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  “This is my son,” Lena says. “Moses, the child of my laundrywoman. She died a few months ago, hardly more than a girl herself. Didn’t wake up one morning. We never knew the father. Probably one of the farmhands. The boy is mine now. His mother gave him another name, a particularly silly one, and I changed it. Moses is rather fitting, isn’t it?”

  The maid stands behind them, nodding at Moses. “Tell Mama,” the maid says. “Come on. Tell her.”

  “I love you,” Moses mumbles.

  “What silly things did they teach you? I didn’t hear. Again.”

  “I love you,” Moses says.

  “What?” Lena says. “Island view? What a stupid thing for you to learn.” The maid looks disappointed. “Oof! I think you need to be changed. Go back to yaya.” Lena passes Moses to the maid, who takes him back into the house.

  “That boy brings me a joy I never thought possible. All my life I was too busy taking care of Papa, pushing him in his wheelchair. Though there isn’t anything wrong with taking pride in having your father be proud of you. Papa died five years ago, Mama . . . what’s it been? The cancer took her nearly a decade already. Narcisito’s been gone three years this Christmas. And Crispin, well, you know when that happened. So why can’t I have my own time now? Moses is my baby boy. All that we have left here in Swanee will be his. Who’ll contest it? Crispin’s daughter probably won’t. Dulcinea has her own life. Sometimes I wonder if she even remembers that the man who raised her isn’t her real father. Well, I suppose he actually is. The year her mother was stabbed, I thought of attending the wake. But I had to respect my brother’s decisions . . .”

  Lena stops, surprised, only now noticing our tender protagonist’s expression. “What?” she says. “Didn’t you know? I thought it was the worst-kept secret.”

  *

  I graduated from being a provincial high school kid into the heady lifestyle of a college student in cosmopolitan Manila. I lived from weekend to weekend, party to party, a time in my life now gathered in my head like a highlight reel. At my first party: San Miguel Beer, the frustrated lullabies of Kurt Cobain, a cool night sky over Quezon City, and everyone later raising their bottles to shout along to the lyrics of The Dawn’s “Iisang Bangka Tayo.” I met my first big-city girl worth falling head over heels for: bright-eyed Anais, flirting with me all night, debating José Cuervo Gold versus Silver, then asking for a ride home. I drove slowly and we spoke about graphic novels, about which teachers we’d gotten for Theology 101, about the Impressionists. She seemed thoroughly impressed that I knew my Manet from my Monet. After dropping her off, I’d sped down Edsa in my lowered Corolla, windows down, stereo blasting, drunk on life as only a teen can be, screaming and almost crying for unaccountable, unforgettable joy. I’d fallen down the precipice of love. Three months later: the breakup by phone. You’re too clingy, she said. I want to be free, she said. I don’t want to “mollycoddle” you, she said. I didn’t know what the word meant, but had stalled as I brought the cordless phone to the study to look it up. Then I cried and made it worse. Dumped, I moped through days, then weeks, then finally two months passed. Resilient and young, I had gotten over her.

  Then came her quiet, quivering phone call. I wish I could remember—for the sake of writing honestly, for the sake of understanding our humanity—the words she told me. I’m pregnant, I assume now, is what they were. I’d like to think I immediately gave her the right response. I’d like to think that even at that young age, I was heroic.

  I guess I asked Anais what she wanted to do. I imagine she said, incredulous at my question, that she would see things through. Of these, my words, I’m almost certain: I want to do the right thing. Of these, her words, I’m sure: We’ll see.

