I.
Edgar died the morning after. Tracing his actions backwards we learn that last night he dutifully had sex with the wife. Late in the afternoon after the business meeting with his father-in-law, he had passed by the puericulture center for the result of the test done on his sputum and the doctor’s reading of his chest x-ray. Before he left the center he had been intercepted by his wife’s obstetrician with a burst of congratulations and a damp, latex handshake. That morning he had received a telegram from his hometown. After the tryst with the wife, for the rest of the night, as was the case, he had been up designing structures, accompanied by his faithful rulers and pencils, and the rather backstabbing couple of coffee and cigarettes. He died the morning after a day of bad news and sex.

This story is not of Edgar’s life, and there would be little background that we would get from him except for the content and context of the telegram. There would be another Edgar but he would figure in later, much later, for now let little Edgar play with his siblings, all six of them, soon to be seven, four girls and two boys. This is a story of Edgar’s death and how, like a flick of a butterfly’s wings, it had caused a pretty battalion formation of dominoes buzzing with potential energy to all come tumbling down and lie flat on their backs, dung beetles doing crunches, without him to put them back up or in their respective boxes.

Now, on with his death. One of the bad news, served rare by the hands of the obstetrician and seasoned by spittle, was that his wife was pregnant. For some men this is undeniably good news, the obedience to go forth and multiply, the reproduction of one’s genetic material: an immortality of sorts and a valid reason to keep the wife busy in the nursery and out of the bed for at least another three months. Edgar did not share the same locker room with these men. He was of another team, fancy uniforms shoved in the space where talent should have gone. Six children, one wife, one house, one housekeeper, one nursemaid, and one interfering but well-meaning father-in-law. When the sun had set and the wife had rolled over, he’s also an architect.

He was one of the few people of his time who would’ve argued with God, for lack of other authorities or committees concerned, to add a few more hours to the day. In his time, people in the provinces and barrios slept and awoke in time with the sun; the gasera was rarely used, except for some heroes in the recent past who were reputedly burning eyebrows pouring over smuggled manuscripts at night. In the city, although there was electricity, night life was limited except for the areas near the bases where the nights throbbed with red lights reflected on brown gyrating backsides, thighs and bellies to the blue-eyes of a well-paying and uniformed audience.

He would’ve asked for a three-hour extension, enough to upgrade the quantity and, hopefully, quality of his sleep. After the third child, he drew buildings and houses, breathed and exhaled smoke, and drank spiked coffee, through the night.

Cosmetically, he developed dark circles and puffiness under his eyes, a skin color more gray than brown, a retreating hairline perceptive of a forthcoming Waterloo, a concave chest perhaps due to numerous hard thumping by its owner in an attempt to calm the gods that rampaged inside, pronounced shoulders, and abrupt weight loss contradicting an expanding midsection. Medically, his test results and x-ray readings told him that he had cancer. Of the lungs. Emphysema. In the time that this was written, cancer still baffled scientists, in his time, well, he should’ve asked God for contraceptives not extra hours to a day.

The hospital, puericulture center, it was called, served him his death sentence, his deadline, the deadline, not for his projects which were literally on the drawing board, but for his life of thirty-five years. As a punchline, he was going to be a father again. He felt exactly the same way his grand-daughter felt on board a ferry, holding on to the hemline of her vacation, photographing the new arrival of tourists pour into the beach from another ferry, sardines sliding out of a can. He was very sad but he appreciated the irony. A long sigh of resignation and he was out of the hospital’s doors.

His father-in-law dipped his hands into business, several vats of simmering businesses, and, as he required more than two hands, Edgar was asked to roll up his sleeves and plunge in. He only had two children then, a genius named Melanie and our boy, little Edgar junior, who did not exhibit signs of advanced mental development but was born wearing his umbilical cord on his neck and therefore came out bluish like a Hindu god. Money was sprouting in a lively manner from his blueprints and more was mailed-in from his maternal side of the family’s fishponds and copra farms. Quite a bundle of pesos could be made adventurous and invested in his father-in-law’s businesses.

“What exactly is the nature of the business, Sir?” he asked, before parting with his jet-setting bunch of currency.

