Lost

Far Tibet calls you with a voice of ether and you turn your head to listen. In that eternal second you become a myth. With your eyes of saffron and your breath of incense you degrade art and turn it into religion, and I from woman into human.


[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]
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For my mother, as she turns fifty-five

She is clean rooms and fresh laundry and open windows and beautiful gardens and warm, healthy food, and afternoon naps and anti-wrinkle creams and reading glasses and Clinique Happy and blue sign pens and yellow “smileys” and checks that never bounce and terracotta tiles and solid walls and etched light fixtures and well-maintained roofs and a home that always welcomes me no matter where I have been.

Feliz cumpleaño, Mamita. Te quiero mucho.

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Time capsule

My family recently decided to move the remains of our faithful departed from one of our old family plots to a new location. The old family plot in Naga City is over thirty years old, and the cemetery it is in had been a parochial cemetery for about sixty years. This old Naga plot is different from the Moll mausoleum (see the old photo below) in the town of Tigaon, which was built almost eighty years ago by our ancestors.


My father’s father -- Heriberto Moll -- and my younger brother who died as a baby in 1978 were the ones buried in the old Naga plot until recently. They were not buried in the Moll mausoleum in Tigaon because, at the time, Tigaon was more than an hour’s drive away from Naga, and the roads were very bad. Bita -- my father’s mother -- was living in Naga then and wanted her husband to be near her. My parents were also living in Naga at the time, and decided to have my baby brother buried in the same Naga plot, beside my grandfather.

Perhaps they were uncomfortable to bury the little baby in a mausoleum, which, to a grieving young mother, must have seemed like an edifice honoring Death itself. There it stood, stoic and cold and brooding across the decades, unquestioningly admitting into its dark innards whoever Moll was most recently departed. And although there were a few Moll niños buried in the mausoleum in Tigaon, they died way before the seventies, so somehow they did not seem like babies to my mother.

And so the Naga plot has been there for over three decades, and every year for one night, the sons and daughters and grandchildren of Heriberto Moll -- me included -- would gather round the marbled space and talk about everyday things. When midnight would strike, we would all pack up, drive to our own homes, and go to bed, because on the next day there would be school and work and errands and housework and gardening and friends and life. The buried would stay buried. And for the rest of the year the family plot would be overgrown with weeds, flooded with mud and frequented by scavengers.


These cemeteries where our plots had been were built with no particular plan in mind, so over time people would bury their dead in whatever much space they could find: they would place graves on top of existing graves until there were five or eight stories of graves over one plot, and they would even place graves in the middle of lanes and passageways, so people had to step over them each time. As old cemeteries go, they looked medieval, they felt medieval. The only thing that would date them as modern is the changing fashion -- and music -- of the people who would visit these cemeteries once a year.

And so the family purchased a plot in a newer, cleaner, more modern cemetery in Naga, one that was privately owned and was created for the business of housing the dead. The plots were larger, the ground layout was more orderly, and there would be ample parking space. Everybody nodded, yes, it was a good decision. Yes, we have to change with needs of the times. Yes, we will move on now.

But then there was the business of the exhumation. The two graves in the old Naga plot were opened and the decaying coffins torn apart and the remains gathered. The gravedigger first found two tiny white socks, and then he found a tiny knitted cap, the kind that all mothers make their babies wear. He could not find any unbroken bones. Because the baby was too young when he died -- only a few months old -- the bones were still too fragile that they either broke or disintegrated. He carefully opened up the cap and showed the pieces of baby skull inside, broken into small pieces, but still perfectly in place inside the little knitted cap. He scraped up the rest of the soil he found inside the cement grave and put them all in the new container. He did not even want to wash the remains anymore, fearing that he would lose more tiny bones. Had he lived, my brother would have been over thirty now.


