Transits, with dearest friends
Sad news came last Thursday. Our old dear friend Carlitos Calaguian, pianist non pareil, had passed away the night before. Word from Emily Altomonte Abrera was that he had just finished playing a set at a hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia, retired to his usual table, asked for a glass of water, and reportedly said he felt so tired. Some minutes later he was found with his head resting on his arm, as if he’d fallen asleep. Turned out he was gone.
On his last visit here, medical tests showed he had a heart condition. His daughter Mingwee had pleaded for him to pass up on the rest of his contract in Siem Reap. But Carlitos loved to play, and do gigs in exotic places. When he was much younger he’d even sign up for long months on cruise liners.
Besides, he had his older brother’s company in Siem Reap. Virgil had opened the Cockatoo Nature Resort a couple of years ago. Our circle of friends had long wanted to join them both for a bonding vacation, with fascinating temple complexes as another come-on.
I stayed for a week with Virgil when he was still based in Tokyo, decades ago. As host and friend he was always enjoyable company, blessed with elfin wit and irreverence. And he knew his food, gardens, and music.
But I had shared longer seasons with Carlitos, starting from way back in the early 1980s, when he was still part of the now legendary Genesis band together with Jaime Fabregas, Pete Canzon, Jun Viray, and Ed “Koyang” Avenir — the last having also left us several weeks ago.
Carlitos stayed in UP Village while I was in nearby Teachers’ Village. We’d walk to one another’s apartments, trade plants and smokes and enjoy long-hair music. While he could play virtually any Western standard and bop on the keyboards for any rock band, Carlitos loved the classics. He had a favorite anecdote: a supposed Aztec princess of a soprano named Yma Sumac turned out to be Amy Camus in real life.
On my trusty Ford Fiera at the time, I’d pick him up from his music gigs and we’d have a post-midnight meal — somewhere on Kalayaan or Kamias or Timog — then finish up with more beers or rhum or cheap whisky. For a while we were a troika with Ruben Domingo, another long-haired hippie, who went on to work as a soundman in Hollywood.
When he rested from his piano-playing, Carlitos functioned as a professional gardener, servicing friends and neighbors in White Plains, where Virgil had “retired” from Tokyo.
So many memories involving dear Carlitos now flit in and out of my sad republic of nostalgia. Virgil will bring him home any day now. And a legion of friends will say goodbye to a unique personality and beloved person.
Ah, our intersections with time and time passing continue to haunt us more and more in our older days, with friends’ departures marking passages, cycles, periods of bereavement and wistful solace.
I grieve over my buddy Carlitos’ rather early demise. I will listen to music and pretend to get over it — until he comes home, and we see him again, for the last time.
In this spirit of self-consolation, I turn over the rest of this space to another dear friend, so she may lift and guide us all through these sad days.
On the first of December some “Friends” and I received a gift by way of a Facebook posting, a wonderfully written rumination by my little sis, Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, who continues to teach in Iowa City. I can’t believe it’s barely been a month since we last reunited in Singapore where I managed to catch her on her last day at a writers’ conference. So many things have happened since, including stabs at the heart via personal misfortune. I share excerpts from Rowena’s freshly minted essay, which provides a balm through sheer power of writing.
It’s titled “Singapore Twice Removed, Through the Layover.” Thanks again for the luminosity, dear Wen:
Watching the premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s new show on the Travel Channel, The Layover, I’m delighted and gratified to discover how very au courant I am today: tonight’s feature is about the food scene in Singapore. So right now I’m in some kind of heaven: instant nostalgia. I was there less than three weeks ago, and now, still nominally jet-lagged in Iowa, the friendly cadences speaking of food evoke what is now my default mood, wherever I happen to be: I feel slightly... homesick. Chicken rice along Bras Basah, the green avenues with glimpses of the white colonial houses now vanishing, clean sparkles of the nanny state, still enchanting after the uncounted times I’ve set foot in the land of Edwin Thumboo’s Merlion; the place where I was supposed to have gone to graduate school but couldn’t, because Marcos declared martial law a week before I was scheduled to travel; the Asian city I know better than any outside my hometown in the Philippines….