  4

  In the taxi on the way to the Bacolod airport, I take from my hand-carry Crispin’s photo album. The covers wrapped in vinyl crinkle and smell of old plastic. I leaf through it: a hand-tinted print of a toddler Crispin beside his father, both saluting while wearing identical military dress uniforms; an overexposed snapshot of Crispin as a bearded young man, in fatigues and holding a Kalashnikov as if it were a guitar, behind him a mountain furred in green; a Polaroid of a Cinco Bravos “Occurrence,” Miggy Jones-Matute and Danilo de Borja dressed in loincloths in the foreground, Crispin in a tiki shirt between the spectacled Marcel Avellaneda and the tiny Mutya Dimatahimik, his arms draped around both their shoulders. There are more family photos: fourteen-year-old Lena doing a cartwheel, her long red skirt blooming toward the sky; nine-year-old Narcisito dressed like Sherlock Holmes, blowing bubbles in a pipe; Junior and Leonora on the campaign trail, farmer hats in bright violet, arms around each other in front of an old Baldwin locomotive engine; Crispin among his Lupas cousins at some reunion in a seaside resort (one cousin wears a T-shirt with Junior’s face above a slogan: I REELECT MY SALVADOR). There is also a color photo of a pretty girl, probably three years old, with hazel eyes and amber hair. It is un-dated, but already fading.

  *

  Dulcé and Jacob circled, full tilt, around the pool. Jacob ran like his pants were on fire. Dulcé was a blur of gangly limbs and golden locks. She pointed to the shed where Gardener kept his tools. “In there,” she whispered, “but make sure they see us.”

  Jacob couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you serious?”

  Dulcé nodded. “I have a plan.”

  The pair went inside the dark shed. Dulcé found some rope and tied it to the doorknob. She unraveled the rope to the far end of the room, where she sat in the corner.

  “Okay,” Dulcé said. “I’ll stay in here with this. You step out and let them see you.”

  “Wha—? Me? You’re crazy, Dul!”

  “I’m older than you by a month, so it should be you. Besides, like you said the other day: I’m just a girl.”

  “But—but—but,” Jacob stammered, “I didn’t mean it. And we’ll be trapped in here with them.”

  Dulcé looked him in the eye. “Trust me,” she said.

  Jacob stepped out just as the dwendes were arriving in the garden. They were looking around, a couple of them even admiring the flowers. Jacob thought: This is a bad idea! But Dulcé had gotten them out of so many scrapes before, Jacob couldn’t help but trust her. “Hey!” Jacob shouted. “Hey you silly dwarves! Here we are!”

  The dwendes turned, clapped happily again, bared their ice pick–like teeth, and skipped toward the shed. Jacob ran inside and crouched beside Dulcé.

  “Ready?” Dulcé whispered. They waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally six pairs of orange eyes entered the darkness of the shed. They floated, sliding sideways, tilting up, glancing down. Finally, one pair zeroed in on the kids. A ghastly chuckle cut through the air. All six pairs of orange eyes turned red and were suddenly looking straight at them.

  —from QC Nights, Book Two of Crispin Salvador’s Kaputol trilogy

  *

  “Say it’s not yours,” Grapes said. “How do you know it’s yours?”

  “I know.”

  “How can you know? Maybe she has a guapo driver or houseboy?”

  “Grapes. Please. I just know.”

  “You know because she’s your all-all-all right now. What happens when she’s not your all-all-all anymore?”

  “You and Granma taught me right from wrong.”

  Grapes sat slouched at the desk he kept in his inner sanctum, their cavernous walk-in closet. One cabinet was wide open and the shirts and pants were pushed aside to reveal a wall rack of pistols. Grapes’s quiet force was more searing than Granma’s angry shouts. She sat now, hoarse, outside in the bedroom.

  “You’re upsetting your grandmother. She’s had a brandy. You know that’s not good.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Trust us. Don’t sacrifice your youth.”

  “I do trust you. That’s the thing. But if I have to leave home and get a job, I will.”

  “Why must you always be the selfish one?”

  “What’s your
definition of selfish? I’m willing to give up everything. So that child can have a proper life.”

  Grapes just shook his head and sighed again. “You’re a freshman,” he said.

  “I’ll leave if I have to.”

  “You’re seventeen years old.”

  “If I’m man enough to make a baby, then I should be man enough to raise a baby.” I’d heard that in the movie Boyz n the Hood.

  “Why don’t you go to your room and think it through?”

  “I have.”

  “Think it through some more.”

