Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (11 page)

One afternoon, the day I found out I was not getting a writing fellowship I had worked on for months, I paced up and down the apartment, flaying myself, drinking beer after beer. When she came in she took a look at my face, and she braced for the bout she knew would follow. She put a hand on my back, wanting to comfort me, but I froze at her touch and walked away. I grabbed pages of my writing in my fist, throwing them around the room. She sat down, helpless, her face caught in a vise, narrowing, beaked. I had never known a face that could change quite like that, neither angry nor sad, but implacable. She was rigid, jaws clenched, lips locked. Her composure was maddening. It set us apart. I turned on her with fury, hoping my anger would draw her out. It was a cycle we would repeat time and again.

For me, the bleakness swallowed everything. In those black holes I fell into, residues of my childhood, when the anger turned inside me, crowding out anything light, I felt in the grip of failure. Perhaps I was reliving my drunken father’s belligerence or my brave mother’s emotional subjugation. I saw no future for me, for Elizabeth and me together. I saw nothing but abandonment and rejection.

She was holding something back from me, I suspected. In time she would leave me.

Elizabeth would listen to the storm raging in me. It horrified and ripped her. “This is the one thing that will destroy us,” she said, exasperated. She could not stand to watch me tear myself apart, she said again and again. She could not stand to hear the bitterness in my voice, lacerations I intended for myself but that pierced her, too. That night she left her chair and came over to me, grabbed me and pushed me against the wall and held me in her arms, and while I seemed to recover quickly, she was left drained.

I didn’t understand then that my moods were harder on her than they were on me.

There were times when she left me alone, unable to stand by while I ranted that she was impervious and unfeeling. She would walk out without a word and be gone for hours. On her birthday, when she had been caught up in her work and I was frustrated, unable to write, she slipped away, and thought about the insults I had hurled at her.

“You’ve decided that I am horrid, cold, and calculating,” she told me later. “Why the hell do you live with me then?”

These fights, with their familiar feints and skin pricks, seemed to blow over in hours or days, and we would once again pick up where we had left off, our intimacy nearly intact.

My first letter from Manila was to Tim, a sketch of the place, a place he had known, but now through my eyes, in my time. A day after he got my letter, he called to tell me he loved it, that I must write just like that. Was he serious? For a moment I believed him, and went back to the typewriter. I had set up

my table and bookshelves in a large room Elizabeth had made into her office. It had a ceiling fan, her desk, which she brought from India, and her bookcases. She had the window view. I had the windowless end of the room. Settled there with the books I had bought in a storefront nearby and Elizabeth’s Philippine flag, which she had nailed to a wall, I wrote for hours, tearing up page after page, tossing crumpled pages around the room, my back aching from sitting on a straight-backed chair. But I was also determined, driven, teaching myself, trying to see.

The rains came, not sporadically but constantly, day after day, flooding the city for weeks. The scene that became commonplace for me: poor souls carrying bundles on their heads, wading in sodden rivers that just hours before had been their streets. By six in the morning Elizabeth was at work, making phone calls, running out to cover a demonstration, setting up interviews at the presidential palace, at Camp Aguinaldo, at the American embassy, the three power centers of the capital. Coming home late, covered in sweat and mud, she would plop down at her typewriter, cursing the hours stalled in traffic, the taxi drivers, the monsoon, the president, the ambassador.

There was nothing simple about Manila.

With the typhoons and the drownings at sea and all the disasters that accompanied the season came the rumors of a coup. Everyone knew that military factions were plotting to take power from Cory Aquino, and had been doing so since the day she became president in February 1986. By autumn, only seven months into her presidency, there was a palpable edginess about the city. People jumped when the lights went out and when army trucks rolled down Roxas Boulevard. We couldn’t get a drink at the Lobby Lounge or drop by the Peninsula Hotel coffee shop without hearing the latest gossip, whispers, asides.

