Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  By this time she had left New Delhi and had flown to Manila to cover the election. Manila was a newsreel I played over and over in my mind. I could see her there too, a head taller than anyone else, in her ponytail, khakis, and tennis shoes, always striding, always in a hurry, a ruthlessly ambitious young foreign correspondent. She had believed that leaving America would mean leaving behind the feeling that unnerved her—her attraction to me, her fear of me. But instead we became at that distance an overwhelming presence to each other, intimate and constant, in letters and phone calls. I made her a tape of crescendos and adagios, and she mixed a cassette piecing together Van Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Phil Collins, Sting. She called it Manila Blues.

  I played it until it was etched in my mind.

  I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh, Lord . . .

  Mornings I arrived at work to find messages in my computer—a two-liner from her, often lighthearted, but at times clipped, all business: thousands of people at an Aquino rally, snarled traffic, guards with M16s on rooftops. Every day we talked on the telephone, at the office in the morning and at home in the evening, looping conversations and long silences that never ended anywhere and left us dazed.

  She dashed off postcards and scribbled notes on the run and wrote long letters when she had a rare day off and could let go under the billowing clouds of the tropics, drinking double margaritas at a poolside table at the Manila Hotel. She drew pictures of the kidney-shaped swimming pool with its sunken thatched-roof bar. She sketched the tourists and reported on the comings-and-goings of the hotel staff, who annoyed her, whistling at her. She lingered all afternoon in the shade of the banyan trees by the pool and wondered if she would ever belong there.

  She always wrote with a fountain pen, in blue-black or brown ink. She was the only person I knew who kept bottles of ink and carried them with her. She wrote her letters to me in longhand, in a tight, slashing twist, the ending of words thrown back, or trailing off, as if she wanted to take it all back, and closing abruptly, without a period, with that illegible signature—Elizabeth.

  2

  FROM AFAR, IN AMERICA, the Philippines has always evoked Hollywood images of the Pacific battles of World War II, the death march at Bataan, the bunker island of Corregidor, the charred airfields of Luzon. General MacArthur, corn pipe in mouth, cinematic in sunglasses, wading ashore on Leyte. War stories overheard in bars, freeze-frames of history. There has been, always, a celluloid quality to the country, a staged extravagance.

  So it was in February 1986, when Manila once again became a front-page story, a daily feature on the evening news. Americans were mesmerized again by the place, fascinated by a melodrama unfolding before our eyes: the fall of Marcos.

  Killings in the provinces, lost ballot boxes, chaos on Election Day, rumors of coups, and, finally, the revolution. Manila was larger than life, with more intrigue and conspiracies than the best soap opera—and far more exotic. It was at last one of those countries where we could tell villain and hero apart, where the lines were absolute: Cory Aquino, a tiny bespectacled woman, goes up against the twenty-year tyranny of the hated Ferdinand Marcos, and a cast of millions of sweet little people smile and weep for the cameras.

  Before that year I had hardly given the country a thought, but that winter the Philippines felt intimately familiar, recalling long-buried memories of my childhood in the Caribbean—sunbaked gardens, panoramic mountains and palm trees, tropical translucent sea, and the poor. An archipelago of seventy-one hundred islands stretching from the Tropic of Capricorn in the north to the equator in the south, lying almost parallel to the West Indies, the Philippines seemed oddly out of place: What was an old Spanish colony with ancient cathedrals and Spanish names doing out there, thirteen thousand miles away, in the South China Sea, lost in the tropics of Asia?

  After work I kept the television on in my bedroom for the overnight news from Manila, where it was already the next day. There was Cory dressed in yellow, the color of her campaign, wraithlike, kneeling at an altar. Here was Ferdinand Marcos stooping and limping, and Imelda, a boulder behind him, shouting to the heavens, “Marcos pa rin!” (“Marcos forever!”). On the other side, the mammoth crowds in yellow T-shirts, hundreds of thousands of Cory’s people rising across Manila in a swell of anti-Marcos chants, “Tama na! Tama na!” (“Enough! Enough!”). I absorbed every detail, the backdrops, the skyline, the faces, the names of streets, the hotel façades, until I had mapped out the city in my head. Manila raw. The open sewers. The primitive art. Too many centuries of too much heat and too many boots trampling its soil.

