Visiting Magallanes

One Sunday afternoon, a quiet summer day, I felt a strange and irresistible urge to take the jeepney for the old section of the city passing through San Nicolas, Colon and then Magallanes St. With my wife and kids, we got off in front of Magellan’s Cross and went inside the Basilica Minore del Sto. Niño.

I have long vowed to bring the kids inside the church and that Sunday I brought my three girls (their only brother was on a summer vacation). Before the image of Senor Sto Niño, I explained to my daughters where we are and why we’re there.

It was an ordinary Sunday at the basilica perhaps giving visitors and tourists who now mingle with the faithful a glimpse of the Cebuano people’s life – that of centuries of veneration of the holy image.

(I sometimes feel annoyed by the tourists’ presence as they stood there ogling at what probably was a mere tourist site to them, without an iota of reverence for such a holy place.)

For centuries Cebuanos visited the basilica in veneration of the holy child’s image that Magellan gave to Queen Juana during her baptism and conversion to the Christian faith in 1521. Legaspi’s men discovered the image some 40 years later venerated by the natives.

Like other Cebuano families, we, through the years, bring the kids to the basilica to pray for good health and the children’s well being. That Sunday was one such visit.

In that old section of the city where the basilica stands was also where Cebuanos did their shopping and congregated before the advent of shopping malls. Today, a whole new generation is unaware of a time when Magallanes and later, Colon St. was the center of the city’s life.

After the mass we walked to Manila restaurant in Manalili St. where we had dinner. Walking, I remember when I was a little boy walking with my parents in Magallanes, looking at the shops and stopping by in one of the restaurants to celebrate my birthday.

On another birthday, it was my Lola Dalena (my father’s aunt who adopted him after his mother died) who brought me to the Augustinian church at the back of the University of San Jose-Recoletos across Carbon Market.

It was a nostalgic visit. Walking, holding my daughters’ hands, I was quietly reminiscing the past. Then I realized it would soon be my birthday. And there was I, a parent with my wife and daughters strolling to have our dinner in one of the few remaining restaurants in that old section of the city.

Being young

One leaves one’s hometown to be educated and be ready for the real world or the big city where one works eventually. For today’s youth, it even means any of the big cities of the world. One returns to one’s hometown either a success or a failure, depending on one’s or society’s definition of these words.

For the young of a not so distant past, youth meant idealism in changing the status quo and to a great extent, we owe much of the freedom we now enjoy to them. Today’s young is privileged for not having been born during war times or despotic regimes when being young meant fighting the establishment or a foreign power.

One leaves one’s hometown to join the struggle and to return with an amputated spirit. As Al Pacino said in Scent of a Woman, "there’s no prosthetic for that." One returns home with dreams nipped in the bud, idealism demolished after a bout with society’s inequities. And in the end, becoming not so different from the enemy one wished to vanquish. Violence is not only during war but also even at deceptively peaceful yet suppressive times.

I left the mainstream years ago for an alternative subculture and returned eventually when the subculture would no longer hold. Then I again tried to find my niche in the very society I wished to change. Occasionally, one’s beliefs are validated and you feel that you are being patted in the back, as when the first Senate after Marcos’ ouster, repudiated a treaty that would have extended the US bases’ stay in the country.

One adjusts to a society far from what one envisioned during years of struggle. The diaspora has gotten even worse now with hospitals running out of health workers. As in far worse times, those who leave the country are considered heroes even if they leave hospitals and other industries in dire need of staff. But who can blame them? Ironically, it’s when one leaves that one can practically help kin and friends. It would be better if we export products instead of workforce. But one can’t wish for too much.

I’m a product of my time. I wish I were not as socially determined, but I am.

I don’t typify the success I must have promised to be years ago. But one sees some truths that not anybody who had not joined the struggle can quite see, if that’s any consolation.

One’s face now bear the lines and marks of years of searching for life’s intangibles in a time of peace, when one was used to living in danger and fear during a not-so- peaceful past (which paradoxically used to define one’s constructed frame of reference.)

I returned to my hometown years ago, to family and friends to lick some wounds before I again set out to find my niche in the world – an adolescent of turbulent times and an adult in peacetime.

I cannot quite imagine the troubles I must have brought upon my parents for not having tread the paved road of life and instead, explored an uncharted path.

Parents suffer from the daring exploits of their kids, which now as a parent I can quite relate with. It must have been terrifying for my parents to see me risk everything when they very much wanted to protect me.

It must had been just as terrible for a parent like Don Jacinto Velez y Roa, gobernadorcillo of the gremio de mestizos, and father of Marcial Velez, after whom the street is named, to be arrested by the Americans and imprisoned at Fort San Pedro because of his son’s involvement in the revolution.

