THE STAIN OF BLACKBERRIES
(a memoir piece)
“What an embarrassment she is!” my mother exclaims, when I read her the news
of Socorro Luczon-Hartford.1 The Filipino-Australian woman has been embroiled in a
series of court battles with her stepdaughter over the Hartford fortune, built on the largest
iron-ore deposit in the world. She’s an evil, vindictive woman, the Hartford daughter
claims, who only married my father for his money. And then she harangued him to death.
Crass, the Australians agree among themselves.
“Poor man,” my mother adds. “After everything that he achieved in his life, and
this is what he’ll be remembered for.”
“That,” I say, “or the thing he said about their aborigines.” James Hartford had
famously swept aside questions of aboriginal land rights with the curt reply that sounded
almost like a chant: “Nothing should be sacred from mining, whether it’s your ground,
my ground, the blackfellow’s ground.”
Later, I show my mother the Youtube clip of Socorro screaming at a white
Australian houseboy. He’s gotten her a Louis Vuitton from her designer-bag collection,
instead of the plastic one she’d demanded. “A plastic bag! A neutral bag! Just a bag for
my goodies!” Even my mother has to laugh at the houseboy’s bewilderment. Any
Filipino would’ve known right away what she meant. “Here, I’ll show you,” Socorro
shouts on Youtube. She marches into the kitchen, hunkers down in front of the kitchen
counter, and pulls open the bottom drawer. Plastic bags, obviously used and re-used,
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Some names have been changed to protect my identity.
explode out of the drawer. Her hand dives into the pile and instantly emerges with her
treasure – the plastic bag, that great leveller of social classes in the Philippines,
indispensable in every Filipino household.
“But how did they manage to catch her on film? In her own kitchen!” my mother
says. “It’s appalling how technology nowadays strips us of our privacy.” Crass, is how
my mother sees advanced countries. “Wasn’t she your classmate back in grade school?”
she goes on. “She came to the house one Saturday, and she did the rounds of the
neighborhood with you. To sell our longaniza.”
That day with Socorro, I’d sold the sausages in half the time that I would have by
myself, and then she insisted that we go back for more. We sold all that, too. My mother
adds, “I rather liked her, she had such spunk.” That’s the way my mother likes to remind
me of my character flaws. Admiration for someone else is accusation against me. “You
were best friends, weren’t you?”
“Only for a while.” A month exactly, I think but don’t say, because my mother
has always worried about my solitariness.
“What happened?”
“She went on to other things. I stayed the same, I suppose.”
I’d long left Socorro buried in the detritus of my childhood, but suddenly the
videoclip is handing me the shovel with which to exhume and re-examine it all, in the
light of my senescence.
More than fifty summers ago, the street I lived on was hosed with water to lay the
dust. Across our house, freight trains loaded with canes and canes of sugar, thousands of
them, lumbered by: past the seven-room schoolhouse, the priests’ monastery still wanting
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a church, the houses interspersed between cogon and bamboo fields, and through a giant
swath of sugarcane fields edging into the mountains.
Intsik beho! Intsik beho! we chanted, emboldened by our numbers as the
Chinaman, with the queue hanging down the length of his back, came and went from his
sari-sari store. The boys would make loud snorting sounds before spitting out gobs of
their frothy saliva on the ground that was already wet from our housemaid’s hosing.
Every Tuesday afternoon, at exactly one o’clock, the Bombay with the black umbrella
and a turban on his head roared by on his motorcycle. Hala! – my yaya said, with our
mother’s tacit permission – if children aren’t safely in bed for their siesta, he will snatch
them and let them bleed to death at the foot of the bridge nearby.
It was a time when people with a limp, or tics and twitches, or mongoloid heads
were pointed to and laughed at if they dared to walk down the street. A wizened old man,
who lived three houses away from us, walked with his left hand on a cane while his right
hand shook violently, the index finger pointing at his lower belly. Invariably, our
houseboy and sometimes even my brother, trailed behind him, stooped and limping like
the hunchback assistant of the mad scientist in horror movies, and doing an obscene
version of the old man’s shaking finger.
My brothers and I were the fruit of the post-war jubilation, and those who had
survived unscathed could only be filled with guilty relief at the sight of men missing an
arm, or a leg, or an eye. The war had been a temporary aberration, over and done with;
now it was time for irrepressible, defiant celebration. The man who leaned against the
front wall of the wet market held a crutch in one hand and a booklet of sweepstakes
tickets in the other; at the other block, a man blew blindly into a harmonica attached to
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his guitar, which he strummed as his foot pressed rhythmically on a pedal that struck a
big drum standing on its side.
Reminders of mutilations of the soul, like those of comfort women, would have
been resented then because they’d have been, in today’s catch phrase, out of sync. “How
awful!” my mother could say fifty years later, when news about them surfaced. “But we
were all victims of that war.” And she would launch into her stories of babies being
bayoneted in the air, and headless men continuing to stagger a few more steps before
collapsing, and the bayonet slap on her butt when the enemy soldiers thought she wasn’t
bowing down low enough.
On the nights when my parents had gone to the “last full show” at the
moviehouse, my two brothers and the houseboy entertained themselves and the
household with a mimicking contest. A favorite was the one-armed man who came round
pushing a cart with a barrelful of molasses, which he sold by the gallon as pigslop. Our
houseboy slipped his arm from its sleeve and held it to his torso underneath his shirt, and
my brothers hollered with glee at the sight of his fingers sticking out from the bottom of
his shirt and caressing his own thigh. The window ledge was their stage, the sliding capiz
windows their curtain. The laughter got more uproarious as the show built up to its
climax, which consisted of my two brothers and our houseboy mimicking me, their
embellishments full of such burlesque detail that I couldn’t recognize myself in them. But
I was convinced that must be how the world saw me. I sat there with the househelp and
pretended that I was having as much of a rollickin’ good time as everyone else in the
audience – my yaya and her younger sister who was the cleaning maid; the driver and the
cook who was his wife.
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When school opened, my classmates just picked up from where they’d left off
with their old friends two months before. I couldn’t keep a friend from one year to the
next, so I was the only one without a pair, although I managed to find a fellow loner
within a week of the beginning of school. This friend would find someone else to pair
with when we got to the next grade, so that I would find myself alone again. Or, just a
few months into our alliance, one of us would simply avoid the other’s eyes when we
were released at recess and then run to link arms with a new best friend.
Zenaida joined us in second grade. I spotted her right away, on the first day of
school. She was wearing an old and faded uniform, like me. But she was a new girl, so
her uniform must’ve been a hand-me-down, whereas I’d been wearing mine through the
lower grade. The school uniform consisted of a mocha blouse and a green skirt held up
by suspenders of the same green cloth and forming a V in front. Our blouse – Zenaida’s
and mine – had turned off-white; and our skirt was the color of snot, although mine was
in two shades of it – fresh and dry – where my mother had let out the seams just the night
before. I felt ashamed for us both, standing like dull moss in a forest of evergreen.
When recess period came, we found ourselves at the same side of the canteen,
where the saltine crackers were. What drew the crowd to the other side were the cakes
and sandwiches. I bought a packet of saltines with my ten-centavo coin and then bought a
bottle of coke with my other. I saw Zenaida taking my lead when she also chose saltines,
but she didn’t have anything extra to buy a drink with. So I took another straw and
dropped it into the mouth of my coke bottle.
The corridors along the classrooms would be full of girls in clusters of three’s and
four’s playing jackstones, chinese or american. The frenzied ones would be running all
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over the playground – going round and round from the foot of the slide to the ladder to
the slide and down to the bottom and back to the ladder again. Others would be squatting
on the carousel, the child-powered platform kind, and they’d be clinging to the bar
handles. The daredevil among them, usually Aurora, would jump to the ground whenever
it began to slow down, and she would push, faster and faster and harder and harder, round
and round, until she could jump back on again. Structures were safe, structures you could
depend on to protect you from blame.
I walked to the back of the schoolhouse, where I knew there would be a couple of
discarded, broken-down desk chairs. My ex-best friend and I had found them when we
were in the lower grade, and it had been our hiding place at recess all through that year.
Zenaida trailed after me, and she wasn’t shy when I offered her the second straw in my
coke. We giggled when our heads bumped against each other the first time we each bent
to our own straw.
