Dub opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it. BabyLu turned to me and said, ‘Julio Orenia. His name sounds like a proper rock star. And he’s coming here, to Puerto. Imagine this little place for a man of his reputation.’
Dub flushed. I looked back at BabyLu guiltily, searching for something to say. ‘I’ve never thought of Puerto as a little place,’ I said at last.
She stared at me for a moment and then unexpectedly she started to giggle. It was my turn to blush; seeing it, she laid a hand on mine and said, apologetically, ‘I guess I try to think of everywhere like a place in a book. That way I don’t miss it if I leave.’ My hand felt hot under hers and my skin prickled with the weight and softness of her touch. Dub glanced at her hand and then away again.
BabyLu got up and started to gather the plates together. I stood up to help. ‘Are you planning to leave?’ I said.
‘Sure, why not? Unless I find a reason to stay.’ She fixed her eyes on me as she said this, but I was sure it was only so that her eyes wouldn’t find Dub. I helped her carry the dishes through to the kitchen but BabyLu wouldn’t let me wash them, slapping my wrist lightly as if telling off a child. She walked back into the main room, where Dub was still sitting at the table. She handed him the sponge. ‘I’ll talk you through it,’ she said mischievously.
I stayed in the sala, browsing her collection of books, my thoughts punctuated by the splash of water, by their laughter. They took a long time to wash a few dishes. I became anxious to leave. When they emerged, they were still laughing. The front of Dub’s t-shirt was sodden. I said awkwardly, ‘Aunt Mary will be wondering.’ The sound of his mother’s name seemed to sober Dub suddenly; he’d had enough explaining to do before we even came up here, but now the street was dark and dinner at the boarding house would be over.
We waited by the door as BabyLu ran her fingers along the bookcase and pulled out the book I’d picked up when we first entered the flat. She held it out to me. ‘Dub can drop it back when you’re done,’ she said. Then, looking at him askance, she added, ‘That’s ok, isn’t it, Elvis?’
‘Sure,’ he said lightly.
She stayed in the passageway, half lit by the light from her apartment, till the elevator doors closed. ‘Jesus,’ said Dub as we were carried downwards, but it was all he said.
Out on Prosperidad I waited for him to retrieve his bike from inside the garage where earlier he’d locked it away, but he surprised me by starting towards the boarding house on foot. Perhaps he wanted to prolong the evening as much as possible, for he certainly walked leisurely, and of course while I walked beside him holding her book some connection to her remained. Whatever his reason, I was thrilled. Strolling along as his companion, comfortably silent together, I felt older, broader, more substantial.
As we came onto Esperanza a gold Mercedes rolled down the hill from the direction of Salinas. I watched as it slowed down and turned onto Prosperidad. In the back, his face in profile, was Eddie Casama. He stared blankly ahead, oblivious to life on the street. The Mercedes pulled up in front of BabyLu’s building. Eddie, I thought and the thought was like ice. I looked back towards the apartment and she was there on the balcony watching us, watching Dub, walk away. I thought about all of the food we’d just eaten. Because of us, however briefly, Eddie Casama would once again, after so many years, face an empty plate. I quickened my step, quelling an urge to tug at Dub’s arm, and he laughed softly at me, at my impatience.
Girl under a Yellow Bell Tree
Without warning, Aunt Mary was summoned to Manila by her mother. It wasn’t unusual for Lola Lovely to make sudden demands on her daughter but Aunt Mary seemed more preoccupied than she might ordinarily have been before the trip. She was nervous of ferries anyway, refusing to travel by some passenger lines altogether or to travel at night. She left early, breakfasting soon after dawn, eating little. I heard her reminding America for at least the third time, as they settled themselves into the taxi, to make sure the boys ate.
America was to accompany Aunt Mary only as far as the jetty, where she planned to buy grouper and baby squid fresh off the boats. She preferred to run her errands early, before the sun grew strong enough to bring out her rash. With Aunt Mary gone, I knew she’d take her time returning. I’d noticed how she tired more quickly these days and had started leaving more of the work to me. The walls of the house seemed, she said, to want to close in on her, a feeling that only dissipated when she was outside. In the past month I’d come in more than once to find her in the yard, staring up at the sky. I didn’t mind if she wanted to stay out; there wasn’t that much to do. At dinner the evening before, our only guest had announced his plans to explore the backcountry for a few days on one of Earl’s hire bikes. The boys weren’t around either; Benny was at school and Dub had left early for the garage. So it wasn’t far into the morning when I found myself completely alone.
I enjoyed the times when I had the house to myself; it was such a rare sensation of stillness and one that had been unknown to me before I arrived at the Bougainvillea. Even if the day was hot, if I found myself there alone I would shut the sala windows to dull the street noise and lower the blinds halfway so that the room yellowed. And then I’d sit at the piano stool and wait as every object around me, with nothing to intrude upon it, nothing to compress it back down, seemed to swell before my eyes until it occupied its space more fully.
For a long while I pretended the house was mine, that I’d just bought it, and I surveyed the downstairs rooms as if deciding which furnishings, which colours would change; how I might rearrange things. When that game became a slightly bitter pleasure, I pretended instead to be a guest, newly arrived and soon to depart. And when finally I tired even of that, I took to inspecting the contents of Aunt Mary’s bookcases and then, more boldly, leafing through the family photograph albums that she kept in the sala.
There were two shelves of albums, containing generations of the Morelos and Lopez families: Uncle Bobby and Aunt Mary as a young couple, his hand at her elbow steering her to face the camera; Aunt Mary in school uniform playing jacks in the garden, the sun bright on her head; the boys as babies; and many more pictures of long-dead, un-named relations. In some of the images, landmarks of Puerto could be seen that, though old and much changed, were still recognisable: the passenger jetty, the basilica, the gates of the naval college. Over the years, I had looked through every album. I was fascinated by the pictures, returning to them again and again. There were so many. I possessed only one photograph, which was of my mother. And, like me, America also had only one, a group portrait of her family in the village, which she kept with her at all times, though she appeared in Aunt Mary’s albums at least every few pages, usually with the boys as children. I hadn’t thought so much about history, or heredity, till I came to the boarding house and first encountered these albums. I knew of course that everyone had to come from somewhere, that everyone had ancestors, yet the power of these photographs, the solidity they conferred, was undeniable. Aunt Mary, occupying her own place in this photographic lineage, could never have doubted she was somebody. It was a guilty pastime. I felt almost as if I were eavesdropping, as if I’d pressed my ear to the door of the past, but to someone else’s past, not my own.
There was one picture in particular that I sought out now, which unlike the others remained unmounted, having been slipped into the back sleeve of one of the albums, as if it were not for display yet couldn’t be discarded. I had found it quite by chance when I dropped the album at some slight noise, noticing as I picked it up again the protruding corner of the photograph and the slight ridge it made under the sleeve’s fabric. Each photograph, like everything in Aunt Mary’s house, had its place. Every album, every section, was dated. Many pictures were captioned: Bobby and I in Singapore; Mom and Aunt Elvie; Graduation; The De Souzas, London, 1972; Niagara! The exclusion of this picture meant that I couldn’t work out when it might have been taken, or whether it was someone Aunt Mary or Uncle Bobby had known when they were young, before even the boys came along. I imagined that I would come across the place left for it as I carried on looking, that I would restore it to its title: Girl under a yellow bell tree. It was an excuse, of course, to look.