Her words

 

WRITING with a fountain pen should be a meditation. It is torture: I am back in the first grade, gnawing my upper lip and watching the nib, then my fingers, the right hand holding on to its dignity in the grip of the pen, and finally, the person ludicrously failing to flow with the pen. 

Jotting with ballpoint pens, pounding typewriters, and tapping gadgets have hardened muscle memory that rejects this medium for rumination. 

Why do I think of cows “ruminating” in pasture, chewing cud? The nib measures the spread of ink saturating the paper, the acquiescent blankness that is handmaiden to an unbovine rumination.

Or a list of items sent out for laundry. The tallying of books read and lines for savoring. Even in its ephemera, writing hints of an interior life. The nib leaves a bead that unspools into the person hovering behind the veils.

In the past, the hands of a maid were appropriated for everything except writing. Bienvenido Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera contrast the precolonial “mujer indigena” who, alongside men, composed the songs, poems, and oral lore passed on by the tribe against the silenced women of colonial times, when the printing press introduced by the Spaniards published no work attributed to a woman.

Not only were they denied education, the culture seeded doubt in women, who questioned whether they were worthy of picking up a pen. 

When a Sister Catherine was told to write down the apparitions of the Virgin Mary that she experienced in 1830, she viewed the task “with repugnance” and only did so out of obedience to M. Aladel, the Director of her community, the Daughters of Charity. 

“(S)he judged herself incapable of doing so, and, moreover, in her opinion, (writing) would have been contrary to humility,” goes the Archconfraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary’s account of St. Catherine Laboure who wrote not once but thrice to document the explicit supernatural visions recreated in the Miraculous Medal of Our Lady of Graces.

After the French nun’s death, Aladel decided not to publish the first account; the other two were made public.

Why was the first narration not published? What happened to this? Why, after waiting for 45 years before confiding to her Director, did she write three accounts?

“She was standing, clothed in a robe the color of auroral light,” Sister Catherine wrote in her extant notes of those Marian visions. So unexpected a harvest from a reluctant writer, its incandescence nevertheless casts in deeper gloom the rest of her words, lost to history. 

Photo of Mangyan woman etching the syllabary on bamboo, the traditional writing surface of precolonial times, was taken by Jacob Walse-Dominguez and sourced from his pinterest.ph account 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 29, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Spines and oracles

       

       

        COVER art is the reason I collect printed books.

When I had eyes only for Nancy Drew mysteries, I would cross the field in campus whenever I spotted a matte-yellow spine popping out in a sea of blue-and-white uniforms. 

Myopic, I passed back and forth to check the title of the book held by a stranger. This was long before Grosset & Dunlap published the neon-yellow “flashlight” editions.

Appearing in the 1980s’ editions, the flashlight did not thrill me as much as the magnifying glass Nancy peered through in the vintage copies I inherited from my mother and the brand-new ones she treated me to during trips to Paul’s Bookstore at Sanciangko St., where odor of ordure dropping from the horses drawing the occasional tartanilla mingled with the smell of books as soon as we opened the door. 

Driven by the anemic fiction collection in my college library, I became a regular at the Music House, a downtown Mecca for secondhand finds. Book spines cued me as I shuffled piles of pocketbooks for that serendipitous find. 

When I wanted to be closeted with a book in mint condition, I went to the USIS Library in Jones Ave. Everything here was hushed, from readers lost like acolytes deep in their prayers to the squeak-free caps placed under the chair feet. Only the cellophane covers of the hardbound books, with their snap and crackle, faintly subverted this order.

The USIS books rarely kept on their dust jackets with the illustrations.   Missing the paperbacks with their crass and loud covers marketed for the masses, I returned to the Music House, which had these in galore, along with a noisome creek, plumes of vehicle exhaust, and a corner bakery that served hot Spanish bread with craters of sweet filling to sustain hours of book excavating.

Because the Music House accepted trade-ins of old books for new ones, I experimented with genres and tasted authors on a student’s budget. I detoured to science fiction fantasy (SFF) novels for their covers of pure kitsch; I stayed for SFF’s unmatched tales of invention and presentiment. 

I brought home, with the Music House’s trademark price handwritten in pencil (“8L”), the 1975 edition by Berkley Books of Frank Herbert’s “Dune”. The story of a fictional desert planet warring over a rare spice was rejected 23 times before published in 1965 by Chilton Books, known for printing car manuals.

For the 1975 cover, Vincent Di Fate drew a pillar of rock that could be a monstrous sandworm guarding the coveted resource from humans. Jim Tierney’s treacherously undulant cover art in the 2010 Ace edition is aptly ambiguous for our time.

