Ilustrado (43 page)

They passed islands connected loosely by long sandbars. Each island un-inhabited. How is it possible—he wondered—for there still to be places unclaimed by people? If I could only take one myself, start over without having to fix the things that need to be fixed. But the dangers of self-reliance terrify him, just like getting what you wish for. He counted: one, two, three, four, five, six. And the seventh. There’s its comma. The boat stopped on its tail, the closest point to the mainland, and he stepped onto a stone landing beside a
post planted deep into the ground. A squashed tire hung from it, bleached gray and half submerged in the water.

The island was perfect: shaded by large trees, many fruit-bearing, and sheltered by taller limestone promontories of the surrounding islands. The craft shuddered against the tire. The boatman proffered a hand thick with calluses and a weeping welt across it. Our adventurous protagonist had nothing except what was in his pockets. Wallet, cell phone, passport—all had been in the backpack. What—he wondered—had the backpack even looked like? Should I ask the boatman to bring me back to shore? The windows of the house, wide open, had white lace curtains waving in the breeze. I’ll stay. I’ve come so far. Listen. Is that . . . Yes. Music. He fished in his pocket and pressed his last coin into the boatman’s hand.

The house was a simple bungalow of whitewashed cement block walls. It was a place he’d seen before. Wasabi-green shutters were latched against the facade. Gray smoke streamed northward from an aluminum chimney. A sarimanok weathervane pointed south.

He made his way to the house, watching the sand spray before him as he walked. This is paradise, he thought. This could be my heaven.

The front door was ajar. He knocked. Called out. Hello! No answer. Is anybody here? That song. A tango. I know it. Vintage Bingbong Cadenza. “Cadenas de Amor.” It sounds like a beautiful woman lying down to remember. A phonograph in the corner declared, “Tenía una cara tan bonita como una bendición y ella me dijÓ: Toda la vida es un sueño. Para lograr lo imposible, hay que intentar lo absurdo.”

He knocked and called out again. Hello! A welcome mat read: “Come In If You’re Good Lookin’.” Cadenza repeated the refrain in Spanish:
She had a face like a blessing and she told me: All of life is a dream. To attain the impossible, we must attempt the absurd
.

Everything seemed familiar.

The interior, spare but comfortable, was as quaint as the outside. More of a large shack with an open plan. French doors on three walls. A fancy iron daybed in the center, facing the doors which framed the edges of two islands, themselves framing the sea. If I could walk on water—he thought—I could make my way into Asia, then Africa, then America, then back home to here. A soft mackinaw blanket was crumpled on the bed and a book lay facedown on the floor. An old brass bason cradled mangosteens, guyabanos, a durian. A stove held a stainless-steel kettle, which was boiling, though the whistle was
broken. A faucet dripped water from a plastic drum. He went to it and tapped it. It sounded like a bell underwater. In a corner, a shotgun slouched like a bully outside the convenience store. Across the room, atop a desk: a shortwave radio, a pile of documents, an alarm-red fedora, a picture frame.

By the door, an unfinished portrait on an easel, its features not yet filled in. The artist obviously possessed a capable hand. Beside the painting, a full-length mirror.

Outside, footprints in the sand. He followed them into the warm sea. Fish the size of sardines bobbed in the tide. When he touched them, they sprang to life and darted away. He walked around the house. A generator. An outhouse. A shed containing drums of diesel. Regular things. Real things. A small parliament of chickens clucked inside a coop. He looked repeatedly out to the comma. Is that her boat at the dock? No. Just the tire against the post. It’s beginning to get dark.

He sat on the bed. What it must have looked like when they transported it by outrigger, its disassembled panels fastened by ropes, a rolled mattress atop trunks and boxes, all weighing the boat in the water, and a still-beautiful woman straddling the windy prow—bare feet pointed like a maiden’s, her soles touched by waves.

A book lay at his feet.
The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim
, by the Bombay lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali.

Perfectly framed between the French doors, like the solstice sun at Stonehenge, a blood orange descended in a valley of stratocumulus.

The voice from the gramophone taunted: “Para lograr lo imposible, hay que intentar lo absurdo.”

The kettle on the stove sizzled. He rushed to it. The water had boiled away. The vessel sighed when lifted.

