The Breath of Night

by Michael Arditti

  ‘Now we must eat food,’ Dennis said, picking up a menu. Philip was distracted by the sight of his fingernails, their spectacularly full moons eclipsing his own faint crescents. ‘I am so hungry, I can eat a whore.’ Maribel screwed up her nose. ‘Why must you look at me like this? Is good English words. Ask him.’

  ‘The standard phrase is “eat a horse”.’

  ‘I am killing Max. He is telling me this to make everyone laughing at me.’

  “With you, not at you. It’s our English way of teasing. Have you met Max?’ Philip asked Maribel.

  ‘I have had that honour,’ she replied. ‘He does many kind things for Dennis. You do many kind things for Dennis.’

  ‘But not the same ones,’ Philip said, determined to dispel any confusion.

  ‘Do you like being in Manila, Mr Philip, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes, very much. Right now I can think of nowhere I’d rather be,’ he replied, with a sincerity that thrilled him. ‘But it’s a city that can be hard work for strangers.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied.

  ‘Really?’ Philip glanced at Dennis, his head buried in the menu. ‘I presumed – I’ve no idea why – that you were both born here.’

  ‘You are very kind,’ she said, a smile illuminating her face. ‘Our home is in Cauayan, a third-class city in Isabela province. Our mother runs a small medium enterprise, selling snacks. We have our own house with a fridge.’ Dennis snapped shut the menu and spoke to her in Tagalog. ‘And we have other modern conveniences. In the garden we grow many indigenous plants and vegetables. We have our own palm tree. Every year when we were smalls, Dennis would climb to the top to bring down the coconuts.’

  ‘Why must you say this? You are making him think I am like monkey!’

  Dennis’s tone made his sister look so crestfallen that Philip wanted to thump him. Maribel, however, responded more temperately. ‘You are a monkey,’ she said. ‘You are a naughty monkey.’ Dennis grinned, giving Philip a glimpse of the carefree boy that life in Manila had all but obliterated. The waiter came to take their orders.

  ‘I can eat a horse,’ Dennis said pointedly.

  ‘I’ll check with the chef, but I think we’ve run out,’ the waiter replied, joining in the joke. Philip, unable to read the menu and refusing Maribel’s offer to translate, asked for exactly the same as she did, rellenong bangus and laing sa gata which, to his relief, turned out to be nothing more exotic than stuffed milk-fish and yam leaves in coconut sauce.

  ‘Don’t they bring us any cutlery?’ he asked in a bid to distract Dennis, who was looking at him smugly.

  ‘Are you not seeing sign? This is kamayan restaurant. Is Tagalog word for Using Hands.’

  ‘Really?’ Philip asked, thinking of the coconut sauce.

  ‘My brother is right,’ Maribel said, ‘but he is also wrong. Of course you will have a spoon and a fork if you wish.’

  With a sniff that left no doubt as to his disapproval of such affectations, Dennis took out his phone and began to text, leaving Philip and Maribel to talk. She filled in the family background that Dennis had left blank, with a description of her younger brother and sister, and their father who had left home, breaking off after a reprimand from Dennis.

  ‘So when did you come to Manila?’ Philip asked, suddenly conscious of her youth.

  ‘The 17 July 2010,’ she replied.

  ‘I am sending her bus money,’ Dennis said, while his fingers worked as nimbly as a tailor’s.

  ‘Do you live together?’ Philip asked, recalling Dennis’s shared room.

  ‘Good heavens not!’ Maribel replied. ‘I live with my aunt. She is very strict.’

  ‘She is not liking me,’ Dennis said.

  ‘Naturally she likes you. You are her nephew.’

  ‘She is not letting me come through her door.’

  The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the meal. Dennis tore into his lechon de leche but, in spite of the greasy pork crackling and the sticky rice, his fingers remained surprisingly clean. Philip felt infantilised by his spoon.

  ‘This is delicious,’ he said, savouring the tender flakes of fish, chopped ham, carrots, peas and raisins, seasoned with lime and pepper and what tasted, improbably, like Worcester sauce.

  ‘It makes me very happy that you like our food,’ Maribel said, smiling.

