‘How long will you be at that thing?’ Pilar asks, unable to sleep with this noisy scrawling beside her.
Perhaps it’s better to write a funny story instead, about the time when her sister slipped on a human turd in the riverbank. She was scolding her then. ‘Ay estupida, how could you forget the lime leaves and flowers again! I take care of you, attend to you, wash your hair, and look how ungrateful you are for my efforts — you never listen to me!’ Engrossed in her litany of accusations, Pilar did not see the culprit gracing the path — she slipped! It was a graceful pirouette that landed her bottom right-smack on it, yes, she sat on it. A bum on a bum artefact!
‘Will you be at it for the whole night?’ Pilar complains. The bedroom has grown even smaller for both of them.
‘Does the light bother you?’ Estrella asks.
‘No.’
‘I can go out, sister — ’
‘No, stay,’ Pilar murmurs but turns her back on the squiggles on paper.
‘If the light doesn’t bother you.’
‘What’s it this time, Eya?’
‘My English assignment — I’m writing about the river — maybe a story.’
‘A good one?’
‘Don’t know yet.’
Pilar sits up and sighs. ‘It’s very warm, even after that rain … open the window, will you?’
Estrella obliges and peers into the darkness. It’s wet out there, that’s all she knows, because night has no face. The anonymity leaves her breathless — I can write about ghosts. ‘You have a ghost story about the river, sister?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘You could help me with my assignment, you know, but you won’t, of course.’ Eya leans on the sill and lets her braids hang out of the window, as if to retrieve something identifiable from the dark.
‘Don’t do that!’ Pilar scolds, her voice fearful.
‘Hair, hair, catch me a story!’
‘Stop it!’ Pilar shuts the window. ‘Don’t you ever-ever say that.’
‘What’s wrong, Manay Pilar?’
Far away owls call to each other. Pilar feels a prickling on her back. A dream sneaks in from long ago: the tightrope hair and someone pushing a coffin in. She shudders.
‘You cold?’ Eya lays a hand on her sister’s shoulder and finds it hot.
How long is one stalked by history? Pilar remembers another longhaired girl from her childhood.
‘It’s Benito, isn’t it?’ Her sister asks, circling her waist with an arm. ‘He likes you.’
Pilar tries to find a way to say it. After a while, ‘He is a good man.’
Estrella is waiting, she knows more.
‘He likes things fair. He gives away bread for free, to the poorest — and — and he says land is not just about survival, but about dignity — and no one has the right to take it from us — you understand?’
Estrella nods. The bread-king is a hero, her sister wants to explain, so it’s good that he likes her, and that he says it too, though secretly. ‘You can tell me … ’ She snuggles close. How precious this moment, how rare to be allowed into her sister’s heart. ‘You can show it to me.’
How much is one humbled? Pilar reaches for the paper under her pillow, then hesitates.
‘It’s all right, Manay Pilar … ’
Big sister cannot find the face to look up. ‘Will you read me his story?’ she asks.
‘Will you read it with me?’ Estrella’s voice is as warm as the night. ‘I can teach you, you know, if you’ll let me.’
On the unfinished English composition, the bread-king’s love letter imposes itself. It has been folded numerous times, reduced into a diminutive square, as if some hand tried so hard to make it disappear.
Chapter 50
Beloved, no hand can make a story disappear — listen.
‘You have to dig deep for the sweetest potato. It hides, you see, knowing that only the patient worker deserves its gift of sweetness,’ Bolodoy once said.
‘You have to dig deeper, so the dead can no longer hear the living, not even when they walk over the grave, ay, the dead must have no reason to turn,’ Pay Inyo advised. He insisted that, down there, the dead might still want to identify the footfalls if they hear them.
Dig deep then, dig deep.
But the sergeant’s grave was shallow. Perhaps I wanted him to be forever turning but among the sweet potatoes. Their sweetness will temper his decay and wash his palate, so the sulk can ease from his lips and the red in his eyes can be starched into whiteness — I was running true to form, the Fish-Hair Woman saving all of the drowned. I let him hold my hand, it seemed for a long time. I promised not to bury him in the fatal coffee grove, but his grave will be shallow. He will hear our village noises forever. He will not forget. For the enemy, salvation is provisional.
