Leaving Auckland (part three)

Two days later, as he sat before a computer screen to talk to her, he thought of how their plans ceased to frighten him when a pane of glass and thousands of miles separated them both. On the phone, or on Skype, all she asked from him were words. And words, as they spilled from his mouth, revealed more about him than he thought they would.

She spoke about a friend who threatened suicide after losing her brother to Typhoon Haiyan, and he found himself unable to hesitate admitting to her that he had tried taking his life four times. The last time was four years ago, he reassured her. I tried to jump off the Auckland Harbour Bridge, but I ended up just sitting on the ledge until the police arrived. Do your parents know about this? she asked. They never found out, he said, which is why it seemed easy to do. I just felt so low at the time. You know how Filipino parents expect their children to be the perfect sons and daughters, just because there are more opportunities here? Well, my life was never perfect. No one’s life is, she said, her eyes growing sad. You’re just too hard on yourself.

This was a palatable portion of the truth that he served to her, now that she knew his family’s story quite well. He didn’t describe the attempts that took place before he decided to make that fateful jump, times he cut himself, or came close to cutting his pulse in half, in the privacy of his room. He found it somewhat amusing how he contemplated death in his room, his thoughts having nowhere else to go, only to find himself stepping outside to find his mother lounging in the living room, watching one of her Tagalog telenovelas. The lawn has to be mown, she’d call out to him the moment she heard his footsteps, putting an end to his plan to return to his room and leave her for good. No matter how much he wanted to leave her, she always had a way of dragging him back into the life she had built for him. He had no way of pulling her into his room, where he could reveal to her just how much he wanted to leave her. As long as he carried out his suicide attempts in the privacy of his den, there was no way for her to find out.

On a warm December afternoon, he parked his car at one end of the Auckland Harbour Bridge and walked down its footpath until he had a full, expansive view of the sea. As he rested his arms on the railings, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible to passersby, he wondered how difficult it would be for rescuers find his body if it sank deep into the waters below or was eaten by sharks. Would his parents find a body to bury, or would they just have a tombstone for his name? He lifted himself up to the ledge, imagining his parents waiting at the seashore as rescue teams combed Waitemata Harbour for signs of life, his mother wailing as they carried his waterlogged body towards her. The previous night, he had imagined a calm, forgiving sea taking him back into its warm and watery womb. Perhaps his body was never meant to be washed ashore, to be buried underneath the ground, if it truly belonged to the water. As he took a seat on the bridge’s railing, the sea beneath him churned, and container ships arriving from Sydney sailed beneath him as he found himself unable to lose his footing in life.

It took an hour before the police came to pick him up. A stocky Pacific Islander constable drove him home, lecturing him throughout the trip about how Jesus had died on the cross for him, and how all his problems could be solved if only he turned to the Lord. When they stopped in front of his house, Paolo waited in his seat, expecting the officer to walk him to the door and talk to his parents. But perhaps it was a busy night for the officer, for he turned to Paolo and said, in his thick South Auckland accent, “Now you’re in charge. Go and tell your parents what happened. I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.”

Inside his parents’ house, his father was telling a story to a small gathering of guests about his exploits as an army sergeant in the Philippines. It was all his father had to talk about, having only reached the sixth grade before leaving his hometown in the mountains to join Marcos’s army. His mother’s smile was impatient yet tolerant as she sat in an overstuffed couch, having heard the same stories at every gathering where she gave her husband free rein to speak.

She glanced at Paolo when he stepped into their house. She said to her guests, “This is our son, Paolo,” as the crowd of shy old men in leather jackets lifted their heads and nodded at him. “Have you had anything to eat? There are dishes in the sink. Can you take care of them?”

As Paolo ran hot water over a pile of dirty dishes, which could have been the same pile of dirty dishes he had washed a few nights ago, he realized that long as he lived, his mother’s heart would remain unbreakable.

A few months later, he met Juliette.

*

“Who’s ‘that guy’?” Maya asked, as Paolo sat in bed, his laptop propped on his lap.

He chuckled. “I meant my dad.”

“You call your dad ‘that guy’?”

“Yeah, people get confused whenever I call him ‘that guy’. I know baby, I shouldn’t be doing it. But it used to be worse.”

