It’s the morning after, and she’s brought him to her favorite fortune-teller, a creepy old widow in a shabby room above the Pagoda. The woman is telling them they’re for keeps. Her voice is raspy, quivering. “What a wonderful message the cards have for you today, Lucila. There will be no other man in your life after him.” He is her ace of wands, her flowering phallus, her other side of no tomorrow.
“Bullshit,” she says. “But better than nothing.”
Because that is what love is. Any fool can tell you this. It obliterates you completely, until there’s only room for the beloved. Everything fades to black. It’s like that wicked card the woman showed her, right after she first got off the bus in Manila, the armor-clad skeleton on horseback, the card of dying and rebirth. The woman kissed her palm: she had never seen a mound of Venus so clearly defined, had never met anyone whom the goddess of desire looked upon so enviously. Lucila, you will be astonishing, novel, and meteoric. A girl couldn’t ask for more.
6. DON’S VERSION
Don steps out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. She’s nowhere to be found. He calls her name. No answer. He grabs his clothes and bolts up the stairs to Joey’s room.
She’s lying on the bed, Joey sitting next to her.
“Is she asleep?”
Joey shakes his head.
“Coño, Joey, you couldn’t wait to do it downstairs?”
“She was going to tell everyone about me.”
“Putragis, she ripped my T-shirt.”
“Fucking blackmail.”
“It’s real Ban-Lon, puñeta.”
“What do we do now?”
“Made in fucking Hong Kong. You know how much this cost?”
“We’ll get you another one, okay? You said you knew what to do.”
“Let me think.”
“Did you get the money?”
“Nada.”
“I told you to look in the cash box. She keeps everything in the cash box.”
“I looked. There was nothing.”
“It’s not a robbery if nothing’s stolen.”
“Obviously.”
“Well, this is really fucked.”
“It is fucked, puta. You’re so fucked.”
“Maybe she’s not really dead.”
“She’s dead, bobo. She’s already starting to stink.”
Suddenly Joey’s bawling like a baby.
“Leche, Joey, not now.”
“I wanted to do the right thing. I thought I was doing the right thing. Wasn’t I doing the right thing?”
He puts his arm around Joey. “We’ll think of something.”
“I wanted to protect you.”
“Not good, Joey. I can’t be your alibi.”
“Did you like her?”
“She liked me.”
“She wanted to do it to me too.”
“No kidding.”
“That’s why I did what I did.”
“Son of a bitch. Two-timing slut. I should have known.”
“I didn’t lead her on or anything. I would never do that to you.”
“I just turn around and she’s already fucking my best friend.”
“She was no good for you.”
“Nor for you.”
“I’m glad she’s dead.” Joey picks up the knife and holds it against her groin. “Don’t look.” He slides the knife quickly. A lip of muscle opens. A thick tongue of blood oozes out.
Don staggers. He leans against the wall.
Joey runs to him and holds him in his arms. “Go away. I’ll take care of it.”
“Do something about her eyes. Her eyes are open.”
“No they’re not.”
“They’re still kind of open, for heaven’s sake.”
“Okay. Am I really your best friend?”
“What?”
“You said I was your best friend.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Hey, you know something?”
“What?”
“It’s my birthday.”
“No kidding? Wow, pare. Happy birthday.” He gives Joey a hug. “Do something.”
As soon as he’s gone, Joey notices that he’s left drops of shower water on the floor, like little beads of glass. He stares at them for a while, wondering if he could pick them up. Maybe, if he was careful enough, he could even hold them up to the light.
7. FADE TO BLACK
Don sleeps all the next day. He takes a shower, puts clean clothes on, and walks out. It must have rained nonstop. He has to inch his way along the sidewalk as passing jeepneys swell the floodwater and stir up muddy waves. Vendors along the sidewalk are pulling down plastic tarps, drenching passersby with torrents of water.
He’s in a bar down the block from his apartment. It’s happy hour. He’s sitting by the window, looking out. The place is packed and noisy, full of people who have walked in to find a dry spot.
A man sitting at another table has been staring at him, his porcine face glowing with sweat, his coffee untouched and cold. Don stares back. The man doesn’t blink, and finally speaks up.
