A Visit to General Lim Street

Monica s. Macansantos

Celeste’s handwriting had a neat, elegant flourish to it, making Gabriel suspect she had gone to one of the fancier Catholic schools in Manila, where the nuns insisted on leaving an imprint of civility upon their students’ penmanship. The cross of her T swept forward into space, as though to provide shelter for the letters that fell underneath it. Celeste Chan. 14 Jungletown Road. A simple address that served as an opening into a stranger’s life.

Or perhaps this was just Gabriel’s wishful thinking, that this woman would invite him to her house, even though she had extended her invitation to Carlos, her former communist comrade-in-arms, and not to him. He had merely been asked by his mother to hold onto Celeste’s address while Carlos decided whether or not to accept the invitation. Gabriel was, after all, her responsible son who had never been a communist or landed in jail. He had found, over the years, that people thought it wise to trust him with addresses and secrets, as though these were objects they were handing over to him for safekeeping, like a purse, or a set of keys.

His mother probably did not expect him, of course, to contact Celeste, or if she did, she had forgotten about this in her rush to restore the joyful order of an afternoon she had painstakingly arranged. The slip of paper was just another inconvenience to dispose of, and she handed it to Gabriel in the hopes that he would, as always, keep it in a safe space until it was conveniently forgotten. Contacting Celeste felt like a deliciously quiet violation of an unspoken rule, and he turned the slip of paper over in his hands as he sat at the edge of his bed during the cold hours of dawn, noticing that Celeste had given her home phone number in addition to her address. This meant she was of fairly comfortable means, being able to secure a landline when his family was still on a long waiting list for one. How did one transition from jungle guerrilla to bourgeois university professor overnight? Of course her transformation was likely to have taken place over the course of several years, and it was probably a journey she was eager to talk about with an old comrade she hadn’t seen in more than a decade. He didn’t expect Carlos to be willing to talk to her anytime soon, not after the way Carlos had behaved with her. Would she be willing, perhaps, to talk to him while waiting for Carlos to come around?

He slipped the piece of paper into his wallet, and returned to bed, taking care not to awaken his wife as he eased himself beside her. It was daylight when he awoke, and he turned onto his back to find her sitting beside him, watching him. “Anything wrong?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“No,” she said, with a look of alarm. “It’s just that you were talking in your sleep.”

“Oh?” He yawned and stretched, and a voice, familiar and yet faraway, grazed the surface of memory.

“Who’s Paulie?” she asked, flicking a lock of hair away from his face.

“Oh my God,” Gabriel said. Paulette’s face resurfaced from the murkiness of his dreams, turning away as she fired a gun. It was the gun’s explosion, more than her voice, that reverberated in his body, and he took his wife’s hand as though to reassure himself that he was still here, in this time and place.

“It was just Paulette,” he said. “You know, Carlos’s old girlfriend. We used to call her Paulie.”

Her face softened, and she turned to the wall that separated their room from Carlos’s. “You were calling out to her in your sleep.”

He sighed as the dream’s afterglow faded, then flickered out.

“He probably dreams of her too,” she said, staring at the wall. 

“He probably does.” He rose from bed and turned away from her as he felt around for his slippers. He didn’t want to discuss Paulette again with her—it was part of his past now, and besides, she had been Carlos’s woman, and not his. Gabriel had just been a friend of hers in 1976, the year before she died, and if his wife wanted to know how Paulette had been killed, she would have to ask Carlos, and not him. He was sure he had nothing to do with it—he had just been a friend, perhaps merely another nuisance in Paulette’s life, and whatever impressions he once had of their relationship had merely been the fevered imaginings of an adolescent mind. In her lifetime, he never knew enough about her to be a true confidante, a true friend. To her, he had just been a kid.

“I don’t even remember what I dreamt about last night,” he said, which was partly true. All he remembered was Paulette raising a gun and firing it at an invisible target.

“She’s dead, by the way,” he said, pulling on his robe.

“Dead!” Her face fell, and then, blinking, she asked, “You’re not talking about Paulette Hoffer, are you?”

“Yes, the Paulette Hoffer.”

