Maximum Volume

The Auroras by Sasha Martinez-2

But, oh—he was so angry when he caught her hours later. She had wandered into the quarters upstairs, deposited herself on the forlorn mattress on the floor. The canopy had disappeared, but the posts had fallen against each other, the fabula of a tent. She had been waiting for the sun to emerge from the torn line of roof above her.

It was quiet; she could believe, then, in the peacetime.

The breeze carried the sea, and it stung her cheeks.

And then the Colonel came. He extended a hand toward her, he said, You are not supposed to be here. She looked at him for a long time before she slipped her hand in his. Her palms were rough, but so were his. Are you trying to kill yourself, child?

She was shaking her head as she rose from the mattress.

She looked up at him, saw that the twist of anger, of panic, she had glimpsed in his face had gone; the Colonel of the stolen magazines had returned. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the bay too-clearly revealed. At the wreckage around them, at the floor of the ballroom he should not have been seeing from this high up.

Aurora slowly slid her hand from his grasp, and he let it go. She wanted to say, Does it not look like God’s hand once emerged from the clouds and merely swept away the walls of our hotel? She wanted to say, too, that she was sorry.

Her hair had been bound so tightly, the skin around her ears ached for days.

Eight years later, Aurora sighs at the remembrance of that pain.

* * *

Jakob returns as her supper is brought into the room. My head aches, she tells him. I cannot dine downstairs. The long trip exhausted me, I only feel it now. She is not lying.

Her husband takes her hand and tells her, Armi is beside herself. The President has asked to see her. Aurora smiles and says, She’s charming enough to turn them on their heads. Jakob’s brow furrows and she says, Armi will be fine. Jakob says, We’re going to a palace tomorrow—the man lives in a palace! At this, Jakob bows his head, murmurs, I can’t take you, I’m sorry. Aurora understands, of course. She is not supposed to be here, after all. She is Jakob’s wife, Jakob merely the brother-invited.

May I have dinner with you? her husband asks.

* * *

She has that comb, still. It is an efficient thing, light, un-gaudy. Jakob likes telling her how beautiful it looks nestled in her hair—the pale of the green jade peeking out of her dark, dark crown. He tries, her husband. That’s very pretty, he tells her whenever she uses the comb. Again and again, Very pretty, sweeting. Sometimes, he runs his knuckles against her bared nape as he says it.

She used to wonder how this trinket—it fit the palm of her hand—could gather thick hair, this long hair, hair she is still too vain to have styled in the new way. Sometimes, she can forget that the comb is still in there, in that mass somewhere—until she lies down to sleep and she unravels and her hair unfurls, and she wakes up the next morning to the comb mute against the pillows.

* * *

Armi swept in this morning, and she pressed her palm against Aurora’s forehead. I do not know you to be so fragile, my dear. Aurora said, Do say hello to the President for me. Armi said, Oh yes, look at me, meeting presidents. Armi sighs, then, Books, dear, really?

Aurora almost says that Armi has just echoed her mother. Books again, darling girl too smart for her own good? she would say, maybe as she was removing her earrings, paste they were. And then, Tama na muna ’yan, anak. Kumain na tayo.

It’s your fault, mother, Aurora would always reply as she uncurled herself to do her mother’s bidding, and it was true—her mother took home the books the guests had left, dazed by her song. Her mother liked to tell her, That’s the only reason I have this job, you know. I lull the men into leaving their books behind. And, yes—Aurora loved sitting by the curtains, just behind the band. Her mother, impossibly tall, her back swaying. The men with their hats on the tables, right beside their drinks—and, sometimes, a book. Huwag mo ’kong biguin, her mother crooned. Huwag kang bumitaw.

Aurora has asked for cigarettes from the concierge. It takes a while for the drag to go down smooth, and for the first half hour of her solitude she sat on the bed with her head between her knees. She could still write the Colonel, she thought all the while: You should see me now, Manuel. A woman of the world.

* * *

Ten thousand of them, Manuel told her. All over this room. A wall, and then another. The place was overrun. I don’t know how the General ever moved. It was madness.

There—he would point to a grayed spot, the plaster having fallen off—that one, it said, Once upon time, the last bear in Luzon hid in a cave just at the edge of Intramuros. Every night, the indios would offer it food, leaving a basket at the mouth of the cave—a spare chicken, or the best catch from the river. Some child would always leave berries, but these would be found untouched the next day. Every night, the Spaniards threw their parties and they drank their chocolate and prayed their rosaries, and every night, the last bear of Luzon would rage. He paced the ground, he scratched at the weeds.

Aurora waited for him to go on. The Colonel said, That’s all I read.

A handful of sentences, among ten thousand books?

Oh, look at you, the Colonel said.

* * *

The gardener, Manuel told her, had been so in love with the Don’s wife that he named a flower after her. The grounds became overrun. I bring you the Doña Aurora, the men would tell their wives in the evenings, holding fistfuls of the too-fragrant, stark white bloom as they crossed the thresholds to their homes.

