Sheilfa B. Alojamiento
She said marriage is a trap. Comfortable at first, but after a while, you’d get numb dumb from the repetitiousness of it. She just turned 50. I recall how, when we were both in our twenties, we already had a thousand reviews that went like that.
And him. I do remember him. A younger him, maybe, but older already, having walked through hell as a construction worker in KSA, jobless at some point and had to convert to Islam, then found succor in the hands of tougher women whom he had to repay with love and sex and respect despite himself. That was the working-class credentials that made her choose him over the middle-class doctor-suitors she knew.
She said what he wanted from her was a son. He said to her he was not getting any younger, and so was she. But at the time they were seeing each other, she was not yet finished with her internship, so she made sure she would not get pregnant. I had by then shipped my own ersatz daughter to my sister’s in-laws in La Union. It kind of irked me when she said, You will feel something after all.
Feel what?
If you bled when you should be gestating?
Gestating oh my God. But I kept quiet. I was thinking, she will marry. She will have a son and I just lost a daughter, and she’s going with him. She will go to Saudi Arabia and they will make a lot of money and I will have no one.
Then he came over. That was the first time I saw him. Also, the first time I saw them together. He was handsome and kind in an unburdened and uncommitted way and he never tried talking to me. Just smiled politely and uncondescendingly. It puzzled me somewhat. Like, did he know it was my friend he was taking from me? For he didn’t seem aware of it. Like he wasn’t the taker. But there he was, as if he was just there to take her out to the park or to a movie downtown, nothing to it that would hurt nobody, only that it was something good to do since he never thought of it before and never had the opportunity.
A couple of years later, she did give him a son. The boy was her replica. I was kind of distraught. I have this idea that when men ask for a son, it’s because they want something to look like them that would reflect them. Something they can mark out as theirs that would proclaim their progeny long after they are dead. A genetic conceit, could be, and with him you can understand that: he is good-looking and a kind man besides. She wasn’t bad-looking either, just a little fat and shapeless, as though whoever made her made sure that no bones jutted out. And that’s what she gave him: more of her.
We used to joke a lot about couples we knew. Friends we saw who married beneath them. What happened to her? She got lonely? Couldn’t find another? But now there was no joke. For he wasn’t so bad though neither a doctor nor a poet nor an intellectual. Now I couldn’t say to her, What went wrong? You panicked?
I gathered that the three of them, and especially father and son, get along fine. Like they’re friends, buddies, now that they’re all grown-up. So, I said to her, It happens everywhere, you should not take it against yourself or against anyone.
Then they showed up in my house. God, they looked awful. A neighbor said a red car was around looking for me. I was in Green Meadows then, in this house, a spacious airy house with light furniture and a low makeshift shelf full of books. She must have noticed that when she got inside: no lumpy couches that bumped against one’s knees, no JVC, no coffeemaker no dining set no fancy paintings decking the walls.
They sat there on the big rattan chair. I could see that the two of them were having a little quarrel, like the husband had been commandeered against his wishes to drive, from downtown Davao to outskirt Mintal just to look for this crazy friend from way back in his wife’s youth. He didn’t even try to hide his resentment at getting seated there in that poor rattan chair which by his standards must be nothing but ragtag poor, including the uncurtained jalousies and the sagging bamboo gate that greeted them outside.
I suppose I wasn’t so welcoming either. I don’t even remember hugging her, which was our way, always hugging, and I didn’t even offer them a drink, not even biscuits, as there was none, just water and more water inside the nice tall Condura fridge which I bought for eight a year and a half back but would be carted off by a neighbor friend for two by and by in several months’ installments. What I can remember saying was how the two of them were growing thick in the middle and he didn’t even respond to that, not with a smirk or a glance up at me, and she didn’t return the compliment by saying how consumptive sick I looked, just laughed a little and said, Yes, it’s the iced tea. I had to smile a bit at the reminder, for it was an addiction she had passed on to me for a little while.
Then she went over to the refrigerator. She stood there and opened it like it belonged to her, the way she used to when we shared a house and a kitchen, standing back and looking down without even bending a little, because there was nothing inside except bottles and bottles of cold water. And then she turned to me saying could I go with them or could I see her, was it the day after, say at Victoria Plaza or was it to visit her in her Mom’s house in Marawi, and I don’t remember if the husband excused himself and went to the waiting car outside as we talked, but she managed to quip in one thing or another, that he wanted to go to his friends, college pals he roomed with when he was a college boy at UM, friends from his bachelor days to drink and party with or have a reunion, and she kind of dragged him in another direction that spoiled all his joys.
I felt sorry. Suddenly, now that she was taking leave, I wanted her to stay. But I just nodded. Maybe because I could see that the two of them were really harried and were on their way elsewhere and her Mommy and some of both families were downtown waiting with the little son, and so we said goodbye. But I was thinking, why didn’t she take the jeep why didn’t she drive she could have brought with her the son and the yaya. Then I remembered they didn’t allow women to drive cars in KSA and I thought, but they’re in the Philippines now why enforce a physical closeness with another fellow when the two of you thought differently why force oneself into a physical dependence on one who perhaps did not have a strong need to be needed to fix the door to drive the car and look after folks and such.
Oh. I was just jealous. Petro-dollars, a six-digit salary on top of a second-hand dream red car from a carnapper in Marawi, perhaps a drug dealer, and that knot of family and friends surrounding her admiring her. I recalled though that just sometime back she was messaging me and cussing her husband, calling him imbecile, cussing the mutawas, the Islamic police in KSA, where you could not go out alone, where there was nothing that you could do outside your house that would not mark you as a prostitute. Notes from hell, I called them, to a deeper hell where at the time of her visit I didn’t want to show her the cracks of, but I could bet she saw it in the empty cold crypt of an unransacked refrigerator.
After she moved to another country, or to two other countries, she wasn’t so angry anymore. No more Islamic police to bedevil her, and so she kind of regained composure. And then she started self-analyzing again, post-morteming her husband, our friends, anyone she found fault with. But I wasn’t sure anymore. It might have been my own unvented anger I was projecting on her all along. For we had parted ways for a long time, and not just she and I; there were ugly fights here and there, between family and between erstwhile comrades and friends. You could say we’d stopped following each other now to know where the other was, geographically, politically.
I have had so many other thoughts since I last thought of her. Found other friends. Loves big and small. Some with hells so much vaster than mine, and some dying there, unhelped, as mostly, mostly, I wasn’t there, too.