Chapter 19 - Sweet Haven

SIESTA hour. The house is still. The world is still, an airless summer day, the leaves on the fruit trees shriveled. The household lies exhausted. I am the only one up and about. In your aunt’s room, I lay my laptop on the desk and let it boot up. I take the video of you that I bought in Quiapo, contemplating the cover for a few moments. Why is it I feel nothing at the sight of your face? Then I slip it into the machine.

There are no credits, no cheesy shout-outs. The video opens with a young woman lying on a bed. I do not know her name. I suppose I might ask my mother, or Joel even, but cannot imagine myself doing so. Is it a bad thing, to participate in a woman’s humiliation and not care to know her name? It is a round, pleasant face, certainly pretty, but not beautiful. Her naked breasts are round as well, larger than mine—when will a woman ever escape these kinds of comparisons? She lies there alone, her arms behind her head. The camera is on her face. She looks down, at someone out of the frame, at her lover, at her lover’s hand as he strokes her. She wears an expression of bliss and expectation.

Do you know this girl? Have you seen the footage, too? It was wrong for the men who did this to leave that moment in. There is a tenderness to her gaze that no professional can have evoked. For me, the theft of this moment is the true pornography. It is the moment at which the camera’s eye and our eyes begin the rape.

Or perhaps you are like everyone else I know who has seen this video. She disgusts you because she is not beautiful enough, and you do not care to see, or know about, the sexuality of someone as dark as she, as native and as provincial and as unexceptional as she. Look, there is a constellation of moles over one breast, and there are patches of dark skin between her thighs—or would you rather not look: accustomed as you probably are by now to the red-carpet perfection of celebrities, you must be repelled by these marks of her individuality.

She speaks, murmurs something in her language. In the background a radio plays on. A man’s head rises from the bottom of the screen. It is impossible to see what he is doing, though the girl’s response is clear. She arches her back so her breasts point at the camera, and a series of small cries comes from her throat. Perhaps this is too tame. The Internet voices I have found all refer to this video in derisive terms. Boring as hell, someone has written. Third-rate production values and fourth-rate actresses, another remarks.

Then the girl is gone from the screen, like an aperitif whisked away after a single taste. I suppose that would be one interesting way of putting it. My professional vocabulary, my storehouse of imagery, has revolved for the last months or so around the act of eating. At the newspaper, one of my assignments is to attend the various food festivals and restaurant inaugurations around Manila. It is my job to shield my boss, a tempestuous linen-wearing older gentleman, from any harm food might do to the waistline. I read nothing nowadays except press releases and the occasional erotic tale downloaded by a coworker. Hence the inadequacy of my words—“a series of small cries” indeed.

But here is another girl, in a tailored blouse that must be part of a uniform. Of what? Donostia has a culture of uniforms, as you know, and it is mostly the powerless who wear them: this new girl might be a pharmacy assistant or a student teacher or a room girl at one of the better hotels. She is not beautiful, either. No one shot in natural light, through an aperture in the ceiling, clothing dragged off her piece by piece, can look beautiful. Beauty is in the stillness and the careful oblique gaze, the explosion of white studio light that blanks out pimple, pore, and the offending curve of nostril. This is a face for that bygone anthropology project of your aunt’s—a plain Malay face with flat cheekbones and lips that protrude. The girl spreads her legs; the man she is with—he is little more than the back of a head, a pair of hands—has eased her panties off. Such an unruly ruff of pubic hair, momentarily captured in the exact center of the frame—no stylish Mohawks for this woman, who bares herself, and then touches herself, for her lover alone.

This is not the first time I have seen this footage. Like a doctor experimenting on his own system, I merely want to see how far I could go. I am aware, scientist-like, of my response: that I am calm, breathing normally, that I feel neither disgust nor anxiety, only a dull desire to experience the next twenty-four minutes through to the end.

But now you appear, you emerge from what seems to be the bath of a cheap hotel room. For a moment it is possible to deny the identity of this uniformed schoolgirl whom I see, blurry as she is, standing just beyond the bed as she strikes a pose, smiling, her arms at her side, fingers linked below her belly. But the image sharpens. And it is indubitably you. And it is alarmingly clear that rules can be broken and new rules made to supplant them. Because the camera has descended from its cage in the ceiling. The camera is in someone’s hands. You welcome its presence, you smile and pose for its eye. It is mobile, intelligent. There is nothing it won’t disclose.

