They decided to take a trip. Just the two of them, without Luchie snorting at Manolo’s attempts to tell a joke or Andres’s fussing after Tala as if she were a little child, still learning how to tie the sash on her dress. Without Iolana around to watch them from the corner of her eye, wordlessly critiquing their actions, letting the occasional long sigh or coy smile speak for her. Because it was tradition to share their home with family and hired help, the lovers did not feel resentful of their lack of privacy or seek to have it any other way. They only rebelled with the occasional trip. Lately, with their long hours behind locked doors, rambunctious tickle fights, and carefree teasing in all corners of the house, it was a good time to go.
The last time they had escaped was months before, on a day trip to a pineapple plantation a few hours north, with stops along the way to browse a small flea market and to lunch in a family restaurant on a farm, where the proprietors’ kids provided entertainment with songs they had memorized from the radio. Manolo and Tala had sat on a sun-bleached picnic bench in the yard, the restaurant’s sole customers, sharing a whole milkfish that they picked at with their fingers. The tomatoes mixed with onions and lightly doused in fish sauce were the juiciest they had tasted, and even the steamed rice seemed fluffier. As they ate, a row of clothes from a washline hung a few feet away, still heavy with dampness, with no wind to flutter them, and a couple of chickens bobbed about, occasionally weaving a crooked path between their legs. Water bags were propped to the tops of poles on either side of them, repelling the mosquitoes, and a row of ants crept along the ground in single file near one of the table legs. The green mountains appeared more distant on the horizon but ever-present, separated by miles and a misty vibration that was in fact the heat, causing Manolo to occasionally wipe the sweat from his brow with the bottom of his T-shirt.
The couple enjoyed their meal, eating slowly, chatting about the pleasant scenery, the little projects they’d left behind at home, and hopes for the future, which included visions of future children returning with them to this farm, climbing upon the table bench with their short, stubby legs, tugging at their shirt sleeves, or skipping joyfully to the adjacent field. They sat side by side, and every now and then, Tala leaned against Manolo’s shoulder and he rested his cheek lightly against the side of her head. After finishing a little more than half of their meal, they saw that the children who’d been peeking in on them separately or in pairs emerged altogether in a group of five. Standing near to the clothesline, they began to sing. It was completely unexpected, comical, and sweet. How the two eldest sisters assembled the three younger siblings, how the youngest, a boy, kept wandering away, only to be herded back in line, and how in spite of the fidgeting among the younger siblings and the patient orchestrations of the two eldest girls, their combined voices ultimately found cohesion. Manolo gave Tala a wink as the performance began. She listened to the children’s melody and nothing interfered with the purity of her joy.
Memories of such excursions were unscathed in Tala’s mind as Manolo placed their bags in the car in preparation for a new adventure. Tala studied the familiar couple next door, who saw them off with a wave. “Don’t get lost!” they joked from their porch.
“We’ll try our hardest,” Manolo replied from the driver’s seat.
They seemed happy enough—Lasam with a beer in one hand and a beer belly to match, Lamata cooling herself with a green fan, her mouth slightly open in a half-smile. They had settled into middle age, bodies with a bit more sag, carried with an air of complacency.
“Will we be them in ten years?” she asked Manolo as they backed up into the gravel road.
“Our neighbors are like these mountains. They’ve always been here and they don’t change. Ours is an active volcano. It won’t go dormant for centuries.”
Words like this from her husband’s mouth pleased her. She agreed. In a sleepy country province, she would not choose the most ready story. Even for the child in her belly, still the size of her thumb, she hoped for more excitement. She almost revealed her pregnancy to Manolo then and there, but willed herself to wait. The time would have to be right. First she would fill the empty shelves of her past, shelves bolstering walls that defined houses that cut into streets of an expanding and voracious city. And they would be a real family, without secrets, simple as the neighbors on their porches, with fire to fuel their active volcanoes.
They stocked up on snacks at the sari sari store. The shopkeeper was in his early fifties, with a booming voice that could have made the canned goods on the shelves vibrate. He had crooked teeth and a wide smile to showcase them. His confident, personable demeanor went well with a strong build and upright posture, made all the more noticeable because of his leathery brown skin, hardened under the pressures of work, sun, and time. This was a man who provided for his family and earned the trust and respect of his customers. Tala liked this man, and yet, she would not choose to be the shopkeeper’s daughter, someone who stocked shelves and filled out inventory slips, someone who went about her business without complication until she glimpsed the unassuming doctor from behind a row of cereal boxes. From that moment on, she would have sought the doctor’s face every day she worked, looking up from her dry goods whenever a customer entered the store. And one day, she would catch Manolo’s eye in return, but not before he had captured her whole heart.
