The Bamboo Stalk (8 page)

Her smile faded.

‘What's wrong with him, looking at me like that?' she asked.

Uncle Pedro wrapped his arms around her and Aunt Aida took her hand. ‘Sit down, first sit down, Josephine,' my aunt said. My mother's face changed.

‘What's going on here?' she asked.

Slobber was pouring from Adrian's open mouth. My mother clasped her hand to her mouth and sat down between her sister and her brother.

Aunt Aida began to explain, stumbling for words. Uncle Pedro joined in, also explaining. My mother's face was frozen and only her eyebrows showed signs of her anguish. She burst into tears. She went to Adrian and hugged him tight but he pushed her away. She turned to Aunt Aida, her eyes throwing sparks, and began to insult her between sobs. ‘You bitch, you bitch!' she said.

She raised her arm and brought it down on Aida's face.

‘What kind of future can my son expect now, all because of you,' she shouted, slapping Aida around the face. Aida stood up but she didn't try to push her away or protect her face with her arms.

‘I wish I hadn't come back,' said my mother. ‘Why do all these things happen to me?'

My mother went on hitting Aida, while I put my hands over my face, the sound of the slaps ringing in my ears.

‘I wish I hadn't come back, I wish I hadn't come back,' she continued.

Then she stopped slapping her sister and hugged her tight. Aida burst out crying too.

‘Josephine! Enough,' said Uncle Pedro, pushing my mother towards my room.

It was the first time I had seen Aunt Aida cry.

Something inside me told me that no one but I deserved all those slaps. Although it was Aida's face that received them, I could feel the sting of them.

My mother spent a week crying over Adrian. Once she had exhausted all her sadness and all her reserves of tears, she called everyone into the sitting room. She sat on the ground with her suitcase open in front of her and gave out the presents she had brought from Bahrain for the members of the family, as if nothing had happened.

I wonder if she believed that what happened to Adrian happened for a reason, and for some purpose.

 

12

In one of her letters from Bahrain, my mother said she wanted to swim across the sea to Kuwait to meet my father or at least find out what had happened to him after the war. She didn't know that all she needed to do was come home to the Philippines and find out there.

One night in 1996, or about a year after my mother came back from Bahrain, I was lying on the sofa in the sitting room of our little house, after an exhausting day at work with my grandfather. Aunt Aida and Merla were watching television and my mother was with Adrian in my room because there was a power cut at her husband's house. Suddenly we heard Uncle Pedro calling ‘Aida, Aida!' from outside. He opened the door and, clearly bursting to share some news, he asked, ‘Where's Josephine? I went to her house and there was no one there.'

Aida pointed to the door of my room. ‘She's in José's room,' she said. ‘What's up?' Without answering, Pedro headed off to my room. My curiosity was aroused and I followed him.

When Pedro opened the door, letting light into the dark room, my mother put a finger to her lips. ‘Shhh,' she said. ‘Don't wake up the boy. I'll come and join you in a minute.'

In the small sitting room my mother sat down between Aida and Merla, while I stood next to Pedro.

‘I delivered some goods to a company today,' he said.

Mother looked at his face with interest, her eyes half-closed.

‘The company belongs to a Kuwaiti businessman,' Pedro continued.

Now her eyes opened wide. ‘Go on. And then what?' she said.

‘One of the staff said the man's well-known in Kuwait,' he continued, looking Mother straight in the face.

Mother stared back. ‘A writer, a novelist, or something like that,' Pedro added.

Mother stood up straight. ‘Do you think . . .?' she said.

*   *   *

Since my father had been writing for a Kuwaiti newspaper, my mother hoped it might be possible to get some information from this man, something that would lead her to him, or maybe she hoped that the man himself would turn out to be Rashid.

Pedro decided to take my mother to see the man the next day to ask him if he had heard of my father or if he could help us reach him or find out what had become of him.

My mother didn't sleep that night. She woke me up early in the morning and asked me to get changed and join her with Uncle Pedro.

