She recognized him.
The look in Manolo’s eyes sent her shooting into the river’s depths, into the bliss of her marital bed, where the warm water soothed her into an endless dream.
She excused herself from the women’s company, saying she could use a little fresh air. She felt their stares on her back, burrowing into her as she walked away, perhaps seeing right through her. This wouldn’t be the case for long.
She knew it was possible to be in two places at once. That the living could escape into dreams while their bodies kept burning sugar and excreting it away, their eyelids twitching in the dark, or, if their eyes were open, they’d remain blinking all the while, never seeing a thing. And it could also happen the other way around, when the phantoms stored in a living consciousness grew so vivid, they took on a life of their own. They walked the earth side by side with those they haunted.
But she was neither a sleepwalker nor an apparition and would accept no such life.
He didn’t know that she’d found him, watching over her in the trees, waiting. And that when they’d finally sat laughing together on the stone, eyes buried in leaves spoke to her in ancient truths as old as the river. She knew then she’d done the right thing abandoning her wings, risking everything on the hope he would end her own endless waiting.
There was no reason for him to know. With their baby on the way, she would be in one place and one only, as real to Manolo as he was to her, even if it meant giving up her past for good.
6. The Veins of a City
So Tala built a city. The way a traveler piles the earth with footsteps, the heavier ones walls and ceilings, the lighter ones open doorways, and if you connected the footsteps with lines through all the places the traveler has been, you would see the framework of skyscrapers and trees, entire forests of people with their many seeing eyes. Tala piled her own city with bricks, each with the weight of this traveler leaving home once more and for good; she left a comfortable protected life, and herself within that life, to a new city with slanting rooflines she had not looked upon every day for years. All of it was alien and therefore merciful; starting over from nothing, hers was a fortress made from love and love alone.
She built a city the way the mother builds a world within her womb, becoming both woman and house, both mortal and god. The cells of her body divide and multiply, and within her own borders there is only potential, a chamber of limitless will and the love that makes it possible. Tala found this city within and built it from the inside out.
It was a city in progress, always in construction and reconstruction, her mind the builder, her eyes the lens from which it sprang, and for her it was a matter of placement, situating herself at once and forever among the bricks and sand and walls, the particles that surround the dwelling of a husband, the matter for a wife to embrace and raise her child in. She would relocate to this city, find herself in that maze of winding streets, and the woman she found would no longer be her, then, but the ever-changing her, the growing-older her, the tired her and the her with regrets, the loved and the damned and the loving her, the mortal and aging her, but like every being in this new city, still divine, still making and building, choice by choice, tearing down walls along the way, in this city or that, watching the silhouette change and grow and sometimes decay.
She found her house alongside the labyrinth of streets, marked with a number that would take the place of her name, for this symbol belonged not only to her but to him, and she lived with him in that number on that house in that parallel city, and she did not look back.
A single nail gave rise to the foundation of a house. From the window of that house she watched the city rise, and out of that city, inhabitants sprang to life, filling the empty rooms and courtyards. Like her, these new inhabitants had no past. But Tala’s city gave them each a face. Matter cannot exist without space, and given a sphere in which to live, the people claimed the validity of their own existences.
Within the perimeter of the city, the people came together in groups, forming networks in which to gather and work. Families arose. Friendships were made and broken. The city was large enough that each person only interacted with a small number of the population each day. The majority were strangers to one another. Anonymous faces in an endless sea of faces.
But every single inhabitant was connected, tied one to the other because the city itself touched them all. The soles of their feet scraped against the same floors, even if only once in their entire lives. Sometimes, two people never passed shoulder to shoulder but looked upon the same street post each day. The walls and city gates absorbed a multitude of fingerprints, and these fingerprints were ingrained in the wooden fibers, an oily residue solidified into cement, stuck in plaster, painted on the metal, forever tracing the city’s multitudinous identity.
The bodies in her city began as shells. At first, she didn’t know how to fill them. For inspiration, she looked to the streets of Manlapaz, where men, women, and children were so full of life it spilled from their mouths. The children burst with laughter and shrieks. The woman at the vegetable stand could not stop with her commands. Fill this, get that, help me, stop, go, no, forget it, hurry up, again. She learned to translate this woman’s words: Listen to me, listen to me, I am here, I exist. The old man by the fishing docks at the edge of the island could not let anyone forget that he used to be young. Anyone who bought his bait left with more than worms; they came away with another perspective of the old man: as a little boy who was good at math, as a teenager helping his mother in the kamote fields, as an athletic boxer who would’ve gone pro if it weren’t for a bad knee.
