Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (5 page)

For Tim, the assignment was over, and he was dejected. On the phone he sounded exhausted, edgy, curt, totally unlike his usual self. He began to dump on his own work and complain about the desk. Had I failed him, I wondered silently, had I been too preoccupied with Elizabeth? He didn’t say, but I had not paid enough attention. He didn’t want to leave so soon and stayed for weeks, taking off with a girlfriend to one of the islands, playing tennis with Elizabeth, sitting alone in his room, sipping Chivas and watching the sun blaze out over Manila Bay one last time.

But Elizabeth was just beginning her tour, and did not take a break. She filed stories every day, sometimes fading out, falling asleep while we talked on the phone on my mornings, her nights. She was up at six and out the door by seven, dashing back to her room, her skin smudged from street fumes and grime, to write and file a piece and run out again, living twelve hours ahead of us on the East Coast. She drank mango juice and played her cassette tapes and had chunks of papaya for breakfast, margaritas at dusk. The hotel staff knew her by now, and her margaritas came perfectly timed, straight up, with a twist, salt on the rim. Perched at the desk in her hotel room, hands flapping in time to the music, she could forget everything, doing the two things she loved most, writing and drinking.

Just around this time, her husband was planning to fly to Manila, and she had been warding off the day. We had talked about it and argued about it. I was impatient, but she wanted to be sure and worried about her parents’ reaction and overturning her life, all of it. But she could not hold out any hope of reconciliation. She was struggling, she said, to break it off with dignity and grace. Elizabeth always wanted smooth endings, muted tones, and polite goodbyes.

His arrival in Manila took away her sense of having a place that was her own, as if his presence

in her room violated her, she told me. She was angry that he persisted, refusing to call it off. When the moment came over dinner, it was swift. She took off her wedding band and, without saying a word, left the table. The next day he flew home. She cried on the phone, telling me about it. The plans she had meticulously plotted out—work, marriage, maybe children—were now over. Everything in her life was changing so rapidly. There was nothing easy about this, having to tell her parents and facing the truth about us, about herself, something that defied definition.

I was restless, distracted from friends and work. Gone were my fourteen-hour days, the late-night TV news from Manila, the excitement, and although the Philippines had stayed on the front pages, my involvement with the story was running its course. Tim was coming back, and he would have gladly kept me around his house, but I had to finish the things I had left undone: I had to sell my house in the suburbs and move a truckload of furniture, rugs, books, lamps, the things one accumulates over years. I rented a restored third-floor walkup in a riverside neighborhood of narrow cobblestone streets and historic brick buildings. I had a fireplace and windows overlooking a parking lot, warehouses, and tar roofs. I moved the furniture from my house in the suburbs, where the grass had grown for months and the For Sale sign had fallen. I had the yard mowed and the house cleaned inside out and the For Sale sign put back up. I fixed up my city apartment, arranged my books, put up the pictures, and had a friend set up the stereo. After work, I stopped at the frou-frou takeout shop around the corner to pick

up a fat slice of lasagna, a container of pasta primavera, a bottle of Soave white. Occasionally I spent an evening out with friends, in Chinatown or in Italian restaurants or at riverside bars. Friends coddled me, kept track.

Tim had gone on another short-term assignment, and with him gone, his pal Andy took me under his wing. He fixed great margaritas—this much José Cuervo and triple sec in a shaker, a cold glass, salt on the rim, twist of lime. He was fastidious about these things. We drank outdoors in the chill of evening in his tiny backyard, or we would go out and splurge on good wine. Andy was a rakish figure at the newspaper, lean and handsome, with spiky black hair, a thatch of premature gray dropping over his forehead. He wore skinny leather ties, carried a hiker’s backpack, and had the strong, silent manner of much older men. He was a loner, flying off to Haiti or Salvador or Nicaragua on a moment’s notice. His passport, his oversize duffel, and his “Trash 80,” the Tandy TRS-80 miniature computer the paper loaned to foreign correspondents, were always packed and ready to go. I met him, like so many others, through Tim, when we were bowling one night across the river, over in a crass honkytonk. His posture struck me, a flat six feet, dangling arms, barbered hair shaved too high up his neck. He was broken up over a girl, living alone with his cat and the worms he grew in the basement of the place he rented on a dead-end block of ten-foot-wide tenement apartments occupied by aging hippies, freelancers, and tweedy university professors.

