Zakino 2

(Excerpt from the forthcoming prose collection Impostor Moderne, with drawings by Ludwig Ilio)

In which the writer’s son Eugenie feels as if he’s abandoned his old man Zacarias Quino on a boat bound for the south

“One will be dead soon enough and still. Still silent. Still Credo Life begins. And it is everything. Without it nothing is possible. With it, everything is forgiveness, redemption, salvation. Be real! And everything begins.”

In the evening we thought the boat would leave but it never did. So we spent the night at the pier, on the boat’s open deck facing the open harbor, expecting to set sail any minute.

Father was invited again for a workshop in the south, in Dumaguete City on Negros island, and usually he went alone, though this time maybe some bonding was in store.

It wasn’t to be my first trip down south, having been there in the maiden workshop held in the early ’60s, or as the Tiempos, who ran it, used to say, when I was “just out of my diapers.”

The waterfront was the usual gaggle of commerce and cacophony of voices, with what seemed the mess of humanity all laid out in cots on the open deck. Vendors were selling hardboiled eggs and boiled unripe bananas, as well kropek and chicharon and quails eggs.

Yet the boat, a somewhat decrepit floating contraption, did not sail in the night, so that in the morning we were still at North Harbor, in the midst of a squalor waiting to weigh anchor.

By noon when the ship still had not left, I began having second thoughts about accompanying my father on the trip, and customarily we used a pay phone in a sari-sari store or carinderia on the waterfront to call up the old homestead at UP to inform my elder brother Esteban that I might be backing out, and for him to come on down to the pier to possibly take me home.     

To make a long story short, and after much hemming and hawing, I eventually decided to disembark with Esteban just as the last call for “puwera bisita” was announced over the crackling sound system.

And as the ship began to pull away from the harbor, with my father on deck looking like the most depressed man on earth, I began to lash out like a storm, the same way I always did when the old man went off to Manila or what he called downtown and he left me at home, and I would throw a tantrum right on the dining room table, or else proceed to his closet and throw out all the clothes from the shelves, even once cutting down a sapling apple tree planted outside a basement room, a gift of a student of his from Baguio.

So Esteban must have found it rather amusing, since here was a 13-year-old storm that was lashing out, admittedly the start of a wayward adolescence but still clinging to the last bits of childhood, though a storm just the same.

Older brother suggested that maybe we should radio the tugboat pilot, where perhaps they could take me out to sea to catch up with the ship my father was on, but we both knew it was too late, and Esteban had no choice but to take home the most disconsolate younger brother he’d ever had the weird luck of having.

I must have cried my eyes out for a few nights, or till my tears ran dry as the corny song goes, and Mother would not get off my case, even suggesting that we ask an in-law who was with the Air Force to transport me to Dumaguete, a stopover on the way to the Muslim battle lands in Mindanao. She said that I simply lost my nerve, though at the back of her mind she must have felt sorry that there was no one to watch over Father in case some hank-panky presented itself in the workshop, nothing unusual in those annual summer affairs in a warm and better place where one could reinvent oneself.

Days or about a week later a couple of postcards came in the mail, from Father in Dumaguete. One was for my younger sister Iluminada, the family bunso, while the other was for me, and both depicted scenes in Negros Oriental, specifically the university town that was Silliman by the sea, in fair Dumaguete, city of gentle people. And apparently Father got wind of how I felt I had betrayed him when I disembarked from the boat at the last minute, and he had written that in fact it was the other way around, it was he who betrayed me.

Soon enough the three weeks of the workshop were up and Esteban and I made a date to meet Father at the pier when the boat arrived from the south, and we took the public transport just as night began to fall in the not-quite-polluted city, in the year 1972 when months later martial law was to be declared.

Whatever it is that transpires between brothers as they wait for the patriarch to arrive from a prolonged journey on the waterfront at night, moves silently between the lamps of the vendors whose patience is second nature to them.

I do not even recall if Esteban smoked a cigarette while we were waiting, though it’s unlikely that he did; he was never a regular smoker — I don’t believe he ever took up the habit.

I must have mentioned to him the first time I had been to Dumaguete, when I was “just out my diapers,” and the one thing that stuck out that summer was the green swing me and my older sister Rosario used to play in, on the porch of the similarly green-painted house where we stayed with our folks in the very first workshop, such that the two of us were called the Dumaguete crew.

We’d imagine the swing was a ship, and we were tossed about in rough waters whenever we enthusiastically swung on the creaking thing, and we probably amused the promenaders or passersby down below on campus on their way to summer class.

Once we got back home to our house on Diliman campus, I remember sitting on the niche of the guava tree in the yard, surveying the browned surroundings like a lookout.

Then there was the sound of a ship coming into harbor, and there Father was with his bags and the customary pasalubong from the south, maybe some sweets and piyaya. He also handed me a ring, a mother of pearl rudimentary-looking jewel, which I still have somewhere around though broken and chipped like a tooth.

I wore the ring like a faithful son as Esteban walked out into the night to call for a taxi to take the three of us back to Diliman, the darkness spreading like a fragmentation grenade around.

* * *

In memoriam Jolico Cuadra, 24 May 1939 - 30 April 2013.