The next day Zenaida bought herself a bottle of coke, and we shared my packet of
saltines. From then on, she alternated the saltines and coke with her ten-centavo
allowance. We learned to take turns at the coke, holding the bottle up to the daylight to
check the coke level after one of us had taken her turn, to make sure that one didn’t sip
more than her share at a time. Afterward, I shared other secrets I had about the chairs and
the ground around it. I showed her that if you pried off a loose chip on the surface of the
desk, the hole underneath had a chewed-up bubble gum stuck in it. I stretched my leg out
from under the desk and nudged a rock with my toe, and big red ants came swarming out
from under it.
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We were careful, though, not to get too near the blackberry trees that stood fully
grown behind the schoolhouse, just a few feet from us. Nobody ever went near them,
although we all had been tempted at one time or other during our first, our kindergarten,
year in school. There were lots of things we were forbidden to do – eating inside the
classroom, talking in line, running down the corridors, speaking the dialect – and there
was a price for every violation. But we were willing to pay it, remorselessly, happily
even, every time impulse got the better of us. We smirked – kneeling at the front of the
classroom with our arms outstretched; standing in the sun by the flagpole; filling the
blackboard with the promise, over and over again, “not to speak the dialect.”
Don’t Pick the Blackberries. This was the one, the only, rule we never broke.
Blackberries filled the ground under the trees and rotted where they fell. Even birds and
bats, I imagine, thought about it as they circled yearningly above them before veering
wisely off toward other fruit. Blackberries would leave a stain on our uniforms –
including our socks and shoes. Wiping it off with our hankies would only spread it wider,
colonizing our skirt and blouse thread by thread. They stayed on fingers for days, no
matter how much you’d scrub it with laundry soap until the skin stung. The school
director and owner Doña Luczon, who never spoke to us except on the first day of school,
gave us these dire warnings as part of her welcome address. We were little ladies; and
little ladies, especially hers, were to look immaculate at all times.
Every schoolday, after the bell had rung to end recess, we lined up for Inspection
before we filed into the classroom. Doña Luczon walked from one end of the corridor to
the other, her eyes skimming over us, looking for a purple teardrop on a mocha shirt, or a
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contaminated fingernail. Till now, I can’t look at indelible ink on a voter’s finger without
being suspicious of its owner’s integrity.
Zenaida was a full head shorter than I. She stood first in line for the roll call
before we filed into the classroom; I stood near the back. The teachers called us by our
baptismal names: Antonia, Concepcion, Dolores, Rebecca, Rosario. Classmates, even
those who were best friends, didn’t know each other’s nickname.
“Ichabod,” our Reading teacher started calling the very last girl in the line, the day
after our lesson on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Aurora didn’t look like she minded,
not even when the classmates caught on and called her Icky. Twelve years later, when the
beauty pageant host asked her what her nickname was, she proudly announced to the
world, “Icky” and then she stared straight into the camera. “And that’s why, all you
schoolgirls out there standing at the end of the line, you don’t even have to dream what
you’ll be when you grow up. You already are.” The judges later said that was what
clinched the title for her.
As black as ebony, was what our Language teacher said, pointing to Zenaida,
during our lesson on similes. As pure as the driven snow – she went on, pointing to
picture cards – as wise as an owl, as old as the hills.
“Like the keys on the piano,” my mother said when I asked her what ebony was.
“Ivory and ebony keys.”
Major and minor? Sharp and flat? Whole and half? My piano teacher was just
discovering that I learned faster when she gave a name to everything on the music sheet.
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“Look it up,” she said. I looked it up. Ivory was in my Webster’s Dictionary for
children. The tusk of an elephant. So was ebony: a kind of hard, heavy wood, native to
Africa.
It’s the opposite of ivory, my mother said, when I still couldn’t get how Zenaida
could be anything like hard, heavy wood, native to Africa.
One day a pair of nuns came to school to pass around a wooden statuette, about
half a foot high, of a mother sitting on a tree stump and a baby sitting on her lap. She was
wearing a long brown skirt that was bursting with many bright colors and a matching
turban that was tied in a knot on her forehead. The baby was naked, so I could see how
very smooth and black his wooden skin was, like his mother’s. On his lap he held a
square box, almost his size, that had a slot on top. We were to slip our day’s allowance
through this slot. For the poor, starving people of Africa, the older nun said.
Every time a coin fell into the box, the wooden black mother nodded her thanks.
My classmates dropped in lots of coins and clapped their hands with delight, and the head
kept bobbing up and down for a long time. Zenaida and I looked on as the people of
Africa were being saved that day.
Decades later, riding in a car from an airport in Johannesburg, I gazed out the
window at black-trunked trees standing in an orderly line along the riverbank. Ebony, my
conference host said, redundantly.
At our Christmas program, Zenaida was one of the three kings, the one who gave
the baby Jesus myrrh. That year, too, the school decided that the theme of our Foundation
Day would be Philippine history; and Zenaida would lead the first wave of Filipinos who
came on land bridges.
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All the short pupils in class were sent to a hairdresser who promised she could
turn their hair from brown and curly (if they were Spanish mestizas), or from straight and
silky (if they were Chinese), to frizzy. In the parlor she wound their locks tightly around
her finger and set them in place with hairpins as close to the scalp as she could. The next
morning they all complained importantly to each other about their tortuous night, with the
hairpins poking holes into their head. Even then, their hair couldn’t be anything like the
wirespring fuzz clinging around Zenaida’s scalp.
In the dressing room, the yayas dipped their hand into a huge clay pot that had
been set on a table, and rubbed greased soot all over their charges where their milky
brown skin showed, including their armpits. The teachers inspected them first to make
sure they met the standard shade of black before they were allowed to put on their
costume of faux-abaca. It was Zenaida’s skin color, of course, that set the standard. The
ones who didn’t pass muster the first time were the peninsulares’ daughters – de Uriarte,
Cuenca, Montilla, Velez – and they were made to go back to the clay pot for another
slather of greased soot.
The tall ones, all of them fair-skinned, were the conquistadors, though Aurora
was only one of the soldiers, towering over everyone so that her red bloomers ballooned
out exaggeratedly over her spindly thighs. Magellan was a Portuguese, not a Spaniard,
our History teacher said, and she wanted to underline this distinction by making Magellan
shorter than his Spanish crew. It’s these little details, she added, that make the difference
between mere legends and True-and-Factual Accounts.
When the faux-pygmies finally made their stage entrance, it was Zenaida who led
the group. The only transformation she had to undergo was to make herself look male.
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Over a black leotard they wore a loin cloth, cut out of a jute sack and tie-dyed red and
black for a t’nalak effect. In one hand they each held a spear, fashioned out of a plastic
pipe and aluminum whose pointed end had wilted by the time they had walked out onto
the stage. But the string of boar’s teeth that Zenaida had around her neck had been her
father’s. I must have realized, even then, that the school had decided on the Philippine
history theme so that they could show Zenaida off as an authentic museum piece.
My mother came home from her Rotary Ann meetings with different stories about
the Ita servants in the Luczon house. Zenaida’s father had been Don Luczon’s guide, she
said, whenever he’d go hunting up in the mountain forests. The last time he’d gone, the
Don had killed a white boar, despite the Ita’s warnings, and the forest tamawo was so
incensed it had pushed a boulder down the hill exactly where they were camping, but it
had crushed the Ita guide instead. Don Luczon had wandered around lost in the forest for
days before Zenaida’s tribe had found him.
My father raised an eyebrow and replied, “He was wearing the Ita guide’s antinganting, I suppose, which was what saved him. Now, how do you think it got from the Ita
to him?”
“Well, that’s certainly more believable than the other story,” my mother said.
“Which one?”
“The one about how the Ita laid down his life for Don Luczon during the war.”
And they both laughed.
That was the tale my mother had brought home from her first meeting. Zenaida’s
father had been the guide for Don Luczon’s guerilla squad, and he’d taken a bullet for
Don Luczon during an ambush. That was how the Luczons came to take the Ita widow
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and Zenaida under their wing. “But,” my mother had said, “Zenaida’s the same age as
Baby,” and she gestured toward me. When she included me in their conversations, half of
which I couldn’t comprehend, I could forgive her for still calling me Baby. “Luczon
couldn’t still have been a guerilla in 1949.”
