America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  After it had been confirmed that the prisoner who spoke Ilocano and said she was only a country doctor was, indeed, a De Vera daughter, and therefore closely related to a family friend and relative through marriage of Marcos, she’d been immediately released from the camp, two years after she’d been taken. Amends were made to the De Vera family for the oversight. The year Hero left for California, Hamin won a landslide election as mayor of Bantay, close enough to Vigan that he and Concepcion wouldn’t even have to move—though of course they did. New beginnings. Hero had never seen the new house in Bantay; Soly said it wasn’t that much larger than the De Vera house, but more modern. Tita Soly never said who’d paid for the surgery, plus the hefty bonus for the doctor’s discretion on the side, but in Soly’s silence Hero thought she could sniff out the trace of her parents.

  When she’d first decided to become a surgeon, Pol gave her a book that he’d read when he was in medical school, written by some French philosopher she’d never heard of. The Phenomenology of Perception. It wasn’t from the De Vera library. She asked what it was about. Pol said, You have to read it to find out. But it’s a good book for orthopedic surgeons. Read the part about phantom limbs.

  It had been too difficult to understand when he gave it to her, but by the time she got to college, she was ready for it. She read it again and again, until its spine broke and she had to tape it together. She lost it around the time she dropped out of medical school, joined up with Teresa and Eddie and everyone. It didn’t matter anymore, anyway. She wasn’t going to be a surgeon, after all—at least not one that needed French philosophy.

  That was what she told herself, but there were lines she still thought about years later, in the room she shared with Teresa and the others, lying on a buri mat on the floor, still smelling faintly of the sampalok leaves used to bleach the straw. The part about phantom limbs. The part about sexuality. The part about no one being saved; the part about no one being totally lost.

  Hero clenched her fists as Rosalyn poured a generous handful of conditioner into her hair and massaged it in, from the roots all the way to the ends and back again. The pain in Hero’s fists helped. Grounded her, let her know where she was, chased away the muddled, murky feelings. Most of all, it helped to keep at bay Rosalyn’s promised gentleness—which hurt, just as Hero had known it would. But you couldn’t tell a person you just met: Please don’t be gentle. Anything but that.

  The First Picture of You, 1990

  When Hero returned, hair washed and blown dry, the girl had torn through a dozen fashion magazines, sample perfume flaps thrown open and savagely rubbed at, producing a hazy veil of mingled scents around Roni’s body so strong that Hero stopped just short of sitting back down next to her. Oh, you’re back, Roni said, sensing the shadow above her. She was still peering down at her outer right forearm, where there was no eczema, just a fine layer of black hair. She sniffed at it, considering. ex’cla-ma’tion.

  Then she looked up, took Hero in. Balked. Said, You look, uh. Different.

  Hero knew that, hair cascading down her back, free from its usual ponytail. Something soft touched at her shoulder. She looked down to see Rosalyn’s fingers pulling back.

  Hey Roni, Rosalyn said. My grandma’s gonna be ready for you just a little bit. You wanna eat something? You want some barbecue?

  Roni slapped her hands atop the magazine in her lap. Barbecue? Yeah!

  Tell my grandpa that I sent you, and that grandma’s on her way.

  Then Rosalyn flicked at Hero’s shoulder. Don’t drop your thing, she said, before walking away from them, back toward the sinks.

  Hero reached up to touch her own shoulder. The hair elastic she’d been wearing earlier was precariously balanced there.

  Roni was halfway out the door. There wasn’t anything Hero could think of to say back that didn’t sound stupid; she had to quit while she was ahead. Rosalyn was out of earshot anyway. So when Roni said, Hurry up, let’s go—Hero hurried up. Went.

  * * *

  There were a few more people in the restaurant when Hero and Roni returned. At one table, what looked like a family: a mom, a dad, and two toddlers, one of whom was beating on the other mercilessly. The one being beaten was sucking a thumb, oblivious. At another table, two middle-aged men wearing uniforms that resembled Pol’s security guard uniform: gray slacks, itchy-looking blazer, cheap badges. In front of all of them, Styrofoam plates, filled with sticky white rice and barbecued pork.

