Words like this from her husband’s mouth pleased her. She agreed. In a sleepy country province, she would not choose the most ready story. Even for the child in her belly, still the size of her thumb, she hoped for more excitement. She almost revealed her pregnancy to Manolo then and there, but willed herself to wait. The time would have to be right. First she would fill the empty shelves of her past, shelves bolstering walls that defined houses that cut into streets of an expanding and voracious city. And they would be a real family, without secrets, simple as the neighbors on their porches, with fire to fuel their active volcanoes.
They stocked up on snacks at the sari sari store. The shopkeeper was in his early fifties, with a booming voice that could have made the canned goods on the shelves vibrate. He had crooked teeth and a wide smile to showcase them. His confident, personable demeanor went well with a strong build and upright posture, made all the more noticeable because of his leathery brown skin, hardened under the pressures of work, sun, and time. This was a man who provided for his family and earned the trust and respect of his customers. Tala liked this man, and yet, she would not choose to be the shopkeeper’s daughter, someone who stocked shelves and filled out inventory slips, someone who went about her business without complication until she glimpsed the unassuming doctor from behind a row of cereal boxes. From that moment on, she would have sought the doctor’s face every day she worked, looking up from her dry goods whenever a customer entered the store. And one day, she would catch Manolo’s eye in return, but not before he had captured her whole heart.
“We could open up a clinic,” she proposed after they’d returned to the car with armfuls of goodies. “While you treat the common cold and diagnose hyperthyroid cases on one side, I’ll treat the broken heart and the plagued spirit on the other. Together we’ll cure the whole person.”
He could have asked her more then, about the woman at the albularyo stand, about her visits there. Had she been striving to help the barefoot kid at her side with the albularyo’s medicines, which his struggling mother could not afford to buy? Did she herself nurse a “plagued spirit”? He remembered her at the riverbank—storms had come and gone inside of him before he’d summoned the nerve to speak to her.
They drove for hours, passing fields broken only by sky, watching the mountains scatter as they wound down to flatter ground, the road beneath them changing from narrow and pockmarked to wide and even. Houses multiplied in number; intersections emerged with potential detours. Eventually, the country road became a city street, which became a highway, and across the bay before them, tall buildings reached for the same sky the mountains of their Manlapaz had already kissed.
“Ma’s palm wine used to get the whole province drunk,” Manolo recalled. “If you’re interested in nursing broken hearts or plagued spirits, it might be worth researching the tricks of the bottle.”
A silly thought crossed her mind—of selling Iolana’s palm wine from her sisters’ booth, in shot-sized bottles, labeled as the remedy for shyness or reticence.
They drove into a thicker swarm of cars at the port of Tagarro Bay. With its big ships on the dock, islands in and of themselves, and its wide boardwalk dotted with shops and outdoor vendors, Tagarro Bay was a gathering place for stowaways. She saw faces, bicycles with their baskets full, shoppers satisfied with their candies and parcels, seabirds perched on metal railings, the outline of ships, the twinkle of water, dirty napkins tossed alongside empty soda cans and Styrofoam trays, crowded benches, palm trees, a thousand pairs of moving legs from a thousand different places, low hedges and skinny trees, beggars with signs and near-empty cups, a puppet show displayed from a cardboard theater, seabirds eating discarded food, and the smells of every object came together in a muggy stew that engulfed them immediately, swallowing their aroma of mountain and earth to season the stew all the more. With this view from her passenger window she decided she would not be the politician’s daughter, suited up and keeping pace with her escort in high heels to meet a ship’s captain or a high-ranking general. She would not be the young movie actress, driving by in a chauffeured car with tinted windows. She would not be the woman on stilts, face painted and head lost in a higher elevation. These were the fairy tales of others. She thought of who she wanted to be most, wife to Manolo and mother to their child, and she realized that every battle, even the most brutal, was fought for the simplest of freedoms.
