Sheilfa B. Alojamiento
The bill crumpled in hand, she goes back to her side of the house quite elated. Just a bit of honest self-appraisal, emphasis on what she might not be able to accomplish without the help of those who should be there doing the job that unfortunately fell in her hands, skipping miles and miles of what she understood as the major factors which, when articulated, would only succeed in painting other people in a bad light, and the landlady agreed to cut down rent. And if the gang could make it to another year, the woman had further proposed, it will be reduced some more.
It isn’t much. But it could buy them Coke and chicken roasted on the spit the famished ones had been hankering for. Not today. With that broad daylight execution barely forgotten, they may not just stroll in. She stuffs the bill inside her side pocket, bends to pick up a broom one of the helps must have thrown aside in haste, starts sweeping the yard.
The house is in a poor shape. Rust in all the likely places, the taps in the abandoned garden across the door no longer working, the canals jammed with decaying leaves, and the garage now their open kitchen a barracks of discarded objects. She gathers empty bottles and stows them among a corroded heap by the fence. The state of disrepair looks to her the general condition of the island municipality: inside the houses there’s not enough water; outside, roadside pipes spurt all day, making mud pools and flowing to the other side of the street.
The hall they are renting used to be a receiving room. The retiring couple have now retreated to the backside, the man hardly outside the house, would not even go out of his room to join Christmas dinner. The back rooms are late additions to the main structure, the wood quality and the lack of design suggesting reduced circumstances if not siege reaction: the roof hiding behind the taller façade, the windows and doors screened, the latter a belated solution to the malaria epidemic that lasted until the late eighties. In the nineties and on until the close of the last century, the town was host to some of the most intense gun fights with a rival clan, now the town’s overlords. Clan wars, her women friends from the island like to tell her, make any member of the involved party vulnerable target: which should explain the layout of the house, she reminds herself as she looks in. A hall with a small bedroom on the fore side, a comfort room in the rear, and in the big middle, the abandoned master’s bedroom on the other side of the wall. The big room has been given over to the two helps whose duty it must be now to guard the outer flanks, and her room which leans closest to the road, the designated sentry post, she the front guard, lookout, and grenade catcher rolled into one. She chuckles, tamps the broom’s base against the window ledge, her mind following the two young girls her neighbors who should be full of activity right now. The landlady has a retail store and a food stall across the school at one end of the street.
The rented space was vacated a few years back. Peace activists buckling under the weight of feudal power, funders and INGOs sent out of the town or pulled out. The withdrawal followed a violent face-off that had offices shutting down overnight and was attended by a heavy torrent that sank the town knee-deep in murky waters, the rebel scion son’s family gathered in a lifeboat and shuttled to a waiting chopper. She has no real recollection of that episode: she was not there. The clampdown was so that the yard of a police officer, the chief investigator, was lobbed with a grenade, slow ball mode. The residents suffered minor physical injuries, but that was enough to get the message across. Order returned to the town, and as the streets and the town plazas quieted, the mosques and the Arabic schools came to life once more, the faucets that dried up for days to weeks running again, the prayer rooms bathed with light.
She resumes sweeping, her back to the wooden gate. Her side of the yard, she can’t help noticing, is the shadowy part, nanka and papaya trees with fruits hanging down like a woman’s fecund belly and breasts, a laurel tree with arms extending far and wide over the main house’s top roof. Abode of the spirits, according to the girls with shaman mothers, reminding her, too, that bad men had been felled there, and one such man used to occupy the bedroom she now sleeps in.
Tau mangih?
A killer. The family’s private guard.
On her first week in the place, scarved girls would pay her visits, each heavy with good intent.
There’s nothing in the Holy Book that prohibits love between two women or two men.
You know what they do to people like you? Dig holes neck-deep to put you there, to be stoned to death.
She dared not give voice to her own thoughts. People will always distrust other people, women will always hate other women.
Berkis, an old hand in the office rental circuit, was among her first visitors. Unlike the landlady who was pleased she repainted the book case and coated the grey cement floor tile red, Berkis glowered.
