"Sa bangkito"

LIKE the “kabo (dipper),” the “bangkito (stool)” is a ubiquitous prop for the Pinoy’s art of making do.

It is cobbled from “retazo” wood, leftover pieces from a bigger construction project. In a country more intimate with dearth than surfeit, we learn to not just not throw away but also to put everything to use.  

Pail and dipper are necessities where faucets drip water by appointment and spew air the rest of the time. In the countryside, where meals are communal affairs, the “bangko (bench),” with its long plank of wood balanced on legs at each end, enables folks to squeeze in for meals by batches. 

The “bangkito (foot stool)” is an adaptation, a diminution of the bangko in size but not in resourcefulness. Before coronavirus disease (Covid-19) demanded physical distancing, public utility jeepneys squeezed in commuters on the bangkitos conductors pulled out from under the seats and positioned on the aisles.

Bangkitos also seat the vendors and patrons of “pungko-pungko (sidewalk-squatting meals sold by the plastic bags)” and other street hawkers of candies, cigarettes, lighters, newspapers, magazines, SIM cards, and face shields.

Papang taught my sister and I how to shine our school shoes like the boys in Colon, straddling a bangkito he painted in bubblegum pink (left over from another job). Is it because our center of gravity is close to the ground that the bangkito is a seat of repose? 

On a visit to Paete, I did not notice the bangkito in the corner of a large showroom of monumental, lushly detailed wood carvings. When the husband asked my opinion, I had to look twice at the reclining figure, so absolute in its stillness.

Barely two feet, the sleeping boy emerges from a stump of wood.  His shirt bares the uncircumcised penis, plump cheeks, and round legs ending in dingy soles.

Pillowed on his right arm, his head radiates ripples of wood. The unknown carver indulged the deep sleeper with a sea for a pillow. Only the splayed legs supporting each end of the stump reminds the viewer of a humble crib, a bangkito.

Every January, when the “novenario” begins for the Sto. Niño, the sleeping boy is not at the center or anywhere near the family altar.  This time, a spray bottle of surface cleanser keeps it company, a reminder of the universal, perpetual fight against the virus.

On the bangkito, the young-old face, slightly bruised around the eyelids, sleeps on.   When construction workers take a nap, they cover their faces with a shirt to keep out the sun or the gazes that catch them with their guards down. 

The boy bares his face, as an animal lies in its lair with exposed belly, the world with its appetites held in abeyance sa bangkito.

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 17, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata” 

Back to the cave

LAST Friday, the 13th, redefined deadlines even for the most jaded.

At 4 p.m., the newsroom texted to remind columnists to submit their pieces early. It wasn’t just the Sinulog weekend but also the paper’s new, compact template that pushed deadlines.

Then, in the VHire queue, an SMS in my phone at past 7 p.m. announced that, as “part of security measures during the Sinulog Festival,” signals will be blocked during the weekend, making call, text, and mobile data unavailable in metro Cebu.

When I arrived home near 9 p.m., phone and wifi services were already suspended. I didn’t have to tax my imagination, visualizing the panic this weekend: no ATM withdrawals, no mobile connections, no surfing, no ranting except to those physically nearby.

The impact of last Friday the 13th sank in when I sat down to write near midnight. Beside the computer were writing companions from way back: a dictionary, a thesaurus, and newspapers—all in paper form, not digital.

Going unplugged is anomalous even though I impose this on myself as a ritual purging, a psychic detoxification, an airing of the rooms inside my head.

In my 18 years or so of deadline writing, the Internet is the abiding presence that transforms solitude into a claustrophobic company of three: writer, Muse, and World Wide Web.

Eighteen years ago, this threesome already bemused me. I’m still uncertain whether being in this crowd is boon or bane.

In the company of the new media, I feel like I’m parading around in the emperor’s new clothes. When my editor instructed me to have my photo taken for the redesign, I posed for the camera self-consciously, wondering how the way I looked influenced how readers of the digital age would read what I wrote.

The insecurities mounted when the paper’s new template came out last Monday. The reduced news hole means tighter writing. Can I choose the words? Can I go for depth with the minimum of text?

Last Friday the 13th clinched it. Not being able to email means I will have to save this piece in a USB, commute to the newsroom before the Sinulog chokes the streets, and pray that there is no policy against downloading a file using a gadget that may infiltrate the newsroom system with malware.

