Ilustrado Page 5

  I close my eyes. The Godfather tune makes me picture silk-socked mobsters skating lithely on mirrored ballroom floors. Liberace at his piano on a dais, watching expectantly for the imminent crash that would break everything into a million little pieces.

  I’m pleased by the idea of not having to make small talk with the men Granma always sent to whisk me past customs, to tug my suitcases from the carousel, to drive me home. I’m overjoyed I won’t have to greet my grandfather. I love the new freedom of life without Madison, not having to call to tell her I’ve arrived safely, my reassurances met with inordinate tears that made me feel both wanted and burdened. Independence is bliss. It really is.

  I remember, though, when Madison and I decided to get our own place in Brooklyn—my first real taste of independence. It had gotten to a point where my conscience bothered me, hiding her there in my grandparents’ apartment at Trump Tower without Grapes’s permission. I remember when I called him in Manila to let him and Granma know my decision. “Just make sure,” Grapes said, “that you scrub the floor well so we can rent it out quickly.” Part of me was flabbergasted that he was so unconcerned, that he didn’t just tell me to stay. But part of me was relieved that I had pulled it off so easily. Madison and I moved our stuff into our shitty little wonderful new place, and returning the U-Haul truck felt like I was navigating my new yacht to one of those all-inclusive island resorts with vacationing Pilates instructors in G-strings and a pool with a bar in the middle of it.

  The next month, however, my grandparents arrived suddenly. After a couple of days of enjoying accompanying them to Broadway shows I’d have dismissed otherwise, and going to dinners with them where Madison and I ate well for a change, Madison was fairly convinced I had exaggerated all my complaints about them. Even I began to doubt myself. I thought, perhaps, my independence had earned their respect. Then they asked to see me alone on their last night in New York; they were leaving for Tel Aviv the next day to see a man about some especially fertile chickens.

  Grapes stood by the table in their room at the Holiday Inn. The place made me sad, disgusted even. Ever since I was little, he liked to remind me that his wealth came from knowing how to save. My grandfather’s thick silver hair was uncombed, and he was in his boxer shorts and undershirt. The shirt was inside out. When he turned around to get something from his suitcase, I saw that the maids had written “Sir” on the shirt tag with a felt pen. The same hand, the same pen, had written “Migs” on all mine. Grapes turned around and sat down at the table. He placed his seven-day pillbox in front of him, opened it to Tuesday, and began taking out tablets and capsules and arranging them on the tabletop. They looked like candies. He hadn’t even glanced at me since I walked in. Granma sat in the corner, looking at her hands. Grapes sighed. It was a brutal, crushing sigh. Like Aeolus, the windwarden from Greek mythology, blowing down all too easily every wall I’d constructed within myself to contain my confidence and pride in the new life I’d just begun. “Why don’t you tell us why you have been lying to us?” He sighed again. “I know you are doing it for that girl.” Sigh. “Wasting your life.” Sigh. “I sent you to an Ivy League school.” Sigh. “What are you doing working for that magazine? You went to Columbia! They should make you editor in chief. Do you want me to go with you to talk to them?” Sigh, sigh, sigh.

  “I’ve got a good position, Grapes.”

  “Do you? I looked at the masthead. Are you editor? Let’s see here. Brigid Hughes, managing editor. Is your name Brigid Hughes? Ben Ryder Howe, senior editor. Is your name Ben Ryder Howe?”

  “Grapes, I’m an editorial assistant. If I work hard enough, I’ll make editor one day.”

  “Hmm, let’s look at the other names. Oliver Broudy, senior editor. Is your name Oliver Broudy? George Plimpton, editor. Is your name George Plimpton? Where’s your name, little Miguelito?”

  “I’m still new,” I said feebly. “They haven’t updated the masthead.”

  “There you go, lying again. Always the same, huh?”

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  “Your version of the truth. Are you the janitor?”

  I looked at Granma. She sat quietly in the corner of the room, looking at her fists. My attempts to make eye contact with her, I still don’t know whether they were for her or me. My own hands started to hurt and I realized I was clenching them so tightly that my nails almost broke the skin.

