Fish-Hair Woman

by Merlinda Bobis

  I am struggling with the concept of transubstantiation when a wide-brimmed straw hat appears from nowhere and hovers around me insolently. I smell sweat and boiled bananas.

  ‘Miss, Miss, won’t you buy some?’

  Boiled bananas over His redemptive flesh and blood? I do not have much choice. I keep to my Theology, but she does not leave.

  ‘Hoy, Miss, I’m talking to you,’ she says, rearranging a kerchief that covers most of her face. ‘Hoy, miss, you deaf?’

  Ay, where’s that Inez?

  ‘Miss, these are very sweet, try them.’

  I note the heaviness of her pregnancy, she’s panting slightly.

  ‘Ay, time for a snack, Miss, hoy!’ The voice cajoles and mocks, then a dirty foot kicks me on the shin.

  I stand, infuriated —

  ‘You still use lime leaves and flowers, miss?’

  My arms reach out instinctively, but she steps back and shakes her head, giving me a look of warning. Her eyes are so clear, as if her three years of absence have polished them in the hills.

  Pilar is in her seventh month. A difficult pregnancy, she says and she’s here on a mission, which she refuses to explain. She warns against any display of recognition. ‘We’re just doing a business transaction here, Miss.’ I can only stare at arm’s length. A peasant’s kerchief under the silly hat, rubber slippers that don’t match, faded blouse and fraying skirt, slight build gone gaunt despite the pregnancy, but still the old, emphatic gestures and lips pursed in mockery — and tenderness? The barest trace. I want to touch her to make sure it is there. But I keep my word: only at arm’s length.

  I take her behind our high school stadium. We crouch among the kogon grass, still keeping at arm’s length.

  ‘Look how you’ve grown — all of sixteen, seventeen years now? In this holiest and most expensive high school? So how are Mamay’s singsong scoldings? She likes my letters? Benito doesn’t know I send them, warns it’s not safe. We have books up there too. Important ones. You’ll go to college? Good. She’ll be happy. She okay? Still perfumes the house with fish sauce and lemon grass?’

  Her voice remains clipped, queries precise as if she has pruned all longing from them. ‘My stupid brother, do you see him? Bolodoy’s still flirting with the governor’s angels? And the Holarawnd Man, still broken-hearted?’

  That stubborn chin, that teasing lift of her brow, ay, sister — I begin to cry.

  ‘Your hair … it’s much longer … ’ Her voice has softened.

  She has always known what to do with my tears, but not that afternoon. She has lost her knack for the old ribbing. She tugs at the end of my braids, fiddles with my books. Her hands are deeply tanned, capable and sure among the pages.

  ‘I can read now — tell them that,’ she says, then stands up abruptly, as if her visit were over.

  I see that her breathing is uneven. ‘You okay, Manay Pilar?’

  She leans against the mossy planks of the stadium, then touches my hand to her belly. ‘You’ll be an auntie soon, imagine that.’

  Much later we will learn that it was a boy. But we’ll never know the name of the ‘the little beloved’ who will rest somewhere in the hills.

  The hills, the hills, the hills: it is incantatory. Kumander Pilar, the most wanted amazona, speaks of her new home in a tone reserved for prayer. Hidden behind the stadium, she loosens her kerchief, fans herself with the stupid hat. Suddenly I want to get angry, to shut her up.

  ‘Better up there, you know,’ she says.

  So gaunt and chin sharper. More stubborn than before?

  ‘Up in the hills, everything is fair, completely democratic, everyone works equally, men and women.’ Then, in an afterthought, ‘I don’t have to be the suffering kitchen maid or wife or harassed daughter — I don’t have to try so hard to win anyone’s love.’

  It is still the same chin. Ay, such fervour for all our displaced longings.

  ‘You don’t have to try so hard to win anything,’ I argue and she laughs, giving the air an abrupt backhand as if to dismiss the love aspiration. ‘So burgis, that one,’ she says. That personal cause is so ‘petty bourgeois’.

  ‘It’s not,’ I say.

