Ilustrado (17 page)

*

“Say it’s not yours,” Grapes said. “How do you know it’s yours?”

“I know.”

“How can you know? Maybe she has a guapo driver or houseboy?”

“Grapes. Please. I just know.”

“You know because she’s your all-all-all right now. What happens when she’s not your all-all-all anymore?”

“You and Granma taught me right from wrong.”

Grapes sat slouched at the desk he kept in his inner sanctum, their cavernous walk-in closet. One cabinet was wide open and the shirts and pants were pushed aside to reveal a wall rack of pistols. Grapes’s quiet force was more searing than Granma’s angry shouts. She sat now, hoarse, outside in the bedroom.

“You’re upsetting your grandmother. She’s had a brandy. You know that’s not good.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Trust us. Don’t sacrifice your youth.”

“I do trust you. That’s the thing. But if I have to leave home and get a job, I will.”

“Why must you always be the selfish one?”

“What’s your definition of selfish? I’m willing to give up everything. So that child can have a proper life.”

Grapes just shook his head and sighed again. “You’re a freshman,” he said.

“I’ll leave if I have to.”

“You’re seventeen years old.”

“If I’m man enough to make a baby, then I should be man enough to raise a baby.” I’d heard that in the movie
Boyz n the Hood.

“Why don’t you go to your room and think it through?”

“I have.”

“Think it through some more.”

*

I still remember my first contact with Crispin Salvador. “One Stone for Two Birds” was assigned to me by the passionately stolid Mrs. Lumbera during my junior year at Ateneo. Crispin’s words came as faded blue ink on pulpy mimeographed paper. We’d read works like Nick Joaquin’s
Mayday Eve
, Gregorio Brillantes’s
Flood in Tarlac
, and Paz Marquez Benitez’s seminal
Dead Stars.
But Crispin’s short story impressed me more than any other.

In it, the young well-to-do protagonist named, coincidentally, Miguel, stumbles upon a stranger brutally stabbed in a dark alley. Miguel comforts the dying man, “who cradles his entrails as if they were the entirety of his life lived previous to this scene in chiaroscuro.”
The man wears a fedora in a “puta red” felt and has carefully taken it off and placed it on an empty cardboard box, so that it won’t be “soiled with blood’s darker shades.”

“These men,” Crispin writes, “were a pair wrought together by the mischief of circumstance, both equally unfortunate in a cold alley in Tondo on a dark evening in February, their embrace possessing the urgency of an unconsummated love instantly made possible in a final night fading to light.” The true drama of this story comes later, however, when the victim draws his last breath just as the police arrive to mistake Miguel for the murderer. “Would this fledgling man take on the responsibility thrust suddenly into his hands? Or would he flee?”

*

Lena refused to tell him anything more and immediately asked him to leave. Our discombobulated protagonist caught the last flight to Manila from Bacolod.

He looks out the window. The Airbus escapes the earth and flies over the intensifying blue. The plane’s shadow is like a water-skier on the meniscus of the unknown. Our protagonist tightens his grip on his armrests. He pulls down the window shade and his body soon relaxes.

He is swimming to the sidewalk and swallows a mouthful of water. It is warm, like phlegm. Terror caresses his insides. He can see the distant sidewalk, the Lexus’s headlights crossing the water and touching it, as if taunting him. He can see the night sky glow red, then blue, then yellow. Stars are falling. His body, vertical, his legs, flailing for the ground that should be there. He thrashes his arms above him, as if having just walked through a spider’s web. His fingers reach through the surface. For an instant he feels air. But his body won’t let him breathe. His epiglottis has seized. Life is being strangled by its very vessel. He loses consciousness and sees himself floating, his posture peaceful, curved like a closing hand. His expression, however, resembles that of a man who has just been cheated.

He awakens, falling into panic, when he feels the plane pitching gently forward on its descent. I never—he thinks—remember my dreams.

