Ilustrado (42 page)

He pays the taxi driver and walks slowly to the gate of his grandparents’ home. Wiping his eyes, he rings the doorbell. Slippers applaud beyond the wall. Floyd, the one-eyed houseboy, opens the gate. He is surprised. He tells the young man that his grandmother and grandfather are inside, eating their merienda. Floyd takes the suitcases. In the yard, the acacia tree our wistful protagonist used to climb as a child has surrendered to the storm, its branches wrenched aside to expose the bone-white flesh inside the trunk. Yet the house is as it always was.

The next moment is the easiest scene I’ve ever typed.

Reflected in the glass of the sliding doors, our protagonist’s expression is complicated enough to conceal the emotions within. His purposeful stride trembles. The screen door to the living room slides noisily. Granma looks over from the table to see who’s there. She touches Grapes’s arm in joyous panic. The two of them struggle up to meet the child whom they thought they had lost. He is unable to find the words he practiced. He discovers he would not need them after all.

The words would have come later and the young man would have figured out then what he needed to say. Of the two choices he faced all his life, he would have decided on the benign third. Compromise is when nobody is unhappy, he would have said to himself—a variation on a theme—knowing he’d have to discover if that were indeed so. But his coming home would have been confirmation that, at the very least, he was willing to try—as a child to his grandparents and, yes, having found courage that he could be forgiven, as a father to his own child, however belatedly. Years later, he’d have remembered how it all turned out and he would have written about it as honestly as he could.

But first there was a mystery he had to solve.

As the airplane descended from the late-morning sun, from his window seat, flying godlike, our protagonist imagined he could touch the solution, reach out and pick it up and turn it to read the minuscule answer inscribed inside. One of those islands was hers. There was the place Miss Florentina described in her nearly illegible scrawl. The comma-shaped jewel protected by a chain of seven sugar-coated emeralds on a bolt of blue velvet. Made civilized and given a name after millennia remaining nameless. La Isla Dulcinea.

When this day began, he’d mused: This is the last taxi ride, the final airplane journey until it’s all whole. Encouraged by the fingers of dawn, he’d sat sleepless with anticipation and stared out the window as they took off, his forehead against the thrumming glass.

The changing terrain had slid away—first shadowy roofs of shanties like a cubist landscape studded with lights, dim horizons of sugarcane, haphazard roads pale like long scars on the dusky landscape, then broken mirrors of rice paddies reflecting the first pizzicato rays of morning. As the sun rose over Pampanga, the enduring devastation of Mount Pinatubo made him gasp.

*

We are liberated by the multiplicity of conclusions to every unfinishing story.

How about this one?

The newspaper’s front page: The headline reads “Text-Message Revolution—What happened after Edsa 5!” The main photograph shows Reverend Martin in shackles before President Fernando V. Estregan, the commander
in chief’s face full of reprimand. The pair are accompanied by a stern Senator Bansamoro, who, the caption explains, “personally apprehended the rebel-rousing cleric.” A secondary article asks: “Bansamoro: Estregan’s fighting cock for VP next election?” An editorial cartoon shows a man being bonked on the head by fellow commuters after asking: “How can it be Edsa 5 when it didn’t happen on Edsa Blvd?” In a sidebar piece, Wigberto Lakandula is said to be at large, with sightings reported from Baguio to Mindanao.

*

Our assiduous protagonist took out his fountain pen and wrote in his notebook, remembering 1991.

After four centuries of slumber, a mushroom-cloud eruption sent wet ash as far as Singapore and Pnom Penh. The region was rocked by earthquakes. A typhoon descended on the mountain to transform ash into lahar—a monstrous dough that advanced inch by inch, to bury five hundred square miles of arable land beneath a foot of tephra and pumicelike sediment. To stem the flow, emergency superdams were built, though those were made brittle by kickbacks. They cracked against the lahar’s glacial persistence.

