Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
I have three hometowns. The city I was born in: Dumaguete. The city my late father came from: Butuan, in Agusan del Norte. And the city my mother came from: Bayawan, at the southern tip of Negros Oriental. I live and work in the first; the second is the source of all my longing for paternal roots, but also the one place I have never really been to; and the third is the mythic source of all my heartbeats, and a significant number of my fiction. And because February 18 was Bayawan’s fiesta (one of three it celebrates annually), I shall write about it. I should: because I rarely go back anymore to visit, but every time I do, I fall in love with it all over again.
The last time I visited was quite recently — only last December 2016, and friends of the family had willingly toured me around even as far away as the mountains of Omod, where we visited the very site on which the legend of Bayawan’s naming came from.
Its old name is Tolong Nuevo, then a part of Tolong Viejo, which is present-day Sta. Catalina town. “Tolong Nuevo” had existed as a place-name as early as 1868. But in 1953, the name was changed to Bayawan, and the name “Tolong” had since lapsed into obscurity, forgotten by succeeding generations.
To “bayaw” means to raise, and in the legend’s case, to raise the chalice for a mass, the very act by which a Spanish priest was doing when he was speared to death by a native Maghat. Today, the site of that old chapel which gave witness to this historical murder is graced by a gigantic statue of the Christ, which overlooks most of Bayawan’s mountains, as well as the plains of rice and sugarcane fields below. It is a rarely visited site, too far away from civilization, overgrown by weeds, and not many Bayawanons actually know of the place, to my surprise.
Somewhere around that area, my own family had once made an old fortune — now gone — from sugar. Our hacienda then was named Hacienda Roca, after “Rosales Casocot,” one of the biggest plantations then at the height of the sugar boom of the late 1950s into the early 1970s. We lost everything in the terrible bust that followed. I have scant memories of this time in my family’s lives.
All I know is, like many Bayawanons who were born in the 1970s, I was born in a Dumaguete hospital — but grew up, and knew childhood, in Bayawan. It is my mythical place of roots, like no other, not even Dumaguete in which I’ve lived most of my adult life.
In Bayawan lay the secrets of my blood, my history. Also here is the setting of my mother’s bedside stories, of those moments when I was a young child and she’d tuck me to bed and gamely recall a life when she was a young woman and World War II was brewing, or much later when she had returned to Bayawan as a married woman in the heyday of the sugar boom and became, for a while, one of its fairer society hostesses. Those were the heady days, when sugar cane oiled the pockets of young hacienderos on the make, and everybody was rich. (And then there was the hard, hard fall…)
Bayawan means memory—and this word alone means so much in the ways it must mean: as a threshold of recollections both happy and tragic.
Bayawan is the stuff of stories. And no wonder that after many years of listening to my mother regale me with her growing-up stories in this place, I would become a writer, most often chronicling what I can from a childhood of ghosts. One such story would later win me a Palanca Award.
When I, too, would move away from Bayawan due to the circumstances of family and adulthood, it was always this place that I kept turning back to as my essence of a "hometown," as a past, as a cache of memories that sustained me as a writer.
It is fixed in my mind like my true north. I remember my family once lived in a fortunate corner just along a narrow stretch of road in Poblacion. I say “fortunate,” because this corner was the focal point to everything else, especially when one was a young boy just ascertaining the world outside, his immediate environs his kingdom of discovery.
My Tita Fannie just lived a stone’s throw away from us. And just next door, in a block that contained so many relatives I cannot remember them all, my three lolas — Rose, Lily, and Adeling — manned their stores, and would give me treats when I passed by. To this day, I cannot forget my Lola Adeling’s lechon de carajay, which remains, for me, the best of its kind anywhere.
Across the street, to the right, there was Oriente Cinema—my bodega of dreams, the place I first saw a movie in. It remains in my imagination as the true birthing place for my current scholarship on film. To the left across the road was Chua’s general merchandise store, its mud yellow paint still sticking to my memories; and further down the road is the old Diao house, where I played away so many afternoons. Everything was big and large in my memory.
Today, however, whenever I go back to Bayawan, everything looks smaller when once they had all loomed large in my seeing as a child. And things have also changed — for the better, I guess, but all these I cannot help but feel as a slight betrayal to a boyhood memory.
The first time I saw the corner of what used to be my family’s house, when I was already in high school and had come back to visit, I saw that it housed a ramshackle selling second-hand clothes from abroad. The ukay-ukay felt sad then, but also somehow liberating. Today, there’s a building there, a squat and common thing of no architectural value, finally obliterating what is left of my memory. But even then this tiny spot continues to haunt me to this day, and provides me the inspiration with which I have built a literature upon: of this spot I remember my mother’s lively beehive of a beauty parlor, my father's yellow sakbayan, my older brothers' merry shenanigans.