We ran from rumor to rumor, trying to make sense out of fantasy, conspiracies printed as fact in the local papers, speculation from columnists and generals and Cory’s Harvard-smooth presidential aides. Some days I stayed behind in the apartment, working on an outline of a book I wanted to write, a story of the Philippines at that special crossroads in its history, after twenty years of Marcos, the flavor and scenes and characters caught up in that moment. I would sit bent over the typewriter, in the chair with the hard seat and the shaky back, staring blankly at the walls, making lists of books I had to read, research I had to do, and people I had to interview.

I wandered around the apartment, feeling caged at times, turning up the music, flipping through magazines, watching Gina, our maid, an eighteen-year-old from Tarlac province who came in to do laundry and wax the floors. With her bare feet she rubbed a dry coconut husk on the floorboards, back and forth, a sort of dance. I would watch the lavanderas—the laundrywomen—on the roof over the garage, scrubbing the laundry by hand with coarse bars of soap and dipping it in tin tubs, and eating their lunch on their haunches, giggling.

The sight of them took me back to my childhood, when I was nine and my family lived among lavanderas and farmers on an unpaved road in a town in eastern Puerto Rico where my father was doing his residency at the municipal hospital, delivering poor women’s babies, making middle-of-the- night house calls. We would be there two years, the length of time the government demanded of my father for giving him a grant to study medicine. The first few months we lived in a wooden house, set up on stilts, with a cold-water shower behind the kitchen. Later we moved up the road to a cinderblock house painted bright pink, with a carport and an unfenced backyard with a wire chicken coop and guava and tamarind trees. The maid came early to feed the chickens and wash our clothes in tin tubs in the yard. She mopped our floors and fixed our meals and filled the house with the smell of garlic and onions. In the afternoons, before my mother got home from her work at the superior court in San Juan, I would get out of my starched Catholic school uniform, take a shower, and run out to the

vacant field across from the house to play baseball with the neighborhood boys, the whacks of our bats the loudest sounds at sundown.

Gina’s face and the lavanderas on the roof brought that back to me and reminded me of the pages I had written for myself, island memories, loose sheets of descriptions I had left incomplete. Far into the afternoon I would go back to my butaca, the long-armed chair, with a beer can dripping wet on the side table, a book in my hands. The living room was in shadows. Gina would come in with a basket of laundry and, too shy to say anything to me, would pad to the maid’s room to do the ironing. Around sundown, when there was no sunlight left and I was still in the Filipino chair, a leg hanging over its long wooden arm, the book propped in my hand, not many pages past where I had started hours earlier, she would emerge, her face glistening from the hot iron, carrying our clothes, shirts flowing on hangers, buttoned up and hung the way Elizabeth had taught her. With another hand she carried an armful of towels, sheets, underwear—everything fluffed and folded in squares and smelling of sunshine.

Days would go by like that, without my writing a single sentence. Days of walks around the block, getting cigarettes, coconut ice cream, newspapers. Days around the pool at the Manila Hotel, days at the Lobby Lounge in my khaki jacket, meeting socialites and newspaper editors, politicians and militants. I was always taking notes, scribbles that later made little sense to me, unintelligible handwriting, half sentences, unfinished quotes. Interviews lasted hours, over lunch and into the afternoon
merienda,
Manila’s teatime, and by the time they were over I would feel numb, coming out of the interviews into the glaring sun.

I stored it all away in some fashion: The Filipina-Chinese heiress, extravagantly chic and rapaciously greedy, who had calculated when she would be married and to whom, the idea being to leave the country, consumed one entire afternoon over lunch at Eva’s Garden. How she laughed at gullible Filipinos and their People Power Revolution, saying the country needed rivers of blood, her fingernails like pincers as she raised a bite of shrimp to her fuchsia mouth.

Another day, in the dusty dimness of a room above a shabby bookshop in Ermita, I listened to the laments of a famous novelist, darling of the foreign press. He was bald and chubby like a monk, a leftist radical from the old Marcos days who had already given up on Cory, his last hope. Like other leftists who had thrown themselves into Cory’s campaign, he was already disappointed in her slow approach to economic and military reforms. They all had expected centuries of history to change overnight when she was sworn in. Worse, Cory had ignored his advice, the packs of reform proposals he had labored over and presented to her. Look, he said, sighing with resignation and pointing at a thick pile of reports, at all the work he had put into it!

