Wednesday, December 31, 2003
On Growing, OldThe age of the city does not lend itself to easy calculations. Dumaguete seems to be at once ancient and young: a quick stroll through Rizal Boulevard, for example, provides an arresting parade of stylized lamplights—such as one might encounter on a Spanish throughway—framing both backdrops of sea and sugar houses, those little seaside mansions that are the remaining testaments to Negros’ sugar bounty. And scattered in the area are hotels and disco houses and restaurants and convenient stores and cafés, peopled mostly by the young and the wheeled. It is much too easy to fall in love with the contradictions of the place.
This is my love affair with my city: I hate it as only someone who truly loves it can. I hate the pervading small town quiet, punctured now by an alien phenomenon of traffic. I hate the rustic charm, the sense of becoming found, the easy 10-minute accessibility from point A to point B. I hate it that I love it, that I find it to embody me. I hate the fact that in my young rebellion, its conservative pretensions provide the perfect foil to define me.
I hate the fact that when you finally decide it is a boring place, it drops a mask and reminds you that everything here is not really what it seems to be. I used to suspect that this was our own version of Peyton Place; now I know it to be true. Dumaguete hides so many secrets, and yields so many facets. Begin with the fact that arriving in the city takes you to a different time, to a different place not quite one would expect for Amorsolo country. It is not enough to know that, yes, the quiet is certain for any small town scattered throughout the archipelago. This is a different quiet: on a cool dawn, when the sun has yet to bear the mark of the tropics, you are drawn to a momentary illusion, to the “New England feel of the place.”
That’s what they almost all write about Dumaguete City and Silliman University—where the heart of the city lies—that romantic open invitation to a comparable Bostonian intellectual air. The elements are there: the interesting semi-seclusion from the grit of big city reality, the vision of fallen brown leaves blanketing the acres to simulate a kind of autumn, the stretch of grass that welcome the wide open spaces, the carefully arranged cornucopia of acacia and American colonial buildings, the after-school hubbub of academia and the culturati that explode in little pockets stretching from the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium stage to trendy coffeeshops about town that see local gossip, study, and occasionally, a poetry reading or two.
“I like the ‘New England’ ambience of the place,” Waray poet Antonino de Veyra once wrote. “Old world charm, complete with fog rolling in at night to the bass notes of boat horns either docking or casting off. Like Gothic, man.”
For Palanca-awardee Timothy Montes, the place was a state of unbearable, elegiac comfort: “[It] is an Eden for aestivators. Each time I walk through [its] shady lanes, I feel like I’m moving to the music of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2.” National Artist for Literature Edith Tiempo has found her home here, and once wrote that its shorelines were one reason why she chose to stay in the Philippines.
Dumaguete is a beautiful headache. It can make you unmercifully drunk, like a rabbit o.d.’d on carrot juice. I have no memory, for example, of last Saturday except as this whirlpool of color and upchuck. In the noon sunlight flooding my new apartment, I vaguely recalled the feathery numbness of waking. I never get hang-overs: what I had was a sense of dread and longing. I promptly fell asleep again, to wake up at three in the afternoon. It was not a good way to start weekends.
I had it coming. Look at me now, here in this darling little Internet cafe called Manson’s. I have finished two tumblers of Choclit Chipz coffee from Le Cimbali, and now I am trying to drown my mind with a juggling act of reading Newsweek and Time magazines while emailing, surfing Premiere Magazine and the New York Times, and trying to catch the eye of the cute blonde right next to my IBM console. I am multi-tasking to fill a void I had long since referred to as residue of childish years—that creeping feeling that, on account of everything, I am alone in the universe. Or perhaps it is a feeling that I am sadly a freshwater fish landed in seawater: I do not know why I am here, or what I see in this place. Do you have that feeling that nobody in Dumaguete can ever really understand you? I traverse the trodden byways of this city, and I am a Martian.
Being a teacher in Silliman has also killed my “social” life. I enter a bar with some vague notions of being Tony Manero from Saturday Night Fever—only to have hopes dashed with the first instance of a shrill: “Sir! What are you doing here?” There had been times I wanted to speak back: “Little girl, I have been here even before you learned that Johann Sebastian Bach is not a rock star.” (I would have said “before you learned to count,” but that would make me old. I cling to being 25 like there is no tomorrow: and yet I cannot deny the fact that in some fresh-faced circle I am a dinosaur. But never underestimate the power of denial.)
Ah. We don’t go out anymore to discos and bars. Instead, my circle of friends sets appointments, fetches cars, and congregates for “dinners.” Conversations matter more now than a night of frenzied jigs on anonymous dance floors (away from the requisite anonymous rubbings with faceless someones). Gerard, my caterer friend, does not wish to ascribe this phase of living to trappings of “a certain age”: “We have only grown mature.” We agree wholeheartedly, more to convince ourselves than out of sheer conviction. And yet, by the time dinner ends, we set ourselves for the rituals of fond recollections and looking through photographs four to five years old: “Hey, that was when we went to so-and-so’s party!” or “How young Gideon looks in this one—and thin, too!” On nights when we do venture out to the cold, to the single bars we once were avowed patrons of but which had since been taken over by younger versions of ourselves (some waitresses still do remember us and our preferred drinks, admonishing us for not coming over as frequently as over—to which we mouth the mantra that “We’re just too busy these days...”), we furtively look to the next tables, admiring the occasional firm ass, the boisterous young laughter. We have become elders without our knowing it. It is a sad thing to notice that the neighbor’s kid who was a child in diapers when you were a freshman in college, is now a strapping young adult drinking her drinks, smoking his cigarettes, gabbing her incessant talks, and doing his own share of flirtations that will have you flustered with pleasure and guilt.
In the 2000s, to be the ultimate paragon of sophisticated youth is to be 13. I did not even know how to kiss when I was 13.
This is my city.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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