But I am a coward, because I can’t bear this, I am cold to my fingertips, shaking; this is the way I feel every time. I deny this is you. My mind leaves me, my thoughts spiral up into the summer sky. I leap up and begin to pace, wearing a track in the dusty floor with my bare feet. Why do I think of the lawyer at this moment? Why do I evoke his huge sad eyes, the trailing sweetness of his cologne? I keep the movie running but ignore the screen. When I return, they have finished with you, for the moment, because it is the first girl once more, the one with the speckled round breasts. I hoped that at least she might be spared, for she seemed so pitiful in her sexual confidence. These men, whoever they are, know the format all right—slow, then fast, then very fast. It pains me, it grieves me, it angers me, it makes me want to lash out with my fists. There is her cunt, in the lower edge of the frame, stretched and compressed with the movement of a disembodied hand. The sounds from her throat are real. The camera zooms in.

IT TOOK hours of agony to arrive at the decision, but by dawn, the answer was clear. She would not allow Naia to go public. She was, after all, the mother; her word still carried weight. She would tell Joel so at once.

In relief, she slept, unwittingly. When she awakened, it was noon. As she lay in bed cursing her sloth, she understood that something else was at play. That this was part of her strategy to see the man again. From the phone call onward, they might negotiate.

As she dialed his mobile she wondered if she had gone crazy. She pictured him saying, “All right, as you wish,” and hanging up, caught unprepared in the midst of a hearing that had absolutely nothing to do with her life, impatient to be rid of her, thinking only of his next appearance fee.

He answered on the second ring. Was he on the road, at work already, at the breakfast table half undressed? Her announcement about Naia was met with a long, uncomfortable silence. When he spoke again, he sounded deferential, very much the shabby boy at the back of the classroom, but she caught a note of amusement, as though he were humoring her, as though he had seen past her ploy at once.

“Of course it’s vital that we have a meeting of minds,” he said. “But, Narita, I’m engaged all of today. I simply can’t see you.” She caught the whine of a tricycle taxi in the background. So he was out in the field. “Tomorrow? What say we discuss your issues tomorrow, over lunch?”

He would try to get away from his morning affairs as soon as he could, he added. Oh yes, oh yes, she said magnanimously, wondered whether he, too, craved excitement and adventure to fill his days, or whether the mayor had ordered him to drop all commitments except those relevant to the three young women who now linked their lives.

The day dragged by. Lightheaded despite her long sleep, she thought about her boss, what he had demanded. Write about the girls, he had said. She could not. She wandered about the garden, played with the dogs for an hour. She opened drawers in Antonia’s room and shook out the clothes left behind. Procrastination was one of her talents, as was nonchalance under pressure. She wondered what Joel was doing that was so important—perhaps it had something to do with the tip she had given him. Tomorrow she would find out. Everything would turn out fine tomorrow.

In the morning, Joel called her mobile. Would it be alright if they met on the city hall steps? he said. He apologized for the rudeness of asking her to come and meet him halfway on such a hot summer day, but she laughed off the sun, told him she didn’t care whether she turned dark or not, and said she would be happy to spare him that extra half hour’s drive to her place and back. When he had hung up she told herself that their behavior—his self-effacing mien, despite his rank in the city; her gregarious and immediate assent—was modern and professional and aboveboard; it did not compromise them in any sense.

Joel was wearing a loose-weave barong tagalog this time. It was standard provincial lawyer’s getup. He seemed exhausted, though he brightened as soon as he saw her. His eyes dropped quickly from her face to the low V of her jersey top. This little evidence of his vulnerability assured her.

“Please don’t ask me to suggest a place,” she said convivially. “I’ve been in town less than a week.”

“Chicken or seafood?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t care,” she said, resisting the urge to chew on a fingernail. “Anything as long as it’s quiet. I hate music. Is there any place in this country where you can have a meal without music? And why does it have to be dance music all the time? We spend all our waking hours in one great big fucking nightclub. Or in one great big R&B-slash-pop … orgasm.”

He looked so serious as he maneuvered the jeep out of the parking lot that she thought she had offended him. Maybe he stocked his CD rack with Beyoncé and nothing else. Or was it her manner? How was she supposed to speak? And in what language? She lapsed into a rapid, Cosmo girl English when she was nervous. It was a turnoff. Men ran.

“Is the beach okay for you?” he said.

