It was not my intention to wean Malu from her politics, just see to it that she saw the other side, that progress was not a result of a class war, that motivation was important, and that as a student of psychology, she should recognize this.
I saw her almost daily during lunch when school started again if she was not in the slums or in demonstrations at the American embassy and Malacañang. I was going to graduate in a few months and had already started working in the family business. Perhaps it sounded flippant when I asked if she was now ready, after all her experiences, to move out of Dasmariñas and lead the revolution.
She was not usually given to flare-ups, but this time, she all but screamed, “Damn your money! How much do you pay your workers?”
I did not let that pass. I asked if she ever understood why so many generations stayed on in Tondo which had been there in Bonifacio’s time, and even earlier. “They are lazy, they lack initiative,” I told her. “You can love humanity—but it will not change.”
“And why should they not be lazy?” she flung back. “This is the whole debilitating effect of colonialism. They work so hard and still don’t make enough. Or eat enough.”
“In our furniture factory,” I said, “there is a lot of absenteeism after payday. What do they do? They get drunk and don’t report for work for three days. They don’t save. I can go through a long list.”
“But not in the farms where your uncle sent us.”
“They are not his farms. All of us, we give justice to our workers.”
“They work very hard,” she went on. “Without rest, and when all is done, there is still very little for them.” Then she challenged me. “I bet you have never been in a slum, you have never been inside a poor man’s house, in Tondo or anywhere.”
She trapped me, all right, and that very afternoon, it was my turn. We drove to Barrio Magsaysay where her group was organizing action teams.
We parked in the bay boulevard because we could not get through the maze of alleys. It was late November, the rains had paused; otherwise, as she explained it, we would have to wear boots because the alleys became rivulets of fetid mud. When we got there, what disturbed me really was not the sorry construction, the pigsty atmosphere—it was the eagerness, the dedication on her face as we entered this misshapen world of people who greeted her with warmth.
She introduced me to Charlie—a frail boy of fifteen who looked much older, and like all youths in the slum, he had dirty skin and bad teeth. He was in faded shorts and his rubber slippers were about to break apart. Wherever we went, he followed. He adored Malu and for a while, I was jealous.
“He is the brightest boy in the Barrio,” she said, enthusiastically. He had organized the youngsters and got them to clean the alleys, keep order. He was out of school; he would have been a high school junior had he enrolled, but his tuition money went to the hospital when his father fell ill. He helped at a stall in Divisoria, got three pesos a day plus some leftover, wilted vegetables.
There were many things that Malu could have done for them but she felt they must do a lot for themselves and I agreed. Still I knew that someday, if it had not already happened, they would possess her and I did not want that. I coveted her.
It was late afternoon when we left the Barrio. We went to the Hilton. I had thought of walking around the Luneta but she was hungry.
We sat together in the coffee shop and I held her hand under the table. Her closeness was intoxicating, an invitation; I was now sure she had some affection for me. I relished that Sunday morning when I visited her, warmed to the memory of her pinching me when I told her father how serious my intentions were. I just loved looking at her, the sinuous line of her jaw, those eyes, expressive of joy and yet seeing sorrow everywhere. I loved listening to her even when she was like some broken record repeating the same phrases about the oppression of the poor which, really, no single person could change for as long as we lived within the iron logic of capitalism.
“I am miserable, Teng-ga,” she said, pressing my hand. “I can’t find peace of mind. Oh, no, not the spiritual kind. It seems as if I’m at ease only when I am trying to help people.”
She moved closer. I desired her then, imagined her naked under me, crushing those lips in a kiss. Looking at her, composed and serene, I wondered how she would look in surrender, her self-assurance completely sundered.
I did something stupid that day which, as it turned out, was a revelation not only about myself but about her. We had finished our hamburgers. The late afternoon was untarnished and driving along the boulevard, the smell of the sea wafting into the car, she sat close to me, silent, as if her mind were far away. Soon, it would be dark. As we turned left through Cuneta to get to Makati, the motels lined up on both sides on the narrow road.
“Let’s go into one,” I said, and before she could object, I had turned left to an entrance. She tugged at my sleeve briefly as if to stop me, but it was too late. I swung the car to an open garage which one of the boys who had risen from a bench pointed to.
