The truth sometimes does not hurt

SHE’S ALREADY ON her sixth cigarette, staring absent-mindedly at the road pavement, her mind going through her brilliant plan one last time, when out of the corner of her eye, she finally sees his plump figure heading toward her direction.

She pretends that she has not seen him, leaves the stone bench where she has been sitting for the past hour, and feigns to scan the waiting shed’s bulletin board. She chooses a poster at the bottom so that she can bow down to read it. She thinks it good that she decided to wear her skimpiest shorts with her red sleeveless top today.

There are so many people crowded around her, stupidly waiting for a nonexistent jeepney— jeep drivers plying the campus roads had joined the Quezon City-wide boycott in protest of the recent oil price hike—that for a second she suddenly doubts whether he would see her or not. It is beginning to get dark.

But her buttocks are successful in calling his attention. “Hannah,” she hears him say beside her, his hand giving her rump a squeeze. She wheels around to face him, exclaiming a small, artificially surprised “Oh hi,” and beams at him. Hannah kisses his cheek noisily, making everyone in the waiting shed stare at them.

It is his turn to get surprised, his blush of a genuinely embarrassed red. “Well… excellent paper you turned in today.”

“Don’t be nice, Gil. It’s awful, going by your high standards.” She smiles her flirtatious smile brimming with lies. Her term paper on the government’s innocence about the recent kilings of activists was lengthy and long-overdue, but, like everything else she wrote, was excellent. It was part of the plan to never say any truth to Gil so that when—

“Are you taking the Ikot jeep?” he asks her, failing to sound as if the question were casual, as if he was not dying for a yes. Hannah knows he is taking the jeep home. If not for his wife, Hannah knows he wants to take her home.

“ Let’s walk; I have something to tell you,” she said. Gil lived in a faculty housing apartment on campus.

Gil, never guilt-ridden and ever hungry for more of Hannah, did not object. He suggests that they cut across the Sunken Garden, a wide grassy expanse depressed by the Marikina Fault Line. It would be easier than taking the road skirting it. And does Hannah know that the Sunken widens an inch every year?

She lies that she has never heard about it. “I will tell you the things I know. Later.”


***


For example, Hannah knows and remembers why she has always failed dismally in anything that involved numbers posing as letters and letters posing as numbers.

She was taking sophomore high school algebra when the Incident happened. For a week, she refused to go to school and locked herself in her room; her father had to leave food outside her door. When Hannah finally was persuaded to go to school again and started working on the lessons she missed, she decided she hates algebra.

“In algebra classes,” she once wrote on her journal, “things unsaid or unknown must be solved for and revealed without any better reason than that they must be.”

She never told her father this. In fact, there were lots of things she never spoke about with her father after the Incident. She noticed changes: squares and rectangles in some parts of their house’s walls where framed pictures of her mother used to hang, the premature white of her father’s hair, her first menstruation. The reason for her silence (and her father’s) was not only that the answers to these questions are obvious, but also that the utterance of the answers would only remind them of their misery.

When her mother died, they did not go to the funeral. It was a bottle of Valium, according to a short police report in an obscure corner of the community tabloid. Hannah silently mourned for her mother, dead and safe from blame under the ground, and her father, now only a living ghost.

***

The Sunken is an empty grassy dinner plate. In its rim, there is the occasional pair who could not afford a decent restaurant, or a cheap motel.

Hannah watches the sun being eaten by a clump of trees, ignoring Gil’s questioning stares. They have not spoken since they left the waiting shed. She holds his hand instead and leads him toward the middle of the field.

Finally gifted with the needed cloak of anonymity by the evening, she proceeds with her plot. She halts, squats on the grass, and pats the ground beside her to gesture that Gil do the same.

When they are seated, Hannah feels Gil’s flabby right arm around her waist, his hand somewhere below her navel. “Now tell me all you want to say.” His words, as usual, soaked in guiltless, unafraid, self-taught innocence.

Hannah feels a rush of years-old excitement. “Can I drop by at your house to return a book I borrowed from Fely?” The words are carefully placed so that Gil’s wife’s name would be at the end of the question. For, Hannah intends, “maximum effect.” As she says this she is looking from afar. She makes a deafening pause, then she faces Gil to drown him in her eyes.

Gil, unprepared of course, is without a life vest. Hannah feels his palm sweating on her stomach. She secretly fights down a smile and says instead: “It’s an F. Sionil Jose she recommended last Sunday.”

