Emil and Soly were happy there, always walking with their arms intertwined, kissing quickly underneath trees and in the shadows of buildings. Soly brought her younger sister Babeth and one of their maids as a chaperone. The maid had the smile of someone too young and kind to be a chaperone. She rarely spoke and mostly to Babeth. The first morning I woke to the sound of her vomiting in the bathroom. Emil and I were in the room next to theirs and I could hear her.
After seeing a doctor, she stayed in the hotel the rest of the trip. Soly left a pot of hot water and tea on the table beside her. “She’s pregnant,” Soly told us later and not unkindly. We were walking up one of the steep hills in downtown Baguio and by the time we got to the top we were too winded and too sympathetic to ask if she was married.
With Babeth there I didn’t feel like some forgotten third person. She was younger than me and smart. When she asked questions, I would answer them and feel like an older sister. The second day she put her cold hand in mine as if I was her sister. I remembered Marisa and I sitting on the prickly stones of our porch and her feeding me fried rice so I wouldn’t cry. The four of us walked the steep streets, hiked in the woods, wore jackets against the cold, and drank hot chocolate in the evenings.
Our fourth day there, I woke up ill. We had all gone to the park with the large duck pond and we were throwing scraps of old bread to the ducks. Not wanting to ruin anything, I zipped my jacket to my chin, smiled, and threw bread also. But finally I said, “I don’t feel well.” Emil felt my forehead and took me to a doctor’s office near the park.
I had the feeling as I was being examined that the doctor was uncomfortable. And while he explained that I had the flu, told me what to do, he stared at my eyes as if he knew me. But he was a kind man. He spoke softly and smiled a quiet smile as he did.
“What is the “V” for?” he asked. He was looking at the sheet on his desk on which I’d written my name.
“Villamor,” I said. “My mother’s name.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “I guessed that.”
When I think of Baguio I remember the cold and the hikes, Babeth’s trusting hand, and I hear the doctor saying “I guessed that” as if it meant more than that.
He gave Emil my prescription and walked us to the door of his clinic. “Mercy Drug is two streets down,” he said. “Don’t get lost. This is the time of day when the clouds walk.”
“Is that what it’s called?” Soly said behind me.
Babeth spread her arms wide and walked into the milky air.
* * *
This weekend Emil is here in Manila. We go to the cemetery to see Aquino’s grave, and Soly and Babeth come with us. “The funeral wasn’t bad,” Soly tells us on the way over there. She had gone with her father, Babeth, and an uncle. Emil had been afraid it would be dangerous.
The line to get into the cemetery begins outside on the main road. The car Tito Gil let us borrow doesn’t have air-conditioning, so we sit inside sweating and sticking to the seats. The windows are rolled down all the way, but there’s no breeze and the exhaust from the other cars and jeepneys is choking. I hold a handkerchief to my nose and so does Babeth.
“Maybe we should have come another day,” I say.
“I want to go home,” says Babeth, becoming uncharacteristically whiny. “Ate Soly, I want to go home.”
Soly turns back to look at Babeth. “We’re here already,” she says. “It won’t take long.”
But it does take long and Soly gets out of the car to buy soft drinks for everyone. When we finally get inside, Emil parks near our family’s mausoleum, far from Aquino’s grave. At Aquino’s grave, several priests and nuns are gathered and everyone else keeps a respectful distance as if the nuns and priests are somehow in charge. Because they are kneeling, most everyone else kneels.
Before leaving, we stop at our mausoleum to pray for Lolo and Ric and Lola and our great grandparents. We don’t remember Lola and we never met our great grandparents, so really we are praying for Lolo and especially Ric. Soly and Babeth pray too. I wish we had brought flowers.
When we get back to Tito Gil and Tita Connie’s we are told that Marisa’s friend Ana stopped by while we were gone.
“How did she know where I live?” I ask after the maid gives us the message.
“I think she came with us once,” says Emil, “when we were still living by UP.”
