The Umbrella Country Read online

  Praise for The Umbrella Country

  “Bino A. Realuyo proves that the telling of a novelist’s heart and country is contained in the smallest movement of moments. Word upon lyrical word, his novel is beauty that dwells like a beloved’s lingering ache, a beloved’s familiar voice. Realuyo’s song page after page.”

  —LOIS ANN YAMANAKA

  Winner of the Lannan Award

  Author of Blu’s Hanging

  “Heartbreaking … Poet Realuyo assembles a powerful array of characters for this coming of age novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1999 by Alvin A. Realuyo

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  “Miss Unibers” appeared in Special Edition Press: The Philippine American Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4, Fall 1994.

  “States of Being” appeared in Caliban, Issue 15, 1995.

  “Hallowed Be Thy Name” appeared in The Asian Pacific American

  Journal, vol. 4, no. 4, Fall/Winter 1995.

  “Querida Means ‘Dear’ ” appeared in Manoa: Pacific Journal of International Literature, Winter 1998.

  http://www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Realuyo, Bino A.

  The umbrella country / Bino A. Realuyo.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78157-4

  I. Title.

  IN PROCESS PS3569.E U

  813′.54—dc21 98-11668

  v3.1

  For “Genie” Sintos Almonte

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Gutters of a House

  Miss Unibers

  Hallowed Be Thy Name

  Querida Means “Dear”

  Sangre

  Godmother of Words

  A Company of Rats

  Butterfly Eyes

  States of Being

  Curfew

  Sunrise, Sunset

  Woodside, D’Merica 11377

  Acknowledgments

  A Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  GUTTERS OF A HOUSE

  It was the season of sun.

  I was balancing myself on a foot-wide unfinished concrete-block fence across the street, watching this steady parade of dust, dirt, and people. In the sky were thin, overlapping patterns of yellow against blue, hovering over boys walking barefoot, pushing carts and belching out words in different tunes, a good day for the countless vendors who passed through our street every morning with their livelihoods placed on their heads and shoulders: mothers and daughters with laundry wrapped in huge sheets, older Taho men with thick soybean drinks in big cylinders, newspaper boys. They were so preoccupied that they hardly noticed me, except for this one newspaper boy—Boy Spit—who always and tirelessly gave me his five-second sideways stare and made faces about the Johnson’s Baby Powder collecting thickly around my neck, my protection against sweat and heat, making a V-shape down my chest. Then he would spit so loud and thick, I could only imagine a flood of sickness coming out of his mouth. Watching him, I knew somehow that he and I were one, as much as he despised my powdered neck and I, the thin dark rings of dry sweat around his. I knew I could spit just as loud, just as thick, and just as powerful, so that everybody here, even the hang-around-do-nothing sangganos, would wake up from their drunken stupor.

  I could squat on this fence all day until Mommy noticed me and stuck her head out our window to make her long, spitless whistle. There was always something here to see. At noon, there would be a totally different set of characters, mostly bill collectors wearing their double-knit pants so wide they covered their three-inch-high elevator shoes. We all hid from these evil-worshipping, Brut-smelling pomade men, shutting our windows on them after lunch. Early in the evenings, the food women would pass—dried fish, tinapa, vinegared milkfish, fermented vegetables. Their voices were songs to these dimly lit streets, a reminder that only a few hours after the burst of dark, nobody would be allowed outside.

  “Oy, curfew. Curfew na. Go inside,” mothers would scream out their windows once the sun had gone down. Nobody would tell me what really happened at midnight, some big secret the whole world conspired in. Nobody ever explained why this was so. All I was told—police roamed the streets to catch anyone still outside. The jeepney streets were dead quiet, enveloped in darkness. Something about “Martial Law,” two words everybody used to explain everything. “Oy curfew na.” So we had better stay in bed if we didn’t want to end up in jail, or on the front cover of the Bulletin. All the children would scuttle inside. A series of shouts slowly followed and lights would turn off, in one house after the other, as if it was all planned, as if the houses themselves needed to sleep.

