La Vida Loma

It was the first of a long series of apartments we would live in; in Santa Mesa Heights in Quezon City but we came to know it as La Loma. The apartment was the farthest from the street in a row of three in a compound. It was a two-bedroom apartment; I shared a room with a brother (-- the resident boy genius; he would accumulate medals for academic excellence that would be more than a foot long laid side by side; he played basketball reasonably well; played the guitar, too; me? I made him look even better for I was simply stupid and mediocre) while everybody else slept in the other room. We shared a wooden bed with a tattered banig for a mattress. Ours had a big window that had a bird's eye view of the kitchen cum laundry area of the adjoining apartment. The window had an iron grille on it but the top grille was missing which allowed us to climb out unto a nearby branch of a guava tree.

The window also allowed moonbeams to flood the room on certain nights and it was simply magical. Moonbeams fascinated me. Its unnatural glow rendered everything in gray scales; depth and space reduced and simplified in a palette of two-dimensional shadows; reality distorted. Moonbeams taught me misdirection and to blend in and be inconspicuous like a cat in an un-catlike pose. I discovered that I could hide in plain sight just by standing in a way that would make me look like something else. Sometimes I would sneak out of bed and explore the surreal two-dimensional world while everybody slept. And, in really bright nights I’d raid Boy Genius' comic book collection while he slept and read them under a stream of moonbeam; Boy Genius kept a stack of pre-owned Lagim komiks and a few DC Comics. A moonbeam is a constant that is with me wherever I am; and it would be the same anywhere; anytime; sometimes, I would lie on the floor and I was transported back to Dada's house.

I saw a lot of firsts in this place: chicken pox; mumps and maybe three of the seven plagues. It was here too that I first encountered mortality; blood spurting out of a brother's eyebrow as a wire clothes hanger stuck out from his eyebrow. And our very own first Christmas tree; even if it was just an outline of a tree rendered in twinkling lights Scotch-taped on the wall. It was here too that I would become aware of the beginnings of cracks on the foundation of our family home; there would be flare-ups for the flimsiest of reasons. And when I stayed home after having been made to stop from going to school, I became the witness of several of these violent eruptions. In the calm of the storms, I would see a muttering caged animal pacing the floor; and then, without warning, violence would erupt again.

I would spend much of the day setting up tin can traps for guppies on an open sewage canal out front. Needle thin dragonflies would hover on the water surface and I would catch a bunch throughout the day. Otherwise, I would climb the Duhat and Caimito trees that lined the fence. Sometimes, the girls-- teenage daughters of the apartment owner, would let me in to watch television. There were lots of things to do and after a while I wouldn't cry as much when I see Big Sis and Boy Genius coming home from school.

We didn’t have television; not even a radio, but we had lots of fun; one of the best times I’ve had was when we sneaked into the playground of a nearby school. The school’s facade had little iron crucifixes on its wall and we used those as footholds to climb over the wall; from there it was just a jump away from the seesaws and swings. One time a security guard saw us; we scampered in all directions, but big sis can’t climb over the wall fast enough. When we got home we got a mouthful of scolding, a whack on the butt and for the finale: a Swirlee-- a head dunk on the toilet bowl.

There was a lesson there somewhere but it got flushed down the toilet.

The Girl by the Duhat Tree

She sat atop the low concrete barrier that ran across the front of Dada’s house. She always wore the same simple black dress, which seemed a bit frayed. She sat with hands on her knees— one in a tight fist, knuckles white, the other palm down. Her head tilted in an angle that made her black hair stream down her face; shoulders hunched; back arched. She was fragilely thin and looked aged in her late teens, her leprous arms and legs sallow and rough as a lizard’s belly. She kept the toes on her naked feet tucked in as if discomfited for not wearing slippers, which overall made her look like a crow from afar. Never did I catch her move and never did I inquire about her presence, a household help or perhaps a cousin’s yaya? I never had a reason to go near her either and I never did; she just sat there.

One summer, an aunt took my sister and me for a weekend in Baguio City. We took a train to La Union and a big black limousine the rest of the way. We went to the usual tourist traps during the day, but at night we stayed in an inn-- in a room rendered in kitschy mint green, along Session Road with nothing to do other than doodle on the misted windows. We only went out for Nido soup at the Star Café. A nightly jaunt the announcement of which instantly propelled me to quickly put on a jacket and ran ahead to the door. And in one of those nights, as I peered through the crack of the half opened door, I saw her— the girl by the Duhat tree. She was sitting on the edge of a sofa in the common area, exactly the way she did back at Dada’s garden. Was she on the train with us? No, she wasn’t. I was quite sure about that. No, she didn’t ride with us on the car either. But, there she sat. As I looked at her, mesmerized; she slowly extended her hand towards me— the one in a tight fist; as if she was about to give me whatever it was she held in it; she then began to open her hand. No, I wasn’t afraid. I was a stupid five-year old who did not know any better, but I was sure I wasn’t afraid. What popped in my head at that singular moment was, of all things, the thermos I left on the table. I almost forgot! Where will we put the bird’s nest soup? I ducked back to the room to grab it; and, just as quick ran back to the door. She wasn’t there. I never saw her again after that, not even by the Duhat tree.

