THE KISS WAS FULL OF TONGUE, AND ALL SENSATIONS MINGLED ON the tongue. It felt like a sliver of flesh from a stony green mango, one of many I plucked that summer from my perch on the lowest branch of the tree in our front yard.
My yaya Nilda stripped the skin off with a rusty old peeler and made deep parallel cuts with a knife, the blade making clean, bloodless wounds in the whitish flesh. She sat me down in the kitchen on a warm afternoon, my mouth wet, my hair and body hot and smelling of the sun. She handed me the knife, and I sliced close to the seed, with what force I could muster, so that in one sure stroke the slivers came away and apart, falling like white fingers into the palm of my brown hand. She prepared three kinds of dippings in round bowls: rock salt, sugar steeped in dark soy sauce, and red-brown bagoong. I dipped and brought the slivers to my mouth, tasting now the sharpness of crystal, now the sweet and salty mush, now the briny mulch, against the mango sliver, hard rind and tender flesh meeting teeth and tongue, making the inner cheek swell and pucker with pleasure.
During the kiss, we were sitting wet by the pool. She tasted my mouth with hers and pressed herself against me and I smelled the surge of pool chlorine, coming off clean and sharp from her skin. She slipped the straps of her bathing suit off and her shoulders were like white wings. I looked down and saw her breasts, freshly peeled, small and pale, squeezed against my body.
It was the Eighties and I was all of thirteen. My father, an attorney, worked for the government. He was tall, thin and handsome, but he was also tense and hunched, like he was listening for a signal or poised to make his next move. He had small alert eyes and wore his lips in a constant curl, ready to make the quick comment or deliver the hard order.
The dark suit was his trademark. I suppose he liked the way he looked in it, bigger and meaner, with the shoulderpads becoming his shoulders, the dark, shiny shell his skin and flesh. To cover his large ears, he styled his hair in a big bouffant. Moroy told me large ears meant a long life. From their size and the way they stuck out you’d think my father would live forever. To complete the look he wore a blank expression on his face that was so impenetrable it scared both acquaintances and strangers. But what really made him scary was Moroy, who hung around him and stuck to him like a big solid shadow.
I liked Moroy. I was fascinated by the way he talked and the way he thought. He had a kind of thinking you could trace with a firm straight line. He was wide and solidly built, moonfaced and foul-mouthed, with squinted, slanted eyes and crooked teeth. He liked to kid with me, turning his big body with startling quickness, reaching out with a fat hand to throw a fake jab or flick an ear.
MOROY’S TRADEMARK WAS A SMALL SHALLOW CRATER ON THE BACK of his neck, the size and shape of an old ten-centavo coin and colored a dark, violent purple. I was sure it was from a bullet. Whenever I asked him about it he would promise me that one day he would tell me all that I needed to know.
It made sense to hire someone who knew what it felt like to take a bullet. But even then I knew it was foolish to have a bodyguard who was also your driver. Still, My father insisted on having Moroy around as minder, chauffeur, errand-boy and right-hand man. Moroy did enjoy driving our 1976 Mr. Slim, solid, swift and perfect from its three-point chrome star, to its extended rear bumper. The engine started with a deep shudder, as though it were shrugging off sleep, and its heavy, bulletproof body moved with a low roar.
Moroy told me about my father’s hidden life, his secret schedule. Sometimes he would need Moroy to drive him to the airport for the next flight to Hong Kong or Jakarta for an overnight trip. Or he would be at a five-star hotel, drinking and talking with businessmen and ambassadors. Or the Floating Casino, coming out in the morning hours wearing that same poker face.
Whenever he had to go somewhere my father would call for Moroy from the garage. He would pick up my presence, perched in my mango tree, in the corner of his vision, and send me scurrying into his room to retrieve his clutchbag. I remember it, black, heavier than it looked, with an evasive smell that dared me to open it while he wasn’t watching. It held papers, checkbooks, thick bundles of dollar bills and a gun.
My father wanted me to become a lawyer like him. He spoke to me about how much trouble he had gone through for me. I knew the way to make a kid serious was to warn him about the consequences. He told me if I didn’t study I’d end up like Moroy, whose meager future depended solely on his master, and whose job, ultimately, was to be expendable.
