Fish-Hair Woman

by Merlinda Bobis

  The waiting maids watch in horror. Luke and Adora want to leave the table. General Lucio and Colonel Belmonte feel queasy. Doc Kiko’s uncle, Don Andres, a shipping magnate with the island of imported game, observes the operation with genuine fascination. But the host is not quite all there. His heart is under siege elsewhere, and his daughter delights in the knowledge. This morning’s headline was a pain for her father, especially after all his friendly overtures to the media. Then he found the flowers.

  It was an elaborately designed crown of gold chrysanthemums. In loving remembrance of ex-Gov Kiko, the gold ribbon said. It inspired Dr Francisco ‘Kiko’ Alvarado to check that his 45 Colt pistol had a full cartridge. He turned it over and over in his hands — a collector’s item with gold engraving. Then he rang his friends. This was how the general and the colonel were invited to the dinner party. The master of the house had stopped feeling safe. History had caught up with him, with its deadly flowers.

  ‘Very good, Mr Tanaka?’ he asks, hoping he does not appear too dispirited.

  ‘Yes, thank you … taste of sea,’ the guest nods.

  The crustacean project is coming along nicely, until the maids exclaim in unison ‘Ay! Ay!’ as the other lobster, survival instinct gone haywire, escapes, no, leaps to the floor! How did that happen? Look, it’s clawing the guest’s hem, Dios mio!

  ‘Pick it up, Teresita, pick it up, pronto!’ The host comes alive, gesticulating wildly. My logging deal, ah, my logging deal! ‘Apologies, Mr Tanaka, apologies — pick it up, I said!’

  The maid Teresita picks it up but the pincers jab her fingers. She screams and hurls the struggling lobster away. It lands on the crotch of the shipping lord who curses, ‘Puñeta, puñeta!’ at the top of his voice, sending everyone to their feet to have a look.

  ‘Pick it up, pick it up!’ The host screeches at his maids, but Teresita is busy sucking her bleeding thumb and the other maid is in shock, so the octogenarian takes full control and employs his cane to dislodge the clinging crustacean, successfully, thank God! Thump-thump-thump! The cane has other uses. ‘Puñeta-puñeta-puñeta!’ The lobster is crushed in no time.

  Silence as the maids clean up the mess, then Stella begins to giggle, but her father snaps at her.

  Again the cane thumps. ‘Bueno, Mr Tanaka,’ the unruffled Don Andres begins, ‘I hear you specialise in theme parks back in your country, good, good. You see, I have a private island with excellent game, native wild pigs, deer, even imported species like zebras, giraffes, and they’re breeding like hell, so maintenance is getting out of hand. Do you think there’s a park in this? What’s your advice?’

  General Lucio shakes his head and whispers to Don Andres, ‘Uhmm, may kaunting operation malapit d’un … ’

  Whispering in their language when a foreign guest is around is the ultimate rudeness! The Japanese is barely able to hide his disapproval, and his host has never felt so helpless. The whole table is conspiring against him. Luke, who kept asking about his father before the guests arrived, now watches the doctor’s every move suspiciously, while Adora watches him watching, enamoured and worried.

  Stella surveys the table with delight, then she motions towards the officers exchanging whispers. ‘My father’s friends here say that my great uncle’s island is close to a militarised zone — so, Mr Tanaka, you think it’s safe to do any deals with us?’

  The guest wipes his lips slowly with a napkin: this is it, dinner is over! ‘Not good for business, not good.’

  ‘Not true, Mr Tanaka,’ Colonel Belmonte intervenes. ‘There’s no “militarised zone” in this country. I find that term offensive. There is no militarisation in my country, we’re not ruled by a junta. We have a civil government elected by the people!’

  ‘Such conviction, Colonel!’

  ‘Puñeta, Stella, will you shut up?’

  ‘Puñeta ka rin, Papa!’ She stands, swaying slightly. ‘You are shit, Papa, do you hear?’ Her arms wrap around her, trying to hold back the trembling. ‘You and your cronies are shit, shit, shit!’

  The master is white-faced. The clenched fist wants to fly out, to shut her mug, to rip up that crown of flowers.

