Luckily—okay, it’s hardly the word, considering the circumstances, but you know what I mean—my dad was close to retirement, and fairly susceptible to suggestions of spending his golden years driving or being driven around the country, like to weekends in Tagaytay or Subic with my mom. And I just had to appeal to his sense of entitlement to get him to agree that he deserved a prize for all his decades of hard work in the maritime insurance industry. That was the key—it was going to be his car, not mine. That way he would also pay for the gas and the spark plugs, even if he was going to stay home most of the time playing Scrabble with my mom. When the 2005 Ford Escape came up for sale at that unbelievably low price, all I had to do was give Dad a little nudge for him to tip over and sign the check, hallelujah. It was like the heavens had conspired to deliver me a chariot in toreador red, to reward me for my cleverness, and to compensate me for all the nasty rejections I’d received since high school.
But this isn’t about me or the car. It’s the professor I’m talking about, isn’t it? … about how he died that awful day in late November.
Some time in September, things began to go wrong, horribly wrong, for the professor. It was bad enough that Typhoon Emong hit the country, the strongest and worst in nearly thirty years. Which was longer than I’d been alive, come to think of it. Emong killed hundreds of people as far south as Surigao, and brought crusty old trees crashing down on power lines, so that the UP campus went without light and water for three days. I rode a bike to the professor’s house just to see how they were doing, and found the old man drying out some papers. Letters from his mother, he said—written while he was still in graduate school—that had been soaked when the wind ripped off a corner of the roof and rain came streaming in. I was surprised to hear the roof creaking and see Lalaine up there herself, hammer in hand, tamping down the errant sheet of galvanized iron. I shouted to her and she acknowledged me with a wave. Looking up at her in shorts, I caught a glimpse of long white thigh before Lalaine disappeared to work on the dangerous edge and I had a chance to say, “Be careful.”
But like I said, worse things were to come for the professor.
First, a few days after the storm lifted and the last fallen branches had been cleared by road crews, Professor Sanvictores came home dejected, profoundly humiliated by Professor Umali’s incontrovertible proof that the annual reports to the governorgeneral from his caretaker in Sibutu had been outright forgeries or fatally compromised copies—at least the segments from 1885 to 1891—given that the real records had been unearthed by one of Umali’s assistants at the Houghton Library in Harvard. Professor Sanvictores was so upset and distracted, he scraped the left fender guard of the Escape against a post in the garage entryway when he drove home. It’s still there, a faint and meaningless scratch, more annoying than anything, but there.
Second, Lalaine had become pregnant by someone else. The professor told me the somber news in mid-November, while we were sitting under the mango tree that shaded the gazebo in the yard. His face was in the shadows: “But I couldn’t get it up. I never could,” he said. “That was the problem, that was our problem.”
Lalaine had tearfully confessed to a liaison with Dencio. I felt outraged, like I myself had been betrayed—like I said, how could a man with five mouths to feed think of carrying on with another man’s wife? I had come to the professor’s house to pick up my salary for the past two months’ work. I usually got paid monthly, and never complained. But when the old man handed me my check, his hand trembling in grief, I felt so embarrassed, so sorry for him, that I almost gave it back, as if I myself had something to feel guilty about.
“What will you do now?” I asked in a voice that sounded even weaker than his.
“I don’t know,” he said. “For some strange reason, I want to keep the baby, but not keep her. God forgive me for saying this, but sometimes I just want to strangle Lalaine in her sleep, and then I remember that it was me who asked her to come here and live with me and my books, to cook for me and occupy half of my bed, all of which and more she’s done without complaint. And when I remember that, much of the pain goes away, at least until I wake up and see her, or hear her mumbling something in that dialect of hers, and suddenly she becomes a horrible stranger again … And then I too become someone else, someone I don’t want to know.” He raised his hands and spread his spindly fingers out in what might have been a profession of innocence, or surrender, or he could have been pushing something back, I don’t know, and he hung his head down in silence, like he was praying, but I didn’t think he was.
