PILGRIMAGE M. was in her twenties when she met the old Tagbilaran painter for the first time. This was in the early 70s, Martial Law was still to be declared. M. then, was a young mother, her present and future suddenly redefined by the momentous arrival of her first child, Everything in her life fell out, became subsidiary to the consuming demands of motherhood. She had just completed an MA in Creative Writing at Silliman University. She was teaching part-time at the Divine Word University. Part-time so she could devote the rest of her day to the care of the child. She felt she was sowing more terror than grace in her students' mind. Reading terrified them. Books did not figure in their growing up. They held a book gingerly as though it were a frog that would leap right out of their hands and into the paddies. She felt sorry for them as much as their stodginess made her impatient. At that time, M. felt as though she had been catapulted from the gentile world of academe into this small intimate community where everyone knows everyone else and what's cooking in the neighbors' pot was a matter for worthy conversation, M. had been living peaceably enough on the fringes of this community for almost a year. In all that time, M. felt herself completely visible to everyone, like a fish in a glass aquarium. The town knew everything that was going on in her life, M. felt. Of course it was not true, but she could not help the paranoia. People around her were just kind and friendly and welcoming, always helpful, ready to show her the way through the labyrinth of community life and interrelationships. They just couldn't help being curious about her. After all, their families go back several generations, they knew one another's back and present stories. The intimacies and familiarity of their interrelationships made her uncomfortable—she, the lone alien amongst a bunch of kinfolks. At that time M. did not know that Tagbilaran was a preview of the life she would live in the far and near future. As far as her husband was concerned, M. sensed, teaching was just "recreational therapy." The pay was not worth talking about. Motherhood filled her days with the routines of housekeeping, shopping 3[Page Scanned with CamScannerfor food, getting meals ready, the laundry, the eternal care of the infant-- milk bottles, daily baths, sleeping time--and when the infant was sick, walking him all evening till he mercifully fell asleep and allowed her some rest. Everyone around her, men and women both, assured her this was what women were born to do. She was lucky she had everything--husband, baby, a home. These tasks were to be her life's fulfillment. M. was wondering why her own feelings did not match their splendid expectations. Something wrong with her? There was a hole in her heart she did not know how to plug. An unnameable sadness consuming her. A heavy fog hanging over her days and following her about despite what seemed to be the perfection of her little world. Despite the overwhelming love she felt for her son. She told no one about this shameful secret. One day, Inday Borja Corales, a colleague in school told her, “You should meet Manang." Inday took her out one day to meet her sister. And that was how M. met the old painter, Hermogena Borja Lungay. Nene. "She's an accomplished artist," Inday told M. as they walked down Grupo Street to the old Borja apartment built on the edge of a cliff where the painter lived with her family. There was no evidence of that accomplishment in the way Nene lived, M. quickly noticed in that first visit. Her house was as drab as any average dwelling in Tagbilaran. The apartment smelled slightly of wood- rot and everyday cooking. No paintings on the faded walls. Battered furniture. Curtains hanging askew on the windows. No signs of anyone actively painting. Her children were all about, in various stages of growing. Difficult to sort them out, there were so many of them, going in and out of the house, preoccupied with their own pursuits. M. never did get to sort them out over time, except two or three of them: N. who became her student, C. who became close, almost like a daughter to her. And L., many years later, L. who would find his way to Tacloban where she had eventually come to settle, after several stations in other Visayan cities, L., restless and full of questions, searching for his own place under the sun. 4|Page Scanned with CamScannerAfter a few more visits, it was agreed that M. was to learn drawing, from Nene. Will that plug the hole in her heart, M. wondered, Will that ease the strange sadness? After two or three sessions, M. saw how good Nene was. She realized her own utter lack of talent. Was it because she was, perhaps, too old to learn? A new teacher, she felt that her own students did not take her seriously in the classroom, despite her terror tactics. If her students did not take her seriously, she thought, why would anyone else do? Thus the art lessons came to an end. But not the friendship. M. continued to visit the old painter. They would sit and watch the sunset over Panglao Island from the porch of her old apartment. There was a fourteen-year difference between M. and the old painter but it did not seem to matter. M. learned that Nene was in the UP College of Fine Arts when war broke out and interrupted her studies, She might have been one of the very few women enrolled in that almost exclusively male bastion, By tradition women were supposedly unable to draw. Jose Joya and. the sculptor, Napoleon Abueva, also a Boholano, were her UP contemporaries. She and Joya led the class on their graduation. She came home to Bohol but she was not allowed to return to Manila to pursue her vocation. She married her high school sweetheart, and started a family. A big family. M. could imagine her entire clan coming, at