The Bamboo Stalk (13 page)

I proved myself in the job despite the difficulties I faced at the beginning. Being a man in itself reduced my chances of finding clients, because in this line of work, as in others, women had better luck. But as time passed this was no longer a problem: I had serious clients who visited the centre after a hard day's work or after strenuous physical exercise to enjoy an hour of real massage, without any of the services that some masseuses provided in the closed rooms at the centre.

 

4

After a month selling bananas in Chinatown and a month working at the Chinese centre, I decided to visit our house in Valenzuela City. I was homesick for the place and I had two envelopes of money in my backpack, one for Mama Aida and the other for my mother and Adrian.

On the bus there were more people standing than sitting. Some of them slept standing up, like horses, their faces pale from exhaustion. The bodies were crammed together and there was a medley of smells, some of which I could make out – the leather of the seats, the humidity from the air conditioning, sweat, fruit, cheap perfume – and others I didn't recognise.

I studied all the faces, looking for something among them: there were workmen tanned by the sun, office workers in uniform, nurses wearing white like a sports team, a mother nursing her baby, children jostling for space at the windows, pressing their faces against the glass, making condensation with their breath and then drawing their little fantasies in the water with their fingertips. People made way for an old man with a walking stick. They helped an old woman to an empty seat and carried a paper bag full of fruit for her. The conductor slipped between the passengers like quicksilver. I admired his ability to identify the new passengers in the crowd. He asked each new face where they were going, took their fares and gave them
tickets. Then he weaved his way through again, back to where he stood at the front of the bus.

The bus shook and the heads swayed in time. It suddenly stopped and took on new passengers, adding to the crush. The bus swallowed up many but spat out few, then set off again. I was mesmerised by the stories behind the faces around me. I didn't need to guess what the stories were, because every face told its own story. I looked into every face and read it, taking advantage of my sunglasses with the mirrored lenses. If people tried to see my eyes, all they could see was their own faces reflected in the lenses.

I couldn't find a trace of a smile on the bus, except in the happy faces of the children. All I saw in the other faces was a mixture of fear, sadness, anger and resignation.

I was like someone in the middle of the bridge between two towns – the town of happy childhood and the town where men and women struggled with life.

I was halfway across that bridge and I had to keep walking, weighed down by my sixteen years of life. I could hear the children singing and laughing in the town behind me as I walked away. The further I walked, the fainter the sound of laughter. The songs disappear. I keep walking, I grow tired, I cough. My back is bent and I grow old. I hear other sounds in the distance, growing closer: crying, begging, complaining, praying, swearing, sobbing.

I took off my sunglasses and held them out in front of my face. I could see my face in the mirror lenses. It no longer looked like the children, and soon it would turn into one of those pale faces I could see around me on the bus.

I was horrified.
What fate awaits me here
, I wondered.

I wanted Alice's white rabbit to appear halfway across the
bridge and take me to a hole that led to my father's country, to Wonderland, before I reached the town at the other end of the bridge and my face turned into one of those faces.

*   *   *

‘Promise me, Mama Aida, that you won't spend any of that money on things that damage your health,' I said.

She put her hand out and took the envelope from my hand. ‘I promise you,' she said.

How could I believe her when her eyes were already bloodshot and her impassive face showed that she was in another world when she gave the promise?

I turned to Mother. ‘Are you still angry?' I asked.

‘Not at all, José. I've never been angry with you.' She looked at my face sadly. ‘It's just that I worry about you. I don't want anything to stop you going to your father's country, when the time comes,' she said.

‘Mama!' I broke in.

‘José!' she interrupted. ‘I've been preparing myself for that day for ages. Do you understand?' She was fighting back tears. ‘I love you, José,' she continued. ‘But you weren't made to live here. I've been preparing myself, so that I didn't get too attached to you. I moved to Alberto's house without you and gave Adrian my attention, but not because I didn't love you.'

She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and continued. ‘It was because I was frightened about getting too attached to you. I left you here in the house with Aida and Merla so that when the time came your departure would be easier to bear.'

I looked at my watch as a sign to my mother that my visit was
over. I put my backpack on my back. As I was about to leave, she asked, ‘Aren't you going to visit your grandfather?'

‘I will,' I said with a nod.

I stopped at the door to Grandfather's house and hesitated. The smell of the place was unbearable. My mother had told me that Mendoza had been bed-bound recently and never got up. He urinated and defecated wherever he was lying. At night he was still shouting scary stuff and having conversations with his dead ancestors. ‘He seems to have lost his mind,' my mother said.

I turned away from Mendoza's door without going in. I'd seen enough of this man and I didn't need to see any more of him. But as I was walking along the path that led to the sandy lane along the side of my grandfather's land I heard his voice from the half-open door behind me.

‘José turned into a pineapple. José turned into a pineapple,' he said.

I stopped as soon as I heard what he said.
My God
, I thought.
Has Mendoza gone mad because of me?
Before I had a chance to walk on, I heard him calling for help behind me. ‘Josephine! Pedro! Aida! Merla!' he shouted.

Aida and Merla! Since when had grandfather been calling Aida and Merla? Now he was crying bitterly like a child. ‘José turned into a pineapple. José turned . . .' he was shouting.

Tears welled up in my eyes.
Should I go back and reassure him that I hadn't really turned into a pineapple
, I wondered. I hesitated, then walked on. I came up to Inang Choleng's house and the bee buzzed inside my head. The buzzing grew louder. I hurried past the bamboo fence that surrounded Mendoza's land and left everything behind – our house and Grandfather's cries: ‘José, forgive me, I'm sorry. José, can you hear me? I'm
sorry. José. José. José.'

