Adora is lulled by this drone.
‘It’s about how and from where you look … how far … and what you will to see …Ay, my beloved chopped down the fart-fart tree, right here where we stand, because she could not see the hills or the weeping woman with the gun. We must clear the air, she said … she was ashamed it was so foul, made foul by her own children … but you see, each year is a hill that moves further away, truly-truly … ’
Adora is desperate to believe that the hills have indeed gone away, that the nights won’t grow cold, that her face is smooth again.
‘They move further away … the scars, the weeping, maybe even the guns,’ Pay Inyo continues. ‘You don’t see or hear them at all after a while. Foulness dissipates. Suddenly even those faraway curves are no longer hills … just lines keeping the earth from the sky.’
Luke wants to catch the old man’s flailing hands, to calm them in his own. Instead he asks, ‘Why tell me stories that I can’t understand?’
The old man abandons the dialect. ‘I story, because — because I story.’
Luke kicks at the grass. ‘He’s dead, yes? You can tell me, you know.’
Pay Inyo shakes his head to dislodge this rambling, his futile attempt to make things better. Perhaps he is wrong. Perhaps first they must not look away but look closely. ‘Sorry, sorry … he good, he fool … he love too much. Truly-truly.’
Pay Inyo’s story about the Australian is his own. All of Iraya contests it, but he will not abandon his faith in his ‘favourite white man’.
Tony McIntyre came to Iraya seeking the famous Kumander Pilar. He could not forget the woman in that ambush by the river, hurling grenades like cricket balls, AK-47 ready on the other arm. He wanted to write her story, he believed in her cause. He will offer a donation in exchange for time with her army, perhaps some interviews. So he spoke with Pay Inyo who was like a father to her. They became friends, he became his ‘favourite white man’. Mister Tony took refuge in the gravedigger’s house. Iraya was under siege. The military set up camp in the village to save it from the insurgents. The insurgents launched a counter-offensive to reclaim the heart of the village. Too many bodies in the river, too many stories that were hushed. Tony saw the young guerrilla who lost her face and nipples, the boy with a necklace of the fattest prawns. He saw the fireflies. He heard about the Fish-Hair Woman.
For almost three months he took copious notes, which fell into the hands of his writing patron, the ex-governor who fed the ‘research’ to his friends in the military. Purges of the armed struggle followed swiftly. More bodies in the river. Thus Tony and the Kumander became persona non grata to the village and the army in the hills. They accused him of being an informer and perhaps she was an accessory to his undercover escapades. The Kumander, ‘a dangerous fool’, had compromised the struggle; others even cited treason. All grew nervous about the love affair, a story that spread like wildfire, kindling every prurient urge but extinguishing morale.
They took the woman first, the white man they left alone for a while, wary of repercussions. He was a white man after all, and anyway he was sleuthing around, off to Hawai’i. Let the ex-governor ‘take care’ of him.
To take care. Pay Inyo always shuddered when he heard these words from the wrong mouth.
Night has fallen in the overgrown orchard. Maybe Adora will later believe that hills do disappear and that no mark is indelible. The Australian boy has found her hand. His grasp is not foreign. It’s warm.
The old man peers into the darkness. Is it true there’s nothing there now? He wants to believe his own words. He rubs his eyes. The landscape has once again short-circuited his heart. Ay, all my beloved! Once they walked here. If you please, sweeten their tracks with lemon grass.
He reads the earth with his soles, but it’s hard to tell between the wild kogon and the lemon grass. Both shoot up with conviction, then bend or fold, unable to hold the initial rigid outburst from the earth. Like once defiant lovers fallen in battle. Ay, to have a herb sweeten their graves, or the mouth. To rid it of grief, like that pernicious coat of fat.
‘Please, sir … is he dead?’
The gravedigger looks up one last time. The hills are now hiding in the dark, and the dark is looming with a familiar-foreign face.
‘How did he die?’
‘I take you to father, Luke … I take you to river.’
