Mourning becomes Alexis

Widely respected Filipino-Canadian film critic and university professor Alexis Tioseco, 29, and his visiting Slovenian girlfriend, Nika Bohinc, 30, were killed by three men who waited for the couple to arrive at their Quezon City home before shooting them both.

It is reported that Tioseco and partner Nika Bohinc, a Slovenian film journalist, were shot several times by three unidentified men who waited for the couple to arrive at the victim’s home on Times St., past 10 p.m. Tuesday. — Yahoo! News Philippines Sept. 2, 2009

I met Alexis Tioseco in March 1994 — 15 years ago — in Vancouver, Canada where he lived with his family. My then boyfriend, his paternal uncle, and I were visiting from Manila and were invited to their home for his Catholic confirmation. He was 14.

“This is our youngest, Alexis,” his mother Pia said in the same unhurried, soft-spoken tone so characteristic of her son.  But everybody else in that room referred to him as “Eggy,” supposedly because his head was shaped like an egg.

He was wearing just a T-shirt and beige corduroy pants while I was covered in wool tights and a heavy boucle jacket. But I wanted to start a conversation so I said, “It’s freezing outside. Aren’t you cold?” He simply smiled and said, “I’m warm.”

He didn’t say much — a word or two maybe — just enough to introduce me to the family dachshund. He then set the dog free of his hold and knelt on the floor next to me by the edge of the sofa, where he remained for most of the afternoon except to get me a glass of soda and to help himself to some prime rib for dinner.

I immediately noticed his ears, which were quite large. I remember thinking: This boy will live long. You know the superstition. But what was remarkable was his presence — quiet and yet palpable; you remembered him a day or so after you have left him.

The next time I saw him was at our home here in Manila for my child’s birthday three years later, when he and his older brother, Christopher, had moved back to join their father who had lived here all along. I saw him intermittently after that — family gatherings, birthdays, weddings, reunions and the occasional funeral.

Through the years, the rest of his body caught up with his ears and he started to become what kids nowadays call “hot” — an umbrella adjective loosely used to mean sexy, appealing, macho, desirable. And along with those ears grew his passion for cinema; his stature as a film critic; his voice that spoke for the fledgling artists who had no foothold and no forum in an industry that remains riddled with politics, absence of funds and sheer neglect; his commitment to his students as an educator; his tolerance for the wishes of his father and the good of the rest of his family; his heart that would finally find it’s home in the form of his girlfriend, Nika; and his patriotism for a country that would later fail to protect his life from its vicious elements.

Writing is not a profession that occupies space or weight in our business-oriented family; it is not discussed. So when we did come together, Alexis and I would find ourselves in a corner, huddled to speak about the written word and how best to use it: he for the cause of his great love — Philippine cinema. He spoke endlessly of his friend, Erwin Romulo, whom I had never met but whose work I admired because of his thought-provoking insight and clever language. There lay the bond.

Our last exchange of words through a couple of phone calls and text messages (a week or so before his death) was immediately after his appearance on the TV talk show Media in Focus with Cheche Lazaro, to discuss the recent National Artist fiasco as member of a panel that included our common idol, writer and UP professor, Butch Dalisay.

The next time I saw Alexis was at the morgue on the afternoon of Wednesday, Sept. 2. He lay supine on a gurney, low to the floor, covered by a blanket in a kind of green shade that was between bright and dark — hospital green, something ominous of all that is not well. His immediate family had yet to arrive from Vancouver so, I brought the suit that he was to wear and a white dress for Nika.

“Hawakan mo ang kamay ko,” I told the undertaker who was escorting me, “Baka hindi ko to makaya.” So he did. He took me first to Nika who was on what seemed like an operating table. She had been embalmed so she looked different — doll-like, beautiful, as she had always been, but gone was the face that moved every which way when she spoke. She looked too perfect and deeper in skin color. I stood around three feet from her, struggling to say a few words because I was choking on my tears.   Goodbye was one of them, I think.

I turned to the undertaker, “Nasaan si Eggy? Dalhin mo ako kay Egg,” I said. Somewhere from the room someone else said, “Alexis donated his corneas.” Someone will see because of him, I repeated to myself as he led me to the gurney where Alexis lay, covered. It was low so I had to stoop a little. He nudged the blanket with much hesitation so that it barely moved.  It only exposed part of Alexis’ head and his right ear. There’s the ear again, I thought, unmistakably Eggy’s. And then he pulled the blanket off completely. My knees buckled under and the distance between Alexis and me disappeared. My head found its way to his forehead. I kissed him several times and I stroked his hair until I was able to pacify myself. He smelled of the sun and of someone who hadn’t showered in a while. He hadn’t been embalmed yet so he was soft to the touch. My hands were cold; he was warm — still.

Because of the way he lived — in simplicity and honesty and fortitude and kindness — everyone whose life was touched by Alexis, no matter how fleetingly, wants to pay tribute to him. Alexis never raised his voice, never said anything remotely bad about anyone or anything. The expression of gentleness on his face never changed. His view of the world and all that is wrong with it was always tempered by grace. That, too, never changed. It wasn’t that he was naïve; he knew the world was ugly but he chose to labor to make a difference and to regard the future with optimism. He set out to convince others of this through his work.

