By now I had moved in entirely to her apartment and left mine partly furnished but unoccupied. Her apartment got more light than mine, with casement windows on three sides. The building, dating back to the American colonial era, had seen much better days. The exterior had gone from art deco pastels to a dirty gray. The ground floor flooded, and the stairwell had dead potted plants and a chipped plaster statue of the Child Christ. The building had its history. Alex the landlord, a short, stocky Filipino who brought in young girls from the provinces to work as housekeepers, sweepers, and laundrywomen, would come to our door on one pretext or another. His eyes roamed around, checking the furniture, the rugs, the hangings on the living room walls, and kept us standing politely while he reeled off stories about the Japanese and American soldiers who fought hand to hand in those rooms during World War II. He was a vivid storyteller, had the typical Filipino knack for drama, painting for us scenes of war and bloodshed and bodies spattering on those walls. The ghosts of the soldiers cursed the place, he said in a sinister whisper, and caused earthquakes.
And, of course, MacArthur had once stayed there. MacArthur had stayed everywhere.
From our second floor we had only a side view of the bay, but the city of beggars and restless commerce lay beneath the wide double windows of our living room. We kept the venetian blinds drawn at night, shutting out the orange and red tiled sex motel across the street, where couples snuck in behind tinted windows, their cars disappearing inside. On the other side we looked over the roof of a lechon manok restaurant, the most popular on Roxas Boulevard. On days when the wind came from a certain direction, the stench of fumes from the restaurant’s exhaust pipes seeped into our flat, stinking up the place; the trash from the restaurant’s kitchen sat uncollected for weeks near the entrance to our building, spilling out on the street, garbage piles torn up by dogs and rats.
We had three large rooms, a gloomy, sunless kitchen with an old gas stove and linoleum counters, and a maid’s room with a bunk bed and a shower. The rooms had chocolate-brown floors, wax-shined wooden planks, high ceilings, and whitewashed rough stucco walls. It was a flat of onetime elegance, a place of cobwebs in the corners and food smells. Elizabeth’s things—rice baskets, a couple of primitive Malay spears, a lopsided wicker sideboard, a pair of Rajasthani chairs, assorted rugs, and the long-armed chair called a butaca—defined the apartment, set a spare, monastic tone.
These rooms had nothing of our past. In time they became entirely our own, with our things, which we would carry with us from place to place over the years.
We talked endlessly in those rooms. Elizabeth, who had buried so much for so long, unfolded her life slowly, sometimes in streams of words, as if she had not really spoken for ten years, as if she had long ago dropped out of ordinary life. She called her twenties a time of anomie, when she cut herself off from the things that had once moved her—books, music, art, and writing. “I don’t read, I don’t listen to music,” she had said when I first met her, and I thought then that it was some sort of sophomoric cynicism, a juvenile affectation.
She had once bought a small farm and had spent her weekends dismantling the old farmhouse plank by plank. She had planted a garden and a row of fruit trees. For a time she believed she would remake it into the peaceful, private place she thought she needed. But it was never finished. Often she warned me about voices that were loud and clear in her head, and her belief then that life was bare and frail, to be lived alone, a point that came between us again and again. When I would try to smash through that, she would balk, retreating to some place in her head where I could not follow. Her detachment at times confounded me. She liked to say she was a clam, deep in a shell. She didn’t want to stick out and expose the layers underneath. Her distant manner was studied, learned since childhood, I supposed, and by now it came naturally, shading the insecurities that I saw sometimes gnawing at her. Buttoned down, impervious at times, she was the very picture of upper-class Protestant girls groomed to a life in which emotions were meant to be disguised and pushed down. That surface, a carapace I used to call it, had little to do with the other Elizabeth, passionate and intense to the core.
