Fish-Hair Woman

by Merlinda Bobis

  That Filipina at the airport frowned on his choice of footwear, he didn’t miss that, before she rattled on about him being her son’s age and that she hasn’t seen him for a decade. ‘Off to a family reunion and wearing my heart on my sleeve,’ she sighed deeply to his face, then, ‘By the way, what’s your name, son?’ She’s setting me up, she’s a snoop, he thought, dishing out plotlines from under her sleeve, just to see how they fit on strangers. He remembers growing slightly giddy, framed in her words. A tight fit, no room to breathe, what with his mouth dry and aching for a joint. Stupid cow, stupid crowd! It picked him up, sure as hell, that presumptuous, engulfing crowd. Their chatter, foreign and bird-like, hurt his ears as he bumped into a woman with her sleeping child who woke up, cried, and the woman started crying too, and he was all sorry and perplexed, so some auntie or other grabbed his arm to say, ‘Her mother’s very sick … hope she gets there on time.’ Then she raised both palms as if she were propping up the dying, and he felt he was drowning in a web of stories, theirs and his.

  Then the pearled lady, for she seemed all lady and proper at first, started blowing him kisses!

  ‘I know the best holiday spots.’ Matt finally breaks the silence.

  Luke retrieves his papers, shoves them into his backpack. Something about an extended hand tells him to beware. The fingers open towards the object of generosity yet curl in slightly, naturally at the tips, back to the self.

  Chapter 8

  This is my love letter to you …

  Matt did not miss that page before it disappeared into the boy’s pack. So how could he remain silent? But he did. There will be enough time when they get there. Silence is the wisest move.

  When wisdom finally descends, it’s after lunch and four glasses of champagne, and stilted conversation. Luke resents it that he allowed the older man to stay or that he got him to talk, well a bit.

  ‘A lot of reading you got there.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Uni work?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  ‘So you’re visiting your father?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘First time to visit him?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you say — you say he’s meeting you at the airport?’

  Luke clams up.

  He’s really meeting you? Are you sure? He asked you over? What’s the story? Matt pursues the string of queries in his head, hearing his incredulous tone, but all he says is, ‘I worked there once. Diplomatic posting, so I knew most of the expats — I might have even met your father.’

  The boy does not rise to the bait but Matt senses the slight body clenching beside him, as if bracing for a blow that’s taking a long time to land. Perhaps it’s he, Matt, who should break his silence and tell the story, but he holds his tongue. Unlike someone years ago in one of those parties at the Oz embassy in Manila — was it early 1987?

  The raconteur at the table, an American diplomat, was spouting advice like a how-to book: ‘Keep your wallet as unreachable as your heart. This is how you travel. No, let me rephrase that. The heart can be made accessible or vulnerable if it suits the traveller, but not all of it and only for the duration of the trip — unfortunately, not with writers. Writers are never cautious or discreet — any writer in the room?’ And he proceeded with his speech, waving his champagne about: ‘Artist types let their hearts out of the bag too soon and it’s always a disaster especially in a foreign country. After a month they fancy themselves “in love” with the landscape. They need to believe this, of course, so inspiration can be sparked. Hey, there’s a fire here, a fire there, and I know this conflagration like the back of my hand.’

  Someone very quickly picked an argument with him. A writer. Tony McIntyre. The night ended with a fistfight.

  More air pockets break Matt’s reverie and knock off the drinks on the table, the glasses of the boy. He turns to Matt, eyes wild, breathing ragged.

  Chapter 9

  Dear Tony,

  Under the shadow of a war, scan the coffee shrubs for a glimpse of that familiar walk, and suddenly you’re sweetly tethered to the beloved’s tightening of thighs, the swing of those much-loved arms or that maddening toss of the head. As if your very life hangs on this vision. The beloved is passing by and, for a moment, you believe yourself completed in the sudden filling of your eyes and in your utterly humbling desire.

  But the beloved is only passing by. And the first rapture of falling comes only once for a very brief visit. Even that leaves too. But does anything remain in its wake, even when those arms no longer swing or when the toss of that head has become just another gesture?

  For a long time I thought I was in love with the dead. Because they have no more gestures.

  Under the shadow of a war, sit with me again and sip the very fragrant coffee, which Iraya could not serve you. You might, at least, feel forgiven with a simple act of welcome — the dead handing you a cup.

