‘Vanidades’: memories of childhood

Do you remember the magazine your mother read?  Was it Vanidades?” she asked, a smile starting mischievously on her face.  I felt mine light up.  “No, not my mother, my grandmother.  That was her magazine.  Of course I remember it,” I said drifting away in a swell of memories.

Vanidades was a Spanish magazine that was available in the 1940s, maybe even earlier.  It was for women, hence its title, which means “vanities” in English.  It offered much information on fashion, cooking, crafts, beauty and life in general.  At the back there were short stories with lovely illustrations.  Sometimes my grandmother would make me read the stories aloud to practice my Spanish, which I did not learn.  It had many cross-stitch patterns and I remember sitting with my grandmother’s sister choosing patterns — bouquets of roses for her dress, little children playing, which she embroidered on a woolen shawl for me.  I loved that shawl.  I wonder what happened to it.

My grandmother would experiment with recipes too.  She would try a recipe first according to the list of ingredients, then she would improvise until she got the taste she liked.

Suddenly I missed her, my lola Ching, who loved me like I was her daughter.  She was more a mother to me than my own mother was.  My mother was my buddy but my lola raised me, brought me to the market with her, made me watch her bargain.  She taught me to cook, explaining as she mixed ingredients, “That’s how you know if you’ve seasoned it well, smell it.  It must smell like you want it to taste.” 

She also taught me to sew while her sister, Lola Dede, taught me to embroider.  My aunt taught me to knit.  My mother taught me to crochet.  I grew up learning all those crafts.  I remember a time when I had to make linen napkins for my lola Ching, who taught me to draw thread so I could cut a straight line, then draw a few threads and hemstitch by hand, then pull out all the threads and roll them into a ball, save them in the baul.  “One day you might need them,” she said.  I remember how I wept after she died and we opened her baul to find all those balls of thread that I wound for her when I was growing up.

We always had lots of maids then. There was a cook, Trining, and her assistants. No one could use the telephone or she would face lola’s wrath.  After lunch you had to take a siesta.  Or if you couldn’t sleep, you would have to pull lola’s white hair using tweezers —  “tiane,” is what we called them in Tagalog. 

She would buy chickens alive at the market.  The chicken section of any wet market is the most foul-smelling place in the world, believe me.  There she would choose her chickens and bring them home.  Then the cook would slaughter a hen.  She would begin by setting a big pot of water to boil.  Then she would take hold of the chicken, turn its head backward and slit its throat, catching the blood in a saucer with rice grains in it.  The chicken would cackle and virtually scream before it quieted down and died.  That’s when she would bring it to the pot of boiling water to de-feather.  It was a major task to serve chicken then.  So much work went into the preparation.  It took hours before a meal was done.

And meals were always served hot, always a ritual.  No one was allowed to read at table.  Everyone was supposed to converse, while the maids served.  No one would watch TV while eating.  No, eating time was for the family to sit, talk and laugh together.  It was almost always a convivial time.

Was ours the style of the Spanish? No, I don’t think so.  True there was Spanish influence but there also was tremendous Filipino influence in the lifestyle then. It was simple, but it was also elegant and it flowed.  I remember Sunday lunch would last until around five. We would sit down for lunch, beginning with soup, ending with fruit, or ice cream or cake, or ice cream and cake.  We would talk, chat, tease, laugh.  Then a maid would come in with a platter of fried bananas, followed by guinataan.  Finally, very full, my aunts, uncles and cousins would say goodbye and go. 

Life was not hectic then.  It was easy or maybe it’s my memory that makes it easy.  There were flurries of activities, rituals, preparing cocido for Sunday lunch, getting ready to do Lola’s recipe of jaleang mangga or mango jam at the end of summer.  But there was something leisurely about life then that I wish we could get it back.

Don’t you wish we could get it back?

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