A Filipino Essay in English

I have not seen Ligao in two years and here is another year ending and the prospects of
visiting this town I call home are as remote as ever. The last time I went was in '62, on the
eve of a departure that meant crossing an ocean for faraway places, and that visit had
been made on something deeper than impulse, squeezed in between passports and
vacation shots—and yet, once in Ligao, what did I really do? I stayed only twelve hours,
just long enough to pick up half a dozen blooms from my aunt's garden and jump into a
tricycle for the familiar ride to the municipal cemetery where my father lies buried.

People in my town have a way of putting it that is unlike any other in the world—they
speak of this as pag-i-sung-ko which means, literally, to meet, to go to the cemetery to
meet one's dead and hold converse with a cherished presence indistinguishable from the
fragrance or ripening grain, the murmur of creeks, the whisper of bamboo groves. He
could have been buried nearer town but my father and the Church rejected each other to
the end, and so he lies there, many kilometers out of Ligao proper, among his fellow
Masons, the town's Aglipayans and Iglesias and Adventists, a firm old man, who has
loomed larger in my life by dying, about whom I cannot think of now, even 15 years after,
without a suggestion of tears.

He spent more years out of Ligao than in it, leaving town when he was 19, returning when
he was 53, to live out just three more years then to die. But he was always a small town
Filipino, with small town notions and small town loyalties, something he unwittingly
passed on to me when he sent me off packing in the summer of ‘47 to Ligao, to recuperate
from a touch of TB. Before this, hometowns where hypothetical quantities in my life. I had
been born in Jolo and had spent portions of my childhood in various places in
Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, Laguna, Tarlac, Rizal, and in ’47, it looked as if I was going to
be a Manilan after all when I took this fateful plane trip with him which ended 500 miles
and three hours later, in the town of Ligao, Albay.

It was for me like going back to the beginning—everyone ought to have one, a town where
he begins from, and probably ends in, remembrance of which calls up the best of his
dreams, the purest of his joys. Seeing the town my father had spoken of so evocatively,
meeting his relatives and his friends, being shown the very spot where his parents’ hut
had stood, the ruins of a Spanish chimney he had haunted as a boy, the river, the bridge,
I began to understand a little why men write their tenderest stories and die their fiercest
deaths for their towns — cannot imagine anyone killing for Quiapo, or Central Market, or
say, Plaza Lawton, but I have it in me, I think, to pick up a gun and blow the head off
anyone who changes by the littlest bit that walk, on a twilight, to the barrio of Tuburan, a
kilometer from the heart of town, a walk through evening mist and trees; or the journey to

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Pandan on a sled, touching whip to carabao rump, and then alighting near the barrio
chapel to make it on foot to this spring, Malisen, with its tricky bed , quicksand in parts,
firm in others, where the barrio folk stake out their fish traps and one can scoop mudfish
and catfish by the pail.

There are mountain ranges around—the volcano, Mayon, dwarfs everything else, and
there is a lesser mountain whose name I never quite remember and hillocks that undulate
in and out of the horizon. One sees it all from the back of the elementary school building,
including the rice fields, the coconut groves, the abaca plantations— these are what
sustain Ligao, and it is odd that I should speak of the town with so much knowledge when
I never lived in it longer than a year.

I have returned to it whenever I could, for stretches of a week or a month, staying in an

old house in Guilid with people who are strictly more friends than relatives. As a young
girl, running home to them between jobs and minor disappointments. I was always given
the back room, the one near the avocado trees, the ducks, and the tilapia pond. But with
marriage and children, someone decided it was time I got the front room and I established
my rights to an enormous, ancient four-poster beside which a votive candle burns night
and day before the Virgin of Penafrancia.

I speak of it as my hometown and yet there is nothing in it I own, except for these
memories and the affection of some people; I hold no papers to any property in it, having
given up long ago trying to collect some debts owed my dead father. But it owns me, as
completely as if I had been born in it, and all those other years, in all those other towns,
hazy remembrances of seashores and shady streets and town plazas, come to a focus in
Ligao. It was in Ligao, too, I assure myself that this and that happened, some vignette of
childhood, though it could very well have been in Pangasinan or Nueva Ecija, but having
taken Papa's town for my own, I desired to invest it with my own past, even if I was a
stranger to it until I was grown. Wrenching time and geography, I forcibly transferred
recollections, reminiscences, retrospections from some unnamed setting in the back of my
mind to Ligao, stopping only when convinced I was as small town as I could ever be. With
my father’s death and interment there, it has since then become, for me, birthplace,
beginning, base, my country in minuscule.

You must meet my uncle C, He is really a granduncle but there being no word for that in
the dialect, I have called him Uncle all these years. He should be nearing 80, I think, but
if I know him at all, he still walks his daily ten kilometers from Danao to Pandan, twice a
day, barefoot, parting the grass ahead with the same bamboo stick he has swung for
years. He is the only man who can walk in formal company dressed in camisa de chino, a
pair of khaki pants, in his bare feet, and still be full of a dignity no one dare jest about.