I had expected her to object, perhaps just a little. She looked at me, shaking her head, then she rolled up the window and together, we went up the stairs. It was obviously her first time in a motel and now, she was all curiosity as she studied the room, the huge mirrors that surrounded the wide bed, the knobs that controlled the red lights and the piped-in music. When the buzzer rang and the boy came, she went out to the anteroom and watched me sign the smudged register with a fictitious name.
After the boy had gone, she sat on the wide bed, looked disapprovingly at me, and asked, “Are you going to rape me?”
I shook my head. “I am not going to do anything you don’t want.”
“I am glad you said that,” she said, “because I’m not ready for this. Oh, I know that by the time you are a junior in the university, you are no longer supposed to be a virgin. But I still am—whatever you may think of my manners.”
“And you’re proud of holding on to it?”
“Maybe, but that is not the reason. I would like to give it to someone I really care for.”
I do not know of her intention but what she said dampened my ardor.
“I suppose I am not the first girl you brought to a motel?”
“No,” I said with some honesty.
“I am getting to like you,” she said with a slight laugh. “And who knows …” she stood up, came to me, and kissed my cheek. I flung my arms around her, kissed the lobes of her ears, felt her body warm and close, her silky thighs. But she was like a block of wood. I let her go.
“You’re a tease,” I said. “You lead me on and let me think …”
“I am not a tease,” her voice rose. “Can’t you see that I like you, but not enough to engage in simple fornication? That is what you want—and if you love me, then you know that love is more than that.”
“Shit,” I said, turning. “Even the church dissolves a marriage if it is not consummated. Spiritual love—that is foolish, for nuns. And even nuns have physical needs. Don’t you realize that I want to marry you?”
“Thank you for the nice thought.” Her tone changed immediately. She shucked off her shoes, then lay down. “Come,” she said. “Let’s not waste this bed and all these mirrors. Let us just talk.”
I could not help but laugh. Desire had really cooled. I lay beside her and gazed at the mirror in the ceiling, at the two of us, fully clothed.
“No one would believe this,” I said. Then I asked her what it was that she really wanted to do.
“To be alive,” she said quietly. “To see that time is not wasted. I don’t want to grow old without having lived usefully.”
“Loving is living,” I said. “So I love you and in loving you I am alive.” I lay still, her hand warm and soft in mine, the blisters from Albay already gone. “But suppose I died tomorrow; what is it that you will remember of me?”
She turned on her side and pressed her hand quickly to my mouth. “Don’t talk like this. As if you always look at the dark side of things.”
“There can be a car accident tomorrow. Or a building may collapse on me. These we cannot foresee. Living is always risking.”
She lay back. Even when we did not speak, I could feel myself flow out to her in calm, blue waves. We reminisced about ourselves, her childhood, those days when she had been so self-conscious with her father and how, by that experience, she had learned to use her eyes better and see beneath the patina, the superficiality of appearances and of speech. It was deeds that mattered.
I reiterated; I would soon be through with school and would then take on more duties in our business. It was time to get married.
And that was when she said we could just live together and find out if we were compatible so that, afterwards, if we weren’t, or if we outgrew each other, we could always part and still be friends.
I was shocked. She was a modern, liberated woman, but I did not know she thought so lightly of the institution of marriage.
“You are fooling, Plat.”
“No,” she said amiably. “Marriage is a lifetime commitment and that is what I want to make when I am sure.”
The telephone jangled. The clerk said our “short time” was up. Four hours! Time had gone so fast, it was almost midnight. I wanted to stay longer since there were many things still unsaid, many questions unasked.
We put on our shoes. She brushed her hair and straightened her blouse. I went behind her and encircled her waist. Turning to me, she kissed me again lightly, this time on the lips.
“So, at least,” she whispered, “you will not say that nothing happened.”
We drove to Dasmariñas hardly talking. Her mother opened the door saying, “Hurry, your father needs you.”
I was uneasy, wondering what scolding she would get. Her mother asked me to stay for a cup of coffee. She was a handsome woman in her fifties, without the matronly bulge of most women her age. In her blue housedress, there was a patrician quality about her, and her eyes, like Malu’s, were alive. Look at a girl’s mother, I remember reading, and this is how the daughter will look.
I asked permission to leave, but Malu returned to the living room and told me to wait, her father wanted to talk with me.
“I told him we went to a motel,” she said, laughing.
Her mother must have seen me blush. She smiled at my discomfiture and said Malu was always making those risque jokes. But she is a good girl, she assured me.
