The Umbrella Country by Bino A Realuyo

Author:Bino A Realuyo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307781574
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

BUTTERFLY EYES

His last words to me—Run, Gringo. Run—whistled in my ears.

Pipo lay on his bed, limbs all over as if they were born separate from each other. His back was turned so I couldn’t see his face. But I could hear him picking the wall with his fingers, removing layers of paper that covered it, revealing the years we had spent plastering the whole house with big square technicolor wallpapers. Soon he had those years all over him, a shower of little tamarind leaves, each torn piece a different color, a different time. Every hour, his fingers drummed and picked the wall, his fingernails became the teeth of hungry night rats.

He had not said anything to anybody.

The General Electric fan roared in his place, its metal screen covered with thick dust, and spitting out more dust all over our room, especially in the sun rays that entered through our window. Streaks shone directly to where Pipo was, hitting one leg of the bunk, splitting our bedroom in the middle with light.

His ribs moved quietly. Ninang Rola had told me once that nobody died lying on their side, always facedown or on their back, so that their spirits could see where they were going or where they had come from. Pipo was on his side, his thumb, halfway into his mouth, facing neither heaven nor earth, eyes closed, his cheeks moving in and out, making sucking noises. His shirt was pulled up so that his bruised back was exposed, so fresh that it hurt to look at it. His blanket was pushed down to his feet. The mattress was so bare I could see its stained striped lining. Hanging above him was my own blanket, left undone like the one on the big bed in the middle of our room. I could see from the spring underneath my bed that the weight of my body was in the middle, the middle part being more depressed than the rest.

But Pipo’s bed had no middles, no sides.

The familiar smell of bruises.

He didn’t move as I edged to him. I touched the dark blue metal of the bunk, which creaked as soon as I sat down. He didn’t even hear my loud breathing, didn’t hear my insides tumbling like a rubber band ball as soon as I smelled him so close to me. I remembered the times I waited outside this room and watched him flee; the scent of the room always swallowed me in.

I waited until the day after to see him. I didn’t want him to remember that I wasn’t hurt by Daddy Groovie, didn’t want to remind him of his bruises, the shape of Daddy Groovie’s palms. I wanted to tell him that he could keep inside what hurt most, deep inside, in Ninang Rola’s words—when you buried something so deep, you would not know it was even there. There would be no need to suck his thumb, pick the wallpaper, because doing those wouldn’t bring him back to the past, or remove Daddy Groovie from him.

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