Fish-Hair Woman

Prologue

The howling bounces around the trees used for coffins. It climbs to a mournful pitch, slopes down and tapers to a whimper. Then it starts again, the same distressing ascent and decline. Sometimes it simply keels over.

I, Luke McIntyre, assure myself it’s not me but I feel the strain in my throat. I swallow, gripping the sheaf of papers. And anyway they can’t hear. They are the handful of passengers flying to Manila, the soft-spoken, soft-soled lot of them. It’s business class and the mood is affluent restraint, like a signature hush. I drum the seat in front of me with my sandals. Someone murmurs her annoyance. Quickly a steward appears to serve the nicest admonishment against the drumming or the fraying sandals, who knows. Bloody snoot!

The howling starts again. It dives into the river and I can’t breathe. The water fills my mouth, my throat, my lungs. It is sweet, it is very sweet.

Chapter 1

Lemon grass. When the river was sweet with it, they came for me. Half an hour after the Angelus, when the dark was wrestling with the light, they came in a haze of the first fireflies. Tinsel on the green uniforms of the three men, bordering a sleeve here, circling a belt there, filling buttonholes, dotting an insignia and smothering the mouth of the sergeant’s M-16. Young Ramon, he of the sullen face. So like a dark angel with his halo of darting lights, harbinger of omens from the river. ‘ Putang ina !’ he cursed, swatting the lights on his pouting lips. I knew it was going to be my final assignation and I heard keening in my scalp.

A river sweet with lemon grass and breathing fireflies — how could you believe such a tale? But in Iraya we had mastered the art of faith, if only to believe that our village was still alive during the purge by the military. So when they came for me, I believed their story, and every strand of my hair heard my heart break.

Hair. How was it linked with the heart? I’ll tell you — it had something to do with memory. Every time I remembered anything that unsettled my heart, my hair grew one handspan. Mamay Dulce was convinced of this phenomenon when I was six years old. ‘Very tricky hair, very tricky heart,’ she whispered to me in her singsong on mornings when I woke up to even longer hair on my pillow after a night of agitated dreams. ‘You had long dreams last night, Estrella, with long memories too.’

But were you alive when the soldiers came, I could have affirmed our secret tall tale with more clarity. You see, Mamay Dulce, history hurts my hair, did you know that? Remembering is always a bleeding out of memory, like pulling thread from a vein in the heart, a coagulation so fine, miles of it stretching upwards to the scalp then sprouting there into the longest strand of red hair. Some face-saving tale to explain my twelve metres of very thick black hair with its streaks of red and hide my history. I am a Filipina, tiny and dark as a coconut husk, but what red fires glint on my head!

In 1987, in my twenty-eighth year, the village told tales about my hair. How they trusted it as much as they trusted undying love, martyrdom and resurrection, even beatific visions. Ay, those fireflies are from the light of Damascus, so surely they’ll strike the soldiers, smother their mouths, eyes and guns into dumbness or blindness, even into mercy. A conversion to something close to love. But Sergeant Ramon only swatted the lights on his forever-pouting lips and ordered me to get my hair ready for the river.

‘Fish with your hair, woman!’

Always that command, which summed up my life. After the government declared Total War against the rebels, I understood why I was born a freak, why I was more hair than body. What incredible length and thickness and strength. Not my beauty, as one would boast of this crowning glory, but my scourge, which made me feel and look top heavy, as if anytime I would be dragged down by whirlpools of black with red lights and there get lost, never to be found again.

Where is she? Always the question that passed from mouth to mouth pursed between a knowing smile and worry or pain, like the way it contorts at the taste of fish soup with too much lemon in it. Where is she? Ay, washing her hair in the river, or drying it now, perhaps combing it, braiding it — but where is she? With her hair, where else, all of Iraya chuckled. Where is she? Eating with her hair, sleeping with her hair, taking her hair for a wander. But not cutting it. If anyone so much as whispered this disaster, the whole village would have been at my door, weeping for their river’s sake, for their lives’ sake. ‘Hair of Estrella, have mercy on us!’ The only time when they would remember my name.

