The trolley rumbled into view.
“I do love you, child,” Hans suddenly said. “Beast though I am, I do. I do.”
She saw him as through a haze, heard his words like the echo of distant thunder—soothing but unintelligible. The trolley came nearer, slowed down, inched to a stop. She boarded it, Hans pushing at her back. She handed the conductor some coins, shrugged when he returned two, and found a window seat. As the trolley began to move, she and Hans looked at each other. Somewhere within her, someone was closing doors, shuttering windows, drawing curtains. A smile of regret crossed Hans’s face; her own face, she knew, mirrored it. Close the doors, shut the windows. He was gone and she was staring at buildings, houses, and the occasional banaba tree that broke the monotonous gray and white of the city.
She refused dinner that night, preferring the company of her humiliation. She couldn’t look at Hans, couldn’t watch him be friendly, normal, gracious, while the secret of how he had turned her out, turned her away in her moment of distress, gnawed within her. The thought of the long walk from the trolley stop to this house, with her knees buckling, the tears she had had to wipe away, oppressed her. There had been men and women at the corner store, children by the estero who watched as she had staggered past. Perhaps they thought her drunk like Carlos Lucas—the scandal of it, and in her condition.
After dinner, Carlos Lucas found her perched on the windowsill, staring blankly at the night.
“Don’t do that, child! What if you fall?” He pulled her gently toward the bed.
“It’s too warm to go to sleep,” she said. “You rest. You have a long day before you.”
He grunted and began undressing. His old man’s body, with its barrel torso, offended her. She left the room, walked to where her mother and Maya were settling the day’s accounts. They shooed her away, telling her she needed her sleep.
In the silence of the living room, she found comfort in her tears. She settled in an armchair, curled her feet under her, and inhaled the moistness of the canal. The sea came to her—that vast stretch of fluid blue across which, in some timeless time, the ships had come, those for which the crown jewels of the Spanish queen Isabela had been pawned. Mayang wondered if the queen had redeemed those jewels, wondered even if they had been as magnificent as the emerald necklace Maya had lent her for her wedding. Thrice—for she was thrice- married. And soon to be thrice a mother. She patted her belly. The child was very quiet, immobile. She crooned to him softly, and managed to croon herself to sleep.
The pain woke her—the familiar spasm of her belly, that bunching of muscles which, strangely enough, felt as though her body was being rent apart. She bit her underlip, broke into a sweat, and waited for the contraction to pass. After an eternity, it left and she rose gingerly, walked to the bedroom, and grabbed Carlos Lucas’s leg through the mosquito net.
“Wake up, wake up,” she hissed at him. “I’m giving birth.” Carlos Lucas mumbled and then sat up, stunned awake by her words. “You can’t,” he said, “it’s too soon.”
“Like hell it is,” she said, sweeping aside the gauze net and laying her body down. She closed her eyes, settled her fists between her breasts. “Like hell it is,” she repeated and laughed at the first curse she had ever uttered.
It was a sixteen-hour struggle, for the child fought his own birth. Mayang herself, shrieking with the contractions, oscillated between the wish to get the whole thing over with and the desire to keep the child inside her. Hans, she knew, would stay barely long enough for a glance at his son and the assurance that Mayang was all right. Then, he would sail to China. In her head, amidst the pain, she saw him boarding a folded paper boat which rocked back and forth on a painted blue sea toward a land where a row of paper dolls with slanted cutout eyes waited, their hands linked within their huge sleeves. “At least he won’t find their women charming,” she murmured.
“What?” Maya bent over her. The old woman eyed her strangely. “Be sure this is a boy now.”
“He is. And his name is Luis Carlos.”
“Carlos Lucas Segundo,” Maya said, her eyes angry.
Mayang sat up and began to scream. “You will not, you will not, you horrible old woman. You will not!” Inside her, the child squirmed.
“Hush, hush,” Carlos Lucas said from the other side of the bed. “Will you be quiet?” He shouted at his mother. “Luis Carlos, then. Luis Carlos. Or if it’s a girl, Luisa.”
Mayang fell back on the bed. “I am senora now,” she said. “I am not a child.”
“She is delirious.” It was her mother. She had come in with six maids. “Come, we have to strip the bed.”
