Nadja
The light outside the window turned dark seven times, which was how I knew that a week had passed since they took me away. They put handcuffs and a blindfold on me, and they put me in a police car. Then we rode around for maybe three or four hours—I realized it was almost impossible to tell the time when you can’t see anything. It felt like we were just going in circles forever. I remember my children shouting and crying for them not to take me away. I remember my limping husband pleading with the main man, the one who looked like the leader. Then I heard the leader say that they were just following the law. They weren’t wearing uniforms so I couldn’t tell their ranks, and I didn’t recognize their faces, though I only had a second to look at them before they blindfolded me. It wasn’t like before when we knew who the policemen in the town were, because their own families lived here or they showed up in your house during the September town fiestas or the March fiesta de barangay, and such. And when we got here, they didn’t remove the blindfold until I was inside the cell. I figured they took me to the mountains because it was cold and I could see the tops of many trees from outside the two windows on opposite sides of the rectangular room, made of concrete, with a steel gate, like the pigpen we used to have. The grilled windows were too high for me to look out of, and there was no stool or table or box I could stand on. So I just looked up at slices of the sky, the clouds, and the stars. They gave me a pillow, a mattress, and a blanket—an old flour sack—but it couldn’t really ward off the cold and I had to sleep hugging my knees. Still, maybe I can’t really complain because the cell was clean, and it had a toilet in the corner, hidden from the door, and there was a sink and a faucet and a pail with a dipper. They also left some toiletries. There was even a mirror above the sink. I had to turn on the light when it got dark and turn it off before I went to bed. We had to cook our own food, but they gave us a change of clothes every morning. White shirts and white pants made out of repurposed flour sacks. So, I don’t know, maybe they meant it when they said I wasn’t really in jail, even though they took away our phones and only let us write letters. At least, I guess, the cell didn’t stink of piss or shit, and it didn’t have rats or cockroaches scurrying about in the dark. Though sometimes I could hear the other let’s say inmates crying from their cells. Let me out, they’d yell, but no one replied. I didn’t join them because it was out of my hands. Anyway, the priest did say during my first night here that I should think of the cell not as a prison cell but as a “place of meditation” where I could perform an “examination of conscience” to find out how I could do better in serving the Lord.
Why was I here? The mayor’s office and the town parish struck a deal and they passed an ordinance that allowed the church to arrest any citizen of Dauin town who wasn’t going to Mass on Sunday, going to confession, donating money to the church, and so on. The police were given the task of apprehending violators; anyone who wasn’t doing their Christian duties was subject to arrest by their local police. The mayor said this new ordinance should help instill discipline in the townspeople who were losing themselves to drugs, laziness, criminality, and so on. I don’t know what this all meant for people of other religions; I have never seen a Muslim in the town and I’ve lived here for more than thirty years. Their weeklong dry run caught about fifty people and they shipped them to cells like mine, though no one knew where these detention facilities were located or how many there were. From what I heard, they’d blindfold you again upon release, drive you in circles, then leave you outside the municipio. Some of the other inmates said we were in the drug rehabilitation centers in Argao, Cebu, but I can’t be sure. My guess is we were high up in the mountains of Dauin. Too far to walk, and you had to have a four-wheel truck or something to reach us because the terrain was too rough for a motorcycle or normal car. So even if you escaped you couldn’t return to town on your own. Besides, they’d also encircled the compound with a high barbed-wire fence. Maybe it was electrified. The only gate had two armed policemen watching over a pair of very large and angry dogs. When I told the priest that I didn’t know about this ordinance and so they had to let me go, he told me, Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. I didn’t know what that meant but I suddenly didn’t have any questions. It had been about a month since the ordinance passed, so I thought there might have been a hundred-plus of us there.
What did we do during the day? They woke us up at dawn to cook and eat breakfast. Then we’d have a morning prayer and they’d tell us to run around the compound around ten times for exercise. Then they’d let us out and give us women gardening tools because they wanted us to plant vegetables in the plot outside the building, which was probably as big as three classrooms stuck to one another. We planted pechay, cabbage, eggplants, and so on. My plants had begun to sprout, but they told me they were going to pack it up and sell it at the market because they were giving 100% of the profits to the church. We should just be thankful that we were being allowed to serve God directly, they said. Meanwhile the men had to feed the livestock and clean out the pigpen and the chicken coops next to our gardening area. They also had to slaughter some unlucky chicken, cow, goat, or pig so we could cook them. The men were happy whenever they brought us fish from the población because it was their chance to take a break.