  The kerchief is quickly readjusted over her face, perhaps to hide the incorrect outburst. I notice it has tiny blue flowers.

  ‘Up in the hills, the return is bigger than us. It’s for the masses, not for them to love us back, but for them, for us to rise together above the oppressive regime, those feudal lords who — but what would you know?’

  I begin to speak, but I am halted by the way she looks at me, with a contempt one reserves for stray dogs. ‘If only you knew … ’ she whispers, making sure the kerchief is tightly knotted.

  What did I know indeed? She was right to ask me at the holiest of high schools where I enjoyed the largesse of my father. To sweeten his public face, the new governor had awarded high school scholarships to three indigent students from Iraya, me among them. Mamay Dulce did not reveal the true identity of my patron. Why should she? My ignorance allowed her to swallow her scruples. She sent me to the most expensive school in the city, on my father’s blood money.

  Pilar knew but she held her tongue. With my secret heritage sitting in her chest, she walked out of the gate like a seasoned food hawker. She never looked back. She held the basket of boiled bananas as if she had done so all of her life.

  When I saw Inez late that day, she was fuming. I stood her up! I told her my sister visited me, that’s why, and she brought wild berries from her hunting in the hills, berries that tasted like you won’t believe it. How sweet they were.

  Chapter 57

  Pilar would not be able to return to the hills that night. You must know this, Tony, and all the details of a history that I saved instead of a body, for I would never find you in the water that night. Because this story is not about you, but for you to understand. My dear Australian, meet my beloveds, catch their eyes, breathe their air. Air that sweated so, you once said. How could I disagree? River air is always moist and, like the water, it too tastes of the hills from where the river begins.

  But no, we cannot go into the water yet. Like Pilar, my story is stalled in the city jail of Rodriguez, in a cell vacated by the all-male inmates ‘for a sexy preggy’ who rides with the banter and gives a false name.

  It is three o’clock in the morning. Pilar has just been released from her first interrogation.

  ‘Hoy, give the missis a mat, will you? And say hello to our guest. Hoy, what are you in for? Selling boiled bananas in the high school? You’re a joker, missis. Hoy, which school by the way? Ah, the holy-holy one, now you’ll tell us they didn’t like stray vendors there, bad competition for the canteen of the nuns, of course. But you’re a funny sort, lady. Hoy, what’s your name and how long will we have the pleasure of your company?’ Then a wolf whistle and a remark about the newest, sexiest inmate, and someone shutting up the whistler with a playful upper cut.

  The caged stink of faeces, urine, perpetual sweat and wretchedness is a lifetime away from the hills. Pilar’s chest feels tight, or is it her belly? Above her, a bulb dangles from half-exposed wires. A sickly yellow. On both sides of her cell, through the iron bars, she can barely make out the bodies jaundiced by the glow.

  ‘You must be special, missis. They chucked us all in here, so you can have that bedroom all by your lonesome,’ someone calls out, while a hand shoots through the bars and brushes her breast.

  Get a grip, girl, she tells herself.

  ‘So we’re suddenly overpopulated now, see?’ another remarks and a hand nearly grabs her nape.

  Get a grip.

  Several voices echo the complaint and more hands reach through, as if needing to come to the light.

  ‘Sorry, my friends,’ she says, walking to the centre of her cell where they cannot reach her. Her belly tightens at each step.

  ‘Ah, a polite one, so better watch your manners.’ A voice of authority from the cell to her left hushes further complaints, but s
he sees faces, hands trying to burst through the bars.

  ‘Missis is visiting us with her airs?’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ A teasing chorus.

  ‘Lintian, not again, Luis!’ someone curses.

  She feels a warm wetness around her feet.

  ‘Sorry, missis,’ says the incontinent Luis, zipping up his pants.

  She shuts her eyes. She hears them shaking the bars, pounding them, the whole cell vibrates and her belly heaves.

  The two men in the jeep were polite when they picked her up outside the high school and invited her to the police station. They found the gun under the boiled bananas, so a little chat that lasted for eleven hours. No, they could not offer her a chair or a meal, but there was a tape of the government’s slogan songs for her ‘enlightenment’ before they brought her to this cell. ‘It’ll be okay, girl,’ a female guard patted her on the shoulder. Didn’t she say all these are standard operating procedures?

