Dogeaters (3 page)

I try to blot from my mind the image of my grandfather Whitman sick in the hospital, the shabby American Hospital with its drab green walls, drab green smells, and the hovering presence of the hospital’s supervising staff of melancholy American doctors. Like my grandfather, they are leftovers from recent wars, voluntary exiles whose fair skin is tinged a blotchy red from the tropical sun or too much alcohol; like his, their clothes and skin reek of rum and Lucky Strikes. It is not an unpleasant scent, something soothing I associate with old American men and my grandfather Whitman, whom I love.

My
Lola
Narcisa claims that her husband is the first white man stricken with
bangungot.
She seems almost proud of his nightmare sickness, a delirious fever in which he sweats, sleeps, and screams. Most
bangungot
victims die overnight in their sleep. It is a mysterious illness which usually claims men. My grandfather’s case is even stranger than most—he’s been sick like this for weeks. At first, the American doctors diagnosed malaria. After a week, they patrolled the corridor outside my grandfather’s private room, consulting each other worriedly and coming up with more, far-fetched theories.
Bangungot
is ruled out of the picture by the chief of staff, Dr. Leary, who dismisses the tropical malady as native superstition, a figment of the overwrought Filipino imagination.

I have been to the hospital only once, with my
lola
and the cook Pacita. My parents have forbidden me to go back; when I ask why, my father replies, “You are much too young to be around sick people.

“It’s best to remember your grandfather as a healthy man.” What they don’t seem to understand is that unlike Raul, I’m not afraid.

When
Love Letters
is over, the servants file out of the room, murmuring good-night and thanks to my grandmother. Lorenza even comes back with another bowl of snacks for
Lola
Narcisa: minced red salted duck eggs dabbed with vinegar, more rice with crunchy
dilis.
Happy and lost in her radio reverie, my grandmother nods and smiles at no one in particular. Lorenza turns to give me one last warning before leaving the room. “Rio, if you don’t go to bed in your own room, your mother will chop my head off.” I grin at her and put my finger to my lips. “I won’t tell, Lorenza. Promise.”

My grandmother dabs her eyes with one of my grandfather’s oversized handkerchiefs. The
Love Letters
theme song is playing, a saccharine instrumental melody replete with organ and violins. The somber voice of the male announcer intones, “Tune in for the next episode of
Love Letters
at the same time tomorrow night. And so, until then…”

Hunching her bony shoulders,
Lola
Narcisa leans in closer to the radio, as if by doing so she can prolong her precious drama one more second. An eerie, high-pitched sound is followed by the voice of the same radio announcer, this time more cheery and impersonal. “This is DZRK, Radiomanila, signing off for the evening. At the sound of the tone, it’s exactly twelve midnight, in the Blessed Year of the Family Rosary. Remember: The family that prays together, stays together.”

Forgotten not just by my mother but by everyone, I sit drowsily on the lumpy bed watching my grandmother eat and cry. Tomorrow they’ll find me asleep, next to her. I know I should go down the hallway to my own room, but the house is too big and dark, all the lights turned off by the reliable Fely and Lorenza. As I watch my rapt grandmother, I too begin to cry.

It’s another movie.
A Place in the Sun
—condemned by the Archdiocese of Manila as vile and obscene. I don’t understand the commotion, why Pucha and I have to sneak off and pretend we’re going to see Debbie Reynolds in
Bundle of Joy.
Fortunately for us, Pucha’s older brother Mikey is our chaperone for the day. He wants to see Elizabeth Taylor naked.

We are all bewildered by the movie, which is probably too American for us. Mikey falls asleep halfway through it, after Shelley Winters drowns. I decide that even if I don’t understand it, I
like
this movie. In my eyes, it is unjust that Montgomery Clift is executed for Shelley Winters’ murder. While Mikey snores away, Pucha and I sit tensely in the dark, waiting for the obscene images that never appear. Pucha is enthralled, although I don’t think she gets it either. She has found a new idol in Montgomery Clift. All she can say afterward at the Café España is, “Shelley Winters is so ordinary. She deserves to die.
Que pobrecito
, Montgomery!” All Mikey can say is, “You owe me one, girls…”

The back of Montgomery Clift’s shoulder in giant close-up on the movie screen. Elizabeth Taylor’s breathtaking face is turned up toward him, imploring a forbidden kiss. They are drunk with their own beauty and love, that much I understand. Only half of Elizabeth Taylor’s face is visible—one violet eye, one arched black eyebrow framed by her short, glossy black hair. She is glowing, on fire in soft focus.

