Chapter 15 - Sweet Haven

“YOU HAVE been home two whole days,” Daniel said. “It’s ridiculous for you and Naia to be acting this way.”

“I’m not the one carrying on the cold war,” Narita told him. “Naia avoids me. I’ve had glimpses of her, once, twice. She slips out here to get some food, then goes back into her room. What does she do in there, anyway?” She stared at her father, trying to visualize him as a stranger might. He was a sad, slow-moving man, with a smile she’d grown to think of as apologetic, though perhaps diplomatic would have been the right word to describe his smile and his nature all these years.

He used to lecture to his students wearing the benevolent expression of one of those plaster saints at the Donostia cathedral. At other times, as enthusiasm got the better of him, his voice would rise in a tenor almost painful to the ear, then boom out in release so that, true to his surname, he seemed to be preaching hellfire from the pulpit. A fair amount of theatrics was demanded of Sweethaven’s professors. It impressed the students. It communicated authority. Narita and Antonia had themselves absorbed hours of those lectures. That had been in the span of time when they were too young to stay home by themselves but the family was between maids. Their father would babysit them by plunking them down at the back of his classroom. Once the picture books had been leafed through, the seed pods collected from the flowering weeds on the walkway outside, the sheets of paper scribbled over, there was nothing to do but squirm in the worn wooden chairs. No matter how closely Narita listened to Daniel’s words, she couldn’t crack them. It was hard to believe this was the same father who produced animal sounds and farting noises at dinner to make them scream.

She wondered whether he had believed in God at all. He had always gone to the Sweethaven church, that white edifice facing the harbor, a space that echoed with the chitter of nesting birds. She wondered how often her mother accompanied him there nowadays. Luth had grown up Catholic and converted for his sake, but for as long as Narita could remember, she would cross herself and mutter under her breath before embarking on a journey, even a half hour’s drive to a friend’s house, on the feast day of a saint.

It was close to midnight now. They were in the kitchen, the coolest place in the house, shielded from the sun most of the day by the mango tree. Insects beat at the fluorescent bar over their heads. Narita had showered three times that day, but was perspiring again. April! She held her breath every time her father came too close. He had grown odoriferous over the years, like an old dog sloughing off skin, nursing a mouthful of bad teeth.

A cellular phone chirped from the direction of Naia’s room. The girl’s in-box had received a new text message. She got plenty of those; they annoyed Narita. Who were these friends, this unknown support system of hers? They seemed more plentiful after 11:00 p.m., when the house was supposed to be asleep; Narita had an image of scrawny, effeminate boys crowding round the drum majorette to pinch her and giggle and squawk good-natured obscenities in her ear.

“I would cut the Internet connection to her room,” she went on. The household subscribed to broadband, and Naia had appropriated the modem for herself. A trail of wires led from the living room to her bedroom. Someone had duct-taped them down to the floor, so now the hallway resembled the stage of a dingy Quezon City bar when some band or other was performing for the evening.

“We thought of taking away her cell phone,” Daniel replied. “And the Internet connection as well. But none of those gadgets are ours, Narita. Antonia pays for them. Antonia bought her that computer, too. Pays all her bills. Every luxury Naia possesses, every gadget, was arranged for by Antonia. The Net, the phone—they’re the only ways those two can communicate. We didn’t have the heart to cut Naia off. We figured the state she is in is enough punishment already.”

Enough punishment. Narita couldn’t fathom the contradictions in him: beloved by his students, henpecked by his wife, outrageously fire-and-brimstone in his values, despite the tentative little smile.

“You know,” he said—he was smiling now—“out of all the people in the world, you are the one she wants most at this very moment.”

“Don’t be stupid, Pa,” she snorted.

“You share a bond that cannot be replaced—”

“She hates me. She only wants Antonia.”

“—because you are her mother.”

Narita sighed. “Look, it’s late. Why don’t you go to bed? I don’t need you to play middleman.”

Fortunately, he did not protest at this; he could be quite tiresome when he felt slighted. When he had shuffled off, she lifted the lid off the bowl of hot food he had left behind. It was stew made of mongo beans with a couple of soup bones in it, simple fare that he had said was Naia’s favorite. Every night since she had been expelled from school he had assembled a meal for her.

Narita cut the light in the kitchen and lay down on the living room couch. Twelve o’clock passed. She felt herself dropping off. A door opened. Behind closed lids, she sensed a change in the light. The kitchen was illuminated. The refrigerator shut with a muted thump, a chair squealed on the floor.

