Ranga: Writings on Bikol

That is the title of my new book published by Ateneo de Naga University Press. It will be launched in November this year. I would also like to thank the readers who wrote me to give their compliments to my last column called “Home.” It seems that the idea of roots, of ties to hearth and home, remains deeply embedded even among 21st-century Filipinos. Thus, I would like to publish here excerpts from the new book, also dealing with the idea of home.

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Like the leaves of memory falling from the trees in the black wind, she remembers them. She remembers her father, his skin brown as the rich volcanic loam in Albay. He had a square face, like a sheet of paper, on which were written the marks of the years: How he joined the Revolution against Spain at 15, so small the Guardia Civil let him pass through their sentries, the messages from one zone  to another hidden in the sewn edges of his calzoncillos, and when the Revolution was won, how the new conquerors, the Americans, arrived. She still remembers her father railing against the new conquerors, these Yanquis, how they “bought” the Philippines for 20 million dollars from Spain that had already been defeated – and humiliated – by  the indios.

“And what a bargain it certainly was,” her father said with a bitter smile, chewing on his betel nut and spitting its red juice on the hard earth. “With a population of 10 million, we were worth only two dollars per head!” and so with the help of the mayor, the bastard son of a Spanish friar, and the local tart, the Americans – their eyes blue as the sky, hair golden in the tropical sun – occupied the town of Oas the way they occupied the other towns in the whole archipelago, save the proud Muslim South. And the Cavalry men hid their Krags and Mausers still smoking from the bullets that killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, changed into civilian clothes, put on the air of all-American boys who were tall and muscle-bound from having fresh cow’s milk and hot apple pie, and began recruiting young Filipinos for school so they could learn the new language. It was like Ali Baba’s secret world, they claimed, this new language that would open the caves of darkness, revealing pearls and diamonds, silver and gold, brilliance spilling over from the treasure chests.

She remembers her mother, who helped her father toil in the rice fields after the Revolution when she was not fixing breakfast, lunch or dinner, or not giving birth to any of her nine children. Her mother made the richest, most fragrant chocolate from the madre de cacao trees that grew in abundance in their backyard. When the rains fell on their thatched nipa hut during the early mornings, leaving a chill that settled over them like a cold breath, her mother lighted a wick floating in a jar of coconut oil, walk over to the kitchen (her bare feet soundless on the bamboo floor), pour water from the earthen jar to the kettle, drop the tablea into the kettle and bring the water to a boil, then later, hand each of them the tin cups of steaming chocolate, which the children would pour on their plates of glutinous rice that they always ate with their mother’s special chocolate, then eat the pale dried fish, which her mother had fried to a crisp.

Her father did not want her to go to school. “Guillerma, what will you learn from those Yanquis?” but her mother insisted. So the ten of them went to school in morning and afternoon shifts, so there would be somebody left to fetch water from the well, or to help transplant the rice saplings from their beds to the fields. Every day, they walked three kilometers to school, and three kilometers back home. School was a clump of three thatched nipa huts, all slightly bigger than their house. Their teacher was just twenty years old: Private Thomas O’Donnell. He spoke the new language in a strangely musical way, reminding her of the way they spoke their Bikol in Albay, their diphthongs rising and falling gently, like the slopes of Mayon, its white smoke a plume of breath reaching the sky. Private O’Donnell, or “Tom” as he liked to be called, read from a thick, hardbound book, whose crisp, fragrant pages spoke of John and Judy and their dog, Spot, children with white skin and blond hair, like their teacher.

In the days and months that followed, she learned the alphabet: “A as in apple, B as in basketball, C as in cherry pie.” They read from the handbills and posters plastered on the walls of the municipal hall that the Filipino generals still fighting in the mountains were not really generals but “bandidos and ladrones,” as proven by their scandalously long hair and their inability to grasp the idea of what the posters called “benevolent assimilation.”

Her teacher spoke of a big man garbed in red called Santa Claus who leaves his house in the North Pole, travels all over the world on a sled pulled by a herd of reindeer, then slides down the chimney every Christmas Eve to deliver gifts to good and obedient children. One day, she wondered, as she was walking home on the streets of Oas ripening with mats of yellow rice grains left to dry under the sun, how a blast of snow felt against the skin, how it felt to look outside the misted glass of the window pane and see nothing, nothing else but a landscape of whiteness cold enough to crack your bones.

Her teacher also taught them some songs, one of which she would never forget: “My bonnie lies over the ocean/ My bonnie lies over the sea/ My bonnie lies over the ocean/ Oh, bring back my bonnie to me.”

After teaching them this song, their teacher’s blue-green eyes brimmed over with tears. She was embarrassed for him – her father had said that only women cry, so what did that make of Private O’Donnell? He apologized, saying he learned that song from his parents when he was growing up, and in the air floated words like “potato famine” and “green grass of home” and “Ireland.” She did well in the school. Her father wanted only her brothers to continue studying in high school. But that meant studying in the next town. “Expensive,” her father said, clucking his tongue, chewing on his betel nut and spitting the red juice on the hard earth. “Less labor in the fields.” But her mother insisted that Guillerma – being the eldest in the family and being the Class Valedictorian of the Oas Elementary School, Class of 1925 – should go on to high school in Ligao. (To be continued)

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