Moroy handed his gun to me once. There was so much to touch, so much to feel. There were ridges, incisions, screwheads, crisscross patterns, pinholes, nipples. It smelled of oil and metal. My hand could not refuse its shape and held it the only way it allowed, tightly embraced around the grip, pointer finger slipping into the trigger’s hollow. I went further and aimed it at the sky and pulled the trigger; he had second-guessed me and it was empty, but the force felt so real. Something clicked and the gun vibrated with a tight metallic sound that startled even Nilda, who just glared at us. “One day,” Moroy whispered, “you’ll shoot a loaded gun, with real bullets.”
Nilda’s duty was to pay attention to me, to take notice of me, every inch, ever part, every blemish and scar, from the sunbaked hair she shampooed every day to the toenails she clipped every three weeks. She was fresh from the province, pale and very young, hired by my mother to replace the old woman who had been wet nurse, maid and servant for several years.
I spent the length of the summer climbing the mango trees at the edge of our front yard. They were tall and thick enough to spread over our concrete fence, and gave our house a dark, imposing presence.
But from my low branch, the light was gentle and I found I could feel the breezes that glanced off our small swimming pool in the middle of the terrace. As the day advanced I saw the tree’s shadow grow longer on the grass and the dogs bark in relief, before everything quieted down toward evening.
At dinnertime my father had Nilda fetch me from the tree, and I opened my arms to let the afternoon’s bounty tumble into her outstretched skirt. In the twilight her legs looked very white, against the mango tree’s dark bark and my own skinny brown legs.
Nilda had come from a province overgrown with mango trees. She taught me how to climb our tree and pick its fruit. She taught me how to peel them and how to eat them. She taught me how to make the three sauces that made three different flavors. It was Nilda who tasted of the green mango we ate, both of us sitting by the pool in the sun and the heat. It was her tongue in my mouth during that long kiss. On that first hot day by the pool, she opened herself to me and her thighs held on to my small body. The sun beat on my head like a hammer, and as I grew hard I felt a headrush, as though the impossible length and girth of my manhood had dissipated me. I had thought it would make me stronger, but here, nothing was predictable. The rush came, from nowhere and from everywhere. She was silent as she held me and only whispered, yes, as she guided me into her, dark and wet, smelling of the sun and the pool chlorine, like nothing else I had ever seen or felt.
At first I couldn’t move. I felt my knees gripped in a rubbery tension. I put a dozen images in my head. Moroy had demonstrated this movement to me by pumping a dirty finger in a tightly rolled fist. “One day you’ll do this!” he had told me, and when I stuck my own finger in my fist he laughed because I didn’t get it. But once from my tree I saw two dogs turning around each other in what I had thought was a heat-crazed stupor as they struck and mounted, joints frozen as the male pumped into the female.
But Nilda felt like no fist. And instead of holding still and waiting, she moved with me and around me. Moroy promised me I would feel like a man after my first time, but I felt I had been swallowed whole, a small boy with salty, sweating skin sliding into her opening.
Over lulls in my father’s schedule, Moroy took me exploring. We ventured through tight roads, into tough neighborhoods. I marvelled at the the dark, cramped houses, the streetcorners and the sidewalks packed with people, places I never knew could exist. Moroy was a policeman once, and this had been his beat. He knew people wherever we went, the security guards at warehouse gates, the bums that hung out in front of gambling dens and sari-sari stores, the tough guys guarding the beer garden doors. When we walked those streets he squared his shoulders and walked a little slower than usual. It was like a killer’s walk. He enjoyed the moment, savoring every step, while I tried to match his stride.
By his silence and the slightly changed expression on his face I always knew when my father was worried about something. I knew enough about the times to understand that things were changing.
Later that week my father went out into the yard, in his pajamas, in the middle of the night, and fired his gun into the sky. Through my window and saw his thin, hunched form snapping back with every shot. It looked like his body would break apart. The muzzle flash burst like tails of comets crashing into earth. I ran into his room and saw my mother crying, her face in her pillow. The clutchbag lay on his bedside table. The shots deafened me and I could hear nothing in the quick, silent spaces between. Then there was a long pause before it started again. Nilda came up behind me and pulled me back into my room, holding me tight and talking to me. She was used to this, she told me. In her town they had domestic disputes, police rubouts, exchanges between the military and the NPA. They would sit quietly and wait it out, wondering who’d been killed. In the morning the news would come around, a vice-mayor or a barangay captain dead, or a group of soldiers, or ordinary townfolk.
