They call him king, Severo, “Chuchi,” Luis. His employees and bastard sons call him Don Luis. His servants lower their eyes, call him Sir. His wife Isabel and his widowed mother Serafina call him by his first name, Severo. His daughter avoids calling him anything, even “Papa,” except on public occasions. When his wife loses her temper, she calls him hijo de puta, whore’s son, cabron. Motherfucker she learns to call him, after several trips to America. When she is really angry, she calls his mother a phony and a whore. She dares him to hit her; he never does, calling her a real phony instead. He is aware it is the worst possible thing he could say to her. They call each other every name in the book, they do not care if their daughter or the servants hear them fighting long into the night. He usually ends by calling his wife a hypocrite with the soul and manners of a common achay, a servant, a peasant, but with none of their warmth and appeal. He brags about fucking the servants, how they are more responsive than she could ever be. You’re dead down there, he accuses her coldly. She tosses her head in contempt. I’m dead to you, she tells him.
It no longer affects her. It is nothing, an old story. Before the war. During the war. During the Japanese occupation. After liberation. Her mother is dead. Her father a weak man, a handsome man, a petty hustler. Her father coughs blood. She is a hostess at a nightclub. Her father dies, in a barroom brawl. She wins a beauty contest. Miss Postwar Manila. Miss Congeniality. She is a starlet on contract at Mabuhay Studios. She cannot sing or dance. She cannot act. She is stiff and wooden on the screen. Because of her exceptional beauty, she is given small parts. The other woman, the best friend, the best friend’s friend.
He’s a wheeler-dealer, ruthless and ambitious. He does business with everyone. Japs, GI’s, guerrillas in the jungle. He meets her, at a party. She is drunk. They are both in love with other people, but he is compelled by her beauty and amused by her bluntness. He meets her again, at another party. She is sober and knows exactly who he is. They marry. He later buys Mabuhay Studios, on a whim. She stops making movies, spends her time shopping for clothes. She takes a lot of airplanes, perfects her English. She is terrified by New York, intimidated by Paris, at home in Rome and Madrid. She develops a Spanish accent, and learns to roll her r’s. She concentrates on being thin, sophisticated, icy. Her role models include Dietrich, Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, Nefertiti, and Grace Kelly. She is an asset to her husband at any social function. She is manicured and oiled, massaged and exercised, pampered like some high-strung, inbred animal. She has reconstructed her life and past, to suit her taste. She is over forty, taut and angular, with marvelous cheekbones. She does not need a plastic surgeon.
It is a marriage made in heaven and hell. They love to fight when they are alone together, boast about their stormy union to bewildered friends. Small arguments over the most trivial things—this is how it usually begins. A witty exchange explodes into a shouting match, objects are thrown around the room. Breaking glass and shattering plates exhilarate her; no one really gets physically hurt. Their mutual contempt is a bond; they would never consider leaving each other. Their daughter is the burden they share, secretly sure she is the price for all their sins. They do not admit this to each other. They are exemplary Catholics, and donate large sums of money to the Church.
To a renowned American correspondent sent by a prominent American news magazine, Severo Alacran is gracious and self-effacing. “Please don’t call me a visionary,” he insists, “I’m really just a businessman.”
Amiably, he poses for pictures. Eyes twinkling, his face friendly one moment and stern the next, he is photographed seated behind his massive desk, surrounded by mementos and awards, framed photographs of his wife and daughter, the President shaking his hand, the President and First Lady at some palace function laughing with him, a smiling group shot with the golf team he sponsors, “Manila Junior Champions.” A creased snapshot of General Douglas MacArthur, Severo Alacran, and an anonymous Filipino man is displayed in a pewter frame on the wall above his desk.
He is thoughtful and relaxed in a solitary portrait which shows him standing next to one of his treasured paintings, “Farmers Harvesting Rice” by Amorsolo. “My enemies claim it’s a forgery, that I can no longer tell what’s authentic from what’s fake,” he admits casually. The correspondent frowns; he genuinely likes Severo Alacran. He hopes the rich man will elaborate. But the rich man breezily changes the subject, inviting the journalist to a private showing of his recent acquisitions later that afternoon.