“My parents kept talking about her at home when they found out she was killed,” she said, gazing at the edge of the bed. “It was one of those things I kept thinking about growing up, even before we met. How girls like us could easily end up like her.”

“If you had met her, you wouldn’t even have thought she was an NPA.”

But yes, there was a toy gun, on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

He found himself unable to meet Carlos’s eye as he approached the breakfast table, and snatches of Paulette’s young, bright voice flickered, faintly, in his ear as Carlos asked for more sausages. Gabriel felt the unexplainable urge to unburden himself with his brother, and to ask Carlos if Paulette had also haunted his dreams. I saw her shoot a toy gun in her parents’ backyard. Yes, that was what had happened, if he remembered right—and never did he have the opportunity to tell Carlos that he was amazed and frightened at once.

Later that day, as he sat in his office, he picked up his phone, wondering if it was the best time to phone Celeste, or the Hoffers, whose number was listed in the phone directory, or anyone who cared to listen to him. He listened to the receiver’s bright hum, closing his eyes as he imagined himself speaking into the bottomless silence, mentioning a secret or two before hanging up. Or perhaps it was better to speak to a priest in a confessional—he hadn’t been to confession in years, but at least, in a confessional, someone was listening, and there was nothing that a priest could do to hold him accountable for his wrongs, aside from acknowledging that he had sinned.

On the other hand, there was nothing preventing him from calling Celeste, and checking whether she was open to speaking with him. He could imagine himself meeting her at Dainty Restaurant for coffee, and telling her about the time he met Paulette, a year after Carlos’s defection, and how he wondered about how such a beautiful woman could be abandoned by the father of her child and left to fend for herself. Perhaps Celeste, who had also been her comrade in the New People’s Army, would graciously share with him anecdotes about Paulette’s shooting skills, which went unexplained to him when he saw her firing a pellet gun with unnerving accuracy.

The phone directory rested on his desk, and remained turned to letter H. The Hoffers still lived on General Lim Street, which he found unsurprising, yet vaguely unsettling. The outpouring of grief in their community when word broke that Paulette had died while fighting as a guerrilla took him by surprise, considering that the same people who mourned her death had distanced themselves from his family as soon as they learned about Carlos’s defection to the NPA. But Paulette was a Hoffer, and her decision to join the NPA was spoken of as a waste of potential, her untimely death a tragedy. The Hoffers, he guessed, were never banished from their circle of powerful friends, and would never have to leave this town where they were clearly loved. And yet he wondered how they could possibly endure the weight of their daughter’s absence in an old house where the ghost of her presence lingered.

They had probably expected him to attend Paulette’s memorial service, or to drop by to offer condolences in the months following her death. But back then, he was too afraid to show his face in their house, especially after disappearing from their lives without any explanation in the months before her reported death. He had avoided Sam, his high school best friend,  after embarrassing himself in their house, and what if his unexplained snubbing gave them all the more reason to suspect him of being connected to Paulette’s death? They didn’t find a body was what people kept saying in the months, and years, after Paulette’s memorial service, and he was sure that whatever explanation was given to the Hoffers by whoever had reported her death to them would never be enough. He was sure it would be impossible for him to sit in their living room, waiting for Manang Rosing, their maid, to serve him tea, without feeling a deep sense of shame. The truth was that her death came as a shock to him, and he found himself equally uncomfortable that the revelations that surfaced after her death did not come as a complete surprise to him.

After work, he found himself driving past City Hall and entering the leafy neighborhood where Sam’s family lived. He hadn’t been to this part of town in years—although he knew an accountant at this office whose family owned a home on this street, he couldn’t remember a time when this chubby, bespectacled boy had invited anyone from their office to his family home. Though the boy was affable, he suspected that he didn’t have close friends at the company, reminding him of the kids he met on Sam’s street as a teenager, who smiled into space as he walked past them, perhaps too timid, or frightened, to acknowledge his presence in their neighborhood. As a child, whenever his father drove past the edge of General Lim Street, his eyes would linger upon the trees that flanked its entrance, wondering how trees, and vine-covered walls, could intimidate him while simultaneously remaining easy on the eye. He found himself hesitating at the wheel before entering the tree-lined boulevard that led to the Hoffers’ house. No longer did he have the same confidence he once had as Sam’s high school best friend to make the pilgrimage up its hilly incline without giving any second thought to the strangeness of his visitations.

