Justine's
No one goes to Justine’s much anymore these days, at least not since the ravishing of the madwoman in one of the club VIP rooms the night of the super lotto draw. No one has seen much of Victor lately either, who himself had been stalking the taong grasa milling about the lottery station, haranguing the bettors in their queues.
The woman’s madness seemed to increase in direct proportion to the accumulated pot of the 6/49 lotto, which draw after draw no one won, and there she was telling sob stories to the people lined up to place their bets, tales of war, anger, lost children, unpaid bills. It was one of Victor’s friends in the queue who noticed the woman had in fact a youthful mien, and if she were cleaned up and scrubbed a bit she could pass for a regular pedestrian, rather comely even — except for her eyes, which betrayed her craziness.
No one knows where the woman came from, she just surfaced one day in the Vito Cruz area in the block between the lotto outlet and Justine’s bar and café, a stone’s throw from Becky’s Bakeshop which occasionally took in lodgers on the second floor, one of them Victor who was from Iloilo, but now enrolled for the summer taking a few master’s units at Mapua a jeepney ride away.
Evenings were spent invariably at Justine’s, Victor along with his fellow borders, a curious blend of young professionals and philosophy undergraduates, mostly also from the Visayas, who during paydays downed a few beers in the club’s ground floor section with the mandatory karaoke, but never with the fatal My Way, only the safe repertoire of Air Supply, Crosby Still and Nash, Seals and Crofts with the summer breeze and hummingbirds winging their way through the pale pilsen until the wee hours if there were pesos to blow, and during the short staggered walk back to their pad they’d see the woman again talking to herself or else to a streetlamp fast fading with the morning, her tattered clothes an off green that in better days could have been the uniform green of the waitresses at Justine’s.
There’s been a book going around the barkada, Victor’s actually, shortly after he flew the coop or took the first boat back to the Visayas, some say, the reasons for which are still unclear. Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera is a collection of nine essay on literary theory, including an improvised homage to Stravinsky. It was a dog-eared paperback, still very much serviceable though the type was quite small.
Victor and Kundera were inseparable for a time, he brought it everywhere he went, placed the lotto ticket he bought regularly between its pages, read random passages from it during beer nights at Justine’s. He said he bought the book from a sidewalk vendor on Recto that specialized in second-hand stuff, books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, the works. But Testaments had a special place in the scheme of things, as Victor vowed that he would refer to it extensively in his thesis on the art of madness, and how through sheer velocity the weak minded can go over the deep end — there but for the grace of god go I.
It was Stravinsky, one of the philosophy students whom Victor had named such because of his resemblance to the musician, who first broached the possibility of luring the madwoman under the showers for a good scrubbing.
“And it won’t take long, with a bar of Safeguard the five of us can handle her, but where to do it?”
Aplan was devised, where one of us would befriend her, and that task fell to me. On a morning of bright sunlight as I was lined up to buy a ticket, the woman was again loitering nearby, kneeling on the sidewalk, muttering some inaudible incantation. She was remembering her village in the province, the strafing of her house by faceless marauders when the agreement on ancestral domain fell through.
No wonder she looked familiar, so we called her Nena — more of a code really than anything else — or at least I did. After placing my bet — 8 for August the month of the doomed memorandum signing, 16 for the date of my birth, 17 for the date of birth of a former girlfriend long dead, 29 for the last two numbers of our boarding house’s address on Vito Cruz, 36 in tribute to the anti-Christ, and 40 because it was the jersey number of a favorite basketball player — I approached her hesitantly and offered to buy her a meal at the carinderia across the street.
She looked at me queerly, as only strange people approached by strangers showing a little kindness do, and dusted herself off and followed me to the Chinese eatery with its display counter of porridge and toasted soy bean cakes, assorted bowls of noodles. Over bowls of mami and lomi she slowly opened up, tried to maintain a semblance of conversation about her life in the province, how she had lost her child in the gunfire assault of the rampaging Commander Panglian, the aftermath of apathetic authorities, the long boat ride to Manila where she slept in a lifeboat on the sundeck, only to wake up with her undies pulled down to her ankles.
It was a litany of heartbreaks going fast with the noodles, patches of her monologue barely decipherable, when Stravinsky happened to pass by from his morning jog at the seaside complex. I left Nena with him because I was already late for work, but not before paying for the meal and with the ticket 8-16-17-29-36-40 tucked discreetly in my breast pocket.
Even if there were days of madness there were days of quiet grace too, and summer on Vito Cruz seemed to weigh on us boarders with a delicate balance, the nights stumbling in like ancestral domains. At the subsequent beer session Stravinsky was livid, and he was relating to Victor a blow-by-blow account of the woman’s, Nena’s, story. Born the year martial law was declared, elementary and high school at the provincial institutes of public education, wed as a teenager to a sweetheart of youth only to lose her first baby to miscarriage, worked for a gaggle of NGOs and for a while verged on turning to communism, the hills and the romance of rebellion were that tempting. Knocked up again in her thirties by a foreign aid worker, the pregnancy a difficult one but when the child came there was no mistaking its mixed lineage, beautiful, may the good lord bless its ways.
Or was our friend just making this up like the violins in his cups?
