fiction

Old Movies
by Ian Rosales Casocot

ON GOOD DAYS, Mother comes out of her room in an Ava Gardner stupor. She is a sinewy siren with mischief in her hair. She has a glass of Scotch in her hand, daintily handled. She lights a cigarette, and blows smoke into my face, all the while keeping an ice maiden stance perfected after so many nights watching Kim Novak in Vertigo. Auntie Nida, on the way to the kitchen, pinches her ass while I gag from the smoke. “Stop that, Charo,” Auntie Nida tells her, “the boy’s only ten.”

“The boy’s a bastard,” Mother quickly says. Then she laughs, the ashes from her cigarette spilling into the slinky black of her Holly Golightly dress. She ruffles my 10-year old hair and coos. “Don’t you just look like your father, Jaggy? Named after him, too. Travis the bastard. All Travises are bastards, yes?”

“Charo! You’re drunk,” Auntie Nida hisses from far away, cloistered with her chopping boards and black-bottomed skillets. There are telltale odors of escabeche stealing into the room.

Sometimes, I catch a flicker of life in Mother’s tipsy eyes. “Ma?” I ask.

“Ava,” she will insist, her voice a bit more throaty.

It never usually lasts long. Ava Gardner fades away, always by the second glass of Scotch.

“Come on, Jaggy,” she will then say. “I suppose we can watch a movie in my room now.”

I do not remember much what sobriety can be. On bad days when she is not Ava Gardner, or Kim Novak, or Lolita Rodriguez, Mother is a weeping shadow, her room locked and curtained off—her darkness as dramatic as the lull before an evening’s last full show.

* * *

PEOPLE CALL ME JAGUAR, like the wild animal, for no apparent reason except that under proper lighting, I can pass of as a young Philip Salvador. My name is Travis actually, because that was how my Auntie Nida remembered my father’s name when I was born. This I learn later on.

My father’s name was Travis, and he was a security guard over at the big pawnshop on San Juan Street. He had a motorcycle and a killer mustache, and told everybody he was once a taxidriver from Carcar, Cebu. Other than that, there was nothing else to remember about him except his face in a terrified blur—people said—as he cranked his way out of town on his motorcycle the day after my mother’s water broke during dinner at Lolong’s house, and fainted dead away.

That was the first time everyone knew she was pregnant—and laboring. “But she was so small, her tummy was so small—she was wearing baggy clothes all the time. Nobody knew!” Auntie Nida would now say, if anybody at all cared to ask. Pregnancies were a dime a dozen.

Everyone thought mother just peed over the bad escabeche.

She had been sick the past few months, Auntie Nida remembered. Refused to eat anything, except hamburgers, which she ate constantly. She had grown pale and was dizzy most days—would not see the doctor even, despite Auntie Nida’s constant nagging.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” Mother would say.

Nay Gloria, Mother’s cousin, swore to Auntie Nida that mother was getting out of bed at the strangest hours of the night, to vomit at the upstairs toilet. Nay Gloria would ask, “Are you all right?”—rubbing her eyes to squint into the garish whiteness of the fluorescent tiles.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” Mother would say.

Food poisoning. And they would go back to bed, and Nay Gloria would think, yes, the fish was bad that evening at supper, and perhaps Nanang Conching could get fresher meat next time? Nanang Conching was getting careless. It was very difficult to get good help these days.

So nobody saw it coming. Not that night, when Lolong was telling everybody at the dinner table that the mayor of the town was up to some dirty tricks. “How the fool got elected is beyond me,” he boomed, just as Nanang Conching was serving the food.

Auntie Nida was nagging along, too: “Perhaps you can eat proper, Charo, Inday. None of those hamburgers now. Bad for you. Bad meat—I hear they use cats for meat, those restaurants. Catburgers! Ay, the horror. Here, Nanang made some fish escabeche.” She scooped a piece into mother’s plate, and ladled a generous amount of the sweet brown sauce over it. Then Mother’s water broke, and she fainted at the shock.

Lolong thundered. “What in God’s name...?”

