America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  Don’t worry about it. Actually, don’t even wait ’til next week. Come back tomorrow—we do karaoke on Friday nights, too. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, we’re always doing karaoke in here. Sometimes on Saturdays they push the tables to the wall and do cha-cha, line dancing, whatever. It’s fun. Come by.

  Hero looked down at Roni. She’s, uh. She’s suspended for the rest of the week, so we’ll see. If her parents let her.

  Rosalyn looked at Hero, opened her mouth to say something, but then stopped herself. Okay. Sure. See you, then. Uh-whatever’s-fine.

  Hero smiled stiffly. Rosalyn winced.

  Joke got old, right? Okay. Yeah. Later.

  Hero turned to Adela and Boy. Salamat, ha, Lola Adela. Lolo Boy. See you next week.

  Bye, Roni said vaguely, cradling her treasure, half out the door.

  Hero started the car, made sure Roni put on her seat belt, put on her own. Checked the dashboard, the front seats, the transmission, the gas meter. She didn’t know why she was checking all of those things until she lifted her eyes and saw that Rosalyn and Adela were standing in the entryway of the restaurant.

  Adela was waving. Rosalyn was just looking. Hero lifted a heavy hand, found it took her a long time to put it back down. She looked in the rearview mirror, then behind her twice, just to make sure she wasn’t backing up into anybody. It felt like she needed to be extra careful. She drove away before she could look back, or wave a second time.

  * * *

  Pol was awake when they got home; they knew because the garage door was open. When Hero pulled the car up the driveway, he came into sight, sitting on his chair next to the card table, smoking. Hero parked outside, turned off the engine, unbuckled her seat belt, opened her car door, climbed out.

  Roni hadn’t yet moved. Roni, she prompted, before looking at the girl’s face, and stopping short. Roni had on a full-blown Our Lady of Sorrows look, seven daggers in the heart. Surprise, then sympathy, thickened in Hero’s throat, fast, as it always did when Roni looked her age. But there wasn’t anything she could do. They were already here.

  Let’s go, Hero said, quieter.

  Roni took off her seat belt, opened the car door. Took her backpack out, and held it in one hand, just by the left strap. It was as if she’d only just been made aware of this possibility—that Pol might be angry with her. Hero realized, then, that this might be the first time she was going to ever see Pol angry at Roni; the first time she was ever going to see him angry, period.

  Geronima, Pol said, face obscured behind the smoke. Halika dito.

  At first Hero thought Pol was talking to her, and was startled when Roni began shuffling forward, face lowered, toward her father. Another first: she’d never heard anyone call Roni by their shared full name before.

  Nimang, Pol said. Can you make me a coffee, please?

  Hero nodded jerkily, neck stiff. Of course.

  She made her way into the garage, then realized that she hadn’t even closed the car door yet. Roni hadn’t, either. She jogged back awkwardly, saw that Roni had left the videotape and the Tupperware of sampalok. Hero retrieved the lot, then closed the doors. The sound they made was too loud in the dense silence of the driveway. When Hero passed, on the way into the kitchen, Roni hadn’t lifted her face yet. Small, wretched sounds were coming from her body; she was crying, but softly and to herself, trying to bury it in her chest, so the tears wouldn’t be misconstrued as an attempt to garner sympathy. She had her honor.

  Hero heard Pol say: Look at me, Geronima.

  Hero put the Tupperware in the refrigerator, unsure of its proper storage. The video she put on the table, then started on the coffee. When Hero was finished, she didn’t know what to do with it; whether she should bring it out, whether Pol had actually wanted coffee, or whether it was just a way of telling her to leave. She hovered near the kitchen door to the garage, trying to overhear. All she heard was Roni sniffling. It wasn’t a good time to interrupt. She went back to the coffee. It would be cold by the time Pol was finished. She considered going upstairs, but found she didn’t want to be far away, even though it was none of her business, not really. She started making another coffee, drinking the one she’d just made herself. It was far too sweet, full of vanilla-flavored creamer, the way everyone knew Pol liked his coffee. Hero drank it anyway.

  The second coffee was finished. Hero had drunk half of the first coffee. She stared down at both cups. The idea of making a third one was absurd, and yet. Just as Hero was about to pull a third cup from the cabinet, she heard shuffling. Pol’s tsinelas. They were coming back inside.

