Chapter 3 Dinner in Makati, Eyes in the Mirror
They parked three streets away because Mina said the block was impossible, and so Hal Rivera walked in Manila for the first time.
It took about ninety seconds to understand that he had been wrong about the city all day. He had seen it from an SUV and from forty-one floors up, and both of those were versions of Manila that Manila was showing to somebody else. Down here it came at him from every side at once.
The street was maybe six meters wide with vehicles parked up both sides of it, which left one lane, which was carrying traffic in both directions by a system of headlight flashes and pure nerve.
Every ground floor was a business. A vulcanizing shop with four tires stacked outside.
A laundry with the doors open and the presses going at nine at night.
A sari-sari store with its whole inventory hanging in the window in little sachets on strings, shampoo and coffee and detergent, single servings of everything, because a person who is paid daily buys daily.
Above all of it, cable. Hal stopped and looked up at it.
“That is a hundred and forty kilos on that pole,” he said.
“Do not do engineering at me, we have a table.”
“Baby, I am not doing engineering. I am admiring.” He was, too.
It was appalling and it worked and it had clearly been worked on by three hundred separate people over forty years, each of whom had solved their own problem and gone home.
“You know what that is? That is exactly what a warehouse rack looks like after fifteen years of everybody being in a hurry.”
A man went past them carrying a propane tank on his shoulder. A tricycle came through the one lane with a sidecar full of water jugs. Somebody’s television was audible from a second floor, and it was, Hal realized, a rerun of something with an audience in it, and the audience was laughing.
Nobody looked at Mina.
That was the thing he noticed most and understood least. She had a cap on and her hair up under it and no makeup to speak of, and she walked with her chin down and her stride shortened, and it was not a disguise, it was a posture, and it made her a tall woman on a street rather than the tall woman.
Two people did clock her. He watched it happen.
A girl of about twelve outside the laundry went completely rigid, and Mina put one finger to her lips and winked, and the girl put both hands over her own mouth and vibrated, and that was the entire transaction.
“Does that work?” Hal said.
“For about four more minutes.” Mina turned in at a doorway between a barbershop and a shuttered lechon place, into a stairwell with a bare bulb. “After that somebody posts it. Come on. Fifty-two stairs.”
“How do you know it is fifty-two?”
“Because you are going to count them,” she said, “and I want to be right.”
The staircase had been built by somebody who had never met a building code, and Hal loved it before he reached the top.
“Fifty-two,” he said.
“I know.”
“You knew.”
“I am counting the stairs of a restaurant that is going to have to get a keg up here.” He came out onto the roof and stopped. “Oh, now that is something.”
It was a roof. That was the honest description.
Somebody had put a bar along the back wall and strung bulbs across on wire and set out about sixteen tables under a corrugated overhang that covered maybe half of it, and at the front there was a low parapet with a plank rail bolted along the top and nothing else between you and four stories of air.
But the view.
South, past the parapet, the Makati towers went up out of the low dark and stood there burning.
Hal could count floors. He could see the little green EXIT glow in a stairwell forty floors up and a cleaner’s cart on the ninth and a conference room on twenty-two where four people were still working at nine o’clock at night.
The whole district was lit like a held breath.
And then he looked down.
Directly below the parapet, Poblacion went out in every direction in the dark.
Tin roofs and mismatched concrete, two and three stories, laundry strung between them, cable and wire hanging in loops so heavy they sagged into the street lights.
A dog barked on a roof about forty feet away and another dog answered from somewhere Hal could not find.
Motorbike engines. A karaoke machine, badly, somewhere south.
Cooking smoke coming up through the bulbs.
Not one light above the second floor.
“Baby,” Hal said. “You see this?”
“Every day of my life.”
“No, but you see it. Look at that.” He pointed south at the towers, then straight down. “That is a mile. That is not even a mile. That is fifteen minutes walking.”
“Seventeen minutes.”
“Nine minutes. And it is a different century down there.”
Mina came and stood beside him at the rail and did not say anything for a moment, and then she said, “That is why I picked here.”
“For the view?”