Eighteen years ago, when I first wrote for a newspaper, beating the deadline meant hauling husband, toddler son and floppy diskette to turn over the column to my editor.

Who could have predicted that the threat of terrorism would bring back the good old pre-digital age? If you’re reading this piece today, it means I’ve found my way in the darkness of the cave to read the writing on the wall.


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 15, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Climb every mountain

THE BEST time to be in this town is after the revelers have gone.

Post-Sinulog, I realized this as I commuted around, examining the city of my birth like a homeowner who has been away for a long time and finds upon her return, the home altered beyond recognition.

A day after Sunday’s grand parade, the sons and I joined early morning commuters. The sight of the purged streets made me wonder about the rest of the city: still in bed, nursing a hangover?

My family’s experience confirmed the reports: traffic during the Sinulog weekend was also headache-inducing.

Uptown, a solitary roadblock was like a throwback, a remnant of the previous 24 hours when it served as a veneer of order and system. According to Sun.Star Cebu, parties took over the streets after the grand parade ended around 9 p.m. on Sunday, with some 90,000 revelers massing in the uptown area alone until dawn of Monday.

With immense respect, I viewed the few men and women still about, sweeping and bagging street waste.

The performances and spectacles hog the limelight during the festival. Yet, we owe a debt of gratitude to Cebu City Hall’s Department of Public Service and barangay environment officers, as well as to the informal clean-up crew—the scavengers collecting discarded water containers–for clearing the streets and making these operational and safe in a matter of hours after the street revelers quit at dawn and before the 8 .a.m. masses moved in.

Hercules himself would balk at the challenge. Every year, as the Sinulog grows in stature and fame, its trash record also piles up. In 2012, 100 tons were left by the estimated million joining the grand parade. This went up to 113 tons in 2013, then 170 tons in 2014. The 2.5 million drawn to Sinulog 2015 left the biggest whopper: 197 tons.

In 2016, the mound slid to 110 tons. Yet, we still need to clear this mountain before we can mention without embarrassment the zero-waste target we seem to set every Sinulog.

Clearing the trash required this year a workforce of 500 that started around 10 p.m. on Sunday and ended by 7 a.m. on Monday, reported Sun.Star Cebu. That’s not the only reason the environmental fallout of the Sinulog is hardly invisible: when the rains come and the gutters and canals overflow and choke the city in traffic for hours, we will know where the rest of the trash went.

Even more unpleasant than the crowd’s leftovers were miscreants in the mob. A day after Sinulog, office breaktime stories centered on personal anecdotes and social media posts about the drunken behavior of revelers and their assault on people and property.

Groping, bruising, verbal abuse and theft were often mentioned. In the 1980s, when I first and last joined the Sinulog due to a PE class requirement, the worst possible experience was walking for hours to get a ride, losing your wallet or getting your face smeared with canal waste by copycats of the Ati-Atihan face- and bodypainting.

It’s hardly reassuring that the official recommendation for future Sinulogs is to station more buses to temporarily hold drunks. The principle is apparently not to detain them but to allow drunks to sleep off their stupor in safety, with free coffee served, if possible.

Why does this proposal sound even more Mount Everest-like than a zero-waste Sinulog?


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



*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 24, 2016 issue of the “Matamata,” a Sunday editorial-page column

Children of the Sto. Niño

IN the land of eternal rush hour, my fellow passengers and I had time to meditate while waiting for our jeepney to move in the sludge-like flow of uptown traffic. At the end of a work day, no one perhaps had the interest or energy to comment on the traffic, swelled by the fiesta for the Sto. Niño.

When two young boys clambered on, passengers checked their belongings before lapsing back into traffic-induced stupor.

The boys started to sing. The kid hanging on to the right side of the jeepney could definitely carry a melody.

He turned heads, though, with his clear enunciation of the lyrics. A family in a parallel lane became part of his audience, with a teenaged son mouthing the lyrics.

This young troubadour turned Kurt Fick ft Paola Sandiego’s popular Cebuano hit, “HAHAHA Hasula,” into a poem of the streets, transforming a daily encumbrance into a moment of clarity, self-mockery and musical appreciation.

At the heart of the devotion to the Sto. Niño is a love for children. For nine days, the sons and I heard dawn mass at the Basilica Minore. Even among the devotees hearing mass on the streets surrounding the church, where one either stands the whole time or brings a chair, many parents and grandparents brought their children.