Whenever they met on Skype, he would feel as though he were at a confessional, in which he could expose himself without fear of retribution.

“There was a time when I fantasized about disowning him,” he said. “I thought of just walking away, telling people that he wasn’t my father anymore.”

“Oh no.”

“I know.”

Maya had been with them on Christmas Eve when his father, helping himself to a slice of carrot cake with his bare hands, claimed that he was like the Chinese who overate, who were just like Elvis, who had died of overeating. His father never failed to embarrass Paolo in front of guests, although Paolo found comfort in Maya’s honesty as she asked, “How did we get to Elvis?” Her comment broke the uncomfortable silence that settled upon the dining table after his father spoke, and his family erupted in giggles. Unlike Juliette, Maya was honest, maybe even too honest, about her feelings.

She could afford to be more forgiving of his father because, despite the old man’s simple mindedness, he was incapable of dominating her. Although Paolo didn’t doubt that the old man was his father, he wondered at times if the old man deserved his respect. His mother and brother listened to his father’s illogical conclusions about the world with a quiet resignation reserved for simpletons. Whenever Paolo tried to knock sense into his father’s mind by engaging the old man in debates, his mother watched them with the same look of mild curiosity she wore when she witnessed odd behavior from her sons. He and his father fought like birds trapped in a cage, flying around in circles before realizing, after many wounds, that they had nowhere else to go.

His brief stint as an expatriate with Juliette in Argentina had emptied his savings account, and if his parents weren’t happy about his decision to live with them, neither were they upset. They were Filipino, after all, and many Filipino sons lived with their parents way into their adulthood. With them, he could live his life whichever way he pleased, leaving early for his job at a downtown café, coming home late at night from a salsa party or a tango milonga. He could avoid arguing with his father, or being available when his mother needed a favor from him. Their relationship with him had always been quiet and distant, and he was amazed at how little had changed. There were chores to do around the house, but otherwise they respected his privacy, as they always had.

To the women he met in Mexican bars and dance studios across Auckland, he was a darling who banished their nervousness as soon as he placed his hand on their waists and smiled into their eyes. They all loved him, even if all he gave them was a single dance until they met again on the dance floor. Only Maya could make him come home early in the evening, pulling him back into a house whose inhabitants tolerated his presence without asking for much in return. Without the blare of Latin music filling his ears, or the warmth of a woman’s thigh as it brushed against his, he was a man confronted by the silence of his own thoughts, a son who had little else to offer aside from his presence in his mother’s house. As Maya sat alone in her apartment in Wellington, waiting for his Skype call, he extricated himself from this crowd of adoring women, speeding down the motorway alone at night to meet Maya in his room, in front of a computer screen.

Why did Maya depend on him, of all people, to quell her loneliness? There was not much he could offer her aside from his promise to return, and she held onto this promise like a prisoner awaiting probation. “When are you coming here?” she’d ask, draping her Chinese silk robe on her bare shoulders after having stripped and touched herself for him. He found it touching, the way she purchased lacy lingerie for these occasions, the way she parted her silk robe, baring the gold necklace that he gave to her on Valentines Day, at a time when he believed that she was his ticket to freedom. Tethered to him by the neck, she asked him what he wanted to see, what he wanted her to do to herself.  More and more did she seem like a prisoner girl who performed sexual favors for him in exchange for the keys to her cell. As he reached orgasm with his hand, his guilt exploded before his eyes when he saw how he had exploited a lonely, naked girl who shivered as she dressed, complaining about the autumn cold.

She would describe her fraught but loving relationship with her mother, and explained how her father, a brilliant man, was in many ways a helpless child who depended on the women in his life to survive in the world. It was clear to him that her parents loved her, even if she chose to live faraway from them, and all Paolo did to earn her devotion was estrange her from her family. Perhaps she too was unsure of their future, and yet she awaited his calls, his visits. He didn’t deserve her love, and yet there it was.

“It’s getting better between me and my father,” Paolo reassured her. “I have to give it to him, he went through a lot of hardship to get to where he was. And without his sacrifices, I wouldn’t even be here in this country.”

“Do you get to talk to him?”

“Barely, but the guy doesn’t talk too much, and when he does I end up debating with him.” He wished he could explain to Maya that between him and his father, silence was the only language that made sense to them both.

