Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  She didn’t believe I would stay gone and pictured instead having me there in Sri Lanka with her, getting a tan, flailing away at a tennis ball, and writing a book in my head. Pictures came, and brown envelopes bulging with patches of fabrics she liked, and her drawings, clippings from the Colombo newspapers, horoscopes, oddities. She wrote about her backbreaking car trip across the island’s rough roads to the farthest northeastern point, the military encampments she visited, and the nights without sleep. There was the bar in Trincomalee, at the Seven-Islands Hotel, where everyone was drunk and jumpy, war at their door. Those hotels she stayed in were so easy for me to imagine—scratchy toilet paper, mosquito nets full of holes, swarms of bedbugs crawling over her legs, and her face sun-darkened, increasingly thin. She fell into the rhythm of the place, into a pace all her own.

  This time Orchard could not save me. It felt hollow, a nest undone. I had little to do but spent a week trying out at the Times. On the first day, I wore a cashmere cardigan I had bought in Hong Kong and my only skirt and sat stiff as a board on a foldout chair in a windowless office. I held on my lap a folder with copies of articles I had written for the San Francisco paper, but no one asked to look at the clippings. They had no interest in my reporting. It was editing they had in mind for me. I had little choice but to go along. I went through the motions, making marks on copy rather casually, and left it at that. After five days, there were handshakes and thanks for my coming but there was no job offer. They said I would get their answer later, and, humbled, I walked out into Times Square.

  The days and nights seemed interminable, and the friends I saw, the streets, everything about the city, had become distant. Andy had a girlfriend; a wedding was planned and he was buying a house. Tim was away most of the time and had taken on what seemed to me a somber manner, the Washington wonk in him. He was distracted, pulled in every direction. He was starting a book and a love affair, and he had just won a Pulitzer Prize. But we still found time for our talks, the turns in my life. One night when I was brooding more than usual he took me to a jam session of his rock band in the damp basement of a suburban house in New Jersey. The guys strummed and fiddled, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer. Wanting to cheer me, to include me, Tim dragged a chair for me and, hitching up his baggy trousers, plucked at his guitar, croaking the words to “Secret Agent Man,” twisting and shouting, sweat soaking his shirt. I tried to join in, but their camaraderie only made me feel lonelier, an outsider. Quietly, wanting to shut everyone out, I went upstairs to the library and fell asleep there on the sofa.

  My birthday came, Elizabeth called, and it was then that I told her I had not heard from the Times and had decided to return to Manila to stay there until she, too, could leave. I had patched together some assignments for magazines and freelance articles for the San Francisco paper. She listened quietly, and I expected to hear caution on her part. She surprised me, bursting out laughing. “You crazy woman!” she said happily. She was riding high seeing the end of our months apart and the end, too, of her long assignment in Sri Lanka. All that time it had been strange for me to see her byline in the paper every morning on stories she had already told me over the phone. How different they seemed in print—never quite as vivid in print as they seemed when she talked them out. While I was seeing the end of winter, she was up in the northeast of Sri Lanka, in Jaffna, the heart of Tamil rebel territory where the country’s civil war between the Tamils and the majority Sinhalese was fought inch by inch, body by body, bombing by bombing. Her car had broken down, her driver had disappeared, and she was barely able to make it out safely. That was her life—snarled trips, unreliable drivers, military checkpoints, red tape, dead ends.

  “The desk thinks I’m just here wandering around in paradise,” she would say. In the last days of her assignment there, she went south to meet with rebels, drove east to the war front in Batticaloa, stopping to record the deaths—nine killed near Kantalai, nineteen dead near Potankadu, fifteen killed near Morawewa—her routes marked with a blue highlighter and the notes on the victims scribbled in black ink on a foldout map.

  She ran on the beaches in Bentota, climbed the hills of tea plantations in Kandy, and jogged at sunset past the cinnamon-colored colonial buildings of Colombo, absorbed in all of it, lyrical when she wrote about it, odes to that place she strangely loved—cows on the road, elephants in her path, bombs in her hotel, smiling musicians playing only for her, the lone guest.

