Chapter 4 - Sweet Haven

MORE and more, Narita found herself catatonic, arrested in the middle of getting dressed, of sipping a cup of coffee, by the tremendous press of her thoughts. Today it was the e-mail that did it, the one from Antonia, short and taut, as all her younger sister’s correspondence had become in the last year or so: “This is your shit.”

There was a time, when they were small, when it was she, Narita, who meted out the tough talk, when it was she who made the rules. Antonia had been so easy to control. Any insubordination from the younger girl would be immediately dealt with by means of a pinch. The times Antonia fought back were rare, but she was vicious and determined enough, and on several occasions Narita had been constrained to grab both her younger sister’s wrists and twist as hard as she could, staring her down with powerful dark eyes. Her father or mother whipped her often enough for bullying, but there had been times when Antonia did not tell. Times when Narita was sure the pain was unendurable, when tears sprang up beneath Antonia’s lashes, when her wrists swelled and turned red afterward. But the younger girl always kept the worst fights secret from their parents. Through those private moments of torture, the sisters bound themselves in a tacit pact.

Now, hugging herself, nose pressed to a bedroom window pane, Narita tried to summon up the spirit of her childhood, that part of her that refused to be surpassed. Her shoulders heaved: strangely, the tears would not come. It was hard to cry when her primary emotion was not sadness, but a certain numb fear, a dumb resignation. Get up, she ordered herself. Get dressed.

It’s your shit, so clean it up.

But she could not move.

It was nearly ten in the morning, and from this vantage point, five stories above the street, she felt removed from the life that went on about her, in the various cells of the apartment building and in the houses of the neighborhood, which seemed but a collection of irregular rust-colored roofs.

Home for her was a two-bedroom flat, expensive, eating up nearly half her monthly paycheck, and too large, really, for one person, when a rented room would have done just as well. But it was blissful to live alone; she could play all the music she wanted, walk around naked, eat breakfast at 2:00 p.m. The little paintings on the wall were all original, done by artists of some distinction: a few bright strokes of pastel on rice paper signified a woman, an underwater scene had been done with someone’s fingertips, some bright red anthuriums meant nothing except that they were pretty. A former boyfriend had encouraged her to keep fish, in a couple of fifty-gallon tanks. He had said it would help her relax. She had a corner apartment, and there were lots of windows, and the air was fresher than down by the asphalt. Sunlight poured in through white canvas drapes. Her bed had a spread from the mountain city of Baguio, woven with tribal designs. It was a small life, neat and hermetic, and she could not bear to leave it.

A century ago this neighborhood had been a ritzy part of Manila. The sprawling three-story houses throughout the surrounding blocks were still owned by people with illustrious surnames. But the shadow of urban decay had crept across the white walls and narrow old roads. The houses were mostly empty now except for the household help. Their owners, well-to-do to begin with, were now comfortably ensconced in American suburbs—doctors and lawyers, she supposed, educated at the best Manila universities, to whom immigration had been an inevitable part of their career tracks. Now the riffraff that always seemed to accumulate in the shadow of the elite had taken over. Jobless men in frayed shorts lounged around corners, parked their buttocks on the curbs, rose when the sun was lower in the sky to join in a game of half-court basketball. In the afternoons, the sidewalks were a confusion of maids and youths and dogs straining at their leashes. Year-old babies, supervised by the entire neighborhood, stomped around in the span of concrete beneath the building where she lived, in novelty shoes that squeaked loudly with their every step, their audible progress celebrated up and down the street. Little boys flitted by on bikes, butterflies venturing in and out of the paths of cars. It didn’t matter whose father was a dockhand or an accountant or a driver in Saudi, or who wore a starched white Catholic school uniform shirt Monday to Friday—in the hour before sunset, children acquired the same democratic layers of dust and roughness, they shrieked and cussed in the same hard voices, with the same wrinkled gray elbows and knees and the same penchant for young-coconut ice drops and rubbery ears of boiled corn.

At a quarter to six the wives started coming home, in their black stretch slacks and their dark tailored blazers, stepping resignedly around puddles and mashed dog turds, in the battered footwear they wore for the bus and jeepney commute. They kept their shiny new office shoes in drawers in their cubicles up in the older, dingier buildings of Makati, the main financial district. They drew their carefully budgeted paychecks every fortnight, while their husbands squatted muttering on curbsides, selling each other secondhand TVs and computer hardware, dreaming up schemes by which they might suddenly become rich. From the hallway entrance to the fire escape just outside Narita’s door, the towers of Makati dominated the view, rising incongruously above red rooftops and a rash of palm fronds. It took a certain lofty distance to appreciate them: they were invisible from the street, concealed by the aging houses and pretentious pastel-colored apartment buildings like her own.

