toussaint

I had always associated this day with jovial get-togethers at the family mausoleum. Pleasantries, jokes, and fun memories of the deceased were exchanged amid laughter and bowls of ginatan (sweet coconut stew with lanka) and chicharon (crispy, deep fried pork rind). Large, fancy candles were burned nonstop, wafting the smell of wax into the air that was already suffused with the faint scent of flowers for the dead. My cousin and I would go from tomb to tomb collecting molten wax to form wax balls. By the end of the day, we would have created several chunks of wax the size of tennis balls.

More food would sometimes be given by the Chinese family whose mausoleum stood just in front of ours. Believing that food should be offered to the dead, they would cook more than they could consume and would give some of them to the families of neighboring tombs.

Part of the thrill of this day was to elbow our way through the slowly moving throng of families bearing candles and flowers for their dead kin. It had always been a slow and arduous ordeal, leaving us all smelling of candle smoke or, if we’re not too lucky, of grilled, sun-dried squid smoke (they loved selling this rubbery, jaw-breaking, foul-smelling delicacy in the cemeteries). It had always been worth the trek, though. I loved gazing at the other tombs—mausoleums that were way larger and more extravagant than ours or those cramped, inexpensive, tiny, tenement-style holes in the wall of the underprivileged, which we used to call “apartment tombs” when we were kids. Sadly, even in death, one is reminded of the grim reality of social classes.

Being the naughty kids that we were, my cousins and I would hunt for funny-sounding names on marble lapidaries and laugh out loud. We would also look for cracked tombs and peek inside, hoping to find discarded skulls or fractured hip bones. There was one time when we actually did find what seemed to be a leg bone. It gave us something to scare each other with the whole day.

Ironically, I’ve had fun memories of All Saints’ Day in the Philippines. The cemetery was like a curious playground for me as a kid and a fun venue for family reunions as an adult.

Today, however, I spent the day without the usual festive mood. I went all alone to Cimitière du Père Lachaise (Father Lachaise Cemetery) in the 20th arrondissement. Known as the graveyard of celebrities, this 44-hectare necropolis is arguably the most visited cemetery in the world. Some of its famous “residents” include Molière, Frédéric Chopin, Jim Morrison, Eugène Delacroix, Maria Callas, Oscar Wilde, Gioacchino Rossini, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Piaf. It’s not surprising, therefore, to find more tourists wandering through its labyrinthine alleys and passageways than somber families bringing chrysanthemums to their deceased loved ones.

In my previous visits there, I had noticed a discrete stretch of lawn set against the west wall of the cemetery. This is called the Jardin du Souvenir (Garden of Memories), undoubtedly created for those who wish to pay homage to their dead who had been buried somewhere else. This garden is always full of bouquets left by people to remember those who, in life, had given them the sweetest of memories. This was where I wanted to go to honor the memory of my father who had died in September last year.

Having entered the cemetery through the Porte des Amandiers, I had to walk all the way to the other end of the sprawling necropolis to reach the Jardin du Souvenir. Armed with a map of the ancient graveyard, I slowly made my way on the damp cobbled streets, past grandiose monuments in red, black, white, and pink marble; past moss-covered statues of weeping women shrouded in mourning veils; past elaborately carved Gothic mausoleums; past stone effigies of 18th century dignitaries reclining on top of their tombs; past bas-relief of suffering Jesuses and grieving Marys; past muddy side streets covered with dried oak leaves; past deeply buried memories that, although forgotten, still stood in all their elegance, as if defying time itself. Some of them had fresh flowers—mostly chrysanthemums, the traditional funeral flower here—arranged in low, wide pots or vases.

There were also neglected mausoleums with broken stained glass windows or cracked tombstones that revealed yawning holes going at least four feet below the ground. I stopped at some of them to peek inside, hoping to find human bones, like what my cousins and I used to do. But I found none.

I’m not sure what my father would have thought if he had known I went to a foreign cemetery to honor his memory on All Saints’ Day. He had always hated going to the graveyard on this day when he was still alive. He hated the smell of the sweaty crowd, the pushing and the shoving just to get to our mausoleum, the lack of parking space, the smell of burning incense and candles which he thought was suffocating, and the general idea of braving the city traffic just to visit putrefying corpses. “They’re already dead, what else can you do about that?” he used to say.

