THE HEART OF THE CITY

By the time Zeno Barragan reached the address Clarissa had scribbled for him on the back of a gallery flyer, rain began to fall again. All afternoon, rainclouds had sagged low and grey over Manila, unleashing showers that sent pedestrians scampering for cover and dampening the bright orange of flame trees that had just begun to blossom along Dewey Boulevard. Now, as night fell, the rain seemed to settle in, coming down on rooftops and parked cars with a steady roar. The address was on a tree-lined lane in the Ermita District -- an old Spanish colonial manor set back beyond a tall wrought iron gate and a flower garden where marigolds and weeds had struck a strange alliance, neither yielding to the other. Zeno rang the doorbell twice. The front door opened and a young girl in a maid’s uniform stepped out of the house. She popped open an umbrella and dashed down the driveway through the rain to unlatch the gate. He hurried through, clutching the guitar case under his arm. He had carried the same guitar – a butterscotch 1952 Telecaster he’d wangled from a drunk American sailor on shore leave in Olongapo City -- through murky barrooms in Saigon, through countless set lists, empty beer bottles, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts; through the damp autumn streets of Tokyo at dawn when the hangover was heavier than the instrument itself, with plum blossoms on the verge of bloom and the snow thawing into the runnels of the outer market in Tsukiji. He turned up his collar and shielded the guitar case from the rain as he dashed up the driveway.

Clarissa had set tonight’s gig in motion after weeks of haggling, arm-twisting, and late-night calls to various backline companies and sound crews. She had recently completed her PhD in art history and visual culture and was working part-time as an assistant to Professor Emilio Zabarte. The professor was writing a book on “indigenous aesthetics and their continuity in contemporary Filipino art” – or some such gibberish Zeno couldn’t quite catch. The professor’s wife, Beatriz, was known among Manila’s highbrow circles for hosting parties that were part status rituals, part avant‑garde exhibitions. He had tried – despite Clarissa’s obvious irritation -- to beg off. He’d played for the likes of that crowd before: generals, bankers, dilettantes from the diplomatic corps, the flunkies and panjandrums of the dictatorship. Every so often, the gatherings would tip into something unendurable. When the schmoozing proved too suffocating, he’d been known to pack up his guitar and drag a chair into the scullery to chat up the kitchen staff, at which point he’d lose interest in performing altogether.

But tonight’s engagement was different. Clarissa had staked more than just her reputation on the evening’s performance, after all. There was the professor’s patronage to consider, not to mention her standing among people who could make or break her in a single evening.

The girl showed Zeno through the front door and walked away, the echo of her steps trailing off into the shadows. The house was huge. The ceilings seemed to rise impossibly high, with massive mudejar rafters disappearing into a vast darkness overhead.

“Excuse me,” a voice said behind him.

Zeno turned and was suddenly face to face with a wiry old man with a slicked crest of white hair, wearing a velvet green smoking jacket and carrying what looked like a copper saucepan in one hand. They faced each other like grotesquely mismatched figures in a carnival mirror —Zeno in a shiny lapelled suit carrying the guitar case, the old man in his smoking jacket with the saucepan. For an instant, Zeno was convinced that the stranger was someone’s lunatic uncle, escaped from the cellar somehow -- until the stranger thrust his free hand forward and broke the spell.

“Ah, but you must be the jazz guitarist,” the stranger said. “You are Zeno Barragan, Clarissa’s beau, yes? My wife saw you perform recently – at the Tropicana, was it? She was quite impressed. ‘It was as if the instrument came alive in his hands,’ was how she put it. This was something I had to see for myself. I am Emilio Zabarte.”

Zeno set the guitar case down and shook the professor’s damp hand, muttering his own name. “I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said. “A girl showed me in. I don’t know where she went. I turned around and she was gone.” He lowered his eyes at the saucepan and asked, “Cooking something?”

