Love In The Shadows - Why And Why Not

I belong to the promdi generation that never dated in high school nor, I believe, engaged in anything more than furtive premarital sex. The only time boys and girls actually mixed was during physical education classes when we had to take folk dancing. But boys and girls never held hands; they held on to some twig or pencil to maintain the fiction of chastity. There were no such things as young teenage couples, only restless groups of boys relating in some clumsy manner or another with giggly groups of girls.

So crushingly conservative was the atmosphere in my little Mindanao town in the 1960s that if a girl was ever seen alone with a boy, it automatically meant they were already sweethearts. It was irrelevant if they'd had sex or not. The only thing left was marriage and, of course, such arrangements were meant to be forever and ever.

Indeed, nice boys and girls who dreamed of college and careers were expected to take cold showers and resort to novenas, if only to avoid the seemingly irresistible temptations of youth. The slightest indiscretion meant severe punishment or even instant exile to some distant province. I know of only one not-too-bright girl who got pregnant and who, of course, was promptly forced into a shotgun marriage.

Like everybody hitting puberty, all of us knew our hormones were going berserk. Our faces were erupting with pimples. But we could only admire the opposite sex from a safe distance. The most daring thing we could do was to write love letters on Valentine's Day, some copied from Rolando Carbonell's Beyond Forgetting and slipped into the beloved's notebook when nobody was looking.

The high point of those anxiety-ridden years was the junior-senior prom, our rite of passage into young adulthood. My problem was that I grew up attending Baptist Church and it was just across from my school. Our kind of Baptists hailed from the Deep South and Mountain States of America; hence, no dancing, smoking, drinking, movies or anything that was fun.

It did not matter that the dance craze then was called "The Twist" and you didn't get to touch your partner. In fact, you didn't really need a partner. Being told that this otherwise silly dance was the handiwork of the devil prompted the first rebellion of my life: I stopped going to Baptist Church.

Because we were deemed too young for love, we thought of love as mainly pertaining to our teachers, many of whom were single and openly in the marriage market. Ours was the vicarious thrill of serving as cheering squads and cast of thousands for one affair to remember after another.

Fe, Esperanza and Caridad (not their real names), all smart city types, stood out among the rather drab field of our promdi lady teachers. Their prospects were clearly not limited to the gawky promdi bachelors in our faculty. They were always the center of attraction because they started each school day by staging a veritable fashion show among the three of them.

Everybody kept wondering how they could afford to never wear the same dress twice on measly monthly salaries of P120, which, like all government salaries, often came months late. The secret was that these ladies from good families elsewhere had not come simply to take on teaching jobs. It soon became apparent that they were getting pretty close to certain deadlines and our town seemed as good as any to look for suitable husbands.

Soon marriage bells were ringing. Fe, who taught biology, hooked this balding mestizo accountant at the government bank. Esperanza, the math teacher, bagged this engineer from one of the town's most prominent families. The best match of all was between Caridad, the physical education instructor, and Tony, our shy and nerdy science professor.

But guess whose love story literally stole the thunder from these popular lovebirds? The old maid librarian, no less.

Unknown to the entire school and town, this strict and somewhat overweight woman we always called Miss Rivera (a pseudonym) had entered into a liaison dangerous with Mr. Bonifacio, a most distinguished-looking man and from all counts somewhat of a great lover. But the man was also a very much married man. In those dark ages of feminism, lovers who defied conventions were subjected to the moral equivalent of stoning, alas, the woman more than the man.

An immorality case was filed against the erring lovers and they were subjected to a most cruel public investigation. My heart went out to them as they sat chastened and impassive behind their dark glasses, hearing lurid detail after lurid detail of their daily assignments on the table of the guidance counseling room. There had been one peeping tom too many.

From where I sat in the back rows, I remember seeing Miss Rivera's taut face once break into a naughty smile that was gone in the twinkling of an eye. Could she have been thinking that those few moments of stolen bliss were worth all the trouble? Then as now, I would hope so.