Seeing Redg

THE hostilities reached our city in 1989. For several months, Maoist partisanos assassinated military agents in broad daylight while para-military vigilantes retaliated by executing just about anyone who quacks like a communist at a ghastly average of one victim per week.

During the same year, I completely disregarded paranoia and suppressed terror from the bloodbath and fell madly in love instead to a pretty lady named Regina, with emphasis on mad.

Regina was a lovely twenty year-old single mom who wrote for the Literary Section of the university paper I edited. We were both in our sophomore year. She came from a middle class Catholic family and schooled by Benedictine nuns. She was the stunningly petite, bubbly business management student who loved parties while I was the hungry, penniless, handsome pretentious writer trying very hard to look like a serious Marxist revolutionary.

Her story was the familiar unwanted pregnancy and teenage parenthood doomed for failure. After dumping her inconsiderate partner, she continued to pursue college while raising her two-year old daughter—Angelica—with the help of her mom. Regina and I were caught in youthful ecstasy and the proverbial seventh heaven affair. In June of the same year, we tied the knot in austere rites and a month later, our union bore a child we named Julio.

Safe in my arms, I carried two year-old Julio while we both viewing this furious 600 year-old dormant volcano start to throw up just kilometers away from our backyard.