The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  I gave the boy who watched the car ten pesos and drove down Magsaysay Street. The windows were up, the doors locked, the air-conditioning on. Where the road went into the base, American sailors piled out of jeepneys, buses, taxis, three-wheelers, a mob of drunken boys leaving a trail of spilled beer and semen from here to Subic City. On my left and right, they walked across the Santa Rita Bridge. A line of cars preceded me to the gates. I dimmed the headlights and rolled down the windows. Some of the Americans noticed me. “That baby takes unleaded premium.” Meaning no harm. The Filipino sentries knew my face. The American guards knew the plates, the sticker, the papers in my hand. They waved me through.

  Subic Bay was an American place. It was not ours, not yet, though the newspapers said that someday the Americans would leave. Not ours, not yet, but I was a child of this place and when I drove over the bridge, across the river they called Shit’s Creek, when I drove through the gate, the traitor in me relaxed. If you hear of a military base you picture gates, fences, guards, patrols, dogs. Subic had all of those things. But, consider the barracks, like college dormitories, the clubs, snack bars, shops and restaurants, the ice-blue swimming pool, the beaches and baseball fields, the lawns, cut and watered and smelling sweet. No jeepneys, no noise, no garbage, no crowding, no horn-blowing. Why not say it? No Filipinos. And why not admit it? I felt at home there.

  I first entered the base with my mother, who worked as cook and lavandera—washerwoman—in the house I stayed in now, until recently the quarters of Commander Andrew Yauger. Mrs. Doris Yauger was a thin, golf-playing woman with a smoker’s cough and a whiskey voice, who later left for a hospital in San Diego. The Yaugers had no children. Commander Andy encouraged my mother to bring me to work. To play. I had television, swimming pool, hamburgers, ice cream, stereo. Commander Andy was a kind man and a good American. At the base he was in charge of civic action projects in the barrios around the base, dispensaries, roads, schoolhouses. He sponsored handicraft cooperatives, handicapped Olympics, Little League Teams, scholarship raffles, dozens of good works. He sponsored me. I was one of his good works.

  In my high school years, I helped my mother with parties that Commander Andy and Doris would give. That was me, a tray of lumpia in my hands, circulating among officers and wives, not a servant so much as a friend of the family, a bright young Filipina who devoured good books, won spelling bees, memorized the U.S. and Philippines presidents. And I spoke such wonderful English. “Very” not “berry.” I recited Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence,” lumpia tray in one hand, napkins in the other, “above the earth is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is high …” Thanks to Commander Andy, I had pen pals in Korea, Spain, Germany, and Chicago. I wonder if they wonder what became of me. I was headed for the University of the Philippines under Commander Andy’s sponsorship. Yes, I was planning to major in English and business administration, a poet with a pocket calculator, very impressive. Would I like to visit America? Someday, of course, perhaps, but only just to visit, for my home is the Philippines, my country which I love, to be made a better place. I had all the answers. And Commander Andy Yauger beamed.

  Sometimes, Commander Andy would take me with him when he went into the barrios. I would sit with him through sweltering meetings with barrio leaders, school groups, women’s clubs, watching him greet and joke, watching him stand and join in singing the Philippines national anthem. Often, he was the only one in the room who knew all the words, though those were the only Tagalog words he knew. After the national anthem, he needed an interpreter. That was me. Commander Andy was at his happiest out in the barrios. No speech was too long, no request too small, no building too hot. He arrived on time, when meeting halls were empty, and he was always the last to leave, never declining a meal of local food he could never guess at, local food he praised. Then, on the ride home, I would watch him wince and sweat, it never failed, yet still he asked for seconds and cleaned his plate, even though he knew he’d be sick, pulling off to the side of the road, to vomit. Sometimes he had diarrhea. In this way, in our own way, we became intimate.

