Fish-Hair Woman

by Merlinda Bobis

  ‘And what’s the inscription on the ribbons, ma’am?’

  ‘In memory of Kiko,’ the woman replied after a long pause.

  His soles tickled. He scratched them against the bucket of roses nearby and said, ‘Okay then, ma’am.’

  The tickle is like an itch. It does not go away, unlike history sometimes. Miguelito opted to forget history when he turned ten. Or perhaps history finally abandoned his bed when an aunt brought him to Manila, away from all the bodies that he had found in the river, those floating hills in the water. And thank God, away from the last body that he found inside the pig kennel where he and his uncle brought the sweet potatoes.

  The pigs were squealing mad, all fifty of them with snouts and hooves bloodied and eyes glinting, running in zigzags, careening against each other, trampling on a head, arms, legs, a torso strewn on the mud and turd. Nine-year-old Miguelito Morada could not put his uncle back together again, even if he tried. The pigs were in the way, the pigs were hungry.

  Miguelito’s uncle had offered his services as caretaker of the pigs and the sweet potato farm, so he could spy on the governor’s private army and his links with the military. The underground cadre even brought his nephew with him to complete his cover. He was just a harmless peasant. What did he know about politics or the revolution? But later the governor found out the truth, so despachar! His private militia dispatched his cause of despair. The pig kennel became an abattoir.

  Miguelito does not eat pork these days and he never takes off his scapular. He is particular with smells, that’s why his job is flowers. He believes he assists the living in laying their dead, but only with flowers. His memory wants to begin only with the laying of flowers. He wants to forget the hand scrubbing the dead, or picking maggots and snails off the flesh. Maggots and snails and squealing pigs, and the hand smelling: a sensory refrain that cheats his memory sometimes, making his feet tickle even more.

  He pushes away the image of a bloated body on a dining table before a woman rubbing her scapular, and the fireflies turning off their lights outside, one by one. The tickling in his soles is almost painful.

  Please lay the dead with grace on a proper bed, and it must be clothed, even made up. The living must make a few adjustments here and there, and flowers are an accessory to such adjustments. Miguelito ties in place the hundredth chrysanthemum, the final one, then rubs his own scapular. He believes this holy gesture will better help those who mourn.

  The crown is nearly finished now. It is the biggest that he’s done so far. No eyes will miss this. His regular customer, his suki, will be pleased. Perhaps she will send him an even bigger tip. Miguelito rummages through the box of ribbons and various coloured pens. He decides on a wide band of gold and a deeper gold pen.

  The phone rings. His suki wants to know if he’s done the order. If not, could he add something to it?

  ‘Sure, ma’am, sure,’ he says.

  There is a pause on the other line before the new words are dictated: ‘In loving remembrance of Ex-Gov Kiko.’

  An hour later, the owner of the shop will curse his best worker. Miguelito left early without his permission and on the busiest day of the week. The others will say that Miguelito felt ill so he had to go home, but the illness is not named. How to explain that poor Miguelito’s feet tickled mercilessly, it made him turn pale, but he couldn’t even laugh.

  Chapter 77

  On the morning of the 27th of September, while the Alvarado kitchen frets about lobsters, Nenita Jimenez, a fifty-five-year-old divorcee, lies quietly inside Gigi’s Salon. Gigi herself is giving her a facial, and maybe later a massage, then nails, then hair: a thorough laying of the living. But no amount of Gigi’s flattery and expert tenderness can help Nenita relax. Her lover Matt has not returned her call since they parted at the airport, where he tried to follow that McIntyre boy, hoping to be led to the truth about the lost father. Ah, all this sleuthing makes her tired, and sad for when anyone finds out the truth in the end.

  ‘You have very good skin, ma’am, ah, so smooth like a teenager’s … I believe yours is a rare skin type, ma’am … ’

  Nenita would have preferred a silent attendant. She could have gone to the proper spa of her five-star hotel, without this prattle. But she prefers the old-fashioned style. Gigi does not rely on exfoliation products from across the counter. Her technique is at its best surgical: extracting all impurities with fervour, getting to the root of dead skin.

