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An analysis of the short story “The Safe House” b y BJ Patino

The Safe House

BJ Patino

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 same-too 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, hisface 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 quiet 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, balasang k4 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 namesnot really their own. To a grownup,
an old friend’s face can never really change; in achild’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 thishigh. 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 willbe 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.

Comprehension Questions:
1. What does “safe house” mean in this context?

2. Why did the narrator feel unsafe?

3. Why did the man in the story have bandaids instead of nails? What does this imply?

4. Do you sympathize more with the visitors or with the narrators? Why?

5. Why did the mother leave? Do you think it was okay for her to leave?