“Magda tells him, ‘Let’s take a shower, shall we?’ like with any customer, but he doesn’t even hear her. He just grabs her with both hands and throws her down—wham!—headfirst onto the bed. Magda’s used to a little rough stuff, that’s her job. All kinds of men in this world, no telling how they’ll behave with a prostitute. So they’d better be ready for anything.”
“ ‘Behave with a prostitute’? Lo, a scientist!”
“Give me a break. I may not be the most sex-driven male, but still. I’m happy to have Angelina as my special bonus for the long hours I put in as president. I might enjoy the occasional night with one of the girls there too, though I wouldn’t miss it if I didn’t.”
“Wi’ some men, physical desire may blossom into a desire for power.”
“It never ceases to amaze me how you, who died just barely adult and never even had a grown woman, could know all this.”
“I saw a few things in me time.”
“And since?”
“Aye, for the most part since. Life alone wasn’t time enough. But go on, what of Heinrich? ’Tis an eternal twenty-one-year-old you’re talking to, so gi’ me the bump and grind.”
“Be patient! Like I was saying, Heinrich went wild—”
“Details!”
“First, he started ripping off her clothes. Magda put up no resistance, but that only turned him on even more. He was all over the girl. Swept her arms aside, big hands pawing her breasts, ripping at those, you know, those drawstring knickers to grab her ass, pushing her legs wide. Like he only had fifteen minutes before they took his toy away.”
“Some men’re like that.”
“But we’re talking about a man with a wife and five children. Can you imagine him doing that to his own wife? … Do you believe in rape?”
“Believe, you say?”
“Taking a woman against her will, by brute force.”
“Seems mere cockmanship to me.”
“No, it’s a power thing. Like Heinrich had to show Magda who’s boss.”
“But, go on, what next?”
“You’re impossible. Anyway, he gets Magda naked, but she’s smart. She just rolls over and waits for the beating she knows is coming any second. Meanwhile Heinrich’s eyeing her the whole time while he steps out of his trousers, one leg at a time, like a soldier.”
“Took off his belt and thrashed the wench, did ’e?”
“No, there you go again. He took off his pants, but he was still wearing his chauffeur’s jacket. That’s how he climbed onto Magda.”
“Aye, the captain’s vice.”
“Strange, don’t you think? His tool was charged up from the moment he got his pants off. An ordinary size cock, at least from what I could see.”
“An Everyman piece, was it? And the moral?”
“Only that I don’t understand sex. Or no, I don’t understand people. You suppose Heinrich’s so frustrated? So pent up in his daily life?”
“I daresay, no.”
“Well, the moment he shoots his load, he’s off her in a flash and crouching down beside the bed. He still doesn’t say a word. And I heard afterwards, even when Magda’s telling him how good he was, how virile—things to boost a guy’s illusions—it was like he didn’t even hear her. He never spoke to her, start to finish. Like some little demon was pulling his puppet strings, no better than a spook.”
“I beg your pardon! E’en we dead have our pride.”
“A slip of the tongue, I assure you. But tell me, Lee Bo, what makes us humans dance?”
“Don’ look at me. I died at twenty-one, too cursed short a plank to reel or jig.”
“Some excuse. You’ve had plenty of time since. Two whole damn centuries.”
“True. People come in all stripes and ev’ry one thinks hisself normal—except when none are looking on. Prob’ly all wipe their buttocks diff’rently too.”
“But we’re talking about him—Heinrich. That night, I had Angelina send him off alone—I didn’t even want to look at the man—and Angelina drove me home herself. The next morning, when I saw him, it was like nothing ever happened. Maybe he knew I was watching. Maybe he acted that way because he wanted to give me my money’s worth. I never asked.”
“And what say’d Angelina ’bout it all?”
“Just that men are a mixed lot. And that if you built a place like that for women to have their way with men, women would be a mixed lot too. And here I imagined all men were alike in bed.”
