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| EDGARDO MARANAN |
| Hometown Stories & Footnotes to Childhood’s End |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS STORY. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
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| It was black, it emitted an eerie, loud moaning sound as it circled in the eastern sky, near Mt. Makulot. The able-bodied men of the barrio picked up their weapons of choice and, brandishing these, and shouting themselves hoarse with curses aimed at the strange creature and the demon whose spawn it was, tried to banish it from their sight and the barrio’s quiet life. I was four years old, more curious than afraid. (An incident in 1924, as recounted by my father.) 1. Burials, and lives in-between Many years ago, we buried Mamay, my grandfather, in the ancient cemetery of Bauan. He was also called Amang Tanda, ‘elder father’, by my cousins who were older than me, who kept faith with tradition and spoke a deeper dialect by virtue of having grown up closer to the native earth, which they tilled as descendants of a long, unremarkable lineage of Batangas peasants. I grew up in that cool, distant summer city on the northern highlands of the Cordillera, and came back to the hometown in the sweltering lowlands of southern Luzon during the summer months of April and May, savoring the kindness and goodwill of relatives towards an achieving youngster who did the clan proud by getting the best grades in the Belgian missionary school he was enrolled in and thus enjoyed special favors such as being served the sole fried egg for breakfast which the senior cousins would, out of mock envy and make-believe malice, cause to disappear from the low-slung wooden dulang they all ate from, after distracting his attention, only to make it reappear presto as soon as he was about to start bawling, but who also got to be doted on by the same pretend bullies who were most protective of him, and even took him to the fields they tilled, acceding to his pleas to let him ride on the back of the cow, or to add his weight to the bamboo kalmot with which they broke the russet earth into furrows at the start of the farming season, even if it meant enduring the jolting ride which was after all more fun than anything in the world, and for him, young as he was, the freshly turned earth always held a fascination, exuded the scent of life, no matter that from time to time dung fell into it from the beast lumbering ahead of them and pulling the harrow whose bamboo blades sliced into the soil, as he and tiller cousin rode the contraption in its progress towards the other end of the sun-drenched land and back again, till midday came when they would all gather beneath an acacia or siniguelas tree to feast on clay pots of rice and sinaing na tulingan . My memories of that interment have always been a reel of frames from sepia to black-&-white to shades of grey, and I have often imagined that on that day, all the trees were ashen, gaunt and gnarled, the tombs were off-white or mud-splattered and were about to crack open, lowering gray banks of clouds were swarming across a bright sun pulsating in a darkening sky, and the bereaved wore clothes with the faded color of fallow earth. For this is how we remember a certain past – roughly the period between the two world wars, then from the late forties up to the start of the fifties, when books had starkly black but remarkably high-resolution photographs, and movies were mostly pre-technicolor – so that it comes as a minor shock that in recent years we have seen footage of the 1940s global war in actual living color. In this mental loop, the moment most distinctive in Mamay’s burial was walking behind the fin-tailed night-black funeral car, looking at my reflection and that of my father who walked in front of me, and we both were sun-burnished images on the gleaming back of the chromed and curtained hearse, following death in its tracks. Not quite ten years old then, I remember having had a sinking feeling within, as though I was gazing into a seer’s crystal ball where the whole sad future was being played out as the ghastly mist assumed portentous shapes. The cortege had started out from the ancestral house – a rural dwelling with wooden walls and galvanized-iron roof, modified from its original structure, a prewar nipa hut of anahaw, bamboo, and petrified trunk-posts. Leading off was the vintage Cadillac, followed by several long-chassis jeepneys laden with mourners, the rest of the procession made up of relatives near and distant, sympathizers, family friends and assorted stoics trudging on foot the several kilometers from our barrio of Cupang to the municipal cemetery of Bauan. As the dead enters a cemetery, Bach-Gounod’s Ave Maria always seems to take on a graver funereal volume and mass, the sky and surrounding nature turn more tenebrous than a usual gloomy day in one’s life, and in my mental files, the penultimate stage of that burial – people gathering at the cemetery chapel for the obligatory final rites and prayers – becomes a Sebastian Salgado frame of black veils, black armbands, and white shirts, copious tears and grimaces of grief, and finally as one, all eyes are blankly focused on the lens of the heavy-duty black box of a camera recording yet another passage of a beloved being who shared this world with us. Our dear departed had been with us long enough, ninety-five years, of which I shared but precious few. It might have rained that day Mamay was buried – of this I have no recollection. ‘Living ancestor’ was my first conscious image of Mamay, nearly doubled up as he walked barefoot on loam or stony ground, on thorny trails or hot asphalt, his torso almost parallel to his feet as he shuffled from chore to endless chore – gathering fodder for the cow, chopping firewood with a slow but accurate swing of the axe which must have been a hefty fraction of his body weight, keeping the rice granary beneath the house in order and free of vermin and other intruders, going down to the fields that lay beyond the backyard looban to gather vegetables and fruits for the larder or kindling for the dapugan of adobe stone where the food was cooked, doing random repairs on household items or agricultural tools, generally inspecting every nook and cranny of the surrounding land which was always dark with the shadows of towering bamboo and century-old jackfruit and mango trees, and – most delightful of all tasks, for me at least – putting back in shape almost as soon as I arrived on schedule for the annual summer vacation my trusty, rusty and red Columbia tricycle, each year more broken down than the year before, despite his stowing it inside the rice granary – could some tiyanak or toy-starved country cousin have been taking liberties with it? – and he would repair it with a fresh lashing of thin wire to keep the prongs in place, the wheels aligned, or the handlebars straight, and it was that trike which I missed almost as much as him, for it disappeared some time after he was buried, vanishing forever. Mamay had not been the first to leave us. He had survived Kakang Angge, his eldest child, my oldest aunt, bed-ridden for nearly a decade in the most fearful corner of the house, screaming in agony as disease wasted her, whose tubercular frame was a flesh-draped skeleton that could not be moved even scant inches without spasms of pain. She railed at anyone within sight or earshot as she cursed her cruel illness, railing even at her own sons who cared for her and loved her too much to be put off by her physical condition and state of sanity, and I remember how it was with difficulty that I would negotiate the dangerous route between sala and kitchen, as if it were a minefield I was tiptoeing through, because one had to pass beside her mat-covered wicker bed and considered himself lucky if she was already moaning in pain-wracked sleep or, awake and sitting on the edge of her bed like a propped-up stooping zombie, glaring balefully out the window at some invisible demon. I had to synchronize my movement through that part of the house with such propitious moments. Her silverfish-infested A4 photograph, framed in faux pinewood, which I salvaged from a disused aparador of my antecedents’ belongings during a recent visit to the hometown, shows a woman in the prime of maidenhood, her hair combed casually back in a bun to reveal a prominent forehead, her pixie eyes nonchalantly ignoring the camera, her half-smile hinting at confidence or a readiness for adulthood, her deep brown skin with no discernible