miyako73
01-06-2013, 10:48 PM
I'm still not sure about the title. I'm also considering "Gen Italia" or "Ms. Gen Italia." Maybe you can suggest. I hope you can critique this first chapter, the result of countless revisions. Be brutal if you can. Thank you.
I
She dialed international on the payphone, and all the brass coins jingling in her hand, the leftovers of her last one hundred-peso bill, were just enough for that brief talk. From our house to the phone booth was a struggle. She wore her gold-on-black Hermes scarf, a frayed square of silk she wrapped and tied around her head to cover her face from dust, belched smoke diffusing the smell of gasoline, and shame. She clasped her vintage tote in case bag snatchers would think she had money because of her damish coiffured hair and fair skin still without the ugly signs that it would wrinkle soon.
She had never felt so alone as if she and her mid-morning shadow were the only ones plodding down the potholed street. Like those beggars, mumbling crazies, drunks, and homeless bums hanging out in the area, she stood on the sidewalk lost in the midst of chaos, in the middle of the dirt and noise of the city I left when I was sixteen, right after high school.
She had never been so broke that she had to go to the street corner to make a phone call. She pined for the things she used to have and despaired at the thought that she would never have those things again. She lost face literally, feeling her powdered epidermis melted inch by inch and fell off like a mask of liquefied flesh—shame was physiological to her.
When my mother called me that night, around nine o’clock Eastern Standard Time, I celebrated my father’s birthday and the last day of my final year at Boston University. Even before picking up the phone, even before hearing her voice, even before knowing why she called, I felt everything was about to change.
I knew I would never be the same.
I was never a clairvoyant, nor was I ever a believer of one, but I could tell when something bad was about to happen. Fear manifested as a tingle from my head down to my spine. Sadness, in a slow progression, boiled in my belly and bubbled in my chest. Anxiety nagged more than a gangrenous wound. I could sense the foreboding like a Red Line subway train looming from the dark and from afar.
Leaning my back against the angle of the two walls that squeezed my body, I sat on the floor with my elbows resting on my bended knees. My skin thickened and pushed out the hair it concealed. My hands unleashed a tremor they could not hold still and contain. My toes, scared and cold, curled inwards, struggling to take comfort from my soles. I could foresee the ominous like a brewing flu in the New England spring.
Then I mumbled the prayer for the dead: Deus veniae largitor et humanae salutis amator, quaesumus clementiam tuam: ut nostrae congregationis fratres, propinquos, et benefactores, qui ex hoc saeculo transierunt, beata Maria semper virgine intercedente cum omnibus sanctis tuis, ad perpetuae beatitudinis consortium pervenire concedas.
When I was in that state of consciousness, my thoughts ran wild, asking if everyone was okay, wondering who it would be this time, deciphering signs and symbols that deprived and disguised meanings, trying to make sense of what I saw in my head that played frame by frame like a strip of negative film raised towards a glare of light to reveal traces of ghostly images. Then my mind suddenly went blank, denying, dismissing, and refusing to believe before yielding to the unavoidable and eventual. I noticed this torment would come when I was at my happiest. It seemed extreme joy preceded tragedy. Always.
* * *
It had been that way since I was a child in a small, idyllic town of giant fire trees during the day and at night, of clouding fireflies. It began when I dreamed of the flaming Laga—the angry goddess of fire and destruction in our folk legends—days before my paternal grandmother, who doted on me like I was hers to rear and take care, died from an undiagnosed cancer in the abdominal area. A great deal of talk, mostly blaming and doubting, ensued when the news about her demise broke. A few questioned her doctor’s expertise, although it was she who avoided seeing him. She did not want to preoccupy herself with what she had: what was rotting inside her body, where to go for the cure, how it all began, why her urine slightly darker than tea smelled, when to finally give in. She did not want also to worry everyone.
That year when Sumilhig—another goddess but of death—was said to have taken my grandmother to the summit of Mount Tagdalit, the resting place of the souls, our town, Caraga, the place where I was born and where my brother and my sisters also grew up, where all my grandparents started and where my father and my mother met, the oldest in the South, the one that got its name from Karag (spirit), unveiled its verdant season so early. The southwest wind, the big Pacific waves, and the monsoon rain also came too soon. The wettest month of habagat (rainy season) unexpectedly ended by July. Then the foliage spread and thrived. The deep canals surrounding the orchards and the shallow ditches below the hilly mounds were swampy and teeming with weeds, noises, and life. The dewy trees along the margins of the sodden roads hosted vines, mosses, and exuberant bugs. The bushes and the long bladed grasses growing here and there bent and swayed, docile to inaudible slow rhythms and phantom frenzied beats. Anywhere the sun drenched with silvery yellows and brightened with dancing glints of gold was supple and abundantly green, but inside my grandmother’s big stone house, Lola Azon’s bahay na bato—its Capiz oyster-paneled windows shut and plaid linen curtains untied—every corner, every nook, every spot appeared dim and gray.
“When death comes knocking, don’t open the door. Don’t welcome him. Avoid meeting him eye to eye. Ignore him. Boredom, if not shame, will make him go away,” Lola Azon was heard to have said. Nobody really understood what she meant. Even the elders who were masters of ancient astrology and folklore could not interpret. Why death was male and human to her sounded interesting to me. It was my first lesson in personification—prosopopeia.
Some who were quick to judge pointed their fingers at Tita Cynthia, my father’s only sister, whom they thought had abandoned my sick grandmother. As if in a chorus of a Greek tragedy, complete with wailing, grief, chastisement, and disgust, they all said, “It is the fate of a strong daughter to take care of her weak mother.”
My aunt did not really leave my grandmother just like that. She had her mother’s blessing when she left. It was she who encouraged her daughter to find her place in the police force. She had always pushed Tita Cynthia to break the barriers our society, our culture, the cavemen—my grandmother’s word she enunciated with anger— had imposed on women. I heard Lola Azon express how she wanted my aunt to move on and only come home in a uniform even her brothers would salute.
I was there when my aunt packed her things. I watched her through the hole drilled by the termites the typhoon that year drove indoors. She folded her clothes in between sobs and filled her bag with a heavy set of hands. Both of my eyes I alternately used wet and filled the entire hole until I could no longer see her. I blew the droplet the size of a mongo bean to push it out of the hole, but it would not move or pop. I left to play with my friends and had never seen my aunt again until she came back to bury her mother. Although too late, she did come home a commissioned officer in badged crisp cerulean blue.
To honor her mother, Tita Cynthia fired all the bullets in her fully-loaded Glock pistol. She aimed her shots towards the sky on a safe angle. The elders interpreted it as my aunt’s blasting statement against God. It could not be true because the anting-anting (amulet) she always brought with her for safety and protection was the thick medallion the size of a fist bearing the image of Sagrado Corazon (Sacred Heart) she put under her bra. It saved her once when a criminal she pursued shot her in the chest and the bullet bounced; how could she not believe in the Divine when she only got a bruise in that incident? Her shooting of the gun seemed to me was her loud warning against those close and narrow-minded people in our town: she might be a woman but her gun had no sex organ.
Others blamed witchcraft after they found a voodoo doll under Lola Azon’s bed while cleaning. A bunch of colored ball head pins pierced its belly. “No wonder it was her stomach, her guts, her womb, the cradle of life, that were in pain,” said the old medicine man, whose left eye was cloudy gray from a cataract, as he checked the doll front and back and counted the pins. “These red ones are the most painful, bloody painful, and these black ones, the teeth of the devil, the daggers of the fallen angel, are the deadly.” He did not say what those green, yellow, and orange tiny balls attached onto the pins were.
Ompo Tacio, known for his herbs that could abort an unwanted baby and poison someone’s hated enemy, was the same old man who told me and my friends that he once visited Heaven and met God, who immediately sent him back to Earth because St. Peter, the gatekeeper who held the key, miscalculated his age. Although entertaining and almost real because of how he seriously delivered his lines, the absurd stories he concocted could not even convince our easy, impressionable minds. Nevertheless, I listened to Ompo Tacio like he was a teacher and jotted down what he told us like I was his student. He was a true master of storytelling.
“How could someone hurt her?” asked his doe-eyed wife who read palms and interpreted dreams for a peso. “This town just lost a spirit mother.” Her voice, hoarse from smoking tobacco through a coned banana leaf, cracked and ululated into a chant. She believed Lola Azon was the living embodiment of Inang Lawa, the lake spirit in our mythology who ripped her chest open with her bare hands, pulled her heart out, and threw it into the sky to become the moon, the mother of the stars. My grandmother was the only one in our town who had this name, Corazon—the Spanish word for heart. The old seer thought of the name as the sign since birth why my grandmother was no ordinary woman.
