Excerpted from The Conviction of Things Not Seen, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025.
The cemetery had inhabitants, and not just those whose descendants had laid them to rest. Two old men were living on the Ordoñez plot. Next to the abandoned Llora mausoleum, a family of four had pitched their makeshift tent. As more squatters crept in, to whom the administrators of the Cementerio de Manila turned a blind eye, a village of sorts arose, keeping watch over the stones of the dead, sweeping fallen leaves from their graves and removing flowers that had wilted and browned in the tropical sun. Thus they styled themselves caretakers of the graves, inspiring even greater tolerance for their presence among those in charge, such that far from brusquely restricting their movements, the guards at the gate greeted them by name and allowed them free access and egress without much resistance. The crypt of the Romulo family even hosted a sari-sari store for the cemetery’s living inhabitants, and some cunning member of the community had taken the key to the public restroom for safekeeping at the store, under the watchful eye of a gray-haired woman affectionately known as Tandang Cora—a joke entirely lost on foreign visitors who, in any case, were few.
The other cemetery villagers didn’t call her that to her face, of course, though she knew and secretly enjoyed the fact that they did so behind cupped hands. The adults addressed her as Manang Cora, or just Manang, and the children called her Lola, adopting her as their grandmother, which suited Cora just fine. She had no grandchildren of her own.
To the adults Cora was perpetually gruff, and she never hesitated to voice her (usually disapproving) opinion about the goings-on in their lives. For the little ones, her frown would soften slightly, and every afternoon the children gathered at the sari-sari store and greeted her by placing the back of her hand on their foreheads, each saying “Mano po,” all of them hoping for a little merienda to silence their growling bellies.
On the day of the Hidalgo funeral, a Saturday, before the morning sun had gotten too hot and bright, the lay chaplain waited with his white prayer book at a low wall of niches beside the graves and mausoleum occupied by generations of Hidalgos. (The family was running late; the Hidalgo daughter had set off for the cemetery and forgotten the guest of honor, the urn containing her father’s ashes, on their grand piano.) Down one of the quieter alleys, just outside a little shed where a clothesline was festooned with flowerprint house dresses and men’s shorts, a woman extracted gel from the leaves of an aloe plant and massaged it onto another woman’s scalp. In the Thomasite plot, where several American school teachers had been laid to rest in the early nineteen hundreds, a young man in jeans and a tank top was raking leaves and collecting litter. Two young boys hunted for makahiya next to the sari-sari store.
At last, three cars carrying no more than seven people arrived at the Hidalgo niche. The cemetery villagers stopped what they were doing and inched closer to see who was being laid to rest, and by whom. The little boys stopped tickling shameplants and leaned their elbows on a nearby wall to watch. One young woman observed the small ceremony from the road while munching on a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar. Across the road, some of the older cemetery dwellers sat on a bench and commented on the guests, speculating as to why there were so few, opining on who looked like this or that movie star or politician, and wondering whether the white guy in the group was American or European.
Cora walked over from the sari-sari store, hands on hips. From the opposite direction, two men around her age, Mang Gero and Mang Nacho, arrived and waved at her, to which she turned up her chin and looked toward the Hidalgo niche instead, where the short ceremony was just ending. Some official cemetery workers were ready to seal the niche closed after the urn was placed inside. The daughter was about to place her father’s rosary into the niche with his ashes when an older cousin stopped her.
“Wait, wait! You have to break it first.”
The daughter hesitated and took a deep breath, then snapped the rosary chain and placed it in the niche.
Mang Nacho had approached Cora and was standing by her right elbow, a dangerous spot. She glanced at him with a grimace.
“Ano?” What?
Mang Nacho tried to ignore her hostility. He had just cut his salt-and-pepper hair, so he actually looked presentable today, even handsome. Cora was all the more annoyed.
“Cora, kailan mo ba papatawarin si Gero?” Cora, when will you forgive Gero?
“Patawarin? Bakit ko gagawin yun?” Forgive? Why would I do that?
Mang Nacho sighed. A whiff of alcohol wafted over toward Cora. She turned to him in disbelief.
“Wala pang alas dose. Ang baho baho It’s not even noon. Your breath
na ng hininga mo!” already reeks!
The chaplain waved at Cora and beckoned her to cross the road because one of the family members wanted to visit inside the Hidalgo mausoleum, and she had the key.
The inside of the mausoleum was hot and dark. A bust of Christ wearing a crown of thorns looked toward the entrance with a pained expression. The Hidalgo daughter said, “All these names from the family tree. They’re all here.”
