After the body displaces water (fiction)

Part I.
http://www.philippinesfreepress.com.ph/06-2010/after-the-body-displaces-water-a-manual-for-divers/

Part II.
http://www.philippinesfreepress.com.ph/07-2010/after-the-body-displaces-water-a-manual-for-divers-part-ii/

automatic writing

because it has been too long since I made the resolve months ago to revive this blog
because it has been two months since i posted the notice in this blog and nothing has followed after that because there is not much to write about
because it is not true that there is nothing to write about
because the truth is that there is much so much but i am swamped with work and family and self and selves
because it is not true that i have that many interesting selves that each one demands time away from writing
because writing matters to me it is everything and i should write every single day
because i should stop writing in the way i do now with and in my mind only
because the mind truly has no limits and is the one thing that astonishes still
because we need limits and margins and edges of things
because surfaces have real edges even if they tend to make things seem cramped and brutal and short
because life is actually cramped and brutal and much too short
because it is too damn long and boring and everything keeps happening over and over again and people don't learn their lesson
because people sometimes do learn their lesson and undergo remarkable transformations and are amazing absolutely amazing that way
because i need amazement and nothing else
because one day when it seemed like it had been too long since anything amazing has happened i opened my inbox and found three poems
because discovering poetry while randomly checking personal emails in the middle of a busy workday restores my faith in a big way
because i need faith and my faith needs restoring every now and then
because the only other person who had such faith and such a relationship with faith has left for another country and i have no one to go to a church with on random days
because i think of leaving the country too
because i am starting to hate the constant leaving and saying goodbye and have recently developed a paralyzing sense of anxiety over flying
because there is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of taking off and that final lurch before flying
because exhilaration is the only way and the only way to exhilaration is to take off and fly and do it on very early mornings
because one very early morning when i was convinced that there was nothing nothing nothing more to this you do the one thing that helped me finally close my eyes and truly peacefully sleep
because i need to sleep and have been troubled by the lack of it in a way that is not healthy for everyone concerned
because to me it is essential that everyone concerned do not remain concerned for too long
because this has gone on long enough and i can now allow myself to stop just stop.

reboot

i want to revive this blog. i have been trying to recall the initial impulse for putting it up in the first place. i do remember that i started this blog at a time of major transition, at a time when one could not afford to think in terms of what's certain or uncertain, when what was there was all that was there, when one was always only half aware of things coming to an end, of the potential tragedy that underlined every innocent, hopeful, gesture. when all acts were, after all, just symbolic of other acts. all of those leading up, ultimately, to this. this life, this work, this job, this apartment, this set of friends, this afternoon, this cup of coffee, this sore throat, this insistence for a stick of cigarette. whatever this is, it has remained, more or less unchanged, in the last four years. of course, then, prior to this, i had no means to recognize those episodes for what they were. the mind is amazing that way. it puts up these shields, making the body invincible for the time being.

when this blog was put up, it only had ten, or maybe less, links. and that seemed to have been the point then. it was part of a conversation, a small gathering. i know that it is probably too soon to romanticize those times. but, i want to revive this blog, nevertheless, because i want to recreate those times. (maybe this rebooted blog can be all about the question: what were "those" times?).

i want to fabricate again that space, that voice, which was both innocent and weary, intimate and open, hesitant but ready. ready to disappear, whenever it had to.

i will not make any commitments. and this blog has no one to commit to. but, for the time being, this blog is alive again. and will contain only, or mostly, live texts, live entries. if there is such a thing. all texts are essentially dead. only the author is ever alive.

the textures, the colors,

the movements. to witness absolute freedom, and unmistakable precision, of expression. nothing like it.

i haven't been satisfied with any performance this way in a long time. just came from the imogen heap concert at the esplanade in singapore, and she was brilliant. and playful, and fun, and entertaining, even if a little too trippy at times, and worth every peso i spent and more. when she announced that she'll be back in singapore before the year ends, i went crazy and screamed "come to manila!!!"

let's hope she does.