  When I spoke up, I could feel myself shaking. “Grapes,” I said, “you don’t understand.” How childish that sounded. I steeled my voice. “This is about my short story. Right? I knew I shouldn’t have shown you the magazine. It’s always this way. Why do you think the father figure is always you?”

  “I’ve never understood why you can’t just write nice stories. Stories your grandmother would like and can show off to her friends.”

  “Granma, is that what this is all about?”

  Granma spoke up. Her voice was surprisingly angry. “Why can’t you write nice things?” Her voice softened. “Why would anyone read your story and want to visit our country?”

  “A writer has to talk about the things that go untalked about.”

  Grapes banged his pillbox on the table. “Don’t argue literary aesthetics with your grandmother,” he said. “She’s right. You are always trying to shock. You have all this horrible stuff in your work. Not very Christian things. Not very patriotic. And you say things that are not yours to say.”

  “If you have to hide something, then you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Right, Grapes? If you had some integrity—”

  “Don’t you dare speak to me like that! You’re one to talk! What do you know about owning responsibility? We helped you play mommy-daddy with that girl in university. What happened there? But of course we helped you. We’ll always help you. Because we love you. But how do you repay us?”

  “Love isn’t based on gratitude. Respect isn’t based on debt. I’m not your constituent.”

  “Oh, how dramatic! Listen to yourself. In what book did you read that baloney? We’ve all always known that you were the selfish one. Out of all of you six.”

  “None of us kids have stood up to you before. Well here I am. Finally. One of us six. I’m telling you who I really am.” He looked like he was going to say something, but he didn’t. Good. I continued: “You hate that I’m independent. That you can’t control me. That I didn’t go into politics, like you, like my father . . .”

  “Those were suggestions,” Grapes said quietly. “I paid for your writing education.”

  “You’d tell me, ‘When you’re done playing Hemingway, when are you going to come home and take your role in politics?’ It’s all you ever talked about. But look at where it got you.”

  “Yes,” Grapes said. “Look at where it got me!”

  I held back. I wanted to hurt him, but not that way. A man’s life is all he has. When you’re old, it’s all you’ll ever have. I said instead: “Look at where it got my dad. A hero’s death. Don’t think I don’t know what really happened.”

  “I just want you,” Grapes said quietly, “to reach farther than I did. Than your father did.”

  Granma piped up. “We love you.”

  “If I became a politician, either I’d be corrupted by the compromises I’d be forced to make, or I’d be shot for my ideals. Don’t you see?”

  Grapes wasn’t even looking at me anymore. “You always have to have the last word,” he said finally. “Don’t you?”

  I thought of what to say, but realized I’d only be having the last word. We stewed in the silence of a stalemate neither of us expected.

  In a small voice, Granma told me: “I think you better leave now.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I looked at my grandfather for what I knew would be the last time. He looked old. I went out into the hall. Granma followed. She started pulling wadded hundred-dollar bills from her pockets and pushing them into my hands. I kept my fists closed. “No, Granma. I don’t want to take any more of his money.”
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  “Please,” she said, starting to cry. “Take it. It’s mine. Please. For me.” She stuffed them into the pockets of my jeans. I let her. I hugged her.

  “Why don’t you come home with us?” she said. “Just leave her. You don’t have to be responsible for her.”

  “What will I do in Manila?”

  “I don’t know,” she said weakly. “Enter politics?” Her voice was so quiet. “I’ll help you,” she said. “I’ll take the weight for you.” I hugged her and told her I loved her. Then I walked to the elevator. I pressed the call button purposefully. We stood there. Granma brought out a Kleenex packet and tried to open it. I pressed the button again. Granma hid her face in a tissue. I pressed the button again. Granma began to blow her nose. The elevator finally came. I was grateful that it was empty. I turned to look through the closing doors, but my grandmother was gone. The elevator went down and down and down until it stopped. The doors opened and I was faced with a group of guys who looked like Midwesterners in town for a wrestling competition. “Hey,” one of them whispered, “that dude’s crying.”

