Chapter 23 - Sweet Haven

JOEL lived by himself in one of the new subdivisions on Donostia’s outskirts. In a corner of the sala was a table with a lamp and a wedding picture. In the photograph, the bride and groom looked ridiculously happy. Her waist was long and pinched—no impending infant to conceal. Joel was young and slim and looked as though made of porcelain, not in the fineness of his skin but in the fragility of his happiness. Narita noticed that he wore no rings on his finger, not even a class ring or one of those atrocious carbuncles other lawyers might match with a gold chain.

There was one other framed picture of his wife, against a snow landscape. Narita didn’t know how distant his wife was from his heart. For that matter, she had no idea whom he may have invited, no matter how temporarily, to take her place.

The houseboy fed them a heated-up supper, glancing at her before disappearing into the darker regions of the house, presumably to eat his own meal, and then to feed the dog she could hear off the garage moaning and rattling its chain. She wondered where the boy slept, if he cared who she was, if he knew anything about his employer’s life.

There was a report of the homicide on the local news, and photos of Gemma and Tristan Bulauan. No mention was made of the porn video, let alone Gemma’s attempt to speak to the authorities about it. The announcer only said the husband was being detained as a suspect. But the announcer’s voice was loud and engaging like a sportscaster’s, and his ringing tones exhorted his listeners to crude speculation. She cringed, hating this aspect of the evening news: it was the same here as it was in Manila, information as entertainment.

“A man who lays his hands on a woman needs to be punished at once,” Joel said grimly. “Otherwise he’ll never stop.”

“How do you punish him?”

“Thrash him,” Joel shrugged. “Dose him with his own medicine.”

Your good friend Zenon used to beat me. How would he react? Zenon looked like an angel, but his hands were light, as the old folks say. What would happen if she told him? Would he put his arms quickly about her shoulder and give her a squeeze, would he embrace her in sympathy the way a woman might, a fellow veteran of pain? Would revelation be the key to sexual congress? They were sitting side by side on the sofa, thighs touching lightly, his skin warm through the material of his trousers. Either of them could have edged away. She needed to urinate but was afraid to ask where the bathroom was, lest the intriguing contact be broken.

This was not the first time she had been alone in a strange man’s home. There had been plenty of that in Manila, so she was familiar, more or less, with the trajectory of events. Under any other circumstances, they would be approaching the moment of reckoning; all he needed was a little push. But why? she thought. Why disturb the ecology of his life? Why him, of all people? Once she had wearied of the phantom that was Zenon, she had granted entry to a variety of men, and gotten all the affirmation she would ever need.

Joel broke the contact with her body at last. The news had segued into the nightly soap opera, and with an exclamation of disgust, he got up to surf channels, holding the remote a yard from the screen, outlined, tense and impatient, against the glow of the box.

Finding nothing of interest, he turned the television off with a snort. “Would you like coffee?” he said. “I have a sack of barako, and a machine that’s gathering dust. I’m sure I kept them in the hope of company such as yours.”

Gallant man, she thought. Mambobola. Bolero. Offering her a cup of genuine barako, the brew with the name that meant “stud.” Fitting enough, she thought.

She paid him back with a smile. “I need the bathroom.”

“You can have both,” he said. “And whatever else you desire.”

She turned away quickly, perturbed, avoiding his face; was he being flippant, or was this an awkward attempt at courtship? She and the man had been in each other’s company for nearly half a day. This was not Manila; this was Donostia, and every moment she spent here compromised her, and her family’s battered reputation. It was late, too late in the evening, too late in her life, to engineer intimacy. She wished she weren’t so tired, that she had the energy to launch herself from the sofa, instead of burrowing into these pillows, watching his movements like a hapless puppy. What did she want? She wanted her own connection, her own dose of oblivion, she needed someone to embrace her and rock her a bit—she wanted a tiny carnal reward, because she was spent. Those months and years in Manila of nonstop work that paid in peanuts, the hours stuck in traffic every day, the press of moist human skin in the jeepneys, the void at the heart of it all.

