The Noise of Infinite Longing (33 page)

S

omething happens when a story dies, like a passion oozing out slowly, unnoticeably, until nothing is left. Manila was falling

off the front pages, and many of the foreign correspondents had left for other parts. I hardly saw Elizabeth in 1988. She was in Sri Lanka for two months, in Vietnam for a month, in Bangkok. I had her telegrams from Hanoi, from Saigon, and letters and postcards. But I was now living alone most of the time in our house in Manila, and when we were together, reality was unavoidable. Her assignment was ending, and I had a job offer in New York. We had three months left in Manila, plenty of time, it seemed, but once you know you have to leave a place where your life has changed, each day becomes a departure, peeling away your skin, tearing pieces away until the waiting to leave becomes almost as painful as the leaving itself.

We didn’t know what the months would bring, what our new life in some other place would do to us, but we knew it would never again be the same.

The last months rushed at us. Horrid things happened in the Philippines. Typhoons battered the country, ferries sank, coup rumors swirled again. Edna and Gina left us.

December came, the Christmas lights went up in stores, on the buildings on Roxas Boulevard, on the tree in the lobby of the Manila Hotel. And I bought my one-way ticket home, to the United States.

The rain was still falling in December, and our house was damp to its seams. My clothes had the smell of rain, of something old; the pages of my books were curling in the humidity; and the yard was deep in mud. At night, the rain seemed harder, louder on the tin roof.The tree branches slapped the shutters on the screen windows, like the storms in Puerto Rico when I was a child, when I hid under the sheets on my grandmother’s bed.

For so many years I hadn’t remembered much about the place, but the color blue, all the shades you see all over Latin America, and the noise that fills the spaces in those towns, the noise of people who explain their lives on the street, in bar corners, at the drugstore, the noise of infinite longing.

I had moved farther and farther from it, until this night in an archipelago in the Asian tropics, in this house of bleached cedar walls and wood floors, a house shaded by tamarind trees and coconut palms, where rain fell in torrents on the tin roof, slashing down to a ground planted in marigolds, the island of my childhood, the island I had abandoned, came back to me in fragments, fleeting, brilliant, elusive, raw like the rain, like passion.

But just as swiftly, it left me again. Someday, Manila, too, would come back to me the same way, in fragments, in flashes of overlap- ping moments, like photographs taken too quickly, one frame lying

on top of the next, out of
f
ocus,
cut o
ff.

T

wo months later, in February, we were living in Manhattan, in a five-story walk-up near Central Park. I had a job editing copy

and writing headlines, deskbound from four in the afternoon to mid- night. After life in Manila, this was extreme tedium, a routine bound by the clock, by deadlines, by the coffee cart that came by the desks every afternoon at five. Watching the wall clock tick ever so slowly, waiting for the nightly “good night” from the desk chief that meant I could finally go home, I wondered, what am I doing here? My Manila tan faded quickly, my face seemed aged, furrowed, and sour. I wrote in the mornings, lashing myself to my desk in the small room in the apartment I used as a study. But my mind began to close again. I was putting up walls all around me.

The first one to notice was Elizabeth. She waited for me at night, bringing me a beer, listening to the stories of my day, trying to lift the depression and anger I didn’t bother to hide. She would finally go to bed wounded, a bird shot down from the trees. Once, when we were in Manila, she warned me that someday I would destroy us. I thought of that now, in NewYork.These nights when she waited for me became nightmares for her. I can’t listen anymore to this, you’re bent on destroying yourself, she screamed one night, and picking up her trench coat, she ran out of the apartment. It was one in the morning. She didn’t come back for hours.When she returned, I was still on the sofa, drinking.

Her face was a fury, and a sorrow. She had cried for hours on the steps of a church nearby. You get over these things easily, she said when she came in, but they take everything out of me—they kill me.

The passion was leaving me, the days when touching her was all I had ever wanted. I didn’t see it then. I saw nothing but my own mis-

ery. I was beginning to leave her. I was pushing her away. But we could not let go. Life without each other was not imaginable.

