THE COLLECTOR
Knock!
My body jumps awake, as if stopping itself falling from a great height.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
Someone is banging on the door. Nanay is already up, her side of the bed cool, uncreasing slowly in her absence. My heart slows as I hear the door creak open and Bondoc’s voice.
‘Tala, we’re going to sort this out. Come with me.’
‘What do you—’ starts Nanay.
‘Come now. Sister Margaritte’s got us an appointment.’
‘Appointment? For what?’
‘For sorting this out. Let’s go!’
‘I can’t leave Ami.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ I call, slipping on my sandals and hurrying through to where Nanay is standing in the doorway. Bondoc’s hand is on her cheek and he drops it hurriedly, though I have seen his hand on her cheek and hers on his many times before when they thought I wasn’t looking.
Nanay turns to me. ‘I don’t even know where we’re going—’
‘I’ll explain on the way,’ says Bondoc, stepping back and holding out his hands to us. ‘We have to be there by nine, or he won’t see us.’
‘He?’
‘Come on, Tala!’ Capuno emerges from his brother’s shadow. ‘We have to leave now.’
Capuno is more sensible than Bondoc, and him urging Nanay seems to decide it. She wraps her face and picks up her stick, and I close the door behind us, hurrying to keep up with Bondoc’s strides.
We are following the steps we took yesterday, and the ones I took last night – down our street, through the field that is now houses, towards the hospital. I scan the doorsteps for berries, but they are gone. Every one, gone. As we walk Nanay hisses at Bondoc to explain, and Bondoc tells her we are to see Mr Zamora, to put our case to him.
‘Our case?’
‘For Ami to stay.’
Nanay’s hand clenches mine, and I feel her slowing until it is like walking through mud and I am almost dragging her.
‘I don’t want to see that man.’
‘I know,’ says Capuno softly. ‘But it is worth a try, yes?’ Nanay stops and takes in a great hiccup of a breath.
‘Yes,’ I answer for her.
Bondoc squeezes my shoulder, his hand huge and heavy and warm. Nanay nods, and we keep walking.
We walk past the berryless houses and the queuing people at the hospital to Doctor Tomas’ house, a neat square built on two floors with wrought-iron balconies at the windows. Bondoc knocks twice on the wooden door, and Sister Margaritte opens it.
‘Come, quickly. It’s nearly five past.’
Inside is cool, the floor stone, like in church. There are framed pictures on the lemon-yellow walls, and the first room we pass is filled with piles and piles of paper, with Doctor Tomas sitting on a low chair, leaning on his knees to write in a large book. He looks up as Sister Margaritte ushers us on, closing the door on the piled-paper room. The door has a small square sign saying DOCTOR TOMAS, hung lopsidedly.
‘So he’s a guest in his own house now?’ says Nanay, and Capuno shushes her while Bondoc snorts. We are led up the stairs, which creak ominously as we climb. Sister Margaritte brings us to a stop on the narrow landing.
We all crowd around the door. It is white except for a small square patch of unpainted wood in the middle. This must have been where Doctor Tomas’ sign used to be. Above it, a large sign hanging on a nail reads:
MR ZAMORA
AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE
TO THE DIRECTOR OF HEALTH
It is in the same red lettering as the notices. I try to swallow the lump that rises in my throat as Sister Margaritte knocks.
‘Enter.’
She turns the handle.
The room is full of colour. The walls are flecked like the church’s stained glass, with reds and purples and greens and blues, as if vines of gumamela flowers have threaded up them. But it is not flowers that crowd the room – it is butterflies. Butterflies lined up like school children, or an army, in neat rows.
‘What is this?’ Bondoc growls.
‘Ah, do you like my collection? I go nowhere without them,’ says Mr Zamora, unfolding slow as a nightmare from behind a low wooden desk. He is wearing a pink tie drawn tight enough to butt against the apple of his throat when he talks. ‘They are dear as children to me. Rhopalocera. Or as you may know them—’
‘We know what they are,’ interrupts Bondoc. ‘Why are they here, like this?’
‘I am a lepidopterist,’ says Mr Zamora.
‘We don’t use that word,’ says Bondoc warningly.
‘A lep-i-dopterist, Bondoc,’ says Sister Margaritte. ‘Not leper.’
‘Oh.’ Bondoc folds in on himself, seeming to lose height.
