened to my breathing, I counted each rise and fall, sometimes missing the last number thus holding my breath until I remembered, then finally I lost count. I had a siesta.
When I woke up, my dress was drenched in sweat and it was dark. For a while, I thought I was back in our ceiling and if I turned I would bump against Lydia, but there was only the edge of the bed, then suddenly I remembered. Quickly I scrambled up, worried about preparing the snacks—no, dinner now, is it? Aysus, how long did I sleep? I rushed out of the room, expecting everyone to be waiting for me with nonstop censure, but the house was so quiet and deserted, as if everyone had vanished into thin air. I tiptoed to the kitchen and turned on the light, then turned it off again, instinctively thinking I should not wake up my employers, for it felt very late. I noted that the kitchen was tidy, everything swept away. I did cook dinner and clean up after, didn’t I?
I found myself walking through the kitchen door, out into the open, trying to get some air. I groped my way from the backyard to the front garden, for it was very dark, past the hibiscus, looking up and around, but there was no cross or volcano to restore my bearings. After a while, I kept hitting tree trunks, then I heard noises, like something being slashed or hacked, and then something falling, then another and yet another. It went on for a while. I had kept very still, not daring to breathe, then something or someone brushed past me. I shut my eyes tight, even if I could hardly see anything. When it was quiet again, I tried to retrace my steps back into the house, more disoriented now. Everything felt unfamiliar, the ground under me, the air. I began to run, panicking and bumping into shrubs, thickets, more trunks, I kept running with eyes closed. When I felt a hand grab my arm, I yelped.
“What are you doing here?” the hand asked, and dragged me forward. I was too confused to answer or resist. Then I heard a sudden clucking, and a lamp was lit.
A chicken, on the tallest ladder of Mills & Boons, was watching me with one eye.
“What are you doing here?” he asked again. I could hear relief in Boy Hapon’s voice. “I could have hit you, you know. I thought it was a prowler.”
“Just walking,” I said as the chicken shut its eye again.
“At this hour?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You okay?”
“I think—I think I lost my way.”
It was a stupid thing to say when I knew our street so well and I had only walked two houses away. “Maybe…” I added, then couldn’t speak anymore. Suddenly all the weight of that summer came pouring out of my chest, as if it were monsoon season already and I would flood that little room of chickens and romances. I could not stop crying.
We stood there, facing each other, with me threatening to drown all his Mills & Boons while he held both my hands, not quite knowing what to do beyond this. Through my tears, I could see the sweat following the contours of his cheeks, wrinkled till his overgrown ears and up to his temples, and his upturned eyes did not waver from my face. This close, he looked extraordinarily pale and foreign.
For a while all I could hear was my sobbing and his even breathing, then suddenly there was the flapping of wings and a clucking from different corners of the piled-up books, coming together all at once in a sorrowful crow. It made me stop and Boy Hapon released my hands, saying, “Why don’t we sit down?”
He offered me the only chair in the house and proceeded to shove several piles of books together to make himself a stool. Then he lit two candles at the end of the room. He had an altar in that corner, the only one without any books. I did not notice this the last time I was in here, but of course I was in such a state then after falling from the mango tree. His altar did not have the usual Child Jesus or Mother Mary though, but a faded picture of a woman stuck against the wall, with hardly any face left. And before it a lone banana heart, its sap still fresh.
“My mother,” he said, then sat down on his Mills & Boon stool. “The nuns said she was my mother.” Then he picked up a book and turned to the last five pages and began reading aloud.
It was as I had imagined it. The chickens were all awake, heads cocked to one side in that attitude of listening, beady eyes alert and beaks half-opened, ready to footnote the happy ending, for every Mills & Boon romance has a happy ending. And how they crowed, after every paragraph: when the heroine stopped fighting the hero, when the hero stopped being cruel, when she realized that he was not cruel at all, when he understood that the heroine did not hate him, and finally when all their misunderstandings and incomprehension in the previous two hundred pages were resolved in a kiss.
