In his little sitting room, which was full of books, he asked us to sit in front of a small desk covered in papers and well-sharpened pencils.
‘My name is Ismail,’ he said, sitting behind the desk. I later found out that he was the Kuwaiti writer Ismail Fahd Ismail, who lived in the Philippines for six years after the liberation of Kuwait.
‘I’m Josephine, sir,’ said Mother.
Then she pointed at me. ‘And this is Isa, my . . .’
‘José!’ I said, interrupting her.
‘José. My son,’ mother said, correcting herself.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the man said with a smile, then paused, waiting for my mother to speak.
‘Sir,’ she said. ‘I want to ask you about a man.’
The man’s calm face showed signs of interest. ‘I thought you needed a job!’ he said.
‘What I need is more important, sir,’ she said.
The man nodded, encouraging her to continue.
‘Sir, do you know a Kuwaiti man called Rashid?’
He gave a gentle smile. ‘Thousands of Kuwaitis have this name,’ he said.
‘Rashid al-Tarouf, sir,’ said my mother, more specifically.
The man raised an eyebrow.
‘A writer,’ my mother continued, ‘who lives in . . .’
‘Qortuba?’ the man interjected.
‘Yes, yes, sir,’ said my mother in surprise.
There was silence for a few seconds.
‘Do you know him, sir? Please.’
The man nodded.
‘Do you know him personally?’ she asked.
The man kept nodding and my mother went on talking. ‘I used to work in his mother’s house in Kuwait. We haven’t had any news of him since the war.’
The man looked calm again.
‘Do you know what’s happened to him? Where is he now, sir?’
He didn’t answer. He seemed uncertain and thoughtful. He pointed at a large stack of papers on the desk in front of him and said, ‘He’s here.’
My mother’s eyes almost popped out of her head. She turned to me and whispered to me in Filipino so that the man wouldn’t understand, ‘Damn Pedro. The man seems to be crazy.’
The man smiled. ‘I’m not mad,’ he said in Filipino.
My mother blushed and the man continued in English. ‘I was in Kuwait during the war. We were part of a resistance group and Rashid was one of the members.’
My mother stared at the man’s face as he went on: ‘You look surprised, but I’m even more surprised than you.’
The man put his hand on the large stack of paper. ‘This is an account of our activities and the events that took place during the seven months of occupation. I started writing it more than five years ago, and the strange thing is . . .’
The man hesitated before continuing.
‘Yesterday evening . . .’
My mother nodded, pressing him to go on.
‘Only yesterday evening, Rashid’s role in it came to an end when he fell into the hands of the occupation forces.’
When the man had finished, my mother didn’t say a word. She was silent in the truck too and at home. After meeting the Kuwaiti man all my mother had come up with was the news that my father had been captured, and an envelope full of money that the man had given her before we left his house. My mother hadn’t told him that she was Rashid’s wife, or that I was his only son.
15
After the Kuwaiti man told us that my father had been captured in the war, Kuwait no longer meant anything to me. I automatically stopped thinking about going back to my father’s country. But my mother on the other hand continued to bring it up from time to time. ‘The promise will be fulfilled,’ she would say.
‘And what if Rashid is . . .’ Aunt Aida started to ask her, but then she stopped and left the rest of the question hanging. Both of them knocked on the wooden part of the sofa.
‘Even if Rashid is dead, his promise won’t die,’ my mother said.
I felt sorry for my mother. What kind of faith could she have that didn’t waver through all those years? She was still building hopes on a man who went missing in war ages ago. I had lost interest and no longer had hopes of going to Wonderland, despite my mother’s faith.
What if the promise was fulfilled, I wondered. What if the man called Rashid did reappear? Could I really be replanted, like a bamboo stalk?
* * *
In 1997, my mother began looking for work and the first person she thought she could ask for help was Ismail, the Kuwaiti man. But by that time he had wrapped up all his business in the Philippines and gone back to Kuwait.
After some effort my mother did manage to find a job as a servant to a rich family that lived in Forbes Park in Makati. She spent the whole day working in their house, came back at the end of the day, had dinner with us and then went off to her own house with Adrian.
I felt my mother gradually growing apart from me. She was away at work and busy with Adrian and his special needs. She was often in a bad mood and always absent-minded, and I no longer saw her smile. She had changed a lot but I understood the reasons for all that and I didn’t hold it against her.
While my mother grew distant, my relationship with Aida and Merla grew stronger. I was close to both of them, despite the distance between them. I never heard Merla calling Aida ‘Mama’. Instead she called her by her name: Aida. She went out without asking permission and came back late at night. She went on trips to places far out of Manila and Aunt Aida couldn’t stop her. Although my aunt treated her daughter well, sometimes too well, and although she always tried to please her, Merla reacted in the opposite way and never treated her mother well.
The way Merla mistreated Aida made me sympathise with my aunt. One evening I heard her complaining to my mother that Merla never called her ‘Mama’. From then on I started calling her ‘Mama Aida’. It had quite an effect on the way my aunt behaved.
When someone ends up having two mothers, you can be sure they’re equally confused about their names, their country and their religion.
16
I had my twelfth birthday in 2000 and I had to go to church to be confirmed.
