by Gina Apostol
General Tom was a large-nosed man with an iron lung, or plaster heart—I never got that right. It was he who was my parents’ old friend. He had wires attached to his body to keep him alive, but he was still the head of the American government outfit LOTUS. He had always been this fleshy man with sketchy features—this impression of an unfinished brow, of a face drawn badly from memory. But with his recent illness, a mild stroke, the subtle vapidness about his mouth was exaggerated. The right side of his face had this local morbidity, a paralytic tic.
With other foreigners in Filipino dress, the American officers stood to wait for the couple to take their seats; then the American general sat beside the president, and Colonel Grier took his place beside the Lady. Her über-hairdo, a hive without the honey, gave the ceremony its loud important spell. I stood beside Don Mariano while my mother took the place beside my father. Before me was Bumbum Esdrújula, that paragon of style. Fortunately, I was a full head taller than her exquisite coif. The band struck the notes of the national anthem, and people around me followed their leader’s example, right hand on the heart. If you could sing with a high, lasting tremolo, so much the better; if you could do second voce, skimming the notes of the melody with artful dissonance, that was okay, too. Unluckily for the maid beside Madame Bumbum, she had to hold the towels. Bumbum’s musical exertions were genteel but prodigious, and the maid kept making her patriotic efforts as best as she could, dabbing at Madame Bumbum until the end of the stirring song.
AFTER THE FINALE, roused from the coughing that had plagued them while the pianist embarked on a complicated composition by an unfamiliar Slavic name—where was their Mozart, their Rachmaninoff, even a Chopin of some sort—cough, cough—(the theater had been enflamed with a whooping disease, an aggrieved contagion, during the prolonged unfamiliarity of the difficult composer’s piece, accompanying the bell-jar cacophony of my numb sensations), the people loudly asked for an encore. After all, they were sophisticates—some woke up, instantly clapping: what a beautiful tune by that composer—what was his name?
The garland of roses came on stage, a funereal wreath. A minion, equally dressed up but doomed to remain unnamed, brought it up, and then came the loud cheering for the Lady. The lady, the lady! The clapping grew louder; she rose from the depths; she walked up the steps; she came onto the stage. She took the bouquet of flowers. She made a low, meaningful bow to the pianist, reappearing from the wing, now suitably irrelevant. Then she offered the roses to the man of the hour.
“Oh, mahal, you see what a Filipino can do? He is a talented boy, and I always knew if we helped him it would happen. He would reap rewards. My people, I always say this to the president: if we have the right weather, we can build swimming pools in two days. With the right talent, we can be famous around the world.”
Her tongue was tainted with that accent that still lulled me to sleep, my mother’s perfectly embalmed Waray—their language clung to their tongues like the formalin that kept skeletons intact.
The audience roared its deep wave of praise.
Then the pianist sat down; he signaled the page-turner to leave the stage; all alone, he flexed his fingers over the piano; he started trilling, his fingers weaving a wild storm. Through the thunder of his display, the audience found the sweet melody. How proud and pleased everyone was. His fingers turned the old Visayan drinking song, the light Waray tune, into an elaborate tribute. The ladies in their gowns were nodding their heads, jeweled combs were wobbling. A Filipino talent! A success in Europe! Ah, this romantic throbbing, this delirious Dandansoy. As the clapping swelled, who was it who came up from the audience? People craned their necks to look, but in their hearts they guessed. She floated back onto the stage, the sails of her varicolored gown flying. She took the microphone from the far right end and began to trill the introductory words of the song, huskily. As if she were shy.
The man in festive white, standing small in his platform heels, had a husband’s look of repressed boredom, used to these domestic displays.
Dandansooooy, she began. And it became a medley, an unrehearsed piece of wit that everyone expected: she changed the tune to her signature song—
Because of you, she sang, I wish to live.
IT WAS ENOUGH to make one turn to revolution.
MR. ESDRÚJULA, THE Secretary, was the first on his feet, then the rest in the front row stood up. Only Colonel Grier remained seated, though his wife rose uncertainly, as if something were falling from her lap. Soon the entire hall was on its feet, clapping for the lady as she sang the song in increasingly dramatic vibrato. What a Filipino she was—what a woman of style. Greater than Maria Callas! Now even Colonel Grier stood up. I saw the Secretary look sideways at him, briefly, then resume his applause. The pianist did a last flourish, an exercise in digital flirtation. The jeweled crowd went mad.
