The Song From My Town

Growing up, I eavesdropped on the conversations of married women. My mother had a shop in the public market where she sold dry goods. In the afternoon, women gathered. They sat on the bangko in the storefront, their number increasing as the sunlight lengthened on the road where stray dogs licked their calves in the cooling heat. They were women of a certain age—public school teachers, housewives of seafarers or overseas contract workers, greying widows whose eyes were locked on their ganchillo as they drifted in and out of the conversation, the yarns taking form while their gossips meandered into small misfortunes: A husband caught philandering, a neighbor in debt, a man who lost in the elections, a fisherman whose boat disappeared in the open waters.

Coming together while their husbands were away, these women fascinated me. They allowed me to stumble into an uncharted territory where the topics that I heard put to shame the make-believe worlds of my childhood. My mind barely understood the stakes then. But I knew somehow that they were much higher; the transgressions of folks who were expected to lead upright lives excited me. I lived vicariously, drawn to women who gloated over the misery of others before they headed home at the stroke of evening.

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My curiosity was whetted even more when my mother shooed me away. But my desire to know proved greater. I found myself moving into the circle of women each time I came home from school or got tired from spending the after-hours with my friends. I held the stories in my mind as I learned more about the people in our town. My father’s kumpare had a second wife who became my godmother. Another kumpare sired a son with their young housemaid, whose room on the second floor he would retreat into. A young priest was rumored to be a widow’s lover. A wife welcomed back a husband who had abandoned his family at the height of his seafaring career.

These scandals took on a patina that glowed before my eyes. Our town hummed with an electric energy, leading me to the heart of secret lives where the stories that I heard drew me to misfortunes that seized me by the neck. Humdrum patterns unlocked a world of enchantments that made me see the ordinary with fresh eyes. Never did I think that I was trapped in an uninteresting place.

My grandmothers from both sides added to the magic. On weekends, my siblings and I trooped into the barrio where our aunts treated us to sumptuous lunch. After meals, my grandmother recounted their lives under the Japanese when she and her husband took their children to live in the mountains, where they avoided the occupiers’ bayonets. My father’s mother regaled me with stories of her marriage to the grandfather I never knew, who had long died before my father met my mother on a ship to Manila, a meeting that begat me and my three other siblings. Even at a young age, I learned from my grandmother why my father lit a candle and opened a bottle of beer on All Souls Day. “My husband was a quiet man,” she said, “satisfying himself with chicken neck because he reserved the meatier parts for his nine children.” Then I found out from my father that a cold San Miguel Beer was my Lolo’s only luxury, who worked long hours and slept with a bolo by his side. One time, I stumbled into a letter from my grandmother addressed to my father. In it she asked if he got mad at her because he had stopped seeing her. Putting back the letter in the corner where I found it, I saw a son who wanted to be loved more.

Without me knowing what it all meant, I walked into a landscape littered with resentments, regrets, and acrimonies. When my parents fought, for instance, things broke in our house. In a fit of anger, my father pulled the Betamax player from the cabinet and smashed it on the floor. My mother stood like a rock, giving my father a cold look. One time, my father threatened to leave our house after another bitter fight, but he never got beyond the second street. He came home hours later, taking me and my older brother on his motorcycle, along with our mother, and then drove us to the beach. No words of reconciliation needed to be uttered. We understood the quiet procedures of domestic peace.

As a young boy, I navigated these feelings in situ. There were no books to be read—no children’s stories to break the lessons of the world to me. Both sides of my family had peasant origins. My maternal grandmother could not read or write. When she needed to sign documents, she used her thumbmark. Meanwhile, my mother had a vocational degree; my father never finished elementary. But my parents made good, making a warm home where we were fed and sent to good schools. Our house had the elements of a middle-class family—a video player, a phonograph, a sala set made of narra. But there were no books. I grew up not knowing what it was like to sleep with a book being read to me. Yet part of my core memory was my father fanning us to sleep on a hot night because the electricity had gone out. When we got sick, he was our caregiver, the one who gave us the medicines and prepared our meals. That taught me about love—direct, unfiltered. I experienced the depths of human bonds through actual, raw encounters. There was no such thing as mediation through books. I accordingly grappled with feelings by experiencing them. There were no characters in fiction through which I could understand the vagaries of relationships. Instead, there were neighbors and strangers whose lives I had secretly held in my imagination.

