By M. Evelina Galang
When my twin and I turn sixty-five, the women in the city begin coming out of their houses. One at a time, we hear their stories. We hear them speaking on the radio. We hear them on the news. Sometimes, on our way to the market, we see the old women lined up and carrying placards, wearing purple scarves and kamisetas two sizes too big with angry letters scrawled across their chests. Today the women are marching. “Laban!” scream the women. “Laban!’ call the protestors. “Laban! Laban! Laban!”
Flora looks at me and shakes her head. “What do they think they’re doing?” She wants to know. “Walang hiyang mga babae!” She spits on the ground and keeps walking. I want to stop her and say, “You know the story, Flora. You know it’s not their fault.” But she is moving quickly through the heavy crowd, weaving her way around the people like a needle sewing stitches. I can barely keep up with her.
We lost everything in the war – our parents, all our siblings, our house and all our possessions. We have never talked about it. It’s easier that way. Almost fifty years ago, Flora and I moved to the city and we began all over again, the Guerra sisters on a new adventure. I met Pepito on a pier one day, and Flora has been chaperoning us ever since. We have never been apart. Not in all these years. And when the children came, my twin was the one who delivered the babies and nursed me back to health. She cooked the meals and bathed the little ones while I slowly made my way out of the bedroom and back into the kitchen. We were so busy. Flora never left my side, never married. “When would I leave you?” she asked me once. “There’s barely time to sleep. How can I go?” So, she was always there.
The women spread their stories across the sky, cast a haze upon our city, and I forget to sleep for all the thinking that I do. I go back to the war. I hear bombs coming down, lighting the night like fireworks at Christmas. I remember every little thing. Could I ever stand on the streets like that? Could I ever shout in front of all the world? Then everyone would know, I think. They’d know.
Once I asked Flora, “Should we?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You have a husband. Your children are old enough to have children. So tell me, should ‘we’ what?”
“So you’ve forgotten?” I asked.
“Have you?”
These conversations keep me up until the skies grow light and our cock crows and Pepito has left for the fishing boats. The children get up. They are the ones frying rice, preparing milkfish, eggs and fresh-cut tomatoes. A little something for the belly before the day begins and I still have not slept.
*
Flora screams in the middle of the night. I stumble through the house and find her rolling about the bamboo cot, clawing her nightclothes, pulling at her hair.
I tell her it’s okay. “You are only dreaming, Flora.” When she doesn’t wake, I shake her bony shoulders. “Sige, Flor, enough now. Wake.”
Sometimes she sleeps so deep, she swings her arms at me as if I am the enemy. “Gising na, Flor!” I shout. “Gising na!” And other times, she snaps right out of it, straightens her hair, and throws me a dirty look. “What are you doing here? Can’t I get any peace?” As if I am the enemy.
The next morning, while scrubbing the kitchen floor, I say, “are you remembering?”
“What?” She pours soap into a bin of water.
“At night, Flor. Are you remembering?”
She says nothing. She balances her body on the husks of coconut shells, polishing each square tile of the linoleum. “Too much work for two of us. You should get the girls to help.”
“They have their own jobs, Flor. They are supporting us in other ways.”
“They could help a little more.”
Pepito doesn’t know. By the time we met, the war had been over for years. Why tell him? Why ruin love? None of the children know. Lately he’s saying to me, “Mahal, bakit gising ka? Sleep already!” When I don’t answer him, he asks, “May nagawa ba akong hindi mo nagustuhan?”
No, I think. You do everything for us, I think. You are kind. He is so brown and his face is young, though his hair is as silver as the moon. Pogi parin. If he knew, he’d leave me. And where would I be. Would he leave me?
These days, I look for signs. I listen to the air and I wait to hear the women chanting when I take the jeepney down the boulevard just past EDSA. I know I shouldn’t look, but I can’t help it. I want to know if the women look like me. I want to know if they are older or younger or richer than me. I want to know if their children are marching with them. Or if their husbands still think they’re beautiful. I sometimes scour the pages of the paper just looking for something about their fight against Japan.
Late one night as we are washing dishes, I try again. “Maybe we should find out more about those lolas,” I whisper to Flora. “Maybe we can join them.”
“Leave it alone, na!” she snaps at me.
“But don’t you ever think that maybe if we had this justice things would change? You might have been able to love a man?”
“Stop. What’s that got to do with it? If God wanted me to love a man, he’d have sent me one!” The more she shouts, the quieter I get, but I don’t stop asking.
“Baka your nightmares would stop?”
“What nightmares?”
*
She stops talking to me for almost two weeks. She moves about the house, banging dishes and pans. She lets the cock into the house and shouts at him for sneaking up on her, shadowing her every move. She talks to my girls when she means for me to hear. Masungit siya.
Her silence towards me grows the memories. I could be stitching up Jun-Jun’s ripped pantalones and suddenly I am 12 years old, asleep with my sisters and brother, then waking to the bombing of the sky and the crashing of windows and doors. I could be hiding under the bed from the scurry of little yellow men with silver bayonets infiltrating our house.
