This myth no longer frightened me, even when Mendoza kept saying, within earshot of me, that he wished I would grow a thousand eyes. But even so, ever since I heard the legend, I haven’t been able to eat pineapple.
Something inside me tells me a pineapple was once a person, Pinya the little Filipina girl.
20
In 2004 Maria appeared in our lives. She was Merla’s closest friend, and now I had an explanation for the tattoo with which Merla had adorned, or disfigured, her silky arm: MM.
Maria was a weird girl. I had heard her name from Merla for some time but I had never seen her till then. When she started visiting us at home, no one in the family warmed to her. She visited often and spent plenty of time with Merla in her room. Mama Aida didn’t hide her feelings towards Maria: she received her with a frown, and this caused many problems between Mama Aida and Merla. Mama Aida warned Merla about Maria all the time and told her frankly that she wasn’t comfortable about her. There were repeated arguments. Merla did what she wanted. The day would end with Mama Aida crying in bed before going to sleep.
I didn’t have any hostile feelings towards Maria because of what Mama Aida thought. Despite her strange appearance – the little hairs that showed on her temples, her short hair, her loose clothes and her way of walking, which was inappropriate for a girl – the reason I didn’t take a liking to her was that she had imposed her will on my cousin.
Merla kept her distance from me and we had absolutely nothing in common any more. We no longer spent the evenings together in my room or went on trips to faraway places. Nothing that made my relationship with Merla special was left after Maria got hold of her. Merla wasn’t even satisfied with the time she spent with her weird friend outside or at home; she installed a phone line in her room so they could chat all night.
Although I was attached to Mama Aida and loved her, and she looked after me, our house was no longer what it had been once Merla started staying out till the early hours. She chatted with Maria on the phone, woke up late and spent the rest of the day outside with her friend.
Every day, when I was working with Grandfather, I would see Merla heading to the sandy lane at the end of Mendoza’s land, jumping on the back of Maria’s motorcycle and wrapping her arms around Maria’s waist. Then they would set off for an unknown destination.
In my dreams Merla was mine, but in real life she was Maria’s.
But I couldn’t get Merla out of my heart. Religion didn’t stop me wanting to have her and her preference for her own gender didn’t stop me thinking about her in my sleep and in my daydreams.
* * *
One time that year I woke up in the middle of the night. Mama Aida was shouting and pounding on one of the doors upstairs. I was still in bed.
‘Keep quiet! Keep quiet, you whores!’ Mendoza shouted through his window nearby. ‘Get up, you son of a whore, and go and see what’s happening upstairs,’ he added, speaking to me.
‘You get up and go see, if you dare,’ I muttered to myself.
On the upper floor Mama Aida was kicking the door of Merla’s room and pounding on it with her fists like a madwoman.
‘What’s happening, Mama?’ I asked, pushing her back from the door.
‘Can’t you smell it? That girl is crazy,’ she said.
I could smell cigarette smoke from Merla’s room.
‘What’s new about that, Mama? You know Merla smokes,’ I said.
She pushed me away and attacked the door again, pounding on it hysterically. ‘That’s not cigarettes,’ she said.
She kicked the door with her foot. ‘Open the door or else!’
‘Merla’s smoking marijuana,’ she added, turning to face me.
Mama Aida, so assertive upstairs, was weaker than I had ever seen her once we were in the sitting room downstairs.
As Maria started up her motorcycle, breaking the silence of the night outside, Mama Aida was sobbing inside. She took her daughter’s hands and kissed them.
‘Please, I beg you, don’t go,’ she said.
Merla looked away, towards the front door, and picked up her bag of clothes.
‘Merla, I beg you. Merla, don’t do it.’
Mama Aida locked the door and stood leaning back against it.
‘Get out of the way, Aida,’ Merla said. ‘Your begging won’t do any good.’
Mama Aida slumped to the ground, her energy spent, her back still against the door. ‘This isn’t the life I want for you, Merla, please.’ She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. ‘I want you to have a real life. A house, a husband and children.’