Ompo Kalaw, a close friend of my grandmother, was one of the characters who had me thankful that I grew up in a town where the magic and the real coexisted. Her every reading of my dream about myself farting or defecating always came out to be true. Utot (fart) and tae (feces) in her deep vocabulary portended good luck in anything that involved money and winning. Both meant I should gamble what my father gave and elbow my way through the sweating crowd to enter the jampacked sabungan—a roofed, open arena with a centrally elevated cockpit the size of the boxing ring—that allowed kids who had bills to waggle in front of adult bettors. She would prod me to bet on sabong, the bladed cockfight, and to pick, shout, and repeat sa pula, the **** on the red side, like I was in a bazaar hawking. When the goddess Duggom, the mythical one who lorded over the night, blessed me with a stinky, dirty dream, it also meant Ompo Kalaw's balato (her share) she asked forthright after every win. I had to give it to her readily to avoid malas (bad luck) befalling me. The old seer had endeared herself to us: to me because I won lots of times and to my grandmother who dreamed a lot.
Lola Azon had always been good even to strangers. She fed and invited them to stay when they had nowhere to go. She had extra rooms built adjacent to her big stone house just for them. “Strangers can be angels, you know,” she would say to anyone who listened to her story, how, during the war, a masked stranger riding a horse with no gun or bladed weapon but his latigo del diablo—a long braided whip made of leather, spiked with crocodile teeth, and understood as the tail of the devil—saved her mother from the drunk Japanese who raped women on the spot and slashed them to death with their katanas.
Another incident, during a long drought in the fifties, a blind stranger found and dug out a giant yam that saved my grandmother’s family from hunger. He did not even barter it for something or sell it to them. He knocked on their door, handed the yam, and left without saying who he was. Nobody knew him, and he had never showed up again. He must be an angel, they thought. I could understand why Lola Azon had a soft heart for strangers.
A sort of lore, when a wounded robber showed up one night and stayed at Lola Azon’s place to rest and recuperate, the next day he returned all the monies, jewelries, and valuables he took from his victims. Her kindness so moved him that he promised her he would be a changed man from then on. He had become the village seer’s assistant, whom people paid to find lost persons, animals, and things. If my grandmother was nice to those strange faces, how much more to people she knew and befriended?
Her grateful friends said she was "ina ng laging saklolo," a mother of perpetual help like the Holy Virgin. They went to see her when they had problems, and she always helped. They sought her advices. They valued her opinions. The young ones who had held her right hand to take it onto their foreheads out of respect could never forget Ompong Ina, their Old Mother who had always welcomed them to play in her orchard and allowed them to climb the trees when the guavas yellowed and the jackfruits bursted and sweetened the air.
Their fictive story about Lola Azon’s death and witchcraft, my earliest encounter with magical realism, fascinated my ears and gave me outlandish ideas to write in the future, but I knew that doll that caused the stir. I made it for her using my old Mickey Mouse shirt and the black buttons from the torn skirt her servant used as rag for dusting. I stuffed it with pillow cotton as soft as a newborn’s cheek. It puffed and bulked the rag doll that came out overfilled and paunchy. Gingerbread man popped up in my head when I drew the pattern on the old newspaper. I used the stitching I learned from her when she hand-hemmed her favorite Sunday dress. My blind stitch looked neat and effortless. She had noticed it. At five, my creative streak had already surfaced, and my grandmother had encouraged it. A creative person herself who loved knitting and embroidery, she actually asked me to make her a pincushion.
There was never a scary witch or a voodoo man but a wild superstition. It could be her colon or her uterus. Maybe a wound in her abdomen or an infection killed her. It could even be her worst nightmare—locally known as bangungot—that suffocated her lungs, prevented her to breathe, and choked her to death while asleep.
Yes, Lola Azon had lost weight and had become weaker each day, but nobody expected her to die so soon. She could still do some cooking, baking, and light chores. Adamant that she could still do the things that had become her routine, she tended her garden, fed and groomed her long-time pet—a chocolate Labrador named Fudge—and read the thick Spanish novels she had collected over the years. She did not spend her last days lying down all day, being gloomy, or feeling sorry for herself. She knew she was sick, but she forced herself to appear strong and sound alive. Even the stomach pain that felt like a pinch in her intestine had not really bothered her. “I’m fine,” she told my father, “and it’s still bearable.” She promised to tell him if it was her time to give up and rest, but she never did.
The day before she died, I won a poetry recitation contest. I did Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”, but I so wanted Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain! My Captain!” for its drama as melancholic as the hit novella on the radio about two lovers, one of whom was doomed to die and the other destined to mourn. I was a sucker for that kind of story.
On the stage, the nuns showered me with praises, aside from a medal and a handful of fruit candies. I beat the older contestants, and I was about eight, still in second grade. I must have won because there was God in my poem, and the Catholic nuns who ran the school judged the contest. My eyes beamed with pride, and my smile intimated nothing but joy. Medals were important to me. Even small achievements made my father, whom I called Papang, nod and say nice words. His patting of my shoulder and tousling of my hair made me very happy. I felt I was his son and he was my father.
Not minding her illness, Lola Azon sent me a congratulatory message she wrote longhand on a cut piece of rice paper together with the boxed sweets she specially made. It read: “Yuri, you’ll be reading your own poems someday. You’ll be telling them your stories. Have some strawberry cupcakes.” The jellied cupcakes were sweet, but her encouraging optimism, which I understood as her last wish for me, was sweeter. The next day at three, when my grandmother would have sat by the wooden rail of the veranda sipping coffee or tea, basking in the mid-afternoon sun, and watching her garden’s July blossoms, she peacefully passed away in her usual afternoon nap. She was still warm and smiling when her servant found her dead. They said either my grandfather or her guardian angel fetched her. Thus the smile. I did not really believe that. Lola Azon had said this to me: “Angels are real people who help.”
My other grandmother, a very religious woman, died in the church her rich family built for the Jesuits. She suddenly fell, face down to the marble floor, while kneeling and making the sign of the cross. They said it was the best way to die because it happened on a Sunday afternoon during Mass. “Jesus breathed his last at three o’clock,” said the town priest.
I was in the church that slow afternoon, but I did not see it happen. So bored and sleepy, I walked around, checking the pews and lifting the saints for lost coins, a weekly habit I had had until the priest prohibited the selling of live swallows the sellers dyed avocado green, banana yellow, and bellfruit red to look like parakeets. Yes, we associated colors to fruits. All day every Sunday outside the church, farmers showed up with wooden cages full of colorful birds that were originally white, brown, and grey. Children would buy and take them home as pets. A promise to St. Francis of Assisi, I would look for coins inside the church during Mass, so I could buy a bird sold for a quarter and set it free afterwards. When I heard a clunk, I thought someone dropped and lost a coin, a big coin enough to buy four birds. I ran towards where the metallic sound was. It was my grandmother’s huge gold medallion earring that first hit the marble floor.
Lola Adela must have died from exhaustion. Prolonged praying and repetitive kneeling caused her heart attack. She prayed too much even when she was in the bathroom. It took her a couple of hours when she had a bath. I could hear her mumbled Hail Mary’s undisturbed by the noises, drips, and flushes. Her murmurs were holy. I wondered what sin she had done that asked for a great atonement. Not an exaggeration, her rosary beads made of pearls had never left her fingers. Thick and coarse, the calluses on her fingertips glowed pink as if they wanted to be noticed. Her friends teasingly said they were from making and counting too much money. I thought so too; Lola Adela owned a huge store that overpriced everything.
In private, many had suspected that the death of Tito Bernard, my mother’s only brother, had something to do with my grandmother’s fervid penance even the town priest, who had been rumored to have fathered a stillborn child, could not rival. On his twentieth birthday, my uncle drank paint thinner and suffocated himself with a plastic grocery bag. He put it over his head and tied so tight around his neck that he asphyxiated. Lola Adela just could not easily forgive herself. She had hoped her endless praying could cleanse her guilt and her son’s transgressions. Tito Bernard dated someone his mother vehemently opposed as if the world would end had he continued seeing him.
I knew how much my uncle loved Raul, a disinherited son of a rich family, who sold fish in the wet market for a living. Sitting with him on the bench under the mango tree that afternoon, my legs resting on his lap, I asked Tito Bernard about the tall, handsome man who kissed him on his cheek the previous day— what I saw did not really shock me; well, Belle falling for the Beast did not shock me too. Waiting for his answer, I got curious why he and the man, whose big arms made my uncle’s neck and shoulders look lean and fragile, hugged and whispered secrets in each other’s ear behind the tree.
