Fish-Hair Woman

by Merlinda Bobis

  How much can the heart accommodate? Death and love, an enemy and a sweetheart, war and an impassioned serenade, and more. Only four chambers, but with infinite space like memory, where there is room even for those whom we do not love. Even sight is as expansive. So dear reader, when your eyes pass over these stories, consider your capacity to gather all of them, even the gaps in between, those that I dare not tell or do not know of yet or perhaps would never even imagine, but which might be utterly clear to you. Why my memories weave in and out of death and love or why I wept over the enemy as my hair grew, its red and black strands shooting from all ventricles up to the scalp, to declare that the heartspace is not just the size of a fist, because each encounter threads a million others. The capillaries of love and war flow into each other, into a handspan of hair.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I touched the lips of the dead soldier, but they were still and cold. I looked around for the others but nothing was visible. The night jealously guarded its facelessness.

  ‘The Fish-Hair Woman weeps for me … ’ the voice sighed.

  ‘Ramon?’ I backed off, but a hand grabbed my ankle.

  The sergeant tightened his grip and pulled me down. ‘For me … ’

  ‘You’re alive?’

  ‘The white man didn’t come for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He left … away, away … ’

  ‘You mean — Tony? He’s not in that river then — he’s not dead?’

  ‘Lemon grass and fireflies … ’ A chuckle sank an octave deeper, burrowing among the roots of coffee shrubs. ‘The heroine loves … the white man … ’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Yet she weeps … for me … ’ The chest heaved and was still, then it heaved again, straining for the next breath. I drew closer and heard none but a distant serenade, measure after measure of dying.

  ‘For me … ’

  It was an incantation, full of sad amazement.

  Chapter 47

  If only I can return to the river when incantations were a different note. I hear her again, see her arms outstretched on a solitary rock in the middle of the water. She is dancing despite the monsoon threat in the air. Hush. Watch her, dear reader: this is the same girl who once broke her heart under the guava trees. Who broke all our hearts.

  ‘I lab my Iraya, yesadu!’ Pilar sings to the river and the blurred hills. In her red tapis, she is an insolent gash against the grey. Again she sweeps the landscape in one ungainly turn — almost ten metres of dark-green water from the rock to the banks overgrown with dita trees, wild bananas, milflores and kamya, and the perennial kogon grass. Around the rock, edible ferns and taro. Further away and from where the river flows, three hills fogged by rain.

  It is a long river spanning three villages, meandering in variant attitudes, sometimes playful and gurgling like a child or humming delicately. Then it thrashes about, spitting over stones in a treacherous current and suddenly in the next bend, it collects its passions into a large basin, barely rippling. In this secluded spot, the river is widest and deepest, and most hushed. Here it is simply called Salog, a river called ‘River’. But when someone catches the rare, giant eel that feeds several families, it becomes Padabang Salog, ‘Beloved River’.

  ‘I lab my Iraya, yesadu!’ She is stamping on her laundry as she whirls, a trick when she feels lazy. She prefers this to the endless rubbing of fabric between wrists.

  ‘Ay, your cheek is so flushed as if a little heart has ruptured in it!’

  The remark startles her. The dancer scurries away from an embarrassed washerwoman. ‘Only in your eye, Fishy — you’re having visions.’

  ‘Uuuy, you’re so happy today, I can tell.’ Behind the ferns, the young Estrella has been spying on her sister. She giggles knowingly and swims towards the rock to tease her some more. ‘Of course, I can tell.’

  ‘Soothsayer, soothsayer, say a soothing prayer!’ Pilar teases back as she begins to rinse the laundry. Her brow is furrowed in mock impatience. Hers is a stubborn face, all defiance etched on the sharp, jutting chin. She is not what one might call pretty. Appealing perhaps, in a rough way. ‘Hoy, Fishy, you better help me before the rain catches us,’ she says, but Fishy only does somersaults, her limbs and long, thick braids flashing in and out of the water.

  ‘Hoy, come back here, you stupid girl!’

  ‘I know why you’re so happy. You spoke with him finally — so what did you say to dear Benito?’

  ‘Mind your own business, scratch your own kaliskis!’

  ‘Can’t scratch my own scales, not yet — just my bum!’ Estrella yells back, flashing her dark behind at the older girl before diving.

