And Then They Were Gone, by Rofel G Brion

When I was in grade school, I would wake up in the middle of the night and ask either  my mother or my father to sleep beside me.  I knew what frightened me.  I was afraid one of them would die.  I was afraid I would die.

 

            Even in college, I would take the bus home and be scared that I would perish in an accident, or I would come home and see either my father or my mother in a coffin in our living room.   Sometimes I even imagined a friend’s funeral.  Or mine.  Who would be there?  Who would cry?  Would anyone be happy?  Would anyone wish they had died with me?    

           

I’m afraid death fascinates me. 

            Maybe it’s because death has come too often to greet me.

            But part of me dies with every death I see.

            And that part I now try to recover with these stories. 

 

 

LOLA GUELANG, 1964

 

I imagine her supervising my birth, Lola Guelang, my mother’s mother.  I was, after all, born on her bed.  It was the only bed in the house my parents had built a year before I came.  My coming was quite an event, I am told, and I see Lola Guelang telling the midwife what to do when she couldn’t get the placenta out.  They had to call in Mamay Dudoy, my father’s uncle, our family doctor, who ran from his house two blocks away.  He had stood as principal sponsor at my parents’ wedding.  A few months before that, Lola Guelang had fainted when she found out that there would be a wedding.  She didn’t like my father then because she had heard that he gambled. After the wedding, however, she saw how hard he worked when she allowed him to take over her rice dealership, a business she had began by trading rice from Bulacan, her home province, to San Pablo, my father’s home town, and had single-handedly turned into the largest rice store in the San Pablo public market.  And when my father asked her to move in with them in the new house, Lola Guelang declared to everyone that she had found a new son.

    

She always liked drama, my twice‑widowed Lola Guelang, even when it wasn’t her own.  Every morning we listened to soap operas in the only radio in the house; this, of course, my father put in her room.  So I stayed in Lola Guelang’s room all the time, watching her comb her long, grey hair, mend her kimonas, or cry over the fate of her soap opera heroines.  When I was old enough to read, she listened to my stories about my comic book heroes as I pretended that I was swimming on her bed.

    

It was a large bed with a very firm mattress, perfect for diving from the windowsill.  I did that over and over again the night they took Lola Guelang to the hospital.  I see myself now, ten years old, too short for my age, jumping on her bed, worried sick, not knowing exactly what was wrong.  I found that out for myself later on, when they took me to see her in the San Pablo City Hospital, then later at the San Juan de Dios along Dewey Boulevard.  I knew she had cancer by the time they took her back home; they cleared our living room and put in a hospital bed.  I watched relatives, friends, and strangers stream in and out of our house.  Some of them slept on Lola Guelang’s bed.  I didn’t care; I had grown tired of swimming on it.

    

One morning, I woke up to the sound of muffled sobs from the living room.  Lola Guelang was saying goodbye.  My mother took my hand and led me to her bedside.  I stood beside Ate Minda, my cousin whom Lola Guelang had sent through medical school.  When Lola Guelang saw me, she made Ate Minda promise to take me with her to the States so she could send me through school.  Ate Minda did, and my mother cried.  I don’t know if it was because she was grateful to Ate Minda, or because she was sad that her mother would go at any moment, or because she was afraid she would lose her only son.    

    

Lola Guelang didn’t leave us that day.  She lived for a few months more.  Long, very long, months.  I went to school every day, afraid that she’d be gone when I came home.  Sometimes I’d catch her laughing with her visitors and I would begin to believe that she could be well again.  But one afternoon, she finally left us.  I watched as her children, my sister, and our cousins surrounded her bed.  I couldn’t join them.  Nobody held my hand to lead me to her.  I was scared to come on my own.  I didn’t say goodbye.

    

Twenty years later, I wrote this poem on my own bed, in my own room, in a much bigger city, away from home:

 

 

GRANDMA ISN’T HOME

 

Grandma wasn’t home

So I dove and I swam

All over her huge bed.

 

They had taken her out

Very early that day In a big white van.

 

But she was very soon back

So I sulked as I sat

At the foot of her bed.

 

She lay and she smiled

As I sulked and I sat

And wished for my waves.

