Collected Stories, page 43
The young woman who appeared in the doorway had to be Pacita Delgado from the way she looked at Burns’ companion—nothing so vulgar as spite or fury, but a look watchful, intimate, composed, smiling. Avellanos took her hand and held it. “Pacita.”
“Ramón. It’s nice of you to come to my party.”
“I couldn’t have stayed away,” he said, watching her. “Also I brought a guest, Mr. Robert Burns, the greatest American novelist, editor, and critic.”
“At least,” Burns said. When her dark eyes lifted with a sweep of lashes, he was jolted. The delinquent lover was right: she was very good-looking—small, well-made, with soft dark hair parted in the middle, and a golden skin. Her clothes looked so starched and cool that he thought of her as something caramel flavored in a crisp, crinkled cone.
“I know all about Mr. Burns,” Pacita said. “I have heard him speak.” Burns bowed politely.
“If I had known you were there I would have spoken better.”
Her eyes played an amused game with his. Avellanos lifted his blunt chin, chortling meaninglessly; he replaced the girl’s hand at her side as if leaning a gun against a wall. “Pacita is one of our best writers, you know. She has won prizes for stories.”
“Ah?” Burns said. “I must get them and read them.”
“They wouldn’t be worth your time. But come and meet my friends.” She was impeccable and composed. Behind her back Avellanos winked at Burns, to Burns’ irritation. The editor was a fool, both for letting so charming a girl go and for flattering himself she was breaking her heart over him. Burns found himself wishing he could touch her skin, which should feel as cool and smooth as old ivory; and the thought of old ivory recalled the little figurine of the goddess Lakshmi that he had bought in Darjeeling, the one he had been stung on. Straight out of a Tibetan temple, stained brown with temple incense through hundreds of years, yah! Soaked in soy sauce to age it, more likely, or buried in a manure pile. Now what had made him think of that thing, and the taint of the spurious that clung to it? This girl was not spurious—but then neither was the goddess Lakshmi. Only the image was spurious; and anyway, spurious or not, he liked that figurine as well as anything he had collected on his travels.
A thin man with a Chinese face put a gin and tonic in his hand. Shouting over the noise, Pacita introduced him to three short story writers, a pair of poets, the widow of a hero of the resistance, a man who worked at the American Embassy, a girl who had been to the States on a YWCA fellowship. The standard literary crowd: he had met them in India, Burma, Thailand, except that here they were less likely to be Communists. They all looked absurdly young; they were ardent, perhaps talented; they flattered him by being eager to meet him. So he would answer questions, arouse awe by admitting that he had met Caldwell and Steinbeck and Faulkner, say earnestly and with complete conviction that there ought to be the freest kind of cultural exchange between their two countries. And he would remain a fatigued stranger in a crowd not his own.
It was jammed and steaming in the small rooms. In the back yard he saw men working over the pit where a pig on a pole hissed fat into the embers. As Burns watched through the open window they slid the brown carcass onto a board and a vehement little man started sharpening a knife the size of a machete. There were cheers, much laughter. Temporarily relieved of social demands, Burns sat in a rattan chair and sipped his second drink, and it was there that Pacita Delgado, hunting through the house with a plate of food, found him.
Because she gave him a brilliant dark glance and a smile of a certain warmth, he took the plate when she offered it. It contained only fragments of roast pig and something like French beans—those seemed safe. Gingerly, while her smile encouraged him, he tasted. The pig was crisp and melting at the same time, the beans tender and salty.
“Delicious,” he said.
Abruptly she sat down by him; the rest of the party was out in the yard. Feeling absurd, wearied with his own routines, he asked her what she was writing now, and she replied that she was not writing: she had to be happy to write.
“You’re not happy?”
Her lips pursed; her eyes glowed at him as if tears had momentarily brightened them; she shook her head with a quick, sober smile.
“Oh, come on!” Burns said. “If the young, beautiful, and talented can’t be happy, what chance do the rest of us have?”
