Former Supreme Court Justice Isagani A. Cruz recalled the other day a charming account of the Santacruzan celebration right here in Manila. The season is long past but just the same it evoked so much nostalgia, I’ll now resuscitate my own giddy memories. For us, in the Ilokano region of eastern Pangasinan, the Santacruzan was one bright time of the year when we had games like the rang-ga or pabitin as the Tagalogs call it, and so many more.
May presages the end of the dry season and ushers in the greening of the land. Its first rain was supposed to be curative so we frolicked in it. The fallow fields start sprouting those weeds which, to others, were just weeds but, to us, they were a delicious addition to our vegetable stew.
The Santacruzan starts mid-afternoon with athletic games. One is the barrio version of rugby: a young coconut is embedded with coins of varying denomination, coated with pig fat then tossed to a crowd of waiting boys who wrestle with one another to grab the coconut and run away with it.
There was also the tall bamboo pole, greased again with pig fat, a packet of coins at the top. The trick is how to climb that slippery pole and get the prize. Then the Santacruzan procession passes around the village. If it was the grand finale, the procession went around the town’s main streets in the early evening, gracing it — our prettiest girls and their boy escorts, the perceived personages from the Bible, all under arches of flowers, the brass band playing the rosary hymn at the end. At the conclusion of the procession in the plaza or village square was the rang-ga — a wide square bamboo frame with goodies hanging from it. Two men lowered it to the crowd which attempted to grab the goodies hanging from the frame. They raised it quickly. All too often, someone strong and agile would be able to hold on to the frame and the crowd would then rip everything from it.
The other week, I visited the old hometown for the vesperas the day before the fiesta honoring St. Anthony of Padua. The Cultural Center’s Tanghalang Pilipino led by Dennis Marasigan, was contacted by Elmer P. Ulanday, marketing manager of the new SM Mall there, to stage the play, Pragres.
This was utterly new. In the past, during fiestas, I watched the comedia, the folk dramatization of the Christian and Moro wars, performed by farmers and their children. There was no magnificent theater. The stage was mounted in the churchyard; rough planks of wood rooted with spilt coconut palm leaves. Two white blankets sewn together formed the backdrop behind which the actors waited for their cues. In front of the stage, slightly below it, was a small pit shrouded with another white blanket. Here, the prompter recited the lines that the actors declaimed as loudly as they could for there was no sound system then. The prompter was a farmer, too; since I always stood close to the stage, I often heard his scathing remarks when the actors flubbed their lines.
A four-piece brass band played the jaunty tunes for the fighting sequences and stylized sword fights, the spangled costumes of the actors, their fancy headdresses a wondrous sight for a boy who had yet to see TV and those choreographed Samurai sword fights.
The performance lasted the whole day. When they broke up for lunch at the landlord’s house, they pranced around the town with me trailing them. As with all comedias, they ended happily with the Moro princess and the Christian prince getting married.
Then there was the zarzuela which was staged in the evening in the plaza. This time, the actors and actresses were in their Sunday best and they had no prompter to scold them if they missed their lines. I loved the singing, the verbose declamations, those weepy encounters when the audience cried, too. The zarzuelas were in our own language and were not as long as the comedia.
And the extemporaneous poetry contests — all in Ilokano; though I did not understand everything, I appreciated the high-flown language, the emotive gestures. That early, I wanted to be a poet too or at the very least, the prompter in the comedia.
Young men in those days wooed the girls with song — the harana or serenade. A group, one of them with a guitar, would proceed in the evening to serenade a girl. Believe it — in pre-war Manila, this was also done.
Sometimes the girl who was being serenaded would open her window and listen. Sometimes, the serenaders would even be asked to come up the house where they were offered snacks. The serenade would wake up the neighbors, kerosene lamps would be brought out to identify the singers.
One night during the Occupation we were accosted by a Japanese patrol, their guns pointed at us, their flashlights on our faces. Somehow, they understood what we were up to and they followed us to the house of the girl whom we seneraded. To please them, we rendered a military song they taught us — me yo to o-kaino sora ke te, without understanding a word.
After that frightening incident, we thought it best to stop the harana lest we be mistaken for guerrillas.
These customs and celebrations have all but disappeared; so, too, some of those rural rituals with which we honor the dead.
One of the memorable events that took place during the wake, for instance, was devoted to the telling of riddles. It was what I was most interested in, for these riddles were often so puzzling, they were also exciting. One old example: Hell bellow and hell above, but heaven in the middle. Answer: Bibingka.
And finally, the dongao with which the Ilokanos bid farewell to the deceased. In China, of course, this is an ancient tradition where mourners are even paid to do their thing. Not so among us Ilokanos. Usually, the dongao is performed by a female relative or a close friend of the deceased. The mourner, her face shrouded with her black veil, approaches the coffin then starts wailing in a stylized manner during which she cites the virtues of the deceased, what he or she had done for her, for others, the reasons why he or she would always dwell in the memories of the living. The performance is filled with pathos and soon the listeners also weep. The dongao lasts no more than five minutes and when it is over, the mourner lifts her veil and more often than not, she is clear-eyed: no tears blemish her cheeks.
We also had Garden Day wherein we exhibited our harvest — the biggest squash or singkamas. We had folk dance competition between the schools in our district.
I was watching on TV the other evening those Cebu prisoners, massed in their orange uniforms, doing their imitation of a Michael Jackson routine. Similar dance extravaganzas are now staged annually, the Sinulog, also in Cebu, the Maskara in Bacolod, the Penagbenga in Baguio. Almost every major town now has a similar group effort during their fiestas — all exhibit the imaginative costuming flair of the native as well as his capacity to innovate Bollywood-like dance routines. Such group efforts were never shown before, not in the last three decades. Obviously, they take inspiration from the spectacles at the Olympic Games openings, the Mardi Gras in Rio de Janeiro.
Such massive displays of social precision — you will find them in the May Day celebrations in the pre-Gorbachev days in Moscow’s Red Square or earlier, in those massive Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, and if you want to go farther back in history, in the circuses that the Caesars gave to the Roman populace. Did such displays of a people marching as one make them strong? Were the circuses able to bridge the cracks in the empire as the barbarians battered the gates of Rome? Maybe not, but while they lasted, they exalted the spirit — and this is what Filipinos badly need today. This is what even a solitary achiever like Manny Pacquiao can do.
Hopefully, then, such cooperative activity will promote the community spirit, diminish the Indio’s vaulting ego, teach him cooperation, teamwork, harmonizing industry — all those ingredients that make for modernization, progress, etc.
In the next generation, perhaps? Abangan!
As the old song goes, mountains crumble and rivers run dry. Change is inevitable but remember always that birth is a miracle, and death is destiny. If the old values must go, they need to be replaced by something equally precious.
In the old days, for instance, a rich and distant uncle was impoverished when he ran for alcalde of our town because he sold his land to pay for his campaign, to feed the electorate. He eventually won, but at what cost! He certainly did not recoup his loss; it was the honor that he craved.
Today, our candidates for public office seek not honor but loot. Today, too, the common provincial joys are silly TV programs, promotional gimmicks, and yet sillier movies.
Like Justice Isagani A. Cruz, it is not just nostalgia that turns us back to the yesteryears of our youth, but the anxiety and the dread that what we have lost may not be replaced by anything of value.