America Is Not the Heart E-Book

Elaine Castillo

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 713

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the Aspen Literary Prize, 2019 Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, 2018 Longlisted for Elle's Big Book Award, 2018 Evening Standard's Wander List Guide to 2019 Getaways A giant debut novel about the redemptive, restorative power of love; about trust and fear; hair and makeup; food and sex; it's about belonging and...not belonging. It's a soulful literary saga set in the early nineties of San Francisco; a coming-of-age about leaving home and, sometimes, the necessity of turning back. How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she's already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay in the Bay Area, knows not to ask about the first and second. And his wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their daughter Roni asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead. 'This book is it: one of the best debut novels (and novels, period) of recent years' Elle 'Blazingly fearless' Observer 'Radical... I was startled at how moved I was' Guardian

Leseprobe

First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Elaine Castillo, 2018

The moral right of Elaine Castillo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

A portion of this novel appeared as “America Is Not the Heart” in Feeman’s: The Future of New Writing.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 129 9Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 133 6EBook ISBN: 978 1 78649 134 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books AnImprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

I knew I could trust a gambler because I had been one of them.

Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

Prologue, or Gali-La!

SO YOU’RE A GIRL AND YOU’RE POOR, BUT AT LEAST you’re light-skinned—that’ll save you. You’re the second eldest child and the second eldest daughter of a family of six children, and your parents are subsistence farmers—your mom sells vegetables at the local market and when that doesn’t make enough to put food on the table, you sell fruit and beans by the side of the road. That is, until your father manages to get a job working as a clerk for the American military in Guam, where he acquires a mistress and regularly sends money back to the family, the latter gesture absolving the first. He returns every three years for a visit, which is why you and nearly all of your siblings are three, six, or nine years apart in age. On those rare visits, you treat him with rudeness out of loyalty to your mother, who neither thanks nor acknowledges your efforts or, for that matter, your existence: eczema-ridden you at eight, hungry adolescent you at twelve, all your early ragged versions. When you’re old enough to know better but not old enough to actually stop talking back to him, your father will remind you, usually by throwing a chair at your head, that the only reason you’re able to attend nursing school is because of his army dollars. It’s your first introduction to debt, to utang na loob, the long, drawn-out torch song of filial loyalty. But when it comes to genres, you prefer a heist: take the money and run.

Growing up, everyone says you’re stupid, you’re clumsy, you get into at least one fight a week, and even your light skin, while universally covetable, is suspicious; your father often accuses your mother of having taken up with a Chinese merchant or Japanese soldier or tisoy businessman while he was away. Did that happen? You don’t know. Is that unknown man your father? You don’t know. If it happened, was it your mother’s choice; was it an affair, or was it a case of—a word you won’t say, can’t think, a word that drifts like smog, through your life and the lives of all the women around you. You don’t know. Looking at your own face doesn’t tell you. There isn’t anyone you can ask.

When you’re hungry, sometimes you go out into the fields and stick your stumpy arm down the pockmarks in the earth where tiny dakomo crabs like to scurry away and hide, your fingers grasping for the serrated edge of the shell. Some days you collect enough to carry home for your mother to steam, using the lower half of your shirt as a basket, but sometimes you can’t wait, yanking one out by the leg and dashing it on the ground to stun it, then eating the whole thing right there, live and raw, spitting out bits of calcium. Sometimes instead of a crab you pull out a wiggling frog, but most of the time you throw those away, watch them hop to safety. People warn you that those holes are also the favored hiding places of some semipoisonous snakes, but when you weigh the danger against the hunger, the hunger always wins. On the days when there are no crabs, no frogs, not even a weak snake, you go around picking dika grass, the kind that the farmers usually feed their horses. You sell makeshift bundles of them by the side of the road, alongside the mangoes and chico. On good days, the dika grass sells so well you produce a little side economy that gives you enough money to buy some ChocNut and maybe the latest issue of Hiwaga so you can catch up on your komiks, even though at the end of every one you have to read the most hateful words you’ll ever encounter, in any language: abangan ang susunod na kabanata. Look out for the next chapter.

Around this time your mother’s great love affair is with Atse Carmen, your eldest sister, who’s room-silencingly beautiful in the way older sisters often are, and who gets away with everything. Atse Carmen somehow gets a gold tooth fitted in her mouth despite the fact that everyone in the family eats one meal a day, if that. So when you’re eleven or ten years old, you get your brightest of bright ideas: you’re going to get a gold tooth fitted, just like Atse Carmen. Not only that, but you’re going to pay for it yourself. You take to pocketing even more of the money you make at the roadside—work that Atse Carmen was never asked to do, just you. But you’ve got three new siblings, a scrappy Rufina, Gloria the toddler, Boyet the infant, so the scant attention that might have been rationed out for you in the past gets allocated elsewhere. This time, though, it’s a blessing—you can carry out your plan in peace. Well, if not peace, then: alone. It’s the same thing.

You begin to save up. You go to the only dentist you know in town; not the same dentist who gave Carmen her gold tooth, but another one who apparently doesn’t balk at accepting dirty and wrinkled pesos from an adolescent promdi girl. The dentist doesn’t ask where your parents are; he doesn’t ask if you have their permission. He doesn’t ask any questions at all. He takes your money, and puts you under anesthesia, and you wake up with a gold tooth.

