Suite Bergamasque

By Bobby Flores-Villasis

Terrazzo under foot, amber and gray stones gleaming. Old wood walls, the banisters to the rooms, coffered doors, all lacquered so the incautious fingertip would not abrade or overlay the larger whorls, more ancient and therefore more venerable. Grills, their rote of tendrils and rosettes and latticework enamelled black, grills everywhere, their true latent disguised as filigree. Patricia set her valise down. Nothing had changed. None of the hardness and gloss diminished by time. Eighteen years. A long time.

“I did not disturb anything,” Inday Ilay said, her gnarled hands clasped to her chin. “Nyora Flora — -“she crossed herself, “she told me not to.”

Ah, Mama. In her life or after, never could stand disorder. Always tidying up, smoothing down, setting things right. Patricia pulled her sweater close. “This is a fine day Inday.”

“She told me to just keep it clean.”

“In case someone visited.”

Inday Ilay smiled. “In case you came home.”

Patricia laid her sunglasses on the console of below a mirror crisp with grapes. “It must have been lonely here.”

“Were you Patty? There, without family — -“

“Family taught me what lonely is.”

“We are the same. That is why we always find work to do. I am embroidering again, in my little cottage at the back.”

“I always liked the cottage. So many big windows, without bars. I was more at home there.” Patricia took pack of cigarettes from her sweater pocket and lit a stick. “Even if you always chased me away with a broom.”

“Because you were always disturbing my work.”

“I made a handkerchief there.”

“You did not finish the embroidery. Bad girl. I wish I spanked you then.”

“I wish you had.” Patricia puffed smoke into the still midafternoon air. Someone should have. A slap to bruise the cheek, a fist to really crush her guts, then her body would not cringe for harsher punishment.”

“Always never mind,” Inday Ilay wagged a finger. “Never mind, I will make a picture now because the watercolors at Lucian’s are so nice — -“

“They were. Such delicious colors, and they were in tubes.”

“And then you said, never mind, I will do that later, I want to play that piece, the one Ma’am Linette played.”

“Just the Claire de Lune.”

“The moonlight part.”

“You remember so much.”

“Every time I clean the big room. It is all in there. ‘Nyora Flora said put it on the table. Maybe she wanted to finish it herself, but she just sat there, touching. I do not know what she was looking for.”

“Anything to make her one of them.”

“She did not go out much with them, since you left. There were so many parties, she said do not feel like going, even to the grand celebration when ‘Nyora Ursulina received the Papal Award. So many cars parked on the boulevard.”

“So she stayed and waited for them to visit.”

“Ma’am Linette, many years ago, she would stop at the gate to ask where Patty is now, what is Patty doing in Manila?”

“Is she married? Did she enter the convent,” Patricia tossed her head back and stared at the mirror, the haughty, heavy-lidded eyes that glowered back, “or has she become another whore?”

Inday Ilay pursed her lips.

“I worked for a living. They don’t. I guess they won’t understand that.”

“I do not gossip with the neighbors.” Inday Ilay tugged at the tip of a crocheted doily. “Even my Norma. She helps with the cleaning now and then but I always send her back to her Lola afterwards.”

“You could have asked her to stay.”

“She might become fond of these. It is not nice for her to grow up liking what does not belong to her.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

Inday Ilay unhooked a bunch of keys from her waist. “I will go and open the big room.”

Patricia held out a hand. “I’m not ready to disturb it.”

“Your own room then. Let me take your bag inside.”

My own room. Patricia steadied herself against the console. I’m back. I’m home!

“It is not heavy. Are you not staying long?”

“For good, Inday. How long, I don’t know.” A month, Dr. Belarmide said. To months, God willing. Well, never mind God. Month was long enough.

She would start tomorrow. The watercolor fountain. The handkerchief with flowers that looked picked from wild meadow and dropped in alarm or from carelessness. As for the piano piece the Prelude and the Minuet that came before Claire de Lune would be torment to her feet, and the Passepied that came after still lacked appeal, but as this was no longer time for comfort or infatuation, never mind. She flexed a hand: she would do the entire Suite Bergamasque.

