by Mia Alvar
Dr. Delacruz patted my shoulder. “Annelise, your partner is a gentleman,” he said. “I might have to fight him for the title of Messiah of Monte Ramon.” He scraped some dirt from my left wheel with the tip of his shoe.
Dr. Delacruz helped us accomplish it. A few weeks later, the next time Annelise was banned from the creek, and girls at school said vicious things about her smell, Dr. Delacruz brought her up the hill to my house. “How many times will she send you to do her job for her?” my mother asked about the labandera, adding that she’d expect a discount for less experienced hands. Once we knew that my mother was occupied upstairs, Dr. Delacruz and I would take over the wash. We scrubbed and wrung, while Annelise finished her bath and then rested on the sofa with a hot water bottle, her face clenched against the pain. As soon as we heard my mother’s door open upstairs, we switched places with Annelise.
Around this time, so much of which I spent with the doctor in the labahan behind our house, an idle wish began. “Pass me that bleach, anak,” said Dr. Delacruz, and for the first time in my life I paused over the word. Adults called us anak or “son” or “my child” all the time, but Dr. Delacruz said it with such soft regard as to sound literal. I began to imagine him as my father, living in this house, or any house, with me, married to my mother. A pipe dream—or was it? Now that Annelise had introduced me to her radionovela, I saw exchanges between Dr. Delacruz and my mother in a new light. This was courtship, from another angle. In Pusong Sinugatan, Reyna ended up in the arms of the one suitor she’d tried the hardest to fight off. And Joe had been admired by every woman about town except the one he loved most, which only strengthened his resolve to win her. He waited patiently, persisted for as long as he had to. Likewise, perhaps the reason Dr. Delacruz never remarried all these years since his wife’s death was that he only wanted to marry my mother. My imagination, once ignited, went wild. If Dr. Delacruz married my mother, she’d have all the comfort and company she needed in him. All the men who passed me by in the sala without so much as a second look would step aside. Why else would Dr. Delacruz spend so much time with me, and in our house? Even granting how many people in Monte Ramon he cared for, why should my life, and my mother’s, be of such special concern to him?
—
The fiesta was approaching. Church bells rang and cannons fired throughout our school days now, rousing us in the morning and distracting us from classroom lectures. Both were being fine-tuned for the ceremonies.
Annelise decided that she and I would bring our petitions to the Virgin early. During fiesta month, she reasoned, the Virgin fielded so many requests for love or health or babies or luck that we ought to lay our concerns at her feet before the others overwhelmed her. We set out with votive candles, a box of matches, and bananas from a tree outside my mother’s house.
They kept the four-hundred-year-old statue behind glass in the church, but a plaster replica of her stood on a roofed pedestal outside. The Virgin’s nose was fine and strong, her mouth tiny, her eyes bold. Annelise lay her palm on the Virgin’s robe, which was brocaded with gold paint.
She had a theory about praying. “You must be specific,” Annelise told me. “Vague prayers end badly. There was a man who traveled up here from Manila and asked the Virgin for money. No specifics, just money. On his way home children threw worthless coins at him. They thought he was a beggar in his raggedy clothes. Well, he prayed for money, and he got it! The Virgin needs specifics.” She set her votive down before the statue.
I lit my own candle, and then a prayer came to me as easily as the tune of a familiar song. I prayed for Dr. Delacruz to become my father. I prayed that he would win my mother’s heart at last, with all the gifts and dishes he brought us and the amount of time and care he lavished on me. I prayed that she would come around, as Reyna had with Joe in Pusong Sinugatan, to the one suitor she had overlooked. I asked the Virgin for a soap-operatic surprise that would change my life. Was this specific enough? Annelise was crossing herself already; I had no time to revise. We ate two of the bananas and placed the rest beside the candles. We looked up at the Virgin’s face as if to read her answer, but her weathered plaster expression remained still.