Instead of answering, she laid her hand on his wrist; he expected her touch to be cool, but it was warm. “I’m grateful to you for making Ramón come.”
“I? It was he who brought me.”
“He wouldn’t have come without you for an excuse. This way he could tell himself he was introducing you to Manila writers. Without you he would have seemed to be coming to see me.”
“And he wouldn’t want to give that impression?”
Her mouth twitched. “No.”
“I can’t understand why not.”
“Of course you can.” She brushed aside his implied admiration as of no consequence. “We were lovers. He told you, didn’t he?”
Burns was embarrassed. He filled his mouth with food and made a wordless, deprecating face.
“It isn’t my doing that we aren’t now,” Pacita said in her low intense voice. Her eyes followed Avellanos, who had just come in the back door, joking with two other men. He did not look toward her, but her eyes stayed on him somberly. “He is the best man in the Philippines.” The way she said it, pronouncing it “Pilippines,” made Burns smile, but Pacita did not smile. “He is. The very best. He did incredible things during the occupation; he was a real hero, he is full of talents. Next election, Magsaysay is going in and Ramón is going in with him, into something big. He is going to help end this jefe government of grafters and landlords and put down the Huks. He is going to be one of the fathers of his country.”
“I hope so,” Burns said, embarrassed by the obscure demands she seemed to make on him. “Well, I’m sorry,” he mumbled, and then, to make a diversion, slid his emptied plate onto a table and said, “The pig was marvelous, and so were the beans.”
“Beans?”
“The vegetables. Weren’t they beans?”
For a moment her face was blank. “Oh. Those aren’t vegetables. Those are something from the pig’s insides.”
At the pit of his stomach Burns felt something deadly uncoil itself—tapeworms, trichina worms, liver flukes, my God. Pig’s insides! Pacita was saying intensely, “I wanted him here. I wanted him to know I don’t hate him because he doesn’t come any more. Do you think he has got that idea?”
Burns hesitated before he said it. “Maybe he thinks you held the party to try to get him back.”
The flattening or hardening of her eyes told him he had struck something sensitive, but he was only half attending to her. His mind kept returning to the alimentary indiscretion he had committed. There was nothing to do except to drown the things, whatever they were, in alcohol, but his glass was empty.
“Of course that’s what he would think,” Pacita said. “I was depending on it that he would sniff a danger, and therefore come. He is not one of these cautious or cowardly or cry-baby people. Ramón is a rare kind. He is not afraid of anything, even me.”
More people were crowding in; the room was insufferably hot. Burns stood up to be introduced to someone, and when the someone had passed by he shook the ice in his sweating glass and met Pacita’s wide and rather stary eyes. She bothered him; he felt something false or hysterical in her manner or her words, and so he coughed in bright awkwardness and said, “Well, probably it will work out right after all,” and tipped his empty glass to his lips. Eventually she caught on and took it from him; the hostess look came back to her face. “Another drink?”
“Please,” Burns said. “It’s very warm.”
Later he was at the door when Pacita and Avellanos said good-bye, but he could detect in the girl’s face no chagrin at having failed. So far as Burns had seen, Avellanos had not said a word to her except in arriving and departing. Now he picked up her hand again and said, “Well, Pacita, it was a wonderful party. I’ll see you around.”
“I hope so.” She took her hand from Avellanos and gave it to Burns.
“Did I mislead you?” the editor said on the way back. “She’s good-looking, eh? Like an essence of woman. Today you heard her purr. Sometime you should hear the tiger roar. Oh, oh!” He fended off imaginary claws. “Well, what time shall I come tomorrow?”
So there went little Pacita’s chances, as casually as that. They turned off the boulevard into the hotel drive. The palms hung without stir in the red evening, the hulks were black on the molten water, the promontory of Bataan was a dark low silhouette against a salmon-colored sky.
“How’s nine o’clock?” Burns said. “I should be over at the club around eleven.” Privately, he wondered if what he had eaten would let him rise at all in the morning.
