The Tesseract (15 page)

Rosa stood in the kitchen with the telephone receiver to her ear. At twenty-to thirty-second intervals, she pressed the disconnect button, then pressed the redial button straight after. The time it took the telecom exchange to establish its link to a mobile was a free-fall of hope and frustration. The hard landing was the recorded message that explained her husband’s phone was switched off, when Rosa knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. Twice there had been a couple of rings before the link had inexplicably failed. Low power at the transmitter station,
or low batteries on the mobile, or just bad luck—which was why each hit of the redial button was making her more anxious. Rosa took bad luck as seriously as she took anything. She had seen enough people, inside and outside her professional life, hurt by nothing except things happening in a way they normally didn’t.

“This time,” she said, redialing again. “This time.”

“Rosie?”
said her husband’s voice, and it sounded extraordinarily faint and far away.

“Yes! Thank God I’ve gotten through. I’ve been getting worried.”

“I can hardly hear you, sweetheart.”

“I said I’ve been getting worried! There’s been some shooting in the area tonight, somewhere quite nearby. We’re all perfectly okay here, but I think you should be careful driving home. In fact, maybe you should even wait a while.”

There was a silence that lasted several seconds. Then her husband said, “Rosie? Are you there? I can hardly hear you.”

“I said…”

“Could you speak up?”

Rosa raised her voice. “I said you have to be
careful
driving home. I think maybe you should
wait
a while. There’s been
shooting
nearby.”

There was another silence. “I’ve nearly got the tire fixed.”

“What?”

“Those wheel nuts. Jesus.”

“No,
listen
, Sonny! In the streets nearby! There’s been shoot—”

“It won’t be long before I can start driving back.”

“I said
don’t
drive back!”

“Hardly hear you, sweetheart. You’re just a noise.”

“Hello?”

“Just a fuzz.”

“Sonny! Can you hear me at all?”

“Anyway, if you can hear me, then…”

“Sonny, will you
listen!
You’ve got to
wait
before coming home!”

“I’ve nearly got the car fixed, and I’ll be home pretty soon.”

“No!”
Rosa shouted.
“Listen to me!”
And her husband’s voice was swallowed by the static.

“I heard you shouting. You shouldn’t have been shouting. I was trying to calm the kids, trying to sing to them and make them calm enough to sleep, and you can’t make little children calm when they can hear their mother shouting.”

Rosa nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. The line…I was trying to speak to Sonny, but the line…”

“Sonny? He’s fixed the tire? Is he driving home? Didn’t you try to stop him?”

“I don’t think he could hear me.”

“You can’t call him back?”

“I can’t get through. I tried so many times, and I got through only once. He couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying…”

Corazon noticed Rosa’s lower lip tense and gave her daughter a frown of stern concern. “Now, there’s no point in us getting ourselves upset. Sonny is a sensible man and he’ll steer clear of any trouble. Anyway, those gunmen will be long gone by now. All that shooting. They won’t want to stick around.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Rosa agreed, and quickly said it again to make it sound less hollow. “That’s true. They’ll want to get out of the area as quickly as possible.”

“Exactly,” said Corazon. Then she spotted the bowl and spoon that Rosa had been using to eat the Magnolia ice cream. A single bowl and spoon, that could be cleaned with little more than a brief rinse under the tap. “So let’s not sit around and fret. Why don’t we do something useful and clean up.”

As Corazon passed Rosa
, she brushed a hand against her daughter’s arm. It was an old instinct, a throwback to a previous time. After Rosa had left the barrio to study in Manila, such physical contact—contact for the sake of comfort—had no longer seemed appropriate. Even when Doming had died, there had been a barrier between them, the kind of invisible cushion that exists between two magnets when they are held a certain way. Usually, it felt to Corazon as if this had been by unspoken agreement—one based on age, on coming of age, leaving home, the shockingly fast transition into adulthood that
Rosa had made out of her parents’ company. At other times, Corazon felt it was the price she had been made to pay for her child’s escape from the barrio and its traps. And at other times still, Corazon worried that something else altogether might have happened.

