Rivotril

Monday, from one in the morning to half past two, I was dreaming. You know Skype? It’s like a telephone – in your computer. It has numbers you can punch – or, to be more precise, click. You can call anyone who also has a telephone in his computer, Skype, and when you have Skype and a Web camera connected to your computer you can call anyone who also has Skype and a Web camera on his computer, and then you can see each other, telephoning and videoing free of freaking charge. The technology made its way deep into my dream.

I was in here, good Lord, it was right here in my bedroom, and my laptop began to ring and I knew it was Evelyn, so I crawled to answer the call. I crawled in darkness; some sort of parade was going on outside and it was probably the fireworks from that parade that made the sky red, or reddish, or pink, like Icelandic pink, soft non-threatening shades that one might see only when a volcano erupts and transforms the chameleon sky. All right, it wasn’t a volcano, but there was something going on out on the streets which I could not see.

Two fat women covered in shadows were also in my bedroom, watching me crawl to answer Evelyn’s Skype call; one of them I thought I recognized but with whom I was too embarrassed to carry out pleasantries. Halfway, my mobile phone began to ring, right where I left it after I began to crawl, on the floor by the wardrobe closet, that sleek Apple iPhone wannabe the screen of which you touched to navigate. I love my Samsung more than anything I don’t have. There it was, the Samsung, the something-thousand-peso wannabe, begging to be loved, a melodious call, dent-dent-dent-la-la-la from someone registered in my phonebook as R, and how torn I suddenly felt. That I had to answer not just either of the calls but both meant that someone would have to wait. Do you know, I hate letting people wait; perhaps I got that from my father, who always said, “Better to wait than to be late. You can't make people wait.”

Where was I?

In a trap, it seemed like, a trap in my own bedroom forged by shadows and guarded by two fat women. Check that: it was a grave dug for me. My body suddenly grew numb, all of it, I couldn’t move, something invisible, something beyond me, or outside of me, locked me into the fetal position from which I could not do anything other than weep, panic, lay hopeless, die a little bit. How awful. How horrible. How harrowing. Skype went into voicemail mode, and I heard Evelyn’s voice jumping. I heard him smile. A surprise, that’s what he may have had in store for me – one small pleasant surprise, of which I know him to be regularly capable, but which this time I could not take.

“Migsy,” mother told me five days ago, “you know what I do whenever I have bad dreams? I cross my fingers. Even in your sleep you can always cross your fingers.”

I crossed my fingers and woke up, the way babies wake up. Tears in eyes; fears unexplained but not unfounded; with a book as a third pillow. David Sedaris edited it: Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.

And He Shall Call His Own By Name

Aunt Violeta lives on Cavalier Street. Somehow I always seem to forget that. Again, I had trouble remembering this when Joseph and I took a taxi there to meet Eduard. The driver was happy to let the meter tick. Joseph, I asked my cousin, do you remember which street they’re on? Maybe we should text Anchit. Of course, just like other minor and unexpected moments of salvation which we find occasion to celebrate everyday, by the time the North Fairview Homeowners Association welcomed us by way of a wooden poster stand, I remembered. Cavalier Street.

Eduard, by the way, is my cousin. Joseph is his younger brother. They are both Ascaños. Anchit is also a cousin of ours, the only son of Aunt Violeta and Uncle Perting. They are the Dungcas. My mother, Eduard and Joseph’s father (Uncle Joey), Aunt Violeta, and Aunt Josie are all siblings. Save for Aunt Violeta, the three were also on their way to Cavalier Street, via father’s white Mazda van, which was carrying five? six? seven people and a pile of aluminum foil-covered potluck dishes. They had to hold Grandma’s hand – the one without the rosary – as she pulled herself up and into the car, and they had to apologize to me and Joseph because there was no more space, guys, we think you ought to go ahead and hail a taxi as we cover this pancit palabok by the bilao.

So Joseph and I got ourselves a taxi. The fare eventually amounted to two hundred pesos. I had two hundred and fifty in my wallet, but – my PR instincts in full swing, not wanting to look cheap – I volunteered to pay. It was about five o’clock. I couldn’t really tell, but Joseph must have been excited. He lives and works in Tuguegarao, the capital city of the northern province of Cagayan where our parents grew up. We rarely see each other, and three years ago when family members who were living in Manila forgot to greet him on his birthday, he posted a Tagalog profanity as his instant messenger status.

Joseph rang the doorbell and we waited. I took a moment to look at the sky: to spot the stars and to contemplate the moon, which was, as I came to think of it, like a pale white slice of queso de bola on black granite kitchen countertop. If only my insides did not turn at the thought of meeting Eduard, I would have come up with a prettier metaphor. But nerves often get the best of us, don’t they, and it’s only when the feared times have come to pass that we stop to think how – well, how prettier, how slower, everything might have been had we mustered a bit more courage.

The gate was opened by a maid I had not met and who let us in without asking who we were. We walked into the room where family gatherings were normally held, a kind of parlor where one could look out at the children’s playground and the birdcages and which was furnished with gravely varnished wooden benches that looked like Biblical tablets on which Moses could carve modern-day commandments. The long dinner table was clothed, on it a stack of clean plates, and the aroma of garlic from the kitchen was pleasant, like a happy memory imposing itself here and now. Here and now: why not? The Dungca residence is one I have long come to associate with buffet trays, bedroom rugs, marble statues, and bad housekeeper retention. It’s a comfortable home, and it’s an uncontroversial family, and we – the rest of us – we all held an unspoken view that the Dungcas had money and things, much more than we did, so it was only natural that when members of the clan – the Dungcas, the Ascaños, the Caguioas, the Bassigs – planned on getting together, the venue was invariably North Fairview.

Eduard, of course, was also close to Anchit – still is. They are like brothers. Before they took dates seriously, before their dates became girlfriends, before their girlfriends became their wives, and before their wives became the mothers of their children, Eduard and Anchit spent weekends lifting weights at the basement of the Dungca residence. Or they rocked and rolled. Their band featured, if I am not mistaken, Eduard on percussions and Anchit on bass guitar, plus a couple of cool neighborhood dudes with musical inclination. I used to always want to join in, but all I had rehearsed then were (pre-emancipation) Mariah Carey’s singles and soundtracks to Miss Saigon and The Prince of Tides. These days, either Eduard or Anchit would wake up early in the morning to compensate for the time zone difference between Winston-Salem and Quezon City, and then they’d hunker down in front of Web cameras with cans of beer, pangs of nostalgia, and a saccharine fondness for the good old days.

We were sending Eduard off. It was going to be my first time to see him again, and yet we were already sending him off. He arrived two weeks earlier, and he was scheduled to leave the next day. He’d already seen and hugged most of us. Had I not been out of town and out of touch, I would have been able to show up for cocktails at Bagaberde, lounge with a group of our-generation-only relatives at Timog Avenue, witness a carnivorous midnight show somewhere along the shadowed areas of Quezon Avenue. But I was unavailable, intentionally. Nerves.

I had often looked back at when I last saw Eduard. It was six years ago. From Tuguegarao he flew to Manila, stayed at our house in Santa Mesa Heights for a week, and, on the day of his flight to America, hugged us all, out on the street, one by one, the Ascaños, the Caguioas, the Bassigs, even the housekeepers, Lisa and Joecy. Bye, Miguel, he whispered when it was my turn, and oddly, despite the fact that we never really knew each other, I struggled to choke back tears. Then he climbed into the front passenger seat of father’s white Mazda van and closed the door. His luggage filled the space at the back. As the car began to pull away, I caught my cousin’s reflection in the side mirror. He, too, was looking at mine, or at ours, those of us who were left standing there. We grew smaller, and so did Eduard, his face shrinking slowly into a glint of light on a sad afternoon and then disappearing as the van turned a corner.

Eduard was last to arrive at his party. I thought I heard that he had been shopping with Anchit. Joseph, quietly eager, rose from our table to give his brother a hug; they had seen each other only the day before. Then I went to hug Eduard, too. We were blocking the buffet table. How are you, he said to me, and I almost said, I’m sorry I didn’t see you earlier. You should be taking good care of yourself, he then added. And we talked briefly about his shaved head and my weight loss, his daughter and my recent whereabouts, all about the present stuff, nothing about the good old days and nothing about what would happen tomorrow.

