Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  “It takes time,” she kept saying. She had her rules about these things, a steel will, discipline, method, and trying to encourage me, she would say, “All those things other people are writing, what they think, what they say, where they go, have nothing to do with you, with your work.”

  She had high dreams for me, and notions of writing that were even more idealized than mine were in those years. She believed writers worked in solitude, removed from the world outside, from money, fame, and glamour. She imagined taking herself away to a ramshackle farm or a deserted southern shore, marking her days by the shift of the wind, the flight patterns of geese.

  I rented my vacant apartment down the hall to a bouncy young field producer for the American networks, and soon she was having the walls painted pink, the furniture reupholstered in flowery fabrics, and chintz draperies hung on the casement windows. She was a charmer, Kay was, with a freckled pudgy face, lank dark brown hair, and moist caramel eyes.

  The first time we met she suggested a restaurant in Makati, a fancy place with the best local food in the city, where the dishes came in platters—krispy pata, crabs boiled in coconut juice. Elizabeth had already met her and had put her off. But I wanted to meet her, had heard talk about her, and Elizabeth came along to the lunch because I insisted.

  Her voice buttery, Kay said she had heard so much about me. Over dinner, she wooed us both with flattery, raving about Elizabeth’s writing and my quick grasp of the political scene. She wrapped herself around us, squeezing my arm, nodding attentively at every utterance, and she flooded us with inside gossip. Living down the hall from us, she was in our life before we knew it. She was always in trouble and she was always in crisis. One day she was being fired, another day she was running out of money, on yet another day she had heard people gossiping about her. She would make herself at home in our apartment, plopping down on the floor, her skirt riding up her thighs, and her hand pulling at strands of her hair. We listened to whatever she rattled on about and brought out apples and Brie and wine, taking her seriously. It was a foolish thing, because she didn’t listen to advice. The next day, the crisis of the moment would pass and she would stay in bed late, tangled in thick covers, calling up her sources, hounding them, and at the same time talking to us while a skinny Filipina she found somewhere gave her a massage, rubbing oil over Kay’s naked body.

  Elizabeth didn’t take to people as easily as I did, always keeping her distance for a long time. Kay was smart, shrewd, and manipulative when she went after someone, and Elizabeth didn’t trust her. But she was not immune, playing big sister to Kay’s helpless wastrel, sitting her down for lectures on demeanor, rewriting her memos to her bosses. Kay loved her. To me she would say, “You have a darkness in you,” adding, “Elizabeth is the only one among us who is pure.” I would nod, thinking she was saying what she thought I believed. I did!

  Other people came around our apartment from time to time. There were photographers and TV crews we knew from our Sundays by the pool who would come to our door uninvited. Elizabeth and I would sit far apart, not looking at each other, keeping ourselves from revealing any intimacy. But they knew. I could see in their curious glances the questions they didn’t dare ask: What was I doing there exactly, how did I support myself, how could we get away with this in Manila?

  One night Camilla came over, tall and slender, smoking Marlboro reds, hipless in jeans, her photographer’s bag stuffed with lenses and rolls of film. She was a Brit, educated in boarding schools, and had the rich European girl’s throwaway beauty—long legs, a model’s cheekbones. Elizabeth had fallen in with her the day they met at a press conference. Camilla was one of those few people whom Elizabeth spotted from time to time and claimed as her own. She was the only person Elizabeth had mentioned to me in letters and phone calls during our time apart over the summer, and the only photographer whose company she enjoyed. Together they had gone up rough roads on horses and had drunk rum with the communist rebels and survived a jeepney crash and the leers of the troops in hillside stations. Camilla had come from Hong Kong to do some freelancing in the Philippines.

