Chapter 7 - Sweet Haven

IN EVERY pair of siblings, there will be a good child and a bad. The good child—fair skin, winning smile, beloved by adults, virginal to the point of being frigid. The bad—she of the unruly hair, the dark complexion, the foul mouth.

Perhaps the tale of the overnight boat to Cebu, the abortionist’s office that to our innocent eyes bespoke such affluence, rumors of how I smoked marijuana behind the high school buildings and in tumble-down beach houses with strange boys—perhaps these form the backbone of the Narita myth, the stories of origin that you received from my sister and my mother. How else can I account for the space and dead silence that grew between us over the years?

When I speak to you at last, I will take both your hands in mine and look deep into your eyes. “Naia,” I will say, “I am not the demon they say I am.”

“I am not a bad mother,” I will say into the silence between us. “I left,” I will press, as your lips tighten and doubt and disgust well in your eyes, “so that you and I could have a better life. There were no opportunities in Donostia. Manila was the only place to go.”

In my fantasies you never speak. You listen, though, ever pliant. I can’t give you a voice because I have never heard your voice, really. We do not write to one another. We talk once or twice a month, long distance, you dispensing the news in a choppy, noncommittal way, me brimming with goodwill, clutching the telephone receiver in moments of quiet when each of us waits uncomfortably for the other to speak.

What I’m really hoping for, in these dialogues that never materialize, is absolution. I want you to squeeze my hands in return and nod and say, “Mother, it does not matter.”

“I didn’t want to leave,” I will confess, when it becomes apparent I have won your trust. “But they drove me out. Shamed me out. In the end it looked very much like my own decision.”

See, even in my moment of imaginary connection with you, when all pretense supposedly drops away, I’m still looking around for someone to blame.

IN truth, it was Antonia’s child. Narita was but the vessel. She could not get the hang of it, mothering. Maternity had nothing to do with instinct. Her fingers longed to find the switch on that slippery, struggling bundle—something she might flip, to instantly still its cries.

Luth and Antonia would snatch up the baby, and it would calm. They would rock it, glaring at Narita, at the book she had been reading when the creature started to scream, and after a while, she made no effort to conceal her relief at their competence. With the birth had come another mouth to feed, and Narita couldn’t help feeling she was that mouth. In the past she had been worth scolding and arguing with. Now she was simply ignored, stepped around.

The week of the fight that changed their lives the heat was deadly—March heat, the kind that shriveled the leaves in all the acacias and browned the lawn and forced them all into the shelter of their dim bedrooms as soon as lunch was cleared. She carried the baby the half kilometer or so down to the beach, where the sand baked her feet through the soles of her rubber sandals. The child whimpered the whole time—Narita had forgotten to bring an umbrella against the glare. The light glancing off the waves was white. In the distance, against the looming shadow of the neighboring island, two fishermen bobbed up and down on the waves like children on a playground ride. She took the baby down to the water’s edge and let the foam play about its toes, but it was no use; it fought her, wailing, and in the open-sided rest houses, strangers gazed at them, and some pointed with their lips—Look, there goes that loose girl with her bastard; her parents are with Sweethaven, but little good that’s done for her. Shame.

Night was falling, quicker than expected from the intensity of the light. She considered the rank-smelling fishermen’s bancas drawn up on the sands, and whether it would be easy to launch one into the current. Left to drift, how quickly would it sink? Would the wailing of a tiny passenger be detected from the shore? The baby hiccupped in her arms. What the hell was she thinking?

“What, are you hungry again?” she said. The baby was making a thin, unbroken sound. She walked as quickly as she could back to the house, joggling her child in an attempt to keep the mosquitoes from its face. The living room was dim; her parents had had dinner and were watching television stone-faced, she supposed, in their bedroom. Antonia was studying for a finals exam. Dinner sat on the kitchen table, a collection of bowls covered with saucers to keep the flies out. It looked to be the same food from lunch; the household was between maids.

