Chapter 1 - Sweet Haven

IN THE video, the girls lie supine on the same narrow bed. They appear to have been filmed unawares, through an aperture in the ceiling: we are looking through a blurred circular frame, a light fixture perhaps. We who watch them do not know exactly, and in those opening moments of anticipation and dread, we don’t really care.

Though the footage was probably taken months apart, the girls seem to lie twisting on the same filthy sheet—helpless, served up for our gaze, on the same hot afternoon. Three girls. Through the magic of computer editing, the camera proceeds from one naked woman to the next without explanation, as though an infinite number of succulent females waits just beyond the round black frame. From time to time the camera startles us by wandering over a body, venturing so close that identification is irrelevant.

It is hard to tell whether the same man services all three—how can one be certain from the mere look of a nape or the muscles of a young back?

Sweat slicks their chests and glistens off their foreheads. Their features twist as though in alarm, as though in the final stages of strangulation. On the grainy screen, their complexions are the flat, bruised gray of death.

All the crucial details—of face and breast and dark, split sex—are visible, and that is what counts.

NARITA was the first of the Pastors to see them. She knew instinctively where to look, slipping out of the office an hour before usual and catching a ride to the Quiapo quarter of Manila, where a web of vendors’ stalls sprawled about the Church of the Black Nazarene.

It was March, the month of spontaneous fire, when timbers and thatch flared up from tossed cigarettes and small children died screaming, forgotten by families as they fled. The trees were shedding their leaves, their branches stark against the blazing sky. The heat pulsed, out of asphalt and sidewalks, from tons of concrete and sheet glass, from roof tiles and hollow-block garden walls, from fetid mattresses, from pounding scalps.

Earlier that afternoon there’d been a freak shower that turned the streets into ankle-deep sewers. On the wet road, a passenger jeepney rammed the taillights of the car in front of it, and both drivers stomped out into the road to argue and wave iron bars at each other, slowing traffic for a kilometer on either side.

Jammed into a Tamaraw FX with nine other passengers, Narita waited. She was a sharp-eyed, nervous woman, dieted down to a passable thinness, in a black T-shirt and jeans. She had happened to sit behind the driver, where she could see nothing of the road up ahead. She had no idea how long the traffic jam was, if there was any movement at all in the gridlock in front of them. The air outside the vehicle was thick with fumes, as foul as the interior air she breathed. She had rolled down her window an inch, and needles of rain speckled the brown skin of her arm. Pulp of a more ominous shade slicked the asphalt: mud and rags and human excrement and scraps from the cardboard boxes beggars slept on, all pressed into an indeterminate muck under thousands of grinding wheels.

The others in the car dozed, sent text messages, stared resignedly into space. Try as she might, Narita could not shut out the collective odor of their skin and clothes. They were all glued together by perspiration and a full hour’s inertia. The road was a giant alimentary canal. The commuters advanced, boluses of humanity, in pulses, a car length at a time.

Desperate for movement, she unlocked the door and eased herself into the steaming air. The FX had gotten as far as the Church of the Black Nazarene. The streets around the building teemed with frenzied transactions.

She slipped past stalls selling roots and drying greens: abortifacients, cures for impotence. Vendors crouched beside displays of movie star magazines, chrysanthemums for the dead, brass fertility amulets, mobile phone cases, cigarette lighters with naked women on them, lucky red seeds to adorn the wrists of newborn babies, playing cards, timepieces being fenced, prawn chips, fish curls. Wads of new spit glistened on the asphalt, like medals.

She came to a street that sold only pirated videos and CDs. They lay upon sheets of woven plastic, fanned out atop low display tables of wood. A riot of color and possibility. The traffic cops just one block away seemed impervious to them.

At random, she chose a hawker.

“Sweethaven Girls?”

The vendor shook her head once, not looking up, and continued to bag a purchase.

Narita repeated the question to the woman’s neighbor.

This man had a narrow display case of wood, like a card table, open to reveal a row of animated films. A clear file held sample liners for what must have been a hundred other movies. You pointed to the title you wanted, and he’d disappear for a few minutes, to some secret stall or the back of a van, to fetch the disc and an empty case and a liner. A neat, portable operation—police-proof.

The vendor examined Narita, her stylish close-cropped hair, the logo on her studiedly casual T-shirt, the way she clutched her genuine-leather purse close to her body to deter snatchers. He did not blink. He looked about forty, a few years older than she, with flat black eyes and a goatee like armpit hair.

“I don’t sell movies like that,” he said in disdain. “Try those people over there.” He pointed with his lips. “They do the dirty stuff. If you’re lucky, there’ll be one or two copies left.”

But the men who minded identical stalls a few meters down the stretch were of no help. The video she sought was sold out, they said, old news.

“We have the State University Girls,” one of them volunteered, calling after her as she resumed her quest among the other stalls. “The Loyola U Girls. The Southern Nursing College Girls. Hey, miss! Miss-ss-ss!”

At last a young woman reached without fuss beneath her foldup table of plywood and drew out a DVD in its case. She was eighteen, maybe, her skin egg-smooth and fair.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she smirked. “The actresses are ugly. You can actually hear them talking in the background. In Binisaya at that.”