  ‘Maybe you’ll like a full body massage after this, ma’am? I give very good massage with my homemade oils.’

  Nenita takes care of her skin, her figure, her looks. She’s particular about good grooming and she takes younger men for lovers. Because it’s not just her ex-husband who can fuck someone a third of his age!

  ‘Such small pores,’ Gigi gushes. ‘Like a baby’s. You’re very lucky, ma’am, really nice skin.’

  The nimble fingers smelling of citrus and flowers make Nenita sigh. Indeed you can learn tenderness, apprentice yourself to it for a long time. Gigi had done so, she said earlier. Now she owns her own salon. Such is perseverance, such is life.

  ‘I love working with skin like yours, ma’am. No trouble at all.’

  Tenderness you learn, but lust is instinctive. She should know by now. Since her divorce she travelled with a shameful desperation, flirting with the local men wherever she went. She always made sure she had someone.

  ‘Naku, there are some women who never get any blemishes, ma’am, they’re just born that way … like you, ma’am … haay, so lucky.’

  There is nothing more lustful than loneliness, she tells herself when an affair ends and she’s out looking for action again. But, well, none of them can make her come anyway, not with their natural endowment. She has to assist herself, and by this time, they will have been delivered back to themselves or to the bliss of sleep and she is always outside it. To come is to be lonely.

  ‘If we have time, I can also do your nails. If you wish me to, ma’am.’

  Why is it that sex, the most intimate of connections, always leaves her bereft, more alone than before? The man in her bed only fills her with his own lack. And she wakes up bearing the weight of a double inadequacy, hers and his, in her womb. Maybe condoms were invented not because of the fear of pregnancy or disease. There is no worse disease than one’s inherent incompleteness doubled in weight. One cannot be more pregnant.

  ‘And, ma’am, all my clients always return for a massage … ’

  Maybe that’s why she never got pregnant. She was always afraid, like her ex-husband who would come to her bed smelling of another woman always younger than she was. A teenager, a child. She’d know. He married her when she was only fourteen.

  ‘If you stay longer in the country, ma’am, you can have some nice trips, you know. I have a brother who can take care of you, ma’am.’

  Gigi pimping for her brother! She nearly laughs at the dirty thought. When did she get to be this crass? Only now that they’re in the same country again, she and her ex-husband. She’s here again because he’s here again. They have both come home … Nenita sighs as her face is smothered with the hot towel. She’s too aware that she’s no longer young and that her current affair is built on a vested interest, his. Matt sought her out because of her ex-husband, but he doesn’t know she knows. She likes to believe that he loves burying his face between her legs.

  The towel is rubbed around her face to peel off the fruity masque. She likes this part best; it unblocks as it cleans. She can almost hear her blood coursing freely. Now she begins to relax. She hopes Matt rings her or comes to the hotel tonight, if he’s not out sleuthing again. Pretending not to be together to ward off suspicions is ridiculous. How can she burn if there is no ample fire at the other end?

  The toner is slapped on her face more eagerly than necessary. She raises a hand to stay Gigi’s wrist, still with eyes closed.

  Her lover’s conflagrations are bound for other destinations and she cannot know the extent of his quest. Nor
does she care to know. She has always kept her distance, tried not to pry, even with her ex-husband, once her good little clown. Ah, how he tried to win over the Filipino-Americans in Hawai’i when they first arrived. ‘My heart overflows in tempestuous waves to find you, my countrymen, so far from home … I’m not just your brother, I’m your servant! Ask and you shall receive, that’s what comes from my village heart beating loudly for our poor country’s peace and prosperity — Mabuhay ang Pilipinas — Long live the Philippines!’ (But in America.) It sounded like a presidential speech.

  ‘There, all pores shut now, ma’am … ’

  Hah, this is probably what Matt wants from me — to tell on my ex-husband! Well, darling Matt, he was one of the first ‘rascals in paradise’. Driven out of this country in the late seventies, so he flew to Hawai’i, with me and his sick bastard daughter in tow. Her mother was the only one that broke my heart really, because he did her in our bed. I found out the truth from the strands of my maid’s hair on my pillow … that’s a laugh but less hilarious compared to how he forced me to adopt his daughter by her, to legitimise our happy, little family in paradise!

