Gilda Cordero Fernando

We talked about it often, Greg and I. We were just graduated from the university then, and looking for jobs.. Chit said, with that intense look she sometimes has when she is on the brink of a sonnet (and the pink glasses slipping down her nose), that maybe the uneasiness was in our age. We would outgrow it. We needed anchorage, we needed love, rhapsodically Greg said we were still trying our wings, not quite sure of where we were going or if we'd even get there at all. Pepe preached, go to church, don't give up your prayers, but then he wanted to become a priest. Ana said we'd never be anybody. We felt lost. I didn't bother Nora. She said she'd marry Pol and have a houseful of kids, and that was that.

Those were the times too when we'd take endless walks along the sea wall, haunt art exhibits and writing seminars and poetry readings-- or if there were none of these in town, we played cards. Canasta in the morning, bowling in the afternoon. We were generation lost. We'd sit around one of those outdoor restaurant tables with red-and-white mushroom umbrellas and order cheeseburgers and coca-cola, talk earnestly about the problems of the world, about existentialism, progressivism, Virginia Wolf, reincarnation and free love. We used words like "esoteric" and "facetious", "sophomoric" and "bourgeois". Greg wore soiled tennis shoes and grew a Van Gogh beard. At intervals Ana would jump, push a coin restlessly into the slot of the jukebox and it would give us an earful of frenetic jive, hot with trumpets.The noise drowned out our sadness and we were sure only of one thing: we shared the feeling. At last, we'd get up, stretching our awkward limbs, and tip the waiter ten centavos.

We generally walked to the boulevard after a session of bowling feeling the salt breeze dry our sweating bodies, and munching peanuts, watch the sun to go down. There would be a couple of sailboats veering courselessly in the water, and the sea smelling faintly of tar, and we would think how wonderful it would be if we would sail far, far away and never return till we were rich or famous or old. And we'd walk home sadder than ever before, kicking the sand with our splitting moccasins because we were young and unknown and did not help any in keeping the world turning.

Canasta was the day's game and we sat on the dusty sagging steps of the porch of our house, hugging our aces. Ana had a gambler's streak-- she'd take her birthday on a wild. With four or five mounds of matchsticks to her name, she'd still be tirelessly at it long after most of us had dropped out from sheer exhaustion. If my parents were away, Nora boiled coffee and made sandwiches out of old bread and with the laughter, some of the lostness would be washed away. We'd sit on the porch with the  scent of calachuchi blossoms heavy in the air, and sing current favorites like "Old Black Magic" and "I Only Have Eyes For You", the girls doing first and the boys seconding. Sometimes Pepe brought along a ukulele a bachelor uncle's sent him from Fiji Islands.

Before it gets too dark, Ana would suddenly jump up, twirling the car keys restlessly in her fingers and brushing the fireflies from her hair. "Let's go!" she'd say, "I'll suffocate if I stay indoors another minute," her lean long torsoed body under the skin tight jeans sagging under the weight of world weariness. I can still see her balancing on the bottom step, hair in a half bang, eyes big and troubled and very dark. Ana drove a convertible. It had a bashed fender and white side wall. She drove over a dirt road in Diliman full speed and she ran over a white dog. It howled once and then we could see it sprawled palely behind us in the moonlight, it entrails spilling out.

Ana's parents didn't live together. Her father was a big burly man who used to beat up her mother. Ana's earliest memories of Christmas were mixed with ugly sounds of quarrelling-- a wrecked christmas tree bursting into flames of trampled stars.

I remember once in the university, she got a note saying that her mother was in the hospital. Ana had just come back from a visit home earlier that afternoon, carrying several tins of sweets into her room in the dorm. In the classroom I saw her suddenly blanch over the note, slowly close her text with the comic book in it, and raise a hand for permission to leave. And the professor glanced sharply as I, too, begged permission to go. All the way to the hospital with her foot pressed down the accelerator, Ana kept murmuring bewilderedly. "But she was all right when I left her..."

We found her mother lying in the hospital bed with a swollen lip and two broken ribs. Ana never spoke to her father again. Every friday he left the convertible in the garage so Ana could use it over the weekend. The tank was always full. But she never forgave him. Her father moved in with his querida, and the last time I heard they were going to have a baby.

Ana was a chain smoker. Most of her allowance went to cigarettes and when she didn't have anymore, she mooched Pepe and Greg. On a rainy night she walked to a gas station and exchanged a spare tire for six cartons of cigarettes. Dragging mournfully on a stub, Ana insisted that the boys take her to a bar. "I've never been inside of one--and if you don't take me," she threatened, "I'll go by myself," and so they did. It was a tiny joint called Chinita's with a U-shaped counter and a stuffed parrot hanging over the door. Ana gulped down a Bloody Mary, Bourbon and a Scotch in rapid succession, pillowed her cheek on the bar top and slept.

Chit and Nora didn't like Ana much but they tolerated her because I did, and because she looked so unhappy. By force of circumstances, we sat in the back row of the class and sort of depended on one another. Our Humanities professor was a young man who graduated from Harvard and he had a secret crush on Ana. The poor fellow picked up her lunch chits and her bus tickets and had to bring the whole bunch of us to the movies every payday.

To be continued...