blemish, her entire sepia image as endearing and as poignant as those sharp colonial photographs of rural folk in eternal innocence, preserved in American books on Philippine geography and social studies published before the war and which we used in school up till the late fifties. She seemed to have been a headstrong woman, going through widowhood quite young and deciding to leave the barrio when farm work and the chance to make a living beckoned elsewhere, and so she left Cupang for Tiaong in nearby Quezon province where at certain times of the year there was a harvesting and a gleaning to be made, and she worked hard to get her share of palay seed, which she would bring back to the hometown for family use or to dispose of for profit. In one of her seasonal migrations to Tiaong in Quezon, she met the man Ponso who would become her second husband after the late Tomas, but soon she would be stricken by arthritis, my father would say tuberculosis, of the bone, and she was forced to come home to Cupang, though there has never been an account of Ponso having accompanied the sick woman back, and for the next ten years she lived in hell. There is no greater sorrow than a parent survives the child, yet looking back, I must assume that when her kalbaryo had finally run its course, both Mamay and my grandmother would have felt everlasting sorrow and relief in equal measure. No, more than relief, gratefulness to God Who, in His unevenly distributed mercy, had at last freed Kakang Angge from her nameless pain. In the coffin-with-family photo taken either at the Bauan church or graveyard chapel, my glazed-eyed grandparents flank the bier on which their eldest child’s remains have been laid, Mamay seemingly drained even of sadness as he stands unsteadily in a long-sleeved shirt retrieved from the hardwood chest reeking of dried herb-roots, shod in his Elpo rubber shoes – funerals and fiestas being the only occasions when these peasant’s fineries were worn by him – and Lola my mater dolorosa of a grandmother too grief-stricken for words and emptied of her tears. Two years after Mamay’s demise, it was Tiya Diday’s turn to depart. Beloved second oldest aunt, she told funny stories, mimicked the voice, mannerism and gesture of people who deserved her famous comic parodies, cooked vegetable dishes and soups with the most deliciously fresh provincial flavors, and had only one good eye. When the relatives were home for the summer, she would hail the fish vendor who trudged up and down the barrio road everyday, to choose the best tambakol or tulingan for the bakasyonistas, or spend much time gathering shoots, malunggay, and the exotic bagó leaves for the dining table. Tiya Diday never married, and from what I recall of her spare account of her past, never had any experience approaching even puppy love, had a homelier face than Kakang Angge’s, and devoted her religious and civic fervor to looking after her sick sister and tending to the needs of her fast-aging parents. The most important thing about her was withheld from me, from all the youngest members of the clan, and that was the frightful disease she had been afflicted with as she approached her sixties, taking its toll year after painful year, but which never made itself manifest to us nephews and nieces for whom she only had smothering kisses and tight hugs and bucktooth smiles. In her quiet moments, which would be in the early afternoon after we had finished our lunch, she would sit on a hard chair, prop one knee up beneath her calf-length skirt, cup her chin in her hand, and start humming an old lullaby or lovesong whose words I never got to know, her one good eye fixed steadily beyond the green and brown leaves of the star-apple tree to some distant point, or moment in the past, that only she would care about, until her head started to nod imperceptibly, the breeze of a barrio summer succeeding, as usual, in reducing one’s reveries to sleep. One day we were informed by telegraph that Tiya Diday was dying. In a chartered bus, we traveled from the north in an unscheduled trip to the faraway hometown in the south to catch her last days as a living, beloved person. She was dying – but that fact had not yet sunk into us nephews and nieces – of cancer of the pancreas that had caused her to bleed for years without ever having had some proper diagnosis, much less treatment. With her mother, surviving sister and three brothers gathered around her papag bed in a darkened room, she suffered towards her last moment on earth, and we the children were made to wait outside, our hair standing on end in fear of something dreadful about to happen. We could not peep inside, we were not allowed to say our goodbyes or be said goodbye to, we could only listen helplessly to the labored, wheezing gasps and cries of pain, her final pleading to her earthly and heavenly mothers, Ina Ko Po! I could imagine my Lola, about to be bereft of yet another daughter, sitting beside her and clasping her hands in utter desperation to hold on to her dear life, for we could hear her reciting the most intense but ultimately futile prayers to God, Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin and a thousand saints headquartered in the hoary church of Bauan town. And then it was time for Lola herself to leave us. She was a petite, half-bent old woman whose hair was already silver, white and gray when I became aware of her existence, tied up in a neat little bun with a metal or horn comb always tucked into it, wearing seemingly the same baro’t saya all the time I knew her, her long skirt reaching down to the ankles whether she was sleeping or sweeping away dead leaves around the house, her appearance funnily reminiscent of the grandmother in the old ‘Buhay Pilipino’ comicstrip in Liwayway of the golden years, down to the roundish protrusion of her big-moled chin. She never displayed any sign of sickness or even debilitation through all those years I saw her puttering around the house and the looban, checking the hen’s nest for eggs, feeding and washing the pig being fattened up for the market, sweeping up dried leaves into a heap and setting them alight beneath the mango tree to make it flower and bear fruit, blowing through the metal tube that fed air to the cooking fire on the dapugan as she did the kitchen chores with and after Tiya Diday, looking after the first-born who had become a helpless, hopelessly irascible patient for almost a decade, and getting up at four o’clock in the morning, every morning of her life without fail, to say her prayers. Four o’clock was still part of night, so dark it was. I would wake up on the scratchy straw mat, but only open my eyes without stirring, as she began her hour-long ritual with a preliminary incantation of praise and gratitude for, presumably, waking up to another day, and follow this up with a string of Ama Namin, Aba Ginoong Marya, the doxology, building up to a favored version of the Marian litany, and after so many years I can still recall some of the divine attributes recited by my grandmother from memory, while the small wick lamp flickered on the wall in lieu of a votive candle, lighting up her face as she prayed to Santa Maria and recited the close to a hundred attributes in the Marian litany. She would not pause from her prayers even as she turned to touch my shoulder reassuringly, or to help me scratch a mosquito bite, or to cover me up with the thin Ilocano blanket I had kicked away in my fitful sleep – interrupted as soon as she’d risen up to begin the ritual – and finally she would finish with Ang Tanda, the sign of the Cross, after she which she would stand up from the mat, just as the roosters crowed, go down the house and begin the day’s chores. In later years I would often wonder: could my summer vacation have been more restful had I had an extra hour of sleep before the dawning of each day? (And did her prayers do her, me, the world of sinners and sufferers of physical affliction, any good at all? Her children’s travails – and those of their own children, later – never seemed to have moved her God.) The last years of her life were spent not in our hometown but in Baguio City, that haven of pine trees up north where most of her children and grandchildren had settled in the early fifties. Her husband, my Mamay, had long been gone, her two elder daughters, Kakang Angge and Tiya Diday, were no longer around to keep her company, and rather than suffer her to be alone in Cupang, her remaining children brought her up to a place she was unfamiliar with, a cold mountain city where the rain was not only not as warm