The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  “Last time it was like this, you were three years old,” Mama said. “Next thing we knew, the tanks were there in Altura. We could hear the helicopters overhead, bombs going off. We hid in the bathroom, you and Marie and I—”

  “I didn’t stop crying for days,” I said. “Yes, Ma.”

  “Like you were waiting for Marcos to leave.”

  We lived ten minutes away from Malacañang. My high school was along the banks of the Pasig River, and farther along, past the GSIS tenements, past the oil depots, the dark water lapped at the banks of the presidential palace. When it rained, the stink was said to waft to Freedom Park inside palace grounds. A promenading American ambassador allegedly elbowed Cory once, sniffed audibly, and said, “Wow, is there rotting fish in the menu later?” before letting out a good-natured chuckle.

  “I’m not sure I’ll have enough, Ma,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “To send to lola.”

  She waved off my protest. “Stop being selfish, Alvin. Those who can help should help. It’s how it is in every family. Maybe if you’ll stop drinking and taking taxis all the time—”

  I blinked. “I’m too tired and sleepy when my shift ends and I just want to go home as soon as I can so I can sleep. Is that selfish?”

  She arranged the plates and bowls and cutlery on the table.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Sophia woke up, and I wiped bits of dried saliva around her mouth. She showed her appreciation by blowing spit bubbles and giving me a wet kiss.

  “Can you text your sister?” Mama asked.

  I put Sophia down and went to my room and realized I had neither money nor phone.

  In the living room, the de facto orphan cheerfully slumped on the floor, eyes turned to the TV. The footage of the army APC breaking the hotel’s glass wall alternated with live shots of Ayala Avenue looking like a ghost town, blasts of red and blue police lights pulsating in the building façades.

  “I have nothing, Ma,” I told her, “sorry.” She took one look at me and in her eyes flashed a mix of terror and pity. “Wait,” she said, standing up to go to her room.

  “Start logging in, c’mon,” Eric called out when I got to my station an hour or so later. “More than 200 calls on queue. Push for wireless, don’t forget! Push for features. Upsell, upsell. Log in now. C’mon. This ain’t your living room. Log in.”

  “What’s wrong?” Philip asked when I sat down and put on my headset. He moved closer to my seat.

  I reached out and caressed his cheek. I saw a bag of Lays on his lap.

  He looked at me, then the bag of Lays, and wheeled his chair back.

  I adjusted my headset and waited for the beep. A minute passed. Nothing. Were the lines down? Another earthquake off Taiwan? A hurricane in Oklahoma? Hijacked planes flying into skyscrapers?

  In this daydream of disasters, the beep intruded, just a little tardy.

  But in my mind I was back in bed, in a pair of shorts from high school, a shirt so tenderized by washing that it felt like satin. Mama was in their room, mumbling her nightly rosary, every now and then patting Sophia’s arm whenever she fidgeted. Her prayer done, the last Amen in the air, the house would resound with the husky voice of her favorite radio DJ. Light banter with a made-up listener. A comment on the horrendous traffic this morning. Then an anecdote to introduce the next song. The night was long and lenient and mine.

  “Everything OK, Vin?” Eric tapped me on the shoulder, disrupting my imagined insurrection.

  M y neighborhood was always teetering between dog-eat-dog desperation and passable pockets of First World. The houses had Frigidaire and helpers from the provinces, the dogs were named after Hollywood actors (a Dachshund named Danny, a tiny poodle named Meryl), but every now and then, when an aunt would get diagnosed with stage IV metastatic melanoma or a father would lose his job at the security agency, things could turn ugly, fast, and it was up to the bumbay to save the day, sky-high interest rates be damned.

  “So now the poor kids have to quit school while they settle their debts,” I said about the Garcias next door. “Too bad. The eldest is very smart. Did you—”

  “Vacillating middle-class,” Gene said. His head was on my lap. We were on my bed, a twin. “They work all their lives, then pass the same life of middling comfort to their kids.”

