by Glenn Diaz
Passing by the empty chairs, the cop said they had positioned the TV in such a way that even the inmates could watch, although from where they were Pacquiao and Morales would might as well be ants, ha-ha-ha. It didn’t happen often naman, so we just let them. Good for the morale. “You don’t want these people angry, trust me,” he said.
Straight ahead, I imagined, grimy hands clutched steel bars and grown men peed on discolored walls.
“He will take your statement,” I told Scott when we got to a small windowless room that smelled like a long-closed cabinet. “Speak slowly and clearly, OK?” I saw the cop’s nametag and said his name although, judging from Scott’s crumpled face, it was too strange for him to remember. “Pangalangan” was too Filipino, with too many A’s and Ng’s, syllables that repeated endlessly, a blathering chant to a Western ear.
More than three years here and all he could say were the basic—oo, hindi, salamat po, talaga, San Miguel—tenses and conjugation were in another universe. “Bes-ta!” he’d often exclaim, after bungling a Tagalog sentence. The smile would appear and forgiven he would quickly be, the same way I had forgiven him for all the little trespasses, the snide remarks about my job, about Manila, the infidelity, Ian, the latent superiority complex kept in check by his anthropology degree, revealed only by one too many bottles of San Miguel.
PO3 Wesley Pangalangan took a seat in front of a small wooden desk and removed a dust cover that revealed a compact electric typewriter.
“Wow!” Scott said. “You still use these things?”
“Scott.” I glared at him. The cop laughed.
“No budget,” he of the challenging name said, chuckling as he rolled a piece of paper into the cartridge. “Maybe you can donate, Mr.—”
“Kilborn.”
“K-I-L—” I volunteered, and the policeman’s fingers typed away. “B-O-R-N.”
“It’s Nordic,” Scott explained, “First name Dean Scott.” He told the story of the missing bag with the usual narrative flare, often digressing to casual observations about the “fascinating country life.” When two, then three, cops hovered around us, his telling became more animated. His bag was probably nicked, he finally said, by some Filipino miscreant who was only trying to find his next meal. “Hope he and his family are all nice and stuffed now.” More laughter.
You know, he said, this same loud rhythmic clacking had been the soundtrack of his youth. His father, a novelist, was often cloistered in his study for most of the day, hunched over his IBM Selectric. His last unfinished work was about the Vietnam War, and for research he had come to Subic at around the same time Scott left for Providence for college. His father stayed here until his death a decade later. “So devoted to his art, he was.” He cleared his throat, as if preparing to say something more.
“Please, please,” Pangalangan told us, “continue, continue. Pacquiao soon.” He pointed to his wrist watch.
After we finished, he said he would let us know if they found anything. I handed him a hundred-peso bill before we left. For his cigarettes, I explained to Scott when we were out of earshot.
His eyes narrowed. “But that’s his job.”
“Basta,” I said. He sighed and gave me a kiss.
Outside the police station, summer glared and pressed unto one’s skin. Scott was too polite to complain, although once or twice, he had commented on the amount of oil the heat would extract from his face, how it could offset the world crude market, make the Philippines a major producer.
We looked for the nearby Sinking Bell Tower at the suggestion of the cops, who, like true guardians of law and order, had begun scrambling for good positions in front of the TV once we left. The belfry was right next to a Western Union and a tricycle terminal, they said. You won’t miss it.
Veiled by some trees and power lines, it soon emerged in the midmorning haze.
“Nice,” Scott said. “The roads here are really wide, too. Nice.”
The church tower was four hulking tiers of eroded bricks and mossy, discolored crevices. Said the marker, it was one of the tallest and most massive in the country, built by Augustinian friars in the early seventeenth century. Back then, a man on horseback could enter the vaulted entrance, whereas now, Scott, who was five-foot-eleven, needed to stoop to do so. “Nice,” he said again, inspecting the remaining archipelago of original red bricks on the lowest tier. The rest of the bricks had crumbled, surrendering to long-ago earthquakes and conflagrations, the awful combination of sun and monsoon. The province was a routine exit point for storms on their way out to the South China Sea.
