Old songs (In loving memory of Caloy Abrera)

On a viewpoint on Halsema Road in Mountain Province, the tall, distinguished-looking gentleman in khaki shorts surveyed what nature and man had laid out before him. Standing on the edge of the roadside structure of unpainted concrete that overlooked a sinuous valley of rice terraces off Sabang, an hour’s drive to Bontoc, he uttered a long, swooshing "Byooo-ti-fulllllll!" Thence swept both arms across the scene, as if to say "All this shall be yours."

The silent injunction was directed at a video crew setting up beside him. Equally enraptured, the cameraman nodded in assent as he went through the paces of extending a tripod’s legs. The bearded gentleman turned around and smiled at everyone else securing their gawking spots on the circular deck. "Now," he announced, "we have time enough for a civilized coffee break."

It was just like Caloy Abrera to come prepared in his usual genteel manner for such expeditions. Striding purposefully back to the CCI-Asia van, he pulled out a square bag and brought it up to the viewpoint. Jaime de Guzman and I smiled in appreciation as its contents were laid out: a thermos bottle with hot water, a coffee presser, a pack of ground coffee, wheat bread and three kinds of cheese.

Indeed, this was the life —- elegantly making do in the relative wilds, whether it be on some remote beach in his native Palawan or another misty roadside attraction in the Cordillera, or from the mystic fastnesses of Mt. Banahaw to a sandbar jutting out into the Cagayan River.

That coffee break is but one fine memory I have of an abiding friendship. It all came back as I passed that very spot Sunday before last, after hours of listening to old songs that prepared me for the revelation: Yes, there was Caloy Abrera standing on that windswept deck as our van pitched by.

The Baguio radio station could only escort us as far as Mt. Data. But the selections all through that four-hour drive were enough to convince me that Caloy too was playing DJ and choosing the vintage music.

"Da-doo-ran-ran-ran da-doo-ran-ran…/ Yah, she looked so fine/ Yah, I’m gonna make her mine…"

It was in 1999 when we conducted that full-week roundabout in those familiar parts, to document whatever struck our fancy, in Banawe, Bontoc, Sagada and Baguio. This was for Lakbay TV, before CCI-Asia took off on its own for Isla, Juice, and other parts ever heralded and now achieved. And now, I was doing the trip by my lonesome, and being regaled by nothing but fine, cheery memories to repel the sobs.

"O papa-um-maw-maw/ O papa-um-maw-maw…"

The songs segued along as we zigged and zagged, with nary a commercial break nor any minute of prosaic identification.

"Dear someone… send your number I can call…/ I’ll be waiting at the door… Seal it with a kiss…"

The Halsema Mountain trail still looked and felt terrible, especially along the first four hours from Baguio, despite the numerous signs thanking the President for the rehabilitation efforts scheduled from July 25, 2001 to June 3, 2005. My God, four years. For a four-hour drive. But time was not now on our side; nor were locations.

"I realize the way your eyes deceive me/ With tender looks…/ Pay-per roses…"

Fresh concrete patches lay side by side with gouged dirt, so that commuters from either direction often had to find a way of give-and-go that would prove most efficacious. Time was on no one’s side.

"And they called it puppy love/ just because we’re 17…"

And I remembered dear Caloy again, how on the drive from Manila the day before, just as we took the detour from MacArthur Highway through Asingan to avoid Urdaneta’s snail-paced mess, I received the first shocking SMS about the freak accident.

In the van were dear friends Jimmy Abad and Jing Hidalgo, along with April and Mabi of the UP Press. We were to join the UP Creative Writing Institute party already in Baguio since the first week of the 43rd UP Writers Workshop. Or rather, we were replacing the early panelists.

National Artist for Literature Rio Almario was still up there, together with UP-ICW and Workshop Director Vim Nadera. UP Mindanao Chancellor and inestimable poet Ricky de Ungria had already gone down. UP Veep Butch Dalisay texted that he and Neil Garcia had just negotiated Kennon Road, unfortunately also on descent mode. We would pass one another somewhere around Villasis, I estimated. Butch suggested the Asingan detour; we took it, and as a consequence failed to wave at one another. But we did note how he and Neil must have stopped earlier to spread out some rough gravel over a stretch of road in our northbound lane.

