Justice

Is justice possible on this earth? Or is it merely an idea, one of the countless fictions invented by the human mind? Yet, if there is no justice in this world, if justice is merely fiction, what’s the use of the idea of justice after all? “All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice,” so, says the magistrate in JM Coetzee’s, “Waiting for the Barbarians.”
We have witnessed numerous political movements and political upheavals in our lifetime, the rise and fall of dictators, the strikes, the protest marches and the euphoric people’s uprisings; and then, we watch the old oppressors come back to rule again. But as we train our eyes toward these panoramic events sweeping humanity, we oftentimes forget that the most savage, the most barbaric, the most damaging, the most debilitating and the most monstrous kind of oppression is happening right within our private lives; right inside our bedroom. And we can't even talk about it!

Dreaming

Last night, I dreamt of Fr. Pops. He was still alive. We were all waiting for him in a veranda but he was whisked away by a group of men even before he could reach us. He was carried off on a boat. After a few minutes, a car full of Catholic bishops, still wearing their holy robes, stopped by where we gathered, observing us. We were still longing to talk to Fr. Pops. I was wondering whether the kind of priest that Fr. Pops was, was the same as the kind of bishops the bishops were. I sensed in the dream they were not. When I awoke, I realized that Fr. Pops was dead. He was killed by a gunman on October 17, 2011, inside his garage in the Mother of Perpetual Help church in Arakan.

One day on Talicud Island

Tunnels

Reeling from shock, fatigue (at least, bearable now as the body begins to heal) and severe, almost unbearable "D" from the trip to Diat Palo, a mining community in Pantukan, Compostela Valley, just a ravine across from where the Diat Uno landslide occurred four days after the New Year.
I wish you knew the feeling. After the long trip on board a dumptruck used to carry ores from the mines, followed by an hour’s climb on a steep miner’s trail up an almost 90-degree cliff; and another ride on a Saddam (a reconditioned army truck from Iraq being used in Mindanao hinterlands), where I kept staring at the giant ferns above us to pull the heavy truck up the road so that we will not fall into the ravines bluish in their depths far, far down below. Seeing the desperation of people soaking their hands in mercury poison, cheerful at the prospect of money, inhaling toxic fumes just to extract gold to satisfy the First World’s craving. Saying yes to a boy, who asked, “Te, are you still coming back? Mingaw na mi kung wala na mo.” Nodding, smiling reassuringly at the boy but deep inside, feeling rotten. So, I just turned into a liar.
Had I been creative enough, I could have told him, “Don’t worry, Ondoy—for that was the boy’s name, not a typhoon’s—“Even if we are no longer here, we are staying with you in mind and spirit.” Just like Jesus. Perhaps, a lie like that can sustain the child for a number of years until he grows up and finds himself working in the tunnels.
Perhaps, he will not work in the tunnels, after all.
Perhaps, he will find a route of escape. Perhaps, he will grow mountain rice to fill gigantic warehouses to feed an army to fight the people’s war that will not fail like they did in in Russia and China. Perhaps, he will grow potatoes as big as Bernardo Carpio.
Perhaps, a different way of telling lies can transform them into truths to light his way out of dark tunnels.

Sun Rising over Diat Palo

Missing Gizzards

In times like these, I dream of Sheilfa, angrier than usual, complaining how some particular guy had attempted to steal her eyes and ears, had she not been too careful and alert. “Don’t trust anyone with your eye,” I warned her, vehemently, in the language of women trying to deal with typhoons and earthquakes every other day or of people on alert for those tropical storms that usually caused the swelling of the river Pangi.
When I woke up, I discovered I was already robbed of my gizzards. I looked for them under the pillows, under the bed, inside the shoeboxes, cabinet drawers, even in the freezer of the refrigerator where I stored my lipstick, but they were nowhere to be found.
I had a funny feeling from the start who the culprit was; and it grew even more stronger the more I confirmed my missing gizzards—the one who stole them was the father of my son!
But it was still in the early morning, when like all the others, I was still breaking my nose over the breaking news, there was no time for me to stop, take the gizzards and fight back. I thought I would find time late in the evening when the air was cooler and everything was written and done with, though, I thought, I would already be too tired and exhausted at those hours.
In the afternoon, I discovered my liver gone; and so were my small and big intestines, the entire 12-meter length of them, gone without a trace; and so were some parts of my brain. I declared it the greatest monstrosity to ever happen in my life! Somewhere deep in me, in some parts I could not locate yet, rumbles a slow burning rage strong enough to break the nose of the of the guy who robbed me of my gizzards, liver, intestines and brain; a rage so slow and protracted it could fuel a long running feminist revolution that would surpass all other world revolutions in time and scale.
So, in the midst of my cluttered room in Nova Tierra, and with the help of a rusty old laptop bought from a Korean junk shop in 2008, I began to track down the gizzard thief. A sneak into his Facebook profile showed a plump man with a potbelly, with partly greying hair and a receding hairline. Hah! So, do you consider that a vindication of years?! Going over some of the comments posted on his wall, I noted how almost everybody called him ‘Sir,’ in such a stupidly patronizing manner that makes me say, Yuck! Nothing about the man gives off an air of intelligence at all. All you can sense, when you take a closer look at his picture, was the sheer stupidity of the eyes and the awkward way in which he held the bottle of beer in his hands to show to the world he was a man. In fact, someone with a discerning nose would notice outright that the stupid guy was holding the bottle as a prop to cover from the eyes of the world the rotten dullness of his life.
Okay, I'm mean. But I'm just getting back here. That guy stole my life!

On the Road to Buluan

Buluan is one of those places I consider so near I could almost touch it; and yet, so far and out of reach.
It sat very close to my hometown, only two or three towns away; and yet, I never heard of Buluan until after three decades I was born. This won’t explain the whole story.
I first discovered Buluan in 2003, when I was part of the team tasked to document the proceedings of the Mindanao Peace Institute (MPI) workshops, where participants from conflict areas around the world spent a week or two learning about peace in Mindanao.
Those workshops culminated on a trip to the conflict areas of Mindanao. On the road, we passed by the Maguindanao town of Buluan.
The ceasefire with Moro fighters were on the papers when organizers boarded the participants in vans that travelled in a convoy to see, among others, the zone of peace in the conflict areas of Pikit, Cotabato and to interview people in Muslim and Christian communities affected by the raging war between government forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and even before it, the Moro National Liberation Front.
I sat next to a bunch of South Koreans, a Canadian and an American who kept talking about how they could never understand why Filipinos could elect Imelda Marcos and her children back to power; [[Are we short on memory or IQ? I was tempted to challenge them but refrained]]; and a young German woman who kept so quiet for most of the trip.
When the van left the Davao-Cotabato highway in Makilala to follow the road leading to the towns of M’lang, Tulunan and Buluan, I was aghast to realize that like the foreigners next to me, I was also traveling that part of Mindanao for the first time.
As soon as we reached Buluan, the first things that caught my eyes were women and men in the midst of a harvest, their clothes flapping like tiny bright specks in the distance; the nipa-thatched huts huddled close to the ground and a beautiful mosque in the midst of the green fields.
Later, in a town of Sultan sa Barongis, I saw egrets feasting in the swamp; and realized that like them, I, too, was a stranger there.
I would hear of Buluan again on November 23, 2009, when a group of journalists left and met their death on the way to Shariff Aguak. But this was another story.