  *

  I still remember my first contact with Crispin Salvador. “One Stone for Two Birds” was assigned to me by the passionately stolid Mrs. Lumbera during my junior year at Ateneo. Crispin’s words came as faded blue ink on pulpy mimeographed paper. We’d read works like Nick Joaquin’s Mayday Eve, Gregorio Brillantes’s Flood in Tarlac, and Paz Marquez Benitez’s seminal Dead Stars. But Crispin’s short story impressed me more than any other.

  In it, the young well-to-do protagonist named, coincidentally, Miguel, stumbles upon a stranger brutally stabbed in a dark alley. Miguel comforts the dying man, “who cradles his entrails as if they were the entirety of his life lived previous to this scene in chiaroscuro.” The man wears a fedora in a “puta red” felt and has carefully taken it off and placed it on an empty cardboard box, so that it won’t be “soiled with blood’s darker shades.”

  “These men,” Crispin writes, “were a pair wrought together by the mischief of circumstance, both equally unfortunate in a cold alley in Tondo on a dark evening in February, their embrace possessing the urgency of an unconsummated love instantly made possible in a final night fading to light.” The true drama of this story comes later, however, when the victim draws his last breath just as the police arrive to mistake Miguel for the murderer. “Would this fledgling man take on the responsibility thrust suddenly into his hands? Or would he flee?”

  *

  Lena refused to tell him anything more and immediately asked him to leave. Our discombobulated protagonist caught the last flight to Manila from Bacolod.

  He looks out the window. The Airbus escapes the earth and flies over the intensifying blue. The plane’s shadow is like a water-skier on the meniscus of the unknown. Our protagonist tightens his grip on his armrests. He pulls down the window shade and his body soon relaxes.

  He is swimming to the sidewalk and swallows a mouthful of water. It is warm, like phlegm. Terror caresses his insides. He can see the distant sidewalk, the Lexus’s headlights crossing the water and touching it, as if taunting him. He can see the night sky glow red, then blue, then yellow. Stars are falling. His body, vertical, his legs, flailing for the ground that should be there. He thrashes his arms above him, as if having just walked through a spider’s web. His fingers reach through the surface. For an instant he feels air. But his body won’t let him breathe. His epiglottis has seized. Life is being strangled by its very vessel. He loses consciousness and sees himself floating, his posture peaceful, curved like a closing hand. His expression, however, resembles that of a man who has just been cheated.

  He awakens, falling into panic, when he feels the plane pitching gently forward on its descent. I never—he thinks—remember my dreams.

  At the domestic terminal the sky is dimming. Outside the airport, he feels strange. Naked. He is conscious of his movements. They do not seem to be his own. He takes a taxi to Makati. Sits in gridlock like a patient waiting his turn for the dentist. The skyscrapers approach slowly from the darkening horizon, the white windows flickering on one by one, here then there. On the sidewalk, commuters wave at jeepneys, construction workers kid with children they’ve enlisted for help. Between the convoluted lines of cars, vendors hawk newspapers or cigarettes or candy, urchins sell sampaguita flowers strung on dental floss. The diorama always saddens him, the way a habitually empty restaurant does as you walk by and peer in to see the family proprietors sitting expectantly in their uniforms.

  Turn there, he tells the driver suddenly. They make a hairpin turn and go down a quiet street lined with high barbed-wired walls. Stop here, he tells the driver gently. Then he hands him fifty pesos. The driver smiles, almost apologetically, and exits the taxi. Our pensive protagonist sits in the backseat and studies the whitewashed property wall. He watches the big metal gate as if he has X-ray vision and can see the house beyond. Did they make the wall higher? He can just see the top of the tree where she used to climb when she was four years old, with him reaching up to hover his hands around her in case her grip slipped. When did they paint the gate orange? I think they did make the wall higher. Do they even still live here?

  The boy thinks of Grapes. Everything to do with fatherhood he learned from him. The boy thinks of Crispin. Did he ever even mention his daughter?

  He watches the wall as if old home movies are being projected on it. He hopes the gate will swing open suddenly. What if it actually does? What would he do?

