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Likhaan 06 (2012)
Likhaan 06 (2012)
The Journal
of Contemporary
Philippine Literature
ISSN: 1908-8795
Gémino H. Abad
Issue Editor
Virgilio S. Almario
Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo
Associate Editors
Ruth Jordana Luna Pison
Managing Editor
Anna Sanchez
Publication Assistant
Zenaida N. Ebalan
Book Designer
ADVISERS
Gémino H. Abad
Virgilio S. Almario
Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo
Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio
Bienvenido L. Lumbera
FELLOWS
Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.
Jose Neil C. Garcia
Victor Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera Jr.
Charlson Ong
Jun Cruz Reyes
Rolando B. Tolentino
ASSOCIATES
Romulo P. Baquiran Jr.
ICW STAFF
Arlene Ambong Andresio
Gloria Evangelista
Pablo C. Reyes
Contents
POETRY / TULA
95 Sea Stories
Merlie M. Alunan
102 Stretch
Isabela Banzon
106 Four Poems
Mookie Katigbak
111 Parameters
Joel M. Toledo
115 Being One
Alfred A. Yuson
iii
121 “Alamat ng Isang Awit” at Iba pang Tula
Michael M. Coroza
126 Mga Tula
Edgar Calabia Samar
130 Sa Kanilang Susunod
Isang Kalipunan ng mga Tula
Charles Bonoan Tuvilla
141 Mula sa Agua
Enrique Villasis
NONFICTION
149 The Last Gesture
Merlie M. Alunan
166 Traversing Fiction and Nonfiction in Travel Writing
Vicente Garcia Groyon
178 The River of Gold
Jeena Rani Marquez
194 Butterfly Sleep and Other Feuilletons
Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas
INTERVIEW / PANAYAM
207 Intensities of Signs: An Interview with the Visionary Cirilo F.
Bautista
Ronald Baytan
237 Ang Tatlong Panahon ng Panulaan
ni Rogelio G. Mangahas
Louie Jon A. Sanchez at Giancarlo Lauro C. Abrahan
iv Likhaan 6
An Introduction to Our Literary
Scene in 2011
Gémino H. Abad
A
nything literary—poetry, fiction, play, essay—is wrought from
language; “wrought,” the past tense of “work,” for the writer works
the language, as the farmer the soil, so their medium might bear fruit.
Thus, we call any poem or short story a “literary work”: a work of language.
As wrought, the poem’s words (I use “poem,” from Greek poiein, “to make,”
as generic term for all literary works) bring the past alive to the present, for
the writer brings to life what he remembers, and thereby, offers the sensitive
reader a gift; the reader need only open with his own imagination the writer’s
present.
The literary work is, of course, a work of imagination, even as language
itself, ceaselessly reinvented, and its script are the finest invention of the
human imagination. It may be that onomatopoeia, the mimesis of the sounds
of nature and human situations, is the origin and fount of language and
writing.
Imagination entails work of memory; the ancient Greeks were right
when they thought of Mnemosyne as the mother of the nine Muses. Memory
brings to life what is past, what in one’s experience has moved one’s soul.
I have always been struck by what Eduardo Galeano says of memory: “to
remember,” he says, is in Spanish, “recordar,” which derives from Latin, “re-
cordis,” that is, “to pass through the heart.”1 For the heart’s memory is the
profoundest, that which has most stirred one’s whole being. Similarly, the
etymology of “experience” from both Latin (experiri) and Greek (enpeiran)
spells the very nature of all our living, for it denotes all the meaningfulness of
our human condition: “to undergo or pass through, to try or attempt (hence,
the English ‘experiment’ and ‘trial’), to fare or go on a journey, to meet with
chance and danger, for nothing is certain.”
v
We consider the author’s work first as literary: that is, both as work of
language and as work of imagination. As work of language, we regard its
craft, mindful of what the philosopher Albert Camus says about style or the
writer’s way with language: that it brings about “the simultaneous existence
of reality and the mind that gives reality its form.”2 As work of imagination,
we contemplate its vision and meaningfulness, for its mimesis or simulation
of a human experience is already an interpretation of it. In short, we consider
the literary work as work (labor) of art. Only then, I should think, might we
consider other factors or forces that made it possible or that might elucidate
certain aspects of its nature other than its literariness; such other factors as
the author’s own life or experience (we would of course have to examine
all his works), his psychology, the social and intellectual forces in his own
time, his own country’s history and culture, etc. Here lies the value of other
theories or approaches than the formalist (despite every theory’s limitations
and excesses). Since theory is essentially a way of looking from certain basic
assumptions, none is apodictic (absolutely certain).
The literary work as work of language and imagination is basically
rhetorical in nature: it aims to persuade and thereby to move and give
pleasure. That is its dynamis, power, or effect (in Tagalog, dating): dulce et
utile, says Horace—revel and revelation.
Dating: the work literally arrives: that is, it stirs the reader’s imagination
and, persuaded by the authenticity of the imagined experience, be that only
an emotional outburst or a train of reflection, the reader is moved at the core
of his being as human. The good and the true and the beautiful: these are
clichés, abstractions, even (if you will) illusions; but when they come alive in
a particular scene or human situation, with words and words through imagery
and metaphor and other figures of thought which arouse the imagination,
then the work, “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing,” arrives. The good,
the true, and the beautiful—and their opposites, as well—arise in the flesh,
as it were, and convict us without pity: we cry tears or are purged in laughter.
“A book,” says J. M. Coetzee, “should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea
inside us.”3
In sum: whatever the literary work’s paksa (subject or theme), it is the
work’s saysay (point, significance, meaningfulness) and diwa (spirit, vision,
stance or attitude toward reality) that endow the paksa with persuasive and
emotional force (dating). What are requisite for any reader are a deep sense
for language and a capacity for that close reading which opens the text: that
word-weave, after all, has already come to terms with itself. Any interpretation
vi Likhaan 6
of the text is a coming to terms with it, too. Of course, interpretations of
paksa, saysay, and diwa may vary because the reader draws from his own life
experience, his wide reading, and his own psyche which comprises his own
temperament and predilections, biases and ideological advocacies.
Play of language, play of mind, for revel and revelation—that is the
“literary work.” Imagination herself is player and mimic with various guises
and masks. For craft, play of language because one must ever try to override
and transcend the voids and inadequacies of language by its own evocative
power, and thereby enhance its capacity to forge new forms or renew past
“habitations of the word.”4 And for cunning, play of mind because there
are no absolute certainties. On that so-called universal plane, we are one
species: homo sapiens, presumably. On that plane, nationality is a legal fiction,
and one’s country is only how one imagines her as one stands upon his own
ground: that is, his own heartland’s culture and history through fleeting
time. That universal plane isn’t the realm of eternal verities, only the site of
everlasting questioning.
The “best among the best” in Likhaan 6
My calling is poetry—that is, only if anyone might presumptuously claim
from the Muse what truly cannot be anyone’s possession in that “craft or sullen
art.” I beg then my reader’s indulgence for my remarks on the poetry wrought
from English that, for embarrassment of riches, could not all be accommodated
in Likhaan 6. There are quite a number of remarkable poems that I personally
would not hesitate to include in an update of A Habit of Shores should I
venture again into those woods “lovely, dark and deep”; for instances, each
one for wholeness perfectly chiseled—Jov Almero’s “palindrome”; Miro Capili’s
“Monet’s Last Yellow”; F. Jordan Carnice’s “Relativities”; Albert B. Casuga’s
“Graffiti: Five Lenten Poems”; Nolin Adrian de Pedro’s “caxton”; Vincent
Dioquino’s “candescence”; Jan Brandon Dollente’s “When I say the sky opens
its mouth”; Eva Gubat’s “A Telling of Loss”; Pauline Lacanilao’s “A Crowded
Bus Stops Abruptly”; Christine V. Lao’s “Swatches”; R. Torres Pandan’s
“Remembering Our Future”; Trish Shishikura’s, “The Manner of Living”;
Jaime Oscar M. Salazar’s “Clinch”; Arlene Yandug’s “Aporia.” There are poems,
too, that taking after other poets’ works and poems, are informed by wit and
satire: Anne Carly Abad’s “How the world got owned”; Jasmine Nikki Paredes’s
“This Poem Is a Mouth”; and Vyxz Vasquez’s “Epal.” I might illustrate further
with some striking passages: from Pauline Lacanilao’s “Love Language”—
Introduction vii
If I ever learn the name
of the moment after prayer
when the Amen sheathes its blade
but the hilt of want still glints,
I will call my child the same.
Or from Eva Gubat’s “Eurydice, Rebooted”—
No need for saving.
She will burn
any stranger’s
rope ladder
hanging
deliciously
from
earth’s
tongue.
Or from Miro Capili’s “Overture to a disturbance”—
A house dreams of its rooms.
The frame of a window yearns
for a view of what extends it.
Likewise, as regards the fiction and nonfiction in English, and all the
works in Filipino, we have reaped a bountiful harvest. As editor I have relied
on my associates for their judgment. I am most grateful to them and to all
our reviewers who have been a great help in the final, objective-subjective
selection of the works for Likhaan 6. While I am not at liberty to reveal our
reviewers’ identities, I might draw from their commentaries which exemplify,
I should think, the standards and tastes of the contemporary critic-reader of
our literature in both English and Filipino. Their comments may also spur
more and ever finer writing. (For brevity, but without losing their sense, I
have edited their comments.)
As regards first the poetry in English, one reviewer, in choosing eight
from “the crop” (seventy-two poetry collections of “generally fine quality,”
says this reviewer), preferred poems that are “aware of the Filipino experience,
yet also conscious of poetry as the most potent use of language [so that] each
word or image, each poem as a whole, pulsates with a certain force because
it has been ‘made’ (undergone poiesis) into a thing of beauty and meaning.”
viii Likhaan 6
This reviewer chose “Sea Stories,” “Akin to Feeling,” “Parameters,“ “Grafitti:
Five Lenten Poems,” “In Lieu of the Visible,” “This Poem Is a Mouth,” “The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’s Cookbook,” and “In the Garden.” The
other reviewer also clarifies a personal view:
I like a poem that is at home in the world, in this century, and perceivable
by the human senses, not one that denies meaning, sensibility, or “reality
as we know it.” If there is a delay in meaning, it is intentional, and there is
a perceivable reward for such a tactic. Such a poem has respect for a reader
who is addressed or is allowed to overhear the speaker’s thoughts. Such a
poem has urgency in what is uttered. It shows a discipline with thought
and language … I praise the poet’s individual vision, but I also value his/her
resonance with tradition. The poem (and poet) is part of something larger
and something older.
Introduction ix
And certainly not the least are Mookie Katigbak’s “Four Poems,” for they
are perfectly chiseled “in the puzzle’s core”: heart’s weather and mind’s “lit
equations/of faiths we keep untrue for.”
For all the works wrought from Filipino, I relied on our reviewers and on
National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario. There were fifty-one poetry
collections; of these, four were among seven finalists in our reviewers’ list. The
poems by Enrique Villasis, Charles Bonoan Tuvilla, Edgar Calabia Samar,
and Michael M. Coroza “ably represent,” says Almario “the most recent
thematic pursuits and the corresponding experimental poetic expressions in
Filipino. The poets invariably display a high degree of mastery of modern
Filipino, even while using the traditional tugma’t sukat or carving new forms
in free verse, and disciplining the language according to their various chosen
ideological missions.”
In regard to fiction in English (fifty-nine short stories), one reviewer
selected eight; other than those finally selected, among these eight (including
the reviewer’s digest of the story) are: “Sugar and Sweetness” (a gay couple
undergoes “the same struggle as other couples having to ‘come to terms with
the brevity of things’”); “The Outsiders” (a community’s “concerted effort”
against new arrivals who bring changes forces it to grapple with its “uneasy
collective conscience”); “Ecstasy at Barranca, a Tale of the Baroque” (a family
rivalry set against the backdrop of their town’s religious tradition); “Still Life”
(“the persona’s world ends when her son gets lost,” but when the Rapture
occurs, “she meets in the empty ‘new world’ a young man who inspires her to
again be the dancer she used to be; however, he too turns into dust, leaving
her to declare the world’s end a second time”); and “Laws of Stone” (“a fantasy
revolving around a quest, its world-building done with care; plot-driven, with
well-drawn characters”). The other reviewer chose six, among them: “The
Outsiders”; “The New Daughter” (“an interesting sequel to the Pinocchio
tale”); “The Room by the Kitchen” (“a domestic helper in Singapore gradually
becomes a surrogate mother to an 8-year-old girl whose parents are too busy”);
and “The Photographer of Dupont Circle” (“the intricacies in the relationship
of a Filipino and his American boyfriend, a professional photographer; when
the latter exhibits his photographs of poverty and squalor in the Philippines,
the Filipino then retaliates, which makes for a thought-provoking ending”).
Four stories were finally chosen. In Jenette N. Vizcocho’s “What They
Remember,” there are, says one reviewer, “two lives that intersect, both
grappling with loss of memory and its retrieval; the significant details
are palpable, and the characters, carefully drawn, are sympathetic.” The
x Likhaan 6
characters’ “pain is all the more poignant for having been suppressed for so
long,” says associate editor Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo; for one character, the
pain “finds expression, perverse though it might be; for the other, there may
be “release from her self-imposed exile, as she ‘stares at her cell phone’s screen
and its blinking cursor’.” Angelo Lacuesta’s “Siren” is “focused,” says Hidalgo,
“on a dysfunctional family, seen through the eyes of a child. But at the heart
of the story is injustice, here made almost sinister by a total lack of remorse.”
It is, says one reviewer, a “deceptively straightforward narrative of a domestic
helper suspected of stealing a piece of jewelry; irony is achieved through
the effective use of the daughter’s (the culprit’s) point of view.” Hammed
Bolotaolo’s “The Old Man and His False Teeth” is, says Hidalgo, “a wildly
romantic tale set in a Manila rendered unfamiliar—yet eerily recognizable—
by an immense flood, and built around a most unlikely love token: a set of ill-
fitting false teeth.” It is, says one reviewer, “a story within a story within still
another story: an old man tells a young boy how he courted and married a girl
who later gifts him with the false teeth he lovingly, meticulously cleans every
day but never uses; he risks his life to recover it, disappears, and becomes an
urban legend.” As regards John Bengan’s “Armor,” I combine both reviewers’
comments: it narrates “the transformation from self-absorbed to sympathetic
character of a gay, small-time drug-dealer who knows the syndicate will hit
him; he attempts to win a beauty pageant by fashioning a unique gown with
an ‘armored’ sleeve which actually makes him vulnerable; at the story’s end,
he tries to save his young assistant who crafted his armor.” It is “as romantic
in its way” as Bolotaolo’s narrative, says Hidalgo, “but even stranger elements
have been tossed into the brew: drug dealers and death squads; a door-to-
door beauty stylist who sometimes choreographs intermission dance numbers
for government employees; ukay-ukay and a gay pageant held every year in
Mintal on the eve of our Lady of the Immaculate Conception’s Day, the
town’s patron saint.’” (Only “Armor” and “The Outsider” are among both
story reviewers’ choices.)
The fiction in Filipino numbered twenty-five. Says one reviewer: “Sa
aking palagay, ang maikling kuwento ang prosang nalalapit sa tula sa puntong
nangangailangan ito ng mga salitang may presisyon upang makapagpahayag
ng damdamin (at ideang) ipahayag sa pinakamaikling maaaring paraan.” This
reviewer chose three of which two were finally chosen: the third one is “Ang
Baysanan,” a chapter from a novel, of which the reviewer says: “Matingkad
ang kulay [ng kuwento] na sapat na nagpapakita ng pumupusyaw nang
tradisyon.” The other reviewer chose eight: among them, “Kung Bakit Hindi
Introduction xi
Ako Katoliko Sarado” (“a complex but likeable persona’s observations show
his understanding of the ‘mysterious’ world of religion and seminary life”);
“Sa Sinapupunang Digmaan” (“a moving story about war and its effects on
the characters, especially the two children”); “Physica Curiosa” (“a laudable
exploration of the mysteries of existence and the world of science in a context
of lies fabricated by a ruling system”); “Birhen” (“a highly controlled series of
lively encounters between a GRO and a geek where the ‘prostitute with the
golden heart’ is given a more contemporary ‘take’ without mawkishness”);
and “Ang Baysanan” (“a ‘traditional’ story which shows an extraordinary
mastery of Filipino and traditional poetry”).
The final fiction selection comprise Mixkaela Villalon’s “Gitnang Araw”
(“its language is powerful, the insights deep, and the deployment of graphic
details impressive; its delineation of character is remarkable, and its dominant
tone effective in creating a rich meaningfulness”); Joselito D. delos Reyes’s
“Troya” (“the principal character and his antagonist are clearly delineated;
apart from the story’s humor, the mayhem after a natural calamity and the
frenetic activities leading to the story’s end are well recreated”); and Carlo
Pacolor Garcia’s “Ang Batang Gustong Maging Ipis” (“a story simply but
powerfully told, the narrative lines spare and uncluttered”). National Artist
Almario says that these three stories are among “more than ten exemplary
entries in Filipino. ‘Gitnang Araw’ is remarkable for its consistent tone which
is effectively employed to create a rich series of meanings. ‘Troya’ uses humor
as an integral part of its highly political allegory. In contrast, Garcia’s story
takes on the guise, as it were, of a child’s story but is nonetheless as powerful
and interesting a read.” All three stories are among both story reviewers’
choices.
As to nonfiction in English (in all, seventeen essays), one reviewer chose
eight, and the other, five; among these essays—other than those finally
selected—both reviewers selected (and so, I have combined their brief
comments): “How To Play the Violin” (“an intimate and lyrical statement
of the author’s artistic creed, it is well-structured and deftly nuanced in its
choice of incidents and tones”); and “To My Granddaughter on Christmas
Eve” (“the concern over a granddaughter’s future in the grandmother’s letter
is candid, eloquent, and touching”). Also selected by the first reviewer are:
“The Old Man” (“a heart-tugging memoir about the author’s father rises to
a universal truth about the complexity of father-child relationships”) and
“A Dead Man’s Society” (“a character profile of Rizal that brings him back
to life and makes him reachable as our neighbor”). The second reviewer
xii Likhaan 6
added “Dao” (the author remembers “the houses his family lived in since his
childhood and reflects on his own life experiences and how familial ties are
forged and homes built”).
The four nonfiction works selected—Merlie M. Alunan’s “The Last
Gesture,” Vicente Garcia Groyon’s “Traversing Fiction and Nonfiction in
Travel Writing,” Jeena Rani Marquez’s “A River of Gold,” and the essays of
Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas—are also among both essay reviewers’ choices;
hence, I have combined their comments. Alunan’s essay is “a long, hard,
disturbing look at motherhood; very well written in a quiet, seemingly
matter-of-fact narrative tone which makes it all the more poignant, where
‘the last gesture’ is letting go the children now all grown up.” Hidalgo also
notes that the essay “is a memoir of motherhood—the physical experience,
of it, the incessant demands it imposes, the gravity of the commitment,
its ultimate solitariness—with an unflinching candor rare in the personal
narratives of Filipino women writers, a candor both surprising and deeply
moving.” Groyon’s essay, “beautifully written, is an honest, self-aware,
unflinching look at the creative process in nonfiction; it deals with the issue of
the blurring boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Its ostensible subject
is the author’s trip to Spain to retrace a Spanish poet’s travels there—this by
a fictionist who has never written a travel essay nor has ever been to Spain
nor speaks her language, but feels obliged to filter Spain through a former
colonial subject’s eyes.” Hidalgo notes “the dry, self-deprecating humor” in
Groyon’s travel essay; when asked to explain why he accepted the assignment
from the Instituto Cervantes to retrace the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez’s
travels in Spain, he said: “I accepted the task with a degree of cockiness,
believing, with my fiction writer’s bias, that if one can write a decent story,
then one can write anything.” Marquez’s essay, which won the second prize in
the 2011 Palanca, is “a biography of Cagayan de Oro where historical events
are interspersed with personal/family vignettes.” For Hidalgo, the same essay
is “a moving piece about growing up in Cagayan de Oro and learning—
sometimes at great cost—the many nuances of identity, family, friendship
and community.” Tiempo-Torrevillas’s series of feuilletons is a “lighthearted
take on obsessive-compulsive disorder which combines smart sophistication
with wistfulness, humor with serious musing; it shows the range of the
disorder through illustrations and anecdotes, and attributes it to the need to
impose order on an unpredictable world.” For Hidalgo, the feuilletons are
“part memoir and part meditations on a variety of things—dreams, television
cooking shows, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and ‘moments of unexpected
sweetness’ which read like a prose poem.”
Introduction xiii
None of the critical essays (eight in English, three in Filipino) and six
nonfiction pieces in Filipino passed.
As regards the interviews, National Artist Almario notes that Rogelio
G. Mangahas is one of the triumvirate of poets in the ’60s [the other two
are Rio Alma and Lamberto E. Antonio] who spearheaded the second wave
of Modernismo through the literary magazine, Dawn, of the University of
the East. Louie Jon A. Sanchez and Giancarlo Lauro C. Abrahan in their
interview-essay explore the three periods—pagbabalik-tanaw, pangangahas,
and pagkamalay—in Mangahas’s writing life where the poet bore “great
difficulties and personal sacrifices [in breaking] away from the dominant
and popular tradition in native Philippine literatures.” Ronald Baytan’s essay,
“Intensities of Signs,” is an excellent introduction to Cirilo F. Bautista; the
interview which follows reveals Bautista’s views on language, the craft of
poetry, and the influences on his works by focusing on Bautista’s oeuvres—his
poetry in English and Filipino, especially his epic poem, The Trilogy of Saint
Lazarus; his fiction in English and Filipino; and his translation of Amado V.
Hernandez.
The annotated select Bibliography of literary works in English by Camille
Dela Rosa and in Filipino by Jayson Petras is indisputable witness to the vigor
and riches of our national literature.
I cannot end this introduction to “the best among the best” literary
works without grateful acknowledgement of the generosity of spirit, cheer
and industry of my associate editors, National Artist Virgilio S. Almario and
Professor emeritus Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo; our anonymous reviewers in
English and Filipino; our indefatigable managing editor, Prof. Ruth Jordana
L. Pison, and publication assistant, Anna Sanchez; Dr. Leo Abaya for the
Likhaan 6 cover; and the diligent staffs at the UP Press (Zenaida N. Ebalan,
Grace Bengco, and Arvin Abejo Mangohig) and the Institute of Creative
Writing (Eva Garcia-Cadiz, Gloria C. Evangelista, and Pablo C. Reyes).
Endnotes
1. Epigraph to Galeano’s The Book of Embraces, tr. Cedric Belfrage with Mark
Schafer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
2. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Camus). I came fortuitously upon this
quote as I sought my source in Camus for his remark on style.
3. In Coetzee’s novel, Summertime (Penguin Books, 2009): 61.
4. William H. Gass, Habitations of the Word Essays (New York: Touchstone Book,
Simon & Schuster, 1986).
xiv Likhaan 6
Short Fiction / Maikling Kuwento
Armor
John Bengan
T
he week Ronnie was planning to die, one of his neighbors paid him a
visit. Ronnie had just come back from the seamstress, bringing home
a newly mended sheath dress he would wear at the pageant, when
Oliver showed up.
“The Death Squad,” Oliver said. “They’re after you.”
Ronnie considered what reactions were possible. He would back away
from the Mylar-covered table where Oliver was nursing his coffee. He would
warn Oliver that he didn’t appreciate this kind of joke, not after bodies had
been found in empty, grassy lots around Mintal. Instead, Ronnie soaked up
his neighbor’s silence, leaned on the refrigerator and lit a cigarette.
Where was the Death Squad when he regularly handed out shabu to the
crew of wiry boys who had hung out at his beauty salon? They were hired
guns, the Death Squad, who used to go after drug pushers, but lately they’d
been taking down street gang members, crystal meth users, petty thieves.
Oliver was talking to him about a list they had at the community hall, a
list of targets. Someone had tipped him off about Ronnie’s name being in it.
Oliver was telling him now so he could leave town before they found him.
“I don’t even push,” said Ronnie.
“You bought from Tiago before he was shot.”
Ronnie had forgotten how nosy the neighbors could be. He thought of
his stash in the pillowcase. Tiago, his go-to guy for crystal meth, was one of
those who’d been killed. They said a man on a motorcycle stopped in front of
Tiago who was chatting with regulars outside his karaoke pub. The man shot
him through the lungs four times. He hadn’t really known anyone who got
killed by these gunmen until that time. A day before the shooting, Ronnie
had seen Tiago in the same spot and they’d waved at each other.
