The scope of his betrayal, of his scheme, made her dizzy. He had come into the bakery one afternoon as if he were just dropping by. Then he whispered that he knew about the movie she had made, about Filipina Fillies. He said he had come to help her; to take her back to the village for a while.
“Is anything in them true? Did you write any of those things?” Jimbo demanded.
Honorata couldn’t speak. She looked down. For the first time, he became angry.
“I’m asking you a question. Answer me.”
His enormous white hand gripped the edge of her chair. He leaned toward her, but he didn’t touch her.
“No.”
“You refuse to answer?”
“No, I didn’t write the letters. I don’t know about any letters.”
There had been no time for letters. Her uncle had come to the bakery on Sunday, and by the next Sunday, she was boarding the plane to Chicago. It had taken twelve hours to go from Manila to her mother’s home in Buninan, and eleven hours to return. The days in between had been desperate: her mother thin and sad; her uncle’s story about Kidlat, about the people who’d come looking for him; and then the VHS tapes, everywhere in Manila, even in Bayombong and Solano—where the bus had broken down—and even in her uncle’s home, though he had no television. She hadn’t known these tapes were possible; these tapes from what was until then the worst time in her life: a time that changed everything, a time that ruined her relationship with Kidlat, which was why, she supposed, he had disappeared. She had made the movie to help Kidlat, because he had said a man would kill him if she didn’t, that everything was special effects anyway, and the movie would be shown only in Canada.
She had gone to Manila with Kidlat eight years before. She had chosen him over her family because Kidlat did not want to live in a village—not his, not hers—and her mother would never have given her permission to go with him unless they were married. But Kidlat would not get married. Kidlat said that in America, people had stopped getting married. And if leaving the village was a choice Honorata had made, it hadn’t felt like one; there had been no thinking at all, just feeling: longing and sorrow and then sudden joy (this, then, was what it was all about). After that, there had been nothing left to do but go with Kidlat, whom she loved, and who knew what he wanted, and what he was willing to do or not do, better than she did.
Always she sent money home. Sometimes her uncle came to get the money from her, sometimes someone from the village came, and sometimes she mailed it with the letters she sent every week. By the time she returned home, by the time she finally saw the thatched roof and wood posts of her family home in Buninan, by the time she saw her mother again; running away with Kidlat meant nothing. The movie—the movie she’d never seen and never would see—meant everything.
It had not all been special effects. Did Kidlat know that?
“So what did you know?” Jimbo asked. “If you didn’t know about the letters, what did you know?”
Honorata said nothing. There was no way to explain. She didn’t know what had happened, but now she knew it had started a long time before her uncle came to get her at the bakery in Manila.
Jimbo grabbed her then. His fingers dug into her arm. They were fleshy and strong. She stared at those fingers, at her own arm, without being able to look away. He saw her staring at the arm, and silently, without looking at her, he twisted her elbow back.
Honorata gasped in pain. But she didn’t look at him.
He released her.
“Whore,” he snarled, and stood up abruptly.
Honorata sat without moving, afraid to be heard. If she could stop her own breath, if she could will herself to stop breathing, she would.
He’d shocked himself. Grabbing her arm. Bending it backward. He’d almost kept going.
The rage and repulsion and roar he felt was a physical thing: a wave. Jimbo’s body dripped sweat, his jaws gripped painfully, the room pulsed with the realization of how Rita’s uncle had played him.
Ramon Navarro was a nasty man: insipid, pandering, unrelenting. He operated independently, no agency, and his clients had to be referred to him by someone he knew. A salesman in Miami had made the connection for Jimbo. From the first approach, Jimbo had had no intention of working with Rita’s uncle. He’d told him to stop calling, to stop sending letters, but when the man asked him to read just this one letter, this one very special letter, Jimbo had done it.
“I go to the bakery at four in the morning, before it is light. The streets are not quiet even then, and they smell of all the people who live here, and sometimes I feel so sad for someone sleeping on the ground, right in my path, that I am tempted to wake him up, to take him with me to the bakery, to give him one of the rolls left from the night before, but I know this would be dangerous, and so I step around him, careful not to wake him up.”
He was a fool. A sucker. And her uncle had played him.
He had worked with Honorata’s uncle only because her letters had been so different, and because Ramon had told him that this was his niece; that she did not correspond with anyone but him, that she was not one of the women who had come to Ramon for help.
What a fool.
A pathetic, fat, sweaty fool.
And from eight thousand miles away, Ramon had known.
For months, there had been no photo. Usually the photo was the first thing to come: a half dozen photos, each with a name and a short introduction. But everything about corresponding with Honorata had been different. The letters were sent directly to him, and he wrote directly back to her. Jimbo used his post office box, of course, but the letters did not go through Ramon.
He bit his tongue remembering this, realizing.
So there had been no photo, and after awhile, Jimbo wasn’t sure he wanted one. The niece was likely misshapen, there was something wrong about her—he imagined acne scars, dwarfism, obesity, a birthmark, what could it be?—but as they became friends, as he found that he was able to tell her the most intimate details of his life, the slights he kept hidden, the embarrassment he felt, he realized he didn’t care what she looked like. It was absurd, that this mail-order bride idea might actually work, that he might actually have met someone he could love and who would love him. He hadn’t really believed it was possible.
And he would help her family. They could visit whenever she wanted. She wouldn’t have to leave them all behind. Maybe he would buy a vacation home in the Philippines, something on the beach; it would be a place to go in the winters.