Professor Zabarte looked at the pan, bewildered. “What was I going to do with this?” he wondered aloud. He looked around, motioned toward a marble pedestal in the corner of the foyer. “There,” he said. He set the saucepan down on the pedestal and wiped his hands on the front of his jacket. “Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Come, the party is in the music room. My wife calls it a salon. It used to be my library. You’ll love it. We simply couldn’t let the wonderful acoustics go to waste.”

The old man led Zeno down a corridor lined with framed plaques, portraits, and mirrors on either side. “Tonight, you play for genuine music lovers,” he said, motioning toward double doors at the end of the corridor. “There are painters, poets, university professors in attendance -- a few impostors, of course. But I—” he tapped his temple, “I will be listening.”

The professor threw the doors open to a party in full swing, elegant and fashionable: glasses clinking, polite laughter, guests milling about paintings hung in some sort of sequence down both sides of the hall – the whole place wonderfully aglitter with cheerful light. Zeno followed the professor into the room, edging sideways between guests. He heard his name called out somewhere above the buzz. He turned in time to see a broad, matronly woman in a sequined turquoise gown advancing toward him. “I am so pleased you could make it,” she said with a spreading smile. Upon her head was a lacquered bouffant so tall and rigid it seemed on the brink of toppling. “I am Beatriz Zabarte,” she announced, offering her hand. “I saw you at the Tropicana two weeks ago. Improvisations like fireworks—chaotic, insane, divine.”

Zeno shook her hand. “I’m glad you enjoyed the show. Yes, that night felt alive.”

“Alive? It was resurrection!” Mrs. Zabarte said. “I told my husband, ‘This man bends time with his guitar.’ I’ve never heard jazz played so eloquently. Such virtuosity. Such soul and passion and fierceness…”

“I was just telling Mr. Barragan he should sit at our table,” Professor Zabarte interjected genially.

“Of course he will,” Mrs. Zabarte said, turning to Zeno, her eyes blinking. “Where else would he sit? This get-together is about jazz. Your music will be the highlight of the evening.”

The couple guided him to a table by the veranda doors. There was piano and a solitary chair on a low riser set off to the right, its edges marked by black tape. Mrs. Zabarte swept her shawl aside, lowered herself onto a chair, and clapped her hands for a waiter. Zeno and the professor sat on either side of her.

“What will you drink, maestro?” she asked. “Wine? Whisky?”

“Whisky,” Zeno said. “Neat.”

“Perfect,” Mrs. Zabarte said triumphantly, as though she had guessed a secret. Then, lowering her voice: “Tell me—do you have the scores for the piano accompaniment? I must hand them to Mr. Alvarez, our pianist.”

Zeno plopped the guitar case on the table, flicked the latches, and drew out a manila folder. “Here, madam,” he said, sliding the folder across the table. “The score sheets.”

Mrs. Zabarte dug her fingers into the folder and fanned the music sheets out onto the table. “Oh, how delicious!” she said, humming a fragment of melody as she scanned the sheets. “How absolutely delicious!”

“Would you mind if I stepped into the washroom before I begin?” Zeno said.

“Of course, my dear,” Mrs. Zabarte trilled. “There is a bathroom at the end of the corridor beyond the hall. My husband will show you.”

“Yes, I must see to the punch anyway,” the professor nodded pleasantly.

The two men rose, and Zeno followed the professor through the crush of guests. He was about to walk into the corridor when he paused before a framed charcoal drawing hanging on the wall near the threshold.

“Ah, that one,” the professor said. “My grandfather’s work. Beautiful, isn’t it? He died many years ago. He fought in the war against Spain, then against the Yanks -- no more than a boy at the time. Notice how he builds tension with negative space? Look at cross-hatching. There is violence there. Real violence. Battlefield violence.”

“This is about war?” Zeno said, touching his chin.

“Yes, it must be, don’t you think?” Professor Zabarte said, puzzled. Then, clutching Zeno’s arm, he said, “We will have time to discuss this later, now I most go check on the punch – and you, my friend, should begin readying yourself for your set. Our guests are eager to hear your music.”

Zeno went into the corridor alone. After taking as much time as he could in the bathroom, he returned to the table to find the professor and Mrs. Zabarte waiting for him, their faces composed but expectant, as if they had been rehearsing in his absence. A waiter poured whisky into his glass.