R&R

He cheated on me, the bastard, and then he denied it. He lied to me at one o’clock in the morning as I buried my head in my arms and quivered at father’s office desk, the telefax’s receiver to my left ear. The swivel chair made a soft creaking noise and I felt, for the first time in my life, truly unhappy. Not just lacking, but unhappy. (And believe me, lacking is bad enough for me.) Are you hiding something from me? was my question; I asked this while destroying a good number of paper clips; and he said no, I am only guilty of flirting. My older brother Francis must have been eavesdropping. Maybe he wasn’t; he was perhaps just still up after a night of lifting weights at the downstairs storage room of our dark, madly shadowed house in Quezon City, after the two routine glasses of protein milk shake. A hard-working man, Francis, and I am almost certain that he will be surprising many pairs of roving eyes when he takes off his shirt on the shores of Boracay.

I would love to take off my shirt in Boracay, too, even if the surfers might mistake me for an anthropomorphic toy. But that weekend all the family ended up going to was Pansol, Laguna, two hours south of Manila, in a hot springs resort spa called R&R. When we arrived, the granny-glass-wearing lady behind the check-in counter unlocked the gates and led us inside. My parents were celebrating their wedding anniversary – thirty-second? Thirty-third? My sister Lourdes is thirty-one, so my guess must be close. We stayed at a two-storey cabana. Surprisingly, there weren’t any mosquitoes. The common pool was divine, and there was a sort of huge net that was spread about ten, fifteen feet above it, like a horizontal curtain, and where I expected to find windblown leaves, dead bugs, and fallen twigs there weren’t any. I practiced the backstroke that Josemaria, my younger brother, had taught me, and both of us even raced from one end of the pool to another and I lost because the sky was very beautiful and I could not help but stop to look at it and admire it as one admires a calm sea on a summer afternoon. Mother sat poolside on a bamboo chair, watching, and then she took pictures with her Olympus digital camera. It was a birthday gift two years ago from the four of us children.

Don’t be too serious, my father muttered under his cigarette breath. He looked on as mother tried to take a picture of my unsmiling face, juxtaposed with a bookmarked David Sedaris book (Barrel Fever) I had brought with me, along with several pieces of bacon-stripped clothing which could be considered underwear and a baseball cap on which was embroidered a jolly-looking rooster. That was it, for I always travel light. Besides, we were staying there for one night only, so why carry unneeded baggage?

I had two beers at the clubhouse that evening, San Mig Light, to go with our dinner of grilled milkfish, grilled pork chops, grilled squid, grilled tomato, grilled okra, and heaps of rice. I would have had more but Francis was conscious of the calories he was taking in, and the rest of the family didn’t really relish the pleasures of drinking anyway. So instead of clinking my glass against another, I watched the game on television. As soon as we finished, Al – one of the green-shirted resort workers – cleared the table and took away the plates. As he did this, father chatted him up; he pointed to me and said, him, my second son, he’s a basketball player, he’s almost six-foot tall. Al nodded respectfully as if to show that it was the most marvelous thing he ever heard, and then he looked me up and down, up and down.

I was seething when I first found out. Fuck you, I shouted on the phone, fuck you for lying to me, I am not going to let you keep on hurting me, I am not going to let you make me sick again, you son of a five-letter animal. There was silence on the other end and I wanted to believe I was hearing guilt and shame and sincerity and an unspoken request, nay, a plea – a plea! – for forgiveness. Goddamn him if he didn’t think we were worth him on bended knees and with tears in his eyes. If Lola Nena was still alive, my grandmother who used to sleep where the bench and bars now were, she would have heard the noise and feebly risen from her bed to walk at a deliberate, forbidding pace across the television room to father’s office, warping the shadows every step of the way, and she would have slapped me on the face for saying such bad words. Maybe she wouldn’t. In any event, I would have whispered to her, Lola, it’s way too late, go back to bed, you are too old to be minding the young.

Josemaria.

Cabana.

January, of the Year of Other Things

The year 2008 was, for me, the Year of Other Things. I say that because it was the year in which I, as a writer (and I feel helpless that I cannot be anything else), didn’t write, or at least didn’t write what was important for me to write. In other words, it was the year which I had spent as a liar. Among other things. Mind you, it was not a year spent too unhappily.

January 2008: I think that this is where I ought to begin. I am in Quezon City. I am going out on a date. Perfumed, clean-shaven, and wearing an ostentatiously fuchsia Lacoste polo I had stolen from my older brother Francis (my own wardrobe betrays such inferior style), I jump into a taxi on the way to old Manila, nervous, excited, and rendered breathless by the brilliant fiction contained in a text message I had sent my parents. “I am off to work, Ma,” the message read. “Technical rehearsals. Tell Pa I am doing this event for Ramos, this scriptwriting gig. He will turn eighty soon, and you wouldn’t believe the logistics of it all.” The birthday party for the former Philippine President with caricatured ears will not be until March, and there probably won’t be any sort of rehearsal until the first week of that month. I haven’t even written the entrance spiel for the host. I tell Ma and Pa that I will be back later tonight. It is eleven in the morning. They were cooking when I left, but this is not the first time I am missing a homemade lunch.

I brought my laptop: for props.

Props. Like this ten-year-old pair of Ray-Bans. Like this leather Quartz watch, inherited from father. It cannot tell time, but it looks fashionable enough and it fits me perfectly, and I don’t have to flop my bony wrist when I have to pretend to check the time. I also have my tattered copy of a book that was sent to me from New York – Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – but I am almost certain that I won’t be reading it on this taxi, on this furtive ride downtown, because my hands are sweating, and my breathing is not normal, and I don’t look poised at the moment, not to anyone who knows me, and my inability to contain this severe excitement, this strange, urgent, formidable franticness, can be seen in the way I thumb an uncooperative Sony Ericsson and in the way I chomp the nails off my fingers. Thankfully, as we drive to the Rizal Park area, no one who knows me sees these ways. No one recognizes and makes fun of the props.

Not that I think anything would go wrong. I certainly hope not! It’s our third date – well, okay: third “get-together,” whatever that means these days. It won’t be the last, and we are seeing more of each other this coming February, and a trip to Chiang Mai is not impossible. You see, we hit it off right away. Or we so hit it off so right away, to be swaggeringly Yankee about it. When we are not seeing each other, we are chatting heavily on the Internet, and I have been on the phone more times than when I bothered editors and clients to pay attention to invoices. While I cannot say that I carry with me a remarkable history of amorous pursuits and conquests, I have never been like this with anyone before, and I am wondering now where I got the courage, the fearlessness, to hang about the populated Manila streets with him – this pink-skinned, hazel-eyed, hairy-naped, beautifully-aged, five-o’clock-shadowed piece of English gentlemanhood from the immediate outskirts of London.

Let us call him Evelyn. A businessman. An adopted child, and then one-time radio disc jockey. A very heavy coffee drinker. A non-smoker. A non-smoker! It’s startling enough to think that someone can drink infinite cups of cappuccino without needing cigarettes, but for me to be seeing that kind of someone in the most serious way of seeing someone – goodness, what shall I think of that?

On our second date, Evelyn asked me to go to Thailand with him. He extended the invitation during dinner at an Outback cafe in Malate, while I was dissecting a stubborn T-bone. “We stay a night in Bangkok,” he said, “and then spend the rest of the vacation in Chiang Mai.” I gave the matter some thought – about two seconds – and replied to him, but of course, why not, I would love to travel with you and see the elephants, the temples, and the pedophiles. Evelyn kind of found that funny, and after teasingly reconfiguring the ration of mixed vegetables (carrots, green peas, and corn) on his plate, he gave off a warm smile.

I will not remember much of what happened on our third date but that we paid corkage to enjoy the heady goodness of cheap Chardonnay. Of course, Evelyn and I were careful not to drink away the profundity of that evening. He wore a Lacoste polo, too. It was maroon. My parents did not send any more messages that day after “Okay – we’ll see you then.”