(Marcial with General Mateo Luga,and Pantaleon del Rosario fought the Americans when many of their contemporaries had long surrendered and capitulated. He surrendered in Leyte eventually in 1902. He remained active in the city’s politics and even in the nation’s quest for independence after that through peaceful means. He never married but sired three children.)

In peacetime, one returns to the mainstream, plant the fields, love and bring kids to the world. Guns are made into ploughshares. Then in the far distant future, somebody’s kid will again find a cause to fight and leave the beaten path and scare the wits out of their parents. Years later he would return to be among his or her people as either a success or failure, depending on how one defines those words. He will come back to plant the fields, love and bring kids to the world…..

Dreams

I used to wonder where have all my high school friends gone because I’ve not seen or bumped into them for years. I would later know several of them have flown out of the country.

Many of my friends are now in Toronto, Dubai, Doha, London, California, New York, etc. Some have left for good, never coming back. I feel like I’m the only one left.

Not that I’m bothered really, but it’s queer feeling that you’re getting old and your peers are nowhere because they’ve left.

You find new friends but you can’t really replace those you grew up with. They are like a map of one’s journey through life. You trace the contours of your own winding journey through adolescence and beyond looking at their faces.

I studied high school at St. Scho in Talisay under the unforgettably progressive Benedictine nuns. Later in life, I toyed with the idea of entering the religious life by becoming a Benedictine monk.

If I did and would be writing history like what I occasionally do here, that would prove my friend Insoy (a.k.a Missing Filemon’s Lorenzo Niñal) more than priestly; he’d be prophetic. He likens me to the monk Ambeth Ocampo who writes a history column for the Inquirer.

So much for dreams of what I’d rather be. People are leaving the country at frenzied pace. In Cebu, art departments have been raided clean of graphic designers. They’re all holed up in Dubai. The few of us left are enticed to go, now and then.

It’s not easy leaving when you’ve got kids already. But who knows?

Our ancestors were globetrotters as early as the 19th Century. With money from trade with foreign markets, they were sent to study in Manila, Hongkong, Europe and some to the US.

Cebu opened to the world market in 1860. That changed the course of the city’s history. After centuries of sluggish growth, it shot up to become the country’s second premier city, overtaking Iloilo City (which after Legaspi left Cebu and before he went to Manila, became the Spanish seat of power.)

Cebu became an entrepot, a trading center and a busy port where local products, usually agricultural, were sent off to foreign buyers who had agents set up brokerage firms here. These firms helped fund the local elite’s economic enterprises.

Being a mountainous island yet with excellent ports, Cebu became a core with commercial and service functions that processed the products from the peripheral islands. There was a considerable agricultural activity though in Talisay, Minglanilla, Banilad, Carcar and Carmen where lands were planted with cash crops by the Parian elite for export to the world market.

In Carmen the Ralloses had an hacienda (which was recently bought by the Lhuillers - talk of the rise and rise of the local elites.) In Minglanilla, a long stretch of land adjoining the national highway was a Velez farmland, now subdivided into villages for low and medium cost housing.

It would be a lie if I say I’m not inclined to leave myself. Well, there’s a time for everything under the heavens.

In the meantime, I’m waiting for my dream machine, the Mac mini to hit the market in Cebu and see how it wipes out the PC. Everybody leaves, the Mac lands.

I’ll be riding the next wave of IT revolution, now with the real McCoy that started it – the Macintosh and see where it will land me; or like my ancestors, trade with the rest of the world, not with cash crops anymore but with IT services maybe.

Dream on, friends. It’s a new world unfolding.

Men's Talk

There’s something about drinking that makes one merry. Maybe it’s the booze, ice cold, bitter and bubbly. It brings out the poet, the dreamer, the debater and the lover in the tipsy drinker.

So one cold starry, starry dawn I found myself with a glass of beer doing the tagay with fellow artist Kahlil and editors Noel and Jobanni in the eskinita leading to Kamagayan.

It’s an interesting place where the Sun.Star building stands. After work, which is usually twelve or one in the morning, we go out into a street brightly-lit by a sodium lamp.

SunStar’s building stands on Don Pedro Cui and P. del Rosario St. It’s not in the corner (another building stands there) forming an L shape of a building instead of a box. Across it on the opposite side of P. del Rosario St. is Barangay Kamagayan, known for pimps and commercial sex workers or CSWs (to be politically correct) who are made to line up the streets as customers in taxis and expensive cars (as well as dilapidated ones) line up to "appraise" and pick up the girls.