Letter to Kathmandu

Dear Pratish. I tried to find the Nepali writer again; our Nepali writer, remember?
But going over my copy of “New Nepal, New Voices: An Anthology of Short Stories,” I felt lost, somewhat overwhelmed by all the strange sounds of the Nepali names; I could no longer recognize our writer among them.
But how could I forget? We have a much stronger claim over her than her father, or husband, or maybe even her lover! We were her sisters in life and struggle; her victories were our victories (or so, we’d like to think!) even if she never knew us, she never knew me, she never will. We were her readers; and that’s the most important thing of all, isn’t it?
The first time you showed her to me, and I read the first lines of her rapturous writing, I had gasped with delight. I tucked her name to memory; in a special place nobody could enter. I promised to read her again until she will become part of my body. We both promised to return to her over and over again, when reality is hard to bear; or when we were half dead struggling against the yoke of our daily coverages: the fightings, the wars, the politics. She would be our refuge, a sanctuary, a place so deep, so safe, no one could probably touch or harm us there; a place where our exhaustions vanish; a place where we start to forgive ourselves and we can be friends with the world again. But two summers afterwards, I have forgotten her name. Wasn’t she the daughter of a royalty who had once outraged her father by joining the street protests against the monarchy? Was she a recluse, who once retreated to the forest to write her first novel? Or were we just making up stories, turning up fictions to escape the tyranny of facts in our lives? I know that our link to our writer is made of a more lasting stuff. Even if I can’t remember her name, I still can still find her in her writings.

Sleepless at Esteban Abada!

EXCERPT FROM A JOURNAL
May 13, 2009—

We just entered our room at half past midnight after Pratish and I listened to Kevin, a young Tsinoy from Davao’s Juna Subdivision, discussing Heidegger. He’s taking up Philosophy at ADMU and staying up all night to do some paper.
“Are you, in any way, planning to be a priest?” I asked, just curious, when we first learned about his course.
“That’s the problem with Philosophy,” Kevin began, obviously flustered by my question. “People think that if you’re taking Philosophy…”
“She used to love Philosophy,” Pratish quickly said, turning to me, coming to my rescue.
“Yes, I used to love Philosophy,” I said, thinking only of Literary Criticism and Deconstruction during my Silliman University days.
Kevin nodded, surprised.
“She wanted to be a Priestess,” Pratish added.
Kevin’s eyes widened.
“Yes, I wanted to be a High Priestess, that’s why I asked.”
I did not say I wanted to be a Witch. And a witch doesn’t need Philosophy to be a High Priestess, anyway. All she needs is a pure heart, and that will serve as her compass; her ephemeris, and a blanket of goodness that will protect her against evil and will enable her to read everything—the present, the past and the future—! Pratish knew how often I struggle to keep a pure heart every day because my mind is always up to some particular mischief. I could never be a witch.
Kevin said, “Ahhhh!” nodding even more vigorously.
Finally, he welcomed our friendship and began discussing Heidegger. It was our turn to nod. Pratish and I couldn’t seem to fall asleep that night. We took iced tea with milk for dinner.

A Walk in the Park

While we were talking in a bamboo shed, a drizzle began and just as suddenly, the sky over the Philippine Eagle camp in Malagos grew dim. "Don't worry," Rolly assures me, "It's still early and it's still pure sun down there," he says, his lips, pouting towards the town of Calinan below. "It's just this way up here, the precipitation is high."
Just as he speaks, we feel the coldness of the jungle beginning to penetrate our bones. The chill reminds me of what I once felt in the forests of Makilala, Cotabato, a long, long time ago. The memory curiously mingled with the smell of damp clothes and bath soaps of a certain fragrance. I remember the feel of soft mahlong beneath my feet, I remember the sight of wet earth and the shivering frames of our companions as they rushed to join us, leaving their slippers at the door. I remember a particular look on a boy's face.

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

For years, I've been living beyond the fetters of Time. Maybe, this explains why I could never keep dates. I can only remember the "before" and the "after" of an event, never the actual event, itself. But this year, at least, I'll make a real effort to remember. I'll take note of beginnings and endings; of the ebb and flow of the tide, of the rising and the setting of the sun, of the appearance and disappearance of the moon, of the time for planting and the time for harvesting.
I'll try to follow the seasons.

Cubicle

I’m inside my favourite internet café in my favourite cubicle: an empty wooden desk near the glass wall looking out to one side of the JS Gaisano mall.
I used to love it here because the sight of the empty desk the color of maples reminds me of the cubicles of some libraries I used to love: the cubicles on the third-floor window of Silliman U Lib looking down into the acacia-lined green oval of the soccer field in Dumaguete city; or, the reading cubicles of the Rizal Library looking out into the dark limbs of acacia inside the ADMU campus in Quezon city. I used to think the mere sight of this empty desk at the internet café could inspire the deepest of my thoughts to come out of the dark dungeons where they lay imprisoned; could perhaps help break my fettered spirit free!
Until the guys next to me started their transactions on the phone; all with their booming voices and their tripping egos, announcing to the world they are certain-so-and-so's, berating someone in a merchandising department of some Tagum city mall, complaining why their dicer cannot get through.
I wonder what a dicer is. I’m sure she’s not someone who throws the dice, the way I used to see people playing dominoes. But the guy is very mad. His voice fills the entire internet cafe as he scolds the woman—I imagine someone on the other end of the line as a woman because of the way the guy talks; I couldn’t imagine him talking that way to a man!
I came here in my favorite cubicle, thinking I could be alone with my thoughts. Now somebody else is stealing my focus!

In Fairness to God

I had struck a friendship with God sometime in our Reporting on Religion Class at the Asian Center for Journalism when Dr. Eric Loo in Sydney, Australia and Mr. Anwar Mustafa in Malaysia had asked us to do a profile of a noted religious leader for Christmas. I was in Davao, trying to find an Islamic leader for the story, but since the deadline was very close and I realized I still had so many things to learn about Islam, I decided as Christmastime approached, to track down God in a parish in Cotabato, where he had been saying mass at dawn in a remote village that was always in the headlines of newspapers because of the frequency of armed encounters between government soldiers and New People’s Army guerillas.
God’s story towards the end of the Martial Law years was both tragic and shocking but just a few months before I set our meeting, the convicted man out to kill him towards the tail-end of the Marcos regime was freed and the man went to him to say he was sorry. They both went to light candles on the grave of someone the convicted man had killed in God's place.
It took some time before I could find someone who could give me God’s contact numbers but with the help of friends I did; and when I called him, he was open to meeting a stranger and asked me to come meet him near the white statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a Sunday morning that week.
I hurriedly prepared for the trip because as usual there were simply so many things to fix at home during my absence. God had not yet arrived when I got there so I had plenty of time to compose my questions and to orient myself. When his old blue Isuzu pick up pulled up, I saw a tall, thin, fragile-looking figure getting off and walking towards me.
He led me to his office, where a yellow Royal typewriter sat on the shelf full of other documents. He asked me about my religion; and for a while, I was tongue-tied.
I had declared in class I was an “agnostic” and a “free thinker,” next to Jana from East Germany who declared she was an aetheist. The rest of our classmates said they were Roman Catholics; like Lilik from Jakarta or Bryant from Bulacan or even Debbie; or Muslim, like Yuri and Kurniawan, from Jakarta; or Buddhist married to a Hindu but who grew up under the tutelage of Irish nuns who taught her to pray the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Holy Rosary, like my dearest roomate Pratish from Kathmandu. Mukund Pandabhan, our professor for Media Law, had once asked me to define what a free thinker was and he did not give me any trouble with my definition.
But when God asked me where I got that notion of being a free thinker, he quickly put me back to the 18th or was it 17th century when the enlightenment and rationalism swept over Europe. “Jesus Christ is even more of a free thinker than you are!” God quipped, irritated, knocking his holy fingers onto my forehead.
God had taught History in a US seminary years before he was sent to the Philippines, where he ended up at the heart of Tondo on the eve of Martial Law. He remembered that the first mass he ever said here in this country was done inside a prison cell.
I first caught sight of God towards the end of my adolescent years which also coincided with my activism years when a friend pointed to me the first European I saw who could speak Ilonggo. He was fascinating to look at: a towering figure surrounded by lumad children who took their turn kissing his hands. In his book which recounted his trip from the Marco Polo airport to Manila, he noted what the Filipino tradition of kissing hands meant because the practice was quite new to him at that time, a source of his fascination. But now, surrounded by lumad children, I could swear he already looked like one of them if not for his skin.
He also noted with surprise how Filipinos loved to worship all those European-looking saints who peopled the Church’s altars.
Some of the images still stuck with me after that trip: God leading me inside a sooty kitchen, where he shared the offerings of the morning mass with the children, his old cellphone and its faded numbers, the old jacket he wore. How lovingly he brushed aside the dry leaves that littered the grave of a friend killed when God was hunted down by the killers and was nowhere to be found.
Back in his office, as he complained about the volume of paper works he had to deal with that week, as he crouched upon the stack of papers on his desk to find that document that could answer my questions, I was struck by how fragile and delicate God has become.
Maybe some people would say the suffering of God was nothing compared to the suffering of people he had served—all those mass of humanity toiling under exploitatively low wages, tilling the land of the haciendas all their lives in exchange of measly pay, the subhuman condition working in the mines, in banana plantations and in factories, those persecuted for their political, ideological and religious beliefs.
But knowing how God, too, survived death threats all his life for doing what he got to do; and how he is fast giving in to age in a land far away from where he was born, I still felt humbled.

