Accents
A love story
I call it a love story, this narrative titled The Reddest Rose, flying with cyberwings to snuggle in my cybernest here in the U.S. of A. Sender May Wan was requesting a favor to help somehow assuage their grief — hers and that of her sister Tamara. The girls are daughters of Maria Luisa Posa-Dominado, who was abducted by unknown elements April 12, 2007, and Tomas Dominado, our relative. The story is a weepie, and I think you'll need a hankie, or perhaps just a prayer for a silver lining that the family life they're missing is not completely lost in the dark clouds of these uncertain times under the Macapagal-Arroyo Administration.
Second of two parts
The wedding came to happen because the various motives of all parties involved combined to make the wedding come to be. The deciding factor was of course the military's calculation that in a married state the couple would mellow in their militance and take the conventional option of subservience to martial rule and lay low.
They were aiming for the maximum objective of pressuring the couple to cooperate and betray their cause as later events have shown.
The relatives and friends of the couple had more personal and sympathetic reasons. They really wanted to provide comfort and safety and normalcy to their loved ones the way they believed laying low could provide for. They also hated the dictatorship but they thought seven of the couple's prime years of dangerous struggle was already more than enough for the detained couple to sacrifice. For the couple, marriage under the then given circumstances, formalized their decision to persevere in struggling against the dictatorship as husband and wife. It firmed up their belief that they could struggle even as they found and raise a family, convinced that a better future of the family that they had started to raise and of all Filipinos would be the fruit of their labor. And marriage would satisfy their families and friends wish for their happiness even if happiness itself had different meaning for all parties.
The bare love nest they went back to under detention was never a tragic circumstance for them. Having survived martial rule so far with their belief intact and firmer was already fortuitous for them as others might say. Scores of their close comrades and friends have already died or were likewise in prison. They themselves have been survivors of encounters and raids by the armed elements of the state. The bride had accumulated three years in three detention while the groom also had two and a half years of detention under his belt. They were accustomed to living conditions far worse in material amenities but far better in freedom in the mainstream of struggle. Actually, it's a small price to pay as contribution to the ouster of the Marcos dictatorship some eight years later.
Also detention provided them the rare opportunity to be with each other, a time and a place to rekindle their love they lost among the devastation that the martial law's brutality wreaked. It mattered not if the regimented conditions of prison life presented seemingly insurmountable conditions, if courting would have to be done in front of the Camp Commander who was intent in censoring all suspicious meanings between lines of sweet nothings that lovers ply each other with. As life will out so will love out in the vow to love each "in sickness or in health", in prison or in freedom.
They already believed that marriage is better lived in freedom. Freedom under martial rule meant struggling against the dictatorship. They could have their marriage first and have their freedom a bit late. It would be only five months later, on August 22, 1977, when they eloped away from a detention that imposed more stringent conditions than before marriage—like being forced to betray their cause. But this is another story told before.
They planned to have children but only under the warm sun of freedom and not within the clammy chambers of a detention camp. Even if it meant being pursued by a company of Philippine army soldiers after having just giving birth to May Wan in the forests of Malinao, Aklan in the May of 1982. Or conceiving Tamara after having been just released from Luisa's fifth incarceration in August 1991 just around Luisa's 36th birthday on August 10 of that year. Both were born on Labor Day exactly a decade apart.
The couple were married at the ripe age of 27 for Tomas and 22 for Luisa. 31 years later they remain married even if Luisa was missing the occasion for the first time. They and the people they served would still celebrate the 32ndanniversary of their commitment to each other and to the people's cause the next time around.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)