Baitan would have been a delight to her husband, someone he would ask after and share her affection for. Someone who would brighten their nightly conversations all the more. Manolo would have gone overboard with generosity, purchasing shoes and sweets for the boy and placing his mother in a proper plywood stall. But still, Tala held back. Baitan knew about her sisters, with whom she shared a strict code of anonymity. They had their rules on making revelations between worlds, but each sister regarded the rules differently, every day the more so. So Tala returned to the market stall a few times a week to argue for Manolo’s sake.
A different sister always waited at the stall to check in with Tala—to gossip and compete and argue and blame. Between the bickering they read herbs and petals for customers, predicting futures, prescribing medicines that were foreign to doctors, curing ailing hearts, helping couples conceive or sacrifice the unborn children whose destinies were already written in the stars.
That day, Imee fanned herself behind the counter. She had her short hair pulled back with a bright yellow handkerchief, revealing a string of hieroglyphic lines tattooed along the side of her neck. She wore loose-fitting brown pants that had once been a skirt, and over her outfit, a purple apron. Tala still remembered the day Imee welcomed her teenage years by cutting her long hair and sewing an extra seam into all of her skirts. Dresses aren’t practical, she had said, and Tala had not seen her wear one since.
Behind Imee, Baitan crouched on the ground, drinking iced gelatin and rolling marbles. The curtain, tied in two knots to stay open, swung a cranky cotton fist in response to Baitan’s abrupt passing. Tala drummed her fingers against the counter and watched the marbles spin and snap.
“I can’t imagine settling down. Coming back here is only bearable because one day, I know I’ll leave. Just like that, and this boxed-in view will change,” Imee said.
Tala believed her. Dalisay had always been the one to nag, complaining to everyone else when circumstances of her own making didn’t suit her. Imee was the first to leap for a different possibility, never content with discontentment.
“You don’t settle down when you marry,” Tala replied. “That’s the big misconception. You spend your life looking for ways to reinvent yourself, and when you marry, you can look outside yourself for once. It’s liberating, actually.”
“And Manolo lets you have your freedom?”
“Manolo is my freedom.”
“Tell me, Sister, when we lost each other, what stopped you from telling him all about yourself, about us, your sisters, who’ve gone to such lengths to find you, to see that you’re okay with this man you disappeared with, who’s taken the inventing out of your life?”
When Tala remained quiet, Imee did not insist on an answer. The sisters retreated back to a silence that was punctuated every now and then with the pleasing snap of Baitan’s marbles. Tala appreciated Imee’s ability to keep quiet when quiet was due. It was a trait her other sisters did not share.
Located a few yards away from the crowd, the booth emitted the comfortable aura of home. The alley leading to it was the width of a stall. The foot traffic on this alley was light, but they could see a portion of the wider sea of walkers beneath the tent of a perpendicular stall. Like an open window to the outside. When Tala glanced up at Imee, her sister had her eyes set like stone in that direction. A corner of her upper lip was curled, almost maliciously.
“What is it, what do you see in the crowd?”
“What do you see, Tala?”
Tala sighed. “Let me guess. A runaway thief just got caught, and now they’re setting his pants on fire. Let me look. No, I don’t see anything special. What is it?”
“Let’s put Manolo to the test once and for all,” Imee said in reply, still looking out toward the crowd.
Imee gave Tala a square wooden box, painted red. It had a gold latch with a key attached.
“The box!”
Imee smiled coyly and Tala laughed.
“Remember what we tell all our customers. Your lover is forbidden to open it. Keep the box where he will see it every day, with the key still attached. Let us see if Manolo deserves your trust. Now, humor me and play along. Remember Tala, for people without wings, without freedom, the box is everywhere. They walk among secrets never knowing how to unlock them. Their lives are boxes, and they steal the first opening they can find. If Manolo can keep the promise not to peek inside, I’ll believe that he loves even the parts of you he can’t see.”
