America set to making batches of food full of iron or calcium or protein, whatever she’d decided a new mother needed most that particular day. Fried sardines, chickpea curry, soybeans or rice cakes heavy with anise to help Lorna make milk. If Aunt Mary knew of the few extra groceries that were diverted in this way, she never complained. I wondered at the time why they would want to do all of this for Lorna, or even for my father. Now I understand that at least a little of it was for me.
I helped America silently at first but found my voice again soon enough; America’s cooking had a rhythm to it that felt right and it pulled me out of myself. When she decided I didn’t need to be handled gently any more, she stopped her cooking and supervised me making a fig and black molasses cake, partly for Lorna but enough for the rest of us too, snapping her instructions like a colonel, her voice losing the softness of the preceding few days. ‘Mix that like you mean business,’ she said as I turned the flour and eggs together. ‘It’s not made of diamonds.’
‘Diamonds are the hardest thing in the world. Nothing like mixing a sponge,’ I said, testing her.
‘Don’t get clever with me. Your reading better get you further than this kitchen if you’re going to feel free to talk to me like that.’ She picked up the tin of molasses and put it down again roughly. Not so roughly that I’d figure she was really cross, just roughly enough that I’d think twice about contradicting her again. I smiled to myself.
‘Haven’t seen much of Benny lately,’ I said.
I’d said it just to make conversation, but now America glared at me. ‘Stop fishing,’ she said curtly. I looked at her, surprised, noticing as I did so how weary she looked this morning, her rash bright across her cheeks. My attention had been inward these last few days and I felt ashamed of it all of a sudden. For now that I thought about it, America had seemed really distracted this last week too, and it occurred to me that perhaps she’d cooked such a lot as a kind of solace. I recalled that I’d come into the kitchen the day after the birth to see her and Benny sitting together at the table as if they’d been talking. They’d fallen quiet as soon as I walked in. America had got up sharply and sent me off to fetch shrimp paste, though I was sure there was an open jar in the Frigidaire. When I got back, Benny had gone. America left the jar I brought on the kitchen table for a couple of hours before putting it back on the pantry shelf.
She watched me now, warily. I turned the cake mixture more firmly, as if doing so might appease her. ‘You think the sun moves around you?’ she said.
‘The sun, the moon, the stars,’ I said lightly and pushed the mixture round so fast that some spattered onto the table.
‘Watch it! That cake’s got to fill eight people.’ I stirred more carefully. ‘Why don’t you just ask him?’ she said suddenly.
I stopped stirring. ‘You think I could?’
‘He’ll tell you if he wants to. It’s his own business. Jesus, Joseph, you’re such a baby. You don’t need my permission to talk to him.’
I stared at her. ‘You get mad at me if I do anything without checking with you first.’ I expected her to respond to this with a crack about how men needed to be told how to wipe their own noses.
Instead, she said softly, ‘You’ll do just fine.’ She didn’t give me a chance to ask her what I’d do just fine with, but opened the molasses tin, thrust it at me and said, haughtily, ‘You may pour.’
When the sponge was ready, she cut a big slice for me to take up to Benny.
He didn’t answer straight away when I knocked, though I knew he was in because I could hear music. Then he said, ‘Door’s open, Joe.’ I wondered stupidly how he knew it was me, even though I knew the difference too between his footsteps and anyone else’s.
He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his sketchbook across his knees, a packet of Marlboro by his feet. I took in the cigarettes, glancing up at him, surprised. He stared back and I looked away. I stayed just inside the door.
Benny’s room was at the front of the house. It was broad and often filled with sun and so gave the impression that the doors and windows were wide open even when they were not. It opened onto a wooden balcony that overlooked a corner of the garden in which, in the old days, a poultry house had stood. The walls of his room were papered with his own work. Sketches of Esperanza: Johnny Five Course’s stall; Cora grinding coffee, her eyes glinting over her glasses at the artist; Ignacio decorating pastry, looking like he was humming while he worked; Dub’s motorbike and on the same sheet of paper the wolf’s head on the back of his jacket. On the wall above Benny’s desk, taped over what might have been pictures of the jetty, were several portraits of the girl under the yellow bell tree. I moved forward to take a closer look. In a couple of them she seemed different; she was smiling. I turned back to him. He’d been watching me and now I saw his face darken like a monsoon sky. ‘Get lost,’ he said, coldly.
As I left, the door was bolted behind me. I looked down. I was still holding the plate, the dark wedge of sponge upon it still warm and fragrant. I turned back and though I knocked more than once, he didn’t reply. The music grew louder, something angry, reminiscent of Dub’s punk. I looked again at the plate in my hand. I heard something shift inside the room and the door shuddered as if someone had sat down suddenly against it. I left the plate on the hall table, setting it down noisily so that he might know it was there, though it didn’t seem likely he’d hear it.
When I first arrived at the Bougainvillea, I slept on a mat next to America in the kitchen as the previous houseboy had done. But after a while Aunt Mary set me the task of clearing out the old pantry at the back of the house so that America might have some privacy. However, America, used to the open nipa huts of her village, refused to sleep in it, preferring the broader space of the kitchen, and so the room came to me.
My room could only be reached through the kitchen. It had a window, but it fell under the shade of trees and so remained dark and cool most of the day. It was smalclass="underline" if I sat on my bedding with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out, the span of them took up more than half of its width. Nonetheless it was mine. Apart from my bedding, I had a small bookcase and a chair and table where I read whatever I found. I did my schoolwork at the kitchen table or in the dining room after the household had eaten and the boys were in their rooms but, when I read for myself, I preferred the quiet of my room where I could create a world entirely in my head without the intrusion of America’s singing or the carriage clock’s rigid division of the evening.
Above the table, I’d taped to the wall a photograph of me as a boy of perhaps two or three with my mother. In it, my mother squinted under a bright sun while I reached forward from her arms, towards the camera. The picture was taken by my brother, on a camera he bought at a pawnshop, much to the disapproval of my father who chided him about his spendthrift nature till the day he left home. I still remember the day he took it, but only vaguely, like a texture rather than an image. I remember the bright light, the sensation of being held higher than the ground, of being smaller than everything.
I’d tried once to sketch a portrait of my mother as I remembered her, to display on my wall, but I was no artist and soon gave up. Instead, I put up pictures from magazines that Aunt Mary was throwing out. And so, flanking the photograph of me with my mother were the exotic spires of the Sagrada Familia and a man in a cigarette advertisement. The man had thick black hair (though not as long as Dub’s), a long, straight nose and European features, except for his eyes, which were narrow like my own. He sat casually on the edge of an office desk, one foot on the floor, the hand holding his cigarette resting on his thigh. In the doorway behind him stood a woman, her image blurred so that her features couldn’t really be made out, though it was clear that she was watching him. She had blond hair. I liked these two pictures and they had stayed up the longest, so long in fact that the rectangles of wall beneath them were brighter than that surrounding.