Caraga 2009

Traveling to Caraga feels like you’re on a graveyard shift. You know the feeling. You struggle to keep awake at 12:30 in the morning and watch your seven year old son march off to bed, drowsy after the last show on television, you dial up the taxi that will fetch you from home in Nova Tierra, near the mosque, you say; and then, when everybody is snuggling comfortably to bed you brave the cold slap of the early November breeze on your face as you board the taxi to the terminal. You found a convivial listener on the taxi driver, suddenly a companion in this dead hours of the night, when all the living are asleep and you are headed for the terminal to catch the first trip to the town you only knew by name from some old travel brochures that featured the oldest church in Mindanao, built here in the 1660s, as an outpost of the Spanish forces who failed to conquer the interior parts.
Inside the Ecoland terminal, people sleep on their folding beds (for rent, at P15 to P20), with their bags on their heads. It takes quite a few pages of Milan Kundera’s “Slowness” before the bus for Cateel (which will pass by Caraga) arrives at one o’clock. You go to the Bachelor bus driver bound for Mati, just to check and counter check. I’ve never been to Caraga before. I never knew where Cateel was. It’s a strange place for me. I wonder, what will greet you when you get there? I stared at the Cesar Montano’s face on the bright huge TM posters above the signs overboard. Mati, Cateel, etc. I glanced sideways at the vendor selling cold eggs, cigarettes by my side. I wiped and blew my stuffy nose and wondered how long can I bear this—not the stuffy nose—but this, being treated like this, a worker without right, without voice. I kept wondering what this—this being yanked out of your sleep at the most unholy hour of the night—had anything to do with writing??! Or, book editing for that matter? When the Cateel bus arrived, I asked the driver again, I asked everyone I could talk to. I was excited (and tired) to go to that old place, that old Spanish bastion, the only one they were able to hold in Mindanao. Then, somebody turned off the bus lights. Everyone claimed the seat as bed. The woman across my seat stretched her legs on the bus aisle even as she asked her companion (a male) where he had parked the car. Park where?! Aren’t they riding this bus? Then, I claimed another seat too, and lay down listening to The Campaign Trail on The NewYorker, for this was the time when Barrack Obama was still running for President. Then, a woman-a hefty one—came aboard grumbling because everyone has been making every bus seat his bed. I got up, asked the woman if she wanted my seat because I wanted the old seat across, but seeing that somebody had already occupied the seat I wanted, I returned to where I was sleeping.
A brief talk with the conductor, telling him I had a companion waiting at the terminal in Tagum, the first stop. Then, in Tagum, seeing Allan coming up the bus aisle in the dawning hours before the bus moved on again; and a few hours later, a drowsy glimpse of Mati, where they fix something of the bus engine. Snaking around the sneaky mountains of Caraga, I was reminded yet again that the place where nothing happens is also a place where everything happens. Away from the newspaper headlines, everything happens in Caraga. You knew all about it during breakfast of nilagang baka and fried talong in a rundown torotoro along the highway, people lining up the weather-beaten dirty counter, waiting for the steaming rice, grabbing a greasy table across a woman in her late fifties, her hair unkempt, her old printed duster had seen better days. She, too, would have been beautiful when she was young. I wonder what she’d seen in these places. Everyone was talking about some encounter between soldiers and the NPAs somewhere beyond the mountains. We will pass by Tarragona, the one included in the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE), Allan kept saying. Later, what I saw of Tarragona was an abandoned wooden shed and an empty public market, I wonder where the people are, what they’re doing at that time of the day. Maybe, sleeping??
When we reached Caraga terminal, I was already dead tired. All I wanted to do was plop down somewhere, bed or no bed at all, but everybody kept talking. Then, I realized sleep was still out of question. We still had a far way to go. We boarded a crazy motorcycle to a village called Pantuyan and waited and waited for the people who never arrived. They were trying to settle some dispute somewhere, trying to avert a “pangayao,” what do they call it, a tribal conflict? I slept on a bench. Somebody handed me a pillow. I slept until my stuffy nose was gone. When it was five o’clock, they said, it was time to go. We boarded a motorcycle that climbed up a newly scraped road. The soil was rocky and limey, like what I used to know in Argao, Cebu, my mother’s hometown. But when I glanced over my shoulder, I discovered we were already on top of the world, the ravines were the deepest I’ve ever seen, I’ve never been in a mountain as high as that and I did not even know its name. We were still climbing higher and higher to I don’t know where: Pluto, perhaps, Mercury or Mars? The motorcycle ahead of us went overboard, its passengers laughing. How could they laugh?! All around us were forest; a weather-beaten shack would appear once in a while, with people staring back at us. Except for that and the jungle, I saw nothing else. Later, much, much later, we followed another rugged, abandoned road. I thought, we were already close to the place where we were supposed to go. But later, I learned, we were still very far. The skylab climbed down and up the mountainous incline as high as 85 degrees. I was bowling over. It was a journey that never ends.
But later, I was struck as soon as I saw the place: a thriving Mandaya community surrounded by forests. Looking down the bluish haze of mountains and outlines of rivers far below, I said, this is heaven, this is the place where I belong, I’m not going out anymore.
But as it happens, I still did.

Being Mary

I resented it when Ja prevented me from getting a house help in the last seven years and now he flew into a rage because he said he was beginning to feel like a house help. I remember A.S. Byatt’s “Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary,” and then, I remember that story itself the way it was told in the Bible, and curiously felt like I was Mary for the first time in my life, talking to Jesus while Martha flew into a rage over the dishes. This is something new to me because all my life I have often felt like Martha, doing all the dishes while someone else like Ja do all the talking to Jesus. [Now, don't ask me, who is Jesus, here, it's Karl].
Being Mary for the first time makes me feel a bit giggly and happy for a change. Ja would kill me once he read this and realized he was being compared to Martha. [[Shhhh, it's Ja's birthday today so I better stop!]]

Ora pro nobis

The landscape at home is getting very horrifying, like the prospect of Hades. I thought a home is a place where you can take a rest and get a good night’s sleep but no. At seven thirty to eleven o’clock at night every night, sometimes extending down to two in the morning, I keep my vigil, waiting for someone to come home. Had I been a bit of the prayerful kind, I would have started saying the novenas, or the holy rosary or the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which surprisingly for my agnostic soul, I found rather comforting once or twice when I tried it. Even if I can’t actually make sense of half of what I was chanting, it took away some of the pain off my chest or even eased the terrible headache I’ve been carrying along for days. Isn’t that why the patriarchs invented it?
But I hate patriarchs. I am sure I am either an agnostic, or a pagan so Sheilfa lent me Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” or Ana Castillo’s “Peel My Love Like An Onion.” She even followed that up with a whole bunch she left at the Bagobo Hotel the following week, which included Flannery O’Connor’s letters, “The Habits of Being;” “Three,” a collection of Flannery’s novels and short fiction; Edith Wharton’s “Old New York,” Katherine Anne Porter’s “Ship of Fools” and Willa Cather’s “O, Pioneers!” You would think I have been reading these while keeping my nightly vigil, waiting for the precious one to come home. But no, I would oftentimes be too tense to read. I would keep repeating whole paragraphs five times in a row, and still, could not make heads or tails of what I am reading. It doesn’t help that my eyesight sight blurs. When the kid finally toned down this week and started coming home on time without a trace of liquor in his breath, I started to feel relieved and happy. But then, Ja started banging things in the kitchen, saying words that are difficult to take. I was worried the kid might flee off again and renew the habit.
The kid confided to me about something when Ja started his temper tantrum. Ja had no idea how it was to learn of things like what the kid was saying. He flew into a rage over the unwashed plates. But what do I care about plates when my son was listening to suicide music?
I watched Sean doing his assignment. Sean’s face looked soft under the light and he was really working hard on his assignment. I did not want to shatter that look on his face. I wished I could get hold of old women’s novenas and moan, “Sa langub nga among gipuy-an imo kaming panabangan,” just the way my old grand aunts from Capiz used to chant when they were still alive. I also wanted to get hold of the Latin version they used to read, chanting, ora pro nobis, every end of the line. But the strange sounds they made and even the strange clothing they wore, those dark skirts reaching down the floor, used to turn me off as a girl, I ended up avoiding them and not learning anything. Now, I began to be intrigued by that cave they kept talking about. This choking, sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach, all remind me of the inexplicable horrors of caves.