“Unless he was a Huk fighting for peasant rights in Mt. Kanlaon,” my father said.
“An hacendero fighting for land rights for the poor. What a joke.”
Afterward, I was sure there was resentment in my persecution of her, because of
her betrayal of the thing that set us apart from everyone else in that school. The school
gave Zenaida occasion to shine above everyone, as an aeta; and she always did so,
magnificently, simply by being herself. I was just an accountant’s daughter in a
classroom of hacienda heiresses. Nothing in Philippine history, nor in religion, could
justify my origin or station in life.
It was also that year that my mother started training me to be Business-Minded,
because we Didn’t Own Land. She stirred her varicolored powders – white, red, black –
into a huge basinful of ground pork and made me stuff handfuls of it into dried pig
casings. Every morning, our laundry line bore strings of pig casings hanging out to dry.
My Saturdays were spent turning them into pork sausages, laying them in a neat circular
pile in a basket, and then peddling them round the neighborhood houses.
The housemaid at each house would open the door and shut it again after telling
me to wait while she went to relay my offer of pork sausages to the Señora. Then she’d
send me round to the kitchen door in the back, where the cook would pick the dozen
pieces that were to her liking. A few more Saturdays of this, and I knew which back door
I could go to directly without having to knock at the front door first. Gradually, I learned
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not to dread the moment when the daughter of the house – and a second grader in my
school – would open the door. I never saw the family who lived in the house.
One Saturday my mother said, Who opens the door at every house that you go to?
The maid, I said.
If you go to Mrs. Luczon’s house, who’d open the door there?
I didn’t reply. I knew where my mother was going with this and she was about to
give me one more reason to hate her. Mrs. Luczon, the School Director?
It’s just like any other house. It’s time you went up there and offered the sausages
to her maid, she said. When I stayed silent, she added, This is how to do business, Baby.
You don’t want to grow old wondering what would’ve happened if you hadn’t let the
opportunity slip by.
The Missed Opportunity. My mother could turn even a basket of encased meat
into an allegory about The Missed Opportunity. At that moment, though, I only hated
how she could feed me to the world’s ogress and call me Baby.
I kept Doña Luczon’s house for last, hoping someone else’s Señora was throwing
a longaniza party that night, but it had to be a slow day. It was Zenaida who opened the
door. I stood fast and mouthed my mother’s spiel, “Would you please ask the Missus if
she’d like some Pampanga longaniza? Five pesos a dozen.” Outside the school, best
friends are strangers to each other.
I handed the basket to Zenaida and she took it into the house. A few minutes later,
she came back with the basket, its contents all askew. A sausage drooped out of the
basket rim, like it was trying to climb out and escape further violence. Zenaida said, “The
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Señora says there’s too much fat in it. Here – ” she pointed to a white bit gleaming
through the casing on the runaway piece “ – and here.”
I have no memory of Zenaida’s voice, nor her tone. I don’t remember anything
else she said, or how she said it, during the three-and-a-half months that we were best
friends. I would like to remember her repeating Mrs. Luczon’s remark as a monotone, the
way we recited our answers to our teachers’ questions in class.
That Monday morning I ignored her as we waited for the bell to ring for the flag
ceremony. But at recess time, we found ourselves inevitably on the side of the canteen
with the saltine crackers. After I’d bought my packet to share, we each bought our bottle
of coke and headed to our Secret Place. Neither of us called it that to each other, but
that’s how I thought of it, because I liked having secrets. Sometimes I wished I had
someone to share them with, with the same drama that I attached to them. That day, I
chewed my half of the saltines more slowly than usual, and took tiny sips on the coke,
blocking half the opening of the straw with the tip of my tongue. So did she, I guess,
because we made the eating last, wordlessly, till the bell called us back to class.
In mid-September, Socorro joined our class. She was from Barotac Nuevo, Iloilo,
and was staying in the Luczon house, because she was his niece. That was why it didn’t
matter which month of the year she started school. I suppose it was because she was Well
Connected that word quickly spread about who she was and where she’d come from. No
one remarked, because I guess it was irrelevant, that this meant that Socorro and Zenaida
were living under the same roof.
But children are more stubborn creatures of habit and caution than you would
think. Friends had already been picked, pairings firmly established, and anyone trying to
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stir disturbance into such permutations were cruelly snubbed. At recess time, I heard a
voice behind Zenaida and me say, “Hey, where are you going?” It was all at once brash,
challenging, unctuous, affable, and self-assured. It was clear right away that Socorro
wasn’t to be put off by anything – not even by the thought that I might have replied,
“What’s it to you?” or that I might have just tossed my head and not said anything back.
But of course I didn’t. She knew she wasn’t really risking embarrassment, seeing the
company I was in.
She didn’t ask, “Can I come with you?” but she just fell in step between Zenaida
and me.
For the first time there was one girl more than the number of discarded desk
chairs in My Secret Place. We all three of us squeezed behind the two desks, but they
buckled under our weight and, with a shriek, we slid to the ground. Socorro and I giggled
as we brushed the dirt and grass off each other, although there wasn’t much of it because
we’d fallen on top of Zenaida. Our giggles rose to peals when we tried to rub out the
grass stains from Zenaida’s off-white blouse and only made it worse because the more we
rubbed, the more we spread the stains all over her.
When the bell rang to resume class, Mrs. Luczon saw at once that Zenaida had not
Behaved. But, because the stains on Zenaida had nothing to do with the blackberries, she
only gestured to our homeroom teacher to deal with it. The teacher knew that Zenaida
and I always spent our recess periods together, so she also inspected me for any sign that
I’d been up to the same mischief, and sure enough she found a blade of dry grass stuck to
the cuff of my sleeve. The teacher tried to get me to admit that we’d “been rolling in the
hay” (she liked to show off her repertoire of English idioms) but I just stood silently,
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struck dumb by the injustice of it. I hadn’t been rolling, and there was no hay, and why
was she sparing Zenaida the interrogation?
At the end of the day, Zenaida and I were sent to the ‘thinking room’ to spend an
extra hour in school. This was a small room – just a cubicle, really, with a single pew in
front of a statue of Our Lady gazing dolefully down at us. (‘Mama Mary’ came only
decades later, post-Vatican Two.) I resented Zenaida for getting me into trouble like that,
and I didn’t care – I even vaguely relished the idea – that her Ita mother and Mrs. Luczon
would give her hell to pay when she got home an hour late. Even I had house chores after
school, in spite of our househelp, if only because my mother was training me into
Womanhood. But Zenaida was househelp, and she was supposed to do earnest work as
soon as school was out.
Socorro was very fair-skinned, like her uncle, and had hazel-green eyes, corncolored hair, and an archipelago of freckles – not just on her cheeks but on her forehead
and even on her upper arms. I was sure she had them on her forearms, too, but they were
covered with very fine golden hair. In the line, she stood second to the last, in front of
Aurora. Any minute I expected Socorro to burst into a string of Spanish sentences, like
my peninsular classmates, but the first time she and I talked, her tongue raced over the
Ilonggo words faster than anyone I’d ever heard. Her voice had a seductive merriment in
it, like the music of windchimes.
“I’m an only girl,” she said. The first of our similarities. She was the youngest
among nine brothers. I was the only girl, and the middle child, among four brothers. As
we continued to tick off what we had in common, even the differences only underlined
our similarites. We were both daughters of non-hacenderos. The umá she came from in
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Iloilo was a real farm, with fruit trees and carabaos that wallowed in a creek that was also
her swimming hole. Not a single cane of sugar grew on it.
She had been sent to her aunt’s school in Bacolod to learn to be a lady, because
she was growing up to be a Hellion. It was her mother’s special word for her, she said,
whenever she came home with bleeding knees from slipping on the rocks in the river, or
a lump on the head from falling off the trees. My little hellion, her mother called her. Of
all our similarities, it was probably our fascination with words that I liked the most. I
didn’t even have to look it up in the dictionary to imagine her like a tornado bucking and
rearing and shaking off anyone trying to ride her.
