The motorcade from Santol mansion set off. The street was chock-a-block with snazzy looking black or dark blue Cadillac limousines and Buicks. All of its occupants were attending Bubi’s funeral rites.
In the Cadillac limousine sat the matriarch, Doña Esperanza, their Gran-Gran; Lucrezia’s mum Camilla; her mum's younger sister Aunt Allegra; Lucrezia and Zita, dressed almost identically held hands and crossed their eyes. The Amahs Ah Wei and Ah Tat who looked after Lucrezia and Zita respectively were sphinx-like in their demeanor. Everyone was clothed in the blackest of black and their mood matched their ensemble. Silence reigned.
"In the past five months, I have assisted at forty - one funerals of friends and relatives. They perished in a holocaust at a brutal ambush among the green hills of Montalban. Machine gun fire pelted them and gunned them down. Then, the barbaric assassins finished them off with bullets fired at point blank range at their necks. Three children: two great-nephews and a great-niece gone just like that. Their bodies resembled sieves for the hundreds of bullets that passed through them. Someone bloodthirsty and evil ordered that all the bodies should be hacked to pieces in a most bizarre manner. Lucrezia was spared deliberately. If that is not sending me a macabre message, I don’t know what is,’’ pondered a still concerned and perplexed Esperanza.
Allegra attempted to attract her mother’s attention by fanning herself furiously while the air conditioning was on high. Dona Esperanza spotted her out of her peripheral vision but decided to ignore her.
I don’t want to interrupt what I define as my grief musings. I’ll get back to her soon. Now Bubi is gone. One fine morning he was swimming at the Polo Club with Heinzie, Zita and Lucrezia. By afternoon he was racked with abdominal pains so severe he was unable to walk. His parents rushed him to Lourdes Clinic, our own clinic.
"It’s Appendicitis, we must operate immediately," pronounced the doctors. To their horror the doctors led by Basilio found that a state of advanced peritonitis had set in.
"How is it possible? There hasn’t been enough time! Septicemia had reached the blood stream and was spreading rapidly. His fever was off the charts!" They exclaimed, anxious and disturbed.
The boy was bombarded with Penicillin. If microbes could laugh, these ones did. The blood poisoning continued its inexorable pace. By five in the morning, twelve hours after he was admitted to Lourdes Clinic, Bubi had initiated his journey towards death. He swam in and out of a state of awareness.
"I love you Mummy and Papi. I’m not afraid.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.’’
‘’Brave Bubi. He fought with all his might but the microbes proved to be powerful and pitiless. Well, so much for the touted miracles of antibiotics. I intend to unload all the considerable shares I own in the pharmaceutical corporations. I think allopathic medicine is not about curing a patient at all. Money will never go into cures. It is not about solutions but palliatives. I must pay a visit to honored Uncle Wak Nam in Chinatown and have a frank talk with him about TCM- Traditional Chinese medicine.’’
Esperanza had made a hard decision. She would not allow anyone to sweet-talk her out of it.
‘’Why is no one making any comments,’’ wondered Lucrezia. She glanced at Zita, put her forefinger and middle finger over her lips and crossed her heart. Zita smiled back and covered her mouth to stifle an involuntary cry.
For days Lucrezia had heard nothing but "What a tragedy! Beautiful Bubi. His parents must be disconsolate. Such a dear little boy. The good truly die young."
Let's not overdo this. I loved him. He was as good and as naughty as the rest of us, certainly not any less naughtier than I, mused Lucrezia. Perhaps even more so. I never tugged at anyone’s hair and caught slimy worms and hairy spiders to throw at their faces. Just because Bubi caught something horrible and died, he has suddenly turned into an angel.
Lucrezia had the impression that angels were powerful and mighty beings deliberately created by God. Human beings do not become angels. I know some of our relatives believe this to be so. Why argue with your elders, even if they're misinformed?
"Are you sure this is the right church?" her mother Camilla asked Aunt Allegra, in a dubious tone of voice.
Everyone in the Keller family uses this and only this church," retorted Aunt Allegra. "Saint Augustine's. Why do you ask?" her Sagittarius temper slowly coming to the fore.
To be precise, the Kellers were assimilated German Jews. Alfred had married Rosario Zoller, the sister of Rudy, Aunt Allegra's husband, the parents of darling Zita and frightful Freckie. Alfred Keller, deeply in love with Rosy, consented to his children being brought up as Catholics.
Camilla replied with some concern. "It's just that I had this peculiar sensation as we pulled by the side of Saint Augustine's. I haven't seen anyone we know.
"Never mind that. Where are our Sikh bodyguards? What about our pygmies? Silvio, have you spotted any of them?" Dona Esperanza asked her faithful and trusted driver.
"No, Mam. They're all strangers out there," dutifully replied Silvio.
"Oh Camilla!" an irritated Allegra declared, "All of Manila with their private armies must be here this morning! This is a High Society event. Every single and superficial individual is coming to Bubi’s funeral to see and be seen."
"That's just the point, Allegra. There should be mobs of them, but it's strangely empty out here."
"They are probably all inside. Perhaps the Kellers decided this. They are very Germanic. This is another funeral we're late to," declared Allegra sighing deeply and rushing to step out of the Cadillac even before Silvio held the car door open for her.
Allegra adjusted her veil. She turned to the matriarch who was being assisted by Silvio.
"Last minute checks everyone. Veils properly placed on the head? Fans at the ready? Prayer books at hand?"
A loud chorus of “yeses” greeted Dona Esperanza!
Allegra walked fast as the Cadillacs in the motorcade stopped to disgorge other black-clad members of the clan.
Camilla took a deep breath, arranged her veil carefully and realized with horror, that she was holding a loud, scarlet and lacey fan. Perfect for a night out to a cabaret.
‘’It’s too late to do anything about it now except bite on a bullet and hope that my falcon-eyed mother will not see it with everything else that is on her mind’’.
"All right, every body. Amahs will follow with the children right after us. If the others haven't arrived, that's too bad. We're not waiting out here in this blazing heat. Let us make our entrance," affirmed Dona Esperanza. She patted both her daughters' shoulders and led the way into the church. Aunt Allegra whispered something to the imperious Esperanza. She nodded in agreement and stepped aside to allow her daughters to enter Saint Augustine's Church before her.
"I was right! We are unfashionably late," hissed Aunt Allegra to all those behind her.
"Unless late, no entrance," Amah Ah Wei replied loudly, looking around the church. "I see..." Dona Esperanza swirled abruptly around and glared at her like a basilisk. She quickly shushed the Amah. Lucrezia and Zita walked down the aisle on tiptoe.
They made an astonishing sight: A straight walking, glamorous dowager with her two distinguished daughters. Two snooty Hakka amahs that stared straight ahead. Two fetching Little Miss Muffets, dressed extravagantly in long, black hand embroidered mourning dresses.
Lucrezia and Zita strained their necks to see over the pigtailed heads of Ah Wei and Ah Tat.
"They are blocking the view."
The strident voice of Ah Wei was heard. "Husbands no here. Nobody here."
"But the church is overflowing with people!" protested Allegra, who was beginning to show signs of irritation because of the heat and the stress.
Dona Esperanza turned, eyes flashing yet again with her long, ring less fingers over her mouth. It was considered rude to wear jewelry to a funeral. Baubles did not become mourning.
High on a dais stood masses of white lilies that surrounded an immense white lacquered coffin. Allegra, with some hesitation, proceeded slowly up the carpeted steps, towards the open coffin, with the saddest look on her face. Allegra possessed the most expressive face set off by her luminous hazel eyes. She leaned over the coffin. Mustering her most sorrowful expression she peered inside. Then, Allegra collapsed in uproarious laughter. Camilla and the matriarch quickened their pace to catch a glimpse of the person inside the coffin. The disapproving look on the matriarch's face gave way to the identical hysterical laughter of Allegra. By this time Camilla had joined them and she too cracked up. They had completely forgotten Lucrezia and Zita. Both amahs desperately tried to hold them back.
"Don’t go up there. You will not be able to control yourselves. You will catch their laughter," they pleaded terror stricken yet embarrassed.
"Don’t try to stop me Ah Wei. I want to see!" insisted Lucrezia. What is happening? Why are our grandmother and our mothers laughing like hyenas gone berserk? Zita, your mother is peeing on the rug! In church? I can’t believe this."
A big puddle had formed around Allegra’s fine, black kid leather pumps. The onlookers/ the faithful watched in stunned and silent horror.
Lucrezia and Zita sprinted up the dais, taking the steps two at a time. They peered inside the coffin while their Grandmother was fanning herself and still howling hilariously. Allegra went down on her knees to dissimulate the urine running down her legs and the noise it made as it splashed on the puddle in the expensive Peking carpet.
Inside the coffin lay the most bloated, biggest and fattest Chinese man they had ever seen.
"I can’t believe any human being would allow himself to turn into a mount of lard. Poor man." exclaimed Lucrezia.
"He must have weighed at least 500 pounds. Pobrecito. Poor man," repeated Zita.
“We are in the wrong funeral!”
The annoyed, mortified and pained voice of the Matriarch thundered throughout the church.
“What’s with you, Allegra? You are supposed to coordinate all our funerals! And you, Camilla?" she fumed, glaring at her red ostrich fan, "what are you doing with that … with that cocotte thing in church?"
“Let’s apologize first and explain to the people here,” urged Allegra, unable to finish without breaking up and peeing some more on the ever-growing puddle of her piss below the fat man’s coffin.
Doña Esperanza, her daughters and granddaughters noticed at that precise moment, that the entire church was a vast sea of Chinese faces.
“O Dios mio! O my God! The only polite, graceful – no! I take that back, dignified? It won’t work either – is to leave immediately,” declared the Matriarch. At her daughter’s hesitation she repeated forcefully. “Let’s leave. Now. Listen to me. These people can go on with their mourning. We’ll make amends later.”
“This is awful. What will they think?” asked a mortified Camilla, her delicate stomach churning and turning her face an unbecoming green.
The matriarch replied, not missing a step as she marched out of the Church of Saint Augustine.
“They will think what they always think of the gwailo-the foreign devils. We are insensitive, uncultured, and barbaric. Camilla! Don't you dare puke, do you hear? We are not leaving any more gwailo bodily fluids in this church.”
