The Bamboo Stalk (16 page)

Merla looked at me and waited for me to reply.

‘No, there's no need for us to go in,' I said.

Alberto came up to us and said, ‘Merla, José, you have to go inside.'

Merla came close and whispered, ‘I was planning to go in, but the way they're insisting has made me worried.'

Pedro's wife went to the door of the house, opened it and beckoned us in. Merla went first, reluctantly, and I followed her, even more reluctantly. The house was small on the outside and seemed even smaller inside. There was a bedroom, a bathroom, a small kitchen in the corner open to the main room. It smelled of
damp, rotten food and death. I felt sick. At the wooden bed my mother and Mama Aida were solemnly saying prayers, while Uncle Pedro sat on a chair nearby.

Inang Choleng was lying on the bed under a white cover, with only her head and shoulders visible. There were three pillows supporting her hunched back. The priest was anointing her forehead with holy oil and saying prayers. He was incredibly brave. Her mouth was wide open, showing a few teeth here and there. I was dripping with sweat as I waited for the priest to finish his task. I half-expected the old woman to spring into life and dig her remaining teeth into his hand.

I was frightened. My guilt about stealing her food years before was encouraging the bee in my head to start buzzing again. My mother and Mama Aida crying, the buzzing in my head, my heart throbbing in my temples, and my limbs shaking – everything encouraged me to leave. Before I could do so, Merla nudged me with her elbow. I looked at her. She was looking at one of the walls. I looked in the same direction and my eyes popped out in disbelief. There were black and white photographs of Mendoza on the wall. One of them I had seen before on his army identity card. In another one he was standing with a group of men in military uniform. In a third he was sitting on a bench with a woman, two girls and a boy between them. There were other old photos of Mendoza I hadn't seen before. I looked to Merla for an explanation for the photos. She leaned over and whispered in my ear: ‘You don't understand anything.' She knew that what she said would hurt me. I look at her disapprovingly. ‘Our wily grandfather had admirers!' she said.

‘But I never saw him go anywhere near her house,' I replied, completely mystified.

The priest left after he'd performed the rites. As soon as he was through the door, Merla asked the question in a low voice. ‘Why
are there pictures of Grandfather on the wall of Inang Choleng's house?'

Uncle Pedro went out after the priest. My mother pretended to be busy clearing the place up. Only Mama Aida spoke and even she didn't look at us. ‘Nothing strange about a mother putting pictures of her only son on the wall,' she said.

Merla and I looked at each other in disbelief. ‘So Inang Choleng was Mendoza's mother?' I asked Mama Aida.

She nodded, and floods of tears rolled down her cheeks. My mother turned her back and pretended to be doing something. Her shoulders were shaking from crying. I went over to her and looked in her eyes but she looked away. ‘That old woman was Mendoza's mother. So who was his father?' I asked her.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes. ‘He didn't have a father,' she said. The words were like a slap in the face.

The bee in my head stopped. The buzzing disappeared. I closed my eyes and tried to detect it but it had left my head to join a hive of other bees, in Mendoza's head.

 

11

Six months after Ghassan's first phone call, and after months of bureaucracy, I finally picked up my passport from the Kuwaiti embassy in Manila. I went straight from the embassy to the cathedral. Now that I was certain to be travelling, I felt confused and afraid of the unknown.

In the cathedral I sat in the front row. I put my hand on the cross hanging round my neck, the one Mama Aida had given me after my confirmation ceremony years earlier. I started to pray: ‘Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name; Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. Amen.

‘Our Father, I am going back to where I was born, to the land of the father I have never known, to a destiny known only to You. My mother says a beautiful life awaits me there but no one but You knows what really awaits me. Our Father who art in Heaven, in my hand I have a blue passport and in my heart I have a faith I fear I may not be able to preserve. Help me to believe in You. Abide with me on my journey. Guide me to what is good and dispel my doubts. Our Father who art in Heaven, are You really in Heaven? Answer me, in the name of Your angels and in the name of Your son the Messiah and of the Virgin.'

