Ilustrado (32 page)

“How could such a cretin as he have such good taste?” Salvador wrote of Raoul. “His title, after all, had been bought by his father, an Algerian émigré who had shady success in olive oil. It’s usually the new rich who have the obsession, and therefore the better appreciation.
Gigi, with her annoying sense of the absurd, would always bring me fancy-wrapped gifts, usually, inexplicably, fresh haggis, which went laughed at but uneaten.”

—from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco

*

It was at that particular New Year’s party that our beloved friend changed forever. Pipo had just driven down at brakeless speed from a rendezvous with Sadie in a small hotel atop M——. As he later, rather drunkenly, recounted, Sadie had informed him, cruelly, in the disheveled bed, that this weekend she, his unattainable Sadie, would continue to remain so, as she was returning north to Aigues Mortes, with Raoul, to spend the August holiday with him and her family. It was as if already forgotten was the previous night, or those promissory words they had uttered with clasped hands on the sands of La Concha a month prior. Pipo and Sadie had so wildly secluded themselves those four days in the Hotel Maria Cristina that during his train journey home he had marked the miles with smug grins, satisfied that he had left her finally truly his. This he told me, not seeing the jealousy in my face.

Now, he was slurring more nonsense into my ear. “For what purpose,” Pipo demanded, his breath reeking of amontillado and vomit, “is this vexing faith I have in a spoken-for woman, as if the acts of her transgressions upon Raoul—that cuckolded Extremaduran count nearby, attending to business in Hendaya, with his big nose and . . . what was I saying?”

“Acts of transgression,” I offered.

“Ah, yes. As if those acts of transgression are my own personal triumphs? In truth, the love of the forbidden has been masquerading as love itself. I’m sure of this. Now. Perhaps it is not that I love her. Perhaps it is that I hate him.”

I was trying to stay angry with him, with his recklessness and callousness. From M——, Pipo had driven my Bugatti through a rain shower tinged muddy from the dust storms of North Africa. He screeched the car to a halt, its windshield almost opaque, just before it could plow into the tables outside Els Quatre Gats where we, his friends, sat drinking beneath the full glory of the clearing sky. His irresponsible nocturnal descent had done nothing to sober him. I was, of course, quite incensed. But Pipo’s always been too charming, too beautiful, for me to stay angry.

Then he rubbed salt into the wound. Among the large clique he later invited upstairs to his apartment was Max, my own former lover. It was with him, it would turn out, that Pipo later smoked his first opium on the rooftop. Malignant rumors abounded the next morn as to what had happened in the solitude of a moonless sky.

I confronted him over breakfast, trying not to betray myself, trying not to glance at his thigh exposed from beneath the short robe I gave him. Pipo replied: “My dear, we discussed the loves greater than those confined to just one subject or family. Max spoke to me about love, an asexual love, a polymorphous, dutiful love for all of humanity. He recalled the responsibilities we must each shoulder. He reminds me of my uncle, the communist guerrilla, though the two could not in appearance and demeanor be more different. I fear I’ve misjudged Max on the strength of his eccentricities and ambiguities.”

What happened the next evening was the reason I—we—lost Pipo forever.

—from
Amore
, Book IV of
The Europa Quartet
, by Crispin Salvador

*

With the roads free of taxis, the bus makes good time, though the traffic slows on Roxas Boulevard. The sky over Manila Bay is as white and flat as a sheet of paper. On the surface of the water are thousands of dead fish, the size of sardines. They rise and fall with the waves.

There’s music. Lively music. And then I see it: the
Paul Watson
. The ship that’s been in the news, the one the administration has been trying to evict from the country because of its owners—the World Wardens. It’s always strange to encounter in real life the people and objects you first get to know on television. The boat is dull among the luxury vessels at the Manila Yacht Club. Her hulking size and gray hull are ostentatiously incongruent with the sleek white boats around her.

A pair of security guards sit on the dock, back to back on a single monobloc chair. One guard looks out to sea, his expression that of a newly discovered stowaway. The other guard is text-messaging as if he were a war correspondent. A group of street kids, five of them, the eldest probably eight years old, loiters around the gangplank. The smallest is daring the others to board the ship. On the deck,
four World Wardens on brightly colored beach chairs enjoy the break in the rains. They play Monopoly and drink red wine, listening to some sort of world music that’s all drums and horns.