She knew that the last occasion she had been able to touch her daughter, without being
aware
she was touching her daughter, had been during the terrible typhoon. The rainstorm had continued for days, and each night Rosa had gone to sleep in Corazon’s arms. Corazon remembered it well. The way that her arms had ached, and how she had often wanted to shift position. Not that she had minded her arms aching. Not that one moment had passed between then and now in which she would not have happily done it again.

But a brushed hand, or similar gesture, was the closest she had come since Rosa had left the barrio and begun her new life in Manila. And, of course, Rosa had left for Manila directly after the rainstorm.

A strange thought, when put like that. Not comfortable, not worth dwelling on.

And anyway, why dwell on the obvious? There was a clear implication: If anything was to blame for the change that had occurred, it was Manila. Manila changed most of the people it touched, so why would her daughter be any different? Nothing to do with coming of age or prices paid. Just the dark city.

As predicted
: A brief rinse and the ice-cream bowl was clean, so Corazon wondered what she might do to occupy
herself next. Something normal and mundane was called for. If she couldn’t hold her daughter in her arms, she could at least surround her with reassuring normality.

Still wondering, Corazon glanced up from the sink and looked out the window. There she saw clouds of nighttime insects whirling under the downward glow of each streetlamp. An unusual number of them, moving in graceless slow motion, as if they were in a dream.

And, equally belonging to a world of dreams, or to childhood recollections of skipping-rope chants, she saw a silhouette.

Corazon took three or four steps away from the sink, turning as she did so. Rosa scraped her chair backward. Through the ceiling, there was the soft bump of small feet sliding off their beds and landing on floorboards.

Rosa asked Corazon what she had seen, and Corazon raised a hand to the side of her face. Rosa didn’t feel any particular alarm, didn’t make any connection with the exchange of gunfire ten minutes earlier, because Corazon’s expression was one more of puzzlement and surprise than anything else. She was almost smiling. “I
thought
I saw…” she said, but didn’t end the sentence.

“Mom!” called Lita.

Rosa looked toward the hallway, then back at her mother.
Corazon, still holding the side of her face, still seeming no more than vaguely startled, looked back at the window.

“Mom!”

Lita’s voice was clearer, less muffled, coming from the top of the stairs.

Rosa swore. “
Stay
in your room, honey!”

“Are you going to come up?”

“
Yes
,” Rosa replied, not moving. “I’ll be right up. I want you to go
back
to your
room.
”

“I
thought
I saw…”

The man outside
was on his hands and knees, crouched in the middle of the road. A thick covering of an indeterminate filth glistened or glittered on his clothes and body. He had an automatic pistol. His head was hanging loosely and his chest was heaving.

Suddenly he rolled over, holding his arms out stiffly. The gun swung around so it pointed down the length of his body. He was aiming at the street behind him, where, distinct under the sodium lamps, two more men had appeared.

In the nine years since she had left the barrio, Rosa made the return journey over the Sierra Madre mountains only five times. While she had been finishing school and starting university, she had made the trip home each Christmas, staying for no more than three days. After meeting Sonny in her first year as a medical student, she had not returned to the barrio at all. Their marriage, eight months later, had taken place in Batangas, the home of Sonny’s family.

Twice a year, Corazon and Doming made the reverse trip
to visit Rosa in Manila. They stayed at Uncle Rey’s. The purpose of their trip was twofold. Partly to see their daughter, whom they missed—especially Doming, who had never had a clear understanding of the reasons for Rosa’s abrupt departure—and partly to petition Uncle Rey for more college funds. Rey always was agreeable to the petition, having been the main reason that Rosa’s career had been pointed in the direction of medicine. Usually, he arranged for the transferral of money several days before Corazon and Doming even showed up.

If Doming hadn’t died, Rosa never would have made the journey for a sixth time. If Doming had lived forever.

Changes, in the nine years: The sawmill had expanded, exhausted the supply of trees around Infanta, and begun to strip the jungle along the mountain road. The river, visible as the road began its descent toward the coastline, was permanently brown from landslides in the defoliated areas. The stretch between Sinoloan and Real was tarmacked. On the tarmac were Japanese and Korean sedans. Sedans hitting thirty or forty miles an hour, where jeepneys—weaving around countless potholes and ruts—had once been lucky to touch fifteen.