When I showed Socorro the fire ants’ nest, she picked up the rock that covered it
and threw it as far away as she could. We all three of us stared at the ants running around
in a blind panic until I started whooping and skipping around the slithering columns of
flame, in an Indian war dance, and instantly Socorro followed my lead. Zenaida sat
behind her broken down desk and watched. (“The Aetas are timid, shy, speechless,
peace-loving, and meek, due to a feeling of inferiority to the lowlanders,” I read a few
years later, in my Social Studies textbook. “The cave is their home, their shelter, their
sanctuary.”)
Socorro picked up a twig and prised the bubble gum off the hole in the desk, and
as she was holding it up, figuring out what to do with it, I shouted, “Booger! It’s a
booger!”
“Zenaida’s booger!” Socorro shouted back. She held it to Zenaida’s face, as if she
was going to push it up Zenaida’s nose, and Zenaida was forced to get up from her cave
of broken-down desks, and they ran, Socorro chasing Zenaida with the bubble gum at the
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end of the twig, while I chanted “Zenaida’s booger!” until Zenaida tripped and fell and
stayed where she’d fallen, trying to get her wind back. Socorro and I used two sturdy
sticks to dig a grave and we buried Zenaida’s booger beside her as we continued to chant,
this time, “Zenaida’s booger is dead!” while she rubbed her eyes with her fists and
gathered her arms around her knees on the ground beside her booger’s grave.
Dolores and Socorro. Our teachers would interchange our names, pretending to
mistake one for the other, so conjoined did they perceive us to be. But we took pride in
their joke, because it gave us good reason to set ourselves apart. Our Arithmetic teacher
caught us reading a storybook between us under the desk, and she made us stand on top
of the desk, all morning. We spent recess on that desk, pretending we were airplanes
tilting from one side to another, grasping one another’s hand for balance, and pointing
with our lips to something out the window, which only she and I could see the joke in. I
looked down from a great height at Zenaida offering up my share of her saltines, but my
hand slapped it away, clear across the room, just as I was making a somersault in the
clouds.
One day Socorro got into a hair-pulling fight with Aurora, who was haughtier and
more contemptuous than most because she claimed to have been named after a princess. I
was trying to pry the princess’s fingers off Socorro’s hair when the Principal came and
sent all three of us into the ‘thinking room’. Socorro and I sent each other hand signals
and made faces and giggled until tears rolled down Princess Aurora’s cheeks, from sheer
desolation. The school didn’t understand that its punitive measures only sealed our
friendship more firmly, Socorro’s and mine, and, I thought, permanently.
18
In those times, when girls were admonished to Behave there wasn’t even a need to
qualify the word because its adverb, ‘Properly’, was understood and therefore implicit.
Now, misbehaving takes on a rainbow scheme of categories and nuances, depending on
what disorder in the psyche is causing it. “Bipolar,” the guidance counselor, if we’d had
one, might have written in the space after Remarks on my report card. “Attention deficit
hyperactivity, oppositional defiance, and dissociative fugue,” were the labels that the
counselor, in her confusion, would’ve attached to Socorro.
‘Bumbershoot! Bumbershoot!’ was our code word for anything Socorro and I
were sneering at, especially if anyone said anything that we thought didn’t quite hit the
mark. We were just getting into the Bobbsey Twins, and it was Flossie Bobbsey’s word
for ‘parachute’. We had both thought the malaprop hilarious.
There must have been a point when Socorro, Zenaida, and I should’ve gone
looking for other Secret Places. Maybe it was all my fault for leading them to that hidden
spot behind the schoolhouse day after day. After we’d dug up all the rocks and piled them
over the fire ants’ nest, after we’d worked the legs off the broken down desks and stuck
them to the ground to make pillars around Zenaida’s booger’s grave, what else was there
to do but turn our attention next to the blackberry trees? Maybe I’d dared Socorro, maybe
I’d demanded that she prove to me what a real hellion she was by climbing the trees. I
have a notion that she just turned around and hurtled toward the trees, and I went after
her, shouting, No! No! Don’t pick the blackberries!
Socorro was up in the biggest tree when the bell caught us by surprise. I was
standing under it, my hands leaning against the trunk, and I was looking up enviously at
Socorro as she popped berry after berry into her mouth. She shimmied down and landed
19
an inch away from me; then she ran toward Zenaida, who’d just stood up from the legless
desks that were now lying flat on the ground. Socorro wiped her hands, running her
palms first and then the back of her hands, all over Zenaida’s skirt and the front of her
blouse, before she and I ran toward the bell. I looked back once and saw Zenaida, a long
way away, walking slowly toward the line.
Mrs. Luczon went straight for Zenaida, when she saw all the purple splotches
forming islands and bridges on the sea of snot that was Zenaida’s skirt. She yanked
Zenaida from the line and marched her away toward the School Director’s Office. I
looked fearfully back at Socorro, who was standing in front of Aurora, and I waited –
hoped I think – for a signal from her that she understood. Something had gone out of
whack, and it needed to be restored. But she was staring at the back of the girl’s head in
front of her, her face lit up by an innocent mirth. Then I saw that she had one hand behind
her, and I am sure she was playing a furtive tug-of-war with Aurora’s hand. I stared at the
back of Zenaida, with Mrs. Luczon’s fingers spread on it, prodding her forward.
The next day, Zenaida was gone. I pleaded with my mother not to make me go
round with my basket of sausages ever, and she gave me a resigned look and said Yes.
I don’t think my friendship with Socorro ended that day. There was nothing as
solid and clear as disgust, denial, or even unease at the conspiracy that had transpired
between us. There was the murky shape of caution, a certain wariness, sitting somewhere
in my stomach; and as I stayed friends with Socorro from one day to the next, that dark
creature grew bigger and threatened to crowd out the insides of my chest.
In the summer, an order of German nuns arrived in town to put up a school in a
block of abandoned shopping stalls nearby. Most of us transferred to this school – for the
20
Catholic education, was the official reason; for its stature, I am sure, was the real one.
The nuns’ first major project was to prepare us for our first Holy Communion. The priest,
at my first confession, forgave me for hating my mother, for grumbling at my chores, for
fighting with my brothers. He never forgave me for Zenaida’s banishment, because I
didn’t tell.
What was there to tell? The whole business must have taken under three minutes.
Or a minute and a half? Just a dead star blinking. Or a grain of sand turning.
Socorro must have stayed on at her aunt’s school until an order of friars, not long
after, bought it out. The schoolhouse was pulled down, and the blackberry trees went
with it. A university, with three buildings five storeys tall, and named after a saint,
sprouted in its place. Mammoth Peterbilt trucks replaced the freight trains and made
potholes on our asphalted street as they rumbled past the university, the cathedral, and the
sugarcane fields interspersed with gated villages. The railroad tracks got up piece by
piece and walked away in the night, and I’d have sworn I recognized some of them
making up the scaffolding on the department store building that was being constructed
downtown. My father went on to other things; my mother stayed the same and opened a
catering business.
A few years later, I was walking out of this store building when I thought I caught
a glimpse of Socorro just outside it. A young man with his back to me was half covering
her, but from the way his head was bent close to hers, I could tell they were enjoying
each other’s company. She had on a red skirt and a white blouse, which was the public
high school uniform. Although it was forbidden outside the school premises, I was
myself wearing the blue-and-white jumper of the Catholic girls’ school that was being
21
guarded by German nuns. She laid a hand on his upper arm and laughed at something he
said. Then her eyes looked past him and met mine before I quickly twisted to my right
and pretended to be inspecting stampitas in the glass case that also displayed rosary beads
and prayerbooks. Even then, as I stared down at the stampita, it was my mother I resented
because I thought that Socorro’s, who lived on a farm on the other island, had been wiser
than mine.
Zenaida’s real name I don’t even remember, so I had to make one up for this
story. THE STAIN OF BLACKBERRIES
A Short Story Memoir (?)
“What an embarrassment she is!” my mother exclaimed, when I read her the news
of Socorro Lantin-Hartford. The Filipino-Australian woman was embroiled in a series of
court battles with her stepdaughter over the Hartford fortune, which had been built on the
largest iron-ore deposit in the world. She was an evil, vindictive woman, the Hartford
daughter claimed, who had only married the old man for his money. And then she’d
harangued him to death. Crass, the Australians agreed among themselves about Socorro.
