She reaches out and touches them.
“He found them,” Saenz tells her quietly, sadly. “It made him angry.”
“He couldn’t have,” she protests, confirming his theory without even realizing it. “How could he … Oh, God.” There it is, the horror of it, coming to her now in all its unforgiving clarity. “I called him. She told me not to, but I thought it would … calm him down.”
“And you told him where you were staying,” the priest says.
Evangeline de Vera, breaking Libby’s rules. “Oh, God. Was it because of me? Was it my fault?”
The two men don’t answer. To Evangeline, that’s answer enough.
Libby always makes it a point to lock herself away on New Year’s Eve, because she can’t stand the noise and the smoke. It’s easier to do it in the Lagro house, up on a hill, and even though the neighbors will be setting off fireworks and drinking and generally making fools of themselves, their homes are far enough apart that she doesn’t really have to suffer through any of it. She plans her own private celebration with a tub of Magnolia ice cream in the fridge and a few action films on DVD.
She is about to lock the gate when the car drives up. As the man steps out, she immediately knows who he is and why he is here.
Libby knows that it isn’t wise to engage him; he’s calm now but she senses his anger, it’s coming off him in waves. Quickly she estimates how long it’s been since Evangeline’s plane took off. Twelve hours, that’s enough time if she follows instructions.
But she hasn’t, which is why he’s here. And Libby thinks she might be able to buy Evangeline a little more time, so she shakes his hand, invites him in for coffee and some of those rosquillos that a colleague at the bank brought her from Cebu.
Before they go into the house, she steals a look at the night sky. Between the New Year’s Eve fireworks and the smoke now hanging heavy over the city, she can’t see a single star.
The police have learned that Hann Hyun-jun fled the country less than a week after Libby Delgado’s murder. They’ve matched samples of his hair and fingerprints from the condo unit he’d shared with Evangeline to the samples found in Libby’s house. But there’s little that can be done other than to get Interpol to put out a red notice for him and wait. He has money, though, and he could go anywhere. Rueda tells Saenz there’s no way to predict how soon, or if, he will ever be found.
The priest continues to reconstruct Libby Delgado out of Evangeline de Vera’s recollections, out of the connections that are now emerging from their association. They web out into the lives of other women—Fanny Jamora, Astrid Samaniego, Lisa Marie Borja … The list spans eight years, five cities, thirteen lives—nineteen if he counts the children. She took it all on herself, led by some impulse that even now eludes him.
She’s left him with little to go on, and there’s no family history to be found anywhere in the silent house on Caridad Street. But Saenz is patient, he wants to know—to understand her life and the magnitude of what she’s done.
Professor Atienza meets him at the Starbucks café at the huge new SM Fairview mall along Quirino Avenue. She insists on buying him coffee (his usual double-shot espresso, not helping the insomnia) and chooses for herself the sweetest, richest concoction on the menu, three hundred tablespoons of sugar and a half-pound of whipped cream. “Life is short,” she declares. She giggles like a schoolgirl, guilty and defiant at the same time.
It’s different when they’re settled at a table; they sit in silence for several minutes, as if bracing themselves for what’s to come. “You knew, didn’t you?” he finally asks. “When you came to my office. You knew who was staying at the pension house in GenSan.”
Tears well up in her eyes, and she fiercely blinks them away.
“I didn’t know who. But I knew why.”
Saenz leans forward, his pale, fine-boned hands clasped together between his knees. In his mind, Libby’s eyes slowly lose their anger, her face relaxing into the easy, barely-there smile in the photographs that are not on his mobile phone.
“Tell me,” he says.
THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE
BY
JOSE DALISAY
Diliman
Somebody died in this car I’m driving. That’s why I got it so cheap. I mean, new Ford Escapes don’t go for less than a million pesos, and even discounting a few years’ use— five years, to be exact, and fifty-two thousand kilometers on the odometer—I’d have valued this 4x2 XLS at around 530,000, maybe even a bit more in those used-car lots that have sprung up everywhere around Metro Manila, near the malls to catch the dads’ eyes while the moms shop. But 365,000? That’s a steal. That’s robbery. Unless you figure all the scrubbing it took to get the blood off the upholstery in the back, right behind me where the professor’s head would have been, the blood bubbling out of his mouth and his nostrils and who knows what other cavities. His wife’s lap would have caught some if not most of the blood, but I could just imagine that head, that whole upper frame of his, jerking up and down like some broken insect, spewing blood and mucus all over the car seat. Of course I didn’t really see any blood when I looked—not that I looked too closely—because the seats sported new beige velour covers when I got the car, and I couldn’t smell anything either because the wife—Lalaine, that’s her name, I keep calling her Mrs. Sanvictores, or Ma’am Lalaine, never just “Lalaine” to her face or in the professor’s presence— had sprayed a canful of acrid-sweet lemon air-freshener into the interior.
How did I learn about the way the professor died? From Lalaine, of course, she was there, cradling his bony head on her ample lap where he might have, would have, lain the same birdlike head—I remember how, when he nodded in class, it almost seemed like he was pecking, the way his nose would dip forward and then pull back—some other time, any other time. Heck, I’ll admit, I would have too with half a chance, and given how I’d sometimes steal a glance at that lap—and, oh, at other parts of Mrs. Sanvictores, or Lalaine. It wasn’t my fault; it was the professor himself who invited me into his house, their house, to discuss his research on the origins of the coffee industry on Sibutu Island—and I didn’t even know he had a wife, or a young wife to be exact, a hot young wife who must have been thirty years his junior, and maybe just ten years older than I was, if even that much.
The second I met Lalaine, as she bent over to hand me a glass of pineapple juice and all kinds of good things began to spill out of the front of her low-cut blouse, I nearly fainted from the sight and the whiff of Shalimar or whatever they name those perfumes that remind you of rustling silk and moonlight. The truth is, she wasn’t what you would call particularly pretty—her cheekbones seemed set a bit too high and the sides of her face tapered down so sharply into her nubbin of a chin that you could’ve said she looked like a caricature, especially with those full wide lips. She was a walking, bobbing exaggeration of a woman, or womanhood itself, that’s what I always thought. Her skin was so white and creamy that the large brown mole that sat on the hump of her left breast looked even larger and browner than it probably was.
“You didn’t even ask if he wanted Coke instead of pineapple juice,” the professor chided his wife as she bent at the knees, with the practiced dip of a professional dancer, to serve my drink.
“This is better for his health,” she retorted in a Tagalog that resonated with provincial charm, making me imagine tender papayas, broiling squid, and potent rum, or whatever they drink down there, south of Tablas Strait.
“It’s all right, I prefer juice.” I practically grabbed the drink from her hand. When my fingers grazed hers I felt like I had been scorched, like the juice would vaporize.
Indeed, it seemed like a fine mist had crept into the afternoon, and as we sat there in the professor’s garden, with him droning on about Leandro de Veana’s report to the Crown about exploiting the colony’s natural resources, I watched Lalaine’s shadow through the jalousies, puttering about in the kitchen, maybe making little rice cakes. That’s what I often
imagined her doing, I don’t know why, they just seemed to go together, Lalaine and rice cakes. I’ll bet she made a lot of them for the professor.
My reverie was broken when the buzzer rang at the gate—it was Dencio, a handyman who lived in the squatters’ settlement nearby, in Krus na Ligas. They used him as a gardener, a plumber, a carpenter, and sometimes even a driver, when they had functions to attend and the professor didn’t want to crease his barong by driving the Ford Escape himself. Dencio was one of those hard-luck characters, the guy who works his butt off fixing other people’s problems but who can’t shake off his own. The professor told me that Dencio had been all set to fly to a construction job in Dubai when his youngest daughter fell ill with dengue after a mosquito bite, and died. Then his wife went insane with grief and walked into the path of a dump truck, leaving him with five kids to feed, one of whom has encephalitis. I mean, who writes these scripts? Now here he was to repair—he announced to me when I opened the gate for him—a leak in the septic tank. A big job, Dencio muttered, both of his pudgy hands clutching large, heavy tools to break the earth with.
