Landscapes of feeling

Oas is a strange town. It is famous for the number of priests it produces while on the next town sits Polangui, Albay’s endless source of the best bailarinas (dancehall girls) in the country.

But aside from this, Oas also sports food that can do any small town proud. It has white bagoong which, when mixed with calamansi juice, tastes like no other in the country. I was there one Holy Week decades ago.

When we arrived, my grandfather was already there, tall but thinner than I remember him. He stood by the gate and we waved at him. My parents, aunts and uncles walked over to him and kissed his hand. They were beginning to make small noises about the trip when suddenly, my grandfather burst into tears. This was not the stern grandfather of memory – the teacher who asked his stubborn students to kneel on monggo seeds if they could not slave over the square root of something or other.

At the edge of town, ringed by rice fields and a river, stood the cemetery. Here, it is a custom to honor the beloved dead, to tell them you are back, if only briefly. We lit two tall candles before my grandmother’s tomb.

When we walked home, the sun was beginning to set, streaking blood in the sky. The last-light left shadows in the rice fields. Later, there would only be the sound of the river and the chanting of the cicadas.

Morning. The sky in the province was bluer, vaster than the one in the city. My cousins and I roamed all around town in our bikes. We pedaled past the wooden houses until we reached the marketplace. We stopped in front of a halo-halo stand. Kuskos (halo-halo) in Oas was a wonder: a bowl (not mere glass) brimming with watermelon, beans, gulaman at sago, crushed custard, and young coconut meat so tender it literally melts in your mouth. And all for P1.50. After they had husked the floor and fed the chickens, the young boys would hang out in the kuskos stall. Here they talked about the J-S prom, compared their crushes, poked fun at their teachers, dreamt of college.

Holy Week in Oas revolved around the procession of the heirloom images on Good Friday. It was my grandmother’s turn to sponsor the family’s procession, and that was why we all had to go home. It was a tradition, and nobody says “no” to tradition – not even bored city kids who had begun to become smart-asses, and “talk back” (actually, reason with) their parents.

Early morning on Good Friday, my cousins and I would brush the cobwebs from my grandfather’s caro (cart in Bikol). Then we would cut vines of morning glory, and garland the caro with the pink flowers. From its niche on the living room wall, my grandfather would bring down the image of Christ on the Cross, holding it gently, and then placing it atop the cart. One story is that this image has been shrinking with the years. It does look smaller, but perhaps it is because I have grown bigger?

By four o’clock, my grandfather, in his well-pressed white polo shirt, would ask the children to pull the caro out of the garage. We, older grandchildren in our best clothes, would follow the caro; by virtue of age, we had been exempted from the task. Our eyes should be alert: there were a thousand relatives whose hands you had to kiss; there were some good-looking boys and girls from Manila, also here for a brief visit.

Only 30 heirloom images joined this year’s procession. In front stood the image of St. Peter with a large key in one hand and a rooster in the other. The Virgin Mary was also there, her face calm as a lake. Then much later, Jesus Christ reclining inside a glass tomb, frozen in temporary defeat. And at the tail end of the precession, the Christ of Resurrection, bathed in brilliant light.

Everything ends in the plaza. In the darkness, we would head for home, where warm soup and food waited for us.

After the Sunday Mass, I accompanied my grandfather to the central elementary school. There would be a reunion of Class 1937 (1937!). My grandfather was not in that batch – he was their teacher in Grade VII.

Lunch was grand: gabi leaves simmered in coconut milk, with shreds of pork fat and shrimps; soft, hot rice whose aroma smelled of fragrant pandan; and fats of pork and chicken adobo.There were stories about the war: how my grandfather brought his old Olympia from the guerilla hideout to another, writing down words for the resistance movement; how my grandfather’s students survived the war by eating boiled banana stalks, then roasted rats and geckos, and, finally, snakes.

It was four o’clock in the morning when my sister knocked on the door of the basement room I shared with my two cousins. I lifted the mosquito net and opened the door. The raw air of dawn stole into our room.

After taking our breakfast and loading our bags into the van, we walked to our grandfather to say goodbye. One by one, as if in procession, my aunts, uncles, and cousins kissed him. He was bundled up in a brown sweater, a bright blue bonnet on his head. I held his hands. They were full of veins. He leaned forward. I kissed his face rivered with lines.

By the gate he stood. After promising him he would be back next year, we all boarded the van and waved at him. And then the van began to move farther and farther from my grandfather by the gate, until his figure became one with darkness.

We did not go home Holy Week of next year. Two weeks later, he would be in Manila, to stay here permanently. But he missed his hometown. He only stayed for three months in the city. He died on a Sunday, when I was watching a sexy Lino Brocka movie in Cubao. He had been asking for me, but I was busy for a whole week and I thought I could drop by the hospital on Monday afternoon. Monday morning at work, my mother called me up to tell me I should go to the funeral parlor because my grandfather was there. “To visit somebody?” I wanted to ask. When everything dawned at me I went to the bathroom, and dissolved into tears. Then I roamed round and round the city and went to his wake only late in the afternoon. Indeed, he was there, his brown casket aureoled with flowers.

We brought him home in a rickety train and buried him in the land he loved, beside my grandmother’s bones. The sepulturero (grave digger) broke my grandmother’s tomb with strong blows from his sledgehammer. One, two, three, four. . . the wooden brown coffin had rotted and splintered.

 First we saw my grandmother’s black leather shoes. Then the bones of her legs, her kneecaps and her thigh bones. And then her St. Christopher’s medal resting on the shreds of blue Catholic Women’s League dress around her ribcage. Finally, the sockets like black windows, and strands of brown-black hair on her skull.

Then a cry came. It was my auntie, my grandmother’s youngest daughter. Her sobs tore the very air, and I shivered. I shivered and felt very sad, knowing she was weeping not only for my grandmother but for all of us, the living, the dying, and the dead.

This essay is included in the book, Si Nanay, si Tatay Di Co Babayaan: Writings on Bikol, to be published by the Ateneo de Naga University Press. Comments can be sent to [email protected]