Those evenings at Sandro’s were long and heavy, an excess of rich food, drink, and talk. He usually wore his evening outfit, a colorful sarong he had picked up in Burma and a hip-long white linen tunic, and hosted these gatherings on his candlelit porch, which he had enclosed and decorated with Asian masks and artifacts, creating the illusion of an opium den. Puffing on a smoke, he conducted the conversation like a symphony maestro, while Candy, who rarely said much around him, played with her hair and sipped wine. Elizabeth and I always stayed longer than we planned and got home across the yard past midnight and a bit wobbly, the smell of incense in our hair and clothes.
On weekends when the weather was good, Sandro would drive out in his tennis whites, screeching to a stop at our doorstep, letting us into the car for the ride to the Manila Hotel. Courtside, Candy and I drank mango juice and sunned our legs and gossiped about whatever was the latest scandal. Sandro was a screamer on the court, shouting when he made every shot, his face streaked in sweat, headband and polo shirt soaked, and Elizabeth—who matched him grunt for grunt, a racket-thrower herself, merciless in combat—scrambled, leaped, raced, a storm on the court. She was younger and fast but not as strong, and just when she was about to beat him, his knees crunching, he got it out of his gut and something in her pulled back and he would win. “Elisabetta! Bella!” he called out to her in his Italian accent, spreading his sweaty arms around her slim shoulders, his six feet bent protectively over her.
We had long dinners at La Taverna, bottles of Chianti drunk with pasta putanesca and all’Amatriciana, simple, old-fashioned Italian dishes that seemed glorious after days of mahi-mahi, sticky fried rice, kare-kare, and pork adobo. Sandro, who had spent fifteen years in the Philippines, entertained us with a stream of stories. He had married and divorced after some scandal he was mysterious about. In Candy he’d found another perfectly sexy companion. She had the tossed long hair, shapely legs, the bikini figure of a model, and had a weekly manicure and pedicure, regular facials and waxing, and beauty naps, and wore satin camisoles. They made a striking couple, elegant and tall in sunglasses.
Presiding at his dinners at home like a sultan in his sarong, tinkling the bell for Nanette and the cook to serve, Sandro made us his sounding board, wrapped up like him in the dirty politics and brutality of the place. “When I came here, this was the third world. Now it’s worse than Bangladesh.” He laughed. “Now it’s the fifth world.”
He was at the point, a threshold often reached by foreigners in the tropics, at which contempt replaces infatuation with the exotic. Locals, once seeming so hospitable and engaging, become, over time, transfigured into ignorant inferiors, mulish, too brown, too dirty, too greedy, shifty-eyed. Corruption, which at first is intriguing and acceptable after four centuries of colonialism and miserable poverty, becomes a character flaw, ingrained in the locals like a genetic blood disease. Their dreaminess, the way they turn a funeral into a fiesta, which had once charmed, now seems pagan and uncivilized. Their colors become too loud, their manners crude, their language primitive. Sandro had reached that point. “This is not a country,” he would say, lobbing an insult while speeding down Roxas Boulevard, shouting at the beggars. “This is a collection of tribes.”
Candy sat by cringing, raising her voice to defend her country, knowing she could not, and he would shut her up. Oddly, she was the foreigner among us, the Westerners who were guests in her country. But when Sandro was away on a photo shoot, Candy would come over to our house with a bottle of wine and fill our ashtrays with red-lipsticked butts, telling us cuentos, stories that kept us glued to her for hours. Like many a good-looking woman, she had her struggles with men, her wild days as a Makati beauty, and now her boring days at the travel office where she worked. She wanted to marry Sandro, have children, a home, but there was no way Sandro would agree. He was more worried about his thinning hair, his aching legs, and losing his edge in the field. He didn’t know how much more bloodshed he could stomach, but he loved Manila in his way, with that bitter love that he knew would hang on to him forever. I could see it written on his face when Candy talked about traveling with him to Italy to visit, to meet his family. He would abruptly leave the room, turn up the volume on the music on his tape player, and change the subject of conversation altogether.
