Banana Heart Summer Read online

  Then followed the plaintive query about a friend’s departure from the nest, fading with her usual tremolo. Perhaps this, in fact, was my opportune moment. Silently, I rehearsed my lines. I decided on innocent sweetness with enough authority, and with just a slight touch of the “poor me” tone, maybe even a tiny quaver in the throat. My business accoutrements.

  As always, there came the declaration of envy, as she sighed into her guitar. The yellow bird can “fly away, to the sky away”—but my knock kept it from taking off. In my head, I inevitably supplied the next line of her song: “You’re more lucky than me.”

  Of course, I knew the song as well as the whole neighborhood did: she sang it all the time. But Dios mio, Miss VV—who could be luckier than Remedios Street’s most beautiful girl, the only daughter of a doctor and a high school teacher, who lives in a bungalow and who’s studying to be a nurse?

  “Ah, Nenita. What can I do for you? And how is your brother Elvis?”

  “Very well, thank you, Miss VV. Elvis cannot forget Basilio Profundo’s palitaw, and he says you’re very nice and very beautiful too.”

  She giggled, tossing her head, making her hair bounce—she had so much of it, waves and waves of black undulating to the base of her spine. Her white headband made it look even blacker. She was wearing her student nurse’s uniform. White suited her.

  “Aysus, he’s so-o-o cute, just adorable!”

  If Elvis could score three floating faiths from her, surely I could do better. “Miss VV…”

  “Yes, Nenita?”

  Whatever happened to enough authority? “I—I know—I mean, I heard—” Self-diminution is the toughest business.

  “Come in, by the way—now, how rude of me.”

  But I kept my feet firmly by the door. My hands found the pili nuts, rubbed them for luck, grateful that her parents were out of town. Then I spilled my intention: “I know your maid left yesterday, I know it’s hard to run a household without one, what with you busy becoming a nurse and all that, and your mother and father working hard and all that, so I think you need help badly, your situation is dire, but I cook good, I wash clothes even better, I clean with my heart and soul, I can be trusted, I won’t ever let you down—I mean I need a job.”

  Finally, my business proposition. No sweetness or innocence, no authority and certainly nothing of the “poor me” tone. Just urgency. I couldn’t even look at her, and I couldn’t tell whether it was her voice or her hand on my shoulder that made my throat tight.

  “Is everything all right, Nining?”

  When your heart has kept itself from breaking for a while, the littlest gesture of kindness can easily snap it in two. I swallowed hard. There was no dignity in a quaver in the throat.

  “Come in, Nining, come in.”

  She led me to the sofa and sat me down. She noted my limp, she stared at the burns and bruises on my arms. I thought I heard her breathe deeply before asking, “Her again?” In a small neighborhood, most events are no longer news.

  “You need a maid,” I said.

  “No, Nining, you’re too young, you’re still in school.”

  “Just tonight, Miss VV, just tonight, I’ll cook and clean and wash for you, just a one-off job, just tonight.” And you can decide whether you still need my services tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  “Do they know you’re here?”

  “No. My mother and siblings are in the city, my father, I don’t know, perhaps looking for a job…”

  The best thing about Miss Violeta Valenzuela was that she never pried. She only listened to your stories and, from them, figured out the world in her head. She was very smart, my Señorita VV.

  “Okay, why don’t you help me cook dinner then, eat with me, and maybe you can clean up after—I have calamine, by the way,” she said, examining my arms and foot before heading for the bedroom to get the lotion. “And check the kitchen for whatever you can throw quickly together, I must be at the hospital at nine.”

  I whipped through the refrigerator, the cupboards. Quick, yes, but not simple. I needed to impress. What would I cook my mistress-to-be?

  Tinutungan: “that on which something has been burnt.”

