Chapter 11
pinky and her family lived in a village by the sea, even though their house—bordered on the south by a swampy bog that buzzed with mosquitoes and on the north by a strip of small, mismatched homes—had no view of the beach.
The ocean could be heard all day long, if she stopped to listen, if she happened to be standing on the right path that led to the school, if there was a break in the motorbike traffic, a lull in the shouts from the vendors announcing fresh mangosteen or live stingray.
At night, while she lay on her bedroll beside her sister, she could hear it still, clear as the music from her uncle’s boom box.
If she couldn’t sleep, she listened through the hours before dawn, her head turned to the left, toward the beach.
The town was silent. The last bar would have shut its doors, and the lonely drunk men would have already wobbled home, back to their children who waited for their fathers every night and for their mothers every day.
Their mothers who cared for other people’s children in Canada or Singapore or Australia or the Emirates; for families, they assumed, who lived in beautiful houses made of stone and brick, with glass windows that could be shut against the night, against the people still awake, making mistakes.
The sea rumbled low and constant, an inching sound that crept up on the famous black Panay sand.
There were no cliffs, nothing for the waves to crash against, as she had seen in movies from Ireland or America, where women stood high above the ice-blue ocean and stared into the distance looking for missing lovers or a glimpse of a faraway home they might have left behind.
No, when she was sleepless, the ocean she knew was never so dramatic.
Instead, it was insidious, a crawling thing that pushed itself slowly landward, and then rolled back again.
It never gave up. Up the shore. Down the shore. Up and down, for all eternity.
Black sand, black night, windows open to the wind that smelled of salt and dead fish. Ideal travelling conditions for nightmares or, worse, demons.
Aswang, her grandmother used to tell her, came from Capiz province, from the shadowy banana groves and the flat black beaches, from the ashes in the coal-burning stoves and the spaces beneath the stilted houses.
From the small towns accessible only via dirt roads to the open-air markets of Roxas City.
During the day, aswang looked like anyone.
Ordinary lolas. A boring fisherman on a boring boat. A teacher. The electrician.
“I should know,” her grandmother said. “They came for me once.” When Pinky asked her to elaborate, she patted her granddaughter on the knee.
“I have scars, darling, that I can never show you. But I am still here, looking after you, so they didn’t win.
” She pointed at the bowl of chicken rice on the table. “Now eat. We don’t waste food.”
According to her grandmother’s stories, at night, the aswang’s seemingly regular human bodies gained power, took flight on bony wings that unfolded from beneath their shirts, opened their mouths to reveal long, skinny tongues that uncurled and found cracks between slats, groped in the dark for human flesh.
Anything tender would do, but fetuses, sucked through the belly button of a sleeping pregnant woman, those were the best. Full with new, thrumming life, the aswang could pretend that they were human, too, rather than a brooding facsimile, incapable of birth or joy or long days in the sun with a lover, hands sticky with beer and cake.
Babies who were not yet babies could be savoured, like life itself.
Pinky’s lola bent forward and whispered so quietly Pinky had to stop chewing to hear her. “They took my first baby. He would have been your uncle. I wanted to name him Manuel.” A cold finger of fear traced a line down Pinky’s spine. She shivered.
For a while, these stories kept Pinky close to home, to where her sisters and lola slept and cooked and studied, to the round wooden cutting board where they learned to mince garlic and chilies together into a sticky, pungent paste.
Through the windows, she could see the village, see the boys on bicycles delivering fish and bread, the seagulls soaring through the burning sky, screaming.
But she stayed home, often sitting in the yard, counting the ants as they marched in a straight line, over rocks, through the dust, their destination so clear and obvious to only them.
But as she got older, she strayed further afield, walking with her friends to the shack near the beach where an old man cooked conch and gave the girls sips of beer. The boys lounging on the sand laughed at Pinky’s grimace when the cold, bitter liquid hit her tongue.
“She’s so innocent! Just wait. She’ll start to like the taste soon enough.”