Tinay: The Dragon Lady

A frumpy, bronze skinned slightly smelly muscular woman with an eternal surprised look on her face. Her hair-- parted in the middle and tightly braided in two shiny plaited loops then tucked behind her head-- was black as midnight and slick as snake skin. Her lips-- also black, are always tightly closed as if she was biting into something. Her liquid eyes, black as the darkest shadow, was as sharp as a that of a hawk.

I knew her as Tinay. She was Dada's labandera.

Tinay would sit on a small block of wood-- her personal bangko, and with knees bent and thighs pressing against her calves she would preside over a tub of overflowing white suds right next to the hand cranked water pump at the back of Dada's house.

Tinay was partial to unfiltered Bataan Matamis cigarettes, which she smoked with the lighted end inside her mouth. She could make smoke come out in a stream from the exposed unlighted end to shoo away a fly. She could also make the smoke flow out of her nostrils, stream up her face and make it appear that the smoke was coming out of her hair. She would only take a break to light up another cigarette. Sometimes she'd take out a cigarette-- which somehow had gone out, from her mouth to re-light it; and sometimes she'd just blow on it and it magically would light up again. On rare occasions, she'd take out the cigarette to spit out ash which had dropped on her mouth, but she would quickly pop in the cigarette back and smoke it until it disappeared onto the tip of her tongue.
By late afternoon, Tinay would be ironing clothes while she listened to Oras ng Ligaya on the AM radio; and just before the resident tuko could conclude its daily recitative, she’d be done and having an early dinner, eating with her fingers. I would watch her sometimes and if I get too near her, she'd shove a handful of rice into my mouth, too. It always tasted good.

Tinay is the fire breathing dragon of my childhood.

Mabuhay ka, Tinay.

Dada's House

Frisco. Streets unpaved; people still kicked dirt to get to where they had to go. Hawks hunted the skies and free roaming chickens comically flinched when shadows flickered on the ground; there were millions of butterflies, dragonflies too; lizards and snails were everywhere; and the horizon still ran away from the eyes. There were few distractions and complications were fewer still.
Dada’s house was perched up a steep rise on the northwestern corner of the estate. A silvery gray rectangle of wood slats on wooden stilts crowned with a tent of rusted galvanized iron sheets with overhanging eaves which seemed to have ended abruptly and whimsically where gutters should have been; and so when it rains, the house was engulfed in torrents of cascading waterfalls which, over time, had carved trenches and indentations along the perimeter of the house. The house creaked and crackled with the seasons and a symphony of aural stimulants ceaselessly bombarded it— the fractious booming of frogs on rainy nights, the cantatas of crickets and other little voices lull one to sleep at night. And at dawn, the hushed stirrings of life gently nudges you out of your bed. At first light Dada would already be at her kitchen whipping up a hearty breakfast of sinangag and dilis, tuyo or pritong itlog. The pungent aroma of garlic and sweet breads permeating the bare unpainted walls.

Cheerfully austere, but unapologetic for being so, the sparse furnishings emit a faint echo of better days passed: a wound-up pendulum clock that chimed the hour; a detailed image of the Sacred Heart of the Christ; select pieces of Narra furniture with intricate rattan wickerwork and bone in-lay.

Big wide windows, of capiz shells interwoven with slivers of wood, brought in the morning sun to the two bedrooms and the kitchen; while the sunset was showcased in the sitting area at the end the day; setting everything ablaze with hues of orange and red. The sitting area opened up to a veranda that presented an Olympian view of the whole estate.
The silong of Dada’s house was an ethereal world all its own; the perpetual shade, the damp earth and the tang of animal scent and droppings conspiring to transport pilgrims to a twilight zone where time was rendered inconsequential. It was a surreal playground and sanctuary for throw-outs, wood scraps, vagabonds, strays and misfits. A fork, a spoon, a canteen with U.S. Army stamped on them would turn up once in a while as grim reminders of a war. Dada's pets populated this realm: a battalion of chickens and a rooster or two, pigeons, feral cats and a dog. Occasionally, a pig or a goat would turn up, too.
It was at my mother’s birthday when I last saw her. I wasn’t sure if her mental faculties could still muster recognition or if time had ravaged her brain to mush. She had a blank look on her face as she sat on a chair, confused like a lost child. She was precipitously at the brink of life yet there was still a bit of the old Frisco about her; the multi-layered flavors of her kitchen seemed to still swirl around her; a faint sound, much like the rustlings of leaves of a distant garden, seemed to still move around her and echo in her now feeble voice; her hearty laugh now a muffled whimper in the darkest of nights. I sat across the room and waited for a frisson of recognition, instead I saw in her eyes the last flicker of an ember.
Dada died a few days after the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Manila. Maybe death had finally set Dada free, liberating her from the bonds of a memory of an atrocious war not her own. A war that brutally took the life of her husband Thomas. Maybe in death she’ll find the half she lost and be whole again. She died where she slept— on the floor. They’ve taken out her bed. Long before Dada died, her house had been looted. Ransacked by vulturous bastards for anything not nailed down to the floor; somebody even attempted to dismantle the veranda; the house quickly fell into disrepair. Dada's house died with her. Frisco changed, too. It lost its charm. Hawks disappeared from the skies, the dragonflies, too. Frisco had become claustrophobically cramped as if the now and the unrelenting tomorrows had tramped down on it, compacted it into a tight bundle and buried it with Dada.


In Memoriam: Dada; 10 June 1902 – 6 September 1995