Everything sounds – doesn’t it? – just like a fairy tale, but being told me and not by me. God. It was impossible for me not to fall in love, and it probably became more impossible because I had uncharacteristically set myself up for it. My generation is, I should think, generally a non-committal generation, come and go, hello goodbye, I am the master of my fate, and yet when I met Evelyn I was ferocious in my attempts to dispel these very notions, and I couldn’t explain my own eagerness to have him and then have him have me. I was enchanted, and I was charmed, big-time, by a Caucasian gent with an accent, and so I thought nothing of what I would then do to reconcile my inner life – now roused like something that’s worth writing about – and the world outside. What could I do? Not much, I was convinced. It even became so that the attention I paid this inner life – this “love life,” if you will, although I am not sure why anyone else would be so terribly intrigued by it – was not proportional to the amount of interest I should have taken on the rest of the world.

So instead I held those January days as a time which, when I have grown old, or old enough, and when most other things have been forgotten, I will be happy to remember. And indeed I will be happy to remember the dinners at Indian restaurants and the sunset at Manila Bay, and the hotdog stands and bad cafes where numerous afternoons were spent, and the contemptuous stares from scapular-wearing pedestrians. I will remember our looking for Advil in 7-Eleven. I will remember karaoke on Roxas Boulevard. I will remember listening to Glenn Miller and Elton John, and then not really listening, and talking and talking and then discussing other preferred soundtracks before we stopped talking. I will remember that shortly after I saw Evelyn off for the first time at the Manila domestic airport, I instantly found it harder to be alone.

As the taxi drove me back home from the terminal, heavy with love and lies, I pined. What was happening? The thought of literature offering enough consolation suddenly seemed absurd. The twenty-three years which I lived more or less unattached did nothing to prepare me from the separation – at once terrifying and temporary – from a man I had not even known for more than a month. News crackled on the radio, but I listened only for the sounds of my phone. The only people I noticed on the streets were those who looked back at me. It was a stupefying feeling, and I am sure I will remember it, too, very well.

It was strange when I finally got back and put my bag down at the living room. The whole house felt empty. Then I saw Lisa, our housekeeper, in the kitchen peeling onions. Mother emerged from the bathroom and I took her hand, brought it to my forehead, and said nothing. She said nothing, too. But the way she looked at me, I could almost sense that she saw someone who was not writing. Then I made my way upstairs to the bedroom, where I wept and felt sorry for my mother.

Two Thousand and Eight

In which Mitzie became a mother.

Weeps out of western country something new.
Blurred and stupendous. Wanted and unplanned.
Winks. Twines, and weakly winks
Upon the milk-glass fruit bowl, iron pot,
The bashful china child tipping forever
Yellow apron and spilling pretty cherries.

- Gwendolyn Brooks, from “the birth in a narrow room”

In which I lived in cafes.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

- Wallace Stevens, from “Sunday Morning

In which we lost our senses, not just in Subic.

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.

- Henry Reed, from “Chard Whitlow”

In which my friends and I fought against, for, with and without each other.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags,
we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

- Wilfred Owen, from “Dulce Et Decorum Est”

In which I acted like I was the Time magazine cover.

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields;
on – on – and out of sight.

- Siegfried Sassoon, From “Everyone Sang”

In which I read more Grantas than books.

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat –
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

- Kenneth Koch, from “Permanently”

In which I never knew where I’d spend Sundays, but I was sure it’d be alcoholically.

“I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!”
That’s how I threw cold water
on my Mother and Father’s
watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner.

- Robert Lowell, from “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow”

In which I tried to have two cakes and eat them, too.

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre,
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,
If we skip the Champs Elysées
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learing who you are,
Learning what I am.

- James Fenton, From “In Paris with You”

...and in which I celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday with some sort of nougat ice cream, compliments of a Thai seafood restaurant called Crustacea.

I appreciate the studious labour
Of your redness, the scholarly fragrance
Of your sex. To mirror tidal drifts
The light ripples across or to enhance darkness
With palpable tinctures, dense as salt.

- Eric Ormsby, from “Starfish”

Checking In

Dear E,

Hey. It has been awhile since we last talked. How are you? I’ve just been thinking of you, and I thought I’d check in and write you a letter. There was a news item on TV awhile ago about Qantas – ha! – and I kind of took that as a sign that yes, maybe it’s time I ask you how you are, how everything’s going. Not rough, I do hope.

I’m doing well. Or at least I think I’m doing well. Here in Manila – and I don’t know if it’s the summer heat keeping the aristocrats at bay – there has been an unusual demand for starving writers who’d be willing to take on cheap side jobs. I consider myself one of those writers, but before I learned to write professionally, before I learned to fill the folds of a brochure with corporate cant and rehash press releases using synonyms, I’d always been of the starving kind. Ha! (You do remember me as always biting my fingernails, don’t you?) Seriously, though, I’m kind of happy with these assignments, not just for their meager financial rewards, but also for helping me keep busy. I mean, I’d take poverty over anxiety any day of the week. “Nothing like it for taking my mind off nasty subjects,” so said Paul Pennyfeather’s guardian.

Okay now. I don’t mean to pry, and I ask this question on the condition that you will answer it only to the extent that you are comfortable (and I will totally understand if you’re not comfortable): how’s that part of your life? You know what I’m talking about. Are you seeing someone these days?

If you are, then I hope he’s good to you and that he makes you happy, because you deserve a good man and a happy life. I hope, too, that he liked The Royal Tenenbaums, or has at least seen it and not walked out from it, and that he smokes cigarettes, or, at the very least, doesn’t care if you do. I mean, I just can’t imagine you without the Dunhill! Your beautiful mouth was always gently furnished with a burning stick whenever we talked at the sixth-floor balcony, and our conversations were always happily enveloped by a cloud of cigarette smoke. Conversations about what? Anything, usually: Coldplay, U2, Thai food, Mardi Gras, David Sedaris, Li Cunxin, the Roman Catholic Church, microeconomics, New York, Los Angeles, how much I hated my job, how you were able to collect "a menagerie of toiletries" from hotels in the countries you had been to the last five years. Anything. When we, you and I, when we first talked about anything (and in the manner, too, that’s most proper for talking about anything, which is alcoholically), you had a way about you, a quiet charm, made more powerful by those eyes as clear and tantalizing as emeralds and by an embarrassed smile that rather melted me like cheese. Knowing you, having experienced you, I’m sure that the next man in your life will be mozzarella in a microwave.

If you aren’t seeing anybody at the moment, I am still wishing you happiness.

I have seen about a dozen pictures of B’s new baby, posted on the Internet. (I’m relieved the parents didn’t name him Dmitri! I regretted the name as soon as I suggested it.) And G and J keep me updated with the infinite number of Facebook quizzes that they take. But it’s you I miss, E. I refuse to let my memory of you be reduced to red Calvin Kleins or your memory of me to ridiculous phone bills. “Let’s watch movies, go to fun fairs,” you had suggested to me when we first met. “Take me to a steakhouse. I want to be your good friend first.” But we never did go to a steakhouse - just the fish market, Macapagal Boulevard's dampa, where transvestites begged us to consider their salmon.

So I figured, if I were going to keep abreast of what’s been happening in your life, something more than checking status updates and smiling at pictures of you and your son at the shooting range was in order.

Something like this letter,
which I send with love,
and happy thoughts of you
from our Landing.

My very best,
Migs

Dennis the Tricycle Driver

There is a man named Dennis who, for a living, drives a very red tricycle in the island of Guimaras. We first met him when we rather clumsily disembarked at Jordan Wharf. There, a crowd of barking drivers – of tricycles and “multi-cabs” (public utility jeeps, really, each of which can fit a maximum of fourteen people) – cordially harassed us pump boat passengers; they roared in Ilonggo, announcing ridiculous rates, and pointed their greasy index fingers at their luxury tin vehicles. They must have seen us as prospects right from the start of our eleven-peso ride, which, if you board at any of the ports on the southeastern edge of Iloilo City, takes ten to fifteen minutes, depending on the weather. Most things depend on the weather, it seems like.

The day was hot and humid and the sparkling waters were almost blinding. We were thus disposed to not have much patience for swindlers. Dennis, who must be in his early thirties, stood out because he had dutifully directed us to the tourism information desk where two young ladies both wearing yellow Survivor t-shirts and denim jeans made sure we were given a warm welcome, and that no one overpriced fares. They had a price list. “You’re going to Enrico Beach, right?” one of them said. She was scanning the pages of her notebook. “Let’s see. If you take a multi-cab, a one-way trip should cost you no more than four hundred pesos.”

