Memories

I was four years old, sleeping soundly on my parents’ big bed. One morning, my mother woke me up, brought me to the bathroom where she washed my face, and made me rinse my mouth. When we returned to their room, she said. “This is the day I told you about. The man with the magic black box will arrive.”

And so she proceeded to dress me up. She pulled my new white, short-sleeved polo shirt from its plastic bag, and shook it in the morning air. Against my skin the shirt was crisp and clean. Mama made me wear my new khaki shorts. She buttoned up my shirt, and then knotted a green tie under my stiff collar.

“Now, you look so formal already,” she said. “When the man stands before his magic black box and disappears under the strip of black cloth, you should give him your widest smile.” Still groggy from sleep, I just nodded lazily.

Whiteness, there was whiteness everywhere! The walls and ceilings of our house with its French windows. The bark of the pine trees in the yard painted white. And then, when we stepped out of the house, the whitest of sky, whiter than the paper Mama would give me, along with a big box of crayons. From this box, I would take out the crayons one by one, memorizing their colors, their shades and tones.

The man inside the van had hair stiff as a toothbrush. He was also as big as a cabinet. He asked me to sit down on a wicker chair in the middle of the van. Behind me, a curtain in pale green. Mama was just outside, I kept on telling myself, so there’s nothing to fear. The man then lumbered over to where the magic black box stood. “Okay, son, ready?” he asked.

I just nodded, noticing the cracks on his pair of brown shoes.

Then his head disappeared under the black cloth. “Smile, son,” he said.

I smiled as he began to count. Ready, one, two, three. But at the count of three, I stopped smiling. I just looked at him straight, behind that magic black box, then tilted my head slightly to the right, as if listening to a voice only I could hear.

Now as I look at that first posed shot (thin hair, oblong head, the most piercing eyes), I still find myself listening to a voice coming as if from afar. But in vain I would wait, it would never come, and then there would only be the sudden explosion of light.

* * *

Like somebody with a Ph.D., Papa was explaining to my grandmother and I how the Apollo 11 would fly to the moon.

From blast-off at Cape Canaveral to the rocket’s head splitting from its tail to the actual landing on the moon – he explained all this with gusto. First, he slipped his right arm in his brown imitation-leather slippers, tracing a trajectory. Then, slipper and hand separated, like molting skin. Soon, only the slippers were left, standing for the rocket landing on the cold, windless landscape of the moon.

That night we watched in our new colored TV. A blur of images. The Stars and Stripes. Then, the astronauts in their white, bloated uniforms, looking like aliens. The rocket blasting off, hurtling in space like a bright comet, and then many hours later, the moon: full of craters deeper and wider than anything I had ever seen. After the Apollo 11 had landed on the moon, the three astronauts free-floating in space (A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind). Men on the moon, my father said, the greatest country in the world staking its claim on a territory millions of miles away from home.

Years later, my grandmother would bring me to Manila in one of her summer vacations. Nora Aunor – the short, brown actress whose rise to fame defied the colonial notions of beauty in the country, she whose eyes spoke a language of their own – has a new film called Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo.

In the film, Nora plays a nurse, Corazon, whose ambition was to go to the United States and work there. She lived near Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City. But one day, her younger brother was shot by an American soldier on the periphery of the base fence, mistaking the young boy for “a wild pig.”

Another image: Corazon’s grandfather (played by Pedro Faustino) was already alive during the Philippine Revolution against Spain in 1896-98, and later, the Filipino-American War from 1898-1904. As a young boy of 10, he wore calzoncillos, like long johns that reached down to the knees. Inside the sewn edges of his calzoncillos was a piece of paper folded many times over. It would contain, in code, the enemy positions, the number of the men, the tactics of the revolutionaries, whom the Americans called bandidos (bandits). When Corazon’s grandfather saw the Americans landing on the moon, he asked, “Kanila na rin ba ang buwan? (Do they now own even the moon?)”

That night, after a heavy dinner of shrimp sinigang, I went out to the backyard. Everything was silent, as if the night itself was holding its breath. Beyond the acacia leaves, the moon rose clear across the Zambales mountains.

While helping her set the table, our housemaid Ludy had told me that there was already a naked man on the moon even before the men of Apollo 11 came. She said he looked like the man in the five-centavo coin. So tonight, I took out the coin I had stolen from the pocket of Papa’s pants, and in the light of the moon I looked for the man. Curly hair, a face well chiseled, broad shoulders. His buttocks were firm and his legs, long and powerful. He was bending down, his body frozen in an arc. On his right hand he held a hammer, pounding something on the anvil in front of him. He was trying to make an object from ore, a shape from all that rawness. Like a god. Patiently he bent down, waiting to be blasted by something like lightning, or by a flash of revelation.

I squinted at the night sky, as if I had the Superman’s X-ray vision. But try as I might, beyond the trees and the mountains I saw no man on the moon. There was only a lighted disk suspended in the air many, many miles away, alone, beautiful, and pure.

These vignettes are included in my book “Riverrun.” Comments: [email protected]