When I read Migen's poems, my school of poetry crumbled behind me. Migen heard hushes and laughters; saw goblins and gnomes. She had Eve put sleep into God’s eyes, and the unawares bore apes.by S.B. AlojamientoI first ran into Tonton summer of 1995. He was in the doorway, standing in the half-light. Hair gray and long, pants tattered, shirt hand-painted, hunger in his eyes. He was strumming the guitar and hardly heard me as I asked for someone I knew who must be upstairs. In the kitchen someone was holding a bottle of beer, gabbling about bringing his family from stinking Manila to placid Dumaguete. He finished each burst of tearful talk with an eloquently rendered “What a sorry state of affair, oh what a sorry state of affair.”
The night before, I had slept at a bus terminal one shabby bridge over a dead river away from the city’s thoroughfares. I had unceremoniously left my last hovel, after a quarrel with my sister over an eel of a husband, bearing only my bag of a few shirts, underwears, and toiletry. Boarding the boat bound for Dumaguete, I was feeling a little wrong in the head. I had no enrollment money and I was thinking of taking up Poetry, which I thought Silliman University might offer me. As the boat neared the port, I beheld what I thought was Poetry Herself beckoning to me: wide stretches of green, rows of acacia trees, capiz-windowed two-story buildings.
I was also feeling angry in a triumphant way. I wanted to rush headlong and jump out of the boat deck flying above the heads of the passengers moving like snails towards the gangplank. Reaching the pathway under the acacia trees, all the places and houses I had lived in suddenly shrank or toppled behind me. It was like finding an Anzalduan prairie, a new territory. I wandered around, sat on benches under the trees, took off my shoes and felt the grass under my feet. Enrollment time was a week away yet. I looked for Wanted signs: salesgirl, waitress, househelp, whatever that would allow me to stay around the campus vicinity. I found the school cafeteria, sat at a table, ate a sandwich and read a book. When it got dark I took a tricycle and had myself brought back to the bus terminal. I thanked my activist days: sleeping on cots for five pesos in bus terminals was always a delight, except that that night I got a space in a darker spot where mosquitoes feasted on my blood.
Six o’ clock in the morning found me in the city plaza, scratching my arms and sides. Guys looked me over, thinking I must have slept in one of the benches there or got myself laid badly. I took off and scrounged around for coffee. By nine o’ clock I was on campus grounds again, admiring the green lawns and the trees once more.
Someone I knew from circa 1980s had said to me years back that he planned to go back to school, take up a master’s degree in the School of Divinity in preparation for pastoral life. I had to know if that plan pulled through. I went to the registrar’s office. He was indeed around and I was given his address. Anonymity and prairie territory got ruled out. His house opened to a kitchen where, as I said, I came upon a hungry-looking long-haired grey guy and this beer-guzzling fellow. They both seemed to me a little wrong in the head that I felt less lost, less sad. In no time I decided to stay awhile, find out what I may find in the city. The next morning I boarded the same boat that took me there, took some money from here and there, then to the school I last went to some eleven years back to get my transcript of records. A week after that I was in the long queue of Silliman enrollees.
“Have you met César Ruiz Aquino?”, the editor of the then just-revived
Sands and Coral, asked. If it is poetry you want, he said, he is
the poet. Fine, I thought, though it was neither César Ruiz Aquino nor any of them guys I wanted to meet, but the Literary Establishment there, the Tiempos. It turned out the couple were no longer with the English Department and there was no creative writing program in that department anymore. There was this woman named Andre who I first thought had hurt her foot and was so nice to me. She would be a good friend later, for a time at least, and she it was who said that once indeed her office, the English Department, was Silliman University’s prima donna. By then it no longer was.
I made friends, at first with schoolmarms who valued my above-average literary élan, for I was your good Literature student. I liked studying the masters and I took to Ester’s maternal care. Ester was in her forties then, I was 32 going on 60. She graduated from Silliman a Nursing graduate some 20 or 25 years back and had been teaching English in a state university in Cagayan de Oro for so many years now, then suddenly, her administrators decided that no matter how good she was at her job, an English teacher should still be holding an English degree.
Ester and I had to part ways when I started going out with fags, but when we were friends, she was really caring as caring went. “I pity you,” she always said to me, voice and facial contours all-sympathy, every time I went to her boarding house to borrow a hundred or two. “You’re so deprived. Financially and emotionally.” I think that was when I began to hate kindness and confidences between friends.