I had never doubted my uncle. There was never an instance in which he did not tell me the truth. He used to babysit me at his beauty parlor all afternoon and tell unbelievable stories that had taught me early to keep on hoping. He had never lied to me; he told me the truth about Santa, my father. He had never hidden even the smallest of truths from me; he exposed the lie of “happily ever after.” He was honest, too honest—he opened my eyes to the truth that I was not a girl and to the lie that I could never be one. That afternoon too, he tried to tell me who I really was and what I should not be.
“He’s a friend, a very good friend who makes me happy,” he said, letting loose a giggly smile with abashed lips.
“I wish to have a good friend like him too.” Seven years old then, I thought it was really hard to find one.
“Why?”
“I also want to be happy like you.”
“That’s very nice. It’s nice to know what you want. But are you happy now?”
“I am, but I want to be very happy like when you giggle in front of him.”
“Listen.” He held my chin like he felt sorry for me.
“I’m listening, Tito Bernard.” I scratched the itch on my leg, while he thought of appropriate words to use.
“Someday you’ll find someone who’ll wet your cheeks with his moist lips. Don’t be scared. Ask him to whisper you something. Ears are also for tongues. Let him hear your giggles. Let him touch your smile. Let your eyes speak. Ask him to breathe on your neck and run his hand around your nape. Warmth is what you feel when held even in the coldest morning or in the middle of the chill and rain. Go with him into the dark. Wilt in his embrace. Never regret about the night you spend in his arms. Love in our forbidden hearts is crazy like that. Sometimes free, oftentimes bound. You don’t need to fear it. What separate the sunrise from the sunset are moments not hours. Be with him. Just feel what he feels. Then enjoy.”
So dramatic. It almost made me cry. I did not know he could say those beautiful words; he cut hair and applied makeup for a living. Although he confused me, what he said rang in my ears like a premonition of what I should expect in the future. He must have known me already even at my very young age. Maybe he had observed how my stubborn pinkies would not curl with the rest, I thought.
It suddenly rained. He carried me on his back towards Lola Adela’s house where my mother was waiting and ready to go home. That was the last time my uncle and I had a chat about happiness, about giggling, about life.
The night before Tito Bernard died, he asked me to give his letter to Raul. I told Lola Adela about it. She took the letter from me and burned it with her altar candle while she prayed the rosary as though a curse had to be broken. I had cried for that and promised I would forever pay for it. Somehow I blamed myself. Had Raul gotten the letter, he would have known about my uncle’s desperate plan, and he could have saved him.
The saddest thing I had seen in my life was more intense than Michelangelo’s Pieta. The agony was alive, and the sorrow real. Raul knelt and squatted on the floor with Tito Bernard’s lifeless body on his unyielding lap and in his embrace that cradled and clasped like a cotton hammock. As still as an altar statue with a forlorn stare, speechless and immobile, crying without sobs and sniffles, his tears slowly falling to linger on his cheeks, he watched the contours of my uncle’s dead face the plastic bag failed to obscure.
I could not really put all the blame on Lola Adela. I could not blame Raul’s unrestrained affection either. I could not also blame Tito Bernard’s selfish act. The word for what my uncle had with his lover that could not speak for itself had not yet existed in our language.
A bit less than fanatical, my mother, whom I called Mamang, inherited her mother’s rosary beads and her religious habits. Her uncritical zeal and passive enthusiasm when it came to church and faith appeared like Lola Adela’s. She knew all the saints and their feast days she celebrated by fasting or not eating meat.
My mother also had my grandmother’s chic but old-fashioned style, which was all about the hair and the matching soft makeup. They both liked their hair formed into buns as round and plump as honey tangerines. As for lipstick, they preferred red but dull to minimize the pouts of their lips. Black dresses and long skirts filled their closets. Like my grandmother, my mother sauntered outside to enjoy summer mornings all dressed up and conservatively covered as if she had a church gathering to attend. Big ribboned straw hats when the sun was high and tall open-toe wedges to elevate themselves from the dry, powdery ground completed their sunny looks and outdoor attires. Everything about my mother had the traces of my grandmother.
Like mother, like daughter, indeed. I did not like their suffocating meddling when they felt their voices were important and their snobbish aloofness when they thought nobody deserved even a syllable from them. My relationship with my mother was no different to what I had with my grandmother. Their personalities and temperaments clashed with mine. Their words pierced like a thousand daggers disemboweling me. Their sarcasms slapped every inch of my face. Their smirks dismissed my existence in their midst. Just too “old rich” and too colonial Spanish for my open-minded taste and humble disposition.
I was in high school when Lola Adela died. The morning it happened, a literary magazine published my very first short story. It was about an old woman, a recluse, who survived on eating roses. They paid me five hundred pesos, and I was the happiest wannabe writer that day. My father had now a reason to invite his friends over for a dinner, I thought. I would hear him say nice things about me again. It did not happen. What I heard from him was his muted crying and eulogy to her mother-in-law, who had expressed before she died that she wanted a festive funeral. So what happened was not really a doleful mourning. People came to celebrate my grandmother’s burial like an elaborate party complete with food, drinks, lively songs, and jovial dances. They had their fill and more.
Someone asked me before what made Lola Adela different from Lola Azon. Without putting much thought, I said, “Lola Adela showed me heaven, and I found no salvation. Lola Azon showed me hell, and I found deliverance.” Pressed to say more, I asked instead, “Hadn’t Lola Azon prepared me for this hell called life?”
I did not know much about my grandfathers. They both died before I was born. I had been told that my mother’s father died due to loneliness. His youngest daughter, the favored among his three children, eloped with his farm assistant, who had no education and breeding—in his household, that meant the man did not come from a rich family or he had no name. My grandfather refused to eat even when my grandmother served him his favorite paella—a Spanish rice dish. Not long after, his lungs gave up, and his heart stopped.
Though regretful in the end, Tita Lorena just wanted to prove that she could survive and succeed without her parents’ influence and money. They had proven, indeed, that anyone could start from nothing. The last time I heard, she and her husband, Tito Eslao, made good in oil and shipping. “Money does not make me happy; my family does,” she would write in her letters to remind us how she once made a mistake. Tito Eslao, in the end, supported my grandparents financially when their businesses failed. They had accepted him before they died. Trial and error, it seemed, was a household rule in my mother’s family.
On the other hand, my grandfather, on my father’s side, fell head first from his horse while surveying the vast tract of land he just purchased. His forehead banged onto the protruding rock that was not even large enough to kill. He never woke up again. His family suspected that he must have been rapturously jubilant because he finally got the land he had always eyed to own dirt cheap from a desperate gambler. Others who were not sympathetic pointed out that it was a bad karma that hit him.
They said God had His own way of dealing with rich people. They seemed right. Their stories about my grandfathers’ deaths, to me, sounded uncanny and bizarre. Innocent but not too callow then, I strongly believed they were divine punishments for crafty, greedy people. With that in mind, I had never said to anyone that someday I would be, like my grandfathers, a smart, successful businessman.
* * * * *
I always knew I would be a writer, but I had never thought that one day I would be writing my story. When they asked how it all began, I brought them back to the night my mother called in May 2000. My final semester at Boston University just ended. Excited like how my father’s farmers were before a harvest, I had been expecting to wear a red gown and a black cap and graduate With Honors in a week or two. I had not wasted my parents’ money, after all. I could now tell my mother that my four-year stay in the United States was not an expensive long vacation. Why would I not feel elated? I could finally show my father a diploma, a degree in Comparative Literature with a minor in Creative Writing. What else would make me happier? Like those same farmers after a successful harvest, I felt I did well.
After four years of changing seasons in New England, I could now go back to where I came from, shatter my bubble, and exist in the real world among the good and the evil. I would now surrender to my fate. My destiny had been to live and survive in the midst of chaos and order. I knew that early on. They said mine was a suhi, a breech birth, where my feet could not wait to feel the air and scratch the surface while my head was still submerged and drowning. There were few who would avoid me like I was cursed or had the evil eye, and there were some, the sick ones, who would ask for my spit and use it as a cure. Many in our town thought I would end up a doctor. Because being a suhi, they believed, I was destined to set bones and clear choking throats, besides reading pulse and warming suuk, the pressure of spasm in a bloated stomach. Oh, superstition, why me?
