The Bamboo Stalk (2 page)

‘Stop crying!' my grandfather shouted. ‘You know I've arranged some work for you here. Live with it.'

The neighbour left and my grandfather lay on his back on the shabby old sofa. My mother sat on the floor lamenting her fate.

My Aunt Aida came out of her room after a while, carrying Merla on her hip and holding an envelope that she handed to her younger sister. ‘My father had started to snore,' my mother said later, recalling the moment. ‘Aida came up to me and whispered, “This is some money I'd saved for Merla. You can do what you like with it, Josephine.”

‘My father stopped snoring,' my mother went on. ‘He opened one eye and raised his eyebrow, then sat up like a corpse that had suddenly come back to life. “While the elders sleep, the children whisper secrets!” he said.

‘He lunged towards Aida with his eyes shooting sparks. I was still on the floor. He twisted Aida's arm in an attempt to wrest the envelope from her hand.

‘‘‘Josephine, take Merla!” she shouted. Merla was about to fall but I caught her and stood in the corner watching Aida push my father, swearing at him as he punched and kicked her. Aida was crazy. Who else would dare do that?

‘I was begging them to stop and Merla was crying in alarm. Despite the pushing and the punching, Aida and my father kept talking.

‘“Aren't you satisfied with selling me to men and . . .” said Aida.

‘“Shut up,” my father interrupted, pulling her hair and slapping her on the mouth.

‘He pushed her hard against the wall. With her front pressed to the wall, he pulled her head back by the hair.

‘“Merla,” he whispered in her ear with a snarl. I imagined his lips parting to reveal fangs and a forked tongue. “A whore's daughter, with an unknown father.”

‘Aida couldn't speak but her eyes were wide open in a silent scream. He continued to hiss at her.

‘“I'll kill her if she keeps bringing trouble to this house,” he said.

‘“Trouble?” Aida asked, then burst out laughing. She looked like a madwoman, with her clothes torn and her hair dishevelled.'

My mother stopped and looked down, then turned her face towards me. ‘Do I have to tell you all these things, José?' she asked.

I nodded and urged her to continue, so she went on. ‘I swear my father almost pissed in his pants at the sight of Aida. He took his fingers out of her hair. She moved slowly towards the door leading to the yard outside. My father followed her, and I went after, carrying Merla. Close to the low bamboo fence around the pen where he kept his cocks, under the big banana tree, Aida stopped. I stood behind my father at the back door of the house. “It's you betting on these cockfights that's the real trouble,” Aida said, in a voice that was hardly audible.

‘My father didn't say a word, and Aida continued. “You're all cockerels!” she said.

‘“It looks like your sister's gone mad,” my father whispered to me.

‘I didn't say a word, because she really did look mad.

‘“You're a cockerel,” Aida said, pointing her finger at my father. “All the men I gave my body to were cockerels,” she added.

‘My father's face showed a trace of remorse, or maybe fear, but he didn't move an inch.

‘“Ah, ah, Aida!” he said. All he did was say her name.

‘But Aida didn't hear him and she continued. “And I'm fed up with playing the role of hen!” she said.

She hitched up her dress above her knees and stepped over the low bamboo fence around the pen. She stood in the middle
of the pen, puffed out her chest and looked up to the sky.

“Cockadoodledoo!” she crowed.

‘Then she pounced on the cocks and began to rip their heads off one by one with her bare hands. She threw the four lifeless bodies towards my father, who almost collapsed in a faint. Aida stood upright, facing us, her hands covered in blood. “Next time it'll be your head,” she said, pointing at our father.

‘The next morning Father left home early with Aida's envelope. He came back a few hours later carrying a wicker cage with four new cocks inside.'

 

4

My mother continued her story. ‘Aida and I ran into Father with his cage of birds in the narrow passageway that leads to the lane at the end of the front yard. He didn't look in our direction. He'd been avoiding looking at Aida since the incident with the cocks. As soon as she came into sight, he looked aside as if he thought she had some eye disease and he was frightened of catching it. Aida had freed herself from slavery and put a stop to my father's tyranny. I wanted to escape from slavery too, but I'm not Aida. That morning she took me to the grocer's shop at the end of the lane. The grocer knew us well and had often lent us small sums of money when my mother was alive. Aida told him the whole story. She said I needed money to work abroad as a maid. The man was sympathetic, as he usually was with us, but he said he was sorry he couldn't provide that amount. As we were about to give up and go home, he said, “I can vouch for you with the Indians. They trust me. I've been dealing with them for years.”

‘Dealing with the Indians meant setting in motion an endless cycle of debt. It meant obediently making regular payments to people who took advantage of your poverty and then watching with your own eyes as the money you paid multiplied and went into other people's pockets.

‘The shopkeeper arranged a meeting between us and one of the Indian moneylenders,' my mother continued. ‘We knew the Indians because we'd had dealings with them years earlier. We'd
bought a cooker and a television and some ceiling fans and floor fans from them on credit. It took us ages to pay back all the money we owed. They were greedy then, but the terms when we bought all those things from them were better than the terms they asked for giving me a loan to go abroad. The shopkeeper tried to explain my circumstances to them, but they still doubled the interest rate. They took advantage of my urgent need for cash.'

My mother shook her head sadly, then continued. ‘We had no choice but to accept. We would have done anything to save ourselves in the short term, even if it meant more trouble down the road.

‘In the employment agency in central Manila the next day I had to stand in a long queue that started at the door to the little office and ran along the pavement, down the street and far into the distance.

‘Hours later I managed to meet the clerk. I paid him half the amount and started to fill in the forms. On my next visit, after my application was accepted, I paid the rest of the money. The clerk told me I would be working in Kuwait, and that was the first time I had ever heard of the country. I cheerfully got ready to leave, though I knew I would have to give half of what I earned abroad to the Indians and the other half to my family. I willingly agreed to let them share out my money between them, in exchange for leaving me free to do what I liked with my body, free to give it to whoever I chose.'