Here, there used to be thickets of bamboo guarding its roadside wall, and it was in their very shadows that I’d hide in, most of the time, from little friends hunting me down in our games of hide-and-seek. Occasionally, from within these bamboo thickets, I’d spy the town’s resident madpeople, Pidong Buang and Wana Buang (for a long time, I thought they were married because they shared the same family name—Buang), who both embodied the perfect caricature of a town’s conscience. Years later, when I was in high school (or college?) somebody reported to my mother the news of Pidong Buang’s death—and it was surprising to feel inside me a surge of memory folding in onto itself, like a chapter in my life of remembrances suddenly coming to a close. How strange that even mad people from our childhood can have such a hold on our imaginations! Our lives!
Bayawan, in reminiscence and in reality, begs me to ask: What is indeed the integrity of memory? Do we really remember what we remember? But always, even with such unsettling questions, my hometown still manages to nurture me.
Whenever I am in Bayawan, I somehow cease to become the citified adult that I am; there, I become the child I once was, and everything else turns sepia… to memory, to play, to running across the brown fields while childhood friends chase me, to scraping knees trying to battle a bicycle, to hearing the sound of bamboo cannons on New Year’s Eve, to chewing on sugar canes fallen down cargo trucks, to tasting baye-baye from Manang Julia’s kitchen. And then—better late than never—I, too, somehow become part of my mother’s stories. Bayawan has become what is in the heart.
7:45 PM |
The Streets of Dumaguete: Calle Santa Catalina
In her article “The Streets of Dumaguete” (Silliman Journal, Vol. 54 Issue No. 2, July-December 2013), sociologist/writer Lorna Peña-Reyes Makil writes of Santa Catalina Street: “Calle Santa Catalina was named after Dumaguete’s patron saint, St. Catherine of Alexandria, known as the ‘Warrior Saint.’ We read that she was chosen to be the town’s patron saint due to the great need for protection against the southern slave raiders. Legends about her courage and physical prowess were narrated by the townsfolk who had observed that her image on certain mornings would carry amor seco — a grass weed — clinging to the hem of her dress, and making them believe that the saint had gone out at night to drive away the pirates.
"I used to walk down Sta. Catalina Street to go to Dumaguete City Hall for some school assignment, as observing the City Council in action. City Hall was an old building built in 1937 with capiz shell windows and wooden floors that survive to the present…
"The street also took me to Dumaguete’s ‘Old Casa Español District,’ which grew out of the original Plaza Complex. Its short side streets leading to Rizal Avenue — Burgos Street and Tan Pedro Street — bordered the place where homes of wealthy and important Spanish-Filipinos used to be. Although many of these homes were torn down or converted into businesses, a few of them still stand, old and sad reminders of Dumaguete’s early elite whose younger generation adapted to modernization.”
Calle Sta. Catalina, however, has also been known as Dumaguete’s “second street,” meaning perpetually second to Calle Marina (now Rizal Boulevard) in terms of being the street of choice for the city’s wealthier citizens to call home. According to gossip, it was the street where aspiration thrived, and soon it was dotted with the smaller mansions of families who could not find a plot to settle in along the seafront, along the so-called "sugar houses" of the Boulevard's "millionaires row." Only a few of these beautiful houses remain…
An excerpt from the story commissioned by the Cebu LitFest 2015...
Manong Rocky was 28 years old when he found himself bound for Cebu City to seek his fortune. He was told this was the reason, and Mother had decided on this for him, and very quickly—Marcos had just fled to Hawaii a few days prior, there was remarkable jubilation in the air, and there were many yellow ribbons being hung from trees and everywhere else along Dumaguete’s streets.
“Do I have to go?” he asked Mother.
“You must,” she said. “This can’t happen again.”
He was quiet.
“There’s nothing here in Dumaguete for a man with an Agriculture degree, ‘noy,” she said.
Manong Rocky nodded.
He lived, for a while, in Visitacion Street, near Jones Avenue, in a compound a certain Mrs. Esperas ruled with the relentless solicitation of a dowager empress: her house, a white clapboard contraption with two floors, was embraced on all sides by smaller apartments she rented out to young professionals—doctors, teachers, lawyers, salesmen—all young men, all without families of their own. Mrs. Esperas saw my brother coming in with a For Rent flyer in his hand, just newly arrived in Cebu with one bulging suitcase, and she quickly sized him up. “There’s a room in the second floor of my house. It’s big enough for you. And lots of sunshine,” she said to my brother. “Is that okay for you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” my brother said.
“Good,” Mrs. Esperas replied, flashing him a quick smile, and went back to her mahjong, her daster with flower prints cascading around her generous body. “Jobie!” she called on the household help, “Show your Kuya Rocky the room upstairs, the one where your Kuya Manuel used to stay.”
“Kuya Manuel is not coming back, ma’am?” Jobie asked.
“Kung mubalik pa ‘to sya, patyon ‘to nako,” Mrs. Esperas said under her breath.
Manong Rocky soon found work as a sales rep for Zuellig Pharma, for which he was given a secondhand blue Ford Laser to drive around, which had the habit of breaking down on the road at the unlikeliest times. His job was booking products assigned to him by his company—mainly Nivea skincare products and Tang TruOrange—and taking orders and receiving collection in a regular routine that became the sum of his life as a young man in the big city. He knew he was not completely happy. The intriga at work got to him, and there were personal grudges from the other sales reps he couldn’t brush away with inattention.