Later, I showed my mother the Youtube clip of Socorro screaming at a white
Australian houseboy. He’d gotten her a Louis Vuitton from her designer-bag collection,
instead of the plastic one she’d demanded. “A plastic bag! A neutral bag! Just a bag for
my goodies!” Even my mother had to laugh at the houseboy’s bewilderment. Any
Filipina would’ve known right away what she meant. “Here, I’ll show you.” Socorro
shouted on Youtube. She marched into the kitchen and, sitting on her haunches, she
22
pulled open a bottom drawer of the kitchen counter. Plastic bags, obviously used and reused, exploded out of the drawer. Puyo was the Ilonggo word for it – supot – that great
leveller of social classes in the Philippines, indispensable in every Filipino household.
“But how did they manage to catch her on film? In her own kitchen!” my mother
said. “It’s appalling how technology nowadays strips us of our privacy.” Crass, was how
my mother saw advanced countries.
“Wasn’t she your classmate back in grade school?” she went on. “She came to
the house one Saturday, and she did the rounds of the neighborhood with you. To sell our
longganisa.” That day with Socorro, I’d sold the sausages in half the time that I would
have alone, and then she insisted that we go back for more. We sold all that, too. My
mother added, “I rather liked her, she had such spunk.” That was the way my mother
liked to remind me of my character flaws. Admiration for someone else was accusation
against me. “You were best friends, weren’t you?”
“Only for a while,” I said. A month exactly, I thought but didn’t say, because my
mother had always worried about my solitariness.
“What happened?”
“She went on to other things,” I said. “I stayed the same, I suppose.”
23
********
Adults can’t pin down the month or the year when a change, even of drastic
proportions, comes into their lives. This is why they need anniversaries and why their
lives, and their relationships, must erupt in seven-year cycles. Yuppies, caught in the
frenzy of soundbites and video clips, have even broken these down into ‘monthsaries’
now.
But when you’re a child, the stages of your metamorphosis are much more
sharply drawn; perhaps the beginning and end of each schoolyear have something to do
with it. You feel the change in yourself most distinctly when school re-opens: a shyness,
even a hostility, drives itself like a wedge between you and the best friend you’d
cultivated when you were in the lower grade, and you think it’s because of the separate
distractions, and the confusions, of summer.
Best friends in school really have nothing in common in the first place, except the
physical proximity and the desperate need to be seen with company, at those times when
they are let out of the classroom but forced to stay within the school premises: waiting for
the starting bell, waiting to to be fetched home from school, and especially waiting out
the 20-minute recess. But it’s also that daily impersonality, devoid of all intimacy in the
friendship, that prevents you from registering the infinitesimal changes happening
between you and your friend.
24
Afterwards, memories of these friendships start to blur; they no longer signify.
But in your advancing years, suddenly you are hit by a flashback, and scenes of your
remote past comes back to you more vividly than yesterday.
In the summer, the street I lived on was hosed with water to lay the dust. Across
our house, freight trains carrying canes and canes of sugar, thousands of them, chug-alugged by, past the seven-room schoolhouse, the priests’ convent without a church, the
houses interspersed between cogon and bamboo fields, and through acres of sugarcane
fields pushing against the mountains.
Intsik beho! Intsik beho! we chanted, emboldened by our numbers as the
Chinaman, with the queue hanging down the length of his back, came and went from his
sari-sari store. The boys would make loud snorting sounds before spitting out gobs of
their frothy saliva on the ground that was already wet from our housemaid’s hosing.
Every Tuesday afternoon, at exactly one o’clock, the Bombay with the black umbrella
and a turban on his head roared by on his motorcycle. Hala! – my yaya said, with our
mother’s tacit permission – if children aren’t safely in bed for their siesta, he will snatch
them and let them bleed to death at the foot of the bridge nearby.
It was a time when people with a limp, or tics and twitches, or mongoloid heads
were pointed and laughed at if they dared to walk down the street. A wizened old man,
who lived three houses away from us, walked with his left hand on a cane while his right
hand shook violently, the index finger pointing at his lower belly. Invariably, our
25
houseboy and sometimes even my brother, trailed behind him, stooped and limping like
the hunchback assistant of the mad scientist in horror movies, and doing an obscene
version of the old man’s shaking finger.
My brothers and I were the fruit of the post-war jubilation, and those who had
survived unscathed could only be filled with guilty relief at the sight of men missing an
arm, or a leg, or an eye. The war had been a temporary aberration, over and done with;
now it was time for irrepressible, defiant celebration. The man who leaned against the
front wall of the wet market held a crutch in one hand and a booklet of sweepstakes
tickets in the other; at the opposite end, a man blew blindly into a harmonica attached to
his guitar, which he strummed as his foot pressed rhythmically on a pedal that struck a
big drum standing on its side.
Reminders of mutilations of the soul, like those of comfort women, would have
been resented then because they’d have been, in today’s catch phrase, Out of Sync. “How
awful!” my mother could say fifty years later, when news about them surfaced. “But we
were all victims of that war.” And she would launch into her stories of babies being
bayoneted in the air, and headless men continuing to stagger a few more steps before
collapsing, and the bayonet slap on her butt when the enemy soldiers thought she wasn’t
bowing low enough.
On the nights when my parents had gone to the “last full show” at the
moviehouse, my two brothers and the houseboy entertained themselves and the
26
household with a mimicking contest. A favorite was the one-armed man who came round
pushing a cart with a barrelful of molasses, which he sold by the gallon as pigslop. Our
houseboy slipped his arm from its sleeve and held it to his torso underneath his shirt, and
my brothers hollered with glee at the sight of his fingers sticking out from the bottom of
his shirt and caressing his own thigh. The window ledge was their stage, the sliding capiz
windows their curtain. The laughter got more uproarious as the show built up to its
climax, which consisted of my two brothers and our houseboy mimicking me, their
embellishments full of such burlesque detail that I couldn’t recognize myself in them. But
I was convinced that must be how the world saw me. I sat there with the househelp and
pretended that I was having as much of a rollickin’ good time as everyone else in the
audience – my yaya and her younger sister who was the cleaning maid; the driver and the
cook who was his wife.
One evening, when my parents were out, this time to a Rotary Club do, our
houseboy suggested that we play hide-and-seek instead, and I felt very grateful to him
that I would be spared another evening of humiliation. When it was Yaya’s turn to be It,
he pushed me into my clothes closet before he clambered in after me and he covered me
with his body and whispered to me not to make a noise or else I would be the next It. It
was a very long time before Yaya found us.
When school opened, my classmates just picked up from where they’d left off
with their old friends two months before. I couldn’t keep a friend from one year to the
next, so I was the only one without a pair, although I managed to find a fellow loner
27
within a week of the beginning of school. This friend would find someone else to pair
with when we got to the next grade, so that I would find myself alone again. Or, just a
few months into our alliance, one of us would simply avoid the other’s eyes when we
were released at recess and then run to link arms with a new best friend.
Zenaida joined us in third grade. I spotted her right away, on the first day of
school. She was wearing an old and faded uniform, like me. But she was a new girl, so
her uniform must’ve been a hand-me-down, whereas I’d been wearing mine through the
lower grade. The school uniform consisted of a mocha blouse and a green skirt held up
by suspenders of the same green cloth and forming a V in front. Our blouse – Zenaida’s
and mine – had turned off-white; and our skirt was the color of snot, although mine was
in two shades of it – fresh and dry – where my mother had let out the seams just the night
before. I felt ashamed for us both, standing like dull moss in a forest of evergreen.
When recess period came, we found ourselves at the same side of the canteen,
where the saltine crackers were. What drew the crowd to the other side were the cakes
and sandwiches. I bought a packet of saltines with my ten-centavo coin and then bought a
bottle of coke with my other. I saw Zenaida taking my lead when she also chose saltines,
but she didn’t have anything extra to buy a drink with. So I took another straw and
dropped it into the mouth of my coke bottle.
The corridors along the classrooms would be full of girls in clusters of three’s and
four’s playing jackstones, chinese or american. The wired-up ones would be running all
28
over the playground – going round and round from the foot of the slide to the ladder to
the slide and down to the bottom and back to the ladder again; others would be taking
turns pushing the carousel, jumping on the platform and clinging to the bar handles until
it slowed down for the next girl to jump down from and push, faster and faster and harder
and harder, round and round – like mice on treadmills.
