by Glenn Diaz
Alvin tried to ward off images of beautiful Indian women in colorful sari burning tires and abandoned vehicles as deranged cows ran amuck, while onscreen flashed the skeleton of a once-blue bus, charred to gray. Another bombing on EDSA, this one in broad daylight, along a route that he used to take every day.
“You up for a few drinks?” Martin asked. “There’s a nice place not far from here. Air-conditioned, billiards. Just ignore the girls in skimpy clothes if you’re not into that.”
43
C arolina didn’t know this airport by heart. Sydney, she could navigate with her eyes closed. Madrid-Barajas, in the few times she had gone back, had shops that she knew from childhood. The new Suvarnabhumi was gargantuan but straightforward. Like Hong Kong, Changi, Tokyo-Narita. Here, in the old Manila airport, the signs were in English but often misleading, the layout, claustrophobic, the interiors, yellow with embarrassing age.
She pulled her suitcase with one lazy hand, her steps unhurried. What a charade, she thought, the tacit agreement that it was completely fine for a 250,000-pound piece of metal to stay afloat 40,000 feet in the air for hours on hours. What a charade, this world made borderless, supposedly, people made placeless and stateless, all you need is your passport (with at least six months’ validity)! En route to the departure area, she showed her ticket to a lady who, with a prodigious smile, asked, “Going home, Ma’am?” She swallowed the long explanation with which she had always answered questions about “home”—that word—and, fixing the Oakleys covering her groggy eyes, managed a most banal tilt of the head.
At the immigration counter, she slid her passport and ticket under the glass, wondering if she was racist. Why else would the somber immigration officer bear a keen resemblance to Reynaldo, belying, it seemed to her, four years of waking up and seeing his face in that private contortion of sleep. But it was the same round jaw and almond-shaped eyes, the same tameness of, excuse her, Oriental features. “Thank you, Miss Chavez,” the officer said, pushing the maroon booklet back toward her waiting hand.
At least this one called her Miss Chavez and not “Ma’am.” In this country, she was obstinately, tediously “Ma’am.” To waiters and tricycle drivers, receptionists and bank tellers, parking attendants and porters. To urchins, who somehow always spotted her red hair and pale complexion in a crowd. To baristas, who felt they could practice their small talk spiels with her (“Is that your regular drink, Ma’am? Which country?”). Even to the florist on the first floor of her condo who claimed he learned floral design in a 40-session course in Paris (“France?” Carolina had asked. “No, the other one,” he said, giving her a look).
From Reynaldo, the habit of “Ma’am” was insufferable, the first warning, the last straw. As in many tired narratives, at the center stood him, the beloved, a shirt of whom now lay in the bottom of her suitcase. She had stolen it from their conjugal closet and tossed it there in a moment of vulnerability, when, packing for the routine trip to Manila, she anticipated missing Rey’s scent. Now she imagined waking up one random Tuesday in the remote future in Sydney and searching for proof that it had happened at all, so strange the turn of events, the decisions taken. Her generous imagination—wasn’t it to blame for all this? How she shook hands with the man who held the manila folder bearing her name and somehow saw a young Benicio Del Toro. How she conjured, with much indulgence, fantasies of romance in the tropics, itineraries that involved sleeping on boat decks, subsisting on the local beer, fucking on the beach?
Now that it was over, she could admit it: she was hypnotized by the thought of a brown lover, different and deferential. “She gave it a shot” was how she planned to euphemize the five-year detour: to her therapist, to curious friends, to herself. Had she been younger, there would have been wailing for the lost years, but by now she knew that all things were necessary and vital in life’s convoluted scaffolding. In Pagudpud, the beachfront house that she and Reynaldo had built from her life savings now stood as a two-bedroom monument to the regret that she knew would visit her and which she planned to hush with repeated assertions that she was fine, she was going home, she was fine.
The morning when Damian showed up in Pagudpud with two suitcases and a well-rehearsed-sounding apology, Carolina refused to partake in what seemed then as an accounting of her life choices. Damian to her left. Reynaldo to her right. Past and present. Old and new. Familiar and strange. Ten minutes into the brunch, it became clear to the two parties that they were not going to be introduced. It was Damian who spoke first. “All right,” he told Rey. “Since you asked, I’m Damian.” He chuckled, extending a hand to Reynaldo, who took it and gave it a firm-looking squeeze. “Rey,” he said.
