Strange and wonderful things can happen on sofas, on the spring and foam of which we breathlessly mature into adulthood. I’m sure that people have been born on them and died on them; less dramatically, we’re happy enough to simply survive on them, to divest ourselves of the aches of the day and mark the passage of Tuesday into Wednesday on a rested back.
I’ve looked for my dream sofa for half my life – something just long enough to cushion my head on one end and my feet on the other. Some people like their sofas firm; I like mine soft but not too spongy, something I could sink into and yet sprung up from in a flash (but who wants to?).
A few weeks ago, in the frenzy of moving from one abode to the next, I met my intended in the attic of a Cubao shop specializing in throwaway goods – ukay-ukay, in other words, except that this particular place went beyond the usual Marks and Spencer jackets and Bossini shirts to feature a full range of houseware, from dinner plates to furniture. As might be expected, 60 percent of the stuff was crappy even by Salvation Army standards – but there in a corner of the attic, lo and behold, was a sofa whose fundamental majesty asserted itself even from beneath the threadbare upholstery and the scuffs on the wood trim. It had clearly been dragged off some American suburban street – perhaps on one of those mad autumn days when you can furnish a whole house just by the streetside pickings – and shipped in a container van in the company of a half-dozen creaky La-Z-Boy. It had enough dust in it to obliterate Iraq – but beneath all that sand was paradise, as a quick butt-test proved. It was love at first sit. The price tag originally said "P10,000"; this has been crossed out and replaced with "Half-Price Sale – P5,000." (This, after a week during which Beng and I had drooled over swanky sofas worth around P40,000 each – and we weren’t even looking in the designer shops.) We spoke to the store manager downstairs; for P250 more, she said, they would deliver it to our doorstep.
And so it arrived there one morning, gathering more dust as the house was built around it, like a palace around a throne (I’m getting carried away here – this place ain’t no palace, with toilet seats the size of a doughnut). A trip to Kamuning market produced 11 yards of floral chintz (what can I say? I like gardens) – and an upholsterer, who worked wonders over two days. A trip to Google confirmed that the sofa’s maker (a company named Schweiger) was top-of-the-line, although I already saw that in the quality of the wood. Total cost of sofa, parts, and labor: P10,000.
Now it looks too good to sit on, but I’m sure I’ll get over my hesitation, and plunge into that sofa, to be rescued and retrieved at some unspecified date.
But, wonder of wonders, I was in the shower one day when I heard a voice over the PA system ordering me to report immediately to the guardhouse. The last time I heard this – "Dalisay, to the guardhouse!" – it turned out badly for me; I had been mistaken by the guards for someone else, for whose real or imagined transgressions I was supposed to deserve a beating. And so I got one, the second I stepped into the guardhouse. It was pitch-black, the better for the surprise; a fist slammed into my belly and I crumpled over more in shock than in pain. For once in my life I was thankful to have been mauled black and blue as a fraternity neophyte barely a year earlier (I have since inveighed against any kind of physical initiation, and I hope no one reads this as an excuse to revive the practice). It was a Sunday evening and the guards – many of them no older than myself, and fresh off some farm, trading a plow for an Armalite – were drunk as was their wont on the weekend. They needed to vent their undefined anger and found me a convenient subject. More blows rained on me; I remember curling into a ball and pretending to myself that it was just another round of initiation. Finally the guards had their fill and sent me back to the bunkhouse (where my worthier seniors included the likes of Orly Mercado and Jojo Binay; but they just had, of course, to pick on me). I was lucky, even then; a bit of roughing up felt like par for the course. Some of the comrades went through horrific torture, and we were always worrying about our threshold of pain.
But this was supposed to be about my release. So: I went to the guardhouse with soap in my ears. This time it was daylight and I could see an officer – a captain or a major – thumbing through a thick pile of papers on the desk before him. "Jose Dalisay," he said. "You’re still here?" I shrugged my shoulders. "You should have been let out a long time ago. Pack your bags. You can go."
I can’t remember now what I said or did; I’m sure I was stunned, and briefly euphoric. It was the 6th of August, 1973, and I had been in martial law prison for just a little over seven months at that point, without any clear indication if and when I was going to be released, because I wasn’t even charged in court with anything.
As release rituals went, I left behind and gave away everything usable, including whatever remained of my bottle of Sunquick (the detention-camp juice drink of choice), my Marlboros, my watercolors. I can’t recall if my father picked me up or if I went home on a bus. What I do remember is wearing, of all things, pink – a pink T-shirt and matching pink jeans (flared, of course); I have no idea why, except perhaps to announce my presence as loudly as possible.
The first place I went to after my house was the university. We were living (or, to be more precise, squatting) on campus, and I was seized by the urge to see what it was like. In prison, I had thought of resuming my studies of picking up where I had left off (which was all of 21 units, when I dropped out). I hurried to the AS Steps, the scene of many a rally, or the foregathering for a big march to the US Embassy or to Mendiola. But when I got there I was all alone, and instead of rousing cheers there was deathly silence. The campus seemed utterly deserted. At that point I knew that I wasn’t going back to school anytime soon – and I would not, not for another ten years.
This would be followed by yet another Kafkaesque episode, when I realized, to my great grief and dismay, that the authorities had issued me release papers with the wrong middle name. Not surprisingly, when I went job-hunting and had to go the NBI for a clearance, an officer informed me that according to their records, I was supposed to be still in prison, so what was I doing there in front of him? A klaxon horn went off in my head. Oh my God, I thought – here I go looking for a job in the New Society, and I get thrown back in prison because of some moronic clerical error! I protested my innocence, and it must have worked to some extent because, instead of being dragged away kicking and screaming, I was sent to a section of the NBI called – I kid you not – "Quality Control," where I sorted out the mess – or rather, began to, because it eventually took weeks (a nanosecond in the calendar of bureaucracy) to establish the fact that I was who I was, and free to walk the streets (but not to jaywalk, much less to foment revolution). In the meanwhile, I learned to become an invisible citizen, for fear that any undue attention would only reawaken the nightmare I had stepped into and was treading on tiptoe.
Such was life under martial law, 30 years ago. Looking back, I’d have to admit that there was often a comic aspect to those terrible situations – although comedy’s only comedy when the protagonist survives, and I guess I did.