The Solemn Lantern Maker Read online

  The angels wait. On the roof, the spot of light on the cherub’s brow has grown, as if its brain were now infused by some lucent thought. Saint Michael and Saint Raphael, and even his fish, are also glowing. The midday sun betrays the hut’s holes and gashes, this life not quite stitched at the seams, but the betrayal is welcome. Even the angel patching the door to the wall lets in more of the morning, so the lost trumpet seems to have been found, perhaps to amplify the conversation below. What is it that they hear?

  Two tongues, two voices. Pilipino and English, a boy and a woman conspiring.

  “May alam akong kuwento …” “I know a story …”

  “So do I …” “Ako rin …”

  “Kuwentong di mo alam …” “A story you don’t know …”

  “Nor do you know mine.” “Di mo rin alam ang akin.”

  The boy sketches the unknowable in his head, extending his comic strip from before, revising the cosmic.

  Four stars in the sky.

  Big angel falling from the fourth star.

  Small angel flying from the first star.

  Small angel on the pavement, arms open and waiting for the fall.

  16

  Nena and her laundry ride home in Noland’s cart with a pail of water. She wants to scold her son but loses heart. Instead she complains bitterly about how her only client was hijacked. “I’ll wash the last lot tomorrow—the last lot, would you believe? … But who’d want to hire a lame washerwoman? … And I worked so hard…” She’s about to speak again but shuts her mouth.

  The cart skirts puddles and dog turds, and Mikmik and her gang blowing trumpets at their ears, asking after Noland’s “dwarf stars.” The nine-year-old bully is surprised they don’t get a rise from “the witch”—she’s not even looking at us? But mother and son keep their faces down, afraid the whole track will know about their guest, will see the truth in their eyes.

  “You must throw that TV out.”

  Never, the boy protests. You love it.

  “We can’t afford it now.”

  The boy makes faces, uses gestures to explain his big plan. I’ll sell more lanterns, I’ll go back to the dump soon, more usable garbage there, people get new things for Christmas, and of course more bottles to sell.

  “You know the police have been asking questions around here?”

  Noland feels the need to pee, he has to pee. The ground trembles, then the rumble of machinery. Quickly Noland pushes the cart to the side, nearly bumping against Mang Pedring with his bag of tools. It’s like being in a wind tunnel when they’re caught this close to the passing train. Their clothes whip about, as if escaping from their bodies to hitch a ride to where there are houses with brand-new televisions and proper tables for a meal. Sometimes Noland wonders what would happen if they just took the train and never got off. Then there’d be no need for houses.

  When they reach the hut, Noland leaves his mother at the door and runs to the back to relieve himself. The black creek wakes up, makes small ripples then is still again. He shivers; his shorts are wet. At the door, his mother detains him. “No, hang these first.” She stretches the job, rummaging through the laundry, pretending to search for the perfect piece and the matching peg. Soon the washing lines look like flapping riggings of the hut, running from its roof to the wire fence. At the other side, the highway.

  She doesn’t want to go in, doesn’t want to deal with that “bad-luck woman” sleeping on her mat. She wants to talk about her to Noland, about all the trouble that she’s waking up in their lives. But how to speak of stories that must sleep? How to break this silence between them? She wants to scold, but all she does is ask, “Is she awake?”

  17

  Helen knocks on the door with a bowl of chicken soup. She calls out to Nena and Noland, but the hut is silent. She shrugs her shoulders, mumbles that they’re probably out, and returns to her hut across the track. Her husband, who takes the bowl from her, is collecting money from the line of video buffs. This afternoon, he’s showing Bad Santa, a deviation from the usual local films but perfect for the season. One mother who’s with her three-year-old wants to know if it’s a good idea for her daughter to see Santa bad, or if it’s a good idea to make Santa bad in the first place.

  “Don’t worry, he’s not really bad, just naughty, and it’s a very, very funny film—watched it several times myself,” Mario says, while sipping the soup. “Hoy, Helen,” he calls out to his wife, “this is really good, plenty of ginger. I love ginger.” He pushes the mother and child inside, mumbling, “I’m having my second helping. Don’t worry, you’ll like it too—that Santa’s a hoot.” He looks forward to his running translation and commentary as the film plays, well after he finishes this soup. “Hoy, Helen, play a cartoon first, one of those shorts.”