There was a bathroom off the living room. It was so fragrant and perfect, towels matched to soap, that it was obvious he never used it; he must have another one in the room where he slept. In the mirror the public Narita confronted her. The same woman she had known and come to terms with over more than a decade. You like him; accept it, she told herself. You don’t really want him; not yet. You’ve known him, what? Three days? Excluding that single college semester, half a lifetime ago. You could wreck his life. You could make him weep. But why, Narita? Why bring another truckload of shit upon yourself?

She wondered how his career as city attorney would fare. One witness was dead; the other would be banished to Manila. There was the third girl, the one called Diana Rosales, but Narita knew little about her, only what Joel had provided: that she had taken up the mayor on his offer and was now temporarily housed at one of his homes, in Bacolod or Cebu, weeping and ruing her foray into what she called premarital sex. Good for her, Narita thought; she’d had the sense to repent, to grovel, to swallow what scraps of mercy Donostia might toss her way. And she was still alive. In a little while she might even venture out, under a different name. “Diana Rosales,” the shameless whore, would be dead and gone, but at least the poor girl still had the world, or what thin pleasure she might extricate from it—the taste of mangoes; the blind, stupid love of a pet dog.

Narita was sorry that her decision to protect her daughter would be the instrument of Joel’s undoing. Without Naia to attest to the identity of the young man in her footage, there would be no scapegoat, no choice but to prosecute his own cousin.

But the case would go on. What was she worried about? Joel was determined to pursue it. There was too much buzz about it in the press; it had reached the national dailies. Yet when he spoke, darkly, of his determination to bring Torres and his friends to justice, she thought he sounded a shade too theatrical, as though he were convincing himself of the wisdom of his plan. What was he so afraid of? He had evidence enough. There was the video itself, to begin with. There was the small bungalow he had brought her to that afternoon. There was the boy called Harrison Co—Joel would simply have to labor a bit more, talk to a few more people. Young men never kept quiet. Surely there had been someone: a disgruntled servant, an enemy of the family, a drinking buddy he would have bragged to. No community in Donostia was ever watertight. It was up to the police now to find the rest of their witnesses, even if the entire merchant population closed ranks and rallied about their black sheep.

Then she thought of the confession Joel had made to her that afternoon, at the bungalow. He served at the pleasure of the mayor, he had admitted. He was the mayor’s boy, giving the word that particular Binisaya inflection that called to mind not the smiling, clean-scrubbed protégé, but the silent, dusty household retainer who, every so often, might be counted on to cook a meal or drive a mistress home or inter some unpleasant business in a sugarcane field.

She massaged her temples in misery. Naia alone mattered. Naia was above everything now, even these feeble attempts to vindicate her honor that, deep down, Narita knew would never prosper. Daniel Pastor was simply not powerful enough. Not within the microcosm of Sweethaven U, and Sweethaven’s power quailed before the numbing reality of Donostia. If she had learned anything from her years in Manila, it was to live and let live. People smarter and more well connected and infinitely stronger than she could ever be decided matters in boardrooms and on golf links to which she would never gain access. Go with the flow—that had been her motto. Accept your paycheck with a smile of gratitude, greet the graying, distinguished boss a pleasant good day as he passed you in the halls, and quietly accept the occasional bit of lucre that fluttered your way.

So, smile, she told herself. Show him your excellent nacreous surfaces. Smile, damn you. The mirror image obeyed: the result was painful, her face broken up into a dozen planes, none of which was connected to the others. Mustering that buoyancy and goodwill that had sustained her from adolescence, she grinned and embraced her fear.

He was not in the living room when she crept out. A single cup of coffee rested on a coaster on the glass tabletop; there were small packets of sugar and creamer as well, the kind a cheap hotel might offer. She glanced sadly down at the fragrant brew. No one had ever made coffee just for her. And she wouldn’t even enjoy it. Now was the perfect moment to grab her bag and leave. He would not miss her. She might take a small sip to honor his hospitality, then get herself out of there before trouble developed.

