Amnesty

[ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano]

Amnesty
By Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.

And before I knew it she had seen me, and I sat in the space beside her, wishing that I had taken another bus and yet wanting, despite myself, to reach across the years and embrace my youth.
She reached across the seat and pressed my hand in urgent welcome. Her palm was rough, her fingers deeply brown around the nails. She looked aged and smaller to me, as though her flesh had retreated in dismay to warm the bone. A heavy black bandanna draped her face, and in her smile there were gaps in the corners of her mouth where teeth and gums had withered to the smooth. She wore a large man's shirt and cheap knit pants. Her feet rested in a pair of yellow rubber sandals with daisy-figures brightening the spots between her big and second toes. She hugged a blue plastic grocery bag to her chest, on her lap; the bag bulged softly with what might have been a change of clothes. I remembered a girl in a white tunic and a light green skirt, spinning magic about the heads of the teenage comrades in that end room of the student union building that was called, for some ancient reason, the Trialogue; she may have been that other corner, defined by frantic glances, in our verbose conversations with history. I had been too young to tell her anything like that, a freshman to her junior, but a score of us had secretly pledged ourselves, above the furious clutter of the mimeograph machine and over pots of the textile paint that would proclaim our struggle’s triumph in lasting cotton, to her service and to her defense, in barricade and picket line; this, even when she had left us. I remembered the lock of hair that kept falling down my brow, at seventeen; that would be how she would remember me, and I grieved for time, but her eyes were clear and her grip was firm, and I realized that she had lost none of her faith in me. I noticed then that her shoulders had broadened, swimmer-like, accentuating the smallness of the rest of her; there would be pads of muscle beneath the collar.
“When did you get out?"
“Just yesterday. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was a trick. I thought it was a dream. The gate was open and people were laughing and clapping. I thought I had died and had gone to heaven!”
The new government had decreed a general amnesty for prisoners of her kind, and had let them out to join the jubilation in the streets. So many things were happening, all at once; I was likely to lose my job as an aide to a minister who had fled with the dictator to Hawaii.
“How long were you in?”
“Six years.” In those years I had retrieved, I thought, a future from the chaos. I had finished my MBA, had married, had fathered a pink-cheeked daughter, had paid down payments on a subdivision house and two-liter car. The car had been in the body shop for a new coat of paint when the rebels took over; now I had nothing to redeem it with and was taking the bus to the office to sort out my papers and gaze out the window, through the half-open blinds, at people littering the boulevard with their happiness. “But the last time I saw you was--when? Yes, I know, I remember, in Tino’s funeral, you were there in the chapel, you came up to speak to me, but I don’t remember what you said.”
I had said something to her, ten years ago, as she stood beside her husband’s coffin to receive us, comrades and stragglers alike. It was a difficult period; we were living through a nightmare, trying to keep our heads above the flood of news about friends dragged to waiting cars, jolted to a zone between wakefulness and death by clips and wires, toasted in their heels by clothesirons, caressed by drugs, cushioned by a bed of ice. We honored others, like Tino, who had fought on high ground, valiantly among the leeches, on a diet of roots and leaves; we honored them in awe and rage and fear, hearing in our minds the throb of gunfire and the cries of a refusal, through blood and earth caking in the mouth, to be buried alive in a hillside in Panay, or Cagayan, or wherever it was our Trialogue friends had fallen, to be recovered by patient fathers and returned to family and Christ, months later, a tangle of bones and flesh, shredded, compacted, yet never so dearly loved. We loved them all whose breasts the soldiers sucked before the carving, whose wombs were flayed by bayonets, whose lips were scorched by acid, yet even as we loved them, we inhaled the warm polluted air of our familiar city, and resolved to survive among the roaches.
Shortly after the funeral I received word that she had left to see for herself how it had been for Tino among his distant people. I had often wondered why she had not set out with him the first time; but then he was a worker in a cement factory, and she a physics major; and years later, believing myself purged of all romantic fancy, I was to theorize that such marriages made in Marxist heaven were fated to unravel. She did not return until her capture, reported by all the papers, as an “amazon” crippled in a firefight.
“I wanted to see you then,” I said. “Many times.” Our bus had stopped at an intersection and a knot of children bearing sampaguita leis besieged our window; the perfume offended me, but she had leaned out to buy one.
“I thought so,” she said, “but that’s all right. How much?” I dug quickly into my pockets for the change and insisted on paying for the lei. She sniffed it greedily as the bus surged forward. “Thanks,” she said, stringing the lei around her neck. “Baduy,” she added, giggling.
“I got a job,” I said. “I got married. I thought I’d give it a try. It was a good job, but that’s gone now.” “You’re a good man,” she said, tapping my arm. “You’ll find another one.”
I played with the sheen of my new wristwatch and said “I don’t know.” I was late for work but there was no work so I laughed. “Who knows, who cares?”
“Honestly,” she said, “I don’t remember you too well. You were a boy in a jacket, that’s why I remember you from the funeral, otherwise...”
“I’m thirty-two now.”
“Your hair’s different.”
“Yes.”
“I’m thirty-five,” she said. “I never even thought we’d make thirty. I turned thirty in there. I suppose I should be thankful for prison, shouldn’t I, for keeping me alive.”
“We all manage.”
“Most of us.” She had turned her eyes to the road, recently concreted. Shopping centers had sprouted on both sides.
“I heard about you,” I said. “Here and there I’ve kept in touch.” In the lubricious company of ex-comrades, we had raised toasts to the dead and traded gossip about the living. We learned about the operations on her leg, her apprenticeship to favored sergeants as cook and mistress, her escape and her recapture. I remember that evening well, when we drank to her memory; we ended up brawling and cursing each other for bringing her up. We consoled ourselves by promising to visit her with gifts of such cakes and flowers as prison had never seen, but in the morning traffic we all forgot. That was how it had been, most times. Once, sucking a salad cherry on a jet from Singapore, Vivaldi humming between my ears, I thought of the howling murder that infested the little islands below us, and I wished our flight to vanish into a cloudbank, into the forgiving arms of angels.
“So where are you going?”
“To Zapote. Tino’s mother lives there, or lived there, I’m not sure, she stopped visiting years ago.” “Will you stay here?”
“It depends. If she’s alive, if she asks me to...It isn’t that important. Last night I slept at the Luneta. I never saw so many people walking about, at two in the morning.”
“It’s a dangerous place.”
She laughed, and I felt silly. Then, subdued, she looked at her thick unpolished nails and said “I’d like to paint these and wear a dress, just to see...The things I’m afraid of, you won’t understand.”
I thought of my young and pretty wife, six months heavy with our second child, feigning calmness at the kitchen table when I left her, cutting slivers of chicken with a slender knife.
I had been afraid of too many things: of the knife slipping in my wife’s hand and nicking her; of falling helplessly behind in my payments on the house and car; of getting caught jaywalking, and having the old subversion charges dredged up by some efficient prosecutor; of choking on my food; of meeting former comrades and hearing the same harrowing news, now and then relieved by perplexing accounts of courage in the face of certain death; of my own death, for nothing.
“Was it difficult for you?” Did she have a choice of juice or tea or coffee in the morning?
“In the beginning,” she said. “I had to keep reminding myself that I was more than just my body, I mean, I tried to think of better things, happy things, things to stay alive for. That was difficult.”
“What did you think of?”
“The future. The past. I convinced myself that someday it would all come together, that we would all meet again, and start afresh, and here we are.” She beamed and lit up corners in my soul.