The Bamboo Stalk (4 page)

My father heard his mother shouting in the kitchen. He left the study and headed towards all the noise. My father sent the cook off with a wave of his hand. He turned to his mother and, casually and rebelliously, he said, ‘It's me.'

There was a heavy silence, then my grandmother said, ‘Yes, you, the man of the house. You'll deal with that bastard, won't you?'

She was sure the cook had done it, so my father had to explain. ‘No, it was me who did it, Mother,' he said.

She clasped her chest with the palm of her hand, as if her heart had sunk and she had to hold it in place. She put her hands over her ears and then over her face. ‘She'll have to leave,' she said, in a voice that was hardly audible.

‘I'm not in the habit of going back on what I say or do, and sometimes there's no going back anyway,' my father answered coldly.

His mother was about to collapse. Despite appearances, my father was also close to collapse. She took her hands off her face, sat down and pounded the dining table with her fist.

‘You can write stuff like that for your crazy readers, but not for me,' she shouted.

‘I made a mistake when I made this baby,' my father replied. ‘But I don't want to make a bigger mistake by abandoning it.' My mother said she had never heard him raise his voice so loud, and this was at his mother!

My three aunts had gathered at the kitchen door after hearing all the noise. They didn't dare come closer.

‘That slut Josephine must leave the country tomorrow,' Grandmother said.

My mother clasped her hands together in front of her face and wept.

‘Yes, yes, madam, I'll leave tomorrow,' she said.

My father silenced her with his hand. ‘She won't leave as long as she's carrying a part of me in her womb,' he said.

His mother stood up straight, her hands resting on the table in front of her. ‘The girl at college, the one who . . . I'll arrange the engagement, tomorrow if you like,' she said.

My father shook his head. ‘It's too late for that, Mother,' he said.

‘It's a disaster, a scandal,' she shouted between sobs.

She pointed at my aunts at the door. ‘Your sisters, you selfish, despicable man. Who'll marry them after what you've done with the maid?'

Rashid had nothing to say in response.

‘Get out of my house, and take that slut with you. Those crazy books have ruined your mind!'

For a whole week, my mother kept asking my father questions about what had happened in the kitchen that day. ‘Why was she pointing at your sisters?' she asked. ‘She was talking about books. What was she saying? What were you saying when you shouted in your mother's face?'

‘He acted out the scene for me and translated the conversation so that I could understand. I cried. Your father made me cry many times, José.'

My mother cried that day because my father hadn't been open with his mother about the marriage. She cried even more because she knew my father hadn't rebelled against his mother to protect her or because he wanted to stay with her, but rather to protect me, his unborn child. And although he managed to protect me while I was in my mother's womb, he couldn't do so when I came out.

If only he had done what his mother wanted.

If only he had kicked my mother in the stomach and I had ended up a small lump of matter swimming in her blood on the kitchen floor.

 

8

Rashid and Josephine lived together in a small flat, a flat my father could afford on his modest salary. The only regular visitors were Ghassan and Walid, who were witnesses to an official marriage after the couple moved to their new home.

One day when my mother, Aida and I were sitting around talking, my mother took a copy of her official marriage certificate from the briefcase where she kept her papers, which are now in my possession along with my father's letters. She pointed to the bottom of the certificate, which neither she nor I could read.

‘This is Ghassan's signature,' she said.

She moved her finger to the next signature. She said nothing for a while then, sadly, she said, ‘His signature is crazy, much like him.'

I examined the second signature, the one she called crazy. ‘Whose signature is that, Mama?' I asked.

‘Walid's,' she said, smiling and folding up the certificate.

Then she took two pictures out of the briefcase, including one of my father. He was smiling, very thin with a thick moustache and small eyes behind a pair of glasses, wearing a loose white thobe and a white cap on his head like the ones the Muslims wear in old Manila and the Chinese quarter. I don't know what made my mother think my father was handsome. The second picture was of two young men on a boat. My mother
pointed at one of them. He wasn't looking at the camera because he was busy doing something. ‘That's Ghassan. He's fixing the bait to the fish hook,' my mother said. Then she pointed at the other man, who was looking straight at the camera. ‘That's Walid,' she said. The picture caught my attention. He had a childish face, apparently much younger than my father or Ghassan, and he looked cheerful.

