Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

Now at least there was a kind of peace. Aunt Mary owned the freehold on both the Coffee Shak and the Baigal Bakery, the only freeholds that Bobby Morelos hadn’t gambled away, but — against the family lawyer’s advice — she refused to charge the Sanestebans any rent.

As I turned to go, Aunt Mary gestured to me to wait. Perhaps she hoped my presence might deter her mother, but Lola Lovely said, accusingly, ‘I kept you safe, didn’t I? When the Japanese were everywhere?’

‘Mom, please.’ Aunt Mary set down her spoon.

‘He comes back from the war, different. Acted as if I couldn’t possibly understand. As if we hadn’t been through hell as civilians too. Did that woman understand him any better than I? A filing clerk! And she could barely spell. And then, just when I think we’ve got our lives back, he presents me with her offspring. I had to think of the effect on you,’ Aunt Mary sighed. ‘They were just children then. They didn’t know about any of that.’

‘Everyone feels they can judge me. That’s why I stayed away.’

‘Mom, no one’s judging you. Shall we just eat?’

But Lola Lovely was not to be placated now and she said, looking at Benny, ‘Fine! You’ve already proved you’re a better person than I am. Are you happy?’ Aunt Mary gave her mother a warning look.

‘Why were you looking at me?’ Benny said. ‘Is this about Aunt Cora?’

‘ Aunt Cora!’

‘Well, what else am I supposed to call her?’

‘I suppose it’s accurate enough.’

‘She’s doing ok now. She’s not a bitter person.’

‘Even you have an opinion about it! Why, you’re just a child.’ Benny made as if to respond but closed his mouth again, looked at his mother. ‘And your mother with her feminism and her activism,’ Lola Lovely continued. ‘Seeing my terrible example and determined not to make the same mistake with you !’

‘Mother!’

Lola Lovely threw down her spoon. ‘We can’t even be together one day without a fight.’

‘Mom?’ Benny looked lost.

But she said, ‘Benito, would you finish your dessert in the kitchen?’

‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’

‘Well, she’s hardly going to dismiss me , is she?’ Lola Lovely said shrilly.

I stepped forward to take Benny’s glass but he shrugged away my help. I looked at Aunt Mary. Her face was dark, lips pressed tight. I followed Benny to the kitchen but he didn’t stay there. He left his half-eaten dessert on the kitchen table and went to his room, closing the door behind him.

America helped me clear the dining room and then took me out into the yard to eat. ‘She’s not at all like her mother, is she?’ I said.

‘Mrs Lovely wasn’t born into money,’ America said casually. I was intrigued but feigned disinterest and America, seeing through it, tossed me a few grains anyway. Lola Lovely, the daughter of a hospital porter, a girl without the benefit of a university education, had somehow managed to land a man like Jimmy Lopez and had climbed into his unfamiliar world. ‘Until he gave her a ring,’ America said, ‘she wouldn’t even let him see where she lived. She made him stop at the corner of the block so that he had to follow her in secret.’

America and I took our time eating and by the time we returned Lola Lovely had retired to the sala, where she sat at the piano fanning herself. I asked if she required a drink and she shooed me away. ‘Just see if my daughter’s finished yet,’ she said without looking at me. The door to Benny’s room was shut, and from behind it I heard the rhythm of Aunt Mary’s precise, melodic sentences. I slipped quickly past the sala to avoid Lola Lovely on my way back to the kitchen.

America regarded me severely. ‘You better not have been listening at the door,’ she said. ‘You make as much noise as a whole herd of carabao .’

‘Is it about Benny? Is he Cora’s boy?’

She started laughing. ‘You’d better not start pecking at my head. You think people have nothing better to do than to explain every last thing to you?’

‘You enjoy knowing things I don’t.’

It was a mistake. I’d forgotten that America, too, was pricklier during Lola Lovely’s rare visits. Her face soured and she said, ‘Let that boy learn his own story without you crowding in on it.’ And with that she barely spoke to me for the rest of the afternoon, except to tell me what to do.