*

Could he will himself to use the same language with Maya? He contemplated the silences that followed the their calls, trying to make sense of the uneasiness he felt as their relationship progressed. He could talk to her about anything, yet when their calls ended, he felt smothered by her hopes. As he put away his laptop and switched off his bedroom lights, he pictured Maya climbing up the steps of her loft bedroom, her faith in his love strong yet unproven.

As he lay in bed, the silence of Maya’s apartment in Wellington filled his ears, overwhelming the sound of cicadas outside his window. He had pictured himself leaving Auckland for good the first time he visited her in Wellington, but what he didn’t imagine back then, when he saw a life with her, was a constant state of exile she had learned to accept.

 She was not in love with New Zealand, and although he knew that her bitterness stemmed from an accident she had a few months after she arrived in the country, he thought it was rather unfair of her to blame every Kiwi she met for what had happened. It was just one stupid driver who made the mistake of turning into a street just as she was crossing it, he said to himself, but she seemed to believe that it was New Zealand’s responsibility to shoulder her personal pain. They’re racists, she’d say to him, after claiming that the policemen who investigated the incident told her that she was to blame for what had happened. “Is that really what they said?” he wanted to ask her, pursing his lips as the question crawled towards the tip of his tongue. Try going back to the Philippines, he wanted to say. At least in this country, they’ll pay for your medical expenses.

He oftentimes wondered if she derived a perverse sort of joy from peeling away the scabs of her wounds to re-expose her hurt. Her mind would return to the past, as though searching for something she had dropped on the ground during the time of the crash. Perhaps it was a detail that would give her closure, or an artifact from her previous life. Whatever she was looking for, he didn’t have it on him. She had survived, he wanted to tell her, and although her injured knee seized up every once in a while, she hadn’t lost her life. What was there to reclaim, if she had lost nothing?

Her text arrived just a day after he had decided to give himself a break, thinking that if their conversations provided no clues as to whether he could leave Auckland to be with her, he would have to search within himself for answers. “I don’t feel safe,” her text read, after he had eaten breakfast. “Kiwi drivers are so reckless. I have to cross the street every day here, and every day I feel afraid.”

He had lost his patience with her, and texted back, “I know how it feels to survive a traumatic event. When I was beaten up a few years ago, I kept looking over my shoulder afterwards. But it’s unfair to blame all Kiwi drivers for a mistake that one stupid driver made. I know it hurts, but don’t make it worse for yourself.” Experience had taught him that forgetting was oftentimes the only way to recover.

But he had made himself her enemy, and she wouldn’t be silenced. She battered him with messages, comparing Kiwi drivers to American drivers, complaining about how traffic rules in New Zealand privileged drivers over pedestrians, and about how the police had told her that she was to blame for what had happened to her. He realized that there was only one way to silence her, and it was by giving her express permission to open her wound fully to him. Something inside was festering, and although he was tempted to look away, she would never forgive him for doing so.

When she answered his call, he asked her how she was, and told her that she could tell him anything. This was her story, not his, and he was relieved that this duty required little of him aside from lending an attentive ear. There was hesitation in her voice, as though she had been brought to shame by his kindness. She started at the very beginning, on a rainy evening in June, when a black car turned into the street she was crossing and stopped when she raised her hands and screamed. He had heard this story before, but could hear the anguish in her voice this time, the powerlessness of her scream as the man behind the wheel, who decided not to see or hear her, decided to drive straight into her. She fell on the car’s bonnet, then fell onto the ground when the car reversed. The driver was a gray-haired, business-like man who pulled over and got out of his car, asking if she was all right. His car was brand new and he was wearing a nice winter coat. As soon as he approached her, the bystanders who had helped her up started chastising her for not being careful enough, as though they knew, automatically, who to side with. A girl who had asked her if she was all right glanced at the driver, took a second look at her, and said, “It’s fifty-fifty, you know. Both of you are at fault.”