  Pol came through the door first, holding his large glass of Coke and ice. Behind him, Roni was hiccuping, eyes swollen, nose red and moist with snot.

  Hero brought the coffee cup over to Pol.

  Thank you, Pol said. Roni sat down in her customary seat, limp with misery, her backpack slumped between her legs.

  Do your homework, Pol said. Added a final blow: Mom’s on her way home right now.

  At that, Roni’s face looked on the verge of crumpling again, her eyes squeezing shut. But then, she steeled herself. Opened her backpack. Searched for her workbook, pulled it out, rummaged around for a pencil. Both of her hands were shaking. Suddenly, her eyes caught sight of the videotape, and stuttered there for a minute, the most animal part of her brain remembering recent pleasure, some dumb feeler within her grasping blindly at it.

  Pol was holding one of the black plastic combs he usually kept nearby; he had one in the pocket of his work uniform, one in the pocket of his bathrobe, and one on the table somewhere, next to his cigarettes. In one hand was the comb, in the other hand was a white panyo. He was threading the thin white fabric of the panyo between the individual teeth of the comb, back and forth, back and forth, so it gradually dislodged the gray dirt that had accumulated there—skin cells, old pomade, dust. It was a ritual he performed regularly; he was a fastidious person about things like that. He’d been like that in Vigan, too.

  It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, seeing him do it, but that seemed to be what hit Roni the hardest; the deliberate economy of movement, his absorption in the mundane task, while she hung from a wire, waiting to be forgiven. Roni looked at the comb in his hands and promptly burst into tears. Loudly this time, no holding back. The sounds echoed in the room; rose in great woeful waves, then died down to wet, choking gasps, then a brief silence, while Roni gathered strength—then lost it, and the wails rose up again.

  Pol sighed with his chest more than his mouth, and said nothing. Let it happen, waited for Roni to lose energy. Hero thought Roni would apologize, even beg—but she didn’t, or couldn’t, say a word.

  Pol’s face had been impassive since their arrival, but for just a moment, Hero saw it flicker. He looked, briefly, like he might say something, reach out. But he pulled back and repeated, somehow to himself as much as to Roni: Do your homework now.

  Most afternoons Hero offered to help Roni with her homework. Today she knew she couldn’t. She had to leave her there.

  Hero took the videotape, not meeting Roni’s gaze, knowing she was unlikely to attract it anyway. Roni hadn’t looked at her since they arrived home, had forgotten anyone else existed; the world had narrowed down to encompass just the people who were angry with her. She hoped the girl would know that she meant to keep it safe, not to confiscate it. Went to her room. As usual, she’d only slept three or four hours the previous night; maybe she would take a nap.

  It felt, as soon as she hit the mattress, as though she’d lived two days in one, her body sack-heavy and numb. For the first time she was aware of the hair on her head, its weight and its texture, how foreign and new it now felt. It was different, getting your hair washed at a salon. She wondered why. Where had Rosalyn put her elastic while she was washing Hero’s hair, she wondered. She thought about whether or not Rosalyn had slid it onto her own wrist. Then tried to stop t
hinking about that.

  Drifing between sleeping and waking, Hero tried to remember the last time she’d gotten in trouble at school, but couldn’t think of a single time; for all the fucking around she and Francisco had done, both of them had been good students, well behaved. She remembered getting into trouble once or twice, perhaps, for speaking Ilocano to a friend when only English was allowed on the school campus, but even then she’d always gotten off leniently, with a warning. There were other students, often young men from less wealthy families, for whom speaking Ilocano would merit a nasty beating and daylong exile in front of the school’s altar.

  She had no idea what Roni was learning in school, whether she got good grades, what subjects she enjoyed. As far as she could tell, school was a place for Roni to fight. But probably whatever Roni was learning in class, Hero had learned, too, even down to the history—in Vigan they’d learned about things like the capitals of all the American states, Colorado mountain ranges. It was Teresa, not a schoolteacher, who told Hero about the genocides that had expunged a sixth of the population from Luzon alone, six hundred thousand souls. The total number killed in the archipelago, including the genocides on Samar, was generally accepted to be around one and a half million.

