Ambrosia, deadline on Wednesday
The rule for Creative Writing is "Don't Tell. Show."
So, for this narrative due on Wednesday, please comment and be specific. If you need to cut and paste lines that "tell" please do. Such lines should not tell but show the reader how it feels like to be in that experience. Please comment, and be as brutally honest as you can. I'm a tough guy. I can handle it. Here we go...
ambrosia
“Pedro Gil Station. Pedro Hill Po.” Unlike the buildings passing by this perspiring train, her photo isn’t rushing. Her photo takes its time to tell my history. Or is it herstory, not mine? …By the Doric columns of the Capitolio, a bullet killed her Maning. This lawyer came from the Lyceum, had topped the bar, and loved her by the time he befriended his killer. In the course of the funeral, she stroke the bulge in his pants and knew: she was beyond being the widow of this lawyer with a hard-on. So she dropped a few tears and saved the rest for other occasions. But before she ever was Mrs. Emmanuel Ujano, she was Miss Ambrosia Ujano... Half a century later, this photograph I hold remembers that tale of Ambrosia. This story has been texted to me by Ambrosia herself, only that she is now my grandmother Am-míe. In fact, Ambrosia is one among Am-míe’s innumerable memories, clogging the Inbox of my phone.
“U.N. Station. U.N. po.” Interrupting my reverie is the only thing this speaker ever does. In lieu of announcing the next LRT station, it forces me back into this train, which is more like a can of sardines and sweat submerging my entire body. My scowl speaks my morning’s complaints, I can’t breath in here! I’m starving Am-míe. I whine without words while looking at Ambrosia’s image on a folded sheet of bond paper. The original has been scanned, emailed, and printed; but the sepia on it remains; so does she. Before her forehead creased with lines, before the mole appeared on her cheek, and a whisker grew on that mole-in this picture, Ambrosia is my age: she smiles from a chair. Its wooden frame celebrates fauteuil relief[1]. The varnish glazes the sheen of honey on the timber. The timber bears her weight. Her weight smiles with her.[2] This picture is interrupted by the inertia of everything else, as the train meanders on the railway. This hand on the handrail retaining my balance; the other holding Ambrosia’s photo; and my eyes staring at it; my stomach beseeching me to eat-I’m proud of my body: multi-tasking just like me. In fact, these parts are the only ones awake, while my brain does all the sleeping. It pays no heed to the stench of morning from the breath of this commuter beside me. My tired brain can’t even react to this collective endeavor of everyone else’s perspiration drowning me. I haven’t even realized how on earth, during rush hour, I’ve come to hold this picture of my grandmother. Come to think of it, that’s the reason-rush hour. And here it goes again, this picture remembering for me… That night, Ilocanas[3] across the seven towns beheld royalty enjoyed just by Crisologos[4]. These women applauded, their minds undressed from worries about the Saka-saka-beasts who could rape them while shooting their husbands, plunder their poultry, or burn their houses. That night, no Saka-saka could seize the attention which Ambrosia already commanded. The peasants didn’t mind her throne carved as a provinciano’s imitation, much like those dining chairs sold with hammocks near Monumento Station, which reminds me… Have I missed D. Jose? Shit…one more late and I’m done for! My toothache begins as it faithfully does whenever I panic in pain. The pain thumps my veins and temples. Even that billboard is pulsating. Wait! …billboards?