  The Urban Farmers Cooperative was one of Andy’s favorite projects. Commander Andy had noticed that in even the worst parts of Olongapo, in the squatter settlements along the river or the shack colonies up in the hills, Filipinos did what they could to make things better. They put flower pots in the meanest alleys, tin cans filled with soil, bougainvillea trained to cover tarpaper walls, papaya trees fighting out of tiny squares of baked, dead clay. Commander Andy arranged for a hillside plot high above Olongapo to be divided into gardens and offered to local poor. He arranged for a water pipe that would run from the base to the gardens. He established a schedule for a jeepney that would take people up to the gardens and back down and—just to be safe—he arranged for some old men to keep watch on the gardens, day or night. For those who did not eat all of what they grew, he promised that base restaurants would purchase anything they offered. What I have said sounds simple but, oh, the meetings, the requests, the excuses; the poor so hapless, the landowners so predatory. The driver wanted extra money for carrying vegetables. The barrio people wanted to be paid for permitting a water pipe to run in front of their houses. The farmers wanted an advance on crops they hadn’t harvested. Others tried to rent out, sublet, even sell plots they hadn’t even planted. Still, in the end it worked: eggplant, tomatoes, onions, pepper, garlic appeared. Miracles. There were flowers too and benches with a view of the city and the base, where people could sit while children ran from plot to plot, watering vegetables, splashing themselves, squealing with delight.

  We would often stop at the gardens on our way back from other projects, many of them unsuccessful. The Olongapo way was to take as much as you could as quickly as you could. And the place to get things was the base. How could it be different, when all that separated a first-world superpower and a third-world city was a polluted river? With the Americans, the only question was how—and how quickly—you could turn their presence to your advantage. And there was this: no matter how much you got, you’d never get even.

  Once, shortly after he had returned from home leave, we drove past Subic City, to a village in Zambales where Commander Andy had donated materials for a basketball court: concrete, hoops, nets, lights—so the people could play at night—and benches, so that old people and children could watch the games. It was the idea of the garden all over again, a project for the whole community, Americans just getting it started, contributing the missing pieces and then backing away. “The sooner it becomes a Filipino thing, the better,” Commander Andy said.

  In this case, it had become a Filipino thing a little too quickly. In fact, before it was built. Muddy puddles marked the place where the basketball court should have been. Cement, lumber, fencing, and wiring, all had been delivered, all were gone. Nothing had changed. Nothing had moved, except the materials themselves. Commander Andy sat behind the wheel of his car, a white Chevrolet which everyone in the barrio had learned to welcome. But this time no one came out to greet us.

  “Tell me I wasn’t kidding myself, Malou,” Commander Andy said after a while. “This wasn’t something that was just my idea, was it?”

  “No sir,” I said.

  “They all wanted this basketball court, didn’t they? They were all on board. At least they said they were. You were there, most of the meetings. Was there something I was missing?”

  I shook my head. I was ashamed of myself for being from the Philippines. And angry at Commander Andy for making me feel ashamed. And also a little grateful that I was better, already, than the people who lived here. It had started raining again, harder than before, and the puddles came together on the would-be basketball court and soon it was underwater, all of it.

  “We could go out into the rain, Malou, and go knocking on doors,” Commander Andy said.

  “If you want sir, I can …” I was already reaching for the door handle.

  “Sit still, Malou,” he said. “It’s raining too hard. And
besides, you already know what happened. Don’t you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Tell you?”

  “Sure. Tell me what happened here. Tell me a story.”

  “Sir?” I didn’t like the way he was pressing me. At one moment, he confided in me, he shared. We were partners. Now he used me: Local testimony. Specimen. Exhibit.

  “I need an explanation, why this particular photo opportunity for the admiral isn’t coming off on time. Unless they want to come out and make mudpies.”

  “All right, Commander Andy,” I said. “Someone stole your equipment. Someone came and took what he wanted or he sent some boys to take it for him. Not in disguise. Not in the middle of the night. They came and took what they wanted while everyone was watching and nobody was doing anything to stop them.”

  I gestured toward the houses around us. Poor, small places, hammered together with wood and tin that had been part of other houses, before typhoons came along, and after the next storm they’d be part of other houses. In the meantime, they were homes to families of ten and twelve. Homes where there was always someone awake and always someone sleeping.