Nobody was able to eat the escabeche except Pudding the cat, but by that time everyone was in the car. Four in the back—mother, Auntie Nida, Nay Gloria, Lolita the neighbor—and three in the front—Dodong the driver, Lolong, and Gerardo, Lolita’s son—, which made the whole car quite tight, but nobody seemed to notice or to care, except mother who was beginning to come around, and was screaming.

“Breathe now, Charo, like a good girl—huff, huff, huff—you wretched child! How can you be so stupid! Why didn’t you tell anyone you were pregnant, for God’s sake! Breathe!”

Mother went on screaming.

Lolong fumed. “It’s that Travis ba, inday? Putsa! Oh Jesus. Are you all right, inday? Are you? This is crazy. Where’s the hosp—?” Mother’s screams drowned out Lolong’s voice.

“Now, now, just breathe, okay?” Auntie Nida said. She was holding her arm over mother’s head, and wiping mother’s sweat from her brow with a tissue paper. “Are we there yet, Dong? Can’t you hurry, you turtle, you son of a bitch? Have you been drinking again?”

“No, ma’am,” slurred Dodong the driver, as mother screamed some more.

In the grim rush, everything seemed like an old Buster Keaton sketch—slapstick tragedy, with no screen irises to fade off the scene, only breathing and cramped space to puncture the soundtrack of tires screeching, and mother screaming.

“Breathe now, Charo, breathe,” Auntie Nida said.

“I can’t breathe!” Mother screamed. “I can’t breathe!”

“Well then, maybe you should have thought of that before you got yourself knocked up,” Auntie Nida said angrily, and then in a beat: “Is Travis really the father?”

Mother screamed.

Nobody saw the car that came from the right of an intersection, rammed into them, and turned like tootsie roll melting on a hot day. Their car skidded to the sidewalk, and crashed, wrapping itself around an electric pole. But they were packed in so tight they just bounced a little bit—except for Dodong the driver who flew through the windshield like a paper plane and landed a good ten meters away with head cracked open like a ripe watermelon.

When the police and the ambulance arrived, which was a long time, I burst through with a wail, into the backseat. Nay Gloria would later tell me there was blood and glass everywhere. Mother had fainted again, and Auntie Nida was screaming. Lolong just kept muttering, “Travis... Sorry. Sorry...” before senile dementia took over, almost on the spot, and he was seen walking around the car, talking to his friend Mike, who had already been dead twelve years. Lolong was 62.

Auntie Nida named me Travis, “to make us all remember this lecheng yawa, this night,” but she couldn’t really think of anything by the time the ambulance screeched into the hospital, and the nurse was pestering her for the father’s family name. “Travis... Travis...,” she just said.

“That would be the father’s name, ma’am. And his last name?”

“Peste, I don’t know his last name!”

“Okay, then. I take it the mother’s... single?”

Auntie Nida wheeled around like a mad bull. “The child’s a bastard, okay? Call him Travis, if you want, just like that bastard.” And like a willowy Delia Razon, she crumpled to the floor weeping and shaking.

* * *

“IS THIS STORY true?” I prod Nay Gloria when I’m old enough to listen, and ask. “It’s a little too dramatic.”

“Ambot, ‘noy, uy,” she shrugs. “If you don’t ask questions, you don’t get lies—or worse, the truth.” Nay Gloria sighs. “Then again, I could be lying. I don’t know ... Go ask your mother.”

But Mother is too busy being Bette Davis.

* * *

MY NAME IS TRAVIS SILAYAN. I have my mother’s eyes. I don’t look like my father. I should know: I have seen him tucked away in my mother’s purse when she is in bed, endlessly and silently watching old movies on her TV, as if she is waiting for nothing to come from the cold of the night, and only has this vicarious comfort of the dark and the flickering pictures before her.

Cofradia. Casablanca. Gone With the Wind. Shane. The Betamax whirs away the silent nights.

The whirring is my first memory.

Sometimes she settles for something new, but the new ones are almost always violent and terrifying—“This is the romance of the present,” she murmurs to me when she remembers I am watching the movie with her.

We do not sit near each other.

