Stories

Sometimes, I can almost say, I work for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Stories like this appear on its pages once in a while to tell the world where I've been spending my weekends. I've been issued the correspondent's ID and an ATM card where I draw out my pay every 15th of the month although fear hovers over my existence most of the time. The fear has something to do with the next pay. And the next stories. I'm scared of the days when I might stop writing these kind of stories and my by-line won't appear on the pages anymore and I'm lost in some remote, unchartered territories of my mind, unable to find my way home.
Those days have finally come. I don't know what to say.

On the Graveyard Shift

It's one o'clock in the morning.
Inside downtown Davao's Clickerz' internet cafe, a strong lemony scent wafts through the air. A lanky guy wipes a rag next to this computer as somebody raises the volume of a curious music playing from an invisible soundbox. The beat is playful and a bit too loud.
A group of dark-clad youngsters smelling of beer are crowding the counter. They are a noisy lot. Their stance and their presence is threatening. They keep passing by my computer, casting hostile glances at my direction. Some of them are standing right behind my back, as if asking me to leave. I can feel them reading what I'm writing here.
It's one fifteen now. I keep resisting the urge to go home in the comfort of bed. I feel so lost it looks like I could no longer find my way home. I'm stuck here in this place crawling with drug addicts, rugby boys and young people losing their way to the crazy whims of the world.
The Roman Catholic Church has a name for it. Purgatory. Urrrgggh. Even their music is boisterously loud. Their lyrics do not make any sense to me. All I hear is a repetitive chugchugging of drums. I'm shaking. The air conditioning is so cold. These people around me never seem to get tired. The bluish lights near the entrance makes me think it's five o'clock in the morning but it's still two o'clock yet. Five more long hours to go before daylight and the streets of Davao become habitable again.
Maybe, I'll have to go to the sea.

The Spy in my Pillow

I can feel a pair of eyes snooping in my room as I was writing this. I saw the dark shape of a head, sticking through the door I was facing as I typed on the keyboard. Several seconds later, the same head materialized through the window to my left, as if its owner wanted to find out what was happening to me, what I was writing here and why. I can feel the piercing pair of eyes as if it were a thermometer, trying to gauge how hot or how cold my room was. Or, more likely it was a barometer trying to tell whether a storm was coming. Was it my temperature he was trying to measure? Was it my storm he was bracing against?

Who was this snooper? Why won’t he come up to me and face things squarely?
I was seeing him only through the peripheral vision of my eyes. But the way he tilted his head to avoid the light and the way the light caught the pair of spectacles he was wearing, the way it sculpted his forehead and his face as he tried to read my face-all were too familiar. I turned around to meet his gaze-perhaps, to ask what was he doing peeping in my room like that, making me feel I was kind of a lunatic---but just as swiftly, he was gone.
Instead, I found myself in my room looking out to another grilled set of windows in our living room, which in turn was also looking out to the busy highway outside.
The blue curtain in my window was tucked away sideways to the left to accommodate the view--but looking out from here, all I saw were the holes of the granite fence walls showing glimpses of jeepneys scrambling along the McArthur highway.
Over an hour ago, the rain was pouring in a tumult down the house. The noise was almost unbearable when the waters slammed down the galvanized iron roofing above our heads. I had stood by that window, watching the last pair of kaimito and coconut trees, swaying across the street littered with small stores and brightly-painted commercial buildings. A kind of a thin, grayish haze seemed to hover over our part of Matina highway. This part of the highway closely approached the intersection just a few houses away, where one curve of the road leads to the SM city mall in Ecoland while another one straight ahead leads to NCCC mall and further down to the old downtown street of Claveria.
The haze and the gray skies were giving me a stifled, oppressed feeling. I blurted this out loud and someone had disagreed. He straightened the pair of spectacles he was wearing, peered at me very closely and said it was the date. February hung ominously over our house, he said, because the day when I was most susceptible to extreme mood swings was getting near. He was talking to me. He said I was sick. He had his own way of seeing things.
Hearing him, I felt sick and tired. The familiar suffocating feeling swept over me.
Then, suddenly, the rain had stopped. He had rushed outside to do his work in some café while I sat here in my room, before the heavenly white screen of my computer monitor. It was the only space in my entire universe where I can be free.
Now, the light in the sky was back. I looked up to see a gleam of white light to the West. I still had an hour before dark and it felt like eternity. I began typing away.