*   *   *

From the cathedral I walked towards Chinatown as far as the Seng Guan Temple. It took me two hours, mostly on foot, simply because I wanted to walk among ordinary people in Manila one last time, breathing in the thick exhaust fumes and trying to look at the sun, which doesn't look like the sun in Kuwait, and looking at the trees on the sides of the street, with their branches hanging heavy with fruit. I looked into the faces of the people around me and missed them even before I had left them. I wanted to apologise to them all, saying that despite the years I had spent amongst them I did not belong with them.

I stopped three quarters of the way from the cathedral to the temple. I felt tired. I hailed a taxi. ‘To the Seng Guan Temple, please,' I said.

The driver was surprised. ‘It's very close to here,' he said, pointing towards it.

‘I know, but will you take me?' I replied.

The traffic was heavy and I would have arrived sooner if I had carried on walking to the temple. In the taxi I could see out of the window on my left and through the front window. I saw things as if I were looking at them for the first time. I was finding it hard to breathe, maybe because of all the traffic around me, or maybe because of the tangle of emotions that I felt. I could see misery in many of its guises through the taxi window: the misery on the faces of the vendors, the dirty clothes, the child beggars following anyone who looked clean, the Muslim boys in their caps that had once been white, offering pirated DVDs of pornography and the most popular Hollywood films. On the pavements there were people with carts selling bananas, including Cheng. He looked happy. People were crowding around his cart as though there were
a festival on. Yellow and blue were the colours around him: the yellow of the bananas and the blue of his plastic bags.

The driver had a wooden crucifix hanging on a chain from the rear-view mirror, and behind the steering wheel there was a little statue of the Buddha sitting cross-legged with prayer beads in his hand.

‘Why do you have the cross?' I asked the driver.

He turned and looked at me suspiciously. ‘Because I'm Christian,' he said.

‘And why the other statue?' I asked, looking at the Buddha.

He smiled, as if he knew what I was driving at. ‘It brings in business,' he said.

The taxi stopped outside the Seng Guan Temple and I started to get out. ‘I see you have a cross around your neck. Why?' the driver said.

I opened the door and got out. ‘It's something my aunt chose for me,' I said with a smile.

He pointed to the temple gate and smiled broadly. ‘And Seng Guan, why?' he asked.

While he waited for me to answer, I closed the taxi door and turned my back on him. But I could hear him through the window. 'Hey!' he said. ‘I answered you when you asked me a question.'

I kept walking towards the temple gate. ‘Hey, be fair!' the driver shouted. ‘Why?'

I stopped at the gate and turned to face the taxi. The man was still waiting for me to reply. I looked up and scratched my head to indicate I was trying to think of an answer. ‘It does something for me, but I don't know what it is,' I said.

*   *   *

I stood in front of the glass enclosure in the middle, where there was a golden statue of the Buddha standing. There was a man with prayer beads sitting on one of the low cushions and there was an old woman standing in front of the glass enclosure in the middle praying devoutly. I stood next to her, facing the Buddha statue.

‘Buddha, I don't know how to pray to you. But if you really are the one who will save mankind from its ordeals and afflictions, then you will hear me and accept my prayer as it is. I don't know how to pray with prayer beads like the man sitting over there. I don't see the need to put my hands together and move them up and down in front of your statue like that old woman next to me. But I know how to light an incense stick and plant it in the bowl of soft sand, even if I don't know why I'm doing it. Help me to believe in you, in your message, your disciples and your virgin mother, Maya, who bore you inside her on the day when her womb radiated light and you were visible inside it before you were born. If you are a god, a prophet or a saint, guide me, be my helper so that, through you, I can see the light.'

PART 4

Isa . . . The Second Wandering

‘The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others.'

