Riverrun: A Novel

PART 1

Memory’s Clear, White Light

Words

WORDS. THEIR SHADOW and light.

My mother taught me the alphabet even before I was enrolled in kindergarten class. She would sit beside me, guiding my hand to form the arcs, loops and crosses, the dips and turns of the letters: the alphabets in a dance. I would copy onto my lined paper the letters, and then the words formed by joining one letter to the next, unlocking meanings, pulling them away from each other’s loneliness.

One word would join another, turning into a sentence, a whole train of them turning into paragraphs, into pages, into books!

On rainy mornings when I could not leave the house to play in the backyard, I would plump my pillow and let it stand against the bed’s headboard. Then I would pull the string of the lampshade (light, warm like skin), and begin to read. When my book was new, I would open it slowly, slowly, in the middle, then I would bring the book closer to my nose. I would inhale the smell of paper and ink, thread and glue, imagine I was inhaling the very fragrances of words. Then I would read.

A world of words, a universe of sorrows and joys! Open, sesame, and out tumbled the tales of Scheherazade told in a thousand and one nights (how deliciously frightening to have your life depend on a tale). Alice wandering into the labyrinths of wonder (how the jaw would drop at every turn of the slippery episodes, turning like the lobes of a seashell). And later, the stories of Bienvenido N. Santos (oh you lovely people, Filipinos in a foreign land, Asian-Hispanic-American, sassy, bright, and noisy, the inner melancholy). The poems of Pablo Neruda (my heartbeats run to you like the sea to the shore).

A geography of feelings, then, from the hidden treasures of a cave to the sea shimmering like the roundest of pearls.

The Hitchhiker

A FULL MOON with no scar shone on the night you were born, my father—my dark-skinned father—said as he sat under the shade cast by the star-apple tree in the yard.

I had been pulling out his white hairs using a tweezer. Five white hairs meant five centavos, and business was brisk. Fifteen white hairs meant a bottle of RC Cola. I asked him about the small, square thing wrapped in layers of old cotton, hung on a string and dangling from the ceiling just outside my window. That is your umbilical cord. The doctor, who was my friend, wrapped it in cotton, then gave it for me to hang from our ceiling.

Why, Papa? I asked.

So that you will not wander far from home.

The cool wind rising seemed to move him to tell more stories.

"It was the night you were born. We still did not have a jeep then, so I was taking the bicycle that night, on my way to the hospital. I was already in front of the huge balete tree, its roots like knotted arms, when I felt the bicycle had become heavier. It was not an uphill climb, but why the suddenly heavy load?"

By this time, I had stopped probing my father’s head for my RC Cola.

Suddenly, I knew that somebody was sitting on the back of my bicycle. That she was a woman in white, with long black hair streaming in the night, and that she had no face. In my mind, I talked to her to please leave, my first child will be born tonight and my wife has been going through labor pains, on and off, in the last two days—

And then what happened, Papa? I asked.

She did let go, in the end, and when I reached the hospital, you were just being born, bald and red and sticky all over—and squealing madly at the world.

The Magic Box

I WAS FOUR years old, sleeping soundly on my parents’ big bed. One morning, my mother—my tall and beautiful mother—woke me up, brought me to the bathroom where she washed my face, and made me rinse my mouth. When we returned to their room, she said, This is the day I told you about. The man with the magic black box will come today.

And so she dressed me up. She pulled my new white, short-sleeved polo shirt from its plastic bag, and shook it in the morning air. Against my skin the shirt was crisp and clean. Mama made me wear my new khaki shorts. She buttoned up my shirt and then knotted a green tie under my stiff collar.

Now, you look so formal already, she said. When the man stands before his magic black box and disappears under the black cloth, you should give him your widest smile. Still groggy from sleep, I just nodded lazily.

Whiteness, there was whiteness everywhere! The walls and ceilings of our house with its French windows. The bark of the pine trees in the yard painted white, as Brigadier General Bautista, the commander of the military base, had ordered. And then, when we stepped out of the house, the whitest of sky, whiter than the paper Mama would give me, along with a big box of crayons. From this box, I would take out the crayons one by one, memorizing their colors.

The man inside the van had hair stiff as a toothbrush. He was also as big as a cabinet. He asked me to sit down on a wicker chair in the middle of the van. Behind me, a curtain in pale green. Mama was just outside, I kept on telling myself. The man then lumbered over to where the magic black box stood. Okay, son, ready? he asked.

I just nodded, noticing the cracks on his pair of brown shoes.

Then his head disappeared under the black cloth. Smile, son, he said.

I smiled as he began to count. Ready, one, two, three. But at the count of three, I stopped smiling. I just looked at him straight, behind that magic black box, then tilted my head slightly to the right, as if listening to a voice only I could hear.

Now as I look at that first posed shot (thin hair, oblong head, the most piercing eyes), I still find myself listening to a voice coming as if from afar. But in vain I would wait, for it would never arrive, and then there would only be the sudden explosion of light.