But it was not he who called off the date next day. At a quarter of nine Avellanos telephoned in great agitation. Pacita, he said, had seen the last of her guests home, cleaned the house, washed the dishes, and swallowed a half bottle of sleeping pills.
“My God!” Burns said. “Is she dead?”
“Not dead,” said the crackling voice. “A neighbor found her. But I can’t meet you—you understand. What a fierce little … well. I am at the hospital now.”
“Don’t have me on your mind for a minute,” Burns said. “There’s nothing special till Monday anyway. But I’d like to hear how she is, if you get a minute to call.”
He found he was genuinely upset. The embarrassment he had felt at her party, the feeling of falseness she had communicated to him, had its explanation in this news, and it gave him gooseflesh. Not falseness, but a more passionate reality than he had been prepared for, had looked out at him from the girl’s hostess face. She had advertised all her friends into her house and carried her death around among them like canapés on a tray.
That day he did not go to the club at all, but lay in pajamas with the doors open to the breezy galleries, and wrote letters and brought his journal up to date and read a collection of Filipino poets. Through the late afternoon, nursing a succession of gin-and-tonics, he watched the hours pass over hotel and palms to quench themselves in another volcanic burst in Manila Bay. He had no bad effects from the pig’s insides; there was no word from Avellanos; he felt lonely and abandoned and somehow abused.
In sleep that night he returned home, and struggling back toward consciousness as through a traumatic birth, he woke wringing wet, and looked mournfully, and saw the foreign sky, the galleried balconies, the palms, the leaden bay, and in the room the portable typewriter, the notebooks, the suitcases of exile. Home was still a month and a half away. Meanwhile, on Monday afternoon he had a talk to give at the USIS.
After breakfast he sat in bed making notes, saying that the peaceful co-existence of peoples depended not on arms or alliances but on knowledge, sympathy, the freest exchange of ideas and attitudes and the value systems by which each people conducted its life. Exchange of people, ideas, books, more important than sale of copra or iceboxes, and not just a few books, but whole sciences, whole literatures. Must apologize for fact that despite long friendly relations etc. with Ph., he and his countrymen knew so little of Ph. cultural life. Except for Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, no knowledge Ph. literature. Since coming to Manila, eyes opened: every sign of young, lively, vigorous lit. both prose and poetry, both English and Tagalog. Dismiss Tagalog—incomp. to comment. But in English, a new, a real variety, fresh intentions, new names: González, Santos, Joaquín, others. Delgado? Well enough known? Get her stuff, read. …
The telephone rang.
It was Avellanos, jubilant. “Listen! Everything is all right! She is being let out of the hospital. It’s a weight off a man’s soul. What are you doing?”
“Oh, say, that’s wonderful!” Burns said. “I’ve been worried … Doing? Why?”
“Because you are coming to a cockfight. Nobody knows the Philippines till he has gone to a cockfight when he should have been in church.”
The very thought was exhausting to Burns. He said cautiously, “You know, I wonder if I should. I’d like to, but I’m not feeling so stout, and there’s this speech on Monday. Also I shouldn’t miss my exercise session. Anyway, isn’t it illegal?”
“Illegal?” Avellanos roared into the telephone. “You are not in Stockton, California!” Burns held the receiver away, and it bellowed at him from arm’s length, “By God, man, I’m relieved. I want to celebrate. Come along.”
Burns hesitated only a moment, held firm. “Really, I hadn’t better. Some other time, maybe, when I’m back on my feet.”
“All right, all right!” the editor roared. “I won’t press you. But I want to see you anyway. I’ll be by the hotel in twenty minutes.”