“If you let me talk, I could have tell you there were too many slitty, chinky eyes in there to be dead child Bubi funeral,” stated Ah Wei.
“Is that the way to describe yourself and your people?” Camilla demanded to know of Lucrezia’s amah.
Ah Wei shrugged, unaffected by her question. “You round eyes. We slitty eyes,” she replied flatly.
“She’s right. We worked ourselves up into this mourning frenzy. Since the ambush and massacre, which took place in the hills of Montalban, Bubi is the first child to die a natural death. Odd, in this day and age, none of us noticed our surroundings, except Ah Wei,” declared Doña Esperanza.
“We all went inside the church blind as bats and as unobservant as sheep,” agreed Camilla, still in a daze.
Instead of blonde, cherubic Bubi dressed in a royal blue velvet suit decked out in a magnificently carved, ebony coffin, they had all participated in this grotesque scene.
Amidst the hostile stares of the Chinese faithful in the church, the matriarch, her daughters, granddaughters and amahs hurriedly filed down the aisle, looking neither to the left nor to the right.
“There are too many churches. Have you counted the funerals we’ve been to? Who can remember them all?” asked Lucrezia’s mother, Camilla. Allegra could only nod. She was too ashamed at her reaction and at the sight of her urine soaked dress to speak.
“It’s our duty to remember and commemorate personal and public events. That’s why we belong to the so-called privileged classes, because our sense of duty and service always comes before our own self-interests. Privilege comes with inescapable accountability. You seem to have forgotten that,” admonished Dona Esperanza. Her voice cut them all like ice.
They made a quick stop at the priory to enable Allegra to use the telephone. She apologized to the young priest for her intrusion. After her call she deposited a large Manila envelope stuffed with money ‘’for the missions’’ in the appropriate box. Allegra cleared up the confusion as she darted into the limousine.
"Bubi is lying in state at Saint Dominic’s Cathedral."
Yes! It's true the Kellers attended Mass on Sundays and holy days at Saint Augustine's, but Bubi studied in the special Swiss German school at Saint Dominic's. Grandfather Keller might have fled Nazi Germany but he had no intentions of allowing any of his grandchildren to forget Hoch Deutsch, High German.
"I like the new Germany which is being created. When the time is right, I hope my grandchildren will return to Frankfurt and re-create a bigger Keller Bank than the one that my ancestors established."
"Now I can see we're in the right place. There are our Sikh bodyguards, attired and turbaned in white as a sign of respect and mourning. But there is still no sign of our pygmies," murmured Dona Esperanza, who was relieved she had regained control over the situation.
Everyone in the cathedral had been waiting for Dona Esperanza. No one dared proceed with the funeral mass in her absence. She possessed the kind of charisma, which, flowed naturally out of every pore. It was in her genes.
The clan had feared another terrorist ambush. It was a normal kind of paranoia. Time would never heal it. Indeed, the ensuing years and bloody occurrences throughout the world would reinforce this realization. Naturally, the members of the clan moved fearlessly as if they were immortal, but in their heart of hearts they never forgot Montalban. Death could come at any moment from assassins, terrorists, and exalted psychopaths.
Lucrezia and Heinzie hugged wordlessly and tightly. Then Doña Apollonia, Bubi's maternal grandmother, with a black Spanish mantilla held up high in her hair by a diamond-encrusted comb, led them towards the altar where Bubi's coffin had been placed.
"She looks like a statue of the Virgin of Loreto. Poor Apollonia, sorrow has made her look tacky today, covered in hundreds of diamonds," thought Esperanza. Then she instantly felt ashamed of herself. ‘’I'm being nasty and I shouldn’t. Maybe the diamonds comfort her in some way. On certain occasions etiquette should be ignored.’’
Lucrezia stood on tiptoes and stared at the porcelain and waxen face of Bubi. Only a tiny speck of coagulated blood on his right nostril marred the perfection.
"He does not look as if he is only sleeping as the grown ups claim. Bubi looks dead to me but he is still such a dazzling boy. I will never forget you Bubi-boo so long as I live.’’
There was a strange and fragrant scent around her cousin. She sniffed. No, it was not the white roses, gardenias and camellia wreaths surrounding his coffin. Nor was it the smell of decay, Not yet, she did not think so. All his blood has been drained from his body. The embalmers then injected him with chemicals to delay the rot. That is what they had been told. This was the third day since Bubi's death. Manila was in the sway of an unrelenting heat wave. She continued sniffing.
‘’It's a resin of some sort. The kamagong ebony coffin had been covered in camphor! What a lovely way to lie in state. Bubi would have been pleased. He is probably watching us invisibly, no doubt from somewhere near the altar."
The coffin was open. Lucrezia longed to give Bubi a parting kiss. She asked her father, Edmond, to carry her. The dead are rarely kissed or touched once they have been placed on coffins for public display. Lucrezia was not squeamish.
‘’I am not afraid of the dead. It is the living that I must fear. Bubi died from complications following a burst appendix, probably blood poisoning. Whatever it was, I am sure that I will not be infected."
Her father lifted her to enable her to plant a kiss on each of Bubi's cheeks. Now she realized painfully that he was already rotting. She felt wood instead of skin. Auf wiedersehn, she told him in silence.
Dona Esperanza observed her granddaughter's gesture and it touched her deeply. She bent down to kiss Bubi and recited a brief prayer, her lips hardly moving.
Monsignor Alberti, the Papal Nuncio, who held the rank of Ambassador Plenipotentiary on behalf of the Holy See, would not be officiating at this funeral Mass. He was visiting vocational schools in Laguna province. Duty came first and foremost to Monsignor Alberti. As much as he loved Dona Esperanza and doted on the children of the Ortigas-Nieto clan, he was beholden only to God and Pope John the XXIII.
This is going to be a tragedy for us, reflected Dona Esperanza. The Monsignor loathed the heat so he made shortcuts in the Latin Mass. He allowed water and fruit juices to be consumed because he was aware of the plight of the faithful who were stressed beyond belief with grief. Thus, he kept his homilies and funeral orations eloquent but brief.
‘’Mama, five people, including Rosy have already fainted twice in this airless and suffocating cathedral,’’ whispered Allegra.
"Are you sure? I feared the number would have been higher, but give the priest time to wreak havoc,’’ countered Dona Esperanza in a loud whisper. She said to herself, ‘‘the intense heat, the grief and the stress will surely raise the casualties, God help us.’’
In Manila, the funerals for the rich and the powerful were solemn spectacles. The rituals for a child in particular contained pathos and compassion. There was the empathy felt on the part of the mourners because practically everyone had children.
Seven years ago, those very same people had lost children, nieces, nephews, parents, friends and family to the unrelenting bombing of Manila by the combined US naval and air forces and the non-stop shelling by the entrenched Japanese forces. They wept unashamedly in remembering those events.
Children collectively were precious to all, rich and poor. A slice of your future died when a child died. Life would never make restitution. You would have to cope somehow and find your own solution but that was, the way of Life and Death.
The Spanish, Italian and the Oriental attitudes regarding Death made you a co-participant in the mourning. They did not turn away from death and hide the grief as well as the dead with the useful excuse of ‘’Privacy’’. This had become the Anglo-American way of death. Denial was key. No one really died. They sort of passed on or away.
In Manila, grief and mourning was as essential as eating, singing, dancing and coupling. It cleansed you and it also prepared you for the next funeral, which might well be one of your own loved ones or even of you yourself. There was a kind of grandeur in the acceptance of Death and the certainty that one’s adored one would be in a glorious place. The place might be called heaven, sky, paradise or cosmic sanctuary. Whichever way you looked at it, it was not of this world.
Dona Esperanza braced herself for what was to come. ‘’When it becomes intolerable, I shall perforce step in and attempt to place things in their proper perspective,’’ she decided in spite of the controversy it would engender.
The parish priest was a Dominican. They belonged to the Order of Preachers and they tended to be wordy! There was almost a genetic suspicion of any thing, which pertained to the Dominican Order. Fifty years ago, the Tycoon Don Cesar Ortigas- Nieto had sued the Dominicans and the Catholic Church and he had won!
Bubi was incensed with the finest myrrh from Afghanistan and camellia oil from Burma. Lucrezia took in the fragrance deep within her whole being.
"Ah Wei, you must breathe this divinity, ‘’ she murmured.
Incense brought memories she longed to forget. The bordello she had been sold to as a child in Shanghai, always used it to mask the odor of sperm soaked mattresses.
Then, the priest turned to the mourners and incensed them for at least three minutes. The humidity and the heat caused some to gag and cough.
‘’Mishap number one, the priest means well but he is not street smart. Less than a minute would have sufficed in this weather,’’ observed Dona Esperanza quietly.
Rosy and Alfred had chosen an exquisite prayer which Bubi recited every night before going to sleep. Heinzie, Zita, Jaime and Lucrezia ascended the steep spiral steps in Carrara marble that led to the high pulpit to repeat them to the congregation. Uncle Matt’s sound engineers had installed state of the art microphones.
‘’Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,’’ said Heinzie.
‘’The bed be blessed that I lie on,’’ declared Zita.
‘’Four angels to my bed,” stated Jaime, his voice cracking.
‘’Four angels round my head,’’ repeated Heinzie.
‘’One to watch and one to pray, and two to bear my soul away,’’ murmured Lucrezia with such clarity and sentiment in one so young that the mourners applauded loudly and spontaneously. Lucrezia bowed her head, because tears blinded her for the moment. Ah Wei had her hankies stuffed in her Hakka pockets. So she blinked her large blue eyes several times to enable the tears to flow down her cheeks.
As soon as they children returned to their pews with their parents, Father Aguinaga began reciting the Psalms that, by tradition, were the most in accordance with the rituals of the dead. He began with the 26th Psalm and he took his time so that all could understand his Latin since he had his back to the mourners and he had a thick Basque accent.
‘’Dominus illuminatio mea, et salus mea, quem timebo?’’
The Lord is the source of my light and my safety, so whom shall I fear?’’
Jaime slumped over in a dead faint. His distraught parents and his amah fanned him furiously.
"Ay Por Dios!’’ exclaimed Dona Esperanza. The priest did not turn around.
"He must be deaf too,’’ said Camilla, Lucrezia’s mother. Lucrezia jostled Ah Wei with her elbow but there was no reaction.
