The Umbrella Country Read online

  His crack got longer and longer the higher he went. I wanted to pull his shorts up, these khaki cutoffs he wore in the house every day, old and seamless, with bulging pockets on the sides, where he put some of his tools. He seldom wore belts because they left marks on his skin. “But at least wear Jockeys,” Ninang Rola always told him. When a screwdriver fell out of his pocket as he climbed up, everybody screamed. His shorts went down, exposing his buttocks. Pipo ran out of the house, screaming, “Who fell?” I realized that he wasn’t outside the whole time when the back of his head was suddenly in front of my face. Some laughed, embarrassed. Dios mío. Dios ko. Mothers covered their children’s eyes with the bamboo leaf fans.

  My mouth opened. Thanking God.

  No boils. No boils. Just a pair of what looked like dark, cratered moons in the middle of the day.

  Daddy Groovie gathered his shorts up and rushed back down. I followed him when he ran inside our house. Ninang Rola showed up with safety pins. Mommy brought a belt, telling him, “Here, put this on.” Although Ninang Rola was controlling her laughter, there was no sign of that on Mommy’s face as she helped Daddy Groovie stick the belt through the loops.

  “What do I do with these?” Ninang Rola asked Daddy Groovie, showing him the safety pins on her palm.

  “Wear them on your lips,” he said.

  Ninang Rola burst into laughter as he walked out of our house again, yanking his shorts up, so tight around his waist his belly stuck up. “Ay, my God, that man, that poor man.” She followed him with her eyes, gingerly putting her hands around Mommy’s nape.

  Soon, Daddy Groovie was climbing the ladder again. The silence of the neighbors followed him up. He replaced the plastic gutters with the same aluminum ones he had saved on the back patio. He had Pipo and me catching the plastic gutters he lowered from the ladder. Up close, I noticed how the burned holes were a little bit bigger than the termite holes on the walls of our house. Children younger than me gathered around us but I couldn’t look at anybody while I helped, didn’t even answer the questions they repeatedly asked—where is the fire, where is the fire? But Pipo, of course, with his arms full of guts, got them to surround him as soon as we finished, and explained to them what had happened, creating stories that made them nod their heads.

  Ninang Rola used to say that Pipo inherited Daddy Groovie’s thick green veins, what she called “guts.” Daddy Groovie indeed had no shame. Full of veins. Climbing the ladder right back as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t the only one. To live in our street was to have a skin as thick as rubber slippers. Shame, I was told by Ninang Rola, had only made people miserable, hungry, but it didn’t mean one had to have no shame at all, maybe a little bit, because what was important was that we did what we had to do to fill our empty stomachs with food, to keep our lives going. Shame, after all, was inherited, like many things around us were, and there was no running away from it; one of those things that she always referred to as “Something in your blood. Nothing you can do about it.” Ninang Rola was the godmother of words. Sentences, long and short, took a special meaning in her mouth. Nobody here could grab my attention as quickly as she could. She was Pipo’s godmother first, and when they couldn’t find one for me, she became mine as well.

  Mommy stood at the door, arms crossed against her chest, jaws tight. Her eyes focused on Daddy Groovie without blinking as if they were holding him, pushing him to the ground, slamming him with plastic gutters. It wasn’t the first time I saw her like that: staring at him when he wasn’t looking, and thinking of so many, many things I could only guess. Ninang Rola was standing beside her, kissing her scapular necklace, reciting the names of the saints perhaps whenever Daddy Groovie pulled out a nail from the wood.

  The crowd slowly disbanded. They mumbled and shook their heads while they walked back to their houses.

  “No use.” Daddy Groovie descended the steps and dropped the last plastic gutter. “Who needs this house when I go to the States?”

  “Hay, Naku!” Ninang Rola walked back inside, shaking her shoulders. Mommy let out a big gasp, then followed her in. I shook my head and first looked up to what he had just fixed, then at Daddy Groovie while he went to the street toward Tarina All-Around store to return the ladder he balanced on his shoulder like a cross. He ran into his construction friends and laughed with them, hitting one of them with the ladder when he turned around. It was between his laughter and when he looked away from his construction friends that I caught Daddy Groovie catching a glimpse of the old gutters on the roof. I bowed my head when I saw his face, his constant swallow of spit and air that made me feel that somehow he had known, as much as he wanted to cover it up, that shame was very much in his blood, even if his guts spread all over his arms of veins.

