Drown in Yoghurt and Formaldehyde

(eight)

The Return

Lena was sixteen when her father first spent the entire night in her room. He’d never stayed before. In the beginning, two years ago, when he had been home barely a month, he would simply watch her, the glow of the night his only illumination. And she would lie on that hard cot, staring back at him with pubescent embarrassment mingled with a searing kind of pull and she would never say a word. Then he would leave.

Her body would be so attuned to this ritual that it soon learned to wake up on its own at three o’clock in the morning, always in time to welcome her father’s gaze.

This was the way her body throbbed when weeks later, she waited with a patience she’d only acquired when her mother stopped speaking. She was lying on her stomach, with her face buried in her pillow. That evening was a cool one. A fraying sheet covered her thin frame and Lena, easy to freeze, was shivering. That was how her father found her and that was what she’d stopped doing when she first felt his large, warm hands on the strong muscles of her calves.

She felt the heat of his body against her sensitized, awakening skin and the feather-light touch of his breath against her ear. The night would go on as he molded the sheet and her clothes to her body, telling her to turn this way, to lift this leg, to put her hand on this part of her. He would touch her where she’d never before ached, to create an even greater pain that her young mind could only welcome. Many times, he would ask, in a sweet, curling voice, for her to touch him this way; that he only needed to see how her small hand shone against his tight, dark skin. How could she refuse when that voice was like smooth cream and those eyes like hot stones? She would touch him like he asked and once or twice, she’d touch more.

But he would never stay the night.

The mornings after, he acted like the estranged father that he was, but Lena paid this no heed. After all, he’d left when she had yet to turn one. However, he acted like a polite stranger, even like a young suitor, around her mother. When he talked to Pining, his voice was always low, like velvet, formal and gently patronizing, and when he asked a question, he would always pause as though waiting for her answer, although he knew that Pining had stopped talking when he’d first walked through the door, very much alive.

“Pining,” Lena heard him once, early in the morning, “Lena’s grown up to be such a good girl. You raised her well.”

And Lena carried the glow of those words until the hour that he would come into her room, when it would burn brighter with his moaned words.

My father thinks I’m the world, she would whisper to herself when she saw him tending to the vegetable garden they had in their yard or effortlessly carrying a carcass of a goat over his shoulder or brushing a lock of hair from her mother’s frozen face. My father thinks I’m beautiful.

No one in the sleepy little town seemed to remember who he was. Twelve years shouldn’t have been that long. Little barrios like this had impressive memories, made stronger by gossip and the fact that there were only a handful of people to talk about.

Lena and her mother, for instance, were town fixtures. Pining was that woman who lived at the edge of the town, the one with that grown daughter. Pining was the dalagita who’d been dragged by the neck of her Sunday clothes by her bull of a father when she’d told him that she was pregnant. Pining was the girl who’d ran around the barrio, the one they’d called their little piece of sunshine.

Pining had then become a presence no one questioned, after suffering through years of malicious talk, when all she’d had to do was wear a skirt an inch too high and she’d be called slut for a week. Now, she was that young mother of a teenage daughter. No one asked who her husband was, who the father was. No one asked the necessary why’s.

There were a few times in the course of twelve years that a man would lift his head from the chickens he was tending and he’d think about Pining and wonder what man could have claimed that beauty for his. The women would pause in the middle of the stream, balancing a stack of laundry on their hips, and wonder what man could have sired such loveliness that was Lena.

Then the questions would be dismissed with a shrug, as they all thought that the answer was in their heads somewhere. Somewhere, inside them, like a hard fact or a general truth, was the answer to Pining and Lena.

But when that answer arrived in the barrio atop a rusty bicycle, no one paid heed. When the answer walked through the dirt roads in faded clothing and tired shoes, no question came to mind. The answer would saunter through the streets they had no name for, with Lena beside him.

The men would then let a forbidden thought slide into their monotonous lives: that when the sun struck Lena a certain way, they’d see her legs crisscrossing underneath that thin white skirt.