Naia sat at the table eating great spoonfuls of her dinner. She glanced up in astonishment as her mother entered, then shrank into herself, like a mimosa folding up its leaves when touched.

Narita hadn’t meant to look so implacable, or to stare so hard. When she drew up a chair opposite the girl’s, Naia took off, leaving the food.

She was maybe five foot four—taller than Narita, at any rate—and already possessed that slender roundness that happens to a woman’s figure for a span of a few years in adolescence, never to return. She wore a pair of cotton shorts and a little T-shirt decorated with a heart in pink studs, right over where her own would be.

In the hallway the girl paused, weighing her choices, then came back to the kitchen. She hunched her shoulders, as though to protect her prettiness—naturally pale skin, a hint of down over the arms—from her mother’s gaze. As she paused directly under the fluorescent bar, Narita realized that the buoyancy she’d been expecting, the glow that came with good health, was absent from Naia’s face. The white light from overhead brought out the heavy shadows beneath her eyes. Her hair, long, black, and so fine it looked wet, fanned out over her collarbones, too limp to hide the rash of tension pimples at her jawline. Pimples, thought Narita—and they had always been flawless of skin in their family. Her chin was a little v, startling on a face her mother had always remembered as round.

“What are you doing here, Ma?” she said. “How long are you staying this time?”

She had a tough, gravelly voice, like a girl who spends a lot of time cheering at basketball games. She had always sounded that way, even as a child.

“I’ve come for you,” Narita replied. “I want to take you back to Manila.”

Naia laughed, short and disbelieving. She did it with her mouth open and twisted, tossing her hair over one shoulder. Narita cringed from the sound, for it was a whore’s laugh, and the little trick with the hair was something the fast girls used to do back when she was in high school.

“Fat chance,” she said. “You’ve been promising me that for years. You said that to me in grade two.”

“This time I’ll do it.”

“What are you going to do, kidnap me?”

In the next unlucky moment, Naia’s mobile phone chirped. She drew it out of her pocket and examined the message on the screen. Her contempt for the sender was obvious, but nonetheless she turned away from her mother and began to tap out a reply with her thumb.

“Hey,” Narita said.

The girl ignored her.

“Hey!” she repeated, too harshly. “We’re not done here.”

“Well, I am,” Naia snapped, storming back to her room, and this time she didn’t return.

NARITA sat, too numb to cry, and her thoughts turned to her father. Why did he persist in his pathetic efforts to reconcile them, telling her good things about Naia, giving her false hope? The girl had blanked out all memories she had had of her mother, ignored all sacrificas made for her as she grew up.

Whose daughter was she, really? Narita thought. She resembled Antonia, truly, but in her face her mother could clearly see the features of the boy who had betrayed her. It was said in these parts that if a baby looked like its father, the mother’s love for him was greater than his love for her. Only the women of an earlier society could have devised that rule, Narita thought bitterly. Such malice, so typical.

The first time she set eyes on Zenon she was nineteen, a college senior. She was minding the English department office over lunch break. Her dad was the chairman. This gave certain privileges: she and Antonia could come in when the place was deserted and read with the air-conditioning going full blast. That day, Narita was alone, her dad at some faculty meeting, and she had left the door unlocked. In came a slender but strong-framed boy in jeans and a white T-shirt. He went straight up to the desk where she sat, moving in a way that was rapid and a bit alarming. She was annoyed rather than menaced. He stood over her and fixed her with a very intense, direct stare and then asked, in the roughest Binisaya accent possible, “Mam, are you open?”

In retrospect, he must have been frightened and desperate: he was flunking a literature course that term. She didn’t yield, or make things better for him. “No. Students not allowed. Wait outside till one.”

Of course she was a student herself, and not authorized to mind the office, but she and Antonia considered the university their home, and their dad’s workplace an extension of their living room. She didn’t think much of the young men and women who came to Sweethaven from different parts of the Visayas, and this one’s sense of entitlement and superiority got under her skin. Are you open, indeed. Ha. Well, for eyes like that she would always be open.

