a short story by Roger B Rueda
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The woman was dead as the audience, shocked into doing nothing, were looking at the man pointing a gun at the victims. The news of the accident knocked her family for six deeply.
***
Over a thousand mourners attended the funeral procession. A swarm of journalists followed her car. Her family mourned her death for two years. Speculation about why she hugged the real target was rife. She was a fashion designer whose inner life had remained mysterious, despite the many interviews she had given.
The fashion empire remained open while transitions were carried out.
***
Caniogan, yes, it is. The once so dreary countryside is now burgeoning with shops, and the streets are lined with enormous mansions where the rich and famous live. A lot has changed since William left and put Caniogan out of his mind - a place of his early days where sugarcane whose tall thick stems and leaves would put their nipah hut out of sight from being noticed from the street. The reasons he left were more complicated. William knew he was gay by the time he was fourteen, and, at fifteen, he needed to flee from here in tears as his father, battering him nearly to death with a bough, didn’t want him to grow gay, even effeminate, as he'd got a very effeminate manner and voice. His mother seemed so very meek and mild
. His brothers were against his taking action like a gay. He had already found his father and brothers domineering. So, the best thing he should do was to run off the mountains or somewhere away from them. He finally reached the coast after a night walking. There, he sat on a bench in a shade of a mangrove tree on a corner and observed the passengers heading for Bacolod.
Sonia, bringing William to mind, sat in the shade of a tree, sipping tea and eating oatmeal cookies, her bonsai coconut trees, hundreds of them, and her hermit crabs listening to her litanies. She cried bitter tears when she looked at the sky.
The once-empty site is now covered with a beautiful house. Passersby have always held Sonia’s house in awe.
It is surrounded by fire trees, so it's not overlooked at all, but it’s the most beautiful place in Caniogan. She has complained about the noise from some of her neighbours’ party though she has always been very friendly towards them. Her house’s facade is kept looking clean and serene, fresh paint applied routinely. It is symmetrical with proportionately decreasing size windows on the second and third stories, giving the structure the illusion of greater size. The rear facade is dominated by a three storey full length porch and a five storey elliptical tower. The integrity of her house is excellent.
Every day, she has to fetch her two adopted daughters from school, which is a half-hour drive away. She left London a month after her husband passed away. Her husband and she established a clothes retailing business in the city centre. When he, her husband's name is Jay, died, he bequeathed most of his properties in the centre of Manila to Sonia. Now, she is one of the richest women in Caniogan. She has several houses in Manila and one in the country, in Caniogan, and a flat in Makati.
When she is not around Caniogan, she is on holiday.
***
While Sonia was driving her adopted daughter to school, a bicycle turned the corner too quickly, and her car sideswiped the bicycle coming towards it. The old man fell and injured his head.
Sonia got out of her car and rescued the old man who hurt his head and back when he fell off his bicycle.
‘Tell me where it hurts,’ asked Sonia, speaking worriedly. Her daughters ran towards her and they carried the injured man to the car. He had to be rushed to casualty.
Sonia rang in to say she'd be back home the next day and that her home help had to bring her some dinner for her and her daughters. She was monitoring his condition if it was improving.
She looked at his face and cried for joy when, after a long while, she saw him recover from his head operation. He gave her a smile
.
The doctor told him that he should rest for a few days.
Sonia then left after verifying the old man, Meliton, was OK. ‘Here, let me give you my business card. I am Sonia Posen. You can ring me anytime lest you need my help.’ She then hugged the old man snugly to her chest. ‘Take care!’
After a month and a half of staying in hospital, he was taken home by her.
Meliton cried and thanked him for taking him home. ‘This is my house.’
Sonia nodded, looking at the old picture frame of their family. William was the youngest person in the family. She looked at all the rubbish on the floor. She suddenly remembered William once more. Her thought of William reduced her to tears.
In the photographs, William had a dark complexion. He was quite short but his Grade Four classmates were very tall. He was as ugly as sin. He'd got short dark hair. He had a big smile on his face.
She remembered him.
***
William would carry a multicolour screen bag in which his Panda ballpoint and some notebooks were kept when he went to school.
‘Negro,’ greeted by his classmates. He was offended by being teased about his complexion, but, later, he was used to hearing it until it became his sobriquet.
‘What?’ he then replied.