At the Marco Polo

As usual, I arrived late for the Wednesday Club 888 press conference. I thought there was nobody inside the little bar just beside the hotel's concierge counter, when I saw the empty chairs near the glass door.
But when I entered, everybody was there. I saw Q and Joel Esco and the rest of the group gathered around the bar, sipping lukewarm coffee from their cups while Awi and the others were crowding around a man in pink in the next table, ambush interviewing.
I was in no mood to join them because I just had a row with Karl, who lost his ID when we were supposed to go to the bank to open his savings account this morning. I stormed out of the house in Matina and boarded a jeepney, feeling ill-used and exploited despite my having screamed so loud, I must have awakened the neighbors.
Even as I took my seat very near the presscon's speakers, my anger at Karl's sloppiness had not left me. Probably it had borne a hole in my stomach. Waves of nausea and exasperation swept over me. I've been reminding him about his ID since the other day but it was only when we were about to go that he finally decided to look for it.
"I don't need an ID," he was saying earlier with that sheepish grin all over his face, the same grin used by his Dad, when he was trying to tell the children, "Don't mind Mama, because we know better. She's just plain neurotic, paranoid, etc.. ."
I was angry. I still am. He needed an ID to go to that bank and he had been postponing going there since eternity. Urgghh, children. As if it was for our own sake that we are doing things for them. I've been feeling sooooo bad in being treated this way. I'm a disgruntled ONE. I feel like I could start a WAR!

The Woman in White

I don't know how to go about my story. Angst, according to Nico, would lead to pangs or hunger. I got to write as fast as I can to earn my bread but I can't because I think, I don't have to eat that much to stay alive. Besides, I need to blog.
Today is the last day of the ASEAN Tourism Forum and all the guests are doing the last minute shopping before their flight tomorrow. There's going to be dinner hosted by some city or town somewhere. I don't think I can go there. I don't need to go.
All I care is to be here, inside the press center, sitting before a keyboard and a computer. Somebody left a cup of coffee and a pile of saucers near this desktop I am using. Except for one or two computers, the press center is full. I don't understand my notes. The woman to my right is talking to her companion from Manila. A while ago, I've been laughing at something that Jessica Zafra has written on her blog and this woman asked me if I had done my stories for the day.
Maybe, she was making an accounting, I thought. I heard she was from DOT or something. I told her I have done wwwooooolll my stories already. I was about to tell her, I've done so many stories for ATF, some came out of the Inquirer business features, some did not come out at all. As long as I can blog here all I can, I really couldn't care less whether they come out or not.
She opened her computer and I can tell that she's under some very visible throes how to go about her story. She typed on her keyboard, "media release," all caps. Thirty minutes passed and she was still staring at the white monitor. I don't know what she found there. It must be quite interesting. She's wearing a white blouse and a pair of black pants. Then, her companion pulled a chair and sat beside her and she said, "She's with Inquirer." Her companion smiled. "From Manila?" I said, no. "Provincial," the woman said. I wanted to strangle her.

