Saysay kan Paggirumdom

Sa nanok kan banggi mapapagimata ka, magios dangan tibaad dai na mapaturog pa. Sa kauntukan kan mga bagay, marurumduman mo an mga nakaagi. Sa daing girong na palibot, mapapanumdum mo an mga dai pa nangyayari. Tibaad dai ka winarasan kaidto nin grasya na masadiri an mga yaon sa palibot mo. Bisan ngonyan mayo ka nin kapas na sadirihon an mga bagay na dai pa naarabot. Ta nganing sa mga oras na arog kaini, magrumdum ka o panumdumon mo sinda dangan ihiras sa iba. An saimong pagrumdom, ining kanigoan na makapanumdom sarong balaog saimo na mayo nin kaagid. Nadudumanan mo an mga lugar na gustong kadtohan. Nabubuweltahan mo idtong mga tiempong inirokan. Nakakaulay mo an mga tawong marayo na, naiistorya o an mga tinugang maarabot pa sana. Masasabat mo an gabat kan dai napapamugtak na kaisipan, dangan kun kun ini malampasan, kanigoan na gian sa daghan.

Traveling

 Of all your activities in a year, traveling tires you the most.

It requires you to do the things you don’t usually do, or want to do.

The night before you take the early morning flight, you pack a set of clothes and things. You become critical which wardrobe to use—which shirts to bring for the simbang gabi or wear during the family’s media noche, which jacket to leave behind because it weighs more than the bag itself. You do not bring gadgets that won’t serve any purpose during the family reunion. You need to bring only the things you need.

In the black duffel bag which weighs less than a kilo, you accommodate all your sensibilities. You like the bag very much because it is too light, yet it cannot make room for some 20 things you have acquired in the past twelve months—clothes, gadgets, books and personal accessories. You wonder then where you can put your food—solid or otherwise—so you don’t get hungry along the way, so your ulcer doesn’t worsen. You see you cannot bring a lot of things. You realize you need not be attached to them even as Nene, your sister always told you.

Traveling from Visayas to Luzon and back, you badly need to travel light. But you know you won’t be able to. After putting inside the bag only the stuff you need, other things would turn up and “bring” themselves to you as you further prepare to leave. The one bag of all your necessities becomes two plus three “hand-carries” so that they contain the pasalubong and other holiday gifts.

You look at the trinkets and accessories and handicrafts made from coconut shells by your humble farmer cooperator Nong Bebot and his wife and children in the sleepy town of Ivisan in Capiz. You cannot just leave them behind because months ago yet, you already prepared these masterpieces as gifts to your brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces. You miss them dearly you have not seen their persons lately you will give them things to remember you for.

The next morning, you catch the shuttle van from the mall and off you go to the Santa Barbara airport—along with three big bags and some heavier anticipations. Some 27,000 feet up in the air, you think of Manoy, your eldest brother, brandishing the souvenir toy car made from coconut shells as his prized possession. You remember how you insisted on Nong Bebot to personalize this sort of gifts by writing the names of your brothers and yourself on the toys’ little hoods and bumpers.

  

The effort and the artistry involved in making these novelty products are essentially what you want to share to your family. For you, such are the best things to share. But you also think maybe just like birds and such other animals scattering branches and things from one habitat to another, you act as an agency of trade but also a messenger of the arts. You act as a middleman good for someone’s business but virtually you are also an agent of sharing in the holiday season.

You anticipate how euphoric Manay, your sister in-law, will be once she tries on the three-layered necklace made from coconut shells and beads. You imagine her welcoming the New Year with all these circles and similar things on her; you wish she will be more financially secure this time because you have always been told it is best to meet the New Year with ball-like fruits and spherical things in people’s pockets and dining table. You combine superstition with religion. Yet, even when you cloud your faith with some Jojo Acuin rhetoric, one perennial truth remains—you long for the family you’ve missed all these months you have been away from home.

Sooner, you will hear thank you from them but maybe what you will get is utter silence. Maybe their being quiet means they want something else from you. Maybe they will want what they have always wanted from you year in year out. Something more than what you can always give—they will want you to be happy. And perhaps their silence will say they are not convinced that you are.

Of all your occupations, going home thrills you the most. You always want to bond with the family you missed once you’re given the chance. Year in, year out, you appreciate it is the best and only space that you are born to fill. You are only their own blood, nothing else.

Your plane landed quite ungracefully it almost wanted to smash the passengers’ bodies on the ground, but then you thank the Lord for having inspired the pilot to have taken the safest air paths faithfully. The entire trip, you have kept your fingers crossed. The crew announces you have arrived five minutes earlier than expected. Thank you, Sir, the flight attendant says as you disembark. You smile and yawn.

