CARMEN  SARMIENTO

Jennifer Misa remembered the day that Martial Law was declared. (The dates of the signing of the proclamation, and of the actual proclamation itself, had differed for numerological purposes.)  She was in the shower and the radio was playing Van Morisson’s  “Brown-eyed Girl” with its lilting lyrics and light calypso beat.  That was not unusual, except that the song kept on playing repeatedly as if on a time warped loop. Seven times, Jennifer counted--more than long enough for her to shampoo twice and let the strawberry scented conditioner soak through her hair roots.  Then there was silence and nothing but the bewildered stutter and aimless crackle of static.  It was the same on all the other stations on the AM band. The TV channels had also gone blank--just an enormous blind unblinking eye and a constant high-pitched electric whine that hurt the ears. Those were the first signs most people had that a threshold had been crossed, that things were somehow different yet irrevocably the same. 

 A warm muzzy sense of profundity washed over Jennifer as she stood in the shower and she thought, that this was what death must be like: naked and senselessly quiet. Her heart went thud. She was fourteen and her emotions were as graphic as comic strip balloons.  Her favorite expression was Yikes! She had tried, “Fuck! Shit!” on occasion,  but they just weren’t her. Now she said it: “Yikes! This is so boring.” 

 Big Brother was bouncing with excitement and wanted to go for a ride. He wanted to see tanks and the militia in action just like in Paris or Prague. He wanted to have one of those posters denouncing the President as the Mad Bomber for a souvenir before they were all scraped off or whitewashed over. Mother rapped him sharply on the top of his greasy head. 

 “Idiot! Stay home. It’s not safe.” She whispered harshly. It was as if she expected someone to be listening in on their conversations right there in their living room with the plastic covered faux Louis XIV furniture and the white and gold bric-a-brac of kissing swans and rosy-cheeked cherubim. “It’s better to be safe,” Mother said, waggling her eyebrows knowingly and walling her bright fearful eyes in the direction of Col. Poblete’s duplex across the street. Jennifer’s heart beat a little faster despite herself, a stacatto of little thumps and thuds.  Arlene Poblete was her classmate. What if her father or one of his operatives had been listening in when ever she called that cute La Sallite using Arlene’s name instead of her own?  She told herself that they must have better things to do than eavesdrop on a fourteen year old but you never really knew for sure.

 Mother compressed her  lips  to suggest discretion.  She had been a little girl in Pampanga during the Second World War and still held close the bleak grey memory of fear, hunger and hiding amidst sudden death. Father had spent his War years as a high school student in Batangas, closeted in his room and reading when there was not enough to eat.  The Japanese had passed through their town a few times but his most harrowing Wartime experience was when they had used several of his Harvard Classics (a prize he had won for a national oratorical competition) as kindling. In general, the family experience of the military was not pleasant. 

 There was no school for a couple of weeks. The days flowed into each other with the seamlessness of water. It felt just like summer vacation except that it was late September. Jennifer and Big Brother could have slept till noon but there were no shows on TV, and nothing much on the radio to keep them up that late. They didn’t dare use the phone too often because of the awesome certainty that their conversations might pique the interest of Col. Poblete and his invisible minions. Jennifer didn’t remember on which day the President came on TV but it must have been around dinnertime.  His eyes flashed fire as he made his announcement.  Father and Mother listened gravely then Father got up from the table.  He picked his teeth and sighed. 

 “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” he declaimed with the toothpick still stuck between his clenched teeth.

 “What do you mean--’despair’--he got everything he wanted, didn’t he? the Great Dictator...”  Big Brother mumbled, with head bent and hair canopied over his eyes. His boney knees wagged together rhythmically, a sign that he was really thinking hard.

 “Stop talking like a Communist.  This is brilliant what the man has done, a stroke of genius—or rather, one stroke of the pen and he has solved all the nation’s problems,”  Father said.  He tussled Big Brother’s hair, the only way he could show affection to him now since they had stopped kissing one another when Big Brother had turned eighteen, except at Christmas and on birthdays. “I don’t know what the Jesuits are teaching you--that de la Costa--he sounds like a Leftist to me.  But God bless you, boy, you just don’t understand.  You’re too young to have a sense of history, you half baked little potato... Ah, youth!  It is wasted on the young.” He put a Ray Conniff record on the stereo and sang along while Jennifer’s little brothers capered about like wind-up toys.