Then there were those who seemed like shells—a beggar outside the same restaurant every afternoon, waiting vacantly, too tired to ask for food. With no words to feed the city. The schoolgirl on her way home from school, reluctant because her father did not treat her like his little girl, and so her eyes escaped to another place, leaving her body behind so that she couldn’t walk in a straight line. But they weren’t shells after all. Each of them had a story, many stories, stories that filled them, lifting them out of themselves, or weighed them, dragging them closer to the ground, some stories fighting, one against the other, helping them move forward, lulling them to rest, each minute presenting an option, pulling them in so many directions. They intersected, the people with their stories, exchanging fragments of their lives, invented fragments or obvious facts, memories, personal truths, secrets, deceit—and with each intersection, they altered the stories of others, confirmed what others already knew, extended their plotlines, raised questions, sparked the synapse that would spark more synapses in the cauldron of infinite lives. She knew how to wake the bodies in her city.
She would fill them with stories of their own.
She did not know quite how to do this. She weighed different possibilities. One, that there were no new stories, that each person relived a different version of the same story, and this pattern repeated with every individual, continuing endlessly in time. Another was that there was a handful of stories, and each person was designated one, and every individual lived a different version of these five stories, sometimes joining two stories together to create something new. And then there was the possibility that no two stories were alike and each was spontaneous, a matter of choice, and because the choices were endless, the possibilities for a life story were also endless. She forged ahead without the answers.
Her city began with a face; she read the lines like lines on a map, the eyes the lakes, the nose the mountain at the center of the land. She had grown into the habit of taking day trips with her husband, if only to find a face in which to recognize the geography and the life living there, so familiar she could claim it. She’d seen many faces on these trips, and watching the maps on each face was travel itself. The skin told of distant continents, the thickness of hair of untasted foods and their undiscovered textures. The sounds from the lips curled around the edges, hinting at far-off currents. And in every voice and pimple, glossy t
ear, or lift of the eyebrow, she saw part of a story, made from one day or a sequence of days, seen through the eyes of a face on the map of some unformed city.
“Look, Manolo,” she’d said one day at Tagarro Bay. “There are people from every part of the world and every background here in one place. If you could be part of someone’s story, whose would it be?”
“Yours,” he’d replied. “I’d be part of yours.” He’d said the words without pausing to think, looked at her with eyes that were not lakes but familiar rivers, and they were gleaming because he was flirting, touching her without touching her, and that quickly she was swimming again, flying in air that was water that was Manolo’s eyes. And she told him what he already knew, that he was the main character, a starring role.
Then without his knowledge she continued her search, for a city, for a past, so that afterward (in time) she could call the faces of her daughter and husband her original homeland, built from the inside out.
She even gave him a peek at the gates, evaluating the faces and their stories out loud like it was a game. How she would not choose the sailor with the brisk lift of the arm, the loosening belly out of which echoed the extension of every laugh, confident and protective of wife and family. She would not choose the fisherman, bustling, busy from line to stall, filled with the duties of work and responsibility, sleeping well and dreaming little. Nor would she choose the expert saleswoman, who knew when to charm and when to bully and how to disguise a bloated price tag as a bargain. When she found him, she knew. He was a lanky figure in plain, dark street clothes, smoking a cigarette in the middle of the plaza, watching the crowd as she was watching the crowd; he met her gaze through the middle of it all, a body bent into the narrow curves of a question mark.
“I’d be in his story,” she said. “Because it wouldn’t be fair if everyone chose the fairy tales.”
And when she had her own personal map, she followed it. Yet there was so much more to do.
She was not creative. She had to start with what she knew. She began with her mother. Because everyone, including her, knows a story about a woman and her letters to a lost love.
This woman is a prostitute. She lives by the naval base in Tagarro Bay. Getting clients is easy; she averages ten appointments a day. She does not take the men home. They do it in cars, in the park, in the alley, in the warehouse of a shipyard, in an empty bunker, in a dirty bathroom. It’s faster this way.
She falls in love with the man who pays her to talk. The one who doesn’t touch her. She sees him every day; he pays her for three appointments. If he had more money, he tells her, he would buy all ten, so she could talk to him all night. So the other men wouldn’t have to touch her.
She brings this man home. She stops taking his money. On their first night in her cramped room, surrounded by hampers full of dirty laundry, abandoned toys, and other clutter, they do nothing but kiss and talk. With this man, she discovers her desire. She wants to make love. She wants to stop taking money from the others. She envisions a different kind of life. He tells her he will take her away, out of her poverty, to his world across the ocean. Where the streets are clean. Where the life she envisions is everywhere, growing on trees, ready for her to pluck like an apple.
He confesses. He was like the others all along. If he could have, he would have had her on the first night, he tells her. He would have gotten what he paid for. But he is sick. Dying. He does not want to make her sick. Her stories made him forget. Her poor, sad world filled with mango trees made the sickness taste a little sweeter. He does not love her, he says. He leaves.
But the sickness, she learns, has already spread. She is infected with this man. Dying. She continues talking to him every day, in letters. She cannot take clients. She is famished. She buys stamps and envelopes before food. She writes on napkins, on the backs of soda labels that she finds in the streets. She sends a letter a day. He never writes back, even when she tells him that she has had his child. She goes on with her life, dictating its passing in words. She imagines her scraps of paper pushed into the points of branches, growing like leaves on the trees overseas. Collecting into a life as it’s meant to be lived.
