Niyati Keni - Esperanza Street

From the back of the shack came a chorus of voices and electronic noise. Suelita’s younger brother Fidel and his boys were in. I watched Uncle Bee through the small front window, heard him talking, going over something once, twice, pausing for a response. I couldn’t make out the words.

Beng Beng Bukaykay had been a curandero, a healer, since his teens. He wasn’t really my uncle. Before I went to live at the Bougainvillea, I’d come to his house sometimes with my mother, and so now, whenever I passed that way, the place took on the colour of memory.

Uncle Bee told me when I was a kid how he came to be a curandero. He said that one by one he’d discovered the secret nesting sites of all the birds including, finally, the daklap owl that lays its eggs on the beach. And it was on account of the owl that he’d been given his powers. He told me how he’d stumbled upon her nest as the sun was setting and she’d begged him not to reveal its whereabouts as her children had yet to hatch safely. He promised never to breathe a word and, in return, the spirits gave him his powers on the understanding that if he ever went back on his word he would lose them. That, at any rate, was his story for the children. I liked his version and demanded to hear it every time I saw him, even after my mother told me that Uncle Bee’s grandfather and great-grandfather had both been curanderos and that he’d learned the trade from them. She also said that Uncle Bee’s father alone had broken with tradition and tried to make it big as a musician in Manila, the Big Apple. He’d come back a shadow, she said, fond of his drink, and married Bee’s mother but died not long after Kokoy, Bee’s younger brother, was born. That part she didn’t tell me, but she discussed it with her friends, forgetting, as usual, that I was there to hear it too.

Uncle Bee did a pretty good trade; he was the only curandero in the barrio. From the bottom end of Esperanza almost everyone came to him, apart from Pastor Levi and Father Mulrooney, who both preferred the attentions of the real doctor in the health clinic on Salinas Boulevard. Pastor Levi could afford a real doctor because his brother, Cesar, was a solicitor who worked for Eddie Casama. Father Mulrooney was a foreigner and didn’t trust Uncle Bee’s remedies. At the top end of the street, most families, including Aunt Mary’s, had their own physicians in the centre of town — guys that had trained in Europe or the States and charged by the hour. For everyone else, Uncle Bee could always be relied upon to offer a cure.

Uncle Bee accepted payment in many forms and it wasn’t unusual to see rice, or eggs, or a pile of sweet potatoes left on his stoop. For a long time, I’d wished to be ill enough to be treated by him, an illness so life-threatening I imagined the white-coated doctor on Rizal Avenue at a loss to diagnose it, my only hope being the curandero with his jars of tree barks and dark, oily pastes and Latin prayers. But Aunt Mary would never have heard of it, and so it wasn’t until America came out in a rash and refused to see anyone else that I had a chance to see inside Uncle Bee’s consulting room again.

I was lost in these thoughts when the door opened. I stood up and moved out of the way as a woman came out. I’d expected a man, an important looking one. I glanced in the direction of the hatch where Suelita was chiding Rico as he rapped on the counter with a coin for another cigarette.

Uncle Bee followed his patient down the steps, clapped a hand on my shoulder. ‘Joseph!’ he said. ‘I see you walking past but you never stop by.’ Uncle Bee was of a breed of men whose appearance never seemed to change; he would remain the same weight and young in his face forever. He was a good advertisement for his herbs.

‘Aunt Mary sent payment for America.’

‘Straight to business? No time for a drink even?’ He twitched his fingers, palm up, motioning me indoors after him.

When he built the house, Uncle Bee’s grandfather would have slipped some money into the hole for each corner post, as was customary, to ensure prosperity. He must have stuck some bills down there rather than small change because his grandson was doing well for himself. Outside, the house was shabby from season after season of monsoon rain and inside it was cramped, but squeezed in among the furniture were a TV and hi-fi equipment and a new Frigidaire.

Fidel was playing a video game with his friends. They were perched everywhere like birds in a tree. Fidel lay across the armchair, languidly, as if he were holding court and slightly bored with it. Fidel was nice enough, an average kid, not especially bright or athletic, but the video game had made him popular. I was in the same class and had heard about the game console that Uncle Bee had bought him for his birthday, bought second-hand from one of his patients, but nevertheless one of the first in the barrio. Even Benny didn’t have one, though not for lack of asking. I could still hear Aunt Mary’s voice explaining why he wasn’t going to get one: ‘Just how is a thing like that going to help your development ?’

‘Atari Twenty-six hundred,’ Fidel said to me, briefly lifting his eyes from the screen. I nodded as if this meant something significant; it was certainly a phrase that had some effect on our classmates. He shifted his legs along the armrest. I sat down lightly on it and he handed me the controls, like a king bestowing honours, enjoying his own generosity. ‘Pac-Man,’ he said. I was immediately inept. He took the controls from me again to demonstrate, smiling as he did so at my momentary reluctance to let go.

Behind the partition, I heard Uncle Bee moving crates around. He emerged from the store with a Pepsi in each hand, jerked an invitation with his head for me to follow him out onto the stoop. ‘Big mistake buying that thing,’ he said. ‘House is never quiet anymore.’

‘See you, man,’ Fidel said as I left, but he didn’t look up.

In the alley, the recent rains had turned the ground to slurry. I watched passers-by pick their way around the edges of puddles. ‘You’re almost a man,’ said Uncle Bee, settling himself back against the doorpost. ‘You ever think about where you’re heading? What you want?’ I’d heard Aunt Mary ask the same of Dub and Benny, but unlike them I was unprepared with an answer. All I could think of at that moment was going back inside and having another turn at Fidel’s video game, joking around with the boys, feeling for a while like I had my own crowd, maybe having the highest score when Suelita’s shift was up and she passed through the room on her way to help her mother in the yard. I didn’t say anything. Uncle Bee watched me but he didn’t press for an answer.

From inside the shack a clamour erupted. Fidel and the boys were hollering in victory. From somewhere out back Missy Bukaykay yelled, ‘Oy, oy!’ The boys quieted. A few seconds later a jaunty series of beeps was followed by a more subdued murmur.

Uncle Bee tipped his head in the direction of the back yard. ‘Wearer of the Pants,’ he said grandly, as if it were a ceremonial title.

He leaned in to me and said softly, ‘You know Eddie Casama?’ His eyes flitted to the corner of the shack round which Rico and his boys lounged.

‘Sure. Who hasn’t heard of him?’

‘Mary Morelos have any dealings with him?’

‘I guess she knows everyone round here, but he’s never been to the house.’

‘She or America hear of anything big , you’d tell me, right?’ I looked at him and he held my gaze until I looked away again. ‘Cesar Santiago’s been working long into the night for months now. Walking around with a haunted look in his eye,’ he said, his voice low, close to my ear. ‘Wouldn’t even tell his brother why.’ Cesar Santiago: Pastor Levi’s brother and Eddie Casama’s lawyer. I sat a little looser on the stoop, arms resting on my knees, drink in hand, mimicking the way Uncle Bee sat, like a man rather than a kid, talking about bigger matters than whether it was ok to make chicken three nights running. ‘Levi finally got it out of him yesterday. Application was submitted to redevelop this place.’ I looked up at the eaves of the shack. ‘Not just my place,’ he said and thrust his chin out in a wider arc. I looked up and down the alley. Uncle Bee settled back and watched me. He looked like he had more to say but he waited. I guessed some kind of response was required of me first.