‘Yes,’ smirks Mr Zamora, thin fingers spreading to indicate the walls. ‘Or to put it in terms you may understand, I collect and study butterflies.’
‘These are all dead?’ I ask, though I know they must be, to be so still. The colours of the wings ripple like fish underwater.
‘No, I trained them to settle like that,’ Mr Zamora sneers. ‘Yes, of course they’re dead. I breed them, hatch them, pin them . . .’
‘You breed them just to die?’ says Nanay.
‘So that I may study them,’ Mr Zamora repeats, raking his eyes across her scarf as he sits back down, pointedly scraping his chair back and away from her. ‘Is this why you’ve come? To question me about butterflies?’
‘No,’ says Nanay coolly. ‘But it is interesting to know.’
‘We’ve come,’ says Capuno hurriedly, breaking the bristling silence, ‘to discuss your plans to remove the children—’
‘The government’s plans,’ interrupts Mr Zamora.
‘You are their authorized representative, are you not?’ snaps Bondoc, who is done shrinking. ‘Or did I misunderstand the sign you’ve hung on Dr Tomas’ door?’
‘I am indeed the government’s representative.’ Mr Zamora narrows his eyes. ‘And you would do well to reflect that in your tone.’
Capuno steps between Bondoc and the desk, pulling from his pocket a carefully folded piece of paper. ‘I have here a petition, signed by the parents of all the Untouched children who are to be taken, and plenty of us without children too. We request—’
‘We demand—’ interjects Bondoc.
‘That you reconsider your plans to relocate the children to the Places Outside.’
‘Places outside?’ Mr Zamora’s voice is mocking, his thick eyebrows rising towards his thin hair.
‘To the next island,’ says Capuno calmly. ‘To Coron.’
‘I see,’ says Mr Zamora, obviously amused. My skin is as hot as if he were making fun of me.
‘We feel it must be possible for the children to stay on Culion, if not in the town itself. Perhaps things can remain as they are, or perhaps they can keep to the areas you have devised and see their parents in a monitored environment. Surely anything is preferable to separating families.’ Capuno was a teacher before he came here, and I imagine a good one, with his straight back and clear voice. ‘So, here it is.’
He unfolds the piece of paper and holds it out towards Mr Zamora.
He does not reach for it, for what feels like a moon age. His face is placid, like a lake hiding the snapping log of a crocodile. Eventually Sister Margaritte takes the paper and places it on the desk in front of him. It is a tangle of names. People have written up the margins and between the other words. I feel the first bright start of hope. Surely he can’t ignore so many names?
‘Read it, sir,’ says Sister Margaritte. ‘Please.’
‘I hope you say your prayers in a more persuasive tone, Sister,’ says Mr Zamora, giving the same hard emphasis to the last word as she did to ‘sir’. He lets out an exaggerated sigh, and leans forward slightly to open the top drawer of the desk.
He takes out a pair of tweezers and lays them carefully by the petition. Then he takes out a glass disc with a wooden handle attached, and puts this next to the tweezers, nudging them this way and that to make them all line up neatly. Like soldiers, or school children, or pinned butterflies. Then he closes the drawer. He does all these things with an infinite slowness that makes my skin prickle and crawl.
In one hand he picks up the tweezers, pincers the top corner of the petition, and lifts it, keeping his long arm extended. With his other hand he picks up the handle of the glass disc, and peers through it. His eye bulges, huge through the glass, flicking back and forth as he reads aloud:
‘We the undersigned write in protest to point four of Article Fifteen, as decreed by Government Representative Mr Zamora. We request that persons under eighteen be afforded the same right as those over eighteen, namely: that the Director of Health authorizes this person to remain on Culion, on the condition they stay within the Sano areas. Limited trespass may be made into Leproso areas under authorized supervision.’ It is horrible to hear the words, quoted from the signs stuck up on every street, spoken out loud, especially in Mr Zamora’s faintly amused tone.
‘We feel that this is the kindest and most tenable way to temper the already traumatic effects of forced separation, without resorting to forced migration. Signed . . .’ Mr Zamora looks up from the petition. ‘Seemingly everyone on this sorry rock.’
‘Not quite everyone,’ says Nanay. She has been standing so still it felt as if I were holding hands with a statue, or a tree, but now she reaches forward and plucks a pen from the inkwell on Mr Zamora’s desk.