After lunch they sent us to two separate wings: one for woodworking (for the men) and one for dressmaking (for the women). Sometimes the men also had to chop firewood and do basic electrical stuff while the women had to cook, do the laundry, and clean the facility. To be honest I felt like we were back in high school, and I couldn’t wait for these tasks to be over, especially since I was a dressmaker myself and many people in town came over to our house to ask me to sew school uniforms, costumes, office blouses, and such; repair torn garments; or modify clothes that didn’t fit. I wasn’t getting paid for this work now so there was no reason to do it. No reason to enjoy it. I and a few others had to teach the rest how to make clothes.
The people who were like our “teachers” weren’t doing anything themselves. They were simply watching us and waiting for us to finish. Well, once I did see them hitting an inmate with a belt when they refused to draw a pattern for a priest’s robes. The one who did the spanking was a woman who read the first or second readings in church back when I still attended Mass. I won’t do anything for the person who put me here, the inmate said. It was really strange. A grown adult smacking another grown adult’s buttocks with a leather belt as if she were a noisy five-year-old. But I watched it happen, and I saw the offender sitting on the floor crying a river and wiping the spit dribbling from her mouth from all the wailing, and she reminded me of my daughter after I hit her with my slipper. After that, no one disobeyed. I think I also recognized some of the other “teachers,” and I’m sure a few of them recognized me, but they always looked away.
At around dusk, they’d tell us to take out our little blue Bibles, which they gave us when we arrived, and we all had a prayer meeting where they’d tell us over and over what we did wrong in our lives and how we could make things right. By returning to God’s light, we’d be free, they said. Then we listened to Mass, and they’d bring us to the kitchen to cook our dinner. Then we’d eat. After cleaning up, we’d pray the rosary, go to confession, and sleep.
They arrested me because I had “lost my way” and stopped going to church. And also, I stopped praying. I stopped because I figured that any God who would let such a kind and hardworking man as my husband get run over by a rich man driving a big truck and take away his ability to walk properly could stay out of our business, frankly speaking. We never hurt anybody. We never stole or lied. But we were the ones paying for it. They all told me that I should thank God my husband didn’t lose his legs and that he could still walk, but that sounded like they thought I was stupid. Or God thought I was stupid. I mean, they fired my husband from his job as a streetsweeper at the municipio because who could ever want a man on crutches cleaning the streets, I guess, and the guy who hit him didn’t pay us a single centavo. He hit my husband and then drove away. And we couldn’t even find him because we didn’t know the plate number—of course my husband was in terrible pain so he wasn’t thinking about any plate number. And no one else on the street remembered the number either, even though the accident happened in broad daylight on the national highway, right outside the public market. And the doctor said we had to operate on his legs because the accident destroyed his knees or something, but we didn’t have any money so we just took him home and prayed for him to get better. Of course he got worse, so I had to work sixteen hours a day as a dressmaker to feed our family, and also had to sell banana turon and juice at the Dauin elementary school to pay the bills and buy the medicine my husband needed just to take away his pain for a few hours. Any God who would let that happen doesn’t deserve to be prayed to. I told the priest this. And he looked at me and said: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Exquisite Corpses (I)
Soon I stopped counting how many times the light outside the window changed. The days were all the same anyway. I also never got any letters back. Maybe my family had gone to live with my sister in Dumaguete. She has more money than me, she could help them. I don’t know. I was too busy being handcuffed and blindfolded to tell them what to do or where to go.
Then, one day, while we were preparing a feast for the priest’s special dinner with the bishop, the guards introduced me to another inmate, a short girl with short hair and dark bags under her eyes. She didn’t look at me, but I saw her eyes smoldering like the firewood we used for cooking. New friend for you, the guards said. I asked them what they wanted me to do with her, and they told me to help her get used to the place because they were tired of receiving complaints from the other prisoners that they couldn’t get any sleep because of her. That means you should just let me go, she said. Be quiet, the guards said. But I recognized her voice as one of the few who kept wailing to let them out. Their voices used to be louder—one body out of many—but as the days melted into each other the choir seemed to be slowly losing its voice, until the only one still yelling was this girl in front of me. She must have been a college student.