Needing less space, we opted instead for the tricycle and hired Dennis: five hundred pesos for five hours, to the beach and back, covering a total of not more than sixty kilometers, but with likely side tours, too, to any one of Guimaras’ caves, or any one of Guimaras’ waterfalls, or any one spot where we could take pictures and notes and admire the unspoiled economy of one of smallest islands in Western Visayas.

I first heard about Guimaras in 2006 when the Manila newspapers reported the worst oil spill in Philippine history. To me, the story had the impact of a footnote – evidence of my urban snobbishness. But the mess of that has since been cleaned up; its last ugly ripple has ebbed. Now, when the island province is brought up in conversation, the beaches are praised as being better than that of Boracay. The sand and soil have been ascribed adjectives in the superlative form, such as “purest” and “most fertile,” respectively. The sweet mangoes are raved about, too, with Bill Clinton and the present Pope alleged to be two of its most famous eaters. “Plant a mango tree and send your child to college,” so went the motto of former Guimaras Governor Emily Relucio-Lopez had been quoted as saying, and I wonder if there’s any other place in the world where tuition is appraised in the currency of tropical fruits – and beachfront hospitality, in US dollars.

“You’re heading the wrong direction,” Dennis told us coolly. He was sporting a childish moustache and the great laughable Asian goatee. “Alubihod is where the tourists go. I’m happy to take you to Enrico, but I haven’t even been there since high school.”

Three years ago, during which time Dennis was working in a bakeshop in Libis, Quezon City, his father died. So he left Manila and went back home. After the funeral, Dennis’ wife insisted that he stay on the island, or at least in Iloilo City. He did. He effectively put Manila behind by buying the tricycle, which he now rides to go wherever in Guimaras he wishes to go, be it to a passenger’s destination, an odd boredom-conceived adventure, or his house in the municipality of Buenavista.

At the start of our Guimaras tour, Dennis filled his vehicle up with four 1.5-liter Coke bottles of reddish unleaded gas; then he drove us to Daliran Cave. We descended a long autumnal staircase before landing on what looked like a set location for the next Indiana Jones movie, if there is going to be a next Indiana Jones movie. I hasten to add, however, that it was King Kong whom I half-expected to emerge furiously from the deep black shadows of the cave.

This piece would not have been about Dennis, but I lacked the material to talk at length about the pump boat captain, whose name is Ariel. He had enough quips, mind, but the best thing I could remember from my sea-breeze conversation with him was that he had worked for Quezon City’s First District Representative Bingbong Crisologo. Ariel had helped build the congressman’s house. Unfortunately, I found it impossible to put a fashionable The Talk of the Town spin on Ariel’s cement-slapping endeavors from the yesteryears.

Thank You, Iloilo

Iloilo City is a gritty city, particularly downtown. To me, it looks like certain parts of old Manila, the parts where I don’t usually go, like Escolta in Santa Cruz or Carriedo, where the dear old fountain is. While on a three-day, two night stay in the capital of the Western Visayan province of the same name, as I was taking an afternoon walk along the streets and sidestepping shards of beer bottles on an abandoned lot, the absurd thought occurred to me that if I were to live in this city, if I were to fit in here and survive for a long period of time or at least look like I’d be able to, I’d probably have to get myself a tattoo, try my best to look like a scoundrel.

Maybe it's not that absurd, for Iloilo seems to be that kind of place. Not that there isn’t anything beautiful that awaits visitors to the city –because, mind you, there’s plenty– but as I explored its downtown area on foot, the sun shining hard on its roads and, at best, only the mildest breeze stirring in the afternoon heat, there wasn’t much else that struck me harder and more profoundly than did its general - what? Artlessness? Lack of urbanity? And I have seen Philippine provinces with weather more agreeable and tropical than this one – sidewalks less littered, too. Cigarette butts decorated the pavements. Dogs strayed, ugly dogs. Faded tarpaulin posters, most of them from the last elections, covered the cracked walls of broken-down buildings. In front of one such building on Calle Real, I saw vendors selling fake Rolexes and blocking the entrance to a local pharmacy. Jeepneys, taxis, tricycles, and pedicabs staggered in all directions, heedless of jaywalking pedestrians and traffic lights on roads which, surprisingly wide though they were, looked nevertheless to be in surgery. At Plaza Libertad, a public park five minutes from the hotel where I was staying, a statue of Rizal stood almost irrelevantly, a marble monument of one of the great Filipino artists ignored by shirtless, brown-skinned boys playing basketball and crying foul in Ilonggo. I wondered if the churchgoers inside nearby Iglesia de San Jose de Placer could hear the fun they were having, what fun, shooting hoops to the soundtrack of spoken sermons and holy hymns, and with a view of one of those Spanish-era structures dilapidating in a way that texture photographers would find accidentally beautiful, along with Iloilo’s other ruins, churches, temples, bell towers, art deco stones, ancestral houses, government offices, and heritage buildings.

As soon as the young men finished a pick-up game, they resumed another. I took pictures; I took notes. They probably played basketball here until it was lights out, and perhaps days here weren’t done until after the closing hours of Plaza Libertad.

To tell you the truth, I had expected differently. But what? I can’t say for certain. When, from the gleaming Iloilo International Airport, I jumped into a taxi with Evelyn, a white man (bless all white men and women in the Philippines; unofficial additional taxes are invariably imposed upon them), I immediately noticed that the driver had not turned on his meter. He instead proposed a fixed fare, “four hundred pesos, sir,” revealing that he had a family of four to feed and that yesterday’s bread wouldn’t have been enough. Naturally, being from Manila, I didn’t budge.

“I didn’t know I was at home,” I remarked, not without the dripping sarcasm of suburban collar-poppers. “Manong, turn on the meter, please.”

His face was creased with lifelines and his mouth wouldn’t shut; he seemed just of the kind of swindling Filipino taxi drivers to which I am particularly averse. In his eyes, I must not have looked older than a recent college graduate. Passionately, he continued to argue. “I’ve been waiting five hours to get a passenger. Five hours! Since seven in the morning!”

“How’s that my fault?” I replied. “If you think you’re getting such a raw deal then change your job.” Evelyn, quiet all this time, listened helplessly. But he must have detected a bit of profanity in the crunchy exchange between the driver and me, a two-dialect exchange which, if transcribed exactly as it were, would have been filled with asterisks. One was speaking in Ilonggo and another in Tagalog. “Shame on you,” I told the driver. “It’s my first time here and you’re the first person I encounter.” At that, he resumed his song of grievances, which would have gone on and on had Evelyn not cut him off. “Stop!” Evelyn roared. He’s British, by the way. “Turn on the meter or else we’ll get off and report you to the transportation office.” There was silence, and in the middle of that silence the meter finally was turned on. “Thank you, sir,” Evelyn said. His accent sounded vicious, but I’ll have you know that he is far from being prone to seething.

It was later that afternoon, after no more than five minutes in my suffocating room at the City Corporate Inn on Rizal Street, that I headed out to walk. Walking, after all, is my greatest equalizer – or should I say tranquilizer?; it calms me down and keeps me from being irrational; and, since any ride would be too fast, a walk has also proven many times to be my richest source of material for writing (that is, if I am writing at all). How else can I describe Life but with the impressive memory of this papery-lipped old man sun-drying his fish out on the asphalt road in the middle of a March afternoon, howling his last price per kilo in a pleading vernacular that I can perhaps never politely condescend myself to understand, but at the sound of which I felt at once blessed and broken? And what else can I say about Love but that it occurred before me as a split-second kiss planted tenderly on the whitener-whitened cheek of a nursing student’s beloved in a jeep that was rumbling and heaving its way to who knew where – might it have been to the woefully commercial Robinson’s Place or the woefully kept University of Iloilo? And how else can I capture Loneliness than by saying it was what I felt at the sight of a middle-aged woman in Jollibee, by herself, all by her damned motherly self, auburn-dyed hair, tinted glasses, pearl earrings, a very 80s print skirt, velvet fingernails, and a faltering appetite, fiddling with and poking her seventy-nine-peso Chicken Joy as though she was performing a poultry autopsy? I would have come nearer as a friendly stranger and struck up a conversation, so that the world would seem to her less unkind, but no sooner than when I closed my book (My Name is Red) and stood up to do that did I notice that there were quiet tears that filled her eyes.

