Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (10 page)

On my last day at work they brought me a cake and champagne. Everyone stood around, not quite knowing what to say. There were toasts, bloated words. Finally everyone dispersed, and banging closed the drawers of my desk, emptying them of me, and logging off the computer terminal, I rolled off my chair and glanced around one last time at our map of the world and the rubber chicken hanging from the ceiling over the managing editor’s desk. I took down my postcards and notes, and skipped out, running down the stairs, through the beveled front doors.

Two days later, on the morning of my departure, Tim stood with me on the stoop. He was on his way back to Washington on a new assignment and was wearing his single business suit, dark blue, with an old wrinkled tie. After embracing me, crushing me against him, he walked off. His shoulders sagged, his head drooped. I watched him, missing him already.

Andy took me to the airport. We sat in a cocktail lounge, drinking beer, tearing at wet napkins, watching the clock, not saying much. Then it was time to go. I felt a sudden void, and I stood on my toes to kiss his cheek, brushing his hair as he bent down to hold me. Turning away from him, I picked up my bags and went through the gate.

Thirty thousand feet over the South China Sea, Elizabeth was at that moment flying south to Manila from Taiwan, heading home to greet me.
There is a typhoon moving west, just now, toward China,
she scribbled.
It has rained a lot lately. That much is true. Welcome to Manila.

W
HEN I LOOK
back to that August in Manila, I must begin with the rain. It came in gulps, torrents, slashing across the world, drowning it. The sky, a crisscross of flashes, lightning snapping, became a vast black sea, exploding. Palm trees lashed by high winds from the south bowed to the ground, and people caught in a tempest of wind and rain, light and thunder, were washed away, helpless. The afternoon became night suddenly and the city, a city of ten million lights, became a phantasm, ghostly.

Elizabeth and I would watch it come from the casement windows of the apartment, our candles burning and the wind hissing through the cracks, 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.

This time, on the day of my arrival, August 21, 1986, Elizabeth was waiting for me at the

airport. She was scanning the crowd. But naturally, I saw her first. Then she caught my eye, gave me a palms-up wave, a little salute, and moved toward me without any apparent rush. She was not one to come running with open arms. But she had that smile of wonder, a slight swing to her stride and a cocky tilt to her head, looking neither directly at me nor away but focused all the same. She reached around me to stroke my hair, light and casual, as if anything could be casual about this. And picking

up a piece of luggage, she led the way out of the terminal.

The waiting car was the same spic-and-span Crown Victoria with the bleached white slipcovers that had, in the spring, taken me to the Manila Hotel the first time. Rolly was again at the wheel, like he was that day in March, but now he was flushed with the excitement of having me back in town. In the back seat, Elizabeth and I fell into our public roles, awkward, nervous, superficial. We kept interrupting each other with simple chatter, as if we were old but distant friends catching up. How was your flight? What’s going on in Manila? How’s the apartment?

She was good at tamping down emotion, but I could sense her loneliness and her toughness, the marks of those months from May to August of solitary living. With me there, our proximity obliterating all that, her voice took on a light, cheerful note and her face was lit up. Uneasy, I kept looking away, out the window, not at Manila, because Manila was no longer new to me, but to avoid

her eyes, to find a proper distance, to avoid being drawn in too quickly by the perfume that came from her. But then I glanced over and was startled again that she was so oddly beautiful, that she was there.

We had a year, or perhaps only weeks, months, or an eternity. We did not know how much time we had, how much time we would last together, because nothing about us had come conventionally, arranged, foreseen, with preambles and assurances. In the back of the car with her, having left a life behind me, I was unsure of myself. I played with my hair, clutched a magazine, and noticing my anxiety, she reached out and touched my hand. With that single gesture she was reassuring me and herself, and when we were finally alone in her apartment, relaxed on her white rattan sofa, I touched her cheek and felt the elation that ran through her.

