White Elephants

White Elephants

S    T    O    R    I    E    S  

Angelo R. Lacuesta

White Elephants: Stories

by Angelo R. Lacuesta

Copyright by ANGELO R. LACUESTA, 2005

All rights reserved.

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Book design by ANGELO R. LACUESTA (cover) and ANI V. HABÚLAN (interior)

Version 1.0.1

The author wishes to thank the following:

Chin, Georgia and Ashley Martelino for the elephant. Gregorio C. Brillantes for his guidance and generosity. Mikey and Lou Samson for the anecdotes. Kim Silos, Copagi Joson, Chuck Ramos and Noel Perez. Jose Y. Dalisay and Alfred A. Yuson for their support. Mabi David for important advice. Mike Manalo at Logika. Karina Bolasco and Ani Habúlan at Anvil. The Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers for time and space. Lolita Rodriguez-Lacuesta, Kite, Gabby and Andi for the usual.

Earlier versions of White elephants, Procession, Leather and Rest stop appeared in the Philippines Free Press. An earlier version of Self with dog, 1997 appeared in Philippine Graphic. Thousand year eve was published online in The Best Philippine Short Stories. Nilda appeared, in a different form, in Future Shock: Prose, an edition of Sands and Coral.

Contents

White elephants

Procession

Thousand year eve

Rest stop

New wave days

Nilda

Self with dog, 1997

Ghosts

Leather

Untitled

Glossary

White elephants

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