At the burial of the remains in the new family plot, Bita was in front, and she cried and had to sit down. My mother did not cry, and stayed standing at the back. But they were both in the same place. They were back in the old family plot, looking down at the freshly dug earth that would envelop their loved ones for over three decades.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

The things we hide from ourselves

(An excerpt from a story soon to be published)

I sifted through the jewels that I had with me – earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and pendants, and remembered the moments when my mother handed them to me. I particularly remember her giving me an antique cross of St. Benedict as a gift when I was thirty-five. I remember because she pulled me closer to her and whispered: “All that you need to say is, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’” That was the very first time I heard her utter the name “Satan” in all the years I have known her.


Then memories stopped because the pain had begun to grow on my back and run down to my hips. My belly had also begun to hurt, and the hunger began. I felt cold sweat on my forehead and my hands felt clammy and my feet felt moist, even when they were placed on the area rug where my chair stood. My head had now started to hurt. At first it felt like a drill was going through my right eye, and then the right part of my head started to hurt. It hurt so much that it felt like it was actually shrinking, and then I could not see clearly out of my right eye.

I staggered up and noticed that my nightgown was damp with sweat and I took it off and wiped myself with a towel. My breathing had become shallow because of the deepening and spreading pain. I gripped the edge of the dresser and gritted my teeth. I managed to get to the bathroom sink and uncap a bottle of mineral water and take great gulps from it, and from where I stood, clutching my stomach, I suddenly noticed something – the corner of a dark-colored, very ornate tapestry behind the door, under an hollow alcove, hidden behind a chest of drawers topped by a rather tall potted plant. I found it odd.

I put the plant on the floor and moved the chest aside. It was quite hard to do because of the pain in my back, hips, and stomach, but slowly, the tapestry emerged. The tapestry was so rich with color and marvelous patterns, and yet it was hidden from view in such a way that people would miss it, even with the alcove light on. Well, my husband and I were the only ones using the bathroom, so why would I cover that tapestry? It was too beautiful to hide. And then something dawned on me.

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Never

Try looking up straight into the sun. Then close your eyes. Do you not see white owls swimming in the dark red of your cloistered vision? That is what you are to me: a floating promise of a forbidden sight.


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And the wedding entourage wore Chuck Taylors

And the guests wore black. And the grandmother of the groom wore a dress embroidered with black flowers. And the father of the bride wore jeans and a blazer. And the flower girls had lollipops. And the wedding cake was shaped like a black electric guitar standing beside a silver microphone.

And the principal sponsors danced in a circle. And the band played progressive rock. And the groom played the base guitar. And the bride sang rock songs. And the priest who presided over the ceremonies was the very same one who wedded the groom’s parents 35 years ago. And the bride and groom have been together for 12 years. And everyone was happy.

And it’s called The Wedstock: the wedding of Ivy and my brother Kid.

And this is their logo, their crest, their shield:


Congratulations on a wedding like no other, and on a love like no other.

[Some photos here.]

Stormy weathers

A couple of weekends ago I got stuck inside my own apartment building because Typhoon Ondoy, which ravaged Metro Manila and other provinces in the mainland, brought unexpected floods that horrified people as the water level rose fast in areas that had never been flooded before. By noon of that Saturday it was flooded everywhere. Evangelista, where I live, and which had not been flooded in the five years that I lived there, was knee-deep in dirty floodwater, and news reports say that Edsa was a twenty-kilometer river at the height of the rainfall last Saturday. It was the worst flooding in Metro Manila in over forty years.



Luckily, I lived on the third floor of an apartment building, and although electricity, internet connection, and mobile phone service were intermittent, I was safe and comfortable. I noticed a leak in the ceiling that was starting to create a puddle on top of my wooden desk so I placed a plastic dipper under it to catch the drops. From time to time I would look out the window to see the floodwater on A. Bonifacio and Evangelista Street rising consistently, and more and more vehicles getting stuck. I could not walk out in that deluge, not even to buy food or check on my car parked downstairs, so I just muttered, “C’est la vie,” and snuggled into bed with Proust.

I used to like summer so much. Growing up in a farm, summers have always been the highest point of my year. School would be out, I didn’t have to wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning, and neither did I have t go to sleep early, and I could read books that were not required for school. I’d stay up in a mango tree all afternoon, reading, with cushions stolen from the sala for my back and tushy. The maid would bring me merienda up at the branches. I’d only go inside the house once the mosquitoes started coming out.

