‘How did you learn how to write?’

Friends and strangers alike would ask me that question. But the notion of beginning still surprises me until now.

As a child, I loved to draw, to memorize in my mind’s eye images of the passing day. I also loved to read – I would finish reading my English textbooks in one week, when we were supposed to read them for the whole year.

And then I would read the English textbooks of my older cousins, along with the criminal cases lodged in the office of my father at the Judge Advocate General’s Office (JAGO) in Basa Air Base, Pampanga.

I read ravenously and I read everything – the ingredients in a can of pork and beans or a sachet of alphabet soup, the newspaper my father bought every day, the Philippine Journal of Education my mother subscribed to, the 10-volume Children’s Classics that an uncle had given to us.

I grew up in a small white house with sloping roof and French windows. My father was a soldier, when soldiers were still honorable, and my mother taught music in school. I studied in the local public elementary school and my teachers were the wives of the soldiers. We moved to Quezon City when I was in high school, and I read the Philippine Prose and Poetry series published by the Bureau of Public Schools. I won first prize in the ASEAN Letter-Writing Contest sponsored by the Dept. of Education and Culture, which gave me a college scholarship, P3,000 and five albums of ASEAN stamps.

I chose to study at Ateneo de Manila University. During the interview, Fr. Raul Bonoan, SJ, was twirling the yoyo and while doing walking the dog in his yoyo, he asked: “Why do you want to study at the Ateneo?” I answered: “I live in Project 4 and it’s the school nearest my house.”

He looked at me in the eye and was waiting, I think, for a more noble answer like “Jose Rizal studied here,” or “Raul Manglapus mastered his Arrneow accent in this university.” But I stuck to my original answer.

Studying at Ateneo meant that if my father could not drive me to school in our dependable, blue Beetle, then I could take the jeepney in front of the crumbling market in Project 4, get off at Katipunan corner Aurora Boulevard, and walk.

In college, I met teachers like Rayvi Sunico and Eric Torres, Edna Manlapaz and Fr. Joseph A. Galdon, S.J. and Fr. Miguel Bernad. Rayvi told me to read the poems of Pablo Neruda and lent me books by Gabriela Mistral. On the first day of class, Eric Torres stood on a chair and recited “The Eagle” from memory. I sat in front and was frozen to see my dear teacher’s arms curved like the wings of an eagle while he recited the craggy lines of that poem. Silently I told myself I am no longer in Basa Air Base, Pampanga. Eric introduced us to poetry from Baudelaire to the Beatles, from Rilke to Roethke. He was a godsend. He brought a tape recorder to class, punched a button that played a Spanish song while he recited – and danced – the poem “Spanish Dancer” by Rilke, complete with castanets and an “Ole!” to cap the performance. I owe this man my life.

Dr. Manlapaz made us read a novel a week. Yes, a novel a week, in our Modern Novel class and Fr. Bernad, whose eyes were already bad that year, recited Shakespeare from memory. Yes, without notes. No primary text, no secondary text, just his self seemingly on fire with the words of Shakespeare.

Father Galdon taught me the poems of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, charged as they are with the “grandeur of God.” One of my most vivid memories of the Ateneo campus is coming out of the cafeteria with Fr. Galdon and suddenly, the yellow leaves began to fall. I looked at Father Galdon and he looked back at me. I smiled and began to recite, “Margaret, are you grieving,/ over goldengrove unleaving?” And without missing a beat, Father Galdon recited the next two lines of Hopkins’s poem, and we finished reciting the poem just as we reached the door of the English Department.

That was why when Father Galdon would later have Alzheimer’s, I did not have the heart to visit him at the Jesuit Infirmary. Benilda Santos, poet and professor and now our Dean again at Humanities, did visit him and was reduced to tears when the good father said, “I know you, but I am sorry, I have forgotten your name.” What also made Beni cry was the memory of the many poems that used to hover like fireflies in Father Galdon’s mind, suddenly blotted out by the disease.

I began to write for Kerima Polotan’s wonderful magazine, Focus Philippines. With my fee I bought lots of books, with The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories by the peerless Gregorio Brillantes among them.

Memory is the mother of all writing, it has been said, and many of my memories are tied up with the books I read in English, or imprinted on my mind in English. I was born of a generation in which you were fined five centavos if you spoke a word of English in school, and you did not only learn in English – you also had to be excellent in it! Essays written with a good hand in perfect English were marked 100 and tacked on the bulletin board for the entire world to see.

One day in college, the writer Linda Ty-Casper came and gave us a workshop. Mrs. Casper was the valedictorian of her class at the UP College of Law and has an MA in law from Harvard, but she chose to write novels about Philippine history – in English. She affected no airs, was quiet and dependable, like the maroon Volkswagen that picked her up from her parents’ house in Malabon and brought her to Ateneo every day, for one whole week. I wrote three poems during her workshop.

When you are young and in love with English, words could make your day. I knew then that I wanted nothing else in the world, except to write. My days began to blaze with happiness because I could put order to the chaos – even the sadness – of life.

I was dazed with words. I kept a journal where I wrote poems, shards of memory, the tug of dreams. During those days, as Marcel Proust would put it, “an hour (was) not merely an hour. It (was) a vase filled with perfumes, plans, sounds and climate.”

I was in love with English and I was in love with words. I knew then that I was finally home.

* * *

Comments can be sent to [email protected]