The Noise of Infinite Longing (30 page)

After four days together, we were pacing in and out of rooms, leafing through the same magazines, recycling the same stories. There was just so much we could say to one another. By now I had heard about mother’s last years, her years in Edgewood. She had a good life, Sara said, painting those last years in watercolors. She had seen mother often, more frequently than the rest of us had seen her. They lived only some fifty miles apart, a straight shoot from Edge- wood to Dallas. Mother liked knowing everyone in Edgewood and was happy that everyone knew her, even if it was a town that didn’t rate a mention in maps, a town of churches and men who tilted their heads slightly when greeting the ladies, a folksy town. Leon and

Maria, that’s how they were known. Leon had grown up in Edge- wood, and sixty years later people still remembered him; that’s how long people stayed in Edgewood. Mother was making plans for the beautification committee and, in her way, she took up gardening (she hosed the yard, I imagined, I could hardly see her digging into the ground).That last year, the one that turned out to be her last, 1994, she spent her afternoons organizing her scrapbooks and trying to trace her family tree back to Spain. She kept busy.

That was one picture. I had another one, the other side, the inverted mirror. In those last six months, even in her letters, where she usually tried to put a gloss on things, I noticed a weariness. She seemed resigned, as if she had reached the last stop. How did she end up there? Her answer, when I asked, was always the same. Leon wanted to be there, she wanted to be with Leon. It was that simple. Sometimes, when she and Angeles were alone, when Angeles went to see her on her annual visits and they gossiped and reminisced like old friends, she talked about Puerto Rico, her trips there—how she was when she went back. She thought everyone would remember her, but how could they? She’d been gone so long, and then she was so hurt. She realized it was too late for her to return there, that she’d been left behind.

Let’s go out to dinner, Sara repeated. I had been lost in thought— of mother, the scrapbooks, the prayer pamphlet she had by her bed- side. (How odd, I thought, when I saw it, I had no idea mother had become religious.) I had been thinking about her letters to me, the most recent ones pleading with me to come see her—We are not so backward here, she had said sadly, almost apologizing. She had to have known, she was getting ready.

Looking at Sara, I said, That’s a good idea. Let’s go to dinner.

Where?

It took an hour to round up everybody.We went back to the Mex-

ican place, ordered up margaritas and Corona for Angeles. Platters of tacos and enchiladas, bowls of guacamole, and we toasted our- selves, our last evening together.The jukebox drowned out our con- versation, though we were hardly conversing, we were exclaiming, joking, moving our shoulders to the Tejana songs. After a while, Amaury and Angeles started to sing, clapping their hands on the table, jerking their heads this way and that to the beat of the music. I ran my tongue around the rim of my glass, tasting the salt, instantly remembering the margaritas in Manila, but it didn’t take much for me to realize that that’s not where I was. I was in Dallas, with my sis- ters and brother, on the third night after our mother’s burial.

We never knew how to end a night, Angeles and I. Somehow we didn’t know how or didn’t want to put a period to it. A simple good night didn’t come easily to us when we were together. There was always one last drink, cognac, brandy, Courvoisier, Grand Marnier. But that night, our last together, even Carmen, Olga, and Sara stayed up, as if this, staying together, would keep mother alive.

When we got back to Sara’s house, I asked her,Where’s mother’s last scrapbook? She went to her bookshelves and brought it to the sofa.We crunched up together around the coffee table. Some of the black stickers at the corners of the pictures had fallen off.We turned each page very slowly, remarking at each picture. There you are. How old were you then? What an awful picture, let me tear it up. Children, we were children even that night.

The pictures were arranged chronologically, dated. The more recent photos were in the back, pictures of me I didn’t even know existed and others I had sent her from Manila, from Philadelphia, from NewYork.

I held up one page, stopped cold—a large black-and-white pic- ture of me in Manila. I studied it for a long time.

Who’s that with you? Carmen said.

A friend. We were at the Cowrie Grill at the Manila Hotel. She was wearing a scarf around her neck, her pen in her shirt pocket. I was dark brown, tanned, my arms were very thin. I was smoking, we were obviously talking, not aware of the camera. I had a glass of white wine, she had red. It was 1987.

I want that picture, I said, carefully lifting it off the stickers. I don’t have a copy of it.

