Ilustrado (27 page)

After dinner, Cristo walks with his wife and children. The cool night air is far more comforting than the warmth of the house. The boys are still wary of him, though Maria Clara is lively and lovely. She jokes easily with the children and makes them laugh. He is envious.

On the path home, Cristo sees his house, the windows lit brightly, the boys running ahead. Maria Clara holds his hand. He tells her: “Let’s have one more. Let’s try for a girl.”

She stops and embraces him tightly.

“We will become American,” Cristo says. “Our children will learn to speak American. When they are ready, we will send them to America to be educated. Just as I was in Europe. All this land will be theirs when they return. They’ll return to make a difference.”

“You can finally cease the war inside you,” Maria Clara says.

“Yes,” Cristo says. “Perhaps.”

—from
The Enlightened
(page 270), by Crispin Salvador

*

I remember just before it ended, it had been bad for weeks straight. “What would we do without each other?” Madison demanded. I watched my ice cream melt in the bowl.

For so long we’d made plans. Being in love is all about making plans. Or maybe it was just us. Everything was outlined, researched, and refined. Our nonreligionist wedding ceremony. Our ecofriendly funerals. We wanted to be wed somewhere sacred, yet not under the eyes of any god except our love, our selves, and, as Madison said, the wonderful communion of the humanity close to us. We wanted to be buried outside of cemeteries, under trees, in muslin shrouds, close to the earth that would easily reclaim us; we wanted our relatives to avoid carbon emissions and instead hold secular memorials for us in the cities where they lived. We planned the sound track of our lives (Lakme’s aria for her matrimonial march; the bridge in Eric Clapton’s “Layla” for my funeral cortege). We talked about adoption as the only moral choice for the world today, and debated about which country we’d rescue an orphan from. Sometimes, though, Madison would say: Maybe I’d like to have one of our own; or, Maybe it would be nice to be married in a cathedral. To which I’d reply with logic and reason.

I looked up from my melting ice cream. “What would we do without each other?” she repeated, this time tearfully. I could answer it honestly and say we’d both be okay. Or I could answer it dishonestly, the way she wanted, and say we’d both be okay. I remember she reached across the table to hold my hands. The sleeve of her white shirt got stained by a glob of ketchup and I watched it soak in. We loved differently. I felt we were blessed by every day together. She took for granted we’d be together forever. “We . . . I mean us,” she said, “we’ll be fine. I have faith.”

Both Madison and I were brought up as Roman Catholics. Our atheism was something we explored together. We led each other through the stubborn questions. How could there possibly be no creator? How could our lives just stop when we die? This struggle toward rationality vulcanized us. Our families, with their inspirational text messages and their shrill e-mails against our decision to be on the organ donor list, made Madison and me feel more alone, and therefore more together. We spent many evenings developing our system of belief, and the only times I ever doubted it was when I was wracked with happiness; I simply couldn’t accept that there was no higher power to thank for it.

“Can you just say it? Just say that we’ll be okay,” Madison demanded. The waitress came to fill up our iced teas but turned on her heel when she saw Madison crying. “Shh. Sweetheart,” I said, a bit loudly. “It’s fine,” I said, hoping people could overhear. Madison never gave a shit about such public displays. We were best friends in a lonely world, and that’s all that mattered. “Promise me we will,” she said. Often we have to lie to people to make them happy. Yet I told her: “I can’t promise.” I said the line as if I’d rehearsed it for my first role in a soap opera. Something inside me was happy when she cried.

After I’d moved out of Trump Tower and snipped the apron strings, and allowance, that tied me to my grandparents, Madison and I learned to find perverse pleasure in parsing and paring our lives to the barest essentials. Our frugality—a privileged paucity exclusive to cities like New York—drove us to reject the religion of capitalist consumerism. This was difficult, particularly because we lived in the United States—we loved too much the awe of standing
in the aisles of Whole Foods, our minds overloaded by the abundance of varieties of mustards and refreshing beverages. Society, it seemed, tempted us into hypocrisy. I imagined that was how Muslim sleeper cells must feel. We had only to turn on the television, open a magazine, log on to the Internet. But like breaking our dependence on caffeine, shuffling off our tendency to buy things we didn’t need came only after two years of necessary cheapness and ontological pondering. Madison, however, still enjoyed going to the shops, to look in the windows at the season’s latest, and she’d return home with wistful eyes. I’d accuse her of manufacturing desire. Inversely, Madison could not understand my dedication to meat, and constantly reminded me of the amount of methane emitted by livestock, or how much water, land, food, and cruelty it took to raise a cow for the cheeseburger I was about to go have with Crispin. She started serving tempeh sausages at breakfast, and tofu mince in our low-carb wraps, convinced I wouldn’t notice. I didn’t.

