I first met this couple more than 20 years ago. It was during the production of a documentary film on street dwellers that I was doing for a foreign television network. They had two small kids at the time, and the family was one of the subjects of my film.
Last week our paths crossed again. I was waking on a short-cut route to Carbon market from our downtown office a few blocks away, to buy tangkong for my rabbits. At a corner towards Plaridel Street, two grey-haired people were sitting by a kariton, a push cart, their home.
The teenage couple in my film was now into their 40s. I didn’t recognize them – until the wife called my name. “Pina, sir,” she tried to refresh my memory, smiling, a few teeth already missing. “Tonio ay,” she then pointed me to the wrinkled man beside her.
Then it all came back to me. As I looked into their eyes, there I saw the same people I once knew. In the exchange that followed, the Tonio and Pina of the past began to emerge from the covers of many years.
They related that five more kids had since been added to their brood, making seven in all. The eldest, a girl, had joined the congregation of nuns that adopted her when she was small. Despite their modest means from picking at garbage bins, Tonio and Pina had produced a teacher, an electronics technician, and a dressmaker; another girl had started her own carinderia business and the youngest boy had landed a job at a restaurant in the Middle East.
One child died from rat bites while still a baby, another one was run over by a speeding truck. The whole family used to live by the street sides. Their “home” would be parked wherever they were when darkness would fall.
The family situation has changed a bit. The children are all married and better placed. And while these days Tonio and Pina still go around with their cart and pick at garbage bins, they say to do so only because it’s the kind of life they know – they’d get sick if they stopped.
Tonio bragged that he was once recruited to work in a construction project abroad. But he said no. The children were growing up, and his wife was sickly at the time.
Life was very hard, he said, but they were okay. They shared whatever little they found. There was no need for TV, the reassuring sight of each other was much better. Despite the noise and dust from vehicular traffic, their sleep was comfortable, sustained by the sweet music of each other’s snores.
The life choices of Tonio and Pina are difficult to comprehend by those of us who follow a different system of living. We come home to the same house at the end of the day; they spend their nights wherever they like. They could heed their children’s invitation to live with them – but the proud parents would rather keep their freedom and independence.
True, the kind of life that the couple insists to stick to may seem to lack the order and security that most of us enjoy. But they deserve no pity. The contentment I have observed in them is not common.
Most of all, the joy they exude in each other’s company I do not see in the mansions of certain couples I know.