 Jennifer learned much later that seven and its multiples were the President’s favorite numbers. She wondered if there had been any special mystical  significance about her hearing “Brown-Eyed Girl” played seven times on that fateful morning when it seemed as if time itself had stopped.  Did the Brown-eyed  Girl in the song perhaps refer to Inang Bayan?  Try as she might, she couldn’t recall more of the lyrics, except that there was something in it about the day when the rains came.

 Thus was the New Society come upon them all. Mother and Father whispered about how influential enemies of the state were given the courtesy of fleeing to the United States.  Their assets were frozen though so, tragically, they had sunk to the middle class or even lower middle class.  The Vice President, who was now the President’s enemy, was branded as the number one oligarch.  That word  was added to the vocabulary list for the Current Events portion in Jennifer’s Social Studies class. The Vice President was third generation sugar money which made him old rich by Filipino standards. The entire hacendero family was officially denounced for having built their fortunes on the broken backs of the poor sacada, the itinerant fieldhand whose harrowing misery had been documented by a chubby Jesuit with Ilonggo antecedents himself. The sugar barons’ lavish ways were legend in the midst of bone crushing poverty.  During the golden wedding anniversary of the Vice President’s uncle and aunt (who happened to be first cousins), it was said that Cristal champagne had flowed endlessly and sprayed iridescent drops of gold from a fountain as large as a small swimming pool. A full orchestra, flown in all the way from Boston, had played Broadway tunes. To punish the family, the contents of their ancestral mansion on Roxas Boulevard were auctioned off for charity.  It was rumored that one of the toilet seats was studded with seed pearls. 

 “Ouch, that must hurt worse than almoranas when you sit on it,” Big Brother chuckled, his hunched shoulders shaking with mirth.  “Those rich bastards don’t know what to do with their money.  They should just give it to me.” 

 Father slowly growled, making them all jump. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Jennifer knew that he’d always wanted to be on stage, maybe even in politics.  Selling insurance was not his avocation.  Father went on:

 “Just think about it, Boy--What could be more foolish than all these lemmings joining the Youth Nationalists when the parents are breaking their backs just to send them to the best schools they can afford?  It’s like spitting in their faces.  Oh how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a child’s ingratitude! For look ye upon this evil generation:  it seeks a sign.” And his red face contorted with pain and rage as if he too were one of those unfortunate spat upon parents cursed with an ungrateful child.  Mother massaged his forearms soothingly.

 Big Brother just laughed at Father. He was always in such a good mood that Mother and Father never thought he would have the kind of focus and dedication one needed to be an activist. Admittedly, he had a rebellious streak. They had given up trying to get him to cut his hair.  Then on the day of his high school graduation, he had shaved his head  and put on a long wig.  When he went up to get his diploma, he had bowed and raised his mortarboard and the wig along with it.  The whole graduating class broke out into wild hoots of laughter, catcalls and cheers.  It was some time before order was restored in the auditorium.

 Father and Mother’s greatest fears alternated between Big Brother taking up his best friend Mokong’s dare to streak across the football field for a bottle of tequila, or his not finishing his engineering course but becoming a rock musician instead. They spoke loudly and frequently about how disreputable it was to be an artist or an entertainer, especially in a combo, even if one worked in Guam or Hong Kong.  Big Brother pointedly ignored this and used his own savings to get a bass guitar for his last birthday. Almost a year had passed and still all that he could play were the opening chords of Sunshine of Your Love, Innagadadavida and Smoke on the Water.  It didn’t seem likely that any rock band would take him in with such a limited repertoire. 

 The school year Martial Law was declared, Big Brother had set out to see for how long he could wear his  Levi’s without getting them laundered. That had seemed to be the only thing he was serious about then. He had already worn them for three straight months and the jeans were so stiff with grime, they could have stood by themselves. It was a silly stunt and especially infuriating when he sat on Jennifer’s bed just to annoy her.   Mother made him sit on old newspapers at the dining table and didn’t change his sheets along with the rest of the family’s because it seemed futile.  He’d stink them up right away again.