  Bits and pieces of free-range chicken, especially those that you’d rather discard: the gizzard, the neck, the feet (all those that might make some delicate palates cringe, these are the ones closest to the heart of the matter) and—

  Blood of the chicken

  (optional, as I had no time to butcher the fowl myself)

  1/2 small green papaya, peeled, seeded; cut to the size of chicken pieces

  1 large fresh coconut, grated for milk extraction

  1 whole lemongrass, tied into a bundle and pounded

  1 thumb-sized ginger, peeled and pounded

  3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

  2 green native lemons, halved

  1 medium-sized onion, sliced

  1 long, green chili

  Pinch of salt

  I piled the grated coconut into a little mountain. I lit a piece of the coconut shell until it became a glowing ember. In the pile, I made a little niche for the ember. Then I blew and blew through the mountain, careful that it did not collapse. The ember burned, the mountain smoked—indeed a little volcano. Nilo or Junior was right: its smoke is the collection of our breaths.

  When the ember died, I threw it away and poured half a cup of very warm water into the smoked coconut mountain. I extracted the milk by pressing the grated coconut in my fists. I passed the milk through a sieve to make sure all solid bits were discarded, and set this first extract aside. Then I poured two and a half cups of the warm water into the coconut pile again. I made the second extract. In our street, we always cooked from scratch, we labored more arduously for our stomachs. Time accommodated our kitchens, our hands accommodated our lives.

  I rubbed the chicken with the green lemon halves to disguise the meaty smell. Strange that, all the time, we attempt to make better the smell, taste, texture or look of nature. We cannot leave well enough alone. Perhaps because nothing is well enough alone. Perhaps because the heart of the matter offends the palate, and where it does not offend, it scares. So we arm ourselves with herbs and spices, and we consider ourselves improved as a species.

  In a wok, I boiled the second extract of coconut milk, and all the spices and herbs combined (if only I had some blood). Then I threw in the chicken pieces, and when they were half tender, added the green papayas, and brought the mixture to a simmer. Then I poured in the first milk extract before the dish was finally done. I served this with freshly boiled rice, fragrant with pandan leaves.

  Señorita VV and I sat down to supper. We ate with our fingers. She smiled at me the whole time and asked for a second helping. The whole house smelled of sweet coconut with that comforting edge of smoked things.

  twelve

  Lab-yu and Fat & Thin and the rest of my heart’s desires

  Clutching my very first hard-earned four pesos, a hundred times over I believed there is a God. Señorita VV was overwhelmingly generous. I said I couldn’t accept it, it was too much. She said I shouldn’t keep her from her nine o’clock shift at the hospital with such arguments, and added that I should quickly wash up and go home. I washed her clothes as well and cleaned the house from top to bottom. I pulled the door shut by about eleven-thirty. There were too many stars in the sky that night, conspiring to be festive.

  My business was done. Or part of it anyway.

  The last bus had long gone by. I walked to the middle of the road and stood there, turned to the left, then the right. I preened before the smoking peak and the soaring cross. I imagined their standoff was momentarily forgotten. They were looking at me with approbation. Four pesos, more than my father’s last wage, and pili nuts and a full belly and the memory of the sweetest turon—what more could a girl ask for?

  It was Friday night and Remedios Street was noisier than usual. The standby boys were carousing at Tiya Viring’s store, trying to outdo Mr. Alano’s w
ailing Cio-Cio San.

  Tiya Viring was an orphan and an old maid. Please don’t take offense at my bluntness. This is not name-calling, but simply a statement of fact. In our street, we called a spade a spade.

  She wore her hair in tight curls; she was tiny, like a girl; she was pale; she always smiled, no, beamed as if she were born to indulge the world. Or maybe it was the other way around: she had always felt indulged by it, what with her eternally munching bits of her store. Sometimes I was tempted to ask whether all her profit ended up in her stomach.

  In the next house, Mr. Alano, the artist of Remedios, was always playing something. He was “an animal with the harmonica,” and he was not bad with the trumpet and the piano. He was the leader of a band that played at funerals, weddings, baptisms, birthdays and on every Saturday in his own lounge room, in a sort of jam session. He loved opera, also Gershwin and Cole Porter. He smoked cigars, he had airs, he did not mingle much with the rest of the neighborhood. The standby boys hated him.