Still, she did not fancy picking her way to the main road in the dark. There would be few tricycles about at this hour. The memory of Gemma Bulauan was still fresh; when she closed her eyes the image of that still, bloodless foot came to life behind her closed lids. She did not fancy having that for company in the darkness. Perhaps Joel might drive her home. In any case, it was only polite that she thank him and bid him good-bye.

Several doors led off the living room. One was ajar. She approached cautiously, his name on her lips, and fell silent when she realized the space was empty. It was his study; she was conscious of bookshelves, a narrow bed half-covered in stacks of plastic binders, a document open on the computer. She moved toward the paper-strewn desk, aware that she was trespassing, holding her arms stiff at her sides to curb the impulse to disturb his things. A printout lay among the papers. From the format, it could have been a search warrant or some such legal brief, but as she drew closer to investigate, something else caught her eye: a spill of objects by his keyboard.

They were videos. The topmost was the one of with Gemma, Naia, and Diana Rosales—identical to what she had purchased on the side street in Quiapo just a few days before. She picked it up, perturbed; the ones underneath were of the same genre, paper liners shoved carelessly into their scuffed cases, all of them most definitely used. Local and foreign, glossy and rough. Pornographic videos.

She felt his presence in the door even before his soft exclamation of surprise. She whirled around, confronting him, the videos in her hands.

“What is this? Research?” She laughed.

In a single moment, Joel saw and understood. The flippant, indulgent expression drained from his face.

“No, Narita, it’s not research,” he said tiredly, and looked away. “I own them. I watch them.”

“And this?” she said, holding up the square of plastic with her daughter’s image. “You watch this, too? For what, for inspiration? To profile the enemy? To wrestle with your sense of outrage?”

“Here,” he said, moving in on her. “Let me take that from you. It’s not the time to discuss this.”

She clung furiously to the video. They struggled, silently, a contest reduced to the tension in their fingertips.

Abruptly, she relented, flinging her arms violently in the air. But the sudden movement offered no release; the rage, contained for so long, began to build, fueling itself; she felt more awake than she had in years.

“What does it do for you?” she confronted him. “Porn, I mean. How big’s your collection? Don’t worry, I’m not judging you. I have my own stash, I tell you; porn’s a good thing.”

He put up his hands helplessly, as if to beg “Peace,” but she was determined to have it out with him, if only to untangle her thoughts.

“It is not the same,” he said. “I know the girls. I have talked to each one of them. This footage—it was made without their knowledge. It was something stolen from them. How could I possibly respond … naturally, to something like that?”

“Naturally,” she jeered. “What is ‘naturally’? Is that your prerogative as a man?”

“What do you think?” was all he said.

She stared hard into his face, appalled at the change in his features, the absence of expression; trying to gauge the degree of his helplessness, of whatever desire she had thought she had detected, trying to determine where the lies, the pride, the greed left off and genuine decency began. He seemed, as they stood there, to shift shape before her exhausted eyes: toadie, gallant, coward, angel. In reality he had not moved a muscle in his face. He simply stood there, an old hand at the game, watching her, knowing his edge, aware of her needs, waiting to see how far she was willing to come.

“That happened to me, too,” she said. “Your good and wonderful friend Zenon Cuaresma. He ran a private peep show from his boardinghouse room. His friends used to watch us. Through holes in the wall.”

But he did not react. It was as if he hadn’t heard, or her words had made no difference. He just kept staring into her face.

“They took turns, don’t you understand?” she raged. “He decided which of them to invite. To look at us. To look at him. Using me.”

Joel said, “I know.”

She began to cry. “You knew what Zenon was doing in that house.”

“Yes.”

“You knew. Why didn’t you stop him, then.”

He held out his arms.

“You knew what Zenon was doing to me. Why didn’t you—” She left the sentence unfinished.

He said nothing, merely closed the distance between the two of them. They had reached the end, the wretched end of it all. She wrapped her arms tight about his shoulders, as she had done too many times to count, with too many men, too many reckless conquests. She stretched the length of her body up against his, testing him, barreling into the wall of his reserve, punishing him. He did not push her off, or stagger backward with a feigned apology. His cheek burned against hers, his breath was hot against her hair.