 

5

When my mother came to work here in Kuwait, she was completely ignorant of the local culture. The people here are not like people in the Philippines. They look different and speak a different language. Even the way they look at each other can have connotations that she wasn't aware of. The climate in Kuwait is nothing like the climate in the Philippines, except that the sun does shine by day and the moon comes out at night. ‘Even the sun,' my mother said. ‘At first I doubted it was the same sun that I knew.'

My mother worked in a large house where a widow in her mid-fifties lived with her son and three daughters. The widow, Ghanima, would later become my grandmother. The old lady, as my mother called her, was strict and neurotic most of the time. Although she seemed to be sensible and to have a strong personality, she was also superstitious and firmly believed what she saw in her dreams. She thought that every dream was a message that she couldn't ignore, however trivial or incomprehensible it might seem. She spent much of her time looking for an explanation for the things she had dreamed and if she was unable to do so herself she would seek out people who interpret dreams. Although the various interpretations she obtained from these people were different, sometimes even contradictory, she believed everything they said and expected the things she dreamed to take place in real life. On top of that, she saw everything that happened, however banal, as a sign that she shouldn't
take lightly. Once, when I was with my mother and my Aunt Aida in the little sitting room in our house in the Philippines, my mother said, ‘I don't know how that woman could live like that, keeping tabs on everything that happened, every coincidence that came her way. Once she was invited to a wedding with her daughters and they came back only half an hour after leaving home. “That party finished quickly, madam,” I told her.

‘The old lady went straight upstairs without looking at me. Hind, her youngest daughter, took up my question and replied, “The car broke down halfway there.”

‘I thought of all the cars lined up in front of the house. “What about the other cars?” I asked her.

‘“My mother thinks that if the car hadn't broken down halfway, then at the end of the journey the angel of death would have reaped our souls,” she said, wiping her lipstick off with a handkerchief.

‘“What do you mean?” I asked her in surprise.

‘“My mother thought some disaster was in store for us,” she replied, bending down to take off her shoes.'

It was a vast house my mother was working in, compared with houses in the Philippines. In fact one house in Kuwait is ten or more times bigger than the houses where my mother came from. My mother arrived in Kuwait at a sensitive time. My grandmother thought her arrival was a very bad omen, and it showed on her face whenever she saw my mother. My father had an explanation for that. ‘You came to our house, Josephine, around the same time a bomb went off near the Emir's motorcade,' he said. ‘Without divine intervention it would have killed him. So my mother saw your arrival as a sign of bad luck.'

My father was four years older than my mother. My grandmother mistreated her, and so did my father's sisters,
except for the youngest one, who was temperamental. Only my father was always kind and gentle to her and he often disagreed with his mother and his sisters over how they treated my mother.

I was almost ten when my mother started telling me these stories about things that had happened before I was born. She was paving the way for me to leave the Philippines and go back to Kuwait. In the sitting room of our little house she read me some of the letters my father had sent her after we left Kuwait. Before I went back to Kuwait as my father had promised, she told me all the details of her relationship with him. Every now and then she made a special effort to remind me that I belonged to another, better place. When I first started speaking, she taught me some Arabic words, such as greetings, how to count and how to say ‘tea' and ‘coffee' and so on. When I was older, she tried her best to give me a good impression of my father, who I couldn't remember.

I would sit in front of my mother in our house in the Philippines, listening to her as she told me stories about him. Aunt Aida would usually dismiss her stories impatiently. ‘I loved him, and I still do,' my mother said. ‘I don't know how or why. Perhaps it was because he was nice to me when everyone else treated me badly. Or perhaps because he was the only person in the old lady's house who spoke to me, other than to give me orders, or because he was handsome, or because he was a young writer and was well-educated and had dreams of writing his first novel, and I loved reading novels.'

She smiled as she spoke to me and, strangely, she often came close to tears, as if the events in the story had just taken place.

‘He said he was happy with me because, like him, I liked reading. He told me that whenever he was about to start writing
his novel, something always came up to distract him. He kept being dragged into the thick of political events in the region. He wrote a weekly article for a newspaper but it was rarely published because of the censors in Kuwait. He was one of the few writers who opposed the Kuwaiti government's decision to take sides in the Iran-Iraq war. Imagine how crazy your father was! He used to talk to his maid about literature and art and the political affairs of his country, at a time when no one else even spoke to their servants, except to give orders: bring this, wash that, sweep the floor, wipe the table, get the food ready, come here and so on.'

Aunt Aida grumbled and fidgeted in her seat but my mother continued. ‘I washed and swept and mopped all day long, just so at the end of the day, when the women of the house had gone to bed, I'd be free to chat with your father in the study. I tried to keep up with him when he talked about politics, and impress him by showing off my meagre political knowledge. One day I told him how happy I was that Corazon Aquino had won the presidential elections. She was the first woman to rule the Philippines and had restored democratic government after leading the opposition that brought down the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

‘Your father was unusually interested in what I had to say. “So you put a woman in power!” he said. “Five months ago, on 25 February,” I said proudly. Your father burst out laughing, then checked himself in case he woke up his mother and his sisters. “That was the same day we were celebrating our national day,” he said. He paused. Then, tapping his fingertips on the desk and as if speaking to himself, he said, “Which of us is the master of the other?” I didn't understand what he was driving at. He talked to me about the denial of women's rights, as he put it, because in his country women don't have the right to take part in politics.
He looked very sad, then he tried to involve me by talking about the Kuwaiti parliament, which had been suspended by the Emir of Kuwait at the time. Although I didn't much care about what he was saying, I listened to his voice and took great interest in how he felt.'