* * *

Once, Manuel told her, I went with the Don to inspect a slaughterhouse. Half a pig hung from a hook on the ceiling. Aurora told him, You will give me nightmares, Colonel. And the Colonel only laughed. He did not meet her eyes.

You were always so unsmiling in the photographs, Aurora told him. This forbidding, tall mestizo hovering over Don Manuel. (She could never tell the Colonel that she, younger still then, had thought him so handsome.) We always wondered where you’d come from. Or, at the very least, what it was that you did.

In answer, the Colonel says: I was not allowed here before, not even when I was with Don Manuel. They barely tolerated him, the great leader of the Commonwealth. The Colonel laughs. I was not American, you see. But from outside the hall, waiting for the Don to come back out, the Colonel said, I could hear your mother singing.

* * *

Aurora has borrowed a cream dress from Armi for tea in the hotel’s best drawing room. Women of the esteemed Manila are in the room with them, and Aurora listened to the parade of names. The lady beside her was craning her neck to look at Armi. Aurora leaned against her sister-in-law and murmured, You realize half the room wants to shove me aside to get this seat? Armi says, her voice not lowered, You are made of sterner stuff, dearest. You will not throw me to the wolves.

Aurora looks around the room, reciting names in her head: Mrs. Coron, Mrs. de Lucia, Mrs. Wainwright, Mrs. Pedrosa. The Misses Torres, the Widow Navarra. At the far end of the room, by the window that opened to a view of the gardens, stands the girl—the girl with the brow wide and clear. Aurora wants to ask if she and her young man have reconciled, she wants to caution her about smoking by the poolside where any of the self-important (and, she allows, the truly important) guests could see her. Aurora can see the girl’s awe over Armi. Today, Armi is in pink. The girl is staring, too intently and too uncaringly so to be polite, but no one notices. Mrs. Harrison has launched into a treatise on the merits of aloe vera for one’s sunburnt skin.

Aurora tries to meet the girl’s eyes.

She will write to the Colonel: I never told you this, Manuel, but I had seen you once before—before you stood in the middle of that wrecked lobby and waited for us to come to you. I was young, that first time, very young—so young, I could hide behind my mother, and no one paid me heed. You must remember her face, you must remember how tall she was. President Quezon passed us—in the lobby of this very hotel—and on his arm was his wife, the woman flowers were named for. And there you were, in your uniform, your Hessians—your dark hair slick against your skull. How stern you were, Manuel. How you surveyed the crowd that had gathered around the Don and the Doña, how imperious you were. You met my eyes, my dear Colonel, you looked at me—how could you have seen me?—and you did not look away.

The room around Aurora has frozen, she realizes. The old man she saw on her first day back—the man she’d looked away from—is standing in the middle of the drawing room, just between Miss Lastimosa of the Tacloban Lastimosas and Mrs. Conde. His hair is a halo of gray. He is wearing a white suit. His feet on the carpet are bare. He smells like lilacs, Aurora notes, and the lines on his face run deep.

The man raises a finger toward her. I know you, he says.

Beside her, Armi giggles. How do you do? she says.

Burly men in the hotel colors come in, having been summoned by an unseen hand. Aurora recognizes the bellhop that helped Armi alight the car—and, yes, his gaze lingers over the hem of her sister-in-law’s pink dress.

Mr. Hudson, the men say, you have to leave now, we’re sorry.

The lady sitting on the other side of Aurora—Mrs. Orosa, she remembers—is saying, Father of a war hero, that Mr. Hudson. They could never make him leave, and now see where that misguided hospitality has gotten us.

Mr. Hudson is led away. He tells Armi, in inflected Tagalog, that it was very nice to meet her, that she looks very fetching in pink. He looks at Aurora, and Aurora hears, Huwag mo ’kong biguin, the man is singing. Huwag kang bumitaw.

The room, almost as one, shakes its head.

Armi insists on a translation. And then, addressing the room at large, she presses a hand against her bosom, and says, I do believe I’ve been courted, yes? The women laugh. Your charmers, Armi says. This country is overrun by charmers!

Aurora does not know Mr. Hudson. Her hand buries itself in her skirt—she will have to apologize to Armi for the creases. Aurora does not know Mr. Hudson, not with his gray hair, not with his white suit, not with his lined face. She closes her eyes, thinks of his bare feet. She thinks of them in shoes. Aurora begins to giggle—several beats too late, she knows, from the chorus of the ladies around her. She must stop, she knows—there, they will start pointing at Miss Armi’s hipag.

Armi, her most-beautiful-woman-in-the-universe Armi, presses a sweat-slicked hand on her bared arm, leans toward her, and says, Oh, sweeting, I am sorry.

* * *

Aurora never asked her mother where the comb had come from. Her mother gave it to her at the height of the summer of 1945, saying, Please take care of yourself, my too-smart girl. And her mother stroked Aurora’s cheek. And then her mother left.

A handful of months after that, mere weeks after the Japanese had surrendered, Manuel Nieto had caught her in the General’s quarters, tracing the sun’s progress in the sky. Her hair had been bound so tightly, the skin around her ears ached for days. She wanted to point this out to him, wanted to say, Look at me trying. The comb had been buried in her bound tresses, and she wanted to point this out too: Look, my mother gave me this. Colonel, this trinket in my hair was her parting gift.