 Inexorably, Jennifer felt her whole existence pulled into the vortex drawn by Martial Law.  It was ominous that it should have happened when she was coming of age, just entering high school, and Big Brother just entering college.  It was as though their destinies had been set, their doom inexorably spelt out. The grey spirit of the New Society descended upon St. Claire’s where Jennifer was a freshman. Sister Anacleta, the principal, had promptly announced that because of the government’s austerity program, there would be no frivolities such as school annuals, class rings or graduation photos that year. Class parties, graduation balls, even “soirees” were no longer authorized. The juniors and seniors howled as one “Oh my God!  Shit you, Sister Anacleta!” 

 Sister Anacleta was unmoved by their protests. She knew her civic duty. She was convinced that the new dispensation was in earnest. Even the redoubtable Miss Sphinx, a revered Clairian alumna and the most feared society columnist of the day, was not spared. She was detained along with all the other radicals, labor leaders and leftists. It was popularly assumed that all those blind gossip items about the Seven Deadly Sinners (a list of adulterous matrons, one of whom  was another true Clairian from kindergarten through College) and their powerful lovers had been the reason for her imprisonment.  Miss Sphinx insisted that there was more to it than airing their dirty linen.  The true cause had been the publication of some incendiary verses she had contributed to a Lithuanian literary quarterly.  When she got out, Miss Sphinx would be unemployed since her publisher was also in prison.  Besides, all the society pages had been excised like so many tumors from those newspapers that were still allowed.

 Learning about the poor became a graded part of the Clairian curriculum. As if to remind them of all the things they would miss out on because of their more exalted positions, Sister Anacleta had them make dust rags out of T shirt scraps, braid rag rugs, and shave walis tingting for Work Ed. There were jokes that the Order of St. Claire’s was making money from the unpaid child labor of its students, and that Sister Anacleta wanted to compete with the poor for their livelihood.  Then, of course, there were the usual mission drives for used clothing, newspapers, rice, whatever.  Occasionally, the assignments struck Jennifer as odd, like when they were all asked to bring cake flour one day, then refined sugar, milk, eggs and shortening on the succeeding days.  She didn’t recall ever seeing an oven in a squatter shanty. It reminded her of when Marie Antoinette had said that the poor should eat cake, except that Sister Anacleta apparently wanted them to bake the cakes themselves. 

  To show that the school was entirely in accord with the New Society ideals of social justice, Sister Anacleta took a direct hand in the government’s Youth for Civic Action Program.  No more of the shallow dilettantism that had just the graduating high school classes traipsing out to the Balintawak market, in order to check on whether or not the minimum wage could buy enough to feed the statistically average urban poor family of three adults and five children for one day.  Their first and only sortee had been disastrous. The Clairians had stuck out in what Miss Battung, the Social Studies teacher’s firmly believed to be correct masa attire for the wet market: plain white T-shirts, sneakers  and dungarees.  And so, the first group of twenty four teenage girls chaperoned by Miss Battung and their homeroom teacher had descended en masse onto the muck and mire of one of the filthiest public markets in the archipelago.  Fearfully, they had linked arms and pressed cologne soaked  handkerchiefs to their quivering nostrils.

 The vendors had been outraged at being treated as alien specimens to be studied.  “Anong akalain ninyo--hindi kami mga tao katulad ninyo? Yung mga Intsik diyan, hindi nga kayo tao. Mas Pilipino kami sa inyo--pa-Inggles Inggles pa kayo diyan... F--- you!” then they had pelted the girls with assorted market rubbish. Animal and fish entrails, swine eyeballs and chicken heads, black, mushy banana skins and slime coated cabbage leaves balled up in wet newspapers had made accurate missiles that left damp muddy imprints on those benighted white T shirts.  The girls had run shrieking and in tears back to the air-conditioned coaster (that had been kept circling around the market) and frantically scoured their defiled selves with more baby cologne and rubbing alcohol.   The senator’s daughter whimpered hysterically about having the market shut down. 

 From then on, Sister Anacleta had decided to keep them in their own backyards, so to speak, and they went back with great relief and renewed fervor to  their monthly social immersions at Bangkusay, the neighborhood squatter settlement.  The only change was that now the same squatter family would be visited by all the high school classes, not just the seniors.