  When Daddy Groovie came home that night, he had shopping bags of food—fish, ampalaya, kangkong leaves, sacks of rice. He took off the shirt he wore on his daily visits to the window and handed it to Mommy to hang outside on our back patio. He put on a flowery shirt that reflected his mood. His thick pomade hair was the only thing that stayed the same, with little ridges that showed his scalp.

  “Hurry.” My cousin Maricon ran to me while I stood outside, my head tilting backward, mouth open, staring at birds hovering above. “Daddy Groovie got a package from the embassy!” she added, aware of what would interest me.

  “Application forms.” Daddy Groovie pulled out documents from an envelope.

  We sat around the table, all seven of us, listening to him attentively.

  “This is one step to go abroad. Important step,” he continued, waving the forms pompously, showing them to us one by one: white forms, yellow forms, more white forms.

  I couldn’t help but hear the chorus of women selling dried and vinegared milkfish outside: Bangus. Bangus kay-ooo. The milkfish song at night.

  There were already two fried milkfish on the serving plate and little saucers full of vinegar and mashed peppers. The steam of white rice covered Daddy Groovie’s face from where I was.

  I waited for someone to answer him, maybe bring up the gutters again, so I would know what we were going to do with the plastic ones left lying in the back. I froze my spoon and fork and looked toward Mommy as if I knew that she was going to say something.

  “Good news, huh?” she asked. Mommy asked the same question all the time. I always felt she was never interested in the idea of going to the States. Even when Auntie Dolares sent letters and Christmas cards from Nuyork, Mommy would only ask if there was good news, good news meaning exact dates, time, and place.

  “Yes, according to Dolares, in possibly two years or less, the petition will be approved. Then there will be an interview at the embassy. Then, of course, I can leave.”

  So he can leave. Mommy’s eyelids fell. “Why don’t you take the stomach of the fish, isn’t that what you like?” she asked me nervously.

  “Y-yes,” I said softly.

  “Finally. Nuyork. Tall buildings. Good food. Better learn my English,” Daddy Groovie said. Then he continued in English, “Spokening Inglis there all the time unlike here, in Manila.” Humming while he scooped his rice. “Even Dolares speaks it so well now, huh?”

  “Dolores, Do-LO-res, not Do-LA-res. LO, not LA. LO like Loko-loko, like you!” Ninang Rola pointed her lips while she scolded him. “That’s all you think about, States, dolares, that you even change your sister’s name. Not everybody’s like you, you know?” Ninang Rola pounded her fork with her spoon to release the rice grain caught in it. She often told me that dolor meant “pain,” that my Auntie’s name meant pain, and that was what she was all about. I asked her to explain but she wouldn’t. She always expected me to understand what she said the first time.

  Daddy Groovie ignored what Ninang Rola said as if he didn’t hear her. He was once again in a reverie, his eyeballs popping like his boils in summer heat.

  “So what happened with the gutters again?” asked Jean, while her twin sister, Jane, said Yes, yes.

  “I don’t know. I was at
the market all morning. I always miss these things, too, Ninang Rola,” responded Maricon.

  “Maria Consuelo?” Ninang Rola looked at Maricon steadily, which meant that conversation was finished before it even began.

  “What happened, Ninang?” repeated the twins. Our boarders, Jean and Jane Lacsamana who weren’t wearing the same clothes for a change, occupied the other room upstairs. They both looked so alike, bangs on their foreheads, thin straight hair down to their waists, so ugly that when they were born in the late fifties, the earth shook, killing over ten thousand people in the north. They lost their mother at birth. I always wondered whether the mother actually died at the moment the midwife placed the twin Lacsamanas beside her. Frightened to death. Her eyes open. But the twins claimed that their mother was swallowed by the earth. I thought that the earth had swallowed them, too, except they were immediately spat out, and spared, to bring more suffering to the world.

