LOW WALL
by Estrella Alfon
I was taking a bath standing under the
cool clean water from the bathroom shower, soaping myself when I felt a small
missile hit my back and I saw a pellet of paper, such as little boys use to
load rubber slingshot, drop to the bathroom floor. Looking around me, and
looking up, I was just in time to see a pate lower itself, a man’s head quickly
disappear out of view behind the bathroom wall.
We had built our barong-barong in the days
immediately after the liberation. It had not mattered to us then, as it had not
to so many others by the fire left bereft what the barong-barong would be like. Enough to us that there would be a
roof over our heads, and walls to hide the wretched bareness of lives pulled
down to the veriest essentials by the liberation’s conflagration.
It had quickly come out however, after a
while when other houses sprang up beside ours, some of them meaner, some of
them better than our own shack, than the shelter we now called home, and was in
some ways inadequate and wanting.
We had pulled the charred wood from the
ashes, their surface embers we had quickly hacked off to save the unburned core
of wood underneath and had made these serve for posts. The twisted tin too, the
blackened galvanized iron sheets; these too we had salvaged and of these
fashioned roofs and walls.
When the rains came, the water leaked in
through the roof and wind drove the rain in through the flimsy,
nail-hole-pocked walls. A storm would rattle the whole structure, shake it like
a truckful of empty cans and when the dusts arose from the seared upheaved
streets, dust settled on food, and beds, and clothing inadequately protected by
low, jerry-built walls.
For we had only salvaged the walls
standing of adobe stone, and on these posed slats of wood, for wood was dear,
and labor dearer and in those days, as you remember, money was not immediately
to be found ----- and so our barong-barong
had low walls.
Even the bathrooms. And so long as there
had been no structure erected behind us, it had seemed the low bathroom walls
were security enough from prying, peeking eyes.
But an auto repair machinery shop began to
form in the back-lot. An enterprising Chinese had seen all the burned trucks
and engines that were left of what had once been a Japanese army garage--- and
from scavenging around for spare parts he could shine to a usefulness the
Chinese had progressed in business so that he now had a shop--- one of the
first repair shops in the city.
We had already dust and rain and heat to
complain about. We had to add now the noise of machines grinding, and people scraping
away the paint from vehicles, and other people spraying new paint on scraped
auto bodies the spray machine making dolorous whining sounds.
Men worked in the shop, and we therefore
quickly had peeping toms. They would hear the bathroom shower going, and they
quickly found out that that meant someone was taking a bath. My sister-in-law
was the first victim. She said she had seen someone peeking through a crack in
the adobe while she took a bath.
We cemented all the cracks in the adobe.
Then one of my brothers, home from camp,
caught sight of a hand one day clamped over the bathroom wall, its owner
probably readying himself for a lift. My brother rapped the hand smartly with a
piece of firewood lying by; we heard a pained yelp, and the scamper of feet.
We had to raise the bathroom wall. But my
father insisted on leaving an opening at top, for filing the wall up to the
roof would darken the bathroom too much.
We were of course, by all times, admitting
ourselves the defeated in this battle between peeping toms and our own outraged
modesties.
We’re fairly modern in our family. We go
about in shorts, and sometimes in bathing suits. Bare thighs and bare shoulders
and bare midriffs do not send any of us into hysterical oohs and aahs. And the
young of the family have always been allowed to watch their elders dressing and
undressing so that they could look upon the human body, ask what questions they
wished, and feel no abnormal curiosity.
But there is something indecent in the
fact of being spied upom while you’re doing your ablutions that outrages the
very sensibilities. I know it made me fighting mad.
I
stood up on the toilet seat, looked out over the bathroom wall and surveyed the
machine-shop yard. Before I could prevent myself, I had shouted a few
invectives at a boy I spied sitting down on a dismantled automobile chassis.
I had seen the head of hair that had
lowered itself from peeking at me and it had been just the shock hair he had. I
strung together all the Tagalog words I had in the back of my mind for just
such emergencies as this, and flung them at him.
Everybody in the yard let their work drop
while they stared at my mixture of English, Tagalog, and Visayan swear words,
but the shocki-headed lad sat there and made no show that he had heard.
Then a Chinese boy also standing by nodded
his head at me, rolled his eyes at the lad and thus indicated himself as
witness that I had indeed placed my finger on the correct man.
All the people in the house had gotten
wind of what was up. My mother gave me my clothes and had to literally take me
off the toilet seat and tell me which article of clothing to put on my by now
dried body.
We ranged ourselves like a tribunal at the
iron-grilled window of the house as we waited for Papa to bring us the culprit.
My palms actually itched with the desire
to slap his boob’s face.
My ears tingled with the desire for
violence and my face felt flaming hot
When the lad came he was sandwiched
between my father whose nostrils seemed to flare with his anger, and a
meek-looking man in a dirty suit of maong,
who kept wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. The lad himself was a
sullen-looking creature. His face looked stony, and his hangdog air was not
repentant so much as sneering.
As always, in cases like this, you get keyed
up to a moment, telling yourself what you’ll do when the moment comes. And yet
when the actual minute arrives, all of a sudden, you feel a change of heart.
That is what happened in this case.
All of a sudden, I seemed to be removed
from this spot, this moment, this role. I watched as from a distance the
spectacle of myself, my brothers.
I rejected the thoughts in my head as
sentimental, saying to myself, the man is just putting on an act, those tears
are mere show.
And yet I know the man was not acting. And
there would be other days, other people. And he would cry, but --- I looked
again at his son --- it would not improve that lad.
I felt guilty in my heart of some fault,
some vague shortcoming I had, that was responsible for that lad’s being what he
was, and what, I knew, he would surely be.
I turned away from the father and the son.
I walked away. Looking back, I saw his face, his tears just drying, his eyes
looking aas though he would call me back.
Reference:
"Low Wall" by Alfon, Estrella. Booksgoogle.com. Web. 16 March 2013. <http://booksgoogle.com.ph/book:-philippine+book+short+stories>
Reference:
"Low Wall" by Alfon, Estrella. Booksgoogle.com. Web. 16 March 2013. <http://booksgoogle.com.ph/book:-philippine+book+short+stories>