Get in your room, she said, wiping at the watery chunks with the towel. Hero hesitated, holding on to the door to steady her. Lulay didn’t look at her. Sige, she snapped.
Hero was in bed, one hand pressed on her own forehead, one foot on the floor to stop the spinning of the room, when Lulay came back inside. Go to sleep now. Tomorrow we’re going to see my friend.
Hero barely heard her, grunted in response. The hand she was keeping on her forehead felt important, like it was keeping her brains, or something worse and more precious, from pouring out.
Tsh, Lulay muttered, and closed the door.
The next day, Lulay took her to a woman’s house. They went on foot, avoiding Concepcion’s driver, avoiding the kalesas in the road. Lulay didn’t explain who they were going to see, or how she knew her; she didn’t explain what they were doing, or why. She’d never been the warmest of yayas, but Hero hadn’t ever seen her quite this irate. Still, when they walked on the road, Lulay took the side closest to the cars. If half the sidewalk was shaded and the other half was in sunlight, she made Hero take the shaded side even if it meant Lulay was walking on the cobblestone road, dodging passing tricycles.
The woman they were visiting lived in an old house in the center of town, and was about as old as Lulay. She worked as the cook for a small, no longer very rich family, at least judging by the state of the bahay na bato: several of the capiz shell window slats were cracked or missing altogether, one of the balconies looking like it had been ripped clean off, maybe in an earthquake. The fabric store on the ground floor appeared to be theirs.
Lulay brought Hero to the kitchen, had her sit on a stool while the woman finished chopping onions. Lulay stood. They talked to each other like old friends, not in Ilocano or Tagalog. Hero still thought it was Kalinga, or Bontoc, but those were all wild guesses, she had no idea really. She couldn’t understand a word.
She doesn’t even know why she’s here? asked the woman, in Tagalog. Hero was meant to overhear it, then—though the woman hadn’t been addressing or even looking at her.
She doesn’t care, Lulay replied. Never mind.
It didn’t last for long. Hero didn’t know if it was because her condition was minor, or if it was already beyond help. The woman’s name was Angelica; that much Hero remembered.
By and large it consisted of holding Hero by the arm and finding out if she was possessed, if there was anyone around her who wished her ill, if there was anyone in her parents’ life who wanted revenge and was taking it through her child. The woman listened and listened, but nothing answered back.
Hero let it all happen to her like it was happening to someone else, like she was an animal in the forest, playing dead. Sitting on a stool in the kitchen, smelling the raw onions, the sweaty film of her own residual drunkenness passing out of her body, leaving behind a migraine. A stranger’s tobacco-sweet breath in her face, making it worse. Searching for demons, finding a person.
There’s nothing, Angelica said, again in Tagalog, again for Hero’s benefit. Wala.
Meron, Lulay insisted. There’s something.
Hero thought of saying: I’m not sick, manang. I just have a boyfriend.
Angelica had to get back to work, favors to friends notwithstanding. She apologized to Lulay, who accepted the apology grudgingly, which was her way of being kind. For Lulay, it was a kindness to hold grudges, to be stingy with forgiveness; it made things matter.
She and Hero departed back into the damp and heavy afternoon heat. They cut through Plaza Burgos on their way back home. On a hot day, it felt like the whole of Vigan was there, selling something, eating something, the kids playing, the stands hocking empanada, Vigan longanisa, ukoy, big melting scoops of buko ice cream, sandwiched in a sun-warm pan de sal. Hero didn’t feel drunk or even nauseated anymore; the hangover had officially begun, skin dry and parched, stomach hollow. She needed to eat. She was going to pass out and die if she didn’t eat. She stopped just to the side of the plaza, and said she wanted an empanada. Lulay huffed, but didn’t protest.