“I know that, Ma’am” I said.
She left for the kitchen and returned with the coffee and a piece of chocolate cake.
“She is giving her father a head massage,” she explained. “He is not feeling well.”
“I did not know she was also a masseuse.”
“Not really,” she explained. “She just lays her hand on her father’s brow then prays.”
I wanted to know more, but by then Malu came out and said I should talk with her father. I was nervous—did she really tell him we went to a motel? And would he tell me now never again to come to this house?
She led me across the wide expanse of carpet and upholstered furniture and all that “burgis crockery” as she described it, to the library. By an old writing desk with several tape recorders, Malu’s father sat on an overstuffed leather easy chair. His dark glasses were not on and when he looked at me, his eyes had that blank, unseeing stare. He must have felt that I was standing for he said, “Please sit down,” pointing to the rattan chair before him.
He asked if I was served something and when he was assured that I was, he sighed, “I had this headache again and Malu is the only one who can relieve me of it.”
“She is a wonderful girl, sir.”
He nodded. “She has special gifts. She is the brightest of my children. I know her values are right. She tells me about those teach-ins, those demonstrations, the idealism of it all. I worry about her, her safety, her well-being. If she were only a boy—do you understand what I am trying to say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you believe in what she is doing?”
“Not all the way, sir,” I said. “Neither demonstrations nor guns will do away with the injustice around us. Education will—I told her that.”
He slapped his thigh as if he agreed, drew his chest in and breathed deeply. He was past sixty, but there was still stamina in him. “But how can I dissuade her? I believe in her goals, too, and that is why I am worried. But I’m glad that you are rooted in solid ground and you can be some sort of anchor to … reason and sanity. Now, let me tell you something you don’t know. She is also a spiritista. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes, sir. She let me read a paper she wrote which she did not want published.”
He shook his head, sadly. “Since 1949—nothing but darkness. Many specialists, even in Europe, have seen me. Do you understand? I was prepared for a life of darkness. I have even forgiven the Japanese for it. I have adjusted to it, although I miss many things. The shape of trees, of houses, the colors … and Malu—my dear child! I have never seen her. If only I could! Sometimes, I touch her face, imagining how she looks. She always tells me she is ugly.”
“No, sir,” I said quickly. “She is the prettiest girl I know. Her eyes, her cheeks …” I was gushing and pitying him at the same time. And I was glad that I could see her and hoped to God that I would know her far better, know the grace that suffused her personality.
“You love her?”
“Very much, sir.”
“We all love her,” he said. “But I have a feeling that we will lose her.”
“Oh, no!”
The sightless eyes locked with mine. “You may not know it, but when she became a spiritista two years ago … Oh—I never found out how she got into it and she has not told me yet. During this last year that she began ministering to me, touching my eyes, praying for me … I could not believe it at first. After all those years of total darkness. But now, I can tell when it is daylight. The reds come flooding into my eyes. Do you know what this means? For a man who knew nothing but night for more than twenty years? I have hope again. And now, when I sit in front of a window, when people pass in front of me, I see shadows. Shadows!”
Malu came to the acacia after her last class; she wore the same old jeans and loose blouse—they were her uniform. She shared with me the chocolate cake her mother had baked and when we were finished, I asked about the spiritistas in Navotas.
“And why are you so interested in them all of a sudden?”
“I want to find out what is in them that attracts you. What are you really looking for? What do you want?”
“Hey!” She playfully shoved a fist into my stomach. “One at a time. I am no computer. What do you want me to be?”
“My wife,” I said immediately. “I want you to raise my children, to keep house, help me be what I want to be …”
“How conventional,” she sighed. “The woman’s place is in the home.”
“It is a major responsibility, Plat. No small matter.”
“I don’t deny that,” she said. “But it is like condemning a woman to prison.”
“A home a prison? Do you want to be free like a bird? But even birds have nests.”
“I know, but you asked what I want. I want peace.”
“It is so abstract, Plat. It is like saying I want truth, beauty …”
“I want those, too, and they are not abstract.”
“Tell me, are you uncomfortable in Dasmariñas Village?”
She did not speak. I had touched the root of it all. She turned to me and said evenly, “My father did not cheat anyone. He worked very hard all his life. My mother, too. I don’t have to explain our kind of life.”
