Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

‘Your father would’ve wanted you to finish your studies,’ said Jonah. ‘Plenty of time for gallivanting later.’

‘Gallivanting!’ my brother laughed again. ‘Joseph never had that in him. Always serious about life, from the very beginning.’

‘No sign of Subong?’ I asked Jonah.

‘His mother went to the police. They filed a report.’

My brother snorted. ‘This country’s going to hell. He’ll be washed ashore in a week.’

‘It’s a hard enough time, Miguel.’ Jonah clapped him on the shoulder gently enough but his words were abrupt and there was iron in his voice.

My brother ground his cigarette out without finishing it. I studied him cautiously. ‘You ever think about getting married?’ I said.

‘Sure, I’m gonna marry an actress,’ he said without looking at me.

‘Seriously, Miguel. Find someone to look after you.’

‘You know any rich women?’

‘Just any decent girl.’

‘I’m not cleaning up Pop’s mess if that’s what you’re hoping.’

I looked over at Lorna. She was crying now, quietly, her face in profile, lower lip jutting out sulkily. She really wasn’t pretty, I thought, yet the baby was cute. ‘I didn’t mean her in particular,’ I said.

‘What plan are you boys hatching?’ said my sister coming towards us. My nephews trailed after her, squabbling at her heels, but she ignored them.

‘Poor girl,’ said Jonah, looking at Lorna. ‘I guess your father taking her in gave her hope for a while.’

‘Who is she anyway?’ Luisa said. ‘He wasn’t her father or her husband.’

‘Is that four now, Luisa?’ Jonah said.

My sister looked down at her children. ‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘Keep you out of trouble,’ Jonah said.

‘Married young. Never had a chance to get in trouble,’ she glanced at Lorna.

‘You didn’t have a lot but you had more than her,’ Jonah said. Luisa’s eyes blazed at him.

Soon it was time to take my father to the cemetery, where arrangements had been made for him to lie beside my mother. Luisa and Miguel were quiet through the mass. Lorna cried openly and once or twice I saw Luisa cast a scornful look at her. The Bukaykays all came to see my father interred, as well as Aunt Mary and the boys and America. I didn’t look about to see who else came and who didn’t, though I was conscious of a crowd. I stared instead at the wall of tombs as my father’s coffin was pushed in and the opening sealed with concrete, the cemetery boys balanced barefoot on planks and bamboo scaffolding. The fate of the cemetery was still uncertain but there was nowhere else for him to go. I pushed the thought away for now and started thinking about the reality of going through his things, of understanding more fully, from the minutiae of his life, what kind of a man he’d been. I wasn’t looking forward to it, and when I overheard Luisa complaining to Missy that it would take her days to sort through Pop’s stuff, I kept quiet.

On the way back we returned home by a different route, snaking in a long line through the alleys of Greenhills, just as we’d done for my mother.

After the funeral Aunt Mary urged me to rest a few days but I was afraid to sit idle and be alone with my thoughts. So after a while she and America conspired to keep me busy instead, sending me out on easy errands so that I wouldn’t work away in silence in the subdued rooms of the Bougainvillea. America, quieter in my presence now, shifted her attentions briefly to Dub, specifically to his state of nutrition. And so I found myself once again on the forecourt of Earl’s garage holding another of Dub’s forgotten lunch packets, having promised America I’d watch him finish it.

It was the first time in a long while that we’d been alone together. I’d intended to leave quickly but he started talking as he took the parcel from me. He looked me in the eye as he said, ‘I’m sorry, Joe. For everything.’ He told me he’d spoken to her the night of the vigil as I knew he would. ‘She was pleased the vigil was moved to the church,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t have felt she could come to your pop’s apartment.’ I could see that talking about her lifted him.

‘I’m glad she came,’ I said, and I meant it.

He looked away, staring along the street into the distance. ‘She’s leaving,’ he said and he tried to sound indifferent. ‘She’s moving out of Prosperidad. She won’t tell me where she’s going, but she’s going with him .’ And his voice betrayed him as he said, ‘She’s keeping it. She still won’t say if it’s mine or his. Either way it’ll grow up calling him Pop.’ I imagined then how he must have begged her, in the shadow of the stone church, until eventually she would have grown anxious, looking about her to see who might be watching. He hadn’t seen her since, he said, and though he’d stared up at her balcony every day from the garage forecourt, the windows of her apartment had remained closed. Each time he’d gone to knock at her door there was no answer, though once or twice he thought he’d heard movement inside. He looked at me as if I might have an explanation. ‘She doesn’t love him,’ he said bitterly. ‘Just his money.’

I didn’t know what might console him. I said, without thinking, ‘She has to think of the child.’ His face coloured.

‘She sent something for you. Didn’t even ask me to fetch them, paid some kid instead. Told him to make it clear they were for you .’ I felt a flicker of pleasure. He didn’t mention whether she’d left him anything too.

I followed him into the garage. Under the workbenches, against the wall, was a line of cardboard boxes that had once contained coconut oil, sour-sop juice, soap. Each one had already been torn open. Dub knelt down and pulled one out. It was full of books. When I saw them I knew for certain that she wasn’t planning to return and I was sorry; I’d have liked to say goodbye, to tell her myself that it had meant something that she’d come to my father’s vigil even when everyone knew she was Eddie Casama’s mistress.

But there was more to the story, an event that gave shape to her leaving, and Dub told me only a part of it. The rest I constructed later from fragments that by themselves might have been nothing at all: the way he started to cradle one hand with the other, the way he touched his guitar but wouldn’t play it, the way he touched his hair, his jeans in the laundry basket wet at the seat from having been rinsed, the t-shirt he never wore again — Eat My Dust . No one else mentioned it either, though their eyes carried its reflections for some time. Of course they may not have known much more than I did. When I recount my version now, no doubt I’ll have embellished some parts and diminished others, but I hope that in the end I will have told, as far as is possible, the truth, and that I will have given both Dub and BabyLu their fair due.

I didn’t pay much mind to Dub’s absence during the rally, distracted as I was by so many other things: Dil at my father’s side, Suelita’s sudden vivacity in Benny’s company, the bruises that proclaimed my weakness. I’d assumed that Dub would be at the garage and didn’t think otherwise, even when I glimpsed Earl standing alone in the crowd. It was only later when his mother asked me to look for him that it occurred to me he might have gone to see BabyLu, for she would have been alone at home while Eddie was at the rally. I imagined that Eddie, happy enough to be seen with his mistress from time to time in the back of his car, at a local noodle joint, or even on the balcony of one of his apartments, would never have brought her to a protest rally, particularly one where he might have preferred to present a blameless exterior. Dub would have expected to have BabyLu to himself for the rest of the evening too, for Eddie’s time even after the rally was over would surely have been taken up by Judge Robello and others of his kind and then, later, with Connie, his wife, to prolong the appearance of propriety.