The pamanhikan cometh

Three hours after gangrene turned my legs into stumps, we finally escaped the gridlock that is South Super Highway Friday night traffic. 

I was drumming my fingers on the car door handle when my cell phone beeped. I read my text message and released a sigh. “Dear, I’ve got a bit of good news! Even if we’re late, they won’t cancel our reservations.” I tried to reach out for her hand. “They know how important this night is for both of us.”

She turned away from me, opened up her compact mirror and powdered her face.

“Dear, I think you made an excellent choice for our pamanhikan,” I said, beaming.

She turned around and slammed her compact mirror repeatedly against my forehead. 

“Are you still mad at me, dear?” I twiddled my fingers “Dear, look, I’m really sorry. I just wanted to make a point with you earlier.”

She lifted her fist in front of my face, and with one finger, she showed me her point as well. “You lost your chance at forgiveness earlier. I told you my family was okay with holding the pamanhikan on a Friday night even with the traffic. You didn’t have to keep on insisting you were right about changing the schedule! Hmmph!” She pursed her lips. “Don’t go looking to me for sympathy.”

I slumped my shoulders and exhaled loudly. I turned away from my fiancée, faced the other side, and extended both my arms for a hug.  But even my yaya just kept her arms to herself “Hmmph!” she chided me. “Buti nga sa ‘yo.”

I picked out the jagged bloody bits of glass from my forehead as we weaved in and out of the pea-soup-thick fog until we made our way to Antonio’s Restaurant.  

We barely made it down the driveway of the restaurant when she stormed out of the car and made her way to the banyo for that mysterious 30-minute female ritual called “freshening up.”  

There was a mild breezy drizzle that swept across my face as I stepped out of the car. I lumbered up the staircase and was welcomed by exquisite turn-of-the-century Negrense furnishings surrounded by lush foliage. I looked at my watch. Half past eight.  And still there was nobody from either of our families to celebrate our pamanhikan. “This is just great,” I thought. A charming venue. Refined ambience. Crisp weather. And a very pissed-off fiancée.  This evening was going to run like clockwork. If your clock runs on Filipino time, that is.

But giving up on the pamanhikan was not an option. Even if her folks were growing moss while waiting for the cars to move along South Super Highway… even if my fiancée wanted to slash my face with the sharp edges of her engagement ring… even if my yaya wanted to hold me down as my fiancée accomplished said slashing. Hey, if our Chief Executive can survive one coup, two impeachment attempts and a hostile Senate, I can survive (what is turning out to be a botched) pamanhikan. It did take two years of subtle hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming and playing with voodoo dolls to get her parents to soften up on me. And boy, were here parents strict.  When she was in high school, the only date my fiancée was allowed to take to Euphoria disco was her dad. While she was on the dance floor, she was only allowed to dance with other women. For a while there, my fiancée thought her dad wanted her to grow up lesbian.  And if anyone approached her with the wrong set of reproductive organs offering to dance, they were carted off by the polo barong-clad men who massage your shoulders while you take a leak in the banyo and were subsequently flushed down the toilet. 

Yeah, her parents may have been strict, but my parents would have given them some stiff competition in the parenting department. If I wasn’t home by midnight sharp after a high school party, my parents would get out of bed and drive all the way down to the party still dressed in their pantulog. And, God bless them, since they didn’t want to embarrass me by getting out of the car and looking for me inside the party, they would send my yaya to look for me instead. After many years of memory suppression, I later realized that situations like those helped me develop important formative skills for a husband-in-training — skills such as fear, co-dependence and, most importantly, submissiveness. 

I glanced at my watch. It was 8:45. No one from either side of our families had arrived yet. And my fiancée was still locked inside the only banyo in the restaurant. I stood outside the door of the banyo and started doing a little jig as my bladder began to announce that it was ready to irrigate the restaurant’s lush foliage. “Maybe we should tell our families to turn back to Manila?” I asked through the door. “Maybe we could move the pamanhikan to another date? Or maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to go through a pamanhikan!” I smiled to myself naughtily. After all, wasn’t it enough that her brothers enjoyed giving me unlubricated prostate exams every time I paid her a visit? Wasn’t it enough that her dad couldn’t find any of my criminal records at the Makati City Police blotter? And wasn’t it enough that I planted a sparkling rock on her finger as a sign of my undying indebtedness to the local five-six?

And look at the bright side of things. We were doing our wedding preparations in an orderly, paint-by-numbers fashion. After all, this wedding was not a pikot (shotgun marriage), although I don’t think her dad would mind testing if his shotgun still worked. The last two times he did check if the shotgun worked were with his two son-in-laws. And, on my part, I am quite glad that this wedding was nothing close to a kasunduan (arranged marriage). Because if it was, her dad would probably make sure that hindi magkakasundo yung dalawang pamilya until technology is developed for my fiancée to become a hermaphrodite. 

Besides, the only other pamanhikan I ever attended was my younger sister’s. Her pamanhikan was congenial but rather uneventful. Especially after my sister paid my younger brother and me to keep our mouths shut and placed my mom under heavy sedation, things went off just fine without requiring any visits to the emergency room. 

It was 9:30. My fiancée was still freshening up inside the banyo. I was about ready to fertilize a lethargic-looking fern right outside the banyo when I felt a cold hand on my shoulder that instantaneously froze all of my bodily fluids. “Where… is… my… daughter?” the accompanying voice wheezed. I opened my mouth to speak but all that came out was an icy smoke.   