  The Clairians collectively referred to the women of Bangkusay as manang with the careful courtesy which they would never have shown them if the same women had worked in their households as maids.  Jennifer suggested to Miss Battung that it would be so much more practical if they just kept a file about each family so that a continuous stream of girls didn’t have to keep bothering them, asking them the same questions every time--Ilan po ang mga anak ninyo?  Ilang taon na po sila? Ano naman po ang trabaho ni mister?...  Miss Battung ignored it, of course.

 Manang Flor had the most interviews because her shanty was somewhat better than the rest as far as the Bangkusay shanties went, with its wooden floor and a  roof that was nailed down--not just held in place by old tires. It  even had a second room including a tiny bathroom with a buhos type toilet.  This probably accounted for why her shanty at least did not smell as badly as those of her Bangkusay neighbors.  Some of the families they visited were embarrassed about even inviting them in. Under Sister Anacleta’s New Society curriculum, a different group of Clairians would troop through her shanty every two weeks.  Manang Flor didn’t seem to mind. She always welcomed them in patiently,  and remained standing by the doorway while the girls sat in the only chairs she had. Five Clairians at a time could fit into what was her kitchen, living and dining room. They  scrutinized her meager possessions, tittered over the posters of Nora Aunor and Victor Wood, oohed approvingly over the college diploma of  Manang Flor’s daughter Delilah who was a Commerce Graduate from Lyceum and was working as a salesgirl at the Manila C.O.D. Dept. Store. Then the same battery of questions was run by her again.

All the adults Jennifer knew sagely claimed they had expected that Martial Law was going to be declared sooner or later.  What no one could really predict though was how the military would behave.  They ignored Big Brother’s Physics professor, Dr. Celso Morales who was the founder of the ALFID [Anti-Imperialist League for Filipino Indigenous Democracy].  Dr Morales had been so certain he would be arrested that he had immediately gone into hiding. After six harrowing weeks of moving from house to house every night, sleeping on a different living room sofa, a child’s cot or even the maid’s room, when the household had no maid, he had run out of places to hide. Still it was almost a disappointment to learn that no one had come looking for him or even asked about him after all.  Sheepishly, he moved back home.  The last they heard, he had started a new organization:  SETIPHIL (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence in the Philippines) and was constructing his own radio transmitters and receivers in Antipolo.

 Then the Military turned right around and arrested and tortured an Engineering student for no reason other than he had been jokingly nicknamed “Commander Pomeroy.” The arresting officer refused to believe at first that he wasn’t the original Huk commander miraculously rejuvenated in the Age of Aquarius because he happened to be an American mestizo. Since he was already a guest in the stockade, they gave him the water cure and knocked out his front teeth anyway with the hose nozzle.  “Commander Pomeroy’s” parents and their lawyer came to beg for his release with a history book, and the original William Pomeroy’s autobiography that proved their son Lito Olsen  was not the Huk Commander at all. They also brought Lito’s birth certificate, grade school and high school diplomas and annual. Before he was let go, Lito had to get a crewcut and weed the traffic islands along Quezon Boulevard for wasting the authorities’ time by not being who they thought he was.  The last Big Brother heard, he was not going back to the College of Engineering but was applying to become a Seaman.  He wanted to get as far away from the Philippines as he could.

 Except for such stories told around the dinner table, Big Brother never talked politics.  Thus it came as a complete surprise to the entire Misa family when they found one Saturday morning that Big Brother had not “stayed in” at his best friend’s house during the curfew. He had not even gone to that Maryknoll party at La Vista the night before where he’d told them he would be. Mother was searching his room for marijuana and Playboy magazines when Father told her: Big Brother had run away, taking his bass guitar. His best friend Mokong was with him, and two other boys whose names Father couldn’t recall. They were not from the same university.  Word was that they had all gone  to join the Youth Nationalists. Nothing else seemed to be missing from his closet. Big Brother must still be wearing his unwashed jeans and the batik polo shirt he’d left the house in. Mother crumpled to the floor, weeping soundlessly with her face pressed into Big Brother’s smelly mattress. Her fingers clawed feebly at the nappy bedcover. 

