Scenes from the last days of Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc

September 1, 2013 marks the fourth death anniversary of Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc. Their murder case remains unsolved.

The following is a book excerpt from The First Impulse: Notes on Love, Film, and Death in the Philippines.



In Vancouver, Chris Tioseco’s cell phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number, so at first he ignored it. But then it rang again and again. It was August 28, 2009.

Four days later, Chris would see another insistent, unfamiliar number on his cell phone. A friend from college, weeping outside his family home in the Philippines, saying his youngest brother’s name, and Nika—Chris this isn’t a joke—

For now it was Chris’ landlord. There was a problem with the washer-dryer hookup at his Vancouver apartment. As a result, four inches of water were rising in all of his rooms.

There was only one way, Chris thought, to cope with a surprise flood in his home. He called his brother and his sisters and his mother. They lived within a few streets of each other in the same neighborhood in Vancouver, so the journey to him wasn’t a long one. They all came, bearing every towel they owned: Paola, Bettina, Leo, and their mother, Pia Arellano Tioseco, wearing shorts and short sleeves and flip-flops, ready to act as family dam.

Chris didn’t feel very upset—insurance would take care of the damage. So the Tiosecos made a day of it. They laughed and mocked each other as they moved furniture and soaked up the water. Only one of them was missing: Eggy, the youngest. It was August 29 in Manila. In their father’s Philippines, the Tiosecos’ youngest brother, whom nearly everyone there called Alexis, always lived one day ahead of them.

*

When their father, Leonardo Senior, had died in 2006, the Tiosecos traveled to Manila together for the funeral arrangements. They were surprised at Eggy’s lead when they arrived. Leo and Bettina, especially, were used to their authority as older siblings. But it was Eggy alone who had lived with their father for the past five years, choosing to remain in the Philippines instead of returning to Canada, the country where he had spent his childhood before his father forced him to return to the Philippines at age 16. It was Eggy who made all the arrangements, Eggy who knew where to be, when. Alexis, the youngest, who turned out to be the most Filipino of all of them.

During those nights between funeral events in 2006, when they couldn’t sleep, Chris and Alexis went through Alexis’ DVDs. Alexis decided he wanted to show Chris Batang West Side. It was his favorite Philippine film by his favorite Filipino director, Lav Diaz. Alexis called it, in his first review, an unequivocal masterpiece. It was the work that convinced him to remain in the Philippines and support its film.

In 2006, Alexis turned the movie on and then sat nearby, typing on his laptop. It would be their quiet way of coping with their father’s new absence.

Chris watched, for the first time, the long takes of a lonely, doomed Filipino boy wandering New Jersey’s snowy streets, and the black and white dreamscapes of a tormented Filipino detective, Juan Mijares. In a voiceover, Mijares longs for his own absent father, while Hanzel Harana, the young man, spends the final moments of his life stepping quietly into a few streetside snowbanks.

Chris glanced at his brother from time to time as the movie played on the television. Alexis kept nodding off in front of his computer. Chris kept nodding off himself. The subtitles, the length, and the patient pace of the five-hour film made him sleepy. Every so often the brothers would wake, wonder where they left off, and restart the movie.

Alexis accompanied Chris and their sister Paola to the airport days later. They felt concerned about Eggy, alone in the house without their father, maneuvering the Philippines on his own. “You don’t have to stay,” they reminded him more than once. “You really don’t have to stay. Are you going to be okay?”

“Don’t worry,” Alexis replied. “I’ll be fine.”

*

In the three years since, Chris Skyped and called Alexis nearly every day, in between his own visits back to his brother in Manila. Alexis had found his stride in the Philippines. He traveled to film festivals, rising in prominence as a critic. He assumed his responsibilities as head of their father’s business, Agila. And the woman Alexis loved, Nika Bohinc—a Slovenian film critic who matched him word for word, who knew and appreciated Lav Diaz’s long films—had chosen to join Alexis in Quezon City, to see what life in the Philippines with him would be.

On the day of Chris’ home flood in August 2009, the family called Alexis from Vancouver and put him on speakerphone. He joined in immediately, mocking his brother Leo from Quezon City, imagining the wet, happy mess. He sounded happy.