‘Nothing. You’re so ugly!’ then all his classmates burst out laughing.
‘I’ll exact my revenge on you all for teasing me, someday.’ He then would run away and start to run and begin to walk a mile away from them.
Perhaps, being dark was natural to him as he would walk miles on a scorching summer day. He ambled down the pathway, stopping occasionally to look in the gardens of vegetables. He would go to the fishpond farm where his father worked to catch some milkfish or tilapia or any fish available in the stream besides the fishponds. He, only all of ten, and his father would pick the telescope shells clean from the edges of the dikes even those shells were too heavy for him to carry. If he didn't want to walk home at that time of night, he would sleep over in the small nipah hut where his father stayed at night.
Sometimes, William would look at men at work as they all were just wearing briefs. He loved looking at them. He wasn’t able to explain his feeling.
***
In those early months, there was a very close bond between Sonia and Meliton. She liked lending him anything, from money to cars.
She would call round every afternoon to cook food for him. She was also trying to train him to do the occasional bit of housework.
She taught him English and introduced him to her friends in Manila.
The old man couldn’t believe his luck, and how kind Sonia was.
When local government elections took place, Sonia persuaded him into running as head of barangay.
Luckily, he won the hearts of the barangay. And since then Sonia backed him and all his projects.
Caniogan became the talk of the town.
***
‘Agi,’ a boy more or less all of six called out to William. He was gnashing his teeth because of what he heard. William didn’t want somebody to call him
agi or gay. His family despised a gay and William wanted to stay away from it. He didn’t want to make any of his brothers nor his cousins ashamed of him.
William’s family was poor. His father was just a fishpond custodian. His mother worked on the farm whenever there was a bumper rice harvest in their place. That neighbourhood seemed to be just right for poor families like of William. There was a rural university a walk away from their nipah hut. And so making a living here wasn’t so hard for his family. At least they could have three decent meals a day. But never did his parents think of sending any of William’s siblings to the university. They were content to be what they were, or maybe they didn’t know what they could do to get their life better. All the children could only go up to high school. His siblings would sell shrimps or tilapia or milkfish or sea bass – whatever was there. When there was not any, they would sometimes vend telescope shell. They would sort out a bushel of their father’s catch on the rice winnower made of bamboo wood. Then they would buy a kilo of rice, some refined sugar, Nescafe, and noodles for their family.
Every so often, when they had nothing to eat rice with, some of his siblings would decant hot Nescafe into the bowl and then put in rice into it. Or, habitually, they would have it with refined sugar. But never did they think how poor they were. To them their situation was a lot better than of other villagers. Never did they look at the situation of the professors nor of the workers of the nearby university. To them, they are exceptions or advantaged people. His brother worked as junior carpenters.
At school, William was gay. His classmates knew he was. He would portray himself at home as a real man, but not at school. Here, he was quite open about it. He was always in fancy dress whenever they had a school play. His cousin would savagely beat him if he took action like a gay. But when he was all of fifteen he got very intrepid. He became blustering. Only his father could try to discipline him not to be a gay. But he failed to heed warnings about it. Until one day when he was taking part in a beauty pageant close to their house, his father, blind drunk, dragged him behind him, the crowd looking at them, his dress torn on the asphalt ground. Then his father took a bough and hit him savagely. He was shouting at him to put the bough down, begging for pity as it fell on him. His arm was bleeding. His shoes were thrown over the back of the crowd cordon.
‘I’m your son, Tatay!’
‘No, I don’t have a gay son. I’m ashamed of you! Go away from here.’
William didn’t say anything. He ran away in fright. He didn’t know where to go. In the end, he decided to head off.
***
Young and inexperienced, William had been struggling to get free of his situation. He would go from city to city to escape the grinding poverty of his life. He had a strong wish to have money and hated to spend it. Finally, William got a job in Cebu City. He was a beautician there. He’d been saving his money every week. He had to go to college for a lot of years as he wanted to be a fashion designer.
He attempted to visit his family, when her mother was in hospital. He really missed his mother so much. His mother was so kind and the only one in their family who understood him. If there was one he wanted to see it was his mother. Of course, he loved his family no matter how they disregarded him.
When he got to Caniogan, he immediately went into their house. He was meaning to kiss his mother when his father came and gave him a punch on the face. He was taken aback, he didn’t expect that his father still hated him. He took his bag and walked out.