I walked to the back of the schoolhouse, where I knew there would be a couple of
discarded, broken-down desk chairs. My ex-best friend and I had found them when we
were in the lower grade, and it had been our hiding place at recess all through that year.
Zenaida trailed after me, and she wasn’t shy when I offered her the second straw in my
coke. We giggled when our heads bumped against each other the first time we each bent
to our own straw.
The next day Zenaida bought herself a bottle of coke, and we shared my packet of
saltines. From then on, she alternated on the saltines and coke with her ten-centavo
allowance. We learned to take turns at the coke, holding the bottle up to the daylight to
check the coke level after one of us had taken her turn, to make sure that one didn’t sip
more than her share at a time. Afterward, I shared other secrets I had about the chairs and
the ground around it. I showed her how to pry off a loose chip on the surface of the desk
to reveal a hole that had a chewed-up bubble gum stuck in it. I stretched my leg out from
under the desk and nudged a rock with my toe, and big red ants came swarming out from
under it.
29
We were careful, though, not to get too near the blackberry trees that stood fully
grown behind the schoolhouse, just a few feet from us. Nobody ever went near them,
although we all had been tempted at one time or other during our first, our kindergarten,
year in school. There were lots of things we were forbidden to do – eating inside the
classroom, talking in line, running down the corridors, speaking the dialect – and there
was a price for every violation. But we were willing to pay it, remorselessly, happily
even, every time impulse got the better of us. We smirked – kneeling at the front of the
classroom with our arms outstretched; standing in the sun by the flagpole; filling the
blackboard with the promise, over and over again, “not to speak the dialect.”
Don’t Pick the Blackberries. This was the one, the only, rule we never broke.
Blackberries filled the ground under the trees and rotted where they fell. Even birds and
bats, I imagine, thought about it as they circled yearningly above them before veering
wisely off toward other fruit. Blackberries would leave a stain on our uniforms –
including our socks and shoes. Wiping it off with our hankies would only spread it wider,
colonizing our skirt and blouse thread by thread. They stayed on fingers for days, no
matter how much you’d scrub it with laundry soap until the skin stung. The school
director and owner Doña Luczon, who never spoke to us except on the first day of school,
gave us these dire warnings as part of her welcome address. We were little ladies; and
little ladies, especially hers, were to look immaculate at all times.
Every schoolday, after the bell had rung to end recess, we lined up for Inspection
before we filed into the classroom. Doña Luczon walked from one end of the corridor to
30
the other, her eyes skimming over us, looking for a purple teardrop on a mocha shirt, or a
contaminated fingernail. Till now, I can’t look at indelible ink on a voter’s finger without
being suspicious of its owner’s integrity.
Zenaida was a full head shorter than I. She stood first in line for the roll call
before we filed into the classroom; I stood near the back. The teachers called us by our
baptismal names: Antonia, Concepcion, Dolores, Rebecca, Rosario. Classmates, even
those who were best friends, didn’t know each other’s nickname.
‘Ichabod’, our Reading teacher started calling the very last girl in the line, the day
after our lesson on ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Aurora didn’t look like she minded,
not even when the classmates caught on and called her Icky. Twelve years later, when the
beauty pageant host asked her what her nickname was, she proudly announced to the
world, “Icky” and then she stared straight into the camera. “And that’s why, all you
schoolgirls out there standing at the end of the line, you don’t even have to dream what
you’ll be when you grow up. You already are.” The judges later said that was what
clinched the title for her.
As black as ebony, was what our Language teacher said, pointing to Zenaida,
during our lesson on similes. As pure as the driven snow – she went on, pointing to
picture cards – as wise as an owl, as old as the hills.
31
“Like the keys on the piano,” my mother said when I asked her what ebony was.
“Ivory and ebony keys.”
Major and minor? Sharp and flat? Whole and half? My piano teacher was just
discovering that I learned faster when she gave a name to everything on the music sheet.
“Look it up,” she said. I looked it up. Ivory was in my Webster’s Dictionary for
children. The tusk of an elephant. So was ebony: a kind of hard, heavy wood, native to
Africa.
It’s the opposite of ivory, my mother said, when I still couldn’t get how Zenaida
could be anything like hard, heavy wood, native to Africa.
One day a pair of nuns came to pass around a wooden statuette, about half a foot
high, of a mother sitting on a tree stump and a baby sitting on her lap. She was wearing a
long brown skirt that was bursting with many bright colors and a matching turban that
was tied in a knot on her forehead. The baby was naked, so I could see how very smooth
and black his wooden skin was, like his mother’s. On his lap he held a square box, almost
his size, that had a slit on top of it. We were to slip our day’s allowance through this slit.
For the poor, starving people of Africa, the older nun said. Every time a coin fell into the
box, the wooden mother nodded her thanks.
32
We had dolls whose eyes shut when we lay them down; and I had a rag doll with
creamy skin and flowing yellow yarn hair. She wore a long skirt that covered the part
where her feet should’ve been. If you turned her upside down you discovered that instead
of the blonde doll’s feet, there was another doll, and this one had black cloth skin and
kinky black hair tied up in several small pigtails. The wooden mother carrying the baby
and coin box was the first nodding doll we’d ever seen. My classmates put in lots of coins
and clapped their hands with delight, and the head kept bobbing up and down for a long
time. Zenaida and I looked on as the people of Africa were being saved that day.
Decades later, riding in a car from an airport in Johannesburg, I gazed out the
window at black-trunked trees standing in an orderly line along the riverbank. Ebony, my
conference host said, redundantly.
At our Christmas program, Zenaida was one of the three kings, the one who gave
the baby Jesus myrrh. That year, too, the school decided that the theme of our Foundation
Day would be Philippine history; and Zenaida represented the first wave of Filipinos who
came on land bridges.
All the short pupils in class were sent to a hairdresser who promised she could
turn their hair from brown and curly (if they were Spanish mestizas), or from straight and
silky (if they were Chinese), to kinky. In the parlor she wound their locks tightly around
her finger and set them in place with hairpins as close to the scalp as she could. The next
morning they all complained importantly to each other about their tortuous night, with the
33
hairpins poking holes into their head. Even then, their hair couldn’t be anything like the
soft fuzz clinging around Zenaida’s scalp.
In the dressing room, the yayas dipped their hand into a huge clay pot that had
been set on a table, and rubbed greased soot all over their charges where their milky
brown skin showed, including their armpits. The teachers inspected them first to make
sure they met the standard shade of black before they were allowed to put on their
costume of faux-abaca. It was Zenaida’s skin color, of course, that set the standard. The
ones who didn’t pass muster the first time were the peninsulares’ daughters – de Uriarte,
Cuenca, Montilla, Velez – and were made to go back to the clay pot for another slather of
greased soot.
The tall ones, all of them fair-skinned, were the conquistadors, though Aurora
was only one of the soldiers, towering over everyone so that her pair of red bloomers
ballooned out exaggeratedly over her spindly thighs. Magellan was a Portuguese, not a
Spaniard, our History teacher said, and she wanted to underline this distinction by
making Magellan shorter than his Spanish crew. It’s these little details, she added, that
make the difference between mere legends and True-and-Factual Accounts.
When the faux-pygmies finally made their stage entrance, it was Zenaida who led
the group. The only transformation she had to undergo was to make herself look male.
They wore a loin cloth, cut out of a jute sack, over a black leotard. In one hand they each
held a spear, fashioned out of a plastic pipe and aluminum whose pointed end had wilted
34
by the time they had walked out onto the stage. But the string of boar’s teeth that Zenaida
had around her neck had been her father’s. I must have realized, even then, that the
school had decided on the Philippine history theme so that they could show Zenaida off
as an authentic museum piece.
My mother came home from her Rotary Ann meetings with different stories about
the Ita servants in the Luczon house. Zenaida’s father had been Don Luczon’s guide, she
said, whenever he’d go hunting up in the mountain forests. The last time he’d gone, he’d
killed a white boar, despite the Ita’s warnings, and the forest tamawo was so incensed it
had pushed a boulder down the hill exactly where they were camping, but it had crushed
the Ita guide instead. Don Luczon had gotten lost in the forest for days before Zenaida’s
tribe had found him. My father raised an eyebrow and replied, He was wearing the Ita
guide’s anting-anting, I suppose, which was what saved him. Now, how do you think it
went from the Ita to him?
