On Quezon Avenue

For two years while on a leave of absence from medical school I floated precariously, awash on a compass-less sea. My parents were surprisingly generous. They continued to bankroll my stay in Manila without, I don’t think, understanding what I was doing. They had already spent a small fortune on my medical education. Maybe they just wanted to salvage what they could.

I moved to Quezon City. Then largely residential, Quezon City was a new city compared to Manila. It was created in the early 1900s to be the future capital of an independent Philippines. I needed something new and fresh because I needed to make myself new and fresh. The old had failed; I couldn’t go on the old me. The tree had dried up. No sap flowed up its roots, trunk and branches. I needed something fresh, something live and flowing.

I rented a room on Quezon Avenue, a short distance from the Welcome (now Mabuhay) Rotunda where old España Boulevard ended and Manila became Quezon City. España was the main thoroughfare in front of the University of Santo Tomás. I needed to distance myself from that scene but I didn’t want to go too far. Like it or not I concurred with my parents. I had sunk too much into the enterprise to start anew.

The room was in an L-shaped, ground floor, one-story building behind the owner’s two-story house. It opened onto a small dining room, kitchen and the other rooms for rent in the complex. One room had its own private entrance adjacent and at right angle to my side window.

One evening, sitting by the window, staring at nothing (perfecting the art of mindless staring was one of my ambitious goals those couple of years), I espied a woman unlatch the short gate separating our rental compound from the main house. She passed in front of the window, rummaged briefly inside a modest, black purse for a key and slipped into her room.

I was intrigued. I found myself waiting for her to appear every evening. In the chiaroscuro twilight, she was a curious aberration, an apparition like Hamlet’s ghost but benign rather than foreboding, momentarily interrupting the solitary, senseless guard I kept at my window. Her appearance was an event in an otherwise featureless, gray landscape. I began to watch for her in the evening and began collecting details. She wore her hair short, cut simply, sometimes with a simple tortoise-shell barrette or a light-colored satin ribbon. Often she wore a dark, narrow skirt just past her knees in length and a white cotton or ecru blouse. She appeared older than me by at least ten years.

We met in the kitchen one afternoon. I had gone to take something out of the communal refrigerator; she had come out to fill a small teapot with water. I found out her name, Lina.

She had just returned to the Philippines from doing graduate work in English literature in the U.S. We bumped into each other a couple more times before she invited me to her room. It was as simply appointed as my room, a bed with no headboard, a thin, pallet-style mattress with two thin pillows under a drab orange spread. By the bed were a tape recorder and a small, round clock with yellowish-green luminous hands.

Lina didn’t have many visitors either. We began to spend more time with each other. We didn’t go out. I would visit in her room or she in mine. We might not see each other for a few days and then like a heaven-ordained conjunction we’d seek each other out and there it was again, our own private island, a miniscule corner of the universe where the whirlwind outside did not intrude. We must have felt something for each other but what I remember most was the strangely luminous congruence of our little world.

I had vague ideas then of immigrating to America but thinking of the future felt iniquitous. I was living in the moment, barely, while learning what there was to live. We didn’t speak much about her experience in America. I didn’t know why she was back in the country. I think she had finished her study program and was looking for a job. During the day she worked somewhere in Manila. These were irrelevancies. Lying on her bed or sitting on the bench outside her door under a mute, unmusical night, we spoke of books and the gorgeous power of words, poetry and its mysterious cadencies, the utter nakedness of images, the languorous deadliness of ideas.

Throughout life I’ve met people who long after they’ve exited continue to walk beside me, sitting down when I sit down, lying down with me at night when I dissolve into sleep and uncanny dreaming. Lina is one of these people. Nothing momentous happened when we were together. What we gave each other neither one of us needed but when it was over we didn’t need as much. When the dry season is over, on its own, the sap begins to flow.