Instead, I planned to go home and teach full time. If it would not pan out, I could work for my father in his newspaper and publishing business. I had always thought that my father started it years ago for me. He knew I had always wanted to write. I could discern his subtle support from the ironies that peppered his speech. Unlike my mother who had expressed her disapproval early on, my father had never imposed his ways and ideas on me. He had learned his lesson a long time ago when his brother, the youngest, he supported and forced to go to a business college rebelled, ran away, and led the life of a vagabond.
* * *
Tito Nick did not want education. All he ever wanted was to play cards—Black Jack, Baccarat, Poker. He was good in odds and probabilities. He would count numbers in his head. He could read faces and sense bluffs. Many years later, he became a professional and finally made it in Nevada. I did not know the real reason though why he had remained single and told his parents never to expect a grandchild from him. He would make money not babies, he said. That hurt his father who valued his sons more than his daughter because of patrilineal continuity my uncle dismissed as nothing but genetic stress. Only Biology, besides Economics, tickled his fancy in high school. He knew some Darwinian concepts he understood using street lingo.
His mother did not really care, for she believed happiness, not procreation, was the sole reason why one had to struggle in life. To her, a nice, happy single man was way better than an irresponsible, cruel married one. My grandfather blamed my grandmother for philosophically castrating my uncle. I thought Tito Nick had his own reason deeper than what he had articulated with an awkward taint of embarrassment. It could be about his last girlfriend who left him for another man or his distrust towards anyone whom he thought would only exploit others or even his penile size that must have been too humiliating to him. He had Peyronie’s Disease that reduced his girth and shortened his length.
I had nice memories with Tito Nick. He was the only one in the family who would call me Dadang (small girl), the opposite of Dodong (small boy), but only when my parents and my siblings were not around. I could not blame him; he did not want to come out a condoner of a behavior everyone believed to be deviant and shameful. All he ever wanted was for me not to suffer because of how I was born. Even though it was only in private and between us, he showed me how not to be ashamed of myself. I just could not hide my smile every time I heard him say it—Dang (good girl), the more endearing, instead of Dong (good boy). To let him know how I appreciated what he said or used in place of my boyish real name, I would get him a glass of water, scratch his itching back, or shine his leather shoes with my spit and the underside of the shirt I wore—using a rag would make them look still dull and dirtier. Those sweet names that came out of his mouth somehow validated who I really was—a small good girl inside.
One summer, he taught me how to swim without holding my cheeks, my jaws, my chin. Assuring me that I could hold onto his shoulders, he threw me into the deep river and scared me with sharks. Wanting to survive, I instantly learned how to move my arms and legs in a rhythm of a dance and use my hands and feet to push myself against the current. My strokes slow, my kicks constant but unwavering, swimming and barely floating like a dog in the verge of drowning, I reached the riverbank safe and whole. When he first brought me to the beach, he did not have to drown me anymore. I already knew there was no shark anywhere in our coastal town. I had also improved, my breaststroke and freestyle fast and reliable. I dove deep and rode the waves with him, the froths of the sea on my brow and its salt on my lips. How could I not forever etch an uncle like that in my memory?
I could never forget that one Sunday when the family got together for lunch. Tito Nick harvested the dirt clogging up his nostrils as he waited for his burps to come out. He had an unusual way of picking his nose, his thumb inside and his forefinger above outside pushing a light pressure. Later he rolled the dirt he collected into a ball the size of a pea and asked us to guess what it was. We all wanted the five-peso prize he laid flat and straight on the table. Of course, we touched and probed it, moved it around like a marble, weighed it on our fingertips, made it slide on the back of our hands, and had it bounce on the floor. I thought it was a ball of gum he burnt with his Zippo lighter. The girls went to check the kitchen and yelled their answer: a mixture of dough and charcoal. Neil gave up after saying that only God and our uncle knew what the tiny ball was. He only stopped us and gave us a five-peso bill each when we attempted to taste his dark booger that looked different from ours. It must have been from his chain-smoking that burnt the dust he breathed and turned them into black gooey ash. Nobody won, but we had fun—yes, dirty but still fun.
He also had me pull his middle finger after telling me how he punched someone drunk— I believed his story. I held his finger delicately like it really needed some gentle help, hoping all the bones would align. To ease the pain, I counted one, two, three and pulled, and he let loose the loudest frrrrrttt I thought had exploded with a discharge or had torn his pants or had cracked the chair. When he had a good, filling meal—that meant at least three plates of steamed rice and other delicious stuff piled on top plus a large bowl of soup that had some solids in it—he could easily do a nonstop foul do-re-mi. Lola Azon would look at him with disgust, and he would blame the cushion he sat on or say the stinky sound came with his new pair of jeans. She would end up laughing, hugging him, and babying her youngest son. Just for always making me smile and laugh, he had somehow completed my childhood. Tito Nick, his face that always looked like he was about to giggle, and my fun times with him had never escaped my memory.
My father had lots of nice things to say about his brother. When career choice came up in a conversation, he never stopped telling people his same story about Tito Nick and the greatest decision his brother had ever made in his life—dropping out of school. Before he heard of Bill Gates and read about his garage adventure after leaving Harvard, he had already known one successful dropout, and that was my uncle. “The lesson here is that if you want to be a beggar, be a damn good one and accept only bills,” he would say with a laugh made loud by pride.
Always on the other side, my mother did not go with the tide. I was in grade school when she first tried to veer me away from writing. She thought most writers ended up as glorified beggars who could cough up deep words on an empty stomach. “Do you know our heroes died because of what they had written?” she would ask me, and that did not scare me at all. Even a bit, she had never encouraged me or checked my writings, not even the shortest among my stories. Her put downs had made me not want to talk to her. She minced minimal words strongly punctuated by her stern hand gestures with an intent to advise, but they struck me like they were long, harsh reprimands. They lingered in my head, hardened my chest, and made me resentful. She did create the wall between us. No matter how I tried, I just could not climb over. I just could not go through.
* * * * *
Even to convey something important, my mother could not loosen up. Even in an emergency, she came off curt and brusque. Even when it involved a matter of life and death, she was still overbearing. Like that night when she called.
I just finished my dinner when the phone rang that night.
I had New York steak and pan-fried potato cubes. The creamy mushroom sauce that I meticulously made but could not match Lola Adela’s complemented well with the medium-rare meat I seared. The amaretto tiramisu I bought surprisingly tasted like Lola Azon’s. I spread them on the table, on which I arranged two sets of plates, forks and knives, and wine glasses: one for me and another for my father who was in the Philippines. That same setup had been my annual dining ritual that kept me sane from homesickness for the past three years, so it was no different on my father’s fiftieth birthday. Although the chair I reserved for him was empty, I did not feel utterly alone. His favorite Merlot completed my illusion of his presence.
I was still chewing the last chunk that had a cherry on it when I checked the caller’s ID. A lot of numbers unfamiliar to me appeared. It must be an international call, I guessed. I knew what it was about. I could feel the tingle throbbing on the crown of my head, signaling what was coming. In my mind, I still hoped the news would be about my father’s bountiful sugarcane harvest or new building project or latest profitable investment. I still prayed it would be my father calling to inform me that he just wired the money I asked, and that, surely, would not interrupt my celebratory mood.
“Hello… Hello… Mang?” I asked. It must be her, I believed. I knew the sighs she let go. The blows of the nervous breathing I heard sounded familiar. They fizzled on the phone like she pressed her lips tight and forced herself to be mute. Her ambivalent silence buzzed like she wanted to say something but she could not. “Mamang, I know it’s you.” My hands shook, and so was the phone that hit my right temple and my trembling chin. “Mang, what happened?” Grains of sweat started to form on my brow, and they were not from the wine. My shoulders lost their strength and drooped. “Is it about Papang?”
She coughed and swallowed the air that dried her spit. I could hear it. Her sniffling did not seem like she had a cold or a nasal discharge. She must have been crying before she dialed my number. “Hello?” Finally, she spoke. She sounded hoarse and stuffy, the usual sound of her voice when she cried her eyes out. My stubbornness had made her cry many times.
“Hello, Mang, breathe or drink some water.” I could hear cars and people passing by and coins clinking.
“Yes… I’m fine” she said. She did not call from the house. It sounded like she stood in the open air and near a busy street.
“Something happened to Papang? Tell me.”
“He is… he’s in the hospital. Very sick.” The resignation in her voice worried me. Her normal self who demanded a lot that she should be heard and listened was gone. As if someone told her to be strong and keep herself together, she regained her composure, and her usual demanding tone came back. “I need you to come home while he can still speak.” She hung up the phone like she did not want to spend more on that call.