“I only got them for the pageant,” Ronnie said. “To prepare. You know,
lose some weight?”
“You’re joking, right?” said Oliver, eyeing him as though he were a
stranger. In college, Oliver never fit in with Ronnie’s clique: sharp-tongued
3
bayots who thrived on banter. There was always something open and raw
about Oliver, as if he didn’t have time to assume a pose, to make pretend.
“Don’t you have any confidence in me?” Ronnie asked. “Maybe this year
is my year.”
After seeing Oliver out of the house, Ronnie resolved to stick to the
plan. Before the Death Squad entered the picture, he had already made his
decision. If the Death Squad were truly after him, they would have to race
him down to that stage.
The pageant, known to many as Miss Gay, was a competition among
cross-dressing gay men, a backwoods copy of international beauty contests
for women. Like the Miss Universe pageant, Miss Gay involved a sequence
of elimination rounds: national costume, swimsuit, evening gown, and the
Q&A. The pageant was held every year in Mintal on the eve of the Feast of
the Immaculate Conception, the town’s patron saint.
As he was leaving his house to offer beauty treatments in the neighborhood,
Ronnie found a young man squatting outside the gate.
“Hi, gwapa!” The boy got up, revealing a set of small yellow teeth. “We’re
looking so pretty today.”
Ronnie knew him as Biboy, one of Tiago’s former drug runners. Biboy
was wearing a lime-green basketball jersey and camouflage shorts, ringlets
of dirt around his neck. With his hard, nimble body and long wingspan, he
resembled a field bird with a handsome face.
“Not buying today. I still have a few more left,” Ronnie said.
“Who said I was selling?” said Biboy, pressing his body closer to Ronnie.
“They took down Bossing Tiago. Haven’t you heard?”
“You should be careful then,” Ronnie told the boy and moved on.
Three weeks earlier, his assistant had emptied the cash register and split,
taking boxes of expensive hair coloring products on the way out. The betrayal
came on the heels of a huge blow. Ronnie’s straight male lover, whom he’d
supported through college, had left to marry a girl he’d gotten pregnant.
Ronnie had to close down the salon and move to a boarding house
in a compound used mainly as an automobile workshop. To pay rent, he
started going door-to-door, offering makeup, hair styling, even manicures
and pedicures. Occasionally he would choreograph dance numbers for local
government employees who needed “intermission numbers” for their parties.
John Bengan 5
Ronnie was going to say something lighthearted when he noticed the way
the youngsters were looking at him.
The one with flattened hair asked him, “So how does it feel to be a thank-
you girl?”
The phrase summoned the humiliating image of a contestant packing
up his things after losing. You did not simply lose: you didn’t stand a chance.
Ronnie bristled. “You carry yourselves not with poise but with vulgarity.
Neither of you deserve any kind of crown!”
When they didn’t respond, he took it as the perfect moment to leave with
a final barb: “You are still on your way, but I am already coming back.”
The following day he still couldn’t figure out his national costume.
Desperate for ideas, he scoured old magazines, looking for icons, but he
couldn’t find anything that inspired. Then, after lunching on a cup of rice
and one salted fish, he saw something on TV.
He was mindlessly flipping channels—his landlord was thoughtful
enough to share cable TV—when a vision seized him: a model marching from
the stage wing in a flowing couture dress, her body glimmering so brightly,
she looked as though she was swaddled in flames. The most remarkable part
of the ensemble was her right arm. Cased in a gold armored sleeve, the arm
looked like it belonged to a knight. The warrior queen stepped out of the
tube and crossed into Ronnie’s living room, blinding him with light.
He took out a pencil and a pad of yellow paper, moved closer to the TV
set, and began sketching. There it was, the gown that would send him back to
the Miss Gay pageant one last time. King Arthur, after all, was British.
Afraid inspiration would wane, Ronnie rushed to the hardware store. He
picked up aluminum sheets, wires, metal shears, tiny screws and nuts, and a
can of gold aerosol paint.
At the tricycle cab terminal, he saw Biboy again. The way the boy beamed
at him, it was as if he’d been waiting for Ronnie to appear.
“After you, gwaps.” Biboy hopped in and sat beside Ronnie.
When they reached the compound, the boy got off and followed him to
the gate.
“Let me carry that,” he offered, grasping at the plastic bags in Ronnie’s
hands.
Ronnie noticed the boy was wearing the same green basketball jersey and
shorts.
John Bengan 7
“Okay, Mister Industrial Design,” said Ronnie. “There’s chicken siopao
and orange juice in the fridge.”
For the first time since he’d moved into the compound, Ronnie got out
of bed early. The dusty shafts of light cutting through the windows made it
seem like he was in a different world. The dress for the Q&A segment was
ready, along with a one-piece red, white, and blue swimsuit patterned after
the Union Jack. He’d borrowed it from a woman friend who, in her younger
years, had worked as a choreographer in Brunei.
There was one competition left. He needed to build an armored sleeve
and pair it with an evening gown, which he had yet to secure. Biboy had
asked him to download pictures of medieval armors that they could copy.
The living room was empty, pillows and sheets heaped on the floor. The
boy had already left to shoot hoops. On the table Ronnie found a fist-size
chunk of bread smeared with margarine. He swallowed it.
Hunger sharpened his focus. After conceiving his costume, he’d begun a
breakfast regimen of pan de sal, two Fortune cigarettes, and black, sugarless
coffee. He would not have lunch until the afternoon when he would buy
Coke and a pack of crackers from the grocery chain across the street. For
supper, he would have a glass of water and a last cigarette. This saved him
some money, which allowed him to splurge on wardrobe and accessories for
the pageant.
Holding a sturdy nylon umbrella, Ronnie ducked out of the gate and
walked over to Mintal’s newest Internet café. The café had opened behind the
gymnasium where the pageant would be staged.
On that hot windless day the paved roads seemed to wriggle under the
heat. The streets of Mintal were fringed with brightly colored trimmings. In a
vacant lot not far from the church, a shabby carnival had shown up, erecting
a neon-lit Ferris wheel that loomed taller than any structure in town.
The café was full of high school boys playing online war games. An
attendant, who was playing along with them, pointed Ronnie to a vacant PC
near the bathroom.
He studied a photo of a knight in a suit of armor. The warrior’s torso was
encased in plates of polished metal, his helmet like a silver birdcage perched
on his steel-padded shoulders. The intricacy alarmed him; he was relieved
that he only needed the arm. But that alone had eight components, with
John Bengan 9
He tottered through the gate, left the printouts in the sala, shut himself
up in his room. He was about to doze off when the sound of an engine made
him jump.
He flew out of his room and peered through the glass window slats.
Bougainvillea grew in tangled profusion beyond the dismantled corpses
of trucks and cars in the yard. Neighbors had been talking about how the
vigilantes were closing in on Mintal after a rash of muggings and rapes in the
village. Witnesses had sworn that Tiago’s hit man rode a motorcycle. All these
assassins, they said, rode motorcycles.
The engine roared. He wondered if the gate was locked. He wished
someone from the landlord’s house would come out and check.
“What are you looking at?” Biboy said, stepping out of the bathroom.
“That noise.”
Ronnie walked over to the kitchen and took a jug of ice-cold water from
the fridge. He drank it all in one swig.
“See, gwaps.” Biboy was holding out a scrap of aluminum. “I copied
your printouts and made one for the shoulder.”
The boy had cut and bent the aluminum precisely into an oval shape that
resembled a gold plate on a knight’s shoulder.
“Show me how you did it,” Ronnie said.
“I didn’t use a hammer. Just this.” Biboy picked up a set of pliers from the
floor. “The hammer would’ve dented it bad. Told you it was easy.”
“Yes, you did,” said Ronnie.
He went back for his gown the next afternoon. The flaws had been
mended, the size altered. The seamstress charged two hundred pesos, but
Ronnie pleaded with her. He’d come to her shop hoping for a price cut since
she’d been a loyal customer at his salon. The seamstress agreed on condition
that Ronnie would offer hairstyling and makeup at her granddaughter’s
début, for half his standard fee.
But when Ronnie tried the dress on, the bodice squeezed his ribs; the
side zipper wouldn’t close. The seamstress offered to give it another go but
he refused.
“It’s only a half inch,” he told the seamstress. “I drank a lot of water
today.”
As he was leaving the dress shop, Ronnie noticed a man across the road.
The bald man was smoking inside an open-air canteen, observing him.
John Bengan 11
awake. He was again the most attractive, vivacious, irresistible creature he
knew.
At 4:30 p.m., he prepared for battle. He strapped the first layer of tape
over his stomach, rolling it tight around his waist, folds of excess flesh inching
up his torso. He donned two feminine panties, deftly inserting pads over his
behind. Carefully, he cupped his soft penis and testicles, folding deep to reach
the hollow between his buttocks.
To keep it flat, he wrapped tape around his crotch, then he threw on one
last pair of underwear, a silky charcoal black swatch of nylon. He would try to
fit into the Union Jack one-piece later for the swimsuit competition. Ronnie
then slipped on ten pairs of pantyhose; the thicker the layers, the more the
illusion of curved, shapely legs was achieved.
For breasts, he placed beneath a strapless bra two latex condoms filled
with water, which he’d tied in such a way that the rubber bloated into small
globes. The tips of the condoms produced a somewhat realistic effect of
nipples.
On his face, he used a palette he’d always relied on. Violet pigment on
the lower lids, copper line over the lashes, indigo eye shadow, slick scarlet
mouth. He applied false lashes using the milky paste from a star apple leaf, for
a lasting hold. The rest of his body he coated with liquid foundation. Under
the glare of lights, the tone shimmered on flesh like porcelain.
He topped it all off with a wig, chestnut brown styled into petals, a gift
from a friend who had been to Dubai.
When he and Biboy arrived backstage, a few assistants were still strapping
tape on their half-naked candidates, clipping extensions and spraying
products on hard tiers of hair. The narrow space smelled of armpits; the floor
was littered with tissue paper and torn fabric.
There they were: bayots jiggling their hands to make manly veins
disappear, while others, once their makeup was on, became stoic. There were
long-limbed girly boys with taut dancers’ bodies toned after working in pubs
in Japan as “entertainers” or male Japayukis, bayots with large breasts, bayots
whose skin glowed from taking a cocktail of hormone pills. A few of them
gazed at Ronnie coldly like they were in a trance.
He wobbled as the boy helped him into his dress. The gown was still
snug; he sucked in his stomach until Biboy could zip him up. Stale, rancid air
John Bengan 13
this was done. Ronnie slipped his bare arm around the boy’s back and they
turned away.
Contestants were forming a queue behind the stage wings. Before leaving
him backstage, the boy told Ronnie he would wait for him outside.
To wild cheers and a thumping techno beat, the night’s twenty-six
candidates breezed onto the ramp, and forming a half circle across the stage,
performed an impromptu line dance. A makeshift runway, dotted with
lightbulbs on the rim, stretched toward the huge hall. Bamboo arches from
which hung loops of colorful metallic paper jutted out from both ends of the
platform. Four big spotlights radiated from the ceiling. Beyond the stage was
a hot, impatient swarm of people.
One by one the candidates took turns at the center microphone.
“Welcome ladies and gentlemen, this is a tale as old as time! I am Beauty—
and the Beast will follow. My name is Desiree Verdadero, seventeen years of
age, and I come from the beautiful island of ice and fire, Reykjavik, Iceland!”
“Season’s greetings! The family that prays together stays together, but
the family that eats together is probably a pride of lions. This dusky beauty
standing in front of you is Armi Barbara Crespo, and I represent the smile of
Africa, Namibia!”
“Buenas noches, amigos del universo! All things bright and beautiful. All
creatures great and small. All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made
them all. This is Guadalupe Sanchez viuda de Aurelio, nineteen years old, and
I come from Caracas, Venezuela!”
Then it was Ronnie’s turn.
He drifted across the platform, the saffron gown rustling on his manicured
feet. His eyes swept past the faces of judges. In one corner of the hall, he could
see little children outside perched on the branches of a tree, peering through
the open vents like hairless monkeys. His face lit up when he spotted, near the
edge of the second row, Biboy raising both thumbs up. Ronnie posed before
the microphone, and lifting his golden arm, addressed the audience.
“A pleasant evening to all of you! The Little Prince said, ‘What is essential
is invisible to the naked eye.’ My name is Maria Rosario Silayan, from the
land of King Arthur and Lady Diana—Great Britain!”
The crowd roared. Sweeping the hem of his gown, Ronnie waved his
golden arm at them. This was what he had come here for, the chance to tower
in heels, look down with unbending grace at a crowd filled with awe, to glide
as though life were just as easy. After striking a last pose, he walked back to
where the other candidates stood.
John Bengan 15
The Old Man and His False Teeth
Hammed Bolotaolo
W
hen the old man woke up one rainy day, it wasn’t because his cat
was pawing at his face as it usually did to intimate its need to be
fed. A dream about a woman handing him a set of broken false
teeth made him bolt upright in bed with a painful erection and a sudden
twitch of his head like he was on a puppet string. He knew he had wept in his
dream with that shameful sob of despair children have, and was convinced
that the woman in the dream was someone he knew, but couldn’t remember
her face or pinpoint where and when they had met.
For a moment his eyes oscillated between his dream and consciousness.
His feet sought his slippers on the floor as his cold hands groped for his
glasses. Although his vision was shrouded in white, almost as if he were tired
of finding the things he sought, he glimpsed a glint that looked like an ember
fighting its fated death. He put the glasses on and peered at the false teeth
with a golden tooth beaming at him. His eyes then turned to a faded photo of
a woman in a frame made of pearls, illuminated by a fluorescent lamp.
He found his cat curled up next to his pillow stuffed with pigeon feathers
on which he laid his feet to help him sleep. He looked up and saw the same
constellations of cobwebs swinging from the ceiling. A wave of relief washed
through him. Nothing had changed after all. He was still alone.
At the center of the room was a credenza inlaid with cobalt flowers and
helices outlined in gold, its feet resembling a lion’s and its drawer handle a
cock’s plumage. It was the sole piece of furniture of value in the old man’s
shack. Every day he would shine it to perfection, as he would polish his false
teeth to make them whiter. It contained his umbrella and his wife’s clothes and
shawls. On top of it stood the frame with his wife’s photo, a statue of Nuestra
Señora de los Remedios, and a half-filled glass of solution with the false teeth
in it. The bed was set in front so that the credenza was the headboard. Next
to the bed, a box fan whirred in the perfumed air. The sampaguita garland
draped on the santo and the roses in old shoes and tin can containers had
16
turned brown, but their sweetness, even in decay, lingered. In front of the bed
was a round table with two wooden chairs as ancient and worn out as the old
man, and a miserable ottoman for the cat. Behind the credenza was a dusty
sewing machine with a hydrant-shaped body adorned with pink paintwork.
This reminded the old man of one scorching day when his wife declared
she wanted to sew with a machine, as if its mechanical nature, unlike the
sentimentality of knitting, reflected her true feelings.
It took the old man some time to notice that he had forgotten to turn
off the radio before he went to sleep. As he listened to the rain tapping on
the tin roof, he caught a familiar song he could not identify, something about
forgetting to remember. He rose and took the false teeth from the glass, and
before he placed them on an embroidered towel bearing his name, he held
them to his face, as one would do a hand puppet:
Why do you always bleach me? … Because you are special … But you never
use me to eat … Because you are precious.
Although it had suffered cracks and accumulated mold over the years,
the terrazzo sink that the old man had given his wife many years ago was still
gleaming. As he poured the denture solution down the sink, a black spider
with eight legs crawled out, its jelly eyes shining with recognition. The old
man tried to flush the spider down the drain, pouring water on it, but its legs
curled up suddenly announcing its death. When he stopped, however, the
spider to his delight moved and made a break for the wall, trying to climb
up to its web but failing to do so. The old man let the spider live, for it had
gained his respect.
As the sharp smell of bleach mingled with the fragrance of the dead
flowers, wistful and harsh, and the stale smell of his cat, and the rain, the old
man felt something clutch at his heart. He remembered the day his wife gave
him the false teeth a few years before she died, although he couldn’t remember
what occasion it was. They were a surprise gift. Alas, they were not a perfect
fit: they were bought from a store that sold second-hand dentures, from a
place where the Black Nazarene was worshipped by thousands of devotees.
Noticing that they were quite unusual, the old man asked her why she chose
the false teeth with a golden tooth, as they might have cost her more than
what was needed. They were a substitute, she said, for their wedding rings
that he pawned when despair paid her a visit. The old man failed to repossess
the rings, for they had already been auctioned off by the time he got the
money to claim them. He also never quite understood why she didn’t just buy
new rings instead of the false teeth.
Hammed Bolotaolo 17
Looking through the window pane drenched with silver drops and waiting
for sunrise, the old man realized that it was the longest rain since he and his
wife had sailed into oblivion. He opened the window and shuddered from the
cold as the raw wind rushed in, brushing his face with the salty fragrance of
the sea. He looked out at the drifting clouds and the blue light of dawn and
thought the rain that had turned into a steady drizzle would soon stop. He
saw a sailor-boy rowing a banca made from a large block of styrofoam held
together with packaging tape. The whole neighborhood had been inundated
for months by the chocolate water from the Manila Bay which drove the
rats up from the sewers, forcing them to settle with the illegal city-dwellers.
In his house made of old plywood and corrugated iron sheets, the slivers of
tamarind-shaped rat droppings were strewn across the linoleum floor, but
there was no stink, or if there was, it was barely discernible.
After a while the old man gargled with lukewarm water and rock salt.
Except for the sailor-boy calling for passengers, there was silence, intermittent
and blunt like the rain, so that the old man could hear his own thoughts.
On the neighbor’s roof, despite the drizzle, there were boys flying kites made
of silk that looked like giant moths blotting the chiaroscuro from the sky.
Amid the flood were floating dogs, refuse, and debris from the outskirts of the
public market, all circling in silence before making their way to the nearby
bay. The flood had become too deep for anybody to walk through it or play
in, and no fish dared swim in it. The first floors of the shanties were emptied,
except for families who had found a way to live with water. People had built
more shacks higher up, it seemed, to reach for the clouds where light was
more generous. The shacks, struggling on top of one another and making the
alleys narrower, were covered with open mussel shells so that they appeared
opalescent from his window.
The old man turned the faucet on and gently held the false teeth under
the cold running water which pricked him like needles. He imagined the lack
of sunshine for a long time might have frozen the pipes. He filled the glass
until it was half-full with water and mixed in it three tablespoons of bleach.
He smelled the solution as he was stirring it, stinging his eyes so that they
turned watery and burning his nose. He then placed the false teeth back in
the glass with the new solution and remembered his wife telling him to be
careful all the time.
I don’t want you dirtying them. We can’t afford to buy another.
He set the glass back on the credenza, and gazing at a canine tooth in the
lower denture, the golden tooth, its luminous flickering undiminished by the
solution, he wondered whether his wife was happy where she was.
Hammed Bolotaolo 19
down the paper, musing on how events were mere recycling of the past and
how men were unable to depart from history. I won’t bother you anymore.
He stood up and took the glass with the false teeth from the credenza, while
the cat leaped over the table and licked the plates.
On the wall, next to the window, hung a broken mirror which made the
old man drift into longing every time he looked into its icy fragments, as he
saw, for all his younger self flitting through his mind like a mirage shimmering
on the horizon. Though battered by the sun all his life, the old man’s face
was gentle. The waves of memory stretched in all directions, and his face,
upon closer inspection, resembled bark waiting to be shed. His eyes, despite
their malady, gleamed like fish scales illuminating hues upon contact with the
sunlight. And his wrinkled mouth, it seemed, only longed for laughter.
Be very careful. They are not as strong as your old teeth. They break rather
easily.
The old man placed a towel on the bottom of the sink to protect the
false teeth should they slip through his fingers. Cleaning them was a serious
business. Although he never used them to eat, he brushed them with baking
soda as lightly as if he were petting his cat, stroking the upper section with a
circular and short back-and-forth motion. And with the same gentle motion,
he brushed the lower section and then the ridge that connected the golden
tooth with the gum. He examined them to ensure that he had brushed them
thoroughly, and that no plaque, tartar, or stain had materialized. He repeated
the slow brushing, sweeping, and rolling, and when he was satisfied, he rinsed
them under running water and patted them dry. Then, as was his usual habit,
he held them to his face:
Why do you always clean me? … Because you are special … I don’t like to be
bleached … I want you to be bright always … Why? … Because you are precious.
With his thumb and forefinger he held the sides of his upper teeth and
jiggled them in his mouth. With the never-ending song of forgetting still
playing, the old man smiled at the broken mirror, and the golden tooth
glittered at him.
Don’t forget to put a towel on your back. Rain and sweat will make you sick.
Although the rain had abated to a drizzle, the sun was still hidden behind
clouds when the old man looked out of the door and called for the sailor-boy
who had been a companion to him since the whole place had been inundated
by the rain and become a lake of melancholia. On their journeys to San
Hammed Bolotaolo 21
No fence is too high for a fearless man, my son, the old man said. If
you have patience everything that your heart desires will come true, and all
that has gone away will come back. Trust me, he said, closing his eyes as he
listened to the songs in the wind.
Sleep with your feet on the pillow, so you will have a good dream.
The wind of nostalgia brushed the old man’s face, and a soggy mass of
pigeon feathers tickled his nose so much that he began to sneeze. I shall tell
you a story, my son, he said, adjusting his false teeth, something that I have
never told anyone before.
And so, amid his sneezing, the old man narrated how he had taken his
beloved from the evil house and brought her with him as he sailed back to
the sea.
It began one Sunday morning when he caught a glimpse of her in the
Church which looked out on the sunset. He had taken a long journey from
the sea, at the far end of the world, where the sun and the horizon met to
mourn.
She was wearing an ivory dress of raw silk as fine and light as spider
webs, singing hymns to Remedios, Our Lady of Remedies, with a haunting
voice that lulled the heart to dream. She was not looking at him, although he
knew from the fluttering of her lashes that she was aware of his presence. He
marveled at how gentle she was, thinking she could glide in the air just by
sighing. And her face shone like a revelation which left him breathless. His
teeth began to chatter, for that was the effect she had on him.
Every Sunday he visited the Church to see her. And no sooner had the
wind brought him from the sea by fate, when he, for all his failings, captured
her heart.
She came from a family with a name, a name written in the books. When
her father had found out about their romance, he at once decided she should
leave for the mountains before the school year ended, where she would finish
her studies and marry a man from a good family. A man of land, of timber, of
gold. Never a man of the sea. For the few months she had left to stay in the
city, she was forbidden to leave the house alone. She was not allowed to sing
in the Church, nor to go to the movie house, nor to talk to her friends. She
was not to see him ever again. Struck with an unbearable sadness in her heart,
she cried herself to sleep every night, her tears drying into translucent silk-
Hammed Bolotaolo 23
despondence. It’s as if it was just yesterday when my fate was driven only by
wind and tide. Ah, the smell of the sea, there’s nothing like it.
The sailor-boy interrupted the old man’s loud musings: What happened
to the girl? Did she become your wife?
The old man resumed his tale. That night, after her father had gone to
sleep, she waited for the man of the sea. Her frantic heart pounding like a
piston so that she didn’t immediately hear his cooing below her window. The
plan seemed sound, but she was scared of her father’s dog.
As in his dream, a torrential downpour began. It was what history books
would later declare the strongest rain that had ever plagued the city. The
young man climbed up the wall in no time and waited for her at their door,
trembling in the rain that was beating on his face, soaked with chills of both
joy and trepidation.
As she had feared, the dog in the house had smelled him and howled like
a wolf. The pounding of the rain, however, overwhelmed its fury, so that its
master stayed motionless, grunting like a boar.
She tiptoed out of her cage into her father’s room and grasped the key
from a credenza with lions’ feet, watching the dog barking in mute rage. As
she dashed down to the main door, lightning hit the house. Her father woke
up with a start, the sound of the explosion drumming in his ears, and saw
the dog going berserk. He hurtled toward her room like a madman. But she
wasn’t there. Grabbing the dog’s leash he flew to the staircase and to his horror
saw her opening the door. He screamed her name at the same time her lover’s
face appeared. He unleashed the dog and snatched from a terracotta jar a
pewter cane with a snake head and a brass cleat foot. The young man brawled
with the dog using his bare hands, suffering bites and losing a tooth when
his head hit the door. As the water continued to rise, he seized the dog’s head
and slammed it on the forbidding wall. The father shrieked with fury when
he saw his dog’s broken neck floating in the water. He sprinted toward the
young man, and with his heavy cane, pummeled his face, knocking out half
the young man’s upper teeth. His daughter watched helplessly from the gate,
crying and shivering, as she treaded the water that threatened to engulf her.