Adelfas had such an unpleasant smell. When ‘Nyora Flora had them planted against the low south wall they may have been meant to grow into a lush, inoffensive barricade. They did screen the view but not the clatter of mah-jong tiles on Teresing de Castro’s gabled porch and the concurrent discussion that tumbled, nor quite intelligibly, into the Alba sala. They’d speak of her, naturally, as raised eyebrows observed her return. Soledad Santileces would cluck her tongue, poor girl, poor girl, as she reached for a pong, but with a mother like that, tch, tch, and Carlitos Pastorfide would agree yes, but we shouldn’t have allowed it to happen, we are a genteel people on the boulevard, and Minggoy Vallarta would slap a tile down, no, it wasn’t my fault or Linette’s, that Flora just doesn’t know how things are done here, she is not really one of us!

Patricia stubbed the cigarette inside a pink swan. Her head felt light. She took a deep breath. The air seemed dense — -this was missing her airconditioned strip-lighted office already? — -though the intrusive smell of brine and diesel fumes recalled that of many other afternoons stretched for siesta on her window ledge, her head pillowed on pigtails, back pressed against the bellied grill. No, not much had changed. The same cordovan seats, ottomans wrapped in brocade, ‘Nyora Flora’s rattan rocking chair with her abrigo draped over an arm as though she had only swept out into the terrace to asperge the fashionable African violets. On the widest wall the same portraits in convex oval glass. A sepia of Don Segundino Alba, that dashing mustache and bastipol, those heavy-lidded eyes! A black-and-white of Flora Pugad, laundrywoman of Campuyo, evicted from the hacienda by Señora Mariana Alba, subsequently housekeeper for textile merchant in Malaysia and a conversation piece upon her exclusion from the Don’s funeral.

It was a snapshot of that moment between tage and smugness as she learned that Nyor Gunding had, after all, assigned her a third of Campuyo, the remotest, which was fine with her, sugar money was sugar money, and the smaller Alba residence on Avenida Santa Catalina. Which was even finer — -she would be on boulevard, on the same street as the Conroy’s and the Vallarta’s, Soledad Santileces and Teresing de Castro, the Pastorfides, the widow Ursulina Baugh, the wheelchair-bound Colonel Rufo Delgado, on the Avenida where the sugar money was spent, graciously. Patricia touched the portrait in between, her meek smile at nineteen, two days bethrothed to Minggoy and Linette Vallarta’s visitor Lorenz Santamaria of Madrid, Patricia with the pigtails cropped and teased into a stylish beehive, the face demure, untroubled, unaware it would shortly become the scandal of the boulevard.

Numbness groped her legs. Her feet had begun to swell again. She pushed off her shoes and sat on an ottoman. Unyielding as ever. What did she expect? Only strangers’ voices mellowed in a place no one really lived in, where no mice or muchacha dared dislocate ‘Nyora Flora’s porcelain elephant by the front door and in their appointed corners the glazed jars, two tall and ornate like the widow Ursulina’s; a plump one with a wide rim like Pilaroca Conroy’s, and two remarkably large celadons her Mama had declared no one else possessed, hija, because these were actually fakes haggled in Malaysia, expensive-looking enough so no one would suspect, not any of those aristocrats who swore by pedigree and heirloom complexions, hah!

Such antics, Patricia shook her head. It crammed the house with whatever the Don’s money could buy to repopulate the rooms plundered by his other widow and her two sharp-chinned brats as they retreated to the bigger. Alba mansion at the tip of the boulevard — -now the wrong end, ‘Nyora Flora would chuckle over her afternoon demitasse, since the pier area has burst its seams and every day shabby stalls sprouted against ‘Nyora Mariana’s bougainvillea-shaded walls to ply ice candy and barbecue and beer to stevedores who picked their teeth in public and pissed everywhere, que barbaridad, how mortifying to those fair and proper Albas, merece, merece!