Andy was one of the hotshots, the sort you kept your eye on, going places. He had been assigned to cover the revolt in Haiti and had been there for weeks, but when the large moment came, the fall of Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the ruinous son of the longtime dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Andy missed it because the Foreign Desk had grown impatient and ordered him to fly back. Andy was holed up at a Miami airport hotel the night Baby Doc and his people fled on an airplane for France. In a fury, Andy called me to rant. He had missed the big story! Within hours he found a flight back to Port-au-Prince and arrived just in time for the riots, the fires on the streets, the mobs in the slum of Cité Soleil. When he came home weeks later, he was deeply tanned and gaunt, wearing a Liberté T-shirt. He brought me a bottle of Rhum Barbancourt, Haiti’s finest. We drank it slowly, molten gold burning our throats.

You’re letting your hair grow, he noticed one day over dinner. That happens after a tragedy, he said, wise man of twenty-seven, his eyes crinkling. He was talking about my long-gone relationship, the lover I had left months earlier, but I didn’t tell him the truth, that no, it wasn’t that—it was Elizabeth.

But he was right about one thing. I had lost direction.

I didn’t go to work early. I didn’t scan the news wires. I walked down the familiar hallways to the cafeteria and noticed no one. Nothing penetrated. But I still edited Elizabeth’s pieces. She was finding her ground, talking out the stories with me. When she was tired after days with little sleep, I would nudge her, trying to fish out of her a curious detail, maybe a strong quote, or a sharp observation to tie up loose ends. Doing this over time, I couldn’t tell where her style, the distinctive way in which she usually phrased things, left off and mine began.

The mail pouch to the Philippines went out once a week, crammed with messages, clippings, books, notepads, batteries, and when no one was paying attention I would hand our clerk a letter for Elizabeth, the envelope sealed, glued, and taped. The letters would get to Manila faster by DHL pouch than by ordinary mail. The clerk never asked questions, her eyes discreetly turned away when she took the letter and stuffed it in the bag. She watched out for messages that Elizabeth would send directly to my computer and alerted me before anyone else could notice.

But I thought everyone knew, and I didn’t care.

Now it was March, and her letters came to my new apartment. I would run up the stairs, grab a beer or open a bottle of wine, dump my things on the coffee table, and rip open her mail, reading her letters in order, like chapters in a novel. She sent me a new tape, Manila Blues volume 2—Diana Ross, Chrissie Hynde, Stevie Nicks. A large brown envelope came another day with a package of postcards—poolside at the Manila Hotel, the tennis courts, the tower wing, on which she drew arrows pointing to her room. She included election souvenirs, Marcos banners, a Cory doll, and a grainy picture of her taken in an instant-photo booth on a Manila street. I imagined her voice and

imagined her in bare feet, twisting her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, the butt mashed on the rim, cassette tapes thrown around her on the floor, and the music coming off her boom box so loud, you could hear it down the hotel corridor.

Some nights I would go alone to a restaurant down the street where people went for tacos and music. I drank margaritas and wrote on napkins, notes I would sometimes mail her. I would leave late, ambling along those dank city streets and falling asleep on the sofa.

All that time I had been making up stories, pages I mailed to her that she would return marked up in brown ink, checkmarks along the passages she particularly liked.

She once asked me, Why do you hate it, why do you hate the place you come from? These pages were stories about the towns of my childhood in Puerto Rico, with garish cinderblock buildings, the turquoise buildings you see all over Latin America, and the noise that fills the spaces in all those towns, the noise of people who explain their lives on the street, in bar corners, at the drugstore, the noise of infinite poverty, an impolite noise, a noise I wanted to forget.

I wrote about my father’s house in a small town on the island, a large thirty- or forty-year-old house where we lived while my father had a private practice and ran the town’s only hospital. Those were the years before I went away to boarding school in Pennsylvania, before my mother left him, taking all five children with her on the day she discovered he had another woman. It was a house of many rooms. The town people called it the doctor’s house, imposing, rising over the town plaza. It had tile floors and a sloping corrugated tin roof and five terraces. I wrote about the maids who

cooked our meals and cleaned the house, and my mother in her heels and her perfume, a lawyer from the big city, San Juan, waiting all night for my father to come home, her eyes black stones.

