The sea of life

Past 8 p.m. on LRT 1 northbound to Monumento on a Friday the trains are usually full, the traditional sardines style coaches, and on Doroteo Jose you get off to walk the access bridge to LRT 2, eastbound to Santolan, Marikina, where a few hundred meters away is the Marian Memorial Chapels on Marcos Highway, Antipolo, site of the wake of Chung Tony, father’s youngest brother and until that fateful Monday last of April, the last surviving male from the original brood of 15 in Gagalangin.

You can hardly recall when last you saw him, perhaps at the posthumous book launch of his elder bro nearly a decade ago, in an upscale bookstore in Makati, the program emceed by a college professor and with some pica-pica on the side. There were readings of excerpts of course, varied reminiscences of the late national artist, one of the speakers who has since also passed to the great beyond. He obliged kin with his laughter, as he did during years of your childhood whenever he came to visit the old homestead in UP Village, on the covered walk leading to the front door the brothers would be talking in the shifting dusk. It was an old Ateneo jacket he had left behind, with the family name printed below the school seal on the left breast side, which you wore occasionally to gatherings, another memento of a time long gone.

You regret not taking time off to attend the wedding of his only daughter Tanya in Guadalupe Viejo in 2006, the singer who wowed the lounge-goers in the metro, but at his wake of wakes his widow Ama hands you a copy of a poem Chung Tony had written for that occasion, in a hillside church where the acoustics could only have been wondrous in the presence of the lord.

The poem is entitled “Setting Sail”, and here it is:

“As foamy crests and choppy waves buffet your hopeless bows,/ You give each other a preserving tow/ But only love, when boundless, will conquer mighty undertows…/ Swirling powers… As they go…

“Life is more than a pain and challenge… No promises of lucky stars/ Love alone when boundless… Requites untrammeled love…/ And makes all chips we wager… Big or minor ones…/ Love goes far… And it grows…

“Setting sail in the sea of life…/ Say a prayer to see you through/Trusting one another… we pledge a love so true/ Boundless shunning boundaries that guarantee our love/ (as/so) we sail… in the sea of life…”

Tita Ama also shows you a clipping from The STAR, a write-up which has a picture of her unmarried son Ditto, in collaboration with another artist, for it is only recently you learn that Chung Tony’s junior is an architect and interior designer. “Di mo nakita yun, no?” she says.

Remembrances of more things past with your Tita Moon, father’s youngest sister and kaututan-dila or sparring partner of Chung Tony, telling you how as toddlers they had seen your mom the Metropolitan Theater actress and your dad the young avant-garde writer kissing each other smack on the mouth in their early married years in the house on Cavite Street, wartime Manila, open city.

Hard to believe there are only two of them left, Tita Paz and Tita Moon, when before they were more than a dozen that mostly filled your father’s stories, “The Mats” and “Flowers of May,” the last two the youngest then gathering the month’s flowers from the late afternoon downpour to place before the virgin’s altar, while their father looks out the window and can only remember the dead Victoria, and the rain that falls on the city is the same rain that falls in his heart.

Tita Lel the piano teacher; Tito Doc in Oakland who once remarked that beer in the Philippines tastes better because made out of rice washings; your father who survived a good number of his younger siblings; Tito Peping the sportswriter, who suffered a heart attack pushing a stalled Minica in the flooded streets of Intramuros on the anniversary of Manila’s fall; the dead Victoria whose likeness you met only in father’s stories; Tito Father the priest whose deep baritone voice was tailor made for sermons from the pulpit; Tita Clara the nurse in Oakland who never got married but passed on too, a couple of years ago; Tito Ting the doctor who bawled like a baby during the burial of his nanay, Lola Paning; Tita Lor the nun who always called you good looking; Tita Paz now in Cavite living with her younger daughter; Tita Baby in New Haven who gave up the ghost while driving her car; Tita Moon who once worked in Philippine Trust, the bank that has served the public since 1916, year of your father’s birth; and Chung Tony of Antipolo, who almost became a Jesuit priest.

There were two others who died in infancy, Josefina and Concepcion, as per “The Mats” of their Manong Paking.

Antipolo in Maytime has the scent of mangoes, and the air is so humid it is as if a thunderstorm were constantly brewing. In the newspapers there’s hardly a notice of the passing of The Band’s drummer Levon Helm, who sang The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down, or of children’s book writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, whose Where the Wild Things Are was favorite bedtime reading fare of your kids when they were still kids.

This is for you Levon! This is for you, Maurice! This is for you, Chung Tony! And for all the lonely people they left behind, saying a prayer to see them through.