“What’s that over there?” He pointed to a slender brick structure in a nearby park. “Looks like a miniature Washington Monument. Nice.” We crossed the road to look at what turned out to be the Tobacco Monopoly Monument. Recalling a history lesson in grade school, I told him about the forced planting of the crop in the region, the plan of the Spaniards to make Ilocos the world’s biggest producer. Ever heard of Tabacalera? The tobacco monopoly had been harsh on the people. “It’s why the Ilocanos are known to be frugal,” I told him. “You’ve met my mother.”
“Nice.”
“Please stop saying nice,” I said.
“Oh, Alvin.”
Yellow-clad street sweepers picked up trash and watered the surrounding greenery. I read off the marker: “‘This monument is an expression of joy and gratitude by the people of Ilocos.’”
“Big bad colonial state coopting intimate gestures,” he said. “Nice.”
I looked at him.
“Wonderful,” he said.
“Did I tell you about the time Philip fell asleep in the middle of training? (He shook his head.) When he woke up, the trainer went on and on about gratitude and professionalism and showing them that we deserve the jobs the Americans are giving us.”
“I like her already,” Scott said.
A few days later, I told him, two white guys visited our class. There was applause when they came in. Maybe because we were surprised to see youngish blondes in shirts and jeans instead of old geezers in ill-fitting suits. They stood on opposite sides of the room, and produced a leather football which they’d throw to whoever had the turn to speak. “We’re excited to see you guys grow with us.” Overhead pass. “We see enormous potential in our Manila operations.” Sharp lob. “It’s a little hot in here, ain’t it?”
Scott fanned himself with his hand.
I looked at him, then at the far-off stretch of the Marcos Bridge, above the tributary that had made these plains enviably fertile once.
Since we’re sharing heartfelt life stories, Scott said, did he ever tell me he was in his sophomore year when they got the telegram from his dad that he loved them, but he’d found something special in Subic. “I knew so little about the Philippines and had so many questions,” Scott said. “I remember thinking, ‘the Philippines? Where the hell is that? What’s the fucking deal?’”
This made me chuckle for some reason. “You still don’t know?”
“Now I do,” he said, wiping the torrent of sweat on one side of my face. I feigned a shiver and looked at him. Bells pealed from the tower.
Applause meant for someone else welcomed us to the church. Applause, then an amplified guitar rift and a giant tambourine, vigorously shaken, in conclusion to a song. We found a spot near a side entrance.
“Wow,” Scott whispered above the din, looking around the cavernous interior. The pews up front were occupied by old women whose heads were covered with white embroidered veils. “I love rituals,” he said, joining in on the ovation. The combination of applause, strings, and percussion reached the high sloping ceiling before returning to earth with a shudder.
“Iti Apo adda koma kadakayo,” the priest said.
“At sumainyo rin,” I mumbled.
“I didn’t know you were a practicing Catholic.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I just like rituals.”
“Very funny,” he said.
When I was in high school, I found a D
aily Bread booklet that mysteriously found its way under my pillow. Hours later, minutes shy of midnight, I was crying an embarrassing amount of tears into the same pillow. Sin, once an abstraction, transformed into something concrete, unassailable, terrifying. How great God was for loving a wicked baleful thing like me! Mama invited me to go to church with her the next day and didn’t seem surprised when I said yes. In college, I met Marx and Nietzsche and Sartre; but also Donne and Dante and Aquinas. A particularly interesting debate in a sociology class one day confirmed my desire to become an atheist. But going home, Paradise Lost in my backpack, my jeepney narrowly missed a slow-moving garbage truck. The prospect of a biodegradable death would forever banish me into a pathetic middle ground, convinced that there was violence in organized religion but not quite prepared to be left on my own.
You’re just needy, Scott had said when I explained this to him once.
