The Noise of Infinite Longing (32 page)

The rain came in gulps, torrents, slashing across the city, drown- ing it.The sky, a crisscross of flashes, the lightning snapping, explod- ing, became a vast black cloud. The palm trees lashed by high winds

bowed to the ground, and people caught in the storms were washed away, like the cardboard homes in the squatter camps. An afternoon could suddenly become night, and the city, a city of eleven million people, would become a phantom, ghostly.

We would watch the storm come, our candles burning and the wind hissing through the cracks in the windows, the lightning close enough to touch, but we had no fear, no sense of disaster. We felt pure, and the rain, the fury in the sky, seemed a miracle, an omen.

The rain didn’t stop, it rained day after day, month after month, from August until late November, and the backstreets became rivers, people traveled by boat from one part of the city to another, the roofs of buses served as rafts, and the floorboards of taxicabs flooded.

Days and nights fused for us, and everything around us took on a meaning, the places we made our own, the cafés, the streets, and the moments when, sinking into this city so foreign and so intimate, we lost ourselves. Mornings came after nights when the geckos crawled up the walls and Albinoni was left playing over and over on the tape deck. I would wake up to the splash of her shower, the sun already above the horizon, the ceiling fan turning, buses and jeepneys rat- tling on the street below.

She was up and gone early in the morning, giving me her quick wave, sauntering down the stairs two steps at a time. I wanted to go with her. I wanted to run as she did from interview to interview, from coup rumor to coup rumor. I wanted to meet the generals, the senators, the coup plotters. I wanted to write those stories.

You didn’t come here to do that, she would say, you came to write a book. So, here, write. She gave me a lamp for my desk, she got me copy paper, pens, pencils, books, and a wastebasket for all the pages I crumpled. She read every word I wrote and patiently marked up the pages with her fountain pen.

I stayed behind in the apartment, hunched over the typewriter, staring at the walls, at the flags and maps. I made lists, I played tapes she had mixed—Aretha, Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones—and I wrote page after page, tore up half of them, began a sentence and crossed it before I got to the end, my back stiffening as the hours passed. I wandered around the apartment, a cage at times, flipping through magazines, reading Graham Greene, Naipaul, Didion, think- ing up titles for my book and discarding them instantly. Late in the afternoon, I would sit in the long-armed wood chair, a relic from provincial times that she had picked up at a market along with all our other furniture. I would open a book from the stack on the side table, and settle myself for the end of the day, a beer glass leaving wet circles on the chair’s arm. That’s when Gina would come out of the maid’s room in the back, long after she had waxed the wood floors in the bedrooms and the living room with a husk of dry coconut she held with her bare foot. From the back room, she carried the laun- dry folded in perfect squares, the shirts on hangers, the clothes still warm from the iron. She made no noise and she hardly spoke. She was eighteen, from Tarlac province, that much she told us. She left the apartment as quietly as she had come in, around the time Eliza- beth arrived, sweaty and harried, ready for a drink.

We ate out nearly every night, usually at Café Adriatico, some- times with a crowd of reporters. Adriatico was a Parisian scene, with the Cinzano and Pernod umbrellas and the alfresco tables with checkered tablecloths and the old waiters in long black aprons. We lingered hours over garlic shrimp and cheese fondue, the house wine and cigarettes, running home bareheaded in a thunderstorm.

T

wice a month my mother’s letters came, already outdated by the time I read them. Amaury had gotten married to the

woman he had met when he was going to school in NewYork to get his teacher’s certification. He was teaching math and science to fourth-graders in a public school in the Bronx. Mother assured me that he liked it. He had gone to see her in Texas, had taken his new wife, a very nice woman, very serious and mature, mother said.They lived in the Bronx, in the projects. I winced reading that, in the proj- ects? His wife’s family lived there, in the barrio, humble people. Mother hadn’t met them, hadn’t gone to the wedding, a quick cere- mony, apparently.

I tried to understand, but all of it seemed so far from me. Ange- les never wrote, so I couldn’t have known that the revolution was fading for her, that it had worn her out. Things had gone terribly wrong. She was anemic, sick. Finally she was beginning to consider what she had once thought unthinkable. She would leave Managua.