Despite his protestations, he would always end up going because he had to drive the whole family there. There was even a time when, after having wandered off into my friend’s family tomb, I heard his voice in the cemetery’s loudspeakers (they install such equipment on this day to page the parents of lost kids, which gives you a rough idea how thick the crowds can get on All Saints’ Day in the Philippines) angrily ordering me to go to the parking lot immediately because they’re all waiting for me and it was already time to go home. My friends made fun of me for months because of this incident.

Now, he’s one of those rotting corpses he had not wanted to visit. Whether he liked it or not, there would be flowers and candles in his tomb today. And, one of his sons would be paying homage to him in a 19th century cemetery thousands of miles away.

The weather was bleak as I made my way through crumbling tombstones. The sun had not shown itself the whole day, the sky was sagging with gray clouds and it was slightly drizzling. My toes were starting to stiffen and I could see my breath in the chilly air. The trees looked eerie without their leaves as we were already well into autumn. I stopped in the middle of the passage and hastily wrote a note for my father on a small piece of paper.

When I reached the Garden of Memories, I saw that there were more flowers there than usual. I was briefly reminded of the large, expensive funeral wreaths given by friends and relatives during my father’s wake. They were too many we couldn’t hold them all inside the small funeral chapel on the second floor. We had them lined in the corridor, on the steps of the stairs, and out onto the sidewalk.

I stood in front of the assemblage of flowers and thought about my father. It was not easy to hold back emotions. If I had been in front of his actual tomb with my family, it would’ve been different. The mood would have been light, delightful even. We would have recounted his funny antics and stupid bloopers. We would have all laughed and remembered him with fondness. We would have felt fortunate that we got to have a father like him, who, despite the harshness of life, never wavered in his commitment and dedication to us all.

But here, all alone in a strange cemetery in the dreariness of autumn, things were different. I longed for his gentle words when I was down. I longed for his hand on my back whenever I felt depressed, which somehow, made me feel things would be all right. I yearned for his booming, angry voice that never failed to reprimand me whenever I would wake up late. I yearned to see him doing stupid, funny things with almost crass audacity.

I put out the short note I had written and wedged it between the thickly packed bouquets of flowers. I had scribbled my gratitude and my love on that paper. I knew there was no way he would be able to read what I had written there. Rotting corpses don’t read sweet notes left by their sons. They’re too busy decomposing. That’s probably what my father would have told me. My gesture was more for myself than for him. I know that despite the passage of years, despite my geographical distance from his tomb, and even if, in life, he was not so crazy about visiting tombs, I will not forget. A son will never forget.

I turned around and slowly made my way toward the exit, suddenly feeling old. It was getting darker and colder. The lethargic sun would set without having even risen at all. I gave one last look at the tombstones before I went out. They all looked desolate. Cemeteries did not seem like playgrounds anymore.

black bridal car

It all started with a black bridal car festooned with flowers and cheesy crepe paper.

“Lucky for them, they found each other,” the fortyish woman sitting beside me at the bus station suddenly blurted out as the black car sped past us. I gave her a polite smile and went back to reading my book.

“Oh yes, it’s good for them. Me, I’ve been alone for years now,” she continued. “And I’m telling you, it’s hard, it’s really hard. I decided to call it quits with my boyfriend years ago because he had been coming home late from bars. I couldn’t help but think that he was cheating on me. I mean, who would come home at six in the morning from a bar? Did he think that I didn’t know that he hooked up with some girl there?”

“Yes, perhaps he was cheating on you,” I curtly commented and started reading my book again.

“Exactly! And what if he brought home AIDS with him? That would have been terrible. So I decided to end it. The relationship wouldn’t have amounted to anything anyway.”

“Good choice,” I simply said as I uncomfortably leafed through the pages of my book.

“You’ll never know what you’re going to get these days. I’d rather be safe than sorry,” she said, more to herself than to me. She went on to ruminate about relationships at this time and age, and how people should always be on guard.

By this time, I had already closed my book; the woman had all my attention now. I noticed that she was not so much into conversation as into prolonged monologues. During the rare moments that her pale blue eyes met mine, she sought confirmation and affirmation, not active dialog.

