A Study in Glitter and Death

I.

The idea of love was a constant preoccupation from the time I was old

enough to understand the story of Lancelot and Guinevere trapped between

the pages of my first chapter-book. This strengthened when I watched Beast

giving Belle a library of her own, and Thumbelina and Cornelius skimming

their toes across the surface of ponds, and oh, how I wanted a Beast, or a

Cornelius of my own. And, eventually, I would think to find them in different

ways, throughout the years of my childhood and adolescence, first

rhapsodizing over them in the diary I started, clumsily, when I was seven and

it took me half an hour to labor over a single paragraph.

I rejoiced during playtimes in kindergarten whenever we were able to

commandeer the small, rickety nipa hut in the corner of the playground,

because Miguel always came running in from the swings, clambering up the

few steps to play bahay-bahayan with us. I was always the mommy, and he

was the daddy, and we had two children, a dog, and a yaya. Our interaction

was limited: as the father, he stayed only for the breakfast I served our small

family on small pieces of paper torn from our notebooks, and then drove off

to work, the office conveniently located near the swings. And yet, cocoons

unfurled, sending millions of fluttering wings dancing all over my nerves –

and I never knew what these meant, always just reveling in the fact of our

marriage until the ringing of the bell, sharp and tinny, promptly put an end to

the whole affair.

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 Today, other boys’ names jump out at me as I read the pages of my

diaries, edged with decorative lines and lined with crisp black letters: Martin,

the boy I saw at Sunday mass, every week without fail. He kept my sense of

Catholic-schoolgirl guilt active, because I found no way to listen attentively,

to pray, when he was a few pews ahead of me. Jolo, a boy from the village

with whom I exchanged over a thousand text messages with every few days,

a brief affair that lost its intensity almost as quickly as the fading of the

summer heat. Justin, with whom I had danced, slowly, to “The Nearness of

You”: the two of us virtually indistinguishable in the crowd of adolescents.

A professor told us that Romeo and Juliet had to die for theirs to be a

timeless, celebrated romance, passed from generation to generation like a

talisman, an ideal. Their love was only as truthful as it was short-lived. I was

always secretly relieved when these little affairs amounted to nothing, just

brief memories that I could laugh over later on, when, years later, I could

palpably feel the old, worn, giddiness as I read and imagined. I imagined

myself to be in love, when I was in the fifth-grade (despite the fact that

Martin and I had only had slight contact), and I imagined what it would be

like to be kissed in high school. Everything - the jittery feelings, the slow

curling of heat in my stomach, sending shivers all the way down to my toes -

was important insofar as it was in the imagining, written down, like the tales

ending with happily ever after.

And I imagine everything to be much like the golden statues that were

fashioned after the lovers, as Shakespeare tells it: glittering sharply, briefly

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in the rays of sunlight that pass over it, then forgotten in the other things

that catch our eye, the skyline of the city, a handsome man, a crying child.

II.

I am not sure how old I was then – but I do remember that I was young

enough that I was allowed to venture outside the house that day in a thin

sando and red flowered shorts bought cheaply from Divisioria. Ate Annabelle

refused to let me and Patty, my younger sister, change out of the sandos we

wore every day under the blouse of our school uniforms because she said it

was a waste of laundry, when we had just worn it for half a day, and so I

remember that I was young enough to merit only half-days of school.

I also remember it was late afternoon because Patty, Gabby, and I had

been allowed to venture out on our own to the park, four streets down from

ours, an hour earlier. I remember that it was a hot day, because when Gabby

pressed his head against my shoulder, while we were walking back, I could

feel the beads of perspiration that molded wisps of hair to his forehead. We

were hungry, and wanted merienda, and so, we walked back without anyone

being sent to the park to pick us up.

I remember hearing yelps, high pitched squeals as we neared the

house, and men speaking loudly to each other in Filipino, and our slippers

raised dust from the gravel as we hurried, hands reaching out to grasp each

other, as my sister, with her free hand, rattled the gate. It was locked - but

the top half was composed of white columns, around three inches across,

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spaced equally apart, and we were all tall enough to see through them and

remember.