  Jean took out her rattan fan and started fanning herself because the steam of the food made our house even warmer. “So what happened to the gutters again?”

  Everybody ignored her, except for Maricon who opened her mouth every chance she got.

  Mommy was quiet as well. Suddenly, both she and Daddy Groovie were not in the space where we were. Daddy Groovie: I knew he was somewhere else, in the States, working at his new job, the job he had been proudly talking about for years while he condemned his inability to maintain a construction job, blaming it on Martial Law, on the president, and on curfew because nobody could work at night anymore. And Mommy: she wasn’t in the States, I knew that. She never spoke of a country other than our own. She rarely left the house, making dresses at home at her Singer Machine; I have five orders, she’d say, two dress shirts and three gabardines, orders, orders. The whole week, she’d be stuck at her corner in the dining room.

  The worlds of this house. Everybody was always engaged in a world of deep thoughts. At dinner, Daddy Groovie was in his own—the world of the States—murmuring words that didn’t make sense while he swallowed fish without chewing, grinning at the same time. Mommy’s world was apart, her own; a world where nobody had ever been, or could ever go, not even Daddy Groovie. Especially not him.

  A sudden burst of laughter brought Mommy back. Jean was spitting rice, trying to catch her breath. Jane was picking rice caught between her front teeth. Everybody was laughing but me. I had been watching Mommy the whole time, so I hadn’t heard what the twins had joked about.

  Mommy stood up and started clearing the table, taking Daddy Groovie’s plate first. She put the plates on top of each other.

  “Stop daydreaming,” Ninang Rola said to Daddy Groovie. “Do that on your bed.”

  We all looked at Ninang Rola. Mommy continued cleaning without a word. Daddy Groovie put down his glass of water after emptying it, then stood up. Water dripped down his neck.

  So quickly the laughter was replaced by silence. Jean and Jane helped clean the table by shaking the rattan place-mats, dropping fish bones on the table. Mommy piled another handful of plates and went to the kitchen.

  So did Mommy love him?

  It was a question I had always asked myself. I didn’t know what love meant then but I was certain Mommy knew. Love might be the wrinkles on her forehead whenever Daddy Groovie came home drunk. She would tell Pipo and me to get a pail of warm water and a face towel, then dab his face while we stood around. All four of us never said a word to each other, except for Daddy Groovie who recited words and names nobody knew and understood. Pipo and I had been part of this ceremony all our lives, the ceremony of circles: Daddy Groovie on Mommy’s lap; a pail of warm water on the floor; the dabbing circles Mommy made on his face; the dizzying smell of San Miguel beer; both Pipo and I close by. All our worlds were somehow so connected and somehow so far apart, they made me wonder what brought us together in the first place.

  The sound of a crying bird.

  My eyes opened in the middle of the night, then my lips. No, I whispered to myself. I felt I could float through the ceiling with my nightmares clutched in my hands so I could hurl them into the aluminum gutters for the stray cats to eat at night. There it was again, that low, muffled noise. It might be cats meowing and scratching the roof, hungry and in heat, or the rain trickling on the shingles. I wished it would stop but it went on, just like it had many times before, except tonight it wouldn’t go away. I closed my eyes, held my pillow, and waited for the sound to disappear, for the morning to come so I could forget, but it continued. Slowly, I moved my hand to wipe my sweaty face, hoping somehow that this was just another dream. Putting my fingers into my mouth, I tasted my sweat. I was wide awake.

  The sound was in the room.

  Our room was too small for four people and rows of cabinets but it expanded in the dark. The partitions of cabinets simply vanished with the walls. Mommy arranged the cabinets in such a way that Pipo and I would be separated from her and Daddy Groovie. They had the side facing the window. Our side was next to the stairs, closer to the lingering smell of food. We always slept with noises of the streets—yells of boys selling salted eggs and fried pork rinds in wicker baskets they carried over their heads—but at curfew time, voices disappeared, and it became so quiet sometimes that the snapping of leaves from tamarind trees could easily be heard.

