Hoho

"SAAN ka, Saang (where are you, Spider Shell)?"

When Rem found the noon heat too much, she dug for herself and her pups a trench under the bamboo and turned up a tiny brown bottle, bits of wrappers, and a single “Tahong (Mussel)” shell. 

Moving to Silang more than six years ago, the husband and I have grown used to living more than a thousand feet above sea level; our palates, not quite. 

Calling Opon our home for decades, we are skeptical about “fresh” seafood sourced from Batangas or other parts of Cavite like Bacoor or Imus, all a good drive away.

Eating is about connecting with the people who raise food for a living. Makeshift seafood stands line up beside the Cavitex, the Manila-Cavite Expressway also known as the Coastal Road. Along the coast of Bacoor are the bamboo homes on stilts of the families of sea farmers raising mussels and oysters.

Yet, we have never pulled to the side of the road to check out the trussed-up immobile crabs and seaweed-strewn piles of shellfish. Tito G., who knows his crabs, cautioned us about roadside crabs, which are “hoho” or “ampao,” meaning “no meat at all just air”.

Far from hoho are the “Kasag (Coral or Mask Crab)” crawling out of the seawater-filled basins of women, up at dawn in Cordova. The vendors scoop them into a “Caltex” can as fast as the “Kasag” can scrape away, sidewise, crabwise, in their doomed escape.

Late afternoons are for going to Saac, just as the fisherfolk unload sacks of “Saang (Spider Shell or Scorpion Conch)” and before buyers snap these up for restaurants and hotels. 

Dropped into water when it boils (not before as the animal will burrow in the shell whorls, reachable only for regret), the Saang is chewy and flavored by nothing more than its own brine and wisps of “sibuyas dahonan (spring onions)”. 

Post-prandial, the Saang shell decorates our garden with its dramatic apex and fearsomely flared outer lip. As a child, I preferred the Saang’s smaller version, the “Aninikad (Plicate or Samar Conch),” whose scimitar-shaped nail I picked out with a bent safety pin after dipping my fingers into the greenish-yellow soup, imagining I was diving.

Don’t play with your food, was a childhood reminder I rarely heard. I threw out the not quite empty shells in the garden, where our dogs sniffed, buried, and unburied them, still redolent of the unknown.

When Rem dug out the Tahong shell, she did not even spare it an exploratory sniff. Buried so long, its opalescent underside had faded to a milky opacity.  Yet, living a thousand feet above the sea, I can smell this shell and recreate, memory as puissant as fingers, much soaped and washed, will still smell of the sea the sea hours and lifetimes after.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 18, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Suburban affair

IN the telling and retelling made in the days after the event, the most dramatic moment was not when the burglar slipped in after the grandmother, grandchild and nanny entered the house, leaving the gate and front door open as, according to her four-p.m. habit, our neighbor would then water the plants while her “apo” watched television.

Nor was it when the intruder knocked her down, hit her head, and tried to stab her with his two knives.

It wasn’t also when, despite pain and shock, the grandmother still made sure her grandchild and yaya escaped the intruder, running out barefoot, crying hysterically but also alerting neighbors.

In our village in Lapu-Lapu City, the retelling escalates after neighbors rush to prevent the stabbing, disarm the burglar, and pull off his mask—revealing the familiar, smiling-but-now-contorted features of the man-next-door.

Criminality—the vulnerability of citizens to its daily onslaught and the inability of authorities to curb crime, let alone prevent it—is one of the “decades-long issues,” along with poverty and traffic, that the Philippine Daily Inquirer tagged as priorities that deserve to be on the campaign platforms of the five contenders vying to be chosen this May as the country’s 16th president.

Only one presidentiable—Miriam Defensor-Santiago—explicitly states in the broadsheet’s series on electoral agenda an anti-crime stance: “launch aggressive fight against illegal drugs”.

Another candidate—Rodrigo “The Enforcer” Duterte—offers a solution that strikes at the heart of Pinoys who still remember the darkest years of the country under martial law.

In a political rally, the Davao City mayor declared he does not only favor bringing back the death sentence but also executing the criminals in public. He promised to take “full responsibility” for lawmen accused of killing criminals.

Macabre and horrendous, Duterte’s version of peace and justice would not have gone unapplauded in our neighborhood. A few nights before the attempt on our neighbor, we drove past a street commotion.