He parked his car across the street from the Hoffers’ steepled, two-story home, just as the vines twisting their way up towards the house’s second floor caught his eye. Other than the abundance of vines on the house’s facade, and the lushness of the bougainvillea bush that cascaded down the property’s concrete wall, not much had changed. Time stood still on 6 General Lim Street, and the house’s clapboard walls hadn’t been subjected to the damages inflicted by the sun and rain. It was more likely, though, that the house received a regular paint job: Tita Irene was not one to neglect the sight of water damage or peeling paint. The living room drapes were drawn, and a small gray-haired figure flitted across the window. Was it Manang Rosing, their old maid? But Manang Rosing had been an old woman long ago, and it was possible that she had been replaced too. His eyes then fell upon the old gray Beetle that Tito Eugene used to drive to work, and he wondered how the old man had maintained the appearance of the car’s sheen well into the eighties. Surely he could afford to buy something that was newer and easier to maintain, instead of insisting that this old relic maintain the newness of the era to which it belonged.

He felt his hesitation creep up on him again before opening his car door and stepping outside. He wouldn’t blame them if they turned him away, but he felt a strange, unexplained peace descend upon him as he crossed the street towards their gate. The closer he came to their house, the more he felt that he was not just visiting the home of an old friend, but was finally, after many years of exile, returning to a place that was once familiar and safe.

There was a stirring from inside when he knocked at their gate. A woman whose face was unfamiliar to him pulled back the living room window’s gauze drapes, glancing briefly before pulling away. Was it their maid, or was it a member of the family who took a quick look at him before deciding whether or not to open their doors to him? It would have been better, perhaps, to have called them first to check if they were amenable to meeting him. But he could hear their front door being unlocked, and Eugene Hoffer, who had visibly aged since the time they last met, stepped outside.

Mr. Hoffer’s eyes smarted in the sunlight, and tilting his head to the side, he asked, “Gabby, what brings you here?”

“I was just in the neighborhood, and thought of dropping by,” Gabriel said, as he watched the old man walk with a sure, steady step towards the gate. Although his head of hair was grayer now and the lines in his face were more deeply etched, his muscles remained taut and tanned—Gabriel’s guess was that Eugene still played tennis at the Country Club.

“I was actually at City Hall,” Gabriel said, as Mr. Hoffer unbolted the front gate and waved him inside.

“Well, it’s nice you thought of us.” A smile then bloomed across his wrinkled, freckled face. Polite Mr. Hoffer, always beating around the bush instead of expressing his discomfort, or annoyance. He had always been nice to Gabriel, even during moments when Gabriel had tested his patience.

“Your niece has just come home from school,” Mr. Hoffer said, as they walked up the graveled path that led to the front door. “I was helping her with her math homework.”

“What grade is she in?” Gabriel asked, trying not to betray his surprise that Mr. Hoffer was willing to speak the truth with him. It seemed that the old man didn’t want to make a big deal out of the situation, and so Gabriel followed his cue.

“Fourth grade. She’s ten years old now. The things they make those kids do at that school we sent her to,” he said, shaking his head as he reopened the front door. “Sometimes I worry that she doesn’t have enough time to play with kids her age, but maybe that’s just me.”

A child in shorts and a tank top was seated at the dining room table when they stepped inside, and her legs dangled from her seat, swinging to and fro as she scribbled inside a notebook spread out in front of her. She had Paulette’s oval eyes but they slanted downwards, like her father’s, and she pursed her lips in concentration, the way Carlos did when he and Gabriel were much younger. Her features, though similar to her mother’s, were not as sharply defined—the plainness of her father’s peasant looks appeared to have dissolved the edges of her mother’s beauty. Paulette’s beauty had been unambiguous—it struck people the moment she walked into a room, and she was fortunate to be good-natured, since this, somehow, softened the edge of her perfection. Her daughter’s plainness was a blessing in disguise, since it would free her from the impossible standards to which Paulette had once been held.