Bargaining with the FireDog

It’s getting late in the year and I haven’t exactly known the FireDog yet. But I can smell hunger stalking in the halls as I sit lusting in the corner after the things that the FireDog can bring, if I manage to strike a successful bargain.
I promise the firedog the most memorable year in terms of pictures if he brings in one of those four to eight megapixel Canon Powershot digital cameras, with 7x optical zoom Canon was selling with a free powershot radio and USB card reader last Christmas season as a holiday treat to unsuspecting customers. Or, I can settle with any of Sony’s Cybershot line with 32 MB internal memory and the Carl Zeiss Vario Tessar lens, as long as these are brought to my doorstep for free before the end of the month.
Or, even that V530 Kodak Easy Share digital camera, now advertised as an amazingly stylish camera, in a very hot deal ad on the Philippine Daily Inquirer, will do for a moment. That V530 is now selling at P20,995; free with 128 MB Kodak SD card and a camera case. It’s a five megapixel digital camera, sleek and stunning in red, grey and black colors, powered by the exclusive Kodak color Science chip. I wonder if this camera is really as good as it looks but it is equipped with Schneider-Krueznach V-Variogin lens, with 3x optical and 4 x digital zoom and an MPEG 4 video that capture high quality, true-to-life colors, so that ad says!
Now that the reign of the firedog begins, I promise to deliver my part if the firedog fulfills his part of the bargain. I’d take pictures of Davao at six o’clock in the morning, standing at that portion of Magallanes street, just a little behind the SP building where the gables of the Royal Mandaya hotel jut out of the old shabby rows of buildings along Bolton street.
I’ll disembark from a jeepney passing by the Bankerohan bridge and take a shot of Davao river, framed by shanties that populate the riverbanks. Or, hang around Bankerohan public market shortly before dusk to take pictures of crowds crawling over the open ukay ukay stalls like ants, under the backdrop of the setting sun.
Walk along Matina’s McArthur highway to buy pan de sal early in the morning, to frame the peak of Mt. Apo blanketed by clouds, with the concrete overpass hanging over the road by the Matina public market.
I promise to be as truthful as I could get, whatever truthfulness means. I’ll take a walk along the seedy aisles and alleys in the city to capture a glimpse of life that other people deem ugly. I’d choose the often forgotten and taken for granted street alleys as mementos to the future. I’ll start with that alley in between the Grand Menseng Hotel and the carinderias lining down Magallanes street that hide the Community Hospital at the back. This alley leads to the bank of the Davao River where people take the boat ride across to the SIR village of Matina. Another small pathway running parallel to the river, branch from this alley going to the emergency room of the Community Hospital, where patients’ relatives keep vigil late at night. This alley stinks of dried urine, where foul-mouthed teenagers ply at night, something that could not be captured by camera. But the sights of barbecue stalls and street food and the transaction going on near the riverbank surely will give future anthropologists something to think about.
I promise to take them all to treasure--but only if the firedog gives me one hell of a chance of owning one of those cameras, instead of just leaving me here drooling over the pages.

Notes from the Year of the WoodCock

Was it a good year? Was it a bad year?
I don’t know. But throughout the year of the Wood Cock, things had a way of turning up.
The year started the morning I was dancing frantically in my room with no lights on. It ended with my blog at some downtown internet café towards the midnight that signaled the start of another year.

I WAS DANCING in my room at the start of the year (that was) while outside, Dad sat at the corner near the door, sketching a brigantine. The boys--Sean and Karl--were staying mostly in the kitchen, eating biscuits and watching Nickolodeon on cable TV, which was eventually cut off later in the year for our failure to pay the subscription fee.
I was dancing not because I was happy and excited but because I was afraid. I was wondering what the Year of the Cock would bring (to my boys) and dancing had a way of chasing away the bad spirits, keeping my heart open and my mind alert. I’ve been hearing things about the Cock even before that. “Isang kahig, isang tuka,” somebody warned. “One eats from whatever she can get from scratch,” went my very poor translation.
But how this creature, the Cock loved to crow and how cocky it can get, how flamboyant and how whimsical---and also how lucky! The Cock had a knack of finding anything wherever it scratched.
Indeed, it was the year I scratched everywhere like crazy. In the nearby city of Tagum, I documented a mining conference where the Mansakas, Mandaya and Dibabawun tribes were angry at what’s happening to their lands and because they can’t understand the paradoxical things the government was telling them about mining. Months later, I documented again the making of the “Tagum Indigenous Peoples’ Declaration on IP Education,” where I watched a Dibabawun balyan (a tribal priest) doing the ritual dance under the mango tree. Midway through his dance, the balyan stopped because the “abian” (spirit) was complaining about the altar. The balyan was using a four-legged wooden table somebody dragged from the workshop hall instead of the traditional “tambara” (altar). For atonement, the abian required the balyan to come back on the full moon, on the 16th day the following month to do another ritual dance.

