Tracing Her

Written on: November 16, 2009



Muntinlupa, Philippines

Cold Tuesday afternoon, December 1995. Several people had already come by, and then walked away with hidden faces, troubled by the reason of the visited and the putrid life that was dictated ahead of them. For almost twice a week, people goes in and out from the dilapidated doors, leaving wakes of both stagnant burden and seldom strings of contentment, forgiveness and joy. And Cecilia, a person who had just awakened from her persistent nightmare, was just about to see and do things across these doors in a different way. Or maybe, she wasn’t much hopeful it would ever be possible.

As she disembarked from the cab, she noiselessly walked across the well-attended pavement, passed through different foul smelling corridors from the first floor up; until she was led into a direction she expected to. Clatter of crumpled scratch pages with some numbers scribbled in them, circular traces of dried beverage leakage onto the wooden desks, old newspapers, and crisscross of wires snaking from the outdated computers and destroyed printers welcomed her with warm nostalgia. Although it wasn’t exactly the same as she used to see it, it was still in its own identity in the universe to be recognized; teeming with decay and depravity, so far from the clean and orderly world she lived in.

Suddenly, a voice of a woman startled Cecilia back into place. “Ma’am, you may go inside.”

Seconds later, as assisted, Cecilia was pulled into a massive cross-section of steel bars. She hesitated at first when a female guard keyed on the padlock, but once it was done and swung open before her she couldn’t help but to step inside and breathe in the air filled with the smell of rust and numbing expectations.

A woman in orange jumpsuit welcomed her with unreadable facial expression across her rounded face. Her deep brown eyes followed her movement as she neared to the desk and pulled a chair to sit. Then the moment had followed for Cecilia to stare at her mother which she hadn’t seen for a very long time. She had imagined once what she would look like, but seeing her face for real was different from the image she had made herself. The first thing that caught her attention was the neck-level hair with a mix of white strands, three to four after she counted, growing down from the central crease. The contrast was so vivid like that of an umbrella. Below, she caught the eyes, same eyes, wherein sagging flesh below had only taken a bit of its beauty. This made her wonder what they had been through; but it’s a wonder so less than her average interest at the moment.

“Hi’ Feli. How are you doing?”

“I was shocked to see how much your face had changed, Cecil,” the woman remarked. “But of course, I know it would be you.”

“So do I.”

With a glimpse of silence, the conversation hanged like a suspended cobweb. The air was temporarily filled by indistinct chit-chat of nearby guards, and distant smashing of doors reverberating against the concrete walls. Few seconds passed to several more seconds. There’s a blank air that surrounded the room. Her mother’s oval face confronted her thoughts the way a child ask for sweet goodies that were locked up inside glass jars.
As gloomy light passed through the nearby windows, a new woman was lit before Cecilia, a face structured by fleshy cheeks ironically against a thin and petite body that was half hidden by a chipping unpainted wood desk. She remembered Feli bragging her photogenic sashes because of this. Of course, that was before she met her father.

She once said as they were sitting at the backyard one afternoon, her younger sister Tina playing with a newly bought rabbit from the nearby church early that morning, that it was the major interest of her father Henry. They met inside a bank both as tellers in the early 60’s. And with the fact that they were aware being both physically attractive, they went along so well. Henry was raised in the suburban Samar and was new to Manila where Felicidad had spent her life since birth. “It’s just a matter of months when I said yes,” she told her many times. “Then another month after that we decided to get married.” Two years later, Cecilia was born.

“So,” Cecilia broke the deafening silence, “Do they treat you well in here? Do they give decent food? Clean blanket?”

“You smell good, Cecil,” the woman in orange said. “I smell your perfume even before they told me my daughter was going to pay a visit. Your taste hadn’t even changed.”

“Shut up.”

“I keep myself informed as much as possible about you even though it’s so hard it’s like I’m prying open a door to which house used to be mine. You were not calling, or giving out letters. I don’t care if I’ve been well taken care of or given with clean blanket. You know, I just --” Feli paused. “Anyway, I managed to know that you have been married five years ago. I haven’t seen the guy but I know he’s a good man. And he has a beautiful name- Henry. Just like your father.”

Cecilia forced a smile.

“Your father would be so happy to see you well now.”

And after she smiled, Cecilia’s jaw suddenly tensed.

“You have kids?”

She breathed in before saying a word, “We have two, both girls.”

“I’m so excited to see my grand daughters.”

“Feli, you know it wouldn’t be possible,” she smiled a wry smile. “I wouldn’t let them get any nearer to a wicked person like you. And in the first place they would be shocked to see their grandmother alive knowing she died even before they were born.”

Feli couldn’t help but to avert her eyes into somewhere else.

“Why?” she asked. “Are you scared you would indeed die here without having a glance at them?”

“Cecil, please don’t do this to me.”

“But I want to. It’s my turn, Feli. It’s my turn. You’ve made my early life miserable, now it’s my time to make you walk, eat… and sleep… and breathe… as miserable as I grew up with the vision of my father bludgeoned to death--”

“Please--” Feli pleaded.

“—killed by her own wife, and to feel so empty and lonely and…” she couldn’t speak the next word. A lump was intruding through the passage between her lips and swollen heart. Her eyes could only moist itself to relieve some of the explosion burning inside her chest. But before she gave in to a noticeable burst, she successfully managed to bring herself back in. “You shouldn’t be thankful that I visited,” she finally said. “I came here not to make you feel better. I’m here to bring back the days you killed papa.”