  I wondered if he knew what “vacillating” meant. He had probably picked it up from one of the countless sit-ins and liked how it sounded. It was a pretty word.

  “Always so negative,” I told him.

  “Yes, Eric. Vacillating. You know. Being indecisive. Like some people.”

  My mother was on the twenty-second floor of a beige Hong Kong apartment, scrubbing the floor and raising a set of foul-mouthed Chinese triplets. My father was dying of a disease that enlarged the knuckles, turned them into bruised overripe guavas. He could scarcely flick open a lighter; his thumbs were losing their opposability; a step back in evolution.

  “We can’t judge people, Gene,” I dangled the bait.

  And the fish, as they said, was always caught in its mouth.

  “I think we have to, Eric. We have to judge. We ousted a dictator and put an hacendera in power. So much for progress.”

  “Give her a break. She’s still grieving.”

  “No one gave lolo a break.”

  Gene’s grandfather was a famous surgeon who juggled his duties as head of the Cancer Institute with anti-Marcos demonstrations. He was onstage at an anti-US Bases rally in Plaza Miranda when a bullet forayed into the tiny distance between his left ear and eye, exiting just below his right cheek. The probe revealed that the gunman used a Vietnam War-era XM21 sniper rifle and fired from the left steeple of the Quiapo Church. He was acquitted: mishandled evidence. Gene was born a few years later.

  This information was useless to him. When he’d shed off his student leader façade, as he did now, tired of the bluster, he’d snuggle and try to make himself small. I’d envelope his long, lean body. When he’d say something conciliatory, like “I want to stay here, Eric. Right here,” my chest would feel the vibration before my ears heard the actual words.

  We closed our eyes, until my father, at the pretense of dinner, knocked on my door with his guava hands. Before heading out, Gene inspected my shelves, as if he hadn’t done so hundreds of times. He ran a hand down the cold, rippling spines. On cue, he spotted Kundera and Adorno, scoffed at Stephen King. Fishing a slender paperback from the shelf, he asked, “Any good?”

  “It’s harrowing.”

  “I like harrowing.” He flipped Reunion on its backside and squinted to read.

  In the living room, my older sister Grace, her two-year-old daughter Bea, and their yaya were watching a trousers-less mustard bear and a large-eared piglet in pink button-downs. This calm was hard-earned, judging from the debris: a blue plastic bottle lodged on a shelf, a yellow rubber duck under a shoe rack, crayons all over the floor. I made some coffee. Gene and I sat on a rattan chair. He smiled at my sister.

  “Have you guys eaten?” she asked.

  “Yes, thanks,” Gene lied.

  Bea wobbled toward me, set herself in between my knees. She had a ready smile, and motioned to touch my hot mug, which I pulled away. Feeling that it was not that hot after all, I let her touch it, and as soon as dainty palm touched lukewarm ceramic, she lit up, her face awash in the newfound nuance of temperature.

  “Ee-nee!” she whimpered. Already, she was capable of simple vowel sounds and a few consonants, the first ones the tongue learned, the easiest.

  The bear was holding the outstretched paw of the baby pig. They walked on a verdant prairie toward a gingerbread house in the horizon, a soft xylophone tune accompanying their adventure. Bea’s head swayed with the beat, before it stopped and turned toward the thin wall separating us from the Garcia apartment.

  Frenzied shouting, muted by concrete, erupted from next door; then plates breaking, a loud thud, the crying of petrified children. I looked at my sister. She looked
at me. I looked at Gene, whose face mirrored Bea’s, seemingly on the verge of crying, in sympathy with her playmates.

  In school the following day, we perched ourselves on a bed of laid-out copies of the Collegian along a depressing slope of the Sunken Garden in front of the College of Law. Four presidents finished their law degrees there, including the strongman who was flown out of Malacañang and into Hawaii a few years ago. Gene planned to take up law in a couple of years. In the meantime, he was in the school’s film program.