She had expected the police to be more compassionate, but instead of allowing her to recount her version of the incident when they took her statement over the phone, they fed answers to her, as though they had already drawn their conclusions about the case. “The car was five meters from you when you stepped off the pavement. Is this correct?” the constable asked her, before she could sift through her memories. Later, a senior officer would scold her when she spoke of her injuries, silencing her by saying, “Don’t call yourself a victim. You’re not a victim. You should’ve been looking.” Hours later, she would receive a call from a man who identified himself as “the driver”, who called to ask her if she was all right. When she told the man on the phone about the nightmares she had, the man giggled and said, “What I meant to ask was whether they found injuries on you when they brought you to hospital. Injuries on your body, I mean.” She went to the police station the day after receiving this call, demanding an explanation, only to be told, “We aren’t obligated to protect your details for you because you’re not a victim. Didn’t we tell you that you and the driver are equally at fault?”

Paolo remembered the night he was mauled outside a bar in South Auckland, and thought of how he never thought of reporting the incident to the police because what was a Filipino boy doing late at night in a neighborhood infested by Pacific Islander gangs? To the police, there were no distinctions to be made between him and the men who robbed him and left him for dead—they were all troublemakers who happened to pick a fight with each other in a neighborhood where brown boys picked fights with each other all the time. He hadn’t put much thought into his decision not to go to the police, but as Maya’s voice broke, he realized that while he had lived in New Zealand long enough to accept his invisibility, Maya, a newcomer, had not yet come to terms with this difficult truth.

After being forced to issue an apology on behalf of the junior officer who had given her number to the driver of the car, the police station’s superintendent, whom Paolo imagined to be a smug, avuncular, gray haired Kiwi, insisted on meeting her for coffee. At the university coffee shop where they agreed to meet, the officer grinned when she complained about how the police had taken her statement. He bought her a flat white and commiserated with her before adding, “Since you’re equally at fault for what happened, you are liable to the driver in case his car sustained damages.”

“My God,” Paolo said, feeling sorry and angry at once.

“They didn’t care,” she said, as she began to cry. “My life didn’t matter to them at all.”

“It all makes sense now.”

“I’m sorry for blaming it on New Zealand. It’s your country.”

“Come on, you didn’t make me feel bad at all. I just thought at first that you were being unfair to them. I’m not a Kiwi, all right. Just because I grew up here, doesn’t mean I’m Kiwi.” He oftentimes said this in the company of his European expat friends who called Kiwis uncultured and unsophisticated, but with her, he said it with pride.

“But you’ve spent almost your entire life here.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m Kiwi,” he said, knowing that with her, he could always come clean. “I don’t mean that in a bad way, but I can’t call myself a Kiwi.”

“I’m glad you didn’t break up with me over this,” she said, cheering up.

“Why would I break up with you over this? You have a good reason for being angry.” He thought of how living alone made a person’s mind return to the wounds of the past, to the source of the mind’s unresolved pain.

“Don’t hesitate to call me if you need someone to talk to.”

“I love you,” she said, in a voice full of gratitude. Among all the women he had dated, only Maya could make him believe this.

“I love you too.”

At least he had listened to her story, which was all anyone could do.

*

He had spent so much time postponing his trip to Wellington that he felt chastised by the cold air as he stepped through the airport’s sliding doors on a windy morning in March.

She was coughing when they met outside her apartment building, and in the elevator she complained about how the sudden change in weather had made her sick. He had arrived at a bad time, as he could see.

“You should be taking care of yourself,” he said, as he dropped his bag on the floor of her unit and allowed her to lean against his chest.

“But I wanted the apartment to be clean before you arrived.” True enough, the apartment was clean, except for the flip-top lid of her rubbish bin that bore traces of food. Hadn’t she noticed this? She coughed into a crumpled tissue and said, “I’m so sorry that I’m sick. I ruined your weekend.”

“It’s good that I’m here, so that I can take care of you.” He waited for the tenderness he once felt for this girl to return to him, but he had postponed this trip for so long that he felt as though he were holding a stranger in his arms.

 As he peered outside her window, he saw the same Victorian houses he had seen in the middle of summer, a cold autumn light defining the sharp edges of their turrets and peaked roofs. A gale whistled through her window, making her building shake. “This building is safe, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s earthquake-proof,” she said, matter-of-factly.

He found himself yearning for space inside her small apartment as he helped her prepare lunch. He had never felt strange about his previous visits, but today he felt as though he had wandered into this woman’s apartment in this strange city without any particular purpose in mind. If there was a question he had meant to ask her during his previous visits, he had forgotten what it was. He couldn’t blame her for failing his test. She was likely unaware that the question ever existed.