It was as I had imagined it, but not the conclusion of the reading, for the little ritual did not end with the last word on the page. Boy Hapon picked up the banana heart and cut it in two, and the chickens crowed one last time before he went into the kitchen with the halved offering—for that was what it was, he said.
“I read—and cook for my mother.” His words were measured, like a reluctant confession.
He had a mother. The whole street was wrong: he did come from someone.
“You think I’m strange—or crazy—like how everyone here does?”
Was this why he invoked the eruption?
“No, I don’t think you’re like that at all,” I heard myself say softly, then I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask what she was like.
“You should look at her picture,” he said, both hands stretched as if cupping a face. “Just look at her picture.”
He sounded so certain about her, I thought, feeling a twinge of envy. “So you cook and read for her?”
“Every night, but now I’ve nothing in my garden, no flowers to offer, no vegetables to cook. Even the bittermelons shrank after the eruption, but this heart, it would do—it’s a flower, it’s a vegetable.”
What could I say to that? I helped myself to a knife and began peeling the other half of the heart, as he was doing, making sure I saved only the soft core, the one not yet fully seared by the heat. I knew what he had planned for it, from the vinegar and chili on the table, and from the way he was shredding it thinly. We were making an ensalada, which wouldn’t be much, as there was so little of the heart that was usable now.
“They said she worked for the Japanese—during the war, you know.”
The shreds of heart were not all that smooth in my hands. We’ll have to boil these for longer, I thought, so they don’t hurt the throat when we swallow.
“That’s why I look Japanese. That’s why they don’t like me here.”
forty-seven
No food, no cooking
Someone was shaking me awake, calling out my name, Nining, then Nenita, then Nining again, as if the caller were slipping in and out of an endearment. I turned away from the voice, wishing it would slip out of uncertainty, but it became more insistent. Sprawled on my chest, I felt two pinpoints of pain there, as if my heart had grown a twin overnight, perhaps from too many romances in that house, in that dream—for it was a dream, wasn’t it?
“Wake up, Nining, wake up!” I felt arms raise me to a sitting position and the voice continued to say, “You have to go home, Nining, now!” Its urgency made me open my eyes and I saw my mistress holding me, and Claro standing at the foot of the bed, looking very pale and catching his breath as though he had run for miles. “It’s born, Nining.” Then his voice broke.
I was quickly out the door with Claro gripping my hand as if he would crush it, and saying, “It’s not moving, Nining, it’s not moving.”
My heart pounded as I took in the shocked tableau of my family—we are only six again, I thought, and it was my fault, I pushed her, I killed it. Then everything came alive in a blur—Señorita VV bundling my mother into their family car and telling us to keep calm because they must take her to the hospital, while my father kept mumbling, “You’ll take care here, Nining, won’t you, that’s a good girl,” while my siblings looked on, as far away as possible from the bloody sheets on the floor.
No, we are seven. It is here!
; I stood frozen by the door. I couldn’t even comfort my siblings, huddled like a flock of petrified birds, damp and disheveled. The humidity in the room was oppressive. Outside it was darker than usual and the clouds hung even lower, like pregnant bellies. I took a step forward, still hesitating. I could see the bundle near the sink, a basin of water beside it as though made ready for a bath.
“Father said to clean it.” Junior’s voice seemed to float in from somewhere else. It woke me up. I found my legs carrying me to the sink while, in my head, I was going through the motions of bathing my siblings when they were babies. Mother showed me how.
“Will she die?”
It is dead, it is dead, it is dead, I answered in my head, then realized whom she meant. “No, Lydia,” I said, then asked myself the same question silently. The answer, also silent, accused me: You wished her dead yesterday. “She’ll be okay,” I said, pushing back the fear in my heart.
“What do we do?”
