Read Online Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa - Free Book Online

stopped at red lights and crossed intersections, knocking on my window, their faces against the glass, their mouths opened with the pitiful cry, “Mum, mum, I’m hungry, one peso, mum.” Those first few days I gave them money, and Rolly would look at me and shake his head. “They are gangs. Don’t give them money,” he said every time. He kept his window rolled up and his door locked. After a while I forced myself to turn away from the begging kids, locking my car door and rolling up my window when we stopped at an intersection.
    I had Rolly take me to Camp Aguinaldo, the military headquarters where the revolution had started, where the nuns had stopped Marcos’s tanks. The entrance gate hung off its hinges and the thick stone and cinderblock walls were pockmarked with mortar shells and bullets. We drove by Malacañang Palace, the presidential palace that was once the residence of the American governor in the period from 1898 to 1946 when the United States governed the Philippines, but these days the palace was overrun with street vendors, beggars, and tourists.
    Manila was euphoric that spring. A month after the revolution, everyone was still partying. There were street fiestas, Catholic masses, and lavish dinners in the mansions of Cory’s wealthy supporters. Everywhere they played the sad melody “Bayan Ko,” a national ballad that had been Cory’s campaign anthem.

    Philippines! My heart’s sole burning fire, Cradle of my tears . . .

    The woman at the beauty salon in the Manila Hotel, who cut my hair the first Sunday I was in town, kept asking me, as did everyone else: “Do you like our country? Did you see it on TV?” For once, Filipinos were no longer seen worldwide as the maids, menial laborers, and whores of Asia. After so many demeaning years, they became television stars, protagonists in the People Power Revolution.
    Cory Aquino had not moved into Malacañang Palace. It was too full of ghosts: those dim and musty halls, the baroque furniture, the remnants of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. As soon as the Marcos cohort was forced to leave, the palace was swamped with vendors and vagrants. At one point, Cory spoke seriously of turning it into a love motel for honeymooners. Poor families set up huts inside the palace’s gates, cooking while tourists strolled around. Youngsters sold revolution trinkets and merchants set up stalls around the palace with mementos, keys, visors, straw hats, and T-shirts (“People Power Is God Power” was popular). Tourists queued up for hours in the heat to tour Malacañang—the dark rooms, the basement disco, the secret clinic with Marcos’s oxygen tank, and, of course, the closets of Imelda’s shoes, her bottles of French perfume and shelves of Hermès and Vuitton bags and silky lingerie.
    The city was a bazaar, mayhem, with slums everywhere, even around Malacañang. I had expected the poverty, but not the veneer of prosperity, the ersatz Americanization. Rows of pricey Miami-type condominiums lined the avenues of Makati, a wealthy district where the capital’s stock market and top corporations had their headquarters. There were fancy residential enclaves where the only people on the streets I saw were maids in uniforms and gardeners clipping the grassy strips on the sidewalks. Villas with tennis courts and swimming pools were kept safe from the rabble by surly uniformed guards armed with M16s and by twelve-foot-high concrete walls topped with razor wire. Inside the gates of the mansions, Mercedes Benzes and MGs, Porsches and Ford SUVs, lined the driveways, and there were household staffs large enough to run small hotels. But the slums were beginning to encroach on Makati and the homes of the rich, and the paint was peeling off some of the old mansions; people were afraid to go out at night.
    By my second week at the hotel, guests had come and gone. A few stayed longer and became fixtures in the scenery. There was the woman in the red spandex swimsuit, with the tended