Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (14 page)

and get the housekeeper there, Nanette, to turn off their hot-water pipes. The compound’s water tower and plumbing worked just as unreliably as the city’s, with its regular brownouts and rare garbage pickups.

I had grown up with servants, but that was a long time ago, and here in Manila I had found it uncomfortable having maids. I didn’t like giving orders and found myself trying to befriend Edna and Gina, treating them with respect and deference. Once I surprised Gina in the kitchen, started a conversation, but I had interrupted her reverie in the middle of the day and she looked up at me sullenly. She had defiance in her, a quiet rancor that made me watch out. Edna was the opposite, talkative (with her eyes and hands, and in Tagalog), spry at all hours, eager to mend a tear in my clothes, to run to the stall for my cigarettes, to deal with the plumber or the guy who trucked in our cases of beer. She kept the house humming. Because I liked her so, I tried not to notice the subtle changes I saw in her expression when Gina was around. She became stiff and dour with us. There were a few times when they were cleaning together and saw Elizabeth and me sitting side by side, our heads close, our hands almost touching, and I would catch Gina glancing over at Edna, a quick exchange that instinctively made me pull away from Elizabeth.

We had a theory of life below stairs, what we called the culture of the maids—
las criadas del siglo,
we called them, maids of the century. Nanette, Becky, Florence, our neighbors’ live-in housekeepers, kept an eye on newcomers, on the traffic in and out of the compound. After their day’s work they gathered, laughing and whispering, in the backyard or in Nanette’s room next door. Nanette was the elder, the majordomo of the servants. They knew everything that went on in those houses: they overheard the lovers’ quarrels through thin walls, they knew how many bottles of gin were consumed and who slept with whom. The maids, not us, I used to say, really ran the compound.

In the apartment on Del Pilar, Elizabeth and I had worked a few feet apart, interrupting each other, reading aloud, trying out ideas. But now we had a living room between us, a formal arrangement, as formal as we could become, careful not to distract each other.

Working alone in my study, gazing out the windows—cloudy skies, bright skies, street traffic— or lying on the twin bed I had there for overnight guests, watching the ceiling fan blades rotate, waiting in vain for the flow of words to start, was more distracting than having Elizabeth nearby. I could easily fritter away time. I fixed up the room, rearranged my books, put things up on a wall board: the Cory doll, banners, postcards, poolside pictures.

On the days when she was home writing, I overheard cackles, a screech, the phone slamming, some excitement of hers, and three, four times, she came into my room. She made it a point to be brisk: laid her hands on my shoulders, flipped through my pages, gave me a story of hers to look over,

related some news she had heard. With some excuse—that I needed to stretch my legs—I would leave my room and go see her, poking my head out to the porch and pulling up a chair next to hers. One day I caught her drawing, something she started doing in Manila, pen and crayon doodles in her

appointment book, tennis courts, airplanes, birds, herself with hair like flames. Her moods, black clouds, brilliant suns.

Around midday, when the sharp smell of Edna and Gina’s rice and pastis lunch seeped through the house, Edna would bring us a plate of chopped-egg sandwiches and a couple of San Miguels.

Without saying a word, she placed everything on Elizabeth’s desk, backed away, and waited at the doorway to the living room, her hands folded in front of her, for instructions on the grocery list, the menu for the evening, a bottle of gin, cigarettes. Then she padded down the front steps, smoothing down her hair and the wrinkles in her uniform, humming, off to the market.

All day long there were doors banging, cars pulling in and out of the dirt drive in front of Elizabeth’s office. Dogs barked, a pair of snarling whippets that guarded the compound but mainly preyed on the cats. Maids shuffled in and out, washing clothes in their tubs, whistling, singing. From

my back office I could hear Gina waxing our floors with her coconut husk, and early in the morning we were awakened by the whoosh of Edna’s broom and the cluck of the rooster that the compound’s armed sentry kept in our front yard. Only the gardener made no noise. He walked on bare feet, spoke only when he came up to be paid, sticking out a reedy arm and mumbling apologetically about a sick son, but the rest of the day he kept his head down, hunched over the rosebushes, clipping the grass blade by blade with his scissors.