  ‘I like it very much indeed,’ Philip replied, an assessment that he was forced to qualify when the waiter brought Dennis his side dish, a plate of barbecued chicken intestines, which looked as if they had been salvaged from a pathology lab.

  ‘Are you a student here?’ he asked Maribel.

  ‘Oh no,’ she replied, shielding her mouth as she ate. ‘I am a fulltime operative of 24:7 Solutions Incorporated Manila. Is it familiar to you?’

  ‘How must it be?’ Dennis interjected. ‘He is Englishman.’

  ‘We are the third largest call centre in Manila, serving all the major cities of the United States of America,’ she said proudly. ‘There are four hundred seats in our workplace and one hundred applicants for jobs each day.’

  ‘Wow! You must have really impressed them.’

  ‘Is me who is getting this for her,’ Dennis said, his mouth full of entrails. ‘Is usual you must have three years in college, but I have a friend and we are doing business. So.’

  ‘Dennis is the kindest brother,’ Maribel said, giving him a look which in other circumstances Philip would have found touching. ‘It was hard for me, but I went on a course and now I have a certificate. I am proficient in English. Would you say I am proficient in English, Mr Philip, sir?’

  ‘I’d say you were very proficient. Proficiency plus.’

  ‘You are making a joke at me.’

  ‘No, I promise.’

  ‘At this moment I work for a bank – US American bank not Filipino bank – but every night I study from books. I learn medicine.’

  ‘Do you want to be a nurse?’ Philip asked. ‘I mean a doctor?’

  ‘Oh no, I want to be a medical transcriptionist. It is the most desirable job in Manila.’

  A request for the owner of the black BMW to proceed to the lobby drew less respectful looks from his fellow diners than its recipient had intended. Dennis muttered a few angry words into his phone before pushing back his chair.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Philip said. ‘Business?’ Dennis looked at him coldly. ‘We’ve still not made any arrangements for our trip!’

  ‘I am calling you tomorrow. I leave you to be sure sister is going to work for nine o’clock. No monkey business. See, I know my English.’ He grinned. ‘Is not just Filipinos who are monkeys.’ He scraped the remaining offal into his napkin and sauntered out.

  ‘I am worrying very much for Dennis,’ Maribel said. ‘Sometimes he is angry with the world, but the world is not always being kind to him. When our father left home, he has given up school to help our mother. He read in the paper about many jobs building a palace in Kuwait. My mother did not want him to go, but he would be making very much money, some to send to her and some to put to one side to buy a bakery.’

  ‘As in baking bread?’

  ‘Yes, this is always his dream. You will not know this, but my big hard brother is as soft inside as the dough. He came to Manila with 3,000 pesos he was borrowing from my mother, my uncle, our teacher and our priest, to pay for his passport and his aeroplane. He gave the money to the agent, but when he returned to the office two days afterwards the agent was disappeared and so was the desk and the chairs and the files and the calendar and even the name sign.’

  ‘Didn’t he call the police?’

  ‘What would be the use? Everything disappears in Manila: money; rooms; people.’

  ‘So what did he do?’

  ‘He had not even the money to pay for his ticket home, but still he went to the bus station. It was where he was sleeping since he came to the city. And there he met a man who has found him work in a bar.’

  ‘Is it that easy?’

  ‘I
t is in this kind of bar,’ she said, with a new note of bitterness.

  ‘So you know about the Mr Universe?’

  ‘Yes, but I am the only one. My mother thinks that he is working in a restaurant. And he will not go home until he can pay back this money. Sometimes I am fearing that he will not go home at all.’

  Maribel started to weep. Philip leant across the table to take her hand, which felt both natural and right. The moment vanished with the return of the waiter, who rattled off the dessert menu with a curtness bordering on contempt. Philip, suspecting that he had broken a taboo by taking her hand in public, released it abruptly, which surprised Maribel but failed to placate the waiter, who grew visibly impatient as she dithered over her choice.

  ‘I have a sweet tooth,’ she explained to Philip.

  ‘And a sweet mouth to go with it,’ he replied.

