Portents

7/27/2019 Portents

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PORTENTS by Jessica Zafra

Positive, she said cheerily, as if I shouldn’t go out and hang myself this instant. I held

on to the phone for a long time; I was sure that if I let go I would fall down. The

coffee turned to mud in my mouth — I ran to the sink and heaved. Congratulations, it’s

a fetus. You frigging idiot.

Afterwards I sat at the kitchen table and tried to make sense of the stuff swirling

around in my head. Visions of blood and umbilical cords and feeding bottles whirled

before my eyes like malevolent frisbees. The newspaper was lying next to the platter

of toast; I read the headline about two hundred times. “May use poison gas, Iraq

warns.” Next to it a picture of a dead Kurdish woman clutching the body of her dead

child. Mother. Child. I felt like throwing up all over again. I imagined a creature

ripping out of my stomach in a gory mess, like the monster in Alien.

There was a Post-it note on the mirror: “Lunch with Lawrence, 12:30,” Lawrence

being a fifty-fifty candidate for the father. I painted a face on and stared at the mirror.I saw my belly swelling up, my clothes rising like a circus tent, and all I could think

about was the ten pounds I’d just lost, and the new dress I bought to mark the

occasion. Finally I got my new dress out of the closet and put it on while it still fit.

In the elevator my next-door neighbor smiled and said Good morning. She had this

sort of knowing smile, and I found myself wondering if she knew about me. I wasn’t

just being paranoid; this is Manila, the neighbors know everything. They are

extremely sympathetic, and if you let them they will take over your life. It turned out

she was just trying to sell me a watch. Her husband had managed to get out of Kuwait

by driving across the desert, and when he got home the banks refused to change his

Kuwaiti dinars. That’s why she was selling his watches. I felt kind of sorry for Mrs.

Santos, setting out with her imitation Gucci handbag and several dozen gold bracelets

to sell her husband’s watches. Or was it Mrs. San Juan, I can never remember.

A nervous breakdown would’ve been in order, or a fit of tears and keening, the kind

that comes with a runny nose and smeared mascara. But I’ve never been one for

hysterics. Thanks to my parents, by the time I was eight, the sight of a chair being

hurled across the room was no longer cause for alarm. Maybe there is something to be

said for a lousy home life. Ramon says my emotional range is limited to rage, guilt,

and occasional hilarity. He neglected to mention blanknesss — there are times when I

just don’t feel anything.

Ramon also claims he can read my thoughts by looking at me —he says I’m

transparent. I hope so; it’s embarrassing to tell somebody there’s a fifty per cent

chance that he may be a father in several months.

By the time it occurred to me to catch a ride I was halfway to my office and decided

to walk the rest of the way. I was swallowed up by the crowd of people hurrying to

work; rising above the din of traffic, their footfalls sounded like the marching of a

distant army.

In front of the church where rosaries and good-luck charms were sold under the baleful stare of the Archangel Michael’s statue, a strange figure appeared on my right;

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a filthy man with long, matted hair. A tattered bag was slung across his bare chest,

upon which his ribs protruded like spikes. A thick layer of soot covered his emaciated

body — he looked like a walking pile of ashes. He started speaking to me in urgent

tones, as if he were revealing important secrets, and there was a crazy glint in his

eyes. I understood nothing. He was speaking either in dialect of in gibberish, I

couldn’t tell, I looked on stupidly. People stared, expecting perhaps that he would produce a cleaver and hack me to death. The man went on with his weird recitation;

why he chose me I had no idea, maybe he could see past the designer clothes into my

dark and grimy soul. After a while he frowned like a teacher who had just given up on

a particularly moronic student. Then he wheeled and dashed into the church, stopping

a moment to rub with his filthy hand the scowling face of the Archangel Michael.

Through the glass I could see the cashier, Wilma, on the telephone, spewing vile

words like poisoned toads into the receiver. She was screaming at some poor bastard

who owed her money. Across from me, Pocholo, in his pink shirt and red paisley

necktie, sat flipping through the morning papers.

“It’s exactly as Nostradamus said,” Pocholo said. “He predicted earthquakes signaling

the end of the world, and we had that big one last month. Then he said a leader from

the Middle East would launch a world war. I thought it would be Khadaffi but no, it’s

Saddam Hussein.

“Sure,” I said. I watched Wilma slam the phone so hard it fell to the floor. Cursing

mightily, she stopped to pick it up. On this particular day she was clad in polyester

cloth abloom with pink and purple flowers, which made her look like a demented

sofa.