The more I remember the more I want to say it. But to whom? After all these years, Pepito would be so angry with me. Lying for almost fifty years. My children would look at me like I was what? Basura? And I cannot say it to the one person who knows, because she is the one who would be angriest of all.
So, one day I sneak away and visit this house they call Lolas’ House and I look through the green gates and I see the women gathered in a circle, plates of sinigang and rice balancing on their laps. Some women are laughing, some whispering into each other’s ears and still there are others dancing in the back, twirling one another to canned folk music coming from old speakers. This is who they are? I think. Like they have no care in the world. This is what it means? To stand up and cry your stories to the world, and then to sing and dance behind the green gates? I cannot decide if what I see is a new kind of freedom or if perhaps the rumors are true. Perhaps these women did not know war. Perhaps they are telling stories from their imagination. I cannot begin to see myself dancing with such joy.
Down the street, a motor-tricycle turns the corner, carrying two little old ladies like eggs in a basket. I better go, I think, before they see me. I better hide.
*
Pepito wakes for the day, but this morning instead of rising out of bed, he nestles his body close to mine. He kisses my belly.
“Old man, get up,” I say, “You have work to do.”
And that is when he pulls me to him, face to face, looks at me, he says, “Whatever it is, okay na.”
I say nothing.
“Married 48 years is a long time, mahal. Di mo alum? Mahal na mahal kita.”
He brushes the hair out of my eyes and smiles. “I survived that war. I know many bad things happened to very good people.”
I can feel myself trembling.
“Nothing would surprise me,” he whispers.
Arms wrapped around me, breath on my body, my husband finds a way to tease the stories out of me.
*
She calls me crazy. Her words fly out of her like angry monsoon winds ravaging these islands. There is no room for discussion, only crying. My sister has gone mad. Na wala siya sa sarili niya. Did I do this, I think. Was it the excitement in my voice? Or the way I told her about the second time I went to that Lolas’ House and heard them talking about the war? Is it my fault? I decide that I must do anything I can to calm her, so I start crying. I apologize. I tell her I will never bring it up again. I beg her to stop. But she is whirling around the room now, bumping into things, pointing her fingers at imaginary figures. All this time, she is telling them. All this time, I thought you were gone. I thought you had left me in peace, but here you are again.
What is it, the children want to know? What is wrong with Auntie? I don’t know, I say. I tell them we must not upset her. Be quiet, I say. Be quiet, everyone.
*
I never bring it up again, though I keep track of the old women, their coverage all over the news, traveling to and from Japan, standing at the courts and proclaiming every sordid detail of their capture, their imprisonment, the ravaging of their bodies. At night, I dream it too. But in the dreams, I am setting the story free. I am releasing the images into the sky and I am offering them up to God and He takes them. The more I dream, the harder I sleep and the lighter I feel.
But Flora sits at the kitchen table each day, motionless. The cock comes into the kitchen and circles her, and she doesn’t even flinch. Day and night, she holds a space in the corner of my hot kitchen. We talk to her but she doesn’t answer. We feed her bowls of lugao, but she barely tastes.
*
Today, I am standing at the stove, putting toyo and pepper into my sinigang when my son, the mechanic, slams the door and for the first time in a long time, Flora responds. She falls under the table. I think she may have slipped, but no, she is hiding. “Shh!” she says. “Shh! They will find us!”
I cannot talk her out from under the table. When I pull up the tablecloth, I see her crouched, her skinny arms wrapped tightly around her knees. Her eyes are shut tight and it looks as if she is holding her breath. She is willing herself invisible. I let her stay huddled under that table until late at night when everyone has gone to sleep. I reach my hand out to her. I wave. “It’s okay, Flor.” I say to her. “Umalis na sila. Wala na sila.”
“No,” she tells me. “Hide with me.”
“No, Flor,” I say again. “They are gone. The Americans have come, and they are gone.”
And then she cocks her head. She listens. “Oo nga,” she says. “Tahimik.”
Yes, the house is quiet. Everyone is gone. We are safe. I tug on her. I beg her to come out.
Flora reaches for my hand, and crawling out from under the table she embraces me and together, for the first time since the war, we cry.
Excerpted from When the Hibiscus Falls: Stories by M. Evelina Galang. Published by Coffee House Press in June, 2023. Copyright © 2023 by M. Evelina Galang. All rights reserved.
M. Evelina Galang is the author of a previous story collection, Her Wild American Self (1996), two novels, One Tribe (2006) and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery (2013) and the nonfiction book Lola’s House: Filipino Women Living with War (2017). She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (2003). Among her numerous awards are a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship, finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2018, and the Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell in 2020. She directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami from 2009-2019 and served as VONA Board President from 2018-2023. Galang lives in Miami, where she continues to teach creative writing.