as the summer downpours in Cupang but even freezing and sometimes came down as hailstones, rain that did not rouse a sweet scent from the earth when it struck, unlike the rain in the lowlands. There was no sprawling looban she could clear of leaves and droppings, no pen or sty for animals she could feed and care for, no fields beyond the bamboo grove where she could pick vegetables from, no familiar trees or undergrowth, no elderly acquaintances whose memories and experiences she had shared for close to a century, for they had either died or had been left behind in Cupang to fade away. There was only the constant smell of diesel fumes and the roar of vehicles, the alternation of highland storm which was most of the year, and Holy Week heat, and one day for no apparent reason at all she fell ill and into a coma for months, lightly breathing as we took turns gathering around her sick bed at the hospital, her eyes closed tight with not a sign of life visible on them, except for an occasional twitching of the eyelids, but we continued to speak to her, hoping she could hear us wish her well, or feel our kisses on her cheeks and forehead and hands, but other than her breath and heartbeat there was no evidence of the sprightly old lady that she was or used to be, and one morning we let her go. On a day that must have been exactly like the one when we buried Mamay, we brought Lola back to her hometown, to the cemetery of her forbears and loved ones, interred her beside her husband’s tomb and those of her two daughters, cried out her name, uttered our terms of endearment for her, and spoke of her graces and goodness, and wished her well on her journey. Life went on until the next dying, and the next death to bereave us was that of Tiyo Idro. He had survived the war in a shell-shocked mental state, struggled through a long bout with poverty, and later led the exodus of the clan to the Cordillera boomtown of Baguio in the years after liberation. By the time he passed away, I was already abroad as a contractual employee, and the demands of my job prevented me from going home to attend his funeral. At least I was told about his death. I was not told about the death of an older cousin to whom I was closest, whom I had admired for his prowess in martial arts, his outspokenness and mature views on life even when barely out of his teens, and most of all for his work ethic. He vended dry goods in the market, blankets and clothes in faraway villages, sweepstakes tickets and patupat sweets from Baguio to Manila – or as far afield as his desperation and finances would take him – and he got through scrapes and situations with his bones and dignity intact. He raised a brood of three children, and got on well with their mother until crisis hit them so hard it split the family, him against all the rest, and it was only when I came home for my annual Christmas break that the news was broken to me. Kuya Tunying had taken his own life. Years earlier, he had turned up one day on the university campus where I was teaching, showing me the back pocket of his pants which had been slashed and divested of his thin wallet containing his lunch money, and he had asked to borrow a pair of pants from me. He turned up again another time, complaining that he had lost his watch to a thief who had snatched it off his wrist hanging out a bus window when he was on a trip to Divisoria, but he said he had the consolation of probably having put a bullet on the fellow’s back, because he saw him suddenly twist, and stagger into a dark alley after he had fired his cheap .22 cal. paltik revolver at the fleeing figure from where he sat in the bus, but that was cold comfort to one whose last remaining treasure was a gold-plated watch in his possession for such a long time. I heard him out, and must have given him part of my meager weekly wages. Having failed to get a loan from his better-off relations to pay his mounting business debts, having lost the affection of his wife and the trust of his children, he had grasped at the final solution, which was a canister of muriatic acid, and the solution made him froth in the mouth as he lay dying in face-contorting pain, without the benefit of extreme unction that could have presumably eased his passage into the happier afterlife where all debts are paid, all hunger pangs ended, and love reigns among reunited families who can now laugh at life as having been a great big joke, but before this paradise can come to pass, the suicide’s corpse is a study in horror, sliced in autopsy to reveal the burned internal parts where the acid had eaten away, from the tongue down into the gullet, esophagus, intestines and down into the ravaged stomach. When finally told about his suicide, I was left numbed for days, and years have passed and I still grieve over his death and salute his courage, for suicide – which ought to be called by a less grisly word such as ‘authanasia’, perhaps, some kind of self-liberation – has always been for me a most impressive argument that allows no refutation, a cheeky comeback at those who have tormented the sufferer, the solution that – at certain times of a farce-riddled, fate-ridiculed existence – agonists have had to consider, only for some of us to hold back from out of, yes, sheer cowardice, or perhaps even a sudden, illogical fear of hell. One day, several years ago, mortality came an inch closer to my immediate family. Itay -- just that one word, in the subject window on the e-mail screen. As I labored in the dreary salt mine of an office in another country, my father had suffered a massive stroke and lapsed into a coma. In a flash, I saw myself and my father walking behind a fin-tailed night-black Cadillac, and I imagined I had replaced my father while my own son had replaced me in the frame, and we were looking at our sun-burnished reflections on the chromed and curtained hearse. The day, I said to myself, that I have long been afraid of has come. The terse e-mail had just one paragraph of text explaining that he had drunk too much during a Rotary meeting and had collapsed, brought to emergency and later diagnosed with a massive blood clot induced by a stroke. The next message a day later said he was being rushed down from Baguio all the way to the Philippine Heart Center in Manila for an operation on his brain to ease up the pressure, that a shunt was going to be installed, that he was still unconscious. I booked a flight home, and prepared for the worst. My father and I – though he was always supportive of my school work when I was young, coaching me to win competitions, goading me to top exams – never really got on like two closest and best friends, and we simply had a relationship between governor and ward, or teacher and pupil, or patriarch and progeny, or programmer and protégé, for he was a taskmaster and a dreamer whose dreams, when not realized for himself, he wanted his first-born to carry on, which rather put me in a bind all through life and derailed some of my own plans, but I suppose everything collapses into a heap of emotions when one’s father is on the brink of vanishing, and my worst fear was that my siblings were withholding the worst from me, that as soon as I landed at the Manila airport I would be whisked off not to the ICU to comfort him but to a funeral parlor to join in the mourning, and so disconsolate was I before boarding the plane taking me back to the homeland that I scribbled a short poem in the dead of night, sitting apart from the passengers at the departure lounge. The years were always / silent between us // as though I never came / from you, a failed dream / at your end of time, // once a wisp of cloud / as you, a young man, lay / on fields of carabao grass // you gleaned me in / your eyes that furrowed / far into the earth / that lay beyond // but the years were always / silent between us. He was still in the hospital, condition stable, shunt firmly in the skull, able to recognize some loved ones, confusing others with somebody else, able to recall birthdays and other figures, but not what exactly he had gone through, and in the months that followed, while he walked with a wobble and a deteriorated sense of balance and spoke in an enfeebled voice, parts of his mind were back at work, and he could recite again the relative distances of all the planets to the sun, countries and their capitals, wonders of nature, facts of history and science, and most of all he could again remember that at crucial times of my childhood, he had been my coach and mentor. Most important, he had survived, he was alive, and he would live to tell