  The plane steadies, banks, straightens, and makes its final approach. “I’m sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen,” the captain says over the PA. “There was a, uh, problem on the ground.”

  My neighbor finally asks me, in English, “You visiting?” I nod. “Me,” he says, smiling, “I come home. For good.” He fishes out a thick wad of U.S. dollars from his belt bag, opens it like a booklet, and flaps it proudly. “My savings. In past times, I work very hard. I remit money for a long time. I will now change everything.” I nod. The money in the middle slips out of the stack and bills shower into our laps. He laughs as we pick them up. I hand over what I collected. The bills smell like sweaty hands and baking bread. I feel unspeakably happy for him. And guilty for having resented him. And sad that I’ve come home with less definitive intentions. “I work so far away,” he says, as if I didn’t understand him. “In past times. Now, for the future of my children, I come home.”

  I can picture his family at Arrivals, a bright stain of joy on a tapestry of disorder. The Ninoy Aquino International Airport is your apt introduction to my country. You’ll be struck by the ubiquity of armed guards, enticed by the glossy luxury shops selling duty-free liquor, cigarettes, last-minute presents; you’ll tumble out into a warlike fug—an overcrowded arrival area with desiccated, air-conditioned air, worn linoleum, and creaking baggage carousels; a quintet of blind musicians greets travelers with faves like “La Cucaracha” and “Let It Be”; a larger-than-life, smirking President Fernando V. Estregan welcomes you from a poster taking up the entire wall; a sign declares, “Welcome to the Philippines, the most Christian country in Asia”; beneath it, another, “Beware of pickpockets.” Grasping your possessions tightly, you pass through the gauntlet of taciturn but thorough customs officials before an exit orphans you to the insidious ninety-five-degree heat and humidity and the swarming masses of other people’s family members, all of them periscoping necks to stare collectively at you. Your armpits drip sweat like a tap, though the sky is almost always white, the sun almost always hidden. On the street, taxis done up like carnivals will honk straight at you, their drivers accosting your bags as if intending to hold them ransom for a twenty-cent tip. In their cabs—perfumed with three different fruit-scented air fresheners, pork cracklings, and spicy vinegar—they hospitably turn the air-con to arctic freezing and crank up the volume on their stereo just for you, so that the Bee Gees fly high-pitched and crystalline from the speakers by your ears. Soot-caked cops do their best to direct the beast that is our traffic, their ineffectual whistles exacerbating the chaos that is our order. It takes you two hours to get anywhere; and when you arrive, it’s almost time to go. Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World.

  *

  The country has changed so much, my childhood years before the war seem improbable. I’m not sure if I remember the events as actual or if they were stories later told to me, Salvador folklore in which I reportedly took part. Most wonderful in my mind are the caged animals on Tito Odyseo’s farm. At dusk, when no other humans were afoot, Lena, Narcisito, and I would creep slowly between the cages. There was the jaguar, with his immense paws. The pair of aardvarks, named for Saints Peter and Paul. The Palawan bearcat. The ring-tailed lemurs. The buff-faced gibbons. The Philippine monkey-eating eagle named Bonifacio. And the baby giraffe, who died before he grew to his full height. I’d run with my brother and sister, around the slow-footed cassowaries that were permitted to roam freely. On those Sundays when his family would host all the others (or at least those in good grace), Tito Odyseo would sometimes release the gazelles, a fleet trio that ran without knowing the estate was a larger, inescapable cage, or ran because a dozen children gave chase, or ran for the opportunity and sheer love of running. I remember how we took after them, for those very same reasons. If only someone had taken a picture of that last picnic, with the animals in the background and the family all present. That was the last time we were together, the last time our ancestral land was still ours, the last time the spirits were still present there in the shadows beneath the trees.

  When the war came, the animals were quickly stolen, one by one, by hungry farmworkers. Tito Odyseo was severely beaten one night when he fell asleep guarding the cages.

  —from Autoplagiarist (page 188), by Crispin Salvador

  *

  From the window he can see Manila. Rain streaks sideways across the glass. Suddenly the plane dips again, and his thoughts take on the tinge of desolation, as they do in such moments. He closes his eyes and tries not to pray.