Where is she? With her hair. Who is she? The Fish-Hair Woman.

How little we know or wish to know of the history of our myths, saints or gods. It is enough that we invent for them a present face and believe that they can save us from ourselves. But no, I will not allow you to invent me, you who read this, so I will tell you everything. Listen. If you need saving at all, understand that I had relinquished salvation after that last night in the water.

Lambat na itom

na itom pero sa dugo natumtom

samong babaying parasira

buhok pangsalbar-pangsira

kang samong mga padaba

Very black net

but blood soaked

our fisherwoman

hair to save-fish

all our beloved

‘… from the river, from the river,’ Sergeant Ramon mumbled the refrain of this local ditty to the first Australian in Iraya.

Three months before the night of lemon grass and fireflies, on another night when the rifles were silvered by the moon, I met Tony McIntyre. ‘Whitey-troublemaker-and-crazy-nosy-tourist-and-bullshitting-writer-hereto-look-for-stories-that’s-what-he-says,’ the sergeant babbled. He caught the Australian spying on me as I bathed in the river. Perhaps he thought he could vanish in a jungle of red berries and lilac blooms, his pink and white face blending with the tropical foliage, until he felt the nudge of steel on his nape — ‘Get up, you spying Amerkano!’

In the village the white man is a rara avis and always tagged as ‘American’. Counter-insurgency operations assisted by the United States have returned an old ghost: forty years of American rule. ‘Amerkano, Amerkano!’ the sergeant taunted the cowering stranger — but shouldn’t he have shaken the pale hand instead, if indeed this was an American weeding out communists?

Tony must have thought, thank God, I’m Australian, then broke into a run. He was lucky then. Sergeant Ramon never shot anyone with me around, not at that time, not yet. ‘Hello,’ I said, holding out my hand to the ashen-faced stranger; and the soldier never forgave him. Because he had stared at my wet body, because I had taken his hand, because I had taken him home. So three months later, the boy-faced soldier came for me. We had to walk to the river, and I had to remember. I knew this in my heart, looking at him waving his M-16 before my hut.

‘You’re eating fireflies, Ramon.’

‘Shut up, woman, and get down here!’

His two men waited outside, as he charged up my steps in a cloud of lights. ‘Pests, pests! The white man brought this with him, pestilence!’

My scalp ached. Piled on my head, the braids began to grow. A chain of handspans, too much remembering. Enough, enough, I wanted to scream.

His jealous pout was luminescent. ‘The river is not fit for drinking, again — lemon grass taste, bah! And the light from these flies, putang ina! They’ve scared all the fishes away — all because you fucked him!’

Tony McIntyre, my lover who had come all the way from the base of the earth to gather our grief into print, so he could purge his own. My beloved Australian with the solemn green eyes, flecked with brown, and the perfect curve of brow. He quoted Rilke as he watched me unbraid my hair. He kissed it, kissed me, his voice as if from a dream. ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror …’ And the strands snagged his hands, his limbs, ay, how tightly, I felt him tremble so.

Chapter 2

Over Rilke the red pen is poised like a dissecting knife: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror . Luke McIntyre queries the line from his father’s favourite poet: Really? He wants to write more but the river is filling him — or is it the howling? More fluid than ever, it’s exploding his throat. Is this how to drown in sound?

‘You ’right?’ the flight steward asks.

‘Water,’ Luke says, ‘Water’ — and the steward brings him a glass, which he pushes away, it spills, and his late ‘Fuck off!’ comes out strangled, unintelligible.

‘It’s only an air pocket. Here, paper bag — breathe, you’ll be fine.’