I weighed his knife, blunted by digging. How can death be so light? I thought I heard the sweet potatoes sigh in response, in our old farm where I had dragged his body for burial. The plots were overgrown with kogon and turog-turog, the sleep-sleep or the prayer plant, which quickly folded when touched in the day. My sudden arrival with a corpse would have closed the leaves in instantaneous benediction or slumber, but it was night and the leaves had shut. Dig then beyond prayer and dreams — six years ago my brother’s beautiful hands should have heeded that warning.
Dear Bolodoy and his religion of sweet potatotes, fishes and long Sunday masses in town. For this farmer, work and dreams were forms of worship. He loved harvest most: the pregnant roots, the slippery struggle of an eel, the pulsing gills of a large damagan. He loved how his hands touched. The touched creature was responding to him alone, as if his overgrown hands had both begged and granted a blessing. In prayer he was even more fervent, priest and supplicant alike, especially when he brought his palms together. He thought his hands folded like the pages of Padre Biya’s Book of Parables, which he couldn’t read. But the hand motion was enough; it was akin to harvesting.
‘And when I harvest enough, when I become the sweet potato king of Iraya, then I would be special too, Padre — even beside Eya and Pilar? And some nice girl would notice?’
‘Certainly, my son, some nice girl would notice, but God doesn’t want us to be arogante, understand?’
‘But at night, I itch between my legs and I want to get married — is that a sin, Padre?’
With this regular exchange at the confessional between the young faithful and Padre Biya, the good father’s pantry was never short of fish or sweet potatoes. But Bolodoy’s ‘religious generosity’, as the Padre called it, incensed Mamay Dulce. She had long damned the church when its singers-and-gossips condemned the pregnant Carmen to eternal hellfire. The day after her goddaughter’s funeral, she buried her faith with her church dresses, novenas, missals and scapulars in the old acacia chest under her bed. Once a year, however, these holy accoutrements were aired for the village fiesta, when the one and only mass was said in the makeshift chapel of Iraya. Mamay went to this mass and no other, believing it was a duty not to God but to her village. She always sat in the front pew, smelling of mothballs.
Mamay had a soft spot for our de facto patron saint, Santa Judith. She had a fondness for feisty saints, especially those that decapitated villains. But the avenging Judith was unpopular among Iraya’s faithful. Dios mio, whoever thought of her in the first place? Was she really a saint? No one could explain the executioner’s dubious appointment, not in peaceful Iraya. Mind you, she was Old Testament, so brave of course, but all that gory stuff, ay santisima, not wholesomely inspirational for the flock! So when Iraya became a parish, Judith’s post was usurped by the devoted martyr San Sebastian, who died for the love of God.
Did Iraya believe in martyrdom? When Mayor Kiko appended the smaller farms to his plantation, the farmers did not protest. They had little clout and too much fear. Legal documents were brandished before their noses by the mayor’s militia. ‘I have the titles, you’re squatting on my property,’ the mayor made it known. ‘But you can still
live on it, of course, as my tenants.’ Then he demanded their gratitude at each election. All were coerced to become ‘flying voters’, to express confidence in their God-Mayor and soon to be governor, on illegal ballots. Mamay never failed to curse at this public event and invoke the wrath of the headhunting saint.
The mayor did not touch our farm, until the sweet potato king began to expand his dominion. Bolodoy planted sweet potatoes on the entire three-metre border between our farm and the mayor’s coffee grove. ‘One never leaves any land idle,’ my brother insisted. So the mayor waved his legal documents again: our farm was an extension of his coffee plantation. Every grain of earth in our sweet potato plots was simply ‘borrowed’ and all the sweetness, which fed us for years, was a gift from our kindly mayor, the true father of the village. Bolodoy, his new tenant, stopped dreaming.