“Diwa?” her grandfather called out to her, and her head bolted up. She stared at Gabriel, who smiled as he stood behind Mr. Hoffer, hoping that her grandfather, with his mere presence, could turn his unannounced visit into a normal, foreseen event in the child’s life.

“This is your Tito Gabby, a good friend of your Tito Sam.”

“Hi,” she said, in a voice that sounded like a younger, unbroken version of Paulette’s.

“He’s also the son of your Lola Aurora,” Mr. Hoffer added, blinking.

“Oh?” she asked, her lips parting in surprise.

“Hello, Diwa,” Gabriel said, unsure if he was capable of hiding his discomfort.

The girl stared at him, tapping her notebook with her pencil’s eraser.

“Come and ask for your Tito’s blessing,” Mr. Hoffer said, giving Gabriel an apologetic look. Diwa slid down from her chair and padded, barefoot, towards Gabriel, who offered a hand to her before she took it and pressed its back against her smooth, sticky forehead.

“The girl’s smart,” Mr. Hoffer said, as she made her way back to the dining table. “She’s just like her mother, which can be both good and bad. We’ve had to come to her school on several occasions because she answers back to her teachers. She even answers back to us.”

“I didn’t know Paulie was like that.”

“Paulie was nicer, in fact. Her sass only started coming out in college, when she started joining activist groups. Before that, she was perfect,” Mr. Hoffer said, sighing as he watched Diwa pick up her pencil and return to her work.

“I’m sorry if I didn’t visit earlier,” Gabriel said, avoiding Mr. Hoffer’s eye. “It was inexcusable. You were all so kind to me.”

“You were young,” Mr. Hoffer said, smiling. “You probably took it hard too.”

“It was hard,” Gabriel said, feeling a soreness in his throat. Unable to speak, he shook his head, then rested his hand on the back of the leather couch. Mr. Hoffer put a hand on his shoulder and asked their maid, a small woman with braided hair who faintly resembled Manang Rosing, to bring them a glass of water. The old woman filled a tall glass and held it aloft with her two hands, like a chalice, as she carried it with her to the living room. Gabriel took it from her wrinkled hands, acknowledging her look of concern with a nod, and a smile, before taking a long, refreshing gulp. He could get away with terrible behavior in this household; he was still a victim in their eyes, despite his lack of decency following their daughter’s death.

Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Gabriel said, “That was good.”

“You all right?” Mr. Hoffer asked.

The little girl raised her head again, and fixed her curious, unblinking eyes on him.

“I’m fine,” Gabriel said, before taking another drink from the glass. “Just thought about Paulie, that’s all.”

The girl continued to watch him.

“Diwa, you should probably finish that in your room,” Mr. Hoffer said, turning to her. She closed her notebook and held it to her chest as she slid down from her seat. Padding towards the staircase, she gave Gabriel one last lingering look before resting her hand on the banister and marching upstairs.

“We try to be open with her, but only when she’s ready,” Mr. Hoffer said. He gestured towards the living room sofa, where Gabriel took a seat.

“I’m sorry for imposing myself on you, and at such a confusing time.”

“No, it’s no problem at all. In fact, we were hoping that you would drop by sometime,” he said, sitting at a respectable distance from Gabriel. “These are interesting times, after all. We thought it would be easier for you to be open with us, now that Marcos is finally gone.”

As the old man fixed his eyes on him, he could feel the urge, yet again, to relieve himself of an old, burdensome secret. But the words for whatever it was he wanted to tell Mr. Hoffer slipped from his mind’s grip. It had been so long ago, and the sins he had committed in this house now slipped, inchoate, into the dense blur of memory. Only the urge to confess remained.

“My brother is staying with me, right now,” he found himself saying, filling the space allotted for his confession with something else.

“And how’s that going?”

“It’s been strange, living under the same roof after not having seen each other for so long. But we’re trying.”

“Were you speaking to him while he was in jail?”

Gabriel shook his head. “No sir, not at all.”

“This has probably been tough for you.”

“You’ve said it. It was just too hard for me, to visit him in jail. We’ve mostly let my mom do the visiting for us.”