“Hands and legs.”
“Beg pardon?”
“They found a woman’s hands and legs.” He passes Don his copy of the Manila Times.
“It’s the projects,” Don tells him. “Folks there get butchered all the time.”
“Hindot! Good thing we live in Santa Cruz.”
“It could be anyone.”
“Some people are real sloppy, puta.” The man sucks on a cigarette and blows the smoke out, exhaling loudly, with exasperation. “You really fucked up. I told you to make sure that sissy Florante would go back.”
“He was too drunk to go back.”
“You and your friend better think of a story fast.” He gets up to leave.
“Aniano,” Don says, “I’m getting out of here. I’ve had enough.”
“Not till you finish the job.”
“Joey will take care of it.”
“Joey’s going to crack the minute you leave.” Aniano stubs the cigarette out on the table with a slight hiss. “If he does, you know what to do.”
“He won’t say a thing.”
“How do you know?” He leaves.
Don waits a few minutes, then goes to the cashier to ask if he can use the phone. He calls a number. He doesn’t have much to say. “Meet me at the bar. Right now.”
He hangs up, pays the cashier ten centavos, and walks out.
He stretches his arms. The sky is still overcast. He should have brought a jacket. He walks a few blocks toward Avenida Rizal, stops to purchase a ball-peen hammer from a sidewalk vendor, who wraps it in a thick roll of newspaper. Don continues walking down the avenue, then makes a sharp turn into an alley, pulls a key out of his pocket, and lets himself inside a building through the back door.
He’s inside Lucila’s House of Beauty. He bolts up the stairs to Joey’s room. There’s no one there either. He looks out the window into the street below. A vendor is passing by, balancing a bamboo pole with two baskets of duck eggs steaming on each end. As soon as the vendor is out of sight, Don drops the hammer onto the ledge. Then he walks out, heading back in the direction of the bar.
A block away he can already see Joey under the lamppost outside the bar. Joey’s face is crunched, his hands shoved in his pocket. He looks like he’s in tears. But when he sees Don his eyes suddenly beam. Maybe it’s the light from the lamppost, a cataract of amber streaming down his face.
NORMA FROM NORMAN
BY
JONAS VITMAN
Chinatown
She doesn’t have to travel very far to see her fortune-teller. This is the chief advantage of living in the Chinese section of Manila known as Binondo. From her apartment on Espeleta, it’s three quick blocks then up two flights of creaky wood stairs. On the third-floor landing, to announce her presence, she will call up to the woman who could be anywhere from forty to eighty and who, using the Fukienese word for grandmother, goes by the name Ah-ma.<
br />
Ah-ma is the trade secret of the girls in Charmaine’s group.
Charmaine doesn’t know why the Chinese make the best fortune-tellers. She has tried everyone else. There are the Catholic matrons, who are of two types: well-preserved socialites fallen on hard times; and the provincial transplants with their reedy bodies and brown-brown faces who consult in the front rooms of the overpopulated shacks they call home. A deck of playing cards is common to this type. There are also the baklas or homos she meets at the clubs—dabblers in trades from cosmetology to cosmology, whose instrument is the tarot. There are of course palm readers, tea readers, face readers, witch doctors who specialize in potions, spells, and counterspells, and two Americans who do extensive readings based on your horoscope—though Charmaine had inevitably run into the dilemma of not having the exact time of her birth, a very important detail to these specialists.
Ah-ma is the only Chinese fortune-teller Charmaine has ever been to, but according to the girls in Charmaine’s group, she is typical of the Chinese fortune-tellers in Manila, and by typical, it is understood that she is superior to all other non-Chinese practitioners.
Of course, these Chinese fortune-tellers are Buddhists and they conduct sessions in the halls and storefronts of their faith, places accoutred with wood and ceramic statues, depicting a celestial range from martial saints of protection with their slightly demonic faces and clutched weaponry to the hermaphroditic and peaceful face of Kwan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Ah-ma’s place of business, which is a floor below where she lives with her only remaining relative, a grandson of eight, has plenty of these statues, and needless to say, Charmaine’s favorites are the various Kwan Yins, resting on the floor, by a couple of windowsills, and among the pantheon arrayed in a tiered central altar that also includes the commemorative black-and-whites in gold frames of the deceased relations of Ah-ma’s various disciples and clients—a funerary memorial.
