My grandmother once told me that my mother’s heart had been broken so many times that pieces of her soul had begun to flutter away like moths. She told me this the day that I saw my mother’s eyes turn hollow.
When I was a little girl in the Philippines, my mother would send me to the water pump at least three times a day, until the insides of my knuckles were blistered and cracked. I would never complain out loud, for fear of the bamboo switch, but I would shake my hands as if in great pain as soon as I placed the water pail by the door. Then, one afternoon when I was twelve, my mother picked up the empty pail herself and walked down the dirt path to the village pump. I watched her from the door. She pulled the lever up and down and stared out at the bay with a strange look in her eyes, like her sockets were empty. A group of children playing chase were running across the dirt clearing in the middle of the village, making clouds of dirt puff up around my mother’s tiny body, but she continued to stare out at the bay, without even saying a word to Marco, the boy with the deformed lip whom she always spoke to.
“Hola, Tita Maria! Hola!” Marco called. He loved my mother, as most people did, and because she always made a point to speak to him, he did the same. But today she didn’t speak. She didn’t seem to hear him.
When she finished, she carried the water pail back, still with that look, and quietly poured the water into the basin we used as a bathtub. Our house had only two rooms one with a secondhand bed for myself, Mama, my grandmother, and my older half-sister, Evangeline, and the other with a wood-burning oven, a table for us to eat, and a small space in the corner, which was where we put the basin at bath time.
“I don’t mind getting the water, Mama,” I said, in our dialect. I had minded, in fact, for a long time, but now that I saw her washing her olive shoulders with water she’d pumped herself, I would have paid two hundred pesos to fetch it for her.
She didn’t say anything. It was as if she forgot I was there, just like she forgot that I was supposed to fetch the water.
When my grandmother came home later that afternoon, with towels of blood for the basin, I told her about my mama’s hollow eyes and how she pumped the water herself.
“Do you think she’s mad at me, Impó?” I asked, as she lit a fire to heat up a kettle of water. My grandmother was a hilot a “midwife,” as Americans call it and she often came home with clothes and towels of blood. The first thing she would do when she got home was heat up the water so she could soak them.
“No, Consuelina,” she said.
“What’s wrong with her, then?”
“Tst-tst,” Impó muttered, waving her hand in the air. This meant that she was too busy to discuss things with me. She was preoccupied with soaking the towels. “Mámayâ.” Later.
Just before sunset, while the clean towels flapped in the wind, and while my mother went to town to buy fruit, Impó asked me to tell her more about my mother’s hollow eyes. We were sitting on a rock wall that had been built before I was born to protect our village from floods. The village had flooded many times since. (“If God wants to flood our village, no wall of any size could stop Him,” Impó said.) We sat next to each other on that wall just about every day, always at the same spot right above the pearly white stone, facing the blue waters of the bay, with our backs to the bamboo huts and straw roofs of our village. We had our own place. We had, even, our own language. Impo had been born in another village, so her dialect was dotted with words that were different from the ones I learned as a girl, but because she was my closest friend, I had picked up some of her native tongue. Our language reflected our historys -- hers, long and wearied, and mine, in its infancy.
When I finished telling her about my mother, she sighed.
“Do you think she just forgot that I’m supposed to fetch the water?” I asked.
She shook her head and looked at her hands. My grandmother often looked at her hands when she needed some sort of guidance. She believed that they had been blessed by God, and if so, then somewhere in the deep creases and gentle wrinkles of her tiny hands, there were answers to some of life’s most difficult questions.
“What’s wrong, then?” I asked.
She inhaled sharply. "Sometimes people dream too much. If you build up too many wishes, it weighs down your soul. And if your soul is weak, it will break. Your mother has a heart of glass.”
“What if the wishes that you make come true?”
“No one knows when their wishes come true. They are too busy making new ones.”
“But what about Evangeline? She has lots of wishes. Will her soul break, too?”
“Evangeline is young. She still has time to dream. And she wishes for things in the future, not things in the past. It is the past that ruins us.”
“I’ll never make a wish, then,” I said. “I don’t want my soul to fly away.” I clasped my hands tight against my breastbone to keep my soul inside.
“Good,” Impó said.
I looked out at the water. “Impó, who broke Mama’s heart so badly?”
“Your father,” she said, looking at her hands. “The American.”
I had asked Impó many times before to tell me about my father, but she said he was katakot-takot a man so terrible that he was surely not in the grace of God and not even worth mentioning. My mother never said a word about him, either. The only reason I knew he was American was because the other people in my village had called me mestisa “half-breed” ever since I was born.
They reminded me that I was mestisa, even though I looked like all the other Filipino girls and had been delivered by Impó, just as they had been. I had coarse black hair, soft olive skin, and eyes that rounded and slanted all at the same time. I had been born in the village, delivered by Impó like all the other children, but they would never let me forget my American blood. Impó said they were just jealous, but when they spoke of my American blood, they crinkled their noses and curled their lips, and I knew they were not envious, but disgusted.