By now, Gil is breathless, his limbs flailing helplessly in her ocean of designs. “You’ve—you have been talking to my wife.”

“Yes, I wanted to visit you at your apartment last week, but when I came around, you were out on a meeting and Fely invited me inside for coffee. I didn’t know you have a charming, intelligent wife, Gil.”

“What are you playing at?”

“What are you playing at?”

“What did you tell her. What did you tell her?” Gil’s face is now scarlet, his voice and body trembling.

“Nothing.” The truth, spoken in one suspicious word, Hannah thinks. “We talked about socialism, the exchange rates, Ruffa Guttierez—.”

“Fucking bbbbb.”

What a beautiful word, bbbbb. Hannah lets herself smile finally. Inside Gil’s ribcage, she knows, the arteries of a fist-sized muscle is very near to bursting.

“I understand you are having an attack right now. Let me then speak your mind: you should have left me alone. How was I not suppose to know about your little affair? You just can’t help but do it with me, just as years ago, you can’t help but do it with a married woman.”

Hannah smiles again, opens her bag, and shows Gil a worn copy of The Pretenders, the name ‘Fely Metrillo’ scrawled on the front cover in a neat handwriting. “But look here, I am not lying about your wife. She would not have lent me this if we talked much more than about Ruffa and Yilmaz.”

***


The incident took place the day she had her first lesson in high school algebra. Classes were dismissed early because of an alleged bomb threat and she went straight home because those were the days when the Abu Sayyaf MILF MNLF were powerful enough to command international media attention and demand that the action star Robin Padilla be sent to their lair as the government’s chief peace talks negotiator.

The noisy silence of the apartment greeted her like an unexpected visitor who had let himself in the house. If it was not for the constant humming of the air conditioner, she felt she could have gone deaf. A hint of strange perfume hung in the air. Musk. Her father, who does not return from his clerical work until just before dinner, hates musk.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of cold water. There was lunch on the dining table, pork lengua potatoes carrots in tomato sauce. She did not sit down to eat but picked up a fork laid on a place mat and helped herself to a piece of tongue. It was sour and sweet.

Then upstairs she heard her mother laugh. Not the laugh her mother usually laughs when Hannah’s father cracks a joke but a different, alien laugh Hannah has never heard before.

From where Hannah stood in the kitchen, she could see the doors to the bedrooms in the mezzanine floor of the apartment. One of them opened.

Out went a lean naked man with a shriveled penis. His stomach glistening with fresh semen. At the side of one of his muscular thighs, a long white scar. Years later, when Hannah would be about to have sex with this same man for the first time, she would beg a baffled, obese version of this guy to show her first his thighs. “Just to make sure,” she would say and never explain.

She could not remember how long she stood in the kitchen. The naked man did not see her, but she was able to notice that his confident gait betrayed the fact that he had been in the house before. He knew where the toilet is.

Thus it was that Hannah was not seen by the naked man, not yet. Quietly, she slipped out of the house and only came back hours later when she was sure her mother would have composed herself already and was awaiting her at the table for lunch.

During the same week, however, Hannah’s mother would announce to her family over dinner that she was leaving them. Her mother would tell the truth, everything: that she is having a relationship with a professor in a nearby state university, and that the truth hurts but must it not be said and accepted?

Hannah wanted to laugh at the telenovela-absurdity of it then, but only because she did not want to cry. She finished her dinner silently and slowly, ignoring the fact that her father was shouting at her mother and has just hurled a platter of white rice across the room.

Up to this day, Hannah believes she could no longer remember much of what else happened during that night. She only took note of two things mentioned in the din of her parents’ row. First: the naked man’s name is Gil Metrillo, a Political Science professor. Second: he has a heart ailment that could only go worse.

***


Gil looked at Hannah in a bewildered but loathing stare, his face contorted in pain. The affliction of the soul as manifested by that of the body, Hannah thinks while she wraps her fingers in her handkerchief.

She stoops down to Gil, gets his cellphone out from his shirt pocket, and dials his wife’s number. She does not bother to find out if someone will answer the other line. She smiles again at Gil.

Then she leaves him to the mercy of his wife and the half-shadows on the edges of the Sunken Garden. As soon as she gets home, she promises herself now, she will look for her old math books in her mother’s former room, now dusty and cluttered with unused items.

Next semester, she finally can enroll in a required college algebra class. ■