Fish-Hair Woman

by Merlinda Bobis

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  Filipino-Australian writer and performer Merlinda Bobis has published in three languages across multiple genres. Her novels, short story and poetry books, and plays have received various awards, including the Prix Italia, the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories, the Philippine National Book Award, and the Australian Writers’ Guild Award. She has been short-listed for The Age Poetry Book Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Bobis has performed her own works in Australia, Philippines, US, Spain, France, and China. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong. About the creative process, she says: ‘Writing visits like grace. Its greatest gift is the comfort if not the joy of transformation. In an inspired moment, we almost believe that anguish can be made bearable and injustice can be overturned, because they can be named. And if we’re lucky, joy can even be multiplied a hundredfold, so we may have reserves in the cupboard for the lean times.’

  Other books by Merlinda Bobis

  The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008, 2009)

  Banana Heart Summer (2005, 2008)

  Pag-uli, Pag-uwi, Homecoming (2004)

  White Turtle (1999) / The Kissing (US edition 2001)

  Summer Was a Fast Train without Terminals (1998)

  Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon /

  Kantada ng Babaing Mandirigma Daragang Magayon (1993, 1997)

  Ang Lipad ay Awit sa Apat na Hangin / Flight is Song on Four Winds (1990)

  Rituals (1990)

  FISH-HAIR WOMAN

  Merlinda Bobis

  First published by Spinifex Press 2012

  Spinifex Press Pty Ltd

  504 Queensberry Street

  North Melbourne, Victoria 3051

  Australia

  women@spinifexpress.com.au

  www.spinifexpress.com.au

  Copyright © Merlinda Bobis, 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  Copying for educational purposes

  Information in this book may be reproduced in whole or part for study or training purposes, subject to acknowledgement of the source and providing no commercial usage or sale of material occurs. Where copies of part or whole of the book are made under part VB of the Copyright Act, the law requires that prescribed procedures be followed. For information contact the Copyright Agency Limited.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Stephanie Holt

  Cover design by Deb Snibson, MAPG

  Photos by Valerie Chan and the Legaspi writers

  Design for news items (Anvil) by Ariel Dalisay

  Typeset by Palmer Higgs

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

  The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Bobis, Merlinda C. (Merlinda Carullo)

  Fish hair woman / Merlinda Bobis.

  ISBN: 9781876756970 (pbk.)

  9781742197968 (ebook:ePub)

  9781742197937 (ebook: pdf)

  9781742197944 (ebook: Kindle)

  A823.4

  This publication is assisted by the Australia Council, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body.

  The writing of this novel was assisted by the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

  Contents

  Beloved

  Gestures

  Iraya

  Testimonies

  River

  For Mama Ola

  Who once grew her hair to the back of her knees

  Who told me stories about a river

  Who opened her window to fireflies

  Who called me her first beloved

  Why do these things happen?

  I cannot find the answer.

  I can only try to lay the question in its place.

  Prologue

  The howling bounces around the trees used for coffins. It climbs to a mournful pitch, slopes down and tapers to a whimper. Then it starts again, the same distressing ascent and decline. Sometimes it simply keels over.

  I, Luke McIntyre, assure myself it’s not me but I feel the strain in my throat. I swallow, gripping the sheaf of papers. And anyway they can’t hear. They are the handful of passengers flying to Manila, the soft-spoken, soft-soled lot of them. It’s business class and the mood is affluent restraint, like a signature hush. I drum the seat in front of me with my sandals. Someone murmurs her annoyance. Quickly a steward appears to serve the nicest admonishment against the drumming or the fraying sandals, who knows. Bloody snoot!

  The howling starts again. It dives into the river and I can’t breathe. The water fills my mouth, my throat, my lungs. It is sweet, it is very sweet.

  Chapter 1

  Lemon grass. When the river was sweet with it, they came for me. Half an hour after the Angelus, when the dark was wrestling with the light, they came in a haze of the first fireflies. Tinsel on the green uniforms of the three men, bordering a sleeve here, circling a belt there, filling buttonholes, dotting an insignia and smothering the mouth of the sergeant’s M-16. Young Ramon, he of the sullen face. So like a dark angel with his halo of darting lights, harbinger of omens from the river. ‘Putang ina!’ he cursed, swatting the lights on his pouting lips. I knew it was going to be my final assignation and I heard keening in my scalp.

  A river sweet with lemon grass and breathing fireflies — how could you believe such a tale? But in Iraya we had mastered the art of faith, if only to believe that our village was still alive during the purge by the military. So when they came for me, I believed their story, and every strand of my hair heard my heart break.

  Hair. How was it linked with the heart? I’ll tell you — it had something to do with memory. Every time I remembered anything that unsettled my heart, my hair grew one handspan. Mamay Dulce was convinced of this phenomenon when I was six years old. ‘Very tricky hair, very tricky heart,’ she whispered to me in her singsong on mornings when I woke up to even longer hair on my pillow after a night of agitated dreams. ‘You had long dreams last night, Estrella, with long memories too.’