As the father was about to smite the young man again with his cane,
another thunderbolt struck the house, like a projectile hurled from a
trebuchet. The house was split open in the middle. Despite the rain and the
flood, fire began to spread and consume the second floor, and flames shoved
Hammed Bolotaolo 25
his body quivered with weariness from the cold. On the stairs he found a
woman suckling a child in a sling made of dried leaves. Flowers for the dead,
sir, she said, handing him a bouquet of dry flowers. Her inflamed breasts were
busy feeding two mouths, each alternating between buds. Without taking
the bouquet, he delved for coins in his pocket and gave them to her, only to
realize that a few steps up, there were more mothers and children with two
heads asking for alms and selling flowers. Thinking he had few coins left, he
continued to go up like the rest of the people ascending in procession, paying
no heed to the silent cry of the desperate.
The station depot seemed to loom out of the dark. He turned to look at
a mass of black clouds gathering on the horizon. The sky opened up filling
the city with a subdued glow, and for an instant, he saw himself and his wife
sailing into the light. But the shroud of darkness came back as fast as it had
opened up. The rain, which had turned to ice pellets, engulfed the city once
more in a deafening cataract.
To the old man’s astonishment, there was a multitude of silent commuters
queuing for tickets. Waiting in line his eyes turned to an empty newsstand
that looked like a wire rooster coop: “NewsFlash: All yesterday’s news you
read in a flash.” His eyes wandered around the station, lingering on faces and
objects of the world he now felt alienated from. It was as if he were trying to
reconnect to people and reaccustom himself to the place, searching for himself
among the anonymous faces. He stared at the Ticket Issuing Machine which
was blinking with green lights: “Exact Fare and In Service.” He then peered
through his glasses trying to make sense of it: “I only accept one transaction
at a time. Should you opt to change your desired destination or terminate
your transaction, please turn the cancel knob counterclockwise. In case of any
problem, please approach our courteous Stationmaster for assistance.”
When it was his turn, the old man moved hesitantly toward the blinking
lights, for he had a strong sense of distrust of machines. He pressed a button,
the light rail’s terminus. Covering a few kilometers of elevated tracks, the
transit line ran above an avenue built by the colonizers along grade-separated
granite viaducts. It wouldn’t take long, he thought, before he reached his
destination.
As he was about to insert the exact amount into the coin slot, the old
man realized that he needed a round-trip ticket, so he turned the cancel knob
and selected this time the round-trip option. He still had enough money after
all. The loud clack startled him when the machine ejected the ticket. He took
the magnetic plastic card and inched toward the entrance.
Hammed Bolotaolo 27
in brokenly, my … false teeth. What? My false teeth, the old man repeated,
and looking down at the railway tracks, he laughed, exposing his swollen
gums. Just then he saw something flash in the dark. There they are, he cried,
pointing at them.
The guard looked disturbed as he explained to the old man that he
couldn’t go down to the tracks. We can’t shut down the operation just to
pick up your false teeth, he said. Can I not just go down there myself and
get them, asked the old man, before the next train arrives? You cannot. The
guard advised him to go to the other side of the station where the office of the
stationmaster was. The Station Control room, he called it. And because the
station had side platforms with no overpass between them, there was no other
way to get there but to go down, take a banca, and climb up to the other side.
To his misfortune, not a single banca was to be found when he went
down. Using his umbrella to clear floating rubble, he decided to swim across,
like an octopus darting through the water.
When he reached the other side, he found the Station Control room
closed, with a sign on the window: “Tomorrow or today?” The old man
looked at the clock with no hands, wondering what time it was and whether
he was late for work. He dried himself with his towel, for he was very wet
and his clothes had turned brown. While waiting he noticed that there were
not as many people as there had been earlier, and that the depot and the
platform where he was mirrored the depot and the platform where he had
been. Everything was familiar all over again.
The wired window opened a little, revealing a man silhouetted against
the light in the room. The old man went right to it and without seeing the
stationmaster’s face explained to him what had happened. The stationmaster
told him to wait, and his silhouette dissolved into the chamber’s shadows,
leaving the old man to his musings.
The stationmaster returned and gave the old man some papers, instructing
him to fill out the forms. The old man looked at him bewildered. You have to
fill out these forms to report your missing false teeth, the stationmaster said.
But they are not missing; they are right there! The old man pointed at the
railway tracks on the other side, making sure that he could still see the tiny
wink in the dark.
Like the security guard, the stationmaster told him that they couldn’t
stop the train for anyone, and that in this place that sent people to their
desired destinations, there were certain rules to follow or everyone would be
stuck. The old man took the papers with reluctance, not fully understanding
Hammed Bolotaolo 29
broken false teeth. It was then that it occurred to him, with certainty, that he
was not alone anymore.
Nobody knew what happened to the old man after the deluge. Tales
about him abounded in the city. Some claimed to have seen him drowning
in the flood. Children avowed that they saw him lingering on with the cat in
his house. Women believed that every time it rained in Malate, it was the old
man weeping. And others said he had gone back to the sea to forget about
his beloved wife, who, despite years of singing to Remedios, had not been
blessed with a child. She had devoted her last years to sewing and had later
died of sadness.
Many years passed, and the many stories about the old man faded away.
It was after the great flood that I started to keep a journal and to write down
the tales the old man had told me. I started to write so that I wouldn’t forget.
Or maybe because I needed to believe.
I don’t know where he went after I brought him to the station on that
day. At times it makes me sad, the old man being gone. Sometimes on cold
windy nights when time is forgotten and I remember myself as a young boy
listening to his stories, I also imagine the old man sailing back to where he
had come from, between oblivion and nowhere, drifting and smiling and no
longer waiting for the aching sunrise.
A
nna heard the door opening down the hall. She put her head back
down under the sheet, but she still heard the beat of her mother’s
heavy steps and the slap of her slippers against the soles of her feet.
When she heard the jangling of keys she could not resist opening her eyes
and poking her head out of the blanket. When she heard her march past her
bedroom she could not hold back her relief.
When her mother got that way there was no stopping her and there was
no talking her out of anything. She didn’t hear anything or mind anything
either. So Anna promptly aborted the siesta, slipped out of bed, and followed
her, a good length behind. She didn’t dare go down the stairs until her mother
had stepped off the bottom step. She gripped the balustrade only as soon as
her mother let go of it. She followed her past the dining room, where what
remained of lunch still lay on the table. Her father always had the cleanest
plate, his fork and spoon at five o’clock and the glass emptied on its coaster as
though it hadn’t been touched.
Anna followed her to the kitchen, where the rice cooker had been left
open. A trail of ants was already making its way toward its rim and a darkening
swarm was already advancing up the kitchen table toward her birthday cake.
They had ordered it from the neighborhood bakeshop the way she
wanted it, in dark chocolate chiffon and rainbow frosting. She had passed
that bakeshop on her bike rides ever since they moved in at the beginning of
the summer. They had that cake for dessert that day, and they were going to
have it—maybe along with the spaghetti and meatballs, the fried chicken and
the red potato salad that Clara prepared—into the next two or three days.
The night before, she had insisted on waiting for her father to arrive
from work before they started eating, and just as it seemed too late, he came,
honking his horn from halfway down the street. She shouted for Clara to
open the gate. Her mother came down in one of those dresses she only wore
on special occasions.
31
She also wore her special watch and large pearls on her ears. Those pearls
were sold to her by a neighbor who showed up at their door with a bottle of
wine one afternoon, who turned out to be a distant relative, who turned out
to be a jeweler, who came to the house almost every week after that with all
kinds of treats. Sometimes it was cupcakes, sometimes it was just banana cue.
She always brought some jewelry to show Anna’s mother.
On one of those visits she took out a little pouch of pearls. “South Sea!”
she whispered, like she was telling her mother a big secret. Anna was at the
table and Clara was always around to refill their glasses and their coffee cups
so it couldn’t really have been a secret.
Before the visit was over her mother agreed to buy the two largest of them
by installment. “It’s an investment,” she said to the woman, and then, later
on, to her daughter. She had put them on her ears and swept her hair back.
She bent down toward her daughter to show them off.
Instead of a bicycle with a ribbon around it, her father walked in with a
small gift-wrapped box. Anna tore away the wrapper and found the battery-
operated bike horn inside, just the model she had seen on that very bike in
the shop they had visited weeks ago. But a very large part of her still hoped
that the bike lay hidden somewhere, secretly reserved weeks ago, returned
for by his father on one of his lunch breaks, picked up earlier that day, and
wedged into the trunk of the car with the help of store clerks, or sitting in the
backseat, cushioned by folded newspapers, camouflaged by the black nylon
jacket his father always had over his office chair, and trundled home at careful
speed.
But as Clara set down the coffee tray in front of his father, turning it
carefully so that the cup and saucer faced him, and as Anna nursed the lump
that had sat in her throat since the beginning of dinner, her father told her
that the bike would come around on her very next birthday, if she kept her
grades.
There was only the spaghetti and the fried chicken and the cake and the
salad and the horn, then.
That night, she resigned himself to this fate and strapped the horn on the
handlebars of her old bicycle. Though it was late, she begged him, and her
father allowed her to try it out. She stuck the two leads on the 9-volt battery,
sat on the seat, and tried out all the sounds the horn could make. There was a
buzzer sound and three different siren sounds. There was a wail made of two
alternating notes that she often heard in foreign movies. There was a sad, lazy,
wavy sound that she associated with housefires—she had seen a couple not far
Angelo Lacuesta 33
clumped clothes and the piles of letters with the thick tip of her slipper. Anna
wondered what kind of music was on those CDs and who would write Clara
so many letters, or why anyone would.
Her mother caught sight of an old candy canister, and Anna knew she
was wondering how Clara had gotten hold of it. Her mother knocked it aside
and when it didn’t open she kicked it against the wall. The lid popped off and
when she saw what it contained she knelt on the floor, planting her knees
on the cushion of blouses and t-shirts. She fished out a tangle of beads and
baubles from the can and clawed the trinkets apart with her hands, flicking
each item away as she inspected them.
She blew an exhausted, frustrated breath, looked briefly at Anna, then
returned her attention to the room. She pulled the sheet off the bed and gave
it a good snap, the air catching the dust. She grasped the mattress, dragged it
to the floor, inspected the wooden bedframe, and brushed past Anna out the
door, back into the unfinished yard, her slippers turning up clods of grassy
earth.
Anna followed her from right at the tip of her shadow, almost making
a game of it. When her mother entered the kitchen again and the shadow
disappeared she counted five floor tiles behind her, then four steps below her
as she climbed the stairs.
They walked up the hall back to Anna’s room. Clara was there. She had
upturned the beds and unloaded her closets. They seemed to be playing a
game. Anna felt his heart leap as she thought of the things she had hidden
there, behind old stuffed toys, under stacks of old textbooks. Her diaries, the
secret stash of books she had filched from the library, the photos of boys she
had clipped from magazines and printed out from websites. Everything lay
front and center as though Clara had known all along where she had hidden
them, all the way from when they were living in that small apartment in
Quezon City.
It didn’t seem so then, but now she remembered their neighbors as noisy
and troublesome, cranking up their karaoke music so early in the day, stinking
up the air with the smell of frying and the smell of barbecue, keeping them
awake with their music and off-key singing until way past midnight. The
women were always cooking and the men were always drinking, their white
plastic tables and chairs spilling out of their tiny garage into the street. There
was something about the way they looked at Clara whenever her mother
sent her out to the store on an errand. They quieted down and nudged and
whispered to each other and looked at her openly when she returned.
Angelo Lacuesta 35
In her maid’s frilly uniform she looked like a teenage girl grotesquely put in
a child’s dress.
“Stop what you’re doing,” Anna’s mother said and ordered Clara
downstairs.
Anna followed Clara down to the sala. Clara was so small that when she
sat on one of the chairs, her feet would not even touch the floor.
Her father wondered aloud whether they could have just been misplaced.
Her mother snorted in disgust.
“Why don’t we take her to the barangay hall, then,” her father said. “Have
her fill a blotter and maybe take a lie detector test.”
To this her mother merely grunted. “Idiot. By that time, of course, the
pearls would have been sold already.” She added that since she had discovered
their disappearance just a few short hours ago, no one had entered the house
or exited it.
“In fact,” she said, and so it was decided, “I’m sure the pearls will still be
here. She’s hidden them somewhere. That’s their modus operandi.”
Modus operandi was something Anna had never heard before.
“Pack up her things and bring them here,” she told Anna. She didn’t take
her eyes off Clara while she spoke.
Anna counted her steps as she trudged back to Clara’s room. She skipped
the path and took pleasure in bringing up clods of grass and earth with her
slippers. Anna found a bunch of garbage bags in the laundry area and entered
Clara’s room again. The closet doors swung freely now. Anna picked at the
things on the floor. She thought of putting them all into one bag but decided
to separate them into clothes, letters and magazines, and everything else.
In the sala she put the three black garbage bags by Clara’s dangling feet.
Clara swung her feet a little bit, as though she was actually being a little
playful, or bored. There was nothing to do anyway until her mother spoke.
Nobody spoke until her mother took her eyes away from Clara and looked at
nothing in particular and told her to leave.
Clara stood up, feet dropping to the floor. She picked up the bags and
walked out of the house and into the street.
“Those were good pearls, Dad,” her mother said, like she was also
speaking for Anna. “They were an investment.”
“They were good pearls,” he repeated as he disappeared into the kitchen.
Anna saw him look at the cake from the night before on the kitchen table.
He opened the fridge and crouched in front of it and seemed to consider its
contents carefully.
Angelo Lacuesta 37
What They Remember
Jenette Vizcocho
H
e had been gone for almost a year, but she would never admit to
that.
She would do a week’s worth of his laundry every now and then,
hang them out to dry, making sure the neighbors saw her fussing over his
cotton shirts, his office slacks, his thick sweaters. He always did go on out of
town trips, the office sending him to places as far as Davao and Dumaguete
to visit the gas stations assigned to him, so it was a common occurrence for
him to be gone for days, sometimes weeks at a time.
It was different before the accident. She used to cook elaborate dinners,
sun-dried tomato pasta with olives and capers, roast beef, lamb chops. These
she prepared as early as a few days before he arrived, back from inspecting
the many franchises on his docket, making sure the stations were up to par,
that the quota of gasoline orders were met, the pump boys in their proper
uniform, each having completed their training before handling customers or
the equipment.
These days, however, meals were single-serve, some bought off a karinderia
after work; a steaming cup of rice to heat the already coagulating chop suey,
or the fried chicken that had grown soggy during the post-lunch hour lull,
each viand knotted in tiny, see-through plastic bags. Other times, when the
lines were too long, or the lunch ladies too slow, and especially when she
thought that their eyes judged her, tried to figure out why she was buying a
take-out meal four days in a row, and pegging her as some lonely homebody,
she would speed past Aling Banang’s and hop onto the first jeepney headed
toward home.
She would rush into her house and hastily pry open a can of pork and
beans or tuna or vienna sausages, tilting her head back and forking the food
directly into her mouth. She bought by the bulk because she needn’t heat
them before consumption. Sometimes her kitchen sink boasted of six or
seven forks, each one slick with oil, before she could be bothered to wash
them. A lone cup she hadn’t rinsed out sat beside the water jug.
38
She would be in bed as early as seven-thirty in the evening. Usually she
would read a book or watch some television, but no matter how drowsy she
became, she would find herself unable to sleep. Sometimes, on the bad days,
she would catch a movie on HBO, or a sitcom she found quite funny, and
find herself still awake the second time it aired very early in the morning. No
matter how little sleep she had, she would be awake at five-thirty, would shove
her tiny feet into her husband’s large, furry bedroom slippers and shuffle off
to the bathroom for a quick shower.
Fashion these days, meant what color scrub suit would she wear today?
She watched those television shows, shows that tracked down people stuck
in a rut, wearing clothes that made them look to old, or too young, or too
fat, or too cheap; once even, a handsome doctor, a surgeon, who practically
lived in his scrubs, attended weddings, parties, even his own son’s graduation
in them, reasoning out that they fit well, were comfortable, and were low
maintenance. She agreed with him. She still found the man handsome, even
though his wife grudgingly admitted she was embarrassed to be seen with
him. She could find nothing wrong with living in one’s scrubs. It defined her
as a person, as a professional.
She worked at a nursing home specializing in Alzheimer’s disease and
dementia, handling cases on a one-to-one basis, helping her charge in and
out of bed, up and down the ramps or stairs, to the toilet, to the shower, with
dressing, feeding, taking medication, and even in activities such as reading
to them, letter-writing, watching television, or playing cards, mahjong, and
Scrabble.
In her twelve years at Mount Cloud, she had worked with and lost seven
patients, one lasting as long as five years with her, one not even making it past
six months before succumbing to her illness. She didn’t know what it was
about the facility. It was a large compound in Cavite, was bright enough, had
lots of space, lots of trees, had a lot of activities going on. But she still blamed
the place for the rapid disintegration that took over anyone who came to stay.
She felt sorry for these individuals who came to her in order to die, whose
eyes didn’t flicker in recognition at the sight of their loved ones; wondered if
they had even the slightest idea of the fact that this was the road they were
headed down, or that if they did, they could remind themselves to remember,
to hold onto that specific memory.
In the last two years, she had been working with Tatay Fred, a fifty-three
year-old retired scuba diving instructor whose son checked him in because he
would go missing from their home only to be found in full scuba gear, sitting
Jenette Vizcocho 39
in his boat, saying he was waiting for his student Monica, and that she was
late, as usual. Since being committed to Mount Cloud, however, he refused
any activity, disliking the walks he was goaded into taking, or the social hour
he was required to attend daily. He would hold onto the railings on either
side of his bed and shut his eyes, refusing to open them whenever she walked
into his room.
Tatay Fred would only become animated whenever his son showed up,
not really because of his visits but because of the things Marcus brought; a
rare golden cowry Tatay Fred harvested illegally during one of his deep-sea
diving trips; an old album containing pictures of Tatay Fred and his many
students and colleagues; an electric blue starfish lazily moving about in a
small aquarium; and once, his entire scuba gear, the skin suit, fins, mask,
the octopus, regulator, and oxygen tank. When these were presented to him,
Tatay Fred’s eyes would light up. He would get out of bed and totter over to
the large ottoman by the window, take whatever his son had brought in his
hands and turn them over and over again in his fingers.
He would start talking, sometimes to no one in particular, at times
addressing someone in the empty chair opposite his, Itong golden cowry, I
went all the way to Samar for it. Alam mo, I can sell it on eBay, five hundred
dollars, minsan higher, glow in the dark kasi eh.
On the day his gear was brought, he touched each piece of equipment,
smiling, struggling a bit as he pulled the mask over his head, fitting the straps
above his ears, pinching the nose pocket and saying, Monica, huwag mong
kalimutan, pinch at the nose to release the air! Breathe through your mouth,
steady breaths lang, mauubos yung oxygen, don’t panic!
Sometimes at night, when she was about to fall asleep, she would forget
that her husband was no longer there. She would jerk awake thinking she
heard the bedroom door close softly, or the muffled flushing of the toilet, or
how her husband used to slowly, carefully crawl into bed. Every night, she
would prop pillows beside her, so that whenever she shifted in her sleep, or
whenever she was in between sleeping and waking she could trick herself into
thinking that there was a warm body lying down beside her.
Her feelings would pull her back and forth, depending on what little
thing she remembered about him. The first few months, the memories would
flood her brain involuntarily, images triggered to life by random actions …,
how as she was stirring creamer into her morning coffee she would see a flash
Jenette Vizcocho 41
and push him around the grounds, following the winding pathways around
the large garden surrounding their facility. She would park him underneath
a shaded area near a man-made pond surrounded by a low enclosure, and he
would stare at the murky water.
In one of their walks, Tatay Fred stood up and walked to the edge of the
pond, and began speaking. Si Monica, sobrang hinang diver. Five dives na,
grabe pa rin mag-panic when she’s in the water. He shook his head. She’s a
good swimmer, passed all her tests, but still always runs out of oxygen during
dives. She wouldn’t answer, unsure of whether her replying would break this
ease that came over him, allowing him to speak to her.
Since then, as though he never treated her with silence, he began telling
her stories; usually about his diving school, about his adventures underwater,
in the end always coming back to Monica. He went into so much detail
about her, her hair that was so long that she refused to tie up causing it to fan
around her face; hair that in the water looked like seaweed, or the tentacles of
a jellyfish. Or how her skin never burned but reddened, how she was so white
she almost glowed like a beacon.
Once when Marcus, his son, was visiting, she asked him while Tatay Fred
was dozing, Is Monica your mother? Tatay Fred talks about her a lot. Marcus
did not answer for a long while, he scratched at his chin and stared at his
father. He sighed and finally shook his head, No, she’s not.
She apologized. But what she really wanted to know was who Monica
was that his father could not shut up about her?
Her husband used to be on the road so much that whenever he would
return, it would take her a few hours to get used to having someone around.
Perhaps the reason why she fussed so much with the cooking and the cleaning
was because she didn’t want to sit and think about what they were going to
talk about, or how she was going to act around him.
He would usually enter the house and set his things by the door, a duffel
bag full of laundry, a random gift from whatever region the head office sent
him, espasol from Lucena, uraro from Laguna, ube jam from Baguio, tupig
from Pangasinan, silvanas from Dumaguete, frozen durian from Davao.
These little sweets they would eat after their meals, the papers, banana leaves,
and colored cellophane wrappers littering the wooden dining table she had
painstakingly polished with lemon-scented oil.
Jenette Vizcocho 43
Her twelve-hour shift was from seven in the morning to seven in the
evening, her night reliever for Tatay Fred a young, single girl named Ivy. They
would usually run into each other to and from shifts and Ivy would talk non-
stop about herself, her boy troubles, her credit card debt, her latest drunken
spree. Whenever they would part, Ivy would ask, How’s Lito? Oh. Her face
would drain at the question. He’s somewhere in Itogon.
Travelling pa rin, huh? Well, you’re lucky, he always buys you presents
when he gets back. Buti ka pa!
She would avoid Ivy’s gaze, smile and nod, grabbing Tatay Fred’s chart
and fussing over it more than was necessary.
She used to bring whatever was left of her husband’s presents to share with
her coworkers. Once, Ivy teased her about no longer bringing her desserts.
So she was forced to commute to Market! Market! to shop for different
delicacies from all over the Philippines, VJANDEP pastels from Camiguin
one week, Cheding Peanuts from Iligan the next. She never partook of them
after choking on the sweetness of the yema in the pastels, the taste insistent
even after she drank several glasses of water. Whenever her friends asked her
to have dinner after their shift or to catch a movie with them, she would beg
off, always promising to join next time. At some point, they stopped asking,
or when they did, became less persuasive in their efforts.
Once, as she was charting at the nursing station, just as she was about
to leave at the end of her shift, Marcus walked into Tatay Fred’s room with
a woman following in his footsteps, her floral dress reaching down past her
knees, her shoes sensible and flat, her wide feet straining the tensile strength
of the leather. Marcus brought a heavy basket of coconuts, pineapples,
mangos, and bananas, Tatay Fred’s favorite fruits. In the woman’s small hands
was a picture frame that seemed to once have been lined in velvet, the deep
purple texture now dull as though having gone through several exposures to
oil or water; on her finger a ring unmistakably a wedding band. ’Tay, I’m here
with ’Nay, Marcus said, setting the basket down and then urging his mother
toward the bed.
The woman smiled and hesitated before laying a hand on top of Tatay
Fred’s. He looked up at her before snatching his hand back. Sino ka? The
woman’s smile faltered before resurging all the brighter, the drop of her lips
almost imperceptible, like the blinking of a light bulb. Freddy, kumusta?
He didn’t answer and so she pressed on, Marcus came for me, alam
mo naman I can’t leave the resort just like that. Oh, I have something for
Jenette Vizcocho 45
into the phone, no, it can wait. When are you coming home? Sa Friday, see
you, hon.
