The cafe that Sabel built

Reaching an open thatch-roofed hut with wooden benches on the crest of a wooded hill, we look back at the gleaming white building from where we started out on the half-hour trek across the valley. It’s at least half a kilometer away as a crow might fly from where we enjoy the panoramic view. Occupying a promontory by the road to Asin, some six kilometers from the city center, the new addition to the landscape lies awash in the afternoon sun.

We had come to Baguio the day before to attend the historic opening of the BenCab Museum, one remarkable man’s offering to a community he joined a couple of decades ago — quite a hefty share, we might say, of his patiently acquired wherewithal. It also stands, or sprawls, all four floors of it, as a tribute to his own enviable experience as someone who has taken being a successful Filipino artist into a new realm.

Indeed, that realm, well-nigh unimaginable till now, practically lies at our feet: an extensive farm with a stream running through it, fed by a waterfall at the property’s boundary. To our left, due west, we can see the South China Sea where the afternoon sun is headed. Towards the east the hillside forest obscures boundaries, although the skyline reveals yet another mountain range dotted with houses. Toward the northeast they cluster around karst towers, or limestone rock formations.  

Directly across, due north, yet another hill breaks off from that typical Cordilleran range and rises beyond the road to Asin. Only a few large residences, of a subdivision demographic spelling wealth, occupy the very crest, high up above the road. It’s a steep slope down to the modernist rooftops of the two-structure museum, with the walkway subtly hidden when you actually go through it, but now revealed with our bird’s-eye vantage.

To the left of the structures, further along the roadside, stretches a concrete driveway and private parking lot that allows BenCab’s friends a certain privilege when they visit. At the end of the driveway is yet another large structure, two-story, also gleaming white. This is his one-bedroom residence cum humongous studio fronted by a Zen garden and pond.

Below it is a Kalinga hut that’s been transported and refitted piece by piece, and is now outfitted with modern amenities such as a bathroom and electrical connections, in case a daughter or son comes to stay. Lower are terraced plots planted to coffee, strawberry, cabbage and other greens. Ti plants with their eye-catching red-purplish leaves stand as demarcation signs, they way they do all over the Cordillera.

Other sections of the farm estate feature large ponds for ducks, with center islands sporting thatch-roofed gazebos. Elsewhere, closer to the stream, are an Ifugao hut and a Bontoc hut, the former actually occupied by some of the farmhands and construction workers Ben has engaged for the continuing labor of passion on his extensive turf.

He purchased the roadside property a few years back, and immediately had his private quarters and studio erected. The much larger museum complex took another year to complete. To protect his Edenic environment, as well as the grand view from the back of the museum and his bedroom, Ben also eventually acquired the entire forested hill across.

He’s had the underbrush hacked off, and begun planting pine trees to join the larger indigenous flora, among them fern trees and some hardwood. Bougainvillea of many colors have also been placed on appropriate corners where freshly concreted steps mark out a steep zigzagging trail, all the way up to the hut that serves as a rewarding gazebo from where one can survey all of BenCab’s farm.

From the museum’s ground floor, occupied by Cafe Sabel, which extends to a large viewing terrace, one can see the efforts being conducted on the forested hill across. On its center a slope has been cleared, flattened, and walled with riprap to make for a halfway viewing deck shored up by large boulders found in place. Then the concrete steps snake farther up to the hut.    

Now enjoying the obverse view after panting up the 350-something steps, Louie and Vanessa Llamado and I can still spot the miniscule figures going in and out of the café. Large groups of museum visitors who hadn’t made it on the previous afternoon congregate on the terrace, likely marveling at the farm’s attractions below.

We identify a few friends also stepping out of Cafe Sabel. There’s Boy Yuchengco in his familiar white shirt and black pants, now walking up the driveway towards the private parking area. There’s Laida Lim Perez on the terrace, perhaps getting a breather from café kitchen chores. She and Louie collaborated on the previous night’s feast as well as the regular menu, with their respective 23-year-old daughters, Fifi Perez and Lia Llamado, co-authors of the Cafe By the Ruins book, pitching in their own inspired ideas and youthful energy.  

Whoever thought up the chicken pinikpikan soup laced with tapuy was certainly inspired. We had it for lunch, but first tasted it at the tail-end of the party the night before — a hearty follow-up to our Glengoyne highland single malt that we tried to share with former Sagada Mayor and now Presidential Assistant for Cordillera Affairs Tom Killip, who had joined our table together with D’Orig indie filmmaker and G-string model Kidlat Tahimik. But they were both into red wine for washing down chicken satay. 