“Anyway,” Pocholo continued, “my aunts say they saw this vision in Taal.” His voice

dropped to a whisper. “They saw a horseman in the sky.”

“A what?”

“A man on a horse. Riding across the sky. A hundred schoolchildren saw it.

According to my aunt it looked like the statue of St. Martin that stands in their

church.”

“St. Martin on a horse?” I said. “Maybe it was St. George or Joan of Arc. I don’t think

St. Martin rode a horse.”

“No, stupid,” he said. “You’re thinking of St. Martin de Porres. We’re elating about

St. Martin of Tours. And you know what? My aunt says they saw the same vision just

before World War II. Then the Japanese arrived.” He ran his fingers through his

artfully moussed and tousled hair. “Oh my God, what if it’s really the end. I mean, I

don’t even have a kid yet.”

I looked away so he wouldn’t see me grimace, and was just in time to see Wilma

spitting into her wastebasket.

All morning I wondered whether I should ask Wilma for her abortionist’s address.She would give the address, I knew, even accompany me to the place. Probably some

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decrepit wooden house in the fetid alleys of Tondo, where the gangs hunted each

other down with homemade revolvers. Wilma hid nothing, she wore her brazen

honesty like a soiled and rusty halo. She had had four abortions, she told me casually

while I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom; the washerwoman down her street

performed the operation, she owed Wilma money. I imagine Wilma’s insides, as torn

and bloody as a battlefield. She said she’d regretted her last abortion: it was a girl,she’s always wanted a baby girl. She put the fetus in a jar of formalin and kept it in

the drawer where her wedding dress, which had outlasted her marriage, lay yellowing

among mothballs and dead flowers.

The others she’d flushed down the toilet.

Lawrence ate his lunch the way he lived his life: very carefully, as if he would choke

on it. Everything about him was resoundingly correct, from his hair to his Italian

shoes, from the schools he’d attended to the fashionable gym where he wrestled withmachines three times a week. I knew that as he read the menu he was figuring out

how much cholesterol, how much sodium and fat were in the entrees.

“It’s going to be bad,” he was saying. “By next year the official exchange rate could

be 28 pesos to the dollar. That’s a conservative projection. We haven’t considered oil

prices and the damage from the earthquake.” Daintily, he chewed on his vegetable.

“Inflation will go through the roof,” he added, almost with relish.

While he delivered his analysis of the economy, I twirled the noodles around my fork

but I hardly ate anything. No appetite. Idly, I wondered if Lawrence was sleeping with

someone else. One of the girls from his office, someone tall and svelte who worked in

PR, shopped in Hong Kong, and wore linen suits with tiny skirts. I concluded that he

wasn’t— I had no illusions about his undying love and fidelity, but I trusted his fear of

AIDS.

“Am I boring you?” he said at last. Mr. Sensitive. He put his hand on my knee—

maybe he expected me to salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I

know we haven’t seen each other much lately, but it’s been hell at the office.”

Without missing a beat he slid his hand up my skirt. Boy, he was smooth, no one

would’ve suspected that the earnest-looking young man in the pinstripe shirt could be

doing something as ignoble as giving a girl a feel in a restaurant. “That guy from thehead office is a major asshole. Goes around trying to catch people loafing. The office

feels like a...”

Abruptly he withdrew his hand and stood up. A large, red-nosed white man in an ill-

fitting brown suit was approaching our table.

“Mr. Fowler,” said Lawrence.

“Alvarado,” said the man, shaking the hand Lawrence extended.

“How was the beach?” Lawrence said. I had to restrain myself from calling the waiterand asking for a receptacle I could puke into.

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“Fine,” said Fowler, “Well. Enjoy your meal.”

“Is that the asshole from the main office?” I said.

“Sssh,” Lawrence hissed. “He might hear you.”

“Let him.” I reached over with my fork and speared food off his plate. He hated it

whenever I did that. Lawrence had a very definite concept of “mine.” Fo r instance, all

his books were stamped “Private Library of Lawrence R. Alvarado.” The strange

thing was, he didn’t even read his books. They were lined up according to height on

his antique bookshelf, neatly covered in plastic. One time I took a book out of the

shelf, and it had been there unopened for so long the pages stuck together.

“Anyway,” Lawrence said, “where were we?”

“You mean until your sahib came along?”

