by Glenn Diaz
I made the great arduous journey of two steps from bed to door and discovered that it was only Manang Bibi, bless her. She looked at me, then searched the small room. “We talk to—” She pointed at Reynaldo’s naked back. “Wake up, wake up.” I wanted to hug her, and I did. She laughed, surprised—“Yes, OK, good morning, OK”—and gave me a pat me on the back. Her hand caught the blanket just before it began to slide off my body. “Whoops,” I said.
Only then did I notice that she was walled by a group of middle-aged men, all with that admirable masculine curiosity that somehow automatically lingered below eye-level.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Hi, everyone, how are you?”
They laughed.
“What is it?” I said. “You can talk to me.” I pointed to my chest. “Me. Talk to me. I’m an independent, moderately successful woman. What is it, Manang Bibi?”
“No, no,” Manang Bibi said, still pointing at Rey.
Feminism is dead, I thought.
I wanted to throw a crazy tantrum and channel an Argentine football coach after a bad call but eventually decided against it. “Rey—” I called out, grabbing a cigarette from the side table and lighting up. The tourists next door had left; no more wet towels or swimwear laid out to dry on the barandilla.
The men and Manang Bibi retreated from our door and gathered on the veranda. Rey, putting on last night’s shirt, stepped outside.
I went to my chair, thoroughly marginalised. I pretended to be occupied by the goat grazing near the house next to us. “Howdy, goat?” I said.
It barked, clearly not a goat.
From their conversation, I caught business permit, municipio , homestay, then problema , fully booked, hotel, then sigue , Saud, Laoag, Manila, and, from Reynaldo, research, Tia Yusing, Australiana pero Español (my goodness), two weeks lang , this last bit accompanied by a shy grin, some mature elbowing from the men, a furtive glance toward my direction.
One of them then looked at his watch and asked Reynaldo and Manang Bibi, “A las doce? A la una?” A consensus appeared to have been reached. They nodded to each other. “Sigue, a las doce. Sigue, sigue.”
They soon left, their bastard Spanish in the air.
Reynaldo went behind my chair and began massaging my shoulders. “Te—” he began valiantly. “Tenemos problema.”
“Un problema,” I said. “Yo se. We’re out of beer. Necesito cerveza, Reynaldo. Este mundo, no puedo vivir sobrio, me entiendes? Imposible! Entiendes?”
“OK, cerveza. Si, si. But another problem. Tenemos otra problema. Bigger problem. Mas grande.”
I stood up, looked at him, gave him a proud kiss on the lips. He moved back and covered his mouth, some silly thing about not having brushed his teeth yet. Bluntness always surprised me, bluntness and vulnerability, dental or otherwise, especially from men, so I laughed. He laughed. A lovely morning. Also, it turned out we were being evicted from the room and had to leave before noon.
Like all pre-menopausal women in their late forties, I didn’t take ultimatums well. I was still folding clothes at around half past two, four hours, one round of sex, and a luxuriously sluggish lunch later. Rey was gone, sent to a store near the plaza to buy the only brand of sanitary napkins that didn’t give me an itch. Manang Bibi was outside and hadn’t stopped fidgeting since noon, despite my fervent orders for her to relax, woman, relax. In the chaos, I had forgotten if I had taken my daily malaria pill so I took two.
Everything became hazy after that. When several men came marching into the room, looking around (“Hello?” I said, like a crazy person being invaded, “How are you?”), I tried to recall how much pesos I had in my purse. I had somehow assumed bribes would need to figure somewhere here, this being a corrupt banana republic. But they were actually the same men from earlier, engaged by Rey to help us with the move to our hotel. One of them handed me a sheet of crumpled A4. On top, the seal of the municipality of Pagudpud: a four-cornered star separating a palm tree, a waterfall, a tottering bamboo raft—“Mum,” the person said, “this homestay, no permit, sorry, we’re closing. Very bad. Inspection later by the mayor. With media. You know Channel Two?” He made a goofy-terrified face. “Sir Rey said take you to hotel.”
I would learn later that there had been a crackdown on homestays because a similar two-bedroom house in the next barangay had just been raided and shut down for housing a cybersex operation. Girls as young as eight were made to do horrible, unspeakable things in front of webcams. Foreigners, mostly white men, paid an hourly rate to watch. It had been run by, of all people, a sixty-something retiree from Adelaide. Paul Keating would be mortified.
