Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (2 page)

diner reeking of onions and burned grease, and homeless beggars wrapped in burlap rags, huddling for heat on steam grates. This part of town was a ruin, rusting away. I walked looking at the ground, the strap of my leather bag weighing my shoulder down, hands balled up in my coat pockets.

Thirty minutes it took me to arrive at the brass and glass doors of the newspaper, a 1920s gray and white tower with marble stairways, brass banisters, and the smell shared by newspapers the world around: ink, cigarette smoke, newsprint. Up on three, the newsroom was a sprawl of battered desks, scuffed floors, and fiberglass-enclosed cubbyholes. The Foreign Desk, where I was an editor, was jammed into the northeast corner of the newsroom. We sat elbow to elbow at a cluster of six desks set side by side in two rows, banging our chairs, overhearing each other’s phone conversations, catching dribbles of gossip. I had the far-corner desk, where I could prop up my feet on a windowsill and get a glimmer of sky out a dingy window. Most of the time I was busy, reading and editing copy, empty coffee cups stacking up on my desk.

In those days the Foreign Desk had an aura. We had only six correspondents to cover the wars, revolutions, and coups of the mid-1980s: the carnage of civil war in Beirut, where the bombing of the

U.S. Marines barracks ratcheted up round-the-clock mayhem; New Delhi, where Sikh guards assassinated Indira Gandhi, her bullet-ridden body bleeding out in her garden; Johannesburg, where the tragedy of racial hatred was played out in violence day after day.

Our reporters rode motorcycles and camels, let their hair grow long and marriages fail, drank heavily, and wandered off into the sub-Saharan deserts to tribal villages and remote refugee camps under siege. We kept a long list of national and metro reporters who wanted to grab the handful of overseas assignments, the plum jobs. They would come over to the desk and sidle up to the foreign editor, pitching their ideas, offering to go anywhere in the world, inflating their credentials (three languages, world travel, even a license in scuba diving).

We played up the romance of the job, tacking up on our bulletin board the postcards, souvenirs, and goofy snapshots of our correspondents fooling around, in baseball caps, khaki vests, sunglasses, arms manfully crossed on their chests as they lounged in swimming trunks against aqua blue seas and palm trees. Deskbound, wan under the newsroom’s fluorescent lighting, we thought ourselves part of the action out there in the field, imagined ourselves inside the postcards as we sat eating our bland lunches of Cobb salads and tuna sandwiches. It was on the Foreign Desk that my longing for far places came out of nowhere. I was terrified of flying and hadn’t crossed any sea or land in the air for years. But the stories out of Damascus, Eritrea and Mombasa, Goa and Cairo, reminded me of my childhood in hot countries, in the Caribbean, and traveling from Puerto Rico to Havana to Mexico

City, where my father studied medicine. They reminded me too of my mother, slowly turning the pages of a copy of the
National Geographic,
pointing at the places that one day she would visit.

Our days on the desk were punctuated by crises and disasters, occasional bombings. We straggled into the quiet mornings, logged on to and scrolled through the wires, looking out for Associated Press bulletins from godforsaken places such as Bhopal, a city in central India where a Union Carbide pesticide plant leaked clouds of toxic gas and chemicals and thousands died. The desk went into high gear immediately. In a flash the desk clerk had tracked down our man in New Delhi

and figured out how quickly he could travel the four hundred and sixty-four miles south to Bhopal.

The question of how he would file his copy from a devastated area—by telephone or telex—in time

to meet the newspaper’s deadline was quickly settled. With bad phone connections and downed lines, it was never easy to report out of India. Bhopal took days.

Aside from the crises, the days on the desk were pretty much set. Arriving in midmorning wearing dusty biker boots and a helmet, the foreign editor looked through the messages on his

cluttered desk, scrolled through the incoming news, and studied the world map pinned above his desk, playing with the pushpins, moving them from one place to another, marshaling his troops. Dave had a knack for sniffing out the next big story, as well as a soft hand with weary correspondents who were fighting malaria or censorship, dangerous travel or complaining wives. Sizing up the day, how the stories were developing, who was writing what, Dave parceled out editing assignments to the four or five editors working. We were not shy about stepping on each other’s turf. I had Latin America and wanted to add South Asia. Somebody else had Moscow, and someone Africa, and so on, but there were no set boundaries. No one truly owned anything. Tensions and jealousies ran under the surface, and the jostling for territory was quite apparent when an editor tried to dominate a big story or had a favorite writer. Unlike some of the other editors who had been on the desk for years, I hadn’t met any of the correspondents and hardly knew Dave.

