Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  Elizabeth, who readily saw the things in me that were so much a part of her, too, had touched that sense of aloneness in me, had been drawn to it. I was dark and fierce and had a face of shadows and moods, a face that to her seemed ageless. I was the very thing that she wanted to avoid—chaos, intensity, a fall from grace. I was writing, passion, books, long drinks in the night. It frightened her, I thought, that I could see through her, that she couldn’t lie to me, or escape me. She would say I was unlike anyone she had known, fearless, unrelenting, moving within a world that I had largely created for myself, haunted by a bottomless sorrow.

  She called these things idiosyncratic. It was, she said, what she found most captivating, a way of being in the world.

  The monsoon had come to Manila by the time Elizabeth moved into her apartment, after she dismantled her room at the Manila Hotel, unpinning the things on the bulletin board, her flags, her postcards and drawings. After all that time in Manila, there was little else for her but her life there, the story. She had once assumed she would return to New Delhi, but she had made Manila hers, and she wanted to stay. With one phone call to the foreign editor, she got his approval to move the paper’s South Asia bureau to the Philippines. It was only a matter of packing boxes and changing addresses, and it seemed to make no difference to the Foreign Desk where she was based, New Delhi or Manila, didn’t matter since she would be traveling all over Asia from one crisis to another.

  She found a large, unfurnished cold-water apartment in Manila, on M. H. Del Pilar Street, on the bay side of the city, not far from the Manila Hotel. It was a tropical-style 1930s building with a rusting corrugated metal roof and streaked gray exterior walls. She moved in to the flat even before her furniture, the few pieces she had bought in India, arrived in crates from New Delhi. She had bought a bed and a rattan sofa and found in the attic of an antiques shop a swayback chair of carved wood and woven cane straw with arms almost three feet long. She got ceiling fans, a small refrigerator, a simple bed. This was her new home. It was a universe away from her house in the States, from her family linen and heirloom silver.

  So much stuff, she would say, things accumulated for the sake of sheer accumulation. She owned sets of fine china and dozens of glasses and wine goblets, platters and pitchers, vases and lead-glass ashtrays, and she had left all of it in boxes, in the cellar of her house and in the dining room, stacked up in corners. With all that stuff stored away, she was living in Manila in nearly bare rooms with dark wooden floors and off-white stucco walls, cooking beans in a pot she had bought at a street market.

  I measured that summer by the flights she took, the places she visited, the dust roads where she ran, the mosquitoes and bars, the broken-down jeepney on a mountain road in Davao, the smell of coconut oil in the rain. By the stories she told me on the phone, and the stories she wrote. Where did I feel her farthest, and where close: airborne five thousand feet over islands of sand so white, and thin water over coral reefs; gazing hopelessly out the window of a glass hotel into the monochrome of Taipei; surrounded by men in red bandannas in an unmapped jungle; or there, at her flat in Manila, beating cockroaches in the bathtub? I recall only slivers of her summer, off-center snapshots, and her letters—from Taiwan, from Singapore, from Sri Lanka, from thirty thousand feet in the air, flitting across the Andaman Sea to the Indian Ocean, counting the gin and tonics, dashing off postcards: elephants, strange seas, monks in saffron robes.

  In Colombo, wearing her faded hunter shorts, drinking a Heineken, she wrote a note while seated on a terrace high on a hill looking over a lake. She had sat for hours, reading, watching dusk descend, the light changing on the water in the lake and the birds chasing bugs. I imagined the hill, and saw her leaning on red-clay earth, the cinders of her cigarette charring her fingertips. I could also see her in her living room in Manila, stretched out comfortably on her Indian rug, laughing at some unintended idiom of mine. I could almost feel her breath, her hand on my knee. Her face made everything around it dim.

  But she was not there in my apartment, and my nights were grim. Desolate. I would warm up a can of beans and sit at my typewriter, and when I ran out of things to write, bleary from wine, I flopped down on the sofa, turned off the floor lamp, and pulled a blanket over my legs, my arms clutching a cushion. I imagined she was done with her bedtime shower, her hair damp, matted, shining. I could smell her room in Manila, the limes in the margaritas.

