On a Ship and a Prayer

One of the favorite quotes I trot out for the delectation of my writing students is something I’ve loosely paraphrased from a letter of Mark Twain, in which he said, in effect, that "Of course, fact is stranger than fiction; fiction, after all, has to make sense."

This came in handy last weekend when I took a ship out to Romblon (I’ll tell you in a minute where that is) with a group of fellow academics and student writers to attend the 19th Cornelio Faigao Writers Workshop (and I’ll tell you in another minute who Faigao is, or rather was).

Romblon happens to be the province–that clump of islands after Mindoro that you pass on your way to Cebu or Iloilo–where I was born 48 years ago, a stone’s throw from the ocean. Its capital–on Romblon Island, the smallest of the three main islands (the other two being largish Tablas and heavily forested Sibuyan)–is also named Romblon; clear enough? The province and especially Romblon town is well known for its marble, which meets every one’s deep-down hankering for a dependable almires and a respectable lapida, not to mention that key fob with your name lovingly engraved on it, ringed by flowers.

It was the writer NVM Gonzalez–himself Romblon-born, in 1915, before the family moved to Mindoro–who noted that when Jose Rizal stopped by Romblon on his way back to Manila from Dapitan, he found the place "muy hermosa, pero muy triste" (so pretty, but so sad). That was also the Romblon I remembered from my last visit to the island, in 1974: a huddle of wood-hulled boats in a harbor, a town of old stone houses fringed by hills of coconut-shrouded limestone. The sadness wasn’t only in the desolate beauty of the scenery, but in the fact that the island was slowly but literally vanishing, coughing up its guts to supply the trade in marble.

I would write about Romblon, slightly fictionalized, in my novel Killing Time in a Warm Place (Anvil, 1992):

"Marble was plentiful and cheap. I had seen Tigbawan Island across the channel where the capital town of Santa Prisca lay, and it stuck out of the water like a bad tooth one side of which had completely crumbled. The whole place was marble, and generations of Tigbawanons had chipped away at the rock beneath their feet. The men who worked for Marblex sawed into the hillside with water-cooled chains and hauled blocks of the smoky rock with elaborate systems of pulleys and planes onto trucks which delivered them to ships in the harbor. These blocks, I was told, would be cut into slabs, most of which would find their way to Manila’s financial districts, to pave the floors and brace the walls of banks; others would go to refurbish statuary in churches–the larger ones with goldleafed seraphs on the roofs, swirling columns, hardwood doors; some would have been ordered by the lapidarists whose shops nuzzled against the churches alongside the flower and candlestick vendors, whose electric drills rose above the Ave’s and Kyrie’s with a shrill insistence on their deadlines."

Last weekend, I returned to Romblon to do honor to another Romblon-born writer, Cornelio Faigao (1908-1959), who did most of his writing and achieved prominence as a poet and journalist in Cebu. The Faigao Workshop has been held in his memory since 1984, and this was the first time the workshop organizers–the Cebuano Studies Center of the University of San Carlos, assisted this year by the Internet-based Romblon Discussion List–brought the workshop to Faigao’s home province.

With me on the panel were Erlinda Alburo, writer and director of the Cebuano Studies Center; Resil Mojares, scholar, writer, and recently retired professor of literature and history at USC; Mila Aguilar, poet and instructor of English at UP Diliman; and Ishmael Fabicon, founder and executive director of RDL-CLEAR (the "CLEAR" being Cultural, Livelihood, and Educational Assistance fcor Romblon), now based in Elmhurst, Illinois. The Faigao fellows–six from Cebu, five from Manila, and one from Romblon–were Cherrie Lee de Guzman, Heidi Palapar, Michael Obenieta, Arlaine Jayo, Henryl Moreno, Jeneen Garcia, Vivian Limpin, Erwin Lareza, Michelle Correa, Gabriela Dans Lee, Roselle Pineda, and Abner Faminiano. Writers Rosario Lucero and Aline Parrone tagged along as observers.

With the help of other US-based Romblomanons, Ish Fabicon had managed to integrate the workshop into the "2002 Sanrokan Romblomanon International Convention"–sanrokan being the local word, roughly, for "the virtue of sharing."