We decided to leave NewYork.

Over the next three years, we crossed the Pacific again several times. For a while we lived in Tokyo. She worked for a magazine, and once again I was writing, flying to Manila for long periods, leaving her to her steamed rice and beans, to nights where she didn’t sleep at all. Tokyo was a prison for her, no place for a woman like her, no place for someone who, like so many wanderers the world over, came alive in the heat and murk of the tropics, in those backwater places of the third world. All that time she spent alone in our apart- ment in Tokyo was far more difficult and lonely than she ever let me know. She didn’t complain. She didn’t demand anything. She had wanted it all for me, wanted the book, the magazine assignments, the smile that had returned to my face, my tanned face.

After nine months inTokyo, we moved back to NewYork. She had a new job, and I was traveling all over the world for a magazine. I didn’t see her for months. I didn’t see the changes, the end that was coming.

On the day I returned from South America after two months away, she sat me down and said, I can’t live like this anymore. Were those her words? I don’t know. That’s one of those photo negatives that overlaps another and another and another.

What is there, what is the picture? Only this.

Chapter Twelve

San Juan,
2001,

“This Sea, These Long Waves”

T

he light falls faintly on the rocks rising along the shore, right where the waves roll up in an unbroken rhythm and come crashing down, swallowed by the black sea. All other sound is drowned, only the incantation of sea against rock, of water heaving

and rising and falling, again and again.

How dark the night is in this place where I was born.

My journey back to this island has been unimaginably long, thirty-five years, a span impossible to measure that stretches over a life, mine, my family’s, the island’s, and my mother’s death. I left when I was sixteen years old, but at this moment, sitting on a bal- cony high above this point of earth and sand carved out of the Atlantic, in the silence of two in the morning, the years fall away, and there’s no sense of time having passed, of the distances I have trav- eled away from the island.

I have finally come home, to this stillness, this insistent sea.

Strange, my own banishment from the island. How could I have been gone for so long?We grow up and too often drift away from fam- ily and birthplace, from the towns of our childhoods, but few of us leave behind everything as I had. I used to tell myself there was noth- ing for me in Puerto Rico. My mother had moved toTexas. My sisters and brother had scattered far from the island. My father was still there, but what could the two of us talk about, what did we have in common

but blood and flesh? He was not a stranger to me, but worse, he was someone I knew too well and didn’t want to know at all.Those were the things I told myself, but I knew that was never the whole truth.

We had emigrated like so many others. We had separate lives in separate places and the island was no longer our address. But I had gone farther away than Angeles or Amaury and certainly farther in her heart than mother. Something of them, something unchangeable, remained in Puerto Rico. But I had wrenched away and had trans- planted myself entirely. I had grown new roots—frail roots that I could pick up and move at a moment’s notice—reinventing myself as if there had never been that old soil beneath me, and in me.What a liar I was, pretending that these threads could be cut off if only I didn’t go back to the place of my birth, the home of my childhood. Sitting on this balcony on this night, I finally see that for thirty- five years I had been a wanderer, restlessly moving, tossing and turn- ing from place to place, from lover to lover, a citizen of the world, which, of course, means a citizen of nowhere. I had been seeking a home, yearning for something I could put no words to, something I

had misplaced somewhere.

Now I am here, home, but perhaps it’s too late. Perhaps the island won’t take me back, perhaps my place in it was erased by the years, and I have no markers left.

M

orning comes full-blown. The sun absorbs the world. The palms waft in the rising wind of spring, and the sea, soothed

by the light, appears translucent where it touches the shoreline and vast, interminable, gray green toward the horizon. It is seven in the morning and on the beach the sweepers are raking the sand, picking up pebbles, and the pool boys are setting up the lounging chairs and the towels. The sand is already burning.

On the spot, just where the beach curves, where my mother would be sitting, shading her face from the sun with her hand, a chair lies unfolded, its chrome legs glinting orange in the heat. She would be reclining there, under that palm tree. I take the chair and imagine myself being her, seeing the water the way she saw it, her head tilted toward the distance, her eyes half closed.

