Pomegranate seed

        WHEN I first bought flowers from Lucia, about four white chrysanthemums arranged with leaves in a small native basket cost P50. 

Buying cut flowers was anathema until Papang died. When my sister and I came with him to visit my grandparents and brother in the cemetery, we brought a pail holding whatever blossoms grew in our garden: yellow bells, purple tops, even red cats’ tails (which lent our reused milk cans-turned-vases a dramatic air like actresses trailing feather boas).

In summer, when only the bougainvillea was resplendent, Papang clipped santan from bushes growing near the graves. Until I read in a library book how Persephone stayed in the netherworld for a third of the year due to the pomegranate seed Hades tricked her into eating, I took out the filament at the center of each tiny blossom and sipped the sweet beads of nectar. 

I did not want to be trapped with the dead, drinking bone-juice nectar. The underworld I imagined had the moldy scent of flower stems rotting in the slush left in the cans we threw away.

Lucia lent matchboxes to those who bought candles. Walking to the cemetery, I realized I forgot to bring the pack that held the candles, brush, and rags for cleaning the graves. Too early for the stores but Lucia had already laid out her flowers and candles at the side of the cemetery entrance.

After I chose candles, Lucia offered a box of matches, saying I could return it on my way out. On my next visit, I resolved to buy her flowers.  

The blossoms were wilted. Lucia asked if I wanted brighter colors. Choosing a batch with fewer blossoms rimmed by brown, I said my father preferred white for grave flowers. 

When a floral basket fetched P150 last year, Lucia still had white mums for me because I told her he liked it that way.

Lucia’s daughter owned the stall across the street.  Her daughter, the guards, and other vendors called Lucia “ang tiguwang (that old person)”. 

Lucia also referred to her daughter in the third person: “si tambok (the fat person)”.  

Sometimes a grandson helped Lucia. A young person is fleeter at grabbing the baskets and jostling with other vendors when cars slowed down before entering the cemetery.  

When the young man was not around, Lucia watched as the other vendors snagged sales. It’s not only the heat that reduces Lucia’s blooms into brown-lined dolorosas.

Once, Lucia had only yellow mums. She offered to ask “si tambok” for white mums. I surprised Papang with yellow ones that day. 

I never visit the dead on the busy feasts of the saints and the souls. I like the long exhale of silence lying over the graves, thinking when I will outdo Persephone and take one more pomegranate seed.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 1, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Idiom

CLOSE your book. No free reading.

In these lines, borrowed from a store display, I distilled my philosophy on virginity after 12 years in a Catholic school exclusive for girls. 

My parents chose my school by family osmosis. Nearly all the women in Mama’s clan displayed the varying lengths and bodily coverage that the blue-and-white uniforms underwent over the decades. 

Or perhaps Papang expected the nuns to restrain me if I gave in to the urge to burn my training bra and run out of the closet?

In my teens, closets hid nothing dirtier than dustpans entangled with brooms.

Families and schools are the seats where a child learns for life that being Catholic is a perpetual guilt-trip. In kindergarten, I felt different from my classmates. My parents permanently separated.

“Broken families” are red flags for outbreaks of rebellion. I cannot recall a homeroom teacher who was not flummoxed when Mama gave her standard opening to explain why Papang was a no-show in getting my report card: her father and I do not see eye-to-eye.

Though I witnessed my parents locking eyes and horns, I thought Ma’s version was clearer than the one spun by the mother of a friend who said her father drowned in the soup.

Escaping into novels as soon as I discovered “Dick and Jane” (heteronormal twins influencing my conversion of hymen into a “book” kept closed to avoid breaking the “spine”), I saw my classmates and their families in the binaries of wealth (rich/poor), color (mestiza/brown), and marriages (intact/broken). 

In high school, “tomboy” was first whispered in comfort room (CR) colloquies, along with smoking, petting (first base, heavy), Cebuano, and “kodigo (cheat sheets)”. Under segregation (the faculty had their own), the student CR, spic and span, was the black market for the prohibited, disorderly, or just different.

I liked to gabble in Cebuano to the tune of flushing before returning to class where I nitpicked the English in my head, but I had little else to exchange in the CRs. 

I suspected I was heterosexual but was pathetically out of experience to prove or disprove.  Thus, college was the great revelation not just because the “books” were “falling off” the shelves but also flying “open,” helter-skelter.  “Browsing” welcome.

My coed uneducation, first in a Catholic university and then in a state college, began in the CRs, reading the cubicle walls where the graffiti of chatty penises and pushy vaginas illustrated the order of “gender disorder,” to quote Judith Butler.  

In an age when the watchdogs of orthodoxy hold that homosexuality is “objectively disordered,” our society’s spaces for excreta and articulation are, in my uneducation, vexedly misplaced.

