Biblirium

A “CHORUS of delirium”.

This phrase captures “wild excitement or ecstasy,” according to my computer’s built-in dictionary.

The same reference defines the verb “chorus” as the act of exclaiming the same thing at the same time by a group of people.

This built-in dictionary has never let me down but last week, I disagreed with its implication of a group erupting into concerted fits of instability, incoherence, wordless rapture.

I discovered Filipino dictionaries in this warehouse. And with sincere apologies to my computer’s built-in dictionary, I broke out into a “chorus of delirium” just on my lonesome.

In Cavite is an “outlet store” of a chain of bookstores. It used to have no air-conditioning system, a tic of irritation when for hours, one’s neck or even torso is tilted awkwardly to read the spines of hundreds of old books left unsold since Gutenberg’s invention.

Then someone perhaps remembered that readers are an excitable lot, prone to flights of fantasy or even a “chorus of delirium” when they come upon a much-loved or sought-after title. A cooling system was installed, perhaps to forestall the removal on stretchers of several seekers in an advanced state of shock from their finds, the heat, or both.

So I was sufficiently cooled when I dissolved into another biblirium (“biblion” in Greek means “book”). Paperbacks and hardcovers are sold at P50 each; if you get two, you shell out P75; if four, P125. The search for “one more” is an excuse that my husband takes with extreme prejudice.

The dictionaries, though, were going for P20!

Since I enrolled in a course on translation, I discovered that the English-Filipino dictionary is disappearing from booksellers’ shelves.

This may be another sign of our digitally remade lives. Aside from built-in computer dictionaries, Google and other digital references answer every search for a dictionary meaning, synonym or antonym.

Without cutting trees or breaking our backs, as the digital natives among my schoolmates would say.

But as with all books, dictionaries are more than what they seem. Spanish missionaries thrust into our country, repudiated by clime, ancient beliefs, and their own prejudice and inner demons, compiled the first dictionaries preserving our native tongues.

Scanning the Filipino dictionaries, I realized that many of the authors are/were school teachers whose love for words they sought to translate for younger minds, in need of a school reference that is small, light, and cheap. Hence, the “pocketable” dictionary.

Passion, rapture—not just wordless. Biblirium in a word.


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


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 26, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Stories à la King

THE storyteller in my mother’s family is my grandaunt Juanita, whom I often visited during summer.

A teenager with an appetite, I wanted lunch to be over. Granduncle Crispin, after coming home for the lunch my grandaunt prepared, then fell asleep in front of the TV set, newspapers opened helter-skelter on his lap or feet, splayed on his chair with the extended leg rests.

When he reported back to work, I could now read the newspapers. During the interlude my granduncle listened to the TV and scanned the dailies, he went through one or two crossword puzzles just before dozing.

My granduncle never left a square in those puzzles blank, a challenge unanswered.

In contrast to my granduncle’s completely filled-in word puzzles, my grandaunts’ magazines had pages with holes. These women’s magazines had features about food, which she clipped and filed away religiously.

Fortunately, I was not keen on recipes; only in their end results. Though all their children had moved away, my grandaunt prepared elaborate dishes.

While she took an hour or more to make con tui—a pig’s foot she emptied of its meat and bones, which she turned into a mash and then stuffed back, sewing carefully the foot-turned-sock—I was her reluctant apprentice.

Privately, I felt she could just have fried the trotter and I would have obligingly gnawed it to the bone. But this would have deprived me of listening to my grandaunt dipping into her bottomless store of anecdotes.

So while I tried to perfectly dice carrots and chayote (my personal opinion was to just delete veggies) for Chicken à la King, Tita Niting told me about her girlhood in pre- and postwar Cebu.

Beyond mediocre as a kitchen apprentice, I remember the stories. After the war, Juanita decided she was going back to school.

Great grandmother Carmen thought too much education ruined a woman, who would just end up as a wife. So these two headstrong women butted heads, Carmen certain that the absence of transportation in those gasoline-rationing days would discourage Juanita.

Age trumped youth. My grandaunt married and learned more practical things, like unstuffing and stuffing a pig’s foot. At one point, Juanita’s shoes so pained her, she removed them and walked home after class.

Ignoring those feet—which, I believe, she would just have stuffed for sausages—my grandaunt attended class the next day. That is how she finished college.

For feminists or any person striving not to be silenced, “voice” resonates. To quote Luce Irigaray, finding your “voix (voice)” is discovering the “voie (way)”.

Beyond pigs and chickens, Juanita’s stories still light the way for me.



