It was a lazy Tuesday afternoon in April. The kind that would make the weak-hearted faint in the balm of Manila. The traffic was so bad at Libertad that my Civic hatchback looked like a silver turtle soaking up the sun. The radio was belting Dionne Warwick’s “Goin’ Out of My Head.”

“Yes. I’m getting desperate. Two more days and not a chain letter under my name.” I prefer it handwritten, not photocopied or mass-produced from the office printers. I love the smell of ink on paper.

Like squeezing an orange. I could feel each impregnated pulp burst its black juice like fireworks inside my nostrils.

“You get a lot from your e-mails. Why bother?” Vivian focused the aircon louvers on her face to ease the specks of oil starting to surface on her cheekbones.

“I used to. When I started a campaign against urban legend e-mails three months ago, friends were very careful to put me on the list. So the chain e-mails ceased.”

“Your apartment is knee-deep in envelopes. One wrong flick of a lighter, and it will be Dante’s Inferno. But I love your walls. All the stamps of the world covering every inch of space. I don’t know why I fancy an artist like you.” Vivian reached for a towel to wipe the sweat off her back. The ridge of her spine made its impression on the leather seat. We passed by the city cockpit and the public cemetery.

“Because I like reading your letters. You love to write them. It’s that simple. Stamp collecting is just an afterthought. You wanted someone to appreciate the calligraphy your father taught you, and I was there to oblige, Vivi.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why do you think people collect African masks or Barbie dolls? You don’t need Camus to explain that.”

Of course, what I said was true. Her Japanese father had taught Vivian the finer points of calligraphy. Her fine arts thesis was a six-foot scroll of Baybayin scripts. She was on the team that interpreted the Laguna Copperplate Inscription and the Angono petroglyphs.

Everyday she would write me a character that was part of a story that culminated at the end of each week. Always in the same parchment, ink, envelope, sealing wax. She knew how to please me. And what I gave in return was shelter and some good love after her father died. She left her mother in Angono and lived with me while working in a call center.

By this time we were approaching the corner of Celeridad, where my father grew up during the war. Only his two sisters, one a widow and the other a spinster, survived the Mendozas. They were poor letter-writers anyway, so I planned to visit them at another opportunity. I would love to say hello to Tia Puring, the spinster who evicted us from the family mansion when I was a teenager.

No need for ski masks and shotguns to send her to the graveyard. I just need to show up, and a fatal heart attack would be in order.

“Everyday I would like to receive a letter, or a semblance of it. Mother was a great letter-writer. She would show me her love letters to Father. When I was a child her drills consisted of a letter from the Filipino alphabet.”

It was composed of 30 letters then. Vivian learned to give me a letter, or a word per day that completed into a sentence, or anything that made sense, after a week.

“When I was thirteen, my father died. Mother stopped writing me letters. She reserved them for special occasions, like a money envelope for my birthday.”

Manila Bay is thirty minutes by foot from here. Its breeze was layered with the stench of uncollected garbage. The market was now decaying as vagrants made use of its empty stalls for permanent lodging. The traffic was still slow. An irate driver cursed a jeepney cutting into the line. Both tempers and temperature rise. I contained myself from reaching for the gun. It’s for backup anyway. And Vivian’s idea in the first place, too.

“I subscribed to free magazines just to get my mail fixed, like The Plain Truth. The waiting time was painful enough because it was released monthly, then it became quarterly, until after three years the mailbox became empty, except for a few electric and water bills.”

I could have raided the Post Office, but the letters were not addressed to me. The west high school was already a kilometer away, and a bunch of screaming teenagers would not sit well with Vivian. The Methodist church was closed. The video rental shop only had two people. One is the cashier and the other an attendant. I knew that a camera was hidden somewhere when I once rented a Wild Orchid tape back in senior high. And inside Spring Cinema, it would be too hard to write in the dark.

“That was where my mother and my aunties saw movies when they came to Manila. Nothing much has changed. Except that fast-food outlet which used to be a small grocery.”

Time has been kind to Libertad Street, but not to its people. I cannot find a familiar face anymore as death, marriage, and migration changed the population. It’s been twelve years.

I realized this would work well to my advantage.

“Open this, Vivi.” I tapped on the glove compartment.

One day a classmate gave me a sheet, one-fourth of a legal size, containing a prayer to the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, followed by three of her titles. Pray for us, one Our Father, three Hail Mary’s, and one Glory Be. An invocation for world peace, the conversion of Russia, the spread of God’s words through missions in Africa and China. Finally in the end there was a request to make ten copies of this letter and send it to somebody else.