Saud Alsanousi - The Bamboo Stalk

No one but me obeyed Mendoza, especially after my mother moved to her husband’s house and had Adrian. She insisted on staying with Adrian in a better environment, away from her father’s house, even if her new place was just a little house at the end of the sandy lane that ran past my grandfather’s land.

Ironically, while Mother wanted Adrian to grow up in a better environment, Adrian himself, the lucky boy, knew nothing of what was happening around him.

My mother won her freedom through marriage. Years earlier Mama Aida had won her freedom by rebelling. In Merla’s case, her freedom and salvation lay, leaving aside her personality, in her association with Mama Aida. This made all of them invisible to Mendoza, so all he could see was me, because I had not yet won my freedom. I hated my name when it came from his dark lips, through the gaps in his brown teeth, from a mouth that smelled of tobacco. I had visions of him dropping down dead as soon as he shouted out his usual summons — ‘Joséeeeee!’ — in a voice that grated like nails on a blackboard. I would run to him, I would bow down, I would take his hand and press the back of his hand to my forehead in a show of respect, but inside me I heaped curses on him.

He was short, dark-skinned, with deep lines in his forehead and cheeks. His eyes were sunken, almost buried under his bushy eyebrows. He coughed constantly as if he were about to cough up his lungs. Ever since I was young I’d thought that Mendoza was at death’s door, but the dying went on many years. I could easily imagine what he would look like dead, because it wouldn’t have been very different from the way he looked before he died: he was just a bony skeleton covered in wrinkled skin.

In his little house he lay on his wooden bed all day with his face buried in his smelly pillow. His upper part was naked. Although I was young at the time, I had enough experience to work as a professional masseur, since I played that role every day. I would sit on Mendoza’s buttocks, which were as hard as his wooden bed, and let a thin trickle of cheap warm oil stream on to his back from the plastic bottle in my hand. I would press my hands against the small of his back and work my way up the bony vertebrae as far as his neck. ‘Aahh,’ he would groan. ‘Keep pressing.’ I was terrified his skin might come undone, exposing his backbone underneath. Like a bird waiting for day to break so it could fly off into the trees, I waited for the signal of liberation that would release me from this arduous task. As soon as he was breathing regularly I would gradually reduce the pressure on his back, switching from my palms to my fingertips, until he began his snoring concerto and I could slip away to Merla.

18

Merla is four years older than me. The only thing that kept me away from her was being summoned by Mendoza. How I envied her. My grandfather was so frightened of Aida that he didn’t dare give Merla any chores to do. Her personality also played a role in it, which added to the burden on me because I had to obey his constant requests.

Merla has a strong personality. She’s been clever and a natural leader ever since she was a child. Boys were frightened of her. She didn’t often use her tongue, as other girls did, but her hands went into action automatically if she was angry.

She was slim and relatively tall, with a pale, slightly pink complexion. Her hair was brown and wavy. Her eyes were blue, which made her a classic mestiza, though she hated the label. Her beauty reminded her of the unknown European father she hated. Because of him she absolutely detested the way she looked and everything European.

We grew close after Mama Aida began to look after me in the four months that my mother spent at her husband’s house every year, before she settled permanently in her new house.

I missed Merla terribly when I was in Kuwait, far from the Philippines.

I longed for her as much as I longed for the colour green, which was hard to find in Kuwait. I missed her like I missed the smell of grass after a downpour, when the wet soil gives off refreshing vapours that bathe the human spirit.

I wish we could bring back the days that are gone with those whose paths have now diverged from ours, and live them again with other people, but no one in this world can replace anyone else. And how much more so if that someone is Merla? I loved to be with her.

She was always a mystery, despite all the time I spent with her, because she hid an aspect of herself that I was not aware of. One day she came home with the letters MM tattooed on her arm and I started pestering her with questions about it.

‘“M” for Merla,’ she explained. ‘And because I love myself so much, a single “M” wouldn’t be enough.’

She was strikingly beautiful, powerfully feminine, with a sculpted body, wild hair and full lips, but I didn’t notice any of that until I saw her in a new light, later. I had just turned fourteen when I first dreamed about her. In my wet dream she was adventurous, and I was too. When I woke up I couldn’t believe that the dream hadn’t been real. It happened again and again as I shed the mantle of boyhood and grew into a man. The sensations I had in my dream — the touch, the taste, the smell and the effect the dream had — came back to me whenever Merla appeared. She was the same girl who had grown up in the same house as me. Nothing in her had changed. It was the way I saw her that was different. It’s not the way a woman looks and behaves that arouses a man’s instinct, so much as the image he has of her in his head. And inside my head, when I looked at Merla, I only saw her the way she looked in my dreams.

But there were limits to where our relationship could go because, apart from the age difference, which seemed big to me, Merla was my cousin.

Once, when I was six and Merla was ten, I said to my mother, ‘Mama, I want to marry Merla.’

My mother burst out laughing. ‘It looks like you’re going to turn Muslim quicker than I imagined,’ she said.

Mama Aida also looked surprised. ‘Are Muslims allowed to marry their cousins?’ she asked.

Mother nodded, and I said, ‘In that case I’m a Muslim!’

Mama Aida put her hand to her breast and said, ‘Perish the thought. My daughter and I are Catholics.’ She roared with laughter and pointed at me threateningly. ‘Go back to your father’s country, and marry your grandmother if you want,’ she said.

That day I was upset that there was something to prevent me marrying Merla. I was in love with her and very jealous, but all those were childish dreams that soon faded. It came back years later in a different form, in dreams that were different from the dreams of childhood.

Merla, her boldness, her rebelliousness, her crazy talk, hanging out on the streets of Manila — the mestiza girl and the Arab boy, drinking iced tea in front of the juice stands on the pavement, visiting Fort Santiago, the old Spanish citadel, our trips up the mountains and down the valleys and into the Biak-no-Bato caves, sitting by the lake with a view of the famous Taal volcano and watching the boats with fishermen seared by the sun.

On those trips, we had fun for free, as Merla put it. We only spent a minimal amount on transport and sometimes, but rarely, some of the places charged a fee to enter a world that seemed infinite. Everything except the train or the bus or the Jeepny and the entrance charge, if there was one, was free. No one tries to charge for the hours you spend looking at the volcano. No one tells you your time is up when you’re sitting under a giant tree that has grown out of the heart of a massive boulder. No one tells you not to float on the surface of the lake, looking up at the clouds and counting them. There’s nothing to stop you reaching out and picking a delicious fruit, and sharing it with the one you love.