 

Then one sunny day

They came in a black van

And took her away.

 

I smiled through my tears

As I dove and I swam

All over her big bed.

 

 

TIYO LAURO, 1966

 

When I was five, Tiyo Lauro came home with a gift for my sister.  A doll’s eye.  It scared me terribly, but everyone else laughed, including my sister who for months had begged him for  a walking doll.  It took me some years to understand that it was a joke.

    

You see, Tiyo Lauro, my mother’s younger half‑brother, a bachelor who lived with us on week‑ends, worked at the Bureau of Customs in Manila.  My family knew another man who worked in the same place and this man was rich.  He brought home imported chocolates, battery‑operated toys, sweaters and shoes and bicycles, everything a child could ever wish for; we knew all this because he was the father of the wife of one of my first cousins.  Tiyo Lauro brought nothing home but his dirty clothes for our maids to wash.  Well, sometimes he would give me White Rabbit or Haw Flakes, or even a couple of apples in December, but nothing more than that.  And yes, that doll’s eye for my sister that everyone else found funny.   My mother asked him once why the other customs man had so much while he had nothing but he said nothing.  He was like that.  He usually said nothing.  And when he said something, it was to tell me not to do this or that without even telling me why.  I didn’t really like him.

    

I didn’t really know much about him.  When I was seven, I discovered some of his secrets.  He left his closet unlocked one Sunday‑‑he woke up late and rushed off to Mass‑‑and I found some girlie magazines inside it, along with some bullets and a periscope and a huge camera with a big flash.  He loved taking pictures of all sorts of things.  Once I saw his pictures of the World Boy Scout Jamboree in Los Banos and of a bullfight held somewhere in Manila.  He also had pictures of our relatives who lived in Mindanao; he visited them often and came home with all sorts of strange things‑‑a deer’s skull, horns and all; a monkey’s breast, cut‑up and salted; a plaque full of miniature swords. 

    

I can’t forget what Tiyo Lauro did one election period.  I was eleven and precocious, as my father always put it, and while everyone else in the family campaigned for Macapagal, Tiyo Lauro insisted Marcos would win.  The more I begged him to vote Macapagal, the more he praised Marcos.  He said Macapagal had done nothing for the country and Marcos was smart and young and was the hope of the land.  We ended up with me shouting at him and him laughing at me.  I decided then that I hated Tiyo Lauro.  On election morning, however, he called me into his room and showed me his sample ballot.  It had Macapagal’s name on it. 

 

Marcos won anyway but Tiyo Lauro and I never fought again.  I don’t even remember being mad at him after that, although I don’t really recall having a good time with him either.  I just know that I stopped hating him. 

    

One midnight, two years after Lola Guelang’s death, I woke up and found my mother crying beside my father who was talking to someone on the phone.  Tiyo Lauro had been shot.  Dead.  It was a hold‑up in a jeepney, my father was told.  But when Tiyo Lauro’s flag‑draped coffin came to our house for the wake, we discovered the real story.

Tiyo Lauro had been a customs secret agent all along.  That was why he never brought anything home.  He was about to bust a smuggling syndicate when they did him in.  The night he was murdered, he took a jeepney home, as he had done every single night.  He sat beside the driver, and a man came up behind him and shot him through his left shoulder.  The bullet, just one bullet, went straight to his heart.

    

We found out something else, or at least we still think of it as something, the following afternoon, when some people who introduced themselves as his office‑mates came to the wake.  One of them, a woman in a grey dress, spent a long time looking at Tiyo Lauro.  We, my cousins and I, spent as much time watching her.  When she lifted her dark glasses and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, we knew we were  on to something.  No one, of course, dared to ask her who she was.  Not even my mother.  She was too busy grieving.

    

I had not seen my mother cry as much as she did then.  Not even during Lola Guelang’s funeral.  I found out why when we laid Tiyo Lauro to rest.  When we got to the family plot, my mother sobbed over Lola Guelang’s grave.  She asked for her mother’s forgiveness; she should have watched over her younger brother more, she cried over and over and over again.  Even as a soldier gave Tiyo Lauro a gun salute; even when a bugler played taps. After a few weeks, I saw a picture of my mother, puffy‑eyed, standing with their siblings in front of Gate One of Port Area, under a huge sign that read, "Agent Lauro de la Cruz Gate".