She came with me as I chopped onions and seasoned the meat, but she never said anything. She didn’t help out much, but I didn’t ask her to. Once the feast was done, the male inmates began packing it up in giant pots, then loading them onto the parish’s pickup truck while the women took a short breather. I asked her why she was here, even though I already knew the answer.
I joined the Dumaguete Chapter of Surrealists, she said.
The Dumaguete what? I said. I thought it was some kind of religious thing, like the Dauin chapter of Youth for Christ, or Singles for Christ and such.
I said that if that’s the case she really shouldn’t have been sent here, but she shook her head and said, No, of course not, nothing like that. I thought about it some more.
Are you an NPA?
What? No, she said.
Sorry, I said. I thought—
She looked away. That’s fine, she said, what we do isn’t really for basic understanding. The sun was setting—we’d been working since dawn—and the way she looked at the darkening trees suggested to me that she didn’t belong anywhere, really. But I never finished college so I wouldn’t know. We were sitting on the grass. I asked her what they caught her for. I told her I stopped going to church. Is it the same for you? I said.
No, she said. I actually like going to church.
Really?
She looked me right in my face. It’s the most surreal thing there is, she said.
I nodded but I didn’t really understand anything. In the end I simply asked her again what she was here for. She answered that they caught her and two of her comrades—that was her word—doing “surrealist activities” at the Dauin amphitheater, the one behind the municipio, with the volleyball court. The last time I went to church was after they said the pandemic was over and they held outdoor Masses there. What were they doing? She said the surrealists typically did automatic writing, dream journaling, lucid dreaming, collage-making, magazine and newspaper cut-ups, poem graffiti, concrete poetry, long poem-novels, and so on. She also explained each activity to me one by one, though I still didn’t understand. After describing the cut-up technique, she stopped and said the authorities didn’t like what they were doing so they picked them up and brought them here. Now I’m the only one left, she said.
What happened to your friends?
They set them free.
How did they—?
They weren’t real surrealists, she said, that’s why.
I said nothing. I looked at the sky, pricked by needles of light. I’d been there more than a week and they still hadn’t told me how long I would stay or what I needed to do to get released.
A couple of the guards began rounding up the prisoners and herding them toward the classroom for the nightly Bible study. They said they’re putting me in the cell across yours, she told me. I looked at her and nodded. We went inside the classroom and listened to the guards pray over us and tell us we were terrible people who needed to be punished. After dinner, they led us back to our cells for bedtime. The girl didn’t speak again, and I fell asleep.
Exquisite Corpses (II)
Many days passed, I guess. I still didn’t receive any letters. I kept asking the guards but they always said they hadn’t gotten any, even though I saw them giving out letters every morning, the other prisoners falling all over each other to see if they had mail. I even heard a rumor that they would give us wall clocks if we showed good behavior, though nothing came of it, probably.
Before we went to bed one night, I asked the girl if she’d written any letters. No, she said. I asked her if she was ever worried about her parents or her family. She said they weren’t worried about her so she wasn’t worried about them. That sounds bad, I said. And then I asked if it was because of her “surrealist activities.”
That and more, she said.
I said nothing.
Then she said: I know my mother would start clapping her hands if she saw me here. There was a silence. And then she continued: She would say that it’s a good thing I’m here because I need to work all the bad out of my body. Like I have a very high fever, you know, and I have to sweat it out by working myself to the bone. I never did anything right, she’d say.
Nodding, I looked at the window and thought about what she said.
Yes, I guess, I said.
I knew you’d understand her, she said, scoffing.
Well, I’m a mother too.
Would you be happy if your kids were here?
I looked at her. In the dim light of the corridor her face seemed to look emptier than usual, like a ghost staring at me. She even looked thinner for some reason. Maybe it was all the—what was it again—the surrealism in her mind affecting her and making her act strange. But then I thought she was just a kid, and kids shouldn’t look like that. Like they were there in front of you but their mind was somewhere else. You could spank them now and then but only if they did something really terrible, I thought.
All I know is working hard is no good if you don’t get paid, I said.
She laughed. After a while she said she couldn’t sleep.
I can’t either, I said, it’s too cold.