Just the start of the changes.

Nobody looked up when an engine passed. Nobody hitched rides, because the rides were moving too fast to stop. The horses that lived in a glade by a hairpin turn had vanished. Concrete tubes redirected streams. The journey took two and a half hours less than it used to.

“Different,” said Sonny, accelerating the Honda sedan to overtake a Kapalaran bus.

“You can’t imagine,” Rosa replied.

“All that used to be jungle. This used to be a dirt track. There weren’t any power lines.”

“Okay, you can.”

Sonny glanced cautiously at his wife out of the corner of his eye. “Caribous munched on fields of wild orchids. Rare birds took fruit out of the hands of children.”

“Mmm.”

“Mammoths would stampede down from the mountain summits…”

There was no acknowledgment.

“Rosa,” Sonny said, after a brief pause, and reached over the gearshift to squeeze her knee. “Is there the slightest chance of getting a smile out of you?”

Rosa shook her head, though she gave Sonny’s hand a squeeze in return. “There’s no chance. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” said Sonny quickly. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just trying to…”

“You’re trying to make this easier.”

“In any way I can, if you just tell me what to do.”

“There’s nothing.”

“But if you realize there is something…”

“Yes.”

“You just tell me.”

“I will.”

Raphael, lying on Rosa’s lap, head rolling with the turns, stirred. Two months past his first birthday. A better sleeper at that age than his older sister had been.

Rosa started to feel ill when they reached the coast—which meant that Infanta and Sarap were now no more than a thirty-minute drive away. She asked Sonny to pull over, handed him the baby, got out of the car, and threw up. While she was throwing up, Sonny also got out of the car and came to stand behind her. It reminded her of Lito and the dead pig on the beach, which made her throw up again.

“This is too hard for you,” said Sonny. “We’ll drive back to Manila. Tomorrow, I’ll collect Corazon myself.”

“No,” said Rosa over her shoulder. “I’m not missing my father’s funeral. Just give me a few minutes on my own. I’ll be fine.”

A short walk took her down a grassy slope and onto sand. Feeling the eyes of her husband and children watching her from the Honda, she maneuvered until the car’s bright blue paint was obscured by roadside trees and bushes. Then she sat down, halfway between the high-tide watermark and the sea itself.

“
Your beauty is
as rare as your fingerprint.”

It was an unexpected line, said earnestly and with a noticeably prepared seriousness. Thinking back on it many times, Rosa suspected that Lito had lifted the line from a
sari-sari
store romance comic. She also suspected that the next line would
have been a marriage proposal. Which, if her life had been her own, she would have accepted.

But instead, she told him that within forty-eight hours she was going to be on a jeepney headed for Manila, where she would live with her uncle Rey. And she told him that they would probably never see each other again.

Lito said that he didn’t believe her. He had a look on his face as if he’d just staggered out of the sea with bleeding ears and glass splinters peppered in his skin. Rosa thought maybe she had the same look on her face. She certainly had it in her head. When she screamed at Lito, telling him that it was true, she felt as if she were screaming through cotton wool. And when the words came out, they were whispered.

Lito asked why. Why Manila, why never see each other again. Rosa had answered him by lunging forward and hitting him. Or scratching him. On the chest.

It was hard to remember the specifics, in the same way that it was hard to remember why her answer had taken the form of an assault. Except that it was appropriate. Without fairness or reason—appropriate in its context.

Then she was pulled back by Doming, who must have followed her when she had run out of the house early that morning, tracking her as noiselessly as the world in which he had come to inhabit. Doming, who had not understood the silent movie scene that had exploded in front of him the night before—Corazon and Rosa twisting their mouths into inexplicable expressions of fury and hatred—but who had understood its aftermath well enough. Saw it on his daughter’s face as she
had seen it on his face, as she had seen it on Lito’s face. And indeed, as Doming could see it on Lito’s face.