    

Many years later, and thousands of miles away from home, I paid my own homage‑of‑sorts to Tiyo Lauro, in a poem about, of all things, my father’s gun.  I’m sure Tiyo Lauro, silent and absent as he often was, will see some humor in appearing unnamed in an‑almost‑parenthetical remark in a rather long poem written by a nephew he knew very little about and who knew very little about him.

 

 

HALINA                                                     THE LURE

 

Kinagisnan ko na                                           I grew up

Ang baril ni Itay.                                            Knowing my father’s gun.

Nakatago ito                                                 He kept it

Sa makapal na supot                                     In a thick cotton bag

Kasama ang mga kahon                                With boxes

Ng maliliit na punglo                                      Of small bullets

Sa kanyang aparador.                                   In his closet.

Kung minsan                                                 Sometimes,

Kapag may nabalitaan                                   Hearing of a robbery

Siyang nakawan kung saan                            Somewhere in the city,

Itinatabi ni Itay                                              My father slept

Sa pagtulog ang baril;                                    With his gun;

Ilang araw iniiwan                                         For days he’d leave it

Sa ilalim ng unang                                          Beneath the pillow

Madalas kong dantayan                                That I loved to hug

Kapag naglalambing ako                               Everytime I snuggled up

Sa kanila ni Inay.                                          To him and my mother.

 

Madalas kong panoorin                                 I often watched him

Ang paglilinis ng baril‑‑                                 Clean his gun‑‑

Isa‑isang tinatanggal                                      He’d remove the bullets

Ang mga lamang punglo                                 One by one

Saka pinupunasan                                         Then wipe it clean

Ng nilangisang tela;                                        With an oily cloth;

Pagkatapos sandaling                                    Then for a few moments,

Ipadadama sa akin                                        He’d let me feel

Ang kinis, lamig                                             The smoothness and hardness

At tigas nitong baril.                                       Of this cold gun.

 

Tuwing magpapalit ang taon                           On the last night of each year,

Itinututok ito                                                  My father aimed the gun

Ni Itay sa langit                                              At the sky

At mabilis na pinapuputok                              And quickly fired it

Nang anim na uli;                                           Six times;

Isang Bagong Taon                                        One New Year’s eve

Pinahawakan ni Itay                                       He let me hold the gun,

Sa akin ang baril,                                           He made me aim at the sky

Pinaasinta ang langit                                       And told me to pull the trigger;

At pinakalabit ang gatilyo;                              Just once, he said,

Minsan lang, sabi niya,                                   But I did it

Ngunit inulit‑ulit ko.                                       Again and again.

 

Nang magbinata ako                                      When I became older

Inalok ako ni Itay                                           My father offered me

Ng sarili kong baril;                                        My own gun;

Mabuti raw na pananggalang                          It would be a good shield

O kaya’y babala                                             Or a fair warning, he said,

Sa may masamang tangka.                             To anyone who meant bad.

Hindi ko tinanggap                                         I refused it

Dahil hindi ko malimutan                                 For I could not forget

Ang umagang dumating                                  The morning when I saw

Sa aming tahanan                                           In our own home

Ang mga damit na duguan                              The blood drenched clothes

Ng kapatid ni Inay                                          Of my mother’s brother

Na kinitil ng punglong                                     Killed by a bullet

Tumagos sa kanyang puso;                             That penetrated his heart;

Samantalang humihikbi                                   As my mother sobbed

Binuklat ni Inay                                              She unfolded the shirt

Ang kamisadentrong                                      With a hole on one sleeve.

Sa manggas lang ang butas.                            It was a clever assailant,

Mahusay ang salarin,                                      I said to myself;

Sa loob‑loob ko,                                           He knew by heart

Kabisadong‑kabisado niya                            A bullet’s chosen path.

