Near the site of the Fallen Lauaan

I need to run to the forest, if the forest is still there.

I just came from a forest area of Upper B'la, where I took a picture of the lauan fell by a neighbor--no, he's not necessarily a neighbor, but he lives somewhere in the area--in a land that Pa has come to consider his home. I took pictures of the dead lauan and caught a whiff of bad energy coming from the greed and pride of men. Maybe, it will take some other time for me to write about the whole thing.

Going home to B'la

Book Lust

Just like any other healthy tree, my bookpile is growing very fast everyday, but no one is reading them yet. At least, officially: don't call my sneak-reading any legitimate form of reading because they're not supposed to be counted. I am still so busy getting my life back on track, trying to cover stories to get me back in circulation; cooking meals to test the limits of my herbs to Ja and Sean's discriminating tastes; running to the kanto, pretending to buy something at the corner grocery store and secretly hoping to lose some weight; sorting and re-arranging the clutter on my table, marking all my reporter's notebooks with dates and subjects of coverage, recording and remembering dreams, thinking about the rainforest in B'la, conjuring things. There will always be sometime at night when everyone is asleep and I turn on the lamp on my table, open the pages of Edith Wharton's Buccaneer and I will be transported back to another time, another place. Then, I will cease to be myself. I will be transformed into someone else I hardly know.

Old passion re-asserting itself

When I was six, Ma came home with an exciting news about an artist/teacher, a dignified and illustrious Mr. I forgot-his-name, accepting six or seven year-old children to train under him at home. The students--whom Ma imagined could be all boys--would stay with the Master on weekdays and may go home on weekends, an arrangement similar to a boarding school for young artists.  Even in a remote place like B'la, it promised something special; it even sounded different: a training in Art. I felt loved, happy.  Even at that point, I thought, Ma must have felt something about me, must have thought I had some of what people called "potential."  I was filled with excitement. Day after day I waited for it to happen: to learn Art, to watch the Maestro render reality on paper. But the month ended without a word from Ma. I waited and waited until the waiting became so unbearable.  When I finally asked her about it,  she told me she decided against it because she was worried about me. For her, it was unimaginable: a six-year-old girl living with boys under the tutelage of a man.   That officially ended my career in Art and Ma quickly forgot all about it.  I didn't. 
Well, maybe, I forgot all about it while I was growing up but that's what I remember now.  I remember how I was quickly forgotten, my dreams set aside. 
Ma taught us to put ourselves last always.  All the drawings that mattered in school were those being done by boys.  The bold strokes, the tri-dimensional realistic renditions, the portraits that copied reality even if they were only done with a ballpoint pen. Girl drawings were merely beautiful, trivial. Together, we--girls--thrived in the shadows, learning from each other and enjoying every moment of it; and that's how we persisted. It's only now, when old passions try to re-assert themselves, overwhelming us in their intensity, that we come to realize we could have been bolder.  
Then, we want to start all over again.

Pa voted in 1965

But for whom? Did he vote for Ferdinand Marcos, who won that year and later, plunged the country into the darkest era of its history? Or, did he vote for Diosdado Macapagal, who lost that year but whose daughter, who got the taste of Malacanang at age 14, also became the president in the post-Marcos years, one of the presidents who faced a plunder case toward the end of her  term? I don't know to whom did he cast his vote but the moment I first laid eyes on his voter's ID, I was simply awestruck  by how young he looked. "So, this is the guy who had smitten Ma?" I asked.  A quick math showed he was still 28; if the birth year on the ID was right; though, we were told all our life that he was born in 1935, just like Ma; and later, I would discover another document which showed he was born in 1936. The place in Mambusao, Capiz, which held the documents of his birth had been burned during the war.
I found his voter's ID sometime in 2016, when he was in his 80s [age count based on the latest document]; and he was in Davao City, struggling with lung cancer, taken under the care of my sister Ai-Ai, while I had to rush to the house in B'la to oversee the sale of copra the following day.  I was alone in the house the whole night, when in the wee hours, armed with a flashlight and my reading glasses, I decided to trespass my way through his dust-covered nito bag, to rummage his old and yellowing documents.  I wonder about the life of that young man, then. Below the word occupation, the clerk had written, farmer. His entire life was the land and the coconut farm. I wonder what gave him so much pleasure then, what made him wince in pain, what made him sad, what were the dreams he dreamed of, what were the things he thought about so often, what were the monsters he feared. "I used to have lots of money because I was always working," he had told me, over and over, while we were in the hospital waiting for his diagnosis.  
"But I've always been working since the day I left college, Pa," I had wanted to say because my experience was different.  "I always had a lot of cash," he kept repeating.  
He told me all about his abundance of cash at the time when I never had enough to survive, so poor, I could not even afford to take a few days off from work. I had wanted to ask, so, where is your money, Pa? Can you save a daughter with your lots of money? But an admission of poverty would surely anger him.  "Pobre?! Kinsa'y ingon, pobre?!" he'd say, and so, I kept everything to myself. 
After delighting at the picture of the younger Pa, my eyes fell on the rather strong and uneven handwriting on the card's left corner, the same cursive that appeared on my birth certificate.  Even the handwriting spoke about my Pa.  It may have lacked the grace and spontaneity of someone accustomed to hold the pen but it showed the stubborn firmness, the grit and determination of the boy who was already working the farm since he was still nine years old.   When they got to Mindanao, he had wanted to study and be a pilot, just like his Uncle, he said. But when the family was able to buy land, he had set aside the dream and helped four of his younger siblings go to school.  At times, when he was bedridden, he still had his memories of Uncle Erin or of Uncle Jose--which of the two uncles was the pilot or the priest, I still kept confusing, until now--and how, he was taken in an airplane with the Uncle once, when he was still a boy.
The back of the card showed his thumb mark and the date, March 29, 1965, when the voter's ID was issued.  Both the presidential and legislative elections was slated in November that year, still a good eight months away.  Pa used to be either dismissive or tyrannical about his views of politics. Some time in the past, I could have picked up a hint whether he voted for Macapagal or Marcos. Sometimes, in fact, I had the vague memory of hearing it, not from his mouth but from the things he refused to say. 
Marcos had won the elections that year, which eventually paved his way to becoming a Dictator.  
I had the feeling that Pa wouldn't have voted for him. 
But that's only a daughter's opinion. 