  The taxi driver walks to the wall and puts his face to it. He looks like a man waiting for the firing squad. A dark stain spreads onto the ground between his feet. It’s as if his shadow were melting. The driver looks up to the sky in gratitude. The gate of the property opens. The guard peeps out. The boy remembers him. The taxi driver, skipping as he zips up his pants, runs back to the car. They zoom away.

  *

  As soon as I leave the plane and walk out of the airport, I get this feeling like I’m being watched. There are only faces in the crowd, like a field of flowers, if flowers could frown and spit and look at their watches.

  I gesture at cabs. The feeling persists. I rush into the first taxi that stops. Out the back window, I see cars lining up slowly then peeling quickly away from the curb to follow us down the street.

  On the way to my hotel in Makati, gridlock gnarls us to snail-mail pace. It’s like waiting for your turn at the dentist. Across the street, a bee mascot paces and waves in front of the Jollibee hamburger outlet. Commuters flap their hands at unslowing jeepneys. On the sidewalk, a pair of boys crack the top pavement with chisels and hammers. Nearby, a sign says SLOW MEN AT WORK. Workers, in hard hats and flip-flops worn paper-thin, gossip by the cart of a fish-ball vendor, smoking cigarettes in a circle. A dusty jackhammer waits beside a gaping pit. One worker, a fat one in a holey Armani Exchange T-shirt, shouts to the children and points to a fresh spot on the pavement. The boys waggle their eyebrows. One boy smiles and gives a thumbs-up. The construction worker waddles over and places his yellow hard hat on the kid’s head. To the other child, he holds out his palm, soliciting a high five, unsuccessfully.

  Vendors thread through the long parade of entrafficked vehicles. They carry boxes of loose cigarettes and candy. A couple of them carry newspapers, like waiters with armloads of dishes. There is news for every taste: the Sun, Times, Gazette, TeenBeat, Abante, Bulgar.

  One paper declares: “Exclusive pics! Changcos’ victory party. Maid-killers celebrate!”

  Another offers: “Sucked up by the Pasig!” I can just read the print of the lede: “Young Mariano Bakakon, 28, expert swimmer from Barangay Ilog, met his death in the Pasig River yesterday after floods in surrounding areas concealed open manholes, one of which he fell into. Bakakon saved himself but later succumbed to exposure to pollutants.” Included is a small picture of a corpse on a hospital bed. Beside it, a photo of an uncovered manhole—a common sight in a city where the covers are stolen and sold for scrap.

  My eyes alight on the garish cover of Bulgar: the compulsory image of a half-naked buxom girl. It’s the latest artista to be seen every where: Vita Nova. She throbs on the page. The holes of her tiny torn T-shirt strategically display her heaving cleavage and sucked-in stomach—she’s dressed like a rape victim, though her coquettishness is unflappable, as if her sole means of power. She has struck the pose of the latest dance craze, the Mr. Sexy Sexy: back arched to thrust out her rump, hands on springy knees, face held up to smile and blow kisses. A large crucifix pendant hangs around
her neck. Nestled blissfully in her rolling valley, Christ holds out his arms to skim his fingertips on her breasts and lolls his head in rapture.

  The taxi driver makes a hairpin left turn off the main road. I get nervous. We drive to a quiet place and the car stops. The driver smiles, almost apologetically, and exits the car without a word. He dallies around the street. He stands at a whitewashed wall, as if before a firing squad. A dark stain appears on the wall in front of him. It spreads onto the ground between his feet. It’s as if his shadow were melting in the heat. The driver looks at the sky. The orange gate of the property opens and a guard peeps out. The taxi driver runs to the car, zipping up his fly. We drive off. He turns around to look at me.

  “Is something wrong?” he says.

  “Of course not.”

  “But you are . . . um . . . you want tissue?” he says, kindly. “How ’bout radio?” He turns up the volume.

  The announcer asks Bobby for a few statements and an American voice replies, barely able to speak from excitement.

  “. . . all wonderful! . . . time that the fucking U.S. got their heads kicked in . . .” He has an aging Brooklyn accent. “. . . time to finish off the U.S. once and for all . . .”