Charmaine also loves the smell of incense perpetually suffusing the air in Ah-ma’s establishment. There is no Catholic equivalent in the churches she used to attend as a young believer—the burning candles had no fragrance to speak of, the incense was acrid like metal smoke, and the holy water no more than regular water that the priest was supposed to have transformed by passing his hand over it.
On the ground floor of Ah-ma’s building is a hardware store called Happy Fortune Supply, and this too has convinced Charmaine of Ah-ma’s superiority to all other seers, to Ah-ma’s aptness in Charmaine’s life.
The tubby eight-year-old grandson runs around the large altar as Charmaine and Ah-ma are consulting. He is like a miniature Buddha. Fatness must run in the family: his grandmother is also a large person, and among the reasons Charmaine has difficulty discerning the woman’s age is because the fat around her neck and on her face has stretched smooth any wrinkles, and because, encased in loose clothes, her body is voluminously formless.
Ah-ma goes into a trance, her eyes rolling back until they are merely whitish, quivering splotches on her face. This has always creeped Charmaine out, so she looks at the ground or at her own hands or at the table that sits between the two of them. Also, there is a low hum, a ululation that signals Ah-ma’s possession by a spirit or spirits. For now, the grandson is a suitable alternative to Ah-ma’s altered visage. He is playing peek-a-boo with Charmaine. She smiles at him. She wonders if he can tell what she is. She wonders, too, but less so, about Ah-ma; again, the fat peacefulness of that face makes any kind of emotion or judgment impossible to read.
Ah-ma makes a subtle transition back to her old self. She opens her eyes and smiles at Charmaine. Because her Tagalog is broken, Charmaine has to sometimes ask the woman to repeat what she’s just said.
Before Ah-ma invoked the Buddhist spirit or spirits, she’d asked Charmaine to come up with a question. This is the question for which Ah-ma intercedes on Charmaine’s behalf, conversing with the other world: Will everything go all right over the next week?
And the other world, through Ah-ma, has answered in the affirmative.
Charmaine hands over a one-hundred-peso bill. This is not payment. That’s what Ah-ma says to all who come to her. By giving money, they are merely helping keep Ah-ma’s temple clean, making sure there is always incense for the funerary pictures and gods of the altar, as well as offerings of siopao buns and hopia cakes, since hunger is the most marked characteristic of the dead and of the immortal.
Where is the grandson? Peek-a-boo! Out he comes from behind the skirt that wraps around the base of the altar, making the golden embroidered phoenixes and Chinese lettering on the cloth dance. Before Charmaine leaves, she fishes in her handbag for two sour ball candies. She hands them over to the fat grandson, the plastic wrappers making a noise.
Yes. Everything will go all right this week. But Charmaine, walking home, is not assured. Why should she disbelieve Ah-ma now?
Fear makes her hungry.
Wah Sun is a little out of the way but this is what she comes for: the menagerie of animals in aquariums and terrariums screening the kitchen from the rest of the establishment. An albino python that might as well be stuffed except for its resplendent fatness and its seemingly oiled skin. A baby crocodile, or maybe it’s an alligator—and what is the difference between one and the other anyway? A large bayawak with carbuncled skin and a crested, thorny spine, blinking its disdainful eyes at the customers. And her favorite: a giant, very flat fish with seen-it-all eyes that reminds her of an aquatic basset hound. It’s grayishblack, about the size of two large pancakes, and makes the most minimal motions with its dorsal fins to stay put in a private spot in the green water.
You’d think it’d be the young waiters she’s bonded with on her frequent visits, but instead it’s the oldest employee, a short, bald man who looks like a human relative of the fish. It’s he who’d told her that the fish is an oscar, commonly found in Africa, though this one was caught in the Pacific, having strayed far from home. They’re aquarium fish, but this one had spent years in another Ongpin restaurant where diners chose their food from display tanks. But no customer could stomach the fish’s ugliness, and so the years passed and the fish got bigger and even less appetizing, until somehow it had ended up here in Wah Sun, one freak next to various others.