  I want no prisoners, Teresa said to the cadres, quoting General Jacob Smith, who’d presided over the genocides in Samar. I want you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. Smith, nicknamed Hell Roaring, introduced a system called reconcentration, segregating the common population from so-called revolutionaries by containing the former in what was called a reconcentrated zone. The point was to sever the guerrilla fighters from the rest of the civilian population, Teresa explained, depriving them of access to food, shelter, sympathy. The reconcentrated zone was placed under strict military surveillance, and everything outside of the zone was treated as a no-man’s-land. Anyone unlucky enough to be outside of its perimeter—maybe a parent or ex-lover was a revolutionary, maybe a sick relative lived on the other side—was shot on sight. Their bodies were left next to the homes that had already been razed, cattle that had been massacred, crops that had been left to decay. Let no livelihood be salvaged from the earth; that was the official policy. Smith’s fellow general, J. Franklin Bell, carried out a similar campaign in Batangas; according to his own calculations, over six hundred thousand Filipinos were killed within three years. Hero didn’t know of any official Filipino calculations.

  Another word for what the Americans were doing, coined by a Republican congressman, was pacification. Bell bragged that he’d found the secret of pacification: They never rebel in Luzon, because there isn’t anybody there to rebel. President McKinley was more succinct; he called it extermination. Hero didn’t learn any of those words at school.

  What she did remember from her time in school was a painting by El Greco, the Greek Spaniard who produced portraits of saints and messiahs and royals. The teachers in Hero’s Catholic school mostly practiced the kind of two-faced, Padre Dámaso–style authoritarianism that had passed for pedagogy in the archipelago for over three hundred years, abstemious piety with a touch of fondling, but they would occasionally extend their lessons to art when the artwork’s subject was religion. El Greco’s work passed educational muster in Vigan, and so when Hero was around ten years old, she saw the first and only painting she ever loved.

  Her teacher showed the class a portrait of Jesus that Hero hadn’t ever seen before, nothing like the blandly virile one Hamin hung next to the more traditional De Vera pastorals, Jesus dewy and muscular like a Hollywood idol, shining hair flowing over his shoulders. The El Greco had been painted around the time Magalat was organizing his revolt in Cagayan—that wasn’t how the teacher framed it, but years later, Hero drew the two things together, looking for a familiar face in the foreign frame. In the painting, Jesus was raising two long anemic fingers in greeting or postponement, and he had strabismus, a quality Lulay used to spout about as a feature shared by mystics, geniuses, thieves, imaginative children, and those possessed by kapres. One eye looked the world in the face. The other eye needed a break, and wandered off.

  The teacher said the name of the painting was El Salvador del Mundo. But in no painting had Hero ever seen anyone look less like a savior of the world. The expression of Jesus in the painting was one of grievous humility and reticence. His face was hollow-cheeked and wan, and in his gaze was the inconsolable calm of someone who had long ago reconciled himself to the knowledge that the world was totally unsavable.

  For years, Hero thought that the title was meant to be ironic. But only in California did Hero remember the painting again and finally realize what she hadn’t been able to know, back then; what the face in the El Greco painting actually looked like. It just looked like an adult. Someone who’d once been a kid, and wasn’t one anymore.

  * * *

  It was evening when Hero woke up. Paz was home, and yelling. Loud enough to echo all the way upstairs, through Hero’s door. She got out of bed, crept near the door. Paz’s voice was muffled, but it sounded like, AND WHAT THANKS DO I GET—FOR WORKING EVERY DAY AND NIGHT LIKE A DOG—WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY FOR THAT KID’S GLASSES—HUH—YOU KNOW WHAT THEY CALLED YOU—YOU KNOW WHAT HIS MOM CALLED US—HUH—HUH—

  Hero thought about opening the door, to more distinctly hear not Paz’s words, but Roni’s or even Pol’s response. But she worried about the sound the door would make, the attention it might draw. Maybe drawing attention was just what she needed to do, to distract Paz from her tirade. She put her hand on the doorknob—then heard them, the stomping footsteps, getting closer, hammering on each stair like a blow. The loud, frustrated hissing and a fist slamming against the wall, then the door to a bedroom slamming closed.