Hero paid for two, gave one to Lulay, who accepted it but didn’t make any moves to eat it. Hero never liked to eat while someone else was watching without eating, but she was hungry; no helping it. She ate, fast, the just-fried empanada crackling under her teeth, burning her tongue, staining her fingers orange. She didn’t even bother with vinegar. It was the grease she wanted; she didn’t want anything to cut through its weight or interfere with the longed-for weight in her belly. Being this hungover made her feel like a balloon, tied to a long and fragile string, battered about by wind and sun, too high, apt to snap off at any moment. The food yanked her back, shoved her in the shade.
There’s something wrong, Lulay said.
Hero’s chewing slowed. She had papaya in her teeth, she could feel it.
There’s nothing. Your friend said.
Lulay was staring out into the square, watching the people. There’s something wrong, she said again.
Hero was nearly finished with her empanada. She licked at her fingers. Looked around at the plaza, at the statue of José Burgos, and the rolled-up piece of paper he held in his hand, only its title visible. PROTESTA.
She put the rest of the empanada in her mouth and averted her eyes from the square. She’d never been sentimental about Vigan before. It was too pathetic to start now.
How much did you have to pay her? Hero finally asked. You’ll be reimbursed.
Lulay looked back at her with more disgust than she’d ever looked at Hero before. Hero relished the disgust; it told the truth, at least. Walang hiya talaga, Lulay said again, looking disgusted even with the words themselves, with having to say them, having to mean them, a girl in front of her who deserved them. Then she held the uneaten empanada out in front of her, like she’d known all along that Hero would still be hungry.
* * *
The only person Hero ever told about the faith healer was Teresa. Late at night, staying overnight at a farmer’s home at the foot of the Sierra Madre before they would make their way back up the mountain, seven hours on foot up to the cluster of nipa huts where the cadres had made their temporary base, past the fields that had once been full of native red and white corn, increasingly replaced by the yellow hybrid corn crops that were spreading in both the provinces of Cagayan and Isabela.
By the time Hero arrived in Isabela province, the cadres had already witnessed several of the upland settlements in Cagayay Valley gradually being converted into cornfields, from rolling banana plantations to old colonial ranches left to ruin. For years, commercial representatives and government employees from the Department of Agriculture had been visiting farmers in the region, offering what was called advertising deals, in which farmers were given free hybrid corn seeds and agrochemicals. They needed only to purchase their own fertilizers, and of course to sell whatever harvest they reaped back to the original seed company. Such corporate-government teams had already successfully convinced farmers to plant hybrid rice years before, and they expected the same success with hybrid corn. The difference between rice and corn, however, was that a fraction of the hybrid rice harvest could be kept to feed a farmer’s household, in addition to being sold for an income. The hybrid yellow corn, on the other hand, was used only as stock feed: a pure cash crop, unsuitable for human consumption. The hybrid corn was also more prone to rot than rice, which made it difficult to store, and few farmers were able to pay for the kinds of equipment and warehouses that would protect their harvest. In fact, what Teresa was increasingly hearing, which she relayed to the cadres in Isabela, was that the majority of any income earned by the farmers off the hybrid corn was often spent paying back the exorbitant loans they’d taken out to cover the other investments required to grow the new crops in the first place, like expensive tractors.
They were at the home of one of those farmers, Chito, a man who’d once been a logger and who’d gone into debt after a harves
t failure. He’d had to give up some of his land as collateral—It’s called land-grabbing, Eddie corrected, acerbic. Chito’s son had a wet cough, which Teresa had heard during a village meeting she’d held, one she and Eddie held to help organize an upcoming picket outside the seed company’s regional headquarters. The boy had been coughing at his father’s side, sick enough that he should have been in bed, but old enough, ten or eleven, to be told that it was time to start becoming a man. When he coughed, he looked mortified, covering nearly his entire face as if hiding from view would make the sound less distracting.
At the end of the meeting, Teresa pointed with her lips at the boy and said, I know a doctor.
It was Hero’s first year in Isabela and her bedside manner, though never warm, was at its least personable. Hero’s forbidding gaze, her huge assessing silences, menaced the boy, made him refuse to be touched or to even open his mouth. Teresa diffused the situation by pointing at a gecko scurrying up the wall of the farmer’s nipa hut, its tiny tail sweeping over the bamboo stalks.