But he played the role of the dutiful boyfriend, because he didn’t know how else to pass the time. As far as she was concerned, he was keeping her company, buying groceries and medicines for her, scolding her for not wearing a scarf to protect her neck from the cold wind, asking her, as they had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, to finish her pho. Just one more day, he said to himself, and he’d be back in Auckland.

On the afternoon before his departure, she put her arms around him as they sat in her bed, and said, “I miss you.”

“But I’m here.”

“When you’re here with me, I think of how you’re going to leave me, and it makes me sad.”

He laughed, unable to muster an answer that would satisfy her.

“That’s what my mother tells me whenever I visit her,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder.

He thought of the silence he left her with whenever they parted, a huge, cavernous silence that haunted him as he lay in bed in Auckland at night. He wanted to deserve her love, even if he had none of her strength.    

This was a life she had chosen for herself, a life of changing addresses, in which one had to believe in the future despite one’s missteps.

The southerly winds kept him awake as Maya fell asleep that evening, secure in her belief in his capacity for love. He rose from his airbed, allowing his travel blanket to fall away from his knees. There had been a time when he felt safe with her, when he believed that her love alone would carry him away from Auckland, away from his parents and their unchanging expectations. He rose from bed and peered outside her window, at a city that had grown familiar to him without shaking off its foreignness. It was wrong of him to expect Wellington to warm up to him when it faced the southerly winds as though wishing for self-annihilation.

He pulled himself away from her window and returned to bed. He closed his eyes, listening to the wind’s howl. He was a child again, lying in bed inside his parents’ house in the Philippines as typhoon winds whipped their city, downing power lines and slapping rain onto windowpanes. The walls of his family’s house were thin, and their roof could be blown away if the winds were strong enough. In Auckland, he had found himself missing those cold, windy nights back home in which he imagined himself in a ship that rocked back and forth in the middle of a storm. After they left his childhood home in the Philippines forever, he would never feel as safe.   

He envied that child who was unafraid of the wind’s relentless howling.

*

Fellow dancers in Buenos Aires would ask Juliette if her dance partner and companion from the Philippines was gay. He’s not coming onto girls, they’d tell her as they sat in the outdoor cafes of San Telmo, expecting Juliette to demystify his behavior on his behalf. “He’s not gay, he’s my ex,” she’d tell them. He sat beside her, watching her field their questions about him as though she were his keeper. Her Spanish was better than his, and he could trust her to explain their situation to strangers in simpler terms. Like the fact that they still lived together because they were unable to afford to live in separate apartments with the money they had saved for this trip. He was relieved to know that certain important events in his life, like moving to a foreign country, were beyond his control. He doubted that he would ever have gathered the courage to travel to Buenos Aires alone, and he was glad that they had planned this trip months before they broke up.

When they were not taking lessons together from the masters of tango, he would wander alone down the cobblestoned streets of San Telmo, past colonial buildings, flea markets, and outdoor cafes where tourists encamped. He’d drop coins in the hats of tango dancers who performed in the streets, wishing to be possessed by their passion when he danced with Juliette.

He walked down the streets of Buenos Aires, hoping to ground himself in this strange city, returning in a taxi to the apartment he shared with Juliette when his feet ached and he could walk no longer. Juliette was respectful enough not to bring male visitors to their living quarters, but if he found himself sitting at their balcony as she turned into their street at dusk, he would oftentimes hear her voice, low and sensuous, forming endearments in French that were not addressed to him. Je t’aime, je t’aime. He had come to Buenos Aires to learn passion, and found himself building a fortress around his heart as their apartment door clicked open and Juliette’s footsteps, quick and officious, disappeared behind a closed bedroom door.

He was just an immigrant boy who thought he would never have the chance to leave Auckland, but here he was, in the birthplace of Tango, watching the sun set over the ancient rooftops of San Telmo. And yet this beautiful city he had yearned for while living in Auckland remained out of reach to him, even as he learned its language, danced to its music, felt its cobblestones underneath his feet, ran his hands over its ancient stone walls. He did not belong here, no matter how much he tried. He began to wonder whether it was Auckland he was pining for. If he were to be honest to himself, he was unsure where home was.