...Hildawa, poet, visual artist and architect, was at the My Favorite Book Awards sponsored by National Book Store and this newspaper, but the funny thing was that I almost didn’t recognize him, he had grown so thin, almost like a ghost of his former self.
He greeted me at the buffet table, and probably realizing that I couldn’t place the face or name, he blurted out good-naturedly, “Si Sid.”
I said sorry, didn’t recognize you, ang laki ng pinayat mo. He had won honorable mention in the contest, good for a cool 10k, half in cash and the other half in gift cheques.
“Marami-raming libro rin yon,” I kidded him.
“Hindi rin,” he said. Depending on what books you buy, that could easily disintegrate.
He put some stuff on his plate and walked back to his table, and it sounded like he was nursing a cough. He was wearing a jacket, and delivered a response later in the program after the handing of awards.
Sid’s winning essay had to do with his experience at the Don Bosco Makati, where he went to elementary and high school. It was entitled “When lightning strikes” and having reread it now after his death last Sunday night (March 30) due to complications from TB (other versions blamed dengue), it somehow seemed prophetic.
By holy week he was in hospital, and the prognosis was not very good but his friends and family were still hopeful. Text messages circulated that he was responding to treatment. An email was sent out that his hospital bills were mounting, however, and that a fund drive was being started by the CCP, where Sid had worked for more than 10 years as head of the visual arts department. Artworks were to be dropped off at Sid’s office to later be sold at the gift shop, in order to help defray expenses.
By Thursday after Easter, it was said that his sister, a medical doctor, had brought Sid home. It was not clear if he was already out of the woods, or the family was resigned to his fate and wanted to give him the comfort of spending his last moments in the privacy of kin and familiar surroundings.
I myself thought he was already in the clear. But Sunday night a text message from a mutual friend, Marj Evasco, whose house the architect had designed, said that Sid had died.
On the first night of the wake at Don Bosco Makati chapel, some familiar faces of artists and writers were around, Sid’s fellow Bosconians, a few strangers.
The poet’s ashes had been placed in an urn at the altar of the Faith Chapel, while by the logbook where guests signed in for remembrance and posterity, there was posted one of Sid’s poems, “Sick Leave,” about the blank rectangular space left on the wall when a painting has been taken down or gone missing.
Jean Marie Syjuco, who was co-curator along with Krip Yuson and Sid for the Chromatext Reloaded show at CCP early last year, recalled that Sid was a constant collaborator, dating back to Penguin days in the late 1980s. In the early 90s Jean Marie and Sid were batchmates along with Meps Endaya, among others, in the 13 Artists award handed out regularly by the CCP.
Also at the wake were Sid’s colleagues at the artists’ collective that holds annual group shows in the Asean region: National Artist Bencab, Ramon Orlina, Susan Fetalvero Roces. It was through Sid that the collective had contacted me to write the souvenir program notes on their show in Singapore in 2006, which helped defray my own mundane expenses at the time.
Sid proved very helpful in providing us contact numbers of artists we had to interview, sometimes even facilitating the interview himself. It was at his office where we interviewed Junyee during Earth Day last year, in conjunction with the installation Angud on the CCP grounds. It was also at the fourth floor visual arts department where Junyee had left one such angud for pickup, as a gesture of thanks for the article we wrote, and which now serves as valuable furniture in our modest apartment.
Several years ago it was Sid who brought together artists in the Yankee Doodle Dandy exhibit for an interview, and he came into the board room with a full bag of Lays.
Back at the wake, Sid’s old high school batchmate Ricky Osal was ruing that he was unable to visit their old chum when their classmates dropped by at the Hildawa residence in Bangkal on the artist’s last Saturday on Earth. Osal had to be with his child regarding domestic concerns.
“We visited him at the hospital but could not see him because the priest then was giving him the last rites,” Osal said.
The batchmate remembered how Sid during high school was a member of the camera club as well as the Singing Saints, the boys choir, “as well as, if I’m not mistaken, our journal and newspaper.”
Osal said that a work of Sid’s can be found at the Makati Tourism Office in Glorietta, he did the design for a t-shirt of the city government.
Aside from the 13 Artists award, Sid also won the Palanca for play and poetry. A collection of his was shortlisted the year I was one of the judges, entitled “God Explains Space to his Angels.” It barely missed out making the winner’s circle after heated debates in Malate and Morato. When I wrote about the winners and how he had come so close, he texted me his thanks just the same.
Then there was the writers group Alon composed of La Salle graduate students in creative writing, of which Sid was a founding member. Their anthology “What the Water Said” won a national book award in 2005, and remains an important work in our literary history, on the level of “Six Filipino Poets” edited by Leonard Casper published during the time of Mahoma or thereabouts.
Other Alon members include Vince Groyon, Ronald Baytan, Alice Cua, Shirley Lua, Camilo Villanueva, John Teodoro.
After Sid’s death various emails went the rounds, one of them detailing his last journal entry: “I tried to cross the river, but the current was so strong.”
Rereading the article on Sid I wrote for this magazine two years ago, what made the most impression on me was his devotion to the written word. Words are primarily visual, a code, as it were, almost like Da Vinci’s. Only here we can imagine the artist in the ether, listening to God or the void explain to him the many uses of space.
He was 45 but already light years away.
Set Design for Act Three
Sid Hildawa
I will stage the remainder of my life
this way: black iron stairs spiraling
to upper floor, leaving behind all
clutter at ground. Upstairs, white.
White plastered walls and cathedral
ceiling; floor of tongue-and-groove
planks, six inches wide, bleached.
Large frosted windows at both ends,
north and south, draped with sheets
of canvas like thin slices of sunrise.
By the brighter end, a potted cactus
to soak in the filtered light. Slightly
off center, a weathered boat for a bed,
with bamboo outrigger to the floor’s
wooden lake. And a bare bulb hanging
low from the ceiling to lure by next dawn the errant fish. In case it comes.
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