  Every Friday night, at nine o’clock, Mr. Alano ran his fingers through a stack of LPs above his Sony phonograph. Eyes closed, leaving music to fate, he chose the tragic heroine of the night. She sang over and over again at full throttle, er, tremor, in that voice that did funny things to our spines. Next to his house, of course we received an earful with such constancy. We were lulled to sleep by too much wailing.

  Tiya Viring kept her store open till midnight. Because she could not sleep either or because she loved the voices of women who sounded as if their toes were being stepped on or as if they just had a big fright, ay, who knows. Tiya Viring began closing up just as Mr. Alano’s phonograph slowed to a halt.

  Sometimes I hoped his women’s voices would cross the street, jump through the red iron gate, past the dogs and the lions and the dragons, then soar up to the Chinese turret. Perhaps the señora would order her husband to lodge a complaint at the mayor’s office. It was not neighborly to keep people from sleeping, and certainly criminal to allow frightened women to occupy your neighbors’ dreams.

  “Hoy, are you waiting for a bus to run you over?” someone yelled at me.

  It was Juanito Guwapito, the leader of the standby boys and the youngest son of Tiya Miling, whose store was the archrival of Tiya Viring’s. You see, Tiya Miling’s dead husband was the cousin of the man whom Tiya Viring jilted on the eve of their wedding, because she caught him with Tiya Miling’s youngest sister who was visiting at that time, and Tiya Viring’s aunt had actually married Tiya Miling’s first beau who broke her heart, which was eventually mended by the man who became Juanito Guwapito’s father. Ay, all those little knots that bound the houses in our street could never be undone.

  “Hoy, girl, you want to get ran over? But the bus won’t come till tomorrow!”

  For reasons unknown to all, eighteen-year-old Juanito Guwapito did not drink at his mother’s store. On Friday nights around nine o’ clock, he gathered his gang at her rival’s. Tiya Miling, all fuming and quivering flesh—she was an ample woman—used to order her son home. This encounter always grew into a big fight over which Tiya Viring beamed indulgently. All that beaming drove Tiya Miling into colossal fits of rage, which she visited on the poor, good-for-nothing Juanito Guwapito. But when she realized that her rival could probably beam her out of her mind, she stopped trying to force her son to come home. She took up the habit of closing her own store before nine o’clock. Tiya Viring’s stayed open till midnight, till Mr. Alano’s diva finally expired.

  “Hoy, Juanito, don’t you worry her,” yelled one of the standby boys who had whistled at me. “She’ll be my girl in the future. I’ll grow her up and marry her!”

  The laughter of the standby boys, shirtless in the summer heat, made me freeze in the middle of the road. Maybe I should go home, maybe I should just hand over my untouched earnings to my father, maybe he will tell my mother about it when she comes home tomorrow. Maybe she’ll think I am the best daughter in the world. But the pull of the palate aching for a sweet was stronger than a grand recognition or even the crass teasing of a bunch of standbys.

  Head bowed, I walked to Tiya Viring’s store, trying to block out the sniggers of the boys. I fondled the four peso bills. Part of me did not have the heart to break any of them into coins. Ah, the pride (no, dignity) that I would relish when I laid the crisp bills on Father’s palm. No, I would not bunch them together. I would watch him smile as I counted out each fruit of my industry. I fondled the bills some more. But my tongue felt coated with too much chicken fat.

  “May I buy, please?” I murmured.

  We called it chocolate, but it was more powdered peanuts than chocolate, wrapped in a silver tinfoil with “I love you” written on it. My “Lab-yu.” Love in a cube the size of a thumb, at one centavo each. Love that stuck to the roof of the mouth as we tried to hang on to it for a little longer before it melted away. And we kept it stuck there, allowing the mouth to pool and swallow, pool and swallow, as we revived our faith in sweet things which, fingers crossed, would not leave us bereft too soon.

  “Lab-yu, please, Tiya Viring.”

  It was only years later when I realized, quite amusedly, how it would have sounded to a foreign ear. “Love you, please,” as we handed out our few centavos. As if we were paying cheaply while we offered love, as if its object needed to be bought to receive our affection, not the other way around. No wonder Ralph, the American Peace Corps volunteer, marveled at this little exchange the first time he heard it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “Five centavos only, please.”