more stories about the hometown we both loved. The most recent death was of an uncle, the youngest in my father’s brood. He must have for years been warned about the evils of smoking but who, like a billion other lung-diseased smokers in the world, did not have the heart to forego the most transient and treacherous of life’s pleasures, inhaling and exhaling poison for most of his adult life just because it seemed, no, it felt, as natural as breathing. And he passed away just as my father was recovering from his own, drink-induced stroke, and just as it mocks nature’s laws that a parent survives a child, an older sibling looking on at the younger one’s deterioration must be sensing an injustice in the order of things. Yet even as he struggled on when it was his time to be confined at ICU – the antiseptic ante-room to eternity where many in the clan, including myself, have done a spell – he wanted to participate in normal life, telling stories, giving instructions, remembering dates and events, all of which he diligently scribbled down, in an increasingly unwieldy writing, on yellow ruled paper. Tracheotomized, he found even whispering difficult, and most of the time an air mask was clapped on his face to draw in oxygen and assist his breathing. Eventually, not only his whispers but also his writings took much effort and insight to decipher. Was this the once brash young Batangueño, who counted among his exploits the unofficial land speed record in a Beetle, which he drove from Baguio to Manila in something like three hours or under? I visited him before returning to my work abroad. We cheered him up by recounting with him barrio stories and what he remembered of the past, and his memory, like my father’s, was prodigious – the coldest temperature ever recorded in the Philippines (Baguio, 1961, 6 Celsius) was among the things his carers and visitors learned from his catalogue of useful trivia. What stories he could have told me about my hometown, about my grandparents, about his own life, had I had the sense, years ago, to talk to him! Abroad, days later, I was staring at the saddest e-mail on my computer screen 2. Flores de Mayo At the end of the war in the Pacific, peace returned to Cupang. I was born in a one-room thatched hut a year after liberation, and my most vivid memory of infancy – otherwise an oft-repeated story that had taken a life of its own as a one-year-old’s implausible recollection of the event, or else a recurrent dream of that story asserting itself as ‘vivid memory’ – was the doomsday detonation of unexploded American bombs in the neighboring barrio of As-is, an incident that so traumatized the young man who was my father, he and his friends decided to quit the hazardous trade of gathering and packing in hemp sacks the yellowish gunpowder extracted from the decommissioned shells – stored by the US Army in poorly guarded rural ammo dumps – and supplying this to the poor fishermen of the Visayan islands who could then expect bigger catches with the aid of their home-made depth charges. In this ‘recollection’, I am quaking with fear behind a banana tree while people run about in all directions, as debris and shrapnel fall all around us through a haze of black smoke sweeping down from the sky. What actually happened, according to my mother’s account in a recent retelling of that deafening moment, was that she bundled me up at the first loud explosion from somewhere south, and rushed me out of the house to put as much distance as she could from the source of the blast which was heard kilometers away in the poblacion of Bauan and in the capital city of Batangas where my father was working at that time in an American military motor pool as a clerk. He and relatives and friends boarded a bus post-haste and rushed to As-is, fearing the worst. A first cousin of his, named Moises, astride a 1,200-pound behemoth of an aerial demolition bomb, had been chipping away with hammer and chisel to remove its warhead and get to the powder chamber, when the accident happened. No witness survived who could later describe the immediate cause – a hurried pounding on the metal casing perhaps, or a lit cigarette carelessly thrown the wrong direction – but the result was quick and deadly, an explosion of metal and flesh, setting off a chain reaction of secondary explosions of the stacked shells and bombs, and my father still recalls in gruesome detail how they had to scrape bits and pieces of his pulverized cousin off the earth several hundred meters in radius, and how the other blast victims had had their limbs torn and sent hurtling from their mangled bodies in all directions, some of these found dangling from the branches of nearby trees. There was another accidental blast in the adjoining barrio of Muzon a few months later – it gave off a louder bang as a whole stockpile of incendiary bombs exploded, hurling steel and bodies through the air and creating a burnt crater big enough to swallow the public school that stood near the blast site. Otherwise, Cupang was a barrio at peace at the end of the war, and those who inhabited it permanently or seasonally reveled in the rituals of rural life, well into the 1960s. June always began with rains lashing the archipelago, flooding the cities in the distant metropolis but renewing the fields in the countryside. We had our Flores de Mayo not in May but on the first day of June, another quirk in Cupang’s history, but we had all the trimmings and excitement of a Maytime festival, despite the occasional rain pouring into our processions. The barrio, for as long as I can remember, had always been divided into ilaya and ibaba, roughly conforming to the north and south divide, but also to the contour of the dipping highway that ran through it, upwards being ilaya heading towards Lemery and Taal, and downwards to Bauan and the capitol being ibaba, but it made for more celebrations, two fiestas instead of one, two processions, two sets of tropical royalty in corrido finery, like the European characters of Francisco Balagtas and Nemesio Caravana come to life in Cupang. The flores started a day early, with the sweet young things who were to march as sagalas and reynas, together with their escorts swarming all over the hedges and wild gardens and backyards of the barrio to gather assorted flowers – roses, rosal, champaca, calachuchi, sampaguita, cosmos, adelfa, bougainvillea, gumamela – to be fashioned into bouquets and sprigs and wreathes with which to festoon the carrozas and hand-held arches of the procession as well as the altar of the tuklong, the village chapel that housed the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary and which was used only for this time of the year. How I envied those older youngsters promenading up and down the barrio, flirting with Maytime fervor as they gathered blossoms and speared them with thin sticks for mounting on sliced wedges of the banana trunk, which then served as votive offerings on the Marian altar. In many of the houses, outsize talyasi woks and giant cauldrons were filled with stewing meats and boiling sauces, five-gallon Rizal kerosene cans – emptied of original contents – were steadily heating up the glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaves to transform them into the sweetest suman in the whole country, kitchen helpers were busy pounding and churning out mashed cassava and squeezing milk from grated coconut for nilupak and maruya, cases of beer were being stockpiled and cooled on sack-protected ricehusk-covered blocks of ice, and from the cities and the towns of other provinces and all the barrios far and neighboring, the relatives and visitors had started to arrive. The wee vacationists that we were – myself, my siblings, and our cousins – had already been brought down from the north days, sometimes weeks, before the big event. On the day of the fiesta – we were right smack in the middle of the barrio’s two geographical factions, thus enjoying two days of celebration – the prusisyon started rolling near twilight. Almost every participant who formed a long line along each flank of the series of carrozas and the principal actors – the queens and their respective courts – held a lighted candle with a protective piece of cardboard catching the droplets of hot tallow, and while praying or singing the crowd had only eyes for their favorite sagala, outfitted, made-up, mascaraed, illuminated with hundred-watt bulbs powered by mobile generators, aspiring to be more regal and lovely than the one following or preceding, each one – but most especially the prima inter pares, the Reyna