XII

The following Friday the family headed to Batangas for the reinterment of my grandmother in Jim’s chapel. The family—cousins, their children, their grandchildren, and a stunning array of uniformed servants—was assembled outside Tita Rosa’s house, as well as a fleet of vehicles to transport us all. Tita Rosa stood at the head of the stairs shouting orders, her hair neatly pinned and lipstick applied. Shipping the family out to Cousin Jim’s holiday house felt akin to preparations for the Battle of Normandy. Jim, along with the cars, had sent the family minibus, and it pulled into the driveway followed by a battered yellow taxi. I watched the taxi warily and saw Laird step out and pay the driver. Tita Dom arrived at my side.

“Ting, where’s your bag?” she asked.

“Already loaded.”

A gaggle of children and their uniformed yayas were already piling into the minibus. Tita Rosa descended the stairs, propped on Carmi’s arm. Beng followed, carrying the floral pillowcase, her face composed in a nervous horror.

“Ting,” said Tita Rosa, “you’re in the Camry. You too, Dom.”

“Why?” I said. “I want to be in the bus with the kids.”

“No room,” she said.

Resigned, I opened the car door and noticed, with some alarm, that Laird was entering on the other side. The front passenger seat was already taken by Miggie’s yaya, Nini, sitting with a cauldron of food on her lap. The driver, one of Jim’s, adjusted his sunglasses in the rearview mirror. I moved into the middle and Tita Dom, noting Laird’s presence with concern, followed inside. At the last minute Miggie was deposited on her lap. The door swung shut with a clunk.

“Hello Laird,” said Tita Dom. I smiled politely.

“It is very kind of you to include me,” he said, sounding stiff and rehearsed.

“Of course,” said Tita Dom. “You’re family.” She looked at me, indicating that I should now say something. I wanted to respond that he wasn’t really family but held my tongue.

“Jim’s house is amazing,” I said. “We always have a good time there.” I felt Laird’s thought echoing in my head: Do you people ever not have a good time?

The ride was probably going to be two hours long and I began planning for civil, subject-based conversation, naps, and general contented smiling out the window. We were barely down the drive when I became aware of Miggie’s intense scrutiny of the right side of my face.

“Tita Ting,” she said. “Is Tito Chet your boyfriend?”

“No. Tito Chet is not my boyfriend. I’m married to your uncle Bob.”

“Where is he?”

“Your uncle Bob is in the States.”

“Why? What’s he doing?”

Miggie didn’t know her “Uncle Bob” but had probably heard a lot about him in the last few weeks, although none of it from me. “Well, it’s ten thirty here, and with the time difference, I think he’s probably going to bed.” Just talking about my husband was giving me a wave of panic, this inflamed by our recent conversation.

Tita Dom began scrambling through her purse and produced her phone. She quickly pulled up Candy Crush and handed the phone to Miggie. Miggie gave me a look of unmistakable dissatisfaction but was, thankfully, unable to resist the phone.

“So, Laird,” I asked, “what have you been up to?” What I really wanted to know was when we would be relieved of his presence in Manila but thought I should save that for later in the journey.

He sat with the question for several seconds before finally answering, “Not much. Seeing the sights.”

“Oh,” said Tita Dom, grabbing the soft lob for her own, “what sights?”

“I went to Fort Santiago,” he said. “I had never been to Intramuros.”

“I haven’t been there in a while,” said Tita Dom. And then to me: “Ting, we should go.” She adjusted Miggie in her lap. “You know, that’s where the family lived. All my brothers and sisters, before the war.”

“And you?” asked Laird.

“Well, I was born there, but I don’t remember. My siblings were sent to the provinces, where it was safer, but I was just a baby, so I stayed with my parents. And one brother also stayed, in the city.”

The story was about to get very dark and I thought­—­selfishly­—­that at least this would create, after its telling, a situation conducive to silence.

“You actually lived in the Walled City, in Manila? I thought you were . . .” Here he struggled to find a word. I heard attempts flicker through his head: farmers, plantation owners, feudal lords. “People who ran farms,” he finally said.

“Yes,” said Tita Dom. “But we lived in the city. My father was a doctor, but he really didn’t have a calling to it. He became a doctor because his mother wanted him to. He worked for Parke-Davis, as a representative. We had a nice house. But then the Japanese invaded, and things in Intramuros got very dicey.”

I imagined that Laird was again filing through the facts in his mind, thinking about the history of the Philippines, of the Second World War, of how old people would have been at certain times: trying to put the human factor into his roster of events. “You are lucky you survived,” he said.

