I'm on a plane don't complain

Desires what of that. Those are for ordinary mortals. They eat they fornicate they use themselves up and then they die.  I’m no ordinary monster. No ordinary glutton, no ordinary fornicator. I don’t believe in death. That’s for my foes and friends to wish for me, for my own sake. I reject that.

What is your psychosis? Moira asks. Each ought to have one or one will not survive. Hers was supposed to be catatonia. That’s what kept her in the odd jobs that she seasonally took on in the US of A. Yes, you will never survive here, you will never, she tells me, after taking my foot size for a pair of sneakers she hopes to ship to my address, from which I got evicted, a couple of weeks after we chatted, then she logs out. 

I’m on the plane on our way to Coron in Palawan to attend a wedding, a good old friend texts. I message back. Hey wrong send. She said she and her expat husband are sometimes afraid their daughter will go hungry, like me, she is so idealistic. Couldn’t tell her that’s too much to ask of their daughter.

You won't learn anything by me

A young writer came up to me today. You write so well, she said. What is your technique?

I felt diluted. Like I really wasn’t the talent I or she thought me to be; just someone picking her way and learned a trick or two along the block.

I said I actually don’t write so well, and I am not a writer. Are you?

But my God, was she tough. She just cast her eyes down and smiled, then knitting her brow as though she was in some harmless guessing game, she again turned her face to me. Wasn’t I glad she isn’t pretty: her cop-out, her get-away. You saying I just wait for the Muse, if she finds me worthy she will find me?

Oh no darling I’m not saying anything!

This is an effort to save that young writer. I am a just a teacher, not a writer, and this is what I have to tell her: Don’t follow me, I have lost my way. As for writing, It cannot be taught. It can only be bought.


When my best friend got married, how my walls went tumbling down. Mimi was my confederate. In life, and in Literature. She drew and wrote poetry and run-on essays, and my, was she good and was getting better and better by the day. So when one day she took the notion of carrying the neighbor’s baby like she wanted to know how it'd feel to play cradle and coo, I just knew she was going to leave me.

Now she’s a doctor in the KSA. I sometimes imagine her going crazy, making doodles inside a stonehouse harangued by an oversized baby. If she ran into a surgeon who told her, You know you’re different, she keeled over. Even of the husband she was rather proud to have procured for herself, she’s run out of things to say. I’m only happy here on payday, she last told me.


Danny was a classmate in college. Quiet but articulate, I once thought he would make a brilliant poet-revolutionary one day. Imagine my dismay when he ended up an officer of a giant pharmaceutical company and stole my pitch in service of corporate money. Charged, he told his girlfriends at FB that he was still going to pay me even if like I said there's no such thing as free lunch in Cuba, but to please please, he loves his wife and family.

And so when it was Karen Kay’s turn to marry and have a baby, I just said Damn. Now there goes another. Into the gully. You cannot marry and be good by me.

I once caught Uma Thurman on telly telling Oprah how women’s lives are interrupted by motherhood. The host cut her. Don’t you ever say that, went Oprah, emotive and sincere-like, hurting in behalf of martyred humanity. You would think Motherhood was Art itself and that great beauties like Uma would do fine serving time in the scullery. Uma, then divorced wife and single mother, blinked and smiled, all artifice. Thankfully it wasn’t her show. She had erroneously used the word “ruined”, too strong too sharp, a taboo for such a dull magazine show.

Are you learning anything? If you are not, then I’m a good teacher, you Go.

my house in a shambles

You poison kings and generals messing around your bed,
but not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault.
You can't go that low.


No idea what set it off, maybe a case of terrible maladaptation to a loss after loss: my tiptop acer laptop self combusted after I fell back into a river while doing a research I wasn't so happy to take on. Around the time it had started to rain, too, and the roof over my head, repaired several times over before, was dripping again, making pools on the floor and wetting the books and the notebooks I heaped in a paper box under my bed. Then as though those weren't disasters enough, a stinky mouse got to visiting my closet.

