ANTONIO DID well at school by Adam and Lucia’s standards. They never dreamed he could top the class as his Uncle Ramalho had in his time. Just getting into the top half was good as far as they were concerned. That would make him one of the ‘smart’ ones in the kampong.
In Ramalho’s time there was no comparison. He and de Mornay’s sons were the only boys in school; boys of their kampong, as Adam and Lucia knew them. Mestico or Eurasian, the English called them. Geragok, the Malays called them. Portuguese was no longer the main language of Malacca, they had finally come to realise, about a hundred years after the British came for the second time in 1824. It looked like they were going to stay.
The Malays had initially called them Inche Geragok after the udang gerigau, the shrimps they caught for a living, but as they lost their status as speakers of the language of the rulers and people of the same religion as the Portuguese, Geragok became a term of contempt.
It didn’t worry them. Except for a few sensitive ones. Or when it was used in a challenging, derogatory way, loaded with racial prejudice, as the English sometimes said, you bloody Dutchman!
Now that there were many boys, and a few girls too, from the kampong going to school, comparisons were made. Philippa and Antonio kept up the family name. Antonio turned out to be far better than the other boys in Arithmetic. And drawing.
He wasn’t half as good as his younger brother at sports. Adam used to boast to his friends that Barnie could kick a chatek, the paper and feathers thing somewhat like a shuttlecock which is kicked and not hit with a racket, almost as soon as he could stand. Antonio wasn’t very interested in games. But there was always a chatek, or a light hollow ball woven of cane like a spherical basket, or a football being kicked around all over the kampong, by adults and children together every evening before the call for dinner came. Antonio kicked the basket with his Malay friends and often got shouted at or ridiculed when he dropped it.
Then one day Adam joined a group fooling around with a football and Antonio stood watching. The ball was passed to him a few times. Fellow’s got no ball sense, Adam said to himself.
But Antonio got interested and often joined the football group. He started to play football in school. One day he came home and proudly announced he was in his class team.
“Alamak! You!” Philippa sneered.
Two weeks later he stormed in with a great shout that he had scored three goals. Three-nil, he said, grinning from ear to ear, bursting with pride. He became Barnie and Alex’s hero overnight.
One evening Aloysious Pinto suggested they go down to the grass patch near the beach. He owned the ball, so they went.
It was a wider space. Here they could dribble and run with the ball and not just kick it to each other, or head the high ones. To Adam’s amazement Antonio, whose kicking was so bad, was able to dribble through anyone. Or stop anyone trying to get past him. Even Oscar de Melo.
After he had beaten Oscar three times, Oscar stood with his hands on his hips and stopped playing to watch Antonio. The others noticed. Oscar was their kampong team centre.
“Hey, that boy of yours is impossible to pass. He can’t kick straight to save his soul, but, man, his feet are there when you try to pass the bugger.”
Adam didn’t say anything but he felt a glow of pride.
“He’ll make a solid defender, man. Like a bloody wall.”
Adam didn’t say anything to Antonio as they walked home. He put his hand on Antonio’s shoulder.
“Aiyah! So late!” Lucia shouted from the verandah steps as soon as they appeared.
He told Lucia about Oscar’s comment when they were alone on the mat that night.
Two weeks later, Antonio’s status in the family soared when he announced he had made the school team. As inside right. Adam was about to say, but you’re so slow, and your kicking has no force, but he held back. It was an evening of celebration for the children.
The great day arrived when Balestier, the European Malacca Club goalie who captained the Malacca state team, saw him play and fielded him for a state friendly.
He scored one goal. It was a bit of a fluke, Oscar, who saw the game, said. “But, but, but … Let me tell you. After a scuffle at our goal, our Majid sent the ball flying to the other half of the field. To Antonio, who was still on his way back to help with the defence. In his slow way, lah. There were only the backs and the goalie there. Man, you should have seen your son.”