Father Aguinaga continued. He was now declaiming the 50th Psalm, which was exquisite in its solemnity.
‘’Asperges me hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me, et supernivem dealbabor.’’
You will sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be made clean; you will wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.
The strain was too much for Rosy, who was pregnant with her fifth child. She began sobbing. Her husband Alfred cradled her in his arms and cried with her. Their three year old daughter Sylvia, who sat beside her father called out ‘’Bubi! Bubi! Come here. Why are you sleeping in that box?’’
Not a dry eye was to be found in the entire cathedral, which sat one thousand three hundred people.
One hour had dragged by. Instead of an early morning sun shining down on a massive stone dome with no ventilation other than two doors to the side of the cathedral and the wide entrance, the mourners now had to deal with a harsh noonday sun in the middle of a heat wave on a windless day.
The cobblestones surrounding the Church of Saint Dominic's only served to increase the intensity of the temperature. Everyone was clothed in the finest black linen and veiled in the most exquisitely hand made black lace veils from Valencia. Even the soldiers and bodyguards had wound black armbands over their army fatigues now soiled from their heavy sweat.
The loud flapping sounds of thousands of Spanish and Chinese fans in all sizes and colors, which went back and forth in rhythmic regularity, seemed almost hypnotic to the children, but nothing alleviated the torrid and tortuous heat. The children slowly begun fainting one by one; then the elderly keeled over after them and finally the women.
‘’De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine; Domine exaudi vocem meam
Up from the depths I have cried to Thee, Lord; Lord, hear my voice."
Rosy’s face had turned a bilious green She stood firm in her resolution that she would see the entire ritual Mass for Bubi come what may. Memories, which never left her, struck her today in full force.
"We took refuge in these very same cathedral (of Santo Domingo) after our villa was destroyed by fire that was deliberately set by the Japanese. Ernst was five and Bubi was two. A piece of shrapnel pierced his lung leaving a hole large enough to place a man’s fist inside the wound. Alfred and I listened to our Ernst’s laments for one hour. Each time he breathed, blood gurgled and spurted out of his back. His laments became weaker and weaker. Not even a sigh in the end, only the steady ooze of his blood each time he tried to take in air. We took turns holding him in our arms and singing to him. Finally, I felt only a trickle of blood run down my arm. Ernst had slowly drowned in his own blood. I carried his stiff corpse for two days inside Santo Domingo, until the American soldiers managed to liberate the church and its environs. He was torn from us and taken to a mortuary inside a makeshift base. Ernst was buried along side hundreds of children who had perished inside Santo Domingo. That is why Bubi has to have the most splendid funeral money can buy. Ernst never had one. I will not be separated from Bubi until we place his coffin inside our mausoleum.’’
Rosy felt faint despite her will to see things through to its sad end. Yet, her resolve was not enough to keep her from passing out a third time. Dona Esperanza had the eyes of a lynx. People begun dropping like flies. Still, the stubborn parish priest kept to his tortoise pace of the funeral mass, oblivious to what was taking place behind him.
If priests and pastors faced their flock, they would see what in blazes was happening to the faithful, reasoned Doña Esperanza. She was now infuriated. This is beginning to look like a war zone.
She shook her skirt, which had stuck to her skin from the sweat. She motioned silently to her Sikh bodyguards. Giants all, they were accustomed to the mountainous areas of the Punjab where the snowstorms could kill you at forty degrees below zero. Temperatures in the desert could climb up to 50ºC. but these men possessed much sterner balls and they were hard to die.
"Kabir! Samir! Amir! Please take the children to the weapons carriers and drop them off with their amahs at the Manila Hotel. Check two amahs and two children to a room. Please look for Silvio and a couple of other drivers. Ask them to come to my pew. Some of the elderly must not remain in church a minute longer. Carry them kicking and screaming if you must.’’
‘’Chances are they won't protest; they are too enervated, Dona Esperanza. We shall follow the same procedure – three to a room so that they can be looked after by their household staff,’’ said Samir.
Kabir murmured something into Dona Esperanza’s ear that irritated her.
‘’What are you saying, Kabir? You mean some may not want to spend the money? It's better than dying!!! Pay no attention. I can't stand it when the rich are miserly. Notify the concierge that I am assuming the expenses. Let’s see these Scrooges say no when I ask for a reimbursement. I am going to be very angry if somebody else dies today. I refuse to countenance a needless death. Basta! The three of you can come back to the Cathedral after you are done with these lifesaving tasks.’’
‘’Why aren't our pygmies here,’’ she asked Kabir and Samir. ‘’I know they’re claustrophobic about churches, especially on a torrid day like this. Aborigines are always the smartest ones and stay away from places overflowing with humanity. Yet I know Gunga enjoyed playing sipa and patintero with Bubi and his quartet of friends.’’
“Doña, who can ever tell with them? This has been a record season for funerals. Perhaps their numbers carry strange omens. I am sure they will honor Bubi with their own rituals which must remain a secret from us,’’ replied Kabir with the wisdom of the holy Sikhs.
‘’I understand and respect the pygmies’ customs and traditions. They are such good trackers and detectors of those who would do us harm. Your people and the pygmies comfort me and make me feel less vulnerable,’’ Dona Esperanza informed him.
Kabir, Samir and Amir were the grandchildren of The Samir, who had been the Chief of the tycoon Don Cesar's security detail at the bank, the numerous warehouses near Manila Bay and all the cruise and cargo ships owned by the clan. To Dona Esperanza, they meant family. The three Sikh brothers vetted all the bodyguards and employees of the Nieto-Ortigas clan.
Fifty years ago, Uncle Wak Nam had strongly recommended Samir the First to Great Uncle Cesar, the tycoon.
"This Mass is outrageous," Doña Esperanza whispered loudly into Kabir's ear, as he was the eldest.
"Hopefully by the time you and your brothers are back, this thick skulled of a Spanish priest would have finished this never-ending Mass. We'll all go down to the cemetery and get this over with ASAP without any more casualties. Ah! One more thing, most of the people in the cathedral have not had breakfast. It is lunchtime now. Here's some money. Buy as many mandarin oranges, mangoes ... never mind the mangoes. How will they eat it? Sweet tamarind seeds … what am I saying? They’ll all get diarrhea in this heat. Bananas are the best, as are pomelos from Laguna. Please buy cases of water and Coca Cola. I hate the stuff but this is an emergency. Anything else you might think of, go ahead. Shukriya," a thankful and grateful Doña Esperanza pronounced.
A slightly frazzled Lucrezia told her grandmother, "I haven't fainted yet but I might soon. Could Zita and Ah Tat share the room with Ah Wei and I? What about Heinzie?"
He was now flat out. His mother Rosy had been revived with strong smelling salts and cold water splashed on her face and neck; she discovered to her consternation that they did not have any effect on Heinzie. She begun to slap his cheeks hard. She was beside herself and was bordering on this side of hysteria.
"Amorcito, I am going to kill myself if something dreadful happens to you."
O Por Dios y la Virgen, my heart goes out to Rosy. Everything has overwhelmed her. That’s to be expected. Bubi’s untimely demise, the funeral, our late arrival, this horror of a Mass, her pregnancy, the heat, humidity and now Heinzie’s heat stroke.’’
‘’Certainly my princess,’’ Dona Esperanza turned towards Lucrezia, her favorite grandchild, ‘’Heinzie and Ah Chung can share the room with you and Zita. That's to be the only exception. You have my permission to pass this on to Kabir."
Esperanza glanced nervously at her grandson, scary Freckie who was eleven years old. He was sweating heavily but seemed unperturbed. Killing hot weather would not affect the likes of Freckie.
"Freckie and his nanny Librada are to have a room all to themselves. He's old enough now," Doña Esperanza said emphatically. That would also keep him out of trouble and protect the other children.
Wonderful news, thought Lucrezia, as a small wave of dizziness came over her. "I'll tell Kabir and the others," she murmured, instinctively lowering her head to let the blood flow to her head. She suddenly had an inspiration. If she fainted in front of that narrow-focused, uncaring priest, right at the altar, he would have to stop the mass and end it quickly.
It’s worth a try. If I do not really and truly faint, I can always pretend. Bubi taught me how to fall and play dead just like in the movies.
She had to move quickly! Edmond, her father, was going to sweep her into his strong arms and carry her outside into the weapons carrier. She slipped out of his reach. "Papi, just a minute."
He looked puzzled. “ What is that child up to? She is too smart for most of us.’’
"The priest and his acolytes are only just beginning the Consecration of the Host. That’s halfway through the Mass. Papi I have to do something! People will faint while on their way to receive Communion. Jesus won’t mind; Bubi would agree and the people in the church will be saved."
Lucrezia sprinted up the steps, past Bubi's opulent coffin. The silver and gold altar floated past her. She could not have timed it any better. The priest turned to the people to say, "Dominus Vobiscum. May Peace be with you. Lucrezia imagined an Indio Guarani arrow dipped in curare had just pierced her heart. She gasped loudly, trembled, took two tiny steps, and dropped like a sack of potatoes before the horrified eyes of Father Aguinaga. She took the utmost care to fall in a dead faint with her head and torso towards the faithful, just in case the priest was clumsy and stepped on her hands.
How can I play the piano, do my homework, star in a school play and write in my diary with smashed and squashed fingers?
Edmond and Doña Esperanza grasped the mise en scene immediately. He ran towards his daughter, followed by Lucrezia's mother Camilla, his brothers-in-law, old man Keller, Bubi's father, Dona Esperanza and Bubi's grandmother, Dona Appolonia. More people come up to the altar.
"Stand back! Let her breathe! I'll take her outside. Ah Wei? Follow me."
Edmond slung her across his back. Camilla was distraught. She was unaware of what had really taken place.
"Lucrezia, amorino. My small love. Will somebody please sprinkle water on her face to revive her?’’
"She'll be fine as soon as she gets a breath of fresh air," Edmond reassured his wife.
"What are you talking about Edmond? What fresh air are you referring to? There is no breeze. The courtyard burns more intensely than inside the church."
Dona Esperanza seized the moment as Horace wrote two thousand years ago. Carpe Diem. Seize the day. She announced in a loud voice.
"I have taken the liberty of gathering all the children, the women and the elderly and we are taking them to the Manila Hotel. They can unwind and rest in air conditioned rooms until this...ahem...the longest of funeral masses is over,"
The priest Aguinaga, better late than never, got the point at last. He looked uneasy, "And well he should," pondered Esperanza.
