The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  “I think you’re being sexist,” he said.

  “This relationship is sexist,” I told him.

  Chinatown was announced by a pagoda-style arch, crisscrossed with bored-looking dragons. We went straight to our regular spot by the estero, where the food was cheap and good. After eating some dimsum, we went to a small bakery for dessert. I bought some hopia for my father. Gene asked if I could buy a couple of boxes for him. It was the first time he asked, so I said of course. Maybe it was for his lola. He said he would be visiting her at Home for the Aged tomorrow.

  We walked for a few minutes and found an empty bench in front of a Chinese drug store. From inside wafted the smell of camphor and incense. We sat down, and I brought out the box of yam-flavored hopia.

  “You need me to bring you anything on Friday?”

  “Just come and say goodbye.”

  “Of course.”

  He looked at me; a timid smile.

  “It will be a long and tiring shoot.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  A dog sauntered by our feet, sniffing and digging its nose toward the hems of our jeans. Gene nipped a finger-ful of crusty bread and the dog, even before it was offered, snatched it from his hand.

  “Dog-eat-dog,” he said, before motioning to pet the mutt on its head.

  I lived in an odd part of the city. Five minutes away on foot, the houses were wooden planks and GI sheets held together by rusty nails and Manila rope, named after this city, where they stood or floated, depending on the weather. Ten minutes away, on my father’s Gemini, the skyscrapers of Makati began to be visible in the horizon, vague and hazy with the smog, but you know they were there, mighty and gleaming, awaiting you once you graduate.

  Usually, these were the only paths. But for the courageous ones like Gene, there was another. It was Friday, and his bus would traverse EDSA. It would ply the North Diversion Road, make a careful turn toward an oft-ignored exit, go for another two hours before stopping at a concrete shed in a sleepy town in central Pampanga.

  Gene would get off and right away see two guys in army green shirts. He would, without exchanging a word, follow them, into a thicket of tiger grass as tall as our house. Right behind it, a barely visible path led to a hill that led, after a two-hour hike, to the foothills of a mountain. The trees would get taller. From those that bore fruit to towering hardwood. Gene would not be able to name any of them, except an astray camachile, like the one that swayed outside the window of his dorm room.

  After walking for four hours, a clearing. A camp with a live fire and a string of huts made of bamboo and cogon, draped with red flags. There would be a few familiar faces, though recognition would be slow. At night, the mosquitoes would be impatient, and a million tambourine wings would sound the forest’s eternal hymn.

  He would find, in the recesses of his bag, under neatly folded clothes and the box of special hopia: a bandanna primed to protect his hair from the sun, tubes of insect repellent, a book about ambivalent friendship. Tucked in between the pages, a scribbled note:

  Take care.

  Love,

  Eric

  15

  T here was always the foetal position. This I learned a long time ago. I learned like a gift. Your hands could always cradle your knees, and you could return to this position—primal position!—and it hardly mattered if you were in the dark, watery womb or a strange room in the Third World one uneasy morning, say, forty-eight years since that first bloody burst.

  Garbled music crooned from next door. “Just when I’d stopped opening doors—” Horrible speakers, and the birds were chirping.

  Like most days, this one began with a new pain. It erupted as soon as I opened my eyes. A throbbing in a sinew in my thumb, which until now I didn’t think could hurt the way knees and lower backs did. Filtered through red-orange curtains, the light in the room was the color of anemic blood. The sound of rolling water bounced around the cinderblock walls.

  I cleared my throat to get the attention of the bare back busy in the tiny room’s kitchen.

  Reynaldo turned. “Good morning, Ma’am Carolina,” he said, hands on a suds-covered plate. “I have already bought—”

  I deflated.

  “Carolina, Carolina. Sorry,” he corrected himself. “I bought the cigarettes and beer.” His smile, encumbered by the tedious formality that he’d held, on and off, for the past two weeks.

  “How about the—”

  “The pills are in the drawer.”

  “Thank you.”

  The usual death-like urge to crawl back under the covers.

  I could still trace Reynaldo’s ghost next to me. The dent in the pillow. The blanket he kicked aside. The minutest levelling that cradled his back. Pubic hair on the sheets.