The older cousin nodded. “Just dust in stone boxes. Yet once upon a time this one had kids with that one, and this other one lost that three-year-old to leukemia. We think our life dramas are so important. But we’re all so insignificant.”
“So impermanent,” the daughter said.
The small Hidalgo party stepped back out into the glare. Had they stayed just a bit longer, listened harder, they might have been able to imagine, might have even thought they heard, the voices of their forebears in the dark.
Cora still had a little cash from her son X’s last remittance from overseas. She decided she would leave the cemetery for a while and forget the place even existed. The guard at the gate nodded as she exited. At her favorite carinderia, she ordered tapsilog: sautéed beef and a fried egg over rice cooked with toasted garlic, accompanied by a side of atchara—thinly sliced carrots and green papaya with bits of ginger, garlic, and onion in a sweetened vinegar. Sitting at the counter in a long, black skirt printed with blue flowers and a light blue T-shirt with a coy-looking Betty Boop on it, Cora used the back of a fork in her left hand to push some of the rice, a piece of beef, a bit of fried egg, and a smidge of atchara into her spoon and closed her eyes as the food landed on her tongue, salty and sweet and utterly satisfying. She shook her head at the pleasure of it. “Sarap,” she said. The young cook, Monica, teased her for being a glutton, saying to the muscular man who was just ducking his head to enter the carinderia,
“Ang takaw ni Manang Cora.” Manang Cora has such a big appetite.
“Kasi alam niya kung gaanong kasarap That’s because she knows how good
ang pagkain mo,” he replied. your food is.
“Puwede ba, tama na yung paglalandi Could you stop your flirting already?
ninyo,” said Manang Cora.
The young man laughed and took a seat at the counter next to her. He took off his faux leather jacket, just tolerable in the cooler January temperatures, and stood up even straighter, if that was possible, knowing the forest green shirt that marked him as a PDEA agent was on full display. He ordered a bibingkang galapong with a side of corned beef. Cora gave his plate the side-eye when Monica put it in front of him with an extra-large heap of the corned beef and a small bowl of seasoned vinegar.
“Sino ngayon ang matakaw?” Who’s the glutton now?
And then, cruelly, making sure Monica was within earshot, she asked if he ate so heartily in front of all the women on his team. She had watched these women agents on the news—hair tied back, vests accentuating their waists, Tavor-21 assault rifles in their arms—with a mixture of envy and resentment. After swallowing the last of her garlic rice and playing along with the young man’s small talk for a few minutes, she turned to face him and said, “Your people have been in my cemetery a lot lately, Jun.”
Jun took a sip of his coffee and pursed his lips. “There are more raids everywhere,” he said. “War on drugs and all that.”
“This is not Navotas or Manila North.”
“No, it’s not. Which is why no one got hurt. How’s your son, by the way? What was his name . . . X?”
“X left two years ago to work.”
“Seoul or Tokyo?”
“Tel Aviv.”
“And his friends?”
Cora ran her tongue along her teeth, looking for bits of stray meat. So Jun knew about the group of stupid, arrogant, drug-dealing losers her son had once hung out with. “Exhumado never had any real friends.”
Back inside the Cementerio de Manila, Cora took the long way to the sari-sari store, along the Landas ng mga Manunulat, the Writers’ Path. The graves of journalists, novelists, and poets killed years before, and memorials to other writers who’d been “disappeared,” lined this avenue. It was rumored to be the cemetery’s most haunted place, even more so than the mausoleum of a Chinese merchant’s wife who’d been murdered by her husband, or so the story went. The cemetery children sometimes played on the Landas at dusk, hoping for a sighting, while the grown-ups grilled corn or meat skewers over coals. There was always a mischievous uncle or cousin nearby willing to put on an old mosquito net, hide behind a gravestone, and jump out to scare them, but no one had actual ghost stories to tell, and Cora at least believed the place was harmless.
Nevertheless when Cora’s ex-husband Gero fell into step beside her and said her name, she leapt away from him, startled.
“Jusko naman, Gero! Ano ka ba?” My God, Gero! What’s wrong with you?
“Bakit ka naman nagugulat? Hindi mo Why so jumpy? Didn’t you hear me coming?
ba ako narinig?
Cora let out a huff, then resumed her walk toward the sari-sari store.
“Ano ba ang gusto mo?” she asked. What do you want anyway?
““Uuwi daw si X.” X is coming home.
