21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

Learning Activity Sheet No. 4

MELC: Discuss how different contexts enhance the text’s meaning and enrich the reader’s
understanding. (EN12Lit-Ie-30)

Title of the Activity: Let’s READ: “The Safe House” by Sandra Nicole Roldan

Directions/Instructions:

Read the story “The Safe House” by Sandra Nicole Roldan. It is written from the
perspective of a young girl, and the sacrifices she and her family made to fight against the
Marcos government. It allows you to see how martial law was like for the people who fought
against it. As you read the story, answer the questions below.

Activity Proper:
“Th
e
Saf
e
Ho
use
”
by
Sa
ndr
a
Nic
ole
Rol
dan

From the street, it is one box among many. Beneath terracotta roof tiles baking
uniformly in the sweltering noon the building/s grey concrete face stares out impassively in
straight lines and angles. Its walls are high and wide, as good walls should be. A four-storey
building with four units to a floor. At dusk, the square glass windows glitter like the compound
eyes of insects, revealing little of what happens inside. There is not much else to see. And so
this house seems in every way identical to all the other houses in all the thirty-odd other
buildings nestled within the gates of this complex. It is the First Lady's pride and joy, a
housing project designed for genteel middle class living. There is a clubhouse, a swimming
pool, a tennis court. A few residents drive luxury cars.
People walk purebred dogs in the morning. Trees shade the narrow paths and the
flowering hedges that border each building give the neighborhood a hushed, cozy feel. It is
easy to get lost here. But those who need to come here know what to look for - the swinging
gate, the twisting butterfly tree, the cyclone-wire fence. A curtained window glows with the
yellow light of a lamp perpetually left on. Visitors count the steps up each flight of stairs.
They do not stumble in the dark. They know which door will be opened to them, day
or night. They will be fed, sometimes given money. Wounds will be treated, bandages
changed. They carry nothing-no books, no bags, or papers. What they do bring is locked
inside their heads, the safest of places. They arrive one at a time, or in couples, over a span
of several hours. They are careful not to attract attention. They listen for the reassuring yelps
of squabbling children before they raise their hands to knock. It is 1982.
The girl who lives here does not care too much for the people who visit. She is five.
Two uncles and an aunt dropped by the other day. Three aunts and two uncles slept over the
night before. It is impossible to remember all of them. There are too many names, too many
faces. And they all look the sametoo tall, too old, too serious, too many. They surround the
small dining table, the yellow lamp above throwing and tilting shadows against freshly-
painted cream walls. They crowd the already cramped living room with their books and
papers, hissing at her to keep quiet, they are talking about important things. So she keeps
quiet. The flock of new relatives recedes into the background as she fights with her brother
over who gets to sit closer to the television. It is tuned in to Sesame Street on Channel 9. The
small black and white screen makes Ernie and Bert shiver and glow like ghosts.
Many of these visitors she will never see again. If she does, she will probably not
remember them. She wakes up one night. Through the thin walls, she hears the visitors
arguing. She can easily pick out one particular uncle's voice, rumbling through the dark like
thunder. He is one of her newer relatives, having arrived only that morning. All grown-ups are
tall but this new uncle is a giant who towers over everyone else. His big feet look pale in their
rubber slippers, a band-aid where each toenail should have been. He never takes off his dark
glasses, not even at night. She wonders if he can see in the dark. Maybe he has laser vision
like Superman.
Or, maybe-like a pirate, he has only one eye. She presses her ear against the wall. If
she closes her eyes and listens carefully, she can make out the words: sundalo, kasama,
talahib. The last word she hears clearly is katawan. The visitors are now quiet but still she
cannot sleep. From the living room, there are sounds like small animals crying. She comes
home from school the next day to see the visitors crowded around the television. She wants
to change the channel, watch the late afternoon cartoons but they wave her away. The
grown- up’s are all quiet. Something is different. Something is about to explode. So she stays
away, peering up at them from under the dining table.