  She is breaking in cold sweat, her knees shake, her belly hurts, heaves and hurts.

  ‘Now you’ve upset her, Luis.’

  ‘I was jus’ jokening,’ the old man giggles.

  ‘Ah, Luis is now English spokening!’

  ‘For the lady, of course.’

  ‘Mang Luis has suddenly grown airs?’

  Laughter around her. Under the sickly halo, Pilar feels the gurgles rising in her own throat, get a grip, girl, tearing joy from her womb, pushing it to her lungs then throat, get a grip, until she’s gagging as she catches her belly as if it’s about to drop.

  Chapter 58

  To free fall and not to plunge deliberately into the water. I can do that now, I convinced myself. I have arrived, but not for you, Tony. On the riverbank my scalp was a relentless spasm, regurgitating the past, recreating scenes, hearing voices in another handspan of hair. I began to retrieve it, pulling the strands of memory, saving them from the dark, ay, all my beloved.

  Tell me, whose salvation is it that we seek? Perhaps at the heart of all seeking, we are always ‘petty bourgeois’, naturally in search of a personal reason for love, war and everything else in between. For when we declaim about our cause, is our not the operative word? Our country, our village, our dead, our story. And even if we elevate our quest to the noble act of communal salvation, is it not a private urge that fuels our feet? Such a short distance between our and mine, whether we run from the left or the right side of the heart.

  Perhaps like a good reactionary, I could never believe in monumental causes. I could only do corpses and memory. I could only do justice to my own curse.

  My hair felt sticky in my hands. Blood from the coffee grove, nearly dry. I pulled all of me that trailed behind, but for the first time, the strands refused to gather. They extended themselves, lengthening into narrative after narrative and my perpetual interrogation of my place in each of them.

  Whose salvation is it that I seek?

  I walked to the edge of the water. I knew the distance so well: between our and mine. This trek to the river was and will always be about my redemption. Tony, I am not your angel. Pay Inyo, I am no miracle. Mamay Dulce, I am not your wealth. I am my own tortured scalp.

  ‘Back home, torture in the third world is easily our favoured “shock-horror” conversation piece,’ you once despaired, Tony. ‘And we allow our stomachs to turn as we sign endless petitions to stop it. A little digestive discomfort, but that’s the least we can contribute to world peace. Oh, yes, we do send cash too and our state-of-the-art politics to save the poor buggers. Private indignation can go a long, long way.’

  Not long enough to reach the military camp, where Pilar had been moved. You see, sometimes the good intentions of all the nations of the world can vanish if they land in the personal pockets and political machinations of the governing self-interest, for we are not unlike our generous patrons in the first world. So I beg you, Tony, do not keep illusions about us. Hope is more real and humble. Perhaps some fallout from it might be caught by the afflicted, some inkling of salvation. For us and, more importantly, for you. But not in a private party, sometime between three and four in the morning, on a rainy Tuesday in November 1976.

  Pilar is dreaming a holy dream. It smells of beer. There are five men praying around her, they must be praying, they’re kneeling, the yellow faces so close to hers. Shining dots in her pupil, no, they’re fireflies.

  ‘Don’t touch her — not like that!’

  Her ankles hurt, hurt.

  ‘But, Minyong, the Lieutenant said we should — ’

  ‘I said, don’t!’

  Her legs are forced open. Ay, fireflies attending to the birth — is it time?

  ‘So the putita is playing tough?’ says the sixth firefly, who has just joined the circle. ‘Go on,’ it continues, ‘ask her about her husband.’

  ‘But sir, we’ve asked for hours — ’

  ‘Ask her again — ’

  ‘But, sir, Lieutenant — ’

  ‘Out of the way — I’ll do it — ’

  ‘No — don’t touch— please, sir, not that way!’

  ‘Aw, shut up, Minyong — sir, she’s played dumb for hours.’ Fireflies crawl around her navel.