She believes he is dead. Then she isn’t sure. She knows he is alive. She wonders if he was ever truly sick. She makes appointments with clients because her children are hungry. She talks only in her letters, only to him. Writing becomes a matter of habit, then purpose, cultivating the tree she can grow because of him. The infection never spreads and never completely heals. It stings underneath her skin, but most of the time, she forgets all about it.
Then there is the story of a man in despair. Teetering on the brink—any moment poised to land in the way of salvation or fall into utter hopelessness. On the brink, he feels safe. But he is merely lost. He is her brother.
He goes to the same bar every night. It stays open long past the others, until the sun is out. It’s possible they make an exception for him, because in the morning he wakes up, aching all over, his chin against the hard table, moist with drool or alcohol or both. Once again, he is the only one there, except for the crazy witch behind the bar. She is always around and always alert. He wonders if she ever sleeps; he wonders if she is even human.
He doesn’t know he’s an alcoholic. There is no such thing in his world, no AA meetings where lonely bachelors and sorry husbands confess their problems. His problems start at home, then multiply. Since his ma started taking the sailor home, he has no place to stay. He is embarrassed to tell his friends. He doesn’t go to school. He can’t remember the last time he ate. Or what he did yesterday.
The crazy witch lets him drink as much as he wants. The burning liquid warms him and makes him forget. Forget the memory at five years old, when his pa took him to the cockfight. The way one rooster made the other bleed to death then afterward collapsed, the way it twitched to its own death while its owner tried to sew its neck together. He wanted to cry or throw up until his pa patted his head, laughing, telling him, What a fight, nothing better than a good fight. And he tried to like it too. Then his pa was gone, and for a long time that fight was the only thing he could remember about him.
Until he turned twelve and his ma forgot his birthday then ignored him for a week straight. He set out to find his father then. Tracked him down to a plush home, with maids and a beautiful wife who looked like the light-skinned women on billboards. His father pretended that he didn’t know him. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending.
But that was two years ago. And the crazy witch is saying something.
“Pay up. I said pay up.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“You think this is a free house? You think I’m your grandma?”
“I’ll wash your dishes.”
She laughs and the creases on her face multiply. She looks fearful, like a monster, her eyelashes thick like spider legs.
“Dishes! You’ll wash dishes? Pay for the alcohol. And all the nights you used this bar as a boarding house, rent-free for you.”
He explains again that he is broke. She signals with her head and he follows her through the dividing doors between the bar and a back room, where crates of beer are stacked among piles of newspapers and dry goods. A metal rack is pushed to one side, where a jacket and two dresses dangle alongside a row of empty hangers. He follows her through a hallway, then another. They walk through a room filled with boxes, where a woman sits at a computer in the corner, looking up as they pass, then returning her attention to a piece of paper she is holding. She files it. They walk on, through a little outdoor courtyard separating one building from another. His footsteps crunch on a landscape of pebbles. It is a strange hidden world behind the bar. From the front, all you see is a cozy little hut, something you might find in a tropical paradise. He never imagined it could extend this far. It feels never-ending. He wonders if he’s dreaming.
Finally they arrive in a room crowded with girls. The younger ones glance up curiously from their game of jacks. Two others do not stir from the
ir napping, and the pretty one staring him down is not much older than him.
“You’ll stay with them.”
“No way. What is this place?”
“No? Then you work for me. Come back this time tomorrow, after you’ve washed your face. Consider this place your office, boy.”
The woman laughs, creases multiplying upon creases. He doesn’t know why, but he thinks only of the rooster, its neck being sewn to keep it alive, killing it.
So Tala grows up without a father. His absence takes many shapes. Mostly it is in the ebb and flow. In the women at the makeup counter, craning their necks closer, enchanted by her fair skin. Others do the same—the teacher, before Mama pulled her out of school, again. The landlord coming to collect the rent, the tourists finding their way to nearby restaurants—bodies leaning in, erasing space. Then at home, a retreat. Outside, her mother is proud; once inside the door, only distance will do. Tala reminds her of him. Sometimes, after writing one of her letters, Mama will grasp Tala’s face in her hands and stare at her fiercely, patting her cheeks and forehead, clutching her arms.
When she turns eighteen, her brother tells her she will marry a man who looks like her father. She will go across the ocean, where Mama always wanted to go. Maybe Tala will even meet her father there, run into him in the street. She will be happy. She will send them money every month. She will make their mama well, do her part to take the burden off of him.
Her brother comes from a world with different smells. He disturbs their quiet with raucous visits, banging his way from room to room and always talking loudly, as if he needed to raise his voice above a place filled with racket. But there is always just the three of them. Tala comes to associate his world, the world of night, the world of noise and smoke and sour beer bottle smells, with a place along the coast where different worlds meet. The place he would send her to must reek of his smell.
The Hour of Daydreams Page 7
