Lola Lovely came down the stairs and into the kitchen, her pañuelo wrapped tightly about her, over her nightgown. ‘I heard the door,’ she said. Then, on seeing me: ‘Oh!’ She crossed herself. I stood up but Aunt Mary pressed me gently back into my seat. Lola Lovely said, ‘Has he been fighting?’
‘Ma’am,’ my father started to explain.
But Aunt Mary said, ‘This isn’t Joseph’s fault. He was set upon.’
Lola Lovely glared at her daughter, ignoring my father. ‘This is what your politics bring into the house!’ she said. ‘Look at the boy!’ I folded my arms on the table and sank my head onto them. I didn’t want to hear any more. The shock and anger that had propelled me home had by now quite evaporated and I was spent. America shook me gently. She pulled me to my feet and, picking up my glass, started towards the passageway that led to my room. I followed her mutely.
The room was just as I’d left it. Its familiarity, like the sound of my own voice in the darkness earlier, was almost absurd. I lay down on my mat, pulled my blanket over me and listened to my father’s voice for what seemed like a long time but may only have been minutes, for his words blended into my dreams, and when I woke again it was morning.
Filipino Delicacies
When Uncle Bobby was still alive, Aunt Mary’s house was rarely empty. Back then, of course, it wasn’t a boarding house taking in strangers. The guests were friends from the rich families of Puerto or weekending from Manila: the women, perfumed, wore dresses from Paris; the men came in suits made by their family tailors. I imagined sometimes how it might have been and, in my head, the men all looked like the model in the cigarette ad on my wall, beautiful and silent, and the women like Vilma Santos, their laughter breaking out in the dark rooms like sunlight through cloud. There were photographs from that time, taken on Uncle Bobby’s camera, the guests posing stiffly around the settee, glasses raised, or captured without warning, heads thrown back, teeth and throats exposed, arms blurred by movement. It was hard to imagine Aunt Mary in such a gathering, besieged by glamour and chatter. It seemed to me that she and her house were meant for stillness. But she was unfailingly hospitable and I imagined her watching for empty glasses or foundering conversation while Uncle Bobby shone at the centre of things, his voice slowing, his gestures becoming more expansive as he drank, blind to anyone’s needs but his own.
America’s cooking even then was the talk of dining rooms across the island, or so she said, and the guests tried to poach her for their own households many times over, each wage offered bigger than the last. But she stayed, loyal to Aunt Mary, and when I asked her why, she said that Aunt Mary had a way of talking to her that made her not mind being a servant. I knew exactly what she meant.
When Uncle Bobby died, the house fell into silence, though whether this was because of grief or Aunt Mary’s innate need for solitude, I never knew.
Before that week, in all the time I’d been at the Bougainvillea, Aunt Mary had never thrown a dinner party. Though close friends and relatives came to stay on occasion and America cooked for them, these were informal evenings, without display. It was unexpected, then, when she announced, in the run up to the rally, that we would be entertaining for a second time. ‘Well, good,’ said Lola Lovely. ‘This place can get like a morgue sometimes.’
‘Do you remember the Robellos, Mom? Joey and Alice?’
‘Alice!’ Lola Lovely pinched her brow as if she was thinking hard before she added, ‘Well a man will make one or two bad choices in his life. It can’t be helped.’
Aunt Mary continued without a flicker. ‘I’ll invite Frankie Reyes and his wife too. It’s been a long time since they’ll have seen you; they won’t refuse.’
‘Perhaps America could serve. We could give Joseph the evening off,’ Lola Lovely looked anxiously at my bruises.
‘Do you not feel up to it, Joseph?’ Aunt Mary said.
‘I’m ok, ma’am.’
‘But how will it look,’ cried Lola Lovely. ‘As if our houseboy indulges in street brawls.’
‘He has nothing to hide, Mother. If they ask, I shall tell them.’
‘If they have any breeding, they’ll be too polite to ask. So there goes your plan.’ Aunt Mary seemed not to hear this.
It was painful to move around and I knew there would be a lot of extra work involved but I was grateful for the distraction and found myself looking forward to it. I leafed through the recipe books in the sala and wondered what Aunt Mary might suggest America cook. Something French, I thought, the food arranged on the plate like a portrait. And so I was surprised yet again when Aunt Mary asked America to fetch a pork leg in time to prepare crispy pata, which she said was one of Judge Robello’s favourites.
Judge Robello looked like he had many favourites. He kept his eye on every tray I brought round and tried everything that America sent out without it seeming to shrink his appetite for dinner. He was a large man, which made him look older than he must have been.
‘Still the same woman?’ he said, through a mouthful.
‘Yes, America is still with me,’ Aunt Mary said.
‘It’s easy enough to find a woman who can cook,’ said Alice Robello, ‘but to find a woman who can follow instructions and keep a clean kitchen, too, is nearly impossible.’
Alice Robello, several years younger than Aunt Mary and years younger again than her husband, had once been a beauty queen: Miss Puerto. She went on to compete in a national pageant but wasn’t placed, becoming instantly one of the group of girls who fell into shadow as the crown was lifted onto another’s head, left to look on, smile graciously. But by then she’d been proposed to by Joey Robello and married quickly into money. She appeared younger than her years and spoke and moved as if an invisible camera were always on her, turning her best side towards the most attractive man in the room — not always, as America noted wryly in the kitchen, towards her husband. Though she was now mother to three children, she was still slim, and when she came in, she flashed a critical eye at Aunt Mary’s figure, hiding her triumph quickly. Wherever she moved, she left behind her a trail of vanilla.
‘We’ve had a succession of cooks and servants,’ the judge said. ‘No one does it quite the way Alice wants. Low fat! Where’s the pleasure in that anyway?’
‘Not easy to find someone who cooks like this,’ Joni Reyes, wife of Frankie Reyes, cut in.
‘I found her,’ said Lola Lovely, coming in late. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress the colour of amber and she cradled one arm carefully with the other. I saw that her cast had been removed. Alice Robello and Joni Reyes stood up to greet her. ‘Of course, before that we had a succession of girls,’ Lola Lovely continued, ‘but the pretty ones, you know, they don’t think they need to learn how to keep a house properly. Our America was quite plain.’ Alice Robello exclaimed her pleasure loudly at seeing Lola Lovely again after so long. Lola Lovely smiled beatifically. ‘Yes, I’m still alive. Manila hasn’t killed me yet.’
‘How’s your beautiful house?’ Alice Robello said.
‘Joni,’ Lola Lovely said, ‘I’m sure America would be happy to give her recipes to your cook.’
‘We don’t have one at the moment. The girl got herself pregnant. Frankie had to fire her,’ Joni Reyes said. Lola Lovely’s eyes glittered. ‘Anyway,’ Joni continued, ‘we like eating out.’ She wore a look of mild discontent, perhaps disappointment, which didn’t leave her all evening. According to America, Joni Reyes had met her husband at university, where she’d studied briefly before dropping out to get married. They’d had their only child, a son perhaps Benny’s age, not long afterwards, at a private hospital in Puerto. I’d never seen her husband, Engineer Reyes, before, and when he arrived he already looked drunk.