A Put-Together Mystery with the participation of Emily Abrera, Gilda Cordero-Fernando, Barbara C. Gonzales, Leigh Reyes, Patricia Evangelista, Tim Yap, and Krip Yuson (with Jade Bernas, Vanni de Sequera, and Chin Martelino)

put together by Sarge Lacuesta

At Homobono’s that early evening hour was its usual burgis crowd, that rind of society that, even on the eve of the year 2047, Philippine politics and economic dynamics could not shed, and the magazine-fixated masses could not bear to live or dream without. But it was no ordinary New Year’s Eve. Tonight, the “colonial fusion” restaurant was also celebrating the hundredth year of the patriarch’s death, and with much circumstance and timing: they held an exhibit of century-old costumes, a mini-auction, and a press conference.

A hundred years of fusion can do that to you, make you complacently restless. It’s that kind of fusion that rubs opposites together: the curry with the basil, the pinipig with the endives, young businessmen with artists of a previous generation, the super-rich with the slightly smart and comparatively well educated. Such was the dining crowd at Homobono’s on that evening, as it was on any other evening. Homobono—himself reduced to a photo, then blown up to monstrous proportions and plastered across an entire wall of the restaurant, who was dead tonight for exactly one hundred years.

In fact, a film crew had set up camera, directional microphone, and lights at a corner of the restaurant, displacing a table nobody bothered to dine at anyway, because it was rumored to be where the old man himself always sat when he was still alive. Nobody had bothered to tell the film and press crew, of course; they were well used making themselves invisible at affairs like this. Only the occasional pop of a flashbulb betrayed their presence, and whenever it happened the intruding burst of light joined the flash from fireworks in the sky outside, lit by early New Year revelers.

At the center of the celebration that evening was the Degustacion, a specially prepared menu that gathered Homobono’s childhood favorites as a poor boy growing up on the streets of Gagalangin, Tondo, his most masterful creations at the height of his powers during his training tours in the Catalan and Basque regions of Spain and a string of small family-owned inns on the Italian coast, as well as offerings from the current executive chef—a sort of post-colonial, post-historical “deconstruction,” as described on the handwritten menus.

This was where Ponce chose to dine with his client. He was there on time and alone, as usual. The woman at the next table had an ashtray in place of a plate between her knife, fork, and napkin, and in the ashtray he could count the mashed remains of four or five cigarettes, glowing with burnt red lipstick

The woman sat abreast of him. Homobono’s is a very modern-looking restaurant, with tables and chairs arranged at rigid lines, as though on an invisible grid, perhaps to fashionably recall old walled cities where the permanent imminence of war prompted street layouts that allowed cast iron cannons to easily be towed from one end of the city to the other. It was this kind of order, practicality, and invisible efficiency that Homobono was said to love.

She was in the middle of the eighth cigarette when Ponce’s client arrived. Mr. Gatchalian was slightly overweight, and from the prematurely wrinkled face and the slightly bent posture, plainly overworked. Still, he seemed meticulous about the way he looked and the way he dressed, with a kind of cleanliness and neatness that tended to backfire by staining one’s appearance— "well put-together," Ponce had heard his ex-wife once describe it.

They traded warm greetings; he shook his warm, fleshy hand. Mr. Gatchalian sat across him and picked up the menu for the Degustacion.

La Degustacion

Capiz Scallops Chorizo Iberico Panna Cotta

Lardo di Collonata, Frozen Green Grape, Muscovado Glaze

Pan-Seared Foie Gras

Pan-Roasted Loin of Pork
Prime Rib
Saffron rouille, grilled crostone
Sgroppino

Roast Tenderloin Medaglione Barolo Sciroppo

The Cheese Plate

Duetto of Crepe Millefoglie & Il Fiato

Coffee or Tea

Ponce hardly paid attention to the list before him; first of all, he hardly understood what any of the items meant, and secondly, his peripheral vision was glued to the woman at the next table. She had taken off her jacket and hung it over the back of her chair; what was left of her business suit was a bronze-colored silk shirt, untucked, over a pair of black pants. He waited for her to lift her cigarette to her mouth.

"Do you have a vegetarian menu?" Mr. Gatchalian asked the waiter.
"I’m sorry sir, I am afraid not."