At the domestic terminal the sky is dimming. Outside the airport, he feels strange. Naked. He is conscious of his movements. They do not seem to be his
own. He takes a taxi to Makati. Sits in gridlock like a patient waiting his turn for the dentist. The skyscrapers approach slowly from the darkening horizon, the white windows flickering on one by one, here then there. On the sidewalk, commuters wave at jeepneys, construction workers kid with children they’ve enlisted for help. Between the convoluted lines of cars, vendors hawk newspapers or cigarettes or candy, urchins sell sampaguita flowers strung on dental floss. The diorama always saddens him, the way a habitually empty restaurant does as you walk by and peer in to see the family proprietors sitting expectantly in their uniforms.

Turn there, he tells the driver suddenly. They make a hairpin turn and go down a quiet street lined with high barbed-wired walls. Stop here, he tells the driver gently. Then he hands him fifty pesos. The driver smiles, almost apologetically, and exits the taxi. Our pensive protagonist sits in the backseat and studies the whitewashed property wall. He watches the big metal gate as if he has X-ray vision and can see the house beyond. Did they make the wall higher? He can just see the top of the tree where she used to climb when she was four years old, with him reaching up to hover his hands around her in case her grip slipped. When did they paint the gate orange? I think they did make the wall higher. Do they even still live here?

The boy thinks of Grapes. Everything to do with fatherhood he learned from him. The boy thinks of Crispin. Did he ever even mention his daughter?

He watches the wall as if old home movies are being projected on it. He hopes the gate will swing open suddenly. What if it actually does? What would he do?

The taxi driver walks to the wall and puts his face to it. He looks like a man waiting for the firing squad. A dark stain spreads onto the ground between his feet. It’s as if his shadow were melting. The driver looks up to the sky in gratitude. The gate of the property opens. The guard peeps out. The boy remembers him. The taxi driver, skipping as he zips up his pants, runs back to the car. They zoom away.

*

As soon as I leave the plane and walk out of the airport, I get this feeling like I’m being watched. There are only faces in the crowd, like a field of flowers, if flowers could frown and spit and look at their watches.

I gesture at cabs. The feeling persists. I rush into the first taxi that stops. Out the back window, I see cars lining up slowly then peeling quickly away from the curb to follow us down the street.

On the way to my hotel in Makati, gridlock gnarls us to snail-mail pace. It’s like waiting for your turn at the dentist. Across the street, a bee mascot paces and waves in front of the Jollibee hamburger outlet. Commuters flap their hands at unslowing jeepneys. On the sidewalk, a pair of boys crack the top pavement with chisels and hammers. Nearby, a sign says
SLOW MEN AT WORK
. Workers, in hard hats and flip-flops worn paper-thin, gossip by the cart of a fish-ball vendor, smoking cigarettes in a circle. A dusty jackhammer waits beside a gaping pit. One worker, a fat one in a holey Armani Exchange T-shirt, shouts to the children and points to a fresh spot on the pavement. The boys waggle their eyebrows. One boy smiles and gives a thumbs-up. The construction worker waddles over and places his yellow hard hat on the kid’s head. To the other child, he holds out his palm, soliciting a high five, unsuccessfully.

Vendors thread through the long parade of entrafficked vehicles. They carry boxes of loose cigarettes and candy. A couple of them carry newspapers, like waiters with armloads of dishes. There is news for every taste: the
Sun
,
Times
,
Gazette
,
TeenBeat
,
Abante
,
Bulgar
.

One paper declares: “Exclusive pics! Changcos’ victory party. Maid-killers celebrate!”

Another offers: “Sucked up by the Pasig!” I can just read the print of the lede: “Young Mariano Bakakon, 28, expert swimmer from Barangay Ilog, met his death in the Pasig River yesterday after floods in surrounding areas concealed open manholes, one of which he fell into. Bakakon saved himself but later succumbed to exposure to pollutants.” Included is a small picture of a corpse on a hospital bed. Beside it, a photo of an uncovered manhole—a common sight in a city where the covers are stolen and sold for scrap.

My eyes alight on the garish cover of
Bulgar
: the compulsory image of a half-naked buxom girl. It’s the latest artista to be seen every where: Vita Nova. She throbs on the page. The holes of her tiny torn T-shirt strategically display her heaving cleavage and sucked-in stomach—she’s dressed like a rape victim, though her coquettishness is unflappable, as if her sole means of power. She has struck the
pose of the latest dance craze, the Mr. Sexy Sexy: back arched to thrust out her rump, hands on springy knees, face held up to smile and blow kisses. A large crucifix pendant hangs around her neck. Nestled blissfully in her rolling valley, Christ holds out his arms to skim his fingertips on her breasts and lolls his head in rapture.

