I used to live in run-down old apartment building in a district ironically named Bagong Pag-asa. It was a ghetto that petty thieves used to get away from the cops running after them, where whores would sit around indoors all day, scratching their scabby legs while playing cards, only to emerge at sundown, looking as soft as ingenues ready for their close-up. But apart from snatchers and prostitutes, Bagong Pag-asa was also mother to people like me. Runaways, attracted like moths to the city’s lights. We come in our hundreds, and in our thousands, we burn our wings, leaving us flopping around in the mud of places like this. Barely surviving but too damned yellow to quit.
The building I stayed at was a rickety place made mostly of cast-off wood and ply-boards nailed into haphazard place. The roof leaked in about twenty places, and walking through the rooms was like navigating through an obstacle course of pails, dippers, and chamber pots. Rooms – there were six, tow on each floor – were lit by bare light bulbs stolen from street lamps by scavengers and rented out to us by the landlady at a rate of five pesos for eight hours. During the day, the toll jumped to five pesos an hour. Thee were days when I decided skipping meals was a better alternative. Studying by candlelight always gave me a headache and my eyes aren’t too good to begin with.
I lived on the third floor, in the room directly above an old man whose daughter would come, once a month, in a shiny owner-type jeep, to pay rent to our landlady. Across the corridor from me, was a young man, with long stringy hair and who never talked, except to the old man on the second floor. That was fine with me. I kept to myself, mostly. And anyway, when I wasn’t studying, I was staring out the window looking at the wall that was about a meter away.
Now the thing about that wall was that it had a vine growing out of a crack right smack in the middle of it. In my moments of desperation, I used to take comfort in the sheer ridiculousness of that vine taking root in the most barren landscape possible, and still fighting gamely to survive. Needless to say, I identified with the plant. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one.
One day, as I was making my way down the steep flight of stairs, I noticed that the door to the old man’s room was open. I looked in and saw the young man with the stringy hair, talking to the old geezer who was sitting in one of those lounging chairs with disproportionately long arm rests.
“See that vine?”
“What about it?” the young man replied in a surprisingly pleasing baritone.
“That vine wasn’t there when I got here. I was sick then too, and I used to sit on this chair and look out on that wall. Then the vine showed up. A tiny sprout at first, but it grew and grew and grew. And as I watched it, I often thought that if the vine lived, so would I.”
“That’s a nice story,” the young man said.
“And it’s about to end, Erik.” SO that’s his name, I thought.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at it now.”
Me and Erik looked out at the vine at the same time. He from where he sat next to the old man, and me, from where I was eavesdropping by the door.
“It’s withering.”
“Like me,” the old man said feebly.
“Don’t be like that,” Erik said gently.
“Why not? We all knew my recovery wasn’t permanent. And I’m thankful for it but, well, I suppose my time is up.”
“Because the vine is drying up? C’mon,” the young man chided softly. “You’re gonna get better again.”
“No I won’t, ” the old man said. “When those leaves are gone, I’ll go too.”
I counted four leaves still on the vine, and thought that I had eavesdropped too long. Before I got even more depressed, I quietly continued on my way. That night it rained hard. As I lay in bed, listening to the complex staccato harmonies of rain on the bare tin roof and of dripping water plinking into the pots and pans scattered across the floor, I remembered thinking that those leaves were history. All through the night, the rain fell. Eventually, I drifted to sleep, lulled by the monotony of the monsoon. Still, from time to time, I would wake up to the sound of the old man’s hacking cough, or the ruckus coming from across the corridor – like someone had woken up and kicked a pail over by mistake, raising a clatter that would have woken the dead. And at least once during the night, I had sat bolt upright in bed, shocked awake by a very vivid dream of the old man, soaked in rain, lying dead on the floor of his room.
When morning came, the rains had stopped and the smell of mud rose pungently up from the ground. I opened my eyes with a feeling of dread. The old man’s fatalism had affected me more than I expected and I looked out the window with a growing sense of fear. What I saw, however, made me want to whoop in unexpected triumph. The rains had stripped the vine of all its leaves, but one. Like a fool, I jumped out of bed and ran down to the old man’s room screaming “there’s one left!”
When I got there, I was greeted by the sight of the landlady holding the old man’s hand. She wasn’t a bad sort, our landlady. Not really. But still, right then, she was holding the old man shaking hand with a tenderness that surprised me. “What’s the matter?” I demanded. “There’s one leaf left! He’s okay, right?”
“He’s dead,” the landlady said with a catch in her throat.
“What? Who?” The confusion must have been screaming from my voice, because the old man looked up at me.
“Erik,” he said, and his hand fluttered towards the window.
It was then that I realized that the leaf I thought I saw was merely painted on the wall.
In a daze, I walked slowly towards the window and looked out. There, in the mud, lay the long haired Erik, his head bent at an awkward angle from the force of when it hit a bit of broken paving. A paint brush, a small can of paint, and a crumpled umbrella lay around him.
“The ladder must have slipped and …” the landlady’s voice trailed off. Either that, or I couldn’t hear her over the pounding of the blood in my ears.
…
I’d like to say that the old man lived, sustained by the painted leaf that gave the lie to his own fatalistic augury. But he didn’t. He died that same afternoon. But Erik didn’t know that. So at least he died thinking he was giving new hope to this man. There are worse ways to die, I suppose.
The story of the Last Leaf is an old one. This is just my take on it.