Gun Dealers' Daughter: A Novel Read online

  Intermittently, my parents would telephone. But since it became increasingly clear we had nothing much to relay to each other, even these halfhearted acts diminished. One must forgive them. They were dealing with architects, feng shui advisors, visionary salesmen of their new order. They were carrying an empire into a new world. And in the meantime, I was gathering a sense of self without a designer to keep me informed of my errors. My days were subsequently taken up by my disasters.

  To be honest, the early days in this precarious mansion had a calm sense of emptiness that might translate, if I bothered to name it, into a kind of peace.

  SO MAYBE MY discovery of that oriel window was unfortunate. I do not know how long I meandered along my allotted portion of the house, like an obedient child, with the gym to the west and the balcony facing the river, so that some phantom of beauty always hovered about my vision wherever I turned.

  That day, I was done with lunch, and with guilt I had left unopened the canopied silver of the usual canapés—Reina Elena had left behind a new chef, a shy girl named Eremita. Victoria Eremita. When I was done with all my meals, Eremita, who looked only a bit older than I, a slim girl in her twenties, always lifted the covers of the dishes in my presence, to check my appetite for her budding art.

  Another servant, some dwarf apprentice, a little man in grown-up clothes, also looked at the dishes in reproof. In this way, I learned that dawdling after lunch was impossible: I would witness Eremita’s disappointment as she left the room with the laden plates. At first, I felt the need to reassure the girl by biting into each cake and pudding and casserole, flattering her good intentions. Then I took to wandering the hallways and stairwells to escape her return.

  As I said, the house in New York was familiar, but surprising. It had lacunar themes—sculpted vaults and scalloped corners. Bootlegger Baroque, Uncle Gianni would call it. I wound up, then down, its marble staircase, knowing someone’s steps might follow. Shadows were everywhere amid the Brahmin brocades. But everyone was discreet. Down in the basement, I found a broken bowling alley in a mysterious labyrinth reeking of ancient steam. It was spooky. I rushed up the marble staircase, happy to see a fleeing figure, an orderly with a notepad in his hand, pretending to be a writer, dispelling ghosts.

  Back in the house’s main rooms, I found myself in the second-floor hallway, where I avoided my image, a serial loiterer against mirrored walls. I escaped into a passage. To my surprise, it opened onto an outdoor ledge, full of ladybugs: a flimsy path, a vertiginous virgin walk. Mine were the first footsteps in ages on its dust. If I reached out, I could grasp the house’s buttresses. If I looked down, I would fall.

  The best thing about it was no one would follow.

  It was this path that led to the oriel window. The window jutted toward the river. I hung upon the window’s travertine and peeked into my home’s reflection.

  At first, all I saw was my face, peering at me in illusion, a figure hanging from a ledge as if seeking refuge from bad weather. The river and the trees behind me framed my dark hair, a graded mesh of black, and a halo of light from the horizon tricked my blinded eye. Gradually, I glimpsed bits and pieces of the benighted room.

  It was easy enough to jimmy the window open and enter through the unscreened casement. Moths, cobwebs, a host of ladybugs and gentle pests. I had seen it, an old door, reflected from the window. A massive mahogany vault, with an unaccountable lunette: a peephole of darkness framed in antique stencil.

  I walked across the room’s dizzy floor, a trippy tortoiseshell motif with an oleaginous layer, a syrup sheen. Everything was dusted and polished, but untouched. The door itself was unlocked, like the rest of the house’s rooms. Why lock up a place in which no one ever stepped foot?

  I looked out from where I had come. I had a clear view of the silver river. A twin tableau, a pair of stucco pomegranates or concrete figs, framed a vanishing point in my vision, toward the water.

  I walked about the cluttered room. I found portraits lined like suspects against the walls. I vaguely recollected them. Solemn pictures of morbid women. A scary child in sausage curls. Watercolors of French cypresses and wheat fields by someone who was not Van Gogh.

  A life-size picture, framed in gold.

  A diving sensation in my chest. A kind of heated swarming. Pink and blue gases colored the monstrous frame. I heaved. I thought I would vomit, but my throat was dry. My body jerked in convulsions, I was shaking as if poisoned: though I had left Eremita’s tiramisu untouched, and my insides, in fact, were empty.