‘That’s enough!’ shouted Merla. ‘You said a husband and children!’
I cried because Mama Aida was crying, while Merla went out shouting: ‘After everything you’ve said about men you want me to have a husband and children!’ But suddenly Merla’s voice cracked. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘Look what’s happened to me! Where’s my father?’
She burst out crying and, trying to fight back her sobs, she continued, ‘Look at yourself. At your drunken father in his house. Look what’s happened to him. Look what’s happened to yourself.’
She pointed at me. ‘Look at him! Look at everyone here!’
Merla rushed to the door, grabbed the door handle and pulled on it with all her might.
‘No, no, Merla, I beg you,’ said Mama Aida, her face covered in tears and snot, as she pressed her back against the door to keep it closed, but as usual Merla proved to be stronger.
The sound of the motorcycle faded into the distance and disappeared.
PART 3
Isa . . . The First Wandering
‘To doubt God is to doubt one’s own conscience, and in consequence it would be to doubt everything.’
José Rizal
1
Now that Merla had left home, there was nothing left to persuade me to stay. If Mama Aida had been a reason to stay, she wasn’t any longer, especially when she went back to drinking and smoking after the fight with Merla.
I was sixteen. I left school. My mother was upset, but I had taken my decision. ‘I’m going to look for a job,’ I said.
When I took this decision I had only intended to break free of subjugation to Mendoza and the demands that had become intolerable after he fell ill. I was prepared to do the same kind of work that he gave me to do, provided it was somewhere else and provided I was paid for it. Once the things were gone that had me feel at peace on Mendoza’s plot of land – Aida’s good behaviour and Merla’s company – I no longer had any reason to stay. Mama Aida’s faith had made me feel that I wasn’t alone, and I had started to draw some peace of mind from her faith. When she abandoned her faith, I lost that sense, and my own weak faith was shaken. For the first time I felt I was alone and that I held my own fate in my hands. I was terrified when I realised that all I had to fall back on was my own resources.
My mother tried to dissuade me. She begged me. She warned me and threatened me. She sent Alberto to see me several times, but I had learned from Merla how to be stubborn and persistent. Only Uncle Pedro stood by me in my decision. He lent me some money and gave me a mobile phone. ‘Stay in touch,’ he said.
He arranged for me to meet a man he knew who sold bananas and said the man would help me. He put his hand on my head and said, ‘Listen, José. I don’t like to give advice, since I very much need it myself, but . . .’ He took his hand off my head and put it on my shoulder. ‘If you want to avoid problems at work, make sure you’re on good terms with your boss. If you want to avoid problems in life, make sure you’re on good terms with the Lord.’
* * *
My grandfather’s health had deteriorated by this time and he made many more demands. He raved more at night, whether he’d been drinking tuba or not. The daily massage sessions, which once took one hour, now took several hours. The shouting at night, which I couldn’t stand, had changed into monologues addressed to his dead wife. He started shouting names I’d never heard before and when I asked Mama Aida a
bout them, she said they were the names of people in our family who had died long before. Then he stopped the monologues and started shrieking frightening things like ‘Help! Help! He’s looking at me.’ I jumped out of bed, went to his house, and looked in the corner by the ceiling where he was looking, but there was nothing there. ‘Look at him, José,’ he said. ‘Can you see him? He’s pointing at me and telling me to go with him.’ He covered his face with his hands. ‘Help! Save me. I don’t want to go.’
‘There’s nothing, Grandfather. Nothing there,’ I said. I would have felt sorry for him if it wasn’t for my memories of how he had treated me.
With his hand over his face, he moved his fingers apart and peeked out between them. ‘Look at him! He’s there!’ he shrieked in terror.
I went over to the corner and waved my hands in the air. ‘There’s nothing there, Grandfather,’ I said.
‘Go closer, José. Go closer.’
At his insistence I went further into the corner. ‘Take him!’ he shouted, addressing no one. ‘Take him instead of me, please.’