  They both blushed. The waiter’s lower lip curled over his pencil and Philip realised with dismay that his change of attitude was caused by Dennis’s departure and by the assumption, all the more painful for echoing his own, that Dennis was pimping Maribel to him. Furious, he longed to break something, if not the man’s nose then at least his bright yellow pencil, but he was anxious not to distress Maribel, who seemed oblivious to everything but the food. She finally opted for some preserved jackfruit.

  ‘Make that two,’ Philip said.

  ‘Are you sure you do not wish to have some cassava cakes or coconut rice?’ Maribel asked in alarm. ‘The jackfruit is, how do you say, a bought taste?’

  ‘An acquired taste?’

  ‘Do not bought and acquired mean the same?’

  ‘Often, but not always.’

  The waiter hurried away.

  ‘Your English is so hard. I try to make every day improvements and still I make many mistakes. Whenever I am having an afternoon off, I must read an English novel.’

  ‘Do you have any favourites?’

  ‘What I like most of all are sad stories with happy endings.’

  ‘In England we call them romances.’

  ‘I think that I would like an English romance,’ she said, so artlessly that Philip was smitten.

  The waiter brought the jackfruit and, as he chewed the flesh, which was as tough as a jackboot, Philip realised that he should have heeded Maribel’s advice. Nevertheless, an aching jaw was a small discomfort in such captivating company. Listening to her description of her favourite soap opera, in which a mermaid princess was washed ashore where she fell in love with a handsome fisherman, Philip felt himself succumb to a similar enchantment. He was quick to deride his own foolishness. There was no denying her beauty, charm and what he could only describe as natural dignity, but the warmth he felt for her was the same that he felt for the simple innocence of his nieces. He could no more take advantage of her than he could of them – even though Gemma, Catherine and Cristobel were eight, nine and twelve, and Maribel, as he had found to his relief, was nineteen.

  On the other hand, unless her artlessness were an act – and one way beyond the skill of any nineteen-year-old he had ever known – she was not wholly indifferent to him. Apart from Dennis’s scorn and his own embarrassment, what did he risk by putting it to the test? He had shied away from intimacy for too long. His few affairs since Julia’s death had been so unfulfilling that he had come to believe that his only chance of lasting happiness had died with her. Friends, for whom bereavement followed as precise a recovery pattern as flu, accused him of clinging to his grief in order to avoid dealing with life. Belinda, who had come closest of anyone to taking Julia’s place, claimed that he had created an image of his perfect fiancée to which no other woman could measure up. In which case Maribel might be just what he needed: a holiday romance so far removed from his everyday world that there could be no comparison with Julia nor any suggestion of betraying her memory.

  All that mattered now was to be sure she felt the same.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ she said, breaking off her story to consult the fake Rolex dangling from her wrist. ‘It is 8.40 p.m. I must be at my desk at 10 p.m., which is 9 a.m. in New York and Washington, DC.’

  ‘Shall I order a taxi?’

  ‘Oh no, I will take the bus.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He tried to find a neutral way of offering to pay.

  ‘Very sure. But I would like it if you want to walk with me to the stop.’

  Heartened, Philip paid the bill, even giving the disparaging waiter the benefit of the doubt. He followed Maribel out and through the warren of backstreets in which scores of homeless families were bedding down for the night. Some were laid out on the roofs and bonnets of cars like unidentified corpses; others, wrapped in threadbare blankets, were stretched out on the pavement in front of open stores and cafés. Philip, keen to respect their privacy, suggested crossing the road, but neither Maribel nor any of the people neatly sidestepping the recumbent bodies appeared to share his qualms. Some even stopped for a chat as though with sunbathers on a beach.

  They joined a crowd at what Philip took to be the bus stop, even though the only sign was Please Don’t Piss Here scrawled on the wall. Judging by the stench, it had been repeatedly ignored.

  ‘I hope I’ll see you again,’ Philip said hesitantly.

  ‘I too would like that very much. Please to text me.’

  ‘I don’t have your number.’

  ‘Dennis will tell it to you.’

  ‘No,’ Philip said, anxious to cut out the middleman. ‘You give it to me please.’

  ‘If you wish. Do you have something to write it on?’

