MONICA WAS A SINGLE MOTHER. THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED WHILE she was living in with her boyfriend. For all their years of argument and betrayal, it took a single reconciliatory night for her daughter to be conceived.
“But I knew,” she always tells me, “I knew I was pregnant right then and there.” I don’t know what to do with that kind of self-knowledge, that kind of woman’s wisdom. I look at her, and this wisdom challenges mine. Like the child was an accident and not an accident. It’s a story she has told me many times, and the repeated telling has left it stony and isolated inside my stomach.
Soon after the child was born, she continues, she could not take it anymore and walked out of his life carrying the baby in her arms. That actually took the span of long and difficult months.
I introduce her to me, to her, to us, to the mirror that hangs faithfully and treacherously over the bed, revealing bodies growing fat and old and tired. I’d like you to meet my wife. She’s thirty years old, five-foot-five, with black hair and black eyes. She’s had one child, suffered a couple of miscarriages but she still has a lot of years in her. And our long and difficult months will soon be over. I say this with certainty because either we will walk out of this dirty motel separated, or we will end up working it out again. I say it also because I, too, have her woman’s wisdom. After all, I am a man of thirty-one who has been married to this woman three years now. And, to add to that: her child, Juliana, now unofficially our child, waits for us in Manila while we wait out the rain in a godforsaken motel whose name I have even forgotten, at the edge of a city far from my own.
The American Naval Base occupied seventy thousand hectares of flat and rolling land, strategically cradled in the null space between low mountains, dark and heavy rainforests and a wide bay. The air here, even by the sea, is hot and stifling, hemmed in by the rainforest and clouded up with stirred-up dust. But today, all the dust has been beaten down by a freakish accident of hard rain and wind.
The super typhoon—as the announcer on the radio has called it—has threatened to rip up the roofs and lawns of the white and green houses on the base. They are American-style bungalows and two-storey houses, sitting back on subdivided plots of bluegrass, with windowpanes like eyeglasses and steel screen doors like rigid mouths. There are other curious sights: mailboxes on poles, white picket fences and garages large enough to hold Buicks, Tauruses and Cadillacs. Only the tropical heat and the surrounding rainforest subtract from the impression this city gives of America.
The roads are winding and well paved, laid out on the zone like a lattice of bamboo scaffolding. Closer to the bay, the grid straightens itself out, to accommodate the M-1 Abrams tanks and armored personnel carriers that rolled along the paved grid connecting the servicemen’s cottages, the barracks and the tactical command centers. Battleships, cruisers and the occasional aircraft carrier once sat in the bay, watching, waiting, radar and sonar spinning. And along the airstrips on the edge of the base, camouflaged by the hedge of rainforest, nested the dark, radar-proof Blackbirds and swept-wing Tomcats.
Occasionally there would be a rush, a take-off, perhaps marked only by a white cloud on the tarmac. When the Blackbird flew, it must have banked lazily around the base, its blackness unmarred except for two white American stars. Then it would jump forward as though time suddenly straightened itself out, leaving a sonic boom that was heard for miles around, reverberating through the rainforest and the mountain passes.
The next sonic clap that was heard was the sound of the mountain itself, unleashing yet another accident. It sent American GIs into helicopters and C-130s, never to return. The pyroclastic flow, a rain of mud and ash, prompted an emergency evac and turned Subic City into empty wasteland.
The process of rebuilding and scavenging began shortly, driven by political and economic eruptions. Abandoned cars, truck and equipment were auctioned off. The base became a special economic zone, harboring processing plants, semiconductor factories and duty-free price clubs. They drove in by the busload from Manila, hungry for crates of cheap corned beef, half-priced running shoes, stacks of corn chips and cheese balls. But with the years that followed came more political issues and economic measures, bringing another change, another wind. Subic City ceased being a city, not even a real town, and the wide roads, the green plains, white buildings and low houses now make for nothing but a weekend resort scavenged from bunkers, warehouses and housing for American GIs, all repackaged into breathing space for city dwellers like us.