Chapter 51
The earth felt cool in my hands: kogon, turog-turog and clumps of beautifully rounded duma, and precious loam cleared for the sergeant’s grave. How strange that the motions of harvest and burial are so alike. We always dig with fervour. Wrists flex, palms scoop and fingers clutch then let go. I stood up, brushing the earth from my hands and knees. Ay, how inconsequential the mound looked, but after a year the vines would engulf it and the leaves would grow thicker, the roots fuller: sweet potatoes in his eyes, cheeks, belly, groin, even in his little toes — when this war ends, Sergeant Ramon will be garnished with grated young coconut and served with a cup of rice-coffee.
Tony, let me serve you the sweetest of potatoes. Let me take you back to the time when my great aunt was forced to flee to the hills in World War Two, when the Philippines was occupied by Japan for over three years. In 1944 Tiya Dami was seventy and formidable. Earlier she had refused to leave town when her three sons joined the guerrillas despite warnings of reprisal. Until the eldest boys were executed by the Kempei Tai. Her youngest escaped and came for her. ‘I won’t leave without you,’ he said. ‘We won’t leave without a funeral,’ she argued. How she did it, no one knew, but she retrieved her dead and prayed a quick novena before she buried them at her doorstep. Then she packed her tapis, a shovel, her rosary beads and a large machete. In the hills the matriarch planted sweet potatoes. She worked furiously, sunup to sundown as if the war were chasing her.
‘The hills bloomed like paradise,’ Mamay Dulce would later tell the story of the Japanese occupation with hardly a pause for breath. ‘So, you see, it’s in our blood, hard work and duma, believe me, our Tiya Dami and her duma became a legend so quickly, ay, for a year, she supplied the town with produce, smuggled by my cousin at a time when hunger flourished like a bad weed because from the city of Rodriguez all the way to Iraya and the neighbouring villages along the river, farms had been abandoned, stores had closed and food was scarce, we even forgot the taste of rice, but such is war, you better believe me.’
It was not hard to believe her. Some things are never outdated. War is a face that ages well. Its features are always terrifyingly young and familiar. But crouched over the sweet potato grave, I wondered whether it was my watching eye that bore these features, their imprint. The fireflies had returned, flying close to my face. Suddenly there was a fleeting spark everywhere I looked. The night relinquished its anonymity, flashing snippets of our history.
Bolodoy’s farm could have been Tiya Dami’s sweet potato kingdom where she was found lying on a cushion of green and purple vines, as if having a siesta. The bayonet wound was tiny and clean, a piggy bank’s little incision, just enough space for a ten-centavo coin to pass through. The old woman had been executed by a retreating Japanese platoon, because she had lied about her only living son — then the war ended and a family of scavengers chanced upon the incredible plantation, ay, all of two acres. Tales about the sweetest potato spread around Iraya. Dami’s duma — or Bolodoy’s duma? The ghost of her sweetness ready for harvest?
When this war is over. When the arms are laid down. When the farmers come home from the hills or the grave. When planting potatoes can be as heroic as an armed encounter — brother, come back with your hands that once curved around sweetness, before those fingers learned how to pull the trigger.
Chapter 52
‘Your own wealth, truly-truly.’ Pay Inyo pointed at me whenever Mamay ranted against Mayor Kiko’s ‘dirty wealth’. ‘Always we think of wealth in terms of land, carabaos, pigs — but what about your own children?’
‘You don’t understand, because you were never hungry,’ Mamay Dulce snapped in riposte.
Born to a family of rice merchants, Pay Inyo was considered ‘rich’ in Iraya with his full-time variety store plus faithhealing and gravedigging on the side. He waxed philosophical each time Mamay fought with him: ‘Ay, Dulce, we must dream and transcend suffering in order to dignify ourselves, truly-truly.’
His words were a drug, sweeter than his jars of sugarcoated dilimon. I swallowed them and regurgitated a sweet pacifism. Mamay was dismayed, wondering whether while my head was well endowed, my heart was sadly in the wrong place. You see, for a long time I had felt that transcendence was akin to the art of making rice-coffee, when the real thing was not there: roast half a cup of rice until the grains are black, boil, strain, add milk, if there’s any, then serve. Then you’ll feel better. So when Bolodoy came home wringing his hands as if they were a cursed appendage, I made coffee.