“There have been times when I wanted to visit him in jail myself. To ask him about Paulette, and what happened in those mountains long ago.”

“I heard she died in an ambush,” Gabriel said, wondering if his sudden visit had given Mr. Hoffer the chance to make a confession of his own.

Mr. Hoffer sighed, then leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees as he fixed his eyes on Gabriel. “Paulie’s death was so suspicious for us. Paulie didn’t even want to go back to the NPA. She wanted to stay on and take care of Diwa. But some people came to take her away one night. We wanted her to stay, but she went with them. I think it was to protect us, in case they retaliated.” Mr. Hoffer smoothed his palms on his knees and shook his head. “They said they were her comrades, but God knows if they were PCs or spies posing as comrades. She had to go with them, maybe because she was married to your brother, and she had to honor their marriage vows. And then a few months later, she was dead, and they couldn’t even produce her body.”

“And then he surrendered himself to the authorities,” Gabriel said, remembering his own shock when he had received the news. He had just begun his senior year in high school, and he had come home one afternoon to find his mother getting ready to take the evening trip to Manila. “Your brother’s back,” she said, slipping some of Carlos’s clothes inside her open suitcase. Just when he had stopped hoping for his brother’s return, it finally happened, and he didn’t know how to feel about its suddenness. A part of him wished that his brother had never come back.

“Would you know why he surrendered?” Mr. Hoffer asked, his voice bearing the faint hint of accusation.

“I don’t know, sir. I just assumed that he got sick fighting in the hills and wanted to come back.” Back then, although Paulette’s death and Carlos’s surrender were two separate events, to Gabriel they felt like puzzle pieces, waiting to be fitted back together to form a picture that made sense.

Mr. Hoffer’s eyes softened. “Throughout these years, I’ve contemplated talking to your brother. Wondered what he was like, whether he was like you. Because he loved my daughter, didn’t he? He had a child with her, and knew a part of her that Irene and I never got to see.” He stared into space, opened his mouth, and quickly closed it. He sighed, and finally said, “I wondered if it was best to see him, to find out from him how exactly she died and why we didn’t have a body. But I didn’t have that strength to hear the details. Neither I nor Irene had that. Irene was so heartbroken. I didn’t want to subject her to that pain anymore.”

“You didn’t have a body to bury,” Gabriel said.

“But we aren’t the only parents who have lost a child to the dictatorship, who do not have a body to bury. I’m just glad Marcos is gone. He murdered our daughter, at least that’s how I feel.” He nodded and sighed.

“Your mother wants your brother to see Diwata, actually. And we have nothing against them meeting—in fact, it would be good for Diwa, to have a father. The problem is that your brother seems unwilling to see her. Which confuses us, because he was the one who told her all about Diwa,” Mr. Hoffer said, casting his eyes around the room. “I remember her coming here around the time Diwa had just turned three. Paulette had told us that Judge Arguelles’s son was the father right after she gave birth to Diwa, but we were too afraid of approaching your family back then, because Carlos was such a famous defector and we couldn’t just make it known to the world that our daughter had carried his child.” He pursed his lips, and shook his head in regret. “When your mother came to visit Diwa, three years later, we weren’t sure if we were ready to allow Carlos into our granddaughter’s life. We were still angry with him because our daughter was dead.” He raised his eyes to the sky, blinking away tears. “We all thought he wanted to be involved in his daughter’s life, through your mother, of course. And we didn’t like it at all, but he was Diwa’s father, and your mother was her grandmother, and we didn’t have the right to keep the child from them. It was only later that we found out from your mother that he wanted nothing to do with Diwa, and that she came to visit Diwa on her own.”

Gabriel hadn’t noticed that the family maid was still in the kitchen, until a sharp whistle interrupted the uncomfortable silence that followed their friendly, but uneasy conversation. Without turning his head, he listened to the maid switch off the range and take a kettle off from the stove. He heard the hissing sound of boiling water as it hit the bottom of a ceramic cup, and the sharp ping of an oven toaster, heralding the sweet, comforting aroma of heated pastries. This woman wasn’t Manang Rosing. This woman was shorter, for one thing, and her movements were brisker.