I went away the year I was fourteen, my trunk packed with sweaters and woolen skirts, my name on labels stitched in each. I was flying off to a place I could scarcely imagine, a private school in the Philadelphia countryside, set among groves of trees, horse stables, and hockey fields. Something happened to me there. At first I was intimidated and shy living among girls older and taller and worldlier than I, the only Latin American, two thousand miles from home and family. I longed for my mother’s voice, for my sisters and my aunt and my grandmother, everything and everyone I had grown up with. Every morning I awoke nauseated, with an ache, a hole in me. But with time I fell in love with the school and wrote poems and began to dream, think, and write home in English. When I returned to Puerto Rico for the summer holidays—having seen snow, pristine green farmlands, and big houses with great lawns and people who didn’t raise their voices—I was uncomfortable.

Returning to my mother’s house, a home she rented in San Juan after she left my father, I lay in bed, hearing her sobs from down the hallway, hating my father and longing for the tranquility of my days in boarding school, when the real world hardly ever penetrated. But I was in Puerto Rico, dressing up in lace and silk, in crinolines, to please my mother. I was a debutante dancing the nights away with tuxedoed boys who smelled of cologne and brought me gardenias.

When I was nineteen, out of college, I lived in a walkup in Brooklyn, telling myself this was the place where I would write my books. I worked as a proofreader in Greenwich Village, making a show of reading Camus on the job and sitting on a bench alone in Washington Square Park in the winter sun. I had to cross Fourteenth Street to get the subway home. I used to hate that walk from the office on Fifth Avenue to Fourteenth Street. I cringed at the sight of tacky stores stacked up with cheap merchandise, fleshy girls in tight skirts and spike heels, smacking gum, and loud men with skinny mustaches and greasy hair. Boom boxes played mambos and merengues at full volume and people greeted each other, screaming, on the sidewalks.
“¿Ay, muchacha, cómo te va?”
Embarrassed at this coarse display, I would pretend I didn’t understand Spanish, that I was not from Puerto Rico, but every now and then I stopped at the alcapurria stand and got a couple of rolls, a taste I remembered

so well, and ate them on the way home.

Elizabeth thought I was stronger for this, what she called my circumstances. Hers were quite different. Everything in her life, she said, had been either “a straight shot to glory”—a phrase she used often, mostly in mockery—with the right schooling, polished manners, and a sense of entitlement, or “a straight road to hell,” which included passion, books, writing, bourbon in the night.

For a long time, she had tried to live an agnostic, neutral life, exquisitely modulated, cocktails precisely at seven, Spode china on the dining table, a perfect dog, a perfect house, a perfect marriage. Her fear of letting herself go, of loving anyone she wanted, was deep in her, deeper than I knew.

That’s why you may not want to come to Manila, she warned me. It’s up to you, she said, but this isn’t friendship. “It’s something dreadful and brilliant.”

I
ARRIVED IN MANILA
in late March, after a thirty-hour flight spent squeezed in a window seat in economy. On the way from the East Coast to Los Angeles, I read a book, smoked, drank wine, and paced up and down the aisles. For years I wouldn’t fly anywhere, and there I was flying halfway around the world. We had a five-hour layover in Los Angeles in the middle of the night, and, relieved that at least one leg of the trip was over, I had a beer in the terminal, wandered around the airport shops, and with nothing else to do, tried to get some sleep, bundling myself on a bench, but it was impossible.

Filipinos swarmed around the check-in counters, a mass of people with bulging suitcases and overflowing shopping bags and large cardboard boxes strung with rope. It seemed a whole country was moving. I had seen this before, at the Miami airport, at the gates for Caribbean and Central American flights. It reminded me of flights from San Juan on Pan American clippers flying to Miami and New York with laborers and farmhands crowded in the back of the plane, women holding on to their babies, men in straw peasant hats holding on to shopping bags of beans, plantains, and mangoes.