Excerpts from
FireFly
© 1997 by Edessa Ramos

On the day I met him, the sky was an incredible sapphire over the treetops, draping itself over the horizon. There was no indication of the turmoil of the times.

The meeting hall of a Catholic retreat center in Antipolo was built like a huge open-air verandah overlooking peaceful gardens of bougainvillea, rose bushes and guava and ipil-ipil trees. It had immense shutters that were shut during rainy days. From the gardens drifted in the sweet symphony of insects and mountain birds, a rather unlikely accompaniment to the heated deliberations inside the hall. Like the fingers of a feverish hand, hot breezes swept in from the nearby Sierra Madre foothills to caress our brow.

The discussions were as heated as the weather. The debates revolved around the strategy of human rights work under the new regime and the question of cooperation with the seven-month-old government. While I listened, I noticed him from afar, fleetingly from across the wide room, with his legs crossed, a pen poised motionless between his fingers. Vaguely I thought I recognized him but could not remember how.

I was deep in my own thoughts about the debate, preparing my intervention, when I was startled by the sound of his voice. Deep and clear, it resonated across the hall. Kind and quiet, but forceful, and sad, to me it seemed. Why sad?

He spoke of the folly of collaboration. His release, he said, was the President´s strategy for testing her capacity to win over the left. He reminded the assembly of the new spate of secret arrests and disappearances, a practice which was picked up with little hesitation. Barely had the corpse of the old dictatorship gone cold when its record of human rights violations will soon be surpassed.

His bold predictions were received with an uneasy silence. Entranced, I took in his every word.

The following day he was at the human rights office in search of reference materials. He sought me out and requested my help in selecting titles from our library. Little angels dug a path of footprints across my stomach as I willingly obliged.

**********

Isko had a wife. A young, breathtakingly beautiful woman whom the military picked up eleven years ago, leaving him alone to care for their infant daughter. It was during the early years of Martial Law. For weeks the family searched for her, in every camp, in every known military stronghold all over the region. Thousands of pesos were spent buying leads from informers. Her father, a local government official, was going insane over his powerlessness to retrieve his daughter. Isko spent several hours a day looking for witnesses in the university campus where she was last seen. Every evening at home, he would search through piles of documents for some clue, some reason to hope, some possible legal recourse, while one hand held the milk bottle stuck to his baby's mouth, rocking the bamboo cradle with his knee. When night deepened, he would sneak into the backyard behind the moss-covered wall to burn papers in secret, seeing her face in the ashes. Did he weep then? Did he bear it in silence?

She was never found. There had never been a body to mourn or to bury. No grave upon which to light candles during All Soul's Day. Every year in November, when most people were trekking to the local cemeteries to pay homage to their deceased loved ones, the family was in some military camp somewhere, begging, buying, threatening for information. Every time some bit of news was heard about a sighting, or of women prisoners being thrown into military jeepneys, or of a body being excavated, off they would go to investigate, fearful to hope, yet breathlessly prepared, though not quite, never quite prepared for the discovery of her torture and death. Ready to weep if it was her. Ready to weep if it wasn't. Still, she was never found.

With the support of all her aunts and uncles and cousins and elders, her parents took the baby from Isko to raise as their own. Their words were scathing, blaming him and his political activism for their daughter's fate, crucifying his soul upon her painful memory. For sure, they said, he would be a failure as a father the way he was as a husband. They resolved that their granddaughter shall be spared the same suffering as its mother. His protests had been useless.

Days after, he stood a few yards outside their gate straining to catch a glimpse of his daughter playing in the yard with the maid. He had wanted to say goodbye, but he had walked away without trying. One month after, Isko quit the university and joined the armed guerrillas operating in the mountains of Northern Luzon.

**********

Isko was still standing in the afternoon sun. I watched its rays playing hide and seek with the dark and gray fronds of his hair the way my fingers had always longed to.

While we sat on the bamboo bench munching on the biscuits, he took out a picture from the worn-out clutch bag and showed it to me. My heart stopped with awe at the sight of the hauntingly beautiful face bathed in sepia. She was faded like an apparition from another century, but her eyes broke free from the curtain of magic surrounding them and pleaded with me to take her sorrow away.

"The picture had to withstand the dampness of detention cells. It's the only one I have of her, taken shortly before she disappeared. She was barely twenty..." His voice trailed off and I saw an empty expression cloud his face.

"So young," I whispered. "So much to live for."

In one fluid motion he had taken the picture and put it away.

"You haven't told me about it," I said.

"About what?"

"Prison... detention."

That smile revisited his face. "You've read about it. You visited some camps. You know."

"I guess so..."

His refusal to talk kept me quiet on the subject . Yet that did not cure the longing in my heart to know what he had endured. The darkness of his cell; the one piece of sky through a hole in the wall that gave him comfort; the coughing and weeping of other human beings somewhere down the endless corridors. The memory of his wife, that nocturnal companion which kept him company through the years of isolation. His eyes could not hide from me this part of his history.

During his first year in the military camp, they came for him at different hours of the day. Time had often stood still, merciless, denying him any form of respite from the torture he suffered in their interrogation room, in that cold empty room where his naked body was placed for limitless hours against the air rushing out of the air-conditioning unit. He started to believe then that time was on their side, and that therefore it was his enemy, and continued to do so for many years after that. Even after his release, he held a considerable amount of resentment for it, and his only recourse was to withdraw - from time, from them whose names and faces are seared into his memory, from the entire physical environment of his agony, and into the safe haven of his mind.

I longed to hear about it from him, in his own words. Everything that I knew so far came from the entries in his case file and bits of intimate reports from the doctor who treated him during his post-release rehabilitation. The telltale marks on his body. The advanced case of asthma. More seriously, the kind doctor's attempts to release him from his nightmare after which he would be found curled up in a fetal position, a shivering ball of humanity, seeking the forgotten comfort of his mother's womb. All these I wanted to hear from him. With my embrace I knew I could still the trembling in his heart so expertly disguised by his cool, unwavering tone. I, now his most intimate friend, would know where it hurts, would lay a healing finger upon it and calm its throbbing.