The Bamboo Stalk (5 page)

The empty spaces around the three houses were planted with trees – mangoes, bananas, guavas, papaya and jackfruit – and the land was surrounded on all sides by stands of bamboo that formed a high wall.

Shortly before my mother came back from Kuwait my family's financial position had improved a little. They would have been able to live better if Mendoza hadn't been so reckless and wasn't addicted to betting on cockfights. Addiction doesn't just apply to drugs: gambling and betting ran in his blood. My grandfather, Aunt Aida and Merla, and even Uncle Pedro and his family, had basically depended on the money my mother sent at the end of each month when she was working as a maid, and their situation improved greatly when she had paid off the money owed to the Indian moneylenders and started sending all her salary. This meant my grandfather could buy a fridge, because Aida had asked for one and he was frightened of her, though most of the time the fridge had no food in it.

My mother relayed Pedro's account of the event. ‘I wish you had been here,' he said. ‘The welcome ceremonies when the fridge arrived were amazing! It was like we were welcoming a warship home from victory in battle. All the men, women and children in the neighbourhood gathered around the house to watch the
workers carry the fridge from the company truck to inside the house. It was a wonderful feeling, Josephine!'

A few weeks after the fridge arrived, the family found a way to supplement their livelihood, fortunately not in the form of cash or else my grandfather Mendoza would have taken it all for himself. Aida agreed to let the neighbours store their food in our fridge in exchange for a small portion of the food, which would be shared out among the family members. So now various kinds of food turned up in the fridge, which had at first mostly been used for cooling water.

 

2

When we arrived home and my mother opened the door, I was wrapped in a sling strapped to her back. Grandfather Mendoza was asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, as usual at midday. He rarely went to his own house nearby, other than to sleep at night.

My mother pushed the door and went inside. ‘I stood stock still in front of him,' she said, referring to my grandfather. ‘Father was in front of me and the door behind me. I didn't expect to go to my room until I'd had my share of insults, and maybe a beating! I was going to show respect by bending down, picking up his hand and holding the back of his hand against my forehead. But then I remembered how he had slapped Aida some years back.'

‘“Father!” I called.

‘He didn't wake up so I raised my voice and tried again. “Father.”

‘He opened one eye, then sat up. ‘“If you had finished the year . . .” he said with a smile.

‘He left the sentence unfinished and kept smiling.

‘
If he knew what I'm carrying on my back
, I thought to myself. “Three years,” I said. “I think that's enough, Father.”

‘As soon as I finished my sentence I heard Pedro's voice from outside. “Whose suitcase is that?” he asked.

‘Pedro pushed the door behind me to bring in the suitcase I
had left at the door before coming in. He stopped at the door and the first thing your uncle Pedro saw was you, strapped to my back.

‘“Who's that?” he asked.

‘I heard him behind me. My father, who was still sitting on the sofa in front of me, burst out laughing.

“It's Josephine, you idiot,” he said.

‘Pedro came past me, stood between me and my father and looked back at me in amazement. “I meant what she's carrying on her back!” he said.

‘My father left the scruffy sofa and scowled as soon as he heard what Pedro said. He walked towards me with his eyes wide open. He went past me. I stood where I was without moving, ready to take a blow from behind. He stood up straight behind me and whispered in my ear, “Another bastard!”

‘He pulled my hair back. My head banged against your little head and you burst out crying, while I was about to . . .

‘“If you did your whoring here instead of—” he said.

‘“He's not a bastard,” I interrupted. “His father's my husband.”

‘He gripped my hair tight, then shouted at Pedro: “You, shut the door quickly.”

‘I knew he was thinking about his cocks but I wasn't as brave as Aida was that time when she broke their necks.'

 

3

The way my grandfather treated my mother was different from that day on. Although he was angry, he showed her a respect to which she wasn't accustomed. And although she had let him down by coming back with a child, at least she was married. My mother was the child closest to him, even if he sometimes gave the opposite impression, because she was the one who looked after him and who treated him as a father, however cruel he was to her. She brought him food and took the trouble to clean up his little room. She even gave him half of what my father sent her from Kuwait, although she and I needed the money.

My mother said, ‘As far as possible I've tried to get along with your grandfather as well as your grandmother did. He's irritable because he was a soldier and had a hard time when he was young, or so your grandmother said. His addiction to gambling is just a way of venting his anger, or maybe it's an attempt to get revenge on old adversaries by defeating rival cocks.

‘We women,' she continued with a smile, ‘need to understand the male temperament and make allowances for the things men do. That means we have to put up with their mistakes, if only to preserve something that's more important.'

She gave a little laugh, then continued, ‘If I tried to resist him, I would end up suffering the same fate as Aida. I would end up with a hardened expression on my face and eyes that didn't show
any emotion, heading straight to my destination like a train, with marijuana smoke blowing out of my nostrils.'

No one but my mother could handle my grandfather properly, because dealing with Mendoza meant dealing with several men, each with his own style, his own tastes and even his own way of thinking. I don't know what set my mother apart from everyone else. Maybe she was more patient, maybe more intelligent.

Mendoza was someone I never managed to understand through all the years I was there. I wasn't sure which of the personalities that he switched between was his real personality. You could have written a novel about him. My mother once said, ‘If you come across a man with more than one personality, you can be sure he's looking for himself in one of them, because he has no character.' But I think she was wrong, because Mendoza, despite his many personalities, did have a real personality. It only came to light in the evening when he drank
tuba
, fermented coconut milk. His other personalities were merely attempts to conceal that real personality. He was crying inside but he suppressed it. And when the drink began to take effect, I could hear him raving at night, saying, ‘I'm weak, I'm lonely.'