‘Don’t ever come here again,’ screamed his father. ‘I don’t have a gay son! William’s been dead for five years now.’
William cried hard. He promised not to visit his family anymore. Even when he heard that his mother died in her sleep as she was not at her best. He wanted to see her wake, but she chose not to. He would just have a flying visit to her grave on every occasion he had time.
***
After a year, William met someone in a chat room. He never expected that the woman would like him. The woman visited him after a month and they met in Cebu. The woman is Sonia Posen. She would spend all evening chatting him up and buying him drinks. They were dating for five months before they became a couple. There had been no news of them since they left for Manila.
Sonia was a well-heeled socialite. It was she who taught William a lot of things in life. He was the one who taught him how to be a good entrepreneur. It was Sonia, too, who introduced him to a lot of Manila big shots. That was the reason why William became eminent after years as a petty couturier in a small street in Makati. In a while, of course, he got a considerable standing of being the finest designer in the whole of the Philippines. He got a lot of celebrity patrons. He was famous for his long gowns. He had a fabulous collection. Several of his gowns came as sets with matching robes. There were eye-catching gowns with sheer lace insets and more traditional long gowns with matching robes. Patrons loved choosing from his beautiful selection of colours to highlight their best features. They would feel like a princess in a lot of his captivating styles.
William Piosca had become a fashion icon as he reflected society’s sensibilities through his clothing design. He had to know just about everything that’d been done before so that he could recognise it when it would become popular again. He was involved in every phase of designing, showing, and producing all types of clothing, from bathing suits to evening gowns. His day included reading current fashion magazines, newspapers, and other media that reflected current trends and tastes. He looked at materials, attended fashion shows, and worked with other designers on projects. He communicated his philosophy, vision, and capabilities clearly and carefully through sketches, discussions, and, occasionally, samples. No matter what his personal style was, he produced a creative, exciting, and gainful product line.
He had an open, creative mind, and was able to see something beautiful or useful in everything. He was approachable, and well travelled, so he was good at creating his own sense of style.
Sonia and William have broken up. William later met his boyfriend at a fashion show. But Sonia and William remained good friends.
***
William’s father, Meliton, was an angry, hard-swearing, tattooed man’s man. By the time William came along, he was a fisherman, drinking himself to death in the evening. When he was two he got drunk and threw his empty crib across the bedroom. When he was all of twelve, he challenged his brother to a fist fight. He routinely shouted at them in front of their friends. By the time he was all of thirteen, he wished he would die.
Four decades on, he’s forgiven himself for hating him.
To his surprise, as he became kinder to himself, he formed a more rounded picture of his father. His anger had its reasons.
Humiliated, Meliton ran away from home. He was a man with a Grade Two education, reduced to knocking on doors and imploring businessmen to buy his shrimps and milkfish.
But his father’s biggest problem was that he never got in touch with his own pain, never learned how to process his feelings. Like many men, he believed the lie that ‘Men don’t cry,’ so he refused to seek out friends and instead turned his pain into anger.
The anger kept shameful sorrow at bay.
This was the father he hated. But a hilarious thing happened after he forgave him. A different father returned from the shadows, borne by a flood of reminiscence. He found himself recalling the times when he didn’t drink:
It was evening at the beach. He was five, and his father was still young and strong. Although he couldn’t swim, he had wandered down to the sea after dinner and paddled a small boat out to the middle of the water. He lay back in the boat, gazing at the mountain that loomed above on the other side of the island.
Suddenly he slipped through the middle of the boat, and he was in the water, struggling. He sank into the dark water. As he resurfaced, he could see his father running down the beach, tearing off his slippers and plunging mightily into the sea. Then he was under again, swallowing cold water, sinking into blackness.
Then he felt himself being pushed powerfully to the surface, as his father rose like a merman below him. He gasped the air, and was saved.
But his father had swallowed water, too, and began to cough and struggle himself. ‘Tatay!’ he cried in a panic. He sank below him, and he again fell back into the black waters, gulping and sputtering, stepping on his head. As they sank, the murky yellow light of the world receded into darkness, with no sound but his thundering heartbeat.
