by Noël Alumit
“I just came from Manila.”
“Maybe she went into the mountains. Baguio City, someplace like that. Talk to Rosario. She owns the hair salon down the street,” he said, pointing me down a dirt road. I saw no sign of a hair salon.
“How far down do I have to walk before I see the hair salon?”
“Only a few hundred feet,” Mr. Gumboa said waving me toward a little hut made of corrugated metal. I walked closer and saw a small sign that said Rosario Lope’s Hair Extravaganza painted in red. The inside was dim with one light bulb. The dirt floor was covered with thick cardboard; a cheap oriental rug was thrown over it.
“Yeeeees?” a chirpy voice came from nowhere.
“I’m looking for Rosario.”
“That is me. The one and only.” She looked at me and smiled, garish orange lipstick tainted her teeth.
She came up real close, and said, “What can I do for you, handsome?”
“I’m looking for someone. Cessy Luwad.”
“What would a young thing like you be doing looking for her?”
“She’s my mother.”
Rosario’s head jerked. “That can’t be,” she said. “Cessy’s boy is in the States.”
“I was. Do you know where she is?”
“She’s gone. She lived here for about a year. She slept in the back. But she’s probably in Baguio City looking for some rich woman’s house to clean. She used to help out, but I had to let her go. I couldn’t pay her anymore. I think she was ready to leave. She’d leave for long periods of time, come back. I couldn’t use her.”
She showed me the room where Mama stayed. It was in the back of the salon, a drafty and dark room, smelling of mildew. A rusty bed in a corner.
“I sleep here now,” said Rosario. “Not a lot of people can afford to have their hair done around here.”
I went back to the bus depot and took the next bus to Baguio City.
The bus ride was an uncomfortable one, jammed with tourists from Manila and Japan and Hong Kong. The journey up the mountain was slow and careful. Narrow, winding roads up the mountain were handled with great caution. A jeepney whizzed by in the opposite direction with children on its roof.
I looked out my bus window at rice fields and acres of green trees. Caribou lazily strolled through fields. The sky was a baby blue with patches of sugar white clouds. I saw a waterfall cascading down a hill and pink flowers in the golden dirt.
And the children, such beautiful children. The bus passed kids doing chores or walking home from school. Their copper skin glistened and their white-white teeth shone. They wore bright T-shirts—yellow, red, green.
I got off the bus in Baguio. The city had changed from when I was a boy. Buildings stood in places that used to be open lots. The humidity of the town was certainly different from Manila. Cool and misty. It felt like Los Angeles on a spring morning, a great escape from the horrible heat down below.
A taxi driver offered to take me to a nearby hotel. I threw my small bags into the passenger seat and took off to a hotel on the south end of Baguio. Baguio houses rested on the side of the mountain. They reminded me of Silverlake or Los Feliz.
My hotel room was pleasantly furnished. Beige paint covered the walls. I had a small window looking over trees. I didn’t remember the hotel being here when I was a kid. Then again, a lot had changed. I lay down on my bed before continuing my search for my mother.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Ghosts Begging to Be Set Free
I’d spent five days searching the province, going in and out of the city to the nearby countryside. Going everywhere to find Mama. With not much to go on, I scoured the city showing the photo of my mother to almost everyone I encountered: men who drove taxis, waiters and waitresses at the restaurants I’d eaten in, kids playing in the park, strangers waiting for the bus, professors and students at the university, tellers at the bank, security guards at buildings, shoppers in the mall, anyone who crossed my path had the photo shoved in their face. People avoided me, thinking I was a crazy person.
Where would she go? I kept asking myself. Where?
I walked the streets, dazed and dejected, wondering why I did this? Why did I want to find her? To know why she never came.
I fell to the pavement burying my head into my arms, because I knew the answers. My mother attached me to this world. She was my connection—then all of a sudden, that connection was severed. I was left drifting, living my life as an extra, just an extra. What did Amada say about extras? They’re nobodies, people who hang around while the real action takes place in front of them.