Ang hilig ng punglo.                                        But up to this day,

 

Subalit hanggang ngayon                                Everytime I open the closet

Tuwing bubuksan ang aparador                      Or lie on my parents’ bed

O hihiga ako sa kama nina Itay                       I am tempted to pick up

Natutukso akong damputin                            My father’s gun,

Ang kanyang baril,                                         Feel the cold,

Damhin ang lamig, kinis                                  And the smoothness and the hardness,

At tigas nito,                                                  Fit my finger around its trigger

Isukat ang hintuturo                                        And once more

Ko sa gatilyo                                                 Pull it very hard.

At muli itong kalabitin

Nang mariing‑mariin.

 

 

 

DORIS, 1988

    

"Doris of Paris".  That was what one Jesuit called her, not just because she lived and studied in Paris for several years and spoke what native French speakers said was impeccable French, but also because she seemed to have brought Paris home with her.  At least that’s what our friends who had lived in Paris, too, used to say.   I had only been to Paris once, for a few days, so I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what they meant.

    

I was sure, however, that Doris was no Parisian when I first noticed her.  I remember the moment well.  My girlfriend and I were in the Ateneo faculty lounge sometime in 1980 when she made me aware that there was a Doris Capistrano teaching Math in the college.  "There," she whispered, referring to a thin, young woman with long, black hair, and a very long, frilly dress, lining up for lunch in the college cafeteria.  "Isn’t Doris attractive?"  No, I whispered back to her, and meant it.  She looked much too conservative to be attractive, I added.   

    

Things changed, however, after Doris had received her masteral degree in math in Paris and I had broken up with my girlfriend.  Doris came back to teach in Ateneo and we ended up in the same circle of friends.  She was definitely attractive and not just because she wore her hair and her skirts short‑‑her eyes lit up as she talked about Paris and math and food and poetry. She was enthusiastic about almost everything, and she showed it not only as she talked but also as she walked and jogged and did almost everything else. 

    

I eventually saw her doing almost all sorts of things when she moved into the campus and became a prefect in the dorm next to where I lived.  I helped fix up her room and she spent a lot of time in mine.  We watched television and listened to tapes; she cooked while I ate and washed the dishes until she decided I should cook, too, so we suffered through some dishes together; I introduced her to my younger friends and  she told me about the boyfriend she left in Paris‑‑a young flautist who played around a lot.  Yes, I listened to her heartaches.  And she listened to mine.  

    

We never cried to each other, though.   We almost always laughed together. We went out with friends who loved the same things we did‑‑movies, parties, food, concerts, travel, clothes.  Yes, clothes.  Dressing up, for Doris, was an art, along with sketching, painting, designing, sewing, making patchwork wall hangings, all of which she also did, and did quite well.  Everything had to be right, and to be right, it had to be different.  And she made sure people appreciated her art.  Once, during a faculty party, she made me guess how many ribbons she had on her.  I guessed and missed two; they were embroidered above the heel of her black stockings.  Yes, her art was also a game.

    

For Doris, even work was a game.  She enjoyed math immensely and she even managed to make me understand how high math was much like literature‑‑you create imaginary worlds with their own laws and, well, world views.  She did her work diligently‑‑she taught and studied math, tutored some high school kids, gave private lessons in French.  But every time she had to work she’d say, "Well, I’ll have to go and pretend to work again".

    

She couldn’t pretend that she was fine, though, when she finally realized that the flautist had found another woman.  She kept to herself and wouldn’t tell me how she felt.  I worried about her, but there was nothing anyone could do for Doris if she didn’t want them to do anything for her.  Doris was stubborn.  That part of her I didn’t like.  But I waited.

    

It took some time, but she finally got over that man.  It was partly because she met another‑‑a young Belgian consul.  At once, she knew, and we, her closest friends, knew, that they were perfect for each other.  He even knew how to court her friends.  He drove from Makati to jog with us around Ateneo; he took us out of town in his car; he gave parties for us in his house.  Most of all, like Doris, he showed interest in what we did, how we felt, who we hated, who we loved.  

    

One Thursday evening, after judging a contest in the dorm, Doris and I shared some beer in my room; the consul had some diplomatic chores.  She and I had not talked for some time before that evening, and she began by asking me about my young friends, naming each one as she did.  After I told her what they were up to, she asked me how I was.  I told her I had a cyst on my back and that I would undergo a minor operation that coming Saturday; I confessed that I was scared‑‑after all, the cyst could be malignant.  She laughed that off and said, "So, what will you leave me if you die?"