Alfred Keller, Bubi's and Heinzie's father pronounced it an excellent idea.
Dona Esperanza approached the priest imperiously, though her language and her tone were gentle.
"Please, Reverend Father. Ay que desastre. What a disaster. I cannot remember his name. I feel that my brains are boiling. Well! Never mind, the time had come for action,’’ she decided.
"Could we have more facta quickly and dispense with the verba? (It was Latin for deeds not words). People are very sick and fainting from the heat. Por el amor de Dios, they could die here!"
That last statement alarmed the parish priest. Still, he hesitated to make a definite move. A vexed Doña Esperanza concluded with considerable irritation.
“He must be a Libra. They can never make up their torturous minds.” Then a bold idea came to her.
"The papal nuncio, Monsignor Alberti, would give a dispensation in a case like this," maintained Esperanza with all the authority she could muster, which was considerable.
"Furthermore," added Alfred Keller, "it's imprudent to leave for the cemetery at this time. It's unbearably hot. Why don't we all take turns staying with Bubi until 4:00 in the afternoon? Then we can proceed to our family mausoleum at Las Lomas Cemetery"
"Our Sikh guards are bringing fruits, cases of water and Coca Cola to tide us over," Doña Esperanza informed the distinguished elderly Keller.
"We are grateful you thought of these details," whispered Alfred Keller. "We are so stricken and devastated..."
"I feel partly responsible for having gone to the wrong church - San Agustin - unwittingly yet inevitably causing these delays,’’ she apologized. Esperanza took her role in these unfolding events seriously.
And so it was decided. Most of the mourners, after drinking the liquids and munching on some fruits, should return to their comfortable, air-conditioned mansions. The children, the elderly and the young who were pregnant or had recently birthed, opted wisely to stay at the Manila Hotel until it was sufficiently cool to take a breath without searing their lungs.
As for Lucrezia: the moment the fiery heat from the air outside slammed into her she keeled over like a penguin.
"Oh God! Now she's really passed out!" Edmond exclaimed in great agitation.
"She'll come to, Edmond and Camilla." Esperanza calmly assured them.
"What do you mean, Edmond? Now she's really fainted. I don't understand." Said Camilla.
"We'll discuss it later, darling."
Kabir was standing by the weapons carrier, holding a lukewarm bottle of spring water from Laguna.
"We're done with the first batch of kids and the elderly." He declared. He then poured part of the water over Lucrezia's head while Camilla fanned her daughter’s face. Ah Wei pressed a meridian point on her ear lobe. She came to almost immediately.
"Drink the rest of the water slowly now," her father urged. She took it all in one hungry slurp. Color begun to return to her pallid cheeks. Heinzie was right behind her, lying limply in his father Alfred’s arms.
Ah Wei and Ah Chung were carried inside the weapons carrier. It had a metal chassis and it was covered in thick army green canvas.
"We all be dead, roasted alive, when we get to Manila Hotel," protested Ah Wei.
Kabir explained that the canvas actually kept the interior cool. It was a five-minute drive from Saint Augustine’s Church to the posh Manila Hotel. The flaps of the canvas would act as a fan. Contrary to its appearance, they would all be comfortable.
"Lucrezia and Heinzie, put your heads on your amahs laps. All right?" He instructed them before climbing into the driver’s seat.
Sámi and Amir brought cases of soft drinks inside the church. Allegra was conspicuous by her absence. Kabir had taken her with the first group of mourners to Manila Hotel. She had always been more physically fragile than Dona Esperanza’s other two daughters, Camilla and Dahlia and her son Matt.
"I'll go with them to coordinate between the young and the old."
Matt had no children of his own since his wife and three children had died bayoneted before his eyes by Japanese soldiers before the arrival of the Americans in 1946. But he did not allow his grief, which he would bear all his life to interfere with his love for all his nephews and nieces.
"Thank you, hijo." She squeezed his hand and hugged him tightly.
Camilla was concerned about Lucrezia. "She's fine hija mia. Ah Wei will take good care of her. I need you here with your organizational talents," said her mother.
Dahlia, Doña Esperanza’s middle daughter, looked as strong as a bamboo; they bend but never break. Lolita, her 5-year old daughter by Rudy, had gone with the first group accompanied by her Filipina yaya (nanny) Inday.
“She too had been sick in church but improved once the car took off and the air-conditioning system started working," reported Dahlia.
Kabir, in the driver's seat turned on the sirens. That meant he could drive faster because the other vehicles would prudently stay out of his way.
"Hold on, children and amahs, here we go!"
Dona Esperanza concentrated on Rosy Keller, mother of the dead Bubi. She was prostrate from her loss, haggard from lack of any sleep, stress, heat, lack of food and liquids. Her husband, who was one of the most besotted men who ever had a wife, was dipping a little water onto her head and gently giving her water to drink. Then he lovingly urged her to eat a few bananas and some oranges.
"Beloved. Please eat for the baby in your womb. For your Heinzie and Sylvia and for your husband who adores you."
"How's Mama and our Keller Mama and Papa?’’ she asked weakly. That would be her mother Apollonia, her mother –in law Rebecca and her father-in-law Max.
"They're doing well. Camilla and Edmond are looking after them."
St. Dominic’s was almost empty. It was easier to breathe. Fewer bodies gave off less heat, Father Aguinaga, extenuated by the heat and his own slowness, dragged his feet to the altar and called out in a quivering voice.
"Dearly beloved faithful, the funeral service and mass for the young child and beautiful creature of God, Alfred Keller Junior, are now concluded. Dominus et pacem. Lux perpetua. Lux er dies. Requiescat in pacem Alfred.
Esperanza quickly made the sign of the cross and turned her back to the altar. That clod should not be a priest. What is wrong with people? These are supposed to be the elite and the leaders. Why did no one protest? Who ordered that the faithful should fall ill, and bite the dust so that a priest could finish the solemn Funeral Mass. This is an act of tyranny not love. Why do people obey Authority so blindly?
At the Manila Hotel, Lucrezia, Zita and Heinzie rested on the fresh mahogany floors with the air conditioning turned up to "coldest". Bathed and scrubbed in cool water by their amahs, they went over the events of the day.
"That was potent stuff, Luki, dramatically folding into a heap of rags on the altar. Zowie! Bubi must have been laughing his head off, wherever he is," marveled Heinzie.
"He taught all of us how to drop dead but you are the best. Gosh! Luki, you saved this day from turning into a holocaust," said an admiring Zita.
While they sipped calamansi juice with acacia honey and water, the children suddenly realized that hunger had taken a hold of them.
"How about a grilled hamburger?" suggested Heinzie.
"Jeepers Creepers. That is the most unoriginal request to make at a luxury hotel. It’s your choice Heinzie. I much prefer blue marlin. Our amahs will too," said Lucrezia.
"Isn't it expensive?" Zita ventured to ask.
"Of course! What are we rich for? The last time we all had a good meal was the night before last night, wasn't it? And none of us ate much because we were all thinking of Bubi. Gran-Gran will be glad we did it. You'll see," Lucrezia stated with some bravado.
"Who's going to order?" they asked a little tremulously.
"We'll ask Kabir, Samir or Amir Singh. They'll come soon," replied Lucrezia.
"You know what we should do until Singh brothers come? We take little siesta. Too much excitement for one day needs calm. We also commit big offense in wrong church. Must show proper respect," Ah Wei told them.
Heinzie looked a little lost. "What is Ah Wei saying?"
Zita and Lucrezia exchanged understanding glances. Lucrezia stifled a yawn. Zita followed. "We'll give you all the grisly details after our siesta or after one of the Singh brothers rings our door, whichever comes first"
"Where did you learn that word grisly and what does it mean?" a sleepy Heinzie quizzed Lucrezia.
"I learnt it from reading the detective novels of Mickey Spillane. It means frightful," explained Lucrezia.
Heinzie snored softly and Zita drifted into a deep sleep. The amahs Ah Tat and Ah Chung, who resembled midgets, stretched out on the rattan sofa with room to spare. Ah Wei took the rattan chaise lounge and fell asleep in seconds. Lucrezia joined Zita on the double bed.
Heinzie slept alone on the bed across from them. He looked forlorn without Bubi. You could see the dark circles under his eyes.
“I will miss him and remember him with love all my life if I live long enough to have a son, I hope he will be as handsome as Bubi. His noble heart, smiling grey eyes and the three cow licks on his light brown curls will be engraved in my memory,’’ ruminated Lucrezia.
Her thoughts wandered to Saint Augustine’s Church and the sight of the monstrously fat man who lay in the widest coffin she had ever seen. They must have all been in shock over Bubi’s death not to see the difference between the size of a coffin one meter and fifty odd inches long and the endless coffin at the church.
I wonder what sort of amends Ah Wei was referring to regarding the incident with the dead Chinese gentleman at the Church of San Agustin. I suppose we all behaved outrageously. Gran-Gran is familiar with Chinese customs. I am sure she will know how to make the proper amends.
By now, most of us children understand why Uncle Matt chooses to work out of a long, marble refectory table in the ornate and massive mausoleum of our Ortigas-Nieto clan. The dead are less troublesome than the living. There is also a certain sense of powerful dignity in a cemetery. It is comfortinge to be close to your dead ancestors especially if they had lived extraordinary lives like Don Valerio, the Founder of our clan, Don Cesar, the Tycoon and Don Alcibiades the banker.
I shall doubtless be scolded but not grounded for the performance I pulled at Saint Dominic’s Cathedral today. Anyway, first things first. I must pray for all my dead cousins. And then I’ll compose a special one for Bubi since he was one of my favorite cousins and playmates and because he has just died. After that I shall sleep a little. I am suddenly very tired. When the time comes, I’ll face the consequences of my actions. I hope to be brave about it.
Lucrezia begun to recite the "Our Father" slowly, for all her little playmates, friends and cousins who had gone to some other world before her. But she was in slumber before she was able to say "Thy kingdom come.”
Showing posts with label Lucrezia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lucrezia. Show all posts
Monday, November 3, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
BUBI'S FUNERAL - Part 1
This is a true story.