The patience and perseverance to carry a sleeping infant, quiet a fussy tot, or teach one’s child to wave while singing the traditional “gozos (hymn of praise)” attest that the church is right in trusting the Filipino family to be its frontline vanguards. More than one homilist recalled the childhood start of his devotion to Cebu’s Patron.

Looking at the posters and tarpaulin displays promoting the Sinulog, the older son questioned the popular depiction of a woman carrying the icon. Why the bias for the feminine when many fathers also sacrifice for their children?

The portrayals can be traced to history (Hara Humamay, queen of Humabon, converted and received Magellan’s baptismal gift of the Sto. Niño), culture (only women offer candles and the “Sinug (traditional dance prayer)” outside the Basilica), and aesthetics (winsome and graceful, women remain the favorite choices of choreographers to lead Sinulog street-dancing contingents).

If there is a blind spot in the fiesta of the Sto. Niño, it is for the other children, the ones not borne for hours on their father’s shoulders as the solemn procession winds down city streets, for the youths who are, in the unforgettable euphemism of one writer, “other men’s children”.

A friend recalled, while having a staycation in one of Cebu’s hotels, sharing the elevator with an elderly foreigner and two prepubescent girls whose manner of dressing and talking was “incongruous in the setting”. Both groups were heading to their rooms.

My friend and her partner encountered the girls on other occasions. These elevator rides marked a contrast of moods: between the young girls who always “looked so happy” and my friend and her partner, depressed by this star-crossed realignment of young girls and elderly foreigners during the world’s longest holiday centered on children.

One novena homilist waxed rhapsodically over the virtues of children: their innocence, smiles, obedience, joy. May the Holy Child shield the young, including those who, in some men’s eyes, remain “other men’s children”.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 17, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Pangaliya”

WE desire; we attain. What we cannot attain, we desire all the more. Simply put, that is how complex humans are.

For the first time, the boys and I joined the first mass that was the opening salvo of the nine days of prayers for the Sto. Niño. Anticipating the competition for parking space, I was the first to prepare at 2 a.m.

An early riser, I don’t find waking up a challenge. Yet my sons, too, woke and dressed without a fuss. We parked at the Cebu Cathedral grounds, which was nearly full. I felt the same surprise when, entering the Basilica, we found all the seats inside the church and in the Pilgrim Center taken.

This was at about 4 a.m. I have rarely been in the midst of a crowd of that size gathered in an enclosed area. If someone gave me the actual numbers of all the people standing between the nearest exit and my sons, I might have panicked.

Yet, the most outstanding feature of that dawn crowd waiting at the Basilica was the discipline. The numbers only became impressive after I noticed the crowd’s uncharacteristic docility and amiability.

Many devotees carried images of the Holy Infant, some nearly as tall and heavy as a toddler. A group of men lifted a bier carrying a statue that may have been used in processions. The crowd parted to give way to them without fuss.

According to Sun.Star Cebu’s Justin K. Vestil and Daryl Niño T. Jabil, about 300,000 devotees joined the “Walk with Jesus” dawn procession that covered the two kilometers from Osmeña Boulevard to the Basilica del Sto. Niño.

Starkly eloquent, Amper Campaña’s photograph on the Jan. 8 front page of Sun.Star Cebu captures the drama of the moment when the image of the Sto. Niño leaves the streets and enters the Pilgrim Center.

The photo is great storytelling without words: the passion of veneration moving thousands of pilgrims to spontaneously raise hands, replicas, candles, cameras and phones at the Sto. Niño, set off by the discipline and unity sheathing each speck of humanity, unmoved by hours of waiting or walking, to act as one synchronous whole.

It is a tale of binary opposites, oppositional by convention but, in this context, complementary. There is passion balanced with restraint, the individual merging with the collective, all made coherent by the globe of light at the heart of that dark sea of humanity, the Sto. Niño.

Even more beautiful than Campaña’s Jan. 8 banner photo on Sun.Star Cebu is the Cebuano word, “pangaliya”.

According to online dictionaries, “pangaliya” means adoration. In the Catholic tradition, “pangaliya” is interchangeable with “pangadye (prayer)”.

In implying an entreaty offered to a higher being, “pangaliya” is closer to “panguyo,” “pamalihog,” “hangyo” and “petisyon”.

The devotees gathered for the dawn opening mass of Jan. 7 give another meaning to “pangaliya”: discipline.