But there were things I did not talk about, things she wanted to know, about broken loves and long parts of my life I left vague. Family, relationships, old anger. Scars had grown over some wounds—a father who drank too much and carried on with too many women, a devastated mother, a family torn apart—and I refused to rip them open again. I had buried all that so far down, had spent years pouring earth over those memories, I was not going to dredge them up. But it wasn’t the family wounds I avoided most. Broken relationships were best forgotten, I thought, best left to wither away.
“I hate it when you do that,” she said every time I clammed up, reversing our usual roles. “You go up to your balcony, looking down from up there, distant. I can’t reach you there.”
Sometimes I fell into a dead stare, my face turned away from hers. While she was careful, probing what she knew were my wounds, I was intractable with her, insisting to know it all. Different as we were, we were fighting each other over the same things. We had lived through these things in our phone calls and letters, but without distance to protect us, and isolated in this place, there was no escape. It seemed to me that our relationship broke all patterns, and I marveled at its force, and sometimes I was frightened.
Passion comes rarely, and when it comes, it can be like a seizure, uprooting everything, consuming and transforming, taking possession, and at the same time, freeing spirit and flesh. It brings with it all that we are and have been, incalculable joy and unmeasurable wreckage. Ours was that, all of that. I saw it even then. My depression, her fears; my dreams for her, her belief in me; my hunger for her, her need of me.
One afternoon, the day I found out I was not getting a writing fellowship I had worked on for months, I paced up and down the apartment, flaying myself, drinking beer after beer. When she came in she took a look at my face, and she braced for the bout she knew would follow. She put a hand on my back, wanting to comfort me, but I froze at her touch and walked away. I grabbed pages of my writing in my fist, throwing them around the room. She sat down, helpless, her face caught in a vise, narrowing, beaked. I had never known a face that could change quite like that, neither angry nor sad, but implacable. She was rigid, jaws clenched, lips locked. Her composure was maddening. It set us apart. I turned on her with fury, hoping my anger would draw her out. It was a cycle we would repeat time and again.
For me, the bleakness swallowed everything. In those black holes I fell into, residues of my childhood, when the anger turned inside me, crowding out anything light, I felt in the grip of failure. Perhaps I was reliving my drunken father’s belligerence or my brave mother’s emotional subjugation. I saw no future for me, for Elizabeth and me together. I saw nothing but abandonment and rejection. She was holding something back from me, I suspected. In time she would leave me.
Elizabeth would listen to the storm raging in me. It horrified and ripped her. “This is the one thing that will destroy us,” she said, exasperated. She could not stand to watch me tear myself apart, she said again and again. She could not stand to hear the bitterness in my voice, lacerations I intended for myself but that pierced her, too. That night she left her chair and came over to me, grabbed me and pushed me against the wall and held me in her arms, and while I seemed to recover quickly, she was left drained.
I didn’t understand then that my moods were harder on her than they were on me.
There were times when she left me alone, unable to stand by while I ranted that she was impervious and unfeeling. She would walk out without a word and be gone for hours. On her birthday, when she had been caught up in her work and I was frustrated, unable to write, she slipped away, and thought about the insults I had hurled at her.
“You’ve decided that I am horrid, cold, and calculating,” she told me later. “Why the hell do you live with me then?”
These fights, with their famili
ar feints and skin pricks, seemed to blow over in hours or days, and we would once again pick up where we had left off, our intimacy nearly intact.
My first letter from Manila was to Tim, a sketch of the place, a place he had known, but now through my eyes, in my time. A day after he got my letter, he called to tell me he loved it, that I must write just like that. Was he serious? For a moment I believed him, and went back to the typewriter. I had set up my table and bookshelves in a large room Elizabeth had made into her office. It had a ceiling fan, her desk, which she brought from India, and her bookcases. She had the window view. I had the windowless end of the room. Settled there with the books I had bought in a storefront nearby and Elizabeth’s Philippine flag, which she had nailed to a wall, I wrote for hours, tearing up page after page, tossing crumpled pages around the room, my back aching from sitting on a straight-backed chair. But I was also determined, driven, teaching myself, trying to see.
