Jun 6, 2008 7
Fifty red cars and the freeway drama.
“Thirteen. Twenty-one.”
Only the disembodied circles of reds, oranges and yellows are visible. The rest is pitch-black. The radio is tuned to a news segment broadcasting an incoming typhoon and its intensity throughout the Bicol region. The couple hardly makes a sound, except for the countdown the wife has started.
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“Fourteen!”
The husband shifted to a lower gear and their steady speed suddenly decelerated with a decrease in engine humming. The side mirrors are blank except for the smallest traces of yellow circles, nothing more. Outside, signs are erected to warn the motorists for an undergoing road renovation that swallowed two of the five lanes, and whoever is behind the signs confessed a formal apology for the inconvenience. The countdown became rapid.
“Fifteen, sixteen, eighteen. Twenty-three, twenty-four! Nineteen.”
The husband sobbed while his wife self-muttered her useless private countdown. His tears glimmered with neon reflections of detour signs and arrows as the car approaches the road construction. There was traffic building up before them, and the cars silently slowed down without any horns honking, as if they welcomed the inconvenience.
Suddenly, the husband blurted out all his feelings and regrets regarding the matter - that he was sorry for his unfaithfulness, for working in Dubai for five and a half years unannounced, for leaving her alone in the hospital despite his financial support in dirhams. He cried and cried and cried with his left hand grabbing the steering wheel and his right momentarily free from gripping the gear stick. The sullen-faced wife expressed nothing, felt nothing, reacted nothing, as if the sobs and wails of her husband were distant and muffled. Her countdown went on and on, nearing fifty.
A certain scene flashed on the wife’s mind: she was wearing an all-white gossamer gown, sitting with a tangram she was tasked to complete for the day, and she suddenly remember (or more like discovered) that she have not finished the tangram due to her obsession with the red square. She cried and cried in front of the tangram, hugging the red square, not knowing why she was crying. At the back of her mind, the color red reminds her of the bouquets of roses her husband used to give her before they were even married.
As much as I want to keep the issue a secret, this very very short story calls for some explanation. The wife happened to be counting red cars from both northbound and southbound lanes in belief that counting fifty red cars would make a single wish come true. She suffered from a five-year nervous breakdown, obviously her husband to blame - in Dubai he fortunately landed to a five-year contract as a construction worker, and there he had an illicit love affair with an OFW, had a three year-old son, and went home to the Philippines after his contract expired with the promise of returning back. His indefinite homecoming visit is covertly devoted for visiting his first wife, and upon return he learned (through friends and relatives) that her wife was depressed and was sent to a mental hospital in Pampanga.
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This story is inspired (and quite relatively the same) with what I’ve watched yesterday at CinemaOne. As much as I would like to credit the movie, I don’t know it’s title. It’s a series of movie clips with different marital scenarios as they drive along the North Luzon Expressway. A clip featured a couple as they bid farewell to each other for their intentional suicide, another about the wife discovering the adultery her husband committed. I have neither started nor finished the film. Feel free to tell me the movie title. :)
*Thanks to Eon and Rara for helping me figure out the movie: the title’s “Sa North Diversion Road” starring Irma Adlawan and John Arcilla.