  On some of those nights alone, when my loneliness and doubts seemed darkest, there was nothing soothing about our phone calls. Sensing my mood, she immediately would pull back, I would feel her vanishing. Frustrated, wanting to shake her, I lashed out, prickling her stoic silence, trying to get a rise out of her. But instead, a chill fell. She had a way with silence, a mastery of it I envied, and I would flounder miserably, threatening to vanish just as she did.

  One day after one of those phone calls, she wrote from Anuradhapura, in Sri Lanka, warning me that I should flee if I ever became like her. She didn’t like the way she could withhold all feeling. But she could, and she knew that we would fight always over her impulse to isolate herself, and if I did the same, if I pulled back from her, then we would both be lost.

  June was gone now, and I spent July giving things away. People trooped up to my apartment, picking through my closet, taking away silk blouses, winter coats, five-hundred-dollar boots, and carrying out my framed New Yorker prints and bookcases, my collections of Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe. And I sold my car. No one who knew me could understand why I was getting rid of everything, why it was so easy to let go of all these things. I had always found it rather easy to walk away from things, to throw them out or give them away. Even people. But I was in a hurry now, ripping off excess, shedding that skin I had lived in half my life.

  Now it was a matter of counting days, waiting to take off for Manila. I imagined the roles I would play there, inventing them, seeing myself as lover, writer, journalist, wanderer, observer. There was no defined role for me in the Philippines, nothing easily explainable, nothing in evidence. And Elizabeth, I could not talk about Elizabeth. I did not then know how to begin to tell that story.

  The day my house in the suburbs was sold, the house I had left so abruptly six months earlier, I was set free to go. I walked over to Tim’s, half a mile in summer humidity, gulping down a cold beer.

  Tim broke into one of those smiles that made me forgive him everything, his plans to see me that he would forget, dinners he didn’t make. We sank into his old sofa in the fading light of the afternoon, with the shutters halfway shut, his floor fan rattling. We talked about Elizabeth, and Tim was generous, wishing me good luck and love and all those things people wish for each other, those things that friends talk about at beginnings and endings. He said he envied me my obsessions, but I didn’t believe him, and we talked of little else.

  Over that last month, before the departure I had scheduled for August nineteenth, a date timed to the closing on the sale of my house, which would give me the modest sum of money that would support me for a year in Manila, I would drop by to see Tim when he was in town and we would go to the backyard, where the tomato plants had grown tall and the rhododendrons were blooming. He would bring out glasses of iced coffee and bagels, cheddar, and plain crackers. He had just turned thirty, but in his Cory T-shirt and loose drawstring white pants, he seemed twenty. He saw himself flying off to crazy places and moving to Hong Kong, to live with a girlfriend there, but it was all only a fantasy. We both knew he would not go. Late in the day, Andy would bike over from his apartment and join us, bringing an onion, a can of artichokes, olives. We would sit in the backyard, with Tim’s jazz tapes playing, and drink rum straight up. Right around dusk, bloated and drowsy, Tim would light up the grill and put on a chicken, and the dark would settle over the three of us.

  Tim was gone much of the time, on assignment in Washington. His house was half empty, so Andy moved in and took up the second floor, where I used to stay. I broke my lease on my apartment and fr
iends helped me pack my remaining things into a truck and haul the load to Tim’s, where I stored boxes that over the years I would forget—a stereo player, family pictures, kitchen bowls. We jammed my rust-colored sofa against the boarded-up fireplace on the ground floor, laid my rugs in the living room, and stashed away the rest of my things in the basement. The place was transformed suddenly, a mishmash of Tim’s hand-me-downs and my terra cotta colors, a palette of burnt siennas.

  The last weeks were a blur. I drank with friends, had going-away parties at restaurants, consumed bottles of white wine, countless rounds of beer. I made arrangements at my bank, closed accounts, changed addresses. I was planning to go away only for a year, and the paper had given me a leave of absence, but I was putting everything in order, performing last rites.