As though to signal the formal arrival of the dinner hour, Homobono’s double-doors opened, and a large group of similarly dressed individuals walked in. They had come from one of the offices above, an international bank that had been the subject of heavy controversy in the papers and cocktail parties.

"Excuse me," Ponce asked her.

The woman threw a glance that told him she was expecting it to be someone she knew. After all, everyone knew everyone else here.

He didn’t know what else to say, except: "would it be OK if I asked for a cigarette?"
He had never done this, and he needed her to know. "I don’t do this."
"Do what?" she asked him, as she shook a fresh Marlboro light out of her pack and handed it to him.
"Smoke," he answered. And she lit him up.
"You used to," she said. She turned her chair to face him. Ponce knew when to turn it on.
"Yes, a lot, just like you. Doctors gave me no chance to recover from a heart condition if I continued. I loved my wife—then—so I quit." He felt he was getting high on the smoke. He had started to say all sorts of truths. "Why do you smoke so much?" he asked.

She ignored the opening and instead looked over at their table. Mr. Gatchalian looked a little impatient, a little ruffled. Ponce thought she was checking him out if he was on a date. He wanted to show her he was straight.

"This is Mr. Gatchalian, a client of mine," he said. "Well, soon to be a client, I hope." He remembered the presentation his creative team made to Mr. Gatchalian at his office the other day. A ten-billion-peso campaign resting on the top-secret line Eternity is a long time to spend forever. He’d waited for the last moment to reveal the tagline and said it to him while looking straight into his eyes.

"I know why they don’t serve vegetarian here," the woman said, and headed for the kitchen.

Ponce pulled together a look of concern, excused himself from his client, and followed the trail of her cigarette smoke. He had ten billion pesos riding on this deal. He had it riding on this meal. And if his client took a shine to him, it was all right, it was all part of the whole package. He would do the unimaginable for the account. People did crazy things to survive. As he walked toward the kitchen he remembered a tabloid article he had come across once. How could he forget? "MOTHER FEEDS OWN FLESH TO SON." Only in the Philippines, he had instinctively thought, and then began to reflect that it was perhaps the most logical headline he had ever come across.

A large man stepped into his path. He was an extremely dark-skinned man who might easily have weighed 300 pounds—50 pounds of which was accounted for by the large, bloodied cleaver he wielded in his right hand.

"It’s OK," she told him, waving her cigarette hand at him.
"Yes, Ma’am Greta," the man answered.
"Meet Mandingo," she told him.

Mandingo grunted to both of them, giving Ponce a small, derogatory look. His presence generated the heavy scent of blood and flesh, an abattoir smell.

Mr. Gatchalian had been a vegetarian for years; and not just because it was a retro fad (which, like gangsta hip-hop and Ilocano food, of late had found new life among The Tatler set), but because his new boyfriend, a twenty-two-year-old history professor at the University of the Philippines, had always warned him that the new genetically modified breeds of cattle, swine, and fowl, could contain Creutzfeldt-Jakob or Kuru agents—deadly spongiform stuff that was the byproduct of genetic modification. Not that vegetables were spared from alteration. He had personally seen and gawked at eggplants the size of upo, and salivated at the sight of upo the size of mini-cannons. Within his lifetime, they had grown twice the size and shrunk to half the price.

But animals were different; he had been taught the alphabet with animals. "A" was inevitably for "Aardvark," though he had seen it stand for "Ant" three or four times, and the rarer "Aardwolf" once or twice. "G" was always for the giraffe, a tall, spotted creature that once ran in herds on the Savannah. He spelled his own name—his whole name, as his father had insisted—with animals. For his first name there was the dog and the donkey, the ocelot and the owl. For his last there were the aardvark, the ant and the aardwolf, there were the cat and the ibex and the lion. There was the turtle and the newt. And for "H," well, there was "humans."

The sight of the dirty kitchen made Ponce limp as a lettuce leaf, and his hopes for any vegetation to please Gatchalian, shaken. There was no sign of any greens. It was strange, too: this was no dirty kitchen—it was cleaner than most clean kitchens, and neater and better put-together, too, clad in brushed stainless steel. The kitchen staff, in white, worked quietly and efficiently, boiling stock, stir-frying, watching the ovens, preparing, he imagined, the rest of the Degustacion.

