Summer was just beginning and I returned to Manila on the dot, as soon as my British Council Scholarship was finished. I did not even entertain any thought of being an undocumented alien like some of the Filipinos I had met in the United Kingdom.
I also returned to attend our class reunion, which was held three months after I arrived in Manila. I would see them again after five years, my classmates who had organized the reunion, which I had thought silly, because it was so early. But they had insisted: maybe they wanted to keep track of each other’s direction, or lack of it. The Humanities and Literature majors seemed to have fanned out in all imaginable places, while the business majors in our cohort were working for the top guns of the Makati Central Business District, or getting that MBA at Wharton or Harvard, then off to Wall Street, coolly earning their fat salaries and bonuses.
I would see them again after five years. What words would I offer to my dear classmates, Chito and Anna? Had new layers of skin grown over the old?
Chito and I began to drift away from each other after our Christmas party. He did not even know that I had already flown to London for my postgraduate studies. When we met on campus, we only nodded to each other, or jerked our eyebrows up in greeting. He had followed the template that his father had prepared for him – he was now in Law School and doing well. And later, marriage, two kids healthy enough to endorse an advert for milk on TV, a mansion in Ayala Alabang, with a garage for at least three cars?
Anna, writing for a small publishing house that puts out children’s books, much to the irritation of her mother, who wanted to train her in running the big family corporation Anna would inherit. But Anna had declared her independence, was now living away from home, surviving on a meagre writer’s pay, and perhaps writing, deep into the night, The Great Filipino Children’s Novel.
I still went to mass when I could, especially when someone I knew had died, in which case, I really had to go to mass simply because that person’s wake would be held in church. I still went to mass, although at times, God seemed colder than the sea water in Morong, Bataan, where I taught English as a Second Language part-time to the children of Vietnamese refugees at the, uh, Bataan Processing Centre. As if the memories of a fatal war could be blurred by teaching them how to shop at J.C. Penney or open a checking account at the Bank of America.
But when I saw my students, their young faces golden in the morning sun, I remembered Chito and Anna.
One night when I returned from the Bataan Processing Centre, our apartment seemed to have become both familiar and strange, like a book I had not read in a long time. After coming back from Scotland, I had wanted to be as far away as possible from my family who always asked me interminable questions on why I came home late. So, I signed up to teach three days a week in Bataan, helping the refugees who took rickety boats and crossed an ocean to flee from a horrible war. I wanted nothing else but solitude and space. I fixed my own food, washed my own dishes, did my own laundry, and cleaned my own room. I wanted my own personal space.
I was home that summer, and after the usual heavy dinner of beef caldereta cooked in spicy tomato sauce, the meat so soft it almost melted in my mouth, I went to the kitchen, out of a habit, to wash the dishes. Mama was surprised; my father laughed; and my grandmother just smiled, adrift on the barge of her dreams. Our housemaid Ludy washed the dishes. I noticed my diploma and graduation photograph in their wooden frames, still hanging on the walls whose blue paint had begun to flake off in parts, especially near the ceiling. I stepped out of the house and onto the front yard, whose leaves gathered around me like an embrace. I thought of the past, the present, and the future, images stretched out before me like the cars in a long, locomotive ride.
I thought of the flash from the photographer’s camera catching me with my head tilted to the left, my wide eyes wanting to contain the universe within my eyelashes; my father rushing every morning to go to work, then rushing every afternoon to travel 30 miles away to take up a university course for four years, and on to Law School for another four years; my mother teaching students to sing “Auld Lang Syne,” her voice a solid soprano vibrating like a laser of light in the air; the Military Air Base like a scoop of land between the plains of Floridablanca and the mountains of Zambales, an infinity of images like old, grainy photographs; Luis and the silk of his skin like the sheen of that river where he swam many years ago.
Of Roxanne with the lips red as strawberries on the mountain city shrouded with fog; of the unutterable words that lay frozen on my tongue as I spoke to Mario, both of us sitting beside the fountain in the chilly air; of the city exploding with its incredible noises and colours, Ali Mall and Fiesta Carnival and the amorous love in the darkness of the cinema houses; of the university sitting on top of a hill, Lux in Domino, a shining sword raised to the bluest of sky; of Desmond from Ireland of the greenest mountains and Angus from the faraway Orkney Islands; of my beautiful country gone to the dogs, governed by crocodiles and vipers, may they all rest in peace; of my love for words, like candle-flame cupped by my hands against wind and water; the many stories that still need to be told, the images wrung from the very heart of memory….
For a moment, though, as I stood there in our backyard, between our lighted house and the darkness beyond, there was neither sadness nor fear, only the humming of the cicadas, a humming so clear and alive.
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(Danton Remoto is the Head of School and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia.)