Riverrun

by Danton Remoto

  “Where will you study now?” Luis asked, scattering my thoughts.

  “The Father Principal has already given me a nice letter of recommendation for their school in Mandaluyong. I hope it works out fine.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the initiation will still go ahead.”

  “C’mon, don’t worry, Luis.” Then I smiled wickedly. “I wish I could stay here and join you for the initiation. I will even stand beside you.” Luis stared at me, as if I had gone mad. But I just ignored him.

  Then I asked, “Could I borrow your bike? I’ll just take a spin around the old school.”

  That softened him. He smiled sadly. “Let me come with you, then. For the last time.”

  As I began to pedal, Luis jumped on the back seat. “I wish I could stay here forever,” I said. “But I can’t.” I could feel his breath hot on my nape. I wished he would wrap his arms around me and never ever let go. Pain was like a beast caged in my heart. I wanted to tell him that I liked him, or that I already loved him.

  But of course, I never breathed a word to him. Not. At. All.

  PART 2

  The Country of Dreams

  Riverrun

  I WOKE UP, on the edges of sleep of my slippery dream of Luis. I held the dream close to my chest, so it would burn still.

  In my dream Luis seemed to be pierced with light. He was all there, blinding me with his smile, the eyes that were wicked and innocent at the same time. The moustache beginning to grow above his moist and reddish lips. How did it feel to embrace him?

  In my dream Luis was about to say something, some words I would hold on to in the summer of my departure. I would soon leave the province and follow my parents who now lived in Manila—ahhh, mad, maternal Manila. In the fever of a summer afternoon I wanted some images and words that would have the weight, the depth, of the first rains of May.

  The first rains of May falling in exuberance over the land, a crystalline cascade waking up everything—grass, leaf, sky, even the very air—from the languorous sleep of summer.

  A cloud broke open and the rain fell. I savored the sound of the rain falling. The ears of Ludy, our housemaid, were glued to the transistor radio, listening to Brother Eddie giving bits of advice to the lovelorn. In my white cotton shirt and shorts I dashed out of the house. My mother’s red roses were crumbling against the wall.

  The sound of the rain would never leave me, haunting me like a memory I could never bury. It was like a whisper in the ear, a hum growing louder, a roar. In the street corner, under the dripping leaves of the acacia trees, I stopped.

  Luis was running in the rain, naked from the waist up. His nipples were like small, brown berries. His thin shorts barely concealed the thighs growing to a fullness. He waved when he saw me, motioning me to come to him. I did, and I took in everything my eyes could hold: a young and beautiful boy in the rain.

  Together we ran in the rain, in the summer of our twelfth year, the year I would leave for the city. Everything seemed to be melting, but not me. Warmth ran through my limbs, flowing like blood in my veins. We ran and ran until we reached the river fringed with trees.

  “We should swim,” Luis said.

  “No,” I answered, “the river might grow bigger.”

  He laughed, and began wading into the water. I was torn between lust and the fear of drowning. Perhaps, I thought at that moment, they’re the same?

  The river parted, and Luis entered it. I watched him swim, his strokes clean and quick. His buttocks were like islands rising and dipping in the water. I envied the river that tongued his body. I watched him swim farther and farther away from me, until his hair had become one with the sound of the rain.

  Stillness

  I WAS ALONE in my bed, staring at the ceiling. Spots of brown had already formed from the rain that had dried up. Then, cobwebs like gauze drooped in the corner of the ceiling.

  The ceiling became a map. River, mountain, and hill. Village, town, and country. And a face rising to the surface, followed by the echo of a voice.

  Luis and I wrote to each other for three months, and then he completely stopped writing. Every afternoon, I waited for the fat, cheerful mailman who woke up the sleepy neighborhood with the roar of his motorcycle. Upon hearing his motorcycle, I would run to the brown gate of our apartment. At first, he said, “No letter, son.” Afterward, he would just smile at me and shake his head. I would walk back to our apartment, something grainy in my throat. My eyes scanned the ground for any protruding stone that might stub my toes.