“Lucky? I don’t know about that. My mother was, I don’t know, what’s the word, Ting? Idiosyncratic. In her own way, resilient.”

I nodded to both.

“She didn’t want to leave her home. Then the Japanese commandeered the house, and she was on the street. At one point she was sleeping in the church, with me. She would go to Santo Tomas, which is where the Americans were interned, and her father-in-law would pass her food through the bars. The American POWs were hungry, but the Filipinos were starving.” She had a long, inward look. “It is right that we’re talking about her,” said Tita Dom, answering some unvoiced question. “Aren’t we burying her today, after all?”

I felt it might be valid to point out that this was the second time we’d done so. But it was also unnecessary.

“And what about your father?”

“What about him?” asked Tita Dom.

“Why isn’t he being interred along with your mother?”

“Because he is at Fort Santiago. His bones were never recovered. But he is with his son, my brother, so they are not alone.”

Tita Dom had succumbed to a nap with Miggie napping in her lap. Both their mouths had slackened into Os and it sort of looked as if they were singing. The reaches of Edsa were ending in a final act of extreme concrete. You could see Manila in the process of consuming the countryside. Laird flicked his eyes sideways, gauging my attention. I met his glance.

He said, whispering, “I don’t mean to pry, but what happened to your grandfather and your uncle?”

I adjusted myself in my seat to face him. “They stuck it out in Manila and made it to the end of the war, but when the Americans were at the gates of Intramuros, the Japanese rounded up what was left of the Filipino men—including boys of thirteen, that was my uncle—and imprisoned them in a dungeon in Fort Santiago. The Pasig, at that point, was tidal, and the dungeon set in such a way as to make use of the rising water, old Spanish ingenuity. Quite a few people drowned. My grandfather and uncle were in that number.”

Laird’s eyes became alert. “I read the plaque,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “You read the plaque.”

Batangas, a coastal province to the south of Manila, was not our home province. That was Nueva Ecija, to the northwest of Manila, a place marked out in rice paddies and small, dusty towns. The rainy season would quickly turn the roads to rivers of silty mud. Carabaos still plowed the fields and people still used the woven salakot to keep the sun off their heads as they bowed to the mud to plant the rice. Nueva Ecija was all industry. The music of it was the flat drilling sound of motorcycle engines as the tricycle taxis circuited the concrete buildings and shopfronts, the storehouses, the mostly abandoned ancestral homes. These houses were now occupied by ancient doñas unwilling to leave the only life they knew and by the maids to whom they were most likely, although distanced by legitimacy and social standing, related. Although we still collected the seasonal tribute from the kasamas, our percentage was small and what the workers were left was such a sliver of profit as to make life survival at best. The wealthy in my family had moved on to business, real estate, technology, infrastructure.

My cousin Jim had bought the acreage in Batangas thirty years earlier and embarked on a building project somewhere between Versailles and the pyramids. Batangas had all the advantages of the coast—views, beaches, waving palms—but also got hit with the brunt of typhoons and was ever threatened by that most awesome specter of the Philippine psyche: the tidal wave. When Jim had first shown up, there was already an impressive house in place, complete with swimming pool, but this structure was soon downgraded to the status of guesthouse and another house built on such a scale that the terrace was the same size as a luxury hotel, something you might find on Waikiki. His most recent project had been a tower, equipped with an elevator, which had glass panels that gave a 360-degree view of the property. Guest rooms were tucked into the various floors below the viewing area. From the outside, the structure looked like an air traffic control tower. From the top floor you could see everything: the island that Jim had constructed because he wanted to see an island; the lake he’d carved out to raise his own sturgeon and lobster, although the climate was not cooperative; the family museum; the chapel; the playground; the helipad; the horses that had once been corralled in a stable and ridden with varying degrees of success by his children and me but that had been set free and now roamed: a mix of Arabian, quarter horse, and thoroughbred, skittish and imposing, nibbling at the grass, galloping away when we tore through the fields on our ATVs.

We gathered on the terrace as lunch was being served. I poured myself a glass of kalamansi juice from a sweating jug. Jim’s kids were all there with their children, and Jim’s sister, Cousin Carmi, with her kids and their kids. Tita Dom’s children would be showing up sometime soon with their kids, and so on. And after we had gained critical mass and eaten, we would all go to the chapel to watch my grandmother’s bones be slid into the wall with the others, who had all been removed from their first final resting place to be put to rest again.

