A Guide To Cine Europa 12

by Philbert Ortiz Dy
posted on Wednesday, September 09, 2009 in Festivals, Movies in
http://www.clickthecity.com/movies/?p=5593

the sick and the dying, the lonely and the broken-hearted

Dearest Amelia,


It is raining here again. Skies were overcast all day. News says that LPA (that’s low pressure area) has already become Signal No. 1, and they’re calling it some male name now. Classes have been called off, office workers are making their way through traffic, trying to beat the heavy gray clouds gathering in the distance, desperate to be home, before the heavy rainfall. I do not know why I start with a description of the weather. Well, in your mails, you always talk about the weather. And you do it so well, so engagingly. The weather! Imagine that. I guess talking about the weather, where you are, is a real, legit way to pass the time. Here, it can be absolutely inconsequential, unless it is of the type that brings about floods and famine. You know, weather in the extreme. One afternoon, for instance, on my way home from work, I just happened to glance at the sky, and saw how beautiful it was, the brightest blue and the deepest pink in a wonderful, graceful, elegant sweep. I mass-texted people, telling them to look up, look up now! Guess how many replied? One. And all he said was: “cool”. It wasn't cool. It was a bit warm, actually, even if there was a slight breeze. But, there, see, everyday weather here does not affect us much. Life goes on. In your case, however, I am amazed at how it always matters, sometimes terribly so. The winter especially, no? I really hope you have recovered from it – the leaking pipes, broken boilers… Sounds real disastrous. Sorry. But then you get beautiful breaks for autumn, and spring, and now summer, too. It must be really lovely at this time of the year. Do you still grow flowers in your little yard? Do the blue and yellow birds still come for the dew on the leaves and the seeds you scatter for them on the ground? I really loved my time there with you. Here, you just don’t do that. You don’t notice the changes in colors, the flowers blooming or dying. You don’t feed birds. That’s too… I don’t know, indulgent? It's as though you're not allowed to appreciate the lighter, brighter things in life, in nature, being in a place where there's too much darkness, too much heaviness. Or, maybe it is just me.

This is embarrassing. One time, I was doing some work, out in our tiny backyard. The weather this time was pretty mild. And there were a couple of birds, you know, those brown ones we see everywhere. I shook out the contents of my bag of chips to the ground for them and they all scampered away. I waited, kept still, but they wouldn’t budge, balancing themselves on the barbed wires, waiting, keeping still. Staring at me like I was some loony. I stood up, went inside our house, and watched the birds from the windows instead. But they still wouldn’t make the move for the crumbs. Apparently, even these birds here think it’s crazy to feed them like that, like they’re your pets, and to not expect anything in return. El caught me spying at the birds from the window, and he laughed so hard the row of birds fluttered away in surprise. El obviously shares the sentiments of the suspicious, arrogant birds. It just is not done here. People do not feed birds! So, yes, please, do send me some of those pictures please, from my visit there three years ago.

I can’t believe it’s been that long. I can’t believe you’re a mommy now and that soon you’ll be taking little Tommy to football or wherever it is European mommies take their kids to. Or to the park to feed the birds, maybe? Haha. But, yeah, wow. Who would have thought, Ames? El and I have been talking more frequently about having one ourselves. A baby, I mean. I keep changing my mind about it. I mean I do want it, even if I will never say it. Not to anyone, anyway. I have not seen the doctor. Hell, I haven’t been to a hospital since my mother died three years ago. But I really should go, you’re right. I keep having these darting pains in my abdomen more frequently, pains like the ones I used to have, just before El took me to the hospital for, you know, that incident last year. I have a very deep suspicion that it would never happen again, that we would never be able to have one again. Ever. There. Thank you. I just had to say it. And I would rather that I be the one to tell myself that, than it be handed to me, you know, in print, in stark medical language. Then it would be really official. And I am not sure how I am going to take that. I feel really bad for El though. I really, really do. I feel bad, sad, on my own, too. Sometimes, I feel more angry than sad.

So… How’s the weather? Oh, we’ve already covered that. Sorry. What else is there… Do you remember Manu, from the org? Tallish, fair, sharp chin? Nice haircut, as in consistently well-styled hair? He had asked me out once, to go to mass with him, remember? And you all found that pretty funny. I laughed too. Except that I did not find it that funny. I sort of did want to go to mass with him, just out of curiousity. But, obviously, that was not going to be very cool. And so… Anyway. This is so weird. I have just been thinking about him lately. I mean, there was nothing there, right? Nothing to think about, nothing to dwell on. Except for that one time, during a Christmas party in someone’s mansion, in New Manila. I don’t know if you remember. You were pretty absorbed, enrapt actually, with whatshisname, the tall jerk. Sorry, I know you used to really like him. I didn’t. I didn’t really care much for that group, even if you were very much into them. Or they into you. They were too cool. Haha. And, really, I just wasn’t cool enough. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t like them enough to want to be like them. But, that Manu. He was different, wasn’t he? He was not cool, as you guys made it very apparent, in your treatment of him. His fault, too. He wanted to go to church with me! Haha. Remember when, at some point during the party, people were lying on the ground, puking into the pool, you and your boyfriend decided you wanted to drive to the south, to Tagaytay, and you practically, literally dragged me. Manu ran after us, and I pulled him into the car, and made him drive. You remember? And we drove. I mean, he drove, you and your boyfriend sat – made out!— in the backseat. Manu and I tried not to look, tried very hard to stare ahead. We were both glad to be out of that party, actually. So we just drove on, past Ortigas, and then C-5, until we reached the city limits, and that’s when we noticed that you and your boyfriend had gone silent. You had both passed out! What a sight you both were. I wish we had digicams or phonecams then.

We could have turned the car back to the party, no? But we were on the South Luzon Express Way already. And it was quite nice, too – the quiet, steady drone of motor on highway tracks, the rush of the wind against our faces. The city and its noise, its buildings and its lights, all diminished the farther we went. Then we realized that we both didn’t know where Tagaytay was, exactly. Manu found a nice, safe spot, took the car to the side, and asked me if I wanted to step out and sit on the hood instead, cool ourselves before we head back. And so we did. We got out of the car, sat on the hood, and, you won’t believe this, we watched the stars. Did it ever occur to you, during your entire life in Manila, to look up to the night sky, to watch the stars? Manu was not as uncool as we all thought he was. Even if he was wearing a collared Bench shirt that night, tucked in his well-ironed slacks! While we were sitting on the hood, he untucked his shirt and kept smoothing the creases down. I don’t remember what we talked about exactly though. I vaguely recall him telling me about his father's home in the province, right in the middle of a field, where, apparently, they would take strolls, at night, and lie on their backs, look at the stars. How quaint, no? Or, maybe he didn't talk about that. Maybe we did not talk about anything at all. Maybe I am making it all up. But I remember him. You remember him, right? I do remember that night. I don’t think Manu and I ever talked to each other after that night though. Did he drop out of the org? He sort of disappeared, didn’t he? I bumped into him on campus, on a few more occasions, but he only ever nodded at me in slight acknowledgment and, always, there was this impenetrable look about him. I heard his name mentioned, a few years ago, in some forum. Apparently, he had moved back to his father’s province and started a rather progressive publication there. So many other things were said about him and his group. After that, though, I had not heard of him at all. Anyway… Why have I been thinking of Manu? I really don’t know. But, recently, every time there’s news of some organizer or reporter or social worker killed, it stifles my breath, clamps my heart shut for a second. And then, I have to stop whatever it is I am doing to scan the report for his name, for any wayward description that might identify him for me. When did I start to care so much? So, so strange, this. I really don’t know, Ames. Must be all these bad things happening around us...

A man was found dead in his apartment, just across from ours, did I tell you? Oh, Ames. Terrible. He had been dead for four days already, before the building maintenance guy here found him. I used to see this man every Saturday, watering his plants, sunning himself in his garden, with a dozen cats around him. I used to be so jealous at how the birds did not mind him. They would feed freely off crumbs of bread scattered on the table in front of him! And, he always said good morning. Nobody says good morning here in our apartment block. Nobody here feeds cats. Nobody here waters plants. Nobody here feeds birds! This man, he lived alone. He didn’t have family. No friends called on him, no lovers had breakfast with him. His plants died, too, Ames. His cats started loitering in other people’s apartments, spilling garbage cans over, stealing food from kitchens, screaming and scratching at each other, every single night, until they bleed. They have become unbearably violent, they have turned into such beasts, in their grief. Some started hanging out in our garage, pissing on our front steps, every single day, as if to tell us to deal with it, deal with US! The nice old man, whose name I never bothered to learn, who lived alone, who died alone, was responsible for the balance of things here in our little world!

I couldn't get up from bed all day yesterday. There were about twelve missed calls on my phone, demanding emails in my inboxes. I couldn't deal. Middle of the workweek, unconfirmed meetings, unsigned checks, unwritten reports, and there I was, worrying over what would happen to the dead man's books, the plants in his garden, the secret dvd collections, the very well-chosen clothes and shoes. Who's claimed his body from the crime lab? Who's going to light candles for him, hold vigil for him, say prayers for his soul? El said that we should light candles on his veranda, get his full name, offer him a mass, if that would make me happy. But that is a bit hypocritical, don't you think? We had all the chance in the world to get to know him and we didn't, and now he's dead. Since last week, I have been watching for movement in his apartment, waiting for anyone, someone, to come by, so I can talk to him or her, ask about the nice, strange, lonely man who lived and died there, all by himself. There are days when I am gripped with such a strong desire to know what's on his kitchen shelf, whose photographs he kept. What was the last satisfying meal he took? Whose number did he dial last? Other times, I feel extremely overprotective of his privacy. No one, not a single person has a right to know the insides of a house that has been well-lived in, alone, for many, many years.

Oh Ames, please come and visit me. Please let me visit you!