I was determined to avoid fast-food chains the next day and thus ended up breakfasting in Ted’s. If there’s anything, after all, for which Iloilo is nationally famous, it's Batchoy. Rumor has it that it was originally conceived by Chinese immigrants in the provincial district of La Paz. Somewhat like the city, the dish looked to me like a thoughtless muddle – of miki noodles, pieces of meat, and abused bits of garlic, pepper, leeks and pork cracklings, all deposited in a bowl of spiteful-looking broth.

Of course, it was good. I even slurped my soup.

Under Construction

Not the blog; the author.

P.S.: But I hasten to proclaim that Up Dharma Down's sophomore album, Bipolar, is beyond fantastic.

I Don’t Yet Know Love, IV

And when I walked out of the hotel I saw that there weren’t much left of the security staff. The marble portico was no longer littered with watch dogs and beret-wearing armed men, and the shiny belt stanchions had been retracted. The sun had set. Many may have called it a day. It wasn’t six yet, or maybe it was only several minutes past six, but I noticed that in all of October of this year Manila turned dark abnormally early. Morning and afternoons were shorter and evenings, longer.

Outside it was certainly darker. From the hard cobbled walkway I spilled onto the street with my unusually plump shoulder bag and a purple matchbox – pedestrian in the way I laid the former on the asphalt and fiddled with the latter and in the way I then waited for a ride, which I thought wasn’t at all going to come. There wasn’t an empty taxi for what felt like an hour – well, I must be exaggerating, I might have waited only fifteen minutes, but as anyone might gather from the cosmic nuances of October, time is prone to stretch once the sun goes down and the stars come out.

Come out they did, prematurely, and one by one too it seemed. These happy crystals spread across the sky’s black silk. I thought it was all too French, but I shall probably still be moved one day by the memory of watching the night fall while I stood in front of a hotel that itself glittered with such rococo charm, such champagne taste that when I had strolled through the exquisitely chandeliered lobby for one last time in my surfer shorts I wondered if the most privileged shaved their legs, and if I was the only one hearing cymbals. I was the only one.

That was when I asked myself, how long an evening was required in order to be able to learn roulette? How shadowed from the luminance of my commonplace existence, that which glares at me soberly every day, every hour, every minute, every morning when I get up from my bed and boil water in a five-year-old kettle to take a bath, must one become in order to sit in disquieting silence beside cigarette-smoking Alexei Ivanovichs inserting five-hundred-peso notes for every bet placed and ball rolled? And it wasn’t just at the casino where this sans souci sort of dream started and may likely end. It was at a sixth-floor room, near the balcony beneath the stars, where I unwrapped a 2009 diary from Johannesburg; it was at a Korean convenience store where in the hush of midnight we shopped for beer; in Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown, where we laughed together at an E-mail address (“i_love_donald_duck”) in a business card. Wonderful, absolutely wonderful indeed – but at some point, when you and I have both woken up, we will be reminded that no matter how deep a night goes it will still have to give rise to tomorrow.

The moment I jumped into the backseat of a taxi fifteen minutes or one hour later, I became less enchanted. Of course. The upholstery reeked. The radio crackled insistently. The driver knew no better way to make conversation than to whine about the Roxas Boulevard traffic and to utter profanities at others who behaved as aggressively on the road as he did, sharp turns and close calls and a distinctly Manila urge to change lanes with reckless, hostile frequency. Mooning out of the window, not wanting to be infected with his impatience, I looked at the city bay.

A boy had jumped from a wooden banca. He was swimming across towards another that was moored not far from the yacht club, towards this boat whose bamboo poles reached out into the black water like the legs of a spider. It was only a short distance to cover, no longer than for the red light to turn into green, but the boy’s small muted silhouette slicing through the vastness of the bay had made it seem as though it would take an eternity. And as the taxi sped away I thought that it would take another eternity for him to dry, for the sun had set and many have called it a day.

I Don't Yet Know Love, III

No, of course I don’t yet know love. So don’t expect that I do. The very idea! I am twenty-three!

Twenty-three but trying, ever so hard. Last week you and I decided to take a walk in Intramuros, to tour the walled district and to step on Spanish-era cobblestone. “To waste a Tuesday,” I thought to myself, before we were able to hail a taxi. You know, I had almost protested –Intramuros sounds a corny idea to young urbanites like me, because the site hardly has any romantic appeal, and if it does, it’s for the ancient, and for the granny-glass-wearing scholarly, and unlike us they would never risk sunburn by going at midday– but I kept quiet. I chugged on my bottle of C2 Green Tea Apple and furiously fantasised about air-conditioned spaces.

When the taxi driver decided to take, unnecessarily, a longer route, with Love Radio and its either proletariat or unintentional humour at full volume, I still kept quiet. Some crimes are better left uncaught. He wants to go round in circles, fine; I’m not the one who’s paying for the bloody fare. So instead of travelling straight through Roxas Boulevard from Vito Cruz Avenue, then turning right on T.M. Kalaw Street, then left to Maria Orosa Street and into Calle Real del Palacio, we zigzagged through grey and strange thoroughfares, past nightclubs, karaoke bars, pool bars, bad restaurants, fly-infested eateries, dentist clinics, insufficiently funded museums, gloomy Internet cafes, Muslim-owned jewellery shops, Chinese- and Korean-owned pawnshops, money exchangers, twenty-dollars-a-night hotels, abandoned office buildings, and other such holes in the wall (in whose haphazardness, I thought, not even the enchanted city surgeons of Metro Manila Development Authority would be able to find hope) – until, half an hour into the journey, we were welcomed at the gates of Intramuros by a security guard who was uniformed in a Spanish, sixteenth-century sort of way. A prim and proper Guardia Civil of Malaysian descent, with no trace of mestizo in him.

“Good afternoon!” he greeted, not really addressing me.

I hadn’t been to this part of the city for such a long time. Uncle Remy’s golden wedding anniversary, held in Sofia Garden at Patio Victoria and carried by a Glenn Miller playlist, was two years ago. And I had stopped visiting the third-floor Tradewind bookstore at Silahis Arts and Crafts Centre ever since I discovered the F. Sionil Jose-owned La Solidaridad in Ermita. Understandable, then, that Intramuros suddenly seemed strange in the October sunlight, with the stones looking so brittle, and the statues charmless, and the shadows oppressed. The clatter of horse-driven kalesas jolted me, as did the buzzing population of college students who loitered away the hours in and out and around the medieval halls of their schools. You mingled with and took snapshots of them while I stood veritably transfixed. Everything seemed unfamiliar, awfully unfamiliar, as though I was observing with a new set of eyes. I even mistook San Agustin Church for Manila Cathedral. And I consider my roots Catholic!

Actually, I could have gone to any part of the city and felt a similar feeling, that which might be described as the inverse of déjà vu: what I thought I had previously known would strike me as unusual. My job, after all, this writing gig for offshore clients in Cleveland, requires me to stay at home, face the computer all day and chat with bosses and clients half a world away, and not when I had attended a first get-together two weeks ago with the other writers from my company's pool did I intuit that there will be a second. Like them, I was just as anti-social, as vehemently shy, an apostle of Google trained to behave according to pay-per-click doctrines.

This quiet, almost unreal existence must have estranged me from the world. Which is kind of sad, if you come to think about it. How can I profess to know love when I now don’t even know where I belong? You and I went to old Manila, and Manila became just another city in the Philippines.

I Don't Yet Know Love, II

My right wrist still hurts, as does my right forearm. I can imagine the muscles, the tissues, its fibres and the tendons that connect them, having been twisted severely, as in Manny Pacquiao’s interminable sci-fi Alaxan commercials: to unknot the pain there might be a need for fast-relief analgesics. But this memory of going ten-pin bowling with you –and of losing three games out of three– will ache only temporarily; long-term it is something that I shall remember fondly.

