My first genuine hero was not a folk warrior, it was a great river.
I was in the process of completing a lengthy narrative, a sort of folk ode, about that river when I received a text message from my mentor and idol, Gilda Cordero-Fernando, inviting me to send something—a few words from a certified senior citizen—for a new section (for the old) here in the Inquirer.
I readily said yes, feeling greatly honored.
But as soon as I had sat down to work, I felt harassed by the magnitude of the task. There was also the hassle of pulling strings, tying some loose ends, in order to book a passage to Palembang, Indonesia, which would serve as one of the sites for this month’s Southeast Asian Games.
Would Gilded Gilda be interested in some humble musings on that river?
Here:
BITS of old jewels—nuggets from a buried treasure or loose ends from a pirate’s loot—were said to have been discovered by ancient folk during a magical season of plenty. These precious beads glinted and quivered among broken blue China ceramics, pastel pebbles, jagged white seashells and the fresh year-round clams called tulya on the river’s clear, sandy edge.
These natives, for the most part, would need only a small step to descend into the river, whose mossy banks were practically at glad level with the bare street.
There’s a story here about that river, close to where the village folk lived and loved as though the blessed body of water was their own, their mother.
That river, a slice of paradise, had been lost, stolen.
Although gone, there glows in my child’s eye a picture of that benevolent river.
Bright as lighted cotton balls, a couple of ducklings glide close to the eastern bank.
The blinking little darlings wear the gold of yellow-bell flowers that adorned most fences in the neighborhood.
If anything, the ducklings, central to the canvas made emerald by verdant lilies, marked my first ability to recognize things in infancy.
Like other places, there were many tales of life and death, joy and misery, in the village.
Most of these tales have been forgotten, but at times trickle in as hopeful swoons in a harana.
They could twinkle like holiday prisms; sigh as fragments of lost childhood homes, undying brotherhood, and friendship.
Native dirge
During rain-threatened afternoons, they could recur as farewell lyrics in a native dirge.
The villagers were indeed of diverse origins; they had contrasting tastes, beliefs, but they were so familiar with the neighbors’ ways they inevitably got affiliated, if not by blood, friendship, superstition, or politics, through mutual admiration, secret love, or cold contempt.
Everybody knew each other in the village.
It won’t take a whole day for the whole neighborhood to know who eloped, who had a miscarriage, who had gone missing, who gave birth, who got bitten by Aling Titay’s mad dog, who was seriously ill, who had gone berserk, who was getting married, who won big in jueteng, whose sow gave birth, and to how many litters.
Maybe only the portly Aling Luming, newly docked from the Visayas with husband David Barrientos, did not know what was cooking in her neighbor’s kitchen.
Why did terrible Tibo, the peppery transplant from far-off Aklan, whose eyes were on a perpetually simulated wild spin, chase Mang Ampong, the smallpox king, with his bolo, cursing?
How Ampong Bulutong, cornered, was saved from sure death after the killer blow got entangled with a backyard clothesline continued to be counted as a small miracle.
There were other hidden lives, some strange and magical, if not comic and totally embarrassing; although the most known were the ones being played out near or on the main street itself—a smooth stretch of sun-baked soil, the rust-colored banlik—that often served as riverside center stage.
There’s another story, it was about an old man who refused to stay down after being felled by a deathly stroke.
The old man left the house he had built for his family and lived alone in a borrowed shack in the grassy far-side edge of the river.
The old man had no big story to tell.
He would descend, limping, into the river every now and then.
But he also made sure that, unlike when he relied on his great fishing prowess for a living, he took only as little as he honestly needed for himself.
He refused to be a nuisance.
He was always up before the sun, praying, preparing his needs alone, sipping the steaming ginger drink salabat, before solemnly tending to his small borrowed garden, pruning trees and plants that counted the tampuhin bananas among his favorites.
The old man also continued to make unscheduled morning trips to his old house at the back of the quaint village chapel, oftentimes to share his small harvest of bananas and assorted fruits, the succulent duhat thick as a thumb and the tiny native lemon dayap, a necessary aromatic for the delicate nectared egg custard that was a top favorite in the fantastic village Maytime festival.
That’s about it for now.
I beg for Madame Gilda’s prayer and blessings while I work to complete the narrative in distant, unknown Palembang.