  ‘Don’t try my patience now, you Burnt-Bum-Fishy!’

  It used to be ‘Burnt-Bum-Baldy’ until she began to grow hair. Lots of it, after she died and lived again, Pay Inyo is known to boast.

  ‘So Benito finally noticed how your eyes have stuck all over him after weeks of endless side-glances?’ she asks, knitting her too-wide brow. Sign of brilliance, the old folks say.

  The older girl keeps her lips tightly shut.

  Fishy circles the rock in easy strokes, pleading, ‘So tell me the news, Manay Pilar, please, please.’ There is a fragile quality about the small, bony face. Its earnestness and the palest brown eyes make people stare. Sometimes, they still whisper, ‘Wonder who’s the father … ’

  ‘Get up here and help, you burnt-bum, you!’ her sister scolds.

  As a baby, Fishy never crawled. She sat at once and dragged herself around on her bum, so it darkened like burnt buns — ‘unlike your bald top which is lighter, cooked just right,’ Pilar would tease her.

  ‘Burnt-Bum-fishy!’

  ‘Scaredy-swimmer-tongue-tied-ogler!’

  Six-thirty in the morning and the river is almost peaceful, save for this regular scene. Eighteen-year-old Pilar and twelve-year-old Estrella are rehearsing their eternal verbal joust, sharpening a tentative kinship against each other’s tongue. The younger girl knows she can outsmart the bully after all. With words. The older one knows this too and more.

  ‘And, sister, it’s not “I lab my Iraya, yesadu”, but “I love my Iraya, yes I do!” It’s ‘love’ with a veeee and the three last words should — ’

  ‘Show-off!’

  Not words, but the heavy silences behind them. They can outwit you with their weight if you’re not careful — Pilar knew this seven years ago. She was tricked by her hate turned guilt turned fear, which mutated into something strangely moving yet dumb when she saw how the rise and fall of the scrawny chest faltered then stopped. Instantly something in her own chest stopped in response and ached in a little corner. The old pebble in her throat pushed down to her heart.

  ‘Eya, Eya, my lovely Estrella!’ She remembers her mother’s singsong at its strangest pitch as if the whole world’s grief had gathered in one note, while the entire house wished the bald one alive and her own breast pounded as if she were back under the guava trees. Yet she could no longer squat on her heart. It was suddenly exposed, fearful that she had killed the fallen angel.

  ‘So did Benito say anything, Manay Pilar?’

  Yes, the imp lives true to expectation, a pest! The washerwoman tries to shrug off her peeve, not so much over this teasing, but at the irritating suggestion that she did not know the words of her song. A raw spot is nudged, a more embarrassing inadequacy. Words, words — who cares about those inedible squiggles on paper anyway?

  ‘Benito likes you too?’ Estrella asks, climbing up the rock. Her braids hang to mid-thigh like two black tails of some drenched animal. She is so thin, her floral tapis might as well be empty. She circles her sister’s waist with an arm and pats it fondly. ‘I do think he likes you,’ she says. ‘His heart is all over the place for you too.’

  Pilar flinches. Ay, this arrogant fish and her wise-cracks, her books and her infuriating lambing, that affectionate nature which always confuses her but wins her mother’s favours on any day. Then t
here’s the old, mean pebble occasionally resurrected as grit in her breast, yes, it confounds her too. Sometimes she thinks it has left for good — ‘Time for your herbs, stupid!’ she says, roughly pulling her sister close.

  The dish of pounded aloe vera sits among the laundry. Pilar has taken this to heart, along with her concocted novenas for Maria Magdalena. A holy-herbal inspiration to make her victim better again. On the night when Estrella stopped breathing, Pilar promised she’d do everything for the injured baldness, even when once, was it in a dream, the fireflies had gathered on that head alone, on the only beloved.

  Pilar knows her place on this rock. On this mesa of basalt and sediment, packed and polished by time and gentled with moss, she must attend to beautiful women with long hair in all her fumbling to be loved. First Carmen, now her daughter Estrella. But years ago, wasn’t there a bit of grace in her need, wasn’t it less desperate because it had no history yet?

  ‘Don’t get mad at me, sister. I do love it when you’re happy — so will Benito visit you, tell, me — ay, tikitikitik!’ Estrella tickles the older girl.

