Images of father

“A full moon with no scar shone on the night you were born,” my father said to me as he sat under the shade cast by the starapple tree in the yard. He was tall and he sat on the perezosa with his long legs resting on a wooden bench.

I had been pulling out his white hair using a tweezer. Five white hairs meant five centavos. Business was brisk. Fifteen white hairs meant a bottle of RC Cola. I asked him about the small square thing wrapped in layers of old, yellowed cotton, hung on a string and dangling from the ceiling just outside my window.

“That is your umbilical cord,” he answered. “The doctor, who was my friend, wrapped it in cotton, then gave it for me to hang from our ceiling.”

“Why, Papa?” I asked.

“So that you will not wander far away from home.”

The cool wind rising seemed to move him to tell more stories.

“It was the night you were born. We still did not have a jeep then, so I was taking the bicycle that night, on my way to the hospital. I was already in front of the huge balete tree, its roots like knotted arms, when I felt the bicycle had become heavier. It was not an uphill climb, but why did it suddenly feel so heavy?”

By this time, I had stopped probing my father’s head for my RC Cola.

“Suddenly I knew that somebody was sitting behind me, on my bicycle. That it was a woman in white, with long black hair streaming in the night, and that she had no face. Only a black void. In my mind I talked to her to please go away. I told her that my first child will be born tonight and my wife has been going through labor pains, on and off, in the last two days…”

“And then what happened, Papa?” I asked.

“She did let go in the end and so I sped away as quick as lightning. When I reached the hospital, you were just being delivered, bald and red and sticky all over and squealing madly at the world.”

*      *      *

Boy, who lived in front of our house, told me one day that they had just bought a television set. Now he could watch Casper, the Friendly Ghost, Josie and the Pussycats, Batman and Robin, Spider Man and The Flintstones every night.

I took the news as an invitation, so one afternoon, after leaving my blue school bag in the room, I rushed out of the house, past my grandmother who was watering the lawn, on to the street beginning to turn gold from the sunset. I only stopped running when I reached the yard of Boy’s house.

I was about to enter through their door when I met his mother, who was just stepping out of the door. “So,” she asked me, shapeless in her faded floral house dress, “where are you going?”

“To watch TV. Boy said your new TV set was delivered yesterday.”

“Yes, but we’re not inviting anybody to watch it,” she said, her thick lips twisting with her words, like the villain in Filipino movies.

I was young and stupid, so I just stared at her. She stepped backward, held the doorknob with her left hand and slammed the door shut on my face. I stood there, my feelings in chaos. My ears burnt with a flame I could not see and a great terrible anger began rising within me. It was the kind that would rarely rise from me, but when it came, it exploded with a fury.

I walked down their cemented stairs, grabbed a pebble, no, a rock, and hurled it at their windowpane.

The smashed window looked like the teeth of a shark.

I ran in the gathering dusk, past my grandmother merging with the shadows, into the living room floating with the smell of fried chicken for dinner. I ran right into my room. I locked the door and sat down in the dark.

Then I heard our jeep nosing into the garage and my father’s voice. In his wake, a series of voices, then a series of loud knocks on my door.

I braced myself and opened the door. Papa was there, his face cold and impassive. Behind him was Mama’s stricken face. And behind her, my grandmother who had just awakened from her late afternoon nap.

Papa grabbed my hand, dragged me to the kitchen, asked me if it was true; I nodded, and clamped my lips. He made me lie down, face flat against the hard, wooden bench. I knew what was coming. Then his leather belt began lashing at my buttocks and the skin of my thighs. Once, twice, thrice. I was just silent, my teeth biting into my lips. I told myself that I won’t let Papa hear me cry.

He scolded me while his leather belt cut the air, then bit into my skin. After the third lashing, Mama said, “Stop,” but Papa could not be appeased. And so my grandmother, my old and magnificent grandmother, stood between Papa and me and said in a voice that when I remember it now, still gave me the shivers. She said to Papa, “If you don’t want to stop, then strike me.”

I looked back. Papa’s hand froze mid-air, the belt hanging limply, like a sail suddenly without wind. Then he turned his back and walked away. My grandmother went to the bench, gathered me in her arms and led me slowly back to her room.

Her hand rested on my forehead. Suddenly, I began to sob, a sharp sob that tore at me savagely, now that my father was no longer there to see me. I cried myself into a deep sleep.

It was Papa who woke me up the next morning. He told me in a kind voice to wash my face and take a warm bath, so that we could all have breakfast together. He even led me by the hand to the washbasin.

He asked me later, “Did you do the right thing?”

I was silent.

But all I did was shake my head. He said I should not do it again; he would buy us a TV set, one bigger than our neighbor’s and a colored one at that, as long as I promised not to smash windows again.

I nodded, Papa smiled, and we were friends again. Or so he thought.

*      *      *

Email: [email protected]. Penguin Books has just published Danton Remoto’s novel, “Riverrun.”