“So Manang Rosing’s gone,” Gabriel asked, gesturing with a flick of the head towards the kitchen.

“Oh, this is Marta,” Mr. Hoffer said, sighing as this maid, who greeted them in a bright, girlish voice, set a tray of tea of pastries before them, crinkling her eyes as Mr. Hoffer nodded at her in thanks.

Gabriel spooned sugar into his teacup and asked, “So Manang Rosing’s retired?”

“Well, sort of. She was quite old when we let her go.” Lifting an eyebrow, Mr. Hoffer said, “Actually, it was your Tita Irene’s idea.”

“What happened?” Gabriel asked, before picking up his cup and blowing into his tea. “Was she too old?”

“She was still perfectly capable of accomplishing her tasks, if you ask me. You know how these peasants are, their bodies are built for hard labor. Manang Rosing was old, but was fit as an ox, and very capable,” Mr. Hoffer said, before picking up a sugared ensaymada and munching on it, his eyes darkening in thought. “It’s quite hard to explain why we decided to let her go, and I think it was still unjust that we did it. But this was shortly after Paulette died, and we didn’t know what to think.”

“You thought Manang Rosing was a spy?”

“For all we know, she could have been. But who knows, maybe it was just our grief that took over us when we handled the situation. Irene and I were looking for someone to blame. Maybe that was Manang Rosing. Or maybe she was just a convenient scapegoat.”

Gabriel’s cup of tea felt heavy in his hand, and he put it down on its saucer, staring at its dark surface as a sudden faintness washed over him. He could hear Ricky, his youth mentor at the Kabataang Barangay Center years ago, tell him, on a quiet, sunny afternoon, You’re doing the right thing. He wouldn’t have said anything about Paulette if it weren’t for Ricky’s urgings, if Ricky had never said at their lectures that the communists were everywhere, listening in on them, waiting for the right moment to sabotage Marcos’s democratic revolution. He had only wanted to prove his loyalty to Ricky the day he talked about Sam’s sister, hoping, somehow, that if he was wrong about Paulette, she had nothing to fear. 

“So you think Manang Rosing had anything to do with it?”

“We just blamed the wrong person,” Mr. Hoffer said, wiping his mouth and giving Gabriel a sympathetic, but knowing look, which made Gabriel suspect that Mr. Hoffer hadn’t completely let him off the hook. “Of course we blamed the government, Marcos, this goddamn dictatorship that took our daughter away from us, that took the children of our friends away from them. But how do you take revenge on this force that’s just bigger than you? So we started looking for someone to blame.”

“And you didn’t suspect me?” he blurted out, his laughter weak and unsettled.

“It was wrong of us to blame anyone,” Mr. Hoffer said, taking in Gabriel’s question with a calm, but reprimanding look. “Those were strange times, and good people made mistakes. Who knows if any of us, even Sam, blurted out his sister’s membership with the NPA while with a friend. Or just said something that planted a seed of suspicion in someone’s head. It could’ve been any of us, but it makes no difference who it was. As long as Marcos was going after our children for standing up to him, nothing would stop him from killing them.”

“You’re being very kind,” Gabriel said, knowing, at this point, that it would do more harm than good for Mr. Hoffer to know what he had told Ricky that day, at the center. The old man found solace in the conclusions he had drawn, and Gabriel was in no place to disrupt his hard-earned peace.

“Paulette loved your brother, till the very end,” Mr. Hoffer said. “It’s why she went with those people when they asked her to come with them. She was torn between us and him, and she chose him.”

“If not for him, she would have stayed.”

“Precisely.”

He could picture her stepping forth from her house, into the arms of these strangers. What was she thinking, as she followed them down the street and into the night? Was she merely obeying her husband, even as she wished to stay with her child?

“It’s all part of the past now. As I said, if there’s anyone who should be blamed for Paulette’s death, it’s no one else but Marcos and the military. That’s how I’ve forgiven your brother. Carlos and Paulette wanted to fight this dictatorship. They faced the dictatorship’s bullets. Both of them were braver than I could ever have been.”

“They were braver than any of us,” Gabriel said, before he finished his tepid cup of tea.