I had finished my kalamansi juice and was about to ask a servant to find me a beer when a group of maids rushed out of the kitchen with net covers and began hurriedly placing them over the food. Tita Rosa’s face crumpled in a frown. “Why?” she asked. I heard the sound of chopper blades as my cousin Jim’s helicopter swung to the front of the house. Bits of grass and dust began to churn in the air. She shouted, “Why have a helipad if you’re going to land your helicopter right beside the house?”

I shrugged and shouted back: “You know Jim isn’t a big fan of walking.”

“But he could get someone to drive him from the helipad.” This was true, even though the helipad was only a hundred meters away.

The helicopter touched down and my cousin Jim and his wife, Cha Cha, disembarked, along with their eldest granddaughter. No sooner had they exited than the helicopter immediately ascended again, heading off to the left, where it disappeared back over the roof of the house. Jim came straight to me and we kissed, his cheek smooth and cool and smelling of some expensive thing. He was as light skinned as I and had the same watery green eyes, the hallmark of mestizos. “How are books?” he said.

“Books are good,” I responded.

“I heard you were thin.”

“Was I fat before?”

“No, but now you’re really thin.”

Satisfied with our exchange, he began making the rounds of his grandchildren. Cha Cha was now pinching my elbow hard. “Ting, so good you’re here. We always see you and that’s good.”

“Why do I leave?” I asked.

“Yeah, we all wonder. Don’t go this time. I hear you have some sort of scandal with your husband, but we’re family and we don’t care.”

“Thanks,” I said. The gratitude sounded ironic and had originally been delivered as such, but was now, on reflection, sincere. My family was deeply loyal to me, as I was to them, a love that never faltered no matter what you did or how deserving you were of approbation, so long as your victims remained outside the clan.

Cha Cha was now sighting across the lawn, where Laird was wandering alone, his expression inscrutable as he took in the view to the sea. “Is that him?” she asked.

“Yeah, that is him,” I said.

“Well, he’s better looking than I thought he’d be but so dark.” She laughed. “And he’s the one who’s in the sun.”

Just then a group of men showed up in white shirts and black pants. They had lanyards around their necks that dangled official-looking ID. Several of them had cameras. I looked over at Jim, who was talking to a member of his security team. Jim set his gaze in our direction. “Press,” he mouthed.

“Press?” echoed Cha Cha.

Jim walked slowly back across the lawn, his brow creased. He came to stand beside us, looking at the photographers with skepticism. “They say it’s some sort of society spread, but why didn’t they call us in advance?”

“Society spread?” asked Cha Cha, unimpressed. “Do we let them stay?”

Jim considered. “Why not?” His head of security had also joined us, standing at a respectful distance. Jim’s eyes drifted over to him. “Tell them they can stay but only for a few minutes. And no pictures at the chapel during the Mass or interment.” The head of security promptly lifted his radio, barked a few words, and then strode purposefully away.

Jim looked suspicious. “They should be following Gumboc.”

“Gumboc is in Israel,” I said.

“Israel,” said Jim. “First Korea, then China, now Israel. You would think there was nothing here to do.” He considered. “Maybe there isn’t.”

The press men were now walking across the lawn in Laird’s direction. Laird turned, looking surprisingly composed, and they snapped his picture.

“Oh my God, Ting, go! Go!” said Cha Cha.

“I don’t want my picture in the papers,” I said. “Why don’t you go?”

“I have to change my shoes. Ting, hurry!”

“Why?” I said.

“They’re all going to think we look like Lord.”

“Laird,” I corrected her, resigned and already heading for the cameras. “His name,” now over my shoulder, “is Laird.”

Later, I would understand the true purpose of those photos, but at the time I wondered what Manila society would make of the shots of me, Laird, and the group of twelve children who were hamming it up for the camera with an inventive array of cheesy grins and jutting hips. Most of the family had retreated, plates in hand, more interested in the food than the photos. Cha Cha appeared at some point in a pair of easily identified Chanel spectator flats and smiled attractively a few times for the camera, and then, with an imperious wave of her hand she dismissed the journalists.

For society-page journalists, they looked a little rough. They were thugs in black rayon pants and short-sleeve white shirts, no oily manners, no attention to fashion that one associated with columnists devoted to showcasing the lifestyles of the rich. Is this my memory now playing tricks on me? Was the one wearing dark sunglasses really scoping out the place? Or were they just journalists, bored with Gumboc away, and needing to fill the pages with something: the ambitious architecture of my cousin’s house or perhaps the excesses of the upper classes, people who could afford not only one burial for their departed loved ones but as many as they felt like, while the poor of Manila’s crisis of grief was quickly followed by another: the problem of how to pay for the funeral of their gunned-down dead.