THE ritual of boyhood. For Joel it begins with what they call the snake crawl, a term they have borrowed from Citizens Army Training. Flat on their bellies, propelled in the darkness by the tortuous movement of their elbows, over mud, grass, twigs, animal turds.

Snake crawl is not absolutely necessary; one may dart from bush to bush, bent at the waist, sharp buttocks in the air, and if truth be told, a boy might straighten up to his full height and amble unnoticed over to where the action is taking place, to stand tactfully behind a banana trunk and, perhaps, release a few hoots of encouragement now and then.

But snake crawl brings with it all the filth and discomfort of adventure. The front of Joel’s T-shirt is furry with detritus. He scrapes his elbows, his knees. He is a ninja, a commando. He is fourteen.

What is this place? A pitch-black grove. Bamboo. Coconut. Mango. Each of these. None of these.

Where, then? The border of a vast estate, over where the hog-wire fence has been trodden down to the ground and it is possible to hoist oneself over into the adjacent hacienda, where it is rumored armed guards patrol night and day, ready to shoot or lop off the heads of lurking thieves or adventurous young boys.

No, really, where is he? Perhaps he haunts the cemetery, creeping from tombstone to whitewashed tombstone, drawn by the sound of voices, daring himself to witness a revelation biblical in its import.

He could be by the river, in a stand of aging banana trunks, some reputed to bear tunnels the circumference of a penis, set at approximately the height of a young boy’s waist. No one has actually seen these scars. Joel thinks he spotted one, only one, the afternoon he took a shortcut through the trees, hurrying home lest it be discovered he had gone boating on the treacherous river. The scar was a round hole, sure enough, weeks old by its color, and surrounded a splotch of brown tissue, standing out from the firm and living green. But it was on a level with his chest—some anomaly there.

What exactly is Joel doing? He is creeping up on a friend. The friend is with a girl. The friend is getting laid.

There are other boys in the bushes, hearts pounding and skin aflame, though the breeze blows cool on this summer night. Yet as he gets closer and closer to the goal, he feels totally alone.

Where is the light coming from? Starlight. A fluorescent bar, pasted with dead insects, atop a distant lamppost. The moon.

This is the first time yet this has all happened to him before.

There is no light. It is pitch black. He sees nothing. He has lost out. All he can boast of, if he dares open his mouth tomorrow evening as his buddies gather at the corner store, is the brown muck that crusts his good Lacoste sports shirt, acquired just last Christmas.

No, there is a glow, from a lighter, and his friend Andoy, on hands and knees, is revealed. In all his stupidity—for upon this ignominious carpet of banana grove filth, Andoy is completely naked. The youth has taken off all his clothes, as one might do with one’s girlfriend, as one might do on one’s wedding night, as one might do with a woman who is worth it, with a woman one swears to love.

Andoy—now on hands and knees, now crouched like a frog, the grimy shins of the girl on either side of his arse. Who is the girl anyway? The one who haunts the plaza in the evenings, voice loud and rough, traveling round and round the perimeter fence with a pack of urchins. Of these urchins, the oldest is no more than eight—they are the ragged retinue that shout obscenities at the girl in between taking experienced drags on their cheap cigarettes. They are sellers of sweets and boiled peanuts and ice water by day, besieging the minibuses that pause for a few minutes at the marketplace in between runs among the sugarcane towns of the coast.

They call the girl Lala. Joel remembers that detail, but not her true name nor where in the town she slept nor any feature of her face. You would think after a childhood of peddling menthol candy to carsick travelers she would have learned the business of buy-and-sell, but no, the sex she renders is completely free, and yes, a few of the neighborhood youths take, with alacrity.

The rest of them, Joel included, watch. Snake-crawling through the brush or darting from slab to slab in the cemetery. They fear eczema, scabies, pubic lice. They fear venereal disease most of all. In the language of the town, all varieties of VD translate to “the disease of woman.” The thought of being laid low holds them in mystic thrall. To descend into that sucking well between Lala’s thighs, to emerge unscathed, if shrunken and wobbling and slicked with protoplasm—this is an experience granted only to the boldest of corner store warriors.

