Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  We had not been apart in six months, had not left the Philippines, but now Elizabeth was in Taiwan on a quick five-day trip she didn’t want to make. The gray cast of temperate latitudes brought her nothing but gloom, nights of insomnia and days of dull interviews with thin-lipped men in black suits.

  At a loss without her, I spent hours at the hotel. You could always tell when the foreign press thought nothing was going on in Manila. They had lunch by the pool. Over on one side were Kay and Camille, chatting at a table under the banyan tree where the pool attendants stood idle. On the other end, by the sunken pool bar, was Nick’s table. Nick spotted me, came over for a cigarette, swinging on the balls of his feet.

  “What have you done with Whitney?” he said, joking, looking around for her. It had been a long time since that night at La Taverna when Nick had blurted out to me that she was like tear gas, toxic. He had changed his mind working around her, getting to know her, maybe because he liked me, too. Now he was solicitous, caring, always looking after us.

  “The desk wanted her to get out of the country and write about something else,” I told him, and throwing his arm around me, he commiserated. He had to deal with the same demands from his bosses. Just then, when he was about to draw up a chair, he noticed a famous American writer, one of a handful who showed up from time to time to write about Cory Aquino. The writer, balding and paunchy with hairy legs, who had earned his reputation in Vietnam, was surrounded by an entourage of young, eager reporters lying on lounge chairs under a droopy magnolia tree, and Nick rushed off to join them.

  Coming into the apartment from the pool later that day, I had to blink to keep from imagining Elizabeth standing there in her Manila Yacht Club T-shirt, ruffling my hair and making me listen to a Youssou N’Dour tape she had picked up at the mall. She was forever discovering music, obscure people who within months became stars.

  I tried to go about my business while she was in Taiwan, and wrote for a number of hours each day, working on a piece about the political crisis in the country. The string of coup attempts, the bloody communist insurgency, the largest in Asia, a Muslim insurrection in the south. The country was splintering, no longer held together by the force of Marcos. Squatter camps sprouted all over Manila, rising up alongside five-star hotels and million-dollar condos. Beggars were getting younger and younger, and violence was a staple of daily life, something you shrugged off. Carjackings, kidnappings, and drug rings were run out of police stations, and in the provinces warlords and machete-happy cults terrorized peasants.

  Cory Aquino was reeling: blows from the left, blows from the right. There was a slim middle as firm as quicksand where she stood. This was at a time—hard to imagine now, so many years later—when Cory was still a heroine to much of the world, adulated by the foreign press, Time’s “Woman of the Year.”

  I rewrote my piece countless times. Looked up a raft of notes I had taken at all those merienda interviews and on a trip with Elizabeth and Camille to a leftist mountain hamlet on the island of Panay. And I wove into the story the things I had heard in the Lobby Lounge and at the coffee shops around town, at the Inter-Continental and the Peninsula, where the coup backers, a handful of embittered politicians, financiers, and right-wing columnists, would take you aside and draw diagrams on paper napkins. After weeks of work, I mailed off the story to several magazines on the East Coast, feeling the combination of relief and anxiety that comes with a finished story.

  It was then that I wrote a one-sentence note, addressed to no one but meant for Elizabeth. Someday I will be able to write, because I will have to, about the years in which I knew you.

  She flew back from Taiwan the day before my birthday to surprise me. But she didn’t find me at the apartment, there to rush to, to squeeze the back of my neck, and when I finally turned up, after an evening with Kay and Camille at the Weinstube, Elizabeth was sitting in the dark, waiting.

  “I didn’t know what it would be like,” she said, bewildered, “coming home and you not here.”

  I walked over to her and raised her chin toward me and, bending down, kissed the soft flesh under her earlobe. A year had passed since my birthday on the bamboo raft at Matabungkay, and I was now having my second birthday in Manila. That evening Elizabeth took me to the Cowrie Grill at the Manila Hotel, the restaurant we liked for special occasions. We sat at our table toward the back, with floating candleholders and sprigs of baby orchids, and we had raw oysters and champagne and French Cabernet, red drops on her lips.