When he thought of the moment months later, Chris decided it was the best possible last conversation he could have imagined with his youngest brother.

*

On September 1, 2009, Josef Cruz was excited about an idea for his own first film. He plotted out what he would tell Mr. Tioseco when he saw him next.

In Josef’s neighborhood, there were wealthy gated villages where many of the palatial houses sit unoccupied. Josef imagined filming these houses, showing just the emptiness as it was. The audio, though, would be alive. Viewers would listen to the past occupants’ arrivals, departures, and conversations, while the camera’s eye passed over the abandoned interiors.

It had been three years since Josef had begun his tutelage under Mr. Tioseco in his film course at University of Asia and the Pacific. Josef borrowed his professor’s personal copy of YiYi and liked it. He mulled the politics filtered through the personal dramas of one middle-class family in Taiwan. The intergenerational love affairs, the train, the small boy with the camera and the protruding ears. The sudden violence. For Josef, it was the start of something.

Josef was game for Diaz’s eleven-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family, an epic meditation on the violence of Martial Law, which Mr. Tioseco would watch repeatedly. Josef began to call himself an oddball film enthusiast, too, seeing the Philippines for the first time through its independent cinema, with Mr. Tioseco as his guide.

Over the next three years, Mr. Tioseco met with Josef once a month. Over cheese pizzas and spinach dip and bottomless iced teas, Mr. Tioseco would lend Josef a stack of books and DVDs to review for their next meeting. Josef began to spend his money on imported Criterion Collection movies. Looking at his own tired clothes months into Mr. Tioseco’s mentorship, Josef suddenly understood why his professor’s shirts always looked a little faded. They would both rather spend their money on DVDs than replace their old clothes.

In mid-2007, the stacks began to include DVDs from Slovenia. Mr. Tioseco began to quote another writer, Nika Bohinc. She was the editor of ex-Yugsolavia’s oldest film magazine, Ekran. There was a passionate, French New Wave-style romance by Matjaž Klop?i?, Paper Planes,  which had shown her what great Slovenian cinema could be.

By 2009, Josef sat across from both Nika and Mr. Tioseco. He watched his sober professor banter relentlessly with the sharp, animated woman from Ljubljana. Josef began to discuss with Nika films that Mr. Tioseco hadn’t seen, while Mr. Tioseco covered his ears in mock torment. He and Nika shared churros con chocolate; Mr. Tioseco grinned and drank the leftover chocolate like a shot, to Nika’s exasperation.

Mr. Tioseco would complain about his family business, Agila, and clap Josef jokingly on the shoulder. “You're going to inherit it, Josef. So I can focus on film. Don’t worry, I'll advise you from behind.”

“Huh?” Josef would always reply, and they would laugh.

On August 27, 2009, Josef attended a silent film festival with Nika and Mr. Tioseco. His professor’s other students were there. They called him by his first name, Alexis, which made Josef wince. He liked the deference and the rhythm of his surname: Tee-oh-se-cko. Tioseco. He could never call his professor Alexis.

Nika patted his professor’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said, winking at Josef. “We’ll call you Mr. Tioseco.”

Many weeks later, when he returns home from the wake smelling too much like flowers, Josef will glance at the media coverage. He will think of how the websites and newspapers and tributes had left this out: how funny Mr. Tioseco and Nika were, how often they laughed.
The film they watched that final night together was Judex, a five-hour silent French serial from 1916. In the opening scenes, a governess deceives a wealthy banker into taking her in. She is dark-eyed, gentle with her young charge, and she calls herself Marie Verdier. Her real name is Diana Monti. She meets later with two male accomplices in a bar. Together, they plan an intimate crime against her employer.

*

Around seven PM on September 1, 2009, Alexis finished his administrative duties for Agila and left final instructions for his secretary. Nika put on her yellow jacket. They left together with their friend, Mia Sebastian.

Magdalena Patpat—Alexis’ long-time, 58-year-old helper, called, affectionately, Manang—rarely prepared dinner for Alexis and Nika; tonight they would go to Bagoong Club. Alexis and Manang smiled that Nika was one of the only white people they knew who liked bagoong, Filipino shrimp paste. In the nine months since she’d arrived from Slovenia, Nika was easily ill from the smog, and she longed for the clean, green spaces that defined her home country near the Alps. She arrived with a suitcase full of Slovenian DVDs to share. Manila first taught Nika what homesickness really was. The move wasn’t easy for her. But she loved Alexis, and she wanted to try.


