Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (15 page)

Elizabeth had saved her rejection letters for years, as many writers do, believing rejection was part of what they call the journey. But she glanced over that especially insulting letter, frowning, saying it was unbelievable that the editor hadn’t even bothered to skim my piece. I sulked, glaring at her as if this were her fault, and went off to the fridge for a beer.

“It’s going to take you six years,” she said calmly, pouring beer into our glasses. Was this one of her visions? Why six, why not five or ten? It was 1987. Did I have to wait until 1993? “I just know,” she said flatly. “I can’t see these things about myself, but I always know about you.” I didn’t know if I believed her, but I knew she believed it. Crooking her forefinger into mine, sitting close to me, she said, “You are a writer—of that, maybe only about that, I am certain.”

But I felt that time was running out for me, and my money was almost gone. I had been supporting myself with the money from the sale of my house, but that money was going fast. Around

this time, Kay was called back by the network she had been working for and would be leaving Manila soon. She took me to L’Orangerie, a fancy restaurant where society matrons stopped for lunch with their Rustan’s shopping bags. Over her cup of
halo-halo,
she gossiped briefly about some scandal at ABC. Then, dipping her dessert spoon into the glop of jackfruit, flan, and purple yam ice cream, she dropped a bomb on me. You should go back to the States, she said, get a job. Ignoring the look of shock on my face, she went on. “You can’t stay here doing nothing. It will kill you.” I wanted to lean over the table and knock her head off, but instead I nodded unhappily.

Later I had to admit that I was floundering, snapping at Elizabeth, turning my frustration against her. Just when things were looking grim, my stack of typed pages looking ridiculous, like such a vain

dream, work came along. A reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
was leaving Manila and she recommended me for her job.

Within days, I was off to South Korea. For years, student demonstrations had been a fixture of the Seoul spring season, marking the massacre in Kwangju in the 1960s, but this time the anti-

government movement was much larger, involving tens of thousands of militants, students and middle- class professionals, men and women, young and old. The uprising in a country known for rigid and bloody governments was getting front-page headlines in Asia and in the West. The military-backed government, which had ruled the country for more than twenty years, was on the verge of falling, teetering dangerously. Every foreign correspondent in Manila was rushing to Seoul (as were correspondents from Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing). Elizabeth had a visa and a plane ticket ready to go, and leaped out of her chair when I told her I was going with her. The
Chronicle
was sending me, all expenses paid. I had business cards printed and got a visa and a plane ticket and packed my khaki jacket and notebooks, stuffing a duffel bag. We had no idea how long we would be gone, figured on a week or ten days. Excited as I was, and scared to cover such a big story, I knew that the life of a correspondent was not exactly what I had had in mind when I thought of writing books, but it was quite a score, and I was thrilled.

It was June 1987, and the scrubbed streets of Seoul, swept down to the last scrap, had been turned into a battleground by tens of thousands of youths in scarves, carrying shards of pavement and broken bricks in their hands. From our room at the Seoul Hilton, we looked down on the wide boulevards that at the moment seemed orderly, with white traffic stripes designating areas for pedestrian traffic at corners and intersections. Seoul was all black and white, like a charcoal drawing. White for the students, the white of their T-shirts, the white of the surgical masks they wore to keep from breathing in tear gas; and black for the government troops: black helmets, black shields, black uniforms.

We had left our hilltop hotel and were running down the slope toward the downtown streets, weaving in and out of the student columns, when tear gas canisters started popping from tanks shooting projectiles toward the students. Rocks and hunks of brick and sidewalk concrete flew in the air and crash-landed everywhere, clanking against police shields, on helmets, on students and reporters. Over here was a student moaning in pain, with a bloody face, his head smashed, being carried out of the line of fire by other students. Over there was the unbroken line of helmeted troops raising their thick shields to protect themselves against the rain of bricks and stones. We ran,

crouching, our arms over our heads, faces down, and found a safe spot behind a building. I thought my head was going to burst. People were screaming, running in all directions.
Pop-pop!
The canisters kept coming, splattering on the pavement and blasting the skin. Government troops didn’t use real bullets, but the tear gas was tough, war grade, like mustard gas. I felt it could tear out my lungs.

