Enough about love

There must have been a time in your youth or childhood when, starry-eyed, you sighed and plucked words from the air as you got to the next item in your girl-friend’s slumbook: Define love. Then spent the rest of the day waiting for Mr Right?

One of the things that I hated about my mother is, she never said a nice thing about anything at all, unless she was envious. Way back in Grade School and on to Private High, my English teacher would ask me to read to the class stuff I wrote like What I Want To Be When I Am Two and Twenty or If I were a Rich Man, and I would show her my A marks, would even volunteer to read them to her, but before I could get to the fourth or fifth flourishing paragraph, she would turn her back and walk out on me saying, What do you know? I also liked carting home Barbara Cartlands I borrowed from our school lib, but again, she never praised me for being such a book reader, even when she could not even afford to buy them herself. She’s like that old ma in a CCR song who always told her star-struck boy, No no, not talk about someday because someday never comes. Always broke my heart each time.

But about this time, you can bet that I am as old and cronewise as my mother, and like her, I too have tossed most of those silly-girl ideas into the sea, or flung them back to the sky where they properly belong, that little girls may climb them. Not saying you’ll never catch me now singing the sweetest thing I found I found in you, only that, please, enough about crap, let’s talk about something else.

It’s like Ara Mina, bosoms full, gushing in an interview, I never thought I’d be like this! For I believe we all somehow started out pure-hearted, even if not always clear-headed. Then two or three decades and another car later, we find ourselves standing by our bedroom window and reaching for our second pack of cigarettes and looking into the dark and asking, Is this all?

No. It’s not about no longer loving the man of the house and the licensed driver of the new car. Neither is it about meeting someone presumably better than the one who has been sleeping with us in the last ten or fifteen years and is snoring right there arms dangling to the floor. What I’m talking about is this: That life – or love for that matter – can’t possibly be the sum total of two lives or two sorry selves together? Friend Eva R. and her American husband put it this way before they finally split ways and found other loves: He: I cannot be more than what I am! She: I cannot be less than what I am!!!

One afternoon on a walk from a hotel lobby to a resto, otherwise handsome Carlo P. said to me: The thing I don’t like about being married is it fixes you for life. People see you as that and that’s it, it's a straight cut ahead. You’re career is pre-ordained, doomed. I really don’t like married men talking, even if they’re only indirectly implicating their unsuspecting wives, but at any rate, he is partly right: To be stuck married can be a very sorry thing; why indeed be content with being a hero of one’s backyard when one can trip the world fantastic and beat windmills down, too? Besides, if truth be out, it’s not true that it’s a cruel world out there, there are just so many people to love and there’s simply not enough room for everyone, and that’s true for boys more so for girls.

What I am saying is, it’s nice to have one true love a la Juliet even if all we could get is a paltry fuck-up who thought himself your Romeo, and we will never be in want of romances to keep us glued to the old windowsill, but if life shows us another way and we soon find out that it’s a swivel door, someone enters as someone leaves, and pain is as pain goes in, don’t lose heart, be grateful.

Now we have some peace and we can clean up our room. Now we can sort the garbage and dispose of the litter of dogs. Now we can have a new pet or be done forever with pets. Now we have sole final claim to the territory that is our singularly beautiful incomparably terrible life.

Ma sorcière

Doing fifty

Never thought I’d get inside a gym. Watching girls —and boys—on their way to the fitness center, with their high-gear suits and designer knapsacks it’s like watching cutouts from Slick magazine, if there’s such a porn mag as that, or maybe, Sex in the City minus Carrie Bradshaw. They may be black belters, can lift tons, are scouring the reefs scaling cliffs and mountain borders or the moon on weekends, but they’re not my heroes. Training in self-defense under the studio lights of some state-of-the-art fitness spa is one thing; growing spine and muscles out of the daily perils of living in the rough tracks and subways is another thing. Listen to those boxing champs, ask them where they first grew their instincts for the kill: if not on the streets it’s right in their backyards, which could be the entire stretch of Boulevard or Bankerohan Underpass. Doesn’t mean got no respect for women who do away with their hairdressers and pick weights instead; where househelps can lift everything up for you, from your comb to your pee pan, and where it’s so much easier to be a cog in the machine than to rage against it, that requires some grit and will power.

Months back, a 58-year old dyke asked me, aghast, that what, dear, you didn’t know any self-defense??? My already brittle sense of self was dashed into pieces. Around that time, I had been mostly in a vegetative state: poor memory, poor body coordinates, poor chemical balance. It was ages since I last went to swim, clambered up a tree, or hiked mountains; in fact, all I counted on was the growing flab in my middle. I suppose I got depressed with the idea that my menstruation stopped rather too early and if I said to a friend I think I'm menopausal, they’d tell me to see an obgyne, might be tumor, remember you’re over 40; and if I told them I think I needed a cancer check, they’d say, it’s just menopause, remember you’re over 40. It was demoralizing, the idea that one’s being 40s is being taken against you every which way, and by Gods, please, I’m not like anyone else okay? I don’t think of aging as an inevitable confrontation with God or reality, I grew up believing that one gets better and better as one gets older, my pitched battles are yet to be fought, shame is to be the young arrival, and now you see me falling face down and getting a black eye just for heaving two bundles of groceries across some rusty stupid gate?

Then Evir G. told me about this gym he frequents for thirty pesos per session down Jacinto Street, ground floor of Dover Lanes.

“Thirty pesos an hour?”
“Thirty pesos per session, my dear, you can live there if you like.”

Well, it isn’t your classy gym steamy with hot legs and men’s mag cover types. In fact it’s so lower-income group, so working class, or maybe just working-hard class, across the board and across borders, that diverse crop whose common denominator is they feel shy or sneer at the idea of going with the yuppies in the fitness clubs uptown at Marco Polo or Torres Street, maybe akin to that section in the sex spas a gay friend in California calls the urinal where the fat unattractive faggots like him are dumped to help themselves to each other or unto themselves, except that in this case, you know that the people who are with you are way over the urinals and are down there mostly for themselves, for the one body they are left with and have to love for the rest of their lives. The equipments are a little run-down with not a timer still working, the locker room not so tidy, the comfort room not so aseptic clean, but about everything you need for your legs, arms, abs, is there.

And it was a gym crowd I could perfectly belong with I almost expected to bump into Amy B there. There’s this fat woman about my age who perfectly fitted into every contraption, could lift tons and knew how to strike the right poses; there’s this 65-year old doing stretches who must have been a yogist or a karate kid in her time, didn’t even deign return my smile, maybe because thanks to the northern light I looked young and stupid by her or I was not doing the arms and the abs right. There’s this other forty something with great long legs and well-muscled arms who spends amounts of time on the bikes and her biceps; then there are young awkward girls, older versions of me, I’d like to think, doing aerobics, trying to learn how to dance or maybe just working some more on their waistline.

My favorite? The little tykes six- and eight-year-old, at the rear of the taekwon-do class, and this young girl in early 20s, a newer version of me, I’d like to think, the lone female in a ring of five not-so-good-looking boys trying to learn kickboxing.

Ma Chatte

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.

colors of my mind

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.