  Philip reached for his notepad, as a flurry of anticipation ran through the crowd. ‘Quick! Is this your bus?’

  ‘It will wait. Do not worry.’

  She wrote down her name and number with exquisite care, blowing on the biro as if it were ink. She passed him back the open pad, and he noted that the ‘i’ in Maribel had been dotted with a tiny circle. As the bus opened its doors, he put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her. The kiss was as easy and unforced as the rest of their encounter. She returned it with a gentle warmth, letting her tongue linger for a moment; which might have been accidental. The hint of garlic on her breath made him grateful that they had chosen the same dish.

  She broke off the kiss and climbed into the bus, turning back to him at the door. ‘Have a good day, sir,’ she said, as though she were already at her desk.

  Four

  17 August 1975

  My dear Mother and Father,

  I trust you’ve recovered from the funeral. No doubt you’re swamped with paperwork. There are advantages to death among people whose only effects are a rice jar and some scraps of bedding. I’ve been living in my memory all week. By a strange coincidence I caught the tail end of a play on the World Service. A boy (I couldn’t work out whether he were at boarding school or borstal) was describing his family. ‘Everyone loves his grandmother,’ he said. I wept. Whatever our differences, Greg, Agnes, Cora and I were as one in our devotion to Granny. I’m sure that the same goes for Nancy, Ann, Portland and all the cousins. She never made us feel small – even as children – but always supported us in everything we did. For me, of course, that was following my vocation.

  Whether she truly believed that my vow had been an integral factor in Father’s return from Burma, she encouraged me to do so. Long gone were the days when the Tremaynes aimed to produce a priest every generation, but while the rest of you were insisting that God wouldn’t hold me to a vow made as a five-year-old, she realised that it was what I wanted. Had I simply wished to convince Him of my sincerity, I could have promised to sweep the paths or share my sweet ration or run more errands for the convalescent soldiers; I would never have pledged myself to the priesthood if the idea hadn’t already been in my mind.

  There’s nothing I’d have liked more than to have been with you for the service but, even if the Regional had given me permission, I couldn’t have left the parish. Tensions are running high right now. I’m one of the few links bet
ween the military and the people. If I’d gone, who’s to say what horrors would have awaited me on my return?

  Running high is an understatement. After three years of Martial Law, it’s plainly not the temporary remedy we were promised. Our hopes of President Marcos have faded as fast as his pledges. Far from tackling corruption, the government has institutionalised it. In Britain, party leaders identify the national interest with that of their class; here they narrow it down to their clan. We supposed that our distance from the capital would protect us from sustained scrutiny, but the poblacion is as closely monitored as Manila. There’s nothing subtle about it. Armed men swagger through the streets, intimidating, arresting, raping and torturing. Some are from the army, some the police and some the constabulary (forget any notion of PC Simon Freeman, it’s a particularly ruthless special unit). They attack each other almost as often as they do us, so that our only hope of redress lies in their increasingly brutal turf wars.

  It’s the young men who, inevitably, feel their oppression most keenly and, in a bid to avoid friction, I’ve reverted to my Ampleforth training, seeking to settle their differences on the field – or, in this case, the court. I fear that, given your respective aversion to balls that are neither bowled at a wicket nor knitted into socks, you’ll already have lost patience with my basketball stories. But I trust you’ll permit me my increasingly rare moments of triumph. Having hit my head on so many door frames that it’s now as dented as Consolacion’s, I deserve some recompense for being 6’4” in a country where the average male is 5’3”. Indeed, I suspect that my unlikely athletic prowess – I write as the free throw champion of the region – has been a more effective recruiting tool for the Church among a certain sort of disaffected teenager than the most colourful fiesta. By deploying all my negotiating skill, I managed to set up a game between the constabulary and the parish. I thought it wise to confine my presence to the sidelines and to call on don Bernardo Arriola to act as referee. In spite of his blatant bias towards the constabulary, we trounced them 88 – 57. That’s when my public-school code let me down. Instead of sportsmanlike handshakes as they left the court, the losers stormed through the crowd and into their jeeps. A few days later, two of our star players went missing. One was found castrated by the roadside and the other strangled in a ditch.