Across the road a family is building another hut. The three children, all under five, wander around showing off their protuberant bellies. The family lost all their possessions in the flood.
Pay Inyo gingerly steps over the cable.
This is not exactly a road. Uncemented it’s more like a wide path that disappears at every storm. The proper road, which is neatly cemented, begins a few metres ahead where there are more houses. This is a cause of bewilderment to strangers in Iraya but not to the locals. They understand broken road: cemented, uncemented, then cemented again. A phenomenon remnant of the past election campaign. Where there are more houses, there are more votes, so the mayor builds his electorate their portion of a road. Of course he promises that, after the election, he will finish the task, so those who live along the unfinished end, must vote for him too. Nothing gets finished in Iraya. Not enough funds, he is known to explain. The health centre has been without running water for three months now.
But we have a health centre!
Mayor Reyes has just been re-elected.
Pay Inyo reaches the cemented end. He checks his mud-caked shoes. How can he climb those polished steps of the biggest house in Iraya?
Marble and always gleaming. The flight of steps is impressive, almost white and lined with potted palms. No speck of dirt. Of course, storms do not visit mayors’ houses.
It was never this impressive before. The Estraderos preferred basalt, its look of authority, and it weathered well. They called the house their summer chalet. It had a Castilian finish: the carved, wooden awnings, the large windows with capiz-shell inlay, the heavy door and its ancient brass knocker, the hardwood floors … and the stone balcony with its graceful banisters. Here Gov Kiko’s ‘angels’ were always seen lounging with their guns. They caroused for consecutive nights on occasions, shooting into the air when they got drunk. There were other shootings here. But it was easy to wash off blood from basalt. It weathered well.
Now it’s all modern like the houses on TV and bigger, plenty of marble, glass and wrought iron, also a high wall and a locked gate. No longer the Casa Estradero. It is the only house in Iraya with a buzzer. Pay Inyo pushes it tentatively, thinking, I hope she’s not in, I hope the mayor hasn’t left for the day yet. It’s easier to speak to him. The old man is wary of the ‘First Lady’, Mrs Gloria Reyes. They say she asks too many questions.
A little window opens on the gate. A round face with distrustful eyes queries him. ‘Yes?’
‘I need to speak to Mister Mayor, please.’
‘Who are you? You have an appointment?’ The voice is shrill, disapproving.
‘Appointment?’ he laughs, surprised. Who makes appointments in Iraya? Pay Inyo finds the notion very funny, here of all places!
‘No appointment, no entry.’
The maid cannot understand why he’s laughing. He shouldn’t be laughing, but this is his first chance of lightness since the storm and he doesn’t want the feeling to lift. ‘I’ll wait then,’ he says, wanting to add, until another storm makes an appointment with Iraya, how about that?
‘My house is open to you. You can come to me anytime.’ In all his election campaigns, Mayor Reyes swore to live by the needs of his people. ‘I am here to serve you. I am the people’s mayor.’ Pay Inyo trusts his mayor, despite the bad roads. Despite the fact that ‘my house’ is not exactly his. Pay Inyo has abandoned this latter knowledge countless times, but it always sneaks in again, causing extreme discomfort in his chest. Didn’t the mayor deserve to be rewarded after those years of struggle in the hills? Didn’t he fight beside the beloved Kumander Pilar? But didn’t he, like everyone else, spurn Pilar after she took up with the Australian — after all those rumours about Tony’s affiliations with Kiko and the military? Who listens to such gossip anyway? The newspaper people, the activists who have been coming to unearth our dead? He abandons his litany of queries. He does not like to be ambivalent when it comes to trust.
The little window is quickly shut. He hears approaching steps, a whispered conversation. The gate is opened a fraction.
‘Ah, Pay Inyo, how are you, my friend?’ It’s the mayor himself, as always casually dressed for office. He is unlike other politicians who are forever wearing the formal barong tagalog, the embroidered traditional shirt. He knows most of his constituents by name. He takes public transport. And he is no mestizo; he is dark, his face broad as a peasant’s. He is one of us, he is the people’s mayor.