The rains came, not sporadically but constantly, day after day, flooding the city for weeks. The scene that became commonplace for me: poor souls carrying bundles on their heads, wading in sodden rivers that just hours before had been their streets. By six in the morning Elizabeth was at work, making phone calls, running out to cover a demonstration, setting up interviews at the presidential palace, at Camp Aguinaldo, at the American embassy, the three power centers of the capital. Coming home late, covered in sweat and mud, she would plop down at her typewriter, cursing the hours stalled in traffic, the taxi drivers, the monsoon, the president, the ambassador.
There was nothing simple about Manila.
With the typhoons and the drownings at sea and all the disasters that accompanied the season came the rumors of a coup. Everyone knew that military factions were plotting to take power from Cory Aquino, and had been doing so since the day she became president in February 1986. By autumn, only seven months into her presidency, there was a palpable edginess about the city. People jumped when the lights went out and when army trucks rolled down Roxas Boulevard. We couldn’t get a drink at the Lobby Lounge or drop by the Peninsula Hotel coffee shop without hearing the latest gossip, whispers, asides.
We ran from rumor to rumor, trying to make sense out of fantasy, conspiracies printed as fact in the local papers, speculation from columnists and generals and Cory’s Harvard-smooth presidential aides. Some days I stayed behind in the apartment, working on an outline of a book I wanted to write, a story of the Philippines at that special crossroads in its history, after twenty years of Marcos, the flavor and scenes and characters caught up in that moment. I would sit bent over the typewriter, in the chair with the hard seat and the shaky back, staring blankly at the walls, making lists of books I had to read, research I had to do, and people I had to interview.
I wandered around the apartment, feeling caged at times, turning up the music, flipping through magazines, watching Gina, our maid, an eighteen-year-old from Tarlac province who came in to do laundry and wax the floors. With her bare feet she rubbed a dry coconut husk on the floorboards, back and forth, a sort of dance. I would watch the lavanderas—the laundrywomen—on the roof over the garage, scrubbing the laundry by hand with coarse bars of soap and dipping it in tin tubs, and eating their lunch on their haunches, giggling.
The sight of them took me back to my childhood, when I was nine and my family lived among lavanderas and farmers on an unpaved road in a town in eastern Puerto Rico where my father was doing his residency at the municipal hospital, delivering poor women’s babies, making middle-of-the-night house calls. We would be there two years, the length of time the government demanded of my father for giving him a grant to study medicine. The first few months we lived in a wooden house, set up on stilts, with a cold-water shower behind the kitchen. Later we moved up the road to a cinderblock house painted bright pink, with a carport and an unfenced backyard with a wire chicken coop and guava and tamarind trees. The maid came early to feed the chickens and wash our clothes in tin tubs in the yard. She mopped our floors and fixed our meals and filled the house with the smell of garlic and onions. In the afternoons, before my mother got home from her work at the superior court in San Juan, I would get out of my starched Catholic school uniform, take a shower, and run out to the vacant field across from the house to play baseball with the neighborhood boys, the whacks of our bats the loudest sounds at sundown.
Gina’s face and the lavanderas on the roof brought that back to me and reminded me of the pages I had written for myself, island memories, loose sheets of descriptions I had left incomplete. Far into the afternoon I would go back to my butaca, the long-armed chair, with a beer can dripping wet on the side table, a book in my hands. The living room was in shadows. Gina would come in with a basket of laundry and, too shy to say anything to me, would pad to the maid’s room to do the ironing. Around sundown, when there was no sunlight left and I was still in the Filipino chair, a leg hanging over its long wooden arm, the book propped in my hand, not many pages past where I had started hours earlier, she would emerge, her face glistening from the hot iron, carrying our clothes, shirts flowing on hangers, buttoned up and hung the way Elizabeth had taught her. With another hand she carried an armful of towels, sheets, underwear—everything fluffed and folded in squares and smelling of sunshine.
