But Honorata had never written a letter.
Honorata had never been one of those women.
Is this what her uncle did? Was this the job that made him travel to Manila? Did he find the women, find the men for them to write to, negotiate the deals?
He had planned it all. He had written letters for her.
Except her uncle didn’t even know how to write. He would have had to pay someone to write those letters. Did the same woman write all the letters, for all the girls?
How long had he been planning for her trip to Chicago?
Honorata knew enough about Jimbo to know that her uncle would not have let him slip through his fingers. Big fish. Her uncle liked big fish.
The scope of his betrayal, of his scheme, made her dizzy. He had come into the bakery one afternoon as if he were just dropping by. Then he whispered that he knew about the movie she had made, about Filipina Fillies. He said he had come to help her; to take her back to the village for a while.
“Is anything in them true? Did you write any of those things?” Jimbo demanded.
Honorata couldn’t speak. She looked down. For the first time, he became angry.
“I’m asking you a question. Answer me.”
His enormous white hand gripped the edge of her chair. He leaned toward her, but he didn’t touch her.
“No.”
“You refuse to answer?”
“No, I didn’t write the letters. I don’t know about any letters.”
There had been no time for letters. Her uncle had come to the bakery on Sunday, and by the next Sunday, she was boarding the plane to Chicago. It had taken twelve hours to go from Manila to her mother’s home in Buninan, and eleven hours to return. The days in between had been desperate: her mother thin and sad; her uncle’s story about Kidlat, about the people who’d come looking for him; and then the VHS tapes, everywhere in Manila, even in Bayombong and Solano—where the bus had broken down—and even in her uncle’s home, though he had no television. She hadn’t known these tapes were possible; these tapes from what was until then the worst time in her life: a time that changed everything, a time that ruined her relationship with Kidlat, which was why, she supposed, he had disappeared. She had made the movie to help Kidlat, because he had said a man would kill him if she didn’t, that everything was special effects anyway, and the movie would be shown only in Canada.
She had gone to Manila with Kidlat eight years before. She had chosen him over her family because Kidlat did not want to live in a village—not his, not hers—and her mother would never have given her permission to go with him unless they were married. But Kidlat would not get married. Kidlat said that in America, people had stopped getting married. And if leaving the village was a choice Honorata had made, it hadn’t felt like one; there had been no thinking at all, just feeling: longing and sorrow and then sudden joy (this, then, was what it was all about). After that, there had been nothing left to do but go with Kidlat, whom she loved, and who knew what he wanted, and what he was willing to do or not do, better than she did.
Always she sent money home. Sometimes her uncle came to get the money from her, sometimes someone from the village came, and sometimes she mailed it with the letters she sent every week. By the time she returned home, by the time she finally saw the thatched roof and wood posts of her family home in Buninan, by the time she saw her mother again; running away with Kidlat meant nothing. The movie—the movie she’d never seen and never would see—meant everything.
It had not all been special effects. Did Kidlat know that?
“So what did you know?” Jimbo asked. “If you didn’t know about the letters, what did you know?”
Honorata said nothing. There was no way to explain. She didn’t know what had happened, but now she knew it had started a long time before her uncle came to get her at the bakery in Manila.
Jimbo grabbed her then. His fingers dug into her arm. They were fleshy and strong. She stared at those fingers, at her own arm, without being able to look away. He saw her staring at the arm, and silently, without looking at her, he twisted her elbow back.
Honorata gasped in pain. But she didn’t look at him.
He released her.
“Whore,” he snarled, and stood up abruptly.
Honorata sat without moving, afraid to be heard. If she could stop her own breath, if she could will herself to stop breathing, she would.
He’d shocked himself. Grabbing her arm. Bending it backward. He’d almost kept going.
The rage and repulsion and roar he felt was a physical thing: a wave. Jimbo’s body dripped sweat, his jaws gripped painfully, the room pulsed with the realization of how Rita’s uncle had played him.