We live in a cramped old house on Polaris St., just off Makati Avenue, hemmed in by KTV bars and Korean restaurants. My mother-in-law’s family built it when she was very young. At the time, there was no Makati Business District yet, just a cluster of low buildings on a short strip of road. There was nothing in our area but tall grass and dirt road. When my mother-in-law died we appropriated the upper floor and left the ground floor empty and unfurnished. We didn’t make much money, and we thought we’d wait for tenants or borders. Once we had the happy idea of converting the area into a small café. “For hungry architects,” I offered.
Upstairs, our living space consists of an area large enough for a drafting table, a white couch, two wicker chairs and a TV set. This connects to a master bedroom, a smaller room for Juliana, and a shared bathroom.
I had the walls repainted and the solid wood floor repaired and polished. I had the eaves fixed, the roof retiled, the spaces between the walls and below the roof fumigated. But I changed nothing else in the house.
I had the walls repainted and the solid wood floor repaired and polished. I had the eaves fixed, the roof retiled, the spaces between the walls and below the roof fumigated and treated. But I changed nothing else in the house.
The house has been designed so that during most hours of the daytime the living room is bathed in good air and a gentle, eggshell-colored light, filtered and recycled through brown wooden windows set with squares of white glass. I did nothing to the original plan. Our walls remain white and unencumbered by heavy molding and the foot-wide narra planks remain on our floor. It’s a good house, small, solid, square, simple. They don’t build houses like this anymore. Now even the small mass housing units I once penciled by the dozen are made to look like Italian villas and mausoleums or Mediterranean dwellings with redundant balconies and tile roofs with unusable, impractical tile overhangs.
I CAME UPON MONICA AFTER THE BIG EARTHQUAKE IN 1990. WE FELT it all the way in Manila but it was Baguio that was the worst hit. In the mountain city the ground cracked open on the main streets, under cars, houses and people. People fell into the sudden chasms, or were crushed under layers of buildings. Six or seven hotels knelt broken and swaybacked on the ground. Aftershocks had made sure the roads that fed into the city were twisted beyond use or rendered impassable by boulders. The city was cut off, left suspended high in the empty air by the main earthquake. They choppered in TV crews in to investigate the damage. They needed warmth, food, clean water. Burnham Park had turned into a makeshift gathering of tents and the Baguio cathedral had become a refugee center.
Important people were stranded and hurt. A senator’s wife lay trapped under the remains of a small hotel, its broken floors piled on top of each other. While waiting for the rescue teams she gave interviews through a small breathing hole. Others were not so lucky, she said, from the darkness of the hole. There were two or three people around her who had been crushed by falling pillars. After two days the hole began to stink of decaying flesh.
Investigations arose concerning the architectural soundness of the felled hotels. Some citizens filed criminal cases against the developers, the engineers and the architects. I shuddered at this, and thought of the designs I had done.
A television station set up relief centers in Manila, where they collected donations of food, canned goods and used clothing. They got volunteers to pack the relief goods into boxes before airlifting them out to the rest of Luzon. Monica and I were on the same assembly line packing pineapple chunks, instant noodles and tetra briks of juice.
Monica worked quietly, and hardly a word passed her lips as she counted the boxes of juice into cubic clusters of four. Years later Monica told me that she knew that I had been trying to catch her eye that afternoon. I had contrived to be assigned to the station beside her. After the volunteers’ dinner I stepped out for a smoke. When I returned she had disappeared on me, just like that, leaving her relief boxes open and incomplete.
After that, I went back to my work, where I discovered the earthquake holiday had left me cracked and open. I could take no more of developers who wanted whole hectares of rolling land made to look like New England, or Southern France, or the Italian countryside. By the time I resigned I had designed a statue of St. Ignatius, a fountain for a beach resort that dwarfed Trevi, a subdivision clubhouse that was a variation on the temple on Mount Parnassus, and a cluster of stunted residential buildings that was my take on the Versailles. Architects are tempted to create monuments. Instead of marble or stone we poured concrete and painted it white. Corners were cut. Lines were fudged and history written, designed and built out of nothing, across centuries and oceans made of pure imagination, unfounded and unformed.