He stood before the portrait. Beneath a red cloak, the unfinished visage seemed to mock him with its emptiness, like the eyes of Greek statuary at their most reprimanding, lupine, dead. His reflection in the mirror, though complete, seemed sucked of its own significance.

He went to the desk to radio for help. The shortwave’s battery was dead.

There, beside the red hat, a picture frame. That girl with hazel eyes. The one from the photo album, but a few years older. First Holy Communion. Behind her, Marcel Avellaneda and Mutya Dimatahimik, each with a loving hand on her shoulders, all smiling proudly.

He picked up the orange notebook, its cover soft and satisfying, in places
worn to the gloss of warm caramel. Beneath it lay three black cardboard manuscript boxes. He could hear his heart beat faster. On the beach, still nothing. Horizons empty as only horizons can be. The music died. The record crackled. How could it have lasted these hours? The needle scratched persistently, like an old clock’s second hand stuck.

Is that an outboard motor? He peered out the window. Gramophone clicking in time with his heart. Calm down. Calm down. Listen.

That’s the engine of a boat.

No.

It is.

It faded in and out. In, then out. Whatever it was, heard or imagined, it was lost in the waves. Gone. He held the notebook closed. Fingertips feeling the side, enjoying the smooth coarseness of paper gathered for a single purpose. He glanced out the window. Listened once more. His thumbs caressed the nap of the book cover. He looked over his shoulder. Somebody is watching. He looked at the manuscript boxes.

I won’t find Dulcinea.

Our protagonist opened the first box. It was empty. He opened the second. Empty. The third. Empty.

He was not surprised or disappointed. That which was missing only outlined that which was not. Their emptiness contained the entirety of what had been lived, and the certainties of how it ended, how it must end for each of us. Our last moment in a string of final moments, the last look you take backward before going forward to the light: that pinprick of dawn, the horizon turning vertical, the sun and the moon in the same sky. The rhythm of a breath we’ve known always and the terminal sequence of heartbeats. The concave heavens and the convex earth. And in the curve between, the dangling end of a rope, that long cord of life, its loose ends frayed, its individual sinews, moments insignificant on their own, woven together, for strength.

Standing thus where the beginning and end circle to meet, one cannot help but look at what has just been made whole, and the small things loved that made it all worthwhile: the last-minute epiphany, the relief after pain, the consolation of yesterdays, your old chair at your desk, loading a typewriter, recollections seasoned by time, a window looking out on someone else’s across the street, the confidence of deep experience, satisfaction at no one else’s cost, unfolding a newspaper, the entropy of love, turning the tuning knob of a radio, admiring young women who know you’re too old to be any
harm, dovetailing, the selfish sacrament of forgiveness, the vibrations of Greenwich Village, the felt of a good Borsalino, sin and all its involvements, retrieving your mail, the tinkle of house keys, good tobacco, firm handshakes, the relief of rationalized blame, shoeshines, the earnest musk of library stacks, answers to questions that should not have been asked, a piece of music heard for the first time, a young couple embracing out of grief, the fuel of oedipal dissatisfaction, perfumed letters not yet opened postmarked far away, the comforts of religion, the long dip above her waist, the optimism of airplane rides, schadenfreude, transatlantic crossings, the portability of aphorisms, calvados, the utopic mouthfeel of political theory, breaking a sweat, the breathlessness of not yet knowing its success or defeat, ballerinas, eavesdropping, foreign supermarkets, that first sip of a cold beer, the freedom of taxis, newly minted ambition, visiting your first tailor, blank notebooks, imagining your first kiss, the smell of hamburgers and cut sugarcane, puberty and its efflorescing complexities, old Manila, the shush of a pencil being sharpened, the tang of a bell, mother’s voice calling you for dinner, reading aloud carefully, soft chill on cheeks and the ticking of bicycle gears, challenges still un-engaged, choosing a flavor through frosty glass and watching it scooped on a sugar cone, running jumps in the house where you grew up, implacable imagination, dust motes spinning in sunbeams in the waking from a nap, the plump scent of shampoo, hearing someone sing your name, seeing faces to whom life will soon ascribe meaning, warmth, the discovery of your first word, the oblivion of not yet knowing there would ever be your last.