(pictures to follow)

international women's day

and everybody says this about their mother, but, nanay was really beautiful, and i would say this had she been someone else's mother.

not too late

for resolutions, is it? here are mine:

1. sleep more
2. drink less
3. walk more
4. sit less
5. read more
6. talk less
7. write more
8. write less (write shorter stuff, that is)
9. call home more often
10. go out less often
11. be more patient
12. be less tolerant

there. one resolution for every month of the year. let's see if we can still recognize this version of me. happy new year all! =)

Preludes

(fiction, an excerpt)



A man died singing. He had sung a total of three songs before he heaved his last breath and collapsed on a chair. It happened at the Municipal Hall. The time was three in the afternoon. The sun was high. Heat seeped into people’s bones. Tuba warmed their blood even more. Someone’s ninth death anniversary was being celebrated. Another man’s life in that party ended. It ended on a high note.
…

At that very moment, Nenita, the wife, was at home, picking leaves for a medicinal brew.
Earlier that day, Nenita had been lying on the sofa, slipping in and out of an afternoon sleep she should not have heeded, embracing Willy Revillame in her dreams. She had had no plans of taking a nap. She had just wanted to catch a glimpse of Willy after she sent off her grandson for the city, before she resumed her cooking.

At the sala, she opened the window to let some breeze in. But the air was so dry. Outside it was very quiet. Everyone was at the Hall, to attend the ninth death anniversary of the juez. Most of them bore the judge a grudge, but they were all there anyway, eager to see what kind of feast his children had prepared. The children had all come home from America and Europe for this very important occasion in the dead man’s journey. Nenita herself did not mind the judge so much, even if she had always found him rather severe. It was the wife whom Nenita did not feel very comfortable with. There had been some very persistent rumors involving the judge’s wife that Nenita did not care so much for.

As soon as Nenita was certain that her grandson had left, she positioned the electric fan in front of her, sat on the sofa, and turned on the TV to catch the last segment of her favorite show. The next thing she knew, Willy Revillame was pulling her into his arms, soothing her with words of condolences, before handing her some cash and offering his left cheek for a kiss. There was a huge applause from the studio audience, even if they were all weeping with him, shaking their heads in amazement.
Nenita forced herself out of the dream and the motion brought her entire body up and out of the sofa. She found herself standing in the middle of the sala, face-to-face with a teary-eyed Willy. Her heart was beating wildly. Her armpits were soaked in sweat. Her hair bun had come undone. She looked around guiltily, she thought she heard her husband swear at her. She felt her husband’s presence in the living room with her, even if she knew he was at the death anniversary party. She quickly turned off the TV and made her way to the kitchen.

She should not have taken that nap, Nenita berated herself. There was an urgent order for ten dozens of suman she had to deliver the next day, for the judge’s daughters who were leaving right after the anniversary. There was already a pile of pandan leaves on the kitchen table, waiting to be washed and warmed, for wrapping the sweet sticky rice rolls with.
She had spent all night until early morning boiling the sticky rice and mixing it with anise, caramel and coconut milk, until her hands trembled and the veins swelled. By the time she was almost done, she had to prepare breakfast and brew a special tea concoction for her grandson who had spent all night drinking. He had very barely made it home – drunk as a fish, crying out a woman’s name like a fool – early that morning.

Nenita then remembered that she also had to prepare the medicinal tea her husband needed to take with his dinner. She had yet to complete the five different kinds of leaves, Ampalaya, Banaba, Bayabas, Dumero, Hierba Buena, the last one she purchases from a man who only comes to town on Thursdays. She was getting ready to pick Ampalaya and Bayabas leaves from her garden when she heard her husband’s voice again, his singing voice. She realized that the sound was coming all the way from the Hall. The sound was very faint, but more than perceptible, and certainly unmistakable to her.

It was the only sound she could hear, when she stepped out of the house and started picking the leaves. Everything else around her was quiet and still. It seemed as though the entire town – the dogs, the frogs, and the birds included – had gone silent for this very rare event: her husband singing again.

She had not heard her husband sing this way in a very long time, ever since he became ill – when the sugar and alcohol in his blood burned the sides of his heart, almost getting to the core of it. Since then, he would get out of breath when he sang. And he also easily forgot the lyrics, especially to the Italian classics, and some of the Tagalog Kundiman he used to be very well known for.

