TWENTY-SIX
Christmas fell on a Monday that year.
At Setti’s insistence, I called my parents over the weekend. Her reasoning was perspicuous yet valid: On a holiday one should always be with family, or at the very least, establish correspondence. Still I dreaded the idea, and put off acting upon it until Saturday night in Greenheights, where we had elected to exchange gifts with Setti’s family.
We arrived on the previous evening. A chill wind escorted us through the streets. It was the voice of a Pacific storm not due for arrival yet eager to proclaim its existence. The house that Setti’s father had built was—as always—all aglow behind its parapet of imported conifers. Beneath one of these conifers I was asked to wait, like a suitor for whom the mistress felt nonplussed, whilst the daughter of the their dead owner knocked on the door. Arms loaded with presents, I stood in the dark. The trees whispered. Twigs fell on my shoulders. Then came Setti’s knock, followed by the sound of the door opening.
There were shrieks and gasps as Setti was welcomed in from the porch. I heard several voices bid her a Merry Christmas. Before moving inside, Setti turned to beckon me from the shadows. I followed like a good hound.
The mellifluent pleasantries stuttered before I could even reach the top step. Everyone—cousins, aunts, uncles—fell silent while I crossed the porch. Even the wind seemed to lose its potency, as if it were little more than a dying breath though the wanton hair of a severed head. Inside, I found a circle of people dressed in earthly tones of brown, green, and autumn umber. The adults carried wine glasses; the children, candy canes. On every face I could discern something akin to the bravura strokes of that French painter from Rouen who had died young, though not without articulating, quite accurately, the softness in the dark of a dead stare.
“Good evening,” I bid them all.
The dead eyes regarded me. A slain hunter’s bow beneath the stars of his haunting ground. Stepping forward, I tried to smile at the kids. None would return the attempt. As I knelt to place the presents under the tree I could feel the soft blanket of their rebuke—everyone in the room—fall over my shoulders. I pushed one present to the back; another I left near the fringe. Still kneeling, I commented to one of the gentlemen that it was a breezy night tonight. He made no gesture to concur. The expression on his face suddenly made me think of the first time I’d met Mark. Setti’s father had refused to speak to me. He had only stared the way these people all stared at me now.
“Yes,” I heard Setti say from somewhere behind. “Very windy.”
The family’s consonance with Mark did not end here. They would not speak to me directly, but as the night progressed, I several times heard them all become quite jovial, though only from a distance. At around nine o’clock I was in the living room adjusting the star on the tree. Setti’s voice was coming from the dining hall. She was telling a joke. At the punchline her audience exploded with laughter. It was a source of great relief to hear it. The dear girl, sensing my difficulty at making a place among her clan, had gotten them laughing! The ice had broken. We could all make merry. I breezed into the hall wearing a big smile. I knew a few pretty good jokes of my own, and now that the floodgate stood open...
But my appearance froze the lake over again.
Soon as I came through the door it all stopped—the laughs, the chatter. Setti’s family sat at the table like the broken dolls of a destitute child. They looked but did not speak. Their plates were full; they would not eat. It was as if they were candles in the windows of that fallen city of the third Reich, and I a captain from the killing north.
Now speaking of children...well, since things weren’t going well with the adults, I thought I might at least have a chance with the kids. Alas, it was not meant to be. Though the goddess Fortuna presented me with more than one opportunity to establish their acquaintance, their mirth seemed forever just beyond reach. Giggles through a wreathed archway. Running feet down the stairs. At the announcement of my presence, however, it all stopped. Toy trains were canceled at the depot. Dollies went without milk. To the children as with the adults, I was little more than a valve turned tightly to the right, stemming the flow of joy. A spanner in the clockwork of time.
I learned to accept this fate, clinging to Setti often, or when she wasn’t around, maintaining a secure distance from the others. I was not allowed to stay with her at night. This, too, I was able to accommodate, with assistance from the little closet bedroom whose confines I had long since befriended. I slept with the fan on and the window open. The cool breezes seemed happy to make themselves at home, lifting the blankets into a kind of dome over my head, and ruffling the pages of books.
More to please Setti than out of any real yearning for blood and ties, I called my parents on Saturday night. This from the bed of my closet, where the signal was good and the privacy sublime. The line emitted its usual wheezes and clicks before putting me through. Then my mother picked up.
“Hello?”
I readied myself. Our last communication had ended rough. “Hello, Mom.”
“Fredo,” she said, though with about as much warmth as Setti’s family. “Hello.”
“Merry Christmas, Mom. How is everything there?”
Silence on the other end, long, unbalanced, like crystalline glassware at the edge of a broken shelf. “Everything’s fine here, Fredo. Really. We’re okay.”