To prove that I existed, I blotched books. Always on the same page. Page 168: the month and year of my birth. Leaving a mark somewhere that I had existed. Whoever picked up the book after me may not notice the dot, but I knew it was there. In their face, in their life somehow. I wasn’t a nothing.
Where was she? Where was she?
I bruised and scarred myself, hating the fact that I was in America, while my parents suffered in the Philippines. I hated that I was healthy, my skin unblemished, knowing, feeling my parents were being hurt, mutilated. I got away. God damn it, I got away.
Amada said I had to correct a mistake. Hurting myself was my way of correcting things that went awry. My life in the U.S. was a mistake. I was supposed to have the same fate as my father or mother: imprisonment, torture. Instead I got away, I was saved. I had the wealth of America on my back, and it felt like an enormous burden.
In the distance, far away, I heard a noise, a bell, a church bell. I stirred. A church! The only place I hadn’t checked. My mother believed in God, she must have gone to church. Surely someone there would have recognized her.
A large pink church sat on a hill. I got to my feet. I tried the front doors. They swung open easily. A man polished candlesticks by the altar.
“Excuse me. Could you help me?”
“Yes, my son.”
“I’m looking for someone. I’m looking for this woman.” I showed him the photo.
“No, I’m sorry. She don’t look familiar.”
I stared at my feet, wondering what to do. I looked up and saw a painting of the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus as he lay dead beneath the cross.
“I love that painting,” the man said. “When Easter comes, the parishioners place flowers and candles around it. A shrine, so to speak. It’s remarkable how we Filipinos celebrate Easter. Almost fanatical about it. Wouldn’t you say?
“When I was a child,” the man said, “we weren’t allowed to have any candy, listen to the radio, watch TV for forty days. The entire time of Lent. We showed how earnest we were by sacrifice.”
There was a rattling sound as a cleaning woman came out with a bucket and mop to clean the wooden floors beneath the altar.
The man dusted the gold frame of the pietà with a rag in his hand. “This painting was the first thing I noticed when I took over this parish a year ago.”
“A year ago?” I said. Perhaps there was someone else here who remembered my parents. “Who was the priest before you? Is he still here?”
“That would have been Father Wandag. He was transferred to Cebu.”
“Is there any way I can get in touch with him. It’s urgent.”
“Sure. But Father Wandag was transferred because he was getting old. Senile. Couldn’t remember his name if you asked him.”
I heard the cleaning woman spraying air freshener.
“Nuns? Anyone who may have been here long enough to know the woman in the photo?”
“Maybe, but we see a lot of people. On Sunday, we have several masses, one after another, and they’re all full.”
I decided it was pointless. It looked like I was destined not to know what happened to Mama, left wondering what happened to her, feeling very much like I did when I was nine. I walked to the far end of the church, ready to leave. Then I sent Montgomery Clift a psychic message, Why did I do this, Monty? Why did I come all this way? For nothing.
“Father,” the clea
ning woman said, “is there anything you’d like me to do before I leave?”
“Yes, there is,” the priest said.
I folded Mama’s photo and put it into my wallet.
“There is a small mess that needs to be cleaned up. I need you to tend to it,” he said in a tone not of employee to servant but dear friend to another dear friend.
“Of course,” the woman said charmingly.
I opened the door to the church, planning my way back to Manila, back to the United States.
“Isn’t it amazing how much upkeep a church needs, Yuna.”
“Amazing,” the woman replied.
I turned slowly. Yuna? Did the priest say Yuna?
I watched them blow candles out. I watched the cleaning woman delicately wipe the glass encasing the candles. I approached them. The closer I got, the clearer her face became. Her hair was shorter, she was a little more frail, but it was undoubtedly her.
“Auntie Yuna?” I whispered.
