Despite her conviction that men were sadly inferior, my mother’s relentless and often-remarked-on low-grade anger was deeply tied to her being a woman. She felt trapped in her womanhood, although she was accepting of all the degradations: that anything anyone didn’t want to do would fall to her, from washing dishes to listening to problems. When I pointed this out, she would get even angrier. Did I not think she was proud of this role? Despite her prickliness, she was very good at being a woman, a cook, a wife, a comforter of babies, a brilliant student—although one who’d abandoned her studies. Any sympathy from me over what she’d given up she took as condescension. What I felt acutely as I watched my unspooling divorce with the same detachment I reserved for a Netflix documentary, was that she would have been a friend through this. My mother, whose advice had always struck me as bizarre and unusable (friends are usually stupid, don’t have friends) would have understood. She would have sat me down and explained it all with a clarity made just for me, in a language all our own. But she wasn’t in Manila. Here I felt the vacuum of her absence more keenly, but sometimes, when for example I was looking at my tita Rosa napping in her rocker, the rosary beads held loosely in her lap, I would think that had my mother been here, this is what she would have been seeing. She would have gazed at her aging sister and begun to grieve, worried at the long years she would spend alone after her ate had died. In these moments, I felt that we held the same space, as if I were not feeling my anticipation of grief at Tita Rosa’s death, but my mother’s. Or maybe this was just more magical thinking, my little way of keeping her alive.

V

V

I awoke with the heat of the day flung over me like a blanket. The previous night I’d had difficulty sleeping and resorted to my dwindling supply of lorazepam at three. It was now eleven thirty. I rose from the bed and went to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. There was no water in the pipes, which responded to my turning of the tap with an angry rattle, but at least the bucket in shower stall was full.

Tito Iñigo greeted me at the door of my room, wagging his tail. A puddle on the parquet near the phone table attested to some earlier activity. I wandered across the sala, to where Beng was sitting at the dining table. She said that Tita Rosa had just gone into the library to pray the rosary and asked if I wanted breakfast.

“Kapé lang,” I said and helped myself to the thermos and the coffee packet.