It is one of the chapters of Book Five of THE SAGA OF FRAY PACO: THE INDOMITABLE CONTESSINA LUCREZIA. Bubi's demise, which came a few months after the Massacre of Montalban, was a terrible blow to Lucrezia. To this day I wonder how she was able to cope. But cope she did and admirably too.
Agents and publishers who think they know it all should cease calling these genres literary fiction. It is not. It is literary non-fiction. Would they call Boris Pasternak's DOCTOR ZHIVAGO a piece of literary fiction? Some ignoramuses actually did!
Pasternak defined it autobiographical fantasy because he added dialogue which occurred but which may not have been the exact words used by the characters and personages at the time.
By the way Marcel Proust called his masterpiece REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, which strictly speaking is not the proper translation of the French work, also an atobiographical fantasy, for the very same reason.
I eagerly await your comments.
NOTE: Because of the length of this story ... I will publish it in two parts, starting with part 1 today.
"I can’t stop thinking of Bubi. Let’s pray to the Child Jesus of Prague to make him well. I have a pakirandam (feeling) that Bubi will die and I don’t know why,’’ said Lucrezia sadly fingering the branches of a tall santol tree that towered alongside the verandah of Santol Mansion.
"November is very pretty month in Manila. Cool and fresh. Plenty waling-waling orchids, tall hibiscus shrubs and little heat. Perfect for children and playmates to spend time in garden,’ replied Ah Wei, her Chinese Amah (nanny) as she plaited seven year old Lucrezia’s long blonde tresses and avoided the issue of Bubi.
A loud silence separated them.
Even the weather is behaving in an odd way. It’s too hot to play any of our games in the garden. And then I don’t feel like playing while Bubi lies so close to death.
Ah Wei sensed things seemed askew including the heat and the humidity and quickly suggested, ‘’Maybe more better if we pray first.’’
She gazed at her amah from her favorite carved Tonkinese armchair. Ah Wei ‘s smooth face, was usually an unreadable Oriental mask. This morning her skin was lined and her anguished eyes betrayed her statement about the perfect month of November. More significantly the amah did not contradict Lucrezia.
She feels Bubi is going to leave his parents, brother and his favorite cousin-me. Tears ran down her cheeks.
"Lucrrre do not cry. It makes you ugly," croaked Fray Paco.
Fray Paco, the rare white cockatoo from the island chain of Sumatra, was the oldest member of the Nieto-Ortigas clan. He surely had passed a century and this was calculated simply and easily. He remembered events, upheavals and tragedies, which had occurred in the late eighteenth century. As a polyglot Fray Paco’s expressions in Castilian and Portuguese were arcane. His blasphemies and curses also harkened to the days when cutthroats, villains and pirates of every color and stripe roamed the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca at will.
"I don’t want to play any games in or outside the house. Even the piano does not interest me. I prefer to sit in the veranda with you and listen to Fray Paco, after we have said a prayer to the Child Jesus,’’ replied Lucrezia in a tearful voice.
Only the children with their respective amahs were in Santol Mansion. Gran-Gran, the Matriarch Esperanza accompanied by their parents was at the Lourdes clinic. It was owned and financed by the Nieto-Ortigas clan. General Basilio Valdes, a kinsman who had served in General Macarthur’s headquarters in Manila, as his highest-ranking Filipino officer was its director. Not only was Basilio rich, he was a fine doctor - Summa cum Laude at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
Basilio had balls. The Lourdes Clinic socked it to the rich so that the poor could be looked after for free.
‘’That means all members of the clan without exception should and must pay all the fees of Lourdes Clinic, if any of us are patients. All our friends and acquaintances with the means to pay are not to expect any discounts whatsoever,’’ Dona Esperanza had decreed and that, was that. Not only for the Nieto-Ortigas clan, for all three hundred families and clans, which ran the Philippines by virtue of their enlightened self-interest, wealth, and self-serving wisdom.
Esperanza had balls and frequently spoke her mind plainly. "I have a rat gnawing at my entrails regarding Bubi’s survival. The miracle drug Penicillin he is receiving will not heal him if it is time for him to die," said Esperanza silently.
Her son and daughters looked at each other. "None of us here present dare break the silence. Only Uncle Basilio and Mater are empowered to do that."
They had been summoned at around five in the morning by great-uncle Basilio, who was the director of Lourdes clinic as well as the one personally supervising the care being administered to nine-year-old Bubi.
"The sun has stopped shining Ah Wei. Would you not say this is a bad omen? asked Lucrezia. "Let’s go to my room. Fray Paco, you can follow us if you like." She did not try to hide the fear in her voice.
"Nil desperandum," (Do not despair) replied the cockatoo quoting Horace. He spread his wings, flew towards the high ceiling, glided and then nosed down to land on the wide, teak parquet.
"Child, Dona Esperanza not like talking bird to walk on wood. Bad for wood. Better you put him on your shoulder," admonished Ah Wei in her peculiar form of Castilian.
Fray Paco heard and understood. Quick’s a cockatoo can blink his thick eyelashes, he was on Lucrezia’s shoulders.
The Nieto-Ortigas clan admired Horace, the Roman poet of antiquity. It was almost a genetic requirement to know him well and to love him. As soon as a child celebrated his sixth birthday, he or she was gifted with a small book bound in parchment containing some of his formidable insights. A young Latin scholar, usually a Jesuit priest would hold tutorials in Santol Mansion to introduce the little ones to rudimentary Latin, with Horace as the basis of their budding knowledge of savoir vivre – the art of living and savoir faire- the art of doing.
The tycoon, the late Don Cesar, whom Fray Paco referred to as Master Cesar or sometimes, simply Pater Cesar, had taught him most of the aphorisms of Horace with loving patience. Fray Paco had been a diligent pupil. Don Cesar was amazed at his memory and capacity to store information and recall it swiftly. Even now, forty-five years after the premature death of the young tycoon. Fray Paco cited Horace frequently, even if he did mangle some of his sayings.
It seemed to Lucrezia that someone was always dying in the immense Nieto-Ortigas clan. Children aged seven and above were expected to attend the funerals.
It was useless to complain about attending yet another funeral; no one listened. Now, I wish with all my heart I will not need to go to Bubi’s funeral because he is going to live a long and lovely life, despite my feelings of bad joss.
The only sympathetic person was Uncle Matthias, called Matt by everyone. He ran the family’s radio and television network and conducted a request show called “Sincerely Yours.” He always played the favorite songs of the dead relative and made effusive dedications to him or her over the radio. Even if he was barely acquainted with them, that was not a deterrent to Matt.
“Genes and blood are important," was his frequent comment.
His mother, the formidable matriarch Esperanza, Lucrezia’s grandmother, considered this display too middle class and bourgeois for words. She would tell him, “Matt, this is schmaltzy, but as long as the family of the dear departed like this sort of thing, who am I to object?”
“Cemeteries are the best places in which to relax. It’s so quiet," Uncle Matt would often tell relatives and friends. He liked to go on frequent picnics by himself in the clan’s impressive and opulent mausoleum. While he drank a fine Remy Martin brandy, munched on pan de sal freshly baked by the family chef Manong, with thick white carabao cheese from their plantation in Laguna, he ruminated over the twists and turns of life.
The children of the Nieto-Ortigas clan were expected to behave themselves during the social part of the funeral ceremony when everyone filed past silently by the coffin of rare wood – solid narra brutally cut down by loggers from the splendid Philippine rain forests. Sometimes the grieving living mourned their dead in coffins, which were nothing but showpieces, such as rare rosewood from Brazil with 18 carat gold handles.
"Absolutely too gaudy and tacky for words," the matriarch Esperanza would comment, but only to the members of her immediate family.
Like clockwork, all the children, under the supervision of their respective parents and amahs, always reviewed the following strict instructions; “Try and look solemn. Fidgeting, giggling and sniveling are not allowed. No one is to make funny faces or comic remarks. If the religious service is too long as some priests could be slower than snails, do mental arithmetic, practice multiplication and division tables in your head. Remember. It is considered crass to cry and sob at funerals except for really close relatives, when it is de rigueur to shed a tear or two."
Hysteria contests among the mourners occurred frequently. The Italians, Spanish, Filipino and Chinese had an extraordinary sense of drama. A mixture of all four races and situations in church could easily erupt into explosions of grief.
If a relative was rich and a public figure, he or she lay in state for three days. Then the most senior heads of the various oligarchic families attended so that the “common people” – not common at all but called that as a euphemism for anyone not remotely related to the clan – could participate in the rituals of mourning.
"It is almost impossible not be related through marriage or through blood ties. Couplings in Holy Matrimony or More Uxorio (outside of marriage) did not make a difference. The fertility of our men and women outrun the fertility of the soil. I wonder if it is the heat, but our sexuality is always at a fever pitch in the Philippines. My vulva and clitoris always seemed to be engorged even if I was not engaged in sexual activity," Dona Esperanza had once confided to her daughters. They had been shocked at their mother’s candor.
Just before the funeral rites begun, with the Mass and the inevitable and interminable eulogies, the young ones (those under seven) were herded, collected and taken out of the church by their respective Chinese amahs who, in keeping with the atmosphere, looked properly sepulchral in their black silk Hakka trousers and long shirts. The children and the amahs played quietly in the church or inside the cathedral courtyard. Sometimes the children listened to the most ghoulish stories from the amahs about mummies in China running after mischievous children in funerals. None of them really believed them but they found the stories fascinating just the same.
A series of unending cries reverberated throughout the corridors of Lourdes Clinic.
"No! Por el amor de Dios. No! Te ruego Dios mio! No! No Te vayas hijo. No nos dejes. Bubi mio. Bubi nuestro. Bubi Vida mia. Bubi de mi alma. For the love of God. I beg you, don’t go son. Don’t leave us. Bubi mine. Our Bubi. Bubi of my life. Bubi of my soul".
Dona Esperanza rose and raised her palms up as a means of detaining the rest of her family. The vigil was over. Death had taken Bubi.
In many ways it is not right. I bow to the inevitable will of God, but I don’t have to like it, reflected Esperanza. She forced herself to remain outwardly calm and walk slowly into the death chamber - Bubi’s room.
Rosario, nicknamed Rosy, together with her equally distraught husband Alfred, clasped and cradled their dead son in their arms. Only then did Esperanza discover that Alfred was sobbing uncontrollably and whispering tender words of love and loss in German.