Eddie Casama sat in the sala at the Bougainvillea, in the centre of the settee, his arms stretched out in both directions along the back of it, shirt sleeves rolled up. Close up, he was younger and softer-looking than I’d imagined. He looked like the kind of man who’d let his kids ride on his back at weekends.

He’d brought another man with him: Cesar Santiago, Pastor Levi’s brother. Cesar was a lawyer and, though he ran a public practice, everyone knew he worked almost exclusively for Eddie, leaving any other cases to his junior partner. Cesar at least was familiar; the Santiagos weren’t rich, but their family had been in Esperanza for three generations so everyone knew them.

Cesar sat in an armchair under the window. The blinds were high and the light on his face was revealing. He smiled wanly at America when she came in to ask what the gentlemen might like to drink. America nodded back at him but, unnerved by the presence of Eddie Casama, she returned briskly to the kitchen, pulling me with her. She sent me back out quickly enough with calamansi juice, soda water and peanuts. ‘Take your time,’ she said.

In the sala, Aunt Mary was leaning forward in her armchair. ‘My son Benito is at the same school,’ she said as I came in.

‘Antonio says he’s tall,’ said Eddie. ‘A basketball player.’

‘Just one of his obsessions. And how is your wife? I believe I met her at a school concert.’

‘Oh, Constanza. Eating my head about what this person or that person said to her. She thought the world of you, though.’

I looked around the room to find somewhere to put the tray, but Eddie’s cigarettes and lighter were on the side table.

‘On the piano will do, Joseph,’ Aunt Mary said.

I balanced the tray with one hand and with the other moved the photographs of Uncle Bobby off the cutwork cloth, laid them gently aside. I set down the tray and poured out mixers of juice and soda, taking care not to let any spill onto the rich, glossy wood of the piano. I glanced at Aunt Mary but she looked pointedly at Eddie. I knew how things worked and, though I wondered about giving Cesar a drink first because he’d smiled at America, I brought the tray to Eddie, who took a glass without looking up.

‘Calamansi and soda,’ he said, ‘freshly prepared. Nothing better.’ He took a sip. ‘This is probably the best I’ve tasted.’

‘Absolutely the best,’ Cesar said.

They were exaggerating of course but Aunt Mary accepted the compliment, though she was too European in her ways for imprecision and said, ‘Joseph made it this morning.’ Eddie looked surprised, as if he hadn’t noticed me up till then.

‘Excellent,’ he said, appraising me without interest, looking away again quickly.

Eddie Casama had been elected barrio captain several years ago, holding office for three years before standing down. In those days, he’d been a small-time businessman running a bakery near the basilica but, even then, he was heading for a laundromat, a chain of dry goods stores, a nightclub, a cockpit, an apartment for his mistress and a 24-hour café at the passenger-ferry terminal. Things had gone well for him, and when he stood down it was to concentrate on business .

When anyone talked about Eddie Casama, it was with a tone that implied he was meant for big things, bigger than whatever the rest of us had in store and, what’s more, that it was inevitable he would get there. It was another constant in the neighbourhood, like Abnor’s tea-stall or the mischief of the jetty boys. There was a rumour that he’d been born clutching an amulet that would guarantee him success in everything he did. Back then I believed it, too, believed that our fates were already decided, that some were simply meant to succeed and others to fail. It was a way of thinking that was deeply ingrained. My mother’s voice had always dropped at the mention of such things, as if even the words held power. My father, claiming greater rationality, had extolled only the power of physical work and a Catholic God, though after my mother died, he turned his back, for a while, on the latter. I wish I could have talked about these matters with Aunt Mary, for I’m sure that she would have been, with her overseas education, level-headed about it. I didn’t see then how these beliefs provided an excuse for inaction, though of course the amulet rumour might also have been about not having to give a man like Edgar Casama his due.