But I cherish the times Ester and I dug the library archives, appreciate the laughter she gave me back in return for the metaphors I threw at the world that hurt. We would go to Sawi’s place in Purok Santan, where our classmate Franklin, Sawi’s friend, camped. Franklin had a sister, Migen, who went to Silliman in the summer of 1967 to join the summer writers’ workshop. She had left a sheaf of poems that miraculously survived almost 30 years of still life inside a steel cabinet. I could not remember what I was looking for that they fell into my hands, but I was always overturning termite-ridden steel cabinets and bookshelves, so it must be during one of those do-days that I found Migen’s typewritten poems in yellowing pages. When I read them, my school of poetry crumbled behind me. Migen heard hushes and laughters; saw goblins and gnomes. She had Eve put sleep into God’s eyes, and the unawares bore apes. I told Ester I’m in love with Migen’s poetry, but she somehow got it wrong that she wanted me to take on Franklin instead. Still, that did not stop us from going to Franklin’s place to search for literature. He had quite a hoard from his theatre and scriptwriting days in Manila.
Thinking of Migen now, I feel she and I could have been good friends. I got word from her telling me to call her in Manila collect if I felt like it, but I never did. Viktor, distinguished poet-bum, thought Migen must be lonely so to ask that of me. I told Viktor you never knew what Franklin told his sister, you know how men are. That got him grinning from ear to ear, like a sick dog.
Franklin wasn't so bad, really. He did prove useful at times, particularly when it came to the economic side of hunger. My landlady was threatening me with a new rate or I will have to share the room with another starveling. At seven hundred a month, I felt somewhat lucky. The house was near the beach, so instead of a cup of rice and fried egg, I often went for saltwater and a good swim for breakfast. Then one day my landlady thought of raising pigs instead of collecting more rent money from me. She made a hogstead right across my window. The smell broke into my sleep and I would wake up to the grunting of pigs. My little peace was shattered. And by then my head had been constantly spinning. I was taking my meals at the
tiangge, at a carenderia owned by Sawi’s neighbor. For lodging in Sawi’s backboards and for sharing his latrine and his frontyard, Franklin got access to credit at
Nang Tiaga’s Carenderia. He accompanied me there later to get me a meal ticket too, also on credit. Then on top of that he also offered to saw his room off into two parts that my housing need may be taken care of, too. “Or we partition it with a plywood or a curtain,” he said. “With Sawi just in the neighborhood we could talk poetry day and night just don’t mention it yet to Sawi, I’ll take care of that.”
It was Viktor, though, not I, he got for a neighbor. Viktor lodged at the opposite wall the next semester. Franklin would knock on his door at six o’ clock in the morning bringing coffee and breakfast, much to Viktor’s vexation. Habitually given to taking a long look at the dark, Viktor went to bed in the wee hours of the morning to rise at midday. Franklin’s knock on his door made him see vermilions. “Sheil, does he think I need looking after?” he would ask, gritting his teeth. I wanted to tease Viktor, tell him maybe Franklin got a crush on him, but you don’t trade jokes like that with a homophobe who did not get a lay all his life on top of not getting a good night’s sleep.
Viktor did not know, but I always thought of him the luckier guy beside me. He had a mother in the US of A or thereabouts who bought him an electric typewriter and French dictionaries. If I recall it right, he also had a brother or two and a sister who for a time looked out for him. Viktor however never got to put to good use his French books and tapes on me. At the time I didn’t know a single French phrase and wasn't in the least interested. I then put French in the same league as Mandarin and Arabic.
Viktor’s mother sent him a package of American sausages. That got Krip (who happened to be at Sawi’s place when the package came) gushing to have seen the largest penis in the world. Viktor liked to recount that part to me and we would laugh a little. Then Viktor’s mother stopped writing and stopped sending packages and Viktor grew worse each day until he could barely see the floor. That must be the time when Franklin thought he could fix him some breakfast, and poor Franklin, he was not even appreciated a bit for it.
When Jenny introduced me to Lorena, my eyes popped out. Up to that time, Ester and Andre were all the female friends I made and they were for a long stretch nice people. I met Jenny around the time Tonton and I were having coffee at someone else’s kitchen. She and I bumped into each other later inside
Scoobies and she shoved me before Lorena who was then having her drink at a corner table by the glass window. Lorena gave me a Hi and a mindless smile, then turned her eyes to the road and the trees outside.
Jenny liked gluing her eyes to conversations which she herself could not conduct and wanted me to get into one with Lorena and her. But Lorena, apparently, would rather be up there growing on a tree or tapping for the minerals in its roots than talk to either of us. I would later hear people, girls especially, and their boyfriends sometimes, complain a lot about Lorena’s indelible scowl. “That bag of bones what’s her problem?” beauties would gash, essaying a boyfriend’s part.
I mentally took to Lorena’s side: I never liked niceness and friendliness in women; it always felt like brassware, offensive to the soul; smelt of grease, dirty. As for Lorena, I really did not get to know her beyond the fact that she was Tonton’s type and that Tonton wasn’t her type. I should think she was my type: sharp-edged from limb to limb and quietest when with people. Of course it never occurred to me to proposition her like Tonton did. I was certain that even for her
yaya I won’t qualify.
