The Navidad Incident (14 page)

That's when he felt he was being watched. Strange things do happen in the sea, he remembers thinking, as he turned around to look—and there behind him was a bus, and peering out the windows were old men! Their faces looked yellow underwater. The passengers waved at him, pointing at the fish skewered on his harpoon, and even clapped their hands, applauding his achievement. The yellow and green stripes on the bus seemed to dance in the rippling coral sea light, yet inside it was apparently dry. Perhaps the chassis was waterproofed? He smiled through his diving mask and waved back at the old men, then went up for air. But when he ducked his head under to have another look, the bus was nowhere in sight. He deposited his fish in the canoe, and dove in again, but no bus. Only when he went home to his village and told his mates did he learn it was the missing bus.

Matías first met Angelina in 1977, when he was forty-nine. The place was an upscale brothel in Manila where he was taken one evening as part of the VIP treatment on an official visit to the Philippines. He wasn't really in the mood, but he went anyway—and Angelina was one of two hundred girls in the establishment. She was twenty-eight at the time, just about ready to leave that line of work. The favor was clearly a passing gesture to a dignitary whose emerging nation was still a little-known quantity, and Angelina perhaps got to do the honors because she hadn't been in demand lately. But whatever the motives on the Philippine side, Matías was taken with her the moment he saw her. That first night, she received him warmly and graciously, suppressing any here-we-go-again expression in the tradition of the trade. A pretense that should have fooled no one, yet Matías was so fresh off the boat he imagined she might actually care for him. The fact was, up until then he'd never really fallen in love.

It wasn't until much later in life that he realized how many special favors he enjoyed from those around him. Believe as he might that his attainments were his own doing, how very different his fortunes would have been without other people's goodwill. During his Japan days, there was an older woman who generally looked after his needs. As a dark-skinned foreigner, short even by Japanese standards, with no economic pull, that was something in itself. Not that he'd have missed female companionship— he honestly felt no yearnings in that direction—still most of the time there was some woman around. He was also befriended by men, so it wasn't all maternal instinct. Cornelius, the first president of Navidad, for instance, had looked out for him and helped set him up in the world of politics, though the alliance was brief.

He also had his share of women the first few years back in Navidad. The faces changed from one to the next at some unspoken signal. Homebodies good at cooking and housework, beauties made for taking out and about. He'd put in his twelve hours at Micael Guili's shop, eat lunch and dinner on the job, and get back late at night to find the woman waiting and himself irritated at having to make some semblance of conversation or love. He didn't know about other men, but he could get along just fine without a woman.

Six years after he started working at Guili's, Micael the proprietor fell victim to the islands' first traffic accident, leaving Matías to run the store single-handed. Two years on, seeing the amount of cash in circulation, Matías reckoned the islanders' purchasing power merited a healthy boost in imported goods. He refurbished Guili's general store, turning it into the first supermarket in Navidad. He swept all sex from his life; there simply was no room for a woman in a routine of sleeping, waking, and eating behind the counter. Everyone was so used to seeing him spend all hours at the grindstone that it came as a shock when in 1963 Matías married Micael Guili's widow María. He was thirty-five at the time, María fifty-six.

Rumor around Baltasár City made it out to be a marriage of convenience designed to give Matías complete control over the burgeoning M. Guili Trading Company. Which was not entirely incorrect, though not the whole picture. Certainly María was amenable to a union with this man who had been toiling away for her; in that sense the nuptials did have a clear economic basis, a merger of their business selves. And Matías, for his part, didn't think twice before annulling his own virtually nonexistent maternal family registry to take on her surname. Micael and María had no children, so Matías became an adopted Guili.

Yet despite what anyone might think, the two of them passed unfailingly enjoyable days together, blissfully unaware of their age difference. Not only was there no pause for pretty young things to insinuate themselves closer to the richest retail proprietor in the country, but even the marriage-of-convenience stories subsided. Getting together with María gave Matías his first real taste of a home, and for all of fourteen years, until María passed on at seventy-one, nothing clouded their selfless partnership. More than enough time to drive the disappointed gold diggers into compromise marriages of their own.