“She said she’d come back,” says the maid who can’t tell us when.
She returns that evening at nine o’clock. “I was visiting a friend in the neighborhood,” she says. “He knows your uncle.” She sits down on the green brocade couch with the heavy arms. I go to the kitchen to get us both some juice.
“Emil and Soly were here, but they went to a movie at the Quad.” We have the living room all to ourselves because Tita Connie and Tito Gil are watching a movie on their TV upstairs.
Ana’s glass of juice sits on the table as she looks at the shelf with Tito Gil and Tita Connie’s Betamax collection. “Oh, this is a good movie,” she says. “I’m surprised your Tito Gil has it.” Before I can figure out what she means she turns and asks, “Have you heard from Marisa?”
“Marisa never writes,” I say. “Only Mama does.”
“At least I know now she’s not ignoring me.”
“No,” I say, trying to sound comforting or understanding. I feel I should say more. “I think she’s still upset about Junjun and the whole thing. She was very scared, you know. She told me she thought he would come after her.”
Ana nods. “I know. I thought he might too.”
Then I remember about the windows “Mama sent a check for the broken windows.”
“Yes. The landlord said he got it.”
“Why do you think he did that?” Then I add, “Junjun, I mean.” But I think she already knew whom I was talking about.
“I don’t know,” sighs Ana. She finally drinks from her glass and I notice her bright red fingernails. “I think he was drunk.”
But that wouldn’t explain why Marisa was afraid he would come after her.
“This is a nice house,” says Ana.
I agree. “What are you doing now?” I ask her.
“I’m working for the Hilton as a customer service representative.”
I’m not sure what that means.
When Ana kisses me goodbye, she leaves a red lipstick stain on my cheek, just like Marisa used to.
I remember sitting in the car with Emil at the airport. Outside the terminal we had said goodbye to Mama and Papa and Marisa. Then we sat in the car and waited for their Philippine Airlines flight to leave. I don’t know why we were waiting. We wouldn’t be able to tell their airplane from the others. I asked Emil, “Do you think he would have killed her?” Sometimes I ask questions like this, pulled out of my thoughts, and Emil has no idea what I mean. But he knew then that I was talking about Junjun.
Emil rubbed his eyes hard, as if he could rub them out. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think he could have.” And we sat there for the next hour while several planes took off.
Before I left for Manila, I worried about Junjun. Anyone who stands outside a window and throws rocks for hours can do much worse. Even now I’m worried about him, someone I’ve never met. I wonder if he seems kind, if he has a mustache, if he had done anything like that before. I feel I should know these things. But one never knows what a person is. There are never enough clues except through experience and I suppose that’s why Marisa left him.
Emil was visiting from Olongapo and he was at Marisa’s apartment, the one she shared with Ana, when Junjun came. It was past midnight and they had come home from a movie. Marisa said to pretend no one was home. “But he must have seen the light,” Emil said. Still Marisa refused to answer the door and she turned off all the lights. Emil told us the pounding stopped and he and Marisa thought Junjun had left, so they went to bed. Emil was sleeping in Ana’s bedroom because she was at home in Bukidnon.
Then Junjun started throwing rocks at their window
s. One window shattered over Marisa’s bed while she was lying in it. Somehow she never got cut and neither did Emil. Only later, while cleaning up, did they slice themselves on glass.
Junjun yelled and threw rocks long after the windows were broken. Emil and Marisa spent the rest of the evening in the middle of the living room. They stayed there long after the yelling and rocks stopped, until they heard the taho man pushing his cart through the neighborhood, waking up everyone.
When they phoned early that morning, Marisa was crying. “Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked.
“They won’t do anything,” she said, her breath heavy like a swimmer drowning.
Junjun’s father is a colonel in the Constabulary.
* * *
Emil comes home near midnight, but we are all still awake. He’s to sleep with me in Ric’s old room, so Tita Connie has us drag in the mattress from the guest bedroom and lay it on the floor. “The guest bedroom, you see, has termites,” she explains. “And who knows when the carpenters will finish repairing the ceiling.” We nod.