“Central Station. Central Terminal ho.” I didn’t expect this relief from a rotting speaker unit in this sweat fest called Yellow Line.[5] I look at the picture again. I never thought that Ambrosia from the picture is actually the Am-míe I knew-done with retirement and menopause. But I’ve never known Ambrosia, simply because I wasn’t born yet the night she was enthroned. I’ve heard of her when Am-míe talked about herself, Ambrosia means foods for the Gods darling! But the name is just as myth as this picture. This photograph should have been sepia. But somehow other colors found their way-to her gown, her throne, her sash, her lips. And the lips look like the sketch of a red My-Gel pen. Compared to pictures of me that always reveal my pimples, her photo has erased Ambrosia’s dimples. This picture renders her in such a whiteness, that all she needs is a poisoned apple. In this picture, she is so without flaw; the perfection itches my face. Actually, Am-míe’s complexion is like rice hulls during harvest, summer, and sunset. Oh, rice…My stomach whines again. I realize my wits have come around after a night’s stupor. I come from the night before. I come from three cappuccinos, nine hours, and Americans hanging up on me. This morning, I am a student on the LRT-1. I am headed from one city to the next city, to the station, Doroteo Jose. From this station and one pedicab away, it could be that Room 104, seven A.M., and Asian Literature are waiting to fire me. At the thought of the homework I have not begun but due in twenty minutes, staring at my grandmother’s photo is certainly not helping. But the picture of Ambrosia smiles as if I have not missed my breakfast, as if an F.A. doesn’t endanger me, as if the class won’t be interrupted by the nudge of the door as I enter. But I can guarantee Ma’am Tanlayco will notice. She will look at me then look away, raise her eyebrows and smirk. She will have none of anyone’s tears or sorry’s, much like Ambrosia. When her daughter had grown her hair and breasts, Ambrosia locked the doors one night when this daughter missed the curfew. I may arrive in class after the grace period. If it means Ma’am Tanlayco’s dharma[6] is to scold me, so be it. Shame and I have gotten along quite well anyway. But when Ambrosia as a child was scolded by her teacher, this girl that was to be my ancestress widened her eyes, and spurted her dignity at the schoolteacher’s face, “Oki!”[7] All this musing amuses me; my lips can’t help but stretch. Passengers are staring now. So I bow my head to excuse myself… …only to look at the picture again. Oh how it smiles! It smiles the dress at me. Ambrosia wears a Maria Clara, the same style-another remembrance-Imelda donned, the day she was stabbed in public. After seventy-five stitches, Imelda Marcos later bemoaned how someone should kill her with “something so ugly. They could have at least tied a ribbon.” I don’t remember the color, but Imelda’s Maria Clara gown does remind me much of siopao. I wander, “bola-bola or asado?” as I speculate which of these Ferdinand Marcos served Floro Crisologo in the Malacañang. The congressman did not become a warlord to be fed that way: “What’s this? We’re in a palace… and siopao only?” Then, in 1970, Floro Crisologo had just stood up at Sunday mass to receive the Eucharist, when a gunshot cracked his skull. I still crave for siopao though. My stomach still hungers. On the night she wore her Maria Clara, Ambrosia had no complaints. She remains enthroned modeling that costume in Tamarisk pink. From her low neck-line and butterfly sleeves, the sheen of the Tamarisk flows through the silk embracing her torso. The pink streams down, pouring itself to the hems draping her legs, plunging at the photo’s edge. But the pink lessens my appetite. I was five when the syrup was pink. But it never tasted like cotton candy. Still I swallowed it so Am-míe could scratch my back, so I could sleep the fever away. Her nails smelled of manicure as I felt the weight of my eyelids. But I peeked at the lines on her forehead. I saw her mole bearing a whisker; her eyes, their eves from Japan; her nose that snubbed her housekeepers-I saw Am-míe’s face that smiled as I dreamed of dolls-all these betrayed the youth subdued by her sixty-eight years of age. Still this Ambrosia survives in Am-míe’s dimples: Am-míe is sixty-eight years young. My stomach is whining for food, but that’s not my hunger anymore; that’s my appetite, vanquished by the pink and the sweat of everyone else. In lieu of starvation, I’d rather think of food than eat it. My memory tastes the fruit colored yellow and green, flavored milk and ripe lemon. It hang on the mango tree. Beside it, the bungalow had a porch filled with pots of greenery and vines, thriving as if these plants were a house themselves. A garden flourished with Doña Aurora, five fingers, guava, San Francisco and pots of asparagus. And the mango tree. Beside it, I held the hollow blocks scattered in the garden. The rubble felt of gravel and limestone that scraped my palm, much like the rubble which my great grandmother Lili Cole aimed at my grandmother Am-míe. While I played with my castle of hollow blocks, Lili Cole and Am-míe swore, “Okin’nam!”[8] at each other outside the bungalow. The rubble could shatter both heads of mother and daughter quarreling before me. This was Panay,[9] not a barangay, but a house, a garden and two quarreling women. Am-míe’s eyes yelled with her mouth and dared her mother to hurl the stone. But the eyes in that memory are not those in this picture. Here, her eyes are beaming with her mouth. On Ambrosia’s sash is an inscription: Wisdom. The letters seem handwritten, as the printing press devoted itself to Bannawag[10]; not on the beauty pageants that she won. On the photo itself, someone I don’t know had scribbled a declaration: Miss Ilocos Sur 1950. Nine… Nineteen-fif… Ah yes! I remember… Floro Singson Crisologo, congressman from 1946 until the assassination; his wife, Carmeling, provincial governor; their son Bingbong and his private army, Saka-saka-they forced the farmers to sell their tobacco to the Crisologos’ Fortune Tobacco Company. Floro was the scourge to the Ilocos, but not to Emmanuel Ujano, the lawyer.