A great concert, said everyone, especially those who had been coughing their heads off a few pieces ago, ready to wallop Shostakovich.
8
THE EARLIEST VOYAGERS had this insight: to keep Manila, all they needed was to gain its harbor. Historical demons knew that—all the Manila characters. Indentured sailors and boatbuilding men. Jesuit priests and Muslim sultans. Impecunious, cunning Miguel López de Legazpi, the first Spanish governor-general of Manila. Basque adventurers. Chinese pirates. Devilish, blue-eyed Dutch smugglers. Everyone took the harbor as prize. Otherwise the city is a disaster. It is muggy, its humidity is disorienting, it is susceptible to nervous illnesses, swamp fever, and dengue. A refuge of rascals. Prime real estate for amoks as well as prostitutes, scavengers and social climbers. Not too different, I guess, from the Hudson’s ancient Mannahatta, lusty grave of the Algonquin nations. Like any old city, Manila has attracted a host of dissolutes and dreamers, with its old harbor and its sinking palisade, easily defended and easily betrayed.
The nurses, knowing my habits, now left me alone. When I opened the drawers in the library, somehow I knew what I would find: Aging music rolls for the Aeolian harp. Leftovers of the old mansion’s gilded age. I remember as a kid wondering what they were for, these scrolls that in a certain light unfolded shadows punctured on my hand. On the mantelpiece, a redundant oleograph reproduced the room’s view, but I had no memory of drawing my childish name on the cheap print. My signature spoiled its bottom right corner: a loop of S’s scratched the view of cows chewing cud and upset a pair of precisely drawn pigs.
My mom in her high heels click-clacking down the Grecian parquet, with the lady who had first enumerated the house’s gifts. The secret doors for the servants, the rams’ heads sculpted into cabinets. The lady’s words were impressive: the Guastavino tiles, the Della Robbia graces, the porte-cochere. The, the, the. I noted how she introduced all the novelties with a definite article. She pointed out where we could put a trampoline in the music room and a playground on the lawn. I refused to ride the elevator, a creaky beast with an accordion mouth, like the contraption in that show I used to watch in America, Get Smart, about a dumb detective.
We must have lived here for a spell, deep in the seventies. When the country was in tumult, a new regime installed: after the awful pall of martial law in 1972. When the demand for their goods was at its height and the money came flowing in, my parents relocated to America until the mobs died down—the bleeding demonstrators on the streets. Down with the Dictator! Lap Dog! Tuta! Not that I could translate those words then. I was seven, eight? Bodies hunted down, radicals lynched, senators jailed, and farmers massacred as the military government clamped down on the storm. How was I to know? I was a baby. From the spoils of those bloody times, my parents purchased this gilded womb. I traced the fleur-de-lys reliefs inset in the fireplace: dimly I recognized the gesture, the way I had followed the gilt trim when I was a child.
I was a martial-law baby. A hyperactive bundle too quick for my yaya, Manang Maring, who seemed old even then. I tortured her on the double staircase—leaping down one side before she had the chance to climb up on the other, and doing it again b
efore she could catch her breath. Now I know the entire house has a dizzying design—the staircase has a twin, and so does the oriel window, and the Grecian keys on one side of the room can be trusted to find themselves again on the other. As a child, I raced through the vaults and the niches and the fireplaces and the bays of this rambling everlasting hide-and-seek place, poking and giggling and running about, while the flustered servants called out my name. And in the meantime, on the other side of the mirror, my country raged.
I don’t know exactly when we returned to the Philippines and my parents sent me back to school in Makati, but I know we came back here, to this mansion, off and on, for summer vacations, for trips with Uncle Gianni to visit museums, parks, and churches in the city. I know it was he who installed soccer posts parallel to the spiral driveway, and the ball would fall, as it would, into the flowers by the porte-cochere.
I imagine everything in the house must be as it was then: even the rusty goalposts must hang about, forlorn without their netting, if one peered beyond the Guastavino entrance, the, the, the, to the lawn enclosure rolling toward the street. But the house’s vacancy disturbs me, its enormous solitude.
Why am I still here?
AFTER LUNCH, I peeped through the faint grisaille of the mahogany doorway’s lunette, like a dumb detective. Not everything in the house rang a bell. My parents, hoarders and wasters both, seem to be storing keepsakes and curios from some disbanded utopia—nuestro perdido Eden. Who was this lady in a kerchief dress? A headless woman, all in white.