Junior still spoke in his strange voice, while shielding the two youngest from the sight of the sheets, but Lydia was peeking from behind his shoulder. Her voice took on a hysterical pitch as she kept asking whether she would die, while Elvis seemed to have stopped breathing on his brother’s chest. Behind them, Claro and Nilo were crouched like Siamese twins, paper-white and sucking their thumbs. Claro was weeping silently, rocking back and forth, his brother helplessly conjoined to his rhythm.
“We will do as Father said,” I answered, gingerly lifting the edge of the bloodied towel. I saw a tiny fist, blue and rigid, then a bloodstained shoulder, and thought of a chicken that had lost its wing. It’s a girl, it is my sister. I kept on telling myself, we are seven, we are seven, so I could go on, so it would be just like before, washing another newborn as Mother had taught me. I kept unwrapping her. I had never seen anything so tiny and crumpled and blue and old-looking. She was caked with blood and white stuff, and her face seemed to have been squeezed into a knowing anguish: I do not belong here.
In my hands, she did not resist as I laid her in the basin of water, one hand under her back and buttocks, the other under her neck as Mother had showed me. I was keeping her head above the water, I was making sure the soap did not get into her eyes. After a while, I heard my siblings rising from their corner, gathering the sheets, then wiping the floor, restoring order, as though they had picked up my rhythm of normality, of life going on again.
When she was all clean and sweet-smelling, I lifted her from the basin and soon Nilo was handing me a fresh towel. I wiped her as tenderly as I could, as I had done with most of them, then instinctively, I laid her against my shoulder. I couldn’t help the rocking movement; I had to check myself to stop.
“We must have a coffin.” I heard Junior behind me, hovering. He was cradling his old shoebox. “It was the only white thing I could find,” he said.
Claro, still sniffling, said there were no clean sheets, but maybe we could use this. He was holding out a white, lacy bundle. “Because it’s the prettiest thing in the house,” he explained to counter my alarm. It was Mother’s wedding dress.
“Here—she will sleep here,” Nilo said, patting the center of the dining table, and Claro responded accordingly, spreading the wedding dress there, and Junior laid the box on it, right on the waistline. “And this, her blanket,” he said, handing me a white handkerchief, Father’s special one.
After a while the two little ones edged themselves towards the table. Lydia was calmer now and Elvis was breathing again. “Look,” he gurgled, “look!” pointing at our youngest sister in the box.
“Candles,” I said, remembering. “We need candles.” Suddenly an altar and a picture with barely a face rose before my eyes—that dream? Such things only happened in dreams, but I was already telling my siblings, “And flowers or vegetables, any offering.” Of course I was there, he was there, and the chickens crowed and the heart was shredded, and he told me he came from someone after all. “I’ll be back,” I said, heading for the door.
I don’t think there was any food or cooking that intruded into that moment. Everything about it was raw but without hunger. It was way past noon, but our stomachs had forgotten about themselves. All were gathered around the table not for a meal, but to watch over the white shoebox. I left them, speaking in hushed voices, and found some candles next door. I remember how disappointed I was to find not a single bloom in the hibiscus hedge on my way back, so I proceeded to my old haunt. To pluck my own heart, just like Boy Hapon, no matter how shriveled. A flower and a vegetable for the seventh child.
It was more than grey outside; the sky was almost black and the clouds dipped so low, as if to reach the banana trees just to make sure, just like me, for I couldn’t believe my eyes. From each tree hung the curved bough, but heart-less. I checked again, going from tree to tree, but all the hearts were gone, hacked from the bough, harvested. I could not stop gaping until a cloud sizzled with a flash of light, then a clap of thunder—on my upturned cheek, I felt the first drop of rain.
forty-eight
Just water
Agua de Mayo. The first rain of May, after a hot summer, has magical powers. We made sure to catch as much of it as possible with our bodies and in pails and basins, to be stored for healing and for blessing things. When I returned, soaked to the skin, my siblings were already in the street, bathing under the rain and being duly blessed, after having lined up outside all possible containers in the house. To my horror, Junior was carrying the newborn wrapped in Mother’s wedding dress, trailing on the asphalt. He was standing still, arms outstretched as if his sister were a precious receptacle that must catch all of heaven’s blessing.