In the beginning, one had to manage. You knew someone finished off by a rat: Or maybe not by a rat but something else: the boy husband ditching him and the comrades laughing off his back. A hard blow it was that one atrophied: he could not lift his butt to get to a doctor perhaps thinking that leptospirosis seemed as good a cause as any other to die of, so there, wasn't he a spectacle, Bayan NCR sending a statement read at his funeral draped with a red flag to the effect that he elevated faggotry to respectability by getting front page coverage of their partido-officiated wedding. Wouldn't one get sick when they're dead with that.

Forswearing death and publicity, I emptied my locker out, brush brush, soak with soap and water, then padded the holes through which the little pest must have gotten in. But alas, it was only paperboard I used, so no sooner had the paste dried on my fingers than mousie got to nibbling through again. I found black dried droppings, not just under the stove and around the tipped plates on the kitchen table, but also in my box of underwears. Gutted the locker clean another time, more furious washing, then on to the mall for a mouse trap, gritting my teeth at having to succumb to another atrocious lie: some icky glue for some panicky runner to step into. Damnation: the awful invention only managed to stick in your clothes and fingers, Rattie just skittered through the whole layout and has moreover moved to the gay literature department, its litter now all over your boxes of poems, paperbacks and like perishable excretions. Poison is out of the question; unpolished brown rice mixed with chicken gravvy and Baygon? That's simply horrid, outrageous. Graceless, too, and unaccounhtably stupid, immoral. You poison kings and generals messing around your bed, not an orphan rat hiding among your treasure vault. Can't go that low, Baby.

You filed a complaint at your landlady's office, a cornerstore fronting their house, only slightly implicating her cat-hating ways. Weren't she the one who made you dispose of your teener cat at your sister-in-law's charge? “I would need wood to caulk the seams and the rot in the timber. And by the way, the ceiling, too, there's a new leak right by the peg hanging my clothes everything under the bed's wet that all I do all week is mop.” She made out like she heard, and you waited for action, but all you heard from day to day was the husband's ever rising voice, gimme this gimme that, where's my other sock, where's the food in the pot get off that rack you brat. A few days later, you'd catch her sneaking out of the gate on foot, knapsack on her back, her three-year old daughter in one hand, in the other a plastic bag. It's not cars and houses alone that make a marriage tick, you knew that, ages back.

You stayed out most nights, a way to walk out of one's own vexed life. Dust accumulated on the surfaces of things, on the caps and lids of food uneaten, on the little jars and cabinets of one's will. You got to frequenting your friend's house where chaos reigns even more supreme. A huge plush sofa occupied center stage around which everyone had to slink and bad days would be when the ex-husband and call-in father telephoned and asked who's in? In the offices, you noted that the population of laptops outranks the number of the employed, and none of them as hardworking as you once were. You excused yourself out of their sorry lives and checked into net cafés, sitting around your old haunts, sipping hot chocolate and staring at the quaintly empty street at three in the morning while the waiter and the guard slept with their heads on the nearby table. Soon you were ruining files, retyping pages here, losing a bluetooth device there, later your memory stick, then your earphones.

You walked home.

You set out to bribing the neighborhood cats. Your friendship with the lot, it so happened, stopped at your doorstep. You stooped down to pick one and they hissed and scampered around. How skittish they had become. Their wives and babies kept on disappearing: not so many folks could live with the racket they make, the rough and tumble on the ceiling, their noisy lovemaking, the crash of pots and dishpans, the devastation of the trash can. Elsewise, they're so easy to tame. Leave the door open, feed them as you eat, let them saunter around, let them sleep at your feet. Soon, they'd be in your bed, on the shelf between rows of classics, on your desk on a loose sheet, the presumptuous bastards.

You never knew what happened to the little rat. Once on your way to the bathroom, you smelled death. But of course. Five cats in a room? What rat wouldn't jump over to their end? Somehow you feel bad the sorry thing didn't die the way you would have preferred for it: in between the fangs of a merciless cat, gnawed to the bone, shred after shred.