In 1966 my grandfather had joined the Philippine Army, which was allied at the time with South Korea, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand under US leadership to fight North Vietnam in the Vietnam war. He was in one of the units that helped provide medical and logistical services there. ‘In the mountains of Vietnam the Viet Cong stole my father's humanity,' my mother said. ‘He never told us what he saw, but he must have gone through indescribable things, to come back at the end of the war in the state you can see him in now.' When I was growing up I hated my grandfather with a vengeance and wished him dead,
whatever excuses my mother made for him. If I complained that he'd been cruel to me, she would say, ‘We went through the same thing – me and Aida and Pedro. We used to complain to your grandmother when he flew into a temper and snapped at us, but she would always say, “It's the war. It's still raging inside him.”'

My grandfather came home in 1973 with traumatic memories we knew nothing about and with a small US government pension for the rest of his life. The pension money didn't count as income for the family, because it was just enough to buy a new cock every month, and if the cock was killed by a more aggressive cock, then it meant the loss of a month's income. If the cock defeated its rival, my grandfather would take his winnings and buy another cock. Whatever money was left he spent on food, stimulants and expensive vitamins for the cocks. Either way the money would fly away like the feathers of the fighting cocks and no one in the family had the right to object. The only solace if my grandfather's cock did win was that he would come home carrying a cage with three cocks in it: the winner, a new cock, and the loser, which would usually be dead or on the point of death, as a feast for the hungry family.

 

4

My mother somewhat neglected my religious education in the belief that my future was to be a Muslim in my father's country. My father had whispered the Muslim call to prayer in my right ear as soon as he held me in his arms in hospital after I was born, but that didn't stop my mother from taking me to the small local church as soon as we arrived in Manila to baptise me in holy water as a Catholic. Apparently she wasn't yet fully convinced at that stage that I would go back.

If only my parents could have given me a single, clear identity, instead of making me grope my way alone through life in search of one. Then I would have just one name that would make me turn when someone called me. I would have just one native country. I would learn its national anthem. Its trees and streets would shape my memories and in the end I could lie at rest in its soil. I would have one religion I could believe in instead of having to set myself up as the prophet of a religion that was mine alone.

Sometimes I think of those minutes Rashid and Josephine spent on that boat when they became my father and mother. It's madness that their minutes of pleasure should make my whole life such a misery.

If I had been born Muslim to a Kuwaiti father and a Kuwaiti mother, I would be living in a big house with a spacious room on the upper floor, with a forty-six-inch television, a walk-in closet and an en suite bathroom. I would wake up every morning to
go to a job I had chosen myself, wearing a loose white thobe and a traditional headdress, at ease in my surroundings, instead of looking like an extra playing the role of an Arab in some Hollywood movie. I could look at the people around me and I wouldn't need to look up to the sky to address them, and they wouldn't need to look down to the ground to notice I was there among them. I could sit in expensive cafés and restaurants without people grumbling in whispers that people like me shouldn't be in such fancy places. I could go to young people's parties in the evening and have lots of Kuwaiti friends, friends like Ghassan and Walid. I could meet them in the
diwaniya
and go boating with them. I could go to the mosque on Fridays and listen to the man standing in the pulpit and understand what he was saying, instead of just raising my hands, imitating the men around me and repeating ‘Amen, amen' like a parrot.

Or . . .

If I had been born to a Filipino father and a Filipina mother, two of a kind, then I would be a Christian, comfortably off, living with my family in Manila, venturing every day into a mass of humanity, exposing my lungs and the pores of my skin to vehicle exhaust fumes. Or I might be a poor Muslim living at peace among my people in Mindanao in the south despite hunger and harassment by the government, or a rich kid living in a fancy house in wealthy Forbes Park in Makati City and going to a school that only the rich can afford, or a Buddhist of Chinese origin, working with my father in a shop in the Chinese quarter of Manila, burning incense in front of a statue of Buddha every morning because it's good for business. Or if I had been born to Ifugao parents in the north of Luzon island, I would wear nothing but a loincloth all day. I would work in the terraced rice paddies in the mountains and sleep at night in a thatched house on stilts, guarded from evil spirits by
statues of the anito. If I had been born a mestizo, I would have had my physical appearance as a feature to exploit, and I could have become a film star or a model in advertisements or a famous singer.

Or . . .

If I'd hatched from the egg of a house fly, I would have zipped around the house and grown old in ten days, then given up the ghost within two weeks at the most.

If I were something clearly defined, anything. If if if . . .

What a puzzle it is!

Did my baptism make me a Christian? Did I really embrace Christianity at that ceremony, which I attended at an age when I couldn't even remember anything?

We all have our own private religions. We take from religions the parts we believe in and ignore the parts that our minds can't grasp. We pretend to believe, we perform rituals we don't understand for fear of losing something we are trying to believe in.

Despite all the wrongs I have suffered, I usually forgive people when they do me harm. I turn my left cheek to those who slap me on the right. I once loved Jesus Christ so much that I started seeing him in my dreams. He smiled and patted me on the head with a hand that still showed traces of the nail that went through it on the day he was crucified. So am I a Christian? But what about the times when I discovered myself through meditation? What about my constant desire to commune with the natural world around me? I used to sit under the trees on Grandfather Mendoza's land, leaning against the tree trunks, until I hardly felt any sensations, which the Buddha says in his teachings are sources of suffering. I loved reading those teachings so much that I became like Ananda, the Buddha's closest and most beloved disciple. Might I be a
Buddhist without knowing it? What about my belief in the existence of one supreme and eternal god, unbegotten and without offspring? Am I a Muslim by default?

What am I?

It's my destiny to spend my life looking for a name, a religion and a country. I won't however deny my parents credit for helping me, unintentionally, to discover my creator, in my own way.