  At the window, Helen rolls her eyes to heaven. “Mario, you shouldn’t be eating something that’s meant for our neighbor.”

  “You and your nosy neighboring. It will get you into trouble one of these days.”

  “Nena’s lost her only customer.” She sighs, imagining her poor neighbor’s “ugly legs” that she always tries to hide, and the boy’s silence. They always make her sigh.

  “Not your problem. I’m sad for her too but she’s unreliable, slow washing, always sick, work delayed. Of course any client will find someone new.” He’s stuck into the chicken leg now.

  “You have a stone heart, you know that?”

  “Ay, Helen, I’m just practical. These times you have to be.”

  “She’s acting funny. I’ve never seen her this distressed, this quarrelsome. Maybe because of last night, ay we’re all afflicted by that—that—”

  “Of course, she’s the queen of misery.”

  “But this morning was different, she’s even more—I wonder if they’re okay, what with that shooting. I hope her son wasn’t there, I hope—”

  “You and your hope—but I’m not going to argue.”

  “You’re a man with no conviction, no balls!” And Helen slams the window shut.

  “No, I’m a peaceful man so I won’t rise to your bait,” he murmurs to himself, gnawing each chicken bone clean.

  18

  Kentucky Fried Chicken and a huge bottle of Coke. Elvis is stuffing himself with the feast. He’s naked, running from the table to under the sheets, television remote in one hand, a heaped plate in the other. There’s a Bugs Bunny rerun on screen: he’s being chased by Elmer Fudd with his shotgun. Bugs hops onto the carrot patch, uprooting a carrot at each hop. Elmer aims—“You wascal wabbit!”—but Bugs confuses him by throwing carrots in the air, juggling them. Elmer fires but hits only a carrot, then another, and another. By the time Bugs is safe underground, he has only one carrot top left. “Oh well, at least there’s dessert.” He smirks, munching away.

  Elvis giggles, copies Bugs’s facial attitude and rabbit voice, “Oh well, at least there’s dessert,” and starts on the chicken. Then, as an afterthought, he yells, “Oh man, where dessert?”

  “Ach, mein Gott, what big appetite you have, Elvie,” a man calls out from the shower, laughing. “To better eat you, my dear,” he responds to his own remark, laughing even louder.

  “No Elvie, shit man—Elvis, okay?” the boy yells back.

  “And what big voice you have—to better—better sing you, my dear,” and he giggles. “Ach, water gut, Elvie, come.”

  “No, we finish.”

  “I buy you dessert, gut sweet.”

  “No, finish now, okay?”

  “I give you dollar, more—”

  “How more?”

  “Ten—”

  “Cheap—hundred—”

  “What! Fifty—”

  “No bargain, I give you gut, gut time.” The boy imitates the other’s accent. “Hundred—”

  “Ach, you baddie boy, Elvie. Okay come, water very gut.”

  Elvis is silent. He’s surprised the German took his call. He didn’t want him to, but what the hell. He stops arguing over his name, and gives up on the f
ood, the TV.

  “Hundred okay, so I wash my Elvie nice.”

  The boy looks his naked body over in the mirror. He looks down there, rubs it, while finishing his Coke. Now he’s ready. He opens a palm toward his reflection, mouthing “Gimme five!” and goes into the shower.

  19

  How to make a star. Noland thinks it, draws it. He fills his notebook with stars of all sizes, all shapes, prospecting beyond the usual five points, but then returns to the old model. He hears himself speak in his head, encouraging his hand.

  “Star.” He fills the whole page with a five-pointed star.

  “One light.” He encircles the first point.

  “Two lights.” He encircles the second too, and so on. When he’s done the lot, he hears his verdict. “A star has five lights. Only five.”

  He has been drawing since lunch and has even forgotten to hide the notebook where he figures out the world and why she hasn’t woken. He and his mother ate the guest’s breakfast, even the burger. Now he touches her foot, very slightly—she’s burning. He looks to his mother anxiously. She hasn’t spoken since they went in after hanging out the laundry. She checked on the sleeping woman, touched her arm, her forehead, wrung her hands. Infection, what if she has an infection there, after—or the blood loss must have gone to her head, made it hot, this fever, ay, Dios ko.