  The night she came over to pick up Elizabeth for dinner, she said she was thinking of moving to Manila and taking a house in a compound of houses not far from us. Looking around at Elizabeth’s things, she was also taking me in. I felt uneasy, guessing that she had not figured out what I was to Elizabeth. Without any makeup, her hair loose around her thin shoulders, she was plain but striking at the same time. She was there a few minutes and then they were gone to dinner, and the next time I saw her, a few days later, at a party inaugurating the foreign press club’s headquarters, she was wearing dangling earrings and rouge, and a mid-thigh black dress that made deep curves of her narrow hips, and she had her manicured hand on Nick’s shoulder, Nick, who was dazzling in white linen, copper-haired and bronzed.

  In the tricky month of November, when the typhoon season draws down and the taxi drivers predict that the rains are over just as a rainstorm breaks out, we heard the coup would come any day. We would sit around the Manila Hotel, waiting, drinking in the Lobby Lounge, skimming the wire stories ripped off the CBS and NBC offices upstairs. Midnight or two in the morning, the phone would ring at home, and a voice would whisper, “It’s tonight.” Reporters scattered around town, to the army headquarters at Camp Aguinaldo, to Malacañang Palace, where the sandbags were piled at the gates. Barricades were going up around Cory’s house, a modest home secluded in a block down the street from her offices in an annex at the palace. On the short wave we heard about the troops moving from the north, armored tanks moving from the south; troops moving to secure the perimeter, the government’s TV and radio stations, and the airport.

  The city was muffled. Streets empty of cars, lights out. At three in the morning, or later, Rolly, our constant driver, was taking us around the city. We were looking for troops, for tanks and men in camouflage taking up positions, anything to suggest that a coup was in process. We found nothing but military checkpoints. Rolly, who was no hero at times like these, stuttered in Tagalog as he handed over his documents at checkpoints, but Elizabeth swayed the guards, dangling her foreign press credentials and flashing her American smile. Around town there were hundreds of international correspondents and photographers. Dozens had flown in from Beijing, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, Rome, anticipating another revolt, a little bang-bang, maybe the fall of Cory Aquino.

  Nothing really happened. No one could actually report that troops moved, any troops. No one saw anything; no shots were ever fired. But Cory Aquino, identifying her enemies, immediately fired the defense minister, the same defense minister who had backed her against Marcos, and put him under house arrest. His “boys,” the colonels and lieutenants who had banded around him to force Marcos out, were put under arrest in the barracks.

  The aftermath of the coup that was or was not a coup left us all frazzled, troops without a war, sitting around the hotel lobby figuring out the next move. I had made myself part of the press corps, insinuated myself into it. Elizabeth had resisted at first, did not want to be seen with me at her side everywhere, but eventually the work became an extension of our private life, rounds of high agitation, vigils on rooftops, mesmerizing tales told in mansions draped in jacarandas.

  Christmas comes early in Manila. The stores, warding off the evils of the rainy season and desperate for the burst of spending of the holidays, hang their twinkling lights early in November and set up their manger scenes and imported Christmas trees wrapped in angel hair. Plastic Santas glow red and white, night and day, on display windows. The temperature is ninety degrees, but shopping malls turn up their scratchy tapes of “White Christmas” and grocery stores stockpile eggnog and fruitcakes, cranberry jellies, hams and turkeys. By mid-December, offices close early and the government ceases to function. Churches toll their bells, barrios have their fiestas, and religious processions fill the streets. There’s a run on fireworks, and the hotels feature evenings of choral music, with children from or
phanages, from the slums and parochial schools, singing out, eyes to the sky, with such wispy voices that tears come to your eyes.

  On our first Christmas in Manila we went to Boracay, a sand island in the central Philippines, a holiday haven then still rural, without paved roads, without electricity, but already discovered, its name printed on beach towels and T-shirts. We left Manila early on Christmas Day, after opening the gifts we had placed under our tree, a potted ficus Elizabeth had strung with white lights and trimmed with handmade Filipino ornaments she’d bought in the street markets: small straw birds, miniature brooms, peasant hats.

  Our four-seat plane to Boracay wobbled above the clouds the two hours of the flight south and sputtered to a landing on a grassy field bordered by coconut trees. We braked at a thatched shed, where we waited with the roosting chickens for a motored tricycle to take us to the dock, a shack where tourists bought tickets to cross by boat to Boracay. There was in this crossing of water, a roiling over slapping waves, a sense of infinite space, a panoramic sea. Soon we were within sight of sand and palms, the sand chalk white, and against it an awning of palm fronds, trunks bent in the wind.