“Next station: Carriedo. Carriedo Station po.” Am-míe once told me I looked like Emmanuel Ujano, her Maning, my grandfather. But the poblacion knew me as the balásang ni doctora[11] who strutted with five feet-of jeans with slits, of an emerald blouse, and his hair tied in a chignon[12]-and five inches of clogs. At twenty years old, I walk past the tricycle drivers who tease me, “How ‘bout a kiss, miss?” I answered, “Not today boys!” And they’d laugh with me. If that was Mamáng they bantered with, she would have spat at them. She did this during highschool, also the time when she cut the hair she needed as the crowned Miss Panay. She paid for it when she knelt down by the bed. Her mother Ambrosia scourged her with a belt. Someone would always ask me the question, “Why not join pageants like your grandmother and mother did? You could win, you know.” I would answer, “I don’t have to.” The truth is, Mamáng dissuades me to, “You don’t have to prove anything.” Well Ambrosia proved it, giving Emmanuel Ujano reason to forbid her from breastfeeding their daughter near his men friends. “You might as well show your pussy!” When no one else was there, she protested against his demands. “Why do you treat me this way?” Her Maning answered, “Don’t you like it gaga when I love you so?” Ambrosia was his niece. Her Maning had adored her before, during, and after his term as student president. Once, when his professor refused to hand over a letter from Ambrosia, Maning raged to his dormitory, returned with a revolver, and shot the old man. The lawyer Faustino Tobia helped him out of the case. When he and Tobia were friends, her Maning had topped the bar and Ambrosia had borne him two mestizas: the newborn Jane was a headache from the day she was born, to her elopement with a drug addict, to the ruin of her lungs and to the night when she vomited blood and died; at three, the firstborn, Mamáng, frowned when her father forgot to bring her a parasol. During this time, Faustino Tobia, who had stolen a chicken and killed the owner, pleaded with Emmanuel Ujano to defend him in court. The lawyer refused. What a fortune that Mamáng was born before Emmanuel Ujano died, otherwise I wouldn’t be looking at this photo in its hues of sepia, like the sepia of cascarón[13] I would buy in the marketplace by the river, while the butchers decapitate the calves. The banks mixed with the clay and the offal when Ambrosia was twenty-nine years old, and was heaving her bay-ón[14] amid throngs in the marketplace. Her Maning had asked her to cook bagnet and pata for his return from Vigan. In the confusion of Iloko and Spanish patois, a nun showed up in front of her, “Oh Ambrosia! Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what, sister?”
“Why! Maning’s been shot!”
That morning when the jeepney dropped him off, her Maning walked toward the marble steps of the Capitolio. He heard someone from behind “Hello Attorney.” Two shots of 45 caliber blasted the aorta of Emmanuel Ujano.