It was this culture that I imagined I was working hard to protect when I saw Monica again a year later, this time at an anti-US bases rally in front of the old Congress building. The senate was in a voting session on the US bases. The Americans had wanted to extend their lease on their military bases for another ten years. Later on the newspapers said there had been about a hundred fifty thousand of us in the crowd, not counting balut and cigarette vendors and the National Police. Monica wore a white shirt, faded jeans and sandals. When I saw her I instantly remembered her. It was raining hard, and I could see her standing quietly and perfectly still, on a concrete island with her arms crossed over her breasts. Through the sheets of rain the building appeared like an image from the past, as though it had just been built.
When the vote came through to end the Americans’ tenure, the news swept through the crowd like radio waves rippling through the air. There were shouts of relief and they sang a song. People were hugging each other and crying. Through all the hysterics I saw Monica standing quietly. I walked up to her and saw that she recognized me and was happy to see a face she knew. I embraced her, and to my surprise she returned my warmth and passion.
The very first time I undressed her, I discovered stretch marks across her stomach and uncovered a scar, raised, hard, but very fine, hidden under the mesh of her pubic hair like a buried wire. I was puzzled then—and then, in the silence of my ministrations I suddenly understood. But she was still so beautiful, still very young, and I thought of myself as a still-young man who would do what it took to love. And that first time, it was so easy to love her, with the courage and perseverance that were strong enough to shape buildings and move governments.
An arm, a leg, an ear, a body. Made to walk, grasp, catch sound waves that fall off mouths and the atmosphere. Made to open and receive my thrusts, my words, my notions. Soon after I recognized the telltale marks of childbirth I saw Monica as more than the sum of these. She was designed from without, not from within, shaped by her lover, her love child, by all the connections she once had, before suspending herself from them like a city trying to rip itself from its foundations.
She was shaped also by her mother, who lived with her in that beautiful small house. While she studied and went to demonstrations and did volunteer work, her mother took care of her child. In this way, Monica grew up building a life out her mother’s life, and on that life she built hers, and on her mother’s death we decided to build our house, for a new family that was Monica, her child and me.
It is easy to imagine what kind of sorrows and frustrations happened next. This sort of thing happens more than it doesn’t. Someone told me that marriages are accidents waiting to happen: lock a man and a woman in a room, throw out the key, and watch and wait. At that time I was already working for a new firm, designing steel and glass office towers. On the side I had concerned myself with preserving the old Jai Alai building along Taft Avenue, one of Manila’s busiest, craziest streets, choked up with jeepney traffic and coursing like a clogged vein under the shadow of the Light Rail Transit. The old Jai Alai building sat in the middle of the din, with a hemi-cylindrical glass façade and striped by a sculptured frieze that depicted the old Basque sport in its many attitudes. The city government saw the old Jai Alai building as either an eyesore or a symbol of the country’s decadent colonial past. Here was a structure that was an arena for a Spanish game that had turned into an ugly vice. “The Sky Room,” as it was named, in elegant Art Deco letters across its glassy face, was the venue for cocktails and evening parties during its heyday. Manila’s elite would glance down from time to time at the Spanish pelotaris hurling and bouncing balls. Still, it was an important architectural and cultural artifact.
At that time the Americans saw Manila as an important extension of their global plans. They brought in military leaders, prospectors and dealmakers, pioneers who could build businesses and establish markets. Then they brought in surveyors and city planners to lay down a grid of roads, bridges and businesses that they thought would connect, like a puzzle, with their own cities, cities like Chicago and San Francisco and New York.
It was about that time, too, that our house was built. My mother-in-law was only ten or twelve years old. She loved radio and television and American chocolates. She grew up listening to the Beatles and Elvis. Manila was an American city, filled with new ways to live and work, spreading and rising with ideas and happenings. She wore her hair long and her skirt very short. She had many lovers, and soon had a happening herself, this child she carried and delivered, and named after what was man’s greatest achievement, the Apollo moon landing: Monica.
To all this built-up memory, the government’s countermove was to tear the entire Jai Alai building down and in its place, erect a new Hall of Justice. Not only was it deemed practical and symbolic, but it also created jobs and lent an air of newness and vibrancy to the congested district.