 “Get a detective.  Maybe he just went to Angeles or Olongapo  to join a rock band.  We must go there to look for him. Ask Col. Poblete to help find him. Bring him back, now!” she begged Father, her breath coming in wheezing rasps. “Have him arrested before he gets himself  killed.” 

 Jennifer was so scared Mother might die from the pain and the sorrow that Big Brother’s latest stunt had caused her and she began to cry too, short frightened hiccoughs. Mother’s face twisted in anguish and she stumbled towards Jennifer and frantically pulled her into her arms.  Mother hugged her so tightly to her bosom that her braid trimmed scapular left its imprint on her cheek. Jennifer’s two little brothers, spaced over several years like Jennifer and Big Brother, through the Billings Method of natural contraception, stared at them openmouthed through the doorway until the yaya took them away.  “Why is mama making wawaw?” the youngest who was just three years old and insatiably curious asked. This made Mother cry harder and squeeze Jennifer even closer.

 Jennifer could hardly breathe. What if something really awful, unspeakable, unimaginable happened to Big Brother? Then she quickly tried to unthink that thought because her having thought it might just make it so. Such trivial matters as where would he plug in his guitar flew scattershot  into her brain.  He’d left his amplifier behind.  Would the Youth Nationalists  have one in their jungle hideaway, their safe house or wherever it was that he had run off to?  Would they let him play American rock songs like Innagaddadavida? She couldn’t imagine Big Brother as one of the Youth Nationalists and already his face threatened to fade into the black, white and gray anonymity of newspaper photos.  She tried to imagine how she would tell them all the news in school.  Would she be dignified and stoic or tender and weepy? She opened her eyes which had been screwed shut by her tears, and forced herself to stare at his high school graduation photo, trying to memorize while he was yet unchanged, his open lopsided grin, the fall of his unruly bangs.  Maybe this disappearance was another of his stupid jokes.  She tried to will the phone to ring with Big Brother at the other end telling them that he had taken off with his barkada for some far away place like Baguio or Lucban, and had forgotten all about the time.  That would be just like him.  But there was just silence except for their weeping.

  Father angrily rubbed away the tears from his dark rimmed eyes and set his spectacles askew.  “Foolish boy,” he rasped brokenly between gritted teeth.  “Foolish, foolish boy. Putang ina niya.” Then he sobbed. The veins on his neck stood out as he clenched and unclenched his fists helplessly. His knees buckled under and he tumbled onto the bed where Mother and Jennifer were curled together in an embrace.  He was trembling so hard he could not make his hands soothe them though he tried.

 Jennifer had never seen Father cry before.  An irredeemable sense of loss, greater than Big Brother’s strange unaccustomed absence, swept over her.  It was so heavy, so oppressive, it seemed to push her right through the floor. Deep inside her, something--perhaps her very soul—slowly screeched “Yikes!” trying to push itself up through the white bubbles of thought coming out of her brain and rising into vaporous clouds of nothingness and benumbing fear.

 Right before the Christmas break, Sister Anacleta decided to expand the Clairian horizons a few kilometers further: to the North Cemetery where the dead presidents and other late luminaries’ remains were kept in marble and granite mausoleums with the caretakers’ shanties like a skin disease growing along the peripheries.   The place was a marble and granite wonderland with fantastic castles, Gothic chapels, Greek temples, concrete and steel structures built to resemble ships or planes. Some were even air-conditioned with kitchenettes, mini bars and little sitting rooms with poker tables or mahjong paraphernalia.  Their opulence was a grotesque contrast beside the bare poverty of the tin and cardboard shacks where grave caretakers and their families lived.  Jennifer thought of how Big Brother would have loved the painful absurdity of it all. 

 They had not given up on him. Mother had taken to playing pelota with the wife of a PC general, hoping that this would give them some  advantage in their search for Big Brother. There had been false leads.  They had even gone to Quezon province once, expecting to find him safe in detention at a camp there but it was not to be.  The boy that was presented to them looked nothing like him.  They still left the bags of goodies they had brought for Big Brother to the bogus boy although Mother had been unable to contain her disappointment and had wept inconsolably all the way home.  Still she never spoke aloud about her worst fears.