The street kids call out to the foreigners. A lanky, balding Caucasian with muttonchops puts down his glass and disappears inside. He resurfaces with an armful of cans of Coca-Cola. Down he goes, the gangplank boinging beneath him. His face is beaming. The children cheer. He passes the Cokes around. The boys put them in their shorts pockets. They begin to pull at the greenie’s clothing, tugging at the shemagh scarf wrapped around his neck. The boys’ eyes grow bigger and I can hear them sniffling. Their voices are raspy: “Hey, Joe, how ’bout U.S. dollar?” They tug harder at the ends of his shemagh: “Can I have this? Made stateside?” The greenie brushes them off, politely at first, then with increasing panic. The scarf is tightening and his face is turning red.

One of the security guards hisses at the children. “Ssssst! Tama na yan!” he yells, jogging to the gangplank. He holds on to the things on his utility belt so that they don’t fall. He slows to a quick walk to make sure. The kids point and laugh. The guard unbuckles the flap on his holster. “Wow, guy,” says the World Warden, “that’s not necessary, eh?” The other foreigners watch nervously from the prow. The kids flee down the boulevard. The environmentalist is left, scarf disheveled, one pocket of his cargo shorts pulled out. When the kids are far enough, one turns and does a mocking version of the Mr. Sexy Sexy Dance. He waves his butt toward the security guards and flails his hands above his head. A resounding fart is heard. The kids collapse in laughter. They lounge on the seawall and drink their Cokes. I watch them throw the empty cans at the dead fish rising and falling in the tide.

*

He sits in the bus, watching it all happen. The fish seem like a detail from the places he goes to when he falls asleep. He is distressed about his dreams. Partly for their content, but mostly because he can remember them. Was I better off before, without memory? Have I always had such nightmares?

Last night was the worst. He’d woken up at four in the morning after dreaming of being cuckolded and hanged. When he went back to sleep, he was immediately whisked away again.

He’d been sitting by his window at Trump Tower, overlooking the East River. The hold music on the phone is a song he hasn’t heard in a long time. “I’d die for you girl but all they can say is, he’s not your kind.” Just as he’s enjoying it, the music stops and an agent comes on. “Sure, Mister Sigh-joo-chee,” the agent says. He corrects the agent: It’s See-hoo-coh. The agent says, “Mr. See-joo-cock, I’m more than happy to cancel your account. But let me first ask you a question. Why do you want to stop being one hundred percent safe and protected?” He hangs up on the agent because he realizes he’s late. Outside, out of breath, he flags down a taxi. In the backseat, he pulls a photo strip from his pocket, taken in a booth in the Châtelet–Les Halles metro station. He and Madison are sticking their tongues out, or kissing deeply but coyly like silver-screen stars, or making monocles with the fingers of their inverted hands. They had rushed into the booth, giggling. He realizes that they both knew that one day he’d be sitting in the back of a taxi and looking sadly at the photos. The taxi driver watches him studying the pictures. The cabbie is Philip Glass. The composer says into the rearview mirror, “Don’t you wish you were relishing first contact with life’s offerings, instead of taking snapshots?” He’s about to reply when he sees Glass is speaking into the hands-free headset on his cell phone. When he gets to the bar, it is nearly his turn to read. Madison is talking to the guy with the fangs, saying, “I’m reading about Schoenberg and why dissonance is so stressful from the scientific point of view of the eardrum.” Fangs says, “Eardrums have points of view?” Madison pulls out a book and says, “Let me read you something . . .” Fangs says, “You know, you’re awfully interesting.” The MC calls his name and he leaves Madison and Fangs and goes onstage. He reads from his notebook: “At thirty-five, she ran away with a circus geek who actually was a Tuscan count waiting for his nineteenth birthday, the age the oracle had prophesied he would call an army and lead it into a series of clashes against the grandfather who had thrown him as an infant into a pit of impalement and left him for dead, and the count’s bloody lost battles before his miraculous victory would birth a new epoch of enlightened peace, re-creating the grandeurs of Rome and the glories of Greece, with she, of course, as queen, her image the people’s most loved to the king’s most feared, and yet even as monarch, with all her riches and finery, she would lie in her milk bath masturbating to the memory of how they had made love in the curtained carriage drawn by six white horses on the marches between battlefields, he still her beardless Tuscan count, she a dot-commer’s daughter from Topeka, Kansas.” He finishes reading. He’s trembling. His head swims as he walks between the tables. People look at him in alarm, their eyes wide and their mouths
like the black holes he saw illustrated in science books as a kid. His old friend Valdes stands up and takes a step toward him. His old friend Clinton holds on to the edge of a table. Sadie throws back a chair while getting up. He sees them watching him fall inexplicably forward. He would be flying, if only he didn’t feel so heavy. Everyone stares and points at the table in front of him. Glasses shatter, hesitantly then instantly. A corner of a table strikes his temple. His middle meningeal artery ruptures, causing an epidural hemorrhage. As the blood squeezes his brain, he sees everyone standing over him. Some point, some take photos with their cell phones, some hold their hands over their black-hole mouths. Markus says, “Holy shit, dude, what did you do?” Grapes stands up and says, “You’ve gone and done it.” Madison is where Sadie was sitting and she says, “Now you’ve ruined everything.” Oh my God, he thinks. This isn’t a dream. I’m going to die, a simple, everyday death. I didn’t make things right.