Chapter 92
This is how it ended, Pay Inyo. It’s better that you hear it from me. ‘Descansar,’ I said and he slumped to his knees, cowering. The chrysanthemums bloomed to watch our story come full circle, while he mumbled a litany of gifts. ‘I saved you, Stella, I took you away from a war, I took you to paradise … ’ I cocked his pistol, it was easy. ‘Rest,’ I said, not for him but for all the loved ones that he took away. The sorry, fat man wept, professing his fatherly love. Dear father, it is not that we love, but that we love to think we love. Human beings need projects, so we can believe our lives are real, and honourable.
Stella rehearses her story. She will tell it when he comes home from the funeral. She will break the gravedigger’s heart. She feels no remorse. The Colt had always felt familiar. How many times did she turn it in her hand, in the room that smelled of dead air, wondering how and when she’d appease memory? Now she rolls the hard candy in her mouth. It tastes as she remembers it. She checks if she is indeed here. Her hands move from each other to her arms, her nape, her scalp, the past. She roams the store, touching the little details of her other life. It is still here. She is still here, the sweetness of childhood invading her mouth. She is here again, Estrella again.
Did we all take this away when we left, this smell of dried herbs and moulding rice, of sweets all ours for the asking, once? Like love. She is thirty-eight years old and too aware of the end of her story. It is a fairy tale, a melodrama, a myth, and it always returns to the river. My village is well named. Iraya: upstream, towards the source of the water.
She crunches the sweet in her mouth, it hurts to swallow. She heads for the door into the night, re-tracing the path back to the source. No, I have never left the water, always fishing for a story and finding none but my own.
‘This is how we begin. We drive to the mayor’s house where they had the wake. She could still be there. If not, we proceed to the orchard where she grew up, at the bend of the road that leads to the river. If she’s not there, we drive to the gravedigger’s store, about twenty minutes from here. We can take our time. She has nowhere else to go. If she attempts to escape, it will be a blessing. Case closed by tomorrow.’
The police take their time. They make three unnecessary stops: a banana fritters stall for some snacks, the new grocery for some Coke to wash them down, and on second thought, the turnoff to the orchard for a smoke.
‘This is where we begin, in this neglected orchard. Ay, I can almost see it now, that makeshift hut in 1987, and before that, a wooden house with a door that sighs when you knock … but we must begin only with this hut before it was overgrown with kogon and bitter history, or else we’ll go astray. They met here for the first time. I arranged it.’ Pay Inyo rambles deep into his memory where it is never dark, where he sees too clearly for comfort.
‘Tony sees the eyes of a hurricane on her crown, he falls in love. Pilar looks into his green eyes, she loves him back. They’re happy, truly-truly. How their faces glow when they visit me but always in a rush, so I make time stand still, I rest my shovel and incantations. The dead can wait, but the living may not even have tomorrow. So we do what the living do. On Pilar’s request we make rice-coffee. We dunk pan de sal into a poor man’s brew, we laugh, we tell stories, our joy so rare in the darkest hour. If there’s a pool of grief, then there must be a pool of joy, and here it is collected in the faces of lovers. It is theirs, it is mine, it is ours. I look hard into this rarest of pools, and think, if only I can steal all the pails of Iraya and fill them, truly-truly … then I can leave them at the door of each household, so all can partake of their own love tryst once upon
a time.’
Pay Inyo abandoned English earlier, then any attempt to clear the road to his destination. In the overgrowth neither Luke nor Adora can keep up with the pace of his memory. He is an old man telling himself stories. He is taking himself to the river, the lovers trailing behind.
‘Ay, believe me, this is how it begins. The jeep was parked in that orchard, with three men in it, all smoking I’m sure, because there were three lights. Aysus, I couldn’t bear to look closer, I was walking quickly, santisima, it was the haunted orchard and it was too dark to see, there was no moon, it was not yet seven.