  4

  I ADMIT THAT I had liked the experience—of sitting still in Manila’s torpor while she had painted in our living room. I had liked the pleasant effort of repose, a kind of introspective challenge. My mother, posing stiff-backed beside me, kept lapsing into her hostess-fluttering, offering cakes and juices to the artist as she worked, though Madame Vera barely answered, speaking only to correct our poses.

  Madame Vera was an emaciated Spaniard of a remarkable hue—stale, dry glue comes close to her pallor: a glutinous texture of gray. On the first day, she had appeared at our doorway in Makati in fur and a venerable silk suit, a corrugated glistening that trailed the musty smell and mothball stench of some theatrical company’s dank costume department; everyday she wore the same kind of suit, like some outlaw from an ancient dry cleaner’s.

  I watched her pull off her gloves while the maid buzzed my mother. Madame Vera’s rings supported her fingers rather than the other way around: it seemed to me the rings kept her flesh in place. I imagined that her entire body was precariously meshed, held together by the same miserable flesh that one saw on her freed hands—a veined, brittle hide in an advanced stage of molting. Waiting with her in the living room, I imagined, as she pulled off a late glove, that if one pulled hard enough, one could rip her skin off, and she’d emerge from the shell of her body, like a cicada.

  She did not look at me but at the furnishings of our house. She stood up to examine the Amorsolo: rose-cheeked women selling flowers in a fresh-meat market. She muttered, I suppose to me: “Nnguhh. This picture is nothing; just wait till you see mine. Nngoohh.” She had a gargling, nasal accent, but I believe she spoke in English: I’m not so sure of what she said.

  As I said, it was pleasing to sit for a portrait, as if I were giving up my duties to someone else, some obligation. The obligation of self-study, one might put it. I delegated so much of my daily existence—there was always a personal servant, a driver, cook, baker, gardener, floral designer, including a personal dog groomer, who used to come on scheduled visits to redecorate my pets, a sweet pair of Alpine pinschers, now dead, victims of some rank methane plague (their mystifying gassiness expelled them from paradise, and I sobbed over their loss). So it was no giant step to surrender my idea of myself to someone else’s expertise. Even my mother relaxed, silent, forgetting her posture so often that Madame Vera barked “Sientate!” My mother would apologize, sitting up.

  In fact, my mother had been in Madame Vera’s thrall. I couldn’t explain it. At first, I resented my mother’s obedience to this hag of a Picasso. My mother was often prey to a procession of hacks, foreigners whom Manila attracted the way the wet season draws moths indoors. That’s how she almost had our entire garden replanted, to put blocking wind trees in the appropriate spiritual corners upon the advice of a lightweight Westerner, whom Mr. Kow Lung, the rightful feng shui master, denounced when he came back from Hong Kong. That’s how we acquired gigantic gold-leaf murals in the private den, when she fell to the folly of a debonair Frenchman, a passing interior decorator, who soon after romped off with someone’s bank account and teenage child. That’s how we got our portraits painted, a frothy extravaganza of Fragonard wisps and the hazy perspective, in the background, of what seemed like a miniature palace, a schematic design Madame Vera had already practiced for her previous clients, a fantastic couple in delusional clouds. That’s how, in the frozen eternity of oils, I miraculously acquired prominent cheekbones and, most wondrously, a
chin. And my mom gained the height of Venus de Milo rising from a cowrie shell.

  Madame Vera had painted us with the most awkward clairvoyance—sketching what she sensed our fantasies to be, an embarrassing wish fulfillment. I understand that to one lady’s furnishings, she had added the lion’s emblem of the old viceroy of Mexico, though the only viceregal things about the subject were her vacant eyes. She looked like a blind pug going up in smoke. For the portrait of the couple, her biggest patrons, Madame Vera had added the mythic complications of tropical genesis—brown Adam and Eve rising to pink and blue clouds from split bamboo. She had smoothed the man’s lupus into a lapidary plumpness and had restored to the other her winsome youth. In my opinion, in Madame Vera’s heaven they seemed to wallow, like my unfortunate dogs, in some hissy, flatulent eternity. Madame Vera was not so much a painter as a pander: in the Inferno, easily she’d be a sinner in lower hell, condemned to eternal lashings from horned demons. In Manila she had found an ideal world for her talent.