‘What's a Kuwaiti businessman doing in the Philippines?' my mother asked Pedro while we were on our way to meet the man.

‘The people who work there say he's been living here for five years. But that's none of our business,' said Pedro.

At the man's office one of the staff told us he was away in Bahrain.

‘Will he be staying there long?' Pedro asked.

‘Two weeks at the most,' the man said. ‘He has a play on
there.'

Uncle Pedro turned to my mother and said, ‘Well our little play here seems to be over.'

Mother turned to me and said, ‘The man's in Bahrain.'

She paused a moment, then continued, ‘He was here when I was in Bahrain, and today he's in Bahrain and I'm here.'

We went back to the car. My mother was speaking to herself: ‘Everything happens for a reason, and for some purpose.'

She opened the car door and sat in the seat. ‘I'd very much like to meet this man,' she said.

We went back later in the hope of meeting the Kuwaiti man when he was back from his trip. My mother pinned many hopes on meeting him. ‘He's bound to know Rashid,' she said. ‘Or perhaps he knows at least how we can get in touch with him. Fate has something in store for us.'

When we were almost home, in the narrow lane leading to Mendoza's land, Uncle Pedro stopped his truck to make way for a vehicle that had just come out.

When we asked Mendoza about the vehicle, he beamed with delight. ‘Those guys were representatives from Smart Communications,' he said, taking a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘I've just signed a contract with them. They're renting six square metres of the land to set up a relay tower. They're going to pay rent every month.'

My mother looked away from Mendoza and waved her hand dismissively. ‘A cockerel every month, more likely,' she said.

 

13

I really loved the piece of land I grew up on. I spent so much time alone there, looking at the things around me, that sometimes I thought I myself was one of the trees that grew there. I didn't rule out the possibility that my head might sprout leaves or that mangoes might grow behind my ears, or that if I lifted my arms a bunch of bananas would appear under my armpits. Sometimes I imagined myself as a humble pebble on the same piece of land. It might shift position, it might be buried by sand and then the rain might uncover it, but it would stay there, never crossing the bamboo fence that surrounded the land. I loved the green, the colour of life, with all its shades, and in the end I sometimes thought it was the only colour in the universe. And yet, though I loved the green on Mendoza's land, I hated Mendoza.

Even the land wasn't spared his greed. He destroyed the only thing of beauty I thought he had created. Despite his greed, there was one thing that had made me see him in a more favourable light – his interest in the land, the trees, his dog Whitey and his gang of cocks. I respected his interest in natural things, even if he didn't himself take the trouble to look after them. Instead his interest took the form of giving me orders to look after them for him. But when he agreed to let them put up that monstrosity of a tower on the land that I loved, crowding out the trees, I could no longer believe there was a good side to his character.

Often, mostly at night, I would lean my back against the trunk of the biggest tree on Mendoza's land, with a piece of flat land stretched out in front of me towards Inang Choleng's house. I would watch everything around me, except for the old woman's house in case the bee in my head stirred and started buzzing again. In that space I had another life. I would sit on the damp ground. The place would be shrouded in darkness, except for the light that slipped through from the windows of the four houses arranged around me – our house, Mendoza's house, Uncle Pedro's house and Inang Choleng's house.

The frogs croaking, the crickets chirping, Whitey barking and the other dogs in the neighbourhood barking back, and other noises I couldn't identify. The noises, coupled with the smell of the earth, would make me want to stay longer. If my mother couldn't find me at night before she went back to Alberto's house, she knew I would be sitting under my usual tree. She would open the window and shout, ‘José! Come on! Come inside!' I would stand up and head back, with a feeling that the trees were bending their branches behind me and trying to grab me. The croaking of the frogs and the buzzing of the insects grew louder, and I sometimes imagined that among all the noises something was calling my name. The weeds caught my feet and made it hard to walk. I wasn't afraid of leaving these things behind me because I knew I would soon meet them again. By sunset the next day I would have prepared myself to meet my friends again.

As soon as I was home, Aida would comment, ‘Ah, the Lord Buddha's back.'

