Ilustrado Page 16

  Lakbay-TV travel channel, opening credits: Ancient Cultures of Mindanao. A couple in intricate fabrics and headpieces. A sword brandished by the groom-prince, its blade voluptuously serrated. The bride, concealing her face with a fan, dances between two pairs of crossed bamboo poles clapped crisply together by attendants kneeling at her feet. The prince, his sword leaned on one shoulder and shield wielded firmly in the other hand, follows his bride, stepping in and out of the intermittent traps, the pace quickening rapidly. The bride steps back to watch her groom, his feet a blur among the wood cracking dangerously together. The hastening rhythm of the clack-clacking bamboo upon bamboo becomes hypnotic, like the rise to crescendo of Ravel’s Bolero. I change the channel.

  BBC World News: Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix is being interviewed, shaking his head, frustrated at what is being said about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I change the channel.

  One of those strange digital channels: in one corner of the screen, a music video from the Eraserheads, who sing about the unrequited love of a young girl from an exclusive college. On the rest of the screen are blinking text messages, updating in real time. Prettypinay89 writes: Hi 2 tropang Marikina! Gdluck 2 chem17 studnts of Phil Womns Schl with ur exams 2mrw. Gothgrrrrl3000 writes: Any1 here in2 deathmetal? Greyhounds rock! Eraserheads suck! And AnAk_Ng_KidlAt writes: Is any1 out there 2 hear me?

  I turn the television off.

  *

  “One more thing,” Crispin said. “One last story.” He stared at the typewriter in front of him. “When you get to my age, the most insignificant memories take on significance. Unrationalized blame, casual kindnesses, random gestures—one day you just need to tell someone about them. There was this time, when I was a boy, when my father was consumed by jealousy.” I already had on my parka and backpack. I was cradling the bundle of outgoing mail in one arm. “Papa had always coveted the zoo my uncle had on his farm. So he decided to get an animal of his own, but for our house in Manila. He wanted to impress my mother, as well as coax her into spending more time with him there than in Bacolod.” I poured Crispin a glass of sherry; he looked up at me, nodded. “Of course, my father didn’t know anything about animals. He just liked having them. He must have thought he could hire people. As one does. He wanted a tiger and somehow he got one. I don’t know how, I was too young. I remember he kept it in a cage by the swimming pool, near the lanai where we had our meals when we ate outdoors. Actually, I think the tiger was there in Forbes Park because it was being transported to the farm at Swanee. I’m not sure anymore.”

  Crispin sipped his sherry. He still hadn’t changed out of his ruined barong. Two black manuscript boxes were on the floor beside him. I leaned on the doorjamb and looked at my watch. Madison would be waiting at home with Valentine’s Day dinner. This morning, to my dismay, she’d told me about finding a recipe for tofu Peking duck, and I still had to somehow find some gluten-free hoisin sauce. It had come to feel like our relationship counted on the successful fulfillment of such errands. I undid my scarf and unzipped my coat.

  “Anyhow. At that time it was a big tiger to me. Huge. I think it must have been an adolescent, because the space by the swimming pool and the lanai wasn’t that big. Doesn’t everything seem bigger when looking back? Well, I can only imagine what the neighbors thought. What arrogance, a tiger in your garden. Ha! Truly. Thing is, the damn thing wouldn’t eat. It was traumatized by the flight or the truck or however it had been transported. It was a mess. I’m not sure whether it was a he or a she, or what became of it. It lay against whichever corner of the cage didn’t have sun. The cage was barely large enough for it to pace and turn.”

  Crispin looked at the manuscript piled in its open box beside his typewriter. “One time my father had us eating breakfast outside, to appreciate the tiger. This part I remember well. We didn’t want to because it smelled bad. Sour and musky. But we had no choice. We sat there, pushing the food around our plates. Mama was reading her pocketbook mystery. My father was in a good mood and he picked up a few bacon strips and approached the animal. How macho, he wanted to feed it by hand. But the poor animal was afraid. It cowered in the corner. Papa got angry and started shouting at it. I’ll never forget what he said. He yelled, ‘What kind of king of the jungle are you?!’”