When Impó mentioned my father, I said nothing. I wanted desperately to hear about the man who gave me my long, slender fingers and my ears that stuck out a little too much ¾ traits that I had searched for, but never found, in my Filipino relatives. I wanted a picture in my head when I thought of him, even if he turned out to be the devil himself.
My Impó didn’t speak for a while, and I was afraid to open my mouth, afraid that I would say something that would make her stop talking about him, but finally I had to speak.
“Tell me, Impó,” I said.
And she did.
*
God blesses every woman with something beautiful, Consuelina. For me, it was my hands. He blessed them and made me a hilot, so that they are the first thing that babies feel when they come into the world. Feel them, Consuelina. Aren’t they soft? They’re the softest hands you will ever feel. I pity those babies who are born in Manila or Cebu.
When I met your grandfather, he didn’t want to marry me until he felt my hands. I wasn’t beautiful, you see. But when he felt my hands, he said, “I will close my eyes and you will touch me.”
So, Consuelina, God gives us one great gift. Do you know what the two greatest misfortunes in life are? It’s when you don’t know what your gift is, or when you have so many gifts that they become a curse. Your sister Evangeline is like that. She is so beautiful and has so many gifts that she will be spoiled all her life, and she will begin to expect people to treat her like a queen. But one day she will realize she is not a queen. She is Evangeline Panganiban. And when that day comes, it will be like the touch of the devil. Do you understand?
Your mother was just the opposite. She was a girl who didn’t know what her gift was. You should have seen her, Consuelina. The first time my son Juan brought her to meet me, I wondered what he’d done. She stood with her chin to her collarbone afraid to even face a dog! And she walked with her arms wrapped around her waist, as if she had a rotten stomach.
“Why does she walk like this?” I asked Juan.
“Maria is a very modest woman,” he said.
Modest, he told me!
She wasn’t pretty, either. Your grandfather called her “kawali,” because he said that her face was as flat as a frying pan.
Even though she wasn’t beautiful and she was afraid even to face an aso, she was a good wife. She took care of my son Juan. I began to think that this was her gift taking care of my only child.
When your grandfather died, your mother comforted me, and she cried and carried on, even though he never liked her, and she knew it. It wasn’t pretend, either, Consuelina. It wasn’t like the time that Tita Camilla cried from her bed so loudly that she made all of us run to her room to see what was the matter. Your mother cried real tears.
And when Juan got sick with disease, she took care of him just as well as any American doctor would. She sat by his bed and fed him sopas and gamót. She would say her prayers, but never in front of him, because she didn’t want him to see her worry. She blistered her fingers making nets for the fishermen so she could earn enough pesos to buy medicine. All this time, little Evangeline was running around, too little to understand anything.
Juan died in two months, and your mother had barely cried any tears when she began to worry about me. She thought I would struggle with losing my son so shortly after losing my husband. But I have known loss all my life, Consuelina. My father was taken prisoner by the Japanese when he was only twenty-five and they tortured him for months before they killed him. He was a handsome and stately man, tall and pale for a Filipino, and he had loved my mother since he was a boy. When I was born, he was so proud of me that he took me all around the village to show everyone how beautiful I was. He bounced me on his knees and taught me how to fish. He told me about my blessed hands. At night he would kiss my forehead and pinch my nose. My father, my beautiful father, would be killed by men I will never know and after he was dead, they dumped his body in a dirt hole like he was a gutted fish. Two years later, I watched my mother’s soul rise to Heaven when she died of malaria. So you see, Consuelina, I have known loss.
Juan was a simple fisherman. He wasn’t a wealthy man. So when your mother was widowed, she had nothing. Nothing except an old and tired Impó and a two-year-old girl who cried more than both of us. I was never unhappy, but your mother prayed morning and night that she would find a better life for us. Your mother was a devout woman, a deeply Christian woman, and she felt peace in knowing that He would take care of her, that He would please her just as she had pleased Him all the years of her life.
Then, one afternoon, your Auntie Rosa wrote from Manila. Your mother could hardly sit still after she read the letter. Rosa said she had heard that Juan had passed away and she wondered if Maria wanted to stay with her in Manila for one month. Juan had been gone for months and months and we had never heard a word from Rosa. Until that day I never knew your mother had a sister.
Your mother had never been outside of the village and she certainly had never been to Manila. We had all heard stories about how the street signs can make you blind and how the women smoke cigarettes and paint their faces with American make-up. Manila was so far from our lives, it might as well be in Hell and some people thought it was.
Maria wasn’t just excited about visiting a big city. She thought it would be her chance to take care of us, even though she did already. I told her, “Maria, don’t worry. God will find a way. You don‘t have to go to Manila.” But she said that going to Manila was God’s way of taking care of us, because there were jobs there for men, women and children.
I was so afraid, Consuelina. I knew Manila was a sinful place and I knew your mother was a naïve and virtuous woman. But she kept saying that she had to go, she had to go, because she could gather up enough money so that we wouldn’t have to worry any more.