I would come in to work early, trying to get ahead of everyone else, check the wires and overnight messages. Legs tucked under me, shoulders hunched, rocking back and forth, I trolled the files and kept an ear out to pick up threads of conversations going on around me. I went for days on coffee and Diet Coke. Around six o’clock someone on the desk would sing out, “Miller time!” and we would sign off for the day and cross the street to Looney’s. In those days every newspaper had its bar, usually a dive, and Looney’s was our dive. Picture the squeaky screen door, neon beer signs, gummy linoleum floors, the jukebox and scuffed pool table out back. I huddled up in a booth, dropped a quarter into the slot, and called out for longnecks. I kept my empties lined up on the table, peeling off the labels and talking shop with other editors and a reporter or two. We lingered past dinnertime and then, one by one, closed out the tab and made our way out.

She came out of nowhere, bookish and terribly proper in her tortoiseshell-frame glasses, as if she had just left Miss Chapin’s. They called her Blake. Genderless and a touch literary, her name drew attention, set her apart.

On the day we first met, a Sunday in early 1985, ten months before my breakup, she was on duty on the City Desk and assigned to fill in details in a wire story I was handling about a group of Americans detained in Honduras. I had never read her articles, which appeared in a suburban edition, and had never seen her before.

“She’s very sharp,” the city editor assured me, but I was skeptical. She was sitting a few desks away, her eyes fixed on the computer screen. She turned her face up to me slowly when I approached, as if surprised that someone had dared to stir the air around her. I introduced myself, made a couple of suggestions, and offered to help her with the Honduran telephone operators and the Tegucigalpa bureaucrats. She listened politely, and then, in a tone that showed both deference and confidence, she let me know that she could speak Spanish and had already made the phone calls.

I was taken aback and stood there awkwardly, managing a muttered compliment. An hour or so later, she sent her story to my computer terminal; I gave it a quick read and waved at her to come over to my desk. She pulled up a chair next to mine, stretched her legs up on the desk, and, without saying anything, watched me read it. She was spare, with wavy reddish hair fluffed and brushed back behind her ears. She was wearing tiny gold earrings, loose cotton pants, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Her head leaned only inches away from mine. She spoke only to answer my questions and to make a point here and there, and she didn’t resist, like so many of our reporters did, when I touched up a line or two.

“There, now we have a real news story,” I heard myself say a bit dismissively when I was done editing, pretending detachment but actually taken by her poise, a guarded manner that permitted no

intrusion. She had such an austere exterior, a patrician face, long-jawed, pale, and angular. In her cardigan sweater and woolen vest, she reminded me of the girls I had known in prep school, the tennis players and swimmers who spent summers sailing or touring France. She had that patina— expensive schools, flute lessons, maids in uniform, rigid discipline.

She typed in her byline, E. Blake Whitney—Elizabeth Blake Whitney. She pushed back her chair, jumped up, and thanked me with a fast handshake, then walked away, head high, hands in pockets, her stride long and quick.

I didn’t see her again for months.

Nobody in the newsroom knew much about her. She didn’t burst on the scene, parading her résumé and her private life. She didn’t come to the parties, to the big announcements, the periodic celebrations for one award or another. But she had a canny charm, a honed sense for luring the powerful, dropping by the managing editor’s office from time to time, his freckled face brightening at the sight of her. He remembered that page of her unfinished novel she had slipped in among her newspaper clippings. It was the main reason he hired her, taken in not only by her writing but by the gall she showed, sending him a piece of fiction.