A few minutes passed. Then she said: Do you have some paper? I looked at the bed and remembered that I had a few blank sheets I’d planned to use for a new letter to my husband. I had wanted to ask him again where they were, what they were doing, how the kids were feeling, how they were getting along. I didn’t want to think about why they were not replying to me but I couldn’t help it. It was becoming heavy in my mind. Sometimes I thought about taking a knife and slicing my arm open and writing a letter with my blood. Or writing my name in my blood on the floor of the corridors, the kitchen, the classroom. Or letting the blood from my arm flow into my mouth and drinking it. Or pulling my own heart out of my chest and wrapping it up in a letter to everyone special to me.
I have some paper, I said.
Good, she said. Do you want to play a game?
Without thinking, I said yes. And that was how I learned how to play what she called “exquisite corpse.” She wrote something on a sheet of paper, then she folded it so that I could only see the last word she wrote, and then she handed it to me. She said I had to write a word or a phrase to connect with what she wrote, adding that I didn’t have to think about it, and that I simply had to write the first word that came to mind. After that I should pass the note back to her and she’d do the same thing, and then she’d give me back the note, and I’d do the same thing, and then I’d give it back to her, and we’d repeat it until we filled the whole sheet. At first I didn’t get it: aren’t we supposed to understand what we are writing? But then I figured I had nothing to lose anyway—at least someone was finally reading and responding to what I was writing. So I did what she said.
We filled every sheet of paper I had with random words. When I read them again I laughed at her handwriting—she wrote like an old woman—and then I laughed at what I wrote. I didn’t understand a thing but the random phrases and sentences we came up with made me laugh, perhaps because I couldn’t believe words like those could ever come out of me. I didn’t know when or how we fell asleep.
At dawn the guards arrived to wake us up for breakfast. I was sitting on the floor, too tired and sleepy to stand up. I looked at the girl and she was snoring on the floor. When the guards saw us they opened our cell doors and pulled us to our feet, but we wouldn’t rise. Or we were too heavy. They filled up the pail with water and splashed it on our faces, screaming at us to get up. In the name of God, they said. Then, when that didn’t work, they pulled out their leather belts and hit us on our thighs and our buttocks. I didn’t hear myself crying out in pain, but I heard the girl across from me loud and clear.
Exquisite Corpses (III)
Many days passed again and I still did not get any letters. I watered my vegetables, picked them, cooked, cleaned, washed the priest’s robes, heard countless prayers, attended endless Masses. And still nothing. They kept bringing in new people every day. But what was new was that the girl I’d played word games with many times had disappeared. The games had become our nightly ritual before going to bed, but one morning, after waking up, I looked at her cell and found it empty. I asked the guards what had happened to her but they said nothing. One of them made some gesture, which looked like he was chucking something behind his shoulder, but I couldn’t really understand it, and he wouldn’t say anything.
Another prisoner approached me while I was weeding my pechay and whispered that she saw my neighbor before she disappeared. A couple of the guards had taken her out of the cell, handcuffed her, and put a sack over her head. Then they led her away. The girl had resisted, but one of the guards slapped her in the face, and she followed along quietly. That was all this other inmate saw. I thanked her. Maybe they finally released her today, I said. Good for her. The other inmate made a face and shrugged. Maybe, she said. Then she returned to watering her vegetables. I stood up to stretch, wiped my brows, and looked at the other women tending to their gardens. If only I could be so lucky, I thought. I mean, why else would they cuff her and blindfold her again if they weren’t going to free her?
I hoped that when she returned home, she’d be able to sit down and talk with her mother about things. Or that when they dropped her off at the municipio and they took off her blindfold, the first thing she saw was her mother smiling at her and opening her arms wide to embrace her. That was what I hoped to see when I got out of there: my husband and my children running up to me to hug me because they missed me as much as I missed them. Even though I never got their letters, even though I wrote maybe thousands of them already, even though I worked until my fingers bled and my feet got bent wrong because of all the sewing I did on the machine just to put food in their mouths and keep the house and us in there together.
I was helping cook lunch when the idea came to me: what if I get them here? Then I would not need to write letters anymore. My husband could work, even though here we were working for free, but at least he would have something to do with his hands. I knew it was killing him to just sit around all day. He wasn’t even going out to see friends anymore. He just sat there watching TV all day. And then the children would know the value of work. They knew how to clean up after themselves, like making their bed in the morning or washing the dishes or sweeping the floor, but they needed to know how to cook, how to make clothes, how to plant vegetables, how to sustain life without my help. And here I could teach them. We could teach them. And when we all got out of here, they could help me with my work and we could keep our family happy.