She was wearing an oversized white shirt with some colorful print in front. He baggy pants seemed haphazardly chosen and worn in haste. She had with her an empty shopping bag.

“And you know what else he did?” she continued while we both boarded the bus that had just arrived. “One night, he went out with my mother and they came back home after midnight. And then, that same night, he slowly crept out of bed and went to my mother’s room and locked the door behind him. What was I supposed to think?”

“How old exactly is your mom at that time?”

“Sixty,” she quipped. “But love knows no age.”

I asked her if she had talked to her mom about it. She said the sexagenarian replied that she was merely trying to live her own life. I have to agree. Everyone has the right to be happy. But sleeping with your daughter’s boyfriend might be going overboard.

“That’s why I decided to end everything. It’s no use staying with a guy like that, even if he was a prince.”

“A prince?”

Apparently, the guy was the distant cousin of the ruling monarch of Monaco. This was getting stranger by the minute. It was more than I expected from a normal morning bus ride.

Fortunately, before the conversation took more unexpectedly surreal twists, she said she had to get off at the next bus station.

“It was really nice talking to you,” she said. She gave me her name and her mobile number, which I wrote at the end page of my book. “Maybe we can meet up again to chat.”

I gave her an ambiguous smile. The bus pulled over by the station. And I watched her walk away. I slowly opened my book again, hoping not to see another black bridal car.

poetry

Returning to an old addiction after three years of hiatus can be exhilarating, to say the least. Like a freshly detoxified drug junkie going back to sniffing cocaine, or like the president of Alcoholics Anonymous, who, after having shunned the liquid for a decade, suddenly finds comfort in quaffing glasses of brandy again, I am back to my old habit.

My addiction.

My elixir.

My home.

There is much to be said. But to start in the beginning is to go against the tide. I won’t go back. Let it all ebb in. I’ve tasted pain in the past year. And it left an agonizing aftertaste. I won’t dare stride back there again, especially nine months ago, when, bursting into a posh hospital room, I saw hordes of doctors and nurses still trying to revive my dead father. And then, two months after that, my aunt, my father’s only sibling, passed away, too. I had barely stashed away my mourning clothes when I found myself wearing them again.

Whatever haze these events have left hovering above me is still there. But life, as it is wont to do, will not stop and shed a tear for anyone. It prods on. And I, too, found myself prodding on. Laboring.

Walking in the dense woods the other day, amid heavy foliage nourished by the first few rays of the summer sun, I felt so alive. Thankful to be so, actually. I knew it wouldn’t last long so I had to cherish it. Be grateful for the air you breathe, my father used to say. There is poetry in everything. There is beauty wedged somewhere between the cracks of dusty cobblestones.

Last Sunday, for instance, I saw a fiftyish man dance with a backhoe to the lyricism of La Callas’s arias within the courtyard of a renaissance palace. The night sky was still bright with a sun that was so reluctant to set. And it was drizzling lightly. Gathered around in our umbrellas and plastic ponchos, we witnessed how the giant, normally uncouth backhoe seemed to have developed its own emotions as it interacted gracefully with the human dancer. That was sheer poetry.

There is poetry in my life, somewhere. And that is what I intend to bring out yet again. Three years of silence has not exactly dried up my inkwell. No amount of detoxification or rehabilitation will keep me away from my addiction. Would that nothing make me kick the habit again.

My name is Slim Whale. And I am a blogger.

let's beat street kids to death, they're not human!

I was reading John Bayley to while away the time as I queued for my ticket at the train station. He was talking about his boredom as a bourgeois kid in a golf course somewhere in Littlestone, England in the 1930s. His hobby was to collect used golf balls and bury them in the sand like crocodile's eggs.

This childhood nostalgia was cut short when I heard a commotion. A few paces from where I was standing, a security guard lifted a long cane and brandished it in the air. A boy, a street kid, wearing a soiled, oversize blue shirt and a pair of blackened shorts, cowered on the ground beside him, refusing to stand up. I thought the guard merely wanted to scare him off the train station's premises because beggars weren't allowed there, but he grabbed his scrawny arm to make him stand and whacked him hard on the butt. The child pretended it didn't hurt. Not a sound came from him but the impact sent him sprawling on the floor. He covered his behind with his grimy hands.