—
Finally the day of the fiesta came. Bright streamers laced the avenues, which filled with tourists escaping the Manila heat, as well as pilgrims from beyond the capital. On the day of the parade, my classmates and I went to Safety to fetch our partners. Annelise had tucked sprigs of baby’s breath into her thick hair and wore a light blue dress—left behind at the convent, she said, by a Safety alumna. As we headed from the campus to the church, Annelise smelled powdery and immaculate. She seemed well. I could not help but think that some specific prayer of hers had been answered.
Six townsmen, Dr. Delacruz among them, took the Virgin down from her glass case in the church and perched her on a wooden boat. The real Virgin was both darker and brighter than the plaster decoy to whom Annelise and I had prayed. Wood grain striped her varnished cheeks, and the jewels in her robe were real. Garlands of sampaguita dangled from the boat’s rim. Parishioners loaded the hull with offerings of mangoes, bananas, pineapples, and coconuts. As they brought the Virgin of Monte Ramon into the streets, her crown trapped and seemed to magnify the sunlight. A throng of pilgrims followed close behind, holding candles. The flame-specked worshipers appeared from far away like a train extending the Virgin’s gown.
Behind the pilgrims glided the elaborate float of Miss Monte Ramon and her ladies-in-waiting. College boys in stiff white barongs escorted these reigning beauty queens of our town. The speakers on their float warbled a folk song in praise of the sampaguita flower. Our group marched behind, boys on the left, girls on the right. The pace of a parade suited me. I wasn’t struggling to catch up with anyone, and the spectators seemed too deep in the pageant queens’ thrall to stare at me or point fingers. Behind us, the elementary school children sang about the wonders of Monte Ramon, from its hills to its Virgin to its local sweets.
After the parade, Annelise and I bought suman and unraveled its leaves to bite into the sweet, sticky rice packed inside. We vowed to taste everything along Monte Ramon’s main street. Halfway through our mission, Annelise complained of an upset stomach. We laughed at our foolishness and called ourselves takaw mata, more greed in the eyes than room in the belly. We made our way down the littered street, feeling full.
Then Annelise said she had to sit down. As I looked for the nearest bench, she held her middle and doubled over in the street. Her eyes grew listless. I could only catch her wrist as she fell.
“Help,” I called. Some passersby rushed over. What happened? they were asking, but I didn’t have an answer. “That’s Annelise, my neighbor,” a voice behind us said. “Her faulty machinery does that to her.” A crowd gathered as Annelise whimpered on the pavement. Help came in the form of the wooden boat that had just carried the Virgin back from the mountains into town. Dr. Delacruz set Annelise down on this makeshift stretcher, and she curled her body to fit inside. The marchers brought her to the town hospital. By the time she reached the emergency room, the skirts of her borrowed dress were soaked in blood.
—
Two days later I was allowed to see her in the recovery ward. I had my radio with me. Annelise sat upright on her bed, sipping from a can of pineapple nectar. A bag dripped fluid through a plastic tube into her arm.
“They made bunot of me,” she said, sweeping a hand over her body.
Bunot was coconut husk stripped of its inner meat, dried out and used to polish floors.
“I had the wrong cells growing in the wrong places. So they took out all my equipment. It would’ve been of no use to me anyway.”
A vision of a ram’s head hovered at the edge of my sight.
“Would you like to see it?” she said. “My crown of thorns?” She folded down the bedsheet and gathered up the hem of her hospital gown, exposing a swatch of gauzed flesh below her navel. Peeled aside, the bandage revealed a length of dark, scab-colored s
utures, crisscrossed like barbed wire. The shadow of raised pink skin around them looked to be weeping.
My head did not know what my hand was up to. I watched, separate, as my fingers rose and reached out—for what? To point, or touch her scar, like a doubting Thomas? But Annelise reached out her own hand and caught mine.
“Show me yours,” she said. I’d never heard her whisper until then, or known her voice to tremble. Still, her grip was tight. I knew what she had asked to see, without her having to explain: my wound, my absence, the feature no one but my mother and Dr. Delacruz had seen. I could not show her without undressing. It terrified me, but I placed my other hand on my belt buckle. Annelise stared without blinking as I showed her first my right side, then my left. My head grew light; there was a drained feeling at my chest, as if my heart had stopped beating. I could still see her scar and was imagining the feel of knives and needles on my own flesh, and wondered if this—the cold sweat above my lip, the difficulty breathing—was how Annelise had felt in the street after the parade.