 There were five catechists and three English tutors in Jennifer’s cemetery group. She decided that she would try to teach the graveyard children art.  She spread out sheets of manila paper on top of the tombs for the children to draw on. At first they would not make a mark, expecting her to give them readymade pictures to color. She tried to show them how one could make up pictures on one’s own, or even just play around with slashes, swirls and squiggles of line. They seemed puzzled but tried to oblige her. They were so unused to this exercise that their faintly outlined pictures of the usual rice fields, nipa hut, mountains, coconut trees, scraggly sun  and V-shaped birds in flight were just squeezed onto small patches of the broad paper.  They could not imagine taking up more space. Then they would only take hold of one crayon each so that every drawing was in monochrome. They thought that was the polite thing to do then. It made Jennifer so sad that she decided she would just teach them English too.

 When Jennifer learned that another of their neighbors was being held at Camp Panopio in Cubao, she had gone along with his sister to visit him.  Arlene Poblete, who secretly had a rebellious streak, came too. The younger detainees in his cell bloc were so glad to have visitors that they gave the girls bookmarks and small wood carvings of doves and flowers.  Jennifer and Arlene got letters written on the inside of cigarette wrappers.  They agreed to write back. Jennifer copied some e. e. cummings poetry for a prisoner who gloomily called himself Prometheus.  She decorated her stationery with drawings of Ziggy and Charlie Brown to cheer him up.

   This would be the first Christmas that Big Brother would not be with them. She made each of her detainee friends a small tray of brownies.  For the cemetery children, there was a party at school with a terrific to-do because not everyone had the same items in their loot bags since there had only been so many donations for such and such an item.  Jennifer wanted to scream as scrawny squatter women assailed her and the other volunteers, asking, why had this one gotten biscuits while all her child had was soap or the other way around?  She could not fathom such matters of injustice.

  Then suddenly right between Christmas and the New Year, without any preliminaries, Father brought Big Brother home.  He was a lot thinner, darker and seemed sadder, wearing different clothes now.  Jennifer did not dare ask him about his unwashed Levi’s. They were gone. Mother was so happy that she bought him a better electric guitar. He  spent the holidays just sleeping.  They kept hoping he would play Innagadadavida or Smoke on the Water again. 

 During their New Year’s Day family reunions, no one mentioned that Big Brother had even been gone. Jennifer overheard Father talking about how he had had to pay over Fifty thousand in bribes just to get Big Brother back safe and sound.  That was a lot of money in those days.  Father had gone into debt.  “A child is a child is a child,” he said, not unlike Gertrude Stein. Father trembled so with happiness, that when he tried to tussle Big Brother’s hair as usual, his fingers fell short and merely touched air.  Because it was still the Christmas season, he grabbed him hard and hugged him and kissed him on his forehead and cheeks in front of all the relatives. Big Brother smiled wanly. 

 Jennifer tried to tell him about the things she was learning about the poor that she thought he might want to hear.  He had spent two months living among them and she supposed that their lives would interest him. She told him about the woman in Bangkusay who already had six children by her lover who was a jeepney driver.  Basta driver, good lover. She  was not his only woman.  He had sired eight other children by two others--four each. She thought that she was the favored one because she had two more than her other rivals.  Their last child had cerebral palsy though, and so he had stopped seeing her, claiming that she was bad luck to have brought a blighted child into the world. The poor woman had come to Siser Anacleta for help. Sister Anacleta had sat stiffly across her in the neat and polished parlor, listening in stony silence.  Tears had rolled down the woman’s cheeks, sunken and withered already, though she was not yet thirty, as she stammered out her story.  Then the palsied baby had vomited on the freshly scrubbed and waxed tiles.  Sister Anacleta had not flinched but with her exaggeratedly sweet and clear enunciation, had told the woman over and over how God had punished her for her sins with this accursed child. 

 Big Brother smirked as he listened, then he guffawed.  He almost sounded like his usual self.  Once he said, a military patrol had come looking for them.   They knew that one of the women in their band had just given birth to twins and so they were looking for twin infants in the village that had sheltered them.  The woman in question had hidden one of her infants under a large basin.  All the while that the military had questioned her, she had prayed that the infant would not cry.  When she removed the basin, she discovered that the child had died. 