The light dims in the eskinita leading to the heart of Kamagayan.

The eskinita looks innocent in the daytime, hiding the harsh realities that lurk in its corners. In the day, it’s nothing more than a parking place for cars of college kids, office workers and businessmen. But as night falls, it stealthily comes to life.

It was here, surrounded yet oblivious to the traffic of girls and customers brokered by the negotiator-pimps, that Kahlil waxed poetic, Noel sounded mushy and Bani, as always, the nonchalant man-kid. And I, was the foolish critic.

Kahlil and Bani were just fresh from the Cornelio Faigao Writers’ Workshop and our drunken talk span from workshop fellows and writing to Kamagayan (which was the subject of their submitted short stories and Noel’s work in progress) and of all topics, love.

In such a loveless, lonely place, we talked of love, unmindful of the CSWs’ chatter, or the pimps’ frenzied dealings and customers’ hushed bargaining inside tinted SUVs with half drawn windows.

I said I would love to read a story about such a place, if it’s done like Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy or his Tropic novels. Or the phenomenal movie Moulin Rouge, with a story within a story.

Just then a thought crossed my mind as I looked at the quiet, deserted Don Pedro Cui St. I remember the story I read in Prof. Mike Cullinane’s emails to my brother Genesis, which he also got from Gavin Sanson Bagares, regarding the man after whom the street was named.

I told them, across the street where we were drinking is a street named after someone who chose to stay single the rest of his life after being turned down by the woman he loved.

The philanthrophist Don Pedro Cui vowed never to marry (and he never did) after failing to win the heart of Jorgia Velez, hija natural of Jacinto Velez y Roa.

Jorgia Velez chose to marry Prudencio Sanson Camara with whom she would have three children, among them was Mariano Camara who would be the second husband of Florentino Rallos’ other daughter Concepcion (the other one was the childless Carmen Rallos Sotto)

I said, talking of love, Jorgia Velez looms large in my mind because of the two men who loved her.

One chose not to marry, after she turned him down, because he couldn’t love anybody else.

The other one was the one she chose who devotedly loved her being her husband.

From across Kamagayan where lonely men at a price of a few hundred pesos seek momentary relief from loneliness with equally lonely women, we - tipsy with beer, drunk with literature and mushy with all the lovetalk - stared at a quiet street named after someone who chose not to love anybody else.

It’s sad that she didn’t love him in return. But she didn’t have to. Loving is giving without expecting anything. Even when unreciprocated, loving is already rewardingly humanizing, and redeeming.

Feel

There are some things I can’t quite explain. So I don’t bother understanding them anymore, in a logical kind of way, that is. Yet, I know there’s a gem of truth at the way I feel about certain things.

Like for instance writing here. I feel like being on stage and washed by floodlights. One gets conscious with the attention and couldn’t help not playing up sometimes to the audience, giving in to what pleases them.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se except when you end up not enjoying or fulfilling yourself anymore at what you do.

One feels it inside the inner bliss and contentment derived from an intimate communion with the audience or for that matter, you, the reader.

The challenge is how to remain oblivious to the attention without getting insensitive to you, and keeping the intimacy albeit imagined, with you. No writer would want to lose his or her readers.

So much for that. I have a feeling I’m thinking aloud.

But that’s not just the only thing I find unexplainable.

I shouldn’t be bothering myself with things that happened more than a century ago yet, unexplainably, I feel moved by them.

Take for instance the demolition of the Parian Church in 1879 as instigated by the Spanish Augustinian friars who felt jealous and bitterly envious of the opulent, marvelous church built by the Mestizo Sangleyes of Parian. In the first place why would supposedly religious people do such an unchristian act of ordering a church’s demolition? Well, given the record of the friars during the Spanish colonial period what they did shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Still, every time I read about it or pass by the fire station where it once stood - and whose pillars are said to be that of the old church - I feel an unexplainable rage, sadness, a feeling of tragedy and loss. Just imagine how life in the downtown area would have been like, had that church remain standing up to this day. Maybe it would have helped preserve the way of life there and more of the physical structures that once stood in the 19th Century (or am I just being too nostalgic?)

Now one returns to Parian and console oneself with a scattering of old houses and seemingly nondescript structures. Perhaps it’s the neglect that renders them nondescript.

I said in the preceding paragraph "…one returns to Parian" as if one used to live there and returns. One’s ancestors did and it’s the descendants who come back to visit the place. One finds not the warmth of home but the feeling of loss like a gaping hole; so huge it leaves a hollowness inside one can’t quite explain.

