“Please,” she said, her lips curling, “don’t strain your imagination.”
Years later, Adrian would understand that her school uniform concealed a body as passionless as hamburger, that quite early in life she had gone beyond common vanity and was locked, even at that moment when he was dying of lust, in a fierce struggle to attain sainthood. His gestures of affection, extravagant though they were, could not touch her for she was a creature of despair, beatified by the pathetic shoes, moth-eaten shirts, and worn blankets that she and other students sorted out and tied into relief packages for the flood victims.
Nevertheless, in his innocence, he chased her through that geography of destruction, wrecking his jeans by wading in black waters to reach the amphibian vehicles which carried him from the sleekly wet school compound to the workers’ districts where the water rose even to the rooftops of row houses and apartments, carrying a debris of existence which should not have been made public: used condoms, broken syringes, plastic tablecloths, torn pillows, muddied bed sheets, and chairs and tables that floated with the ease of boats. He helped pluck a girl off the back of her mother’s corpse, which had borne her safely through the flood for six hours. He was there when the amphibians spotted a man clinging to an electric post and he was among those who beat sewer rats off his thighs. Though he cringed within himself, he had managed a smile and did not raise an eyebrow when the amphibian nosed out two boys, barely ten years old, on a roof, calmly launching toy boats of sardine cans. Finally, back in the refugee tents, Adrian had fended off, with due compassion, the lascivious offer of a nine-year-old girl, handing her instead coffee and buns. At this point, the Commander’s wife had arrived, neat as a pin in her pale peach suit, and had talked to the relief workers with tears trickling down her cheeks. At the edge of the crowd, Adrian had followed an old woman beckoning mysteriously. My son, she said when he had drawn close enough, is as handsome as you are. At which, she picked up something swathed in a faded blue blanket and Adrian let out a terrific yelp at the sight of the dead cat nestled in its folds, its gray fur matted down on its tiny skull.
What grief the girl had caused him. Adrian had vaulted out of the refugee camp and, still shaking, had found his car and driven away, convinced that nothing but nothing could be done for the miserable hordes of the calamity. By the time he reached his parents’ house, he was over the flood, over the girl, over politics. Moreover, he was convinced that poverty was the only way of life for a certain category of people; they would die without it—as surely as it would kill people like him. He never looked back, electing to return to the proper side of morning, though from time to time his heart would stir restlessly, would slide into despair as though mourning something valuable which had been irrevocably lost.
Lost, it had seemed, until that day of Eliza’s frantic phone call and he, cursing silently and steadily, had left his office, taken his car out of the parking lot of the business district, and driven through narrow and winding streets to a nondescript apartment building. He had berated himself for having gotten mixed up with Eliza Hansen, mistress of the head of state’s aide-de-camp, no matter how advantageous the relationship had been to his own finances. He had regretted it even more when he discovered that the building had no elevator and he would have to climb six flights of stairs to reach a room where Eliza’s inexplicably dear, dear friend “lay dying!”—she had screamed over the phone. Adrian’s mouth had twisted wryly at the thought that this same dear, dear friend was, in truth, his employee and what boss in this godforsaken land abandoned his office and his work to come to the rescue of one unimportant documents clerk? At that, he rattled the knob of the filthy door that bore her family name. It was locked, of course, and in a fit of anger, he let loose with a kick. The door sprang open. Something stirred on the sofa and he was walking in, his eyes on Anna who lay amidst the blankets of her fever, her long, long, long hair loose for the first time in his sight. Her eyelids fluttered open and he had found himself looking into the lost tranquility a sixteen- year-old saint had once possessed.