“What do you want?” she said to the child. She herself would not eat. It had been months, and she had failed to lose the pregnancy weight. “You want chicken? You want some milkfish? You want Sky Flakes? Jesus, will you shut up for a minute?”

There was nothing a toothless mouth could cope with. She found an opened carton of milk in the fridge, sniffed it, made a face. Fresh milk was so expensive; the household saved it until it went rancid. It would have to be thrown out. Beneath one of the saucers was a half-eaten bowl of tapioca. Her father’s culinary specialty. How long had it been sitting there? It didn’t smell too good. Was it from a new batch or an old? What did it matter? It was on the table. She took a teaspoon from the dish rack and sat the child down in her lap.

“Here,” she said brusquely. Her mother had scolded her some days before for her inconstancy, abandoning the child for days on end and then abruptly taking it up and carrying it everywhere, as though it were a new puppy. The baby began to eat. Was it happy? It had liked the tapioca before. She could not tell. Obediently, it swallowed teaspoonful after teaspoonful. It gurgled and farted and smiled. Narita wept. “I love you,” she said. She held the child, and sweat made excruciating snail tracks down her sides. They were pasted together by the secretions of their skins. She did not know how long she sat there rocking the glutted creature. She thought they might catch on fire from this inexplicable wave of love.

THEN Antonia’s door opened and she emerged, peevish, in the huge plastic spectacles she would wear only at night. It was finals week at the university, and for once Narita and the baby were not admitted into her bedroom. She was studying, passionately and on the verge of panic. The course in nursing was not going well—the exams were too objective; there were too many things to commit to memory: measurements and values and names of chemicals that were outside her sphere of experience. Still, her concentration was acute. She did not register her sister and the child as she entered the kitchen to fix herself a snack. A ferocious mechanism seemed to drive her, coupled with the bitterness of having to study something she loathed. She liked to remind Narita of this every so often—that she had shifted courses for her sister’s benefit. Preparing for the day when the baby would be hers by merit. Narita’s gut would go cold with rage. Oh that baby, that cumbersome, costly, insatiable child.

Antonia’s was the only air-conditioned room in the house. Their parents had bought the unit secondhand, as an incentive for her to study, and for the baby to have a cool place to sleep when it was grouchy. Antonia had left the door open a crack, and the gentle wave of cold that emerged nearly drove Narita mad. She slipped in, carrying the child. In here, it was a different country. Antonia’s idea of home décor resembled something out of an American magazine. She’d found lengths of cheap ditsy-printed cotton down at the marketplace and sewn them into matching bedspreads and pillows and curtains, ruffled and quilted. There was a gooseneck lamp clipped to the headboard—an expensive and exotic thing in those days. On one shelf was a potted plant, some kind of herb, and a collection of varnished cowries of graduated size, the most common of shells, really, the kind the waves tossed up every other day on their stretch of beach, yet she displayed them with pride, as though she lived in some much colder hemisphere and saw the tropical ocean only two weeks of a year. The room smelled foreign, even, of Glade.

In the cooler air, the baby quieted at once. Narita laid it on the immaculate bed. Something was going on in that round stomach of hers; the baby frowned, gazed up at her mother, and emitted two strange grunts. Immediately the sweet stench of milk-rich feces spread through the room. Narita turned her over. The back of her diaper felt warm and mushy.

At that moment, the baby threw up, a great yellow wave, all over the spread. Narita grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a couple of sheaves of paper from the pile of notes on the bed. Working fast enough, she thought she might scoop all the vomit up and toss it into the toilet down the hall before Antonia noticed. But it was too late. The yellow dribble was rapidly soaking through the spread, to the sheet beneath, and into the mattress.

Then Antonia came in.

“Get her out of there!” she screamed. She saw the damage and began to weep. “My God, I’m going to kill you. Clean it up.”

Narita clung to the child, dead certain her sister spoke not to her but to the baby. And strangely, she was relieved—now the pretense of sacrifice was finished.

“Clean it up!” Antonia screamed again, but she shook her head. Antonia began to rain blows about her shoulders. “This is your shit!” she wept.