  Crispin laughed heartily, then sighed. “Yes, it’s funny now. But at the time my brother and sister and I were terrified by the whole thing. The sadness was only felt later. You know how it is. My father threw the bacon at the tiger and hit it in the face. This puddle of piss formed under the animal, like some fluorescent toxic spill. I can see it like it was yesterday. The tiger cowering in its urine. Papa standing over it screaming. Mama still reading. We children averting our eyes, watching flies land on sliced mango on the fine china in front of us.”

  Crispin rearranged his ashtray and meerschaum pipe, moved the decanter to the left, placed the matching glass beside it. He stared at what his hands were doing, watching with absolute disinterest in their tasks. “I remember telling this story, years later, to my girlfriend, Gigi. It was odd, I hadn’t remembered it for twenty years until I recounted it to her. I wept after. The first time since childhood. Gigi told me our country needs a revolution. Of course she’d say that, she was French. It took even me a long time to understand that in our country revolution isn’t just parricide. It’s deicide. I finally think our redemption will have to be more noble than that. Anyway, I always wanted to use my memory of that tiger for a short story, or a scene in a novel. But some things are better kept in the past.” He pulled the paper from his typewriter, added it to the manuscript, and closed the box. He put the box on top of the other two. “After I wept, I remember how clear my eyes were.”

  Crispin looked at me. I’ll never forget how he looked at me. As if I was a holy ghost. As if he realized what had to happen.

  “So long,” he said, with his shy smile. “Keep it bouncing.”

  I went home to Madison, the screaming of the living room smoke alarm, windows wide open, and an apartment as cold as the winter outside.

  That was the last time I spoke with Crispin.

  5

  Cristo rears his new dappled charger at the crest of the hill, the sound of his men following like the drums of war. The horse whinnies nervously. Already Cristo is missing Paloma, swearing the Americans will pay for shooting his beloved mount.

  There, at the bend of the river in the distance, is the infantry of Captain Peter Murray. His old nemesis. The campfires are intermittent like distant lighthouses as soldiers pass in front of them, pitching tents, fetching water, preparing dinner. Sergeant Lupas stops his own horse beside Cristo’s.

  “They have no idea,” Cristo says.

  “Yes, sir. But what of the women and children in the village?”

  Cristo is silent.

  “Capitan, the men are worried. They are wondering if it would be better to surrender.”

  At this, Cristo lowers his voice to a rare sharpness. “You mean you are wondering. Not them.”

  “I don’t need to prove my loyalty to you, Cristo.”

  “Don’t you see, Ricardo? This is what those Amerikanos want. They think they can create a cordon, to cow the villagers into giving us up.”

  “Our food is dwindling rapidly. Our supply lines are nonexistent. And the toll their cordon is taking . . . Cristo, the villagers . . . the women and children, they are starving.”

  “After three years, we will give up? Does any man think I don’t worry for my own family? No, Ricardo. We won’t play into the enemy’s hands. Not after so long. Bear in mind, old friend, when we win, such worries will be over.”

  “They’ll only send more troops, Capitan. And more after that. America is a big place.”

  “In your mind, Sergeant Lupas, we’ve already lost. Haven’t we?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Tell me. Who do you think is being hunted? Us or them?”

  Lupas does not say anything. He only nods.

  “Prepare the
men for our charge,” Cristo says, his voice low and careful. “Tell them it will be victorious or it will be our last.”

  —from The Enlightened (page 223), by Crispin Salvador

  *

  I entered into fatherhood with only the best intentions. I think that in the beginning I did things right. As best a boy of seventeen could. Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be. I guess I’ve chosen.

