Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

As I left, the door was bolted behind me. I looked down. I was still holding the plate, the dark wedge of sponge upon it still warm and fragrant. I turned back and though I knocked more than once, he didn’t reply. The music grew louder, something angry, reminiscent of Dub’s punk . I looked again at the plate in my hand. I heard something shift inside the room and the door shuddered as if someone had sat down suddenly against it. I left the plate on the hall table, setting it down noisily so that he might know it was there, though it didn’t seem likely he’d hear it.

When I first arrived at the Bougainvillea, I slept on a mat next to America in the kitchen as the previous houseboy had done. But after a while Aunt Mary set me the task of clearing out the old pantry at the back of the house so that America might have some privacy. However, America, used to the open nipa huts of her village, refused to sleep in it, preferring the broader space of the kitchen, and so the room came to me.

My room could only be reached through the kitchen. It had a window, but it fell under the shade of trees and so remained dark and cool most of the day. It was small: if I sat on my bedding with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out, the span of them took up more than half of its width. Nonetheless it was mine. Apart from my bedding, I had a small bookcase and a chair and table where I read whatever I found. I did my schoolwork at the kitchen table or in the dining room after the household had eaten and the boys were in their rooms but, when I read for myself, I preferred the quiet of my room where I could create a world entirely in my head without the intrusion of America’s singing or the carriage clock’s rigid division of the evening.

Above the table, I’d taped to the wall a photograph of me as a boy of perhaps two or three with my mother. In it, my mother squinted under a bright sun while I reached forward from her arms, towards the camera. The picture was taken by my brother, on a camera he bought at a pawnshop, much to the disapproval of my father who chided him about his spendthrift nature till the day he left home. I still remember the day he took it, but only vaguely, like a texture rather than an image. I remember the bright light, the sensation of being held higher than the ground, of being smaller than everything.

I’d tried once to sketch a portrait of my mother as I remembered her, to display on my wall, but I was no artist and soon gave up. Instead, I put up pictures from magazines that Aunt Mary was throwing out. And so, flanking the photograph of me with my mother were the exotic spires of the Sagrada Familia and a man in a cigarette advertisement. The man had thick black hair (though not as long as Dub’s), a long, straight nose and European features, except for his eyes, which were narrow like my own. He sat casually on the edge of an office desk, one foot on the floor, the hand holding his cigarette resting on his thigh. In the doorway behind him stood a woman, her image blurred so that her features couldn’t really be made out, though it was clear that she was watching him. She had blond hair. I liked these two pictures and they had stayed up the longest, so long in fact that the rectangles of wall beneath them were brighter than that surrounding.

In the evening after dinner, Benny came to my room. I heard his footsteps along the corridor but I didn’t quite believe them until I saw him in the doorway. He hadn’t been to my room in years and he looked around now, inspecting it. ‘Smaller than I remember,’ he said softly. He reached up, tried unsuccessfully to touch the ceiling, laughed. He looked at the magazine pages I’d pasted up, at the photograph of me as a child in my mother’s arms; he gazed at that for a long time. He’d seen it before, but he looked at it now as if it were new to him. He pointed at one of his own sketches, a portrait of me, and smiled. He’d made me pose for it, sitting at the table with my hands folded in front of me, my face framed by towers of jars filled with America’s homemade pickles, pyramids of vegetables. He’d taken a long time to arrange each object, explaining his composition as he went. He’d leaned back to check everything when he was done and told me to look serious but I’d struggled not to laugh as he drew me, and he’d captured in his sketch the tightness of my mouth as I held it in. It was the same expression my mother had when she was trying to stay angry at my father while he clowned around to distract her.

Benny sat down against the wall facing my bed. He crossed his legs, laid his sketchbook across his lap and started, silently, to work. I knew better than to try and make conversation. I picked up the book I’d been reading, one of BabyLu’s, about a village girl in England whose fate lay not in her own hands but in the hands of two men. I struggled to imagine the damp, green valleys that filled the book, the encircling silences; they were like nothing I’d ever known. I tried to read again now, but had made no progress at all when, several minutes later, Benny pulled out a photograph from his sketchbook and, leaning forward, placed it on the bed next to me. I picked it up slowly and looked at it, at the girl, her eyes narrowed against the sun, her image flashing under the bleak electric light in my room. I looked at the photograph on the wall over my table, where my mother creased her eyes on a sunny day. ‘Who is she?’ I said at last and wished for a moment that I hadn’t, for the question seemed to break into the stillness of the room, crashing over the walls like surf.

‘She was my mom,’ he said. I looked again at the girl in the photograph, her small neat features, the long fingers on narrow hands. Her hands, her eyes, her mouth were Benny’s. I stared at him, not knowing what to say. I opened my mouth but he shook his head and I was relieved; I was sure that nothing I might have said then would have been right. He worked at the sketchbook for a while longer and then he gathered his things together and, placing the book flat on the floor, tore the page out and handed it to me. I looked down at it and he left. I closed my eyes to listen to him moving away over the stone flags of the passage and the kitchen beyond.

When I could no longer hear him I opened my eyes again and looked at his sketch. In the centre of it I lay on my bedding, a book by my side, open but discarded, and instead in my hand was a photograph, the girl under the yellow bell tree recognisable even from the few lines that gave her substance. Behind me, the walls of the room crumbled away to reveal a rich landscape, not the concrete and colour of Esperanza Street but a jungle thick with palms and creepers, prehistoric. Over the shattered walls vines crept in, reclaiming the room, the house, and in the centre of it all I lay without fear, a look in my eyes of certainty, of belonging.

I went to the kitchen to find something to fasten the picture to the wall. America was lying on her mat, her arm over her face and her eyes closed, but she wasn’t asleep. As I came in, she rolled away from me. I searched through the drawers, wary of making too much noise. ‘What are you looking for?’ she said crossly but I’d already found where she kept the tape in a tin box with scissors, strips of paper and a pen; America liked to label everything. ‘You put that back when you’re done,’ she said without opening her eyes.

Back in my room, I held Benny’s sketch up next to the photograph of my mother and taped it over the man in the cigarette ad.

When I returned to the kitchen America was sitting at the table. I sat down opposite her. ‘He’s told you,’ she said and she sounded relieved. ‘I’ll tell you the rest if it’ll stop you pestering me, but you’d better not breathe a word.’ She leaned in to me, trying perhaps to be menacing, but all I saw was how exhausted she looked. She’d have been asleep at this time on any other day.