  Look at him, washing the dishes with maniacal intensity, as if they were belt buckles and shoes for inspection. Chin up, stomach in, back so straight I was spent just looking at it.

  The music next door continued, “There ought to be clowns.”

  Birds still chirped in this place?

  The mattress felt like woolly concrete, which was what you’d expect in cheap homestays in the tropics. Like that “rustic cabin” in Fiji, to where Damian and I had gone early in our marriage, thinking we were ragged, adventurous folk only to realise soon enough that our marriage was just about the limit of our bravery. Is a stupid pail of hot water too much to bloody ask? I apparently screamed to a gecko at one point, per Damian.

  Here, the bed spread was as coarse, especially if you were naked, which Reynaldo and I often were, naturally, this being officially a holiday now. Elsewhere in the room, everything was an afterthought. The cardboard calendar on a side table announced the wrong month, maybe flipped to December by the last impatient guest. The tiny pot sat unused on a single-burner gas stove (also unused). The fifty-watt bulb required a little back-and-forth twist to work.

  Reynaldo and I had arrived in Pagudpud, in the northwest tip of the Philippines, during peak season. It was Holy Week— Semana Santa —and with all the hotels and resorts booked for weeks, we had to settle for a homestay recommended by one of Reynaldo’s friends. It was a newly built house with two rooms, each with a private bath so narrow it was clearly designed with the armless demographic in mind. The rooms opened up to a communal veranda. The beach was a five-minute stroll away.

  The barest of necessities—no fridge, no wardrobe, no water heater (watch out, area critters)—were constant reminders that it was a place where people did not stay. For transients, in tourism parlance. A place that was not home, which made no such claim.

  The other room in the house was occupied by three young tourists who came yesterday. With their big backpacks, rubber thongs, and silly excitement over the beach, they were probably Manileños, Reynaldo said. A giggly lot, the first time they saw me lounging in the veranda, one of them whispered something to the other two and they all laughed.

  Reynaldo had chuckled, too. He looked up from my laptop. “Maybe not used to seeing an older woman drink so much.” I smiled. “A beautiful older woman,” he corrected himself. I felt a warmth in the numinous area between chest and gut, but that could also be the gastric acid.

  Manang Bibi, the old toothless lady who owned the house (a gift from a daughter in Switzerland, she wouldn’t let us forget), introduced us to the tourists. I waved at them. They waved back, said hello, then took what must have been dozens of photos in front of the house, in all poses and all manner of facial contortions imaginable.

  Asians.

  I didn’t say this out loud.

  At dinner later that day, still in the veranda, their banter was non-stop. I was pinching the huge grilled tilapia, foregoing the salty concoction of fermented fish, onions, and tomatoes (fish on fish? No thanks). I could make out parts of their conversation via the pockets of words I could understand. I tilted my head to hear better. Reynaldo, watching me, shook his head. Wind turbines, someone said, twenty stories, puta , enough money, hitch a ride; then Ayn Rand, siem
pre , harsh; and then professional, laptop, boytoy, puede , Vanessa Redgrave, late forties, forlorn—

  They were talking about us.

  16

  D on’t you love farce?” Streisand was asking when I opened my eyes.

  So many questions, that tiresome Barbra.

  I rolled over. The bed creaked under my weight.

  “You went back to sleep,” whispered Reynaldo, now half-reclined next to me. “Did I tire you out last night?”

  He went for my mouth, caught my left cheek.

  “Reynaldo, please.” Something flew into my eye.

  “Are you OK?” he asked.

  I rolled out of bed to the esky by the door. I opened it and fished a cold San Miguel. It was too late when I noticed the cup of coffee on the bedside table, the “3-in-1” instant coffee, this country’s vilest invention. In a corner sat my open luggage, the mountain of ill-folded clothes. The period of formality was long gone; after his early attempts at cleaning up after me, Rey and I were now cohabiting like thoughtless twenty-somethings, the sort hated by hotel chambermaids from Algiers to Zeltweg.

  “Any tasks for me today?” he asked.

