Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (6 page)

The Philippine Airlines flight was packed, an airborne migrant bus. For the thousands of Filipinos making a living in California, it was the cheapest way home. Once all were aboard the Boeing 747, the PAL flight turned into a fiesta. We got as much San Miguel beer as we could drink, had meals every other hour, and could smoke anywhere. There were loud gatherings in the aisles, in the galleys, by the exit doors. In that setting there was no room for solitude or reflection. I had five hours before the stopover in Honolulu and another ten or twelve, depending on the headwinds, before landing in Manila. The movies flickered silently on the screen, people wrapped in smelly blankets snored, and the cabin was freezing, while the attendants, young Filipinas with fluttering eyelashes and whispery voices, giggled in the curtained-off kitchen galleys.

I couldn’t sleep and pretended I was already living in Manila time. I tried to picture Elizabeth’s day. Was she watching the clock, counting the hours until my arrival? Forty-five thousand feet above the Pacific, in the predawn dark, a vast blackness out there, I couldn’t see her face anymore, couldn’t hear her voice. She had become evanescent, a hallucination, a blur of reddish gold, ivory, and cream, the shades of her.

It was early morning in Honolulu when we landed for refueling. Strange all of a sudden to see daylight and palm trees, and to have flown back in time. Hawaii seemed a mirage suspended between yesterday and tomorrow, a few thousand miles east of the International Date Line, dead time, when in a second, you lose a whole day of your life.

The last leg of the trip was the longest, twelve sleepless hours. I was jammed against a couple of seatmates, a disheveled girl in a frayed frock who was playing nurse to the obese fellow she was

traveling with, feeding him his meals, tucking him into the blanket, taking him to the bathroom. He had hired her in San Francisco to keep him company on his bride-hunting trip to the Philippines. He had documents, pictures, and letters from a girl there, he said, and I thought of that poor Filipina,

dreaming of a handsome Americano and a house in the California suburbs.

The smell of stale food, waste, and sweat filled the cabin, and my legs ached, but I was distracted, listening to the Filipina attendants talk up the wonders of their country, the volcanoes, the mountain ranges, the beaches of Boracay. Finally we descended through miles of rain clouds and then broke through. I looked down on a gray sea and the dirt-sand coastline of Manila, narrow-tailed

boats, fishing nets strung from black poles, wobbly shacks partly immersed in water, and everywhere,

from one end to the other, palm trees. Just as I had imagined. I felt a sudden quickening in my chest and jumped to grab my bags, first in line.

After all that distance and time, it now seemed there had been no distance at all between the East Coast, thirteen time zones away, and this haunting country.

The Manila airport sat in a bayside field surrounded by shacks. In 1981, when it was completed, it had a sleek, modern look, a sweep of steel and concrete and sheaths of glass. But in 1986, just five years later, the exterior looked weather-beaten, and the cream-colored linoleum corridors were scuffed, smelling of industrial cleaner and cigarette smoke. I moved down the terminal in a fog from jet lag and the shock of arrival, my duffels banging against my legs. As we came to Immigration, a row of cubicles with uniformed clerks eating their lunch of garlic rice and longanisa, the smell of pork sausages drifting to the passenger queue, a mariachi band appeared, plucking away at string guitars. Dazed, I smiled at everyone.
Mabuhay!

I looked for Elizabeth but knew she would not be there. She would think it too ordinary to come greet me at the airport. Or perhaps she was frightened of some public display—that I would run to her and grab her in my arms. But for hundreds of others these arrivals were a celebration, and they crowded against waist-high barricades, shouting and shoving to embrace friends and relatives.

Elizabeth had sent a driver to pick me up, and there he was, holding up a cardboard sign with my name carefully printed on it. He had a rubbery face and eyes puffy from heavy drinking. Outside, on the ramp for arrivals, the multitudes multiplied and the temperature seemed twenty degrees hotter. The sunlight made red motes in my eyes, my skin felt grainy, dozens of minuscule bumps rose on my neck. The muscles in my arms twitched, blood rushed to my face. I put on my sunglasses, hoping the circles under my eyes would not show, and ran my hands through my hair, which was curling in the heat.