  “Maybe someone came out and spoke to them. Someone who was at your meetings, someone who asked—” I stopped to catch my breath. “Someone who asked who sent them. And the boys mentioned a name and that was the end of it. The name of someone who can take what he wants. And that was the end of it. Because the person who asked wasn’t supposed to die defending the money of U.S. taxpayers. Was he?”

  “Okay, Malou,” he said. He’d softened now. He was smiling.

  “I’m not finish,” I said. I corrected myself. “Finished. Because after they took what they wanted there was something left behind. A bag of this or that. Some loose nails, maybe. A few boards. Scraps and garbages … garbage. Little things. And the people who live around here and saw what happened and did nothing to stop it because there was nothing they could do … then they came and took what was left and they became part of what happened, until there was nothing left but what you see.”

  He sat quiet for a while after I had finished, looking out at the rain. The whole place ached with failure and guilt, it seemed to me. Then, even as the rain kept pouring down, some children ran onto the court, four or five of them, splashing, diving, sliding, rolling around and covering themselves with mud, then standing up and letting the rain shower them clean. Commander Andy watched them and I knew he’d already forgiven them, and their parents, that tomorrow he would try again, here or somewhere else. “Look at them go!” he said. “Kids and puddles. Put a puddle next to a swimming pool, a puddle always wins.”

  By the time we drove through Barrio Barretto, the rains had passed, and also his bad mood. Everything was clean and dripping, the road steaming and the air so fresh, we rolled down the windows. “Let’s go watch the sunset from up high,” Andy suggested. “And smell some flowers.”

  With this my heart sank again, because something had been happening at the Urban Gardens. Andy hadn’t noticed it but the farmers had spoken of it, not to me but around me, and I knew it was only a matter of time. And that there was nothing to be done. Meanwhile I listened to Andy, fully himself, renewing our argument about whether we would see a so-called “green flash” at sunset, an explosion of gases he claimed to have witnessed many times at sea but which I had never seen in Olongapo. He teased me about it, even as we pulled into the Urban Gardens, or what was left of them. And then the teasing stopped.

  The plants were all gone, except for a few dead cabbage leaves, brown as tobacco. The benches and fences had vanished also, all of it as if it had never been. Andy was dumbfounded. The basketball court had never been born. But the gardens had flourished, for a while. Crops had been harvested here, money earned, meals eaten. “What happened?”

  “The water pipes,” I said. “Illegal connections. One by one. So first the farmers have plenty water and then a little less and then a trickle that becomes a drop. Arid now … the result is what you see.”

  “The result is what you see,” he repeated. “That’s profound. Really, Malou. The result is what you see. So excuse me. I’m going to see the result.”

  He got out of the car and, from the way he slammed the door, I knew better than to follow. I leaned against the car, watching him move from plot to plot, although the borders were eroded and only little sticks with seed envelopes on top showed what had once been planted there. They looked like cemetery markers now.

  “You knew about this one too,” he said when he came out of the garden. “I sensed you weren’t too happy about coming up here. You knew.”

  “I heard the farmers talk about it. Then … whenever I came here … I tried the water. Always it was less.”

  “Sure, I see.” He turned away from me, sighting across the ruined garden. The sun had set behind the Zambales mountains and we had not even seen it go, it just slipped away. “I have a question or two for you, Malou. A bunch of questions. Like how long have I known you? And why didn’t you tell me what was going on, why the hell didn’t you tell me, or did it kind of tickle you, seeing me walking around stupid?”

  That, I think, was the moment things changed for me. Because, when it had started, I was every Filipina confronted by an American. I was the maid who spills a drink, the lavandera who burns a shirt, the cook who puts a prime steak into the oven for two hours and turns it into pot roast. “Yes, mum.” “Sorry, sir.” The bowed head, the downcast eyes, the explanations that evaporated, English sentences falling apart under pressure. The customer was always right and the American was always the customer.