My suitcase set down in the hallway, that anonymous morning in February, I leafed through the stack of mail that had arrived during my absence. This particular letter was thin, without a stamp, though on university letterhead. I assumed it had been hand-delivered. I opened it straightaway. Its contents were so striking, I could do nothing but stare at my image in the hall mirror. Such news always reflects our own mortality.

I had seen, you see, something of myself in him. Beyond our coming from the same place and our complicit understanding of what it’s like to be away from it. The news of his death—a drowning—convinced me I had known him better than I did. Perhaps it was just my age, or my loneliness, or both, for those two circumstances, eventually, cannot be separated. The fact is, I didn’t know him as well as I should have. Only from our classes, a few consultations in my office, and the profile he said he wished to write. On two occasions we had stilted conversations over cheeseburgers. That was all. He was just another face in my workshop, and I envied and pitied him as I do all my students. Perhaps a bit more. So I was surprised that the letter had affected me so deeply. The simplicity of random accidents is often too painful to bear, and I began to wonder what had happened.

Life, as it does, went on, perhaps too easily. There were the quotidian tasks of a new semester, a string of anxious appointments with my proctologist, the afternoon naps deserved by we of the creaky limbs, and the continued effort to finish the manuscript to which I’d long kept faithful, like a guilty spouse. Atop a pile on my desk lay the unanswered questionnaire he had asked me to ponder before the interviews that never happened. Weeks passed and I was disturbed to find I could not stop thinking about him and the short
stories he had submitted in class: one was about grandparents raising a grandchild; another was about a failing relationship with a girlfriend; the last story, his most convincing, presented a protagonist working out the permutations of his first encounter with his child whom he did not know.

One afternoon, I found myself unscrewing my old fountain pen and writing answers on my young student’s questionnaire. His generic queries, and my premature obituary that
The Philippine Sun
had run—which I’d framed and put by my desk—weighed heavily. Amid the blessings of another spring—while sitting at a bus window, walking to class, even midsentence during a lecture—I spent an inordinate amount of time glancing at what I realized, for the first time ever, was the short road leading through the winter of my life. I sat at my desk and looked at the manuscript pages etched with words and gathered together in three black boxes: my masterpiece, my great return, my honest song for my homeland.

To make sense of what was happening to me, I obsessed on what had happened to him. I kept returning to the single article devoted to him online—a brief of such brutal brevity, elucidating the moment the world would first move on without him. I became scared of crossing the street. Avoided soaping the soles of my feet in the shower. And so, with the relentlessness of Sisyphus, I locked myself in my oubliette and threw myself into revising—salvaging—that long-awaited book. But I was like one of those men who every day dons his suit, jokes with his kids over breakfast, kisses his wife, and goes out the door to the job he lost long ago—all that’s left to a man like that is habit.

Days became weeks. Pages became chapters. Weeks became months. But with every sheet of paper I filled, I doubted more and more the utility of chronicling ancient sins. What were those spent leaves but shed days?

One night, before dawn, I staggered from my desk to vomit violently into the wastepaper bin. The rest of the day I was ill, unable to stand, the heat of a circuitous dream waylaying my thoughts to the things I never talked about. Through eyes made young—no, through
his
eyes—I saw what I’d become. An angry man doomed to failure, a failure of a man damned to anger.

The moon had set, or perhaps it hadn’t yet risen, or perhaps it wasn’t to have come at all, when I went to that familiar trash receptacle near the Hudson River and burned the three manuscript boxes—that old albatross, that old cormorant, that old vulture. I watched the book ablaze. It transformed into smoke. I knew that if I had left it for our children, all I’d be leaving was a list
of our shame. That night, I slept. A deathlike sleep the likes of which I’d not had in years.

Morning arrived, I returned to my desk, and rolled a blank sheet into my trusty old Underwood. I didn’t know what I wanted to write, though I wanted it to be—this time, finally—a memorial. Complete with attendant promises.

I sat there, closed my eyes, my fingertips resting in the warm embrace of the typewriter keyboard. Outside, beneath my window, a door opened infinitely, voices tumbled out atop each other, tangled with music, the chimes of cutlery, and familiar, treasured, scents. The memories of my young student sluiced, flowed into one, which carved its way into a geography it had never traversed.