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Christina sat on top of a hill overlooking Tañon Strait and Negros Island. She looked at the peaks of Mt. Kanloan silently absorbing the vista. It was early morning. The water was flat calm with hardly a ripple. It looked like plate glass, an interplay seemingly of all possible shades of blue. Talk seemed almost ludicrous. But she was with Congressman Bukad and so inevitably she expected there would be no chance at all for silence.
They had spent the night together, two lost souls whom nobody else would have. At some point in the night they both listened to "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" by the Beatles. This they compared to the soundtrack for a movie remake of the album, which featured the Bee Gees. In the end they felt only a sad nostalgia for old times.
They were similar. But only because of the latent monstrosity lurking inside them, always dark, though at times also beautiful. They were different as well. Congressman Bukad entertained no emotional engagement with anyone. He was cold as ice, pragmatic, and ruthless whenever opportunity arose. He accepted the world for what it appeared to be. Anything beyond that was mere distraction, especially tenderness and art.
"I feel for everything and so the world victimizes me. Sometimes I wonder if I victimize even myself," Christina said. And then added, "But I have gotten used to that."
This statement made the congressman feel rather insecure. He took it as an assault against his defenses. They were just here for the night, he thought to himself. I cannot need her. Which was why he brought up the issue of corruption.
"Balili Beach. What feelings do you get from that?"
The question decked Christina and she fell over laughing a most sincere laugh. She laughed from the bottom of her heart in the sense of body and soul. She laughed until she dropped tears, until she keeled over, her head falling on Bukad's right thigh. She lay there, on the grass, her head resting on the congressman's fat thigh. She looked up to the sky and felt a measure of respect for him.
Why indeed would anyone even think of corruption in the context of feeling? What can anyone feel about politics? Nobody takes that really seriously here. It had about as much consequence as showbiz or a cockfight although people did die for and over it at odd times. It was a game the local power elite played between themselves, she thought, and the stories have always been best appreciated in the sense of the absurd and the comic.
The Balili Beach episode seemed to Christina as something like a local remake of C5. It was an ancient remake of the same tired old plot retold over and over again. The Fertilizer Scam. NBN-ZTE. In the end, their end result was comic rhetoric. The story was that they were looking for a team of volunteer scuba-divers to search the waters off Balili Beach for the "mojons," those concrete cylinders used to mark the boundaries of the lot.
"Doesn't it make you mad?" Congressman Bukad asked.
"Yes, it actually does." Christina replied. "I guess I laugh not at the events themselves. I laugh at how we deal with it as a people."
A foreign observer had said we do not love our country enough. And that is why we take all this corruption without even the slightest show of offense. "We are a vanquished people," Christina explained. "It is nothing more or less than that."
"A vanquished people can only laugh at themselves. They cannot get mad or feel offended. Those sort of feelings are battlecries. They are a call to action. And who would rally them? Who stands even the smallest chance of winning against these thieves? Who will be their champion?"
"What about you, Ysmael? Will you be their Spartacus?"
Congressman Bukad felt manipulated. He began to realize this woman with him was not all she pretended to be. Still he had to admit. This was a good entry to the "Good vs. Evil campaign" everyone was talking about. He would have to start working on it soon.
