ON MAY 5, 1999, Judge Martin Ocampo ruled two terms of reclusion perpetua each for Spanish-Filipino citizen Francisco Juan “Paco” Larrañaga and six others for the kidnapping and murder of Marijoy and Jacqueline Chiong on July 16, 1997 in Cebu, Philippines.

For Paco’s family, it was a mistrial. Judge Ocampo disregarded the defense witnesses’ testimonies and documentary pieces of evidence that supported Paco’s claim that he was in Manila when the crime took place.

On October 7, 1999, Judge Ocampo was found dead in his room at the Waterfront Hotel in Mactan, Cebu. He had a gunshot wound in the head. An official autopsy showed that the probable cause of death was suicide.

October 13th, that Saturday, at 10:23pm at a bar called Komida along Escario St., Jillian Costa, teary-eyed, turned to Clive Rivas and asked if he was fine with adding another set of Red Horse beer to their table. A set of beer meant four bottles and another one thrown in for free—a marketing strategy that Komida, like almost every other bar in the city, was popular for among college students. Clive nodded somberly, which Jillian failed to note was Clive’s way of saying that he himself was in pain, but for a different reason. Jillian went on to ask the other two people at their table if they were amenable to another “4+1” set. Across Jillian was Carmen Suarez, who gleefully said, “Yes, please, let’s add another set,” seconded, albeit despondently, by her boyfriend, Marc Philipp Tabasa, the oldest in the group. Clive, Jillian, and Carmen, all of about seventeen to eighteen years, were friends since high school, and were now going to the same college taking up the same major. Marc, twenty-one, was a freshman in law school.

Earlier that afternoon, part of the discussion in Marc’s Criminal Law class was the Chiong Murder case. For Marc, it was clearly a mistrial, with which half of the class was in disagreement. The topic lingered with him and later that night, he felt he had to share it with the Computer Science majors he was hanging out with. The discussion didn’t quite go the way Marc wanted it, as at the mention of Judge Ocampo’s death, Carmen aired that there was obviously foul play; the suicide was staged as retribution for his ruling. This, then, led to Clive asking which method they preferred in killing themselves. Carmen preferred drowning herself, as she loved the sea. Clive asserted that his suicide would have to involve a gun in the mouth, tilted 45-degrees up, as it was the most certain way to die. At that point, Jillian started crying. She started missing her older sister, who jumped off a building and died a few years back. Everyone fell quiet until Jillian brought up the need for them to add another set of beer. This broke the tension in the air to some degree. Jillian finally stopped crying, and shared Carmen’s excitement for the prospect of more beer. Marc, however, had started to grow irritated at his girlfriend’s and her friends’ indifference towards the case. And Clive. . .well, Clive was feeling a different kind of pain, something that he had been feeling for a week now, since the morning that he professed his love for Ralph Licayan III.

See, for Clive, Ralph was not like any other person on the planet. Ralph had so much passion it was infectious. At first living off the trust fund that his parents left him, Ralph ventured into financial networking that earned him half a million pesos right before it went defunct. Using that money, he opened a dance club that featured Latin music, which became an instant hit among yuppies that he got his return-of-investment in three months. He profited from it for several months more until Techno and House music became too popular that he ultimately had to shut it down. Other businesses that he engaged in were in RTW, advertising, events organizing, Encyclopedia dealership, and several others that only operated for a few months before they stopped generating income. The only businesses left in operation now were the cafeteria that he opened near a public hospital, the photocopying center, and the Internet café that became a cruising area for the gay community. For Clive, Ralph was inspiring that way. He had so much going on that Clive could not help but reflect on the emptiness that was his life.

“What’s the matter, Clive?” Jillian said. “You’ve been quieter than usual. It’s disturbing.”

Clive shrugged, not quite ready yet to share with his friends the tragedy that was a week ago. He would ultimately tell them, of course, as he never really kept any secrets from his close friends. But he wasn’t ready to laugh at his folly yet. The pain, the wound, the entire drama was still too fresh to be comedic.

“Hey, where’s Ralph?” Carmen asked. “Text him to come, will you?”

Instantly, Clive felt a stinging in his eyes. He made an effort to speak but he was feeling some invisible force choking him. Luckily, Marc interjected, asking to speak privately with Carmen. All Clive could do was nod as Carmen and Marc excused themselves to where Marc parked his car.

“What’s up with him?” Jillian turned to Clive yet again. “He seems annoyed at us, for some reason.”

Clive knew the reason. He’d noticed earlier on, the way Marc was all fidgety with hissing noises here and there. It was Marc’s arrogance surfacing again like a shark about to devour a full-sized young adult. Clive just shrugged at Jillian. Yet again.

“Something’s up with you, Clive. You seem depressed.”

Fearing that he might choke up if he answered with words, Clive gestured with one hand to wave the topic off. However, Jillian was not satisfied. She pressed on and on for Clive to share why, usually upbeat, Clive now just seemed to be overdosing on sedatives. As Clive was about to finally tell Jillian that Ralph was the center of his universe, a feeling that was unreturned, Carmen came running back to their table, shaky and sweaty with dirt on her cheek and on her arm.

Jillian jumped from her seat and sat down right next to Carmen. “What the hell happened?”

Carmen was panting. “That asshole! That motherfucker! He tried to run me over with his car. I was lucky enough to jump right behind a lamppost.”

“What?” Clive could not help but yell. For a moment, he’d forgotten how taxing unrequited love was. “Why the fuck did he do that?”