  We had no hotel reservations, and Christmas was Boracay’s high season. Dragging our duffels, we wandered up and down a boardwalk, looking for a vacancy. Just when we were about to give up we found Casa del Pilar, half a dozen cottages standing on concrete blocks and making a semicircle around a rustic restaurant. Our room had two wooden cots, foam mattresses, and a toilet flushed by dumping a bucket of water into it. We had a porch, and at sundown the houseboys came by with torchlights.

  In the days we spent there, days that began with the sunrise, we got around to the village a mile beyond, a cluster of taverns, cheap motels, and vendor stalls. We bought drawstring shorts made of flour sacks, beach towels, and straw hats, and slogged on burning sand back across the island, slapping at sand flies in the air. Elizabeth went windsurfing and fell laughing into the water, and she took out a catamaran and disappeared in the horizon while I lay peering into the sun, trying to spot her. For a long time there was nothing out there, and just as I was beginning to panic, I saw her, a tiny figure in that distance. She came ashore pulling the boat by a rope. I ran up to her, all worry, but she had on her happy shark smile, wide-mouthed, all teeth, the look she must have had the day when she was a kid who, wanting to run away from home, had taken a dinghy out into a storm.

  Late in the afternoons we would walk to the far point of Boracay. We were wanderers, tourists, picking up shells along the way, our backs to the sun, our skin gritty and broiled. At sundown the houseboys lit the garden torches, and we read and drank gin and tonics on our porch, bare feet on the rail. Darkness fell quickly and in our room a candle burned, and we would go to sleep hot and sweaty to the beat of maracas and drums and the stomping of couples dancing in the nightclub next door.

  On our final night, the last of five, we walked over to a restaurant by the water, a long way from our cottage, close to the village. There were sand floors and bare tables and dogs licking our toes, and the smell of barbecue and coal fires. On the way back we came on a deserted piece of beach and lay down on the sand and she named for me all the stars and the constellations, tracing in the air the shape of the Big Dipper and the archer and the bear. After a little while we dusted our shorts off and walked to our place in the dark, which was not like the dark of night anywhere else.

  It was a time, our first year together in Manila, when our lives, our days and nights, everything about us, seemed braided. Twists and strands that even now I cannot possibly separate. It was New Year’s Day, 1987, and we were lying by the Manila Hotel pool, my skin deeply tanned from Boracay, my hair darkened by the sun, in feathery curls, and already, by noon, we were into our second or third beers, surrounded by friends, familiar faces, the regulars. Everyone was out that day.

  Elizabeth did laps in the pool, her striped pink and white tank suit slick on her skin, revealing ribs, flat stomach. She moved like seaweed in the water, her freckled shoulders rising, churning, and when she came out of the pool, toweling her hair, she squeezed in next to me and Nick. He brushed his mustache on her cheek, a brotherly kiss, and challenged her to a game of tennis. Nothing she would like better, beating him on the court, and others came around, Nick’s drinking mates, leathery faces you saw here and there, all over the Far East.

  No scuttling clouds this day, not a trace of smog. There was a carefree informality, the camaraderie of people thrown together, and we drank and talked all afternoon. I thought I would never leave Manila, that none of us could.

  We had no routine, except the morning coffee that Elizabeth brewed in an old iron pot, standing in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil and then pouring it through the nozzle, one cup at a time. Her days had an unpredictable rhythm. She was not bound to an office clock or a set number of stories. With the slow pace of a new year, she would take a day or two to write a long piece for the front page, organizing her notes, starting and restarting her lead, writing postcards to the office, breaking away for a beer on the couch with me. On other days she was out the door early, going on interviews, arranging for trips to the provinces, doing what reporters do.