The pain is like nothing you’ve ever felt before, not like a chair leg glancing your temple, not like the non-look of someone staying in the backseat of a cool car while their driver is sent out to buy chico from your stand. Your mother isn’t even angry that you used the money for the procedure; there’s something bordering on pride in the look on her face when she sees you and Atse Carmen; smiling, glinting. So now you know what triumph feels like; the feeling lasts for a while. Lasts until all of your teeth, with the exception of your ungilded back molars, rot and fall out as a result of what turns out to be a poorly and cheaply executed fitting. By the time you’re fourteen, you wear dentures. You’ll wear dentures for the rest of your life. These early ones, which your father’s American salary pays for, give you blinding headaches. You hate having to brush your teeth in your hand every night; you avoid looking at yourself in the mirror in those moments, but sometimes you slip up and catch sight of your mouth, wound-pink and hollow, a grandmother’s maw in your child’s face. Atse Carmen’s gold tooth never falls out.

When you’re sixteen, you get into Saint Louis University, a Catholic college nestled five thousand feet high in the mountainous forests of Baguio City. You’d wanted to take your aching gums to Manila, but your mother absolutely forbade it; the cost, the distance, the demonstrations. You’re the second and last girl in the family to go to college. At the time your father’s still in Guam; he hasn’t become an American citizen yet, but it’s in the process. When his citizenship comes through, your younger siblings will be able to come to America as green card holders, but you’ll be over twenty-one by the time you finish nursing school, too old to be petitioned. You’re going to have to become an American by yourself.

In Baguio, you brave the treacherous drive up Kennon Road, the winding road known for its landslides during the rainy season and its speeding accidents year-round. It’s the only road that can take you all the way up to the city, the scent of pine trees growing stronger the higher up you get, passing the abandoned mining towns and the Ifugao souvenir huts by the side of the road selling wood carvings, like the little one of a naked man wearing only a barrel, whose titi pops out when you lower the barrel. You’ve seen that figurine even back home; it’s a common enough little comic trinket found in any household. It’s only in Baguio that you hear that the figure appeared after the Americans had built their military settlement in Baguio, the only American hill station in Asia, displacing the Ibaloi living there. You never look at that little wooden titi the same way again.

But you also don’t turn your dormmates down when they all want to go to the restaurants at Camp John Hay, formerly John Hay Air Base, perched there at the topmost part of a hill in the Cordilleras, overlooking all of Baguio. You can only enter the recreation camp if you’re a guest of a U.S. citizen, but one of your new girlfriends happens to be dating an American soldier and she’s generous enough to invite all of you to the camp, so in the end it’s like you’re all dating the soldier: you get to see the golf courses, the country clubs, the rich Filipinos getting married, plucking pine needles out of taffeta. At Camp John Hay, the cost of everything is listed in dollars, not pesos—when you get back to your dorm room and start to calculate the price of a hot dog, you throw the paper away before you’ve even finished the math.

At SLU, most of the girls in your dorm speak Tagalog, Ilocano, or Kapampangan. One day one of the girls, Fely, says to the group: You know how they say rich people have red heels?

You have, in fact, always heard this growing up: that poor people have dusty, gray heels, and rich people have smooth, moisturized heels, red with health. You have a tendency to hide your feet, even though you’ve always rubbed cream into them religiously so they won’t look like your mother’s heels, desert-cracked. Well, I have a trick, Fely says, showing all of you her smooth, impossibly red heels. You just put merthiolate on it! Not iodine, that makes it orange. Merthiolate is the secret! After that, all of you take to staining your heels with the liquid antiseptic. From then on, you love wearing slingbacks, mules, cropped trousers. Years later, even as an adult nurse in California, sometimes you’ll still put merthiolate on your heels.

There are nine of you in total, and all of you are the first inhabitants of that newly built dorm, Cardinal Cardijn Hall. You’ll never really know who Cardinal Cardijn is; those are just words to you. Another new building on campus that year is the Diego Silang building, named after Diego Silang y Andaya. Now his story, you know a bit better; you remember the school lessons, punctuated with blows across the knuckles to help the kids remember. Diego Silang, the eighteenth-century revolutionary who, with the help of British forces who wanted their own piece of the Philippines, staged a revolt against Spanish colonial rule. Everyone says Diego Silang’s an Ilocano, that as a revolutionary he wanted to form an Ilocano nation. Even your future Ilocano husband will remember Diego Silang as an Ilocano, will remember that the revolutionary as a young boy lived and worked in Vigan, his own hometown. But you know a different story: you know that Diego Silang was born in Pangasinan, just like you. His mother was Ilocana, but his father was Pangasinense. You feel somewhat petty for thinking that it matters, but—it matters. It matters to you.

Diego gets betrayed, of course; by the British powers that promised reinforcement, and then by a friend of his, paid by the church to kill him. Leadership of the revolt falls to Diego’s wife and fellow insurgent, María Josefa Gabriela, an Ilocana with a Spanish dad and uncertain maternage—a native maid in a colonial household, maybe Igorota or Tinguian. Either way, your lessons told you that Gabriela was a beautiful bolo-wielding mestiza. The mestiza part means they’ll definitely make a movie out of her life one day: people remember the mestizas. That you’re light-skinned enough to pass for mestiza doesn’t slip your mind; frankly, you’re hanging on to it as a crucial talisman for your survival. You want to be remembered, too. Like a blow across the knuckles.

Gabriela’s siege doesn’t work out; Spanish forces overpower her troops, and they retreat into hiding. Eventually, the Spanish capture them and hang them all in the Plaza Salcedo, not far from the home where your future husband’s family will have lived for hundreds of years before the word Filipino ever even existed. Abangan ang susunod na kabanata.

In Baguio, you learn how to lie to your mother. Every year when it comes to reporting your textbook expenses, you subtly up the price so that you can skim off the extra, add that to the money you save by choosing to walk instead of using the jeepneys, and use the money to go with your new girlfriends to the PX stores, buy up all the American peanuts that taste different from the fresh mani you’re used to eating, worse, addictive, and check out all the exotic beauty products they have in store: soaps, powders, pomades. Most of the other girls are happy with Avon perfumes and everyone you know smells of Charisma, Elusive, Occur, or Moonwind. You, on the other hand, save up money to buy Madame Rochas, the most expensive perfume in the shop, which you’ve never even smelled—the lady behind the counter at the PX shop only displays the bottles behind a huge mirrored glass case, doesn’t let anyone try anything on until they hand over the cash.