Buzzing around us were hordes of vendors, cabdrivers, guards blowing whistles, flower peddlers. There was no room to move. The taxis were battered, the fenders dented if they had fenders at all. The seats were covered in torn clear plastic or in heavy corduroy. Flowers wrapped in cellophane were thrust at my face from every side, and sampanguita garlands were flung around my neck. “Mum, mum, you want?” vendors whined, holding out palms with filthy fingernails. “Only one peso, please, mum.”

Rolly, my driver, shooed them away and went to get his car. Shoved by the crowd, I waited for him to come around, wilting in the humidity and the stink. Out beyond the airport, they were burning rubber tires, garbage, and sewage, a nauseating smell I would come to always identify with the country. The heat had a meanness to it. Like a swamp. No sweet breezes off the bay, no swaying palm trees, no bright tropical flowers. Only this suffocating damp heat and the bitter smell of too many bodies packed too tightly in airless space.

The road that ran from the airport to downtown Manila followed the contours of the bay. It was lined with dying palm trees, squatter camps, unfinished condos, discos, fleabag motels, cocktail lounges, fish markets, churches, massage parlors, and food stands. A long time ago the road was the boulevard of the rich, with their mansions facing the harbor and the iridescent sunsets of the South China Sea. Roxas Boulevard was hardly grand now, but there was still a touch of lost beauty in the sweep of the road, the panorama of the bay, and even in the frayed royal palm trees along the way.

As we lurched from light to light, bumping over potholes in insane traffic, Rolly pointed out the sights. The Baclaran Cathedral, the Manila Yacht Club, the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines. The sky was a primal blue, cloudless, and the sun was bristling on that twenty-second of March, at the peak of the dry season. I rolled down the car window to smell the city, inhaling the fumes from the

jeepneys that crisscrossed lanes, blasting their horns. The jeepneys, jitney buses converted from discarded wartime jeeps, were the main public transport on the Philippine islands, tailor-made to suit the owner and christened with names like Sagittarius, Sweetheart, Virgin Mary, and dolled up with gaudy lights, heart-shaped decals, ribbons, and Child Christ figurines dangling off the rearview mirror.

At an intersection on the bayside, on a landfill jutting into the harbor, a cluster of boxy mausoleum-like buildings were laid out on watered lawns between tree-lined boulevards, slums and sari-sari stores, roadside stands selling cigarettes and beer. The buildings had the impersonal presence of American convention halls. These constituted Imelda’s monument to herself, the campus of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Rolly beamed at the sight. To him it looked American, like pictures he had seen of Los Angeles. Imelda had it built in the 1960s to lure international conferences and jet-set glitter to these bedraggled shores. In the 1970s celebrities the world over did come to the brocade ballrooms to be wined and dined under vaulted ceilings and chandeliers. Ronald and Nancy Reagan flew in for a visit, as did the fringe Hollywood stars, the George Hamiltons and Liberaces, and the heiresses and divorcées, the Doris Dukes and Christina Fords. Now the Cultural Center was drawing only the has-beens of the concert circuit, itinerant evangelists, and third-rate conventions.

Rolly tried to be the perfect guide, and I was absorbed, already defining the place, and watching for the Manila Hotel. First I saw the tower wing, a vertical white concrete rectangle with a slanting bluish-green roof. As we got closer, driving past the iron gates of the whitewashed American embassy, where dozens of Filipinos shoved and slept in line to apply for visas, I saw the hotel of Elizabeth’s postcards. And I felt the blood pounding in my head, knowing that she was waiting.

The hotel was elegant, vintage 1912 California missionary style, set back from the street with a sweeping driveway and a porte-cochère edged with royal palm trees. It was painted a colonial white, and it had turrets and balconies and floor-to-ceiling casement windows. General MacArthur had

lived there for years; Hemingway had visited. In 1986 the hotel was the province of the foreign press.

U.S. networks and newspapers all had offices there. Diplomats and congressmen, human rights activists, freelancers, and photographers roamed the halls. Informants, treasure hunters, and Vietnam War veterans lazed around in the hotel bars, drinking Johnnie Walker in mahogany-paneled rooms fragrant with fresh orchids.

I didn’t want to hurry as I stepped up through the brass-framed portal, walking under the high swooping arches past bellboys in white uniforms, gliding on marble floors that glistened from decades of polish. I was trembling, seized by a sickening sensation of terror and excitement, but tried to appear casual, like a jaded tourist landing at yet another port. The lobby was enormous, with clusters of dark burgundy sofas and armchairs laid out under a carved wooden ceiling and cascading Capiz chandeliers.