“People lie together for all manner of reasons. The only ones who do it always for the same reason are harlots, very likely. So what’s your verdict on the new maid?”
“Ah yes, that was the point of all this, wasn’t it. My mind’s made up. Tomorrow I tell Angelina to send the girl over. Things have changed course. Having her close by might just make things change course again. That’s my move.”
BUS REPORT 4
A fisherman set out by canoe from the village of Uu and paddled through a southern break in Saguili Reef to the outer coral slopes and the open sea, where there are big fish to be had. Only this day, he had no luck. From morning low tide until afternoon, he didn’t see a fish worth the name. Some days are like that. He was about to call it quits and head home, when a large something cut across his field of vision—a very big cabrilla. Stealthily, he dove after it; the fish didn’t notice it was being chased. Cabrilla are none too bright, but curious, which makes them easy to catch. The fisherman was closing in from behind when suddenly the fish darted off. He wanted to give it one last try but ran out of breath, so he had to surface and hope he wouldn’t lose his quarry by the time he dove again. He found the fish calmly feeding on the coral in the distance. Slowly, he swam toward it, this time coming right up on the fish; he pulled the rubber sling on his harpoon gun and let fly. The point pierced it straight through.
That’s when he felt he was being watched. Strange things do happen in the sea, he remembers thinking, as he turned around to look—and there behind him was a bus, and peering out the windows were old men! Their faces looked yellow underwater. The passengers waved at him, pointing at the fish skewered on his harpoon, and even clapped their hands, applauding his achievement. The yellow and green stripes on the bus seemed to dance in the rippling coral sea light, yet inside it was apparently dry. Perhaps the chassis was waterproofed? He smiled through his diving mask and waved back at the old men, then went up for air. But when he ducked his head under to have another look, the bus was nowhere in sight. He deposited his fish in the canoe, and dove in again, but no bus. Only when he went home to his village and told his mates did he learn it was the missing bus.
Matías first met Angelina in 1977, when he was forty-nine. The place was an upscale brothel in Manila where he was taken one evening as part of the VIP treatment on an official visit to the Philippines. He wasn’t really in the mood, but he went anyway—and Angelina was one of two hundred girls in the establishment. She was twenty-eight at the time, just about ready to leave that line of work. The favor was clearly a passing gesture to a dignitary whose emerging nation was still a little-known quantity, and Angelina perhaps got to do the honors because she hadn’t been in demand lately. But whatever the motives on the Philippine side, Matías was taken with her the moment he saw her. That first night, she received him warmly and graciously, suppressing any here-we-go-again expression in the tradition of the trade. A pretense that should have fooled no one, yet Matías was so fresh off the boat he imagined she might actually care for him. The fact was, up until then he’d never really fallen in love.
It wasn’t until much later in life that he realized how many special favors he enjoyed from those around him. Believe as he might that his attainments were his own doing, how very different his fortunes would have been without other people’s goodwill. During his Japan days, there was an older woman who generally look
ed after his needs. As a dark-skinned foreigner, short even by Japanese standards, with no economic pull, that was something in itself. Not that he’d have missed female companionship— he honestly felt no yearnings in that direction—still most of the time there was some woman around. He was also befriended by men, so it wasn’t all maternal instinct. Cornelius, the first president of Navidad, for instance, had looked out for him and helped set him up in the world of politics, though the alliance was brief.
He also had his share of women the first few years back in Navidad. The faces changed from one to the next at some unspoken signal. Homebodies good at cooking and housework, beauties made for taking out and about. He’d put in his twelve hours at Micael Guili’s shop, eat lunch and dinner on the job, and get back late at night to find the woman waiting and himself irritated at having to make some semblance of conversation or love. He didn’t know about other men, but he could get along just fine without a woman.