I thought maybe she got disconnected, but it seemed she was done. Very typical of my mother. I called back.
I
She dialed international on the payphone, and all the brass coins jingling in her hand, the leftovers of her last one hundred-peso bill, were just enough for that brief talk. From our house to the phone booth was a struggle. She wore her gold-on-black Hermes scarf, a frayed square of silk she wrapped and tied around her head to cover her face from dust, belched smoke diffusing the smell of gasoline, and shame. She clasped her vintage tote in case bag snatchers would think she had money because of her damish coiffured hair and fair skin still without the ugly signs that it would wrinkle soon.
She had never felt so alone as if she and her mid-morning shadow were the only ones plodding down the potholed street. Like those beggars, mumbling crazies, drunks, and homeless bums hanging out in the area, she stood on the sidewalk lost in the midst of chaos, in the middle of the dirt and noise of the city I left when I was sixteen, right after high school.
She had never been so broke that she had to go to the street corner to make a phone call. She pined for the things she used to have and despaired at the thought that she would never have those things again. She lost face literally, feeling her powdered epidermis melted inch by inch and fell off like a mask of liquefied flesh—shame was physiological to her.
When my mother called me that night, around nine o’clock Eastern Standard Time, I celebrated my father’s birthday and the last day of my final year at Boston University. Even before picking up the phone, even before hearing her voice, even before knowing why she called, I felt everything was about to change.
I knew I would never be the same.
I was never a clairvoyant, nor was I ever a believer of one, but I could tell when something bad was about to happen. Fear manifested as a tingle from my head down to my spine. Sadness, in a slow progression, boiled in my belly and bubbled in my chest. Anxiety nagged more than a gangrenous wound. I could sense the foreboding like a Red Line subway train looming from the dark and from afar.
Leaning my back against the angle of the two walls that squeezed my body, I sat on the floor with my elbows resting on my bended knees. My skin thickened and pushed out the hair it concealed. My hands unleashed a tremor they could not hold still and contain. My toes, scared and cold, curled inwards, struggling to take comfort from my soles. I could foresee the ominous like a brewing flu in the New England spring.
Then I mumbled the prayer for the dead: Deus veniae largitor et humanae salutis amator, quaesumus clementiam tuam: ut nostrae congregationis fratres, propinquos, et benefactores, qui ex hoc saeculo transierunt, beata Maria semper virgine intercedente cum omnibus sanctis tuis, ad perpetuae beatitudinis consortium pervenire concedas.
When I was in that state of consciousness, my thoughts ran wild, asking if everyone was okay, wondering who it would be this time, deciphering signs and symbols that deprived and disguised meanings, trying to make sense of what I saw in my head that played frame by frame like a strip of negative film raised towards a glare of light to reveal traces of ghostly images. Then my mind suddenly went blank, denying, dismissing, and refusing to believe before yielding to the unavoidable and eventual. I noticed this torment would come when I was at my happiest. It seemed extreme joy preceded tragedy. Always.
* * *
It had been that way since I was a child in a small, idyllic town of giant fire trees during the day and at night, of clouding fireflies. It began when I dreamed of the flaming Laga—the angry goddess of fire and destruction in our folk legends—days before my paternal grandmother, who doted on me like I was hers to rear and take care, died from an undiagnosed cancer in the abdominal area. A great deal of talk, mostly blaming and doubting, ensued when the news about her demise broke. A few questioned her doctor’s expertise, although it was she who avoided seeing him. She did not want to preoccupy herself with what she had: what was rotting inside her body, where to go for the cure, how it all began, why her urine slightly darker than tea smelled, when to finally give in. She did not want also to worry everyone.
That year when Sumilhig—another goddess but of death—was said to have taken my grandmother to the summit of Mount Tagdalit, the resting place of the souls, our town, Caraga, the place where I was born and where my brother and my sisters also grew up, where all my grandparents started and where my father and my mother met, the oldest in the South, the one that got its name from Karag (spirit), unveiled its verdant season so early. The southwest wind, the big Pacific waves, and the monsoon rain also came too soon. The wettest month of habagat (rainy season) unexpectedly ended by July. Then the foliage spread and thrived. The deep canals surrounding the orchards and the shallow ditches below the hilly mounds were swampy and teeming with weeds, noises, and life. The dewy trees along the margins of the sodden roads hosted vines, mosses, and exuberant bugs. The bushes and the long bladed grasses growing here and there bent and swayed, docile to inaudible slow rhythms and phantom frenzied beats. Anywhere the sun drenched with silvery yellows and brightened with dancing glints of gold was supple and abundantly green, but inside my grandmother’s big stone house, Lola Azon’s bahay na bato—its Capiz oyster-paneled windows shut and plaid linen curtains untied—every corner, every nook, every spot appeared dim and gray.
“When death comes knocking, don’t open the door. Don’t welcome him. Avoid meeting him eye to eye. Ignore him. Boredom, if not shame, will make him go away,” Lola Azon was heard to have said. Nobody really understood what she meant. Even the elders who were masters of ancient astrology and folklore could not interpret. Why death was male and human to her sounded interesting to me. It was my first lesson in personification—prosopopeia.
Some who were quick to judge pointed their fingers at Tita Cynthia, my father’s only sister, whom they thought had abandoned my sick grandmother. As if in a chorus of a Greek tragedy, complete with wailing, grief, chastisement, and disgust, they all said, “It is the fate of a strong daughter to take care of her weak mother.”
My aunt did not really leave my grandmother just like that. She had her mother’s blessing when she left. It was she who encouraged her daughter to find her place in the police force. She had always pushed Tita Cynthia to break the barriers our society, our culture, the cavemen—my grandmother’s word she enunciated with anger— had imposed on women. I heard Lola Azon express how she wanted my aunt to move on and only come home in a uniform even her brothers would salute.
I was there when my aunt packed her things. I watched her through the hole drilled by the termites the typhoon that year drove indoors. She folded her clothes in between sobs and filled her bag with a heavy set of hands. Both of my eyes I alternately used wet and filled the entire hole until I could no longer see her. I blew the droplet the size of a mongo bean to push it out of the hole, but it would not move or pop. I left to play with my friends and had never seen my aunt again until she came back to bury her mother. Although too late, she did come home a commissioned officer in badged crisp cerulean blue.
To honor her mother, Tita Cynthia fired all the bullets in her fully-loaded Glock pistol. She aimed her shots towards the sky on a safe angle. The elders interpreted it as my aunt’s blasting statement against God. It could not be true because the anting-anting (amulet) she always brought with her for safety and protection was the thick medallion the size of a fist bearing the image of Sagrado Corazon (Sacred Heart) she put under her bra. It saved her once when a criminal she pursued shot her in the chest and the bullet bounced; how could she not believe in the Divine when she only got a bruise in that incident? Her shooting of the gun seemed to me was her loud warning against those close and narrow-minded people in our town: she might be a woman but her gun had no sex organ.
Others blamed witchcraft after they found a voodoo doll under Lola Azon’s bed while cleaning. A bunch of colored ball head pins pierced its belly. “No wonder it was her stomach, her guts, her womb, the cradle of life, that were in pain,” said the old medicine man, whose left eye was cloudy gray from a cataract, as he checked the doll front and back and counted the pins. “These red ones are the most painful, bloody painful, and these black ones, the teeth of the devil, the daggers of the fallen angel, are the deadly.” He did not say what those green, yellow, and orange tiny balls attached onto the pins were.
Ompo Tacio, known for his herbs that could abort an unwanted baby and poison someone’s hated enemy, was the same old man who told me and my friends that he once visited Heaven and met God, who immediately sent him back to Earth because St. Peter, the gatekeeper who held the key, miscalculated his age. Although entertaining and almost real because of how he seriously delivered his lines, the absurd stories he concocted could not even convince our easy, impressionable minds. Nevertheless, I listened to Ompo Tacio like he was a teacher and jotted down what he told us like I was his student. He was a true master of storytelling.
“How could someone hurt her?” asked his doe-eyed wife who read palms and interpreted dreams for a peso. “This town just lost a spirit mother.” Her voice, hoarse from smoking tobacco through a coned banana leaf, cracked and ululated into a chant. She believed Lola Azon was the living embodiment of Inang Lawa, the lake spirit in our mythology who ripped her chest open with her bare hands, pulled her heart out, and threw it into the sky to become the moon, the mother of the stars. My grandmother was the only one in our town who had this name, Corazon—the Spanish word for heart. The old seer thought of the name as the sign since birth why my grandmother was no ordinary woman.