Even when I was a freelancer, I’d spend summer like I was partly on vacation. I’d go out and have meetings only in the early mornings or in the late afternoons or evenings, and work at home just in the morning, and stay in bed reading all afternoon. There’s something about summer that makes me feel lackadaisical, carefree, like I’m a child again. And once, there was this magical summer when I joined the Hell Week of the Urban Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Course of the PNP Special Action Force. It was for work, but it didn’t feel like work. It felt like I was just hopping around the dust and the grass in combat boots smelling the gunpowder, with sweat streaming down my back and hot wind blowing through my hair – a child in a vast playground. And whenever summer ends, each June, I always feel like it's the end of an era.


I suppose when one gets older things do change. Now I find summer quite tiresome. It melts the makeup off my face, it makes my sun block feel sticky on my arms, it makes my glasses slide down my nose, it makes me sweat through my pantyhose, and it makes cars feel like ovens inside after you park them, even in the shade. The things that I have always liked about summer – the heat, the dust, the fact that school was out – seem annoying now.

But when it’s cold and raining, somehow I feel more cheery. I can run errands without (literally) breaking a sweat, there are less people on the sidewalk, and there’s no smog and no dust. The air smells fresher, too, and the gray atmosphere is easier on the eyes than the bright, vivid light of hot days. Though rainy days bring their own set of health hazards, these are nil with sensible rain gear. Plus, of course, no one should swim out in six-feet-deep floods.


Why have I changed this way? Perhaps, after all these years of summery living I’m due for a wash-down. Perhaps, too, summer fashion has gone and left me for younger skins and more active bodies. Perhaps the discomforts of summer has always really been there, but I was too young to notice, and now I am old enough to see them, and can now appreciate the cool, the wet, the gray, and the subdued. These days I look up at the sky, see dark clouds, and start feeling comfortable. Perhaps it really does come with age. Now approaching my mid-thirties with forty-inch hips, the rain has grown on me. Rain is now my new sun.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3, 4]

To bed, to bed

The thought of tackling Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past has always been intimidating. Just seeing the entire work in six volumes lined up in my bookshelf, in its own matching case, is enough to make me think of it as the reading project of a lifetime. But once I picked up the first volume, “Swann’s Way,” I immediately took to it, and from then onwards, Proust has become my bosom buddy.

That’s because he opened the entire work with memories of falling asleep.

Falling asleep is my favorite activity of the day. Not the sleeping itself, which I do not have much memories of, but the delicious moment of surrendering conscious thought into something dreamy and strange. Not, too, just the usual falling asleep after a long, hard day, but the luxurious falling asleep of one who has the privilege of time, like a princess who can linger in her pillows and let her mind swim to and fro in a thick, dark, warm liquid, not having to care about the state of her kingdom, because she is a princess and not a king.

Of course, Proust had it differently. He was sickly and delicate, and he probably spent long stretches of time in bed out of necessity rather than luxury, but the experience of falling asleep, that moment where the mind is suspended and sort of just goes about slowly in gloopy semi-darkness, is divine, regardless of whether one is a princess, a sickly aristocrat, or me.


I would often spend hours in the office, doing things that I have to do, all in anticipation of going home, getting into bed, and falling asleep. I would spend hours on a short story or a paper, telling myself that my reward for finishing the work would be to let myself fall asleep. Over a year ago, when I was suffering from a mood disorder that had depression-like symptoms, I would let myself fall asleep over and over again, all day. I would wake up after an hour just to make myself fall asleep again. Now that I have largely recovered from that condition, though, and have a nine-to-five job, I don’t sleep so much anymore, but I always look forward to the moment of falling asleep everyday at the end of the day.

What do I get out of it? It could be a million things. Aside from feeling good at knowing that I do have the luxury of time to linger in this moment of falling asleep, it also helps me to remember things, important things that I have already forgotten for a long time. It gives me images and aromas that eventually end up as details in some of my stories. But perhaps, most importantly, it teaches me the importance of surrendering to things that are beyond my control -- the night, the biological need to shut down for the day – and realize that there are other things I can wield my power over. Perhaps this is why Proust was still able to write his six-volume novel despite his physical weaknesses. I'm no Proust, but I can also fight battles of my own choosing.