Jane Wyman bends over a comatose Rock Hudson. She tells him she loves him, she will be with him forever in the rustic cottage by the frozen lake. He finally opens his eyes. A deer wanders up to the picture window. Sentimental music interrupts the pastoral silence, swelling to a poignant crescendo as the closing credits roll along. As no doctor ever could, the power of Jane Wyman’s love has cured Rock Hudson and pulled him from death, like Sleeping Beauty.

I try to imagine
Lola
Narcisa bending over my grandfather’s bed like Jane, an angel of mercy whispering so softly in his ear that none of us can make out what she is saying. My grandfather the white man tosses his head from side to side, still locked in his eternal nightmare after all these years. He barks like a dog, grunts and sputters like an old car. My grandmother wipes the drool from the corners of his mouth while my Rita Hayworth mother, Dolores Logan Gonzaga, stands as far away from her father’s bed as possible. She seems terrified and bewildered by this image of her dying father.

He groans
Chicago
,
Chicago
,
Chicago
, with such longing I shut my eyes and the movie projector goes off in my head. Concrete, glass, and in the background, cardboard cut-out skyscrapers. June Allyson descends from a winding staircase, wearing a ballgown made of gold-flecked, plastic shower curtains. My grandfather mutters repeatedly in his frenzied sleep:
Chicago
,
Chica-go
…

He shrieks, as if someone or something has finally caught up with him. The anguish in his voice, in the way his body twists and jerks epileptically on the hospital bed, is unbearable. The anxious American doctors have been waiting for a sign. They rush into the room, trailed by eager nurses ready with gleaming, stainless steel bedpans, ominous catheters, and intravenous attachments bursting with glucose and pints of fresh black blood. My mother Dolores covers her eyes. She is shaking and sobbing with grief. “DON’T TOUCH HIM!” my
Lola
Narcisa screams in English at Doctor Leary. Everyone stops dead in their tracks, stunned that the shriveled brown woman has so loudly and finally spoken.

I am confused by the thought of Elizabeth Taylor’s one violet eye luminous in black and white, the pristine illusion of elegant deer peacefully grazing outside Rock Hudson’s picture window. In this hospital room, there is only our sense of foreboding, heightened by the grayness of bedsheets and medical uniforms, the dim fluorescent lights, the lizards watching from the corners of the ceiling. My grandfather is dying. My mother has been tranquilized and waits for my father, who has telephoned the nurse’s station to let her know he is on his way. Our family priest, Father Manuel, has been summoned. No one seems to remember or care that my grandfather Whitman is an avowed atheist, that his hatred for the Catholic clergy runs deep. “Don’t wake him,”
Lola
Narcisa keeps pleading in English. “If you wake him, he dies. Uh-hmmm.” She nods her head. “Better to leave him dreaming.”

Typhoon rages outside. She waits in the chair next to the bed, eyes glazed and gone. Buzzing static emanates from the radio. She rocks, ever so slightly. It is a rhythm only she can feel and hear. The air is crackling, electric. I feel a chill, and cover myself with one of my grandmother’s shawls. Above my
lola
’s head, a speckled lizard disappears behind the safety of the velvet painting. On a tin plate resting on the windowsill, the
katol
incense has burned down into an ashy, smoldering heap, the smoke still dense and fragrant. The ancient Philco radio is alive, hissing and humming to my
Lola
Narcisa, its dreadful music somehow soothing her.

B
ECAUSE, THEY WOULD SAY
. Simply because.