  Just as I was falling asleep, the phone would ring, shrieking in my ear. Jolted fully awake, I waited for the seashell-roar of the overseas line to clear. And then the click, Elizabeth’s voice. It could be anything—a cheery good-night call, or questions: Should she cover that press conference or go to the slums and talk to “real” people; should she change hotel rooms again; were her stories making any sense; was I writing? Or it could be a night of insomnia, a fight on the phone with her husband, who had stayed behind and was not agreeing to a divorce and wanted to go see her in Manila.

  What did you say? I asked, alarmed.

  I told him not to come, she said after a pause, but he’s coming anyway.

  I couldn’t sleep after that.

  Days later, her voice was a reed, thin and tired, on the morning she called me after she had nearly fainted inside a crowded cathedral where Cory Aquino was speaking. And it was frantic on the afternoon when the military revolt against Marcos started in Manila and Elizabeth found herself hundreds of miles from the action, in the central island of Cebu, where she had gone for a rally with Cory and was left stranded, scrambling to get on a plane to take her back to the capital. It didn’t help her anxious mood that Cory had vanished and was said to be hiding somewhere.

  Occasionally, less often, it was Tim on the line. Brisk, hoarse from smoking Dunhills, bursting with news, gossip, reports on Elizabeth, except he usually called her “Whitney, Whit!” Once again she had trounced him on the tennis court, he said, and got a sprained toe running on the court. Tim loved women, all women, and Elizabeth Blake Whitney was high up there on his list. But they had separate assignments. He was following the Marcos campaign and she was covering Cory, and there was friction under the camaraderie, a friendly but tenacious rivalry for front-page play and at times my attention. With his easy patter and affectionate manner, he was a fair-minded competitor, praising Elizabeth, saying she had a magic wand, but he had a ferocious drive and bristled when anyone beat him on a story. Hard on himself, harder than we on the desk could ever be, he took it all out on himself, not eating, not sleeping, his nerves on edge.

  One day he called up breathless, shaken. He had had a narrow escape at a Marcos rally where shooting had broken out. A reporter Tim knew was grazed by a bullet while she stood close to him, and he could still smell the blood. Another time his wallet was snatched out of his knapsack and his press credentials ripped off, and there were innumerable times when his days were spent outrunning the flying stones of the Marcos crowds. But his main concern always was this: Were his stories getting play, was he beating the competition, was he missing anything? I would reassure him on the phone, but he knew me too well; he knew Elizabeth took up most of my time, and no apologies from me could make up for that. I could see him rifling through the canvas bag I had given him, ballpoint pens spilling all over the room, coins falling out of his pocket, rushing around, stoop-shouldered, shaggy-haired, children hanging by his shirttails. All this was far more real to me than my days at work, the rattling furnace, the newsroom gossip, linguini dinners at trendy trattorias, and incessant talk of real estate.

  Twice, three times a week Elizabeth’s phone calls or letters came. Sometimes just single sheets, sometimes a batch arriving on the same day, stiff and musty, like the smell of old books, of things that have traveled an immense distance. She recounted her days, often mundane, occasionally scary, and sometimes she imagined me
there with her, close by. So much was left unsaid, but quarrels could break out suddenly over the phone. She used to say, with a bit of sarcasm, that I was in the constant and brutal pursuit of the truth, and she balked at that. She wanted to calibrate things, calibrated her words, her emotions. I calibrated nothing. She asked me to be patient, but I was never patient, and finally, worn down, with a glacial edge in her voice, she would cut me off with a curt “OK, bye” and hang up the phone. Stumped and frustrated, I would sit in Tim’s armchair, kicking myself in the half-lit gloom.