You are upping the value of their house.
Party to the INGO community that decamped, Berkis vacillated between helping her and shooting her down.
When you leave, they will raise the rent to four.
That she found a room she could fix on that side of the town is to her Divine Providence enough. The last one she rented had but a hole on the floor for a washroom. She pulls out a black sack from under a table, returns to the side of the fence, unearths more bottles from underneath the discarded iron gate. The sight of rust distresses her. In a rotting back shed is an old Ford, battered beyond belief. She puts the heap of glass and plastics in, takes the sack back into the kitchen. The girls from the seaport side might want them. Loose change to pay for a stick of cigarette, perhaps a sachet of shampoo or a pad of sanitary napkin. She ties the sack’s end and sets it down beside a crumbly corner table, another object of strenuous kitchen debates on that side of the house. The rogues want it dumped in the backside, she charging them with the task of seeing to its bone reconstruction, even diverting food money for the purchase of a saw and a hammer.
Bukun kami apuan mu! Bukun kami kalpintil!
They’re not her grandfather, and they’re neither carpenters’ nor farmers’ daughters. So the tool box has been sitting there underneath the table, gathering dust, sheltering mosquitoes. She sweeps the pile of leaves into a tin pan, scatters them underneath the hedges. It seems to her that even a little thing like garbage segregation will take long sticking in what she often disparages as a hit-and-run-slash-and-burn economy.
Jolo, please understand, was always an open harbor. I do think conservatism is more characteristic of land-locked people.
Was that a dissociative statement, a classist slur descriptive of those tied to the land like her grandfather? But that piece rather stuck. The speaker, a lady lawyer, took the ax, too, when her client the plaintiff to the landmark case later retracted her indictment against politicians’ sons and blamed activist attorneys instead for forcing her to testify.
To her who wasn’t there when this confrontation was unfolding, this lawyer-activist had retorted: You can’t call it a class.
She made the mistake of asking, where are the intelligentsia? Insisting, and hedging around that chestnut that shouldn’t it be the intellectual class’s role to question incessantly the medieval order of which conservative religion is to blame, how come there’s so little class analysis going on around here. She was struck shut. Whatever powered that upsurge of people into the streets demanding the felony be stopped, this lawyer advanced, class analysis it was not: they were just good people trying to do good. So there. That splitter-ism arose from a much older democratic tradition, maybe all the way from Greece past Constantinople, and that was what gathered people regardless of where they were educated or raised.
In the sixties, her interlocutor had further reminded her, Jolo was your progressive as progressive went. It was a mark of prestige if one taught here.
So it was. She stows away the broomstick and the tin pan, takes a rug. Clears the table’s grimy top of its peculiar burden: a detached side mirror, a barber’s comb, a lost buckle, a discolored baseball cap: boudoir gear when going out for the kill. She drags a toolbox from underneath the rickety side table, hauls the shabby piece to the middle of the garage floor. Her thoughts go back to the time the lady lawyer recalled to her. Students from the pioneering college in the island winning in national debates and international swimming competitions with but the wide Sulu Seas and a now forgotten corner pond by a stream as training ground. One such debate the local disputants won went, Should the Communist Party of the Philippines be legalized? That must be around the time when Desdemona Tan, Misuari’s first and late wife, taught here and was passing around among a select crop of students Mao’s little red book.
The houseowners, too, had backed that lady lawyer’s reportage. Over Christmas dinner where she was asked to sit, the landlady talked some.
Yes. Walden Bello was a family friend. He would go with them to their farm, play the violin to the scent of a ripening durian fruit.
And during Lent when Catholics would stage the Station of the Cross, the woman further recounted, all the shops would be closed, the streets cleared of pedicabs and cars for the procession of penitents to pass.
Before then, she had no kinship with anyone that belonged to that house. No working relationship with the scion son the lady’s kinsman and the whole assemblage of UN-propelled rallyists, being herself marked out a fifth-columnist of a kind, left of left, as those center of left and right like to chastise her, again and again. But perhaps it was that that conveyed her there, her being left of left fringe, and for being tardy, too, past a thicket of convoluted and interlocking directorate.