Six years after he started working at Guili’s, Micael the proprietor fell victim to the islands’ first traffic accident, leaving Matías to run the store single-handed. Two years on, seeing the amount of cash in circulation, Matías reckoned the islanders’ purchasing power merited a healthy boost in imported goods. He refurbished Guili’s general store, turning it into the first supermarket in Navidad. He swept all sex from his life; there simply was no room for a woman in a routine of sleeping, waking, and eating behind the counter. Everyone was so used to seeing him spend all hours at the grindstone that it came as a shock when in 1963 Matías married Micael Guili’s widow María. He was thirty-five at the time, María fifty-six.
Rumor around Baltasár City made it out to be a marriage of convenience designed to give Matías complete control over the burgeoning M. Guili Trading Company. Which was not entirely incorrect, though not the whole picture. Certainly María was amenable to a union with this man who had been toiling away for her; in that sense the nuptials did have a clear economic basis, a merger of their business selves. And Matías, for his part, didn’t think twice before annulling his own virtually nonexistent maternal family registry to take on her surname. Micael and María had no children, so Matías became an adopted Guili.
Yet despite what anyone might think, the two of them passed unfailingly enjoyable days together, blissfully unaware of their age difference. Not only was there no pause for pretty young things to insinuate themselves closer to the richest retail proprietor in the country, but even the marriage-of-convenience stories subsided. Getting together with María gave Matías his first real taste of a home, and for all of fourteen years, until María passed on at seventy-one, nothing clouded their selfless partnership. More than enough time to drive the disappointed gold diggers into compromise marriages of their own.
What was behind this miracle? Very simply, Matías was a stranger to romance. The sensation of falling hopelessly in love with someone to the exclusion of all else—that he never knew. He had no idea people could agonize day and night over such things. Had accusations reached his ears that his marriage to María was calculated, he might well have asked, “You mean there’s anything else? Men and women can relate in other ways?” The marriage suited him; working all day, staying up talking late into the night, it seemed an ideal life. Short on romance, perhaps, but full of affection. María was a woman of superior intelligence, much brighter than her deceased husband had ever been and studiously careful not to overstep her prerogative. Pundits quipped that Matías got his savvy from her, from their nightly kitchen talk. Not surprisingly, when death claimed María just as Matías was entering into politics, he mourned a lost confidante as much as a soul mate.
Now this same Matías suddenly found himself in love with someone he met in a Philippine brothel. Infatuation hit him totally out of the blue and left him reeling. He dragged himself from her bed at four in the morning and spent the whole of the next day contriving to see her again. It was the longest day he’d ever known. The basic equations of his life no longer added up. If a man could feel such electrical storms of emotion, where had he been for fifty years? Scarcely able to wait out the daylight hours, he made his own way to the establishment of the night before and found the same girl, Angelina—her name long since committed to memory.
For four nights straight, he visited Angelina, always staying until dawn, prolonging the hours of lovemaking with installments of his life story. Hers he never asked, fearful that he might babble, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”—the oldest line in creation. Why would a professional woman tell him the truth anyway? Meanwhile, his days were a parade of perfunctory meetings with Philippine officials, his evenings spent in dinner engagements. Afterward would come invitations to other brothels, but he’d bow out—only to find himself racing to Angelina, his knees practically giving out by the time he reached her. This isn’t normal, he thought, this isn’t normal at all. If Angelina was at all perplexed, she never let it show. She had herself a good customer who’d be heading back to his little island in a few days’ time. No matter how far the guy pushed his luck, what harm could he do? She listened to what he had to say and asked questions at appropriate intervals. This is one smart woman, thought Matías. María was smart, but this one’s smart and beautiful too. She had her own views; she didn’t just palm off what she thought he wanted to hear.