Fiction is not stranger than life. Oracular, book covers are the writings on the wall. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 22, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Tse

       

        IMAGINE God as a viewfinder documenting the night of a typhoon.

The viewfinder takes an establishing shot of a village. Cars parked on the street. Darkened houses.

The viewfinder zooms in and under a parked car on the street. A dark shape under the still warm belly of the car engine.

Close-up: meet Tse, aspin (asong Pinoy) with a mongrel’s universal features: sheath of fur of undetermined color under the dirt; wiry build; and intelligence behind streetwise eyes.

Tse does not first mind when the rain falls and water seeps into the dry spot under the car. 

It takes her mind off a growling gut. For dinner, she licked a few cans before the woman came out swatting with a broom. 

Tse! Tse! In a wink, Tse jumped out of the trash bin, followed by rolling cans and cursing. She checked out the houses that placed scraps on the sidewalk, but in the steadily falling rain, no reused ice-cream containers were left out.

She avoided streets where dogs were leashed or caged near house entrances. For such well-fed lives, these mutts had the ugliest tempers, barking and straining to get at the interloper. Sometimes, Tse traded insults with the enraged dogs but tonight, she focused on looking for a dry place.

Tse could smell the chill in the air. It was going to be a long night of waiting for morning and the old woman who came to collect kitchen scraps from house to house. After emptying the leftovers in her canister, the old woman threw away the plastic bags for Tse and the other strays to fight over.

To beat the competition, Tse bolted down the bags without chewing. At first, she was terrified by the bag swinging from her anus but then learned to drag her bottom on the ground to remove it. 

The first time she met a dog whose owner stopped for it to do its business on the street and then scooped the stools in a bag, Tse looked hard at the dog as if it had sprouted wings from its bum.

These ruminations abruptly ended when the water level on the street rose. Tse scampers from under the car. Rain and wind are companions on the street. 

Floods are death.

A lifetime of stepping around traps directs Tse to run for higher ground in the streets plunged into chaos by the cutting of power. People shouting. Dogs still chained and caged, baying. And the waters rising. 

Tse runs past her enemy, the huge black dog chained to the gate where she made the mistake once of peeing against. The dog’s helpless howling follows Tse when the flashflood tags and lifts the aspin, not gently at all. 

Tse’s thought as the dark swirls: where are those wings when you need them?

(In memoriam: if we cannot evacuate with our animals, release and give them a fighting chance to survive.)

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 15, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column

Curating

        IT is a year for watching leaves.

Flipping through a journal tracking the year, I noticed leaves dominating nearly each of the 50 or so pages. 

While sweeping the street or clearing the garden, I pick up leaves to press between the pages of the journal. At some later time, flipping through the notebook for a blank page to write or draw on, I meet the leaf again. 

The dried specimens are attached with clear tape on the page. The sticky tape serves like the thin sheet of glass we used in Biology class to mount a specimen for studying under a microscope. 

Under the clear tape, decomposition reveals an odd beauty in the dried striae, lace-like patterns, and spectral hues.

During summer, we helped Papang sweep and burn the leaves fallen under the caimito trees. He believed the smoke drugged the mosquitos. My sister and I loved smelling the fire in our hair, rising from our sooty, sweaty arms.

A faint memory of burning leaves, prohibited now by anxieties over global warming, lingers over these 365 days, curated by leaves. 

An arboreal diary rendering the Taal phreatic eruption in early January, trailed by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) breaking out in late January, the community quarantine clamping down on the pandemic in March and undergoing permutations by acronym—ECQ, MECQ, GCQ, and currently, MGCQ—until the present. Recently, typhoons Quinta, Rolly, Siony. And then?

Branches of leaves weighed down by a fine down of grey ash greeted the morning after Taal Volcano spewed steam, water, ash, and rock. Even the finest mist from rain turned the ash into slurry paste blanketing the trees, stressing this mahogany stand into a premature shedding of leaves months before its usual summer balding.

The enforced lockdowns that kept residents inside their homes led into a surfeit of energy, partially released by relentless street sweeping and garden planting. I saved a leaf or two from those days when the authoritarian compulsion to impose a façade of order warred with the disorder roiling inside.

We harness science and technology to predict storms and avoid their worst. Leaves, though, tell us something after an upheaval. When there is more rain than wind, leaves clot in the gutters. After more wind than rain, leaves are strewn and left in tatters. Nothing is more eloquent than the unstirring foliage of trees just before a storm. 

The clatter of ghostly phalanges echoed when, after days of good weather, I swept the curling, desiccated carcasses of leaves littering the street, darkening browns dominating but with splashes of green here and there. 

Leaves cling not one second more, a surrendering that fills this primitive human with quiet.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 8, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”