But the Colonel was looking out toward the bay, and it was a long time before he looked at Aurora again. He asked her, though, his eyes trained to a point too far away—that gaze so inward, so apparent in its lack of involvement in her, she realized, it was a trespass to witness it—he asked her, What is it you do here?

Nothing formal, Colonel, she said. She told the truth. I help around.

And then, Please don’t ask me to leave, Colonel.

The Colonel said, They knock on my door and tell me to put this place to rights. Or at least keep an eye on it. The Colonel, at last, looked at her. Do you know who I am?

Yes, I do.

A good man lived here once.

Yes, Colonel, I know.

Did you know, then, about the ten thousand? The Colonel didn’t wait for her to answer. Ten thousand of them, he said. All over this room. A wall, and then another. The place was overrun. I don’t know how the General ever moved. It was madness.

I don’t know, Aurora began, how the General could have ever left this room.

He looked at her, he said, I don’t know where they are now.

He looked at the jagged tear on the floor—God’s hand, she’d thought, claiming and tearing asunder.

You really shouldn’t be here, young lady, Manuel Nieto says.

Do not return here, please, the Colonel says, unless I am with you.

* * *

Eight years ago, the Colonel gave her a letter. Written by a man named Manuel, to a woman named Aurora. Patawarin mo ako sa lahat ng aking naging kamalian sa iyo. Ang pag-ibig ko sa iyo ay hindi nagbago kailanman. Ang puso at buhay ko’y iyo lamang. Walang asawa na makakatulad ka sa bait at sa lahat ng bagay. Ang buong kaligayahan ay tinanggap ko sa iyo. Sa oras na ito ay paniwalaan mo ang sinasabi ko at manggagaling sa kaibuturan ng aking kaluluwa. My darling sweetheart, the letter began.

I don’t know what to do with it, the Colonel said. I’m not supposed to have it.

And he left her standing behind the counter, the letter trembling in her hands.

Aurora’s hair was once again unfurled down her back.

* * *

Armi and Jakob had gone to Baguio, with the rest of the party. More politicians, Jakob told her last night, wanted to meet his sister up north. In the mountains, he said, if you’ve ever heard a more ridiculous thing.

Baguio, Aurora told him, slowly releasing the word. You and Armi are going to Baguio.

Jakob came in late last night. He apologized. He reeked of smoke. She did not mind, not really. She listened as he bathed, her hand running over the bedspread again and again. He returned to the bedroom, a towel too low on his hips, and he said, I keep taking baths, sweeting. I don’t know how you stand it.

And then, Give me a while, will you, Mrs. Kuusela?

She turned on the bed. But she already glimpsed the sheen of his skin—pale made ghostly. She was dismayed to note, by the white curtains filtering the too-bright night outside. He is carelessly soft, her Jakob. No reason to be taut around the middle where she let her hands linger whenever he embraced her, his hipbones have all but disappeared against that first give of flesh, his buttocks and thighs were on a descent into slackness. She was embarrassed for her husband, Aurora realized. She burrowed her head against the pillow and inhaled the fragrance of spring blooms.

The weight of Jakob, a near-negligible dip in the bed: No need to keep the light on? The lamp clicked off, the room remained lit by the moon low over the bay.

And now, Jakob has gone. In her hands, now, is a short note, delivered express at the expense of the hotel—the woman at the concierge’s desk is keen on telling her this. Jakob has written that a Congressman, this rising star, stood up during breakfast and told Armi, All of them are married; you’ll have me instead. All the married men, including the President (him again!), laughed. Armi did, too, Jakob says, but he is not worried about the young politician. He is not worried at all.

When Armi returns, Aurora thinks, I will tell her: Armi, you are so young, and so very beautiful. Too very beautiful for your own good. Your face has laid claim to the universe. Who will you love, Armi? Who may take your hand?

The woman asks: Is there anything else I can help you with, Mrs. Kuusela?

Aurora wants to ask her if she knows the girl who fought with her beau, she wants to ask if the young couple has made up. Aurora wants to ask the woman how old she is, and if she could guess how old Aurora was. Aurora wants to ask, Do you think I belong here? Do you think I’ve come home—because I don’t, I really don’t. Did you know—Tessa, the curlicues on the woman’s nametag reads—did you know, Tessa, how the Americans put their feet up on our old furniture, how their boots sent mud flying, how their cigars grayed our walls? Did you know about my mother, Tessa, how all the men and women poured into the room whenever she sang, and how she loved those dresses that made the matrons blush?

Did you know, Tessa, that in this very room, this cavernous room, I once met this tall man, this handsome man straight out of the glossies—this man with his polished Hessians and his hair so precise, and his big, warm hands, those rough palms, his story about the bear? Can you tell me about him, Tessa?

But Aurora thanks Tessa, asks that a pitcher of iced tea be sent up to her room.

Have a good day, Mrs. Kuusela.