  The grandpa was out of the kitchen now, perched on a chair behind the display counter. He’d brought the radio out with him; it was still broadcasting the baseball game. Hero saw Roni shoot a glance that way, disappointed.

  Kumusta po kayo, ako si Geronima, ito si Roni, we’re here waiting to see Lola Adela. Rosalyn told us to come here.

  Lolo Boy smiled vaguely, adjusting his baseball cap. Okay—sit down, anywhere.

  Salamat po, Hero murmured and pointed Roni toward a table at the back of the restaurant, in the far corner, away from the other customers. Go sit down.

  Gutom kayo? Lolo Boy called. It was odd; he was speaking Tagalog, but his accent in Tagalog was more American than anything else, as if he’d come to America as a youth and had spoken both languages simultaneously so that they were one. It reminded Hero of the way Roni would sometimes switch between English, Pangasinan, and Tagalog, seamlessly, oblivious to the differences between them.

  Hero forgot that Rosalyn had mentioned barbecue. She looked down to ask Roni, but Roni had understood the question.

  Yeah, I’m hungry! she replied, climbing into a chair so she was kneeling on it, rather than sitting on it, her hands slapping at the table.

  Lolo Boy’s smile turned genuine. What do you want to eat?

  Barbecue! Roni cheered.

  Barbecue! Lolo Boy cheered back. Roger. He turned around and began busying himself with the plates, filling one with a heaping mound of rice and three sticks of barbecue. When he took a second plate, he stopped and glanced back at Hero, only just remembering she existed. Ah—ikaw rin, you want barbecue?

  Hero nodded. Oo po, barbecue na lang, thank you.

  We have a lot of other dishes, Lolo Boy said, gesturing at the metal warming dishes. Meron kami, ahh, afritada, adobo, pinakbet, pinapaitan, laing, kaldereta, daing na bangus, tortang talong, lechon kawali—take your pick.

  Barbecue’s fine, po, Hero said, though her heart had skipped at the mention of pinakbet.

  Lolo Boy looked skeptical; why, Hero couldn’t quite figure out. He made no move to fill the plate. Waiting.

  Okay, sige po, pinakbet, Hero said, flustered, more to shuffle his expectation off of her.

  Pakbet! Coming up.

  Hero turned to Roni. Sit down properly in your chair.

  Roni flopped down, losing energy abruptly. I’m hungry. How come they turned the TV off? I wanted to watch that show. Ah! We forgot to ask Rosalyn.

  It’s not a show, it’s a movie, Hero said, wondering why she even remembered.

  Lolo Boy appeared in front of them, holding their plates. One barbecue, he announced, sliding the plate in front of Roni. At isang pinakbet. He lifted his chin at the utensils gathered in an empty can of Chaokoh coconut milk, washed and repurposed. There’s forks and spoons there.

  Roni was picking up a stick of barbecue with her hands, not even looking at the forks and spoons.

  Hero reached across her for a spoon. The first bite was sitaw and kalabasa, sweet, but the sabaw was just too bitter and too salty; they’d been overgenerous with the bagoong, and there was too much okra, not enough ampalaya. Maybe American-born Filipinos didn’t like ampalaya, she thought. It was fine; this version wasn’t her favorite, but it was fine. She had another spoonful, then another—then another, getting hungrier as she was eating. It often happened to her like that; she wouldn’t realize how hungry she was until she started eating. But by the time that happened, the food had an in
verse relationship to her hunger: eating, she got hungrier, but the food wasn’t enough, ran out too fast, even if it wasn’t even that good. She and Roni ate in silence.

  The door opened with a chime. Adela walked in, her hand raised to greet the customers. She stopped at the family for a moment, chatting with the woman then reaching out to firmly pull back the chubby fist of the toddler who hadn’t yet stopped beating on its sibling.

  Del, Lolo Boy called.

  Adela turned around, the toddler’s fist still in her hand.

  Boy gestured toward Hero and Roni.

  Adela glanced over at Hero and Roni without moving her head. Hero straightened in her chair.

  Then Adela let go of the child’s fist, turned, and waved. Hi guys, she said brightly, in English. I’ll be with you in a minute.