To Manang, Nika was as tall and beautiful as Alexis warned she would be. She was not at all used to servants. Nika asked for coffee once, but that was all. She prepared her own salads, straightened up her own desk. Manang helped prepare Nika’s office, the largest room on the second floor. Nika taped up dozens of postcards and fliers from film screenings she’d attended around the world, and worked on a nonfiction screenplay modeled after her favorite movie, the wild, passionate, tragic love story, Jules et Jim. Manang would often overhear Nika speaking in Slovene on Skype to her people back home.

*

On September 1, Manang joined her co-worker, Criselda, in the bedroom they shared near the kitchen. They settled onto their twin beds to watch television.

Criselda was 42, quiet, stout, with a broad face, a malformed right ear, and a slow walk. Since she’d been hired six weeks prior, Criselda had proven herself a good cleaner and an amiable presence. She had passed her initial Quezon City employment clearance, though she lacked the money, apparently, to provide a National Bureau of Investigation clearance; she said it would come later. At Alexis’ request, Manang watched Criselda, testing her, making sure nothing small went missing. Nothing, so far, had gone missing.

Criselda checked her cell phone. She texted quickly. She excused herself and left the room. To call her father in the province and buy a few things, she said. Manang nodded.

*

Manang was comfortable working for Alexis, for the most part, and put aside her thoughts of retiring home to Negros Occidental after a life working abroad; first as a nutritionist in Saudi Arabia, and then as a maid in Manila. Alexis was a rare boss. When her children needed extra care, or a relative was sick, she was quick to tell Alexis, and he was quick to help with a salary advance, or extra food and space in the house, anything at all.

Alexis asked Manang to select her own co-worker in July 2009. He wanted her to decide who felt right, since she would be sharing her room. Criselda Dayag had been referred to the household by two of Manang’s acquaintances, neighborhood trash collectors.

One day in late August, Criselda asked Manang if Alexis would be all right giving her a salary advance for a sick family member of her own. Manang advised her to ask, since he was kind. Alexis, of course, allowed Criselda the advance.

*

Soon after Criselda left their room on September 1, 2009, Manang heard Astor barking. Astor was Alexis’ father’s old dog, gray around the muzzle but still strong, a Belgian malinois fenced near the front door. The dog stood just past Manang’s waist; each day she fed him leftovers and listened for his barks against intruders.

Manang looked outside. Criselda texted, intent on the small square glow of her cellphone.
Manang glanced around in the dusk. No reason, really, for Astor to be barking. Manang went back inside. Criselda followed her. She sat on her own bed watching TV for a while longer.

Criselda went back outside. More barking. Manang passed Criselda and opened the green metal gate. She looked out into Times Street. There was no one; only the usual rushing cars, the sound of diesel engines from nearby Quezon Avenue, the same houses across the street, with corrugated tin roofs. A presidential candidate, NoyNoy Aquino, lived down the street.

Manang went back inside, to the bathroom near her room. When she emerged, the first man put his hand over her mouth. Then a second man gripped her. She saw a third man, and their handguns.

The men shoved Manang into the room she shared with Criselda. Manang wanted to protest to her, but she saw that Criselda was sitting, calm, expressionless.

“Lie face down,” the men ordered. Manang obeyed.

They hogtied, blindfolded, gagged, and left her. She heard them turn on the television in the living room. They were waiting, Manang realized. Criselda and the men would not simply loot the house. They would wait for Alexis and Nika to return home. Why?

Manang’s wrists and ankles swelled. She began to pray. Don’t let them come in, Manang prayed. Let me be the one instead of the two.

*

Two and a half years later, after Manang hears the shouts and the gunshots—after she returns, wild-eyed, from the police station—after she cleans the blood—after she goes through Alexis’ and Nika’s rooms, telling investigators what few items went missing—after she shouts to their friends, gathered in stunned vigil on the street, “God doesn’t sleep! He knows exactly what he’s doing!”—after she clears out Alexis’ and Nika’s offices—after she takes Alexis’ and Nika’s movie fliers and posters down from the walls—Manang lets me into the house at 39 Times Street and asks me who I am. She looks at my dark hair and hears my beginners’ Tagalog and looks at the translator next to me. She says the names of Alexis’ friends, touching the tips of her fingers for each. I am not one of those names; I am a stranger to her.