I think the typhoon just arrived. Signal No. 1 is here, intent on gaining force, turning into Signal No. 2. The streets will be littered with filth and mud, and canals will flood. Little houses will float, families will lose their homes. The displaced and the desperate will fill Baclaran, walk on their knees to implore the Mother of Perpetual help. A ferry will sink. Again. Some kid will try very hard to not let go of the hand of his brother, but the current will be very strong. Billboards will come falling on cars, killing their drivers. Or, maybe not. Maybe this is nothing. Maybe parents will be glad of the chance to leave work early, prepare steaming bowls of soup for the family. Kids will be happy making paper boats float on little streams. Lovers will be daring enough and will drive out of the city in the rain, to spend the night in some high altitude place overlooking a volcano's crater. Or, maybe they won't even make it there, getting only as far as the highway, far enough to say that they have left the city behind.

Dearest Amelia, how are you, really? You look happy in your pictures. You lost weight very quickly. But I am worried when you tell me that on your days off, instead of reaching for a book, or thinking of a poem to write, you just doze off instead, from fatigue. I was worried when, at the park, you cursed rather violently at a white man, and muttered, under your breath, that he deserved to be hungry and homeless. I am worried when you tell me that you shy away from other Filipinos who smile at you and approach you and want to talk to you at the park. Should I be worried? Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I just am imagining all of these things. I cannot be relied on too much, these days. I am so utterly, terribly, embarrassingly maudlin. You wouldn't recognize me. But if you tell me you will come here for vacation, then I shall certainly be cheered, and I shall not bore you with my useless imaginings about the sick and the dying, the lonely and the broken-hearted, the poor and the unemployed, in a word, all who need your perpetual help… Amen. (I can’t believe I can still recite the Perpetual Help novena from memory!) Kidding aside, I promise not to bore you with issues at my work. And I promise not to drag you to one of El's hoity-toity art gallery events, either. And, I just might allow you to bring me to the doctor for that much-needed check up you've been bugging me about, or to drive to Tagaytay for a very sinful bowl of beef Bulalo. Which reminds me, I have to go and prepare dinner now, make myself useful around the house, close all the windows, shut the storm out.

Please, please you take care of yourself, Ames. Try to enjoy the brief summer respite. I miss you, miss you, miss you. Send my love to the little one, and his father, too.

Love, love,
J.

whose culture reigns?

I've been conversing with FB friends on the whole national artist awards controversy, and i am not fully comfortable with how the messages are being shaped. i am attending the 'pagluluksa' tomorrow, but i cannot say that i am wholly in agreement with the movement's call. i think there is a need to inquire into the motive behind the act first. what does the president have to gain by doing what she did? i have a strong suspicion that this issue was created precisely to divide us, to expose the biases of the academic elite. and we are leading ourselves right into the cracks.

i don't think it was right, or even necessary, for the film critic Tioseco to say that the number of caparas films and wowowee viewers cannot ever be a barometer of culture. why not? why can't viewership ever be a gauge? maybe not according to established practice, or existing award criteria. but, who has a say on what defines culture, what doesn't? whose culture are we talking about anyway?

there was a very good opportunity to discuss various and varying notions of 'culture' during the ANC show; instead, only one prevailing notion surfaced: high culture.

the message in this campaign should be clear: there were clear, established processes, procedures, and parameters. and the president disregarded them. we protect the system, we uphold the standards; because these are what lend prestige to the award; these ensure that our money, our admiration, our approval for the use of the title 'national artist', go where they rightfully should.

flash creative non fiction

"conversations, no. 2"
(random studies, from ten years ago!)



It is 6:39 P.M. when we enter my dingy apartment. The darkness in the living room breaks our conversation, and, for a moment, silence hovers, until female snores swell from the floor. We quietly step over my roommates, wrapped like blankets to/around each other. It is too late for embarrassments. In the shadows, their totally shameless shapes and figures are unmistakable.

Slowly we make our way to a corner, where a wooden foldable table stands for the day’s crumbs and scraps, which still cling onto the tabletop, along with some plates left unwashed for the next day or the next meal, if there will be any. What kind of life is this that you lead, I can almost hear my mother’s voice even as I am straining to hear what he’s thinking.

We grope for the three-legged bar stools, we smile at each other in conspiracy, our teeth bared, candid, in the dark. One takes out a lighter, the other whips up a candle. Soon, a willowy smoke and a tiny wavering flame, sufficiently disturb the concentration of black in our little corner.

In the miniscule light, the clarity of his eyes is a shock. I stare at the two tiny dancing pyres, one in each bespectacled black ball. I am hypnotized by the spectacle.

Oh, you were saying, we were talking about my wanting to go away to this small city in the Visayas, to live alone, and write, my ultimate wish. And he is quieted by this. Have we never talked this out before? We never really talk anything out, between the two of us. Why we got to talking at all, we never talk about that, too. I am emboldened to ask, while there are glowing wicks in his eyes flickering and swaying, animating his eyes like mad.

And what about you? You're not sure? You still don't know what you can do, what you want to do? I press on: You must want something fiercely, passionately; to be out of the ordinary. You know, you should forget for a while --

He doesn’t take his eyes away from my face. I know only because I cannot stop staring at them. He answers by asking: Can you forget for a while that your father’s back is exposed to the sun all day? That your mother is in a makeshift kitchen, blowing air into a pipe to keep the firewood burning for food to cook in time, for supper suffered in silence?

Once he said: We have become too poor to even afford decent conversation.

How do I tell him that wishes are free, that, sure, we have not even gotten to the discussion of our college thesis, that we might not even graduate and become decent members of the workforce, be the society’s saviors, the way we have been trained for! All that will be taken care of later. If I were a man, it would have been so easy for me to leave all this -- I gesture with my arms, to the sheaf of papers, the clutter on the table, the books scattered around the two entwined bodies on the floor.

I am drawn to life on the road, for some reason. If I were good enough with the guitars I’d be like Joplin, play in the streets –

Over this, he shakes his head and break into a lazy, lopsided smile - that endearing imperfection — then he takes off his glasses and exhales heavily onto them, creating fogs on the lenses that he briskly wipes off with the edge of his frayed collar. I am, all of a sudden, gripped with a terrible certainty: Things will change, irrevocably. You will not remember this.

I try to stop him from getting up to switch the lights on, from waking the two brazen mummies on the floor, from revealing the rest of the apartment in its full shabby glory.

It is not even 8:00 P.M. when the little white candle melts, and the dancing optic flames altogether disappear.

harry potter or mano pater?

there's absolutely no comparison! mano pater is a living, breathing sorcerer. he types up my father's pleadings and memos on an old trusty olympia typewriter. he is very handy with ribbons and printwheels. he has all legal forms down pat. he doesn't need to consult any manual. he knows everyone who matters in the bulwagan ng katarungan. he has my father's back all the time. my dad is a 77 year-old provincial, pro-bono abogado. mano pater, who is probably older than my father, is his super senior-citizen secretario. (mp gets a kick out of being called that.) my dad's not doing too bad himself.

this is a very random post. i just wanted to weigh in on the whole harry potter buzz. may anyone who googles harry potter be misdirected to my post about mano pater.

MY SINCEREST SORRY

for flooding your inboxes. i was merely trying to cross-post one item from my blogspot, the next thing i know, all 3 years' worth of posts are transferred to my multiply account. sorry, sorry, sorry.

daryll�

summer with scouts, pirates, and pregnant rats

(an excerpt. story came out in FP's may 23 issue)



There would be this glint, this tiny wavering light, in Don’s eyes every time he talked about computers. It was a bizarre and unforgettable kind of glimmer, one that made me uncomfortable, and that made him look vulnerable, and then also uncomfortable.

Don was very tall, and this was another thing that he was clearly uncomfortable with. He stood at about 6 feet in height, but he was all flab. He did not look the least bit athletic. He really did look like the proverbial geek with sallow skin, in need of some fresh air and real sunlight. His front teeth were small and sort of pointy, which sometimes made him look malicious. But he wasn’t at all malicious. He loved Coldplay, was always borrowing my CDs, and he knew, with a fragile and desperate certainty, that he was destined for greater things than monitoring machines and pleasing foreigner bosses who couldn’t speak English, violated labor standards, and knew twit about computers.

Sometimes the glimmer in Don’s eyes wavered with sadness, sometimes with great hope, especially when he talked about finally taking that special two-level licensure exam online, or about presenting his new inventions and software to Steve Jobs at the Apple Convention, some day, some day very, very soon. All of these things he was saving his money and himself up for.

Like a pregnant rat, Gerry would say, a pregnant rat scrounging for bits and pieces of food and warm fabric for her lair. Gerry liked to kid Don about his miserly ways. I never got the pregnant rat parallel, until I almost saw one, that summer. They said that a rat had bore a hole into one of the corner posts of our old apartment. The boys had found the hole without the rat in it. Gerry and my brother proceeded to break up the burrow, fishing out all sorts of unrecognizable graffiti-like bits and pieces of once-whole things. With sticks and rods, they scratched and scraped the walls of the rat hole. And then, for good measure, my brother, with a strange mix of anger and playfulness in his actions, poured muriatic acid into it. Don and I had looked on, cringing at the thought of the rat, bloated with a litter of little black fetuses, smoked up in acid.

I never really saw the rat. But that did not stop me from dreaming of it for nights on end. I knew my boyfriend was getting exasperated with me stopping all of a sudden, in the middle of sex, because I was convinced that I saw the pregnant rat as big as a cat with a tail as thick as the body of a snake, darting from one corner of our room to another, or scampering under our bed.

One day, he just left – the rat, my boyfriend. He did not return for a week. I dreamt less of the rat, I noticed. When he came back, he had a stuffed toy mouse with him, a gift and a remedy, to satisfy my fascination and to stymie my fear. Ayan, para matigil ka na, he said. It drew a lot of laughter but was no good for much else. I was still bothered by the pressure our lovemaking was creating on the spring bed. I resumed dreaming of the rat trapped under the bed, stuck in the bed frame, its bloated stomach bursting, its head flattened, its thick wet tail flapping heavily, pounding the wooden floor.