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For a long time, he distrusted me, speaking of me as Jose's daughter from the city, I was
ill at ease before this man with the weatherbeaten face, who seemed to take everything
seriously. He never had much of a formal education but he could write a sensitive hand—
he had been quite a swain in his younger days, with a reputation for climbing up porches
of pretty young girls, and for drawing his bolo quickly, but life has tamed him and now he
reads the lives of saints and goes to church early in the mornings.

Uncle C has not opened many books in his life but there are a number of things outside of
them that he knows: He can smell out a storm, he knows everything there is about fields,
and yields, and irrigation, what to do with poor lands, when to cut down the bananas or
strip the abacca or begin to smoke the copra, what fish will bite today with what bait, and
both in Danao where he lives, and in Pandan where he owns a few parcels of land, he
cannot walk by without a hundred urchins running out to kiss his hand.

Eventually, he learned to like me, I could tell from the stories he told when we met. They
were always stories of my father and himself, stories of swooning girls and outraged
parents, cocked guns and missing bullets, mysterious bundles picked up by faithful
servants in the dead of the night and thrown into the river, conventos stoned and priests
run out of town, and I never asked him where fact ended and fancy began. That he
deigned to spin these tales for me was manifest affection and I would sit in my rocking
chair till it was time to go home to Guilid. I’d give my rocking chair a last push, feeling the
packed earth beneath my feet. His housekeeper would shuffle out to light the Petromax. In
the sudden hiss of the burning lamp, we would blink at each other, half a hundred years
between us. He would tilt the lamp to look at me better and let me go with baskets of
guavas and balls of native chocolate.

I wish that I could say of him he had been in the Revolution but I do not know that he
was, he has spoken of it. I wish also 1 could say that he is full of wisdom, but he isn't—he
is an old man and has seen the stars come and go for 80 years, but I do not know if age
and the stars make a man wise. I wish I could say that he had been a hero, slaying
dragon or minotaur, befuddling the Sphinx, but he hasn't and all he's really done was to
get born and live with an instinct for goodness, subtracting from no one to add to his own,
respecting property lines, meeting seasons of life with courage and kindness: poor harvest
and rich, bereavement and birth, drought and flood, just a man, unlettered and unshod.

Once, I saw him with shoes on and I couldn't look—it was all wrong. He had come to the
railroad station to see me off at the end of one of my quick vacations and I noticed his
great dark feet encased in rubber shoes. He was Uncle C still but there was nothing now
to tell him from the baggage carriers, the dice players, the chicken merchants—it was like
seeing a magnificent wild creature, full of natural splendor, suddenly festooned and
painted for the circus,

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“Don't they hurt?” I asked. “Don't they? Take them off,” I insisted. And he did, measuring
his movements, bending down to untie the shoes, knotting the laces together and
throwing the burden over an arm. It was strange how quickly his dignity returned, even
with his shoes dangling absurdly from an arm. He waved his bamboo cane at me. “You
come back soon,” he called as the train started to move. “And stay longer!” “You will meet
me?” I said. “Yes, with cart and carabao, if you wish.” “But no shoes, Uncle,” I said, “no
shoes.” He grinned suddenly and flung his arms upwards, a man cheering something and
wishing it long life. Long live; I thought, watching him grow smaller as the train raced
towards the mountains, long live my uncle, I cheered, long live his bare feet.

I have written before of this house in Guilid, and of the three spinsters in it. There used to
be four but Tinang died the year I went to Ligao for the first time.

When I walked into that house in '47, everyone was mourning. Manay Tinang had been a
teacher, so was Manay Tin. Manay Pina was the housekeeper and Paz, the baby, was the
merchant.

Their father had built the house himself, put up the posts and planed the shingles, every
one of them, and built his house to last, built it with an eye to space and sun and air. The
bedrooms opened on the dining room, the dining room opened on the sala, and the sala
welcomed the world outside. I lived there for a year, getting well, constantly plied with
Klim and fresh eggs, and in and out of the rooms was an assortment of nieces and
nephews and cousins and whatnots. My three Manays were sending I don’t know how
many children to school, and once or twice, Manay Tin would sigh about the expense
and.-the trouble but it did not stop her from apportioning her treasury warrant each
month to ensure some child's future.

She was for everyone's learning a trade, typing or dressmaking or basket weaving. The
brighter ones were pledged support through normal school or nursing school or farm
school, and from each was drawn the tacit promise that when he was through he would,
in turn, send a younger brother or sister through school. Two sins alone imperiled their
help: drink and love. If a nephew took to the bottle the news of it somehow filtered back to
Ligao, and the monthly allowance stopped even before he'd gotten over his first hangover.
If a niece fell in love, she was aware of the iron clad rules—everything to be held in
abeyance till after graduation. She might marry the boy, if he passed some acid tests, but
there was still her promise to help send her siblings to school. Marriage made no
difference. Until her first baby came, a married niece assigned a reasonable percentage of
her income towards the general education fund. But after the baby, she was released from
this duty and she thereafter kept every centavo she made. Her own children might look
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forward to the continuation of the arrangement, which had its disadvantages—nieces were
wont to postpone marriage until it was impractical or impossible to marry at all, but they
stayed on in the house, upping the number of spinsters in the rooms. But everyone got an
education—only the wastrels remained illiterate.

