EVANESCENCE

After selling everything we had, I reduced my family’s life to a few pieces of luggage, and we got on a slow boat to Davao without our beloved pets and treasured belongings. I slept through most of the sea voyage back to my hometown. Following my husband’s very public defection, my family’s public life was inevitably linked to the underground. These were the days of martial rule and we were Boy’s family in the city. I feared unfamiliar presences, I suspected military agents. 

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The Davao City we came home to was unlike the rapidly urbanized NCR we had just left. The six hundred thousand Davao City residents lived in mostly rural households. Like in Metro Manila, there was steadily rising migration to the city and, with this development, the proliferation of urban shanties along the Davao Gulf. But in general, like in Davao City, it remained as restful and slow as I remembered it in the 1950s. Some major streets were still shaded with huge acacia trees. Jeepneys decorated with long multicolored tassels moved at twenty to twenty-five kilometers per hour and brought you right to your doorstep. 

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I recalled the days after his public defection came out on New Year’s Day of 1978. The nation was gripped by media frenzy as news spread of a prominent figure from the Marcos government, amidst the heydays of Martial Law, defecting to the communist insurgents. Boy's sudden defection dominated conversations everywhere. Immediately, I departed from the beaches of Pangasinan and swiftly returned to my family in Manila. With my children in tow, I drove to DAP in Tagaytay to assuage Susan’s fears that men in military uniforms would come to arrest us. 

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Traumas come in a bundle. I could not explain my spouse’s public defection to the communist underground because I did not know anything about it. True to the clan that we are, with a lot of tolerance and care for each other, we lived through this period of disharmony and disconnect in our stories and simply stopped talking about it. So did my children and I. We stopped talking about Boy altogether. 

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Until Jose Maria Sison, founding chairman of the CPP, released his letter tributes on Boy’s and Maita’s passing in 2012, I had no organizational lead on what had happened to my family. Sison identified Alan Jazmines as the cadre responsible for Boy’s defection. Even more puzzling is Jazmines’ article “Revolutionary Simplicity” which failed to mention that Maita Gomez was the political authority in the Rizal guerilla zone where he made arrangements for Boy’s safety and integration. Neither would the Sison tribute mention this important detail, even as Boy himself confirmed in a magazine interview that he implemented a successful enterprise in the Nueva Ecija guerilla zone. 

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Jazmines identified the place he brought Boy to as “the consolidated areas of authority of the people’s revolutionary government under the protection of the New Peoples’ Army and the auspices of the NDF in Central Luzon.” Boy was accompanied by a woman whom Jazmines identified in his letter tribute when he wrote, “Bel and the family and loved ones of Horacio “Ka Boy” Morales, his fellow fighters, friends, and colleagues. It would take another decade before the truth would come out from Boy’s own lips when he faced me in 1989.