The answer came from a father-in-law and not from a potential business partner, “Trust me son.” A well-meaning clap on the back was answered by his amphibious cough and it was a done deal.

In the months that followed he had glimpses of what businesses they messed with. The major money-maker was cigarettes whose packages brandished the name of a very keen American businessman and possible father of the bastard son corruption in this side of the world. The others were sugar and fabrics. Edgar stopped poking into whatever his father-in-law’s business dealings were; he began to trust him because his investment was rising like dough giddy with yeast.

He managed the small office they had put up, a table for him to entertain his clients where he would trim down their fancy of building to the tune of Noah’s ark, a table for his father-in-law furnished with a telephone, and another table for the wife, his wife, who came in at the end of the month to perform administrative work, mostly for Edgar, in the other business all contracts and receipts were written in sand.

As he became familiar enough with the general idea of the business, the old man’s trips to the province, to his wife and family, were becoming frequent and longer, this was on account of the air being easier to breathe in the company of dense foliage and for his age, he said, it did him good. That the old man lived long enough to intersect with his great-grand daughter’s life, Edgar wouldn’t have known.

What he would know one morning, the morning before he died, was that the cigarette company had closed all doors, completely puckered up its mouth, anus and every other pore: no payment or reimbursement of current transactions; old blue eyes wouldn’t even recognize his small-time business partners, which was, in a way very good of him. It would be wise for them to follow suit, straighten up and fly right, because the government caught on and let loose rabid bloodhounds, bit on their hindquarters by enraged citizens.

On that morning, his father-in-law finally answered the question he posted years ago, about the nature of the business, and this time the old man answered it like a businessman, grave and without a well-meaning clap in the back.

There was about two thousand in the bank and five clients to be billed at the end of the month. There was money from his mother’s share of the bangus and copra harvests. At the other end of the scale were six children, one wife, one house, etc. and the life they were all used to. Birthday parties, private schools, imported toys for wife and children, the wife’s being more expensive, a Volkswagen mini-van being her latest. The days of free cigarettes were over but the parties that they were scheduled to host, for the collection of ladies’ and men’s clubs that they were involved in, were written in ink on their, and the members of the clubs’ calendars. He knew he had to take in more projects, and he wished for insomnia.

The matter of the telegram was addressed late into the night. It was shoved into his breast pocket right after the housekeeper had delivered it to him during a breakfast of bacon and eggs over pancakes, with soy sauce for the meat and margarine for the cakes and dalandan juice, freshly squeezed, hold the sugar, for his persistent cough.

The children were vying for his attention, their most notable talent at this time was not choking on the huge amount of food they were shoveling into their full blast mouths, chewing and breathing and telling their stories which ranged from successfully wrestling a brother out of the playpen, reciting the multiplication table, or drawing a castle, all at the same time, vying for Daddy’s attention and approval. Mommy was content at the other end of the table, nibbling at her bacon, smiling over her brood, right out of Deptford.

Edgar’s maternal ancestors owned a patch of land under sea which was suitable for breeding bangus and another patch of dry land for planting coconuts. These lands had been passed through several generations, the latest of which were Edgar’s. It was passed in the sense that the elders died or atrophied and now the younger ones had to take over, no last will, no geometric chopping up of property, just one patch of watery land and one patch of dry land, both very good, passed on to another generation, not to individuals of that generation but to the collective.

The ancestors, the great-great-great grandparents, saw to it that the whole family would benefit from the land, one land title, one family. For several decades, and two world wars, the land undersea and above sea were home to bangus, coconuts and a family which was getting harder to call one unit because it had ramified like roots in fertilizer-rich soil, and all of the members of the family called the lands theirs. It was an unspoken rule, however, that those who did not work as farmers or fisherfolk, should not lay claim over the income of either lands.

Very few of Edgar’s siblings and cousins took to the land, their eldest was living the American dream, no soy sauce for her bacon or margarine for her pancakes, the others were either in the city or the nation’s capital. Edgar shouldn’t be receiving any money if not for his mother who had a good head on and made herself irreplaceable in the financial management of the lands’ produce. All in all, as family-managed businesses go, it was doing well and the family who stayed with the land had permanent sunburnt smiles on their faces and good spending money on their bamboo banks and narra chests.