Old Man Peter

It's just him with some of the usual failings, I know. Nothing against me. Nothing against Shirley. Nothing against anyone. My annoyance has nothing to do with what he did or did not do for his crazy wife and crazy children, but more to do with what he did not do or say for me and my crazy life. Because, of course, like him, like anyone else, I am just interested in myself and nothing else matters as much as my momentous fuckover life. And that's his fault by me. But of course, how could he, by God, with his troubles and life's emergencies, capped by a hospitalization a few months back from which he might have not emerged alive, and Shirley forever fucking the world with his money, the children he was otherwise too old to look after and do laundry and ironing for, his work in Wollongong and the human rights journals he sometimes had trouble writing for, his unwritten books and the interview transcripts which he wants to finish by himself, his friends in the movement asking for more and more of him when all he could scarcely afford really is less and less.

And so when he thought of you at all, of course, it is more as one of the many things he comes by as he tries to search hell for a way to deal with his life's toughest trial: Shirley. In what way can you help him, in what terms could you come useful, say – say to see to his affairs while he is away; to make sure that Shirley could not hurt him some more in the only way she can: financially, that is, even if he has no finances to speak of, or precisely because he has no more for Shirley to want and profit from some more. That you yourself would need anything from him, professional, political – that one never occurred to him. Once he appeared in your trial where you stood him, thanks to a nice advice from your lawyer-employer friend who didn't even know that the law to which she should be appealing your case did not apply and therefore could not help you fuck be her.

How sad that about everyone is so encumbered with the most important problem to deal with: the self; one's small life. The small self as the big burden, says Kate Millett, who was betrayed, turned in by the very friends and comrades who God knows probably were just jealous of her years her money her property and just wanted to stomp their feet, a way of reasserting parity, she had no right to think of herself an artist and shoot up by them and so they turned her in to the psychatric ward where they themselves were more than fit to be in, to be sedated and straitjacketed for life, if they knew what they deserved. That is the very function of friends, Peter said one night in the kitchen that he was making coffee as I made out to wash the dishes, Gwen smoking her life away in the veranda. To betray you. You should expect that of friends. How consoling it all sounded then. And now that is probably how he feels towards me, that I betrayed him. For allying with Shirley's fucked-upness, or at least for refusing to take his side, for refusing not to defend Shirley's Goddamnalmighty life. For refusing to make a hero of him or at least paint the good man that he undoubtedly is.

So I have this resentment against him, too, for being not thoroughly enlightened, not thoroughly socialist or feminist enough? For being a man who for all the good that was in him, did not know how to listen, is not ever capable of listening, to what is said by those who did not make history, who did not make books, who did not make or were said to be did not make revolutions?

But who is ever thoroughly anything?

Whoever is ever.

A letter home

photo by jon roberts




Dear Anna.

I'm sorry if I didn’t get you right the first time. What I get for not looking back.

Pigcawayan is a long way back and since family I was closest to -- my mother, my grandparents (two sets) and an aunt-- are all departed, there’s nothing there left that I love except the graveyard, which I heard will be bulldozed in a little time soon. High school wasn’t so happy a time for me, you know that, and I have little to connect with as far as my high school classmates and friends are concerned. I have a few good memories of people, can't remember if you were one of them. But one day, I will go back to Pigcawayan. So much of me is buried there.

When you said you’ve read all of me, it was like oh, so someone from down there reviewed my career and had taken a peep at the shape of my soul, too? that should be nice. Our country should know a bit of us before we depart, don’t you think so? But understand that I’m rather long estranged from home and I’d like to believe that I had gone continents. I am honored by your good appreciation of me but if you knew what I know, you wouldn’t like me very much. Happens all the time, even with those who swore fealty, sad planet this.

You want to know something? I don’t miss them.