A case of very fine steering

My Da taught me how to drive when I was sixteen and we were in California. When I went back to the Philippines, I still lacked practice, and thus practiced on the car of whatever boyfriend I had, at night, after dates, on the private roads of subdivisions whose residents have long gone to bed. I could make mistakes and not kill anybody, I didn’t have to stay on my own lane, and I didn’t have to obey any traffic rules. I thought I did pretty good.


But when Da came home, I still wasn’t a good enough driver. It was only after a while that I realized that it’s not the practice on deserted roads with the freedom and ignorance of a four-year-old that makes a driver. It’s the daily nitty-gritty of driving through many different roads amid constricting situations and still arrive unscathed that makes a driver.

They say we get the habits of our teachers. I never got the driving habits of my boyfriends who taught me how to drive, in their own teenaged way, but I did get some of my Dad’s habits. Perhaps he was really the only one who taught me how to drive.

Once, years ago, as a new driver with a student’s permit, I was plowing through traffic and barely missed another car that was backing up. Da, on the passenger side, just said, “Oops,” and didn’t say anything for five minutes. I knew he was disappointed, and I felt bad. And then he said, “No matter how much you know the road you’re on, no matter how perfect your driver’s instincts have become, you still need to be unfamiliar with that road in certain ways, because sometimes that’s the only way you can keep a sense of defense when driving.”

I nodded, but couldn’t say a word. And then after a while, he added, “You can only steer finely when you can really see what’s there and what isn’t there.”

Little did he know that on that day, he has given me a mantra for going through the relationships of the rest of my life. People are roads that I must travel.


Thank you, Da. Happy birthday. And Happy October 13.

[Previous posts about Da: 1, 2]

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Bloody

(An excerpt from a story in progress)

Evelyn coughed once, feeling a thick, warm liquid gather in her throat, and then realized that her legs were pinned under the dashboard with a searing pain that was traveling up her back, and she had the disconnected thought that she had somehow prophesied this: tired, brittle bones snapping.


The steering wheel, dented and dislocated by the impact, was digging into her chest. Blood was trickling from her nose and she breathed through her mouth, feeling more and more dust granules catching on her tongue. She could not feel her left cheek anymore. She felt dizzy, and in her swimming, swirling vision, saw that the red car was a Honda, and over its license plates was a black bumper sticker with “GUILTY!” spelled out in bold letters. Like a faraway phonograph from another time zone, the red car’s radio was still running, though stuck, playing what sounded like “No breathing... No breathing...” over and over and over again, and Evelyn, in the heady, muffled state of quasi-rational thought, wondered if she was really meant to die like this, violently, mannishly, entwined in twisted metal and covered with broken glass, with some unknown dead character of an indeterminate origin that flew towards her in an overturned and bashed-in Chariot of Fire, making her look like a blatant coagulation of blood like the incubus that would never be a part of her, telling her that she was guilty, and rubbing in the fact that she was suffocating painfully, blocked by an unforgiving fate at the fork of a junction: some obscure, has-been, barren writer who didn’t even think of gassing up before taking a drive to nowhere.

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Little girl

She was born tiny and out of wedlock, but she is as pure as can be, and larger than life in her solitude and her books. She knows more Tagalog songs than I do, and can speak Bicol like she has lived for a hundred years.


But she still has her dollhouses and her bead bracelets that have her name spelled out in glittery curlicue letters, and for all her gravity, she is just seven years old. This is her magic.

Happy birthday to my niece, The Shrimpmouse!

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Scarlet chair

A scarlet chair stands alone on a darkened porch, casting vague shadows on the floorboards like a forgotten thought. The half-light embraces me as I look at the crisscrossing lines, in the hope that in their junctions something would come alive, not like me, who stare at furniture with dust in my eyes.