But I didn’t know any of that. Mother’s letters couched bad news, glided over these things. I believed, sitting in my own little revolu- tion in Manila, that now Angeles and I had found places of our own, that I was living a life like hers, in a foreign country in the middle of historic change. She had her stories; I had mine.

So I wrote long letters to my mother, the way she liked them, making her feel that she was there with me. But she wasn’t with me. I hadn’t ever felt as far from my family as I did then, not far in miles, but far, their lives so remote, so unlike mine. Even Angeles’s life seemed distant, but hers was the only life I could really understand. All of the United States seemed unreal, the clean streets, the malls, the dead quiet of the towns where my mother lived, and those grainy images of Ronald Reagan I saw on TV in Manila. Nothing seemed to happen in the United States, and everything seemed to happen in Manila. I told mother those stories.

Christmas in Manila came early. The stores put up the twinkling lights in early November and set up their mangers and their

imported fir trees, draping them in angel hair. Santas glowed red and white, night and day, in display windows. The temperature was ninety degrees, but shopping malls played their scratchy tapes of “White Christmas,” and grocery stores stocked eggnog and fruit- cakes, canned cranberry jellies, glazed hams and turkeys.That’s what Manila has in common with San Juan, I told friends in Manila, those four hundred years of Spanish rule followed by years of American colonization. As the Filipinos never tired of saying, they had lived four hundred years in a convent and fifty years in Hollywood.Weeks before Christmas, offices in Manila began to close at midday to give employees time to shop and party, and the government ceased to function—not that it really functioned the rest of the year. Rumors of coups disappeared because no one was going to have a coup at Christmastime. Churches tolled their bells, barrios had days of fies- tas, processions filled the streets. There was a run on fireworks, and the hotels advertised evenings of choral music.

The city, like the towns of my childhood, became a festival, one very long festival. Parties every night, gifts spread out under trees, eggnog cocktails to make your head explode. Then, on Christmas Day, Boracay. Half the foreign press, it seemed, left town for Boracay, a spit of an island two hours south of Manila. Only bucket planes flew to Boracay—to be exact, to Panay, a short boat ride to Boracay. We wanted to go, not with a caravan of reporters, but alone, the two of us. We left on Christmas Day, after opening the gifts under a tree in our living room, a potted ficus tree Elizabeth had decorated one night with white lights and handmade trinkets from the local market.

Our six-seat plane sputtered to a landing on a grass field sur- rounded by coconut groves just a mile from the South China Sea. It jerked to a stop near a thatched hut, what passed for a terminal, where tourists waited with the chickens for the motor tricycles that took passengers to the docks to catch the next banca to Boracay.

There was a long crossing of water, the banca roiling over slapping waves, and then, the sight of chalk-white sand and palm trees, a Gau- guin painting.

Our days in Boracay began at sunrise, a walk to the village half a mile away, a cluster of taverns, cheap motels, and vendor stalls. I bought waist-string shorts made of flour sacks, a beach towel, a straw hat, and walked on burning sand, slapping at sand flies. I lay on the beach, my skin turning brown, dark brown, black. Before sundown, the houseboys at Casa del Pilar lit the garden torches and brought around our gin and tonics. We put our bare feet up on the balcony’s rail and watched the sun sink into the water. Night fell quickly, and the sky sparkled, stars like diamonds set against black velvet, a dark- ness that was not like the dark of night anywhere else.

S

ix months later I had a third of a book written and was filing articles for a West Coast newspaper, earning some money, and traveling all over Southeast Asia, from Manila to Hong Kong, to Bangkok, to Seoul. Seoul was, in the summer of 1987, the hot spot of Asia, millions of demonstrators on the streets, another dictator under siege. But these were no peaceful protests with statues of the Virgin Mary guarding the crowds, as they had done in Manila in 1986. These were bloody street fights, and the first thing you did was go get a gas mask. Nasty mustard gas spewed out of cannons, and police- men in helmets and shields, armed with batons, marched against

students armed with stones and bricks.

