Transported

How can you not like anything named "Seeker of Hearts?"

Last Monday, as most other Pinoys were working in their offices, factories, farms, and schools, I found myself mulling over this phrase, on a long Monobloc bench in the company of about a hundred other applicants for drivers’ licenses. We were, of course, at the Land Transportation Office, just about the most unromantic corner of Quezon City, where Reeboks stand toe-to-toe with flip-flops and perfumes commingle with sweat in that unblinking democracy of red tape. I faced a four- to five-hour wait for a piece of plastic, but came prepared.

Every three years, I undergo this routine, and I remembered well enough from the last time I wrote about it in this column ("License renewed," Jan. 13, 2003) to bring along a book to read, rather than stare at signs on the wall that said "SYSTEM SLOWDOWN." "Seeker of Hearts" came from that book, which wasn’t a love story – well, yes, it was, but of a different sort. The name referred to a tulip grown by a Turkish woman named Fatma Hatun in the early 1700s – just one of 1,323 varieties of tulip to be found in Istanbul at that time. The book I had chosen to transport me from bureaucratic limbo was The Tulip by Anna Pavord (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), a paperback I’d fished out of the National Book Store bargain bin about a year earlier and had promptly neglected.

I like flowers just as much as the next fellow (I just haven’t been known to give them) – I have sweet memories from childhood associating roses with the Virgin Mary, and thus my own irretrievable innocence – but I’m no floriculturist; I can’t tell an aster from a zinnia if my life depended on it. I bought the tulip book because I like books devoted to singular passions – whether they be watches, cars, antiques, or computers. As The Tulip’s back cover blurb proclaims, it "promises to do for the tulip what Longitude did for clocks and Fermat’s Last Theorem did for maths." This is almost criminal for me – as a writer of stories – to say, but I enjoy good nonfiction far more than the kind of novels that make up a semester’s reading list, not just because the events described in them "really happened," but because they raise reality to a higher order of intensity, in language, through language.

It’s hard to resist a book which begins with a search for a rare tulip on a mountainside in Crete, thus: "Omalos is a bleak town set high on a pancake plain, imprisoned between walls of mountain. The plain was nibbled bare by sheep. It was so quiet you could hear the seedpods of the wild spurges popping in the heat. I quartered the ground like a bloodhound, cheering at finding anemones in all colors…. It seemed likely that where there were anemones, there might also be tulips."

There were no tulips where I was in that waiting area, its concrete floor speckled only by the occasional curl of candy wrapper. Three crackly microphones barked out people’s names, herding them to Window 2, 5, or 6. A table stood on one side, laden with medical paraphernalia; behind it a nurse sat waiting to give blood-pressure and blood-sugar tests for a small donation.

Earlier that morning, and in keeping with the government’s standing requirements for all drivers’ licensees, I had taken and passed a drug test (P250) and a medical exam (P50), consisting of relieving the remains of the previous night’s beer into a vial, for the former, and reading letters off the same EFPTOZ eye-chart I’d memorized since grade school, for the latter. With time on my hands, some loose change in my pocket, and a desire for the honest truth in my heart, I shut my tulip book, approached the nurse, and surrendered my arm. The suggested donation, she said while pumping up the air, was P35 for the two tests combined; I must have felt relieved to hear that, because my BP came out to what it almost always does, a mysteriously normal 120/80, despite my accounting for a quarter of my barangay’s annual consumption of crispy pata.

But I’m sure my BP shot up when the nurse told me that she needed to prick my finger for a blood sample; as everyone knows, grown men can take hammer blows but cringe at a nurse’s needle. "Will it hurt?" I asked her, but even before I finished asking the deed was done, and a ribbon of bright red blood bubbled at my fingertip, to be mopped up by a small thin spatula that dried out to a certain color, a shade of pink that, matched against a coded strip, the nurse pronounced "Normal!" Given that I drink Coke by the tubful, that again was a surprise – unless, in this utterly corrupted world, she too were complicit in a conspiracy to convince me that all was well.

I heard my name called out on one of the mics – to Window 2 where, in an innovation worthy of a Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service, the LTO had set up a digital camera (one of those single eyeballs perched Martian-like on a skinny tripod), the better to take people’s pictures with in a trice, without giving them even a minute to comb their hair or fix their makeup. It was about 10:30 a.m., and I settled back into my seat to wait to be called again to pay my fee, thinking that I would be home in time for lunch of nilagang baka.