“I’m sorry to hear that” was all I could say. The professor said nothing, and to break the awkwardness of the moment, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
For over a week before the storm, Dencio had been digging out a large pit in the back for a new septic tank. The old one was beyond repair and foul brown sludge had begun bubbling up in the toilet. I saw that myself when I went in for a pee. Lalaine had done what she could to contain the overflow with rolled-up newspapers, but I could see how, despite her best efforts, the house was beginning to be less habitable by the day. The professor’s books and papers filled every shelf and cranny like an overgrown garden with the shrubbery gone mad. A small altar was tucked away in a corner with glowing electric bulbs illuminating Jesus cradling his heart in his palm. It had to be hers, because I never knew the professor to be a churchgoing man. I mean, the word “God” would sometimes creep into his speech, like an expression, and I know enough about social scientists to know that when they say “God,” it’s with all kinds of little asterisks.
That’s when I saw her in a corner of the kitchen, as I stepped out of the bathroom, breathless because I had stopped inhaling the instant I noticed all those soggy newspapers on the floor. I actually heard her before I saw her—whimpering in a chair, with her knees up and her arms curled around them. She looked up—surprised, embarrassed, defiant, fearful—and it occurred to me that we had never really spoken about anything more serious than the weather or her rice cakes, certainly not in private. Through the window, I could see that the professor was still in the gazebo, maintaining a stoic silence, flipping through the pages of a newspaper like he cared about what was happening in Afghanistan. Lalaine sat backlit, so that her edges seemed even softer, silvered in shadow. I could see the wetness of her nose, and when she noticed me standing there, she abruptly brushed the snot with the back of her hand. It only made things worse by smearing her cheek, but somehow Lalaine looked vulnerable and therefore all the more beautiful to me.
“Are you all right?” I instantly realized the stupidity of my question.
“Help me,” I thought I heard her say, and moved closer so I could be sure. “My husband’s going to kill me.” She began rocking herself and crying. “He can’t forgive me, he’s going to kill me, I just know it.”
“No,” I said, not even sure why. “The professor wouldn’t hurt anyone, especially not you.”
She looked up sharply. “You’re not his wife. How would you know?”
I felt like snapping back with, You’re not his wife, either, or something to that effect, just to register my own disgust about how she’d betrayed the man. She and Dencio, she with Dencio.
“You have no idea the things he makes me do. I do them to keep him happy, because I promised to love him. And I don’t care if you believe me or not, but I still do.”
“Then why would he kill you? And if you think he will, why don’t you leave? You should go home.” My voice was laced with bitterness and chastisement, and I realized that I might as well have been speaking for the professor.
“I have no other home,” she said. “There was another man, back in Sibutu. He was an evil man, he hurt me. I came here to get away from him. But everything,” she sighed, “everything just gets worse and worse.”
My mind reeled. How many other men did this woman have in her life, and how could I believe all the stories she was telling me about them? And granted, she must have been woefull
y unlucky to shack up with the wrong guys. But how about taking some responsibility for her own poor choices, and for whatever she might have done to make good men go bad? I mean, history, folks, history—Jezebel, Delilah, Cleopatra, Mata Hari, it’s a list that just goes on and on.
“Well, that’s true,” I said. “You can’t keep running away from the past.” If there was anything I learned from school, anything at all, it was that.
Apparently sensing my lack of sympathy, Lalaine rose up from her chair to get a glass of water and gave me a steely, almost reptilian glance that simply confirmed my own dawning mistrust of Mrs. Sanvictores. Or whoever she really was. How could all that liquid softness vanish so quickly, and be replaced by this new skin, hard, resistant, and opaque?