“Look, Manolo,” she said. “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 replied. “I’d be part of yours.” He had parked the car and they remained seated while he dangled the hand with his cigarette out the window, neither of them rushing to join the noise and madness of the crowds. His stare drank her in, the kind of look a man gives a woman when he anticipates making love to her, and receiving that look she smiled, the fine hairs on her arms standing on end as she recalled the last time he’d looked at her that way, the pleasures it had led to. She told him he was definitely the main character, a starring role in her story. She returned to window watching, and whenever she noticed a particular character, from the busy fisherman to the overzealous preacher, she pointed them out to Manolo, imagining their stories out loud as he listened.
Then she found him, a stick-figure type, elegantly thin, with an edginess that defied his body’s elegance. Striking in his aloneness, he smoked in the middle of the plaza, watching the crowd as she watched the crowd. He seemed to meet her eyes through the blur of nameless faces in constant motion.
Manolo followed the direction of her stare to find a typical boardwalk scene unfolding, one with too many people on their disparate missions, none of them connected except for the fact that they had all shown up at the same place on the same day; but suddenly a pathway cleared and a silhouette emerged within it—another crowd-watcher at the other end of their gazes. For no more than a few seconds that slipped discreetly past him, they watched each other instead of the crowd, three observers with the universe bubbling in between them.
She was hungry and told Manolo so, so they disembarked toward the seafood stands for the shrimp fry that she craved. As he ventured toward a suitable vendor, she pointed to the benches where she would go to find him and went to meet her phantom. To learn his story, and hers. Before her eyes the city began to rise up—not downtown Tagarro Bay, with its looming skyscrapers and discreet alleys zigzagging behind the big ships, but the one she had built in its shadow.
10. Out of the Lonely Sky
Father had developed a strange, new habit of patting him on the back. As they met in the hallway, Manolo on the way to the washroom with a fresh towel over his shoulder, Father leaving the washroom with minty breath—pat, pat, pat, pat. As they met in the kitchen, Manolo coming in to brew a pot of coffee, Father searching the refrigerator for the remainder of the condensed milk—pat, pat, pat, pat. As they met in the yard, Manolo to do the watering and Father getting up from his favorite shady nook—pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. Sometimes, the pats would sneak up on him after a casual conversation. Like yesterday, when they had stood together in the yard after merienda, and Father wished out loud for a comfortable spot on which to nap outside. After chatting for some time about the possibilities of a hammock—what type they might purchase and where they would hang it—Manolo had momentarily forgotten Father’s recent affection, until he turned back toward the house and—pat, pat, and pat.
“What’s the meaning of all this?” he’d asked then and there.
But Father mistook his question and walked away feeling a bit offended.
“If you’re not a fan of hammocks, you should’ve just said so in the first place.”
This wasn’t the only suspicious behavior sprouting about the place. The other day, Manolo had found Mother and Luchie talking animatedly in the hallway, only to stop their chatter once he entered their sight. “Carry on,” he’d invited them, but this only incited silence and expressio
ns of exaggerated innocence, which caused him to think the two women ridiculous, if only because he wasn’t in on their little secret.
Tala, too, was off somewhat. She had returned with him from their trip to Tagarro Bay, only to settle into a more reticent mood—reticent as well as distracted, staring for long moments at the contents of her closet when she was getting dressed, stirring her tea into a cup-sized whirlpool, and spending much more time in the bath, as evidenced by the wrinkles on her fingers and toes when she emerged.
So at the end of the week, when he came out of his office with his last patient for the day, bidding her a good weekend and accepting her gift (a bag of ripe figs from her fruit tree) as he walked her to the front door, he was relieved to find his parents setting up the card tables. They opened two portable tables and placed them side by side on the outdoor patio next to the sliding door that separated their dining area from the backyard. Whenever they had the family or neighbors over for mah-jongg or cards, something they’d done since he was a boy, Manolo felt comfortably fixed in the routines of home, as if all things were as they should be. And a bit of normalcy was just what he needed.
Around those parts, they said gambling was in the blood—you either navigated toward the weekly circle of card addicts who frequented living rooms and back patios, placed your bets at the raucous cockfighting arenas, or waited hopefully for your numbers to be called at the church-sponsored Bingo nights; or you turned your face away, believing gambling to be a complete waste of time and money, something reserved for the idlers and miscreants.