  6

  HOW QUICKLY WE disassemble our lives. The apartment at Del Pilar had been our cloister, but now we wanted a house, trees, a garden, a bigger sky at our windows.

  We found an old wooden house in a compound a couple of miles up Roxas Boulevard, farther out from the city. It had a yard with frangipani trees and tamarinds, marigolds and bougainvillea. Elizabeth had longed for the outdoors: she missed her garden back home, the sense of space that came with a house and many rooms, porches to sit on, and birds to track.

  We saw the house off Roxas one day when we went over to visit Camilla, who lived alone with her pug and her maid in the compound, diagonally across from a house that would soon be vacant, number 33. It was the first in a cluster of four houses on an unpaved two-car lane. The houses were wonderful relics from colonial times, unlike anything I had seen in downtown Manila, draped in bamboo stands, palm fronds, and yucca leaves. The compound had no name, but we called it P. Lovina, the name of the street that ran alongside it, a stretch of dilapidated motels, food stalls, and squatter huts, a block off the bay.

  From outside, the house seemed oddly askew, with curved bays north and south. It stood a bit lopsided, as if one side had sunk inches deeper into the ground over decades of floods. Cypress green patches showed in spots through a thin coat of white paint that was already flaking, and the slanted tin roof was rusting. Set back from P. Lovina, with only a sagging wire fence to protect it from passersby, the house rose high off the ground, almost two stories, with the lower exterior enclosed by flimsy wood slats nailed in a crisscross pattern, giving them the appearance of a garden trellis. Bordering the foot of the house were overgrown rosebushes, bare patches strewn with broken glass, and a tangle of weeds. A shroud of old trees cast large shadows over a yard that had been left to the seasons. And around the front, where a garage door opened to an empty, unfinished ground floor, an awning of tin scraps hung over the maroon-colored steps that led up to a wide, screened veranda cooled by the breeze.

  From the moment we swerved into the dirt driveway and ran up the steps of the house, Elizabeth wanted it. She waltzed from room to room, throwing doors open, sticking her head in the bathroom, measuring the rooms in her head: a sunny living room with beamed ceilings and wide-plank floors, bleached cedar walls and Capiz-shell window shutters; an airy kitchen; a sunlit room for my study; and our bedroom, with high windows open to the side yard. There was a raw beauty about the place, and a feeling that it would soon come to ruin. Winds had blown too hard against it, and time, too. But for us, it seemed ideal, secluded and unspoiled.

  We would have dinners and parties, and we would smell blooms all around us and feel the rain directly overhead, sometimes hard like stones crashing on the tin roof, like the ripe coconuts that dropped off from time to time, rolling down and waking us, and we could see sky from every room.

  We moved in May, a large van taking our things, dishes and pans, the office stuff that Gina and her sister Edna had spent days wrapping in newspapers and packing while Elizabeth and I rushed about our apartment, marking up boxes and checking off our lists, the tape deck blasting at full volume. The movers came and cushioned the furniture in quilts, strapped desk drawers, and hauled down the sofa and our bed, the steamer trunk, and all the rest. The building’s maids and janitors stood around gaping. I had moved a dozen times and this was the fastest move I had seen, leaving us suddenly in a bare apartment, as if we had never lived there at all.

  Over the ten months we had lived there together we
had collected restored pieces Elizabeth bargained for in the antique shops along Mabini Street and in the galleries in Intramuros, the old Spanish fortress city within Manila. She had found a hand-carved Mindanao bird, a Chinese chest, altar tables, and a narrow onetime chicken coop, made of wood, that had been converted into a long bench, which now would occupy the length of a wall in our new bedroom at P. Lovina. We had our butaca and the Rajasthani chairs, and Elizabeth had pillows made for those chairs and had them upholstered in hand-spun indigo cottons she had bought in Sri Lanka. In time we brought an Afghan rug and an Iranian tapestry from Hong Kong, and a statuette of a Buddhist monk with a beggar’s bowl and a gold-leaf goat sculpture from Bangkok, and a pair of long wall carvings that had been smuggled out of Burma into Thailand.