‘He was crazy, unlike Rashid and Ghassan,' my mother said. ‘He loved racing cars and motorcycles.

He was daring, reckless, argumentative. He loved travelling though he had a phobia about planes. When he had to fly he took sleeping pills before take-off and slept like a log. He didn't wake up till the wheels hit the runway.'

I liked his character, from his picture and from what my mother said about him. I stared at the picture. He was holding a plastic bag in one hand and my mother said it contained chicken guts, which my father liked to use as fish bait. He was wearing dark sunglasses and was holding his nose because of the foul smell coming from the bag.

‘The smell must have been horrible, Mama,' I said, pulling a face in disgust.

‘Yes, the smell of guts is really nasty, but the smell of fish on Rashid's clothes . . .'

She left her sentence unfinished, closed her eyes and took a deep breath until her chest expanded. ‘I miss him so much,' she sighed.

Aunt Aida pointed to the kitchen door and said, ‘In the upper section of the fridge, José, there are ten galunggong fish. Bring two of them.' Aida stuck a finger up each nostril, then continued in a hushed voice. ‘Let's put them up your mother's nose!' she said.

My mother ignored her and went on talking about herself
and my father when they were together.

My father stayed away from his mother's house while my mother was pregnant. He was stubborn, she said, or pretended not to care, while inside he badly missed the old lady. I was sure he felt remorse, even if he didn't show it. He didn't visit her at all during that period, maybe because he was embarrassed. He did try to contact her but his sisters told him she didn't want to hear his voice and so none of them made any attempt to get in touch with him.

My father was sure that as soon as I came into the world his mother's attitude would change. He thought she would take me into her arms as soon as she saw him carrying me, as soon as she realised she had now become a grandmother. He had taken a decision to call me Isa after his father if I was a boy, or Ghanima after his mother if I was a girl.

My mother had no regrets about anything in her life, including marrying my father and getting pregnant with me. She believed and still believes in her own private philosophy: ‘Everything happens for a reason and for a purpose.' The couple lived in isolation until I was born – the moment my father had been counting on. In the maternity hospital on 3 April 1988, the doctor gave my father the news that I had arrived. ‘Your wife has given birth to a baby boy, and they're both in good health,' the doctor said.

My father picked me up in his arms and took a long look at my face. ‘Maybe he was looking for just one thing that you two had in common,' my mother said. For sure, what he saw was a face with elements taken from other faces, but not from his own. My features were a mixture of my mother's, Aunt Aida's and my grandfather's.

As soon as we three – my father and mother and I – were out of hospital, my father drove to his mother's house. When we
arrived my father asked my mother to stay where she was in the car, because his mother might not be able to handle the sight of her just then, whereas her grandson, me that is, might make it possible for her to accept my mother as time passed. My mother waited in the car while my father carried me in to his mother.

My father tried to open the front door but his mother had changed the locks so that he couldn't come in if he ever thought of coming back. When he rang the bell a new Indian maid opened the door. He spoke with her a while, then pushed the door to go in and disappeared out of sight of my mother. A few minutes later my mother saw a car drive up to my grandmother's house. She lay low in her seat so that no one would see her. The car stopped at the kerb outside the house and four women got out. One of them rang the bell and the servant opened the door. It didn't take long. As soon as they disappeared behind the door, the garage door at the side of the house opened and my father appeared, carrying me in his arms and heading for the car in silence.

‘Your father changed after he visited the old lady's house,' my mother said with a sad look. ‘He didn't speak much and he was always thinking about something. He spent more time reading and writing. I tried to persuade him to go out boating several times but he always refused. He said Ghassan and Walid were busy getting ready for a trip abroad. I begged him to go abroad with them but he refused.

