The Tesseract (11 page)

Corazon’s footsteps hesitated.

“…come in later.”

“Don’t be too long. The hospital program starts in half an hour. You know I can’t watch it without you, or I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Half an hour…”

Rosa’s mother left the room.

It came as a surprise. The headlights flaring on the road, everything etched in a sudden bright monochrome, with quick sliding shadows. A Mercedes with blacked-out windows, fast moving.

A few seconds, and it had passed.

Barrio Sarap was as unlike Manila as a shark was a milkfish. Separated from the capital city by one hundred miles and the Sierra Madre mountains, the barrio sat on the eastern coastline of Luzon, gazing over the Pacific rather than the South China Sea. The only stone building was the church. Outside of the lumberyard, which had its own private generator, there was no electricity. There were no phone lines. There was no tarmac. There was only one tapped freshwater source, not counting the granite-filtered streams that ran down from the boondocks.

A hard rural life, but a resolutely siesta atmosphere—even the thud of a fisherman’s homemade dynamite or a metal screech from the sawmill seemed distant and unobtrusive. The only real disturbances in the barrio were occasional alcohol-fueled brawls and the late-summer typhoons, which would rip though the
nipa
huts, turn coconuts into cannonballs, and bring high tides that could suck palm trees down in their wake.

Unless, as a disturbance, one counted the kind of dramas that unfolded around adolescence, and adolescent preoccupations.

Premarital
sex meant: Have sex, and you get married. Sex without marriage didn’t happen. Frustrated Sarap boys were forced to collect themselves into groups of threes or fours and make a trip into the mainland, where the girls were less stubbornly virginal. There they would head for the larger towns, prowl, and hope that their long and exhausting journey would be rewarded. That failing, they’d pool their money and hire a prostitute.

As for the boys from the mainland, they stayed where they were. No need to make the trip across the mountains. They knew that the coastline girls were provincial and conservative, and didn’t put out without a cast-iron commitment.

This was the power of the Sarap girls. In their own way, Sarap boys shared the same provincial values and were damned if they were going to end up marrying someone who’d already been laid. So, where a future was concerned, Sarap girls were the only option. Their power: A smile was a good reason for a
boy to wait on a hot dusty road, hoping the smile might walk that way again; an indifferent turn of the head was an agony of rejection—and both could cause sleepless nights.

Sixteen years old, knee-length cotton dress with a sun-bleached floral pattern, schoolbooks under her arm. Rosa had silken hair that dropped to her shoulderblades and skin that was as deep in color as the sky. One day, a suitor would tell her that her beauty was as rare as her fingerprint, just before she rejected him.

Her house was about two miles down the coastline from her school in Infanta, the nearest town. Making the journey home on cloudless afternoons, she’d walk along the road. It was longer than walking along the beach—the road meandered inland at some points, through hamlets and rice paddies—but most of the route was shaded by roadside palm trees. In the mornings, however, Rosa always followed the beach. At seven
A.M.
, the sun was too low in the sky to be any bother.

A boy said, “Look,” as she passed him. He was kneeling down a short distance away, with his back to her, beside six feet of fine netting to trap the milkfish fry that swam in the shallows. In front of him was the white plastic container in which he kept his catch.

Rosa stopped, a little surprised.

It wasn’t until he had glanced over his shoulder, to check if
she had heard him, that she recognized the boy as Lito. They were the same age and lived in neighboring
barangays
, so Rosa was vaguely aware of his existence, but they had never exchanged words. He didn’t go to school, and they had no friends in common. The closest they had come to a conversation was at a fiesta, when Lito’s older cousin had asked Rosa for a dance. Lito had been his shadow, backup in the background. When she had politely declined, Lito had stepped forward to stand beside his cousin and opened his mouth as if he meant to say something. But instead he’d nodded, which had felt to Rosa like a tacit agreement that dancing with his cousin was not such a great idea. A second later the two boys disappeared.

“Aren’t you going to look?” said Lito with an impatience in his voice that Rosa found even more surprising. Since she had turned sixteen, no boy had spoken to her with anything less than the utmost courtesy.

“I’m on my way to school,” Rosa replied.

“I know. I see you walk to school most mornings. Sometimes I’m on my boat, far out at sea. You’re just a dot on the beach. But most mornings I’m right here, so I see you.”

“Oh…”

“It’s okay. I don’t expect you to have noticed me. I just thought you’d find this interesting.”

“Find what interesting?”

“Well.” Lito shrugged. “Either you look or you don’t.”

Rosa hesitated, then walked over the sand toward him. As she approached, he picked up a T-shirt and slung it across his left shoulder so that it hung over the side of his chest. Only then did he turn to face her.

“So,” said Rosa.

Lito pointed at the water in the plastic container. “You have to see up close. You have to get closer.”

Rosa squatted.

“There. Now follow my finger. You see this very small fry?”

“Yes.”

“You see anything strange about it?”

“No.”

“What do you see?”

“Actually, I can see two fry.”

“No, you
think
you can see two fry, swimming next to each other. But it isn’t two. It’s one fry, and he has two tails…” Lito frowned. “I’ve been catching these fry since
I
was a fry, and I’ve never seen anything like it. I thought maybe something happened to his mother. She might have been hit or bitten by a larger fish when she was pregnant. Some kind of shock…”

“Since you were a fry?” said Rosa, and laughed. Then she frowned, puzzled rather than annoyed. “Is that what was interesting?”

“Yes.” Lito’s expression became suddenly alarmed, and he tugged at a fold on his draped T-shirt. “You don’t think it’s interesting,” he said.

“It’s…
quite
interesting.”

He didn’t seem convinced.