Occasionally, a moment of guilt interrupts your bliss; you know how stretched money is back home, and you have younger siblings who’ll have to go to school eventually, too. But all the girls do it, you tell yourself, a little kupit here and there when you’re living away from home, it’s nothing, you could stop if you wanted to, and it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

You were hoping to stay in Baguio, up there in the cool green hills, safe and perfumed, away from Pangasinan and everyone who knew you. But something goes wrong; it turns out that Atse Carmen has applied to do her nursing internship at Baguio General Hospital, too. The only thing is, because it’s a government hospital, only one member of a family household at a time is allowed to apply for an internship. Everyone expected her to apply in Dagupan, closer to where she’s attending nursing school; you’re not quite sure why she chooses Baguio. Some part of you thinks, with a rage bordering on glee, that it’s because she’s somehow found a way to be jealous of you, listening to every person back home talk about what a nice city Baguio is, and how lucky little Pacita is to be going to university there, and maybe she’ll get married and settle up there and the family will be able to go visit her for summer vacations.

When during one of your monthly calls back home, Atse Carmen answers the phone and preens over her acceptance, you know what it means. You’re either going to have to wait a year and work somewhere else until you can apply when Atse Carmen’s internship is over—or you’re going to have to leave Baguio. You’re starting to learn that the things you get, you don’t get to keep.

Your mother at least has the sensitivity to realize that your sister’s acceptance into Baguio General is pushing you out of a city you’ve made your own. She asks you if you want to come back to Pangasinan. She says that she knows somebody who knows somebody at the College of Nursing at the University of Pangasinan, right in Dagupan City. And maybe things will be less expensive in Dagupan than they seem to be in Baguio, she says. A stone between your ribs, you say yes. You’ll come back.

When you come home, you find out the reason Carmen went to Baguio General Hospital and took your place: she went to Baguio pregnant, leaving another infant with your mother, born while you were away. You hadn’t even known about the first one; no one told you she’d had a kid, and no one tells you anything about the father, or fathers. You meet the baby on your first visit back to Mangaldan since leaving Baguio, a little baby boy with his black hair in a topknot, left long in the traditional custom of not cutting a child’s hair until the first birthday.

You only meet the two boys again when they’re young men, after Carmen comes to live with you in California, her tourist visa having expired. Her two sons, Jejomar and Freddie, have American citizenship—they’ve been registered not as Carmen’s children, but your mother and father’s. Legally, they’re your brothers. They call you Atse Paz, and not Auntie.

It’ll be easy enough for Carmen to get a nursing job in California; the shortage of nurses in the state is so severe that many hospitals don’t check for papers. But neither of her sons even have high school degrees, so you try to get them jobs here or there, some janitor work at one of the hospitals you work at, or sometimes you pay them to clean your house, or babysit your future daughter. You’ll wonder if they themselves even know that Carmen is their mother. They look so much like her it makes your molars ache.

Once you’re in Dagupan, you don’t study as hard or push yourself as much as you did in Baguio. You still want to leave the country, but you’re getting tired of holding up the weight of your own desires. You just want to get through the year. You get straight Cs in most everything from Anatomy and Physiology to English Speech Improvement. Your highest grade is a B, in Physical Education. Your second highest grade is a B minus, in Land Reform and Taxation.

The only person you know at the University of Pangasinan is your cousin Tato. He’s two years older than you and studying either politics or law, you’re not sure. He’s not as light-skinned as you, but you share the inchik eyes, which is what you think about when your father comes home from Guam, gets drunk, and says, That’s not my blood, pointing vaguely in your direction. You had a crush on Tato when you were kids; you used to visit their family house in the town center sometimes on your way back home from selling food or cookware with your mother at the Mangaldan Public Market. You haven’t seen him since before you left for Baguio, though, so when you meet him for the first time on campus, you’re surprised by how mature he looks, a man with tough meat on his bones. You know distantly about what happened at Malacañang Palace last year, the student rally, the riots, but you never talk about it with any of your friends. Once you meet Tato, you know he’s involved.

He asks you, without really asking you, if you want to come to a demonstration. The look on his face says he knows you won’t come. You remember that Tato went to Mangaldan National High School; every morning he walked through the massive Greek pillars of the school on the way to his classes. Back when you were kids, you and your mother were the ones to visit his house—he never came to see you or your family home in Bari. You don’t really know how to put it into words, the way he looks at you, somehow kind and condescending all at once. Maybe it’s just because he’s older. A boy. Tato doesn’t even wait for you to give the excuse that he knows is coming. He touches your shoulder and tells you it was good to see you, but he has somewhere to be.

It’ll take you a long time to talk about martial law, and you’ll never talk about it with anyone who lived through it with you. But for now, you don’t go to the rallies, you don’t join the student protests; you go silent or change the subject when someone at your table in the canteen brings it up. The fear in you predates dictatorships. No one would ever mistake you for an intellectual or an aktibista; most of the time, you don’t even really understand what people are saying when they talk about the news. Reading Tagalog has always been difficult for you, even though you’ve gotten more or less fluent with everyday speech. But things like old kundiman from the thirties and forties where half the words for love are words you’ve never heard in your life; things like the complicated dialogue in some new movie where all the characters are manilenyos except for the yaya; things like newspapers—they still send you into dizzy spells. So you stay away.