He was sitting on the verandah with the samsu Adam had opened, talking to Lucia and Adam. Antonio was not back from the game yet. And now Lucia could leave Philippa to fix the evening meal on nights they had visitors.
“You really should have been there. He went through that bugger Dass of Johore as though the bugger was like smoke. As though he wasn’t there. Then I saw Junid come up. That bugger is so fast with his big feet. He’s a big fellow, you know. But he can move fifty times faster than that half starved … er that slow Antonio of yours.”
Oscar was reliving the game as Oscar always did, talking with his hands and his whole body.
“My stomach was turning round and round. Faster, faster, I yelled. But Antonio was too slow and Junid came at him like an elephant to a worm. Then chut! The ball was through Junid’s legs. The goalie came out. When he was three feet from the goalie he kicked. Shit! A slow rolling ball. But the goalie’s leg had not anticipated that Antonio would use his left. The ball slowly, slowly, slowly rolled into the goal. I nearly died watching it roll.
“Christ, man, I’ve never seen anything like that. He went through the three buggers like water. As if they weren’t there. He anticipated how every one of those three bastards would move. Christ, man, it was as though he had read their minds.”
Adam and Lucia looked at each other. Adam just had to see Antonio play the next game. Lucia insisted on going with him. Their presence completed the family support.
It was a rather insipid game. But they both saw Antonio’s uncanny anticipation of his opponents’ moves. Adam walked home with Lucia feeling terribly frustrated. So many times Antonio had the advantage, but he was too slow. And once he had kicked in the opposite direction that the goalkeeper had expected the ball to come from, but his kicking was inaccurate and the ball grazed the goal-post; on the outside.
Antonio became a regular player in the state team. The Malacca state team then was at the bottom of the ratings.
When Antonio was in his final year at school, studying for his Junior Cambridge, Malacca had crept up the state soccer ranking and a critical game against the almighty Selangor was to be played in Malacca the following week. Five men on the Selangor team, including the goalkeeper, played for the Federated Malay States team. Antonio was included in the Malacca team. Oscar believed it was a mistake.
“He’s not ready yet.”
“Why do you say that?” Adam asked.
“Given time and experience, he’ll speed up.”
“Honestly, Oscar, I doubt it.”
“Maybe … But he has one thing going for him. It’s funny, though. He’s always calm. As if he doesn’t care a damn. He never gets flustered because he’s always so bloody cocksure.”
“He doesn’t talk much about the game afterwards, does he?”
“Right! Like he’s not interested. Funny, that … God. If it was me. If I had his sensing of the game …”
“If he had your kick, Oscar, he’d kill them,” Adam said. He was in a good mood and feeling friendly towards Oscar de Melo.
On the day of the big game, as Antonio sat at the dining table sipping his morning coffee with Philippa, he suddenly said, “Phil, I’m going to break my leg today.”
“Sheesh!”
“Yah. I know. Those Selangor guys are so rough. And that Junid bloke from Johore, the big-built back … He’s playing for Selangor now.”
“Yah. I remember him. Ugly but sort of beautiful …”
“It’ll be rough,” he said in a bland voice.
“Then don’t play today. They won’t miss you that much, you know.”
Antonio smiled. “Don’t be like that, lah!” He continued, “It’s funny but I know. I can’t remember dreaming it or anything like that. Even if I don’t play, I’m going to break my leg today … maybe in a road accident.”
Philippa looked at him bemused. She did not say anything.
ANTONIO LOOKED handsome, Philippa thought, as he stood beside the Malacca centre-forward ready to go in the evening sun on the field. Malacca had won the toss.
Philippa enjoyed watching football. But it wasn’t a religion to her as it was to Uncle Oscar. Selangor scored two in the first half. She reckoned they had three men on Antonio. However good he was at dribbling past a man, going through three was another kettle of fish. Her gaze drifted from the game as the second half started with long lobs to and fro and the forwards of both sides watching the ball go over their heads in frustration. “Windy!” someone shouted. She saw Marie de Silveira chewing her nails with tension on the other side of the field. Her eyes narrowed. It’s her! So she’s his girl!