  But were you alive when the soldiers came, I could have affirmed our secret tall tale with more clarity. You see, Mamay Dulce, history hurts my hair, did you know that? Remembering is always a bleeding out of memory, like pulling thread from a vein in the heart, a coagulation so fine, miles of it stretching upwards to the scalp then sprouting there into the longest strand of red hair. Some face-saving tale to explain my twelve metres of very thick black hair with its streaks of red and hide my history. I am a Filipina, tiny and dark as a coconut husk, but what red fires glint on my head!

  In 1987, in my twenty-eighth year, the village told tales about my hair. How they trusted it as much as they trusted undying love, martyrdom and resurrection, even beatific visions. Ay, those fireflies are from the light of Damascus, so surely they’ll strike the soldiers, smother their mouths, eye
s and guns into dumbness or blindness, even into mercy. A conversion to something close to love. But Sergeant Ramon only swatted the lights on his forever-pouting lips and ordered me to get my hair ready for the river.

  ‘Fish with your hair, woman!’

  Always that command, which summed up my life. After the government declared Total War against the rebels, I understood why I was born a freak, why I was more hair than body. What incredible length and thickness and strength. Not my beauty, as one would boast of this crowning glory, but my scourge, which made me feel and look top heavy, as if anytime I would be dragged down by whirlpools of black with red lights and there get lost, never to be found again.

  Where is she? Always the question that passed from mouth to mouth pursed between a knowing smile and worry or pain, like the way it contorts at the taste of fish soup with too much lemon in it. Where is she? Ay, washing her hair in the river, or drying it now, perhaps combing it, braiding it — but where is she? With her hair, where else, all of Iraya chuckled. Where is she? Eating with her hair, sleeping with her hair, taking her hair for a wander. But not cutting it. If anyone so much as whispered this disaster, the whole village would have been at my door, weeping for their river’s sake, for their lives’ sake. ‘Hair of Estrella, have mercy on us!’ The only time when they would remember my name.

  Where is she? With her hair. Who is she? The Fish-Hair Woman.

  How little we know or wish to know of the history of our myths, saints or gods. It is enough that we invent for them a present face and believe that they can save us from ourselves. But no, I will not allow you to invent me, you who read this, so I will tell you everything. Listen. If you need saving at all, understand that I had relinquished salvation after that last night in the water.

  Lambat na itom

  na itom pero sa dugo natumtom

  samong babaying parasira

  buhok pangsalbar-pangsira

  kang samong mga padaba

  Very black net

  but blood soaked

  our fisherwoman

  hair to save-fish

  all our beloved

  ‘… from the river, from the river,’ Sergeant Ramon mumbled the refrain of this local ditty to the first Australian in Iraya.

  Three months before the night of lemon grass and fireflies, on another night when the rifles were silvered by the moon, I met Tony McIntyre. ‘Whitey-troublemaker-and-crazy-nosy-tourist-and-bullshitting-writer-hereto-look-for-stories-that’s-what-he-says,’ the sergeant babbled. He caught the Australian spying on me as I bathed in the river. Perhaps he thought he could vanish in a jungle of red berries and lilac blooms, his pink and white face blending with the tropical foliage, until he felt the nudge of steel on his nape — ‘Get up, you spying Amerkano!’

  In the village the white man is a rara avis and always tagged as ‘American’. Counter-insurgency operations assisted by the United States have returned an old ghost: forty years of American rule. ‘Amerkano, Amerkano!’ the sergeant taunted the cowering stranger — but shouldn’t he have shaken the pale hand instead, if indeed this was an American weeding out communists?

  Tony must have thought, thank God, I’m Australian, then broke into a run. He was lucky then. Sergeant Ramon never shot anyone with me around, not at that time, not yet. ‘Hello,’ I said, holding out my hand to the ashen-faced stranger; and the soldier never forgave him. Because he had stared at my wet body, because I had taken his hand, because I had taken him home. So three months later, the boy-faced soldier came for me. We had to walk to the river, and I had to remember. I knew this in my heart, looking at him waving his M-16 before my hut.

  ‘You’re eating fireflies, Ramon.’

  ‘Shut up, woman, and get down here!’

  His two men waited outside, as he charged up my steps in a cloud of lights. ‘Pests, pests! The white man brought this with him, pestilence!’

  My scalp ached. Piled on my head, the braids began to grow. A chain of handspans, too much remembering. Enough, enough, I wanted to scream.

  His jealous pout was luminescent. ‘The river is not fit for drinking, again — lemon grass taste, bah! And the light from these flies, putang ina! They’ve scared all the fishes away — all because you fucked him!’

  Tony McIntyre, my lover who had come all the way from the base of the earth to gather our grief into print, so he could purge his own. My beloved Australian with the solemn green eyes, flecked with brown, and the perfect curve of brow. He quoted Rilke as he watched me unbraid my hair. He kissed it, kissed me, his voice as if from a dream. ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror …’ And the strands snagged his hands, his limbs, ay, how tightly, I felt him tremble so.