She grabbed the heavy pillow, but Narita did not wait to find out what she would do with it; she wrenched it out of her grip and brought Antonia to a full stop, with a hand at the throat.

She did not throttle her. That was Antonia’s version, later. But how was she supposed to react? Her sister had attacked her. Then it became immaterial who struck first, because she hit her sister hard, aiming for one of her breasts. Antonia landed against the desk, wrenched the gooseneck lamp free, and struck the side of Narita’s face with it. “Slut,” she panted. “Cunt.”

Narita could hear nothing, not the baby howling, not their mother and father begging them to stop. Somehow she flung the lamp away and got a hand on her sister’s T-shirt collar and slung her bodily out the door. She had to keep Antonia from the child. Her head throbbed, her skin burned; not even Zenon had aroused such a storm in her cells.

It ended in the kitchen, with the paring knife Antonia had left on the counter to cut a guava. Her palm came up in a plea for mercy, and that was where Narita gashed her, clear to the bone—gave her an extra line, a change in her fate; leave it to the fortune tellers to figure out what.

SOON after that, the distance she craved was granted, and she acquired a space of her own. The space was a long rectangle, just wide enough to turn over on her side in the night, with a limp pillow and a striped sheet borrowed from her landlady. She lived with seven other girls in an apartment, in a dingy corner of the state university campus.

This was her last chance, her father told her. Thank goodness they had had the foresight to make inquiries. Now she must complete an undergraduate degree, in the relative anonymity of Manila. After that, she would finish a master’s degree. One could not get a decent job without an MA, he said doggedly. She need not worry about the baby’s welfare. Antonia had sworn to sacrifice for the child—she was younger, she had more time; and wasn’t an aunt’s nurturance the next best thing to a mother’s love? They fully understood Narita’s need for a career, he droned on in that stern yet kindly way he had, impervious to the tears welling up in her eyes. There were a few more words about realizing her full potential. She was truly his daughter—how happy he was that she had chosen the intellectual track expected of a Pastor. The family would pay for her tuition and expenses. They were not poor, but neither were they rich—they just wanted a dignified conclusion to her education, so she might get on with her life. For her, his neglected, misjudged elder daughter, they were willing to sacrifice.

She had listened dumbly to his words, trying to fathom the logic. They were kicking her out. “You can always come back,” her father had said magnanimously, as though he were talking to one of his students in crisis. “You know you will always be welcome.”

“Which will it be, Narita,” he had pressed her. “European languages? Tourism? Library science?”

She’d considered her choices in silence, too depressed to feign delight; they both knew these were low-prestige courses at the state university, but at twenty-two she was too old, and her marks too poor, for anything better.

She shared the room with three of the “bed-spacers,” as the boarders were called. They were all college freshmen, all sixteen, all taking A.B. Tourism. The course was open to any and all: there were no grade requirements, no limits on the number of students who could get in, no competition. “Because we want to travel,” the girls would giggle. They had no idea that a tourism career would consign them to years of slaving in the government bureaucracy, that travel would be by bus from one dusty provincial city to the next, that the so-called training trips abroad, lasting all of four days, would go to the family and friends of whoever was top dog in the hierarchy. Their fantasies stopped at meeting foreign men, Tom Cruise look-alikes in shades. They didn’t even have passports, Narita thought with a shudder. They spoke, as though from experience, of the nasty officers behind the glass windows of various embassies their aunts and uncles had been to, in the perennial quest for work overseas. Any kind of work: one could support a whole family by driving a truck, mopping floors. If you want a visa, never wear a red blouse, they would hector one another. Wear blue instead. Red is painful to the eye—it means Denied! And never, ever wear perfume.

They studied in chorus, learning their notes by rote. Taking breaks, they’d extricate high school boyfriend photos from their wallets and pass them around, pretending not to brag.