  It wasn’t always that way. I remember what made it easy to choose otherwise. Anais. Fetching her from painting class, her belly growing beneath the smock, her clothes scented by linseed oil. Listening to her dreams of moving away to raise our child in Prague, Buenos Aires, Antananarivo. Her empathy for Vincent van Gogh, of E. E. Cummings and that poem about love being gentler than rain with small hands. Together, we did the ultrasounds, the Lamaze classes. Together, we looked through baby-name books, leafing through the pages of all the possibilities of our shared future. Together, we made love, the baby inside her every hope held firmly between us. I received the call in the middle of the night from her maid: the water was broken, Anais was being rushed to the hospital. I was there through the prolonged delivery: my hand feeding her ice chips, my little voice saying, breathe, breathe, Anais turning to me to say, finally, I love you. Just like in the movies. Then came the doctor, telling us the baby was in trouble. Then came the emergency C-section and my long paces in the waiting room. The first time I held my daughter and realized my childhood was over, I was ecstatic about it. She was worth every sacrifice. Then, the changing of the diapers, the burping, the first steps and the first words. Bringing the tiny, tiny girl to visit my grandparents—how they cooed and fawned, had their pictures taken with her in their arms. Then, after, in private, Granma, tearful, telling me: “You looked like you were playing house.” Later, the struggle to keep my grade point average high enough to stay in school. And of course, the month that I wasn’t there—when my grandparents sent me “to see the forest from the trees” by visiting my brother Jesu in London, where he was completing his MBA. Anais felt abandoned, or maybe she felt scared, or maybe she was just as lost as I was, and she threatened to cheat if I didn’t come home. Later that summer, my too-late return home to Manila, Anais’s threat made good—she’d kissed another boy.

  At least, that’s how I recall it. It was so long ago.

  For our little family, for our daughter, for myself, I tried to win Anais back. But the betrayal had wound its way between us like barbed wire. I’d left her, and she’d left me, and we wanted to make each other regretful. She, like me, was a kid raising a child. Anais said she was sorry, and I know she meant it. What I don’t know is why I couldn’t forgive. I thought of which places in the house the other guy could have kissed her, and I learned to avoid those spots. I twisted inside at the thought of him holding my child. I could not force from my mind the look Anais must have given him as they embraced outside, beneath the orchids her mom grew on posts, where we had always embraced, where we were trying so hard to embrace now. What plans had been made? What promises were exchanged? But what more could Anais do but say sorry, kiss me again, reassure me?

  I’m making this confession without hope for absolution.

  One morning, I pretended to go crazy. Perhaps in pretending, I proved myself so. I looked into the middle distance, whispering to Anais: “Jacques Chirac is after me. Listen, can you hear him? We have to hide.” I crouched behind the couch. Anais held me. She believed me. I was intoxicated by a cocktail of success and anger and disbelief. She believed me? She wordlessly tightened her arms around me. “Beware of Jacques Chirac!” I exclaimed.

  Anais grasped my face, looked me in the eye, and said calmly: “Jacques Chirac’s in France.” She began to cry. I did, too, for all manner of reasons.

  After, my absence was gradual, until one day it was complete.

  *

  On the second New Year’s Eve during the war, minutes after raising his glass of sake and pledging undying love and protection for his brother, sister-in-law, and their children, Salvador’s uncle Jason disappeared. “He was there,” Salvador recalled in Autoplagiarist, “and when we turned around from hugging each other in hopeful, even desperate, celebration of the new year, Tito Jason was gone. I was devastated. For a long time we were all mystified. Only after the war ended did we discover what had happened to him. What he experienced, and the stories he later told me, would ultimately push me to make the decisions I made as a young man.”

  —from the biography in progress, Crispin Salvador:

  Eight Lives Lived, by Miguel Syjuco

  *

  People are spilling out of establishments, watching the rain, enjoying the breeze in the open sections of the Greenbelt Mall. The hustle of the cafes and the bustle of the shops are almost too much to bear. Christmas carols play like torture devices. It’s like I’m in one of those dreams where you go to school and everyone stares, horrified. I check my fly. I quicken my step. Some faces turn away, into their coffees, up at the light fixtures.