The efficient solicitousness grates on the boy’s nerves. Plus the condescension, he reckons, shutting his eyes tight. The howling tapers off, his ears hum, his throat relaxes. Finally he’s able to out his belligerence — ‘I am fucking fine’ — but the steward has long been gone. Luke feels the wetness on his lap. He shuffles the pile of papers again, turning to the page about Tony in the river, the red pen clenched in his hand. He scrawls over the page, defiles it: I am not like my father. He looks around guiltily, is anyone looking? Only the couple across the aisle with that outrageous ‘lip service’. Watch it, another kiss blown towards him — Jee-sus, you’re old enough to be my mother! He endures, he almost blushes.

He goes through it again, how two nights ago faint breathing answered the phone, then a woman of pauses. Why he bothered to ring Manila makes him cringe. He should have kept this trip under wraps. The business class ticket, the detailed directions, and the address and phone numbers on a postcard with a smiling girl under the coconuts should have been enough currency with which to fly in and out of there. The card casually said, Hello, Luke. Will be great to see you, my boy. We’ll have a wonderful time, I promise — xxx Dad. A fucking arm-around-the-shoulders tone, as if he saw him only last week.

The breathing went on for a while as he brusquely said his hellos and demanded to speak to Tony McIntyre. It was a breathing with attitude, he could not understand what, but he was certain it was there. He knew it was someone young. He knew the phone was held clumsily then passed on — he just knew that too — to someone else. The woman of pauses.

‘Tony, you say? (pause) You wish (pause) to speak (pause) to your father.’

Long pause. A vacuum filled by his apprehension and ineptness, until he gave it meaning, a gesture — was it a kind of sigh?

He was moved to be gentle. ‘Yes, please.’

‘He is away,’ and the line went dead.

Chapter 3

Tony wept the first time he saw me take my hair to the river. The soldiers were restless while the whole village waited, each one praying, please, let it not be him, not my husband’s body, or, Santa Maria , I’d rather it’s my son this time, relieve this endless wait, time to come home now, or, Madre de Dios , let her be found at least still whole, ay, my most foolish youngest. All hearts were marking time on the riverbank. Quickly I took to my task. Hair undone like a net, I descended into the water to trawl another victim of our senseless war.

Desaparecidos. Our disappeared, ay, so many of them. And the lovers left behind became obsessed with doors — one day my son, daughter, husband, wife will be framed at the doorway. Behind my beloved will be so much light.

They will come back — or will they? They did through the water’s door, from the darkness into the light. I served this homecoming, fished out their bodies from the navel of the water, while the soldiers looked the other way. They did not understand why a body never surfaced until I rescued it. Did it hope to vanish forever? ‘No, the dead only wants to become part of the water for a while,’ Pay Inyo said. Perhaps the gravedigger was right, for each time a body was dumped into the water, the river always changed flavour, no longer sweetened by the hills but tasting almost like brine, raw and sharp with minerals. Like fresh blood, something that remained in the tongue. ‘Ay, the dead must curse memory,’ the old man said, ‘so we can never forget those whom we loved.’

‘You’re crazy, your village is crazy, this is mad, a nightmare, why, how could you … this is not happening, I don’t understand, I don’t know anymore… ’ A week after he arrived, Tony wished he had not come to the river. He wept on my wet, salty hair that had wrapped the naked body of a female guerrilla. Perhaps barely sixteen and with hardly any face left, she could have been anyone’s daughter. Dark blotches, the size of a fist, covered her pelvis and breasts that had lost their nipples. I refused to think of what happened to her alive, if only to still my heart in this retrieval, but can anyone miss the stories of the body? Later in my hut Tony ranted his shock, lost under my hair. He could not see it growing and how I was remembering for the dead the contours of her lost face. He was inconsolable.