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


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 19, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Just as sweet

AT exactly the juncture where four roads converged, the bare-chested motorist with flowing light-colored hair paused to take out a smart phone.

My husband peeled away from our group to elaborate on the directions from the phone app: the road on the upper right led to Osmeña Peak, the highest summit in Cebu and “hagkanan” (a place to kiss) for mountaineers; on the upper left, to Dalaguete, home of Mantalongon, the “vegetable basket” of Cebu and border of the eastern and western southern mountain ranges; the lower right to the highway market in Poblacion, Alegria, nearest the southern tip, jump-off for Dumaguete on the Negros province; and to the lower left, the Sangi market in Madridejos, gathering for bus travelers to or from the next town of Badian or Cebu City.

It is impossible to remain lost in this country.

When roads fork or destinations depart from maps, there is always a Filipino to give directions.

Often, we will do more than point you on your way. We will tell stories.

As the bare-chested foreigner roared off for Badian, the locks escaping from his helmet streaming behind like corn hair glinting in the sun, the older women in our group murmured, Hesus Hesus Hesus.

The married daughter of Ason mimicked her elders, piously covering her eyes with both hands but keeping the upper fingers splayed so we saw her eyes, glinting mischievously.

The joke used to be played by the late Maldo, Ason’s childless brother who raised Evelyn, who uses the peeping-tom gesture not really to mock the skimpily clad visitors who rent motorcycles to dip in the freezing Camba-is Falls of Guadalupe but to tease her elders, specially her 80-year-old mother, Ason, who still farms not just one plot but several others, scattered miles apart, near her crossing home in Tagaytay.

Tagaytay, Alegria is like many places in the country, at the crossing of place and time, between the set ways of farming and encroaching ecotourism, between the brief passages of mortals and the defiance of memories.

On the way to the Poblacion, my husband stops by his own “hagkanan,” the Tubod trickling the sweet spring waters that refuelled him on his walks as a younger man, crisscrossing the west and the east, when the top of Evelyn’s head barely reached his hip, when Maldo was still teasing his own mother, when the lilac-throated kachubongs still hung upside down like bells out drinking the whole night, and red-beaked black birds roosted in trees and squawked like a convocation of bats or uplanders choking on eyefuls of bare skin.

The waters are as sweet as ever, reported the husband.

Must be a goat fell at the Bukal source and drowned, I said as we continued on our descent.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 12, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"

“Kuntahay”

BIBIBI is a hand-crafted sake named by its maker Aki Ikeda after the “sound sunlight makes when hitting the water”.

Ikeda, her mother, and sister also produce in their sake brewery in Shikoku, Japan another sake that has won over the experts. Its name: Fufufu.

Since I read these lines in the February/March 2018 issue of “DestinAsian,” I have been thinking about the stories in sounds.

We attempt to render in words experiences captured by sounds. What if there is no sound? Can there really be none at all?

Ikeda’s wordplay lingers despite my having no experience with the Japanese language nor of sake nor of living in Shikoku, where, in a kelp factory converted into a brewery, three women and a “toji (master brewer)” make sake in winter with spring water harvested from the “flanks of Mount Hoshigajyo”.

I have seen, though, how sunlight bounces off water from watching the sea as a child, as a mother watching her sons lent for a moment to the sea’s embrace, as a watcher of waves returning, breaking apart, and departing again as another year turns the corner and disappears.

There is no limit to what we imagine.

At the start of this week, I walked with thousands of others to the Office of the University Registrar (OUR) at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. The acronym is incongruous for an edifice that reminds each person approaching the building of what divides us from those within.

The OUR processes the documents of all those seeking to enter the UP System. Last July 30 underscored the difference.

On the first day of general enrolment for all UPD students from undergraduate to graduate levels, private high school students in Metro Manila also “lined up” to submit their applications for the UP College Admission Test (UPCAT) to beat their batch deadline.

Hence, there were no lines to speak of outside the OUR. I walked on T. M. Kalaw Street, sharing this with other pedestrians and motorists, because the sidewalks circling the OUR were covered by mats, tents, and trash left by people squatting on the sidewalks.

The listlessness and silence prevailing in the sidewalks contrasted with the chaos swirling outside the gates of the OUR. No matter what one’s business was, the objective to get inside the building (or leave it) directed the energies of each person in that melee.

UP is a metaphor for survival. Despite the platitudes of equity in education, struggles are omnipresent in a system that pressures, sieves, privileges.

In the middle of a queue that was not a queue, I remembered “bibibi”. The sound of light meeting liquid turning fluid for this Cebuano, though, is “kuntahay”.

Imagine.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 5, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”