  Her accent, when she spoke English, was stronger than Boy’s, but only just. They both sounded more American than Paz or Pol. Her demeanor reminded Hero of Rosalyn; that tone in her voice when she’d told Hero to relax.

  Hero became aware of someone’s small hand reaching over to pick up her spoon. She looked down; Roni was stealing a large bite of pinakbet.

  Don’t take people’s food when they’re not looking—

  You can steal some of mine.

  Then it’s not stealing. Still, Hero leaned over, picked up a stick of barbecue and bit a chunk of it off. She was startled; it was surprisingly good, flavorful, juicy, overcharred in the best way, so that the sugar in the marinade became smoky and caramelized. She took another bite.

  Adela walked over and sat down across from Roni. Hello, hello, she said, leaning forward to put her elbows on the table. Adela left her mouth wide open when she smiled; Hero saw she had two gold teeth in the upper row.

  Roni hesitated, looking down at Adela’s hand. She seemed to be calculating as to whether or not she should give Adela the mano. Amused, Adela let her. Roni touched her forehead to the tops of Adela’s knuckles and mumbled, Mano po.

  Lolo Boy was approaching the table with a plate of sticky black sampalok candy, wrapped in red cellophane. He placed the plate down onto the table while Adela patted her pockets, pulling out a packet of Lucky Strikes. She turned to her husband and made a face at him. Lolo Boy went back to the counter, then returned with a lighter. Adela had the cigarette in her mouth, leaning forward without skipping a beat into the space that Boy lit up.

  Thanks, handsome, she said. Don’t overdo it, Boy replied, but left the lighter on the table.

  Adela leaned forward again, plucking one of the sampalok candies off the plate, pulling off the cellophane and chewing at it, then spitting out the shiny maroon seed and licking the salty-syrupy residue on her fingers. Then she took a drag of her cigarette and brought her gaze over to look at Roni, again without moving her head. Just the skating over of those mobile, precise eyes, so open they were unreadable. It was the look of a person confident enough that she didn’t have to bother with defenses, the look of someone whose feet were planted firmly but flexibly in the ground, muscles loose and warm.

  In Hero’s makeshift clinic, the small kitchen in an abandoned nipa hut, stitching up Teresa’s forehead after she’d gotten into a fight with a young man from the village who’d taken a new female cadre into an alley and tried to shove his tongue down her throat. Her first time treating Teresa, hands trembling and voice brusque, ordering her not to laugh or she would make a mistake, Maybe you’ll think before you act now that you’ve seen how much a head wound bleeds, and Teresa chuckling through gritted teeth, Donya, people think scars are sexy in their leaders, and do you really think this is my first head wound? What Hero had thought to herself back then was what Hero thought to herself now: There isn’t anything, anything in the world scarier than a strong person.

  So. I hear you’re kinda sick, Adela began, smiling like it was an inside joke, waving the smoke away.

  * * *

  Hero was sent to a faith healer, just once in her life. Neither Hamin nor Concepcion knew about it. As far as Hero knew, it wasn’t their idea. It was all Lulay’s doing.

  Lulay, a woman so scrawny she looked like she’d either die within the day or never succumb to death at all, like one of those fasting saints Hamin used to talk about. It had been Concepcion’s firm policy not to have young, beautiful yayas or maids in the house, even if Hamin had never really been the babaero type, nowhere in the league of Melchior or even Pol. Lulay had worked for the De Vera family all her life, as the personal maid of Hamin and Pol’s mother, the original Geronima De Vera, and then, after her early death, as Escolastica’s yaya. Escolastica had never taken to her, and so when Hero was born, Lulay came to live with them.

  Lulay only spoke Tagalog to Hero, but neither Tagalog nor Ilocano had been her first languages—what language was her first, Hero never knew. Lulay didn’t talk about it. Lulay had age-washed tattoos on her upper arms and chest that Hero only vaguely remembered seeing when she was a child, when they would be in the bath together. Lulay was from the north of Luzon, that much Hero knew, which meant she was practically a local, and thus an artifact from a rapidly disappearing era of De Vera servitude; the newer generation had begun looking farther afield when it came to their help. Hero’s younger cousins were raised and driven around by people from Negros, Samar, Davao, Sulu. Hiring servants from farther-flung provinces made it more difficult for a rebellious or disgruntled or newly-in-love maid or driver to run away, back to the safety of their friends and family. As far away as possible from a comfort zone: that was the best state for a servant. The younger De Veras enjoyed their modernity.