Ramon Navarro was a nasty man: insipid, pandering, unrelenting. He operated independently, no agency, and his clients had to be referred to him by someone he knew. A salesman in Miami had made the connection for Jimbo. From the first approach, Jimbo had had no intention of working with Rita’s uncle. He’d told him to stop calling, to stop sending letters, but when the man asked him to read just this one letter, this one very special letter, Jimbo had done it.
“I go to the bakery at four in the morning, before it is light. The streets are not quiet even then, and they smell of all the people who live here, and sometimes I feel so sad for someone sleeping on the ground, right in my path, that I am tempted to wake him up, to take him with me to the bakery, to give him one of the rolls left from the night before, but I know this would be dangerous, and so I step around him, careful not to wake him up.”
He was a fool. A sucker. And her uncle had played him.
He had worked with Honorata’s uncle only because her letters had been so different, and because Ramon had told him that this was his niece; that she did not correspond with anyone but him, that she was not one of the women who had come to Ramon for help.
What a fool.
A pathetic, fat, sweaty fool.
And from eight thousand miles away, Ramon had known.
For months, there had been no photo. Usually the photo was the first thing to come: a half dozen photos, each with a name and a short introduction. But everything about corresponding with Honorata had been different. The letters were sent directly to him, and he wrote directly back to her. Jimbo used his post office box, of course, but the letters did not go through Ramon.
He bit his tongue remembering this, realizing.
So there had been no photo, and after awhile, Jimbo wasn’t sure he wanted one. The niece was likely misshapen, there was something wrong about her—he imagined acne scars, dwarfism, obesity, a birthmark, what could it be?—but as they became friends, as he found that he was able to tell her the most intimate details of his life, the slights he kept hidden, the embarrassment he felt, he realized he didn’t care what she looked like. It was absurd, that this mail-order bride idea might actually work, that he might actually have met someone he could love and who would love him. He hadn’t really believed it was possible.
And he would help her family. They could visit whenever she wanted. She wouldn’t have to leave them all behind. Maybe he would buy a vacation home in the Philippines, something on the beach; it would be a place to go in the winters.
When the photo finally came, in a brown envelope with Ramon Navarro’s name scrawled across the back, Jimbo was dumbfounded. How could Honorata be this beautiful? Why would such a woman write to him? For a while, he had once again doubted the uncle. So Ramon Navarro had explained. About Filipina Fillies. About the way his niece was taken and forced to make a movie that ruined any chance of a normal life for her. How this experience had nearly destroyed her. How it had been months before she would leave the one-room house of her mother. How afraid she was that Jimbo would find out.
His niece had been naïve, and Ramon was sorry that she was not a virgin, but could Jimbo understand his predicament: a beautiful niece, his sister’s only daughter, no one had known what to do. He hadn’t meant to introduce her to men, but when he had learned ab
out Jimbo, he had thought maybe this would be an answer; maybe his sister would trust his judgment and agree. He should have explained it all to Jimbo from the start, but he hoped Jimbo would understand why he could not. In the interest of honesty, he felt he should give Mr. Wohlmann the name of the movie, Filipina Fillies.
He was stupid, ugly, useless slime. And her uncle had known it.
He’d watched the movie.
Not right away. He’d waited awhile. Spent days thinking about it, knowing he shouldn’t watch—that Honorata deserved better from him—but, of course, he had watched it. He had seen horror in the way her body shuddered, fear in the way her lip trembled, sorrow in those wet brown eyes. It was terrible what had been done to her. And he could not get any of these images out of his mind. He read the letters, and he watched the movie, more than once, and after he made himself return the movie to the porn store, he imagined her in it over and over.
That had almost been the end. He stopped writing to her, ignored the two letters that arrived, did not return the calls that came to his office in the city. He had sickened himself, and he felt overwrought, and he wished it would all go away.
Then a telegram arrived from Ramon Navarro.
