Banana Heart Summer

by Merlinda Bobis

  “I wonder whether we should store these at all.” Nilo was shaking his head at the brimming containers.

  “We should go inside,” I said, then turned to Junior. “It will get better.”

  He blinked at me through the rain running over his face. For a moment, I saw a query there, quickly washed off by the downpour. He hesitated at first, then laid our sister in my arms, whispering, “I’m calling her Agualita—little water.”

  It was our secret. We all promised not to tell on each other to our parents for the rest of our lives. Not about the wedding dress, which we soaked in vinegar and the strongest detergent to make it white again, not about staying too long under the rain, and not about our own Agualita.

  forty-nine

  Pinuso: becoming a heart

  Mother stayed in the hospital for a week and a half, fighting for her life, and we did not even know it. The baby had been dead in her womb for days. We had never seen our father look so grim, his face tight and set. We wondered whether he had found out about our secret and was angry and biding his time to punish us, perhaps when Mother came home. But to hide fear and anguish, the face must of course shut, even to the ones we love. He stopped looking at us closely as he used to; in fact, he hardly looked at us at all. And he refused to take us to the hospital.

  We buried the seventh child the following morning after that first downpour, because Father was adamant that we should conclude this birth and death at once. On the wooden cross, he painted Marinella, after mother’s Marina. After the funeral, I came home to take care of my siblings, though I still cooked for the Valenzuelas. Señorita VV made sure the meals were enough for two families; she sent all my cooking neighboring next door. She visited us each day, but I could not understand why Ralph came and spoke intently to my father, as if about some very serious business.

  It rained every day. When Mother came home, our street was no longer grey, and the guardians of the sky were back in their appointed places. The cross gleamed as if brand-new and the volcano stood calm and still, as if it had never known an inkling of fire. Heaven was how it was before, with patches of blue emerging, but not our street. It seemed to have shrunk. Mr. Alexander Ching had cordoned his “new” property, the size of which surprised everyone, and resumed construction. My friends’ house was demolished and lives were erased. Even our old haunt was soon fenced in with chicken wire. Meanwhile Tiya Miling put up a new sign, staking her own claim. So on the day I went to buy some snacks for Mother’s homecoming, I felt as though I had strayed to another street.

  Our street would never be the same again. My friends never plundered those guavas. I never trespassed on that mango branch. I never fell. Tiya Viring never stole the heart of Juanito Guwapito. Tiyo Anding never flew. Imagine our new street, our salvation. Imagine my final rendezvous with Nana Dora’s snacks. I walked our street with two points of ache in my chest, where there seemed to have grown twin bumps, one on each side.

  Nana Dora did not appear in her usual spot during that first burst of monsoon. Our street missed the delicate melody of her frying and her paddle of a spoon stirring sweetness into the air. I wondered if the downpour had washed away all her sticky rice, her coconuts, her palm sugar, her sweet anise and all the secret condiments that had kept her coming without fail, always on time and with that unwavering intent: to assuage our hunger.

  This time I walked towards her hut with a little more confidence, clutching the coins that Father had given me. Surely the world would be all right again at home. He was back at his old job in the Chings’ construction and Mother was coming home, saved. But even so, I worried about her return and how I could face her, especially how she would look at me, if she looked at me at all, knowing I had killed it. These were apprehensions that I could not tell my señorita. They sat in my chest; maybe that’s why my heart grew a twin, I thought, and both were pushing out, wanting to be acknowledged.

  Maybe I could tell Nana Dora instead, ay, there was so much to tell—but we ended up with her doing all the telling. She left no gaps for me; I could not even begin with my own story about the seventh child. She was confessing tales, which took years for me to understand after that last afternoon in her hut. It was her final transaction with our stomachs.

  She rambled over her steaming pinuso—literally her “made into a heart,” her “becoming a heart.” Our final dish. It is ground and sweetened sticky rice and coconut wrapped in a strip of banana leaf shaped into a heart and steamed. It is only a cheap heart at one centavo each. It is small but heavy; it has bulk, it is filling.

  “I’m afraid I could never find the balance between my love and anger.” The prickliness was gone. There was a quiet sorrow about her as she told me about the Calcium Man and the woman with a womb as barren as soup without water. “You see, Nining, it’s the fault of our insides. The heart is not all that far from the stomach, and then there’s the spleen just around the corner. So many strange goings-on in there…” She was mumbling, as though talking only to herself. “And you almost think you can perfect eating alone…maybe so. But not forgiving those who abandoned you at the table, for how can you betray that part of you which was betrayed?” Then she said I should go, for the hungry queue had begun. She refused to take my money for the bag of pinuso. That was the last time I saw her.