His knees had turned to water and he had had to sit down on the sofa edge, his hands automatically taking her hot, dry hands while his mind, for some strange reason, instantly dredged up from his storehouse of memories his grandfather’s tale of Magellan crossing a nameless sea in a still young world. He had seen, as he had looked into her eyes, the sea; depths beyond depths, and the tiny ships and white sails of grace moving along the rim of time. Almost without knowing it, without being aware that he was doing so, he kissed her fingertips one by one, as he told himself that this was what it meant, that to love was to regain the capacity to remember a world without names, to recall by virtue of the whorl above the beloved’s knucklebones and the blue of the veins beneath the skin the unbearable fragility of mornings in this country, to find October odors trapped in the skin folds between her toes along with the scent of talcum powder and soap and human sweat. He moved then, without willing it, helplessly, and sank himself into the swamp of her delirium, as her fever broke and her bones melted in a cold sweat that drenched him and the bed sheets, soaking his chest, his legs, his armpits so that he thought he was making love to the monsoon and was himself dissolving into a needle spray of rain and the pungency of washed leaves and cleaned tree bark in a festival to end the dry season. Sometime during that febrile day and evening when he could not leave her, he was reconciled to the impossibility of not being with her, beside her, on her, beneath her, under her, in her—if he were to remember anything at all, from the dawn when Lapu-lapu, half naked, bare feet slipping on the wet sands of Mactan, had skewered with a bamboo lance that vagabond poacher Magellan, to the day the Commander’s wife showed up, impeccable and exact, at the refugee center to inaugurate an era when dead cats would masquerade as babies.
Twenty-four hours later, Anna, hair still plastered to her skull, lifted her head, shrouded his nude body with a horrified glance as he stood by the sofa holding a cup of tepid cocoa to his lips, and said: “Your parents will kill you.” Her eyes rolled into her head and she fainted.
Will kill you, will kill you, will kill you . . . The drums repeated her words, delighting in their rhythm. As Adrian forced his way toward the two women, he had to admit the truth of her warning. His father’s glance in the last weeks had turned shy while his mother, at his appearance, would veer away, ducking her head and pretending to croon over orchids, ferns, and imagined dust on the furniture. It was no accident, certainly, that his father had terminated abruptly a telephone conversation with some colonel when Adrian walked into his library. He shivered at the thought; he knew vaguely that Anna had been snagged in one of those eternal military raids and that her husband had perished in some accident where the military had been involved.
It was Eliza who noticed him first and nudged Anna. She turned her head and now the two watched him with heavy-lidded, almost Moorish eyes as he crossed the street, dodging a formation of warriors who marched past, brandishing spears.
“Where have you been, Lord Adrian, my son,” Eliza sang out. She held a rum bottle in her free hand and, smiling at him, raised it to her lips. She drank daintily, licked her lips clean, and giggled. “Have you been to your true love, darling?”
“We’re into English songs now,” Anna said. She and Eliza began to sway from side to side, in time to their humming.
Adrian straddled the ledge, ignoring stray comments from the crowd. He had grown used to the reaction that Eliza’s presence provoked. She was so regular of features and limbs the very air about her seemed to delight in wrapping itself about her body. She was not unaware of her effect on passersby and from time to time threw an ironic glance about her, never stopping her singing though, taking Anna into snatches of Spanish, English, and Tagalog, mixed with some mathematical language Anna seemed to understand. Her feigned indifference merely emphasized her consciousness of her beauty and was so provocative that not a few men halted their peregrination about the plaza to stare at her.
She had be
en that way, too, the first time he saw her, three years ago, in the resort city of Baguio. She had sat on a boulder underneath the park’s pine trees and, humming, singing, had detached herself from the fury of colors and sunlight about her, and from the anger of a young man who paced back and forth before her in obvious frustration. She had raised her eyes at Adrian’s appearance, smiled gently, and remained still for a moment. Then abruptly, she had risen to her feet, walked forward briskly, her right hand raised to take his arm.
“There you are,” she had said, pressing against him suddenly.
Over her head, he had met the other man’s eyes and had recognized him almost at the same instant he was himself recognized. Though the young man belonged to the city’s wealthiest clan, it was an uneven match—and the challenge died in the other’s eyes before it was even born.