It wasn’t until the following semester that she saw him again. They were taking a literature class together. It was the same course he had flunked. Zenon sat in the back, in his plain white T-shirt, among the older, shabbier boys, the ones who were taking the course a second or third time in order to graduate. She came in late and proud of it, taking the seat next to him. The class tittered. He didn’t notice her entrance, intent as he was on what he was writing, and she saw at once that he was left-handed. He had laid his notebook on the armrest of the empty chair beside his, and he wrote in so confined and intense a manner that the whole chair shuddered with each stroke. The notebook was made entirely of graphing paper. He was going to be an engineer. She loved that immediately, his competence, his diligence. He was always punctual, always took notes.

And yet he managed to flunk pretty much everything that came his way. Maybe he had smoked too much marijuana and his wiring was shot. They read bits of Shakespeare that semester. Standing up in the center of the classroom, she was Juliet and he Romeo, meeting for the first time, the coy lines forming a perfect sonnet. Zenon turned a delightful shade of red. Each time he opened his mouth, the class shrieked with laughter. It was his accent. His vowel sounds were unsophisticated—in fact, he could make only three. It sounded nothing like English. Beneath the gale of hilarity, no one heard her speak.

Possibly, he was just stupid.

He rode a motorcycle to class, which in a private school like Sweethaven was not special. He didn’t own the bike; he borrowed it once in a while from a friend, and it was a humble Honda 70, poor relation to the Vespa. It didn’t matter. A motorcycle meant freedom, aimless joyrides around the city. She thought she might seduce him. His speech annoyed her, but she made herself deaf to it. He had read so few books, though she was glad to learn that he liked the same adventure movies, more or less. Antonia was appalled when she found out. “That’s your boy toy, that Rambo fan, that’s your stud?”

He kissed like an animal. Without preamble, without apology. A tongue-sucker: he made the back of her throat ache from the strain. He said he was a virgin, and she wanted to believe him but couldn’t, because he was too good-looking and too cavalier about the claim. He’d gone to a Catholic boys’ high school. His whispered love talk was straight out of the Betamax movies he had spent his boyhood watching. They went all the way at long last during midterms week, in his boardinghouse, where the residents could do as they pleased. He had his own bedroom, and his own cassette player, useful to mask the sounds they made. He was turning eighteen the following day. “Advance happy birthday,” she told him. She thought she might remind him that it was her first time, the best present any teenage boy could ask for, but she didn’t want to rub in the fact. When she opened her eyes she found the sheet streaked with her blood.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Who’s going to wash this?”

So they declared themselves in love. They talked about the future, passionately; kicked around the notion of having children; dreamt aloud about the things they would have someday. He wanted a bigger motorcycle. She wanted her own computer. They rode down to the beach by the airport and watched the jet from Manila come in, followed an hour later by the propeller plane from Cebu. He mentioned, idly, that the city could not stay backward forever, that the airport must expand. Or he himself must advance, haul himself out of the sinkhole that was Donostia. He was the exact opposite of Antonia, who wanted everything to stay just as it was.

They imagined what it would be like to run away.

Four weeks of that, and then he changed. He was handsome and never easy to control to begin with, and she began to perceive that he was no longer attracted to her body. He was done with her. When she called him at his boardinghouse, it took him ten minutes to come to the phone, and throughout the wait she fancied she could hear his housemates snickering. She began to suspect the woman teachers of ulterior motives; she set her eyes on girls who were taller or shapelier or fairer-skinned, and began to imagine each of them pursuing Zenon, though he had never laid eyes on them. She supposed it was she who hit him first, a wide, theatrical slap to begin with. But then they began to hit each other on a regular basis, making up just as violently afterward. One afternoon they fought at the beach, pelting each other with handfuls of sand. He had unearthed some tale of her wild high school days. “You weren’t a virgin,” he accused. “I bled!” she said, weeping. “Hymens grow back,” he said obstinately. She snatched up a stub of coral and, clamping his hand to her thigh, scored his forearm with it. Blood welled up along the cut. Zenon blinked back tears. They waited, in conspiracy, for darkness to fall, and then he dragged her across the sand to the rest house they had rented, and he had her up against one of the bamboo posts. He was out of condoms; they were tempting fate. Zenon was actually crying. “You don’t know how much I adore you.” The sex was explosive, of course, given the buildup. “I love these rape games,” she said.