What was behind this miracle? Very simply, Matías was a stranger to romance. The sensation of falling hopelessly in love with someone to the exclusion of all else—
that
he never knew. He had no idea people could agonize day and night over such things. Had accusations reached his ears that his marriage to María was calculated, he might well have asked, “You mean there's anything else? Men and women can relate in other ways?” The marriage suited him; working all day, staying up talking late into the night, it seemed an ideal life. Short on romance, perhaps, but full of affection. María was a woman of superior intelligence, much brighter than her deceased husband had ever been and studiously careful not to overstep her prerogative. Pundits quipped that Matías got his savvy from her, from their nightly kitchen talk. Not surprisingly, when death claimed María just as Matías was entering into politics, he mourned a lost confidante as much as a soul mate.

Now this same Matías suddenly found himself in love with someone he met in a Philippine brothel. Infatuation hit him totally out of the blue and left him reeling. He dragged himself from her bed at four in the morning and spent the whole of the next day contriving to see her again. It was the longest day he'd ever known. The basic equations of his life no longer added up. If a man could feel such electrical storms of emotion, where had he been for fifty years? Scarcely able to wait out the daylight hours, he made his own way to the establishment of the night before and found the same girl, Angelina—her name long since committed to memory.

For four nights straight, he visited Angelina, always staying until dawn, prolonging the hours of lovemaking with installments of his life story. Hers he never asked, fearful that he might babble, “What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”—the oldest line in creation. Why would a professional woman tell him the truth anyway? Meanwhile, his days were a parade of perfunctory meetings with Philippine officials, his evenings spent in dinner engagements. Afterward would come invitations to other brothels, but he'd bow out—only to find himself racing to Angelina, his knees practically giving out by the time he reached her.
This isn't normal
, he thought,
this isn't normal at all
. If Angelina was at all perplexed, she never let it show. She had herself a good customer who'd be heading back to his little island in a few days' time. No matter how far the guy pushed his luck, what harm could he do? She listened to what he had to say and asked questions at appropriate intervals.
This is one smart woman
, thought Matías.
María was smart, but this one's smart and beautiful too
. She had her own views; she didn't just palm off what she thought he wanted to hear.

But if Angelina thought her islander just a one-week special, she was sorely mistaken. On the fourth night, Matías proposed. Angelina just stared back at him and gave the only intelligent response possible—she laughed. She laughed until tears came. It was a good minute before she caught her breath and saw—she could scarcely believe her eyes—that her suitor was dead serious. Matías ardently restated his case: he had standing in his country and real prospects for a more powerful position. This was the year after Navidad gained independence from American protectorateship, and newly elected Representative Matías Guili was in the good graces of President Cornelius. In fact, the President had appointed him as his personal emissary to the Philippines. Matías stopped short of telling Angelina that one of these days she'd make First Lady, but he hinted at something close.

“You give me till tomorrow to answer?” asked Angelina. Coming instead of the outright “no” he expected after such fits of laughter, Matías was elated. The whole of the next day, with no official chores, he roamed the busy pavements of Manila. He may have wondered what the hell he was doing, but he never doubted he'd taken the right course.

At last it got dark, and he went to see her. The old lady at the door recognized him and showed him in without a word. Matías blushed like a high school boy awaiting a reply to his first love letter (though only he could tell, his skin was so dark). Angelina greeted him with a serious expression and sat down silently at a small table beside the big bed.
Hardly a beaming bride-to-be
, thought Matías. He didn't dare breathe until she said something.

“About you proposing, I'm happy you want to marry me, really I am. But me, somebody's wife? Well, that's not me. I been living in this world too long now to stay cooped up. What am I gonna do? Cook meals, do laundry?”

“You wouldn't have to do any of that. You'd have a maid.”