That had been the beginning of a week of learning, as Eliza had locked them both in the summer house, with the fireplace in the living room spewing heat day and night, as she led him through the labyrinths of love, making him understand the extent of his aloneness. On Sunday, returning from the supermarket, he had found Julius sitting at the patio. Eliza was gone and so were certain irreplaceable bottles in the usually well-ordered shelves of his father’s wine cellar.
“Holy cow, friend, you look done in,” Julius had said.
They had scoured the city for replacements for the missing wine, with Julius muttering bitterly about his friend’s propensity for strange women. Strays, he had called them. Adrian had kept quiet, himself bitter about the knowledge of how Eliza had managed to work her magic those seven days. But Julius had reason to complain for they had to steal two bottles from his father’s wine cellar, but there was no helping it. The old man wasn’t due in Baguio for another year while Adrian’s father was arriving in three days. Adrian had never been mortified.
When he chanced upon her at the Hotel InterCon in Manila, he had sworn to get even. She was having a breakfast of toast, bacon and eggs, and a margarita and looked up without surprise when Adrian pulled the empty chair across the table and sat down. He had told her that she owed him five thousand pesos. Her eyebrows had lifted but she had said nothing, merely sighed, picked up her purse, slid out a checkbook, and wrote the amount in. Having signed it, she had detached the check and pushed it toward him. It was only then he realized she had known who he was from the very beginning.
“I could bill you for services rendered, of course,” she had said as he had tucked the check into his shirt pocket. “Seven days, six nights . . . Uh, uh. Expensive. Tell you what. There’s the matter of a dry-dock your family wants to build in Negros. What happens if you don’t get government permission?”
His heart had skipped. “You’re kidding.”
“I have a friend who sits outside the Commander’s office. He is a little absentminded. Once he wrapped his lunch leftovers and the national budget was lost. It took three months before they could get another copy signed—even though government was disintegrating.”
“You’re kidding.”
But she had picked up her fork and resumed eating. Adrian had known it was over. He had drawn out the check and flicked it across the table. She had laughed then.
“Take it,” she had said, her mouth curling beautifully. “Triple it for me in three months and we’ll call it quits. You can do it. Stocks, money market, whatever ... I believe in giving young men a chance.” At that she had cracked up, laughing over her plate.
The dry-dock permit had cost his family ten percent of its capitalization. All in all, it had been an expensive week. But he had never regretted it.
“Stop dreaming,” Eliza was saying now. “Wake up, wake up.”
He saw that Anna was eyeing him strangely.
“We’re hungry. It’s noon. Even the warriors are taking a break.” He stirred himself. “We’re expected at the governor’s for lunch. My father and some friends . . . Well, we can walk.”
The women looked at each other—quickly, warily. Then Eliza smiled and Anna nodded. They rose. Adrian untied his T-shirt and slipped it on. He led the way through the thinning crowd, down emptying streets. Along the way, all the front doors were open and faces leaned out of windows and called to strangers to enter and eat, along with impertinent requests to Adrian to share his women. Some called to Adrian by name—former schoolmates, he explained to Anna and Eliza, at which the two wondered why they found none of their former friends in the crowd. For a few minutes, Adrian expounded on the advantages of attending a Catholic school; one was able to set up a grand cabal of one’s own, always a help in business and government matters. But Eliza, impatient, dug her elbow into his ribs and asked why everyone wanted to share his women and not him. She was still laughing, teasing him and asking who would give him away—she or Anna—when they reached the broad cemented road leading to the governor’s palace.
At the foyer, a maid in white told them that lunch was being served upstairs, in the state dining room near the verandas. Already, they could hear ebullient male voices as they climbed the marble stairs. The crystal chandelier overhead tinkled delicately from the sea wind. Eliza muttered that she could just see herself, slinking down those steps, making her grand entrance.