These are good for coughs, did you know that? Teresa said to the boy. You want to try it? The boy shook his hand, but his shoulders relaxed. Teresa took the gecko by the tail and dangled it over her mouth. The boy burst out laughing, then coughed again. From that point on, Hero told Teresa what she needed the boy to do, and Teresa translated.
Eventually Hero would learn that a cadre doctor had to be someone people could trust. Over the years, she was surprised to find that people did, actually, trust her. She’d never thought of herself as a trustworthy person before. But it had to do with how awkward she was, how blunt, how poorly educated in Marxism. Something about it rang true to people, at least the people in Isabela. That was what Teresa said, anyway.
People don’t want their doctors to be charming, donya. They just want them to know what they’re doing. You don’t have to be Rogelio de la Rosa to splint a leg.
Teresa had a host of nicknames for her. There was Nimang, which everyone used, and doktora, and then sometimes there was donya, or la biguenya, or donya biguenya, or donya doktora, or some other combination that included all the epithets. They weren’t as formal with their kasama names in Isabela; someone would introduce himself as Ka Jerusalem, then a week later admit that you could call him Jay. Teresa introduced herself to the cadres as Ka Teresa—along with Eddie, she was one of the few who made no differentiation between her kasama name and her real name, and Hero followed their example. Eddie, insouciant, sometimes even called Teresa Tessie. What Hero loved most wasn’t the cadre names people chose, but the word kasama itself: kasama, pakikisama. In Ilocano, the closest word was kadwa. Kadwa, makikadwa. Companion, but that English word didn’t quite capture its force. Kasama was more like the glowing, capacious form of the word with: with as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, with as a way of life. A world of with-ing. In Isabela, Hero was with.
Teresa reacted to the fact that Hero had come from Vigan differently from most people in Manila, something that had taken Hero some getting used to, those first few months at UST. There, when she said she was from Vigan, a hush of fear would come over people’s faces. The braver ones would ask things like, Is it true that you’ll get shot for looking someone in the eyes for too long? Is it true that the warlords kill people in the street and no one says anything? Hero was at a loss for how to answer any of those questions; it was the first time she’d caught onto the fact that this was the impression outsiders had of Vigan. Not that it was an old colonial town, Ilocano, full of austere traditionalists and especially pretty at night when the lamplight glimmered off the cobblestones.
She brought those qualities up sometimes, when people asked, and received blank stares in return. No one knew all that much about Vigan except that it was a no-go zone, a kingdom of terror, along with the rest of Ilocos Sur and Ilocos Norte. At the time, Hero tried hard to think back on her childhood, on her adolescence, her teenage years, running around the Calle Crisologo, fucking her brains out, coming home drunk, losing days to a hangover and a book, keeping silent at dinner. When she figured it out, she felt stupid. Of course she’d never had cause to feel afraid. The warlords people were talking about were her neighbors and godparents, the longtime friends and business partners and sometimes spouses of the De Veras. It was the first time she’d really had to think about where she’d come from, what it meant.
But Teresa never mentioned it, never mentioned the Quiambaos or the Ibarras, never even said if she recognized the De Vera name, which she probably didn’t; it wasn’t like they were the richest or most prominent family—just another one of the old guard. When Teresa talked to Hero about Vigan, it was with a childlike, teasing kind of affection, referencing only Vigan’s most stereotypical, postcard-worthy qualities. She said things like, So did you go to school in a kalesa? Did you have a silk fan? Was your house made of damili tile? Did men still do harana? Were you ever serenaded outside your window? Bashful, Hero admitted, to the sound of Teresa’s ensuing laughter, that she had in fact been serenaded.
Hero wondered about it, about why Teresa never talked about Vigan the way other people did. There were some cadres among them who made disparaging remarks about Hero being a biguenya, making hints about her real loyalties, but Teresa cast a cold eye on those remarks until they died down. Hero’s increasingly indispensable skills as a doctor didn’t hurt.