“What’s the matter with you?” he said. Funny he should use the exact same words he

said coming up to me at Diday’s birthday party while I stood in a corner holding my

breath to get rid of my hiccups. He said he was Lawrence and I should breathe into a

paper bag, so we went into the kitchen and rummaged in the closets. There weren’t

any paper bags, and when he found a plastic shopping bag I didn’t need anymore, my

hiccups were gone. He got my name and my telephone number, it was as easy as that.

“Miggy,” he said. Miggy, for Chrissakes. I knew Lawrence wasn’t going to follow

me, he hated scenes — and I walked out of the restaurant, it was as easy as that.

I wandered around the mall for a while. I went into stores and looked at things. There

was this outfit that looked like our uniform at the Academy of Our Lady’s Seven

Sorrows — white blouse, blue necktie, and a navy-blue skirt — only the skirt was too

short. At Seven Sorrows, skirts had to cover the entire knee area. If your knees were

exposed the nuns would give you a lecture on modesty. There was no spanking — the

nuns were an enlightened bunch — but after fifteen minutes of having guilt laid thickly

on you, you’d wish they’d give you ten lashes instead and get it over with.

Corporal punishment would simplify everything. For sleeping with a guy you weren’t

married to, you’d get, say, five hundred lashes. For sleeping with two guys, neither ofwhom you were married to, one thousand lashes. For even thinking about abortion,

ten thousand lashes. And I’d been such a good girl too, until recently, anyway, so I’d

probably get five hundred extra lashes for being such a disappointment.

I made a mental list of the reasons for and against having this baby. Pro: This child

would be mine, really truly mine, which couldn’t be said of a lot of things. Pro:

Maybe I’ll turn out to be a genius who will invent some thing beneficial to mankind,

like a device that would cause world leaders to self-destruct if they got the urge to

wage war.

Anti: I’m not sure I’d be such a hot parent. I have serious deficiencies in theresponsibility department, as the credit card people will attest. Anti: The lack of a

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husband, the resulting social stigma, and if not that, my own paranoia. I would drive

myself crazy wondering if someone was going to cast stones at me. Anti: my mother

would freak. She’s in California, running a Filipino restaurant, and she’s always going

on about the decline of traditional Filipino values. I don’t think she would appreciate

having me prove her theories. I can just see her talking to my father, blaming him for

dying young and leaving her to raise his daughter to adulthood (I was always “hisdaughter” everytime I screwed up).

When I got back to the office people were scurrying about like newly-beheaded

chickens.

“What’s going on?” I asked Pocholo. He was alternately squirting his asthma

medication into his mouth with an inhaler and stuffing folders into his briefcase.

“There’s going to be a big earthquake at 2:30,” he said, only there were no pauses

between his words.

“Says who?” I demanded.

“It was on the radio,” he said. He snapped his briefcase shut. People were running into

elevators. Wilma let loose a steady stream of obscenities while she stuffed into

shopping bags the fake Benetton shirts she sold on installment.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “You can’t predict exactly when an earthquake will happen.”

"It was on the radio,” Pocholo repeated, as if media coverage were an infallible

confirmation of truth. “2:30. Powerful earthquake, intensity nine.”

“Well, I’m not leaving,” I declared. “I’m not going to fall for an idiotic prank.”

“This building could collapse!” he screeched. “Like the Hyatt Terraces!”

“You can’t predict an earthquake exactly.”

“What if there is one? Be reasonable!”

Reasonable! I nearly laughed at that. Pocholo gave up, gathered his briefcase and

inhaler, and ran to the elevator.

“Come on,” said Wilma, “It’s almost time.”

“It’s a prank,” I said. “I’m not leaving.”

“They’re closing the building,” she said. “Everyone’s getting out. Do you want to get

locked in?”

She had a point. I got my bag — I could use the afternoon off, anyway.

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I figured I’d go home and get some sleep; maybe when I woke up this whole thing

would turn out to be a bad dream like the one that killed my Uncle Danding. One

night he ate too much rice and stewed pork, then went to bed and started screaming

horribly in his sleep. They slapped him, poured cold water on him, pounded and bit

him, but he never woke up. He died uttering strange garbled noises. The official cause

of death was cardiac arrest, but everyone said it was bangungot, the sleeping sickness.

It did seem like a dream, the crowd of people gathered at the parking lot and looking

at the building, waiting for the swaying to start. Idiots, I muttered, as I flagged down a

taxi.

“Where to?” the driver snarled.