  Chapter 45

  The logging deal is off, politely withdrawn. Mr Tanaka declines to be driven back to the Hilton. He takes the hotel’s pick up car, and Dr Alvarado is left in a state. His hands are all over the air, declaiming his rage. Don Andres argues that, in fact, it was the guest who was rude, leaving his dinner unfinished like that. Dr Alvarado dismisses the old man. He is close to apoplexy by the time the cane thumps out of the door. He screams at the maids, he screams for Stella to come down, to explain herself. But she is now caught in a gale, morphine induced. She is locked in her chest that is all but collapsing.

  ‘Stella, come down here this minute, you ingrate — Stellaaaa!’

  The maids make themselves scarce.

  When he starts kicking his daughter’s door, the two officers go on control mode and take him to his favourite girlie club. ‘Relax, Kiko — you’re not a happy boy tonight.’

  No one can tell what time he came home. No one knew how Luke found him. And no one heard anything until the howling began.

  It is three in the morning. The boy is a dog. Adora rocks him as he sits on his haunches before the body of his host. The pudgy fingers are open, begging the room for some elusive thing.

  Death is meticulously set. Yesterday’s headline graces the body’s feet; the crown of chrysanthemums circles its head. The pool of blood heightens the gold of the flowers and the Colt gleams, a true collector’s item. The faint engraving on the handle affirms the doctor’s Spanish bloodline: Estradero, his maternal surname.

  Now the room’s smell has justified itself. Dead air.

  Howl after howl escalates in pitch. The boy is doing his scales. He is seven again, before another body, the pool of blood deeper, a whole tub running red, like a river. The girl, herself in shock, rocks him. Her eyes are fixed on the blood and the flowers. Her mouth is opening and closing, making air.

  ‘Ay, Luke, ay,’ Adora finally says.

  The boy thinks she’s asking him to affirm himself. I, Luke, I.

  Or asking to be affirmed. This is I, Luke, this is I.

  Then she is silent again.

  IRAYA

  Chapter 46

  Three soldiers, two killed by their own guns, the third by asphyxiation. Under the berries ripening in haste: a crimson chest, a shattered groin, a snapped neck. And no moon, not even a firefly now to light the men’s frozen stare, this attempt to memorise the final tableau so they can take it to the other side. It was stingy dark in the coffee grove, a no-face night. One went by feel alone.

  Listen to that night when the soldiers came to take me to the river, and how the coffee grove detained us. Tony, I want you to hear my history. I want you to know my village beyond your brief, foreign idyll into war. To know the heart of terror and grief, of love — not yours but theirs. I want to wrap you in my hair, these strands that would not stop growing into story after story, into all that I remember of my village in 1987 and the years before. Stories that can save, that can kill.

  Picture this: I freed the soldier’s neck from my hair. I kept pulling back the strands, but not to save a body this time. Yes, this is my dead, I had killed him and I could not stop weeping.

  Paghaya. Deep weeping. Pag-haaaa-ya. The wail is in the middle syllable. For some, a stifled exhalation; for others, a near-scream, but always the breath travels the full distance from the groin to the gut, welling up to the throat. It is a weeping that is not about this or that moment. It has a history as long as the distance covered by that breath.

  Pay Inyo told me not to forget this lesson of weeping: ‘You have to weep not from the throat but from lower down, just as in singing, so you don’t grow hoarse, because it takes forever to get to the last note. Remember, weeping is like singing and vice-versa, so everyone can sing, truly-truly, so let’s hear you, Eya, take it from lower down, a lot of breath in there, and it
does not run out, go on, sing!’ our Holarawnd Man urged us in his strange logic.

  In an earlier time of peace and hopeful heart, we were Pay Inyo’s accomplices in his courtship of our mother. He was going to serenade her with her own children! I remember how our mouths were pampered by every delight from his glass jars and wooed to break into song. He trained us for weeks before the big night. ‘Come now, breathe from down there, Pilar, and you too, Bolodoy, go on, everyone can breathe from down there.’

  If only the final tableau that our dead memorise and take to the other side were about trusting that infinite breath, then dying would be kinder. None of the agonising finality, no last breath. Death would simply mean breathing at the other side, where the dead would be soothed by the thought that those who mourn them at home would not also expire, because there’s a lot of breath down there, an inexhaustible well in the groin, and it does not run out. Weeping is like singing.