Every day his route was a constant stream of pharmacies and little shops dotting the commercial enclaves of Gaisano Metro, Gaisano South, and Gaisano Main, all of them along Colon Street, in downtown Cebu, where business thrived in an electric pulse. It was near the end of 1986, and much of that pulse was the rugged optimism of a country suddenly freed from a dictator. My brother trudged along, making do with a job he scarcely cared for. For him, this was life in the big city: scores of deadening department stores in crowded downtown, as well as assorted boticas along Gullas, Magallanes, and Manalili Streets. Among them, Majestic Pharmacy was easily his favorite, because they bought a lot of Nivea—and because he liked how the salesgirls there flirted with him.
We would visit often, Mother and I—and when we first came in to visit Manong Rocky, in 1987, we regaled at the fact that my brother had a car, although he was careful not to mention its tendencies of breaking down once too often. The traffic startled my mother.
“This is Cebu, Ma,” he would say, explaining the crawl of cars, tight along city streets.
“Yes, it is,” Mother would reply, slowly, understanding that this was a strange new world, and it was best that she learned to embrace its progress.
I would sit at the backseat of the Ford Laser, all of the twelve-year-old in me in perfect awe of everything about Cebu City that loomed large, bigger than the biggest thing in Dumaguete, everything quite intricate and embracing in their big city intimidations.
“You want to listen to the radio?” my brother asked, swerving with such daring in and out of Colon traffic.
“As long as it’s not all talk shows,” Mother said. “I’ve had enough of radio mouths blabbing all day long.”
Manong Rocky made a ceremony of turning on his car radio—a car radio!—and then flicking through the dial to get to some FM station, and soon I’d hear the static easing out into melody. An unfamiliar song washed over me.
I … I was a game he would play He brought the clouds to my day… Then like a ray of light, You came my way one night. Just one look and I knew…
The song somehow reminded me of Stephanie, but I don’t tell Manong Rocky that. Invariably, it proved a serenade of lasting recall for me—and years later, all grown up to the worldly ways of adult life, I’d realize it is with this song I’d attach a perfect soundtrack to the sheer awe of being a little boy, recessed deep in the comfortable darkness of the interiors of my brother’s car, humming along to a catchy melody with a full view of passing neon signs and bright lights and city streets teeming with a sophistication I found alluring and frightening. It would become a song I’d always associate Cebu City with—and haunting me still, because in the many years to come, I’d find myself in the metropolis in some taxi bound for Ayala Center or elsewhere, and the taxi driver would turn on the car radio, and out would always come “You Got It All” by The Jets.
You would make everything clear, Make all the clouds disappear. Put all your fears to rest, Who do I love the best? Don’t you know, don’t you know… You got it all over him, You got me over him. Honey it’s true, There’s just you. You must have been heaven sent, Hearing me call you went Out on a limb. And you’re all that he’s not, Just look what I got. ‘Cause you got it all Over him…
When would I get over him? I thought, the movies flickering in my mind.
I’d soon find that Manong Rocky’s haunt after each work day was Ding Hao along Colon St., at the back of Manalili, where he bought pork steamed rice, siomai, and lumpia for our dinner. Ding Hao would become the place I’d ask to go to in future visits—its dim sum an immediate bridge to memory.
Sometimes, when he was feeling adventurous, Manong Rocky would take us to Sunburst Chicken near Mango Avenue, in an area people were beginning to call “uptown,” and here we would have our fill of fried chicken—which was quite a delicacy then, in the late 1980s, when fried chicken was perfectly only for those with upper middle class pretensions.
In other visits, I’d insist on spending a day in the air-conditioned comforts of Robinson’s near Jones, right across the park where people went roller-blading. And he’d insist on taking me to the highest point of the city, at night, where we could see the sprawl of the metropolis twinkling like a million promises.
“This is it,” he’d say.
“It’s not like Dumaguete at all,” I’d reply.
“Not at all.”
“’Nong, do you think you’d ever want to come back home again?”
He looked out into the beckoning meshes of light down below, and never answered my question.
I’d find out in later years that Manong Rocky had a very simple idea for a nightlife in Cebu, what a young man could find in 1987: Boulevard Resto was where he would go, again uptown, because it had a regular band playing. And sometimes, for variety, he would go to Food Street right across Boulevard Resto. The bars in these two places were the placed you’d go to be seen, he said. Of course, there was also Robinson’s and Rosita’s around the same area—but that was where you went for upscale shopping and for groceries, away from the grimy masses of Colon.
On each payday, he sent home to Mother half of what he made, promising more when he could.
And on weekends, he said, he would go to Lapu-Lapu for some beach time—where he’d remember Dumaguete like a slowly vanishing thought, and sometimes he wished he was back home again, with Efeb, with Mother, with Father and his crazy politics, in that strange little apartment in Tubod.
And sometimes, he didn’t know what else to wish for.
10:12 AM |
A Memory of Bayawan as Hometown