In late afternoons, when nothing else was happening, we crossed over to Camilla’s house down the lane. There were slices of mango, chocolates, crackers, gin and tonics, and she would show Elizabeth the brilliant fabrics she had discovered in her trips to Mindanao and Bangkok. Camilla wrapped them around her hipless waist, trying them out for color and shade. An intuitive photographer, Camilla had no fixed ambition, no direct route anywhere. She usually had a project going—reupholstering her sofa, stripping old wooden frames, saving strays in the yard—when she wasn’t traveling out in the islands, sometimes with Elizabeth, taking pictures of military camps and homeless villagers, massacres and shootouts, for a photo agency in London. But there were times we found her in her bedroom, blinds drawn, reading a romance novel, and times when she could not stop pacing from room to room, screaming at her maid for failing to buy groceries, or yelling into a dead telephone after a call home.
She had gone to a boarding school, dropped out, spent summers in the Bahamas or Bermuda and winters in Aspen or the Alps, stayed at the Pierre in New York, but seemed just as comfortable in a provincial motel in Panay or a toiletless shack in the mountains. She traveled first class with her Louis Vuitton luggage or on a jeepney with a knapsack. I often thought there was about her an only child’s loneliness.
Afternoons when I couldn’t write and Elizabeth was out, I would visit Camilla and bore her with the latest report on my work. It was important to me that friends knew I was hard at work, that I was writing, that I was doing something. She paid attention, trying to figure out what it was that I was writing. Then we drifted to other things and I would lose her interest. I didn’t enjoy the trust she had in Elizabeth, to whom she confided. So we were left with bolts of fabric to discuss, but I was useless in this area—fabrics and recovering cushions and sofas and those things that interested her and Elizabeth, at least on the surface. It’s beautiful, I always remarked when she unfolded the cloth, asking if the colors would go with the new slipcovers, the kind of question that I had picked up from listening to her and Elizabeth for hours.
Around dusk, when the breeze increased and the leaves of the bamboo stalks that grew around Camilla’s veranda brushed against her porch screen, I would run down her steps and up the pebbled lane just as Elizabeth was arriving home. She would immediately throw off her bag and loosen her shoes and Edna would bring us chilled glasses of San Miguel and we would stretch out on the rattan sofa, catching up on our day. Far, far from us, I could still hear the wail of the birds’ eggs vendor on P. Lovina, crying “Balut, balut.”
Rejection letters came from all the magazines to which I had sent my political piece. One by one, each rejection slip went up on my bulletin board. I tried to find encouragement where there was none. One magazine editor sent me back the manuscript with a terse note saying she already had a writer, a name I recognized, reporting from Asia, and that my article was, with regret, being sent back unread.
Elizabeth had saved her rejection letters for years, as many writers do, believing rejection was part of what they call the journey. But she glanced over that especially insulting letter, frowning, saying it was unbelievable that the editor hadn’t even bothered to skim my piece. I sulked, glaring at her as if this were her fault, and went off to the fridge for a beer.
“It’s going to take you six years,” she said calmly, pouring beer into our glasses. Was this one of her visions? Why six, why not five or ten? It was 1987. Did I have to wait until 1993? “I just know,” she said flatly. “I can’t see these things about myself, but I always know about you.” I didn’t know if I believed her, but I knew she believed it. Crooking her forefinger into mine, sitting close to me, she said, “You are a writer—of that, maybe only
about that, I am certain.”
But I felt that time was running out for me, and my money was almost gone. I had been supporting myself with the money from the sale of my house, but that money was going fast. Around this time, Kay was called back by the network she had been working for and would be leaving Manila soon. She took me to L’Orangerie, a fancy restaurant where society matrons stopped for lunch with their Rustan’s shopping bags. Over her cup of halo-halo, she gossiped briefly about some scandal at ABC. Then, dipping her dessert spoon into the glop of jackfruit, flan, and purple yam ice cream, she dropped a bomb on me. You should go back to the States, she said, get a job. Ignoring the look of shock on my face, she went on. “You can’t stay here doing nothing. It will kill you.” I wanted to lean over the table and knock her head off, but instead I nodded unhappily.
Later I had to admit that I was floundering, snapping at Elizabeth, turning my frustration against her. Just when things were looking grim, my stack of typed pages looking ridiculous, like such a vain dream, work came along. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle was leaving Manila and she recommended me for her job.