Her life, she thought, once exemplar of principle and accountability, now a cautionary tale. She stirred the pork sinigang for about a minute, the soup thickened and piquant with the pulverized gabi and chili. When that was done, she asked no one in particular if they should start with the salad, except the crab salad that she ordered had not arrived yet. “Right,” she said, and, turning to Damian, added, “They still haven’t figured out the courses thing here.” She then turned to Rey. “No offense,” she said.
When the salad did arrive, she clapped and said, “Yum, yum, yum!” Rey moved his chair closer to her and wrapped an arm tightly around her shoulders. “Lovey,” she cooed, wiggling out of the embrace, “how can we eat if you’ll squish me like that?” Rey let go and moved his chair away. “What can I say?” Damian elbowed him. “Always been a stickler for protocol, our Carolina.” “I just thought she was cold,” said Rey. “Oh let me tell you,” Damian said, the beginning of a chuckle wobbling his words, “cold is never a question with Carolina. It’s a promise.”
“Excuse me,” Carolina said, pushing her chair back. She heard two versions of her name, and as she stood up she expected a commotion, or at least a restraining hand on her arm. When neither materialized, she forced herself to quicken her steps. The men out of earshot, she allowed herself to take deep breaths. She made her way to the trellised footpath connecting the restaurant to the hotel, then to the lobby filled with white women caustically hovering over tongue-tied receptionists. Outside the hotel was another footpath, lined with orchids hanging on decapitated soda bottles, en route to the tentative blurring of alien pebbles and crushed corals unto powdery sand.
There was also a beach in her childhood, windswept and fringed with pine trees, near a fishing town, in Huelva. There was no resort. No welcome coconuts. No brown children coerced into playing ukulele for dining tourists. Instead there were nudist colonies. Beatnik travelers on horseback. Rumors of sunken galleons. Her parents were intrepid folk, she’d been told, before they settled down when the economy boomed in the 1960s, like so many in their generation. In their youth, they had been in Siem Reap when the civil war broke, in hashish-swathed Thamel before the travel agencies and trekking equipment shops opened, in Sagada overhearing giddy news of head-hunting tribes beyond the picturesque paddies. That summer of ’73 was supposed to be different. After all, they were parents now. They had an eight-year-old. They took a one-week leave from their office jobs and brought young Carolina on their first trip as a family. A nice, safe trip. Some sun and some wine. Each other’s company. Like the old times, really, they thought, just more structured, more accountable.
They must have heard of the wreckage from one of the fishermen. Just off the coast, a galleon marauded centuries ago for its treasures or tossed around by irreligious winds, dug up by neither archaeologist nor treasure hunter. It must have been irresistible, the image of the leviathan ship, intact, aground in a muddy grave. With rented diving gear on their backs, they entrusted Carolina to the old couple who owned their hostel in the sleepy village nearby. They’d be back the following day, they said, and a reward awaited her if she behaved. “La, la, la” by Massiel was playing on the radio, to which her mother hummed while her father, a tall man of quiet gravity, talked to the couple outside. A pat on Carolina’s head—they weren’t touchy folk—an
d off they went.
“So that’s him,” Rey said now, plopping next to her on the beach.
“Where is—” she trailed off. “Never mind.”
“I imagined him to be not so, well,” he said, “bony.”
“Can you teach me how to dive?” she asked.
He looked at her, and she couldn’t decide if it was fondness or loathing in his eyes. “My cousin,” he said, “he owns a dive shop over there.” He twisted laboriously to point to his back.
Carolina blinked away the sting of the sun in her eyes. “Where’s that again?” she asked.
Reynaldo smiled and made a show of twisting his body again, an elaborate quasi-ballet extension of the arms, as he strived to point to the same vague direction. “There,” he said with a loud grunt.