My father must have used up four or five magazines that night. I tried not to think of the possibility of the bullets returning to earth. Every Christmas season we heard stories about bullets being fired into the air and lodging themselves into young boys’ skulls in their downward trajectory. We all pretended everything was normal when he appeared in the kitchen the next morning, in his thin, dark suit, cradling his clutchbag. He fixed Moroy with a hard look and told him to prepare for a long drive.
School starts when summer ends. After my first day, Moroy picked me up at the gate with energetic honks. He greeted me with a grin, like there was something he couldn’t wait to tell me. He drove slow, letting the engine’s slow churn fill the silence. Outside the sun had begun to turn a darker yellow.
We drove out the high school road, past the football fields. Outside my window the buildings slipped by, the gym, the chapel and the grade school. He turned into the side road that led to the seminary. He was still grinning, tapping his thumbs on the wheel. His grin was sinister, like he was planning to do something clever and terrible. The blood flowed from my arms and legs and I imagined he could bash my head in and bury me under the bushes without anyone ever knowing.
He stopped the car, pulled up the handbrake, opened the door and stepped out. He came over to my side and gestured to the driver’s seat and the wheel. I scooted over and gave the gas a few hard pumps. On the dashboard the needle rose past the red mark as the buzz of the engine drilled into my back. I drove the clutch to the floor with my left foot and released it slowly, allowing the balance of my strength to creep into my right. I negotiated a three-point turn and headed out into the main campus troad. Moroy reached over to the back seat and retrieved his gun, placing it on the dashboard with a thud.
We passed college students walking to their classes. If they looked closely they would have seen the gun, blueblack and tinted orange from the late afternoon sun. Moroy pointed to a side road that opened into a hidden clearing, covered by an undisturbed layer of dead leaves. I stopped the car and shut off the engine. When I opened the door, the sounds of the school had gone. Moroy took the gun, unloaded it, and jammed a fresh magazine into the grip, producing small, startling sounds, a click, a low sliding screech, a louder click. Then he drew the slide back and let it spring forward with a final snap. He handed the gun to me and I held it with both hands, close to the center of my body. I could feel it against my groin. In my lap it sucked up the lines and folds of cloth into its metal center.
We stopped out onto the leaves and the grass. He motioned me over to the edge of the clearing, where the trees began. I held the gun low, thinking of where it was pointed.
“OK stop,” he said. We had gone some distance into the trees, where the only things I could hear were our own movements disturbing the fallen leaves and the brown undergrowth.
“Now aim it at that tree and shoot.” Moroy had picked a tree at random.
I raised the gun, looking at my hands like they weren’t my own. He gripped my hands and taught me to hold it with my right hand taking aim and squeezing the trigger, my left hand cupped like a cradle to keep steady and cushion the recoil. My arms trembled with the great weight.
“Now shoot.”
Something in me refused. Maybe it was the image of my father shooting into the empty air, his thin frame absorbing the blow.
“What’s the matter with you? Squeeze the trigger!”
Nothing happened. Moroy’s moonface broke into a fat smile. “I know about you and Nilda,” he said.
I fired fast and blind, imagining myself emptying the clip into Moroy’s big skull. The smoke that followed each explosion quickly cleared, but the smell of gunpowder remained, along with a kind of nerve shock.
Moroy smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. It was his way of telling me everything was alright, my secret was safe with him. We walked to the tree so I could look at the exploded bark and the clean round holes in the white wood underneath. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Moroy looking at me. When he moved toward me I swung around and kept him in sight. He flashed his signature smile, took the gun and congratulated me on a job well done.
We returned to the school parking lot, where Moroy asked me to treat him to fishballs and Coke.
Moroy prided himself on once being the mayor’s “trigger.” But when his boss lost the next election there was only his old police detachment to return to. Then he started working freelance for government officials and big businessmen.
I asked Moroy about the kind of trouble my father was having. Things were changing, he told me. He was even in danger of losing his job.
“Where would you go?” I teased him. “He made me you too comfortable. Now look at you. You’re fat and spoiled.”