I noticed through the jalousies that the professor had left the gazebo. I wondered if he had observed my brief exchange with his wife, or whatever she was to him now. Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that he might have—could have, should have—suspected me of being the baby’s father at some point, if she hadn’t fingered Dencio. I mean, it was possible, wasn’t it? As far as I could tell, apart from the professor himself and that sneaky Dencio, I was the only male who went into their house with any kind of frequency. Never mind that Lalaine and I hardly ever spoke. I could have gotten her cell phone number and initiated and carried on an affair via text, beginning with innocuous thanks and comments about the refreshments, and then about the decor, or her perfume, raising the level of intimacy with every message. That’s what I could have done but never did, and meanwhile this half-literate handyman was giving it to her by the bucket, while I listened to the professor deliver the annual Cesar Adib Majul Memorial Lecture at the C. M. Recto Hall and chased coffee production figures at the National Library.
“I have to go back to the professor,” I told Lalaine, who had turned away from me, which was just as well because she now seemed ugly to me, even her legs where I could see splotchy patches, maybe from all the tension and the guilt. “I’m sure you’ll be all right.” Now that she was standing upright, up to her full height that nearly matched mine, she hardly seemed the helpless victim of moments before.
I couldn’t find the professor anywhere in the front garden, so I went out back. There he was, staring into the yawning pit that Dencio had dug for the new septic tank. How was this ever going to get finished, I wondered, now that the professor knew about the affair and Dencio had presumably been fired? The pit had filled to the brim with rainwater during the storm, but the waters had subsided and I could see the hole was large and deep enough to swallow a man, the soft rough edges of its mouth making a silent scream of warning.
“In Herculaneum,” the professor said, “they excavated tons of compacted human waste from a septic tank, and so were able to establish what the citizens ate, like dormice and sea urchins. It’s funny how we learn about people from the shit they leave behind.”
That was the last time I saw the professor alive—at least literally speaking, since the following day I heard him, through the partly open door of his faculty center office, speaking to none other than Professor Umali. I couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying—and the fear suddenly seized me that it was about my perfidy in having worked for Umali a few years earlier. I began constructing my tortured defense—then realized that they were having a casual conversation, almost as if Calixto Umali was back to being the professor’s most brilliant and respectful pupil. One of these days I’ll ask Umali about that unexpected visit, like who called whom first and what was on the agenda. I might even wheedle some work from him again, and feel guiltfree now that the professor’s gone, but we’ll see.
Two mornings later I got a text from Jo-Anne, our departmental secretary, telling me that the professor had died. What, where, how, why? I texted back quickly. I’d just come out of the shower and hadn’t even pulled my pants on—but even before Jo-Anne responded, a flurry of ideas ran through my mind. Chiefly, that Lalaine somehow had something to do with his death. At the very least, she had driven him to it.
Jo-Anne’s text seemed to confirm my suspicions: Accidental fall into hole behind house. Hit head. That was no simple hole, that was the septic tank, and yes you could lose your footing on the edge, fall in, and hit your head on the hollow-block floor and get a nasty bump, but it wouldn’t kill you—it just didn’t look deep enough—unless you were hit again and again.
I could just see it happening: Lalaine luring the professor to the backyard, then Dencio coming from behind with a shovel and whacking the old man over the head with it, jumping into the pit to slug the professor some more and finish the job. I was sure that Lalaine had texted Dencio, then given him that Help, he’s going to kill me look, and that Dencio quickly figured out the side benefits of compassion and had mustered the temerity to do her bidding. But if they’d killed the old man there, why not just leave his body in the pit and cover it with earth and concrete? Too obvious; I’d often noticed Lalaine watching those truecrime and CSI-type shows on TV, where the scheming wife and her lover-accomplice always get caught. “The soil’s too fresh,” the detective would always mutter, pawing on bent knees at an obviously off-color spot.
