And then when he bought the Ford Escape — in a color the dealers call “toreador red” — the professor looked even younger, snappier, more eager to engage anyone in anything, from a debate at the University Council to a drag race on Temple Drive. Or so it seemed. I was still a senior then and his baby-thesis advisee, not yet his assistant, but he had made it a point to ask me to join him in the SUV for a ride to the post office, using a supposed problem with my endnotes to Chapter 6, on the Battle of Biak-na-Bato, as an excuse. As soon as we were driving down A. Roces Street, nothing about my thesis was ever brought up again. Instead, he told me about how he’d cashed in some stocks he had inherited a long time ago from his father to buy the car — his retirement paycheck was still too far away — and that the Escape was his wedding gift to himself and Lalaine. One of these days, he said, he’d teach her how to drive, but not too soon. Heck, maybe it was better to get her a driver, he added. Lalaine was bound to scratch the car up, she was good with dainty little things like cups and saucers, but large objects confounded her, she was new to all this and an SUV was just too much. It was at this point that I wanted to ask him how they had met, but we had reached the post office, and the professor realized with a chuckle that he had forgotten the parcel he was supposed to send his sister in Chicago. “I know, they’re all wondering why I married her, asking who and what she is, like it’s their business,” he muttered as we drove back to the faculty center. “But if you were me, you’d do the same thing, I’m sure you would.” I kept quiet, but I wanted to say, Of course, professor, I certainly would, I’m your man, whatever is good for you is good for me too!
And so it went for a few years, during which I graduated with my degree in history. I thought I would go on to law school and realize my father’s dream of having an attorney in the family. For a brief while I even got a job as a call center agent, advising people in Ohio how to set up their digital answering machines, only to keep returning to campus and hanging out with the professor. Eventually I signed up for an MA. I didn’t really see myself becoming an academic or a professional historian — I mean, I loved all the war stories, the expeditions and encounters with strange tribes, that sort of thing. But the kind of history the professor was seriously interested in, having to do with varieties of coffee beans and price fluctuations in Antwerp and Rio de Janeiro, was almost like Accounting 312 to me. I suppose I was fascinated by the professor and by his young wife, and by the life they led. I’d expected her to get pregnant within months of their wedding, but it never happened. I got used to seeing Lalaine just the way she was, just short of pregnant. Me, I’d had a couple of girlfriends, nothing serious. I was never good at figuring out what they wanted, except the obvious, which turned out to be something they didn’t really want as much as I did. I mean, what is it with these women? It’s not like I grope or fondle them the first chance I get. I do everything by the book — saving up for dates so I can take them to a decent dinner after the movie, telling them about my day and asking about theirs, escorting them home in a cab and being properly hesitant when they ask me in, focusing on the TV while they make coffee, keeping my hands on my knees until they relax and get that glassy look in their eyes, talking about future and family. I start feeling frisky and touch them somewhere that seems to burn, because they jump up and say things I never had in mind, and I go home totally bummed out. I hate to say this because I dislike generalizations, although history tells us that when you take a really long step backward and look again, people tend to do the same basic things wherever they are, whether in China in the Qing dynasty or in Montezuma’s Mexico, but I came around to the conclusion that it was my not having a car, my own car, at the age of twenty-four, that made me look not so hot to the girls. I mean, let’s face it, driving a car makes you look like you can do anything, or go anywhere — even the professor knew that. I’m sure those Egyptian charioteers got laid a whole lot more than the foot soldiers, the cowboys more than the cooks. I’d brought this up with my parents — I still lived with them in Kamuning and drove the old man around in his ’93 Civic that now coughed in first gear and groaned in second. It was hard to convince sixty-somethings that they, I, needed a new car when their only son was a perpetual schoolboy, earning little beyond the scraps the professor threw me from his research funding and the transcription jobs I took on now and then for other academics. (Once, even, in a really bad fix, from Professor Umali himself. Although of course it had to be kept secret, and I swear I never broke any confidences or passed along any gossip.)
Luckily — okay, it’s hardly the word, considering the circumstances, but you know what I mean — my dad was close to retirement, and fairly susceptible to suggestions of spending his golden years driving or being driven around the country, like to weekends in Tagaytay or Subic with my mom. And I just had to appeal to his sense of entitlement to get him to agree that he deserved a prize for all his decades of hard work in the maritime insurance industry. That was the key — it was going to be his car, not mine. That way he would also pay for the gas and the spark plugs, even if he was going to stay home most of the time playing Scrabble with my mom. When the 2005 Ford Escape came up for sale at that unbelievably low price, all I had to do was give Dad a little nudge for him to tip over and sign the check, hallelujah. It was like the heavens had conspired to deliver me a chariot in toreador red, to reward me for my cleverness, and to compensate me for all the nasty rejections I’d received since high school.
But this isn’t about me or the car. It’s the professor I’m talking about, isn’t it?... about how he died that awful day in late November.
Some time in September, things began to go wrong, horribly wrong, for the professor. It was bad enough that Typhoon Emong hit the country, the strongest and worst in nearly thirty years. Which was longer than I’d been alive, come to think of it. Emong killed hundreds of people as far south as Surigao, and brought crusty old trees crashing down on power lines, so that the UP campus went without light and water for three days. I rode a bike to the professor’s house just to see how they were doing, and found the old man drying out some papers. Letters from his mother, he said — written while he was still in graduate school — that had been soaked when the wind ripped off a corner of the roof and rain came streaming in. I was surprised to hear the roof creaking and see Lalaine up there herself, hammer in hand, tamping down the errant sheet of galvanized iron. I shouted to her and she acknowledged me with a wave. Looking up at her in shorts, I caught a glimpse of long white thigh before Lalaine disappeared to work on the dangerous edge and I had a chance to say, “Be careful.”
But like I said, worse things were to come for the professor.
First, a few days after the storm lifted and the last fallen branches had been cleared by road crews, Professor Sanvictores came home dejected, profoundly humiliated by Professor Umali’s incontrovertible proof that the annual reports to the governor-general from his caretaker in Sibutu had been outright forgeries or fatally compromised copies — at least the segments from 1885 to 1891 — given that the real records had been unearthed by one of Umali’s assistants at the Houghton Library in Harvard. Professor Sanvictores was so upset and distracted, he scraped the left fender guard of the Escape against a post in the garage entryway when he drove home. It’s still there, a faint and meaningless scratch, more annoying than anything, but there.
Second, Lalaine had become pregnant by someone else. The professor told me the somber news in mid-November, while we were sitting under the mango tree that shaded the gazebo in the yard. His face was in the shadows: “But I couldn’t get it up. I never could,” he said. “That was the problem, that was our problem.”