I turned to leave. Across the street, Abnor hooked a stool out with his foot and started wiping down a cup with a rag. He set the cup down firmly. I started over to him. He’d poured out a tea for me before I’d even reached his corner. Winking, he stirred in an extra spoonful of sugar and handed me the cup. I wasn’t used to sweet tea anymore — Aunt Mary preferred it made without — but I took the cup without hesitation. Abnor never let me pay so I tried not to drink his tea too often, which was a shame because I enjoyed sitting here.
Abnor had roots in the same village as America and they flirted affably whenever they met. For no other reason than that, I trusted him. Abnor’s tea-stall had got all of his younger siblings through school, two through college, and then married. They were long since grown and gone but still Abnor stayed put, sleeping under the wooden wings of his stall in all weathers until Primo put down a folding bed for him in his store room. Now every evening after closing up shop, the two of them sat side by side on Abnor’s wooden stools, sharing tea and cigarettes and watching the street like a television.
Today, Primo’s doorway was still open, the windows unshuttered. A group of men and women stood at the threshold, more sat on the floor inside the store. I heard the brusque, urgent music of a news programme. Primo leaned back against the glass of his shopfront, blowing on his tea.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
Abnor raised an eyebrow. ‘The Pope’s been shot. He’s in hospital. It’s been all over the news.’ He crossed himself. Behind him, Primo fiddled with the cross around his neck.
I cast a glance across the street at Johnny, said apologetically, ‘Aunt Mary’s not so keen on TV. It’s sometimes on for the guests in the evening, but we’ve been quiet.’ I stood up and craned to see the screen. The Filipino anchorman, a fair-skinned mestizo, sounded almost American. He looked nothing like any of the people who had gathered to watch. The footage was a few months old: on a tour of the country earlier in the year, Pope John Paul II reminded the sea of people who had come to see him not to use contraception.
‘It’s a bad thing,’ Abnor said, ‘the way the world is.’ He shrugged.
I sat down again, sipped my tea. I looked more closely at the people clustered in the doorway, grief painted on their faces, a grief that seemed scenic somehow, distant, because I didn’t feel it. The Pope being shot, like most things, seemed like a matter for everyone else but me. Abnor watched me. I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘They think he’ll be all right, though?’
‘It’s up to Him,’ Abnor said. He pointed up at the sky and despite myself I looked up. ‘At least he’s in His good books.’
‘You hear about the salon?’ I said.
Abnor’s voice dropped and he frowned as he intoned like a movie hero, ‘A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.’ He jabbed the air with a finger like he was conducting an orchestra, emphasising alternate syllables.
‘Man,’ said Primo quietly.
Abnor leaned in to me. ‘Martin Luther King!’ The two men laughed softly. I glanced guiltily across the street at Johnny. His head was back in his book of quotations. The sight of it made me smile suddenly, but only because the incline of the pages was in the same plane as his quiff. It would have made a good photograph. Abnor patted me on the shoulder.
From out back, a cockerel started up a ragged call. ‘I’m going to eat that bird some day soon,’ Abnor said. Primo kept a fighting cock in the yard behind the store. It had lived with him in his apartment until the neighbours complained about its noise. He crooned a soft pocking noise deep in his throat. The cockerel quieted. ‘That bird’s like having a wife,’ Abnor muttered. ‘Always wanting to talk.’
He took the cup from my hand, filled it again. He reached for the sugar. From inside the store, the news channel jingle came on again. The people at the doorway started to disperse and, as they passed, one of them bumped Abnor’s shoulder. ‘Oy,’ he muttered crossly as a shower of sugar crystals scattered over the rim of the cup, bouncing off the counter of his stall like raindrops. I watched him gather them together with the side of his hand, sweep them into his palm. And I remembered then, quite unexpectedly, the only time I’d ever seen Aunt Mary angry. Over dinner at the boarding house one evening, during the Pope’s visit back in February, she’d raged about the First Lady’s decision to build a wall in Manila along the route of the Papal motorcade to hide the slums. In her agitation, she’d knocked the rice spoon out of my hand as I served her. I went to fetch a dustpan and came back to find her picking the tiny grains of rice one by one from the pile of the rug with her fingertips, her other palm cupped to receive them.
‘God loves the poor,’ I murmured, testing the words. It was something Mulrooney often said in church. But coming out of my mouth, it sounded phoney. Abnor glanced at me curiously. He put the refilled cup in my hand. I looked down at it. I pictured the Greenhills children, sweeping the market for discarded fruit as the traders packed their stalls away, plucking snails from crevices. I lifted the cup to my mouth but didn’t take a sip, instead studying the two men over its rim. Abnor’s eyes were milkier than I remembered. Primo dressed like someone much younger than his years but, close up, the gap between him and Abnor diminished. It wasn’t just the effect of age, I thought. They both wore a kind of contentment which, now that I considered it, might just as easily have been resignation. The thought was so abruptly dispiriting that, though the tea was still hot, I drained my cup, burning my throat.
As I stood up to leave, Abnor said, as I knew he would because he’d said it innumerable times before, ‘Say Hi to my girlfriend.’
Halo-Halo Special
When Aunt Mary returned to the Bougainvillea, she brought her mother with her. I hadn’t seen Lola Lovely for three years. Twice a year, she summoned her daughter, and sometimes the boys, to Manila, rather than manage the journey to Puerto. It wasn’t a long trip, but Lola Lovely liked things to be a certain way and so tended to avoid travelling. She was in her late sixties, but she barely looked her age and she flirted in a desultory fashion with the taxi driver as he hauled her luggage out of the trunk. She looked over the façade of the Bougainvillea, pursed her lips at the boarding-house sign. Behind her, Aunt Mary’s demeanour was cool and I wondered if Lola Lovely had kept at her for most of the way with her demands: ‘Adjust this cushion, fetch a drink, call the steward.’
Lola Lovely lived by herself in Manila. The house was hers, left to her when Judge Lopez died; most of the rest of his estate went to Aunt Mary, who was courting but not married then. The Manila house was modern and much larger than the Bougainvillea — too large really for Lola Lovely, even with her maid and the houseboy, the only staff she was unwilling to do without. It had been designed by an architect who was an old family friend, a fraternity brother of the judge. I’d never seen it but had heard about its big spaces, the skylights that cut blocks of light over marble floors, the waterfall that no longer cascaded in the lobby. Lola Lovely chose to stay there after Mary and Uncle Bobby were married. She loved the arts, couldn’t bear to be too far from the pulse, she’d once said. The proper upkeep of her beloved home would have been covered by her allowance from the Lopez lands if Uncle Bobby hadn’t developed a passion, if not a talent, for poker. Still, Lola Lovely clung to the house, managing as best she could with the remainder of her inheritance. But each time Aunt Mary returned from seeing her, I’d hear her listing to America the latest signs of decay.