On the TV screen is the President, his face glowing blue and wrinkly like an-old
monkey's. His voice wavers in the afternoon air, sharp and high like the sound of something
breaking. The room erupts in a volley of curses: Humanda ka na, Makoy! Mamatay ka!
Pinapatay mo asawa ko! Mamamatay ka rin P%t@ng*n@ ka! Humanda ka, papatayin din
kita! The girl watches quietly from under the table. She is trying very hard not to blink. It is
1983. They come more often now. They begin to treat the apartment like their own house.
They hold meetings under the guise of children's parties. Every week, someone's son or
daughter has a birthday.
The girl and her brother often make a game of sitting on the limp balloons always
floating in inch from the floor. The small explosions like-guns going off. She wonders why her
mother serves the visitors dusty beer bottles that are never opened. She is surprised to see
the grownups playing make-believe out on the balcony. Her new uncles pretend to drink from
the unopened bottles and begin a Laughing Game. Whoever laughs loudest wins. She thinks
her mother plays the game badly because instead of joining in, her mother is always crying
quietly in the kitchen.
Sometimes the girl sits beside her mother on the floor, listening to words she doesn't
really understand: Underground, resolution, taxes, bills. She plays with her mother's hair
while the men on the balcony continue their game. When she falls asleep, they are still
laughing. The mother leaves the house soon after. She will never return. The two children
now spend most afternoons playing with their neighbors.
After an hour of hide-and-seek, the girl comes home one day to find the small
apartment even smaller. Something heavy hangs in the air like smoke. Dolls and crayons
and storybooks fight for space with plans and papers piled on the tables. Once, she finds a
drawing of a triangle and recognizes a word: class. She thinks of typhoons and floods and no
classes. The visitors keep reading from a small red book, which they hide under their clothes
when she approached. She tries to see why they like it so much. Maybe it also has good
pictures like the books her father brought home from, China.
Her favorite has zoo animals working together to build a new bridge after the river had
swallowed the old one. She sneaks a look over their shoulders and sees a picture of a fat
Chinese man wearing a cap. Spiky shapes run up and down the page. She walks away
disappointed. She sits in the balcony and reads another picture book from China. It is about a
girl who cuts her hair to help save her village from Japanese soldiers. The title is Mine
Warfare. It is 1984. The father is arrested right outside their house. It happens one August
afternoon, with all the neighbors watching. They look at the uniformed men with cropped hair
and shiny boots. Guns bulging under their clothes. Everyone is quite afraid to make a sound.
The handcuffs shine like silver in the sun.
When the soldiers drive away, the murmuring begins. Words like insects escaping
from cupped hands. It grows louder and fills the sky. It is like this whenever disaster
happens. When fire devours a house two streets away, people in the compound come out to
stand on their balconies.
Everyone points at the pillar of smoke rising from the horizon. This is the year she
and her brother come to live with their grandparents, having no parents to care for them at
home.
The grandparents tell them a story of lovebirds: Soldiers troop into their house one summer
day in 1974. Yes, this very same house. Muddy boots on the bridge over the koi pond,
strangers poking guns through the water lilies. They are looking for guns and papers, they
are ready to destroy the house.
Before the colonel can give his order, they see The Aviary. A small sunlit room with a
hundred lovebirds twittering inside. A rainbow of colors. Eyes like tiny glass beads. One
soldier opens the aviary door, releases a flurry of wings and feathers. Where are they now?
the girl asks. The birds are long gone, the grandparents say, eaten by a wayward cat. But as
you can see, the soldiers are still here. The two children watch them at their father's court
trials. A soldier waves a guru says it is their father's. He stutters while explaining why the gun
has his own name on it. They visit her father at his new house in Camp Crame. It is a long
walk from the gate, past wide green lawns.
In the hot surrey everything looks green. There are soldiers everywhere. Papa lives in
that long low building under the armpit of the big gymnasium. Because the girl can write her
name, the guards make her sign the big notebooks. She writes her name so many times, the