  “Can’t buy me laa-ab, laa-ab!” Juanito Guwapito teased me, arms fixed as though he were holding a guitar, hips thrust forward, legs apart.

  “Laa-ab! Laa-ab!” the rest of the standby boys joined in the chorus. They were fired up with gin and the Beatles.

  In the next house, Cio-Cio San wailed and “Can’t Buy Me Love” competed accordingly. Tiya Viring beamed.

  But I was tuned in to a higher scale. All I could do was order the rest of her lined-up jars in my palate’s scale of preferences: sweet tamarind with its slight sour edge, sour tamarind which we sprinkled with salt, sticky and stretchable balikucha (possibly as much as two hand spans from the mouth to the pulling hand) made from palm sugar and coconut milk, tiratira, sourish-sweet and also stretchable but couldn’t compete with the former, Marie biscuits which we dunked in coffee if we had any, chicharon (pork or prawn crackling) which we dunked in vinegar, dry, crackly galletas patatas which broke into sharp pieces in the mouth, Choc-nut which was a bigger and more expensive version of Lab-yu, polvoron made from sweet powdered milk and margarine and which could choke us if we weren’t careful. There were also turu-talinga biscuits that came in the shape of ears and lollipops in three flavors, chocolate, lemon and strawberry, which we used as pretend lipstick, plus sweet-and-sour red “hosts,” called such by us kids because they were shaped like hosts, though dunked in the blood of Christ, we imagined. And, of course, Fat & Thin.

  Now this last one won over the rest. An afterthought purchase? An additional five centavos? I hesitated. Ay, why not, I can still hand over P3.90 to my father.

  “Also a packet of Fat & Thin, please,” I said. For my siblings when they come home tomorrow.

  A fat and a thin man, both dressed in suits and bowler hats, were printed on the packet of salted melon seeds. We ate them with considerable technique and precision, and delicately: with thumb and forefinger, position a seed, pointy side facing mouth, between the upper and lower front teeth. Crack seed, push back with teeth half of the salty shell (mustn’t touch lips, or else they’ll get pickled and turn white after a whole packet). Now bite out that thin little core.

  It was not so much the pleasure from the taste, there was so little of it, but the ritual of eating that kept us going. Too much trouble for some, I realize, but satisfyingly companionable. We always ate melon seeds with company. I loved Fat & Thin. Long ago, when it was just Junior and me, and Mother still laughed, she’d buy a packet
and we’d sit around learning these tricks of eating, of companionship, of delight. Ay, she did it so well. There she sat with her patrician features in perfect repose, our melon-seed-eating queen whose lips never, ever turned white.

  thirteen

  Adobo: the novena of the pork stew

  “Where have you been, you brat? Answer me, you good for nothing, where have you been?”

  His palm landed hard on my cheek. We stared at each other, shocked. My father had never hit me like that before.

  My siblings looked up from the table where a stack of greasy plates stood. Their mouths hung open.

  He wrung his hands, tried to reach for me. I flinched away.

  “We were worried sick. Your mother’s still out looking for you. How could you do this to us?”

  My heart sank into a bottomless pit in my stomach, my hands and feet developed a chill. I’ll really catch it now. But how could I know she was coming home today? And I thought Father wouldn’t be back till very late, ay, how could I know. “I—I was just next door, Papa.” I found it hard to speak, I had two Lab-yus stuck to the roof of my mouth. “Yes, just next door, Papa, I was busy, so I didn’t—I was—I should have—”

  “What?”

  He raised his hand again before he hid it in his pocket.

  “I was working, I was not doing anything bad or anything that you don’t—”

  “Where did you go after school?”

  “I—I didn’t go…”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going anymore.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll help you now, Papa.”

  “What?”

  I heard a giggle from the table and someone whispering, “Novena-ha-ha-ha,” but for my ears only. Eleven-year-old Junior had quickly recovered from the shock of seeing our gentle father lose control and, like a little devil, was ready to torment me. Or perhaps the teasing was meant to allay his fear. He was now licking one of the greasy plates, while keeping the others from doing the same. “Novena,” he whispered again, giggling.