Nenita herself never understood all the fuss about her husband’s singing, and the fuss his brothers and sisters made when he stopped singing. She could not even understand half of the songs he sang. They were mostly in Italian, Spanish, and Tagalog. He rarely sang Bisaya songs, the ones she could understand, and actually liked, even if she herself could not carry a tune to save her life. Thankfully, their grandson was there to indulge her husband in music talk. She was happier listening to the two of them talk and sing, and strum guitar strings, from the kitchen.

She used to feel slighted whenever her siblings-in-law recalled with such intense, exaggerated regret, the way their brilliant brother squandered his money and his talent, and oh, all the wrong decisions he made along the way. Including, though they would never say directly, his decision to marry Nenita. They liked to remind their brother, themselves, and anyone who cared to listen, of what their brother used to be, what he could have been, whom he could have been married to. Nenita ceased to mind this, and them, a long time ago. She had forgiven all of them. They were all dead now, save for one brother who lived in the city. She never stopped praying for their souls, but she was not very sorry that they died.

Nenita knew that her husband was happy the way he was. She never heard him complain. He had nothing to complain about. She took him back every time his affairs with other women turned sour. She took care of him when he started getting sick, when the part of his heart that was supposed to beat started merely murmuring and whistling. Thankfully, her friend, the herbalista, had just the right concoction for this ailment. Even the doctors were delighted with her husband’s progress.

Nenita took her husband back again when, with the money her in-laws sent for his medication, he went away to be with one of his women. People say her husband went to Manila with the judge’s widow. Nenita never confirmed this. Nenita never asked. She just took her husband back. Nursed him back to health again. After that though, Nenita noticed that he spent more and more time alone, in the toilet. And when she asked if he needed help with anything, he would just mumble incoherently. So she let him be.

She could have prepared him then that other brew her herbalista friend had suggested at the time, the one that would make his balls shrink, give him hallucinations, make his blood boil until his veins popped. But she didn’t, of course.
She did buy and continued to keep the packet of dried purple leaves said to be from a rare vine found only in Mt. Banahaw. She didn’t even know where Mt. Banahaw was, only that it was up there in the North. She did know that she would never use the herbs, even if she wanted to keep it, see it, touch it, and feel the soft lump of leaves in her palm, every now and then. She derived some sense of security, a very calming sense of power, in knowing that she had that little packet hidden in one of the kitchen drawers.

She listened more closely to her husband’s singing. She closed her eyes and trapped her breath in her throat, the way she did when she listened to the beats and murmurs of her husband’s heart at night. Listening to the air that carried her husband’s voice this way, she almost caught the sound of his labored breathing, and his heart’s irregular beating.

He was singing a popular Spanish song now, about kissing someone for the last time. Nenita remembered being told by her husband that that was what it was about. Kiss me more, kiss me more, that was what the man wanted to tell the woman he loved. Nenita found that she could enjoy this one; the song was recognizable. She laughed lightly as she found herself swaying in slow, heavy movements, to the music of her husband’s voice.

She started imagining herself as a young woman, dancing with this beautiful, dark man who eventually became her husband. And then she heard him choke, heave a breath before he sang: Perderte. Long pause. Perderte. Another pause. Despues. And then there was applause, in which Nenita joined, still laughing at her silliness

After that, all was quiet again.

Nenita gathered the leaves and went back inside the house. Just as well, because it was starting to be very, intolerably, hot outside. Certainly hot enough to boil an old man’s blood and pop his veins, she thought.

Direct attacks on the imagination

(a reply to/an echo of Chingbee's post. See: http://curiouscouch.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/we-tell-ourselves-stories-in-order-to-live/)

I have been to Mindanao several times. There are many Mindanaos. Many different kinds. I have been to a few of them. First, as a young dancer on tour with a dance company about 15 years ago, next as a fellow for the UP writers workshop almost a decade ago, and then several more times as a journalist and for NGO-related activities which always get me into close contact/require me to work with community organizers, lawyers, and media practitioners. In my most recent trip, I literally skirted the Mindanao which is now marked in our collective consciousness with backhoes, and shallow mass graves, and the image of a hundred gun-toting, crazed paramilitary men triumphantly leaving a very bloody scene, ready to resume their normal lives, after killing some 60 innocent unarmed men and women, on that beautiful Monday afternoon.

