Not another requiem

On the first anniversary of my father’s death, an old colleague of his at the UP Creative Writing Center died on the other side of the world. About a week or two before Alex Hufana passed away at age 76 in Riverside, California, I was rummaging through my father’s basement library at Maginhawa, and came across a book that Alex had given to Franz Arcellana, with a sterling dedication as befits a gift from one writer to another. Especially if the book itself was written by the gift-giver, in this case Sir Hufana, teacher of generations of poetry students in UP Diliman, circa 1970s to 1980s.

It was in one such poetry class where we had as classmate the beauteous Malou Estrella, younger sister of the Ateneo varsity basketball player, and the class – with no more than a handful enrolled – was held every dusk on the first floor of the Arts and Sciences building.

Here was where Mr. Hufana taught us poetry, rhyme schemes, meter and measures, how wife would rhyme with strife and knife but failing to mention life, and when class was dismissed a male classmate or two would thereby escort Malou Estrella to her sundo at the covered walk between AS and Business Ad, stars in our eyes seeing how she walks in beauty like the night.

Later, much, much later, in another class and the stars dropping out of sight, we were just two or three in class and we would hold it in Sir Hufana’s classroom at the Faculty Center, a twice a week affair for what would constitute a regularly threesome for poetry from Poro Point to Hong Kong and Balic-balic, Alex, Douglas Cheng and myself.

For Douglas, a Chinese who must by now be teaching English and literature in a Hong Kong university, often fell asleep during the lecture, so while he nodded off the teacher and I grew to realize that the sleeping student symbolized our collective subconscious. Just Alex and me and the snoring Mr. Cheng between us. Me trying my best to keep a straight face and ignore that my classmate was sleeping. Sir Hufana proceeding with the lecture in a matter of fact manner, not even bothering to wake up Douglas.

It was Alex who became the second director of the writing center, when it occupied part of a first floor converted classroom at FC that has since transmogrified into a reading room (but which doesn’t prevent classes from occasionally being held there).

Those were times when writing center lieutenant Tony Serrano would bring to office a kind of prototype of the Gameboy, an exciting contraption of pindot basketball. Ruth Roa was also around then, and we were classmates in Miss Mariano’s class, may both their souls rest in peace. Ruth would wear dark glasses to class, the better to hide her beautiful eyes when she dozes off.

But just because my classmates fell asleep did not mean the teachers were boring or that I was the only attentive one in class, rather the truth may lie somewhere between – the lecturers had trouble keeping a lively discussion going, for which reason I was prone to observing my immediate surroundings.

There were also strange visitors to the center, I recall once an elderly woman kept haranguing the personnel for one reason or another, as if she were the precursor of Laraine Onassis who considered everybody a prostitute and wrote "bulok" across the posted name of a nerd working in a newspaper.

The weird woman commented to Sir Alex how she had read his "immense body of work," to which Alex would retort by repeating the word "immense" amusedly.

Maybe the woman was lonely and just needed companionship, and the poet Clovis Nazareno who at the time was also present when the visitant was there, remarked: "Maganda siguro ang apo."

All I can remember is that she looked like Mary Walter. Can you imagine what Mary Walter’s granddaughter would look like?

I got word to Clovis in Bohol about Mr. Hufana’s death, and Clovis reacted almost incredulously. He swore and said our old poetry teacher was his drinking buddy, but that now Alex and Franz were in Tierra del Fuego.

And Demetillo? My friend wanted to know. Long been planting camote in the Elysian fields.

Serrano too got word to me re certain corrections in the obituary notice for Mr. Hufana, how the Ilocano was born Oct. 22 and not Oct. 26, but in 1926. How the remains would arrive last Friday noon, and that a service and tribute would be held that night at the UP Protestant Chapel.

I was not sure if Hufana’s daughter Leni would be there, Leni the former European languages major and once upon a beauty contestant but who must already be very much married and a mother of kids, continuing the blood line from Poro Point.

Of course Sir Alex was also a Raven, the second to die in recent months after Larry Francia.

If there’s anything we learned in that poetry class it is that poetry can’t be taught, but if we were determined enough and searched doggedly we might get an inkling of how it’s done.