An Excerpt from Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay

In this excerpt from my second novel, my two main characters—a small-town cop named Walter and a karaoke-bar singer named Rory—drive from their town of Paez into the heart of Manila to recover the body of Rory’s sister Soledad, a domestic helper reported to have died in Saudi Arabia in mysterious circumstances.


IT WAS midday when they reached Laguna, announced by a concrete arch on the highway, on either side of which the scenery looked exactly the same, a seamless flat stretch of rice fields fringed by coconuts. Walter had gone around enough to know that many parts of the country looked very different from this—and that there were Filipinos who grew up and grew old dreaming of mountains and oceans, of places like Paez on the far side of a big island—but he knew, in the same way, that you could drive for hours and see nothing but ocean on the one side and coconuts on the other, so large was this land, yet so familiar. Walter knew something else: that deep in those groves of coconut and bamboo, beneath the duhat and the tamarind trees, some people bore arms much bigger than his service .38, stewards and devotees of a stubborn faith in—what was it?—justice, or the future, or some such abstraction that never seemed to be worth another open-mouthed, fly-infested corpse in a ditch. He had seen a few of those along this same road the first few times he had traveled on it, although the last time—sitting in a provincial bus as a civilian—he thought he had seen them very much alive, sharp-angled shadows in the thorny bushes and the bamboo brakes. Even now, as he made a careful turn around a blind corner, pounding on his horn and with the engine keening, he did not know if he would be met on the other side by an Army carrier, or by a makeshift checkpoint—a fallen log, a 55-gallon drum—marking the temporary confusion of zones. That was what this country was all about: zones, boundaries, demarcations, reminders of where you belonged and where you stood. To forget these things was to invite disaster, and Walter had no intentions of going down that road again. Prudence was his watchword now, prudence and circumspection, the studious avoidance of unnecessary conflict—of which, as God himself knew best of all, there was entirely too much in Walter’s world.


WALTER STARED ahead at the asphalt road that bored through kilometer after kilometer of coconut country. Now and then an oncoming jeepney laden to the roof with stiff-haired children, great taut coils of green banana, and trussed-up chickens provided visual relief and nudged Walter back to alertness at the wheel. Rory had collapsed into her corner, yielding finally to the importunings of her shattered nerves, her hands clasping the handkerchief between her knees. Her eyes closed, and her breathing grew as regular as the throb of the van’s engine making steady time on a road in a landscape as fixed as the stars above at night. 

Bizarrely, just as the van crossed a steel bridge into another town, Walter found himself slowing down for a procession of hired jeepneys and tricycles queued up behind a dirty gray station wagon; its rear top and seats had been sheared to make way for a vinyl flatbed, on which a child’s white coffin, stenciled with silver scallops, now rested. Walter inched his way along the shoulder past this sorry train, doing his best not to seem disrespectful of the dead, but drawing dark stares all the same from the family in the frontmost jeep, just behind the coffin. A small boy who may well have been the brother of the deceased waved at him and Walter smiled back; the boy dropped out of sight, wanting to play a game, but the van had gone on ahead. Rory slept through the interval, her fingers unclenching in their first new hour of repose.


THE VAN merged into a stream of delivery trucks on the expressway and Walter’s driving settled into a recognizable rhythm, punctuated by a forward surge every few minutes as a gap opened in the line of traffic ahead and Walter gunned the engine to take advantage of it. He was in no great hurry, but he hated staring at the boys in the backs and at the tops of the trucks—the teenage jockeys who leapt down from their perches and guided the drivers with slaps and whistles when they backed up into tight corners, and who sometimes literally lost their heads when they awoke from their tarpaulin beds to find a low-hung bridge or power line in front of them, a second too late. Worse, Walter hated being stared at, with the inevitable snickering and ribald teasing that went on whenever a man and a woman—who might have been brother and sister, for all these roughnecks knew—came within viewing distance, like a movie with a makeshift plot to occupy the bored. If he had been all by himself Walter might have pulled out his gun to scare the hecklers away, but then again if he had been truly alone, they would have retreated into their own thoughts in sullen silence. It was a silence Walter understood, but which he himself found difficult to bear for too long if he were with someone else, as he was now. His passenger had been so still that he had thought she had fallen asleep again, but he noticed her fingertips thrumming on her lap, marking time, or the tempo of a tune he could not hear.


WALTER TURNED left at a junction in the superhighway and joined a throng of westbound vehicles on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the throbbing nerve of traffic Rory remembered from her last visit to Manila and the Megamall, and it now seemed broader and busier than ever, a great ditch having been dug right down its middle as far as Rory could see in both directions. Her curiosity drove her to crane her neck out the window and Walter had to pull her back in to keep passing buses from lopping her head off. The sudden touch of his hand on her arm—a sharp, instinctive tug—jolted her back to her seat, and she caught her breath, realizing how she had been staring open-mouthed at the city, once more transformed as much by itself as by her memory and imagination, which quickened with every new feature that sped past her senses—the hotels and condominiums insolently upthrust against the steel-gray sky, the earth-moving machines that rose and snarled like ravenous prehistoric beasts feasting on the city’s guts, the sheer profusion of gleaming new cars and battered jeeps nudging each other aside on that eight-lane highway, the shifting billboards flashing one impossibly pretty face one second and an even prettier one the next, the appliance stores and furniture showrooms touting chrome-heavy wares in rakish angles and sexy curves—banks of busy but soundless flat-screen TVs on which the same image moved as of one mind and body, high-backed beds and apple-green sofas that stretched from one end of the room to the other, aquariums aswarm with strange and precious fish. And the people themselves all seemed to know where they were going, or how they were expected to act in this massively choreographed, painstakingly produced performance, the pedestrians sure of step even with cellular phones glued to their ears, the motorists puffing blithely away on their cigarettes and tapping their fingers on their dashboards in tune to some muted radio, staring a hundred meters ahead.

Rory remembered, from her last visit to Manila, that the impression would fracture and fail upon closer scrutiny—that she would slip on the grime on the sidewalks and smell the sewage in the culverts and see the palpable confusion in one of every five faces she would meet on the street; but in the few minutes that it took to cover three or four city blocks and what they had to offer, she could absorb only the general rhythm and the vibrancy of things, the surge and swell of a vast and mighty ocean aboveground. It was almost absurd to think of the city and of death in the same breath, so adamant was its vitality, its insistence on the attention and respect—almost as if it had grabbed and held you by the jaw—of the slow-witted visitor.  At that moment, for some reason not immediately clear to Rory herself but which Walter naturally took to be sisterly bereavement, Rory burst out in tears, caught in the rip of opposing tides, feeling badly for Soli one minute and cursing her the next for having done something so grievously stupid as to end up lifeless when there was so much more to see and do, wherever she may have found herself in the bustling universe outside of Paez.