ALL THOSE scratching yielded gems. Things that I loved simply turned up in the most unlikely places to cheer me up when I was about to lose hope. Bruce Chatwin’s “Songlines” selling at P35 at the NCCC Bookshop when my spirits were down. Or the Winter1993 issue of “The Paris Review” featuring Wang Meng’s fiction, “The Stubborn Porridge,” and Joanna Scott’s “You Must Relax!” and many others I never expected to find.
My dear friend Ava Vivian’s story on the Free Press, I chanced upon to read one afternoon when I entered the City Library while waiting for the rain to stop. Or, the email I got from Janis, the author of the Waray poetry whose lines had always made me cry, now telling me she had survived a year working for the Department of Labor and Employment!
Or Keith texting me from out of nowhere because he was going with us on our trip to Mamasapano, Maguindanao at the height of the rido conflict there when some other colleague had tried to scare me off from riding the helicopter.
Or, when I was running out of everything to give to the house help, Inquirer texted me to pick up an unexpected check for a story I wrote the previous year that the editors had picked up as the newspaper’s Best Feature for the month.
But most of all, the allure of working in our paperless news magazine www.davaotoday.com which never ceased to make me feel both magically invisible and visible, at the same time.

On the first month of the year when I was reeling from friends’ betrayal, I unconsciously opened the old copy of “The Complete Handbook of Astrology,” left lying in my elder son’s room. On the left bottom of the page was a pen and ink drawing in sepia of a girl fainting and being helped by the dwarves. I read, Cancer Affinities, and discovered the archetypal Cancerian: Snow White, the innocent whose trust was betrayed but who found comfort and shelter in the bosom of her tiny family. I have never been a “Snow White,” I hated all the things she represented but the day that I discovered this “archetypal Cancerian” was the day I beamed with gratitude to those bosom friends in my life.

It was also a year of outrage and endless running away. Realizing that the battle I’ve been fighting in the kitchen (or the home, as a whole) was something that I could not win, I decided to run away from home. I took refuge in my sister’s house in Butuan and began thinking of endless possibilities. Loving the taste of freedom and the unbearable lightness of being freed from all weight of responsibilities, I kept dreaming of flight. But in the end I went back home to the kids, quietly cursing myself for having the mentality of a slave.

But things, indeed, had a way of turning up! On the day when we finally launched the maiden issue of Davao’s newest online magazine www.davaotoday.com, I went home to hear the heartwarming news of Karl winning the editorial cartooning contest in the Davao city division elementary school press conference. Towards the end of the year, he would win in the region. But he’s still a boy. He hardly cleaned his room last year. He got me worrying 90 per cent of the time for always coming home late and staying too long in those internet cafes, playing games of Ragnarok, or whatever online game it was that caught his fancy. He found numerous exasperating ways to circumvent the rules we set at home. On the day that he won the division press conference, his campus paper adviser scolded him for coming to school late. On the day that he won the region, the only sign pen that he brought to the contest would not write. So, you see!

BUT STILL, the year ended with a happy note. Like magic.

Fodders for the New Year

FODDERS. I went around Davao city before the Christmas holidays and had real trouble finding an SM city mall second floor bookshop because it has been replaced by another shop selling Christmas gift wrappers, gifts and souvenir items.
Talking to the guy of another bookshop at the ground floor, I learned that the owner of the bookshop was lending out the space of the upstairs bookshop to a friend for the holidays. The books will finally be back some time in February. It’s a long wait for my book-starved soul but anyway the one running the ground floor was pouring into their rummage bins a horde of dusty, crumbling paperbacks put on sale at P10 a piece. There, I found a sturdy paperback edition of Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing," a crumbly copy of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," Philip Roth's hilarious parody of former US President Richard Nixon’s stance on abortion "Our Gang," and other paperbacks by Jack Kerouac, and by the author of "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey. Forgive me for sounding so pathetic but my state of penury is now reaching 'poetic' proportions. The garbage bin is my last chance of nourishing my soul. It is perhaps, my last chance of getting an education!
Thanx to UP Prof. Butch Dalisay for his column too is a rare, delightful holiday treat. Hope he doesn't mind that I post here a part of his Philippine Star PENMAN column to brighten the prospects of another year. HAPPY NEW YEAR!


