SPEED

Short Story Published on February 18, 2012
Philippine Free Press Online


AFTER MONTHS of interviews, endless paperwork, and interminable wait, Emil finally secured a position to manage a modern poultry farm in Sana’a, Yemen. This after he had lost his job selling veterinary products for a foreign company headquartered in Manila.

How well she remembered those early days – long rides in the Beetle with their infant son in her lap, crisscrossing Batangas, Laguna, and Calamba in search of poultry and piggery farms. Map Quest and GPS had not yet been invented, but they had something more reliable – they followed their noses. They knew they were close to their target when the air started smelling foul. The stronger the odor, the bigger the farm, and the faster Emil drove toward it.

She always suspected their son’s love for cars started when he was barely three months-old, riding with them on those sales calls, lulled to sleep by the movement of the car and the cooling breeze blowing from the windows. Sometimes when he was awake she would put him down on the back seat and he would gurgle happily, legs thrashing, fists clenched, arms pumping almost in rhythm with the hum of the engine and tires’ swishing. Surely it was during those long rides when the obsession for cars took root in her son’s soul, fueling his need for motion and speed. And was she wrong to blame her husband for that, too?

They called him Dr. Emil. He had a degree in Veterinary Medicine from Araneta University but he was a far better salesman than a veterinarian. Case in point; he successfully sold himself to her, didn’t he? She – Manila-born and raised, a true-bred kolehiyala with big dreams – had somehow fallen for this tough, macho Batangueno with his quaint probinsiyano ways. In fact his old-world gallant manner: opening doors for her, treating her like a queen, protective and caring – charmed her city-cynical heart. Certainly, having a cooler-full of live crabs and dozens of fresh buko left at her doorstep was a refreshing change from the tiresome flowers and chocolates other suitors plied her with.

Above all, she liked playing Henry Higgins to his Eliza Doolittle, advising him on the latest cut of jeans, taking him to museums and plays, introducing him to her artsy, sophisticated friends. Si malakas at si maganda, she’d inscribed on the leaf of her photo album chronicling their days together: swimming in the beaches of Nasugbu, haggling with fruit vendors in Tagaytay, enjoying bowls of steaming bulalo in a little tienda on the road to Tanauan. She’d never been so vastly entertained.

Nonetheless their courtship was fraught with dire warnings from family and friends (his and hers), which only strengthened her conviction that they were meant to be. The romantic in her was totally enchanted with the idea of the two of them standing resolute in the face of such universal disapproval. So Romeo and Juliet, she could barely stand it.

She married him on a crisp May morning in a dress so short, his mother fell to her knees with a quick sign of the cross as though her morals and character fell just as short of the older woman’s expectations. But Emil gave her a look of such total indulgence she couldn’t help flashing her fakest sweet smile at the woman she would soon be addressing Inay. And while the fad lasted, she wore her micro-minis whenever she accompanied her husband on his visits to the barrio, fully enjoying the attention and shocked exclamations that followed her wake. Emil never objected. She rather thought he liked parading her around. Look what I caught!

Emil left for the job in Yemen when their son was six and his sister Annie was five. Alex was a dynamo in motion. He learned to walk when he was barely a year old and then he was running all over the place, the quick staccato of his bare feet on the wooden floor of their home a constant rhythm that started in the morning when he jumped out of bed eager to see what the new day brought in terms of excitement, and up until he slumped back in bed at the end of the day, finally exhausted but blissfully fulfilled, his latest speed toy clutched in his arms. That’s how she would always remember Alex – a risk-taker perpetually in motion: a lightning streak on roller blades, daring moves on the skateboard, leaps in the air on his racing bike; and one of her most distinct memories – his Acura overtaking her Ford effortlessly, the throb of his car like wild horses momentarily held in check, laughter trailing as he zoomed past her yelling, Wanna race me, Mom?

She conceived their youngest Samantha when she ran out of her contraceptive pills the month she visited Emil in Yemen. Typical. How could she have imagined she could get her prescription filled in that hauntingly beautiful but backward country? Sana’a is the world’s oldest populated city, stretching back to about 1000 BC. It is home to the Great Mosque, Jami’ al-Kabir, considered as one of the oldest mosques in the Muslim world. The city itself is famous for its unique buildings towering several stories high, decorated with colorful geographical shapes, carvings, and stained-glass windows. Yet for all that, she couldn’t find a decent drug store that carried her birth control pills. Hello, Samantha.

In the days following her arrival in Sana’a, she soaped and scrubbed clean the walls and ceiling of his small company-owned bungalow and hand-sewed curtains for the windows. She framed collages of photos and hung them on his walls where before they were bare. One evening when he came home, the dining table was draped with an exotic scarf she had purchased from Souq al-Fetlah. A filigreed brass lamp in arabesque motif glowed faintly in one corner and his favorite country rock singer crooned softly in the background. At the center of the table was a water glass with maple-colored wildflowers she had rescued from the weeds that struggled to grow outside his back door where there was nothing but soil and sand and scraggly scrub.

Emil was exhausted from a full-day’s work culling sickly birds from the healthy and making sure his non-English speaking crew of Somali, Ethiopian, and Yemeni workers were on the job and not crouched in corners chewing khat and comparing jambiyas. He paused at the door in his dusty work boots and sweaty baseball cap looking bemused at the transformation she had created. Wow, he finally said. “Do you think we should take pictures for your mother?” The sheen in her eyes belied the mocking timbre in her voice.

He gave her a heavy, gold bracelet the morning of her flight out of Sana’a. It was a beautiful keepsake she cherished for the memories it brought back of dry, arid hills and strange, enigmatic people; and a husband who was yet to grow into himself. She nurtured those memories and the ones that came after, layering each loving touch, each challenge and triumph, to the perfect world she was building in her mind.

But fate, ever relentless and indifferent, had finally caught up with Alex and dealt her dreams a sweeping blow.

It had rained early that afternoon and there was water on the freeway. It was hard to see in the dusky October light. Alex was driving fast from work, weaving in and out of lanes to avoid slower-moving vehicles. He was meeting his friends for a hastily planned street race. One of them had just traded in his car for a new import and they were all excited to see how their own cars would perform against it. Alex was running late and he was growing increasingly annoyed with the slower car in front of him. He moved to his right impatiently and stepped on the gas to get ahead of it. That’s when he hit the spot on the road where water had collected. It was a shallow pool, but he was speeding and his car was light because he had taken out the back seats to max out his speed for the street race. His Acura hydroplaned, spun around, and when it landed, Alex was facing the fast oncoming freeway traffic racing toward him at 70 miles per hour. He never had a chance.

She thought she would die, too, but work saved her. When the tragedy struck she was working full-time and pursuing a graduate degree three evenings a week. Yet the weekends stretched before her like the sand dunes of Yemen: endless, dry, and pitiless, devoid of life and hope. Desperate, she applied for weekend work and soon found herself too busy and too tired to think about anything else but a quick meal and a soft bed at the end of each day, seven days a week. She learned to survive, one day at a time. Not so, with Emil.

Later she would ask herself how she could have been so oblivious to the extent of her husband’s pain; so blind to the despair that gripped him like a pit bull that had sunk its teeth into his throat and would not let go.

Witnesses at the scene said he had accelerated toward the concrete barrier instead of swerving to avoid it. The damage to his car almost mimicked the total wreck of his son’s.