But there’s no staying away from this. Martial law means curfew at nine o’clock, it means streets empty except for military jeeps, it means classes where there were once fifty pupils are now classes where there are forty-eight, maybe forty-six. You and your other nursing student friends at the University of Pangasinan stay together through it all, eating all your meals together in the canteen even though some other girls have taken to eating alone in their dorm rooms, sometimes playing music if they have a record player, Bread’s Make It with You crooning all the way down the dorm corridor. In the canteen, there are some girls who just start weeping into their plates, right there in front of everyone; maybe because one of their relatives has been taken, maybe just from the fear alone, stretching all of you wire-taut. No one knows if you’ll even graduate, if there will even be a university left when this is all over, if it’ll ever be over. Then, a year into martial law, you hear about Tato.

It’s your mother who tells you that one evening, when he’d come back to Mangaldan to visit his parents for the weekend, Tato disappeared. Auntie Bobette had been outside with a basket of kangkong, plucking the leaves off the long stems, planning to make monggo for dinner once Tato was back from drinking with his barkada. By the time the food had long gone cold, by the time they were eating its leftovers for breakfast and then lunch, Tato still hadn’t come back. A week later, Uncle David disappeared, too. That was how Auntie Bobette knew Tato hadn’t just gone underground with the aktibista friends he’d made at school—that lesser maternal grief of the period. If her husband was gone, too, something else must have happened.

Your mother tells you that a few months later, men from the military came to Auntie Bobette’s house in Mangaldan, parking their jeeps in the dika grass, startling the goats into bleating. They knocked on the door, and when she opened it, they said they were there to inform her that they were willing to pay her for the death of her husband, as befitting the surviving family of a deceased Philippine Army officer.

Auntie Bobette didn’t ask what they meant, didn’t ask why they were offering to compensate a death no one had even confirmed yet. She only said, And what about my son, Tato.

They didn’t acknowledge her words, or even flinch at Tato’s name, only repeating that they were willing to pay for the death of her husband. They spoke as if reciting a speech they had memorized. Bobette said, in Pangasinan, replying to an answer they hadn’t given: So they’re both dead.

She directed her words at the soldier who had been doing most of the talking, a Pangasinense commanding officer not that much older than Bobette. He’d probably known her husband well, drunk Diplomatico rum with him at the carinderia down the street, lit each other’s cigarettes, judged the beauty of each other’s mistresses. Once again the officer said to Auntie Bobette, not in Pangasinan but in a mixture of Tagalog and English: We are ready to compensate you, as a military widow, for the death of your husband.

And Auntie Bobette replied, with the blazing calm of a seraph: I don’t want money. If you’re saying they’re dead, then you give me their bodies.

When your mother told you this story, you were terrified of the next part—of what might have happened to Auntie Bobette, at the mercy of four or five soldiers. You thought maybe your mother, who had never been in the habit of calling you regularly at school and had never even visited your dorms, was about to tell you about one more vanishing. But instead your mother told you that the frustrated officers just turned around, got back in their jeeps, and left. Nothing else. For years, Auntie Bobette waited for one more knock on the door, for it to be her husband’s or her son’s face she finally opened to; gaunt and gulping at life, or bloated and ragged in death, left at her front door as a final courtesy. But it never came; it never was.

A month or so after you hear about Tato from your mother, you meet Auntie Bobette on campus. She’s just finished finally collecting Tato’s things from his former dormmates, who’d kept his belongings safe even when the school had already given away his room to new students.

You ask how she is, sounding inane even to yourself, but you can’t find the words to speak about Tato or Uncle David. Auntie Bobette seems to understand that, because she only shifts the weight of the bulging duffel bag she’s carrying, full of some of the last things on earth that have touched her son. She refuses when you offer to carry the bag, refuses when you offer to accompany her to the bus depot. She just touches your arm and says, Asicasom so laman mo.

All of your classes at school are taught in English, and even though most of your friends at UP are Pangasinense like you, most of the time you all end up speaking to each other in some mixture of Tagalog and English, imitating the poppy Taglish of teleseryes and radio programs. So that means you can’t remember the last time someone told you to take care of yourself in your own language. This is probably it; the last time.

Shortly after Tato disappears, you’ll meet the man who’s going to become your future husband and the father of your first and only daughter, the man whose ancestral family home stands at the center of Vigan, up north in Ilocos Sur, one of the old colonial homes that used to belong to Spanish officials or Chinese merchants. His family descends mostly from the latter, but his face is all Ilocano indio, pitch-black eyes, strong flat nose. He’s an orthopedic surgeon, and he teaches and practices at Nazareth Hospital, the first place you work as a student nurse. People say that he’s only recently come back to the Philippines from having lived in Jakarta for ten years.

It’s hate at first sight. He’s one of these mayaman jet-setters who’ve been all over the world and speak the English of commercials and foreign movies, the English of Asian kings played by white actors. People say that he’s recently divorced, that he found his first wife, a cousin of Marcos, in bed with another man. You see him sometimes on his rounds, and he has a different nurse hanging on his arm every afternoon, a different girl in the passenger seat of his dark orange Fiat every evening. He’s a notorious babaero, the Don Juan of the hospital, and most of the nurses flutter when he so much as enters the room. Yet his reputation never veers toward the sordid. This, you discover, is less because of his wealth or the weight of his name, and more because of the fact that every woman who sleeps with him agrees that he’s a champion at eating women out. This is what differentiates Doctor De Vera from your run-of-the-mill babaero, they say. The man loves to make women come. He doesn’t just rabbit-rabbit-rabbit and then tapos na, they giggle to each other, while you jab a straw into a Coke bottle.

One day you’re assigned to do your rounds with him as a supervisor. He looks you up and down and instantly you know—your skin all prickly, the tiniest hairs on your body alight—that if you let this happen, you’ll be next.

