Authors: Miguel Syjuco
“Afterward I made a mistake. On the ferry, I guess I was feeling sentimental leaning on the railing with him, watching our island on the horizon. I asked if he ever thought about what he’d leave behind. Those children had affected me. Crispin grew irate and stormed off. He didn’t talk on the car ride home. Then he went straight to bed. The next morning, he was gone.”
*
I don’t really miss Madison. I don’t have any regrets. I know everything ends, eventually. Another obvious statement is that, usually, when things are done and dusted, you can make sense of them. She was the love of my life until suddenly she wasn’t.
The unfathomable Madison Liebling. The girl whose laughable name I fell in love with first. Environmental science student and minor-celebutante daughter of the Lincolnshire Lieblings’ “ball bearings baron,” the unexpressive father who had controversially, and uncharacteristically, married and claimed his Filipina “lady friend” after a stint in the U.S. Embassy in Manila during the David W. Newson tenure. Madison, equestrian prim and Miss Manners proper, with her improbably narrow waist, with her one blue eye and the other one brown (freckles in between spangling the perfect nose). We were made for each other. Except for, of course, the differences. How did we become so prejudiced by our idiosyncrasies? Despite her Puritan ancestors, her own half-breed background, the childhood that coincided with her parents’ midlife study of Eastern philosophies and the healing powers of crystals, her extensive teenage travel, her Upper East Side and Seven Sisters refinements, she still could neither decode nor understand the nuances of our shared background.
Identity was never a quest for her. We shared the same languages, but spoke of worlds so subtly different that language was not enough. Over time the big things were left unsaid; they gave way to the little things, those once-endearing imperfections that had somewhere become deal breakers. Like how—despite her senior thesis on the environmental impact of public bathroom air hand-dryers versus recycled paper towels—she persisted in leaving on all the lights in our apartment when she went out. Or how she liked to watch her favorite show,
The Golden Girls
, with the volume too loud, even when I was working in the next room. And especially how she had, despite my well-voiced aesthetic preference, enlarged and framed a photo to affix over the mantel of our Williamsburg flat: the blue Earth rising over the horizon of the moon. Astronaut James Lovell had taken it during the Apollo 8 mission. Madison and I would sit on the couch, passing the bong, staring at the picture. She loved that photo. She said that it made everything look peaceful. No people, no countries, no borders. I found the sentiment cheesy. I liked to say I could see the hole in the ozone. This would upset her. Usually, we sat in silence, exhaling smoke.
*
Despite it being agreed, by one and all, that married life and fatherhood suit him well, Cristo cannot evade his fears. What of the rumors? And the connections? It is no better than the Inquisition, and guilt is often assumed before innocence can be proven.
Late that evening, long after the guests have left and his wife and children have gone to sleep, he writes in his diary: “The developments in the provinces around Manila make me both fear and long for trouble here. This is what we’ve been working for so long! It is close and I’m strangled by fear. I awaken weeping, alone in my room. Suddenly it is bigger, as if I’m in a strange field. The shadows are friars, soldiers, traitors, streaking through underbrush just beyond my seeing. If I suffer such nights, what must that final one have been like for my poor old friend José [Rizal]? Only upon entering Maria Clara’s room, to hear her and the children’s breathing, do I find the bravery to shirk my ideas of independence. Listening to them renews my faith in the reform movement, my conviction that soon will come concessions from Mother Spain—perhaps even representation in the Cortes. And yet, hardly a
year has passed since these reasonable requests brought José before a firing squad. It seems only yesterday he and I were together in Madrid, young men in love with our own promise. Dawn arrives. Poor Maria Clara mistakes my fatigue for melancholy, something of her doing. Her tears devour me. But it must be my own cross. For my sons. My pride! Narciso Junior, the running terror. Little Achillo, only now beginning to hold his neck up. My third still in Maria Clara’s womb. When I’m greeted by them in the morning, I wipe my heroic thoughts from my mind. Then an evening like tonight’s entangles me. Aniceto, Juan, and Martin come for supper. Our ideas and the possibilities for change, our impatience, are as thick in the air as the smoke from our tobacco. These ignite again the fire that burns in my head through yet another sleepless night. Until the infernal process renews itself yet again come morning.”
