Adieu, Ophie

In the picture, you see her as we would all want to remember her: the quintessential Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, happy as a lark, eyes and soul smiling, holding a book.

The poet is in red, too  bright as glee, although I’m not sure if she was clad in polyester. Likely not, as she was as fashionista as her lines of poetry were all of a flow, elegance designed and dictated by seeming lack of form, yet the guile was there as a guiding hand.

When she wrote about “Lady Polyester,” she meant that she was opposite that stereotyped subject, simply not plastic  but the genuine thing. Authentic. Honest.

She wore her heart on her sleeve, exposed for everyone to see  all the tender ministrations she was capable of, showered as largesse to generations of students, mentees and dementees, young poets she had taken under her mighty wing. Her graciousness was also endowed freely among her peers.

So, too  naked and glinting  were her perennial peeves, her frown-weary concerns, the quick vulnerability to hurts that her closest poet-friends would laugh off and say you’re imagining things again, but then again just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean no one’s out to get you, mwahaha!

It was always fun to laugh over and laugh down Ophie’s lover’s quarrels with the world, for often she was like a child given to preconceived adversities  how everything seemed to lead to funk and tantrum, even if she knew, or perhaps because she did, that she was much-loved.

Last Thursday night, an hour before midnight, right at the long bar at Oarhouse did I receive the shocking SMS, from fiction writer Susan Lara, that our good and deep friend Ophie had passed away. Igan D’Bayan had just walked in for Red Horses and propped himself at the other end of the bar. I called him over to read him the awful text. He was just as instantly devastated. 

Igan is of UST, where Ophie was lady of the manor, for decades the dominatrix who whipped to shape legions of literature and creative writing students, producing countless fine Pinoy writers and poets, among them Merlinda Bobis, Lourd de Veyra, Jerri Anonas, Nerissa Guevara, Carlomar Daoana, Gelo Suarez...

Oh, there are so many more. My freshly wounded memory can’t get up from that Oarhouse bar quite fully yet. And tonight after I write this eulogy for dear Ophie, on a Friday, I will pass by for Jimmy Abad so we can join the many other Ophie lovers at the wake in Floresco Funeral Home on Letre Road, Dagat-dagatan, Malabon.

Lourd had texted the sad news, too, as did Jerri, and Joel Toledo, and Gelo who said he was naiiyak  as warranted. The next hours flooded us all with more tribal text. And memories. How many more of our writers owed her allegiance and friendship? Wendell Capili. Ralph Semino Galan. J. Neil Garcia. Becky Añonuevo. Mike Coroza. Cirilo Bautista. Frankie Jose. So many more.

For her second book, The Time Factor & Other Poems, Ophie asked me to help her out with the cover and design. The artist Iya Fernandez, now based in Paris, executed an excellent line drawing that Ophie greatly appreciated.

A lasting image of her would be with floppy hat, reclining on the sandy bank of Lake Balinsasayao in Negros Oriental, on one of those Maytime writers’ workshop jaunts we shared in Dumaguete  listening to Beethoven on a cassette player, while Tony Tan and Baboo Mondonedo raced one another lazily on a stretch of a swim across the deep water.

I wrote a poem that was included in my second collection, Dream of Knives, titled “Tejeros River/Lake Balinsasayao (for Ophie)”:

“Laughter in river or lake/ equals harmony of poets.// In the mountain quiet/ each traces his own cloud/ across the spanning sky/ of kinship, good ship/ lolling by the banks of wit/ and life’s simple graces.//

“On the sun-fawned rocks/ fishers pose serenely, their calm/ of sticks arching into stillness./ Water kisses the clean space/ below, rippling glint and shadow,/ glint and shadow …//

“Dead logs and lakeweed/ lie in the same state of rest/ as the world around us, wondrous./ Sun, water, sky, forest;/ someone asleep there;/ Ludwig playing in back;/ kids sharing a picture-book …//

“Look, look  a moment’s sparkle,/ a coming together in tranquil air …/ And all is marvel and memory/ before/beyond us: a beau bonding.”  (Dumaguete City, May 1983)

Another memory: Ophie playing classical music on the grand piano at Dr. Albert Faurot’s Endhouse (piano-shaped) inside the Silliman University campus, and doing the same years later on an upright with slack keys at Mom Edith Tiempo’s Montemar haven in Sibulan.

Oh, yes, before that she would be drawn into an argument at a workshop session by no less than Dad Doc Ed Tiempo, and she’d be so flustered as he continued to tease her, tongue in cheek and utterly deadpan, until Mom would cut in and say, Oh, Ed, stop doing that to dear Ophie. And only then would La O. realize he had been pulling her leg. And begin to laugh in manic shreds. 

But oh yes she was all seriousness when it came to poetry. Then again, she was like a child struck by wonder when first taken to Sans Rival, initially a small pastry house on Ma. Christina St. in Dumaguete, off Chin Loong the Chinese resto where we usually had lunch. Sans Rival was for merienda. She loved their spaghetti. 