    

I asked her how she was, how she and the consul were, and if her parents knew about him.  She said she felt he loved her and she loved him too, and that they had talked about a future together, but nothing was definite, so she had told her parents nothing about the relationship.  Her mother had seen her through her last heartbreak, and Doris didn’t want her to be anxious again.  Not that early, anyway.

    

That weekend, while I nursed a punctured back and worried about the biopsy result, Doris drove with the consul to Taal, to meet some friends and motor to the volcano.  I came back to Ateneo on Monday and found a note on my door.  The head prefect wanted to talk to me about something.  But before I could see him, a friend called.  She told me Doris had been murdered.

    

She tried to explain how it had happened but I couldn’t even listen.  I rushed to the bathroom, I don’t know why, but I did, and I remembered how I used to wash the dishes in the sink after dining with Doris, how she wouldn’t allow her boyfriend to shower in her bathroom after jogging so he had to use mine, how she made fun of my "nervous bladder".  And I cried.

    

I rushed to the morgue and found Doris on a stretcher, her face bloated for having been under the sun for hours after she died.  Our other friends were there, too, discussing what Doris would have wanted to wear for the very last time.  We knew, as we grieved, how important that was to Doris.  It would have to be the brown suit her boyfriend had given her.  But it couldn’t be.  Her mother wanted her to wear an embroidered gown, something we all knew Doris wouldn’t be caught dead in.  But we also knew that Doris would have laughed  that one off; after all, a funeral could just very well be another game for her‑‑she could say she was just pretending to be dead.  Just as she could say that she was, all along, just pretending to live.  It was as if she knew how her life would be so short; everything just had to be a game, everything just had to mean joy.            

    

We never found out why Doris was murdered.  She had been shot from behind, just one bullet  piercing her chest.  Later, I saw a picture taken a few hours after she had died, why it was taken I never really knew for sure.  She lay on a cart; she wore a light blue chambray shirt, deep blue denim pants, light blue sneakers, and shocking pink socks‑‑so very Doris.  Her face showed no sign of pain.  Thank God, I thought, she must have heard that shot and thought that someone was just bird‑hunting.  She might have even wished she could join their game.

    

That did not console me, however.  I remember crying many, many times for Doris‑‑during the wake in the college chapel; during her funeral; during the afternoons I was alone in my room, imagining Doris calling out my name from outside.  No friend had died on me before, I told everyone, and I never imagined it could bring such pain.   I cried as I read the many poems written about her, for her, by the people she loved, by the people who loved her.  I couldn’t write one myself, even if, after only a few weeks, I found myself returning to the usual run of things‑‑waking up, eating, teaching, having fun, playing all sorts of games, and doing all sorts of things as if Doris had not died. 

    

After a year, when I found myself very much alone, during a very cold spring many miles away from home, not too distant from the city that Doris loved, this came:

 

NGAYON LAMANG MASASABI                I CAN ONLY SAY THIS NOW

Kay Doris                                                                                For Doris

 

Nang yumao ka                                                When you died

Nang biglang‑bigla                                           Rather suddenly

Naghinagpis ako                                               I grieved

At lubhang nangulila                                          And longed for you deeply

Ngunit pagkaraan                                             But after

Ng iilang araw                                                  Only a few days

Mabilis na nakabalik                                         I quickly returned

Sa nakagawian nang                                         To the usual                 

Takbo ng buhay.                                               Run of things.

Sandali ko                                                        This alarmed me

Itong ikinabahala,                                              For a moment,

Tulad ng saglit                                                   Like the brief anxiety

Na pagkabagabag                                            About my thinning hair

Sa pagdalang ng buhok                                     When I look into the mirror

Sa aking tuktok                                                After I wake up each morning.

Pagtingin ko sa salamin

Tuwing ako’y gigising.

 

 

AND, YES, THERE WERE OTHERS

   

Yes, there were others after Doris.  They passed away in very quick succession, not even leaving me enough time to grieve in between.  I know it may be too early for me to write about their deaths, but I can not stop now.  I will not.