Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

He wouldn’t tell me why he’d come, but I knew from his face and from Aunt Mary’s that it was something important. He said nothing as we walked down the hill. We’d turned off Esperanza, passed the Espiritista chapel and were almost at the street where we lived, when he said, ‘Your mother was unwell.’ But he couldn’t bring himself to say anything more, and it wasn’t until we reached our door and Aunt Bina came out to meet us that I learned my mother was dead.

He told me that, in the end, it had been quick, merciful. I couldn’t understand what he meant by that. What was merciful about dying, about having so much taken from you?

Her body was lying on the bed. She looked asleep, pale, barely like the person she’d been and, for a while, I hoped it wasn’t her, hoped that somebody in their grief had made a mistake and that my mother would return to demand an explanation for the presence of so many strangers in our apartment.

Aunt Bina helped my father to wash and dress my mother’s body while Elisa took me outside to play cards in the hallway. We played Pusoy even though there were only two of us, and Elisa talked and talked, about nothing perhaps, for later I couldn’t recall a single thing she’d said. The only time she was silent was when she was dealing the cards, and then I heard soft sounds from the apartment, which might have been a man crying.

My mother lay in the apartment in a simple coffin for a day and a night while people came to see her. It was November and the rains had stopped and the days and nights were slightly cooler. It was still warm though, and Aunt Bina opened all the doors and windows and pressed my mother’s face and chest gently with ice, bought from the store downstairs, that she’d wrapped in a towel. I heard someone say, ‘At least she won’t puff up like a balloon like the Magpulong boy,’ and I imagined a boy blown up into a taut sphere, skin stretched to bursting and I giggled, but only for a moment before my father shushed me angrily.

The apartment slowly filled with people. I recognised only a few of them, but they all knew who I was and looked at me with pity. The women sat by my mother’s body and the air rang as they chanted. My father smeared oil on my forehead with his thumb and then on his own and on Elisa’s and so on round the room. He swayed a little; he’d been drinking. Aunt Bina lit incense and candles.

Jonah and the jetty boys came. The boys stayed in the kitchen, playing cards and sipping from the same bottle as they passed it round, curling their fingers round the rim to keep their lips from touching it. Jonah came through into the main room and, though I saw him glance towards the kitchen several times, he stayed by the coffin, by my father, for the entire afternoon.

Elisa, helping out, disappeared and reappeared constantly. Deep into the afternoon she arrived again by my side, her eyes broad, astonished. She touched my fingers lightly and leaned into me, whispering in my ear. She’d overheard her mother say that Jonah had paid for the funeral. I felt ashamed as she told me but annoyed too, with her and with Aunt Bina. I looked at my father but I didn’t know how to ask him. I went with Elisa to find her mother. Aunt Bina was outside in the hallway. She spoke authoritatively, like a teacher, as if a vigil was for her an everyday event, although I couldn’t remember another in our building. ‘To start with, he refused to accept any repayment from your pop,’ she said. ‘But you know your father. Dante wouldn’t take the money except in loan, so Jonah’s agreed to take instalments. He won’t charge any interest on it though. Almost came to blows over it,’ she added with satisfaction, though she broke her eyes away from mine as she said it. Interest, instalments . I wished Elisa hadn’t told me at all.

Elisa held my hand through most of the evening and I let her. She squeezed my fingers every now and then. Her hand felt dry and rough. She seemed older, smarter, and I wondered more than once how it was that she too seemed to know what to do when it was my mother who’d died, when I felt like a visitor in my own family’s apartment.

My brother and sister returned for the vigil, arriving together late in the evening. Luisa brought with her two small children I’d never seen, laying them down to sleep, amid all the noise and the passage of people, on a mat under the dining chairs that had been pushed back against the wall for want of room. Her husband didn’t come with her. My father asked after him but seemed barely to hear her answer. Luisa had married young but reasonably well, at least that was what everyone said at the time. Her husband was considerably older and had a steady job with prospects . She’d done well enough, my mother had once said, for a girl who never finished high school. Behind her, my brother Miguel took his cap off as he came through the door and stood next to my father, his face serious, his back straight like a soldier’s. He watched me for a minute, as if wondering who I was. Soon after they arrived I was sent to get some sleep in Bina and Elisa’s apartment. The next morning as we stood by the grave Miguel rested his hand on my shoulder all the way through the eulogy.

After the funeral my father told me to wash and, as I stood at the tap in the yard, he came over to me and scrubbed my hair roughly with soap, holding my head down as he sluiced pail after pail of water over me to rinse the suds away. When he stopped and I looked up at him in astonishment, I saw his eyes were wet. He turned away without a word. Elisa came out with a towel and wrapped it round me, rubbing the ends of my hair with it, gently.

Luisa stayed for a couple of days, making sure our father ate and keeping the place swept and clean. Miguel left straight after the funeral. Before he went, he pushed some coins into my hand and said, ‘If Pop asks, it’s for Our Lady, but if you want to get some candy, that’s ok too.’

It wasn’t much but I slipped the coins into my father’s bedside drawer, leaving them on top of his Bible, before I set off back to Aunt Mary’s; all but one, which I clung to, the metal growing damp in my palm in the heat. In the street outside our building I waited for America, who’d come to collect me and pay her respects, though she’d barely known my mother at all. My father stood with his back to me, in the stairwell, talking to Pastor Levi while America talked to Aunt Bina and waited to catch my father’s eye to tell him she was taking me back to the boarding house.

On the ground floor of our building, to one side of the street entrance, there was a small general store. It was owned by our landlord, who owned most of the building and one or two others in the centre of town. The store was open and I thought of what my brother had said. I bought a handful of Juicy Fruit candies and some chocolate and three hard sugar cookies, one each for my father and America and one for me.

When we were ready to leave, after Pastor Levi had gone, I pulled the cookies and some of the candies out of my pocket and offered them to my father. I thought he might take one, or maybe shake his head and leave them for me but, his face alive with rage, he swiped at my hand and scattered my offerings across the sidewalk. I was stunned. America said nothing to me but put a hand on my father’s arm and said, ‘Think what you want the boy to remember about today.’ My father pulled his arm away and glared at her, but he watched us as we walked away through the alley towards Esperanza. When we got home, America made coconut cakes and champorado , rice cooked with chocolate, and let me eat only sweet things for the rest of the day.

Aunt Mary gave me every Sunday off, but after my mother died, I lost the greater part of these to God, fidgeting silently beside my father in the chapel while he prayed. Sometimes I prayed too, mostly that my father might decide to skip church the following week, but my appeals were never answered. Afterwards we’d return to his apartment for lunch, where he’d try to make conversation to stretch out the afternoon, turning a cup round and round in his hands while I watched him from across the table, the dirty plates stacked between us. Eventually we’d end up back at the jetty, though Jonah always saw to it that my father had Sundays off too. As soon as we got there, my father seemed to relax. It never struck me as strange; somehow the jetty was the proper backdrop for him. Even now, when I think of him, the first image that arises is always of a man balanced on the cross-pole of a newly moored outrigger, his hard brown feet curved round the bamboo, one hand on his hip, the other on the boat’s canopy.