Madame Panopticon

HER signature of rummaging in two big bags made me realize I was again seated beside the stranger I named Madame Panapticon.

Bearing two full bags and dressed in clothes that came down like curtains for a final performance, this elderly lady gets on the train at Boni, two stations after mine, and always gets off at Santolan, another three stations before my train stop.

Except for the infants, everyone in our train watches as, during the entire ride, she fishes around in one bag after the other and transforms before our eyes.

In the frenetic pace of the city, many working women and girls going to a meeting put on their “faces” in the train, not minding the strangers staring at or ignoring them.

Madame Panapticon mimicked the exhibition but, in place of a mirror guiding the hand putting up the scaffolding for the public self, the people across her became the tool to reflect her face as she slathered, one after the other, various unguents that she took, one item at a time, from her bags.

In a queer way, the layers she applied on her face and neck did not end in a mask. I fell asleep, watching the people across us watching her. I woke to find a garish, rouged face turned towards me. For a moment, I saw the “skull beneath” Madame Panopticon’s visage.

In the second occasion, she transferred without ceasing items from one bag to another. One elderly man even peered inside a bag, as if to verify the source of the seemingly endless stream.

When she shook out and folded underwear as decrepit as the bags and their owner, I closed my eyes. I was no longer comfortable with the eyes watching Madame Panapticon. Mine.

The first time I started commuting in Manila, I imagined I was part of a supercolony, as populous and eusocial as the Ant World.

Among animals, eusociality is the most advanced form of socialism, where nature selects the best to breed and everyone else specializes in other tasks essential for the colony’s productivity.

I imagined that if I fell out of my place in the commuter chain—squashed perhaps by a passing bus—the blot my corporeal self would leave behind may eventually dry up and disappear from the single-minded tramping of other commuters.

To keep a supercolony—or any system working—a miniature of that system embedded in the collective consciousness and the subterranean levels is all that is needed.

Eyes are superfluous. These are private, looking inwards, into something as unverifiable as the soul. Eyes are not eusocial.

Madame Panapticon ignores this conceit. The All-seeing Eye—what the Panapticon stands for, in Greek—seeks out and judges the abnormal to be assured I am part of the herd and safe. How our eyes betray us.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the September 24, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column of SunStar Cebu, “Matamata”