Cristo puts down his pen and rubs his eyes. Pondering the decisions, crushed by their opacity, he cries out: “Blessed Mary, Ever Virgin, assist me!”
—from
The Enlightened
(page 165), by Crispin Salvador
*
It was raining heavily the morning my sister Charlotte left. At least I think it was. I was only thirteen, yet she’d intimated her decision only to me. Our rooms in the house in Iligan, which our family rented after moving from Vancouver, were connected by a bathroom. Or maybe Charlotte and I had been close. I’m not sure. When she told me—her bags already packed—I wanted to stop her, but I wanted her to be happy. So I swallowed the heavy secret. I think it was the only one I’ve ever properly kept.
My grandparents were five hundred miles away, in Manila. Only three hours by plane, but absent again. Grapes and Granma had lately been fighting badly, taking it out on Charlotte, on me, on all of us grandkids. Granma was sure Grapes had another woman and she therefore refused to leave his side. She was convinced politics was either an excuse or an aid for his trespasses. And so, when he went to the capital for the national conference of governors—the final one for his term of office—Granma went with him.
Charlotte was gone when they returned.
Before anyone discovered that her bedroom was empty, I sat there among her orphaned possessions. The room still smelled of
her, this fresh smell that I do not remember enough to describe, though I remember it sufficiently to know it was only hers. I went through her
Elle
magazines, cutting out all the photographs of girls in swimsuits, keeping them under my shirt to later hide away between the pages of my Bible.
I was young, but I understood. I couldn’t blame my sister. She’d been wrested from her high school sweetheart and brought a world away to this paradise of hackneyed exoticism—golden mangoes, sun-drenched white-sand beaches, reef diving, and a language still so foreign to us our trying to speak it made the locals smile. We kids had been assigned bodyguards, drivers, maids to iron even our socks. Luxuries that improved then dissolved the sense of freedom we grandchildren knew in Canada. I hated hearing Charlotte downstairs in the corner of the playroom, crying long distance over the phone. I hated my grandparents—for bringing me here, to a new school; for screaming at Charlotte; for relocating us to a home from which they were still so often away.
In Charlotte’s room, her bed was still unmade. I sat at its foot and went through the CDs she didn’t take. On the new boombox Granma gave her for her birthday, I played Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.” It was one of Charlotte’s favorite songs, which she used to belt out beautifully as she accompanied herself on the baby grand that Grapes bought her. Whitney sang: “I believe the children are the future, teach them well and let them lead the way.” By the time she reached the chorus—about making the choice not to follow in another person’s shadow, and then that powerful bit about winning or losing but at least living a life that she believed in—by the time Whitney got to that part about keeping our dignity, I could hold back no longer: I crumpled and cried, once again, as I have many times when faced with no other options. In my shirt, the pages with the swimsuit girls crinkled and bent.
The weeks and months and, finally, the year after her departure were like a bad movie. Grapes disowned her, had us sign new articles of incorporation in which her name was excised from ownership of his assets, the material proof of his love for his family. He told people he had one fewer grandchild. I don’t remember much of Granma during that time, which meant she was in her room too often. What must it have done to them to have lost, this time, a grandchild?
Mario told me that he hadn’t seen Granma like this since I was too young to remember, since when my parents died. He told me that even through the rough time when our grandmother found out about Grapes’s other woman—when Granma left him and brought us children to the country’s nicest hotel for over a month, on Grapes’s credit—Granma had held strong, for us. My brother made as if he were reassuring me that our grandmother would be okay, but by the act of sharing that weight with his thirteen-year-old brother, he ended up revealing how he, too, felt alone, jostled precipitously by my sister’s departure. So close were Mario and Charlotte in age that they’d constantly fought, in the manner of those who share so much. He began to have trouble at university. He never went to class. Who would want to go to a university where everyone spoke in the local dialect that you couldn’t understand, some even mocking him for being wealthy and only speaking English? One evening, my grandparents were berating Mario in the playroom. He sat between them, Grapes against the far wall, Granma leaning against the pool table. My brother’s reticence likely infuriated my grandparents as much as Charlotte’s insolence had. Granma grasped a billiard ball in frustration. Threw it at the floor. It bounced and hit Grapes smack-dab on the forehead. To this day, we kids laugh at this, though my grandparents cannot yet.