Drained, she let them chatter about her ears. She lied; they were so gullible. She told them she was a schoolteacher in a graduate course, adding five years to her age. She was their ate, their big sister, plain in her too-large T-shirts, hair cropped and frizzing past her ears. They must have felt sorry for her: girls would pour out their secrets to those who posed no threat. In the beginning, she couldn’t speak Tagalog too well, which heightened their pity, though she heard them giggling, in the next room, about the Bisaya spinster who shared their lives.

Her landlady slept with her husband beneath the stairs. They were both clerks. A four-year-old boy lay between them. The adolescent son took a cot that in the daytime folded up against the kitchen wall. There were three other children who every night chose a spot on the living room floor beside the maid. That maid—even in that cramped misery, there was someone whose status was lower. In the other bedroom on the second floor were four other students. Eight persons above, eight below. That was her Manila.

Insomniac, she would feel her way down the pitch darkness of the staircase, wondering where the children were sleeping this time, trying to detect, through some primordial radar, the twin lumps on the linoleum breathing heavily and steadily like drugged animals. The bathroom light, when she switched it on, was yellow and cruel, the bulb naked—the kind glimpsed in the windows of one-room nipa shacks. It awakened the sleepers, all of them stirring, blinking, resentful. But the bed-spacers put food on their table, and so they could not complain.

She hated those midnight trips. She couldn’t help them. Her bladder had a mind of its own, screaming for attention as soon as the whole house had settled down, as awful as in the first months of her pregnancy. The ghost of Naia lingered in her pouches and tubes. Childbirth had damaged her somehow, permanently.

The bathroom—she thought of it as a latrine. A shower fixture and a faucet sprouted from one tiled wall. A piece of looped wire fixed the rotting door in place. With the door shut, the room was so cramped she could not wash without water raining onto the porcelain seat. The toilet wouldn’t flush. Bathwater was rationed to one pail per person. A strange odor seeped through the drainpipes and pervaded the kitchen. It wasn’t fecal, or ammoniac. It was the smell of fungus on a corn cob. It was the smell of yeast, of perverse growth.

She felt constipated all the time, stoppered up and bloated with cheap cafeteria food. A lump of meat, a cup of rice, a few spoonfuls of limp gray plant matter. The food gleamed in a requisite slick of flavored oil. No matter what it was called, it tasted the same.

She thought she might walk the campus after class, to shed weight, purposely choosing the darkened paths, her sneakers squelching on the damp mat of flame tree flowers, eyes dully seeking out pinpoints of lights in the foliage where fireflies survived. She marched to the raunchy creaking of bullfrogs. In the monsoon rains of July and August, stretches of the campus grounds turned into shallow ponds. September came, and with the rains came the chilling drafts. She was a dumpy little figure stealing through the dark, stopping at the library some nights to stare, dully, at the students who tripped blithely down the concrete steps to drive off in late-model cars.

THE first year alone would be the hardest, her father had said. But it would be the trial from which you emerged the stronger.

She found she didn’t care. Time carried her along, from one classroom to the next, from rented bed to rented bed. The following semester, she found another boardinghouse, along the road to one of the business districts, in a tenement of concrete occupying half a block. The food, served in the kitchen on the first floor, was still awful, but by then she had discovered the benefits of starvation.

Her housemates went to the nearby Catholic women’s college: they spoke the Tagalog-English patois in that chiming, half-singing fashion of Manila’s private school girls, clumping up and down the narrow metal staircases in their white-and-green uniforms, hugging books to their chests with bony arms. She listened to their speech and copied it, knowing a proper disguise would be her ticket out. The colegialas regarded her in puzzlement, then probed in their artful, delicate way. Who was her father? What did her mother do? Had she lived in the States? What was the reason for the slight but unmistakable American accent? “I have a tita in the States, too,” one of them might volunteer, in condescension. Still, they kept her at arm’s length. They knew all too well of Daly City, Venice Beach, various communities on the West Coast overrun by Filipinos of the totally wrong sort. Anyone could pick up an American accent these days.