The maids helped her to a chair. Then, they removed the bedsheets and spread out layers of linen paper, sweet-smelling and new, on the mattress while Carlos Lucas raged from one end of the room at what he called an incredible aberration.
“She’s not comfortable,” he shouted, “sitting there. Hurry up, for God’s sake. What shit is this? Buy a new mattress tomorrow, throw the old one out. Buy four new mattresses! What do I care? Let her lie down!”
Mayang screamed as another contraction hit her. The maids clustered, one fanning her, another combing with her fingers the damp hair away from her brow.
“Don’t let her hurt!” Carlos Lucas yelled.
The Chinese-Malay maid knotted one of Carlos Lucas’s handkerchiefs. “Here,” she said, giving it to Mayang, “keep it between your teeth. It’s shameful, the way you’re carrying on. When I had you—”
The bed was ready. The maids helped Mayang through the six tiny steps it took to reach the bed’s edge. They helped her stretch out and then, as one, turned toward Carlos Lucas.
“What now?” he stormed.
Maya, wheezing with fatigue, showed him the enema bag. “You have to leave,” she said. “Go. Wait in the living room. Send for the midwife, though what good that’ll be, I don’t know. I know more about childbirth than she does.”
Thrown out of the bedroom, Carlos Lucas found himself pacing back and forth, back and forth, in the kitchen, his hand reaching automatically for a plate of biscuits someone had left on the table. He crunched the biscuits between his teeth, shivering to a stop whenever Mayang’s screams came slithering through the walls, the doorways, the curtains. Why, he wondered, was it taking so long? The first two had slid out of her as though her opening had been greased—easy births, with nary a murmur of pain. Dimly, he saw the midwife arrive, hustled past him by a maid. She had come through the service entrance and was carrying a black bag. The dog-smile she aimed at Carlos Lucas hovered in the air long after she was gone.
After a time, Carlos Lucas noticed that someone else was pacing along with him, reaching one end of the room just as he reached the other. He half-saw the hand that picked up a biscuit a second before he did; it must have happened a dozen times before it registered in his mind and he lifted his eyes to the other man’s face.
“Hans!”
The German gave a wry smile. “Yes, friend.”
Carlos Lucas was moved. Hans’s company in this long wait confirmed his trust. He held out his hand, which the German clasped in his own, his mouth twisting in the wash of strong emotions. Then, they resumed their pacing, each on his side of the dining table, their shoulders stooped, their hands crossed at their backs. From time to time they exchanged fond looks, and smiled to reassure each other.
The living room clock struck three o’clock, its notes resonating in the silence. Carlos Lucas counted backwards, to Mayang’s announcement of her pains. Sixteen hours! Abruptly, the Chinese-Malay maid appeared, in her hands a cheesecloth bundle stained red. Maya followed, hobbling on her old woman’s feet, her face ashen, drawn with fatigue. Her eyes flickered back and forth, as though she had trouble focusing them. She was mumbling.
“The clay pot is ready, senora,” the maid reassured her. “Shall I bury it under the jasmine or the tamarind tree?”
“Yes, yes, the tamarind . . .” Maya stopped, placed a hand on her right templ
e. With her left, she held her skirts bunched, keeping the bloodstains away from her flesh.
The maid nodded and was about to leave for the kitchen when Maya called out suddenly, frantic. “No, no, no! Set it adrift—the estero water, to the sea. Yes, to the sea.”
The maid hesitated, threw a glance at Carlos Lucas, and then shrugged. It was only when her back had disappeared through the kitchen doorway that Carlos Lucas understood; they had been discussing the afterbirth. Abruptly, he was seized with such a deathly chill he thought himself done for; there had been no wail of triumph, no sound at all, only silence after a series of terrible screams from Mayang. His child was dead.
“Was it baptized?” he whispered, shaking from head to foot.
“Right now? Don’t you want a baptismal feast for your son?” Maya was indignant.
Carlos Lucas yelled in sudden jubilation. He did a dozen mazurka steps about the table, and threw his arms around Hans, screaming “we did it,” while the German pummeled his back. He barely heard Maya complaining about the child’s strangeness. The boy would not weep, she said, and merely frowned and grimaced each time the midwife smacked his bottom. His hair was stained red from lying in his mother’s blood for so long and no amount of water poured over the thick curls could rid them of a reddish glint. Worse, he had the eyes of his grandfather—as gray as the ashes of Carlos Lucas’s best cigars.