“Ah, Mr. Barragan, I was telling my wife about your interest in my grandfather’s charcoal drawing,” the professor said. “I meant to ask you, what was it about the work that you found interesting? Did you notice that none of the forms are defined at all – that they are suggested rather than drawn?”

“I don’t really know about that,” Zeno admitted sheepishly. “I thought the draftsmanship was excellent. But the truth is, I don’t know enough about art to tell you what it was exactly that caught my attention. There was so much going on there.”

“Who knows anything about art?” the professor said. “I myself am something of an artist. That is to say, I dabble. I paint, mostly oil and watercolors, which is why I am interested in the experience of art – it’s enjoyment. All my study of brushwork, color theory, composition, and perspective has only led to more questions. I need not go on to recount all my various disappointments. Suffice it to say that I have more questions now than when I first took an interest in things like intentionality and whether or not such things really matter.”

The professor paused and looked at Zeno as if waiting for his words to sink in.

“Yes, perhaps,” Zeno said, tentative.

"Let me make myself clear,” the professor said, sensing his confusion. “I once stood before a carved piece of mammoth ivory in the British Museum – something unearthed from a cave in Siberia, I think. This was no replica, mind you. The piece was authentic – a relic from a time when survival was an act of faith. The carving was behind glass in a dim alcove in the prehistoric galleries. I had just walked in and there it was -- the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. It was a slender fragment, no longer than a man’s hand, polished by time into a soft, honeyed sheen. The artist, twelve thousand years gone, had shaped the surface into a reindeer, rendering the animal’s body with astonishing grace and accuracy. You could actually feel the creature quickly raise its head – sense its quiet alertness, as if it might leap from the ivory at any moment.”

The professor took a sip from his glass and set it down on the table. He looked at Zeno, his smile touched by a faint sorrow. “What was it that had moved this nameless primitive soul to articulate such a grand vision? Was he trying to express some notion of God? Was he carving a prayer? Was he simply recording the memory of a hunt? Or perhaps the right question to ask is…”

As if on cue – and to Zeno’s considerable relief, the doors at the end of the hall opened and servers entered, each carrying a tray. They set the first course down on the tables before the guests. At head server’s signal, they lifted the silver dome covers to reveal bowls of clear consommé. Glasses were filled, bread served in baskets. Then the servers stepped back, bowed, and left the room.

“Well, gentlemen, enjoy your soup,” Mrs. Zabarte said.

“That’s duck consommé,” Professor Zabarte told Zeno. “I insisted the kitchen get it exactly right. The secret is in holding the flame just right and keeping the fat and the grease down while you lift the broth up.”

The room filled with the tinkling of spoons against china. Gradually, the murmur of conversation began to rise. Zeno did not eat when he was working – not in the ordinary sense. His nerves forbade it. He consumed, absorbed, digested – but taste was a mere shadow on his tongue. The waiters poured more wine, cleared plates, glided between tables as conversations hummed and twittered around him like an orchestra tuning before a symphony. When the servers came to take the plates of the main course away, he lifted the guitar case from the floor and walked toward the riser.

Mr. Alvarez, a thin, balding man in his forties in a formal black suit -- was waiting for him at the piano. The two men shook hands and nodded to each other, acknowledging the moment. Zeno sat on the chair facing the hall. He unlatched the guitar case, opened it, and lifted the guitar from the blue felt lining of the cradle. Mr. Alvarez offered him the jack plug. A hush fell over the room as the two musicians tuned their instruments.

“Let’s do the Charlie Christian number first,” Zeno told Mr. Alvarez. “But bring the tempo down to a slow blues in four and improvise.”

“Improvise?”

“Take her as far as you want.”

“Oh, how wonderful,” Mrs. Zabarte said, probably louder than she had intended. “How absolutely wonderful!”

