The Quiet Ones

by Glenn Diaz

  “OK—”

  “But you know this, right? You have your man. You know this.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I like you,” she said, like a final judgment.

  After fifteen minutes we reached the restaurant and took a big table that overlooked what we were told was a mini-zoo and butterfly sanctuary. At this hour both places were barely lit and all we could see was the buzzing throng of moths around tiny yellow spotlights. Beyond it was absolute darkness. Debbie claimed she saw the outline of a snake.

  While we were waiting for the food, I finally remembered why Agnes of Iowa seemed so familiar. “Agnes,” I called out from across the table, “you ever read that short story by Lorrie Moore?”

  “Short what?” she said.

  Birgit sat up in attention. “We were just talking about—” Her fists formed that cylindrical thing again.

  There was a short story called “Agnes of Iowa,” I told her, and it was wonderful, the way it handled temporal shifts, always tricky in a short story. I read a lot of fiction when I was learning English, I told them. The old couple seemed to appreciate this piece of trivia, although they excused themselves and went back to their room half an hour later, claiming conjugal headaches.

  I returned to our room at around ten. Rey, with a fresh crew cut, was slumped on the desk, head on an open textbook. Our “engagement” had set him back a good week, and exams were coming up after the break.

  He’d left the telly on. On it, two stoic-looking Caucasians, a man and a woman, were on the ground. It was either the middle of the woods or an ill-maintained park. They looked haggard, but also bored, like the resigned victims of a delayed flight. Above them stood three men covered from head to toe in army gear, long firearms slung on their shoulders.

  By morning, every TV in the resort town must have been tuned in to the continuing coverage of the kidnapping turned hostage situation in Palawan. I saw policemen going around, talking to nervous foreigners, assuring us that there was no need to worry. We were far away, they said, from the restive south.

  “The south always seems to be a problem area, no?” Agnes of Iowa told Debbie of Alabama while our breakfast was being served.

  Elis laughed, loudly and phlegmily enough for all of us. He explained the Civil War joke to Birgit.

  “What joke?” Agnes wanted to know.

  The details were rehearsed many times over lunch. The hostages taken from a ritzy resort on a private island. The captors arriving at daybreak. The unlucky bunch including a couple from Kansas, missionaries who were celebrating their eighteenth wedding anniversary (“Just terrible,” Debbie sighed, shaking her head, “but how does one question the shepherd’s plan for his flock?”). The Philippine president addressed the nation and said she was ordering a strict news blackout. The recorded statement was followed by the latest update on the kidnappers’ alleged coordinates, endless playback of the demand video featuring the missionary couple, and sundry commentary from grim-looking experts.

  “Well, that’s what happens when you give Islamic extremists the tiniest breathing room, you know,” said Bo, “when you show them mercy. I tell you, if this happened on American soil, I bet you—”

  “Yes, you’ll bomb the poor island to oblivion,” said Douglas. “This is exactly why America is so well loved the world over.”

  “Did anyone see the group of backpackers this morning?” Debbie asked, looking upset.

  “Is the Israeli Survivor that’s here,” Birgit volunteered.

  “Everything changed after Reagan,” Elis said.

  “You mean smelled the backpackers? ’Cause I sure did,” Agnes said.

  “Israel, oh don’t get me started,” Bo said.

  “Where’s Susan?” Agnes asked Douglas. “She promised to give me her adobo recipe.”

  We all turned to him.

  “Oh,” he said, surprised, “she has a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Whatever for?” Agnes asked.

  “Yes, whatever for?” I asked.

  “You didn’t join her?” Debbie asked.

  “You gotta join her, man,” Bo said.

  “She’s an adult,” Douglas said. “She can handle it.”

  “Eh?” I said. “What is ‘it’ exactly?”

  “You look different without her,” Elis said.

  “Yes,” Agnes said. “I see what you mean. Smaller somehow.”

  Birgit laughed.

  “First time everyone’s so concerned about me,” Douglas said. “Halleluiah.”

  “Rey’s not joining us today?” Agnes asked after a while.

  “He’s studying,” I said.

  “He’s in college?” Douglas asked.

  “In the military academy,” Birgit said with a wide smile.