Who is she? Carmen asked. Elizabeth.

Carmen looked at me, a question on her face, as if she had found the last piece of a puzzle but was still not quite sure what it was.

Angeles interrupted before I could answer.

Mother liked her a lot, when she met her in NewYork two years ago. It’s too bad, she said, looking at me, touching my shoulder.

Oh! Carmen said, looking at the picture more closely.That’s Eliz- abeth. I’m always the last to know, Carmen complained. It was her usual complaint that because she lived in Sweetwater, a four-hour drive west of Dallas, out of the way of the family circuit, and because she lived such a tidy, conservative life, she was often left out of fam- ily business. This time, she was right.

What happened with Elizabeth? she asked again.

She’s gone, I said. The last thing I wanted was to talk about that. Happened months ago, I said casually, as if it had been the most ordi- nary thing in the world. We had come to that point . . . took a long time, but we had drifted apart, you know how it is.

I smiled, reassuring them and myself, took the picture, and put it aside on the table.

Let’s see what else is here, I said, turning to the next page. Angeles and Amaury didn’t go to bed that night, or maybe they

did after I had finally pulled myself away. My flight was leaving the next morning. Carmen was taking me to the airport. I could count on her to get me there on time.

Seven o’clock in the morning and I was already showered, dressed, packed, and ready to go. I went to the kitchen to make cof- fee, thinking I was the first one up, but Sara was already there, the coffeemaker percolating.

She loved you so much, mother did, Sara said suddenly. She didn’t talk about your life, I mean she talked about your work, your writ- ing, but didn’t go on about your relationships—your friendships, she called them. She was happy if you were happy, like she was with all of us.

What did she say? I insisted.

She didn’t understand, not really, Sara said. Wished you’d get married, have children, and she wished you had been closer to her, that you hadn’t gone so far from her. It made her very sad. But she was so proud of you.

I could say nothing. I thought, I never talked to mother about it, about my love for women, and she never asked me. That silence ran deep, and it was perhaps more than any other thing what kept me away—I was afraid she would ask, and at the same time, I resented that she didn’t want to know, that a whole part of my life was unac- knowledged and not talked about with the ease she talked about my sisters’ husbands and children. The tacit understanding was not enough; the silence set me apart from the others.

Sara was looking away from me. She was thinking about mother, about all the Septembers she would drive to Edgewood to leave red carnations at my mother’s graveside. She was about to cry.

Here, don’t, I said, rushing to her.

I could hear the shower, doors closing and opening, Amaury fold- ing the sofa bed, Angeles in her slippers, dragging behind me.

These hours were so long, waiting for the ride to the airport. I dreaded going, I dreaded the good-byes, the tears, the parting of flesh.

Later that morning they gathered on the sidewalk by the carport. It was time for me to go. One by one, they reached out, Amaury, Sara, and Olga. Carmen, who still had to take me to the airport, was already in tears, packing her car. We were all leaving pieces of our- selves, I thought, more alone now that mother, our center, was no longer there to hold us together, or perhaps closer than we had ever been when she was alive.

I turned to Angeles, who was standing back, waiting. I wanted to take her with me. I turned to her and held her desperately, touched her hair, her face. Then, I let go and got into the car.

#

In the tropics, in late summer, the wet season, there are no gray col- ors and no pale colors and murmur of voices. The heat makes the colors brighter, the voices louder. The smells explode in the air. There is a way the sky looks after a rain shower, the way a rainbow suddenly appears while you sit on a porch and watch the rain dry up in a matter of minutes. The sky turns a blue so pure you think you can see through it.

The bamboo raft swayed gently with the waves, held in place by ropes the beach boys had tied to poles in the water. It had rained ear- lier that morning but now the sky was cloudless, the sunlight spread out, the sun climbing directly above my head. The beach was crowded, as it was on weekends, the wood boats swaying with the weight of families, children jumping off the boats’ rails into the sea, girls dancing to the music from boom boxes playing at top volume.

My legs dangled in the water, water so clear I could see to the bot- tom. Elizabeth dived in and out, splashing water all over me. I rarely went swimming. I only wanted to smell the sea, to feel it near me, to feel it like air.