  Estrella

  ‘You buy this literary love crap?’ he shot at Aunt Therese, who was her wet self again, sniffling through the collection of letters: from Tony addressed to Luke, then from Tony’s lover addressed to the lost beloved — hoo-hah! Not hard to be incredulous, and even less hard to dismiss letters from strangers addressed to strangers.

  ‘Each time I see you … you’re angrier … I’m sorry, Lukey — ’ and she made a move to stifle him again in a soppy hug.

  ‘Don’t!’ He stepped back. ‘And don’t call me that, you never had the right to call me that.’ Ah, the doting aunt who had to manage his teenage mother’s ‘inexperience with babies’, to usurp her place in his heart.

  ‘You hate me too, don’t you — but your father, he … ’

  ‘Seems like he had fucked and fucked up most of the women around him — you included.’

  Once upon a time in a shared house, there lived Aunt Therese married to Uncle Josh, brother to Tony, husband to Patti (she was never Patricia to him), then of course little Luke.

  ‘How fitting that he abandoned us all, huh? Perhaps I should take the invitation of the vanishing man — tell him to reappear and answer for the lives that he’s undone?’

  By that time she was in full-blown tears and incoherent apologies, and that infuriating ‘but I never thought you knew and it was never serious’ — blah-blah-blah.

  Was it Mum who once said that children are like dogs? They smell anger, fighting, sex. They smell sadness.

  Luke weighs the ‘main letter’ on his lap. He is reading it again, desperate to know this disappeared bloke and his lover. Their stories are taking him to a river, drowning him in sorrow like his mother.

  Once upon a time Patricia McIntyre never surfaced from the water, but now her husband has. After years of silence he thinks he can make peace with his son with a photo from the past, a business class ticket and love letters. Well, Tony, let’s fucking meet then and shake hands. Luke stares at the top page of the longest letter. Uncle Josh suspects that, in fact, it’s ‘Tony’s oeuvre’, under a pseudonym of course. It’s Tony performing again, an old trick. In the boy’s lungs, the old rage rises, this bigger river that might tide him through a meeting with the vanishing man who couldn’t even be original. What sorrow? It’s fucking pathos! Emily Dickinson must be turning in her grave.

  This is my love letter to you who never wrote to me.

  The handwritten preface is desolate on the page. Small, hesitant pencil markings nearly worn off. A ghost of censure, then 75 pages addressed to the beloved:

  FISH-HAIR WOMAN

  by

  ESTRELLA CAPILI

  BELOVED

  Chapter 10

  My memories shuttle back and forth, like blood going up and down from heart to scalp and back, desperate for release. And so sprouts a handspan of hair, and another and another. My memories are long and far reaching, and the further away, the more present. How can this be, Tony, that I remember even my birth? But I do. I return to the sweet river before the fireflies, like someone watching from the outside, l
ike the eyes of the wall. I am back in that crumbling house in Iraya. It is 1959, summertime, and I am born bald.

  ‘But beautifully so, like the smoothest bottom of a clay pot,’ Lola Trining croons to the reddish brown scalp of her new granddaughter.

  ‘She glows, ay almost!’ the midwife Mamay Dulce adds her singsong. ‘You can come in now, Pilar, over here,’ she calls out to her daughter. ‘Meet your new friend, little Estrella, our lovely Eya. Yes, hold that lamp closer, see how her head glows like a little sun, aysus, how beautiful!’

  ‘But she has no hair, none at all!’ Pilar is six and literal about beauty. She turns away from the kicking bundle and stares at the new mother lying so still and pale: Carmen of the beautiful hair, Carmen of the river.

  More ohs and ahs from the older women. Carmen thinks of wind kissing her brow, breasts, belly, but she can’t stop the tears. Her mother, Lola Trining, is saying, ‘You have a girl … it’s all right, padaba.’

  Padaba: beloved. The endearment sinks into Carmen’s ear. Pa-da-ba. Three soft breaths, the wind at play. Blow it into my ear and I will bloat like a pig’s belly. Someone had promised to kill a pig for what I have done — wind, wind, don’t fill me up again. Young girls must not grow heavy or else.

  ‘But why’s she crying?’