Mandingo pulled open a drawer and out slide the refrigerated body of a man. A little less than a man, Greta quickly pointed out: where the eyes were, the corpse had holes. Ponce thought of how those little frozen grapes they had earlier might fit into those sockets neatly—

And then the entire menu unfolded and translated itself in his mind…He thought of the Lardo di Collonata, the dark red bouillabaisse, the flesh-colored scallops, the seared foie gras. He thought of the tenderloin, the chorizo panna cotta, and wanted to tear his own eyes and tongue out.

"It’s against the law to kill a person, but no law prohibits eating their flesh," she announced.

It was the smell of Greta’s smoke and the smoke from his own half-spent cigarette that kept him from screaming in panic. It dulled his mind, slowed his senses.

Greta opened another drawer and retrieved a canister of brushed steel. Ponce flinched.

"Our work has taken us a hundred years. Now the recipe is finally complete."

This kind of stuff was all over the newspapers: the use of modified spongiform agents taken from deceased animals as vectors for genetic manipulation within a live generation. The labs were talking about taking it to the next level—packaging hot viruses containing benevolent genetic strains in human spongiforms. The uproar arose when someone proposed to reintroduce them into humans so their reproductive genes would carry the fixes and enhancements into the next generation. It was the equivalent of an oral vaccine—and so much more, the stem-cell engineers promised.

Greta unscrewed the canister and allowed Ponce a long look: the liquid was dark, flecked, oozing, dark red-brown, like used cooking oil. She called it "the elixir." It was not the archaic word that scared him; rather, it was the use of the article before it.

With smoky fingers Greta traced Ponce’s handsome face, his broad shoulders, his tight pectorals. She brought her cigarette to his lips and waited for him to take a long, deep drag.

"You are dying, anyway," she said. "Don’t let everything go to waste."

Old man Homobono himself designed the contraption. It was meant to make light of the work they were doing. It was also meant to recall genetic chance, and at the same time, the wheel of fate. More importantly, it also recalled his favorite game show, Spin A Win.

A thrill ran through Ponce’s body as Greta fixed the straps across his hands, chest, and upper thighs.

Mr. Gatchalian felt woozy from the wine. It was not his habit to drink a lot of wine, but Ponce had insisted. For any other client, it might have been a deal-maker: the label on the bottle announced itself as a ‘95 Chateau Neuf. For him it was par for the course. His signature, after all, unlocked a yearly advertising budget of ten billion pesos. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little weak, a little helpless.

Mr. Gatchalian stood up, tossed his napkin on the table, and headed for the kitchen. He passed an attractive couple who seemed to be on the last days of their relationship: both were privately pleased with their appetizer, and neither spoke to each other. He passed a young, bright-looking girl in a gauzy blouse and miniskirt, dining with an bald-headed man in glasses. He passed a circle of matrons whose lustrous skin and shrill laughter might have come from a gaggle of teenagers. He passed a slightly attractive, but befuddled-looking man. He passed the camera crew and reminded himself to suck in his belly and stick out his chin.

Finally, he passed the bankers’ table. They were all young, bright, with sharp noses and strong mouths. He’d never seen a better-dressed bunch. He envied the fine weave of their wool jackets, hung carefully on the backs of their chairs, their ties, not slung over their shoulders like ordinary diners did, but pinned to their white shirts by clips. He admired the way they ate so cleanly, so neatly, picking off morsels from the tiny tasting portions on their dishes without having to dislodge their cufflinks and roll up their French cuffs.

He knew about the things that hung over them, of course. Who didn’t? It was all over the papers—lawsuits for insider trading, hostile board takeovers, an imminent bank run, not just by everyday depositors but by private bank clients. But despite all the red headlines, the white papers from the regional think tanks, under all that immense pressure, here they were, graceful, quiet, the most civilized humans he had seen in a long time. This is what humans are meant to be, he reflected. We are a race with ten thousand years of training behind us: animal attacks, competition from other hominids, alien invasion, AIDS, two and a half world wars, and the chronic terror of the 9-to-5 job, the daily grind, the crushing weight of advancing age.