I want to excuse myself from whatever it is you want of me. Besides, I love someone. She’s okay by me. The rest would be excess baggage. But more than anything else, I love my art, my writing. Beside all that she’s nothing too.

I will probably die alone, my shadow high above these walls. How glorious.

baliwasan grande, a reprise

photo by talisa





Remember the cat they dumped at our gate? Who would have thought it would survive? Then a couple of nights after, we heard it wailing among the crash of tinplanks. And then no more. That was your cat, Shi, you said into the dark as we quietly coaxed ourselves to sleep. Between the two of us, I was the one who was a streak messianic, always out to bring dead cats back to life. You were the one who always knew better, knew who will live and who would die.

Of course we never saw that cat again.

Later Gigi gave you a gun. How we laughed at it. Paltik. We said we could not fire a shot through all this rust! But how he made so much a show cleaning it. For the children to see. They liked to clamber up our fences and hang by the branches of the guava tree to watch us. You went to Zeni’s house across the street carrying the gun in your hand. That hushed them. The doctor has a gun! And even Zeni laughed, politic that she was.

Then I collared a man. How An-An shouted at them in the name of Allah. Don’t you know a little respect? She yelled. Are you doing this because she is a Christian? Later, Zeni would tell us that they went out and fired shots into the air. But I was so furious to listen and be frightened. What I felt then was, her young niece did so much better than she ever could by me. For I couldn’t remember a time when Zeni or anyone of the cadres I knew ever spoke up for me and I hated her cavalier defense of the offended distinct Moro culture. Iba kasi ang kultura ng Moro, she kept on yammering. I could have struck her if I were a rod. It was An-An I wanted to embrace and cry to, tell her that that was the first time someone ever stood by me against a tribe. But I didn’t. I was afraid she would smell my loneliness, my bereftness, and doubt me.

Soon, I would leave Zamboanga, without making leave. You said that was a good decision. I could have killed someone there, or I could've gotten myself killed. I said I couldn’t stand the quality of the anti-communist anti-Christian talk I was made to listen to. Said I couldn’t stand Moro nationhood, if that was all there is to it. Shirien would later relay to me the censure. You could have talked things out with them, he said, they would have understood, accepted any explanation you could have offered them. I did not tell him that leaving doesn’t need any reason or explanation, could not tell him that understanding and acceptance is the last that I wanted from anyone.

In Marawi twenty years later I would visit your mother and I couldn’t find the old hearth of the home I once knew. Tita Aida was forever wiping your car’s windows, forever testing your car’s battery, and I could not, for the life of me, understand why anyone in that freezing cold climate would aircondition their bedroom. I promised myself to not ever go back there and to not ever talk to you again.

Now Gigi is dead, leaving behind with me a nylon rope to make revolution with. I am honored by the gift. But I cannot even organize a forum without Gabriela’s minions barricading at the gate. How they buggered me. Had me bought and resold. Made me walk their dogs.

I feel irrelevant. I feel important.
I feel blasted, I feel blessed.

But I must have known, even then, that I will live.

A terrible fish rising

Dear Lia.

I didn’t get the job with the natdems. Maybe I will not ever again. Goodbye struggle. Goodbye rebolusyon. Goodbye Mao Zedong, goodbye marx love of my life, long live consumer capitalism. Are you through with me? Then you’re through with me. What could I do. If I didn’t get you right the first time. So here I am. In the garden, growing revolutionary petunias thinking of you and got a black eye instead.

A black eye. It sounds like a pulitzer to me. You get that, normally, for fighting a man. A natdem man maybe. Except that these aren’t normal times for me. I didn’t get into a fight. Not yesterday, not last week or last month, not in the last nine months. And that’s the hard part. That I didn’t get into a fight. That I had not been fighting. It’s depressing demoralizing. Like I’m not myself anymore. Like I’ve turned vegetable. By and by someone will again take pickings of me and steam me, sprinkle with a little salt and vinegar, spice with garlic and onions, and I am done! Deliciously done.