  But they never slept, those houses. Ears, eyes, mouths, always awake, alert, watching everything, anything. Listening.

  Piso. Diario. Piso per bote. Lata.

  The wind brought me Boy Spit’s voice.

  Our house, where everything happened, a house of wooden shingles connected to our neighbors’, ours in the middle of three, with aluminum gutters wrapped around the rim of the roof, like some cheap crown Boy Spit would wear if he joined our Miss Unibers, our house holding on to the others like a close-knit family. The gutters on each house were in different states of rust, bent and tilting on certain areas, marked by holes, holes on all of them, by years of seasonal typhoons. Other houses were connected to each other as well, all of them similar, some of them very old, some new. Only the color and age of the doors set them apart. The wooden doors were the first to go once the flood had sat still for weeks. One could easily tell by looking at the bottom, at the floodline across, the color of mud-softened wood. Most of our neighbors painted their doors immediately after the flood. Our door had the same color for years, a certain shade of brown, like that of a tamarind leaf days before it fell off a twig. Two long rows of houses facing each other created our street, ours to the east, where all the cats gathered, lying in our aluminum gutters to sun themselves.

  They were always up there, those gutters; you wouldn’t notice until you looked closely. That’s why it came as a surprise when one day Daddy Groovie decided that it was time to change them to plastic. Plastic, the way he said that word, so forceful. What’s gotten into him? I could see the question in everybody’s faces. It was one of those rare moments when he actually planned to do something for the house that had anything to do with his construction job. The following morning, they were there: plastic gutters lined up inside our house.

  Plastic. Women always used that word to describe men. Ang plastic-plastic mo, so fake.

  “No more aluminum gutters,” Daddy Groovie exclaimed, his face so dark his teeth gleamed. “Look at this plastic, made in the States yan.” Whenever he said the word States, he would raise his chin. He repeated it many times, staring at the plastic gutters that were just like his name—Groovie—made in the States, a name he had given himself while he was drunk.

  The gutters were long. They would touch our ceiling if I stood them up against the wall of our living room. They looked soft, unlike the aluminum ones, whose edges were as sharp as Gillette’s. I thought I could probably twist the plastic gutters the way I did my rubber slippers until I ripped them in half. They were clear, and I imagined the rain flowing through with everything the cats had left, or perhaps with the cats themselves, as they sat there lazily for days.


  “Ready?” Daddy Groovie asked, as we all waited for his instructions on how to bring the gutters outside. “You take those.” He told Mommy and my godmother, Ninang Rola, to hold the ends of one, while he and I took another.

  Outside, a multitude of eyes were waiting.

  The children of our street. Most of them felt special when they could boast about their houses being painted, their windows being replaced, or their rooftops rebuilt. They would run and tell everybody, as if we couldn’t see what was going on or hear the noises of hammers and nails. But I didn’t tell anyone about our new gutters, although I knew it was the first time Daddy Groovie had done something like this. I simply waited for the children to come and watch, watch me carry plastic gutters out of the house, watch me gather them on one side so we wouldn’t trip over them. And there they were—English-speaking Titay and Sergio Putita—sitting on the unfinished concrete-block fence, throwing questions into the air—what are you doing, wow, what’s this, plastic, wow, from where, wowow—and all I could tell them was: I’m too busy to talk.

  Plastic, the way they said that word, only because they had never seen Stateside gutters before.

  “Where is Pipo?” Mommy stood by the gutters, wiping her head with the back of her hand. I could tell she was playing along with Daddy Groovie. She had long given up on asking him to fix anything in our house. Seeing her with a hammer in her hand was a familiar sight. I had often found her with Daddy Groovie’s tool belt dangling around her waist, fixing pipe leaks in the back patio, pounding the walls with nails, changing our fluorescent lightbulbs on the ceiling while Ninang Rola stood by to hold the small rickety chair for additional support. Dahan dahan. Dahan-dahan. Be careful.