  *

  The airplane comes down low. From above, the city is still beautiful. We pass over brown water off the coast, fish pens laid out in geometrical patterns, like a Mondrian viewed by someone color-blind. Over the bay, the sunset is starting, the famous sunset, like none anywhere else. Skeptics attribute its colors to pollution. Over there’s the land, the great gray sprawl of eleven million people living on top of each other on barely more than 240 square miles—fourteen cities and three municipalities, skyscrapers and shanties, tumbling beyond Kilometer Zero and the heart of every Filipino, the city that gave the metro its name: Manila.

  The megalopolis’s components, when named, sound like mountain music, all drums and cymbals and gongs: Parañaque, Mandaluyong, Makati, Pasay, Navotas, San Juan, Cubao, Quezon City, Caloocan, Taguig, Malabon, Pasig, Las Piñas, Marikina, Muntinlupa. Connecting them, the grid and the superavenues—Edsa, Roxas, Aurora, Taft—countless overpasses built like Band-Aids, innumerable billboards, restaurants for every nationality and budget, huge shopping malls with Bulgari, Shoe Mart, Starbucks, Nike, you name it. You want it, you can get it in Manila, in shops and tabloids, alleyways and boardrooms. There, by the shadow of our airplane, near Rizal Park, where the statue of our hero stands as centennial testament to a stolen revolution, we’re now flying low enough to see tangled lines of jeepneys and buses bringing people home from work; that crowd there, with the banners, is a small part of a million worshippers en route to the weekly, desperate, El Ohim prayer rally, where Christ is the answer to unanswerable Boolean questions. If you look closely, there’s Reverend Martin onstage, in his metallic double-breasted suit and happy-colored tie: a man of God and man of the people whose faith earned him financial security and a mansion in a gated subdivision.

  Modern Manila. She who once was the Pearl of the Orient is now a worn dowager, complete with the hump, the bunions, the memories of the Charleston stepped to the imported and flawlessly imitated melodies of King Oliver, the caked-on makeup and the lipstick smeared in thick stripes beyond the thin, pursed lips. She, the trusting daughter of East and West, lay down and was de stroyed, her beauty carpet-bombed by her liberators, cautious of their own casualties, her ravishment making her kindred to Hiroshima, Stalingrad, Warsaw. And yet, from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live.
Life works with the Lord’s benevolence and a generous application of duct tape and Filipino ingenuity. Five hundred years ago Spanish conquistadors sailed their wooden ships into the world’s most perfect harbor to begin their mission of, as historians say, God, gold, and guns; their walled fortress is still there, as is their religion and blood, but the gold they, and others, took with them, or apportioned among their few native deputies. Manila has changed much since. It’s changed so little. If you know where to look, this is the most exciting city in the world.

  The airplane’s wheels touch down. The passengers clap.

  *

  The spectators watch the action eagerly. At the intersection, stranded cars block Antonio’s way. Our hero slows. Eagle-eyes search for Dominador. There he is! He’s abandoned his Jet Ski and is running up the stairs of the pedestrian overpass. “Santa Banana,” Antonio mutters. “If he gets through, he’ll make it into the shopping arcade, and I’ll never find him in that crowd.” Antonio revs his Jet Ski ferociously. It speeds across the water, between buses, between taxis, their occupants blinking at what they’re witnessing. Antonio builds velocity, his black leather jacket flapping like a cape. He jerks his vehicle to the right, heading straight for a half-submerged car. The Jet Ski slides over its hood, up its windshield, and flies through the air, Antonio hunched over the handlebars. Man and machine arc higher and higher, the engine screaming like a banshee in heat. He lands on the pedestrian overpass, the Jet Ski’s underside trailing sparks as it slides over the cement. The fleeing Dominador looks behind him, wide-eyed and stupid-looking. The Jet Ski closes in. Antonio leaps over his handlebars, like a gazelle through the air, and tackles Dominador. They tumble together. Antonio whispers in his ear, “If you don’t mind, I really prefer being on top.”