“We could open up a clinic,” she proposed after they’d returned to the car with armfuls of goodies. “While you treat the common cold and diagnose hyperthyroid cases on one side, I’ll treat the broken heart and the plagued spirit on the other. Together we’ll cure the whole person.”
He could have asked her more then, about the woman at the albularyo stand, about her visits there. Had she been striving to help the barefoot kid at her side with the albularyo’s medicines, which his struggling mother could not afford to buy? Did she herself nurse a “plagued spirit”? He remembered her at the riverbank—storms had come and gone inside of him before he’d summoned the nerve to speak to her.
They drove for hours, passing fields broken only by sky, watching the mountains scatter as they wound down to flatter ground, the road beneath them changing from narrow and pockmarked to wide and even. Houses multiplied in number; intersections emerged with potential detours. Eventually, the country road became a city street, which became a highway, and across the bay before them, tall buildings reached for the same sky the mountains of their Manlapaz had already kissed.
“Ma’s palm wine used to get the whole province drunk,” Manolo recalled. “If you’re interested in nursing broken hearts or plagued spirits, it might be worth researching the tricks of the bottle.”
A silly thought crossed her mind—of selling Iolana’s palm wine from her sisters’ booth, in shot-sized bottles, labeled as the remedy for shyness or reticence.
They drove into a thicker swarm of cars at the port of Tagarro Bay. With its big ships on the dock, islands in and of themselves, and its wide boardwalk dotted with shops and outdoor vendors, Tagarro Bay was a gathering place for stowaways. She saw faces, bicycles with their baskets full, shoppers satisfied with their candies and parcels, seabirds perched on metal railings, the outline of ships, the twinkle of water, dirty napkins tossed alongside empty soda cans and Styrofoam trays, crowded benches, palm trees, a thousand pairs of moving legs from a thousand different places, low hedges and skinny trees, beggars with signs and near-empty cups, a puppet show displayed from a cardboard theater, seabirds eating discarded food, and the smells of every object came together in a muggy stew that engulfed them immediately, swallowing their aroma of mountain and earth to season the stew all the more. With this view from her passenger window she decided she would not be the politician’s daughter, suited up and keeping pace with her escort in high heels to meet a ship’s captain or a high-ranking general. She would not be the young movie actress, driving by in a chauffeured car with tinted windows. She would not be the woman on stilts, face painted and head lost in a higher elevation. These were the fairy tales of others. She thought of who she wanted to be most, wife to Manolo and mother to their child, and she realized that every battle, even the most brutal, was fought for the simplest of freedoms.
“Look, Manolo,” she said. “There are people from every part of the world and every background here in one place. If you could be part of someone’s story, whose would it be?”
“Yours,” he replied. “I’d be part of yours.” He had parked the car and they remained seated while he dangled the hand with his cigarette out the window, neither of them rushing to join the noise and madness of the crowds. His stare drank her in, the kind of look a man gives a woman when he anticipates making love to her, and receiving that look she smiled, the fine hairs on her arms standing on end as she recalled the last time he’d looked at her that way, the pleasures it had led to. She told him he was definitely the main character, a starring role in her story. She returned to window watching, and whenever she noticed a particular character, from the busy fisherman to the overzealous preacher, she pointed them out to Manolo, imagining their stories out loud as he listened.
Then she found him, a stick-figure type, elegantly thin, with an edginess that defied his body’s elegance. Striking in his aloneness, he smoked in the middle of the plaza, watching the crowd as she watched the crowd. He seemed to meet her eyes through the blur of nameless faces in constant motion.
Manolo followed the direction of her stare to find a typical boardwalk scene unfolding, one with too many people on their disparate missions, none of them connected except for the fact that they had all shown up at the same place on the same day; but suddenly a pathway cleared and a silhouette emerged within it—another crowd-watcher at the other end of their gazes. For no more than a few seconds that slipped discreetly past him, they watched each other instead of the crowd, three observers with the universe bubbling in between them.
She was hungry and told Manolo so, so they disembarked toward the seafood stands for the shrimp fry that she craved. As he ventured toward a suitable vendor, she pointed to the benches where she would go to find him and went to meet her phantom. To learn his story, and hers. Before her eyes the city began to rise up—not downtown Tagarro Bay, with its looming skyscrapers and discreet alleys zigzagging behind the big ships, but the one she had built in its shadow.