  She returned to Manila in late April, days before my arrival. She was at the airport waiting for me, but this time she walked in a hurry, waving happily, throwing her arms around me. In the car she handed me an envelope. She had written one long passage, unsigned, recalling what she felt when she first knew me, how she thought it was her secret alone, but feared that I knew and that scared her. It was the most profound restlessness she had known, she said. That was why, she said, she never wanted us to become comfortable or routine—we were much more than that.

  There they were, waiting for my arrival at the top of the stairs at P. Lovina—Edna, Gina, and Boom. In the nearly two months I had been away, Boom had ballooned, hardly recognizable as the skinny orange tabby Camilla had rescued and given to Elizabeth. Edna and Gina, wearing freshly pressed uniforms and their biggest smiles, gaped at me, still surprised that I had come back to Manila. Edna and Gina took my luggage and Elizabeth brought out wineglasses and a bottle she had saved, anticipating my return. We toasted and drank madly. At that moment, that day, everything was perfect. I was home.

  No one had expected my return, but just the same everyone—Sandro and Candy, Nick, Rolly the driver, and the bellboys, waiters, and bartenders at the Manila Hotel—welcomed me back with great fanfare.

  Soon it was the middle of June, and Elizabeth was flying to Vietnam, where the telephone lines did not work and the telex rarely did. She couldn’t receive any mail, moving from hotel to hotel, traveling the length of the country, preparing to do a series of stories about a place that up until then had rarely let American reporters in. Without letters to write her and without our long phone calls to consume my day, I had nothing but time on my hands.

  In the mornings I idled alone by the hotel pool, looking around for familiar faces, for Leo the tennis pro, or the chatty women at the tennis club front desk, or the easygoing hotel staff that catered to my whims. Without Rolly to drive me around, because he only worked when Elizabeth needed him, I would walk two blocks from P. Lovina to Roxas Boulevard to pick up a taxi. I walked quickly past the squatter camp, which had grown to the size of a barangay, a small village of double-decker shacks, sari-sari stores, and food stands. Taxis zipped by on Roxas, filthy, without door handles, windows, or air conditioning, but with Jesus dolls hanging by a string and swinging off rearview mirrors. I would get to the hotel and have my coffee by the pool, sometimes indulging in the barrio breakfast of corned beef hash and fried eggs while swatting away the flies. There was hardly anyone around. By noon the tedium set in, and I entertained myself by looking up at the balcony of room 817, envisioning Elizabeth there, a blot of red hair at that distance, waving down at me, and I imagined returning to that room one day, in our tenth year together, and sitting with her in those lumpy brown rattan armchairs, watching the hulking freighters in the bay, the lights below, and feeling her breath of margarita salt.

  Halfheartedly, I worked on a magazine piece on the Philippine military, struggling to make it pertinent to an American audience. I sent it off to a magazine I can’t recall now and began another magazine piece, a profile of Cory Aquino. In no time, or because I had so much time, the project grew, became an unwieldy sprawl, untidy stacks of pages on top of my desk. Late afternoons I was still writing, cheered one day by a rare telex from Elizabeth in Hanoi.

  She was coming out of Vietnam, flying to Bangkok in July after a month of traveling the length and width of Vietnam, from Haiphong to Hue, from Danang to Nha Trang, where children pinched her skin and wanted her sunglasses, pleading at her elbow, “I will be your sister, take me
with you.” There was Saigon and the Cuu Long Hotel, and she was mesmerized by the city and the river, and the girls in ao dais and the Amerasian kids, and those delicious bowls of pho in the open food stands.

  I flew to Bangkok to meet her, and paced for hours in the airport’s reception area, not a cocktail lounge in the place, and when her flight arrived, flashing red on the electric arrivals board, I stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the long line of passengers going through immigration. Her face was turned away, and she was in animated conversation with a large, burly American in a baseball cap. She was talking with her hands, with fingers pointing. I watched her stop at the immigration booth, hand over her passport, still talking to the American, and it was then, when she looked down the stairs, that she saw me and turned again to the big man and embraced him farewell and ran down the stairs, her eyes on me. She had lost fifteen pounds, but her face was shining, sunburned, and her eyes glistened with excitement.