Or, coming from another meeting, my mother said: The Ita had been the guide for
Don Luczon’s guerilla squad, and he had taken a bullet for Don Luczon during an
ambush. This was how the Luczons came to take the Ita widow and Zenaida under their
wing. My father snorted at this story. No way was Luczon a guerilla in 1949, which was
when Zenaida would’ve been born. Unless he was a Huk fighting for peasant rights in
Mt. Kanlaon. An hacendero fighting for land rights for the poor. What a joke, my father
said.
35
Afterward, I was sure there was resentment in my persecution of her, because of
her betrayal of the thing that set us apart from everyone else in that school. The school
gave her occasion to shine above everyone, as an aeta; and she always did so,
magnificently, simply by being herself. I was just an accountant’s daughter in a
classroom of hacienda heiresses. Nothing in Philippine history, nor in religion, could
justify my origins nor station in life.
It was also that year, when I was eight years old and in second grade, that my
mother started training me to be Business-Minded, because we Didn’t Own Land. She
stirred her varicolored powders – white, red, black – into a huge basinful of ground pork
and made me stuff handfuls of it into dried pig casings. Every morning, our laundry line
bore strings of pig casings hanging out to dry. My Saturdays were spent turning them into
pork sausages, laying them in a neat circular pile in a basket, and then peddling them
round the neighborhood houses.
The housemaid at each house would open the door and shut it again after telling
me to wait while she went to relay my offer of pork sausages to the Señora. Then she’d
send me round to the kitchen door in the back, where the cook would pick the dozen
pieces that were to her liking. A few more Saturdays of this, and I knew which back door
I could go to directly without having to knock at the front door first. Gradually, I learned
not to dread the moment when the daughter of the house – and a second grader in my
school – would open the door. I never saw the family who lived in the house.
36
One Saturday my mother said, Who opens the door at every house that you go to?
The maid, I said.
If you go to Mrs. Luczon’s house, who’d open the door there?
I didn’t reply. I knew where my mother was going with this and she was about to
give me one more reason to hate her. Mrs. Luczon, the School Director?
It’s just like any other house. It’s time you went up there and offered the sausages
to her maid, she said.When I stayed silent, she added, This is how to do Business, baby.
You don’t want to grow old wondering what would’ve happened if you hadn’t let the
opportunity slip by.
The Missed Opportunity. My mother could turn even a basket of sausages into an
allegory about The Missed Opportunity. At that moment, though, I only hated how she
could feed me to the world’s ogress and call me baby.
I kept Doña Luczon’s house for last, hoping someone else’s Señora was throwing
a longganisa party that night, but it had to be a slow day. It was Zenaida who opened the
door. I stood fast and mouthed my mother’s spiel, “Would you please ask the Missus if
she’d like some Pampanga longganisa? Ten pesos a dozen.” Outside the school, best
friends are strangers to each other.
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She left the door open when she went to give my message to Doña Luczon, so I
peered into the sala. But it was dim inside, and all I could see were the outlines of
massive sofas fencing a coffeetable so wide I thought I could skate on it, and table- and
floor lamps whose silhouettes added to the gloom. Zenaida came back to the door to say
that the Señora wanted to take a look at my sausages. I handed the basket to Zenaida and
she took it into the house. A few minutes later, she came back with the basket, its
contents all askew. A sausage drooped out of the basket rim, like it was trying climb out
and escape further violation. Zenaida said, “The Señora says there’s too much fat in it.
Here – ” she pointed to a white bit gleaming through the pig casing on the runaway piece
“ – and here.”
I have no memory of Zenaida’s voice, nor her tone. I don’t remember anything
else she said, or how she said it, during the three-and-a-half months that we were best
friends. I would like to remember her repeating Mrs. Luczon’s remark as a monotone, the
way we recited our answers to our teachers’ questions in class.
That Monday morning I ignored her as we waited for the bell to ring for the flag
ceremony. But at recess time, we found ourselves inevitably on the side of the canteen
with the saltine crackers. After I’d bought my packet to share, we each bought our bottle
of coke and headed to our Secret Place. Neither of us called it that to each other, but
that’s how I thought of it, because I liked having secrets. Sometimes I wished I had
someone to share them with, with the same drama that I attached to them. That day, I
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chewed my share of the saltines more slowly than usual, and took infinitesimal sips on
the coke, blocking half the opening of the straw with the tip of my tongue. So did she, I
guess, because we made the eating last till the bell called us back to class.
In mid-September, Socorro joined our class. She was from Barotac Nuevo, Iloilo,
and was staying with Mrs. Luczon, who was her aunt, and that was why it didn’t matter
which month of the year she started school. I suppose it was because she was Well
Connected that word quickly spread about who she was and where she’d come from. No
one remarked, because I guess it was irrelevant, that this meant that Socorro and Zenaida
were living under the same roof.
But children are more stubborn creatures of habit and caution than you would
think. Friends had already been picked, pairings firmly established, and anyone trying to
stir disturbance into such permutations were cruelly snubbed. At recess time, I heard a
voice behind Zenaida and me say, “Hey, where are you going?” It was all at once
ingratiating, teasing, self-mocking, and self-assured. It was clear right away that Socorro
wasn’t to be put off by anything – not even by the thought that I might have replied,
“What’s it to you?” or that I might have just tossed my head and not said anything back.
But of course I didn’t. She knew she wasn’t really risking embarrassment, seeing the
company I was in.
She didn’t ask, “Can I come with you?” but she just fell in step between Zenaida
and me.
39
For the first time there was one girl more than the number of discarded desk
chairs in My Secret Place. We all three of us squeezed behind the two desks, but they
buckled under our weight and, with a shriek, we slid to the ground. Socorro and I giggled
as we brushed the dirt and grass off each other, although there wasn’t much of it because
we’d fallen on top of Zenaida. Our giggles rose to peals when we tried to rub out the
grass stains from Zenaida’s off-white blouse and only made it worse because the more we
rubbed, the more we spread the stains all over her.
When the bell rang to resume class, Mrs. Luczon saw at once that Zenaida had not
Behaved. But, because the stains on Zenaida had nothing to do with the blackberries, she
only gestured to our homeroom teacher to deal with it. The teacher knew that Zenaida
and I always spent our recess periods together, so she also inspected me for any sign that
I’d been up to the same mischief, and sure enough she found a blade of dry grass stuck to
the cuff of my sleeve. The teacher tried to get me to admit that we’d “been rolling in the
hay” (she liked to show off her control of English idioms) but I just stood silently, struck
dumb by the injustice of it. I hadn’t been rolling, and there was no hay, and why was she
sparing Zenaida the interrogation?
At the end of the day, Zenaida and I were sent to the ‘thinking room’ to spend an
extra hour in school. This was a small room – just a cubicle, really, with a single pew in
front of a statue of Our Lady gazing dolefully down at us. (‘Mama Mary’ came only
decades later, post-Vatican Two.) I resented Zenaida for getting me into trouble like that,
40
and I didn’t care – I even vaguely relished the idea – that her Ita mother and Mrs. Luczon
would give her hell to pay when she got home an hour late. Even I had house chores after
school, in spite of our househelp, if only because my mother was training me into
Womanhood. But Zenaida was househelp, and she was supposed to do earnest work as
soon as school was out.
Socorro was very fair-skinned, like her aunt, and had hazel-green eyes, corncolored hair, and freckles all over – not just on her cheeks but on her forehead and chin,
and even her arms. In the line, she stood in front of Aurora. Any minute I expected her to
burst into a string of Spanish sentences, like my peninsular classmates, but the first time
she and I talked, her tongue raced over the Ilonggo words faster than anyone I’d ever
heard. Her voice had a seductive merriment in it, like the music on a cruise ship.
“I’m an only girl,” she said. The first of our similarities. She was the youngest
among nine brothers. I was the only girl, and the middle child, among four brothers. As
we continued to tick off what we had in common, even the differences only underlined
our similarites. We were both daughters of non-hacenderos. The umá she came from in
Iloilo was a real farm, with fruit trees and carabaos that wallowed in a creek that was also
her swimming hole. Not a single cane of sugar grew on it.