Tala walked home with the box in both hands. She knew how the box worked its temptation for the stricken lovers who came regularly to the booth, but more than this, she knew how much she believed in her husband. She was surprised to find Manolo home so early. She ran to greet him, but he seemed out of breath. His hairline was moist with perspiration, as if he had just come in from jogging. But Manolo did not exercise, though he regularly advised his patients to do so.
He looked at her with an expression she could not decipher.
“How was your walk today, Tala?”
3. A Second Look
Manolo believed in his trade, unlike other doctors inspired first by prestige, financial security, and admiring nods from the community. He liked the smell of alcohol, the powerful sting against the back of your tongue as you inhaled. This was medicine, its healing antiseptic smell. He liked the sensitivity of a stethoscope, its magnified ear that could amplify breath and heartbeat, tunneling into the very being, that field of energy fueled by imagination and love, and with just the cold touch of a flat metallic ear, without intrusion or pain, he could gauge the sound of a human spirit, healthy or ill, sprightly or flagging. He even liked the interaction, the daily exchanges with his patients—not too chummy, never too involved, but with a level of intimacy and trust he worked hard to earn. In medical school he had received top marks, studying while other students went to parties, memorizing facts about biology and anatomy and chemistry long after his peers had gone to sleep. He believed in these facts, that there could be such a thing as an absolute truth. That symptoms had a cause; that medicine provided a cure. And yet, he could never forget the code of the duwende.
Perhaps because of the mountains, wise and secretive among them, lifting them closer to the great unknown, his fellow countryfolk listened with a middle ear. They heard voices in the ground, whispered murmurings among their footsteps. They believed these sounds belonged to the duwende, grown men the size of toddlers, with the power to possess and paralyze, destroying lives with a single stare or recitation of a dreaded curse, muttered under dwarflike breaths.
Duwendes’ homes were said to rise from the earth in mounds or gape open from the knotty bases of ancient trees, where they tunneled into burrows running parallel to the ordinary world. So the countryfolk were careful where they trod, paying their respects with the words “Excuse me, just passing through, sir,” every time they walked passed a hiccup in the earth. Years could pass without incident, and suddenly, the woman down the street, friendly and cheerful as could be, would one day come home changed. She would lie in cold sweats, barely speaking, with her hands on her stomach and her body hunched in pain. Her family would call upon Manolo’s expertise, and when he asked her where she had gone or what she had eaten, she would reply that nothing in her day had been different . . . except for one important thing. She had passed the anthill by the well, forgetting to say the words everyone knew . . . forgetting to say “Excuse me, just passing through, sir” to the duwende who might live there. Manolo could only recommend rest and gentle foods, perhaps a laxative or painkiller, but inevitably this woman would worsen by the day, her silence changing shape, elongating to strange mutterings, the corners of her mouth beginning to froth. They would no longer call him to follow up on her condition. Instead they would visit an albularyo, and in extreme cases, a babaylan, who would chant a powerful healing spell over a strand of the assaulted woman’s hair, and afterward the family would return to the anthill offering steaming plates of food with their apologies to the duw
ende. If they were lucky, this woman would awaken the next morning in peace, returning to her routine, just as cheerful and friendly as before.
Every neighbor knew of someone like this woman, someone who had been cursed or possessed by the duwende. Someone whose luck had changed from good to bad, someone else who became a different person altogether, forgetting their friends’ names, forgetting how to finish a sentence or walk in a straight line, someone who’d become a thief or a beggar overnight, their personality, their sanity, swallowed by the wrath of an offended dwarf. Sometimes, the curse could be lifted in a matter of hours; other times, the victim could live for years thus transformed. It only took one case for the villagers to understand Manolo’s limitations. They would not call on him for these matters, not anymore, and he was glad. He didn’t consider himself qualified for the plight of the mind, of the spirit.