Asked about his last name, he laughs heartily. He addresses the famous correspondent by his first name. Steve. A young man’s name. Alacran, he explains, means “scorpion” in Spanish. “How about that, Steve? What’s in a name?”
That same week, he is interviewed by Cora Camacho, the Barbara Walters of the Philippines, on her popular TV show, Girl Talk. He flirts and disarms her. “My dear Cora, of course I’m happily married! Aren’t you?” He knows, as do most people in Manila, that Cora Camacho is single. She stifles a giggle, her overly made-up face feigning shock and dismay. “Mr. Alacran! I’m here to interview you—not the other way around.” She smiles brightly at him.
He has decided she is hard as nails. “Of course,” he agrees, smoothly. “How could I forget? Ask me anything. You know,” he says, leaning closer to her, “I’m flattered to be on your show. You’re our most celebrated media personality—a positive role model for all Filipinas.”
Fuck you too, Cora Camacho thinks, her smile widening. “Why, thank you, Mr. Alacran!”
“Cora dear, you make me feel so old. You must stop calling me Mister!” He is aware that the age difference between them is slight.
Cora squirms in her TV chair, leaning forward for a camera close-up. “What shall I call you then—Sir?” She winks at her invisible TV audience, devoted millions who identify with her totally. Like them, she is a fan. Like them, she is demanding and devouring.
“You must call me by my first name. Severo.”
“Se-ve-ro,” Cora Camacho repeats, huskily.
“There, you see? You make me feel young again,” Severo Alacran lies on national television.
She hopes he will linger after the taping ends, maybe offer her a ride home in his limousine. She hopes her “Tigress” perfume isn’t too overpowering. Maybe he drove himself to the studio today, in one of those fancy sports cars. A Maserati or Ferrari, something Italian and phallic. A young man’s car. They could be alone, speeding on the highway, like in those American commercials where the road is endless and smooth, empty of other cars, trucks, buses, jeepneys, pedicabs, barefoot boys riding slow, plodding carabao. Cora Camacho loves the obvious, thinks she deserves to ride in an open sports car just once in her life, with the wind undoing her lacquered hair and one of the world’s richest men driving beside her.
Cora Camacho moves closer to Severo Alacran. The camera closes in on her determined face. She is glad she always carries an extra toothbrush in her briefcase. The interview is about to end, and she only has time for one more question.
The White Bouquet
ANNOUNCING HER INTENTION TO marry Pepe Carreon, Baby Alacran breaks the customary silence at the dinner table with her quavering voice.
“What a strange idea,” her father says. He is preoccupied with the salad on his plate, fresh wild spinach and red Spanish onions tossed with vinegar and a dab of olive oil. “I want more vinegar,” he demands, suddenly. “Vinegar and some salt. I can’t taste anything!” The servant leans over to pick up his plate, then hesitates.
“You can’t,” his wife says. “Doctor’s orders.”
He groans. He longs for red meat, the peppery, greasy taste of pork adobo. He imagines the piquant flavor of shrimp wrapped in taro leaves, stewed in a mixture of hot chili and coconut milk.
His daughter repeats her announcement.
“NEVER!” her mother snaps. “He’s much too old for you.” She eyes Baby with suspicion. “How long has this been going on?”
“Don’t be absurd—Pepe�
��s a perfectly nice fellow,” her husband interrupts. “His father manages our soft drink plant.”
“No, that’s Pepe’s uncle. Pepe’s father’s in the army,” Baby gently corrects her father.
“Que horror! I detest army men,” Isabel Alacran says. “You like Nicky,” her husband reminds her.
“Nicky’s Nicky. The army’s vulgar,” she retorts.
Severo Alacran is secretly pleased. Perhaps his daughter isn’t so hopeless, after all. He drinks thirstily from a glass of Swiss mineral water. This unquenchable thirst is constant, a symptom that has appeared in recent months. “Cut out all salt,” Dr. Ernesto Katigbak has advised, “especially soy sauce and patis.”
“I need my patis,” Severo Alacran insisted.
“You’ll be sorry,” Dr. Katigbak warned him.