‘Josephine!’ Mama Aida said. ‘José is twelve now.’
We were sitting around the dining table in the kitchen.
‘You go smoke your poisons, Aida, and let José go his own way,’ Mother replied.
‘I’ve given up smoking marijuana,’ Mama Aida retorted sharply.
‘Since when?’ asked Mother with interest.
‘From today,’ answered Mama Aida, without looking at my mother.
Mother didn’t comment, but went to feed Adrian. Mama Aida continued, ‘We have to take José to church, Josephine.’
Adrian automatically made the sign of the cross in the air as soon as Mama Aida mentioned the church.
‘Sooner or later José will turn Muslim in his father’s country,’ Mother said. ‘If you’re such a believer . . .’ she resumed, then paused a moment. ‘Then your daughter is now sixteen. Make her behave properly, then take her to church, or to hell.’
Mama Aida didn’t say a word.
* * *
My first visit to the Manila Cathedral was with Mama Aida, who insisted I be confirmed in the cathedral rather than just in the little parish church where I was baptised years earlier. Mama Aida asked Uncle Pedro and his wife to come and witness the rite and to join her as my sponsors. The two agreed, but my mother stuck to her position – ‘He’ll embrace Islam sooner or later’ – and she didn’t attend.
We went through the big wooden door – Mama Aida, Pedro and his wife, and me. We stopped in front of the statue of an angel carrying a font of holy water. Everyone dipped the tips of their fingers into the water and made the sign of the cross, and I did likewise.
The cathedral certainly gave me a sense of awe, but I wasn’t sure if that was because of faith. Maybe the candles, the statues and the icons played a part too.
Mama Aida, Uncle Pedro an
d his wife sat down and started saying prayers, while I stood in the middle on a long red carpet, wooden pews on my left and right. I had a new sensation I hadn’t known before this visit – complete serenity. There was a decorated ceiling held up by eight marble columns, large crosses on the walls and stained-glass windows. The sunbeams threw the colours of the glass on to the marble floor, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, in a white dress and a blue cloak, stood above the altar, surrounded on all sides by bouquets of flowers.
In the front seats there were lots of boys about my age, accompanied by their parents, waiting for the bishop to conduct the ceremony. Mama Aida’s excitement was a ritual in itself.
We finished the confirmation ceremony and the bishop blessed us with holy water after we had answered ‘I do’ to his questions: ‘Do you reject Satan and all his works, and all his empty promises?’ ‘Do you believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth?’ ‘Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord?’ ‘Do you believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting?’
What difficult questions you ask, Father! And how easy it is to say, ‘I do, I do.’
Lucky Adrian. These questions don’t give him any trouble. He has no doubt and no faith. No uncertainty and no fear. If only it had been me who nearly drowned that night, so that my brain cells would be damaged, instead of his.
Before we left the cathedral Mama Aida gave me a crucifix on a chain. Her happiness that day was the most beautiful part of the confirmation ceremony.
17
‘José, José, José . . .’
I heard the call dozens of times a day from my grandfather, and although I longed for a real name, it made me want not to have a name at all, at least when Grandfather was around, so that he couldn’t call me. The reason for the constant summoning wasn’t that he wanted to talk to me. When Mendoza called my name, an order was bound to follow. ‘Fill the trough with water for the cocks.’ ‘Clean out the pen.’ ‘Take the scraps to Whitey.’ ‘Climb the mango tree and pick some mangoes.’ ‘Warm up the oil and follow me.’
No one but me obeyed Mendoza, especially after my mother moved to her husband’s house and had Adrian. She insisted on staying with Adrian in a better environment, away from her father’s house, even if her new place was just a little house at the end of the sandy lane that ran past my grandfather’s land.
Ironically, while Mother wanted Adrian to grow up in a better environment, Adrian himself, the lucky boy, knew nothing of what was happening around him.
My mother won her freedom through marriage. Years earlier Mama Aida had won her freedom by rebelling. In Merla’s case, her freedom and salvation lay, leaving aside her personality, in her association with Mama Aida. This made all of them invisible to Mendoza, so all he could see was me, because I had not yet won my freedom. I hated my name when it came from his dark lips, through the gaps in his brown teeth, from a mouth that smelled of tobacco. I had visions of him dropping down dead as soon as he shouted out his usual summons – ‘Joséeeeee!’ – in a voice that grated like nails on a blackboard. I would run to him, I would bow down, I would take his hand and press the back of his hand to my forehead in a show of respect, but inside me I heaped curses on him.
He was short, dark-skinned, with deep lines in his forehead and cheeks. His eyes were sunken, almost buried under his bushy eyebrows. He coughed constantly as if he were about to cough up his lungs. Ever since I was young I’d thought that Mendoza was at death’s door, but the dying went on many years. I could easily imagine what he would look like dead, because it wouldn’t have been very different from the way he looked before he died: he was just a bony skeleton covered in wrinkled skin.
