From the diary of B. Balbacua
July 2, 2001 | 12:00am
Each day he passes the Church of Our Lady of the Abandonados not once or twice but four times, a kilometer or two from Lambingan Bridge, half-dreaming that some former First Lady might be there kneeling on her way to the altar.
The historic church that houses the bones of soldiers and faceless victims of Manila’s liberation, still stands there like a mute witness to the daily ritual drive of B. Balbacua to and from Malate taking the kids across town to the old school, to and from work where the sidewalk carinderias harbor some secret potion.
It just so happens that the in-laws have just sent him, from deep south and with the monsoon season setting in, some native lime whose juice goes well with either ginamos, the homemade fish fry, or the regular ginebra, red or blue.
Also in the package were some fish stewed in vinegar, minus the heads because lola says they were beheaded by the Abu Sayyaf lolo. From the sixth floor of an apartment off Boni Ave., the taste of the viands conjures certain hours and nights in the south, specifically on Negros Island, where the ships come and go like moonshine tuba.
In the afternoons B. Balbacua drops the wife off at the corner of Indiana and San Andres to pick the kids up, the younger one occasionally picked on by the schoolyard bully, the older one expectant of the onset of adolescence.
Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t, the weather unpredictable as always, that’s why there’s always an umbrella at the back of the car newly painted by a fellow nicknamed Tarzan.
The long drive through Sta. Ana and Paco, cumulative-wise, has made B. Balbacua recall his own Super Grandma, aka Mariang Bar, who once ran just such a place off Tejeron aka M.L. Carreon, near the corner of what might still be Rubilin. That’s because streets seldom retain their names, if not their old flavor, and why the New Panaderos must be distinguished from the Old Panaderos, and where the twain meet is a SeaOil gas station.
Super Grandma it was who used to make him read the newspaper aloud to her, not in the American Eagle in Sta. Ana where the smell of old wooden cabinets pervaded the place, but in the hallway in his father’s house in Diliman. He tried out his best newscaster imitation on her, at times even spoon-feeding her gruel or oatmeal, entertaining comments and asides from the half-blind woman.
There were summers when his American cousins would come visit and stay with them in Diliman, and they would bawl like nobody’s business when they were forced to go visit the American Eagle, whining through their tears: "I don’t want to go to Santy Annie, I don’t want to go to Santy Annie!"
There was another cousin, a distant one, who was knifed dead in one of those bars, and they never did tell Super Grandma because she might not be able to handle it. All the while she must have thought Freddie –that was his name –was still around, was still singing and doing his jig about "Sugar and spice and all things nice."
And when Mariang Bar passed away across the Pacific, B. Balbacua recalls how she was practically swimming in her own piss with no amateur newscaster beside her, no grandson weeping how he doesn’t want to go to Santy Annie.
These things among other lambent wayward ruminations crossed the mind of B. Balbacua during the daily drive past the Church of Our Lady of the Abandonados, with one signal light jammed that you had to continuously press down on the small stick as you turned left, coming from New Panaderos onto Pedro Gil, or vice versa.
He wonders if there might be a former First Lady saying her prayers at the altar, and if she ever read the stories of Greg Brillantes, who himself has spent many hours behind the wheel with a stereo cassette playing the tapes of Frank Sinatra, thinking about a flood in Tarlac, and the cries of children on an April afternoon in the year 1957.
He worries if it ever floods near Gabby’s, in that turn to Lambingan Bridge where the jeepneys seem to congregate on their way to and back from Kalentong or Paco.
Now late at night B. Balbacua nurses his trusty Ginebra with or without lime juice, looks at the recently installed phone that could ring sooner than one suspects, surveys the view of Boni and the passing jeeps and cars on an uphill, downhill stretch of road, glances at the grounded pool below with the lights hanging out like entrails, and waits for the late night news.
He realizes of a sudden that the year is 2001, that a mechanic named Tony Bisaya has yet to pay him for a fourth-hand car, and that there will be another long drive tomorrow feeling like a defrosted Robert Frost, always preceded by a sign of the cross in memory of all the abandonados in this his somewhat curious lifetime.