  Nena is on the floor, boiling water on the stove. The Amerkana needs a hot sponge to make her sweat, to get that fever down. Then she hears the sudden movement and her son’s intake of breath—the white woman has sat up, she’s beginning to scream! Nena runs to her and clamps a hand over her mouth, terrified that the whole track will hear. She holds her, keeps holding her until she settles back to her dream, while Noland squats at their feet, eyes fixed on the women clinging to each other, vowing he’ll love them forever.

  20

  At five-thirty, Noland is outside Quiapo church, sent on an urgent errand. His mother could only think, herbs from Quiapo. No one will die in her house, no one will die on her again, not even a stranger! He holds the piece of paper to give to the vendor. Nena set this list on his palm then closed it, murmuring an invocation of faith: “This will work, this must work.”

  Noland is swept up by the rush hour. Crowds frantic to get home are making detours for commerce and God, and for every other need.

  “How much for the fish? You’re sure it’s as fresh as it looks? How much for the flowers? I want a bunch for my altar. How much for this Child Jesus? He’s perfect for my manger. Oh, this little Bethlehem is cute. How much for fortune telling? Your cards aren’t accurate. How much for these mahogany seeds? The packet says, ‘Tried and tested, an effective cure for diabetes, arthritis, rheumatism, ulcer, asthma, high blood, stomach pain, cough, menstruation, cancer.’ Are you sure? Oh, but how expensive.”

  From the market around the corner, through Plaza Miranda, and now outside the church, Noland has eavesdropped on all the bargaining. Its urgency is irresistible. It must really be Christmas. Everyone wants more, hopes more. Earlier, as he cut across the plaza, the Christmas ornaments made him dally awhile. A stage was being decked for the Christmas Eve celebration—the angel was the largest he’s seen yet, and it was a lantern too, an angel lantern—and they’re still working on her, look. If he cranes his neck now—the boy sidesteps the crowd, trying to get a view of the lantern again. It’s being hoisted to the top of the stage. He hops up and down. He is too young to know about another stage that made this plaza a landmark. In 1972 a political rally was bombed here. The bombing “justified” a dictator’s years of martial law.

  Finally, he finds a little rise on the pavement. He steps up; he can almost see the angel’s head.

  “Hoy, out of the way!” someone scolds.

  It’s the “religious” vendor asking Noland to make room for her customer, who’s haggling over the going rate for novenas. Her son is very ill and she can’t afford the surgery, but maybe a miracle… She’s rushing to her third job, so she’s contracting the vendor to do the prayers for her. “And pray to the Black Nazarene too, it might work this time, it’s Christmas, you know.”

  This will work, this must work. Noland suddenly hears his mother’s words. How could he get distracted! He clutches the list, thinks of his own angel at home, her fever. He walks around the church, examining the stalls of bottles and packets. Root, bark, fruit, leaf, sap, even things he cannot identify, all packed for every ailment in the world. Here where wallets are thin or empty, it is faith that cures, it is deprivation that makes miracles.

  The boy stares hard at the list but can’t divine its intent. He has yet to learn how to read the squiggles:

  Para nakunan. Panlinis. For miscarriage. For cleaning.

  Tentatively he moves toward two vendors sorting their wares, taps one on the shoulder and holds out the piece of paper.

  One of the women grabs it without looking up. “What’s this?” She frowns. “Is this an ‘n’ or an ‘m’—nakunan or makunan?” Is this “for miscarriage” or “to miscarry.” Then she realizes it’s a boy before her. “What, your mother sent you to buy this? Hesusmaryosep, Jesus-MaryJoseph, your mother has no delicadeza”—no delicacy of manner, no propriety. “Who’d send her son on an errand like this! Have a look at this, have a look.” She shows the list to the other woman. “It says, ‘to miscarry’ doesn’t it? Hoy, we don’t sell that!” The woman quickly covers a row of bottles labeled pamparegla, to induce menstruation. The herb is discreetly traded outside the church that condemns abortionists to hell.