  That week in Bangkok we played tourists, walked barefoot in the gold-encrusted Temple of the Emerald Buddha, next door to the Grand Palace, gobbled up pad thai and steamed dumplings off street vendors, and went gallery shopping on Silom Road and at markets, looking for pieces of ancient art and celadon pottery and gilded Buddha images for Elizabeth’s collection. The heat was scorching, the smog suffocating, but we took a narrow wooden boat down the Chao Phraya and the smelly klongs—canals—bordered by wild orchids and palm fronds, waterlogged shacks, and moss-covered boat docks. Skinny kids in sports shorts waved as our boat passed. In her shades and a military-green T-shirt, Elizabeth resembled a character out of the veldt, handsome and strong, the strain of her long journey in Vietnam easing. After the boat ride, after the late-afternoon cocktails, the evening flowed into night in the thick summer heat of the gardens of the Oriental.

  August was misery. The heat, the constant rain, the moss in the closets, the flooded garden. Elizabeth finished her series on Vietnam and then, with just a day or two off, had to turn around and fly to Seoul, a four-hour trip with a stop in Taipei. She had a fever before taking off but she insisted she had to go. When she arrived that night at the Seoul Hilton, she called. She had a rash over her chest and on her stomach; her neck, her back, and her legs ached. She was so weak, she nearly passed out during an interview. She wouldn’t call a doctor. Whom do you call in Seoul? The hotel can help, I said, but she didn’t listen. When the rash and the ache got worse days later, she called a doctor, but he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Leave Seoul, go to Hong Kong, I suggested, figuring that Hong Kong was only two hours away and that an English-speaking doctor might be easily available there.

  I took the first flight to Hong Kong out of Manila and met her at the Mandarin Oriental. She looked awful. Her face had a scary jaundiced yellow color, and there were deep purplish hollows under her eyes. Her body shook and her stomach was covered in red blotches. Her bones ached all over and she could hardly move her neck. Within minutes of checking in at the hotel, she saw a doctor. He knew it at first sight: dengue fever. He gave her a shot and ordered her to bed. We stayed inside our quiet room for a couple of days, pampered by British civility, scones at teatime, cream and strawberries at breakfast. She began to recover; the fever went down and her humor was back, and she could get out of the room. We browsed the shops in the Prince Building near the hotel and bought a stack of Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham paperbacks, and on the day we were leaving to go back to Manila she gave me a small black velvet box holding a delicate Swiss watch I had admired in the hotel’s jewelry shop. It was her way of congratulating me on the job I had been offered at the Times. I would start in January 1989.

  When we returned to Manila, she forced herself to spend a few more days in bed, saying all along that she should be out and about and filing stories. She worried me sometimes, refusing to take a break, so careless with her body. It was around that time that her editors told her that they were naming her replacement, the reporter who would take over her job in December. Her assignment in Asia was over and done. She sank into the seat of the butaca, telephone in one hand, cigarette in the other, shaking her head at me. We had known all along that this day would come, but it was different now. Now it was a cold reality. The life of hopping on planes and covering coups and falls of governments, a life that was a constant surprise, fascinating and maddening, was slipping away from her.

  She had three months left. She flew everywhere—Thailand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, down to Mindanao and up to Cagayan—cramming in as much work as she could. But it seemed her heart had left it. She worried about the future, what she might do next, and the paper wasn’t telling her. I was no help, had no answers. I would be going to the Times in January to work on the Foreign Desk, the kind of work I had thought I had left behind me, but I figured that perhaps Elizabeth would be sent abroad again and I would go with her and finally write that book. The last months in Manila were hectic. Typhoons battered the country, a passenger boat sank in the Visayas Sea, near the central island of Cebu, and hundreds of ferry travelers drowned. It was the worst shipwreck on record anywhere. Coup rumors and intrigue swirled up again, and military-backed cults rampaged in the provinces, slaughtering villagers and leftist rebels, cutting off their heads and posing for pictures with their trophies.