That night, after sending the boy to bed with promises to return the next day with a guaifenesin-based expectorant for the mucus, they’d given Chito and his wife two American-made M-14s to defend themselves against landlords or rustlers. Or if anyone from the military comes to threaten you about the demonstration, or any of those debtors try to take more of your land, Eddie added. As usual, there wasn’t enough ammunition to last them if a real fight broke out; Teresa and Eddie said, as they always did, that they’d try to get more, but it was usually months before they were able to keep their word to villagers. Even the cadres themselves were limited to firing four or five rounds a day, assassination missions included. It was the gesture that counted. The mother boiled monggo for everybody, and the father put the guns in front of the altar, where a brown-skinned Santo Niño watched over them all, his face illuminated by two red candles burning to stubs on either side of him.
By dinner it was just Hero and Teresa in the hut, Eddie having left to meet up with two of the newer recruits, Amihan and Jon-Jon. Chito told them to sleep overnight, it was too dark to make their way through the mountain. Teresa was a night owl; she often ended up in some long conversation with one of the cadres late at night. Sometimes it was Hero; more often than not it wasn’t. Either way she would stay awake in their nipa hut, surrounded by warm bodies, listening to Teresa and her interlocutor debate faith, or distribution of wealth, or maternal love. Hero knew she wasn’t the only one staying up one more hour just to be able to fall asleep to Teresa’s voice.
Hero mentioned Lulay’s faith healer friend to Teresa that night. They’d been talking about faith healers because the boy’s mother had previously resorted to them for the family’s illnesses, too poor for any other remedies. Teresa rolled over on the mat to face her, intrigued. And what was it like?
Anticlimactic, Hero replied in English.
Teresa rolled back onto the mat, looking up at the roof. And why did your yaya take you there in the first place?
Hero shrugged, said she didn’t know. She described what the time had been like, how she’d been acting out. She never had any shame when talking to Teresa, not even about her sexual past, which she’d never talked about before, not even when it was her sexual present. Teresa didn’t care about that kind of thing. She tolerated the ribald jokes made by some of the cadres, was aware of the minor or major sexual affairs that were going on, but kept some crucial part of herself out of the fray. It wasn’t possible to involve Teresa, not in that way. Teresa let details like that flow over her, like she was standing at the wettest part of a shore, warm water lapping at her fe
et. Just enough to be part of it, but never enough to be dragged in by the tide.
Hero paused in the middle of her story, closed her eyes. She called me walang hiya.
She probably hated my guts, she went on, interrupting herself. Of course. Most yayas hate the kids they have to take care of.
Teresa picked absently at her nose with her thumb. Oh, definitely, donya. I always take the people I hate to faith healers.
Then she flicked the hardened snot away and started laughing to herself, the sound of which Hero was getting used to: Teresa laughing to herself, at Hero’s expense. She’d grown to like it, even, the way Teresa’s fond ridicule made her feel pliant and real, like being suspended by the scruff of her neck in someone else’s teeth.
Reimburse, Teresa repeated. Tangengot. You didn’t even know that faith healers can’t accept money, otherwise they lose their powers?
How was I supposed to know that? Hero snapped, growing crabby. It was my first time.
A long silence. Then she said:
I don’t even know what was wrong with me then.
Teresa didn’t say anything; Hero thought she’d fallen asleep and turned her head slightly, just to check, but Teresa’s eyes were still open.
Tanga, she said again, quiet. A lover’s bower voice, without the lover or the bower. Then she said: Depression yan, ’diba?
Hero stopped. The word had never occurred to her before.
Walang hiya, Teresa mused to herself. Well. Kahit ano. Whatever. There are worse things.
Teresa closed her eyes, sleepy at last or pretending to be. That’s one of the things I like about you, anyway, donya. That you have no shame.
* * *
America Is Not the Heart Page 12