  The night before she was taken to the faith healer, Hero had swum home through the blissful fug of Francisco’s father’s rum and half a crushed Valium, sneaking in through the servant’s entrance on the ground floor. She’d done it a hundred, a thousand times before; she was sure her parents and all the servants knew, but she hadn’t yet been punished for it. She’d been with Francisco, as usual. She was sixteen, had just finished high school, was a couple of months shy of moving to the UST dorms. Francisco’s parents were sending their son to study in the States, somewhere on the East Coast; Hero could never keep the names of the towns or schools straight. Francisco’s family was far richer than Hero’s, as the regional distributers of Coca-Cola, but theirs was newer money, which allowed Hamin and Concepcion to keep Francisco and his parents at a patronizing arm’s length, while simultaneously dropping hints that the two should marry.

  Hero was on the verge of breaking up with Francisco; she just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. She had the feeling he was in the same place. But it seemed neither of them could bear to give up the halfhearted but still somehow addictive fucking, using each other up and flopping over like rags when they were done, then starting up again as soon as one or the other felt the itch creep up again. While it was going on, it was good. Sex was always good. What made Hero feel like climbing out of her skin with revulsion was the rest of it: the way girls at school she didn’t even know came up to her eagerly and said, You and Francisco make such a good-looking couple; the way older strangers smiled on the street when they walked arm in arm after the movies, his sweater tied around his waist to hide the cum stain; the way flower sellers on the street came up to them, gave Francisco a free rosal; the way Francisco had to give it to her under the seller’s approving eye, and Hero had to hold it in her hands or tuck it behind her ear, and smile.

  Around the time Lulay took her to the faith healer, Hero had been forgetting to eat more and more often, and then, when she finally remembered—it was her body remembering for her, the sudden gnawing raring up from the depths of her like a recurring nightmare—she’d eat until she was sick, and then eat some more. But no matter how much she ate, the food had lost its taste. It wasn’t just food. She’d stopped wearing Tabac, she’d stopped reading. Tito Pol was in Indonesia and she hadn’t seen him for nearly a year, but she knew that even if he were in town, she would av
oid him. She didn’t want him to know about this part of her, this limp shred of a girl she’d discovered herself capable of being. She wanted to protect the person she was when she was with him, the curious, smart niece she’d been all her life. She didn’t want him to meet this version of her: banal, hungerless. Someone’s nobya.

  When Hero arrived home, Lulay was sitting cross-legged on the tiled floor in front of Hero’s bedroom, her thin, gristly arms crossed. Nodding off into the liver spots on her chest. She woke up when Hero’s footsteps approached.

  Walang hiya, she said blandly. No shame. The insult was a greeting. Hero opened her mouth to reply, and threw up instead.

  Lulay stood up, gripped Hero by the upper arm, hard. Took her to the servants’ bathroom. Grabbed a blue plastic bucket that was next to the drain, dumped the waiting water out of it. Kicked it in front of Hero so it rattled like a top, before settling. She stuck a finger down Hero’s throat, made her throw up in the bucket, which stank of watery piss, like someone had missed the drain or hadn’t cared. Stuck the finger deeper when Hero’s throat closed up, then pulled it out with a fresh stream of vomit, until Hero’s eyes were streaming with reflexive tears, snot coating her lips.

  Lulay took the small tabo next to the sink, filled it up with water, grabbed Hero by the hair. Stuck her head over the bucket again, then poured the water over Hero’s head. Hero choked, spluttered, then finally relaxed. Lulay did it two more times, the water only a fraction warmer the third time.

  Walang hiya, Lulay spat out again. She brought Hero to her bedroom, a dry towel draped over her arm. At the sight of the mess she’d made when she’d thrown up the first time, Hero dumbly made movements to kneel down, meaning to clean up the vomit, but Lulay pushed her out of the way, making a tsk-ing sound.