To venerate requires discipline to wake up early and adjust daily routines to join the novena. The discipline extends to consideration for other devotees sharing limited space and respect and obedience for the authorities implementing measures to maintain order and system.

For Sto. Niño devotees, the challenge is to translate “pangaliya” day by day. Beyond the Sinulog, is there “pangaliya”?


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 10, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The infant’s new clothes

SOME images are best captured by sight, not description.

On a busy Friday morning, at Legazpi corner P. Burgos Street, the traffic enforcer held up a hand to stop traffic for a couple pushing a cart.

While propelling with one hand, the man clutched to his waist two small figurines. These Sto. Niño images were unclothed.

Based on the red-and-gold images tottering with every jolt of their cart, I presumed the couple would later “dress up” the naked images for customers.

In the past two years that I’ve been unable to join the Sinulog, one of the sights I missed most were the busy stalls of vendors outside the Basilica.

In these stalls, as well as in nearby street corners and carts, perhaps the most lucrative enterprise next to the selling of Sto. Niño images during the January fiesta of the Holy Infant is the commerce involving miniature capes, crowns, scepters, orbs and even tiny pantaloons.

The dressing and accessorizing are part of many devotees’ preparations for the fiesta. In the same way that homeowners will order new curtains and bring out the best plates and silver for guests, the “bida (protagonist)” of the feast should also have new clothes.

My former teacher is a devotee who owns a towering Sto. Niño. She and her daughter carry this heavy and cumbersome image when they join the foot processions that open and close the novena leading to the fiesta. She has a “suki custorera (regular dressmaker)” to sew and fit the image’s garments, which are not renewed yearly but only when they show signs of wear. Moths are an irreligious lot and tinsel crowns quickly dent.

The refurbishment requires considerable expenses, specially as some images are bigger than dolls or real infants. As with any enterprise whose popularity and commerce intensifies with time, the Sto. Niño line, whether ready-to-wear or made-to- order, has diversified and specialized.

For instance, instead of a red-and-gold cape made of felt paper, gold rickrack and sequins, a customer can have a made-to-order fully lined cape in plush and thick velvet, embroidered by hand with gold and crystals. Genuine Sharobski, the vendor will tell one in all sincerity (she means these crystals were bought from Moro traders, not handmade in Austria).

The wealthy buy gold jewelry for their icon every fiesta. I have not seen any image dangle precious metal during processions, a sign that prevention of human avarice perhaps works better than petitions.

The practice of grooming one’s Sto. Niño turns off other devotees. Vainglory, they say. As with the emperor’s new clothes, the preoccupation with the corporeal reveals the frailties of faith, its susceptibility to spectacle and blindness to spirit.

Yet, strange is faith. Even in the tawdriest stall, a knock-kneed, pitted figurine is transformed from being a comical eunuch into the imperial and imposing “Patron”. Some of the vendors show skills beyond the artisanal, making what looks like stiff, bristling nylon flow and hang like real human hair, brushed a hundred times and one.

Watching vendor and customer attend to each image, I don’t think of children playing make-believe with dolls but of doting family members looking down on a favored child.

The impression is unshakable, glimpsed in a sea of hands waving at the replica of the Sto. Niño during the singing of the “gozos;” or in jeepneys, where the images are cradled by churchgoers or resting on laps; or in a driver who touches a dashboard image, its colors and features rubbed beyond recognition, for protection or luck on the road.

The red-and-gold image draws its power from crisscrossing narratives. Is it because an infant awakes protectiveness in the human? Or does the pull of the story stem from the hope stirred by God coming down to live with people? Faith is seeing, touching and believing, the myths aided by the Infant’s new clothes.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 12, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The Niños

RECENTLY, I’ve had to rearrange the lights surrounding the image of the Holy Infant in our living room. After the 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Cebu and Bohol last year, the family replaced the candle lit at Angelus with a battery-powered series of blue and white lights.

When the lights blinked for the last time, we replaced the batteries. I noticed a veil of dust coating the pillow. I dusted the pillow and then, the shell-like ear and cheek of the image reclined on it.

This image of the Child Jesus came to our home three Christmases ago. The husband bought it from an antique seller in Vigan, whose selling spiel stressed the “ivory dusting.”

I don’t know what the term means. The image’s chief claim to art is its resemblance to a real infant. Almost a foot in length, the image reminds me of a baby raising his arms to be carried. Its slightly drooping eyes are soft and guileless; from the left eye, either paint or varnish trickled, making me think of an infant who, woken from a nap, cries to be held.