The historic church that houses the bones of soldiers and faceless victims of Manila’s liberation, still stands there like a mute witness to the daily ritual drive of B. Balbacua to and from Malate taking the kids across town to the old school, to and from work where the sidewalk carinderias harbor some secret potion.
It just so happens that the in-laws have just sent him, from deep south and with the monsoon season setting in, some native lime whose juice goes well with either ginamos, the homemade fish fry, or the regular ginebra, red or blue.
Also in the package were some fish stewed in vinegar, minus the heads because lola says they were beheaded by the Abu Sayyaf lolo. From the sixth floor of an apartment off Boni Ave., the taste of the viands conjures certain hours and nights in the south, specifically on Negros Island, where the ships come and go like moonshine tuba.
In the afternoons B. Balbacua drops the wife off at the corner of Indiana and San Andres to pick the kids up, the younger one occasionally picked on by the schoolyard bully, the older one expectant of the onset of adolescence.
Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t, the weather unpredictable as always, that’s why there’s always an umbrella at the back of the car newly painted by a fellow nicknamed Tarzan.
The long drive through Sta. Ana and Paco, cumulative-wise, has made B. Balbacua recall his own Super Grandma, aka Mariang Bar, who once ran just such a place off Tejeron aka M.L. Carreon, near the corner of what might still be Rubilin. That’s because streets seldom retain their names, if not their old flavor, and why the New Panaderos must be distinguished from the Old Panaderos, and where the twain meet is a SeaOil gas station.
Super Grandma it was who used to make him read the newspaper aloud to her, not in the American Eagle in Sta. Ana where the smell of old wooden cabinets pervaded the place, but in the hallway in his father’s house in Diliman. He tried out his best newscaster imitation on her, at times even spoon-feeding her gruel or oatmeal, entertaining comments and asides from the half-blind woman.
There were summers when his American cousins would come visit and stay with them in Diliman, and they would bawl like nobody’s business when they were forced to go visit the American Eagle, whining through their tears: "I don’t want to go to Santy Annie, I don’t want to go to Santy Annie!"
There was another cousin, a distant one, who was knifed dead in one of those bars, and they never did tell Super Grandma because she might not be able to handle it. All the while she must have thought Freddie –that was his name –was still around, was still singing and doing his jig about "Sugar and spice and all things nice."
And when Mariang Bar passed away across the Pacific, B. Balbacua recalls how she was practically swimming in her own piss with no amateur newscaster beside her, no grandson weeping how he doesn’t want to go to Santy Annie.
These things among other lambent wayward ruminations crossed the mind of B. Balbacua during the daily drive past the Church of Our Lady of the Abandonados, with one signal light jammed that you had to continuously press down on the small stick as you turned left, coming from New Panaderos onto Pedro Gil, or vice versa.
He wonders if there might be a former First Lady saying her prayers at the altar, and if she ever read the stories of Greg Brillantes, who himself has spent many hours behind the wheel with a stereo cassette playing the tapes of Frank Sinatra, thinking about a flood in Tarlac, and the cries of children on an April afternoon in the year 1957.
He worries if it ever floods near Gabby’s, in that turn to Lambingan Bridge where the jeepneys seem to congregate on their way to and back from Kalentong or Paco.
Now late at night B. Balbacua nurses his trusty Ginebra with or without lime juice, looks at the recently installed phone that could ring sooner than one suspects, surveys the view of Boni and the passing jeeps and cars on an uphill, downhill stretch of road, glances at the grounded pool below with the lights hanging out like entrails, and waits for the late night news.
He realizes of a sudden that the year is 2001, that a mechanic named Tony Bisaya has yet to pay him for a fourth-hand car, and that there will be another long drive tomorrow feeling like a defrosted Robert Frost, always preceded by a sign of the cross in memory of all the abandonados in this his somewhat curious lifetime.
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