  The drowsy summer gave way to the relentless falling of the rain. The rain fell harshly, glinting like the smallest of knives. But still—no letter from Luis. The sky turned into lead. The potholes on the road became puddles. The umbrellas turned the air into a madcap of colors.

  But still, no letter from Luis.

  After Mama arrived from school early one afternoon, I asked her, “Could I visit the military base?” She was sitting on our sofa covered with a plastic sheet.

  Her left eyebrow arched. “In the middle of June? With classes just starting? Perhaps in December, or summer next year.” Then she turned her back and told Ludy to prepare snacks of glutinous rice flavored with chocolate.

  I walked away from her and locked myself up in the bathroom. The white tiles stared back at me. I touched the wall, spelling out every letter of the name of Luis on the tiles. I touched the silent tiles as if they were the face of Luis.

  But the coldness, it just seeped right through my bones.

  How to Survive as a Nouveau Poor

  HOW DOES a mother survive the nightmare of poverty, or in her case, lower-middle-class poverty?

  Every morning, she will repeat this line after waking up: “We’re better off than a million others. At least we have fried fish and tomatoes for breakfast.” Then, she will rise from her bed, wash her face and rinse her mouth, proceed to pour vegetable oil into the frying pan. Usually during cool mornings, the lard would have congealed. She will get a tablespoon, scoop the lard and let it rest on the bottom of the pan. She will let the lard sputter and quiet down. Now the lard is hot and she can begin frying the tuyo (dried fish).

  After frying the tuyo, she will flatten a head of garlic, throw it into the pan, and then follow this with last night’s rice. She will sprinkle salt to taste.

  She will wake me up her only child, now a teenager having his share of sulky days. She will tell me to wash up and then sit before the breakfast table. She will fill my plate with fried rice enough to last until snack time, then give me an allowance of ten pesos per day.

  She will buy minced pork, not pork sliced into big pieces. She will use the minced pork sparingly, just enough so that our mung-bean stew would smell of meat. She will buy a big bagful of mung beans, and let a bowl of it stand overnight in water. The bean sprouts could be cooked the next morning, mixed with garlic, onion, tomatoes, soy sauce, and calamansi juice.

  She will look around her workplace to check which item was not yet being sold. In her elementary school, almost everything was already being sold: sweet meats of tocino and longganisa, clothes and decorative items of angels painted pink, insurance plans, funeral services, and memorial-park lots. She sold Tupperware, like she did in the 1960s. She felt it was like returning to an old love. Her sales pitch: these lunch boxes would save you money in terms of cheaper, home-cooked food, in the short run; and hospitalization, in the long run because the canteen sells overpriced slabs of food laden with cholesterol.

  These plastic glasses could contain the calamansi juice you had squeezed right in your very kitchen. No soda, no false orange flavors, no coffee, no tea: just pure, natural citrus good for bones (ours are beginning to ache from age and this horrible inflation) and teeth (the stronger, the better, for the inflation rate would still go up before it went down, and we would need stronger teeth for the chattering to come).

  On the way home, she would ask for cassava leaves from Mareng Mely who lived
around the corner. Old Woman Mely thought my mother would give them to the children in the neighborhood, to play with. The children would break the stems into inch-long strips, the tough skin hanging on, and the strips could be turned into instant necklaces, with the star-shaped leaves as pendant. But no, the cassava leaves could be simmered in coconut milk flavored with shrimp paste from Pangasinan. It reminded her of what they ate in World War II, when they fled to the forests to avoid the wrath of the Japanese soldiers, surviving on what they could forage there: pith of banana trunks and meat of snakes, and yes, cassava leaves simmered in coconut milk, with river shrimps that used to cluster near the rocks in the river.

