Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

The two men settled themselves in the sala while I went to fetch Aunt Mary. Both had been to the house before but they, like many of our visitors, seemed not entirely at ease; the place was too impeccably tidy and the presence of the grand piano gave the room a kind of old-fashioned formality. Also, though Bobby Morelos had been dead for years, his presence persisted in the room; his graduation certificates were on the wall, photographs of him on the piano. I’d often admired the portrait of him in naval uniform as I dusted the piano, once I was trusted to do so, my fingers itching to press the keys but afraid of making a sound. In a certain tricky late-afternoon light that gave the present the texture of the past, it almost felt as if he might walk into the room at any moment.

Aunt Mary was upstairs at her desk. She wasn’t expecting visitors and she moved quickly on hearing that both priests were here to see her. I followed her down the stairs, heading to the kitchen to fetch water and iced tea, which I knew was Father Mulrooney’s favourite drink. I brought the drinks to the sala but before I could serve them Aunt Mary sent me back out again to fetch America.

‘It’s a terrible thing about the Pope,’ said Aunt Mary, as I came back in, as if she might have been talking about the men’s favourite uncle.

‘Yes. Thank you,’ Father Mulrooney nodded. No doubt he’d had plenty of practice by now with his responses. But he didn’t dwell; there was other business at hand. ‘I’m not at liberty to reveal my sources … ’ he enunciated carefully and, so saying, he blushed. Aunt Mary smiled at him encouragingly. Later in the conversation, on an unrelated matter, he wouldn’t be able to refrain from saying the same name aloud more than once: Jaynie. Johnny Five Course’s sister who ran the Beauty Queen salon. Eddie Casama’s wife was one of her regulars, though it was widely known that Eddie himself was no stranger to manicures. ‘Several days ago,’ Mulrooney continued, ‘I learned from my sources that Eddie Casama has submitted a planning application.’

‘As part of a consortium,’ Pastor Levi said. I looked at America who, like myself, uncomfortable with the idea of taking a seat next to the others, was leaning in the doorway. She looked bewildered; the language of our world had no need for terms like consortium .

‘He wants to build a shopping mall in Esperanza,’ Mulrooney continued. ‘My sources are facing eviction because their business is situated in the area earmarked for redevelopment.’ He flushed again. I pictured the Beauty Queen, squeezed in among the pharmacy, the noodle joints, the market hall and any number of places that were the body of Esperanza.

‘Father Mulrooney came straight to me when he heard,’ Pastor Levi said.

‘To speak to Cesar,’ Mulrooney said to Aunt Mary.

‘Cesar was cagey. But I got it out of him eventually.’

‘They submitted the application months ago,’ Mulrooney said, ‘but it was buried. Displayed publicly all right, but in English and on some village official’s door.’

‘He came to discuss it with me a few days ago,’ said Aunt Mary. ‘Bobby and I had friends in government. Engineer Reyes and Joey Robello were part of Bobby’s poker crowd. And the Robellos are related to me by marriage. I suppose those men might not normally have been in Mr Casama’s circle.’ She glanced at Mulrooney and added carefully, ‘Of course, a man like Mr Casama hardly needs my support.’

‘Yes, yes, Joey Robello, Engineer Reyes,’ said Mulrooney darkly. I shot a complicit smile at America, but she stared back coolly. She knew I’d never met either of those men even if, like everyone else, I’d heard their names. Joey Robello, a judge like his father and grandfather before him, had his eye on a seat in the Senate and Engineer Reyes had been elected to the District Council three times, though it was unclear who exactly had voted him in. There was a story about Engineer Reyes known to everyone in Esperanza. Fresh out of university and ambitious with his father’s money, he had tried to dig a basement under his father’s house, planning to turn it into a games room — I remember Abnor repeating the words over and over with obvious amusement: a room just for games . The basement was barely excavated when it flooded and though it was drained and the work restarted, it kept on flooding. Finally, the foreman explained to him that there was an underground spring, which eventually led to the sea, running beneath the street; the same water that was tapped further along its course by the pump in the market hall. Reyes, known then simply as Frankie Reyes, was furious. Why hadn’t the man thought to tell him before? The foreman explained that he’d assumed Reyes had known all along, he was, after all, an engineer. Work ceased and, after some wrangling, the men were finally paid, though less than they’d originally been promised: a mistake on Reyes’ part for the whole of Esperanza quickly heard the story. From then on he was always addressed as Engineer Reyes, though he never practised as one.

‘They’re all in league with each other,’ said Mulrooney. ‘Busy lining each other’s pockets.’ I thought I heard in his voice a note of defeat, or perhaps if not defeat, then doubt, as if the odds against Esperanza were approaching some critical threshold. But Esperanza Street was used to change, I thought. Like anywhere, it had been formed in layers, each one built upon the last by the generations of people that had lived and died here, though until now the process of its changing had been like the gradual shaping of a shoreline over centuries. ‘Of course he’s arguing that it will bring money into the local economy,’ Mulrooney said, ‘implying that everyone stands to benefit.’

‘Did he mention the full extent of it?’ asked Pastor Levi, and he watched me closely as he listed street after street in Greenhills, including, finally, my father’s. For a moment I thought it sounded too ridiculous and I couldn’t believe that anyone would allow it. Then Levi added, ‘Cesar said they plan to build a multi-storey car park over the north half of the cemetery.’

America grabbed my hand, squeezed it hard and I gaped back at her. If our dead, my mother among them, were not to be allowed their rest, I thought, then there was little hope for the living.

The Coffee Shak was my favourite place on Esperanza; it felt like somewhere things could happen. It was also Esperanza Street’s famous place, being listed in foreign guidebooks. I passed by it most days, but once a week, if the Bougainvillea had foreign guests, I got to go inside to pick up ground coffee. In its present form the Shak was relatively new to the street, but it had been around in other incarnations for years, starting life as an unnamed, brightly painted vendor’s cart — a wooden contraption on wheels with room for a small motor underneath to run the grinder and a big steel urn bolted onto the counter. When Aunt Mary’s stepsister Cora first met Ignacio Sanesteban he was running a shop selling machine parts on Esperanza Street, but he didn’t have much of a head for it and was, as she often recounted, bleeding money. She took charge and turned his shop into the Shak, the only place for miles around where tourists and expats, tired of being served cups of lukewarm water with sachets of instant coffee, could relax with the real stuff. It was immediately popular.

Cora took to grinding the day’s beans fresh in front of the first customer every morning. It was this ritual that earned her a place in the guidebooks, framed pages of which decorated the pillar nearest the door, alongside a large, framed photograph of the old cart.