The banyo door swung open. “Hi, Dad!” she shrieked. My fiancée bounced over and hugged him tightly. 

“Helloooo, my sweetheart!” he cradled her in his arms and planted a kiss on her head. “Did I keep you waiting long?”

“Oh, don’t worry, Dad, you’re right on time.” She took her dad by one hand and took her mom by the other hand and led them to the dinner table. Meanwhile, I just stood by the banyo door waiting to thaw. 

During those few precious minutes I spent waiting to defrost, I made a quick mental review of what I had read in The Idiot’s Guide to Philippine Wedding Traditions and Life-Threatening Injuries:

Timing mo bulok. According to the guide, the pamanhikan is often the first time for both sets of families to meet and discuss the wedding plans. This meeting is often awkward and can involve some gunplay. Traditionally, no hiring of wedding planners, no scouting for conjugal properties and no visits to the gynecologist can be done until after the pamanhikan is held. This is the reason why the older folks often berate modern engaged couples for getting the chronology of events mixed up: proposal, ocular visits for the honeymoon, bachelor’s party, prenuptial agreements, bachelor’s party, birth control, bachelor’s party, pregnancy test, bachelor’s party and so on and so forth. (Disclaimer to my future father-in-law: This chronology of events merely for humorous purposes, it doesn’t come anywhere close to real life. I promise.) 

Ang Kwento ni Lola Basyang. But on top of the gunplay, the primary role of a pamanhikan was put ever so succinctly by my fiancee’s dad. “Sweetheart,” he cooed as she sat on his lap and stroked her dad’s hair. “Your role in the pamanhikan is to be my bundle of joy that a man can only pry away from my cold, dead fingers. But my role is to put the fear of God into your fiancée. That is my only joy as a father giving away his only unmarried daughter.  What fun is there in being a dad if I cannot exercise my right to frighten your boyfriend back into pre-puberty?” 

Little did I know, not only are there roles that we all play in a pamanhikan, but there is also a script that we must follow. And the script we follow must adhere closely to the best traditions of classic ‘80s Pinoy movies. It should have some melodrama, it should have a crying scene, and it should have Cherie Gil. The evening should start with some light name-calling, then smoothly transition into some dinner and bitch-slapping; then, before dessert, someone should get thrown into a pool. Before the night is over and all the hair-pulling is done, I can declare to my fiancée in front of her family, “Kung saan, kailan, at paanong labanan, magpasabi ka lang. Hindi kita uurungan!” Then my fiancée can reply, “Hayop... Hayuuup... Hayuuupppp!  Ay, wait.  I’m supposed to be on your side, ‘di ba?” And finally my sister can end the evening with “My brother is not a pig! My brother is not a pig! Ang kapatid ko ay tao, hindi baboy damo! Wait a minute, didn’t you write a column about nose-picking? My mistake. Baboy pala yung kapatid ko.”

Don’t have a cow, man. The guide says that that there should be some sort of bigay-kaya (dowry) involved during the pamanhikan.   Apparently, it is not enough that you have mortgaged your soul to the local five-six for your fiancée’s ring, but you still have to sell your vital organs to some rich Saudis to gain her family’s reluctant approval. And when you talk about dowries, this will probably involve a couple of chickens, some cows, and maybe a monkey or two. You just can’t have a pamanhikan without monkeys. Now the chickens are fairly easy to come by but the only cows my family had were vacuum-packed in our freezer. And let’s not even start on  the monkeys.  

The pamanhikan is an opportunity for the man’s family to formally ask his fiancée’s family for her hand in marriage. The hand costs three chickens. If you want to ask for her other body parts, it will cost you more poultry than that.  After you have given them enough chickens to put up their own KFC, the pamanhikan will finally move on to discuss potential wedding plans and other matters like the budget, the guest list, and when they will have the man tested for contagious diseases. After several hours of spirited haggling, the woman’s parents will finally bring in a financial analyst to review your credit history and compute your present net value based on your projected future income streams. This part of the evening can make any man very uneasy, especially if the man does not have a degree in accounting or animal husbandry. For our pamanhikan, I think her parents were even planning to bring over a proctologist to make sure that all my equipment was in working order, but luckily her brothers had already vouched for my equipment.

A couple of nights before our pamanhikan, my fiancée’s family attended another pamanhikan. But this one was for her younger brother who had come home from the States to get married. I could see from the swelling on her dad’s cheek and the limp in his gait that that evening was not a pleasant one. From what I understand, the evening was so melodramatic that even Judy Ann Santos showed up. In fact, her brother had to be rushed to the hospital for irregular heart fluctuations (or at least that’s what went on record). 

So, if we were strictly following a Pinoy movie script, then as far as her dad was concerned, my pamanhikan would be all about his revenge.   

Before I could take my seat at the dinner table, her dad pulled me aside, grasped my hand and pumped it firmly. “RJ,” he said, “Trabaho lang ito, walang personalan.”

And that’s when I lost all bladder control.

For comments, suggestions of if you want to help defray the costs of my pamanhikan, please text PM POGI <message> to 2948 for Smart, Globe and Sun subscribers. Or email ledesma.rj@gmail.com.