  ‘Yeah, tough as nails — ’

  Her scream tears the air.

  ‘But not anymore.’

  Her scream knifes her throat, plows into her bones.

  ‘Not that way, sir.’

  The air smells of roasting meat.

  ‘No, no, sir,’ the youngest soldier pleads, ‘not like that — ’

  ‘Shut up, Minyong!’

  The fireflies descend, from belly to pubis.

  They grow into haloes, no, six faces.

  She’s split open.

  Pilar is spread-eagled before the smoking men, her skirt and panty crumpled beside her tied ankles, the belt buckles digging into her flesh, all of her an immense yellow pain. On her belly, a track of cigarette burns.

  It is in the Stardust tabloid the next day:

  The rebel commander was discovered in a ‘hanky-panky’ with another suspect. This caused premature contractions according to the medico legal … her baby boy … died of asphyxiation …

  But because of the furore caused by the ‘most indecent and sinful reporting of the guerrilla’s capture’, to quote the army chaplain in a later issue, the paper is banned by mid-afternoon. After all copies are sold out.

  I am in my final year in high school. I am an ignorant virgin. I am certain it is my fault. I shouldn’t have left her at the gate. I should have never let go of her hand. In my school dormitory I fall extremely ill, nearly blind from the ache in my scalp. My best friend Inez is with me, her usual calm broken for once. She sees my whole body heave, she thinks I am dying, she runs off to call the nuns. When she returns, I am no longer there. Mamay Dulce is taking me home to the village. Her eyes are extraordinarily dry like mine, a wrung-out stare, even as she mutters that weeping is like singing.

  In Iraya I cannot vomit enough to dislodge my throat from my body. My hair begins to grow and grow, refusing to stop, each handspan replaying the final meeting with my sister.

  Pilar is tortured and gang-raped then dumped back in prison, but the tabloid is extremely discerning with its choice of tales. Owned by a golfing partner of the Lieutenant who led the interrogation of an enemy of the state, the tabloid can only tell the ‘correct’ story: the pregnant amazona was ‘whoring it out’ when the unfortunate birth happened. Three days later it publishes the next episode in public outrage: the most wanted rebel commander escaped after a shootout, killing three of the force’s most promising men. They had very young families too.

  And after that, whatever happened in the hills?

  ‘If you are violated, rise, bathe, it’s not yet the end of the world!’

  Kumander Benito is philosophical about rape. He does not believe in vendettas. They muddy the issue. They impinge on more important concerns, which she sacrificed in one impulsive decision. He blames her for returning to the lowlands to see her
family, on the pretext of some urgent mission. Hah, some foolish loneliness! He tries to forgive her, ay, she’s too young, or to forget perhaps … it’s not yet the end of the world indeed. But each night as he holds his sleeping wife, his arm over her belly, he feels its scars burn through his own flesh. He longs for the morning when they can be separate bodies again. They bury their grief deeper each day, then leave the grave somewhere in the hills, without even a cross to mark it.

  In his heart Benito repeats himself for assurance and consistency: my wife was rescued, that was enough, my stillborn son was given a proper burial, that was enough, three of the pigs were wasted, that was enough. It was not that long ago when he decided it was enough to use the young Pilar as decoy for smuggling arms to the hills, while she was falling in love. But that first operation failed. He abandoned his staged romance, because he had loved her back.

  I loved you too, Tony, because she loved you back, did she not? Because I felt her in your flesh, in your grief. When I took you to the river, you found my eyes bone-dry, wrung-out from all the weeping. Even before the faceless corpse of the young guerrilla who had lost her nipples. Even before the boy with a necklace of the fattest prawns. And you wept.

  ‘I’m afraid, when I die, I can’t stay dead,’ you said. ‘Each time your heart breaks, as now I know it does, I’ll hear it in my breast.’

  We buried the little body together with Pay Inyo. Then you saw the streaks of white at my nape. You believed that my eyes shimmered with an incoming storm. And you held me. For a moment that was enough.

  Love is our main cause after all: whatever, whoever it is that we love or do not love, and whether they can love us back.