Because he tells the President what to do. Because he dances well. Because he tells the First Lady off. Because he dances well and collects art. Because he calls the General
Nicky.
Because he owns a 10,000-acre hacienda named
Las Palmas.
Because he employs a private army of mercenaries. Because he collects primitive art, renaissance art, and modern art. Because he owns silver madonnas, rotting statues of unknown saints, and jeweled altars lifted intact from the bowels of bombed-out churches. Because his house is not a home but a museum. Because he smokes cigars. Because he flies his own yellow helicopter. Because he plays golf with a five handicap. Because he plays polo and breeds horses. Because he breeds horses for fun and profit. Because he is a greedy man, a generous man. Because his wealth is self-made, not inherited. Because he owns everything we need, including a munitions factory. Because he dances well: the boogie, the fox-trot, the waltz, the cha-cha, the mambo, the hustle, the bump. Because he dances a competent tango. Because he owns
The Metro Manila Daily
,
Celebrity Pinoy Weekly
, Radiomanila, TruCola Soft Drinks, plus controlling interests in Mabuhay Movie Studios, Apollo Records, and the Monte Vista Golf and Country Club. Because he conceived and constructed SPORTEX, a futuristic department store in the suburb of Makati. Because he was once nominated for president and declined to run. Because he plays poker and wins. Because he is short, and smells like expensive citrus. Because he has elegant silver hair, big ears, slanted Japanese eyes, and the aquiline nose of a Spanish mestizo. Because his skin is dark and leathery from too much sun. Because he is married to a stunning, selfish beauty with a caustic tongue. Because most people envy his wife. Because most people are jealous. Because his downfall is eagerly awaited, his downfall is assumed. Because his wife has had her tubes tied. Because he’s always wanted sons. Because his only legitimate child is female. Because she is not exceptional or beautiful; because she hardly speaks. Because her name is Rosario but she is burdened with the nickname
Baby.
Because her mother dislikes her and almost admits it. Because her father flaunts his mistresses. Because her mother is discreet. Because her father has exquisite manners, and her mother is famous for being rude. Because her father threatens to acknowledge his bastard sons. Because he employs them in menial jobs. Because his bastard sons worship him, love him, plot against him.

Because he dances well, and collects art. Because he never finished school. Because men, women, and children are drawn to him, like moths to a flame. Because he is unable to maintain a full erection. Because it doesn’t matter. Because he no longer drinks. Because he maintains a high-protein diet, and has trouble moving his bowels. Because he suffers from hemorrhoids, and has been operated on twice. Because he has premonitions about his death and believes in God. Because he dreams of cancer eating away his brain, his liver, his stomach, his balls. Because he dreams of morphine, how it won’t be enough.

They call him king, Severo, “Chuchi,” Luis. His employees and bastard sons call him
Don
Luis. His servants lower their eyes, call him
Sir.
His wife Isabel and his widowed mother Serafina call him by his first name, Severo. His daughter avoids calling him anything, even “Papa,” except on public occasions. When his wife loses her temper, she calls him
hijo de puta,
whore’s son,
cabron. Motherfucker
she learns to call him, after several trips to America. When she is really angry, she calls his mother a phony and a whore. She dares him to hit her; he never does, calling her
a real phony
instead. He is aware it is the worst possible thing he could say to her. They call each other every name in the book, they do not care if their daughter or the servants hear them fighting long into the night. He usually ends by calling his wife a hypocrite with the soul and manners of a common
achay
, a servant, a peasant, but with none of their warmth and appeal. He brags about fucking the servants, how they are more responsive than she could ever be.
You’re dead down there
, he accuses her coldly. She tosses her head in contempt.
I’m dead to you
, she tells him.

It no longer affects her. It is nothing, an old story. Before the war. During the war. During the Japanese occupation. After liberation. Her mother is dead. Her father a weak man, a handsome man, a petty hustler. Her father coughs blood. She is a hostess at a nightclub. Her father dies, in a barroom brawl. She wins a beauty contest.
Miss Postwar Manila. Miss Congeniality.
She is a starlet on contract at Mabuhay Studios. She cannot sing or dance. She cannot act. She is stiff and wooden on the screen. Because of her exceptional beauty, she is given small parts. The other woman, the best friend, the best friend’s friend.

He’s a wheeler-dealer, ruthless and ambitious. He does business with everyone. Japs, GI’s, guerrillas in the jungle. He meets her, at a party. She is drunk. They are both in love with other people, but he is compelled by her beauty and amused by her bluntness. He meets her again, at another party. She is sober and knows exactly who he is. They marry. He later buys Mabuhay Studios, on a whim. She stops making movies, spends her time shopping for clothes. She takes a lot of airplanes, perfects her English. She is terrified by New York, intimidated by Paris, at home in Rome and Madrid. She develops a Spanish accent, and learns to roll her r’s. She concentrates on being thin, sophisticated, icy. Her role models include Dietrich, Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, Nefertiti, and Grace Kelly. She is an asset to her husband at any social function. She is manicured and oiled, massaged and exercised, pampered like some high-strung, inbred animal. She has reconstructed her life and past, to suit her taste. She is over forty, taut and angular, with marvelous cheekbones. She does not need a plastic surgeon.