The cover confronted Narita. Title in electric pink script: Sweetheaven Girls. It ought to have been “Sweethaven.” She frowned at the misspelling. The rest of the cover was a blinding montage of close-ups—pink flesh, gray flesh, hairy zoological shapes.

From among these disembodied body parts a teenager stared. Narita’s heart leapt, her blood ran cold. She thrust the DVD back at the vendor, wishing she had not seen that face, that thin, pale face with the full lips and dark eyes serenely raised above the flat chest spanned by a white sports bra. How divorced that face had seemed from the lower half of the body, the naked half, the thighs parted to expose the neat shaven cleft of its sex.

“Are you buying it or not?” the vendor said.

Narita paid. The video cost as much as a fast-food hamburger and Coke. She held her palm out numbly for the change. Her hand remained outstretched long moments after her fingers had closed over the coins. Then in embarrassment she shoved money and purchase deep down into her purse and stumbled off. The traffic was moving at last, she noted. Slowly, but moving. She would have to hurry, take the first available ride home—whether jeepney or Tamaraw FX; it did not matter—before another collision brought everything to a standstill. She struggled through the seethe of bodies, keeping her head down against the drizzle. Directly before her was the Church of the Black Nazarene—squat masonry, strings of Tivoli lights over its square towers, saints in grimy cement. But in the weird light of the rainy afternoon she saw it as a remnant of Spain, a fragment of Europe, and caught a fleeting glimpse of romance and escape. She bought a circlet of jasmine flowers from a ragged little child and held it to her face, taking deep, desperate breaths.

THAT very night she dreamt about her daughter.

She had not dreamt about Naia in a very long time, though in the very first months after she had been forced to leave, the girl had come to her every night as she slept.

It was a curious dream. In it, Naia was little again, and they were saying good-bye.

Words poured around them, not Tagalog, but Binisaya, the speech of Donostia, the speech of Narita’s own childhood. The child clung to her, hair slipping out of the twin knots into which Tita Antonia had twisted it, and it was damp and faintly greasy, as though Naia had emerged from a fever or been splashing in and out of the waves. The lone runway stretched all the way to the sea. The passengers were boarding. Narita put the child down. The aircraft waited on the tarmac, the queue of passengers stalled momentarily, shielding their faces from the sun. At the metal staircase, Narita turned. Don’t, she wept to her dream self. But her arm came up to wave randomly at the line of people pressed up against the chicken wire fence, people who had come many kilometers by decrepit bus to send off loved ones and witness the miracle of aviation—old men, drawn and leathery; their sad, ample-hipped wives; peasants; urchins. A score of brown hands were already in the air, waving farewell.

She could see her family: her father, Daniel, and her mother, Luth; her sister, Antonia, who held the baby up high in her arms. A tense knot against the terminal wall. Narita’s lips moved, and it seemed a sound escaped from them and almost rescued her from the inevitability of the dream. The child’s small white palm came up in the air, in a gesture that mimicked hers. Then, looking down, she found herself strapped into a seat by a window, and she found a book in her hand, a red book, a hymnal from the Sweethaven church.

The aircraft taxied to the extreme end of the runway, its nose pointing to the sea. With a start, she saw that the child had followed her, Naia’s face blank with misery, a ghost child stumbling across the sun-flooded tarmac, moving too fast for belief, fifty feet away, twenty feet, beneath the silver wing now; in a moment she would glide through the carpeting at Narita’s feet. In a great howl of engines, the plane flung itself forth, past ditches of succulent taro, tethered goats, a water buffalo, a tricycle loaded with palm fronds. A single, overwhelming moment of weightlessness, then the press of the entirety of sky.

Narita leaned into the window, toward the tilting horizon—corrugated blue of ocean, spindly outrigger craft of fishermen, the blazing zinc rooftops of the city, rapidly diminishing as the plane climbed. The enclave of Sweethaven University was indistinguishable from the rest of the city of Donostia—church vanished, elementary school any one out of a thousand specks, everything reduced to the same insignificance at this height.

She was gone, she was free.

And then, as half-dreams went, this one took a strange turn at the moment of exultation: the stewardess, emerging with a trolley of delights, began to travel in slow motion backward; the aircraft lifted, and Narita found herself looking up at her thighs; light poured through her skin; they fell silently toward the vast sea.

When the plane disintegrated she jerked awake, raised her head from the depths of the damp pillow. It was six in the morning and very hot and bright. She was alone in the flat, as always. A garbage truck churned and puffed in the street below.

She sat up and found herself, irrevocably, alive. Her clothes lay where she had shed them. The bottle of rum stood open on the kitchen counter. A spill of orange juice had drawn the ants. The empty video case was still there, where she had left it last night, by the computer in her living room. The shaven, stripped, serene-faced child was still there.

Nothing had changed. A breeze stirred the curtains. A vendor made his rounds in the street below, announcing his wares with a peculiar hooting cry. He was selling tofu bathed in syrup, his voice already fading as he strode rapidly away, covering as many blocks as he could before the early heat drove him to rest beneath one of the dusty mango trees.

In the bathroom, there were a few curds of vomit on the tiles, where in a blind panic, escaping the lurching images on her computer screen, she had missed the bowl.

She made herself look at the video cover. Not “Sweetheaven.” Sweethaven. A real place, a place of learning, and for her first twenty years, the only way of life she’d known.