Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

In the morning, when I checked the top of the Frigidaire, the photograph of the girl under the yellow bell tree had gone. I looked, of course, through the albums a few days later, expecting to find it back in one of the sleeves, expecting that switching albums might represent the limits of America’s ingenuity. But I’d underestimated her, for there was no trace of it.

With his mother gone, Dub was scarcely to be seen at the Bougainvillea in the evenings. At first, America sent me out nightly to fetch him, but more often than not when I arrived at the garage it was locked, the windows dark. If Earl was still about, he’d profess ignorance even as he frowned up at the building opposite. At those times, I looked up at the balcony of BabyLu’s flat and usually the doors were open, a light on, sometimes music floating out into the evening.

Dub brought back more of her books for me, his eyes eager as he dropped them onto the kitchen table in the mornings before he left for work, waiting till America was out of the room. He told me how BabyLu put them aside in a pile near the door so she wouldn’t forget, as if he wanted me to think well of her even though we both knew she was Eddie Casama’s mistress. I was flattered by the books, by the knowledge that she thought of me at all, though I also knew they meant he always had an excuse to return to her.

With better claims upon his time, Dub’s bike grew dusty and even America remarked on the dulled chrome, the encrusted paintwork. She grew weary of worrying about him. She left it later and later before asking me to look for him, and then after a while she didn’t ask at all. The last time she sent me down to the garage neither of us expected I would actually find him, but when I arrived he was on the forecourt cleaning down the bike. It looked like its old self again. He smiled when he saw me and shot a glance across the road and up to BabyLu’s balcony. I followed his gaze to where she stood, watering her plants. ‘She wants me to take her out on it,’ he said. ‘She wants to feel what it might be like to leave town, even if it’s just to come back again later.’

I watched him work. He was careful with the machine, as he was with his guitar. I thought about how often Aunt Mary scolded him for shoving aside the antique figurines she’d brought back from Europe to make room for his drink, his keys, his helmet. I wondered how he was with BabyLu, whether he treated her as if she were fragile, irreplaceable.

We watched as BabyLu’s balcony doors closed and her curtains were drawn. A minute later she emerged from her apartment building and slipped quietly across the street. She had on jeans and a light jacket and her headscarf. She looked like an American movie starlet. Dub laughed when he saw her and reached out to pull at the knot of her scarf. I was startled by the familiarity, as was she. She jerked her head away and reproached him with her eyes, glancing along the street. But she was smiling as she removed her scarf and pushed it into her pocket to grasp the helmet he held out to her. She fiddled with the straps for a while and then, giving up, winked at me as she lifted her chin to let Dub fasten them, his fingertips as delicate as if he were picking out splinters. ‘Bye-bye, Jo-Jo,’ she trilled as she climbed on behind him, her voice cloying and comical, childish. I watched them ride away, waiting till they’d disappeared from sight before I started back to the boarding house.

The following day, Dub recounted how their evening had unfolded. He had taken her along the coast road as far as Little Laguna. She’d pulled faces at him in the rear-view mirrors all the way. At Little Laguna they’d taken a rowboat out to a floating bar to sip cocktails while the sun set over the water. When they returned to shore, they’d continued down the coast before cutting through the backwaters to ride through the villages back to Puerto. They’d stopped a few times for a cold drink at a roadside shack or for her to take a picture or disappear into the bushes to relieve herself. Afterwards they’d sat together for a while on the wall of a bridge to watch carabao carts laden with sugar cane or bamboo roll by and, in the distance, people walking across rice fields towards narrow plumes of smoke that rose from behind the treeline. I wondered if he’d glimpsed BabyLu the village girl then, however fleetingly, but of course it was too tender a question to voice. Dub’s first account of their evening stopped there and I thought he was simply being discreet. What he didn’t say then was that when they returned, as the bike cruised into Prosperidad, they saw Eddie’s Mercedes waiting in front of her building.

The sun, long depleted of its vigour, at last drew its uppermost edge down behind the buildings on the opposite side of Esperanza Street, its final glow outlining them thinly against the descending dusk. From the gate, I watched the street turn to velvet and everything become rich, convivial. In a line stretching from the brow of the hill down to the jetty, the lamps came on in clusters, their yellow light seeping through the smoke that layered upwards from the braziers. Into this haze, the night flowers had already started to release their scent. Behind me, the house lay quiet. It was time to close the gate for the evening but I lingered there thinking, as I often did, about how the falling light smoothing over the boundaries of the street endowed the scene almost with the illusion of freedom. I didn’t want to go back inside just yet, and of course today there was no one to mind if the gate closed a few minutes late: Aunt Mary was still in Manila with her mother and America had already retired. Still, I hesitated, if only for a moment, before slipping out onto the sidewalk.

Johnny Five Course sat by his stall reading a book. Even from a distance I recognised the cover: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations . Aunt Mary kept a copy in the sala for the amusement of the boarding-house guests. Books of quotations and anecdotes were the only things Johnny liked to read.

Johnny’s food cart was easily the most colourful stall on the street, and consequently was a magnet for foreigners. Johnny’s sign said in English: Five Corse Meals. Two Set Menues, Complimentry Tea and Coffee. Eat-In. Take-Out . Today, as nearly every day, menu ‘A’ was pinakbet, lumpia , pork and egg noodles, coconut curd and tea or coffee. Menu ‘B’ was pinakbet, lumpia , pork and egg fried rice, coconut curd and tea or coffee. There were no chairs and Eat-In meant sitting on the low wall behind the frangipani tree, the food laid out on a banana leaf in front of you. For Take-Out , Johnny served the pinakbet in a polystyrene cup and the rest wrapped up in waxed paper packets enclosed in another banana leaf. From the roof of the cart, a hurricane lamp cast its gauzy light over a row of open pickle jars and bottles of soy and fish sauce. A ring of flies circled lazily over the jars. Others clung to strips of fly-paper strung like forgotten Christmas decorations along the cart’s awning. All the while a small table fan taped to one of the posts arced uselessly from left to right and back again.

Johnny glanced up as I emerged onto the street. He looked pleased to see me and my heart fell; it meant he had news. He beckoned me over with his book. He looked different and he waited, smiling, while I appraised him. His hair had been teased into a quiff like the prow of a boat. I didn’t say anything. He closed the Bartlett’s and stood up, laying the book down on his stool. He smoothed his quiff with the palms of both hands like he was diving into a pool. ‘Hey Joe, how are you doing?’ he said. I wondered what response might result in the shortest conversation.