Hans stuttered and, without meaning to, shot a glance of horror at Maya. The old woman jerked back; her hands flew up to her neck, groping for the absent necklace. A terrible certainty possessed her, though Hans recovered swiftly and tendered his congratulations to his partner and friend, saying that now they would have to discuss his leaving the house; since his family was growing, he would need the space and so on and so forth… Carlos Lucas once more was grateful for the German’s tact and, squeezing his hand, drew him into another embrace. Meanwhile, Maya watched openmouthed, the hair on her nape stirring like worms. She fought down the confusion rising within her and merely added to it. Her sorry state overwhelmed her, from the sour odor of her skin to the pungent blood on her clothes, to her shriveled naked neck. She shuffled toward the doorway and crossed the living room to the bath. Suddenly, she remembered the necklace, and retraced her steps to her bedroom.
The sun sat on the windowsill—a white, murderous ball of heat. She spat at it, hardly knowing what she was doing. Slowly, she took the pins from her hair, loosening its knot, shaking her head so that white strands settled upon her shoulders and fell to the back of her thighs, down to her ankles, like a winding sheet. Next, she unlocked the dresser’s top drawer and brought out from its velvet box the emerald necklace. It caught the flames of the sun as she held it up, the Virgin Mary’s legacy for which the friars had torn the monastery apart on the demise of her Capuchin, not knowing that she and Carlos Lucas had secreted the treasure away, together with the pirate chest of gold. She was about to slip it over her head when she smelled herself. “I stink of the grave,” she said aloud.
She tucked the necklace into a folded towel, chose underclothes from the closet, found herself a bathrobe, and left the room. She ignored the putrid German who, with his back to the living room, was watching the estero. She could take some comfort from the fact that he would soon be gone and the stars of fate could right themselves again. As she turned away, she caught a glimpse of the canal and noticed how odd the boats looked in the white light of the afternoon. They seemed to have been painted black from prow to stern and were almost etched against the inordinately brilliant light. She shook her head and murmured that her eyes were playing tricks on her again, for the boats were plying a sky route.
In the bathroom, she undressed, sat down on the stool, and checked the soles of her feet for calluses, reminding herself that a woman’s first beauty was her pink, soft insteps. She remembered the necklace, unfolded the towel, fondled the emeralds briefly, touching each of the eight stones with her forefinger before slipping the jewel over her head. She chuckled at how she must look, a withered assortment of bones and skin with an incomparable thing of beauty about her neck. She picked up the porcelain pitcher and tested the cistern water with her hand. It was cold. Quite inexplicably, the evening her Capuchin monk had done a misa cantata came to her. “Tonight,” he had said, “I sing for you.” And thus his voice, rising above the high tenor of the boys’ choir, had a lambent undertone, a rather poignant Latin confession of love that moved the unknowing congregation that Sunday as they knelt on the pews, Maya among them, in a ceremony of candles, music, gold vestments, and incense.
No one missed her until three hours later, when Carlos Lucas was allowed to enter his own bedroom at last, to press a kiss on the mushroom-pale lips of his wife, who lay like a frazzled blossom, so near death that tears sprang to his eyes. Broken with pity, he held her hand and asked her what he could give her, what treasure in the world, to make her forget the pain of giving him a son. Mayang, as empty from her ordeal as from the loss of Hans, let two tears slither down her cheeks.
“My heart,” she whispered through dry lips.
Carlos Lucas jumped to his feet and shouted for his mother. “She wants her harp,” he yelled. “Get her the harp!”
The Chinese-Malay maid came running from the kitchen.
“Where’s the senora?” Carlos Lucas asked. “Make arrangements to get her harp. Tell her Mayang, needs…”
But she was not in her bedroom or in the dining room, not even in the distillery, and the mystery was threatening to drive Carlos Lucas crazy when the Chinese-Malay maid remembered the bathroom. She knocked on the thick wooden door gingerly, asking if anyone was in there, already wondering to herself why, if Maya was taking a bath, there was no light within. Gently, with her fingertips, she pushed at the door; it yielded and swung inward. Enough light came from the great windows of the living room to show the full-size mirror on the bathroom’s opposite wall and, within the carved wood of its frame, Maya’s image, stark naked save for the emeralds, her flesh already cyanotic blue.
