Before the Rain Read online

  On the bed was a plain paper bag with my name on it, in Elizabeth’s handwriting. After the manager left, I tore it open. I pulled out a T-shirt with an Asian woman’s face printed on its front, a small bag of salty plantain chips—the kind I loved as a child—a Philippines flag decal, and a hardcover notebook with a scrawled note on the opening page, Mabuhay Ang Filipinas! Figured you’d find something to fill this up—Elizabeth. I sat on the bed, tried on the T-shirt. I took the adhesive paper off the decal and pasted it on the notebook’s red cardboard front cover. I opened the bag of plantains and took a mouthful. I sipped kalamansi juice: tart, like lime, but with a sweet edge. I took a quick shower, rinsing the plane off me, and put on jeans and a shirt. I looked in the mirror. My face had no color; my hands shook.

  Finally I walked down the hallway, past the guard, to the elevator and punched 8, and walked very, very slowly to her door. I knocked and she opened immediately, the sudden click startling me. I stood there, frozen. The sun beamed in on the room, streaking her hair. Her face was fuller and her skin was shades darker, deeply tanned, and she was smiling, gleaming in a way I had not seen her before. Everything I had thought about, the words I would say, the way I had scripted this moment, all of it left me. I stared at her, whispering something. I don’t know what we said but we didn’t touch.

  Walking in, I flopped down in a rattan armchair and she took the sofa. She inspected me closely, getting used to my being there, stretching her legs the length of the sofa. “Your hair’s long.” She smiled, her eyes running over me. “But you look great.” I could feel every pore on my skin, every line on my face. I looked around the room. Brown furniture, rust colors, vanilla walls. She had a Philippines flag on a wall—dark blue, white, and red with a sunburst of yellow—a Cory doll, bumper stickers and banners from the campaign. Messages, notes, and postcards were stuck with pushpins on a board above her desk. She had her Walkman wired to hand-size speakers on top of a TV set, her Tandy computer on the desk next to her old Royal typewriter. There were clothes draped on a chair. The sliding door to the balcony, which the housekeepers liked to keep locked against flies and mosquitoes, was wide open.

  She brought me a drink and took one of my cigarettes. I couldn’t look straight at her, and the tension didn’t ease as we talked and drank wine. Neither of us moved. At last she rose to refill her glass and walked behind me. I could feel her standing very close behind me, her hand on my shoulder, and I touched it, keeping my hand on hers for a very long time.

  That evening we went to a café in the Ermita-Mabini neighborhood they called “the tourist district.” We took a sidewalk table under a Cinzano umbrella and drank wine and picked at gambas al ajillo. Children were playing hopscotch and jumping rope across the street on Remedios Circle, and vendors strolled by with bunches of red roses and carnations. Table candles flickered in the breeze, and the night was bright with the headlights of passing taxis and the neon signs of restaurants and nightclubs and cocktail lounges. Café Adriatico was packed and noisy, and the bells of the four-hundred-year-old Malate Church tolled nearby.

  “Es un gran festival,” Elizabeth said, radiant. There was something startlingly different about her. She didn’t sit with her arms crossed tightly around her chest. She didn’t stiffen her jaw. She seemed younger, talking freely, laughing loudly, her dimples rippling around her mouth. We talked about everything: early years, moments, Manila, her work, my work, and writing. Interrupting me, she would speak in Spanish, as if the language itself were ours only.

  I had gotten no sleep in more than forty-eight hours, had lost a day in transit, but the soreness from the flight, and the weariness, were gone, as if I had crossed no distance at all and the passage of time itself, the two long months we had been apart, were abruptly reduced to a day or two. But at the same time everything was different.

  For once I didn’t feel foreign, an outsider consciously reshaping myself to fit in. Foreign places, especially untamed tropical islands, can give you that fleeting sensation of total freedom. It is their ultimate appeal, the illusion that one can be entirely oneself, without bounds and conventions, a pilgrim soul stopping by on the way to nowhere.