Manolo had never seen a duwende, though his parents both had. They recounted these instances with bizarre clarity. He didn’t know what to think of their stories. Since childhood, he’d heard the same details from the two most levelheaded people he knew, never inconsistent, never with a shade of doubt. While his mother was a shameless gossip and his father liked to pass his days reading magazines, they were no liars. Did this mean his mother had actually watched a duwende drag her school friend fifty feet by her hair, and his father had watched a good friend turn from a patient, good-natured compadre to an eccentric who stared into the emptiness and uttered bits of strange mumblings to pass his days? Manolo could not share their superstition—the duwende was not based on fact, but supposition, fear, and perhaps, deceit.
Yet, he couldn’t escape the etiquette or deny the spaces in the earth he walked on. As an adult, he had tried to break from the habit’s persistent grip, but the words left his mouth as if they weren’t his to keep. In their backyard, a mound of earth rose up near the base of a guava tree, and when he passed it several times a week, he had to say the words:
“Excuse me, just passing through, sir.”
After that first night he’d seen Tala fly from the river, the mound seemed all the more conspicuous. He regarded it with new eyes, thankful for his perseverance.
As he followed her, he tried to avoid stepping on the obvious bumps along the road, sparing himself the verbal incantations.
Manolo was grateful that Tala kept a straight course, never peering over her shadow for a second look at the path she had just crossed. She walked with blind faith—that everything she needed to see was there in front of her, and whatever came before had received its due attention. In this he found her even more beautiful. She seemed to belong in the spaces where each footstep placed her; she filled in the picture along with the sun and the trees.
He was apprehensive at first. His heart hammered in his throat; he could not keep his hands still. Particularly when there was nothing nearby to hide behind, and with a single turn of her head, Tala would see him. But she continued on in a way that eased his misgivings. The farther she walked, the more confident he grew. He began to lose the reluctance that came with the guilt, nearly convincing himself that even his following her this way was natural.
There were tricky moments along the path, a few feet of sparse foliage, entire stretches of gravel without a single tree in sight. Manolo maneuvered around these obstacles by giving Tala a wider rein. He watched her walk ahead until he could no longer see her past the bend of the road or the other side of a hill. Then he waited, calculating distance and time by the ticking of her footsteps.
Once they arrived at the market square, Manolo felt more at ease. The ringing of the church bell overpowered the drum of his heartbeat. The activity of commerce filled spaces with sound and movement, laughter and bickering, children circling their mothers, traders hauling cartloads of goods, all of it distracting him from the conspicuousness of his breathing, the dangle of his hands, the shifting lines of his silhouette. In this crowd it would be safe to light up another smoke and speed things up a notch, shortening the distance between him and his wife. Should Tala turn his way, it would be easier now to find cover—behind a colorful piece of fabric, a potted plant, a display of jewelry. He came across a row of fans and purchased one. It was made of paper, blue on one side, red on the other. He opened the fan and held it in front of him like a screen, and just as soon realized this womanly prop looked ridiculous in his hands.
“Is that you, Dr. Lualhati?” the vendor named Malakit asked aloud, looking at Manolo quizzically. Manolo quickly dropped the fan and moved on without answering.
Farther down the street he purchased a big straw hat. As he walked, he unbuttoned his shirt and slung it over his shoulder, wearing only a white undershirt. Manolo was never one to wear undershirts by themselves, or to wear hats. He kept the brim low, nearly covering his eyes. If Tala should glance over her shoulder and see him, the hat, undershirt, and cigarette would disguise him, and she would notice nothing but a blur of strangers.
But these precautions proved unnecessary. Tala was like an arrow already cast, her destination set. He began to wonder why she walked so determinedly, not stopping to compare prices or browse for the freshest vegetables. The orange folds of her dress swooshed around her ankles, in keeping with her momentum. The stalls became fewer in number, and still Tala walked. When the stalls nearly disappeared altogether, Manolo felt a jolt of displacement, as if waking suddenly from a dream. At the edge of the outdoor market, every detail set in with perfect clarity—the saltwater smells of fresh seafood driven in every hour, the black railing of a fence, the uneven pavement, cluttered with holes. Within the space of a few yards, he’d gone beyond the border of the market that his imagination had scouted, and he could no longer predict what he’d see next.
