Life & Living

I went to the launching of Chitang Nakpil’s latest book (Myself, Elsewhere, Nakpil Publishing, available at major bookstores).

It was very pleasant and relaxed. We all sat in the open air plaza of Serendra and munched on old fashion merienda goodies: chocolate eh and churros, ensaimadas, pandesal with chorizo filling. There were guitars softly playing old songs and we chatted with many old friends we had not seen for a long time.

Chitang was sitting with P.L. Lim. "Don’t tell them you are 91," Chitang admonished him, "It dates us all!"

I got a copy of the book. When I got home I started to read it. It was well written, of course. How else could it be? Chitang’s descriptions of a protected childhood in old Ermita were charming and strangely familiar.

I spent my own happy childhood in rustic, unfashionable San Juan where I grew up like Chitang, the only girl in a family of adored and domineering big brothers. However, unlike Chitang and her brothers, we were brought up "The American Way," speaking only in English and believing in Santa Claus! We all went to UP and the beautiful Manila that Chitang describes was the Manila I used to know and love and which no longer exists.

Often when I am lunching with my two old friends Balti (Armando Baltazar) and Ernie (Martinez) whom I always call "my only living men friends," we like to reminisce about life in Manila "when we were young and gay—and gay meant carefree and merry not homosexual!"

And always when we part, we congratulate ourselves for being among the lucky survivors and say to each other, "How nice it is to talk to people who still remember when a giant rubber tree was growing right in the middle of Taft Avenue!"

Chitang’s book brought on that same feeling of deja vu. It made me remember so much. Remembering is sometimes a dangerous thing at this stage of Life. It brings back nostalgic memories of a carefree childhood in a beautiful place, of the halcyon days and nights when we were in our teens and twenties. My special memory is of "dancing cheek to cheek" on the roof garden of the Engineering Building of the old UP on Isaac Peral. (I only learned from Chitang Nakpil’s book that Isaac Peral was the Spanish inventor of the first submarine.)

I enjoy the mental picture of myself at eighteen. There was a full moon. I was laughing at boys on the sidelines who were pointing to themselves and saying, "The next dance is mine!" Then the thought inevitably follows—"but they are all dead now"—and the sadness begins and, as the song goes, "what’s so painful to remember, we might as well just forget."

Chitang’s book is like that. It brings back so many beautiful memories of all that was good when we were young. Then in the last chapters, when she describes the wartime horrors that she went through, mental pictures of that terrible time began to come to me. I had not thought of them for years, but they came back as vivid and as strong as if it all had happened only a few days before.

After I got through reading Chitang’s book it was one o’clock in the morning, but I could not sleep. Those terrible mental pictures kept haunting me. I think all of us of our generation get those nightmares every once in a while. Memories of the war—there is only one war for us who survived it, "The War" that changed many of our lives, "The War" that made us feel naked fear and sheer terror that we never had felt before in our protected young lives. For the first time we felt real Hunger—the actual physical gnawing pangs of a protesting half-starved body. In the dark I heard again the cries of hungry babies sucking in vain at empty breasts—I saw again the haunting face of a man who had just been told that his old mother and his three young children had been killed when a bomb from the much awaited Liberation planes hit their air-raid shelter.

Such harrowing memories kept haunting me all night till I finally fell asleep. When I woke up, it was a bright sunshiny morning. I rang for my breakfast juices, my maid told me my mahjong quorum had called asking if there was a game. She asked me if I was going dancing instead. What gown should she prepare? Was I going to a luncheon? Should she alert the driver?

I was back in the wonderful world of the NOW. And in my heart, I said a prayer for all who were not as lucky as we were and another prayer of thanksgiving to the good Lord for having allowed us to survive to enjoy again each precious day of a privileged Life.

Thank you, Chitang, for bringing back all the memories for us Survivors, the good ones that make us happily nostalgic, the bad ones that leave us shuddering with remembered horror but make us so very grateful we are alive to tell the tale and to still enjoy the wonderful joyful world of the Living!

For dear Chitang and all of the other Survivors — "This is the day the Lord has given. Rise and rejoice!"

Live in the NOW!