Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

‘It’s a good kitchen,’ she continued, ‘I get it all to myself, but I don’t get to use it that much — only the refrigerator. Meals are sent over ready-made most times. Eddie arranges it. I know when he’s coming because he sends over double, or more if he’s not alone.’ I wondered if Eddie was the name of her husband. I thought if I had a wife that looked like that, I’d be home every night. She said his name as if he were someone familiar to both of us, a mutual friend. ‘It’s mostly from the same restaurant,’ she continued. ‘Rosaline’s. Not real expensive as you might expect with Eddie. He took me there for our first proper date. When I saw it, I thought he was testing me. He said he used to wash dishes there and sweep up when he was a kid. I guess he wanted me to see that part of him.’ I knew the place she was talking about, though I’d never eaten there. It was near the jetty, one of a line of noodle joints and eateries. It had been there for as long as I could recall. I couldn’t imagine a woman like her in it. ‘It’s a rat-hole really, but Eddie says he’ll miss it when it has to close for the first phase. He imagined when he was a kid that it would always be there. But it’s like he always says: change is inevitable. He says he’ll have to make sacrifices like everyone else.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about but I didn’t care to ask; looking at her, it was hard to think straight. She carried on, her voice low, conspiratorial, eager to fill any gaps. ‘I’m a village girl,’ she said, but I didn’t believe her; she looked nothing like the village girls that came through Esperanza on market day. ‘When I first came, I slept on the floor of my friend’s room. There were four of us just on the floor. We had to go for a walk when her boyfriend came.’

When it became clear that Dub wasn’t coming out any time soon, she said, ‘He thinks he’s Elvis, right?’

‘He plays the guitar,’ I said, ‘and sings.’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You want to?’

I’d never really thought about it. I tried to picture myself holding a guitar and singing, and it made me laugh out loud. She seemed to like that. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

‘Joseph.’

‘Maria Luisa. But I get called BabyLu.’

I looked at her smooth brown face, her arched brows that made her eyes look as if they perennially harboured a question. ‘He has long hair,’ I said.

‘Elvis?’

‘Dub.’

‘What kind of a name is Dub?’

I shrugged. ‘He’s a musician.’

She started laughing. She was still smiling as she crossed the street back to her apartment. I watched her go. Even after she’d disappeared into the building, her scent hung over the forecourt.

Dub came back out. ‘Did she ask about me?’ he said.

I held his lunch out and he took it automatically. ‘She said you looked like Elvis.’

He stood looking at her apartment block for a couple of minutes until Earl came out and said, ‘I gotta do all the work by myself today?’

After Dub had gone back inside, I turned to leave and, looking up, I saw BabyLu on her balcony. She waved at me and I waved back. Lucky Eddie , I thought.

‘What are you, a Champion or a Pall Mall man?’ Suelita, the curandero’s daughter, leaned across the counter of her mother’s sari-sari store, her head framed by packets of Crispy Pops and chicharon. Her elbow on the counter, she held up two cigarettes, as if she was displaying a deck of cards, inviting me to choose one. She was weighing me up; was I a big spender or a cheapskate? Already, she’d hijacked our interaction far away from the one I’d rehearsed as I walked down Esperanza to the curandero’s alley, confusing me almost immediately by smiling as I approached. It was an expression she wore infrequently, even less so when serving in the store. Unfortunately her mother, Missy, was also the local midwife, and so Suelita was left to man the store often and at short notice.

She was still smiling as she held up the cigarettes. Her smile was difficult to interpret, as enigmatic as most of her expressions seemed to me, but she wasn’t about to give me time to analyse it; she expected an answer. Champion or Pall Mall? I looked at the cigarettes in her hand, then at the hand itself: slender, tapering fingers but broad at the palm. A hand that might lift sacks, keep children in line, play the piano. I looked at her other hand flat on the counter and she slid it away from me as if conscious of the scrutiny. The movement made me look up at her face, which still contained the question. I didn’t smoke, had never learned to, and besides, Aunt Mary hated it. For a moment I felt relieved that I didn’t have to name my brand when I couldn’t know what Suelita, with her singular way of appraising the world, might make of it.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I felt slightly ashamed as I confessed. Her smile returned, deepened as she shot a closed look at the boys who lounged on the benches to the right of the hatch. Rico and his boys. I knew some of them from school. They were all smoking. ‘Uncle Bee in?’ I said.

‘Sure,’ Suelita said in English. ‘He’s treating a man for importance.’

She watched me closely as she spoke, a spark in her eyes that waned as quickly as it had flared. Then she said, ‘He’ll be out in a minute,’ and I thought she looked disappointed. For the briefest moment I considered the unlikely possibility that her disappointment might have been because I’d come to see her father, not her. I stayed where I was, wondering how I might revive the conversation, but she picked up a pair of scissors and started snipping at a pile of old newspapers, turning her shoulders so gradually against me that it took me several more seconds to realise I’d been dismissed.

Suelita was seventeen and her mother had plans for her to go to nursing school. She could have been anything she wanted; I was sure of it. Watching her now, as she cut out individual words from the newspaper and spread them out over the counter, a bored expression on her features the whole while, it occurred to me that perhaps the reason why she always looked so discontent was because the best she could hope for was nursing college, when maybe what she wanted was something else entirely.

I looked around to see where I might wait. Rico and his boys stretched out a little, closing the gaps between them. I was glad; the store had a liquor license and they looked like they’d been here awhile. I moved round the corner away from the hatch and sat down on the front stoop.

The curandero’s shack squatted in the alley that ran from Primo’s store all the way to the basilica and the Chinese bars that skirted it. It was a single-storey wooden structure that Uncle Bee’s grandfather had built with the help of his neighbours when Esperanza Street was still young; when the older, richer houses perched wide apart on the hillside with a clear view of their lands, the docks and the ocean beyond.

The shack, like countless identical buildings in the neighbourhood, or like the nipa huts that were scattered through the backcountry, had an ageless quality to it. Whenever I saw it, it seemed to me a thing that lay close to the heart of our street, not its geographical heart but its essence. The bones of buildings just like it lay under ever-newer structures like the Coffee Shak with its rain-marked concrete and plate glass, or the forecourt of Earl’s garage, or my father’s apartment block.

Uncle Bee had added the sari-sari store and a consulting room to the shack himself, though he hadn’t had to rebuild anything to do it. Both were just part of the main room that he’d fenced off with nipa panels and were separated from each other by a partitioning curtain. The consulting room contained a fold-down bed and floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with herbs, bundles of dried leaves, dried fruit, oils and balms, cigarette papers, candles. From the rafters, long strips of Sunsilk shampoo, hair conditioner and laundry-detergent pouches hung down like creepers.