As I watched this lifeless man on the ground and what I now recognized was a widening pool of blood around him, a sudden memory seized me. I had traveled with my grandfather when he campaigned for a municipal council seat; it must have been when I was four. Tatay Gaudencio liked bringing me to campaign stops because children from remote villages were curious about me and came out of their houses along with their mothers, who my grandfather made speeches to on a megaphone.

We were coming back from one of those stops in our family jeep, military green with a dark khaki cover. I rode in the back and looked outside through a clear plastic porthole as the headlights occasionally revealed a tree or the bottom of a house. Suddenly, a body-shaped, too-bright figure appeared in my line of sight, then another. I crouched between the driver and passenger seats to look ahead and saw another body, indistinct but unmistakable, lying by the road among dirt and stone. With a calm voice, my grandfather said the people in this town were peculiar because whenever they had the urge to sleep, they simply lay down wherever they were and stayed there until they weren’t tired anymore. He suggested I sleep too since it was getting late, so I leaned against the cloth cover and closed my eyes. But seeing Ninoy lifeless on the ground, I grasped that what I had seen were dead bodies, and Marcos had something to do with their murders.

Over the following weeks, the TV news became preoccupied with Ninoy Aquino, though I could tell those announcers weren’t telling the whole truth. Thankfully, the American UHF channel from the Angeles Army Base aired a documentary on Ninoy, which talked about how he was Marcos’s major opponent before the president declared martial law in 1968 and ended up ruling the country for more than a decade, even though he was only supposed to serve a four-year term. There had been no elections in our country since Marcos came into power, which Ninoy loudly criticized before the president put him in jail.

But after Ninoy suffered his heart condition, Marcos allowed him to go to the United States to get treatment in a city called Boston, where he settled in exile. I was not familiar with this word, “exile,” and had to look it up with a magnifying glass in my Webster’s dictionary. It meant being forced to live outside your own country against your will, a thought that saddened me. Ninoy was able to stay in the United States instead of in a Philippine jail under one condition, which was that he could not criticize the president or his administration. So to still speak his mind, Ninoy came up with a series of jokes that could be interpreted various ways.