Down there was where Crispin had his wrists swabbed with rubbing alcohol, invited nails into his flesh, listened to the hammer falls, bang, bang, bang, until he was raised on crossed planks above the crowd. An Easter ritual more promissory than penitential. Do the promises we ask for matter as much as those asked of us? Can any of us alter those things that life will change anyway? The woman who gave you life will one day fade, of something never truly understandable. The man who raised you, his power freshly withered, will offer his hand in mutual forgiveness, and you will hesitate to take it. A lover, deserving, whom you still wish you’d known how to love properly, will be wrested from you forever. And you will regret not making that defining decision that would have lifted you from the dead into a life you once thought probable. When God takes what he gives us, is our anger justified?

These are the thoughts that ran through his head as he watched the familiar desert below. He wondered, too, if déjà vu unsettles because it tells us that each moment should be appreciated more than it is. It reminds us that every instant is worth remembering.

He took out photographs from a folder. Harsh, contrasty duotones. Over-saturated color prints. A Roman soldier wearing white Adidas shell toes. Hooded, shirtless flagellants, blood blackening the waists of their Levi’s
jeans. A close-up of a sanguineous bamboo rod, bending ever so slightly in the motion of the wielder’s devotion. Lines of men and women dressed like Jesus, waiting like understudies in a Lenten play. Red and blue pennants strung up, ends tied to a sign that reads:
LOCATION OF CHRIST’S SECOND FALL—PROUDLY SPONSORED BY SAN MIGUEL BEER
. Sadie Baxter, Pentax slung around her neck, her blond hair a Caucasian halo against the brown skin of the crowd beside her.

He studied a photo that had bothered him a long time. Crispin on his cross, arms spread to the sky, eyes rolled back. What did Crispin see? At his feet, two old women and a fingerless leper stretch handkerchiefs up to catch his blood. In the crowd in the background, noticed for the first time, a man sticks his tongue out at the camera, thumbs in his ears and fingers frozen in their waggling.

Our faithful protagonist gazed out the window. This is also—he said to himself—the last landscape my parents saw in their final hours. But now it is entirely different.

A jeepney below sent up dust as it made its way across the wasteland. The plume rose, pillared, dispersed into a cloud. Ahead of it, the top half of a church buried in sand. In Tagalog and Sambal, he remembered, Pinatubo means “to have made grow.”

Look! There’s the shadow of our plane. Why is that still a thrill to spot? Maybe it confirms that we’re still tethered to home, even if only by shadows.

*

Or this one?

The newspaper front page: The headline reads “Text-Message Revolution—What happened after Edsa 5!” The main photo shows police escorting Dingdong Changco, Jr., into his cell in Camp Crame. Farther down, a secondary photo shows President Fernando V. Estregan and Reverend Martin raising each other’s arms on a stage surrounded by a multitude. The article explains that after the riots, Estregan declared a state of emergency. The military arrested various prominent figures, including the president’s savior, Nuredin Bansamoro, who was sitting for breakfast with his wives and children. All detained were charged with conspiracy and treason and linked to the recent bombings. In an “Exclusive!” account along the bottom of the page, Reverend Martin says his appointment as the president’s spiritual adviser is “a gift from Above.” He describes the urge to speak in tongues as he led his followers—millions
strong—in a “Thanks God” rally outside the palace. The sidebar article reports that Wigberto Lakandula received a presidential pardon and was declared a hero of the people. He is intending to run for Congress, tapped to fill the seat of a retiring Respeto Reyes.

*

The plane began its descent. He felt it in his stomach. He thought, too, of how we almost always overlook these waypoints, the everyday transformations that occur between milestones, crises, epiphanies, and deaths. It went by so quickly, is what we say of our youth, of our loves, of our wedding days, of the childhoods of our children, of our very lives.

Somewhere he had read of that mystery of how we retain our consciousness, memories, personalities, when every cell in our body is replaced every seven years. Is nostalgia—that sense of wonder and grief at how far we’ve come—only intuited mourning for that self we’ve molted, felt so wholly in our every atom that we cannot intellectually perceive it, only feel it? The things a father did, or didn’t, or imagined, or feared doing to his child—all those are gone forever, their loss honed by memory. The fingers held out one by one as her age is counted; the count is always doubted and must be started again. The Internet searches. The questioning of common friends: “How is she? What does she look like now?” That time at school, when her mother pulled her away, and the little girl looked back at him, confused. Those letters that were planned but never written, or written but never sent. The oblique hints in a book that he hopes she’ll one day read when she is old enough.