I had to take him to my hut, because Pay Inyo said he would not have a man go mad in his house. ‘It’s bad luck, there’s enough bad luck as it is, besides you’re the one with some education, I only have crooked English, you know,’ the old gravedigger said. The village watched, and when I took his hand, they whispered among themselves. ‘The white man will stay with her? Why’s he here anyway? To watch our war, to watch her fish our dead, to sleep with her?’ They accused me with their eyes: you like the white man, you’ll take him home, take him to your bed. Sergeant Ramon watched too, his eyes darkening as I tried to lead Tony away from the bank, where an eighty-year-old grandmother dumbly caressed the corpse’s feet as if she were trying to remember something. But Tony did not budge, rooted to his shock, and the old woman noticed him for the first time. Slightly she lifted the feet, like caught fishes, towards him, and he doubled over, retching.

‘Sissy Australian — bakla!’ Ramon spat at Tony’s back.

Ay, my back most loved. The night before he disappeared, Tony marvelled at how thin I was. ‘How sharp this vertebra, how so exposed and sad,’ he said, counting the ladder to my nape, kissing each bone, christening every hillock with the name of a gem. ‘Sapphire, lapis lazuli, jade, ruby … ’ Often I remembered his lips and the trail of precious stones on my back and always my hair hurt.

‘But let’s trade these gems for something more useful than kisses, Tony. Perhaps loaves of bread, white or brown like those in your country where it’s easy to choose because there are choices. My village owns my hair, so why can’t they have my bones as well?’

‘Time to go, Estrella, time to go … ’ Tony hushed my bitter query.

After I trawled a boy’s body, which nobody claimed, the cracks began to show. Ay, so many bodies before him, for nearly a year. Nightly I felt the seams of my scalp, it hurt, and hurt even more after the boy. I kept seeing the small head thrown too far back, flopping behind him. Around his throat was a necklace of weeds and the fattest prawns.

Along the river a crowd queried the little corpse, crossing and re-crossing themselves. ‘Thank God, it’s not ours, but whose is it? We don’t know. It must be from the next village. But it can’t be one of the rebels, too tiny, too young — ’

‘It is not it!’ I screamed, and hid my face lest the village remembered that there could be no drought for the eyes.

You who read this, may you never need to pretend that you have forgotten. May you never know the kinship between fishing for the dead and killing. The first time, you break, so you practise the art of forgetting. You teach your gut to keep whole. I am seamless, you tell yourself. You breathe in deeply then let go and thank heaven it’s not you in the water. This is an artful exercise, this conversation between the lungs and gratitude.

Chapter 4

The art of forgetting. Luke underlines it, a riposte in his head: you mastered it, Tony. Of course, thirteen years is plenty of practice.

The plane lurches, so does his stomach.

From across the aisle, the woman blows him a kiss again. Luke catches the gesture before he doubles over. The papers nearly spill from his lap.

The woman nudges the man beside her, and her lips pucker and veer to the side. He nods and looks towards the boy, then makes a move to rise, but she detains him with a practised hand: slim wrist, dress watch, and nails that have seen years of tender manipulation. She sighs, as if the boy has suddenly made her tired. Perhaps it’s his thick glasses that seem forever askew or the hunched shoulders tight around the blades. She thrusts her lips at the boy again; this time, she nearly catches his eye.

My God, she’s trying to pick me up? Luke turns away in distaste. She’s been blowing him kisses since Sydney airport and her man always nods as if in approbation. He rearranges the pile of papers for the nth time. From a page, Beloved stares at him in bold print. How apt, he sniggers in his head, glancing at the keen couple.

She rubs his arm now, smoothing the golden hair; he nuzzles her. She’s patrician, elegant; he’s much younger and handsomely morose. The crumpled shirt and jeans make him look roguish, a foil to her perfect grooming. He pushes back the armrest, they snuggle closer. From the crook of her pearled neck, he surveys the boy with unabashed interest.

Ménage à trois? Luke chuckles. Should he wink at him, blow her back a kiss? He must be okay now. Ah, nothing like sleaze to fish him out.