  That evening, with the vendors bringing us roses and the air filled with chattering voices, I thought I had found a home. Elizabeth was leaning back on the rickety metal chair one moment and lurching forward the next, her lips red from the wine, her eyes fixated on me. She was an apparition, an invention of mine, perhaps.

  We let the evening stretch, in no hurry to leave our spot under the umbrella, letting the spicy chicken get cold and ordering more wine, her foot touching mine, her fingers darting over my hand. In time we climbed into a taxi back to the hotel, rolling down the windows, her hair blowing into her eyes as the taxi sped down Roxas Boulevard and the city and the bay around us flashed by, all lights.

  We stayed up a long time in her room, watching the red lights of the freighters in the bay and the torches sputtering in the garden below, her tape deck running for hours in the dark, Bach’s Air, Pachelbel’s Canon, Albinoni’s Adagio, the same tape playing over and over.

  When I awoke the next morning she was gone. I had coffee, read the papers, showered. I thought I had all the time in the world. An hour passed before she appeared. She was sweating and flushed, her ponytail curling, drenched, her shorts and T-shirt soaked. She had jogged around Rizal Park near the hotel and up to the Cultural Center and looked wrung out. But there was something else in her face, a troubled look.

  What’s wrong, I asked, getting up from the sofa and going to her. She looked away. Gently turning her face back to me, I saw she was crying, her mouth twisted, choking back sobs. I tried to hold her but she pushed me away. She couldn’t do this, she said quietly. She had to go back to her husband, do the right thing and live the kind of life she had planned.

  I couldn’t believe it. All of it struck me at once. I could hardly speak. My head was pounding, and I wanted to scream. I felt as if I were in a play, something unreal, that the moment would soon pass. How could so much change in a few hours, from night to day? Was this what she had tried to warn me against—herself?

  She crumpled on the sofa, her body in a small bundle on a corner, heaving with wrenching sobs. Seeing her like that, her words echoing in my head, I was suddenly in a rage that began small and deep and then exploded. I had been given four weeks of vacation, only four weeks, not much time, all of it now crashing around me.

  Give me four weeks, I pleaded. Give me four weeks.

  I turned my back on her and stepped on the balcony and stood looking down, wanting to scream, my eyes blurring. I was gripping the balcony rail, looking down and away to the bay. I was desperate. I knew what she was up against. I remembered my anguish and fear, a gnashing depression and shame during those awful college years when I feared that fingers were pointed at me, when taboo words were whispered and a stigma attached to girls with buzzcuts, muscled arms and legs, and athletic swaggers. I was not like them. I wore skirts and lipstick and didn’t have an athletic bone in my body. I lied for years to my mother, my family, my friends and classmates and the wet-mouthed boys and men I dated into my late twenties. These weren’t outright lies. These were omissions, half-truths, avoidance. I tried to live two lives and fooled only a few. But I didn’t get married like my mother had hoped. I did not live the life I was bred to live. Elizabeth was boxed in, trapped in a marriage she no longer could fulfill. I don’t know how long I clung to the rail there, wanting to disappear, until she came behind me, quietly wrapping her arms around me, saying nothing.

  We stayed in the room that day, sorting out our lives. There was little about us that had been preordained, little that would have signaled our attraction. On the face of it, ours was less a melding of like-minded spirits than a collision of immutable forces: her steely reserve and rigorous emotional discipline and my obsessive passion and combustible temperament. But there we were, unable to let go of each other. I can’t remember if it was that day or some other time whe
n she asked about my love affairs. She forced a laugh here and there, calling me Lothario, counting with the fingers of one hand the number of affairs I had left in shambles behind me. Hers was a lean life. She had her boyfriend, met him in college, lived with him a few years, got engaged and married, and was now leaving him. She hadn’t counted on me showing up in her life.

  We watched the sun bleach the sky at midday and watched it grow into a giant orange ball as it sank into the bay at dusk. After the hours alone, talking, crying, I began to know the fear she lived with. It was the fear of us together.

