The Breath of Night (24 page)

No matter how hard he fought against it, a part of Philip rebelled at being rowed across the lake by three slightly built women. Maribel, however, was in her element. Her supervisor at work, a cousin of one of the founders, had told her of the feminist collective who took visitors out on rafts, serving them meals of freshly caught carp and fern salad, while they sat back and enjoyed the view. He could not escape the suspicion that the wealth of photographs she had taken were as much to curry favour at the call centre as to capture the moment, but with the mid-afternoon sun gently toasting his skin, the buttery taste of the fish and piquancy of the leaves lingering in his mouth, the soft plash of the oars rustling in his ears and, not least, Maribel’s sweet-scented hair tickling his chin, it was a minor cavil in an otherwise perfect day.

Alerted to a stirring in the trees, he looked up to see a monkey hanging from a branch. ‘There!’ he said, pointing it out to Maribel with the excitement of one more accustomed to
squirrels
. Suddenly the stillness was shattered, as one of the women screeched an instruction to the others and they paddled
furiously
into the middle of the lake.

‘No!’ Maribel said, pressing down his hand. ‘It is not
permitted
to point.’

‘At a monkey?’ Philip asked, perplexed.

‘No, it is not the monkey. It is the
kapre
; you will make him angry.’

‘What’s a
kapre
? Some kind of wild woodland animal?’

‘Yes, he is most wild. He is full of hairs; he lives in the
balete
trees and he smokes a big cigar.’

‘Wait a minute! You don’t mean… Julian – Father Julian – wrote of his parishioners believing in such mythical creatures. You’re not telling me you do too?’

‘I most absolutely do,’ she replied, as affronted as if he had questioned her faith in St Paul. ‘If you anger him, he will throw coconuts from the trees, which will hit you on the head and maybe sink this boat.’

‘You’re sure of this, are you?’ Philip asked, both delighted and dismayed by her credulity.

‘I am, and so are all these people.’ She addressed the women, who laid down their oars as soon as they were safely out of range. While they chatted among themselves and cast the odd reproachful glance his way, Philip felt a growing sense of
isolation
as the only male European rationalist on the raft. Allowing his imagination to run riot, he fantasised that the woods had once been the site of sacrifice to a Philippine mother goddess and that the collective was a front for the revival of the cult, to which Maribel was seeking induction by bringing them their latest victim. He weighed up whether to make a grab for the nearest oar before they immobilised him, or to jump
overboard
and strike out for the shore. He was a strong swimmer and the water looked calm, but as with everything else in this country, there was no knowing what might be lurking beneath the surface, let alone slithering through the undergrowth when he reached land.

‘You must eat this,’ one of the women said, as she chopped open a coconut and handed it to him, along with a wooden spoon to scoop out the meat. He held it to his mouth, gulping the juice so greedily that it ran down his chin.

‘You wish for something to wipe it clean?’ Maribel asked.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Here.’ She handed him a tissue.

‘Can’t you do better than that?’

‘I do not understand.’ Philip mimed a kiss. ‘Oh, you are the most wicked man,’ Maribel said, casting a hurried look at the women, two of whom were sitting on the edge of the raft, dangling their feet in the water, while the third was slicing a pineapple.

Philip worried that he might have offended Maribel’s modesty, which had already been strained by their proximity on the raft, but her broad smile reassured him that she was blushing with pleasure not embarrassment. To his joy and relief, she was at ease with their newfound intimacy. It was a week since they had first slept together, an event which, for all his agonising, had been as relaxed as it was blissful. While part of him had been grateful to discover that she was not, after all, a virgin, thereby freeing him from both pressure and
responsibility
, the other part felt let down since, humiliating as it was to admit, he had been attracted as much by her innocence as by her naïveté. Moreover, he was tormented by thoughts of her previous lover – for his own peace of mind he stuck to the
singular
. Was he a boy from the village, her consort in the Santa Cruz procession whom she had left behind when she moved to Manila, or a student in the city, perhaps a trainee doctor who had sparked her desire to work as a medical transcriptionist and whom she had selflessly renounced when he won a
scholarship
to train abroad? The one candidate that he refused to contemplate was a fellow Westerner, still less one introduced to her by her brother (the backstreet solicitation rang mockingly in his ears). He had delicately broached the subject, only to retreat when she turned as pale as if he had drawn attention to a scar or a missing toe. His one consolation was her insistence on keeping their new arrangements secret from Dennis. ‘Am I likely to discuss my private life with him?’ he had wanted to ask, before realising how insulting that would sound. Instead, he had promised to say nothing to anyone and been rewarded with a flurry of kisses.