The plane hurdles another air pocket. His toes curl, his breathing goes awry again, but this high it’s impossible to drown. He steadies the page in his hand, turns it over and writes.

22 September 1997

Dad went on holiday: 1984

Dad extended holiday: 1985

Dad disappeared: 1987

Dad resurrected: 1997

Hallelujah-ha-ha-ha!

Chapter 5

Long before Tony arrived in Iraya, I suspected that the sergeant had secretly desired me, maybe even worshipped me in some grudging way for my nerves of stone. He could never look at what surfaced with me. He only stared at my body wrapped in the wet tapis , then at my face, perhaps hoping to find a sign of breaking. He never saw me weep over the corpses that I trawled, even when the whole riverbank howled. ‘Because she keeps her heart out of the water and she has secret powers inside,’ Pay Inyo explained, thumping his chest. ‘In war, we need secret powers, truly-truly.’

No one knew that my hair stole all the grief from my face. How could anyone see the ache in my scalp, the trick of memory, the betrayal of nerves at the roots of my hair? It’s not my ancestry, not my father’s Spanish blood, but the flush from the heart that had cursed the red into my hair.

My hair, the anchor for the remnants of a village. The disappeared could be retrieved for a decent burial and perhaps the river would be restored to its old taste, sweetened again by the hills. Then we could drink it again, we could fish there again, we could gather the river fern and taro leaves again. We could have our river back. Always the village cried, ay, Estrella, have mercy on us!

Tony cringed before the fish steamed in lemon grass after I rescued the girl without a face. ‘How could you eat this — my god!’ His limbs went cold and locked around him, his sweat soaked my mat. He was incoherent for weeks. Deranged by his strange ailment, he screamed about the lemon grass fish growing fat and swimming inside the belly of the dead girl. I wrapped him with my hair each night to keep him warm, then fell in love.

Another river swells on desperate nights like this, flowing in the pelvis. Strange how, when close to death, we grow more intimate with desire. One tries to hide it, but the river overflows. Each night when I hushed his cries, my tapis betrayed me, reweaving its flowers into fishes, which grew as luminous as the moon on the river then swam to my breasts, biting behind the nipples. His blue fingers reached for them, coaxing the fishes to leap out. Underneath my hair, he loved me over and over again, until the chill ebbed from his flesh because I had shared it with mine — ay, dear reader, my scalp hurts again. I can hear the strands pushing out. This is the hum of memory, my beloved mumbling about winter love in the tropics, his breath tinged with lemon grass.

‘I’ll take you away from this,’ he promised. ‘I’ll take you back with me, back to the light. And we will cut that hair.’

Back to clean, sunny beaches where breakfasts stretch till midday, where life is revived by cups of coffee, where the water never changes flavour, where it’s blessed by a sky so blue, one can believe in heaven. So you told me, Tony. Ay, strange, lucky Oz-traay-yuh, savoured in one lazy roll of the tongue — but not home, never home. Still, he made ready to leave, to arrange something for me, for us, at his embassy. The sharpest pair of scissors to cut me off from my river.

As he was about to go, I unbraided my hair, which he could not bear to see loose after we buried the boy with the necklace of prawns. I spread it around my hut, hoping he would understand. ‘You know, Tony, all of this is destiny,’ but he never heard me. I saw lights in his eyes. He seemed happy, perhaps inspired at the thought of taking his lover home with her cropped mane.

‘Time to go,’ he had said on the night I found the little corpse. He had rocked me to sleep then, wondering why there were no tears though my voice cracked with sorrow. Later he noticed the strands of white at my nape. Again he invoked Rilke, as if reading the poet in my hair: ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror … and we have no need of this, Estrella.’

The day before the soldiers came for me, the gravedigger brought the news. ‘Lemon grass and fireflies, Estrella, you better believe it. Strange but how beautiful, perhaps a sudden miracle, ay, our chance for salvation, perhaps shards of the light of Damascus, sent to pierce the hearts of the soldiers, truly-truly… ’ Hunched at the foot of my steps, Pay Inyo insisted that it wasn’t brine anymore. ‘Ay, we know there’s a body when the water tastes of brine, but it’s lemon grass this time — ay, what is this beautiful curse — who is this body?’