“I hope it doesn’t take them much longer to finish,” says Emil, being polite.
“Ay,” says Tita Connie. She sighs and tells us how long such work can take and how once she had to have everything redone because the work was completed so poorly. We simply nod.
Later Emil says, “I don’t think I’d like to sleep in this room all the time.”
We’re both in our beds and the only light is that coming through the window. He’s been here before and been in this room since I moved here. But I sense that lying in the dark he’s beginning to feel the same way about the room that I do. Ric has always been in the back of my mind, even before he died. But this room makes him real.
“I don’t sleep very well sometimes,” I tell Emil.
“I can see why,” he says. “Why couldn’t they give you the guest bedroom?”
“Because it has termites. And then where would the guests stay?”
“True. But at least Tita Connie could have packed all these things away.”
“I don’t think she wants to.”
“Yes.” I imagine Emil nodding.
Ric’s photo albums, records and books are stacked neatly on a bookshelf next to the door. Tubes holding his architectural projects still lean against the shelf with his name printed in the neat writing he learned. This bed is worked into the contours of his arms, his hips, his toes. Sometimes I get the sense I’m living in the room of someone else named Ric and I feel a strange double vision, a vertigo. Emil doesn’t sense all of this. He doesn’t know what Ric meant to me. I’m not sure what Ric meant to me except that it was both good and bad.
I shift to a cooler spot on the bed, which never does any good because I always wake in the depression of Ric’s body. I sit up. “I’m going to turn this mattress over.”
“OK,” says Emil. I see the white of his shorts as he stands.
Moonlight comes in the window. We pull the sheets off the bed and they hiss against each other, crumple in whispers to the floor. We’re giggling and sweating.
“All right,” says Emil. His voice is hoarse with laughter and with trying to stay quiet. “I’ll lift my end and you grab it and pull it over.”
The mattress is thick and heavy. I try to hold on to the end Emil is pushing over to me, but it’s too thick and I can’t get a very good grip on it. It bends along the middle as Emil is pushing it over. “Stop, stop,” he whispers and readjusts the mattress. I shift my hands, holding only the bottom, and guide it down while Emil pulls the other end toward him. We shove and pull until it’s centered on the bed. Then we flop down and giggle at the furtiveness involved in changing a mattress.
“Maybe we could put away Ric’s things slowly,” says Emil. “One book a week.”
“We could construct facades.” I poke Emil in the side. “You could design them. And I’d put all my own books inside.”
“We could send Tita Connie away on a trip. Leave all sorts of travel brochures lying around the house. Tours to the Holy Land.”
“Shopping tour of Hong Kong.”
“Lourdes and the Louvre.”
“With a shopping tour of Paris.”
“Of course. That would be included in the package.”
Finally we get up and sort through the sheets on the floor. Emil is suddenly quiet as he helps me remake the bed. “You know…,” he says. He shakes the pillow case to get the pillow all the way in. He looks down to the bed as he sets the pillow on it. “Soly and I are getting married.” His voice is shy.
I smile at him and sit down on the bed. “So you’re engaged.”
“Yeah,” he laughs finally. “I guess that’s what I meant to say.”
“Same thing.”
“Not always,” he says.
“But in this case it is.”
“I hope so,” he says, sounding more certain than hopeful.
“I like her. I like her very much.”
“I know, so I wanted you to be the first to know. Except maybe her parents. I guess she’s already told them.”
“We have to tell Mama and Papa. And Marisa.”
“I think I’ll call them.”
“We could call from here. Because Tita Connie and Tito Gil will have to know and then they’ll want to talk to Mama and Papa afterward, so we may as well call from here.”
“That’s true,” says Emil. “What time are we going to church tomorrow?”
“Nine. Then we’re going to lunch.”