The women’s hands would then flutter when they let themselves think about the clinging tightness of the stranger’s worn pants and that their husbands never looked that way at them. Never looked that way at all.

And no one even asked who this stranger was. Like the way the people thought the answer to the mother and daughter was at the back of their heads, beside the knowledge of how to take the bus ride to their rich cousins in Manila or how to create a kamote patch from scratch, people thought they knew.

Not three weeks before her father calmly walked his bicycle back into their lives, a boy—she’d forgotten his name now—had come up to Lena after mass, with a tentative smile on his freshly-scrubbed face. He was two years his senior, cocky, arrogant, and incredibly smitten.

“I see you in the mornings, when you go to the market.” The boy shrugged and tried to look as though he wasn’t too eager, as though Lena couldn’t see the mad throb of the pulse on his neck. “I bought some sitaw from you once, twice.”

Lena nodded politely. Pining, ever quiet, was beside her, holding a rosary between her pale hands.

The boy had given her mother but a curt and dismissive glance. Everyone knew that Pining never spoke much and to even attempt getting a response from her would be a foolish venture. Her face would remain as smooth as dull glass.

Yet as the boy plied Lena love-struck compliment after compliment, Pining’s countenance had grown grimmer and grimmer, as seen from the beautiful scowl marring her usually pristine face.

“I’m taking over the family piggery,” he told Lena and Pining, puffing his chest out. The younger girl had murmured diplomatically; her mother’s chin raised a notch and fixed clear eyes on his slick, sly smile.

At home, Pining drew back her hand and slapped Lena.

“He only wants one thing from you, girl. Don’t you forget that!”

This was how Pining would break her silence, the blankness in her face, and the blanket of resigned sorrow in their abandoned lives.

The last time she’d slapped Lena, the last time she’d raised her voice at her was almost ten years ago, when, at six, the girl had looked up from the photograph on the bedpost and remarked to her mother how handsome her father was. How stern his smile but, then again, so dreamy.

He can carry me off, mother, to those dreamlands he goes to, those places he writes to us about. About lights in the sky and falling leaves and unbreakable water. Right, mother? Right, mother, mother?

He never talked about where he’d been, her father. Gonzalo had been away for more than twelve years. His letters and telegrams to Pining had stopped coming before the fifth year was over and even then they were few in number and far in between. The last one was but three lines and when Lena, years later, had found it tucked underneath her mother’s mattress, the words had leapt to her mind and held vigil there:

It looks like the sky is falling where I am. You shouldn’t have sent me Lena’s picture. She’s too beautiful.

And when a year passed with no word from him, Pining assumed he was dead. No one even asked what he was doing that had killed him, or where and when it was that he died.

They told the little girl who never clung to her mother’s skirts that the father she never knew, the one who left while Pining was sobbing because of the pain of breastfeeding, was dead.

But Lena would stare out her window every night since she was six, half-expecting someone to walk up her house’s steps. Someone who looked like the strong-jawed, grim-mouthed man in the grainy photograph her mother kept tacked on her bedpost.

As it was, he came in the middle of one scorching afternoon during summer and it was she who was the first to see him.

She’d looked up from the drone of her dishwashing and saw through the wide windows the dirt road that connected, like a misplaced vein, their little shack from the main road. For a few moments, she watched the way smoke swirled up from the dirt roads, marking the distance a sluggish blur. The heat made her eyes water, as though it had long ago sidled up to her to press its own hands against her face, her body. Her thin cotton dress—a ruined, wrinkled white—had darkened in the valley between her budding breasts, under her thin arms and at the small of her back, where it stuck like a familiar caress. She watched, too, when a man on a tired bicycle stopped a couple of meters from the dry bushes that marked their property, to lift a well-muscled arm to wipe the perspiration that glistened on his forehead. The faded red of his shirt was completely drenched and she watched, mute, when he whipped it off his body and dropped it, a sweaty bundle, between the handlebars.