 “Yikes!”  Jennifer cried, before she could stop herself.  She wished she had something more intelligent to say.  Big Brother leaned back and shut his eyes.  He was sleeping again and she did not disturb his rest.

 Big Brother was too late to go back for the second semester of Engineering although he had been enrolled before his great adventure.  Bits and pieces of it came out at the most unexpected times.  He now ate vegetables. When the cook went on vacation unexpectedly, he offered to go to market for Mother.  He had learned how to cook using the chopped off, still good parts from half rotten vegetables.  As he stir-fried bokchoy, sweet peas and carrots, he told Jennifer about how there had been days when they had nothing to eat except boiled roots and leaves, day in and day out.  There had not even been any salt at times. 

 “One night, they took us into a cave.  It was totally dark except for a couple of torches beside these colored portraits of Lenin  and Mao.  Then we had to bow down before them with hands outstretched while they poured hot wax on our naked palms. We were not to cry out as a sign of our deathless loyalty.”

 Then he laughed.  “You must be really gullible if you believe that I ever did anything like that.”

 Before the school year ended, Sister Anacleta decided that Miss Battung and Jennifer’s group should take the cemetery children on a picnic.  Only the ten most outstanding from the English  and Catechism classes would go. Miss Battung called out the names of the chosen few.

 “Yolly Ocampo,” she said, then with a hint of irritation. “Where is that Yolly?”

 “She’s still taking a bath, Miss,” said a bullet headed little boy whose closely shaved scalp exhibited the many nicks and bald patches that a drunken barber had inflicted.  He was dressed for their outing in a too tight white cotton barong tagalog and shiny dark trousers that hugged his thighs and calves.  His cracked and faded leather shoes were too large for him though.  They looked like they belonged to his father or to an older brother. Jennifer realized that this outing was so special to them  that his mother had dressed him in his best clothes--in all the family’s best clothes!  The mother, with another child on her hip, hovered with shy pride at the fringes of the crowd that had gathered to see the children off.

 Miss Battung frowned upon learning that Yolly who had placed highest in the English class was not ready yet.  It did not bode well for young girls in such circumstances to care overly much about how they looked or smelled.  Baths were an inconvenience in the cemetery squatter settlement where one had to haul water from a single pump close to the gate.  Her taking one right before the outing smacked of profligacy. When Yolly came out, looking radiant in strappy sandals, a wool skirt and sweater and smelling of Camay soap, Miss Battung sniffed:  “Alembong! even if she’s just wearing relief goods...” She considered such determination to speak and write fluent English unseemly in a pretty girl.  She often told the Clairians that all the signs pointed to Yolly ending up as a mail order bride, or worse.

 “Oh if only Miss Battung could become a mail order bride!” someone whispered behind Jennifer. 

 “If only someone would just take her cherry,” another girl whispered back. 

 “Maybe you would have to pay someone to take it,” Arlene Poblete said.  “But who would even have that much money?”

 Jennifer stifled her giggles. She decided that it would be a good idea to write some letters in Miss Battung’s name to those ads in the personals section. She would put Gloria Diaz’s photograph and the address of Miss battung’s boardinghouse.  That should get some responses.

 They took the cemetery children to the Wildlife Park.  It was a school day so there were not many people around.  The children ran to the manmade lagoon and stood around it hand in hand, quietly staring at the expanse of grey water.  “It is the sea!” blurted out the bullet headed boy who remembered having been on a boat from Samar. 

 Then they ate: pancit canton with rice and fried chicken, and hard candy for dessert.    It was a veritable feast for them.  After lunch, they were to go to the Luneta.  Miss Battung counted the cemetery children.  One of them was missing--the bullet headed boy.  Jennifer was sent to look for him.  She found him standing by the chain link fence facing the highway. The day was only half done and already he was full of the unnameable largeness, the phantom promise of plenty that lay beyond the cemetery walls and graves. He was throwing stones at the cars speeding by. The harsh dusty wind tore at his open mouth and the smoke filled rush of the engines burned his fevered and livid eyes.  His thick stubby arms in the ridiculously too short and too tight barong sleeves spun with fervid power and grace.  It almost seemed like he could fly, that he could hurl himself at the cars and they would pass right through him. He was so alive just then, Jennifer did not have the heart to stop him. Besides, she didn’t even know his name.