When the photo finally came, in a brown envelope with Ramon Navarro’s name scrawled across the back, Jimbo was dumbfounded. How could Honorata be this beautiful? Why would such a woman write to him? For a while, he had once again doubted the uncle. So Ramon Navarro had explained. About Filipina Fillies. About the way his niece was taken and forced to make a movie that ruined any chance of a normal life for her. How this experience had nearly destroyed her. How it had been months before she would leave the one-room house of her mother. How afraid she was that Jimbo would find out.
His niece had been na?ve, and Ramon was sorry that she was not a virgin, but could Jimbo understand his predicament: a beautiful niece, his sister’s only daughter, no one had known what to do. He hadn’t meant to introduce her to men, but when he had learned about Jimbo, he had thought maybe this would be an answer; maybe his sister would trust his judgment and agree. He should have explained it all to Jimbo from the start, but he hoped Jimbo would understand why he could not. In the interest of honesty, he felt he should give Mr. Wohlmann the name of the movie, Filipina Fillies.
He was stupid, ugly, useless slime. And her uncle had known it.
He’d watched the movie.
Not right away. He’d waited awhile. Spent days thinking about it, knowing he shouldn’t watch—that Honorata deserved better from him—but, of course, he had watched it. He had seen horror in the way her body shuddered, fear in the way her lip trembled, sorrow in those wet brown eyes. It was terrible what had been done to her. And he could not get any of these images out of his mind. He read the letters, and he watched the movie, more than once, and after he made himself return the movie to the porn store, he imagined her in it over and over.
That had almost been the end. He stopped writing to her, ignored the two letters that arrived, did not return the calls that came to his office in the city. He had sickened himself, and he felt overwrought, and he wished it would all go away.
Then a telegram arrived from Ramon Navarro.
Honorata was ready to leave the country. She could come very soon. It was important for her to get away quickly. And insanely, Jimbo had said yes.
When he thought of the day she arrived, of how it had felt to wait for her, of how he had made Gina work to get ready for her, of the way Gina had looked at him, surprised, and then—most powerful of all—when Rita had stepped out of customs, and he had seen the wolf look of the man walking behind her, the rush of tenderness and desire, of caring and lust, that he had felt in that moment.
That first time in the hotel room, it was . . . it meant . . . it was sacred to him. That’s how it felt in his mind: sacred.
But she had known nothing about him, had taken him with the expertise of any paid hooker.
It was not to be accepted. He wouldn’t accept it. He wanted to hurt her. Of course he had twisted her arm back. Of course he was enraged.
The only thing to do now was leave the room.
Jimbo didn’t return in the morning. She didn’t see him for two days, and she didn’t know whether he went to work or not; she stayed mostly in her bed, slipping out to eat some chicken left in the fridge and pretending not to hear Gina when she asked if she had any laundry to do.
On Tuesday, a bouquet of flowers arrived for her. She ignored the card, left it unopened on the table, and Jimbo continued to stay in his room.
The next day, more flowers arrived. No card.
The evening after that, Jimbo knocked on the door between their rooms. For the first time, he waited for her to say he could come in. Then he stood in the doorway, looking smaller.
“May I come in?”
She shrugged.
“I’m sorry. I won’t hurt you.”
She looked down.
“I thought you’d written the letters. I thought you’d agreed to come here.”
“I did agree.”
He said nothing.
Honorata thought about her uncle. Her uncle saying that the tape was killing her mother—that running away for love had been one thing, a devastating thing, but this, this tape, it would kill her mother.
How could her mother have seen a tape? Where would her uncle have taken her to find a television? A VHS player?
Honorata still felt the hands of the man on her, her eyes still blinked at the white light of the camera; over and over, she heard the noises of the men who had watched.
“I’m not that kind of man,” Jimbo said at last.
She looked at him then.
“At the airport. I thought you’d written those letters. I thought you knew me. I thought you’d chosen me.”
For the first time, Honorata’s eyes teared. She looked down quickly. She wanted him to leave her room.
“I wasn’t looking for a prostitute. I made arrangements for a wife. Your uncle assured me, he . . . the letters . . . what you said . . .”
Honorata focused on breathing. One breath in, then one out. Her stomach knotted, turned.
She didn’t look up. She stared at the floor in front of his feet, and imagined his hand coming down hard on her back, knocking her forward. But he didn’t hit her. There was silence in the room, and then she heard him move, heard the door open. He was gone.
All night, Honorata lay in bed with bile in her throat. “At the airport . . . I thought you knew me . . .” The room dipped, turned, she would be sick. She thought of herself as a little girl: the yellow dress she’d worn for her first communion, the red frogs the children caught in pails, her mother’s voice, singing bahay kubo, kahit munti. Her grandmother had called her lucky. In the Spanish that no one else spoke aloud, Lola had said, “tienes suerte”—“You are lucky”—over and over. So often that when Honorata was four, she told her new teacher that her name was Honosuerte.
Honorata didn’t remember confusing her own name, but the story was family lore. And she did remember a teacher’s strangely angry face, and a child’s giggle, and she remembered hitching up her skirt so that she could rub a finger across the stretched elastic of her faded blue panties in a way that soothed her—in a way she would repeat right now, if it could still soothe her, if she could still feel that sudden enveloping calm that would come over her the instant that her sensitive first finger slipped across the softened elastic edge. Honorata also remembered the teacher leaning in to her ear and whispering that she would not be so lucky if she lifted her skirt in school like that again, and that the word was not suerte, but lucky. In the Republic of the Philippines, one said lucky.
For a week, Jimbo avoided her. And Honorata avoided him back. But then one night he slipped into bed beside her, and gradually they returned to something like their former routine. They didn’t discuss the letters; Honorata never saw them again. Jimbo still spoke to her with tenderness, but the sex was rougher. Once, he left town for five days without telling her he would be going. And after that, he was gone more and more: a night here, three days there. Honorata eavesdropped on Gina talking on the phone and learned that he was going to Las Vegas.