Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein

DECEMBER 1973

“Don’t stiffen your fingers. Relax them,” the officer barked.

I was sitting on a gray metal chair next to a battered desk with him behind it. We were in a dimly lit room furnished with worn metal office furniture. Workplaces were laid out along its walls. The shaking in my body had begun and before it washed over me like ice-cold shower, I distracted myself by staring at the beige walls that had not seen a fresh coat in a long time. Smudges of grim, grease, and dirt dotted all sides of it. A strong antiseptic smell of cleaning solution pervaded the air. Mixed with stale cigarette smoke, the odor was stifling.

Men wearing khaki military uniforms worked at their desks. A few wrote by hand. Others typed on aging typewriters, their tapping slow and irregular like that made by beginning typists. Several soldiers wearing camouflage fatigues sauntered into the room. After dropping their gear on the floor, they huddled together and talked in whispers.

I clinched my fingers, released them and clinched them again, repeating this action as if in a trance. Cigarettes smoke drifted all around. I looked at the men to take my mind off the soldier pressing my fingertips against the paper. I heard the shrill, grating sound of opening and closing of metal file cabinets. Only a handful were busy; the bored ones idled the time away while puffing at smoke and watched it mesmerized as if a mystery lays behind the small balls of white clouds.

The man in front of me was a soldier of a military detachment unit, one of the few details I noticed as I walked into the building where a sign in big, bold black letters, 1st REGIONAL MILITARY COMMAND, CAMP OLIVAS, SAN FERNANDO, PAMPANGA was emblazoned over its entrance. The main camp, Camp Olivas, was a few miles south from where we were.

The processing area was the front office housed in a small, squat gray structure where military personnel worked. I noticed that the man fingerprinting me was of average stature for a Filipino man, around five feet five inches. Dressed in camouflaged fatigues, he had a broad face, a flat nose and dark brown Malay eyes.

“Be still,” he commanded as he held my fingers too tight. “Do not stiffen your fingers. Let me do it,” he snarled.

Guiding each of my fingers along the blotter, he coated each one with the indigo blue ink and pressed my sore fingers firmly on the form in front of him. He took his time. My small ink-stained fingers ached from the pressure. He wanted to hurt me. Chatty as a parrot, he harangued me with instructions on how to steady my fingers. The more he talked the messier the fingerprinting became. I closed my eyes to distance myself from what was happening. I imagined I was far away from this place to forget what was happening. Just take me away from here.

His own hands and fingers were by now stained and resembled a toddler’s fingerpainting hand. He looked at his hand in disgust before wiping it down with a sullied brown paper towel using force unsuitable to the task. He handed me a few of the towels to clean mine. I wiped the inky mess off to no avail. It was then when it dawned on me how fitting this scene was—this image of the mess we were in—his mess, the government’s, and the country’s mess under a dictatorship. I was in it now too, I suppose. By staining my hands with the ink on the form that registered my fingerprints, I was now declared an “enemy of the state,” joining thousands of political prisoners under Ferdinand Marcos’ reign of terror. The year was 1973. I was fifteen, a junior in high school at St. Scholastica’s Academy, a private, Catholic school found by German nuns in 1925 in San Fernando, my hometown. It was the same school my mother and her sisters attended though I wondered later what she and my aunts would have thought about what I was about to experience.

Barely two hours into classes that fateful morning, a woman I recognized as someone working at the principal’s office came shortly before ten. She handed the teacher a slip of paper. When she left, the teacher instructed me to go to the principal’s office. Walking down the stairs from the third to the second floor where the office was, I felt the usual trepidation a student would feel when called to report to the principal. Having been there since kindergarten, I neither found familiarity nor comfort in the office occupied by the school head, Ms. Luz Arceo, a figure dreaded by Scholasticans, or Kolasas, as we liked to call ourselves. Still, I had no hint of the trouble to come.

Upon arriving at her office, my eyes set upon Ms. Arceo talking to four men dressed in military fatigues.

“Please sit down,” she told me in a firm but uncertain voice. I could tell she was not sure how to proceed. I slid gingerly onto the seat she offered. The soldiers remained standing, making the room feel crowded. She paused for some time as if not knowing what to say. Then without looking at me, she spoke.

“These men are taking you with them,” she said.

As she spoke, I noticed her voice had lost the obstreperous tone she often took. Her cringing look of disapproval was also gone. When she finally looked at me, she displayed an expression I had never seen before. It was as if a new mask has been painted over her usual scowl. My instinct about fear kicked in. Her eyes communicated that she neither knew what to do nor what to say. Incomprehension spread across her face. So did the fear I recognized with her twitching. This was new and alien territory for her. In that instant, I understood what she meant by the soldiers taking me with them.

By then, the Philippines had become inured to the familiar scenes of soldiers knocking on people’s doors and barging in unannounced. The country wallowed in an embattled state. It was troubled, chaotic, violent, militaristic, dictatorial. For men in uniform, anything went. These soldiers did not care if one was a young girl in a convent school or the leader of the underground movement. Everyone was fair game. They were willing, able, and too eager to arrest anyone Marcos, his cronies and aides believed was their enemy. These hardened men understood enemies of the state come in many sizes, identities, religions, and gender. Innocent fifteen-year-old convent schoolgirls were no exception.

And then, as if on cue, my mind went dark.