The guard forcefully dragged him away and sent the cane whirring down again. I'm not sure which body part it hit because I turned away and looked at the violent scene again just in time to see the boy grimace in pain. Still, not a sound came from him. His face was again stern and resolute, the grimace having faded as soon as it appeared. The people who were impatiently queuing for their train tickets craned their necks to get a better look. Some women gasped. But most of them surveyed the incident with curiosity, if not with indifference.

The guard dragged the boy toward the stairs, beat him some more, this time more vigorously, and hurled him down the steps. The boy, of course, did not fall as he got hold of the railing and clung there like a cat under attack. The guard turned away and walked proudly back to the station. I heard some unintelligible cuss words from the boy and then something flew and hit the guard's nape. From afar, it just looked like an empty plastic bottle of water or something lighter. Infuriated, the guard turned and ran toward the stairs again, his stick and his truncheon ready to attack.

They exchanged curses and threats. He, no doubt, hit him again with his two weapons because I saw both his cane and his club rising and falling from behind the low concrete walls of the stairwell.

Having beaten down his enemy, the guard hurriedly went back to his post. He had the air of a soldier who had just done something patriotic for his country. Apparently, the boy wasn't ready to surrender. He ran up the stairs again and shouted in Tagalog: “You son of a whore! You can only do such things because you're a guard! You wait and see!” And he let loose more Tagalog expletives.

I got my ticket and walked with big strides toward the turnstiles. I had seen and heard more than I should. I stowed Bayley's book inside my bag, suddenly losing interest in reading about the travails of rich, English school boys.

the eyes of a father

It was like the old times. My high school friend and I chatted animatedly about politics and business. Our conversation swung from being highly contemplative to mildly perky. He related his experiences when he supervised the construction of mobile phone towers in war-torn Mindanao (Southern Philippines), how the rebels in the boondocks demanded that his team of civil engineers pay revolutionary taxes to be allowed to continue their construction; how they were forced to hire gun-wielding rebels as workers; and how one of them actually discovered a murdered man on the site. There was even one instance when one of his colleagues, also an engineer who spoke Bisaya (local dialect widely spoken in Mindanao), overheard two armed boys talking:

“Can you shoot the guy working on top of that tower?”

“And what would I get if I did that?”

“I'll give you a pack of cigarettes”

The engineer, horrified at what he had heard, spoke to them in their own dialect and offered them one pack of Marlboro each in exchange for his colleague's life. The boys, fortunately, readily agreed and left.

I said he was lucky he didn't perish there. He had tried to blend in, he said. He had worn shorts and faded shirts at work so as not to attract undue attention to himself. That was just a minor inconvenience he had endured so that he could return in one piece to his wife and hyper-active little daughter in Manila.

We proceeded to speak about the economy, corruption in government (sorry for being redundant), businesses we could put up, and the unimplemented law that requires the demolition of buildings older than thirty years. He spoke in a quiet voice, still with his familiar lisp. He was more articulate than he had ever been. Despite his lack of sleep, his mind was still clear. Such conversations are best accompanied by clinks of beer bottles and punctuated by crisp laughter. This time, however, I was merely gulping water from a transparent plastic cup and he sipping coffee, our smiles were dry and somber for we were seated in front of the tiny coffin of his four-month old son. Wreaths of flowers, two mass cards, and an inflated Dalmatian dog swamped the white, gold-trimmed coffin, making it look grotesquely puny in their midst.

“Look at his eyes,” he said, pointing to a large picture of the boy on top of the coffin. “Those are the only parts of his body that weren't punctured by tubes at the hospital.” The boy's eyes stared back at us in all their innocence. They were big and bright but they didn't sparkle with dreams yet. They never had the chance to.

This was the only time I sort of missed my friend's corny jokes, for which he had been infamous way back in high school. We used to pull our collars up to our foreheads to conceal our faces, in mock shame over his horribly corny retorts. We even coined the adjective “belty” in his honor. This was in reference to the Circum Pacific Belt, the string of underwater trenches and volcanoes in Asia, which we were studying in geography class at that time. He undoubtedly oozed with the corniest lava there was.

