When Love Did Come

CHAPTER NINE

The lights in the corridors flickered on and summer's cold end got under way. Manny Pineda came by Rayel's office for new ideas, and the Taft-based basketball squad was doing well. On those Saturdays when the team practiced at the university gym, the streets were packed with cars and buses, driven by overweight men who wrote out large checks to the athletic department and whose daughters were part of the pep squad.

Rayel paced the classroom, tossing a piece of chalk up and down in his right hand. "Consider, for a moment, the nature of Open Systems Interconnection, or OSI. The seven layers of operation. Physical, Datalink, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and the Application layers. What, by the way, are the main protocols used in the Application layer?" The students all focused on their notebooks, pretending to do something.

He pushed and prodded, and finally a young man (black complexion, foreigner from Nepal, front row) said hesitantly, "Some of them might be HTTP, FTP, TFTP, DNS, and SMTP?"

"And SNMP if I may add," Rayel said, then gave them a two-minute backgrounder of what the hell the abbreviations stood for. After that, he picked up the thread of the lecture again. "Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol, the basic building block of web pages. This is where we should concentrate on our lesson." He paused, thinking of Jenny, while the students wrote in their notebooks and wondered if he would ask about the main protocols used in the Application layer of the OSI model on the first examination.

During the second week of summer school he was looking out the window while covering a fine point in Boolean algebra, looking at nothing except the quaver of the turning leaves in the hostile winds of April, and saw her. At first it didn't register, since he was working hard at getting the students to appreciate the intellectual leavings of one George Boole, the nineteenth-century mathematician who took formal logic up about fifty notches. He's teaching Logic Circuits and Switching Theory this summer for the juniors. But the familiar walk and wire-rimmed glasses finally got his attention --- Jenny. He stopped talking, he wasn't sure how long, and watched her wind along a sidewalk, knapsack over her shoulder. Jenny from a distance, always from a distance. When she moved out of sight, he turned back to the class. They all looked at him in a strange kind of way. His face, maybe, or his body. They saw something, in his eyes or the momentary sag of Superman's shoulders, and they knew they hadn't seen it before. Professor Capistrano blacking out in class? I don't think so. But it did happen.

Rayel glanced back at the wall clock. Fifteen minutes to go. "That'll be all for today," he said. As he scraped up his chalk box from the desk in front, they filed out, some of them giving him side long glances and talking to one another. A young lady whispered, "Did you see how he looked? What happened to him all of a sudden?"

He hadn't realized how much it showed. Words weren't needed to tell them how much he loved her. Jenny was right in believing they had to stay apart. Aside from protecting themselves from each other, people would start to pick up on how they felt, even if they were merely in the same room with other people. He'd been looking at advertisements for faculty positions in universities in Cebu and Davao, but at his salary, which is up to the sky, it would be difficult to make a move. Besides, with his mother's health declining, he felt a responsibility to stay in Manila and not be too far from her. He'd thought about Baguio, but still it's too far from her. Still, his hope lingers, there might be something somewhere that'll meet his requirements and take him away from the city where Jenny Pineda lived.

***

It's hard to say where all this might have gone if it hadn't been for the ducks. Probably to the same place via a different route. The history of the situation is this: the university needed a new building. The school population had increased over thirty-five percent over the past three years and is expected to pick up the pace. More students mean more classrooms. The school president and his board were able to float out eighteen million pesos for a new building and Dean Rodrigo Madrigal was tasked to supervise the project. This was because almost ninety percent of the population increase came from the ECE department. Rod welcomed the job and gladly accepted it. The papers were signed last February and final construction plans were now being drawn.