O

n a hot, cloudless day in September 1994, ten days after her birthday, we had buried my mother in a country cemetery in

the Texas town where she died, two thousand miles from her island, from this place in the sand that had been hers for so long. In the church, the pews were filled with people who had not really known the woman I had known, who had not heard her speak the lines of García Lorca, who had not seen her move on a dance floor, who had not seen her eyes reflected in the sea. And after the last prayers were said, they lowered the mahogany coffin into the ground, and we, her children, standing together, but apart, outsiders like her, did not look. It is late March 2001. The six of us are together again. We have flown to the island from NewYork, New Orleans, Dallas, Honduras, to bury our father. We had expected his death because he had been ill for several years, during which I didn’t see him once. But when the news came that he was dead, I shuddered, the distance that had been ours during so much of my life was suddenly gone, and I knew

instantly that I had to come to his side in his death.

The island has become over the years in my memory a series of still lifes, which I recall in furious winds and hot rains, a place of trammeled beauty. Flying in, floating over the jagged coastline of San Juan, gliding over the five-hundred-year-old fortress of El Morro and over the peacock-colored colonial buildings of Old San Juan and the rows of beige-and-pink hotels along the shore, the plane had

dropped slowly onto the runway of the Luis Muñoz Marín Interna- tional Airport. Just as the brakes screeched and the wheels rolled to a stop, applause broke out, as it always did. People scrambled for their bags, the door opened, and a blast of hot tropical air hit my face. I had not forgotten that smell, that air; that was not a still life. Along the road in San Juan, there is hardly room left for one more building. Hotels clutter the view of the ocean, expressways cut into old neighborhoods, and every other stop seems to have a Burger King. High-rise condominiums and gated communities rise along the beach, and the slums are mostly gone. San Juan spreads out before me in all directions, in pastels and undiluted colors, the sea speckled with sunlight.The Caribe Hilton, where I had learned to swim when I was a child, has been renovated once, twice, three times in the years since I had last seen it, and is painted a rich vanilla, its entrance

a spray of yellow flowers.

Olga is already there, the first one to arrive. She is in her room, her eyeglasses on, her hair combed down in girlish bangs, and she’s on the phone talking to her sons in New Orleans. She drops the phone and bursts into tears when she sees me. We had seen each other several times since mother’s death. We had had our sisters’ reunion in Miami and visits in Dallas, but this is the first time that all six of us would be together since mother died. What we don’t say because it doesn’t need to be said is that it had taken the deaths of our parents, nearly seven years apart, to bring all of us to the same place at the same time.

Arrangements, Olga, we have to make them all. You, Sara, and Carmen stay in this room, and Angeles and I will stay in my room. A memorial service has already been planned by father’s family, his wife’s family.We, his children, I think, are like guests of honor, mak- ing our brief appearance.

Sara and Carmen, looking as if they had just gone for a stroll

instead of a four-hour flight from Dallas, come in, lugging their bags, just as Olga and I are talking. Sara looks very thin, though she isn’t; it is only her face that looks thin, sucked-in cheeks, that sharp, birdlike face she has. Carmen looks perfect—how does she do it?—diamond earrings on, hair curled, fresh makeup, her ladies’ jeans creased as if she had just ironed them.

No noise in the world is like the noise of sisters seeing one another after a long time. It’s not only the words and exclamations, but the noise of memory and joy and awful sorrow, all at once. Everyone is talking at the same time, exchanging flight stories, and everyone but me is dialing up on cell phones to husbands and chil- dren back home.

Angeles is arriving later tonight, after a ten-hour flight. She had to go by way of Costa Rica and Caracas. We’ll have to go and pick her up at the airport, I say, you know she can’t stand not having someone waiting for her. And Amaury? someone asks. He’s already here, staying at Jacobo’s. He brought his wife.We’re going over there to Jacobo’s and then we can all go get Angeles tonight. Arrange- ments, always the arrangements.