Honorata was ready to leave the country. She could come very soon. It was important for her to get away quickly. And insanely, Jimbo had said yes.
When he thought of the day she arrived, of how it had felt to wait for her, of how he had made Gina work to get ready for her, of the way Gina had looked at him, surprised, and then—most powerful of all—when Rita had stepped out of customs, and he had seen the wolf look of the man walking behind her, the rush of tenderness and desire, of caring and lust, that he had felt in that moment.
That first time in the hotel room, it was . . . it meant . . . it was sacred to him. That’s how it felt in his mind: sacred.
But she had known nothing about him, had taken him with the expertise of any paid hooker.
It was not to be accepted. He wouldn’t accept it. He wanted to hurt her. Of course he had twisted her arm back. Of course he was enraged.
The only thing to do now was leave the room.
Jimbo didn’t return in the morning. She didn’t see him for two days, and she didn’t know whether he went to work or not; she stayed mostly in her bed, slipping out to eat some chicken left in the fridge and pretending not to hear Gina when she asked if she had any laundry to do.
On Tuesday, a bouquet of flowers arrived for her. She ignored the card, left it unopened on the table, and Jimbo continued to stay in his room.
The next day, more flowers arrived. No card.
The evening after that, Jimbo knocked on the door between their rooms. For the first time, he waited for her to say he could come in. Then he stood in the doorway, looking smaller.
“May I come in?”
She shrugged.
“I’m sorry. I won’t hurt you.”
She looked down.
“I thought you’d written the letters. I thought you’d agreed to come here.”
“I did agree.”
He said nothing.
Honorata thought about her uncle. Her uncle saying that the tape was killing her mother—that running away for love had been one thing, a devastating thing, but this, this tape, it would kill her mother.
How could her mother have seen a tape? Where would her uncle have taken her to find a television? A VHS player?
Honorata still felt the hands of the man on her, her eyes still blinked at the white light of the camera; over and over, she heard the noises of the men who had watched.
“I’m not that kind of man,” Jimbo said at last.
She looked at him then.
“At the airport. I thought you’d written those letters. I thought you knew me. I thought you’d chosen me.”
For the first time, Honorata’s eyes teared. She looked down quickly. She wanted him to leave her room.
“I wasn’t looking for a prostitute. I made arrangements for a wife. Your uncle assured me, he . . . the letters . . . what you said . . .”
Honorata focused on breathing. One breath in, then one out. Her stomach knotted, turned.
She didn’t look up. She stared at the floor in front of his feet, and imagined his hand coming down hard on her back, knocking her forward. But he didn’t hit her. There was silence in the room, and then she heard him move, heard the door open. He was gone.
All night, Honorata lay in bed with bile in her throat. “At the airport . . . I thought you knew me . . .” The room dipped, turned, she would be sick. She thought of herself as a little girl: the yellow dress she’d worn for her first communion, the red frogs the children caught in pails, her mother’s voice, singing bahay kubo, kahit munti. Her grandmother had called her lucky. In the Spanish that no one else spoke aloud, Lola had said, “tienes suerte”—“You are lucky”—over and over. So often that when Honorata was four, she told her new teacher that her name was Honosuerte.
Honorata didn’t remember confusing her own name, but the story was family lore. And she did remember a teacher’s strangely angry face, and a child’s giggle, and she remembered hitching up her skirt so that she could rub a finger across the stretched elastic of her faded blue panties in a way that soothed her—in a way she would repeat right now, if it could still soothe her, if she could still feel that sudden enveloping calm that would come over her the instant that her sensitive first finger slipped across the softened elastic edge. Honorata also remembered the teacher leaning in to her ear and whispering that she would not be so lucky if she lifted her skirt in school like that again, and that the word was not suerte, but lucky. In the Republic of the Philippines, one said lucky.