When everyone sat down, Scott and I got a great view of the grand retablo behind the altar. The gold-decked fixture housed ivory statues of Jesus and Mary in the center panels. Virgin mother and crucified son were surrounded by trumpet-wielding cherubs in golden robes; giant candlesticks tied with twine and cedar leaves; and a statue of Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino saint, in a cylindrical glass case.
The choir stood up once more. The song was in Ilocano, but I thought I heard “trigo” and “ubas” in the lyrics. Did they grow wheat or grapes here?
After the mass, the exiting horde poured to the churchyard via the carpeted nave. A few sampaguita vendors approached Scott outside, and he smiled away the leis and garlands thrust into his face. I noticed the old women sitting on tiny stools all over the churchyard, laps brimming with rosaries and scapulars, candles, prayer booklets.
“There are people you can pay,” I told him, “to pray for you.”
“Are you saying I need to pray to get my bag back?”
“St. Anthony has never failed me,” I said.
“That’s funny.”
We headed to the main road to wait for a bus that would take us back to Pagudpud.
“Now that I think about it,” he said, “how about religion?” He looked back to the church. A tricycle stopped in front of us, the driver offering a tour of Laoag. “Is faith an anchor?”
An old emaciated woman limped her way to Scott, palms adrift. She was hunched to half her height, her face so wrinkled it took me a while to discern her eyes, her mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. There were times, he said, handing the lady a fifty-peso bill, when he direly wished that a Judeo-Christian afterlife existed, if only to give these people the kind of life they never had on earth. “There’s got to be a more just way to live.”
I seized his hand.
He squeezed back.
“You know,” I said, “if the police don’t find anything in the next few hours, say goodbye to that bag.”
“Wish you didn’t tell me that. I always like to harbor some hope.”
“Let’s enjoy these final moments of innocence.”
“I like the sound of that,” he said.
A near-empty bus stopped in front of us.
“I prayed for that,” Scott said, and we laughed.
A spiral staircase snaked around the Cape Bojeador Lighthouse in Burgos, a few towns away. As we climbed, Scott ran his hand down the coral-colored bricks of the structure, the graffiti-covered walls. “I’ve been to Lascaux, and these,” his hands hovered above the so-and-so-was-here sort of vandalism, “are really just like those cave paintings, you know? Declarations of existence, of a self-aware being. I’m glad we stopped by here. Thanks, Alvin.”
“Sure,” I said.
Only a few people were allowed in the octagonal lantern room at a time, and since it was nearly lunch, it was deserted. Outside, on the overhanging balcony, elaborate grill works separated tourists from the grassy knoll fifteen meters below; beyond, the endless blue of the South China Sea, a few vessels creating tears in the serene fabric.
“The lighthouse used to guide galleons, I heard,” I told him.
He gasped. “Oh that’s right,” he said, as if recalling a cherished childhood memory. “Manila galleons to Acapulco! So the ships would glide across that lovely cape?” He made a viewfinder out of his hands. “Have I told you about the Manila Men in Louisiana? A friend’s doing a book on the Battle of New Orleans, and she came across a strange reference to ‘Spanish fishermen.’ Apparently there’s this tiny fishing village south of New Orleans—we’re talking bayou country, marshland, houses on stilts—that date all the way back to the eighteenth century when some of the Pinoys jumped ship. Wait, are you listening to me?”
I fixed my sight at the imaginary ships bound for Mexico, thousands of lumbering miles away. What were those Filipinos thinking, jumping ship? Behind me, I could see a few tourist-filled vans snake up the winding road, en route to the sun-baked hill where the lighthouse stood.
“I had this call from a woman in Louisiana last week,” I told him, “from one of the poorer parts, I think. Her account was DTO. Dial Tone Only. It’s the cheapest. You can’t make outgoing calls unless—”
“There are many, many poor people in America,” Scott said. “Common misconception.”
“I know that,” I told him. “Now please listen.”
He smiled, breathed in the vaguely saline air.