FOR years after she’d moved to Manila, she dreamt of him, allowing him to sneak under the covers with her, late at night, when the world was asleep and she had only herself to account for. At first the thoughts filled her with guilt, then she resigned herself to them, and then he became an old and familiar lover, who forgave her every pore and stretch mark. They had known each other for the span of a single semester, had lain together for less than that. So she used this irrevocable absence to get to know him better. She didn’t know how many times she created the moment when they would see each other again. Sometimes she stumbled after him, pleading, a romantic heroine: tears and streaming hair—the works. At others, she rolled him beneath the sole of her hobnail boots. Each encounter ended in sex. When one fantasy had exhausted itself, she turned over in her narrow bed and started on another. She tracked him down to an apartment in Marikina; she met him in the kitchen of their empty house. She encountered him at the funeral of her parents; he came to the funeral of Antonia; he showed up at her funeral, gazing into her casket while bouquets of red roses opened simultaneously about them, filling the chapel with their scent.

PERHAPS if she’d devoted more of each night to sleeping she would have done better at her jobs. She alternated between the newsprint women’s magazines and the daily papers, editorial assistant here, writer there, staying no more than a year each time. One year, right after an election, the paper she was employed at closed. The candidate who owned it had lost his bid; no funds were left; the paper’s reason for being was no more. She came straight home to Sweethaven, armed with gifts.

“Are you really staying this time?” her mother said cautiously, as she set up her computer in her old bedroom.

She wasn’t sure; she’d left her résumé in various offices around Manila; in a couple of weeks she would be making a stream of long-distance calls to follow up.

“Well, think your decision through,” she said. “This confusion can’t be good for Naia.”

Ah, Naia. What miraculous transformations had taken place in her absence. Naia was a restless, long-legged little girl with huge eyes and a deep, scratchy voice. She made boats and kites out of paper, stole every roll of tape in the house, had stamped her name on five different pairs of scissors. Entering a room, she left it in shambles: cushions on the floor, wads of paste on the sofa, doll limbs and hair ornaments and colored felt-tip pens on every available surface. She and Antonia had made up a series of nonsense melodies, one for each of the dogs, it seemed, and whooping and gazing into each other’s faces, they would sing at the top of their lungs.

She, at seven, had the most amazing whiskey laugh, sensual and adult, filled with promise, heard in every room of the house.

Antonia she called Tita, and nothing else after that; it made sense, for she knew of no other aunts.

Her mother she called Narita.

“That’s Mommy!” Antonia exclaimed, scandalized.

“No,” Naia said, frowning. “She’s not a mommy. She doesn’t even live here.”

“Give it some time,” Antonia said when she and Narita were alone.

One evening, as Narita tried to work, laughter and a scandalous splashing from the bathroom intruded on her thoughts. She leapt up in annoyance, her chair thudding back against the wall. Distractions in the news room she could cope with—the explosions of temper from the direction of the editor in chief’s desk, the boys from layout arriving with pages for her to check. But this low, vital child’s voice, the squeals and giggles from Antonia, the snatches of meaningless words in their private language—all these sent a wave of pure jealousy through her, and the sentences curdled in her mind before she could even tap them out on her keyboard.

She had been writing a feature on Donostia as it faced the coming millennium. It was a feature she hoped to sell to one of a score of magazines that had cropped up with the desktop publishing boom in the capital. And now, suddenly, she realized she did not care about the new Internet café that had sprung up outside the Sweethaven gates, nor about the mobile phones that more and more people were brandishing like phasers in their own private blockbuster movies. In the same moment she realized that no one else in the world cared, either. Technology was advancing at the same pace all over. There was nothing enviable or indeed distinguished about the little city where she had grown up.

Enraged with herself, she flung her bedroom door open, in time to catch a small, pale figure as it flashed down the hall, wet hair flying, sturdy thighs pumping—leaving a trail of water drops and wet footprints all over the living room. Investigating, she found it had balled itself giggling and naked in a corner of the couch. Antonia stood over it, wielding, of all things, a toothbrush. As she watched, her younger sister unfolded Naia, parted the strings of wet hair over her face, and slipped the business end of the toothbrush between the unprotesting jaws.

“That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” Narita exclaimed.

“What?” snapped Antonia, jolted out of the ritual. “That I brush my child’s teeth for her?” With a sure hand Antonia maneuvered the instrument over Naia’s molars. “I just want to be sure it’s done right.”

My child’s teeth, thought Narita. Antonia hadn’t realized what she’d just said.

Give it time.

But there was to be no further time, for, a week later, a news daily called. The new owner was replacing the entire central desk to avert future mutinies, and could she start at once?

“It means more freebies.” She shrugged, packing up her gear once again.

“We have enough exotic soap,” Antonia said.