CHAPTER 1
THE DUCK POND
A pond is a good place to be at, especially for
Francisco, seven years of age and precociously fascinated by the migrating
ducks that made it their home. In November last year they flew down into this
body of water that was created by the accident of a partially-blocked stream
in a depression beside a low hill that approached then leveled out to the
side of the highway that stretched from Kananga to Ormoc City, if you
were going west, or from Kananga to Tacloban, if you were going east. In
previous years, they flew off after a week or two, but this year, they stayed
and never left. The owner of the land, the mayor of Kananga, Feling Gardizabal,
decreed that the ducks should be left alone and not harmed in any way. They
flourished, squawking and flapping their wings as they cleaned their
feathers with their busy bills. Cars and buses stopped or slowed down to allow
the passengers to gawk at the ducks in their pond. At a time when the wild
ducks of the Ormoc delta marshes were virtually decimated by hunters and the
dredging for fish ponds, this vision was a delight to behold. In the minds of
some of these viewers, perhaps the thought must have arisen that this edenic
situation was not bound to last.
For Francisco however, gazing at the
ducks as they noisily glided about the pond, stray breezes ruffling its
surface, there was no such thought. Shielded by the broad fronds of
a coconut tree from the hot sun, he felt the happiness of the ducks as they
bent down and dove into the green depths of the pond grubbing for water weeds
and tiny fish. He felt their pleasure at being left alone to pursue their avian
existence without the worry, if ducks worried at all, about ending up on
somebody’s dinner plate. He admired the iridescence of their black, blue and
green plumage as the sun’s rays bounced off them. Sure, he had thought of
pulling his slingshot at them from time to time, but he knew that the mayor’s
word was law and he would dare break it at his own peril.
In the midday sun he sat down and
splayed his legs out under the coconut tree. Across the pond, past the tall
cogon grass that partially hid the highway from him and him from the
highway, he caught sight of a jeep wheeling round a bend from the direction of
Ormoc. Before it disappeared from his view, another jeep sped swiftly to
overtake it. The pursuing jeep swerved to the left
and screeched to a halt in front of the other jeep,
forcing the driver to hit the brakes and jolt to a stop.
Something told Francisco that trouble
was brewing in the scene in front of him. He quickly scrambled
behind the trunk of the coconut tree. Crouched on his haunches, he peered round
the trunk and saw a group of men, three that he could see, alighting swiftly
from the blockading jeep. They wielded objects in their hands. Confusedly he
thought at first they were holding tiradores, slingshots
carved out of the forked branches of the guava tree, the kind he used to hunt
little tukmos or native doves with. They surrounded the jeep,
preventing whoever were inside it from escaping. A tall,
fair-skinned man with a pock-marked but handsome face leaned into the back
window and exchanged words with another man in the back whose face he couldn't
see. There were raised voices. The tall fair man with the handsome face
straightened his back out and strode quickly back to his jeep, shaking his head
and raising his hand to the other men in his party. More voices were
raised, and the other two men, or three, or four (Francisco, in his confusion,
thought they were an army) fired into the vehicle.
Bang! Bang! Bang
Francisco could not remember how many times
they fired. But this he remembered: when the shots rang out, the ducks,
startled by the popping sounds, rose as one from the pond, their wings
flapping nervously like laundry borne off in
a sudden gust of wind. One swerved towards his
head, forcing him to dive down and press his face to the ground. When the ducks
had flown away, their squawking fading into the distance, an ominous
silence fell on the highway. Francisco’s nose picked the acrid smell
of exploded firecrackers wafting across to where he lay hidden in
the grass. When he raised his eyes, he saw that the shooters had already piled
into the jeep. The driver violently reversed the vehicle and roared
off in the direction of Ormoc. Two men from the bullet-riddled jeep
had managed to open the doors and stumble outside, where they collapsed on
the highway. One of them was a tall, swarthy-skinned man who he
recognized immediately. It was Feling, mayor of Kananga, member of the
influential and wealthy clan of Gardizabals whose influence stretched from
Ormoc to the island of Biliran to the Basque country of the Pyrenees. He owned
hundreds of hectares of land, was a wealthy sugar baron, and,
as mayor, was the most powerful man in Kananga. Yet there he lay fallen on
the cement pavement, as still as a heavy bag of rice, a dark red fluid oozing
from his body. In time he would learn that the other figure who also lay dead
on the highway beside him was the mayor’s son, the notorious and feared Antonio
“Basco” Gardizabal. He could just barely make out the outline of the driver
slumped backwards, his mouth agape in the rictus of violent death.
Francisco rose up in terror and ran
away as fast as he could, past coconut trees and sharp cogon grass
that scratched at his skin. He saw what in time would prove, for some, too
little, but for others, too much. When he finally made it back to his shanty
and had blurted out what he had seen to his startled father, Domingo, a
thin, sinewy man with leathery skin roasted the color of coffee from so
many hours working under the sun, the man wasted no time in bundling him
out to one of the islands of the Camotes, across Ormoc Bay,
there to hide among relatives in San Francisco, his namesake town. The way
he did this was to escort his son via a pathway in the rice paddies away from
the highway into a fork in the road that led from the town of Villaba. At
the junction, they took a public jeepney to the pier of Ormoc.
Because the last outrigger boat to the islands had left already at one in the
afternoon in order to avoid the high afternoon tides, they slept on the
sidewalk near the port, trying not to look too conspicuous. The next day, at
noon, he put his son on a boat to San Francisco, instructing the boat
master to contact his cousin in town. All this transpired before the
frightened boy could bid goodbye to his beloved ducks, and before anyone knew
that there was a witness to the assassination of Feling, his son and
his driver. The day was December 8, in the year of 1975, two and half
years after President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos'proclamation of
Decree 1081, otherwise known as Martial Law. In time they would know of
the boy Francisco, but by that time the sequence of events that led to
the killing would have been understood already and his son, a direct
witness to the crime, would be safe from harm. Or so he thought.
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