Leaves

THE CARCASS was beside the highway. Due to its age and immensity, it looked like a boulder blasted from a mountain than a stump that had once seen a hundred years come and go.

The husband said that ten men could not move that trunk. Still of use, its branches were carted away. Before we pulled away, my last sight was of a few leaves littering the ground near the stump.

Yearends put to mind these leaves of mine, a mortal’s tale that pales to the stories from trees and mountains. Except that sometimes more than the tale, the telling is everything.

One of the things put to the test by the pandemic, running for nearly two years now, is our sense of time. In the naturalized order, we account for time. What have I planned today? Who will I be five years from now?

Until physical then social isolation disrupted the flow, the calendar paced our days. This Middle English word comes from the Old French “calendier,” which evolved from the Latin “calendarium,” meaning “account book”.

“Turning a new leaf” does not just physically correspond to flipping the calendar to the next month. In the book of days, turning a leaf means reading a saint’s inspirational anecdote or a historical turning point intended to elevate the reader’s life of the mind. 

I discovered recently on the Internet Hillman’s hyperlinked and searchable website of the 1869 classic, Robert Chambers’ “Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character”.

A Scottish gentleman whose inborn lameness prevented him from joining games, Robert swapped jam sandwiches for books. Later, he teamed up with his brother William to sell books for a living when poverty shut the doors to university and priesthood.

According to the bookofdays.com, a habit of scrupulously accounting for his days boosted the Chambers’ bookstall. Robert woke up early to read; this way, he also reduced his use of candles. By reading aloud to a neighbor and his son as they baked, Robert added freshly baked bread to his paltry meals.

In the Chambers’ “Book of Days,” saints, royalty, and historical figures fill every leaf with ideas that met Robert’s criterion of “improving the fireside wisdom of the present day”. 

Since the pandemic began, the journals I keep each year harbor more ghosts than leaves of wisdom. These empty leaves are more redolent of the Irish singer Enya’s version of the “Book of Days”: “No day, no night, no moment,/ Can hold me back from trying./ I’ll flag, I’ll fall, I’ll falter,/ I’ll find my day may be/ Far and Away.”

With apologies to Robert Chambers, I’ll find my day.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 13, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Milagro”

 

THE ODDEST bedroom talk between newlyweds transpires between Noel Manalansan (acted by Jay Ilagan) and Mila Carandang (Charo Santos) in Mike de Leon’s 1981 film, “Kisapmata”.

Noel is in bed while Mila writes in her journal. 

Though a warm-blooded male, Noel is interested in another form of intimacy. When will you let me read your diary? he addresses the ceiling.

Mila demurs that her thoughts are difficult to grasp. Noel retorts that it is precisely why he is interested to read what she writes.

You will have your chance after I am dead, replies Mila. 

Inequalities of power are explored by De Leon in his dramatization of Quijano de Manila’s reportage of the January 1961 crimes that took place in the Zapote, Makati home of a police officer.

In both versions, the patriarch wields power of life and death. Retired cop Diosdado “Tatang Dadong” Carandang (Vic Silayan) recreates Pablo Cabading of the Manila Police Department, who shoots dead his daughter and son-in-law, attempts to murder his wife, and commits suicide.

“The Manila Chronicle” and the “Philippines Free Press” (with Nick Joaquin writing as Quijano de Manila) focused on physical violence, alluding only to a father’s “obsession” with a daughter who marries without parental consent and attempts to leave the parental home.

De Leon’s film locks our heads in a vise, forcing us to confront domestic and political taboos. When Tatang rapes and impregnates his daughter, he does not only force his wife to connive, he gets a lesser man like Noel to pay the bride price: dowry and wedding to possess Tatang’s prized stock, next to the worms and pigs he breeds. 

Noel is the classic “pendejo”. Among Pinoy machos, the cuckold is the biggest idiot for denying that his woman is fooling him.

Admitting he is one redeems a pendejo. Yet, Noel is denied salvation by the “milagro (miracle)” of his eponymous wife, who confides to her diary rather than reveals to Noel the truth to free him from the dangerous illusion that he is only up against an overstrict father.

Noel and Mila are victims, their Christian names hinting of the dangers of retreating into religiosity to deny and justify exploitation. While Noel is naïve and her mother Dely (Charito Solis) is cowed, Mila, underneath the piety, claws back to survive, seeking to escape from her father-rapist-jailer by using her pendejo of a husband. Postulant predator, she is a true daughter of her father.

In political parlance, “nagmilagro (making a miracle)” cynically expresses the opposite of the Christian miracle: abuse and corruption by those sworn to serve the public, incest and fascism breeding human anomalies: worms, pigs, predators.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in the January 3, 2021 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Source of “Kisapmata” still of Noel and Mila: news-abs.cbn.com

Analog

THE PLANNER I chose for next year disconcerts. It marches the months in a row before inserting the weekly pages. The journal plots 2020 but begins in December 2019.

Then I remember why I liked this journal, its simple lay-out, almost bare except for fine lines and grey print. I am seduced by all that expanse of unmarked paper inviting contact with a pen’s nib or the gossamer brush of daydreams.

Yet, choosing a planner these days has become a chore. Do you need one for goals, exploration or inspiration? Will it be a-page-a-day, a weekly spread, monthly, five years, or a lifetime?

The word “planner” itself is a giveaway. Do I “plan” each day, let alone 365 days? While I live with some intentionality, productivity is a grid that I chafe at rather than welcome.

Perhaps this mindset has something to do with my start in keeping a journal. In grade school, my father passed on to me the diary given away by pharmaceutical companies. I could doodle in it and buy with my savings a book instead of a sketch pad, he suggested.

Later, my maternal grandmother gave me the journal a bank gave at yearend to clients.

How would I fill all those pages? Nothing much happens to a seven-year-old.

I did not know then the effect paper has on imagination. I tore out and cut up the medical ads inserted in the journals. Purple intestines, blue hearts, and rainbow organs became paper mosaics. I drew cartoons in the readymade panels of the corporate diary.

And I experimented with my handwriting, trying and discarding attempts to copy my classmates’ admirable cursives before settling down with the scrawl that is no one else’s but mine.

Even though I compose now with a keyboard, I think there is no better way than holding a pen and letting it flow on paper to hear myself better.

Keeping a journal is like taking a walk. Why one does, where one goes are minutiae; what matters is keeping the conversation running.

The bead of ink from the ballpoint becomes a trickle, a gush, then a slipstream widening into a channel where the unknown tempts and daunts.

Ever the good listener, paper receives everything unspooled by the pen, absorbs confidences, makes omissions palpable, nudging the voice to move on to the next recall, coax the lurking insight, claim the orphaned memory at the fringes of self-conceit.

In these digital times, when each is hell-bent on talking to all, writing to oneself, an attentive, thoughtful audience of one is not just another analog anachronism, not a trend in communicating in bullet form, not a selfie in long form. If we cannot hear ourselves, who can?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 24, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”