fiction by Roger B Rueda
Alpha was a shy, quiet-spoken girl. When we were classmates at primary school, she was always polite and respectful. She never had an ambition, though. She wisely contented herself with her family and her love of nature. All of eighteen, her turf was their farm. Seldom would she go to Iloilo City. She seemed very innocent.
At weekends, she would go to the sugarcane field and pick tinôtinô, or she would go with her cousins and they would bite sugarcane off a bit. She also liked eating bananas.
We would romp happily around the mounds of hays whenever she invited us to their house. I would throw hays at our other classmates.
Her family spent a lot of time rearing free-range chickens. Sometimes, her mother would cook us nice meals. I liked her chicken adóbo and tinúla of chicken and green papaya.
Alpha and I remained friends until high school and even college. She did mass communications at a local college; I, creative writing in another city. She became very talkative. Her skirts were knee-skimming and flirty. She told me that she had been idolising Vega, the daughter of their neighbour, when one time we met at my grandmother’s house, which was along the road to their house on the farm. Vega grew more rebellious because her father left them when they were all young. Her mother’s permissiveness towards Vega and her siblings reflected the wild abandon of her own life.
Vega was marvellously cool, so Alpha, then a young innocent girl, admired the way she had coped life.
She’d got a lot of boyfriends. She’d flirt outrageously. She was very open in her attitudes about sex. Her parents, though, didn’t know what she was doing in their community. Her parents were naïve and innocent. They were both illiterate.
I was speechless with shock when she showed me her chest full of kiss marks. She became a tart. She would go to the ROTC building all alone in the night to meet some guys there. Young men didn’t respect her, so I wondered a lot. When we took a tricycle to the busy plaza, the driver refused to take our fare, but rather he poked her in the ribs.
Alpha was deflowered by Vega’s brother, Manny, also a rebellious brat. She had a crush on him since she was all of ten, so when Alpha was all alone he pulled her to their house, which was also along the road to Alpha’s house. She never resisted him though she already knew that he might rape her. He was sort of a maniac. But to Alpha, it was an opportunity to have a relationship with Manny though she knew it wouldn’t be going anywhere.
I thought that Alpha only behaved stupidly. She had been a smart woman, and now she was perceived as vain, spoilt, and promiscuous. All her friends and classmates knew it. She just disregarded her friends’ advice to her. She wanted a different path and so she went and studied all alone.
One of her friends locked her and raped in the toilet in school. The man was trying to blackmail her into doing whatever he wanted. She was afraid that some photographs of her in the nude might be circulated all over the campus, it would really embarrass her and her family.
***
It was only an hour or so later that her father Lando discovered that Alpha was missing. The unexpected and sudden realisation briefly panicked Alpha’s family. Her father walked to the street corner and waited for her. It was late in the evening.
Lando seemed very worried. He couldn’t explain why he was feeling that way, however.
He and his wife walked in silence for some while. They kept a vigil in front of their house. His voice trembled with emotion.
The next day dawned sombre and gloomy: Alpha came within minutes of bleeding to death after her wrists were slashed. She told her parents that she was held down and raped by their neighbours, while she was walking a few steps to their house. She couldn’t let out a scream because they gagged her mouth with a towel. She was trying to resist it, but her might was not enough: she was weak to move. Three men raped her, according to her. She seemed to be crying with anger and frustration.
Lando almost ran amok as soon as he heard that news from his daughter. It seemed that bombs fell in the town. He became a chaotic sort of person.
An hour later, two policemen arrived on foot. They immediately arrested the three young men in connection with the rape complaint. That came as a shock to three young men. They arrived in court handcuffed to two police officers. They became an embarrassment to their parents, who were professors of the university.
They were detained by the police after further questioning. Their case was a heinous crime and they had a slim chance to be in the clear. Alpha’s family, most of them lawyers, vouchsafed to help. Actually, because they had the same family name.
For months, there had been no talks between parties. Manny’s mother was depressed, and she’d do everything so long as her son would be cleared. She was willing to pay any amount, even if that’d mean borrowing money from a lending firm.
Alpha’s family were terribly cross. It seemed that they wouldn’t agree with any settlements the other party would offer.
Being poor was other reason that they couldn’t just agree with anything. It was an insult to their whole family if they would just give in. So, the three young men had to be sent down. Or else, they’d no face to show in the town.
***
A year later, the three young men were seen at the party. Everyone was shocked to see them. Never had they seen Alpha since then.
The parties had agreed to try to settle their dispute by negotiation. Alpha had demanded a million peso-settlement. The three suspects then had been released from detention.
Their life continued as normal. They felt, though, incredibly ashamed of themselves for being indicted on a rape charge. What had happened ruined their reputation as it brought disgrace upon them.
Years later, the three started a family.
***
The family left the farm, their landlord had sacked them. They moved to a nipah house near the highway. A decade later, the simple house transformed to a mansion, the biggest so far in the town.
A woman alighted from a limousine. She walked into the municipal hall. It was only two months before the election that Alpha announced she would run for mayor.
She had been making substantial donations to poor barangays. A lot of poor students were going to college on her scholarship.
About three thousand people started holding a rally to support her candidacy. They were shouting slogans. Nobody had known who Alpha Focker was. All they had known was she was just a public spirited woman.
Alpha’s coming back completely altered the political landscape of the town.
A big banner was draped across one of the streets saying, `Welcome Ms Alpha Focker.’ The crowd were enormously enthusiastic.
It seemed that everything that had happened to Alpha was likely to sink into silence.
Tinôtinô - Small orange fruit similar in size and shape to a cherry tomato. The fruit is covered in papery husk, its flavour pleasant.