her: parents, siblings, cousins, an assortment of uncles and aunts, the Church, the community elders, the meat-and-fish mongers in the marketplace, her own peers, preaching the overbearing, gospel: family first-the husband, the children, the home. A_woman's true vocation. Preached sincerely and with great conviction everywhere one turned: "More than preached, it was lived, practiced in every home, by lines of valiant women-one's very own. mother, grandmothers, every woman in almost every home-- gaining thus the sanctity that no woman would dare to violate. Thus, M. learned, Nene put aside her paintbrushes to follow her husband wherever his job took him, dropping babies in every city they were obliged to stay, raising her children as a proper woman was expected to, hearing always in her head the inexorable law of her generation: Family first, Husband and children. The home. That should be enough for you, she e been told. M. wondered, Has she been living all her life with The same way she was feeling now? oa too must ha Kole in hear! Si Page Scanned with CamScannerBut M. did not remember them talking about this in those days. That first time they met, Nene was not painting. Inday Corales told her, She had to stop when the babies started coming. One after another. "She is short-tempered," Inday Corales told M. "Irascible. Given to violent outbursts. She has forbidden all her children to take up art. She refuses to teach them." M. dared not ask her friend about this. As for herself, M. had nothing to tell Nene, She was not practicing any art. Nor had she discovered what she wanted to do. Despite a master's degree in creative writing, she was not sure she wanted to write. If Nene was the painter who did not paint, she cannot be said to be the writer who did not write since she hadn't become one yet. That was still to come, fifteen, twenty years later. After more heartbreaks. Then she found the courage and conviction to say, Yes, yes, yes. I will write. When that time came, she was no longer living in Tagbilaran. M. left Bohol in 1979. She moved to another island, finding teaching jobs wherever she went. Somewhere along the way, she finally found a plug for the hole in her heart--she began writing poetry .«lisdidenottake away her sadness, Artists thrive in a supportive community, which was not always possible in the places where she had found herself. Thus though she had left Bohol in 1979, she kept coming back. Through the 80s and the 90s, through the 2000s. For reasons she did not try to explain, she found her lone community with the old painter. She did not follow a regular pattern for those visits. She went whenever she could and for any excuse. She would home in on that house perched on the edge of a cliff in Grupo Street. Nene’s house, overlooking the narrow strait between Tagbilaran City and Panglao Island. Nene had suffered an illness that nearly took away her life. The turning point. She was nearing 70. During one of her visits, M. found out that Nene was painting again. "| asked God, 'If you allow me to just sit up, I promise to paint. Just allow me to sit up, Lord. That would be enough.’ God granted my prayer." 6IPage Scanned with CamScannerSometimes Nene would be asleep when M. came in from Cebu. Or Dumaguete, Or Tacloban, C. would be puttering around the kitchen and would make her welcome with a cup of tea "She'd been painting until dawn," C. would tell her. Unfinished canvasses leaned against the walls of the sala. M. would hang, out until the old painter woke up. Then Nene would show her the new paintings. If M. arrived in the afternoon, she would find Nene with a bunch of kids hunched over their scrapbooks, drawing. They'd be all over the house, sprawled on the floor, at every table space, noisily but intently doing their exercises. She taught art to children for most of her remaining lifetime. Or she would be puttering in her garden. Then she would share cuttings from her plants. She gave M. a vine-like plant she called rosas de piedra. It thrived for a while in her care but it never did flourish. The popcorn bougainvillea M. brought home from Nene's garden was growing vigorously in her own garden, throwing its long branches over the fence. Nene would come in from the garden and together they would look at her newest paintings. No matter how brief or inconsequential their conversation would be, M. would leave the house in Grupo Street feeling comforted. It wasn't because of anything either of them may have said to each other. It was witnessing a woman in the act of art-making, against all interruptions and distractions. Despite illness and other vexations of the body and spirit. Against the progressive debility of age. Against one's own hatefulness, weakness, laziness, anger—remiorse, self-pity. Art-making, perverse, obdurate, intrepid. Working with great pride, but also with greater humility Against the truisms that made women hostage and turned them very often against the best of themselves and “what they could do, the + admonitions: It’s not a woman's place. There are better things to do, better uses for her energy, her time, her efforts. The higher priorities-the \, husband, the children, the home... Herself aging, M. has acknowledged the reason for her pilgrimage to that little house in Grupo Street to sce the ol! woman painter living out her obscure days, quietly painting, in sunlight or nightlight, until her frail 7 Scanned with CamScannerhands could no longer hold the brush. Hermogena Borja Lungay reversing the history of esis women. Through her own life, affirming the best that any woman can De with the last strength of her being. : She had taught M. by example how to plug the hole in her heart with poetry. So be it, so it shall be, as long as mind and body held together. fee rere eee reac HHH Scanned with CamScanner