So that’s where the vague stink was coming from. I know, I didn’t mention it earlier, but I was thinking of Lalaine—Shalimar, remember?—and had shut out the creeping suggestion of decay, something that now afflicted me with cloying tartness, now that Dencio had mentioned it and Lalaine was out of sight. Or rather, she had stepped out for a second to let Dencio into the main house and into the backyard, where the septic tank was located. She looked happy to see him, and murmured something I couldn’t understand—I think they came from the same part of the country and spoke the same dialect—and for a minute back there I wondered if Dencio looked at Lalaine the same way I did. It seemed like a silly idea. Men with five kids to feed don’t have time to fantasize, do they? Now the stink was definitely in the air, like the earth’s own bad breath. Even the professor noticed it, not that he minded too much. “Sometimes a dead bird falls on the roof,” he said, although I wondered how he could have known that, and how large and dead a bird had to be to create such rot. But I could believe how the roofs of these faculty houses might accumulate all kinds of garbage, even as the professor and I spoke; and on other visits, our conversation would be interrupted by the thud of a falling mango from one of the stout branches arching over the property.
Let me tell you about these old houses on the UP campus. They were built in the ’50s and some of them still have the suburban look of that time, where they pinched the wet concrete for cheap texture and carved the outlines of rocks and boulders on the wall before painting the pebbled spaces over, just to offset the basic gray boxiness of the house itself. They had given the professor one of these, a concrete shell that he began to fill with books of every imaginable kind, including obscure commentaries on the apocalypse, herbal recipes for the relief of gout, and a pictorial history of the American Civil War.
I can imagine Professor Sanvictores coming to UP as a young instructor, eager to make his mark in history. Or was it economics that he first signed up for? This was years before his stint as a teaching assistant and doctoral candidate in Minnesota, where he picked up and cultivated the American accent that many coeds found charming, if not irresistible. Now every two-bit club and radio deejay and call center agent has one, but none of them can come up with and use a word like “contumacious” the way the professor did to describe certain tribal chieftains in old New Zealand.
I was dying to ask either the professor or Lalaine herself how the two of them met, and more than that, how they ended up being man and wife. I mean, what ever did they see in each other? But of course, silly, I knew what he saw in her, I could see that even with my eyes shut. But what about Lalaine? I could understand her developing a schoolgirl crush on him, especially if he put on that Minnesota affect and gave his sophomore-class version of his lecture on Rizal’s women and free love in the nineteenth century. Truth be told, in his younger days the professor might have been found attractive by some women from a certain angle, especially women who liked stray cats and boys with cowlicks and otherwise smart men who needed to be helped with the simplest things, like using an ATM card. And did the professor have any money? It’s a fair thing to ask. From what I’d gathered— and I would hear this again at the wake, not that too many family members bothered to show up—there had been a farm in Quezon Province, somewhere on that long, ragged, storm-bitten eastern shore nobody really wants to call home. The professor’s mother had wanted him to become a priest; his father a lawyer or a businessman. Both parents expected their only son to get married, but they died long before Lalaine stepped into his life— or did he step into hers?
Almost as soon as Lalaine appeared beside the professor on campus, the predictable gossip swirled about her being a bargirl he’d met during a semester spent doing research down south, maybe while he was trying to figure out how the plague that ravaged Brazil’s coffee industry reached Sibutu’s liberica plantations in 1888. Nobody thought to ask Lalaine for her CV, or they assumed she was some graduate assistant like me. Even at the wake, nobody thought to ask her sensible questions like, So have you thought of donating his papers to the university archives? or, Isn’t it wonderful that Professor Umali came to pay his respects? If there was anyone who would have wanted the professor dead, it was Calixto Umali. He had been a thorn in the professor’s side for ages—at one time, his protégé, like me, and then his rival and archcritic, especially after he’d returned with his PhD from Leipzig—you know, where Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche all wore the school jersey—taking every opportunity to dispute the professor’s theories and gathering his own coterie of departmental groupies around him, the kind with braces on their teeth. Umali cut quite a figure as well, with a full shock of hair, like a crown. Sometimes I think the professor brought Lalaine back from Sibutu and married her—cake, bouquet, pigeon, and all— just to prove that he knew something more about life than migration theories and why empires crumble.