In his little house he lay on his wooden bed all day with his face buried in his smelly pillow. His upper part was naked. Although I was young at the time, I had enough experience to work as a professional masseur, since I played that role every day. I would sit on Mendoza’s buttocks, which were as hard as his wooden bed, and let a thin trickle of cheap warm oil stream on to his back from the plastic bottle in my hand. I would press my hands against the small of his back and work my way up the bony vertebrae as far as his neck. ‘Aahh,’ he would groan. ‘Keep pressing.’ I was terrified his skin might come undone, exposing his backbone underneath. Like a bird waiting for day to break so it could fly off into the trees, I waited for the signal of liberation that would release me from this arduous task. As soon as he was breathing regularly I would gradually reduce the pressure on his back, switching from my palms to my fingertips, until he began his snoring concerto and I could slip away to Merla.
18
Merla is four years older than me. The only thing that kept me away from her was being summoned by Mendoza. How I envied her. My grandfather was so frightened of Aida that he didn’t dare give Merla any chores to do. Her personality also played a role in it, which added to the burden on me because I had to obey his constant requests.
Merla has a strong personality. She’s been clever and a natural leader ever since she was a child. Boys were frightened of her. She didn’t often use her tongue, as other girls did, but her hands went into action automatically if she was angry.
She was slim and relatively tall, with a pale, slightly pink complexion. Her hair was brown and wavy. Her eyes were blue, which made her a classic mestiza, though she hated the label. Her beauty reminded her of the unknown European father she hated. Because of him she absolutely detested the way she looked and everything European.
We grew close after Mama Aida began to look after me in the four months that my mother spent at her husband’s house every year, before she settled permanently in her new house.
I missed Merla terribly when I was in Kuwait, far from the Philippines.
I longed for her as much as I longed for the colour green, which was hard to find in Kuwait. I missed her like I missed the smell of grass after a downpour, when the wet soil gives off refreshing vapours that bathe the human spirit.
I wish we could bring back the days that are gone with those whose paths have now diverged from ours, and live them again with other people, but no one in this world can replace anyone else. And how much more so if that someone is Merla? I loved to be with her.
She was always a mystery, despite all the time I spent with her, because she hid an aspect of herself that I was not aware of. One day she came home with the letters MM tattooed on her arm and I started pestering her with questions about it.
‘“M” for Merla,’ she explained. ‘And because I love myself so much, a single “M” wouldn’t be enough.’
She was strikingly beautiful, powerfully feminine, with a sculpted body, wild hair and full lips, but I didn’t notice any of that until I saw her in a new light, later. I had just turned fourteen when I first dreamed about her. In my wet dream she was adventurous, and I was too. When I woke up I couldn’t believe that the dream hadn’t been real. It happened again and again as I shed the mantle of boyhood and grew into a man. The sensations I had in my dream – the touch, the taste, the smell and the effect the dream had – came back to me whenever Merla appeared. She was the same girl who had grown up in the same house as me. Nothing in her had changed. It was the way I saw her that was different. It’s not the way a woman looks and behaves that arouses a man’s instinct, so much as the image he has of her in his head. And inside my head, when I looked at Merla, I only saw her the way she looked in my dreams.
But there were limits to where our relationship could go because, apart from the age difference, which seemed big to me, Merla was my cousin.
Once, when I was six and Merla was ten, I said to my mother, ‘Mama, I want to marry Merla.’
My mother burst out laughing. ‘It looks like you’re going to turn Muslim quicker than I imagined,’ she said.
Mama Aida also looked surprised. ‘Are Muslims allowed to marry their cousins?’ she asked.
Mother nodded, and I s
aid, ‘In that case I’m a Muslim!’
Mama Aida put her hand to her breast and said, ‘Perish the thought. My daughter and I are Catholics.’ She roared with laughter and pointed at me threateningly. ‘Go back to your father’s country, and marry your grandmother if you want,’ she said.
That day I was upset that there was something to prevent me marrying Merla. I was in love with her and very jealous, but all those were childish dreams that soon faded. It came back years later in a different form, in dreams that were different from the dreams of childhood.
Merla, her boldness, her rebelliousness, her crazy talk, hanging out on the streets of Manila – the mestiza girl and the Arab boy, drinking iced tea in front of the juice stands on the pavement, visiting Fort Santiago, the old Spanish citadel, our trips up the mountains and down the valleys and into the Biak-no-Bato caves, sitting by the lake with a view of the famous Taal volcano and watching the boats with fishermen seared by the sun.
On those trips, we had fun for free, as Merla put it. We only spent a minimal amount on transport and sometimes, but rarely, some of the places charged a fee to enter a world that seemed infinite. Everything except the train or the bus or the Jeepny and the entrance charge, if there was one, was free. No one tries to charge for the hours you spend looking at the volcano. No one tells you your time is up when you’re sitting under a giant tree that has grown out of the heart of a massive boulder. No one tells you not to float on the surface of the lake, looking up at the clouds and counting them. There’s nothing to stop you reaching out and picking a delicious fruit, and sharing it with the one you love.
‘Have you noticed? Nature gives us happiness for free,’ Merla said.
‘But we bought tickets to go in,’ I said, stuffing my hand into the pocket of my shorts and taking out two pieces of yellow paper. ‘Do you think they have the right to make us pay?’ I asked.
The Bamboo Stalk Page 7