"Meine libschen. Meine schatzie. Meine weldt. Meine alles. Bubi ist todt? Neine! Neine! Meine liebe Gott."
Dr. Basilio Valdes, who had attended Bubi until his last breath now enfolded Alfred’s father into his arms. "I am so sorry ... I feel so helpless."
Esperanza took both of Rebecca’s hands and clasped them hard. Two wet cheeks. Two women, one Catholic and a mélange or races, the other, an assimilated German Jewess, paternal grandmother of Bubi, united by bonds of love, blood ties and grief.
"What can I say Rebecca. After the horrors of the Second World War in which both our families lost so many, after the massacre of Montalban where forty of our dearest relatives, friends and political allies perished, including three of my beloved grand nephews, I had payed in vain for a respite. Lucrezia survived the massacre, which remains a mystery to me … I had hoped that our family would witness another miracle, and that Bubi would recover,
"Do not torment yourself so, Esperanza. God, this time, willed differently. Till the day I die I shall never understand the mysterious ways in which God works," murmured Rebecca.
"Why did the so called wonder drug not work Uncle Basilio?" wailed Rosy. She did not wait for him to reply and went on.
"You said thousands of Allied soldiers in Europe and in Asia were saved by Penicillin during the last phase of the war. Why did our Bubi die of blood poisoning? Because everything in this type of medicine is pure drivel. Maybe it’s just propaganda put out by the drug companies. We should stop buying shares immediately."
"Nothing works against a higher power. Nothing. Do you hear me hija? Science and Medicine will always attempt the impossible. It has ever been thus since the beginning of time. God and nature will never fail to find a way to thwart or bend the rules we doctors thought we had overcome," replied Dr. Basilio Valdes with a leaden heart.
"He’s still warm. Feel him Uncle. Could he be in a deep sleep like … ike Lazarus?" stammered Rosy.
Dr.Basilio Valdes gazed at Esperanza. He was pleading with his eyes.
"Querida. Bubi has been dead for just a few minutes. Remember that his fever was over forty five degrees Celsius," Esperanza told Rosy and Alfred softly.
They do not want to part with Bubi just yet. I can feel it. I understand it. I run this clinic and I also happen to be one of its most important shareholders. My family is hurting. There are exceptions to the rules. So be it ruminated the man who was also the doctor. He came up with a wonderful and affectionate solution.
"Stay here in the room with Bubi as long as you wish. Perhaps the rest of the family who have been keeping a vigil in our waiting room might like to hug and embrace Bubi. How about allowing me to hold the boy? I am his great-uncle after all. I loved him too."
It was Kabir Singh, a Sikh, head of the Nieto-Ortigas clan’s security, acting under the Matriarch’s orders that broke the news of Bubi’s death to Uncle Matt. He was at his desk at the family owned radio station DZRC. He read the announcement over the air. It was hard not to be overcome by emotion. Then he personally called every publisher of every newspaper.
"What? Bubi Keller dead? We didn’t even know the boy was sick. Peritonitis you say? That is such a tragedy. He was a lovely boy. His parents must be in a state of shock."
Uncle Matt also apprised the owners of the television stations.
"This is awful. Is this the Bubi Keller who is the son of Rosy and Alfred Keller? Is not your sister Allegra married to Rosy’s brother Arthur? Our deepest condolences."
This particular funeral was to be an extraordinary one. A dear little boy cousin, Bubi Keller, suddenly died of peritonitis.
Not one of the usually rich old caryatids, opined Uncle Matt.
Bubi's death was a blow to Lucrezia. She cried herself to sleep in her mummy and amah’s arms on the day her grandmother had told them.
"He was one of my favorite playmates, together with his younger brother Heinzie. If Heinzie had died too, that would have been more than I could bear," mused Lucrezia.
Bubi, Heinzie, Zita and she made up a quartet of conspirators, as they called themselves because they loved creating new pranks to play on people. Many of them never came to fruition. None of them enjoyed being grounded. Not going to the polo matches to see their uncles and older cousins play chukkas on opposite teams was too thrilling to miss. Then, they would not see the fast paced soccer games, and go to the symphony concerts, piano recitals, musicals and ballet performances. The worst punishment decreed? No movies and no television for two weeks!
Lucrezia began writing down all their would-be mischief and mayhem in her diaries. In the end, imagination took over and it became more effective than the reality of actually pulling off the pranks.
All the Ortigas clan had extensive wardrobes for funerals, especially the women and the girls. Lucrezia had over a dozen dresses. Plain black, serious black, frivolous black, crisp black and white, silk polka dots, lacey black on dark brown and hazy grey. Wintry white and lily white were worn only when members of the Wak Nam or Chen Yu clans died. The Chinese chose white as a symbol for mourning. It made more sense to Lucrezia.
"White is like light. It is where the soul flies to after death. That’s what Gran-Gran said. It is the sun itself. Festive and joyful. Black is too sad and bleak. It’s too...well, black."
Even Amah Ah Wei was distraught over Bubi's death. "Amah Ah Chung very wretched. She love Bubi boy too much."
"First Carly, Cookie, and Mila died. Now Bubi. Ah Wei, I am losing all my favorite playmates.” Carly, Cookie and Mila had been killed in the ambush and massacre at Montalban nearly five months ago.
"In China many people die all the time, all my family gone in few days. There is still Heinzie, he very good heart and Zita, good head like yours. Must make new friends," Ah Wei replied as she twisted her hair with her fingers into curls. She stepped back. "You look very like Shirley Temple."
"Who is she?" asked Lucrezia.
"She was the most famous child star in Hollywood. During the years of the Depression she kept the spirits of the American people high," Lucrezia's mother Camilla informed her as she entered her bedroom. "Oh, Ah Wei, please dress Lucrezia in the very formal black dress, the long one. This death is such a shock to us. Rambunctious Bubi dead at the age of nine. How did he look at his birthday party last month?"
"All white children look same to me - round eyes, long noses, too pale skins. Too much milk, same, same," murmured Ah Wei, spinning black velvet ribbons on Lucrezia's hair. "Only Lucrezia not look same," she declared.
Camilla smiled at the Amah's comment. She was attired in a simple linen, high-necked, black suit with no jewelry and a black lace veil over her shoulders, accompanied by black low-heeled pumps.
"Ah Wei, please see that she does not forget her prayer book and her veil. I'll meet you both in the driveway."
"No need!" said Doña Esperanza from the hallway. "We'll go together."
Her high heels thudded softly on the Kashmir runner placed over the narra mahogany floor. During the hot season, all the Persian, Indian and Peking rugs were washed with cold rainwater from special storage tanks and hand scrubbed with soft brushes by highly trained muscular coolies from Hang Zhou. Then they dried them in the shade of the mango and santol trees and aired them for a few days. Camphor lined rooms expressly built to hold the carpets and rugs were their final destination from the months of March to September.
Ah Wei quickly grabbed Lucrezia's prayer book bound in chiseled leather and hastily adjusted her round black veil over her blonde curls. Inside the prayer book, Lucrezia had hidden several blank pieces of paper. Ah Wei carried a small pencil in her loose black silk satin trousers.
If anything or anyone strikes my fancy or catches my attention, I can count on Ah Wei for my pencil.
Handkerchiefs? I always bring them. They are useful for wiping sweat off the brow and the neck. Cathedrals are like volcanoes during funerals. When Lucrezia cries I will be ready, reasoned the ever-practical amah.
The matriarch looked the part. An I-own-the-world kind of walk, long, black silk dress, its high neck covered in jet buttons. A single strand of pristine Mikimoto pearls, the size of Bing cherries hang around her long neck. A black silk lace veil was draped over her imperious chignon and gathered below her waist. She held a heavy, silk taffeta fan and reminded everyone to bring along fans because they were in the midst of an unusually torrid season for the month of November.
Even the temperature doesnot seem to favor the Ortigas clan this year.
Fray Paco perched on the shoulders of Doña Esperanza. He cooed and pecked at her earlobe.
"Querido, it's too dangerous to leave you outside the church. You might be kidnapped. Times have changed for the worse in that regard."
Fray Paco was so precious to them, so vital to their lives; Esperanza would pay any amount demanded as ransom. She feared Fray Paco might be harmed. His obscene mouth when incensed and the criminal's temperament would be a lethal combination.
Now if Freckie would be kidnapped instead, it would be foolhardy of the criminals, contemplated Doña Esperanza. She for one would not pay a centavo to ransom her grandson. Why, as in O. Henry’s amusing short story, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” she might demand a high ransom to bring Freckie back into their fold. Esperanza smirked at her secret ramblings. That would be her first reaction. On more reflection, as much as Freckie was easy to dislike, she could not bear to hurt her daughter Allegra so… in the end, even Freckie the pest would be ransomed.
Fray Paco grunted, "Ay porr Dios! Que lastima He hovered over Lucrezia and pecked her softly on the lips. His attendants, the twin dwarves Eusebio and Euclide scanned the sky. Eagles and hawks, his mortal enemies, could swoop down on Fray Paco when you least expected it. "Bye! Ciao! Adios!" he bellowed as his attendants took him on his perch across the lawn on the way back to his jungle room.
It is one of the chapters of Book Five of THE SAGA OF FRAY PACO: THE INDOMITABLE CONTESSINA LUCREZIA. Bubi's demise, which came a few months after the Massacre of Montalban, was a terrible blow to Lucrezia. To this day I wonder how she was able to cope. But cope she did and admirably too.
Agents and publishers who think they know it all should cease calling these genres literary fiction. It is not. It is literary non-fiction. Would they call Boris Pasternak's DOCTOR ZHIVAGO a piece of literary fiction? Some ignoramuses actually did!
Pasternak defined it autobiographical fantasy because he added dialogue which occurred but which may not have been the exact words used by the characters and personages at the time.
By the way Marcel Proust called his masterpiece REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, which strictly speaking is not the proper translation of the French work, also an atobiographical fantasy, for the very same reason.
I eagerly await your comments.
NOTE: Because of the length of this story ... I will publish it in two parts, starting with part 1 today.
Bubi's Funeral (part 1)
"I can’t stop thinking of Bubi. Let’s pray to the Child Jesus of Prague to make him well. I have a pakirandam (feeling) that Bubi will die and I don’t know why,’’ said Lucrezia sadly fingering the branches of a tall santol tree that towered alongside the verandah of Santol Mansion.