She kept her secret for three days, smiling as she made dinner or did
her duties at work, thankful for the fact that Tatay Fred had retained his
slim physique that the bed turns and transfers were not too difficult for
her to manage. The night before her husband was due to come home, she
marinated an array of chicken, beef, and mutton in a mixture of soy sauce,
rice wine, peanut butter, and lemon; adding minced peppers, ginger, garlic,
and cilantro. She had cooked satay for Lito one time, and he had been raving
about it ever since. She tried to imagine how he would feel, what he would
look like at her news, excited to finally have a guaranteed piece of him with
her always, despite his numerous travels.
At work, all she could think about was what sex the baby would be, or
who it would look like, wishing it Lito’s height and sharp nose, her dimples
and the shape of her fingers and toes. She ducked out of Tatay Fred’s room
as he was sleeping, feeling a wave of nausea and running for her thermos of
watermelon-lemon juice she kept chilled in the staff kitchen, something she
had been craving the past few days that oddly calmed the churning of her
stomach. When she returned to his room, he was missing, the side rail of his
hospital bed lowered, the thin sheet she had fitted around his sleeping figure
now in a bundle on the floor.
She rushed out of the room, peering into each of the doorways she
passed, her heart thudding in her ears, her eyes brimming over as she cursed
herself for being so careless as to leave without endorsing him to one of the
idle nurses at the station. She had covered the entire floor without catching
any sign of him, the halls unusually quiet. In her shock, she found herself
wandering back to his room, noticing the open closet for the first time, seeing
the golden cowry and the picture albums, but not the scuba diving gear.
She raced to the manmade pond, seeing Tatay Fred’s robe strewn on the
grass. She surveyed the water, looking for some sign of disturbance, finally
noting faint ripples coming from beneath the surface. Without thinking, she
jumped in, the loose material of her scrubs billowing and filling up with
water, her thin cardigan feeling heavier and heavier across her back and arms
as it grew sopping wet. She surfaced more than once to determine where Tatay
Fred was, gasping for air. She had never been a strong swimmer, her limbs
starting to feel heavy. She thrashed around in the cold, her breath flowing
out of her mouth in strong bursts, her throat burning up as her body caused
her to reflexively inhale. She awoke to find herself in an empty room, Tatay
Jenette Vizcocho 47
about having children, telling her they were nearing forty and he was really
envious of his friends who were on their second or third child. At night,
Lito would be waiting for her, then still working at the head office in Pasig
and usually home at roughly the same time as her. He had been researching
nonstop on ways to increase the probability of conception, every dinner
discussing some technique he read off the internet, or relaying advice from
his female coworkers.
She felt slightly mortified at how he began to approach sex scientifically,
methodically, charting her monthly period in a calendar, or testing her
cervical mucus with his fingers; stretching the cloudy, viscous liquid over
and over again between his thumb and pointer finger to tell whether she was
ovulating, a slight furrow between his brows. How he took her basal body
temperature in the mornings, gently nudging her awake before commanding
her to say “ah,” a basal thermometer in hand. How when he determined she
was fertile he would then begin kissing her on the ear, knowing it was the
quickest way to arouse her, all the while repeatedly whispering, it’s okay to be
a little late today. After making love, he would insist she keep her legs up for
ten to fifteen minutes, setting a timer beside her and fussing over her as she
lay there in bed, stroking her hair and smiling down at her.
She was hesitant, although she never spoke of it, unable to shake the
thought of how one of her colleagues had gotten pregnant and started acting
out of the ordinary. She would laugh or cry or throw a temper tantrum for
seemingly no reason at all; one time locking a patient inside his room and
refusing to let him out because he did not finish his vegetables, another
crying for three hours straight because she said she never saw anybody visit
the woman who was in room number 17, yet another coming to work in
the middle of the afternoon in her pajamas, her distended belly straining
the material of the pajama top, the buttons misaligned. She spoke of how
she woke up and cleaned her entire house, only rushing off to work when
she remembered it was a Monday. Although aware that pregnancy normally
resulted in some hormonal and psychological changes, she was alarmed when
her colleague seemed to fare worse and worse as she grew larger, how she quit
her job in a fit of rage over a misplaced chart and stayed at home ever since.
Lito seemed to become more and more desperate as time passed without
any success, disappointed when another month saw her reaching into the
closet and pulling a packet of sanitary pads out. He began making side trips
to the grocery; forcing her to eat plenty of fruit for breakfast; buying a wide
array of vegetables, carrots, pumpkin, beans, and peas; banning beef and
Jenette Vizcocho 49
She had one of those plastic underwater Kodak cameras she took with her
and would try to enter the vessels, taking pictures of the ship, the plankton,
the different kinds of fish. She would leave the film with him soon as she used
them up, making him drop them off and pick them up at the nearby photo
centers.
She knew he was smitten with her, would keep him dangling, hoping,
bumbling desperately for her attention. He would ask her at the end of each
dive, Monica, may plans ka na ba for dinner? She would hedge and say, why?
And he would redden and mumble his invitation to dine with him in one of
the nearby restaurants. She would say maybe, or yes, but would always send
her yaya out with a flimsy excuse of a stomachache, or a migraine, or how she
wasn’t hungry. However, whenever they were underwater, she would tease him
with her touch, would swim so close to him that her untied hair would caress
the skin of his arm, or his neck, or the side of his face. Or she would disappear
from view even when he had explicitly reminded her at the start of every
dive to be within range so that he could come to her whenever she needed
assistance, and then would pop out of nowhere laughing so hysterically that
she often ran out of oxygen.
At the end of that summer, just as she had a week’s worth of time left
before she had to leave, he got into an argument with her. They had scheduled
to go to the site of the USS New York, an 8,150-ton armored cruiser some 87
feet, underwater. It would be one of the deepest dives Monica would have to
make, and he reminded her to regulate her breathing, to stay within eyesight.
She cracked her gum at his words and said, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah, but just
as he was cutting the engine of their boat, she hit the water without warning.
A few seconds after, a bunch of her bracelets floated up from where she had
landed.
Fred dove into the water, circling the wreck over and over again, checking
under the portside and around the upper and lower decks, trying not to
panic when his Submersible Pressure Gauge indicated he was low on oxygen,
resurfacing only when he was all but depleted. There she was, sitting in the
boat, laughing with her arms around Joey, preventing him from diving down
and alerting Fred that she was safe. Gotcha, didn’t I, she said, giggling, her
bracelets back around her wrist. Fred climbed aboard the boat and drove
home, and refused to speak to Monica even when she hung out in their resort,
even when on her last day, she dropped off an envelope full of underwater
snapshots, the majority of them photos of him.
Jenette Vizcocho 51
Troya
Joselito D. delos Reyes
S
a gitna ng kalamidad, maraming dapat unahin ang chief executive ng
isang first-class city na laging binabaha: asikasuhin ang evacuation ng
mga tao lalo na kapag nagpawala ng tubig na kulay tsokolate’t may
tangay pang retaso ng troso ang Angat Dam; alamin kung may sapat na supply
ng bigas, instant noodles, asukal, sardinas, kape, at bottled water para sa mga
apektadong residente; makipag-ugnayan sa National Disaster Coordinating
Council para sa mga tulong at ayudang bigas, instant noodles, asukal,
sardinas, kape at bottled water galing sa national government; itulak ang
pagpasa sa resolusyon na nagdedeklarang nasa State of Calamity ang kaniyang
nasasakupan kasama na ang paggasta—nang hindi dumadaan sa bidding—ng
calamity fund para sa mga nasalanta at masasalanta; ayusin ang pagdi-dispatch
sa mga amphibious rescue vehicle na pahiram ng AFP at six by six truck
ng city hall na paroo’t parito sa mga apektadong barangay; sumagot sa mga
interview sa radyo at telebisyon, manawagan ng tulong sa kapuso’t kapamilya
ng sansinukob; magpabaha ng maraming press release na nagsasabing “the
situation is manageable, Valenzuela under flood” sa lahat ng diyaryo, hao siao
man o hindi; alamin sa PAGASA kung may papadaluyong pang bagyo—na
Lupita ang susunod na ngalan—at delubyong makapagpapasidhi sa baha,
kung kailan ito tatama, kung iiwas o lulusob, kung ang tinamaan ng lintik
na bagyo ay sadyang tumatarget sa kaniyang abang nasasakupan; tawagan
nang nagmumura at tanungin nang nagmumura ang Meralco kung kailan
mawawalan at magkakaroon ng buwakananginang koryente, mag-“thank
you for your prompt response and cooperation” pagkatapos. Ligirin ang
nasasakupan kasama ang camera crew ng mga network habang ipinaliliwanag
na force majeure ang lahat ng nangyayaring baha at delubyo sa lungsod na
iyon sa puwit ng Metro Manila, at sabihin—mariin at nanginginig—“handa
kami sa lahat ng uri ng disaster!” habang binabayo ng ulan sa ibabaw ng
pump boat na bumabaybay sa kalsadang nagpapanggap na ilog, at palakasin
ang loob ng mga kababayan at sigawan sila: “kayang-kaya natin ’to, mga
52
kababayan!”; ipahukay, katulong ang MMDA, ang bumababaw at kumikitid
na Meycauayan River at Tullahan River upang maayos na dausdusan ng
tubig-ulan na manggagaling sa panot na kabundukan ng Bulacan at Rizal;
dumalaw sa mga evacuation center at magsama ng mga doktor at nars na
titingin sa mga batang magkakalagnat at magkakaalipunga, at siguraduhing
may sapat na supply ng paracetamol, cough syrup, mefenamic acid, at
antibiotic na malalaklak ng mga taong nangangaligkig sa ginaw; magsama ng
mga photographer para sa isang dramatic photo-op na astang kumakalinga
sa mga nilalagnat, inuubo, inaalipunga; ipaliwanag sa pangulo ng bansa na
“everything is under my control, the flood will surely subside, Ma’am.” At
“everything will be all right as soon as the weather clears, Ma’am.” upang
hindi mabulyawan sa harap ng media gaya ng ginawa ng Pangulo sa isang
gobernador noong huling manalasa ang bagyo—na nagkataong Gloria
ang ibininyag ng PAGASA—sa lalawigan mismo ng high school level na
gobernador sa Luzon na hindi alam ang pagkakaiba ng resolusyon sa ordinansa
at Local Government Code sa Local School Board.
Hindi dapat magutom, magkasakit, malungkot ang mga tao sa evacuation
center. Walang dapat mamatay. Punyemas! Lahat ng gagawin ng meyor sa
kuwarenta y otso oras ay para sa tao! Simberguwensa! At walang panahon ang
isang pinagpipitaganang meyor sa panahon ng baha at delubyo para sa isang
kabayong maaagnas! Punyeta!
Ibig sabihin, hindi matutulungan ni meyor si Kapitan Timmy Estrella
sa suliranin nito: kung paano ididispatsa ang isang patay at malapit nang
mamaga’t mangamoy na malaking kabayong nakasalalak sa makitid na ilog
ng malurido sa bahang barangay ng Coloong. Walang ipahihiram na crane na
babaybay sa ilog ng Meycauayan para dumukot sa malaking kabayo. Walang
pulis dahil naka-dispatch lahat kasama ng mga amphibious vehicle na hiniram
sa Camp Magsaysay at Camp Capinpin. Walang rescue team dahil maraming
taong nire-rescue sa buong lungsod. Walang panahon para sa kabayo ang
lahat ng may kukote sa loob at labas ng city hall.
“Unahin ang tao, Kap. Hindi ang kabayo,” tagubilin pa ni meyor sa
kaniya sabay tapik sa basang balikat niya bago siya lumabas ng opisinang
parang binabahang ilog sa dami ng umaagos na empleadong, gaya ni meyor
ay litong-lito sa ginagawa. Naging isang malaking pabrika ng relief goods
ang lobby ng city hall. Nakita niya si ex-Kapitan Trebor, ang tinalo niya sa
eleksiyon at kanang kamay ni meyor, na nagmamando sa mga tagasupot ng
relief goods. Kinindatan siya ni ex-Kapitan Trebor, ngumisi. Nabantad ang
lahat ng nikotinadong ngipin.
I
sa siyang mabait na bata kaya lagi siyang nagpapaalam.
Noong gusto niyang maging alimango, tinawagan niya muna sa ospital
ang kanyang nanay kung saan ito nagtatrabaho at nagtanong, “’Nay,
puwede po ba ’kong maging alimango?”
“Oo, anak, oo,” ang mabilis nitong sagot sabay baba ng telepono.
“Bakit mo gustong maging alimango?” tanong ng ate niya na tuwang-
tuwang nakikinig.
Kasi raw noong Sabado, may dumaan na mamáng naglalako ng alimango
at nang bumili ang tatay nila, nakita niya kung pano magpakitang-gilas ang
mga ’to, kung ga’no sila kahirap mahuli, kung pa’nong napapasigaw ang mga
nasisipit nito. Ngumisi ang ate ng bata.
Pagdating ng nanay galing trabaho, mabilis ’tong nagtungo sa kuwarto
nilang mag-asawa, ’di pinansin ang anak na nakakipkip ang mga kamay sa
pagitan ng mga nakatiklop na alak-alakan at naglalakad na parang alimango.
Di rin siya napansin ng kanyang mga magulang nang pumasok siya sa
kanilang kuwarto, pilit na inaakyat ang kama, ginagaya ang kanyang nakita,
kung pa’no magkumahog ang mga alimango na makaakyat, kung pa’no sila
madulas sa pagsubok.
Ang sabi ng nanay sa tatay: “Dinala kahapon nang madaling araw, hindi
alam ng nanay ang gagawin do’n sa bata, luwa na ’yong bituka, ang sabi niya,
tahiin ’nyo ho tahiin ’nyo ho, hindi ko naman masabi sa kanya na hindi ko
na ho ’yan matatahi. Lumaban pa raw kasi ’yong bata, ’kala mo kung sinong
matapang. Nakuha din naman lahat.”
Nabaltog ang bata pero hindi siya umiyak. Sinabihan siya ng nanay niya
na mag-ingat, sinabihan siya ng tatay na hindi na siya puwedeng maging
alimango. Tinawag nila ang ate nito para siya kunin, sinabi ng ate niyang
masakit mamatay ang mga alimango, matigas sa labas, malambot sa loob,
kumukulo ang lahat ng laman nito kapag iniluluto. “Gusto mong mapakuluan
ang bituka mo?”
68
Hindi na naging alimango ang bata kahit kailan.
Noong sumunod na linggo, tinawagan niya ulit ang nanay niya sa ospital
at nagtanong: “Puwede ba ’kong maging hito, gusto kong maging hito!”
“Kung ano’ng gusto mo,” ang sagot nito nang humihikab.
“Bakit mo gustong maging hito?” tanong ng ate na aliw na aliw na
nakikinig.
Dahil daw noong isang Sabado, noong pumunta sila ng tatay niya
sa bagsakan ng mga isda, nakita niyang hinuhuli ang mga ito at kahit na
alisin sila sa tubig, di sila matigil-tigil sa pagkawag, parang buhay na buhay.
Manghang-mangha ang bata sa isdang kayang huminga sa lupa, nakakatawa
pa, may bigote sila! Ngumiti ang ate ng bata.
Pagkatapos ng hapunan, nagulat sila nang magpunta ito sa banyo para
maghilamos nang di inuutusan, sumigaw pagkakain, “Ako na, ako na!”
Habang nag-iimis ng pinagkainan, ang kuwento ng nanay sa tatay: “Sunog
ang buong balat. Kung ako ’yon, hindi na ’ko pumasok sa loob, di naman
niya kaano-ano. Dagsaan ang mga reporter, tingnan mo, sa balita mamaya:
Pasyente Naging Bayani.” Sa banyo, walang tigil ang gripo sa pagpugak ng
tubig. Maya-maya, narinig na lang ng nanay at tatay habang nag-aabang
ng balita. Kaya pala di pa lumalabas ang bata! Ito ang kanilang naabutan
pagbukas ng pinto: ang bata nakadapa sa sahig, kumikiwal-kiwal at naglagay
pa ng dalawang guhit ng toothpaste sa ibabaw ng kanyang mga labi.
Nagsasayang ka ng tubig, ang sabi sa kanya ng nanay, hinatak siya nito
patayo, di ka na puwedeng maging hito, ang sabi sa kanya ng tatay, inalisan
siya nito ng bigote. Tinawag nila ang ate para bihisan ang bata, at habang
pinubulbusan, “Nakita mo ba kung pa’no pinapatay ang hitong malilikot?”
Hindi, sagot ng bata. “Hinahawakan sa buntot saka hinahampas ang ulo sa
bato. Gusto mong pumutok iyang ulo mo?”
Hindi na naging hito ang bata kahit kailan.
Pero ang mabait na bata, laging nagpapaalam.
May sumunod pang linggo’t gusto naman niyang maging palaka. Hinanap
niya ang kanyang nanay at nang marinig ang boses nito’y nagtanong, “Palaka
’nay, puwede ba, puwede ba?”
“Sige, anak, sige,” at naglaho ito sa kabilang linya dahil may dumating
na pasyente.
“Bakit mo gustong maging palaka?” tanong ng ate na siyang-siyá na
nakikinig.
Mahirap silang mahuli ang tugon ng bata habang nagmumuwestra:
noong Sabado raw, kasama ng mga kumpare ng kanyang tatay, nagpunta sila
P
amilyar ang daan papuntang Gitnang-araw. Dito, lubak-lubak ang
kalsada maliban kung malapit na ang eleksiyon. May eskinitang laging
tinatambakan ng basura sa tapat ng babalang “Bawal magtambak ng
basura dito gago.” Oras-oras din ang traffic dahil sa gitna ng kalsada nagbababa
ang mga jeepney, at beterano sa pagsingit ang mga tricycle at pedicab. Dito,
halos hindi na makausod ang nagsisiksikang bahay, sari-sari store, junkshop,
bakery, at iba pa. Sa umaga, inuunahan ng mga lelang na naka-daster ang
tandang sa pagtalak. Binabasag naman ng sintunadong pagkanta ang gabi,
at madalas magbasagan ng bote ang mga lasing sa videoke. Tuwing tag-ulan,
bumabaha ang lansangan at ginagawang swimming pool ng mga bata ang
kulay pusali na tubig. Tuwing tag-init, mainit na mainit sa Gitnang-araw.
Walang patawad ang tanghaling-tapat, parang matinding apoy sa pandayan,
pinatitigas at pinakikinang ang lahat ng tagarito.
Pumapatak sa Agusto 4 ang Pista ng Gitnang-araw, pero Hulyo pa lang
ay bumubuhos na sa kalsada ang kasabikan ng buong pook. Tuwing panahon
ng pista, napupuno ang simbahan ng mga panalangin kay Santo Domingo de
Guzman Garces, patron ng Gitnang-araw at mga dalubtala.
Simple lang ang panalangin ng mga tagarito: maaliwalas na buhay,
pagkain sa mesa, kapatawaran sa kanilang mga sala, at matinong signal ng
cellphone.
Sa taong ito, tulad ng nakaraan, nagdarasal ang batang si Agustus na
makapag-aral. Nagdarasal naman ang nanay niyang si Wendy na madapuan
ng suwerte—maka-jackpot sana sa lotto, manalo sa kontest, o mapadaan sa
bahay nila ang game show host na nagpapamudmod ng pera—para mapag-
aral niya ang kaniyang nag-iisang anak. Parehong nangangarap ang mag-ina
ng mas magandang bukas.
Nananalangin naman ang tanyag na pintor na si Boy Tulay ng inspirasyon
para sa kanyang susunod na obra. Kamakailan kasi ay natagpuan niya ang
dalagang mamahalin niya habang-buhay. Nangangarap si Boy Tulay na
73
makalikha ng napakagandang sining na pag-uusapan ng buong Pook at
magsisilbing simbolo ng kanyang pag-ibig.
Maging si Balbas na siga ng Pook Gitnang-araw ay nagdarasal. Gustuhin
man niya, hindi siya makapag-alay ng bulaklak sa Santo dahil kasalukuyan
siyang nakakulong sa Muntinlupa. Sakto sa araw ng Pista ang araw ng
kanyang pagbitay. Nangangarap si Balbas ng kapatawaran at kinabukasan—
maaliwalas man o hindi—basta’t naroon siya’t humihinga.
Hindi tiyak kung ugali ni Tonio Ginuaco ang magdasal pero tila nasagot
na ang mga panalangin niya. Nitong huling linggo, kinilala siya ng pangulo
ng bansa bilang makabagong bayaning Filipino. Isasabay sa araw ng pista
ang pagpapatayo ng rebulto ni Tonio sa bungad ng Pook. Sa kabila nito,
nangangarap pa rin si Tonio ng manit na sabaw at isang bandehadong kanin.
Simpleng tao lang si Tonio.
Samantala, halos walang panahon si Aling Taptap magdasal dahil sa
paghahanda niya para sa araw ng Pista. Bilang pinakamahusay na kusinera
ng Gitnang-araw, tiyak na dudumugin ng mga kapitbahay ang kaniyang
karinderya. Ito pa naman ang unang pista na wala sa piling niya ang kaniyang
anak. Saan man ang anak niya ngayon, ipinagdarasal ni Aling Taptap na ligtas
ito at hindi nagugutom.
Hindi man matataas ang mga bahay sa Pook Gitnang-araw, tiyak na
sumasayad sa langit ang mga pangarap ng mga tagarito. Sa gitna ng walang-
patid na ingay ng lansangan, sa pusod ng semento, aspalto, buhol-buhol na
kable ng koryente, libag, at kalawang ng Pook na nagbibilang ng petsa bago
ang araw ng Pista, nakabibingi ang ingay ng mga nagsusumamong pangarap.
1. Ginuaco
Si Tonio Ginuaco ang paboritong kapitbahay ng lahat ng naninirahan
sa Pook Gitnang-araw. Malumanay magsalita at maamo ang mukha, para
bang hindi niya kayang mag-isip ng masama sa kaniyang kapuwa. Pero ang
tunay na nakapagpalapit ng loob ng kaniyang mga kapitbahay ay ang hilig ni
Toniong magpakamartir.
Noong nag-aaral pa si Tonio, napagbintangan siyang nagnakaw ng
pandesal na baon ng seatmate niya sa eskuwela. Wala kasing sariling baon
si Tonio at madalas siyang manghingi sa katabi. At dahil alam ng lahat na
dalawang subo lang ang layo ng pulubi sa kawatan, siya ang napagbintangan.
“Malaki pa naman ’yon,” reklamo ng batang nawalan ng baon. “Hindi
yung tig-pipisong pandesal, ha? Yung tig-tatlong piso at may palaman na
tuna.”
Mixkaela Villalon 75
sa bahay ng Ale para sabihin na siya ang dumakip sa dalaga. Detalyado
ang pagkuwento ni Tonio kay Aling Taptap kung paano niya binigyan ng
sopdrinks na may halong pampatulog ang dalaga, at nang mawalan ng malay,
tinadtad niya ang katawan at hinalo sa adobo.
“Oo na, Tonio. Umuwi ka na nga,” sabi ni Aling Taptap.
“Gin’wako,” sabi ni Tonio. “Ako’ng may gawa. Gin’wako.”
Nang naholdap ang malaking bangko malapit sa Pook, pinuntahan ni
Tonio ang estasyon ng pulis. “Gin’wako,” sabi niya, at sapat na iyon sa mga
imbestigador. Inaresto nila si Tonio sa kabila ng dalawampung testigo na
sumusumpang hindi siya ang nangholdap. Hindi rin matagpuan sa bahay ni
Tonio ang perang ninakaw pero idineklara ng hepe ng pulis na tagumpay ng
hustisya at karangalan ng Pulis Maynila ang pag-aresto kay Tonio Ginuaco.
Kinabukasan, natagpuan sa ilalim ng headline ng bawat diyaryo ang
mahiyaing ngiti ni Tonio Ginuaco. Tinawag siyang “Slumdog Criminal
Mastermind” ng mga pahayagan dahil sumuko man siya sa mga awtoridad,
walang may alam kung saan niya itinago ang pera. Ang patpatin at tahimik na
si Tonio Ginuaco, nasa TV at diyaryo, mag-isang nakapagholdap ng bangko,
at ngayon ay pinag-uusapan ng buong bansa.
