Monterey Bay(60)
Soon there was only one remaining task: the resolution of a trademark dispute concerning the aborted cigar company in the Philippines.
“I’d be happy to press forth,” the secretary said, “and notify you when everything has been resolved.”
“No,” she replied after a moment of deliberation. “I’ll manage this one myself.”
She gave the secretary his last paycheck. Then, for the sum of fourteen hundred dollars, she booked a seat on a DC-4 from San Francisco to Manila.
On the plane, which was different in every way from the cargo ship that had once taken her and Anders in the reverse direction, she tried to prepare herself. It would be upsetting, most likely, to see Manila again after eight long years, to witness the near total destruction she had read about in the papers. But the shock of actually arriving there, of seeing animals in the rubble fight for what she hoped was not a human bone, was terrorizing and instructive in a way she never could have foreseen. She learned the manner in which her own tragedies compared or did not. She learned the completeness with which landscapes could dematerialize and reconfigure. She learned how to take reliable refuge in smoke and drink, lighting cigar after cigar, pouring glass after glass of lambanog, the local coconut wine, as she wrote and received her telegrams from the lobby of the Manila Hotel, which, although it had been torched by the Japanese upon their retreat, remained partially open for business. When her correspondence had been read and attended to, she would roam the broken city and see something that, for the first time in nearly a decade, she could imagine wanting to understand.
So she did her homework. First, she returned to the manor and the mango orchards or, rather, to what was left of them. The manor was now a pile of bombed-out masonry. The fountain in the courtyard was dry and filled with soldierly remnants: condoms, cigarettes, machine-gun cartridges. The orchards were cratered and patchy, the surviving trees visibly disappointed by the burden of continuing to fruit.
“Where,” she asked one of the locals in an ugly mixture of English and what little Tagalog she remembered, “is your most beautiful bay?”
The journey from Manila to Donsol took two days by bus. In Donsol, the beach was littered with what looked like fishing shacks but that on closer inspection turned out to be ticket kiosks for sightseeing trips into the outer bay.
“Butanding,” one of the tour guides explained.
She didn’t understand but bought a ticket anyway. Minutes later, they were afloat, just her and the guide. Their brightly painted pontoon boat was little more than a canoe with wings. It was late afternoon. Her legs and back still ached from the bus’s hard, tiny seats; her stomach still wobbled from the twisting country roads. The light was slanted, tropical, the beach fluttering like a white ribbon in the distance. When she saw the huge shape in the water below the boat, she thought she was hallucinating until the guide began to yell and smile.
“Pagsisid!”
She looked down at the water again. The shape was coming closer now, its size four times that of the boat, its darkness punctuated with thousands of white dots, its rearmost section tipped with what looked like a gigantic scythe. The guide shoved two objects in her direction: a pair of goggles and a curved length of bamboo with a rubber mouthpiece on one end.
“Pagsisid!”
This time, there was an accompanying pantomime. He donned the goggles and snorkel. He steepled his hands and thrust them forward. Dive. Nodding, she rose to her feet, the boat rocking beneath her. She stripped down to her underclothes and took the gear from him. Without thinking twice, she jumped.
And later, she would learn the names: whale shark, Rhincodon typus. She would acquire an exhaustive knowledge of its habitat, diet, and life cycle. Despite the promise she had made to herself after drawing the portrait of Tino’s father, she would begin to sketch again: the whale shark rendered over and over in pencil and pen and charcoal and crayon, whatever seemed to best memorialize its massive, philanthropic shape. On that first day in Donsol, however, she did none of this. She drew nothing and she learned even less. Instead, she simply hovered above the whale shark and allowed its current to pull her, its toothless mouth funneling untold trillions of plankton, its company so quiet and natural that when darkness fell and her time was up, the guide had to catch her by her bra strap and physically drag her back on board.
That night, in a borrowed hammock beneath a balete tree, she remembered Monterey.
To do so was a delayed act, foreign and fragmented, so she approached it carefully and with the buzzing of the insects as a buffer. Her father, during his remaining years, had never alluded to those last days, so she had been forced to piece it together on her own, which had left her with the following conclusions. Tino, first of all, had been good on his word. After learning of her pregnancy, he had gone to his mother armed with Margot’s offering: the photographs of Anders and the whore. But instead of taking the payment in good faith, instead of offering her assistance and discretion, Mrs. Agnelli used the information to her advantage. While Margot had sat in the lab waiting for Ricketts to return, Tino’s mother had gone up the hill and blackmailed Anders, who, fearing for his reputation and, to a lesser extent, that of his daughter, saw no choice but to finally admit defeat and return the cannery in exchange for his rival’s silence. After this, they’d stayed in Monterey for only one more day: long enough to finalize the transaction and to prepare for a hasty departure. On the train out of town, there were no words of either accusation or apology. It was only when they arrived in San Francisco that her father managed a sour smile and an assurance that things would rectify themselves in due course.