That night, bony Damian successfully sent away on a sixty-seater bound for Pasay, Carolina and Rey finally pushed through with a long-standing, constantly postponed plan. After a light dinner, they rented a tricycle and went on a road trip to a secluded cove even farther north, the tip of Luzon almost. It must have been past nine when they arrived. The sand, as he had promised, was even finer than in Saud, like an unstable field of Egyptian cotton. Cool wind from the sea teased their small tent and bonfire. Blanketing the deserted shore’s length was the bluish glow that gave the lagoon its nickname. Sitting lotus-style outside their tent, she felt absolutely alone with Reynaldo, and for the first time she didn’t struggle against the calm.
44
T wo years later, the christening of a niece of Reynaldo’s, a surly baby named after her, coincided with the hot flashes that the elder Carolina knew was not the usual Occidental discomfort over tropical heat.
When she entered the makeshift tent set up not far from their hotel, she was welcomed by a deluge of requests for photos (“Kodak, Ma’am, Kodak!”). Later that night, away from the doting relations of little Carolina Catubig, she was vigorously reporting to Reynaldo the countless arms and hands that grazed her shoulders and hips and, once or twice, breasts when he cut her off. “Well, feel free to leave.”
Carolina looked at him. “You have the bloody nerve—”
The ensuing fight, the two would later joke, laid the foundations of the house. The following week, Rey started asking around in Saud for leads and soon found, through that labyrinthine relative network that Carolina had shunned, a nice cheap property a hundred meters from the sea. It could be had for a discount and, the seller had whispered, a standing invitation to the baptism of the mestizo baby that would surely result from this union (if Carolina prayed to Santa Clara hard enough and soon enough). After a trip to a bank in Laoag, the construction began. There was no turning back, she knew. Or there was, but it would take some maneuvering, certainly more than a quick pivot back to Australia and a eight-hour flight.
On the day when the final paintjob was finished, Carolina stood terrified in the middle of the living room, amid the potent swirl of drying paint. By no means did it compare to the three-bedroom in Sydney that now swam adrift in the volatile housing market, but it was probably the only private residence in Pagudpud that had wall-to-wall carpeting or a functional bidet. In a sentimental touch, she brought her favorite monobloc chair from the veranda of the old homestay and put it in her new wooden patio. She realized then that what she was terrified of, mostly, was how happy she was. From the moment she saw the truck hauling the first batch of sand and gravel on-site, her movements had been accompanied by a nervous twitch, a stutter even if she spoke in English, to Rey and the usual people. She belatedly discovered it to be giddiness.
But soon the days in Pagudpud started to open with increasingly intolerable pain—in her back, her right knee, in the concave of her stomach where skin had begun to sag. The seaside house was new, a source of security, but her primordial dwelling, that always-delicate vessel, was not. Less and less, she was able to do the morning walk on the beach. Yoga, with Birgit back in Basel, was no longer fun. Her digestive system had started to resist the nine o’clock San Miguel.
“Want to go to Manila?” she asked Rey, who was in town for All Saints’ Day.
That weekend they found themselves in the middle of a geriatric crowd in geriatric Araneta Coliseum; Carolina’s favorite 70s quartet happened to be in town, thirty years past their prime. A good sign, she had thought. Past the concert’s one-hour mark, the venue dimmed and a guitar solo filled the air, greeted by massive cheering from the forty- and fifty-somethings who must have been teenagers when they first heard the riff. Carolina screamed and hugged Rey, who had to be reminded that, no, still not “Chiquitita,” mainly because the group wasn’t, and would most likely never be, ABBA.
It was a wistful, slow song, meant to give the singers a chance to rest after a series of upbeat numbers, and the languid succession of notes somehow hauled her back to Triana in Sevilla, to their house by the Guadalquivir that smelled most days of her grandmother’s cured jamón and echoed with her grandfather’s throaty Castillan. It was they who had to come to Huelva to fetch eight-year-old Carolina, their touch vibrating with pain, pity, and rheumatism, all at once. We’re here, they told her, we’re here, cómo te sientes? Carolina didn’t know how to respond, even as the same question continued, ceaseless, during the funeral, on all fronts, cómo te sientes, estás bien? The priest was quoting George Santayana—“There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval”—when a high-pitched sound escaped from Carolina’s pursed lips, the innocuous beginning of a hiccup. Everything stopped and everyone surrounded her like a clenching fist, a sidelong glance thrown at the sanctimonious cleric for upending the orphan.
