Post by ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano on Jun 13, 2007 19:09:06 GMT -5
Continuation of Good Intentions 101 SY '72-'73...
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... Fuck 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 hiccups. 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.
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... Fuck 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 hiccups. 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.