A glassful of beer went down Carmen’s throat in a matter of seconds. After slamming the glass down on the table, she brushed the dirt off her arm. “We were in his car, and he was all serious and mad and shit. He told me you guys were nothing but idiots, and that I was one big idiot, too. He said we didn’t know what mattered for real in this world, because all we cared about were superficial stuff, blah blah blah.” Deep breath. “I asked him where it was coming from. He said we didn’t care about the murder case, probably because we do not know squat about lawyering and shit. I told him his intellectual snobbery was baseless, because he himself had no legal skills to prosecute a robber who just snatched a handbag under broad daylight in the middle of a crowded street. I mean, he’s a goddamned freshman, for Chrissakes! So he threw me out of the car and tried to run me over with it.” Another deep breath. “We are so over!”

Clive leaned back in his chair, unable to comprehend what just happened, especially how Carmen was mad instead of saddened by being left by the man she loved. “Were you in love with him, Car?” Clive felt the need to ask.

“Are you kidding me?” More beer down Carmen’s throat. “We haven’t even had sex yet.”

At 12:03 in the morning, Clive, staggering with inebriation, found himself on the street where Ralph lived. It had been a week since they last saw each other. In between that, no text messages were ever exchanged. Clive was too scared to send Ralph one, even as an apology, and Ralph was too pissed to even think about it. In Clive’s head, as he made his way to Ralph’s doorstep, a scene was playing. Ralph would open the door for him and he would pull Ralph close and kiss him deep and they would end up in Ralph’s room making love. Perhaps Carmen was right. Maybe Ralph didn’t feel the same way because they hadn’t had sex yet. It depressed Clive why sex had to be such a requirement for love for other people.

At around the same time, in another part of the city, Marc was pacing around in his room with a cell phone pressed against his ear. He was regretting trying to run Carmen over with his car, not because it was attempted murder by the very definition of the law but because, dammit, he was actually falling for the girl. He had to apologize somehow, and quick.

Still at around the same time, a few miles away from where Marc was, Carmen was helping Jillian into her dorm room. Jillian was a drunken mess, which made Carmen proud of herself as despite having drunk the same amount of beer as Jillian had, Carmen was far from being drunk. As soon as she had Jillian tucked into bed, she reached into her handbag to check if there were any text messages from Marc. To Carmen’s utter horror, she could not find her cell phone.

On February 3, 2004, the Supreme Court affirmed Judge Ocampo’s decision and upgraded the penalty to death by lethal injection for Paco and the five others accused. Clive would find out about this and it would remind him of the night that Carmen was almost run over by Marc’s car.

Back in 1999, October 14th, Sunday, 12:34a.m., Ralph, still shaken from an interrupted sleep, opened the door to his house and let a drunken young man in. “What the fuck, Clive?”

Clive’s head whirled with choices of words to say. He walked right inside to the living room without so much as a preamble. The entire scene in his head involving him and Ralph making love quickly vanished. He could not possibly pull Ralph towards him for a kiss; Ralph might throw him out. Besides, Ralph was already not looking very pleased.

“You don’t show up for a week, with not even a single text message, and you come waltzing in here piss-drunk as if you live here?”

Clive looked down. He certainly did not want to elevate Ralph’s already foul mood. “I was just hoping I could crash here for the night,” Clive said, with a softness that was weighty with an apology.

“OK. Take the couch.” Ralph pointed quickly at the couch where he and Clive first talked fervently about themselves a few months ago, then he disappeared back into his room and slammed the door.

Heaving with an epic attempt to stop his tears from flowing, Clive made his way to the couch and sat down. It took him a while before he fell asleep.

At 12:40a.m., back in Jillian’s dorm room, Carmen had given up looking for her cell phone and stopped to stare at Jillian snoring lightly. It was an amusing sight. Just for kicks, Carmen bent down and gave Jillian a full kiss on the lips, which Jillian would never find out about until four years later when she and Carmen were already in Atlanta working as software developers for the Bank of Scotland. It would be another night of bingeing with beer, and Carmen suddenly could not stop herself from admitting the unilateral kiss. They would both laugh it off, like it was nothing, but really, that night, that moment, would push them into embarking on a committed relationship that would last seven years until Jillian succumbed to ovarian cancer.

But back in 1999, that same night, still at 12:40a.m., Carmen’s phone was ringing and vibrating on a table at Komida. I was just walking by on my way to the bathroom when I heard the sharp, monophonic Nokia ringtone that used to annoy me a hell lot. Drunk that I was, I swiped the phone from the unoccupied table and answered the call.

“Hey, is Carmen there?” the voice from the other line went.

Slurring like crazy, I answered, “Carmen whuh? There’s no Carmen in this re-si-si-dence.”

“Huh?”

“Huh?”

“Hey, is this you, Clive?”

“Clive whuh?”

“Hey, Clive, stop being such an adolescent and hand the phone over to Carmen, will you?”

“I told you, Carmen does not live here!”

“Goddamit, Clive!”

“My name is not Clive! My name’s Eli. Who the fuck are you?”

“Fuck you, Clive!”

“Fuck you, too! I’m not Clive!” I yelled right before thrusting the phone into my pocket. Had I known at that moment that was going to lead me into meeting Clive in a matter of days I would’ve had left that phone alone ringing on the table. But what the hell did I know?

TO BE CONTINUED….

A/N:

Fact vs Fiction

The characters in this story are, of course, fictional.

The Chiong Murder case referred to here, however, is not. I even borrowed some of the “reportage” from the following article: www[dot]fairtrials[dot]/news/article/list

Thank you all for reading!