The crowd of reporters and photographers from Manila was there, and correspondents from Japan, from New York, from the Middle East. On the day that Chun Doo Hwan fell, when he resigned, the Seoul press office was mobbed. Hundreds of reporters were clamoring for the text of the president’s statement of resigna-

tion, front-page news all over the world. I stood on a stool, scrib- bling, watching a scene similar to ones I had often seen on TV, dur- ing big press conferences, during crises, but I had never been part of one. Finally, after hours of waiting, copies of the text were handed out, thrown out like confetti. Reporters, photographers, the net- work cameramen stepped on one another, elbowing their way out, scrambling for their rented cars back to their hotel rooms. I had no idea where Elizabeth was, or our friends from Manila, it was such mayhem. I found a way to our hotel and wrote the story and phoned it in to my editor in San Francisco. It led the front page, which was not a surprise—it was the lead story on the front page of just about every newspaper in the world. The surprise to me was that I had written it.

You’re good at this, Elizabeth said later. I raised a glass. Few things made me happier.

Junctures, there are junctures that you see only when you are looking back, when things change, when decisions are made that are immutable, irreversible. My life had been a life of junctures. I made decisions without weighing consequences. I assembled and disassem- bled my life in one moment. I didn’t even know in Seoul, or later, back in Manila, that my life had changed entirely. I knew it only later, when that life no longer existed, when I had passed through it, had lived it, and it was gone.

In one year I had transformed my life, had willfully destroyed the career of editor I had carefully made step-by-step, from one news- paper to another, from one job to the next, rung by rung. I had left the hemisphere I knew, the people closest to me, and had traveled far from all of it because of a mere notion that I had to break free and find a way down to the bottom where the words I wanted to write had long drowned. I had to go away from the origin of the words, my birthplace, my island, my family, to find them again, to recapture

them, and to write them. And I had to go that distance to understand passion.Words and passion came at the same time. It was no coinci- dence that Elizabeth and writing became one and the same. One could not have lived without the other.

I

was working in my bedroom when the letter came. We had moved from the apartment building into an old big house in a compound of foreigners, a provincial-style house with large rooms, plank floors, bleached cedar walls, shuttered windows, and a yard of frangipani vines, tamarind trees, marigolds, and bougainvillea. From the moment we saw it, when we swerved into the dirt driveway and ran up the steps to the porch, we wanted it. There was a rough beauty about it, and a sense that it would soon come to ruin.Winds had blown too hard against it, and time, too, but it was still beauti-

ful and unspoiled.

All day long doors banged, and cars pulled in and out of the drive- way beneath the porch. Dogs barked, the whippets that guarded the compound and preyed on cats. Maids shuffled in and out, washing clothes in their tubs in the backyard, whistling, humming, singing. Everyone was a singer in the Philippines. From my bedroom, where I had my desk, I could hear Gina waxing the floors with her coconut husk, and her sister Edna dusting the window screens with a broom, and the cluck of the rooster the guard kept in the yard. Only the gar- dener made no noise. He walked on bare feet, spoke only when he came up to be paid, sticking out a scarred hand and mumbling apolo- getically, but the rest of the day he kept his head down, literally almost on the ground, hunched over the bushes and plants, clipping the grass with his scissors.

Edna brought me the letter that morning and closed the door behind her when she left the bedroom. I had been dreading this

letter.

The paper was asking if I was returning to Philadelphia—I had agreed to a year’s leave, and now it had ended. I knew my answer before I folded the letter and slid it back into the envelope. I put it in my top drawer, like things I needed to keep around but didn’t especially want to see in front of me. I waited days, weeks, to answer it. I talked to Elizabeth night and day about it, but she left it entirely up to me and refused to be dragged into the decision.

You have to decide, she kept saying. I can’t be responsible.

She had a strong, one might say forbidding, sense of division between us. We were together, true, but we were not one and the same. We were not a two-headed monster, she liked to say. I had to set out my own course just as she had to set out hers.

How well she played that hand, born poker player that she was. My decision was clear. I couldn’t leave Manila. I couldn’t leave her.