Here comes her duck-egg porridge decorated with scallions and burnt flakes of garlic on top. Now she is really famished. Outside it has begun to drizzle, and the quiet streets of seven p.m. Binondo will be ghostly by the time she is ready to go home.
You do not tell the men who you are.
You ask for the lights to be turned low or all the way down. And though you’d think this would be a giveaway, it also signals a becoming modesty. It can be used as a turn-on.
You insist that the men come to your place. This way, it’s easier to control what she calls the “performance.” That she lives in an out-of-the-way, mysterious place like Binondo can be both good and bad. Good: anonymity. Bad: the clients’ suspicions of criminality that anonymity breeds.
Your outcall visits must only be to hotels, and in these hotels you must have a personal relationship with one of the staff, preferably a concierge, but you’ll settle for a bellboy or a maid. You give these contacts a 20 percent tip for their troubles, which usually runs to four hundred pesos. Never, ever go to someone’s home. The casualties: Nene from Tacloban; Aurora; Saltie. They had been made to forgo their usual precautions by either the promise of larger-than-normal fees or enticing photos of the men sent over e-mail. They’d been lured to apartments in various parts of Manila and had ended up dumped unceremoniously near estuaries of the Pasig, by the slums. Saltie’s body had been not-so-cleanly severed along the waist. Her top half was found in Tondo and her bottom, from which her “thing” had been cut off, dug out of a dump by the squatter areas of Balut.
The best bet is to have the men passed on by your circle. These men having been vetted, the sex is more relaxed. Though you’d have to wonder, if these men are so great, why would they be passed al
ong by the other girls? But sometimes the answer is very simple: these men want variety. Variety upon variety. They want as many girls as they can get.
To them, to everyone, you are a girl, as normal as any girl. To preserve your virginity you will only take it from behind. That way, too, the men don’t have to wear condoms. There is no threat of pregnancy taking it from behind. And what man doesn’t prefer to go condomless? Never mind AIDS or HIV. Safety among the girls of her circle is a wish and a prayer: at night you may court danger, but in the day you don’t think about it.
This is another story about why she will only take it from behind: she is the pet mistress of someone high up in the Philippine government. This jealous man employs a private gynecologist whose job it is to inspect his stable: the women are to remain pure for him and only him. And after they have been deflowered, they are no longer of any interest to him. This man is a virgin fetishist, a blood fetishist. Far-fetched and long-winded for a cover story, she knows, but in fact a true story: there is such a man high up in the government and his cravenness is legendary. Rumors are that he will soon run for president.
Her jawline is soft and more than convincing, and that was true even before hormones. Every night she has to oil and massage her breasts, because even though they look terrific, they can feel hard to the touch and sometimes, when the weather gets cold, they tend to get stuck. Lesson: never buy anything Filipino. Always go abroad. Maybe her new breasts will be from Scandinavia. But Scandinavian tits—Denmark is best—have a price tag to match their quality. Though in that part of the world, the moralities are not so hypocritical.
Her nipples are sensitive, even more with her breasts. Why should this be a surprise to her? But even before she can think of new tits to replace her old-school silicone models, she has to take care of things down there. Finally. After eight years. After a series of psychiatric interviews to determine her “stability of mind,” her “100 percent certainty.” She is finally taking care of things down there. In three days, she is flying to Bangkok—a middle ground between quality and price, not the best but better than anything available in Manila, and certainly more affordable than Europe; with a lenient psychiatric screening process that is widely considered no more than a formality—a joke, really. Nobody “interviewed” will ever be denied; at least nobody who is paying for Dr. Srichapan’s services. Alicia had gone to Dr. Srichapan. Now, Alicia doesn’t have to ask for the lights to be turned down. She can wear a bikini without much work. And according to her—the number one question from the girls—she has a range of feeling down there. She can let the men fuck both without condoms and without risk of pregnancy. The only gray area is whether to reveal her story to the men. Pro: full-op tranny fetishists are not uncommon, and they can be made to pay much, much more than those who are only paying for girls. Con: why bother going through all that work of transformation only to undo it by one slip of the tongue?
Manila Noir Page 17