  He handed me a banana cue, saba crusted with caramelized brown sugar that crumbles when you bit unto the soft, warm flesh.

  It was June, post-drizzle. Despite the remnants of ash everywhere, the smell of moist foliage permeated the air. Students lay on top of makeshift mats, and lovers sneaked to cop a feel. To me, this place had always spoken of the largeness of adulthood, of the world, especially for the wide-eyed provinciano whose first brush with Manila included, among others, a communist for a philosophy teacher, a dear wallet snatched while he was walking in Philcoa, and a nagging suspicion that everyone else except him had life figured out.

  Things, in other words, that made one feel inconsequential.

  Gene was from Tarlac. When he was ten, he followed a nondescript track behind the town cemetery and, two hours later, was nearly gunned down by one of the roving militia men in the nearby hacienda, the ambiguous borders of which he had apparently breached. He was taken to a big, palatial house, announced by a grand staircase that cascaded over three floors. Gene had never seen anything like it.

  A granule of sugar, which could well have originated from the same hacienda, precariously clung to a corner of his mouth now. I narrowed my eyes at him—“Hold still”—and plucked the guilty morsel. I motioned for him to open his already full mouth, then flicked it inside. “Yum.” Mouth closed now, he tried to suppress a laugh; his cheeks were plump with air, with half-chewed banana mush.

  “When I look at Sunken from here,” he made a viewfinder out of bony fingers, “framed by my shoes, and your shoes, pointed upwards like this, it’s kind of, you know,” he blinked, “OK. I’m actually OK with this. The world is OK.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I think I need to tell you something.”

  When Gene said he was a member of the communist party, my first thought was, “Yes, and?” I had always assumed that the militant groups on campus were somehow connected to the movement. To me, there was nothing worrisome about this. It was the call of the times. Even I, a good-for-nothing member of the bourgeoisie, understood that our generation would be judged on how well we’d wage this fight. At least Gene did his work here, in the city, in the open, away from the crossfire in the wild countryside.

  And so the moment of the needless confession passed and I merely nodded, acutely aware of the wet grass brushing my ankles, the various clouds in the distance, this thick and bulbous, this reed-like. He said it as a matter of fact, with no trace of fear or terror, like the way he told me he has an out-of-town shoot next weekend, and would I see him off at the bus station?

  Of course, I told him, the words automatic but also heavy in my tongue. Of course.

  “They said Bush called Cory about Subic,” he said. “Pretty sure the coup attempt came up.”

  I knew he was waiting for a quip of solidarity from me, something to assure him that I partook, in my tiny way, in this fight. “Yes,” I said. “I saw the fighter jets fly over Pandacan. We waved from the street and screamed, ‘Thank you, Americans!’” We laughed, and ten years later I would remember this moment upon catching the younger Bush’s inauguration on the cafeteria TV of Magellan Solutions, Inc.

  It was a school day, so he got up after a while. There was always a short film to shoot for his classes, locations to inspect and parts to cast, screenplays to check for the future Cannes showstopper. We said goodbye. I gave him a hug, tighter than usual, and longer.

  I walked to the Main Library. From the lobby, I descended a flight of stairs to the dank basement where the Filipiniana section was located. During the regime, students had rallied against the Americanization of the university, evident, they said, in the way American books littered the shelves of Main Lib. In response, the school administration imported Soviet books. The precious few were put in the basement, where a mausoleum stillness now welcomed the sound of my sneakers.

  My relationship with Gene had progressed the way normal apolitical relationships progressed: from the beautiful surface of best feet perpetually forward to deep secrets, moments of light farce. To cite, he liked dropping big words that end with –ism, and I liked calling out his bluff, like asking him to explain commodity fetishism in light of his need to chain smoke.

  From nodding acquaintances in freshman English class, we had become somewhat friends after spending time on the pretzel-like queue to pay for tuition. Like most students, our Form 5s were stamped “Enrolled under Protest” in response to the recent hike in tuition.