It was rare to find, he said, among the piles of applications he sorted through every day, a talent like hers. She could turn a phrase, he said, an extravagant compliment coming from him. A short essay she did that spring for the paper’s Sunday magazine about living in the suburbs had the rhythm of a tone poem, he said, and she could get into people’s heads. “You should read her interviews. You could put them right into the paper just as they are.” The newspaper had platoons of reporters knocking on doors and poring over documents, doing the paper’s famous investigations, but she made it a point to work alone, outside the bustle of the newsroom, and she did not whine for attention; she did not overplay her hand. On the desks she worked—Suburban, National, Metro—they said she was the ideal reporter: resilient, self-contained, a good soldier.

On the few occasions when she came to the main office in the city from her rounds in the suburbs, I watched her from a wary distance, annoyed that her presence—a walk through the newsroom, a passing smile, a quick wave—could wreck my concentration. I would catch her gazing at me, her eyes drifting in my direction while her body was turned to someone else, and then she would swiftly turn her back on me and I would return to my work, fidgeting at my desk, pretending to ignore her.

One weekend in July, a few months after we had first met, on a day I was busy reading a piece that she and another metro reporter had written for the front page, she came over to the desk and stood leaning against a radiator not far from me. Another reporter was seated near me, his legs dangling off my desk, making himself at home, asking how he could get a foreign assignment. He wanted to put his name on that list. Leaning against a radiator, she listened to him, silently amused.

Quietly, she asked me, “So how does one get on the list?” I was surprised that she would bring up the question directly. “You just tell me,” I said, turning my full attention to her. She nodded, her eyes fixed on my face, and it crossed my mind that she might be playing me to get what she wanted.

The next day I stopped by the managing editor’s office and mentioned her name for a spot

coming open, a six-week assignment in Nicaragua, the new killing field of Central America where the revolutionary Sandinistas were at war with the Contra rebels financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. He stared at me, startled, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, crinkles around his icy Nordic eyes. “She won’t go,” he said with a flick of his wrist, dismissing the thought. “She just got married and bought a house, and she’s not going to leave it for two months.”

But the idea piqued his interest. He had on his sly grin, usually inscrutable, but I had known him

long enough and sometimes could read his poker face. “Bet she’ll go,” I said, taunting him, poking a finger in his arm and then leaving his office.

Several weeks later he offered her the Nicaragua assignment. It took her two seconds to take it. I rushed to invite her out to dinner, something I did with many of the reporters coming onboard.

Walking up the street by the paper, where a few old warehouses and rundown buildings had been turned into bistros and lofts, we fumbled to fill the awkward gaps in our conversation. She was diffident, careful with me, and kept a foot of distance between us, her face looking down or straight ahead. I, trying to impress her, to make my mark early, barraged her with questions, drawing her out, and making sweeping statements about the desk, about the mission. We found a table by the bar, ordered wine, and looked over the menus for a long time. She took a cigarette from my pack, struck a match with the edge of a fingernail, and flipped it into the ashtray, her hand shaking slightly. Her eyeglasses reflected the restaurant lights and partly concealed her deep-set aquamarine eyes, but I noticed that her gaze didn’t waver. She had me pinned.

We drank one glass, then another. After a while, after the half-truths strangers tell each other about their lives—she never mentioned her private life and I didn’t ask—she leaned forward and pushed up her chair, seeming more at ease. Sounding pompous even to myself, I told her that foreign reporting was a calling, strenuous, solitary, and obsessive. Embellishing as I spoke, I said that few people had a natural knack for it, and that I guessed she might have it. I was courting her with words, flattering her and exaggerating my importance at the same time. She seemed drawn in right away and came up with stories she would do in Nicaragua, recalling her trips to Mexico, the purple of the sierras, the Yucatán ruins, the mood of the people, the language.

She had read
The Conquest of the Incas,
and Latin American poets and novelists, and one year after college when she was living in Europe she taught herself Spanish after visiting the Basque region—she had fallen for the barren broodiness of the place, and the food!

It didn’t seem to make a difference to her that Nicaragua was a tinderbox, that villages were carpet-bombed day and night and the city of Managua was a blazing hole—or, more likely, that is why she sought the assignment. She liked the romance of it, the intensity of life lived so closely to death.