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Authors: Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

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BOOK: Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution
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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.

The packers came, and once again our life was crammed into boxes, brown-taped, roped, and stuffed into a van and taken away to be loaded onto a freighter that would disappear in the sapphire seas of the Pacific, churning through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean, passing only miles from the island where I was born, and turning north, far north, to New York harbor.

The house was a desert, colorless now that we were leaving it. The movers left footprints on our cedar plank floors, and there were scraps of boxes and pieces of cardboard, brown wrapping paper and rolls of tape. We left behind the beds, a wicker sideboard, the white rattan sofa, but the place still looked barren. We locked the front screen door behind us and ran down the steps into the waiting car

—it was Rolly seeing us off. Elizabeth carried Boom in his new travel cage. This time I did not glance back as the car pulled out. I did not wave.

We sat apart, each taking up a corner of the back seat, looking out the windows at scenes so familiar, they had become nearly invisible, but this time they were frozen frames—the squatters, the half-naked kids in the mud, the bay green-gray and flat, the colors flashing by. I heard Rolly say, “You’ll be back someday. But when you come back, this country will be nothing but garbage piles and funeral homes. Boom is so lucky. Going to America!”

At ten in the morning on December tenth, with Boom in his cage in the cargo hold of the United plane, we boarded the flight to San Francisco, and when the plane lifted off, Elizabeth pressed her face to the window and took my hand and said, “This country can break your heart.”

PART III

8

N
EW YORK HAD ALWAYS
been a seduction. It would always be the city that stole my heart when I was fourteen, when the city seemed to rise to meet me as I peered down on it from my window seat on a Pam Am clipper. The buildings shooting into the sky seemed great monuments to me, defying gravity, beyond imagination. I was taken by the city instantly and promised myself that one day I would walk down Park Avenue and Fifth and Central Park and have exciting evenings at the theater and live in a garret in the Village, where I would write all those poems pent up inside me. But nothing like that had happened when I returned to the city when I was nineteen years old, out of college, a dreamer getting on the train in South Carolina and riding north with twenty dollars in my wallet, head in the clouds.

I had no such illusions in January 1989. With the crunch of dirty snow under our feet and icy winds tossing about us, Elizabeth and I looked for an apartment for days and wound up renting a fifth- floor walkup in the Upper West Side, near Central Park, a brownstone with foxhound pictures framed and hung on the wallpapered foyer walls, emerald-green carpets on the stairs, and carved balusters.

Our furniture came in batches, my sofa and rugs from Tim’s, and, months later, the Manila shipment, which came in airtight containers unloaded at the docks and pitchforked into a six-wheeler, which brought it to our stoop, the men puffing and panting as they lifted and shouldered each piece up five flights of narrow stairs, tearing the wallpaper, nicking the plaster. We crammed it all into three cramped rooms, nearly sunless, where light filtered through a soot-smeared skylight. The windows of the living room, which was in the rear, looked out on weather-streaked faded yellow brick, the back side of a towering apartment building.

The apartment had its charms: dark hardwood floors, a red-brick fireplace that evoked nights by the hearth, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on one wall, a Mexican tile kitchen, and a garden roof of tarpaper, potted plants, and withered vines, with deck chairs set out for alfresco twilights. I squeezed my desk against the window in the second bedroom and made room for a twin bed for guests. The windows of both bedrooms opened out on a leafy street, looking down into the French doors of a maisonette across the street and the steam pipe in the corner, which blew hard all winter.

We were jolted awake in the middle of the night by the screech and whistles of car alarms, police sirens, ambulances, and jackhammers on Central Park West. Boom, who’d survived the trauma of traveling in a cage in a dark and cold airplane cargo hold across the Pacific, hid for days under our bed or up in the kitchen cabinets, and so we began our new life.

Elizabeth got a job with a magazine, working out of an office with her nameplate on the door and writing pieces culled from files reported by correspondents around the world. Gone were the T-shirts and bandannas, the tennis shoes and jeans. Here she had to thread into her stories the perspectives honed at the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations, and by sitting in, in her best silk, on occasional boardroom breakfasts with Kissinger. It didn’t surprise me that she seemed comfortable there. This was inbred in her, a social polish that came naturally. But she was only passing time, waiting to go overseas.

I was working in a pantheon. I walked by the same names I had read in the
Times
since my early days as a newsroom clerk in Columbia, South Carolina, bylines I had known at a distance for decades. Every afternoon I arrived in the newsroom on the third floor and crossed the long rust- carpeted corridor past desks piled high with books and unopened manuscripts. Heads bent over word processors—graying heads, bald heads—women in long black skirts, their hair wind-whipped, older men in suspenders and rumpled Brooks Brothers jackets. These were the legends.

They used to say that people went to the
Times
and died there. I believed it. A sunless pallor came over your face, along with creases on your forehead and a definite slouch to your shoulders. I still have the ID picture they took on my first day. There was a smooth look on my face, a genuine smile, and my hair had life to it, shiny and dark. I was just out of Manila, still tanned, still fresh- looking, allowing myself big hopes.

But right from the start, I was not what you would call a rousing success on the Foreign Desk. I didn’t throw myself into that work. On the graveyard shift, I came in every midafternoon and plunked down at my assigned desk, hung my jacket on the back of my chair, and cranked down the seat, which was left too high by the tall fellow who sat there in the mornings. The top of the desk was sticky from years of spilled drinks. Copyeditors worked in a cluster of ten desks jammed together, feet away from the Foreign backfield, where assigning editors handled reporters, did the heavy lifting on stories, and made the key decisions. The Copy Desk was something else, a rung below. We were grunts in boot camp, word technicians, or lifers who had lost ambition.

Midnight, sometimes one in the morning, after the last page proofs had been checked and marked up for the last edition and the janitors were emptying the trash cans and vacuuming the carpets, I would sign off, throw out my collection of half-drunk coffee cups, and slog out of the newsroom, down the elevator to West Forty-Third Street, which was loud with the idling engines of the newspaper delivery trucks. Huddled down against the winter wind or the cloying summer heat—it did not matter which, as weather on that block always seemed the same to me, the grime unrelieved—I walked down to Eighth Avenue, by patrolmen and truckers at the deli, and hustlers in glittering wigs and beggars sprawled on garbage bags. It was a risky block then, before the regeneration of Times Square.

There were no collegial beers after work, no dive bar. Everyone scurried their separate ways to catch the subway, the last train to Westchester, the bus to Montclair or Hoboken across the river. After a few months of this tedious routine, working the night shifts and on weekends, too, my once tanned skin took on a fluorescent gray color, a sallow cast. I had pouches under my eyes, and my hair had a droopy look, flattened around an aging face.

Elizabeth had the power surge she usually experienced in new jobs. She immersed herself, and, a quick study, she was soon in command of her work. She had late Friday-night dinners with the office crowd, with bottles of fine wine. And when she was done with her day, which started at the normal hour of ten and usually finished around six, she did not have to walk down to Eighth Avenue

for a cab at midnight or slide on spit on the Times Square subway stairs. Keeping in mind that I didn’t have the office life she did, she would bring me leftovers from her dinners and would always wait up for me. She could hear me on the landing, shuffling up that last long flight, turning the doorknob of the apartment door, and double-locking it behind me. She waited for me to come in and, springing up from the armchair where she had been seated, already in pajamas, her hair damp from her bath, she would stand expectantly, with a hopeful smile. But she could read my mood in seconds, the way I yanked off my coat and threw it on the sofa. I would go directly to the fridge and grab a can of beer, without a touch or a smile for her.

BOOK: Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution
3.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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