6
Harp notes were Luis Carlos’s earliest memories—cool silver music drenching the house in the evening, after dinner, just before the maids hustled them off to bed, the three of them, Clara, Clarissa, and himself, picking him up because he was the smallest, off the floor where they’d sat cross-legged, chin on palm, elbow on thigh, watching and listening to their mother play. That a woman with short, permed hair, wearing the shin-length shirtdress of current fashion, a white faux-pearl choker, and white stubby-heeled leather shoes should be coaxing German leider tunes from an ancient instrument did not appear to be incongruous. Indeed that was how his mother always would be in his mind: in consonance with the cool fall of harp notes, so that even in the midst of the driest day she seemed attended by the first rains of the monsoon, the earth’s exhalation of relief from parchness.
His father, on the other hand, evoked constant panic, for Luis Carlos could only remember the terror of the trolley bells the day Carlos Lucas had taken him for a walk. The walk had ended in a dim-lit place of many tables and a number of men, where Carlos Lucas launched a magnificent peroration against the Capuchins, their beer, and their superiors while imbibing glass after glass of whiskey, enjoying himself so thoroughly that when Luis set up a wail for home his father transfixed him with a glare of hatred. Staggering, Carlos Lucas led his son out of the tavern, through streets where daylight rendered him incapable of determining direction. They scuttled down one alley after another, in search of the house, until Carlos Lucas, exhausted by the perambulation, postponed the chase in favor of a nap and, letting go of Luis’s hand, stretched himself out in the middle of the street, across the trolley car’s rails. Luis Carlos, being well trained, squatted peaceably beside his father, shooing flies off his suety face, until a clang-clang of bells warned of the trolley’s approach. In horror, he let loose a seagull screech and, grasping his father’s inert hand, tugged with all the strength of his five-year-old body, trying to drag the old man to safety. It was u
seless. Straining against the weight, screaming, Luis Carlos in his valiant struggle was a pathetic and comic sight. So intent was he on saving his father, he did not realize his own predicament until he saw men in a corner store pointing and laughing enough to shake their heads off their shoulders as the trolley slowed, stopped six inches away, and the driver and the conductor, both bellowing with laughter, came down and hauled Carlos Lucas aboard. Luis, mortified, did not want to be rescued but there was no helping it; the driver slid an arm around his waist and hoisted him like a bag of sugar into the trolley car and seated him by his snoring father. The shame of it became a constant flurry of bells at Carlos Lucas’s heels— noise which caused Luis Carlos to shudder whenever his father drew near. He couldn’t know his aloofness confirmed Carlos Lucas’s worst fears.
There was no denying the alliance between Mayang and her son. Carlos Lucas, appearing at the harp playing, would be seized by an almost uncontrollable rage whenever Mayang lifted her eyes from the music score to let them fall on her children. Clarissa provoked a smile; Clara, pursed lips in an intimation of a kiss; but Luis Carlos. . . She looked at him with a stillness that confessed a loyalty unto death, an oath of fealty without words. The child watched his mother with equal gravity, his eyes unwavering. What Carlos Lucas saw was Hans and Mayang at dinner, exchanging looks so distant, so grave, that the very memory kicked at the inner walls of his heart.
It did not help that Luis’s nanny, his yaya, bragged about the child’s reddish hair, his gray eyes, ascribing the alien heritage to Mayang’s obsession with St. Francis during her pregnancy. Carlos Lucas had to warn himself not to scrutinize Luis’s features for traces of the putrid German.
In the tavern, though, with the sense of power alcohol brought him, he could summon his son’s image with equanimity. “Ah, yes, the nose,” he would murmur, belching fumes at his unknown audience, “the eyes, of course, the mouth. . . ” The desire to weep clutched at his soul; he sang in a broken baritone, while other customers clapped and pretended to dance the fandango. Don Carlos Lucas, white- haired, bleary-eyed, felt his dog-jowls quiver with the melancholia of old peasant songs, those taught him by Juan Itak. He sang of a woman who kept saying she’d rather not, no, would rather not and crossed her legs, tucking her skirt between her knees. Throughout the performance, his hat sat without compromise on his right knee—a hat battered and soiled by the successive disasters that struck the house after Maya’s death.
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