For a week, Jimbo avoided her. And Honorata avoided him back. But then one night he slipped into bed beside her, and gradually they returned to something like their former routine. They didn’t discuss the letters; Honorata never saw them again. Jimbo still spoke to her with tenderness, but the sex was rougher. Once, he left town for five days without telling her he would be going. And after that, he was gone more and more: a night here, three days there. Honorata eavesdropped on Gina talking on the phone and learned that he was going to Las Vegas.
Jimbo didn’t say anything to her about these trips. He didn’t speak about Las Vegas anymore, he never mentioned gambling. He also said nothing about a wedding. One night when they were naked, he slapped her bottom hard, and another night, her cheek. Now and then, he told her a dirty story.
Honorata spent hours roaming the streets surrounding Jimbo’s home, her eyes averted, imagining that Jimbo had someone watching her. She walked dully, her knees aching with the miles traversed, timing the speed of cars passing on the busy road. Timing them, estimating when they would pass her, thinking about what would be possible. The awareness of what she was doing would rend her nauseous, weak limbed. She would think carefully, It’s not true that I’ve missed my last chance. Her father used to say that tomorrow might always be better than today. He had said she was a strong girl, that God did not forget his children. And what would Tatay think of his daughter now?
Tatay had told her lots of stories about his parents, who had died in a bus accident when she was only five. They had gone to Manila and ridden on the top of a double-decker bus all the way down Roxas Boulevard. But there was an accident—her father never learned exactly what happened—and the bus flipped on its side right near the church. Many fell out of the top, but only Lola and Lolo were killed. Every year, Tatay went to Manila in June and prayed for his parents. When he came back, he would tell Honorata again the stories he knew of them and of how they had grown up. How Lola had been an orphan and lived on the streets. How Lolo had met her when he was in the army. How they had come back to his village, and, at first, the family had not accepted Lola, who was not from the mountains, but when she died, the whole village had mourned her.
In this story was something about Lola’s past. Even as a child, Honorata had known it. But she didn’t know what Lola had
done or why the villagers mistrusted her initially. Tatay had wanted her to know about his mother. Maybe not everything, but the important thing: that once she had been shunned and then she had been loved.
Honorata thought about this story, and about Tatay telling her this story, nearly every day.
In October Jimbo came to her room excited.
“We’re going to Vegas tomorrow. Martin will be here to take us to the airport at seven. Bring that green dress.”
She looked at him, surprised.
He didn’t say anything more, and she didn’t ask any questions. He took her from behind on the bed, her face pressed into the flowered satin, and then he left.
“Be ready at six thirty.”
That night, Honorata packed the small bag her uncle had given her. Jimbo hadn’t said how long they’d be gone. She packed four dresses and several pairs of sandals. She packed a swimsuit. Was it always hot in Las Vegas? She added a white sweater. She didn’t have any identification. Jimbo had taken her passport when she arrived, nearly a year ago now. The passport her uncle had ready and waiting.
15
Years ago, when Coral was a junior in high school, her mother had kept her home—on a day she had a world history test—to go to the funeral of Odell Dibb, who owned the El Capitan on the Strip. It was a crowded service, but they had arrived an hour early and had seats even though many others stood or waited outside. Coral had never been in the First Congregational Church, and the only thing she knew about Odell Dibb was that her mother thought he was a good man. She didn’t know why her mama had made her attend the funeral; she didn’t like to miss school, and Ray Junior could have gone instead.
They weren’t the only black people, though. There were quite a few, and the Reverend Sherrell, from Antioch Baptist, was one of the men who spoke. He said that Mr. Del Dibb had been good to the African American community, had been part of the desegregation of the Strip in 1960, one of the negotiators of the Moulin Rouge pact, and even before that, he had been a champion and a fair man to whom plenty of local people owed a debt. There were other speakers too, and Coral shifted around in the hard pew, thinking about whether she could make up her world history test at lunch the next day and whether or not the teacher would be annoyed at her.
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