The next day we went prepared for anything, wearing military-like helmets and U.S. Army gas masks that we’d bought in a shop downtown where reporters geared up. Sweat and breath fogged up my goggles, and I had to take big gulps of air when the tear gas canisters exploded, spreading puffs of stinging smoke. The tear gas was dense, nauseating, and I was coughing, couldn’t hear myself speak. I lost track of Elizabeth and wandered around side streets looking for her. My heart was pumping madly, but I got far enough from the clouds of gas to take my mask off. I was queasy, sick to my stomach. Slowly, trying to orient myself on unfamiliar streets, without a map, I found the way to Myeongdong Cathedral, a center of anti-government activity. I found Elizabeth there, seated on the steep steps up a hill, her hair plastered down, her mask stuffed in her bag, interviewing students.

That afternoon I filed my first story to San Francisco, a straight news account that I wrote in a

nervous frenzy, chain-smoking and pounding on the desk when the words didn’t come. When the editors in San Francisco told me it was leading the front page, I let out a howl and Elizabeth raised a wineglass in my direction and, beaming, said, “You know, you might be better at this than I am.”

We were still in Seoul three weeks later when the final round of the uprising came at the end of June. President Chun Doo Hwan, humiliated by the swelling opposition, which now included world leaders as well as the South Korean corporate and middle class, stepped down. A former general, ghostly in a dark suit, he went on state television and gave a speech that was stirring not for its tenor, as he was emotionless, but because of the words he wielded—
free elections, civilian rule.
It sent shock waves across the peninsula and reached all around the world.

That evening we took off with the boys to the Bear House, a distinctive tavern set in the thick green hills outside the city. At my left sat the
New York Times
and at my right the
San Jose Mercury News,
and we had wine and big slabs of beef and I listened to the stories around the table, telling some of my own, shoptalk, chuckling, everyone puffed up. It was a long, roaring, blowsy evening. Across the table, Elizabeth gazed at me with a smile, making it my night.

Time moved so fast then, and the choices I had to make that summer caught me off-guard. It had been a year since I had moved to Manila, and here was another August so soon. On our return from Seoul I had a letter reminding me that my leave of absence was expiring.

I ripped open the envelope knowing full well the news it was bringing me, read the short formal letter quickly, and, clutching it, stood in front of Elizabeth, who had been seated at her desk, working. I handed her the letter. She scanned it, looked up at me, and said, “So soon.” She had a year and a half left in her tour—a year and a half in which we would live apart. Eighteen months of letters and telephone calls and that awful empty longing. “Impossible!” I said out loud. I remembered too clearly the last time we had been apart, the summer of 1986, when I slept on my sofa, the telephone perched on an armrest nearby so I could fling my hand on the phone the second it rang. I remembered too well the fluorescent lights in the office, the lonely pasta dinners, and the Manila Blues tapes.

I was propped up on cushions in the bedroom that evening when Elizabeth came out of the shower, her long hair pulled up, a towel rolled around her waist and chest. Drops of water trickled down between her shoulder blades and down the curve of her back. I watched her pour lotion on the palms of her hands, rub them together and up her forearms and shoulders, up to the swerve of her neck, then down her legs. She didn’t seem aware of my eyes as she fluttered among her things, doing her ritual ablutions. She slid in on her side of the bed, pushing the lightweight cotton Indian blanket down to her feet.

“Are you crying?” Her voice was low, a whisper. She moved closer, touched a teardrop on my cheek, and took my face in her hands. She could let me go, she said. She could handle it, she said.

I tried to find a way to stay, and I called up the managing editor to tell him I would go back but only to work as a reporter, not as an editor. Why don’t you fly back and we’ll talk about it, he said to placate me. I knew that false ring in his voice. I knew the answer was no. They wanted me back on

the Foreign Desk. I waited silently, thought of a future without a newspaper job and no money. He had won. I would fly back to talk it over. I made plans to go; Elizabeth decided to go with me. Nothing was happening in Manila, and she wanted time off. I called Tim to tell him. It had been a long time since we had talked, and hearing his booming voice and his effusive enthusiasm reminded me of our old talks in the row house. He wanted me to stay at his place, and Andy, who was also living there, would pick me up at the airport. We were packing our bags late the night before takeoff on August twenty-seventh when the phone rang.