You’re not going to let it happen. You’re going to get the rounds over with and get back to the nursing station and do your paperwork without using an English dictionary for once. In the middle of the rounds, you realize that in your haste to finish, you’ve advanced several steps ahead of him. You turn around. He’s paused in the middle of the corridor, looking at you, amused.

You walk very fast, he says in English.

You flush. Standing there smiling, you think he looks like a darker-skinned Rogelio de la Rosa, pomaded hair and all, and before you keep on thinking up stupid things like that, you turn away from him. But it’s too late. He’s seen your face; he knows he’s made you blush. Now you definitely have to avoid him.

But he doesn’t chase you, the way you think he will, the way you expect men like him to. He’s just—present. He’s around with all the answers when you need advice about a patient’s sepsis, he’s opening the entrance door to the hospital for you in the morning when you’re yawning and too unguarded to remember not to thank him, he’s in the break room debating favorite desserts with other nurses when you’ve slipped in looking for a place to take a nap. What’s your favorite, he’s asking Evelyn, a young nurse. She replies, Brazo de Mercedes.

Brazo de Evelyn, he quips, and she titters, along with two other nurses nearby, hanging around the edges of the flirtation in the hopes of getting in on it themselves.

You roll your eyes and turn around to leave. Pacita, he calls. What’s your favorite dessert?

You think about ignoring him, the way you should have ignored him when he opened the door for you that morning, the way you should have ignored him when he made the comment about how fast you walked. You didn’t even realize at the time that he must have liked it because he’d gotten the chance to stare at your wiggling ass. Only later did you think about it, in bed, hot all over with fury and something that wasn’t fury.

You should ignore him, but instead, you turn around and declare, in a voice so hard it sounds like you’re delivering an insult: Tupig.

One of the other nurses, Floribeth, starts laughing. Kakanin, native cakes pala! she says. You can buy that on the side of the road anywhere.

Yes, you retort. Isn’t that great?

You turn around to leave, proud that you haven’t blushed at all, proud that you’ll be getting the last word, proud to leave Don Juan and his admirers in your wake. But just before you turn your back, you see that Doctor De Vera has gone still, stricken.

Years later, when you’re married, he’ll tell you that tupig was the favorite dessert of both his older brother Melchior and his late mother. When they don’t sell it at the small Filipino grocery store in the California town you’ll live in together, you’ll try to learn how to make it without ever telling him—and then, when all your attempts turn out disastrously, you’ll give up, without ever telling him.

No matter how much you try to avoid Doctor De Vera—in your head, you address him only as the babaero, it helps to distance yourself—he’s everywhere. And maybe it’s just your imagination, but it feels like he’s looking back at you, too. Even when he’s meeting another date in front of the hospital—a young woman whom everyone whispers is the daughter of some CEO, of some company you’ve never heard of—it’s you that he’s looking back at, as he slips into the driver’s seat. It annoys you, because you see through it; it annoys you, because you’re meant to see through it. He’s not hiding the fact that he’s looking at you, and he’s not hiding the fact that he sees you looking back.

The fact that he’s a babaero isn’t the problem. It’s not just the celebrity, or that his first wife was Marcos’s cousin or that he’s a De Vera, of the De Veras of Vigan, or that he’s a champion at, at, at cunnilingus. The problem starts with the fact that he’s good at what he does; he’s the best orthopedic surgeon on the island of Luzon. You’ve assisted him in the operating room more than once, and while he never loses the louche grace in his limbs—he and his anesthesiologist are known for singing kundiman during their procedures, so that you’ve become used to the sound of someone belting out Dahil Sa Iyo beneath the deafening keen of a saw juddering through a femur—there’s always an expression on his face, a posture in his body, which you only ever see there, in theater. Each gesture has a calm, deliberate economy, so that even the air pressure around him seems to change, like someone descending into a mineshaft. No, it’s not calm; it’s self-possession. Even in a cavern, he owns himself. So that’s what it looks like.

The part that really gets to you, the part that gets to your quietest of parts, is the part about polio: you learn that his specialty is children with polio, that this was what he was doing in Indonesia, opening rehabilitation clinics in rural areas. It became less common as you were growing up, but you still remember some kids with polio around Mangaldan and Mapandan, amongst the families living even farther out into the rice fields, past the bangus farms.

Still, still, still—you’re not going to let yourself be seduced by him, by the myths that cling to his shoulders: cosmopolitan Don Juan, pussy-eater extraordinaire, savior of children—it’s all so ridiculous.

It is ridiculous, but not for reasons you know yet. You don’t know yet about his brother, about his mother, about the beloved niece of his, also named after his mother, who joined the New People’s Army in college and whom he long assumed was dead. You don’t know that he’s going to ask to name your first child together after that niece; you don’t know that you’re going to say yes the minute you see the wrecked look on his face when he asks; you don’t know that when your daughter is around five years old he’s going to learn that this niece is still alive, that she’s survived two years in a prison camp, that she needs help, money, and most of all a place to live. You don’t know yet that that place will be your home in California.

Most of all, you don’t know yet that he’ll be utterly undone by his own life, that he’ll lose everything he has now, that no one who flirts with him and courts his favor in this era will remember him in twenty years, that not even the aura around his name will survive except as a source of fatigued pride, passed down to your daughter, who won’t fully grasp the context or the importance of that name when she says she’s proud to be a De Vera. You don’t know yet that when he’s an old man, marbled with lymphoma, one night while you’re asleep next to him he’s going to remove the oxygen mask keeping him alive, and that afterward, instead of burning his body and scattering the ashes over the rice fields in Ilocos Sur as per his final wishes, you’ll put him in a box in Northern California, ten minutes from the Veterans Hospital where you work, so at least you can visit his grave on your lunch break.