I wonder why, until we talked about what to do that Sunday afternoon, I had never bowled before. I never did understand the appeal of the sport, at least as far as the concept of playing and winning was concerned. Even the bowling shoes I saw only as a kind of fashion accessory. I liked to think that an asphalt basketball playground, imagined with tattooed opponents and drunken hecklers (even armed frat boys, as was the case in the gritty Quezon City district where I grew up), would unleash much more freely my competitive nature than would an air-conditioned, bubblegum-coloured alley on the fourth floor of a tycoon-owned shopping mall.

Ah, the alley: it could not have possibly been less dark. Its shiny synthetic lanes, manicured with bright shades and glossy brand logos, made for an effect that I can only describe as tranquilizing. The panel walls were plastered with stickers of balloons, clownish, cartoonish faces, and unnamed planets surrounded by happy grainy gases. Soft jazz emanated from speakers located behind the bar, while moustached spectators lounged and watched and smoked cigarettes and took small, smooth swigs from their bottles of San Mig Light. What if a player accidentally drinks too much beer? I don’t want to be too imaginative here, but one might do more than just fracture a finger; so much for balance and for stabilising the body! Bowling, I had always thought, was for people unable to exude grace any other way. And for Woody Harrelson. “Gawd, Kingpin was atrocious,” I remember you saying. “I didn’t find the film funny at all.”

What is funny is that I believed in your sense of humour a little bit more than in your athletic skill. I mean, you always tripped on the smoothest of pavements and you always scurried too quickly along zebra crossings. And you were the one who had made the rather charming profession of being “useless” in any sport, even in those that didn’t always require sobriety. But when you scored a 133 in our first game, with at least three strikes and a couple of spares, beating me by a margin so wide that I cannot now be bothered to remember how wide, and when like a majestic show-off you turned round to look at me before your ball ever hit the pins, such that you could witness my profanity-laced reaction and at the same time listen to the soundtrack of a beautiful crash, I no longer was the one laughing.

In a comedy of embarrassment, I begged and promised to pay for a second game, and then a third; if it weren’t for a primetime telecast of The Emmys that evening I might have insisted on continuing to fight the losing battle. Oh, how utterly pathetic I looked in my humourless attempts to win, to feed my almost childish desire for victory. And you beat me each time without any unnecessary excitement or alcohol. I, meanwhile, achieved nothing but muscle pain that until now has not been eased.

At any rate, I hope that you will not blame me if my sharpest instinct is to always keep score. Not that that will hurt you; I only inflict damage on myself. Did you notice how desperately I deciphered and monitored the lime-coloured lines on the scoreboard? You’d think that, aside from my wrist and arm, my neck too would have suffered some kind of strain. More than being ignorant of what ten-pin bowling on a Sunday afternoon stands for, perhaps my affliction has to do with making a competition out of too many things, and with feeling insecure and bereft and bitter after even just the most minor losses. And perhaps I don’t yet know love, which is why I treat it too as a game, and you as a kind of prize – which you most certainly are not. You mean much, much more than something or someone I’d be terrified to lose.

I Don’t Yet Know Love, I

I don’t know if you would love me still if I resumed smoking cigarettes. I only say “resume” to mean that I haven’t resumed officially – or haven’t yet. A harmless stick a day of Marlboro Lights shouldn’t count, should it? The effect of such a small intake of nicotine cannot be cancerous, and is, I reckon, as ephemeral and underwhelming as the slightly detectable stench it leaves on my shower curtain in the evenings.

“It’s not good for you,” you once said to me in the swimming pool. You said it almost severely, this honeyed barb. “Smoking makes you appear so – well, so less gentle.” I would’ve seconded the remark with a nod, and said something by way of agreement and penitence, but it was one of those unpleasant mornings that did nothing to assuage the aftermath of a fight the previous night (over something about dating websites). Unpleasant: several weeks had passed since the last summer and still the sun shone viciously. I was struggling to hold my breath. My head was safely above the surface of the water, I recall, turned to look in the direction of where black ants marched funnily along the granite poolside, but even so we still both heard my flagrant breathing, or heaving – clumsy, rapid, and difficult. Like a smoker’s. I know that you had helped me cut back dramatically. But health, good or bad, is a cumulative effect of many causes; health is the upshot of habit, of a series of submissions to either virtue or vice.

At the moment, however, the only vice that I have picked up and held onto is you. Oh, and alcohol. (They say it takes two to tango, but they didn’t say how much better it would be if chardonnay joined a happily confused dance.) At any rate, I am, or I’d like to believe that I am, a very healthy gentleman – with sports and books and friends and time and a bit of experience, just a little bit. I mean, if you had met my chemically affected copywriter-slash-journalist self from a year ago, the one who behaved unexceptionally in the general sense of rumble in a Manila-based advertising agency, maintained a glacial attitude towards virtuously corporate cant and took long drags from a Marlboro every five minutes, would you still have loved me, and cared for what was good for me and what wasn’t? Would you kiss me still if it turned bitter once more, my tongue, my gums, my lips, my breath, all that from which these words find voice?

Sorry. You might have noticed that lately I have been categorical. Not that I mean to. It’s just that I don’t yet know if tobacco has an influence on love, as is certainly the case the other way around.

Not My Gig

A string of drunken karaoke nights has reinforced my desire to join a rock band. Don’t roll your eyes. Don’t laugh. (Besides, the dreams I am having while asleep are even more absurd: of pterodactyls swooping down from the August sky, gorging itself with flesh ripped from my back; of a mall escalator so steep that it would throw people off; of human eyes in a gumball machine at a hospital; of black leather shoes and my impossible taste for them.)

And don’t think that I am not being serious. During my spare time, whenever I am not watching reruns of Boston Legal or writing crammed copy for offshore business clients in the US (my new sort of freelance job), I catch myself wondering what it would be like –what it would really be like– to have a flourishing musical career.

Not that my life isn’t musical enough, because I think it most unfortunately is. In fact, the people around me, poor souls, are positive that I sing more than I talk; they live in the daily swathe of my squealing Don Henley/Damien Rice imitation. I’ve got a rickety Yamaha C40 classical (reviewed and regarded by everyone as “made for beginners”), a thirty-dollar digital piano (through the speakers of which I accidentally dropped a plastic pick; now every key farts), and a baritonal voice that’s still somewhat strained by a tonsillectomy from a decade ago, and which can’t be strangled for a high note unless motivated by a flying cockroach.

But I’m a greedy person. I want more, like most do. But don’t blame me; unwittingly, I have contracted one of those modern-day social ills that corrupt and disrupt an ordinary man’s criteria for satisfaction: it’s called university education – catalysed of course by Jewish preachers and their Magis perspectives.

So be more understanding if, these days, I am blinded by interminable visions of myself on some sort of stage, seated on some sort of stool with some sort of guitar in my hands, revelling in hot spotlight and wiping beads of sweat off of my forehead before muttering something about what had inspired the next number. (“So there I was, at rock bottom, all around me these breasts heaving on free-flowing draft beer night – when suddenly, an epiphany...”) And I could just as well picture myself in noiseless repose on a bathroom floor, with pen and paper and a clumsy rhyme – you know, the alleged behind-the-scenes stuff that independently made music videos have led us to believe. I do have other rather liquid scenarios in mind, all of them less probable than a forty-five-minute set at an empty Outback Cafe at Ermita’s Swagman Hotel and none more thought-through than my first ever trip to a tattoo parlour (what’s “bust your conk” in Chinese?).

But it’s hard to determine where exactly to start. There must be plenty of unheralded local bands out there waiting for either a break or an intervention. They’re printing just as much announcement fliers for auditions as for their Friday night gigs at a gritty Tomas Morato bistro. These are groups of musicians whose ambitions haven’t yet been thwarted by disappointing MySpace visits but who want more than frat boys and potheads for an audience. Not that they’re untalented, or as instrumentally ill-equipped as I am; if anything they just might be (in the same way that karaoke galvanised me) demanding more for themselves, and thus of themselves. Oh, I am quite certain, there starves today many artists in their mid to late twenties, frustrated by the mediocrity that glares at them from the surface of the sheet on which they write lyrics – about love, beauty, and other such profundities, mediated by a pretty, breathtakingly quiet chord.

