"None of us really believed this virus shit was worth downing tools for": a lockdown story by Sri Lankan-New Zealand writer Dr Himali McInnes
Pablo was different to the other builders I worked with. I liked the way he smelled. It made me want to sniff him. That scent of grassy tobacco undercut with sawdust and metal. That pong of fresh sweat on his dark Chilean cheekbones. It was an honest smell, thrust in your face, nothing hidden or vulgar.
It was kind of Pablo and his girlfriend Mia to let me stay at their place when lockdown hit. My parents couldn’t understand why I didn’t come back to their place instead.
“Why you not come home, Sang?” my mum’s voice floated up the phone line from the Waikato. “You too skinny, son. You come here, I make you eat. Beef pho. Bún chả. The crispiest banh xeo outside Saigon.”
Ho Chi Minh City, not Saigon, I thought. Saigon is so old school, Ma. My mouth watered as she talked. But I couldn’t just run home whenever the shit hit the fan.
I couldn’t tell Ma that I wanted to be near Pablo. She’d get suspicious, ask me why I wasn’t making more of an effort to meet a nice Vietnamese girl. Or even a nice Kiwi girl. My parents were getting desperate, now that I was in my thirties. Deep down, they probably knew their eldest son wasn’t interested in women. But to admit this would be unbearable.
I loved the sorts of things Pablo talked about, on those long lingering Auckland evenings at the flat, when we drank our beers slowly because there wasn’t much else to do. Pablo sat on the deck and talked and talked. The autumn days stilled to crisp nights. Wax-eyes fed hungrily on dusky figs. Pablo told me about the mountains he loved back home. How the hills here felt different. Younger, but still beautiful. He talked of his village, nestled into an elbow of valley. The beehives he tended there. His old man, his mother, his three sisters. The girl he left behind, that Mia didn’t know about.
"You’d like Isidora, Sang. She’s as wild as the wind. I remember her hair best - thick and down to her waist. She was tough, like a mountain goat. But soft on the inside. Acted like granite, sweet as honey within.”
“You must miss her a lot?” I said carefully.
Pablo’s beautiful face clouded. His lips pouted in thought. I felt a sudden urge to press my finger into that pillowy smoothness. His eyes looked at something far away as he spoke. “I haven’t seen Dora for so long now. I’ve forgotten what she looks like. And anyway, now there’s Mia.”
We were quiet for a while.
“I’ve got Quechua blood humming in my veins,” Pablo said suddenly, draining his beer. “But it’s hush-hush, you know? The Chilean government would like to smudge my indigenous face away. Poof! Make it vanish into thin air. Here, people just assume I’m Māori.”
I didn’t ask him if this was better or worse.
The lockdown dragged on and on. None of us really believed this virus shit was worth downing tools for. Not when we were young and fit and good with a hammer. One of the other builders reckoned it was a hoax. Something to do with Bill Gates and a new world order. I knew it wasn’t a hoax; I just figured it might not be as bad as the scare-mongers said.
A skeleton of scaffolding appeared around the house one weekend. Pablo said he was doing some DIY. He didn’t ask Mia for permission, even though technically it was her house.
“No time to rest, Sang. Us Chileans, we work hard. Not like you Kiwis.”
I felt weirdly gratified that he’d called me a Kiwi. The word bloomed inside my chest. I took my shirt off and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. At my flat-lining lips. My eye-lashes that stuck out boyishly like tiny fingers. The way my skin cleaved tight to my ribs, each bone grooved with shadow in-between. My heart that thrummed like a wriggly tadpole underneath my skin.
That’s what I liked best about Pablo, I decided. The way he took everyone at face value. He’d never once asked me where I was really from.
Pablo spent a happy weekend replacing rotten weatherboards. The flashings over some of the double-hung windows had to be re-done. The gable had pigeons roosting inside a hole - he said he could hear them scuttling around in the attic.
Afterwards, Mia stuck a bowl of chips out on the deck. Pablo leaned back, dragged deeply on his cigarette. The front feet of his chair lifted off the decking; he teetered in perfect balance. I thought he looked like a lissome South American bird of prey, hung in mid-air, considering his target. He fixed me with the intense stare I’d found so unnerving when I first met him. “Well, you could say my parents named me after a rapist, Sang. Or one of the greatest poets my country ever birthed. Take your pick.”
“Oh you’re not still going on about that Neruda guy, are you?” Mia blew smoke upwards and rolled her eyes at me.
“All my life I’ve loved his words,” Pablo said. “And yet he literally raped a maid in Ceylon. Wrote how the poor woman kept her eyes open the whole time. Like she was a statue. The world didn’t care, it was in love with his poetry. Espléndida razón, demonio claro del racimo absoluto, del recto mediodía….”
“Luminous devil,” Mia whispered into my ear. Her breath was hot and gingery. “Bright devil of the noon. Or something to that effect.” She slid off her seat and onto the decking. Her long white arms wrapped themselves around Pablo’s legs and squeezed tight. She laid her cheek on his knee and smiled at me. “But the world does care these days, Pablo. Hash-tag Me Too.”
My tadpole heart slithered treacherously close to the surface. I drank my beer down in one gulp and burped loudly.
“Why you no call, Sang?” My mother’s voice wormed into my ear. Her words needled. I held the handset away and wondered why Mia still owned a landline. “And why you not find nice girl, make babies? Your Pa and I getting old, you know.”
Pablo and Mia had had flights booked for South America. It was to be Mia’s first time meeting Pablo’s family. Of course, once the borders shut and aeroplanes started collecting in fields like fossilised birds, no one was going anywhere. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected a swell of relief in Pablo.
"Autumn is on the march, Sang. Adelantado otoño.”
I gazed at Pablo’s profile as he looked out the window. I took in the gutsy bob of his Adam’s apple, the sinewy tendons corded along his arms. I thought about what it would feel like to run my tongue over that burning landscape. There was the faintest movement in the corridor. Mia, watching me, watching him.
Mia put on weight. Her flesh as she walked down the hallway, wrapped in her towel, was soft as creamed butter. Every night, she found new things to do to potatoes and pasta. She blamed the stress of working from home. Pablo seemed to enjoy Mia’s newly voluptuous look.
“Plena mujer, manzana carnal, luna caliente,” he said, as he caressed Mia’s hand.
Mia looked at me and smirked. “Full woman, flesh-apple, hot moon. Yep, that’s me all over, baby.”
Lockdown, meanwhile, made me hungry but never sated. Every time Pablo and Mia slipped off to their room, I slammed my sneakers on and whistled out the door before the sounds of their love-making could reach my ears. I walked for miles, sometimes right in the middle of the road, like a zombie in the apocalypse. The tui rioted in the trees. An orchestra of birdsong, fruity and full-throated, made the air swell with beauty. But what would normally have filled me with delight just irritated me.
I found the letter when I got back from an early morning walk. The envelope was heavy, thick with importance. It smelled like granite and ice. Or so I imagined. A line of stamps along the top were criss-crossed with red and black circles. The letter was addressed to Pablo; a strong inky hand, the words firm, a woman staking her claim. The address on the back simply said: ‘De Isidora, tu prometida.’
