Free Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa Page A

teenagers danced to boom boxes, and men tossed their empty bottles over their shoulders. By midafternoon the beach became quiet, that drowsiness
    that comes in the tropics as the sun spreads out and mutes everything, and the boats, black silhouettes, lay still.
    She stretched out on the raft to dry in the sun, her hand shading her eyes while she looked at me.
    We were alone in the world, it seemed, hardly stirring, swaying softly with the waves. From somewhere I thought I could hear Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and in the distance, looking inland beyond the shore, white wisps of smoke swirled from hillside huts and the scent of burning wood drifted back to the sea, even from that far.
    I knew at that instant, with her face beside me and the wisps of smoke in the hills beyond, that I had found myself a place; nothing I had known before had captured me in quite this way, with such sudden passion. We let the last hours of the sun pass, and that evening, back in Manila, we sat under windblown torches, listening to the strolling violins in the hanging gardens by the bay.
    Weeks later, when my holiday ended and I had to leave Manila, I gave Elizabeth a gold ring with
    a sliver of coral set in it. She wore it for a long time on her left hand.
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    I LEFT THE PHILIPPINES in early May, after the spring and the sea and the gold ring, the weeks that were her gift to me. Tearing myself away, delaying my scheduled departure once, twice, one day, then another, I finally returned to the United States, but not to stay. I was going back to end that life, to break away from the things that had once mattered: a long career, ambitions and promotions, a climb that had been steady and single-minded, but leaving me restless.
    On the interminable flight from Manila, I practiced the words I would use, arranged my reasoning for public consumption, wanting to explain my decision to resign in a sensible, dispassionate manner. I tried to mimic Elizabeth’s even-tempered voice in imaginary conversations in which I convinced myself that the course I was about to take was absolutely right, inevitable, handed to me that afternoon on the bamboo raft at the Matabungkay resort. I had a plan: I would quit the newspaper and return to the Philippines to write, to cover the revolution, to be with her.
    It seemed simple the day I told Elizabeth. We were having drinks in the Lobby Lounge and I dropped the idea abruptly, my mind already made up. I had wanted her to back me, to take me by the hand and call for wine to celebrate. But the soft look on her face hardened. She shifted her glance away from me and her hand moved automatically to her mouth, fingers on her lips, the pose she adopted to give herself a moment to recover. She wanted to believe I was only dreaming, that this was one of those romantic creations of mine that often amused her but more often scared her. She thought this would pass, that I was carried away on palm trees and margaritas.
    “You can’t give up your career just like that,” she said. “What if this doesn’t work out, what then?” She was afraid of the burden, that the time would come when I would end up blaming her for ruining my life and that a sense of obligation would shift to her. I had answers ready, trying to reassure her, and brushed aside her arguments in a torrent of words.
    On the morning I left her in her room, knowing that nothing would keep me from going back, she took me in her arms, her hands cold, as they always were when she was afraid or anxious, and clasped me to her. She seemed suddenly smaller and very alone. I had to go, and loosened her arms. She fixed her eyes somewhere in the distance, looking toward the bay. I closed the door behind me, the breath taken out of me.
    Flying east to America, strapped to my seat, I played back the days and nights in Manila, the torchlights and the ships, the trenchant music, dreading going back to reality. I flew dazed and disconnected from Honolulu International to LAX. I called