The taxi driver makes a hairpin left turn off the main road. I get nervous. We drive to a quiet place and the car stops. The driver smiles, almost apologetically, and exits the car without a word. He dallies around the street. He stands at a whitewashed wall, as if before a firing squad. A dark stain appears on the wall in front of him. It spreads onto the ground between his feet. It’s as if his shadow were melting in the heat. The driver looks at the sky. The orange gate of the property opens and a guard peeps out. The taxi driver runs to the car, zipping up his fly. We drive off. He turns around to look at me.

“Is something wrong?” he says.

“Of course not.”

“But you are . . . um . . . you want tissue?” he says, kindly. “How ’bout radio?” He turns up the volume.

The announcer asks Bobby for a few statements and an American voice replies, barely able to speak from excitement.

“. . . all wonderful! . . . time that the fucking U.S. got their heads kicked in . . .” He has an aging Brooklyn accent. “. . . time to finish off the U.S. once and for all . . .”

Then I feel it again. That sensation of being watched. Like when you sit through a horror film then come home to an empty apartment. I gaze through the dark tint of the taxi and into the cars beside us. In one, a woman is at the wheel, singing her heart out, her hairbrush as a microphone. In another, a driver is gazing ahead as if willing the traffic forward with his mind; his employer in the backseat picks his nose then examines what he’s found.

The radio blares laser sounds, then the breakneck reporting in Tagalog: “My compatriots, this just in. It is reported that Wigberto Lakandula has taken the Changco family hostage in their Binondo home. My compatriots, it is believed that upon entering the domicile, Lakandula shot and slew two men in the employ of the family, a bodyguard and a driver. He immediately took the couple, their six-year-old
son, and two maids captive. A police cordon has been established around the area and SWAT team members have been deployed to the scene. Already a crowd of girls has gathered at the site, screaming for a glimpse of their hero. Police psychologists say Lakandula is acting out his lifelong frustrations against society, and will therefore be violent and unpredictable. Authorities ask all members of the public to stay away to avoid getting hurt.”

*

Eventually, the American dream comes true for Erning Isip. He returns victoriously to his hometown for his first vacation, proudly wielding the greenbacks he earned from his new job working tech support at Lehman Brothers. Upon arriving, however, he contracts a stomach virus from drinking Philippine water, which he is no longer used to. He goes to see a doctor at the Makati Medical Center. The doctor examines him. “I have bad news,” the doctor says, “and good news.” Erning asks for the bad news first. “The bad news,” the doctor says, “is you require a small procedure.” Erning asks for the good news. “The good news is it only requires a local anesthetic.”

Alarmed, Erning replies: “Local?! Can’t I have imported instead?”

*

When they reach Makati, the taxi driver asks, “Hotel Happy International Inn, is that right, sir?” He’s asked it four times now. “Yes,” our exasperated protagonist says, before turning to the window. He can’t wait to get out of the car.

Familiar sites grind by as pedestrians blur past, faster than his stranded cab. The gleaming, splendiferous malls. The guarded gates of Forbes Park, where our prodigal protagonist grew up. The Manila Polo Club, where he and Jerald learned to play tennis, always swinging for over the back fence to see the ball boys climb like monkeys after the balls. The large home of the U.S. Ambassador, with its cameras and high walls. The larger home of the Sultan of Brunei’s brother’s Filipina mistress. Santuario de San Antonio Church, where all his relatives and friends are, and always will be, baptized, communioned, wedded, waked, interred. The brawny ten-lane Edsa Boulevard, host to four peaceful revolutions. All who return to Manila love to say nothing changes, but that’s not true. More soaring overpasses are stacked atop each
other. More rows of billboards stand like upright dominoes, sporting pretty Brobdingnagian mestizas in low-cut jeans or lingerie. There is now a Starbucks across from Santuario (you can wash down the host with a grande Mocha Frappuccino). From where he sits, he counts six towering cranes, pirouetting, and four new skyscrapers, each striving higher than the other and those that were there before. The pace of Asian progress is ostentatious. Here in Makati, this is not a poor country.