Smaller and Smaller Circles (21 page)

 

 

I can feel so many eyes

 

watching me

 

watching

 

me

 

 

 

 

 

“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

Luke 2:19

34

Edith Solis had
given birth to Noel under difficult circumstances, to say the least.

She had been fifteen, working on weekdays at a tiny
carinderia
in Krus na Ligas. The father had been a newspaper delivery boy, all of sixteen years old. He would come to the food stall on a beat-up red bike, a wad of folded bills hooked around the middle finger of his right hand.

Edith was pretty then, small and brown and neat, with large eyes and straight, black hair. The newspaper boy was tall for his age, lean, all long legs and fingers. He had a ready smile, liked to flirt with the
carinderia
girls.

“Next time I come, I'll buy all your leftover food,” he would say. “That way you can close early and we can all see a movie.” And while the other girls would titter and laugh, Edith would look away, conscious that the young boy's eyes were on her.

Joel. Edith remembers his name, even though it has been thirteen years since those hot and sweaty nights in his cramped shanty home, rushing breathless through sex before his mother or brothers came back from wherever it was they had gone to in the morning. Fast and furious through something she thought was love.

Her mother had smacked her hard across the cheek when she told her she was pregnant. Edith never went back. Nothing really to go back home to, no younger brothers or sisters for whom she might have stayed, just a mother either needling her constantly for her wages or passed out drunk on a tiny cot that served for a bed.

Edith stayed with a succession of friends, finding odd jobs to earn a meager living: tending a fish stall at the wet market, cleaning the yard at a local day-care center, washing clothes for a UP professor's family.

She worked until she got too big with Joel's baby, and then in her eighth month, when she was down to her last two hundred pesos, a surge of blood and water alerted her that the child was coming as she walked bareheaded in the hot sun along Don Mariano Marcos Avenue.

Someone could have made a movie out of it
, she would joke much later, after the long, excruciating labor at a community hospital where she lost so much blood, where the baby came out and did not breathe for several minutes. They put him in her arms and gently told her to say goodbye, but she refused. She held him and talked to him, all but willed him to come back to life.

She didn't want to name him after the father who disappeared even before she knew she was pregnant. When she first saw her son, she cried, in anguish that he could be dead, in joy that he was so well formed and perfect for such a tiny, tiny thing.

From me
, she whispered to herself in awe at that moment.
He came from me.

After a few years, all these things became just a memory, something interesting to tell Noel when he was big enough to understand. The first years were difficult ones. One infection after another, first the ears, then the throat, then the lungs.
She queued up—in burning sun and pouring rain—for the largesse of politicians, for the mercy of the Church, for handouts from private charities and public agencies. She charmed her way back into the odd jobs she used to do, and when the charm failed, she begged in the streets for food, for loose change. No sacrifice was too big, no obstacle too great, because she was determined to feed, clothe, obtain medical attention for him.

He didn't crawl until he was over a year old, didn't talk till he was almost three. Thin arms and legs, the head just a little too big for the body, large, serious eyes like her own. She thought he would die before he was five. Nights awake, praying, weeping, hoping the neighbors wouldn't complain about his constant wailing.

And then somehow it all became right in his sixth year. He filled out, grew taller. He began to play like normal children, to run and shout and get into scrapes like the rest of the neighborhood boys.

Edith found work as a seamstress, realized soon afterward that it was something she could do well.

The boy was not smart and did not do very well in school. But he was observant, learned practical skills quickly. It pleased her that when she came home at night tired and hungry, she could ask him to perform simple chores. Wash the dishes. Cook rice. Fetch water. He was a good boy.

He came from me.

And then he was gone.

Today she is hanging the clothes out to dry on a line already sagging with other people's washing. No matter. She has known her neighbors for years, and they know what belongs to whom.

It has been several months since he disappeared, but she still washes the boy's clothes. The whites need special attention, underwear and school uniforms. She washes them and soaks them in bleach every once in a while, so they don't develop yellow spots in the box where she keeps them.

She does not hear the two men coming until they are right behind her. When they say her name, she almost jumps.

She is about to ask them what they want, but something in their faces stops her cold.

The laundry basin, still half-full of wet clothes, slips from her grasp.

No. Don't tell me. Don't tell me.

The men came
to tell Binang today, after more than five months.

Since they left over an hour ago she has been sitting in the half-light, staring down into a small oval mirror perched on what passes for a windowsill.

She is looking at the face in the mirror. She sees an old woman. Lined face. Thin, dry lips. Tight, iron-grey curls.

Binang gave birth to her sixth child late in life, when she was forty-two. She had not thought she would ever have another
one; the first five came in rapid succession, beginning when she was eighteen. It was a hard life, made more difficult by a husband who worked as a plumber only when he was sober. Which was rarely.

Binang looks in the mirror, absentmindedly twirling a strand of hair around a finger, and wonders where her young self went. Fifty-four. How many times in the last two decades had she doubted that she would make it this far? So many possibilities. An accident while crossing the highway after years of dodging murderous passenger jeepneys. A fire sweeping through the neighborhood, densely packed with wooden shanties.

Or just plain wearing away and giving up, the likeliest possibility of the lot.

When she learned that she was pregnant with Lino, she was filled with a kind of fury she thought she would never feel again.
Why, why, why? I'm too old. I'm too tired.

