Feelings
How many deaths one must die before one breathes one’s last? (Part 2)
By Emmanuelle
ONE can’t have too much . . . of runways. Especially a runway that was wide, and white and sun-washed, a tall lanky figure standing at the foreground, hair tousled by a gusty wind. Hands in left and right pockets of brown slacks, slouch frozen in time, his was the Great Profile.
She told herself she would be definitely heading somewhere white and padded if she kept seeing Great Profile at every runway. Bad scenario, if more than once she actually bodily saw him as she stepped down the plane; worse case if she saw him everytime but only in her mind, only in her mind.
One can’t have too much pain. So, from runways she ran.
She joined the Red Cross, which, at the time, was a world different from Rosa Rosal and her neat legion of crispy smiley whites. Red Cross then was a gung-ho gray army of doctors and nurses and volunteers, fixers of detritus of towns and villages wrung through a dirty war. Water was unclean, flies outnumbered humans, families breathed respiratory diseases, cholera was epidemic, girls-turned-mothers hemorrhaged and babies died unborn or at first light. As Red Cross nurse, she taught cleanliness and sanitation, mother-and-child care and first-aid remedies. She also suctioned pus from ulcer sores and dug bullets out and sewed-up bolo wounds.
She commuted aboard army trucks and Willy’s jeeps and bicycles. Where no wheels can roll, she trudged on mud and rocks. Or hitched a ride up carabaos and horses. This daughter of a many-termed governor patted the animals’ boney familiar backs. She was at home far away from home.
No, she was not afraid a bit even when she had to share the trails with armed men and their families dutifully following. These were former lowlanders-turned rebels-wanting to turn lowlanders again. Well, sige pa la; she felt a teeny weeny bit afraid. Those old and rusty equipments at their hands or backs were real guns after all.
Right there, in a town lounging lazily at the foot of the Cordilleras, she met her surgeon straight from UP-PGH. She looked down (she was tall, you know; her father was partly English), and among the welcome party of men and women and children alike, there he was. So, he was more than a little bit shorter her height; but, wait a minute, the surgeon was Rizal-like to her taller version of Josephine Bracken!
He was the only doctor in town, and a stranger just settling. Among his clinical and surgical duties was to oversee the peaceful assimilation of the ragtag armies of former guerillas or rebels, who didn’t know any better but to surrender without sending any feelers, walking dizzily with hunger and malaria and cholera straight to the guns of the defenders of the municipio. The soldiers, still neurotic with the past war, shot them one after the other. Bodies kept toppling down the streets. Children going home from school gingerly stepped over the dead and the dying.
Each day, after he was through being doctor and surrender diplomat, he followed her around with his boxed camera, admiring the view from afar and checking her progress with mothers and surprisingly fathers and even other town bachelors in attendance. He didn’t wonder why guys would want to learn the right way to boil drinking water but he did wonder why they would like to know how mothers who had just given birth can avoid infection.
“Ah, these men, too, are like me, admiring the view and checking her progress,” he thought.
After she was through with this town and its villages, she proceeded to the nearby ones, going farther from him each day. And each day, after he was through being doctor and surrender diplomat, he proceeded to follow her to the nearby towns, admiring the view with his camera and checking her progress.
Soon enough, he had to admit the truth. He was not merely admiring the view and checking her progress. He was in love, deeply and woozily in love.
Afterwards, no matter how sternly they lectured the young ones about the virtues and the advantages of long engagement, they were listened to with a disbelieving smile.
The nurse and the surgeon were married exactly two weeks after they first met.
(To be continued another time.)
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