But at this hour of the morning there was little life in the street below, except for cars once in a while or jeepneys, progressing in explosive stops and starts over the asphalt, their drivers avoiding the perennial traffic jam on the main road by taking unlawful shortcuts through the neighborhood. All that to shave a minute or two off their travel time, thought Narita. Someone below her hollered an oath in Tagalog—an oath or a greeting, she was not sure. The words fell upon her ears but did not register. She had been thinking in English.

It occurred to her now that she was scared to death of going to the office, and that she had not experienced this sort of fear since the first year or so in Manila, when she had bumbled through the unfamiliar language that was Tagalog, and knew, from mocking remarks here and rebuffs there, that neither English nor Binisaya would pass. She remembered the remark made by the young woman at the video stall in Quiapo. “The actresses are ugly. You can hear them in the background, talking ‘Binisaya’.” Then the sneer, the deprecating laugh.

But I’m Bisaya, too, Narita thought. Wasn’t it obvious? After fourteen years, had she managed to blank out her origins? Had she ever been truly Bisaya in the first place?

In the train the feeling of remoteness continued. She was in the habit of taking the Taft Avenue line, getting off at the Manila City Hall, walking a distance through a network of tunnels before emerging close to the post office at Liwasang Bonifacio and flagging down one of the jeepneys that passed by her workplace. She had long been accustomed to the filth, to the odors, to the queer sensation of grabbing a handrail still warm from a fellow commuter’s palm. All three lines of the railway system reserved the forward car for women. Still, it was impossible to avoid the men as she raced to the front end of the platform, trying to catch the train as it pulled in. For the first time in her life she hated them, the whiff of acrid sweat, the weight of a form that struck her by accident, their dirty, wilted rucksacks. In the front car she awakened, momentarily, from her trance, long enough to register the appalling proximity of the women, how they all sought to evade one another’s eyes, the press of a breast on her shoulder blade, a hint of down on an upper lip, a mask of powder here, some lip gloss there, a student’s glittering barrette, the outlines of a push-up bra, all the various devices of convention without which they were all naked. The train rumbled through a wilderness of sweatshops and dingy apartment buildings, fast-food restaurants and upper rooms converted to churches. Narita stared, mesmerized, at balconies from which drying clothes hung. In each of those places lived at least one person as unhappy as she, someone trying their utmost to negotiate the city while keeping true to some internal landscape.

In the Liwasang Bonifacio tunnel it occurred to her that her life had contained two trajectories, the second not a trajectory so much as a pathetic Brownian movement through her immediate environment. She shied away from a youth who advanced toward her with the small, hard eyes of a criminal, deafened her ears to the noise from a blind man’s battery-operated guitar. Her efforts to collect a paycheck, the absolute necessity of learning to speak the Manila mélange of Tagalog and English—both had usurped immense reserves of energy and time. No one in this city was immune, she thought. It was a perverse collection of frustrated humanity, all dreaming of a better place, a few on the move to somewhere better. She thought of her younger sister, who had taken more than a decade to stage her great escape from Sweethaven.

Manila had not been good enough for Antonia. She had skipped the capital and fled to the other side of the world. At first she had been proud of her feat, but now she was lonely and caustic, carping about the long and dark winters, unable to negotiate the language of her adopted country even after two years. It was a relief to know Antonia was in worse straits. It felt to Narita as if she had kept her older-child advantage after all.

She had no clear picture of her sister’s life at that moment.

She looked sharply at each person she passed: the boys in their billowy denims and stifling-hot hoodies, the girls in tight blue jeans and tacky jeweled sandals, the sightless man anticipating the chink of coins in his yellow plastic cup. Impervious, all of them, and ignorant of the world beyond their soap operas and their infuriating mobile phone shorthand. She read the papers, she watched the foreign cable channels, she knew the intricacies of life in another place—yet her mind was stunned, as though she had been whacked by a plank, like a dog destined for the fiesta cauldron, and the only image she could summon up was of Antonia shivering in a wilderness of snow.