  Back home, I unwrapped each little heart for my siblings and my mother. “She’s here, she’s back,” Junior said under his breath. “Father, Ralph and VV brought her home and they talked for a while up there in hushed voices, then Father went back to work. She didn’t speak to us yet…she’s resting,” he explained earnestly.

  The twin bumps on my chest throbbed. I worried about how I could face her. I told Junior to take the pinuso up to her. He avoided my eyes, saying maybe Claro should do it. How could I know that my brother was also nursing his own guilt—that, for him, the pork knuckle and the stillbirth were the same story, and he would tell it to himself for years? “She’ll be okay again, won’t she, Nining?”

  “She will be—I’m sure,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll take this up myself.”

  A snack and a “getting better” bath in a basin. This was how I had planned her homecoming, so I boiled some water with lime and tamarind leaves, and kept telling myself: I will make amends, I will feed her, I will wash her, I will ask forgiveness, I will be her Nining again.

  “Add this to the bath,” Claro said, passing me a bottle of agua de Mayo.

  “It’s not pure, but it is the first rain of May,” Nilo said, then scolded the two youngest who were trying to climb the stairs. “No, you can’t go up yet. Mama must rest.”

  So I took it up, all our apprehensive love to our mother, in a hot bath and a little heart. I laid it at the foot of the mat, keeping my eyes down. I did not know how to begin.

  “You have filled out…”

  It was as if someone else had spoken. The voice was depleted, so unlike her.

  “I brought food and a bath, Mama.”

  “Come closer. Let me look at you.”

  “I didn’t mean to, Mama, I’m sorry, I never meant to—”

  “Hush…” She was trying to raise herself, so I propped her up with a pillow. She was paler, thinner, like a ghost that could disappear before I had done my duties.

  “Maybe we should start with the bath first or else it will get cold. Is that all right with you, Mama?” I asked, dipping the towel into the basin. The scent of lime and tamarind steamed into our lungs.

  She closed her eyes, I thought she had fallen asleep.

  “Mama?”

  It took a while before she spoke again. I dared not start without her permission.

  “Would you like to go to America, Nining?”

  The towel sank among the lime and tamarind leaves.

  “Violeta and Ralph will take you.”

  My hands sank deeper and stayed there. I thought I heard her sigh.

  “You’ll be good, won’t you, Nining?” She kept her eyes closed, as if she had looked at me enough.
“They’ll be good to you there, very good…to my firstborn.” Then she stretched out an arm to be washed.

  EPILOGUE

  Sometimes I want to write and tell Mother that I am perhaps the Philippines’ first exported domestic helper. She never writes. But during the coldest winters here in Oregon, I linger in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. Still my kingdom, even if the house is not my own. My new employers say that at forty I should be doing something else, that I’m too bright for the kitchen. Makes me smile. Kitchens need brightness. Here, I’m master of the ritual of appeasement, of making better, and ultimately of balance. Here, I know how to keep warm. I fondle the old stones in my head and cast them into the magic pot. Then I add the faithful configurations. Everything will be as it should be. My esophagus its usual length, my heart and spleen in the right place. But sometimes when the flavors get confused, the spleen remembers and I worry that it might grow heavier than my heart, that I will lose the balance between my love and anger. So I write my letter of recrimination. Time and again, I scribble then dispose of it. It embarrasses me, scares me. But maybe I will write it to her sometime, properly and with conviction. Maybe I will even send it. Maybe there’s a place for it on the page after all—

  How do I tell you that we were good kids? That there was no need for your sad, furious hands to set us to rights? That I knew how they longed to multiply the meager rice and fish to feed our thousand yearnings? And that they could have done so, easily, had they held my limbs with a little more tenderness? How do I say that I have kissed those hands again and again in my dreams, and now I understand? And it is all right.

  Merlinda Bobis was born in Albay, Philippines. The author of poetry, fiction and drama, she has received the Prix Italia, the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories, the Philippine National Book Award, the Judges Choice Award (Bumbershoot Bookfair, Seattle), the Australian Writers’ Guild Award, and most recently the Philippine Balagtas Award, a lifetime achievement award. Banana Heart Summer was shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her second novel, The Solemn Lantern Maker, will be released in the U.S. in 2009. She lives in New South Wales, Australia.

  Other books by Merlinda Bobis

  Pag-uli, Pag-uwi, Homecoming (poetry)

  White Turtle / The Kissing (short fiction)

  Summer Was a Fast Train Without Terminals (poetry)

  Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon (poetry)

  Ang Lipad ay Awit sa Apat na Hangin / Flight Is Song on Four Winds (poetry) Rituals (poetry)

  and coming soon:

  The Solemn Lantern Maker

  BANANA HEART SUMMER

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2005 by Merlinda Bobis

  Illustrations and design © Murdoch Books Australia Pty Limited 2005

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008000768

  Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33786-7

  v3.0