Pay Inyo breathes deeply, before he says, ‘Mister Mayor, I have to see you, please. Sorry for the bother at this early hour, but I need to see you.’ He is impervious to the mayor’s fidgeting, because he is staring at his shoes. The maid, still hovering, stares with the old man.
‘Come in then, come in. I was just about to wait for my bus, but if you need me … ’ The mayor keeps up the comradely tone to hide his worry. He has kept up with the movements of ex-governor Francisco Alvarado. He read about his return from Hawai’i, and now his murder. He should play his cards carefully.
The gate is opened a little wider so the old man can squeeze in.
‘So what can I help you with, my friend?’
‘In — in private, please, Mister Mayor.’
The mayor hesitates, shifting from one foot to the other, then smiles but without the usual spark. ‘Okay, come up then, come to the balcony.’
The maid does not hide her hostility, standing close and ramrod straight in her white uniform. Pay Inyo cannot tell where her mop came from. She follows right behind him without a word. There is thorough mopping at each marble step, where his shoes had been.
‘I washed them,’ he says. He did too at the public pump.
The maid just stares at his shoes, mop ready.
Pay Inyo believes that the news of death, any death, softens the features. The clouding of the eyes is inevitable, not so much from tears but from commiserating with someone’s capitulation to our shared mortality. You are going before me, perhaps even preparing the way for all of us who will eventually follow. He searches his mayor’s face but there’s nothing there except comradely demeanor, which is growing tired as the gravedigger attempts to choose the right words. It takes time to explain death, wakes, homecomings, truly-truly. He rambles.
The mayor tries to remain composed, his broad, peasant face open as always. He must not be shocked, flustered, worried, or difficult. He must be a true comrade to this old man begging for the dead to be allowed to return to his own house, at least for three days.
‘I appeal to your kindness, Mister Mayor, sir … ’
Running a hand along the marble banisters, the mayor’s eyes wander though the sprawling garden, now recovering from the storm. His wife grows beautiful things that flower through the year. He sniffs the air, luxuriating in the scent of soaked vegetation, of newly budding things. They have done well. No smell of blood, of drink, of ghosts … of pigs. It took months before the animal scent disappeared. They have exorcised the evil from this house. A pool and a tennis court have replaced the pig kennels. If he shuts his eyes, he swears he would hear his children splashing in the pool, the thwack of his wife’s racket, her laughter. This is home, yes, after years of want in the hills and in prison, we are finally home. The mayor suddenly feels generous. He says ‘yes’ to the drone of the old man.
As Pay Inyo is marched to the gate by the maid and her mop, he does not feel any sense of accomplishment. Nothing but an extreme discomfort in his chest, as if someone twisted his heart towards the wrong direction.
Chapter 84
Three days then: short, precise grieving. First day for the dead, second day for the living, third for those between living and dying, the uncertain ones.
On the first day Stella arrives with her dead bundled in a black plastic bag, much to Pay Inyo’s horror. This is no way to treat the dead! Behind her the bearers, with their odd gestures, are doing their best to appear respectful. One keeps winking as if to conspire with his mistress, while the other shakes his head to admonish her.
She is wearing red. No one wears red around the dead and never at a wake. But it is not the dress or the body bag that distresses him most.
‘Your hair, your beautiful hair!’ Pay Inyo blurts out as she enters the gate. Then, ‘Estrella, Eya, lovely Eya,’ he greets her in Mamay Dulce’s affectionate singsong. He cannot help himself. The green towel roams his face again and again. He stares at her staring back, he wrings his hands, opens his arms, ‘Ay, padaba — ay, beloved, what have you done to yourself?’
Suddenly he sees her from twenty years ago, when she lost her voice from wailing at her brother’s funeral. She was tearing at her long, long hair, then banging her head against the wall. He had to hold her down. Later she slept with clumps of hair in her fists. She had just turned eighteen.