  And one day Edna and Gina resigned and left. We had hoped we could help them go with us to America. They had pleaded for so long. We had put Gina through secretarial school and Edna in cooking classes. We had trusted them with the house, our things, and Boom, who was Elizabeth’s little passion, the way she swept him off the floor, throwing him in the air, squeezing him tight against her. But in the end, we decided we could not take the girls. We wouldn’t have room for them or the money to pay them American wages. We had to give them the bad news. On a swampy Monday morning in late August, three months before our departure, Elizabeth called them to come to the porch, where we sat at her desk. They stood before us rigidly, like wayward students at the principal’s office. Their eyes downcast, they waited for the blow. Gina nodded tight-lipped while Edna clutched the hem of her apron and pouted. We felt terrible, and apologized and promised to get them jobs before we left Manila. They nodded and seemed agreeable, backing away from us politely as we kept apologizing.

  But the truth was that we were not entirely happy with them. During the months when we had been away from Manila, they had entertained their friends and family in our house without asking our permission and had let the place get run down. Dirt and dust had built up in corners, under carpets, and on the baseboards and bookshelves. Elizabeth took them aside and ran her fingertip on the woodwork, showing them the soot, and ordered them to clean the house from top to bottom. They had never seen her severity. She had dealt with them more than I had; she had listened to them, asked about their family up in Tarlac province, and had treated them with dignity and respect, unfailingly polite and warm. Startled by the change in her tone, they glared at her and literally fled out of the room, got their pails and brooms, and did not raise their voices for days.

  But Gina left a note for us on the kitchen table. It said, We are not machines. The day they left, without a word to either of us, a taxi came to get them, and, carrying their bundles, they walked from their rooms in the back through the side garden. They were wearing their old clothes, their hair dirty and messy. I thought I saw a smirk on Gina’s face. They did not raise their eyes to us. We pretended we didn’t care, but we felt abandoned, angry, and sad. When I checked out their rooms, which we had left entirely in their hands, I couldn’t bear the smell. Dirty mattresses, filthy, overflowing toilet, urine stains, trash bags on the floor. Candy, next door, who had had maids all her life, gave us a lecture. “You were never firm with them. You should’ve checked in on them,” she said as she made a tour of their rooms. “You’ve got to know Filipinos. You can’t give them too much freedom. Besides, you paid them too much.”

  For weeks we found no one to take their place. Girls from the squatter camp came and lasted
a day, and our clothes piled up unwashed. I swept and Elizabeth cooked, but we could not manage the place alone. We could not understand why the maids didn’t want to work for us. We knew Candy would know. She had the ear of the servants in the compound and heard their gossip. But all she would say was, “It’s one of those things, nothing to worry about.” We let it go at that and finally found someone to take the job. But one day, long after all that, we got the truth out of Candy. Some of those maids, she said, sucking on her cigarette, didn’t want to live in our house. “Your relationship, you know.” Elizabeth blushed, raising an eyebrow. I felt a hollow ache I couldn’t express. Candy flicked her cigarette. I think that was the moment when I began to leave Manila.

  I had finished my profile of Cory Aquino, and Elizabeth took off on her last assignment in Sri Lanka. It was November, and it seemed everyone was gone. Sitting in Elizabeth’s desk chair on the porch, I watched thunderstorms move in, ominous clouds hovering so close, they seemed to brush the treetops. I would wait for the burst of hard rain to batter in through the wire screens, spatter the tile floors, splash my legs, and drench my clothes. The pungent smell of wet earth, mossy and dank, filled the air, and I felt a lassitude those last weeks that left me already yearning for all that had been mine those years.

  Elizabeth came back from Sri Lanka, and we had a couple of weeks left with nothing left to do. We lay in our room those last nights, imagined the ordinary plaster walls of American homes, walls without geckos, and the routine of office work, and getting on subways and trains, and driving down the interstate. But we could not really imagine it—nights without bamboo rustling at our windows or the rooster crowing at dawn, and the cries of “Balut, balut.” Holding back time, and an unknown future, she would put her head on my pillow, her hand gently silencing my mouth.