  In the Club Coup d’Etat, it’s hot and murky. The soaring hall is dark and foggy and dense with techno. The bass penetrates, charging the bones. The melodies are anthemic and ineffable. On the dance floor, light flashes red, then green, then blue, then yellow, then red all over again. Tonight is billed as Old-School Trance Night. When did trance music become old-school? The place hasn’t changed, except I don’t know anyone. They’re all so young. They dance self-consciously, humid with movement. In the sapphire neon near the entrance a camera flashes like lightning—the spherical Albon Alcantara waddles through his rounds for his Gazette column, “Albonanza,” his subjects posing like big fish just caught. In dim corners, figures do their best to melt into plush pleather couches. One couple is trying to dry-hump unnoticed, like modest dogs, in the darkness near an air-conditioning vent. A boy-faced dancer plays with glow sticks, makes simple circles in the air. I’m tempted to borrow them and show him a thing or two. How strange it is to be old enough to have fantasies that are no longer only concerned with the future.

  My cell phone vibrates in my pocket. A text from my old friend Gabby. How’d he know I was back? Edsa 5 brewing while you read your text messages. Protests planned this weekend against the Estregan Administration! Stay tuned. Every body will count.

  Bouncers block my entrance into the VIP area. From within, an acquaintance spots me and almost leaps in place. I don’t remember his name. He was much younger, from the International School while I was in college. I remember not liking him. He tells the bouncers I’m “cool.” They eye me uncertainly. Inside, old friends pick me up with their hugs, slap me hard on the back, shake my hand as if I’d won something. “When did you arrive?” Mico asks, shouting over the noise. He tries to slip a pill into my mouth. I keep my lips shut tightly. I smile and shake my head and hug him in deep gratitude. The gang’s all here.

  Tals (warmly): “Hey, cuz!?”

  Mitch (looking over my shoulder at a bevy of college girls): “Pare, check out those biatches.”

  Edward: “Where you been hiding, nigga? You were abroad? Since when?”

  Angela: “Can I bum a cig?”

  E.V.: “So you’ve returned to the decline of the Roman Empire.”

  Pip: “O! Wassup?”

  Ria: “I haven’t seen you since you stopped updating your Friendster profile.”

  Chucho (shaking my hand vigorously): “What a guy what a guy what a guy!”

  Rob (not really meaning it): “Dude, we’re leaving for another party, wanna join?”

  Tricia: “Fucking trance, man, fucking trance.”

  Markus is also happy. “You came!”

  “No,” I shout back. “I always walk this way.”

  We exchange effusiveness. He puts a baggie into my pocket. I push it back in his hand, but it’s already closed into a fist. “Homecoming present,” he shouts. I joke that he’s an addict. He replies: “Dude, you’re only an addict when your sup
ply runs out.”

  It’s nine months since I stopped having my own supply. Five months since I last touched that bullshit. I really don’t want to go back to that vibrating wakefulness, that bubble of abrasive beauty and precarious self-confidence that should come from inside me but doesn’t. How sexy it was: Madison waking up on the weekend, rolling over naked, shrewdly wrapped in the thin white sheet, saying, “Hey, let’s get high.” How easy it was: wadding up a couple of hundred bucks and picking up the phone and calling the “car service,” telling the operator that I needed a “Cadillac” for coke, a “Mercedes” for marijuana, a “Lexus” for ludes, or for the driver to bring “umbrellas,” because it looks like rain, when what we really wanted were shrooms to trip on at the natural history museum. It was simpler than ordering a Domino’s pizza. And we didn’t have to tip.

  Cocaine made life uncomplicated. We never had to cook, never got tired, never worried about personal insufficiencies. It fueled electrified sessions when I’d write twenty-page short stories in a night, overflowing with confidence that would eventually fall, but easily rise again an instant after I lifted my head from the mirror on the coffee table and wiped my nose. I was the best writer at Columbia. The best writer in New York. The best writer in the world. The best-kept secret, waiting for his time. I had a mission from God, to act on behalf of my people. Madison would joke that we use mirrors for our lines so we can watch ourselves being stupid. Then we’d do a few more hits and have excellent sex that we mistook for love. When the anxieties came, as they did, with the comedown, it was as simple as pouring another drink, or popping a pill to pass out. My sleep, those times, was always deep and restorative.