I have never known anyone like Maria. If she sees a weight on someone else’s shoulders, she will take it. Even if they don’t want her to bear their cross, she will. She feels like she is more deserving of suffering than anyone else. But that is a dangerous thing a very dangerous thing. It’s true that God gives grace to those who suffer for others. But if you keep take weight off other people’s shoulders, and keep taking and taking, soon your back will be so heavy that you will no longer be able to stand.
Your mother went off to Manila and she was gone only two weeks when she came back home. You should have seen her! She was holding a big suitcase made of real leather and she was wearing American clothes. Everyone gathered around her and wanted to touch her suitcase and smell her hair. But you know what, Consuelina? Even though she came back to the village like a big-city girl, she was still our Maria. She told me that she had found something more wonderful than any factory job: She had met an American businessman named David Oslo, and he was in love with her. Even though she still loved my son Juan, she said she had agreed to marry David Oslo and move with him to America. Rosa had given her one of her big suitcases so she could come home and pack what little she had. It would take months for her immigration papers to come through, but when they did, she would leave Manila right away for her new life in America. Then she would send for me and Evangeline.
“Imagine, iná!” she said. “Evangeline will be an American girl!”
I had never seen your mother smile so much, not even when she was with my Juan. She told me about David Oslo how he had more paper money than she had ever seen, and how he took her to fancy restaurants where she ate beef and drank wine. She told Tita Camilla and Tita Solyn about him, too. You should have seen Tita Camilla’s face. She has always thought of herself as beautiful, and I knew she was angry that this kawali was able to find an American businessman who wanted to marry her. Tita Camilla wasn’t the only one, though. Everyone was jealous of your mother. Even if they never liked Americans, they knew what a life in America meant and your mother, Maria Panganiban, one of the plainest women in the village, would be the first to go. She would drive cars and eat meat and watch television sets. And your silly old Impó and Evangeline would be there, too.
So she packed her big suitcase and left for Manila again. Everyone in the village told her goodbye and gave her kisses on the cheek because they knew they would never see her again. David Oslo would send for her in Manila, and then she would be off to America. Evangeline cried when your mother left again, but Maria leaned over, kissed her nose and said, “Next time you see me, little Vangie, we will be an American family.”
I didn’t expect to hear word from Maria for years, but on the night that I delivered Tita Gloria’s first baby, only four months later, she came back. I walked out of Tita Gloria’s house with my towels and with the sounds of a screaming infant at my back when I saw your mother standing there. It was very early morning, the sun had not yet risen, but I knew right away that it was your mother because I could see the outline of her arms, wrapped around her belly like she had a sour stomach, and I could see the big leather suitcase sitting at her feet.
“Maria?” I said. My beautiful hands were still wet with blood. “Maria?”
I walked closer and saw that she wasn’t wearing her big-city clothes anymore. She had on the white dress that I had sewn from a rice sacks years before. It was the dress she was wearing when she left for Manila the first time. She was looking down at the dirt. I asked her if she was sick.
Have you ever been so tired that it was hard for you to speak, Consuelina? Like the words are being pulled out of your throat with fishing wire? Well, that is how your mother sounded when she spoke.
“Iná,” she said, and she covered her face with her hands to cry. That is when I saw her swollen belly. I didn’t say a word to her, Consuelina. I didn’t know what to say. Instead I took her home. When I touched her belly to feel you move inside, she told me that she had been cursed. She had disgraced God, and now she would forever be shamed. I told her that God knew she was a good and virtuous woman and that He would forgive her, but your mother said she was out of His favor. The devil had come to her like he came to Eve, but instead of a snake, he was a man a man who promised America, but never came back for her.
It has been twelve years since she saw the American. He probably doesn’t even remember the girl with the kawali face. But he is still able to break her soul.
It is the past that ruins us, Consuelina, and now you know your past.
Kalimutan ang nakaraan.
And now you must forget.
*
When my grandmother finished the story, I asked her why Rosa wanted my mother to stay with her in Manila. This was the first I knew of my mother having a sister.
Impó said that Rosa was in the company of bad men, and they are the ones who wanted my mother to live in Manila. But my mother never made herself available to those Filipinos. Instead, she found my father.
Impó and I sat there quietly until the sky was dark and the mosquitoes began to nip at our legs. I watched the water push against the shore.
That night, when we went to bed, I turned away from my sister, mother, and Impó and waited until their breathing was steady and calm. The insects buzzed and chirped outside. The smells of that night’s fish was still in the air. Things were as they always were, but nothing was the same.
Once I knew that all of them were asleep, I turned on my back and looked at my mother. She was sleeping quietly, with her hair fanned under her head in great black waves. I saw her standing in the light of dawn with her packed suitcase and wondered if she had ever noticed my fingers or my ears.
I signed the cross.
“Santo Nino, I wish you could make me disappear,” I whispered, and I put both hands to my chest so my soul wouldn’t flutter away.
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