  She will bring home the Nutribuns, those breads hard as rocks distributed to school children by the Nutrition Foundation under the sponsorship of the First Lady. She will bring these rocks home, use a hammer to break them down into bits, soak them in a basin of water. When sufficiently soft, she will pour half a small can of condensed milk and pour the mixture in her old pans, then steam. After 30 minutes, she will lift the lid (the steam blurring her very face), set the cans on a basin quarter-filled with water, to cool. Then she will put the pans in the ref (heaven help her that this 15-year-old ref would not break down, not now, oh good and gracious Lord), and the morning after, she will serve this as my breakfast, her rebellious teenager, in case I was already sick and tired of having fried fish every morning.

  Night. She will draw a deep, deep sigh (a mother is a lifeline and the rope should not break). Her husband, my father, was working thousands of miles away, in deepest, hottest Riyadh. The distance would spread between us like a desert. Her heart would thud heavily in her chest.

  Then she would repeat numbers one to eight when morning comes through, again.

  Fourteen

  IT WAS A morning without wind. Mrs. Santos, our class adviser in II-Narra, walked with me in silence. We were going to the house of Felix, who had been the Vice-President of our class in first-year high school. Felix was a tall, big-boned boy given to quick smiles and easy laughter. He always wore black leather shoes in school, even on that year when the fad was colored rubber shoes. He kept his old pair of shoes clean and shiny with coat upon coat of inexpensive black dye.

  The moment we entered Escopa, I sensed a familiar feeling wash over me: that I was leaving behind a known world, and entering the sad stream of another. On the narrow streets, the half-naked children were running after each other, screaming, playing tag or hopscotch, pulling twine tied to the noses of empty sardine cans set on wooden wheels. Fringing the alley were the hovels, with their grimy skin of plywood walls, the corrugated-iron roofs held in place by rocks or flat rubber tires; women in faded floral house dresses washing clothes in the rusty artesian well, or gossiping, or sitting in row of threes, picking each other’s lice; older men fetching water, naked from the waist up, their bloated bellies like the bellies of bullfrogs; some men with multicolored tattoos of birds and snakes on their biceps and chests, some with tattoos of hearts pierced by an arrow; younger men drinking beer at eight o’clock in the morning in front of the variety store loud with the morning melodrama from the radio, the men wearing double-knit trousers worn at the knees, several days’ beard and moustache on their faces, their eyes dark and shifty. And in the air, the heavy smells of the place: uncollected garbage, brackish water, a stink strong enough to knock you down. But on and on we walked, into alleys becoming narrower and narrower, coiling and uncoiling before us.

  Finally, we stopped before a lean-to set apart from the rest. “Number 28,” Mrs. Santos said, reading the number painted in red on the wooden wall. Its wooden walls were thin but not dirty; its corrugated-iron roofs were nailed properly into place. A small crowd had begun to gather inside, but I knew the four thick wooden posts would hold.

  We called out our greetings. A man who must be in his mid-forties looked out of the window. He nodded in greeting, and was soon rushing down the stairs.

  Our teacher tried to smile. “Good morning. I’m Mrs. Santos, the teacher of Felix and this is Danilo, the President of their class.”

  The man, who introduced himself as the father of Felix, nodded and tried to smile as well. “Please come in,” he said. He had a firm, strong face, and skin like wood that had been soaked in the rain for a long time.

  We mumbled our condolences, saying we should have come yesterday when the body of Felix had been retrieved from the bottom of the mountain lake, but we heard about it only late last night.

  “Thank you for coming,” the father said. His eye bags bulged. “Please follow me upstairs.”

  There were about twenty people inside the cramped living room that also served as the kitchen and dining area. They all stared at us the moment we entered the house. On the wall hung a calendar-poster of God the Father, His long white beard flowing down. He was surrounded by cherubim whose bodies were chopped off from the necks down. All the heavenly figures floated on a dirty, yellow cloud.

  After Mrs. Santos had introduced herself, the mother of Felix stood up. She was a big woman with a tired face. Her hair fell on her shoulders like tangled cobwebs. She walked over and gripped the hands of Mrs. Santos.

