Bedford, Massachusetts

b. 1914

The Wedding Ring

Gabe Paiva disguised his mother's wedding ring at Cabuatuan 3 in the Philippines, the first of four POW camps that he survived, by wrapping thread around it.  However one day a Japanese guard “sneaked up on top of me,” says Gabe, “and saw my open palm.” The thread had slipped, the gold shined through. It was too late.  The guard demanded the ring.  He pushed ten pesos, Japanese occupation money, at the frail American prisoner.  

Knowing that he would be beaten if he did not surrender it—and then it would be taken nonetheless—Gabe handed over the ring.  But he refused the payment. “I didn't want to have the sense that I sold it,” he says. 

Right then he made a second and drastic decision:  “I didn't let it bother me. I couldn't afford to let it. Emotions can kill and negative emotions can damage the body.”  The loss of the ring deadened Gabe; it helped him to endure.  Only after returning home did he allow for regret.  “I should have sewed it into my clothes,” he says now.  “I should have done it another way.”

From 1942–1945, the Japanese Empire exploited Gabe as a slave laborer at freight yards, docks, and factories.  He was starved and beaten.  He contracted dengue fever and scab-like lesions grew inside his lungs.  His body bloated with fluid from malnutrition, causing him to wake from sleep with a swollen, puffed-up face.  The guards found this hilarious—look, look how well our American friends are fed! 

Civilians jeered at Gabe and fellow POWs as they walked past, straw bound to their feet, clothes ragged and filthy.  Horios, the people called out, dishonorable ones.

Gabe has now forgiven his captors.  But he misses his mother's wedding ring.  He remembers, at age four, standing by her deathbed with a pouch of camphor hung around his neck to protect him from the influenza epidemic ravaging Boston.  He remembers, too, his ma at the window calling for him to come inside.  And the fava beans, roasted Portuguese style.  He remembers Susanna putting a roasted fava bean in her mouth and gently chewing it, and then taking the bean from her mouth and feeding it, soft and infinitely sustaining, to Gabriel, her youngest son.