At my grandmother's table

Recently, I dreamt of my grandmother. I had never done so before; when I awoke, the dream lingered in my mind. My grandmother died of cancer 31 years ago, in November. I wasn’t there when she passed away and was never able to say goodbye. In my dream I found myself being led into a large room of an ancestral house (whose, I couldn’t tell), where I found her lying in bed. She was ill, and happy that I visited. We talked for a while. Finally I was able to say the words, “I love you, Mamá.” She reached out to hug me  a benediction of sorts. Afterwards I had to say goodbye.

Shortly thereafter, I dreamt of her again. We were going on a long trip together. Was it to our provincial home? It wasn’t clear  dreams have a way of catapulting us into our dream world in medias res, and we are left to find our feet. While we were at the bus terminal, I had to use the restroom, so she offered to stand in line and buy our tickets. She stood straight-backed and serious as she always did in life even when she was in pain, in her duster with the huge side pockets. When I joined her at the queue, she told me that there was only one ticket left and that she had to go ahead. We agreed that I’d buy my own, and follow her. But strangely, the only ride available was the FX going back to my own home, and that was what I took. I never was able to join her on that trip. I suppose it wasn’t time for me to take that journey.

Last night, I dreamt of her  the third dream in three months when all these years I’d barely thought of her. It was her birthday. I burst into her apartment singing “Happy Birthday” with a beribboned box for a present. I was a little abashed that it was all I could give, and covered it up by singing a little more loudly than I should and promising a bigger treat for her sometime soon. But she seemed pleased, sitting there on the sofa with my grandfather. At the dining table, a family friend beckoned me to a game of chess.

At this time when we remember loved ones who have passed away, my thoughts turn towards her. My grandmother was a solemn woman whose stern features belied a tender heart, especially for the poor. She always had a kind word for her grandchildren, on whom she doted. She was very different from my gregarious grandfather, who strutted through the big house as though to the manner born and with his commanding presence chatted up everyone he met. I remember my grandmother occasionally taking me as a child on long bus rides from Cubao, where we then resided, to Quiapo, where we watched movies at the Odeon or Cinerama, and her solicitously shelling a soft-boiled egg for me and me slurping it with gusto while the bus rocked and bounced. At the movie house, while the images sparkled before my eyes, my stomach roiled vertiginously. But this was my grandma’s treat, and the rigorous journey rewarded in the end by a magical cinematic feast, not to mention the gustatory delights of a Chinese dinner, was, to my child’s mind, a lusty adventure quite like no other, and worth the migraine on the ride home as I snuggled in her arms.

But growing up has a way of foisting distance, and we grew apart. She could neither understand my impetuous, headstrong ways, nor I her stultifying traditionalism. When at college shortly after my evangelical conversion I turned the little statues of her saints around so that their faces lined the wall, our rift became complete.

Ultimately my remembrance of my grandmother is inextricably bound up with images of the provincial home where I spent many happy days, first as a child and later as a budding adolescent. These were before the turbulent years. In the gallery of memories that make up every person’s backstory, this is where I choose to remember her. In the following account, she appears in cameo, entwined with all that was good and bright of that youthful, jubilant time. Maybe the characters are called by a different name; maybe the events glow, unintentionally, with the patina of nostalgia. No matter, for wherever and however my grandmother appears, her memory remains true.

This one’s for you, Mamá.

I once had occasion to enjoy a perfect meal but missed calling it by its name. Now, years later, I tell its story. It was a summer like no other, spent in the great old house that belonged to my grandparents, in their hometown by the sea in one of the islands of the South. We’d been invited there for the summer  my aunts, younger brother, younger sister and I  while our parents made preparations for our family’s relocation to another province in Western Visayas.