Then over dinner at South Sea Resort I’d crankily raise my voice at her for the nth time, in exasperation: Well, you say you want seafood with some gata, and you like shrimps, so I’m telling you to try out this dish, for chrissakes, and don’t fret over what it’s called, Tinuktok, cuz it’s Bicolano and it’s minced shrimp with young coconut and it’s great, just believe me and trust me and dang order it na so we can all get on with our dinner!

Ophie: Ang sungit talaga nito!

Moi: Eh ang bagal mo, eh. Gutom na ko. Ha-ha.

She’d allow me to smoke even in her office at the former Center for Creative Writing at UST, the only one other than Jimmy and Lourd granted that privilege. You’d have to be a poet she liked, hehe. Otherwise Ma’am Ophie or Dean Ophie might sic the sikyu on you. Or some rector or other. She had ’em all twirling ’round her pinkie.

Dr. Isagani Cruz would schedule a meeting of our Manila Critics Circle at Ophie’s Office as we called her Center. She’d always have wonderful food served, including my fave lengua, which she’d sure to have generous leftovers brownbagged for me. 

Isagani would say we were always like cat and dog, the way we often argued, and I’d rub it in and say, Eh kasi, si Donya forgot to prepare coffee for brewing and now I’m stuck with instant, nyeh nyeh. It was all part of a tease, as she often drew the tease, from Doc Ed to Nick Joaquin who also liked to rattle her cuz even when she was already one of our most accomplished and mature poets, she still had that aura of naiveté that seemed to challenge pricking.

Freddie Salanga loved to tease her too. So did Ricky de Ungria: Indyanera ka naman talaga, oo; Ophie, ba’t ka ba ganyan, eh “Love Woman” ka pa naman? Ah, it’s because she thinks she needs a passport to get beyond España, we’d chorus.

It seemed that only when she was safely ensconced in Dr. Alice Sun Cua’s car, with its special physician’s sticker that made light of number-coded days, would Ophie the nervous mother hen allow herself to venture past home turf, which was Malabon to Dapitan and Gov. Forbes.

Rio Almario teased her and guffawed right beside her until she’d threaten to go all weepy. Cirilo, another deadpan artist, applied the somber tone and she always bought it hook line and sinker.    

Lito Zulueta was her best buddy for the longest time, but with whom she’d always wind up in a reported spat, until we all heard how they had patched it up again.  

Oy, talagang mahal ko yang si Lito  she’d say  but he’s so kakainis ... O, Ophie, tama na! Hetong Valium, o.  I’d offer. And at semi-serious dialogues, she’d be told: Why do you always wind up blackballing your former wards? Let ’em fly! Don’t be like that Direk friend of mine in the South who for all his genius always winds up disowning everyone he’s trained. 

I recall yet another image of Ophie, a distant one, how she spent weeks alone in a cabin in wintry Iowa, as recounted by our common poet-friend Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas. Oh, and as Cesar Ruiz Aquino, also of Dumaguete, liked to recall, the terror in everyone’s faces, not least of which was Ophie’s, as the pumpboat they were taking to Apo Island was turned back by strong waves. 

And there’s yet another: our ride on a big slow boat to Bohol, us and the kids all out in the sun by the rusting prow, open to wind and sea views. Many poems were written of that moment and that summer sojourn. Yes, many poems have been written that were engendered by Ophie and her presence. Many poems has she mothered, not just those she had written. And no greater testament is there than that to her worth as a mentor. 

Of herself, her travails, her poetic process, she wrote, for A Passionate Patience: Ten Filipino Poets on the Writing of Their Poems, edited by Ricky  anent the tragedy that befell her family when their house burned down in August of 1991:

“How does one explain these previous recurrences of images and metaphors that would eventually figure quite prominently in an actual situation in my life? In, and of, poetry, there will always be questions left unanswered, and answers that could trigger more questions. We can only postulate at this point the essential and, in the most literal sense, prophetic quality of poetry. The significant thing here is I have found my metaphor  a signature beyond forging, a poetic trademark.

“I had previously never written a poem about a very recent major tragedy in my life, and at close range at that, simply because I just couldn’t. There was always the fear of messing up the work with all that blood and goo. But this one poem was within only a week’s space from the harrowing incident.”

And here is the poem “One Final Burning”’s last stanza:

“its life cinders on/ until this ultimate imploding,/ one deafening blast to climax rite/ as loved ones writhe, ashen/ in their own consumed shells,/ or perhaps, relived at last/ over this burning’s end./ the skull tautens, breaks,/ bursts forth into nothing, nil,/ its ghost given up... pure annihilation!/ the cold remains of its spirit/ ash-kohl in its final irrevocable/ bleak dissembling, now, here in/ this one kind of final burning.”

Adieu, Ophie, mi amiga. Our love burns for you.