  “Pipo’s upstairs. That’s okay. We can manage,” was Ninang Rola’s answer to her.

  Mommy looked at me, unconsciously shaking a Gerber jar full of wood nails.

  “He’s studying,” I said quickly, pretending I was looking at the gutters beside her.

  Suddenly there was a ladder against the wall, a narrow and tall one from the ground to the roof. Daddy Groovie’s footsteps on the ladder, then on the roof, could be heard from inside our house. Whenever I heard him make a big step, I would cover my eyes, quickly look at the window as if my own body would fall by. Somehow I felt it was me who was on the roof, balancing myself on the edges of the gutters, discovering toys we had lost after flinging them up into the air. But I had always been afraid of heights, unlike many of the boys here who climbed the roofs of their houses without hesitation as if the ground were a mattress they could land on should they accidentally fall. But Daddy Groovie wouldn’t need a mattress, his body being as hard and thick as the asphalt ground itself.

  Pipo, on the other hand, only listened to it all, in our bedroom, where the noise of footsteps was louder and clearer.

  “Is he done yet?” he asked Ninang Rola each time she came in. He stayed inside the whole time at his favorite spot on the floor, squatting and surrounded by newspaper and magazine cutouts. He gathered them toward him as soon as he saw me.

  “What’s this?” I managed to pick up one of the pictures without having to sit down. Between us was a box, half-filled with pictures. Taped on its side was a cutout picture of the world.

  Miss Unibers, it said, in Pipo’s chicken-scratch handwriting.

  Pipo gave me a sharp look that reminded me of the stray dog that bit me when I was much younger, of the manner it stared into my eyes for a long time before it leapt at me, piercing its teeth deep into my hand. Whenever Pipo looked at me, it was always as if he was about to leap and bite, a stray dog, squatting on the floor, rib-thin and savage.

  “Mommy is looking for you—” I almost didn’t hear myself.

  He snatched the picture out of my hand and threw it into his Miss Unibers box, without saying anything. Looking at the box made my skin crawl. I inhaled air a few times, blocking thoughts out of my mind.

  That was Pipo. One quick look at his longer legs, you could tell he was older than me, you could see it in the eleven-year-old veins on his arms.

  A week later, the plastic gutter melted in the summer heat. Sgt. Dimaculangan’s wife came from across the street late that morning, screaming that our gutter was on fire.

  Pipo was the first one outside. When he ran back to the house, he screamed, “Fire!” He stampeded to our bedroom, looked out the window, managed to sit on the sill, and pointed his fingers at the gutters.

  When I came out, our neighbors were already there, their necks bent backward as they stared at the gutters on our roof. Standing beside me was Mr. Sing-sing from Tarina All-Around store. He commented that Daddy Groovie had not returned his ladder. He was talking to another man whose name I didn’t know. I could only remember the faces of the neighbors who lived beyond ten houses from us because I had seen their faces looking out their windows, or I had seen them painting their doors. There were too many people in our street for me to know who lived in each house. If we didn’t know them, we usually just said, “The old man from the yellow door … the fat woman from the green one … that ugly man from the dirty-color-of-his-face door.”

  Daddy Groovie took out the ladder and leaned it against the wall of our house. From the window upstairs, Mommy and Ninang Rola tied the ladder to the window with thin hemp and straws. “Steady,” Ninang Rola announced. Both of them were wearing colorful sundresses with shoulder straps. Ninang Rola’s straps were held together by safety pins that glistened in the sun. Her clothes had always been as old as her. She had never wanted anything more than what she called “God-given gifts.” That day, her God-given gift had little rips at the bottom, parts of it bleached white, blown by the wind.

  “That’s what happens,” repeated Mr. Sing-sing. “If he knows how to return what he borrows, nothing like this will happen. Dios ko, it’s been a week. Punishment. The Lord knows. He knows.”