But how does one capture his essence? One cannot; there is no way. His character was too big for words, his writing too vast to be minced into containable parts.

At the burial service for Alexis around 10 people eulogized him, one representative from every area of his life: cinema, school, broadsheet, glossy magazine, friends and family. They all had their personal memories of Alexis. There were a lot of tears shed and lot of words spoken at that podium. There was real pain. But the more copious the tears, the more dramatic the stories, the louder the cries of the mourners, the farther away from Alexis they seemed to veer. 

Alexis was the quiet one. But he made all the difference — every time.

We all have our own movies in our minds. We all have our own script of how we experienced Alexis. We all have our own stories to tell. Here are two of those — two movies, so to speak — about Alexis from the hearts of a 33-year-old and a 13-year-old.

I finally met Alexis’ best friend, Erwin, 33, filmmaker, journalist, Palanca-winning writer, Philippine Free Press editor, on the first day of the wake.  We had just brought the bodies to the chapel. It was 7 p.m. and Erwin had not slept a wink since the previous night because he had kept vigil at Alexis’ house to preserve the crime scene and, “to stay close to Alexis in whatever way I can.”

“He has always been Alexis to me, never Eggy, because he introduced himself as Alexis… We shared the same obscure taste in film. We had this deep interest in old Filipino cinema. It was a common passion,” Erwin said of their friendship since 2001.

It struck me that Erwin spoke of Alexis in the present tense. “I will argue it out with anyone who negates me. Alexis is the foremost Filipino film critic in the world today. He is a good critic because he is totally honest; he calls it as it is but is never vicious. This guy knows his stuff and his views are never political. He writes only of the things he loves while most critics write about the things they hate. His integrity is never questionable. He can never be bought nor wined and dined. If he likes a film, he promotes it. He just wants people to see films for the simple reason that they are good, period. He comes from a pure place. His dream is to elevate the quality and status of Southeast Asian cinema in the world.”

I asked Erwin to tell me about Alexis, the person.

“I will describe Alexis by not describing him,” he told me. “I’ll tell you a story instead and you figure out the person that he is.

“My wife and I separated over a year ago and I did not want to tell anyone about it in the beginning so I kept it to myself and stayed at home mostly.  Later on, about two months into the thing, word got out. So my friends found out but I still refused to talk about it. One day, Alexis showed up in my house and asked to just hang out with me. So I let him in and we were just there, watching DVDs, reading, playing CDs. We didn’t talk at all; we were just together. When it was time for him to leave, he stood up and hugged me — no words. You see, I have this aversion to being touched. And Alexis is not physically demonstrative. It was a most tender gesture. It meant the world. He took nothing but he gave me what I most needed then. It’s ironic because we deal with words and that was all non-verbal. I was only able to tell that story the night he died.”

Erwin broke out in tears so we had to pause for a bit. He ended by saying, “Someone asked me to edit the novena prayers for Alexis just now and there’s a line there that said, ‘Although we grieve, we know it will not be for long.’ I edited it out. How do we move on from here? I can’t; I don’t know how. How do I replace Alexis? I can’t. What people can do now is to focus on his work; it should never be forgotten.  Go to alexistioseco@wordpress.com. Read it; read everything.”

On the final day of the wake, my 13-year-old daughter, Isabel, started crying when we stood by the two coffins to bid Alexis and Nika goodbye.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“May I please say something to Ate Bettina (Alexis’ oldest sister)?”

 So I took her to Bettina and the three of us sat down. She told her story.  “Once, when I got home from ballet at around 10 p.m. Kuya Alexis and Ate Nika where talking to Dad and Mom after dinner. I sat beside Kuya Alexis.  He asked me how ballet was and I told him that I wanted to quit (after having studied it for six years, three times a week, three hours each time). I told him, ‘My classmates keep telling me I should get a life because I can never join them on weekends. I can never attend parties or hang out with them. It’s just school and ballet, school and ballet. Then Kuya Alexis asked me, ‘Do you love ballet?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said to me, ‘Then keep on doing it no matter what anyone tells you.’”

 Isabel continued, “I just wanted to tell you that I’m still in ballet because of him.”

 And what of Alexis and Nika’s death? Barbaric? Savage? Cruel? How do we make sense of it? We can’t. We can rant and rave, we can talk it out, we can cry until the tears stop flowing, we can console each other endlessly, but we still won’t. It will stay that way. Like Erwin said, there are no words.

 And what of that movie in our minds and hearts about Alexis? Maybe we should borrow, once again, from him. As he had said in his critique of his favorite director Lav Diaz’s five-hour indie film, Batang West Side, “Needless to say, it was a departure not only in length, but in aesthetic: its rhythm, the distance from the camera to its subject, the duration in which shots were held, the construction of the discourse (equally about past as about present), and most uniquely in its attitude toward its audience — its stubborn refusal to give in to our inherent need for a neat ending, instead forcing us to draw our own conclusions.”

 Alexis finally came home last night — his ashes in a pristine white urn. His sisters, Bettina and Paula, set him down on the altar of the family matriarch’s home. I walked over to touch it. It was warm — still.

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Thank you for your letters.  You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com