"I love you more today than yesterday…"

Before Asingan, I received the heart-wrenching text from Sonny Hernandez of CCI-Asia, which only some weeks back had had a grand launch of its Living Asia Channel at the CCP. (And which I wrote up in this space.) Their head honcho, our dear lifetime friend Caloy Abrera, had been in an accident. I couldn’t believe my eyes, my numb fingers around the cell phone, my fears. I immediately texted his wife Emily, who was just as dear. "Say it isn’t true…" I implored.

"You don’t have to say you love me / Just be close at hand/ You don’t have to stay forever/ I will understand/ Believe me, believe me…"

I felt like I should turn back. Well, deposit Jim and Jing in Baguio first, then head back the same day. But I was supposed to meet with Rhey Bautista, University of Baguio’s Prez, regarding a long-festering problem that he had so graciously offered to have his far-reaching influence bear upon. I could only wish that the meet would result in a decision to defer having to go to Bontoc the following day.

Meanwhile, the sobbing started as we went up Kennon Road. Blank stare at the mountainsides sweeping past, at the sudden ravines that now symbolized the unexpected pitfalls more than sloughs of despond. Up the long and winding road of momentous grief. Cross-texting with common friends, expressing and hearing shock.

Finally, settling down at Kaibigang Jimmy’s condo, I couldn’t help the flood of tears, especially when an acquaintance rang up on the miserable cell phone to ask for soundbites for a newspaper report on the accident, on the victim, our prized friend.

The meeting with Rhey at the Country Club verandah went well, fuelled by whisky for me, brandy for him, and pizza for the young Atty. Crispin Lamong. Rhey’s and Deb’s son Peter Rey was running for vice mayor of Baguio, on a united opposition ticket, opposed, that is, to the rampant commercialization and "selling" of the city. "No to casinos!" was one rallying cry.

I said I wish it would also soon assume another: No to, or at least a moratorium on, the proliferation of Smart Addict banners all over every other lamppost in the city. Or at least inside Camp John Hay. Really now, Smart and Globe ought to spare once beloved landscapes of their unnecessarily cutthroat advertising mano-a-mano. Room enough for everyone, right? Else how can Sun Cellular even try to butt in?

Good word came by text from a Smart phone in Sagada. But it would mean that we couldn’t revise the plan to drive to Bontoc, spend the night there, and have that crucial Monday morning meeting to resolve yet another silly, petty conflict. Which had the least thing to do with literature, but still had, somehow. Our own literature.

And so the heavy heart all through the long, excruciating ride over patse-patse roads past La Trinidad, Buguias, Natubleng, Sinisip… The old songs came handy, they all seemed to speak of a friend now gone, and yet there he was deejaying us through.

"I know I’ll never love this way again…"

How was the painter Jaime de Guzman taking it? The pianist Carlos Calaguian? The photographer and brother-in-law Charlie Altomonte? And dear Ems?

"I’ll be loving you, eternally/ With a love that’s true, eternally…"

Surely she’d understand why we couldn’t be there with her in the somber lowlands.

"Hold my hand and have no fear/ I’ll be there/ I’ll be there… We’ll be together/ I’ll be there…"

We were up traipsing around the mountains again with dear departed Caloy, we were hearing him, seeing him all over the place.

"Please release me, let me go…"

It had been five years since that last trip together to Sagada, which we now had to avoid like the plague. At least for the nonce. On our first night then, at the lodge on Mapia-ao at the entry to town, I had experienced a rare, singular moment of irritation with Caloy. We were sharing a small room with three single beds for Jaime, him and myself. He had risen before dawn, and I too was soon roused by a rustling sound, of some plastic wrapper ceaselessly unfolding from an infernal bag or knapsack. It went on for long minutes, and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I had to rise and stalk off to a foyer where I slumped grouchily on a wooden sofa to try to resume precious sleep.

A couple of hours later, as we set off on a trail after breakfast, Caloy sidled up and whispered, "Sorry, Tito Krip, I was in a dream state myself, didn’t realize the plastic rustling kept you up."

