11
11
The storybooks I possess were always pro-family, so they were unisex, that patriarchal ideology allowed them for me. Such literature were all kept upstairs in The Garret, my room with a varnished floor of timbre, confined by wooden walls painted alabaster bearing white windows and covered by a white wooden ceiling that never leaked during past typhoons in my life prior college. My room was shaded by a galvanized roof painted dirty white. During sunset, I’d climb the window and sit on the roof and dream of the life of Song Verona, as I looked at the sunset and the rest of Magsíngal: the roofs in the neighborhood and the dreamers on them, the centuries-old belfry beside the museum, previously the church that Diego Silang had burned during the revolution, the municipio with its gorgeous fountain, and the new church blocked from view by trees' foliage, nonetheless discernible by its neon-blue cross in solid luminosity amid the indistinct haze of twilight.
A twenty-minute drive from Magsíngal was Vigan, home of brick roads, Spanish houses, grand azoteas, and the majority of my mestízo crushes. Now a city, it is divided by Quezon Avenue into two: the East side and the West side. Unlike the East side’s elite ambience frequented by movie shootings of Noli Me Tangere and other period films, the West side had the modern buildings, only a few traces of Spanish structures whose inhabitants weren’t even European but Chinese. During the Spanish occupation, Vigan was divided between the mestízos and the Indios, which explained the demarcation line, Quezon Avenue. This calsada ended infront of Simbaan a Bassit, The Small Church, near my favorite place in Vigan: Women’s Clinic.
Even since Vigan was still a town, Marissa Oandasan owned the clinic near Simbaan a Bassit. It was a rented unit in the Romdaris building on Rizal Avenue. My curiosity always caught up with me as she did her gynecologist diagnoses to her patients.
As the pregnant woman lay wide open on the patient’s bed, her duster all rolled up and her panties off, Marissa Oandasan’s gloved hand would put her fingers together the way it forms the head of Donald Duck. And whether the patient was ready or not, Donald Duck swung so smoothly in the air and thrust itself unblocked inside the cave, until my jaw would drop to see half of Marissa Oandasan’s forearm inside the patient’s vagina. Of course, the patient would cringe in pain. This sneak preview of discomfort provided enough reason to be thankful for not being a woman.
Everytime I get out of the clinic door I as always welcomed to the outside world by the cemetery at the other side of the road. It was hidden from view by a white wall, but the sepulchers were piled-more-than-one on top of the other-so high that the wall’s concealing function appeared blatantly questionable. This cemetery was adjacent to the Simbaan a Bassit, where, rumor has it, Monique Wilson played the raped nun Maria Clara who sung Pinagbigkis kang ligaya at lupit with a continuous flow of her tears, yet hitting the high note without lip-synching.
12
Women’s Clinic stored my earliest memories of Star TV, especially the Aerobics shows where women who wore bathing suits with rubber shoes treated aerobic dancing like performances. While Marissa Oandasan performed her diagnoses, I did my own observations on television, where there was Small Wander that enamored me to the robot Becky, and eventually, Charlie’s Angels, post-Farrah Faucet. I loved the series, the way I loved a TV Show with a female figure with curves and long hair in it. I despised all-men shows. For me, there simply had to be a woman in the movie, just as a woman was indelible throughout my youth, as undeletable and ineluctably there as Marissa Ujano.
One night, in my sleep, I was surrounded by spider webs. To the right was a spinning wheel. The century-old bed, the cobwebs looming on everything that included me-all these in away in a garret perched on the crest of a tower rising from the legendary castle besieged by deep and labyrinthine forests of thorns-a morbid spectacle guarded by a fire-breathing dragon that threatened the grandeur of inferno.
Suddenly, someone, who presumably overcame the obstacles, opened the door of my royal attic. He was coming to wake me up from a hundred years of solitude and comatose. I would be redeemed by the kiss of true love. And before my hero’s lips could land on mine, somehow a reflex woke me up and made me realize: the knight in shining armor for whom I awaited a century: He was a woman! To my utter repugnance at her audacity to kiss me, I yelled, "Malandi kang brrruha ka!" and I caused some internal bleeding in her face as my heavy palm slapped her left cheek…
It reminded me of my lost chances at love-being unrequited most of the time-and the agony of having to wait for the one to come.
Song Verona, however, never waited. Though it was clear that his was as unrequited as mine, he wrote a poem that marked him as the lover who would never be forgotten so easily…
Once you’re done dreaming
of people,
of ambition,
of places you’ve never been
or things you haven’t seen;
the perfect life,
the perfect love,
the perfect one-
-once you awake,
once you come back
to this imperfect world where I belong,
open your eyes to find me waiting,
earnest for a stir, a sigh, a sign of waking. I’m
waiting for your return. I
don’t know if you can hear me
or if you’re even there.
Still
for, because, and with you
I exist to come true
once you’re done with dreaming.
Because, though I’m not perfect,
at least, you can be sure:
I’m real.
~
A woman’s kiss definitely insulted my memory of my unreturned affections. So even in that dream, I was furious. I had to slap her.
Then I was welcomed back to reality by the appalled face of Marissa Ujano-her hand rubbing her poor left cheek, her eyes wide open signaling her flabbergasted self-esteem. She was stupefied by her ungrateful son. She had become a the victim of his impossible dream. I was certain that this awkward moment took her by surprise, as I was petrified by the unforgivable crime of slapping the woman who fornicated with my father to give me a taste of this world.
However, this was only one of the few surprises Marissa Ujano had in her life.
However nothing compared to another surprise on that fateful night in 2004 when I was no longer dreaming: Marissa Ujano was in the middle of her campaign speech for mayorship in some barrio, and her opponent stormed the hall with his scoundrels carrying guns aiming them at her. Blood was not unusual in politics… That’s enough!