Riverrun

by Danton Remoto

  “Yes, Pa. Thanks. I might be home before one. I’ll just hitch with one of my classmates.”

  “Do you have enough money?”

  “Pa, just give me a hundred,” I said, a little embarrassed.

  He flicked open the overhead light, groped for his brown imitation-leather wallet, then handed me two crisp hundred-peso bills. The soft yellow light drenched the gray-washed hair, the doe eyes that were also my eyes, the flab around the neck.

  “Thanks again,” I muttered, kissed him on the cheek (smell of Champion cigarettes and Tancho pomade), then got off the car.

  “Take care, son,” he called out to me, then turned off the overhead light. Since I turned twenty that year, my parents had allowed me to go to parties without the usual, irritating reminders about avoiding drugs and B.I. (bad influences). They must have gotten tired of suspecting me of doing things I would never even do, simply because everybody else was doing them. I had always wanted to be an original.

  Papa’s words still echoed in my ears as I stood at the curb. A sudden gust of cold wind made me shiver. At the end of the road gleamed the rainbow lights of Marikina. I waited until the warm, familiar hum of our car was gone. Turning around, I saw Chito, a shadow between two coconut trees. He startled me, so I said testily: “Have you been there long?”

  “Your Dad and you are so sweet,” he said, smiling strangely. A whorl of smoke blurred his face, erasing his nose, eyes, his very hair. For an instant, I thought he would just simply vanish.

  “What’s wrong with that?’ I asked.

  “Nothing, nothing really,” he answered, and then took a drag at his dope, which blazed like an eye in the darkness.

  In silence, we entered Anna’s house, with its tall brown steel gate and concrete walls dark-green with thick ivy. The house was split in three tiers, built to follow the curve of the hill slope.

  Only half of the class attended the party. Our teacher, who had required us to read The Nuremberg Trials, Volumes I and II for our class in Philosophy of Religion, was not around, either. I heard he had gone up to the mountain town of Sagada to read Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Anna’s parents were in Europe. But even without them, you could sense their presence in the very pores of the house. The four maids in white, starched uniforms walked on their toes, as if afraid to stun the fish in the white-and-blue Ming plates and the long-legged birds in the porcelain vases. The cheerful Malang painting of the slums blended perfectly with the tawny wall carpet. On the library stood the mahogany shelves with their thick, hardbound books of The Guerilla Strategy in the Stock Market and books on Commercial Law. Their white Christmas tree reached to the ceiling, glittering with balls and baubles, stars, and angels. Under the tree were gifts in big, colorful boxes.

  Anna’s brother, Rico, wore a blue Armani shirt and black jeans that hugged his thighs. He was drop-dead gorgeous. Much taller than Anna, he had one-inch long hair, sharp cheekbones, and eyes that turned alternately brown and black with the light. He dazzled when he smiled. Like a model in a toothpaste commercial. He had none of Anna’s nervous energy, though. He did not mind serving our food (chicken barbecue, potato salad, Chinese ham, fried noodles). He also emceed our boisterous program of song and dance, a job he obviously loved doing. But he was nowhere to be found later.

  I had to get up every now and then to pee, because I had such weak kidneys. I had urinary-tract infection which, my doctor said, came from taking too much salt in my food (must be all that fried fish and shrimp paste) and holding back my urin e. I still got mad when my friends claimed it was an STD. But how could I say it was not sexually transmitted, for that would mean admitting I was still a virgin at 20?

  And I had also let go that night, drinking six bottles of beer and finishing two packs of Marlboro. My classmates were sprawled lazily on the rich, red carpet amid throw pillows covered in Thai silk. We seemed to be floating on a cloud of smoke. I had to be careful not to step on my classmates. I could have peed in the toilet in the kitchen, which was nearer. But I had earlier discovered Anna’s own little corner in the library, with its friendly books: Narnia, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

  The library was quite far, so my bladder was about to burst when I reached the door. I turned the knob, pushed the door open, and froze.

  In the half-light of the lamp Chito and Rico were lying on the black leather couch. With tenderness, they were kissing each other’s eyelids and lips, nuzzling earlobes and necks, nipples and belly buttons, their fingers caressing each other’s bodies ….