“Uuwi? May bahay ka ba dito “Coming home?” Do you have a house here
na puwede niyang uwian?” that he could “come home” to?
Gero looked away for a moment.
“Ikaw naman talaga, Cora. Aw c’mon, Cora. He said he was just
Magdadalaw lang daw sandali.” gonna visit for a bit.
Cora put her hands on her hips and said no. No, she would not pretend they were still together, living in a shanty near the Thomasite plot. She would not cover for Gero’s relationship with Nacho. She was done lying to their son. Did Gero really think X hadn’t figured it all out?
“Tama na. Ihing ihi na ako.” Enough. I really have to pee.
She walked away from him as fast as her aching legs would allow.
*
We wrote because we wanted to bear witness.
We wrote to remember.
We wrote because we were haunted by what we learned,
and we had no way of haunting others without words.
We wrote because we were not at home.
We wrote to find our way home.
We wrote because you are homeless too, are you not?
Are you living?
Are you already dead?
Who decides who lives, who dies?
Can you hear us? Can you see us?
Why are we here?
*
On the night of the drug raid, the villagers took refuge in their shanties, mausoleums, and the sari-sari store while dozens of PDEA agents barreled through the cemetery. In every makeshift dwelling, people huddled together while the agents ordered them at gunpoint to stay put while they searched every container for meth, weed, narcotics.
In the sari-sari store, Cora heard a hoarse whisper coming from the back of the mausoleum.
“Cora. Cora!”
“Gero?” Cora asked, peering around the side of the mausoleum to see. Gero had his arm around a barely-alert Nacho and was trying to get him to enter the sari-sari store.
If the agents saw Nacho in this state he would be arrested or worse. Gero too.
“Tulungan mo kami,” Gero pleaded. Help us.
Cora gave Nacho a whack on the cheek. “Nacho. Nacho. Ignacio Paredes!”
Nacho opened his eyes and squinted at Cora. She grabbed a flashlight and ordered both men to follow her.
She led them toward a garden just past the beginning of the Writers’ Path and then toward the garden wall a considerable distance from the road. There, the remains of an older wall, most of which had crumbled or been demolished, formed a space where she, Gero, and Nacho could sit and wait for the raid to end. Usually no one came here during the raids because they preferred the other places they called home, and some inhabitants still feared the possible hauntings they might encounter near the Writers’ Path. If the agents headed this way they would pretend to be asleep, and if necessary Cora would “wake up” and deal with the agents herself. They could hear orders being shouted in the distance and see different areas of the cemetery lighting up, but no gun shots or screams. Cora’s chest was uncomfortable. She hated this sensation, the maw of fear creating a heavy blackness where she imagined her heart to be. Something crawled across her foot, and she jerked it back with a gasp. How long would they have to stay like this? Were there footsteps and voices coming closer?
Cora couldn’t stand waiting, so she ventured back out into the garden and started walking toward the line of graves along the Writers’ Path. Agents were coming her way. She saw three of them. She sat on the side of the road near a satirical poet’s tombstone. When they got closer she recognized Jun, another guy, and a female agent.
“Kayo pala, Manang Cora,” said Jun. He asked what she was doing so far from the sari-sari store.
“Nandoon ata yung buwisit na asawa ko I think my damn husband and his
at yung kaibigan niya e.” “friend” are there.
There was silence for a moment. Then Jun beckoned to his colleagues, and they began to walk back toward the Romulo mausoleum.
“Wala kayong makikitang shabu doon! You won’t find any meth there!
Pero sige, bahala kayo.” But hey, it’s your call.
Morning came, and when Gero and Nacho came out of their niche, they found the Cementerio de Manila much as it was every morning—some folks sweeping leaves, children playing on the road, dead people’s loved ones putting flowers on graves. Cora was in the sari-sari store handing one of the security guards a can of orange soda. Gero stopped at the storefront and waited till the guard went back to his post.
“Salamat, Cora.”
Cora was wiping down her work space with a dust rag. She didn’t look up at him. After a minute, Gero left. A couple of small children approached Cora and took her hand. “Mano po.” She looked up, finally, and watched Gero walking away.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She holds degrees in literature, medicine, and bioethics and is currently a practicing physician in Boston. She writes fiction, poetry, and essays. Her work has appeared in America magazine, the New York Quarterly, Cleaver, The Ekphrastic Review, and many other publications. Her poetry chapbook Beyond the Galleons was published by Yellow Arrow Publishing in 2024.
Read more from the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025 Finalists.