As though he knew she was watching, he looked up and fixed her with a steady gaze, eyes so much like her own.

“Lena,” he called. “I’m home.”

“Itay,” she murmured. Then she ran out of the house to throw herself into this stranger’s arms.

Her mother had been a beautiful girl. And when she grew older, when she fell in love with a restless vagabond, when she had a baby girl and was then abandoned to quench a raging wanderlust, she grew even more beautiful. As though the sorrow etched itself into her bones, seeped into her pale, creamy skin, to create an even more heartbreaking beauty that, in its exquisiteness, became untouchable.

Lena remembered one night, when she was ten or eleven, and she’d been hearing the neighbors’ murmurs of her burgeoning beauty, her inevitable perfection, the fated likeness of her and her mother, she decided to see for herself.

Her mother had been napping in the small living room, half-reclined in the bamboo sofa. The afternoon light that peeked from heavy clouds hit her hair, creating a soft brown halo around her. In sleep, Pining was as angelic as some of the townsfolk made Lena believe.

Her gait unsteady, her hands trembling, Lena reached out and touched her mother’s limp hand. She marveled at the difference—her mother’s fingers were long and tapered, like candles, while hers, at the cusp of childhood, were short and dimpled; her mother’s skin was smooth, pale and almost translucent and hers was roughened by play and the color of creamed coffee; even their veins were not the same: hers were green and fat, her mother’s were blue and spindly.

Pining awakened to find Lena’s dark hair curtaining their held hands. She felt Lena’s skin against hers—that was what woke her up. With a muffled shriek, she drew her hand back, clutched it to her bosom, and stared in horror at her child.

Lena stared back.

“Don’t touch me again,” Pining hissed.

Lena, at first, did not notice that her mother had completely stopped speaking. It was her father who pointed it out to her, while she prepared dinner, while he watched her, while her mother sat on her bed and stared at the floor.

“Your mother,” Gonzalo said, “she was a loud girl.”

She smiled, thinking her father jested with her. Her mother had always been a quiet woman. A day would go by and all Lena would hear was a sudden intake of breath when Pining would begin praying the Angelus in her mind. In a week, Pining would call her daughter by her name only twice. When she went out to sell her vegetables in the market, she only murmured her greetings, as the prices had been fixed long before, back when Pining was still her family’s errand-girl.

“It’s true,” he said, though he, too, smiled a sad smile. “She talked about the most inconsequential things. She laughed at every little detail.”

“Did you laugh together?”

“Of course.”

Lena cut a tomato in half. She watched the minute seeds spill from the oozing liquid and carefully chose her words. “Do you miss her laughter?”

He stood up then, the smile slowly disappearing from his face. A line had formed between his eyebrows. Before that moment, she’d only seen it in the dead of the night, while he was hovering above her, his entire body tensed.

“I just didn’t think that she’d ever stop laughing, that’s all.”

Pining had stopped laughing long before she stopped speaking. Lena tried to remember the sound of her laughter and found that she couldn’t.

But she’d learned to love her father’s laughter, for he was a somber man, one who rarely laughed, although in the short time that she knew him, she’d heard him laugh more than her mother ever did in Lena’s lifetime.

During one of those nights that Gonzalo had stayed longer and longer in her room, she’d grown impatient waiting for him to push aside the thin sheet that separated her room from the rest of the house. She wandered the house, drawn by the haunting, lyrical sound of her father chuckling. She came at a stop outside the door to her mother’s room and peeked through the bamboo slats.

Her mother, swathed in pristine white, lay immobile on the bed as her naked father knelt on the floor. Lena’s breath hitched as she watched that tall, corded man, brown all over, implore her mother to make a sound, even a tiny one, imploring her by his laughter, trying to draw her out by the sound of his feigned happiness. She watched as Gonzalo clasped his hands together, then draw them apart, laughing that melodic, maniacal laughter, calling her mother’s name, calling, calling, calling.