  Pilar begins to giggle, then checks herself. ‘Hoy, stop that, estupida!’ She unbraids the thick ropes, rubs them with the herbs — ‘I hope you didn’t forget the lime leaves and flowers again, you stupid girl.’

  ‘Don’t scold, sister. Of course, I have them, but why must you always use that word with me? Estupida — stupid Eya doing stupid this, stupid that!’

  Again the raw spot is prodded. Pilar tugs at a lock of hair.

  ‘Aray, that hurt!’

  ‘Aray, that hurt — wimp!’

  ‘Why do you always torment me?’

  Not words, but the heavy silences behind them. When Mamay Dulce rushed out of the house, raving about the patron of coffins who must save Eya, Pilar and her brother could not speak or dare look at each other, lest they saw an angel hurtling down in the other’s eyes. Pay Inyo ran after her half-crazed mother then, out into the night, and Bolodoy began to weep. Strangely enough, her eyes smarted too and the tiny head’s purple bruise became a blur.

  ‘Why, Manay Pilar?’

  When memory is punishment, there are no reasons, nothing left to say.

  Estrella turns away from her sister’s silence and cups her hand in the air. ‘Yes, it might rain,’ she says. ‘Let me wash off these herbs, a quick dip, then my turn — I’ll rinse the laundry.’ She slips into the water and moves away in vigorous strokes.

  ‘Hoy, Eya, Benito likes me, I think,’ Pilar calls out a confidential speculation as a peace offering. ‘But he didn’t say he’ll visit … ’

  The young swimmer is too far away to hear the sisterly intent, which falters and loses conviction, suddenly displaced by an acute irritation. But I’ve always taken care of you since that night you died, haven’t I, she wants to scream at the stupid fish doing somersaults further away, rippling the water beyond her eyes. In her pocket she feels for the letter that she can hardly read.

  Chapter 48

  Benito is too old for her, too everything. Bolodoy wears this unhappy conclusion like the moistness in the air. Hot and pondering on his peeve, he squats in the middle of the sweet potato farm, waiting for the grace from heaven.

  Ay, the impressionable farmers and Pay Inyo, of course, have warmly embraced that stranger from an island somewhere. That’s how Benito explains his origin, with a casual wave of the hand towards the south of Iraya, as if to say it’s not really much to talk about as he’s too preoccupied with only important things like equality, land, rice and, of course, bread. He orates about ‘these human concerns’ as if he invented them.

  ‘The secret of the best pan de sal, our bread of salt, is simple: crisp outside and soft inside. Not a fluffy, insubstantial softness, but one with character,’ so the bread-king often begins his call for courage in these difficult times.

  But when one is hot and tired, bread pales beside real food: steamed fish and two ripe tomatoes buried in boiled rice, still warm, and wrapped in banana leaf that’s now getting wet. It has started raining. Ay, better to eat before lunch turns into soup. Shrugging off his musings about the popular stranger, Bolodoy wonders if it will be more than a drizzle today, finally. For weeks, the farm was parched, the sky never daring beyond a mere threat of rain. Dios ko, give my new plots of duma a good drenching, please. He hopes to be saved from the backbreaking trip to the river for water.

  Pilar’s older brother is twenty years old, small, thin and can’t quite look people in the eye. A mother of ample passions, a dominating younger sister, who will always be taller than he is, and an exceptionally clever stepsister made him shrink into the background. He suspects that his body is too afraid to put itself forward; he can’t seem to grow any taller or bigger. Always the inconsequential runt, he plays the devoted sidekick, an errand runner for the family, though with one source of pride: his unusually large, strong and seemingly tireless hands, men’s hands even when he was still a boy. He can do nearly everything with them: build a house, weave a basket, plant or harvest a whole acre of sweet potatoes in a day, make even stumps grow, and catch fish, even eels, ay, with such effortless efficiency.

  Palms wide as taro leaves and fingers long and fat as bananas, but with none of their softness or grace. They’re awkward hands that grow clammy in company, hands made confident only by solitary occupation. He even had to give up on village dances. The first time he extended a hand towards a girl for a dance, she laughed; when he closed it over hers, she flinched.