  One day not long after we had talked for hours and nothing, it seemed, was left to be said, a letter came, written with the abandon she urged in me but rarely allowed herself. I read it a dozen times. She had always pictured herself a loner, going about life on her own, but now she wanted to share everything. I could only guess what it had taken out of her to express so much emotion so directly, breaking down barriers she had put up. I knew then I would go to Manila.

  The revolution, which had seemed spontaneous, an improvisation, lasted just seventy-two hours. The truth of the events has long ceased to matter, a mythical story now after the years and the legends have consumed it, transformed it. They called it the People Power Revolution, bloodless and full of song and prayer: the day the nuns stopped the tanks and plaster statues of the Virgin were carried through streets blackened by smoke from burning tires. The day, February 25, 1986, when Cory Aquino, wearing yellow lace, was sworn in as the eleventh president of the Philippines, and Marcos, with his puffy face and bandaged hands, was airlifted with Imelda from the presidential palace by American helicopters and flown to Clark Air Base and on from there to exile and death, in 1989, in Hawaii.

  Around the newsroom we had kept score, cheerleaders on the sidelines. Standing on desks, on chairs, clustered around the TV set up on a wall, we watched each episode that day until the final scenes of euphoric Filipinos mashing portraits of Marcos, climbing over the gates of Malacañang in a rampage, looting Imelda’s rooms, trashing everything in sight. The stars of the American TV networks, blow-dried and suited for their Manila Hotel stand-ups with proper furrowed brows and smug attitude, savored this triumph. It was no small victory for the foreign press, which had hounded Marcos for years and had descended on Manila by the hundreds that February, and could now pick at the bones.

  In all the commotion, in the insane rush I had lived on for weeks, I wasn’t braced for the inevitable: the deflation that comes after a big story is over. There are no credits at the end, no lights coming on. What occurs is a kind of drawdown, a disengagement from battle. We had our postmortems at the desk and our rounds at Looney’s, and pats on the head from up high, gushy notes from the managing editor I would stick on my fridge. But the strain began to come out in the open. Jealousies, sniping, gossip, telegraphic glances, lowered eyes. I had trampled on other editors, grabbing the story for myself. I had blurred the lines, had become too involved with the story and the reporters, especially with Elizabeth. I had lost control and had also lost ten pounds, bitten my nails to the quick, and more than once made a fool of myself when the news editor demanded a rewrite of Elizabeth’s stories and I disagreed. It’s time to let go of the story, Dave told me one night, kindly drawling it out, but with a knowing glance.

  For Tim, the assignment was over, and he was dejected. On the phone he sounded exhausted, edgy, curt, totally unlike his usual self. He began to dump on his own work and complain about the desk. Had I failed him, I wondered silently, had I been too preoccupied with Elizabeth? He didn’t say, but I had not paid enough attention. He didn’t want to leave so soon and stayed for weeks, taking off with a girlfriend to one of the islands, playing tennis with Elizabeth, sitting alone in his room, sipping Chivas and watching the sun blaze out over Manila Bay one last time.

  But Elizabeth was just beginning her tour, and did not take a break. She filed stories every day, sometimes fading out, falling asleep while we talked on the phone on my mornings, her nights. She was up at six and out the door by seven, dashing back to her room, her skin smudged from street fumes and grime, to write and file a piece and run out again, living twelve hours ahead of us on the East Coast. She drank mango juice and played her cassette tapes and had chunks of papaya for breakfast, margaritas at dusk. The hotel staff knew her by now, and her margaritas came perfectly timed, straight up, with a twist, salt on the rim. Perched at the desk in her hotel room, hands flapping in time to the music, she could forget everything, doing the two things she loved most, writing and drinking.

  Just around this time, her husband was planning to fly to Manila, and she had been warding off the day. We had talked about it and argued about it. I was impatient, but she wanted to be sure and worried about her parents’ reaction and overturning her life, all of it. But she could not hold out any hope of reconciliation. She was struggling, she said, to break it off with dignity and grace. Elizabeth always wanted smooth endings, muted tones, and polite goodbyes.

