Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  By dawn, a clear, steamy day, crowds had gathered around the camp and on the eight-lane EDSA, the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue that had played such a big role as the site of mass demonstrations during the People Power Revolution. Gawkers, mirones, and kids climbed up over the high barbed-wire fence, running not away from but toward the sounds of shooting. Television crews, local reporters, foreign correspondents, and photographers were spread out through the crowd, crouching up and down EDSA along the front entrance to the camp. I was standing with a large crowd when I heard and then felt a bullet whip past my ear. First I felt the wind, the whoosh. Then I heard the crack. I saw a column of soldiers moving toward us, and I grabbed Elizabeth and charged down a street, my heart racing. The pavement shook under the slaps of hundreds of running shoes and rubber sandals. Elizabeth sprinted ahead of me, pulling me forward, and the shooting did not stop. We ran down a side street of shabby homes and there we found a car to take us back home to P. Lovina. Drained, exhausted, and soaked with sweat, I filed a story to the San Francisco paper while Elizabeth worked at her desk on the screened-in porch.

  No one would agree later at what point the coup failed, whether reinforcements from the north did not come through or the coup leaders flinched at the last moment, arriving at Cory Aquino’s home without the nerve to capture her. But when it was over, the headquarters of the armed forces of the Philippines lay in ruins: shelled, pounded, and finally incinerated. Rebel soldiers came out waving white flags, stumbling and falling, hiding their faces, a defeated army. It was the bloodiest fighting in Manila—some sixty people killed—since World War II.

  We canceled our trip to the States, and, making the decision I had known all along I would have to make, I let my leave of absence expire. My days as a foreign editor were over.

  For the crowd of foreign reporters and photographers who had lived through the last months of Marcos and the madness of the revolution in 1986, the coup attempt of August 1987 was the last great explosion, the moment, so undefinable, when the story turned. In the next few months there was hardly a peaceful week, a dull day. The coup attempt had attracted notoriety worldwide, and I was filing stories to San Francisco almost every day and getting raves from the Chronicle editors.

  A chaotic metropolis in the best of times, Manila seemed overcome with anger and sinister conspiracy theories. A friend of ours, a young leftist leader named Lean, was assassinated in broad daylight, his face blown away by bullets from a passing van while he was on his way to make a speech. Cory Aquino, who barely escaped from the coup attempt with her life, once again shook up her administration. Cabinet secretaries were fired, generals shuffled, captains and lieutenants we knew were placed under armed guard in their own homes. Aquino, looking ashen and haggard after such a close call, took on a steely military pose, no longer wearing her canary yellow smocks and prattling away about peace and reconciliation.

  Saturated with Manila and feeling after-coup fatigue, we made plans to take December off and go to the States. Edna and Gina, who would stay to take care of our house, squealed with joy when we gave them their Christmas presents—clothes and money. Their eyes teary, they watched us get into a car waiting to take us to the airport. Standing straight and proud in their pink uniforms, with their faces pressed to the porch screen, Edna cradled Boom, a scrawny orange stray kitty Camilla had given Elizabeth for Christmas, her parting gift before she left for London for the holidays. Looking up at Boom and the girls, I swung open the taxi door and slid into the back seat, doing the mental travel checklist—passport, wallet, plane ticket, dollars—distracting myself. The car turned the corner and I looked back at the girls, the squatters in the vacant lot next to our house, the domino players in the shed, the waters of the bay.

  7

  MORNINGS OVER FRESH coffee, and late-night catch-up sessions with Andy, my voice a rasp, filled my first days back at Tim’s house, which smelled of pine and Christmas candles left to melt in the night, wax spots on a coffee table. Already the tree was trimmed with cranberries and tinkling ornaments I’d found in one of the boxes I had stored in Tim’s basement.