I began to scold him, just as Mother would have done, and usher everyone into the house, but no one was listening. I finally kept quiet and stood there with my candles as dripping wet as myself, just watching them. Their bodies trickled with grey grime, for it was not just rain falling from the sky but all the debris of the eruption that had hung in the air for weeks: heaven was flushing itself. The wedding dress was no longer white.
The rain fell in torrents, hitting our bodies, sending us flinching. Deep puddles rose around our feet and our scalps felt like they were being hammered. “Ay, Nining, rain, rain!” Nilo shouted through the din, jumping up and down, and Lydia and Elvis followed suit, while Claro checked his haul, pouring the grimy water out and setting up the containers again for when the cleaner drops began.
The whole neighborhood was busy catching this outburst of heaven—summer was over. Pails, basins, cans and bottles lined our street, and heads and hands were stretched out of windows to catch the water. Grown-ups usually behaved more discreetly in this ritual, but the standby boys were in a frenzy, throwing cans of water at each other, while the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” blared from the new jukebox. Next door, Mr. and Mrs. Alano were at separate windows, resigned that blessings were no longer shared. Meanwhile from Boy Hapon’s fringe garden came such clucking, squawking, crowing and all the possible chicken sounds that you could imagine. They had finally flown from their Mills & Boon roost, I imagined, and gone outside, not wanting to be left unblessed. I looked across the street, up the red turret. I thought it was slightly open, but I couldn’t be sure.
It was just rain, just water. Without sweets or spices or condiments, without our expert or fumbling interventions to make it taste better, without our need to disguise its nature, but how we reveled in each drop. Sadly love is not just water; we do things to it. We dilute it with other daily longings or the wishes for more, or our fears, angers and sorrows, then our pangs and recriminations, our ludicrous inclination towards endings. If only we could leave love alone, like the uncompromising and uncompromised glass of water at our elbow.
But perhaps we are born compromised to hunger, in all its variations, and just water or just rice or fish will never assuage it. Just water is too fluid and with not enough bulk to fill us, and it passes through our bodies too quickly. So we seek for more and we cook, we spice and sweeten up, we mak
e better, but who can blame us? All the houses in our street knew that the meal at the table was never enough, and surely the air outside tasted of something else, unfamiliar, thus perhaps better?
That summer, I understood that Father’s love would never be enough for our mother, and my siblings and I could not make up for his lack. Each time one of us was born, she seemed to hunger for more replenishment and desperately so, as if we were depleting her coffers of affection. Had the newborn been alive, it would have emptied it. But thank God, we were only six again, saved from the seventh hunger. Later, after the funeral, while I anguished that I caused my sister’s death, a sense of shameful relief sneaked in sometimes, especially when I watched my siblings eat, always arguing as to who got more and that they wanted more.
But under that first burst of monsoon, there was no wish for more. All we wanted was water.
We stayed outside for a good half hour, waiting for cleaner drops. Claro was especially keen on this, checking his row of bottles and cans, even a basin and a pail for the purer blessing; and he was taking occasional sips, worried perhaps that appearance alone did not ensure purity. Nilo and I began helping him, pouring out the grimy water and starting all over again with this hope for “just water.”
By now, Junior was squatting before our door, still holding the seventh child, presenting her to the whole street. Earlier I had attempted to take her away from him, but he held her even closer to his chest, as if he were her only kin. Lydia and Elvis tried to catch their brother’s attention, but he shrugged them off. They snuggled close to him anyhow, playing with the train of the wedding dress. After a while, even Claro and Nilo joined the tight circle, faces raised expectantly for the clear drops that would take days to finally come.
“Still so grey,” Claro despaired.
“It will get better,” I said.
Banana Heart Summer Page 17