  That was followed by five bottles of San Miguel and tentative brushing of knees under the table. The all-male dorm on campus where he was staying was hushed at 3 AM. One wing smelled of dirty socks; the other, of nail polish. There was a poster of Mao on the wall opposite his bed, below which the little red book innocently lay on a cluttered desk.

  “Will we regret this tomorrow?” I had asked, above the sound of belts unbuckling and heavy alcohol-laced panting.

  “Shut up.”

  The following day, I was scampering across the Palma Hall lobby, a freshly typed paper in hand, when I heard a faintly familiar voice booming garbled from a megaphone. There he was, fist punching the stolid air, wearing the same shirt and jeans from last night, surrounded by a sea of red-clad bodies on the floor, ears upturned in attention. I felt something tighten in my pants.

  Rescue 911 , my father’s salient proof that the United States was the best country in the world, was interrupted by breaking news. A 13-year-old boy shot his 16-year-old boyfriend at a shopping mall in Cavite. He then shot himself, his body falling on top of his lover’s in a dramatic embrace. The two had a kind of whirlwind romance that only young people were capable of, which ended with a vow and a final bullet to the temple.

  My father had a choice cussword for things that reviled him and saddened him at once: putang ina , whispered. Son of a bitch. Hearing this, Gene cleared his throat, stood up from the couch, and said goodbye. “We’ll go ahead na po.” My father grunted. “Pa,” I said, “we’re going to Chinatown. Want anything?” My father grunted.

  We walked to the main road where we took a jeepney. Everywhere there were still reminders of the ash fall that last week surprised the city, the powdery haze that covered the buildings and jeepneys of the capital. We were miles upon miles away from the eruption; closer to Mount Pinatubo, the effect was a little more than the inconvenience of unseen dust constantly pressing unto one’s skin and hair.

  “Look at that,” I told Gene, pointing at the ash-coated sidewalk. “Too bad we kicked them out. The Americans would have helped with the clean-up.”

  True to form, he smiled his patient Eric-was-being-Eric-again smile. It was the first time, he said, since Magellan landed in Cebu in 1521 that there was no foreign military base in the country. “Imagine,” he said, an intense vibrato softening his voice, “a proud Philippine flag waving on its own.” He again made a viewfinder out of his fingers. “Dramatic, ’no? What a nice opening shot for a short docu film.”

  “More like a tattered, ash-covered flag,” I said.

  He asked me what I thought of the shooting incident.

  “Ang lungkot,” I said. How sad. “Like the Garcias. Do you know they’re moving back to Mindoro?”

  “That’s it?”

  I thought about it. “It’s also romantic, I suppose. That’s Romeo and Juliet. You and me against the world.”

  “You think that would have happened if they were rich?”

  “Let’s see,” I said. “They’ll probably be in an all-boys’ school
, where they’ll form some sort of ambiguous friendship. One night they will get drunk and then experiment on what it’s like to kiss another boy.”

  “OK—”

  I looked at him. “So they just took a shortcut.”

  In Avenida Rizal, we walked to the elevated train station. The concrete structure offered a nice enough shade at noon, which explained the permanent congregation of street urchins.

  The city was thankful for the trains: another step closer to leaving its own streets.

  “Gene, are you OK?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Something about you lately.”

  “Just been thinking about a lot of things.”

  We put our tokens on the metallic turnstile on the way to the platform. A policeman walked by and inspected the perforated edge.

  “Fascist pig,” Gene said under his breath, and for a moment I was scared that he was going to do something crazy, like seize the cop’s handgun from its holster or push him to the stone-strewn tracks. When he talked about the police—always with the requisite pejorative label like “pawns” or “pigs”—it was as if he had been there during the massive rallies in Plaza Miranda and Mendiola Bridge and Congress, taunting the riot police and evading the swinging rattan truncheons.

  Wasn’t it strange, I asked him, that Imelda was the first chairman of the agency that built this train system. “Trains and Imelda, strange combination.”