The Blue Afternoon

Carriscant spent eight years behind the grey walls of Bilibid prison before he was transferred to the island of Guam, to a prison camp for former unrepentant insurrectos (battles were still being waged in the hills of Mindanao as late as 1913) run by the US military. In 1919, after serving sixteen years of his sentence he was paroled and went to live in Capiz, on Panay island, where he opened a small restaurant in the main square of that pretty provincial town. He was still obliged to report to the authorities in Iloilo once a month until the full term of his sentence was up. He never returned to Manila and lived quietly and forgotten in Capiz where his restaurant, ' La Esperanza', earned him a decent living. It was only in 1935 when he bought the house of a former Portuguese manager of the sugar refinery there, and came across a stack of old illustrated magazines through which he idly leafed, that he ever thought about moving.

I asked Carriscant how he had survived his sixteen years of incarceration. 'Two things, really,' he said, 'though I have to tell you conditions were not so tough, especially on Guam. It was more like a farm there, and I ended up ru

'What was the second thing?'

'You.'

Love is not a feeling. It does not belong to that category of bodily experience which would include, for instance, pain. Love and pain are not the same at all. Love is put to the test – pain is not. You do not say of pain, as you do of love, 'That was not true pain, or it would not have disappeared so quickly.'

It was Udo Leys who told Carriscant about A

'She's going back to Germany,' Udo told him, morosely. 'I tell her no but she says she can't live here. The shame, the scandal. Everyone knows her as the woman married to the murderer.'

'But I wasn't found guilty of murder.'

' Salvador, I have to tell you, everyone talks as if you did it.'

'Jesus Christ… Anyway, I'm sorry about A

'Ah, Salvador, she'll never see you. Never again, she say. She's even given up her job with the bishop. She stays indoors, she can't face anyone.'

'Did you give her my last letter?'

'She tear it up, before my eyes. She won't see you.'

'Poor A

'Listen, it's not so easy for me,' Udo protested equably. 'Everybody talks about it, everybody wonders how and why, why were those men selected as victims… A cause celebre, Salvador. They'll be talking about it for years.'

'I didn't do it, Udo. I didn't do anything. I'm an i

'Of course you are. I know that. But you'll never stop people talking.' He smiled apologetically. 'Anyway, it'll be better for the child to grow up away from this atmosphere.'

'What child?'

Udo frowned. 'Didn't A

We dined in the hotel: a mutton stew which I disliked but which Carriscant declared was among the finest he had ever tasted.

'Mutton is a coarse fibrous meat with a strong taste. This dish is not pretending to be anything else. Garlic, potatoes, carrots and cabbage, what more could you ask for?' Back on dry land his appetite had returned. The dessert was a dense flat triangle of cake, a kind of heavy sponge, served with syrup from a green and gold can. The clientele were all smartly dressed, the dining tables covered with clean linen, the silverware much used but well shined.

'I like this hotel,' Carriscant said, spooning more syrup. 'I could live here.'

Adulthood. When the prospect of physical or sensual excess is no longer enticing. Is this why I feel an adult? Is this why I feel so old beside Salvador Carriscant?

THURSDAY, 4 MAY

I sit at the pine table in my room and stare out at the street with the trams going by with a clatter and fizz. Their approach is a

So: S.C.'s version goes like this. During the false period of reconciliation with A

My head fills with clamouring questions when I try to come to terms with these facts. How did she end up in German New Guinea? Carriscant said Udo Leys told him she was returning to Germany… How did she meet Hugh Paget? Was she married to him by the time I was born, or did he marry her afterwards and adopt the baby girl as his own?… The thought comes to me that Hugh Paget might be merely a convenient fiction. An old photograph of a man of the cloth, found somewhere. A handy sad story to relate to a kind fellow like Rudolf Fischer; a neat explanation for the presence of a baby daughter. My mother is no fool. Widow's weeds hide a great deal…

Hugh Paget. My English father.

Question: How did Carriscant know my name? How did he know to come looking for me in Los Angeles?

We went out to buy Carriscant a new suit – his idea. We found a tailor's on the Rua Conceicao and Carriscant bought a three-piece suit off the peg. It was a dark navy blue with a thin red and white chalkstripe, a double-breasted coat and a vest with small lapels. With it we purchased a cream soft-collared shirt and a maroon tie. The trousers had to be taken up an inch or so, which they did on the premises while we waited. He looked well in it: a fit, boxy, broad-shouldered older man, and the cream shirt set off the olive tones in his skin. And all of a sudden I see the young surgeon in Manila -confident, gifted, and so very sure of himself. Carriscant celebrates by having a haircut and a professional shave. I stand outside the barber's and watch the thick suds applied to his face, see the poised careful scraping as the swathes of smooth skin are exposed. Carriscant studies himself in the mirror, his fingers on his chin, pulling and pushing, testing the grain.

He is dressing for someone-not me-and intends to look his best.

In the afternoon we go to an a

Mr Dillingham was a serious young man with a pronounced overbite which he tried to disguise by pushing his bottom lip out and up to cover his protruding top teeth, a trick which had the effect of making him look oddly pugnacious. But whenever he talked, or smiled, the old overbite reestablished itself until he remembered his trick again. I became so fascinated with this labial manoeuvre that I found I was paying scant attention to his words. I concentrated once again.