Days would go by like that, without my writing a single sentence. Days of walks around the block, getting cigarettes, coconut ice cream, newspapers. Days around the pool at the Manila Hotel, days at the Lobby Lounge in my khaki jacket, meeting socialites and newspaper editors, politicians and militants. I was always taking notes, scribbles that later made little sense to me, unintelligible handwriting, half sentences, unfinished quotes. Interviews lasted hours, over lunch and into the afternoon merienda, Manila’s teatime, and by the time they were over I would feel numb, coming out of the interviews into the glaring sun.
I stored it all away in some fashion: The Filipina-Chinese heiress, extravagantly chic and rapaciously greedy, who had calculated when she would be married and to whom, the idea being to leave the country, consumed one entire afternoon over lunch at Eva’s Garden. How she laughed at gullible Filipinos and their People Power Revolution, saying the country needed rivers of blood, her fingernails like pincers as she raised a bite of shrimp to her fuchsia mouth.
Another day, in the dusty dimness of a room above a shabby bookshop in Ermita, I listened to the laments of a famous novelist, darling of the foreign press. He was bald and chubby like a monk, a leftist radical from the old Marcos days who had already given up on Cory, his last hope. Like other leftists who had thrown themselves into Cory’s campaign, he was already disappointed in her slow approach to economic and military reforms. They all had expected centuries of history to change overnight when she was sworn in. Worse, Cory had ignored his advice, the packs of reform proposals he had labored over and presented to her. Look, he said, sighing with resignation and pointing at a thick pile of reports, at all the work he had put into it!
One evening, in the swelter of a cocktail party at a downtown apartment of heavy foam-filled cushions covered in loud ruby colors, I met a celebrated human rights lawyer, a University of Manila professor with a Yale degree. With wild hair and her eyes bulging with excitement, she talked with heartfelt admiration about civil society in Chile, where she had been an international election observer, and described with equal amounts of horror and self-satisfaction her work crisscrossing the Philippine islands, cataloging massacres and monitoring election abuses. Smart as a whip and sharp-tongued, she could mount an impressive diatribe against the Filipino military, yet could just as easily turn around and hug the most notorious military rogue at the party.
Manila then seemed to me a universe away from America. I was always startled to see President Reagan or any footage from the United States on the TV news in Manila. The streets and cars I saw in the American news sparkled, the buildings shimmered. The politics in Washington seemed bland and rigidly civilized. Everyone looked blond, groomed, and smug. We subscribed to the Inter
national Herald Tribune and I waited for it every afternoon, then read every word of it. The Wall Street boom, Trump, Gorbachev, Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev photographed together in the White House: an orderly world, another planet.
At that time, the last months of 1986, there were at least two dozen people writing books about the Philippines. Big books on the fall of Marcos, on hidden wealth, on Imelda, on the history of the country. Every journalist who had ever set foot in the place was writing something, and the ideas in my head seemed odd and abstract measured against theirs and their familiarity with the country. They were everywhere, at the tables by the pool at the Manila Hotel, mooching drinks; at parties with Cory’s confidantes; at little dinners in Ermita penthouses, getting dizzy on piña coladas and gorging on stir-fry Mongolian beef and oxtail kare-kare.
It took me no time at all to rein in the invitations, to know the names, the twisted connections, and every morning, I would scour the local papers, a half dozen of them, for the latest scandal. Manila had little else but scandal, corruption, sex, and gossip. On the cocktail circuit, and in the air-conditioned offices in the business district of Makati, where the political insiders courted the foreign press, I could be earnest, a veteran of the place. I clipped the papers and made files, a habit I had from newspapering, of putting things in order.
I was making a niche for my writing, but the truth was not that at all. I was getting caught in the quagmire of Manila, the press circles and political intrigue, avoiding the drudgery of writing and the long, solitary hours at the typewriter.
Elizabeth had little patience for my impatience.
Before the Rain Page 8