William felt his hands grip his calves and place his feet firmly on his shoulders. Then, as in the game they’d often played, he drifted down and bounced back up from the sea, thrusting him to the surface. And then his tattooed arm was around his chest, towing him to safety. Keeping his face above the water, Meliton coughed, then murmured, ‘It’s OK, Yam. It’s OK.’
Finally they staggered on to the sandy beach. As he stood gasping, shivering and crying, his father hugged him to his heaving chest. Then he went to the trailer to get a towel and wrapped it around William.
In a while, as his father heated hot cocoa powder on the stove he did the unusual - he sat him on his lap. After a while, he turned the boxing match on the radio, and they sipped hot chocolate while the sun sank behind the village.
At the end of his life, he thought his father, like him, had forgotten that day. He forgot his kindness. He wished that, when he ruminated on his failures, he had been able to remember the good things. He wished that, when he thought of his years of his disparaging anger, that he had been able to recall that day at the beach. Most of all, he wished he’d had a kind father to remind him of the good things about himself - his sense of humour, his charm, his ability to spin a story for a crowd, his compassion for the unfortunate, his intelligence, his ability to make a day’s outing with a young boy into an exciting adventure.
William wished someone had told him that he did not have to be a man of steel, that it was OK to be sad. He wished he had understood that he was no different from any of them, a mixture of good and bad. He wished he had realised that he could be forgiven, and that he could forgive. The fact was, he didn’t have to die alone in the country of resentment. There was room for him in the country of love.
***
Nowadays, Sonia Posen is something of an institution. She has written books, decorated TV studios, sung a duet with Martin Nievera and even has an orchid named after her. And the accolades keep on coming. Now in her fifties, the grande dame of Manila fashion shows no signs of giving up.
The principal features of Posen’s style are unusual colours and fabrics that people normally aren't used to see. Posen manages to make her accessory the ideal exclamation point – playing with bright colours and queer.
***
The barangay officials invited Sonia to be one of the judges as there was a beauty pageant to be held in honour of the gays in their barangay. She was so excited to attend it. She missed it already since she was a pageant fanatic when she was young.
She sponsored the pageant for Php 1, 000, 000, so the barangay officials wore the name Sonia Posen on their shirts. Her paparazzi covered the pageant for national televisions.
While Sonia and he were meaning to crown the winner, Meliton was shot two times in the arm at the ceremony. Sonia hugged him tightly to her chest as swiftly as she could.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Sonia Posen looked dead as the people looked at the man pointing a gun at her. They had to be rushed to casualty.
The police responded to it in just a few minutes.
In hospital, Meliton volunteered all the details of what happened, but the perpetrator was nowhere to be found.
***
In 2010, Sonia Posen being an AIDS patient lending her time and care in an effort to breathe life into people from lack of knowledge and lack of concern, and, worse, hatred, appeared on TV. She uplifted those afflicted by enlightening them on the reality that is HIV/AIDS. She had stories to tell, and she wanted people to read and learn.
‘Thank you, William! I will miss you,’ said Sonia Posen on a national TV.
Meliton watched her with a surprised expression on his face.
Sonia is alive. She didn’t die.
***
The next week, Sonia Posen was really back. In his room, Meliton was crying bitter tears when he got the letter. He was shaking like a jelly before it. He hesitated slightly before opening it.
Dear Meliton,
I am the real Sonia Posen. William’s the only one who was able to impersonate me completely. And I thank him for that. When my company and his became one, many things happened. Her boyfriend was killed in their room. The police suspected foul play, and so did his boyfriend’s parents.
William ran away. Police issued a photograph of him. He wanted to commit suicide. He was wondering where to go or what to do and I suggested that he should stay in my house in Caniogan. His impersonation of me wasn't planned, it was completely accidental.
When I’d been a bit down, and away, I was substituted for him in the last five years. That was because I was diagnosed as having AIDS. I struggled on, drawing my strength from his courage. I left the house by the back door and went to the US secretly because my disease didn't generally respond to treatment in the Philippines.
William’s death was the worst piece of news I'd heard for a long time! It was sad to know his death that time. But now I feel it is time to move on.
Take care.
***
In newspapers, Sonia Posen company is re-launched as The House of Sonia Posen and William Piosca, Inc. as shareholders have voted on the proposed re-naming of the company. They have expanded their retail operations in almost all cities. A dividend is sent to Meliton every year.