As you now greet the smoggy air, you see Manila, the noisy, sprawling metropolis. The sight of tedium and traffic greets you. You shake off some jetlag by humming with Julio Iglesias on your mp3 player. But you see you need to be more alert. You have to keep an eye on your valuables, because you remember this is Manila.

You wouldn’t want the three bags to be reduced to two or one as you make your way further out the terminal. Even though you badly wanted to travel light, it should be okay for you to bring these other luggage for the sake of family.

Far beyond the traffic inching its way through Pasay Road, you picture Maria and Xhanemma, your nieces opening their gifts back in your brother’s house in San Vicente, breathlessly trying on the quaint bracelets, and pairing them with the equally artful earrings made of payaw seeds. Where else would you want to go?

Memory, all alone in the moonlight

Leoncio P. Deriada, People on Guerrero Street
Seguiban Printers and Publishing House, 2004
Manila Critics Circle's Juan S. Laya Prize for Best Novel, 2004


LEONCIO P. DERIADA’S People on Guerrero Street, the author’s first novel insistently profuse with memory, illustrates that the literary author is predominantly a diarist—one who chronicles his own life and its realities.


Here, the narrator “I” essays in 55 chapter-episodes his experiences with the people of Guerrero Street in the 1950s Davao City. Set in Davao City’s Guerrero Street during the school year 1953–1954 when the author was a junior in Davao City High School, People on Guerrero Street tells a good lot of realities in Davao City at the time.


The narrator’s sensibility appears to be that of a grownup man, cautious and wary of life’s harsh nature and sarcastic and cynical about life’s funny nature.


Reminiscent of J. D. Salinger’s Houden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, his Deriada’s “I” speaks very cynical against the harsh modern world but promises more hope for himself when after the death of his brother’s brother-in-law Pepe, he realizes he needs to go on—when he sees that the new year beckons for him better and brighter possibilities.


While he displays utter disgust for the usual, inane, unruly or ridiculous behavior of people in his neighborhood, the events happening around him affords for us the culture itself, the society that ridicules and supports him. The narrator “I” makes clear that he yanks away superstition and fake religiosity, as much as he abhors his rivals for his crush.


Through vivid recollection of things past and present—“I” expresses his utter fondness for a male figure, perhaps being with no father figure in the household he is sharing with his brother. Hewing a verbose reportage of events, faces, things, and realities, the novel unfolds before the reader as it unfolds to the eyes and ears of the narrator “I.”


He is also subject to the “immorality” of some other characters—Carna and Luchi, with whom he is oriented to the lascivious characters and tendencies of a woman—while still being able to hold Terry as his chalice, his prized possession.


Yet, Deriada’s piece is more than about teenage puppy love; rather it illustrates a young man’s initiation into the harsh realities of the world, which he is soon facing as an adult. Pepe’s death is the persona’s first encounter with tragedy, virtually the first step in toughening the persona as he faces figurative and real deaths in the immediate future.


In the novel, the treatment of things that happened in the past is equally lengthy—as if the entire purpose of the narrator is to remember everything, and when he does he becomes an anti-character, one whose existence in the novel is questioned because of his very sensibility which sounds like the author’s himself.


Lush with his memorable past, Deriada’s autobiographical tract declares that the author’s memory is worth the beauty rendered in literature. They mirror a beautiful life, something that is full of anticipations, as the “I” narrator’s prospects at the end of People on Guerrero Street.


Here and there awarded for his fiction and outstanding work in other literary genres, Deriada says that many characters in the novel are real people just as many are pure inventions or merely transplanted from other times and other neighborhoods. Regardless of which is real or fictional, he says, these characters all belong to the realities insofar demanded by the novel.


By simple remembering, Deriada employs his memory in including facts into the “fiction.” Maybe, he says he has what is called the photographic memory. “Until now, I have a very clear picture of past incidents in my life, from childhood to the most recent, and Deriada says, “I was born in 1938 but I can remember incidents when I was three. I remember practically everything that happened to my family from the first day of the War [World War I] to the last days of the Japanese in 1945.”


Deriada has perhaps one of the clearest memories—an exceptional ability to remember the past and recollect facts in order to portray significant characters that exist for a purpose. The narrator “I” even remembers words when he encounters images and events which he is narrating. He swings from the present back to the past when some characters remind him of certain things in the past.