  It had been two years since the day I left the suburbs and found a refuge in Orchard, and now my old friend and ally Andy occupied it, had watered the plants, hung new pans in the kitchen, put out fresh towels and soap for me. The city was enduring an arctic spell, and we had gone out, he and I, the day after my arrival, to find a tree, with muffs on my ears, scarf up to my nose. We bought gifts to put under it, and afterward, lights twinkling and pine drops in our hair, we sprawled happily on the sofa and sipped cups of hot rum.

  Elizabeth and I had flown back together, but she had gone on to visit her parents in Connecticut, while I was going to Tim’s and later on to Texas to spend a few Christmas days with my family.

  Tim was returning from assignment in Afghanistan, where he had mounted mules, squatted down with mujahideen, scoured the bazaars of Kabul, and waited for coded signals in the mazes of Peshawar. He came back with a bushy beard and mustache, and a thicker waist. He had grown older, lines under his eyes, a slight sag to his cheeks, but his eyes had the moony spark of the road, of having been somewhere, and he hugged me, swallowed me in his arms, and he put on his muj turban for me and offered me the attic, his room, and he picked up the dirty socks under his bed and wiped the dust off the stacks of books on shelves and desks.

  He stayed with us only a few days, shuttling here and there, sleeping on the sofa, hanging up the handmade carpets he brought from Islamabad, but mostly talking, a running monologue. He always talked out his stories, could recite full interviews, and paint the backdrops.

  Elizabeth called up every now and then from her parents’ home, but only with the sparest conversations ending in breezy goodbyes. I rarely called her there, wounded every time her tone was that of someone talking to a stranger or a secretary, crisp and businesslike. For three weeks we had little contact, but I knew she was joining me before New Year’s, and that made the days tolerable. We had agreed that she would visit her parents alone. She hadn’t seen them in two years, their longest separation ever, and they had to talk privately and sort out all of their differences and disagreements, all of those things she knew would devastate them. She had to deal with this alone with them.

  I saw old friends, tried out the latest restaurants, went to brunches, and flew to Texas for thirty-six hours to spend Christmas with my mother and sisters. I hadn’t seen my family in three years, and in the interim everyone’s lives had gone on in different directions. I was fortunate. I didn’t have to explain anything to my family. They rarely questioned my decisions or my life even if at times I might have upset them. When I got back from Texas, I met with editors in New York and in Washington, discussing prospects, possibilities. Nothing was offered, and I could not see beyond that point ahead to a whole year—to the end of 1988—when Elizabeth’s assignment in Manila would be over and we would have to return to America.

  A couple of days before New Year’s, I was alone in the house, my ears perking up at the sound of each car passing. Then I heard a car slow down and stop, turn in and out of a parking space. A car door slammed shut and steps came closer and stopped at our doorstep. The bell rang. I opened the door, and Elizabeth’s face was brushing mine, her arms enclosing me.

  Tim’s attic had no lamps. The bed was covered in a heavy spread that smelled of age, sweat, and cologne, but the linen was fresh, and the room had the sheltering quiet of a garret. A streetlamp cast shifting shadows on the walls inside the attic, and above the rooftops across the way the pink light of the moon on a cloudy night fell faintly on the bed’s pillows. I could make out the sharp edges of Elizabeth’s cheeks, the corner of a closing eyelid, and a half shadow on the parting of her mouth.

  I awoke the next morning to her eyes looking at me. She was propped up on her elbow, looking down on me, sunbeams angling across the bed. I pushed back the hair from her forehead. I wrapped the quilt tighter around us. We had not had moments like this in our last frantic
months in Manila, moments when, with nothing around us, we could languish undisturbed, submerged, alone.

  On the night of New Year’s Day, we had lobster and champagne. Elizabeth’s eyeglasses steamed up as she bent over the deep pot, and after jumping back as she threw the live lobsters into boiling water, she watched the brown shells quickly turn brilliant pink. She melted the butter and, all done, poured herself a finger of Scotch. I had candles on the table and champagne glasses I’d found in my stored boxes, and I got fresh flowers. The house smelled of fudge she had baked, and calla lilies and beeswax. The Christmas tree lights making white dots on the walls.

