Leaving Auckland (part one)

Maya was fast asleep in her loft when Paolo rose from his airbed, his thin travel blanket falling away from his knees. The wind had pulled him from the depths of sleep—it was the kind of wind that sounded like a wailing child if it made its way into his dreams. Now that the brief warmth of summer had given way to the chill of autumn, this howl had become an insidious coming and going in his ears, reminding him that he wasn’t used to this sound, that he was faraway from home.

Although Maya’s twin bed could fit them both, Maya struggled to sleep beside him, and they ended up buying an airbed for him early on in their relationship. Before going to sleep they’d lie parallel to each other in separate beds, him asking her about the dreams she had, she asking him if he was warm enough. Secure in his love, she fell asleep before he did, leaving him to ponder over the love he offered her. It was when she was asleep that his loneliness crept in, driving a wedge between them in the dark. In the morning, after every second night he spent with her, he’d fly back to Auckland, leaving her alone in the solitude of her apartment in Wellington with the promise of his return.

He rose from bed and put a finger between the Venetian blinds, peering into the darkness at a city that slept. The Victorian houses that rose from the flanks of Mount Victoria glowed in the night, asserting their Englishness in the middle of the South Pacific. New Zealand was a blank slate to the builders of this city, a land one could fashion whichever way one wanted, and to Paolo these houses spoke of an earlier time from which he and Maya were far removed. After he and Maya had made love in her loft for the first time, he descended her stairs, looking out of her window and into the deepening summer night before exclaiming, “This is paradise.” From her loft, Maya laughed—she was a writer, unimpressed by clichés. She was used to this view and its foreignness, in the same way that she had become used to other views in other foreign cities faraway from the land of their birth. He hadn’t left his adopted land to visit her, and yet these quaint Victorian homes, so different from his parents’ squat one-storey bungalow in Auckland, taunted him with their permanence, with the stories they possessed but didn’t tell. Tonight he felt as though he floated above these pitched rooftops, sailing above the wind that crashed into windows and howled through cracks that had been left unrepaired. As much as he tried to feel the ground beneath him as he walked these city streets, he felt as though he were invisible even to this town’s ghosts.

In Maya’s case, she had chosen to live on the fourth floor of a modern apartment complex, buying herself a nice view of these hills and the houses that lay claim to the city’s history. A view was all she needed, for she didn’t intend to settle here for good. Paolo wondered how a person could ever feel at home in a place that one had no desire to claim as one’s home, but this was what allowed Maya to live in a city where he felt adrift. He looked up at Maya, asleep in her loft, the grills of its banister fashioned like a net that cradled her from harm. She had lived alone, in too many foreign places, for so long. She was used to this solitude, more than he was.

*

She’s the daughter of my former boss in the Philippines, his mother told him, after asking him to clean out his room for another guest. They were always from the Philippines, and he always knew what to expect. They all showed up at his mother’s doorstep, lost and bewildered in the new country, and his mother took on the task of helping them gain their bearings, making sure that they knew the right word for a fancy kitchen implement or a part of the house just so that they remembered who they were to listen to if they wanted to survive in this new land. She had been as clueless as they were when she had first arrived, but now she was in charge, and she wouldn’t let any of these transients forget this. Paolo wasn’t sure what grated upon him more, the authority his mother assumed when speaking to these new arrivals, or the deferential attitude her guests took on when dealing with her. Despite being teased for their ignorance, they all called her Auntie. His guess was that they couldn’t help it—many of them had arrived in New Zealand alone, and were seeking a surrogate mother to chastise them as they found themselves unmoored for the first time in their lives.

He had been away from the Philippines for so long that he had become a foreigner to the ways of these guests, and he found himself unable to appreciate their servility when confronted with his mother’s demands—to help rake up the leaves in their backyard, to wrap Christmas presents, to scrub their pots and pans. One guest had scrubbed the Teflon coating off a brand new set of cookware, mistaking it for dirt. She found their ignorance entertaining, in the same way that she found their predilection for praying before meals and singing karaoke afterwards comforting. None of these characters defied her expectations, which was why she allowed them to sleep at their house. Their actions were too familiar and predictable to disrupt what was a pre-arranged relationship. They were Filipino, they were newcomers, and they all needed her help.

