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history. But even with the positive energy that comes with
reaffirming one’s loyalty to the national ideal, one can never escape
anxiety by betraying those one loves. In the final scene of the novel,
the reader finds Anna listening to a tape recording of Guevarra, a
veteran guerrilla fighter who votes for death sentences for his wife
and son in a public trial, for they, like Manolo, have betrayed the
guerrillas. Guevarra’s need to articulate his betrayal of his family,
and Anna’s need to listen to Guevarra’s story, testify to the
formation of a new zone of intimacy that is connected by their
shared anxieties over the fragile and ambiguous boundaries
between loyalty and betrayal, public concern and private feeling.
At the end of the novel, Anna retreats to a small village in
Laguna. She brings with her a radio and a recorder, with which she
teaches the children of the village to gain access to the experiences
of the modern and the contemporary. With these facilities of
postmodern information technology, the novel hints at her
severance from her ancestor’s strategy of becoming-Filipina. Maya
dies wearing the necklace of diamond and emerald which she stole
from the statue of the Virgin Mary. It is her emblem of shame, but
also the mark of her becoming-Filipina. The necklace is later
remade into a pair of diamond-and-emerald earrings, which Anna
finds in her mother’s jewel box, but subsequently pawns. In place
of the necklace, she turns to modern means of communication,
such as a tape recorder and radio to pass down memories and
history to the children in the village. Previously, Anna listened to
the radio to make up for her loss of family and memory; now the
tape recorder and the radio redirect her obsession with the past to
the promise of the future. That future begins with her listening to
the Guevarra’s tape recording, and her students listening to the
radio. These new modern technologies mediate the affect from one
person to another, from the individual to the collective. Stories,
music, children’s nursery rhymes, and folk tales on the tongues of
the people in the street, amplified, multiplied and circulated
through information machines, produce a milieu that gives the