Emily Dickinson. A poster I had bought from the poet’s house in Amherst.
I rifled through a boxful of gloves, tiny overcoats, galoshes —discarded winters of my mother’s discontent (above all things in America she hates the cold, as if it were an affront to her affluence, the one thing she cannot control). A Pisan Pinocchio in limbo: tangled up in its own strings. Bundles of old wallpaper—Beatrix Potter prints and Roald Dahl figures—tightly raveled, unused.
Carefully, I smoothed out the scrim of the Roald Dahl wallpaper. It was Uncle Gianni who had helped plan the interior of my rooms in Makati, when we returned from America in the seventies. He was a fastidious looter, a keen-eyed man of art. He found copies of old Bauhaus typescript scrolls during a business tour of the Black Forest or White Mountains—had he flown in from Germany or New Hampshire? Wherever he was, he indulged my tastes. Like Magellan, his hero, he liked finding things. I guess I had a fixation for the Bauhaus then—their chromatic play, rigid lines. Obsessions overcame me, instant crazes, precious and obnoxious, but in the middle of a hobby, I’d find another horse, and in this way I filled my mind with passing knowledge, like those gold rings in transit in old-fashioned merry-go-rounds.
Did we see an exhibit somewhere in Copenhagen of some modernist memoirist? Aesthetes with a cause, Uncle Gianni laughed. The Bauhaus flouted the Nazis by fetishizing function: How German, he said. Anyhow he brought to Makati one day fine sketches of interlocking S’s, providential initials of my name, and an ingenious printer from Bulacan fashioned the typescript into ribbons of scenes from my favorite writer at the time, Roald Dahl. Ciao, bellezza. Uncle Gianni presented my finished rooms with a flourish. He liked to waste the frustrations of his artistry on me.
And when Jed and Soli had first seen my bedroom in Makati, they had laughed. I didn’t begrudge them their complicitous glance; they were always acting like coconspirators anyhow, Trotsykites in college drag.
Jed and Soli.
Jed and Soli.
Jed and Soli.
Jed and Soli.
MY CHEST HURTS.
Is it mere acid reflux, an unsettling in the gut, or is it a hypochondriac twinge, an atherosclerotic pang or premature congestion imagined in the heart? Something in that vein. A sense of decay, of blockage. I will sit here and wait it out.
9
EVEN IN A freshman dorm full of Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, nat-dems, soc-dems, and plain god-dems, as Edwin Cardozo, a pervert in plainclothes, called the young Christian politicians who wanted a share of the campus election pie, Soli Soledad and Jed De Rivera Morga were a conspicuous pair.
You could say Jed and Soli were a monad-unit of basic class warfare simply by entering a room. And a downright theoretical contradiction when they entered hand in hand. Solidaridad Soledad was some kind of leader of campus demonstrations and midnight Mendiola rallies, a classic petty-bourgeois hell-raiser of our listless, insipid consciousnesses—while Jed was the avatar of all that she protested.
Soli was not, as she liked to boast, an aboriginal pygmy, but she had this deep sheen: the color of rare Philippine mahogany. For some reason, she smelled of butterscotch. Her caramel gleam, a dark brown smoothness of feature, complemented her elfin irony. From the first, to me she was riveting. Who knows where she was from—Albay or Albania. It’s true, her ethereal quality belied her absolute allegiance to dialectical materialism; but of course, among kids at the university, that only added to her charms rather than subtracted. She carried her collegiate Maoism like a Joycean chalice, and in my memory, callow as my ideology, she lies in this fog of secular grace. In the end, I have no words, really, for my attraction. She never lectured me: but somehow whenever I was in her presence I knew my mere existence was a crime. At the very least, I understood I was a fraud.
To view my life through her empathy was like studying my nausea with a ready-made glossary—maybe I remember Soli so clearly because she gave names to my unease, though her doing so gave me no comfort. Exhibit A: Here are the Filipino people. You are the wicked witch beneath its wing. Exhibit B: To enter the gates of your country, give up your suite of custom-designed rooms and march.
So this campus radical’s constant carrying on in the dorm with Don Mariano’s son, my neighbor in Makati and like me an alumnus of that infernal American high school, haven of bureaucrat-capitalists, imperialists, and feudal lords, evil trinity of my country’s didactic, dialectical griefs, as per Soli, was disconcerting.