Hindi nagtagal, sinugod ng Asong Ulol Gang ang presinto at galit na
sinabing sila ang nangholdap ng bangko. Hindi nila matiis na ibigay kay
Tonio sintu-sinto ang puri ng kanilang pinaghirapang krimen. Bahagyang
nagkagulo sa presinto dahil ayaw ni Tonio mapalaya. Nagsisigaw siya doon
ng “Gin’wako! Ako! Ako ang gumawa!” Napilitan tuloy ang Asong Ulol Gang
na maglabas ng ebidensiya—mga litrato nilang mayhawak ng mga baril at
nanghoholdap ng bangko, kuha sa sariling cellphone, at naka-upload sa
Friendster. Kumbinsido sa wakas, pinalaya ng mga pulis si Tonio.
Nakayukong lumabas si Tonio mula sa kulungan, nahihiya sa sasabihin
ng ibang tao. Sumunod sa bawat hakbang niya ang alingawngaw ng mga
preso, tawang-tawa sa pagkahulog ni Ginuaco mula sa kaniyang pedestal.
Simula noon, halos wala nang maniwala kay Tonio tuwing umaako siya
ng mga kasalanan. Nang masaksak si Boy Tulay sa may paaralan, sinabi ni
Tonio na siya ang may sala. Pero imposibleng siya, dahil may nakita si Wendy
na ibang taong umaaligid kay Boy Tulay bago mangyari ang krimen. Hindi
masukat ang kalungkutan ni Tonio Ginuaco noon.
Mabuti na lang at nariyan ang Pulis Maynila at ang mahaba nilang
listahan ng mga hindi malutas na krimen. Ipinakilala ng hepe ng pulis si
Tonio sa ilang kilalang personalidad ng panahon. “Big break mo na ’to,
Mixkaela Villalon 77
“Pagka natutukan ka ng baril, cool ka lang. Unang natetepok ’yung mabilis
nerbyosin.”
Natutuhan ni Balbas ang leksiyong ito nang minsang natunugan ng mga
pulis na magkakaroon ng malaking bentahan ng shabu sa garahe ng isang
kilalang bus liner. Nang i-raid ang garahe, bisto ang ilang malalaking tao—
ang kumpare ni senador, ang may-ari ng estayon sa TV—at si Balbas sa gitna
ng barilan. Imbes na makipagbakbakan o tumakbo paalis, inipit ni Balbas ang
ilang pakete ng shabu sa kilikili niya at nagkunwaring napadaan lang sa lugar
na iyon. Pumipito pa siya sa sarili habang naglalakad palayo. Cool na cool ang
itsura, babad naman sa pawis ng kilikili niya ang naiuwing droga.
Sa kongkretong kagubatan ng lungsod, iisa lang ang batas: ang batas ng
supply at demand.
Tuwing nagkaka-raid, abot-langit ang presyo ng shabu. Nagtutungo sa
ibang bansa ang malalaking drug dealer para hindi sila tiktikan ng pulis.
Kumokonti tuloy ang droga sa lansangan pero hindi nagbabago ang dami ng
mga adik. Dito nakakita si Balbas ng pagkakataong ibenta ang kakarampot
niyang droga. Para maparami ang benta at para na rin takpan ang anghit ng
kilikili sa kaniyang produkto, hinahaluan ni Balbas ng dinurog na asin ang
ibinebentang shabu. Sa sampung pisong droga na hihithitin, sisenta porsiyento
lang ang tunay na shabu. “Okey lang,” isip ni Balbas. “Mga adik lang naman
ang dinadaya ko. Ano ba’ng gagawin nila, isusumbong ako sa pulis?”
Hindi nagtagal, kinahiligan ng mga adik ng Gitnang-araw ang shabu ni
Balbas. Dekalidad daw ito at malakas ang tama. At eto pa, sabi ng mga adik,
ang shabu ni Balbas—may flavor. Lasang asin (at marahil kilikili).
Dahil dito, nakakita si Balbas ng oportunidad na ipagbuti ang kanyang
negosyo. Balbas’s flavored shabu, whooh! Kahit nang magsibalikan ang mga
big-time na drug dealer sa Pook, hindi nila matapatan ang inobasyon ni
Balbas.
Nag-eksperimento pa si Balbas. Sinubukan niyang haluin ang shabu sa
iba’t ibang sangkap na mahahanap sa kusina. Minsan asin, minsan asukal. May
pagpipilian na ang mga adik na sweet o salty. Para sa mga bata, hinahaluan ni
Balbas ng Tang orange juice ang shabu. “Mami, wala na bang Tang!” sigaw ng
mga bulilit na nanginginig at nangingisay sa tuwa.
Habang lumalaki ang merkado ng shabu ni Balbas, nagkakaroon ng iba’t
ibang demographic ang mga suki niya. Para sa mga may diabetes, Splenda-
flavored shabu. Para sa mga binata’t binatilyo, shabu na may dinurog na
Cherifer, para siguradong tatangkad. Para sa mga nagda-diet, shabu-lite (70
porsiyento less shabu).
Mixkaela Villalon 79
“Kung tutuusin. hindi droga ang ibinebenta ko,” paliwanag ni Balbas
minsan sa sanlaksang adik na araw-araw tumatambay sa bahay niya para
humithit. “Kung droga lang ang habol ninyo, maraming nagbebenta diyan.
Pero nan’dito kayo para sa ambiance, di ba? Saan kayo nakakita ng bata,
matanda, mayaman, mahirap, nagsasama-sama? Nagbibigayan? Dito lang
sa bahay ko. Kung ganoon, ang ibinebenta ko ay ang tunay na diwa ng
pagkakaisa.”
Mabuti man ang adhikain ni Balbas, dugong negosyante pa rin ang
dumadaloy sa kaniyang mga ugat. Pera pa rin ang laging nasa isip, at kung
paano ito pararamihin. Ang minsang sisenta porsiyentong shabu, naging
singkuwenta. Tapos kuwarenta. Pakonti nang pakonti ang dami ng shabu
kompara sa mga hinahalo niya para magkalasa. Patuloy naman ang pagdami
ng mga customer ni Balbas. Tinaguriang “the place to be” ang kaniyang bahay
kapag nagawi sa Pook Gitnang-araw. Kahit daw ’yung mga hindi nagsha-
shabu, bumibisita doon, nagbabakasakaling makakita ng artista o kung
sinong bigtime tulad ni Ginuaco.
Ngunit walang bahagharing nagtatagal. Kung sino man ang nagreklamo
tungkol sa negosyo ni Balbas, hindi na mahalaga. Ni-raid ng malaking puwersa
ng Pulis Maynila ang bahay ni Balbas. Nahuli sa akto ang higit dalawampung
adik na humihithit. Nang imbestigahan kung ano ang hinihithit, nalamang
asin, asukal, Tang orange juice, at kung ano-anong legal na kasangkapan lang
ang ginagamit. Wala ni kurot ng shabu sa buong bahay ni Balbas.
Kahit walang mahanap na ebidensiya ng droga, arestado pa rin bilang
drug dealer si Balbas sa kabila ng pagpupumilit ni Tonio Ginuaco na siya ang
may sala. Hinatulan si Balbas ng pagbitay.
Mabuti na lang at naging masugid niyang customer ang anak ng huwes.
Nakapag-apila pa siya na itapat sa araw ng Pista ng Pook Gitnang-araw
ang kaniyang pagbitay. Para raw maalala siya ng kaniyang mga kapitbahay,
mabanggit man lang ang pangalan niya habang nag-iinuman. Higit sa lahat,
para marami-rami ang magpunta sa simbahan at mabingi ng mga dasal si San
Pedro habang sinasampa ni Balbas ang gate ng langit.
Nag-unahan ang mga TV station sa exclusive rights ng nationwide live
telecast ng pagbitay ni Balbas. Nangako naman ang Ajinomoto, SM Bonus
Sugar, at Tang orange juice na magiging official sponsors ng telecast at ng
Pista ng Pook Gitnang-araw bilang pasasalamat sa pagtangkilik ng mga adik
sa kanilang mga produkto.
Mixkaela Villalon 81
sa pusta. Ibinibigay nila sa mga magulang ang napapanalunang pera. Ganito
ang gawi sa Gitnang-araw. Kahit mga bata ay may papel sa pagtakbo ng Pook.
Para makasali sa labanan ng gagamba, kailangan muna ni Agustus ng sarili
niyang pambato. Nakadiskubre siya ng gagambang gumawa ng sapot sa likod
ng kabinet ng nanay niya. Maliit lang ito at kulay brown. Nagmamadaling
ipakita ni Agustus ang bagong alaga sa pinakamatalinong tao na kilala niya,
si Aling Taptap.
“Gagambang pitik ’to,” sabi ni Aling Taptap. Kasinlaki lang ng kuko sa
hinlalaki ng matanda ang gagamba. “Laking Gitnang-araw. Matapang,” sabi
niya kay Agustus.
Matapang nga ang gagambang nahanap ng bata. “Papa” ang ipinangalan
ni Agustus dito.
Unang hinamon ni Agustus ang kapitbahay na si Buknoy at ang alaga
niyang gagambang bayabas (dahil nahanap ito sa puno ng bayabas). Malaki
ang gagamba ni Buknoy, mahaba ang mga paa. Limang Papa siguro ang
katumbas nito. “Ito si Tyson,” pakilala ni Buknoy sa alaga.
Mukhang paniki si Tyson na nakabitin patiwarik sa patpat ng walis
tingting. Sa kabilang dulo ng tingting, masyadong maliit si Papa. Hindi ito
gumagalaw.
“Nanigas na ’tong isa,” tukso ni Balbas na nakikinood sa labanan.
Gumapang papalapit si Tyson kay Papa. Mabagal, tantiyado ang galaw.
Kung ibang gagamba siguro si Papa, umatras na ito. Pero nanatili lang ito sa
kaniyang dulo ng tingting. Tahimik ang mga manonood. Nang magkaharap
na ang dalawang gagamba, kasimbilis ng kidlat ang pangyayari. Isang pitik
lang ng paa ni Papa, talsik sa tingting si Tyson.
“Hu!” kolektibong bulalas ng tulalang manonood.
“Walang gagalaw!” natatarantang sigaw ni Buknoy. “Baka matapakan
n’yo si Tyson.”
“Dapat pala Pacquiao ang pangalan n’yang alaga mo,” sabi ni Boy Tulay
kay Agustus.
Simula noon, tuloy-tuloy na ang pagkapanalo ni Agustus at Papa.
Lumilipad naman sa ulap ang puso ni Wendy tuwing nakikilala ng ibang tao
ang ningning ni Agustus. Tuwing sumasakay siya ng jeep, nakikilala siya ng
mga jeepney driver bilang ina ni Agustus, champion sa labanan ng gagamba.
Kadalasan ay nalilibre pa ang pamasahe ni Wendy. Pabalato raw sa hindi pa
nababahirang rekord ni Agustus.
“Nanay, gusto kong maging astronot paglaki,” sabi ni Agustus isang
gabi, puno ng liwanag ang mukha—liwanag ng lightpost na kasalukuyang
kinakabitan ng jumper ng mga kapitbahay.
Mixkaela Villalon 83
Binuksan ni Agustus at Papa ang contest sa pagkapanalo nila laban kay
Watsuhiro ng Japan at ang kanyang Yakuza spider. Sunod na tinalo ng Team
Gitnang-araw ang Egyptian Camel Spider. Default naman ang pagkapanalo
ni Agustus nang hindi sumipot ang pambato ng Amerika na si Spiderman.
Aksidente itong napukpok ng tubo ni Balbas sa pag-aakalang taga-Meralco
ito at nasa bubong ng bahay niya para putulan siya ng koryente.
“Foul!” sigaw ni Boy Tulay mula sa gilid ng basketball court bago
magsimula ang susunod na laban. Philippines versus China na, at di hamak
na mas malaki ang pambato ng Intsik. “Putris, alakdan na ’yan e!”
“Sa China, ganyan ang itsura ng aming mga gagamba,” sabi ng Tsino.
“Kung natatakot kayo lumaban, magprotesta kayo.”
“Walang inuurungan si Papa,” sabi naman ni Agustus, at pormal na
sinimulan ang laban. Wala pang limang segundo, pinatalsik na ni Papa ang
alakdan.
“In dis corner, weying kalahating sako ng bigas, kampyon ng Pook
Gitnang-araw, Agustus and Papa!” pahayag ni Boy Tulay pagkatapos ng laban.
Ninakaw pa niya ang watawat ng Pilipinas mula sa paaralan para isampay sa
balikat ni Agustus. Nagpalakpakan ang mga jeepney driver, tambay, adik, at
sari-saring lumpen ng Pook. Halos walang nakapansin sa misteryosong anino
ni Batman na laging umaaligid at sumusunod kay Boy Tulay saanman siya
magpunta.
Tuloy-tuloy na ang pagkapanalo ni Agustus. Pusta ng mga taga-Gitnang-
araw na wala nang pipigil pa sa kanilang kampeon. Paano pa at itinapat sa
unang linggo ng Agosto ang huling laban ni Agustus. Sa bisperas pa mismo
ng Pista ng Gitnang-araw nataon ang Finals. Hindi bale kahit gaano pa kalaki
ang pambato ng kalaban. Pinatunayan ni Agustus at Papa na wala sa laki
ang labanan, kundi sa kung gaano kahigpit ang kapit sa tingting. At kung
may isang bagay na likas na magaling ang mga taga-Gitnang-araw, ito ang
mahigpit na pagkapit sa patalim.
Pinangakuan ng businessman mula sa Golden Apples Subdivision si
Wendy ng scholarship para sa kaniyang anak, pati na rin ng bahay at lupa
para sa kanilang mag-ina kapag nanalo si Agustus sa Finals. Sa gabi, bago ang
huling laban, habang mahimbing na natutulog si Agustus, tinatahi ni Wendy
ang uniporme ng anak para sa unang araw niya sa eskuwelahan.
Umaga ng huling pagtutuos: Philippines versus Brazil. Nagtipon ang
mga tao sa basketball court para panoorin ang makasaysayang labanan. Nasa
dulo na ng patpat ng walis tingting si Papa. Nasa lalamunan na ang puso ni
Wendy.
Mixkaela Villalon 85
Tulay. Ganito talaga ang buhay-artist. Laging tinutuligsa ng makikitid na
utak ang sining.
Isang gabi, inumpisahan ni Boy Tulay ang kaniyang susunod na obra.
Sa loob ng tunnel sa bungad ng Pook Gitnang-araw, sa dilim na minsang
naliliwanagan ng headlights ng nagdaraang mga kotse, isinulat niya ang
simula: BOY TULAY
Pinagmasdan ni Boy Tulay ang kanyang gawa. Maganda. Perpekto ang
bilog ng O at maarte ang lawit ng Y. Pinagnilay-nilayan pa niya ang susunod.
Sawa na kasi siya sa “GUWAPONG TUNAY.” Gusto niya sanang isulat ang
BOY TULAY MALAKI ANG BAYAG pero mababasag ang tugma. Mahirap
makaisip ng parte ng katawan na katunog ng “tulay” maliban sa sa “atay” pero
ang pangit naman kung BOY TULAY MALAKI ANG ATAY.
Habang iniisip pa ni Boy Tulay kung paano tatapusin ang obra, may
bumangga sa kaniyang likuran. Babae na kasing edad niya. Mahaba ang
buhok, kulay lupa ang balat, at bakat sa mukha ang gulat. Nagbanggaan ang
kanilang mga mata. Sa bahagyang liwanag ng headlights ng nagdaraang mga
sasakyan, nakita ni Boy Tulay ang paintbrush at timba ng pulang pintura na
hawak ng babae. Pagkadaan ng kotse, bago manumbalik ang kadiliman ng
tunnel, naisip ni Boy Tulay na dati na niyang nakita ang dalaga, hindi lang
niya maalala kung saan. Walang imik na tinalikuran ng babae si Boy Tulay at
tumakbo paalis.
Tumulala si Boy Tulay sa pader ng tunnel. Doon, nakasulat ng pulang
pintura malapit sa pangalan niya: TUNAY NA REPO
Parang sininok ang puso ni Boy Tulay.
Sa mga susunod na araw, halos hindi makaisip nang tuwid si Boy Tulay.
Naaalala lang niya lagi ang babaeng nakabangga sa loob ng tunnel. Hindi
niya makalimutan ang mga matang iyon, pero hindi rin niya maalala kung
saan niya ito unang nakita. Babaeng pintor na pula rin ang paboritong kulay.
Nakaramdam si Boy Tulay ng kurot ng pag-ibig.
“Putang ina ’yan,” bulong ni Aling Taptap isang umaga nang makita ang
pinto ng kanyang bahay: BOY TULAY TUNAY NA REPO
Nagkalat ang pinakabagong obra ni Boy Tulay sa buong Pook.
Nagkandarapa naman ang mga MMDA na takpan ng sariling sining ang gawa
ni Boy Tulay. Hindi nagtagal, nagmukhang sapin-sapin ang Pook Gitnang-
araw, nagtatalo ang mga kulay ng pintura sa bawat pader.
“Nakita ko na talaga siya dati,” giit ni Boy Tulay minsan habang
nakatambay sa bahay ni Balbas. Napapalibutan siya ng sampung adik na
humihithit ng kung ano, pero hindi makuha ni Boy Tulay na tumira ngayon.
Mixkaela Villalon 87
Nawalan na siya ng gana magpinta sa mga pader. Parang wala nang saysay
ang buhay. Gusto niyang maglaslas, magpasagasa sa bus, uminom ng pintura.
Bukas pa naman ang Pista ng Pook Gitnang-araw. Mas maganda sana kung
may kasalo siya.
Pauwi na sana si Boy Tulay para magmukmok nang bigla siyang sinaksak
ng isang nakamaskarang salarin. Isang saksak lang, malalim, sa tagiliran ni
Boy Tulay. Tapos, mabilis na kumaripas palayo ang masamang-loob.
“Ba’t mo ginawa sa ’kin ’to, Batman?” sigaw ni Boy Tulay na nakalupasay
sa kalsada. Sinubukan niyang pigilin ang pag-agos ng kanyang dugo, pero
alam niyang ito na ang kaniyang katapusan. Sa kanyang huling mga sandali,
biglang natamaan si Boy Tulay ng inspirasyon.
“Putang ina! Lilipat na ’ko ng barangay!” sigaw ni Aling Taptap sa
madaling-araw nang buksan ang kaniyang pinto. Nakahandusay ang walang-
malay na bangkay ni Boy Tulay sa harap ng kaniyang bahay. At sa kaniyang
pinto, nakasulat sa dugo:
—ANG TRAHEDYA NI BOY TULAY—
PINTOR NA MAHUSAY
SINAKSAK SA ATAY
KAY TUNAY NA REPO INALAY
ANG HULING BUGSO NG BUHAY
5. Kalan
Buong buhay ni Aling Taptap, sinubukan niyang maging mabuting
tao. Hangga’t maaari, hindi siya nag-iisip ng masama tungkol sa kanyang
kapuwa. Simple lang siyang tao na naghahangad ng simpleng buhay. Iisa ang
motto ni Aling Taptap. Minana pa niya ito mula sa kaniyang ina: “Wag kang
maaksaya,” bilin ng nanay niya noong siya’y dalaga. “Magagalit si Lord.”
Natutuhan ni Aling Taptap ang mga pinakaimportanteng leksiyong
pambuhay sa kusina ng kanyang ina. May halong katakam-takam na amoy
ang bawat payo ng kanyang nanay, tumatatak sa isip at nauukit sa kumakalam
na bituka, dala niya hanggang pagtanda.
Sa kusina niya natutuhan na ang nanay talaga ang nagpapatakbo ng
pamamahay. Ang tatay man ang nag-uuwi ng kakarampot na kita, trabaho ng
nanay na pagkasiyahin ito sa pamilya hanggang makakaya.
“Puwedeng gamitin ulit ang mantikang pinagprituhan,” payo ng nanay
niya habang nagtatrabaho sa kusina. “Puwedeng panghugas ng pinggan ang
pinaghugasan ng bigas. Ang kanin bahaw ngayon ay sinangag bukas. Pang-
paksiw ang lumang isda. ’Wag kang maaksaya. Dapat walang nasasayang.”
Mixkaela Villalon 89
kinabukasan. Walang oras si Aling Taptap mamili ng mga rekado. Kasama ang
dalaga niyang anak, magdamag nagluto ang mag-ina sa kusina. Kinabukasan,
chumibog ang mga pulis sa pinakamasarap na dinuguan na natikman nila.
“Ang lambot ng laman,” sabi ng isang pulis habang ngumunguya.
“Kakaiba ang lasa. Tamang-tama ang texture,” sabi ng katabi nito,
muntikan nang tumulo ang itim na sabaw sa uniporme niya.
Binayaran ng hepe si Aling Taptap ng mas mababa sa totoong presyo ng
serbisyo at produkto niya. Nagulat naman ang mga pulis pagbalik sa kanilang
barracks nang malamang nawawala ang lahat ng mga bota, sapatos, shoe
polish, at ilang baril at kahon ng bala nila.
Madalas ding lapitan si Aling Taptap para magluto tuwing may handaan
sa Gitnang-araw, lalo na kapag may namatayan. Umiiyak na lumalapit ang
mga mag-anak, nakikiusap kay Aling Taptap kung anong luto ang puwedeng
ipakain sa mga bisita ng lamay. Tinatanong naman ni Aling Taptap kung
sino ang namatay, babae ba o lalaki, gaano katangkad, gaano kabigat, paano
namatay. Sa lamay, siguradong busog ang mga bisita. Sigurado ring sarado
ang kabaong.
Mababait ang mga tao sa Pook Gitnang-araw. Kahit sila’y pawang mga
adik, magnanakaw, mamamatay-tao, luko-luko, at iba pang salot ng lipunan,
napamahal na sila kay Aling Taptap. Maging si Boy Tulay na laging nagsusulat
sa pinto ng kanyang bahay ay pinapakain niya sa karinderya. Walang maisip
na dahilan si Aling Taptap para lumipat ng tirahan. Mahirap man sila rito,
mababait ang mga tao sa Pook. Kung hindi nila tutulungan ang isa’t isa, sino
pa ang tutulong sa kanila?
“Bukas na ang alis ko, Nay,” sabi ng dalagang anak ni Aling Taptap isang
gabi habang sabay silang nagluluto sa kusina. Blueberry cheese bibingka ang
iniluluto ni Aling Taptap habang naghahanap ng rekados ang anak niya para
sa adobong desaparacidos.
“Saan ka ba talaga pupunta?” tanong ni Aling Taptap. Sa kusina nag-
uusap ng masinsinan ang mag-ina. Dito itinuro ni Aling Taptap ang lahat ng
kanyang nalalaman, dito siya nagbibigay ng payo. Hindi niya maintindihan
kung bakit kailangan lumayo ng kaniyang anak.
“Sa States, Nay. Magtatrabaho,” madaling sagot ng dalaga.
“States? Ni wala ka ngang visa. Paano ka pupunta doon, lalangoy?” ani
Aling Taptap.
“Aakyat ako sa tuktok ng bundok at lilipad,” pabirong sagot ng dalaga.
“Mahirap ang buhay doon,” babala ni Aling Taptap.
Mixkaela Villalon 91
Nagtakbuhan naman ang mga bata sa lansangan para sa mga palaro ngayong
Pista. May palosebo, pabitin, at ang kinasasabikang panoorin ng lahat na
labanan ng gagamba. Malakas daw ngayong taon si Buknoy at ang kaniyang
gagambang koryente (dahil nahanap ito sa kable ng koryente), habang si
Agustus, ang dating bulilit na kampeon, ay kuntento na munang manood
lamang.
Sa barong-barong na tahanan ni Agustus at kanyang ina na si Wendy,
kumakaway sa hangin ang nakasampay na unipormeng pang-eskuwela sana
ni Agustus.
Wala pang tanghalian, nagkakantahan na ang mga sintunadong lasenggo’t
adik ng Pook. Magkakaakbay sila’t gumegewang sa kalsada, nagtataas ng mga
bote ng beer. Kinakampayan nila ang alaala ng matalik nilang kaibigan at
pusher na si Balbas. Sigurado sila na nasa langit na si Balbas ngayon. Paano
pa, e kapag may problema si Balbas dati, ang una nitong hinahanap ay si
San Miguel. Magpapatuloy hanggang gabi ang pagtagay at pagkanta ng mga
lasenggo. Sayang nga at hindi nila mahagilap si Boy Tulay. Balak sana nilang
magpapinta ng mural para kay Balbas sa pader ng estasyon ng Pulis.