For the husband, it was the small penis of the image that pushed him to wrap it in “hablon,” the plain cotton woven by women in Ilocos Sur. After a little finger snapped off during handling, he decided to carry the swaddled figure in his arms from Manila to Dumaguete to Cebu. In the airport, passengers cooed over the “baby”. A male colleague was spooked by it.

When the husband finally pushed open our gate, our companion thought he was bringing home someone’s baby. I scoured the stalls of Carbon to find a basket, made of rattan, that would hold it. Only after we placed it under the Christmas tree were we struck for the first time that we now have two images of the Holy Infant.

When our first son was born 20 years ago, I thought the retelling of the story of Nativity centered on the man-God born in a manger was not complete without “props”. I found a small figurine of about six inches in a store in Cebu City that also sold a small crib made of “salago” twigs.

The “props” eventually took over the story as the son arranged his toys around the crib and its reclining image every December. When the second son was born, the plastic farmland toys were replaced by racing cars, robots and construction figures. The small figurine suffered a broken neck and finger, but after gluing, the Nativity story went unaltered.

When the boys became older and rechanneled their energies to the digital world, we kept the image of the Holy Infant on the table near the main door the whole year round. Sometimes I touch it before leaving or upon returning. More often, it is forgotten until December draws near.

Last Oct. 15, 2013, when the temblor hit Cebu and Bohol with the strength of “32 Hiroshima bombs,” as described by Inquirer Visayas, some wooden Japanese dolls, books and bric-a-brac fell from our shelves. I was in Manila then and only heard the account of how our home escaped unscathed, including the dozen or so images of the Sto. Niño.

For the arrival of the Vigan image made me do a headcount. How many images of the Infant Jesus is in your home? In ours, there’s a gold-leaf painting on an old block of wood, made and given by the late artist Tito Cuevas, who also painted the image on river stones. There are metal, plaster and flourescent copies of the Holy Infant garbed in imperial gear, with its familiar crown, globe and scepter. There’s a wooden carving of a sleeping child, resting on the globe, its scepter forgotten against its leg, a Cebuano artist’s rendition of the Child taking a respite from eternal vigilance.

My late father cut and pasted on the inside of a clam we had in our meal an image of the Child that he dusted with gold and watercolor. I later stuck the clam on a cardboard covered in red for my sons’ school’s celebration of Sinulog.

I’m not a collector of icons. Our house is too tiny to hold anything but books and other essentials.

But as we learned last October, there’s always room for the Child in every home. Man-made images may suffer a broken neck or finger. But not even the energy released by 32 Hiroshima bombs can stir what lies at the heart of the Sto. Niño.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 5, 2014 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

Sinulog stories*

WHAT’S your Sinulog story?

As I was thinking of what to put in the article that will occupy this space on Sunday, I realized for the first time how, for years now, the piece I compose for every third Sunday of January is invariably about the fiesta of the Sto. Niño de Cebu.

I must have been in my mid-30s when I walked out of the newsroom a few minutes before Saturday noonbreak to find the streets sucked empty of vehicular traffic. The main thoroughfares were being prepared for the 1 p.m. Grand Procession.

Rose, a newsroom colleague, was my companion to my first procession. Unlike Rose, who has heard mass every Friday at the Basilica and attended the novena leading up to the fiesta for as long as she can remember, I’m proof that one can be born in Cebu and not have any inkling about the devotion for the Sto. Niño.

Of this quintessentially Cebuano side, I had a label retained from a college lecture: syncretism. Fusing bits of Catholicism and folk beliefs does not always yield a seamless byproduct, a blending free of contradictions, I reasoned.

That year, though, I met my deadlines early. Rose and I joined the streams of people converging downtown. Weeks before the novena, my editor assigned me to look for historical anecdotes to run as sidebars alongside the paper’s daily coverage of the fiesta. I trawled the Net, read old newspapers, scanned books and visited museums. There was a surfeit of information about Cebu’s “Patron”.

However, the most engrossing stories came from people. It seemed everyone had a story to tell about the ways the figure in red and gold touched their lives.

The narratives came even when I wasn’t interviewing: classmates having an impromptu reunion in a jeepney going to the Basilica; a devotee assisted by fellow passengers to get a towering Niño in a battered hat and muddy sandals be seated in a stifling, crowded Vhire.