“No, that's not the point. I'm a damn good cook, you know, but picture me trying to look like a good little wife. Me, arm-in-arm with you in public?”

“I don't see why not.”

“I'd feel wrong. I never even think about it till now, I never get used to it.”

“You'd get used to it in time,” he pleaded desperately.

“No, it never work. So …” Angelina paused pointedly. “I just have to say no.”

“Oh,” sighed Matías. His voice hit bottom.

“But … I got an offer of my own.”

Matías looked up.

“I'm maybe not wife material, but we can still stay together. I only know you this very short while, but I like you. And I can't keep on like this in Manila forever. It's a young girl's game, you know. So here's my offer: I ask you, please take me with you to your country.”

“Without marrying?”

“That's right. I wanna run a place like this in your Navidad. Take no customers myself, I just manage the girls. I run a class house, invite a few girls from here who wanna tag along, hire local Navidad girls too. That way you get to see me every night, we drink and talk and sleep together just like this week. But not like a wife—I have my own work. No bother with home life, we both get something better—a secret partnership.”

Thus Navidad's very first brothel was established and met with great success. Backed by Matías, enterprising Angelina signed a twenty-year lease on a public hall—bargained down to a nominal price—from the Navidad government. Originally built by the German admiralty, then used as Japanese officers' housing, then occupied by the postwar American administration, it was a grand affair. She completely redecorated the place to her own taste and brought in a hotel chef and a few girls from Manila. Within a year their numbers doubled.

Angelina had a real knack for business. Overcoming all initial difficulties through good old hard work and acumen, she succeeded in teaching island males the modern market value of sex as a commodity. Granted, she catered to a privileged minority of island society, plus wealthy vacationers and VIPs from abroad, yet it wasn't long before others followed suit with slightly less upscale establishments. But by then, of course, Matías was President of the Republic and Angelina his trusted nightly advisor. How right she'd been to choose the divan of commerce over the housewife's overstuffed couch.

One hot afternoon, a housewife living near Naafa Village set out for her taro patch. Gathering taro is much easier in the cool morning hours, but first she'd gone to the river to wash some clothes and the sun was already high before she realized the taro basket was empty. Oh no, she thought, now I'll have a thirty minutes' trudge before I wade into the muck in the noonday heat. She was waist deep in the taro patch when something flicked past the corner of her eye. Strange, she thought, shouldn't be anyone about. Maybe a dog? On looking up, however, she swears she saw a bus the size of a full-grown sow racing across the fields along the banked earth paths. It was painted in green and yellow stripes, very pretty.

The woman watched the bus drive off, when it struck her: Buses aren't that small, and they don't go puttering around taro fields. She let out a gasp and strained to get a parting glance, but by the time she reached the embankment—one leg sucking up a thick slurp of muck, then the other—the bus had vanished into the banana trees. Now wait, she told herself, that bus didn't even reach as high as the lowest bunch of bananas. Words that figured in her official testimony and later appeared in Foreign Office documents about the missing bus.

The woman made her way over to the banana trees in question and peered into the undergrowth, but the bus was long gone. If only she could have seen if there were tiny people on board or some other species of passenger. She waited around for an hour or so through the worst of the midday heat, until finally—still no bus—she put her basket of taro on her head and trudged back home.

Matías first met the two of them after losing the third presidential election, when he was at a very low ebb. He hadn't just lost his job and authority, word had it—leaked by accident or possibly on purpose—that this new President Bonhomme Tamang's investigators were closing in on him day by day. Papers detailing his under-the-table dealings in connection with the construction of the Navidad Teikoku Hotel might soon fall into Tamang's hands. Meanwhile, for what it was worth, Matías kept passably busy compiling a list of Tamang's political errors as ammunition for his comeback in the fourth election. Though if the shit hit the fan over his own corruption, there'd be nothing he could do. Fleeing overseas would be suicide. Living in Japan on his bank accounts posed no problem, but what would he do with himself each day? No, exile was out of the question. Think as he might, he was at an impasse.