“Araw na ng Pista, Tonio. Magbayad ka naman ng utang,” sabi ni Aling
Taptap habang nagsasandok ng kanin at ulam sa pinggan ni Tonio. Pero kahit
abot-langit na ang listahan ni Tonio, palagi pa rin siyang pinagbibigyan ni
Aling Taptap.
“Bayani na ako, Aling Taptap,” sagot ni Tonio na masayang kumakain
sa karinderya. “Dapat nga, libre ’to. Karangalan para sa inyo na dito ako
kumakain.”
“Bakit wala ka sa bungad? Di ba nagtatayo sila ng rebulto mo?” tanong
ni Aling Taptap.
“’Di naman po ngayon matatapos ’yon,” sabi ni Tonio Ginuaco, muntikan
nang tumulo ang pulang sabaw sa kanyang t-shirt. “Sarap nitong luto n’yo,
Aling Taptap. Pang Pista talaga ang handa. Ano ba ’tong ulam ninyo?”
Binuksan ni Aling Taptap ang kaldero ng katakam-takam na ulam. Pira-
pirasong malambot na karneng lumulutang sa malapot na pulang sabaw,
kasimpula ng puso o pintura—tiyak na bestseller ng kanyang karinderya
ngayong araw ng Pista. Pampabusog sa mga tiyan na halos buong taon
kumakalam at ngayong araw ng Pista lamang makatitikim ng masarap.
“Eto?” sabi ni Aling Taptap. “Menudo.”
WAKAS
95
Nights, as they sit on their mats
rubbing their knees, waiting for ease
to come, and sleep, they hear the sea
endlessly muttering as in a dream
someday someday someday….
Nudging the old men beside them,
their mates—empty-eyed seafarer,
each a survivor of storms, high waves,
and the sea’s vast loneliness,
now half-lost in their old age
amid the household clutter—
old women in my village
nod to themselves and say,
one uncharted day, the sea
will open its mouth and drink in
a child playing on the sand,
a fisherman with his nets,
great ships laden with cargo,
and still unsated, they say,
suck up cities towns villages—
one huge swallow to slake its hunger.
As to when or how it would happen,
who knows, the women say, but this much
is true—no plea for kindness can stop it—
nodding their heads this way and that,
tuning their ears to the endless mumbling….
somedaywecomewecomewecome
somedaywecomewecomewecome
somedaysomedaysomeday
Merlie M. Alunan 97
The boy’s flourescent stare, as though
his eyes were wells of plankton—
was that a starfish dangling on his chest
seasnakes wriggling in and out of his pockets
The house in Delgado waits empty and dark
as on the day, ten, eleven years ago
when the M/V Doña Paz with two thousand
on board, became grub for the sea.
Of that time, the old women in my village
remember coffins on the dockside,
stench in the air, in almost every street, a wake,
funerals winding daily down the streets.
No driver in our village has made a claim
to the telling of this tale, yet the story
moves like a feckless wind blowing
breath to breath, growing hair,
hand, fist, feet with every telling,
and claws to grip us cold.
We cower in the dark, remembering,
grateful of the house above the earth,
the dry bed on which we lie, the warm body
we embrace to ward off the tyranny of rain
pelting our fragile shelter—a mere habit
of those who breathe air and walk on land,
you might say, but still, always in our mind,
the sea grumbling grumbling sleeplessly—
somedaywecome
somedaywecome
somedaysomedaysomeday….
Merlie M. Alunan 99
his spade had formed over the grave,
we were empty of words, just as he was.
He’s not mentioned that time since.
We soon left the graveside—we still had to dig out
the old house from the silt, the hearth to make anew,
the altar to rebuild. More urgent to us then, the claims
of the living, than mere obeisance to the dead.
Twenty years since, and now, he too, like us,
is growing old. We still do not talk about that time.
Everything behind us, that’s what we’d like to think.
The streets of Ormoc have been repaved, houses rebuilt,
the river that runs through its heart tamed, so it seems,
by thick strong concrete dikes.
But who could feel safe now?
As the moon waxes and wanes, so the tide too
rises and ebbs—a daily ritual the sea could not help.
Behind his eyes watching the waves, the terror lurks
unappeased—when will the sea grow hungry again?
Somedaywecome somedaywecome
Wecomewecomewecome … someday …
Michiko chan
was picking flowers
the day the rocks
heaved and the sea
rose on its toes
to kiss the hillsides.
Now a thousand things
litter the beach at Sendai—
boats, houses, cars,
bottles, shells, felled trees,
animal bones, broken bodies.
102
Theme Song
There you go
beneath the blue suburban skies
after inching
toward a finish line
you wished
never to cross.
Five tortoise years of caring
for the sick wiped out
as suddenly
as death
when you took the roundabout
back to Penny Lane.
Nothing out of place
in memory,
nothing changed.
But here
where ashes settle, where
cactus flowers bloom,
it all begins
again. Those boys
you fathered,
now motherless,
leave you emptied in a house
full of presence. They’re
on the road
revved up for the one ride
of their lives.
Once you too sped across continents
on a knapsack
of dreams, your daring
man size
as your sons grown.
Muse
Snapshot
106
Over and over against hers. No one will know
What it means, only that in his final hours,
He never asks for his absent child. As though
He knew again the limits of her air, her body
A jackknife in difficult water—knows she’s
Swimming for her life as fast as she can,
The chlorine as strong to the eye as seawater,
Dirty brine, her heart on its second wind,
Giving in. The whole human length of her
Crying swim, swim.
Puzzle
Naming Stars
Women Talking
Om
Penitence
111
The well inside the heart, that much appoint
To root, to quench the thirst of burning seed.
(Though all this time we keep missing the point.)
The cracks along the path lead to disjoint.
Locate that fault and fix with blinding speed!
Let’s kneel down and hurt at that sharpened joint.
Scrape and bruise, the skin will reappoint
With scar, or heal. The sound will never plead:
“All this time we still keep missing the point!”
Go palm the beads, go feel from point-to-point,
Until you reach that cross where doubt is freed.
We kneel down and hurt at that sharpened joint
When all this time we keep missing the point.
Para Que—
All …
115
Then
again,
if we find that we don’t mind, either it enters
an even more
special niche of relations, or catches
itself slip-sliding away. Maybe we
say, how be jealous
when one is not possessed, yet how be sane when
obsessed?
***
I am sorry for being a double-edged sword.
One blade cuts to the quick and pares off all raiments
to arrive quickly at joy. The other drags the core down
to now dull, now sharp extravaganzas of misery.
Why, if querida in Spanish means dearest, beloved,
must it be downgraded to mistress in our understanding?
Does there have to be another room, so secret,
When one crosses the border from colonial to native?
Questions, questions. When all that matters
is the hour the minute the moment
when you are all there is, all
that can be.
Being One
Voice
Saan ba nanggagaling
ang isang awit? Sa puso
diumano ng tigib-hinagpis
o sa diwang bagaman batbat
ng hinala’t sumbat ay nagkikibit-
balikat sa hindi maampat
na liwag at liwanag.
Maaari rin sigurong biyaya ito
mulang langit—maningning na kerubin
na lumapag at nagtiklop ng pakpak
upang magpabukad ng ngiting
sinlawak ng habang buhay na pangarap
at magpahalimuyak ng sutil na pananalig
at hangad makalipad.
Ano nga ba kasi ang isang awit?
Higit marahil sa himig o titik,
higit sa sasál o bagal ng pintig,
bunsong talinghaga ito ng isang
makata na sa husay maghimala
ay hindi masupil magsupling
ang salit-salit na salita.
121
Troso
Ibong Sawi
122
122 Likhaan 6 • Poetry / Tula
Sa isang irap mo, ako’y nabulabog.
Sa isang ismid mo, ako’y nagkagapos.
Sa isang palis mo, ako’y bumulusok.
Sa isang tampal mo, ako’y nabusabos.
Kaninang Umulan
Panglaw
124
124 Likhaan 6 • Poetry / Tula
Bakit pipiliin ko at higit na hahangaring manatili
sa isang pook na salat maging sa alat? Sapagkat
dito ko natutuhan kung paano manimbang, tumimbuwang,
humakbang. Dito ako napapalagay. Dito ko ibig humimlay.
Dito ko nakakasiping ang panaginip na tahip ng minulang
sinapupunan na dambana ng mga antigo’t kabisadong ritwal
na ginagampanan kong banal, itinatanghal noong diumano’y
bago tinangay, sinaway, at pinasayaw ang laya’t layaw sa litanyang
lagutok ng isang libo’t isang nakayuyukayok na himutok.
Tagpo
Wala silang alaala, at hindi nila iyon inaalala. Ang unang kamangmangan
ng tao: na sukátin ang panahon, na sabihing may sandali’t—saglit lamang—
Hindi ko na nakikilala ang mga ilog na nilanguyan namin noon, bagaman
pinapangarap ko ang muling mga pagkikita. Na hulihin ang kidlat sa
ikalawang pagdapo sa iisang puno, ikulong sa bitag ng baboy-damo,
kamukha ng mga sinaunang diyos. Walang apoy dito, sa kung gaano kalalim
ang pagnanasa. Tutubo mula sa lupa, mag-uugat ang mga alamat ng kung
ano-anong puno’t halaman, uulan ng damulag at kumag sa santinakpan
sapagkat kailangan, sapagkat kailan ba nagkulang ang kalikasan sa ating
pangangailangan. Umiikot ang usok ng bagong-sinding katol sa pampang.
126
Bagong panahon at bigong paglilimayon ng insekto’t insurekto ng
sibilisasyon. Magkaniig gaya ng mga sinaunang hayop na nangawala na
bago pa man binasbasan ng pangalan. Sumpa ang gunita at ibig nating
manumpa.
Sa Isang Madilim
Samantalang Sakop
Nakabitin sa paa ng halimaw ang kuting, inaakalang ina niya ang hayop
na iyong maglalaho sa balat ng lupa. Ikinadena ang lahat ng demonyong
natagpuan sa ating panig ng daigdig. Pinatitig sa sariling anino’t binuwang.
Nakapalig ang kuliglig, at umaapaw ang salimbayang tinig sa paligid.
Darating ito, ang gabi, sanlaksa ngunit iisa ang mukha, gaya ng lahat ng
mga multo sa araw ng paghuhukom. Nagkakalas ang hinagap, samantalang
iniisip ko ang lahat ng baliw sa mundo. Hinangad namin noon na maging
mahigpit ang tula, manaludtod, pilantod na sumasayaw sa hininga’t pahinga
ng kapansanan, ng pinapasang karamdaman. Maanong linya na lang ang
nalalabi sa mga pinaniniwalaan ko? Gurlis sa dibdib. Haba ng sibat. Patlang sa
pagsusulit. Panlalabo ng abot-tanaw. Nakamata ang maninila sa katiyakan ng
panganib, sa dunong ng mga bulaklak, sa dungong pintig ng pantig ng mga
salitang mababaon sa limot. Pangako, narito ang sentimental sa pananakop,
ang karumal-dumal sa pakiwari. Ang paglalabo-labo ng mga kahinaan ng
Pangawan
Paghawak ng Panahon
128
128 Likhaan 6 • Poetry / Tula
ang kamay niya sa aking leeg, ako na nagbibilang ng malas, salamat sa
mga salita ni Laurenaria at ni Ligaya, gaya ng alamat ng buhay, sapagkat
wala tayo roon, at wala tayo sa wakas, sapagkat dito lamang sa daigdig ng
salita, ng tulang daigdig ko mahahawakan ang panahon na humahawak sa
atin—at kapag napagod ang isa man sa atin ay ilalahad ng kaninong palad,
ang tadhana—ang guhit na nag-uugnay sa akin at sa mga salitang unang
binigkas para pangalanan ang bayaning naglalakbay ngayon sa kung saan,
sakaling nakamata ang talinghaga kahit wala siyang larawan, sapagkat hindi
siya magpapakita gaya ng ninunong nagpakalunod sa lawa upang huwag
mawala ang tiwala natin sa hindi masasabi ng salita, sapagkat ano na nga ba
ang nangyari sa atin?
Alingawngaw
130
ng kongkreto’t bakal, binubusalan ng sanlibong atungal ang mga usal:
tabi-tabi-po. Matagal nang naihalo sa graba’t semento ang sandangkal
na tore ng punso. Sa pagtawid, aandap-andap ang bombilya. Nangangapa
sa tambak ang mag-ina, tila nagbubungkal ng bisig para sa pundidong
parola.
Ayon sa Matatanda
Sa Paghihintay
Sa Kabilang Banda
Sa Ipinaglalaban
Nakayukayok
ang kinakalawang na tuktok
ng isang latang hindi matama-
tamaan, habang naghihingalo
sa mababaw na burak
ang mga walang pares
na tsinelas,
nilalangaw.
Sa Paglingon
Sa Panahon
Ngayon, ito
tila
umuulan
dito
titila
ito
lamang,
ako
lamang
na naman
Sa Pagtambay
I.
May basag na naman
kagabi. Kasama ang ilang tuyong bulaklak
ng naghihikab pang bogambilya, hinakot ko
ang mga bubog. May pipilay-
pilay na pusang tumawid. Nakakainip.
Sana dumating na
ang pansit.
Lumba-Lumba
141
Barko
Bangka
Tagiwalo
“How did you do it?” It’s a question frequently asked. A question to which
there probably are no answers. No answers that anyone could lay out categorically
as one would, say, how to make guava jelly or papaya marmalade (which I love
to do to this day, now and then). Still it keeps cropping up, “How did you raise
your kids?” If I had the answer, does anyone out there want to know? And the kids,
grown up now, all five of them and self-directed adults, don’t they have a say in the
whole business of growing up the way they did with the kind of mother that they
did have—best keep quiet and let the years put the memories away.
Then there’s the other question: What do you think of motherhood? When it
comes to that, I find myself even dumber. For motherhood is just something you
go through with as little thought as possible, aside from all that it requires of your
body, and afterwards, your time and any effort it might demand, whether you
have ever thought of those requirements or not. Thinking back, the things one
had to do or did were a matter of course, they just seemed to happen—from the
tearing of the flesh in the motions of parturition, to feeding, to reshaping your
body to create hollows where a body may cradle or finding a place on one’s shoulder
where a head might rest, motherhood claiming all that it requires from you just
like that, and you had no choice in the matter but to go ahead and act as instinct
and intuition demanded. When all is said and done, all you have are random
memories, and all it comes down to is the last gesture.
I
t’s a month late. The child is expected in October, and half of November
is almost gone, I am still big as a house. I do not walk; I waddle. I cannot
lie on my back. My center of gravity has shifted to my belly. The middle
of my body bloats with the unaccustomed weight. Lying on my side, I sag
like a badly stuffed sack.
Maybe you got the dates wrong, Tita Meding, my nurse aunt, tells me.
I am seeing Dr. Ramiro on a weekly basis now. He palpates my belly, checks
149
the infant’s head, and brings his stethoscope down to listen to the heartbeat.
He nods his head and does not appear bothered. You’re both fine, he tells me,
the baby’s head is well-engaged. Nothing to worry about.
So I go home and try not to think of anything. I attend to the tasks of
the household. I go to market, buy fish, vegetables, fruit, stocking up the
household for when I would stop doing all these for the Big Event. I am
too uncomfortable and uneasy to read. I cook. Count the layette over and
over. Recheck the small suitcase stuffed with the things I will bring when I
go to the hospital. Nothing much else to do now but wait. On the 15th of
November while tending the rice slowly cooking, I feel a rush of fluid down
my thighs. It splashes on to the floor at my feet. It’s here, I tell myself without
panic.
It’s now, I tell him, but there’s no pain yet. He gives a slight nod. We eat
lunch untroubled.
We go to the doctor’s clinic, and he examines me for the nth time that
month. Go to the hospital when the pains are coming in regular intervals, he
tells me. In the meantime, go home. Relax.
I go home as he advised, put on a napkin to catch the drip, and go about
the usual business of the household. I am relaxed.
Tita Meding comes to visit and tells me: You might dry up.
So what do I do? Is there a way to stop this leaking? She shakes her head.
It goes on for two days.
On the third day, supper over, I feel the first twinges. An hour passes, and
the pain is coming in regular intervals now.
Let’s go, I tell him. It’s time.
She arrives at dawn, the 17th of November 1970, beautiful and perfect,
my first daughter.
While they are cleaning me up, I say to myself: You are complete now,
you have become a mother. As they wheel me back to my room, I ask myself:
What does it mean, complete? I feel for my last rib—it’s still in the old place.
My womb feels hollow. Complete, back to myself. Except for that little bit
of flesh which had been torn from me out there in the nursery. I am all by
myself again. I hear an infant crying. It must be cold. They’ll be bundling her
up soon so she’ll be warm. From here on I’ll have to be chasing after that little
piece of myself. A piece of myself, I smile, hovering between sleep and dream.
A little piece of myself had taken a life of its own. A will of its own, apart from
mine. Something of mine, gone, taken away. Perhaps, perhaps I will never be
whole again. Thus, I succumb to sleep.
I
n 2009, I received an offer for a rather strange commission. The Instituto
Cervantes in Manila was planning to commemorate the centenary of the
Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez the following year, and wanted to send
three Filipino writers to Spain to visit the places in which Hernandez had
lived and worked during his short life, and to each write a travel essay about
the experience.
I call it a strange commission because it seemed, and still seems, a rather
roundabout way of memorializing a poet’s life and work. One would imagine
that a centenary edition of his poetry, accompanied by scholarly essays by
Hernandiano experts, would have been more apt. Still, I had never been to
Spain, and I embrace any opportunity to travel, so I accepted the project and,
after a flurry of preparations, found myself en route to Madrid.
It was only when I was finally there that it sank in just how unprepared
I was for this endeavor. I spoke very little Spanish, could read even less, and
knew next to no one in Spain. I had done some preliminary research into my
purported topics, but even then was stymied by the scope of the assignment.
Was I to focus on Hernandez and his troubled life? Or was I to concentrate
on the country? Or should I use Hernandez’s poetry as a lens through which
to view Spain?
I have no claims to being a travel writer. Up to that point I had written
only fiction and the odd feature article or two about smaller places—
restaurants, resorts, cities—never an entire country. Still, I accepted the task
with a degree of cockiness, believing, with my fiction writer’s bias, that if one
can write a decent story, then one can write anything.
The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is, I believe, that of
conjoined twins. Forever attached to each other, sharing vital organs and
bodily fluids, and living the same life. Well-meaning society-at-large, hell-
bent on an orderly taxonomy, would prefer that the twins be separated so
166
each can function autonomously, with their own individual identities, but to
me, it seems physiologically impossible.
The recent to-dos about the fictiveness of certain books and films
presented as nonfiction, most famous being the scandal of James Frey and A
Million Little Pieces (2003), indicate how far we have come from journalist
Daniel Defoe, whose realistic novels claimed to be true stories, the better to
boost credibility and, therefore, respectability, in an age when romance had
become a debased and derided form of reading material.
Further back, conquistadors embellished their logs and journals with
fantastical details, to bolster support for their expensive expeditions. Miguel
de Cervantes pretended, as did many of the writers of his time, that his Quixote
was a mere translation of a found manuscript, and repositioned the border
between fiction and reality by showing his heroes responding to a world that
had read about them in the best-selling first volume and now treated them as
celebrities of a sort. In medieval Japan, travel journals were stylized to produce
deliberate and specific emotional effects, and autobiographies were presented
and read as novels, the precursors of the still popular “I-novels.” Real-life
stories of crime and passion were written down and read as sensational
potboilers. If we proceed further to the beginnings of narrative, how many
of the epic writers believed that they were writing histories for the future
generations of their societies?
In a more recent era, the advent of the New Journalism in the United
States saw nonfiction writers blurring the boundaries between fiction and
nonfiction, as in Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1966),
yet even Capote’s “invented” genre maintains the separateness of the two
categories, one merely qualifying the other. These days, the idea of multiple
truths arising from multiple subjectivities has gained comfortable purchase
in mainstream thought, and we are used to seeing the world as a large gray
area. Once reality is filtered or curated by an individual consciousness, what
results is a mere version of reality—a fiction, no matter how close to the truth
it comes.
As a fiction writer, I often deal with readers seeking to confirm that
events in my fictions actually happened, and if they actually happened to me.
Readers are all too willing to believe the veracity of something that they’ve
read: there is a pleasurable frisson in the certitude that this really happened,
which accounts for the success of even the most banal biographies, memoirs,
or histories. Realism is the point where fiction and nonfiction are joined. It is
the union of history and romance, and their children carry their mixed DNA
blissfully unmindful of the contradiction.
The more I thought about the assignment, the stranger it became. Not
only did I have to convey my first impressions of an unfamiliar place, but I
also needed to consider it alongside its historical existence in the 1920s and
’30s, as well as filter it through the sensibility of a long-dead poet. I grappled
with the assignment the whole time I was in Spain and for several months
after, as I labored to complete the essay.
To begin with, approaching a place with an assignment in mind already
colors the experience, eliminating any aspirations to objectivity one might
hold at the onset of traveling. I planned my itinerary with my purpose in
mind, and as I traveled about, I mentally categorized things as useful to the
project, and therefore worth a closer look, or not. I blinkered myself quite
effectively, leaving me with the niggling feeling that I was only experiencing
a small fraction of what Spain had to offer. For instance, in my relentless
pursuit of the ghost of Miguel Hernandez, I completely forgot about an
aspect of Madrid that was closer to home and would have excited me to no
end had I remembered—the city had once been the stomping grounds of
several 19th-century Filipinos who went there to study and returned home to
lead the Philippine Revolution against Spain. Many of their haunts still stand
in the old quarter of the city, as well as a few memorials and markers, all of
which I realized I must have passed on one of my rambles.
Undoubtedly, my impressions of Spain would have been quite different
had I gone in cold, so to speak, without an articulated agenda, and I wonder
what sort of essay I might have written had I done so. I recognize that a travel
writer is never objective—in a sense, all travel writing is simply the story
of a consciousness, a sensibility, moving through a place and an experience,
whether or not this entity chooses to reveal itself as an explicit “I” in the
narrative.
In my case, my “I” was a newcomer, an outsider unfamiliar with the
country, and bearing various other signifiers: Filipino, fiction writer, 21st-
century participant-observer. I initially resisted the role, wanting to place the
subject matter front and center in my essay, but I quickly realized the futility
of such a strategy. Given all the material that has been written about Spain, my
own contribution would be insignificant if I did not infuse it with that which
only I could contribute to the subject: my own personal, biased perspective.
Thus it would not matter if I ended up writing about Spanish clichés, because
the clichés would at least have been experienced by and through me.
Not quite the whole truth, and perhaps I had been unfair to load a
chance, casual encounter with as much significance as I did. However, I felt
that my dramatization had arrived at a kind of truth, one that was necessary
to my essay. There was no one else near us at the time, and what were the
chances of this woman happening upon my essay, reading it, and contesting
my version of events?
I felt that I would be safe from accusations of falsification, and yet the
deliberate liberties I took with reality continued to bother me, more than my
rearrangement of chronology. I recalled the infamous story of Janet Cooke,
who fabricated a Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for the Washington Post in 1980
and was forced to return the prize and resign in shame. I imagined how I
would react to being censured by Oprah on a live television show.
And yet my decision seemed correct. I had taken some creative license
to make myself look less foolish and to streamline my essay, but it did not
feel dishonest. I wasn’t writing news, or history, and biographers have been
known to insert full-blown scenes into their accounts, complete with quoted
dialogue, where they would have had no way of knowing or recording what
had actually been said or done. Truman Capote and Norman Mailer had
taken far greater liberties in their own fiction-nonfiction hybrids.
W
hen I was six I was brought to a place where a gigantic fish made
of solid gold swam in the depths of the first river one sees after
coming down from the city’s airport in a valley. In my mind’s eye
I could see it glistening in the sun and gliding beneath the river’s old steel
bridge of cold gray. I had wanted to see the bizarre fish so badly, but I was told
that, like the engkantos in the suburbs, it chose the people to whom it revealed
itself. I would wait for the fish to emerge from its murky home; it might just
show itself to me. It never did.