It is a sickening sight. You'd be totally without imagination not to be affected by it. It doesn't matter if you have never been to Mindanao, or know no one in Mindanao, or know little about Mindanao. The kind of calculated display of power, the very efficient application of a very specific kind of violence; the scale of it, the magnitude of it... The utter impunity with which it was carried out. This is hard not to imagine; rather, hard for our imagination to not be attacked in some way, to be tickled, at the very least. It is harder not to imagine that we have also, somehow, been attacked in a very deep and painful, and embarrassing, and disgusting way. My struggle since last week has been precisely this: against imagination.

I have been forwarded, but have no intention of checking the list of those who have been massacred. Not now, not soon, anyway. A week's worth of report writing has to be rushed in a day-and-a-half's time. A very dear friend, a very important person in my obscure little life just died. A bright light went out and created a permanent darkness in my little corner. This one will take some getting used to, a process that cannot be rushed. And yet I am able to cook, and eat, and shop, and watch movies, and drink with friends, drink with my sister, feed the dog, feed the household composed of my husband and myself, and entertain the occasional droppers by in our apartment. I even managed to start writing a 3-story cycle. I finished 2, and could not go on from there, however. My imagination finally abandoned me. Or, maybe, I need to write a different story altogether. Or, I need to write differently.

My friend, Chingbee, writes in her blog that "Given we artists are allegedly known for our imagination, then it would certainly be a failure on many counts if we are unable to imagine the Maguindanao Massacre as a direct affront to us, unable to imagine the means by which we can combat the seductions of silence and complacency and forgetfulness, unable to imagine the methods with which to address each other and cure our ignorance and ensure that life does not go on unmarked, unresponsive to, and unchanged by this most sickening of all the sickening events we have been through under this regime." She suggests that the story is the arena on which we must act, or fight. Just as the government has been shamelessly twisting the facts and exploiting the power of rhetoric to confound the public, so must we wrestle from them the words and the images, the characters and their motivations, the plots and the resolutions.

We must protect our truths, our stories. And, perhaps, we must tell [only] the stories that need telling in these difficult times.

husbands and wives

Rain in Singapore today. Wet streaks across windows. Water pearls form on glass panes. Tops of buildings tower over trees, and melt in the milky haze.

The girls are still in bed, cowering under thick white sheets. Clothes, shoes, boxes of spices, bangles and beads, plastic and paper bags are strewn all over the carpeted floor. Steaming cups of coffee rest on window ledges.

I brewed the coffee. I hope the coffee aroma permeates their dreams, and eventually takes them out of their sleep. The girls continue to ignore it. I am almost done with my second cup.

We pooled our funds and got what passes for a suite in this tiny hotel. It is bright and airy. We are surrounded by windows. Windows look out into other people’s windows. This city-state is big on windows.

Everything here seems fabricated though. The chaos of street festivals, markets, shops, food stalls, have a disconcerting awareness in and of themselves. The non-Asians are easily fooled. Come to Mindanao, I want to tell them. Come to Quiapo. Come to Samar.

At the concert last night, my mind flew, and I missed out on some important pieces. I always need music to think. I did not know I needed to think of anything in particular last night. I will tell you later what I thought about.

I never quite just listen. I do not know how to just listen. I mean, I have very keen ears, they prick up when there’s a rupture in the harmony. But I cannot imagine this: sitting through a musical performance focused solely on the act on stage. My kind of music is that which takes me out of the act, out of the moment, makes the mind fly and expand. Makes my heart stop completely, as in an attack.

At certain parts of the performance, I was enrapt with the musicians backing up the main act. I realize I still have a fascination for second voices, and back-up musicians. Must be from all those years of singing first, and never learning second voice as a kid. When I sing without my siblings I cannot hear myself.

This is why I feel sorry sometimes for marrying you. I wanted so much to keep you as a backup vocal. You were my second voice. Now we sound alike. Does this make you make you mad when I say this?

We girls are here because our husbands make us sad. This is our collective secret, the general belief. The rationale for the shopping bags and the wine. Nobody here knows that I am happy. Even if I am married. Nobody would believe. It remains my part of the secret’s dirtier little secret. I am careful not to sound smug. You remain my biggest, most shameful, forbidden love.

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)