Where the chameleon lives

According to Pedro, he tells him to go home but he keeps coming back. Maybe he lives here," my maid Ana says as she helps me pack my bags for Makati. "Who?" I ask with an edge of impatience. Ana likes to speak in riddles.

"The lizard in the garden. I thought it was a bayawak, but apparently it’s not. It’s not so big and it’s green. I think it changes colors," Ana continues.

"Oh, in English that’s called a chameleon. It’s a lizard that takes on the colors of its surroundings so its enemies won’t recognize it," I explain patiently. I know that if I don’t this magical quality of the chameleon will be interpreted as some evil property and life will complicate.

"It’s a good lizard then?" Ana asks.

"It’s a good lizard," I say with authority so firm you would not suspect I did not have it. Ana and I love and respect each other. We also mutually suspect the other of being a witch. Perhaps we are both right, in which case, I would be the senior witch because I’m older. Coincidentally, as soon as she mentioned a chameleon in our garden, a part of my mind said, "There’s my familiar," the animal that represents me.

I turn the key in the lock. Marie, the landlady’s maid is here to do her weekly cleaning. She sees me and profusely apologizes for being there. Apparently I am never supposed to see her. She is The Invisible Maid, part of the rental contract, which means that the landlady is responsible for the rest of her package. I don’t have to do for Marie what I do for Ana, Pedro and my driver, Crispin. I am their social security system, The Source of financing for educational, medical and burial insurance for their clans, an exaggeration perhaps, but sometimes it feels like it. That’s part of being Filipino. We know where we are on the social scale and we acknowledge the responsibilities that come with our status without resenting. That’s the hard part.

By the time I return from class Marie is gone. I make myself a mug of instant decaffeinated coffee and settle down to write this column. As I put the kettle on to boil, I feel young, like the student I was in Switzerland before marriage, etc. changed my life. Heating water for coffee or tea was one of the simple joys of my maidenhood when I was responsible only for myself. That was a long time ago, back when the invention of instant coffee was considered a blessing not a curse. Now if I got caught with my mug of instant decaf I would be at once berated for drinking an unhealthy product and socially rejected for being so totally without class. Nobody who’s anybody drinks instant coffee anymore.

I’ve always straddled two lives. While in advertising, I could do accounts (left-brained) and creative (right-brained) work at the same time. At the newspaper where once I worked, I could do the business side and the editorial side at once. This ability is what led me to describe myself as a chameleon, hence my view that the chameleon in my garden is my familiar. Now I still am a chameleon as I straddle country and city living.

In the country I have an enchanted house, staff, magic and witchcraft. In the city I have a small often dusty flat shared with a friend who always travels. The apartment is small but its greatest gift is if you leave book on the floor face down, you will come home to find book on the floor face down on the same page (if it’s not The Invisible Maid’s day in). This is a sublime blessing for readers who hate bookmarks. Without a maid you can find anything and everything you own in the dark because you put it there and return it every time you use it. Until you have lived alone, maidless, you don’t know what peace and tranquility can be.

Lest you think this is ideal, let me tell you it is terrible when you are sick. No matter how high your temperature might be, you have to get up and feed yourself. This is when self-pity can overwhelm. After so many years of life alone and life with others, let me say this: Your spirit is hardly stretched by so much solitude.

With Ana my spirit never stagnates. Last year she stretched it when she decided to empty our pond and accidentally killed two carps. Just a few weeks ago, having gotten my reluctant permission to prune some trees in the garden in anticipation of heavy typhoons, so branches wouldn’t get tangled in electric wires, she and Pedro over-pruned what already was a lush garden. "They’ll grow back," Ana says, and I know she’s right but we were there already.

One day, when I couldn’t come home for the weekend, Ana told me she had spent it wrestling with an aswang who came in the form of a large strange bird. I drew the line: Enough! Aswang is folklore. I don’t want you scaring yourself. It is unwise to scare yourself when you’re alone. In the privacy of my bedroom I wondered what she had been battling all weekend. Loneliness?

"Filipinos are fundamentally animist," I think it was Father Jaime Bulatao, S. J. who made that observation. In the city there are no animals, only dust and solitude eased with instant decaf. Strangely I am willing to admit that there is room for this in me, a place in me that can settle here, a spot that is dust-friendly. In the country loneliness visits in the form of birds. Does happiness take the form of lizards that settle in our gardens? Not that I’ve worried too much about where I found more pleasure but the chameleon in my garden somewhat affirms what I’ve strongly suspected this whole year. I feel more at home in the country, where all my complications, and therefore my heartstrings, truly reside; where my familiar, the chameleon, truly lives.