 

5

Less than six months after I started my new job the manager of the Chinese centre told me I would have to look for a new job and he was giving me one week's notice before my contract with them ended.

The law in the Philippines requires employers to give workers redundancy pay if they lay them off after more than six months in the job. Employers often lay workers off before the six months are up, so that they don't have to make redundancy payments, and also because contracts are usually renewed automatically after the six-month period. Workers are always available, so it's in the employer's interest to terminate contracts before the six-month threshold and find new staff to replace those who are leaving. This may be why Filipinos rapidly acquire experience in a variety of trades, because the system keeps them moving from one job to another all the time.

Before my last week at the centre was over I had come up with a new job at a tourist hotel on the island of Boracay, south of Manila. I got it through one of my customers at the centre, who worked in a tourism company. It was a pathetic job, with a salary that would hardly keep me alive till the end of the month, but the man assured me that the tips from tourists would guarantee me a reasonable income. ‘That's the most I can offer to a young man who hasn't even graduated from senior school,' he said.

When would my father's promise be fulfilled
, I wondered.
When?

In the Philippines the doors had started to close in my face, one after another. All the doors left were only half-open. I could hardly slip through them, hardly make even a temporary living.

*   *   *

Before I set off for Boracay on the longest journey I had made since I was a baby, I passed by the family home and prepared the things I would need.

I felt as if I was trying out every possible means of transport that existed in the Philippines, all in a single day. I took a tricycle, a Jeepney, a bus, a train, a plane and finally a boat.

It was on the same boat that I began working. It was a small boat, with one man standing behind the rudder and another man helping him. I wasn't lucky enough to be one of those two. I was the third man and my job was to stand in the bow with a long bamboo cane that I used to check whether we were approaching shallow water and to keep the bow away from rocks when we came into harbour. When we arrived I threw the painter and tied the boat to one of the bollards with a thick rope. Then I had to put the gangplank in place so that the passengers could embark or disembark. Then I followed after them, carrying their bags to the vehicle that took them to the hotel.

Every hotel in Boracay had one or more of these boats to bring the tourists over from the much larger island of Panay where there is a small airport at Caticlan. I spent the whole day going back and forth between the two islands, mostly standing at the bow. It was ten minutes there and ten minutes back. The boats, each marked with
the name of its hotel, set off towards Panay as soon as we received word that a plane had landed. There would be dozens of boats heading for the same destination at the same time. The quality of the boats varied: some were luxurious, some were average and others were basic. The quality of the boat indicated the quality of the hotel it belonged to. When they set sail for the big island, the men working on the boats hoped to find plenty of tourists so they would stand a better chance of receiving more tips for their services.

My skin changed colour. The skin on my shoulders and my nose peeled off because of the salty water and the rays of the sun. I soon looked very different.

In Boracay I really missed the colour green. But I liked blue too. For all those years I had never seen how magical it was. In Boracay the world was an infinite expanse of blue. When I looked up at the blueness of the sky, I could imagine my eyes soaring like a pair of seagulls, their wings touching the white of the clouds. If they tired of flying I could imagine my eyes as a couple of fish in the sea, swimming through the endless blueness. I fell in love with the blue of the sky and the sea, whereas before I had noticed it only in Merla's eyes.

In my work at Boracay I saw Kuwaitis again, for the first time since our meeting with Ismail in Manila. Newly married couples came on their honeymoons, as well as groups of young men in high spirits, six or more at a time. They came to the island when Kuwait had its long summer holiday. They were so happy. I loved the atmosphere they created wherever they went. They were crazy. They made lots of noise in the boat, singing together in my father's language, which I didn't understand. They were really good at clapping in rhythm. They formed a circle around one man, or two men facing each other, and started by clapping softly. They clapped louder and louder till it sounded like a hundred men, while the man in the middle of the circle did some weird dancing.
He leaned forward and shook his shoulders, bending his legs and putting his hands on his head to hold his hat in place, then leapt up in the air as the circle around him broke up. They went on clapping while the man in the middle stayed where he was, swaying from side to side, then started moving his arms as if he were pulling on an invisible rope.

I loved them. I jumped for joy if I found out there were young Kuwaitis on the boat. At first I could only identify tourists as Arabs but later I could tell which of them were Kuwaitis. I tried to convince myself it was because I was one of them.

Their clothes, their shoes, their hats, their sunglasses, the perfumes they used – none of it was appropriate for the place they were visiting. Their clothes made them look rich but the way they behaved made them seem simple and naïve.

In return for a smile or for helping them across the gangplank between the boat and the quay, some gave me good tips. Money didn't seem to mean anything to them. When they got into the jeep with the captain and his assistant and set off for the hotel, I looked at myself in the bow, holding the long stick, and wished the stick would change into a magic wand that could turn me into one of them.

I wanted to follow them and call out to them saying, ‘Hi! Stop! My name's Isa. I'm one of you. Wait for me.'

The jeep drove off and their laughter faded into the distance. I sat on the ground not far from the boat, looking at it, imagining my father and mother aboard in those moments when I began my journey before I was born. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. I saw my father in his white cap with Ghassan, throwing their lines in the water, and Walid looking at me cross-eyed, sticking his tongue out at me. I went up to the boat. Walid vanished. I moved closer. My father disappeared. I stopped there in case the third
man vanished too.

*   *   *

I lived in a small staff annex, next to the hotel and with a door that opened on to a narrow dusty lane between our hotel and the high wall of another hotel. If you walked to the right, you came to the beach and if you walked to the left you came to the street that ran parallel to the shoreline and went past the other hotels.

I only went to the staff annex to sleep. Before going to bed I often spent some time smoking cigarettes in the narrow lane or sitting on the beach nearby.