My suitcase and Reynaldo’s backpack were soon loaded into the waiting multicab, a tiny truck with an open rear, divided in the middle, which sat six to eight people sitting back to back. Manang Bibi was busy counting the stack of blue bills for the ten days when our vehicle started to move. At the last moment she looked up to wave goodbye—toothless goodbye!—and seeing her, the house and my favourite chair beside her, I began to cry. “You OK?” the man asked. I nodded, making a mental note to invite Manang Bibi to the wedding, and also so I could find out once and for all what Bibi stood for. Beatrice maybe? Bathsheba? (Genoveva, it turned out. Close enough.)
A few moments into the ride, I saw Reynaldo’s figure down the road, walking erectly, holding something. Seeing him there, amid the banana trees and huts and roadside stands with petrol in Coke bottles, I felt a distinct envy: he belonged here , in this place. He strode with a correctness and security I knew I would never feel in this country.
Which was fine. Displacement, it was a valid way to live. How many expats were there around the world? A billion?
“Stop,” I whispered to the man, pointing at Rey.
“Ha?” he barked, leaning in closer.
We passed Reynaldo, who gave our vehicle a confused look. We were some yards away from him when someone recognised Rey and the multicab slowed down to the side of the road.
“Rey!” I cried, perhaps the first time in my adult life that I had shouted.
A jam-packed jeepney, top loaded with people assembled amid tarp-covered supplies, came rampaging by. I thought it was going to hit Reynaldo, in true Hollywood B-movie fashion, but the next moment it was gone, and Rey was still there, smiling and unscathed, the plastic bag with my napkins wildly penduluming in hand.
“Carolina?” I heard Reynaldo outside knocking on the shower’s sliding glass doors. “You OK? Maybe you can—”
“What?” I called out.
“You’re moaning—”
“You’re ruining it, Rey!”
Bathing: it should be a fundamental human right, with its own UN body. Food, shelter, education, lavender-infused aromatherapy. I stepped out of the bathroom of our new hotel, feeling my skin glow, my pores like happy children. Reynaldo, stretched out on the bed in front of the TV, looked at me with something between befuddlement and sex.
“What?” I asked.
His eyes were still on the TV, but his hand had somehow found the curve of my waist. “I don’t think I’ll make you as happy as that bath.”
Yep.
I pulled the loose end of my bathrobe belt and dislodged the towel off my head. “You already have.”
We laughed into sex, and I knew I smelled divine, that I looked somehow lovely, or at least clean. And so I despaired that he still drew the curtains and turned off the lights. After we were done, I elongated my naked self on his side. The cold from the air conditioner, I wanted it to reach every sinew and crevice. I closed my eyes shut.
I heard the TV being switched on. A posh Attenborough voice proceeded to narrate an experiment. They put a guy in a room and asked him to stare at the woman in the TV monitor, which fed off a CCTV camera in the next room. Nine times out of ten, the woman said she could somehow “feel someone’s eyes” looking at her even though the man was not in the same room. The research wanted to prove that the human brain was capable of sending out waves that defied physical space,
that we could literally “touch” people by looking at them, something beyond the built-in gaze detection system that dated back to when humans were still prey to giant winged basilisk or some such creatures. Language, in short, was rubbish when it came to desire.
“Riveting, right?” I asked, eyes still closed. “Talking about us obviously.”
I expected a grunt or a chuckle, a warm hand on my damp shoulder or elbow.
“Rey?”
Had my eyes been closed for hours? For weeks? Maybe I had finally scared him off. Maybe I would wake up in my bed in Sydney or my desk at work, and all these had been a dream, the past month all occurring during REM sleep, abridged in two, three hours.