  I was turning the small back room into my study, with a view of the bayside palm trees and the bay’s spectacular sunsets and the rosebushes at my window. I had a twin bed, a glass-fronted bookcase, a big bulletin board, an electric typewriter. I had windows on two sides and the rustling of tree leaves in the breeze. Elizabeth made the screened veranda in front of the house into her office, just as she had once transformed her Manila Hotel room, thumbtacking flags, calendars, and maps, arranging a workplace in a corner open to the wind, the sun, the rain, and the constant noise of traffic going by on P. Lovina. She got a scratched-up desk the compound’s owner gave her, and a bookcase she had dragged from New Delhi was her file cabinet. She had a straight-backed chair and her computer and her old Royal. She gave me—a birthday present—a hand-tooled narra (mahogany) swivel chair and her New Delhi desk, and these completed my study.

  We had not wanted a staff, a household of full-time help, and we had not needed both Gina and Edna, but Gina said she would not move without her sister. We had room for them, in the maids’ quarters below the kitchen stairs. We were tired of restaurants, and Elizabeth, who hated to waste money, wanted to eat at home more often, as she had done when she lived alone, making herself dinners of beans or soup. But the house was too big for the two of us to care for, and we hardly thought we wanted beans or soup for dinner every night. We were too busy to do the cleaning and grocery shopping ourselves, and Gina begged us to bring Edna along, so we hired Edna too.

  She was older than Gina, plain-looking, flat-faced and stocky, a square body on short legs, and Gina had the oval face of a young virgin and a coquettish eye. Unlike Gina, Edna spoke no English and had no experience working for gringos. But she was a talent at the stove, turning out feasts for us and our guests. She could make lemon chicken and grilled lapu-lapu, frying the fish to a crisp the way I liked it, or broiling it in olive oil and garlic. These were not basic Filipino dishes. These were dishes Elizabeth taught her to make, communicating in a language of their own, mincing garlic, slicing mushrooms, tasting as they went along. Edna had a specialty all her own, the Filipino eggroll they call lumpia. It was a triumph, and Edna knew it. She would come out of the kitchen in her pressed apron with a cocky smile, her small hands balancing platters heaped with fried rolls, which were devoured by our guests, who left oil stains from the lumpia on the carpet and the white sofa.

  Mornings she would knock softly on our door, carrying a tray of coffee and the newspapers. We never left our room until we were dressed, living as we were with eyes all around us. Elizabeth was no longer free to run around half naked, but she was still first in the bathroom, leaving me to my newspapers, and by the time I got in the shower there was no hot water left, or any water at all. I would scream out the window, “Tubig! Tubig!” (“Water! Water!”), and Edna would run next door and get the housekeeper there, Nanette, to turn off their hot-water pipes. The compound’s water tower and plumbing worked just as unreliably as the city’s, with its regular brownouts and rare garbage pickups.

  I had grown up with servants, but that was a long time ago, and here in Manila I had found it uncomfortable having maids. I didn’t like giving orders and found myself trying to befriend Edna and Gina, treating them with respect and deference. Once I surprised Gina in the kitchen, started a conversation, but I had interrupted her reverie in the middle of the day and she looked up at me sullenly. She had defiance in her, a quiet rancor that made me watch out. Edna was the opposite, talkative (with her eyes and hands, and in Tagalog), spry at all hours, eager to mend a tear in my clothes, to run to the stall for my cigarettes, to deal with the plumber or the guy who trucked in our cases of beer. She kept the house humming. Because I liked her so, I tried not to notice the subtle changes I saw in her expression when Gina was around. She became stiff and dour with us. There were a few times when they were cleaning together and saw Elizabeth and me sitting side by side, our heads close, our hands almost touching, and I would catch Gina glancing over at Edna, a quick exchange that instinctively made me pull away from Elizabeth.

  We had a theory of life below stairs, what we called the culture of the maids—las criadas del siglo, we called them, maids of the century. Nanette, Becky, Florence, our neighbors’ live-in housekeepers, kept an eye on newcomers, on the traffic in and out of the compound. After their day’s work they gathered, laughing and whispering, in the backyard or in Nanette’s room next door. Nanette was the elder, the majordomo of the servants. They knew everything that went on in those houses: they overheard the lovers’ quarrels through thin walls, they knew how many bottles of gin were consumed and who slept with whom. The maids, not us, I used to say, really ran the compound.