She would never recover from that early grief, her therapist had said, not fully, and this was both burden and gift. You’re lucky, he’d chided her, yours would be a life fully felt . It was this savage, unconquerable totality that would press on her during panic attacks. That night in Araneta, she had elbowed her way through the concert crowd, and, outside the coliseum, found herself engulfed by another horde, this one exiting a nearby mall. They smelled of fish, didn’t they, she thought, of bananas and ginger and too-fragrant soap? Many had a permanent scowl. Or a stupid, gap-toothed grin. They were touchy, shrill, wouldn’t shut up. They were always in your face, trying to prove their worth. Yes, my English, I learned it from school, my accent is good, you’re Australian? I saw all the movies of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. Who are these people?
Reynaldo found her sitting on a sidewalk not too far from the coliseum’s grilled entrance. Her breathing had steadied, but she was still not quite herself. When Reynaldo, relief plastered on his face as a silly smile, joined her in the pavement, what she saw was a stranger who didn’t understand. Who never would. “I want to leave this place,” she told him. “I want to go home.” “OK,” he said. A moment passed in silence, then another, and he didn’t realize that by “this place” Carolina didn’t mean the dirty patch of sidewalk in Cubao and by “home” she didn’t mean the concrete house whose front walls were always somewhat wet with South China Sea’s eternal flying kiss.
On the day of her supposed flight back to Sydney, Rey mentioned in passing a dengue outbreak in the region. “Didn’t we cover this?” he asked. In their previous incarnations as medical researcher and assistant ages ago, they did cover dengue fever, although not too extensively as there were no special antiviral drugs for the disease. Twenty deaths in Pagudpud alone, he said.
“Oh dear,” she said, her mind flooded with images of the gaunt, jolly faces of the neighborhood kids, including her brown namesake, now a brusque two-year-old. Using her corporate connections, she facilitated the donation of virtually unlimited paracetamol tablets and bags of intravenous fluids to overburdened hospitals in the region. In the van to the health department’s regional office in La Union a week later, Carolina recalled that first bus ride with Rey. Memories of beginnings, when things neared the end, were always kinder in hindsight, and the idea of a second chance seemed, at worst, harmless.
The dengu
e outbreak stemmed, her old company received unprecedented media mileage, and she was offered a three-year consultancy contract at the country office in Manila. The deal included a unit in an upscale township in a suburb south of the capital and flights to and from Pagudpud every two months. At the signing of her contract, in the blazer and pantsuit that she once thought tedious and restrictive, she felt like her old self. With freshly minted 2nd Lt Reynaldo Tupaz sent off to his first assignment in Leyte, the set-up proved fortuitous. This was what she needed. A mix of company and solitude. A break, not a complete unfastening.
45
T hen it happened, a year or so later, an even, long-enough time for these things to happen. It was dinner at a Spanish restaurant in the military base turned upmarket commercial district where Carolina’s condominium was located. Rey had just been recalled to the army intelligence office in the outskirts of the same complex, fresh from his first assignment.
It was a version of themselves that she had never imagined in the heady Pagudpud days, so, of course, Carolina would reflect in hindsight, of course, something had to go wrong. That was how tragedies worked. She had been telling Rey about the wonderful outreach activity earlier at her office, a feeding program at one of the relocation sites that her company sponsored, their arms criss-crossing to scoop some paella negra and alcachofas con jamon, to move the glass of Chilean red and fish a stray napkin, when she asked him, finally, “How was your day?” When Rey gave her a blank look, she knew he was cheating on her.
Not again, she thought, almost amused. Used to it and amused. She ordered another bottle of wine, the first still half full. Maybe betrayal happened to certain types of women, a Leave-Me-I-Can-Take-It Type, with an air and disposition that made leave-taking easy, inevitable, just a matter of time. The second time around, she was almost giddy at the prospect. It was no longer the terrifying new experience as it had been with Damian. It was just what it was. She did a quick computation in her head and realized with giddy trepidation that she could be back in Sydney by St Patrick’s Day.
