Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

the furniture, the rugs, the hangings on the living room walls, and kept us standing politely while he reeled off stories about the Japanese and American soldiers who fought hand to hand in those rooms during World War II. He was a vivid storyteller, had the typical Filipino knack for drama, painting for us scenes of war and bloodshed and bodies spattering on those walls. The ghosts of the soldiers cursed the place, he said in a sinister whisper, and caused earthquakes.
    And, of course, MacArthur had once stayed there. MacArthur had stayed everywhere.
    From our second floor we had only a side view of the bay, but the city of beggars and restless commerce lay beneath the wide double windows of our living room. We kept the venetian blinds drawn at night, shutting out the orange and red tiled sex motel across the street, where couples snuck in behind tinted windows, their cars disappearing inside. On the other side we looked over the roof of a lechon manok restaurant, the most popular on Roxas Boulevard. On days when the wind came from a certain direction, the stench of fumes from the restaurant’s exhaust pipes seeped into our flat, stinking up the place; the trash from the restaurant’s kitchen sat uncollected for weeks near the entrance to our building, spilling out on the street, garbage piles torn up by dogs and rats.
    We had three large rooms, a gloomy, sunless kitchen with an old gas stove and linoleum counters, and a maid’s room with a bunk bed and a shower. The rooms had chocolate-brown floors, wax-shined wooden planks, high ceilings, and whitewashed rough stucco walls. It was a flat of onetime elegance, a place of cobwebs in the corners and food smells. Elizabeth’s things—rice baskets, a couple of primitive Malay spears, a lopsided wicker sideboard, a pair of Rajasthani chairs, assorted rugs, and the long-armed chair called a butaca—defined the apartment, set a spare, monastic tone.
    These rooms had nothing of our past. In time they became entirely our own, with our things, which we would carry with us from place to place over the years.

    We talked endlessly in those rooms. Elizabeth, who had buried so much for so long, unfolded her life slowly, sometimes in streams of words, as if she had not really spoken for ten years, as if she had long ago dropped out of ordinary life. She called her twenties a time of anomie, when she cut herself off from the things that had once moved her—books, music, art, and writing. “I don’t read, I don’t listen to music,” she had said when I first met her, and I thought then that it was some sort of sophomoric cynicism, a juvenile affectation.
    She had once bought a small farm and had spent her weekends dismantling the old farmhouse plank by plank. She had planted a garden and a row of fruit trees. For a time she believed she would remake it into the peaceful, private place she thought she needed. But it was never finished. Often she warned me about voices that were loud and clear in her head, and her belief then that life was bare and frail, to be lived alone, a point that came between us again and again. When I would try to smash through that, she would balk, retreating to some place in her head where I could not follow. Her detachment at times confounded me. She liked to say she was a clam, deep in a shell. She didn’t want to stick out and expose the layers underneath. Her distant manner was studied, learned since childhood, I supposed, and by now it came naturally, shading the insecurities that I saw sometimes gnawing at her. Buttoned down, impervious at times, she was the very picture of upper-class Protestant girls groomed to a life in which emotions were meant to be disguised and pushed down.
    That surface, a carapace I used to call it, had little to do with the other Elizabeth, passionate and intense to the core.
    But there were things I did not talk about, things she wanted to know, about broken loves and long parts of my life I left vague. Family,