Maybe we can help each other, us who want more. And maybe we’re fated to meet each other someday, in a kind of mutual discovery, so that we might lead rock band lives, sing rock band songs, and excuse promiscuity with rock band reasons. Our nights shall no longer be spent on karaoke, or on some other pathetic reverie.

But then again, maybe we are better off ordinary. At least I am.

Submergence

Summer afternoon, the two most beautiful words in the English language, and with it comes the transformation of a lazy July day into night. The sun that, only awhile ago, made the swimming pool glow in the garden of my friend Evelyn’s house is slowly sinking out of sight. It’s five o’clock. I feel like taking a swim, and, even though I don’t really know how –as an eight-year-old, I wasted three whole months on lessons–, even though I know that the cold will be sharp, and the chances of getting a tan dismal, when I soon dip my bare feet into the water, I tell myself that I am onto a luxury, a fine luxury, however masochistic.

The swimming pool is spoilt by a view of the garden that surrounds it, a lovely thicket of mysterious trees and potted plants and orchids in infinite colours, and by a sky across which, once every hour, a plane soars. (Evelyn lives fifteen minutes away from the airport.) On the left side of the pool stands a chalet, the path to which is stone-paved; because I am constantly looking for romance I imagine that this wooden dwelling is where I, if I lived here, would store all the wine, and build the bar, and drink my morning coffee and read my novels, and gather all the pool party guests who didn’t bring their swimming suits and only want to mingle with each other and smoke cigarettes. But there’s nothing in it right now except for old plywood, a dump of torn bed sheets, and a Monobloc chair. Abandoned, like a child with no talent.

Evelyn should hire someone to take care of these things, maintain them. There is one gardener, a long-haired Visayan in an invariable wardrobe of basketball jerseys and denim shorts, who does all the watering and pruning and raking, but he doesn’t do much else after work, just swings in the hammock as a brown-skinned pendulum and reads the tabloids. No one comes in to keep the chalet. No one comes in to clean the swimming pool.

So I tread the water with my head above the surface, my mouth shut tight to prevent any kind of swallowing. The pool must be one of the dirtiest –and oldest– I’ve ever been in. Dark green corners hint at algae growth. Cracks on the wall reveal something brown, earthy and inappropriate. The ancient floor tiles, once white, have been evidently jaundiced by the apathetic passing of time. Buds, windblown leaves, petals, black ants, fallen dragonflies, dead beetles that are as big as a fingernail: they float around me, gently, almost lovingly, as though to parody a Valentine’s Day advertisement of a spa. Once, I made the mistake of submerging myself completely under the water, and from that my skin developed a rash that only copious amounts of Efficascent Oil could heal. This is why I won’t do laps.

For now. Not that I will never; a devoted pool man can ease my squeamishness. And maybe Evelyn can even throw in a carpenter to refurbish the chalet.

A Correspondence with Colm

"My dreadful discovery of the second kind of cockroaches in Manila took place several days ago during my first night at the new apartment, where I had forgotten to initially bring an electric fan. I found that these crawlers were infinitely creepier and –consumed perhaps by deeply familial ties– downright suicidal. They kept coming and coming, in between chapters of Colm Tóibín, the first one taking off from the edge of a splintery closet door and fluttering straight to the wild hairs of my left leg. After getting it off with a violent jerk, I began chasing the cockroach, whereupon its short life came to an end with the vicious smack of a Pony sandal. And yet how many of them had followed!"

I wrote the above paragraph ten months ago, and the reference to a certain novelist from Enniscorthy, Ireland has, ten months later, provoked a response from a most unlikely reader. Of course I cannot not boast about our correspondence, even though I probably will never forgive myself (or be forgiven by people who matter) for hereby telling the rest of the world. Here's a bit of what is supposed to be private stuff between me and, ahem, Colm:

---
Dear Migs,

On the subject of cockroaches, if I can do anything to help, let me know.

All the best,
Colm
---
Dear Mr. Toibin,

You are not really Colm Toibin, are you? (Besides, it's Tóibín.) If you are then you have a lot of explaining to do. More than exterminating the cockroaches, convince me that this E-mail address is not illegitimate. Tell me that you had indeed written that little note from Spain (as was traced by the IP address). And ask me which I liked better: The Master or The Blackwater Lightship?

I could ask for more proof of your identity, and then tell you the story of my life so you could make it into a novel (Why not? Filipinos can be cardinally, creepily Catholic, too), but it's morning in Manila as I write this, and I'm still feeling the bitter effects of a whiskey-aided reunion with my cousin Johnny from L.A. It was the first time I ever tasted liqueur slapped with a Green Label; not that I care very particularly for it; I ruined my drink by pouring half a can of Coke and then, on my second glass, half a can of tonic.

Well, there you are. (A phrase from Flanner.) Colm. If you're not Colm then have the decency at least to tell me so.

Love from Manila,
Migs
---
Dear Migs,

Yeah, it’s me. I am in the Pyrenees trying to finish a novel, nearly there and so fed up having to work flat out every day that I search myself online (sic) which I know is a very bad sign. I hope your hangover is better and I need to warn you that hangovers, in my experiences, seem to attract even larger cockroaches and make them feel brave. It is a cool idea that someone in Manila where I have never been is reading one (or maybe two) of my books. Which do you like better?

Colm
---
Dear Colm,

I hate to disturb your novel-writing process but you are not Colm Tóibín! What are you doing reading my blog?

If you really are Colm, then let me make this known: I've read all of your books. Unfortunately, a TV producer friend of mine from New York borrowed my copy of Mothers and Sons and never returned it. (I have his Hollinghurst, but that's no replacement. Ooh!) I already love you, without having yet heard your accent. Why you never gave Mr. Henry James a shag in The Master escapes me - but maybe you're just understated like that, the power of what you write lies in between the lines, and behind what's not being said or done.

The hangover is gone, replaced by an intoxicating disbelief. Please tell me you're not Colm Tóibín.

Love,
Migs
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Dear Migs,

Here is what I did. I went to Google, and then to Blog Search, and then I keyed in my own name. Your blog had appeared just four minutes earlier and, because it had my name in passing on it, it came up so I was tempted to write to you and I gave in to the temptation (I usually, being a good Catholic, do not). I have to confess that I keyed in myself again this morning and to my horror a whole long lecture and reading I gave in Boston in March came up. So there.

Colm

P.S.: Sorry about Henry James. It just couldn’t be done.
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Ohmigod Colm,

Being a good Catholic myself, I am tempted to believe your story. (Agnosticism won't bring me anywhere.) Besides, anyone who readily admits having searched his own name on Google deserves to be trusted, not least if it's an author whom I so admire, and after whose prose I try to pattern mine, however vainly.

But I don't want to praise you too much and scare you away. Good luck with the new novel; I hope it's not as swaggeringly heterosexual as The Heather Blazing.

Love,
Migs
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Dear Migs,

I have bad news for you. While there is a small (and unresolved) lesbian scene in this book, it is even more swaggering.