“I’d better get to school.”

“Yes.”

They both stood up, and before Rosa could say anything else, Lito had lifted his net and was walking toward the shallows.

Rosa watched him for a few moments. He wasn’t short, but he certainly wasn’t tall either, and he was as black as the other boys who worked in the sea. But he was more handsome and less scarred than many of them, and he cut his hair much shorter. Disco hair was prized by all whose parents permitted it, following the local tradition of diligently matching Manila fashions of the previous year.

Maybe Lito had strict parents. Anyway, avoiding disco hair was no bad thing. Disco hair, Rosa commented to herself as she set off again toward Infanta, looked pretty ridiculous. She hadn’t really noticed before, but it wasn’t manly at all.

At lunch break, when Leesha had suggested they leave the school grounds to talk in the burned-out WW II army truck, Rosa had known that something important had happened. So had Ella, who’d spotted them as they left the playground and caught up before they vanished into the privacy of the jungle.

Arranging themselves in the cabin, laying palm leaves beneath them to protect their dresses from the rusty seats, there was a sense of anticipation. A few minutes later, it was difficult to imagine how the sense of anticipation could have been better rewarded.

“What?” Ella gasped. “You did
what?
” She fluttered a hand weakly in front of her face and nearly knocked her glasses off her nose. “Quick, I’m dizzy. I may faint.”

“It’s the truth,” said Leesha, glowing with happy defiance.

“You realize—” Ella began, but she had to break off to fan herself more vigorously. A series of deep breaths gave her the strength to compose herself. Then, after a pointless glance into the thick foliage that surrounded the truck, she whispered, “You realize that there’s absolutely no going back from this point.”

“Of course. But I don’t want to go back. I want to marry him, and he wants to marry me.”

“So he says!”

“I told him. I told him I wasn’t an inland girl.”

“And?”

“He told me he wasn’t even interested in inland girls.”

“Oh?” said Ella, arching her eyebrows. “For someone not interested, he’s made enough trips over the boondocks.”

“Only to keep Doublon and Simeon company.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Mmm-hmm nothing, Ella.”

“Mmm-
hmm
.”

“Mmm-
hmm
nothing! If I didn’t trust him, I wouldn’t be marrying him.”

“Marriage!” Ella echoed, abruptly changing her tone. “It’s too wonderful for words.”

“I’m telling my parents this evening.”

“This evening! What do you think they’ll say?”

“I hope they’ll agree to it.”

“But of course they will! Turing is so…well! His father virtually
runs
the sawmill.”

“Everyone says he’ll be the general manager when Tata Rudy retires.”

Ella widened her eyes. “And one can only expect that Turing will run the sawmill after his father.”

“Yes,” sighed Leesha. “But I’m not interested in that. If I could only tell you, Ella, when you’re in love, things like sawmills seem so unimportant.”

“It’s
too
wonderful!”

A silence began to grow. Rosa waited until it had reached a suitable length before she cleared her throat and asked, “What exactly is a blow job?”

The nature of the act
was both predictable (Rosa had heard rumors along similar lines) and unexpected (she hadn’t thought the rumors were true). Straightforwardly unexpected, however, was that halfway through Leesha’s graphic explanation, Lito popped into Rosa’s mind. Dismayed, forcing him out, Rosa told herself it was because she happened to have seen him that morning. He had been registered as something beyond a familiar local face, so his arrival in her mind was without any great meaning. Inevitably, she had fleshed out the image, and he was the first boy at hand.

It was an argument that carried no weight, and after the briefest of absences, Lito popped back again. This time, Rosa’s dismay was at the rush of jealousy she felt toward Leesha. Then it was at the odd elation that followed, and finally at her own hot cheeks.

Leesha noticed the blush immediately. She read it as innocence. Rosa, twirling the small silver-plated crucifix that hung around her neck, was content to let the mistake go uncorrected.

Chismis
, gossip like a soft wind that raises heads from field work, strong enough to chill sweat.
Chismis
ladies, the ones who excelled in the collection and distribution of gossip. Nobody trusted them, but everybody gave them their confidence and secrets, because taking these things was their art. Ella’s art. Since she had been as young as five or six, people had identified Ella as a
chismis
lady-in-waiting. They said she made up for Coke-bottle glasses and thin lips by having second sight and a big mouth.

When the end-of-school bell rang that afternoon, Leesha’s news had already spread beyond the boundaries of Infanta and was making its way cross-country to her barrio and her house. Rosa followed lazily behind, daydreaming, keeping half an eye out for any pretty flowers growing by the side of the road.

Rosa’s father, Doming, wasn’t talking over dinner that evening. Nothing unusual—a whole week could go by without his uttering a word. Ever since the dynamite fishing accident that
had deafened him, his communication had become more and more limited, these days restricted mainly to nods, smiles, shrugs, and similar gestures. Not that the underwater pulse had damaged anything beyond his hearing—Doming had never been a big talker. Rosa sometimes felt he was closer to his natural self after the accident than before.

Corazon’s not talking, however,
was
unusual. Normally, Corazon was chatty to the same degree her husband was not, but she hadn’t opened her mouth since the three of them had sat down.

Eventually, Rosa became troubled. The quiet was not angry or resentful, but it was certainly loaded, so she decided to find out what it was loaded with. “Is there something the matter, Mother?” she asked, ladling a cube of chicken neck onto her plate.

Corazon raised her eyebrows. “Should something be the matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No,” said Rosa, genuinely. “I don’t. Tell me.”

Corazon’s eyebrows rose again. Then she pursed her lips. “How is your schoolwork?”

“Schoolwork?”

“Yes, your schoolwork. How is it?”

“It’s fine.”