The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi Read Free Book Online

real personality. You could have written a novel about him. My mother once said, ‘If you come across a man with more than one personality, you can be sure he’s looking for himself in one of them, because he has no character.’ But I think she was wrong, because Mendoza, despite his many personalities, did have a real personality. It only came to light in the evening when he drank
tuba
, fermented coconut milk. His other personalities were merely attempts to conceal that real personality. He was crying inside but he suppressed it. And when the drink began to take effect, I could hear him raving at night, saying, ‘I’m weak, I’m lonely.’
    In 1966 my grandfather had joined the Philippine Army, which was allied at the time with South Korea, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand under US leadership to fight North Vietnam in the Vietnam war. He was in one of the units that helped provide medical and logistical services there. ‘In the mountains of Vietnam the Viet Cong stole my father’s humanity,’ my mother said. ‘He never told us what he saw, but he must have gone through indescribable things, to come back at the end of the war in the state you can see him in now.’ When I was growing up I hated my grandfather with a vengeance and wished him dead,whatever excuses my mother made for him. If I complained that he’d been cruel to me, she would say, ‘We went through the same thing – me and Aida and Pedro. We used to complain to your grandmother when he flew into a temper and snapped at us, but she would always say, “It’s the war. It’s still raging inside him.”’
    My grandfather came home in 1973 with traumatic memories we knew nothing about and with a small US government pension for the rest of his life. The pension money didn’t count as income for the family, because it was just enough to buy a new cock every month, and if the cock was killed by a more aggressive cock, then it meant the loss of a month’s income. If the cock defeated its rival, my grandfather would take his winnings and buy another cock. Whatever money was left he spent on food, stimulants and expensive vitamins for the cocks. Either way the money would fly away like the feathers of the fighting cocks and no one in the family had the right to object. The only solace if my grandfather’s cock did win was that he would come home carrying a cage with three cocks in it: the winner, a new cock, and the loser, which would usually be dead or on the point of death, as a feast for the hungry family.
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    My mother somewhat neglected my religious education in the belief that my future was to be a Muslim in my father’s country. My father had whispered the Muslim call to prayer in my right ear as soon as he held me in his arms in hospital after I was born, but that didn’t stop my mother from taking me to the small local church as soon as we arrived in Manila to baptise me in holy water as a Catholic. Apparently she wasn’t yet fully convinced at that stage that I would go back.
    If only my parents could have given me a single, clear identity, instead of making me grope my way alone through life in search of one. Then I would have just one name that would make me turn when someone called me. I would have just one native country. I would learn its national anthem. Its trees and streets would shape my memories and in the end I could lie at rest in its soil. I would have one religion I could believe in instead of having to set myself up as the prophet of a religion that was mine alone.
    Sometimes I think of those minutes Rashid and Josephine spent on that boat when they became my father and mother. It’s madness that their minutes of pleasure should make my whole life such a misery.
    If I had been born Muslim to a Kuwaiti father and a Kuwaiti mother, I would be living in a big house with a spacious room on the upper floor, with a forty-six-inch television, a