Within days, I was off to South Korea. For years, student demonstrations had been a fixture of the Seoul spring season, marking the massacre in Kwangju in the 1960s, but this time the anti-government movement was much larger, involving tens of thousands of militants, students and middle-class professionals, men and women, young and old. The uprising in a country known for rigid and bloody governments was getting front-page headlines in Asia and in the West. The military-backed government, which had ruled the country for more than twenty years, was on the verge of falling, teetering dangerously. Every foreign correspondent in Manila was rushing to Seoul (as were correspondents from Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing). Elizabeth had a visa and a plane ticket ready to go, and leaped out of her chair when I told her I was going with her. The Chronicle was sending me, all expenses paid. I had business cards printed and got a visa and a plane ticket and packed my khaki jacket and notebooks, stuffing a duffel bag. We had no idea how long we would be gone, figured on a week or ten days. Excited as I was, and scared to cover such a big story, I knew that the life of a correspondent was not exactly what I had had in mind when I thought of writing books, but it was quite a score, and I was thrilled.
It was June 1987, and the scrubbed streets of Seoul, swept down to the last scrap, had been turned into a battleground by tens of thousands of youths in scarves, carrying shards of pavement and broken bricks in their hands. From our room at the Seoul Hilton, we looked down on the wide boulevards that at the moment seemed orderly, with white traffic stripes designating areas for pedestrian traffic at corners and intersections. Seoul was all black and white, like a charcoal drawing. White for the students, the white of their T-shirts, the white of the surgical masks they wore to keep from breathing in tear gas; and black for the government troops: black helmets, black shields, black uniforms.
We had left our hilltop hotel and were running down the slope toward the downtown streets, weaving in and out of the student columns, when tear gas canisters started popping from tanks shooting projectiles toward the students. Rocks and hunks of brick and sidewalk concrete flew in the air and crash-landed everywhere, clanking against police shields, on helmets, on students and reporters. Over here was a student moaning in pain, with a bloody face, his head smashed, being carried out of the line of fire by other students. Over there was the unbroken line of helmeted troops raising their thick shields to protect themselves against the rain of bricks and stones. We ran, crouching, our arms over our heads, faces down, and found a safe spot behind a building. I thought my head was going to burst. People were screaming, running in all directions. Pop-pop! The canisters kept coming, splattering on the pavement and blasting the skin. Government troops didn’t use real bullets, but the tear gas was tough, war grade, like mustard gas. I felt it could tear out my lungs.
The next day we went prepared for anything, wearing military-like helmets and U.S. Army gas masks that we’d bought in a shop downtown where reporters geared up. Sweat and breath fogged up my goggles, and I had to take big gulps of air when the tear gas canisters exploded, spreading puffs of stinging smoke. The tear gas was dense, nauseating, and I was coughing, couldn’t hear myself speak. I lost track of Elizabeth and wandered around side streets looking for her. My heart was pumping madly, but I got far enough from the clouds of gas to take my mask off. I was queasy, sick to my stomach. Slowly, trying to orient myself on unfamiliar streets, without a map, I found the way to Myeongdong Cathedral, a center of anti-government activity. I found Elizabeth there, seated on the steep steps up a hill, her hair plastered down, her mask stuffed in her bag, interviewing students.
That afternoon I filed my first story to San Francisco, a straight news account that I wrote in a nervous frenzy, chain-smoking and pounding on the desk when the words didn’t come. When the editors in San Francisco told me it was leading the front page, I let out a howl and Elizabeth raised a wineglass in my direction and, beaming, said, “You know, you might be better at this than I am.”
We were still in Seoul three weeks later when the final round of the uprising came at the end of June. President Chun Doo Hwan, humiliated by the swelling opposition, which now included world leaders as well as the South Korean corporate and middle class, stepped down. A former general, ghostly in a dark suit, he went on state television and gave a speech that was stirring not for its tenor, as he was emotionless, but because of the words he wielded—free elections, civilian rule. It sent shock waves across the peninsula and reached all around the world.