The woman lifted her face, her eyes meeting mine. Fright filled her face, then, as quickly, relief. The crash of breaking glass echoed in the solemn church as the candle she held in her hands fell to the floor. She backed away from me, fainting.
The priest caught her and led her to a pew. I grabbed her other arm and we gently sat her down.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll be all right.” She fanned herself with her hands, taking deep breaths. She pressed her hand to my face, her palm flat against my cheek. She put her head into my chest, and wept. Was this the woman who used to torment me as a child?
She asked the priest if she could go. He said yes. We worked our way to a main street. She hailed a taxi, got inside.
“I was deported,” she said. “One night I got drunk and got lost. The police found me wandering the streets. They decided to check if I was legal. I wasn’t. So they deported me, right away.” That explained why Auntie Yuna never came home. She was taken away. “I found myself back in Manila. I worked in bars again. I got tired of that. Or they got tired of me. I wasn’t pretty like before. I had nowhere to go except here. I was a waitress for a while. I was a clerk at the university. I finally got this job at the church.”
The cab stopped in front of a small apartment building, rancid with the smell of rotten food. She led me up a creaking stairway to her apartment. It was small, her bed, kitchen, and bathroom all in close proximity. Her window was open and the mildewed white curtains grappled with the wind, resembling ghosts begging to be set free.
“You look fine,” she said. “Have you found your mother?”
“No. How did you know that’s why I’m here?”
“Why else would you be here? You didn’t come to find me.”
When I was a kid, I hated her, wished her dead. All I felt was pity, pity for the woman she was, pity for the woman she became. I noticed her bed, a stained mattress on the floor. Little cockroaches crawled out of thin cracks in the wall.
She sat by her window, the ghost-curtains blowing around her. “I was bad to you,” she said. “I spent a lot of years being awful. This is what I get—a rundown apartment with nobody…except maybe you.”
I looked away.
“I want to say that I have a nephew. When I return to work next week, I want to tell people that my nephew visited. My nephew from the States visited me.
“I don’t want people to think I have nobody. It hurts me to know I have no one. It hurts even more when everyone else knows it too. Maybe we can write letters. Yes? Maybe you can send me a Christmas card, and I can show it to people. You can send cards on the holidays, cards from Los Angeles. I miss L.A., you know.
“Please, Bong, I have no one. Your mother doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“My mother?”
She lowered her head and said, “She’s here in Baguio City. She saw me working as a waitress in a restaurant. She made a big scene. She asked me where you were. I told her I was deported. I told her I didn’t know where they took you. I told her you were somewhere in the States. She beat me right in the restaurant, almost killed me. They put her away for being crazy. She almost killed me.”
“Where is she now?”
“She was let go from the hospital. She comes to church sometimes. Whenever I see her, I walk toward her, but she walks away. She won’t let me near her. I haven’t seen her in church for a while.”
“I have to go,” I said.
“Bong,” Auntie Yuna said, “may I tell people I have a nephew?” I nodded.
“Maybe we can write?” she said, and scribbled her address on a piece of paper.
“Maybe.”
•
I went to church on Sunday, walking through waves of heat. Women carried parasols and fans. We were burning, burning alive. They walked into church to escape the heat, only to find it became warmer inside, a suffocating warmth.
I watched parishioners come and go, hoping my mother would be among them. After a while, all the women looked the same. I was bleary-eyed, thinking the next woman might be the one.
I had it planned out. Once I spotted her, I would follow her. She wouldn’t notice me. I would sit next to her on a pew, and watch her pray or do whatever it is women do in churches. We would kneel together, kindred strangers. She would only know me as the-man-beside-her, but she would know there was more to me. Finally, when Mass ended, we would exit the church and in the afternoon light, she would recognize me, and tell me she missed me. Salvation.