It seemed as good an excuse as any for Burns to get dressed. Waiting in the lobby—he somehow did not want Avellanos invading the private clutter of his room—he found himself thinking of Pacita Delgado’s melodramatics as an illustration of the peculiar ardency of the Filipino temperament. People elsewhere might die for love, or pretend to, but where else would you encounter a gesture like that party? She was already an anecdote in his mind, and so he was surprised when, as the government car pulled in, he saw in the front seat beside Avellanos the glimmer of a sheer camisa and the flash of a woman’s face. She was on his side of the car; her golden skin was paler, her eyes were shadowed, but the smile she turned toward him as he crossed the drive was utterly natural, slightly amused, as if they shared a joke. Well, perhaps they did.
“Hello, hello!” he said, and bent to the window, took her small cool hand. “This is a very pleasant surprise. I heard you were ill.”
“You heard worse than that,” said Avellanos. “You heard she was so stupid she tried to kill herself. What you didn’t hear yet is that I have talked her out of all that. We are going to get married. What do you think of that?”
Moved to excessive and awkward congratulation, Burns said it was the best conclusion to a dramatic story he could think of. It seemed to him that Pacita’s upturned face was astonishingly demure. Studying the blunt angle of Avellanos’ jaw and the look of cocky satisfaction on that smiling face, Burns thought, though he did not say, that no bridegroom had ever looked less trapped. And yet he had been very neatly trapped indeed.
“Let me persuade you about this cockfight,” Avellanos said. “You want to see the Philippines; this is where you see us best. You don’t know Filipinos until you have seen some little fellow who has trained a chicken for months put it into the ring against another’s rooster. He bets everything he owns on it, steals his wife’s savings, sells his children’s shirts to raise a peso. If he wins, glorious; if in one pass his rooster gets its throat cut, then you will see how a philosopher takes disaster. His first act after losing everything will be to beat his wife to shut her mouth, which he thinks opens only to say no and raise objections. His next will be to go hunting for a new rooster. You should come along and meet this philosopher.”
“I’m afraid I hadn’t better.”
“Would you send away a visitor to the States before he had seen a baseball game?”
Burns still shook his head, smiling. The editor regarded him for a second in a friendly, appraising way. Then he gave up, slapped his shirt pocket, and sprang out of the car. “Well, I’m sorry we’ll have to celebrate alone. Excuse me a minute. I am out of cigars and I have to make a phone call.” Ahead of his energetic rush the door man opened just in time; otherwise, Burns was sure, the editor would have bolted right through the glass.
From the car Pacita smiled up enigmatically, and taking a chance, curious to hear her say what he knew was true, Burns slid in beside her. “I congratulate you,” he said.
“Thank you. I am very lucky.”
He studied her. She was extraordinarily attractive, and she feigned well the weakness of recent illness. He said, “You did me the honor of being frank with me at your party. Will you be frank with me again?”
“Of course.”
“I’m afraid you may be offended.”
“No, please. Why?”
He plunged. “Does Ramón think this suicide attempt was really serious?”
Smiling, with a forming wrinkle between her brows, she said, “I don’t suppose he thinks it was a joke.”
“But he believes you swallowed the pills.”
The wrinkle between her brows became a knot; hard lines and planes appeared under the softness of her face; her eyes flickered at him. “You don’t?”
He would have retreated, but he was in too deep. “It occurred to me to doubt,” he said. “According to Freud, anyone who wants to kill himself succeeds.”
Literary curiosity, as he now saw, had led him into an inexcusable gaffe; her eyes were hard to meet. “So I win him back by a trick,” she said, or spat. “I am full of weak despair and cunning. I bribe some intern to pump my stomach and give me something to make me look sick. I pretend I am dying so he comes to the hospital, and pity restores him to me. Let me tell you, that would be the way to drive him away forever.”
“Then why …” he said. “I’m sorry, I’ve offended you, and I truly didn’t mean to. It just seemed to me you have so much to live for, I couldn’t believe you seriously meant to die.”
“I didn’t mean to die.”
“You said you swallowed the pills.”
“Thirty of them.” She threw a hand in the air in a gesture exactly like one of Avellanos’. “A neighbor came over around midnight. I had asked her to come.”