  We were of the water octave, Pay Inyo said. Our voices were too low, strange for children, and none could surface towards a high note. ‘It’s because of all that daily swimming in the river — hoy, look up too, watch how birds take off and soar. Each bird is a note that you must catch, understand? You dive to the groin for breath then surface and fly, because singing is not about wallowing in the depth, that kind of singing is lazy.’

  Listen, my love: Grief is not about wallowing in the depth. It is not lazy. Years later this logic would see me through each dive into the river, as I worked my limbs and hair, as I heaved with the weight of mangled corpses. I made myself believe each of them was my own breath that I needed to save so I could surface again. Because I knew I could never fly. My hair was too heavy with history, even if in the water it feigned lightness, intimating the undulations of flight as I reeled each body back to the bank. But not in dry land, where memory insisted that its ponderous weight must be acknowledged, always.

  Dry, heavy and still warm, that nameless soldier was swaddled in my hair. I wept, drawing breath after breath from deep down, feeling the air rise but hearing only the unmusical rasping in my lungs and throat. Pay Inyo was wrong; our kind could not sing.

  ‘Everyone can sing,’ he once said. ‘Look, that’s the wing of the note, watch it flap about, now snare it with that air from your throat, go on!’

  ‘And what’s in it for us?’ At thirteen, Pilar did not want to catch flying birds. She had the lowest voice among us and was feeling very much scolded. ‘Serenade my own mother? Ay, how ridiculous. Why don’t you do it alone? You’re Mister Holarawnd after all — well, you can win this one too, can’t you?’

  ‘If I marry your mother, you’ll have a daily food fiesta in my store, you’ll eat to your heart’s content and I’ll help in your sweet potato farm and I will love your mother forever and ever. These are what’s in it for all of you, truly-truly — so you’ll help me turn her heart around?’

  The bridge in a love affair argues the case of the lover to the beloved, spans the river of desire. For Pay Inyo, we were his indispensable bridge. ‘Aysus, what can be a more trusty bridge than those who are already joined in blood to the opposite bank?’

  ‘But what if she says “no” again?’ I was seven and so afraid for Pay Inyo.

  ‘Then I might die,’ he said, clutching his chest and winking at me.

  ‘How many times have you died?’ Pilar scoffed and Bolodoy tried not to smile as he sucked a sugar-coated dilimon. ‘You die each time Mamay fights with you anyway,’ she continued. Master of the art of contrariness, Pilar insisted that all this wooing was a waste of time — love bridges are cursed to break.

  Like my hair, a bridge for our dead, so I thought sometimes. But after each haul I saw no case to argue in the eyes of the bereaved, none to woo. For all my ferrying the dead to land, I knew they went to the other side alone.

  ‘From dust to dust, not from dust to water,’ Pay Inyo blessed them at each funeral. He was convinced that each rescue of a corpse from the water was a retrieval of Iraya’s peace. ‘When this river remains completely clean for a year or even half a year, we shall be able to sleep without care, truly-truly. Then we can wake to the time when the greatest tragedy in our lives would be only an unanswered serenade or a sudden falling from trees.’

  Mister Holarawnd Man with his all-around hope had taught me about faith. After I came back to life and began to grow hair, he believed that nothing in this world was beyond saving. He whooped with joy each time he saw another black root pushing out of my scalp. He lit votive candles for Saints Jude and Rita, trusted collaborators in that miracle against baldness. He turned the minds of Iraya from my mother’s aberrant history towards this heavenly blessing, declaring my head capable of wonderful things, then suggested that I probably had some secret powers inside.

  Thus the mythmaking began. Some remnants of my first trim found their way into his herb concoction for headaches. The rest was laid on a banana stalk, which Mamay sent sailing down the river to ensure a good-natured disposition when I grew up. Meanwhile, secretly, Pilar prayed novenas to Maria Magdalena then shampooed my hair with aloe vera, lime leaves and flowers. Bolodoy wove grass hats to protect my head from the sun and checked it religiously for fresh growth, tending my scalp like a plot of newly planted sweet potatoes. And as the old folks advised, Mamay trimmed my hair once a year, on the eve of the feast of Saint John the Baptist, to make sure that my scalp was twice blessed. Then she added her own inspiration to this repertoire of magical intentions. She made me stand on the overturned mortar for my yearly trim, believing that this wooden receptacle, where rice was pounded, would inspire more prosperity for my miraculous scalp. Finally she made sure that I never went to bed with my hair wet or else I would go mad, for this was a common belief in Iraya.