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?

Fathers

Yes, I know, it must be sad to lose a father; yet, I can’t help wondering, how much sadder to lose a son? Or, how is it to have a father and not to have one at the same time? Or, to have one who is still alive but who is not quite a father at all, the way a classmate’s father or a friend’s father is, even if only taken for granted? It wouldn’t really matter, would it? As long as he is there: mad or angry, friend or a foe, someone to rebel against or someone to follow; as long as he is not someone living a separate life totally different from your own.
How is it to have a father that way? You don’t know how it feels, Ma, because you have had a father all your life. Do you know how it feels to be me?
Before the news came about the passing of your father’s father, you woke up one morning, saying you dreamt that your father was dead. Were you sad? I asked. Why were you sad? I asked again when you nodded.
Because then, he would no longer have the chance to know me, you said, speaking as if you were still a work-in-progress, soon to be completed in some future time, like some deadline for your architectural plates, before being offered to some distant, unworthy god. You did not ask who fathered me when I grew up. I would have told you it was my mother.

Gift from the Hermit

My Birthday Card is a hermit, shown here as an old man in a long robe, looking straight into the lamp, giving the light his full attention. In the horizon, where the hermit stands, is a mountain, denoting isolation and distance.
On a special day, I tracked down the hermit where he lives to beg from him a bit of that isolation and distance which has endowed him the eternal wisdom.
Instead, the hermit showed me a box full of mementoes of forgotten things, now soiled and full of cobwebs.
I opened the box and two decades of dust flew off the lid, clouding my eyes. Afterwards, I saw books half-eaten by termites and ants; among them, “The Principles of Structures,” “Advanced Mathematical Formulas,” before a dusty executive organizer, its pages stained and browned with age, caught my attention. Its once white cover page, now badly stained, showed what could only be inconsequential scratches made by a baby with a fuschia pentel pen. The following page showed the name of a woman who lived at 202-F Tres-Labangon St. with a business address at Sunstar Daily, Osmena Boulevard, Cebu City; and the old telephone numbers, 54543 and 52658, still in use before that newspaper changed its address to its own building along P. del Rosario St., boasting of its first of a kind newspaper architecture in that part of the country.
The following page of the organizer showed a three-year reference calendar, denoting the years 1992, 1993 and 1994 and somewhere towards the end of 1994; a ballpen scribbling of a woman’s hand showed a series of dates from January 1 to 14, when she wanted to take a leave of absence from work. Immediately beside this note, as emphatic as if she was ordering herself, she wrote another note which says, “On November 15 or November 30, book a plane ticket to Cotabato for a December 31 flight.”
Everything that followed was history. How she made that crucial decision and boarded the Airbus 320 flight—or was it a smaller aircraft then?—that took her away from that place of nightmares, perhaps, forever. How someone had come only a few days after that looking for what he could no longer see, now safely intact and unreachable across the sea. How she had come to watch those inconsequential scratches of fuschia eventually transformed themselves into plates of architectural drawings.
The Hermit’s lamp particularly illumined the lone entry of the journal on January 2, 1993, which says, “3:07 a.m.,” the major source of energy for the woman. It was the only entry she wrote on her journal that year because of the volume of mind-numbing work she had to do. Her superhuman energy turned her into the female version of the mythical Bernardo Carpio. In the following pages, where her January 16, 1993 entry was supposed to be, the woman had crushed out the “3” and replaced it with “4;” which means that the next entries were made in 1994, exactly a year after she wrote her lone entry.
I took a look at all the entries of the journal, over and over, wondering how the woman was, what happened to her over the years? Clipped in the journal was the December 20, 1993 x-ray results, which says, “no radiological evidence of active PTB,” for the woman, 24 at that time, was frequently worried about her lungs and her frequent coughing.

Pasensya! These are dangerous times!

[From a conversation with a noted radio broadcaster]

When I told him about it, he did not laugh. Unlike most people who learned about what happened along the boundary of barangay San Isidro in Carmen, Davao del Norte at 9:24 to 9:34 am on Black Saturday, he did not even pass judgment over what we did or did not do, as if there were really some right things and wrong things to do under those circumstances; as if the incident itself was our fault.
Things like that always happen, he said. It was designed to scare you, he said. It also happened to me before, he said. Two times.
The first time it happened to me was back in the 80s somewhere in Ecoland. I never knew I ventured into the territory of intelligence agents.
We were just looking for corpses in a sack because someone called the radio station about the corpses hidden in a toilet of Kabacan elementary school. The one who called said the corpses were hogtied and placed inside the sack. This was in the 80s, when Davao City was the killing fields. I used to work for DXRH and four of us--three regular reporters and a volunteer--took quick notes of it and went to find the corpses.
We did not know where Kabacan elementary school was, so we kept asking.
We went all around the place looking for the goddam school. We reached where the Hall of Justice building is standing now, asking where Kabacan was. There was no SM City yet. There used to be the headquarters of the CHPG (Constabulary Highway Patrol Group) nearby in a building they shared with the police. We were so determined to find the corpses that when we came upon the headquarters, we asked the policemen on duty whether they knew where the Kabacan school was.
"Why?" The policeman asked.
"Someone told us there were corpses inside the toilet there. We want to verify if it was true because we want to report it on air."
The policemen told us to wait. One of them went inside to tell the chief. Afterwards, the policeman who went inside came back. He said the chief wanted us all to go down.
We were using the Pinoy 2 vehicle, the mobile patrol of DXRH, at that time, and the vehicle did not have a lock. We brought along with us the mobile radio base at that time and I was afraid it might get lost if I leave it alone in the car.
So, I told the police, maybe, I should stay in our vehicle to watch over our equipment. But the policeman said, no, the chief asked all of you to go down. All of you, he said. So, I was forced to go down.
But before that, they took our tape recorders, our IDs, even our wallets. When they took our wallets, I was alarmed. Why would they take our wallet? I asked myself. I began to feel helpless. They all forced us all to go down.
“Get inside!” said one policeman who shoved me into the door using his armalite butt because I did not want to follow inside.
Then, we were led into a room in a basement which only had a stair going down. We were practically under the earth, then. When we reached the bottom, we saw the chief. He had a desk. So, I realized, it was his office.
I never knew until then that the building had an underground; and that they used that underground office as base of their operations.
He made us stand in the middle of the hall. All of us, made to stand in the middle. Do you know how it felt? They could just have shot all of us there and nobody would know. We were under the ground. They’ve taken all our IDs.
The next thing that the chief ordered was, take off your clothes, meaning, the upper clothes. So, we took off our shirts. Then, he ordered us to take off our pants and we took off our pants.
Then, the chief asked, “So, what brought you here?”
“We’re just looking for the corpses, sir,” we said. “Somebody told us there are corpses hidden in the toilet of Kabacan Elementary School. We’re only here to cover the news.”
“Ahh,” the chief said. “Maybe, those were dogs.”
That’s all what the chief said.
Then, he said, “You may dress up now.”
Then, he said to his men, “Give them back their belongings.”