I slowly learned to participate more actively in the sex, despite the nightmares, only because I had missed my boyfriend, and he was, well, very vigorous in his attempts and thrusts to make me not think of the rat. He became more and more creative in his ways to accommodate my irrational rodent fears and fascinations. I think it was during that summer when I started to truly love him.

***

The apartment was located in the not-so-glamorous part of the Scout Area. Sometimes, there was no water in the taps. Sometimes, there was flood in the bathroom floor. But it had three big bedrooms with huge wood-framed windows, a two-car garage with not a single car, lots of stray cats, no rats – none in sight anyway – and, in front of the apartment stood an old branchy tree that bore no fruits and hardly had any leaves.

That summer, when we moved into the apartment, was one of the country’s hottest. In the countryside, the fields had cracked open, waiting for a single rainwater to drop; the unnourished crops had shriveled up in desperation; animals dropped dead or wandered like ghosts in abandoned towns. All of these according to the papers, as sensationalized and dramatized to me by my silly boyfriend.

In an old apartment in Scout Tobias, corner Scout Santiago, he continued in his reportorial voice, people have shed off all manners of clothing, have been drained of all strength by the heat, and have barely enough energy left to… procreate. This is the beginning of the end, he said. We were in our room. The curtains were drawn. We could see the gnarly branches of the old tree outside. Everything was still. There was absolutely no breeze. But our bodies were entwined, sweating profusely, very much alive in the oppressive heat.

One payday, as my brother promised, he blew all his salary on a rather big air-conditioning unit, and had the thing installed in the living room, of all places. Before that, I had just bought a small television set with my scholarship allowance, and from then on that room was where we ended up congregating, after a long day’s work. I started broaching the idea of having cables installed, the very possibility of which excited us all. We would linger in the living room talking about what shows we would watch if we had cable TV, and what shows we used to watch all the time at home where we did have cable TV.

Although the summer ended with no cables being installed, with that same TV set literally exploding into pieces, the living room became the cooling and the coolest center of sorts in that scorching hot, old apartment. Eventually, it became a communal bedroom, dining room, and study room, too.

But we would only drink out in the garage, where we could freely smoke. This was the only house rule we created and actually followed. Besides, those summer nights were quite beautiful, even if humid. The skies were always clear, the stars vivid. Don liked to come out of his room at night. He liked the night stars, but not the sun. He liked to sit out and talk to us, but he hardly drank.

Gerry was the hard drinker and liked to play the guitar, sing Dylan, Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Freddie Aguilar, and then some Nirvana, too, for some strange reason. His thick muscled neck would turn red, the veins almost popping out, when he sang, always in earnest, but sometimes out of tune.

Gerry also liked to roll a joint every now and then, even at his age. Gerry was old. The oldest jologs in the world, we called him. He was old enough to be a grandfather, which he was; a fact that he was in denial of.

Gerry turned fifty that summer. I only remember this because that was the only Saturday he did not drink with us. We never really knew where he went that night, dressed in a white button-down shirt, black slacks, and shiny patent leather shoes. But he came back the next day, sober, dry-eyed. Strange. My boyfriend said that Gerry probably went to church, went to confession and did his penance; that was his secret life. My boyfriend was convinced that Gerry was just pretending to be astig, to be tough, when he was actually a saint with tattoos. Or, a secret agent of the intelligence bureau.

Once, I caught a glimpse of a photo of a young man and two boys in Gerry’s wallet. The young man in the picture looked exactly like Gerry, and that was how I knew that Gerry was certainly not, as my brother suspected, a pedophile, that those kids were not his preys. They were his son and grandsons. Well, you never really know these days, do you, my brother would often say. You could be standing right next to one in the toilet, in the bar counter, in the train, or you could be sharing a room with them, isn’t that right, Gerry? My brother joked. Don just raised his eyebrows and exaggerated a yawn. Haay, here we go again.

But it was Gerry who made the nastiest gay jokes. That’s why I first thought that Gerry might just be overcompensating, that he might be, in addition to being a saint and a secret agent, also gay. He never brought a girl home, nor went out with one; and he did share a room with Don. Gerry was also especially mean about Don’s rather soft ways, always making insinuations about Don’s being gay, which Don might have been, if he weren’t too preoccupied with his software dreams. He could have easily taken advantage of the rooming situation with Gerry.

Gerry did have a rather remarkable twenty-year old laborer’s body, I told my boyfriend once. And my boyfriend said I was the one who was being mean, this time. But it was true. Gerry had the unhealthiest habits, had no notion of exercise or diet, but had the hardest abs, the firmest forearms, and the tightest buns. I swear to God. I never really bothered to find out where he came from and all. But his body, usually clad in ridiculously tight and short denim cut-offs, spelled it out for me. This was a man who had labored long and hard, not in the gym, but in cargo ships, maybe, or in factories.

Gerry looked freakish, actually. His face was as old as a World War II veteran’s, bearing all the coarse lines and deep marks of battle. But his body seemed ageless, perfected by the forces of nature. And of poverty, my boyfriend always added.

***

Don surprised us with a visit one night, just last year. Yes, exactly a year ago this month. My boyfriend and I were already living in the subdivision close to the campus, so far away it seemed, in atmosphere though not in distance, from the Scout Area. Our little house was carefully furnished – everything in it was relatively new and bespoke our current states. We had stripped it off of any trace of its previous occupants. Each of the original concrete tiles had been plucked out and replaced with wooden floorboards. The off-white walls were repainted in ochre and tan. A floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookshelf was installed in the area where a television set obviously used to stand.

It was a Friday night, I remember. We were entertaining guests, colleagues from the University. It was a particularly cool and windy summer night. The doorbell had rung, just once, and I ran to get it, thinking it was the pizza delivery.

From the doorframe I saw only the silhouette of a tall, fat man, standing awkwardly by the gate, shifting his heavy weight from one foot to the other. Pizza Hut? I called out. It’s Don, he replied, in a level tone, devoid of all inflection and emotion, that I almost missed it. What? Who? It’s Don, he said in an even lower voice. Oh my god. I ran to the gate to open it, to let him in. Come in, come in, Don! He didn’t want to come in. We had guests, he noted. And he couldn’t stay long anyway.

We sat out in the veranda, looking at what few stars we could see instead. He had just come straight from the airport. He was going to be in Manila for only two days and then he was flying to Taiwan.

Taiwan?! Wow. Are you going to study there? Did you get a scholarship? I asked him. Why Taiwan?

To work, not to study. In an electronics factory. Production line. The factory supplies hardware. Minor parts. To Apple Computers. He said, reciting the information in a robotic litany.

That’s good, that’s good, I said. After that you can take that exam you’ve always wanted to take.

It’s been so long, Don, what else have you been up to? I asked, attempting to break the silence.

Tried to… hang myself. In my mother’s old house. He said, looking down at his hands, resting on his lap.

What? Don! Why?

Brought the entire ceiling. Down. With me. Too heavy. Mother was so mad. He said, smiling briefly, looking away.

What? Oh, Don. I clutched at his hand. But he pulled it away, and stood up to go.

When he bent down to kiss my cheek, I caught his eyes. They were clear, and dry, and kind of dead.

Take care, Don, I somehow managed.



In bed with my boyfriend, I sometimes think of Don’s lifeless eyes, of Gerry’s dead body, my brother’s inert anger at himself, and the crazy pregnant rat that had remained a phantom that whole summer of 2002. The summer of our discontent, as my boyfriend now jokingly refers to it.

I do not know what to make of it. I was certainly happy before and during certain parts of that summer. But, what happened since? How did it end so tragically? How did it all go wrong like that? Why did we survive and they didn’t? I ask my boyfriend these, every now and then.

What the hell was I thinking? Why did I leave home, nga ba? I had become a liar. I had either become too happy or too bored. I had either been in denial or had become a prophet. I clearly knew, but pretended not to see, what was before me.

I stop again in the middle of sex. I jump from bed, catching my boyfriend by surprise. Oh fuck, oh man, he says.

I pace from one corner of the room to another, naked, while he lies there in his discomfort, in his discontent, watching me.

It was true happiness! That was what it was! We had family then, and dogs, a car, a real home, with real rats! We had mountains and fields for a bedroom view, three minutes to the beach, small coffee shops, real conversations, with real friends, drinking at night along Magsaysay, passing out in the amphitheater, diving naked into the sea! All those out of town trips, the endless laughter, the guitar music, the loud singing! And I said no to all of it?! What the hell was I thinking?!

I realize that I am shouting like a crazy woman, so I lower my voice.

Why did we leave? Why did we come back here?

He does not answer.

I stop pacing. I stand by the window. There is a rare summer breeze. It blows the curtains to one side, but from our window there is not enough view of the night sky. I see billboards instead, the pale light of a street lamp casting strange shapeless shadows on the wall.

We were not ready for paradise just yet? He offers.

And they were ready but did not deserve it? Is that what you mean?! Fuck you! And, and how could you have witnessed it all and remain like that?

Like what, love?

Like that! Whole!

He shakes his head. I know he is trying to understand, but he doesn’t. Maybe I don’t, either.

He gets up from bed. Let’s go home, let’s get married, he says.

He stands behind me, pulls me softly into the hollow of his chest. And then does his earnest to make me forget. But I know that the pregnant rat is still there, trapped under our bed.

random studies: singapore (2)

while waiting for a cab, i saw two young, attractive men in office suits, taking off their footwear before entering the gates of the temple. in a few minutes, they exited through the right wing of the main structure, looking so grave, i almost didn't recognize them. i saw them approaching what to me looked like a trash bin. but then they started addressing the thing, furiously spitting out what seemed to me to be really vicious curses, while they violently cast stones, or something hard and unwieldy, against the sides of the tin drum. after a few minutes, they calmed down, wiped off the sweat covering their faces, and went back into the temple perhaps to say a few more prayers. then, they emerged from the gates, stepped into their shoes, and merged with the crowd.

random studies: singapore

(just for the sake of having something to blog about)


there is a beautiful hindu temple right next to the hotel, just before you reach the park and the bus stop on pearl hill. when i arrived, last sunday, there were so many birds, many, many birds, black ones with yellow beaks, flying around the spires, and crapping at the beautiful gods and goddesses!