My grandfather was as shameless in moments of weakness as he was in moments of strength.
I moved a small table up to the wall and stood on it, so that I could get my head right into the top corner of the room.
‘See, Grandfather. There’s nothing here,’ I said.
He pulled up the bed cover and hid under it. ‘Damn you!’ he sobbed. ‘I hope you grow a thousand eyes so you can see things clearly.’
I jumped off the table and went to the fruit basket in our kitchen. I picked up a pineapple and took it back to Grandfather’s house. He was still under the cover. I put the pineapple on the small table I’d been standing on and left, closing the door behind me.
* * *
I spent the whole day behind a cart selling bananas in Manila’s Chinatown. All I earned from my work was a commission on sales, which varied from day to day. But even on Saturdays and Sundays, the busiest days, it was hardly worth anything.
On the pavement opposite where I parked my cart, Cheng parked his cart, with the narrow street between us. Cheng was a Buddhist of Chinese origin, born in the year of the tiger, 4683 according to the Chinese calendar. He was eighteen at the time and worked for the same banana merchant. His commission was more than my commission and he sold twice as many bananas as me because of his experience in this work and because he knew so many customers. When I asked him if we could share a place to live, he asked me when I was born. I told him I was born on 3 April 1988. He closed his eyes, thought a while and counted on his fingers. ‘Year 4685, the year of the dragon,’ he said. ‘That’s excellent. We both have wood as our element.’ If I had been born in the year of the snake, the horse or the sheep, Cheng wouldn’t have let me share his room, because they have fire as their element, and wood and fire don’t go together, he said. Chinese astrology is complicated and Cheng didn’t trouble himself with the details. He just looked at the basic elements, such as earth, fire, water, wood and metal, and took his decision on that basis. It was the kind of madness that my Kuwaiti grandmother went in for when she decided whether things were good or bad omens, or so my mother had told me.
For a small amount, Cheng made space for me to share his little room on the second floor of an old building in a street close to Chinatown. The room had one window, which looked out on the Seng Guan Temple. When we spread our mattresses on the floor at night, there was only just room for a small fridge in which we kept our food in plastic containers. On my first night in his room I asked him why he had agreed to let me move in, given that the room was so small. ‘I need a voice to listen to, other than my own,’ he replied.
I pointed to behind the door, where there was a guzheng, or Chinese zither, leaning against the wall. ‘Isn’t the sound of your instrument enough?’ I asked.
He smiled and said, ‘I told you I need to hear a voice other than my own!’
Cheng had fixed shelves over the fridge and we put everything we owned on them: our clothes, towels, books, bars of soap, plastic noodle bowls, candles and small statues of the Buddha in various poses.
At night we lay on our mattresses, chatting in the dark until we fell asleep. One night, after I’d told Cheng where my father came from, he said, ‘Ah yes, Kuwait. I read that name in the list of goods for export in the office of the businessman where I used to work.’
He paused a while and then asked me where Kuwait was.
‘It’s close to Saudi Arabia,’ I said.
‘They don’t grow bananas there,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They import them from here.’
‘If you were a banana, maybe you could go to your father’s country,’ he added with a laugh.
What a choice I had – either a pineapple at Mendoza’s place or a banana exported to my father’s country.
2
When Cheng was asleep at night, I looked out at the Seng Guan Temple through the window of our room. It looked awesome, dark grey, with a tiled roof in the style of Chinese houses and with lots of decorative reliefs on the walls. There was a statue of a Chinese dragon and one of a bald old man with a smile on his face and a long beard. Above the arched doorway there was a plaque with an inscription in Chinese, and under that plaque, inside the arch, it said Seng Guan Temple in English. I loved the place and grew curious to find out what went on inside, but although I was curious I never thought of going into the temple.
Instead of visiting the temple, my curiosity led me to the shelves above Cheng’s fridge. I pulled out one of his books and from that night on I started reading by candlelight when he was asleep. I read the teachings of the Buddha, about his life and his disciples and how he sat in the lotus position under the fig tree, and the story of his enlightenment.