Patricia recalled the ceremonious installation of the black wrought-iron chandelier, of which every house on the boulevard had one. Her piano, there where it had always stood, sleek, imposing, because girls who lived in these houses had to have one. A gallinera, of course, hi-fi system in carved cabinets, marble-topped consoles with a myriad glittering things on them, everything Señora Flora Pugad vda de Alba thought would secure her and her dark girl in pigtails acceptably. Patricia bit her lip. Poor Mama. Always setting things right.

“Hoy cocoa,” Inday Ilay was saying. “And I made flan de coco the minute I received your telegram. You always liked it, even when you were yet this small, there in the farm, remember? You were so thin, then, except for pigtails. And so dark.”

“Morita. They called me Morita.”

“Ay, yes. That Malueca and Juancho, such naughty children. I was so happy when Nyor Gunding told me to be your yaya and not theirs. So naughty. They would get big slices of my flan and not finish eating it.”

“I’d wait for you to come out with the leftovers.”

“Ah, but finally, each time ‘Nyora Mariana said let us go to Campuyo I always brought one just for you, remember?”

“Malueca found out. She pushed a whole layer into my face.”

“Patty — -“

“We’re alike, Inday. I don’t forget easily.”

“But I forget what is not nice.”

“Then we’re not really the same. My memory is not selective.”

“Patty, you were just little girls, playing — -“

“Tell me she now looks old and tired.”

“Malueca? She had twins, you know, boys, ‘Nyora Mariana’s pets. Two girls, then miscarriage, at the very time the others were all at the funeral of Bettina, dodong Menandro’s daughter, the flight stewardess. Not even a year after Katrina, the other one, also a plane crash, how sad. Ma’am Pilaroca almost killed herself, they say. They were about your age, you must have been playmates on the boulevard….”

Morita, they would call. Fetch that hoop, Morita, bring me my lemonade, bend down there so we can jump over you, leave my jackstone alone, Morita. Morita! Patricia shut her eyes. Lilting little tweets, rustle of wings: were those tiny birds still nesting in the eaves? They can be so inconsiderate, darting in and out like that, like thought, like memory, arrogant of their allure, black and yellow plumage preened to seduce the eye while beaks and claws stole in twigs, leaves, scraps with which to finally secure dominion.

She pushed open another window and lit a cigarette. Past her gate Avenida Santa Catalina routed cargo trucks and buses away from downtown. Beyond it Alfonso XIII bleached its concrete benches and concrete promenade and concrete seawall white. The two parallel streets, with the long strip of acacia-shaded lawn between them, composed the boulevard the dark girl in pigtails, stepping to the gate of her new house, had found a bit bewildering. Where could she go to pick wildflowers? You must be happy with me, hija, her Mama had stroked her brow. No more pigs rooting at your daisies, no more scratched arms in the canebrakes of Campuyo where plumes overhead turned silver in the sun, no more nipa roof that leaked while you dreamed, no more, hija, no more. Go on, play in your garden, it’s a big one out there, everybody’s garden and yours, too, now that you are one of them, just keep out of the streets where the cars pass. It had been, suddenly, precarious, all green and white, all those people in sharkskins and nylon dresses just sitting or walking back and forth, their pastel parasols aglow, their voice melodic, los sobrinos this and fachada that, the grass clipped close and kind to the feet, the trees wide and singing overhead while the vast water ripple into forth and bubble among the boulders just below the seawall, but where were the wildflowers? And then it was angelus and the tall fluted columns bloomed, golden, a kind light that hummed a lullaby as it caressed her darkness she had to hug it all like new music. The house was another matter. Too big. Too bare. And all those grills! To keep out what we do not want her Mama assured her, don’t worry, I will fill it with pretty things, precious things, and in your turn you will fill it with many beautiful children, don’t worry, with all that you have no man will be able to resist you, you’ll see….

A row of cargo trucks rumbled into the Avenida. Brown birds exploded from the trees, shredded leaves and the light. Patricia flinched. “Lorenz, where is he?”