***
the jealousy of the older,although also extremely striking, chinese woman was so apparent when she was faced with a much younger version of herself, whose world still looms large and unexplored in front of her. it was a rather disturbing sensation, seeing how the emotion was so plain and open, and almost raw, across the older chinese woman's face. all of a sudden, the lines around her eyes became visible, her deep brown irises dulled. almost from out of nowhere, and rather comically, an awkward bony hand went up to her hair to fluff it out and and pat it into place, fluff it out and then pat it into place again, and again.

***
oh, but the change in light and atmosphere here is so subtle as to be dramatic: within the hour a cool breeze starts to blow from the south; the light softens and spreads out evenly, casting a sheer cream-colored veil of incandescence over people's faces.

Home is so sad...

HOME IS SO SAD

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

(Philip Larkin in The New York Review of Books, Volume 2, Number 9 )

My Easter offering

The boat from Sabah


Exactly three in the afternoon, the hour of great mercy, someone announced wryly, when I asked for the time. We arrived at the Zamboanga City port area in a gleaming, cream-colored, Toyota Altis, looking ridiculously conspicuous and unsure of ourselves. We told the driver to take shade, hide a little. He parked the car closest to the wall, but within full view of the area of water where the boat was supposed to dock. To our left, we could see the façade of the gothic Bureau of Customs and Immigrations building – its grand pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, large windows and elaborate tracery providing a stark contrast to the tableau of poverty in front of it. We stayed in the car, hesitant to go out into the scorching hot afternoon, hesitant to confront what we had come all the way to this dramatically stunning but perpetually troubled region for.

The boat from Sabah had not yet arrived, we were told. An opening, however, had already been cleared between a passenger vessel and a domestic cargo ship. Military jeeps, police mobiles, two ambulance units, and an International Committee of the Red Cross wagon were also already in front of the docks. Immigration police in their green fatigues, and Red Cross volunteers in bright red shirts, took advantage of the shade offered by the swaying shadow of the big Basilan-bound passenger boat that was rocking softly in the waters, loading its passengers: women with their children bound to the sides of their waists, and men carrying on their shoulders colorful plastic bags fashioned into shapes of suitcases.

There was a palpable buzz. The atmosphere at the pier was almost festive. Comfortable, at the very least. There was a relaxed camaraderie and unspoken accord among the people waiting: government workers, local and international volunteers, advocacy groups, the police, the curious, and the cargadores.

Meanwhile, our guide, a young, vivacious nurse working with the Department of Health and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, gave us instructions. We were to follow her and say “From the DOH”. That was all. Nothing more.

But we had many other questions: about the boat carrying the undocumented Filipinos who had been expelled from Sabah, about that place which doesn’t want them but which most of these people consider as home, about these people whose notion of country and nation are unlike our own, whose allegiances are created by wherever there is for them a family and a means to live.


The boat from Sabah, our guide said, is a big one with three main sections. It regularly plies the Sabah-Zamboanga route. It is not at all like a prison boat, she said. The first two levels are occupied by paying passengers. A metal latch-door separates them from the passengers of the boat’s topmost section. This section is reserved for the Halaw – the expelled, the rejected, the ones who have been discarded – as the deportees are referred to in the local Tausug language.

Our guide told us that the number of Halaw varies, depending on the Malaysian government’s schedule of deportation. There is what is called a massive deportation with hundreds to thousands of undocumented Filipinos shipped back to Zamboanga every week. On a regular basis, for the so-called regular deportation, the boat from Sabah comes twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the deportees number from fifty to two hundred per trip. The Malaysian government arranges and pays for the cost of deportation. She said that the people are probably given some food for the trip, too. But most of them have been in detention centers for months that apart from their travel documents, they do not have much else – not the money they worked for, or the families they live for – when they land in our shores. Some of them, because of prolonged detention, lose their minds, their memories, and their names as well. The most unfortunate ones lose their lives.

According to DSWD records, there has been a rising number of deaths from among the deportees. Infants almost always do not survive the trip. Even the adults, the very sick ones, the severely malnourished, also eventually succumb to death despite efforts to treat and rehabilitate them. Ironic, our guide said, that they should survive harsh conditions in detention, in sea transport, only to die when they are freed on land.


It had been almost half an hour already, and the afternoon was getting hotter, I started seeing mirages everywhere. The glare of the sun was so fierce that the skies, the sea, everything looked white. The blaze outshone the sparkling white sand of the islands in the horizon and we could only see a wide strip of wobbly, wavering, shimmering light from across the sea. The mountains and islands of Basilan had disappeared. No approaching boats could be seen.

In a few more minutes, though, about a dozen Badjao bancas started to float into our vision. Our guide told us that the Badjaos usually meet the big boats on their bancas, to beg for coins to be thrown into the water, to exhibit their magnificent diving skills to the spectator-passengers. The entourage of bancas was a sign that a big passenger boat was approaching. We then got off the car and told the driver to head back to the hotel and to wait for our call.

The heat rising from the ground and striking from above accosted us promptly. I swayed a little and had to take deep breaths to steady myself, before I could join my friend and our guide who had started to walk ahead of me toward the docks. As we were walking, the boat from Sabah came into view, spewing out two cones of thick black smoke into the air. The entourage of Badjao bancas u-turned in what looked like a choreographed move, and then they arranged themselves with a theatrical sense of blocking along the boat’s portside. The boat passengers packed themselves to this side of the boat, leaning against the rails, shouting, applauding, and waving at the kids on the bancas. A few coins glimmered momentarily as these were tossed up in the air and into the sea. The Badjao kids dove swiftly after the coins underwater.

The boat continued to move slowly toward the docks, heavily tilted to one side. I feared it would spill the people over to the water altogether. My heart palpitated in excitement, in anticipation, in anxiety, as the boat neared the pier and its anchor was thrown to the wharf.

At the wharf, the inter-agency team that had come to meet the deportees started to move as well. They pulled themselves from what were earlier relaxed, comfortable poses – leaning against cars, crouched under the shadows – and composed themselves into bodies poised for action. They accorded us with slight disinterest, polite disregard as they took their positions. “From the DOH”, we said, even when nobody bothered to ask.


The smell, the heat, the noise that met us as soon as we stepped into the cargo section of the boat were more than sufficient warning of what we were to witness.

Immigration officers filed past us, followed by the quarantine team, and the social welfare coordinator, who made their way to a room next to the captain’s cabin. All passengers had to pass and get their travel documents stamped in this room before they could be allowed to leave the boat.

I tried to catch up with everyone, slightly fearful of the estivadores who communicated mainly by shouting and routinely spewing colorful curses in Chavacano, as they unloaded cargo from the ship. I tried even harder not to stare up at the passengers of the topmost section and the panicked, anxious look in their eyes. Their cheeks were sunken, their jaws stood out, their skin had boils and spots. They leaned over the rails, peeked through the metal latch-door, and watched us, not making any move, not making any sound. The rubber soles of my shoes kept sticking to the greasy surface of the metal floor and made embarrassing sucking noises the faster I walked.

In the holding room, a young female nurse who had escorted the deportees was already briefing the team. There were 261 deportees in all. At least eight of them were in emergency medical conditions, and should be rushed to the hospital as soon as possible. But there were also some newborns, infants, and a couple of other children who had to be loaded off the boat first. There was an outbreak of some kind of pox, too. Most of the passengers had already caught it.

After the briefing, we made our way to the topmost section of the boat. The latch-door was pulled and we climbed briskly up the metal stairs. When we were safely inside, the door was closed again behind us with a loud clang that reverberated throughout the floor of the Halaw section.

There were too many bunk beds, there was hardly any space to navigate between them. The light was blocked, the air was stale, and then some of the deportees started to smoke. The smell of tobacco blended with that of unwashed bodies, grease on the steel bed frames, leftover food in the bins, and sweat on the blankets.

There was a slight confusion before we were able to locate the deportees in need of emergency medical assistance. Everybody had the same exhausted, but anxious look about them. Everybody looked in need of medical attention. And then we spotted them, the patients. Their limbs had shrunk, but their heels and feet had swollen to unimaginable shapes. This was the main, the most common complaint. They couldn’t move their legs. They couldn’t feel anything anymore. They had been sitting for too long – three, five, six months long. They were very rarely allowed to stand or to walk. They could only sit on their heels or lie on their backs. Two of them had tried to stand, they both got struck by a cane behind the knee and were forced to sit. So they did. They sat. They sat for too long.

Disuse atrophy of the most severe type, the nurses said. This occurs when there is an injury to, or disease of a nerve, or even from total lack of physical exercise, from not using the muscles enough. Considering that these people were manual laborers, the injury and utter lack of mobility they had been subjected to must have been pretty harsh, our guide said. She wasn’t sure if this would be reversed with vigorous exercise or better nutrition. She wasn’t even sure if it was just muscle atrophy that was the problem. She also suspected kidney failure, due to dehydration and a variety of insults to the body. This, she said, is fast becoming a common cause of mortality among deportees.