Without much prodding, we hopped on a boat  the only one that plied the waters to the island at the time  and began our adventure. We spent a good two nights and three days lying cot-by-cot with perfect strangers who never took a bath (neither did we!), and listening endlessly to pig squeals and the cackle of roosters while the tiny vessel pitched and rolled and the wind churned above the choppy waters. At mealtimes, the place stank of grease and sweat.

Throughout those three days we dined on chicken pork adobo cooked by an aunt and kept cool in a wax paper-lined tin can. Such hardy food! Never did meat taste so good in such undesirable circumstances! Hunger made our stomachs crave it, yet our appetites withered with each retching sound and the pungency that drifted to our noses afterwards. Between the stench and our appetite, youthful vigor won, and we managed to stuff ourselves. We three fortuitous children slept any time we wanted, wandered anywhere we pleased, never took a bath. Our habits broke away from us like foam in the ship’s wake. Life in that boat was lived blissfully in suspended chaotic animation.

When we finally docked at the single pier it was wonderful madness and mayhem. My brother nearly fell off as he tried to dash for the gangplank now bustling with muscled cargadores and dizzy passengers impatient to get off. We girls were more sedate, choosing to observe the cacophony of the island from our privileged view by the railings. Of late I had become surprisingly demure, having been visited during the trip, to my confusion and delight, by the first onset of my menses. I imagined how the boat’s lilting must have disrupted my body waters and caused them to flow. With the inside of me in flux, I felt I was now kin to the sea, Venus rising to the waves’ (rock-and-roll) beat. I was 13.

We were met at the pier by our grandparents, two erect figures shading their eyes from the sun as they looked up to scan our faces. We waved enthusiastically and, amid whoops and hurrays, rushed into their arms. Then we were swept to the house where welcome abounded. The weeks that followed were spent making friends, hiking up mountains, boating to nearby islands, roasting in the beach. We woke up every day, my two siblings and I, with the thought of another escapade in a summer slung from end to end with high adventure. How could we not think such thoughts? We were young, free and restless. In that great house with huge windows and burnished narra planks, we ate exploits for breakfast (along with hot pan de sal) and dreamed of pirates at night. We were swashbucklers who scrubbed floors with coconut husks (but only after much persuasion from our aunts). We came to see such chores not as impediments but as the lowly accoutrements of the heroic life. After all, a hero endured many things.

On full moon nights our aunts’ friends would come knocking on our door and we would all stroll to the pantalan, glinting with barnacles at low tide. Perry, suitor of my older aunt, strummed his guitar, while the sea breeze moaned in back-up and friends ribbed each other with ribald jokes. On quiet nights we would be playing Scrabble with our grandparents, both avid players, or reading by lamplight. I read all I could of my grandfather’s collection of Philippine Readers and Reader’s Digest books. My aunts buried themselves in romantic novels with intriguing titles that made me think of that strange, mad alchemy of pain and passion that must be love. I shuddered to think it would ever visit me.

Then one fine morning over breakfast of steaming cocoa and the hard sesame biscuits called linga, our aunts talked about hiking up the slopes of the mountain where grew coconuts in abundance. We were going to feast on the luscious meat of butong, or young coconuts. Tom, a good several years older than I, volunteered to take each of us on his spanking new motorcycle. So there I was, perched behind him, my hands too shy to touch him, while he urged me  for God’s sake!  to hang on tight! But I was 13 and newly made a lady and I cared not for his raking eyes. While the motorcycle humped and bumped over the unpaved road, I paid no heed to his entreaties and clung to his collar by my fingertips.

The young coconuts proved creamy and succulent. The boy who climbed and picked them for us carved spoons out of husks and shells. We drank the sweet juice until it dribbled down our chins. We hiked further up, chattering like picoy  the bright-plumaged parrot that perched in a cage in one corner of my grandparents’ house  and ate and drank until our gullets would burst.