  Chapter 2

  Over Rilke the red pen is poised like a dissecting knife: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. Luke McIntyre queries the line from his father’s favourite poet: Really? He wants to write more but the river is filling him — or is it the howling? More fluid than ever, it’s exploding his throat. Is this how to drown in sound?

  ‘You ’right?’ the flight steward asks.

  ‘Water,’ Luke says, ‘Water’ — and the steward brings him a glass, which he pushes away, it spills, and his late ‘Fuck off!’ comes out strangled, unintelligible.

  ‘It’s only an air pocket. Here, paper bag — breathe, you’ll be fine.’

  The efficient solicitousness grates on the boy’s nerves. Plus the condescension, he reckons, shutting his eyes tight. The howling tapers off, his ears hum, his throat relaxes. Finally he’s able to out his belligerence — ‘I am fucking fine’ — but the steward has long been gone. Luke feels the wetness on his lap. He shuffles the pile of papers again, turning to the page about Tony in the river, the red pen clenched in his hand. He scrawls over the page, defiles it: I am not like my father. He looks around guiltily, is anyone looking? Only the couple across the aisle with that outrageous ‘lip service’. Watch it, another kiss blown towards him — Jee-sus, you’re old enough to be my mother! He endures, he almost blushes.

  He goes through it again, how two nights ago faint breathing answered the phone, then a woman of pauses. Why he bothered to ring Manila makes him cringe. He should have kept this trip under wraps. The business class ticket, the detailed directions, and the address and phone numbers on a postcard with a smiling girl under the coconuts should have been enough currency with which to fly in and out of there. The card casually said, Hello, Luke. Will be great to see you, my boy. We’ll have a wonderful time, I promise — xxx Dad. A fucking arm-around-the-shoulders tone, as if he saw him only last week.

  The breathing went on for a while as he brusquely said his hellos and demanded to speak to Tony McIntyre. It was a breathing with attitude, he could not understand what, but he was certain it was there. He knew it was someone young. He knew the phone was held clumsily then passed on — he just knew that too — to someone else. The woman of pauses.

  ‘Tony, you say? (pause) You wish (pause) to speak (pause) to your father.’

  Long pause. A vacuum filled by his apprehension and ineptness, until he gave it meaning, a gesture — was it a kind of sigh?

  He was moved to be gentle. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘He is away,’ and the line went dead.

  Chapter 3

  Tony wept the first time he saw me take my hair to the river. The soldiers were restless while the whole village waited, each one praying, please, let it not be him, not my husband’s body, or, Santa Maria, I’d rather it’s my son this time, relieve this endless wait, time to come home now, or, Madre de Dios, let her be found at least still whole, ay, my most foolish youngest. All hearts were marking time on the riverbank. Quickly I took to my task. Hair undone like a net, I descended into the water to trawl another victim of our senseless war.

  Desaparecidos. Our disappeared, ay, so many of them. And the lovers left behind became obsessed with doors — one day my son, daughter, husband, wife will be framed at the doorway. Behind my beloved will be so much light.


  They will come back — or will they? They did through the water’s door, from the darkness into the light. I served this homecoming, fished out their bodies from the navel of the water, while the soldiers looked the other way. They did not understand why a body never surfaced until I rescued it. Did it hope to vanish forever? ‘No, the dead only wants to become part of the water for a while,’ Pay Inyo said. Perhaps the gravedigger was right, for each time a body was dumped into the water, the river always changed flavour, no longer sweetened by the hills but tasting almost like brine, raw and sharp with minerals. Like fresh blood, something that remained in the tongue. ‘Ay, the dead must curse memory,’ the old man said, ‘so we can never forget those whom we loved.’

  ‘You’re crazy, your village is crazy, this is mad, a nightmare, why, how could you … this is not happening, I don’t understand, I don’t know anymore… ’ A week after he arrived, Tony wished he had not come to the river. He wept on my wet, salty hair that had wrapped the naked body of a female guerrilla. Perhaps barely sixteen and with hardly any face left, she could have been anyone’s daughter. Dark blotches, the size of a fist, covered her pelvis and breasts that had lost their nipples. I refused to think of what happened to her alive, if only to still my heart in this retrieval, but can anyone miss the stories of the body? Later in my hut Tony ranted his shock, lost under my hair. He could not see it growing and how I was remembering for the dead the contours of her lost face. He was inconsolable.

  I had to take him to my hut, because Pay Inyo said he would not have a man go mad in his house. ‘It’s bad luck, there’s enough bad luck as it is, besides you’re the one with some education, I only have crooked English, you know,’ the old gravedigger said. The village watched, and when I took his hand, they whispered among themselves. ‘The white man will stay with her? Why’s he here anyway? To watch our war, to watch her fish our dead, to sleep with her?’ They accused me with their eyes: you like the white man, you’ll take him home, take him to your bed. Sergeant Ramon watched too, his eyes darkening as I tried to lead Tony away from the bank, where an eighty-year-old grandmother dumbly caressed the corpse’s feet as if she were trying to remember something. But Tony did not budge, rooted to his shock, and the old woman noticed him for the first time. Slightly she lifted the feet, like caught fishes, towards him, and he doubled over, retching.