Elena – feeling like the anointed mutya ng nayon, muse of the barrio. The Santacruzan ended at the tuklong, the village bamboo chapel, with the liveried paragons of Christian virtues who were the procession’s main characters taking up their places on the limited number of bamboo seats, joined by the barrio’s worthies, special guests from out of town, and the prayer leaders, while the rest of humanity milled outside, either seriously praying or engaged in inebriated banter and some occasional altercation if not outright fisticuffs, and the inside of the tuklong was filled to overflowing with floral offerings to be deposited by ladies partnered by gentlemen who knelt before the altar, as the congregation sang one single line repeated several times – Halina’t tayo’y mag-alay ng bulaklak kay Maria – in a round-style of singing where the same line overlaps itself all through the evening, so characteristic of the devotional single-mindedness and literary poverty with which, on hindsight, I have come to associate the faith I was born into. The last fiesta and procession I attended in my hometown was almost seventeen years ago, with my two children experiencing it for the first time, and they gamely acted as candle-bearers, although both were good-looking enough to have been costumed principals under the bright arches. As I took photographs all through the night, I relived the exhilaration of fiestas gone by and waxed nostalgic over my childhood frustration of never having been asked to be a Constantino, the sword-bearing cross-pollinated runt of a Swiss Guard-Conquistador consort of the barrio queen, the King Constantine to his mother Queen Helen who set out centuries ago to look for the actual death-cross of the martyred Christ and somehow found their way to the gaudy world of folk Catholicism, Filipino-style. Like many a barrio lad who papped on romantic tales in comic books and the Liwayway magazine – aching in the loins while gazing at the whimsical representations of busty women by Coching, Alcala, Redondo & co. – perhaps I had fallen precociously, subconsciously in love with those much older grown-up lasses with rouged cheeks, wearing sequined long gowns, tiaras and sashes, their baby-powdered flesh glimpsed but in parts, and many of them were distant cousins or young aunts who went on to marry barrio swains. Some of them would stay in the barrio to raise families and tend the fields, some would eke out mundane lives in distant cities as itinerant merchants, shopkeepers and dry goods vendors or, in time, professionals, while the rest would be migrating to other countries, serving in highrises, hospitals and homes for the elderly – sic transit pulchritudo mundi – and for some of the dashing young stalwarts who escorted them, there was always the US Navy or the merchant marine. When my children and I travelled to Cupang for that particular fiesta, we took the B.T.Co. Ford bus bound for Batangas City, instead of Lemery, a route with which I was not familiar. From the capitol, we got on a jeepney that would pass through Cupang on the way to Lemery via Muzon. I was on the lookout for the familiar old houses of thatched roofs, weather-beaten wooden sidings, crooked house posts of ancient, near-petrified trunks, capiz-shell windows, bougainvillea trellises with their riot of red, pink and purple bracts and prickly branches, family sari-sari stores built into and underneath the frontage of houses, through whose grills we salivated as urchins at the capped garapon of cookies, biscuits, candies and gums, native pilipit and panutsa, the canned pleasures of processed viands and fillings and desserts, the plastic tubs of Star margarine and the metal canisters of Royal Guava Jelly, as we pondered how best to spend the fistful of copper centavos in our grip. With mounting excitement – much more so that I was about to relive the experience with my children in tow – did I await the sighting of our gate, the pultahan of tamped earth graded into a few steps with bamboo retainers, where in days gone by we would sit on a wooden bench while waiting for the bus or overloaded jeepney headed southerly, during the summers of my youth, and most of all I was anticipating the sharp rise of the highway which led up to a swerve towards the left, the cue for me to shout para to the driver, but there was no such rise, and the jeepney careened on towards the northerly part of Cupang, until I realized in panic that we had passed the house a kilometer back. The reason was that many of the old landmarks had disappeared. Ancestral huts had given way to recent masonry erected with funds from overseas toil: Katas ng Saudi and Katas ng Amerika had been primarily parlayed into spanking-new abodes of adobe bricks or hollow blocks sometimes reaching the point of ostentation, followed by the stainless steel jeepney that meant either a life of leisure or economic independence, and Cupang was no exception among the thousands of barrios all over the country. Shingles, sometimes a whole series dangling like wooden wind chimes by the door, proliferate like historical markers in front of houses old and new, proclaiming the professions of successful siblings – doctor, engineer, lawyer, accountant, medical technologist, dentist – who spent scores of collective years in the universities of Manila and other places like Baguio, their studies financed by what their parents earned, farming the land or hawking assorted merchandise all over the archipelago, and now these professionals, whose titles hang outside the door, would hardly be expected to be living in that barrio. The road from Cupang has taken generations of my townmates not only to the country’s metropolis, but to the global highway as well, joining up with millions of compatriots in a diaspora whose end is not in sight. 3. The pit and the pendulum Vacations in old Cupang were the time of my life. I had witnessed the centuries-old ancestral hut give way to a more contemporary wooden box on concrete posts with GI aluminum sheet roofing, with ample working and playing space underneath the new structure where there used to be an antiquated granary and shed for implements, the house blessing marked by a minor fiesta that had most barriofolk streaming in to celebrate with us. When I had gotten older, I grew sentimental enough to rue the disappearance of the prewar dwelling my ancestors had grown up in. Childhood in Cupang hovered between terror and delight. We would strip off as soon as the rain fell, making the road steam and the earth release its musty odors, and we gamboled in the yard or clambered up the trees. When the collecting steel drum was full to brimming with rainwater, I would jump into it, shrieking as soon as the cold liquid touched my body, and there was Tiya Diday threatening to do greater harm on my person if I did not jump out of the drum forthwith. Nature’s predators, we cut off Y-shaped boughs from the tough kakawati tree to fashion hardy slingshots with which to bring down anything that flew overhead or perched on branches or crawled in the brambly thicket or among the tangled bamboo. We lay down on the warm asphalt at night to look at the streaking meteorites and unblinking stars that were starkly visible in the dustless rural sky. We were unafraid of highway traffic which was almost non-existent after dusk, for there was hardly a motor vehicle in the barrio, the provincial jeepneys and buses plied their routes only at daytime, and the only danger lay in being struck by hordes of bats cluttering the twilight sky and swooping down like dive bombers sent out from a vampire’s cave. In the old hut lit only by small kerosene wick lamps at night, the small ones huddled together to listen to stories from our elders about kapre, tikbalang and tiyanak abounding in the dark woods around us and in the fields, ravines and dry river beds in unchartered territories, and we dared not stare into the sullen lukban tree that loomed outside lest we see a vision of hell. In the meantime, the small lamps were translating our small huddled bodies into elongated, flickering, distorted shadows on the hut’s sawali walls. On hot summer days, there would sometimes be an alarm sent throughout the barrio: a mad dog, asong bang-aw, was on the loose, children were to keep indoors, and all able-bodied men were to go on patrol with their heavy dark ironwood kamagong clubs. One time, as I sat by the window reading from a pile of Hiwaga, Tagalog Klasiks, Filipino and Espesyal comicbooks, in which fantasy came to wondrous life and all sad tales had happy endings, I heard an ear-shattering