You don’t mind letting her stay in your room, do you? She’s a young woman who’s coming all the way from Wellington and we can’t allow her to just sleep on the living room couch. It was impossible to say no to his mother, for she would’ve already formulated the answer for him long before she made the request. She treated these young women like her daughters, and they slipped into the same role she tailored for all of them. In her household, at the very least, they played the part, covering their bosoms with their hands whenever they had to suffer the inconvenience of leaning forward in front of Paolo or his older brother, Brandon, or nodding their heads in agreement when his mother bemoaned the fact that Kiwis never went to church. They were all dalagas who guarded their virtue in the same way that his mother held fast to her expectations of every woman who walked through their door.

“You’ll take her to your salsa class too, will you? Her parents are in the States this year and she can’t afford to see them, the poor thing.”

His mother was at it again, believing that a night of salsa dancing would make him seriously consider his mother’s candidates for future daughter-in-law. The last female guest whom he had brought to a salsa party, upon his mother’s request, had fixed a frightened stare on his shoulder as he rested his hand on her waist and urged her to relax. He was puzzled when he started receiving texts from her the week after she returned to her university dorm, asking if he was free, and whether she could visit him at the Mexican café where he waited tables and taught salsa classes. How could he tell her that there had been nothing between them, and that he was just trying to be nice to her because her nervousness around him made him nervous too? This was what many Filipino girls refused to understand—he gave every woman his all on the dance floor, but he had no interest in dating a Filipino girl. They all gave meaning to every touch they received, and although innocence likely appealed to men back home, he found their innocence exhausting and pitiful.

But their new visitor from Wellington had an American accent and didn’t speak in halting English, unlike her predecessors. She had lively, intelligent eyes, and was unafraid to begin a conversation with him as he washed the dinner dishes. She talked about her journey by train from Wellington as she sat on a barstool before him, and remarked that Kiwis were as nice, or even nicer, than Texans.

“Pardon me for saying this, but I never knew that Filipinos could live in Texas,” he said, watching her pull back a lock of curly hair from her round, delicate face.

She laughed. “They’re not all that bad. Not all of them are gun owning Jesus freaks. Then again, I lived in Austin, the sane part of Texas.”

His mother, by this time, was ensconced in the living room with a distant aunt who occupied the upstairs guest room, a dour-faced woman from California whom he had never met before, whose cackling laughter was eerily similar to his mother’s. They were trading jokes they read aloud from their smart phones about the new Miss Universe, a Filipina with long legs, slender arms, and a German last name who nearly missed being crowned after Steve Harvey, the contest’s bumbling, overexcited host, mistakenly named Miss Colombia the winner. Paolo didn’t like this Miss Universe, perhaps because his mother seemed to like her too much for his taste.

“What do you mean by sane?” he asked Maya. This girl was nowhere near as tall and statuesque as this year’s Miss Universe, but expressed no interest in beauty pageants, and didn’t seem to be the type to do so.

“You know what I mean. It’s the reason why you’re afraid of Texas.”

Her face had yet to shed the puppy fat of her youth, and yet she gave off the confidence of someone who had lived overseas before, and who was no longer in awe of the foreign. Fear, he knew from experience, was often disguised as awe.

He brought her to a salsa class he taught the next evening, and he watched her gravitate towards the bar, ordering a drink as he guided other girls through the basic moves. The confident, worldly woman he had met at his mother’s house the previous evening was now awkward and shy, and he wanted to pull her back into the swarm of happy, dancing bodies and show her that there was no need to be afraid. After dancing with some of the regular girls whose curves and rhythms he had already grown accustomed to, he took her hand and guided her through the basic steps. Although she knew how to sway her hips, she kept glancing at her feet, laughing nervously as he lifted her chin with his finger.

“Don’t look at your feet. Connect with me,” he said. Her lips parted as he said this, giving off the impression of a genuinely interested student. She was listening, or rather, her body was, following his lead as he made ninety-degree turns and coaxed her into a spin. She relaxed into his arms as he brought her down and caught her at the end of a song, and said, “I want to do that again!” when a new song came on. She was unguarded for a beginner, which was why she was picking up the moves so quickly. “In a year, you’ll be spinning on the dance floor,” he said as they stepped aside to watch the after-class dance party unfold. She smiled in disbelief, and he wondered whether she had caught on to his flirting.