The newspaper offices never slept, but the afternoon round of editing and story consultations had yet to commence, so the section where she worked was quiet for once. A television mounted above the editorial central desk was on as usual—she couldn’t recall ever seeing it off—and a security guard and a couple of early-bird layout artists watched a hamburger commercial, their mouths slack.

The desks lay in that wide, high-ceilinged room exactly as they had been left the night before, strewn with faxed stories and press releases, each computer decorated with a paltry souvenir of its owner: a fortune plant in growth jelly, a blue plush dog. Otherwise there was little to indicate who sat at what computer—there were no name plates, no private space; the editorial staff chatted in the lavatories and smoked in the stairwell, and everyone could monitor everyone else. It was the life of her profession. She was used to it.

Down the dingy yellow-painted hall, the personnel department was open—the same confusion of papers as the editorial section, the same lack of privacy, the insular camaraderie of the staff. Journalism was not an affluent pursuit. With the usual high-spirited greetings and smiles, she procured herself a set of leave forms. Returning to the newsroom, she cast a glance at the editor in chief’s cubicle; he had no office of his own, only a space partitioned off on three sides from the rest of the room. He sat at the desk, an elegant brown-skinned man in his early sixties, carefully dressed in a blue button-down shirt. A coat stand behind him held a dark jacket, still in its dry cleaner’s sheath of plastic, and a couple of silk neckties. There was something about his dignity, his handsomeness, his small and dry smile, that reminded her of her father, or at least of the kind of man her father should have become.

“Well, come in,” he said. “If it isn’t the Donostia girl, the Sweethaven princess. How are things at the university there?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir,” she murmured, which was the truth.

The leave forms fluttered in her hands. He held out his hand for them, scanned them briefly, but did not sign them. “Personal reasons? And what might those be?”

“My mother’s in hospital, sir,” she lied.

“Not dying, I hope?” He chuckled. She smiled to show she was a good sport. “How long do you want?”

As long as it takes, she wanted to say, but answered, “Six days,” unable to keep a humiliating quaver from her voice.

He shook his head and gave that same dry chuckle, and she felt her gut turn in fear.

“Well, perhaps you might help us with a story or two, then.” He lifted the morning mail from his desk.

On the impeccable gray surface lay a copy of Sweet Heaven Girls.

Her extremities turned cold, and she felt a sudden and alarming urge to void her bowels.

“It seems a breath of scandal has perked up your hometown. It’s more than a breath, actually. I hear your mayor has launched a witch hunt to rid Donostia of pornographers and various unsavory elements. You know about this movie, Miss Pastor?”

“Yes, sir,” she said softly. There was no point in lying.

His voice dropped to a level so intimate it was almost sensual. “This is no ordinary sex scandal, it seems: even the Manila newspapers have picked up on the story. They say one of the women has killed herself, but they say that of every puta who unwittingly turns her puki into a screensaver. So are you acquainted with the girls? Personally?”

How much did he know? The video disc lay there, identical to the one she had so recently purchased, a shocking reminder once more of how close their profession was to the bustling and vulgar life of the street. No, she thought, we are the street, we are the masses, the whores, the market, we are no better than them, their exploits keep us and every other paper in this city alive. She flicked a glance up at him cautiously. Age had clouded his eyes over; it was impossible to see whether he was taunting her or simply curious, mildly concerned over the fate of three young strangers.

“Neighbors? Classmates, that sort of thing?”

Perhaps he sensed she concealed something, for he continued to scrutinize her, her jeans and Girbaud T-shirt, the misshapen, slept-on hair. She took off the glasses she wore for editing work and met his stare full on. It was the only way she knew to appear ingenuous. He had known her for six years. There was no way of telling how much of her he could read. In the newsroom beyond, the television blared. Applause and a hysterical announcer and a taunting drumbeat, one of the noontime variety shows.

“No, sir, I don’t,” she said indifferently, and wagged her cropped head.

He sighed and opened the drawer at his midriff, raking the DVD into it. She knew then she was in the clear. No one in Manila knew of the child she had left behind: all her personnel forms read “Single,” and after “Dependents,” she had always scribbled, “None.” So he knew nothing, this crafty old man—he had not seen the resemblance, he had failed to make the connection between the fashionably starved, ironically smiling woman before him and the grainy teenage girl.

