An heirloom camera, a lost Beetle

Before I knew him as a writer I knew him as a father, although sometimes the two can be intertwined and subsequently inseparable. Even as father taught me how to write or how not to write, he also taught me how to drive or, as the case may be, how not to drive.

The first driving lessons I took were with him in the right front seat, giving instructions, in the old Volkswagen Beetle that was colored green then repainted blue, or was it the other way around? The memory of color progressions plays tricks.

We test-drove in the parking lot across the Arts and Sciences Building in UP, along Katipunan Avenue, where I made a risky turn that sort of surprised him, down University Avenue with the trees and greenery looming large on both sides of the road.

Mostly I learned some too just by observing him drive, me in the right front seat, and him saying, “Drive defensively.” It’s a dictum I find hard to follow in these days of natural aggression, but I must admit when the traffic gets tough and I remember his driving style, who knows how many times it has spared me an accident on the road?

There are some episodes about his driving that remain etched in the mind, like that of his figure hunched towards the windshield, going at 40 kph weaving in and out of traffic.

There was a time of course when he drove me to Araneta Avenue shortly after I had read a friend’s obituary notice in the papers, to pay last respects to a girl drowned in Vigan. I must have been breaking down, because shortly afterwards he wrote me a letter saying that I had such capacity for feeling.

How could I forget the day he drove me and the new wife to our first conjugal abode in UP Los Baños, a one-room affair adjacent to the communal toilet and bathroom? In the rusty, trusty Beetle, Keith Jarrett was playing on the rundown cassette player all the way to Laguna in midsummer, and before father left us to ourselves at the entrance of the Silangan Nook, he handed to us several hundred pesos to tide us over before the first payday.

It was Pa too in the driver’s seat with his fellow National Artist Nick Joaquin to his right in the Beetle, me in the backseat between them, when father drove his kumpadre to Sulo hotel from our place on Maginhawa and Nick singing “Two drifters...”

When the Beetle became more trouble than it was worth to maintain and the family bought a new Nissan Sentra, it seemed almost to coincide with the old man’s decline in years. But you should have seen the look on my father’s face whenever he would drive the air-conditioned Sentra, he was like a changed man, proud to finally afford this luxury in the tropics.

Soon enough the inevitable had to manifest itself and I took up the driving chores whenever I was available, driving father around on special occasions, like when we were doing the documentary on him and we drove to the UP Faculty Center through the driving rain. Yet I couldn’t help noticing even as he was getting hard of hearing and his vision wasn’t like it used to be he was still somewhat hesitant to hand over the car keys; it was a duty he was proud of, something that has translated to me and my own kids, now teenagers, who also do a lot of commuting by themselves but nonetheless appreciate a ride in the Sentra — with LTO stickers dating back to the early 1990s put on by Pa — or the hand-me-down Lancer from eldest sister to school.

If father was memorable as a driver, he was also a silent talent behind the camera, specifically his vintage Leica which he brought with him during family outings and get-togethers, inconspicuously clicking away from a corner or in front of group photos.

Among my prized possessions are photos of myself as a baby, a toddler and a young boy in our house in UP Campus, no doubt taken by father. Pictures of me trying to wield the garden hose, on the steps of the sawali house looking with an amused smile at the camera, grinning beside the television set with a Mad bust atop it, in kindergarten class during snack time and on all fours about to begin a race, beside what looks like a flower pot or ashtray in possibly the Arts and Sciences building.

Who knows where that Leica went, certainly not to the late poet Jun Lansang, who once expressed an interest in it and tried to wrangle a trade, to which father, incredulous, would say something like, “Not on your life!”

About a year after Pa’s death, Mother saw fit to pass on to me one of the old man’s cameras, a Canon instamatic, strictly old-school using 35 mm. It has become an unwitting heirloom, a souvenir from another time. I still lug it around with me whenever there are gatherings or visits to the cemetery to his grave, and despite ribbing from the younger generation in tune with digital and cell phone cameras. I must have seemed like an oddball to them insisting on this analog dinosaur.

During the rare trips abroad or to the province I bring it with me, a reliable relic among my fellow journalists with their high-tech gadgets and real-time relay of photographic images to the home office.

Among the rare photos in his old south room in Maginhawa is one of himself as a boy with his five siblings and parents in the ancestral home in Tondo. He is at the leftmost corner, and a crack in the glass separates him from the rest of his family, with half of his siblings yet to be born.

Seeing that crack in the glass I couldn’t help but be reminded that he was the last to join his parents Lolo Jose and Lola Paning and siblings in the photo: Tita Lel the piano teacher, Tito Doc of Oakland, Tito Peping the sportswriter of Project 6, Tita Victoria who died as a teenager after being kicked by a horse, and Tito Narcing the priest. All went ahead of him.

In my office drawer is a photo of father as an old man in the north room beside the stereo when it was still working, holding what could be a mug of coffee and with his feet up on the bed, the figure bathed in morning sunlight. The photo is like a guardian angel, or at least something to scare off the little roaches.

Just as his Canon instamatic could be considered a dead man’s view to the present world, and how light years away he can still cast a moist eye on the living.

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The preceding essay is from the forthcoming book Regarding Franz, to be launched in October.