"November is very pretty month in Manila. Cool and fresh. Plenty waling-waling orchids, tall hibiscus shrubs and little heat. Perfect for children and playmates to spend time in garden,’ replied Ah Wei, her Chinese Amah (nanny) as she plaited seven year old Lucrezia’s long blonde tresses and avoided the issue of Bubi.
A loud silence separated them.
Even the weather is behaving in an odd way. It’s too hot to play any of our games in the garden. And then I don’t feel like playing while Bubi lies so close to death.
Ah Wei sensed things seemed askew including the heat and the humidity and quickly suggested, ‘’Maybe more better if we pray first.’’
She gazed at her amah from her favorite carved Tonkinese armchair. Ah Wei ‘s smooth face, was usually an unreadable Oriental mask. This morning her skin was lined and her anguished eyes betrayed her statement about the perfect month of November. More significantly the amah did not contradict Lucrezia.
She feels Bubi is going to leave his parents, brother and his favorite cousin-me. Tears ran down her cheeks.
"Lucrrre do not cry. It makes you ugly," croaked Fray Paco.
Fray Paco, the rare white cockatoo from the island chain of Sumatra, was the oldest member of the Nieto-Ortigas clan. He surely had passed a century and this was calculated simply and easily. He remembered events, upheavals and tragedies, which had occurred in the late eighteenth century. As a polyglot Fray Paco’s expressions in Castilian and Portuguese were arcane. His blasphemies and curses also harkened to the days when cutthroats, villains and pirates of every color and stripe roamed the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca at will.
"I don’t want to play any games in or outside the house. Even the piano does not interest me. I prefer to sit in the veranda with you and listen to Fray Paco, after we have said a prayer to the Child Jesus,’’ replied Lucrezia in a tearful voice.
Only the children with their respective amahs were in Santol Mansion. Gran-Gran, the Matriarch Esperanza accompanied by their parents was at the Lourdes clinic. It was owned and financed by the Nieto-Ortigas clan. General Basilio Valdes, a kinsman who had served in General Macarthur’s headquarters in Manila, as his highest-ranking Filipino officer was its director. Not only was Basilio rich, he was a fine doctor - Summa cum Laude at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
Basilio had balls. The Lourdes Clinic socked it to the rich so that the poor could be looked after for free.
‘’That means all members of the clan without exception should and must pay all the fees of Lourdes Clinic, if any of us are patients. All our friends and acquaintances with the means to pay are not to expect any discounts whatsoever,’’ Dona Esperanza had decreed and that, was that. Not only for the Nieto-Ortigas clan, for all three hundred families and clans, which ran the Philippines by virtue of their enlightened self-interest, wealth, and self-serving wisdom.
Esperanza had balls and frequently spoke her mind plainly. "I have a rat gnawing at my entrails regarding Bubi’s survival. The miracle drug Penicillin he is receiving will not heal him if it is time for him to die," said Esperanza silently.
Her son and daughters looked at each other. "None of us here present dare break the silence. Only Uncle Basilio and Mater are empowered to do that."
They had been summoned at around five in the morning by great-uncle Basilio, who was the director of Lourdes clinic as well as the one personally supervising the care being administered to nine-year-old Bubi.
"The sun has stopped shining Ah Wei. Would you not say this is a bad omen? asked Lucrezia. "Let’s go to my room. Fray Paco, you can follow us if you like." She did not try to hide the fear in her voice.
"Nil desperandum," (Do not despair) replied the cockatoo quoting Horace. He spread his wings, flew towards the high ceiling, glided and then nosed down to land on the wide, teak parquet.
"Child, Dona Esperanza not like talking bird to walk on wood. Bad for wood. Better you put him on your shoulder," admonished Ah Wei in her peculiar form of Castilian.
Fray Paco heard and understood. Quick’s a cockatoo can blink his thick eyelashes, he was on Lucrezia’s shoulders.
The Nieto-Ortigas clan admired Horace, the Roman poet of antiquity. It was almost a genetic requirement to know him well and to love him. As soon as a child celebrated his sixth birthday, he or she was gifted with a small book bound in parchment containing some of his formidable insights. A young Latin scholar, usually a Jesuit priest would hold tutorials in Santol Mansion to introduce the little ones to rudimentary Latin, with Horace as the basis of their budding knowledge of savoir vivre – the art of living and savoir faire- the art of doing.
The tycoon, the late Don Cesar, whom Fray Paco referred to as Master Cesar or sometimes, simply Pater Cesar, had taught him most of the aphorisms of Horace with loving patience. Fray Paco had been a diligent pupil. Don Cesar was amazed at his memory and capacity to store information and recall it swiftly. Even now, forty-five years after the premature death of the young tycoon. Fray Paco cited Horace frequently, even if he did mangle some of his sayings.
It seemed to Lucrezia that someone was always dying in the immense Nieto-Ortigas clan. Children aged seven and above were expected to attend the funerals.
It was useless to complain about attending yet another funeral; no one listened. Now, I wish with all my heart I will not need to go to Bubi’s funeral because he is going to live a long and lovely life, despite my feelings of bad joss.
The only sympathetic person was Uncle Matthias, called Matt by everyone. He ran the family’s radio and television network and conducted a request show called “Sincerely Yours.” He always played the favorite songs of the dead relative and made effusive dedications to him or her over the radio. Even if he was barely acquainted with them, that was not a deterrent to Matt.
“Genes and blood are important," was his frequent comment.
His mother, the formidable matriarch Esperanza, Lucrezia’s grandmother, considered this display too middle class and bourgeois for words. She would tell him, “Matt, this is schmaltzy, but as long as the family of the dear departed like this sort of thing, who am I to object?”
“Cemeteries are the best places in which to relax. It’s so quiet," Uncle Matt would often tell relatives and friends. He liked to go on frequent picnics by himself in the clan’s impressive and opulent mausoleum. While he drank a fine Remy Martin brandy, munched on pan de sal freshly baked by the family chef Manong, with thick white carabao cheese from their plantation in Laguna, he ruminated over the twists and turns of life.
The children of the Nieto-Ortigas clan were expected to behave themselves during the social part of the funeral ceremony when everyone filed past silently by the coffin of rare wood – solid narra brutally cut down by loggers from the splendid Philippine rain forests. Sometimes the grieving living mourned their dead in coffins, which were nothing but showpieces, such as rare rosewood from Brazil with 18 carat gold handles.
"Absolutely too gaudy and tacky for words," the matriarch Esperanza would comment, but only to the members of her immediate family.
Like clockwork, all the children, under the supervision of their respective parents and amahs, always reviewed the following strict instructions; “Try and look solemn. Fidgeting, giggling and sniveling are not allowed. No one is to make funny faces or comic remarks. If the religious service is too long as some priests could be slower than snails, do mental arithmetic, practice multiplication and division tables in your head. Remember. It is considered crass to cry and sob at funerals except for really close relatives, when it is de rigueur to shed a tear or two."
Hysteria contests among the mourners occurred frequently. The Italians, Spanish, Filipino and Chinese had an extraordinary sense of drama. A mixture of all four races and situations in church could easily erupt into explosions of grief.
If a relative was rich and a public figure, he or she lay in state for three days. Then the most senior heads of the various oligarchic families attended so that the “common people” – not common at all but called that as a euphemism for anyone not remotely related to the clan – could participate in the rituals of mourning.
"It is almost impossible not be related through marriage or through blood ties. Couplings in Holy Matrimony or More Uxorio (outside of marriage) did not make a difference. The fertility of our men and women outrun the fertility of the soil. I wonder if it is the heat, but our sexuality is always at a fever pitch in the Philippines. My vulva and clitoris always seemed to be engorged even if I was not engaged in sexual activity," Dona Esperanza had once confided to her daughters. They had been shocked at their mother’s candor.
Just before the funeral rites begun, with the Mass and the inevitable and interminable eulogies, the young ones (those under seven) were herded, collected and taken out of the church by their respective Chinese amahs who, in keeping with the atmosphere, looked properly sepulchral in their black silk Hakka trousers and long shirts. The children and the amahs played quietly in the church or inside the cathedral courtyard. Sometimes the children listened to the most ghoulish stories from the amahs about mummies in China running after mischievous children in funerals. None of them really believed them but they found the stories fascinating just the same.
A series of unending cries reverberated throughout the corridors of Lourdes Clinic.
"No! Por el amor de Dios. No! Te ruego Dios mio! No! No Te vayas hijo. No nos dejes. Bubi mio. Bubi nuestro. Bubi Vida mia. Bubi de mi alma. For the love of God. I beg you, don’t go son. Don’t leave us. Bubi mine. Our Bubi. Bubi of my life. Bubi of my soul".
Dona Esperanza rose and raised her palms up as a means of detaining the rest of her family. The vigil was over. Death had taken Bubi.
In many ways it is not right. I bow to the inevitable will of God, but I don’t have to like it, reflected Esperanza. She forced herself to remain outwardly calm and walk slowly into the death chamber - Bubi’s room.
Rosario, nicknamed Rosy, together with her equally distraught husband Alfred, clasped and cradled their dead son in their arms. Only then did Esperanza discover that Alfred was sobbing uncontrollably and whispering tender words of love and loss in German.
"Meine libschen. Meine schatzie. Meine weldt. Meine alles. Bubi ist todt? Neine! Neine! Meine liebe Gott."
Dr. Basilio Valdes, who had attended Bubi until his last breath now enfolded Alfred’s father into his arms. "I am so sorry ... I feel so helpless."
Esperanza took both of Rebecca’s hands and clasped them hard. Two wet cheeks. Two women, one Catholic and a mélange or races, the other, an assimilated German Jewess, paternal grandmother of Bubi, united by bonds of love, blood ties and grief.
"What can I say Rebecca. After the horrors of the Second World War in which both our families lost so many, after the massacre of Montalban where forty of our dearest relatives, friends and political allies perished, including three of my beloved grand nephews, I had payed in vain for a respite. Lucrezia survived the massacre, which remains a mystery to me … I had hoped that our family would witness another miracle, and that Bubi would recover,
"Do not torment yourself so, Esperanza. God, this time, willed differently. Till the day I die I shall never understand the mysterious ways in which God works," murmured Rebecca.
"Why did the so called wonder drug not work Uncle Basilio?" wailed Rosy. She did not wait for him to reply and went on.