But if Angelina thought her islander just a one-week special, she was sorely mistaken. On the fourth night, Matías proposed. Angelina just stared back at him and gave the only intelligent response possible—she laughed. She laughed until tears came. It was a good minute before she caught her breath and saw—she could scarcely believe her eyes—that her suitor was dead serious. Matías ardently restated his case: he had standing in his country and real prospects for a more powerful position. This was the year after Navidad gained independence from American protectorateship, and newly elected Representative Matías Guili was in the good graces of President Cornelius. In fact, the President had appointed him as his personal emissary to the Philippines. Matías stopped short of telling Angelina that one of these days she’d make First Lady, but he hinted at something close.
“You give me till tomorrow to answer?” asked Angelina. Coming instead of the outright “no” he expected after such fits of laughter, Matías was elated. The whole of the next day, with no official chores, he roamed the busy pavements of Manila. He may have wondered what the hell he was doing, but he never doubted he’d taken the right course.
At last it got dark, and he went to see her. The old lady at the door recognized him and showed him in without a word. Matías blushed like a high school boy awaiting a reply to his first love letter (though only he could tell, his skin was so dark). Angelina greeted him with a serious expression and sat down silently at a small table beside the big bed. Hardly a beaming bride-to-be, thought Matías. He didn’t dare breathe until she said something.
“About you proposing, I’m happy you want to marry me, really I am. But me, somebody’s wife? Well, that’s not me. I been living in this world too long now to stay cooped up. What am I gonna do? Cook meals, do laundry?”
“You wouldn’t have to do any of that. You’d have a maid.”
“No, that’s not the point. I’m a damn good cook, you know, but picture me trying to look like a good little wife. Me, arm-in-arm with you in public?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I’d feel wrong. I never even think about it till now, I never get used to it.”
“You’d get used to it in time,” he pleaded desperately.
“No, it never work. So …” Angelina paused pointedly. “I just have to say no.”
“Oh,” sighed Matías. His voice hit bottom.
“But … I got an offer of my own.”
Matías looked up.
“I’m maybe not wife material, but we can still stay together. I only know you this very short while, but I like you. And I can’t
keep on like this in Manila forever. It’s a young girl’s game, you know. So here’s my offer: I ask you, please take me with you to your country.”
“Without marrying?”
“That’s right. I wanna run a place like this in your Navidad. Take no customers myself, I just manage the girls. I run a class house, invite a few girls from here who wanna tag along, hire local Navidad girls too. That way you get to see me every night, we drink and talk and sleep together just like this week. But not like a wife—I have my own work. No bother with home life, we both get something better—a secret partnership.”
Thus Navidad’s very first brothel was established and met with great success. Backed by Matías, enterprising Angelina signed a twenty-year lease on a public hall—bargained down to a nominal price—from the Navidad government. Originally built by the German admiralty, then used as Japanese officers’ housing, then occupied by the postwar American administration, it was a grand affair. She completely redecorated the place to her own taste and brought in a hotel chef and a few girls from Manila. Within a year their numbers doubled.
Angelina had a real knack for business. Overcoming all initial difficulties through good old hard work and acumen, she succeeded in teaching island males the modern market value of sex as a commodity. Granted, she catered to a privileged minority of island society, plus wealthy vacationers and VIPs from abroad, yet it wasn’t long before others followed suit with slightly less upscale establishments. But by then, of course, Matías was President of the Republic and Angelina his trusted nightly advisor. How right she’d been to choose the divan of commerce over the housewife’s overstuffed couch.
BUS REPORT 5
One hot afternoon, a housewife living near Naafa Village set out for her taro patch. Gathering taro is much easier in the cool morning hours, but first she’d gone to the river to wash some clothes and the sun was already high before she realized the taro basket was empty. Oh no, she thought, now I’ll have a thirty minutes’ trudge before I wade into the muck in the noonday heat. She was waist deep in the taro patch when something flicked past the corner of her eye. Strange, she thought, shouldn’t be anyone about. Maybe a dog? On looking up, however, she swears she saw a bus the size of a full-grown sow racing across the fields along the banked earth paths. It was painted in green and yellow stripes, very pretty.
The Navidad Incident Page 11