  I just closed the door quietly.

  The party broke up at around two o’ clock. Anna led us out of the house.

  I didn’t notice it had rained, which was rare in December. The road glistened, and all about us hung the pure, clean fragrance of newly-washed leaves. Anna and I stood beneath the soft glow of the pagoda lanterns atop the big concrete posts.

  “Bye, and thanks,” Anna said.

  I said, “Bye, Anna.” I could not help it, so I leaned closer to her. The punch she had drunk brought out the flush on her cheeks. “Merry Christmas, Anna,” I whispered. “Please don’t be so sad.”

  She broke into a thin, quick smile, and then she kissed me back on the cheek and said goodbye.

  Still ‘Groovy’ After All These Years

  A FEATURE ARTICLE

  IT MUST BE the times we graduated because ours was not just a reunion for the sake of making beso-beso to each other. Oh, yes, we did that, too, rubbing each other’s cheeks and noting how the girls seemed to be getting younger and the boys getting older so quickly. The girls were beginning to land in the society pages, having married well, in the Jane Austen sense, into this or that good family. And the boys, who used to be cute were growing bellies and beginning to lose their hair.

  But we also met to raise funds for our educational projects: to help upgrade the level of teaching in the country’s selected public schools. In effect, it meant teacher-training, book donating, and gathering together our unused computers and giving them to the schools, for them to be wired in this age when information came at the speed of light.

  They also asked me to write something for our souvenir program, revolving around the line “Still ‘Groovy’ After All These Years.” So I said that our lives had always been groovy, if not nervy. After all, we started college in 1979, when the President was bullshitting the country through his decrees and the First Lady was buying Picassos left and right. The elections for the National Assembly had just been rigged, with the fractious Opposition (the Opposition has always been fractious, in all countries, across the centuries) losing to the team of the First Lady and her obscure members. But let us forget, in the meantime, the politicians. They would always stink, they would always be furry, they would always be there, like cockroaches. Only their faces would change, for son would take over the father’s position, and mother would take over the daughter’s, down the line of mongreldom.

  Remember our classes? Mr. B. in Physical Education class who made me heft a barbell twice my weight of 90 pounds. Miss Y. in Theology class who told us that Jesus Christ would always carry our yoke for us. When she saw we were all sleepy (for it was three o’clock in the afternoon and her voice should be patented for it could surely cure insomnia), she asked: “What does yoke mean?” I then raised a timid hand and said, with some confidence: “Ma’am, the yellow part of an egg.”

  Our History teacher asked the most mind-boggling questions like, “What was the height of national hero Dr. Jose Rizal?” It was a good thing that I remembered Rizal’s height. When I was in high school, we went on a field trip to Fort Santiago where Rizal was jailed before he was shot at Bagumbayan. I noted that Rizal was as tall as my mother, so I wrote the answer in my test paper: “Five feet, four inches tall.” Correct.

  But then, the next question was, “What was the name of Rizal’s dog in Dapitan, where we has sent on exile by the Spanish authorities?” What the hell do I care?, I though
t. But of course, I had to give an answer, so I wrote “Bantay.” I could almost hear the buzzer in the quiz show on television going “Ngeeeeee!” The correct answer was “Usman.”

  We also had a Literature teacher who, when he was teaching us Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “The Eagle,” stood on a chair, raised both his hands as if they were wings, and then recited the whole poem. I was fresh (fresh from the province of Pampanga and the jeprox of Project 4, Quezon City) and here was my teacher in front of me, with his wide nostrils flaring such that I thought I could already see his brains through his nose!

  We also had a Poetry teacher who, when he was teaching us Rainier Maria Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer” turned on his cassette recorder to a tape of Spanish flamenco music, picked up his castanets from his table, and began twirling and twirling on the teacher’s platform while he was reciting Rilke’s immortal lines:

  And then: as if the fire were too tight

  Around her body,

  She takes and flings it out

  Haughtily, with an imperious gesture,

  And watches: it lies raging on the floor,

  Still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die—.

  Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet

  Exultant smile, she looks up finally

  And stamps it out with powerful, small feet!

  Then he ended his performance with a crisp, “Olé!”

  I could not do that, not in ten lifetimes.

  We also had a History teacher named Father Lenny, S.J., who would bring an armful of books and dump them on the table before every class. He would talk about the books of Barbara Tuchman as if she just lived down the road, and then he added: “When I am dead, these are the books I want on my chest.”

  Father Lenny made dead and boring history come alive before our eyes. He said: “I was a young boy growing up in Maryland when I saw the footage of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Such cruelty! That is why I cannot understand the biblical injunction to turn the other cheek, or to give a piece of bread to someone who cast a stone at you. Why, if a Nazi soldier cast a stone at me,” he said, his blue eyes widening, “then I would pick up a rock and throw it at him.”

  Oh, we remember all of them, our teachers cranky, weird, and memorable, some of them beloved even, as we now move on into our lives as doctors and gentlemen farmers, businessmen and non-government organization workers, teachers and jet-setters, philosophers and priests, musicians and lawyers, stock brokers and real-estate brokers, politicians and socialites, homemakers and peacemakers.

  Statistics from the Placement Office indicated that many of my batch mates were in social-development work, breaking out of the mold that was hip and fashionable in the 1970s. We were educated by Jesuits with whiskey in their breath. Our husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, did not love us all the time. We wished we were taller, slimmer, sexier, richer. But at the back of our minds, we seemed to sense that, perhaps, this life was enough.

  Our bones were not yet brittle and our teeth were not yet falling off. Our pores could still feel the coolness in the air. We could still sashay to Dancing Queen and jiggle to Rock Lobster. We could tell our children, both natural-born and adopted, our nephews and nieces, that our lives were not so bad, not bad at all.

  You could even call it “groovy” (Jesus, that word is so ’70s). Yes, I guess we are still groovy (if not grabe) after all these years.

  Home

  SUMMER WAS just beginning and I was back in the city to attend the class reunion. I would see them again after five years, my classmates who had organized the reunion, which I had thought silly, because it was so early. But they had insisted: maybe they wanted to keep track of each other’s direction, or lack of it. The Humanities and Literature majors seemed to have fanned out in all imaginable places, while the business majors in our batch were working for the fat cats of Ayala Avenue, or getting that MBA at Wharton or Harvard, then off to Wall Street, coolly, logically claiming their profitable figure.

  I would see them again after five years. What words would I offer to Chito and Anna? Had new layers of skin grown over the old?

  Chito and I began to drift away from each other. He must be truly busy in school. When we met on campus, we only nodded to each other, or jerked our eyebrows up in greeting. He had followed his father’s blueprint—he was now in Law School and doing well. And later, marriage, two kids healthy enough to endorse powdered milk on TV, a mansion in Ayala Alabang, with a garage for at least three cars?

  Last I heard, Anna was working in a small publishing house that puts out children’s books, much to the chagrin of her mother, who wanted to train her in running the family corporations Anna would inherit. But Anna had declared her independence, was now living away from home, surviving on a meager writer’s pay, and perhaps writing, deep into the night, The Great Filipino Children’s Story.

  And, yes, what about me?

  I was still looking for somebody to live with, somebody who would watch films with me, talk to me with intelligence and wit, hold my hand when the waves of sadness threaten to drown me suddenly, inexplicably. Luis was gone and so was Mario, but one day, someone will come, bearing both gladness and grief.

  I still went to Mass when I could, especially when someone I knew had died, in which case, I really had to go to Mass simply because that person’s wake would be held in church. I still went to Mass, although at times, God seemed colder than the sea water in Morong, Bataan, where I taught English as a Second Language for a year to the children of Vietnamese refugees at the, uh, Processing Center. As if the memories of a fatal war could be blurred by teaching them how to shop at J.C. Penney or open a checking account at the Bank of America.

  But when I saw my students, their young faces golden in the sun, I remembered Chito and Anna.