Who had seen the fish? No one knew, but oh, it was down there. The
city’s motorelas—little vehicles built with the heart of a tricycle and the body
of a six-passenger jeepney emblazoned with its owner’s name in bright red—
raced through the shaky Carmen Bridge when traffic was light. I would
wonder if any of those motorela passengers or drivers had seen it. But the
passengers who spoke to each other in decibel levels that competed with the
din of the motorelas seemed to have more pressing concerns than looking for
a fish made of gold. Well, then, maybe some of the city’s swankiest, like the
man with a fleet of vintage luxury cars, whose gleaming crimson Mercedes
stood out among the queue of motorelas, minicabs, and Japanese cars on the
bridge. But the fish couldn’t very well be an uppity snob, could it? There were
half-naked children laughing in the water and contending with the kinetic
force of the torrent the river becomes after the rains. And there were men
who would painstakingly hand paint movie billboards on the far end of the
bridge. But none of them said anything about actually seeing the fish. Even
at night, when city lights transformed the turbid river into a glass sheet of
orange shadows, the golden fish did not show itself to anyone. It was just
there, living among us.
It was almost sacrilegious to proclaim “there is no fish,” at least from my
side of the city of half a million people. Some of the older people of the city
178
swore they had seen it. The colossal fish had emerged from the Cagayan River
sometime in the 1950s. It was so huge that all of Cagayan de Oro City shook
violently in a mighty quake when it came out of the depths of the Cagayan
River.
Those who had seen it in their childhood claim it was not a fish;
it couldn’t have been because of its towering height and the power of its
majestic movement. It was a sleeping red dragon which lived in an invisible
river beneath the San Agustin Cathedral on one side of Carmen Bridge.
Beneath the Cathedral there are secret passageways which priests had
used as escape routes during the Japanese Occupation. According to the city’s
elders, one underground tunnel goes all the way to the pier of Cagayan de Oro
because the body of the priest who had bathed in the river and disappeared
was found at the pier.
The golden fish in the river was supposed to explain the de Oro part of
the city’s name. And then there’s the ancient Bukidnon word cagaycay, which
means to rake up earth with a piece of wood or one’s bare hands; it can also
refer to gold ore from streams or rocks gathered from a river. Another place
name origin version claims Cagayan means “place with a river,” from the
Malayo-Polynesian ag (water), kagay (river), well, for obvious reasons: a river
does run through the city, with headwaters as far as the Kalatungan mountain
range of Bukidnon. The Cagayan River is the dividing line between Cagayan
de Oro’s two congressional districts and is believed to be the city’s sole witness
to its ancient secrets.
II
I first saw Cagayan de Oro in 1979 when the place must have been
caught in that nebulous space between city and country. The city center
didn’t have the sprawling greenery of its countryside, but it didn’t have the
skyscrapers of a modern city, either. The tallest building in the city was just
going to be built—a six-storey edifice that was going to be called Trinidad
Building, where my mother would hold office on its top floor. And there
were no malls, no, not a single one. There were small shops like Suy Tiak and
Golden Friendship which sold earrings and cups, notebooks and décor, in
glass cabinets that were always locked. Everything else one would have to find
in Gaisano and Ororama.
Stores, fast food chains, and restaurants seemed to be indicative of a place’s
urban status. But Cagayan de Oro then did not have Jollibee or McDonald’s.
The closest people could get to the famous burgers was through television
M
y eyes brush across the Safari icon my on laptop toolbar. The image
used by the Safari Internet service provider is that of a compass.
In the early days of Internet access, the signifier for the “Home”
function came with an icon, a familiar little box with a peaked roof and
an open door. It’s been nearly two decades since that icon evolved—from
a house to a compass—and its imagery, now superimposed on the Mac’s
default “cosmos” desktop screensaver, seems perfectly emblematic of the
metaphysical journey we’ve taken from on the World Wide Web.
It’s now the icon for “Help” on the new TextEdit program on this machine.
The old Microsoft icon for “home” had looked to me like one of the nipa
huts from my childhood: a formulation, a cognitive signifier (a triangle and
rhombus for the roof, a rectangle within which appeared a vertical rectangle
for the door), to which one might add a horizontal rectangle for the window.
Children across the world draw sticks at the base of the rectangle and a ladder
to indicate this dwelling is tropical, probably rural Filipino; in the Western
hemisphere, in place of the stilts and ladder, there would be a chimney on
the roof with smoke curling upward: an archetype that constitutes every
child’s first attempt at dimensional representation for one of the most basic
of human concepts.
Beneath that one-dimensional sketch lies, invisible and vivid, an entire
milieu: for me, there’s a coconut grove, the bucolic regions behind our
backyard where as children we took the short cut to school; the huts of the
cocheros, dappled in the sunlight of an unending afternoon, the rustling palm
fronds overhead and the distant thrum of a ukulele or the plaintive strains of
the theme from a radio soap opera. Home, home.
All of this is symbolic. I never really entered the home of Acoy, the
tartanilla driver; the only bamboo-and-thatch hut I entered on a regular basis
194
as a child was Bising’s: our dressmaker’s tallish bamboo and sawali house, with
the highly polished wooden flooring and the acacia leaves that pattered like
rain as Bising ran her dressmaker’s tape down one’s shoulder to the knee and
around one’s midsection to measure one’s “heaps” (hips) as she scrawled the
centimeter numbers designating her clientele’s bust-waist-hips … calibrations
of one’s growing.
Bising’s house leaned somewhat crookedly, west of the coconut grove and
across the main road: redolent of the hog she raised under the house and the
industrial acridity of the 3M oil from her atras-avante Singer sewing machine.
Beyond her house lay the Baptist Student Center, where during the year I
was ten, I would while away solitary summer afternoons reading the novels
of Grace Livingston Hill. This spot marked the neighborhood boundary my
parents felt I’d be safe to wander alone, away from our home.
The idea of a house, existing only on that Platonic plane of Being, is
encapsulated in those geometric forms. But with that ideograph is an entire
childhood and its aromas and its uncertainties, its fears of the unknown, and
the sureness that my father and mother would always be there.
Butterfly Sleep
i
D
reams have begun to be for me an unrestful reflection of waking
consciousness. Set at night in localities whose vague familiarity
brings disquiet: searching for a classroom or a ride to a waiting
airplane; arriving late or unprepared for an otherwise easy exam in a class
I’m taking and not teaching, a quarter-century after attaining the PhD …
these are simple to decipher, no play on words in the truffle to arrive at some
understanding of a vulnerability—an unresolved issue, whatever—that one
has willed away from one’s awareness.
On waking, one finds no delight in the vocabulary of the subconscious,
those buried treasures of puns or inventive configurations of the various
untidy sloggings through one’s daily mire. Even the occasional flash of lucid
dreaming—the critically trained mind reverting to its discipline, recognizing
correlations between past dreams and this present REM scenario; between
waking life and this fabrication of the sleeping mind; spotting the significance
W
e all have them: sudden interventions that break into one’s
awareness, lifting the everyday toward the sublime, an intrinsic
spiral in the DNA code of humanness.
The first time a child speaks your name. The taste of water right after
you’ve vomited, replacing the bile of your bodily wretchedness with the
restorative sip of the first and most basic element of biologic life.
I
’ve just read the Time article about obsessive-compulsive disorders, and
while it evoked from me a responsive chuckle, it also led me to thinking
about my loved ones who, like me have, or have had, minor manifestations
of the condition—behavioral quirks so mild as to be barely considered as
eccentricities. According to the list of symptoms, I must be the sister of The
Monk.
Reading the descriptions of the disorder, I recognize in myself a few of
the compulsions, a couple of which I’ve outgrown … but one of them—the
leeriness about germs and the fear of contamination—continues to manifest
itself in my need to take at least two baths a day without fail. The one taken
before I go to bed is especially important for my sense of well-being, even if
(or especially if ) during the day I’ve dropped by a public place like the grocery;
God alone knows what germs I may have encountered in the air and that
subsequently cling to my hair and skin, from walking down the breakfast-
cereal aisle of Hy-Vee to pick up a box of oatmeal!
I remember my mom recounting (numerous times, I must add) how my
nursery-school teacher commented that “Rowena is so fastidious; she keeps
washing her hands,” and how anxious I’d be if I inadvertently misinformed
a visitor at the house who asked if my parents were in (“I said you weren’t
home, because I didn’t know you were. Was that all right?”) … and all the
unspoken dread and guilts that plagued my childhood. I laughed just now
when I read the little checklist in the article, describing the symptoms of
childhood onset of OCD … because I experienced at least three of those.
T
o say that Cirilo F. Bautista is a great writer is an understatement.
It was January 1991 when as a literature major, I enrolled in the
poetry class of the renowned Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista. He had a formal
demeanor about him, and he commanded attention, respect, and awe from
his students. This sense of awe at Cirilo’s genius and strength of character
would stay with me, even until the time I interviewed him in his home in
207
Original PLAC on a Cavite beach: (Top) Alfrredo Navarro Salanga and Cirilo F. Bautista;
(Bottom) Felix Fojas, Ricardo M. de Ungria, Alfred A. Yuson, and Gémino H. Abad.
Quezon City on February 28 this year. I had already been teaching for almost
twenty years, but during the interview, I would still stare star struck, and
Cirilo remained the same: the same composed intellectual with a serious
mien, a commanding presence, a low confident voice, and a compelling sense
of irony about the world and about himself. Only one thing had changed:
his age. Born in 1941, he is now seventy-one years old, definitely older, white
hair and all, a little weaker, but still prolific and undaunted by time like
Tennyson’s Ulysses.
To Cirilo, poetry is a sign, “a sign of signs,” a sign so intense that “it is
always contemptuous of language, yet it is nothing without it.” 1 More than
twenty years after, I can still remember quite vividly Bautista’s first lesson. He
wrote on the board his favorite line from Lawrence Perrine’s Sound and Sense:
poetry “as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than
does ordinary language” (italics in the original).2 Poetry, as intense language,
demands an intractable imagination and an uncompromising dedication to the
craft—and Cirilo has demonstrated nothing but this in his career as a writer.
It is not easy to devote one’s life to poetry, an art considered by many
to be impractical and financially unrewarding. Coming from a poor family,
Bautista worked as a newspaper boy and bootblack when he was still young;
he worked as a checker at the University of Santo Tomas to support himself
through college. But he did not disappoint himself and his family. He was
To understand Bautista’s epic trilogy, it is important that one has read his
lyrics. It is a known fact that many of Bautista’s lyrics have actually appeared
in the trilogy. Ricardo de Ungria has discussed this strategy or “recycling,”5
which reinforces quite clearly the modernist poetics of Bautista. The sonic
repetitions, the conscious attempt at intertextuality, the self-referentiality,
and the fragmentation and multiplication of poetic selves/worlds in Bautista’s
poetry—all of these lead to the ultimate poetic technique of collage and the
poet’s bold claim that he has written only one poem, that is, his entire body
of work: “All my poems are one poem.”6
Bautista’s modernism, however, is tempered by a deep sense of poetry’s
social function: to serve the nation. As a sign of the times and “[a]s an artifact
of culture, the poem … revitalizes the national pride or awakens the nation’s
moribund aspirations. It has now been conscripted into the service of the
national soul….”7 This faith in poetry finds concrete embodiment in The
Trilogy of Saint Lazarus (2001), Bautista’s retelling of Philippine history.
The Archipelago (1970), the first epic in the Trilogy, focuses on the
beginnings of colonization with Magellan’s “discovery” of the islands and
untimely death to Legaspi’s building of Manila to the trial of Rizal. Thus,
to tell Manila’s story, Bautista uses three major characters—Magellan (the
Bearer of Consciousness), Legaspi (the Lighter of Consciousness), and Rizal
K
inikilalang isa sa tungkong-
bato ng ikalawang bugso ng
modernismo sa panulaang
Tagalog si Rogelio G. Mangahas,
kasama ang dalawa pang persona na
naging katalamitam at kaumpugang-
bote niya noong dekada 60 sa kanilang
pagsisimula, sina Lamberto E. Antonio,
at ng ngayo’y Pambansang Alagad ng
Sining para sa Panitikan Rio Alma (o
Virgilio S. Almario sa prosa). Triumbirato
ang tatlong ito, les enfants terribles noong
mga panahong iyon sa University of the
East, pangunahing akademikong aparato
ng kanilang pagmamakata, at masugid Sir Rogelio G. Mangahas noong
silang inabangan ng kanilang mga kaniyang kasibulan.
kapanahon sa university belt. Pinaigting
nilang tatlo hindi lamang ang isang poetikang tumututol sa gahum ng popular
na pagtula at namamayaning estetika na binalikwasan noong una ni Alejandro
G. Abadilla; manapa, isinulong din nila bandang huli ang isang makabayang
panulaan, na tumititig hindi na lamang sa mahahalaga at “unibersal” na
karanasang pantao, kundi lalo’t higit sa mga kondisyong nag-aanyo sa mga ito
sa lupain ng Filipinas. Pawang supling ng panahong magulo at magalaw ang
tungkong-batong iginagalang, ngunit ang bawat isa sa kanila’y may salaysay
na animo’y nag-uumagos patungo sa isang malaking ilog, na masasabing
ang panulaan ng kanilang henerasyon, na inilarawan minsan ni Bienvenido
Lumbera na “denouncing economic exploitation, bureaucratic corruption,
upperclass decadence and foreign domination” (1997, 66).
237
Sa loob at labas ng panitikan. Ang magkakabeerkadang sina Lamberto T. Antonio,
Rio Alma, at Rogelio G. Mangahas.
Talasanggunian
Almario, Virgilio S. 1985. Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo: Panulaang Tagalog
sa Ika-20 Siglo. Lungsod Quezon: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Lumbera, Bienvenido. 1997. Revaluation 1997: Essays on Philippine Literature,
Cinema, and Popular Culture. Maynila: University of Santo Tomas
Publishing House.
Mangahas, Rogelio G., tagapagtipon, koawtor, at patnugot. 1967. Manlilikha:
Mga Piling Tula 1961-1967. Maynila: KADIPAN.
———. 1971. Mga Duguang Plakard at Iba Pang Tula. Lungsod Quezon:
Manlapaz Publishing, Inc.
———. 2006. Gagamba sa Uhay: Kalipunan ng mga Haiku. Lungsod
Quezon: C&E Publishing, Inc.
A
Almario, Virgilio S. Seven Mountains of the Imagination. Manila: UST
Publishing House.
This is the English translation of National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario’s
Pitong Bundok ng Haraya by the award-winning poet Marne Kilates.
Alunan, Merlie M. Tales of the Spider Woman. Manila: UST Publishing House.
This is Alunan’s latest collection which includes the suite of poems that won her the
Palanca first prize in poetry in English for 2010. Alunan is now professor emeritus at
the University of the Philippines Visayas where she has taught most of her life.
Antonio, Emilio Mar. Maya. Manila: UST Publishing House.
This slim volume contains some of the author’s 144 pioneering poems for children,
originally published by the author in the popular magazine Liwayway. It was intended
to be the initial volume of a series of books to commemorate the poet’s lifework
during the100th anniversary of his birth in 2003.
Ayala, Tita Lacambra. Talamundi. Manila: UST Publishing House.
This critical anthology showcases over half a century’s worth of Tita Lacambra Ayala’s
poetry, “curated” by fellow poet Ricardo M. de Ungria, who assumes the role of
both editor and guide. The poems are divided into five suites: the short poems, the
experimental poems, the lyrics, the long poems, and love poetry. Ayala, a graduate of
UP, is also a multimedia artist and an active member of the Davao Writers’ Guild. She
was married to the late Jose V. Ayala Jr., poet, fictionist, and painter, and is mother to
Joey Ayala and Cynthia Alexander.
B
Baldemor, Manuel. European Journey of Discovery. Manila: UST Publishing
House.
This collection features the distinguished artist’s rendering of some European cities
that he has visited, including his epic mosaic mural People Power, in the Basilica
of St. Therese of the Child Jesus in Normandy, France. It also includes an erudite
but accessible essay on the artist’s lifework by the art scholar and artist, Dr. Reuben
Cañete. Baldemor is Paete’s shining star: painter, sculptor, printmaker, writer, and
book illustrator. Both artists are UST alumni.
267
Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra. Vigan and Other Stories. Pasig City: Anvil
Publishing, Inc.
In her third collection of stories, Brainard draws inspiration from autobiographical
and historical sources. Set in various times and places that intermingle in the narrative,
the stories examine the Filipinos’ notions of self-identity.
Briscoe, Leonor Aureus. Ben on Ben: Conversations with Bienvenido N. Santos.
Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, for De La Salle University by special agreement.
This collection of interviews of “Mang Ben” by Briscoe gives readers an insight into
Santos’s creative process and his views on literature.
C
Casocot, Ian Rosales. Beautiful Accidents. Quezon City: University of the
Philippines Press.
This collection of twelve stories over the last decade includes “Things You Don’t
Know” which won first prize for the short story in English in the 2008 Don Carlos
Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
Casocot, Ian Rosales. Heartbreak and Magic. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
This collection of eight stories, a mix of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and history,
explores the tensions between the idyllic and the modern, the past and the present.
Cayanan, Mark Anthony. Narcissus. Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press.
In his first collection of poetry, Cayanan examines desire, queerness, the frailty of the
gaze, and the subjectivity of poetry.
Cruz, Isagani. Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults. Pasig City: Anvil
Publishing, Inc.
The five stories in this collection are risqué, exposing the absurdities of Philippine
politics, religion, and middle-class life.
Cuizon, Erma, et al., eds. Babaeng Sugid: Cebu Stories. Pasig City: Anvil
Publishing, Inc.
A collection in English and in Cebuano by members of the country’s only women
writers’ organization, Women in Literary Arts (WILA), the stories deal with
the “women question” pertaining to marriage, the need to connect with another,
motherhood, and sexuality. Six of the ten stories are flash fiction.
D
Dalisay, Jose Jr. Pinoy Septych. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Dalisay’s first book of poems written over almost thirty years contains mainly the
author’s comic observations of Filipino life at home and overseas. Dalisay, a member
of the Carlos Palanca Hall of Fame, has won numerous awards for his fiction and
E
Enriquez, Antonio. The Activist. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Prolific, much-awarded Enriquez weaves a Zamboangeño’s tale of love, family, and
community, and their struggle for justice and freedom in our country under Martial
Law. As it unravels the horrors of the dictatorship, it also provides rich insights into
the Philippine south. Enriquez has written ten books of fiction and currently resides
in Cagayan de Oro City.
Enriquez, Antonio. The Survivors. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Set in Zamboanga at the height of World War II, this novel casts a different light
on the horrors of war by transplanting a colorful cast of characters from scenes of
razed villages to a vast and unknown forest where they face the dangers of the jungle,
Japanese atrocities, US air raids, starvation and cannibalism, and strange creatures.
English 269
Toeing the line between morality and monstrosity, savagery and survival, they learn
what it means to love and forgive and ultimately, be human, in dark and trying times.
F
Fuller, Ken. A Movement Divided: Philippine Communism, 1957–1986.
Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
A sequel to Fuller’s earlier book, Forcing the Pace, published in 2007, the narrative
traces the attempts of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) to rebuild itself
until the two splits that occurred within the party that led to the formation of the
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968 and the “Marxist-Leninist
Group” split in 1972.
G
Garceau, Scott. Simianology. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
Ranging from the surreal and poetic to the comic and provocative, Garceau’s fourteen
essays are loosely linked by a trio of tales involving apes—“Simianology 1.0,” “2.0,”
and “3.0”—which implies our varied connections to the primate world.
Groyon, Vic H. The Names and Faces of People. Manila: C&E Publishing, Inc.,
published for De La Salle University.
First published between 1966 and 1980, these stories reveal the struggle of the
middle-class Filipino to come to terms with the cultural and geographical changes
during that period.
H
Habulan, Ani, ed. The Anvil Jose Rizal Reader on the Occasion of the
Sesquicentennial of His Birth (1861–2001). Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
In words and in images, this anthology celebrates the life and works of Jose Rizal
through the eyes of both seasoned and young writers and artists.
Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja. Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers. Quezon
City: University of the Philippines Press.
Hidalgo profiles six women writers of her own generation who are still writing:
Merlie M. Alunan, Sylvia Mayuga, Marra PL Lanot, Barbara Gonzalez, Elsa
Martinez Coscolluela, and Rosario Cruz-Lucero. The book’s Epilogue is also a sketch
of Hidalgo’s writing career and influences beginning with her mother.
J
Javier, Carljoe. Geek Tragedies. Quezon City: University of the Philippines
Press.
Inspired by young writers’ fondness for comics, video games, and pop culture, Javier’s
thirteen stories chronicle the humorous tragedies of his generation.
L
Lacuesta, Lolita, ed. The Davao We Know. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
This anthology of nineteen stories by Davaoeños from the Philippines and abroad is,
says Lacuesta, “a response to and a record of the change[s] in the life of the city and
province.”
Lilles, Cecille Lopez. Fortyfied. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Philippine Star columnist Lilles’s first book is part of the UST Publishing House’s
Personal Chronicles series. Her essays are humorous accounts of her attempts to
understand the male psyche, proving that men are as interesting and riveting to
women as women are to men.
Lolarga, Elizabeth. Catholic and Emancipated. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Poet and veteran journalist Lolarga’s essays, part also of the same Personal Chronicles
series, “chronicle both the familiar and the unsung,” as Rosario Garcellano puts it.
Lopa-Macasaet, Rhona, ed. Turning Points: Women in Transit. Pasig City:
Anvil Publishing, Inc.
This anthology of twenty-three essays by women writers deal with critical passages
and turning points in their lives.
M
Manlapaz, Edna Zapanta, ed. Light: Selected Stories by Joy T. Dayrit. Quezon
City: Ateneo De Manila University Press.
This posthumous collection of twenty-four stories by Joy T. Dayrit includes a number
of Dayrit’s drawings and paintings which document the way she created her stories.
English 271
Maraan, Connie J. Better Homes and Other Fictions. Manila: UST Publishing
House.
Maraan’s second collection of short fiction and nonfiction affords an intimate view
of the author’s clear and deceptively simple style which matches her clear-eyed vision
of the world and the multiple roles she must play in it. She works in the Social
Development Research Center of De La Salle University.
Maranan, Edgardo, ed. The Secret of the Cave and Other Stories for Young
Readers. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
Maranan’s four stories bring young readers to experience a hopeful and idyllic past
in Philippine history. The title story is a revised version of “The Artist of the Cave”
which won second prize in the 2009 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature
(in the Short Story for Children category).
McFerson, Hazel M., ed. Mixed Blessing: The Impact of the American Colonial
Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines; 2nd edition. Quezon
City: University of the Philippines Press.
First published in 2002 by Greenwood Press, this revised edition covers events after
the election of President Corazon Aquino. A number of the new essays are more
directly relevant to the main theme of the complex Philippines-US interaction.
McMahon, Jennifer M. Dead Stars: American and Philippine Literary
Perspectives on the American Colonization of the Philippines. Quezon City:
University of the Philippines Press.
McMahon discusses the reaction of anti-imperialist American writers to America’s
role of colonizer. She analyzes how conflicts in American identity surface in the
colonial regime’s use of American literature, and also considers the way three early
and important Filipino writers—Paz Marquez Benitez, Maximo Kalaw, and Juan C.
Laya—interpret and represent these same tensions in their fiction.
Mercado, Julio F., ed. Anthology of English and American Literature for
College. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
This anthology aims to provide the college teacher and student a balanced combination
of traditional and classic works from England and the United States.
Miraflor, Norma. Available Light. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Miraflor’s second novel is the “unauthorized biography” of one Ela Cruz, told in
interlocking parts—her childhood, adolescence, marriage, motherhood, illness, and
death. The novel also comprises the protagonist’s stories, columns, recipes, letters,
photograph captions—a “stitching together [of ] the swatches of her life.” The author
has a philosophy degree from UST, was editor of the Varsitarian, and an instructor
and journalist in Manila before moving to Singapore in the early ’70s. Together with
her husband, she runs Media Masters, a Singapore-based publishing company.
N
Nadera, Vim. Kayumanggi. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Edited by Romulo P. Baquiran Jr. and Michael M. Coroza and designed by Mannet
Villariba, this unusual volume contains the poetry of much-awarded poet, performing
artist, and UP professor Vim Nadera, and the musical scores of Fer Edilo who set the
poems to music.
Nem Singh, Rosario P. Anthology of World Literature for College. Pasig City:
Anvil Publishing, Inc.
Readable, lively, varied, and representative, the anthology encourages students to
develop an appreciation for wide and varied reading and a wholesome sense of
values.
P
Pastrana, Allan Justo. Body Haul. Manila: UST Publishing House.