I don't know why Mother would be upset that I was sitting under the trees. Perhaps she was worried I would strike roots so deep into the ground that I would never go back to my father's country. But even roots don't mean much sometimes.

I was more like a bamboo plant, which doesn't belong anywhere in particular. You can cut off a piece of the stalk and plant it without roots in any piece of ground. Before long the stalk sprouts new roots and starts to grow again in the new ground, with no past, no memory. It doesn't notice that people have different names for it –
kawayan
in the Philippines,
khaizuran
in Kuwait, and bamboo in many places.

Once the relay tower had been put up in the clearing in front of my favourite tree, I began to sit cross-legged on the ground facing in the opposite direction – with my back to the tower and facing the tree trunk. Although I was in a different position, the same sounds still found their way to my ears.

 

14

One morning, about ten days after the relay tower went up on Mendoza's land, I was in my room when I heard Uncle Pedro honking the horn of his truck outside. I opened the window and shouted, ‘Need any help, Uncle?' He gestured for me to come out.

My mother was sitting in the seat next to him. She opened the door and my little brother stepped down. ‘José, take Adrian to Aida and you come back and come with us,' she said.

Off we went to the office of the Kuwaiti businessman.

‘He's not coming today. You can come back tomorrow,' one of the staff told Uncle Pedro, but my mother insisted on meeting the man. The worker turned to a colleague and didn't say anything. His colleague picked up the phone and made a call. ‘You can visit him at home at this address,' she said, writing it out on a piece of paper. ‘If it's really so important.'

Uncle Pedro pulled up in front of a simple house, not much different from the one we lived in. ‘Are you sure of the address?' my mother asked.

Pedro pointed towards the door of the truck. ‘Go and check for yourself,' he said.

‘This couldn't possibly be a Kuwaiti's house, Pedro,' she said.

Pedro didn't answer. She opened the door and turned to me. ‘Come along, José,' she said.

I followed her while Pedro stayed in the truck waiting for us. Mother knocked on the door. We didn't have to wait long. ‘Welcome, come in,' the man said in English.

He was a man in his forties. He seemed simple, perhaps compared with the image that went with Pedro's description of him as a Kuwaiti businessman. He was of medium height, thin, greying a little on the temples, calm-looking, and with a distinctive pointed moustache that drooped on the sides of his mouth, and black eyebrows that seemed to be thicker than they should be.

In his little sitting room, which was full of books, he asked us to sit in front of a small desk covered in papers and well-sharpened pencils.

‘My name is Ismail,' he said, sitting behind the desk. I later found out that he was the Kuwaiti writer Ismail Fahd Ismail, who lived in the Philippines for six years after the liberation of Kuwait.

‘I'm Josephine, sir,' said Mother.

Then she pointed at me. ‘And this is Isa, my . . .'

‘José!' I said, interrupting her.

‘José. My son,' mother said, correcting herself.

‘Pleased to meet you,' the man said with a smile, then paused, waiting for my mother to speak.

‘Sir,' she said. ‘I want to ask you about a man.'

The man's calm face showed signs of interest. ‘I thought you needed a job!' he said.

‘What I need is more important, sir,' she said.

The man nodded, encouraging her to continue.

‘Sir, do you know a Kuwaiti man called Rashid?'

He gave a gentle smile. ‘Thousands of Kuwaitis have this name,' he said.

‘Rashid al-Tarouf, sir,' said my mother, more specifically.

The man raised an eyebrow.

‘A writer,' my mother continued, ‘who lives in . . .'

‘Qortuba?' the man interjected.

‘Yes, yes, sir,' said my mother in surprise.

There was silence for a few seconds.

‘Do you know him, sir? Please.'

The man nodded.

‘Do you know him personally?' she asked.

The man kept nodding and my mother went on talking. ‘I used to work in his mother's house in Kuwait. We haven't had any news of him since the war.'

The man looked calm again.

‘Do you know what's happened to him? Where is he now, sir?'