“You didn’t even ask if he wanted Coke instead of pineapple juice,” the professor chided his wife as she bent at the knees, with the practiced dip of a professional dancer, to serve my drink.
“This is better for his health,” she retorted in a Tagalog that resonated with provincial charm, making me imagine tender papayas, broiling squid, and potent rum, or whatever they drink down there, south of Tablas Strait.
“It’s all right, I prefer juice.” I practically grabbed the drink from her hand. When my fingers grazed hers I felt like I had been scorched, like the juice would vaporize.
Indeed, it seemed like a fine mist had crept into the afternoon, and as we sat there in the professor’s garden, with him droning on about Leandro de Veana’s report to the Crown about exploiting the colony’s natural resources, I watched Lalaine’s shadow through the jalousies, puttering about in the kitchen, maybe making little rice cakes. That’s what I often imagined her doing, I don’t know why, they just seemed to go together, Lalaine and rice cakes. I’ll bet she made a lot of them for the professor.
My reverie was broken when the buzzer rang at the gate — it was Dencio, a handyman who lived in the squatters’ settlement nearby, in Krus na Ligas. They used him as a gardener, a plumber, a carpenter, and sometimes even a driver, when they had functions to attend and the professor didn’t want to crease his barong by driving the Ford Escape himself. Dencio was one of those hard-luck characters, the guy who works his butt off fixing other people’s problems but who can’t shake off his own. The professor told me that Dencio had been all set to fly to a construction job in Dubai when his youngest daughter fell ill with dengue after a mosquito bite, and died. Then his wife went insane with grief and walked into the path of a dump truck, leaving him with five kids to feed, one of whom has encephalitis. I mean, who writes these scripts? Now here he was to repair — he announced to me when I opened the gate for him — a leak in the septic tank. A big job, Dencio muttered, both of his pudgy hands clutching large, heavy tools to break the earth with.
So that’s where the vague stink was coming from. I know, I didn’t mention it earlier, but I was thinking of Lalaine — Shalimar, remember? — and had shut out the creeping suggestion of decay, something that now afflicted me with cloying tartness, now that Dencio had mentioned it and Lalaine was out of sight. Or rather, she had stepped out for a second to let Dencio into the main house and into the backyard, where the septic tank was located. She looked happy to see him, and murmured something I couldn’t understand — I think they came from the same part of the country and spoke the same dialect — and for a minute back there I wondered if Dencio looked at Lalaine the same way I did. It seemed like a silly idea. Men with five kids to feed don’t have time to fantasize, do they? Now the stink was definitely in the air, like the earth’s own bad breath. Even the professor noticed it, not that he minded too much. “Sometimes a dead bird falls on the roof,” he said, although I wondered how he could have known that, and how large and dead a bird had to be to create such rot. But I could believe how the roofs of these faculty houses might accumulate all kinds of garbage, even as the professor and I spoke; and on other visits, our conversation would be interrupted by the thud of a falling mango from one of the stout branches arching over the property.
Let me tell you about these old houses on the UP campus. They were built in the ’50s and some of them still have the suburban look of that time, where they pinched the wet concrete for cheap texture and carved the outlines of rocks and boulders on the wall before painting the pebbled spaces over, just to offset the basic gray boxiness of the house itself. They had given the professor one of these, a concrete shell that he began to fill with books of every imaginable kind, including obscure commentaries on the apocalypse, herbal recipes for the relief of gout, and a pictorial history of the American Civil War.
I can imagine Professor Sanvictores coming to UP as a young instructor, eager to make his mark in history. Or was it economics that he first signed up for? This was years before his stint as a teaching assistant and doctoral candidate in Minnesota, where he picked up and cultivated the American accent that many coeds found charming, if not irresistible. Now every two-bit club and radio deejay and call center agent has one, but none of them can come up with and use a word like “contumacious” the way the professor did to describe certain tribal chieftains in old New Zealand.
I was dying to ask either the professor or Lalaine herself how the two of them met, and more than that, how they ended up being man and wife. I mean, what ever did they see in each other? But of course, silly, I knew what he saw in her, I could see that even with my eyes shut. But what about Lalaine? I could understand her developing a schoolgirl crush on him, especially if he put on that Minnesota affect and gave his sophomore-class version of his lecture on Rizal’s women and free love in the nineteenth century. Truth be told, in his younger days the professor might have been found attractive by some women from a certain angle, especially women who liked stray cats and boys with cowlicks and otherwise smart men who needed to be helped with the simplest things, like using an ATM card. And did the professor have any money? It’s a fair thing to ask. From what I’d gathered — and I would hear this again at the wake, not that too many family members bothered to show up — there had been a farm in Quezon Province, somewhere on that long, ragged, storm-bitten eastern shore nobody really wants to call home. The professor’s mother had wanted him to become a priest; his father a lawyer or a businessman. Both parents expected their only son to get married, but they died long before Lalaine stepped into his life — or did he step into hers?
Almost as soon as Lalaine appeared beside the professor on campus, the predictable gossip swirled about her being a bargirl he’d met during a semester spent doing research down south, maybe while he was trying to figure out how the plague that ravaged Brazil’s coffee industry reached Sibutu’s liberica plantations in 1888. Nobody thought to ask Lalaine for her CV, or they assumed she was some graduate assistant like me. Even at the wake, nobody thought to ask her sensible questions like, So have you thought of donating his papers to the university archives? or, Isn’t it wonderful that Professor Umali came to pay his respects? If there was anyone who would have wanted the professor dead, it was Calixto Umali. He had been a thorn in the professor’s side for ages — at one time, his protégé, like me, and then his rival and archcritic, especially after he’d returned with his PhD from Leipzig — you know, where Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche all wore the school jersey — taking every opportunity to dispute the professor’s theories and gathering his own coterie of departmental groupies around him, the kind with braces on their teeth. Umali cut quite a figure as well, with a full shock of hair, like a crown. Sometimes I think the professor brought Lalaine back from Sibutu and married her — cake, bouquet, pigeon, and all — just to prove that he knew something more about life than migration theories and why empires crumble.