Before the Rain Read online

  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.”

  3

  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.

  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 li
ved 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.