It was an impulsive conviction. But she didn’t have time to think any more about Marie. Antonio had the ball at his feet and he was already at the goal mouth when she looked as the crowd roared. Two Selangor men were moving in so fast it looked as if they would be crashing into each other. To the crowd’s surprise, Antonio put his foot on the ball and stopped suddenly.
He was about ten or 12 feet from the goal-line. The goalie was crouched, ready, waiting. Like a goalie waiting for a penalty shot. Antonio kicked. The goalie jumped the other way. The ball went in. But a split second later Selangor’s Junid crashed into him and into Selangor’s Chinese centre-half over Antonio’s leg, stretched out after his kick.
“Oh God!” Philippa burst out.
The crowd went wild with the home side’s first goal. She saw the Chinese centre-half pick himself up, then Junid, but Antonio just lay there.
Oh God! Antonio, she said silently to herself.
The referee and linesmen crowding around. The stretcher. The ambulance. The de Silveira girl there on the field. Crying. Her own feet moving. Her voice saying, “I’m his sister.” The hospital smells.
“Can you please, please telephone Doctor Ramalho Rosario … Yes. For God’s sake, I am his sister.”
“You sit here. Just wait here.”
“Has anybody telephoned Doctor Rosario? For Christ’s sake! Can I use the telephone?”
“Please. Just you sit and wait here.”
“Is he a government servant?”
“No. He’s still in school.”
“Huh?”
“I said he’s a schoolboy.”
“Is his father a government servant?”
“Look here! Do you know Doctor Ramalho?”
Antonio’s fracture healed in the course of time. But he brought horror and shame down on the family by saying the day after he broke his leg, “That’s it. No more.”
“Whaddeyer mean?”
“No more football!”
Adam and Lucia understood. So did Philippa. But the others didn’t. Balestier was most upset. Meeting Adam in the corridor of the hospital during visiting hours, he grabbed him by the arm and tried to get Adam to persuade Antonio to stay with the team.
But that was the last soccer game Antonio played in his life.
While his leg was healing Antonio took to reading Zane Grey, and the Sexton Blake series one could buy in small booklets. Then he went on to some of Philippa’s slushy schoolgirl love booklets. But he got into the reading habit and when he went back to school he read with more concentration and interest. He also had to catch up with the other boys.
He did well in his Junior Cambridge and Ramalho told Adam he would pay for Antonio’s fees at the Technical Institute to study civil engineering. Antonio had always been interested in new technical ideas. Thanks to the Christian Brothers, Lucia said.
He graduated from the Technical Institute in 1936 at 20 with a diploma and got a job in the P.W.D., the Public Works Department. The family was proud of him.
They were also proud of Philippa who had started teaching in the Convent primary school and after three years of attending afternoon classes had obtained a teacher’s certificate. But she had been corresponding with her childhood friend Christine Frois who had gone down to Singapore two years earlier and Christine had written of the wonderful world of Singapore. She said there was a teacher’s job going at the French Convent in Singapore.
Her letters were full of the dancing and music. She wrote of songs that were the rage in Singapore; Moonlight and Shadows, The Lady is a Tramp, I Can Dream, Can’t I, Tiger Rag, My Happiness, The Nearness of You, Cocktails for Two, Blue Hawaii … And the films; Troubled Waters with James Mason and Virginia Cherrill, Scarface, The Front Page, The Good Earth.
Only My Happiness, Tiger Rag and Moonlight and Shadows had come to sleepy Malacca. And of course Blue Hawaii, and all the Hawaiian ukelele music. The Hawaiian War Chant, which even Pa could hum, was still one of the top pieces.
It was not the films and the music that attracted Philippa to Singapore, nor being the centre of a world within her grasp, her London, Paris, Hollywood. It was getting away from the kampong into a modern, living, throbbing world. And getting away from Ma and Pa and the kampong steeped in the glory of their Portuguese past that had ‘gone phutt’ hundreds of years ago.