As with other icons, the Sto. Niño does not lack for history, dogma and pageantry. Yet, people also refer to Him as if He were their father, son, brother, confidante, best friend. What’s the fate of skepticism in the inner circle of divine and familiar ties?

I admit I was still on assignment mode when I walked out of the newsroom with Rose. Not having experienced the press of bodies anticipating their sighting of the red-and-gold figure, I led Rose too close to the Basilica gates when, in a great clamor of bells, a vision in red and gold issued forth and the world erupted into a sea of waving, upraised hands. I found myself waving, too, a queer but not unpleasant taste of the novelty of participation while on coverage.

Seconds later, awe turned to helplessness and panic when the crowd surged forward to follow the flower-bedecked carriage. I lost touch with the ground as I was gripped and propelled by neighboring bodies as we all turned from an avenue into a narrower street. As suddenly as it came, the fear went. The crowd adjusted; I was deposited gently back to the street. I found Rose but could not tell her anything, my throat still gripped by something suspiciously salty.

Many of the stories I’ve heard explain why January is not just an extended holiday but a second Christmas to Cebuanos. Most of the stories attributed to the Child’s intercession are momentous: the desperate answered, families healed, the straying recovered, wishes granted.

As it is with miracles, even the small ones are seismic: about to kiss the image of the Holy Infant for the first time, it is not the spectacle within the glass case that stills me but the depression on the floor just before the image, as if heavy marble gave way under the weight of the intangible gifts offered by pilgrims.

On the second day of this year’s novena, I was standing in the still empty expanse of the Pilgrims’ Center, waiting for the 1 p.m. mass. The sun was not out but there was still enough noontime glare to make me squint. At first, I wasn’t sure if I saw the iridescence because the mere idea of dragonflies was bizarre and fleeting in the pollution of downtown Cebu.

It was no trick of the eye, though. A dragonfly, its wings like a shimmering bolt of silk, hovered then flitted above the simmering granite ground. A few minutes later, a butterfly traced a lemon-colored swath in this most unlikely of gardens.

Were these drawn to the flowers carpeting the altar and draping the walls? Or to something else, an intangible garden of flowering faith?


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


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 16, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Finding Joseph

SHE was born to be misunderstood.

When she joined our circle of women, she stood a head taller. Her riotous graying curls blocked my view of the tiny red-and-gold figure in its gilded glass house. A beige strap peeked from her gossamer-thin sleeveless blouse. A girlish ribbon of white cinched the lower V of her back.

Those curls, that indiscreet strip, the faint spots age left on the back of her dimpled upper arms. I tried to move my eyes back to the distant figure of the Holy Child but my eyes had a mind of their own.

When the sea of devotees broke into song to open last Friday's 7 a.m. Misa de Translacion at the Basilica Minore, the woman in white began to shimmy, quiver, rock. There may have been only a pocket of space separating her from the rest of us. Her curls, shoulders, torso, hips and rump conveyed this space was a sweeping stage, a grand auditorium, a raised dais.

At the end of the first two songs, she lifted both arms and offered herself to him. While the rest of us stolidly sang, holding on to our bags, packages, fans and portable chairs, she blew Him a kiss.

Though the rest of us who surrounded her did not budge, I sensed the molecules shift among us. Standing next to where I slouched against the barricade was a group of older women, clad all in brown. Blinding white veils covered their heads.

They, too, glanced when the Woman in White began her dance-worship. One of them, a woman cradling a sleeping infant, ignored her and stared ahead.

Blocked by those curls, I thought of Jezebel and wondered if a permed head also wreaked as much havoc during ancient times.

When the direction to sit came, the Woman in White unfolded a stool. Glancing back, she saw the mother holding the sleeping infant. She stood up, touched the other woman on the arm and offered the stool. But the mother shook her head, without even glancing at her. When the Woman in White repeated her offer, the mother tightened her arms around the child and refused, sharp and final.

After the woman resumed her seat, I found out I could now look down on those curls.

When the baby woke, it first made no sound. Its mother shifted and began to rock and sway. But it would not be rocked to sleep; it wanted to nurse.

When the mewling protests began in earnest, the mother's brown-dressed companions shared the mother's distress. The mother whispered that her daughter, who brought the bottle of milk, had gone to the toilet. Someone whispered that the girl will have to cross oceans to get back to them in this crowd. Another remembered that their group had since moved from the spot where she left them. And the final whisper: neither the women nor the girl in the toilet brought a cell phone.