As a young boy, Manolo had always enjoyed the nights that uncles, aunts, or neighbors came over to gamble with their coins and bills stacked impressively on the table. He would sit on Father’s lap, listening to his elders talk, and they often forgot he was there. They spoke of frightening but magical creatures—half-human, half-demon beings who came out after dark, preying on passengers in the lone pickup truck rumbling down the country road or the foolish wanderers exploring moon-drenched nooks. He found out about the family friend who’d become possessed by the duwende, the pregnant neighbor who’d lost a baby to the aswang, the landowner who’d become rich because the diwata favored him, reading his dreams as he slept beneath the shade of her tree.
This eavesdropping was also the way he learned of infidelity and its dirty trail of temptation and humiliation. He learned of cheating neighbors and scandalized husbands. When they thought him too young to remember or understand, the drunken neighbors had turned to him and insisted he find a nice, simple girl when he grew up—the less attractive, the better. Not a whore, Manolo. Oh, but you can never tell! Please, you can always tell, even the quiet whores say how much they want it with their eyes.
The gamblers often spoke of their children, who had won what prize in school or had narrowly escaped a coma falling off a coconut tree. But mostly, it was about how deep the hurt could be when a child was left disappointed, or when a child did the disappointing. The elders had consistent dreams for their kids’ futures—visions of movie stars, doctors, nurses, ambassadors, and scientists circled the table. They had no aspirations for their children in local government; the system would swallow even their giant, unspoiled hearts, wringing out the compassion for anyone beyond a numbered few. They had seen this happen far too many times to believe it could turn out differently.
Manolo had ascertained early on that his parents’ moods brightened on these nights as did his own spirits, and for a long time they believed he was one of those born gamblers, addicted from the start. But the game itself did not appeal to him. He’d meandered to his Father’s lap because he enjoyed watching the concentration on the players’ faces and hearing their jovial conversation, peppered with hopes, sorrows, disappointments, and desires—feelings his parents didn’t speak of with him when they were by themselves.
On this night, four couples—Camcam and Hildo, Lourdes and Jing-Jing, Lasam and Lamata, and Mother and Father—came together on the patio, filling their yard with laughter and regular sprinkles of cigarette ash. By this time the sky was a deep and mysterious blue, with hints of stars already winking mischievously. Nearby, other neighbors had assembled outdoors as well, taking advantage of the night air to sing drunken and euphoric songs accompanied by a clumsy guitar melody. Camcam and Hildo’s dog had followed them over and was busy sniffing the tree trunks in their yard and spraying them with whatever drops he could muster from his aged bladder. Every now and then, Hildo would lose a promising hand and drop his cards onto the table with a loud exclamation—“Pu tang!”—and the dog would react to his master’s voice, jaunting over at a slow but determined speed to sit beside Hildo’s legs until he felt assured that all was once again right. Like her husband, Camcam was a competitive player, though more quietly so, muttering sly warnings each time she picked up a new card. “Ah! I’ve got this one now. . . .” Lourdes and Jing-Jing took turns playing, watching, scolding, and rooting the other on when they weren’t in charge of a hand. They laughed at the same time or shook their heads simultaneously, depending on the numbers, shapes, and colors they conspired with. Their hosts, Mother and Father, kept the mood easy and welcoming, with coffee brewed and palm wine at the ready should their tastes change to something a bit looser. They sat with their chairs touching, Father chuckling happily at regular intervals and Mother getting up to fetch snacks from the kitchen when their bowls needed refilling.
Far beyond the age of sitting on his father’s lap, Manolo sat with his wife in the garden encircled by flowering shrubs and bordered by tall trees, where their blanket was within earshot of Hildo’s curse words and the high pitch of Mother’s occasional laughter. Every now and then, the visiting dog would amble into their enclosure, sniff their feet, and be off once more.