  “The water,” I said. “If I told you about the connections, you would turn off the water. You or the people you told. I did not like that. All over this country you see people carrying buckets of water from wells and faucets to their houses. Or they carry dishes and laundry to the water. Their clothes, their pots, their dirty bodies. And the water is never clean because this is the Philippines. There is always someone upstream, sending their dirt down to you. And there is always someone downstream, cleaning themselves in your dirty water.”

  I took a breath and gathered myself. I had Andy’s full attention. He wasn’t used to outbursts. He was a good man but—as I was learning—not as smart as I was, in some ways. Looking back, I see that I learned everything I needed to learn about Americans from Commander Andy. That night, a few lessons from him awaited me, but I could see them coming.

  “I’m sorry about the basketball court. People took what they could. It’s a shame. So the cement goes into someone’s house and the lumber into someone’s roof. I’m sorry about your garden too. But the water that was meant for vegetables and flowers goes into tubs and mouths and pots. That’s not what you planned. I’m sorry about your plans.”

  I could have gone on. There was no end to this kind of speech. The story of our lives, the history of our country. But I’d said enough. The power was already draining out of Commander Andy and toward me. Enough. More words would have been a waste. The Americans were curious about us, in the way that travelers are curious. They wondered aloud, they asked questions, they immersed themselves in things. But, at a certain point, they stopped learning. They learned as much as they needed and they stopped. We kept on learning because we never stopped needing.

  “All right, Malou,” he said with a sigh. “My job is giveaways, goodwill, public relations. That’s what they told me when I came. And I said, no, that’s not my style. This is about community development. This is about nation-building, even. That’s what I did. Thought I did. Tried to do. Now you’re telling me I’m a Santa Claus after all. Reparations.”

  “Reparations?” I did not know the word and by now I’d learned never to fake it, when I did not know. And sometimes the people I’d been speaking to were fakers themselves.

  “Repairing something that is broken … only you’re the one who broke it,” he said. “And maybe you can never fix it, even if you try. So you try and you pay.
Understand?”

  I nodded. And, before long, the issue of reparations arose again.

  I’d felt it coming. There were those increasing confidences, first about work, then about his wife. She was ill, he told me, she was unhappy, she was without joy in him or for him and that, he said, went for every room of the house. So it happened, in a car, parked near the Binictitan Golf Course, a sudden lunge, a coupling so pent-up and so quickly over, it was almost as if the same song was playing on the radio when we were finished as when we began. Then the tears came. His, not mine. He leaned forward, head in his hands like an athlete who’d let down his team. What team, I wondered as I watched him, and what game? This was the game they all played in Olongapo. He hadn’t let down the team. He’d joined it. Maybe that is why he was crying. Anyway, I knew he was mine then. My American. My first American.

  I waited for his tears to pass, guessing that when his sadness was over he would want sex again. What should I tell him? Should I tell him—would it make any difference?—that he was not my first man, not quite, or should I let him blame himself for ruining me? What should I say? “That’s all right.” “These things happen.” “We were friends before and we will be friends again.” “I still respect you.” Those were things that men said to women, not the other way around. Suddenly the whole thing was comical. I was glad his face was away from me, so that he could not see my smile. I decided not to tell him he was not the first. Something would have been lost, his pride in me, his shame in himself, the purity of the occasion, something that I could use, in the long run, to my advantage. I ran my fingers through his hair, pitted his head. “Never again, Malou,” he said when he pulled himself behind the steering wheel. It was a promise I was sure he would not keep.

  I saw Commander Andy through the years at the University of the Philippines. He would come to Manila, sometimes on business, but eventually I knew he was coming to see me only. The one-sided relationship slowly faded; for him, as his departure for America grew closer, the guilt outweighed the pleasure. I say that now, as if I’d known what I was doing, yet part of me always believed that, when he left, he’d be taking me with him. And that, when he asked me, I would smile, I would think that I had seen this coming, I would compliment myself on having made it happen, and I’d have gone to America. There were two kinds of Filipinos. There were the ones who were destined for local consumption and others who were meant for export. I never doubted which category I was in. Commander Andy was my ticket out, I supposed. And I wasn’t wrong. But, in the end, I miscalculated. My big mistake.