The music began, and almost at once Zeno leaned into the strings with peculiar intensity, coaxing a playful, melodic line from the guitar. The piano slid gently underneath, unfurling a bed of chords for the motif. Some of the audience shifted in their seats. Zeno’s hands moved through the progressions with a deftness that sometimes dazzled, sometimes confounded the room. Once, when Mr. Alvarez introduced a walking line, Zeno’s face tightened, his eyes half‑closed, as if he were listening to something far off – a sound that was not in the room at all. The music plodded along, each number following the last with unbroken momentum. The audience reacted with a mixture of awe and unease. Every now and then someone would gasp or let out a cry, as if startled by their own feeling.

No one responded to the music with more emotion than Mrs. Zabarte, who clutched at the air as if to catch notes floating by, or squeezed her eyes shut and jerked her head back at sudden chord changes. Even when the music was neither particularly heartbreaking nor rapturous, when it merely chugged along, she tapped her foot on the floor or thumped her fist on the tabletop. Zeno ended the set with a wistful rendition of John Coltrane’s Naima, improvising on what was supposed to be the trumpet lines with guitar arpeggios and bent notes that danced in counterpoint to the piano. When the final note dissolved into silence, the room seemed to hold its breath, as if the audience was reluctant to let the spell break. Then the applause exploded, fierce and unsparing.

“That was quite a performance,” Professor Zabarte said when Zeno returned to the table. “You certainly lived up to my wife’s glowing praise.”

“We have to thank you for such beautiful music, Mr. Barragan,” Mrs. Zabarte chimed in. “You must also forgive me for behaving like such a fool during your performance. I embarrassed myself, as usual. I had forgotten that jazz could soar with a beauty far beyond the music we usually hear. I suppose it was the spontaneity that affected me so deeply. One feels that you go out on a limb with each note. It’s like watching a ballet dancer on a tightrope.”

“True, true,” the professor said. “Remarkable how certain sounds can summon emotions that are larger than the music itself.”

Mrs. Zabarte nodded in agreement. “When I was a young girl in Cavite,” she said, her eyes gleaming, “there were nights when the brass bands played under the lamps in the plaza. They were all excellent. I remembered that as you played. I don’t mean the music. The music was obviously very different. But I remembered how the stars seemed brighter -- millions of them strewn across the night sky. It was as if those nights returned to me in a rush, vivid and complete. I remember how, on our way home one night, we turned a corner by the church, and Emilio was there…”

The professor laughed, loud and unguarded. “I was?”

“Some friends had introduced us a few weeks before,” Mrs. Zabarte continued, “but I didn’t know how he felt. He was standing there with a book under his arm. He looked up, startled, as if we had interrupted a thought. I remember how shy he was. He barely spoke, only nodded. Later, he began to walk with us. He would ask about the music, about the trumpets. Always careful, always quiet. We saw each other like that for weeks, in the glow of the streetlamps, the brass band fading behind us. He never pressed, never hurried. But I knew. I knew I would marry him. Even before he asked, even before he found the words.”

“Your cousins thought I was a schoolteacher,” the professor grinned.

“Yes, yes!” Mrs. Zabarte said, her face lighting. “Oh, but I was so in love. I remember how the nights seemed endless, how every walk home felt like the beginning of something, yet he hardly spoke.”

The professor leaned back in his seat, smiling faintly. “It was not so simple,” he said. “I was afraid she would think me foolish.”

“You were too careful,” Mrs. Zabarte said. “There were times I thought you might disappear altogether. Weeks when you stayed away, and I wondered if you had changed your mind.”

He nodded. “I thought you deserved someone braver. Someone who could say what he felt without hesitation.”