He awoke. He was crying. His pajama pants and bed were soaked. He spent the early hours washing the sheet in the bathtub, ashamed of what the chambermaids would think. By the time he was done drying it with the hair dryer, it was time to go see Miss Florentina.

*

Erning and Rocky Isip decide they desperately need a change. They finally squirrel away enough U.S. dollars to return to the Philippines and settle down. Their life’s savings are invested in a bubble-tea franchise. Rocky has a baby, whom they name Boy. Still, the couple feel they’ve so little connecting them, so they have another child, a girl, whom they name Tiny.

Sleep-deprived from caring for the kids, Rocky and Erning fight more than ever. Holding urgently on to the love left between them, they make a pledge to try harder. They spend many cozy nights watching the latest pirated DVDs. They attend Couples for Christ counseling. They forward each other loving and humorous text messages. Nonetheless, they grow relentlessly apart. Even the old joys of walking slowly, hand in hand, in the mall do nothing for them. Since there is no divorce in the Philippines, they file for an annulment and separate.

Erning gets depressed and grows fat. Rocky takes up Tae Bo kickboxing, loses weight, and dates an event-planner-slash-DJ before
abruptly starting a common-law union with a congressman nearly twice her age. Rocky reverts to her maiden name, Bastos, and takes custody of Boy, who becomes a troublesome lad. Erning keeps Tiny, who becomes very religious, the favorite of the nuns at the Assumption.

One day, while out playing golf, poor Erning has a stroke. In the hospital, he is told by his doctor: “Mr. Isip, from now on you can only eat things that can swim.” Several weeks pass and Erning doesn’t show for his follow-up appointment. The doctor, worried, decides to pass by Erning’s house, because, anyway, they are neighbors in Valle Verde. The doctor rings the doorbell and the maid opens the gate.

Maid: “Yes, sir?”

Doctor: “Where is Mr. Isip?”

Maid: “He’s in the pool, sir.”

Doctor: “Very good! What’s he doing?” Maid: “He’s teaching the pig to swim!”

*

I forgot to mention, last night I was feeling a bit crappy about Sadie throwing me out of her car, and I made the mistake of doing a smidge of coke. When I finally passed out, I slept fitfully. At four in the morning, I thought I heard knocking on my door, but it must have been the neighbors screwing. I couldn’t get back to sleep for a while. I looked through Crispin’s stuff again. Closer scrutiny of a sheaf of photographs underscored this oddity: Crispin tied upon a cross, hands impaled with iron nails, palms open in both supplication and ostentation.

On the reverse of the print was written the name “Sadie Baxter.” In the same messy writing, “f/2.8 & 500.” Beneath that, the place and date: “March 1994. Pampanga.”

In another, a close-up: Crispin’s face tilted heavenward, pupils rolled so far back into his head he appears to be contemplating the uncharted surface of his mind.

I woke up this morning with my bed soaked, and that photo still in my hand.

*

My departure from Spain, with Max Oscurio, delivered me to Manila entirely changed. To be precise, I felt no different, but the streets hummed with a new inaudible sound, the acacias hunched more troubled, the stamens of the bougainvillea and gumamela twisted in anticipation. The light was more slothful than on the Continent, perhaps more fecund with possibility, or maybe it was just the humidity that I no longer remembered being so brazen, as if it had been fortified with the centuries of sweat from our nameless brothers and sisters. Maybe that salt of perspiration had become foreign to balikbayans like me. My friends and I in Europe had dubbed ourselves the New Ilustrados—the New Enlightened, taking on the yoke of revolution as our fee for our material advantages.