Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

Eddie was quiet for a moment and then, afraid perhaps that he hadn’t finished with all the niceties before he got down to business, he asked after Dub and even Lola Lovely, whom he’d been told was visiting. Satisfied with the answers, he put down his glass and said, thoughtfully, ‘Progress is impossible without change, don’t you think?’

Aunt Mary said, ‘That will be all, Joseph.’

‘Anything else to eat, ma’am?’ I said. Aunt Mary looked at each man in turn. Eddie Casama raised his hands to decline.

‘America will need some help,’ she said firmly to me. And to Eddie, ‘It’s one of our foreign guest’s birthdays. He’s asked for a Filipino feast.’

‘Have you warned him he’ll be eating for a week?’ said Cesar. Aunt Mary smiled.

In the kitchen, America was standing in the slanted light from the window, like a woman from a painting in one of Aunt Mary’s books. She’d been deseeding a pumpkin and thin orange threads quivered from her fingertips. ‘So how are things in the corridors of power?’ she said. I repeated what Eddie had said about progress and change. ‘That crook,’ she said. She cupped her hands and moved over to the sink. She rinsed her hands briskly. ‘He’s up to something all right. Whatever it is, his kind always land on their feet.’ She uncovered a filleted milkfish that I’d left on a dish beside the sink, ran her finger lightly along its flesh, feeling for bones. I’d deboned it earlier with an old pair of tweezers and I knew she wouldn’t find any. She nodded and covered it over again.

I waited for Aunt Mary to call me back into the sala but she didn’t. It wasn’t until Lola Lovely came in through the front door with Benny in tow, tired from a trip downtown, that I had the excuse to go back out. Benny stayed by the door as he was introduced but slipped away quickly, loping through to the kitchen to see what he might take to eat in his room. Lola Lovely stood just inside the threshold of the room and eyed the men expectantly. They rose to greet her. She appraised Cesar, her eyes narrowing, and said, ‘You look familiar. Are you a doctor?’ She cupped a hand under the elbow of her plaster cast.

‘A lawyer, ma’am. Cesar Santiago. It’s nothing serious, I hope?’

Lola Lovely waved the cast impatiently, said ‘Oh, it’s nothing. The Santiago brothers. The lawyer. Ah, yes.’ She looked impressed.

‘Mrs Lopez,’ Eddie said, holding his hand out. ‘I’ve never had the pleasure. Edgar Casama.’

Lola Lovely smiled at him. ‘Mr Casama. Are you from round here?’

‘Greenhills born and bred.’

‘A Manila man!’

‘No, ma’am,’ Eddie laughed. ‘Greenhills, Esperanza.’

Lola Lovely looked alarmed, ‘How can that be?’

‘I was born behind Colon Market.’

‘But there are no proper houses there.’

‘There are houses, most certainly. Not as elegant as this one.’

Lola Lovely looked perplexed as she took in Eddie, the Rolex on his wrist, his expensively cut jacket, which he had declined to let me hang up and had now discarded carelessly over the armrest of the settee. She studied him, trying to place him correctly in her world. ‘You’re a friend of my daughter’s?’ she said, and I saw Aunt Mary shift forward in her chair, ready to intervene. ‘She was always interested in the other side,’ Lola Lovely continued. ‘A social reformer at heart.’ Aunt Mary cleared her throat.

‘Then of course Mary will know that the key to social change is opportunity!’ Eddie beamed.

‘Why, yes,’ Lola Lovely looked doubtful. She never seemed entirely at home with other people’s politics.

‘Take me for example,’ Eddie’s tone was almost flirtatious. His eyes shone at her. ‘Why, I didn’t attend school beyond tenth grade.’ I thought how he gave just enough away to seem vulnerable, certain now that Lola Lovely was no threat to him. Lola Lovely allowed herself to be charmed.

‘We knew such difficulties during the war too,’ she said. ‘I had to live in a village with my husband’s foreman and his family. Our house here was stripped by the Japanese. I took what valuables I could carry and we left in the night on an ox cart. Can you imagine it? Mary was just a little girl.’

Eddie laughed. ‘You must have dazzled the entire village,’ he said.

Lola Lovely threw her hands up, delighted. ‘I had to learn how to milk a cow. I had to put my hands down there!’

‘Madam, there is such dignity in working with ones hands,’ Eddie exclaimed. Of course, he spoke like a politician; who could be sure what he really thought? Still, I liked the sound of it.

‘Will you stay for some food?’ Aunt Mary said, though she knew they would hardly have done so at such short notice, and so by asking she gave them their cue to leave. Lola Lovely looked disappointed as Eddie declined.

The men lingered in the hallway for maybe another fifteen minutes saying their goodbyes, edging towards the door with each exchange — last minute queries, mostly from Lola Lovely, about school grades and health, which couldn’t be answered briefly — until eventually Cesar, who had stood gripping the door handle for several minutes already, turned and stepped out into the late-morning sun, moving aside almost immediately to allow Eddie to precede him.

Lola Lovely followed the men out onto the verandah and looked on as they climbed into the back of Eddie’s Mercedes. She waved as the car pulled out of the driveway, a tiny plastic Jesus nodding his endorsement through the back window. ‘How unexpected,’ she said loudly as she stepped back inside. ‘A Greenhills man and quite refined.’

Aunt Mary remained preoccupied for days after Eddie Casama’s visit and though America claimed to have interrogated her about it, we remained unsure as to why. Then, late one afternoon, I opened the boarding-house door to find Esperanza’s two priests side by side on our doorstep. Esperanza being such a populous barrio, it was unusual for the two men to make house calls together and so I was alarmed at the sight of them. The women of the household were at home, but the boys were out and, immediately, I imagined the worst. Father Mulrooney spoke hurriedly: ‘No calamitous acts of God, Joseph. We just wanted to talk to Mrs Morelos. Is she in?’

Father Mulrooney was in his forties but still had a boyish handsomeness about him that made the older women of Esperanza flirt kindly with him and enquire as to whether he was eating properly. He had an air of naivety too, the kind inevitable in men who had entered the seminary at seventeen and known no other life. His hair was coarse and tousled and sandy-coloured and his skin was of the kind of paleness that was ill suited to our sun and had a perennial tinge of redness to it. He had a slightly crumpled look — the sort of man who might in another life have been well advised to marry. Mulrooney was popular in the neighbourhood and well known, for twice a day without fail he walked out from his meagre convento , once before breakfast while the sun was still low and again before supper when the heat was abating. I liked to imagine that these times were chosen deliberately so that the sight of his flock and their uncertain circumstances might curb his appetite, for he remained of slender build.

Pastor Levi, by comparison, enjoyed his wife’s cooking. He was an earnest man, his face prone to smiling and deeply crevassed. He was younger than Mulrooney, in his late thirties. He had travelled a roundabout route through the Lutherans, the Anglicans and an agnostic period during which he had acquired a wife. He returned to Roman Catholicism, kept his wife, though he never completed any official Vatican paperwork on the matter, and carried on to father five children; Mulrooney was the youngest’s godfather. Although Father Mulrooney was officially Levi’s senior, the name of Pastor stuck to Levi: it had a good ring to it.