During one of our last games together, the girl asked whether I wanted to join the Dumaguete Chapter of Surrealists. I said I still didn’t know what the group did; I still thought they were doing church or religious things. Once again she said no, but she added that I had already passed the initiation—our first game was the test, she said, and I passed with flying colors. I wanted to see how well you can enter dreams, she said. Even with her explanation I still didn’t understand how that game could have been a test, or how a person can enter a dream, but I was happy because at least I’d managed to pass something. (The last thing I passed was a PE class in college, many years ago, before I dropped out to marry my husband.)
What is it that you people do anyway? I said.
She put down the pen and paper and thought about the question for a few moments. We enter reality and come out the other side, she said.
I don’t get it.
You’ve lost your ability to dream, she said. This part I understood: I hadn’t dreamed about anything since my husband’s accident. When I slept, it was like a black cloth fell over me and I disappeared. Or it was like I closed my eyes and died for a few hours, and then came back to life. She asked me if I wanted to start dreaming again, if I wanted to remember my dreams. I said yes. Then I asked her if I had to sign anything. Or pay.
Just sleep, she said.
I made a face and said nothing.
She smiled at me. When you wake up tomorrow, she said, everything will be different.
I didn’t know how many days ago that was, and today went just like the other days. I still slept in complete darkness. After the Mass, one of the guards came to me and said the priest wanted to talk to me in the confessional. They didn’t say why. I entered the booth and couldn’t see his face through the wood panel. Just shadows and shapes. God bless you, my child, he said. I asked him what he wanted with me. I heard him chuckling softly and then he asked me if I wanted to get paid for my work here. Of course, I told him.
Good, good, he said.
But I want to see my family more, I said. So just let me go.
Silence fell between us. I heard him clear his throat a couple of times. Then he mumbled something, but I didn’t catch it. I thought I also caught him wiping his brows. I heard the click of a lighter. I saw the glow of a little flame. And then I smelled cigarette smoke. Well, of course, of course, in that case, he said. Then he made me an offer.
Return to the Eye
Too many days have passed here that I’ve started forgetting birthdays. Mine, my husband’s, my children’s, my sisters’, my parents’, my friends’, and so on. Maybe my birthday was yesterday, or tomorrow, or a year from now. But I remember the names of all the saints. Santa Ana, San Andres, San Agustin. I remember feast days. San Isidro Labrador, Santa Catalina, San Jose. I remember the Ten Commandments. The Seven Last Words. The Seven Deadly Sins. I remember the sins I’ve committed. Lying; taking the Lord’s name in vain; coveting my neighbor’s things. I can pray the rosary front to back, from memory, including the litany.
Will I forget the names and faces of my loved ones, too? Happily, no. I saw them in my dreams last night. And today is finally a different day in this place. It’s my first day and my first mission—the guards took me with them in their police van, and we went on our way down to the población. They didn’t give me a gun, but they gave me a list of names with photos and addresses. I recognized many of them. My job was to knock on doors and verify if the faces matched the names. The guards were to handle the rest.
After about an hour of traveling, we arrived at the center of town and began the mission in earnest. I sat in the back of the van, along with the armed guards, watching the people go about their daily business. I’ve spent so many days up in the mountains that I felt like a foreigner stepping foot on a new land. Even the people I recognized on the street looked like aliens. It felt like I was floating, like I was swimming in the sea for too long. Still, the sun felt brighter and warmer here. My sweat even tasted sweet. And I didn’t have to keep stretching my back and my legs. And I was going to get paid at the end of the week. And they even gave me my phone back. I found myself praying, giving thanks for the bright new day, the opportunity to get off that mountain. Then I noticed the van round a corner onto a familiar street. I saw the bakery where the kids used to buy bread every afternoon; the sari-sari store where my husband used to buy cigarettes and drink with his friends; the row of neighbors’ houses where I spent entire Sunday afternoons gossiping. Then, the van stopped. We got off. I read the list again as we approached our first house. I wiped the sweat off my brows. I took a deep breath to steady my hands, which felt like an electrical current was running through them. I even felt like jumping. Please don’t point your guns at them, I whispered. I want to see their smiling, shining faces, with tears in their eyes, crying out for joy as they run out the door and towards me. And then I will open my arms to embrace them, ready to lead them to a new life under God, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