‘Ay, Eya!’
He sees her face collapse at the sight of him, but the dead nudges her from behind, wanting to be let in. Her face orders its features; she is composed again. The gate is closed and her little procession moves forward. She takes the old man’s hand, touches it respectfully to her brow, then asks, ‘Up the steps?’
The old man can only nod mutely, staring at the bare nape.
She does not meet his eyes, even as she hangs on to his hand. For a second, she grips it, like someone trying to regain balance, then lets go. She nods at the bearers to follow her.
Pay Inyo is openly crying now, like an abandoned lover. He begins to sob, his chest racked by sounds so deep and anguished, they seem to be wrenched from his toes. As if on cue, the bearers whisper, ‘Sshh …sshh… ’ But the woman in the red shift does not look back. The leather pumps click up the steps and her body leans precariously at each rung. Her arms are tightly wrapped about her middle, the elbows sticking out.
‘Ay, Eya, ay, ay!’
He is crying because she has lost her hair, because she is so thin, because she’s wearing red, because her dead is handled with dishonour, because she did not meet his eyes, because she gripped his hand, because she did not settle in his arms. Because she has come home.
Three days is not enough time to cry.
‘So this is Casa Estradero … a mausoleum … ’
In the pristine room she is a pacing wound, ay, his once innocent girl who fell from the fart-fart tree.
The room is indeed pristine, stripped of all furniture. Only marble and glass remain, and a crown of orchids from the mayor and his wife. Condolences and apologies to the family of the bereaved. The first couple will be in Manila throughout the wake for some urgent business. They moved all the furniture into another room and left hastily before the corpse arrived. The First Lady was thorough with her orders about tidiness. Two maids with serious faces, and a mop each, stand at one end of the room.
‘So this is where my mother served as a maid.’
Her clicking heels echo through the cavernous space, hurting the old man’s ears. ‘But it’s not the same house, really,’ he says.
She replies to the high ceiling. ‘How should I know? I was never invited in, not then.’
‘I’m sorry, child, I’m sorry … ’ he whispers, apologising for history.
She remembers the dead. ‘Anywhere on the floor,’ she orders the bearers. They heave a sigh of relief and lay the master of the house, or what used to be his house, in the middle of the room. The maids grip their mops. It is Pay Inyo who feels the cold floor on his back. ‘No way to treat the dead, child, any dead. A going-away tenderness, if you please, even for the most despised.’
‘You think I despise him? He is my father.’
‘Ay, Eya, what has life done to you?’
Her pacing stops. She looks at him then at the door, like a child about to run away, then shakes her head. Her arms cross over her chest, fists tight, knuckles white.
‘Child … ’
She turns away, asks the walls. ‘Where is the coffin?’
‘It — it’s not dita wood, sorry … there’s no more dita in the river … ’ He cannot bring himself to say, they’ve cut them all. ‘I have something else downstairs … it’s plain, unshaven, as you ordered.’
‘I’d like to see it.’
‘I also have a better one … it — it’s simple, but more — more decent. Please, please … look at it, at least … they’re both downstairs.’
‘Are they coming?’
‘Who?’
‘The village, the whole village.’
‘They will, ay, yes, they will.’
‘Now leave us alone, please.’
The first guests arrive by noon. A couple and their sixteen-year-old daughter. The father is blind, hanging on to each of the women’s arms. They are barefoot, purposeful in their strides. Straight to the coffin, which has been raised from the floor by makeshift stands.
‘Is it him?’ The father asks, chewing his betel nut.
The woman cannot answer. She is shocked by what she sees. The coffin is open. Her daughter hides behind her. She is gnawing her hand, making strangled noises.
It is a poor man’s coffin, wood unshaven and freshly made, perhaps haphazardly so. Even the poorest man in Iraya can afford something better. But this is not what causes the women to draw back.
The dead is naked! Except for a pair of white briefs.