  Chapter 78

  By the time Nenita’s pores had opened again after a steamy interlude with Matt, her ex-husband was dead. By the time Luke had found the body, everyone else was otherwise preoccupied and nowhere near the Alvarado mansion, or so they will all swear. Brother Nestor was teaching. Miguelito was in bed nursing the tickle in his foot. Inez was sleeping in, recovering from her river trip with Matt, and Minyong was in his hut lighting his first cigarette of the day.

  Later these names will be caught in a web of motives, which the police will investigate half-heartedly, lest the web expands to compromising territories. They will argue that a death threat does not equate with pulling the trigger. It may only be as brave as sending a crown of flowers. But after the seventh funereal tribute, Doctor Francisco ‘Kiko’ Alvarado is shot dead with his own Colt 45. By the time Luke finds him, the one hundred chrysanthemum buds have bloomed. By the time Adora finds Luke howling before the body, the jeep’s tyres have already slowed down in her head, in another time.

  On the third shot she’s still holding the baby in her arms. It wakes, it cries, it stops. Everything stops in Manay Sabel’s corner store. Her temple, cheek and neck sting. Her baby brother is wet, ay, so wet. He falls from her arms, she hears him drop. Then the good doctor comes to her rescue. He takes her away to Hawai’i where he invents her congenital flowers.

  Adora was nine when Dr Alvarado operated on her while Pay Inyo, the village herbalist, hovered around with his incantations and the doctor’s photographer clicked away for his boss’s press release the next day. Ex-Gov Kiko returns to his old profession: saving the sick, healing the poor. The village watched, unimpressed. Those hands have blood on them, and some of the families of the victims plotted to expose it. So the embittered doctor returned to Hawai’i. Indeed he had left the Philippines in 1978, his own hands dark with the crimes of martial rule. No, actually, I was chased out of my home by the communists! They sent me a crown of flowers each day, they threatened me, they wished me dead! What could a man do? This country was not safe, so I left on my own accord. I was not driven out.

  Driven out to paradise, to a bungalow dripping with bougainvillaeas and overlooking the lights of Honolulu. Here Kiko turned his clothes inside out, so he could find his way home. He erased a whole political history and became a born-again Christian. Finally in 1986 after the February revolution that ousted the dictator, when the Philippine air was festive and forgiving, he believed it was time to go home. But home spat him back to paradise, where he found a new rascal giving better speeches. That this other man responsible for the twenty-year regime of terror and corruption, under which he served, should join him in paradise was fitting. But I’m not like him, I’m only small fry, not like that puffer fish with all its poison!

  The doctor feared contamination but he had little choice. He had to come to the extravaganzas of the Filipino-Americans. The loyalist rallies demanding that the deposed fish be restored to power, the waving of flags, the grand speeches, the song and dance — all amounted to the longest running variety show, which was blessed with daily masses to help the fish swim home. Its motto was I’ll go home by hook or by crook! This echoed in Kiko’s heart, though he nearly choked when a loyalist priest likened the fish to Jesus Christ.

  Meanwhile the lady of the fish shopped with conviction at the most expensive boutiques in Waikiki. Gossip has it that one time, as her consort plotted to return home on a secret submarine, she bought herself a pair of designer military fatigues for when the action began. But the homecoming plot went nowhere. So they plotted some more and rallied for support and sang and danced for dignity and shopped for their lives, then plotted again. Soon the fish and his lady began to bemoan their ‘impoverished condition’ in paradise. ‘Oh, we are so broke, we will welcome food and cash donations from all of you, our dear countrymen and women.’

  Who could outdo this melodrama? Doc Kiko found himself without an audience. Try as he would, he could not compete with the pair’s grander schemes. He even learned to sing and dance himself, but to no avail.

  Amidst this variety show, Adora grew her congenital flowers. She became the master’s new angel.