‘There was movement among the kogon, I’m sure I heard it. The three lights got off the jeep, so I hid behind a bamboo hedge. I could have run home, but something held me down, ay, baya, perhaps it was the heavy thumping of my heart. One of the men shone a light onto the foliage. I swear I saw a face, I swear it was a woman emerging from behind the kogon, ay, ay, I could have screamed — it was the dead Carmen, that Carmen of the longest hair, madre de Dios! Then all lights went out. I heard the sound of running feet and someone calling “Stop!” then more running around as if they were playing tag, then again the light. I saw her face, clearer this time, no, it was not Carmen, but someone else, ay santamaria! My chest was almost bursting with the pounding of my heart. I couldn’t see all of her hair but I swear I heard it rustle the kogon, the balangubang, the guavas, the jackfruit, the cacao, even the lemon grass and suddenly she was not running, Dios mio, she was floating, all her hair untangling from the orchard, ay, all of twelve metres as she rose towards the bend of the road that leads to the river. Then the shots. Two in succession, then a third. Then silence.’
Tomorrow one of the church singers will tell this story about a woman’s body found in the river. The village will revel in its multiple versions. The police will ditch this testimony. Case closed.
Chapter 93
‘Baliktari, baliktari!’ Pay Inyo whispers, his tone urgent, anxious. Adora finds the order absurd. Luke is confused, turning to Adora for some explanation. ‘Turn inside out, turn inside out!’ The old man shines his flashlight at the canopy of bamboo ahead, taking off his shirt, gesturing to the lovers to do the same, quick, quick! Turn your clothes inside out, so you can find your way home. Or else the bamboo’s rascal spirit will trick your sense of direction.
‘Your father, he hard head, he not follow, Mister Luke. We stop here, but he jus’ laughing-laughing, so he no come home … ’ As they walk to the river, the old man will point out landmarks in his halting English, then lose himself again in the language of his memory. But perhaps it is memory that loses its way home. For this is how we remember: we leave home even as we presume to return to it. We take off on a road that splits into capillaries dense with remembering, knowing or half-knowing, seeking, assessing, querying, discovering, arguing, with all the side-trips and embellishments, those tricky curlicues that go nowhere but spiral into the ether, then we are lost. So we must turn ourselves inside out. See what is in the heart, the gut, the entrails.
‘Turn inside out, quick, quick — now!’
Jesus, this is the twentieth century! But Luke obliges the gravedigger who won’t take no for an answer. He raises his shirt, fumbles for his belt buckle. Adora follows suit, unzipping her dress. It’s too dark to see. They grope at their garments as if blind, to find the seams, the always hidden side.
Tony never found his own seams, because he clothed himself in a war and wore it with bravado, Luke thought. ‘Tony wanted to lose his way home.’
‘Wrong, wrong, we all want come home — now we walk to deep, careful not fall, hold me, hold.’ Pay Inyo grasps each hand of the lovers as they descend into a ravine of rainwater. It is a long, stagnant pool, waist deep and filled with storm debris. The bottom is thick mud. Luke feels his feet sink. Mosquitoes buzz around his face, vines snag his arms, something slaps his shoulder. ‘Light, please, light, light!’ he screams, ‘turn on the light!’ He tries to grab the flashlight now hanging around the old man’s neck.
‘Sshh … no light, I know way … sshh, spirits sleeping … ’ Pay Inyo squeezes their hands reassuringly, then addresses the darkness. ‘Maki-agi tabi’ — please-may-we-pass.
The water is cold and slimy, but the air is warm, moist. Even the vegetation perspires. This is the only place that the loggers have spared. People lose their way here. The villagers talk of sightings of a woman with the longest hair, wailing because she cannot untangle the strands from the brambles, because she cannot get to the water. This is the long way to the river, hidden by balangubang and kogon and the last of the giant ferns. You take this path if you do not wish to be seen. This is the only part of Iraya that has not been overrun by progress. Even the politicos with their logging concessions are afraid of this place. It is protected by stories. People are known to get sick or go mad after passing this way. After each storm it becomes a pool, like a self-contained collector of waste. It never flows to the river. It dries up by itself and becomes even more dangerous.