“I’ll invite Soly and her family to lunch, we’ll tell everyone, and then we can call Mama and Papa.”
“This is all very well planned,” I say.
“It’s practice for the wedding.”
We finally get back in our beds. “So when’s the wedding?” I ask.
“We haven’t decided on a date yet. Probably February.”
“Where are you going for your honeymoon?”
“Baguio,” Emil says.
“I guessed that.”
* * *
Not even Mama can come back for the wedding. She cried when she told us. Mama has always been the only one of them who wanted to come back. Even before they left, she acted as if they were returning although their tickets were one way. She wrote long lists of things for us to do, telephone numbers of repairmen, notes on what to tell Mang Anting, the yardman. “He comes every Wednesday,” she said, as if we had never noticed.
“I knew…,” said Emil—we were sitting on our porch talking to Freddy— “I knew they couldn’t come back so easily. Tito Gil was the one who arranged everything for them. I don’t know exactly how he got the visas for everyone on such short notice. But if they come back, they might not be able to return to the States.”
Ever since the time we saw Freddy again at Kong’s he has been to the house every weekend. Whenever I go home to Olongapo, he’s there. He and Emil and sometimes I go to the basketball court near the sari-sari store. I only shoot baskets because I don’t like the other men teasing me about playing. Anytime Freddy and Emil go, other people show up because Emil has a basketball. It’s an old one Papa bought him. He and Papa used to play basketball when Emil was younger. I don’t remember when they stopped.
Afterwards, we sit on the porch and drink beer, which Emil lets me drink because he says I’m in college now. He gives me a fake serious look when he says this. Naty usually frowns when I go in to get the beers. I wonder if she frowns at Emil and Freddy too.
I usually tell them what’s going on in Manila. “It’s quieted down, I think. But it’s not the same as before. People still talk, you know. More than ever.”
It was after they had played basketball and I’d stayed home reading that we sat and talked for a long time about Mama and Papa and Marisa. It was our last long talk together because the next weekend and the weekends after, Emil and I were in Manila and then everything was just the wedding for the next month.
I’m going to be a bridesmaid and Freddy is best man. Babeth is the flower
girl. For the next month we were fitted and rehearsed and hauled around Manila. Babeth and I sat in Goldilocks bakery looking at ensaymada, mamon and other pastries and eating halo-halo while Soly and her mother spent an hour looking through photographs of wedding cakes. It took so long and I ate so much halo-halo I got sick and lay in the back seat of their car all the way back to Tita Connie and Tito Gil’s.
Emil went to the tailor with Freddy and Tito Gil to get new barong tagalogs made. “I already have many,” said Emil. But Tita Connie said they weren’t formal enough for such a special event and he didn’t want to embarrass Soly, did he? They all were measured for new pants too. Tita Connie went with me to the seamstress and, fortunately, couldn’t say anything because Soly had already chosen the dress style and material. Forest green.
“Lovely,” said Tita Connie, who I knew was accustomed to pinks for weddings. Forest green was an unusual choice.
But before all of this, Freddy and Emil and I sat on our front porch in Olongapo, not realizing what would happen over the next few weeks. Freddy asked about Papa.
“I’d heard about it,” he said of the bank hold-up, “but I never knew exactly what happened. I only read what was in the newspapers.”
It was already dark and we could smell fish from the kitchen. “I don’t know .exactly what happened,” Emil said. “We couldn’t get near the bank. We couldn’t even get on the base.”
“So what did you do?”
There was a short pause before Emil answered quietly. “We waited outside, all the families.” I knew he had been thinking about the waiting in the sun on the other side of the bridge. People walked around us and we could hear the swimming children yelling, asking for money, from the black river below. We stood there and breathed in that river-smell, the garbage of the city, and waited.
“I read…,” said Freddy. “I read that a memorial mass was held for the man who held up the bank and that the hostages attended. I think one of them said, ‘He wasn’t a bad man.’”
Mango Seasons Page 15