Malacañang was under attack, someone yelled into the phone.

We got Camilla out of bed. We woke up Candy next door. The first thing Candy said was, “Sandro’s in Italy! He will hate himself for missing this.” Camilla grabbed her cameras and the four of us piled into Candy’s car and sped down Roxas Boulevard toward the presidential palace about two miles away. The roads were empty. Red flares flashed across the sky. In the distance there was gunfire. Heavily armed soldiers in black berets—the elite presidential guard—surrounded Malacañang and the entrance nearby to Arlegui Street, where Cory Aquino lived. A handful of local reporters and gawkers milled about. Taking out my notebook, I asked the people around me if they knew if the president was safe. They shrugged, shaking their heads. Elizabeth moved into the street crowd, questioning bystanders and the few guards who allowed her to approach. No one knew anything. The soldiers pushed us back, shouting, “Clear out! Clear out!”

It was already past two in the morning, pitch black, strangely quiet suddenly. We drove off to Camp Aguinaldo, some three miles from the palace. The streets around the camp were deserted. A six-wheeled truck was parked crossways near the main gate, blocking the way. We got out of the car and walked cautiously toward the truck and ran smack into a couple hundred men in black ski masks and bandoliers, carrying M16s and M60s. They were massed at a side gate to the camp, pushing their way in. For months we had been waiting for the big coup, the one that was going to end Cory’s presidency, and we also knew it had been drawn up, plotted and directed by a flashy colonel we had interviewed six months earlier. These were his men. This was his coup. That much we knew.

By dawn, a clear, steamy day, crowds had gathered around the camp and on the eight-lane EDSA, the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue that had played such a big role as the site of mass demonstrations during the People Power Revolution. Gawkers,
mirones,
and kids climbed up over the high barbed-wire fence, running not away from but toward the sounds of shooting. Television crews, local reporters, foreign correspondents, and photographers were spread out through the crowd, crouching up and down EDSA along the front entrance to the camp. I was standing with a large crowd when I heard and then felt a bullet whip past my ear. First I felt the wind, the whoosh. Then I heard the crack. I saw a column of soldiers moving toward us, and I grabbed Elizabeth and charged down a street, my heart racing. The pavement shook under the slaps of hundreds of running shoes and rubber sandals. Elizabeth sprinted ahead of me, pulling me forward, and the shooting did

not stop. We ran down a side street of shabby homes and there we found a car to take us back home to

P. Lovina. Drained, exhausted, and soaked with sweat, I filed a story to the San Francisco paper while Elizabeth worked at her desk on the screened-in porch.

No one would agree later at what point the coup failed, whether reinforcements from the north did not come through or the coup leaders flinched at the last moment, arriving at Cory Aquino’s home without the nerve to capture her. But when it was over, the headquarters of the armed forces of the Philippines lay in ruins: shelled, pounded, and finally incinerated. Rebel soldiers came out waving white flags, stumbling and falling, hiding their faces, a defeated army. It was the bloodiest fighting in Manila—some sixty people killed—since World War II.

We canceled our trip to the States, and, making the decision I had known all along I would have to make, I let my leave of absence expire. My days as a foreign editor were over.

For the crowd of foreign reporters and photographers who had lived through the last months of Marcos and the madness of the revolution in 1986, the coup attempt of August 1987 was the last great explosion, the moment, so undefinable, when the story turned. In the next few months there was hardly a peaceful week, a dull day. The coup attempt had attracted notoriety worldwide, and I was filing

stories to San Francisco almost every day and getting raves from the
Chronicle
editors.

A chaotic metropolis in the best of times, Manila seemed overcome with anger and sinister conspiracy theories. A friend of ours, a young leftist leader named Lean, was assassinated in broad daylight, his face blown away by bullets from a passing van while he was on his way to make a speech. Cory Aquino, who barely escaped from the coup attempt with her life, once again shook up her administration. Cabinet secretaries were fired, generals shuffled, captains and lieutenants we knew were placed under armed guard in their own homes. Aquino, looking ashen and haggard after such a close call, took on a steely military pose, no longer wearing her canary yellow smocks and prattling away about peace and reconciliation.