‘Thank God we didn’t ask Dennis to bring us!’ he said, roused from his reverie.

‘You are not angry with him? He is no longer making texts when he is driving? You will not send him away?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Philip replied, touched by her sisterly concern. ‘He’s safe with me.’

‘He is a good boy, but sometimes he has to be bad to be strong. And now he has many worries.’

‘Well, if he must get involved in all those shady deals.’

‘No, it is our father.’

‘Has he been back in touch? Or have you found out where he’s living?’

Maribel’s face crumpled like a crushed flower. ‘I have always known this, but I have not been telling it to you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘But you must! You must understand how I am doing this, so you have no shame for our family: so you do not think Maribel comes from such bad people that I do not wish to see her again.’

‘I would never think that. You know I would never think that! What does it matter where we come from?’ Philip asked, as the gulf between them widened.

‘My father has come from prison,’ Maribel said, pressing her hand against her mouth as if trying to force the words back inside.

‘He’s been released?’

‘No, he is still in there. He is in there for all the rest of his life. He has been raping my sister.’ At the sound of the word, two of the women looked up with haunted eyes.

‘And you? Did he touch you too?’ Philip asked, afraid that he might be sick.

‘No, but he has never been touching Analyn either.’

‘Then how could he? Are you sure you mean
rape
?’

‘You will be sad that you have ever met me. You will think that all Filipinos are wicked people and liars. You will never believe one more thing that I say.’ Maribel began to sob, prompting the women to look accusingly at Philip. Undaunted, he asked them to resume rowing, trusting that the gentle motion would calm her. ‘My father is a bad man. He has been hitting us all with sticks. Even Angel Boy.’

‘Angel Boy?’

‘He is my second brother. He has a leg like the root of a tree. He has been born like this after my father forced my mother to lie with him during the day.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘But most of all, he hits my mother. He hits her and he rapes her and she takes herbs so that she stops the babies, and he hits her harder than before when he finds out. And Dennis says that he will kill him. My mother is fearful that these words are true, and so she says that he must go away. He does not wish to go. He is worrying about what my father will do to us. But my mother says that he will help us more by sending money. So he finds a job in Kuwait. But I have been telling you this already.’

‘Yes.’

‘When Dennis has left home, my father has become more cruel. He is jealous because Dennis has a dream and he has not. He has nothing in his head but drink and…’ She is unable or unwilling to put it into words. ‘He hits my mother so hard, until she cannot walk out of the house because her face is as purple as a
ube
.’

‘Was there nowhere you could go for protection?’ Philip was no longer so ingenuous as to suggest the police. ‘What about your priest?’

‘Father Elmo is praying with us. He is telling my mother that she is married to my father and that her sufferings will be short.’

‘You mean it won’t be long until he beats her to death?’ Philip asked in disgust.

‘No, you must not be saying this!’ Maribel grabbed his hand between both of hers and squeezed it tight. ‘He means that my mother will be in Heaven for ever while my father is being burnt by the Devil in Hell.’ Her quiet conviction was more
chilling
than any cry for vengeance. ‘But my mother will no longer wait. She is frightened for her own body and she is frightened for ours. So she is telling Analyn what she must be saying so we can escape. There is a law in the Philippines against anyone who is raping a child. At first they have been sentenced to death. But
this is a gentle country and our last president has ended this sentence. Now they must be put into prison for life. This is what has happened to my father.’

