The waiter placed a drink in Salas’s shaking hands. He sipped it — a good scotch — and thanked the waiter for his solicitude.
“A gift, sir,” the waiter replied, “from Señor Ocampo. He would like for you to join him.”
Salas looked across the room. Señor Ocampo was the Spanish mestizo with whom he had chatted while having his shoes shined. The rest of the scotch was in a bottle on the table.
“I hear you were mugged,” said Ocampo. “It’s terrible, it is, but you know, this city, this country, has always been like this. It hasn’t gotten worse. A cesspool.”
“Then what they say about you mestizos is right,” replied Salas.
“And what is that?”
“Enough distance to see the problems in the Philippines and too much love for the country to ever leave.”
Ocampo laughed heartily. “My father was pure Spanish blood, third generation. His mother cried for a month when he said he was marrying a Filipina.” More hearty laughter followed. Ocampo poured Salas a generous glass. “I’m buying you dinner,” he said. “The thing to order here is lengua.”
Salas did not want to be alone and this Señor Ocampo was certainly good company. A few glasses of scotch had soothed Salas’s fear, although he still felt a nagging generalized wariness. Ocampo was in the sugar business. His wife and children lived on the island of Negros, in Bacolod, and while on business in Manila, Ocampo considered himself a bachelor.
“So what’s your story, Salas,” he said. “Who are your people?”
Salas laced his fingers together. He knew his history well.
“Mine is not a happy story,” he started. “I was born in Baguio in 1915. My father was a carpenter.”
“Same profession as Our Lord’s.”
Salas smiled. “Yes. There were eight of us children at one point. We had little money. There were only four of us still living at the start of the war.”
“How sad.”
“The Japanese finished us off.”
“Except for you, of course.”
Salas almost laughed. This was not the first time he’d forgotten to include himself among the number. “My mother died in childbirth. There was”—here Salas looked thoughtfully at his entwined hands—“a good deal of blood.” He looked up at Ocampo. “I found her. The baby miraculously survived. He was covered in hair. The local mystic said this was a good omen.”
“Ah, but the mystic was wrong,” said Ocampo with deep-felt sympathy.
“Wrong?”
“Well, yes. The child died in the war.”
“That’s right,” said Salas. “I mean, right in God’s eyes. We must accept his decisions.”
“You are a man of faith!” declared Ocampo.
“Well, I was raised by nuns — a Belgian order in Baguio. They taught me English, introduced me to books. She was a good woman.”
“She?”
“Sister, Sister Mary. She was a good nun although she had a drinking problem and. . and a mustache. She also had a wimple.” Salas traced the wimple with his fingers extending out from his head.
In response, Ocampo stroked his mustache. “And where is she now?”
“The Japanese. . Unspeakable, you know. Even though she was a nun. .”
“And even though she had a mustache!” added Ocampo. Here they fell into awkward laughter, much controlled, yet impossible to completely suppress. “I’m sorry. I’m an insensitive drunken boor!” said Ocampo.
“No, no,” said Salas, patting the man on his arm. “She would have wanted it this way.”
“Ah.” Ocampo filled the glasses and raised his to clink with Salas’s. “To Sister Mary.”
The following morning, Salas was awakened by the ringing of the phone, but he did not answer. He was exhausted from the previous night. He had been tortured by bad dreams, nightmares brought on by scotch, and some mild form of hysteria activated by a change in life, or so Salas argued. A prisoner had come at him in his very bed, this bed, with the rumpled sheets. This skin-and-bones apparition had no head. He also had no shirt, and his bare chest revealed each rib in clear detail, a delicate vault of bones that arched above his flat belly. The navel was stretched open — then blinked: an eye in this unlikely location. He held a sword high above his shoulders. His belly-eye was trained on Salas. Salas counted his final seconds, and then he was back in Fort Santiago in the caves with Balmaceda. All kinds of prisoners were digging, Filipinos and Americans mostly. Balmaceda was making his way through the deep tunnel with a little silver mallet. The prisoners shifted soil to the scrape and scrape of shovels.
Balmaceda, on impulse, took the mallet and cracked it across a man’s skull. Instantly the man collapsed. None of the other prisoners seemed to notice. Salas went over. The man’s skull had split cleanly in two. Balmaceda separated the halves, like two hemispheres of a cracked almond. Balmaceda plunged his hand deep into the brain meat. When his hand came out, bloodied and trailing stringy gore, he held a stone. It was a ruby, uncut and blood red. Then Salas realized that the scar on his stomach had started dripping blood, then trickling. He covered the wound with his hands.
Salas dressed quickly. He had slept until noon. He looked at the table. The pan de sal and coffee were cold. Fernando was sulking by the kitchen door with a black eye.
“Why didn’t you answer the phone?”
“I just missed it. I’m sorry, sir,” said Fernando, whose sweat was still thick with coconut liquor.
Salas took a jeepney to Quiapo. He had the jeepney let him off around the corner from the restaurant where he had seen Balmaceda. He straightened his shirt and combed his hair in the reflection of a parlor window. On the front page of the paper was something about the Liberal Proclamation Rally at Plaza Miranda the following week, but this was dwarfed by a headline describing a restoration project in Intramuros that the first lady had decided to oversee. The engineering firm that had won the contract bid was Japanese.
“Sir, fifty centavos,” said the paper boy.
Salas gave him a five-peso bill.
The restaurant was busy on Sunday. Salas took the same seat by the window, wondering if Balmaceda would turn up, even though he usually only came during the week. No matter. Salas felt a solidarity sharing this seat. Hundreds of sparrows shot through the air. Salas had always hated the sparrows. They symbolized Manila to him — Manila, whose calcified lungs coughed up the little birds much as a consumptive coughed up blood. A waiter came to take his order.
“Where is the owner?” asked Salas.
“On Sunday, he is with his family,” said the waiter.
“Do you work here during the week?”
The waiter shook his head. He was a student at Santo Thomas. He had a scholarship. Salas participated wearily in this accidental conversation, wolfed down his siopao, nodded hastily as he got up from the table, pressing a tip into the student’s hand. He headed for the door, having momentarily forgotten the purpose of his visit.
Then, across the street, Salas saw Dr. Santos again. He was leaning with both hands on the back of the bench in exactly the same attitude Salas had on the day he sighted Balmaceda. Salas jumped into the street, this time confused into pursuit. A jeepney screeched to a stop, then was quickly bumped another half foot by a bus that had been following close behind. Salas was knocked down, although uninjured. He saw the back of the doctor’s head disappearing down the street, just slightly above that of the average-height man, but as he was now lying on the sidewalk, there was nothing he could do.
When Salas returned to his apartment, a soldier was standing in the hallway and his door was open. He paused at the top of the stairs. Fernando, who was at the end of the corridor watching, shrugged apologetically.