In the distance, beyond the shore, the mountains seemed painted, a sweeping, dark green backdrop. Small clouds scuttled over their peaks. Whitish smoke rose in wisps from hillside huts and the scent of burning wood wafted back to the sea, even from that far.

It was my birthday, and I was floating on a raft in the South China Sea.

Elizabeth came out of the water and leaned on her elbows on the edge of the raft. Our food had arrived.The beach boys had waded in the water and brought it in boxes they carried on their heads—fried fish, bones and all, and lumpy white rice. We spread the food on a dry palm leaf and ate it with our fingers, drinking lukewarm San Miguel beer.

Nothing I had eaten since I had left Puerto Rico tasted like that fish, crispy and salty. No sea had looked like that sea. No sun had burned quite like that.

I had arrived in the Philippines that week, on an early spring day. Marcos had already fallen and fled to Hawaii. Corazon Aquino was president, and the yellow banners of her campaign, what came to symbolize the end of the dictatorship, still flew off telephone polls and the roofs of shanties. I had expected the heat of the tropics, but this heat had a meanness to it, like a swamp.Waiting for a taxi at the airport, jostled by vendors and girls throwing sampanguita garlands around my neck, I felt no sweet breezes off the bay, only a suffocat- ing, damp heat and the bitter smell of too many bodies packed too tightly in too little a space. The cab had air-conditioning, the driver said, but it was useless. All I got in the backseat were puffs of luke- warm air. I rolled down the window. I wanted to breathe real air,

even dirty air, and smell the city.

The road that ran from the airport to downtown Manila followed the contours of the bay. It was lined with dry palm trees, squatter camps, condos, discos, fleabag motels, cocktail lounges, fish mar- kets, churches, massage parlors, and food stands—all of Manila seemed jammed along one road. At one time, Roxas Boulevard had been a prime address for the rich, with mansions facing the harbor. Roxas was hardly grand now, but there was still a touch of that lost beauty in the sweep of the road, in the panorama of the bay, even in the frayed royal palm trees along the way.

Elizabeth was at the Manila Hotel waiting for me.When she left Philadelphia for her job in Asia, I had told her I would see her there, in Manila. Two months later I arrived on holiday. I had wanted to see Manila for myself after all those months that winter, in January, February, and March 1986, when Manila was all I thought about, the stories I edited, the images on television, the fall of Marcos, and Elizabeth’s voice on the phone. I booked a flight, Philadelphia to Los Angeles to Manila, thirty hours, ten thousand miles, thirteen time zones, because I simply had to be there, be- cause I had to be with her.

As the taxi approached the Manila Hotel, my blood was racing. First, I saw the tower wing of the hotel, a white rectangle that looked like all the Holiday Inns in the world. But as we got closer, driving past the American embassy, I saw the hotel of the postcards, the orig- inal facade. It was set back near Rizal Park, with a curving driveway and an overhang to keep rain off the guests.

Bellboys and doormen in white uniforms and white pillbox hats rushed to greet me, saying my name. I was startled; how could they know? The lobby was enormous, furnished with dark burgundy sofas and armchairs under a carved-wood ceiling hung with palatial chan- deliers.

It was a hotel for grand entrances and passionate intrigues, drunken reveries and moonlit dinners by the water. I could see myself growing old in those rooms, having coffee by the pool every morning, an eccentric character in a straw hat and sunglasses, wan- dering absentmindedly through the garden.

She was not in the lobby. A manager greeted me and took me up to my room. It was two floors above hers, but I knew she was in her room, waiting.

A vase with freshly cut flowers and a bowl of fruit with a note from the hotel management were arranged on my room’s coffee table.A bottle of wine rested in a bucket of ice. On the bed, wrapped in plain brown paper, was a thick book, a journal. On the front, she had written me a note, welcoming me to the Philippines. “Mabuhay! You will soon fill all these pages,” she wrote. Along with the journal, she had left me a Philippine flag and a T-shirt. I rubbed my fingers on the journal, feeling the leather covers, and tried on the T-shirt. I looked around the room, the jolt of arrival, the idea that she was just an elevator ride away, making my hands shake.You travel thirty hours and suddenly you’re sitting in a hotel room in a place you could only imagine just the day before, a place so far from everything you know and yet strangely familiar.