“I am not asking you to,” I said. “People deserve the fruits of their labor.”
“That’s what Father said. The only things I knew were parties, clothes. Oh, yes, Father told us about the poor, but I was protected from real knowledge. Then, when I was a junior in high school, I had a very good teacher in literature. She made us read Rizal, all those stories by our own writers that would waken us. We asked questions. She took us to the Philippine General Hospital and saw all those people in the corridors who were going to die because they had no money. I have been only to the best hospitals—the Makati Center, those in the United States. We read stories about the slums, so we visited—not Tondo—but Malibay in Pasay. And you know, what I used to spend for one dress—that was what one family needed to live on for three months! I was shocked. I felt guilty that I had so much, that I was comfortable and there are so many people who are not. And my teacher, when the nuns learned about what she was doing, they fired her. I really hated them for that.”
“You cannot be Santa Claus,” I said. “This is a job for government. Besides, the poor will always be with us.”
“They are people!” she said emphatically. “That I cannot forget. I wanted to think only of myself, of the fun I used to have. I just couldn’t anymore. And that was when I went into meditation. To ease my mind—not to run away or to seek some enlightenment. Don’t you have mental or emotional problems at all?”
“Yes,” I said. “Lots of them. But the one that gives me the most frustration—is you.”
Her brows arched in mock surprise. “You trouble me a lot, too,” she said. “We should meditate together then. I have my own mantra which is just like saying the rosary over and over.”
“Om ni pad ni om …”
“Not that esoteric,” she said. “What I want the world to have: love … light, love … light.”
She said there must be a way the sick can be helped without going to fancy hospitals and buying those expensive medicines. Many of man’s diseases were psychosomatic and most ailments could be cured by the human body itself. She went searching for faith healers, found most of them were fakes taking advantage of the ignorant, just as many specialists in medicine took advantage of their patients.
All these led her to the spiritistas.
“Can you take me to Navotas to see them?”
“So you can laugh at us, or look at us as if we were freaks?”
I told her then what her father had told me.
“I believe, Plat,” I said simply.
We reached Barrio Santa Clara late in the day. It was not a long way from the boulevard that skirted the bay. We passed new housing areas that were being built on land that was once fish ponds. We turned right into a narrow, cemented street, the wooden houses intruding into the street itself. I drove slowly for people had spilled out into the street, loafing, taking in the late afternoon sun.
The chapel was within a compound of shoddy wooden frame houses and we parked in the driveway cluttered with laundry lines, empty fish baskets, and old lumber. Beyond the driveway, the chapel was just another decrepit building with an open foyer through which I could see no pews but an enclosure with several women and men. They greeted Malu warmly. She introduced me as her future husband and they beamed at me and shook my hand.
We did not stay with them; she led me out to one of the houses by the chapel, across an alley heaped with cooking pots, stacked firewood, and empty chicken coops. The whole place smelled of sweat and tired people. In the dim, almost sepulchral living room, a corpulent woman was stretched on an iron bed stacked with pillows that needed washing, her hair grayish and stringy. When she saw Malu, she half rose and grinned, baring a set of bad teeth stained with betel nut. Malu greeted her politely. She was the priestess, the leader of the congregation.
Dusk was now upon us. Back in the chapel, a single fluorescent tube in the nave was on and several candles in the altar with the image of Christ were lighted. They were all within the enclosure now. I sat just outside on one of the benches by the railing. They started with the national anthem, not the anthem sung in the schools with its exotic Tagalog. The melody was the same, but the words were simpler, more beautiful. The woman whom we had met in the house intoned a prayer first and all the members, not more than fifty and mostly women, stood silently. They were working-class people; their clothes were shabby, and their skins were dark with sun and toil. Now, their eyes closed, they started praying, Malu with them. After a while, many started to sway and tremble; the fat woman walked around, stood before each member, praying. I was transfixed, watching Malu. She had closed her eyes and her arms started to quiver. Each one spoke, not in unison but singly, in a Tagalog I could hardly understand, not the Tagalog of the sidewalk but the Tagalog of the poets. They thanked God and promised they would work for His glory. Then it was Malu’s turn—the priestess was in front of her. Malu was in a deep trance and, perhaps, did not know what she was saying. Her voice was resonant, and her Tagalog was beautiful and frightening and I feared for her, for she said, “Dear God, Your poor and Your weak—Who will help them? When You said You gave us not peace but the sword, where now is the sword so that we may bring justice to Your people?”