When we came home  dusty, bones aching, butts sore from the rough ride  the sun was low in the sky. Windows glowed with lamps newly lit. In our neighbors’ yards, wood fires smoldered, the debris of a summer’s day burning away. Smoke cast a haze over the gathering dusk. A distant cousin hailed us from the branches of a guava tree across the street. I waved back. In our yard, our grandmother was sweeping away dead leaves. Our shimmering summer was ending. In a couple of days, our aunts would be leaving us for Manila. In a week’s time my siblings and I would be off to a new, strange city. Years after, I could not smell wood smoke without images of my grandmother and that early evening rising to meet me like ghosts of long-lost friends.

Mamá looked up when she saw us, and smiled that shy smile of hers that was as precious as it was rare. “You all look a sight,” she said. “Go wash your hands and get ready for supper. You’d better be hungry!”

We washed our hands and feet by the well in the garden, and trudged up the long flight of stairs to the empty balcony where we’d spent many long conversations with friends, sometimes silly, sometimes profound, as only young people can make them. I could picture them in their favorite spots  Johnny who was my age and was half in love with me, perched on the sill; Mark his older brother who was my secret crush, sprawled on the narra armchair, his presence filling the space; Elise, Mark’s older sophisticated girlfriend whom I could never hope to match, all over him like a vine; Jelly, our cousin, laughing and teasing everyone, as was her wont; Perry, tongue-tied with passion, strumming his doomed love for my aunt, on the topmost stair; Derek who serenaded me once, standing by the door like the cadet he hoped to be. And yes, Tom, with his raking eyes, who cast furtive glances from his corner. In the space of a summer, we had all become hapless players in that rigmarole called love, bound to one another in love’s ill-fated chain of unrequited passion.

Down the hallway, the wood-fired kitchen beckoned with sweet and various scents. My siblings and I slumped on the long bench of the massive dining table, miserable that we had to eat when all we wanted was lie down and sleep. We no longer cared to be heroes home from the hunt, nor I the woman-child in bloom; we were common foot soldiers with souls as grimy as our feet, aching only for rest and a child’s careless sleep. Into each of our bowls Mamá ladled clear fish broth fragrant with alogbati leaves harvested from her garden. Through my half-closed eyes I could see the veins pulsing in her hands, like beaten pathways to her heart. Our noses quivered. Windows that had folded were opening slowly in our minds. Eat, she coaxed. Wearily we dipped our spoons into our bowls. My brother slurped his soup. My sister sipped hers. I daintily brought the spoon to my mouth, careful not to scald my lips.

As tongue met soup, eyes brightened, bells pealed, heaven came down and ambrosia filled my soul. I blew and slurped and drank. The silvery white meat of the talakitok was fresh, tender and sweet, the broth flavored with onion leaves, soured delicately with tomatoes and the green batuan fruit. We reached for the steamed rice, and the calamansi halves daubed with rock salt, and ate like newly released prisoners of war. The quiet laughter of those around us warmed us, and our spirits rose from whatever desolation they had sunk. Since then, I have never looked askance on the lowly alogbati again, nor dismissed the talakitok’s capacity for the sublime. Likewise, since then, traces of the benison of my grandmother’s table have lodged in my brain, never to leave, even during the hard years that followed. Only my grandmother’s table could work such a miracle. My grandfather with his stentorian voice sat powerfully at the cabisera, the head of the table, but it was my grandmother’s quiet orchestration of the basic, simple things  rice, fish, fresh greens, child’s hunger, wood fire, welcoming table  all hewn by her rough peasant hands  that channeled the grace that blessed us.

Did I forget to mention? Deep in the folds of the high thatched roof of our grandparents’ house lived the tukô, a grizzly lizard that told us the time of day and night. Now, years later, myself grown up and old  Venus long vanished into foam! I hear it clucking. And I know that somewhere, at that place where she has gone ahead and partakes of a supper far greater and more joyous than any she has known before, my grandmother keeps her humble wood fire blazing; her well brims with water for the feet of weary travelers; and her table glows with the purity of simple fare  warm, nourishing, and sweet to the soul.