  When Rey, newly bathed and lovely, joined the group half an hour later, there were welcoming grunts from Bo and Douglas. Elis looked to be well on his second REM cycle but he gave Rey a jolly wave, as well. I told everyone he was going back to the mountains tomorrow. Noises approximating sadness were made around the table. I leaned closer to Rey, expecting him to give me a kiss but he didn’t.

  “Back to the barracks, I see,” said Bo, smiling.

  Rey nodded. “It was nice meeting all of you.”

  They smiled at him.

  “What happens to you now?” Debbie asked me.

  I resisted the urge to run my hand in the space between my chair and Rey’s and exclaim in shock that, lo and behold, Rey and I weren’t joined in the hip! “Oh, I’ll find something,” I said. “I can do yoga, or start an herb garden, maybe organise a book club—”

  “You know,” Douglas said, “a friend of mine who works in publishing told me I should write a book about my years in Alberta. There’s some good material there, I’m sure of it. It’s more a matter of sitting down and searching myself—”

  I asked Rey what he wanted, coffee or juice. “Or beer. Of course you want beer. It’s your last day of freedom. Funny why I even ask.”

  He shook his head and made a show of rubbing his tummy. Empty laughter around the table. “My tita,” Rey said, “I mean, my aunt, it’s her birthday. I passed by her house and I had a few bottles. Maybe just coffee, ma’am.”

  I looked at the menu.

  He chuckled. “I mean—”

  “Coffee it is,” I said.

  Someone’s hand shot in the air to call a waiter.

  They have cappuccino, latte, and Americano, the waiter said. I relayed this to Rey, who looked at me. “I understood,” he said, then gestured “no thanks” to the waiter. Rey excused himself and said he should go back to studying. All these, in full view of my new-found friends, who looked down, or away, embarrassed or maybe simply bored.

  Just then a tall, nice-looking Filipino youngster with fiendish eyes approached our table and hovered uneasily next to Birgit and me.

  “Kid, can you get me a pop?” Douglas asked him.

  The boy nodded but didn’t move.

  “I don’t think he’s the waiter, Doug,” Agnes told him.

  Turning, Birgit lit up and grabbed the kid’s arm. “Oh there you are. Here, please—” she moved her chair and gestured for me to move mine. The boy grabbed a chair from the next table and wedged in between us. “Everyone, this,” she said, “is Ernesto. Or Erning.”

  “Is that what he’s doing off you?” Douglas asked.

  Everyone looked elsewhere.

  “Wow,” Douglas said, “so if you are all doing it to me and Susan, it’s OK, but if I make a little joke to Birgit and little Erning here I’m an asshole?”

  “I need to go to the little girl’s room,” Agnes said.

  “Erning is a fisherman,” Birgit said sprightly.

  Debbie stood up. “I’m going to join you, Agnes, wait.”

  “Something’s been bothering me,” I said.

  They all turned towards me, Birgit and the guys, even Erning.

  “I’m not the only one who calls them ‘Filos,’ yeah? Like short for Filip
inos. Is it an Aussie thing? I’m not sure how I got it. But I must have heard it somewhere—”

  A pause, then Elis looked at me. “That’s really offensive, Carolina,” he said. Hoots and laughter from Bo and Douglas and Birgit and Erning, whose smile unveiled a pair of savagely delicious fangs, which in hindsight accounted for the fiendish impression.

  I laughed, too, but when I turned to the faces around me, all with remnants of that wild, empty joy, it happened. As usual, it began as a profound abysmal feeling, a chokehold, visions of ruins, a sharp pang between the eyes that descended to the throat then quickly the chest then the legs. It began with creeping paralysis simultaneous with pummelling heartbeats. Then the certainty that there was a furry animal trapped in my chest, struggling to get out. I excused myself and forced my legs to move, out of the restaurant. I found myself on the beach, which was thankfully deserted.

  An arm soon swept my shoulders, a voice loud in my ear. “It’s OK,” it said. “It’s OK, I’m here, Carolina.” The sand burned my legs and toes.

  I might have tried to disengage. I might have pushed or kicked or screamed. A small crowd might have gathered, curious, suspicious, pitiful of the two people on the shore, in the middle of noon. I might have told the person to leave me alone, he didn’t understand, that he was nothing but a distraction, all these were just meaningless, temporary distractions.

  I felt the hands leave, and I was alone again.