Yes, I am done. Finished. Hello world. Etes vous fini avec moi? Bien. Merci. Merde. I feel murdered. Am I a murder walking? No. I am ice waking. Waking everyday to everyday everydayness trying to forget it all the lost wars the unfought fights. Who was it who wrote Who will find me buried under the days? Some lesbian poet who ended up marrying a rich man I forgot her name. Maybe she does not want to be remembered the poor thing. I hate days. Their insensateness. The stupid mindless grind. Buy buy buy is all it says. Pay this pay that. The solution to every problem, be it a noisy street , a neighbor’s stinky poultry, or the unbearable heat. Before long you don’t notice anything anymore. Say how bright the light. Because you always stay home these days. And when you go out into the street you always look down, anyway. A way to keep away from trouble. Before long you don’t mind and couldn’t care anymore. How sad the country. Or how fucked up the artists, or how good the food. That’s where I had been to before I got my black eye. My hands heavy with goods. A sackful of fruits and vegetables and mushroom and asparagus and white corn. What could I be thinking? The carbonara you served for dinner? I was thinking maybe of writing about the urge to privatize. Of Tita's advice to aircondition one’s room if you don’t want toxic intrusions into your study and rest; of the rage nowadays to go on a vegie diet if one doesn't want poisoned by canned food. Or it could be that I was thinking of your saying to take care of one's self because no one else will or does. I was also thinking of the backriding eighty year-old woman I met at a durian fruitstand at Toril uplands. Wanted to grow old healthy and strong like her. A racket I know. A stupid lie. A bourgeois lie. As though one could privatize comfort, patent as one’s own the enjoyment of peace, good health, happiness. Was crazy enough to be telling myself and believing me too that one should not miss out on her macro bio diet if she wanted to keep on producing estrogen; couldn’t quite take well to the idea of an early menopause. So it was with a breath of vengeance that I picked up yesterday my weights and began on a regime of muscle-toning exercises. Something I had forgotten to do in the last two three years. I had been all flab. Sags all over. Arms, waistline, stomach. Depression. Maybe a bad diet. Malnutrition. Who cares. Then I said No. Couldn’t live for long disgusted with one’s deteriorating body. Sylvia Plath’s terrible fish rising.

Then that: I hit ground face down on the day I rose from vegetative state and took up my weights in both hands because I decided I was done with sleeping muscles I want my old strength back, defy the years if I must. It’s like being told by a niece I hardly see that You are wrong, Grandma, you’re through! You’re way way down over the hill!

To get a black eye without nobody there out to hurt you, just a day settling into night? How humiliating. To be reprimanded, berated, by no one but a slippery ground and a stupid stone on an unlighted street one evening of coming home to cook one’s dinner? Degrading.

How did that happen?

I got scared, I guess. Got nervous. Confused. So I slipped around. Took the long way through the main gate to the subdivision because I didn’t like walking through the crummy hunger-stricken squatters area weighed down in both arms by bundles of goods. Because the past weeks, I had been quite harassed by people’s niceness in the troughway and I had been wanting to slap Misay. Only twelve year old and already a bit like me: so stupid and shameless around money. "‘Te, ‘Te," the whites of her eyes glued to my grocery bags, like what makes me think I have the right to what I bought? Made the mistake of giving her a twenty, and she didn’t stop collecting twenties from day to day if she could find me. “Work, ‘Te, you have work for me ‘Te?" So last night I took the long way to get away from her and her mother and her grandmother and as I stepped up to the rickety backway gate, my supershoes which never in the past three four years of wear and tear betrayed me, gave me away. I slipped and in a sec my face hit the crumbly edge of the slab of cement that should have been a foothold.

And how's my face now?