I counted to three and opened my eyes. Reynaldo had fallen asleep on his side of the bed, my bathrobe draped over his groin. He looked tired. I stared at him. As expected, a montage followed, swift and overpowering: our meeting at the airport, the tentative brushing of shoulders on the bus to Pagudpud, our first night at the homestay seemingly a lifetime ago. We had joked then about ways to wrench him off from the habit of “Ma’am Carolina.” “Would you date someone,” I asked, “who calls you Sir Rey?” He took a swig of beer, smiled. That on-the-ledge feeling of being on the threshold of a romantic possibility, it was the same with Rey, but at the same time it wasn’t. Here , I recognised the power—how it reddened his cheeks and had him fumbling with the beer bottle. “Good beer,” I pronounced, and that made the San Miguel good, indeed (it was really good). Later, I lay on the pushed-together beds while Rey stiffly sat on the other side. For a while, there was no sound in the dark room except the belaboured rhythm of heavy breathing. I spotted a huge spider traipsing across the unpainted ceiling but was too exhausted to be afraid. What are you doing? Was I really in bed, inches away from the tense, motionless body of my maid’s nephew? Had I really become one of those older women who’d invade the tropics in search of so-called romance? “Reynaldo?” I called out in the dark. Something shifted in the hard mattress. I swallowed hard and felt how parched my throat was. “How about—” I swallowed hard again, then tried to inject a wholesome lilt into my voice, “how about a head massage, hmm?” Slowly, I sat up, back turned to his, waiting, a side of me hoping he wouldn’t actually do it. I wanted to scream. Don’t! A moment passed. Then another. The spider went on its way.
His fingers were warm, landing just above my ears; cautious, cautious contact that involved hardly a square inch of skin. In that space, I was transported to that final hug from Damian. The rogue thought emerged, assertive: I deserved this, and what could go wrong?
He now stirred, slowly opened his eyes, a soft smile in his face. I did that, I told myself, I woke him up with pre-linguistic thought.
20
D id you hear?” asked Debbie, Alabaman and retired like everyone else in the group.
“I bet we will shortly,” I said with a wide smile.
She shot me a confused look. “One of the attendants told me they’re filming Survivor in an island a couple of miles from this very beach.” Her flabby arm waved grandly to her right, almost knocking off her husband Elis, who taught elementary school history and now always resembled a half-dozing fifth-grader, a cosmic comeuppance.
“Wow,” I said, “once word gets out, we should all brace ourselves—”
“Which Survivor ?” inquired Elis, bolting up.
Debbie turned to him. “What do you mean, which Survivor ? There’s more than one? They copied us again?”
“Blech!” cried Douglas, who was Canadian and who had spent forty years drilling rigs in the oil fields of Alberta, a Herculean feat of humanity that he’d managed to bring up with uncanny frequency. “This is exactly what happened to Ko Samui after that awful, awful Dicaprio movie. Tourists arriving in droves disturbing the peace in the place. Terrible. I saw the movie last year, I think. There was a blizzard. We were snowed in. Reminded me of the winter of ’88 when all the rigs in the northeast section were down.”
Beside him, a petite Filipina half his size and a fourth his age looked away, ignoring what sounded like attempts at translation by an even younger Filipina next to her.
“Hey, hey, old man,” said Bo (or Beau?), an energetic Vietnam War veteran from Iowa. “No dissing American things today, just today, can you do that? (Debbie nodded.) That boy Leo whats-his-face, he is a very good actor, I’ll have you know. He was on that nice ocean adventure film with that plump girl, uh, Williams, Windsor—”
“Winslet,” Debbie offered.
Bo’s wife Agnes, a retired AT&T operator, mumbled her agreement from behind a bent straw sticking out of a coconut. “She exposed her breasts in that film, but it was tastefully done.”
Birgit laughed. She was European (“from Switzerland, the German side”) and once or twice had to be told by resort employees to cover up while sunbathing. Away from the beach, she dressed, or undressed, like on-a-mission Farrah Fawcett on Charlie’s Angels . She threw me a conspiratorial grin, as if I was Kate Jackson, all business and mannish. Just then a young vendor with distracting biceps passed by in front of the al fresco restaurant. Birgit eyed the bloke. When the boy looked back, she licked her lips, and the poor boy looked away, unsettling the wooden case of sunglasses and bracelets and other souvenirs balanced in his arms.
Birgit and I broke out in laughter, interrupting Bo and Agnes who were in the middle of sharing something—their plans to put up a deli in Cedar Rapids? Agnes’s amazing sandwich-making skills? “Sorry,” mumbled Birgit, who looked downtrodden, indeed, watching the vendor’s figure recede farther down the beachfront. “Auf widerschen,” she whispered.