Then, instantly, we seemed to remember who we were, and to be ashamed. Annelise replaced the bandage and the sheet. While I got back into my trousers she switched on the transistor radio, finding Pusong Sinugatan. Ignacio, one of Joe’s unscrupulous rivals for Reyna’s affections, had exposed the priest who had married Joe and Reyna as a fake and was therefore trying once again to win Reyna back from her American love. In the meantime, General MacArthur had begun his humiliating retreat from Corregidor and out of the country. Joe despaired of ever seeing his sweetheart again. Then the station interrupted the episode for a weather advisory. The rainy season would arrive any day now. In other news, the Pope would soon induct Jaime Sin, the Archbishop of Manila, into the College of Cardinals. “Cardinal Sin!” laughed the announcer. Annelise fell asleep, and I was sitting a safe distance away from her at sundown, when Dr. Delacruz came into the room. “It’s late, anak,” he said to me. “Let’s get you home to your mother.”
—
Dr. Delacruz and I rode in a silence that felt tender and familiar, fetching food from his own kitchen along the way. “Your friend will be much better now, anak,” he said. “She’s suffered for three years, and now she won’t suffer anymore.” He paused. “Not unless she decides she wants children.” At our gate he unloaded the wheelchair from his trunk. With care and confidence, he lifted me from the passenger seat and set me down in my chair. It took me a moment to unclasp my arms from his neck.
The doctor handed me a plastic bag with a Tupperware container inside, still refrigerator-cold. He carried my books in one arm and pushed my chair with the other, using my keys to unlock the garden gate and front door.
My mother had just come downstairs from a bath, her hair wrapped in a towel. She looked weary, the lines and hollows of her face sharper than usual. I remembered then that she could become grumpy and delicate around holidays and festivals—times of year that even her most devoted guests spent with their wives and children.
She turned and stared at the doctor, without greeting.
“Danny and I just got back from the hospital,” he said. He pointed to the dish in my lap. “We brought you some dinuguan.”
The dish was a fiesta tradition: a stew of pig innards cooked in pig’s blood that followed the roasting of lechon. “Thank you,” said my mother, “for thinking of the help. They’ll eat this when they’re working late.”
Dr. Delacruz looked down at the floor.
“As for Danny and I,” she continued, as I knew she would, “we’ve got these sensitive American taste buds—no dinuguan for us.”
I felt sure that he knew the truth, but was too gallant to expose my mother. She stepped aside—a cue for me to wheel toward the kitchen and refrigerate our dinner.
After Dr. Delacruz and the last of the servants had gone, I reheated the dinuguan on our stove. I was hungrier than I had realized, and the mud-colored gravy sated me as no meal had for some time. It seemed my mother hadn’t eaten all day, either. In her haste a splash of dinuguan landed on her robe. She barely paused between the mouthfuls to wipe it off, her napkin leaving a dark smear. I saw my mother in a sad new light. She looked as much like a child as she’d sounded, earlier, pretending for Dr. Delacruz’s sake that dinuguan offended our American palates. By this time I was so certain our lives were about to change that the house seemed already occupied with other people, watching as we slurped dark innards from my mother’s fading china and sharing in this ritual that had once been our secret.
—
The rains began gently enough that I could still visit Annelise after school each day. In the hospital, the week she remained under observation, we passed the late afternoons reading or listening to the radio. I finally confessed to her my hopes regarding Dr. Delacruz and my mother, and we laughed, imagining how Ruben Delacruz would suffer, then learn to tolerate me as a brother. We daydreamed about Dr. Delacruz’s big house, which had room enough to board the servants, meaning Annelise could live under the same roof, and move out of the ravine with her mother and her little brother.