About fine. Just a swollen brow and a swollen right eye.
The real hurt is somewhere else deep inside, in a place I still have to find.

a blind alley cat

Did I tell you I’m done with cats? Yes, I was. Until about two nights ago when, tired from a week-long work and travel between Lanao and Davao, I could not sleep in my bed because some God-damned kitten was meowing from outside my window. It wasn’t raining, so the wayside culvert should be dry, I said. If the little devil would just keep walking, she should soon find ahead of her the uncemented part that offers for her a way up the road or up to our neighbor’s fence. But she seemed such a darn stupid cat to find her way that I gave up and decided to pick her and throw her to the highway in the hope that some fucktruck ferrying illegal sand and gravel would for once put an end to her whining and wailing.

She was a foot down the culvert. Did not hiss or budge a little as I reached down to pick her. I was a little unsure about putting her inside my room as I know that people in the neighborhood, including my landlady, are getting a little sick of cats that keep on multiplying themselves. Way down the alley some houses even took to poisoning them, feeding them with food laced with Baygon. I could smell that in the air now and then as I pick my way through along our streets, and by and by, I would just notice that the population of cats standing by my doorway had drastically gone down, say from five to two. Maybe food is going scarcer hungry humans are at each other’s throats over it all the time; maybe thieving cats are an aggravation.

This one I salvaged is about three months old. Kind of cute, but for her face. I couldn’t place her family line, if she was cat or dog or hare or mouse. Looks like her face underwent several radical surgeries. I understand, of course, that it’s just the skin disease that she got for eating straight from garbage and rusty food cans. At first I thought she was Chinese I even wanted to name her Xu Xien; but closer to truth is she looks mongoloid. Perhaps I had better call her Loida, or maybe just plain Ugly Cattie.

But first thing is her survival, or she won’t have a chance at her famed nine lives. There was no food in my room, so I had her put down in the yard so that I could go out to buy from the store, but no sooner had I gotten out of the gate than she got to running and meowing after me. She would stop every a couple of yards, turning her head this way and that, like she was trying to trace which way my scent went. I hurried some more. A bit of me was hoping that by the time I came back some jealous owner had already picked her up. But it was almost eleven and the barbecue stands and roadside stores had all closed down. I returned without food and the damn kitten was still there, running to me as soon as she picked my smell.

I put her inside my room. Her eyes wouldn’t glow into my flashlight, and it looked like she was dying from malnutrition. She could hardly open her eyes, like they sunk beneath layers of dried pus, and she kept on jerking and choking on water like the feel of liquid in her mouth hurt. She had nothing but water that night, but as soon as she found a rag, she slept and never woke me until early the next morning.

I still have to find a vet to properly appraise me, if she was born blind or kids in the neighborhood had fun gouging her eyes out. They do that all the time: clip their tails; sew their limbs with wire; throw them into the canal, wrap their heads with cellophanes, prick their eyes with banana cue sticks. They’re so creative, so naturally ingenious in the fun art of torture I am all admiration for them. And I haven’t asked around as yet who could have played with this one so that I can properly thank them.

But it feels nice, annoyingly so, to have some cute thing playing around one’s feet again, at the time when you thought you are through with cute things; at the time when you thought you’re past caring about pets.

on my side of the street

I live on a street which has no name. My landlady calls it the shortcut street to Ma-a highway, which I didn’t know existed until a few days after I had settled in a room she let me for a song. I thought it was one of those blind streets you see a lot in the city’s more crowded pavements downtown where you are stopped in your tracks by some sorry boarding house or a junkyard strewn with garbage and corrugated iron. Barely finished when they started letting the rooms, the floor was unpolished, the locker unpainted the day that I looked in. I had the honor of doing the painting and the polishing myself, so of course I chose tile red for the floor and mahogany for the closet, and they do well by the white water-stained walls. I have five windows, or two pairs on the side that looks into the shortcut street, and an unpaired one on the room’s front side.