“The doctors told us that 85 percent of those who have this condition survive. My son was part of the 15 percent who didn't. He put up a good fight, though. I knew he did.” He stared blankly at the coffin, a faint, sad smile twisted on his lips. I didn't really want to speak about his boy as I knew that he had told the story to every visitor at the wake ten million times already. It's hard enough to go through the experience once, it's horrible to relive it repeatedly in a narrative. But he didn't stop talking so I silently listened, my eyes involuntarily drawn to the ribbons pinned on the coffin's lid. There is consolation in giving shape to grief through words.

“We did some research on the net regarding his condition,” he continued. “In a way, we were prepared for whatever would happen. I'm not sure if our own research scared us more or prepared us further. All we knew was that we didn't want to give up. We won't just sit around and watch him slip away like that.”

He was unusually calm and composed, enunciating every word with clarity. Would that I have the same fortitude to face sorrow. It wasn't helpless resignation that I saw in his eyes. It was brave acceptance. The kind that one sees in the eyes of a soldier who knows he is about to die and yet pushes on, valiantly. A lost cause is only arrived at by cowards.

“At least my son won't experience how grim this world is.” After having spoken about the government, brain drain, and unemployment, we both agreed that the boy had died blissfully unaware of how ugly the world is. But he would also be regrettably incognizant of how his father stood by his side every single step of his painfully short life; how he clasped his tiny hands and whispered prayers into his ears; how he marveled at his (the boy's) bright eyes in those rare moments when he actually opened them at the hospital.

I was wrong. This was not like the old times. This was something else.

can the dawn be this bland?

The jeep sped through so fast the trees lining the highway melted into one long greenish blur. The horizon was bleeding purple streaks. Several kilometers down, Manila was still twinkling with specs of white light against a background of black mud. The smog hovering above it made the city seem less carnal. Everything tends to look so calm from this vantage point. Even a lynch mob would look like a quiet throng of termites going about their normal routine when viewed from above. No excitement whatsoever. No passion. No histrionics. No drama.

The skies were slowly blushing pinks and purples as the sun agonizingly tore its way up, ever so slowly. Carbon monoxide perfumed the cool air with mystery and hate. The houses along the highway slip by like insignificant weeks. Weeks that are littered by unrealized dreams and shelved projects that eventually decay in my closet, weakly wagging their tails for attention. I have long stopped keeping track of events because it keeps me boxed. The memories of which keep on sauntering back like they wanted to hang out with me.

I cannot say that I am dejected nor can I claim that I am ecstatic, like this delicious dawn. This feeling doesn't even come close to ennui. Such ambivalence can eat up the soul. It is infinitely better to feel some strong emotion, any emotion, and wallow in it than feel the silence of undecided thoughts. The soothing calmness that comes before a tidal wave can be unnerving. It kills more ferociously than the wave ever could. I do have some minor distractions, pinches of excitement, and slight surprises. But as a whole, the days just breeze by and I float with them, disemboweled, an ordinary tree lining the highway, smugly content in melting away into a greenish blur against a horizon that has just spit out a young, clueless sun.

it slips away, slowly

Your kiss now speaks of dried up memories, of mummified dreams we once swirled on our palms, arid and syrupy like your parched lips. That kiss used to give me something better than ambivalence. I don’t remember what exactly. But it had been there before, always leaving a tickly haze in my mouth. Now your kiss leaves nothing but entangled cobwebs on my gums like bland cotton candy that refuses to melt. The residue of betrayal blackens the teeth, they say. I wonder if it would also cause my braces to rust, the way your heart rusted two months ago. I prefer lust than rust. But even that is no longer there, having left the moment you confessed you had thought of leaving me. I don’t want tears to moisten your scorched lips and make them supple again. Tears well up from somewhere less noble, somewhere too shallow for pain to wade in. I brew blood and sulphur in a deeper, more intimate place, beyond the reach of tears. Oh but you can’t see it. Not when your kisses merely take me to the bliss of minor distractions. I won’t ask you about love and its absence again. I would rather scratch off my scabs and let the wounds bleed copiously. It amounts to the same thing.

I see memories flying with dry leaves, conniving with the wind to take them farther than my imagination could ever fathom. They will be preserved there, wherever that is. And I would be preserved, too, as I kiss you and imagine my memories of your love intact in some place I cannot visit.