Inday Ilay stood by the window. “That is why you came back?”

“I didn’t want to. I was advised to amuse myself.”

“They say Malueca does not let him go anywhere without her, even just to watch the cane loading. Their anniversary will be next week.”

“I have forgotten.”

“‘Nyora Mariana asked me if I could help serve, but now that you are here — -“

“We do what we have to do.”

“I would like to help. When I was a young girl they were my family. Do you want to go?”

“You think Malueca will want me there?”

“Maybe, if they know you are here. It has been many years, people forget.”

“I haven’t. Have you?”

“I will get that cocoa now, you must be hungry.”

“Coffee. I drink coffee now.”

“It is not good for you, and those cigarettes — -“

“Doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Take off that sweater. It is very warm. I will heat the cocoa. You will like it.”

“Coffee. Very black and very sweet.”

“Oh, all right. But I will have to go to the store. No, I still have money for that. I will be back at once. It is very near. You remember the Masangkay house, just in the corner with the very big garden? Nong Fulgencio sold it and went away after Blas shot himself, his only son, how sd. It is a grocery now. More stores everywhere, tomorrow downtown might be in our backyard! Oh, I wanted to hang your clothes, but you still have the key to your aparador.”

The gown was white, as she has insisted, not ‘Nyora Flora’s suggested ecru. Its lace bodice had been encrusted with crystals, racemes and paisleys and tambourines of clear stones, not nacre and Osmeña pearls as ‘Nyora Flora wanted. It wasn’t ‘Nyora Flora’s wedding, after all, though Patricia had no doubt she had contrived the match. Never mind which had more class, Patricia would dazzle in purest white, with gossamers the length of the cathedral aisle.

The gown smelled of potpourri and naphthalene and cologne, from the things she and Inday had stowed into the dresser with it that whispery dawn before she hurried out and turned from the sniffling Inday Ilay at the gate, hurry, hurry, the maids were about to troop back into their respective gates with brown bags of warm pan de sal in their arms. She had walked briskly down the Avenida, light suitcase in hand, walked close to the front walls where no one would see her, the early risers, Doña Ursulina pinning up her gray braids for morning mass, Linette cleaning her arpeggios, Menandro Conroy on his porch looking out to his boulevard, hurry, the lone ship sailed at sunrise.

Patricia fluffed at out the skirt. It hadn’t yellowed much. A bit discolored but, in moonlight for instance, it should look immaculate. The waist would be narrow. Never mind, she didn’t have to wear it. She would carry it in her arms, that would be more suitable, held it like a baby, present, offering sacrifice.

She gathered the parcels and strode out of Lucian’s. The way people stopped for her these days! If only she could whisk off the turban and show them snakes on her head. If only she could coax the serpents out of her heart, lungs, glands so they’d see how voracious they had become, the worms their malice had bred in her bones, how venomous and fatal. But then, what for? Halt the press of pedestrians, the surge of cars and motorcycles and the ubiquitous motorcabs, stop for sympathy and pity, terror, entertainment? Well, they’d have to wait. She wasn’t ready. There was a lot to be done so her spirit would not be condemned to loiter in their premises, like the stray dog from the pier.

The sidewalk was littered with rubble, as was the sidewalk across. There had been a tree there, its crown shaped like an upended heart, in summer gladdening the grass below it with shed petals that kept its fuchsia sheen for days. She wondered if it still stood, behind the wall of rusted corrugated sheets that, for the meantime, attempted to conceal a relentless hammering and thuds, stones tortured inside a rotary drum, men yelling above the din — -

“Hey, you!”

Patricia glanced behind her and upward. A man on a purlin slung across the sky aimed his finger at her eyes. Good build, she thought. The sun danced on his hard hat. She squinted. Stout legs, muscular arms.

“Go away!” he shouted. “You want to get killed? I said — -hey, what are you, deaf?” He cupped his crotch with a hand, thrust it at her laughing.