  One day the mail brought me Elizabeth’s Manila Blues volume 3—“a last blast from a tortured brain.” She said she dreamed of my anger and my moods and awoke feeling lonely, wondering how solitary she might have been if she had never met me. She no longer brooded the way she had months earlier, during our first days together when I visited Manila, when she was uncertain about us and afraid of what our relationship would do to her life. Now there was little visible trace of the deep upheaval she had felt then, but I believed there was uncertainty still, a fear perhaps of a life new to her. When she was not traveling, she meandered around the streets of Manila, fending off beggars, buying cigarettes and Hershey’s Kisses, going to the turo-turo for a bite of dinner, maybe rice noodles or crispy chicken, in the rain. It was the start of the rainy season and she felt so lonely, she said, she could feel the emptiness on her skin.

  On my last day at work they brought me a cake and champagne. Everyone stood around, not quite knowing what to say. There were toasts, bloated words. Finally everyone dispersed, and banging closed the drawers of my desk, emptying them of me, and logging off the computer terminal, I rolled off my chair and glanced around one last time at our map of the world and the rubber chicken hanging from the ceiling over the managing editor’s desk. I took down my postcards and notes, and skipped out, running down the stairs, through the beveled front doors.

  Two days later, on the morning of my departure, Tim stood with me on the stoop. He was on his way back to Washington on a new assignment and was wearing his single business suit, dark blue, with an old wrinkled tie. After embracing me, crushing me against him, he walked off. His shoulders sagged, his head drooped. I watched him, missing him already.

  Andy took me to the airport. We sat in a cocktail lounge, drinking beer, tearing at wet napkins, watching the clock, not saying much. Then it was time to go. I felt a sudden void, and I stood on my toes to kiss his cheek, brushing his hair as he bent down to hold me. Turning away from him, I picked up my bags and went through the gate.

  Thirty thousand feet over the South China Sea, Elizabeth was at that moment flying south to Manila from Taiwan, heading home to greet me. There is a typhoon moving west, just now, toward China, she scribbled. It has rained a lot lately. That much is true. Welcome to Manila.

  PART II

  5

  WHEN I LOOK back to that August in Manila, I must begin with the rain. It came in gulps, torrents, slashing across the world, drowning it. The sky, a crisscross of flashes, lightning snapping, became a vast black sea, exploding. Palm trees lashed by high winds from the south bowed to the ground, and people caught in a tempest of wind and rain, light and thunder, were washed away, helpless. The afternoon became night suddenly and the city, a city of ten million lights, became a phantasm, ghostly.

  Elizabeth and I would watch it come from the casement windows of the apartment, our candles burning and the wind hissing through the cracks, the lightning close enough to touch, but we had no fear, no sense of disaster. We felt pure, and the rain, the fury in the sky, seemed a miracle, an omen.

  This time, on the day of my arrival, August 21, 1986, Elizabeth was waiting for me at the airport. She was scanning the crowd. But naturally, I saw her first. Then she caught my eye, gave me a palms-up wave, a little salute, and moved toward me without any apparent rush. She was not one to come running with open arms. But she had that smile of wonder, a slight swing to her stride and a cocky tilt to her head, looking neither directly at me nor away but focused all the same. She reached around me to stroke my hair, light and casual, as if anything could be casual about this. And picking up a piece of luggage, she led the way out of the terminal.

  The waiting car was the same spic-and-span Crown Victoria with the bleached white slipcovers that had, in the spring, taken me to the Manila Hotel the first time. Rolly was again at the wheel, like he was that day in March, but now he was flushed with the excitement of having me back in town. In the back seat, Elizabeth and I fell into our public roles, awkward, nervous, superficial. We kept interrupting each other with simple chatter, as if we were old but distant friends catching up. How was your flight? What’s going on in Manila? How’s the apartment?