She had been sent to her aunt’s school in Bacolod to learn to be a lady, because
she was growing up to be a Hellion. It was her father’s special word for her, she said,
whenever she came home with bleeding knees from slipping on the rocks in the river, or
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a lump in the head from falling off the trees. My little hellion, her father called her. Of all
our similarities, it was probably our fascination with words that I liked the most. I didn’t
even have to look it up in the dictionary to imagine her like a tornado bucking and rearing
and shaking off anyone trying to ride her.
When I showed Socorro the fire ants’ nest, she picked up the rock that covered it
and threw it as far away as she could. We all three of us stared at the ants running around
in a blind panic until I started whooping and hopping in a wide circle around the nest, in
an imitation Indian dance, and instantly Socorro followed my lead. Zenaida sat behind
her broken down desk and watched. (“The Aetas are timid, shy, speechless, peace-loving,
and meek, due to a feeling of inferiority to the lowlanders,” I read a few years later, in
my Social Studies textbook.)
Socorro picked up a twig and prised the bubble gum off the hole in the desk, and
as she was holding it up, figuring out what to do with it, I shouted, “Booger! It’s a
booger!”
“Zenaida’s booger!” Socorro shouted back. She held it to Zenaida’s face, as if she
was going to push it up Zenaida’s nostril, and Zenaida was forced to get up from her cave
of broken-down desks, and they ran, Socorro chasing Zenaida with the bubble gum at the
end of the twig, while I chanted “Zenaida’s booger!” until Zenaida tripped and fell and
stayed where she’d fallen, trying to get her wind back. Socorro and I then used two sturdy
sticks to dig a grave and we buried Zenaida’s booger beside her as we continued to chant,
42
this time, “Zenaida’s booger is dead!” while she rubbed her eyes with her fists and
gathered her arms around her knees on the ground beside her booger’s grave. (“The cave
is their home, their shelter, their sanctuary.”)
Dolores and Socorro. When our teachers called out one name, they called the
other, as if we were twins, and we took pride in that, because it gave us good reason to set
ourselves apart. Our Arithmetic teacher caught us reading a storybook between us under
the desk, and she made us stand on top of the desk, all morning. We spent recess on that
desk, pretending we were airplanes tilting from one side to another, grasping one
another’s hand for balance, and pointing with our lips to something out the window,
which only she and I could see the joke in. I looked down from a great height at Zenaida
holding up my share of her saltines, but my hand slapped it away, clear across the room,
just as I was making a somersault in the clouds.
One day Socorro got into a hair-pulling fight with Aurora, who was haughtier and
more contemptuous than most because she claimed to have been named after a princess. I
was trying to pry the princess’s fingers off Socorro’s hair when the Principal came and
sent all three of us into the ‘thinking room’. Socorro and I sent each other hand signals
and made faces and giggled until tears rolled down Princess Aurora’s cheeks, from sheer
desolation. The school didn’t understand that its punitive measures only sealed our
friendship more firmly, Socorro’s and mine, and, I thought, permanently.
43
In those times, when girls were admonished to Behave there wasn’t even a need to
qualify the word because its adverb, ‘Properly’, was understood and therefore implicit.
Now, misbehaving takes on a rainbow scheme of categories and nuances, depending on
what disorder in the psyche is causing it – bipolarity, attention deficit hyperactivity,
oppositional defiance, dissociative fugue, narcissism. “Bipolar,” the guidance counselor,
if we’d had one, might have written in the space after Remarks on my report card.
“Attention deficit hyperactivity, oppositional defiance, and dissociative fugue,” were the
labels that the counselor, in her confusion, would’ve attached to Socorro.
‘Bumbershoot! Bumbershoot!’ was our code word for anything Socorro and I
were sneering at, especially if anyone said anything that we thought didn’t quite hit the
mark. We were just getting into the Bobbsey Twins, and it was Flossie Bobbsey’s word
for ‘parachute’. We had both thought the malaprop hilarious.
There must’ve been a point when Socorro, Zenaida and I should have gone
looking for other Secret Places. Maybe leading them to that hidden spot behind the
schoolhouse day after day was my fault. After we’d dug up all the rocks and piled them
over the fire ants’ nest, after we’d worked the legs off the broken down desks and stuck
them to the ground to make pillars around Zenaida’s booger’s grave, what else was there
to do but turn our attention next to the blackberry trees? Maybe I’d dared Socorro, maybe
I’d demanded that she prove to me what a real hellion she was by climbing the trees. I
have a notion that she just turned around and ran to the trees, and I running behind her,
shouting, No! No! Don’t pick the blackberries!
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Socorro was up in the biggest tree when the bell caught us by surprise. I was
standing under it, my hands leaning against the trunk, and I was looking up enviously at
Socorro as she popped blackberry after blackberry into her mouth. She shimmied down
and landed an inch away from me; then she ran toward Zenaida, who’d just stood up
from the legless desks that were now lying flat on the ground. Socorro wiped her hands,
running her palms first and then the back of her hands, all over Zenaida’s skirt and the
front of her blouse, before she and I ran toward the bell.
I looked back once and saw Zenaida, a long way away, walking slowly toward
the line.
Mrs. Luczon went straight for Zenaida right away, when she saw all the purple
splotches forming islands and bridges on the sea of snot that was Zenaida’s skirt. She
yanked Zenaida from the line and marched her away toward the School Director’s Office.
I looked fearfully back at Socorro, who was standing in front of Aurora, and I waited –
hoped I think – for a signal from her that she understood. Something had gone out of
whack, and it needed to be restored. But she was staring at the back of the girl’s head in
front of her, her face lit up by a strange delight. Then I saw that she had one hand behind
her, and I am sure she was playing a furtive tug-of-war with Aurora’s hand. I stared at the
back of Zenaida, with Mrs. Luczon’s fingers spread on it, pushing her along.
The next day, Zenaida was gone. I pleaded with my mother not to make me go
round with my basket of sausages ever, and she gave me a resigned look and said Yes.
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I don’t think my friendship with Socorro ended that day. There was nothing as
solid and clear as disgust, denial, or even unease at the conspiracy that had transpired
between us. There was the murky shape of caution, a certain wariness, sitting somewhere
in my stomach; and as I stayed friends with Socorro from one day to the next, that dark
creature grew bigger and threatened to crowd out the insides of my chest.
In the summer, an order of German nuns arrived in town to put up a school in a
cluster of abandoned shopping stalls nearby. Most of us transferred to this school – for
the Catholic education, was the official reason; for its stature, I am sure, was the real one.
The nuns’ first major project was to prepare us for our first Holy Communion. The priest,
at my first confession, forgave me for hating my mother, for grumbling at my chores, for
fighting with my brothers. He never forgave me for the evening of hide-and-seek inside
my clothes closet, nor for Zenaida’s banishment, because I didn’t tell.
What was there to tell? The whole business probably took under two minutes.
Three? A minute and a half? I have thought it all out. There is nothing to be contrite
about. I’d had no choice in the matter. I swear that choice had not occurred, did not
occur, to me.
Socorro must have stayed on at her aunt’s school until an order of friars, not long
after, bought it out. The schoolhouse was pulled down, no one having any respect for
local history then; and the blackberry trees went with it. A university, with three
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buildings five storeys tall, and named after a saint, sprouted in its place. Mammoth
Peterbilt trucks replaced the freight trains and made potholes on our asphalted street as
they rumbled past the university, the cathedral, and the gated village. The railroad tracks
got up piece by piece and walked away in the night, and I am sure I recognized some of
them making up the scaffolding on the department store building that was being built
downtown.
A few years later, I was walking out of this store building when I thought I
spotted Socorro just outside it, leaning on the post, and talking and smiling up at a young
man. She was wearing a red skirt and a white blouse, which was the public high school
uniform, but she’d slipped off the lowest button so that she could tie the two front ends of
her blouse in a knot. An inch of skin showed just below the knot. I was myself wearing
the blue-and-white jumper of the prestigious Catholic girls’ school that was being
guarded by German nuns. She laid a hand on his upper arm and laughed at something he
said. Then she looked past him and straight at me just before I quickly twisted to my right
and pretended to be inspecting stampitas in the glass case that also displayed rosary beads
and prayerbooks. Even then, as I stared down at the stampita, it was my mother I resented
because I thought that hers, who lived in a farm on the other island, had been wiser than
mine.
Zenaida’s real name I don’t even remember, so I had to make one up for this
story.
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