Names Above Houses

In the Year of the Rat

3 In the Year of the Rat When Fidelito’s first tooth fell out, his mother threw it on the roof so that the rats would find it. They were up there searching for coins. Evenings on the tin roof, their nails clicked like hail—they were always up to something: gambling, counting money. The change in his mother’s jar once filled the glass to the mouth. Now she swore she had seen rats with silver disks between their teeth. Still, the old women in the village who muttered about refusing dark fruits and curing tetanus with the ends of a cephalopod, the plastic part of cuttlefish bone, said rats were lucky. They told her to throw her son’s first lost tooth on the roof for them to find. When the new tooth grew in, it would be strong like the rat’s. 4 !@ The macaws found the tooth first. It could have been worse. His tooth might have been found by ants. Fidelito would have grown antennae and that would have presented the problem of appearances. At least you could hide wings under a shirt. 5 !@ Fidelito’s mother found a pair of nubs bordering his spine. They were drawn up like hands wringing their own skin from themselves, two clenched fists. Translated, it was the odd grace. A boy has no discernible nimbus, though she found him at one year to be an accomplished craftsman. All day he would gather twine from his mother’s frayed skirts and braid them into wreaths of darker hues. 6 !@ Fidelito’s mother is picking up his nimbus again. This aura is hard to see. Quite careless for a boy of two, he leaves it where he knows someone is liable to snare a foot and fall with the splendor of an exploding green fly. That happened once to Luis the mail courier. As mail couriers go, Luis is without much seriousness and is given to moments of exaggeration. The nimbus had closed itself around his ankle, or at least that’s what he says, and mail tore itself open and spread all over the village so that Eduviges Mateo learned about her husband’s habit of discounting the melon prices for Florizel Francisco in exchange for marmosets. How sinister to love marmosets—the white-wigged kind. The thing is with that kind of love, there is a boy in a tree, possibly among the wigged-ones, and he is picking off leaves with his teeth because he is not accountable for that symbol he has lost. And like that, you really can’t blame a man for his love of tufted ears and the long tail. 7 !@ Fidelito’s mother tried to trace her genealogy for the origins of wings. There was Perfecto Reyes, her brother who believed he was a macaque. Trinidad Biliboan, her great aunt, felt compelled to rescue sea-spume from the ocean. Even Dindo Pimintel, her brother-in-law, had traces of insanity. He had a relationship with geckos that the villagers could not construe as natural and had developed a system of manual suction cups for scaling the plaster of his house to sun himself with the lizards away from the tortures of shade. They had all met untimely deaths. 8 !@ At two, Fidelito had grown too heavy for his atrophic nubs. When one is young, one sees so many terrible omens and has no way of knowing that the sky with its furious lie is not thicker than water. The motels rattling along the beaches, the thin sway of the coconuts never erasing their solitude. Fidelito learns to see through these as one would look through windows, embarrassed by fictions he has made about his charming looks—two, and already quite handsome. At any rate, the boy with atrophic nubs has a lot to contend with—the irregular feature of his back, the ellipse. 9 !@ Appearances were getting hard to make with Fidelito. He was always climbing tamarind trees. Itong Dimaculangan, the village crazy man, would ascend after him singing the Ave Maria and smoking his thick cigars. Itong had a fondness for the signs of apocalypse. Cherubimseeking took place in lofty places. And he would invoke Fidelito’s name with every branch he scaled like...