But nothing. I waited through most of the masses and she did not come. Someone else did, though. Someone I had filed away long ago. Among the Filipinos, I spotted a woman who did not fit in. She appeared too self-assured, too arrogant. She stepped out of a limousine, shrouded in black, a veil falling across her face. In church, she did not appear solemn or humble. She was too dignified for that. As if God were an equal, not a figure to be worshipped. That kind of attitude could only belong to an American. It was Mrs. Baker. The woman who arranged my passage to the States, whose house my mother cleaned, to whom my mother ran for help. Mrs. Baker, the soldier’s wife.
When Mass ended, she walked to her car. A driver held the door open. I approached.
“Mrs. Baker?”
“Yes.”
I peered into her face. Her eyes had a milky film over them, but they were focused and sharp. She squinted and asked, “Do I know you, young man?”
“Yes, you do. I don’t expect you to remember me. I was only a kid when we saw each other last.”
“You have to be more specific than that. I knew a lot of kids. Were you that boy who used to steal apples from my tree? Shame on you, stealing like that.”
“No, Mrs. Baker, that wasn’t me. My name is Bob Luwad. You helped me get to America. Do you remember?”
She turned her head to the left, then to the right, her eyes probing me. “Cessy’s boy?”
“Yes.”
“Good lord…” She took my arm and led me into her car. “Let’s talk at my home. We can talk while we have tea, some fruit perhaps.”
Mrs. Baker’s home was much smaller than I remembered. In fact it appeared to be about the size of Mr. and Mrs. A’s home in Pasadena. A maid brought in slices of mango with a saucer of bagoong, shrimp paste.
“Ever since my husband died, I haven’t the opportunity to share my meals,” she said with a smile. Her smile emphasized the creases in her face. She removed the veil and streaks of gray ran through her hair. “Cessy’s boy. I had always wondered what happened to you. Cessy said you were doing well.”
“She hasn’t seen me in twenty years. How would she know that?”
“Don’t know. She told me you looked good, healthy and everything.”
Mrs. Baker was slower, a little more settled. She wasn’t the glamorous party hostess I remembered her to be. She had come to a point in her life, it seemed, where nothing was a big deal, nothing excited her.
“Mrs. Baker, how would she know about me?”
“She seemed to know that you’re
doing well. Like she’d seen you in the flesh. She said sending you to the States was the best thing she’d done.”
There was no way my mother could have seen me. I figured Mrs. Baker was a bit senile.
“Did you know she was imprisoned?” I said, trying to approach the topic of my mother from another angle.
“Awful. Awful that happened to her. I had it all arranged. She would send you to the States first. Then she and her husband would follow. I had it all set. But she never came back. I waited weeks. I had my husband try to find your parents, but the Filipino government said they had no knowledge of them. Lying bastards. I tried to pull strings, but nothing.
“I wrote letters to every Filipino official I knew, used U.S. military stationery. I got a letter back telling me it wasn’t diplomatic to meddle in another country’s affairs. Some nonsense about Americans being the visitors in this country.
“Then my husband fell sick. I was crushed when he died. With his death, I lost any political muscle I had. All I could do was pray your mother was okay, pray that you were okay.
“Around six, maybe seven years ago, she showed up on my doorstep. She was looking for work. Couldn’t give her a job. My driver takes care of me, does all the things needing to be done around here.
“She stayed here a while, though, till she got back on her feet. She found a job. I don’t know where. She stops by every once in a while, drops off cookies or fruit for me. She tells me you’re doing fine.”
I looked around the house. I didn’t know what I’d see— maybe an imprint, some lingering shadow of her. “How do I find her? Where would my mother go?”
“I don’t know where she works. But I know she goes to the marketplace on Tuesdays. I think she told me she shops for her boss there at least once a week.”
“What marketplace?”
“The one near La Trinidad, past the Chinese Temple.”
“Tuesdays, huh?”
“Pretty sure of it.”
I thanked her, went to my hotel room. I wanted to sleep. I wanted the day over with. I wanted to get closer to Tuesday.