The previous occupants that rented the place, though no blood kin to the landlady, belonged to that scion son’s camp. With the defunding, they, too, had to decamp. If she was to go by the same rule of thumb, she, too, should be allied with that scion son’s camp, and therefore, with the landlady. For one, the office that employed her before coming to the island, as jealous city friends liked to tell her, was his handler. Fronted money for the campaign for which he made a name for himself. When she took on a job for that office, she was barely concerned that she would be arguing for his case. The name sucks, she thought then. Could not quite believe anyone from his background capable of bringing down the house. That he was cousin to a queenly lass she hasn’t as yet paid enough tribute to, did not help further. Bad times. For she had needed the job. And wanted it, too: it would bring her back to the island. It was after her report was out when praises and cavils started coming that she proved her hunches right: it was a hack job that was a perfect match for someone reckless and suicidal enough as she was. Journalists who wanted to go by the rules would not want to cover his case. Too sticky, and would likely ban them from going back to the island for good.
They were banned, anyway, regardless of him.
She was not really new to that island. Had set foot there twice before, different times each: first, as a fledgling journalist in the Solidarity network of old when she was only twenty-two; and second, a decade after when a Manila office tasked her to assess local implementation of a thoroughly harmless mainstreaming program. She did not stay longer than a day during each time. The island always touted as a dangerous place for strangers. It might have been and it is still. But she has her doubts now. It could be that it was her hosts that made it so: it’s not so much that they want them out quick and safe as they don’t want them picking ideas from around the place.
What you doing? You ran out of fuel?
Her head turns around. Aisa, the darker of the two helps, standing over her shoulder, a smile on her lips, a plateful of bread and pancit guisado in hand.
Eleven o’clock and no customers. We’ve not been faring well these days. The school banned their girls from going out for lunch or a Coke.
The hammer suspended above her head, her jaw drops an inch lower. She sets the tool on the ledge. Before she can wipe her hands and ask the girl to wait while she fetch a bowl, Aisa has laid the food beside the hammer and has turned on her heel.
Return the plate later. The madame won’t like it if I stayed a minute longer.
The girl waves a hand, skitters away.
She stares after the running figure, the week’s news flashing anew before her eyes: An irate father gunning down one of their friends, the girlfriend dragged home wailing, the bewimpled principal castigated: if her school could not teach their girls to know right from wrong, what are they wasting their wads in tuition fees for?
She was away on the day that it happened. When she arrived, straight from an offshore trip, she had pulled out a thin sheaf from a bundle she deposited in the living room and headed to the school to hand her librarian friend a copy. Instead, she was summoned to the school principal’s office.
The parents entrusted their children’s minds to us. We therefore want to make sure that everything our students read will not bring them to harm’s way.
She instructed the gang to keep away and to not ever bring in even as tag-along girls who go to that school on one the end of their street.
Turning to the window ledge, she suddenly can’t decide if she should take the hammer or the plate. Could it be that the landlady’s offer for them to stay as long as they could make it was some kind of a consolation prize for those like her who might not have long to go? For the longest time the town’s councilors have been cleaning up every street corner, closing down video bars and the ramshackle pub houses. Lately, too, next to bad women and street bums the four-lettered acronym that in the vernacular translates to sexual perverts, has also made it to the local mutawa’s coffee talk. Could the woman be actually saying that she, too, will have to evacuate soon?
Damn. That she should always be banished wherever she sets foot in.
She lifts the food, goes inside, the wood frame the gang tacked up saying welcome in the vernacular reminding her of her own unwanted presence in the town.
Maytah nakalanjal? One gatekeeper queen had accordingly demanded when her lurking around in a garbage-filled village on seawater earned notice. How did that load of shit get in? As though the town was not an open port where stevedores, fishermen, merchants, and felons arrived and departed as they wished. She otherwise loved it there. The open-house ethos, the men indulgent, and interested, handing their girls to her lettered tutelage.
