Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (8 page)

A few days later she went with Nick to Cagayan, a hellhole in northern Luzon where the communists had a stronghold. When she came back two days later, cranky and dirty, her clothes coated with dust, she went straight to the bathroom to wash up. I knew she was fuming. She had stepped into his old job and chafed at Nick’s overbearing shadow, his swagger, his boisterous confidence, boyish ego, and rough edges. Going along with Nick was her concession to me, and a friendly gesture to him. But the trip to Cagayan had done nothing to change her mind. She didn’t like

working with other reporters. She didn’t like having to listen to their war stories. She wanted to work

alone.

We argued about this. I thought she had to try to work with others, to go out and have a beer or two, to share a few stories. I believed that once she relaxed, everyone would love her. It bothered me that they didn’t, that they didn’t see in her what I saw. I wanted her to stroll into the Lobby Lounge, drop her bag on the floor, snap her fingers for a gin and tonic, and tell her stories. But that was me. I would sit around the table in the Lobby Lounge, or by the pool, in a crowd of a dozen veteran reporters, and speak out blithely, as if I had been in the Philippines all my life, as if I knew anything.

She joined occasionally, pulling up a chair away from the center of the crowd and draining her drink, her eyes wandering, half listening or not listening at all, absently playing with her pen. She had just dropped into town, a novice from the suburbs, and was terrified by her ignorance, her lack of experience. At the same time she was relentless, blitzing through the city, tossing off routine news, finding stories others had overlooked. But in the end, she and the rest of the crowd were all covering the same ground.

There were weekends in the months of upheaval that followed the fall of Marcos when a riot would erupt at a rally of Marcos’s
abandonados,
and the press, sunning by the hotel pool, would rise from their towels and jump into long pants to go cover it. The rallies had a pattern. Two thousand people, hard-core Marcos believers, massed every Sunday around a stage at the Luneta, the grandstand at Rizal Park, a stone’s throw from the hotel. Speeches, wailing prayers, and Imelda’s teary songs, taped in exile in Honolulu, began at dawn, waking the hotel guests. Looking over the hedges, we could keep track of the rally and the riot police in their helmets and Dirty Harry shades, swinging their long, wooden batons. Most days there was just posturing. But violence could break out abruptly. Sometimes people were injured, killed.

That’s when the press would leap from poolside chairs, charge out of the hotel, and run across the park, Elizabeth, her notebook and pen in hand, her running shoes untied, her hair tumbling. I would stay by the pool or wander off into the park, staying on the fringes, not quite knowing what to do with myself, neither reporter nor tourist, feeling left out, rather useless. Late at night she would return to

the hotel, drenched in sweat and stinking of tear gas, her bandanna twisted around her neck.

Sunday mornings were a ritual. The press was out in full force. Early risers came in tennis whites, holding Prince rackets under their arms. Late risers came out with bloodshot eyes from Saturday night’s barhopping in Ermita, all-nighters of knocking back six-packs and sleazing around the strip. By noon the poolside tables buzzed with chatter. Twenty people shouting, beer bottles piling up. “Boss, boss,” Nick screamed at the waiters, who moved in prissy steps and paid no attention. Beers were easy. Piña coladas required extensive instructions. No sugar, and just this much foam, two fingers, and the waiter invariably responded, “No problem, mum.” Half an hour later the piña colada arrived in a tall, warm glass, a sugary mix with five fingers of foam topping it off. The piña coladas, sold by the dozen, were swallowed in quick gulps, and not a drop was left in the glass, just wisps of

foam for the flies to crawl over. It was just about this time that the hottest sun settled in a spot directly overhead and pinned everyone down.

I am watching you
—a note from Elizabeth on one of those days when, wishing to be alone, she dragged a chair under a tree, away from the crowd. I was propped up on my side on a lounge chair by the pool. My hair was wet, slicked back, and my head moved naturally back and forth while I talked to a hefty blond fellow on the chair next to me. I ran my hand over my sweaty thighs and legs, rubbing oil over them, and sensed that she was watching me, could feel her eyes without looking in her direction. The fellow was turning toward me, listening. I was talking about the Philippines as usual,

playing with my hair, sipping my beer. He seemed charmed, transfixed, lighting my cigarette. I inhaled slowly and let the smoke out in a long stream. I was doing this for her: I knew she was looking at me behind her sunglasses. Everything around me slowed down, the sun burned my skin, and the wind was still, the heat rising.