This collection offers the poet’s “contemplation of peripheries—childhood, domestic
scenes, strange birds, [and] new places” (Alfred A. Yuson). In the words of another
poet, J. Neil Garcia, “The body in this astonishing debut by Thomasian poet Alan
Pastrana is of course the sensuousness of the verse form itself.” Pastrana has degrees
in Music Literature and Piano Performance from the UST Conservatory of Music
where he now teaches.
Pinzon, Mary Jannette L. The Rhetorics of Sin. Quezon City: University of the
Philippines Press.
Focused on Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila, who figured prominently in
the political life of the Philippines, this biography analyzes the discourses of Sin over
the period 1972 to 1992.
R
Remoto, Danton. Bright, Catholic, and Gay. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
Remoto’s essays give readers an insightful view of the Philippines’s LGBT scene; they
are, moreover, serious political and social commentary.
English 273
S
Sianturi, Dinah Roma. Geographies of Light. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Sianturi’s second collection follows upon A Feast of Origins which won a National Book
Award from the Manila Critics’ Circle. The poet teaches at De La Salle University but
is currently based in the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.
T
Tadiar, Neferti X. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the
Making of Globalization. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
First published in 2009 by Duke University Press, Tadiar’s book discusses a
contemporary paradigm for understanding politics and globalization through
close readings of poems, short stories, and novels brought into conversation with
scholarship in anthropology, sociology, politics, and economics.
Tan, Michael. Thinking and Doing Culture. Manila: UST Publishing House.
The essays, culled from Tan’s column, “Pinoy Kasi” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer,
show how the study of culture might contribute to the building of a national identity.
Currently dean of UP College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Tan is a professor of
anthropology and holds degrees in Veterinary Medicine, Anthropology, and Medical
Anthropology.
Toledo, Joel M. Ruins and Reconstructions: Poems. Pasig City: Anvil
Publishing.
This, Toledo’s third book of poetry, was revised and reconstructed during his stay at
Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy. Most of the poems were written in the wake of the
disastrous typhoon Ondoy.
Torres, Gerardo, ed. A Treat of 100 Short Stories. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing
for De La Salle University.
Published to mark De La Salle University’s centennial year, Torres gathers one hundred
short stories by young students, in both English and Filipino. Most are realistic, but
a number are in other fictional modes: fantasy, science fiction, and magic realism.
V
Velarde, Emmie G. Show Biz, Seriously. Manila: UST Publishing House.
Part of the Personal Chronicles series, this collection not only offers observations
and insights into many celebrities on the big screen and on stage, but also records
Velarde’s personal struggles and triumphs, proving that life is no less dramatic than
art. Velarde, the entertainment editor of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is an alumna
of UST and a veteran prize-winning journalist.
W
Woods, Damon L. ed. From Wilderness to Nation: Interrogating Bayan.
Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
Eight essays, four in English and four in Filipino, four written by authors residing
in the Philippines and four in the United States, explore the concept of “bayan” or
nation through various aspects of Philippine culture, identity, and consciousness.
Y
Yuson, Alfred A. Lush Life. Manila: UST Publishing House.
This collection of seventy-five essays by much-awarded writer for all seasons,
“Krip” Yuson, is culled from more than a decade’s production of creative nonfiction
originally published in several print publications; it covers the whole range of the
author’s multifaceted interests.
Z
Zafra, Jessica. Twisted 9. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
Ninth in Zafra’s Twisted series, this collection has all the qualities her critics and fans
expect and appreciate. Funny, frank, and self-deprecating at times, the book treats
readers to Zafra’s preoccupations (e.g., Roger Federer) and gripes (e.g., bad hotels).
English 275
Filipino
A
Aguirre, Alwin at Nonon Carandang, mga patnugot. Dadaanin. Lungsod
Mandaluyong: Anvil Publishing Inc.
Koleksiyon ng sandaang kuwentong may sandaang salita na isinulat ng sandaang
manunulat ang hatid ng Dadaanin. Nagbigay ng kontribusyon ang mga nagsisimula
at kilalang manunulat sa buong bansa para mabuo ang libro na inabot ng dalawang
taon bago natapos. Matutunghayan sa bawat kuwento ang iba’t ibang tema at
emosyon.
Agustin, Jim Pascual. Baha-Bahagdang Karupukan. Maynila: UST Publishing
House.
Iba-iba man ang mga paksa sa mga tulang nakapaloob sa librong ito, mababanaag
ang pakay ng makata na bigyan ng boses ang mga aspekto ng buhay na kadalasan
ay nakaliligtaan o kinaliligtaan. Ang makata ay nakatira sa South Africa. Ito ang
kaniyang ikatlong aklat. (hango sa UST Publishing House Catalogue 2010-2012.)
Almario, Virgilio S. Jacintina. Maynila: UST Publishing House.
Ang pagsusuri sa akda ni Emilio Jacinto ay bahagi ng isang balangkas ng may-akda
sa kasaysayang pampanitikan ng Filipinas na naiiralan ng pambansa at makabansang
pagtanaw at pamantayan. Aniya, hindi mabubuo ang diwa ng Himagsikang Filipino
bilang pinakadakilang yugto sa kasaysayang pambansa kung hindi isasaalang-alang
ang isinulat nina Bonifacio at Jacinto. (Hango sa UST Publishing House Catalogue
2010-2012.)
Antonio, Emilio Mar. Maya. Maynila: UST Publishing House.
Ang aklat ay kinapapalooban ng 144 tulang pambata ng makata na unang nailimbag
sa magasing Liwayway. Ang Maya ang unang bolyum ng inaasahang serye ng mga
libro bilang paggunita sa buhay-makata ni Antonio sa kaniyang ika-100 taong
kapanganakan noong 2003.
Antonio, Emilio Mar. Suplungan ng mga Hayop. Maynila: UST Publishing
House.
Ang Suplungan ng mga Hayop ay isang nobelang patula na unang nailimbag sa anyong
komiks sa Manila Klasiks noong 1961. Layunin ng muling paglilimbag ng obrang ito
ang ipakilala sa bagong henerasyon ng mambabasa ang “Hari ng Balagtasan” at ang
marami pang yaman ng ating panitikan.
276
Antonio, Teo T. Distrungka. Maynila: UST Publishing House.
Ang koleksiyong ito ng isa sa mga pangunahing makata ng bansa ay pagdalumat ng
tao, bilang isang nilalang na buo, at ang konsepto ng pagdestrungka ng kaniyang
pagkatao bunga ng kaniyang karanasan at kaligiran. (Hango sa UST Publishing
House Catalogue 2010-2012.)
Antonio, Lamberto E. Alitaptap sa Gabing Maunos: Mga Kuwento. Lungsod
Quezon: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Unang aklat ng maiikling katha ng makatang Lamberto E. Antonio ang Alitaptap
sa Gabing Maunos: Mga Kuwento na aniya ay isang katuparan ng “isang makatang
‘nagkatahid sa panulaan’ na ‘magkabagwis’ bilang prosista.” Matutunghayan sa
libro ang sampung kuwentong nasulat ng may-akda sa loob ng mahigit tatlong
dekada at naging bahagi ng iba’t ibang publikasyon gaya ng Liwayway, Philippine
Studies, at Writings in Protest. Bagama’t dumaan sa mga pagbabago ang mga katha sa
pagsasatipon nito, litaw pa rin ang mga isyung panlipunang nagsasanga sa nakaraan
at kasalukuyan gaya ng karanasang rural at urban na tumatalab sa isa’t isa, pagkasira
ng kalikasan, transaksiyonalismong seksuwal, at paglalaho o pagpapanibagong-anyo
ng pag-ibig. At sa bawat pilas ng libro, inaanyayahan ni Antonio na hanapin ng
mambabasa ang ugnay sa mga tauhan, na gaya sa totoong buhay, ay tila mga alitaptap
na kumukuti-kutitap sa kabila ng nakalulunos na kalagayang pansarili at pambansa.
B
Balde, Abdon M. Jr. 100 Kislap. Lungsod Mandaluyong: Anvil Publishing Inc.
Koleksiyon ng 100 maikling kuwento na hindi hihigit sa 150 salita ang hatid ni
Abdon M. Balde Jr. sa 100 Kislap. Maikli man sa unang tingin, malayo naman ang
naaabot at maraming paksa ang nasasaklaw ng bawat kuwento. Ang bawat kislap ay
pumupukaw sa damdamin ng mga mambabasa. Ayon kay Balde, sapat na ang bilang
ng mga salitang ginamit sa bawat kislap para talakayin ang bawat paksa nang walang
nasasakripisyong bahagi ng kuwento.
C
Carandang, Nonon E. at Rakki E. Sison-Buban, mga patnugot. Lasang
Lasallian. Lungsod Quezon: Central Books Supply Inc.
Isang aklat ng mga tinipong akda ng mga Lasalyanong nakaranas ng tuwa’t sayáng
idinulot ng mga pagkaing kadikit na ng kanilang búhay sa DLSU ang Lasang
Lasallian. Bilang bahagi ng ika-100 taóng pagdiriwang ng pamantasan, ang aklat na
ito ay may intensiyong ipamahagi sa mambabasa ang sayáng walang kapantay bilang
Lasalyano. Pinatototohanan nito na habang hinuhubog ang mag-aaral sa loob ng
institusyon, kasabay nitong nilalasap ang iba’t ibang pagkain ng búhay at lasa ng mga
pagsubok sa lahat ng aspekto tungo sa kahusayan.
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Casanova, Arthur P. Klasrum Drama: Mga Anyo ng Dulaan para sa Paaralan.
Lungsod Mandaluyong: Anvil Publishing Inc.
Hatid ng Klasrum Drama: Mga Anyo ng Dulaan Para sa Paaralan ang iba’t ibang aralin
na tumatalakay sa iba’t ibang anyo ng dulaan na maaaring gawin sa paaralan. May
nakalaan na halimbawa sa bawat anyo ng dula na tinalakay para masundan ng mga
mag-aaral. Dahil sa hilig sa drama at teatro ni Casanova, ninais niyang magbigay ng
ilang panuntunan o gabay sa pagbuo ng mga dula na maaaring gawin ng mga mag-
aaral sa pamamagitan ng librong ito.
Casanova, Arthur P., Rolando C. Esteban, at Ivie C. Esteban. Mga Kwentong-
bayan ng Katimugang Pilipinas. Lungsod Mandaluyong: Anvil Publishing Inc.
Ang mga pinagtipon-tipong kuwentong-bayan ng iba’t ibang tribu sa Mindanao ang
masasaksihan sa librong ito. Karamihan sa mga kuwentong kalakip sa aklat na ito ay
isinalin mula sa mga katutubong wika ng mga grupong etniko sa Mindanao o kaya
naman ay mula pa sa pananaliksik ng iba’t ibang iskolar. Layunin ng aklat na ito na
makatulong sa paglago ng kultura at ng identidad ng Filipinas kung kaya’t magsisilbi
rin itong sanggunian ng mga mag-aaral sa mataas na paaralan.
E
Evasco, Eugene Y. Mga Pilat sa Pilak. Maynila: UST Publishing House.
Ang Mga Pilat sa Pilak ay kalipunan ng mga personal na sanaysay ni Evasco na
naisulat sa loob ng isang dekada. Sa pananaw ni Ruth Elynia Mabanglo, ang mga
likhang nakapaloob sa koleksiyon ay “simple, kumbersasyonal ang tono, may mga
paksang karaniwan ngunit nilapitan sa di pangkaraniwang istilo, ngangayunin subalit
panghabampanahon; partikular ang tuon pero unibersal ang tema.”
F
Fabian, Agustin C. Kay Lalim ng Gabi at Iba Pang Kuwento. Lungsod
Quezon: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Koleksiyon ng 19 na maikling kuwento ng pag-ibig at romansa ng batikang manunulat
na si A.C. Fabian ang hatid ng obrang Kay Lalim ng Gabi at Iba Pang Kuwento.
Unang kinagiliwan sa magasing Liwayway, ang mga akda ay kinapapalooban ng mga
kahulugang tumutugon sa mga isyung pampamilya, pangkasarian, panlipunan, at iba
pa na inihulma sa mga aksiyon, desisyon, at saloobin ng bawat tauhang nakapaloob
sa mga ito. Ang libro ay bahagi ng seryeng Aklatambayan ng ADMU Press.
G
Gervacio, German. 101 Bugtong na Hindi Alam ng Titser Mo. Maynila: UST
Publishing House.
Itinatampok sa librong ito ang koleksiyon ni German Gervacio ng mga bugtong.
Bukod sa pagdaragdag sa mga nakagisnan nang mga bugtong, nais ni Gervacio na
“buhayin ang ngayo’y unti-unti nang namamatay na sana’y masayang palitan ng
L
Lacuesta, Mookie Katigbak, patnugot. Metro Serye 1. Maynila: UST
Publishing House.
Tampok sa antolohiyang ito ang obra ng iba’t ibang artista, kuwentista, at makata.
Nasa anyong mapa ng isang pedestrian, ang mga likha ay umiinog sa tema ng
pagsakay at paglalakbay. Kinapapalooban ito ng mga tula nina Eliza Victoria, Mark
Anthony Cayanan, Joseph de Luna Saguid, Lawrence Bernabe, at Marie La Viña. Si
Manix Abrera ang nagsilbing ilustrador ng mga libro.
M
Mabanglo, Ruth E., patnugot. Ang Pantas (The Prophet) ni Khalil Gibran.
Lungsod Quezon: C&E Publishing para sa DLSU Press.
Sa librong ito, muling ipinamalas ni Ruth Mabanglo ang kaniyang kahusayan sa
pagnananis na maisalin sa pinakamalapit na salita nito ang aklat ni Khalil Gibran
na The Prophet. Partikular na tinatalakay ng akdang ito ang kagandaha’t misteryo ng
búhay ng isang tao sa kaniyang patuloy na pagtuklas sa sarili. Ito ay pumapailanlang
kung paanong ang isang pantas ay inaaral ang konsepto ng pamamalagi ng isang
indibidwal habang siya ay nagmamahal sa wika ng bagong himig at ng pag-iral ng
tamang pag-iisip ng kaluluwang punô ng mga katanungan at paghahanap ng kasagutan
sa mga misteryong ito. Maging ang kapalaran, ang karma at ang mga pangunahing
birtud ng búhay ay mas naging maliwanag at makabuluhan sa saling ito.
N
Nadera, Vim. Kayumanggi. Maynila: UST Publishing House.
Ang librong ito ay kalipunan ng mga tula ng premyadong makata at performance
artist na si Vim Nadera, kasama ang musical score ni Fer Edilo na siyang nagbigay-
himig sa bawat obra. Sina Romulo P. Baquiran Jr. at Michael M. Coroza ang
nagsilbing patnugot ng libro. Si Mannet Villariba ang naglapat ng disenyo.
O
Ortiz, Will P. Bugtong ng Buwan at Iba Pang Kuwento. Lungsod Quezon: The
University of the Philippines Press.
Kalipunan ng mga kuwentong pambata ang hatid ni Will P. Ortiz sa Bugtong ng
Buwan at Iba Pang Kuwento. Gayunman, ani Ortiz, hindi nangangahulugang
pambata lang ang mga kuwentong masasaksihan sa libro kundi “para sa bata, ukol sa
bata, at nararapat ding basahin ng nakatatanda.” Sa labindalawang kathang pambata
sa koleksiyon, iinog ang usapin sa mga batang manggagawa na kumakawala sa
ikinahong imaheng walang lakas, nawawala, at laging hinahanap tungo sa pagiging
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suwail, matitigas ang ulo, at handang lumaban kung wala sa katwiran ang nakatatanda.
Sa ganitong paghulagpos ng naratibo ng bata sa mga obra ni Ortiz, binibigyang-tinig
ang mga batang matagal nang iginapos ng tradisyonal na lipunan.
R
Reyes, Jun Cruz. Ang Huling Dalagang Bukid at ang Authobiography na Mali:
Isang Imbestigasyon. Lungsod Mandaluyong: Anvil Publishing Inc.
Umiikot sa kahirapan ng búhay sa mga kanayunan sa bansa ang tinatalakay ng nobelang
isunulat ni Jun Cruz Reyes. Ayon sa sa introduksiyon ni Bienvenido Lumbera, ang
wikang ginamit ni Reyes ay maaaring maituring na akma sa isang borador kaya’t maaari
itong ituring na burara. Ngunit dahil sa postmodernismo na paraan ng pagsusulat ni
Reyes, napalaya niya ang kaniyang sarili sa mga batas ng paglikha.
Rodriguez, Rommel B. Lagalag ng Paglaya. Lungsod Quezon: The University
of the Philippines Press.
Ang aklat na ito ay kalipunan ng mga kuwentong lagalag ni Rommel B. Rodriguez.
Lagalag ang sentral na tema ng mga katha sapagakat kadikit ng paglalakbay/pag-alis
ang patuloy na paglikha ng mga tanong. Bilang lagalag sa sariling búhay at panahon,
isiniwalat ni Rodriguez sa kaniyang mga obra hindi ang mga sagot kundi lalo’t higit
ang mga kuwestiyon na umiinog sa kalayaan, pakikibaka, at pagkatao.
T
Tiatco, Sir Anril Pineda. Miss Dulce Extranjera o Ang Paghahanap kay Miss
B: Dulang May Dalawang Yugto. Lungsod Quezon: The University of the
Philippines Press.
Binibigyang-búhay ng inilimbag na dula ni Tiatco ang kuwento sa búhay at pagkatao
ni Josephine Bracken. Sa pamamagitan ng mga dokumentong pangkasaysayan,
maaaring likhain ang iba’t ibang Josephine—ito ang pinaglulugaran ng dula na
pinangungunahan ng dalawang tauhang mandudula na tumatalab sa isa’t isa at kung
pakasusuriin ay maaaring mga “biktima ng awtoridad at manipulasyong ideolohikal
at ng gahum ng kasaysayan.” Sa pag-usad ng mga eksena, matutunghayan na bilang
dula, hindi ang bersiyon ng kasaysayan ang ipinatatampok sa dula kundi ang
pagpapakita kung paanong “ang kasaysayan ay maaaring basahin bilang nagtatanghal
na naratibo o nagtatanghal na paninindigan.”
Tolentino, Rolando B. at Rommel B. Rodriguez, mga patnugot. Kathang Isip:
Mga Kuwentong Fantastiko. Lungsod Quezon: Ateneo de Manila University
Press.
Hatid ng librong Kathang Isip: Mga Kuwentong Fantastiko ang labinlimang maikling
kathang dumadaloy sa imahinasyon at imahinaryo upang bumuo ng pantasyang
V
Velasco, Emmanuel. Dalawang Pulgada at Tubig. Maynila: UST Publishing
House.
Unang kalipunan ng tula ni Velasco ang Dalawang Pulgada at Tubig. Ayon sa kapuwa
makatang si Jim Pascual Agustin, “tumatatak ang mga salita at imaheng likha ni
Velasco sa isipan ng mga mambabasa, tila multong nakapasok sa paningin at hindi
aalis o tuluyang magpapakita.”
Vera, Rody. Tatlong Dula. Lungsod Quezon: The University of the Philippines
Press.
Usapin ng identidad ang nagtatahing tema sa tatlong obrang pantanghalang
nakapaloob sa librong ito ni Rody Vera. Sa matagal na panahon, ang identidad
din ang nagsisilbing kahon ng pagkatao na naglatag sa idea ng “nararapat” batay sa
pakahulugang heteroseksuwal. Sa ganang ito, iginigiit ni Vera sa kaniyang mga dula
ang paglaya sa kumbensiyon ng pagkatao at hamunin ang manonood/mambabasa
na pumaloob sa sariling proseso ng pagsisino, na bagama’t madalas na napakasakit at
napakahirap ay siyang “magdadala sa atin sa inaasam nating Langit at Kaligayahan.”
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Y
Yu, Rosario Torres. Alinagnag. Maynila: UST Publishing House.
Laman ng koleksiyong ito ang mga pananaliksik at panunuri sa mga akda at kani-
kaniyang búhay ng mga respetadong manunulat tulad nina Amado V. Hernandez,
Bienvenido Lumbera, Genoveva Edroza-Matute, Lope K. Santos, at Ricky Lee.
Ipinakikita rin ang ugnayan ng ideolohiya at kasarian sa panitikan at sinisipat ang
katayuan ng literaturang Filipino sa kontemporaneong panahon. (Hango sa UST
Publishing House Catalongue 2010-2012.)
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Si Michael M. Coroza ay kasalukuyang Associate Professor sa Kagawaran ng
Filipino, Paaralan ng Humanidades ng Pamantasang Ateneo de Manila, nagtuturo
ng panitikan, malikhaing pagsulat, at pagsasaling pampanitikan sa gradwado at
di-gradwadong paaralan. Premyadong makata at mananaysay, nagkamit siya ng
Southeast Asia Writers Award (SEAWrite) noong 2007 mula sa Kaharian ng Thailand
at Aning Dangal Award mula sa National Commission for Culture and the Arts
(NCCA) noong 2009. Dating pangulo siya ng LIRA at kasalukuyang Secretary
General ng UMPIL. Sa pamamagitan ng kaniyang palatuntunang-panradyo, ang
Harana ng Puso, na sumasahimpapawid tuwing Linggo ng gabi sa DWBR 104.3 FM,
itinataguyod niya ang pagbabasa at pagtatanghal ng tula, lalo na ang mga katutubo at
klasikong awiting Filipino gaya ng mga kundiman, danza, at balitaw.
Kasalukuyang guro ng Filipino sa Faculty of Engineering sa Unibersidad ng Santo
Tomas si Joselito D. delos Reyes. Nagtapos siya ng BSE Social Science sa PNU
Manila at MA Araling Filipino sa Pamantasang De La Salle. Inilathala ng NCCA
noong 2005 ang una niyang aklat, Ang Lungsod Namin. Kasapi siya ng UMPIL, LIRA,
Lucban Historical Society, at Museo Valenzuela Foundation. Kasaping tagapagtatag
at dating pangulo siya ng Bolpen at Papel, PNU Creative Writers’ Club. Nalathala
sa mga dyornal, antolohiya, pahayagan at magasin ang kaniyang mga akda at salin.
Nagpapabalik-balik siya sa hamog at halumigmig ng Banahaw upang makapiling ang
kaniyang dalawang anak, sina Divine at Esperanza, at asawang si Angela na guro ng
pisika sa Lucban Academy.
Si Carlo Pacolor Garcia ay kasalukuyang nagtatapos ng kanyang masteral sa Araling
Pilipino. Nitong nakaraang Enero-Pebrero, ipinalabas ng Tanghalang Pilipino, sa
ilalim ng produksiyong Eyeball: New Visions in Philippine Theater, ang kaniyang
dulang “Bakit Wala Nang Nagtatagpo sa Philcoa Oberpas” na una nang naitanghal
sa taunang Virgin Labfest (2010); siya’y nakasali na sa dalawang palihang pambansa
(UP Writers Workshop at IYAS); at gayundin nailathala na sa Philippine Humanities
Review (2008).
Vicente Garcia Groyon teaches at De La Salle University-Manila. His novel, The
Sky over Dimas (DLSU Press, 2003), received the Grand Prize from the Don Carlos
Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Manila Critics Circle National Book
Award, and the Madrigal-Gonzalez First Book Award. He has published a collection
of short stories, On Cursed Ground and Other Stories (University of the Philippines
Press, 2004), and edited anthologies of short fiction.
Mookie Katigbak is currently working on her second book of poetry. She is the
creator and editor of Metro Serye, a literary folio featuring new poetry, fiction, and
graphic art. A prizewinning poet, she won Palanca Awards for two short collections,
The Proxy Eros and Sl(e)ights, both of which were eventually included in her first
Issue Editor
Gémino H. Abad is University Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing
at the University of the Philippines. A poet and scholar, he has finished his six-volume
anthology of Philippine short stories in English from 1956 to 2008, in continuation
of the late Professor Leopoldo Y. Yabes’s critical-historical anthology of Filipino short
stories in English 1925 to 1955. In 2009, he received the Premio Feronia, Italy’s
highest award for foreign authors.
Associate Editors
Virgilio S. Almario is among the most prominent living poets and literary critics in
the Philippines today. He was proclaimed National Artist for Literature in 2003 and
is now a Professor Emeritus in the College of Arts and Letters, UP Diliman.
Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo has published more than twenty books of fiction, creative
nonfiction, and literary criticism. She is a UP Professor Emeritus and continues to
teach creative writing and literature at the Graduate School of the College of Arts
and Letters. She is also director of the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary
Studies; before that, she was director of the UST Publishing House.
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