“You mean Dad, too?”
“That’s right. We’re together and...and...” And just like so many other times since I’d moved here, my mother began to cry. My offered remedy was the same as always. I asked if she’d like me to come home. “Fredo,” she wept, as if the very idea lay beyond the boundaries of conception. “We’re fine. Everything is okay. You can let go.”
“Let go? Mom, I told you I never wanted to do that. I only came here for the work.”
“I know, honey. I know. I’m just so sorry for what happened.”
“Don’t be. I’m doing well at the network. We have a hit program—”
The sound of her anguish hit a new crescendo. I gave her a few moments to work through it. Tears are like that—the driving rains of a summer typhoon. They sweep; they draw back; they sweep again. “Mom? Mom?”
“What is it like over there?” she asked from the crest of an ebbing tide. “What is it like?”
A gust of wind came through the window. The curtains brushed my face. Chimes rang from the porch. Looking over the street, I saw a young girl dressed in rags. She lived with her dad, I knew, in a hovel down by the dirty water than ran through the village. She owned nothing. There would be no Christmas for her this year, or probably next year. She would not go to school after the holidays. Her dress was torn; her shoes didn’t match. She barely had enough to eat. And this girl...this beautiful little girl...she looked back at me and smiled the happiest, most pure smile I have ever been privileged to see.
“It’s wonderful, Mom,” I said. “It truly is.”
Her tears were out of control. She told me she loved me, and that one day—one perfect, glorious day—we would see each other again.
“I love you too, Mom. Please tell Dad I’m thinking of him. Tell him Merry Christmas.”
“Yes, Fredo. I will. Merry Christmas.”
The line clicked. And that was it. That was the last time I can remember calling home. Setti has asked me why. My answer is always the same: We just don’t have anything left to say. This sometimes prompts Setti to wonder: Will that ever happen to us? Will we ever run out of words for each other?
No, baby. I can’t imagine that happening.
Still, we didn’t talk much on the night that followed. I took her for a walk through the village, just for something to do. We were hand in hand like a pair of high school sweethearts. The wind had elected to stay, whipping our clothes. Setti’s hair was a curl of incense above the smolder of her eyes. It reached for the boughs of the duhat trees, which in turn had set their dreams on the stars.
It was after dark, yet there were children in the streets, playing tagu-taguan and patintero. Their laughter sparkled with the Christmas lights, which were strung on just about every window and wall we passed. Dogs barked at us. Cats nibbled at charitable meals.
We walked to the end of the lane, turned right a couple of times, then made a circle around Tulip Street. A family playing badminton stopped and stared as if we were ghosts. The birdie, abandoned mid-flight, fell to the concrete. I bid the family magadang gabi and apologized for interrupting the game. Yet the stares, the hanging jaws, persisted. It reminded me of how I’d been greeted back at the house, and once we were away I chanced to ask Setti what might be wrong.
She was taciturn at first, allowing the winds to speak in her stead. A huge palm frond dipped, as if about to prompt for a password, then rose. Setti and I walked halfway up the hill. Here another street led us back to Tulip.
“They’re offended by me,” I said. “They don’t think I should be here.”
“Hindi ka nila nakikita,” was the other’s reply.
It puzzled me. “But whenever I’m in the room they look straight at me.”
“Tinitingnan ka nila.”
And that brought us back to the first square. “They don’t think I should be here.”
Setti’s next words were in English: “It was in fact meant to be. Otherwise you never would have made it so far. The plane might have crashed. Or been hijacked.”
“There are no accidents, Setti? Is that what you mean?”
“Not for the things that truly matter. You were meant to be a part of PTN. The choices Rodrigo made—all of them since he came to be manager—led directly to you. You came over here to live, Fredo.” She placed her head on my shoulder. “And to die.”
“I don’t plan on dying here.”
That was what I remembered saying, right up until these contemporary episodes—the ones I’ve mentioned at odd places throughout this manuscript. Until Trentinara. Mere moments ago, however, the flashback changed: I didn’t plan on dying here. I may have said that instead.
But then...I had also died in Cleveland. I left that city and became a memory to all who once knew me. My parents wonder how they could have let me slip away. How they could have let this kite of their making, seemingly tethered with such great advertence, break from its mooring and fly off free.
I didn’t plan on dying here. I hadn’t planned it in Cleveland either. But then Setti...perhaps she is correct. Perhaps a plan is nothing more than a prediction of Fortuna’s behest. And when we happen to get it right we think ourselves so, so smart.