  My days had no clear schedule, no hour when I began work and when I finished, no deadlines except those I imposed on myself, making believe that something would come out of these hours bowed at my desk, over my typewriter keys, envisioning lines and lines of prose, and imagining on those days when the writing came swiftly that it would always be like this.

  Elizabeth, who in our early months together had fought to keep her life distinct from mine, close but separate, now would come into our apartment after a day out and call my name the second she opened the door. She always surprised me doing this, calling my name as if she had just returned from a long trip. Dumping her shoulder bag on the floor, she would wash the grime off her face, and, grabbing a beer, talking all the while, she would give me the details of her day: the places she visited, the people she met. An interview with the American ambassador one day, a schoolteacher the next, and one day, an audience with President Aquino. For that one, Elizabeth put on a long skirt, a silk blouse, and a string of pearls and arrived at Malacañang Palace in a chauffeured black Mercedes, because she wanted to impress and because the palace did not allow taxicabs inside the grounds, where Cory had her office.

  On any day, no matter how tired she was, she would put aside whatever she had to do and pick up the pages I had written that day and would listen to everything I was saying. We talked for hours, sometimes looped side by side on the sofa, sometimes stretched out on the carpet. Then the telephone would ring and she had to go off to her desk and start writing a story, but pulling me to her, her hand grazing the nape of my neck, she would wait a minute longer.

  I took up tennis that spring, played early in the morning three times a week with Leo, the Manila Hotel pro. He hand-lobbed balls over the net again and again, making me run from one end to another. I missed every time. Old Leo had the patience of a saint, with sweat dripping down his big round face, down the rolls of fat around his neck and collar. He would yell at me, “Move your feet, move your feet,” just when I thought I was racing across the court. My elbow would not bend easily, my legs were not strong enough, my feet slow. But he kept at me. He spread his bulging arms around me, his hand squashing my bones as he tried to teach me how to hold the racket, how to twist and twirl. I practiced at home, swinging my Prince Pro against the air, tossing a ball up to the ceiling and watching it plop on the floor nowhere near my racket. I was artless, I knew, playing tennis the way I had played baseball when I was a kid. I would feel again that thrill of childhood, when I blazed around town in roller skates, or hit a home run, or leaped down the plaza stairs on my bike. Leo kept pushing me, “leetle by leetle.” Occasionally, not often, Elizabeth dropped by the courts, clapping when I hit the ball back and over, cheering me on.

  She made me think I could do just about anything. She said I had the mind and t
he heart, that I was bold and daring. A mountain, she called me sometimes. It was an image she fashioned for me, and I allowed myself to believe it. I still had my moods, when I crashed to the bottom. But less often, and I was not despairing. I had a resolve, and if things took longer for me, if sometimes I blocked myself, I would in the end find the way. I had believed that since childhood, had lived it. But somehow, here, it was coming true. She knew the stubborn streak I had: how I flew thirteen thousand miles to see her though I feared flying; how I gave up a newspaper career for the idea of writing, though I loved newspapers.

  I never felt alone in Manila. It was impossible to feel alone. There was instant connection with everything around me, and I was no longer watching from a safe distance, no longer an outsider. Sometimes I saw myself in Filipinos. There was a kinship, like family, people you have known a long time, forever. We had superficial things in common: the tropics, bloodlines to Spain, deep bonds to the Roman Catholic Church and with America. I had a natural understanding of their culture that did not come from books. There was the colonial’s craving for acceptance and place, and I smiled knowingly at their fatalism. They called it bahalina—que será será—throwing themselves at the mercy of the gods, a sentiment so ingrown, so Asian and so Spanish both, that it came to them, it seemed, with birth itself. I understood too their flair for tragedy, their affinity for it, that life was opera, bombastic emotion, tear-drenched. And in the vigil that was their lives, I understood their search for deliverance—saints, astrology, tarot, dance.

  But it was more than that, something far more alluring: a seduction. It was the hallucination of the tropics, the madness of the South Seas. The longing for the primitive and primal. A simple thing, perhaps, that allows a shedding of skin and a wild abandon. For me it came instantly, when I first saw Manila.