On our way home, we were all so shaken no one said a word.

Actually, they always do things like this to scare you. Especially when you venture inside their territory.
It happened to me two times, he said. The second time was when I was walking along Jones Avenue, this black jacket.
Jones Avenue, somewhere in Acacia, used to be the site of big protests in the 80s. This used to be where the protesting groups meet. This was also where the three (or four?) Davao lawyers, among them Lawyer Larry Ilagan, the husband of Luz Ilagan, were arrested.
I was walking through this area wearing this black jacket one day, the recorder clipped in my arm, when a car stopped just beside me, all its windows opened at the same time, with a full-cocked long firearm protruding from each window, all pointed at me. Somebody inside the car ordered me to raise my hands.
I could not immediately raise my hands because my recorder was clipped in my armpit. If I raise my left hand, my recorder will fall.
But they compelled me to raise both arms, so, I was forced to do just that. My recorder fell crushing to the ground. Yes, the recorder fell! I was lucky no one pulled the trigger.
When everything was cleared, they said, “Sorry, Bay, pasensya! These are difficult times, you know.”
They must have mistaken me for an NPA (New People’s Army).
I picked up my recorder. It was totally shattered.
They just sped away.

HE SAID these are the things they do to you when you venture into their territory, their operation base. That is where the body was found. That was also the place where they throw away the corpses. Who said there is such thing as the right thing or the wrong thing to do under those circumstances? You could never guess what’s on their minds!
When they come upon you and isolate you from the rest of humanity, the first thing for you to do is to find connection because you never know what will happen next. When they take away your phone, your last chance is gone.
It’s better to err on the side of caution.
You would never know whether or not your press ID can save you.

Dear Old Self

So, do you still remember going into the midnight sale at the Metro? No, no, not even the Metro but that rustic department store somewhere near Gaisano South of Colon? Yes,Fairmart. Where we used to walk through the thickening crowds swarming the store and pushing their way to the rummage bins, where the sales staff used to throw away those items as thick as they’re dusty and smelling of old corners for having stayed on the display shelves for years.
What were you thinking then, as you waded through the swelling, palpitating crowd, finding your way around the thick forest of clothes, inch by inch, nudging those who shoved and elbowed you, shoving and elbowing in return?
What decadence, you used to grumble, your eyes popping at the price tags of a coveted piece of blouse or underwear which could transform you into another you, affording you a chance to dream, “What decadence!” you exclaimed, mimicking that Russian KGB in a popular American situation comedy you used to watch in Honey’s room inside the Tsa Elim Dormitory.
So, what were you thinking then? Did you think you can change yourself from being a poor girl from a land across the sea now in a big city to get a college education? Did you think you can change the world by changing the way you looked?
You tried a dress and saw how it suited your young and scrawny body, how it flattered your skin, your mind a whirl of emotion as you looked at that face in the mirror. Was it you? Who’s that girl? You asked, turning, staring, wanting to take all, spending a day’s worth of food allowance to buy a dream and feed your burning delusions.
I didn’t know what happened after that. I have counted the years and surveyed this particular time, and found out how brief it was compared to the great avalanche that eventually followed and pulled you out of there and brought you to me.
I wish you had been more circumspect. I wish I had warned you but I was equally careless! I wish you had tarried in one of those magazine shops somewhere near the Ultra Vistarama and the Oriente where you can read Time and Newsweek for only P5 or so, or a newspaper for P2 or so; or ogle at Itzhak Bentov’s “Stalking the Wild Pendulum,” or Carl Sagan’s “Broca’s Brain” in another bookstore, instead of shoving your way into that stupid midnight sale, flirting with your own ego!

Stuck!

The shape of my writers block is a jagged rock that feels like a migraine. Why can’t you finish what you’re writing and move on with your life? Ja kept asking me, so, I go back to this tiny laptop to see what I can do with the story, but still the story refuses to budge. What is wrong with my head? The migraine seems to open ugly cracks on my mind where the blood cascades in powerful torrents.

The boy who (does not) refuse to grow up

Yes, I’m here inside Peter Pan, the curious dropping place of women shopping in the nearby mall. They came here in thongs and printed dresses, mother and daughter in the next table, a woman, a friend and a cousin, wiggling their bodies, shaking their hair as they go from table to counter, waiting for their orders. I just arrived here with Sean, who after a bite of the sugar-coated raisin bread, loosened up a bit and told me how, when he was in Grade One, he tried to buy an icecream cone worth 20 pesos with his 25-centavo coin. He was a bit puzzled why the woman selling it was mad at him. It was such an embarrassing blunder, he said, but now that he is entering Grade Four, he already has a fair understanding of things and would no longer commit such a mistake. I told him it was okay. I sensed it was better here than at Dunkin’ Donuts, where he would be preoccupied with the sweetness of his ChocoWacko. Or maybe at the Bread Station where he would be too busy eyeing the array of starchy delights to put in our basket. Earlier, I was here to exorcise the headache I’ve been having on Holy Thursday and Good Friday and erupted full blast on Easter Sunday. Now that everything is over, I am perfectly okay.

Everything Is Accounted For

What they pay with money, I pay with my own body. I pay with skin boils, inflamed sinuses, sore throats that develop into hard coughs, stomach acidity, stomach ulcers, arthritic knees, blurring eyesight, blurring memories, crumbling spirit, long hours of hard mental labor.

My Kerala

Maybe, she's still out there, doing volunteer works in Kerala. Though, I found out a few days ago the Kerala she was talking about is not the place where Arundhati Roy grew up but quite a totally different kind of Kerala.
“Why?!” she had asked, raising her brows when she saw the look of consternation on my face. “Does it make any difference? What is so special about your Kerala and this Kerala? The work I'm doing here is just the same. Why do I have to go to India?”
I said because in India, the colors of the flies are different.
I'm thinking of this because I'm beginning to be afraid. I just walked out of the store because I found out, rummaging through my bag just when I was about to pay, that I was short of cash and that I could have placed my money somewhere else. The storeowner, an accommodating lot, allowed me to bring the food to the table, while I run to the nearest ATM but when I rummaged through my bag again, I discovered that even my ATM was missing. I placed an emergency call to Ja but Ja, as usual, is unwilling to help. He is perched on his stool on Mt. Olympus, watching the rise and fall of whatever stocks on Bloomberg, so what do you expect?
Now, I'm beginning to be afraid. Someone is telling me to see to it that schedules should be followed to the letter so that nothing will go to waste. The hair on my neck stood on ends. I thought the world already knew I never follow anything to the letter. How can they missed my reputation as image breaker, iconoclast, rule breaker?
Years ago, I told my Uncle during the funeral of an older Uncle that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who follow rules and those who break them. "I belong to the latter," I said, pursing my lips, "I make my own rules." Uncle was shocked.
Now, I'm afraid of people who tell me to follow rules. I spend my whole lifetime breaking them and I'm not about to give that up.

