A soft spot for ‘Papel De Liha’

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not. – James Joyce

Excuse me if I embarrass you by letting you feel the marshmallow spot on my heart. I have always been baffled by the words of Jesus when He said, "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." The words are simple, but the insight unspoken is profound and grandiose. It sounds like a threat of eternal damnation and yet they are words that ring not with arrogant condemnation. The words are harsh, but they are delicate. The admonition is impossible, at the same time easy. The "unless" and the "never enter" are unbearable weights, and the "kingdom of heaven" a long and tall infinite wall; the "little children" is the light, tiny but an invincible feather that italicizes the words of our Lord. And every day I try to wrestle with that circumspection and try to live and grow old as a child – impossible but easy.

Maybe that is why I am drawn to kids, because they envision the world with profound simplicity. And maybe that is why I am writing about a children’s book, one that approximates how a child would look at a great important figure: the mother.

With our mothers, we are all children, and will always be children.

In a few months time, I am going to marry the most beautiful woman that ever happened to me. I have fallen head over heels in love with her, maybe because in many ways she has helped me grow young, as I wanted to, and has helped me understand, as she herself is learning, what it means to be a little child to a mother. She is a good, and lovely, daughter. With her I am a man, and I am a child.

She is passionate about children, too; she’s a preschool teacher. And she was the one who introduced me to Ompong Remigio’s award-winning story for children, Papel de Liha. She says three-year-old angels roll over in laughter when they hear,

Ang nanay ko, and imis-imis
Pag may duming nakadikit, kiskis dito, kiskis doon.
Pag may mantsa sa damit, kuskos dito, kuskos doon.
Pag may sebo sa kawali, kaskas dito, kaskas doon.

Even the English translation of the story is funny.

She’ll pass by the bathroom and have a look-see.
If drops of wee-wee have gone astray, she splashes here and there.
If bits of aah-aah are on display, she flushes here and there.
If little ooh-oohs get in the way, she washes here and there.

I can just imagine what a riot it is inside her classroom when she reads them this story. These lines, as they all giggle and snort in chorus. During those precise moments inside that room, as she reads to them Papel de Liha, the world explains to me why almost half of James Cameron’s ultra melodramatic Titanic shouts of saving "women and children first!" that woman reading – the lady that makes a gentleman out of me – is the second mother to those precious children whose kinds our Lord admonishes us to become; the future mother of my kids reading the life story of my mother – Remigio had unwittingly written the biography of my dear Mama – to a captive audience.

Remigio’s story of less than 30 pages weaves together the sweetest, softest, most delicate spot in my heart.

I teach in a school that boasts being the first Asian university for women, and recently we celebrated Women’s Month through the boundless confines of art: sculpture, literature, theater. Each student portrayed the strength that is woman: the fighter, the contender, the well of untapped possibilities – like how Lualhati Bautista’s Dekada ’70 portrayed a woman – a lover, a friend, a mother. Authors like Virginia Woolf or Simone de Beauvoir have paved the way for inventions like Women’s Month and have given a louder voice to femininity by putting it to the streets and on a pedestal and through every possible medium (Hollywood, for example, has recently presented us with women’s award-winning counter-cinema: Chicago, Frida and The Hours, among others).

The beauty of Papel de Liha is exactly in the existence of loud feminist advocacy. Not because it is like them, shouting, but precisely because it is unlike them: quiet. It whispers through the voice of a child. The book naturally highlights itself alongside a Spice Girls or a Madonna or a Vilma Santos kind of femininity because of its simplicity. Papel de Liha is the light, tiny feather that italicizes women’s lib.

The story moves me because it does not defend motherhood, neither does it have to be seriously grown-up; motherhood does not need to explain itself. And so Remigio presumes that the mother – my Mama – is the caress of life, the sweetness of affection, the reflection of providence that watches over the lines of the earth. That is why in the story, when the child becomes sick – and I remember the days when I catch fevers – the toiling hands of the mother is the antidote to pain. The mother’s kiss, her magic touch, teaches the child love, hope and faith. Remigio reminds us, as an unwitting child would sensibly assume, that it is a simple thing to remember our mother’s names, and the shape of their palms.

Unlike my wife to be, my mother was not the most beautiful thing that happened to me because she never happened to me; I happened to her. I was always the one happening to her, as the child to her mother in Remigio’s story.

The book easily transports me back to the days when I used to watch Batibot (they once showed a story of a child who thought that her homely mother was the most beautiful woman in the world), while Mama cleaned the cluttered, empty house when my brother and father had already left. Before long, I was no longer her clumsy baby; I had become a brash teenager, then a rude college student, and then an ingrate, who might have thought of her once as a bully, and maybe even an ogre sometime.

In less than a thousand funny words, Remigio had written the biography of my mother. Mama must have really felt like an ogre sometimes, what with all the sweat and the floor stains she had to rid and the experience of washing my behind. Although she had lapses, she always offered her lap as a pillow for three men (or three infants) – Papa, my brother and me. Sometimes she was the infant. But for the most time she had to have marble brows and strong arms; paradoxically, she also had to be that light, tiny feather to give my robust father, shrewd brother and me, a tickle when we complained about the weight of the world.

In Papel de Liha, Remigio wrote of my mother, I know, and the selfishness that she had learned to stifle so that she may unashamedly bloom in behalf of her children and her man. She must have glanced at her hands once or twice and wondered why in the world she is a mother.

Isang araw dumating si Tita Maring.
Ang sabi niya: "Ano ba naman Milagring!
Kaskas-kiskis-kuskos ka nang kaskas-kiskis-kuskos
kaya kumapal at gumaspang na ang palad mo.
Parang papel de liha na pang-isis.
Hinay-hinay ka lang at baka
hindi na hawakan ni Turing ang kamay mo."
Hindi na hahawakan ni Tatay ang kamay ni Nanay?
Bakit? Ano ba ang papel de liha?

Her hands are no sandpaper. She is no ogre. As a child, and until now, I see how stunning she is, especially when I see her with Papa. She is beautiful. They have never aged. Together, they are always children. We, her children, have tried to deform her, but she is always a child; Mama and Papa – they are always children in each other’s arms.

Minsan, nakita kong magkahawak-kamay si Nanay at Tatay.

Ang sarap tingnan.

Mali talaga si Tita Maring.

Hindi papel de liha ang mga palad ni Nanay.

And as I have matured a bit, and have seen anew why the Bible writes, "He that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death," I no longer bite those toiling hands that fed me. It must have been a sad moment, if once in her deepest of thoughts, my Mama was frightened of us, her children, of what we had or could become. And now, a few months before I myself begin a family, I can answer why I should want to stunt my ambitions in order to be possibly insulted and looked down upon by my child: the future mother of my children who told me of Papel de Liha, and my mother, whom Remigio wrote about, are willing to sacrifice to drain the fullest cup of scorn that human beings can pour out. This is the essence of real love, when one feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man; when one gladly cleans the feces and urine, of somebody else, in the toilet bowl.

It took my mother more than 20 years, with toiling hands, to make a man out of this child, so that I may face up to the challenges of life – now, another woman in less than 20 minutes had drawn the child in me anew. And once again, the stifling of selfishness begins: love is proved this time in my Mama’s letting go of me to another set of sacrificing hands, whom she now trusts to be as delicate and as toiling; and whom I trust would not be exactly like my mother, but a mother and a woman of equal caliber.