The bald pate and startled eyes, the gaping mouth, the fat shaven jowls locked on the chest that’s matted with grey hair and blood, now brown, the three little holes like secret openings, the distended stomach, the deep navel on formaldehyded, greenish flesh — the wife almost screams.
‘Is it him, Viring?’ the blind man asks again, chewing vigorously.
‘It — it is.’
He spits. It hits the stomach, just above the navel. The betel nut spittle is almost the colour of blood.
‘That’s for my Raymundo.’
The wife begins to cry. The daughter whimpers. The father finds their arms again. ‘I’d like to go home now.’ His bare feet have not lost their purpose as they stride out of the room. Now he can return to the river, where they found the headless body of his son. He can make peace with the water, even if he can never drink it again.
A widow has been watching from the doorway, awed by the perfect arc of spittle. As the family leaves, she walks towards the coffin, feeling the sudden rush of saliva in her mouth.
From the furthest end of the room, someone watches her watching. Her hands are locked around her nape, eyes bulging. ‘You have come home, father … You have come home.’
Chapter 85
Ours is not the story of a war. It is the story of those whom we love and hate.
In the evening of the second day, this silent declaration threads the tales around the dead coagulated with spittle, with the loathing of a whole village. ‘You spit after your stomach turns, because something has curdled it inside,’ someone says. Or perhaps the mouth needs to expectorate the memory of brine, or lemon grass. Again and again, Luke sees a perfect arc. Does the village sigh, breasts easing, after it hits the mark? His own stomach turns, curdles, then the rush of saliva, which he swallows with difficulty. How can this be real? This is the world of the living.
He remembers the taste of the river from the manuscript: How salty is a decapitated body? What minerals does a bloated limb generously shed?
If you don’t want to know, you spit.
Kiyat-kiyat and Kiri-kiri, the bodyguards of the dead, pace through the crowded room. The guests eye the guns at their hips, then nod to each other. They hold their spit until the two have gone outside to piss among the flowers or to buy more beer from the new grocery. A shake of the head, a wink: admonition and conspiracy. Drown your sorrows with gin and beer!
These men with odd gestures do not look in on their boss. True, they are not squeamish about shortening lives but handling dead bodies is another story. It was agony to cart that body bag around. They keep as far away as possible from the coffin. They will leave before the funeral; they are not patient men. They play cards with a group of young farmers. Close by someone strums a guitar.
Eve
ryone is standing or squatting around the dead, each with a drink in the hand. This could be an exhibition opening with the spittled dead as macabre installation, probably injected with tons of formaldehyde to keep it frozen in its death throes, or to suppress the dead smell. Luke sniffs the air, can I smell him, and feels something between a laugh and a scream in his throat. He pushes it down, like the saliva. That man was a perfect host to him, was he not? He lured him with his false ‘affectionate’ letters, the chatty postcards, even the airline ticket, all allegedly from his father. He called him his son. He lied. Surely there’s enough reason to spit. And yet, just as strong is the urge to cover the spittled body — Luke can’t bear the sight of it.
The mud from the storm has been dragged in. The maids gave up on their mops yesterday. Adora does not move beyond the door. She is the only one who appears serene, holding her lover’s hand. She ignores Stella who’s crouched in a corner, still in her red dress and oblivious to the talk going around; she hears it as bird wings. Meanwhile Pay Inyo is back at his store, his heart breaking. He was told to stay away.
The wake gets lively. The guitar is no longer solemn. Drinks flow and tongues grow loose, maybe because everyone is spitted out by late afternoon. The stories are about the deceased, weaving from the irreverent to the insolent. The word oragon passes from lips to lips. ‘What is it?’ Luke asks. It means gutsy, boastful, horny, lustful, or all of the above to describe the dead. But no one speaks enough English to explain this.
Even if Luke understood, he would hear no lust in the word. Oragon. Hard syllables, dry, like the tongues that speak them. Lust has been spat out. In a while, dryness will slip into malice, where it will feel at home, because there is never any moisture in malice. Malice is always deprived.
Fish-Hair Woman Page 26