Of the book’s creative style, Deriada says the blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction is [also] necessary in writing an autobiographical or historical novel. The writing must be good if the boundaries between the real and the invented are blurred. A less skilled writer would not be capable of doing so.


Deriada considers that the biographical novelist has to tamper with reality for the sake of fictional reality. He says his remembering of the past was sweeping and holistic, while the parts he needed for the novel he had to choose carefully. At some point, he recognized the need to be factual, and in some instances, he needed to fabricate.


While the girding or the main structure of the novel is factual, inventing or “fabricating” was necessary only when the real past needed the unity demanded of fiction. This fabrication entails tampering with the temporal succession of events, transplanting characters and incidents from other times and neighborhoods and the outright inventing of characters and incidents.


For instance, Deriada recalls fondly, “the big theater production on the college grounds of the Ateneo de Davao was not in 1953 but in 1954. It was in celebration of the International Marian Year,” and even says, “Certainly, Purico’s famous amateur singing derby was called Tawag ng Tanghalan, not Tinig ng Tanghalan.”


Deriada’s freedom to play around with his facts in order to back up his literary purpose—aided him to turn in some durable portraits of people, places, and events,” which can’t be done if it were pure facts alone. Through this, Deriada immortalized his friends, classmates and even loved ones in his works of art.


Deriada shares the sentiment that the “past is distorted,” primarily because it is given existence by memory. “Reality does not have the discipline of fiction. So the writer has to tamper with reality” for them to create his craft.


Of his work, Deriada says he has virtually written his life—with some “beautiful, little lies.”

An Mga Taga Bagacay Kun Semana Santa

Sa mga huring aldaw kan Marso, maimbong na an paros hali sa bukid kan Buyo—minahugpa ‘ni sa mahiwason na natad kan eskuwelahan abot sa may parada, asta magsabat ini kan maaringasang duros hali sa baybayon kan San Miguel Bay sa may parte nang kamposanto.

Sa panahon na ini, duros an makapagsasabi kun ano an mga disposisyon kan mga tawo sa Bagacay—kadaklan sainda mahayahay, an nagkapira trangkilo sagkod maboboot, pero an iba man maiinit an pamayo ta kulang—o minsan sobra—sa karigos.

Kun ika tubong Bagacay, pirming malinaw saimo an mga pangyayari sa palibot kan sadit na barangay na ini—an kasiribotan, an kariribukan, o maski ano pa man—aram-aram mo na an mga likaw kan bituka kan mga ordinaryong ka-barangay.

Mabibisto mo an kakaibang parong kan duros, mamamati mo an aringasa sa tinampo ta bantaak an saldang. Mabibisto mo man an korte kan niisay man maski na ngani nagdadangadang pa sana siya sa tinampo. An amyo kan tunay na buhay mahihiling sagkod maiintidihan mo sa lambang istoryang ini.

An aking daraga sa kataid na harong na nagpasuweldo sa Manila maduang taon na man bago nakauli giraray—mapution na an kublit pag-abot ta an tubig sa Nawasa halangkaw an chlorine content—nom! Dai na lugod nabisto kan kaklaseng nagdalaw sa harong ninda. Sa Martes ang balik ko sa Kuba-o. Mabait naman ang mga amo ko—pinapasine nga ako pag Sabado, kasama ko ang kanilang matuang babae. Sa Let the Love Begin nakita ko si Richard Gutierrez saka baga si Angel Locsin, pangit man pala siya sa personal. Nom! Nagtatagalog na! Pag sinisuwerte [o minamalas] ka man nanggad talaga!

An mag-inang parasimba nakaatindir pa kan pagbasbas kan mga palmas. An mag-irinang hali pa sa Cut 12 [basa: kat dose] mapasiring sa kapilya sa boundary pa kan Iraya para duman mapo’nan an entirong pagpangadie sa mga santo. Linakad kan mag-irina an mainiton na tinampo hali sa harong ninda antos duman sa malipot na baybay harani sa kapilya. Nag-uurunganga pa si mga ibang aking kairiba ta pigguguruyod man na yan kan relihiyosang ina. Bara’go pa man an mga bado ta iyo man an ginaramit kan mga eskwela durante kan closing sa eskwelahan—alagad muru’singon na an mga aki

An mga aki kan mga mayaman na pamilya sa may pantalan nag-uruli man. Tulong awto an dara pero dai pa nanggad kumpleto ta si tugang na abroader dai nakahabol sa biahe haling airport. An dakulang pagtiripon kan pamilya madadagos ta madadagos nanggad maski na ngani hururi an ibang miembros kan pamilya. Hain na daw si mga makuapo na nag-ayon sa mga ralaban sa UNC; o si sarong pinsan niya man nanggana sa arog kaining contest sa Colegio. Haraen yan! Padirigdiha lamang daw ta mag-iristorya kan saindang mga maoogmang nagkagirinibo. Ay, iyo, hay, magayonon an trophy sa UNC. May kwarta man ni, ano? Hahahahaha! Iyo man po. Thanks very much and I love you all and gabos ini po saindo, Lola!