An hour later, as she lay restless on her cot, her father arrived, all laughter gone from his face. He laid back on the bed and pulled her so that she sat atop his nakedness, so that she could watch the way his eyes closed when her hips met his, those moments that told her he was still waiting for Pining to let out a loud, clattering laugh.

During the day, when Lena was alone with her mother inside the house, the girl could feel the weight of her deadened stare. She would eventually find the courage to stare right back and once she did, her eyes would say the mantra in her head, one that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, drive away: You’re the one he goes to bed with every night. You’re the one he returns to after he’s had his way with me.

That was when she gradually learned envy. And realized that she could, possibly, learn hatred.

One night in the summer of her sixteenth year, her father stayed the night.

It began the way each of their nights began since he first went to her room. Her body would slide out of its sleep and wait for her father, who would never fail to draw aside her curtain mere moments after. That night, he walked to her bed unclothed and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that he was ready, more than ready, for her body.

He drew the hem of her dress up, making it bunch around her hips, and he thrust between her open legs, never once thinking if she was ready for him. She always was, these days. When he murmured her name, she pulled down her bodice, exposing her shapely, hard-tipped breasts to his gaze, his touch.

They lay on the bed, a sweaty entanglement of limbs, torsos, and her long hair sprayed across the pillow. Her back was arched, her lithe body balanced on her shoulders and the heels of her tiny feet. His insistent thrusts, the greedy way with which he branded her as his, the possessive grip of his hands all over her, were all elements of the night. He took all that she could give and she settled for whatever he wanted to toss.

When they both had their release—he from the clasp of her body, she from the rough caresses of his calloused hands—he fell on the bed, facedown, beside her. He kept one hand underneath her dress, keeping her madly awake.

“Please,” she whispered.

His hand stilled on the soft convex arc of her stomach before it traveled to rest on one bare breast. Moments later, she felt him press his dry lips on the curve of her neck.

She awakened that morning to find her father asleep beside her and she took her time reveling in the pleasure of seeing the even rise and fall of his back as he breathed. She looked at the rich brown skin the sunlight revealed and she arched against the heavy hand that remained, throughout the night, against her breast.

She reached underneath his body to find him turgid and waiting. When she squeezed, he bucked against her hand and rolled over with a moan, displaying his body like a sacrifice.

When she heard the creak of her mother’s bedroom door opening, she straddled his hips, letting out a loud gasp when her first slide downwards completely impaled her on him. She discovered that she was getting drunk on the way he looked and how his body reacted: that he could sleep so peacefully, those lashes resting on his cheeks, and that his entire body arched up, without him knowing it, to meet her warmth.

It began deep in her belly, like the rumble of the earth before it quakes. She started to laugh and it jostled with the rising sounds of his helpless, angry groans, creating a bouncing melody that reverberated throughout their small house. She threw her head back, arched her nubile body, and every muscle in her tightened, held still, then broke free. And she laughed some more.

When her father’s eyes suddenly opened, he screamed his surprise and, grinning, she bore down on him and then lifted, letting him enter her over and over until she was sure that it was her body that he felt, it was her cunt that was taking over him; she fucked him until it hurt, until he stopped thinking of no one else but her, until he would be screaming her name, thinking of her laugh, her voice, her body. She fucked him and she laughed, laughed and fucked, until he came violently into her, asking her to please stop.

Still feeling him shooting inside her, she saw her mother sweep aside the curtain at the doorway of her room and Lena paused in her laughter but not once did she stop the motion of her hips. Mother and daughter held gazes for a few silent moments and then Lena couldn’t take it anymore and she just had to laugh, and laugh harder.

*


This story was published in the January 27, 2007 issue of Philippine Free Press.

Page 36! Weee! :)

Labels: General Fiction, Publication

posted by Sasha Martinez @ 10:47 PM 0 Comments