What did he mean by that? she thought. Good girls didn’t ride down to the beach with men they barely knew. That was an old maxim of Luth’s generation.

“The beach is fine,” she replied.

They left the city, driving through a landscape of coconut trees and scrub, and he was silent for such a long time, it seemed, that her Manila instincts began to kick in and her nerves began to fray. There was no lunch, no restaurant. He was in league with the men who had violated Naia. Their destination would be a bunkhouse deep in a coconut plantation, where a steel bed and plastic ties awaited. This was the last day of her life. It was a beautiful day, blue range of mountains rearing up on one side, cloudless summer sky. The only vehicles they met were the long yellow buses, packed to the rooftop with baskets of produce, that menaced them in clouds of stinging dust.

Just as she was contemplating a decisive leap onto the asphalt, the jeep slowed and her driver made a sharp turn off the road, into what at first seemed to be a gravel driveway. But there was no house in sight, and they went on, over a rutted track so narrow that branches scraped their windshield. “Sorry,” he said more than once. Then the path came to an end and she found herself staring at clipped Bermuda grass and a border of flowering plants. Beyond, a collection of deliberately rustic bamboo-walled bungalows, with hot water, no doubt, and a minibar in each. Some people might refer to this place as a resort, others as a motel. Now she understood why he drove the derelict jeep. A more elegant vehicle would have been wasted on Donostia, which, beyond the provincial exterior, seemed to keep a few lively secrets.

There was a splash, some distinctly Germanic roaring, a series of high-pitched screams. Two ladies, and at least two white men, she thought. She clambered down from the jeep self-consciously, feeling superior and shamefaced at the same time. The pool was small and kidney-shaped, and the bikini-clad girls frolicked in the water, holding out their arms, coaxing their elderly escorts to jump in again.

The restaurant was in the pavilion by the pool. They seated themselves at one of the polished wooden tables. The Bermuda grass went all the way to the beach, where a chicken-wire fence secured the property from outsiders. The usual band of scruffy children drifted past, casting disinterested glances at the world in which she sat. A breeze ruffled the fronds of the golden coconut palms. It was all very manicured and pleasant. She had had no idea places like these already existed here. A waiter came with a menu. The food was not expensive by Manila standards, but most of the clientele would have to be foreign to afford these rates. She chose from the pasta menu, playing it safe, not sure if she should insist on splitting the bill at the close of the meal.

“What do you think?” Joel said. “Is it a nice place?”

“You don’t own it, do you?” she said nervously, trying to flatter him—the instincts of the good lifestyle journalist, nosing around for freebies.

He shook his head. “No connection at all. But here they don’t play dance music.”

Embarrassed, she thought she might as well get to the point. “Why have you taken such an interest in Naia?”

He blinked. “I’m doing my job. I feel sorry for her, yes. But I assure you I have no ulterior motives. I’ve been seeing a lot of your parents. They may have told you. But that’s because they have opened up to me. They are educated people. They’re not angry, they’re not unreasonable.”

“Unlike …?”

“Unlike the families of … of the other two.”

Narita shuddered, suppressed the memory of the video. No, she would not go there. Not yet. There was silence. She chewed on a handful of peanuts from the tray in front of them.

“Zenon didn’t tell you,” she said at last.

“Tell me what?”

“That I’d gotten pregnant.”

Was that surprise, sudden fear in his eyes? Well, hadn’t he known about the pregnancy, then? She’d assumed the entirety of Sweethaven had eventually found out. Well, if not, surely he could count back from Naia’s age, surely he had been smart enough to draw the appropriate conclusions.

“Well, I figured it was him, on my own,” Joel said at last. “Who else could it have been?”

Thanks, she wanted to say.

“How well did you know him?” she asked.

“Not very well. We hung out, like regular guys. That was all. Believe me, you had a powerful impact on our lives. On Zenon’s life in particular. The moment he set eyes on you, the first day of school, it was all over with him. I guarantee you, he spent weeks agonizing with us over what to say to you before he managed to make his move.”

He was looking past her shoulder now, as if hoping that her daughter might peer palely from a window of one of the bungalows. He seemed to have a hard time meeting her eyes. She had thought he might be interested in her, sexually; that early face-to-breast once-over had told her that, and she had thought she might build on it, gain leverage. Now she wasn’t so certain.