They belonged to an exclusive club, these girls—outsiders banned or simply ignored. Four of the housemates wore braces—not the disfiguring metal bridles that the occasional kid in Sweethaven had worn, but expensive ornaments sported with pride. The brackets on each tooth were jeweled in pink and amethyst, so that whenever they smiled, the wearers appeared to have masticated flecks of their own gums loose. They never ate. They would stare in longing at the plates of macaroni and cheese congealing on the kitchen Formica, then sniff delicately and, stomachs rumbling, ascend to their rooms. She supposed it was too much of a bother to pick flecks of food out of their braces. As she studied their speech, she copied their diets. Her hips shrank. No one could tell, by looking at her, that she’d ever borne a child. The stretch marks on her belly, smooth white and gray waves that she idly passed her palm over at night, were invisible beneath her jeans. As the fat leached out of her, so did the shame.

ONE DAY she answered an advertisement in a newspaper, and found herself, after a long and dusty jeepney ride, in a part of the city where container vans rumbled ceaselessly through the narrow streets and hawkers sold cheap goods—stuffed toys, fishing rods, cassette tapes and clothing, all copied from some designer ideal. She entered a long, low-ceilinged room of arctic temperature, and the first thing she saw were the computers. She had never seen so many of them at one time; she counted twenty before giving up; each topped a desk at which a nondescript person of advanced years tapped away. She had never seen an office so messy—piles of papers on each desk, the waste bins overflowing with more paper; long paper ribbons emerging from a fax machine as she stood there. Two televisions blared overhead. She had no idea TVs were allowed in a workplace. A doughy, effeminate man in a black silk shirt plowed into her and went on without an apology, in one hand, a wine bottle; in the other, a gaily wrapped present that drew her hungry eye. She followed the man’s progress over to a room at the far end of this huge communal office, a room with an outsize viewing window through which she could see all that took place. At a desk sat a wizened lady of clear importance, her makeup dramatic, her waved and layered hair carefully lacquered into place. As the man approached her with a skip and a cry, the lady nodded imperiously, and was greeted, and she rose to receive her present and her bottle of wine. In that moment, Narita resolved to take for herself whatever it was this personage had for her to deserve such wonderful gifts, borne with such arrogance. Over the din of activity she caught the rise and fall of their voices, their dah-lings and their mahals, and to her longing ears, filled for the most part by the staccato vulgarity of street Tagalog, they sounded impossibly posh. Someone, somewhere in the vast room, was bellowing about a lost dummy. The televisions blared on. She stood there, unnoticed, exactly where the receptionist had bidden her, and after a while, the person for whom she had been told to wait arrived, an oily, impatient old man, his sports shirt faded, the stench of cigarette smoke attending his person. He sat her down at an empty desk and shoved a piece of paper at her.

“Edit this,” he commanded.

Narita turned confused and outraged eyes up at him.

“I need some paper, sir,” she stammered. “To write on.”

“What kind of school did you go to? Didn’t they teach you proofreaders’ marks?”

“I’ll rewrite the article on the back,” she said. She rummaged uneasily in her shabby denim shoulder bag. She needed a pen, a good one.

“Here,” the man said, drawing his own fountain pen from the collar of his shirt. “A tip, Miss Beautiful, from the news editor, yours truly. In this profession, you don’t get anywhere by taking your bloody time.”

She nodded, wondering how she was supposed to feel at the name he had called her. He didn’t seem unkind, just old and overworked, his skin blackened as she imagined a fish might look strung up over smoking twigs for three days. Her fingers began to shake with anticipation at the thought of taking a test, under time pressure, a test that required no academic reading, no wretched theory, surely only a matter of putting in a comma here, a matching word there. She scanned the piece of typescript the news editor had handed her. It was an excruciating little piece about the darling buds of May, though the May they knew in Manila was a month of deluges and drought. Someone had headed it “Lifestyle/Sir Ivan Borja’s Column for Sunday.” She had never seen such awful English in her life. She scribbled and scribbled, lost in the effortless joy of asserting her knowledge. This was fun. She had never trained for anything like this. Her mind drifted to Antonia; it was like the stories they had written years and years ago, adopting the voice of some lovelorn small-town adolescent swain. She chuckled, the dull resentment lifting for the first time in months, and before she knew it the piece was done. She looked up gaily to find the news editor assessing her with his sharp, cynical old eyes, eyes that flickered rapidly over the piece she had rewritten.