We arrived at the guardhouse intersection. A turn left would take us back to the house. The road right curved to the top of the hill where, months ago, Setti and I had first made love. It had been on a night not unlike this one. Cool and windy. Trees forming dark walls along every avenue and alley. I had walked with Setti to the top of the hill; I undressed her under the stars. And her breath had come up short, though between gasps she made no plea for repose. The memory was sweet. Unable to stop myself, I looked up the road. It was pitch black. The trees were in sway beneath a dodging moon. I thought we could find our way up and perhaps relive a fond memory.
Setti thought otherwise. Gently, I tugged her in one direction. Just as gently, she tugged in another.
“Setti,” I asked, “wouldn’t you like to walk up the hill with me tonight?”
She provided a sad smile and shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Too cold,” she replied, looking down at a bundle of chasing leaves. “Too cold.”
“It was cold the last time.”
And Setti: “I know.”
So we didn’t go up the hill. We turned left, walked past her father’s house (fully lit, windows burning as if painted upon the scene by that suicide merchant of pastel colors whose works still decorate small town offices), and arrived at a little garage its owners had converted to a cafe. The Kape Kagubatan glowed with the burnt-orange hue of a stream-side campfire. Tall flowers nodded at the entrance, their shadows like serpents on the street, luring us to sit down. We did not take them up on their offer. Making a right turn, Setti guided me down another lane that curved along the wall of a Catholic church. The church was dark and empty, which seemed strange considering the holiday. Setti explained that the contractor hadn’t finished it yet, but only in an absent manner, for we were now back at the hill.
“Look,” Setti said, pointing at the slope.
It was woodsy. I could make out nothing but leaves and trees, faintly lit by a row of houses on the street’s opposite side.
“What’s up there?” I asked, as if I couldn’t remember its significance.
She took me closer to the slope. One tree in particular had caught her eye. It was tall and dead. Its black trunk arced toward the street like a warlock conjuring demons. Several of its cadaverous boughs squeaked their hatred of—or love for—the wind.
“Look,” Setti commanded again, lower this time.
And something in her tone resembled the tree, dead and black. I turned to ask if anything was wrong. In these wanton currents of air Setti had become stricken with hypertrichosis. Her long, dark hair concealed all but the austere daggers of her gaze. Then the wind blew again, sweeping the affliction back to reveal a girl with nothing more to say. A haunted portrait staring not at me, but at another presence in the room. So I followed the daggers into the trees. And near the top of the slope I could make out a humanoid shape hanging from one of the branches. It hovered in the dark like a corpse in an upright coffin. As I watched, dumbfounded, a breeze found its way through the withered foliage. The corpse swayed toward the street. When the light struck it I could see that the body was human, but not necessarily the head, pertaining to the beast in that tale by McCormack, which trapped its protagonist in a diction prison.
“Setti,” I moaned, “there’s a man up there.”
“Yes.”
“What’s...what’s wrong with his head?”
“It flees the truth.”
This required further explanation. I turned to ask Setti what she meant.
“Put it this way,” she said, “we’re close. It’s almost over.”
“You keep talking to me in riddles.”
“Think harder then.”
Flustered, I looked back up the slope. If there really was a dead body up there the police should be called. But first I needed to find it again...and I couldn’t. There was no dead man in the dark with a misshapen head. The body turned out to be just a large, broken limb that had gotten caught during its fall. Now it swung and creaked on the slope like...
Well, you know what it looked like.
“Let’s go home,” Setti said.
Hand in hand we walked down the hill. At the bottom lay the intersection. To get to Mark’s house we would turn right this time instead of left. I wasn’t thinking about that, though. The warm softness of Setti’s hand, plus the wind, plus a small fire that some neighbor had lit to burn leaves, got me in the mood for poetry. I was thinking of making love to Setti. The house was crowded but we would find a place. We knew things about these things.
Then something up the slope exploded.
It was loud enough to blast the tranquility to pieces. I instinctively jumped in front of Setti. A hundred dogs started to bark. The explosion echoed over the valley, faded, faded...and disintegrated beyond the treetops.
Still protecting my lady, I asked of no one in particular: “What happened?”
My lady had an answer: “Gunshot.”
“How do you establish that?”
“It came from atop the hill. People have been killed there before.”
I peered back up the street. “You’re saying somebody just got murdered?”
“Probably not tonight. The wind knocked something over.”
She was being ludicrous. The blast had sounded nothing at all like the wind blowing over a stack of sheet metal, or an ill-constructed wall. It was an explosion.
But Setti refused to entertain my idea to investigate. Huddled close, she led me back to Mark’s house. And there we remained over the holidays, wherein the curtains of her equivocation, her suppressio veri, would at last draw back to show, once and for all, the identity of the Rainbird.