The village around him swelled in countless directions. A few steps away a blind woman sat against the fence, her hands open on her lap, asking to be lifted up and out, back into the flow. Manolo strode toward her with uncertain purpose, only to see she wasn’t blind, but sleeping.
He scanned the road ahead and quickly found Tala again. All along, he realized, he had anticipated witnessing a certain notion of her predictability. He had expected to watch her shop, to learn whether or not she haggled or paid the first sum offered. He had wanted to feel envious of her admirers, to watch other men stare at the woman who came home to his bed. Tala was supposed to carry wildflowers home with her groceries, then prepare for the evening meal, and like talismans, these images of her would have flickered back to him during his rounds. But now the market was nearly behind him, and Tala, up ahead, had somewhere else to go.
A nervous premonition made his palms begin to sweat and his heartbeat quicken. Could it be that Tala was on her way to meet a lover? Manolo clenched his teeth at this uninvited notion. He lingered at the last stall and purchased a walking stick. It was just the right length for his height, with a swirling pattern etched into the wood.
It dawned on him that Tala could have motives, other than groceries, for going to the market square. But a lover wasn’t one of them.
Other possibilities swarmed through his imagination all at once, making him lightheaded. His heartbeat slowed from a sudden surge of cold. Was she seeking out her wings somehow, or figuring out a way to replace them? He leaned involuntarily on his new cane. To calm himself or simply out of habit, Manolo tried to recollect that first image of his wife at the river, but he couldn’t picture what the length of her hair had been. Had it dangled just below her shoulders, or farther down her back? Without this detail, others began to unravel. Manolo always envisioned her wearing a blue dress, but now he wasn’t so certain. Had it actually been violet or turquoise? Had she worn the same shade every evening?
He watched as Tala shopped at last—from a pauper’s basket, as if she had only received a few centavos earlier that morning. She sat cross-legged on the ground, conversing jovially with the woman selling what looked like leaves, twisted to strange, unnatural contortions. From what he could see at a distance, it was possible that the leave
s resembled familiar objects, but Manolo assumed they were manifestations of the beggar woman’s fancy. Neither possibility made them worth buying.
Manolo felt surprisingly detached trying to pinpoint the woman’s association with his wife. Was she a friend of Tala’s, or were they meeting for the first time? He could not tell, but decided that Tala’s dress at the river had been purple.
The boy with the basket leaned too consistently in Tala’s direction, standing close to her even when her attention was focused on his mother. Something about Tala and the boy made Manolo uncomfortable. He was still a child, not beyond the age of asking question after question, but old enough that the questions he asked would ring with a peculiar wisdom, one that only the very young and the very old seemed to possess. He still had the silky complexion and round eyes of a child, accompanied by a thick mop of hair and clothes that looked like they had been handed down by someone much bigger. He wore a shirt so aged that it fell around him like an old man’s sagging skin, nearly covering his basketball shorts entirely. Manolo imagined that the bottom of this boy’s bare feet had the same color and consistency as the street. Yet they were similar somehow, Tala and this boy, in a way he could not describe. He imagined two seeds blown into the wind, riding the same breeze.
Tala got up and took the boy’s hand, leading him back into the thick of the marketplace, toward Manolo. Ducking back into the stall where he bought his walking stick, Manolo forgot just how beautiful Tala had looked after swimming, when she had been unaware of his presence behind the green. It struck him now that Tala hadn’t invited the attention he expected she would during the course of this walk. The image he had had of her parting the crowd with a single step couldn’t have been further from reality. She blended in, so much so that he almost lost her now. He let her outline fade until it became distorted, whether from his staring too long or the widening distance between them, he could not tell.
The Hour of Daydreams Page 3