  The desire to apologise to Reynaldo peeked from behind the dark billowing cloud of anger, unhappiness.

  “How do you say ‘Things will be OK’ in Spanish?” he asked.

  I looked to the sea, tried to take deep breaths. “Todo estará bien.”

  “How about ‘I will never leave’?”

  “Nunca te dejaré.”

  “‘There are things still worth looking forward to.’”

  I looked at him, and air began to resume its freedom, its bounty, the sand growing soft and warm. “Hay muchas cosas,” I looked at him, “que estamos emocionado.”

  “Maybe we should go easy on the booze. At least during breakfast.”

  “A lo mejor—”

  “No, I didn’t ask for a translation. That’s an order.”

  I looked up, the sun a pleasure blinding. When I turned around, I saw Birgit and Elis and Doug in the small crowd, tiny smiles, hands raised in little tentative waves, giving me that look. I smiled, waved back. Rey and I went back to our room and I must have slept like a log. The next time I opened my eyes, it was dark.

  After great pain, a formal feeling comes— / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.

  Damian liked Emily Dickinson. He had recited this to me the morning after we found out we couldn’t have children. We were in Melbourne for our anniversary. It was the finals of the Australian Open. Becker versus Lendl. He took the phone call from our doctor between the third and fourth sets. We didn’t finish the match, and I must have had too much to drink that night, because I remembered the following morning for the splitting headache, the quiet, and Damian’s voice purring those two lines and the rest of the poem while he caressed my hair. We stayed in the rest of the day.

  Eyes still closed, I flung my arm now to the left side of the bed at the hotel in Pagudpud, expecting to land on Rey’s torso. Instead, the crumple of paper. I turned on a bedside lamp and found a hotel stationery, neatly folded in half, in the middle of the bedspread.

  21

  T he note was about a page and a half, in impregnable Tagalog.

  It was the first time I saw Rey’s handwriting—a beautiful, even cursive, the work of a mind that was either relaxed or fascist (or relaxed in its fascism). A quick glide surfaced familiar words: my name in the salutation; “extend” twice and “leave” in the first sentence; then “Tiyo Maning,” my maid’s wife; Baguio, the mountain resort town where the military academy was. In the second paragraph: “salamat,” “trabaho,” “Maynila,” “Pagudpud,” “para,” “Pilipinas.” “Pero” and “pamilya” in the third paragraph. “Tagalog,” “siguro,” “simple,” “Ingles,” “Espanyol,” “relasyon,” in the fourth. The final paragraph, a tiny one of a dozen words, began with “Gusto” and ended with “kuwento.” Fondness. Story. An indecipherable ocean in between.

  Even before I noticed it, I had put one hand on my tummy and the other on my chest, awaiting the shortness of breath. It did not come. I looked at the letter again, at my surroundings, the empty hotel room, the receding light outside the window, and waited. You’re alone, I said out loud. Still nothing. I looked to the side table, the tiny plastic containers with all my tiny, life- and sanity-saving tablets inside. I was a tad disappointed.

  I considered my options for the letter. The most straightforward—and least intimate—was to get someone to translate it. I could also pick up a Tagalog-English dictionary in town and do a patchwork translation and infer the general spirit of his message. I could, finally, do the noblest thing, take the longest, most salacious route and try to learn the language. The scary idea reminded me of my grandmother, a nice plump woman who grew zucchinis and made her own yogurt in Sevilla and didn’t offer the most politically correct counsel, like her favourite: “Moro viejo nunca será buen Cristiano.”

  22

  M y foray into the Filipino language was nipped in the bud by an insect, which reminded me of grand colonial missions to far-flung areas foiled by malaria-bringing Anopheles . When Rey left, Birgit and I decided to break away from the group, who had become too vocal about our “unorthodox” lives (“Are you from broken homes?” Agnes asked). Birgit and I found a house for rent a bit away from the beach. The bungalow was surrounded by untamed undergrowth. In one corner of the backyard was an ornately postmodern assembly of cinder blocks, discarded furniture, a rusty, wheel-less bicycle, and old tires that filled with water after it rained. I had half a mind to do something about the clutter, but I kept postponing it until a week into my Tagalog lessons when I went down with a 39.5 fever and a splitting headache. The joint pains followed, and I was sure it was dengue.

