Fiction: So All This Could Have Been Mine?

SB Alojamiento

She was plump as a pillow. Looked like she had been left to herself in the kitchen most of the time. Pink cheeks, pink lips. She was especially plump around the belly. I was feeling giddy, like demons were dancing and somersaulting inside my head. Standing there in your yard in front of her, I couldn’t believe what I had just done. I had the notion of retreating. But held out. I inspected your tiny house. So this is where you keep her? I asked for you and she almost turned away, like she wasn’t finished stacking the firewood under your stove yet and she still had to clean the fish and by and by you’d be coming home and she had not even cooked the rice.

“You’re his officemate?” she asked. She must have been accustomed to human rights cases pursuing you down to your hovel. I did not reply and she looked me up once more.

“You’re Incomplete?” she asked again. She had a sullen voice that could have only come from weariness.

“Can I piss?” I answered. “Is there a CR?”

I meant to be a pestering burgis, and already, my eyes were taking in every dreary detail of her environs – earthen jar, plastic plates and plastic glasses; banana peelings on the table and one under the chair; unwashed dishes and uncleaned fish in the sink; coconut husks, a litter of paper, among the fallen bundles of firewood under your stove. The corner of an unrolled mat peeped out of your half-open room, baby’s bottles rolled among empty glasses on the floor, and unwashed diapers spilled out of a pail beside a plastic pee pan under what looked like your writing table. I set my Tamil-woven bag on the wooden bench while I looked around the walls for a possible exit to the urinary. She indicated to me the direction, and I went out of the same door I got in, slunk between nipa thatches, and was surprised to see you had a decent toilet bowl. On the line above me hung your nylon underwears. Red, blue, green. With black prints. I almost fell out of the latrine giggling.

“I'm not his student,” I said, as I picked my brightly-colored bag, put it on my lap and looked at her in the eye. Her lips paled a little. She was waiting for more words, I could see, and I tried to match her anger and her hurt.

“I like him, you know,” I said in a voice that tried to steady itself, “We…” I paused like I couldn’t tell her the rest of it, and she stared at me a moment, her mouth opening a little, before her face jerked toward the window. She was looking out into the sea, like her hopes were dashed anew and were now floating there. A glint in her hurt eyes had that and-now-this-again look, and I knew that I wasn’t a new case really. My fingers twirled with the tassels of my bag, my teary eyes tracing the blazes of the reds and greens and oranges and blacks and fuchsias of the hanging threads. I have a nice bag. I was telling her, you don’t have. She glanced at it, I noticed and I felt high, happy, mad. Had she asked where I got it, I would have told her I’d been to East Timor, scaled its mountain borders and consorted with the Tamil guerillas. But she didn’t. My bag was the last of her concerns. She was more interested in me, and it was I she was examining when I looked back up at her. I knew, too, that at that moment, I looked painfully young and beautiful in her eyes.

“He is always like that,” she finally said, drawing a breath, as she returned her gaze to the sea, her brows knitting with boredom and exhaustion. I almost laughed. You were really all she had, beside a thatched roof and a dirty kitchen beside the sea. And there I was, trying to taunt her with a bag that she didn’t have. But I was happy inside me. I was thinking of you. I was thinking, Now I have outhurt you.

“Why are you here?” she suddenly asked, as she turned her face back to me, more exasperated than anything else. She wanted me out of her house now, I believed, and wanted you home right then, now that she had a thing with you.

“Nothing.”

I was still playing with my bag’s tassels. “I just wanted to see you, I guess.”

She put her hand on the table as though she was about to get up and send me out.

“Now that he wouldn’t see me.”

That held her down another moment and she looked a little puzzled.

I made a funny face, my eyes big and wide on her. “I called him up today, you know, and he wouldn’t talk to me.” Her mouth dropped open.

I looked toward the door, went on talking. “There’s really nothing between us. Really. I mean, there was, almost, but I ran away. I ran away as fast as I could.” I stopped, catching myself grinning and seeing that she was slightly smiling herself. I wished she read English and had read Alice in Wonderland and recognized the line, but what a wide beautiful smile she had, reddish lips and even teeth. For a second or two we laughed into each other’s eyes, and fearing we would break into senseless laughter, I stood up and picked up my bag.

“You’re going now?” She really sounded anxious, to my bafflement.

“I think I have to. It’d be funny if he'd find us talking.” I reached for her hand and clasped it, and turned toward the door.

“Wait.” I paused.

"You're sure..."

“Yes, I’m going now. I’m sure.”

“No.” She looked lonely and pale and was trying to smile. I waited.

“You sure there was… there was nothing between you?”

I laughed. “I’m sure. There was nothing. It was nothing. He loves you.”

“I don’t believe it.”

I felt suddenly annoyed. “That he loves you?”

“No. That he doesn’t love you.”

My knees wobbled a moment. I faced her and held both her hands.

“No matter. The thing is, oh… now that I see you, and saw how it is here, I don’t feel as bad anymore.” I let go of her, adjusted the sling of my bag on my shoulder, and stepped toward the door.

“Would you know it… if …” I stopped, turned around and hang my head to one side. She was a confused heap, her hands making funny movements, her face a grip of anxiety.

“Does he go out with other women, too? Would you know? I mean, do you know of others beside you?” There was urgency in her voice, and the walls of your house shook with my laughter.

Then I stopped. She looked shocked and was flushing all at once and gripping the edge of the table as though she was falling.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh!” I went back to her and hugged her tight, and I lost my head a little.

Next thing I knew I was running down the narrow pathway and out into the road toward the highway. I had a sense of fleeing from something terribly sad and mad. People were staring and were moving aside as I came their way and I realized that I was laughing and crying all at the same time.