She applied for the job and got it without having to go to Singapore for an interview. The reference from the Reverend Mother and Padre Mendoza’s letter were enough.
With heavy hearts, Adam and Lucia accepted Philippa’s decision without trying to persuade her to stay. They had half-expected it. Since Fred Perera had left the year after he got married, so many from the village had gone away to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.
“You see. The tiger girl. Always restless. Must seek adventure,” Mrs Foo said.
“She’s 22 now. She should be able to look after herself,” Adam said to Lucia. But in his heart of hearts he was deeply frightened for his beautiful little blonde girl. Only last week Tarquinio Peralta had been relating hair-raising tales of Singapore at de Silveira’s funeral. Lucia wasn’t listening. If she was she would have read his doubts. She could read him like the back of her hand after twenty-three years of marriage. She was thinking of that lovely but brusque girl of hers who would soon be branded a spinster if she stayed in the kampong any longer. Perhaps the Singapore Serani, the Singapore Eurasian boys would not be frightened of her. And Auntie Cecelia would keep an eye on her.
Then she started wondering if Auntie Cecelia would really be able to keep her eye on Philippa.
A year later Antonio came home one evening from the P.W.D. office in Malacca and after the dishes were done, when Adam was sitting at the table lighting his second after-dinner cigarette, and Ma was wiping her hands dry, he broke the news that he was being posted up north.
It was a surprise to them. Antonio explained that he could not refuse. They were building a lot of roads up there, he said. It’s a great opportunity.
Antonio waited till Ma and Pa had talked it through and then, stuttering, repeating himself, almost inaudibly, he said he and Gloria had talked it over. (“Actually, they told me about the posting yesterday.”) This evening he had spoken to her father because Gloria and he had been through a hard time when he was studying at the Technical Institute in Kuala Lumpur, and seeing that he would get government quarters, because as a Technical Assistant, he was not just an ordinary person like a kerani, or a mandor, and now that he was earning a decent salary, with enough left over to feed two, even after paying Uncle Ramalho the monthly instalment they had agreed upon, and he was getting on in years, he and Gloria had decided to well … get hitched.
Ma’s jaw dropped. He saw Pa throw a quick glance at Ma and then look blankly into space over his shoulder.
He felt intensely uncomfortable. Both Ma and Pa had been overwhelmed by his news. Flustered, he talked on.
“Mr Starkey, that’s my boss, as I told you … Mr Starkey says the SEE in Ipoh … Ah, yes. It’s Ipoh they are posting me to. Up there in Perak. Mr Starkey says the SEE there is a pukka gentleman. He said he would write a personal note to him about me. It seems they both played for Johore years ago. Rugger, that is … Not football.”
Ma and Pa were still silent. There were tears in Ma’s eyes. He felt bad about beating Phil to it.
“SEE is Senior Executive Engineer …”
He paused.
“Mr Starkey says Ipoh is a nice place … It’s very different from Malacca, he said. The SEE there is a friend of his. A good friend, he said. A Mr Diamond. Mr Starkey called him Di …”
Lucia threw her head back and broke out into a loud, almost hysterical laugh. “Die for you!” she said to Antonio.
Pa broke his silence. “There’s a boxer in Singapore with that name …”
Ma stretched out her arm across the table and put it around him. She bent over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Oh, Antonio. I’m so happy.”
Pa put his hand on top of Antonio’s as it lay on the table. “Congratulations, son.”
“The Foenandos are such a nice family.”
“Philippa will be thrilled to hear …”
“When are you leaving?”
“Ipoh? That’s a real Chinkified town.”
“They say it’s so hot up there …”
“You will get married in our church …”
“Father Mendoza will be so pleased …”
“It’ll be the first wedding in both the families …”
“Oh, Antonio!”
“That’s not so far. We can always take a train.”
“She’s lucky to get you, son.”
“Joe Diamond! Yes, that’s it. Joe Diamond … they say he’s damn good …”