Well the gang was all there with our respective lotto tickets, and at the corner the karaoke machine, which eons ago was a jukebox, now played a jazzed up version of Cortez the Killer by Neil Young, indeed daring us to pick up the mic if not our air guitars.
“Koya, it was painful, you cannot imagine the pain,” Nena had said, the philosophy student quoting her as saying of the night of the marauders, the faceless death masks, the fire in the dark a blazing pyre of sadness, which she could anyway claim as hers alone. The child, 3, gone. She crawled out of the ensuing confusion into the mud behind her hut, she did not know if she was dreaming or what, the muck was thick and good for cover.
The fellows almost applauded. It was decided that the next day we would bathe her ourselves in one of the rooms of Justine’s, with discreet permission of course from the manager and with due apologies to the waitresses who were themselves quite attractive in their green green grass of home uniforms. And what of home?
Kundera had written that the composer, the real Stravinsky, had resorted to writing music to help him through an inconsolable homesickness, and in so doing created another homeland. Music is the last refuge to which some scoundrels cling. Ours was the karaoke with its playlist, the song numbers occasionally matching those in our lottery tickets, as in Victor’s case, he who was forever pining for a lost Iloilo, but substituted it for the madwoman — 24 for Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, 5 for Harbor Lights, 7 for I Can’t Tell You Why, 44 for Walk on the Wild Side, 39 for Himala, and 18 for Nena, that weeper, sleeper of a song by a local astrologist in the folk rock era. No coincidence if we called her that, she being chased by the furies all the way to Manila. Or maybe she was herself the fury.
Victor knew most of the songs by heart, having worked part-time as a disc jockey during his undergraduate days in West Visayas University. But now all he had was his book and the patchwork company of friends, and the taste of ensaymada at Becky’s when one bit into the pastry.
It was a slow night, barely enough customers to fill a couple of tables on the ground floor of the club, most people at home preferring to watch for the super lotto draw results with the bouncing numbered ping-pong balls, the host exclaiming excitedly in Tagalog each number as if it were a striptease, the aural equivalent of a card shark slowly making out the card behind the exposed one in hand, whether it was good or busted.
The tub itself was orange, the soap of a kind hardly seen now in the supermarket shelves, likely old stock bought at the corner sari-sari store. The kettle whistled like an alien in the karaoke setting, many of the waitresses seemed to have their day off, and if in the corner a stenographer would suddenly pop up no one would really be surprised — the grandfather of Justine’s owner once worked at the Supreme Court.
Slowly the striptease began, or how to put it, the gradual peeling off the clothes of Nena who did not really resist, her eyes staring at a fixed point somewhere above our heads as if searching for a stray guardian angel with the karaoke waiting to play and the TV set tuned to the government station for the live draw after the news. Six numbers to remind us that things could still go well in the world, six songs for possible redemption amid the decadence and squalor in the old section of Malate, three pieces of women’s clothing that had the smell of sun and sweat, a musty rancidness that spoke of too lonely hours, the words choking on themselves.
From the club’s second floor where the VIP rooms were located, if a glass jalousie was left slightly ajar one could espy the neighborhood of residential apartments and a street basketball court further on down, the sidewalks lined with erratic flowering shrubs where Indian loan sharks did their rounds and many a toddler took first steps, as in a sense the madwoman too was now doing, her first steps into the orange tub of warm water, our hand towels if not our hands at the ready, her skin smelling like parched soil after first rain.
It might have driven us mad too had not the hills of her hinterland memory hovered into view, nipples alternately light and dark and bearing a likeness to charcoal embers being fanned, the red is black and black is red, contours like the interiors of a honeycomb. Four Strong Winds was playing with no one really daring to sing and if it was no longer Tina Revilla hosting the draw it still looked like her, or should we say it was still her voice announcing the numbers, even if we had in fact heard that she had long since migrated, doubtless to a better place where karaoke habitués found their voices, without madwomen devouring bowls of mami and plates of tokwa at a roadside carinderia, the turo-turo testament of gustatory betrayals.
Victor, strange fellow, was leafing through his book, fingering the lotto ticket, opting not to take part, neither in the bathing nor the singing. The better to see her, Nena being cleaned up under the garish light, he could wait forever.
But back to the bathing — four pairs of hands shaped her, as if sculpting a breathing, moving figurine, the skin often pockmarked, an amalgamation of sores, bruises, chafing. She was riding the waves of the tub as if the shores of her old hometown, and Stravinsky beside himself with joy he could compose a philosophical treatise for her right then and there, how purity of heart is to will one thing. If she perhaps smiled lucidly it was not because the sirens were giving out a song, Crazy Love, and the boat was about to lift anchor. Last call for puwera bisita.
Tina Revilla or her look-alike began announcing the winning numbers, and the towel was now brought to Nena’s body to dry her off, the weeks, even months of her apathy washed away. Victor, what a guy, was enjoying his book, and the sight of the clean woman as well, when something suddenly overtook her, was it shame or desire?
We had wanted her to dance like Salome, after whom a preschool down the road from the club was named, but she took flight, wrapping the towel around her and scrambling down the stairs. Before she was lost like a bubble to the warm night Victor handed her his lotto ticket which he had used as a bookmark.
The balut, chicharon and peanut vendors barely recognized her at the exit, and Stravinsky who had most determinedly shaped the skin of longing almost gave chase but at last thought better of it.
