Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

The jetty was always a relief after the sobriety of the boarding house and the chapel, and every Sunday I found myself straining my eyes towards it as we walked down the hill.

As always, Jonah pretended to be surprised to see us. ‘You’re getting big,’ he said to me. ‘How old are you now?’ Though he knew very well.

‘Fifteen.’

‘Can’t tell you apart.’ He made a show of looking from me to my father and back again, and I was pleased, even though I knew it wasn’t true; I took after my mother. My father rolled his eyes.

We settled ourselves on the sea wall. As usual for the hour, business at the jetty was slow. In the shallows, under a hard blue sky, two of the jetty boys splashed ashore with bunches of flustered chickens like sprays of flowers. Behind us, near the road, two more heaved pigs one by one into the trailer of a waiting motor rickshaw, the animals screaming as they were lifted by ears and tails and swung over the side like sacks. In the shade cut by Jonah’s office, three of the boys were shooting hoops at a basket nailed to a palm tree, watching out for any signal from Jonah in between shots. The rest sat along the sea wall, perched like gulls, retreating under the visors of caps, eyeing the line of boats that rocked in the swell.

Jonah patted his belly absent-mindedly. On a clear day, I could distinguish him from the rest of his boys from as far back as the crest of the hill by the bulge of his belly, out of proportion with the rest of his wiry frame. He referred to it as his pregnancy and said, with slightly exaggerated joviality, that it just went to show he didn’t need a woman. Jonah’s wife had left him a couple of months before.

With little else to do, the boys on the sea wall started up a noisy game of poker, tossing single cigarettes into the centre as stakes. We watched them for a while. Then Jonah said, ‘Well, she came back.’

‘Who?’ said my father, his eyes on the game.

‘Margie. Long enough to get the armoire . Some antique her grandmother left her.’

‘Is it so bad to just do what she wants?’ my father said. Then, softening, unwilling perhaps to sound critical, he added lightly, ‘She leave you with any furniture?’

‘You heard about the note?’ From the way my father smiled, I guessed he already had, but he sat quietly, attentively, as Jonah told it again. Jonah started off as if it were just another of his anecdotes. ‘A man gets home after a hard day at work to find his wife gone. She’s left him a note at least, but she’s made him a ham sandwich and impaled the note in the middle of it with a toothpick. Like the sail of a boat, you know. A joke maybe about me belonging at the jetty? Only this time, unlike all her other departures, the note was real short.’ And he said in a high voice, mimicking his ex-wife, ‘ It’s just not enough anymore. What does that mean, anyway? This time she didn’t even bother to cut the sandwich in half. Now, I like my sandwiches whole anyway. Whole and square, not cut into little triangles with the crust trimmed off like the First Lady’s expected round for tea.’ He crooked his finger daintily. ‘You think she did it so I could finally have something my own way? A last kindness for the condemned man?’

My father shrugged; Jonah didn’t expect answers. He carried on, he was just warming up. ‘So I get a beer and take the sandwich through to the TV. No point wasting food. My parents are watching Kuwarta O Kahon — they love that show, never miss it. Every week they talk about what they’d do with the money if they won. Or about Pepe Pimentel’s hair. So we sit there, no one saying anything; I guess they figured she’d be back, like before. Then Pop says, “He’s my age, but he’s got a better head of hair.” And my mom says, “He’s younger than you, and anyway it’s a wig, Dexter.” “ Pepe? ” my pop says. “A wig ? No way!” And they’re arguing about Pepe Pimentel’s hair when I notice some photos are missing from the cabinet. Can you believe it, she left behind our wedding photo but she took the one of Enrique, her dead Pomeranian. And now whenever I think of Margie, I can’t help but picture Pepe Pimentel. I’ve even imagined the two of them together, you know, together ,’ and he said the last word carefully, with a glance in my direction. I saw my father’s jaw tighten as if he were stifling a laugh. Jonah’s ex-wife, Margie, was easily the most glamorous person I’d seen in Esperanza — not the sort of woman I could imagine with Jonah. I’d seen her a few times at the jetty and she seemed wrong there, like she’d arrived by accident — taken a left when she should have gone right. Her presence had felt strange, like an intrusion, and even though I didn’t know her, I’d wanted her to leave. She’d seemed startled when my father brought her a chair, eyeing the seat for dirt before she sat down.

‘She says the jetty’s days are numbered. That we can’t stem the tide of progress ,’ Jonah’s voice rose to a peak, ‘That only an idiot clings to the past rather than embraces the future .’ He swept his arms out in a grand gesture. ‘I mean, do I look like an idiot?’ My father clicked his tongue, drew his legs up, dropped them down again. Margie’s father ran a freight company and her uncle owned a fleet of jeepneys. It wasn’t the first time, my father told me later, that Jonah had declined to work for either of them, preferring to make his own way. After Margie left, her family insisted they hadn’t seen her.

‘That’s what happens when you bite your own finger,’ my father said.

Jonah threw his hands up. ‘Ah, who needs an armoire?’

The jetty boys erupted loudly as another poker player folded. The nearest, Subong, often to be found in my father’s orbit, was a boy too simple and too open to bluff well at cards. He pulled back from the group now, groaning. My father glanced up at him, a half smile on his face. Subong walked a few paces along the wall, his arms folded above his head, berating himself. He stopped, looked up at the sky for several seconds, then he turned round and walked back to the group. The boys dealt him another hand. Subong sat down again, one leg dangling over the seaward edge of the wall, the other leg bent, cards propped against his knee. He eyed the growing pile of cigarettes hopefully. My father shook his head and then, catching Jonah’s eye, started to laugh, quietly at first and then more deeply, until his whole body was shaking. His mirth infected Jonah who wiped his eyes and slapped a hand again and again on the concrete coping of the wall.

I stared at them, at my father, at the unexpected spectacle of his pleasure. I would have liked to laugh too, to share the joke, but instead I watched and, without really understanding why, I felt rebuffed.

The last boats always departed earlier on a Sunday and they waited now, surging gently, loaded up and ready, for anyone who might fill the remaining seats. While the light lasted, the boatmen would hang on for as long as they had the patience, regardless of the official timetable on the noticeboard outside Jonah’s office. I knew my father wouldn’t leave until the last one had been pushed out into the waves, and so I sat, quietly, savouring the grainy lilac light that washed the jetty, the soft flare of boat lamps.

Along the sea wall the jetty boys stirred suddenly in the middle of a hand and I turned to see Subong, on his feet now, cards and cigarettes momentarily forgotten, pointing along the coast road. In the near distance a man pushed a cart along the edge of the traffic stream, a handkerchief tied across his face like a bandit to shield him from the road dust that swirled up around him. The occupants of the cart, a woman and some kids, waved in our direction and, seeing them, Jonah started whistling and waving back. Everyone craned to see. ‘Trouble on wheels,’ Jonah said, but loudly, as if for the new arrivals’ benefit, though they were still far out of earshot.