  When I saw the painting, I knew I had been right to fear for my mother’s goodwill—that some awful discovery of bad taste would come about from this misguided aesthetic project. When Madame Vera unveiled her prize (she hadn’t allowed us to see the piece in progress, and I for one never looked), I felt as if I had been smacked: caught in an insult. My cheeks burned as I looked at my unrecognizable self, my smoothed-out nose, my pink, sculpted cheeks, and most of all my blameless chin: I was caught out in my hideous dream of perfectly symmetrical beauty. Madame Vera was standing in a corner, watching us. She still clutched pieces of the frame’s wrapping in her avian arms. I imagined she was leering at us, in the beaky way of an unevolved creature, a vertical pterodactyl, some ave de rapiña. I felt sodden, spit-upon. As my mother came closer to look at the painting, I stepped forward, as if to shield her from the insult.

  My mother took a breath.

  “Vera, what can I say?” my mother said.

  I knew she was going to speak it: my anger and embarrassment at the painter’s dishonesty.

  “It’s marvelous,” my mother continued. “You captured my Sol at just the right angle, finding her beauties so wonderfully—that mold of your chin, darling: she did it so well. Look. And I can’t say that you didn’t do so badly with my own self. I do like the coloring: it’s so—lifelike. I can’t wait to show it to Frankie.”

  Madame Vera clapped her hands at this, rattling her rings: “Ah, hush, hush, Queenie—it’s all in the subject. I just draw. I’m a vessel.”

  I looked at both of them. I looked back at the painting, at my mother.

  Madame Vera showed us where she thought she could do some last revisions—in the refined shadowing of an ear, the adjustment of light about a head. And that was that. She asked permission to exhibit the work in her show that year, 1980. It took the capital by storm, as the papers liked to say. The last I knew, the picture had been installed on the mezzanine, a reception hall in the house in Makati—the house my parents were dismantling right now, as they set their bright hopes for a new life in the oasis they were building in Alabang.

  5

  HENRY HUDSON HAD sought China but instead found Albany. Ferdinand Magellan found Manila and was disconcerted by geography. He came by accident upon the Philippine islands and was, as they say, disarmed. I transferred my notes and manuscripts to the oriel room. I continued my writing exercises there, gathering bits and pieces of time, keeping occupied. Its view satisfied me. Sometimes, looking down from the balcony into the distance, the long, tree-lined road, I felt a thrill of solitude, as if I were Antonio Pigafetta, the ancient chronicler, seeing a primordial wasteland—the greenery of old Manila, say, before the arrival of the pirates and the pillagers. I was a discoverer. I was getting better. They say this part of the river leads to some salt waterway where the Mohicans used to pray, before the advent of the casinos. The shadow of Native American wilderness, the survey of sedge and sediment on this winding drive may not be so different from old Manila. Both islands reek from the salt of ancient error. The resemblance was a trick of my downcast homesick angle, anomalous mist of monsoon-like rains, the bent, gray sky and low tree limbs, spent autumn brown leaves curled and cankered.

  I kept seeing Roxas Boulevard at a narrow glance—I closed my eyes and smelled it: the smell of shrimp, evening dinners and wet trees. Moist heat. Palms. Ruined iron-trellised houses. Low bungalows against bright green lawns facing the open sea.

  I heard the dish carts trundling down the hallway into the service elevator. Garlic smells. Then the clanging of the elevator’s ancient shaft. Rumbling shut. Then the wily creak of its creepy descent, Eremita’s daily freight.

  I kept writing.

  It is easy to like New York, from this quiet quietus—the soft butt-end of the Hudson’s light as I write. A sense of doubling persists, a shaky orientation. But always, the sight of water renews. I hope to find footholds, after all. To remain well, I must find ways to feel at ease. Live in the moment. A corny slogan I gather from my doctors. An octogenarian chorus bleats in my brain. Recovery, they say, means learning to exist in the present tense.

  It is a delusion of my memory that my past exists at all. When was that concert, for instance—that birthday concert for the president? The midterm of the eighties? The finals of the seventies? I know that incident, a gathering of identities within a single event, has perhaps only an apocryphal significance, but I keep recalling it nevertheless—that limousine taking a swift turn, heading for Manila Bay.