According to Flor M. Gitgano’s Feb. 11 report in Sun.Star Cebu, a gunman and accomplice ambushed a local official known for his fight against illegal drugs. Basak barangay captain Isabelito Darnayla survived multiple gunshot wounds.

When our family first settled in the neighborhood in the early 1990s, it was so bucolic, we longed for more public utility vehicles instead of grazing cows in the vicinity.

The prosperity came, as well as crime. Before our neighbor got assaulted in her home, a rash of break-ins hit our street. Suspicion focused on our neighbor’s attacker, who had a history of domestic abuse, unemployment, and an addiction to illegal drugs.

Over a thick undercurrent of suspicions, fear and anxiety are the signs: a familiar face emerging from a burglar’s mask, a tricycle left skewed on the street (Darnayla’s attackers rode a tricycle, the king of the road in sitio Kagudoy).

The signs confirm every citizen’s nightmare: crime has crept out of the news and lives nearby.

The night of his arrest, our neighbor’s attacker died while in the custody of the authorities. When we go home, the sight of two houses, blazing side by side in the night, does not just weave tales of a victim who can no longer sleep in her home and of an accused who died before the process of justice could begin.

These stories are about lawlessness, a suburban affair.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s February 14, 2016 issue of the “Matamata,” a Sunday editorial-page column

Branding Cebu

NOWADAYS, Cebu is known for something else other than dried mangoes and “danggit (rabbit fish)”.

Tagalog-speaking plane stewards planning their overnight stay in Cebu discuss it. Bureaucrats from a Manila head office plot their Cebu City tour around it.

Searching on Yahoo for sites linking this to Cebu yielded 844,000 results. It’s a trifle, compared to “Cebu and dried mango,” 8,770,000 results; and “Cebu and danggit,” 11,100,000.

But for this Cebuano “lumad (native),” the illusion of consolation afforded by the Yahoo search dissipated instantly after we left the Mactan-Cebu International Airport to crawl for hours to go to Cebu City on a Friday afternoon.

Tragic but true: traffic in Cebu is as ugly as its cousin, the road snarls decongesting Metro Manila.

Many write about traffic in Metro Manila as if it were an actual person. Rich or poor, one tries to know its moods and whims and adjusts to these as a matter of coexistence.

At 76, my mother treats traffic in Lapu-Lapu, Mandaue and Cebu—cities she traverses daily to visit her mother—as if it were another teenager: predictably unpredictable.

I caught up with her in Cebu City after four hours on the road from Mactan: just three hours longer than my plane trip from Manila to Cebu. While gazing outside the taxi at the varying expressions of commuters crawling like us, I mused aloud about the timing of Cebu’s rush hours.

Sonya C. Solon Quintana, 76, road warrior: “Cebu has no rush hours. Cebu traffic is for the entire day.”

Ma’s stoicism is startling. She belongs to a generation that fetched their children from school to take lunch at home and bring them back just before the afternoon bell rang at 1 p.m.

When we were in our lower years, “rush hour” meant that in between noontime dismissal and the lunch that had to be eaten hot at home, we dropped by a family friend from whom we sometimes ordered home-cooked meals because my parents worked.

The essence of many terms other than “rush hour” and “noon break” has changed, too. Many private schools, once gender-exclusive, have turned coed in Cebu. Parental time to drive sons to an all-boys’ school and daughters, to an institution exclusively for girls is a privilege removed by urbanization.

Car pools were operated then by relatives or friends. It was unthinkable for one’s children to be fetched by strangers; family drivers, engaged for years, were entrusted with one’s children. These days, you pick a car pool covering your route and offering the best price.

So perhaps, the Metro Manilans who love/hate their traffic are right. It’s an entity you co-exist with; it’s not just a problem to solve.

Thus, city leaders must consult and listen to the citizens living daily with Cebu traffic. Unlike investors, tourists and other visitors, Cebuanos have a pretty good idea what goes on to transform overripe mango slices to dried mango, or danggit isda (fish) to danggit buwad (dried fish).

“Surreal” is a polite way of describing the colorful pennants decorating Mactan center island while crawling in traffic to and fro the international airport. “Free yourself from stress” and “Free yourself from daily commute” may set a record for branding a city but for the wrong reasons.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 9, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”