José Rizal

 

 

1

Kuwait airport looked very gloomy when the plane landed on Sunday, 15 January 2006. People's faces were much the same – gloomy in a way for which I could see no justification. The passengers formed lines in front of the immigration officers who stamped their passports. There were signs above the front of each line, some of them saying
GCC Citizens
and others saying
Citizens of Other Countries
. I stood there, uncertain which line to stand in. Should I go to the line where the Filipinos from my flight were standing? Or the line with the people who didn't look like me?

Under a
No Smoking
sign attached to one of the columns, a man in military uniform was standing, leaning against the column. I went up to him and asked him which line I should stand in. ‘Sir,' I said, ‘does
GCC Citizens
include Kuwaitis?'

He threw his cigarette on the floor and crushed it with his boot. He spread his arms, shook his head and said, ‘No English.' I went over to where they were stamping passports, carrying my briefcase of valuables: old pictures of my father and my identity papers. I stood in one of the GCC lines behind men wearing loose gowns and Arab headgear.
They must be Kuwaitis like me
, I thought.

The officer stamped their passports one by one until my turn came. I put my hand in my trouser pocket but before I could take out my passport the officer shouted at me so rudely I was shocked.
He waved me towards the other line, where the Filipinos and people of other nationalities were standing. He said something I didn't understand. I hurried to the other line, while the officer went on talking loudly and pointed at the sign above him. He sounded angry. Then he pointed a finger at his ear and made that gesture that meant he thought I was crazy. I was shaking and people were looking at me. Was it forbidden to stand in that line? Was it a military zone?

In the other line, a young Filipino said to me, ‘You were standing in the wrong place. That line's for Kuwaitis and people from the other Gulf states.'

I nodded gratefully and muttered to myself, ‘He turned me away when he saw my face, even before he had a chance to see my passport.'

I crossed the yellow line on the floor and presented my blue Kuwaiti passport to the officer. He took it, leafed though the pages and examined my face. ‘Sorry about my colleague,' he said with a smile. ‘I could stamp your passport here, but would you mind going back to my colleague?' I looked over at the scowling officer and shook my head. ‘Please, you have a right to stand there, even if it does take you longer,' he said. He handed my passport back without stamping it and said with a smile, ‘Welcome to your country, but not through the gate for foreigners.'

I crossed the yellow line a third time and submitted my passport to the angry officer. The fact that my passport was blue made his face turn red. Without checking my face or making any comment, he stamped the passport. I turned to his colleague with the smile as soon as I was through the gate. He was looking at me, still smiling. He gave me a wink and a thumbs-up sign, then went back to work stamping foreigners' passports, letting people into the country in the proper lane.

The shops, restaurants and cafés at the airport were closed. The lights were off and the chairs were upside down on the tables. It was really depressing. I turned and looked at the faces of the various people who had come to meet arriving passengers. If the faces weren't sad, they were blank and silent.
If they weren't in a good mood, what made them come out to meet people coming back from their travels
, I wondered.

Ghassan was standing in the crowd. I wouldn't have recognised him if he hadn't been holding a sign with my Arabic name, or my Filipino number, on it – Isa. He was wearing a dark Arab thobe and nothing on his head. His moustache, like his hair, was silver, or rather a mixture of black and white, which made it difficult to guess how old he was. His eyes were sad in a way I hadn't seen before. If someone were ever to ask me what sadness looked like, I would say, ‘Ghassan's face.'

It was cold outside, not as my mother had described it in our conversations about Kuwait. When we came out of the airport I took a close look at the streets. Beautiful trees and flowers were planted on the verges and the roundabouts but the scenery grew less and less green as we drove away from the airport, until in the end it was mostly yellow. On that day there were flags at half-mast along the road too.

‘The way we put up flags is different from your way,' I said to Ghassan. ‘In the Philippines we put the flag at the top of the mast.'

Ghassan nodded and in English with a strange accent he replied, ‘In Kuwait too, and everywhere else, but the country's in mourning.'