Ompo Kalaw, a close friend of my grandmother, was one of the characters who had me thankful that I grew up in a town where the magic and the real coexisted. Her every reading of my dream about myself farting or defecating always came out to be true. Utot (fart) and tae (feces) in her deep vocabulary portended good luck in anything that involved money and winning. Both meant I should gamble what my father gave and elbow my way through the sweating crowd to enter the jampacked sabungan—a roofed, open arena with a centrally elevated cockpit the size of the boxing ring—that allowed kids who had bills to waggle in front of adult bettors. She would prod me to bet on sabong, the bladed cockfight, and to pick, shout, and repeat sa pula, the **** on the red side, like I was in a bazaar hawking. When the goddess Duggom, the mythical one who lorded over the night, blessed me with a stinky, dirty dream, it also meant Ompo Kalaw's balato (her share) she asked forthright after every win. I had to give it to her readily to avoid malas (bad luck) befalling me. The old seer had endeared herself to us: to me because I won lots of times and to my grandmother who dreamed a lot.
Lola Azon had always been good even to strangers. She fed and invited them to stay when they had nowhere to go. She had extra rooms built adjacent to her big stone house just for them. “Strangers can be angels, you know,” she would say to anyone who listened to her story, how, during the war, a masked stranger riding a horse with no gun or bladed weapon but his latigo del diablo—a long braided whip made of leather, spiked with crocodile teeth, and understood as the tail of the devil—saved her mother from the drunk Japanese who raped women on the spot and slashed them to death with their katanas.
Another incident, during a long drought in the fifties, a blind stranger found and dug out a giant yam that saved my grandmother’s family from hunger. He did not even barter it for something or sell it to them. He knocked on their door, handed the yam, and left without saying who he was. Nobody knew him, and he had never showed up again. He must be an angel, they thought. I could understand why Lola Azon had a soft heart for strangers.
A sort of lore, when a wounded robber showed up one night and stayed at Lola Azon’s place to rest and recuperate, the next day he returned all the monies, jewelries, and valuables he took from his victims. Her kindness so moved him that he promised her he would be a changed man from then on. He had become the village seer’s assistant, whom people paid to find lost persons, animals, and things. If my grandmother was nice to those strange faces, how much more to people she knew and befriended?
Her grateful friends said she was "ina ng laging saklolo," a mother of perpetual help like the Holy Virgin. They went to see her when they had problems, and she always helped. They sought her advices. They valued her opinions. The young ones who had held her right hand to take it onto their foreheads out of respect could never forget Ompong Ina, their Old Mother who had always welcomed them to play in her orchard and allowed them to climb the trees when the guavas yellowed and the jackfruits bursted and sweetened the air.
Their fictive story about Lola Azon’s death and witchcraft, my earliest encounter with magical realism, fascinated my ears and gave me outlandish ideas to write in the future, but I knew that doll that caused the stir. I made it for her using my old Mickey Mouse shirt and the black buttons from the torn skirt her servant used as rag for dusting. I stuffed it with pillow cotton as soft as a newborn’s cheek. It puffed and bulked the rag doll that came out overfilled and paunchy. Gingerbread man popped up in my head when I drew the pattern on the old newspaper. I used the stitching I learned from her when she hand-hemmed her favorite Sunday dress. My blind stitch looked neat and effortless. She had noticed it. At five, my creative streak had already surfaced, and my grandmother had encouraged it. A creative person herself who loved knitting and embroidery, she actually asked me to make her a pincushion.
There was never a scary witch or a voodoo man but a wild superstition. It could be her colon or her uterus. Maybe a wound in her abdomen or an infection killed her. It could even be her worst nightmare—locally known as bangungot—that suffocated her lungs, prevented her to breathe, and choked her to death while asleep.
Yes, Lola Azon had lost weight and had become weaker each day, but nobody expected her to die so soon. She could still do some cooking, baking, and light chores. Adamant that she could still do the things that had become her routine, she tended her garden, fed and groomed her long-time pet—a chocolate Labrador named Fudge—and read the thick Spanish novels she had collected over the years. She did not spend her last days lying down all day, being gloomy, or feeling sorry for herself. She knew she was sick, but she forced herself to appear strong and sound alive. Even the stomach pain that felt like a pinch in her intestine had not really bothered her. “I’m fine,” she told my father, “and it’s still bearable.” She promised to tell him if it was her time to give up and rest, but she never did.
The day before she died, I won a poetry recitation contest. I did Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”, but I so wanted Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain! My Captain!” for its drama as melancholic as the hit novella on the radio about two lovers, one of whom was doomed to die and the other destined to mourn. I was a sucker for that kind of story.
On the stage, the nuns showered me with praises, aside from a medal and a handful of fruit candies. I beat the older contestants, and I was about eight, still in second grade. I must have won because there was God in my poem, and the Catholic nuns who ran the school judged the contest. My eyes beamed with pride, and my smile intimated nothing but joy. Medals were important to me. Even small achievements made my father, whom I called Papang, nod and say nice words. His patting of my shoulder and tousling of my hair made me very happy. I felt I was his son and he was my father.
Not minding her illness, Lola Azon sent me a congratulatory message she wrote longhand on a cut piece of rice paper together with the boxed sweets she specially made. It read: “Yuri, you’ll be reading your own poems someday. You’ll be telling them your stories. Have some strawberry cupcakes.” The jellied cupcakes were sweet, but her encouraging optimism, which I understood as her last wish for me, was sweeter. The next day at three, when my grandmother would have sat by the wooden rail of the veranda sipping coffee or tea, basking in the mid-afternoon sun, and watching her garden’s July blossoms, she peacefully passed away in her usual afternoon nap. She was still warm and smiling when her servant found her dead. They said either my grandfather or her guardian angel fetched her. Thus the smile. I did not really believe that. Lola Azon had said this to me: “Angels are real people who help.”
My other grandmother, a very religious woman, died in the church her rich family built for the Jesuits. She suddenly fell, face down to the marble floor, while kneeling and making the sign of the cross. They said it was the best way to die because it happened on a Sunday afternoon during Mass. “Jesus breathed his last at three o’clock,” said the town priest.
I was in the church that slow afternoon, but I did not see it happen. So bored and sleepy, I walked around, checking the pews and lifting the saints for lost coins, a weekly habit I had had until the priest prohibited the selling of live swallows the sellers dyed avocado green, banana yellow, and bellfruit red to look like parakeets. Yes, we associated colors to fruits. All day every Sunday outside the church, farmers showed up with wooden cages full of colorful birds that were originally white, brown, and grey. Children would buy and take them home as pets. A promise to St. Francis of Assisi, I would look for coins inside the church during Mass, so I could buy a bird sold for a quarter and set it free afterwards. When I heard a clunk, I thought someone dropped and lost a coin, a big coin enough to buy four birds. I ran towards where the metallic sound was. It was my grandmother’s huge gold medallion earring that first hit the marble floor.
Lola Adela must have died from exhaustion. Prolonged praying and repetitive kneeling caused her heart attack. She prayed too much even when she was in the bathroom. It took her a couple of hours when she had a bath. I could hear her mumbled Hail Mary’s undisturbed by the noises, drips, and flushes. Her murmurs were holy. I wondered what sin she had done that asked for a great atonement. Not an exaggeration, her rosary beads made of pearls had never left her fingers. Thick and coarse, the calluses on her fingertips glowed pink as if they wanted to be noticed. Her friends teasingly said they were from making and counting too much money. I thought so too; Lola Adela owned a huge store that overpriced everything.
In private, many had suspected that the death of Tito Bernard, my mother’s only brother, had something to do with my grandmother’s fervid penance even the town priest, who had been rumored to have fathered a stillborn child, could not rival. On his twentieth birthday, my uncle drank paint thinner and suffocated himself with a plastic grocery bag. He put it over his head and tied so tight around his neck that he asphyxiated. Lola Adela just could not easily forgive herself. She had hoped her endless praying could cleanse her guilt and her son’s transgressions. Tito Bernard dated someone his mother vehemently opposed as if the world would end had he continued seeing him.
I knew how much my uncle loved Raul, a disinherited son of a rich family, who sold fish in the wet market for a living. Sitting with him on the bench under the mango tree that afternoon, my legs resting on his lap, I asked Tito Bernard about the tall, handsome man who kissed him on his cheek the previous day— what I saw did not really shock me; well, Belle falling for the Beast did not shock me too. Waiting for his answer, I got curious why he and the man, whose big arms made my uncle’s neck and shoulders look lean and fragile, hugged and whispered secrets in each other’s ear behind the tree.
