My name is Lady Love, says the girl.
The girl is eleven years old. She is small for her age, all skinny brown legs and big dark eyes. Lady Love is the name she prints on the first line of school papers and uses nowhere else. It was her grandmother who named her. Everyone else calls her Love-Love. Ma did, when she sent Love-Love to the market. Get the children dressed, Love-Love. Don’t bother me when I’m playing cards, Love-Love. Quit lecturing me, Love-Love.
Nobody calls her Lady, and only Dee ever called her Love. Just Love.
Love, he would say, give your Dee a hug.
Dee is short for Daddy. It embarrasses Love-Love sometimes, not the hug, because Dee gives good hugs, but that she calls him Dee. Only rich girls call their fathers Daddy. Pa should be good enough for a girl who lives in the slums of Manila. But there they are, Dee and Love, Love and Dee, walking down the street in the early evening, the small girl stretching up a scrawny arm to wrap around the tall man’s waist.
Love-Love was supposed to be the third of eight children, but the oldest died of rabies and the second was rarely home. It fell to Love-Love to tell Ma to stop drinking and Dee to quit smoking. You’re drunk again, she would tell Ma, and Ma would tell Love-Love to go away.
Love-Love worried they would get sick. She worried about rumors her father was using drugs. She worried about all of them living where they did, in a place where every other man could be a snitch for the cops.
Ma and Dee said everything was fine. Dee was getting his driver’s license back. Ma made money giving manicures. They had already surrendered to the new government and promised they would never touch drugs again.
Let’s move away, Love-Love told Dee, but Dee laughed it off.
Let’s move away, she told Ma, but Ma said the little ones needed to go to school. We can go to school anywhere, Love-Love said.
Ma shook her head. They needed to save up first. Don’t worry yourself, Ma said.
Love-Love worried, and she was right.
Love, said her father, one night in August.
Love, he said, just before the bullet slammed into his head.
I meet her at her aunt’s. She is sitting on a battered armchair. I crouch in front of her and stick out my hand to shake hers. If nothing else, an interview is an exchange. Tell me your name, and I’ll tell you mine.
My name is Pat, I tell Love-Love. I’m a reporter.
I was born in 1985, five months before a street revolution brought democracy back to the Philippines. That year it seemed every other middle-class mother had named her daughter Patricia. Evangelista, my surname, common in my country, derives from the Greekeuangelos, “bringer of good news.” It is an irony I am informed of often.
My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.
I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bags ran out. They are the hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. They are the cornfields in rebel country and the tent cities outside blackened villages and the backrooms where mothers whisp