There are other structures, beautifully complete, but in the memory of the city, completely forgotten. Buildings whose shells have long outlived their use. The old Metropolitan Theatre was another structure built in the Art Deco style, and has since been revived and left for dead a number of times. Now there is no more use for it, or the lot it stood on, so it has become a haunt of vagrants and glue-sniffers. Inside, the cushioned seats, the stage and the parterre boxes are kept in darkness.
Soon the room we had locked ourselves in had grown dark and different from the early days of our marriage. There were two of us in the shrinking room, plus a child in the adjoining quarters, and all the eggshell-white light did was let us see ourselves in starkness. I began to see Monica as half-formed and incomplete—a married woman that needed to bear the responsibility of a child before she could be whole.
In the mirror her body appears in full and clear detail, a phenomenon complete unto itself, oblivious to me, the powerless observer.
I’ve loved all kinds of women. I have been through so many of them, lived inside so many of them, that it has often become hard to distinguish the real me from them: their thoughts, their words, their gestures so simply and easily became mine. It’s been said that when couples grow used to each other they start to look alike. I like to think it’s because people start wearing their faces the same—pulling that same tired smile, or that same pained look, or that same fixed, blank expression. I have worn all of these faces, on and off, for most of my life, not just trying them on like masks or items of clothing. But building them, tearing them down, and rebuilding them like heavy edifices that are built up and torn down through seasons.
There are affairs that, in the thick of them, make us wish we weren’t there. Our weekend habit is walking the malls. My habit, of late, when I am walking with her, is wondering whether I could simply disappear into the crowd that passes us by. I pick the right time, the right crowd, and by slipping into that unformed mass of teenagers, matrons and maids on their day off, I would lose her and she would lose me. But my hand grips hers tightly. When I was a child I got lost in the shopping arcades and department stores so many times that my parents had soon learned to play it cool—like me, who had gotten so used to it that getting lost was a natural process of life. A little like falling in love, perhaps. You get used to the swell, the anger and the loss. After that, you begin to accept everything as a sort of accident that’s already happened.
The last time she walked out on me, we were in a taxicab waiting for the lights to change. There were no harsh words, no argument, no single thing you could talk about afterwards and blame like a piece of poor engineering. It was a long and careful build up, ending in one of those heavy silences when you look out your side of the cab. She simply opened the door and hit the sidewalk running. She didn’t even slam the door but left it open. It was an incomplete move, one that I could take as an open invitation. But I had made a promise to myself about all that, and that after strike three that would be it. Still, she was one of those girls who made you feel like everything was strike two, that made you say to yourself the next time would be the last time, although it would actually be strike three, or thirteen, or thirty.
But I didn’t move that day. I simply reached over and pulled the taxi door shut. I made a few excuses to the driver, and pretended to busy myself with a Time magazine. It felt to me like a silent victory, an occasion marked by nothing more than a quiet contentment and a trace of a smile. I was quite sure, too, that the driver had seen my expression. But we drove on.
In this city, in this country, buildings, hotels, condominium towers, convention centers are built, all with the regularity of a harvest. During this season, men and women celebrate with a feast that brings over townsfolk from neighboring villages. Even the poorest house becomes an open house, the best plates and glasses are brought out, and the most secret family recipes are prepared. In the city, we have a rhythm too, much like this. During such swells, the markets go up and people rejoice: building and buying season once again. With the turning of the months, the land goes dry, the rains fail to fall, and the crops fail to flower. The politics changes and the banks bleed dry, corporations go under and deals turn sour, turning celebrated buildings into white elephants, half-formed shells, or empty lots.
On the way to the Jai Alai site I passed a six-storey shell of concrete and open air, with clusters of uncut, six-inch- diameter steel bars protruding seven or eight feet from its smooth cement face. Why, even on Makati Avenue, in the very nerve center of the business district, there rises a monolithic nothing made of grey, unpolished concrete, built by banks, subsidized by the government and now peopled only by ghosts and city birds, its upper floors still wrapped in heavy green netting, its temporary nature gaining permanence.