The Parian Church became the center of Parian’s life. The rich mestizo Sangleyes lavishly supported the Church partaking of their vast wealth amassed from trading and planting cash crops for export to the world market.

Parian was a separate town from 1755 to 1849 before the gremio (administrative ward) system was put in place. (Mojares, 1983) Also in 1849 Parian parish which was founded in 1614 ceased to be a parish and was placed under the jurisdiction of the Cathedral. In 1879, the Parian Church was demolished.

One doesn’t dissect feelings or their expression in works of art like a laboratory cat. So bear with me here as I try to write (not explain) the unexplainable like my feeling a terrible loss for the demolished Parian church, and the old Parian itself whose absence paradoxically, left a haunting presence in the lives of a generation born long after it ceased to exist.

Travel

I love to travel. It’s exhilarating being new in an unfamiliar place, away from the comfortable confines of one’s world with its usual patterns and predictable routines.

I usually go on strolls, whenever I’m new to a place, to acquaint myself of the strange territory. My lungs hungry for adventure suck in the refreshing breeze of the unfamiliar air.

Be it in a bustling city or a remote island I usually leave the pack and explore on my own unhampered. I like seeing a place with fresh new eyes and musing lightly, alone in my thoughts or sometimes entertaining myself with a good book when there’s nothing much to see. It’s relaxing, soothing experience.

Sometimes, I think I may have taken after my adventurous ancestor Ramon Velez y Santos (born 1840, father of my great greatgrandma Rosario). He owned a 13.32-ton ship which he named Paciencia. Like the Parian merchants of his time, he used it to scour the islands for products like copra, pearl, cacao, tobacco, etc. for sale to foreign merchants. He was also a renowned photographer in 1880s when photography was first introduced.

Unlike him however, I don’t scour the islands for products I can trade. I used to travel a lot as part of my job. I took on that job even if it meant the demise of a quite lucrative business I was starting due partly to the lure of travel and of seeing new places.

Whenever I got home I always brought with me souvenir items to remind me of the place I’ve been to. I searched around for icons of unique cultural peculiarities, just inexpensive ones but quite significant.

Sometimes, it’s food that took my fancy.

Now, I travel a lot because my family lives on an island frequented by tourists.

On one of my trips, I read a book Recollections of a Voyage to the Philippines written in the 1870s by a Belgian writer J. De Man and translated to English from French by E. Aguilar Cruz. Reading the book gave me a refreshing perspective of 19th century Philippines from the eyes of a tourist.

There’s something about travel that’s rejuvenating. I like being aware of my sweat dripping on my back, trickling on my forehead while I go strolling under the sweltering heat of the sun in light casual clothes. Or feeling the hurried breathing of my nostrils taking in the fresh gust of wind on top of a hill or on a wet, damp shore when the tide has ebbed..

More than the physical exhilaration, I love the feeling of not being claimed by a place while I absorb everything in. It’s like dining places. I wrote a poem once of a mountain I climbed:

I’m hungry,
And I’m having my fill.
Of rugged mountains,
And pouring rain.
Of overcast sky,
And blowing wind.

introduction

"My life would have been the poem I would have written. But I could not both utter and live it."
- Henry David Thoureau

It’s either we write or we are written about. One can’t be both. I tried once, twice I guess, but always went back to where I began, back alone to my pen, so to speak.

So here I am on my third or fourth reincarnation as a writer. I don’t exactly know how many times I died and was born again, but at least, with every rebirth is a chance to grow wiser and give back to the giver of talents - to the muse - my efforts with my gift.

One can’t be like the man in Jesus’ story who went out to bury his treasure and returned it to the master a year later nothing less, nothing more. It never pleased the master that he never made anything of it.

But this isn’t exactly about that (although in a runabout kind of way, it is) but of reacquainting or more appropriately, of reconciling. It is a necessary first step, in a first column, for to write is to be true, to be honest and it’s never easy. Going through a broken rib, an aching tooth, a head splitting migraine, is not something anyone would like to experience anytime.

To write is to heal as well. Nothing heals like forgiveness and reconciliation. So here I reestablish ties with an old lover, friend, critic, enemy – my readers whom I may have failed countless times over.

It’s nice to be familiar again with the cadence of your footsteps, the song of your voice, the bright colors of your smile, or the dark clouds of your anger, and the unfathomable stillness of your silence.

But to be present to someone, to make a gift of ourselves, one has to be able to stand a beloved’s absence and silence. For he who can’t stand both would not be much of a presence either. Still, nothing beats a good read. It’s like a refreshing, cold drink that quenches one’s deep, old thirst after a long, long journey.