I had never doubted my uncle. There was never an instance in which he did not tell me the truth. He used to babysit me at his beauty parlor all afternoon and tell unbelievable stories that had taught me early to keep on hoping. He had never lied to me; he told me the truth about Santa, my father. He had never hidden even the smallest of truths from me; he exposed the lie of “happily ever after.” He was honest, too honest—he opened my eyes to the truth that I was not a girl and to the lie that I could never be one. That afternoon too, he tried to tell me who I really was and what I should not be.
“He’s a friend, a very good friend who makes me happy,” he said, letting loose a giggly smile with abashed lips.
“I wish to have a good friend like him too.” Seven years old then, I thought it was really hard to find one.
“Why?”
“I also want to be happy like you.”
“That’s very nice. It’s nice to know what you want. But are you happy now?”
“I am, but I want to be very happy like when you giggle in front of him.”
“Listen.” He held my chin like he felt sorry for me.
“I’m listening, Tito Bernard.” I scratched the itch on my leg, while he thought of appropriate words to use.
“Someday you’ll find someone who’ll wet your cheeks with his moist lips. Don’t be scared. Ask him to whisper you something. Ears are also for tongues. Let him hear your giggles. Let him touch your smile. Let your eyes speak. Ask him to breathe on your neck and run his hand around your nape. Warmth is what you feel when held even in the coldest morning or in the middle of the chill and rain. Go with him into the dark. Wilt in his embrace. Never regret about the night you spend in his arms. Love in our forbidden hearts is crazy like that. Sometimes free, oftentimes bound. You don’t need to fear it. What separate the sunrise from the sunset are moments not hours. Be with him. Just feel what he feels. Then enjoy.”
So dramatic. It almost made me cry. I did not know he could say those beautiful words; he cut hair and applied makeup for a living. Although he confused me, what he said rang in my ears like a premonition of what I should expect in the future. He must have known me already even at my very young age. Maybe he had observed how my stubborn pinkies would not curl with the rest, I thought.
It suddenly rained. He carried me on his back towards Lola Adela’s house where my mother was waiting and ready to go home. That was the last time my uncle and I had a chat about happiness, about giggling, about life.
The night before Tito Bernard died, he asked me to give his letter to Raul. I told Lola Adela about it. She took the letter from me and burned it with her altar candle while she prayed the rosary as though a curse had to be broken. I had cried for that and promised I would forever pay for it. Somehow I blamed myself. Had Raul gotten the letter, he would have known about my uncle’s desperate plan, and he could have saved him.
The saddest thing I had seen in my life was more intense than Michelangelo’s Pieta. The agony was alive, and the sorrow real. Raul knelt and squatted on the floor with Tito Bernard’s lifeless body on his unyielding lap and in his embrace that cradled and clasped like a cotton hammock. As still as an altar statue with a forlorn stare, speechless and immobile, crying without sobs and sniffles, his tears slowly falling to linger on his cheeks, he watched the contours of my uncle’s dead face the plastic bag failed to obscure.
I could not really put all the blame on Lola Adela. I could not blame Raul’s unrestrained affection either. I could not also blame Tito Bernard’s selfish act. The word for what my uncle had with his lover that could not speak for itself had not yet existed in our language.
A bit less than fanatical, my mother, whom I called Mamang, inherited her mother’s rosary beads and her religious habits. Her uncritical zeal and passive enthusiasm when it came to church and faith appeared like Lola Adela’s. She knew all the saints and their feast days she celebrated by fasting or not eating meat.
My mother also had my grandmother’s chic but old-fashioned style, which was all about the hair and the matching soft makeup. They both liked their hair formed into buns as round and plump as honey tangerines. As for lipstick, they preferred red but dull to minimize the pouts of their lips. Black dresses and long skirts filled their closets. Like my grandmother, my mother sauntered outside to enjoy summer mornings all dressed up and conservatively covered as if she had a church gathering to attend. Big ribboned straw hats when the sun was high and tall open-toe wedges to elevate themselves from the dry, powdery ground completed their sunny looks and outdoor attires. Everything about my mother had the traces of my grandmother.
Like mother, like daughter, indeed. I did not like their suffocating meddling when they felt their voices were important and their snobbish aloofness when they thought nobody deserved even a syllable from them. My relationship with my mother was no different to what I had with my grandmother. Their personalities and temperaments clashed with mine. Their words pierced like a thousand daggers disemboweling me. Their sarcasms slapped every inch of my face. Their smirks dismissed my existence in their midst. Just too “old rich” and too colonial Spanish for my open-minded taste and humble disposition.
I was in high school when Lola Adela died. The morning it happened, a literary magazine published my very first short story. It was about an old woman, a recluse, who survived on eating roses. They paid me five hundred pesos, and I was the happiest wannabe writer that day. My father had now a reason to invite his friends over for a dinner, I thought. I would hear him say nice things about me again. It did not happen. What I heard from him was his muted crying and eulogy to her mother-in-law, who had expressed before she died that she wanted a festive funeral. So what happened was not really a doleful mourning. People came to celebrate my grandmother’s burial like an elaborate party complete with food, drinks, lively songs, and jovial dances. They had their fill and more.
Someone asked me before what made Lola Adela different from Lola Azon. Without putting much thought, I said, “Lola Adela showed me heaven, and I found no salvation. Lola Azon showed me hell, and I found deliverance.” Pressed to say more, I asked instead, “Hadn’t Lola Azon prepared me for this hell called life?”
I did not know much about my grandfathers. They both died before I was born. I had been told that my mother’s father died due to loneliness. His youngest daughter, the favored among his three children, eloped with his farm assistant, who had no education and breeding—in his household, that meant the man did not come from a rich family or he had no name. My grandfather refused to eat even when my grandmother served him his favorite paella—a Spanish rice dish. Not long after, his lungs gave up, and his heart stopped.
Though regretful in the end, Tita Lorena just wanted to prove that she could survive and succeed without her parents’ influence and money. They had proven, indeed, that anyone could start from nothing. The last time I heard, she and her husband, Tito Eslao, made good in oil and shipping. “Money does not make me happy; my family does,” she would write in her letters to remind us how she once made a mistake. Tito Eslao, in the end, supported my grandparents financially when their businesses failed. They had accepted him before they died. Trial and error, it seemed, was a household rule in my mother’s family.
On the other hand, my grandfather, on my father’s side, fell head first from his horse while surveying the vast tract of land he just purchased. His forehead banged onto the protruding rock that was not even large enough to kill. He never woke up again. His family suspected that he must have been rapturously jubilant because he finally got the land he had always eyed to own dirt cheap from a desperate gambler. Others who were not sympathetic pointed out that it was a bad karma that hit him.
They said God had His own way of dealing with rich people. They seemed right. Their stories about my grandfathers’ deaths, to me, sounded uncanny and bizarre. Innocent but not too callow then, I strongly believed they were divine punishments for crafty, greedy people. With that in mind, I had never said to anyone that someday I would be, like my grandfathers, a smart, successful businessman.
* * * * *
I always knew I would be a writer, but I had never thought that one day I would be writing my story. When they asked how it all began, I brought them back to the night my mother called in May 2000. My final semester at Boston University just ended. Excited like how my father’s farmers were before a harvest, I had been expecting to wear a red gown and a black cap and graduate With Honors in a week or two. I had not wasted my parents’ money, after all. I could now tell my mother that my four-year stay in the United States was not an expensive long vacation. Why would I not feel elated? I could finally show my father a diploma, a degree in Comparative Literature with a minor in Creative Writing. What else would make me happier? Like those same farmers after a successful harvest, I felt I did well.
After four years of changing seasons in New England, I could now go back to where I came from, shatter my bubble, and exist in the real world among the good and the evil. I would now surrender to my fate. My destiny had been to live and survive in the midst of chaos and order. I knew that early on. They said mine was a suhi, a breech birth, where my feet could not wait to feel the air and scratch the surface while my head was still submerged and drowning. There were few who would avoid me like I was cursed or had the evil eye, and there were some, the sick ones, who would ask for my spit and use it as a cure. Many in our town thought I would end up a doctor. Because being a suhi, they believed, I was destined to set bones and clear choking throats, besides reading pulse and warming suuk, the pressure of spasm in a bloated stomach. Oh, superstition, why me?