Colm

A Chat with Her

HER. So you said you liked me.
ME. Duh! Don’t tell me you never noticed. Silly girl.
HER. Fine. I did. But why?
ME. Why not? I still have a dick and I'm capable of being attracted to women.
HER. And?
ME. And what? I like you. I had a rather big crush on you back then.
HER. Crush?
ME. Yes, something like that.
HER. Ha! This is interesting. Can I fish for compliments?
ME. I enjoyed being with you. But not anymore because you had left me behind.
HER. Whatever.
ME. Besides, why are you asking me these questions?
HER. So it was my company more than anything else? Just being curious George...
ME. Not just the company: the you, if you know what I mean. That’s why I enjoyed my twenty-third birthday so much. You means: beautiful, lovely woman (physically). Hazel eyes. Seductively silky voice. Carefree spirit. Genuinely kind heart. Someone who doesn’t care what other people think. Lives her own life, free, but grounded by values of family, and faith in God. (I couldn’t believe in God but I can be attracted to people who do.) And you never looked down on other people. That was something I found so wonderful about you. You were so much less pessimistic than I was.
HER. I think I have a tear in my eye.
ME. I mean every word. Lying would've taken so much longer.
HER. Now, please correct my grammar, okay?
ME. Okay. I can be your editor, if not anything else.
HER. Now that we’re both with someone else, do you somehow feel more connected to me? Closer?
ME. No. Are you disappointed?
HER. No.
ME. Do know that I won’t judge you. I’ll never do that. I love you very much as a friend and I am proud of our connection.
HER. Oh Migs, I am so in love with him.
ME. Please get out of here with that romantic crap!
HER. Piss off! Let me be. I’m shining!
ME. Well, so am I. And don't worry. I’m very much a romantic myself. I just consciously repress it, for it gets in the way of my writing craft. Ha!
HER. Sheesh! Man, that just stinks up your fart. Never repress!
ME. By the way, I really am serious about going to where you are. But I should have somewhere to stay. Your place? I won’t rape anyone, I promise.
HER. You can’t. They’re not as fortunate here, if you know what I mean. Besides, that would be against house rules.
ME. I was kidding, silly.
HER. Oh.
ME. I know where to stay, but I don’t want to spend the night by myself. Maybe you and F can join me for a slumber party, or a threesome, whichever you prefer.
HER. Maybe. And, by all means, rape me; I’m just not sure if you’d be able to handle that.
ME. Rape you? God, never in my lifetime did I ever think I'd hear that from someone I had a crush on.

Pollination

In front of us was a Green Label which did not necessarily promote sustainability. It did inspire, in increasingly intoxicating and soda-mixed stages, a discussion of socio-biological theory, as exampled by a butterfly story that my cousin Johnny –how apt, given what we were drinking, he’s from Los Angeles, here on lawyerly business– began telling.

“How can a butterfly,” he was saying, “who has escaped his cocoon and begun to fly, how can a butterfly like that make a caterpillar see what he has seen? The caterpillar has experienced nothing but a creaky floorboard.”

Johnny is forty-three years old, going on “forty-something”. He reads the Zohar. He called me in that Monday night for sashimi and drinks in his nineteenth-floor room at Linden Suites. A single candle had been lit, thus allowing the balmy aroma of eucalyptus oil guide our senses to proper judgment. It was a lovely night, conducive to conversation (if not religious conversion), and the view from his window offered a glimpse of the quiet, solemnly-lit Ortigas skyline. Looking over a whole urban district made me feel rather wise.

“Besides,” my cousin continued, pouring himself more whiskey, “even if they had made a pre-cocoon pact to report their lives to each other, the butterfly’s world would be beyond the comprehension of the caterpillar. He won’t understand it, not yet, not until he himself has broken out of his own enclosure.”

“But the butterfly can’t just forget about where he came from,” I interrupted. “Doesn’t he have the duty to keep in touch with the caterpillar?”

“Pollination,” Johnny said. “His duty now is to convey pollen to the stigma of a flower.” Then he drank from his cup and smacked his lips.

I noticed that the tiny chunks of ice on the raw tuna had melted away, and that the wasabi had blended with the Kikkoman to make a thick, unattractive and excremental sort of sauce. Then, looking at Johnny, who was wearing a crumpled black Gildan shirt and looking like the lost son of Mister Mathis himself, I thought of how he was able to handle being the eldest in our generation, the very contradictory essence of that, and then the inconvenient distance between America and the Philippines, where the Ascaño family –his, ours– beckoned him to come back, or at least pay visits more regularly.

“Oh. Do you still write?” Johnny asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But only if the world is interesting enough.”

It was almost six in the morning when we finally retired: he, to the bedroom, and I, to the luxuriously upholstered sofa by the window. The candle had long since been dead. The new morning cast a slightly beautiful light, and the rise of the sun was begging to be watched. But I hadn’t yet slept.

Not Quite Our Love Burger

No, please don’t eat my Sausage McMuffin when I’ve undressed your Sausage McMuffin with Egg. Between the two there’s an important difference which I wouldn’t want disregarded: the ten pesos that add up to a flat, round, and slippery Sunny Side Up. That’s ten pesos, with which I could have bought –well, I don’t know– a blank CD? An antibiotic? A jeepney ride to Chinatown ?

Not that I will make a fuss over such irritatingly happy sandwiches; their fibrous buns; their noisy paper wrap; the Styrofoam cups of stale coffee they come with. After all, we aren’t exactly notorious for breakfasting. It’s the concept of a greasy 8 a.m. meal at McDonald’s –had together– which we’ve come to appreciate, and which has motivated us to take the frightfully pleasant 7 a.m. walk from your house, then through a marshy row of mountainside shacks, then across the highway, and finally to the small commercial J.P. Rizal district where all the fast food restaurants and coffee shops are, and where, at 9 a.m., Uncle Ian is due to show up. (I don’t mean to imply that he’s always on time for meetings.)

As we wait for him you suddenly realise your mistake (“That was your McMuffin, wasn’t it?”), and I –in similar whoopsy-daisy fashion– realise mine: orange juice. I should have ordered orange juice. It’s a good source of vitamins, isn’t it, vitamins I need to boost my self-esteem or heal these face pimples away. Either would do, as they are very closely related; at the heart of the matter is my dermatological well-being, which has been adversely affected by this mild case of dehydration. Yes, I know. I should pay more attention to what I consume –as should you– and how much of it I do consume.

But let’s forgive ourselves today. Our half-troublesome, half-inconvenient symptoms aside, everything seems to be in order. The sky is blue and the sun is shining, and the clouds are of the cleanest cotton. It’s also kind and breezy outside. The pedestrians –including this rebellious boy by the glass window, him who’s wearing Ray-Bans and a brown “Don’t be Sofa King Stupid” t-shirt and who would otherwise look so absurd in a less temperate climate– all look like they’re filming a TV commercial for spring: splendid, warm, and hospitable. My penchant for romance dictates that I should write a description of the weather on this sheet of tissue, to be brought home and typed later, but I don’t have a pen. I don’t even have my orange juice.

A Filipino Jealousy

A dictionary definition of the word ‘jealousy’ is the “mental uneasiness from suspicion or fear of rivalry, unfaithfulness, etc., as in love or aims.” In the American Heritage Dictionary, jealousy means “close vigilance”; in Webster’s Revised Unabridged, it is an “earnest concern or solicitude.”

Tie all these together and what do you have? An oft-stereotyped behaviour in Filipino relationships.

I say it not because I believe it, but because I’ve heard of it, countless times, from university sociologists and from Westerners with brown-skinned girlfriends (or boyfriends). Apparently, Filipinos are very hot-blooded. “In no other country,” a Caucasian friend observed, “have I witnessed people going such great lengths to confirm their jealous suspicions – checking a lover’s cell phone on the sly, sifting through the other’s private E-mail.”

I’d be none the more patriotic for saying this, but I suppose there’s something in my friend’s observation which rings painfully true. Just read the papers. On the front page, players in the political arena are bringing each other down, and officials are matched against others in fierce power rivalries. In the showbiz and entertainment section, celebrity romances are sensationalised by introducing infidelity rumours: break up, make up, break up again. And stories from the metro beat writers often report a homicide in this barangay and that, carried out by an otherwise good-natured husband in a drunken fit of jealousy. Wives, too; one of the craziest headlines I’ve ever read was about a woman who castrated her philandering partner.

This is not to say that Filipinos are inherently murderous monogamists. It’s just that most of us like to, uh – well, express “earnest concern”. Hence, the publicity blitz on Ruffa Gutierrez’s divorce. And eunuchs. Whether suspicions are warranted or unfounded is beside the point. Jealousy has its case-by-case origins, but the question here is: does it have a locale? Is it a weakness of the Filipino character?

In a country that is predominantly Roman Catholic and with a soap opera culture that glamourises love forevermore, we have learned to find security in faith and loyalty – and fear the most minor departure from this norm. In the close-knit setting of family and Filipino domesticity we’ve nurtured a great anxiety over abandonment. And in a tradition where love may exist without jealousy but rarely the other way around, we live to love the best way –perhaps the only way– we know how.

So don’t be surprised if you happen to have a Pinoy or Pinay sweetheart who cares for you hotly, uneasily, vigilantly. Instead be kind and thankful. In the dictionary of the Filipino, jealousy is the most maligned form of flattery.