  “What punishment? Things like this happen all the time. It’s too hot to use those. What are those? Imported gutters? They will never last in this heat,” said the elderly Mrs.-from-across-the-street. I gulped when I heard her but I didn’t say anything. We always inhaled every word said by anyone older.

  “What a waste! Stateside gutters? What a waste! Good thing Groovie didn’t buy them,” retorted Mr. Sing-sing.

  “How do you know?” The Mrs.-from-across-the-street looked at him, slammed his back with her palm. “You know too much, don’t you? You should keep your eyes to yourself, mind your own business a little bit more or you are the one who’s going to be punished. You think you are all-knowing, like God-Jesus-the-Savior-Almigh-teee?”

  The man snapped his jaws shut, his cheeks sank into his rugged face. He looked back to Daddy Groovie, the same look he always had behind his counter at Tarina All-Around store while waiting for the next person to walk by and buy something.

  Mommy and Ninang Rola came running back out, one after the other.

  “Not fire. Just smoke.” Mommy stood beside Sgt. Di-maculangan’s wife, arms swinging. “Just smoke.” Mommy’s face knotted as she watched Daddy Groovie struggle to go up. The corners of her lips pointed down.

  Daddy Groovie grabbed the sides of the ladder and shook them slightly for balance. He also knocked on the bottom steps and tested his weight on the first step. He looked up while pulling the ladder toward him. “Sturdy,” he said. The woman behind me let out a deep sigh, “Ayy.” Then he went up. I couldn’t help but stare at the two holes on Daddy Groovie’s loose shorts as he moved up. Where were his Jockeys?

  “Stupid Groovie,” said a hoarse voice above me. “Thank goodness I didn’t ask him to put my gutters up!”

  I had gotten used to hearing his name mentioned by unknown people though it took me a while to get used to saying it myself. Groovie was not an easy word to say; I wasn’t even sure if I could write it correctly. Most Stateside words were hard to say.

  “Stupid Groovie,” the voice said again.

  When I looked behind me to search for the voice, I realized h
ow big the crowd had grown. Families in the block who seldom got together were all out for this one. They even held each other’s hands. Some were carrying umbrellas, hiding themselves from the sun, mostly women; men never carried umbrellas in the sun, they weren’t supposed to. My playmates gathered around an empty corner, behind the group of hang-around-do-nothing men.

  Even Boy Manicure, the owner of a beauty parlor about five houses away, was there, holding an umbrella decorated with little yellow butterflies. Our eyes met when I turned around. I quickly looked away. I noticed how everybody was fanning themselves with bamboo leaves woven and shaped like upside-down hearts. I suddenly started feeling the heat myself.

  Daddy Groovie’s weight rocked the ladder. He raised his left foot but before he could put it on another step, one of the ropes snapped. The torn piece landed on his face and he quickly flung it into the crowd. “Putang-ina,” he cursed, then looked down, as if searching for it. A bird quickly flew across to snatch the torn piece, mistaking it for a worm.

  We all held our breath. Mommy ran inside again. In a few minutes, her face was at the window, worriedly tying the rope. “Keep steady.” She sighed and curled her lips to a wrinkly circle, puffing air, so embarrassed perhaps at all these eyes watching her. “Careful, now.” She pulled the ladder slightly toward her. It started to shake again.

  “Bamboo ladders usually don’t break,” said the Mrs.-from-across-the-street, after seeing me gasp a few times. She ruffled my hair with her hand. Her fingers felt soft, as if parts of them were being shed on my head.

  I wasn’t thinking about the ladder. Or Daddy Groovie falling. I was afraid that his shorts might fall off. At home, he was famous for his giant boils. I was sure he had one at the time since he had been complaining about how he couldn’t sit very well. He also had been boiling hot water in the morning before he bathed. Mommy said boils were better taken care of by sitting on a bucketful of hot water. “Everything we need is around us. We have leaves and roots for all kinds of diseases,” she would say. “Or above us,” Ninang Rola would respond, while telling Daddy Groovie how God’s wrath showed up in many different forms in the human body. Boils, just one of them.