Damn Edong. Coming home drunk that New Year's Eve twelve years ago, putting his arms around her and grinning with his grey lips and stained teeth. How she hated him when he came near her like that, reeking of beer and gin, cigarettes and old sweat.

She had tried to push him away, and that always made him angry. The first few times she said no, he merely laughed and persisted in his playful advances. One too many times, though, and he changed. Binang saw his whole aspect transformed, as though he was becoming someone else right in front of her eyes.

He drew himself up to his full height, a good five inches taller than her. His shoulders rose, and he stood with his feet planted firmly apart. The smile disappeared; the eyes grew cold. And when he came for her, there was no saying no.

Her friends used to tell her it wasn't rape if the man was your husband. She didn't say anything, but inside she seethed; she wanted to take a knife to their faces.

When Lino was born, Binang sent him off almost immediately to be raised by her eldest daughter, who was married and had a child of her own.

“It's your turn, all of you,” she said, cold and resentful. “I've served you many years. It's time you started taking care of each other.”

Edong up and died not long after, bad gin taking its toll on his liver.

The boy grew up not far from his mother's home, seeing her as a sullen, hostile old woman who for as long as he could remember seemed to have an especial dislike for him.

She never hit or scolded him. Whenever she saw him, however, a look of intense displeasure would spread over her face, as though she had just had a mouthful of bitter medicine. If he happened to be eating a meal at her home, she would set the old tin plate that held his food in front of him with a clatter. She spoke to him only when ordering him to be quiet, to behave or to run an errand.

When he was about six, he came to see Binang with his sister Susing and her two children—his nephews, although they were about his age. He saw, as he had seen many times before, how Binang doted on the two other boys. How she smiled and cooed to them in a way she never did with him.

When Binang went behind the frayed curtain into the shanty's kitchen to prepare a snack for them, Lino blurted out to his sister: “
Lola
doesn't like me.”

Susing glared at him. “Be quiet.”

“It's true.
Lola
doesn't like me.”

Alone in the dark, tiny kitchen, Binang began to cry.

That was six years ago.

Where did all that time go, and what did she do with it? Today, it dawns on Binang that her youngest son died not knowing who his real mother was. Nobody had ever bothered to tell him.

On afternoons when
she has no washing to do, Lolita Bansuy sells
maruya
and
turon
to help make ends meet. They sell very well; Lolit is a good cook. Her snacks are usually gone just two or three hours after she sets out to sell them. During rainy weather she sells
ginataang mais
,
kernels of corn boiled in sweetened coconut milk, or
goto
,
rice porridge made with the stock of beef and tripe and spiced with garlic and ginger, prepacked in single-serve plastic bags.

Almost everyone in the cluster of shanties behind the school knows Lolit. She is a short, chubby, jovial woman who has a constant smile on her face. And although she is widely acknowledged to be a busybody, few people can resist her good-natured jibes and infectious laugh.

Poor, homely, working as an itinerant laundrywoman, living from hand to mouth, Lolit has an extraordinary talent for happiness.

The only thorn in her side was her boy. Thirteen-year-old Vicente—Enteng for short—went around with a rough, glue-sniffing crowd of mostly older boys; he often acted as their lookout during burglaries, in exchange for a meager cut of the takings.

He had grown, in the space of a few years, from a quiet and well-behaved child to a tough, sour-faced, belligerent ruffian. Money in his pocket, speech peppered with obscenities. Swaggering through the neighborhood like a big tough man, sneering at adults who warned him to stay away from their own children.

Lolit had tried to talk to him, cajoled, scolded; the boy would merely stare out the window, then hurry out of the shack when she was done, ready for whatever thievery or mischief his mates would propose that day.

She would be left alone then, wondering if the change in her
son was because he missed his father. Jun died when Enteng was nine, a good man defeated by a weak constitution and a bout with pneumonia following weeks of back-breaking work in the new wet market along the highway. The construction crew, most of them paid less than the minimum daily wage, had to rush to finish the structure; the mayor wanted it completed before the elections. Enteng had loved his father, clung to his hand when he picked him up from school, hung on his every word.

The boy had watched Jun suffer, long nights when the man would alternately shiver from chills and sweat from fever. Not enough money to get him to a hospital or give him all the medication he needed, even though Lolit took in even more washing, nearly running her own health into the ground.

Enteng watched his father die while Lolit was doing some other family's laundry in a subdivision further down the highway. Saw the light go out of his eyes, the gentle face go slack.

The boy knew better than to telephone her employer's house. They would need whatever money they could scrape together for his father's funeral.

Unafraid, he crept into the cot beside the dead man. Held his father's limp hand in his own small one. Waited patiently for several hours in this position. Finally fell asleep, as he had so often done before, resting his head against his father's arm. That was how his mother found them.

Afterward Lolit would see Enteng's eyes following other boys his age, walking with their fathers to familiar places: the waiting shed near the overpass, where Jun used to buy his cigarettes. The tricycle stand near the school, where he would wait for his son after class. The Jollibee in Fairview, where he would bring his small family once every few months for a Sunday burger-and-fries treat.

She had tried to keep that going, but of course it was never the same. There would always be someone missing, someone who might have been sitting across the table from them, eating a regular Yumburger, if things had been different.

Such sadness and longing in the boy's eyes, but he never said a word.

Then, a year later, a purse snatching, his first run-in with the police. Witnesses said he didn't do it; the older boy who did had passed the purse on to him and dissolved into the noontime crowd at the junction of Tandang Sora and the highway.