Mrs. Zabarte shook her head. “But I knew,” she said. “Even in your silence, I knew. You walked beside me, and that was enough. I waited for the words, but I did not need them. I had already decided. I remember how it felt. The nervousness. The pounding of the heart. When he went off to Manila for his studies, I thought I would die. If it had not been for his letters, I think I would have gone mad with grief. They were such beautiful letters – so sentimental and full of affection. But then came the news that the Japanese had taken Manila. Emilio had fled to the hills to join the guerillas. Oh, Mr. Barragan, I was devastated. Every day I prayed. I imagined him hungry, hiding, perhaps wounded. I could not sleep. There were rumors – especially that last year of the occupation. The Japanese were beheading suspected guerillas in the street, they said. I was terrified. What if he’d been captured? What if he was in some rat-infested dungeon somewhere, awaiting his death? I’d sit by the window, listening for footsteps, for news, for anything. My mother told me to be strong, but the silence was unbearable. And then—months later—a letter arrived, smuggled through friends. His handwriting, shaky but alive. I cried over every word.”

Professor Zabarte smiled tenderly at his wife. He rested his hand on hers and remained silent, waiting for her to continue.

“When the war ended, he came back thinner, older. But still with that same smile,” Mrs. Zabarte said. “He could barely walk. I came to see him every day until he regained his former vigor. We married at once, as if to reclaim the years stolen from us. I remember the church bells, the smell of rice cooking in the courtyard, the way he held my hand as though he would never let go again.”

Her eyes glistened.

“Even now, Mr. Barragan, I can still feel the brightness of that moment – especially when I listen to beautiful music. The relief, the joy, the certainty. After so much fear, after so much death, we chose life.”

By the time the last of the guests had gone, the house had reverted into silence and shadows. The rain started again a little after midnight. Zeno stood under the portico before the front door now watching the rain fall in crescent swoops beyond the eaves. He had been standing in the same spot for a while. He had watched the guests emerge from the house, and the cars pulling away one by one, the red taillights vanishing into the wet darkness. Now he was alone with his guitar case, and the rain was falling hard all around him.

The evening, though marked by its usual pretenses and small humiliations, had proved less intolerable than he’d thought it would be. The professor had written him a generous check, and they had lingered at the table together for one last drink before saying good-night. God knows he’d seen worse. This one passed without real incident – which was why he was surprised when, as he slipped the check into the inside pocket of his jacket, he was struck by a depressing notion: the guitar as burden, the gig as ordeal, and himself as something less than a musician and more a hired hand, a juggler at a children’s party.

“Do you need me to call you a cab?” a voice said behind him.

Zeno turned. It was the girl who had run out to open the gate for him. “No, thank you,” he said. “I will wait until the rain lets up and walk to Mabini Street. Much easier to get a cab there this time of night.”

“Did the Señora not invite you to stay in one of the guest rooms for the night? Mr. Alvarez is staying the night. There is a storm coming.”

“She did ask. I declined.”

“Oh, I see,” the girl said. She turned to leave but stopped halfway, her hand on the doorknob. “Your music was beautiful,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “I have never heard anyone play the guitar that way.”

“Thank you,” Zeno said. “I’m glad you liked it.” He turned away and looked out at the rain on the driveway.

“It was beautiful and strange and sad.”

Zeno turned to glance at the girl. “Sad?”

“Wasn’t it meant to be a little sad?” the girl said. She lowered her eyes, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. “Or perhaps that is only because I’m a sentimental person. Music does strange things to me. The more beautiful the melodies, the sweeter the longing I feel.”

“I see,” Zeno said, returning his gaze on the driveway. A siren wailed somewhere off in the distance, the sound barely audible in the rain.

“I don’t know why, but your music made me think about the night my baby was born,” the girl said. “There was a storm blowing then, too. I remember the wind and the rain on the roof as my labor deepened. I thought I would break apart. The pain was like nothing I had ever known. Hours of it, my body fighting itself and the storm outside.” She touched her hair, suddenly embarrassed. “You have to understand,” she explained, lowering her voice, “I was only sixteen. I went home to Batangas, to my mother’s house. We had nothing. We were poor – like everybody else at the time. The midwife came late. The storm had flooded the roads. The power was out. I thought I would die there, in that small room with the kerosene lamp burning in a corner. My mother held my hand, told me to breathe. The walls shook with the wind. The roof was leaking. Then the sudden quiet, the cry, the weight of him in my arms. I was emptied and filled at the same time. It was hard, harder than I imagined, but in the end, there was joy in it, too -- the kind that makes you forget all the pain. I held him close and it was enough. Even now, when I think of that night, I feel the weight of him, the warmth. Poor as we were, it was the richest moment of my life.”