“For that view. Not the other one.” She put her forearms on the plank.
“Everybody takes a person to the CBD. There is a place on the fifty-first floor with a wine list like a phone book and I have been there nine times and I could not tell you one thing about it.” She tipped her chin at the dark below them.
“This is the actual city. The other one is a photograph of a city.”
Hal looked at her sideways.
“You are very smart,” he said, “and I am extremely tired, and I want you to know I am tracking about seventy percent of what you say.”
“That is more than most.”
They ate sisig and grilled squid and a whole plate of something Mina refused to name until he had finished it, and then named it, and Hal did not give her the reaction she had paid for, which annoyed her tremendously.
“Nothing?”
“Baby, my abuela made blood sausage in a kitchen the size of this table. You are going to have to try harder.”
“I will try harder.”
“I know you will. It is one of my favorite things about you.”
She was on her second San Miguel and she had taken her shoes off under the table at some point, and her hair was down out of the architecture it had been in all afternoon and had gone a little wild in the humidity, and she had a smear of calamansi on the side of her thumb.
She had done four hours of television and put a man on the floor in a corridor and Hal did not know about the second one, and she was sitting on a roof in Poblacion with her feet bare, arguing about sausage.
“Tell me about Savannah,” she said.
“You know about Savannah.”
“I know the version you tell people. Tell me the other one.”
Hal turned his beer around on the table.
“We went back and forth until I was nine,” he said.
“San Juan, then Savannah, then San Juan again for a year and a half when my father’s thing did not work out, then Savannah for good.
My mother taught fourth grade in both places.
She is the toughest person I have ever met, and I include your entire dance corps in that. ”
“What was the thing that did not work out?”
“A boat.”
“A boat.”
“A charter boat. He had a partner and the partner had a cousin and there was a hurricane, and after that there was no boat and no partner and no cousin.” Hal shrugged.
“He worked at the port after. He was okay about it. He never once said a word about that boat again in his life, which as a kid I thought was strength and which I now think was something else.”
Mina had gone still, in the way she did.
“And Savannah?”
“Savannah is beautiful and it is hot and it is a small town wearing a city’s clothes.
” He smiled. “I was the Puerto Rican kid. Not in a bad way, mostly. In the way where everybody is real friendly and you are aware every single day that they know exactly what you are. Then we moved out to Atlanta for the work and Atlanta is different, Atlanta is everybody from everywhere, and I did not know how tight my shoulders had been until they came down.”
“Do you miss it?”
“San Juan or Savannah?”
“Either.”
“I miss my abuela’s kitchen,” Hal said. “That is the whole answer. Every place I miss is a kitchen with her in it, and she has been dead seven years, so I am not really missing a place.”
He heard himself say it and made a small face.
“Sorry. That got heavy fast.”
“Do not apologize.” Mina reached across and put two fingers on the back of his wrist. “Do you know how many people have told me something true at this table? At this restaurant, in eleven years?”
“How many?”
“You are the second one.” She sat back. “The first one was my accountant, and it was about tax, and he cried.”
Hal laughed so hard the table next to them looked over.
Then the table next to them kept looking over.
It took about a minute. Hal watched it happen the way you watch a crack cross a windshield.
The woman at the next table said something to the man.
The man did not turn around, which was worse, because it meant he had been told not to.
Then a phone came up at an angle that was pretending to be a selfie and was not a selfie.
Then the woman was standing beside them, apologizing before she arrived.
“Sorry po, sorry, Miss Mina, ay, I am so sorry, I do not want to.”
“Ay, hindi po, come here.” And Mina was up out of her chair.
Hal sat and watched it and it took seven minutes.
Not twelve minutes of one photograph. Fourteen minutes of one photograph, and then the woman’s husband, and then her sister on a video call held out at arm’s length so a woman in Cabanatuan could scream at Mina Hermosa through a phone in a rooftop bar in Poblacion, and then two men from the bar who had been working up to it, and then the kid from the card machine, and then the manager, and then, inevitably, the three cooks, brought out one at a time by the oldest of them in order of seniority.