  And then suddenly, she began to cry. In a voice like sandpaper, the mother said: “I did not allow him to go out with his friends, Ma’am. He said they’d swim only in a shallow mountain lake in Boso-boso, five of them, their last excursion together before summer begins. Before they separate from each other. But I did not allow him—”

  “I understand … I’m sorry,” was all Mrs. Santos could say.

  The mother continued: “My son is gone, Ma’am. He has left us, he who is the brightest among my brood of ten, the eldest who promised to send his younger siblings to school, my dearest Felix. I’m only a laundrywoman, and my husband a carpenter, but we would have done everything so he could finish college.”

  The father turned away and looked out of the window.

  Mrs. Santos and I walked over to the coffin of Felix. Its texture was rough and it was painted dirty white, unlike the old worn pair of black shoes—with its lines like an old person’s face—the shoes that Felix had scrupulously dyed and kept clean every day.

  Sticks of tall yellow candles guttered and glowed around the coffin. I tried to pray, but instead, in my mind ran images of Felix: the Felix who laughed so loud one teacher told the class he was fit enough to be tied, and the Felix who sometimes stared into space, as if waiting for someone to come home. Along with a few other classmates, I would have joined them that day on the lake, but remembered I was in my room that day, trapped again in a strange mood I could not understand.

  An old woman, who must have been Felix’s aunt, offered us a glass of Coke and a plateful of Fita biscuits. As we ate, various voices floated in the thick, cramped air, merging with the heat-haze that only sharpened all the other smells in the slums.

  Yes, the voices. They told us how Felix could not be found by his four young friends who had dove and scoured the very bottom of the lake several times over. Of how, in growing panic, the young friends ran and ran until they saw a clump of thatched huts and told the people of the accident. Of how the mountain folk told them that a nymph who lives at the bottom of the mountain lake takes the life of a young man every year, and so far, no bodies have surfaced yet. Of how the mountain folk rented a jeepney that took them to the mayor, who in turn contacted the Navy. Of how a Navy frogman in his webbed limbs dove into the lake of fifteen feet, thinking this would be an easy job, scouring the shallow depths of a landlocked body of water. But he surfaced again and again, shaking his head. Of how he dove again into the darkness of the lake, when he saw through his mask a diaphanous woman in white. Her head was bowed low, her long, black hair streaming down her face. When the diver sensed she had no face, he wanted to flee. But he stayed when he finally saw Felix, bloated beyond belief, lying near the feet of the woman. Of how the Navy frogman talked to the woman in his thoughts, begging her to please let go of the boy. He was reminded of his own son,
who must be as young as this boy lost in the lake. Of how the woman in white finally turned her back and was gone, swallowed up by the gloom of the lake. Of how the Navy frogman cradled the broken body, like father to son, then swam up, breaking the water’s surface, finally back into the world of air and light. Of how the moment the bloated body of Felix was laid gently on a flat rock, his eardrums exploded. Of how the old women of the mountain shook their heads and clucked their tongues in both pity and fear. Of how the mortician in the town had much difficulty putting color back on the face of Felix, which had begun to assume the grayness of the lake on a mountain top.

  We were all fourteen years old, studying in the public high school beside the crumbling marketplace in Project 4. I studied there because the Salesian Brothers in Mandaluyong did not allow me to enroll in their school since classes had already begun, even if I carried a glowing letter of recommendation from the Father Principal of Don Bosco in Bacolor, a letter in long, flowing script, that began with the words “Shalom, Brother.”

  I studied in that high school and stayed there, while my mother taught Music and my father worked in Saudi Arabia. There was a strange joy to growing up in the city, throbbing with its myriad joys: the huge department stores with their colorful shops of candies and toys and the live mannequins glassed in on display windows in front of the stores, moving their arms and heads every five minutes or so; Fiesta Carnival with its endless rides and games; the cool, dark movie houses spinning tales of terror and love on the screen.