Six women went mad all at the same time in one cell, a young male deportee narrated. No, they didn’t go mad, their bodies were inhabited by demon spirits, sinaniban, explained another, a much older Muslim man. These women had grown so thin, had wild looks in their eyes. They howled, tore off their clothes, tried to attack the other women in the cell, they said. Good thing an Imam was around. He exorcised the demon spirits from the women’s bodies and insisted that the women be transferred to another room. The women’s chamber was a pretty bad section of the detention center, they all agreed. It was only when the women were transferred to another cell that they went back to their normal selves, that they recovered their human bodies, the men said. They shook their heads of the memory, of the sight of those women. Pinaka-kawawa talaga yung mga babae. The women really have it worst, said these male Muslim deportees, with such sadness, such anger, such sympathy. It was difficult to conceive of them as terrorists, insurgents, criminals, as they have often been referred to in the newspapers here and in Sabah.


There weren’t enough stretchers, it turned out. One of the patients had to be carried on the back of his brother who was only just strong enough to lift the patient, off the bunk and on to his back. The patient was too tall, his limbs fell limply along the sides of his brother’s body; his bare, swollen, heavy feet scraped the metal floor as his brother crouched low and lugged the patient’s body heavily along.

Then the boat started to move, the men panicked. Where are we being taken? What’s going to happen to us? My heart leaped, too. I tried not to panic. Probably just positioning the boat more closely to where the ambulances are, I said. But, why is the boat moving away from the pier? Why is it leaving the dock?! Was there something wrong with our papers? And, then, finally, the question was asked with much fear and trepidation: Are we being taken back to Sabah?

When the boat stopped, the deportees started moving frantically toward the door, eager to leave this section, eager to get off the boat. This created a commotion that proved difficult to control. Some of the patients had to be settled back on the bunk beds, to let the other passengers out first. Two men had decided to wait it out calmly and proceeded to light cigarettes instead. They had been through this before, they said. One of them had been deported thrice already, the other twice. They exit through Taw-tawi, they said. No sweat. It is very easy. In Sabah, they know someone who can produce fake IDs. You want one? They offered. No sweat, mam. It really is very easy. They insisted.

I decided to sit with one of the patients who had been asked to stay behind. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly alarming about his condition, although there was a gangrenous wound on his elbow. A red band was tied tightly right above it. What caught attention was that he spoke English, and only English. His eyes darted from one corner of the boat to another. He couldn’t look straight at any one point longer than a few seconds. When his eyes rested on me, piercingly, although for only a very brief moment, my heart tightened instantly with fear. I hated myself for it. Then he looked away and offered his right hand for a shake. It took me a while to realize that he had introduced himself. His hand was furrowed, bony, dark, and small. The back of his palm was also spotted with what looked like boils. I took his hand and shook it very lightly in mine.


I only realized that I had been holding my hand out, very awkwardly, in the air, like I was trying to dry it, when someone asked me if there was something wrong with it. I shook my head furiously, mumbled something indistinct, and hid my hand behind my back.

It had been almost four hours since the boat from Sabah had docked. We had already arrived at the Center for Displaced Persons. The deportees had been loaded off the fleet of six-wheeler trucks that had brought them to their temporary home in Zamboanga, from the pier. They had also already been oriented of their new status and situation, and had been formally welcomed to the Philippines. They were now lining up in front of a makeshift eating area for their first hot meal, since they left Sabah. All around them, the neighborhood kids were clapping their hands, welcoming them, and cheering: Halaw! Halaw! Halaw! Shouting out that derogatory term, which everyone seemed to have embraced and turned into something endearing instead.

You are now in the Philippines, you are now free, the Center Head had told them. When it was translated to Bahasa Malay, some shed tears involuntarily, but very, very quietly. When they were told that they may now stand and start making their way out of the hall and into the eating area, the silence was broken by the sighs of relief, and the shuffle of feet, of some two hundred fifty three hungry people, who had sat for far too long in a place they used to call home.


We didn’t speak to each other, my friend and I, while we were in the car, on our way back to the hotel. Zamboanga looked even more intriguing in the deep blue of a March summer evening. All around us, the city had turned on its lights, the streets were filled with cars. Elsewhere, parking lots were full, side streets were blocked. It was a Saturday night, after all. And the place is known for some real good nightlife. The visiting American forces sometimes leave their camps and risk their safety for this nightlife.

We turned all our attention to the driver, as we crawled down Zamboanga’s city streets, in search of some mangosteen and other fruits in season, to bring back to Manila the next day. We asked about his family, we joked with him, we made him laugh, and we laughed much too loudly for his comfort. But, my friend and I, we were comfortable only in this kind of gaiety, so we kept at it.

Then we passed the boulevard, which was lined with lovers and groups of friends out for some simple, inexpensive fun. From the boulevard, we could almost see the boat decked in lights, lolling softly in the water, waiting for passengers for the return trip to Sabah. We fell silent all the way back to the hotel.

At the hotel, we let each other take as much time as we felt we needed in the shower. When it was my turn, I turned the shower knob to full heat, and let the hot water scald my skin. I opened my palms, scrubbed soap several times on them, and held them up, to cup as much hot water as they could take until they hurt, until they seriously started to hurt.

Out in the hotel balcony, while we smoked, we could almost hear the boat’s droning call, the single continuous note, vibrating through the air. We listened in silence, both of us perhaps wondering, how many of those passengers bound for Sabah would be expelled right back to this very same place with their dreams, their spirits, and their limbs broken. (revised, april 2009)

a generation continues to pass

an uncle died singing. he had sung a total of three songs before he heaved his last breath and collapsed on a chair. the time was one-thirty in the afternoon. the sun was high. the heat seeped into people’s bones. tuba warmed their blood even more. a man’s ninth death anniversary was being celebrated. another man’s life in that party ended. it ended on a high note.

a most intent spectator

is what i've been these last few weeks. it is like living in high drama. it has its lows. the little crashes after the peak are unbearable,too. as R___ says, what to do, what to do with all these feelings? so many things. puede rin nothing.

so many ways of responding. you want to remember everything as they were. you want to remember you as you were. how? how to do it?

these are what i plan/want to do:

1. stalk the Ballet Philippines' resident choreographer, Alden Lugnasin (who i've talked to before and did an article on a long time ago). understand what it really takes for him to create a piece. what each movement means. what the dance does to him. how he lives his life and how it is expanded by dance. i dream of a documentary as a final output. i imagine a really intense conversation. hay.

2. do a critique of the costume design and makeup in Max Luna III's "KatiTaog" -- a rumination on the properties of water -- and arrive at an understanding of why the women had to have an aztec look about them, even if the piece is heavily based on "Pangalay".

3. do a study of the woman as subject, or subject as woman, in Alce Reyes's "Amada".

4. write about the ideology of melancholia and the forces of production in relation to the eheads concert.

5. do nothing. move on t the next spectacle. really.

what i want to do

when i grow up:

The Mechanics of Loss

Sometimes it will feel as though you are on television. What with the candlelights, the house filled with flowers, and velvet curtains in the backdrop. You will glow. You will be radiant. You will look absolutely tragic, delicate, and beautiful. Everyone will feel sorry for you. Everyone will want to be you. Even you will want to be you. The weight loss will be amazing: sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, thin limbs. The effort at cheerfulness, the ironic retorts, the entertaining anecdotes will naturally be underlined with sadness, which you will try to hide, of course, but which they will see anyway. The sight of you will soften the hardest of hearts, will move even your enemies to tears.

At some point, however, you will start to want to feel some real pain. And it will come when there is no one to see it. Then you will be truly helpless and vulnerable. Be careful: there is much too many negative lay literature on dealing with loss out there. You will want to read them all, because you will understand and believe them all. Know what to ignore. Know what’s useful. It mostly has to do with culture, you know. Various cultures deal with it in varying ways. All of which will be wrong. All of which will be worth trying. The absence is permanent, after all. You have all the time in the world.

The truth is that it takes a while. It happens while you are walking back to your apartment, one windy January afternoon, when the sunlight is so soft, it falls in various colors and in many wonderful ways, on pavements, on footbridges, on roofs of cars. The fall and spread of light is almost like a choreographed Christmas dance, or like music made visual, making the city streets kinder, the buildings and people’s houses friendlier, the strangers’ faces not so strange at all. But you know that none of this is real anyway, so you walk on. It can happen when you arrive in your empty, quiet, clean apartment, and you open the glass door that leads to a sparse garden outside, to let last night’s smell of cigarette smoke out, but the sound of a choir of birds will so surprise you, and make you forget you are in the middle of a dense, dirty city, so far from home and everyone you love. You will forget that it is only three in the afternoon, the middle of workweek; all of this will make you want to fix yourself up a tall glass of rum and soda, play some old Sunday music. You know there is something artificial about all of this natural light, this natural beauty, and then that’s when it’s going to start, but you will heave it off very deeply, and insist on putting your feet up and staring lovingly at the trees anyway. It also happens while you are having breakfast with your favorite cousin and you are laughing over old family jokes, and there is a very brief pause, the sound of your forks lightly scratching the plates will be so magnified, drinking up the glass of water will only choke you, dear. It is very possible that even while you’re in a strange country, pondering foreign faces, none of which possesses a single familiar trait, a smile, a sigh, a flip of the hair by the well-dressed, middle-aged woman across from you on the train will do it. While in a conference, the smell of the artificially cooled air will be so familiar, harmless, impersonal, but also very distinct it will finally bring tears to your eyes.

Of course, it will often be shameful, because random. Then you will know that this is what it truly means. It really is just control that you lose. Your memory is on the loose, your body is not yours, your mind has splintered into so many sectors, a different voice has taken up residence in each. This is when you sometimes really lose it. And this is also when, sometimes, you will be grateful for losing it, because it will be easier. You understand now how some people cannot go back to how they were. And, perhaps, this is the real loss: no longer having that right, that capacity, or that grace to go back. And forth. Being denied that instinctive mental movement which we used to take for granted.

Understand that this is the mechanics of loss, and it also explains in part the mechanics that bind: children to their parents, and parents to their children, in this enormous circle of pain that underlines love and life, and giving, and taking; of birth, and death, and growing, and necessarily feeling.