"It’s okay, Tito Caloy. I know you only too well to carry a long grudge…"

But that’s how deep friendship is – a wave of the hand, a nodding smile, occasionally a grimace mock or serious over imagined slights, inadvertences, accidents…

But God, not that kind of an accident. Not involving Caloy of Palawan, of Corregidor, of Malate, of Makiling, of Candelaria, of Banahaw, of Taguig, of home, home, home…

Why, our kids had grown up together. Why, we were as kids more than they were, forever.

And as the van rumbled on through Halsema, now nearing the Olympian setting of Mt. Data, the radio seemed to give itself extra life, perhaps aware that its watt power from Baguio would soon be lost.

"I cry the tears, you wipe them dry… You give me strength…"

Why – everyone was saying, texting, everytime we’d get a signal up on the old mountain trail of perpetually political rehab – we just saw him at Santi Bose’s grand retrospective at the CCP last Wednesday.

"I’ll cling to the warmth of your tiny hands/ The wind will die down when you walk by/ And morning bells will chime.../ I’ll be there when you’re feeling down…"

Yes, and of course he was smiling in that benign Christ-like manner of the evangelist, the advocate, the patrician philanthropist of good cheer among the ordinary, the boring, and the downtrodden. I had always admired Caloy for that quality of benevolence, that patience with the commonest and dullest of folk. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to him, the fellow Piscean of utterly distinctive worth. Because he showed us how to live without quick anger or rancor or impatience. He was our opposite; he bore the crosses we would have no part of whenever we had our sullen way.

"Tito Krip," he once counseled us with his forty-carat smile, "the problem is you expect your son to be like you: thoughtful, considerate, etc. We are all different children under the same God." Or something like that. And he chortled, which broke into laughter that could be called garrulous were it not for its sheer earnestness of joy.

As the van drew past the Ten Commandments on large concrete tablets set on a mountainside on Mt. Data, Freddie Mercury of Queen took over the befogged airlanes in a final burst of vintage power.

"Love of my life, you’ve hurt me/ You’ve broken my heart and now you leave me/ Love of my life, can’t you see/ Bring it back, bring it back/ Don’t take it away from me, because you don’t know/ What it means to me…"

A loose white shirt. Khaki shorts. Sandals. When we finally paid respects to the urn by the bowl of bright flowers, and listened to Emily’s poignant, elegant story of recall, remembrance, and revisioning with a medium as Caloy’s voice, that was how she started, describing his get-up for his intuited exit, in that marvelously regnant, pregnant surfeit of symbols as he left us. He chose the tracks, those little crosses of an urban quotidian. He had stopped to smell the flowers. He admired the plants, envisioned them in some part or other of his many gardens.

"I love you very much," he said through the medium. "I love our family very much. I’m sorry I didn’t hear the train."

And those first words were soon followed by a torrent of counsel and wish, even as they spoke of growing familiarity with his newfound setting of bright light, with no floors, darling, hijo de pooh…

No old wood to work on. But a lot of old loves, old love songs.

"…Love of my life, don’t leave me/ You’ve taken my love, you now desert me/ Love of my life, can’t you see/ Bring it back, bring it back/ Don’t take it away from me, because you don’t know/ What it means to me…"

Fellow Pisces, he is gone; he stays on. "God bless…," as he loved to say "Hijo de pooh…" he would also trail off whenever he exclaimed disapproving wonder at any Kafkaesque development. The man was two fish, swimming in opposite directions, but they always seemed to do it gently downstream.

"You won’t remember/ When this is blown over/ And everything’s all by the way –/ When I get older/ I will be there at your side to remind you/ Back —- hurry back/ Please bring it back home to me/ Because you don’t know what it means to me/ Love of my life, love of my life…"

The gentlest of persons, going in so gruesome a manner. Life isn’t fair, but full of random twists and grand irony. It can be awful, it can be beautiful. For the most part, what can make it bearable or lovely are the many memories of friendship. With someone like Caloy, with Caloy, it has been lovely indeed, like listening to old songs when you desperately need them.