“Cecile, you know--”

“Please, Feli! You have told us in the court days you have done it, and I felt justice had come since. But suddenly it was taken back as I realized I couldn’t accept the idea that you have done that to him.” Then with a force like wind, “ Feli! Papa had loved you!” Cecilia began to shout. “He loved you! And he is our father!

“But things turned shit,” she said in a lower voice. “What is it with aunt you think more worthwhile than your own family, huh?”

“Your father wasn’t the person you think, Cecil. He turns to a stranger when you and Tina were out of school. But his cousin treated me differently every time. She was always there for me. She loved me and I couldn’t help but to fall in love with her. You can’t blame me for feeling things.”

“Of course, I can. It’s your choice. You can turn away but you didn’t.”

Feli fell silent. A woman carrying plastic bags could be seen outside the window.

“As I recall, a close neighbor of yours had a statement that she heard you screamed before a shot was heard.”

Feli smiled, “Yes. I--”

“Don’t fuck with me. It’s one of the reasons I went here,” she said. “A week ago, she confessed she had been paid by the defendant. That’s you, of course.”

Feli’s face suddenly changed. She looked back at the window. The woman was gone.

“How does that feel? Lucky? That lie wouldn’t make your sentence even worse, right? But it proves a lot of things of who you really are; what you further deserves.”

“Yes. I deserve the worst.” It was all she could say.

“Papa’s body had been uncovered from a backyard in a residential area in Mandaluyong. Have you seen how he looked like then, fresh from crashed concrete?”

Feli didn’t speak.

“I’m asking you!”

“No,” Feli said. “Oh, God. No.”

“Well… half of his skull had been severed into pieces. His jaws hung open like he was pleading for air or something. Forensic people discovered his teeth were jammed probably even before he went unconscious. His legs were severed, so was his lower spine that had led him to a partial paralysis until he was shot dead, close range onto the nose bridge. In short, the murder wasn’t what you claimed to be a self-defense. It was intentional. He was slaughtered. Like a savage beast-- from the street.”

Then a voice called out from the distance just outside the metal railings. “Five minutes!”

“The trial closed in with a question lingering in the air,” Cecilia said. “I was thinking that maybe you were with aunt when the crime was done, am I wrong?”

Without a trace of hesitation she answered, “No.”

“Well, so you let her live her life in freedom?” she asked. “You know, we hadn’t heard of her for more than a decade. That proves you love her unconditionally.”
“That proves it,” Feli said coldly.

“Unfortunately, she doesn’t. She might be mingling with other woman out there at this moment, making them believed she really cared, and would sacrifice for the sake of forbidden love. ”

“I don’t care.”

These three words struck her chest so painfully that made her threw a sarcastic smile on her mother’s face--an act of painful dismissal.

“Well, I think I would be very late to the party,” she said, with a tone of termination as if she just wanted to quit talking to someone who dared insulting her whole life. “It wouldn’t bring us elsewhere, anyway.”

Cecilia began pulling herself together, clutching her bag, key chains rattled. Standing up, she greeted, “Merry Christmas, Feli.” Then she strode away towards the guards standing on the hallway.

The man to the left was smiling to Cecilia’s direction as she walked nearer to them. “We’ve got another beautiful visitor, eh?”

“Don’t talk like that,” the man on the right replied. “I’ve seen her visited her mother once, maybe 13 years ago. I think she’s a little hard to her mama.” Their eyes locked up on her until she finally walked passed them without uttering a word or giving a nod.

It was past 5 when she stepped out of the facility. On the very moment her face was licked by the cold and warm mix of air, then was the time everything became so vivid: in the cold breeze that would make things easier for both of her mother and herself; and something with the sinking sun that told her she wouldn’t regret whatever she have done and about to in her life especially if it bled out from the past years when her nightmare was taking its place, until the time she went absolutely impervious to her own emotional prime mover.

Impervious, she thought. What a word.
* * *
On the distance, a sight of a woman riding off a cab brought so much pain. It was because she knew that woman would be the last to give her deserved punishment and worst guilt an incriminated could ever be holding and bearing with the rest of its life. A guilt that would cause her to take a second look and warm consideration on a simple Christmas gift she had received from her before she left.

It was wrapped in a clean white cloth which she slowly unwrapped feeling what it was. And each time she unfold one over the other, a pause was dedicated to leave a space in her mind the image of her little Tina and Cecil together far back then. Her daughters so naïve about the world and the pain it would bring to everyone who had been given the chance to be born, grow, and realized upon maturity, just like a fruit, that to be picked and put into a basket filled with the other ripe fruits is a fate to be considered just already like a prison; a place to live without any valid excuses from the misdeeds we hadn’t even had the choice to avoid; a prison she was scared not for her but for her daughters to be caught into, which she had built herself unconsciously from the deed she believed she had in no position to control. And every time she held a fold away, she felt relieved by the voice that said she wasn’t the culprit of the bleak future that was laid before them, but at the same time consumed by her own realization of self-deception.

After some moments, bubbles of sudden fear and uncertainty gradually swarmed around her head like disturbed bees. It was triggered by the sight of a gleaming light emanating from the dreadful blade revealed by the last unfold. And with it was a picture of her two grand daughters beaming on her direction. It was a sight that drew a genuine smile on her battered face that occurred since the longest time she could ever imagine. And right there and then, she turned at the blade for the very first time not as a deadly weapon but as a sharp-edged tool promising to cut away all the skin that covered everything that… well, everything that could have nourished a sweet and unregretful life.