And then when he bought the Ford Escape—in a color the dealers call “toreador red”—the professor looked even younger, snappier, more eager to engage anyone in anything, from a debate at the University Council to a drag race on Temple Drive. Or so it seemed. I was still a senior then and his baby-thesis advisee, not yet his assistant, but he had made it a point to ask me to join him in the SUV for a ride to the post office, using a supposed problem with my endnotes to Chapter 6, on the Battle of Biak-na-Bato, as an excuse. As soon as we were driving down A. Roces Street, nothing about my thesis was ever brought up again. Instead, he told me about how he’d cashed in some stocks he had inherited a long time ago from his father to buy the car—his retirement paycheck was still too far away—and that the Escape was his wedding gift to himself and Lalaine. One of these days, he said, he’d teach her how to drive, but not too soon. Heck, maybe it was better to get her a driver, he added. Lalaine was bound to scratch the car up, she was good with dainty little things like cups and saucers, but large objects confounded her, she was new to all this and an SUV was just too much. It was at this point that I wanted to ask him how they had met, but we had reached the post office, and the professor realized with a chuckle that he had forgotten the parcel he was supposed to send his sister in Chicago. “I know, they’re all wondering why I married her, asking who and what she is, like it’s their business,” he muttered as we drove back to the faculty center. “But if you were me, you’d do the same thing, I’m sure you would.” I kept quiet, but I wanted to say, Of course, professor, I certainly would, I’m your man, whatever is good for you is good for me too!
And so it went for a few years, during which I graduated with my degree in history. I thought I would go on to law school and realize my father’s dream of having an attorney in the family. For a brief while I even got a job as a call center agent, advising people in Ohio how to set up their digital answering machines, only to keep returning to campus and hanging out with the professor. Eventually I signed up for an MA. I didn’t really see my
self becoming an academic or a professional historian—I mean, I loved all the war stories, the expeditions and encounters with strange tribes, that sort of thing. But the kind of history the professor was seriously interested in, having to do with varieties of coffee beans and price fluctuations in Antwerp and Rio de Janeiro, was almost like Accounting 312 to me. I suppose I was fascinated by the professor and by his young wife, and by the life they led. I’d expected her to get pregnant within months of their wedding, but it never happened. I got used to seeing Lalaine just the way she was, just short of pregnant. Me, I’d had a couple of girlfriends, nothing serious. I was never good at figuring out what they wanted, except the obvious, which turned out to be something they didn’t really want as much as I did. I mean, what is it with these women? It’s not like I grope or fondle them the first chance I get. I do everything by the book—saving up for dates so I can take them to a decent dinner after the movie, telling them about my day and asking about theirs, escorting them home in a cab and being properly hesitant when they ask me in, focusing on the TV while they make coffee, keeping my hands on my knees until they relax and get that glassy look in their eyes, talking about future and family. I start feeling frisky and touch them somewhere that seems to burn, because they jump up and say things I never had in mind, and I go home totally bummed out. I hate to say this because I dislike generalizations, although history tells us that when you take a really long step backward and look again, people tend to do the same basic things wherever they are, whether in China in the Qing dynasty or in Montezuma’s Mexico, but I came around to the conclusion that it was my not having a car, my own car, at the age of twenty-four, that made me look not so hot to the girls. I mean, let’s face it, driving a car makes you look like you can do anything, or go anywhere—even the professor knew that. I’m sure those Egyptian charioteers got laid a whole lot more than the foot soldiers, the cowboys more than the cooks. I’d brought this up with my parents—I still lived with them in Kamuning and drove the old man around in his ’93 Civic that now coughed in first gear and groaned in second. It was hard to convince sixty-somethings that they, I, needed a new car when their only son was a perpetual schoolboy, earning little beyond the scraps the professor threw me from his research funding and the transcription jobs I took on now and then for other academics. (Once, even, in a really bad fix, from Professor Umali himself. Although of course it had to be kept secret, and I swear I never broke any confidences or passed along any gossip.)
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