Patricia staggered back. The parcels slipped out of her arms. Morita, they roared. Look at you, so careless! Clean up the mess, Morita. Morita! She reached for the parcels, one by one. How heavy they had become, the little spools of colored thread, box of watercolors, paintbrush, assorted needles, a thimble. She hugged the things with both arms, hurried through narrow Noblefranca street and out into the boulevard. She laid the parcels on a bench and sat. not yet noon and already she was tiring. The bench tilted toward a crumpled foot. Hot morning, and too bright, she could clearly make out a thin crack on the nearest lamp globe, fissures where the paint on the column was sure to peel after the next rain. A harsh light strafed stucco and brick, tile roof and stripped awning, the facades of the fourteen mansions disintegrating before her very eyes. Somewhere on another street a drill shrilled to life and bored into her cranium. Everywhere the city was being ravage to rebuild, revive, renew. The violations that possessed her, alas, had no such redeeming purpose.

Cocina Indaya agreed to cater, Inday Ilay said, even at such short notice. Patricia took out the box of beige cards from her valise and wrote names below the embossed long-stemmed roses. Inday Ilay would knock on doors that same evening. It would be a pleasant chore, strolling by the lamps, the moon above the acacias.

“We serve dinner at eight,” Inday Ilay summed up, “and then they move the food to the orphanage at ten.”

“That’s correct.”

“Mrs. Damaso says it will be a bit late to feed the children, but they will wait.”

“Good.”

“Patty — -suppose someone comes?”

Patricia put her pen down. “No one will,” she said.

Inday Ilay fetched the things from the big room. Patricia stood the easel on the terrace and tacked the picture up on it. The bristol board was brittle. She completed the column of water, angled the translucent downspray to suggest a gust. She touched up the blues on the morning glory, dabbed in some ochre to ripen the leaves that skittered on the brick paving. She reached for her cigarette. It had burnt itself out on the pink swan. She lit another and walked down to gate. The pier looked busy. The ships were bigger, cleaner, and there were more of them, six, seven today, all gangplanks crowded as men and cranes fed the holds. The city was growing. She had recognized no one at the airport. Soon it would be a city of people she had no names for, though she couldn’t yet decide if that was better than the entire boulevard of names that would always be strangers.

She returned to the picture. Down in the left corner she painted a doll with posies on its apron, pink ribbons on its ponytails. It smiled as it waited to be retrieved.

She woke up shivering, just past midnight. The house was still. She put on her sweater and padded out to the porch. The fluorescent lamp hummed. She walked, barefoot, into the boulevard. The moon must have slid over to the far west. There was only the glow of lamps, a radiant gold that had made the alien playground precious when she returned to claim it after all the others had gone to sleep. She sat on a bench and lit a cigarette. There were people on some of the other benches, young men on the grass around a harmonica, a couple pressed against the dark of an acacia trunk. A man on the seawall teetered toward a cigarette vendor, stopped, retched into the water. The dream had wracked her awake the same way, her feet in slime. Eighteen years and you came home to the same harrowed sleep, the same scenes on the boulevard except perhaps for the women in slit skirts and glossy heels who stopped by the lamps to restore rouge or repair a stocking run with a dab of spit, there were more of them than she could remember. They were like ships and the buses during fiesta. ‘Nyora flora said, there were more of them where there are more strangers to take home.

She didn’t notice the man until he was in front of her. He did not say anything as Patricia gave him her cigarette. She smelled rhum. She hugged her sweater close and fled as he began to speak.

Satin stitches defined the monochromatic red petals, a twist of chain stitches linked it all into a coronet. She cut into the muslin and made her eyelets, snipped at a corner for a scalloped border. She laid the handkerchief beside the pink swan and the coffee mug. Pretty, and she had been so afraid, taking eighteen years to admit melancholy into her fountained court, to concede that a scallop drew its grace from the rigid, confining square, and holes made lace.