‘The farm was never ours, Eya. Why is that?’ the sweet potato king wept, and all I could say was, ‘You know, rice-coffee is good for bellyache.’
This is good for you, children. Sweet potatoes are better than rice. Rice-coffee is healthier than true coffee. A miracle among the ferns is more satisfying than straining your bottom over little holes inside the house. Ay, Mamay, I did learn the tricks of transcendence from you, those that could dignify the tenants’ hands waiting for a measly wage from my father.
Transcendence was basic fare in Iraya. If you don’t have rice, try a feast of sweet potatoes but totally re-invented: slivers fried into crisp kalingking or cubes simmered slowly in thick coconut milk, and some buches, those oh-so-hot patties, and not to forget, the proverbial boiled roots served with grated young coconut. Ay, aren’t we lucky to have such a culinary range derived from a single root of sweetness! Thank God for transcendence evidenced by such nostalgic farting after a week of sweet potato staple, when we could not afford rice. The nostalgia was so strong, it evoked our loyalty to simple peasant life and kept us blissfully content. We trained our palates not to wish beyond our rightful station.
‘Why don’t we ever have something nice?’ once young Pilar asked. Mamay Dulce had slapped her hand after she stole some tsokolate. ‘But I helped make these, so why can’t I — ’
‘Because we’re selling them.’
‘But we’re always making and selling, and never having any!’
Pilar had picked the cacaos herself and sucked the coats off their seeds, with me as earnest assistant, then dried them under the sun. Ay, those long hours of grinding, mixing, and moulding them into little balls. Now she wailed, fist clenched tightly around the brown mixture. I was so afraid the chocolates would be contaminated with her fury.
‘Why can’t we have some?’ she persisted.
‘I told you, we’re selling and saving.’
‘You’re always saving, Mamay!’
‘For the future, you know.’
‘Whose future — what future?’
‘Your college, of course.’
‘I don’t want to go to college, I want my tsokolate!’
Our mother’s money kerchief was always hidden under her blouse, like a scapular warding off the evil anxieties of want and promising her dreams for us. Or perhaps it was simply a weight on her chest, like the knowledge that there would never be enough pesos tightly knotted between her breasts.
‘I want it now!’
Mamay slapped Pilar’s wayward hand, then she turned to me. ‘Little Eya wants to go to college, don’t you, dear child?’
‘Hairless people can’t
go to college!’
The chocolate pack was sealed and Pilar turned her back on me.
Easily the heart could break over a withheld sweet. You should know this, Tony. Years later I realised that my sister never forgot that chocolate ritual and all the endearments that Mamay reserved only for me. Nor could I forget a similar heartbreak when Bolodoy came home wringing his hands as if he wanted to be rid of them.
‘How is it that since I was eight, I had farmed land which is not mine and why should each root now sweeten for the mayor who had never soiled his hands, and why-oh-why could I never be the sweet potato king?’
I remember how our palms clapped in time with our desires:
‘Amy, Susie and Tessie,
Romeo, Juancho and Jose Marie.
I like coffee, I like tea.
I like cinco
to buy me a muffin
and bicho-bicho cake —
Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling — statue!’
We had to freeze after the wishing. It was a childhood game, which we never outgrew. I like. I love. I desire. Pilar’s tsokolate was elbowed out by the heart of Benito. Bolodoy’s kingdom of sweet potatoes was displaced by guns. College for Mamay’s children paled beside her wish to get her own flesh and blood back, alive. Then always we froze after desire, knowing this was mere muscular exercise, a flexing of the heart. Feel that movement, beloved? And when the strain begins to tell, we shut this organ like a fist, in fear if not desperation or, worse, atrophy.
In the abandoned sweet potato farm, my heart shut like Bolodoy’s praying hands but with so little wisdom between them. Earlier I had desired to be saved from my final appointment with the river. I had killed a man and had buried another. I had wept over the enemy. I had remembered too vividly. And in remembering older anguish, I even forgot the ache in my scalp. For a while I was blind to my growing hair.
Fish-Hair Woman Page 15