He smiled and turned to me, hunched his shoulders, bobbed his big head and threw slo-mo jabs at the air. Then he sat down and gave a thoughtful smile. He looked down at his shoes and I saw the ten-centavo scar. “And you’re slow,” I added.
That night, Nilda held me locked into her by twisting her legs around mine. I felt unnatural. I couldn’t stop. I came, my body jerking uncontrollably. It must have looked funny, my small body plugged into hers, my eyes rolled up inside their sockets, my lips curled and trembling. It took all the energy from me. Minutes later, she turned to me with a fresh look of hunger and excitement in her eyes and asked me if I wanted another one.
While Nilda and I spent the long, rainy after-school hours together, my father’s secret trips with Moroy grew more frequent. One night in September, on one of those trips, a van sidled up to the SEL as it sped along the coastal road. The windows opened, guns poked out and opened fire. A brief chase followed, then the inevitable crash. The scene was littered with blood, glass shards and spent shells. They even showed it on TV. Policemen and reporters crowded over the wrecked car.
That was the one encounter Moroy didn’t survive. He was too slow and too fat, and besides, he was driving. As the van gained on them, Moroy swung the car from side to side. When the van sped ahead and spun to block their way he tried to sweep it to the side. When the twisted metal of the van locked with the car’s fender and did not let go he steered and drove the car’s bulletproof bulk into it. Then he threw himself to the backseat to cover my father’s body with his own. Five or six men stumbled out of the van. They fired pointblank at the SEL’s windshield until the bulletproof glass gave way and then poked their guns through the holes. But the bullets couldn’t poke through Moroy. The TV cameras showed him lying with his arms outstretched, spreading his body out. Moroy’s hand still gripped his gun, still unfired. He had that same grin frozen on his moonface. He seemed pleased with his irrefutable logic.
The few bullets that had found their way around Moroy’s body punched through my father’s legs and narrowly missed his windpipe. The emergency doctors at Makati Med thought he was dead on arrival, but eventually discovered a weak pulse. Hours later he was lucid enough to recount the ambush in vivid detail. At Moroy’s funeral the mayor came and spoke gravely about how this bodyguard had once taken a bullet for him, too.
Months later, my father could walk again, only with a very stiff limp. He looked like a hollowed-out tree. He had taken a long vacation and spent most of his time at home. He had a nurse who pushed him around the house in a wheelchair. He spoke with a raspy, exhausted voice, but told me how he still wished me to become a lawyer.
He bought me a second-hand car for my graduation. It rattled and the airconditioner sometimes didn’t work. The week before school, Nilda and I rode the Marcos highway fast and hard, all the way to Fairview, where there was a huge empty mall where nobody went but they still played movies, even to empty theaters. We bought ice cream and we watched a Tagalog movie. Five minutes into it she leaned against me, took my hand and brought it up her skirt, between her thighs. It felt warm and very tender to be touching her there. It felt as though what had happened between us was ages before.
Nilda left at the end of the month. Yayas become redundant when their wards are grown. I was fourteen, entering high school at the end of the summer. My mother gave her a ticket for the boat ride home, along with a month’s pay.
Nilda’s eyes were red and wet with tears while she undressed me, slipped her uniform off and joined me for our last bath together. I planted my feet on hers and kissed the hollow of her shoulder. It felt good to know her body. I knew where she liked to be touched and kissed, and how her many different parts tasted. I pressed myself against her, covering her body with mine, from the skin on my face to the soles of my feet.
Nilda laid out her bags and her boxes in the living room and opened them in front of my mother for inspection. I saw her uniforms, her bathing suit and her pink underwear and noticed that she had snuck in two of my old sport shirts, folded tight and small. There was also a photo of me as a boy, in an old silver frame. My mother wordlessly put it back on the piano where it belonged, beside pictures of my father.
I put her bags in the back of the car and we drove in silence to the port area. On the way I asked her what she was planning to do back home. She said she didn’t know. She turned to me and said she wanted to stay with me and go with me wherever I wanted to go. “Uban ko nimo,” she said, in the language she had taught me, what they spoke at home. I threw her a smile and offered to visit her one day. She laughed bitterly and asked me if I even remembered where she lived. Of course, I said, where there were mango trees all over. •