From time to time, on the way to San Filemon, Papá breaks out of his silence. “Why don’t you get married, hija?” he asks me while we are in the middle of an intersection filled with cars and buses and jeepneys all claiming their right of way.
Several answers suggest themselves. “Well, Papá, since it is your wish, suggest someone.” Let him introduce me to someone from his hometown which I’m driving to, reluctantly, in deference to his wish. “A gem of a husband. With no airs and much property, unsullied by vice, temper, instability of any kind. Immune to temptations of the flesh and capable of extreme devotion to one woman but generous enough to allow me my own extracurricular interests.”
Papá looks at me with a strange kind of attention. “Let’s put our heads together,” he says.
Instead of mediating calm, I expected imperiousness: a reasonable definition of Papá when he is crossed. How did Mamá live with him? “A man of quality” is his measure of others. His anger comes from meeting mostly repugnant men. Repugnance, he claims, is the other word for hell. High hell.
“Let’s,” I say, preparing myself for surprise, biting off what I really want to say, what I’m thinking. The magic wish of children, impatient and full of expectations, tempts me to think something will drop from the sky to release me from Papá, to end the trip, to return me to my apartment. I have had enough of the rich weave of his recall since we drove onto the highway—reason and feeling producing anger and grief and, yes, love. His memories are capable of tearing me up inside. I want to understand my father without simplifying his life, without falling on my knees.
In tricking me into driving him to San Filemon—to give his driver a day off—is Papá trying to induct me into his own quest, whatever that is; converting me into the heir of his thoughts? He will not succeed, I should tell him. I am his child. Stubborn, strong-willed; like him.
He says something I do not catch. I look at him. He appears to be bearing down on his own reflection. Perhaps he threw the question at me to keep me at a distance.
Papá keeps his silence past the rich villages behind tall fences of stone, with only intricately grilled windows and glazed tile roofs visible; and the tops of imported palms costing several thousand per blue, red, champagne stalk. He might be juggling the chronology of lives scattered at random in his thoughts.
After a long while he turns to me and says, “People do not make a sound when they are killed.”
This has to be the conclusion of a long train of thought which has nothing to do with me, thoughts inclined to the guarding of his privacy. His asking me along to San Filemon is a concession on his part. Perhaps I do not know him at all. When I see trees, he could be seeing skeletal remains beyond any hope of resurrection. While I feel myself held and also spiraling upward the way the flight of birds abates the wind, hooks it, he might be . . . I do not know—the opposite of myself.
I want to say these things to him, but I cannot repeat the sarcasm that sharpens them in my thoughts. He is taking himself, not me, back to San Filemon. His asking me to come is not to recompense me for years of being ignored by him.
“Perhaps, you know best, hija.”
I cannot tell which question of his he has answered for me.
“Why did you and Mamá have separate rooms?” I play his game of coming at me with no reserve. Let him wince. Lie barefaced.
“Because of the war.”
“The war was so long ago. Which war?”
“One of my men strangled his wife in his sleep. He was dreaming the Japanese had crept up to where he was. You don’t know what war is. I saw many things I have no wish to remember. The older I get, the clearer they become in my mind. They are all I can think of. I wake up in the middle of silence. I lie awake, waiting for sounds, waiting to be awakened. I was afraid I’d strangle your mother, thinking she was the enemy and finding out too late. Sometimes I wake up crying because I have killed her in my dream.”
I drive on with the sky wide over us. There are no birds flying beneath the clouds.
Attempting to distract him from pain I ask if he’s ready to stop for merienda. “There’s a place around here that serves chocolate mousse. The Swiss Cafe?”
“Let’s go to Panyang’s caríndería for lunch,” Papá says. “Let’s not stop until we reach Calamba. It’s not too far. Are you hungry already?”
I asked for this. I should have known he would revert to his old routine, trying to shock me by offering to treat me to a place which has no tablecloth, where the spoons are stacked beside the toothpicks for flies and idle hands to pick on. But, determined this is the last demand he will get away with, I answer, “Do as you want, Papá.”
We are two children, stubborn, irreducible.
“When you were a child,” Papá says, not indicating how young he meant, and while we are waiting for Panyang herself to serve the kándulì her specialty, “you were going to write Rizal’s novels. All over again.” He has seated himself where he can see every corner and out through the door to the street. I push together the bottles of ketchup, now containing palm vinegar with red-hot peppers, patís, toyò, all to be used in flavoring the food to each customer’s taste. I wait till the last possible moment to reply, “Really? How old was I?”
“Six or seven. It was at a party. You were asked what you were going to do when you grew up and you answered, with no hesitation, ‘I’m going to write the Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo.’ I was surprised you even knew what those are. You could not have read them.”
“I overheard a lot of things when I was young.”
“I also remember,”Papá adds, choosing a spoon and a fork from the odd collection in an old drinking glass, and wiping the eating surfaces with a paper napkin, “that you wrote to me, too.”
“Really?” I refuse to be surprised by Papá‘s memory of myself. I pick my spoon and fork but do not wipe them. Perhaps if I get sick Papá will stop inviting me to roadside restaurants.
“I found the letter in the Bible when I opened it to write down the date . . . when your Mamá died . . . ” He looks up at the ceiling where a naked bulb hangs, smeared with the wings of flies. Behind him is a counter where, in the manner of fast-food restaurants in Manila, palayóks of food are set up in bamboo containers. Panyang is cooking the fish just for Papá, and we are waiting for it.