Some days the temperature was a perfect 85—the brochure tropics—with the wind off the South China Sea driving out the ghastly odor from the garbage in Manila Bay. The leaves of the trees became a translucent green, and the haze lifted. The sky turned a cerulean blue, just as it does in the Caribbean after midday showers.

On the day of my birthday, my second Saturday in Manila, we drove down the coast to find Matabungkay Beach. We hired a driver and rode for a couple of hours on a narrow road clogged with trucks, buses, and sputtering jeepneys. There was nothing panoramic about the drive, as people had told us there would be, no coastline to see. But we were involved with each other, barely aware of

the driver and the road, until we spotted a faded billboard announcing the Matabungkay Beach Resort. We took a dirt road past shacks and beer stalls and at the end of it we found the resort, the main building a large, airy shed of concrete with a tin roof. It wasn’t the enchanting pavilion, the white beaches, we had in mind, but having gone so far and having a day to ourselves, we ran up to the reception desk and signed up for a raft. Cheap, ten pesos for half a day. In the restaurant a throng of people, not the foreign tourists of the Manila Hotel but barrio Filipinos, large, loud parties, were picnicking and drinking, the women with their heavy breasts, the men with their soft bellies.

Out in the water there were dozens of
bancas,
narrow-tailed boats, loaded with families.

Vendors in cutoff shorts and rubber sandals, their skin charcoaled by the sun, their bodies fish-bony and sinewy, waded through the water, carrying boxes of food, beer, and ice cream. We hired two of them to pull our bamboo raft into the water and they anchored it about two hundred feet from the shore. A vendor took our lunch order and one hour later he was back, wading in the sea while balancing a damp box on his head with our rice, crispy fried fish, and a couple of San Miguel beers. We spread the food on a dry palm leaf and ate it with our fingers and drank the lukewarm beer.

The water was so clear, you could see the bottom. Elizabeth dived in and out, and I dangled my legs off the raft, splashing water on my face and arms to keep cool. I rarely went into the water. I only wanted to smell it, to feel it near me, to feel it like the air. I watched her body swivel, and the changing light on the waves, and the sun spots skittering under water. Around us the boats swayed, like floating huts. Kids jumped naked into the sea, teenagers danced to boom boxes, and men tossed their empty bottles over their shoulders. By midafternoon the beach became quiet, that drowsiness

that comes in the tropics as the sun spreads out and mutes everything, and the boats, black silhouettes, lay still.

She stretched out on the raft to dry in the sun, her hand shading her eyes while she looked at me.

We were alone in the world, it seemed, hardly stirring, swaying softly with the waves. From somewhere I thought I could hear Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons,
and in the distance, looking inland beyond the shore, white wisps of smoke swirled from hillside huts and the scent of burning wood drifted back to the sea, even from that far.

I knew at that instant, with her face beside me and the wisps of smoke in the hills beyond, that I had found myself a place; nothing I had known before had captured me in quite this way, with such sudden passion. We let the last hours of the sun pass, and that evening, back in Manila, we sat under windblown torches, listening to the strolling violins in the hanging gardens by the bay.

Weeks later, when my holiday ended and I had to leave Manila, I gave Elizabeth a gold ring with

a sliver of coral set in it. She wore it for a long time on her left hand.

I
LEFT THE PHILIPPINES
in early May, after the spring and the sea and the gold ring, the weeks that were her gift to me. Tearing myself away, delaying my scheduled departure once, twice, one day, then another, I finally returned to the United States, but not to stay. I was going back to end that life, to break away from the things that had once mattered: a long career, ambitions and promotions, a climb that had been steady and single-minded, but leaving me restless.

On the interminable flight from Manila, I practiced the words I would use, arranged my reasoning for public consumption, wanting to explain my decision to resign in a sensible, dispassionate manner. I tried to mimic Elizabeth’s even-tempered voice in imaginary conversations in which I convinced myself that the course I was about to take was absolutely right, inevitable, handed to me that afternoon on the bamboo raft at the Matabungkay resort. I had a plan: I would quit the newspaper and return to the Philippines to write, to cover the revolution, to be with her.