  I waved him off. He and his charade. I made my way outside and settled in the white monobloc chair from where, for the past few weeks, I whiled away the long and lovely hours, to soak in the carcinogenic blanket made especially for us non-Filos. I wondered if Reynaldo was the kind of guy who would brood over the space left on a bed, like me, like Damian, when he hadn’t run off with a needy grad student with father issues. The sound of running water resumed, but what did I expect?

  The tourists emerged from next door, garbed in swimmers, cameras slung around their necks. “Off to the beach?” I called out. They smiled, said yes, and quickly turned away, except for one of them who looked at the bottle of San Miguel in my hand.

  I stared back, smiled.

  He looked away, the poor bloke.

  A few weeks in the Philippines and you learned to cope.

  The other two appeared to be a couple; the inquisitive one probably a close friend of one or both. They descended the stone steps from the veranda, crossed the patch of uneven grass, and began their leisurely stroll to the beach. They started off walking together in one line, until the third wheel stopped to make way for a passing jeepney on the narrow road. He drifted a meter or two behind and stayed there. Oblivious, the couple held hands, dragging their feet in unison. They made a right turn by the row of parked motorized tricycles, before disappearing behind the palm trees that lined the road.

  My vision soon began to blur and the world started to spin, which was what happened when you ingested beer on an empty stomach. I felt a barf coming, so I got to my feet and looked up. A few passers-by looked on. One was a little girl, no more than five or six. I twirled, then curtsied, and she smiled and imitated my graceless turn. She then picked up a plastic container of water, bigger than her, and went to an artesian pump on the other side of the road.

  I was still in my chair when the tourists next door returned from the beach, visibly darker, eyes reddened, sand in the requisite places.

  The third wheel, I saw now, had one of them sad, pitiful eyes. Like Peter O’Toole or Paul Newman. Or Bambi. He appeared to be the funniest one among them, in that irony that was so familiar. Almost every quip of his was punctuated with laughter. From the rapid-fire mix of Tagalog and English now, I got “French cows” and “moo,” and the punch line, indeed, was distinctly French: abrupt-sounding and vulgarly, grotesquely nasal. I stifled my laughter, watching him fix a phantom beret.

  A showman. Probably depressive.

  Takes one to know one, Damian would have quipped.

  I could smell lunch, a simmering mix of vinegary aroma with a lot of garlic. Maybe tilapia again. You’d think, with so many islands, more than seven thousand, Reynaldo said, there’d be greater variety—

  “What’s German for coconut plantation?” we heard doe-eyed boy ask his friends.

  They shrugged. I smiled at Reynaldo, a minor conciliatory act.

  “Nyu -gen,” the boy said, and the laughter was so wild that even Reynaldo and Manang Bibi smiled.

  Asians .

  I sat back, feeling vindicated. What was not to like about this lovely country?

  No one would take the Philippines a month ago. The new head of oncology, pirated and desperate to impress, wanted to send all mid-level executives abroad to “master with native fervour” every country in his jurisdiction (“plus an internal evaluation of the country office, a soft touch, nothing major”). We all tried to affect an air of corporate nonchalance, but the news was all people could talk about. A free trip—without a burdensome conference schedule or pretentious let’s-build-houses-for-the-poor itinerary. Many hoped to be sent to Japan or Vietnam or Thailand. The Philippines, I learned, was associated with mountains of garbage and streets crawling with gun-toting gangs, mail-order brides and nosy nannies. Hurricanes and earthquakes. The usual insurgencies. One manager thought it was somewhere in Central America (a sad day for the New South Wales education system); another somehow lumped it together with the Seychelles and the Maldives—“those strings of islands with fancy-schmancy names”; another still thought it was a US territory, like Guam or Saipan, only poorer.

  They must have been too young to remember when Manila was a main Asian hub, the envy of Bangkok and Jakarta. The Philippines figured in the history textbooks of my childhood in Sevilla, not as prominently as Mexico and Sudamérica, but at least a section or two, from the “Age of Exploration”—where the subtle brainwashing to abhor the upstart English began for us—to the Galleon Trade. Sevilla, I knew, was the entry route for all the riches from the Americas, from where Magallanes himself set off. The legacy in Manila, I found, was almost scary: a language teeming with Spanish words, millions of Reyeses and Cruzes, fervent Catholicism in the middle of Islamic, Buddhist seas. We did this? This Asian Mexico? Outside Manila, much of the northern countryside was like rural Andalucía or Cataluña in the late 1980s, without the garbage-strewn hillsides, with Baroque churches instead of Romanesque monasteries and the chance castle.