Instead, I planned to go home and teach full time. If it would not pan out, I could work for my father in his newspaper and publishing business. I had always thought that my father started it years ago for me. He knew I had always wanted to write. I could discern his subtle support from the ironies that peppered his speech. Unlike my mother who had expressed her disapproval early on, my father had never imposed his ways and ideas on me. He had learned his lesson a long time ago when his brother, the youngest, he supported and forced to go to a business college rebelled, ran away, and led the life of a vagabond.
* * *
Tito Nick did not want education. All he ever wanted was to play cards—Black Jack, Baccarat, Poker. He was good in odds and probabilities. He would count numbers in his head. He could read faces and sense bluffs. Many years later, he became a professional and finally made it in Nevada. I did not know the real reason though why he had remained single and told his parents never to expect a grandchild from him. He would make money not babies, he said. That hurt his father who valued his sons more than his daughter because of patrilineal continuity my uncle dismissed as nothing but genetic stress. Only Biology, besides Economics, tickled his fancy in high school. He knew some Darwinian concepts he understood using street lingo.
His mother did not really care, for she believed happiness, not procreation, was the sole reason why one had to struggle in life. To her, a nice, happy single man was way better than an irresponsible, cruel married one. My grandfather blamed my grandmother for philosophically castrating my uncle. I thought Tito Nick had his own reason deeper than what he had articulated with an awkward taint of embarrassment. It could be about his last girlfriend who left him for another man or his distrust towards anyone whom he thought would only exploit others or even his penile size that must have been too humiliating to him. He had Peyronie’s Disease that reduced his girth and shortened his length.
I had nice memories with Tito Nick. He was the only one in the family who would call me Dadang (small girl), the opposite of Dodong (small boy), but only when my parents and my siblings were not around. I could not blame him; he did not want to come out a condoner of a behavior everyone believed to be deviant and shameful. All he ever wanted was for me not to suffer because of how I was born. Even though it was only in private and between us, he showed me how not to be ashamed of myself. I just could not hide my smile every time I heard him say it—Dang (good girl), the more endearing, instead of Dong (good boy). To let him know how I appreciated what he said or used in place of my boyish real name, I would get him a glass of water, scratch his itching back, or shine his leather shoes with my spit and the underside of the shirt I wore—using a rag would make them look still dull and dirtier. Those sweet names that came out of his mouth somehow validated who I really was—a small good girl inside.
One summer, he taught me how to swim without holding my cheeks, my jaws, my chin. Assuring me that I could hold onto his shoulders, he threw me into the deep river and scared me with sharks. Wanting to survive, I instantly learned how to move my arms and legs in a rhythm of a dance and use my hands and feet to push myself against the current. My strokes slow, my kicks constant but unwavering, swimming and barely floating like a dog in the verge of drowning, I reached the riverbank safe and whole. When he first brought me to the beach, he did not have to drown me anymore. I already knew there was no shark anywhere in our coastal town. I had also improved, my breaststroke and freestyle fast and reliable. I dove deep and rode the waves with him, the froths of the sea on my brow and its salt on my lips. How could I not forever etch an uncle like that in my memory?
I could never forget that one Sunday when the family got together for lunch. Tito Nick harvested the dirt clogging up his nostrils as he waited for his burps to come out. He had an unusual way of picking his nose, his thumb inside and his forefinger above outside pushing a light pressure. Later he rolled the dirt he collected into a ball the size of a pea and asked us to guess what it was. We all wanted the five-peso prize he laid flat and straight on the table. Of course, we touched and probed it, moved it around like a marble, weighed it on our fingertips, made it slide on the back of our hands, and had it bounce on the floor. I thought it was a ball of gum he burnt with his Zippo lighter. The girls went to check the kitchen and yelled their answer: a mixture of dough and charcoal. Neil gave up after saying that only God and our uncle knew what the tiny ball was. He only stopped us and gave us a five-peso bill each when we attempted to taste his dark booger that looked different from ours. It must have been from his chain-smoking that burnt the dust he breathed and turned them into black gooey ash. Nobody won, but we had fun—yes, dirty but still fun.
He also had me pull his middle finger after telling me how he punched someone drunk— I believed his story. I held his finger delicately like it really needed some gentle help, hoping all the bones would align. To ease the pain, I counted one, two, three and pulled, and he let loose the loudest frrrrrttt I thought had exploded with a discharge or had torn his pants or had cracked the chair. When he had a good, filling meal—that meant at least three plates of steamed rice and other delicious stuff piled on top plus a large bowl of soup that had some solids in it—he could easily do a nonstop foul do-re-mi. Lola Azon would look at him with disgust, and he would blame the cushion he sat on or say the stinky sound came with his new pair of jeans. She would end up laughing, hugging him, and babying her youngest son. Just for always making me smile and laugh, he had somehow completed my childhood. Tito Nick, his face that always looked like he was about to giggle, and my fun times with him had never escaped my memory.
My father had lots of nice things to say about his brother. When career choice came up in a conversation, he never stopped telling people his same story about Tito Nick and the greatest decision his brother had ever made in his life—dropping out of school. Before he heard of Bill Gates and read about his garage adventure after leaving Harvard, he had already known one successful dropout, and that was my uncle. “The lesson here is that if you want to be a beggar, be a damn good one and accept only bills,” he would say with a laugh made loud by pride.
Always on the other side, my mother did not go with the tide. I was in grade school when she first tried to veer me away from writing. She thought most writers ended up as glorified beggars who could cough up deep words on an empty stomach. “Do you know our heroes died because of what they had written?” she would ask me, and that did not scare me at all. Even a bit, she had never encouraged me or checked my writings, not even the shortest among my stories. Her put downs had made me not want to talk to her. She minced minimal words strongly punctuated by her stern hand gestures with an intent to advise, but they struck me like they were long, harsh reprimands. They lingered in my head, hardened my chest, and made me resentful. She did create the wall between us. No matter how I tried, I just could not climb over. I just could not go through.
* * * * *
Even to convey something important, my mother could not loosen up. Even in an emergency, she came off curt and brusque. Even when it involved a matter of life and death, she was still overbearing. Like that night when she called.
I just finished my dinner when the phone rang that night.
I had New York steak and pan-fried potato cubes. The creamy mushroom sauce that I meticulously made but could not match Lola Adela’s complemented well with the medium-rare meat I seared. The amaretto tiramisu I bought surprisingly tasted like Lola Azon’s. I spread them on the table, on which I arranged two sets of plates, forks and knives, and wine glasses: one for me and another for my father who was in the Philippines. That same setup had been my annual dining ritual that kept me sane from homesickness for the past three years, so it was no different on my father’s fiftieth birthday. Although the chair I reserved for him was empty, I did not feel utterly alone. His favorite Merlot completed my illusion of his presence.
I was still chewing the last chunk that had a cherry on it when I checked the caller’s ID. A lot of numbers unfamiliar to me appeared. It must be an international call, I guessed. I knew what it was about. I could feel the tingle throbbing on the crown of my head, signaling what was coming. In my mind, I still hoped the news would be about my father’s bountiful sugarcane harvest or new building project or latest profitable investment. I still prayed it would be my father calling to inform me that he just wired the money I asked, and that, surely, would not interrupt my celebratory mood.
“Hello… Hello… Mang?” I asked. It must be her, I believed. I knew the sighs she let go. The blows of the nervous breathing I heard sounded familiar. They fizzled on the phone like she pressed her lips tight and forced herself to be mute. Her ambivalent silence buzzed like she wanted to say something but she could not. “Mamang, I know it’s you.” My hands shook, and so was the phone that hit my right temple and my trembling chin. “Mang, what happened?” Grains of sweat started to form on my brow, and they were not from the wine. My shoulders lost their strength and drooped. “Is it about Papang?”
She coughed and swallowed the air that dried her spit. I could hear it. Her sniffling did not seem like she had a cold or a nasal discharge. She must have been crying before she dialed my number. “Hello?” Finally, she spoke. She sounded hoarse and stuffy, the usual sound of her voice when she cried her eyes out. My stubbornness had made her cry many times.
“Hello, Mang, breathe or drink some water.” I could hear cars and people passing by and coins clinking.
“Yes… I’m fine” she said. She did not call from the house. It sounded like she stood in the open air and near a busy street.
“Something happened to Papang? Tell me.”
“He is… he’s in the hospital. Very sick.” The resignation in her voice worried me. Her normal self who demanded a lot that she should be heard and listened was gone. As if someone told her to be strong and keep herself together, she regained her composure, and her usual demanding tone came back. “I need you to come home while he can still speak.” She hung up the phone like she did not want to spend more on that call.
I thought maybe she got disconnected, but it seemed she was done. Very typical of my mother. I called back.