Patricia felt her temples tighten. Her knees and calves clenched numb. No! she threw her cigarette into a hedge and ran into the sala. She grasped the door. It slammed shut. Sweat slithered down her nape. Inside the sleeves her arms were sticky. She tore off the sweater and flung it down. Now she was cold. She hugged herself, dragged at her fee. Odor of adelfas, stench of sewers along the street outside, her belly heaved. She bunched her blouse and pressed it to her mouth. The numbness crept up her back, a dark weight bristling with thorns, succubus demanding flesh and marrow and, soon enough, her soul. Not yet! The light, that again, stinging even when she closed her lids. The same fierce blaze that leaped from the sea, crashed through the grills and now she could almost hear the plink of slivers against the bud vase and the gilded angels and the glass fruits, the countless silver-framed photographs, candlestands of pewter and brass that never attended a prayer and, safe and sad I n their vitrines, the dolls that never knew her embrace. She’d give some of it to little Norma. She’d give it all away! The darkness gripped her shoulders and dragged her down. She curled and gave herself up to it, the tears lacerating her face as it streaked down to the amber and gray patterns on the floor.

She did not enumerate… [MISSING SECTION]

The waiters loaded everything… [MISSING SECTION]

Patricia smoothed the wedding gown over ‘Nyora Flora’s bed. She switched off the lamp. Moonlight rushed into the room. The gown glowed white. She slipped into her heels, patted her carefully coiffed hair, turned out the lights in the sala and left the house.

There were cars parked all up and down the Avenida. Crowds jostled on the grass and the seawall. Malueca would enjoy that, though Lorenz probably still preferred the little dinner and ‘Nyora Mariana abhorred the ill-mannered public gawking at her guests, those dusty street urchins that had to be shooed from her gate, the peanut vendor and the ice cream vendor and a balloon vendor though it wasn’t a Sunday.

Patricia paused by a silver Caprice. The man walked through the crowds and past the cars unperturbed, almost disdainful, his denims smudged, shirt damp. He dripped a small bag and a towel, not very clean. There was stubble on his face. Motorcab driver, stevedore most probably, never mind, his stride was disinterested, he seemed aloof, he wouldn’t be surprised to hear what she wanted, and that she wanted it only if, afterward, she never saw him again.

They did not speak in the big moonlit room as the undressed, pretending to be casual and accustomed, Patricia thought, she beside the bed, he b the window, his back to her, a massive unfamiliar shape. She lay back on the gown. The beads stung her skin as his weight covered her. They did not speak as his stubble grazed her cheeks, her neck, as his hands crushed her breasts, her thighs, the long-secret flesh between, as she willed her hands to his heaving chest and down his back to the straining mounds of his buttocks to urge him close, make him know her quiver was fear and desire and need for the gross and the sublime to invade her, as they would in time, and time was running out, she wanted it all, now, never mind if he was smothering and crude and brutal, there could be no bigger cruelty than what already tenanted her bones, she no longer even had a scream for the irredeemable thrust that spilled her blood.

She rose as the door closed behind him. She slipped on a white dress as he shut the gate. The blood on her thighs quickly seeped into her skirt.

Patricia learned against the fluted column and caught her breath. Her whole body was clenching. The golden light deepened the red blood on the gown she cradled in her arms, the blood on her dress. She was tired. But she would go. Morita would go, past the brooding acacias and the lamps, the empty cars and shuttered houses, past the gasping and staring faces toward the blazing lanterns of the Alba mansion, up the flagstone driveway to the gaping mahogany door where they would rush to gather, breathless, mute, their eyes and diamonds glittering because they would tremble as she laid the gown at the feet of Lorenz and Malueca Santamaria, trembling as they heard her blood tell them no, she was never a whore, not at nineteen and not now, she had never betrayed Lorenz Santamaria, but never mind, she had nothing to explain, no time for that, she must return to her house, her room, numb with the weight of all that had invaded her, what she needed of the world and what she did not want, loneliness and a little joy, despair and feat, anger, sorrow, tonight’s exultant, reaffirming wound, it had all claimed her as nesting bough, domicile, empire, and now that she had nothing more to give she would be free, thank goodness and never mind God, she still had enough time for it all to abdicate.