  Mornings by the pool, lounging alone, getting darker and younger, sipping green mango juice and reading, lying under the yellowing leaves of the banyan trees, making up stories in my head, scribbling in my red notebook, filling the pages. That winter in Tim’s house, those days when I awoke startled and gagged in the bathroom, the empty house in the suburbs, the old miscast relationship—all of it faded away in Manila. Those mornings by the pool with my books, and the late afternoons in my hotel room on the eleventh floor, writing on a clunky, battered pink-lacquered typewriter I bought in a pawnshop in Manila, were the first moments of peace I had known in a long time.

  We were up soon after dawn every morning, Elizabeth charging around, gathering pens, highlighters, notepads, tape recorder, and camera, and bolting out the door, late for an appointment. I had the day ahead of me. I was on vacation. I had nothing scheduled. In my first few days I had Rolly drive me around, shopping trips for cheap Reeboks and discount Ralph Lauren shirts. We drove around the gated, walled-off residential areas, peering up to mansions not unlike in size and opulence to those in Beverly Hills, and we stepped into the sewer-filthy alleys in the garbage slum of Tondo. All through town kids crowded around the car when we stopped at red lights and crossed intersections, knocking on my window, their faces against the glass, their mouths opened with the pitiful cry, “Mum, mum, I’m hungry, one peso, mum.” Those first few days I gave them money, and Rolly would look at me and shake his head. “They are gangs. Don’t give them money,” he said every time. He kept his window rolled up and his door locked. After a while I forced myself to turn away from the begging kids, locking my car door and rolling up my window when we stopped at an intersection.

  I had Rolly take me to Camp Aguinaldo, the military headquarters where the revolution had started, where the nuns had stopped Marcos’s tanks. The entrance gate hung off its hinges and the thick stone and cinderblock walls were pockmarked with mortar shells and bullets. We drove by Malacañang Palace, the presidential palace that was once the residence of the American governor in the period from 1898 to 1946 when the United States governed the Philippines, but these days the palace was overrun with street vendors, beggars, and tourists.

  Manila was euphoric that spring. A month after the revolution, everyone was still partying. There were street fiestas, Catholic masses, and lavish dinners in the mansions of Cory’s wealthy supporters. Everywhere they played the sad melody “Bayan Ko,” a national ballad that had been Cory’s campaign anthem.

  Philippines! My heart’s sole burning fire,

  Cradle of my tears . . .

  The woman at the beauty salon in the Manila Hotel, who cut my hair the first Sunday I was in town, kept asking me, as did everyone else: “Do you like our country? Did you see it on TV?” For once, Filipinos were no longer seen worldwide as the maids, menial laborers, and whores of Asia. After so many demeaning years, they became television stars, protagonists in the People Power Revolution.

  Cory Aquino had not moved into Malacañang Palace. It was too full of ghosts: those dim and musty halls, the baroque furniture, the remnants of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. As soon as the Marcos cohort was forced to leave, the palace was swamped with vendors and vagrants. At one point, Cory spoke seriously of turning it into a love motel for honeymooners. Poor families set up huts inside the palace’s gates, cooking while tourists strolled around. Youngsters sold revolution trinkets and merchants set up stalls around the palace with mementos, keys, visors, straw hats, and T-shirts (“People Power Is God Power” was popular). Tourists queued up for hours in the heat to tour Malacañang—the dark rooms, the basement disco, the secret clinic with Marcos’s oxygen tank, and, of course, the closets of Imelda’s shoes, her bottles of French perfume and shelves of Hermès and Vuitton bags and silky lingerie.

  The city was a bazaar, mayhem, with slums everywhere, even around Malacañang. I had expected the poverty, but not the veneer of prosperity, the ersatz Americanization. Rows of pricey Miami-type condominiums lined the avenues of Makati, a wealthy district where the capital’s stock market and top corporations had their headquarters. There were fancy residential enclaves where the only people on the streets I saw were maids in uniforms and gardeners clipping the grassy strips on the sidewalks. Villas with tennis courts and swimming pools were kept safe from the rabble by surly uniformed guards armed with M16s and by twelve-foot-high concrete walls topped with razor wire. Inside the gates of the mansions, Mercedes Benzes and MGs, Porsches and Ford SUVs, lined the driveways, and there were household staffs large enough to run small hotels. But the slums were beginning to encroach on Makati and the homes of the rich, and the paint was peeling off some of the old mansions; people were afraid to go out at night.