  At the table she played with the lobster, cracking the claws, forking out the meat, sucking the juice, and then, taking the joints left on my plate, she dug in until there was nothing left but scraps of broken shells. I had never seen anyone eat lobster with such intensity, and I laughed at her; we laughed over nothing the way we did when no one was around.

  There were obligations. She had to talk to the top editors, make the rounds at the paper, and accept dinner invitations. Innocuous occasions, usually, but for her uncomfortable. Awkward being the center of attention, she would say. As she walked through the newsroom, reporters and editors, doing a double take, recognizing her, came up to her, complimenting her stories, wanting her to talk about her exotic adventures, the sort of thing she made a point of not doing. But it was not all raves and slaps on the back and kisses. Some of them, even old friends, did not quite know what to say to us. What could they say? Gossip about us had gone around. We did not fit the picture anymore. They knew her before she left for India, when she was married and I was only her editor. Now there was no husband, and I had flown off to Manila and we were living together. Everyone tiptoed around that, but they seemed more open to her, warmer and kinder, while for me there was barely contained reproach. I had crossed the line—I had fallen in love with a reporter, a married woman.

  I was having lunch with a columnist who had been a casual friend before my move to Manila. It was just the two of us, and I had looked forward to seeing her and catching up. The lunch was going as most of those reunions go, a little awkward, a little forced and superficial but amenable overall. She was asking about Manila and Elizabeth when she lowered her voice and leaned toward me. “Are you a couple?” she said. “Everyone’s talking about you two, so is it true, you’re lovers?” I couldn’t believe it and fell mute. What would Elizabeth say? I couldn’t find the words, couldn’t say yes. Finally I heard myself say, No, it isn’t true. I didn’t know who I was protecting. Me? Elizabeth? But it was too late to backtrack and explain. I had lied and I was ashamed of myself.

  Elizabeth blew up at me. “How could you lie? Why, for god’s sake?” I had been afraid, plain and simple, and lost my nerve. “You don’t have people asking you that question,” I lashed back. “You don’t have to answer that question.” The worst moment came when the managing editor, seated across from me at a long table in a windowless conference room, suggested without exactly saying so bluntly that I could not be rehired. My relationship with Elizabeth, he said, violated the paper’s nepotism rule. He was red-faced, obviously embarrassed bringing up this subject. I was mortified, had no reply. I understood too well. They would keep her but cut me loose. I was the responsible guilty party. Later, when I told her, Elizabeth was shocked. How could they do that to you and not me? She threatened to quit the paper. I stopped her. I blamed myself. I had made the choice. When I had resigned at the end of my leave of absence, they had held out a hope that I could go back to the paper at some point. I had counted on that. I was wrong. People have to live with their choices, I liked to say. Now I had to live with mine. I had to start over.

  It was January 1988 and our holiday was ending. Elizabeth did not take departures casually, and leaving her family again, the roads she loved driving on, the changes of season, her house outside the city, her ingrained American life, tore at her. We had a one-night stopover in Los Angeles before flying off to Manila, and we decided to step out of our hotel—the Biltmore—and its flashy cocktail bar and ambled without direction around the nearly empty downtown streets. We stopped at a Mexican restaurant that seemed to have some life in it and tried to make the evening stretch out, just a few more hours on American soil. At the same time, we were already nostalgic for Manila, knowing that the time was coming soon when our life there would end.

  That was the year that Manila fell off the map. The story was fading. My editors in San Francisco had little appetite for Philippine stories, and many of the foreign correspondents were leaving Manila for bigger news in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo, the Middle East. Nick was being transferred to New Delhi, the city of his old nightmares, where his wife had walked out on him after spending weeks alone in the heat while he traveled the subcontinent doing stories. He had been out in the field for nearly ten years, but he liked to say that he had two wars left in him and could not give up the life on the road, the sauced nights and midnight deadlines, dozing on airplanes from Madras to Nicosia. The New York Times and the Washington Post were planning to close their Manila offices, and a new breed of foreign correspondent was taking over the bureaus that remained in town. They were the early wave of the digital generation, earnest overachievers, straitlaced nonsmokers with black-frame glasses and dispassionate temperaments. Not a Nick in the bunch!