How could I answer? How could I return to the water now?

The old man begged, ‘Ay, Estrella, have mercy on us! Relieve the water, make it taste like our river again, only as sweet as the hills.’

The following day the sergeant arrived with his men to force the retrieval, but not for the sake of the water. He wanted the village to witness the fate of communists. He wanted to witness how my hair would fish out this new body.

‘Get down here, woman!’ He waved his rifle at the flying lights. The uniforms were a lit apparition, a terrible beauty.

My scalp ached. I wanted to pull out every strand that heard my heart break. ‘I can’t do it, I can’t go there, not anymore — ’

‘Putang ina, you’re getting soft, big hair!’ Sergeant Ramon yanked at my braids. The black and red rope coiled at my feet. Then he laughed softly, Adam’s apple rippling. ‘Easy to break, your Oz-traay-yuhn — your pale sissy did not even know how to fight like a man.’

A stone sank in my womb. ‘You cur!’ I pushed him away, lashed out with my braids. Welts bloomed on his face and arms. Quickly his men barged in, bringing more fireflies, and the sergeant grabbed my arms, pinned me down, breathing into my ear, ‘You’ll leave him in the water then?’

The rifles glowed and clicked. I let my hair fall.

Slowly he unbraided it, taking great pleasure in smoothing the strands into a net. His men watched in absurd respect. More fireflies entered the hut, lighting my acquiescence.

We went, a grim procession to the river, guarded by flying lights and the soldiers who held my hair like a bridal train. Again I remembered his lips and the precious stones on my back and the river in my pelvis and his lemon grass fish swimming from the belly of a dead girl now growing her face and nipples back and her grandmother rubbing her feet as if trying to remember something and the soft mound of earth singing the ten-year-old bones to sleep.

Thus the betrayal of memory, while the soldiers wondered how my hair grew so quickly in their hands. They were in on the secret now, they heard it from my scalp. Once I dive into the water sweet with lemon grass, I can never leave my heart on the bank again.

Chapter 6

Years later the dead is resurrected. He kicks his tomb door open and says, ‘I’m risen, boy, so pay attention. I have much to say, I am replete with goodwill and felicitations, I am reborn. Here’s an airline ticket and love letters. Open your arms and receive me!’

Luke giggles. The scene has been unfolding like a cartoon in his head, with the mummy wrapped in paisley design, like the shirts Tony left behind in 1984. They smelled of his cigarettes, or did he just imagine that when he’d try them on? The closet was full of them, until the bathtub incident a year later, until his grandparents thought perhaps paisley was too cool for a seven-year-old. Until he started howling. So Saint Vinney’s was suddenly overcome by generosity: paisley with too much heart.

Dearest Luke,

My heart breaks when I think of each one of those long years when I’ve been away from my only son. I count them in my hands and find I don’t even have enough fingers to mark each year. Too long, too long indeed. Forgive me, Luke, I have wronged you. I beg you to let me make it up to you now before it’s too late. I am not well. Life has overtaken me and I know I deserve it.

I have taken to bed. In this merciless heat, the days are too long. Too much time to think, to remember and break one’s heart. It is not death I fear, my boy, but the fact that I might never ever see you again.

What does he think of me, a fuckwit? So the man’s gone sentimental, saccharine, and superlative to boot.

Remember, I used to tell you that wherever you are, your guardian angel is Dad with wings. I have never stopped guarding you in my heart. But my wings are tired.

Jee-sus, what a redundant ham! Heart, heart, heart all over the place — after thirteen years? And I’m supposed to fucking remember?

Luke has read this letter too many times since he got it two weeks ago, along with chatty postcards also forwarded