Each time Dr. Delacruz spoke to me or brought me home, my sense of imminence grew. I found myself recalling all the moments he had entered our house or tended to me when I was ill, finding signs I might have been too young to recognize before. Had he always said “anak” to me, and always with such tenderness? One evening after I’d visited Annelise, Dr. Delacruz took me home as usual, and we found my mother in a miserable state. She was sitting on the floor in our sala. The gardener and the maid were standing over her, surrounded by some things dragged from her room: a mahogany trunk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a mirrored vanity tray cluttered with brushes and bottles. Her shiny robe had loosened, revealing a swath of pale freckled skin at her chest.
“What do you mean, you cannot take it? This is French perfume, very expensive,” my mother was telling the maid. Payday had arrived, it seemed, and my mother once again lacked cash to give the servants outright. The maid, a girl so young she still wore her hair in two braids, looked at her feet, but kept her hands clasped behind her back, resolved not to accept my mother’s half-empty bottle. The gardener held an ivory nesting doll in one hand but seemed to be waiting, however meekly, for more.
Dr. Delacruz approached them from behind my chair.
“Where have you been?” my mother demanded—whether of me or of Dr. Delacruz I wasn’t sure. The doctor whispered to the servants, handing each of them a sheaf of peso notes from his pocket. After the gardener set the doll gently upon our coffee table, both servants hurried past me and out of the house.
In my concern for Annelise I had forgotten how lonely and fragile my mother could become during fiesta season. “I was visiting my friend,” I said, “at the hospital.”
“The labandera’s daughter?” My mother laughed. “The squatter child with the ‘feminine problems’? You be careful of squatters, anak. People from the ravine see a boy with a big house, a nice garden, and—”
“That’s enough,” interrupted Dr. Delacruz. “Danny has been a great friend to Annelise.”
“And so have you!” she replied. “Another outcast only the Messiah of Monte Ramon could love! You think I don’t know how you’ve been encouraging my son, bringing her here to use our water and foul up our house? I can smell her from upstairs!”
Despite my shame at getting caught, I thought of Reyna and Joe again, the turning point in Pusong Sinugatan when they were on the verge of love but didn’t know it yet. They too had shouted at each other, seemed ready to come to blows, just moments before their first kiss.
“Look at this house.” My mother pointed to the ceiling. A leak from her upstairs bathtub had made a growing stain in the plaster, damp and beginning to smell like mold. “My phone’s been cut off, too. But I suppose I have to be a labandera’s daughter to expect help!”
“Was he a phantom that just paid your servants?” said Dr. Delacruz. “I’ve been getting your son home every day. I’ve brought you food—”
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“Oh, the servants’ dinuguan has nothing to do with this!”
“The servants!” Dr. Delacruz laughed. “That’s right, it’s the servants who eat the dinuguan. Because your ‘delicate American stomach’ can’t handle native grub. You know, it’s all this make-believe that’s the problem. It’s not the house that needs fixing.”
My mother huffed air out of her mouth, dismissing him.
“Anak,” said the doctor, kneeling suddenly to address me, “I’ve always wanted to help you. There are prosthetics we could try, or better chairs. But your mother says no to all that.”
“Because this chair is an heirloom,” said my mother, “and Danny is proud of his grandfather.”
Dr. Delacruz ignored her. “Anak, your mother was sick in the mornings while she was expecting you. So sick she came to me for help.”
My mother’s eyes grew wide.
There was a German pill, said Dr. Delacruz, which women in both Europe and America had taken for my mother’s symptoms. “It calmed their nausea and helped them sleep.”
I was confused. Their union was taking a long time and veering in a direction I hadn’t foreseen. I scrambled to reword my prayers to the Virgin, to be more specific, to make sure she understood my exact fantasy. But it was difficult to pray—or hear my thoughts at all, for that matter—in our living room that evening. The skin of my mother’s face seemed to have tightened to the bone, and turned nearly as white.
By the time she was expecting me, Dr. Delacruz continued, Westerners had lost interest in the miracle pill. Large shipments were made to pharmacies in Manila when it would no longer sell in Europe and America. My mother, in her suffering, begged Dr. Delacruz for a prescription. That was all she needed; with it, her American father could obtain any Western drug she wanted, even ones not readily available in Monte Ramon.