  His arrival in Manila took away her sense of having a place that was her own, as if his presence in her room violated her, she told me. She was angry that he persisted, refusing to call it off. When the moment came over dinner, it was swift. She took off her wedding band and, without saying a word, left the table. The next day he flew home. She cried on the phone, telling me about it. The plans she had meticulously plotted out—work, marriage, maybe children—were now over. Everything in her life was changing so rapidly. There was nothing easy about this, having to tell her parents and facing the truth about us, about herself, something that defied definition.

  I was restless, distracted from friends and work. Gone were my fourteen-hour days, the late-night TV news from Manila, the excitement, and although the Philippines had stayed on the front pages, my involvement with the story was running its course. Tim was coming back, and he would have gladly kept me around his house, but I had to finish the things I had left undone: I had to sell my house in the suburbs and move a truckload of furniture, rugs, books, lamps, the things one accumulates over years. I rented a restored third-floor walkup in a riverside neighborhood of narrow cobblestone streets and historic brick buildings. I had a fireplace and windows overlooking a parking lot, warehouses, and tar roofs. I moved the furniture from my house in the suburbs, where the grass had grown for months and the For Sale sign had fallen. I had the yard mowed and the house cleaned inside out and the For Sale sign put back up. I fixed up my city apartment, arranged my books, put up the pictures, and had a friend set up the stereo. After work, I stopped at the frou-frou takeout shop around the corner to pick up a fat slice of lasagna, a container of pasta primavera, a bottle of Soave white. Occasionally I spent an evening out with friends, in Chinatown or in Italian restaurants or at riverside bars. Friends coddled me, kept track.

  Tim had gone on another short-term assignment, and with him gone, his pal Andy took me under his wing. He fixed great margaritas—this much José Cuervo and triple sec in a shaker, a cold glass, salt on the rim, twist of lime. He was fastidious about these things. We drank outdoors in the chill of evening in his tiny backyard, or we would go out and splurge on good wine. Andy was a rakish figure at the newspaper, lean and handsome, with spiky black hair, a thatch of premature gray dropping over his forehead. He wore skinny leather ties, carried a hiker’s backpack, and had the strong, silent manner of much older men. He was a loner, flying off to Haiti or Salvador or Nicaragua on a moment’s notice. His passport, his oversize duffel, and his “Trash 80,” the Tandy TRS-80 miniature computer the paper loaned to foreign correspondents, were always packed and ready to go. I met him, like so many others, through Tim, when we were bowling one night across the river, over in a crass honkytonk. His posture struck me, a flat six feet, dangling arms, barbered hair shaved too high up his neck. He was broken up over a girl, living alone with his cat and the worms he grew in the basement of the place he rented on a dead-end block of ten-foot-wide tenement apartments occupied by aging hippies, freelancers, and tweedy university professors.


  Andy was one of the hotshots, the sort you kept your eye on, going places. He had been assigned to cover the revolt in Haiti and had been there for weeks, but when the large moment came, the fall of Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the ruinous son of the longtime dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Andy missed it because the Foreign Desk had grown impatient and ordered him to fly back. Andy was holed up at a Miami airport hotel the night Baby Doc and his people fled on an airplane for France. In a fury, Andy called me to rant. He had missed the big story! Within hours he found a flight back to Port-au-Prince and arrived just in time for the riots, the fires on the streets, the mobs in the slum of Cité Soleil. When he came home weeks later, he was deeply tanned and gaunt, wearing a Liberté T-shirt. He brought me a bottle of Rhum Barbancourt, Haiti’s finest. We drank it slowly, molten gold burning our throats.

  You’re letting your hair grow, he noticed one day over dinner. That happens after a tragedy, he said, wise man of twenty-seven, his eyes crinkling. He was talking about my long-gone relationship, the lover I had left months earlier, but I didn’t tell him the truth, that no, it wasn’t that—it was Elizabeth.