Dogeaters (10 page)

“Senator Avila,” Uncle Agustin groans. “
Por favor
, Freddie—how about another drink?”

“Senator Avila has no proof. It’s those foreign newspapers again—”

“American sensationalism,” Uncle Agustin agrees.

“Does anyone want more coffee?” my mother wants to know.

“How about you, Agustin?”
Tita
Florence gives my uncle a meaningful look. Uncle Agustin ignores her.

“Boomboom Alacran went to the main camp, just to see for himself.
Di ba
, Mikey? You told me,” Raul says. Mikey nods.

“It’s right there, a few kilometers outside Manila. Looks like an ordinary army barracks
daw
, but if you’re ever arrested—” Mikey gives us an exaggerated shiver. “It’s true,” he insists, “Boomboom tells me everything.”

“Boomboom’s full of shit,” Uncle Agustin says, smiling. He lights a fresh cigar.

“AGUSTIN!”
Tita
Florence’s hand flies to her watermelon breasts in a gesture of dismay. “Your language—the children!”

“All the Alacrans are full of shit,” my father adds. “Severo Alacran built his empire on shit: bullshit.” The men can’t stop laughing, including my brother. He feels extremely grown-up, I can tell.

My father leaves to make one of his important phone calls in his private study. It is past ten o’clock. My mother watches him close the door to his study with a peculiar look on her face. I am the only one who seems to notice; everyone else is busy chattering or getting drunk. “Would anyone care for coffee?” my mother asks wearily. “No thank you, Dolores—that’s the third time you’ve asked!”
Tita
Florence says. She starts to get up from her chair, smoothing the wrinkles on her rayon skirt. “Come along, Agustin—it’s late.” Uncle Agustin starts to say something to her then thinks the better of it. He gets up slowly, a satisfied smirk on his face. “A lovely evening, Dolores—you’re the best hostess in town! Isn’t she the best, Florence?” My
Tita
Florence is silent. Uncle Agustin barely avoids crashing through the furniture as he makes his way to the foyer. “Mikey,” he barks, “go find that sister of yours! What’s she doing in the bathroom? Putting on more makeup?”

I dutifully kiss one of
Tita
Florence’s rouged cheeks. She smells like garlic and “Evening in Paris.” For the first time in the entire evening,
Tita
Florence focuses on me. “And how is your
Lola
Narcisa these days, Rio?” She pats me on the head.

Mikey leads a sullen Pucha back into the foyer where we all stand, waiting uneasily for my father to finish his mysterious phone call and join us in saying good-night. Pucha signals me with her eyebrows, then whispers she’ll call me first thing in the morning. We’ll go over the night’s
tsismis
, the juicy gossip that is the center of our lives. If the laundress Catalina is really the General’s mother, then who is Apolinaria Cuevas? Who is the red-haired foreigner’s wife
Tito
Severo is fucking? “Shit,” Pucha will say, impressed. “Did you hear the way my father and your father both said
shit
?”

O
N BOUGAINVILLEA ROAD, LOCATED
within one of the posh Makati subdivisions patrolled by men in blue uniforms, a jeep full of restless soldiers is parked at the top of General Nicasio Ledesma’s hilltop driveway. The soldiers smoke and laugh softly among themselves; it is very late, after all, and they know enough not to draw attention to themselves by making too much noise. The youngest complains of being hungry. “Should I knock on the back door and tell the old woman to bring us some food?” he asks his companions. “
Sige
, ’
bro
—wake her up,” one of them tells him. Another soldier climbs out of the jeep, yawns and stretches his arms, then saunters up to a wall of the General’s windowless villa to take a piss. The soldiers find it hard to stay awake. It has been a long, uneventful night, with only the vibrating cicadas filling the sultry silence. In the encyclopedia-lined study of the fortresslike house, General Ledesma has been in conference with his protégé Pepe Carreon for hours.