For all her radical verbiage, Malu was not one to carry arms; she was scared of them and of military men. Her threshold for physical pain was low. She once suffered through a horrible toothache because she felt it was more torture to sit on a dentist’s chair. Her childhood memories of her visit to one were indelible—the drill, it had seemed to her then, was going right through her tooth, into her being. I accompanied her to my dentist who was an excellent and understanding woman with a calm, soothing manner. Still, she paled visibly with the first shot of Novocain in her gums.
“How can you be a revolutionary when you cannot even visit a dentist without trembling? How will it be then when you get shot at? Or when you see blood?”
“You are no different—you’re just like all of them,” she said. “Did it over occur to you that revolution is not just shooting and dying? It is also cooking, typing, keeping files, planning, teaching—and organizing.”
I knew she was doing a lot of this and during the Christmas break that year, I saw her less, but I phoned every day. She was busy in the slums, worried that those driftwood houses would soon be bulldozed by the government.
“It is for the greater good, Plat,” I said. “That place was meant for harbor facilities, for storehouses.”
“But there is no place where they can be relocated,” she said angrily. “And more than that, the government will not start any construction for two years. I know, I researched it.”
I could not argue. Perhaps, I was just being jealous of Charlie who was now with her every day. I knew the slum needed not just simple housing but sewage disposal, garbage collection and a water system. Burned into my mind was that afternoon we went there, the pigpens that passed for homes, the unmistakable imprint of harsh living in the mottled skins of people, the big bellies of children, the rancid smell of rotting garbage and human waste in the alleys.
“I think you are in love with Charlie,” I blurted out.
“Don’t be funny,” she retorted, and banged the phone.
I visited her on Christmas day—her mother had called and said I should have lunch with them and she hinted that Malu needed to see me.
It was a memorable day. I brought this engagement ring hoping it would make her happy. It was not much, a simple .32 carat diamond in white gold setting. It was also a bleak day and I did not give her the ring though she gave me a gold-filled ball pen. I couldn’t give the ring because for the first time, I saw her cry, the tears just welling in her eyes and down her cheeks.
We were out in the garden by ourselves, under the golden shower pergola. I held her, tried to comfort her. Charlie was dead; they had buried him that morning.
“He had so much promise,” she said. He was going back to school so that someday he would be a lawyer and would know how to fight for the “little people” who had no defense; they knew neither the law nor big men.
They were already bulldozing the settlement. The slum dwellers had organized a picket line and Charlie was a leader in the picket. He had left the line to plead with the Metrocom who had now brought the bulldozers. He did not even taunt them. He merely left the line to tell them that all of them, soldiers and squatters alike, were “little people.” They shot him instead.
“I ran to him and they would have shot me, too” Malu said, “had the others not rushed with me to the fallen boy.”
I was now busy with exams and term papers, but I religiously went to the acacia at noon. Sometimes she joined me, though briefly. At one time, she said she was going to India just to be alone. I remember witnessing a Hindu festival in Singapore: men paraded in the streets, their tongues, their cheeks punctured with long thick needles. A bearded man pulled a cart with ropes fastened to his back muscles by iron hooks. There was no blood and my eyes were not fooling me. It was self-hypnosis again, of this I was sure. Now, serious doubts crowded my mind and I worried about Malu coming back, garbed in saffron and chanting on street corners.
It was during the small graduation dinner Mother gave that I presented the ring to her, told her not to open the package till she got home. That same evening, she called and said she would give it back. I asked why and she said she wanted to be fair with me. She said, “Truly, I love you.”
A warm and glorious glow engulfed me. It was the first time she uttered it. Why then give the ring back? I could not understand. How could I compete with something I could not vanquish, least of all touch?
“There is this cause,” these were her exact words, “that will take most of my time, my energies, my precious Teng-ga.”
Malu disappeared during the two-month school vacation and frightened her parents and me. Her mother often called to find out if she had gotten in touch. She had gone to the province, she had told her mother, for another of those teach-ins. She would be away for just a couple of weeks, but on the third, when she did not return, we started looking. She had said she would go again to Bicol; I hastily called Uncle Bert, but neither she nor her group was there. I did not inquire of the army or the constabulary—they were the last people to ask about Malu.