Remembering how my milk flowed when my nursing sons woke and cried, I was about to urge the mother to nurse the infant when I saw the zipper at the back of her brown dress. Then I, too, wondered if the girl with the milk bottle would ever come.

The mother beseeched the Woman in White if she could take her seat. The older woman immediately stood up. The rest of us women drew closer and shielded the mother as she settled down and prepared to nurse. When the mewling quieted and the mother became still, we, too, were becalmed, as if our long barren breasts had found the release and life once more flowed.

In a whisper, one of the women in brown told the Woman in White that the infant was born 12 days ago. In the Misa de Translacion, or Translocation, the Santo Niño is reunited with Our Lady of Guadalupe. The images are then brought to St. Joseph Parish in Mandaue City, completing the connection.

From advent to Christ's adulthood, Joseph was near invisible but essential: he helped the Mother bear the Child, the Man to achieve His Father's plans.

At mass end, I found myself again beside the Woman in White, pinned against the barriers as priest after priest sprinkled holy water and benediction on petitioners and icons.

"Father, drench me," she said, swaying. While people turned away from her uplifted face and raised arms, I smiled at Joseph.

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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu's Jan. 18, 2009 issue

Sea-legs

JANUARY brings to mind the sea.

From my home in Barangay Bankal in Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu, I follow on television the roiling waves of men heave and pull the statue of the Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno de Quiapo in its yearly sojourn from and to its berth at the Minor Basilica.

I have never seen up close the life-sized statue that, according to Wikipedia, was carved by a nameless Aztec carpenter and transported by galleon from Mexico.

But lapping up the testimonials and footages of the procession, specially the rising injury and body count of the Jan. 9 fiesta, creates a sensation no different from being tossed at sea.

Here is an excerpt of the late National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin’s description of the Black Nazarene procession:

“To Quiapo's fiesta procession speed wave on wave and horde upon horde all of Manila's maledom: ‘kanto’ boy and ‘maton,’ jeep driver and stevedore, the ‘siga’ and the ‘sikat’... And all, from 13 years and up, have come to prove themselves macho in the roughest, rowdiest, ruggedest procession in the city's year. And what a spectacle it is: that rumbling sea of heads in the midst of which, now sinking and now rising, now tottering and now falling, now rushing and now lagging, suddenly appears uplifted over the tumult, dark and dazzling, terrible and triumphant: the Lord of Downtown.”

Though I have never been to Quiapo, I can imagine that surge of humanity, as well as the almost mystical amalgam of horror and wonder roiling inside those swirling in its midst.

In early 2000, I was a speck in the noontime crowd milling outside the Basilica Minore. Mixed with the devotees were the curious, like me, who found themselves drawn to the Saturday procession closing the January novenario. I had never attended any novena mass before this, despite years of Catholic education.

I wore stout walking shoes but brought an umbrella I could not open in the tight press of bodies. I also had no candle, no box of matches, and no replica of the Holy Child. But my real initiation took place when the red-and-gold image emerged from the church gates and the crowd surged forward.

Forced to tighten ranks when it turned from Jones Avenue to the smaller Jakosalem Street, the procession baptized me with my first “sea-legs.”

As the crowd pushed, I found out I could not walk. Unable to hold on to anyone, I could only grip my furled, useless umbrella to my chest. With my arms pinned thus, I was propelled forward by the surge of bodies.

I made an inarticulate sound when I lost my footing. But instead of falling down, I was carried by this wave, which deposited me later, without harm, on a spot that appeared after the crowd turned the corner.

For one used to making decisions, even one as elemental as putting one foot forward, the moment left me in almost superstitious awe. Since then, I’ve talked to others who went through the same experience of “floating” at some point during the procession.

One moment is emptiness, a total absence of will. In the next, life rushes back into the vacuum, as do gratitude and wonder.

The absence of tragedies in Cebu’s Sto. Niño fiesta is just one of the contrasts cited when a comparison is made with the Black Nazarene feast.

While one celebrates Jesus as child, the other worships the suffering Christ, flogged, crowned with thorns and carrying the cross of humanity. One feast tests men to suffer and endure; the other draws children, families, even the elderly.

Outwardly different, both celebrations must come from the nothingness we face before unsolved mysteries, whether of nature or of belief.

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


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 11, 2009 issue