There’s nothing else to do but stand and excuse yourself. Personal necessity, you can always say. Walk straight to the washroom then, and do it. Do it wholeheartedly, do it soundlessly. In the stark, cold, windowless space of this white, tiled room, in the middle of nowhere.

There will be many, many more such rooms. And, the truth is, it will take a while to understand it, to lose it, to live with it.

fellows, panelists

Link

Fiction as allegiance.

And an allegation.
(paper presented at the UP centennial writers' conference/workshop
at UP Visayas-Tacloban College, Dec. 1-6, 2008)

The burden of representation
As an avid reader and an amateur critic of fiction, I have found that, inevitably, dealing with fiction entails getting to a certain level of inquiry that also, inevitably, leads to one of only two results. One is what Pierre Macherey has termed as the breaking down of the story before questions it is incapable of answering, the other is my breaking down as a reader before a story I am incapable of questioning.

This is hardly unusual. I know that I am not alone in this reading practice or experience. Instead of just asking who the characters are in a story, we ask, for instance: Whose story is this, really? Is it a good/fair/innovative way of rendering these people’s lives? Is this a sound depiction of the subject him/herself? Instead of asking what the story is all about, we ask: What, ultimately, is the story saying about stories, about history, about time? Is this a sensitive rendering of a society, a culture, a social relationship, an event, a phenomenon? Instead of merely asking what the writer wants to say, we ask: What does this say about the writer? Whose interests does the writer serve? Or, even, what does this story want from me as a reader?

These questions, of course, point to concerns that are usually considered as being well beyond the pale of craft, way outside the parameters of form. I cannot disagree more. For sure, these are questions that delve into issues of ideology, representation, language and subjectivity, questions that the creative writer, as it is stressed in workshops time and time again, need not burden herself with. But these are concerns I burden myself with only because I have found that they cannot be disassociated with issues of form. No less than an appreciation of all these other aspects is demanded by fiction itself; and by narratives, in general, primarily because of its very nature, its very form.

My preferred definition of fiction is that which takes into consideration its form and the conditions that give rise to, sustain, or break, the form. Variations of this definition appear in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Macherey, even Haydn White. Resil Mojares’s work in The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel also comes to mind. So do the women’s stories in the anthology Fern Garden, edited by Merlie Alunan. Moreover, the stories of Eric Gamalinda, Erwin Castillo, Nick Joaquin, Chari Lucero, Gina Apostol, among others, illustrate the definition further. Their stories celebrate the form, question the boundaries between the mimetic and the marvelous and, in the process, engage quite intensely with the stories’ material and historical conditions. I pay much attention to these aspects because what, as a reader, I demand from (and enjoy about) fiction, are no different from what I, as a writer of it, aspire for. Similarly, the things I am dissatisfied with in some works of fiction are the very same things I want to avoid in my own writing -- monologism, univocalism, and objectivism. Kind of like the traits of this government which I also cannot stand.

I do tend to agree with the idea that fiction is necessarily burdened with issues of representation – not only in the sense of Greek Classical representation as the reproduction of something, or the elaboration of a concept corresponding to a thing perceived; but also in the sense of political, everyday representation as in formal statements made to a higher authority. Representation as the communication of an opinion, or the registration of a protest! More and more, I am seduced by the idea of fiction as a claim, a contention and, sometimes, an allegation.

(I must say that I love the word allegation. Used appropriately, it can be an effective way of stating one’s belief by merely citing the plausible opposite. The exercise of alleging can be an immensely successful way of rendering the tyranny of truth as irrelevant or, at least, relative, conditional. Allegation is a very powerful legal fiction, so to speak.)

I remember a critic from New Zealand, enthusiastically presenting a paper on one of Jessica Hagedorn’s novels, in a literary conference in UP. The critic went on to praise the novel’s style and evocative language, only to be severely critiqued right after. The poor guy did not know what hit him. What more do you want, I’m sure he wanted to ask. Here I am, telling you that I love this novel, by a Filipino writer, about the Philippines, and you complain! What the critic did not anticipate was the ultra sensitivity of the audience – literature teachers, writers, and critics all – to issues of representation. The guy was severely berated for not having recognized that the reading he just offered had long been rendered inoperable, narrow-minded, and generally unsound. His only fault: to praise the book for the wrong claims; and to claim an understanding of the state of the nation, merely through the book. What really struck the audience’s nerve was that this one particular novel by a Fil-am writer was being read by a foreigner as a representation of the entire Philippines. On the contrary, readings of it in Comparative Literature classrooms have tended to treat the novel as being quite unabashedly intended for a foreign audience, and its postmodernist tendencies merely serve to mask the novel’s ideology. At some point, I remember thinking: Well, why the hell not? Why can’t one write for the audience one wants? Would it have made a difference if the author were not a Fil-American, if she were just a Filipino? Would it have made a difference if she wrote about America, instead of the Philippines, and applied the same techniques and strategies?

Apparently, yes, one can and does write for one’s ideal reader. However, one has to always account for one’s subject position, which is revealed by the mere choice of readership. And, nowadays, yes, it does make a difference who you’re writing as, what you’re writing about, and where you’re writing from.

I have my own reading of the novel, and I do tend to go with the postcolonial critique of ideology approach. I submit though that, to a certain extent, the engagement with critical theory – particularly of these kinds – can get out of hand, get in the way of pure reading pleasure. Not to mention how it can get in the way of pure fiction-writing pleasure.

Theory indeed gets in the way. But, isn’t it only right that it should? The complexity of the world we write of and the world we write in demands that it be rendered sensitively and, well, honestly. Whether one writes of a world of simple peasants in the distant Philippine past, or the underground world of punk-gothic individuals in dizzyingly fast-paced urban New Manila, one is still writing of the here and now. One has to, in a sense, theorize the world one writes in, through the fictionalized world one writes of.

All I mean is, there is no turning back, no reclaiming lost innocence, no feigning indifference. One can no longer unread what one has read. There are pressures and demands on the writing and reading of Philippine fiction, in English, at least, that cannot, and should not, be ignored.


Home as a syndrome
As a writer from the Visayas, who is based in Manila, for instance, I cannot help but react, sometimes violently, to pressures for a particular kind of representation in my fiction. I’m sure this is a familiar experience to many. For instance, in national writers workshops, it is almost always expected of us to turn out a story with a strong, local flavor, but rendered from an ironic perspective. I mean, if you merely translate into English a perfectly sensible and successful oral narrative in Waray, for instance, it would surely be considered too simplistic, unimaginative, a failure. But, really, what does local color mean? Does this mean including snippets of conversation, expletives and curses, in the local language for emotional color? Does it involve using Waray terms, written in italics, even for phrases that have an idiomatic equivalent in English? Does this mean writing about rural folks, in idyllic seaside settings, engaging in so-called native – therefore humorous, strange, or fantastic – practices? Because I am very much guilty of all that, of submitting to such pressures and demands. What’s even more unfortunate is that these are pressures I myself exert on my own writing, almost as a matter of course.

The truth is, it is only on occasions like this that I am forced to confront questions that sometimes do spoil the pleasure of writing fiction. Most of the time, I just write what I can, whenever I can. I still believe that a writer’s role is to write. I cannot use the excuse of engaging with theory as a reason for not being able to produce fiction. Neither do I see theory as an impetus to write fiction. I do not write fiction in order to illustrate a theory. I do not write fiction in order to save the country, to improve people’s lives, or to empower the marginalized. There are other activities, other kinds of writing, that I do that, to my mind, would more closely approach those objectives. As a fictionist, my first allegiance is to the story, to memory, to play. My fiction, moreover, aims to play with the concept of fiction itself, with the concept of allegiance even, as well as of memory and remembrance.

My stories have invariably been about home – home as a syndrome, a physiological disorder: a disruption of normal physical or mental functions; a disease or an abnormal condition. The body is in one place, but the heart is someplace else. The language that is used for speech is not the language of one’s secrets. This is the main affliction, an affliction whose symptoms are not always manifest, rather latent. In my stories, the characters are always engaged with and yet distanced from home; but they never really leave it, they bring it with them wherever they go. The struggle is to accept that home is a concept, and a floating, unstable one, too. The struggle is to broaden the concept in order to encompass one’s changing conditions, one’s mobile location, one’s shifting position. The struggle is to not make everyone notice that the character is not always there; that she is, in truth, some place else; that she has actually disappeared, has established her home in the deepest recesses of her mind, a place beyond anyone’s reach.

I remember how, as a child growing up always amidst some twenty other cousins, in a small family compound here in Tacloban, or in Barugo, or Matalom, or Cebu, during the summer, I was always trying to disappear, and it was quite easy to disappear. I did it several times. I simply slipped out of the group of cousins playing out in the yard, to go back up to the house, hide in the room, go through my mother’s bags, rifle through my father’s documents, open cabinets and drawers, climb atop kitchen counters, mix up and blend condiments, write and draw figures on walls, dress and make up the saints, all the while unnoticed and unmissed. This went on for quite some time until one afternoon, when I decided to hide behind the backdoor of my grandparents’ house in Tacloban, to blend with the brooms and mops and cobwebs and dust, for about twelve hours, they say. I stood there without making any movement or sound, watching the maids, some aunts and cousins, go in and out of the house. I remember how I maintained my position even when my cousins and, eventually, the adults started looking for me. I could clearly hear and see people combing the entire house, the entire compound, looking everywhere but behind the backdoor. I stood there even when I could see my mother starting to panic and to blame hapless househelps for my disappearance. I do not, however, for the life of me, remember why I did what I did, or what was going through my mind while I stood there, very, very, very still. Neither do I know what made me step out of the dark, privileged, corner behind the door, in order to blend, inevitably, with the rest of them.

Since then, I don’t think I have been able to hide and disappear without anyone noticing. I did not mind becoming more visible only because I eventually realized that that was actually the best way to obscurity; an obscurity which served my need to observe, to create worlds within a world, story after story.