It began to drizzle so we retreated to the roofed area, some more slowly than others (Bo and Elis). There were a few more intimate introductions to a place than the weather, and Pagudpud had welcomed us with its monsoon range. Lethargic drizzles of amazing stamina? Sure. Blinding rainstorms? Yep. We quickly got used to it. Me more than anyone, thanks to Sydney’s manic summer downpours.
We settled in our new table just in time for breakfast to arrive. Almost all the plates had the same things: toast, some jam, a sunny side up, and either corned beef, sausages, or tapas.
I cleared my throat. “You know, I heard they tried to do a version of Survivor in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
They looked at me. Agnes took a noisy sip from her coconut.
“Not a big hit, I heard, especially the part where they couldn’t eat anything except rice for days and, yeah, never mind.”
Elis let out a polite chuckle.
What a tough audience. I was smitten.
It was a strange group, like tropical Canterbury Tales , with retirees instead of pilgrims. Debbie and Elis were in town “just to get a feel of the place, you know—” Debbie said dreamily, to which Elis added, “—to see if it’s a nice enough place for me to die in,” after which they shared a hearty laugh (I liked them). Douglas the Canadian was here to open a scuba rental shop and also to meet Susan, the twenty-year-old mother of three with whom he had been exchanging love letters and photos. Bo and Agnes flew in to meet their Filipina daughter-in-law and decided to stay for an extended vacation (“Don’t like her,” Agnes said, “too independent and comfortable with herself”). Another member of the group, whom I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting, was now in a jail in Manila on child abuse and human trafficking charges, awaiting extradition to Australia. Birgit, well—
I met her first, at the beach the day after Easter. The sunbathing chair next to her was the only empty one.
“Hi, how are you?” I had asked before lying on my tummy.
“Still a little rough, and the singing, God, the singing doesn’t stop. And the food—” She shuddered.
“Excuse me?” I said.
She sat up and looked at me. A wire dangled from her ear, connected to a flip-phone that came into view when she lifted her legs.
“Sorry,” I said.
“—but is the same. Is the same.”
I naturally tried to place her accent, which
was difficult because she spoke with a soft, lazy drawl, as if she were always high (which she was, I’d find out later).
“And the men are nice. So nice. People, they tell me, ‘Oh, you should come to Africa, come to Caribbean, very nice.’ But I don’t know, something violent about those places, right? Not nice. Or is it just me? I don’t know.”
This went on for about fifteen minutes before I dozed off. When I woke up, she was gone. That night I saw her at the hotel restaurant. She was with a big group of white people, and she stood out because the others were all couples. She saw me, gestured for me to come over, and introduced me to everyone, after which she turned to me and asked what my name was again.
“You’re so soft-spoken for a Russian,” one of them told me, the first time that those words probably appeared in one sentence.
Holding my third San Miguel for the night, I laughed and explained with some effort my theory on the strange result of combining the harsh staccato of Spanish and the sing-song of Australian.
They didn’t look convinced. When Reynaldo and I joined them the following day for breakfast, they asked how long I was in town for. “I don’t know,” I said. Then Rey and I looked at each other, to me a sweet punctuation, but the two women, Agnes and Debbie, gave me that doleful look reserved for elderly criminals, right smack between pity and moral unease.
The following day, we were feeling adventurous so we decided to grab dinner at the “Italian fusion” place at the next resort maybe a hundred meters away from our regular place. Birgit sidled up next to me.
“I think I found it,” she said.
“You did? I’ve been looking for a good quality conditioner, too—”
She laughed. “I like you,” she said. “You have humour.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You want to try this new massage place—”
“They say, ‘Asians not very good lovers.’ You know what they’re talking about.” She held her two hands together and formed a tube of some sort, “But you’re not coming for that, right? Right? We’re not young. It is not about that anymore. I want to know. Does he carry your bag? Give you a back rub? Buy your napkin from the store? Things like that. This man, last night, I was,” she smiled, “down there, and he wanted to hold my hand. So very sweet. Odd, but sweet. I like it.”