‘Don’t—’ exclaims Mr Zamora, but Nanay has already ripped the petition away from the tweezers, leaving a shred behind between the glinting pincers. She scrawls her name in a tiny piece of space, then puts it back down on the desk, jabbing the pen back into the inkwell so little black spots spray everywhere.
‘There. Now everyone on this “sorry rock” has signed it,’ Nanay hisses. She is breathing hard, her scarf flaring in and out. Behind her, Bondoc is looking at her as if she is as wondrous and terrifying as a tiger.
Mr Zamora is staring at her too, but as if he has seen a ghost. His arms are raised as if he still holds the petition, the fragment quivering in the tweezers. His skin is pale as paper, his puffy lips mouth wordlessly. His gaze flickers from Nanay to the ink spots that are blooming across the square piles of papers, across Nanay’s scarf. He whimpers like a kicked dog, and looks down at the spreading black on his pink tie.
‘Mr Zamora?’ says Sister Margaritte.
He whispers something.
‘Pardon?’ she says.
‘Out,’ he says, quiet as a hiccup. ‘Get out.’
‘But, sir, you haven’t given us an answer,’ says Capuno, stepping forward.
Mr Zamora reels back, knocking over the chair and drawing himself up jerkily.
‘Don’t come near me!’
Capuno stops mid-implore.
‘You want an answer?’ Mr Zamora turns his back on us and opens the drawer of the dresser he has stumbled against. He takes out a small bottle and scourer, then squirts the clear liquid from the bottle on to the ink on his tie. A sharp smell prickles my nose, like the tang of the hospital. While he speaks, he begins to scrub.
‘The answer is no. No matter how many petitions, how many signatures, no matter how much you lepers and your offspring want a different answer, it will still be no.’
‘But—’ starts Capuno.
‘And you’ll be wanting a reason, as if the reason is not clear enough!’ Mr Zamora is not looking at any of us, which I am glad about because I don’t want him to see me cry. ‘We want to end this disease. And do you know how we kill a disease? We stop . . . it . . . breeding.’ He stops scrubbing his tie and puts some of the clear liquid on his hands, then begins to scour his palms. ‘We stop it multiplying. And to do that we must keep clean.’ His palms are scrubbed raw.
Sister Margaritte touches Nanay on the shoulder and we all begin to back away towards the door. Mr Zamora continues speaking into his hands, which have started to bleed.
‘We stop it cleanly in its tracks. We take the clean ones, and give them a clean life. Surely you must agree that is important above all things. Take these butterflies,’ he says, gesturing at the walls. ‘They have never known disease, or danger. I even give them a clean death – is that not a kindness? They are beautiful. Clean. Untouched by the world.’
Sister Margaritte opens the door and we hurry out. Before she closes it I look back at Mr Zamora, still scrubbing, surrounded by the rainbow patchwork of dead butterflies. He looks up, finally. He is panting, his eyes wild.
‘We will make history of lepers,’ he says, ‘and a museum of this island.’
Sister Margaritte slams the door.
My hands are shaking, and even Bondoc trembles as we leave Doctor Tomas’ house. I hear Doctor Tomas asking Sister Margaritte what happened, but she only shakes her head and walks past us all without a word. She takes the path down towards the sea, towards church, and I know she is going to pray.
The rest of us walk in our own little bubble of quiet past the hospital and its queue of people, past the new houses, all the way home. Nanay is limping heavily, leaning as much on me as she does on her stick. Bondoc hovers, but she does not fall.
At home, I boil water and steep ginger root. I huddle next to Nanay as we drink.
‘He’s sick,’ says Capuno finally.
‘We knew that already,’ rumbles Bondoc.
‘No, really sick,’ says his brother. ‘Did you see how he laid the tweezers and magnifying glass out? Such precision. And how regimented those butterflies are?’
Lepidopterist, I think, rolling the word out over my silent tongue. Lep-i-dop-ter-ist. The beats drift softly up and down, like butterfly kisses.
‘And how he reacted when I got near him,’ says Nanay in a small voice. ‘He wasn’t just disgusted, he was scared.’
‘We should report him,’ says Bondoc.
‘To who?’ sighs Capuno.
‘The government that sent him!’
‘But they are in agreement,’ says Capuno. ‘He is acting on their behalf.’
‘Then why the petition?’ Nanay says sharply. ‘Why give us that hope?’
‘Because it was worth it, wasn’t it?’ says Capuno. ‘To try everything?’
She does not answer him. I am not sure either.