The eldest of Edgar’s siblings, Felicidad, married a Navy man who was old enough to retire but young enough to be proud of. A good head Fely’s got, just like her mother, and that good head got herself a husband, a new country, and a degree in economics. Those years she spent inside the state college gave her ideas, mostly general ones in that it generalized in one sweep, her old country, her family, but most of all, the management of their land.

Of her country she said that it was ruled by pathetic greenhorns, children who were given a packet of condoms which they blew into sticky balloons, that condoms weren’t part of the general information or of the general merchandise stores of the citizens whose country she was criticizing didn’t sway her view at all. Of her family, that they were backward and knew nothing of running a business: she commended them for being good farmers and pardoned them for not being good enough to dream of higher employment. Of the management of their land, that it should be divided among the children, herself included, whether or not they turned the soil or caught the fish, and be issued separate titles.

She and her husband sailed to the country run by gurgling infants playing with oily rubber inflatables and dropped her generalizations onto the laps of her family, most of who could read and understand the poetry of the land but not a word of English.
There was anarchy at hand in the land of coconuts and fish and Babel’s tower was erected overnight fed by the bricks from the language of a confused family unit, the language of an American state college’s economics, and the silent language of the land.

Out of the hospital, into the car; an opened telegram in his breast pocket. A pink slip taped to his gray decayed lungs, a pink mass of fecundity stuck in his wife’s womb. A source of additional income burnt to ashes and smoke, copulated with the wind coursing through the city’s own gray bronchioles.

A middle-aged man caved in, shriveled, looked inward to his blackened air pumps and, unable to coax them to life with his promises of a smokeless future, searched his cardiac chambers for a dying man’s appropriate emotion and was promptly squirted out into the stomach where all there was to perceive was insatiable hunger and desire. In one gastric gesticulation, he was reborn through the anal sphincter and deposited in the seat of his car. Edgar drove home with an opened telegram in his breast pocket and a crap frosted disposition.

The wife greeted him at the front door, with a kiss, his pair of patent-leather slippers, and the promise of leche flan for merienda, his favorite, warming in the steamer and letting its presence known by enticing curlicue wisps of custard-filled air wafting towards the open door. She led him to the kitchen and fed him the flan. Flavored with sweetened langka, eggs beaten by the gentle hands of the wife, not the housekeeper, milk from the cows of New Zealand as its carton said.
After six children, he knew what words were to come out of her mouth, forming shapes traced and punctuated by her tongue. He ate the whole llanera, the wife only slightly concerned not because he had never devoured the whole llanera before, not in the six previous announcements she had staged over the past fifteen years, but of the silence given to her lively and well-prepared speech.

A wife-made, 12-egg leche flan had always been the harbinger of all their six children, now seven. In some parts of the world, the flapping of storks’ wings wove the tale of life, in this pin-prick area, babies were announced through llaneras of custard, each soft pat singing the song of creation in the wet caverns of the mouth.

These were the precious moments of the day when the children were legally locked away in school and the wife was busy embroidering the days of the week or the names of each child on socks, underwear, and handkerchiefs after having fulfilled her wifely duties of announcing the master of the house’s arrival and on certain special occasions, the arrival of a new member of the family. It is during these moments that Edgar had time to tend his green garden, not a flower to disturb the verdant view, turning the soil as a token to his roots and gratitude for the source of the stipend his mother sends him, yes, there was also a pond filled with cat-colored koi at the west end of the garden.

He usually wore gardening gloves to protect his artist’s supple hands, but not this time, not this last time. His last afternoon alive was spent digging his bare hands into the dirt, a man checking out, getting a feel of, his new living quarters.

The morning after, he was found slumped over his work table with blood marks on his lips and on the tracing paper underneath. In his right hand, there was a piece of paper locked in a death grip which the embalmer managed to wrench free but threw away having no special instructions but to make the job as swift as possible. On the days of mourning, dung beetles lay on their winged backs and performed crunches.