It was a hotel for grand entrances and passionate intrigues, drunken reveries and moonlight dinners by the water. I could see myself growing old in those rooms, having coffee by the pool every morning. I would become an eccentric character in a straw hat and sunglasses, wandering absent- mindedly through the garden. “She comes here every Christmas,” the regulars would whisper. “She has her Bombay at that table at six o’clock every day. They say she writes books.”

Rolly took my bags to the shiny marble-gray reception desk, where the carefully groomed clerks chirped and laughed, greeting me effusively by name. They had everything ready, the registration form, the bay-view room, a formal letter of welcome. A manager took me up to my room, and I knew Elizabeth was near, not there in my room on the eleventh floor, but in room 817, where she had been living for two months, where she worked and played music, the room I had tried to picture so often.

Taking his time, the manager offered me chilled fresh kalamansi juice, a bowl of tropical fruit— mangoes, papaya, bananas—and a bouquet of flowers plucked from the hotel’s garden. He threw open the dark wooden trellis that had been placed in front of the sliding glass doors to keep the sunlight from bleaching the upholstery. Through the glass doors to a small balcony, I looked out on the harbor and the pool and garden below. I stood there for a minute, squinting at the sun, forgetting the manager was still in the room.

On the bed was a plain paper bag with my name on it, in Elizabeth’s handwriting. After the manager left, I tore it open. I pulled out a T-shirt with an Asian woman’s face printed on its front, a small bag of salty plantain chips—the kind I loved as a child—a Philippines flag decal, and a hardcover notebook with a scrawled note on the opening page,
Mabuhay Ang Filipinas! Figured you’d find something to fill this up—Elizabeth.
I sat on the bed, tried on the T-shirt. I took the adhesive paper off the decal and pasted it on the notebook’s red cardboard front cover. I opened the bag of plantains and took a mouthful. I sipped kalamansi juice: tart, like lime, but with a sweet edge. I took a quick shower, rinsing the plane off me, and put on jeans and a shirt. I looked in the mirror. My face had no color; my hands shook.

Finally I walked down the hallway, past the guard, to the elevator and punched 8, and walked very, very slowly to her door. I knocked and she opened immediately, the sudden click startling me. I stood there, frozen. The sun beamed in on the room, streaking her hair. Her face was fuller and her skin was shades darker, deeply tanned, and she was smiling, gleaming in a way I had not seen her before. Everything I had thought about, the words I would say, the way I had scripted this moment, all of it left me. I stared at her, whispering something. I don’t know what we said but we didn’t touch.

Walking in, I flopped down in a rattan armchair and she took the sofa. She inspected me closely, getting used to my being there, stretching her legs the length of the sofa. “Your hair’s long.” She smiled, her eyes running over me. “But you look great.” I could feel every pore on my skin, every line on my face. I looked around the room. Brown furniture, rust colors, vanilla walls. She had a Philippines flag on a wall—dark blue, white, and red with a sunburst of yellow—a Cory doll,

bumper stickers and banners from the campaign. Messages, notes, and postcards were stuck with pushpins on a board above her desk. She had her Walkman wired to hand-size speakers on top of a TV set, her Tandy computer on the desk next to her old Royal typewriter. There were clothes draped on a chair. The sliding door to the balcony, which the housekeepers liked to keep locked against flies and mosquitoes, was wide open.

She brought me a drink and took one of my cigarettes. I couldn’t look straight at her, and the tension didn’t ease as we talked and drank wine. Neither of us moved. At last she rose to refill her glass and walked behind me. I could feel her standing very close behind me, her hand on my shoulder, and I touched it, keeping my hand on hers for a very long time.

That evening we went to a café in the Ermita-Mabini neighborhood they called “the tourist district.” We took a sidewalk table under a Cinzano umbrella and drank wine and picked at gambas al ajillo. Children were playing hopscotch and jumping rope across the street on Remedios Circle, and vendors strolled by with bunches of red roses and carnations. Table candles flickered in the breeze, and the night was bright with the headlights of passing taxis and the neon signs of restaurants and nightclubs and cocktail lounges. Café Adriatico was packed and noisy, and the bells of the four- hundred-year-old Malate Church tolled nearby.