One evening, in the swelter of a cocktail party at a downtown apartment of heavy foam-filled cushions covered in loud ruby colors, I met a celebrated human rights lawyer, a University of Manila professor with a Yale degree. With wild hair and her eyes bulging with excitement, she talked with heartfelt admiration about civil society in Chile, where she had been an international election observer, and described with equal amounts of horror and self-satisfaction her work crisscrossing the Philippine islands, cataloging massacres and monitoring election abuses. Smart as a whip and sharp- tongued, she could mount an impressive diatribe against the Filipino military, yet could just as easily turn around and hug the most notorious military rogue at the party.

Manila then seemed to me a universe away from America. I was always startled to see President Reagan or any footage from the United States on the TV news in Manila. The streets and cars I saw in the American news sparkled, the buildings shimmered. The politics in Washington seemed bland and rigidly civilized. Everyone looked blond, groomed, and smug. We subscribed to the
International

Herald Tribune
and I waited for it every afternoon, then read every word of it. The Wall Street boom, Trump, Gorbachev, Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev photographed together in the White House: an orderly world, another planet.

At that time, the last months of 1986, there were at least two dozen people writing books about the Philippines. Big books on the fall of Marcos, on hidden wealth, on Imelda, on the history of the country. Every journalist who had ever set foot in the place was writing something, and the ideas in my head seemed odd and abstract measured against theirs and their familiarity with the country. They were everywhere, at the tables by the pool at the Manila Hotel, mooching drinks; at parties with Cory’s confidantes; at little dinners in Ermita penthouses, getting dizzy on piña coladas and gorging on stir-fry Mongolian beef and oxtail kare-kare.

It took me no time at all to rein in the invitations, to know the names, the twisted connections,

and every morning, I would scour the local papers, a half dozen of them, for the latest scandal. Manila had little else but scandal, corruption, sex, and gossip. On the cocktail circuit, and in the air- conditioned offices in the business district of Makati, where the political insiders courted the foreign press, I could be earnest, a veteran of the place. I clipped the papers and made files, a habit I had from newspapering, of putting things in order.

I was making a niche for my writing, but the truth was not that at all. I was getting caught in the quagmire of Manila, the press circles and political intrigue, avoiding the drudgery of writing and the long, solitary hours at the typewriter.

Elizabeth had little patience for my impatience.

“It takes time,” she kept saying. She had her rules about these things, a steel will, discipline, method, and trying to encourage me, she would say, “All those things other people are writing, what they think, what they say, where they go, have nothing to do with you, with your work.”

She had high dreams for me, and notions of writing that were even more idealized than mine were in those years. She believed writers worked in solitude, removed from the world outside, from money, fame, and glamour. She imagined taking herself away to a ramshackle farm or a deserted southern shore, marking her days by the shift of the wind, the flight patterns of geese.

I rented my vacant apartment down the hall to a bouncy young field producer for the American networks, and soon she was having the walls painted pink, the furniture reupholstered in flowery fabrics, and chintz draperies hung on the casement windows. She was a charmer, Kay was, with a freckled pudgy face, lank dark brown hair, and moist caramel eyes.

The first time we met she suggested a restaurant in Makati, a fancy place with the best local food in the city, where the dishes came in platters—krispy pata, crabs boiled in coconut juice. Elizabeth had already met her and had put her off. But I wanted to meet her, had heard talk about her, and Elizabeth came along to the lunch because I insisted.

Her voice buttery, Kay said she had heard so much about me. Over dinner, she wooed us both with flattery, raving about Elizabeth’s writing and my quick grasp of the political scene. She wrapped herself around us, squeezing my arm, nodding attentively at every utterance, and she flooded us with inside gossip. Living down the hall from us, she was in our life before we knew it. She was always in trouble and she was always in crisis. One day she was being fired, another day she was running out of money, on yet another day she had heard people gossiping about her. She would make herself at home in our apartment, plopping down on the floor, her skirt riding up her thighs, and her hand pulling at strands of her hair. We listened to whatever she rattled on about and brought out apples and Brie and wine, taking her seriously. It was a foolish thing, because she didn’t listen to advice. The next day, the