“I named you after Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, you know,” she says. “You had killer eyes, like Travis Bickle.”

I am five. I do not know who Robert DeNiro is.

Later she tells me she doesn’t really know why my name is Travis. “Your Auntie Nida named you Travis. Go ask her,” she whispers, and turns away.

I have no memory of my mother not crying.

The man in the photo has chinky eyes and short hair gelled back. He slings a black coat over his shoulders, “like James Dean,” mother tells me. She does not care I am rifling through her things.

He poses with peacock masculinity astride his motorcycle—of a vintage model that I once have seen in one of those magazines. But it is an old photo. The colors are almost gone, and the borders are frayed with time. And the spot where his face is is somehow faded, but you can still see the tentative smile, and the way it crinkles his eyes.

I am six when I first see the picture, and I think the man strange. Nobody I know poses like that, not even Lino the doctor who comes now and then to check on Lolong and my increasingly frail mother. Not Noy Ishmael—Ishmá, Nanang Conching’s husband—who has become our driver after Dodong. (Nobody is allowed to talk about the past.)

Certainly not Lolong who is doubled up most days in geriatric gravity, and snaps without his dentures at everybody, and demands to see Lolang night after night. “But Nanay’s gone, ‘Tay. You should know that,” Auntie Nida tells him, as she leads him to bed.

“What do you mean, woman?” Lolong booms back. “She was just here a moment ago, showing me this beautiful child... this beautiful child...”

“Okay, ‘Tay.”

“Do you know that beautiful child’s name?”

“No, I don’t, ‘Tay.”

“Aw, you wouldn’t know, anyhow. It was Charo. Yes. Sweet Charo. She was a beautiful child.”

“Okay, ‘Tay.”

“What are we talking about? Who are you, woman?”

“It’s Nida, ‘Tay. Your eldest daughter.”

“I don’t have a daughter,” he snaps. “I’m not even married yet.”

Auntie Nida looks old for her age.

* * *

“YOU ARE SO ROCK HUDSON,” Steve tells me. We are sitting up in bed past midnight, watching TNT. Marlon Brando is screaming “Stella!” and rips his shirt. Stella comes down the stairs, swaying in the wanton heat.

“And I suppose you want to be my Doris Day?” I tell him, as I catch my breath. In the darkness I reach for his hand. He gives me a squeeze. I tell him I love the way the bluish tint of the TV bounces off his curly hair.

Steve laughs, and turns serious. “Come on, Travis. This is the ‘90s, you know. You really don’t have to hide who you are anymore, not from your family. Did you know that they published Ladlad last year, and it has since been flying off the shelves? I don’t know what that tells you--“

I sigh. “It tells me nothing.”

Steve reaches for the remote control and turns the TV mute. “Something. It tells you to be open is to be free.”

I grin. “You talk like a goddam queenie activist.”

“Jesus, Jag, we’re too old for these things.”

“I am only 26.”

“Well, I am telling you the truth. And you know why Jason Gould’s gay.”

“Who’s Jason Gould?”

“Barbra Streisand’s son.”

We laugh. “I think I know what you’re talking about,” I tell Steve. “Still, my mother’s my mother.”

“It’s always someone’s mother,” Steve says.

In my constant nightmares, Mother becomes a crazed Joanne Crawford, immortalized by Faye Dunaway as Mommie Dearest, shouting “No more wirehangers!” I picture her with a glass of Scotch in her hand, spilling liquor down my face.

“Jag,” Steve says after a while, “do you remember Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon? Do you remember he was cold and hard, like his name, Sam Spade? He beats up Joel Cairo—the Peter Lorre character—not just because he has to, but because Cairo carries a perfumed handkerchief. Get it? You know what that meant in a 1941 movie.”

Maybe we watch too many movies. Just too many Judy Garland musicals.

* * *

I AM EIGHT WHEN I manage to read the note at the back of the photograph: “To Charo. Sa atong kaugmaon, Travis”—and think how strange it is for this man to also have my name. But stranger things have been said to me. That I am a “special” child, for one thing.