You don’t know yet that you’re going to love him, and that you won’t be able to differentiate this love for him from your devouring hunger to be recognized. It’s not that you’re imagining that he’d whisk you away to his mansion in Dagupan City or Vigan or Manila and you’d live happily ever after. You’ve got a happily-ever-after in mind, and it doesn’t have anything to do with being anybody’s nobya. For that matter, it doesn’t have anything to do with Dagupan City or Vigan or Manila at all, or anywhere else in this country. You already know that the first thing that makes you foreign to a place is to be born poor in it; you don’t need to emigrate to America to feel what you already felt when you were ten, looking up at the rickety concrete roof above your head and knowing that one more bad typhoon would bring it down to crush your bones and the bones of all your siblings sleeping next to you; or selling fruit by the side of the road to people who made sure to never really look at you, made sure not to touch your hands when they put the money in it. You’ve been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you’re hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.

But while you’re still here, warming yourself in the glow of someone like the babaero, you’re just. Curious. You want to know what it’s like to be wanted by someone like that. Most of all, you want to know what it’s like to get it, and not need it. Most of the time, you need things you never get; you get things no one would ever want. But getting something you want, that you don’t really need? Getting something that’s just about feeding that half-sewn-up second mouth inside you, unfed and lonely, cramped somewhere between your heart and your gut? You’ve never had that before. You’ve never had it, but you want to feel worthy of it, like the woman in the hair-dye ad you’ve been seeing around recently. You want to feel like it’s because you’re worth it.

If you had a girlfriend who was telling you this story, you’d cluck your tongue, tell her to throw the guy in the trash. You’d tell her to forget his name, to practice her English and pack her bags. But it’s not a girlfriend telling you this story.

As usual, you’re getting ahead of yourself, but there isn’t enough road in the world for how ahead of yourself you need to get. You need to get so far ahead of yourself that by the time you reach yourself, you’re a different person.

You end up getting so far ahead of yourself that you land in Nashville, Tennessee. You’re twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two. You have a nursing degree, a long-distance older boyfriend, and an H1-B visa. Your clothes are polyester, and most of your teeth are removable. You think you’re going to lose the accent you speak English with, but you won’t. Not ever.

You and a group of other Filipino nurses are hired to work at the Nashville General Hospital under the care of Meharry Medical College, which you learn is one of the preeminent historically Black medical schools in America. All your life, you’ve been dreaming of America, singing its lyrics and combing its style into your hair. But now the prospect of meeting actual, real-life Americans makes you apprehensive; you remember some of the crueler stories you heard back home, from the older generation who’d gone to work in the sugarcane or asparagus fields on the West Coast and returned broken-bodied and bitter, or never came back at all.

To your relief, you’re treated kindly, with a kind of semipaternal, semiflirtatious warmth. Most of the doctors and managers in the hospital are from upper-middle-class Black families, and early in your visit, you and the rest of the Filipino nurses are invited to the house of one of Meharry’s bigwigs, Dr. Garnett, the Director of the Division of Neurology, Chief of the the Neurology Service, and Director of the Neuro-Diagnostic Laboratory at Hubbard Hospital. The house is enormous, like something out of a Sampaguita Pictures set. You thought you’d seen the end of houses like this by leaving the Philippines. One more thing you’re wrong about.

Doctor Garnett and his wife, Louise, both mestizong-itim and wearing matching pale yellow dress shirts, ply you with iced tea in blown-glass tumblers that you hold with trembling hands, terrified of breaking something so precious. They tell the nurses not to hesitate to come and seek them out should they find themselves in need, or even just homesick. It must be hard to be so far from home, Louise soothes. Your parents must miss you terribly.

Your parents don’t miss you at all, as far as you can tell, given that you haven’t seen or heard from your father in two years and you only talk to your mother once a month, usually to give her a heads-up about the money you’ll be wiring her. You try to think if anyone in your life has ever told you they missed you.

The only person who might miss you, though he hasn’t said it that way, is Doctor De Vera. Not Doctor De Vera: Apolonio, Pol, your boyfriend, you remind yourself, the word still stiff and pinched like a shoe you haven’t worn enough times to break in properly. Before you left the Philippines, you ended up lettting him take you to the movies, and then you let him take you to bed. The stories were. Accurate. You were ready for the affair to be over the minute you left for America, but he was the one who asked you, naked between your open legs and smiling, if you’d ever heard of letters. If you’d ever heard of the telephone.

So you talk on the phone once every few weeks. He’s not as good on the phone as he is in his sporadic but effusive letters, most of which you don’t really understand. He shifts freely between Tagalog and English, writes a lot of flowery musings on love and faith, distance and time. All of his letters are written on his personal stationery, and every silken, onion-thin page has the same header. In cursive script: APOLONIO CHUA DE VERA, M.D., F.P.O.A. Below it, in smaller, elegant capitals: FELLOW, PHILIPPINE ORTHOPEDIC ASSOCIATION. FELLOW, WESTERN PACIFIC ORTHOPEDIC ASSOCIATION. ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY. TRAUMATOLOGY. CRIPPLED CHILDREN. PHYSICAL MEDICINE AND REHABILITATION.

He says I love you about a dozen times per letter, says he longs for you and he falls asleep dreaming of you in his arms, but he never says the words I miss you. You never say it, either.

It’s all going well, better than you ever thought it could, until one week just after your payday you call his house in Dagupan, and a woman answers the phone.

A year earlier, you might have been shaken, but your newfound American confidence inspires you to ask for Pol in English. And it’s in superior English that the woman tells you: I’m Doctor De Vera’s wife. Who’s calling?

This is a lie—she isn’t his wife, just another girlfriend, dressing for the position that she wants. But you don’t know that then. You hang up the phone, and before you know what you’re doing, you drink almost an entire bottle of Chivas Regal and wait to die.