Chaotic Manila had been relatively quiet all that summer, our first three months at P. Lovina. There were no rumors of coups after the one in late 1986 that fizzled even before it got started. There was no news of massacres or ferries sinking or guerrilla attacks in the provinces, where an old Muslim insurrection festered in the far south of Mindanao and the largest communist insurgency in Asia survived in the central islands. With my writing coming more easily, though I had yet to sell a piece, my bleak moods and the fights that followed had grown smaller, fleeting like the migraines I had had for many years. With the rainy season in the offing, the summer seemed to fly by with friends and the daily routine of writing and filing.

Elizabeth, having grown up with cocktail parties and formal dinners, cared little for the social whirl. She had enough of it going out every day on her news rounds. But for me, closeted in the house most of the day, going out was a relief. I needed the political talk, the ferocious arguments, the late nights, all that smoke and wine that we enjoyed at Sandro’s, next door.

Sandro was a sixties radical, had come to Manila from Italy to work on an engineering project in the Marcos years. He stayed one year, then two, more than a decade, found love with a Filipina

model, divorced, and was now living with Candy, a tall, striking Filipina American who had grown up with cover-girl looks and money. Sandro had long ago given up engineering and had become a news photographer, working for European and American magazines, taking pictures all over Southeast Asia. He made plenty of money, lived like a pasha, knew everyone in town, and even in his fifties had the virile good looks of Italian matinée idols. He still showed off a flat stomach and

muscled frame. Even if his hair was graying and thinning, he was one of the best-looking foreigners in Manila—Sandro and New Delhi Nick had the swagger.

Those evenings at Sandro’s were long and heavy, an excess of rich food, drink, and talk. He usually wore his evening outfit, a colorful sarong he had picked up in Burma and a hip-long white linen tunic, and hosted these gatherings on his candlelit porch, which he had enclosed and decorated with Asian masks and artifacts, creating the illusion of an opium den. Puffing on a smoke, he conducted the conversation like a symphony maestro, while Candy, who rarely said much around him, played with her hair and sipped wine. Elizabeth and I always stayed longer than we planned and got home across the yard past midnight and a bit wobbly, the smell of incense in our hair and clothes.

On weekends when the weather was good, Sandro would drive out in his tennis whites, screeching to a stop at our doorstep, letting us into the car for the ride to the Manila Hotel. Courtside, Candy and I drank mango juice and sunned our legs and gossiped about whatever was the latest scandal. Sandro was a screamer on the court, shouting when he made every shot, his face streaked in sweat, headband and polo shirt soaked, and Elizabeth—who matched him grunt for grunt, a racket- thrower herself, merciless in combat—scrambled, leaped, raced, a storm on the court. She was younger and fast but not as strong, and just when she was about to beat him, his knees crunching, he got it out of his gut and something in her pulled back and he would win. “Elisabetta!
Bella!
” he called out to her in his Italian accent, spreading his sweaty arms around her slim shoulders, his six feet bent protectively over her.

We had long dinners at La Taverna, bottles of Chianti drunk with pasta putanesca and all’Amatriciana, simple, old-fashioned Italian dishes that seemed glorious after days of mahi-mahi, sticky fried rice, kare-kare, and pork adobo. Sandro, who had spent fifteen years in the Philippines, entertained us with a stream of stories. He had married and divorced after some scandal he was mysterious about. In Candy he’d found another perfectly sexy companion. She had the tossed long hair, shapely legs, the bikini figure of a model, and had a weekly manicure and pedicure, regular facials and waxing, and beauty naps, and wore satin camisoles. They made a striking couple, elegant and tall in sunglasses.

Presiding at his dinners at home like a sultan in his sarong, tinkling the bell for Nanette and the cook to serve, Sandro made us his sounding board, wrapped up like him in the dirty politics and brutality of the place. “When I came here, this was the third world. Now it’s worse than Bangladesh.” He laughed. “Now it’s the fifth world.”

He was at the point, a threshold often reached by foreigners in the tropics, at which contempt replaces infatuation with the exotic. Locals, once seeming so hospitable and engaging, become, over time, transfigured into ignorant inferiors, mulish, too brown, too dirty, too greedy, shifty-eyed.

