The pebbles forgive me

It's not everyday I walk around Katipunan with copies of Homer's The Iliad, Burton Raffel's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and, er, The Sad Clown and Other Five-Minute Tales for Bedtime inside my bag.

Buti na lang. (That's thank goodness, for the konyo.)

(I text my mother: "Foucault is cool." And she replies, "You should check out my pendulum." I'm sure I'm not the only one with a compulsion to giggle at that statement, no?)

All this pretending-to-be-smart-and-well-read thing is a strain on my budget. And oh yeah, on my mind. And my eyes, as some idiot lost her glasses. Gahdammit, what kind of idiot loses her glasses while she's wearing them? Never mind the sudden rains last Wednesday, never mind the flash-lake around the overpass. Those glasses were on your head -- how could you have lost them?

Ahem.

Everything about me is either about to melt, or go poof! so I leave you with an excerpt of the latest short story I managed to squeeze out of wherever these things come from. It's called Park 9 Alley, and I have a feeling this will be one of those bitcheries of a story that would forever be in-progress, guh. Anyway:

Somewhere in this street, someone is kissing someone he is not supposed to kiss. I suspect it is Francisco Revelar, the architect [note to self: scratch that -- change it to "accountant."] who has not seen his wife in two years. It is understandable that he kiss someone else – I think he is kissing the girl Marta from the sari-sari store in front of his house for she often has that sad, faraway look on her pale, prematurely lined face and I’ve learned that it is those sad looks that make the men rise from their beds in the middle of the night and cup a young girl’s aging face. It is understandable that Francisco Revelar kiss Marta. After all, two years is a long time, a very long time. Dishes get stacked in the sink, the sinks are cleared, then get filled again. Drains record the remains of breakfasts, lunches and dinners, until they revolt by clogging up, and someone has to push his sleeves to his elbows sooner or later so water can make its proper descent into the sewage that spreads like misplaced roots underneath the gray concretes of this city. Windows turn muddy, then are wiped down one procrastinating afternoon months later. Doors squeak, complaining of the capricious comings and goings of men, these doors swell in their hinges after a thunderstorm, they crack in the heat of a summer, until they are oiled into silence, or replaced by something sturdier, not necessarily prettier. Oh, don’t let me get started on floors.

All this and more, over and over for seven hundred and thirty days, more or less – am I the only one who wonders what I should do with the quarter-day that helps define a year? What exactly is “365 ¼ days a year”?

Anyway. A lot happens, two years is a long time. Imagine all that waiting, all those mornings with no one to listen to you say, “Five minutes more.” All those noontime show summaries not recorded. All those six o’clock bell tolls without some floury, sun-kissed arms thrown around your neck. All those nights lying in a bed that grows larger and wider with every passing night.

Two years is a long time. Francisco Revelar knows – he has waited that long.

The classic story: Ida Revelar goes out one night after making dinner, she tells her husband of twenty-two years she needs more vinegar. Her husband, the architect, looks up from his newspaper for the barest of moments just to nod – trifle acknowledgment in a marriage that has lasted that long. It used to be enough, that little nod, a swift kiss on the shoulder before he went off to work, a distracted squeeze of the bridge between thumb and forefinger in social gatherings.

Francisco Revelar gives his wife a nod, returns to his newspaper.

He has read through the Obituaries, notes that someone with his first name died yesterday, and he looks at the front door, expecting Ida to come bustling in, her hair escaping the loose bun arranged at her nape, apologizing for taking so long, the neighbors wanted to chat about the president’s daughter, dinner will be ready in a bit, god she hopes she didn’t burn anything while she was away gossiping.
But she does not come in, she won’t. Although Francisco stays in his chair, at first puzzled, then worried, then a dismal bewilderment – Ida does not come in.

And he thinks then: What will I eat for dinner?

She’s dead, she’s surely dead, he thinks three months later.

What is wrong with that sink? he thinks two months after that.

I can’t change the locks, he thinks five months after that.

Where did the brown of the linoleum go? he thinks four months after that.

Another Francisco Something is dead, he thinks a month after that.

What now? he thinks, finally, eighteen months into that nightly ritual in his chair.

Every night, in that chair, he wonders. He cannot help it. There is so little one can do when one is waiting. He has tried, many times. He has busied himself with a company that used to bear his surname, he has started a garden (he has discovered a fondness for ferns), he has even decided (with the help of a self-help book) that it is his calling to be a poet. The distractions worked, to a point, although the last one did not work very well. But Francisco Revelar has learned that no matter how many ways he busies himself, he ends up, every night, on his chair, with the day’s newspaper in his hand, reading it from cover to cover, saving the Obituaries for last.

Until tonight, apparently. Because he is kissing Marta from the sari-sari store in front of his house. He is still waiting, of course, he must, he always is – any minute now Ida will shuffle into the living room with a bottle of vinegar and an unplanned basket of vegetables. He should be in the house now, he should be waiting. What if she comes home? What if she can’t see through the grime of the windows? What if another Francisco has died, and he can’t pour some Scotch in honor of the unfortunate soul?
But there he is now, kissing a sad young girl in the middle of the night. He has cupped her face in his hands. Her cheeks are so pale beneath his callused fingertips. Two years ago, his wife went to get some vinegar. He does not even remember Ida’s face when she told him so. He remembers that someone named Francisco died, and that he shall be remembered through life by a wife and two daughters. Not Ida’s face, though.

He is kissing Marta. He is kissing her with his eyes open, so he can watch how her eyelashes flutter to rest on her cheeks. Marta is young. Two years is a long time.

All right? All right. Off I go now.

Pahabol, a wave to Pancho, who's probably running in a field of strawberries with A.G. right now. Brokeback Plateau. Okay, fine, corny.

Toodles.