Severo Alacran asks the hovering servant to fetch him another bottle of mineral water and more ice. He follows her with his curious, detached gaze as she exits briskly into the kitchen. She is young enough, not too homely. She is new at her job. He must remember to corner her later and ask her name.
“That boy is no boy,” his wife is saying. “He’s at least thirty-five!” She observes the way her husband studies the new maid, and resolves to get rid of her first thing in the morning.
“He’s only twenty-seven,” Baby squeaks.
Her mother glares at her. “So? You’re not even eighteen! I won’t allow it. He’s some kind of army man or cop, isn’t he? How humiliating!”
“Isabel, don’t be a bore. He’s a perfectly nice fellow. He’s been coming to our house since he was a boy—”
“If I had known, I wouldn’t have allowed him in my house!” Isabel says to her husband.
“I do business with him,” he tells her, coolly.
“He’s just been promoted,” Baby says to her mother, hastily. “He’ll be working with General Ledesma. Don’t you remember? Uncle Nick told us about it at dinner—”
Her father nods. “That’s right. The other night—”
“I don’t remember a thing,” her mother snaps.
“It’s astonishing, how fast and far the boy has risen in his career,” Severo Alacran says, with satisfaction.
“His army career,” his wife snorts in disdain.
“Don’t underestimate the military,” Severo Alacran says, finishing his second glass of imported water.
“How long has this been going on?” Isabel asks her daughter.
Baby blushes. “He proposed, last night.”
Isabel looks puzzled and annoyed. “When? Where? You never leave that room of yours,” she adds, in an accusing tone.
“On the telephone,” Baby answers.
“The telephone,” Isabel murmurs.
“Ingenious! I like that in a man!” Severo Alacran pats his daughter on the arm. She cringes at his touch, tries not to show it. “How nice for you,” he continues, awkwardly. “How nice.” He signals for the dishes to be removed.
Isabel disagrees, vehemently. “Disgusting! An army man. Those uniforms…He’s ugly, besides. One of the ugliest men in Manila. How can you do this to me?” she asks her daughter. “Between the two of you, I see nothing but more ugly children.” She shudders. “Dwarves! Hydrocephalics! Harelips! A legacy of bad blood and bad skin…”
“For godsake, Isabel. The boy only has a mild case of eczema. Don’t get hysterical,” Severo Alacran says. “Those things can be treated, with a little cortisone.” He remembers with a grimace the time his face broke out in boils, after one day’s sunbathing on a private beach in Spain.
“Oh sure, cortisone,” Isabel sneers. She gestures toward her daughter, who blushes deeper. “What about her? She has a chronic case of eczema, seborrhea, and God knows what else! What do we do about that?”
“For godsake,” Severo Alacran stammers. “He’s a nice fellow.”
“Nice,” Isabel mutters to herself. She wishes it were Saturday, and she were in bed with a lover in some anonymous hotel room.
Baby hangs her head in shame. She has been repeatedly reminded that she is not blessed with her mother’s presence and feline allure. She is unbearably shy, soft, plump, short like her father, without any hard edges. Her complexion is marred by tiny patches of acne. Her breasts are flat, her waist narrow, her hips much too wide and out of proportion to the rest of her. Her legs are thick and muscular—“peasant legs,” her mother calls them—in contrast to her feet, small and delicate. Her only fine points are her melancholy eyes, dark and erotic as the mass of unruly, luxurious black hair that grows down past her tiny waist. Her hair hangs with a sensuous heaviness that suggests something wild buried within her. Baby’s mother nags her to tie her hair back, pin it away from her face, wear it up in a bun, braid it, cover it with a scarf, a hat, or a veil, straighten it, cut it all off.
“Whose baby are you?” her mother croons, a lullaby of exasperation. Baby conjures up a powerful childhood memory, envisioning her ornate gold and white crib in all its baroque, overwrought splendor. A canopy of lace, organdy, and pink satin ribbons. Fat, Florentine cupids dance above her, their mischievous faces frozen in permanent glee. Her mother gazes down at her, curious but indifferent. Her father preoccupied, mysterious.