Until they’re done with school! Better with girls than coming home pregnant!
In the middle-income residential section where they now hold office, the houses are closeted. Embankments, really, that pretend to be houses: fenced in behind concrete walls as tall as the roof above one’s head. If she accepts a ride, the men always make it a point to tuck their pistols in their waists as they open and close the car’s door for her. She puts the plate on the table, images of the land and other lands racing through her mind. How did she get here in the first place. For friends she used to know it was like flying to Pluto she could as well have disappeared into the ether and be not heard from ever again.
So it was not true? This shit our shaman friend was saying, about men in black hoods, carrying a blade each, looking for us?
If you believe all the crap that crazy woman is saying, you are the worst dragadik of us all.
Many of the neighbors of the host family in that portside slum were from provinces north and south of the island who hardly cared what went on by royal statute.
Kanila ra yan. It’s all theirs.
The object of scorn was the last recruitment, the realm under siege, loyal subjects were being called once more to come forth. Crossdressers and parlor beauticians crowded in hideouts, pushing each other out to join a truckload of soldiers about to be shipped to Sabah.
You are the men, not us!
Better in jail among thieves, murderers, and drug addicts than in Lahad Datu. It was not their war.
The ladies of the court had accordingly made rounds, crouching along under the low houses, collecting a peso each from every vendor and pedicab rider, a membership ID with a royal seal as inducement.
Di’. Di’ aku magad kanila yan. No way. Nobody’s going with them their royal soldiers.
She herself could not gather the oafs to send them to a forum outside the island, help make sense of a claim that interested other people in academe and all those good places more than it concerned them.
Ipamungluh hadja kita. We’re just cannon fodders to them.
Even to this time, as she sits there before a plateful of white bread and chicken guisado, she can’t quite get over the thought that she made it there, among that roguish class, past all those guardian queens’ dragnets.
How did you do it? You shuttle between here and there like that godforsaken island was your park when we can’t even get near their docksides!
They knew, of course, who helped her get into the quarry. Which is why they snubbed her as that warlord’s son had snubbed them. He barred a red-tagged women’s organization from addressing his besieged constituents during a climactic confrontation, prohibited a news bureau from covering what it wanted independently investigated lest reports will not only hurt the outraged Overlord but will hurt him as well.
If that doesn’t make him an opportunist activist and a fraud, what could he be?!?
Was it from these flanks that the Abandon policy emanated? She can’t help but recall her own desertions.
Low voices from the street startle her. She rises, walks around to the other side of the table, leans across the window. The hammer on the ledge bites her elbow, and she glances down at the mess on the other side of the window: a toothy cutter, a toppled furniture, three thin limbs waving, one lying aslant on the garage floor. The miserly sight makes her think of piyanggang manuk, and Berkis’ account returns to her: an old beggar-woman, an undocumented case.
They had her body bleached on the shore! Legs spread wide, feet tied to tree twigs, a pointed stick stuck between her thighs!
On the road three cropped heads slouch by. Downtown chaps who frequent the front gate of the private high school at the T-end of the road. Probably went a-courting. Either they didn’t know the likes of them were under a ban in the vicinity or went there to defy gravity. Take-back- the-night-take-back-the-day-policy. Good luck to you. She goes to the cabinet, reaches for the tin pot on the bottom ledge, sits on her heels to plug the cord’s end under the front window.
Last she heard, the scion son had been arrested. She has not been in contact with her friends for quite a while, her leaving the city and landing in the island the scion son and his friends fled a bad joke on both herself and them. In that famously secular city, she could not even gather a decent number of people for a drink. Here, she can still make herself tea and cruise around the shelled place uncovered, unabashed, and unambushed.
So far.
Let that banyaga be. We can still use her.
Is the three thousand in rental money the equivalent of her modicum of usefulness? She is horrified. Ironic, too, that where scion sons lost agency, she herself found ground.
Or, did she?