  It seems to me that our life was a series of arrivals and departures, that we came together only to part; airports from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Bangkok to Seoul to Honolulu were familiar grounds. We had been back from the States less than two months, just enough time to feel at home again in our house on P. Lovina, when we were flying out of Manila again. This time Elizabeth was going to Sri Lanka for an indefinite period to work on a magazine story and I was going back to New York to get another job. I packed most of my things, believing that this could be it for my time in Manila. We thought about it that way, a separation we could no longer avoid or postpone. I would take a job and wait for her. We painted a silver lining on it to keep ourselves from unraveling, but those days were a touch melancholic, a series of unspoken goodbyes.

  Sandro and Candy threw a blowout going-away party for me, and just about everyone came. To my surprise, I felt exuberant, embellishing the glories of New York. Slick in a black shirt and pants, her face blushed pink, Elizabeth held court in a corner, sunk into a floor cushion, mouthing cocktail patter with Nick, who had a new girlfriend, a soulful Californian who took pictures of the misery in Manila. Elizabeth behaved cheerfully enough, as if she had not a care in the world, but I could see her eyes wandering toward nothing in particular.

  Our separation did not happen overnight. We made it a procession of days, days in Thailand, flying in a single-engine plane from Bangkok to Phuket, an island all green and lilac and magenta with bursts of flowers on the landing strip and along the route to our hotel, a hillside teak and stucco villa overlooking terraced gardens, the coral green and turquoise waters of the tan sand beach, and, farther in the distance, the royal blue of the Andaman Sea.

  We spent three days sticking toes in the sand, sitting under canvas umbrellas, drinking tangy piña coladas. Her skin smelled of sea air and brine, and the late-afternoon sun filtered down on our room, slits of light through closed shutters, and in the open balcony, the ripple of vines.

  Days later we sat restless and anxious in the waiting room at the airport in Bangkok, having nothing left to say after the last evening, after the dinner under torchlights at the riverside terrace of the Oriental Hotel, where we watched the barges churning slowly on the Chao Phraya, and later, in our room, curled under rose-perfumed sheets. I woke up a few hours later, shaking on the morning of my flight out.

  It was time. We moved down the long corridors of the airport terminal to the departure gate as if we could slow down the clock. But I felt myself going numb, deliberately cutting her off, the need I had for her and the separation anxiety that seized me every time I boarded a plane. When the last call was anno
unced, she slid the straps of the heavy bag she had carried for me on my shoulder. After the quickest of goodbyes, without an ardent embrace or even a casual hug, I stepped up to the security gate and laid my luggage on the conveyor belt and went through the metal checkpoint. I kept walking, looking straight ahead. I knew she was still standing behind the plate glass. I could feel her eyes on my back.

  Flying out on Air France, I wrapped myself in smelly airline blankets and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. I imagined her alone back at the hotel room at the Oriental, seated at the desk there, writing me already on the hotel’s linen-soft stationery. She had noticed the minute she walked into the room that only one side of the bed had been turned down, that even the chambermaids knew I was no longer there. She ordered room service and drank to me, a glass of red wine. The next day she flew six hours to Colombo, Sri Lanka.

  By now I was at Orchard House. The street and the buildings on it, even a dilapidated old church, looked just as shabby as they had looked when I lived there with Tim in the winter of 1986. It was two years later, but little had changed. Her letters from Sri Lanka arrived two, three times a week. Thin envelopes were addressed in her hand, with bird stamps—Ceylon’s white-eye, Legge’s flower pecker, Layard’s parakeet.