Because they watch so much, and discuss with one another even more, they have developed a unique vocabulary to describe one another’s exploits. Andoy is the fool who goes naked. Mikey’s specialty is rape style. Jik wastes precious time talking to the girl. It is reputed Jik likes to get to know the girl first, for between these unparented, perennially giggling females there are certain differences: one hopes for a little baby someday, another’s father was a negro GI, and so on. Poor Jik. But what does “rape style” mean? Joel does not know Mikey, not personally, but he conjectures it has something to do with force applied, with the drama of wrenching someone’s thighs apart when they have already been widely and resignedly spread.

As for Kiddo, he is the uncircumcised one, the pathetic coward whose penis wears a sweater in the tropical heat. They call him the paper bag. Wrinkly and brown.

SOME marry young, settle with a pregnant new wife in a hollow-block hovel, and there their thirst for knowledge ends. For others, the shy, misshapen ones hampered by buck-teeth and pimples, the adventure goes on, well into their womanless college days, where they are crammed into boardinghouses in Donostia, two boys to a room, or three or four. Vacating their bed spaces for an afternoon to watch, a single eye plastered to an aperture in a thin lawanit wall, as a housemate performs on an unsuspecting girlfriend.

Joel and Zenon pay several hundred apiece for their rooms. They occupy a single bedroom divided into two by a lawanit wall, share a bathroom with the rest of the house. They take most of their meals at the carenderia over on the next street. When they are broke, which is often, they stretch a little can of sardines over the course of the day, pouring tomato sauce and slivers of fish over heaping plates of rice. They can’t live without rice, or cigarettes. Zenon borrows everything: smokes, money, a motorbike. Joel has stopped keeping score, but knows his friend has probably cadged a month’s rent from him in small change.

Joel spends his free time at the library, and the weekends in the town he calls home. He can’t bear to be alone in his room. The odor of Zenon penetrates the wall, of sour sweat, cheap cologne. Lying down, he finds it takes a tremendous effort of will to get up again. Some days he is rudely shaken awake by one or two of the other boys, who bundle into his section of space, hiss, “Wake up, your buddy’s back. It’s showtime,” and cut the lights.

He pities the girlfriend who enters in a jingle of earrings, a sweep of skirt. She had seemed such a vibrant, indestructible personality when he had met her for the first time in World Literature class. What would it take to know a girl like that? She will go far, he thinks—all the way to America, or at least Manila, where she will be an advocate of some sort, and wear business suits and give interviews on TV. She is not pretty, but she comes from a good family, and is clever and fearless and articulate, strong and blunt in her opinions; she has every advantage on her side. He is not worthy of her, which is why he refuses to peer through the gaps in his wall, one of which a buddy has designated “Narita’s hole” in pencil. His housemates tease him, calling him faggot, thinking that the rain of insults will build up his nerve. He doesn’t watch, but many times he listens, sick at heart, as her voice rises, wave upon joyful wave. The boys pile around the peepholes. They are all virgins in that house, but for Zenon. They enumerate the many strange things they have observed about her body; they point out various moles and irregularities on her skin, then dramatically spit in the dust of the tiny courtyard, as if to get rid of her aftertaste. The more she visits, the less worthy she is of their respect. Joel knows that, if he ever dared speak to her, look her in the eye, be the recipient of her wide and unknowing smile, what esteem he harbors for her would vanish as well. He is aware he is stealing from her, but lacks the courage to warn her, to shake her equilibrium with a small, secret note or a cough from his side of the wall.

One afternoon there is a struggle from the next room. The girl cries out in surprise and outrage. Zenon shouts back. There is a thud, as of a body thrown backward against the bed, a series of alarming thumps upon the wall. The girl begs for mercy. Zenon lets her go. “You’ll be back,” he snarls.

She’s pregnant. The word rips quietly through the boardinghouse. It fills the teenage boys with consternation: they have an instinctive fear of babies, of misshapen bellies, of mothers and the mysterious power they possess. But unless Zenon confirms it, the news must remain a rumor, and the girl’s status in the house goes unchanged.