  So as my colleagues openly scrambled to get the “best” countries—South Korea for the electronics, Thailand for Phuket, India to visit relatives—I sent an email to my new boss. I mentioned in passing my long, impeccable performance in the company, save for that episode five years ago, and said that my Filipino help had a nephew in Manila with research experience who could help me. “A tour guide and an assistant in one,” I wrote. “We don’t have to fly in Mindy.” Only after hitting Send did it occur to me, with that curse of introspection that had worsened since Damian left, that I could not wait to get out of there. That I was dying to get out of there.

  There was no response to my email, but in the dinner meeting the following week where he announced our destinations, in McDowell Hall with the orange draperies that watched over everyone, the new oncology head said in between quips about the Abu Sayyaf and Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection that I’d be traveling 3,884 miles to the Philippines, and who’d want mangoes? There was an awkward pause and, if I hadn’t been a little pissed from all the Chilean pinot noir, I knew I would’ve heard the fictitious crickets. I could feel my face contorting into that look of severe, constipated amiability that it would wear whenever I found myself in the centre of unwanted attention. There was a soft rustling of whispers, a spattering of unsure applause. I took another sip of wine, mentally egging David (the oncology head) to move to the next person, the next country. Malaysia, Vietnam, Papua New fucking Guinea. Anything.

  At the send-off dinner later that week (globalisation-themed, someone said), I was eating a piece of hors d’oeuvres—an unagi sushi? A banh mi slider?—when the events came in a flood, all of my twenty years or so in this company: the routines, the scenes, the little life of lonely self-sufficiency. The repertory of small talk so limited and contrived that I could recite most of it from memory.

  “Hewitt in the Aussie Open
finals, how ’bout that?” from Liam in corporate.

  “Big rugby match tonight!” from Duke in biologicals.

  “Did Mindy really get arrested for DUI in Chatswood?” from Caitlin, the receptionist on the third.

  How silly, looking back. The corporate world was like high school, with supposedly higher stakes and infinitely less sex. I had never been a social butterfly, but it all went further downhill after the divorce was settled five years ago: two intense weeks, I was to learn later, when people at R&D joked about hiding scissors and staplers when I came close.

  (Had I relied too much on Damian? Did I, in that awful cliché, build my world around him, so in the aftermath, I was reduced to an idle ruin? There was a vacancy that pervaded my days but was that not to be expected? We had done everything together, from early evening walks around the block to occasional holidays, like the bank-breaker in South America in ’86 that culminated in Machu Pichu. It was majestic. Ten short years later Damian started to unduly extend his consultation hours, the beginning of the end. He was working for tenure, he’d thunder, for me, for this family. Bloody tenure.)

  “What if I didn’t return?” I asked my assistant Mindy in my office the morning after the send-off.

  “And what are you going to do there,” she asked, “give massages by the beach?” before taking a bite of her morning bagel.

  Reynaldo wasn’t quite how I had pictured him during the eight-hour flight to Manila (two direct flights daily—who knew?). When Yusing (my help) bragged about her nephew’s credentials, I had imagined a lanky Asian guy in his twenties, glasses, pastel-coloured clothes. Layers. Charming acne. Like the Asian students at USyd I’d see all the time around Camperdown when I’d drop by the PA Hospital on Missenden Road. Instead, the man holding out the manila folder bearing “Ma’am Carolina Suarez” was, well, a man. Tall, firm-looking, with an incredible suntan made more pronounced by his white shirt. His biceps peeked from his sleeves, and the area in his chest was spotted with sweat, like hypnotic spores. He sported a buzz cut, which would make sense later, when I found out that he was on his penultimate year at the state military academy and was only in an extended leave, something my cook had neglected to mention.