A boy in Bayombong
I know I said something a couple of weeks ago about how stressful holidays are — to the extent that you need to take a holiday from the holidays — but one great thing about Christmas, beyond the material gifts, is how it manages to bring people together and people home. For most of us Pinoys, there’s nothing lonelier than Christmas away from family and away from home, so we make an effort to reconnect with loved ones over the season, especially those we haven’t seen for ages.
It’s strange and funny how some of the unlikeliest reunions happen. Two months ago, I was due to give a talk before a professional association, and needed to ask the friend who invited me — UP music professor Dr. Maurie Borromeo — exactly what time and place the talk had been set for. Unknown to me, at that very moment I was calling, she was with another friend of hers from the same hometown — Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya — who overheard the conversation, and who asked which “Butch” it was that Maurie was speaking to. The next thing I heard from Maurie was, “There’s someone who wants to talk to you,” and then I found myself listening to a woman who introduced herself as “Dollie Gutierrez.” She’d been looking for me, she said, for the longest time, and now here I was on the other end of the line, delivered by serendipity.
And as soon as I heard her name, a 50-year-old curtain lifted suddenly, and I was back to being a boy in Bayombong, visiting the young Gutierrezes whom I called “cousins,” and who indeed felt closer to me than my blood relatives. In fact, I called them my “Syrian cousins,” and you’ll see why.
The odd thing was, we had nothing to do with Bayombong or anything up north or certainly anything Syrian, otherwise. My family came from down south, in the island province of Romblon. But a young man named Pat Gutierrez was born there as well, and he came to know and to work with another Romblon fellow named Joe Dalisay at the Department of Public Works, Transportation and Communication. (I used to park myself there as a boy, in the old Post Office building, rocking in my dad’s swivel chair, doodling with his pencils that were red on one end and blue on the other, and pecking away at his typewriter, which to me was the most majestic of all machines.) I gather that Joe gave Pat a leg up in the latter’s career, and they became fast friends. But Pat now lived and worked in Bayombong, where he had met and married a Syrian mestiza named Lorice Zuraek.
So how did Syrians end up in Nueva Vizcaya? As it turned out, early in the last century, a young man named Nicholas Zuraek followed his brother to the Philippines, both of them Christians fleeing religious persecution in Damascus. The brother eventually went back home, but Nicholas stayed on, and married a Filipina named Maria Panganiban, and they settled in Bayombong, where they had several children, among them Lorice. Pat and Lorice Gutierrez themselves would have 10 children, Dollie being the eldest.
And these were the “cousins” I played with during idyllic summers I would spend in Bayombong, when my father Joe came over to visit his good friend Pat, bringing me along for the ride. And what a ride it was, back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, on those Rural Transit buses we would take overnight over the dustiest and bumpiest of roads, stopping for a chilly breakfast at the junction in Sta. Fe. Even today, as an older man, I trace the romance of travel back to those bus rides, which were laced with the fear (perhaps unreasonably, with more informed hindsight) of being ambushed by headhunters, who were supposed to jump out of the bushes when the fire trees bloomed. I was five years old when these summer sorties began, and around 11 or 12 when they ended — and at that age a boy’s senses are wetted paper, with every experience an inkblot spreading like a glorious stain into one’s fibers.
I remember the cacao and the balimbing in the large and leafy Gutierrez yard, the fresh corn and the bales of dalandan from a gathering in a neighbor’s house, the sweet-sour flesh of rattan fruit sold in cords on the street. I remember going up Bangan Hill, a Bayombong landmark. I remember the pretty girls in nearby Solano, where I tagged along to teenage parties I was tragically too young for. But most of all I remember the delicious cakes that Aunt Lorice used to bake — chocolate upside-down cake best of all — moist and quivering with yummy goodness, filling the air with an aroma that I haven’t been able to shake off in 50 years.
What a joy it was when Dollie told me that Aunt Lorice and Uncle Pat — who now live in Canada — were coming home for Christmas. I quickly asked them out to lunch (at Abe in TriNoma, which has become one of my favorite restaurants for its bamboo rice and calamares en su tinta, among other unique offerings). Meeting them again after so many decades brought out a boy, a smiling boy, I myself hadn’t seen in a long time. Uncle Pat, now approaching 90, was slower of walk, but as tall and as handsome as ever; Aunt Lorice remained everyone’s ideal of a surrogate mom — kind, generous, brimming with stories about her children and grandchildren. Dollie, now a mother of two and who came with her husband Bong Basa, was still the ate to me and to the Gutierrez boys — especially Russell and Walter, now white-haired gentlemen in the pictures Aunt Lorice showed off. Before we knew it, three hours of happy reminiscences had passed.
Over lunch, Maurie gave Dollie a book that reminded us of another Bayombong connection. Its author was the poet and novelist Edith Lopez Tiempo, one of our National Artists for Literature, and a literary mother to many writers such as myself, who first met her and her husband Ed as a fellow in their famous Silliman Writers Workshop in 1981. Without the gentle nudging of Ed and Edith in Dumaguete, I might not have gone back to school and on to a lifetime of writing and teaching.
And yet another Bayombong connection turned up when Maurie mentioned another beloved professor, this time from our own UP, who came from that place —the late, lamented Concepcion “Ching” Dadufalza, mentor to generations of students and future teachers. Not only was I one of those students; when Ching moved in with her sister seven years ago, she left her house on the UP campus to a younger faculty member — none other than that boy who spent a few summers in Bayombong.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