She took a week off from work to help me get settled in the vacant apartment I rented on the same floor as hers. By the time I arrived, she had bought me a table lamp, handmade in Mindanao, with a glazed wooden base in deep rose and plum and a wide cloth shade stained burgundy. She had set it up on a plain table by a window, where I would sit for hours and write. She had big hopes for me and

my writing and brought me stacks of copy paper, pens and clips, dictionaries, maps. I took the apartment not because I wanted to have a separate home, but because Elizabeth did. She said she wanted her own place, her own things, wanted to find her own way. For a few weeks, I pretended to

live in my apartment, but I never slept there. My clothes hung in her apartment.

Days and nights fused and everything around us became ours: the restaurants and cafés, the foul streets, the morning fog on the bay, and the moments when, sinking into that city so strange and intimate, we lost all fear. Mornings came after nights when geckos crawled up the walls and we lay in our bed listening to the preludes and canons that had become the backdrop to our silences. There was nothing that came before those nights, before those hours, hours that for me transcended years, anguish and ache, insatiable longing. Tears that had accumulated in me in the years that came before her

would burst out suddenly, and I would drift into a dreamless sleep, her arm around me. I would wake up to the sprinkling of her shower, the sun already above the horizon. Through the bedroom window, you could see the coconut palms in the Malate plaza and overhear, even with the window shut and the ceiling fan turning, the cranking of buses and jeepneys on the street below.

We ate out almost every night, usually at Café Adriatico, under the Cinzano umbrellas, as we had the first night I spent in Manila in the spring and the first night of my return in August. That evening in August the lights went out, leaving the city dark, and we, oblivious to all, kept talking and drinking and picking at the calamari. Our evenings at Adriatico were a kind of refuge, a Parisian scene, with garlic shrimp on our plates or fondue burning, Bordeaux and the chant of the flower vendors, and running home careless in a thunderstorm.

Other nights we had dinner at the Weinstube, a German bistro nearby. As we walked down the tawdry blocks to get there, on torn-up sidewalks crawling with roaches and past gutters stinking of garbage, Elizabeth, loping half a dozen steps ahead of me, laughed as she stepped on the bugs and skipped like a kid over sidewalk cracks. The Weinstube had vacuumed carpets and white linen tablecloths, slithering waitresses, and a piano player. It was the kind of whispery place where expats began their days of drinking in midafternoon. The owner, a willowy Filipina in a tight madam dress and with sharp red fingernails, would slide up the piano stool around midnight and take requests, which invariably ran to “As Time Goes By” and “My Funny Valentine,” songs wafting over rapt guests in a 1940s setting of shimmering table candles and snifters of Rémy Martin and Courvoisier.

We walked everywhere those first months—to the San Andres market down a slummy street and bought potatoes and plantains, pineapples, mangoes and papaya, and the rare piece of fresh fish that had not rotted lying out in open, unrefrigerated stalls covered with flies. We found cloth napkins, place mats, iron pans, inexpensive household stuff, all spread out on straw mats at the market. We felt happily invisible among the barrio people, the housemaids who shopped for the expats, and the

farmers, shirtless men in flip-flops smoking pungent local cigarettes. We bought clay pots for cooking, wooden bowls, and big fat candles to set on Elizabeth’s steamer trunk. Slowly we made a home.

By now I had moved in entirely to her apartment and left mine partly furnished but unoccupied. Her apartment got more light than mine, with casement windows on three sides. The building, dating back to the American colonial era, had seen much better days. The exterior had gone from art deco pastels to a dirty gray. The ground floor flooded, and the stairwell had dead potted plants and a chipped plaster statue of the Child Christ. The building had its history. Alex the landlord, a short, stocky Filipino who brought in young girls from the provinces to work as housekeepers, sweepers, and laundrywomen, would come to our door on one pretext or another. His eyes roamed around, checking the furniture, the rugs, the hangings on the living room walls, and kept us standing politely while he reeled off stories about the Japanese and American soldiers who fought hand to hand in those rooms during World War II. He was a vivid storyteller, had the typical Filipino knack for drama, painting for us scenes of war and bloodshed and bodies spattering on those walls. The ghosts of the soldiers cursed the place, he said in a sinister whisper, and caused earthquakes.

And, of course, MacArthur had once stayed there. MacArthur had stayed everywhere.