S gets tired and curls on its side to sleep. She enters amaze the size of the playground at
school, but with tall barriers making her turn left, right, left, right. Barbed wire forms a dense
jungle around the detention center. She meets other children there: some just visiting, others
lucky enough to stay with their parents all the time. On weekends, the girl sleeps in her
father's cell. There is a double-deck bed and a chair.
A noisy electric fan stirs the muggy air. There, she often gets nightmares about losing
her home: She would be walking down the paths, under the trees of their compound, past the
row of stores, the same grey buildings. She turns a corner and finds a swamp or a rice paddy
where her real house should be. One night, she dreams of war. She comes home from
school to find a blood orange sky where bedroom and living room should be. The creamy
walls are gone. Broken plywood and planks swing crazily in what used to be the dining room.
Nothing in the kitchen but a sea green refrigerator; paint and rust flaking off in
patches as large as thumbnails. To make her home livable again, she paints it blue and pink
and yellow. She knows she has to work fast. Before night falls, she has painted a sun, a
moon and a star on the red floor. So she would have light. Each painted shape is as big as a
bed. In the dark, she curls herself over the crescent moon on the floor and waits for morning.
There is no one else in the dream. Years later, when times are different, she will think of
those visitors and wonder about them.
By then, she will know they aren't really relatives, and had told her names not really
their own. To a grownup, an old friend's face can never really change; in a child’s fluid
memory, it can take any shape. She believes that people stay alive so long as another
chooses to remember them. But she cannot help those visitors even in that small way. She
grows accustomed to the smiles of middle aged strangers on the street, who talk about how it
was when she was this high. She learns not to mind the enforced closeness, sometimes
even smiles back. But she does not really know them. Though she understands the fire
behind their words, she remains a stranger to their world' she has never read the little red
book.
Late one night, she will hear someone knocking on the door. It is a different door now,
made from solid varnished mahogany blocks. The old chocolate brown ply board that kept
them safe all those years ago has long since yielded to warp and weather. She will look
through the peephole and see a face last seen fifteen years before. It is older, ravaged but
somehow same. She will be surprised to even remember the name that goes with it. By then,
the girl would know about danger, and will not know whom to trust. No house, not even this
one, is safe enough. The door will be opened a crack. He will ask about her father, she will
say he no longer lives there.
As expected, he will look surprised and disappointed. She may even read a flash of
fear before his face wrinkles into a smile. He will apologize, step back. Before he disappears
into the shadowy corridor, she will notice his worn rubber slippers, the mud caked between
his toes. His heavy bag. She knows he has nowhere else to go. Still, she will shut the door
and push the bolt firmly into place.
Although this happened a long time ago, people are only beginning to heal from the
past. The “Martial Law babies” write about it more, since they were children during martial
law. However, many famous writers who went through martial law, those who were tortured
the Marcos government, have remained silent, or have not written much about it, simply
because of the pain they have gone through. For them, to write about it, is to relive the pain.
However, as a nation, we must remember these dark times in the past in order to heal and
to make way for a brighter future.

Procedure/Questions:

1. What is the dictionary meaning of ‘safe house’?

2. Why does the man have band-aids instead of toenails? What does this imply about the
visitors?
they are not actually a business cuz it's kind of government

3. Why did the visitor react this way when he saw the President on TV?
Perhaps they reacted to what the President was doing in our nation because of the
good it did and the evil it did.

4. What does the word “underground” imply?

5. Why did the mother leave? Do you understand the decision? Would you have left as well?
Why?

6. Why was it necessary for the narrator to say that she locks doors against visitors these
days?

7. Why didn’t the narrator feel safe?

8. What is the double meaning of The Safe House?

9. Why do you think this was used for the title?

Rubrics for Scoring (if applicable):