American milk

My first day in school was a wonderful day. Because my mother had already taught me how to write, I was not afraid anymore to carry my blue school bag with its lined pad paper, pencil, and crayons. And because my mother also taught the Grade Six class in the building across the quadrangle, I knew she would always be near.

During the first month in school, the Americans from Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City came. The men were tall, with small brown dots on their pale white skin. They came at eight o’clock a.m. in a convoy of three vehicles. The first and last vehicles were trucks with uniformed men carrying small guns. The middle was a van with the men in white.

All the Grade One students formed two lines in the dry and treeless quadrangle. In front stood the two Americans, giving milk to all the children. The knots of children were excited, their voices buzzing, because we only saw Americans on TV. When my turn came, I looked up at these tall men, craning my neck until I thought it would snap.

The American smiled and laughed. “Weather up here different, son. Have you had milk for breakfast today?”

I would have answered “yes,” along with dried fish fried crisp and fried rice smelling of garlic, but he had already poured the milk in a tall, red plastic glass and gave it to me.

Like the rest of the children, I drank the milk in front of the Americans. “They just wanted to be sure you would have enough energy for the school day,” Mrs. Lood, my Grade One teacher, said later in class.

And so I drank the milk in one go. It was thick and creamy and so unlike the Darigold evaporated milk we drank at home, watered down so that the supply would last longer.

“Good boy,” the American quipped. “You may keep the glass, but bring it again on Monday, for the next milk-drinking session.”

Later, we would return to our classrooms – Quonset huts that were remnants from the Second World War. In these hot and airless rooms, their rooms shaped like domes, we were fined one centavo for every “local” word we used. We became spies of some sort, listening to our  pug-nosed Social Studies teacher brightly say: “Thank God the Americans came because they improved the color and features of our race.”

In our English class, we mouthed “things” by turning our tongues into a curve, with the “h” aspirated so audibly. In this class, we also read hardbound books from America about John and Annie and their dog Spot, who also seemed to speak in English. He barked “arf-arf” and not “bow-wow” the way the local askals, dogs on the streets, did it.

And so every week for the next 10 months, the Americans in white came with their free milk, to make sure we would grow up as tall and healthy and cheerful as they were.

*      *      *

Like somebody with a Ph.D., Papa was explaining to my grandmother and me how the Apollo 11 would fly to the moon.

From blast-off at Cape Canaveral to the rocket’s head splitting from its tail to the actual landing on the moon – he explained all this with verve. First, he slipped his right arm in his brown imitation-leather slippers, tracing a trajectory. Then, slipper and hand-separated, like molting skin. Soon, only the slippers were left, standing for the rocket landing on the cold, windless landscape of the moon.

That night we watched in our new colored TV. A blur of images. The Stars and Stripes. Then, the astronauts in their white, bloated uniforms, looking like aliens. The rocket blasting off, hurtling in space like a bright comet, and then many hours later, the moon: full of craters deeper and wider than anything I had ever seen. After the Apollo 11 had landed on the moon, the three astronauts free-floating in space (A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind). Men on the moon, my father said, the greatest country in the world staking its claim on a territory millions of miles away from home.

Years later, my grandmother would bring me to Manila in one of her summer vacations. Nora Aunor – the short, brown actress whose rise to fame defied the colonial notions of beauty in the country, she whose eyes spoke a language of their own – has a new film called Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo (Once a Moth).

Another image: Corazon’s grandfather (played by the magnificent Pedro Faustino) was already alive during the Philippine Revolution against Spain in 1896-98, and later, the Filipino-American War from 1898 to 1904. As a young boy of 10, he wore calzoncillos, like long johns that reached down to the knees. Inside the sewn edges of his calzoncillos was a piece of paper folded many times over. It would contain, in code, the enemy positions, the number of the men, the tactics of the revolutionaries, whom the Americans called bandidos (bandits). When Corazon’s grandfather saw the Americans landing on the moon, he asked, “Kanila na rin ba ang buwan? (Do they now own even the moon?)”

That night, after a heavy dinner of shrimp sinigang, I went out to the backyard. Everything was silent, as if the night itself was holding its breath. Beyond the acacia leaves, the moon rose clear across the Zambales mountains.

While helping her set the table, our housemaid Ludy had told me that there was already a naked man on the moon even before the men of Apollo 11 came. She said he looked like the man in the five-centavo coin. So tonight, I took out the coin I had stolen from the pocket of Papa’s pants, and in the light of the moon I looked for the naked man. Curly hair, a face well chiseled, broad shoulders. His buttocks were firm and his legs, long and powerful. He was bending down, his body frozen in an arc. On his right hand he held a hammer, pounding something on the anvil in front of him. He was trying to make an object from ore, a shape from all that rawness. Like a god. Patiently he bent down, waiting to be blasted by something like lightning, or by a flash of revelation.

I squinted at the night sky, as if I had Superman’s X-ray vision, or the eyes of Lee Majors, the $6-million dollar man. But try as I might, beyond the trees and the mountains I saw no man on the moon. There was only a lighted disk suspended in the air many, many miles away, alone, beautiful and pure.

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