Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

The morning of the rally, then, Dub helped carry baskets of food down to the jetty office but his mind wasn’t on the rally, it was on her; on the memory of her leaning in a corner of her balcony the evening before, the light from inside her apartment glowing on her hair and back, leaving her face in shadow. He’d looked up at her from the garage forecourt and, though she’d barely moved in response, it was enough to tell him that she’d seen him and that perhaps she was ready to talk. Before he could respond he saw a movement behind her and Eddie came out onto the balcony, slipped an arm around her waist, his fingers spread over her belly. Eddie looked down over Prosperidad, at Dub who automatically bent to his bike as if inspecting it. Dub hadn’t meant to look away at that moment, to relinquish her to Eddie so easily, and he was never sure later why he did. He looked up again immediately, a challenge in his stance, but they were already turning away, already moving back inside the apartment, the doors swinging partly shut behind them. Dub kicked his bike lightly, gazed up at the empty balcony, then rode slowly home.

By the next morning he’d slept little and thought a lot. His night had been consumed with analysing her slight movement on the balcony, the incline of her head, her glance in his direction though her eyes, like her face, were indistinct in the half-light. He’d decided that if she was on the balcony when he got to work he would go to her the first chance he got. And of course she was there, watering her bougainvillea.

When Earl left for the market hall, Dub bolted the garage door and walked across the street. She was watching him from just inside the balcony doors and counted out the seconds, opening her apartment door to him as he raised his hand to knock.

The sun was low in the sky and Dub and BabyLu were asleep when Eddie’s men came. Cesar was not with them of course, for he was with Eddie, and would never have embroiled himself too deeply in his employer’s personal matters. Nor was Eddie’s chauffeur there, the man who had warned Dub off in the street without a word passing between them. Rico’s barkada may have sufficed for me but Eddie would surely never have sent them to BabyLu’s apartment to deal with Aunt Mary’s boy: they were too coarse and of course they were local. The men who came to the apartment were probably not even from Esperanza.

The men, three of them — a fourth waited in the car — knocked at the door, politely, then more firmly, for it took BabyLu some time to answer. When she did, they didn’t stop to speak to her, though they nodded respectfully enough and held their hands behind them or out to their sides so that they wouldn’t touch her as they pushed past. They walked straight to the bedroom where Dub was already dressed, and even as they pulled him out of the flat, as BabyLu flung her books at them one after another, they still did not say a word.

I imagined at first that he was taken to a place similar to where I was taken by Rico: a patch of waste ground at the edge of Greenhills strewn with piles of trash that nobody would ever clear away, or perhaps a dead-end alley behind Colon Market, the stench of which would bring back the memory of this day in all its clarity; a place where a boy like him would be lost, out of context. But because I didn’t like to imagine him there surrounded by Eddie’s men — thugs — even if they did wear suits — I pictured him instead being driven around Esperanza, around Puerto, in silence for some time. Then at last the man next to the driver, clean shaven, a few years older than Dub, with the appearance of a clerk or the manager of a small but respectable store, said, ‘She’s pretty, huh?’ as he twisted round in the seat to look at him. Maybe it was the first time this man had ever seen her.

The other men nodded in agreement. ‘Anyway, there’ll be other pretty girls for you,’ one said to Dub.

‘She looked real mad, eh?’ the clerk laughed, rubbing the back of his head.

‘Heavy, some of those books.’

‘She reads a lot, huh? That’s what you do together? Read? Talk about books?’ The men laughed.

‘You should really forget about her.’ The tone of voice was casual, as if giving advice to a friend.

‘Girls that pretty are always trouble.’

‘Sure. Find a girl who’s not so much to look at and they won’t mess you around.’

‘You think it’s just you? That you’re even the first?’ the clerk said suddenly.

‘That true?’ the driver turned to him.

The clerk looked at Dub again. ‘Would you leave her alone if you thought it was true?’

‘I love her,’ Dub said quietly, almost to himself, looking out of the window at the streets moving past, the painted stalls strung with fruit, clothing, lottery tickets. I wondered, when I imagined it, whether he would really have said such a thing. I suspected not, though I hoped he had, for the possibility of him saying it seemed to me the only thread of purity in the entire matter.

‘Well then,’ said the clerk, ‘that’s a bit of a problem.’ They drove out of town, away from the coast. The suburbs yielded to rice paddies, coconut palms, guava groves. The men stopped the car and pulled Dub out onto the road. In the distance, the twilight was pricked by lights and smoke threaded up between the trees. The air smelled clean. The men pinned him down, his face turned to the side, one cheek against the dirt. They pulled at his right hand, spread his fingers out, palm to the road. One took out a pocket-knife but kept it folded. The clerk took out a bolo, tested the blade with his thumb, whistled. ‘My cousin Jaime plays guitar too,’ he said.

‘You know anyone who doesn’t play the guitar?’ Pocket Knife said.

‘My grandmother.’ The men laughed, enjoying themselves.

‘It’s nothing personal,’ the clerk said. ‘It’s just that she belongs to Eddie Casama. He’s not known for sharing.’ He raised the bolo. Maybe at that moment Dub felt a surge of disbelief, before the fear, like I had. But for Dub the blow never came. The bolo hit the ground in front of his hand, in front of his face, and stayed upright, wedged in the dirt at the slightest angle, visible the whole while as the men pulled his head back and cut his hair away jaggedly with the pocket knife. When they’d finished they pulled him back to the car.

‘Eddie knows your mother, eh?’

‘You have a little brother?’

‘You like bikes? You have to be real careful on some of these tracks.’

‘Maybe we’ll see you around.’

He was driven back. They dropped him on the coast road, within sight of the jetty, where the last boats were already leaving and the scent of roasting nuts and meat and wood smoke filled the air. He walked quickly, not looking around him to see who might notice Dub Morelos without his usual confidence, the stains of old tears and road dust on his face, his hair short, uneven, filthy.

At the corner of Prosperidad and Esperanza he slowed. In the street in front of the entrance to her building: the same car, the same men. They saw him, waved. He looked up at her balcony, then back down. He counted the men, four , though he already knew of course how many there were. He hesitated, not wanting to walk away when they remained so close to her, aware all the time that his presence would keep them right where they stood. Her balcony door opened and he saw her come out. The men looked up too and were caught by a cascade from her watering can as she missed her bougainvillea, scattering along the sidewalk as she hurled the empty can down at them. She leaned out over the balcony, picked up a small potted plant in each hand, raised them, ready. The clerk looked across at Dub and in that same moment Dub knew that if BabyLu saw him she would come out to him and then he alone could not guarantee her safety or that of the child inside her. He turned away and ran on up the hill, the sound of laughter, real or illusory, trailing in the air behind him all the way home. I imagined then that she turned, expecting to see him without knowing why, and saw only the emptiness where he had been.