Upstairs, the General’s wife tosses and turns on her spartan bed, a regulation army cot she once asked her husband to send over from one of the barracks. The General found her request perfectly understandable, in light of her devotion to an austere, forbidding God and her earnest struggles to earn sainthood through denial. A former piano teacher and distant cousin of the General, Leonor Bautista was forced to marry Nicasio Ledesma by her elderly parents. After much initial resistance and the intervention of her parish priest, Leonor Bautista succumbed and married the General. She found life with the much-decorated war hero undemanding and rather tranquil, except for the strangers frequently trooping in and out of her house. She is not expected to accompany the General to the social functions he attends; for this she is eternally grateful. The General seems to want nothing from her at all after their marriage. He showed no reaction when the reclusive Leonor immediately asked for her own bedroom down the hall from where he slept. “The smaller the better,” Leonor said. “Leave the walls unpainted. I want no air conditioning, no electric fans, no mirrors. I would like to be as far away from you as possible,” she added, with a cryptic smile. It was their wedding night, one of the rare occasions when Leonor spoke to her husband directly. From then on, Leonor Ledesma divided her life evenly between “good days” and “bad.”

Good days are spent collecting and sorting old clothes, toys, medicine, and canned goods for the Sisters Of Mercy Orphanage. “Bad” she spends locked in her narrow room, fasting on water and praying prostrate on the cold cement floor to her beloved Santo Niño statue, a three-foot tall Holy Child dressed in a red velvet robe embroidered with real pearls and semiprecious gems. Every few months, the General’s wife retreats to a Carmelite nunnery in Baguio for rigorous meditation and more prayer in an atmosphere heavy with imposed silence. The General encourages her spiritual odysseys and asks her to pray for him. “The Lord listens to you and only you,” he tells her. “Beg the Lord’s forgiveness on my behalf.” Leonor Ledesma gives her husband a pitying look, almost tempted to speak. After her parents die, the General arranges for her piano to be brought to Manila by army truck, but she refuses to acknowledge its presence in her living room. In frustration, the General finally donates the dusty, out-of-tune piano to the Sisters Of Mercy Orphanage, which pleases Leonor immensely. She writes him a note, which is brought to him on his breakfast tray by the gray-haired servant Hortensia: “You have atoned for some of your sins, Nicasio—but only some. The Sisters were grateful for your gift, as were the poor children of the
hospicio.
I will make a novena in your honor this Wednesday.”

Leonor Ledesma sees her husband as a curious toad disturbing the solitude of her tropical fortress with endless midnight meetings. “Who are those men outside making noise?” she asks Hortensia.

“His soldiers,
Señora
,” Hortensia replies, “only his soldiers.”

“Are we at war again?”

Hortensia shakes her head. “
Hindi
,
ho.
”

“Tell them they should be quiet or go home!” Leonor Ledesma pauses before asking her next question. “And who is that bloodsucker always eating at my dinner table?”

Hortensia wants to laugh, but knows better. “
Si
Mister Carreon,
Señora
.”

“The eldest son?” Leonor Ledesma has always suspected the General’s bastards are hiding somewhere in the villa.

Hortensia sighs, bracing herself for the confrontation she knows will follow. “
Señora
, you have no children.”

“I know
that.
I’m not a madwoman like they say—you’re blind, Hortensia! You can’t see what’s right in front of you!” Leonor Ledesma lowers her trembling voice. “It doesn’t matter to me, any of his children. I wish they’d just crawl out from under the sofa, say good-night, and leave! They’ve desecrated this house long enough.”

“Yes,
Señora.
” Hortensia’s stony expression remains unchanged. She believes the General is too much of a cold fish to have any bastards—unless the
tsismis
was true and he was making one with that movie star Lolita Luna.

“Would you sing this hymn with me?” Leonor Ledesma asks, her tone softening. She takes the older woman’s hand. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” Hortensia hesitates before joining in, praying silently to her own God to rescue her from another unbearable night with her proselytizing mistress.