In December 2011 Manang is still guarding the house. The rooms are empty now. I can only imagine the voices that were there before, the way Josef Cruz might have, in the film he imagined for his professor Mr. Tioseco.

Manang tends the garden and feeds Astor the dog, who fell inexplicably silent that night—poisoned, perhaps. She still sweeps and scrubs. She sleeps alone now in the same maid’s quarters where the men tied her up and forced her to hear what they did.

I tell Manang that I never met Alexis and Nika, but that I am a mixed Fil-Am from abroad like Alexis, and I would like to write about them. I ask her how she is.

Manang sits on a black couch in the living room and holds out her left arm. “I have pain here still,” she says. She says, too, that she wishes she’d been the one instead of the two. She will say she would like to rest now. That she feels ready to leave the world. But Alexis and Nika? Twenty-eight and twenty-nine years old? “Parang anak ko sila.” They were like my children.

*

Toward ten on the night of September 1, 2009, Mia Sebastian, 28, could feel herself lingering with Alexis and Nika and their friends, not wanting to leave each others’ company yet. Nika and Eggy thought they should start a film club. Eggy began assigning roles. Though Nika was returning to Slovenia in three days, they were filled with plans.

They went to dessert nearby and lingered there too. Then they agreed they should return to Bagoong Club and take a final photo there together. It felt like that sort of notable night. Everything should be remembered.

Toward ten, Alexis and Nika invited Mia to watch a movie with them at 39 Times Street. It was late, and a Tuesday night, but it was a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai director Alexis was wild about. The filmmaker was a former architect. Alexis was sure that his work would inspire Mia with its elegant visual symmetry. Mia agreed to join them and watch.

On the way back to Eggy’s house, Alexis and Nika sat with their arms around each other in the back seat. Mia felt, near them, several realizations at once. The couple were so happy together, so calm, at rest in their bond, in no rush to be anywhere else. Eggy was an old friend; Nika was a new one. On September 3, Nika would be returning to Slovenia to finish her undergraduate studies. It would take a while, but they would all be all right. Mia felt certain of it.

Even as she absorbed their closeness, Mia wondered if she should accept the invitation to watch the film. The back and forth, in her mind, felt suddenly, inexplicably intense.

Eggy answered Mia’s wordless indecision for her when he leaned forward.

“Mia, Nika’s a little tired. Why don’t we watch the film some other time?”

They stopped in front of 39 Times Street. Alexis handed Mia a copy of Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, and The Free Press, where his new, regular column would soon be edited by his friend Erwin Romulo. Nika handed Mia a CD of their photos together from Siargao, where they had vacationed together a few weeks ago.

Mia asked the couple to wait. She had an urge to take a picture of them. She pulled out her camera. Alexis and Nika were baffled and amused. Mia felt silly, then; she wasn’t sure why she was so moved, why she needed that final photograph. She decided not to take it.

The street was poorly lit, Mia recalls for the Free Press a year later. But I could see them smiling, side by side, so at ease, and so happy. I had one last look at them, then turned away and got into the van. . . . I didn’t even wave or turn around. I just rode off with this feeling, a very full but somewhat bittersweet feeling.

Mia stayed up until 2am that night, looking at the photographs Nika had collected for her. It was a sweet but complicated moment, her feeling so moved. It was complicated for Mia to tell me about it years later. What if she’d gone with them into the house? Could she have helped negotiate whatever was waiting?

But Mia will also wonder about that feeling right before they went inside, why she almost felt moved to tears, why she became so emotional. She realized she must have confused the couple at that moment, with her request for a photograph of them. The act made sense for her, to crystallize her gratitude and love for them.

I thought about it for a long while, after I spoke with her—all of the longing and connection happening for Mia in that moment, on Times Street, in the Philippines, on September 1, 2009.
For Alexis and Nika, perhaps the moment was much simpler. They were simply going home together.


— VC/HS, GMA News