Jed De Rivera Morga’s fame had preceded his arrival at the dorm. I already knew that he had run away from his dad’s home to live with his mother at her residence across the street from us in the Village, when Don Mariano refused to let him stay in Manila for college. Don Mariano wanted him to go abroad, like the rest of us. My mother retold in hushed tones the serial narrative of Jed’s ridiculous rebellion against Princeton, Stanford and Cornell (oddly enough, when I got to the dorm, budding Marxists talked about him with the same deferential scorn). Ma rehashed each installment of Jed’s anti–Ivy League capers in the way she always talked about the Morgas: as if they existed on another planet.
The fact was, for certain sections of Manila society—those who subscribed to the protocols of status and thus underscored, by their attention to its rigors, their own devout inferiority—the Morgas were from a different planet. As far as the evidence went, they were as likely descended from the Spanish-era oidor Antonio de Morga, who had written the history of the Philippines in 1602 as I was descended (according to my father) from Rajah Soliman, the vanquished sultan of pre-Hispanic Manila. Still, these twin legends kept each of our families’ hired guns busy through several biographical volumes of sad veracity. Family book projects were a serial fad in Manila, gleaming coffee-table tomes called Tides & Time (Volume 1: The Chinese Dynasty) or Modern Rajah: Kingdom Conquered to Kingdom Come—vanity presses of fine megalomaniac proportions written with style by literary eunuchs. What separated the Morgas, of course, from my parents was that the Solimans and the Kierulfs were provincial upstarts whose genealogy was up for grabs; while Jed’s people were old oligarchs who had owned the swamps of Manila when tamarin monkeys still lived in them. To its credit, Jed used to say, like primordial slime his family kept its grip on the land even now that different species of baboon held sway.
As Jed acted out his sophomoric dramas of privileged anarchy in Makati, my mother was already ordering the maids to start packing my bags in anticipation of my departure for some leafy arcadia in New Engla
nd or New York—someplace new. Very few of my classmates chose college at home. But an infection that attacked me—a debilitating contraction of lungs, or esophagus, or ganglia—this withering in the loins kept me home instead of on my way to some hallowed ivy hall (a weakness, for some reason, strikes me at inconvenient times). It was that infection that reunited me, gratuitously, fortuitously, with the pale misanthrope, Joaquin Eduardo De Rivera Morga, aka Jed, gold-haired scion of Philippine gold and silver mines.
As if college in Manila were a form of convalescence, my parents allowed me to stay a term at the local university while I recovered. My mother kept saying, a bit doubtfully, “Well, if the Morgas are doing it—?” I guess if the Morgas did things, one did not have to finish one’s sentences.
Anyway, I pointed out to my mom, I was not yet seventeen—everyone at the dorm would be my age. In Manila, high school ended two years earlier than ours at the American School, and at the American School, I had always been too young.
My mom, whose competitive streak was old-fashioned, as Uncle Gianni liked to say, loved to boast that in public school in America I had kept skipping grades—inday, you were an advanced student! She thought it was an advantage. As far as I could tell, at the American School it made me something of a dork (even in A.P. English). She liked to retell how I had begun reading at age three, was bored in school at five, and when I was seven tests in New York resolved the mystery of my moods—I had the vocabulary and comprehension level of a sullen ninth-grader. Now here I was, too sick to go abroad but just the right age for Manila. Inday, it’s ironic. Precocity had given me leverage in the event of unforeseen disaster. She wrote my college to defer until January intersession; and after negotiations with the local university that made a fuss over some exam, she enrolled me in Manila that June.
I have a distinct, sunlit memory of passing Jed with Soli one sharp milky noon, there by the covered walk at the college. I remember that lost, malignant emptiness as I watched them, that wasteful coveting madness as I held a lunch tray (or was it a book) in my hand. Maybe it was an extension of my illness—a tardy canker—the shallow whinge of deflated gall—that occasioned the response I had at the sight of Jed with Soli. Did I love him even then? I had a dim notion I would get to know him in that ramshackle place they called a university dorm: after all, were we not high school cohorts (though in the early days he never remembered my name)? Did we not share the same road signs home, a pair of historic anachronisms saluting the wrong side of the revolution: Admiral George Dewey Drive, parallel to President McKinley Road?