Abandon Jolo. She did not know there was such a dictum in the wake of the mass expulsion. Now she feels like that evil bird charged with checking on the land in the aftermath of the flood.
Since she moved to that side of the town, she has noticed as well that the portside girls, mostly vendors’ and pedicab drivers’ daughters, have not been dropping by. Frequenting the office are the bootleggers’ and policemen’s neighbors who could easily get off the hook if their motorcycles were impounded or when caught red-handed after a good chase. Most of the portside tenants are also from a tribe which the ruling group in the island likes to dismiss wholesale as a shifty sort, magpindapinda hulah.
She quails at the derogative. If she thought of it, most people she communed with all her life were really of the sort. Wayfarers, travelers, merchants, and laborers who wandered from town to town, from country to city, then back; roving bands and lone rangers who pitched tents wherever night might catch them or wherever there was a thatch house or a tent that had room for the likes of them. In a way she’s of the tribe, too. She knows as well that in another time, that was the way to live.
The phone on the table buzzes and she reaches for the flaming device. Berkis. Isn’t she in hiding? That one only calls when in town.
How are u, Bro?
She texts back. Come to lunch. I’ve got news.
Proj. extnsn apprvd?
Na-ah. Rental down to 3t. Let’s buy piyanggang manuk. Fetch the thugs.
No reply. The big shot grousing again.
Berkis always identifies down rather than up, rejects anything that stinks of privilege. Scraggly hair, broad-backed and on the shorter side of life, the chap walks with a slouch and bends her head as though she had horns and would gore anyone who got in her way.
It’s her Valium-addled brain, a girlfriend had let on. Berkis turned to drugs after leaving rebel base. Friends in the left flanks had Berkis rehabilitated, even had her sent back to a school in Manila. Returned to the island a medik. In the mid-eighties when secessionists boarded the country’s carrier to talk peace with the Cory government, her father opted to stay behind. Berkis stayed with him, chopping wood and hauling water. When way later the rebel base was bombarded following a flag-raising fracas, Berkis went on a pilgrimage, lone ranger fashion, to bring food to the starving fighters. Half a sack of rice on her back, the soldiers let her through, not raising a gun to stop her. To friends and family members who know Berkis well, it was just another of her episodes.
At least she did not try to cut her wrists again!
Berkis would tell her later that her father had lost his apportioned house and lot to the clan that ruled that side of the town, the scion son’s own father paying them a visit. The housing project was for the families of ex-combatants, those who had been displaced by the war. Berkis deduced that the patriarch had compared notes with Catholic business or he would have not known who had been defaulting on their monthly amortizations.
She actually likes Berkis. The cad adores Kurt Cobain. Adores him more for shooting himself in the head. Dislikes pious words and distrusts good intentions. She sometimes suspects Berkis would cheer if she got beheaded. She heard her gloat when a journalist of some repute got kidnapped.
Hah. I saw the video. She was in a hammock, naked, surrounded by her captors. Good for her. What business she got, anyway, coming here for a good story.
She told the gang that beside all the ladies and most of the gents, she much prefers the company of Berkis.
At least with Berkis, I need not watch my back, only my front.
Brows darkened.
Don’t be too sure. With people here you’ve got to watch both your front and back all the time.
Spouts of smoke rising, the lid dancing, she unplugs the power cord, places the pot on the table. The phone beeps again.
An unknown number. Metah peboreyt topic mu in reyp? Bunnal na-gangrape kaw?
The personal affront barely grazes through. Must be one of the gang’s downtowner friends, someone she passed on the street ungreeted. They just circulated copies of their print publication through their own underground network. At least they’re being read. That’s more than what the Mother Superior on the T-end of their street could do for them. Whoever she is… She? Why is she so sure that it’s another woman sniping her? Oh, well. It’s always women against other women. Even rape as a castely claim, it’s still women versus women.
Our men don’t rape women from other tribes! Our women are clean. We use soap and water when washing ourselves!