It seemed simple the day I told Elizabeth. We were having drinks in the Lobby Lounge and I dropped the idea abruptly, my mind already made up. I had wanted her to back me, to take me by the hand and call for wine to celebrate. But the soft look on her face hardened. She shifted her glance away from me and her hand moved automatically to her mouth, fingers on her lips, the pose she adopted to give herself a moment to recover. She wanted to believe I was only dreaming, that this was one of those romantic creations of mine that often amused her but more often scared her. She thought this would pass, that I was carried away on palm trees and margaritas.

“You can’t give up your career just like that,” she said. “What if this doesn’t work out, what then?” She was afraid of the burden, that the time would come when I would end up blaming her for ruining my life and that a sense of obligation would shift to her. I had answers ready, trying to reassure her, and brushed aside her arguments in a torrent of words.

On the morning I left her in her room, knowing that nothing would keep me from going back, she took me in her arms, her hands cold, as they always were when she was afraid or anxious, and clasped me to her. She seemed suddenly smaller and very alone. I had to go, and loosened her arms. She fixed her eyes somewhere in the distance, looking toward the bay. I closed the door behind me, the breath taken out of me.

Flying east to America, strapped to my seat, I played back the days and nights in Manila, the torchlights and the ships, the trenchant music, dreading going back to reality. I flew dazed and disconnected from Honolulu International to LAX. I called her from a pay phone at LAX but could hear only broken phrases. Passengers, couples, families, American accents, murmurs of lives swirled around me, but I was shut off, unable to engage in even the most casual conversation. Arriving home exhausted in the middle of the night, I saw a lean and tall figure walking in my direction at the airport gate. It was Andy, dandy Andy, waiting for me, grinning. He picked up my bags and drove me through streets that now seemed bleak and unfamiliar, and when I got to my apartment, nothing seemed familiar to me. I glanced around, trying to orient myself, but felt only the emptiness of the place. Andy sat with me, drinking wine, listening with a frown to my decision to leave the paper, worried that I was moving too fast.

On the first day back at work I noticed a difference on the desk. Some editors shook my hand, the foreign editor gave me a friendly slap on the back, and everyone asked about my trip. But I caught the sidelong glances, the eyes that glided quickly away from my face. I had the definite impression that I had stepped into the middle of a conversation about me that I was not supposed to hear.

Later, when I went to Tim’s house to have a drink with him, he lifted me in his arms and hugged me, his barrel chest a warm refuge, but after a drink or two, he said, “Everyone’s talking about it, you and Elizabeth.” I thought I detected disapproval. Perhaps it was his caring. I could no longer tell. I only knew that I wanted him to understand, to support and protect me. I tried to explain, but how

could I explain?

He did try to understand, he did say he was on my side, but the situation pained him. It was not easy to defend me.

“She’s going to tear you apart limb from limb,” another friend warned me. She reminded me of past relationships she had heard me talk about and how bad I had felt then, and she reminded me, as if I needed a reminder, of the obligations I had to the paper, and my aspirations. “What happened to you before will be nothing compared to what she’s going to do to you.”

People are going to say you’re crazy, the managing editor said when I told him I was leaving. His Irish altar-boy face was furrowed, his blue eyes widening. He was shocked at my decision, the last thing he expected, he said, playing with an empty coffee cup. We were seated in the cafeteria, midafternoon, when the lunch crowd had thinned out and we could talk without ears prying around us. I looked out the window, giving myself time, and burned my tongue on my coffee. He was rolling his wedding band, clasping and unclasping his hands.

I responded the way I do when I doubt myself, with a smile that is both a grimace and a narrowing of the eyes.

I have to do this, I said, I have to go. I couldn’t begin to answer the questions I knew he had in mind, everyone’s questions. I was beyond reasoning, beyond his reach. We left the table and, his hand gently at my elbow, walked down the long hallway. As we walked, I brought up Elizabeth’s name lightly, inserting it between one thing or another. He noticed.