You don’t die, but your roommates are shrewd enough to hide every bladed object in the apartment you share together, a fact that shames you more than having broken into the communal and as yet untouched bottle of Chivas Regal that all of you pooled your money together to buy, a gesture to treat yourselves for all the long hours. You pass out mumbling, but nobody understands you. You wake up, groggily ask for water and some food, but nobody understands you. It’s only when you sober up that you remember none of your roommates speak Pangasinan.

When the babaero calls the dorm, you tell your girlfriends to hang up on him. You send him one letter to say it’s over: it takes you forever to write the letter, in English, checking all of your spelling and grammar, getting the other nurses—whose English isn’t much better than yours—to check all of your spelling and grammar again. You work on it so long that the letter you end up with bears no resemblance to the letter you intended to write; by taking out so much of your bad grammar, you’ve taken out most of your feelings, too. Now it’s nothing more than a cool and polite good-bye, a last kiss from a mature woman, nobody you’ve ever been. There’s only one mention of the other women he’s been fucking, and even that is courteous: you wish him well with all of his other putas, but you’re done being one of them. The letter, in the end, sounds a lot like the babaero.

A few months after the Chivas Regal episode, you’ll learn about job openings at hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area. More and more of your siblings back in Mangaldan are starting to talk about immigrating, their applications for U.S. citizenship via your father under way, so your idea is to share an apartment together somewhere out there, where you’ve heard there’s good weather, more space, more jobs, and even more Filipinos. Eventually you get a job offer from San Jose Medical Center, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Shortly after that, you get another job offer from the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto, also in the Bay Area. The nursing shortage that brought you to Tennessee in the first place seems to exist in California, too.

Now you have a choice. San Jose Medical is in the South Bay, where you’ve heard most of the Filipinos live, along with Daly City just south of San Francisco. The Veterans Hospital, on the other hand, is in Palo Alto, a moneyed white neighborhood you won’t be able to afford to live in, so you’ll have to commute—but it pays much better than San Jose Medical. However, if you choose the Veterans Hospital, you can’t work at any other hospital; it’s a government hospital, and it’s illegal to work elsewhere when you’re a federal employee.

You take both jobs. You prefer the Veterans Hospital, despite the commute, despite the precarity of your position there. The pay is good and the wealth of the area means the facilities are kept clean. The benefits are more than decent, and you can afford to get a new pair of dentures that fit your mouth so well that you almost, almost forget that you’re wearing them. San Jose Medical Center, on the other hand, is in a rougher part of San Jose, and most of the patients are young men: Black, Mexican, Filipino, and Vietnamese, often with gunshot wounds. You learn about the fights between Mexican and Filipino gangs, young boys who could be your little brother, coming in with their faces bludgeoned, their bellies shot through. Many of the nurses have to be accompanied by hospital security guards to their cars every evening. The stress of working there takes a toll on you; after a month, you get Bell’s palsy. You’re not the only nurse in the hospital to be afflicted with the condition, which is usually temporary if it’s treated in time. You’re particularly vigilant, taking prednisone and doing the exercises so your face looks like your face again as soon as possible.

This is when Atse Carmen comes to live with you, there in your apartment in Milpitas, on a tourist visa that’s about to expire. She’s a messy, loud roommate, leaves her creams open in the bathroom and her panties strewn on the floor. Around this time you also find a local Catholic church attended by a mostly Filipino congregation, over on Abel Street. You and your siblings were all raised Catholic, even though your mother was a well-known bruha and faith healer in Mangaldan. In your family, Catholicism was a simple cult of personality: everything was about the Virgin. But you find you can’t really attend Mass in Milpitas with Carmen at your side—Carmen, who attracts too much attention, yawns loudly during the sermon, often leaves with some tito’s phone number. Anyway, you don’t love attending church during the day; the Sunday morning crowd in particular tends to be a social outing for the middle-class Filipino community in the larger South Bay, Filipinos in pearls showing off their cars and bags and plaintive kids. When you start spending hours worrying about your outfit every Saturday evening, you stop the Sunday church visits. Instead, you come by every now and then late at night on your way home from work—around midnight, when no one’s there, often not even the priest. Still in your stale nurse’s uniform, you slip into the last pew, pray a few Hail Marys, and try not to fall asleep on your knees.

When Carmen’s visa does expire and she’s still there for another month, another year, you start to freeze every time you see a police car in your rearview mirror driving home. After a couple of years with you she moves out to live in San Francisco with some tisoy named Dante, a handsome kid from a wealthy family who send their son money for rent and food, which he spends on beer and driving to the casinos in Reno. Dante doesn’t have a green card either. The romance only lasts for about a year; Dante gets deported shortly after beating Carmen with a two-by-four plank, sending her running barefoot out of their studio apartment into the streets of the Excelsior district in the middle of the night, ending up hiding underneath a parked car in the next neighborhood, still in her negligee. The next morning, the owner of the car crouched down to see Carmen there, fists clenched even in her sleep.

All of this you learned two days after the incident, with Dante already in police custody, and Carmen back at your door in Milpitas, half of her face and upper arm purple, one suitcase, no wheels. She opened her mouth, but before she could kill you dead with shame by having to do something as unthinkable as explain herself to her younger sister, you rushed to let her in.

You get Carmen a job as a nursing assistant at San Jose Medical, working in the emergency room, like you. Shortly after she starts working, her own Bell’s palsy starts up. You tell her about all the exercises she needs to do, give her the medicine, but to your chagrin, Carmen is careless about her rehabilitation, doesn’t do all the exercises. The nerves and muscles in her face never quite recover; the palsy becomes permanent. Carmen takes it all in her usual stride, turns the whole ordeal into a vivacious joke. She’s still beautiful, maybe even more so than before, and the distinctive force of her beauty now makes your worship of her prior allure seem trifling and childish. Still, you’ll be unmoored by the loss for years. Carmen’s face was the yardstick along which you’ve measured so much of your life; you don’t know what to do without it. Actually get to know who your sister is, maybe. But that seems unthinkable, too.