  Hero waited. Listened. She couldn’t hear Pol or Roni at all—then she heard the papery shuffle of tsinelas. Pol, walking around, still in the kitchen. Hero strained to make out voices, but either they weren’t saying anything, or they were saying it low, only for each other.

  She heard the other door open again. Stomping down the stairs, again. Paz’s voice, still hard, but not as loud. Tired and barbed, directed at Pol. I have to go back to work. I’ll get in trouble. Then a final hiss: Bahala na kayo!

  Hero couldn’t hear Pol’s response. The sound of the garage door opening, a car engine starting up. A car driving away. The garage door closing. There were still noises coming from downstairs; the television. Hero’s mouth was dry and woolly from sleep. She badly needed a drink of water.

  Roni and Pol were sitting on the couch together, watching television in the living room, all the lights still on. Roni was slurping noodles out of a Styrofoam cup; Maruchan instant noodles. Pol had the same noodles, but he’d put them into a separate bowl, added a raw egg to it, which he was stirring, his eyes on the screen.

  A handsome older bald man was onscreen, looking like he was dying of a head injury. He was talking to a much younger man, with a soft, pretty face. They were both wearing red and black uniforms, covered with dust, gold insignias on the chest. Teresa also had a uniform, though she wore it only on the days when journalists or party bigwigs were coming to visit. Khaki green with patches on both sides of her chest, just above the nipples: NEW PEOPLE’S ARMY on the right side. And on the left side, TERESA MACALINTAL. Teresa often joked that it should be the other way around; that she should be wearing NEW PEOPLE’S ARMY over her heart.

  Once, in the early days, both of the patches fell off, and it was Hero who sewed them back on, the sutures tight, the uniform still warm from Teresa’s body, which was sitting across the room in Hero’s clinic in a tank top, chain-smoking and making fun of one of her counterparts, a commander from Bataan who’d mistaken Teresa for one of the commander’s wives. Later, the newer uniforms came updated with patches that stuck on with Velcro, but Teresa never switched over, saying the uniform was good luck, she’d stayed alive this long and wasn’t about to test it. Hero had never believed in things like b
ertud, or anting-anting, amulets that would protect someone the way rumors abounded that Marcos himself had once paid someone to embed a piece of holy wood into his back for protection. But whenever Hero saw her handiwork, the white stitches holding up Teresa’s name, a splinter of her believed.

  You guys are still awake? Hero asked.

  I took off work, Pol said, turning around on the couch to face her. Roni didn’t turn around. Pol picked up the remote and paused the show; a recording then, not a live broadcast.

  Nangánkan? You want cup noodles?

  No, I’m. I’m not hungry. I already ate.

  Pol didn’t try to hide his disbelief. When? You’ve been in your room.

  Hero opened her mouth to argue, but her stomach answered for her, in a low rumble. The corner of Pol’s mouth lifted. See.

  He stood. I’ll make another one for both of us, I’m still hungry. You want raw or boiled egg?

  Hero stepped forward, hands stretched out, but in refusal. Boiled, but—no, no—I don’t—I’m not that hungry—

  Pol had already gone back into the kitchen, rummaging through the cabinet for another Styrofoam cup.

  Hero stood behind Roni awkwardly, hands behind her back. The girl still hadn’t turned around.

  Hoy. Roni. Okay ka ba?

  Small shoulders shrugged. Hero swallowed, then walked around the couch to face Roni. The girl’s eyes and nose were swollen and red, like she’d been crying for hours with no respite, and had only just stopped. The eczema around her eyes was inflamed, cracked open and still wet with pus. The tears must have stung the sores. Roni’s eyes were unfocused as she sucked another mouthful of noodles, sabaw splashing onto her cheeks. She wiped at them with the back of her hand, messily.

  Someone had replaced the extra-wide Band-Aids that Hero assumed a teacher or school nurse had applied to Roni’s knees. Now there were large squares of gauze on both knees, stained with iodine and blood, neatly taped down. Hero had forgotten about Roni’s other injuries, besides the missing tooth. The gauze protected the scrapes completely while making them look much worse than they were—someone had overdone it, but someone had done it well. The work had been done by a practiced nurse, used to changing dressings daily. Hero thought of Paz, screaming and slamming doors, then kneeling in front of Roni to carefully change her bandages before she left for work.