There are two sides to where I live. On the “back side” is the shortcut street, littered on both sides with makeshift shanties attached to or hanging by the back fence of a private elementary school or a big house. A morning trip to buy a packet of shampoo at the corner store is a sightful of life’s sundry details: you walk right into a family breakfasting around a small table right by a fireside with a black kettle still boiling water, half-naked men scrubbing their thighs by the wayside tap while their wives scrubbed laundry over wooden washboards, little children being dragged towards washbasins, old men squatting with cups of coffee between their knees.

The “front side” is the middle-class neighborhood of First Street whose faces you seldom see as they hardly go out of their gates on foot. Most of the houses are built tall, shaded with big trees, climate change sensitized, sotospeak, but for the controversy over the hillside development way up, not to mention the diggings for gold and lime here and there, which threatens to bury the housing subdivision in a landslide one fine day, oldtimers in the NGO circuits say. I worry, of course, mostly for the nice houses who may not outlive the trees. But I reckon that by then I’d be in Ireland making my own diggings at William Butler Yeats library, or in nearby Ho Chi Minh City, consorting with holdover commies.

By then, if my landlady’s own modest projections hold true, they would have made a two-story or three-story building in place of our humble hovel. There will be three or four rooms to a row, all bachelor’s pads, said she, which she will let at 3k apiece, twice dearer than what I pay her presently. Strange that well-married people always prefer bachelor boarders for co-occupants in the vicinity, couldn’t stand to see more of themselves, but I didn’t tell her that. What I wanted to say to her was, I reckon I can afford to rent three rooms by then, if I could still enjoy visiting rights to the country.

Projecting on you again? Please to excuse me, just my own little take at macho swagger. Did you know that in pre-Christian Beowulf hubris is amply rewarded, not severely punished? But in Catholic Ireland Yeats wrote a prayer for her daughter saying may she grow up without an opinion. I don’t know why he prayed that, maybe he wanted his daughter to be good and stupid, that she may marry properly and not be one of them disgraced divorcees. I wish Catholic men shut their big mouths up and stop bothering God and women, how thoroughly ignorant they could be. And by the way, the opposite of hubris is not humility, but grief, which according to Sappho has no place in a house with a resident poet (namely Herself). Humility is post-Christian acquisition, like wedding ring is post-marital clamp on one dirty finger. But I’ve gone a little way off your turnip heads must be going in a spin following me. I am making soup as I write this and outside it rains and children from the shortcut street are running and shouting. I stay inside, held in by the waiting for the roof to start dripping.

Yes sirs, there’s a leak in the ceiling that once every so often drips water onto my red tile floor. One fine day I will fix it, it’s just Vulcaseal or the gutter clogged with mango leaves, and will grill the windows as well. Right now I don’t want to outstyle my landlady as yet. Already she is distressed with the pots I planted with green veggies right outside my door. Not her idea of ornamental gardening, I reckon, and on days that I am gone and it doesn’t rain, I come home finding the plants drying at the roots.

In the summer of 1996

The writers’ workshop was just concluded. I was temporarily staying at André’s place with Andre still around but was packing. She was to go on leave for a doctoral degree in June and we were extemporizing about how either of us could be useful to each other’s emergencies. She was struggling to break loose or at least get a vacation from the drudgery of a marriage that momentarily fixed her there, in a house by the sea with a crumbly kitchen, and a husband who was rather busier with giving bohemian girls-friends free backrides than bringing home the bacon if you believe in tales about men bringing home bacons.

I just came back from a one-month gruel, a research for a health project to be implemented in the slums of Jolo and was still feeling my way around the idea that I shall be overseeing someone else’s thatched roof, one hobo husband, and a mangy dog somewhere down the kitchen. When here came Viktor, crawling in, his back heavy with a pack of books and maybe a few shirts.

He didn’t scratch his head or his genitals this time as he talked so, in fact he looked so decent and smelled right I felt like praying to God to bless his soul, and he said that he and Sawi had a little quarrel, thanks to the writers’ workshop that ended in a disaster of sorts. Sawi fell for this girl from the high urbs who seemed to fancy him, too. If he wasn’t another idiot, Viktor said. “Imagine leaving a girl to a bottle of beer?”