crash of metal and glass. I looked up to witness, right in front of our house, a smashed jeepney lying on its roof, its wheels turning pointlessly in the air, its underside a jumble of broken camshaft and twisted rods, while bleeding, hideously lacerated passengers screamed and cried out to God as they emerged one after the other from the crumpled back of the vehicle. Mario, closest to me among all cousins because nearest to me in age, was playmate and protector who could cut, whittle and fashion lengths of bamboo into Scaramouche swords with coconut shells for hand-guards as well as bows and arrows with feather fins, who devised chicken traps, and provided motor power for my red Columbia tricycle, one foot on the platform and the other foot furiously pounding on the ground while maneuvering the handlebar with both hands, as I sat frozen and wind-whipped and gleeful on the saddle, my feet in the air and safely off the madly whirling pedals. We would start from the spot where the hut in which I was born was progressively rotting away from disuse and termite infestation, under the massive mango tree on the highest point of the hill, and from there we would hurtle down the narrow dirt path cutting through amorseco grass and a grove of banana trees, race underneath the length of the house, until we came to a dead stop in the dark looban where the bamboo creaked and sighed and the flies buzzed over the pit privy. I probably must have wished that my cousin and I could have tried slaloming down the sloping asphalt highway from ilaya to ibaba, right past the house on the hill called Tanawan and towards the aplaya where the sea began, but the three-minute derby run was thrill enough, although it took my huffing and puffing cousin much longer to trundle the Columbia with me still on it up all the way back to the starting point. For a city boy sojourning in the barrio, bowel movement was always a problem. I had a choice between squatting on a piece of newspaper or a spread of magazine in a discreet corner of the yard – the warm bundle to be wrapped up and thrown into the pit privy – or squatting on the pit privy itself. The newspaper was fine, except that one had to endure being watched from behind by an impatient, hard-bitten Spot, the shit-eating dog, who waited tongue hanging out as I moved my bowels and would start inching forward if I so much as hinted with body language that I was done. Either one had to shoo him away, or else there would be no shit to throw into the hole in the ground. And the pit privy was childhood’s cave of nightmares, the black hole in one’s consciousness. It consisted of four bamboo sawali walls with a gutted door and no roof. The hole in the middle was defined by a square platform of some pieces of wood propped up somehow underneath by a structure that must have been rotting over the years, which was probably the reason the platform sagged as soon as one squatted on it. In the rare times that I used the pit, my eyes would dart around and above me, my heart would be racing, my knees would be wobbly from nervousness plus the strain of uncustomary squatting, and the difficulty of crapping was compounded by the fear of the sudden appearance of the bayawak lizard which made its home among the bamboo only yards away from me, or of the rumored python hiding out in the nearby tree, the thought of a sawang bitin dropping in before I was done perhaps the undiagnosed primal source of my cardiac condition and paranoia in later life, and the sheer fear of these creatures almost made me ignore the armies of squiggling white maggots marching out of the hole, while red hurtful ants scurried around, and not to forget, by the way, the sheerest terror of all, which was the platform just giving up, and caving in, delivering one to the only fate that is truly worse than death. Sometimes, I could give credence to the theory that, apart from my other chronic illnesses, my irritable bowel syndrome in late middle-age could be traced to that pit and its pendulum of terrors that swung ever closer. On the brighter side, we had ice cream in the barrio. Mamay Balás, the lone ice-cream maker in Cupang and a relative several degrees removed – as most of the old people of Cupang were – churned out soft vanilla- and buko-flavored snow-white ice cream which anticipated by decades the whipped swirl-top soft delights sold in the megamalls and amusement parks of the future. He pushed his galvanized iron cart up and down the undulating pockmarked asphalt road, selling his sickeningly sweet ice cream for ten centavos a heaping mug or bowl, with a free second helping to the youngster now penniless but wanting more, for Mamay Balás was the barrio lad’s everyday Santa Claus, whose semi-frozen confections in his makeshift ice-cream factory beneath his nipa hut dispelled the heat of the summer months, he whose legend will outlive him for ages, as he rests in the pantheon of long-dead village heroes who will be remembered for contributions to the gaiety of rural childhood. 4. Baskets and ropes Father’s second life has opened up to me a book of stories about the past. I have often wondered what kind of person Mamay must have been like in his younger days, when he was my age, for instance, how he did in school, what women he courted, how he met and won my Lola, what he did during the Revolution, and how he lived and died a poor peasant in a barrio that seemed completely cut off from the twentieth century, except for the occasional traffic on its asphalt highway. Having slowed down and more sedentary now than he has ever been, my father has more time to talk about the past, although he struggles to put together bits and pieces about Mamay and Lola. Once, in college, I had tried to write a history of the family, starting with a genealogy whose recollection strained Mamay’s brain to exhaustion, but I did get some interesting data from him a few years before he died, written down in a bluebook which was among the things razed by a fire that ate up the old Baguio market in which we had a dry goods shop. I had gotten him to recall the names of his grandparents and distant relatives, and to recount what he did during the revolution against Spain. Nothing to boast about, he said: he was among the few riflemen who engaged in a few skirmishes in Bauan, and he denigrated his ‘riple’ which he said was too heavy and unwieldy – there was not much else I could get him to reveal. But my father has, for the first time, said so many things about Mamay that he could have told us, his children, a long time ago. Mamay was a man who “knew so many things”, in my father’s terse description. He knew how to weave all kinds of baskets and all kinds of ropes needed for everyday life as well as commerce. In Cupang he earned fame as a master craftsman of baskets which included the balaong, one meter high, five feet wide, used as a storage for palay, made of bamboo strips about one millimeter wide; the baluyot, similar to the balaong but made from soft buri strips and could thus be folded; the takuyan, one foot square at the base, tapering towards the mouth, with ears to which carrying strings were attached, worn around the waist, and carried the sheaves of rice harvested from the fields; the bilao, a circular, flat-bottomed, made from closely interwoven bamboo strips, meant for winnowing rice bran; and the bitsay, like the bilao but with sieve-like small holes for straining out the tiniest particles of bran to be made into hog mash. He was also adept at rope-making, was possibly the finest rope-maker around, and he spun and wove ropes of buri fiber from thin strings to thick cables, the first for tying and attaching things, the second for draught animals to pull plow and harrow with, or for drawing water from deep wells, and my father continues to marvel how Mamay could expertly piece together a sturdy rope thirty meters long using two-meter long buri segments, the secret being in serial joining and fine knotting and painstaking plaiting of the fiber strands. He made plows from hardened wood and harrows fashioned from the taywanak variety of toughest bamboo, whose nodal protrusions alone were enough to break the earth into furrows, and took very little time in improvising a simple yatab, a cutting implement used in harvesting rice stalks. Mamay, too, was a master carpenter, who could assemble an entire bahay kubo all by himself, using hardwood trees for posts, whole and split bamboo for frames and sidings, nipa leaves for the roofing, without so much as a single iron nail, instead using thin strips of bamboo for lashing the whole structure together. He could have made money, he could have started a trade and made life easier for his brood, but that, says my father now, was not Mamay, who charged only a few centavos for even the most finely, tightly woven of baskets, volunteered his services to people, and gave away baskets to those who could not pay for them. This is not how I remember my Mamay. I simply knew him as a quiet, big-eared, splayed-footed, gray-eyed, diligent presence who never seemed to stop doing chores, a gently ambling old man who cried with joy whenever grandchildren arrived for the annual fiesta and family get-together, and who shed tears again when we all left at the end of summer, making us promise to come back the following year, always expressing the fear it could be the last time he was saying goodbye to us, who stood so old and bent at the roadside and never budged and just kept on waving a calloused, weathered, carbuncled hand at the tiny passengers aboard the jeepney speeding away towards Muzon for the junction rendezvous with the Manila-bound bus, until we both disappeared from each other’s sight. 