“Salcedo,” I said.

“Too near,” he snapped, zooming off before I could get in the cab. Taxi drivers! This

was not a great moment for humanity: everyone was being an idiot or an asshole.

All the taxis were taken, and the buses were so full people were sprouting out the

windows. I could see the passengers crammed together like fillings in an enormous

sandwich, bumping and rubbing against each other with every lurch of the bus.

Maybe if something asks who my kid’s father is, I could say I took a really crowded

bus and got knocked up.

By the time I got back to my apartment my feet were throbbing. A menu from a pizza

parlor that delivered had been shoved under my door; reading it I had a sudden wild

craving for anchovy pizza. Pregnant women are supposed to have these wild cravings,

but I was slightly worried. I’ve heard old people say that what you crave during

pregnancy determines how your child will turn out. For instance, if you crave guavas,

your child will be stubborn. My friend claims her clumsiness was caused by her

mother’s fondness for noodles. And singkamas is supposed to produce fair -

complexioned children, no matter how dark their parents are. I thought, if I ate a lot of

anchovies, would my child have scaly skin, or look like a fish?

I phoned the pizza place anyway, and when I put the phone down it rang. “Hi,” said

Ramon.

“How did you know I was home?” I said.

“You’re always home on Sunday.”

“It’s Monday.”

“Oh. Are you going out tonight?” he said. “Can I come over?”

“Okay.”

When I hung up I noticed how quiet the building was. No radios blaring, no TV, no

brats squalling down the hall. For a second I wondered if there really was anearthquake. The last time, when the tremors started there was a stunned silence. The

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phones stopped ringing, the printers stopped whirring, conversations paused in mid-

sentence; everyone sat gripping their desks, their eyes wide open and their mouths

shaped into O’s. Then people dove under tables and Wilma was saying

“OhGodOhGodOhGod” and there was a loud wailing in the air. When the tremors

stopped I heard Pocholo’s radio, and the B-52s were singing, “Cosmic! Cosmic!”

I switched the TV on. There was this soap opera about a little girl whom everyone

maltreated. The actress was played by a little girl was so good at being a martyr, it

was as if she had a sign on her forehead that said, “Kick me.” The soap was

interrupted by a news broadcast: 262 more Filipinos had fled Kuwait. A middle-aged

woman told a reporter she had been raped by Iraqi soldiers. Why should I be

ashamed, she said, I didn’t want it to happen. It was amazing how casual she was.

How could she be so cool? War could break out any second, and that madman could

use chemical weapons. I thought of worldwide recession, rioting for food, and

pictures I had seen of Hiroshima after that blast.

Maybe Pocholo and his aunt were right, the world was coming to an end. What alousy time it was to be born, with madmen waiting to gas you or blow you away, and

the earth opening up to swallow you. On the other hand, with everything going

against you, you didn’t need your own mother plotting to get rid of you.

Ramon came in at six. His hair looked like he’d cut it himself, which he often did. He

brought a take-out box of friend noodles and a videotape of Road Runner cartoons. I

heated the pizza leftovers and he ate them on the card table on the terrace.

He looked exhausted. “I stayed up late filling out the forms for my grant,” he

explained, rubbing his eyes.

“I had a weird day,” I said. I told him about the street crazy in front of the church, and

his strange message.

He rubbed a spot of sauce off my chin with his thumb. “Maybe it was an obscene

proposal. Or maybe he was speaking Aramaic. Repent or else.”

“My officemate says the world is ending,” I said.

He ate the last crumb of pizza. “Maybe.”

“Doesn’t it worry you?”

“It’s not like I can do anything about it. If it’s true. What’s scary is being the last

person on earth,” Ramon said.

"Everyone else is dead, and you wander around the rubble and slowly realize you’re

alone.”

“God,” I said. “What would you do?”

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“Keep looking for another survivor. Try to go crazy,” he reached over and picked a

noodle from my plate. “We’re being morbid tonight.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “All this talk about war.”

It started to rain, so we got up and went inside. As I closed the door to the terrace Ithought I saw something in the sky — a man on a black horse, riding through the rain.

“You want some coffee?” Ramon called from the kitchen.

“Yes, please,” I said. My knees were wobbly, I had to sit down. You’re seeing things,

I told myself. Pregnant women do it all the time, it’s hormones or something.

“What’s wrong?” said Ramon.

“Nothing,” I said, and in the pit of my stomach I felt a little kick.

Portents

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