  Bullets are verbs, so she told me during our grammar lessons. This was after your father had left, when my mistress Stella stopped sleeping.

  In Adora’s heart the story continues. The howling has ceased. She leads Luke away from her master’s corpse. They sit on the couch as if waiting for something to begin or perhaps to end. Her hands rest on her lap. There are not enough gestures to tell this other story.

  I was not adopted by the Alvarados. I was brought to Hawai’i by the master to serve as maid to his sick daughter who barely left the house. I became his full-fledged angel before I even began to grow breasts.

  I saw your father only very briefly. He was the master’s guest in paradise. December 1987. I heard him plead with Doc Kiko to help find a woman back home. He looked mad, ay, his eyes had fireflies in them — but no madder than my mistress. She always has this headache, like a purple ball in her head, she says, so she injects herself, I can’t bear to look. Then she’ll have fireflies in her eyes darting this way and that. She loses her breath as if she’s about to die. She sounds as if her voice is already ten feet below the ground, and her hair grows and grows … but who will believe a maid who is mute? I remember the stories in our village, when the soldiers lived there. Once upon a time there was a woman who took the dead home with her long, long hair.

  Adora watches her lover counting the chrysanthemums. She follows his eyes, as if she too can find her stories woven into that crown.

  My mistress taught me how to read and write, but only a bit, it was hard to learn, I didn’t do much school back home. She said she wished she could hear me read. Once she opened my mouth and searched for my tongue with those lights in her eyes. She and your father talked and talked behind the master’s back. It was only for a very short time, your father’s visit. Then one night the master took him to the airport. He never returned. Stella — Estrella waited … ay, all those years. I think she was waiting for your father, because she was waiting for the stories.

  Ay, how to tell all these to the boy who howled himself hoarse in her arms? How to tell those who can speak about what the silent ones hear so clearly? The weeping in Estrella’s scalp and hair: her nightmares, rage and anguish, and her beloved. It has been Iraya all along, always her padaba, her true beloved. I wonder if Tony McIntyre ever understood.

  Adora turns to the son, straightens the glasses that have gone askew.

  Your father told her so many scary stories, sad stories. I know because after he left, she stopped sleeping, she’d cry for hours, her headaches would make her scream, her arms bloomed with needle marks. Then she began writing love letters, pages and pages of them, but her father always read them and threw them away. But she kept writing, stories s
he said, and she hid them, I helped her … stories will find him, will find her, will find all of them, she said. Nightly I combed her hair to ease the pain in her scalp … and how they grew, her hair, her stories, the fireflies in her eyes, the needles … best for pain, her father said. And I always cleaned up after … but I couldn’t after my baby brother dropped from my arms.

  The lovers at their most intimate. Luke keeps counting chrysanthemums. Adora understands. She knows shock like a second skin. She knows it will pass even if it leaves an indelible mark.

  Chapter 79

  Desperar, despachar, dispensar, descansar. When you despair over a hopeless situation, you must dispatch its cause and beg indulgence for the act of dispatching, then you can rest.

  Stella is afraid she might disturb the man resting on the floor. ‘Hush,’ she says but Luke and Adora are already silent. Seated on the couch, they are gazing straight ahead as if after a movie, waiting for the credits to roll. It is six o’clock in the morning, but the room is still lit by a lamp. Here the windows are always shut, the curtains drawn.

  Stella half drags herself into the room, eyes glazed. Morphine. Morpheus. God of sleep. God of Forgetting. God over pain.

  Long ago her father infused her with the god after she fell from the fart-fart tree. Mamay Dulce had begged Mayor Kiko to come to the house, because his five-year-old daughter was dying, so he administered the god and she forgot the pain that was growing like a purple ball in her head. But years later she remembered, after Pilar’s torture and when she saw Bolodoy’s bloated corpse. She grew very ill and stopped sleeping, terrified that her head would split with the pain. ‘Ay my poor Eya, my only beloved now.’ With both her blood children taken by the war, Mamay Dulce swallowed her pride again and sought the help of their patron.