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Anna Villerverde, Lois Carlos’s daughter, the sensation as well as
memories created by the song are adopted as weapons to
counteract the horror of her memories of the torture afflicted by
Colonel Amor, and to reclaim her reconnection with a historical
past that is no more:
Anna found herself listening to a song about boats sailing
the heavens, one of which was carrying away the woman
who said no, thanks but no thanks. . . . For she
remembers . . . the memory that had been her birthright
rising to reclaim her. . . . Chains of female voices,
emerging from the secret niches of her brain, linked her to
the years, back, back, back, even to a time when the tinkle
of gold anklets was a message, herald of a passing, one
morning of beginnings in a still-young world of uncharted
seas.” (Rosca, 1988: 346)
Anna’s intuitive response to the song heralds her role as the
heir to the memories of her ancestors as well as the recorder of
family history. The grown-up Anna is a history teacher, but as a
subject of history, Anna is marked not just by her profession, but
more importantly, by the historical condition of modernization in
the Philippines which gives Anna the access to an alternative
technology of memory. After WWII, Luis Carlos joined a band on
a Pacific ocean-liner, playing saxophone and flute, putting himself
in exile. He came back two years later with a Chinese wife, who
died soon after giving birth to Anna. Anna was left behind to be
raised by Luis Carlos’s sister, Clarissa, while Luis Carlo was away
in Hong Kong. Anna’s naming breaks the enforced refrains of
names among the generations and signifies the family’s relief from
repeating the same mistakes. Anna was cared for by a nanny paid
by Luis Carlos in a nursery refurbished from the family garage. She
grows up among the remnants of the family’s old Binondo
10
house,
10
Binondo is a district in Manila primarily inhabited by ethnic Chinese in the
Philippines.