The taxi driver drove onward, through the city streets with surprising ease and speed until we hit solid traffic at the foot of the Nagtahan Bridge, forced by bridgeworks into a single lane. Some meters ahead where the bottleneck was at its thickest, there was a continuous stream of diesel smoke from a dump truck and the urgent sound of a jackhammer. In the smoke and the sound, the city looked and felt like there was an earthquake and it was going up in flames. The river itself was dark and moved slow, as though it were thickened with ash and upturned mud. It seemed like an emergency, like the whole city was being evacuated. I felt an urge to pay the driver, get off and pick my way through the bumpers and the tailpipes, until I reached the other side of the road where cars sped by. Foolish to return to a city that was slowly being ravaged by fire and moving earth, I would hail a cab, hitch a ride, or snag a jeepney rail with an outstretched arm, and look for Monica, beginning at the exact spot where she stepped out of the taxi, and going out in concentric circles until I reached the end of the city. When I found her, of course, she would be half-alive, trampled underfoot, or worse, would still refuse to take my hand, even in the middle of a burning city.
There must be other worlds, other women. I ride the thought to its natural conclusion, like one of those new MRT trains you get on but can’t escape because every exit is packed. I imagine the crowd slowly thinning as the train plods from stop to stop, until I am the only one in the train and the door beeps open and I emerge into another city, far from the woman I knew. It would be a dream city. My dream city, where everything works and there is no fear of getting lost or getting mugged, even while you are walking in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night. There would be museums, well-kept buildings, true monuments. A city with a vast network of asphalt roads and silent trains and quiet sidewalks, like Singapore, Frankfurt, or Paris.
Cities like Subic City, which is called a city but only almost is, with the white houses and buildings, the traffic lights, the vast hangars filled with US goods, its empty tarmacs littered with the spent fuselages of jet planes and trucks, its organized web of roads and right angled intersections, all abandoned once, abandoned twice, hermetically sealed at the borders and connecting nowhere and with no one.
We had a half-baked plan to rent one of those abandoned, refurbished, fully-furnished cottages and sit out the heat and find time for our own kind of r&r: release and reconciliation. I begin to think that coming here has been a bad idea to begin with. But Monica’s manner tells me that it is a good idea to be dislocated sometimes, and to think and to plan.
But this rain is unplanned, blowing across the tar in hard sheets, so that even the road seems soft and powerless. Cars and buses switch on headlights and hazard blinkers. Yellow lines are blurred and washed away in the water. The rain has hemmed us in and driven us out, out of the old base and into surrounding Olongapo City. Our leisurely drive has been turned into a frantic search for temporary lodgings: a drive-in motel with a fast-in, fast-out garage, a rain-drenched roomboy who averts his eyes, a flight of stairs, and a small, dimly lit refuge on the second floor.
The motel room has the same smallish floor footprint as our house—so white and square that the walls disappear from our minds. But the glass in the windows has been painted dark grey and the curtains are heavy and filthy. The smell is a cheap construction of freon, cigarette smoke and car air freshener. Some music is coming from the ceiling speakers. Tinny and incomplete, like sounds on the roads we have passed. It feels as though we’re on the very edge of our normal existence as husband and wife. But it also feels like we’re dead center, with nothing but roads spiralling outward from us.
I fight an urge to rip the curtains apart and break the windowpanes open to the weakening light and the cold smell of falling rain. I want to break down the walls and feel the daylight that sits contentedly in the middle of our living room.
Days before my wedding day someone advised me not to ever look at my wife’s naked body in its entirety. He warned that boredom would soon set in, and the marriage would be doomed. But as the dark gathers, there is nothing to do but look, nowhere to look but upward, where a mirror almost as large as the bed shows me her entire body, precisely framed and measured, like a picture frame around her. It’s funny because we have no use for the mirror. I’m even half scared the bolts might give and send it crashing down.
Monica has a mole, a dark fleck like dirt on the rim of her downy navel. I look for a minute, looking not at her but at her in the mirror. I reach over and touch it. Moles are an accident of nature, with no real function or value. It seems painful to touch it, but she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make a sound.
“So they’ll still know its me when I die a horrible death. You know, my face might be mangled or something.”
I read yesterday about that mountain of trash falling on the squatter community that surrounded it. Mothers went out of their minds looking and waiting for their chidlren and their husbands. The newspapers announced more than a hundred deaths, but unofficial reports placed the number closer to a thousand. After all, when entire families were lost, and there was no one to orphan or widow, who would come looking for them? I understood that it was difficult to search for the marginalized and the dispossessed, those exiled to live like trash among the trash.
