Afterlife

 

Even in death, my purple basil still remains a thing of beauty. I'm saying this as my herbs are bidding goodbye to me, one after another. 

First, it was the rosemary that said its farewell last week. I barely heard the plant's lament as her leaves, which already looked scraggly and bedraggled, turned yellowish, browned and gradually died. I was doing a difficult story to even mourn. How could I atone for months and years of neglect? 

I've been ruthlessly pruning it for months because its leaves had been growing untrammelled in the wrong side of the pot. I even buried parts of its stem in soil, hoping to generate a new plant in the process. I cut its stems and placed the leaves in the jar of salt. [Ja and Sean did not complain, though. Our salt has become very tasty]. 

I never believed that my rosemary would die in my hands because it has been with me for years. If I ever sensed a plant whimper, I merely ignored it and continued replanting the aloe vera and the snake plants into new pots. So the last pot of rosemary died alone. I used to have so many pots of them the previous years but now they're all gone. 

So I went to the store thinking I could easily replace the plant. But when I asked how much their newly planted rosemary cost, the store told me it was P300 per small pot. Well, I never thought it sells that much. My rosemary, by its sheer size alone, could have sold for more than P1,000!

The last purple basil to die was growing in a pot where I did not want it to grow.  It was a seedling that sprung from a mother plant, the one I bought from a gay entrepreneur selling herbs outside her salon at the height of Covid lockdown. 

I could still feel the breeze blowing my face that day I rode that trisikad along the city's deserted downtown streets bringing the plants with me. That gay seller was not your ordinary beautician.  She had so many other plants that caught my eye, though I only stuck with the purple basil and the Italian oregano, which had smaller leaves than the oregano I already had at home. Both mother plants died long ago.

Sean and Ja were always wary when I brought home some strange plants because they knew these plants would find their way to my dishes which they were required to eat. But these plants had graced our table for a long time now, they had been with me in my countless experiments and reading adventures; and Sean and Ja had somehow adjusted to them. [Actually, not really].

So, as I was saying, the last purple basil, descendant of that mother plant that I bought at the salon, died ahead of the rosemary. But I did not mind its dying mainly because it had been flowering profusely, which meant, its life was already over and it would soon be preparing to die. I also wanted to use the pot where it was growing, my ulterior motive; and besides, I spotted a younger purple basil growing in another pot, so I thought I won't miss it after all.

I tore its roots from the rectangular pot where it tenaciously clung for years. It was so hard tearing it. It took all my strength to uproot it from the soil. When, I finally succeeded, I placed the naked plant in an empty pot and was awestruck by its grace and beauty.  

This must be what sadness--or despair--does to you. 

Carried Away

Sometime in 1992, when I made a total mess of myself, I half-expected, even fervently wished, my family would bail me out from a monster called Fax Elorde. Of course, you could never expect such a thing so, I suffered the agony in silence. Mirisi. I did not say that to myself, though. I was still too young to understand I was in a real big trouble for life. I put up a brave face, invented stories, pretended everything was all right although Fax Elorde was a total asshole, so stuffy, so full of himself, so full of hot air. It’s only much, much later when his son would describe him as “just a practical guy, totally devoid of talent” that I enjoyed a hearty laugh; but at that time, I particularly wished I had a rich Uncle to kick him out the door, turn him upside down, cover his whole body with catshit, tell him to go to hell and get lost forever. I toiled from eight o’clock until midnight and walked the deserted street home, tense, anxious, worried and always went to bed totally exhausted.

Complications

If you’d ask, why have I been switching jobs that fast in the past months, perhaps, Flannery O’Connor could explain it better to you than I do. Just look for Enoch Emery, when his blood was conspiring something, and he got to do what he got to do. I was thinking about this, walking past Kapitan Tomas Monteverde elementary school, thinking, I only desire a simple life, why do things easily get so entangled? When a ball jumped out of the fence and for a while, looked like it will bounce on the roof of some running jeepney. Luckily, it didn’t. Instead, it bounced back the side of the road and got caught by the passersby before me. The guy played with the ball for a while and almost reverently put the ball down on the pavement and left. Just as I moved to pick it up so that I can throw it back to the fenced campus where it came from, another onlooker got it ahead of me and did just what I had in mind.
I was thinking about Flannery O’Connor all the while. I was thinking why would Flannery O’Connor choose a character like Hazel Motes to cross the path of another character like Enoch, to cross the path of the blind man, the fake, and later turn to be the real blind man himself?
Why would Hazel Motes stand there as if struck as he watched the peeler when what interested him were the scars on the face of the blind man and the blind man himself? Why would Sheilfa suddenly leave the entire bunch of books—containing Flannery O’Connor and Flannery O’Connor—in the lobby of the Bagobo hotel and call me days later to ask if I already got it? Is Sheilfa some kind of a Hazel Motes?