“I wouldn’t have known she was his,” he said, shifting his weight as though in discomfort; he would be the kind of man for whom talk of a child’s paternity, any child, would be grossly impolite. “She doesn’t at all look like him. She resembles you, through and through.”

Was this flattery? She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. If only the circumstances of this meeting had been different.

“I pity her,” he said. He did not sound condescending in the least. “I want justice for her, that’s all. I’m not here to clean up after Zenon. It’s not up to me to make right the … things that he put you through.”

Things? she thought. Which things? It had been so long ago, and she had harbored her private Zenon for so long that she could no longer quite distinguish between fantasy and what had really taken place. What had Zenon told this man? It occurred to her that the woman he thought he was speaking to was far different from who she was.

“I haven’t kept in touch with him,” Joel said. “I guess we had very little in common. But I thought about you a lot. I hoped you were okay.”

The meal was over. They lingered, left the table to walk on the grass, sought the shade of a young guava tree. Joel asked her if she would like a glass of wine. She couldn’t remember anymore whether that was appropriate to have after lunch. What did it matter, she thought. Who was there to correct her, point out the embarrassing residue of provincialism? The Europeans goofing around in the pool were too enamored of their brown girlfriends to notice, too working class to know the difference, too old to care. The wine made her skin burn; it was the wrong thing to drink on such a hot day. They took the last few steps to the seashore and sat at a weathered bamboo table beneath a thatch parasol. The sea breeze, though sticky with salt, brought relief. There was a jetty a hundred meters down from where they sat. It was a private one, Joel said; the owner of the place, a German, he had heard, used it a few months a year for his own boat. It was not a pretty beach, she thought. The sand was volcanic—brown, not black—and rimmed with decaying seaweed, coconut fronds, whatever flotsam the tide had tossed up. Beyond the brown waves, the water was a deep and forbidding blue. Antonia would have rejoiced in this ugliness, she thought. She would have gone to work at her sketch pad at once, laboring over the details until she owned the whole scene and could tuck it away, defused, into her black Rotring carrying case. Narita wished she could encapsulate the past in the same way. She wished she could shake this compulsion of hers to evoke what had been, redrawing it, rewriting new versions of it. The truth was, Antonia had cast off their brilliant Sweethaven childhood as though it were a shabby and outgrown skin, had reinvented herself as a sweet-tempered brown-skinned Internet bride.

In the sky beyond Joel’s head, metal flashed. A little Cessna was taking off from an invisible point within the fringe of coconut palms.

“I don’t believe it,” she heard herself say.

“What don’t you believe?”

“That there’s so much money in this world. Look at that plane. A flying school in the middle of nowhere. And this hotel, and a man who owns a boat that he uses only a few months out of the year.”

The Cessna, so like a little boy’s plaything, turned inland—a vanishing strip of metal in the sky. Joel smiled sadly and shook his head.

“Who’s making all that money?” she pressed. “How is it being made? Why didn’t any of it ever trickle down to me? I work so hard; I always have. Six days a week at the newspaper, closing pages, chasing after stories, talking to socialites about their wretched hobbies. Every day. Even today I’m working. I’m supposed to make a feature out of this video scandal, you know that? In payment for my weeklong break.”

He was looking searchingly at her.

“They expect you to write about your own kin?”

“They don’t know she’s mine.”

This astonished him, she could tell. It took him a while to speak again.

“I’m sorry for that. Certain things are beyond our control.” He sipped the last of his wine. “There’s plenty of money going around. The hacienderos, the grand old plantation owners, they no longer rule as such. There are the Chinese. As ever. But the European investors have come in, and our countrymen haven’t done too badly for themselves in America. I know one of the men who run that flying school. I helped him with one of his deals.”

She wished she hadn’t brought up the subject of wealth, of work, of compromises. Her family—rootless, anonymous until the moment each parent had gravitated to Sweethaven—embarrassed her. He could trace his roots to some bearded horse-riding, whip-cracking Castilian pioneer, whereas the university was now no more than a glorified institute to train nurses: hundreds of young men and women whose futures hinged on a labor shortfall abroad.

“Narita, what I really want from you right now is your trust.”

She jumped. It seemed he had an agenda as lengthy and involved as hers.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Are you comfortable with me?” He frowned. “We get along, don’t we?”

She shrugged.

“Then come with me. I am taking you to a place. Whatever you find there, whatever you feel, must remain a secret between us. Just don’t leave for Manila without giving this a chance.”