Ilustrado (21 page)

“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 supply 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.

I pocket Markus’s baggie. I can hear Dr. Goldman, my therapist in New York, speaking from her armchair: This is the first step to failure. But such an expensive gift would be rude not to accept. I don’t have to do any of it. Anyway, it’s been so long. I’ll just have a bump. Or two. Maybe a line. Or a couple of small ones. Maybe just half the baggie, and share the rest with my friends. If I consume it all myself, nobody will care. I’m home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I’ve already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like I’m a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough.

*

Poor Cousin Bobby is a casualty of the slumping economy. He loses his hospital job and falls in with a gang of Pinoys with pimped Subarus. One day, Bobby is arrested and brought to court, accused of
raping his date after they watched
Eyes Wide Shut
. Erning, of course, sits right behind him, to lend moral support. With his new cell phone, Erning takes surreptitious photos of his cousin, to send to family back home, but he can only capture the back of Bobby’s head. The bailiff comes by and threatens to confiscate it.

When the trial gets under way, the rape victim is asked by the prosecuting attorney: “Jhanelle, would you please describe here for the court the person who assaulted you sexually.”

The rape victim, on the verge of tears, says: “Very dark-skinned. Short. Wiry black hair. Narrow eyes. Thick ears. With a broad nose with a flat bridge.”

Erning jumps to his feet, shouting angrily: “Stop making fun of my cousin!”

*

“Don’t use that tone with me,” Madison had said.

“What tone?”

“That tone.”

“Madison, I’m just talking.”

“But why that way?”

“Sweetheart. Liebling. Madison. What way?”

“Is it the new toothpaste?”

Madison and I had been needing quality time and I’d brought her out for lunch. We had steak-of-the-forest burgers at her favorite vegan place, in Chelsea. Run by a couple of forgetful hippies, it wasn’t very good, but Madison had a soft spot for failing restaurants. She said she couldn’t stand to let people lose hold of their dreams. For dessert, we shared a carob brownie and held hands while walking to the museum. When we went into a bank’s ATM enclosure to get cash, Madison looked up at the wall of curling flyers about people still missing. She gathered off the floor the sheets that had fallen like leaves and she blue-tacked them up again. Madison went and waited outside. She was really moody when we got to MoMA.

I told her: “It wasn’t the toothpaste.”

“If not, why throw a hissy fit when I didn’t change the channel?”

“Liebling, please don’t raise your voice here.”

“Was it because of that show on princes William and Harry?”

“Why would it be?”

“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Told me what?”

“That I used to have a crush on them.”

“Please. What do I care? I used to have a crush on Phoebe Cates. I don’t know what you see in them anyway. They’re just princes.”

“Who lost their mother tragically.”

“So did I.”

“You only talk about your parents when you need the advantage. I
knew
that this was about William and Harry. Or is it
also
the toothpaste? What’s with your hate for organic? I thought you cared about Mother Earth.”

“I do. I just don’t know why she’s so self-important. Come on, give me a smile. That argument was so this morning. I asked why you bought that toothpaste. And you said—”

“No. First, I was like, Surprise! Look at this. And then, you said . . . What did you say?”

“No. That’s not true. I said, Sugarbabe, if you’re making tea, could you make me a cup of rooibos. And you said—”