Igwang bayaw na nag-uli hali sa siyudad—an agom na iyo an tugang kan pinsan may darang ba’gong omboy na primerong pakadalaw sa mga apuon. Napoon pa sana man an duwa sa pagpapamilya kaya padalaw dalaw pa sa mga magurang kan esposa. Cute-on baga si baby, hay? Sain mo ni Manay pinangidam? Cute-on. Bebe, bebe… O Rosalyn, nuarin na an bunyag ki Nonoy? Imbitari man daw nindo kami, puwede man pating magtubong si Dorcas! Saen na ngani si apartment nindo, Glen? Sa Calauag baga, bakong iyo? Itukdo mo ki Lino tanganing aram niya pagduman. Iyo po, Ma.

Igwang mag-ilusyon na dai makatios na dai magkahirilingan ta si urulayan sa Katangyanan dai nagkadaragos ta pinugulan si daraga kan inang may hilang.

Maski an sarong tiyo-on na igwa pang kulog boot sa mga sadiri niyang tawo ta dai sinda dai nagkairintidihan sa kontratang pinag-urulayan, magkakaigwa pa siya nin panahon para tapuson an ika 14ng altar na portrait kan Mesias—na nagpapahiling kan pagdara kan bangkay ni Mesias sa lubungan ni Joseph kan Arimatea. An mga materyales na ginamit para sa abaanang magagayon niyang obra maestra dinonaran pa man hali sa simbahan kun sain siya lektor. An taon-taon niyang panata napapadagos nin huli sa huyo kan saiyang boot, sa pagpangadie niyang daing ontok, nagngangayong dai man lugod pabayaan nin Kagurangnan an saiyang pamilya na ngonyan nagdadakula na ta an saindang maboot na manugang-agom kan mahigos niyang matua—maaki na kan saindang panduwa. Siisay pa man daw an mas masuwerte sa mga tawong ini?

Nagsisiribot an sarong pamilya sa Banat ta iyo an toka ninda sa prusisyon sa Via Crucis, maharanda ta mapa-basa—mapatarakod nin kuryente sa mga harong na igwang mga linya nin Casureco, para dayuhon an pabas[og]. Aaaaaaa, si Eba natentaran kan demonyong halas kaya kinakan niya si prutas kan poon na ipinagbawal ni Bathala. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, kaya an gabos na tawo nagkasa-la-la-la. Daraha na daw digdi mga salabat sa nagbabarasa-kansubago pa iyan! Aaaaaaa….

Sarong gurangan na kantorang taga Iraya, na agom kan sarong mahigos na Cursillista—sinubol si mga aki niyang daraga para magkanta sa Via Crucis magpoon sa kapilya antos sa Calle Maribok dangan pabuwelta—alagad atakado an pamayo ta dai magkakurua kun haraen na an mga daraga. Haraen na sa Imelda? Si Belinda? Pasugui na daw ta si mga aki duman, iwaralat mu’na digdi. Ta diputang agom yan ni Belinda! Nagpaparainum na naman sa may ka–Tampawak? Ta kun ako pa an mapauli diyan sa bayaw mo, titibtiban ko talaga man nanggad yan! Mayo na sana man maginibo pakakatong-its, mainom! Susmaryosep! Noy, paulia na ngani si Manoy mo!

Sarong parasira pagkatapos niyang magpangke—mala ta nakadakul sinda kan bayaw niya kansubanggi—sa may tanga’ sagkod sa rarom sa may parteng Caaluan sagkod Tinambac—nagdesider na mag-pasan kan krus sa Via Crucis. An solterong ini haloy na man nagsisigay-sigay sa aki ni Balisu’su’. Pero korontra baga an sadiri niyang tawo ta diyata gusto man nindang makahanap nin trabaho ini sa Cavite. Dai man ngani nag-anom na bulan baga—nagbuwelta ngani ta garo nagkairiyo na man sagkod an maputi-putting aking daraga ni Balisu’su’. Ano man baya an nahiling mo diyan Polin sa aki ni Tsang Sining? Bados na gayod si Joralyn?

Ciudad Iloilo

Abril 2009