Source of image: 123rf.com

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131) 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 25, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Crack

 

THE POLICE should have killed Reina Mae “Ina” Nasino when they arrested her and fellow workers in a raid at dawn on Nov. 5, 2019. It would have saved the State at least the additional expenses it always claims it can ill afford.

Instead, Ina, obscured in personal protective equipment (PPE), dominated online feeds during the furlough of six hours that the court granted so the 23-year-old urban poor organizer of the nongovernment organization, Kadamay, formerly working in Smokey Mountain, Tondo, can leave the Manila City Jail to visit her daughter.

The other body rivaling Ina’s viral image belongs to the truly dead, baby River. Like her PPE-hidden mother, River cannot be seen, only imagined in the small white coffin her mother, handcuffed, touched with difficulty. 

Mother and daughter are in white. Color of surrender, contagion, innocence, death. 

Along with Ina, 61 other activists were arrested in Bicol and Manila on the strength of warrants signed by only one Quezon City judge, reported Lian Buan of Rappler. Had Ina been shot while “resisting arrest,” a dominant narrative explaining this country’s history of inconvenient bodies conveniently silenced, who would remember her now?

Ina and River “benefit” from the punitive justice that reduces bodies into “bodiless reality,” instruments to demonstrate that far better for extracting obedience to the State is not torture or death but “punishment… (that) strike(s) the soul rather than the body,” as  Foucault, quoting Mably, states in “Discipline & Punish.” 

In the ensuing war of opinions spouting over two bodies we barely see, the news photos of Ina and River illustrate the difficulty of seeing,  past the long arms and uniformed escorts bristling around Ina’s white-coated figure during the wake and the burial, what the State and its instruments have effaced: underneath the PPE shroud are the breasts a mother was prevented by law and order from giving to her baby, born underweight after she carried her while jailed in a cell designed for 40 prisoners but holding 80.

No one dropped River into the cracks. Not the jails that don’t have facilities for breastfeeding inmates. Not the courts which ruled against her nursing while on hospital arrest and separated the infant from her mother a month after birth. Not the police, which used national security and the pandemic to keep mother and child apart even unto death.

Specially not us, so quick to condemn activists, dissidents, and political prisoners jailed for their beliefs.

This “bodiless reality”—who next after the Nasinos?—is superior to extrajudicial killing.

Thanks to the State in the time of Rodrigo Roa Duterte, we have a baby album like no other.

Source of photo: AP/sunstar.com.ph

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 18, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Tools

       ON the day it is announced that the poet Louise Glück is chosen for the Nobel Prize for Literature, I look for a pencil left by the man who repaired our roof.

William lives nearby. We like his work, his honesty. He repaired our toilet and dropped out of our life. The husband learned he found regular work nearby.

Then the pandemic. Unable to leave home or to look at each other the whole day, we looked around for what we could repair. The husband is quite the handyman. He built a shelter, the gate. I repaired sentences.

Some things were beyond us. Gutters rotten through.  Drip-drip of a ceiling. The faded pink of a sticker marks the page of “The Egg” in the copy of “Louise Glück: Poems 1962-2012” that I brought home when May was ending in 2018:

“Across the beach the fish/ Are coming in. Without skins,/ Without fins, the bare/ Households of their skulls/ Still fixed, piling/ With the other waste.”

When community quarantine loosened, other men came. They had papers to show they tested negative for the virus. They brought tools; we lent them ours. They repaired what needed to be repaired. William turned up. 

He lost the day job. He put on weight from days of staying home. His young son was not with him when he went up our roof and fixed what awaited William and his tools. Cleaning up, I found a stub of a pencil he left behind.

“EX C.” is left from the wood shaved to expose the dull lead point.  A Mongol No. 2 with a teeth-dented ferrule holding pink bits of eraser. A gap yawns from the lead to the midpart of the wooden body. William decided the pencil was no longer useful for him or his son. So I pocketed the tool.

“… Where/ the rift is, the break is.” At first, I had a hard time finding Glück on the Net because my professor’s pronunciation of her name rhymed with “click”.  When I held her book finally in my hands, turning the pages slowly, the words fell like rain, felt like no rain, fell as pellet after pellet.

I looked for William’s pencil in all the bottles holding an assortment of wooden pencils, regal, honed to a fine point, never been used. I use mechanical pencils in the journals. Pencils go into William’s pockets. I cannot carry mine; these might impale me.

The Mongol No. 2 stub I found finally in the thicket of pens I keep on hand for daily reading and writing. A minimum of words is needed to explain to William what we need.  

In place of poems, William’s pencil left marks and lines. A chewed bit of Mongol No. 2, the prosody of a working life. Glück, closing “Arboretum”:

“Or they became like stones in the arboretum: as though/ our continued existence, our asking so little for so many years, meant/ we asked everything.”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu's October 11, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, "Matamata"

Storytime