A thirty-foot-long table had been set up near the wide open French windows. The governor sat at one end, presiding over the conversation and the meal. Adrian saw his father and his associates, including the corporation lawyer and accountant, clustered near the governor. He scanned the rest of the crowd and could almost hear the dry chuckle his grandfather would have given at the sight. It would seem we never had the Revolution, the old man would have said—for among the crowd of pedigreed mestizos, with their imperial noses and casual arrogance, his father’s Malay middle-aged man’s fleshy jowls were an affront. Strangely enough, he himself had escaped the injustice of his genes; though dark brown, he had patrician features. As he introduced Eliza and Anna to the governor’s social secretary, his father shot him a warning look. The men’s response to the women’s appearance was old gallant—they bowed to the women—while their females palpitated, waved fans, and began subtle inquiries into the two’s origins and family connections. Anna, pitilessly polite, put on such naiveté that Adrian was surprised though he barely kept himself from laughing when he heard her explain that, indeed, her father was an ice cream vendor and her mother took in laundry. Eliza ended the inquisition by declaring, in a loud voice, that she was a nobody and who cared, anyway; certainly not, to her knowledge, the male folk. At which she favored the governor with such a lascivious look the man stuttered.
Room was found for the women at the lower end of the table while Adrian was seated near his father. The bar, said the governor, was at the other side of the room and if it pleased the men to drink, they’d have to get it themselves. The house was short of hands because of the benighted Festival. Adrian rose and his father joined him.
As they walked to the bar, his father flung an arm about his shoulder and drew him closer.
“Why’d you bring the women?” he whispered. “We’re discussing business.”
“I couldn’t leave them; they don’t know anyone on this island.”
“Don’t call attention to them. That’s Hansen, no? The beautiful one. She could be useful.” He glanced at Anna. “But the other one . . .”
“Anna.”
“Villaverde,” he said firmly. “Out of place, out of place, son. Shouldn’t mix your pleasures with your public life. Well, what shall we have? Gin and tonic.”
Adrian considered bringing wine to Anna and Eliza and thought he’d better not. The women near the two were already fanning themselves too energetically. He asked for Archangel Beer.
“I suppose she is satisfactory in a way,” his father said as they made their way back to the table. “Lots of experience, I must say. Got a report from Colonel Amor. She was his—what shall we say?—his ward for a time, you know. A year, to be exact.”
His father’s nostrils trembled. Confused, Adrian look
ed away. He took a swig of the beer, his eyes on Anna through the mug’s distortion. He remembered how malleable her flesh was, curving to his every curve, fitting every line of his body. He felt a sudden chill. His heart, he told himself, was breaking. For whom, over what, he didn’t know. He forestalled further conversation with his father by moving to his seat.
His plate had been heaped with pieces of lechon, puchero, and rice; his coffee cup and water glass had been filled. The governor favored him with a benign smile and said it wouldn’t be too bad if the Festival could be made to last the year, instead of this annual bash which drove people crazy. Perhaps the resort would help . . .
“A consortium, Excellency,” said the accountant quickly, “could be set up. Government and private capital. Minimal risks for everyone. We provide the pre-operation costs—studies, plans, surveys—and government loans can provide the rest.”
Adrian’s father leaned forward. “We have one area in mind,” he said. “This section of the waterfront is almost a hundred percent public lands. They could be leased at minimal cost, perhaps a peso per hectare per year. We can build a hotel, beach cabanas, a major pier, docking for yachts and small boats. Overseas promotions will bring in tourists and there you have it: a major industry for the island.”
The governor nodded.
“We’ll have to dredge the sea, comb the beach, and build breakwaters. But that will be up to the board of directors, which should have representatives from both the national and local governments. At a suitable remuneration, of course, since public service is a thankless task.”
“Conflict of interest, gentlemen,” the governor said, “conflict of interest. We do have such a clause in the constitution or something.” He sighed. “However, we don’t want to seem uncooperative, especially since the national government is involved. It is involved, isn’t it?”
A glance around the table. Adrian’s father hesitated and then gave a curt nod. The governor sighed.
State of War Page 3