“Cheap porn,” he muttered. “Dish of the week. Mustn’t forget it’s in there. Cora will have a heart attack when she comes to visit.”

She waited for him to sign her leave forms.

He noted the direction of her gaze.

“Not so fast, Miss Pastor,” he said, and one misty eye narrowed; the effect was grotesque. “Pull up a chair.”

She thought, wretchedly, that now he would pick her brains for an editorial he planned to write, on morality and the depravity of the Internet and this generation’s teenagers.

Before she could move, he tossed across the impeccable desk a copy of that day’s Lifestyle edition, folded up until only the piece she had written was visible. It was now a crazy quilt of red and blue squiggles.

“The red,” he said, “represents timeworn passages, outrageous clichés. The blue, Miss Pastor, are passages identical to some I found in similar articles in the Gazette, the Globe, the Post. I believe I hired you to produce journalism, my dear, not to stitch together press releases, which are there to inform us, not to be plagiarized.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said softly. “I’ve been tired.”

“You began so well, Narita Pastor,” he said, his face never losing its dry composure. “A talented writer, full of energy, a perceptive copy editor, and completely hassle-free. No husband. No children. A bit too active in the boyfriend department, but what young lady isn’t nowadays?”

She knew it was not in her best interest to correct him.

“Your job,” he said, “is the cushiest on any paper. All glamor and freebies, none of the shit that goes with putting the paper to bed, press kits and the Internet to help you along, and you give me this.” He tapped the folded sheet of newsprint with the end of his pen. It was a Waterman, she thought detachedly. The accusation of plagiarism filled her with cold rage. Every journalist she knew derived material from the press releases that landed in their e-mail or arrived in little envelopes, often escorted by a gift. True, the lifestyle regulars were the worst, but the opinion and business writers were a close second, and any one of the editors was likely to print a feed verbatim, passing it off as a news story, as a favor to a friend.

“A fresh graduate could do your job,” he grunted. “At half your price. So you better start showing some of that old fire, Miss Pastor.”

She suspected some sort of personnel overhaul was afoot once more. Tenure was impossible in this profession. Was the lifestyle editor to be replaced, with some diva arriving with a retinue of her own? If so, this was a pro forma notice. Dismiss me, then, you old fart, she raged inside, though her face retained its usual mild, self-mocking smile. Once, at the very beginning of her employment, she had gone on a handful of dates with this man, married for thirty years to the same woman. Narita had been seeing someone else at the same time. The brief romance had been a mix of game and opportunism: rewarding him with nothing in the end, she had thwarted whatever ambitions he might have had of rejuvenating himself in her fire.

“Well,” he said at last, “as your trip to Donostia seems hardly a matter of life and death, I will grant you six days. That, plus the day off. Any more and we’ll have to find a permanent replacement for you, and pay you by the piece.”

The other editors were arriving. She counted to herself, marking their laughter and the jocular taunts that came to her over the top of the wall divider. News, foreign, photo, sports. Her own boss, the lifestyle editor, would not be there; he was on a press junket to Palawan Island. Poor old bag, probably making the most of his status before the management expelled him.

The chief editor signed the leave forms with short, dismissive movements and tossed them over to her. She turned to go.

“Oh, and another thing,” the old man called. “Pay us back with a story. The scandal at Sweethaven. Send us a depth piece. Write about the girls.”

THE story conference had begun, as it did every day at half past one, the editors planning the headlines, reporting the contents of their sections to make sure they didn’t print the same story twice. Portly bodies and blocky heads, seamed faces and flabby stomachs. Veterans, men whose shoulders were humped and arteries slowly silting up from sitting at the same computers sixty hours a week. Two people were smoking. She herself had quit long ago, but the smell of secondhand smoke was not unpleasant. She heard nothing of the voices about her. Six days. Six days, nothing more, and the threat of losing her job. The years of careful work, of machinations, the prudent lunches with the paper’s managers, had come to naught after all—she was in as much danger as any first-timer. The men listened in amusement as she took them through the lifestyle page lineup for the following day. The Chilean food festival at the Hyatt, the figure-skating championship in Minnesota that the Philippine team had won. It was candy; her job was to report on the candy. Over in the main room, the television blared on, ignored. She caught sight of a line of dancers in metallic shorts and matching thigh-high boots, now to the front, now to the back, the game show announcer squealing, whipping up the crowd, nine pairs of skinny buttocks winking in time to the drums.