“We drove him to the hospital,” Lalaine told me that same afternoon, in the very same gazebo where I had been sitting with the professor just two days earlier. I had to go to that house, I had to hear it from her own mouth, I wanted to see Lalaine twitch and hear her sputter, trying to explain away the terrible truth. “It happened late last night, around one a.m. I woke up to get a glass of water, I’m always thirsty being pregnant, and he was gone from his bed—actually the sofa in the living room, where he now sleeps, or was now sleeping … Anyway, the door was open and I looked out and—I don’t know how, but I could feel where he was, what he was doing or wanted to do. So I took a flashlight and went to the backyard, calling his name, but there was no answer. And when I looked into that hole in the ground he was already there, unconscious, bleeding. I jumped in to try and pull him out, but I couldn’t … so I called Dencio.”
“Dencio? Why not call me? I’m sure you have my number somewhere.”
“There was no time to look. Dencio lives close by, and I was very afraid. He came, rushed right over, and helped me pull my poor husband out of the pit, and we brought him to Labor Hospital but it was too late. He died in my arms, in the back of the car. You know—he was still alive when I found him.”
I didn’t know where to begin tearing away at her lies. Dead from a fall into a six-foot pit? Okay, sure. Dencio so conveniently nearby? So, all right, Krus na Ligas was just five minutes away on a bike, but why not scream to call the neighbors for help, like genuinely distraught wives are supposed to do? Driving to Labor Hospital? Why not the UP infirmary just a few streets away— not that they were good for much more than dispensing Tylenol? Again, why drive anywhere at all? Why not just let their victim writhe to his death at the bottom of that infernal pit? Perhaps she suffered a pang of guilt watching him lie there, looking back at her with How could you? in his glazed-over eyes. Did Dencio drive the Ford Escape at full speed, or did he take his time cruising out of the UP gates and onto C. P. Garcia, maybe stopping for a burger in a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s along the way?
And now that I gazed at Lalaine in her proper widow’s somber dress, a deep-blue linen outfit with a modest neckline that she might have worn to a dinner with other faculty wives at the Executive House had she felt up to it, I didn’t know whether to marvel at, or be appalled by, her incredible composure. Her simple words were inflected with emotion and what I had mistaken for sweet naïveté, that’s how dangerous she was. I realized that this was going to be a bit more difficult case to crack, that I had to be equally deft and skillful in probing the mind and motives of the widow Sanvictores.
It was the audacity of her next gambit that astounded me. Placing her hand so carefully that her fingertips just barely touched my knee, and with no suggestion of malice or enticement in her demeanor whatsoever, the widow Sanvicto
res glanced at the parked Escape and asked: “Would you like to buy my husband’s car? I need to go away for a while and could use the cash. I just realized I have very little money, and it will take time to go through his papers. You understand, of course—about the car, all the memories. I don’t drive, and … and I know you like it. I’ve seen how you look at it.”
My throat went dry. Of course she had seen me look, many times, at the car, at herself. Unlike my girlfriends, she knew what I wanted, and was prepared to give it, at least in stages. “I don’t have much money,” I began to whine. “I’m just a graduate student, and the Escape is such a nice car.” She or someone— maybe Dencio?—had taken the trouble to wash the SUV that morning, so that it sparkled more than usual, enough to give me a headache. But I managed to pull myself together and pop the question: “How much do you want for it? Maybe my father can help. He needs a new car, or a newer one, anyway.” I covered my mouth with my hand to disguise my desperation.
She beamed and picked up a pencil from the gazebo table— I could see lots of numbers on a pad of paper, so she must’ve been working on some calculations when I called to say I was coming by—and wrote a number: 365. The buzz in my head got stronger. Surely this was a mistake. Didn’t she know how much a 2005 Ford Escape XLS was worth? Had she even bothered to ask around or bought one of those car magazines at the pharmacy checkout for thirty pesos, scanned the ads, and realized she could make herself an extra hundred thousand or two? I know; I’ve looked. I buy those magazines and dream about Audis and Alfa Romeos, but that’s because I’m a regular guy.
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