  I stepped out of my top bunk and made sure I didn’t make a creaking sound. I landed on the floor, after using Pipo’s bed as a step. I was the expert on soundless movements. I had done this many times. I used to get up late at night, when everybody had fallen asleep, to check if they were still breathing. I would stand in my favorite spot, by the dresser with the big mirror, where I could see all of them as the lamp post outside shone on their bodies: Daddy Groovie and Mommy in the bed at the center of our bedroom; yes, they were still breathing. Then I would go back to bed. In Pipo’s case, I usually just moved sharply on the bunk and if my brother responded, by changing his sleeping position, I knew he was still alive. Then and only then could I sleep well. Eventually Mommy caught me and said a few words, as if she had read my mind and my fears, something about her dying in the middle of the night while I was wide awake to witness it. She didn’t say anything else. That was all I needed. Ever since, I always wake up in the morning with an even greater fear that somebody will not be waking up with me.

  Down on floor level now, the sound was even more apparent. The big eye of the window stared at me, flickering with lamp post light. The room had so many corners, I could hide anywhere. I went behind a huge cabinet and looked toward where Daddy Groovie and Mommy slept. In the dark, I thought of a cockfight, the way they looked, naked like that, two smoked, trained cockfighters except that their motions were totally hushed, and they weren’t leaping in the air and scattering their feathers. I didn’t know what they were doing except that Daddy Groovie was in control of whatever it was, his hands on Mommy’s mouth as her voice passed through the holes between his fingers. The crying bird. The sound of cats. The rain. Mommy was pushing him away but he wouldn’t budge. He seemed to be some kind of powerful giant who managed to pin her down on the bed, as if he had so many hands. I stood watching, still wondering if this were all a nightmare.

  “So what are you going to do when I’m in the States, huh?” Daddy Groovie whispered. He sounded angry, although anger always came side by side a knotted face and pointed stares. It was too dark to see what was on his face. His voice got deeper. “Find another husband, huh? Huh? Huh? The way you always wanted. Just waiting for me to leave, huh?”

  And no, she wasn’t crying. I had never seen Mommy cry in my life.

  “Groovie, stop—”

  I saw Daddy Groovie lift something from the floor, what looked like a piece of wood and move it toward Mommy, grabbing her neck tightly with his left hand.

  “Why don’t you just use this, huh? How ’bout this for your new husband?”

  “Stop, Groovie, don’t.”

  I slowly walked away from them, sideways, not knowing whether witnessing all this
was better than waking in the middle of the night to make sure they were breathing still. Groo-vie. A faint begging sound led me to my bed.

  Bird, I said to myself, face up to the darkness of the ceiling, my body feeling the heaviness of its weight on the thin mattress.

  We all slipped into the morning as if the night had its hands on our backs, pushing us. I woke up to an empty room. Ninang Rola had already left for church. She had a lot of walking on her knees to do. Daddy Groovie wasn’t there either, probably at the piers with his construction friends, something I could tell by looking at the hanger by the door where his favorite hang-around pants were kept. Pipo was probably convinced to go to church with Ninang Rola so that he could watch her, make sure nobody took her bag. She spent her Sundays walking on her knees in Iglesia de San Pedro, hands postured as if begging for life or perhaps an early death, eyes at a steady gaze at the front altar, rosary hanging around her fingers. Her knees were darker than the rest of her skin as if they were permanently dirty. She joined hundreds of parishioners every Sunday to do this, atoning for their sins which she herself might have enough of. When I went to the Iglesia one time, I noticed how clean and shiny the marble floor was, then I saw Ninang Rola on her knees. How I wished they could all come to our house so I didn’t have to polish the floor with red Johnson’s Wax every other day.

  Mommy walked in and opened the cabinet door. I went to the other side, so that I wouldn’t see her undressing. I didn’t leave the room. I looked away, pretending I wasn’t watching, something I had been doing for as long as I could remember. I had seen her naked many times. I had carefully examined the contours of her body, delighted by the way her round breasts hung like curtains to her chest, her nipples mounting to marble-shaped tips. How different her body was from Daddy Groovie’s rugged and muscular one. Her skin was very light, even lighter when the sun shone on her back; her stomach was very flat and smooth, unlike Ninang Rola’s scarred one.