“Tonight I’m listening to Bourdain’s casually cynical voice, familiar as an old friend, resonant with eerie echoes of that other great traveler Nick Joaquin, as he samples the street food along the Indian quarter of Singapore. I’m thinking I could gladly return there, going through the well-regulated precincts of Changi airport into a world where the new always seems to be reclaiming its space from the seas of the past, the same way the very soil on which that city-state is built has risen through assiduous human enterprise….
“The brightly lighted avenues of this cheerful well-regulated city — the Switzerland of the East, I call it — hold absolutely no terrors for me... but the same cannot be said of the sterile solitude of my hotel room on the 11th floor, an isolation that invariably freaks me out and evokes an inexplicable paranoia; almost every visit I’ve had to Singapore (jet-lagged at two in the morning, propped sleepless on the thick pristine fatly cushioned eiderdown pillows) I go through it: the silence awakes in me that moment of panic, where I feel isolated and dispossessed: Quo vadis is the existential question that looms in the Singaporean silence.
“You are here, is the answer, while my inner compass seems to be spinning awry: ‘here’ is an Asia without the underpinning of anarchic chaos in the Asia I know as my home; a sense of foreignness that would come if one were linguistically unmoored. Not so, in English-speaking Singapore; the country of the future, always tearing down and rebuilding, ever vertical and erect; the poster-child of ethnic amity, where parity between the three major races is conscientiously observed.
“For all my returns there, I have never been in Singapore long enough to learn the nuances that must surely exist between the invisible caste demarcations in this carefully constructed place, this city-state of an idea. The young woman who cleans my hotel rooms and refreshes the linen and bath towels each day is Chinese; the taxi driver is Tamil; the clerk who sorts out my Internet muddle is Malay. I cannot detect the economic hierarchy that operates silently in this societal machinery. Yet they all remind me, each of them, of someone else I have met in another part of the world, in another part of my past.
“During my first night at the conference, Kirpal (Singh) takes us out for a seafood dinner on the waterfront; it is so much like Rizal Boulevard in Dumaguete that I am momentarily disoriented. On my last afternoon in Singapore, I hear a familiar voice from the room next to mine: it is Krip, my oldest friend and big bro, just arrived from Manila to moderate the final panel and to launch his latest book. Krip/Kirpal. Jasmine Teh here and in Valencia. In the audience at one of the conference readings, I see two fellows from the Silliman Writers Workshop, Liza and Igor, who are now working in Singapore.
“The hub that turns this massive wheel of global synchronicities is Kirpal whom I first met in Iowa at the IWP two decades ago, and whom we brought to Dumaguete just last summer, where he spoke of the unity possible in humankind, sitting on the porch of the mountain cottage where I’d written a book a lifetime ago.
“My life keeps folding over like an inscrutable piece of origami. During the conference’s panel discussion, I speak about being an Asian in the 95 percent-Caucasian American Midwest: ‘The Voice of the Designated Other,’ the resident exotic amid the Methodists. By the third day of the conference, I have lost my voice because of a rhinovirus caught from the woman seated next to me during the fifteen-hour flight from O’Hare to Narita. The Designated Other has no voice.
“The closing night of the conference, we are taken on a riverboat ride. The leisurely glide over the smooth waterway reminds me of the annual steamboat ride down the Mississippi River, to which the John Deere company in East Moline would treat the international writers at the writing program in Iowa. Across the world, down quiet waters lit by the soundless hum of the engines of industrial might.
“Here, there. Tonight, 19 days away, I am listening to Anthony Bourdain grooving about the futuristic orderliness of Changi airport, the world’s best; on my study-room TV, I watch as Bourdain strolls down the streets I’ve come to know fairly well; he stops by the food shops he’s come to love: a return visitor, like me, to Singapore’s past/present/future ethos, Singapore the template for global amity, the ylem —primordial matter — out of which our sociological future will perhaps be forged. I’m waiting for Bourdain to speak of the taste and texture of the chili crab he and I have separately savored in our recent past. Living over the vivid, the strangely familiar, I’m waiting for the moment his camera crew takes us on the bumboat ride by night, the vertical lights glittering on the water... for all like the celestial river to the afterlife. Just maybe. Just maybe, too, life is... good.”