The one who seemed to weather the changes well was my eldest brother, Jesu. Somehow he appeared to thrive, taking up scuba diving, wearing his hair long, sporting a shark’s tooth around his neck. He worked with Grapes at the main zipper factory, as his protégé and right-hand man, sacrificing the last years of his youth to our grandfather, a man who could never be sufficiently pleased—though perhaps it was only that Grapes’s devotion to us was so deep, so fragile in its honesty, so ideal in its wholeness, that he expected perfect love in return. From Jesu, he demanded everything. All those years I mis-took my brother as thriving later became etched as fading contradictions into his assumed seriousness. Jesu worked to rally us kids together, tried so relentlessly to save Granma from her own choice of her old woman’s grief, that my eldest brother’s manner turned steely. I wanted to shake it out of him to find the person I once knew.
Claire, by then, had escaped, married to a charming man with a mustache and living in California. Once in a while she’d call, and
she’d cry, and we’d each match her tears. You could hear the guilt in her voice that she wasn’t with us.
As only the young can do, Jerald and I grew, happily, despite the cracks in the family’s foundation. We learned the rough local dialect. Joined the same basketball team. We gave each other flat-top haircuts. Wore matching gold chains. Slam-dunked the minibasketball in the low rim Grapes had his men install for us. Jerald and I took pictures of each other in midflight: I was Manute Bol, Jerald was Mugsy Bogues. We went often with Granma to Ingo’s—a deli opened by a lumbering German who’d married a spritely local—the only place in hundreds of miles where one could find brie, bratwurst, smoked salmon, paté; we enjoyed imported steaks that weren’t leathery like the ones from local cows. Granma made us promise not to tell our grandfather.
Two years after Charlotte left, construction on my grandparents’ mansion was finally completed. The house clung to the side of an ancient windswept ravine, high in the hills overlooking Iligan City. Seven stories tall, the structure’s four lower levels were left undeveloped, reserved for when each of us grandchildren would start our own families. For the interiors, Grapes and Granma pored over books on Frank Lloyd Wright and Japanese Zen and through piles of
Architectural Digest
. This, you see, was to be their dream house, a place where they could fade away and die satisfied—our modern, ancestral
home
. They named the house and had a sign engraved with Grapes’s arabesque script: Ourtopia.
From their room on the top floor you could see, between two hills, the deep blue of the sea during the day or the winking sparkles of the conurbation at night. Grapes had built a basketball court for Jerald and me, a tatami-covered prayer room for Granma, a Japanese tea garden with a Korean barbecue grill for family dinners. He made the place his castle, replete with a shooting range, a painting studio, even a pool only four feet deep (such was Grapes’s fear that one of us would drown that he refused the risk of anything deeper). Each grandchild had a room with a view. Claire’s, while she was away with her husband, became a temporary storeroom for old clothes. Into Charlotte’s, when it became clear she would not be returning, Grapes moved his computer and gigantic printer to spend wakeful nights
creating digital art, habituated as he was by years of sleeplessness on the other side of the world. He was seeking distraction from the politics he was missing, for shortly after we moved into Ourtopia, Granma succumbed to a dark depression, refusing to leave her bed until Grapes had sworn off the consumptiveness of political life.
Being around Grapes during those times was not easy. He was quick to anger and, somewhere in the rifts grown between us, he had developed his own views of who each grandchild was—inaccurate perceptions based on whether we listened to him or on whatever personal flaw we kids were working through. Family dinners were hell and I learned to use as my escape the excuse of testy bowels. I spent my time on tiptoes when Grapes was around, or sequestered myself in my bedroom. There—in my sanctuary filled with books, exercise gizmos, stolen
Playboy
s from the seventies—I’d often watch, vertiginous above the trees of the ravine, small geckos climbing the window screens, attracted to those bugs lured by our lights. Ours was the only illumination for a mile, except for the unfamiliar stars and city in the distance. The lizards would be there the next morning, weighed down by full bellies. When the sun was strong, you could see, in their translucent bodies, their reptilian hearts, like beans in their chests. I’d flick my finger off my thumb to hit those tiny creatures through my side of the screen, to watch them hurtle, like shuriken, to the fathomless green below. Lizard by lizard, I’d flick them off, fascinated by killing, forgetting for a moment the slow rot outside my bedroom door.