  ‘Quiet, Pilar!’ Mamay Dulce scolds her youngest child, then gently, ‘It’s all right, Carmen, we’re here.’ Her singsong blends with the trickle of water on the basin — the baby howls from the shock of her first bath.

  ‘The wind visits with a soft drizzle,’ the woman on the bed whimpers, then more tears.

  ‘Hush, mother’s here, child.’ Lola Trining can’t trust herself to say more.

  ‘Hoy, lighten up, all of you. While I’m midwife, there’ll be no crying at births,’ Mamay Dulce scolds then proceeds with her task.

  After the ritual of the first bath, a collective sigh settles in the room.

  ‘Now here’s your little girl, all nicely scrubbed … see how lovely she is, our Eya, Eya, lovely Estrella … ’ the midwife croons.

  ‘But she doesn’t want it,’ Pilar protests. ‘She’s upset, can’t you see?’

  ‘You shut up!’ the midwife scolds her daughter, then lays the baby on its mother’s belly.

  So warm on her navel, like boiled rice wrapped in banana leaf. Between sobs, the fifteen-year-old mother trembles. Her knees lock tightly together. It’s the wind again, filling her. Not warm but hot between her legs.

  ‘Ay, Dios ko, so much blood!’ Lola Trining screams as she rescues the infant. ‘Dulce, do something, ay, ayyy!’ She’s wailing now, the baby held tightly to her breast.

  At the foot of the bed, Pilar feels faint. She sees her mother trying to staunch the blood with a blanket, but it won’t stop, and she keeps muttering, ‘But she was fine, she was, I don’t understand.’ The blanket grows soggy in the midwife’s hands.

  Carmen has shut her eyes, afraid that the wind will fill even her sockets. It’s blowing inside her belly now, like a storm. It’s cooling the rice.

  ‘Santisima — Carmen? Ay, God help us — Carmen!’

  The wind blows the boiled rice away and her belly is cold, so cold.

  Chapter 11

  Dulsora Capas, a.k.a. Mamay Dulce, would soon become my new mother. She was an ample woman who spoke in singsong and to me she always crooned, Padaba, padaba — beloved, beloved. I hear her now as she prepares my mother’s funeral feast. Her sorrow spills into little reprimands as musical as her affection.

  ‘I told Pilar this apple is too red for a room of black clothes, but she never listens, that girl — hoy, you’re no lechon dressed for a fiesta!’ she scolds the main course on the table, and extricates the plastic apple garnishing its open mouth. The roast pig is glistening, sweating out oil in crackling glory. It was fattened for the baby’s baptism.

  ‘Haay, look at you now, laid out instead for the mother’s funeral. Nine months of prime hog’s feed and nine months of pain for poor Carmen, God rest her soul — ay, that Pilar of mine, I told her, no apple — it is shaking, no, it’s my hands. Have they lost their touch? After more than twenty births, my first death, and the daughter of my best friend, too. Poor Lola Trining, my poor goddaughter Carmen and now little Estrella, ay, I let you down with these hands — snap out of it, Dulsora! There’s a job to do.’

  The village midwife is making the final touches to the feast. Under her great arms, between her abundant breasts and thighs, she is sweating as she putters around the table set with her culinary exertions. She’s melting in this summer heat most felt in her hidden places. Occasionally she lifts her skirt and fans herself with a washcloth, then wipes her tears again, scolding herself into sobriety. If one could only sweat out guilt, but it’s never liquid and it lurks deeper, beyond the secret folds of flesh. Hers is ample flesh but not from ample food. The village gossips diagnose her as tabang lamig, ‘cold fat’ that’s pale and unhealthy.

  She throws open the large window inlaid with capiz shells, a left-over elegance from more prosperous times. She leans out, whistles for the wind but it does not come. Like everything else these days, like grace. She hears again the krrrr-krrrr in her belly. Ay, the birdcall of the damned! Her heart is so heavy, it pushes at her stomach and makes wicked her bum, santisima!

  ‘Haay, Lola Trining,’ she told her grieving friend earlier, ‘with this extreme case of the runs, I’d rather stay home. Besides, who’ll prepare the table, who’ll look after the baby? No, she should not go to her mother’s funeral. It’s bad luck for a baby who’s not baptised yet. I’ll stay home with her and my Pilar stays as well. Heat and a suffering stomach, what torture!’