My head was always filled with stories – real and fabricated, my own and others’, for good and for bad. I think it was my father who first had the inkling that I would one day venture into writing stories, if not jokes. I think the very first time I understood what it took to make people laugh was also the time I understood how language works. I remember that it was one of those evenings, after dinner, the adults were out in the veranda, smoking, having coffee, airing themselves out. I sat next to Tatay and said, in Waray: Let’s say your name is You and my name is Me. Now answer this question: Who is the crazy one between the two of us? Tatay laughed so hard, I was instantly pleased, even if I didn’t have the foggiest idea why he found it so funny. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I don’t even think the idea for what was apparently a joke, was my original. For a while there, I was a major hit. Everyone started telling and retelling my joke, it became deeply embarrassing, especially because I was the last to actually get it. When I finally did get it, I tried formulating similar quips, a few of which elicited a wan response, none of which quite achieved the same kind of sweeping success that the first joke elicited. Until today, I am still trying.

There is nothing special about the stories I write. There is nothing special about me as a writer of stories. Everyone in my family is either a storyteller or a politician, which is basically saying that they are all fictionists. A few of them actually became highly successful writers and many became spectacularly unsuccessful politicians. My point is simply to say that the simple question of why I write has an equally simple answer: given that there have only been two fates, I think I’d rather be a failed writer than a failed politician. As for why I write the way I do and for whom I write, I think it is clear to me now: I write to please those from whom my fiction is derived. This is my fiction, my audacious allegation. Whether or not I actually do please them, can be the subject of another forum, for another time.

Speculative Non Fiction

That, according to my friend Carl, is the kind of writing that I do. Fancy term for LIES, and FABRICATIONS, really. =)

Watch for his upcoming collection of essays and stories.

CSF: creative semi-fiction

Sad, as in “also”


My mother would have been sixty today. She was born in 1948 in a town called Matalom, in the southern part of Leyte. Stories have it that when my mother was young, she would often get ill, suffer strange, undiagnosed, incurable symptoms, the only remedy for which was to bring her back to the town where she was born. At the time, it took almost an entire day to travel from Tacloban, where their family eventually settled, to Matalom, which they visited only once every year, or depending on how often my mother became ill.

My mother had six brothers and sisters, but she was the only one who was born in Matalom, her mother’s hometown. This, her siblings used to say, explains why she took after their mother the most. And, they would always add, also the reason why she took after their mother in the worst ways possible; that is, in terms of mood and disposition.

I never really knew their mother; hence, I find it difficult to relate to her, to even refer to her as grandmother. But, I shall try. Their mother, A___, was a tall, buxom woman, with a polished look about her. In the photographs hanging on the walls of the old house in Matalom and in Tacloban, she is always the tallest among everyone, man or woman, and she always carries herself with a combination of grace and ease; with a skilled, concise execution, which can only be described as stylish in a military way. Most people, however, thought that she was, on the whole, in look and manner, rather severe. Again, I have no direct, personal recollection of her severity or grace. I also do not recall any story about her being demonstrative in her care and affection for her children and her husband, or for anyone, for that matter.

The stories I retain of A___ are, on the whole, inconsequential: how tiny her waist was despite her full figure, how her height and her low, somber voice commanded attention, and how stubborn she was in her refusal to learn any other language but Bisaya. For some reason, people also referred to this language as Kana (the Bisaya term for “that one”, or perhaps the Bisaya pejorative for “Americana”). I have some very curious memory of that voice applied to what I thought was a peculiar language.

I also sometimes remember her smell, which was, invariably, a combination of fresh laundry and sweet-sour fruits. (This was how my mother smelled, too, on Sundays, without the scented lotion and expensive perfume).

A____ died thirteen days after I celebrated my third birthday, a month after my mother turned thirty.

***

It is always of these that my memory of that day is made up: tall men and women, in black and white, milling about, standing in corners; dark figures slumped, arms sagging against reddish-brown wooden seats. A glass is thrown violently to the deep-red, concrete floor, and stepped on by many grieving, angry feet shod in leather. A string of white rosary beads is pulled apart, and the round, tiny crystals slide swiftly off the string and scatter themselves on the floor, under the furniture, and under people’s soles. And then we are being lined up in front of the coffin, arranged according to some logic I could not understand. From being carried in someone’s arms, I am, against my will, settled on the floor next to my siblings and my cousins. My baby brother, who is only a few months old, takes my place in the coveted cradle-arms of some aunt or uncle. There is lightning in my face, and I am temporarily blind. I think it is at this point that I start to cry. But nobody sees.

Nobody hears, either. There are too many languages being spoken all at the same time. And my grandmother’s language is spoken the loudest by more voices than I have ever heard it spoken before. “Kana! Kani! Kana sad! Kani sad!” (which, I thought, translated to “That one! This one! That one is sad! This one is sad!” only to find out, very soon enough, that “sad” only meant “also”, or “too”). And the controversy had merely to do with flowers – over which ones to bring to the chapel, which ones to throw away, or burn.

Nothing of the nine-day wake should be left behind, a nameless grandaunt says emphatically. Unless you want a member of the family to follow suit, another one adds. Very quickly, it is settled. No one dares argue. Bouquets, wreaths, and vases of dried up and decaying flowers are thrown into a sack to join the pyre. Brighter, fresher ones are arranged atop a long, black hearse which, like its passengers, looks “sad sad”, as it waits there, strikingly odd in the otherwise car-less street.

The funeral took place at high noon and I remember the heat.

I cannot ignore the heat. It bears down on us as we walk in a solemn procession from the gates of the cemetery to the small clearing where there is an empty tomb and several priests waiting, their white frocks stiff in the windless air. A____ is the first to stake her claim in the family lot. Eventually, as the years would pass, that clearing would disappear, as it is crowded with more of her family members following her lead, despite the careful adherence to superstition. It becomes too crowded that it would not even accommodate my mother who, on the very day I turn thirty, would be, as some would say, “laid to rest”, away from her family.

At the burial, I cannot take my eyes off my mother’s face, as she watches the cement inevitably applied to the square opening of the gray tomb, sealing the niche (and her mother) off, finally, from the rest of the world. There are several broken flowers strewn all around us. The candles are melting quickly before the harsh heat of the sun. The kids are starting to surreptitiously gather them to form balls of wax. I am slumped against the chest of someone whose face I cannot see. I cannot stop staring at my mother’s face. There is so much going on in it. She has on an expression I have never seen before. I am looking and looking but not understanding the meaning behind it. And then it strikes me: it is almost the same expression she has after dabbing on “White Flower” liniment onto her temples and after inhaling the vapors. It is the look of someone disappearing, fading away. It is a look that is focused on something beyond my ken. It is a look that worries me no end.


***

Matalom, in Bisaya, means sharp. When I think of Matalom, on the contrary, the images are framed in soft light. In my mind, sometimes, I see the houses, the municipio, the plaza, the old church, the ancient trees, the coast and the sea beyond it, neatly arranged, in quaint stillness, underneath a layer of mist. Perhaps this is because my first vivid encounter with the place was through sleep-heavy, glazed eyes, encountering early morning sunlight coming at me in tiny broken streams, through intertwined foliage.

I probably slept through much of that first trip. I only remember that, when I woke up, the car we were in was slowing down, bringing the excited chatter to a hush. When I looked up, we were under a canopy of acacia leaves and branches that were tangled in a complex embrace. I would soon learn to treat the magical welcome arch, as a marker, an unmistakable sign, that we had entered the town proper, if not a different time zone altogether. As a matter of propriety and practice, everything slows down, therefore. In a minute, the plaza starts to loom to our right, and, to our left, the cathedral and the town’s patron saint, San Jose, facing the municipio and the country’s national hero, the other Jose.

My grandmother’s house is located on the same block as the church. Its “dirty kitchen” faces the small, square, black windows of the church rectory. When attending afternoon novena masses, we pass through the backdoor, from the kitchen, and enter the church compound via the rectory. We sometimes see the priests, off duty, strumming guitars, grooming gardens, meditating.

I have heard that, in every generation, at least one of the Tías carries on an illicit conduct with some young Pádre, in the much too short, tree-lined path between the women’s earthly kitchen and the men’s holy ground. It is probably not true, but not hard to imagine. I imagine this: A___ herself as a product of the prohibited passions between a Spanish man of the cloth and an otherwise pious native girl. A____’s mother is fourteen and he forty. She is much too tall for her age and her kind, while he is much too lay for his order and for his own good. It’s all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.

As soon as we passed the church, the driver took a quick left and there it was, the house where my mother was born. There is nothing remarkable, or imaginative, about the house, which, like all the others, looks like a girl’s dress, with concrete walls for a skirt, wooden and capiz windows for a top. The house would be quite easy to miss, save for the bougainvilleas, that climb wildly all over the front of the house, adhering brightly colored papery bracts, that persist for a long time as to be permanent, on the walls.

The car pulled up under the colorful vines. And as soon as the rusty door of the car was opened, before we kids could even get off the orange Ford Fiera, we were untangled from the arms of our yayas, lifted over bags and boxes, and ensconced in the warm hugs and kisses of a hundred Tías. Then the rest of the contingent spilled out of the car, and there were even more combinations of tearful embraces, as the decibel of “Kana! Kani!” chatter rose higher and higher.

“Kana sad! Kani sad!”

No, no one was sad, everybody was happy. They were actually just giving instructions on which bags to unload, which ones to leave behind. That was just how everybody was: nothing was ever not a cause for excitement.

In those times, many, many years ago, we only ever traveled in big, noisy, highly-excitable groups. We filled buses, or rented big vans, even if some of the families had their own private cars. The only time there would be a semblance of silence during the trip was when we passed the steep, winding roads, by the sides of mountains; the chatter would then turn to prayer. As soon as the most challenging part of the road to Matalom was passed, the adults instantly recovered: they sang cheesy songs, told tired old stories, and then passed around the miniature “White Flower” bottle, whose oil they dabbed on their temples, and the vapors they inhaled, like junkies, through their noses.