Madison rubbed my hands. “Why can’t you see,” she said, “that whatever you’re looking for is right in front of you?” It was her familiar mantra, as if our success relied solely on me. A little boy in the booth behind her kept peeking over the seat back. He’d torn off one end of a straw’s paper cover and had the straw in his mouth. He squinted over Madison’s head, aiming the wrapper at me like a blowgun. “First I thought it was because you’re a guy,” Madison said. “Uncommunicative. Then I thought you were lost and needed to be found. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

Like anyone, we were filled with the justifications made to cope with the guilt that comes with failing to adhere to personal aspirations. We couldn’t afford now to eat healthily as well as ethically. We didn’t have enough time yet to volunteer. We skirted the dread-locked Greenpeaceniks on the street with their flyers about whaling off Antarctica or the dirty oil-sand mining in Canada—this was New York City, who had time to stop and talk?

“Maybe that’s it,” Madison said. “I mean, maybe it’s New York that’s eating us. We have to be so cool, so on, so alive, that we deaden other parts of us.” The boy made faces above her head. Madison shook my hands. “Why don’t we just go?” she said, hope filling her face like seltzer pouring into a glass. “Grab our passports and take
off,” she said. “Tonight. We’ll go to Penn Station and hop on whichever train is leaving and we’ll see where we end up. Europe. Asia. Africa! I’ve been trying forever to get us there,” she said. “We can make a difference.”

In the two years Madison and I were together, what we came to believe in most was the potential of humanity, by way of our faith in each other. We found joy in being free from fatalism. We relished whatever synchronicity allowed us to be alive together for as long as we had been and might be.

“Come on,” she begged, “Liebling.” Tears streamed down her face in earnest. I wish I knew the moment when we stopped trying to impress each other. But something made me say: “Our problems will follow us.” I think there are a limited number of phrases we all use interchangeably for fights. We say the same old things to different new lovers. Maybe I didn’t know the words that would’ve made things right. I watched her cry.

Her tears always told me I mattered. When you’re young, a lovers’ quarrel is the sharpest thing in the world. And I loved it. I twisted things around, milked her anguish, to be on the receiving end of her regret. I wish I knew the moment when sympathy died. If I did, I’d write it down, so we could all make sure that it never happens again.

“So, what will we do?” she said, withdrawing her hands, raising herself up in the seat. I looked at her, my Madison. She was about to go from soft to hard, and I had to act decisively or lose my advantage. “We’ll keep trying,” I said. “Don’t stop believing.” I could hear that old Journey song in my head. I wanted Madison to take my hands again. Holding someone’s hand reminds you where you are.

A week later, while making tea, she ended it. I was adrift.

*

Bebot remembers it well.

It was 1955 and Dolores was readying herself before her first summit. He came into her room. I thought you were ready, she told him. I am, he said, I just need to have my barong pressed. That’s not being ready, she snapped. When she finished applying her makeup, she went out front to the car. Elmer had the Impala idling, the electric fans whirring full blast. Where’s my husband?
she said to Elmer as she got in. I don’t know, ma’am. Dolores leaned over to the steering wheel and held the horn down until Bebot came rushing out. He sat beside her without a word. As they neared the memorial, he asked her, Are we going to the dinner after? I’m going, she said. Did Leslie telegram from Madrid? he asked. Dolores didn’t say anything. I hope her voyage went well, Bebot said.

When they arrived, the sun was low in the sky. The light glinted harshly off the brass of the band near the stage. Two bare flagpoles flanked the covered monument. The crowd was already gathered at their seats. I told you, Dolores said, I knew it. Bebot didn’t reply. They walked side by side down the long path through the new lawns. Bebot looked at her intently. It will be okay today, he said. It was a long time ago. Dolores looked at him as if he’d just insulted her. My brother and mother were killed, she said. I know, Bebot said. I know.

The couple rushed to take their places reserved at the front. Dolores’s secretary, Tadio, was there. Good afternoon, Congresswoman, good afternoon, sir. Here are your programs. Dolores made Tadio sit between her and Bebot. Tadio looked like he wanted to disappear.