There have been other disasters. Like that disco that burned to the ground, along with two hundred boys and girls, six or seven years ago. There were few survivors; the disco had no fire exit and the doors opened inwards. To a group of young man and women in panic, the room had become a tomb, their own bodies sealing it shut. Those who escaped carried third-degree burns and the raging memory of that night.
And years before that, there was the big earthquake, in the aftermath of which I met Monica, appearing from the anonymous crowd like a found object, a lost treasure.
Again I imagine the mirror crashing down on us, sparing my face but smashing hers, with shards of glass and metal. Even a little earthquake might do it. The bolts would be shaken loose, the threads would give, and the mirror would gape open, pointing its shiny jaw at her sleeping face. A second tremor, and the swinging angle would intersect with her sleeping softness. The impact is expectedly violent and the outcome, gruesome. Her face twists in my vision like morphing video. What can I do? The mirror invites such visions.
I try to feel how it feels being trapped for weeks under the broken glass and the rubble. I imagine I would survive, barely, and my wife would not. Through the layers of crushed steel, glass and concrete I hear the faint sounds of rescue teams and telephone crews coming in and going away, their picks and shovels and boots tapping on the silence with the faraway sound of insects’ wings. Even Juliana’s voice, crying out for her mother through the ruins, would sound weak and almost imaginary. We would be too buried, too well hidden.
Meanwhile, Monica’s hair becomes dirty wires, the eyes, arched and half closed, become dark slits full of blood, and the bow-shaped mouth, still with a trace of coral-colored lipstick, everts itself to become black gums and crushed teeth. As the evening comes her body, too, loses all color and turns dark and grey.
But the mole remains, a small round bump on a flat, featureless frontier. It is so dark and round that it replaces her face. In my mind it begins to have features, looking up at me, expecting to trust me. You can tell she’s had a child because of the swell of her stomach and the fine lines across its convex face. Stretch marks. She’s sleeping now, once again, exhausted from the long and looping trip. In the mirror she is completely naked, with a white blanket bunched around her and underneath her, its folds like a vast ridge of mountains and rice terraces, a network of roads and bridges surrounding her white, smooth flesh.
In the darkness I try to piece together, from memory, my first naked image of Monica—of Monica before she became mingled with me. I must start from ground level: the feet, small, her calves fluted, her thighs thick and smooth like white cement. The curve of her belly was gentle, and in dim light had curves small and infinite, before reaching her small upturned breasts, her narrow shoulders, the fluted bones and cables of her small white neck. And then I piece together color, first a foundation of white, then infinite shades of yellow, brown, and pale red, piecing her together like the jigsaw puzzle to which I would soon connect, and in which I and all my construction would submerge and mingle with the pieces. Soon, mere months later, we first made love, I would become lost in her, once and for all time. I would put my face on hers, and she would put her face on mine, slapping them on and on like fresh yellow paint, until old emotions grew into new emotions, like annual rings on a dead, sawed-off tree stump, or the widening circle of buildings, roads, bridges, towns emanating from Manila, the epicentre, buildings built on the ruins of other buildings, destroyed by earthquake, politics, fire, emotion, war, neglect.
On the day she walked out on me, I arrived at the site to see a small crowd of architects and activists gathered in front of the fence, yelling and pointing fingers at the demolition crew. I took one last powerless look at the Sky Lounge, the sure sweep of its letters, the curve of its glass face, its absolute fullness and decadence. It looked like the hull of a doomed ship on its maiden voyage. The bottle would swing and strike, the structure would move and the ship would sail, never to return again.
She is all of a sudden old, and she doesn’t move. She’s dead and I am useless, both of us paralysed as the imagined earthquake rocks back and forth, lulling the dream city to sleep. Even dream cities fall. They fall because they are cities. In my crumbling city, I look at her, my heartbeat faint. One day they’ll blast the fallen walls and uncover our hiding place, brick by brick, hollow block by hollow block. If they ever find us they’ll find us like this, still as stones. •