Reclined with her on the blanket and watching the sky’s hue deepen, Manolo thought back to his childhood and its night sounds, the gambling voices and the crickets, coins tinkling into a pile at the center of a table and oil popping on the frying pan. It was a comfortable and carefree time, but he remembered those nights he had gone to bed with a tight feeling in his chest. He would shut his eyes harder then, as if this might make the feeling pass, and the darkness would engulf him all around, an infinite gaping mouth into which he would endlessly fall alone. Sometimes, for comfort, he would escape to his parents’ bed, safe with their protective bodies breathing warm beside him. And the tightness would either return or go away, making way for sleep. As he got older, he found the tightness never failed to come back, sometimes after a very long interval, sometimes sooner, and he came to know this feeling had a name—sadness. Being an only child meant having the occasional, inevitable loneliness, but even when he spent time with Palong, who was like a brother to him, or went off to university, surrounded by the distracting habits of peers his own age, including those he liked and respected, the feeling still returned habitually, like the smell of that gaping endless mouth in the dark. He waited for a remedy, and like most young men he believed it would come in the shape of a beautiful woman.
That beautiful woman had come, only to bring him more sorrow, that which had a source and a motive, unlike the sadness of his childhood, which was the color of space, of innocence waiting to be filled. In spite of his hurt, he’d appreciated learning the difference at last, between the waiting and the knowing, and when he became a doctor he understood even more that such emotions couldn’t be left in the hands of medicine and that even the least pleasant ones, those thrusting hearts into darkness, should not be numbed but entered into, with the body as well as the mind, sprawling in that stifling endless space, so as to find a way through the dark that always comes and goes.
He watched the night sky, knowing its coming and going. This fluctuation was life. Those enormous colors, truth. Tala, beside him, was still. She was not the first beautiful woman in his life, but she was the first to make it here, into the sounds of his childhood, beside the boy completely at home among the gamblers’ stories and heartbreak. Together they had their
own quiet circle of comfort in the dark. She was family to him now, closer to him than anyone and more beloved, and yet, it was still possible to lie side by side and feel the ghostly scratch of loneliness, like an animal trapped in the depths of the earth. The sky was dark now and infinite, and he knew this would never change, that every one of us contains a depth that could never be seen or reached by another person.
“Even the beauty of the stars can’t compare to family,” Tala said, still gazing heavenward. As though she were reading his mind, or perhaps because the vastness of the cosmos inspired similar thoughts, Tala told him she had been thinking of the dark and lonely places from which she had come. “You’ve brought me into your home, and now your family is mine.” Her words and tone were full of gratitude, and love. She placed his hand on her belly. “And now, we’re starting a family of our own. Manolo, I’m pregnant.”
Manolo felt tall enough to leap into the kapre’s tree, for the first time past the giant’s kneecap, above his waist and shoulders, the sinuous veins of his neck, and the malodorous stench of his breath. He stood on the giant’s nose, eye to eye, sharing a whiff of the kapre’s ever-present cigar. His view of the stars was endless. This infinity took his words, demanding quiet and reverence, then glory. He lifted Tala up and whisked her gleefully through the air. They would have a party, he exclaimed, invite the whole barrio, summon Little Roland two days in advance to roast the finest pig, busy five women in the kitchen to cook an endless feast. He led Tala by the hand to the circle of gamblers—the four couples, including Mother and Father, with their expectant faces, shiny under the moon and all their hopes for the future.
When he made the announcement, there was general applause, followed by the distant clapping of some neighbors, who joined in the applause for the sake of congratulating, without knowing who or what they were congratulating. There was a yelping and whooping through the night, and everyone knew that something good was alive in the Lualhati home. Mother beamed and Camcam bounced giddily in her chair, a different woman from the serious gambler determined to win. News of a baby brought people together. Father stood up in his chair and placed a hand on Manolo’s arm. With the other hand—pat, pat, pat, pat—a gentle warmth and signification of pride. Manolo laughed heartily, finally understanding the meaning of that gesture—his father and the women had discovered the news before he had.
The Hour of Daydreams Page 10
