A bird always in your sky

In the evening when the rain is still and the drive home weaves through traffic on the get-go, and Indiana Street in Malate is as much a setting of a short story written shortly after the Second World War by Francisco the Man as a street we drive the kids to each morning, perpendicular to Julio Nakpil of the architectures of the streets of Manila.

In the evening when the moon is still and the drive inland reeks of sewers and such, and from certain angles the moon seems whiter and paler than it really is save for Jack Daniels, but then the moonshine comes raining down and we are more than just drinkers of whiskey and rum, more than the sum of the wakes of our childhood.

Yellow Shawl was her name, address Indiana Street, three points of view, aka the wing of madness, in which Baudelaire is quoted in the epithet concerning a singular warning, safe in the porte cochere of an apartment on an afternoon spent waiting for a woman’s dress to swish in the breeze.

Aside from yellow shawl we also recall In These Hallowed Halls, chronicle of the groves of academe, written by FEU’s favorite son, Jess Cruz, whom we last saw waiting for a jeepney ride near the main Post Office in Lawton. The moonlighter Cruz, may his good soul rest, occasionally would drop by the office in Port Area to personally hand in his column, and he would ask about his former student Carmelo sitting at the central newsdesk, but it invariably would be a Thursday which was Carmelo’s day off. Coincidentally Mang Jess died on the same day his student would no longer report for work, the two of them bidding the newspaper goodbye at the same time.

Sometimes I would run into Mang Jess in the lobby or the corridor of the offices in Port Area, and we would exchange small talk about my father, who was a good friend of his, the lifestyle section, where we both moonlighted as columnists, and some common acquaintances.

"Up to now I still can’t believe it," he would say, concerning my father’s death three years ago, shaking his head.

I forget now if I told Mang Jess that I had shown my old man the feature on him and his cats that appeared in this same paper, something to cheer Francisco the Man up while he lay virtually immobilized in his bed in the ancestral homestead in UP Village.

When they were both hale and hearty the two men getting along in years used to talk over the phone about literature and such, maybe about the Palanca awards where they must have once sat in the same panel of judges.

During the brief exchanges with Mang Jess he would admit to me that sometimes his confidence as a writer was shaken when his column didn’t come out or was bumped off, but he never stalked off angrily or had a tantrum when the pages were tight.

Mang Jess and my dad had some common friends, among them Jolicco Cuadra and Chiqui Gomez, whom I had expected to see at the wake had I gone there posthaste, so brief I heard it was.

On the same Black Friday Mang Jess bid goodbye another icon in journalism also wrote 30, but since tributes to Teddyman Benigno have been profuse and quite a few of them better written – notably by his contemporaries in this paper – we’d rather confine ourselves to a brief remembrance of the summer in Dumaguete in 1973, when we tagged along with the old man for the annual writers workshop where Benigno’s daughter Nena was one of the writing fellows.

Nena was with some friends who were also fellows at the workshop, Catherine Salazar and Gemma Mariano, young women in the province in the summer of ’73, at the time flirting and also tying to ward off the swains Cesar Ruiz, Angelito Santos (+), Felix Fojas. By the way Jolicco Cuadra was also part of the batch then, looking like Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.

I forget now if Nena submitted poetry or fiction at the workshop, but she might have been a heavy smoker sitting near the back of the room, probably befuddled when Francisco the Man wrote on the blackboard to suggest another title for a story, "Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded, Friendship Faded," instead of "Again, a Short Story," by Cristina Ferreros.

Nena was dark like her dad, and quite a looker though not stunning, there were rarely any stunners in workshops like those, especially to a 14-year-old who tagged along to have a different kind of ship-riding vacation.

I think either Lito or Sawi had eyes on Nena, except maybe in the back of their minds loomed the figure of Nena’s papa who was by then already the chief of Agence France Presse Manila bureau.

Sawi who has suggested to write a column titled "Underneath the Cutoff Line," in reference to the text censored or deemed subversive during the martial law years. He it was who kissed Gemma who had a towel draped over her head during a boating excursion off the coast of Negros, and where Jolicco went swimming fully dressed and lost a shoe in the process.

But the likes of Teddyman we only see once in a lifetime, he wrote like a boxer and boxed like a writer, and my condolences go to Nena who may no longer remember the adolescent son of Francisco Arcellana who sometimes sat in during the workshop sessions in Dumaguete in the summer of ’73.

If we failed to drop by Teddyman at Magallanes it must have been due to wake fatigue, because another amigo Edwin Ang had passed on the Thursday before Black Friday, the publisher of Luna Caledonia and the poetry of Marj Evasco losing the battle with skin cancer.

We believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth, a bird that is always in your sky.