I opened the tulip book and was, again, captivated by the spirit of excess that seemed to trail this flower, leading its besotted fanciers to ruin. I learned, for example, that the reign of Sultan Ahmed of Turkey from 1703-1730 was "generally designated by historians as the lale devri, the Tulip Era. The Sultan was completely ruled by the vagaries of his favorite flower and it was at this stage that the tide turned in the bulb trade between East and West, for Ahmed III imported millions of tulip bulbs from Holland to decorate his garden…. But Ahmed’s passion for tulips led to his downfall. His subjects rose in revolt against him, because of the vast amount of money he spent each year on extravagantly staged tulip festivals. The Dutch, with their own tulipomania of the 1630s firmly behind them, had no compunction in encouraging others down the same prodigal route."

For all I knew, the Silk Road itself must have stretched between Window 2 (ID picture taking) and Window 6 (cashier, for payment of fees) because a full hour and a century of tulip history passed without hearing my name. I was getting to be an expert in distinguishing between European and Turkish tulip preferences (the former bulbous, the latter dagger-like). Finally, at 10 minutes to noon, the lady in Window 6 rose to announce that they were closing up for lunch, and that we could all return at 1 p.m. to resume our vigil.

I took that announcement with a strange equanimity. I was on leave for the day, and hungry, and my mind had been straying from tulips to the food stalls and vendors just outside the gate. Every government office attracts a caravan of merchants, and I can always depend on the bakod business for the kind of snacktime staples I won’t find in Greenbelt: nilagang mais, hard-boiled eggs, banana cue. But I found myself suddenly torn between a craving for fried chicken and chicken mami, and compromised by walking out the LTO gate to the nearest Chow King, where I ordered a quarter-chicken with rice. That turned out to be a mistake, because I had another kind of chicken in mind – either the aromatic, paper-skinned version of Savory, or the starchy but tasty crust of KFC, which my European friends so abhor – and this fourth of a fowl seemed rushed, which should have been no surprise in a fastfood joint.

To console myself, I took a walk to the ukay-ukay store around the block, and flipped through the racks of T-shirts to seek my Holy Grail of the moment, spurred by my current addiction to badminton: Nike Drifit shirts, which cost upwards of P1,000 in the posh boutiques of Eastwood and Makati. I had no luck today (a few days later I would find a newish one in another ukay-ukay in Cubao, for P120), and flirted briefly with a University of Michigan T-shirt that had seen one too many laundromats (better than seeing none), before putting it back.

I enjoy ukay-ukays for about 10 minutes, until that cloud of stale, sour air that distinguishes them begins oppressing and depressing me. I have no compunction buying and wearing possibly dead men’s suits or shoes, excluding bloodstains and formaldehyde; surely the owners of all my pens from the ’20s and ’30s have long departed. But one’s delight in a bargain can come at the price of a form of spiritual fatigue, which the ukay-ukay exhales by the gray lungful. I stepped out of the place and saw, from the corner of my eye, a sign advertising a Thai-massage spa, and would have gone straight into it for instant rejuvenation, but it was almost one.

I trudged back to the waiting area at the LTO and perched my butt at the end of a long bench, fully expecting to tip the thing over. But I’ve lost around 15 pounds in three months of jogging and badminton, and the seat held. I was about to return to my book when I noticed a crowd building up to my right, milling around some object of curiosity. Pinoys cluster around mirones, adding to their bulk like iron fillings to a magnet, and I was no exception. I stood at the crowd’s edge to see a poor sod taking a driving test right on the premises, starting and braking a jeep in frightful lurches. It can’t be easy passing your driver’s examination in the middle of a virtual Colosseum, with at least half the audience rooting for your demise.

I read some more: "The Turks did not call tulips tulipam. They called them lale, the name coming with the flower from its Iranian heartland. Busbecq evidently confused his interpreter’s description of the flower, made in the shape of a turban (tulband in Turkish), with the flower itself."

Suddenly my name was called, and I hopped over the benches to Window 6, where I paid P293, including a late-renewal fine, for a three-year license. I sat down again to await another call to Window 6, where I could pick up the new card itself in another hour or so. Over that hour, my imagination traveled from tulips to Thailand, to how good a foot massage would be at the end of a long day’s waiting.

It was close to 3 p.m. when I took possession of my newly minted driver’s license, and while all the driving in the world could not have taken me back to Sultan Ahmed’s gardens or even to Omalos, I had had enough transportation for one day – more than enough, indeed, for a sickeningly normal fellow who can’t tell asters from zinnias.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html