I remember construction workers from the house being built next door,

clad in faded jeans, and loose shirts of varying colors surrounding a sack that

had previously contained rice as the red letters on the front proclaimed. It

was squirming, although one of the men was holding it by its knotted top,

tied firmly with straw rope wound around and around. It was squirming and

yelping, and I was a child, but the keening cries of pain and death tore into

my ears, the first time I had ever heard those come from our terrier,

imaginatively named Terry, and I knew, I just knew that he was screaming,

writhing in the sack as another man struck him again and again and again

with a block of wood, long and thick enough to be held comfortably and

cause such pain.

I forgot about my sister and my brother, both younger than I was then,

both beside me, all three of us with our faces pressed against the bars and

screaming so loudly you could no longer tell his cries from ours, so loudly

that we drowned out the dull sounds of wood meeting flesh.

I don’t remember what happened afterwards, what we screamed, if we

begged them to stop, how long we stood there – did we stand there,

clutching the bars of the gate, until someone saw us and dragged us away?

Or did we witness everything down to the last drawn-out cry, the moment

when the sack went limp and the man holding the wood finally lowered his

arm, breathing heavily from the force of his exertions?

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 Later on, after I had succeeded in relegating it to the dust of the

memories that gathered in my mind, my Dad handed me a sheaf of papers

containing I had written when I was very young. In the many badly-written,

misspelled, ink-stained pages (and one small notebook in which I had

chronicled my first-grade musings) was a sheet of paper torn from a VECO

stenography notebook, crisp and white, still, with a notation penned at the

end, in my father’s crisp, decisive printing. There, I had written a short piece

against animal cruelty because even animals need to be loved, especially

pets. I had entitled it “For mY pet DOG.” My handwriting was awkward and

ungainly, my feelings badly-expressed and trite, the paragraph filled with

grammatical errors and misspelled words, but Dad kept it, not only because I

had written it, but because he told me that it was something that had to be

remembered.

III.

When I was younger, I often sat, enraptured, on the wooden tiles of my

parents’ bedroom as Dad, speaking with variations in tone and inflection,

recounted the day he and Mom first met. My eyes used to widen

considerably at the thought of Mom, clad in a power suit with shoulder pads,

running across the room, hairpins falling, in pursuit of the man she believed,

at first sight, she was going to marry. I imagined Dad with more pepper and

less salt in his hair leaping across chairs, clambering on top of the

refrigerator, spilling trays of food as he ducked in between tables, his hard

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work amounting to nothing, when, finally, Mom cornered him under the

mounted electric fans and trapped him inside a brown sack she whipped out

of her purse. I thought of Mom, kicking off her heels to make her job easier,

as she lugged him to her car and dumped him into the trunk, and how scared

my Dad must have been on the drive to Arellano, and how he stared around

him, bemused and bruised, when my Mom finally let him out of the sack and

announced to her family that he was her fiancé.

This retelling gave birth to my notion of the Great Love Story – a

genetic trait that ran in both the Go and del Rosario bloodlines, one that my

maternal and my paternal grandparents passed on to their children, and

perhaps, someday, to me. On nights when even my Dad’s lullabies, humming

interspersed with whistles and occasional lyrics, and pik-pik failed to put me

to sleep, Mom and Dad would take turns telling me the stories of their

parents, wildly romantic, fit to be turned into a movie script by Walt Disney

or written down in a book, like the novels stacked by my Mom’s bedside.

I think of my maternal grandparents - the wink of Angkong’s Rolex

caught in the sun, in a window high above the bustling streets of Cebu, in the

days when Coca Cola was worth only five centavos. I think of Ama, still

Rosalinda then, dressed in the gray skirt-white shirt-gray tie combination

indicative of the San Juan Recoletos college, where she studied pharmacy,

walking home to the small house she shared with her large family. I think of

the improbability of a forty-five year old Chinese businessman falling in love

with a seventeen year old girl barely out of the schoolroom. I imagine him,

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staid and businesslike, offering her parents enough capital to start a

pharmacy in exchange for her hand in marriage, and his signature in black

ink across the marriage contract. And of him, years later, kissing his child-

bride before leaving for work, and calling her, affectionately, “Linda aku,”

while their children slept on in the early morning

In Pampanga, I see my Lolo Ato, hair slicked back with pomade,

dressed in a thin button-down shirt, driving slowly along the dusty roads to

visit friends in a nearby barrio. I see my Lola Ima, face smooth and unlined,

hair waved in the fashion then, walking, carrying a number of bundles and

baskets. I imagine him offering her a ride, and she, turning him down,

because a girl considered to be the prettiest in her community did not just

accept a stranger’s courtesy in those days. I imagine my Lolo Ato, running

around Lola’s dormitory, surrounded by an abundance of plants and flowers,

in a hot Manila night, shouting for her, as the guard dog, unused to male

intruders, nipped at his heels, barking furiously. I imagine him, forgetting his

exertions and the shirt that clung to his back, as the ice cream slid down his

throat like icy threads and saw the look on her face, the first time she had

ever tasted ice cream, their first date, and I think of how he proposed

marriage three dates later.