“I don’t want to know what I wrote.”
He does exactly what I ask him not to. “It was a list of demands which I still find amusing. ‘Dear Papá, I want you to give me a house and a car and beautiful things. Your good daughter.’ Now that you can give me the house and the car, it is doubly amusing.” He laughs, placing both elbows on the table and covering his face briefly with both hands.
I shrug and smile, unable to look away from my young grubby self.
The seconds between his laughing and his covering his face add years to Papá. He looks much older than seventy-five.
He recovers instantly. “Your letter, by the way, was on lined primary paper. Large handwriting, firm. You underlined beautiful twice.”
I am about to complain about the details he insists on recalling when I remember our agreement when we started for San Filemon: no politics. Better to be strangers than fight. But are there no happy memories between us?
Your Mamá always wanted to have a party in the garden, in the moonlight.” Papá says as Panyang comes with a steaming bowl of kándulì fished out of Laguna de Bay. He acts as if this is a small fulfillment of that dream; starts serving as soon as the bowl is set down, while Panyang stands by to watch our pleasure.
I never liked fish, kándulì least of all, but I eat, covering the fish with vegetables on the spoon.
Panyang offers other dishes, already cooked but not yet served to anyone. Papá accepts.
“It’s good,” I tell Panyang, hoping the lie will satisfy her and make her move away.
“I’m sorry about Doña Inez, Judge,” Panyang says, hovering about. “I wanted to come to the wake but I thought, I, who would recognize me?”
It is a subject I have not heard Papá discuss. This time, he directs the matter to Panyang. “Not recognize you!”
“Well, I’m only Panyang.”
“You’re the best cook in Laguna. Have we ever gone to San Filemon, my wife and I, without stopping here for lunch? The best cook. That’s better than being a judge.”
“Sí Judge, naman.” Panyang beams and repeats what Papá said to those just coming into the restaurant. “That’s Judge Arvisu . . .” and she goes into a litany of Papá‘s accomplishments, fine points, and virtues as if these are ingredients in a special recipe, then turns away only to start bringing to our table dishes we cannot possibly eat; in heaping portions.
Papá acknowledges the customers at the other tables as if this is a private party, in Mamá’s honor, to which he has invited everyone there. He is at ease. The customers might as well be comrades-in-arms during the Japanese Occupation, acquaintances, friends from his childhood, compañeros of the Bar, de confianzas.
For their benefit he directs a remark to me, “Now, are you convinced that Panyang’s is better than those fancy restaurants in Manila and Makati where this kuhol is called escargot to justify the prices?”
Everyone laughs with Papá. New customers look at the dishes on our table and order the same, as if the menu is not written in chalk on a blackboard donated by Coca-Cola.
Papá is charming when he is not struggling with his thoughts, which I seem to provoke although I do not wish to bring them up. At me Papá is apt to throw tantrums. “I still know more than you do, and I can prove it,” he will say if I corner him in a discussion. Or, “Regardless of what you or Freud say, I still see Jesus crucified in every tree.” He throws his ideas at me as if I am a dart board.
At Panyang’s he tells one anecdote after another, setting the customers roaring with laughter. Recalling other stories, adding details, they respond to Papá with stories about the mayors of towns around Calamba. Birds of a feather with the politicians from Manila. They trade election stories, Madame Marcos yarns, Aquino tales; delivering each with proper words from the Visayan and Ilocano and Tagalog, while not for a moment impeded in their meal.
A man selling Sweepstakes tickets stands inside the doorway, listening. Children on errands stop to look in. People who had not intended to eat lunch make their way inside, sit, and place their orders. A man selling a wooden bed he has made sets it outside the door to listen.
Papá could have won an election that noon.
Watching Papá‘s performance I am soon laughing, not at his jokes and anecdotes, but at the unlikely situation we are in: entertaining a townful of people in a small dark caríndería where two dogs perform the duty of sweeping the floor with their tails.
In the kitchen Panyang stirs more pots. When we are about to finish, she insists on bringing out still another dish. “Just to taste.”
Finally, after we have had a taste of every palayok, every fruit and dessert, with Papá bringing out more stories as Panyang brings out more food, Panyang refuses to bring the bill. “You come so seldom, Judge. I owe you so much.” She practically claims kinship to avoid being paid.
This gesture and attitude so please Papá, though the same drama must have happened each time he and Mamá ate there, that he leaves a wad of bills on the table. Then taking leave of the other customers as if he were their host or their guest, he walks out to the car.
And Panyang, obeying rules laid down through the years, allows my father the last word; but follows us out to the car, handing us, after we have sat down, everything movable from her store: bananas, bags of dried fruits, watermelon seeds, strings of palm-wrapped cakes, mangoes. “It’s not the best of the season, but on your way back, I shall have a basket of the sweetest mangoes in Laguna.” She clasps Papá’s hand; then, running to my side, plants a kiss on my cheek, so taking me by surprise that I take the hand she offers me in plain view of the people on their way to and from the market in Calamba.
I wave to Panyang—she has earned that gesture of intimacy—and drive on to San Filemon with Papá, as if there are birds flying under the clouds a few inches from my face.