Somebody announced over the loudspeaker, Please stand for the national anthems. Everyone stood. The Filipinos in the crowd put their hands on their chests. The Philippine flag was raised slowly by two soldiers in dress uniform as the band played the “Lupang Hinirang.” When the song ended, there was an odd silence. Everyone watched the flag flap at half-mast. Bebot looked over at Dolores. She was staring at a long line of ants making their way over a flag-stone in front of her.

Dolores was remembering. She thought of how she and her brother Manito would manufacture wind chimes with the spent bullet casings they collected near their house on Jorge Bocobo Street. And every day, to build strong muscles for fighting, they lifted the large bags filled with the new banknotes, the Mickey Mouse money (one sack bought a cup of rice). Sometimes they even studied their vocabulary for the next day’s class, reciting the strange words with eyes made narrow and voices made shrill.

That was how we maintained our innocence, she thought now. When she looked up, the Japanese flag was already near the halfway point on the pole and the band was arriving at the last few bars of the “Kimi Ga Yo.”

When Bebot glanced at his wife, he saw that she was weeping.

—from the 1973 short story “Manila Banzai Blues,” by Crispin Salvador

*

In Barcelona, Salvador lived in a studio in the Barrio Gótico. The years spent there for his schooling were significant for two vital but different relationships: that with Gigi Mitterand and that with Max Oscurio. He recounted their first encounters, at the same picnic party, in
Autoplagiarist
.

Of Oscurio: “At the entrance to the park, beside Antoni Gaudí’s mosaic-scaled lizard straddling the staircases, I saw the two Berties, Roberto Pascual and Edilberto Dario, whom I’d not seen since Manila. Pascual was excitedly telling about a
strip-teaseuse
he’d seen in Paris, a Montréalaise who had simulated sex with a black swan on-stage. It was good to share laughter with them again. They introduced me to their older companion, who, despite unkempt hair and sunken cheeks, drew one’s interest with his enervating eyes. They seemed to have the blackness of Rasputin’s. He leaned against the banister, stroking the lizard’s blue head as if it were his pet. This fellow brightened when I greeted their group and he immediately proffered his hand for me to shake. His fingernails were long and painted like a woman’s, Tyrolean green. When I tried to shake his hand he grabbed mine firmly, brought it to his lips, and planted a kiss upon my knuckles. I was so taken aback I could not resist. ‘Max Oscurio, my beautiful boy,’ said he. ‘How is it a prince like you has not yet joined our coterie?’ Instantaneous was my repulsion.”

Of Mitterand: “Trumpets today, and trumpets and more trumpets sounding joy. She was alone, enjoying a cigarette away from the crowds of picnickers. Her hair reminded me of brass just before it tarnishes. Trumpets! She spoke Spanish with a French accent, having difficulty rolling her
r
’s, dragging them on the ground as only the French have the right to do. How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person? She was sitting sidesaddle on the long bench shaped like a Mediterranean kraken, its mosaic matching her ruby earrings as if a prescient Gaudí had intended this very moment. How did I not guess instantly that she was a violinist, with fingers so long, so slender, they were chopsticks of ivory pinching her red-stained cigarette? I found my heart beating so rapidly I felt my lungs would collapse. I asked if she liked the park. She said the survival
of Gaudí’s work is ‘a reprimand to Franco.’ Which struck me as one of those strong, stupid opinions that are endearing in their way. But her breasts were monumental in her low-cut blouse, her figure rangy almost to the point of awkwardness. Her white trousers were short above her tanned calves, her ankles of such slightness I wanted to circle my fingers around them, to marvel that they could support her. She explained that the dip in the bench, rolling as it does from the wall and sparkling with tile like the hollow of a wave, was molded to the posterior of a naked workman whom Gaudí had made sit in the wet clay. I of course did not believe her. She pulled me to sit at her side and we wiggled into the bench’s curvature. She smelled of oranges and pastis. Then, standing and looking around, she pulled her trousers down and sank her naked, milk-white posterior into the recess. ‘See!?’ she declared, taking my flabbergasted expression as a sign I conceded my disbelief. I averted my eyes politely, staring instead into hers, which smiled with magnificent infantile coruscation. She hadn’t even given me her name when I silently pledged my heart to her. What a cruel moment that afternoon when she introduced me to Raoul, her Spanish fiancé, an Extremaduran count no less!”