The last time I was in Matalom was with a much smaller, quieter contingent: my two brothers and two sisters, all of whom I had to baby-sit, without my knowing it. My brothers, who were the real junkies, were then both hooked on mind-altering substances and eardrum-busting sounds. My older sister was trying not to depress herself, while waiting for the results of her board exams. My baby sister was, well, still a baby at the age of twelve. We did not know the real reason for our overextended stay in Matalom, until ten days later when, despite the long distance calls to our parents, they still would not come for us or send us money for bus fare back to Tacloban. We eventually realized that hieing us off to Matalom was Mother’s idea of rehabilitation and spiritual exile for her children, as much as for herself, I suppose.

My baby sister was a mere foil, or an accessory, it turned out: for as long as she was with us, no one had the heart to pull the rug from under our feet, even when we older kids started depressing the hell out of everyone with our posturing. Everybody was charmed by my baby sister’s crystal clear singing voice, and entranced with her almost translucent complexion, not to mention the fact that she was named after my mother, decidedly their favorite among A___‘s children .

I, on the other hand, had just graduated from UP then, had no job, and was forever in black, agonizing over the fact that I could not, had no excuse to, be with my boyfriend who was a journalist in Manila. Before we arrived in Matalom, I was bent on showing everyone that this was all a waste of my time, and that I was there against my will. Of course, I was not able to maintain my position for long. Given the situation, I could not exactly complain about being forced to take a “vacation with my siblings in a seaside town, right across a white-sand resort island”, as my mother put it.

Mother literally packed us off, drove us to the terminal, and paid the bus driver who had already been instructed over the phone, to reserve the first row of seats for us, for the four-hour trip to Matalom. Against our will, she convinced us to go to Matalom at the pretext that it was a matter of obligation.

By then, most of my mother’s brothers and sisters had stopped going to Matalom, or, when they did, they would rather rent rooms at the only beach resort in town, than accept the hospitality offered by their cousins who were then caring for the house. We somehow gathered that there was some dispute over the old house beside the church, and over the land on which that house stood. Perhaps it was because my mother was born in that house that she could not let anything or anyone sway her from staying there or from maintaining ties with her mother’s sister, and her cousins.

We all noticed, moreover, that, indeed, Mother never had severe migraine attacks for the rest of the year, after being in Matalom for only a few days. She, therefore, had a well-founded reason for believing that a two-week stay in the place would cure us of our ills as well.

***

Mother was right, as always. We returned to Tacloban, after being deported to and forcefully rehabilitated in Matalom, healthy, happy, and detoxified, with new haircuts to boot. Our Tías cried, probably with as much relief as with sadness, as we waved to them from the bus. Half of the bus passengers were annoyed, the other half amused, that we had overloaded the bus with all sorts of items we accumulated in our two-week rehab-vacation in Matalom: corals, shells and stones from the beach, funky retro clothes from the ukay ukay, big jars of fiesta food, a sack of fruits, and several old photographs and stolen library books. We promised ourselves that we’d go to Matalom at least once every year, and preferably with the entire family. Even with the whole clan, just like old times!

We are still talking about going to Matalom. One of these days, one of these days, we say. Of course, it never happens. If it ever does, it would only ever be as a very small family that we would go, as it would be as a family without my mother. And, without her, I need to be convinced that we can go back to the way things were, with her siblings and their families, like in the old times, traveling together in one big happy pack.

What we never thought would happen, happened. We lost our mother; the migraines were not just migraines. The ties to her family were severed, not strengthened. And I, for my own little, insignificant part, cannot bear to be anywhere near anyone who has hurt her. My older sister, who is kind and generous, once suggested that we should reach out, be the ones to repair the damage. But I refused. I told her that I am still trying to be angry rather than hurt, at everyone who hurt but never angered our mother. For now, I am content to keep these images of my mother’s life and those who peopled it, underneath a film of vapor; content to condense everything onto paper.

I can not even enter the house in Tacloban, where mother grew up, and where we used to live for years, when my grandfather started to get sick, and until he expired. I hear the house is falling apart. The plants have died, the vines have dried up and detached themselves from the walls, and are now hanging limply like skeletons in the air. I hear the piano is missing, and can no longer be found, while the rest of the furniture have been divided senselessly among the siblings – a ten-seater dining table with only four chairs in one house, a platera without the platos in the other, an aparador without the mirror left behind.

I sometimes see unrecognizable men and women, dark sagging figures on wooden chairs, drinking tuba or cheap rum, and getting drunk in the afternoons, throwing up all over the porch, unmindful of people passing the street. I sometimes see faces, peering at the window, from behind dust-encrusted curtains. Most of the time, though, I just look away whenever I sense movement behind the curtains.

***

A____ was already dead, when I took my first trip to her hometown. Since A____’s death, my mother made it a point for us to visit Matalom as often as we could, perhaps as a way for us, her children, to know and remember A____ more. What I do remember is that as soon as we reached Matalom, everyone spoke differently. My own mother’s tongue shifted swiftly from Waray to Kana, and my poor father, who never acquired the facility for the language, was forced to speak an even more foreign language – Tagalog.

I think I only realized the import of my grandmother’s death, and a little bit of my mother’s sense of loss, when I noticed that no one spoke my grandmother’s language in the house in Tacloban. Not even my mother or her brothers and sisters spoke it, when they were in Tacloban. It was a silence that could not be ignored, especially after I had been to Matalom, where Kana was the only language spoken. And, that was when it hit me: A____was the only with that voice and that language, after all, and it was a sound that I would never ever hear, ever again.

Was this also why my mother had on that expression again, when people started speaking to her, in her mother’s tongue, when we arrived in Matalom?

One afternoon, in the old house in Matalom, while everyone was down in the sala, examining yellowed documents, and sepia photographs, I went up to A____’s room, and forced myself to cry. I dabbed on the strong mentholated liniment at the corners of my eyelids until they stung. I forced my eyes to remain open, even when they were tearing uncontrollably, so I could stare at my face in the mirror, to see how well I could imitate my mother’s expression. This was a few years after A___’s death. I don’t know how, in all those years, I had convinced myself that menthol vapor was all it would take.

A____ died when I was three, my mother thirty. My older sister was four, my younger sister had not yet been born. Of course we were all too young, my mother included, to understand what it would take to complete the numbers game: for me to reach my mother’s age when her own mother died, for my older sister to have her own three year old daughter, and for our baby sister to have to play the role of mother, in our almost-abandoned household.

***

Mother would have been sixty today. At sixty, she would have been happily retired from managing her office and would now be applying Oprah-style, positive management, self-help techniques on her husband who always obliged her, and the rest of the household who were helpless against her. At sixty, she would have been a beautiful young grandmother, and still very much a mother.

I see her through the mist: she is still relatively slim, young-looking for her age, and elegant even in her green Hawaiian-print, housedress. I see her tending the garden– or, at least, supervising someone on how to tend the plants and the vines starting to climb all over the front of our house. I see her trying, again, to change the colors of the wall, the location of the door, of our still-unfinished house, inspired by something she saw in a magazine, or in a dream about the old house in Matalom. I see her at the dining table, which she and my father sometimes liked to use as worktable. She is making “thing to do” lists, plans, inspirational prose, reminders and notes for her children, who have started their own families, and need her now more than ever. She is seated next to my father who, at the age of seventy-six, is still writing pleadings for his non-paying clients; is bent on saving other people but, without my mother, cannot function on his own. I see the two of them being torn away from their work, by the kids – not us, but our children! – who are doing something silly, looking so adorable, making a mess of Mother’s make up, breaking some jewelry, perhaps, wearing my father’s oversized leather shoes, trying to run in them, and falling all over their faces. My mother’s expression softens. This is the kind of chaos that appeals to her, and against which she has no power or a single management skill.

It is her sixtieth birthday. We have already been to church for the six a.m. mass. We are taking a trip to Matalom, A____’s hometown, the place where Mother was born. This was her idea, she made arrangements for everyone and everything. It is a beautiful day, just the right amount of sun and wind; a perfect day to travel with the entire family, indeed. And, of course, because it is my mother we are talking about, family means not only us – who are all home for the occasion—, but also friends, cousins, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, and grandaunts, too. Of course, she has forgiven and forgotten past misdeeds, everyone looks to her now to keep ties bound, just like they deferred to A____, her mother, to settle family matters.

Of course, too, every now and then, she remembers A_____, her own mother, who did not even live long enough to reach the age of sixty, who barely knew her grandchildren— all beautiful and bright in their own right, although some of them have to be taught how to be happy, sometimes. She cannot help but think of herself, and how she made it without A____. Has it really been three decades? Why, every time, every single time she remembers, it puzzles her that it still hurts, it still stings, no matter how long it has been. It clutches at her heart, and it induces her to fervent prayer, mindless of the three year old granddaughter who is alarmed at the change in her grandmother’s expression. Oh God, may her children never know such sorrow, may she not have to leave this little one yet, kana sad, kani sad…

It is all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.

***
My mother would have been sixty today. And I am alone in an apartment, in a house that has no history. My husband and I live and work in a noisy, wet city, whose language has adopted us. We surround ourselves with people who do not know anything about us, whom we do not know enough about. Sure, we exchange bits and pieces of ourselves, of our families, sometimes; we highlight certain events, we hide others, we mention the colorful characters, we obliterate the rest. We have degrees in language, in cultural studies, in history. We convert to discourse and fiction and poetry what we have inevitably cut ourselves from. It has become a matter of survival.

I am looking for an excuse to celebrate my mother’s life in this city that has nothing to do with her, except that this is where she died, this is where she left us. And, wherever my mother went, she did bring home with her. I am always looking for excuses to round up old friends and whatever family we can pull in from the vicinity; to gather different tongues in one table and let them speak their language, as long as never about it. Kani sad, has become a matter of survival.

Quezon City
September, 2008