“She was crying because her phone bill was two months overdue and she didn’t have any money.” Apparently, her brother was in jail, and the phone was the only way she and their mother could get in touch with him. Had to tell her—and at this point she really started to wail—that all I could do, I’m afraid, was take note that she called us, but we can’t stop the servicemen from disconnecting her line when the time came. “Basta, it’s sad.”
“Any type of social system requires some degree of violence,” Scott said.
“You think so?”
“Civilizations thrive on destruction, young Padawan,” he said, leaning over the ledge. “Lately I’ve been thinking—”
“Congratulations.”
He smiled. “But seriously, my father used to yap during dinner. ‘This America is not the country I grew up in.’ ‘When Reagan became president, he busted the unions, blah, blah.’ You know the rest.” Still, Scott said, he had always trusted society to find a way to reconfigure itself, you know? Kind of how the Filipinos overthrew Marcos and installed a housewife. “I mean, who could come up with that narrative? But it works, you know?”
I knew that his mother was a university professor, while his father did OK as a novelist and left them a robust inheritance. After graduation, he went backpacking across Europe.
I still lived from payday to payday. In my future lay a potbellied, glassy-eyed fifty-something impoverished by credit card debt and taking cabs all the time. My mother often loudly wondered how dare I call myself Ilocano, with my wanton over-spending and misnamed savings account. I don’t, Ma, I’d tell her, to which she would say, maybe you should. If you can finish half a kilo of bagnet, you can save a few thousand pesos per payday. I remembered I also needed a new laptop.
Scott’s face now wore the shade of red that was painful, mesmerizing to watch. We better go back to Pagudpud, I told him after a few moments.
Sarah Geronimo was singing the national anthem on the mounted television when we stepped on the bus. She finished with much pomp, and the passengers clapped, stopping only when the ring announcer mispronounced her last name. But “Jer-ow-nim-ow” was an easy mistake to make, I thought. Native Americans and Filipinos, both brown, both forlorn-looking.
When the ruckus subsided, the bus descended into tense silence.
“You know,” Scott said, looking around during a lengthy commercial break, “if Magellan had just come to Mek-tan on the morning of a Pe-ki-yaw fight, he wouldn’t have had any trouble from Lapu-Lapu and his men. No, sir. They would have been glued to their little nipa sets under the palm trees.”
I chased away visions of Lapu-Lapu, kampilan d
iscarded on the ground, shadow boxing while his warriors in the background cheered him on.
It hadn’t been five minutes when the bus slowed down and eventually pulled over a spacious shoulder. The driver refused to put everyone at risk, he said, by going ninety on the snaking viaduct while he regularly glanced at the mounted set. “I can’t take it,” he said. “That would be wrong.” The passengers nodded in solemn agreement.
Soon the bus was shifting at every connected hook and uppercut to the Mexican’s jaw. “This is fucking awesome,” said Scott, looking around, in the throes of anthropologic orgasm. In the ninth round an hour or so later, a vicious left landed squarely on the chin of Morales, sending him falling to the mat. Like a sack of rice! someone shouted. Everyone laughed in raucous agreement.
“It’s a good thing I always root for the underdogs, like Pe-ki-yaw,” Scott said when the cheering had subsided.
“Pacquiao was a huge favorite. Like twenty to one. What are you talking about?”
He gave this some thought. “You know what I’m talking about.”
The bus, filled with happy, oblivious underdogs, soon roared back to life.
12
B ack in Pagudpud, Scott and I walked the length of the beach after getting lunch at the al fresco restaurant of the hotel closest to our homestay. Above us, the constant swaying of palm fronds, sunlight intermittently leaking. Columns of cinder blocks soared in just about every resort that we passed by, either some form of future expansion or an abandoned attempt.
Philip, I told Scott, received a standing ovation from the whole company last week when a call of his was played during a general assembly. “It’s a great day here at UTelCo!” he cried. “My name’s Philip. How can I help you today?” Without so much as a hello, a gritty male voice answered, “I want to smash this phone into your head.” Not the type to be frazzled, Philip asked, “Landline or wireless?”