The Visit

LIKE A SNEEZE it spread among my friends, the news that the President would visit our military base. But perhaps, drop by would have been the word. For on that day, with the September sky the color of lead, the presidential plane landed on the runway stretching from the hangar like a gray tongue. In the horizon loomed the Zambales mountain range, including a dormant volcano called Mount Pinatubo.

It was a Saturday. Since we had no classes, my friend Luis and I jumped onto our bikes and sped in the direction of the runway. Of course we should not be seen, so we just crouched on a slope, beneath the coconut trees, and watched the presidential plane make a smooth, graceful landing. The stainless-steel door opened, and there was the President, in his crisp off-white barong Tagalog. The spun pineapple fibers sheathed the body still young and firm, the chest of the bemedalled war hero of the country. Youngest mayor, youngest governor, youngest congressman, youngest senator, and now, the youngest president of the country.

His slit eyes seemed to crinkle in the heat as he walked down the plane. At the landing he stopped, acknowledged the salute of the generals arrayed before him like penguins. Swift and sharp was his salute, his thumb a small wing beneath the four fingers slanting to the sky. His hair was well-cut, his eyes staring straight ahead, lips pressed together—a face poised forward, to the future.

But he only farted, Luis complained later, when we were already having soda and crackers bought from the commissary. Luis was right, for after the salute and handing personally a sheaf of papers to Brigadier General Bautista and exchanging brief words with him, the President turned around and climbed the stairs again. The last thing I saw was his pure, off-white, dazzling barong, before he was swallowed up by the darkness of the plane.

The First Television

BOY, WHO LIVED in front of our house, told me one day that they had just bought a television set from the Ocampo’s Appliance Store on M. Hizon Street in San Fernando. Now he could watch Casper, the Friendly Ghost, Josie and the Pussycats, Batman and Robin, Spider Man, and The Flintstones, yaba-daba-doo, every night.

I took that news as an invitation, so one afternoon, after leaving my school bag in the room, I rushed out of the house, past my grandmother who was watering the lawn, onto the street beginning to turn gold from the sunset. I only stopped running when I reached the yard of Boy’s house.

I was about to enter their door when I met his mother, who was stepping out of their house. Now, Boy’s mother was the type who had been immortalized in countless sitcoms, drama shows, and even advertisements. In the morning her hair would be in rollers; in the afternoon her face would be greasy from all that cooking.

So, she asked me, shapeless in her faded house dress, where are you going?

To watch TV. Boy said your new TV set was delivered yesterday.

Yes, but we’re not inviting anybody to watch it, she said, her thick lips twisting with her words, like the villain in Tagalog movies.

I was young and stupid, so I just stared at her. She stepped backward, held the doorknob with her left hand, and slammed the door shut on my face. I stood there, my feelings in chaos. My ears burnt with flames I could not see, and a great terrible anger began rising within me. It was the kind of anger that would rarely rise from me, but when it came, it exploded with a fury.

I walked down their cemented stairs, grabbed a pebble, no, a rock, and hurled it at their windowpane. I only ran away when I was sure the window had been smashed.

The window looked like the teeth of a shark.

I ran in the gathering dusk, past my grandmother merging with the shadows, into the living room floating with the smell of fried chicken for dinner. I ran right into my room. I locked the door and sat down in the dark.

Then I heard our jeep nosing into the garage, my father’s voice, in his wake a series of voices, then a series of loud knocks on my door.

I braced myself, and then opened the door. Papa was there, his face cold and impassive. Behind him, Mama’s stricken face. And behind her, my grandmother.

Papa grabbed my hand, dragged me to the kitchen, asked me if it was true; I nodded, and clamped my lips together. He made me lie down, face flat against the hard wooden bench. I knew what was coming. Then his leather belt began lashing at my buttocks and the skin of my thighs. Once, twice, thrice. I was just silent, my teeth biting into my lips until they bled.

Papa said, in-between the lashings, that he would not raise a child like me, that I should learn to check my temper, that we could also afford to buy a TV set, I should have asked for one, that he would never be shamed by a woman who never finished elementary school, whose husband was the dumbest trainee in the barracks.

All these words were flung while his leather belt cut the air, then bit into my skin. After the third lashing, Mama said, Stop, but Papa could not be appeased. And so my grandmother, my old and magnificent grandmother, stood between Papa and me and spoke in a voice that when I remember now still gives me the shivers. She said to Papa: If you don’t want to stop, then strike me.

I looked back. Papa’s hand stopped in midair, the belt hanging limply, like a sail suddenly without wind. My grandmother walked to the bench, gathered me in her arms, and led me slowly back to her room.

My grandmother’s room was redolent with the smell of White Flower and the medicinal oil Pak Fah Yeow, which she bought from the Chinese merchants in Binondo. She ran her fingers through my hair.

Later in life, my grandmother would return to Albay, to live in the old house my grandfather built for her. But I only had to smell White Flower or open the 1.5 ml bottle of Pak Fah Yeow, let the soothing smell perfume the air, and I would be back