Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (25 page)

In all this time I have learned to live without her. I have learned to be alone. That is different from learning to live alone. I don’t mean living alone with an office to go to where you can hear voices, have a drink after work, and I don’t mean having family and friends close by, on the telephone, in the next town, dropping in. I mean alone, weeks spent in entire solitude, locked in, mute to the world, days and weeks when picking up the mail that comes through the front-door chute may be an occasion, hoping each day for the slant of a familiar handwriting, days when you walk by the telephone hoping it will ring, and when it doesn’t, you want to shout,
Is anyone out there?

It is the life she had imagined for me, a life without soirees and salons, without frippery, distractions, or intrusions. I have become what I believe she saw in me, what I had dreamed for myself. There are days when the early-morning sun comes through the windows and falls on this desk and the air has the tinge of summer in it and I play my music, strings and violins, and the old Manila tapes, and I dance alone with a freedom I didn’t have then, not even then.

Sometimes I believe that ours was a love that lived outside us, that it had its own force that had nothing to do with our will, with promises made and moods and fear. I imagine it as an unbroken circle, widening and narrowing but always holding us within it.

We want to discard what we no longer need. Not only do we want to dispose of it, but we want to obliterate it, to kill our onetime need of it. But we want to believe too that the totems we trusted had magic, a kind of protection against evil—the absence of passion—can save us.

We vest in our love a kind of sanctity. We frame it and hang it on our walls, we arrange it so around us, like icons and saints. The lamp she gave me, the black typewriter, the pictures of another time and another place, this desk. These are only objects in the end, possessing nothing but the curves and planes, the visible, palpable symbols of what we were to each other. Now they sit inert, without magic or power, detached from what we have become.

I have not put them away in a basement. I don’t want them out of sight; I don’t want them taken from me. But they are no longer the crucibles of those years. I have stopped kneeling at those stations of the cross. I knelt for so long.

How little we know about passion. How wretched it is. How imperfect. We don’t understand the transfiguration it brings, the delusion, and we shudder at its harrowing pain. I have looked at it for so

long, its flowering and its decay, but I don’t know it truly, cannot yet find the place where it comes from, and yet I know that there is no life without it. Terror is its companion, and loneliness, and desolation, abandonment, perhaps, in the end. We are all fractured, broken somewhere, and passion, this passion of ours, that moment when for once we feel at one with the other, is the only refuge, the only peace we can know.

I have no choices now, in this blanched city where Sundays fall into an easy stupor, where benign churches, redolent with lilies, fill with people who never raise their voices. I want the milky green of plants in the tropics, the loud voices that rent the air, the dust in my face. Her fingers in my hair.

The sky here, and all the spring skies of this place of robins and cardinals, her kind of place, this sky over me has no traces today of clouds. It is perfect, cerulean, azure, azul, all the words we use to describe a sky that is simply itself, pristine, newborn. You want to reach up and hold it in your arms.

I close my eyes and I am listening to her voice. I lay my head back on the sofa, my hair falling over my ears, spilling on the back of the cushion. I feel her moving, coming closer, her fingers barely touching my chin, lifting my face, her breath on my skin. Her face is now on mine, a light, infinite.

I owe Kathy Robbins just about everything. A brilliant agent, gifted editor, and a consummate ally, Kathy has been my anchor for nearly two decades. In all that time, she has been fiercely loyal, demanding, and generous. Her team at the Robbins Office—David Halpern, Louise Quayle, Mike Gillespie, Rachelle Bergstein, and Arielle Asher—is an indispensable support system, always smart, thoughtful, and gracious.

My editors at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt took to this book with enthusiasm and heart. George Hodgman, who acquired the book, gave it his keen eye and sensibility, and Andrea Schulz and Christina Morgan contributed their exceptional talents and skills. Thanks are hardly enough for everyone else who worked on the book at HMH, including Alison Kerr Miller for her terrific copyediting; Lisa Glover for orchestrating production; Patrick Barry for the book jacket and Melissa Lotfy for the interior design; Christina Mamangakis and Ayesha Mirza for introducing the book to the world; Loren Isenberg for expert advice; and Johnathan Wilber for keeping me on my toes.

My deepest gratitude to my family: my sister Angeles, now gone, remains a constant inspiration; my sisters Carmen, Sara, and Olga stayed by me through difficult stretches, always encouraging even when there was little to encourage; my brothers, Amaury and Hank, along with my magnificent nieces and nephews, cheered me on from the sidelines.

I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude to colleagues and friends in Manila for their invaluable friendship and camaraderie over the years I lived there. To all of them,
salamat po!

A number of wonderful editors and writers have offered advice, support, and friendship along the way, especially Alison Smale, Elise O’Shaughnessy, Carolyn Lee, Gloria Anderson, Gene Roberts, Joe Lelyveld, Susan Kamil, Robin Desser, Tina Brown, Graydon Carter, Klara Glowczewska, Reinaldo Herrera, Michael Caruso, Jennifer Hershey, Seth Mydans, Jim Naughton, Danielle Mattoon, and Jill Abramson.

For a variety of reasons, I owe much more than I could ever say to Tim, Andy, Mirta Ojito, Mark Bulik, Mark Fineman, Jennifer Mlekoday, Adam Platt, Tif Loehnis, Tom Christie, Kate Doyle, Nan Doyle, Susanna Doyle, Victoria Doyle, Kate Platt, Greg Brock, Jane Ashley, Mari Mater O’Neill, Liane Ramírez, Monica Corcoran, Amy Blackstone, Julia Preston, Trudy Rubin, Fran Dauth, Jennifer Preston, Belén Fidalgo, and Margaret Scott.

LLT

New York, New York August 31, 201