By then, too, I had taken on more responsibilities in our business. I had a desk in Operations and Planning. Mother and my older brothers had thought it best to let me work for a couple of years before going to Wharton for an MBA. It was just as well. I could not concentrate, I brooded over the times Malu and I shared, the conversations and, most of all, that evening in a motel when we held hands and dreamed.
She returned in the first week of June, shortly before classes began. It was her mother who told me she was back. I asked to talk with Malu. Her mother suddenly seemed ill at ease, as if Malu was beside her telling her to say she was not in, for that was what her mother said. I went to her house immediately and was told by the maid who opened the door—she did not let me in—that Malu was still out.
I called again that night and was told she was asleep—although it was only eight. She was avoiding me, she could have easily called. When school opened, I waited for her and this time, there was no escape. She was in the same jeans and formless blouse. She had grown darker and there was a look of unease about her.
“Why don’t you want to see me?” I asked bluntly.
She turned around. We were in the vicinity of the registrar’s office and students were milling about, looking at bulletin boards, checking their schedules. “I will see you in half an hour at the acacia,” she mumbled, her eyes downcast.
“No!” I was angry then. “I will not leave you. I’ll follow you till you tell me what is wrong.”
She bit her lip. She was in trouble and I wanted to help her, if she would only let me.
We walked out into the street, onward to the library, to our tree. The grass was green now, the dead brown of the dry season banished; the first rains of June had done their job and a freshness perfumed the air. Everything about the world seemed bright, except for this gloom which now encompassed us.
We sat on the old and twisted root. She began slowly. She had no more tears to shed. “They are dead, Teng-ga. All five of them. And I am the only one who got out.”
“Who are dead?”
“Bubut, Eddie, Lina, Tom and Alex …” She looked at me, beseeched me. I could not quite grasp it at first, but in the back of my mind was a huge, oncoming wave of fear. What had she done? What had she been sucked into?
They had gone to the south, somewhere in the mountains of Quezon, and joined another group for the duration of the school vacation. Familiarization and training, that is what they called it.
On their way back, they had been particularly careful because they were all unarmed. Alex, a medical student, was an old hand and their guide. They bivouacked in an abandoned farmhouse for the night with Alex outside as sentry. That early morning, a shout erupted from the surrounding green ordering them to come out. Even as they filed out of the hut, their hands in the air, they were mowed down.
Malu had dropped quickly to the ground in abject fear and that was how she was spared.
The armed men swarmed around them. A lean man in jeans, with crew cut, pulled her up from the grass where she was cowering. The men were laughing; they were not in uniform, but they were obviously a commando team. “Leave us alone for a moment,” the crew-cut man said, and the men dispersed to the bushes. The man yanked her inside the hut and told her to undress. She begged that she be allowed to look at her friends, they might still be alive, but he just laughed at her. “If they are, we will kill them all before we leave this place. And, of course, we will kill you, too.”
She said, “My first thought was one of shame. He started to touch me. I drew away and he barked: ‘One more move like that and I will shoot you.’ I tried to push him away but he was strong. He was laughing. He held my hands and repeated his threat. I wanted to live. It was painful at first and I thought I would not be able to endure it. But he took his time before he started pushing. I don’t know how long it took—I was afraid he would kill me when he got through. I thought I would cooperate so he would let me live. And I started pushing, too. He kissed me and I kissed back. I did! Oh, it was disgusting. He seemed surprised and pleased and he said he would not kill me because I was good, but that if I was not gone in another hour, his men would return and surely use me as he had done, then kill me.
“You just don’t know how I hated myself afterwards for doing what I had to do in order to live. Even now, when I remember, I am so ashamed of myself. How can I live with the thought that I am alive, that I was a coward? And after what had happened, I don’t want to see you, ever. I have nothing to give you now …”
Her hand was cold and trembling. I had listened with anger mingled with sorrow, anger at the men who had killed her friends without reason, at the man who had violated her, and even at Malu herself for having brought this upon herself; sorrow at the wrenching pain that she had to endure and which, I was sure, would scar her always. I wanted to scream at her, but she looked so helpless, like a child who needed sympathy, and I realized it was not just sympathy that I had to give; I loved her truly in a manner I had not realized. I could live with what had happened and help her live, too, if she would let me.
“Plat, the ring which you returned—I would like to give it to you still. I want to marry you. With me, nothing has changed.”