The following day, there she is indeed, knocking plaintively at the front door. She interrupts a poker game being played atop the bed spread. The boys are galvanized at the prospect of another show, but Zenon is merely annoyed: they have been playing for stakes and he is winning. “Get under the bed,” he growls to Joel. Joel shakes his head, rises in disgust, leaves. Anton follows. The fourth, Manny, giggling, gets down on his hands and knees. “Hurry up!” Zenon hisses. Obediently, the boy hunches himself up among the dusty shoes and forgotten socks: he is an ugly youth, with a big head and a mouthful of large teeth.

In a little while, the girlfriend enters. Zenon takes her, soothingly, in his arms, and she melts. Joel, his heart broken, does not stay to hear the rest of Zenon’s performance. Nor the moment of discovery, and the girl’s scream, of disbelief, of realization, as her innocence comes to an end.

BUT they are good boys; in every sense they are simply exercising their prerogative. They are the youths who, on summer afternoons, go riding about the plaza of their hometowns on rented bicycles, the luckiest ones on the dirt-track motorbikes that are hand-me-downs from uncles and fathers. Few of them are old enough for driver’s licenses, but all have learned, or are learning, to control their wheels. Often the talk centers on motorbikes rather than women. They guide the vehicles past the two-story frame houses about the plaza, craning their necks when they pass a significant balcony. Their eyes flick left and right, already experienced, after a summer of two, in the art of filtering, dismissing the peasants and town hall clerks who plod through the town’s streets after Mass, tuned only to the sight of a mysterious and unreachable female face.

The boys, they part company around eleven at night, surrendering the neighborhood sidewalks and the corner stores to the real men, the tough guys in their twenties and thirties who do, occasionally, make genuine trouble. What a relief it is to Joel to leave the summer day’s filth from his body, making a great splashing in the dim and tile-less bathroom as he pours water over himself again and again with the plastic dipper, leaning on the artesian well hand-pump to fill up the bucket. His grandmother croaks, in complaint, from an upstairs bedroom. She is widowed and cannot sleep unless her maid is in the room. Joel, on summer holiday from his parents and siblings, paces the darkened sala, reveling in the freshness of his skin. He treasures these midnight moments of solitude, for he is fourteen and his world is intact, and yet perpetually and excitingly threatened. He knows that at any moment the tale of his activities down by the cemetery might reach his father, twisted by adult histrionics. He will be branded a pervert and a rapist, a marijuana addict, or a pusher, which is the worst of all.

He comforts himself by padding up the pitted wooden staircase, taking care to avoid making unnecessary sounds. The doleful image of the Sacred Heart, adorned with red electric candles, presides over the head of the stairs. Joel genuflects without excessive thought. He is more interested in his grandfather’s law books, which occupy the horseshoe cupboard that crowns the stairwell. Gently he slides open a glass door and reaches inside for a volume. Like the wood of the risers, it is riddled by the action of small chewing insects. He begins to read, about murder. He appreciates a good paperback now and then, but these ancient tomes, elegantly annotated by a hand long dead, enthrall him. He reads the penal code, puzzling at the convoluted sentences. Beneath the weak yellow bulb he may peruse these legal reports until the breezes of predawn dry the fresh sweat from his armpits and the back of his knees.

In the morning, he rises at six to the metallic rhythm of the church bells two blocks down, and dons his rubber sandals for the walk down to the baker’s. He takes the handful of coins that his Lola has left for him on the kitchen table. Where he passes storefronts and eateries still boarded up from the night, his sandals crunch over shattered beer bottles and cigarette butts. Occasionally he chances upon a slip of rolling paper pasted to the sidewalk by rain. Beauticians use the paper to fasten hair to curlers, but Joel knows that furled around a teaspoonful of marijuana, it makes for a pretty good smoke.

When he returns, it is with a bag of warm pan de sal. His grandmother is awake, smelling of lipstick and powder and old person’s armpit and some mentholated Chinese balm. She embraces Joel, and he twits her for her vanity. He is strong and healthy and can function for three days without sleep. He is the talented and beloved grandson; he can do no wrong.