‘So he was found guilty?’ Philip asked, uneasy in spite of himself.

‘Oh no,’ she replied blithely. ‘He has only been in prison for three years, so there will be many more years until there will be a trial. With God’s grace, he will be dead long before this time.’

‘Then what’s Dennis’s problem?’

‘It is my uncle – the brother of my father – he has made a visit to see my mother, and he has said to her that Analyn must be telling the truth to the judge, or he and the cousins of my father will kill her.’

‘Is he serious?’

‘I am sure of it. You will think that he is right, because my mother and my sister have been making false charges. But we are poor people. I am swearing to you that there has been no other way.’

‘Please don’t upset yourself! I understand.’

‘To save us all, Analyn must be giving up her own chance to marry. No man will take a wife who has been disgraced.’

Maribel’s voice was so anguished that for a moment Philip considered stealing Dennis’s gun and heading north to take the law into his own hands: a thought that felt not only absurd but shameful, when he compared his image of a lone avenger, born of black-and-white films on wet winter afternoons, with Maribel’s, born of brutal experience. Despite the baking sun, he began to shiver and asked the women to row them back to the shore. He countered Maribel’s apologies for ruining the
afternoon
with gratitude that she had confided in him.
Nevertheless
, he was aware that his sympathy was constrained not just by circumstance but by time. In less than a fortnight he would be on a plane back to London and this extraordinary adventure be reduced to a series of dinner-party anecdotes (‘did I tell you how my drug-addicted driver pulled a gun on a kid in the street?’) or,
if he pursued his literary ambitions, an exotic setting for a novel. In either case, Maribel would become a shadow of her true self, as broken as her English.

What was the alternative? There was no way that he could invite her to live with him. He could barely support himself, let alone a girlfriend. Besides, how would she survive in an alien culture thousands of miles from home, where her motives for being there would be viewed with mistrust?

That was always assuming she agreed to come.

Plunged into gloom, he was relieved when, after a long and clammy coach ride, they found themselves back in Manila. He led Maribel through the crowded hotel lobby with an assurance tempered by the awareness that he too was an interloper.
Familiarity
had not dulled her enchantment with his room, which she wandered up and down, as if to absorb its opulence. She then wrapped herself in one of the bed-curtains, which he caught in a surreptitious photograph, only to delete it in response to her rising panic. She escaped into the bathroom where she ran a
perfumed
bath, putting up merely token resistance when he slipped in with her. Half an hour later, they lay in matching bathrobes on the bed and, after ringing her aunt to say that she was staying at a friend’s, she amused herself by scrolling through the
television
channels. Her instant retreat from the Adult Films filled him with shame and, as a penance, he agreed to watch a local soap opera in which the actors shouted so loudly that he feared for his reputation with his neighbours. He toyed with taking her to eat in the Champagne Room, but the thought of the waiters’ supercilious smiles persuaded him to order room service and for the rest of the evening the boundaries between food, sleep and sex were deliciously blurred.

He awoke shortly after two to find a jaunty Filipina on the still running TV wishing him a ‘Happy Period’. The girl, who was advertising tampons, was followed by a plump matron, who promised that by drinking her brand of powdered milk his baby would grow up to be taller, cleverer, more attractive and,
from what he could make out (the problem was no longer one of intelligibility but of logic), a more talented chess and cello player than by drinking any other. The shock, first of the adverts themselves and then of their juxtaposition, was compounded by the memory that at one point during their fervent lovemaking, his condom had split. Grabbing the remote control, he slammed the off switch, but it was harder to silence his anxieties. Breaking out in a sweat, he edged away from Maribel, who was breathing deeply beside him, her skin a burnished copper in the dim light, a sweep of hair veiling her left cheek, even as the rest of her lay exposed. Wiping his hand on the sheet, he ran his fingers down her side, gaining confidence with every inch. It was impossible for anything more substantial than a dream to be trapped inside that tranquil body.