Lalaine had tearfully confessed to a liaison with Dencio. I felt outraged, like I myself had been betrayed — like I said, how could a man with five mouths to feed think of carrying on with another man’s wife? I had come to the professor’s house to pick up my salary for the past two months’ work. I usually got paid monthly, and never complained. But when the old man handed me my check, his hand trembling in grief, I felt so embarrassed, so sorry for him, that I almost gave it back, as if I myself had something to feel guilty about.
“What will you do now?” I asked in a voice that sounded even weaker than his.
“I don’t know,” he said. “For some strange reason, I want to keep the baby, but not keep her. God forgive me for saying this, but sometimes I just want to strangle Lalaine in her sleep, and then I remember that it was me who asked her to come here and live with me and my books, to cook for me and occupy half of my bed, all of which and more she’s done without complaint. And when I remember that, much of the pain goes away, at least until I wake up and see her, or hear her mumbling something in that dialect of hers, and suddenly she becomes a horrible stranger again... And then I too become someone else, someone I don’t want to know.” He raised his hands and spread his spindly fingers out in what might have been a profession of innocence, or surrender, or he could have been pushing something back, I don’t know, and he hung his head down in silence, like he was praying, but I didn’t think he was.
“I’m sorry to hear that” was all I could say. The professor said nothing, and to break the awkwardness of the moment, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
For over a week before the storm, Dencio had been digging out a large pit in the back for a new septic tank. The old one was beyond repair and foul brown sludge had begun bubbling up in the toilet. I saw that myself when I went in for a pee. Lalaine had done what she could to contain the overflow with rolled-up newspapers, but I could see how, despite her best efforts, the house was beginning to be less habitable by the day. The professor’s books and papers filled every shelf and cranny like an overgrown garden with the shrubbery gone mad. A small altar was tucked away in a corner with glowing electric bulbs illuminating Jesus cradling his heart in his palm. It had to be hers, because I never knew the professor to be a churchgoing man. I mean, the word “God” would sometimes creep into his speech, like an expression, and I know enough about social scientists to know that when they say “God,” it’s with all kinds of little asterisks.
That’s when I saw her in a corner of the kitchen, as I stepped out of the bathroom, breathless because I had stopped inhaling the instant I noticed all those soggy newspapers on the floor. I actually heard her before I saw her — whimpering in a chair, with her knees up and her arms curled around them. She looked up — surprised, embarrassed, defiant, fearful — and it occurred to me that we had never really spoken about anything more serious than the weather or her rice cakes, certainly not in private. Through the window, I could see that the professor was still in the gazebo, maintaining a stoic silence, flipping through the pages of a newspaper like he cared about what was happening in Afghanistan. Lalaine sat backlit, so that her edges seemed even softer, silvered in shadow. I could see the wetness of her nose, and when she noticed me standing there, she abruptly brushed the snot with the back of her hand. It only made things worse by smearing her cheek, but somehow Lalaine looked vulnerable and therefore all the more beautiful to me.
“Are you all right?” I instantly realized the stupidity of my question.
“Help me,” I thought I heard her say, and moved closer so I could be sure. “My husband’s going to kill me.” She began rocking herself and crying. “He can’t forgive me, he’s going to kill me, I just know it.”
“No,” I said, not even sure why. “The professor wouldn’t hurt anyone, especially not you.”
She looked up sharply. “You’re not his wife. How would you know?”
I felt like snapping back with, You’re not his wife, either, or something to that effect, just to register my own disgust about how she’d betrayed the man. She and Dencio, she with Dencio.
“You have no idea the things he makes me do. I do them to keep him happy, because I promised to love him. And I don’t care if you believe me or not, but I still do.”
“Then why would he kill you? And if you think he will, why don’t you leave? You should go home.” My voice was laced with bitterness and chastisement, and I realized that I might as well have been speaking for the professor.
“I have no other home,” she said. “There was another man, back in Sibutu. He was an evil man, he hurt me. I came here to get away from him. But everything,” she sighed, “everything just gets worse and worse.”
My mind reeled. How many other men did this woman have in her life, and how could I believe all the stories she was telling me about them? And granted, she must have been woefully unlucky to shack up with the wrong guys. But how about taking some responsibility for her own poor choices, and for whatever she might have done to make good men go bad? I mean, history, folks, history — Jezebel, Delilah, Cleopatra, Mata Hari, it’s a list that just goes on and on.
“Well, that’s true,” I said. “You can’t keep running away from the past.” If there was anything I learned from school, anything at all, it was that.
Apparently sensing my lack of sympathy, Lalaine rose up from her chair to get a glass of water and gave me a steely, almost reptilian glance that simply confirmed my own dawning mistrust of Mrs. Sanvictores. Or whoever she really was. How could all that liquid softness vanish so quickly, and be replaced by this new skin, hard, resistant, and opaque?
I noticed through the jalousies that the professor had left the gazebo. I wondered if he had observed my brief exchange with his wife, or whatever she was to him now. Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that he might have — could have, should have — suspected me of being the baby’s father at some point, if she hadn’t fingered Dencio. I mean, it was possible, wasn’t it? As far as I could tell, apart from the professor himself and that sneaky Dencio, I was the only male who went into their house with any kind of frequency. Never mind that Lalaine and I hardly ever spoke. I could have gotten her cell phone number and initiated and carried on an affair via text, beginning with innocuous thanks and comments about the refreshments, and then about the decor, or her perfume, raising the level of intimacy with every message. That’s what I could have done but never did, and meanwhile this half-literate handyman was giving it to her by the bucket, while I listened to the professor deliver the annual Cesar Adib Majul Memorial Lecture at the C. M. Recto Hall and chased coffee production figures at the National Library.
“I have to go back to the professor,” I told Lalaine, who had turned away from me, which was just as well because she now seemed ugly to me, even her legs where I could see splotchy patches, maybe from all the tension and the guilt. “I’m sure you’ll be all right.” Now that she was standing upright, up to her full height that nearly matched mine, she hardly seemed the helpless victim of moments before.
I couldn’t find the professor anywhere in the front garden, so I went out back. There he was, staring into the yawning pit that Dencio had dug for the new septic tank. How was this ever going to get finished, I wondered, now that the professor knew about the affair and Dencio had presumably been fired? The pit had filled to the brim with rainwater during the storm, but the waters had subsided and I could see the hole was large and deep enough to swallow a man, the soft rough edges of its mouth making a silent scream of warning.