“Like Jesus, you know?” Nay Gloria says. “Only not holy.” She is flustered. “Oh, you know what I mean...”

“No, I don’t,” I tell her.

I am exasperated with the evasiveness of adults. My Grade Two teacher, for example, tells me I am too far advanced from my other classmates. I have an urge to tell her that is what you get when you have watched Judy Holliday ten thousand times in Born Yesterday since you were five.

Nay Gloria sighs. She is still unmarried. She lives with a friend named Carmen.

“Okay, Jaguar,” Nay Gloria is saying. “This is what I mean. You ask me who your father is? Nobody knows. Maybe your birth was some kind of... of an, uh, Immaculate Conception, just like Mama Mary. You know?”

I’m eight. I don’t exactly know what she means. But it sounds nice. Chocolate Connection. Which is like the name of the ice cream Nay Gloria buys me when we go to the movies with Tita Carmen. They are always happy, and are always glad to take me along with them, “as long as you remain quiet and be a good big boy that you already are.” I nod gratefully, because I like real movies—the big ones on screen, and because my mother never takes me anywhere anymore.

Nay Gloria and Tita Carmen buy me popcorn and Pepsi, and if I want, they will buy me ice cream, too. I stuff myself as E.T. flickers in the dark. There is something about Elliott that makes me understand. And he has the most beautiful eyes on a boy I have ever seen.

* * *

LOLONG MISTAKES ME for a mirror while I am dressing to go out with Gerardo and the gang. He has been too cranky lately—78 years old and making everyone miserable. Only mother seems content with his old age.

I wonder when the old coot will die.

Lolong studies my face. “Oh my God... Oh my God,” he whispers, almost afraid.

“Lolong, are you okay?” I steady his shaking hands. The faint brown blotches on his skin snake like a curse. His skin feels cold and balmy. For a moment, clarity enters his eyes, and he regards me with the careful scrutiny of an interested, yet wary, stranger.

“Charo?” he croaks.

“Mother is in her room, Lolong,” I tell him. “She’s tired. She’s watching a Shirley Temple movie.” She is not. She is crying again, and refuses to see me.

I tell all these to Gerardo when he comes up the drive in his new red Jeep.

“Forgive the old man, Jaguar,” Gerardo says, as we drive to the Dumaguete Music Box. “I remember, when you were born and we had that accident—I think I was six—he went completely nuts. Never recovered from it. I suppose he remembers you during that time.”

“I was a baby. Nobody remembers a baby’s face.”

“I remember you. When you plopped out into the backseat, you did not cry. You boomed.”

I fidget with the car radio. Soon I clear the air with Madonna singing “Papa Don’t Preach.” We have our high school girls to score with. I am 18, a virgin. I am ready. I am enthusiastic. I am eager for the bravado of beer.

* * *

TONIGHT, MOTHER DIES of ovarian cancer. I suppose she must die from something. She has already been dead a long time.

She does not tell anybody she has the disease until she emerges one day from her room, her face a frightened blur, clutching her groin in a staggered fashion to Auntie Nida’s room, screaming from the pain, and fainting dead away.

That was the first time everyone knew she was sick—and dying.

Everyone thought mother would just fade away, like the iris vanishing point of her old movies. Nobody sees her around anymore.

She did not tell anyone she was cringing, night after day, from the pain, from deep inside her, for the past months. Auntie Nida only knew she had refused to eat anything, even hamburgers. She had grown pale and was dizzy most days—would not see the doctor even, despite Nay Gloria’s constant nagging.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” mother would say.

Tita Carmen swore to Nay Gloria that mother was getting out of bed at the strangest hours of the night, to cry at the upstairs toilet. “Are you all right?” Tita Carmen would ask her, partly irritated from the constant visits, which interrupted her sleep and Nay Gloria’s, their bedroom only a jump away from the creaky toilet door.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” my mother said. “Just remembering Tatay, that’s all.”

Lolong has been dead six months.

And they went back to bed, and Tita Carmen thought that perhaps she could oil the hinges of the toilet doors tomorrow. The house was getting old, and its occupants even older, and crankier. It was very difficult to get good sleep these days.