Zeno was still looking out at the rain, but he could feel her watching him. “He was a beautiful baby -- but so fragile, so different,” she continued. “Always coughing, always feverish. I used to sit awake through the nights, listening to his breathing, terrified it would stop. Once, just a few weeks after his first birthday, the pneumonia nearly took him. He was so weak he couldn’t cry. His lips turned blue. I thought I would lose him. We had no money for a doctor, no medicine. I prayed, begged, held him against my chest as if my warmth could keep him alive. Somehow, somehow, he pulled through, but the fear never left me.”

“I can only imagine,” Zeno murmured, clearing his throat.

“The worst thing was knowing that my child deserved more than what I could give,” the girl said, her voice trembling. “It was not his fault he was born to an impoverished mother. He didn’t ask to be my child. He didn’t ask to be born. He was so beautiful and clean, and he smelled like milk and warm skin. I would press my face to his belly and laugh, and he would kick and squeal, and for a moment the world was only him. But then there were the nights — endless nights — when he cried and I paced the floor until my legs ached, when the laundry piled and the rice ran out, when I thought I would break from the weight of it all. He was always sick. I would look at him and feel fear and desperation rise in me. His forehead burned, his breath came hard, and I didn’t know what to do. I’d sit by his side through the night, listening to his cough, counting the minutes between each breath. I was afraid to close my eyes. The days after were worse, when he was weak and I had to carry him until my arms trembled, when I had to wash his clothes and boil water and find food.”

Zeno lowered his eyes and shifted his weight. The girl’s hand was still on the doorknob, her hand pale as marble.

“Oh, but how I envied the rich, the way they could buy milk, toys, books,” she went on, her voice faltering. “I never really noticed how the rich lived until my son was born. Then I saw – and the more I saw, the angrier I became. I saw how their children grew stronger every day, while mine fought for every breath. I was furious. I hated myself. I hated the poverty that chained me. I hated him for being sick. He would look at me with those eyes, pleading. There were times when his breathing grew so shallow I feared he would not last another day. What was I to do? I could not afford to take him to a doctor. I had no money for medicine. I had nothing to give but water and prayers.”

The girl studied his face for a while. Zeno could feel her eyes on him in the dark. He felt like a caged animal.

“One day a nun came to our house,” she went on. “Neighbors had told her about my baby. By then, our misery was known to the whole town. She was suddenly at our door one morning. I thought she was a ghost. She saw my baby lying on the cot. She did not look away. She sat by him for a long time. She asked about the father. I told her I had met him in Manila. Then she turned to my mother and said the orphanage could provide care we could not afford. She spoke gently and seemed very moved. She was kind and patient and sat by my baby until his breathing eased. My mother said the choice was mine. She reminded me that sometimes love means stepping aside, letting others do what you cannot.”

Zeno pursed his lips nervously. Why was she telling him all this? What gave her the right? He wanted to say something, anything to shut her up -- but nothing came to mind.

“For months afterward, I’d wake in the night and reach for him,” the girl said. “I would sit up, clutching his blanket. That emptiness—it never leaves. It is always there, like a shadow. My mother spoke about the nobility of sacrifice, but I didn’t feel noble. You understand, don’t you? You make such beautiful music. Where does music like that come from? Someone who makes music like that must know exactly how I feel.”

When the rain ceased, Zeno walked to Mabini Street in the dark. The wind had dropped and the sour reek of stale beer and vomit rose from gutters, drifting upward into the night air. He hailed a cab at the corner of Arquiza Street and slid into the backseat with the guitar case. The music was still echoing in his hands. For the first time in days, he allowed himself to feel tired. He leaned his head against the glass of the side window and fell asleep as the cab moved through the heart of the city.

Carlos Castillo studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in the Republic of the Philippines. He published poetry and fiction while in college and has since written for various digital marketing companies. He regularly submits prose for literary magazines and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.