“Bachelor’s degree? Sweethaven U?” he queried.

She nodded. No use in telling him she was a dropout.

“A throwback you are, Miss Pastor. A throwback to the grand old days of letters.” As she shook his tobacco-stained hand, she could barely believe what was happening. She was hired. Her job was to correct the galley proofs that came fluttering, loose-edged, from the paste-up department, where the aging personnel eyed any computer with derision. In addition, she would be on call to rewrite the Lifestyle columns—but gently, lest she offend their authors. She would work from twelve to seven, six days a week, minimum wage, to start the following day—she need never see the inside of a classroom again. Her heart leapt. She was through with bed-spacing. She would get her own room in a boardinghouse. The humiliating monthly audits of her family were over. She glanced around, at the novel new Macs and their deferential handlers, and every cell in her body crackled with energy. She listened in a daze as the lonely old news editor with the mannered speech gleefully voiced his congratulations, and then issued her a series of half-joking warnings about the newspaper life. But she didn’t understand. She was part of a word factory at long last, the culmination of her dreams, where academic degrees didn’t matter, where the only things that counted were language and style and wit. She didn’t care how many hours she worked without overtime pay, how many weekends she would have to give up from now on, how overstaffed the paper claimed to be, how little room for advancement there truly was. At that very moment she didn’t care how they bled her. No matter how hard she labored, she was certain her passion for stories could never wane.

IN THE years that followed she fought the city, the traffic, the three-hour commutes, the men whose eyes consumed her body on the street, the paychecks that came late, the newspapers that closed and reopened at the end of every election. She had no notion of goals, of graduation, of commencement, no way of grading herself, no common standard against which her life could be measured. The vocabulary of achievement, which she’d grown up with, lapsed into irrelevance.

It was lonely. For the first time she did not have a younger, clingy person at her side, to yank along, to serve as sounding board for her thoughts. Her sister didn’t need her. Antonia was independent now. She had taken on the burden of caring for Naia with a sigh of resignation, and this martyrdom was a precious victory in the war for Luth’s grace.

Ten years. Ten years of struggling for her space; of rented beds, rooming houses, up-and-downs shared with grudging officemates, studio flats with the single window kept shuttered against the fumes and dust of the city. There was the apartment in Cubao, a few steps away from a major jeepney route, where water flowed from the taps for only a couple of hours each evening, after the landlord had tripped the booster pump, noisily sucking other households’ water supplies through the surrounding network of pipes.

One year the pump drew nothing. In a bucket, she collected rain streaming down from the eaves, fishing out leaves and hunks of rotting iron with her hands. She bathed with Eskinol and a face towel, washing her hair with rainwater that she boiled in the bucket, using a plastic heating coil. A rash of pimples erupted over her arms and back. Fearing an uprising from his tenants, the landlord uncapped the rusted artesian well that stood in one corner of the property. She cooked, brushed her teeth, like the rest of her neighbors, with water that had come up through depths of rain-soaked clay. It was the color of diluted termite spray. The fact that it was contaminated—cracked sewer pipes and open-pit toilets leaking their effluents into the earth—did not hit home until the morning she awakened and found herself struggling for breath. A thick wad blocked the back of her throat. She hacked it loose and spat. It sprang to the floorboards and writhed, blindly—rubbery and dark pink, alive. She screamed, once in terror, then a second time, out of despair. But there was no one to hear. And so she sobbed, wanting to plunge a knife down her throat and scrape herself inside out. After a while she stopped crying and sat, knees drawn up beneath her chin, afraid even to breathe. There was no point in moving house; Manila pulsed, blind, around and in her.