‘Two days after you were born, they did go abroad, but if only they hadn't!

‘Ghassan and Walid were passengers aboard the Kuwaiti plane that was hijacked by a pro-Iranian extremist group on its way to Thailand. Your father went crazy. He was glued to the television screen most of the time. If he wasn't watching
television, he was reading the newspapers or calling his remaining friends in search of news, but all they knew was the same as the news on television. Things got worse. Two of the passengers were killed and people were horrified. Your father broke down when he saw television pictures of the body of one of the passengers being thrown from the plane door at Larnaca airport. He wept his heart out when an ambulance took the body away from under the plane. I'll never forget how Rashid looked when he heard the news. He started beating his chest with his fist and shouted, “They didn't kill him. It was us who did it. It was us who did it. We shouldn't have supported Iraq.” I don't understand, even now, how someone could cry with such feeling over the death of someone he'd never met, and how someone could accuse himself of committing a murder when he hadn't done it.

‘After that there were rumours that a third Kuwaiti had been killed, but it wasn't officially confirmed. Rashid followed the news. Through friends who worked in the newspapers and television, he confirmed it was true. Someone had died on the plane after being hit. He had had a fit and his condition had deteriorated. Without medical attention he had died of a heart attack.

‘It was Walid. Fear of flying hadn't killed him but it may have played a part. Your father sobbed and sobbed. All I could do was fall on the floor and grieve for my husband and his friend, but I couldn't do anything about it.

‘After Walid's death, the old lady agreed for the first time to have contact with your father by telephone. “I didn't really want to speak to you, but I just wanted to let you know that you're in for a run of bad luck. Look what happened to your friend after that horrible thing was born. It's a curse, like its mother,” she told him.

‘Your father bit his lip and floods of tears rolled down his cheeks. “Throw them out and see how your luck changes,” his mother concluded. “Then come home and you'll find I have a mother's heart and I've forgiven you the horrible thing you've done.”

‘My grandmother hung up. Rashid bowed his head. With the receiver still in his hand, fighting back his tears, he said, “My mother says . . .”

As soon as my father had arranged a birth certificate for me, with the name Isa, he contacted a travel agency and asked them to book a seat on any plane going to Manila, so long as it wasn't on Kuwaiti Airways.

A few days later I made my second move, but this time it was from my father's country to my mother's country.

PART 2

Isa . . . After His Birth

‘He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.'

José Rizal

 

 

1

From Kuwait we flew to the Philippines to live in the land of my grandfather, from whom I took the name José Mendoza. Mendoza was really my grandfather's family name but people often called him by that name alone.

I grew up on a piece of land of no more than 2,000 square metres in Valenzuela City in northern Manila. There were three small houses there, one of which, the largest of the three, had two storeys. That was where we lived, piled on top of each other – my mother and I, Aunt Aida and Merla, Uncle Pedro and his wife and their children. Another house, which was very small and separated from the larger house by a watercourse a metre wide, was where Grandfather Mendoza lived. The watercourse between the two houses was not a stream or a branch of a river, but rather a drain where waste water collected along with our rubbish, which made the smell unbearable, especially on humid days.

Far from those two houses, in a corner overlooking the road and under a giant mango tree, stood the third house, which was made of bamboo stalks and was the smallest of the three. My grandfather had built it many years earlier for a poor, single woman called Choleng. We didn't know where she'd come from. Before she came to live near us her only home was the pavement. We didn't know anything about her but her name, to which we added the title
inang
, or ‘mother', out of respect for her age. His decision to let her stay on his land for free was one
of the paradoxes about my grandfather, who was usually greedy and mean. She was very old. The way she looked frightened the neighbourhood children. Her back was hunched and she had a grey moustache. The white hair on her head covered only bits and pieces of her scalp; the rest of her scalp had sores and red patches. Children made up frightening myths about her, which made it impossible to walk past her house, especially after dark. Inang Choleng was the local witch. She ate children and would never die, they said.