The Language of Birds

On February 16, 2010, I paused after I finished Batman’s part in, “On a Deadly Trail: Three Journalists Killed in the Philippines” when I noticed a piercing sound that began at the neighbor’s ground and increased in intensity as it approached my window. It sounded like a fierce warning—so I thought it was somebody downstairs, a possible assassin, perhaps, whistling a secret code.
Ja said I was becoming neurotic because of what I was writing—but there was something about this particular sound, which was so shrill and so piercing as if it tried to attract attention. When the whistle grew very painful to my ears, I turned around to find out what was going on.
And when I did? Lo! A yellow bird, a tamsi, perched itself on my window grill, chirping with delight; its companion, perched on the clothesline, returning a piercing chirp. The sight was a treat after days of wrestling with my thoughts, staring at an empty computer screen for long hours. The birds made me think of Batman, a Davao broadcaster killed on Christmas Eve in 2007 and Geneboyd, a young photojournalist killed in Jolo, Sulu on November 12, 2004.
I remember how Batman last waved at us at Yellow Haus while I and Mandaya and Jepoi and Di were brainstorming for the maiden issue of I Love You, Baby magazine, the magazine that circulates in our mind. It was late at night and Batman and Tec, talking at a table away from us, stood up to go. He was gone a few weeks after.
I did not get to finish our last conversation with Geneboyd. We were at the Waterfront Hotel waiting for the press con to start and he was talking about that cartoon show a lot better than Spongebob Squarepants we used to be so crazy about in 2004. We had to stop because the guests had arrived and we had to listen and he had to take pictures. We all got down to work and rushed to write the stories afterwards. But the next thing I knew, he was in Jolo and something happened.
The whole thing was so unacceptable and senseless, I got the sudden urge to ask him, who was that cartoon character, again, Boyd? Please tell me. Please tell us what happened in downtown Jolo. But he could no longer reply.
I thought about the two journalists as I watched the bird on my window grill pointing its beak to the sky. I never knew a bird’s beak could be so beautiful. It was so extraordinarily sharp and I gasped at its thinness. I wanted to grab my camera and capture the moment. But the birds must have noticed. They started to fly, still chirping at each other and shrilly calling back to me. I strongly felt they were trying to tell me something I couldn’t make heads or tails of, a message that must be very important.
Suddenly, I wish I could understand the language of birds.

Happy New Year!

Did you notice how hollow it sounded, even as a soundless text message from me to those happy enough to remember today?

The doctor is sick

I tried to make out the expression of her face as she sat silhouetted against the glass door. But the glare from the street outside hurt my eyes. All I could see was the shape of her hair falling on her shoulders and half her body leaning against a chair. Her voice was sad and clinical, as if she was explaining a surgical procedure. “The lumads—once they get pregnant, they already half-expect to die,” she continued in a monotone. “Yet, when everybody talks about the Reproductive Health Bill, nobody thinks about the lumads.”
For a moment, I swore she was only talking to herself. But she was facing me, gesturing with her hands. She tilted her head slightly up, so that the light caught briefly the outline of her nose and eyes. She was a doctor. Her profession trained her only to deal with the coldness of empirical facts.
I squinted. The sun outside was harsh. It was hot, something they blame on global warming. Perhaps, if I had only moved closer to where she was, I could have seen some anguish—or anger—on her face. Perhaps, I could have established a human connection. Perhaps, I could have understood better what she was talking about. But I was a little farther away and I could only see her shadow.

Please remember everything!

Where were you on January 2, four years ago?
I tried asking you but you can’t remember.
Is it only the mind that forgets? Or, is it the heart?
Is it because we did nothing significant that day that the date simply slipped off our memory for good?
We must still have been living in that rented house with a red gate, numbered 72, along McArthur Highway, the house that Sean thought was our own to the chagrin of the real owner. It was the house that Ja, your stepdad, described as a garage because the owner used to park their rusty old sedan and a new van just outside our front door window. It was a house that I remember with horror and helplessness because the bedroom where we used to sleep had no window and the other room, where you used to draw and be alone, used to have windows that looked out to a stove in the open kitchen of the other house. That window was eventually overshadowed by ugly granite when the owner built another extension to their house.
It was a perfect trap, that house. It was built only as an afterthought.
First of all, I’m not very good at dates. I couldn’t remember the exact day I met your father or when exactly America first attacked Iraq, but I can still picture his eyes and the way that his shirt revealed the curves of his shoulders. Just as I had clear pictures on my mind of Operation Desert Storm on the pages of Newsweek magazine on the magazine rack of the Recoletos library; and then, of Typhoon Ruping, afterwards, when the entire city went dead and we had to hunt for bread and canned goods out on Colon street because there was nothing to eat in the entire Tsa Elim dormitory. I still can remember the exact day when you arrived, the dress I was wearing, the look of panic in your father’s eyes, the exhilaration and the long hours of struggle before that. It was a day that changed my life, so, I can’t believe I can’t remember anything on January 2, 2006, when you turned 13. I remember meeting towards the end of that year another 13 year old boy whose mother and father were killed on the street of Kidapawan in broad daylight; and I immediately took to him because I was thinking of you.
If I could not remember where I was on January 2 four years ago, it was not because I had forgotten you. I’m sure I was shuttling to and from Davao city and hometown again, desperate, as usual; trying to cope with the crazy demands of the holidays and jobs. Maybe, it was the Christmas I lost Sean’s biplanes along with his medicines and other toys in a small backpack in the bus, because deep inside, I was crumbling. The holidays always required me to spend the money that I didn’t have and I was always thinking that I wasn’t good enough for you.

Missing Kwin Dukduk

In times like these, one could not help missing Kwin Dukduk. She’s an intense young woman who fiercely believes in what she says and would often arrive with lots of egg pie from Goldilocks to give when she’s terribly upset about something.
At least, Kwin Dukduk is sharp.
I missed her today when the sun was at its zenith, and somebody started talking about the discarded bag of a boxer’s wife selling at P120,000 or more. Actually, I did not have anything against the boxer’s wife or her discarded bag (which Ylevol said was Chanel and did not interest me at all). But somebody insisted that if the boxer’s wife only lived abroad, she could have been selling her discarded bags or panties for a million dollars and everybody would be crazy enough to buy them.
I was not surprised at all by that stupid display of absurdity and decadence. Just like everybody else I’ve been used to it, but I couldn’t help opening my mouth because I know of somebody who sold his old camera seven times its purchase price by bestowing upon it some historical value no brand new camera could ever have. (It was Jamil!)
Didn’t we learn enough that the market has always been susceptible to some idiosyncratic twists and turns just because such thing as 'market value' has oftentimes been dictated by perception? And that, perceptions going awry, with all the overvaluations and undervaluation in between, had precipitated numerous historical crashes in the stock market and the world economy, looking back to the early part of this century alone, including the most recent global financial meltdown? I know that if Kwin Dukduk were here before me, she would vehemently nod her head and say, "The market is such a cold-blooded idiot. It has no heart at all," and then, because this thought itself would upset her, she’d turn the computer's volume up and break into a song by Susan Vega!
One could not help missing Kwin Dukduk. Every time I was with her, I always felt I could turn the world upside down and still emerge as winner.

Letter to Sean

I was thinking of you when I got a glimpse of the waves of Lianga from the car on the road. I never knew that waves could gallop like that. But there they were, right before my eyes, galloping like horses at the back of thatched structures that served as the public market. It was raining and the people I was with in Lianga were taking lunch at an eatery that displayed gigantic fresh crabs, fresh catfish and octopuses that reminded me of the tentacles of the kraken in the Pirates of the Caribbean. I never stopped thinking of you even for a while. When I saw the kraken’s tentacles on the plate, I wanted to shout “The Flying Dutchman!” the way we do it at home, taking in a scared look before breaking into our long hard laugh that continue to amaze the neighbors.
I told the people of Lianga I felt like a cannibal eating the kraken. They were telling me some people sometimes come down from the mountains to flee the fighting and stay in the gym for days.
Braving the rain, I went out of the eatery to take pictures of the galloping waves, intending to frame them against the dark shadows of the thatched huts.
But I discovered when I got closer, that my camera could not capture the terrifying texture of the waves before my eyes. Within the thatched huts were women persuading me to buy the fish they were selling. I aimed my shot at the gleaming bodies of their fish, instead.
It was a terrifyingly ugly shot because it was made as a compromise. I’m sure that people who would happen to take a look at it someday would wonder about the senselessness of the whole shot and would harshly judge me for taking it.
As you grow older, you would know how to be true to what is in your heart. Once you set out to take pictures of the waves, by all means, do it whatever it takes, and don’t stop to take pictures of krakens.

The Lettuce Tree

I wish you'd find time to water the lettuce I planted in the pot outside my window. I only remember it on my way to Esperanza when I looked out the window of the running car and saw the murky brown water of the Naboc River snaking down the ridges below, trying to but never finding the level ground that could put a stop to all its running.
I want you to remember as you water the plant that there was only one leaf left of it the other week but now it has grown three leaves, each one promising to be greener than the other.
Let's not allow the plant to wilt. Let us work together and pray for more shoots to grow and spread into leaves so that when I come back, its succulence and crispiness will make us forget the blight.