A treasure trove
PENMAN
By Butch Dalisay
The Philippine STAR 12/26/2005

”Speaking of books, let me share my joy in discovering – or make that rediscovering – the treasure trove of used and remaindered books on the fourth floor of National Book Store in Cubao. (I believe they have the same setup at NBS Quezon Avenue.) I found myself with a free hour on my hands a couple of weeks ago and remembered Clinton Palanca mentioning to me once that he went up to that floor for his fix of French books. I don’t read French, but any bookstore that has a corner for such rare treats must have something more, and I gave up my usual foray into the seafood section of Farmers Market for a stroll though the NBS shelves. What a cornucopia it turned out to be – shelf upon shelf and row upon row of books in glorious disarray; there was some effort to put all the books, say, about the vacation-spots of England in one corner, and all the computer books in another, but ultimately a grand disorder prevailed, refreshing and compelling in its challenge for you to explore the place for its hidden prizes. I’d stopped buying books for some years, having hopelessly fallen behind in my reading of what I already had, and I’d forgotten what a pleasure it was to brush the deckled edges of carefully bound books or to savor the prose of an unremarked genius. In the end, I came away with a fine balance between interests old and new: the hardbound and well-illustrated In Search of Shakespeare by Michael Wood (P500), and a thick paperback I just couldn’t resist, Infinite Loop (How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane) by Michael S. Malone (P360). There went my budget for crab and shrimp, but I’m not complaining.

In Search of the Lost Catalogue

by Germelina Lacorte


"Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born."--Jorges Luis Borges "The Library of Babel"