I found his personality fascinating. If I had stayed sitting under my favourite tree on Mendoza’s land, would I have become a Buddha, I wondered. Damn that relay tower.
Cheng noticed I was interested in his books, especially as I asked him many questions about his religion and the rituals. After that he started telling me about the Buddha every night and in return he would ask me about Jesus Christ. We compared them, noticed the similarities in how they were born and how they lived, their disciples and all the things that happened to them.
They were great men, I thought.
Would I be betraying one of them if I followed the teachings of the other?
Both of them advocate love and peace, tolerance, charity and treating other people well.
* * *
One day Cheng invited me to go to the temple with him. I hesitated at first, thinking it might not be allowed, but he assured me the temple let in Buddhists and non-Buddhists. ‘You’ll feel serene inside,’ he said.
Shortly before sunset, when we’d finished work, Cheng and I went to the temple. It was nothing like a church, but the feeling was the same.
‘Watch me, and do what I do,’ Cheng said, and when he realised I was confused, he added, ‘Or you can just sit there’, pointing to some red leather cushions on the ground. There were six rows of ten cushions side by side, each no more than a foot off the ground. I sat in the middle, on the fifth cushion in the fourth row. The light was low. In front of me there were three large glass enclosures with a life-sized golden statue of the Buddha in each one. In the middle enclosure the Buddha was standing upright surrounded by golden decoration in relief against a dark red background. In the other two enclosures the Buddha was sitting cross-legged.
Cheng and I were the only people in the temple. Cheng went up to the glass enclosure in the middle with his hands pressed together under his chin. He bowed his head and started to pray.
All my senses were on high alert. Many things can be discovered and experienced for free, as Merla said. I was impressed by everything: the incense smoke that hung in the air like a thick fog, the smell of jasmine flowers in all the corners. And the silence. Silence in itself can give rise to voices inside us that seem to be the voices of people that we feel we can trust.
The voices show us the way to unfamiliar places and we hurry off confidently.
Cheng finished praying. He walked over to a large bronze bowl, lit an incense stick and stuck it in the soft sand in the bowl.
Before Cheng prepared to leave, I went up to the glass enclosure, leaving the red cushion behind me. I stood in front of the statue with the tranquil face. I bowed and made the sign of the cross. When I looked up, I found the expression on the Buddha’s face was just as tranquil, with no disapproval of what I had done.
I went to the bronze bowl, lit an incense stick and planted it in the soft sand. Then Cheng and I left together.
* * *
In the evening, after we’d spread our mattresses on the floor, Cheng sat cross-legged on his mattress. He rubbed his hands together like a fly. ‘Could you pass me the guzheng, please?’ he asked.
I went to the corner behind the door, where he left his instrument propped up against the wall. I picked it up carefully with both hands as if it were a child. It looked magical. It was made of ivory inlaid with tortoise shell. The twenty-one strings were carefully tuned. I passed it to him. He put it on his legs, then took off his shirt.
‘Are you going to breastfeed it?’ I asked him. He laughed at my joke.
‘I’m used to playing naked. If you weren’t here,’ he said.
I burst out laughing. ‘OK, OK, that’s quite far enough,’ I added.
He fixed little rings on his fingertips, with prongs like claws on them, and looked serious. ‘Before you sit down, José, switch that light off and light those candles on top of the fridge,’ he said.
I switched the main light off and lit the candles. And then . . . but how can I convey here the sound that instrument made?
‘Jasmine Fragrance,’ said Cheng, referring to the piece he was about to play.
The fingers of his right hand strummed three strings at extraordinary speed, repeating the same chord, while the fingers of his other hand skipped from string to string, filling the room with magical music. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I felt my entire body respond to what I was hearing. I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. It was obvious that the instrument could make music. But how the strings produced the fragrance of jasmine, now that I can’t explain.
The Bamboo Stalk Page 9