NARITA stood in the middle of the living room, taking stock of her home. The nonfat milk had been poured down the drain. The houseplants were freshly watered. The lovely goldfish—the lionhead that looked like a newborn puppy, the triangular ryukins, the fat little pearlscales—were greedily sucking up the food pellets that speckled the surface of their tank. In less than a week they would be dead. There was no one she could trust with the key, no one to feed them and clean out their tank in her absence.

“Good luck,” she addressed the small, quiet living things throughout the flat. “I’m sorry.”

She drew the glass shutters on the high windows, saying good-bye to the sunlight that poured through the white canvas drapes. She cast a last look at the zinc roofs of the neighborhood: the expanse of summer sky, the billboards, and the eternal roar of the superhighway to one side, and to the other, Manila Bay, concealed by recent high-rises, evidenced only by the occasional scent of salt and rot borne on a hot breeze.

She had provisioned herself against the hazards of the return. For the flight, she had donned a pair of Calvin Klein jeans; at the bottom of her canvas bag was folded a second pair, DKNY. The blouse she was wearing was an H&M, and among her T-shirts was a Dolce and Gabbana, the real thing; she was ready to peel it back at the nape to display the label, if anyone were so tacky as to ask her for proof. Some of these she had procured through the gift checks that arrived regularly at the Lifestyle section, contained in innocuous white envelopes bound with strips of clear tape. She always knew when a freebie was coming, by the inordinate amount of tape. Otherwise, she filled her closet from export overruns and the secondhand shop a few blocks from her flat: off-season Tommy Hilfiger sportswear and wrinkled Ralph Laurens. She was proud of her labels, of her traveling exhibit. She would bring her laptop, too. In Donostia, laptops, even the huge ugly ones, still had a certain cachet. The native never returned a failure.

There was no point in delaying further. She took a deep breath, picked up her bags, locked the door behind her. She met no one in the hall, or down the four flights of stairs. Almost as soon as she stepped out into the street, a taxi lurched violently past, the cabbie escaping the traffic on the main road, eager to get to Taft Avenue, where the pickings were better. She flagged it down without thinking, taking a moment to assess the vehicle and what she could see of the driver. Behind the wheel was a man in his forties, a dark, shriveled man who set her nerves on edge. There was no backing out; he had already reached over to unlock the back door. At least the cab was clean enough, and she noted that all the locks on the doors were complete, as were the levers that rolled down the windows. Escape, in case he tried to abduct her, would not be a problem.

The antiseptic scent of lemon failed to relax her, and she cursed the masquerade of her clothing. Please take me straight to the airport, she begged silently, anticipating a holdup, watching the cabbie’s every cue with suspicion—the direction of his eyes, the movement of one dark, powerful hand from wheel to gearshift. Please, please, she groaned. I am not the rich person I resemble.

But she made it to the terminal without incident, and after the customary twenty-minute delay, into the plane, where the armor of her clothing proved no help through the ordeal of the takeoff.

Are you afraid? she heard Naia say, for over the years she had kept the habit of conjuring up the child, when she was worried or quite simply losing it. It was good to have someone smaller and more vulnerable to reassure.

I’m always afraid, she replied.

Of flying?

Oh yes, flying in particular.

The plane tipped, shuddering as it continued to climb.

Why?

I don’t trust the pilots. Human or auto.

And you think you can manage better than they? the child said, precociously, for the Naia of her thoughts had never quite grown beyond the cool, inquisitive age of seven.

Narita wanted to say that she couldn’t even begin to imagine the efficiency of pilots, or of instruments, or the vigilance of the control tower—trapped as she was in a body strapped down and bullied by forces it could not understand. She was aware only of her heart thumping in her mouth, of her stubborn and undeserving self. All the silly rhyming prayers of her childhood descended on her then, evaporating just as quickly at the moment of landing.

I’ve never gotten used to planes. It was the long bus trips I loved. They gave me time to brood. And when I was little, I liked hanging over the rail of a stinking boat, musing over the blue islands on the horizon. I would watch the other passengers, how they tossed eggshells and the hulls of boiled peanuts in the wind. I was too naïve to recognize unhappiness, discontent.

I have not taken a sea journey since, oh, that weekend when I was very young and extremely confused and I decided to get rid of you.

Except something made me change my mind. I saved you. I installed you where I thought you might be safe, while I tossed myself into the air currents, to be wrenched every which way.