5. A captain and his castle-house Other than the extinct hut where I was born, there is a house in the old hometown that I will continue to inhabit in my mind. Of our vanished house, I have no real memory, and only my mother’s description of it remains. Of the other house, full of legend, to which I have always attached a tinge of envy and sadness, I know that it will always be there, but I may never enter it. It is a house that used to belong to one Julio Salud – Captain Salud as the rural folk called him – a harbor pilot whose enviable highly paid job it was to guide incoming ships towards their berthing docks at the old Batangas pier. He had built a mansion on top of a hill with a view of the sea, actually the bay of Batangas, and to this day I remember with a vague aching that from that spot of the national highway below the Captain’s mansion, on a hill called Tanawan – literally a lookout or viewing point – the sea off Batangas’ shore was deepest blue, and that I used to dream of someday living in that house, from where I could watch the stately ships come in and the sun set on the far edge of the world. The story begins with a young Isabelle, future Captain’s wife, getting pregnant by a rich scion in Cagayan de Oro. The weakling’s parents did not like her, took away her child and reclaimed their son from her, whereupon she fled to Manila where she met Julio, an enterprising lad who had sent himself to college and finished marine engineering. They got married and eventually settled in a small house in the southern town of Bauan to be near his place of work which was the provincial capital, where he eventually landed the job of harbor pilot whose wages were fabulous by the standards of the day. They began to accumulate wealth, and they built a house on a hill in a place called Dahilig, which, as its name implies, was a promontory that sloped down to ricefields and woodlands, situated at the far end of Cupang on the road to the poblacion of Bauan. The hill overlooked a panoramic view of rolling terrain, with field and forest stretching out on all sides, and in the distance, shimmering in summer like an impressionist painting, was the sea. On the very edge of the promontory demarcated by a cyclone wire fence and stone posts was mounted a high-magnification telescope, with which the Captain scanned the horizon for incoming ships he would be asked to safely steer to shore. The house was U-shaped, the middle part a reception area that opened out to a front lawn and a back garden. In this well-appointed house on Tanawan they entertained movie stars, beauty queens and other personalities who came all the way from Manila. Sometimes the place was used as a location for film shooting. The Captain had an extensive vintage wine and liquor collection, while Isabelle had expensive jewelry, single settings and parrures of diamond and emerald, ruby and topaz, and every precious stone that a ship captain’s wages could buy. They had shelves fully stocked with antique as well as state-of-the-music 78 rpm vinyl records, played on a mahogany stereo set which Julio himself had assembled. On Tanawan was a pleasure dome decreed by wealth, where the latest Connie Francis hits and big band music were played, where Manila’s society peacocks and partners strutted, danced and drank the nights away, in summer heat or monsoon weather. The peasants of that Batangas countryside could not have imagined that in the midst of all the rural quiet and backwardness of the centuries stood an enchanted palace, or at least a sprawling epicurean bungalow, with Mediterranean airs and a Hollywood lifestyle. But most of all, most of all, what the house took greatest pride in was Isabelle, she of stunning looks which combined the features of Marlene Dauden and Lolita Rodriguez in their younger days. That alone would have assured the marriage, had it lasted, the excitement of unending amour and romancing, on top of all that dolce vita. Near the end of her life, decades later, Isabelle would be no more than a dehydrated vegetable, reduced to silence or incoherence and memory loss, years after leaving the barrio to escape the pestilence that overcame her family of declassés. When disease set in, sometime in the 1960s, Tanawan was on its way to becoming Paradise foreclosed. Captain Salud was taken ill, afflicted with aggravated arthritis of the knees and, having lost much of his physical vitality, became accident-prone, his sailor’s instincts diminished, his confidence shaken, until that day he crashed a ship as he piloted it towards the pier, for which he was sued, because of which he lost his job. His illness got even worse. A 12-year-old son, one among five children, died, and it was a matter of time before he followed son to the grave, with the rest of the family, save for Isabelle, doing likewise in the years of ruin that followed. While he was still alive but barely, the house had been mortgaged, the trove of jewelry sold off one by one to maintain the house’s and the family’s upkeep and pay off their creditors, until Isabelle was driven by debt and despair to attach herself to a succession of lovers who could tide them over with some pittance, this sullying of Tanawan’s goddess unbeknownst to the dying Captain, until the day he died, which was soon followed by foreclosure and the total loss of high-society friends. Now widowed, she answered an ad for a job in Saudi Arabia as family driver to an elderly Arab woman, but when her employer died, she moved on to the United States where she became one of the earliest Filipino “caregivers” to elderly Americans, before this profession became all the rage in the overseas recruitment business. Her eldest daughter, one of Tanawan’s charmed princesses, who had had four children post-foreclosure with a man from whom she was separated, followed her to the US, had a string of affairs, finally got around to marrying an American which was the point of it all, and brought over her children for a new lease on life, while Isabelle returned to the Philippines sickly and frail, suffering a near-fatal stroke that rendered her immobile and close to comatose. The story of Tanawan came to light when, about eight years ago, a former student of mine at the State University and I were drawn into an intense relationship after we chanced upon each other by accident thirty years after we first met in the classroom, both of us in the meantime having become overseas workers in full flight from sundered marriages and star-crossed post-marital relationships. As we exchanged stories from our youth, it turned out she knew intimately the family of Captain Salud and called his wife her Tita Isabelle, for her mother had been like a sister to the Captain’s wife and her siblings, and she recalled that in her early teens she would spend her summer break at the Tanawan mansion, marveling at the opulence of the place, the joie de vivre of the occupants, the razzle-dazzle of the guest glitterati, and the magnificence of the rural landscape below and the marine panorama in the distance, and it just struck me that this wondrous woman was a lovely wisp of a girl who would spend summer days in that castle-house on the hill, upon that vantage point called Tanawan – and was it even possible that, as she stood on its balcony or peered through the telescope, surveying the wind-swept fields below, laughing in the breeze as she pointed towards that blue blaze in the distance, I would be zooming past below her and the mansion of dreams, perspiring in an overloaded jeepney bound for Bauan with my Tiya Diday for the Sunday mass, my eyes gazing upward at that mysterious hilltop where the Captain’s castle stood, wishing myself to be, someday, in that Captain’s boots, and living his life all over to a happy ending? In my later years in college, I would think of that house from time to time, and sometimes wished I could own it someday, even renaming it Villa El Mar in homage to that blue vision on the horizon. Tanawan on the hill has possibly changed hands several times, and last we heard, it has been put up for sale again. I still have whimsies of someday becoming its white-haired owner, dreaming of the summers of my childhood and of ol’ blue Batangas bay, with that once wisp of a girl, ravishing well past midlife, still in my arms, the two of us dancing under starlight to the music of old-fashioned times. 