  Birgit, whom I had mercilessly mocked for her extra coat of paranoid pre-yoga mosquito repellent every morning, let out a high-pitched noise when I broke the news to her. Then she laughed for about two minutes. “I told to you so,” she cried. “I told to you so!” I should’ve known, I told her, shaking my head, I should have. A vaccine was imminent, just wait, I said, before noticing that she had slowly slinked away to our adjoining toilet. “Not contagious!” I shouted.

  “I believe you!” she called out, shutting the door.

  I staggered out of bed, my head impossibly heavy. I knew these things in theory: how mundane, annoying discomforts, like headache and fever and listlessness, mirrored unseen disquiet beneath the skin. In my case, it was thrombocytopenia: one of them words that made pharmacology oh so fun. There was a feeling of security in knowing the biology of it, the sordid intelligence at work behind the shell, which left precious little to chance. In front of the dresser mirror, I examined every square inch of my skin for the first time in decades. I tried to distinguish blotches from freckles, discern rashes from harmless bikini marks, all the miscellaneous ravages in between.

  When I woke up the following day, the fever was gone—again, as forecast. The birds were chirping and, when I looked out my window, Birgit was in a downward-facing dog on her mat. Just to be sure, I added Advil to my morning twins Cipramin and Malarone and drank lots of fluids. Two malaria pills (I liked the haze they created). I took a quick shower, gave Birgit a jolly wave, and headed to the beach, face towards the sun.

  The book I had picked up from the bookstore in Laoag (“Learn Filipino”) resembled a coloring book more than a serious pedagogical tool but, with a Filipino-English dictionary, it sufficed. At my usual spot by the beach I went over the early stuff again: the alphabet (which reassuringly included ñ but also the threateningly nasal “ng”), numerals, and simple phrases, like introductions (Ako ay si Carolina mula España), time-telling (Ika-pito ng gabi), and
directions (Doon ang simbahan). Around lunchtime I hissed at a young boy building a sand structure of some sort. “Paumanhin,” I told him. “Saan magulang?” Excuse me. Where are your parents? He gave me a blank look. “Magulang?” I repeated. “Saan?” A tourist who had been watching the encounter stood up from her chair and laughed for a solid minute. She then explained that I just asked the boy the whereabouts of someone cunning. “Magulang is cunning?” I asked, opening my dictionary. Besides, she said, not hearing me, the children here spoke Ilocano, not Tagalog, so just say mama and papa.

  That night, the fever returned, a 40.5 at least. I woke up in a cold sweat, head swirling with half-formed images, hazy bits of conversation, scary words like magulang. I took an Ambien and closed my eyes. For the first time since I could not remember, I prayed. So hard that it scared me a little. Was this it? I thought, drifting to sleep, trying to ward off the tireless images. I wondered how Australian media would report my death. Would there be action against Australian aid to the Philippines? A diplomatic protest with dire consequences on the trade of bananas or mangoes? I started to drift to sleep, the thought of this mad world unfolding without my participation wresting a tear from my eye. The following morning, the fever was gone again.

  On my fifth day in this wishy-washy state, I woke up with faint memories of talking to Rey, which was ridiculous because I knew they had no access to pay phones except during furloughs. But when I checked my mobile, there was indeed an unidentified number that called at half past midnight. The following day, I tasted blood in my mouth and asked the caretaker to find me a ride to a hospital.

  Birgit tagged along but opted to return with the car back to Pagudpud. I’m fine, I assured her. Hospitals had never been existential, anxious places for me. What I saw in them were paperwork, policy, bureaucracy. The lives of legions decided in tedious board meetings, where people talked in confusing acronyms like BLS and LSA, SCIC and SICU, said weird things like, “Of course, I remember rubella of 1993!” and rejoiced like children when chips were served. During the hour-long drive, Birgit had suggested that we call my family or at least alert the Spanish embassy. “Just in case,” she said. I shook my head and told her something about dengue’s negligible mortality rate. She grabbed my arm. “What do you mean mortality? You die? I did not mean that. Crazy.” I looked out the window and saw a sprawling Baroque church sweeping into view. A wedding party stood by the door. “Look at that,” I said. “Can you please pull over here? I’m late for the ceremony.” I laughed at my own joke. She felt my forehead and muttered something. “More faster,” she told the driver.