Sergeant Ramon and his men dragged her through this ravine, but Pay Inyo will never know this. Ten years ago he convinced himself that she only passed this way when he found her kerchief with tiny blue flowers, a combat boot, a belt. Then he found her in the river, but not all of her. He recognised the two eyes of a hurricane on the crown. But how to bury only a head? For a week he lived by the river, waiting, staring into the water. Fish-Hair Woman, have mercy on us! He chanted all his incantations. And each night the fireflies gathered, flying so low, querying an old man squatting on the rock in the middle of the water, poring over his little book, his voice rippling the current, scouring the riverbed, then ululating among the dita trees.
Ay, he should have plugged the wellspring in the hills and bailed out the whole river with his little pail, bit by bit, until he found an arm bereft, a lonely torso, an orphaned leg. He buried her without a word to anyone. It was not a head burial for there is no such thing. More like planting a head as you would plant coconut. Perhaps a sapling would sprout from the double hurricanes to grow her a trunk, and years later, green fronds would wave like multiple arms towards heaven.
He never found the rest of her.
‘What — what’s that?’ A twinkling flies before Luke.
Adora cries out, opening her hands, reaching out.
‘Firefly!’ The gravedigger shudders. On nights with no moon, fireflies came to light the dead, so the living can see them, find them. He has not seen a firefly here since they logged the trees by the river.
Ay, to catch light, to take it home. Adora is a girl again before the scars. She is waving a glass jar, its cap ready, in the backyard of Manay Sabel’s store. Her baby brother is gurgling at the arcs of light.
‘Leave it alone, Adora!’ Pay Inyo whispers. ‘It’s for the dead.’
The firefly lingers.
‘Quick, quick to other side, ay, tricky spirits here, quick!’
They drag themselves out of the water, they catch their breaths. They reach the clearing. A few paces away, the stream that leads to the river and at the other side, the coconut plantation of the Estraderos. The old man shines his light on the possible routes. They could cross the stream, cut through the plantation, but it would be a long hike. Or they could turn to the left, the coffee grove — he hesitates. Should I tell the girl? What has he done now? Why drag them back to the past? He is meant to bury, not to dig up history. No, he owes it to them. They must look at history closely together now.
‘Adora … ’ he begins, ‘I wrote you a letter about your aunt years ago, right after you arrived in Hawai’i … remember?’ Ay, there is too much to apologise for. ‘I lied … it was not typhus that killed her … ’
Adora squats before the stream, washing the mud off her body. She heard whispers then, when they laid her on the table beside her brother and the doctor dug up the bullets from her flesh. Aysus, those bullets are for the aunt, she’s become too greedy. But she was always greedy. Remember the pork crackling in her pocket?
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Manay Sabel was not there when her niece and nephew were caught in the strafing. She was in the hills, delivering the taxes of the people to their army. By the time she returned to Iraya, Adora had already been flown to Manila for more surgery, through the kindness of the good doctor and his photographer who clicked away to feed the endless press releases. By the time Adora arrived in Hawai’i, her aunt was dead in the coffee grove.
‘Ay, child, I’m so sorry … ’
There are no tears now. Grief is stale, and her heart is hard.
Luke squats beside her. He does not understand this new tale but knows it is about her. She keeps washing herself as if she heard nothing at all.
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.
It is difficult to see what she has described so vividly in the manuscript. But Luke hears the distant thrashing, or is it playful gurgling, a humming? He knows they have arrived.
‘Hills, there, there … ’ The old man waves the flashlight forward.
They walk further upstream. The light shines on the rock. ‘Your father, he sit there. He talk himself, he say he bad, he ashamed, he cry … ’
‘Did he — talk about me?’
The light catches the other side of the river, sprouting with stumps. ‘Sorry, I not remember, but I tell him no cry, he okay, he good man, he no — ’
Fish-Hair Woman Page 29