  By my second week at the hotel, guests had come and gone. A few stayed longer and became fixtures in the scenery. There was the woman in the red spandex swimsuit, with the tended body, the sort of woman who travels to a remote spa in the Alps to have her skin stretched out just so. Easy to see her in thick gold bangles and Oscar de la Renta gowns, her hair bleached and stiff like a wig, swept up in a French twist. She held her body tight, and her face had the shrunken look of years of dieting. She stretched out her leathery legs, rubbing them against each other, while her back reclined on the chaise longue directly under the sun. She wore lavender-frame sunglasses and held up one hand at her forehead like a visor while the other held up one of those summer bestsellers. A flabby middle-aged guest, thin-haired and pear-shaped, turned to me one day and said, aghast, “Do you know, she’s sixty!”

  Most weekdays the hotel was empty. Tourism was down, and the press was out working. The waiters lolled under the shade; a few children splashed in the pool. The tennis pro, old Leo, with his oiled black hair and rolling paunch, waddled aimlessly around the clubhouse, recalling old times, checking up on new arrivals, and roughhousing with his boys, young guys who had the arms and legs to take on the toughest players. Early in the morning, right around the time the sun started glinting silver on the bay, the clubhouse crew would line up the blue and white striped loungers along the edges of the pool. They swept the grounds and skimmed fallen leaves off the water, and stacked up the tangerine towels, but aside from a few of us, no one was around.

  Every now and then, Elizabeth dropped by the pool between press conferences and interviews, and lay under the prickling sun on the chair beside me, her shirtsleeves rolled up, a bandanna in her back pocket, sweat making her shirt stick to her back. She was there just a few minutes until she had to run out again, always harried. She had a long stride, her head bobbing as she trotted in a rush to get somewhere.

  She didn’t run with the press pack. She didn’t share notes, she didn’t cuddle up with them, she didn’t party much, and she didn’t show up when they showed up.

  But she went with Nick to Cagayan province. Nick, New Delhi Nick, whom I adored and indulged those first years on the Foreign Desk when he was reporting from India and Thailand, from Bhopal and Srinagar and Bangkok. Now he was in Manila, reigning over the press corps from his office on the second floor of the Manila Hotel, handing out chilled beer bottles from his minibar, along with free tips on life in Manila and recycled war stories. He had left me messages as soon as he heard I was in Manila and now was taking me out to dinner at La Taverna, a favorite hangout of the farang, the expats, a grungy place with dusty Chianti bottles lined up on wooden beams around the dining area. Italian flags and posters hung on
streaky stucco walls.

  We relived the old days and caught up on our lives (his divorce, my breakup) when midway through the antipasto he mentioned Elizabeth—he called her Whitney. Clearing his throat, a sure sign that unpleasantness was coming, he shifted his body, pulling up the chair closer to me. “She’s stuck up, isn’t she, a bit of a pill,” he said, his mustache wet from the wine, his eyes a little glassy, red-rimmed. He was now peering closely at me, trying to size up my reaction, and he snapped open his silver Zippo and flicked up a flame for both of our cigarettes. “She’s like tear gas, toxic.”

  I felt the sting, and said something inane in return, swallowing hard. He had no idea how it hurt, or why. But I knew she had that effect on some reporters who went up against her—not all, but enough of them to isolate her. She seemed awkward with the gang at the hotel bar where we all put together tables and drank for hours. It was a rite, everyone showing off for each other. But I thought she had to strain to fit in, and it made me uncomfortable for her. “She’s no good in groups,” I admitted, but didn’t agree that her aloof pose meant that she was cold and indifferent. I told Nick he should get to know her. She’s not all that bad, I said, laughing. Later that evening, back in her room, I told her what he had said. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her. She stood stock-still, glaring at me, but said nothing. I knew it hurt her; her silence said it all.