And she did. And as she gripped the icy, sweating bottles, she knew she had started to like the boys too.
Before long, it didn’t matter what stories her lola told her about aswang flying through the night, looking for wandering girls who should have been in bed.
Pinky left in the darkness, her heart beating so hard against the walls of her chest that it almost hurt.
She realized then there was a type of pain that stops short of real pain and becomes something pleasurable, something that rushes through your body and leaves you breathless, makes you see and hear the world with a clarity that is astoundingly bright, makes you chase it again and again.
Pinky learned this as she snuck out of her house in the night, hurrying down the road toward the beat of American pop music, toward the voices of men and boys who didn’t have anywhere to go in the morning and so laughed as if their lives were great because what else were they supposed to do.
She knew then that there were no aswang.
There were only the fictional stories of aswang designed to keep girls like her—girls with a wildness inside their bodies, girls who would have beat the walls of their homes with their fists if they dared, girls who listened for the right wind on the right day so they could smell the rest of the world on a breeze—afraid and compliant and safe.
The myths were a prison. Pinky knew that now. And she hated it.
When Pinky, at age seventeen, began dating her first boyfriend, she wondered, for a while, if this was what it felt like to be free.
She sat on the back of his motorcycle, her arms wrapped around his waist, and let the wind rip through her long black hair until she was enveloped in her own personal tornado.
They drove down roads she had never explored before, heading inland, away from the sea, cutting through farmland and sprawling low hills.
When she looked up at the sky, it was hazy blue, a smudge of smog obscuring the higher sky, the brighter sky.
But when they had sex, she could not stop her brain from imagining a pregnancy, a baby that could be born, that could tie her to this boy forever, even if he grew old and grumpy, the kind of man who waited for his wife to bring him beer, who came home from a job and thought his work was over, who expected her body in the night, even if all she wanted was sleep.
When he came, she saw her older self in his eyes, back bent from reaching down to pick up children, hair ragged from too many home haircuts, bones jutting from her shoulders, her elbows.
Like the aswang stories, men were designed to imprison.
Everywhere she looked, there were barriers to true freedom, to the wildness she wished she could unleash in the world.
There, her lola feeding her stories and lumpia so she would never leave.
Here, her boyfriend and the possible, probable, yet-to-be-born babies.
There, the sea, the edges of waves like stubby, webbed fingers emerging from the netherworld, ensuring that no one left these shores.
In the end, it was too much, and she left Capiz in the full light of day, after writing her boyfriend a letter that was far too short for the love he had professed, but she didn’t care.
Her sister rode in a taxi with her to the airport, and when she tried to hold Pinky’s hand, Pinky patted her gently and then shook her off.
The ride was silent after that. In the check-in line, Pinky reached into her purse for her passport and found a container of snacks: salted peanuts, dried mango, and three soft sweet pandesal.
Of course, it was her lola who had snuck the food into her bag.
Without hesitation, Pinky dropped the container into the garbage can and walked to the counter, her whole body quivering with the anticipation of soaring, of distance.
She flew first to Manila, where she applied to international nanny agencies while living in a hostel room she shared with three other girls, all of them hoping for the same thing: a job and ticket to somewhere far away.
She didn’t know what the others were fleeing, but here, in the big city, she felt unseen and unencumbered, even if she was just waiting for her life to start.
The bright lights of the nightclubs, the music that blared from the karaoke bars, the rainbow umbrellas that shaded every shouting street vendor—she could wander from spot to spot, never walking a straight line, following the next shiny thing that beckoned.
There were no stories here, only her five senses, straining to keep up.
it didn’t take long for the job offer to come from a family in Singapore, a sunburnt American family who, when they picked her up at Changi Airport, laughed when they first said her name out loud.
“Pinky!” The husband slapped his thigh with an open hand. “Only in the Philippines would they think that’s a normal name.” Asher and Ava, the children, roared with laughter.