When I met Manay Tin in °47, she had been the head of the family for a month, the length
of time that her sister had been dead. They did not share their grief easily with
newcomers. I remember feeling like an interloper, the silences that arrived suddenly at the
dining table when someone had just said something awkward, how one by one, they
melted away into the darkness of the kitchen or the bedroom or the garden below,
returning after half an hour, white-faced, thin-lipped but dry-eyed.

It was a long time before anyone laughed in that house. It was the children who did it.
There were always so many of them underfoot, to be taught reading, cucored in
arithmetic, drilled in good manners, and to be made to realize, by precept and example,
the meaning of duty as the three spinsters saw it. My Manays’ lives were circumscribed by
church, school, home, but Manay Tin added a fourth dimension by visiting her sister’s
grave twice a day.

Manay Tin was heavy set when I met her for the first time but there were several pictures
around the house to show how she had looked at 18, slender and soft-mouthed—I
imagine she broke a few hearts. But that house in Guilid meant more than shelter, it
stood for duty, tradition, filial obligations, and one did not leave it while one’s parents
lived. When the old folk died, there were still the countless nieces and nephews; no suitor
had been plucky enough to sweep them aside and carry off one of my aunts. And so it
went. The children left for the city, and twice a month, bundles of vegetables, salted meat,
and rice, wrapped as carefully as CARE packages, were shipped by train to the city, and
the money, too, never too much since there was not too much, but whoever studied in the
city could depend on Manay T’s 20 or 30 pesos at a time.

Each summer I went home to Ligao, there was always someone with brandnew degree,
who used to toddle beneath the tables, between the chairs, who was now a nurse or a
teacher. Implacably, she was held to her end of the bargain, and the consequences of
rebelling were terrifying - the house in Guilid forever inaccessible to her, an absolute
ostracism, the Manays walking by like strangers. If a girl fell in love before graduation, she
weighed the chances of her passion against the tradition of the house, and invariably, the
house won. The boy was dispatched with some comfort, perhaps told to come back in five
or eight years, and if he was foolhardy enough to do so, he found his wooing compounded
by the fact that he had to court the niece all over again, court her, her aunts, and the
current crop of children in the front porch.

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The nephews got off more lightly. After a year or two of token support, they were allowed
to go, with no hard feelings, and they married women from Batangas or Laguna and either
went to their wives’ provinces or brought the women back to town to live. Their first
babies were brought around, to visit the aunts who spoiled them with cuddling and too
much candy.

The system was harsher on the nieces. The last time I was home, there were two
marriageable girls in the house, no great beauties, but charming quiet mannered girls.
The younger one was going to be a school nurse in a town nearby but she would be home
for the holidays. The second had just had an engagement broken off and it did not look as
if another suitor was coming by quickly. She had been betrothed to this young man for
more than ten years but the aunts had not liked him, and he received his walking papers.
The latest news we got, he was buying a bridal bed for another girl. Gely took the news
calmly, but she and I talked in the old kitchen, beneath the swinging bulb. She would not
come right out and say that she had loved him deeply or that her heart was broken—it
would do her no good to admit either. “But,” she said, wistful, “I thought,” she began
again, “I thought—of running,” and covered her mouth. I remembered her from her
childhood, a sweet-faced, rather skinny child annoying the pet monkey in the yard,
coming home on weekends from a girls’ academy in Legaspi, bringing into the house her
laughter and her muddy shoes. If she grieved tonight, only her large, luminous eyes
showed it. She pushed 30 and in a few more years, she would be a spinster herself. It was
very likely that she would succeed Manay Tin as head of the family, but that evening in
the old kitchen, her mouth trembled a little, her eyes shone with unshed tears.

How many renunciations the women had to make for that house in Guilid! Yet it was a
matriarchy and the young girls who now gave up love would in time become unmarried
matriarchs themselves, demanding the same sacrifice of later flocks of nieces. But no one
turned hard and bitter: all in that house were women to the last, fussing over shoes and
clothes and jewelry. They set a festive table each year, with guests coming from Sorsogon
and Naga, and everything went as well as if the men had planned it. When a storm was
up, a brother or nephew might be sent for to tie the trees down and lash the windows, but
otherwise, the women ran the show, worrying about the crops, buying up mortgages,
making all their devotion to the Virgin of Peñafrancia.

“When you come again,” Manay Tin likes to say, “the house may not be here.” But each
year that I manage to make it to Ligao to turn around the corner in Guilid where I can see
the kakawati fence, the roof and the walls rise brown and sturdy as ever. As surely as
suns rise and set in Ligao, Manay Tin will wait for me at the door, telling me which flowers
I might pick in the garden so I can meet my dead father and thus begin my visit properly.

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