6. War, peace and a wedding The war in the Pacific had cured my father’s athlete’s foot. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Philippines soon after, he was a junior high school student in Manila, having decided to quit Batangas High School because he could no longer afford to pay tuition or pay for his board and lodging in the capitol. It was not much, but then his family’s resources were next to non-existent. He and his eldest brother saved up enough money to pay the fare to Manila, and once there they looked for jobs that could earn him passage to at least a high school diploma. He found employment in an optical shop cleaning lenses, and soon he was adept at taking optical measurements. He also sold sweepstakes on the side, wearing out his shoes as he walked the whole length of Avenida Rizal, and still found time to read his books and work on his assignments for his classes at the National Teachers College. Often he had to shower quickly and dash off to school or to work, which was the reason he could not dry his feet fast enough, for which the painful price was foot eczema. In December 1944, the Japanese invaded. He remembers the day the sky over Manila was swarming with Japanese warplanes thick as flies, but no bombs fell because the capital had been declared an “open city”. The first time he had seen an airplane – though nobody in the barrio knew at that time what it was or where it had come from – was twenty years earlier, when he was a four-year-old tagging after a posse of hard-bitten barrio elders who thought the apocalypse had arrived, with the coming of a strange-sounding monster they could not fully describe later, except that it was black and gave off a frightening roar and they had to conclude that this was a monster from hell that they must confront and do battle with, arming themselves with bolos and hoes and wooden clubs and anything they could lay their hands on. Thinking that their war whoops and imprecations – dimonyo! hayup! putanginamo! – had sent the flying beast slinking away beyond the clouds, they celebrated their victory over evil. The Japanese bombs were dropping in other places all over the country. The exodus to the provinces was a stampede of fear-stricken citizens the likes of which he had never seen before. He and his brother fought for precious space on the train which started out from Paco, and reaching Calamba they transferred to a pagulpol, the charcoal-fed bus bound for Batangas, and were safely home when the full fury of the Pacific war was raging all over the islands, and brutally came to Batangas in the form of massacres and executions, some of which happened very near Cupang. But his family lived through the war unscathed, only had to worry about subsistence and sustenance, and the only way to feed themselves was to become, as far as Mamay and his sons were concerned, migratory farm workers who trekked barefoot across kilometers of field and forest, away from roads where Japanese checkpoints proliferated and troops moved about, to reach the neighboring province of Quezon where they took part in small-scale harvests for their share of a few kerosene cans of palay, which they then carried back to Cupang slung on their shoulders from bamboo poles, a journey of several days fraught with danger and murderous to feet and soul. Much of the time, my father walked on bare feet, which are what a peasant would know to be most effective in threshing rice, and he had no need of his shoes either when time came for them to break up the fallow land again, trudging behind the plow and cattle. And the re-acquaintance of bare feet with raw earth was what finally liberated my father from the agonizing pain of his foot eczema, which was how he called his affliction. During the war years, a family from Malabon had moved to Cupang where the patriarch engaged in farming while his wife and daughters turned to dressmaking to make ends meet. It was the perfect setting for a rural love story, if one did not mind so much that an enemy occupation army lurked everywhere. My father was soon courting one of the daughters – they spent hours, as good friends, singing popular tunes from the pocket-sized Song Hits pulp magazine. He even got into a fistfight with a rival who was a tough guy in the barrio, sustaining an ugly wound inflicted by the ruffian’s balisong, but in the end he won my mother’s hand. They got married as soon as the war ended, and soon thereafter, I was begotten so that in time, I would make my own later journey from Cupang, towards childhood’s end, but only to find myself careworn past mid-life ten thousand miles from home, aching for the rains and the scent of the earth and the star-spangled nights of the old hometown. 7. Epilogue to a life Christmas is over: in a few days, I leave to resume my contractual job overseas. I have been taking long walks around the subdivision with my now doddering father, he who used to heave up to his shoulder a full cavan of rice at the age of fifty, who was never daunted by any foe no matter his size or heft, from his grade school days to his middle age, who once punched an arrogant Manila trader in the face and knocked his tooth out for having bawled him out in front of people in his Malate store which my father supplied with woodcarvings from Baguio, and who in his youth, as a new father starting a family, had sailed the Visayan seas after the war to sell gunpowder to fishermen, until that fateful explosion in As-is put an end to his maritime adventures. I ask him so many questions that he tires more easily than he should, pausing in mid-stride and squinting his eyes and scratching his head, his brow furrowed as he recalls incidents and periods and little histories, and I hold his elbow to make him resume his slow shuffling walk which is part of his daily constitutional. I do not remember exactly when I became taller than he was, not because I had grown perceptibly, but because he had shrunk quite obviously, and rapidly, as old age set in. One is never aware of that particular point in life when the elders’ adage takes effect: they are on their way back – to the dustbowl, presumably – while the youth is still on his way to the turning post – in this case, towards post-middle-age where mortality kicks in. He knows, everyone knows, that in time – we hope not for a decade yet, but he says he feels it coming – he would be taking the journey that Mamay and Lola and his siblings have taken, except that having lived most of his adult life far away from Cupang, the old hometown may not likely be the final destination. Besides, his two brothers rest in a Baguio graveyard, as well as nephews and a brother of mine who died prematurely a long time ago. But even if we shall no longer bury our dead at the Bauan cemetery, our old hometown will always be there for us to visit: there lie not only a clan’s memories of hopeful lives as well as failed dreams, but also the remains of the men and women who gave us those memories, and the best moments of our childhood. Whenever I find myself in a place where the sky is unsullied by city lights and city smoke, I look up at the stars and wish I could lie down again on the asphalt road of old Cupang, feel the warmth on my back and feast my eyes on the constellations which I knew as a boy. Mamay and Lola, my uncles and aunts and cousins and acquaintances may have commingled with the dust of this earth, but they may as well now be among the shooting stars that blaze across the sky, or they could be the spirit-wisps one sees shining among those distant galaxies, but wherever they may be, they will never be too far away from the old hometown. This essay won Second Prize in the 2006 Palanca Awards |