Coffee is served. Baby fidgets in her chair, fighting back the urge to chew her nails. She desperately wants to excuse herself from the table, jump up, and disappear into her room. Wait for Pepe Carreon to call on her private telephone. One ring, hang up. Call again. Listen to him whisper how much he loves her no matter what. Nothing can stop them, he will say. He is not afraid of her father. Her mother makes him laugh. He speaks in a low, self-assured voice. He thrills her with his dark voice and persistence. She is not sure why he has chosen her, if he means what he says.
Her parents argue the merits of Pepe’s proposal. Doesn’t she want to go to finishing school first? her father asks, without enthusiasm. He’ll send her to Switzerland, which he’s sure she’ll enjoy. She can meet cousin Girlie in Paris. The Swiss are rich and hygienic, their houses sparkle on the Alps, they have window boxes filled with blooming geraniums. It is a picturesque country without poverty or suffering. Even the cows look rich, and are fed chocolates. Don’t you adore Swiss chocolates? How can you discuss chocolates at a time like this? her mother interrupts. I won’t allow it, I won’t allow it, I won’t allow it, she keeps repeating. What about college? her father asks. He is trying to be kind. COLLEGE! Her mother laughs. Your daughter is dim-witted, she tells him. Have you seen her grades? She can barely read.
You’re her mother,” he reminds her.
I certainly am!” Isabel Alacran says, lighting a cigarette. Her hands are shaking. It is strange. Baby has never seen her mother become distraught or lose her composure.
Baby’s hands lie in her lap. She is ashamed of their clammy dampness, the gnawed tips of her fingers. She hides them under the table. Mortified, she feels the wetness under her armpits, the sweat darkening the long sleeves of her new dress. She tries to recall if she remembered to spray herself with deodorant this morning, after taking the first of her daily showers. She bathes three times a day, sometimes four in a frantic effort to ward off the nervous sweat that breaks out automatically in her parents’ ominous presence. Lately, she’s been forgetting to apply the men’s deodorant she’s forced to use. She is ashamed, sure her mother will make a comment any second. Her mother is impeccable; her mother never sweats.
Her parents continue bickering, oblivious to her. Baby sits very still. It is almost ten o’clock, the time when Pepe usually calls. Soon the phone will ring. She will have to remain in her chair, unable to answer her phone, until her parents excuse her. They insist on an audience for most of their quarrels. Baby tries not to think of Pepe. He will call her later, after midnight. She prefers that; she likes talking to him when she is drowsy, her sleepy voice as husky as his. She pretends she is another woman, someone like her mother. Full of sexual mystery, Baby whispers back into her telephone…
She isn’t sure she wants to m
arry Pepe Carreon, but she will. She derives no actual pleasure from the touch of his lean, scarred flesh; she recoils from his gruff, aggressive kisses. She wishes they could remain suspended forever, their only real contact on the telephone. Furtive conversations, late at night. It’s his voice she truly loves.
He speaks to her in a language she barely comprehends, using words like desire, adoration. It confuses her. Love is the only word to which she fully responds, and Pepe uses it freely. Baby decides it is her duty to love him in return. He never calls her stupid. He loves her, even when he hurts her with his touch, his face hovering over hers, a grim mask of flaws and scars as familiar as her own. He loves her no matter what, that’s what he says.
She clenches her hands into small fists. As a child, the servants had painted her nails with iodine that burned her mouth every time she chewed them. When that failed, they rubbed her fingertips with fiery chili peppers. Then, the sweating started. Dark patches of salty sweat under her arms. “She sweats like a man!” her mother exclaims, horrified. Baby wears pads under her arms to protect her clothes. She is nine years old. She fears that one day the sweating won’t stop, that the perspiration will travel across her chest and back, working its way down, soaking her underwear and skirt, dripping in puddles at her feet. She lives in perpetual shame, and learns early how to make herself sick enough not to have to go to school and confront the cruel stares of the nuns and her classmates.
Dr. Ernesto Katigbak is brought in to examine her. “It’s plain and simple anxiety,” he tells her parents. “The child must learn to relax…” To control her perspiration he prescribes fragrance-free powders, astronomically expensive powders they order from a pharmaceutical firm in California.
Dogeaters Page 3
