Intimate Strangers

My Divine Comedy

By Agatha Verdadero

"Your sister said you're a lesbian. Are you?"

My next heartbeat was light years away as I stood petrified at your bedroom doorway. Your shrunken frame barely filled the white Monobloc chair you sat on, but your presence permeated everywhere. Your wedding portrait-with the floral lace of your trousseau and veil in delicate pointillist detail on the canvas-leaned against a corner. Rosary beads peeked from under a pillow. A stack of adult diapers sat on upright luggage along one side of the room. An electric fan revolved at promenade pace overhead-perhaps because the AC was too cold for your bones. Curtains were drawn shut to keep the piercing sun at bay, away from your sensitive eyes. This was your territory and I was a trespasser, hovering over the threshold.

Though I towered over you, I almost cowered in fear at being ambushed. I had just landed at midnight from a sixteen-hour journey across two continents, weighed down by a welcome from strangers who, at various stations, stamped my passport, sold me a local mobile phone SIM card, and drove me to a friend's condo, where I was to stay alone, in the middle of the country's central business district. Unlike so many other arriving Filipino passengers with their families' ecstatic messages writ bold on placards by the exits, I had nothing, not even a cup of tepid coffee, to mark my homecoming. My eldest sister didn't send her driver to pick me up this time. And never will again, she said.

After a night of fighting for sleep against urban noises and jet lag from my eyrie high above the metropolitan grid, my alarm clock ordered me to stumble onto a bus close to scorching noon to have lunch with you as the foremost order of the day. I had headed back to see you because you said, "I can't hold on any longer," several months ago. You had to see me in the flesh one final time. I was grateful you waited for me while I wrapped up some urgent work matters because my secret terror was for you to depart in my absence. You never hinted then that you had a burning question that needed to be asked before I could even step into your room.

"So, are you?"

I could have stammered through a lie, but you did not suffer liars gladly. In my childhood, you gave me the impression that the ridges between your brows could slice through any fog of deceit I surrounded myself with. When you cast that furrowed glare my way, it was easier to admit that the Dutch milkmaid figurine had slipped through my fingers while dusting the shelf and shattered to pieces on the floor than to mutter a denial, even when I knew the inevitable spanking would follow. Your hand was an anvil. Before I had reached third grade, I already understood what a Napoleon complex was because Dad somehow had to explain through my tears how you managed to bring down a broom handle or a rubber slipper so hard across the back of my thighs. It wasn't a thorough explanation, as far as I was concerned, but it had to do.

You were the eldest among eight siblings, but even then, all of them stood above you in adulthood. Before you turned ten, you had already notched a few life-and-death runs through pitch-dark rice fields during the Second World War while intermittent gunfire between Japanese occupying forces and Filipino guerrillas punctuated the night, just to fetch the midwife from the next town for the arrival of a new brother, a new sister. You were a parent to them even before you had a chance to play with a real doll, which was non-existent in a time of war. Perhaps it's because you grew up at light speed and bore grave responsibilities at an early age that you brooked no childishness from your own daughters.

"Yes, Mom, I am."

I choked on the last two syllables, not that they were untrue but because-suddenly-I could breathe again. "I am" pealed in my mind like a carillon. My utterance to you of the truth was the release I never knew I needed. I gasped and my lungs quickly filled with life, astonished at the purity of oxygen after at least two decades of vacuum. This must have been what I felt when I was born blue in the face, with my umbilical cord around my neck. The surgeon could not have freed me from that stranglehold fast enough, when I bawled my entry into the land of the living. It cost you a scar on your belly and meant any future childbirth had to follow suit.

As I celebrated freedom within, I tightened my knees instinctively. I braced myself for the inevitable rage, scanning your face warily for the telltale twitches at the corners of your mouth and eyes, portents of doom as when I went below an A in any subject at school. You held your stare straight at me while swaying to the internal metronome of your resting tremors. Your seventy-six years sloped your shoulders, but everything else about you and the room was undisturbed. Your hands were at peace on the armrests.

"When Dad was still alive," you began.

My jaw dropped a fraction. I had expected a maelstrom, but your voice was a gentle breeze crossing the breach between us. And I was confused. Dad had died in 2007. What part did he play this very moment? I was ready to doubt your remembrance of things that had transpired more than six years ago, as a defence against the inevitable verbal whiplashes. I held my breath again, but I saw your eyes brighten at the memory. Luminescence was not an attribute I associated with you.

"He and I talked."

I took it for granted I would be fodder for conversations in your empty nest. As the youngest among three daughters, I appeared to be the errant one, having transplanted myself nine thousand kilometres away from home in 2002. I had given up my tenure as assistant professor "to work among refugees" from the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes Region. In my oversimplified paradigm then, that meant teaching them their ABCs and the English language, to prepare them for their relocation to various parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

When I said goodbye to you and Dad, I explained my uprooting as divine will, derived from prayer and reading God's word. I did not delude myself into thinking I was saving people. That is God's province. I had enough difficulty saving pesos and dollars to afford the six-month Swahili language studies required of incoming long-term volunteers. I went simply because, as I always said to my elder sister, "God determines the times and spaces we occupy." He said go, so I went. There was no parting of clouds, no clap of thunder, no mandate carved on stone by an invisible hand. Whatever He wanted to do with my life while I was in Africa, I trusted He would show me. I have always believed God's work focused on the unseen things. It is not ever captured as a photo-op or a sound bite or a video clip for followers of social media to devour.

"We both agreed, no matter what happens."

In the next few years, we became strangers to one another. From the briefest of emails and phone calls, I gathered that you and Dad had increased your number of maintenance drugs to keep blood clots from forming, bones from breaking, and hearts from bursting. I would have wanted to know more about the minutiae of your days in our home at the foot of an active volcano, but I felt I had no right to ask. I was the one who had chosen to set down roots away from you, halfway across the world. I had to live with the consequence of not knowing anything current about family. Hivyo ndivyo ilivyo. It is what it is, in the language of my adopted land.

So when the rare phone call or email happened, I delivered my own vanilla narrative: I was safe behind the electrified fences and guarded gates of Nairobi's leafy (read: upscale) suburbs, conveniently forgetting to share that I once almost lost my mobile phone to a teenage snatcher in a school uniform, had my screeches for help not summoned nearby masons and plumbers from their construction sites. They had collared him and he tumbled into an open ditch, where they proceeded to introduce him to the tools of their trade with which they had armed themselves, despite my renewed screams-this time, for them to stop the lynching playing out for a small crowd of gathering oglers. The young man was finally able to run away, leaving behind only a torn notebook in the trench, slowly bleeding black ink as it absorbed the flowing water.

I chose to regale you instead with stories about waking up to hyaena and elephant tracks outside my tent in Amboseli and triumphing against the wind shear at four thousand nine hundred metres above sea level to reach Point Lenana and stand above the clouds. They were the reports you wanted to hear because they painted the Africa promised by the pages of old National Geographic issues we bought from the dry section of Central Market. So while your news of ailing health struck fear in my heart at the shortness of your days, I convinced you that my new home indeed offered a fabulous, unending safari every day, bookended by oranges at dawn and maroons at dusk.

"We will love whoever you love. We just want you to be happy."

And it was that declaration that shook me to my very foundation. Because in spite of my silence, my avoidance of mention, You. Knew. You both knew that I had a different voyage, the real voyage, going on in my interior landscapes, not through scree or savannah. In the intervening years especially since university, I had begun questioning who and what I saw in the mirror. I could not reconcile the woman who enunciated English words to South Sudanese children with the woman whose gaze lingered...