  But I did go mad on nights when my hair was just beginning to grow. I dreamt of falling while singing the Alleluia, of angels descending upside down with hands folded in prayer, akin to the attitude of divers, and of coffins hanging from the dita trees along the river, like ripe fruit about to be plucked. In the morning I found that my hair had grown a handspan and Mamay Dulce was whispering in her singsong, ‘You were tossing in your sleep, child. I had to hold you tight, Dios mio, you had long dreams again. Ay, what goes on under that little head, that very tricky hair, very tricky heart?’ And she crossed herself, more out of habit than belief.

  ‘Cross his eyes too, and close them, gently, gently.’ In the coffee grove I remembered Pay Inyo’s advice about the dead. The soldier’s lids were smooth and curved like kamya buds, slightly damp and cool, with the odd fragrance of departure. ‘Whatever their lives had been, all the dead must be handled kindly, because it is this moment that they’ll take to the other side, so a going away tenderness if you please,’ Pay Inyo had said. ‘Gently shut the senses, like flowers.’ But I could not close the mouth of the man I had killed. It was still screaming silently, cursing me, making the coffee berries shiver as their crimson deepened with all our doomed intentions.

  ‘Sing is the word, not scream! So take it not from the throat, children, but from lower down. And don’t eat while you sing,’ Pay Inyo scolded us when we failed to catch his conjured winged note while munching some vinegar-dipped chicharon, its porky crackle punctuating our song like a greasy percussion. But the louder percussion of his breaking heart soon drowned our futile serenade. Mamay Dulce said ‘no’ to his sixth proposal of marriage.

  There was a full moon that night and the closed window was a bluish white. The earnest man was also as ghostly, dappled with the shadows of the fart-fart leaves. Poised in his fiesta clothes, with an arm extended and a hand on his heart, the lover craned his neck to catch every flapping note as he sang the only English song he knew — ‘Oh, my love, my darling’ … and the three of us gathered behind him in the same entreating pose, trying to echo his plaintive outpouring of ‘Unchained Melody’. But we never caught the elusive birds that flew too high for us, for Pay Inyo was a tenor. Ay, we breathed from deep down indeed and found ourselves managing on
ly the desperate refrain about needing ‘your love’, but on a different key.

  The house remained silent for too long, so Pilar went back inside and opened the window. She sang not a love song, which should have been Mamay’s response, but a teasing ditty. And at the top of her voice, which of course brought our mother out of the bedroom —

  ‘Mapula-pula pisngi ni Dulsora

  Tugtog mambo-jambo

  Kabit ni Pay inyo!’

  Very red, the cheeks of Dulsora

  The music is mambo-jambo

  She’s dancing with Pay Inyo!

  Then Pilar rushed back to our chorus line as Pay Inyo, seeing the beloved apparition at the window, began a more ardent rendition of his special English song. How we sang and implored our Mamay to accept Iraya’s all-around man. I heard myself sing with the most desperation, fearing for the life of our friend who had wooed us as much as this woman leaning out of the window, her smiling face bluish white and as round as the moon.

  The serenade went on for too long and too desperately. We nearly outgrew the old man’s stratagems in the art of village courtship. Turutalinga, dilimon, labyu, tira-tira, balikucha and all delights available in his glass jars were the palate-sweeteners for us children. Flowered housedress, tortoise-shell comb, rosy lipstick or sequined velvet sandals from the city were the heart-implorers for dear Mamay Dulce. These were the gifts that he brought on his regular courting hour, three to four on a Saturday afternoon. He never visited without presents. Mamay Dulce protested against his spoiling us and, more strongly, against ‘the tarty trivia’ laid before her feet! ‘You want me to become your red woman?’ But once the scolding settled down, she fed him boiled sweet potatoes and freshly grated coconut, and the perennial rice-coffee laced with condensed milk, the latter reserved only for special guests. I saw this as proof that Mamay cared for Iraya’s all-around man, even as she turned him away and patiently explained, time and again, that she will marry no one. ‘Because of the kids, Pay Inyo, they’re my only beloved and they’re irreplaceable.’ He argued, of course, but she hushed him with her stubborn logic. ‘I’m afraid the heart has very little room.’