  In the apartment on Del Pilar, Elizabeth and I had worked a few feet apart, interrupting each other, reading aloud, trying out ideas. But now we had a living room between us, a formal arrangement, as formal as we could become, careful not to distract each other.

  Working alone in my study, gazing out the windows—cloudy skies, bright skies, street traffic—or lying on the twin bed I had there for overnight guests, watching the ceiling fan blades rotate, waiting in vain for the flow of words to start, was more distracting than having Elizabeth nearby. I could easily fritter away time. I fixed up the room, rearranged my books, put things up on a wall board: the Cory doll, banners, postcards, poolside pictures.

  On the days when she was home writing, I overheard cackles, a screech, the phone slamming, some excitement of hers, and three, four times, she came into my room. She made it a point to be brisk: laid her hands on my shoulders, flipped through my pages, gave me a story of hers to look over, related some news she had heard. With some excuse—that I needed to stretch my legs—I would leave my room and go see her, poking my head out to the porch and pulling up a chair next to hers. One day I caught her drawing, something she started doing in Manila, pen and crayon doodles in her appointment book, tennis courts, airplanes, birds, herself with hair like flames. Her moods, black clouds, brilliant suns.

  Around midday, when the sharp smell of Edna and Gina’s rice and pastis lunch seeped through the house, Edna would bring us a plate of chopped-egg sandwiches and a couple of San Miguels. Without saying a word, she placed everything on Elizabeth’s desk, backed away, and waited at the doorway to the living room, her hands folded in front of her, for instructions on the grocery list, the menu for the evening, a bottle of gin, cigarettes. Then she padded down the front steps, smoothing down her hair and the wrinkles in her uniform, humming, off to the market.

  All day long there were doors banging, cars pulling in and out of the dirt drive in front of Elizabeth’s office. Dogs barked, a pair of snarling whippets that guarded the compound but mainly preyed on the cats. Maids shuffled in and out, washing clothes in their tubs, whistling, singing. From my back office I could hear Gina waxing our floors with her coconut husk, and early in the morning we were awakened by the whoosh of Edna’s broom and the cluck of the rooster that the compound’s armed sentry kept in our front yard. Only the gardener made no noise. He walked on bare feet, spoke only when he came up to be paid, sticking out a reedy arm and mumbling apologetically about a sick son, but the rest of the day he kept his head down, hunched over the rosebushes, clipping the grass blade by
blade with his scissors.

  Chaotic Manila had been relatively quiet all that summer, our first three months at P. Lovina. There were no rumors of coups after the one in late 1986 that fizzled even before it got started. There was no news of massacres or ferries sinking or guerrilla attacks in the provinces, where an old Muslim insurrection festered in the far south of Mindanao and the largest communist insurgency in Asia survived in the central islands. With my writing coming more easily, though I had yet to sell a piece, my bleak moods and the fights that followed had grown smaller, fleeting like the migraines I had had for many years. With the rainy season in the offing, the summer seemed to fly by with friends and the daily routine of writing and filing.

  Elizabeth, having grown up with cocktail parties and formal dinners, cared little for the social whirl. She had enough of it going out every day on her news rounds. But for me, closeted in the house most of the day, going out was a relief. I needed the political talk, the ferocious arguments, the late nights, all that smoke and wine that we enjoyed at Sandro’s, next door.

  Sandro was a sixties radical, had come to Manila from Italy to work on an engineering project in the Marcos years. He stayed one year, then two, more than a decade, found love with a Filipina model, divorced, and was now living with Candy, a tall, striking Filipina American who had grown up with cover-girl looks and money. Sandro had long ago given up engineering and had become a news photographer, working for European and American magazines, taking pictures all over Southeast Asia. He made plenty of money, lived like a pasha, knew everyone in town, and even in his fifties had the virile good looks of Italian matinée idols. He still showed off a flat stomach and muscled frame. Even if his hair was graying and thinning, he was one of the best-looking foreigners in Manila—Sandro and New Delhi Nick had the swagger.