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

familiar feints and skin pricks, seemed to blow over in hours or days, and we would once again pick up where we had left off, our intimacy nearly intact.

    My first letter from Manila was to Tim, a sketch of the place, a place he had known, but now through my eyes, in my time. A day after he got my letter, he called to tell me he loved it, that I must write just like that. Was he serious? For a moment I believed him, and went back to the typewriter. I had set up
    my table and bookshelves in a large room Elizabeth had made into her office. It had a ceiling fan, her desk, which she brought from India, and her bookcases. She had the window view. I had the windowless end of the room. Settled there with the books I had bought in a storefront nearby and Elizabeth’s Philippine flag, which she had nailed to a wall, I wrote for hours, tearing up page after page, tossing crumpled pages around the room, my back aching from sitting on a straight-backed chair. But I was also determined, driven, teaching myself, trying to see.
    The rains came, not sporadically but constantly, day after day, flooding the city for weeks. The scene that became commonplace for me: poor souls carrying bundles on their heads, wading in sodden rivers that just hours before had been their streets. By six in the morning Elizabeth was at work, making phone calls, running out to cover a demonstration, setting up interviews at the presidential palace, at Camp Aguinaldo, at the American embassy, the three power centers of the capital. Coming home late, covered in sweat and mud, she would plop down at her typewriter, cursing the hours stalled in traffic, the taxi drivers, the monsoon, the president, the ambassador.
    There was nothing simple about Manila.
    With the typhoons and the drownings at sea and all the disasters that accompanied the season came the rumors of a coup. Everyone knew that military factions were plotting to take power from Cory Aquino, and had been doing so since the day she became president in February 1986. By autumn, only seven months into her presidency, there was a palpable edginess about the city. People jumped when the lights went out and when army trucks rolled down Roxas Boulevard. We couldn’t get a drink at the Lobby Lounge or drop by the Peninsula Hotel coffee shop without hearing the latest gossip, whispers, asides.
    We ran from rumor to rumor, trying to make sense out of fantasy, conspiracies printed as fact in the local papers, speculation from columnists and generals and Cory’s Harvard-smooth presidential aides. Some days I stayed behind in the apartment, working on an outline of a book I wanted to write, a story of the Philippines at that special crossroads in its history, after twenty years of Marcos, the flavor and scenes and characters caught up in that moment. I would sit bent over the typewriter, in the chair with the hard seat and the shaky back, staring blankly at the walls, making lists of books I had to read, research I had to do, and people I had to interview.
    I wandered around the apartment, feeling caged at times, turning up the music, flipping through magazines, watching Gina, our maid, an eighteen-year-old from Tarlac province who came in to do laundry and wax the floors. With her bare feet she rubbed a dry coconut husk on the floorboards, back and forth, a sort of dance. I would watch the lavanderas—the laundrywomen—on the roof over the garage, scrubbing the laundry by hand with coarse bars of soap and dipping it in tin tubs, and eating their lunch on their haunches, giggling.
    The sight of them took me back to my childhood, when I was nine and my family lived among lavanderas and farmers on an unpaved road in a town in eastern Puerto Rico where my father was doing his residency at the municipal hospital, delivering poor women’s babies, making middle-of-the- night house calls. We would be there two years, the length of time the government demanded of my father for giving him a grant to study medicine. The