He felt himself invigorated by the sight. He looked at the banker at the head of the table. He seemed the oldest of the lot, yet still younger than him by many years. He watched him open his mouth and slip a trembling sliver of meat into it. During that brief moment he imagined himself shrinking into that piece of meat, delivered into his warm mouth, chewed up tenderly by his perfect teeth.

"Stem-cell research. That’s a bit over the top," he heard a young one say.
"It’s a fad, that’s all it is," another said. "Revived from a hundred years ago. Remember when they thought it would save the world, save humankind? It’s like iridology and phrenology."
"What about alternative fuels? Poly-level search engines? Sex simulators? Synthetic fabrics? I could think of a dozen other high-yield industries," another said.

Mr. Gatchalian’s stomach grumbled. He recalled the barongs and the sayas displayed in the restaurant foyer—part of Homobono’s centennial celebration. Pineapple and banana fibers, hemp cloth, flax, and slab linen, all made during the days when there were no synthetics. Now it all seemed delicious to him.

The man at the head of the table finally spoke: "Stem-cell research is high-yield and long-term. My father was into it, and it’s still got legs. Eventually, it’s going to make us live and outlast everything—wars, disease, jail time, age—and yes, it’s going to keep us rich. Gentlemen, under our very noses we’ve got some high-level experimentation going on that’s just about to break out and cause a global stir. That’s what we’re celebrating tonight. No place better than my father’s favorite hangout."

Well, that makes for another thing, Mr. Gatchalian thought. The New Year, a century of old man Homobono, and a new scientific breakthrough.

He lifted his glass, and Mr. Gatchalian trembled with awe at the sight of the bottles on their table: ’95 Chateau Neuf. Homobono’s was serving it as house wine. It was improbable. Suddenly ten billion pesos seemed so cheap.

There is a fragment of a poem painted above the entrance to the dirty kitchen at Homobono’s:

from "Las Ruinas del Corazon" by Eric Gamalinda

She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death
may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life

by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely
in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin,

then sliced thick portions of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate
an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of the chest,

then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine.
Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles

and washed everything down with sweet jerez.

There was also, that night, a blackboard with menu items chalked out, in a kind of restaurant code: "more Pampangos for the sisig; only Davaoenos for Davaoenos."

Tipsy, woozy from the verse and the wine, Mr. Gatchalian moved on, looking for Ponce. Yes, he would give him ten billion a year for dinner once a week at Homobono’s, wine and extras included.

The dirty kitchen yielded easily to him. The forekitchen was strangely deserted, and though he was familiar with the "show kitchens" many fine dining restaurants had, he did not expect Homobono’s to yield to such coarse marketing ploys.

First he saw that lady sitting at the table next to them, smoking a cigarette. Then he saw Ponce, strapped to the chair. Behind him, a deliciously large black man tested the roleta for snags, spinning the wheel so fast he could barely recognize what was written on it, its teeth clicking cheerily across the rubber-and-metal stopper, until it slowed and he could read what was written on the red and yellow wedges: heart, lungs, thigh, loins, a dozen other things he could almost feel twitching inside him.

The horror of the scene before him emptied his head; the only thing he had was the complaint he had earlier intended to make, lying sour and stale on his tongue.

"All I wanted was a decent meal," Mr. Gatchalian said. "May I please have him back?"
Greta looked at Ponce, as though for the last time. "You should have walked away. You shouldn’t have come to me, you shouldn’t have asked me."

Ponce looked back at her, her face crumpled in confusion and indecision. Her hand touched his lightly, almost as if by accident. Thoughts clicked furiously in his head.

"Eternity is a long time to spend forever," he told her, looking at her eyes through the smoke, his fingertips again touching hers.

When the two emerged from the kitchen, Greta first approached the businessmen’s table.

“We have something new on the menu. For the first time, it’s something vegetarian. And then we shall celebrate one hundred years—and the new year ahead.”

The businessmen applauded and raised their glasses to her. The man at the head of the table was especially happy.

Ponce smiled and slipped his hand over hers. He took her cigarette from between her fingers and put it between his lips. He tasted her lips, her mouth on it. This was certainly worth ten billion, maybe more. Through the windows he could see the fireworks light up the sky. The new year stretched out before them, and so much more. He took a long drag from her cigarette.