Hearing one, or both of these stories kept me sleepless far into the

night, nowhere near the intent with which they were told, and when I finally

fell asleep, I did so with the certainty that one day, the gene would surface,

dominant, in my life.

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IV.

Pain is what we remember, more than anything else – I remember a

friend telling me this, when I caught sight the criss-cross inflammations on

the inside of her forearm. I remember, too, asking her why she did that to

herself – shouldn’t she then keep a monument to her happiness, as small

and frail as it was? I remember her smiling, a little sadly, as she told me, “It’s

commemorative, you know. It reminds me that I haven’t cut deeply enough.”

Laughably, what flashed through my mind was the image of another friend’s

forearm, years before, in the sixth grade, when it had been the fashion

among our class to write and draw little things in the same place. There was

a technique to it – pressing deeply enough that the tip of the pen scratched

against your flesh, leaving not only traces of ink, but a slight raise in the

flesh that could be read easily but stung when you touched it.

Everything passes, I told her, forcing the memory out of my mind.

Hurting more won’t take away the root of the problem.

And then, a year or so later, the day came, and it was like a blade,

tracing the first of deliberately-drawn lines on the delicate skin of my wrist.

That day, I learned that heartbreak is the farthest thing from the truth, that it

feels more like rough hands grasping frantically at your heart, twisting it

tightly, gripping it, in an effort to stop the pumping of arteries, the

movement of blood. But this is never so: I walked to class, clutching at the

arm of a friend, a flush spreading over my face as hot tears slid into my lips,

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spreading salt in my mouth, and, later that night, as I struggled to write, how

much more eloquent the page would be if the tearstains on it could

remember for me.

I remember that day, and I wonder what my Dad thought the times he

answered a ringing phone and heard his oldest daughter gasping for breath

on the other end, in an effort to control her tears, and what he thought to

say when she broke down. “Anak,” he always began, in the middle of my

attempts to speak. I remember. “Anak.” Speaking as if this reassurance of

our ties could serve as stitches, black thread threaded through the eye of a

silver needle, a way of restoring what was now fragile, attempting to reverse

what a good friend had the sense to tell me, you are broken.

On a day that had been particularly nerve-wracking, when the tiniest

word could destroy the composure I had wrapped around myself, a group of

my friends, all girls, visited me at home and brought me a cake, still in its

bright red box. I remember sitting among them, silently, in the living room of

my apartment, and listening to them speak, occasionally nodding when they

asked me a question. Someone pushed a fork into my hand, and I gripped it

loosely, nudging it downwards along the side of the cake to appease them.

I chewed and swallowed. It tasted sweet, and I told them so. I thanked

them for coming, and became the recipient of many hugs, before they all

left. I sat down again and saw the imprints of the fork, the outline of its tines

against the dark frosting, and I thought of lines crossing an arm, and the

attempts to write lines since it happened, marvelling at the incongruity of it

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all: I had received a cake – one we, singing and laughing, had often given

others, with candles stuck in the frosting - to commemorate the first time I

had ever experienced pain in such a boundless, limitless way, and I wrote it.

I remember that every time a twinge of pain, sharp and white-hot, like

a jolt of electricity, went through my body, palpable though not like flesh-

wounds, every time a song brought tears to my eyes or I saw the look on my

sister’s face as she entered the small bedroom we shared, and found me,

crying, day after day, every time, I took a pen and filled lines in a journal

with my small, neat, handwriting, attempting to capture in dotted i’s and

crossed t’s what it felt like to have papers to pass, classes to attend,

conversations to make when you were frozen in time, what it felt like to hurt.

I remember paging through the black, leatherbound notebook every day to

remember what I had previously written, and every line, every page

completed was another cut, angry and inflamed, another bruise, different

shades of color mingling with flesh, a way to remember, always.