Corruption, which at first is intriguing and acceptable after four centuries of colonialism and miserable poverty, becomes a character flaw, ingrained in the locals like a genetic blood disease. Their dreaminess, the way they turn a funeral into a fiesta, which had once charmed, now seems pagan and uncivilized. Their colors become too loud, their manners crude, their language primitive.

Sandro had reached that point. “This is not a country,” he would say, lobbing an insult while speeding down Roxas Boulevard, shouting at the beggars. “This is a collection of tribes.”

Candy sat by cringing, raising her voice to defend her country, knowing she could not, and he would shut her up. Oddly, she was the foreigner among us, the Westerners who were guests in her country. But when Sandro was away on a photo shoot, Candy would come over to our house with a bottle of wine and fill our ashtrays with red-lipsticked butts, telling us
cuentos,
stories that kept us glued to her for hours. Like many a good-looking woman, she had her struggles with men, her wild days as a Makati beauty, and now her boring days at the travel office where she worked. She wanted to marry Sandro, have children, a home, but there was no way Sandro would agree. He was more worried about his thinning hair, his aching legs, and losing his edge in the field. He didn’t know how much more bloodshed he could stomach, but he loved Manila in his way, with that bitter love that he knew would hang on to him forever. I could see it written on his face when Candy talked about traveling with him to Italy to visit, to meet his family. He would abruptly leave the room, turn up the volume on the music on his tape player, and change the subject of conversation altogether.

In late afternoons, when nothing else was happening, we crossed over to Camilla’s house down the lane. There were slices of mango, chocolates, crackers, gin and tonics, and she would show Elizabeth the brilliant fabrics she had discovered in her trips to Mindanao and Bangkok. Camilla wrapped them around her hipless waist, trying them out for color and shade. An intuitive photographer, Camilla had no fixed ambition, no direct route anywhere. She usually had a project going—reupholstering her

sofa, stripping old wooden frames, saving strays in the yard—when she wasn’t traveling out in the islands, sometimes with Elizabeth, taking pictures of military camps and homeless villagers, massacres and shootouts, for a photo agency in London. But there were times we found her in her bedroom, blinds drawn, reading a romance novel, and times when she could not stop pacing from room to room, screaming at her maid for failing to buy groceries, or yelling into a dead telephone after a call home.

She had gone to a boarding school, dropped out, spent summers in the Bahamas or Bermuda and winters in Aspen or the Alps, stayed at the Pierre in New York, but seemed just as comfortable in a provincial motel in Panay or a toiletless shack in the mountains. She traveled first class with her Louis Vuitton luggage or on a jeepney with a knapsack. I often thought there was about her an only child’s loneliness.

Afternoons when I couldn’t write and Elizabeth was out, I would visit Camilla and bore her with the latest report on my work. It was important to me that friends knew I was hard at work, that I was writing, that I was
doing
something. She paid attention, trying to figure out what it was that I was writing. Then we drifted to other things and I would lose her interest. I didn’t enjoy the trust she had in Elizabeth, to whom she confided. So we were left with bolts of fabric to discuss, but I was useless in this area—fabrics and recovering cushions and sofas and those things that interested her and

Elizabeth, at least on the surface. It’s beautiful, I always remarked when she unfolded the cloth, asking if the colors would go with the new slipcovers, the kind of question that I had picked up from

listening to her and Elizabeth for hours.

Around dusk, when the breeze increased and the leaves of the bamboo stalks that grew around Camilla’s veranda brushed against her porch screen, I would run down her steps and up the pebbled lane just as Elizabeth was arriving home. She would immediately throw off her bag and loosen her shoes and Edna would bring us chilled glasses of San Miguel and we would stretch out on the rattan sofa, catching up on our day. Far, far from us, I could still hear the wail of the birds’ eggs vendor on P. Lovina, crying
“Balut, balut.”

Rejection letters came from all the magazines to which I had sent my political piece. One by one, each rejection slip went up on my bulletin board. I tried to find encouragement where there was none. One magazine editor sent me back the manuscript with a terse note saying she already had a writer, a name I recognized, reporting from Asia, and that my article was, with regret, being sent back unread.