Lorena was great on the stage. You don’t have to watch her perform in a big play to see that. She took part in a poetry reading on IWD and essayed a role in a cast-of-two workers strike act that climaxed in a rape scene. “You should have watched her play battered wife,” Jenny said to me, raving, as always. “The part when she got up from bed ever so slowly so as not to wake the sleeping husband? When she took off her clothes and put on her bra her shirt? The calm, the tension...” Each time Tonton attempted to describe her poetry, I would be all-envy. “Now she goes for details. Corners, bed, table…” Up to that time, I did not think of myself as a poet, at least not seriously so. Until I met
the César Ruiz Aquino.
Sawi indeed was the literary event in Dumaguete. You could hear Mikki raving his name, from table to table in every watering hole. Younger poets would hover over his poems to hunt for women’s names in the lines and Tonton liked quoting his poetry:
Ultimately she couples with the sun
However axes retrace their way and heads
Roll by the blade of her eye.
I think lots of us fell that way. I remember jogging to Purok Santan one sunny morning and playing with ants under Sawi’s window because he would rather get back to bed than make me coffee and conversation. By and by he would get up and play some blues and would croon along,
What’s happening to me? I would giggle under the window.
Even Jenny whom I thought too dumpy to have a thing or two to do around a loft like poetry, got high every time she spoke of Sawi. She was sauntering in Sawi’s class of senior citizens – a herd of MAEd students serving their second life terms in the academe in pursuit of professional advancement – and was having the time of her life watching Sawi hipping it up with the old cows.
“Have you ever known love without hope?” Sawi, in inimitable grandeloquence would pitch the question above their heads, and Jenny’s heart alone jumped. On my way to class I would find Jenny’s poet seated on his table, knees spread apart, his heart leaping out of him. On some afternoons he would be under an acacia tree, engaged with a clump of girls, his face dazed, Love Without Hope becoming him. Ester, who once too often would be walking the path with me, would be shaking her head, lowering her gaze and her voice, and would tell me about a teener classmate who confessed about Sir Aquino’s advances.
I realize now that I should have stuck to Poetry where Sawi was concerned. What do you want ba, one interview would go. Poetry on the verge, I would tell him. On the verge of what? Death? What? On the verge of madness, I would venture. He would nod. “You are like Sylvia Plath.”
That got me whirling away and flying up to the second floor of the university library to find out who Sylvia Plath is. I could not believe my eyes. Then later Tonton would tell me, “Sawi was oh-so-sad today, his adopted stowed away, so he went like his life is over nobody loves him and no girl could ever love him, so I said, Try Sheilfa, you know what he said?”
“Shut up.”
“He said what I want is a simple girl.”
“A what?!?.”
“He said Sheilfa is too libidinal for me.”
One thing I liked about Tonton, he didn’t think libidinal a dirty word, even if at the time I thought it was and was all-shame around it. So I said to Tonton I could not take this idea of poet-maniacs discussing me, so much for the tale of the dying minotaur rejuvenated by a good screw. Tonton he frowned kind of annoyed. “Cesar Ruiz Aquino? Saying that of you? You should be honored!”
And so I was.
Put together, Viktor and Sawi did make a really good pair. The two of them made quite a sight walking one behind the other around the streets of Dumaguete. Like a picture straight from Darwin’s
Evolution of the Species, I would tell Ester. As for sexual advances, I should say they really did not make a long way. I reckon they were just lonely, for all the mad millennial claims they made. Viktor, for one, seemed happy enough with counting his erections and was decent enough not to do it when I was looking. One night in summer at
Jo’s Chicken Inihaw he sat with a group of writers and fell in love with this fellow from Manila and my, he could not get up, he said, because he got it standin’ up as they were about to leave the table. The girl was so disgusted and wanted to bash his head, maybe spit at his face, too, but the guard and the boys had their day.
We got on well, though, Vik and I. He would heap me with books, some of which I did not manage to read for a long long time: Thomas Mann, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Henry Miller and Henry Miller. He was unabashed about his sexual fantasies, a trait you would appreciate, knowing he mistook you for a prissy feminist cunt. He and his friend Mikki had this idea of dying with their asses up so that they could donate their penises to the gay liberation movement. I would tell Viktor I think the gay liberation movement is after its own tail and not his or Micky’s, and that men are too addled-brained to relate to sex toys and robots are better function-wise that he would grin and scratch his head and his tail. “Sheil, why do you always speak like an old woman?”
But I do miss Viktor. Beside Migen and Sawi, I loved his poetry next. If Migen heard hushes and laughters, Viktor had an ear for permafrosts cracking on Arctic summers and could make Bob Dylan’s train come through his head in a dream. He crunched poetic brilliance all day long that mostly I just played the sponge.
Whatever happened to Viktor, Tonton wouldn’t tell. But he had this poem which he wrote after Tonton and Eliot which I have kept. About a woman by his side running away in her sleep and the wave’s wild music played by cold and secret fingers.