In spite of being bookless, I had developed a deep appreciation for the power of language, especially my first tongue, Akeanon. Listening to everyone in my hometown, I was struck by the vivid character and complex metaphorical nature of our language. Bourgeois equivocations were unheard of. The people spoke what they felt. In the company of older people, children were exposed to the names of body parts, an occasion that was usually accompanied with ribald laughter. If formal, the vagina is puyas; if used as an insult, bilat; if irreverent, tinggil. The wondrous permutations of my tongue became clear to me. At home, my parents reinforced its special place in making sense of our native world. Unable to speak English, our mother spoke to us in crisp Akeanon, which became more vivid when she got angry. She expressed her fury in ways that seemed biblical. I remember how her words burrowed themselves deep in my heart, the pain outlasting the original utterance. She learned her language, I suppose, from her own illiterate mother, whom she loved deeply. Yet I was also attentive to other things when language failed. When my grandmother was buried, days after the town got covered in Pinatubo ashfall, my mother let out a howl whose haunting echoes still reach me to this day. The cry was heartrending, allowing me to know the gravities of her grief.

Such feelings heightened my unbookish emotional education as I continued to observe my mother and the events in our household. Perhaps I was seven or eight years old when she fell seriously ill. She had high fever. My siblings and I were having dinner with our father. She came out of the bedroom and spoke to us, but we could not understand what she was saying. Then she squatted next to the dining table and peed in our presence. Her hallucination had begun, her fever intensifying. Before the night was over, she was rushed to the hospital, leaving me and my siblings in the care of our house help. In the nights that followed, I found myself crying to sleep, afraid that if I allowed myself to doze off, I would wake up the next day as an orphan. A few years later, when she was having a crisis she had never disclosed, I came home from hearing Mass and found our table empty. No food had been prepared. It was the eve of Christmas. I saw my mother wordlessly walk into the bedroom. She was in her late 40s, my age now as I write these words. I kept the dark memory to myself, not realizing yet what I would do with it. I made a list of my loneliness and learned to guard it warily from anyone who might pry it open.

The beauty of my town, the transgressions of the people in it, the language handed down from our ancestors, and my sentimental education sans books built a world around me that constituted a deep reserve of self-knowledge, one that enabled me to develop the profoundest respect for the place where I was born. A few years ago, when I was vacationing in my hometown, I played with my then-adolescent nephew. We were riding the bicycle in the afternoon. He was behind me, his feet balancing his body on the wheel. “Our town is more beautiful than Manila,” he said. He could travel the world now, I thought, because he has learned to love his town.

Little did I know, too, that the discoveries I made as a boy would serve my writing in good stead. If someone asks me how I became a poet, I would not know the exact time and place when I became self-aware of my identity as a writer. But there was a folk song that struck me with such force as a boy.

Lumalabay nga daw aso
Aso pa lamang
Ang tanan-tanan nga butang sa kalibutan

Ang mga matam-is, ahay!
Nagapait man, ahay!
Sa Gihapon, ahay!
Umagi lamang.

San-o pa?, san-o pa?
San-o pa nga adlaw?
Magbalik ang gugma
Sa dughan gintigay.

Ang mga matam-is, ahay!
Nagapait man, ahay!
Sa gihapon, ahay!
Umagi lamang.

I heard this song from the men and women in my town. I heard it in the store of Lola Nani, where I read komiks in Filipino and got introduced to Darna. I heard it from my mother who hummed it on our family trips as my father drove us in his stainless owner when the dark fell. I heard it at the wakes of the dead. I heard it at reunions for the balikbayans. Perhaps this song, so simple in its expression yet so profound in its wisdom, awakened the early poet in me. As I journeyed away from my hometown, I carried with me my earliest memories of love, failure, and loss. This reserve, forged without books, became the fodder for my poetry.

Everything passes like smoke. All in this world is smoke. When will the time come. O when, O when will love return. What is sweet, turns bitter. Like in the old days, everything passes.

Poet, scholar, and curator, Charlie Samuya Veric directs the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at the Ateneo de Manila.