  “Go away, boy! How dare you come to us!” she spits.

  Noland escapes, perplexed by her anger. But there’s no time to find out why. Quickly he’s swept in the surge of the faithful, into the church.

  21

  It is Quiapo’s center, this Black Nazarene that has literally come through fire. It was blackened by a shipboard fire on the journey from Acapulco to Manila in 1606, but by the grace of God was saved. How miraculous, like all the tales of salvation that brought the wretched indios to their knees for nearly four hundred years, much to the approbation of the Spanish conquistador. Let these “Indians” hope for heavenly redemption, not a country’s liberation.

  Centuries later, the faithful still pin their hopes on it. They too will come through suffering with the intercession of this burnt Christ, who is looking up though weighed down by His cross. They too are looking up from their knees, to Him. Their hopeful gaze has fixed this Christ in His suffering. His cross is not the world’s iniquity, as is preached, but its hope.

  You were born poor and suffered like us but rose to glory, so surely we can too, we must. How wearying to have the world demand this of anyone, how exhausting to be God. But humanity is wired to hope, aim higher than its height, and pity the man or god assigned to fulfill it. Inside the church, the man-God is flanked by the oldest stories of restitution in stained glass: His birth in a manger, Gloria in Excelsis Deo, and His glorious resurrection, or is it the final judgment?

  The late sun is streaming through the glass; the candles are lit. The altar is a spectacle. The faithful look up and up. Not Noland, though. His gaze is fixed lower down, on the angels guarding the Black Nazarene, for whom he has no time.

  Noland likes his Jesus white, his angels bright, as they are in the ads and on Christmas cards. So he crosses himself before the winged guardians instead, surveys their clean robes, their golden hair. He wonders about their feet. How are they shod? He imagines his own angel asleep at home and is overwhelmed by inspiration that’s hardly divine. He rushes out of the church, checking his pocket for remaining cash and the bottle of herb that another vendor sold him without asking questions. He’s hatching more domestic stratagems. Like all the faithful this boy hopes, but it hasn’t occurred to him to kneel, to pass on hope as a burden on anyone’s shoulder.

  His mother stopped going to church years ago, so he conjured his own cathedral. He longed for angels; he found them. He wished for stars; he made them.

  It’s nea
rly dark when he reaches Central Market at the other end of Quiapo. He walks the dimly lit corridors of plastic flowers, beaded dresses, fake designer jeans, then finally finds where the housedresses are sold. He fondles them—how soft, how bright. The vendors are impatient.

  “What would you like? Is it for your mother, a Christmas gift? What’s her size?”

  No answer from the boy. He’s looking for blue, the right blue.

  A hundred pesos for small, a hundred and sixty for large. He checks his pocket. Twenty pesos, that’s all. It doesn’t stop him. He keeps searching for a good ten minutes. The vendors are not convinced. They drive the street kid away.

  22

  The only light comes from the television playing a Mexican soap opera with Pilipino subtitles. Nena stares at the reunion of her favorite lovers but can’t quite follow the passionate repartee. She keeps shifting and glancing at the sleeping American, muttering that she can’t stay here. When City Flash comes on, she freezes. The face of the “salvaged” journalist Germinio de Vera fills the screen. He wears a puzzled look, the same one that wondered why on earth he thought the palm of a child was as small as a star, as small as a country, as small as hope. Did he save this thought for broadcast to more than seventy million viewers tonight?

  Salvaged doesn’t mean “saved” in this part of the world, which has turned an English word inside out to reveal the dark interior, the deadly heart. The news speculates that Germinio de Vera was salvaged for exposing a senator’s “friendship” with a famous Jueteng King, the godfather of illegal gambling. Perhaps the senator’s election campaign was funded by this generous personage? As a consequence the senator looks the other way when the king-maker flaunts his mansions and fast cars and three mistresses maintained by the masses’ faith in numbers dreamt up or rumbled for luck. But the journalist pushed his own luck further, throwing the deadly card on the table with the question: Was the senator the Jueteng King himself? The answer was a speedy salvaging, on a motorcycle.