Eventually your mother, your remaining siblings, and a few remaining friends talk you into going back to the Philippines for your first visit since you left. It’s a few months after martial law has been lifted, a few months after the two Filipino union leaders were gunned down in Seattle City Hall. Everyone back in the Philippines—your old friends at the University of Pangasinan, your old friends still working at Nazareth, everyone who’s heard the gossip from the nurses back in Tennessee—everyone assures you that the babaero isn’t around, he’s still in Jakarta, you won’t run into him, just come, just come home.

Your family thinks you’re living in a giant house, not an apartment, and they don’t know how far Milpitas is from San Francisco, the glamorous red-bridged seaside city they picture in their heads. Since arriving in California you haven’t been to the beach once. Your family doesn’t even know that you and Pol have broken up. Your mother never even approved of Pol, anyway; not because he was a babaero—nothing special about that—and not even because he was close to the Marcos family, but because he was so much older than you, divorced, no kids. Who could trust a man like that, your mother seemed to think. A man with baggage. You’ve just turned twenty-nine years old, your accent still hasn’t left, and you’re starting to understand what it means to have baggage. Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.

So you go. It’ll be your first time returning to the Philippines not as a Philippine citizen, but as an American citizen. You were naturalized just that year, so you’re not even a toddler American yet, still a baby. You had to renounce your Philippine citizenship, which was easy enough, but to your surprise you found you couldn’t bear to throw away the passport, its distinctive brown-black cover, the shining letters, and your young face in it, still imminently recognizable. The only thing that’s different is the way the Philippine border guards treat you when you’re going through customs with your new blue passport, like the look a hero gives to the kontrabida at the end of the film. Like that’s exactly what you are: an enemy of life.

Atse Carmen can’t go with you, of course, but she helps you pack the balikbayan box, full of children’s clothes, new sandals, bedsheets, lotions, perfumes, alcohol, macadamia nuts, chocolate. On your first day back, after the long bus ride from Manila to Pangasinan, you go with your sister Rufina to the night market in Calasiao to get fresh puto, like you’ve always done, and it almost feels like you never left. Only when you ask the vendor if they’re all out of pandan flavor, the woman behind the stand smiles at you and replies, in English, that they have a new batch, if you just wait a moment, ma’am.

No one has ever called you ma’am, certainly not in the Philippines. Startled, you continue to speak to her in Pangasinan. The woman continues to reply in English. In the tricycle on the way home, you ask Rufina what that was about.

Rufina says, They can tell you don’t live here anymore.

You look down at yourself, the clothes and tsinelas that you borrowed from Rufina because everything you brought from California was too heavy for the weather. When you look up, Rufina’s shaking her head, with the face that’s looking more and more like your father every day, so much so that when you first saw her waiting for you in the airport in Manila, something in your chest clamped down in self-defense.

It’s not the clothes, she says.

Rufina will be the last of your siblings left in the Philippines, just one year younger than you, the only exception to your parents’ three-year conception rule. She’s already over twenty-one, too old to be immigrated through your father’s imminent citizenship. She’ll never go to college, will continue working instead on the farm, bringing vegetables to market, the same as your mother. You’ll have to be the one to file the petition for Rufina. Sibling to sibling petitions take more than twenty years. The rest of your siblings—Gloria, Boyet, Lerma—are under twenty-one and thus young enough to come to America as the children of a U.S. citizen, once your father’s petition is approved.

Rufina always tells you that you don’t have to do anything, that she has no real desire to go to America, that she likes the life she has. It’s like listening to someone speak to you in another language. You brush off her words and continue filling out the paperwork.

A couple of weeks into your visit, two nurses from Nazareth General Hospital come to visit you in Mangaldan. They inform you that the director of the hospital has heard that you’re back in the country and wants to see you. There’s a car waiting for you. It’ll be the first time you’ve ever been personally escorted by car anywhere.

The director of the hospital took a liking to you back when you were an intern there, liked how tough you were with the doctors and how tender you were with the patients. She’s the daughter of the first woman to practice medicine in Dagupan City, and her mother delivered half of the babies in Dagupan from 1927 until World War II. In 1961, less than ten years after you were born, the current direktora took over her mother’s clinic and along with her husband, turned it into Nazareth General Hospital.

Years later, when your first daughter is born in California, you contact the direktora. Over the crackling long-distance line, heart in your throat, you ask if she would do you the honor of being your daughter’s ninang. The direktora, after a moment of startled silence, warmly accepts, says she’d be happy to be the godmother, and thanks you for asking. You grip this victory in your fist like pesos. You have fake teeth, you sold chico and mung beans by the side of the road, no one in your family ever had a car, your Tagalog still has Pangasinan holes in it, your fluency in English is a recurring dream that always cuts off just at the crucial moment—but. You’ve given your first child something like a pedigree, and no one can take it from her.

But for now, you get into the car. Waiting for you at the hospital is the direktora, whom you’ve always just called doktora. She greets you, kisses you on both cheeks, and then instead of asking you out to a fancy lunch like you were kind of hoping she would, knowing that it would be her treat, she says: Just talk to him. You don’t know what she means, until you enter the nurse’s break room and waiting for you inside is the babaero.

Skinnier than you remember, darker than you remember, more heartstopping than you remember, and he hasn’t even said a word yet. He doesn’t comment on your beauty, he doesn’t comment on your clothes, he doesn’t say anything like, It’s good to see you again, Pacita, as plenty of the older male doctors who remembered you from your nursing days have said in the ten minutes since you’ve been in Nazareth, with the good directed somewhere around your ass.