Bottled Feelings

I know you’d say this is such a boring picture. That you’ve seen this before and that I could have done this better; maybe, find another angle to give larger space for the ripples in the water, so that maybe, it could bring about the catharsis that we need.
You know, you might be right. I took this picture towards the sunset in early 2006 when things were equally foreboding as they are now. I remember staring at the dark clouds looming over the estuary of Davao Gulf and thinking I should not take such kind of pictures in the beginning of the year--!
But who could resist? I clicked away the shutters, discarding the symbol and, as my pagan soul seems to warn me, a thousand and one repercussions. In the face of such irresistible beauty who would still care for meanings? Isn’t that how cruel our impulses are?
This morning, I was crying at the dining table because Jamil told me I was not cut out for running stories, I often get left behind. But I was not cut out for slow moving stories either because I had not written anything of the sort for a long time.
I did not have anything against Jamil. He is the kind of man who would push you down when you’re down and push you up when you’re up.
In fairness to Jamil, he cried the first time he saw my first fiction in a magazine. That year, we still lived in a garage. He used to treat me like that woman in VS Naipaul’s “The House of Mr. Biswas” but the day he read that story, he came up to the room in a daze and taking a long, hard look at me, said, “Ma, you made it, Ma.” If you’d known Jamil for a long time, you wouldn’t believe he would do it—come to the room in a daze and say, “Ma, you made it, Ma.” I wanted to ask him, made what? But I merely stared at him and kept quiet because I knew how lousy that story was. I kept a copy of it in my drawer to take a look at it once in a while but over the years, my belief only strengthened that it was really such a lousy piece. So, I hid it again in the drawers hoping that someday, I will have the courage to burn it. I was not crying because Jamil told me I was not cut out for running stories because I believe he was right. I was crying because I remembered something that Rainier Maria Rilke wrote in his “Letters to the Young Poet.”
Things are getting so dark for me these days that I began rummaging my files to search for meanings.

Lusting at Zeitgeist

It’s a German word, I know. Which means, the spirit and outlook of the age. But we never saw it when over a year ago on our way to the campus, roommate Prathibha and I first passed by the row of shops just outside our dormitory’s gate.
We were only aware of the most pleasurable things staring at us from the glass walls: Jeanette Winterson’s, “Arts and Lies,” Neil Gaiman’s collections, and again, further down, Winterson’s “Oranges are not the only Fruit.”
We were almost late for the morning classes but we couldn’t help ourselves. We entered the shop, almost gasping for breath, to find more treasures inside (perhaps, the world classics crammed in such a small space): Gabriel Garcia’s “No One Writes to the Colonel,” in at least three editions; “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” some old classics by Chesterton and other titles I thought I’d never ever find on earth.
It was only much, much later, when Pratish and I would meet our German roommate Jana would we find time to look at the shop from a distance and read the German name above it.
If there was one pleasure that Pratish and I were hanging on to during our summer stay in Manila, it was this very small bookstore that offered the best of the world’s classics in such a small space. The prices, however, were not really as dirt-cheap as it could go: the owner, of course, knew what she was selling and had kept the prices only as low as P100. I discovered that in Manila, you can book-hunt to places where you can actually find books by your favorite authors at P50 (try the uppermost floors of the National Bookstore in Cubao) or even at P20. Try the Instituto de Cervantes during its anniversary and you’d get them with long-stemmed American roses!

Lady of the Flies

Perhaps, you should stay here for a while. It feels better to work with editors who treat you like a real person.
Quite unlike those people you knew who rushed you into writing something they thought was easy simply because they didn’t know anything about it and you were just as stupid to oblige.
The last time you left this job for such a thing as a book project, they let you climb the highest mountain in Davao Oriental on a habalhabal.
The driver got so pissed off when you insisted getting off the motorcycle instead of sticking it out with him down the slope that you swear was an 80 per cent incline. You went there supposedly to edit a book, didn’t you, and not to commit suicide!
But when you reached the highway and you were back on this habalhabal, the driver revved up the engine and sped along the road like crazy. All the people by the roadside of Caraga were turning their heads to see what was going on and because the driver was already flying so maddeningly fast, you only managed to catch a glimpse of the look of concern on their faces.
The driver only wanted to scare you, you knew even without looking. He thought you did not have the right to complain because you were a visitor. It’s part of the customs and traditions of the place, is it not? You must do everything they wanted to—including getting killed in a stupid habalhabal ride, maybe?
As soon as you reached their house, somebody asked, ‘Were you scared? That was so fast!’ and you managed to say, ‘Was that the fastest you could get?’
You were seething with fury. When, days later, you told a man about it, the man said, ‘You should have complained, you should have gotten off that motorcycle, you should have told them how you felt!’
But you were just a woman they were trying to scare. You knew you would detest the look of triumph on their faces. So, all you did was to tell them their fastest was not even fast enough for you.
It was a totally different kind of job. They made you travel over 24 hours on the road non stop from Davao to Bukidnon to Cagayan de Oro, to Iligan where you crossed the Mukas wharf near Kulambogan on your way to Ozamis, going all the way to Oroquieta and the small towns leading to Dapitan and when you reached Dipolog, you could not even sleep a wink because they had to start the meeting where you were supposed to interview, or at least ask questions from, the leaders they gathered. You could no longer remember what questions you managed to ask because you were so numb and dumb from sleeplessness and exhaustion after more than 24 hours on the road.
They didn’t notice, though. They were so goddamned dedicated to their work, they thought it was natural for you to travel all the way from the other side of Mindanao and still be up and about to ask all the brilliant questions!
When they were about to start the meeting a latecomer arrived and everyone decided to let her have a nap because she traveled three hours on the road. Three hours against your 24 hours!
When you got too tired to stay awake, they just let you sleep on a hammock while flies buzzed around the benches and tables scattered over the uneven dirt floor. The people you met there were patient, too. Their leader did not make it because he got no money for the fare, said the woman you talked to. The sound of your last conversation mingled with the buzzing of flies in your dream.

Women are strong

[[From the Journal of a Demented Woman. Retrieved from the Trash Bin of Decaying Things]]
“Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don’t know how strong we are until we’re pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.” –Louise Erdrich

I’m training for sainthood and this has gone on for years. Martyrdom is not my cup of tea but here I am, sacrificed before an altar, staying awake at 10:41 at night, waiting for him to come home.
It’s another kind of experience, something which fiction could only approximate but never copy. Bleeding and angry at the same time, I sit here on a chair, facing this computer on my table, trying to make sense of the ticking of the clock, thinking of that body—a baby I once pushed out of my body now a being separate from me. It is now a body with a life of its own and a mind that has totally discarded me.
Early in the afternoon, I climbed up the stairs leading to the high school faculty room on the second floor and was surprised to find the teachers waiting for me. The stories they told me were simply astounding. Of the school disciplinarian chancing upon the four of them--smoking? maybe drinking?--in a store in an eskinita across the school ground. Of the sketchpad full of drawings—his drawings?—of demons and monsters and obscenities—what do they mean?
Six hours after I left the school campus, I sit here, waiting interminably, thinking of a million things that could go wrong. I am thinking of the dark, deserted road stretching from our house to the highway. I am also thinking of the people surrounding him, I am thinking of gang wars in the news, of dangers lurking in the streets. I am thinking, too, how come that he cared more for other people than he ever cared for me?
Where in the world is he?
It’s like inside a torture chamber, sitting here, held incommunicado for eternity. It’s like the crucifixion of Christ, only that, this time, I am the one being nailed. I can feel the stab wounds all over my body. I am bleeding.