That evening we took off with the boys to the Bear House, a distinctive tavern set in the thick green hills outside the city. At my left sat the New York Times and at my right the San Jose Mercury News, and we had wine and big slabs of beef and I listened to the stories around the table, telling some of my own, shoptalk, chuckling, everyone puffed up. It was a long, roaring, blowsy evening. Across the table, Elizabeth gazed at me with a smile, making it my night.
Time moved so fast then, and the choices I had to make that summer caught me off-guard. It had been a year since I had moved to Manila, and here was another August so soon. On our return from Seoul I had a letter reminding me that my leave of absence was expiring.
I ripped open the envelope knowing full well the news it was bringing me, read the short formal letter quickly, and, clutching it, stood in front of Elizabeth, who had been seated at her desk, working. I handed her the letter. She scanned it, looked up at me, and said, “So soon.” She had a year and a half left in her tour—a year and a half in which we would live apart. Eighteen months of letters and telephone calls and that awful empty longing. “Impossible!” I said out loud. I remembered too clearly the last time we had been apart, the summer of 1986, when I slept on my sofa, the telephone perched on an armrest nearby so I could fling my hand on the phone the second it rang. I remembered too well the fluorescent lights in the office, the lonely pasta dinners, and the Manila Blues tapes.
I was propped up on cushions in the bedroom that evening when Elizabeth came out of the shower, her long hair pulled up, a towel rolled around her waist and chest. Drops of water trickled down between her shoulder blades and down the curve of her back. I watched her pour lotion on the palms of her hands, rub them together and up her forearms and shoulders, up to the swerve of her neck, then down her legs. She didn’t seem aware of my eyes as she fluttered among her things, doing her ritual ablutions. She slid in on her side of the bed, pushing the lightweight cotton Indian blanket down to her feet.
“Are you crying?” Her voice was low, a whisper. She moved closer, touched a teardrop on my cheek, and took my face in her hands. She could let me go, she said. She could handle it, she said.
I tried to find a way to stay, and I called up the managing editor to tell him I would go back but only to work as a reporter, not as an editor. Why don’t you fly back and we’ll talk about it, he said to placate me. I knew that false ring in his vo
ice. I knew the answer was no. They wanted me back on the Foreign Desk. I waited silently, thought of a future without a newspaper job and no money. He had won. I would fly back to talk it over. I made plans to go; Elizabeth decided to go with me. Nothing was happening in Manila, and she wanted time off. I called Tim to tell him. It had been a long time since we had talked, and hearing his booming voice and his effusive enthusiasm reminded me of our old talks in the row house. He wanted me to stay at his place, and Andy, who was also living there, would pick me up at the airport. We were packing our bags late the night before takeoff on August twenty-seventh when the phone rang.
Malacañang was under attack, someone yelled into the phone.
We got Camilla out of bed. We woke up Candy next door. The first thing Candy said was, “Sandro’s in Italy! He will hate himself for missing this.” Camilla grabbed her cameras and the four of us piled into Candy’s car and sped down Roxas Boulevard toward the presidential palace about two miles away. The roads were empty. Red flares flashed across the sky. In the distance there was gunfire. Heavily armed soldiers in black berets—the elite presidential guard—surrounded Malacañang and the entrance nearby to Arlegui Street, where Cory Aquino lived. A handful of local reporters and gawkers milled about. Taking out my notebook, I asked the people around me if they knew if the president was safe. They shrugged, shaking their heads. Elizabeth moved into the street crowd, questioning bystanders and the few guards who allowed her to approach. No one knew anything. The soldiers pushed us back, shouting, “Clear out! Clear out!”
It was already past two in the morning, pitch black, strangely quiet suddenly. We drove off to Camp Aguinaldo, some three miles from the palace. The streets around the camp were deserted. A six-wheeled truck was parked crossways near the main gate, blocking the way. We got out of the car and walked cautiously toward the truck and ran smack into a couple hundred men in black ski masks and bandoliers, carrying M16s and M60s. They were massed at a side gate to the camp, pushing their way in. For months we had been waiting for the big coup, the one that was going to end Cory’s presidency, and we also knew it had been drawn up, plotted and directed by a flashy colonel we had interviewed six months earlier. These were his men. This was his coup. That much we knew.
Before the Rain Page 11