THE DAVAO CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY--- In stark contrast to Jorge Luis Borges’ universe (which others call the Library), composed of indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries; the Davao City Library sits on a clearly definable space---an L-shaped floor area of more than a thousand square meters on the third floor of the SP building, clearly bounded by solid walls that one can grasp from end to end.There are no spiraling staircases here, no room leading on to another identical one, no illusory mirrors to multiply and create semblance of infinity.You just climb six flights of stairs up the building (in front of San Pedro Cathedral) and find your way on the third floor to the library entrance---which also serves as exit. Inside, one can immediately grasps the expanse of space, divided into rectangles and squares, to delineate the reading room from the bookshelves; the office spaces from the carpeted children’s corner, the periodicals from the cubicles beside the windows overlooking Rizal Park three floors below; the glass-walled conference room with its long table and ergonomic chairs; and another enclosed space housing rows of computers used to be connected with the internet, but are now being used only for the Library’s CD-ROM collections.And yet, going through one of the Library’s 17,000-title collections can sometimes give you the same effect of that Borgesian labyrinth---you’d get lost in a maze, trying to find your way through the printed page that leads you to some strange, unfamiliar world which entrances and exits duplicate and multiply a thousand times over.ONE morning, I have wandered inside the lonely, dimly lit circulation section of the library; and in between the small rows of shelves---I found among the maze of titles there---Toni Morrison’s "Beloved" lying side by side with Robert Ludlum’s "Icarus Agenda;" and Stephen King’s "Nightmares and Dreamscapes" with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "The Brothers Karamazov."Trying to understand what quirks of fate had brought two different authors together, I had struggled, for a few seconds against this seeming sensual assault. But in the end, the odd combination seemed to produce a strange effect---a sensation you feel when you find a discarded treasure in a books on bargain downtown. So, like all the rest who peopled the Library, I stayed on to read.If I had entered here in search of a book, I would have been tempted to find the catalogue, to consult Book A to find the exact location of Book B, as Borges would say---but I have entered the Library with the stubborn belief that such catalogue does not exist, or even if it does, leafing through it wouldn’t help me at all---and so, I lingered among the shelves, picking my way through the titles I didn’t expect to find.And yet, some surprises lurked in some remote, forgotten corners of the library.On the long shelves of the Reference Section, where old copies of encyclopedia and Bibles were on display, I found "The Encyclopedia on Witchcraft and Demonology," written by Rossell Hope Robbins, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, published by Crown Publishers Inc. in New York.Probably, you’d say, I have strayed too far. But the book illumines that part of history unknown to most people---the witchcraft trials that began in the 15th century Europe, reached its peak in the 16th century Salem and finally ended in the 18th century; precursor of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States’ McCarthy era and later, our own Martial Law era,---and now, the vigilante killings?!Thumbing through the book pages, I saw the bluish logo of the Rotary Club of Nepean-Kanata in Ottawa, Canada. It had slightly faded, unlike the bright purple ink with which the Library left its mark on the next pages; as if to assert its ownership over the book, probably one of its latest acquisition.For the Library is not buying books, says Librarian Nora Fe Alajar, "The library lives on donation." Of the 17,000 titles in its collection, only 3,000 are Filipiniana issues from the National Library. The rest---over 14,000 titles--come from institutions and individual friends worldwide.Friends of the library---which included such institutions like the Asia Foundation and the Ateneo deDavao University (ADDU) and civic clubs like the Rotary and individuals---are posted on a bulletin space in the library entrance outside.It is late in the morning. Thick venetian blinds diffuse the harsh light that enters through the glass windows to the west. I am keenly aware of the humming sounds of the air conditioning, interspersed with the rustles of papers and the muffled sound of distant traffic as I pick up another book.It is the crumbly paperback copy of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a Penguin Classics in the 1950s, the only copy I find in this library. In one of its stained pages, stamped on red ink, I read, "adult education section, public library, N. Y. C." It is the novel’s second volume, translated from Russian by David Magarshack. The first volume is nowhere to be found.A professor of long ago---had often said no library can exist without a copy of this book. But what about a library with only half a copy?Who is to say, what makes up a good library? Whether constructed by a series of hexagons that extends indefinitely into space or a room of ones own, libraries are driven to answer the same thirst, or quest, that once had drove Virginia Woolf---to knock on its door only to be turned away because the libraries in those days "were not opened to ladies" unless escorted by a "Fellow of a College" or "furnished with a letter of introduction." But that was three quarters of a century ago, when Woolf had written "A Room of Ones Own."Now, I am inside the public library, vigorously writing on a desk, knowing fully well how some libraries are still kept shut from me.‘That in order to read a book---any book---I have to transcend invisible boundaries marked by sex, class and race,’ I think, as my eyes fall on the note on the wall, which says, "Photocopying is punishable under the intellectual property rights law."A wide gulf still exists between those who can read a book and those who can’t; those who can pay the cost of intellectual property and those who can’t bring food to the table.I decided to go over the Filipiniana section, where the Library keeps complete stacks of the Palanca winning stories dating back to the 1950s. In the past years, the Library has been winning citations, making it the favored little cousin of the National Library, which regularly send new published titles by the country’s poets and fiction writers here.Now, the latest titles from the country’s few publishing firms still keep arriving, says Alajar, "Over 300 of them arrived late last year." Some of the very old books---they could not tell how old---have been discarded, kept in storage, or put away to the three satellite libraries in the districts of Tugbok, Calinan, Tibungco and Toril; or in the newly-opened ones in barangays of Marahan and Buda.THE hissing of air conditioning is now getting louder. I sit in a chair facing the periodical section of the Library; in between college students, deep into their books. Immediately before me are potted Chinese bamboo plants that seem to grow taller the longer I read the printed page. The girl to my right, is stretching her arms upon the desk; the guy to my left is forcefully punching periods on his notebooks, shaking our desk.Many people go to the library for quite different reasons; some in search of the lost catalog, the book of books that tells people how to live. Others, come here just to read the newspapers. Still others---who believe no such catalog exists, merely come here just to drift-because once they open the pages, they could never tell what world they’ll find.