So nobody saw it coming. Not until that night when mother screamed.

I remember that night. I am in Steven’s arms. We have finished watching Spartacus. We try to memorize Laurence Olivier’s poolside seduction of Tony Curtis. We are hungry for oysters and snails.

Now we are watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal at Lolong’s house when the call comes from the hospital. “It’s Auntie Charo,” Nay Gloria cries on the phone. It takes forever for her to speak intelligibly. She breathes deeply. “Jaggy, your mother’s dead.”

“I suppose,” I finally say.

Something collapses inside me, but, as yet, there are no tears. Mother, I think, has cried for me all these years. The coincidence of moments is suddenly too strange: death coming in as I am seeing Death—hooded and ominous, cinematic—playing chess with the knight. A negotiation. It is easier to think of yesterday when—

When I visit her in the hospital, and she sits up in bed, eating an apple, and smiling. I have never really seen my mother smile.

“Hi.”

“Hello, Ma,” I hesitate.

She laughs weakly and puts the half-finished apple away. She looks terrible and cheap—Loni Anderson after the facelift. “How very An Affair to Remember. Do you remember how that scene with Deborah Kerr goes after she sees Cary Grant again after the accident, and he comes up to her and says a nonchalant hello?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Deborah Kerr goes, ‘And all I could ever say back was hello’... That was a sad movie, wasn’t it? It was the sadness that made it more beautiful, I think.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Is your mother still beautiful?”

“Yes, Ma. You look like Ali McGraw.”

“Ah, Love Story. Do you remember that? Ali McGraw dying of a dreadful disease, yet growing more beautiful by the minute. Hollywood’s beautiful, Jaggy. I just wish life could be a little bit more like that.”

“I’m sorry, Ma.”

“I’m sorry, Travis.”

This is the longest conversation we’ve ever had.

“Ma, I’m—.”

She looks at me quietly, and nods faintly. “I can understand,” she gently says. She closes her eyes, and I move to the door. Her voice, weak now, stops me.

“Travis never touched me, you know,” I hear her say. “But he promised to take me away—away from all that fright. But I guess he forgot. I guess he got too frightened. Your Lolong was capable of anything, even when he was already getting old.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry, hijo, I could have been more of a mother, you know? Like Ann Revere—“

“National Velvet. Elizabeth Taylor was just 12.”

“—or somebody. Like one of those Brady Bunch.”

“Mr. Brady died of AIDS.”

“Yes, but all we really remember are the toothpaste smiles.”

“The toothpaste smiles...”

“I still can be Mrs. Brady, you know.”

“I suppose.”

“Just give me time, okay?”

I nod.

There is silence, punctuated only by the soothing whir of the air-conditioning. I move to the television to turn it on, and to the light switches to turn them off. This is the only right scenario: the silence, the blue hue of the muted TV screen, and the encompassing darkness.

“Goodnight, ma.”

But I think I have always known this is coming. Now, I push down the cradle of the telephone with my fingers, and Nay Gloria becomes a persistent buzz in my ears. I have promised my mother I will not cry: I can only see around me and breathe in the comforting darkness, and hear the soundtrack the scene will have wrought—John Williams as he takes me to the stars? Nino Rota, perhaps, with a haunting score, as beautifully sad as the trembling of my feet. I slowly walk now to where Steve lies sleeping, waiting for my arms to engulf him goodnight. He wakes a little, buzzes my cheek, and whispers: “Is it all over?”

“Yes.” I, too, speak softly.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“We’ll see her tomorrow, Jag.”

“I know.”

“Okay, then, good night.”

“Okay.”

In the dark of the room, the blue shadows still flicker, but they only lull me to sleep. The last thing I remember is the solicitous dusk, which is the authority of dreams, the keeper to the vicarious life that becomes the seeking hearts’ devoted companion. Steve, Lolong, Auntie Nida, Mother, my so-called father, my so-called life—and this, my redemption, my wishes for a happy ending: they all collide in a dreamy sepia kaleidoscope, and I breathe deeply. Like the old films, the night fades, and I descend into the movies of my dreams.

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