In the month of August one Saturday on a cloud curtained evening, a corpse arrived in a zinc casket in a

wooden crate at Ninoy Aquino International Airport where the dead body of woman’s name down as Cabahug,
Aurora V. who was dead from a mysterious drowning and Filemon Catabay who was beheaded for some reason –
sealed tight and properly tagged with names and other identifying information. But something happened when an
inconsiderate and vengeful vice-consul surnamed Quirante had switched the woman’s papers (a seamstress from
Muntinlupa) with the beheaded man’s who was Filemon.

And so it happened that a family of seven had come all the way in a jeepney from Lingayen to meet and to
claim the segments of Filemon Catabay, who had been executed three months earlier. They had learned of his death
the way many others did – after it happened, from a routine news report on DZXL, between an involved discussion of
a movie star’s rumoured abortion and a commercial for a new and more potent livestock dewormer. They talked to
the security guard named Al Viduya who was in charge that time to see the body of Filemon, but he disallow them
and tell to them that they need first papers to sign and it isn’t as simple as they think. But Al said he can check if the
body was in cargo. When Al entered the door he didn’t find the named of Catabay instead he saw the typewritten
name of the deceased, Aurora Cabahug, he looked again to make sure there was no mistake. And then he told to the
family that there was no named of Filemon instead a body of dead woman named Aurora. He convinced the family
to go back on Monday so the family decided to leave the airport and go somewhere. While walking the mother
paused on the sidewalk’s edge, taking her daughter’s arm. “What kind of a family do you think she had?” referring to
the body of Aurora.

It was a case of corpse switching. It was a mistake, like every mistake and quirk of fate that materialized in
the rest of the novels trajectory, the body in the box was that of Aurora’s, not Filemon’s.