A word of Tagalog slipped from him as they walked down a narrow street to where his car was parked, and she reassured him, as they stepped inside, that he could speak the language again if he wanted to. “You speak such good Tagalog, I’m envious,” he said to her on the drive home, wondering how she could hold onto the grammar of the old language while speaking English without the usual trepidation of a new immigrant. He couldn’t admit to her that he once spoke Tagalog fluently, but had been teased in school for his halting English. He had decided to release himself from all those familiar expressions and cadences of speech that were holding him back, preventing him from expressing his thoughts in the language of his new home. How had she mastered English without losing her footing in their native tongue?

“I had no choice. My parents brought me back to the Philippines when I nine years old. I was forced to learn,” she said, as they sped down the motorway.

“You mean to say you didn’t grow up in the Philippines?”

“Well I did, but I spent my early childhood in the States.”

“Your English is really good, you know.”

She looked away from him, and a note of impatience crept through her soft voice as she said, “Thank you.”

The adults were asleep when they arrived at his parents’ home, and before she withdrew for the night he brought out a bottle of wine and asked if she wanted a drink. He wanted to know how she had ended up in New Zealand, and whether she had arrived in the country alone. She took a seat on a barstool and, allowing him to pour her a glass, said she had responded to a job posting for a subject librarian in English at Victoria University in Wellington. She had done a masters degree in library science at the University of Texas because she thought it would lead to a job in America, not realizing that there were too many library science graduates in America and not enough jobs. “That’s what you get for insisting on doing something that’s related to what you love when America thinks that you haven’t compromised enough. I should’ve become a nurse instead,” she said, laughing. Prior to that she had earned a masters degree in Creative Writing, which, she explained, was a worthless degree as far as finding a job in the States was concerned. “It helped me become a better writer, through, and I’m mainly a writer. Being a librarian is just a day job,” she said, tapping her palms on the countertop as though to rest her case. He asked her what she wrote. “Fiction, mostly. I’m writing a novel right now in my spare time.” Was it about the Philippines, or America? “It’s about the Philippines, of course. I write about home all the time.” And with that, she smiled into her glass of wine before taking another sip.

“And now you’re in New Zealand,” he said.

“It looked like a nice place to live when I researched it. Faraway from the rest of the world. Beautiful. Easy to get a work visa, especially if you have degrees from a western country.”

“Your parents probably miss you.” He had been with his parents when he left the old country, and oftentimes wondered whether he would have had the courage to leave the motherland if he alone were to make the decision.

“We talk every day. My mum’s on facebook,” she said.

“At least you talk to her. I barely talk to my parents,” he said. He was sure that his parents were fast asleep, and that he could say this aloud. “Well we talk, but we don’t really talk, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s sad.”

This was his first Christmas in New Zealand after his return from Argentina, and he needed someone to commiserate with him, more than anything.

“I talk to my parents all the time,” she said. “I tell them almost everything.”

“So how long have you been away from home?”

“Six years.”

“That’s an awfully long time, for someone who’s close to her parents.”

“Yeah, but you get used to it,” she said, playing with her wineglass. Her story was not unlike the stories of those who came to their house to seek temporary refuge, and he was deceiving himself into thinking she was different. He was sure she shared their reasons for being here, although she wasn’t reciting the same script. She wasn’t talking about how much money she could make in this country or asking whether he knew more about securing permanent residency. The people who came to visit his parents clung to these questions as though they were life rafts that would carry them to safety. This girl, on the other hand, did not share their fears.

“Life’s great back home, don’t get me wrong. But when you’re a woman and you won’t be tied to a single place or a single person, they just won’t get it back home.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, filling her empty glass without her bidding. “You’re a girl who’s lived overseas for so long. If my mum was your mum, she would’ve told you to be careful.”

“That’s why I’m keeping my distance from your mum.” She laughed, downed half of her glass and said, “I’m sorry. She’s your mum.”

“That’s all right. I know who she is.”

Later that night, as she got up to leave, he stood in her way and kissed her, catching her off-guard. They were both drunk, it was Christmas, an old year was coming to an end, and soon, he was sure, he was going to move out of his parents’ house. In a few days, this girl would be leaving. Her hand rested on his back as her tongue encircled his, and when he grabbed her breast she pulled away and whispered, in the mother tongue, “That’s enough for tonight. Off to bed now.”

*