Thoughts in Midair

I did not know how it happened. I only knew I was on top of the stairs, hurrying down to catch up with Sean and Ja who had already gone out the door a few minutes before. When all of a sudden, I lost my balance and my feet and body succumbed to the laws of uncontrollable motion. I could see all the people down below in the midst of their Chowking dinner, looking up at me and gasping, all of us contemplating the natural course of my fall. Right there in midair, I was struck by the hopelessness of the situation: I had fallen from some other places long ago but never from such a stairway as this. There was no way I could ever stop the fall. I only wished I could get a glimpse of Sean and Ja’s retreating back and ask them to come back.
But it happened in a flash. I did not even have enough time to say goodbye as I looked down and contemplated my end at the bottom of the stairway. These were my last thoughts as my head hit the floor and I saw the sparks of a million stars.

For Each Pot, a Bowlful

“Don’t forget to water the plants. Pour one bowlful of water onto each pot in the morning because that’s what ganda loves. Don’t use the dipper from the bathroom. Use the big bowl we use for rice. The rice bowl is the symbol of life. Using it will give us sustenance, blessings. As long as the plant lives, we will survive.”
This was the text message I sent Ja exactly a year ago from a room I shared with Pratish on Esteban Abada, just a 15-minute walk to the Ateneo campus on Katipunan Avenue, where we were having on campus classes at the Asian Center for Journalism. The Ganda, which I raised in a pot at home in Nova Tierra, was a gift from Babu Avelina, a brave and intelligent Mansaka woman we interviewed some time in September 2008 for a book project on the Lumads in Mindanao.
I carried the plant uprooted from Babu’s garden in Maragusan to the rickety bus that took us out of the rustic town near the foot of Mt. Candaraga to Tagum city. From Tagum, I took a more comfortable bus to Davao city, where Sean and Karl were waiting for me after such a long absence.
I couldn’t describe in one sitting what happened to me during the trip.
It was not Babu—but something else about the whole set up that actually left me feeling drained and downright oppressed. The plants must have sensed how my feelings towards the whole thing warmed and soured and then, warmed again. Only the memory of Babu Avelina sitting in her porch that faces the beautiful Mt. Candaraga reminds me that the trip was worth taking after all.
Mansakas use Gandas to spice up their tinolas (I could no longer remember how they call the dish) just the way we use onions. Our hosts proudly let us taste the dish for lunch—and that was the first time I tasted the native spice.
When Ja saw the plant, he said, “Oh, my God, I never knew you’d like to plant a weed!”
I merely smiled. Months later, when out of desperation, I put the weeds into his cup of noodles, he suddenly changed his mind.
“I never knew a simple plant like that could make my noodles taste better!” he said.
Now, I’m going ahead of the story. At the time when I sent Ja the text message, he still was unconvinced about my plants. I had to use it as a metaphor to scare him into watering it and taking care of the boys while I was away for the summer. I was worried about my boys. I was worried that the plants might not survive my long absence.
By the end of May, I went home to see the plants, scraggly from lack of water, but still surviving. Sadly, though, this is also how I feel about my boys but thanks God (or Goddess), we survived!

Before Ampatuan

Sometimes, we still look back and realize that we have crossed the line between the before and the after; and we are sad because we could no longer go back to that lazy--no, hectic--Sunday afternoon when everybody was packing, rushing to go. We agreed, we had biases, afterall. We are human beings. Our biases will always be towards humanity. Looking back now, we realize that we are thinking of another place, another time; and the thin line that separated our present from the past is the same thin line that bordered sanity and madness. That Sunday, we never had a hint about what will happen on a Tuesday, in between nine o'clock and eleven o'clock in the morning, when our world changed forever.

Lost and Found: Memories

Maybe, because I’ve taken so many detours in the past and gotten lost so many times in some jungles; maybe, because I’ve been stranded too often in someone else’s kitchen or got trapped in some odd jobs, my memories of dates have gotten so mixed up. Since the day I left the university I’ve been having trouble filling up forms that needed dates: I no longer remember things the way I used to remember them before.
But I still remember very clearly how the news of Ninoy Aquino’s death found us inside the upper classrooms of Holy Cross of Bansalan College in August 1983; which meant, we were in our higher years, then; because higher years at the Holy Cross of my hometown were in the classrooms on the third and fourth floors—the freshmen were on the ground floor.
When news about the Yellow Friday movement reached the airwaves, we were aware of the surging excitement in the world beyond, although we were still being kept inside the protective campus walls. One day, the whole class watched Ninoy’s wake on TV—I couldn’t remember where this was, but we were agog over Kris Aquino because we thought she looked like Jane! And here, the memories came back, Marichu or was it Tessa or Angie calling up Jane to catch a glimpse of her look-alike on screen—but this was still when K was still sweet, slim and seventeen; her mother, not yet President; and we watched Fr. Patrick Payton’s show in the park at night, featuring Jesus, Mary and the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, where at the end Fr. Payton would say, “The family who prays together, stays together;” followed by another show of the Exodus with Moses and his long cane in the desert.
Since I could no longer remember dates, I had to figure out many things on my own, which was rather hard to do. I figured that I couldn’t have graduated from high school in 1982, before Ninoy Aquino was gunned down on August 21, 1983 in the airport tarmac. To find the exact date, I’d begin again in 1972, when (former President) Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. I was still four years old. I can’t forget the sight and smell of lush Bermuda grass getting mixed up with the sound of Ma in the background, as she turned on the radio to listen to static (was this my memory or the memory of someone telling this to me?!). I remember hearing my agitated Ma the following day, talking to her fellow teacher in a slightly suppressed voice, “huh! Marcos has declared Martial Law!” and the rest of their blah-blah-blah!
The following year, I started school. I’d begin counting six elementary years and add them up with the four years in high school to finally get the exact date I graduated.
Just to make sure I got it right, I’d validate it with another memory: this time, no longer in the four-story building of my high school and its perennial sound of trumpets playing. This time, it’s the memory of huge glass windows awash with sunlight; of whitewashed walls and our tightlipped Ilocano professor holding us in his geodetic engineering class when all we wanted was stick our ears on the radio to listen to the reports of people crowding the streets of Edsa. That was February 21 to 25, 1986.
I did not make it to the reunion of the high school Batch 1984. But the huge streamer they put up had put an end to my figuring out.

Karl

Late in the afternoon of the last day of the year, the sun made bright outlines of your shirts on the clothesline and painted strips of gold on the walls of my room. Near the corner where you always strummed your guitar, sat an empty chair. I listened to the neighborhood kids singing your songs downstairs. All I had were the debris you left behind, as usual: an abandoned cap of the black pentel pen that dried up long ago left lying on the floor, a drawing pad full of sketches of skin-and-bone kids with angular faces, long spiky hair and half-finished bodies, a tattered notebook full of your dogged attempts at rap, the earphones I told you not to mix with my clutter; your soiled socks strewn in the corner.
Where are you? I strain my ears for the sound of your footsteps. It has been 17 years today since you left my body. I wait for the sound of knocking at the door.
My room is full of shadows.
You are everywhere.

Happy Birthday

What do I have for you today? Our years have been spelled out by p-o-v-e-r-t-y. I should stop trying to send you gifts I can barely afford; stop pretending I could even cook up your favorite spaghetti, or give you that branded hood you wanted so badly.
I have to be more upright; more down-to-earth. All I have are words. Let’s sit down and count the years we’ve been together. I still remember the precise hour when you arrived; I can reduce that entire year to one eventful second—only one second—that changed my life.
I can start at the dawning of the early signs. It was quarter to one in the afternoon on New Year’s Day of 1993 there at an old Tres de Abril apartment. I could not forget the bright red cushions on the rattan chair. Facing the wooden bookstand, I was glancing at the clock, timing the pain every five minutes, seeing your father’s anxious face outside the screen door. He had rushed in from his rented house to take part in this moment of great drama: The rush to the hospital on a taxi, the panic on his face, moments of exhilaration as I was led the way to a mysterious chamber filled with women’s screams.
My first encounter with snotty hospital attendants and edema, a form of women’s torture, angry voices scolding women giving birth to men; bloody sheets and writhing bodies on the beds next to mine, women moaning in great pain.
Sorry to give you these ugly images on your 17th birthday. But ugliness surrounded that moment of great beauty. If I fail to remember this, you wouldn’t understand half your life: You were raised in great pain.
Your father only came in when all the blood had been washed away. He actually missed the whole story.