The slightest of smiles lightens her face, and she drops a bag of tea into the steaming cup. What she’s thinking is, we all get raped. We all get trounced. For good measure. One who walked in people’s marches with her and survived incarceration in a log house at the backside of a military outpost, had shut her up, too.
Don’t call me rape survivor or rape victim or rape whatever. My life stretches long and wide before and after that!
Putting away the tea bag, her left hand fumbles for the money she stowed in her pocket. She’s thinking of the landlady’s gift of house to her. Recently, kidnappings are on the rise again. Some unholy hours of the night when she would be alone, she would be wakened by the roaring of motorcycles. This would be followed by staccato gunshots. In the morning, the radio would report another shootout, another holdup with homicide, and by and by, everyone would be calling to fill her with detail. As the landlady and her entourage retreat to the rear, she, on the other hand, lurches forward toward the front road.
She takes a sip, carries the cup outside. From the other yard, Aisa is coming in, a slab of wood in hand.
For me? Firewood?
The madame said if the snack house don’t pick up she’ll give you one of the formicas. I’m praying it won’t.
An impish grin widens the longish face.
She laughs.
The girl has been brought to the island by a poor relation, a nephew who introduced Aisa to the house as his woman. The thirtyish man himself, a polio case, had served the family and the now absent children. If she were to write down Aisa’s story, she would not know if the girl’s been abducted for marriage or raped, then courted to be one of the aunt’s househelps.
When I woke up, we were already lovers.
The girl is bent low, one hand trying on the saw.
I’ll do it. I’ll just finish this. Tea?
The saw is replaced on the ground and the girl rises to her feet. I’m a coffee girl and I happen to like the coffee here.
Fingers clawing air, the girl turns around, leaves.
As she crouches to pick up wood and saw, her phone rings, and she goes in again to take the call.
Bro, we’re on our way there, Coke and piyanggang manuk and bagfuls of junay and piyutu and siyanglag and everything fresh and warm. Just prepare the five-hundred refund as that’s for my boat ticket when you see me off tonight. Okay?
She switches off the phone cold with anxiety. There goes another long-distance runner.
She walks to the front gate, not throwing a glance at the tangled heap on the garage floor and half-expecting to see a cab brimming over with heads reared one on top of the other.
Like cactuses in a desert. Her glance falls on the corroded steel gate leaning against the side fence. It has been replaced by bars of timber nailed inches apart. Unlacing the iron chain tying the two sides together, she pulls the right handle open, kicking with her toes a stone that gets in its way. She hardly has time to understand gates. This one she always regarded as she would anything one passes but not worth looking back at to say thank you to. Tacked together without thought of workmanship or value, it might have been made especially for her. A woody contrivance of transparency, something her grandfather might have made himself. From her bed inside, she can see through the intervals of wood what goes on outside, and may see anything or anyone that slips by. Just as she can be seen by anyone from outside. Isn’t that next to an open-country policy?
She smirks. Right. Open-country, open-fire policy. She takes a woodcut and plants it against the bottom edge of the wooden scaffold, goes in. Noises from outside the hall rise as she is zipping her pants. Berkis and the portside fellas yelling her name, knocking on the window panes and shaking open the loosely latched bathroom door.
Uyy! Buhi pa kita duun?
She yells back, thumping the heel of her palm against the backside of the door.
Yari pa! Naglalanuh pag-intawan sin manusiyah!
She takes time to give the stain-speckled tile floor a good washing, the hubbub soon settling down into a familiar chatter, objects falling onto the floor, glasses clinking. The sound of wood cutting makes her peer out. Forks and knives and palms raised high, a leafy bouquet laid out on the long table, frosty cold Coke sweating inside glasses. She rubs knuckles and exchanges hugs, the portside girls endlessly gushing like they can’t quite see enough of her. The hammer’s blows making her blood jump, she pushes her way through a barricade of love slowing her down, bends over across the window to look.
Outside, Berkis is stooped over the ungainly piece.
You a heartless one. Why did you leave this poor old woman here crying unhelped?
