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

indifferent. I told Nick he should get to know her. She’s not all that bad, I said, laughing. Later that evening, back in her room, I told her what he had said. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her. She stood stock-still, glaring at me, but said nothing. I knew it hurt her; her silence said it all.
    A few days later she went with Nick to Cagayan, a hellhole in northern Luzon where the communists had a stronghold. When she came back two days later, cranky and dirty, her clothes coated with dust, she went straight to the bathroom to wash up. I knew she was fuming. She had stepped into his old job and chafed at Nick’s overbearing shadow, his swagger, his boisterous confidence, boyish ego, and rough edges. Going along with Nick was her concession to me, and a friendly gesture to him. But the trip to Cagayan had done nothing to change her mind. She didn’t like
    working with other reporters. She didn’t like having to listen to their war stories. She wanted to work
    alone.
    We argued about this. I thought she had to try to work with others, to go out and have a beer or two, to share a few stories. I believed that once she relaxed, everyone would love her. It bothered me that they didn’t, that they didn’t see in her what I saw. I wanted her to stroll into the Lobby Lounge, drop her bag on the floor, snap her fingers for a gin and tonic, and tell her stories. But that was me. I would sit around the table in the Lobby Lounge, or by the pool, in a crowd of a dozen veteran reporters, and speak out blithely, as if I had been in the Philippines all my life, as if I knew anything.
    She joined occasionally, pulling up a chair away from the center of the crowd and draining her drink, her eyes wandering, half listening or not listening at all, absently playing with her pen. She had just dropped into town, a novice from the suburbs, and was terrified by her ignorance, her lack of experience. At the same time she was relentless, blitzing through the city, tossing off routine news, finding stories others had overlooked. But in the end, she and the rest of the crowd were all covering the same ground.
    There were weekends in the months of upheaval that followed the fall of Marcos when a riot would erupt at a rally of Marcos’s abandonados, and the press, sunning by the hotel pool, would rise from their towels and jump into long pants to go cover it. The rallies had a pattern. Two thousand people, hard-core Marcos believers, massed every Sunday around a stage at the Luneta, the grandstand at Rizal Park, a stone’s throw from the hotel. Speeches, wailing prayers, and Imelda’s teary songs, taped in exile in Honolulu, began at dawn, waking the hotel guests. Looking over the hedges, we could keep track of the rally and the riot police in their helmets and Dirty Harry shades, swinging their long, wooden batons. Most days there was just posturing. But violence could break out abruptly. Sometimes people were injured, killed.
    That’s when the press would leap from poolside chairs, charge out of the hotel, and run across the park, Elizabeth, her notebook and pen in hand, her running shoes untied, her hair tumbling. I would stay by the pool or wander off into the park, staying on the fringes, not quite knowing what to do with myself, neither reporter nor tourist, feeling left out, rather useless. Late at night she would return to
    the hotel, drenched in sweat and stinking of tear gas, her bandanna twisted around her neck.

    Sunday mornings were a ritual. The press was out in full force. Early risers came in tennis whites, holding Prince rackets under their arms. Late risers came out with bloodshot eyes from Saturday night’s barhopping in Ermita, all-nighters of knocking back six-packs and sleazing around the strip. By noon the poolside tables buzzed with chatter. Twenty people shouting, beer bottles piling up. “Boss, boss,” Nick screamed at the waiters, who moved in prissy steps and paid no attention. Beers were easy. Piña coladas