From our second floor we had only a side view of the bay, but the city of beggars and restless commerce lay beneath the wide double windows of our living room. We kept the venetian blinds drawn at night, shutting out the orange and red tiled sex motel across the street, where couples snuck in behind tinted windows, their cars disappearing inside. On the other side we looked over the roof of a
lechon manok
restaurant, the most popular on Roxas Boulevard. On days when the wind came from a certain direction, the stench of fumes from the restaurant’s exhaust pipes seeped into our flat, stinking up the place; the trash from the restaurant’s kitchen sat uncollected for weeks near the entrance to our building, spilling out on the street, garbage piles torn up by dogs and rats.

We had three large rooms, a gloomy, sunless kitchen with an old gas stove and linoleum counters, and a maid’s room with a bunk bed and a shower. The rooms had chocolate-brown floors, wax-shined wooden planks, high ceilings, and whitewashed rough stucco walls. It was a flat of onetime elegance, a place of cobwebs in the corners and food smells. Elizabeth’s things—rice baskets, a couple of primitive Malay spears, a lopsided wicker sideboard, a pair of Rajasthani chairs, assorted rugs, and the long-armed chair called a butaca—defined the apartment, set a spare, monastic tone.

These rooms had nothing of our past. In time they became entirely our own, with our things, which we would carry with us from place to place over the years.

We talked endlessly in those rooms. Elizabeth, who had buried so much for so long, unfolded her life slowly, sometimes in streams of words, as if she had not really spoken for ten years, as if she had long ago dropped out of ordinary life. She called her twenties a time of anomie, when she cut herself off from the things that had once moved her—books, music, art, and writing. “I don’t read, I don’t listen to music,” she had said when I first met her, and I thought then that it was some sort of sophomoric cynicism, a juvenile affectation.

She had once bought a small farm and had spent her weekends dismantling the old farmhouse plank by plank. She had planted a garden and a row of fruit trees. For a time she believed she would remake it into the peaceful, private place she thought she needed. But it was never finished. Often she warned me about voices that were loud and clear in her head, and her belief then that life was bare and frail, to be lived alone, a point that came between us again and again. When I would try to smash through that, she would balk, retreating to some place in her head where I could not follow. Her detachment at times confounded me. She liked to say she was a clam, deep in a shell. She didn’t want to stick out and expose the layers underneath. Her distant manner was studied, learned since childhood, I supposed, and by now it came naturally, shading the insecurities that I saw sometimes gnawing at her. Buttoned down, impervious at times, she was the very picture of upper-class Protestant girls groomed to a life in which emotions were meant to be disguised and pushed down.

That surface, a carapace I used to call it, had little to do with the other Elizabeth, passionate and intense to the core.

But there were things I did not talk about, things she wanted to know, about broken loves and long parts of my life I left vague. Family, relationships, old anger. Scars had grown over some wounds—a father who drank too much and carried on with too many women, a devastated mother, a family torn apart—and I refused to rip them open again. I had buried all that so far down, had spent years pouring earth over those memories, I was not going to dredge them up. But it wasn’t the family wounds I avoided most. Broken relationships were best forgotten, I thought, best left to wither away.

“I hate it when you do that,” she said every time I clammed up, reversing our usual roles. “You

go up to your balcony, looking down from up there, distant. I can’t reach you there.”

Sometimes I fell into a dead stare, my face turned away from hers. While she was careful, probing what she knew were my wounds, I was intractable with her, insisting to know it all. Different as we were, we were fighting each other over the same things. We had lived through these things in our phone calls and letters, but without distance to protect us, and isolated in this place, there was no escape. It seemed to me that our relationship broke all patterns, and I marveled at its force, and sometimes I was frightened.

Passion comes rarely, and when it comes, it can be like a seizure, uprooting everything, consuming and transforming, taking possession, and at the same time, freeing spirit and flesh. It brings with it all that we are and have been, incalculable joy and unmeasurable wreckage. Ours was that, all of that. I saw it even then. My depression, her fears; my dreams for her, her belief in me; my hunger for her, her need of me.