If only we could go back and reverse the things we did wrong, better the things we did right. We can’t. Not because time doesn’t move that way, but because we ourselves would be entirely different. It would not be fair. You’ve had your chance. You’re no longer on the stage. The clapping has subsided. The trumpets are silent, packed up in cases already gathering dust.

*

Or maybe even this one?

The newspaper’s front page: the headline reads “Text-Message Revolution—What happened after Edsa 5!” The main photograph shows Vita Nova, primped and proper in a red pantsuit, giving a press conference, a smiling Senator Nuredin Bansamoro at her side. She has finally revealed the evidence to a senatorial inquiry—transcriptions of a postcoital conversation on
the infamous sex tape—proving President Fernando V. Estregan masterminded not only the bombings, but also the riot led by Wigberto Lakandula (whom the army says they’ve killed, though no body has been presented). “Clearly, the president wished to destabilize the nation,” Bansamoro is quoted as saying, “in order to declare martial law and avoid the coming elections.” An impeachment is under way. Another article explains that Reverend Martin has broad cast a prayer rally from his cell in Camp Crame, urging his followers to throw their support behind Bansamoro “in our country’s darkest hour.” A sidebar article says the Catholic Church continues to support Estregan, despite evidence of his wrongdoing, because Nova is “morally suspect for her corrupting films and recent television commercial endorsing contraception.”

*

The plane descended into one of those cold, brittle mornings that are perfectly blue. The green hills roiled up and away from the ivory strip running the length of the coast. The South China Sea ran westward, transparent then deepening into a glissando of indigo.

He stumbled down the steps onto the tarmac. The other passengers were already embracing relatives or text-messaging on their phones. He shivered and hugged himself.

Outside the airstrip was a dusty road with a sari-sari store and canteen. Nobody was behind either counter. The place looked like the ghost towns of the movies, with attentive flies and a pair of dogs loping down the street in search of scraps. The other passengers disappeared. No signal on his cell phone. The sun, overhead, destroyed all shadows. A road stretched in either direction. The sky was scented with fish. The sea he could hear somewhere.

A shade appeared in a doorway. “Where you go?” a little woman asked.

She watched with her dog face, with such intensity her irises appeared to quiver, to recur from somewhere earlier, perhaps a dream, or not.

“Where you go?” she asked.

He told her.

“I bring,” she said, then faded into shadows.

He waited.

In the passenger compartment of her trike, he put his backpack on the floor and his feet on the backpack. Leaned his head out the door, like a dog in a car window. The wind still cool, but softening. The road straight and proverbial, though dusty. He shut his eyes. The motorcycle hummed. The driver
whistled an unforgettable shapeless tune. The air smelled of two-stroke oil and seaweed. He nodded off.

*

Or perhaps this one will eventually make most sense:

A blank page rises up to receive black letters, fingers pushing and resting in the warm curls of the keys of an old Underwood, the decanters of sherry and water sounding like bells with every hammer fall. I transform memory into fiction. Outside, beneath the window, a door opens, voices tumble out atop each other, meat grills, cutlery scrapes on plates, music from a jukebox communicates only two bars before I can name the tune, a man’s voice singing: “I’d die for you girl and all they can say is, he’s not your kind.” The door closes. Silence. Only the cold city breath on my face. I transform fiction into memory.

*

Slowing brought him back, brakes like a kettle at boil. Eyes closed, trying to hold in the dream. He could make sense of it but then it was gone. The wind changed, now humid and sticky. The trike stopped. He stumbled into the light. Foliage alongside the road was interrupted by a worn path leading to a spot of blue as small in the distance as a postage stamp. He turned to pay the driver. The trike was gone. So, too, was the backpack. That familiar panic cleared what was left of the drowsiness. Did I, he wondered, even bring a backpack? There answered only an urgent hushing from the sea. Nothing to be done. Shadows grew long toward the west. He followed the path.

From the beach he saw the island chain. A man stood on the prow of an outrigger pump boat, its name emblazoned in festive letters on the wooden hull:
Pekod
. The boatman watched him wade through the surf. Started the motor when he climbed aboard. He told the boatman: “Isla Dulcinea.” But the engine was already roaring. They tilted through the water, bouncing over waves. Am I dreaming? he thought.