  6

  IT MUST HAVE been Manong Babe who drove us to that entrance facing the water. Already you could see it—the tale of a different city beyond the bleakness of scheduled failure: we passed the blackouts of Manila’s streets, a regulated system of select disrepair. By the water, gowned, crowned women were alighting from their cars, sweeping onto the sidewalk. Even if it was easier to park first and walk across the street, no one bothered. Limousines waited in line by the sidewalk, drivers idling as all the idle matrons of Manila disembarked.

  Ladies in Manila do not walk. I have never seen my mother, Reina Elena Soliman, the former Queenie Kierulf, cross a street.

  I recognized Mrs. Esdrújula, the stateliest lady in society, emerging from a car a few feet away. She was wearing her single-lined blue tiara. She had begun to wear it ever since she had been knighted by the pope. It was a sweet indulgence, granted for her gifts of new money to old charities. In return for her saintliness, she got to wear a crown of her own design, with subtle celestial symbols and utterly terrestrial stones.

  “Dear Bumbum,” my mother murmured as she spied her old friend. Manong Babe got out to open my mother’s door. “Doesn’t she look so saintly, just like Saint Catherine of Siena!”

  I did not remind my mother of the actual fate of her worshiped and beheaded saint: we had seen it one summer on a trip—a face visibly decaying against sweating glass. My mother had shrieked in the cathedral: Oh my God, inday, the saint is ROTTING!

  A guard had shushed her in Italian.

  Annabelle “Bumbum” Esdrújula, obviously much better preserved than her patron saint (her legendary slanting cat’s eyes could be duplicated by no amount of surgery), approached us with her retinue. Guards with guns preceded her, and guards with rifles marked her egress. A maid walked behind her, carrying her towels.

  In only one thing was Madame Bumbum Esdrújula unfortunate—she was always perspiring like a pig, a porous animal—the single miserable aspect of her genes, her Basque pedigree—or was it Alsatian? Her origins, in fact, were inscrutable, though impeccable. Her malady required a ritual of prevention—this tidy, ingenious parade, with towels and a maid.

  It was a curious thing to see this magnificent woman followed everywhere by the white-uniformed girl, who bore white, folded, monogrammed towels, three at a time, like some latter-day midget-page in Francisco Goya. Sometimes this maid, forgetting the occasion, would go about in rubber slippers, flip-flopping, adding to a glamorous event a comic genius.

  Whe
n Mrs. Esdrújula stopped in progress, the maid knew what to do. She came up and swiped at the famous clavicle while Mrs. Esdrújula bent to her delicate ablutions. The process of guards also stopped to watch. This expert procedure required the maid’s ginger knowledge of the limits of foundation cream and how to dab precisely at fine, etiolated, clammy skin.

  My mother tiptoed to kiss Bumbum on the cheek, beso-beso, left and right. These rituals were not useless—they made a public comment without need for words, expressing personal regard with due restraint and, in some cases, contempt without bloodshed.

  I followed my mother out of the car. Manong Babe held the door open, winking at me.

  “What is it, Babe?” Ma said to him, turning back to look at us: “Are you ill?”

  She was sharp-eyed, my mom. Nothing missed her evil eye. Manong Babe climbed back into the car. Ma introduced me again to Mrs. Esdrújula. I was, in fact, several inches taller than she was; I calculated that, barefoot, Mrs. Esdrújula was really only slightly taller than my mother, who was not quite five feet in her heels. That must be the mark of these ladies’ stature, I thought, as I kissed her moist face: Madame Bumbum was not quite life-size, but she could fake it.

  Mrs. Esdrújula barely touched my cheek, and I inhaled her fragrance as she turned away.

  “Ah, chica, you are now so—large. Queenie: how scary. Your daughter is a lady now.” She said this to the air, to a portion of Manila Bay, while she tenderly touched a part of her cheek, as if to make sure it was still there, uncorrupted by affection.

  We walked toward my father on the sidewalk. He was chatting with Mrs. Esdrújula’s husband, a nondescript bald man.

  Mr. Esdrújula outsmarted God by his plainness. A minister without portfolio, the Secretary, as he was called, was a man whose face you never remembered. The incredible ordinariness of the Secretary’s face, the dull features that lent itself to no caricaturist’s wit, the extreme cipherly quality of his presence—clearly, birth had given him an advanced ticket for oblivion. No one knew who he was except the shrewdest of operators.