Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

He took the cup from my hand, filled it again. He reached for the sugar. From inside the store, the news channel jingle came on again. The people at the doorway started to disperse and, as they passed, one of them bumped Abnor’s shoulder. ‘Oy,’ he muttered crossly as a shower of sugar crystals scattered over the rim of the cup, bouncing off the counter of his stall like raindrops. I watched him gather them together with the side of his hand, sweep them into his palm. And I remembered then, quite unexpectedly, the only time I’d ever seen Aunt Mary angry. Over dinner at the boarding house one evening, during the Pope’s visit back in February, she’d raged about the First Lady’s decision to build a wall in Manila along the route of the Papal motorcade to hide the slums. In her agitation, she’d knocked the rice spoon out of my hand as I served her. I went to fetch a dustpan and came back to find her picking the tiny grains of rice one by one from the pile of the rug with her fingertips, her other palm cupped to receive them.

‘God loves the poor,’ I murmured, testing the words. It was something Mulrooney often said in church. But coming out of my mouth, it sounded phoney. Abnor glanced at me curiously. He put the refilled cup in my hand. I looked down at it. I pictured the Greenhills children, sweeping the market for discarded fruit as the traders packed their stalls away, plucking snails from crevices. I lifted the cup to my mouth but didn’t take a sip, instead studying the two men over its rim. Abnor’s eyes were milkier than I remembered. Primo dressed like someone much younger than his years but, close up, the gap between him and Abnor diminished. It wasn’t just the effect of age, I thought. They both wore a kind of contentment which, now that I considered it, might just as easily have been resignation. The thought was so abruptly dispiriting that, though the tea was still hot, I drained my cup, burning my throat.

As I stood up to leave, Abnor said, as I knew he would because he’d said it innumerable times before, ‘Say Hi to my girlfriend.’

When Aunt Mary returned to the Bougainvillea, she brought her mother with her. I hadn’t seen Lola Lovely for three years. Twice a year, she summoned her daughter, and sometimes the boys, to Manila, rather than manage the journey to Puerto. It wasn’t a long trip, but Lola Lovely liked things to be a certain way and so tended to avoid travelling. She was in her late sixties, but she barely looked her age and she flirted in a desultory fashion with the taxi driver as he hauled her luggage out of the trunk. She looked over the façade of the Bougainvillea, pursed her lips at the boarding-house sign. Behind her, Aunt Mary’s demeanour was cool and I wondered if Lola Lovely had kept at her for most of the way with her demands: ‘Adjust this cushion, fetch a drink, call the steward.’

Lola Lovely lived by herself in Manila. The house was hers, left to her when Judge Lopez died; most of the rest of his estate went to Aunt Mary, who was courting but not married then. The Manila house was modern and much larger than the Bougainvillea — too large really for Lola Lovely, even with her maid and the houseboy, the only staff she was unwilling to do without. It had been designed by an architect who was an old family friend, a fraternity brother of the judge. I’d never seen it but had heard about its big spaces, the skylights that cut blocks of light over marble floors, the waterfall that no longer cascaded in the lobby. Lola Lovely chose to stay there after Mary and Uncle Bobby were married. She loved the arts , couldn’t bear to be too far from the pulse , she’d once said. The proper upkeep of her beloved home would have been covered by her allowance from the Lopez lands if Uncle Bobby hadn’t developed a passion, if not a talent, for poker. Still, Lola Lovely clung to the house, managing as best she could with the remainder of her inheritance. But each time Aunt Mary returned from seeing her, I’d hear her listing to America the latest signs of decay.

I opened the door and took the bags into the house. Lola Lovely smiled anxiously at me. When Benny came down the stairs, she looked relieved and said ‘Ah!’ She had draped a shawl over one arm and made no move to give it to me. When eventually she put it aside, I saw that her arm was in plaster up to the elbow. ‘My wrist,’ she explained irritably to America. She was not the kind to accept without resistance the encroaching signs of frailty.

America had prepared lunch and I’d laid it out in the dining room by the time Lola Lovely had settled herself in. ‘Sheets of music everywhere in one room, sketching paper everywhere in another. You boys inherited your untidiness from your father,’ Lola Lovely said to Benny as she sat down at the table.

‘I’m sure they’d have tidied up if they thought they were due an inspection,’ Aunt Mary said.

‘It’s only me. Their old Lola.’

She waited for a moment and it was America who said, ‘You look just as young as the last time, ma’am.’

Lola Lovely looked pleased. ‘I should take you back to Manila with me,’ she said. America laughed off the invitation uneasily.

Lola Lovely ate carefully with her free arm, concentrating on her plate. She picked at her main course, but when I brought the halo-halo out she smiled and sat forward in her chair. After a while, she said, ‘So why is that boy working in a garage? Shouldn’t he be off to college?’

‘He’s not made any set plans yet.’

‘You give them too much freedom,’ she waved her sundae spoon at her daughter. ‘I’d have threatened to cut him off.’

‘He wants to be a musician,’ Benny said. ‘He doesn’t need college for that.’

Lola Lovely started laughing. ‘He should study law like his grandfather. Make some proper money.’ Lola Lovely looked at her daughter and said, ‘It’s fine to encourage these things when they’re young .’

‘Not everyone wants money,’ Benny persisted.

‘Of course everyone wants money! Even Marcos started off with ideals. But power corrupts!’ Lola Lovely said this with a sudden glee; I’d forgotten how she enjoyed holding court, enjoyed proclamations. ‘It’s that wife of his. She’s twisted him. Women shouldn’t meddle with their husband’s politics.’ Aunt Mary’s spoon hesitated on its way to her mouth. Lola Lovely continued, ‘You know, your father always had an eye on the Senate. He’d have made it too, but then of course that scandal—’

‘Aunt Cora said all politicians have mistresses and no one blinks,’ Benny said. His mother stared at him, startled.

Lola Lovely looked stung. ‘It may be gossip for her, but it was my life,’ she said.

‘It was her life too,’ Aunt Mary interjected softly, a look on her face as if she recognised a danger. Lola Lovely looked at me warily and I turned to leave. She needn’t have worried; the whole barrio knew the story. Cora Sanesteban who, along with her husband, Ignacio, ran the Coffee Shak and the Baigal Bakery two blocks down the hill from the Bougainvillea, was Aunt Mary’s step-sister. Cora’s mother, the mistress of Judge Lopez and a mere filing clerk at his office, had died when her daughter was six, after which Cora and her older brother — for the judge had fathered two children with this woman — came to live in the Lopez household. The judge would not, could not, have turned them away, but Lola Lovely had plenty to say about it and after a while the two kids were made to sleep in the garage, when even the servants slept in the main house. They stayed there for several years. Then the judge died and they inherited just enough to be asked to leave and make their own way in the world. Aunt Mary was a child herself, ten years old, when Cora and her brother came to live with them, and maybe if she’d been older, things might have been different.