One for my father

To start the week on a light note, here’s one for culture shock: just to check up on their reading, I gave an objective quiz last week to my American students – the ones I teach Philippine Culture and Society to, here in Wisconsin – and one of the questions had to do with an essay on Filipino riddles by our foremost expert on the subject, Dr. Damiana Eugenio (who once gave me a "5.0" on a similar quiz, taking care of my surfeit of self-esteem and guaranteeing my rapt attention for the rest of the semester). I asked for the answer to a riddle cited in the essay: "A deep well full of sharp blades." (Isang balong malalim, puno ng patalim.)

The answer, as every Pinoy should know, is "mouth." One student of mine – drawing on more familiar experience – wrote "garbage disposal."

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Last week, the 20th of September, marked the 10th year since my father Jose Sr. left us. I can still remember the day he died – how his heart literally exploded, how the ambulance came too late, how I whispered our love to him in the ER, how the tears burst forth when the doctors let us into the operating room after they had sewn him up. I remember kissing his cold brow before pushing him gently into the eager fire of the crematorium, and then reclaiming his ashes – still warm, like a bag of bread I cradled in the crook of my arm – hours afterward.

Even as I write this, those tears keep coming. Some sons lead their lives in defiance of their fathers, seeking escape and deliverance from the tyranny of their own blood. I have led mine as an offering to him, seeking his quiet and continuing approbation.

He was far from a perfect man, and his flaws ran across his character like long and tender scars. He was a gambler, and we were forever in need of money; I was never sure which one caused the other, but I remember the steaming pancit he would bring home when he won something – and also the long dark hours of waiting for the door to creak open, assuring us that, win or lose, he was home safe.

He was blessed with a bright, sharp mind that, under different circumstances, could have brought him to Congress or the Supreme Court. He topped his elementary and high school classes and dreamed of going on to law school. He read voraciously, and mastered English so well that, despite growing up and going to school in a small seaside village in Romblon – where I the eldest would also be born, when he was 31 – his way with words would be sought by men of power. He put me to bed with the promise of stories from the Readers’ Digest; we had no TV until I was 12, but the house seemed always full of books and newsmagazines, albeit cheap pulp editions of Erle Stanley Gardner and back issues of Time. Until his last days, beyond my mother and their brood of five, my father’s closest companions were his rosary, his dictionary, and his crossword puzzles.

He never finished college. He was both too poor and too brash, and had met my mother at a pier where they were both waiting for somebody else. She was a landlord’s daughter from the same province, studying in Manila for a UP degree. He swept her off her feet, and they were married soon after, confident in his natural intelligence. She too was a bright young woman – much later I would find a book to which she had contributed a poem, a feat she had conveniently forgotten, yielding her dreams to his.

And then, as in most marriages, followed good times and bad: the loss or lack of jobs, the constant moving from one habitation to the next, each seemingly smaller and more plebeian than the one before it, until we ended up squatting in a hovel in Diliman, sharing the toilet with a pig being fattened for slaughter. In the meanwhile, largely through my mother’s labors as a minimum-wage clerk, I had been sent to a rich boys’ school, there to expand and cultivate my own trove of English words, which I was expected to parlay into something bankable down the road, while my siblings made do in public institutions, or otherwise stopped schooling. My father threw in what he could from wherever he could get it; no job was beneath him, not even a stint as a barker for jeepneys – a man’s first responsibility, he would later impress upon me, being "to provide."

My father had briefly been a Manila policeman; a motor vehicles office agent; a clerk in the public works department; an aide of the governor; and then a barangay elder in his old age, a man whose views and judgments were much sought and respected by those who knew him, even if a townmate would sting my ears years later by asking, over one too many beers, "If your father was so smart, why was he so poor?" So poor, indeed, but rich in kindness; even his favorite expressions – "Gademmet!" and "That’s foolish!" – sounded more like mild complaints than curses.

My mother nurtured us with heroic love and devotion, but it was my father’s gentle roguishness that stirred my imagination. I tagged along to wherever he would take me: his office with its swivel chair and red-blue pencils, the valleys and mountain passes of Nueva Vizcaya where we had distant cousins, his own mother’s burial in the old hometown, a fleeting and solitary visit to my estranged grandfather, a "Trip to the Galaxies" in a fake rocket ship built by Reynolds Aluminum as a Christmas gimmick, a bed of newspapers on the floor of a charity ward where my mother was being operated on. It was my little sister Elaine whom he missed the most on these sorties, but it was I, firstborn, who stood and sat beside him. If he had told me that the boat we were getting on would take us to America, I would have believed him and dusted off my preformed notions of San Francisco.

He would never set foot outside the country, even when it became possible for him to see at least Hong Kong. The reality of the world didn’t seem to excite him as much as reading about it did. Romblon and its politics seemed worthy enough of his fine mind.

So I have done, and still do, his traveling for him. Every new place I see – more than 20 countries now, over 25 years – I report to him about, in mental letters that pass for prayer. And as I confess my own fears and foibles to him – my own gambling, my own predilection to hurt those whom I love the most – I also tell him things to mend his exploded heart, those things he never saw: how Elaine finished law near the top of her class, and married a great guy in America; how Jessie took his undergraduate diploma at the age of 49 (topping my 30), and is now in law school himself; how Rowie has been resisting offers to work in Washington so she could serve our people here; how Joey’s son Pipo is besting others far older and bigger than him in class; how Beng heads a successful art-restoration company, and how Demi is racking up "1.0"s in graduate school; how I became vice president of the university I dropped out of; and how his bride Emy misses him terribly, but enjoys gardening in Elaine’s and Eddie’s backyard in Virginia, and continues to care for all of us, as though we had never aged.

Father, perhaps we never have. I’m 52 now, but every time I have visited your crypt these past 10 years and touched my fingers to the marble between us, I feel like that boy again, waiting for you to come home.

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