Rainy Days and Mondays

The rain always made her happy. Which was unfortunate because she lived in the dry climes near the Ilocos desert. It rarely rained there and the choice to live in the area was not hers to make. She used to live in Tacloban, where the weather mimicked London, only it was much milder and kinder on the soul.

Today she is tending her vegetable garden, something she hates doing but has to, to help supplement her food supply. She came to live here in the North because her aging Aunt asked her to and she had no other choice but to make the move because she was indebted to her. Her Aunt is the family matriarch and sent her, who comes from the poor branch of the family, to college in Cebu when she was younger.

There was nobody else left to take care of the old Aunt. The other relatives were either married or settled abroad, or could not be made to budge from their cushy, trust fund-supported lives. She was the only one left who could be molested to care for the cranky octogenarian.

She did not live with her Aunt. The old coot guarded her privacy jealously, despite the armada of servants that ran her household like clockwork. There were forbidden spaces, forbidden topics of conversation, forbidden ideas and other restrictions that came with her relationship with her Aunt.

Call time at the ancestral house was seven am. She was expected to take breakfast with the matriarch and count the pills she was to take with each meal. Though still sharp, she was increasingly paranoid about the people who surrounded her. It was light work. She had to bring in meals at her Aunt’s suite whenever she did not feel like coming out to eat. She would be asked to read chapters of Victorian pulp during the early evenings to lull her to sleep. Her Aunt loved the British accent she acquired while living as a child with her domestic helper mother in London. She was allowed to go home when the last of the dinner dishes was washed.

While she was welcome to eat at the mansion, she preferred having dinner at her own cottage. It was small and cozy, a modern version of the nipa hut, which served as a guest house when her uncle was still alive and the couple entertained regularly. She loved cooking and loved the regular harvest of fresh vegetables from her garden, although she resented the time that tending it took from her reading.

No one knew if her Aunt would still live to be a hundred. Their ancestors lived to a ripe old age, sharp and healthy, which meant that if that did happen she still had at least a decade to stay with the matriarch. She was enrolled in an online MBA course with an Australian university, and though she appreciated the time that her lazy lifestyle afforded her to study, she did not like the uncertainty of having someone else control her future.

Today she read the anticlimactic reunion of Countess Mikaela and Duke Cambridge to her Aunt. There were signs of a drizzle during the walk home, which lifted her spirits a little. The rain made her happy because it reminded her of her late mother, who died working in London. She went there when she was five and came home to her father’s family in Tacloban when she turned 17, upon her mother’s death. They were poorer than dirt and thus encouraged her to seek her mother’s family in the North. Her Aunt acknowledged her and put her through school. The family was kind to her and did not discriminate against her despite her poverty.

She even got special treatment from some of her cousins who would take her along on their vacations around and outside the Philippines during school breaks.

As she approached her door, she saw a shadow moving across it. She was scared. If someone took it into their mind to hurt her here, she’d be a sitting duck. The cottage was isolated and cell phones did not work this side of town. She could not call for help.

The shadow became a clear figure in the weak evening light. She saw an unkempt woman with stringy hair and dirty skin. Her clothes were tattered. She was gaunt, as if she had not eaten for days. She looked to be at least twenty years older than her, in her fifties.

Fear gave way to sympathy. She held out her hand and told the woman she won’t hurt her. She asked her for her name, but the woman only grunted. Then she opened her mouth. Where there was supposed to be a tongue was a short stump of pink flesh. She clearly could not speak.

With a sigh of relief she opened her door and let the woman in. She took the notepad and pencil by the telephone and wrote “could you read and write?” The woman nodded. She asked, “what’s your name?”

The woman wrote in reply, “Sylvia”.

Then she offered her a seat and set two plates for dinner. It was a quick meal of fried fish and steamed vegetables. Then she took out a set of clothes and a bath towel and told Sylvia she could take a warm bath in the guest bathroom.

She took out her best linen and cleaned the guest bedroom, where she indicated Sylvia should sleep. Then she told her, she could stay for as long as she wanted with her, no questions asked. Sylvia nodded and smiled, an indication that she could hear and understand what she was saying.

Sylvia was up early the next morning, with a sheaf of papers in front of her on the dinner table. She looked years younger from when she first saw her yesterday. She looked up with a sheepish grin, scribbling quickly “I took liberties with your paper. I just had this urge to write.”  She smiled in return, and said it was okay, but she had to hurry or her Aunt will come looking for her.

She practically ran to the mansion, with extra cheer and a spring to her step. She was jolly as she did her duties, which made her Aunt wonder what the heck was going on. She could hardly wait for dinner to finish and breezed through three chapters of her Aunt’s new Victorian novel. Her Aunt pretended to fall asleep and smiled as she watched her run out of her boudoir through the slits in her eyes.

Curious to see what Sylvia had been writing, she sprinted through the distance that separated her cottage from the mansion. When she came home there was fish stew and steamed vegetables waiting for her. It rained that evening, as she pored through Sylvia’s poetry.

“These are great!” she exclaimed. Sylvia replied with a shy smile. “Thank you” she wrote. “Are there more?” she asked. Her guest must have written close to a hundred poems in the time she was away for that day.

Then she explained she was taking an online course with an Australian university and that she could ask them of the possibility of publishing Sylvia’s work. Her expression changed then. Her lips hardened and her eyes grew cold. She shook her head. “NO!” she wrote. Then, “If you do that, I’ll leave!” She let it be.

Their lives fell into a routine over the next three weeks. She’d run over to her Aunt’s in the morning, sometimes nearing tardiness because she consumed Sylvia’s poetry deep into the night. Evenings she’d run back to the cottage with dinner and Sylvia’s poetry waiting for her.

It never occurred to her to look for her guest’s kin until the third week, when she came home to find Sylvia passed out on the bathroom floor, nose bleeding profusely, and the toilet full of bile which she must have regurgitated.

It was reflex that made her call her Aunt. It all came spilling out and as arrangements for an ambulance have been made, her Aunt confessed to her that she thought she was carrying on an affair with a man. It made her laugh. The old coot was still an inveterate romantic despite her increasingly crabby demeanor.

Sylvia had late stage lung cancer. She knew about it but did not want to tell her family, which was why she wandered from their home in Pangasinan. It was a miracle that she lasted that long without treatment.

As she lay in the hospital, she wrote “Sorry” on a notepad to her. She sad it’s okay, but she wished that she told her the truth so she could have taken better care of her. When asked why she ran away, she turned her head and sobbed. Then she asked for Sylvia’s family’s contact details, she said she would not tolerate such behaviour.

They found Sylvia’s family soon enough. Then she understood why her guest ran away. Her husband was leaving her for a woman half her age and she did not want him to stay with her out of pity. Their two children were in America and estranged from her because she would not give them their inheritance when they asked for it.

There was remorse, but it was too late for it. Sylvia died on her third day in the hospital. It was raining then. The squash was in full bloom, their yellow flowers reminding her of a dish Sylvia made for dinner once.

As she was cleaning her cottage after her guest’s death, she found a note folded and inserted in one of the pillow cases in the guest bedroom.

In it was scribbled:

                As the Lord called me

                Bid me do His will

                I stopped speaking

                For my heart is full

                And I need to live

                I told myself

                Run away

                So I ran away.

And that’s what she did too.