Peggy Bose sat beside us for this decade’s laughs, and was soon joined by her daughter Lilledeshan, just back from the US and now contemplating a permanent return to her hometown highlands. Padma Perez joined us, too, as did the poet-journalist Frank Cimatu and TV journalist Howie Severino. Elsewhere were his video-docu partner Egay Navarro with his life partner Rica Concepcion.

Pepper Teehankee shoved a photographer before us; how sociably he was working again. Then he thrust Atty. Lisa Marcos before us for an autograph on the BenCab book we had co-authored with Cid Reyes. Cid wasn’t around, but many other friends from Manila came up for the museum opening on Friday, February 27, despite the threat of heinous city traffic and scant lodging owing to the Panagbenga Flower Festival. 

The occasion, malt whisky and soul soup conspired to aggravate our sense of social daze, yet we recall having spotted or said hello to fellow sosyals Maurice Arcache, Deanna Ongpin, Maribel Ongpin, Sonia Ner, Bogie Tence Ruiz, Sonny and Susan Yñiguez, Tiny Nuyda, Jack Teotico, Tara Sering, Margaux Salcedo who’s Erap’s new young spokesperson, and Romy Vitug who video’d the entire affair — all of whom had motored up for the museum opening.

Then there were the “old” Baguio hands, an extended family like no other: Baboo Mondoñedo, Dave Baradas, Joel Tabora, Pynky Gomez Magsino, Boy Yñiguez, Diokno Pasilan, Tommy Hafalla, Kawayan de Guia, Herr Bautista... Et al.  

The invite said the official opening would start at 4 p.m. By 3 p.m. the crowd had started to arrive, spreading out all over the gallery floors and down to Cafe Sabel and the terrace. By 5 p.m., emcee Rico Hizon from Singapore managed to start his welcome spiel. But those of us on ground level couldn’t make our way up to the museum lobby or even the second floor anymore, and had to content ourselves with the sound system that featured opera arias sung live, before a group of G-stringed young natives started the infectious gangsa beat.

We just stayed on the terrace and waited for everyone to come down and join the feasting. BenCab and Annie Sarthou never made it, so besieged were both by photo-op demands and interviews, or queries regarding the treasure trove of artworks on display.

And what a repository it is. Per its website, www.bencab-museum.org: “(T)he museum houses the artist’s collections of his own works, as well as those of acknowledged Filipino masters and rising contemporary artists. The granary gods, lime containers, native implements, weapons and other outstanding examples of indigenous arts and crafts of the Cordilleras are also highlighted... The Bencab Museum is committed to the promotion of the arts, and the preservation, conservation and protection of the environment, as well as the culture and traditions of the Cordilleras, as an expression of the artist’s gratitude to the country that nurtured and inspired an artistic career that continues to grow, mature and fascinate.”

Annie disclosed that the BenCab Art Foundation had mulled over calling it the Museum of Cordilleran and Contemporary Arts or MOCCA, one “C” better than all the MOCA’s in the world. But they settled for BenCab Museum, quite simply.

A simple name for a grand vision. What is certain to become an important landmark includes several halls, salons and rooms that offer diverse thematic collections: the BenCab Gallery, Cordillera Gallery, Maestro Gallery (with works by Aguinaldo, Chabet, Edades, Joya, Legaspi, Luz, Magsaysay-Ho, Sanso, Zobel and other acknowledged Filipino masters), Philippine Contemporary Art Galleries 1 and 2, Erotica Gallery, Print Gallery, Sepia Gallery (for changing exhibitions), Indigo Gallery (in homage to the old Indigo Gallery on A. Mabini St. in Malate where Ben had his first solo exhibit, back in the late ’60s), Patio Salvador (an open terrace for sculpture shows and receptions — named after his older brother, the first painter in the family) and Larawan Hall, to serve as a function room for art workshops, seminars, art film showings and other activities. 

Only Ben could have pulled it off. Not only has he been very successful in creating collectibles that command consistently high prices; he has also shown that he believes in channeling those spiraling resources back into the enhancement of his very own métier — what has helped spell his genius, luck, destiny and apparent legend. And that is the vitality that is his country’s art.

It is why the café he also conceptualized is named Sabel — after the now mythic itinerant model who gave him that first spark of social consciousness, from the very bowels of Manila where he learned to record life in the streets, before ascending into an intuitive aesthetics by way of celebrating the form of a woman scavenger, that as a subject and motif he returns to time and again. 

Ben knows all about cycles; that is why he situates his kingdom of art within the nourishing space of our awed regard for nature and its phases. As no fool on the hill, his certainty of where he came from and where he’s going is level with the trajectories of sun and moon.

With the BenCab Museum, it is no less than awesome, what this man has done.