Like a love-struck swain passionately swooning over his inamorata, “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., penned a poignant poem for Cory from his cell in Fort Bonifacio, on their 19th wedding anniversary.
Ninoy’s “I Have Fallen in Love” (“With the Same Woman Three Times” as subtitle), opens in lilting verses: “I have fallen in love/ With the same woman three times/ In a day spanning nineteen years/ Of tearful joys and joyful tears”. The “three times… in a day” timeline poetically doesn’t limit heartthrobs every waking moment. The oxymoronic romanticism of “tearful joys and joyful tears” epitomizes their mutual affection.
Just as poets baptize youth as the age of love, Ninoy segues: “I fell in love when she was young/ Enchanting and vibrant, eternally new/ She was brilliant, fragrant, and cool as the morning dew”. Shades of the sweet bucolic aura of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” as he edifies Cory as “vibrant, fragrant, and cool”.
The poem further versifies: “I fell in love with her the second time/ When first she bore her child and mine/ She’s always by my side the source of my strength/ Helping to turn the tide”. It’s wisely said that a woman’s matterhorn is motherhood. No wonder Ninoy falls more in love with Cory whose child he sired, plus four other offsprings, or five times to shower love.
Shifting the mood, he sadly refrains: “But there were candles to burn/ The world was my concern/ While our home was her domain/ And the people were mine/ While the children were hers to maintain/ So it was in those eighteen years and a day/ Till I was detained, forced in prison to stay” and, “on her shoulders fell the burden of life”.
The “candles to burn” and the “world as my concern” bespeak Ninoy’s causal advocacy against tyranny, corruption, and abuses in government, landing him in martial law incarceration for 7 years or so, leaving Cory to bear the burden of their family. Cory’s baptism of hellfire made her doubly suffer for Ninoy and their children caused by despotism and autarky, that got them “burned” by Ninoy’s “candles to burn”.
All these hardships and heartaches as Cory’s heavy cross, made Ninoy love her for the third time, “Amidst the hardships she has remained/ Undaunted and unafraid”, and “calm and composed”, like “God’s lovely maid”. While Ninoy used to be the linchpin of strength, “suddenly she’s our sole support/ Source of comfort/ Our wellspring of hope”.
Perhaps, Ninoy was taken aback, mesmerized by the courage, resiliency, fidelity, and resoluteness of Cory once thrust into hellish sufferings as her calvary. Hence, given the unusual milieu besetting Cory, Ninoy loved her for the third time, as she loomed with courage.
Perhaps the arrest of Ninoy at the behest of President Ferdinand Marcos, and/or FM’s gestapos, marked the beginning of Cory and Ninoy’s darkest doom and crucible of sorrows, and the ominous death knell of Ninoy, though unbeknownst then…
One bears in mind that Ninoy was no sissy. At a sapling age of 17, he showed unusual grit and guts, the kind of fortitude unexpected from one so young who ventured into the battlefields and trenches in the Korean War as war correspondent. During martial law when human rights were trampled upon like dispensable toys, Ninoy stood his ground unflinching and uncowed. He in effect courted the inevitability of his incarceration and death. Certainly, he topped the martial law menu of FM’s bullies for him to get jailed during the martial law infamy.
When Ninoy stood proud of Cory’s bravery that made him love her for the third time, it wasn’t just an empty adulation. It was the ultimate confession of pristine love. For Ninoy as the soulmate of Cory, he didn’t really count the many times he loved her. Not even when he tried to count the ways… (To be continued)
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