Much later, after several hymns and an interminable rosary led by the General’s wife in a halting voice, an exhausted Hortensia bids her mistress goodnight. The General’s wife falls into a fitful sleep, grinding her teeth in anguish. She wakes with a start, her eyes frantically trying to make out objects in the dark. Aside from her bed, the only piece of furniture in her narrow cell is a wooden chair on which her threadbare robe is draped. She convinces herself no one else is in the room, that the Santo Niño is watching over her. She breathes deeply as she lies back down. She reproaches herself for not demanding that Hortensia bring her mat and sleep on the floor next to her bed. Leonor Ledesma’s eyes open and close, then open again. The low ceiling reminds her of the lid of a coffin, the exact shape of her tiny bedroom. “How fitting,” her husband once said.

She lies in the suffocating dark, waiting for the ceiling to fall and seal her away forever. She imagines that being smothered might be a sweet death; she waits for this death to claim her every night. This yearning for a sudden, painless death is her most selfish desire, her greatest sin. Father Manuel has warned her about this many times, in confession.

The General’s wife, out of sheer habit, recites the “Hail Mary” in a whisper. Outside her screened window, the leaves of an acacia tree rustle in the wind, lulling her back gently to the red landscape of her dreams.

I
THOUGHT FIRST WE
would take only Manila; then Luzon; then other islands, perhaps, also. I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night…And one night it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came: one, that we could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; two, that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; three, that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and four, that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly.

J
OEY SANDS. DO YOU
like it? Like a crooner, don’t you think? That’s where I got my last name. “The Sands.” A casino in Las Vegas. This old drunk fuck was telling me about it. “HEY, little pretty black boy …ain’t seen nothin’ like you since I left Detroit…”

He couldn’t get over it, touched me when he got the chance. Did I have a daddy? Was my daddy an American? Shit, I laughed back at him, imitating his drawl: SHEE-IT, man, I said. Mocking him. You must be kidding! Man, I don’t even have a
mother.
Laying it on real thick, so he’d feel sorry for me.

He started coming around CocoRico all the time. I’d be at the bar up front, checking things out. Actually, he wasn’t bad looking. When he wasn’t drunk, his face and eyes didn’t droop as much, and you’d notice his big body and muscular arms, pretty strong and firm for a man his age. I’d always act surprised to see him.

That was before the disco craze, before I talked Andres into hiring me as a DJ for the back room. “What do I need you for?” Andres used to say, pointing to the jukebox. It seemed like forever before Andres let me give it a shot, and look at him now: he’s making money, the place is jammed until all hours of the night—even
girls
want to come here and dance, the music’s so good.

“You’re kind of young, aren’t you?” the American once observed. But I could tell he was fascinated, just like all the rest of them. Joey Taboo: my head of tight, kinky curls, my pretty hazel eyes, my sleek brown skin. “Where’s the little GI baby?” he’d ask Andres, if I wasn’t around. Andres would shrug in that bored way of his. “He’ll be here any moment now, I’m sure.” The American would buy more drinks, sitting close by the door. Sometimes I’d get there, let him buy me dinner. Sometimes I’d just stay away.

“Call me Neil,” he said, his eyes fixed on me in that sad, funny way of his. It was one of his sober days. “NEIL. What kind of name is that?” I loved making fun of him.

“Good sport,” he’d laugh with me, jabbing at his own chest with one of his large hands.

I spit on the floor in contempt. “Man, you don’t have to talk to me like I don’t know anything!
Puwede ba
—good sport,” I mimic, rolling my eyes. “What do you think this is? The Lone Ranger and Tonto?”

I sulk, look away from him. Scan the room for a pretty face. Make him feel real bad.

Embarrassed, he looks lost. “Joey, I’m sorry.” He means it. I like that best. I could make him do anything.

I keep at it for just a little while longer. “Man, I’m no savage.” When he looks like he’s going to cry, I stop. Touch his leg under the table. Soothe him with my voice. “NEIL,” I tease, gently now. “Neil Sedaka—ahhh…”

One time he asks me a favor. “For my buddy—” Some younger guy named Phil. I didn’t like Phil as soon as I met him. “Phil wants to see a live show—” Phil is standing there, next to Neil. Staring at me and not saying anything.

“You mean a sex show?” I take my time drinking my beer, ignoring Phil’s piercing gaze.