  ‘Ay, thank God,’ he calls out to the sky that has had a change of heart. He cups both palms under the large raindrops — beautiful hands? Eya used to watch him catch fireflies and fish in the river, and she’d call out, ‘Ay, ay, catch all, beautiful hands!’ But they failed her miserably under the fart-fart tree. Thank God, she lived and her hair grew. Ay, the purple bruise even spread through the scalp and into the brain perhaps, like some ink of brilliance.

  ‘Estrella must have read every book in school by now, it’s time for her to go to town or the city. We can’t teach her anything anymore here — she’ll do high school, of course, won’t she?’

  He overheard her teacher confiding to his mother last week, and the two women beamed. But Mamay Dulce could never be as proud of her own children. On his third year in school, Bolodoy was dismissed by the same teacher as ‘hopelessly no-read-no-write’, so he abandoned all formal education and read instead the time for harvest in the sweet potato vines and the promise of fish in the tides of the moon. And Pilar, well, she’s still in the sixth grade at eighteen and always playing truant or getting into major altercations with her teachers. She’s naturally smart but can’t be bothered with school. ‘How can you read when your stomach is empty?’ So she’s more interested in ‘entrepreneurial concerns’ that allow her to buy proper food. Her dream is simple: to eat rice regularly and not the boring duma, those root crops that she grew up on. They made you listless, they made you fart!

  Daily Pilar gathers firewood to sell. She plants or gleans rice at a neighbour’s farm in exchange for half a kilo of unhusked grains. The neighbour warns her against the encargado, the foreman of the mayor of Iraya. You’re not his hired farmhand and he does a headcount at the end of the day, so be careful. He explains the farm is not his anymore, because the mayor, who does not even live in Iraya, found some papers that proved he owned the land. Pilar vows to confront the encargado, but the other unlisted workers plead for her to stay away. So job lost, rice gone, back to duma and her fury over such a grave injustice. But ever enterprising, she resurrects herself in another occupation, arranging to stand in for Tiyo Ruso, the bread-man, when he has an attack of pleurisy. As early as five till eight in the morning, she cycles around Iraya with the two heavy bread cans strapped on the seat behind her. She calls out ‘Pan! Pan!’ in a voice with more authority than the old hawker’s, then persuades those who finished breakfast of rice and fish to have a second one, ‘Because my special pan is good for the soul.’

  Now she has
a new bread-man. ‘Not a fluffy, insubstantial softness’, let’s hope. Bolodoy tries to contain his worry, or is it resentment, as his lunch turns into soup under the downpour. Bread-man not as business partner this time, but as her fair stranger, that orating rooster who sprang from where exactly, no one knows, then built a bakery in tiny Iraya of all places. Yes, the newcomer who gives her the eyes all the time. But who am I to object? She’s a big girl now and she can collect all the stares that she wants.

  The jealous brother is soaked. Around him, more puddles. The thudding on his back eases apprehensions. He abandons his meal, stretches his limbs and ambles along the rows of sweet potatoes. ‘Duma, duma, duma,’ he whispers their name, invoking their green will with the power of his breath. Soon new buds will sprout into a lush carpet, then the inevitable thickening and rounding of roots. More rain and enough sun, then another harvest. He firms up the plots, loving the drenched earth in his hands. He hears a sigh of relief in each promised root of sweetness.

  Chapter 49

  Somewhere in the south of Luzon, in the Philippine archipelago, is my beautiful, peaceful home. It is called Iraya. It is three hours by bus from the city of Rodriguez and one hour by foot from the town of Ilawod. We always walk to hear mass there, me and my brother Bolodoy. I love my home. It has a very long river with many shrimps, fishes and also eels. I swim in it, wash clothes in it with my sister Pilar and catch fish from it with my brother. It has a big rock in the middle where I sit and think of stories.

  The lamp flickers over Estrella’s assignment for English Composition. She is sprawled on the bed shared with her sister, and she does not know how to proceed. There is so much to tell. Will she write about the time when Bolodoy caught the biggest dalupingan with the silverest eyes? She was with him when he hauled in the last and best catch, just as the sky was turning as rosy as Mamay Dulce’s sour soup. The grand fish graced it at dinner. The eyes were boiled white, sightless and petrified among the purplish sweet potato leaves that tinted the water. ‘It’s a pink river and it’s very dead,’ she complained over the steaming bowl. She was seven and no longer bald.