  And on that night I returned from the Processing Center, our rented house seemed to have become both familiar and strange, like a book I had not read again in a very long time. After college, I had wanted to be as far away as possible from my family, and since I could not afford to go abroad, I just went to Bataan, to teach the refugees who had fled a horrible war. I wanted nothing else but space and solitude. I fixed my own food, washed my own dishes, did my own laundry, and cleaned my own room—things I did not have to do at home. It was not just the experience of being without a housemaid; I wanted space.

  But I was home for summer, and after the usual heavy dinner, I went to the kitchen, out of habit, to wash the dishes. Mama was scandalized; my grandmother smiled, adrift on the barge of her dreams. Our housemaid Ludy, the now-fat Ludy, did the dishes. I noticed my college diploma and graduation photograph in their wooden frames, still hanging on the walls whose blue paint had begun to flake off in parts, especially near the ceiling. I stepped out of the house and onto the yard, whose leaves gathered around me like an embrace. I thought of the past, the present, and the future, the images stretched out before me like the cars in a long, locomotive ride.

  I thought of the flash from the photographer’s camera catching me with my head tilted to the left, my wide eyes wanting to contain the universe within my eyelashes; my father rushing every morning to go to work, then rushing every afternoon to travel 30 kilometers away to take up a college course for four years, and on to Law School for another four years; my mother teaching her beloved students to sing “Auld Lang Syne,” her voice a solid soprano vibrating like light in the air; the military base like a scoop of land between the plains of Floridablanca and the mountains of Zambales, an infinity of images like old, grainy photographs; Luis and the sadness of not telling him how I felt for him, the silk of his skin like the sheen of that river where he swam many years ago; of Roxanne with the lips red as strawberries on the mountain city shrouded with fog; of the unutterable words that lay frozen on my tongue as I spoke to Mark whom I loved, both of us sitting beside the fountain in the chilly air; of the city exploding with its incredible noises and colors, Ali Mall and Fiesta Carnival and the darkness of the movie houses; of the
university sitting on top of a hill, Lux in Domino, a shining sword raised to the bluest of sky; of the headless young soldiers brought back from the war in Mindanao; of Richard caught in the elegiac beauty of a pencil portrait; of my beautiful country gone to the dogs, governed by gnats and vipers and vermin, may they all rest in peace; of my love for images and words, like candle-flame cupped by hands against wind and water; the letters and syllables and sentences, the stories that need to be told, the colors bleeding from the imagination, wrung from the very heart of memory.

  But for a moment, as I stood there in the backyard, between our lighted house and the darkness beyond, there was neither sadness nor fear, only the humming of the cicadas, a humming so clear and alive.

  Quezon City-Stirling-London-New Brunswick-Los Angeles

  1990-2000

  GUIDE QUESTIONS FOR CLASSROOM AND BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION

  1. What is a rite-of-passage story or novel? Why do you think this work qualifies under that category?

  2. Why is the novel called Riverrun? What is the allusion or reference?

  3. What are the two parts of the novel and why is it divided this way?

  4. Martial law is a recurring subject matter among Filipino writers. What makes the novel similar to earlier novels about martial law? What makes it different?

  5. Describe the main character’s relationship with his family, his friends, and ultimately, his country. Cite passages from the novel to prove your point.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Danton Remoto took undergraduate and graduate degrees in Literature at Ateneo de Manila University. He received a British Council Fellowship to take up an M.Phil. in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland. He also took up postgraduate studies in English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University on a Fulbright Fellowship. He has taught at Ateneo de Manila University and Rutgers University, and has worked as a Communications Officer at the United Nations Development Programme based in New York. At present, he works as a producer and host of a top-rating, daily show called “Remoto Control” aired on Radyo 5, 92.3 News fm, with live telecast at Aksyon TV Channel 41. He is also a Consultant of the News and Public Affairs division of TV5, a Professorial Lecturer at Ateneo de Manila University, and a Columnist in the Op-Ed section of the Philippine STAR. He is one of this year’s recipients of the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas (National Achievement Award in Literature) from the Unyon ng Mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL), the Writers’ Union of the Philippines. He has published 15 books of poems, essays, anthologies and translations. This is his first novel.