When I first read this piece what I felt was, Fuck. This one hurts.
Then on second reading, it was, Hell, it was a life well-lived! Selling ice cubes is appropriate; it goes with beer and rum. And he was right about rum over piggy-banking; he was right about fries and hotdogs and about bastard fathers; and he was right about dying on some friggin’ plan to retire in a country he long abandoned for what he became. The rest (Jesus, funeral rights, Facebook, one cold heart) is not for him to suffer.
Passage
Ed Quitoriano
(a repost from Facebook)
His first love was computers, not new ones but stuff that needed his screwdrivers, solders and wits for resuscitation. You could see heaven on his face once the dead computer came to life. Then came Ms. J, the biggest love of his life.
Life with Ms. J was the peak of the happiness that he wished for. All the more the world around him became hazier. He chose only a few people to connect with and only those he believed could understand him. In fact, he was a person not easy to fathom and I am not one of the few who could. For almost twenty years we talked without talking, thought of each other without really trying; I, always hoping he got what he wished for.
Ms. J died somewhere in 2008 but not without giving her all to him, including a will to a family inheritance for him to live by in Bohol. But without Ms. J, he went deep inside himself, harnessing and brandishing his own beliefs and fought for the will as if it were a claim he could make without making friends with Ms. J’s family and friends. He placed all the money he got for legal battles he could not win until he lost and found himself dejected, always believing that he was a victim of discrimination in a foreign country.
But he never gave up nor dared himself to rethink fully well. He just pivoted, acquired some rice lands on mortgage, ran a small swine farm and soothed his loneliness with beer and rum. In March 2011, he met Ms. L through SMS. She was forty-something then, never married. She is a teacher, a specialist in braille.
They decided to live together, moved to Ms. L’s hometown and decided to live as man and wife – alone in a rented small bungalow near a jetty. She went to teach and he to sell homemade ice cubes. He bought three freezers, she a generator after Yolanda struck the power lines. After work, she would come home to prepare a hundred of ice packs in small plastic bags. The ice business earned them PHP200-300 a day but not without a daily fight over how the earnings should be spent. The man won and got the daily dose of beer and rum and the usual drunkenness, vomiting and not knowing where the bedroom is.
For him, the booze was his world away from sadness into a make-believe world of remembering Ms. J. He loves Ms. L, he would say but nonchalantly also say that he loves Ms. J more than everything else. He still had Ms. J’s dog with him and her name as password to his email address. He would play their favourite songs and shed tears in front of his desktop, with Ms. L patiently watching and listening by his side.
Two years of booze and dejection, on the one hand, and the ever-loving presence of Ms. L, on the other, made him decide that 2014 would be different. He whispered a promise: he would marry her, bring her to his homeland, tour her to Paris and money would be no object. He said he had stashed some money, big money, somewhere in Switzerland in the care of someone he would divulge. He also got himself a new passport and was making inquiries with his embassy for the marriage and travel requirements.
On January 10, he passed away, found slumped in front of his desktop with earphones still on. The whispered promise to Ms. L. came too late. Even the passwords to his files and pin numbers of his ATM he brought to his grave.
To local people, he was ‘the American who died because of too much drinking without eating.’ But he was also the American who dug an old man and a child from the rubbles during the October 2013 earthquake and the technician who taught neighbours how to convert their motorbikes into power generators during the blackout that followed Yolanda’s onslaught.
A lot of foreigners got married to locals in Bohol but to most people they are all Americans, including Mr. K. But he was not the typical foreigner or the typical Dutchman. Even during the earthquake, he admonished Ms. L to stop praying to Jesus on the argument that Jesus has nothing to do with earthquakes. In fact, he could easily get into an argument with anyone if it was about religion, faith and super beings. He would rather that Ms L watch science documentaries than talk about God. How much he hated Pacquaio, dancing prisoners and Pinoy soap opera for wasting the time of viewers.
At one time Ms. L’s uncle, a 60-something community organizer, offered to give them company. It did not take very long for him to claim primacy of beliefs, calling him a ‘murderer’ for killing ants that clung to his underwear; or an abuser for shooing his dogs away; or a transgressor for switching on the TV without his permission or for wiping off the stinking vomit from the floor.
He could wage war on anything and everything if it was about what he stood for. He grew pigs and could not stand the sight of a slaughter. He ate crabmeat but could not help calling a cook a torturer for cooking the crab alive and bound. I too had a bout with him many years ago for suggesting that I should not dare to offer fries and hotdog to my son because I was only the biological father and he was the real father in my frequent absence.
A lot of friends really wanted and tried to understand him, but he chose to be alone. Ms. L tried her all to bring him to the present in her hometown. She introduced and brought him to parties and reunions with fellow teachers and never for a moment faltered on the husband-wife image and despite the frequent remembrance of Ms. J as the love of his life. The only moments that she stood up against him were when she demanded he stop drinking, forcibly pulling him to the bathroom. She would beg for him to change his clothes when he took her to school. But he was a fortress of self-choice. He would demand ownership of Ms. L’s time after school, often threatening to complain why she had to work overtime when it was voluntary on her part.
Ms L was in panic when she found him dead. She had never seen a dead man in her house, much less a partner whose family she did not know and whose friends she would only know from the stories he told or via Facebook. She was alone with him and there was the basket of fears - of being asked by the police about the cause of death, payment for the morgue, when to bury him and the expenses for the wake and the funeral.
But to her surprise, people she does not know were forthcoming. Even the neighbours who kept their distance came forward to console her and offer their prayers – despite knowing that if he were alive, they would not be allowed to pray in his house. Somebody even made sure that a customized casket would be crafted because his size would not fit the standard Pinoy caskets.
Now he has no choice; he cannot prevent people from praying over him or the priest who said mass yesterday. He and Ms L never officially got married but on his casket Ms L. inscribed “from the loving memory of his wife… sons, daughters, relatives and friends.” Underneath the casket are his dogs, including Ms. J’s dog. For them, he is just asleep and they wait.
I owe him, a debt I can never repay. The last twenty years without communication is something that brings pain, and somehow, the good years before that do not strangely warm my heart.
Goodbye, Kees.
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