Different Countries

Prologue

PrologueTHE WIND BLEW into the face of David Magallanes and hurt his eyes. He used this as an excuse to allow the tears that had been threatening to flow since the bus started moving. What had he done? What was he doing? David was seized with fear and guilt as the bus started to speed up into the highway. Everything had seemed a distant dream that he had nothing to do with since he left the office this afternoon. He had gone straight to the bus station, bought the ticket and found his place inside the bus, instead of going back to his cramped apartment where his pregnant mistress, Alma, and their baby would be waiting for him as usual. He would not be coming back to them. He didn’t have the willpower to continue the life he thought he could have in Manila, away from his wife, away from his hometown and the memories of his first daughter Teresa. Why had he turned into this callous person? David blamed fate for cursing his beloved, beautiful Teresa with leprosy—that dreadful, ugly disease. He did not have the lesions on the skin that numbed one’s sense of touch, but his daughter’s affliction had petrified his heart. He loved his daughter but couldn’t do anything about being weak. He stayed in Manila so it would be easier for him to travel to Culion Island where Teresa had been a patient since last year, 1948, but David was not brave enough to visit his 17-year-old daughter. He was afraid he would not recognize her—or even reject her.

While sitting at his office desk this morning, routinely checking the requests for payment piled on the table, it had dawned on him that he didn’t have it in him anymore to be a husband to another woman, a father to new daughters. He would just send Alma and their daughter money. He would work again at the municipal government in his hometown or set up a small business with his wife Luz. He would provide for Alma, baby girl Ronda, and the one yet to come. Luz knew about Alma and had said nothing; she hadn’t been to Manila to visit David since the affair started, but David remained confident that Luz still loved him and would take him back. God forgive me, was all David could mentally mutter now. Alma and their daughter and Teresa started becoming a blur in his memory. The smog that the bus emitted seemed to obscure the scenes it was leaving behind.

David would never know that his sin was graver than abandoning Teresa and Luz before, and then Alma and their children. When David left Manila, he was also denying his descendants their link to their past, which would be lost to them even when their paths would cross more than four decades later.