  Truth is, the midwife does not have the courage to attend the funeral. This is her first death. But she did all the right things in the proper way, rose to the usual demands of childbirth, down to the littlest detail and prayer, and it was an easy delivery too — how? — why?

  ‘God is so cruel sometimes. But, Dios ko, too young to go at fifteen. Ay, forgive your godmother, Carmen — these hands, these cursed hands have failed you, child.’

  But Mamay Dulce will endure, as she always has, thriving on singsong conversations with herself and large helpings of sweet potatoes. She farms an acre of the tubers with her children, eight-year-old Bolodoy and six-year-old Pilar. Good kids raised on good duma, these hardy roots of the earth, the best food for common sense. ‘And you don’t get that from rice,’ she tells Pilar, who always complains she’s sick of eating duma, duma and more duma — ‘Can’t we have rice today?’

  Eight kilometres from the dead girl’s house is a paradise of duma. Four years ago it was a jungle of kogon, balangubang and wild bamboo, until Mamay Dulce decided that the soil was perfect for tubers. At that time, she was renting with distant relatives, and the midwifing was never enough to pay for the stuffy room next to the pigsty. So she went ‘prospecting’ and found the perfect spot — ah, sweet potatoes, a few yams including the purple kind, and her house in the middle, nicely framed by a hedge of cassava, how about that? A real home, not far from the river too. So each time she went to wash, always she lingered in that wild patch to dream of her own little heaven. Surely this land could be hers, is hers, so she cleared it, built a hut, and plots and plots of rambling sweetness, an acre to be exact. The farm was in the outskirts of Iraya, with no neighbours. It was jungle then ricefields and no road, just hidden paths that one memorised through a particular tree, a creek, a rock, and the sound of the river.

  ‘Can’t complain. The kids have been good with the farm, even little Pilar, who thinks she’s made for things better than duma. Ay, what a hopeless atrebida, that child has frivolity tucked under her arm. No apple garnish for the pig, I told her this morning. And where did she borrow this plastic atrocity anyway?’

  Sweat trickles behind her knees, santisima, how she oozes summer. And grief. Tears and sweat, tears and sweat. She keeps wiping herself. She scolds the pig again. ‘How can you stand being dolled up for this occasion? This is no fiest
a! No circus either, heaven forbid — but what to do? When the funeral party arrives, our hands will be full.’ Soon she will hear them chattering along the dirt road, hungry after the half-hour walk from the cemetery, led by the cantoras, the church singers of course. It can’t be helped. Their leader Manay Sabel, who loves to sing unholy tales, will soon descend upon them with her chorus of evilspeak. ‘Listen here, you’ll be demolished not by family and friends, but by those curious hangers-on, those chismosas — irrepressible gossips, God, I hate them! After weaving tales against my goddaughter in all those nine months, they’ll have the nerve to step into this house and rip you apart, crackling by crackling, flesh by flesh, picking until the bone, we know their ways, don’t we?’

  The roast pig glistens, absorbing the story of its second demise.

  ‘Of course, they’ll feast with their mouths and ears and ogle with their eyes between burps, salivating over tall tales as they rush back to you for just a little more of that lovely crackling, please, and, by the by, can we see the newborn — oh, that poor orphan with such a dark heritage, that bastarda, didn’t you know, the mother was, well, you know — ay, those grapevine promoters, and Lola Trining is too good to them. If I were in her shoes, hah!’

  Her belly heaves under her heart — krrrr-krrrr — there it is again. She can’t tell where the pain is anymore. Believe me, it’s the eighth miracle now. Miracle at the confessional, her euphemisms for ‘defecating’ and the ‘toilet’. ‘Confessional’ is her secret spot where wild ferns grow at the edge of the sweet potato farm. ‘Ferns tall enough to hide your preoccupied bottom in a place more private than little holes inside the house.’ So she explained when her children asked why they have no proper toilet like Lola Trining’s.

  Long ago Mamay Dulce perfected the art of rationalising poverty. Today she adds grief to her repertoire. The ache of the heart must be pushed towards other organs, made anal, thus ordinary and ‘ejectable’. A daily miracle — santisima, what a bum — she runs to another holy appointment!