I HAD SPRUNG as a child on a twilight, riding a seesaw in Cabanatuan, and

from the dusk around me, a cousin had stepped out, herself also now dead
and buried at the other end of the island. "Your mother is dead," she said and
I rose on the seesaw, and thats how that scene has since been frozen in my
mind all these years, forty, if a day.
Many times, I had wanted to find my mothers grave, or the child on that
seesaw in the park, the word orphan brushing past her like bats wings—she
will never find her way home.
Finally, I made contact: a lady who lived in that town would look for
it but I could only give the year and the name. 1933. Maria Laguda Taga.
She called weeks later. "We have found it," she said. Because I was mildly
skeptical, she insisted, "Its the one." Name and year matched, she said. The
records were intact, and oh, yes, one more detail, she added—there was an
angel, all right, with a horn.
We left the city at dawn and made good time. Earlier that summer, we
had practised for this trip by venturing out to Dau, picking up four cans of
imported peaches, and heading back home, feeling foolish and heady, like
circumnavigators trying out their sails before the big day. For the Cabanatuan
trip, I had traced the route on the road map. Translating it in terms of flame
trees, traffic signs, and other landmarks, it seemed easy enough.
In the towns of Gapan and Sta. Rosa, there was nothing I remembered
and only the market looked familiar. The cemetery was in the outskirts, near
a rice granary, and I was all for beginning our search but the lady who had
found my mothers grave expected us at her home first.
Her home was in the barrio of Sangitan, where I had lived as a child, but
forty years had wiped out the rice and sugar cane fields, the footpaths and the
carabao trails, and now, there were shops and hospitals and nursing schools

7
8 •> The True and the Plain

instead. Where was the old public school? I asked. "Right around the corner,"
she said, pointing out the high school. The storied posts were there and the
second floor windows.
"There's the park," she said. Somewhere there, a child waited to be shown
the way home.
The seesaw in my mind began to move slowly.
First, we had lived in the heart of town, in a small concrete house with
a porch where I had stood on Sundays to await the papers. And then we had
moved to a house near a road lined with old acacia trees beneath which we
had played, and then, finally to Sangitan, to a two-story building owned by
a kindly woman.
The house where my mother had taken ill and, from there, been brought
to a hospital to die, was a two-story house, painted green, and we had lived
on the second floor. There was a long, wide window fronting the main street,
where I sat for hours, watching the hustle and bustle below. Somewhere in the
house, behind me, the woman who was my mother would make the sounds
of home: a bed scraping the floor, water running, firewood fed into a stove,
and I sat at the window, safe and warm, enveloped by the presence of this
woman who figured briefly in my life.
I remember her like that, as an emanation, a light, constant, true. When
she died, she lay in state for three days in the living room that she had scrubbed
in life. Another girl sits by the coffin, watching the immobile face beneath
the glass, because the other one, the daughter I really was, had skipped to the
nearby park, to ride the seesaw, though her mother lay bleeding to death.
After three days, men had boarded up that glass panel and picked up her
coffin to pass it through the window, to other arms waiting below, on the
street. I rode in a car, I think, a small black car, and from where I sat, squeezed
by other bodies, I had looked up at the green house and seen this big black
cloth, flapping at the windows, signifying a death.
Many years later, with a family of my own, I came across a picture of
that cortege. It must have been shot from afar because the mourners are
like ants in that picture—no one distinguishable from that distance, no
one and nothing, except for the hearse covered with wreaths and pulled by
plumed horses. I finger the photograph;—where am I? It has been mailed
from somewhere South, by a relative displeased by the irreverent things I
write of my youth.
 Child on a Seesaw ••• 9

"To write of yourself as though your mother never loved you ..." she said.
"Here are pictures of yourself as a child. Look at your shoes, your dress, the
fan in your hand, the curls on your head. Look at how she holds you in this
one, her arms enclosing you possessively, her hand on your heart, and you are
pulled close to her, see? like a lioness and her cub. How can you write of those
days the way you do?"
I never got to meet this relative. This was her first and last letter to me,
written, as she so carefully put it, "when I am old and not too well anymore,
and I just want to make sure you remember the correct things about your
mother." She lived in Bukidnon, where it was cold, among the mountains,
tending to some cattle and a small business, "and strange as it may seem, your
writings reach us here and I would otherwise leave you alone, except when
you begin writing about your mother."
I had written foolishly of playing in cobwebby corners of the house,
conversing with shadows, and my relative had singled that out as seeming
to imply that I had wandered around, abandoned and neglected. She had
enclosed a picture of my mother, young, on the threshold of life. Decked in
jusi finery, she has just graduated from college and poses for posterity against
the protraitist s usual canvas backdrop of sea and sky, and real potted plants
at her feet.
She looks away from the camera, searching an invisible horizon, a white
carved fan in her hand. Her clear brown face rises from the deep scoop of
her gown—what does she think of, what does she see? She has not met my
father yet, therefore, doesn't think of love; is full of trust and hope, therefore,
doesn't see her death a few years hence. Shortly thereafter, she sails for Lanao
and meets my father in the hinterlands, and sails off with him to Jolo and
has two children there, and sails a third time for Luzon where she is to die in
Cabanatuan, and I am left with wanting to know her and nothing much to
start on except memories that have upset a relative and a sepia-colored pitcure
in my hand.
I pass a finger over her face, touching those dark eyes, as though some
knowledge and understanding might seep from the picture to my bloodstream.
I want to understand, I ache to know why some things that have happened
to me, have happened to me; if it was possible at all to have deflected some
of the pain and the loneliness; tenderness or love I would as lief have missed;
10 •> The True and the Plain

missed being hurt or used wrongly or sold short, had I but walked away from
a corner a second earlier or hopped on a later bus or left a door unopened.

M Y MOTHER'S GRAVE lay in the middle of the cemetery, weeded and cleaned,
thanks to my lady friend, and bigger than I remembered. The marker tilted to
one side, the earth beneath was crumbling. The posts were there but the chain
was gone, the floor was cracked. "They built them sturdy in their time," said
the caretaker, summoned from his home nearby. "This should really all have
crumbled a long time ago."
The angel disturbed me because I remembered her blowing the horn, but
this noon, she stood to one side, peeled and graying, looking down quietly
holding the horn against her robe. "I swear she was blowing that horn," I said
aloud. She couldn't have been not blowing it, I thought, dismayed. My face
must have betrayed me because someone asked, "Anything wrong?" There
were the cross and the marker and my mother's name and the caretaker who
insisted he remembered her funeral, but the angel with the horn was not the
angel of that little child in the deserted park.
There had been a funeral earlier and now the mourners filed out, some
lingering around us. It made for quite a crowd and you would think we were
burying my mother all over again. I remembered a pair of eyes, tendrils of
hair bent over some task, a flash of arm stirring something on the stove in the
kitchen.
Did I want it spruced up? someone asked. Not spruced up, really, I said,
choosing my words slowly. Only the crack sealed, the marker set aright, a bit
of paint, some grass, and then I looked at the angel and did not know what
to say. The tip of her nose was gone, a sad creature, weary from looking down
for forty years. Her folded wings drooped from her shoulders—too much to
think she had held them spread out, poised for flight, through many wars
and many upheavals. If I prettified her now, the seesaw in my mind would
never descend, and the little girl, aloft forever, would yield to the terror of
the night.
"Leave her alone," I said. Then, "Perhaps the horn," I thought. If I could
only bring it to her mouth (that small, tormenting detail), so she could be as
I remembered her, blowing the final tune that awaits us all—but the heat, the
dust, the cold curious crowd were beginning to turn the morning into a farce,
so I stepped back and prepared to leave.