V.

When we are children, it becomes easy to believe the things our

parents tell us, because they keep the truth out of the equation, leaving only

the gleam of gold and the heady scent of sampaguita flowers, much like fairy

tales that end right after the characters fall in love, until they, or life, deems

it a necessary evil.

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 Now, I wonder if my Ama stared blankly up at the ceiling while

Angkong forced himself inside her, perhaps a few days after he signed the

check that gave her parents money for a pharmacy. I wonder if tears welled

in her eyes, if she bit her lip to keep from crying out in pain and displeasing

him. I wonder if she sat up slowly, afterwards, or lay in bed, limply, as he

dressed himself, or if she had a journal she had written things in, like me. I

wonder what she could have written. And I wonder if she realized that

something in her had been torn apart, destroyed by her husband-to-be, if her

dreams had fallen away the first time he thrust. If she thought of the

pharmacy her parents built with money he had given them, and of her

textbooks in pharmacy, gathering dust, the words on the pages now

meaningless. I wonder what she felt the day the first stirrings of life caused

her to shiver, to lay a hand, wonderingly, on her womb.

Or if my Lolo, lost in a drunken stupor night after night after night,

realized that every single dream of their marriage his wife had built, layer

upon shimmering layer, filled with home-cooked meals and money enough

for clothes, disappeared every time she felt his side of the bed sag as he

collapsed on it, early in the morning, stinking of beer and cigarettes. I

wonder if she gasped, if thoughts of leaving him crossed her mind, the time

he flung plates angrily at the wall, to shatter into millions of pieces, the

shards flying across the room, falling across the couch, one of them

embedding itself in the cheek of their youngest son. I wonder if she thought

about these things, back turned to her class, as she wrote the day’s lesson

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on the blackboard, dust from the chalk shimmering on her clothes, if she

thought about having to go home to a family of seven children, headed by a

drunk.

When we are children, our parents want us to know that the glitter of

gold caught in the sun is beautiful and something to be wondered at, an

image to shimmer in our minds until we are compelled to write. Most of us

are lucky: these younger memories written, when read years later only bring

its author amusement, a reminder that these actually happened. It is only

later that we find that when we stare too long into the flare, flames lick at

our eyes, and we may become blind, that it will become impossible to see

the page as we attempt to chronicle our loss – and yet, the day may come

that another bright gleam will revive the spark that was once lost, and allow

us to see once more.

Writing this, I remember the tears that sprang to Mom’s eyes the day

she told me how much Ama mourned when Angkong left their family to

settle permanently in Canada, how the smoke from the red-lit tip of Ama’s

cigarette wafted in the air, obscuring her face in the same way that tears

affected her vision, as she told her children, “Ngayon kung kelan ko

natutunan mahalin ang Papa niyo, ngayon pa niya ako iniwan.” I remember

my aunts telling me how my Ama smiled the day before she died, even with

tubes in her veins and in her nostrils, because she said their father had

visited them.

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 I remember well the first torrent of tears my Lola shed, halfway

through my Lolo’s funeral mass, the moment she realized that he was gone,

that she would have to contend with an empty bed, an empty house, and

how she sagged helplessly against my father’s strong arm as they both

mourned. I remember how, after a visit to Pampanga, we noticed that more

and more pictures of the two of them together were filling the house, from a

crumbling photograph of the first few seconds of their life together, to a

family portrait including all seven children, bearing their faces and

memories, to the caricature done of them by a street artist, dated

September, 2001, the year before Lolo died.

What our parents never tell us is that scars never fade, that the

memory of hurt is as real as the cross-hatches on a friend’s forearm, bearing

the image of blood welling up in a perfectly straight line carved out on flesh.

Sometimes, it is enough for us to learn for ourselves that what they never

told us may also be wrong – that, sometimes, the muted gleam of blood can

be beautiful, a reminder of life and passion and humanity. And even just a

single line of black ink crossing an expanse of white is enough to revive all

this in our memory, to bring back the sensation of eyes rubbed raw by hands

that refused to admit weakness, the same hands that will reach out to

someone later on, to bring back the day we learned that love is entwined

with destruction and memory, that love is watching someone die: “written by

Tina after seeing the death of her pet dog, Terry, 1997.”

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