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

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Horror movies

The very first horror movie that I saw in my entire life was “The Thing.” I was probably seven or eight years old at that time. I found the Betamax tape for it from a stack near the TV one evening, amid tapes of Disney and Looney Tunes and Voltes V and NBA games, and watched it when everyone else was out for the evening. The maid left the room after the first scary scene, so I ended up watching the rest of the movie alone.

The movie never scared me. For one, I particularly remember not seeing at all the actual Thing that horrified and killed many of the characters in the movie. Also, the movie was set in some snow-bound encampment where it always seemed to be night, so the scenes were a little difficult to see. I suppose I was either too young to understand that it was something that was supposed to scare me, or too jaded at such a young age to believe that any of it was real.

I grew up in a small farming barrio in Camarines Sur, a community that has been around for hundreds of years. Naturally, old wives’ tales and rumors of all kinds of aswang were everyday things. Our maids would often tell my brother, sister and me ghost stories before putting us to bed. My sister would be scared, but I would fall asleep so easily and stay asleep so soundly as if I had just read a feel-good bedtime story.


It was obvious that even early on in my life, horror movies and horror stories would not hold the usual spell over me.

What do I get out of horror movies if not the scare that other people watch them for? Surprisingly, comfort. Although come to think of it, this is not really so surprising. Because aren’t horror movies, on some level, meant to comfort us with the knowledge that they are just movies and those things will never really happen to us? I have never believed in ghosts or spirits or aswangs or mananaggals or vampires, not even when they were ordinary fare when I was growing up. Maybe it was this early inundation with folklore that gave me a more objective eye when confronted by the horrific tale. Maybe it’s because I have never seen or heard or felt anything that can be remotely identified as paranormal, even when I’m seated right beside someone experiencing that exact thing at the very same moment, gripping my arm with icy hands while I brush off her hoarse squawks and continue chewing my chocolate wafer and reading my Nancy Drew. Maybe it’s because during my childhood every dark shadow that seemed to hover in the corner of the room always turned out to be either a chair heaped with jackets or a dress on a hanger waiting to be worn for a party the next evening.


Maybe it’s because I have always believed that every single dark and looming thing I don’t comprehend at first can always be broken down into its basic commonplace, non-horrific components -- such as a chair, or a heap of jackets, or a dress on a hanger, or a guilty conscience, or a nagging memory, or a sudden remembrance, or a déjà vu moment, or a big secret, or a love in progress, or a dream about to be born. And there it is, something that we should never, ever be scared of.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Go, story

True love is like ghosts. You can feel it coming, and then when it finally goes, you are left there with a slightly trembling heart. But it never really goes. You remember the moment for as long as you live because you imbued it with the power to save you, but it never does. It leaves you just on the brink of salvation, exhausted, dispirited, unable to pull yourself over to the other side.

It rained, I remember, the night she came.

Thus begins a story that I have started writing years ago and haven't yet finalized now, even after over twenty drafts. But after a little more time, it appears to have finalized itself without any need for me. It has come to the point where the story has taken a life of its own and has shaken itself free of me. Now I can only stand by and watch the story shape itself into a world where I can see myself walking silently among the characters, the grass, the words, the fears, the memories -- a different me walking, a different me looking out of the page to look at myself reading that very same page.

Always, at this point, I know I can let go of the story and let it fly to the form of publication that it is destined to join.


And then I go back to the more mundane things that seem to occupy my life in between stories: clean up my apartment, call a few friends, sleep, get some work done for the presentation due on Tuesday, pay my bills, order a new checkbook, listen to the The Royal Tenenbaums for the millionth time. It feels a little empty, but only for a moment. Because there is always yet another draft to finish, another story to write, another plot to thicken, another idea to dwell on. And then when the whole strange, inexplicable, fascinating, magical cycle starts over again, it will feel like a ghost has touched me once more, just a moment before the rains come.

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Talk

You smile at me from across the table and around us people don’t see. Fathers sip their coffee, mothers take a forkful of lasagna. Yet across that table we weave a tapestry of loving glances which, as the night wore on, took the liberty to adjust itself into colors so voluptuous they home into my stomach, curbing my need for food.

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