  She was good at tamping down emotion, but I could sense her loneliness and her toughness, the marks of those months from May to August of solitary living. With me there, our proximity obliterating all that, her voice took on a light, cheerful note and her face was lit up. Uneasy, I kept looking away, out the window, not at Manila, because Manila was no longer new to me, but to avoid her eyes, to find a proper distance, to avoid being drawn in too quickly by the perfume that came from her. But then I glanced over and was startled again that she was so oddly beautiful, that she was there.

  We had a year, or perhaps only weeks, months, or an eternity. We did not know how much time we had, how much time we would last together, because nothing about us had come conventionally, arranged, foreseen, with preambles and assurances. In the back of the car with her, having left a life behind me, I was unsure of myself. I played with my hair, clutched a magazine, and noticing my anxiety, she reached out and touched my hand. With that single gesture she was reassuring me and herself, and when we were finally alone in her apartment, relaxed on her white rattan sofa, I touched her cheek and felt the elation that ran through her.

  She took a week off from work to help me get settled in the vacant apartment I rented on the same floor as hers. By the time I arrived, she had bought me a table lamp, handmade in Mindanao, with a glazed wooden base in deep rose and plum and a wide cloth shade stained burgundy. She had set it up on a plain table by a window, where I would sit for hours and write. She had big hopes for me and my writing and brought me stacks of copy paper, pens and clips, dictionaries, maps. I took the apartment not because I wanted to have a separate home, but because Elizabeth did. She said she wanted her own place, her own things, wanted to find her own way. For a few weeks, I pretended to live in my apartment, but I never slept there. My clothes hung in her apartment.

  Days and nights fused and everything around us became ours: the restaurants and cafés, the foul streets, the morning fog on the bay, and the moments when, sinking into that city so strange and intimate, we lost all fear. Mornings came after nights when geckos crawled up the walls and we lay in our bed listening to the preludes and canons that had become the backdrop to our silences. There was nothing that came before those nights, before those hours, hours that for me transcended years, anguish and ache, insatiable longing. Tears that had accumulated in me in the years that came before her would burst out suddenly, and I would drift into a dreamless sleep, her arm around me. I would wake up to the sprinkling of her shower, the sun already above the horizon. Through the bedroom window, you could see the coconut palms in the Malate plaza and overhear, even with the window shut and the ceiling fan turning, the cranking of buses and jeepneys on the street below.

  We ate out almost every night, usually at Café Adriatico, under the Cinzano umbrellas, as we had the first night I spent in Manila in the spring and the first night of my return in August. That evening in August the lights went out, leaving the city dark, and we, oblivious to all, kept talking and drinking and picking at the calamari. Our evenings at Adria
tico were a kind of refuge, a Parisian scene, with garlic shrimp on our plates or fondue burning, Bordeaux and the chant of the flower vendors, and running home careless in a thunderstorm.

  Other nights we had dinner at the Weinstube, a German bistro nearby. As we walked down the tawdry blocks to get there, on torn-up sidewalks crawling with roaches and past gutters stinking of garbage, Elizabeth, loping half a dozen steps ahead of me, laughed as she stepped on the bugs and skipped like a kid over sidewalk cracks. The Weinstube had vacuumed carpets and white linen tablecloths, slithering waitresses, and a piano player. It was the kind of whispery place where expats began their days of drinking in midafternoon. The owner, a willowy Filipina in a tight madam dress and with sharp red fingernails, would slide up the piano stool around midnight and take requests, which invariably ran to “As Time Goes By” and “My Funny Valentine,” songs wafting over rapt guests in a 1940s setting of shimmering table candles and snifters of Rémy Martin and Courvoisier.

  We walked everywhere those first months—to the San Andres market down a slummy street and bought potatoes and plantains, pineapples, mangoes and papaya, and the rare piece of fresh fish that had not rotted lying out in open, unrefrigerated stalls covered with flies. We found cloth napkins, place mats, iron pans, inexpensive household stuff, all spread out on straw mats at the market. We felt happily invisible among the barrio people, the housemaids who shopped for the expats, and the farmers, shirtless men in flip-flops smoking pungent local cigarettes. We bought clay pots for cooking, wooden bowls, and big fat candles to set on Elizabeth’s steamer trunk. Slowly we made a home.