Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

Johnny was full of schemes to make it out of Esperanza Street, out of Puerto, out of the Philippines. He was going places: ‘The Mississippi River, man,’ he’d say. He loved that name, stretched it out a long way. ‘The Meesseesseepee Reever.’ His dreaming made me feel empty. The week before he’d said to me, ‘Maybe I’ll do an MBA stateside.’ I didn’t know what an MBA was but I didn’t admit to it. Most of Johnny’s outside information came from Jaynie, his sister, who ran the Beauty Queen hair salon near the market hall. Jaynie and her colleague, Lady Jessica, whose real name was Jesiah, were the eyes and ears of Esperanza and their clientele included the ladies from higher up the hill who could afford to send their children to college in Europe or the States and still had money to fritter on manicures and hair perms.

Johnny lived with Jaynie and his father in a two-room apartment in Greenhills just behind the Espiritista chapel. They had their own tiny kitchen but shared an outside bathroom with four other families. Johnny got up every day before dawn to go to market and he’d rolled out his stall and was cooking over the butane gas stove before Jaynie was even up. He ate all his meals at the stall and when he got home he washed and slept and got up before dawn to do it all over again.

‘So now you’re Elvis?’ I said, pointing at last to his hair.

‘You think it suits me?’

I didn’t, but I said, ‘Sure.’

Johnny looked pleased for a second. Then he said, ‘It’s crazy about the Pope, eh?’

‘What about the Pope?’

He stared at me. ‘You work too hard,’ he said. He thrust his chin in the direction of Primo’s store, where a group of men and women had gathered at the doorway. Through the windows I could just make out the fitful, bluish light of Primo’s countertop TV. As if afraid I might be lured away by it, Johnny said quickly, ‘So how are the boys? Benny, Dub?’ Listing them as if I might be uncertain which boys he was referring to.

‘Fine.’

‘Eat my dust!’ Johnny had taken to this phrase, having seen it on the back of one of Dub’s t-shirts. Dub was fast becoming legendary around Esperanza. ‘Get the same shirt for America. She moves quick for an old lady.’

‘She’s a devil in an old lady’s body.’

‘Jessica describes herself as a woman in a man’s body,’ he said, which stalled the conversation as both of us tried to imagine it. I looked away again in the direction of Primo’s store. ‘Still going strong,’ Johnny said cheerfully, waving at Abnor who sat as always at his tea-stall in front of the store. For some time now Johnny had had his eye on Abnor’s pitch, which was a short distance from the Espiritistas and the Redemptorist church. Perhaps he imagined himself ready to nourish the congregations as they emerged from communing with the dead, or meditating on moderation and self-restraint, the money burning in their pockets. Abnor waved back. I raised my arm to wave too and Abnor patted the stool next to him in invitation. Johnny wasn’t quite ready to let me go. ‘Salon might have to close,’ he said.

‘Jaynie’s place?’ I was surprised. Like his and Abnor’s stalls, it was part of the fabric of the street.

‘That bastard Eddie don’t want to renew the lease.’

‘Isn’t his wife in there every week?’

Johnny pushed his jaw forward, lowered his eyelids and, holding his arms out as if he were a politician delivering a speech, said in an exaggerated mimicry, ‘Change is inevitable.’ I didn’t know if he was pretending to be Eddie. I stared at him blankly. ‘Forget it,’ he muttered.

I looked back at the Bougainvillea. ‘Aunt Mary likes the gate closed by now,’ I said.

Johnny picked up his ladle and pushed the pinakbet roughly round the pan. ‘There are no tyrants where there are no slaves, man,’ he said. ‘Rizal.’ I was pretty sure Rizal hadn’t said man but I didn’t correct him. Johnny picked up his book again and for a moment I thought he might be about to assail me with another quote, but he shrugged and sat down.

I turned to leave. Across the street, Abnor hooked a stool out with his foot and started wiping down a cup with a rag. He set the cup down firmly. I started over to him. He’d poured out a tea for me before I’d even reached his corner. Winking, he stirred in an extra spoonful of sugar and handed me the cup. I wasn’t used to sweet tea anymore — Aunt Mary preferred it made without — but I took the cup without hesitation. Abnor never let me pay so I tried not to drink his tea too often, which was a shame because I enjoyed sitting here.

Abnor had roots in the same village as America and they flirted affably whenever they met. For no other reason than that, I trusted him. Abnor’s tea-stall had got all of his younger siblings through school, two through college, and then married. They were long since grown and gone but still Abnor stayed put, sleeping under the wooden wings of his stall in all weathers until Primo put down a folding bed for him in his store room. Now every evening after closing up shop, the two of them sat side by side on Abnor’s wooden stools, sharing tea and cigarettes and watching the street like a television.

Today, Primo’s doorway was still open, the windows unshuttered. A group of men and women stood at the threshold, more sat on the floor inside the store. I heard the brusque, urgent music of a news programme. Primo leaned back against the glass of his shopfront, blowing on his tea.

‘What’s going on?’ I said.

Abnor raised an eyebrow. ‘The Pope’s been shot. He’s in hospital. It’s been all over the news.’ He crossed himself. Behind him, Primo fiddled with the cross around his neck.

I cast a glance across the street at Johnny, said apologetically, ‘Aunt Mary’s not so keen on TV. It’s sometimes on for the guests in the evening, but we’ve been quiet.’ I stood up and craned to see the screen. The Filipino anchorman, a fair-skinned mestizo, sounded almost American. He looked nothing like any of the people who had gathered to watch. The footage was a few months old: on a tour of the country earlier in the year, Pope John Paul II reminded the sea of people who had come to see him not to use contraception.

‘It’s a bad thing,’ Abnor said, ‘the way the world is.’ He shrugged.

I sat down again, sipped my tea. I looked more closely at the people clustered in the doorway, grief painted on their faces, a grief that seemed scenic somehow, distant, because I didn’t feel it. The Pope being shot, like most things, seemed like a matter for everyone else but me. Abnor watched me. I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘They think he’ll be all right, though?’

‘It’s up to Him,’ Abnor said. He pointed up at the sky and despite myself I looked up. ‘At least he’s in His good books.’

‘You hear about the salon?’ I said.

Abnor’s voice dropped and he frowned as he intoned like a movie hero, ‘A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent .’ He jabbed the air with a finger like he was conducting an orchestra, emphasising alternate syllables.

‘ Man ,’ said Primo quietly.

Abnor leaned in to me. ‘Martin Luther King!’ The two men laughed softly. I glanced guiltily across the street at Johnny. His head was back in his book of quotations. The sight of it made me smile suddenly, but only because the incline of the pages was in the same plane as his quiff. It would have made a good photograph. Abnor patted me on the shoulder.

From out back, a cockerel started up a ragged call. ‘I’m going to eat that bird some day soon,’ Abnor said. Primo kept a fighting cock in the yard behind the store. It had lived with him in his apartment until the neighbours complained about its noise. He crooned a soft pocking noise deep in his throat. The cockerel quieted. ‘That bird’s like having a wife,’ Abnor muttered. ‘Always wanting to talk.’