We left Manila all together on Friday, boarding the M/V Blessed Mother (whose sister ship, no surprise, is the M/V Virgin Mary). The names led me to observe that we were leaving on a ship and a prayer ("pangalan pa lang, panalangin na")–a prayer, perhaps, to reach port safely.

As it happened, the Blessed Mother was more than adequate, comfortably airconditioned and well-appointed (a tad too well, with not one but two karaoke lounges), hardly the seagoing sardine cans I remembered from childhood voyages. Our outbound trip was quick and pleasant, a 12-hour glide across mostly calm waters. We reached Romblon at 2 a.m., then took a jeep 11 kilometers to our destination, the very tastefully designed Talipasak Beach Resort run by NVM’s friend (and my distant cousin, as it turned out) Mina Mingoa.

The workshop itself went by swimmingly, with just a hiccup or two to break the smoothness of the proceedings. I was deeply impressed by the quality and the range of the work and by the critical sense of the fellows, from whom I can only expect better things in the years to come.

It was, however, our journey home that left the deepest impression on everyone’s mind. Here’s what happened:

We waited pierside in Romblon for our ship–as it happened, the same Blessed Mother, inbound from San Jose–after paying the obligatory visit to the town’s marble shops (and its one-and-only Internet café, a touch of grace in a province without air service and an island without a cell site). We were supposed to leave at 5 p.m.; the ship appeared on the horizon at that time–but, saddled with a mechanical problem, could not dock safely to pick us up. The ship’s owner, Romblon Gov. Eleandro Madrona (another distant cousin), radioed orders for the ship to send out its lifeboats for us.

These were large boats, capable of taking on about 110 passengers each, and they came out of the rapidly darkening distance to get us and our bags and our mortars and pestles. Above us rose a swollen moon and a careless spray of stars. The sea seemed gentle. We felt stirred by excitement, but of a benign and beautiful kind. None of us, I was sure, had ever ridden a lifeboat, nor did we really care to–but this would be an easy adventure, an unexpected gift at the end of a long weekend.

It was 8 p.m. by the time we clambered down to our boats and claimed our seat-space, imagining what it must have been like on the Titanic, in a real emergency. Here we had space and goodwill to spare. People introduced themselves warmly and made friends, lending the beams of their flashlights to latecomers finding space for their butts and baggage.

And then, at the very last minute before shoving off, a tricycle drove up in a mad clatter to the very edge of the pier, disgorging a distraught mother cradling a very sick child in her arms; a man, presumably the father, held up a dextrose bottle above them. Somehow, this family managed to get settled in the boat, in the same fragile triangle; a nurse shouted for us to wait for the oxygen tank, which had to be brought in another tricycle. Blood dripped from the child’s nose through a tube into a plate; in whispers, we learned that Lalaine had already been declared dead of typhoid fever at the local hospital, but had been revived, and now she had to be rushed to the city on the Blessed Mother; Romblon could do nothing more for her.

Our boat pulled out into the darkness, headed for the ship’s twinkling lights, with another full lifeboat beside us. The sea roughened in patches. Someone took a photograph somewhere. In minutes, the swell had worsened, and when we reached the ship we realized that we were going to plow straight into the waiting ladder–a heavy wood-and-metal contraption–at ship’s side. People screamed and ducked as we went under the ladder; sailors struggled mightily and noisily on both ship and boat to couple the two quickly and safely, but we kept hitting the side of the ship, the ladder, and the other lifeboat. Miraculously, the dextrose bottle remained where it was supposed to be.

Finally the ropes and latches held, and we clambered out of the lifeboat–leaving our bags for later, and Lalaine and her parents first–into the belly of the Blessed Mother. The airconditioning had conked out on our deck, requiring quick rearrangements and a downgrade for most to tourist class, but we were simply glad to be dry and alive; Lalaine’s dextrose bottle hung above their bunk like an odd lantern, at once a symbol of life, and of its passing.

The next morning, over breakfast and tepid cups of 3-in-1 coffee, the fellows and I came to the same inevitable conclusion: we’d spent the weekend talking about the twists and turns of plot and character–but still, and yet, fact was indeed stranger than fiction.

[Postscript: According to fellow passenger Dean Pestaño, who took the photo here, Lalaine died that morning on the way to Mary Johnston Hospital, not too far from the pier.]

* * *

Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com..