“D. Jose Station. Doroteo Jose.” A train’s sliding door, a station, and two plights of stairs later, I hail a pedicab driver. The man has the size of a carabao. His veins redden his eyes piercing my contacts. He charges me 30 pesos. The price in his eyes shuts me up that I can’t argue. I’m late and I have no choice… There goes my siopao. I retain my silence, meaning my safety. More like shame, actually. It means I won’t get hurt just by not saying a word. I’m afraid I will never be like Ambrosia. In preschool, she swore at her schoolteacher. In college, her boyfriend killed a professor for her. Years after college, she buried a husband, then later, a daughter. Years after the burial, she would sit by the table for breakfast. Then her eldest grandchild, a macho Jaubey,[15] would brush his fingers on her nipples. But Am-míe wouldn’t mind. In fact, she would tease him in return, you’d never make me as happy as my Maning would! Then she told that story when she touched good-bye her dead husband’s hard-on during his funeral. The memories conjured by Ambrosia’s photo conveyed what Am-míe possessed, yet had long ceased being mine… the day I fell from the bed. I shut my eyes when the parquetry[16] echoed the thud. I didn’t hear the thud. The thud was me. I opened my eyes and saw Mamáng’s words, “Mm… Kitám? (See what you’ve done?)” She stared at me as she waited for a reply from me and not from the walls that stared at me also. Her look meant I didn’t have to fall. Or that I could have but she never should have seen it. It meant I should have tried my best to land on the bed. Please stop looking at me Mamáng! I promise I will never look at myself again![17] In the manner that didn’t make her forget the belt scourged by her own mother, Mamáng introduced me to shame, I didn’t even know the word. I didn’t feel shame. The shame was me. This shame prevents me from questioning the pedicab driver, a moron for dropping me off at P. Noval when, earlier, I said Dapitan. Behind the Benavides monument pointing at FEU, the Big Ben strikes ten after seven at my conscience: Forget “The Jujube Fruit” homework! Five more minutes and you’re failed! I break into a run along the Santissimo Rosario’s sidewalks. By the botanical garden, I ask Big Ben the time but the foliage blocks everything on the roof deck. Instead, the roof deck looks at me. Since 1953,[18] de la Barca has never dropped that compilation of “La vida es sueño” revisions. Four storeys below him, my handouts slip from my fingers of sweat. A confetti of Xerox copies fall on the tarmac. After smelling the tarmac and picking them up, I clutch them in my armpit. Ever since Monti carved that plume, it has never escaped Shakespeare’s hand. Below him, the Panda pen has not escaped my teeth so it won’t fall as I sprint for St. Raymund’s Building. St. Agustin raises his Bishop’s staff for the baptized flock. Beneath him scrambles a lost sheep in the form of an AB student. Facing España, Hope raises his arms for a plainchant, remembering his first year when, below him, Ambrosia’s grad portrait was posted by Juan de la Cruz for all Dominicans and Thomasians to see[19]; Faith raises the Cross that had blessed Mamáng when she graduated from Medicine; but Charity is distracted from his beggar-the Tria Haec witness me. I am the third generation in half a century of Ambrosia’s lineage. Yet below Dante Alighieri, I scamper like swine possessed by Legion from the nine circles of hell; Moliére could write me a satire if he wasn’t made of stone.
[1] A fauteuil is a chair with armrests, an upholstery on the seat and seat back, its frame of wood ornamented with relief carvings.
[2] Ilocana, a woman from the Ilocos.
[4] The family of then Congressman, Floro Crisologo, a friend of Marcos.
[5] The Manila LRT Yellow Line, the first metro line of the Manila Light Rail Transit System, popular as LRT Line 1. As the name implies, the line is colored yellow on all LRT maps.
[6] The professor teaches Asian Literature, including the Hinduism of India. One of its doctrines is dharma, or duty: you don’t question the morality of it. You just do it.
[7] Iloko for pussy.
[8] Another Iloko profanity involving the mother.
[9] Panay Sur, one of the thirty barangays of the municipality Magsingal, Ilocos Sur.
[10] Bannawag (Iloko for "dawn") is the magazine that has been released every week since 1937. It has been acknowledged as a foundation of Iloko literature since the 1900s. An Ilocano proves himself a writer when Bannawag publishes his short stories, poetry, comics, essays, or serializes his novel.
[11] The doctor’s maiden daughter.
[12] A bun of hair tied at the nape of the neck; or simply, hair tied into a bun for people my age.
[13] Ground starch rolled and covered with dried brown sugar. It looks like Chow King’s Bochi.
[14] A woven basket made of strips of bamboo skin, each strip was painted with a color. This basket is often used in an Ilocano market.
[15] He is macho because he has a farmer’s complexion, a wrestler’s volume. He beat his younger brother Jep for getting expelled from school,. He strangled his sister Ria for having a girlfriend.
[16] Wooden tiles
[17] Papá also looked at me when he caught me playing with a doll. Not a word. He just stared. I scrounged for an explanation or a lie that I could believe in, but even my words failed. After twenty years of memory, I still remember Papá word after word as he would swear, curse, and blaspheme. But when he looked at me for playing with a doll, his silence gave tongue to everything he did not say. Papá just walked away.
[18] Francesco Ricardo Monti, a professor at the UST College of Fine Arts and Architecture from 1948 to 1958, erected the statues on the Main Building in 1953.
[19] In 1954, Juan de la Cruz studio was the Official Studio for UST Education Graduates.