Then over and above that there was Mikki, he said. On their way home from the fellows’ party where he and Viktor mostly sat in a corner, Mikki teased him. “Guess, who danced with all the girls at the party?” Sawi cracked up that he challenged Mikki to a fight. Mikki went down on his knees, on the mud, if Viktor was not exaggerating, and clasped his hands and went “You know that I worship you, you know that I worship you.”

And that was not all.

Later that same week a friend called Grace materialized at Sawi’s door. Sawi told Viktor to clear away, and so Viktor kept to his room and let Sawi take care of Grace. A few minutes later, Sawi excused himself and went back to bed to catch some sleep. When he woke up he caught Viktor and Grace talking about old times, rather enjoying themselves. The misunderstanding with Mikki had hardly blown over and the fellows were gone but just a few days, so for a poor heart it was rather too many to handle. So Viktor thought it was best to stay away awhile, let the moment pass. André found it all so amusing and so she readily agreed, glad to be of help to the crazy poets she was rather fond of. She gave Viktor the veranda, an open-air affair of nipa roofing, bamboo walls and flooring adjoined to the main house, also an incendiary affair of nipa shingles, clapboards, and squeaky floor.

He did go back home to Sawi’s place after a few days leaving André a duffle of books. By then I had gotten into an arrangement with André. The two children were already taken to Diutay’s parents somewhere in Bacolod, Diutay would be traveling a lot between the children in Bacolod and the house and the job he held in the archives of Silliman U Lib. There was the dog to feed and the house to tend, so it would be nice if someone was there the days Diutay was away. I was given a room. It was a tacky situation: people so kind and you eat at their table and sleep close to them. Then André left and Diutay went to the children in Bacolod. Then he came home and we played housemates, he doing the cooking, I the dishwashing.

Then one uncanny morning that Diutay was away, I saw Viktor coming this way, knapsack on his back. And it felt like, Lord, the plot thickens!


High on marijuana, he jumped off from Sawi's back window landing straight into the neighbor's garden and ruining her precious ilang-ilang. The neighbor demanded eviction since he looked like he could not afford compensation. “Can I stay here awhile, Sheil? I’ll just sleep in here,” he said, indicating the bamboo divan in the veranda. When Diutay checked out on his property, of course, he was surprised there was another man in the house, though since I told Viktor early on to explain his presence, as I would not take that trouble, they did get on fine for a while. Well, the three of us did get on fine for a while, especially when Diutay played my Bob Dylan tapes, but with the three of us on our nerves’ ends most days, with money running and with sister, wife, or donor angry at the other ends of our lines, we wanted to bash each other’s skull half the time. Or at least, I wanted to bash their skulls more than half of the time. How Viktor slunk along the walls the days I left the dishes slanting on the sink.

A letter came through the wires that had the women in the English department shaking their heads. In the house by the sea, the rice bin was going empty, the dog, prone to manginess to begin with, was going unwashed as one great freeloading backriding housesitting guest took to low life and went staying out of the house as often as she could, in the company of faggots at that. Then Tonton, another once infamous poet-bum, reappeared, though thankfully this time, from rock-climbing and doing some local tourism beat for a newspaper in Cebu. So it was his turn to ask, “And have you eaten?” and took me later on to a dinner of kinilaw and sinigang.

“Did you know,” he said to me, while we were sitting at Andre's porch, “that one time I had to cut a neighbor's banana tree without asking their permission because for days I had nothing to eat?” I got so furious at that that I walked out of the house holding his hand and shouting, “I am walking with Kafka! I am walking with Kafka!” Our good-woman neighbor, seemingly happy that I had a rather good-looking long-haired canestalk of a boyfriend after all, smiled at us. We sat the night out at the boulevard, back to back. I came home in the morning with the house in a shamblier shambles and the wooden posts that held the room I was sleeping in hacked in several places. On the ledge of a closet a bolo was laid.