Now, Back to Work!

B'la is a fictional place that doesn't exist only in the imagination. It exists in the minds of people who once lived or have always been living there even if they're no longer there physically.

That Old Letter

I could no longer find that goddamned letter. No matter how I tried or cried, I could no longer find it. The last time I saw it, I was either in that state university where I first saw you strumming the guitar, walking in from the rain, water droplets in your hair; or, maybe, I was home in B'la, and that letter was in a box. I said, the letter could never get lost here, the box was my only possession and I hid it from Mother, and since there was no place in the house that Mother could not see, I was secretly hoping that Mother would not open it. She should not because it was mine. The box contained the only things a girl could possess in the world, some notebooks and foolish writings, memorabilias from the barricade line and being such a small, humble, unassuming box, it was very easy to rummage, no letter could ever get lost there. So, I placed the letter in one of the pages of my old notebook, thinking I would go over it again and again, I will never get tired of reading it, especially when I was alone and Mother was not looking, and Nani, my cordon sanitaire, was not around, tucked away conveniently from my life. I said, I got to read that letter. I got to savor the feeling of being adored by those amazing pair of eyes and feel the blood tingling in my veins. It was not everyday that I felt my blood tingle. But I was still young and thin and lean and innocent and in love for the first time and too naive to know that the letter, being made of paper, could also get lost in a corner or get blown away by the wind as I was whisked away from there to places I've never been to; far away, very far away from you.

The Myth called B'la

Family Album (excerpt of a life)

(My life as Germelina Lacorte is still a work-in-progress. This is an excerpt.)

THIS IS a snapshot of our house, before the old porch was torn down. It was probably taken in the 1980s, in one of the hottest, driest summers of the El Nino, so, all you see here is the stark wooden structure standing against the bleak dried up landscape of B’la, one of those little known villages in the surrounding towns of Mt. Apo.
All the leaves of the trees are gone. Even the bermuda grass in the front yard had browned and wilted.
Ma must have taken this with the Kodak 110 Instamatic camera that Eve was prodding her to buy at that time. A camera is supposed to capture beauty. Here, it captured the color of dust (gray and hazy) and the dried up stems of the gumamelas (brown). Even before time has turned them into sepia. Ma had tucked it for years among her files of old letters.
If we had known, then, that Ma was taking this picture, we would have stopped her at that time. Imagine, the house taken in the midst of a drought! Without even a single leaf to hide the truth. It was unthinkable. We barely reached our teens then. The truth, for us, was just too ugly to bear : a blurry image of a wooden house tilting in the uneven landscape. It was a one-bedroom house, perched high up on wooden pillars, with a porch and staircase facing east, and turns inward to a very small living room that leads to an even smaller dining room and a much smaller dirty kitchen and a bangkera to the south. The porch windows—which had long rectangular boxes holding potted plants—had wooden grills of geometric designs.
The living room—had a couple of wooden jalousie windows facing east---opens to the small bedroom to the west, where we used to peer out at the setting sun with fear in our hearts. Small kerosene lamps light our nights. We slept on wooden lauaan floor and wake up to the harsh sun, dappling the floor near the porch with geometric shapes, and the living room and the bangkera, with stripes.
The dining room opens to a pantawan facing west, where a huge rotting wooden table stood nearby a rickety wooden ladder that led to our muddy backyard. On top of this rickety structure, precariously stood a huge water tank, where once upon a time, a cat had drowned. I used to be afraid that this water tank might fall and spill its contents down the termite-ridden ladder, in a deluge. Nothing of the sort happened and yet, the fear and apprehension I used to suffer in the good old days in that house, stayed with me until now...