"You said thousands of Allied soldiers in Europe and in Asia were saved by Penicillin during the last phase of the war. Why did our Bubi die of blood poisoning? Because everything in this type of medicine is pure drivel. Maybe it’s just propaganda put out by the drug companies. We should stop buying shares immediately."
"Nothing works against a higher power. Nothing. Do you hear me hija? Science and Medicine will always attempt the impossible. It has ever been thus since the beginning of time. God and nature will never fail to find a way to thwart or bend the rules we doctors thought we had overcome," replied Dr. Basilio Valdes with a leaden heart.
"He’s still warm. Feel him Uncle. Could he be in a deep sleep like … ike Lazarus?" stammered Rosy.
Dr.Basilio Valdes gazed at Esperanza. He was pleading with his eyes.
"Querida. Bubi has been dead for just a few minutes. Remember that his fever was over forty five degrees Celsius," Esperanza told Rosy and Alfred softly.
They do not want to part with Bubi just yet. I can feel it. I understand it. I run this clinic and I also happen to be one of its most important shareholders. My family is hurting. There are exceptions to the rules. So be it ruminated the man who was also the doctor. He came up with a wonderful and affectionate solution.
"Stay here in the room with Bubi as long as you wish. Perhaps the rest of the family who have been keeping a vigil in our waiting room might like to hug and embrace Bubi. How about allowing me to hold the boy? I am his great-uncle after all. I loved him too."
It was Kabir Singh, a Sikh, head of the Nieto-Ortigas clan’s security, acting under the Matriarch’s orders that broke the news of Bubi’s death to Uncle Matt. He was at his desk at the family owned radio station DZRC. He read the announcement over the air. It was hard not to be overcome by emotion. Then he personally called every publisher of every newspaper.
"What? Bubi Keller dead? We didn’t even know the boy was sick. Peritonitis you say? That is such a tragedy. He was a lovely boy. His parents must be in a state of shock."
Uncle Matt also apprised the owners of the television stations.
"This is awful. Is this the Bubi Keller who is the son of Rosy and Alfred Keller? Is not your sister Allegra married to Rosy’s brother Arthur? Our deepest condolences."
This particular funeral was to be an extraordinary one. A dear little boy cousin, Bubi Keller, suddenly died of peritonitis.
Not one of the usually rich old caryatids, opined Uncle Matt.
Bubi's death was a blow to Lucrezia. She cried herself to sleep in her mummy and amah’s arms on the day her grandmother had told them.
"He was one of my favorite playmates, together with his younger brother Heinzie. If Heinzie had died too, that would have been more than I could bear," mused Lucrezia.
Bubi, Heinzie, Zita and she made up a quartet of conspirators, as they called themselves because they loved creating new pranks to play on people. Many of them never came to fruition. None of them enjoyed being grounded. Not going to the polo matches to see their uncles and older cousins play chukkas on opposite teams was too thrilling to miss. Then, they would not see the fast paced soccer games, and go to the symphony concerts, piano recitals, musicals and ballet performances. The worst punishment decreed? No movies and no television for two weeks!
Lucrezia began writing down all their would-be mischief and mayhem in her diaries. In the end, imagination took over and it became more effective than the reality of actually pulling off the pranks.
All the Ortigas clan had extensive wardrobes for funerals, especially the women and the girls. Lucrezia had over a dozen dresses. Plain black, serious black, frivolous black, crisp black and white, silk polka dots, lacey black on dark brown and hazy grey. Wintry white and lily white were worn only when members of the Wak Nam or Chen Yu clans died. The Chinese chose white as a symbol for mourning. It made more sense to Lucrezia.
"White is like light. It is where the soul flies to after death. That’s what Gran-Gran said. It is the sun itself. Festive and joyful. Black is too sad and bleak. It’s too...well, black."
Even Amah Ah Wei was distraught over Bubi's death. "Amah Ah Chung very wretched. She love Bubi boy too much."
"First Carly, Cookie, and Mila died. Now Bubi. Ah Wei, I am losing all my favorite playmates.” Carly, Cookie and Mila had been killed in the ambush and massacre at Montalban nearly five months ago.
"In China many people die all the time, all my family gone in few days. There is still Heinzie, he very good heart and Zita, good head like yours. Must make new friends," Ah Wei replied as she twisted her hair with her fingers into curls. She stepped back. "You look very like Shirley Temple."
"Who is she?" asked Lucrezia.
"She was the most famous child star in Hollywood. During the years of the Depression she kept the spirits of the American people high," Lucrezia's mother Camilla informed her as she entered her bedroom. "Oh, Ah Wei, please dress Lucrezia in the very formal black dress, the long one. This death is such a shock to us. Rambunctious Bubi dead at the age of nine. How did he look at his birthday party last month?"
"All white children look same to me - round eyes, long noses, too pale skins. Too much milk, same, same," murmured Ah Wei, spinning black velvet ribbons on Lucrezia's hair. "Only Lucrezia not look same," she declared.
Camilla smiled at the Amah's comment. She was attired in a simple linen, high-necked, black suit with no jewelry and a black lace veil over her shoulders, accompanied by black low-heeled pumps.
"Ah Wei, please see that she does not forget her prayer book and her veil. I'll meet you both in the driveway."
"No need!" said Doña Esperanza from the hallway. "We'll go together."
Her high heels thudded softly on the Kashmir runner placed over the narra mahogany floor. During the hot season, all the Persian, Indian and Peking rugs were washed with cold rainwater from special storage tanks and hand scrubbed with soft brushes by highly trained muscular coolies from Hang Zhou. Then they dried them in the shade of the mango and santol trees and aired them for a few days. Camphor lined rooms expressly built to hold the carpets and rugs were their final destination from the months of March to September.
Ah Wei quickly grabbed Lucrezia's prayer book bound in chiseled leather and hastily adjusted her round black veil over her blonde curls. Inside the prayer book, Lucrezia had hidden several blank pieces of paper. Ah Wei carried a small pencil in her loose black silk satin trousers.
If anything or anyone strikes my fancy or catches my attention, I can count on Ah Wei for my pencil.
Handkerchiefs? I always bring them. They are useful for wiping sweat off the brow and the neck. Cathedrals are like volcanoes during funerals. When Lucrezia cries I will be ready, reasoned the ever-practical amah.
The matriarch looked the part. An I-own-the-world kind of walk, long, black silk dress, its high neck covered in jet buttons. A single strand of pristine Mikimoto pearls, the size of Bing cherries hang around her long neck. A black silk lace veil was draped over her imperious chignon and gathered below her waist. She held a heavy, silk taffeta fan and reminded everyone to bring along fans because they were in the midst of an unusually torrid season for the month of November.
Even the temperature doesnot seem to favor the Ortigas clan this year.
Fray Paco perched on the shoulders of Doña Esperanza. He cooed and pecked at her earlobe.
"Querido, it's too dangerous to leave you outside the church. You might be kidnapped. Times have changed for the worse in that regard."
Fray Paco was so precious to them, so vital to their lives; Esperanza would pay any amount demanded as ransom. She feared Fray Paco might be harmed. His obscene mouth when incensed and the criminal's temperament would be a lethal combination.
Now if Freckie would be kidnapped instead, it would be foolhardy of the criminals, contemplated Doña Esperanza. She for one would not pay a centavo to ransom her grandson. Why, as in O. Henry’s amusing short story, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” she might demand a high ransom to bring Freckie back into their fold. Esperanza smirked at her secret ramblings. That would be her first reaction. On more reflection, as much as Freckie was easy to dislike, she could not bear to hurt her daughter Allegra so… in the end, even Freckie the pest would be ransomed.
Fray Paco grunted, "Ay porr Dios! Que lastima He hovered over Lucrezia and pecked her softly on the lips. His attendants, the twin dwarves Eusebio and Euclide scanned the sky. Eagles and hawks, his mortal enemies, could swoop down on Fray Paco when you least expected it. "Bye! Ciao! Adios!" he bellowed as his attendants took him on his perch across the lawn on the way back to his jungle room.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Victor Vencer
The Saga of Fray Paco
Book 5: The Indomitable Lucrezia
Chapter 5. Victor Vencer
“Hatred has kept me going all these years. I find that it has been good for me and my vengeful deeds today fill me with enormous satisfaction. Those who say that vengeance eats away at your inner self are wrong. Vengeance is the best armament to have and to hold. I could not have perpetrated this ambush without your dedicated support. You are the best guerillas in Asia. I will forever remain grateful,” declared Victor Vencer.
The Marxist –Stalinist guerillas that formed part of the PLA, the Philippine Liberation Army had gathered around him in the stream. Fully clothed they attempted to cleanse themselves of the blood and gristle, which had crusted on their clothes.
“This part of the Tanay stream is teeming with leeches and mosquitoes," he reminded his men.
The mosquitoes had gifted them with malaria and the leeches could kill you if enough of them sucked your blood. Their poisons thinned your blood in such a way that you bled to death internally.
Their expressions remained somber and impassive. It wasn’t easy to do your ablutions covered in blood from head to toe. They used rubber gloves and each of them held a smooth oval stone found on the banks of the river to scrape off the bloody remains of the Ortigas Nieto clan and their loathsome employees.
I am an authentic self-made bastard, mused Victor Vencer, leader of the Philippine Liberation Army (the PLA), natural son of Don Rodrigo De La Rama. This was not due to the fact that he was illegitimate, which certainly was not his fault – the only event in his raging life he had not been responsible for.
Victor Vencer de la Rama had spent most of his childhood, youth and adult life perfecting his hatred, rage, envy, frustration, and above all, his thirst for blood against the “Haves” and the “Mores” as he called and described “them".
The oligarchy and the small, middle class exhaustedly emerging from the bloody horrors of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, which had ended in February of 1946; needed to be eliminated from the planet.
I particularly loathe members of the Philippine Army, especially those officers who graduated from West Point. Chinese merchants are also part and parcel of the hit list of the PLA. All military personnel, government employees and Chinese merchants are the enemies of the Filipino people. What makes up the people? The poor peasants and farmers, and the workers exploited by the USA, their multi-national corporations, and the rich Chinese.
Victor Vencer nurtured an undying and ferocious rancor for the Ortigas Nieto clan.
The despicable Don Cesar whom I had never met ruined my father’s family – the De La Rama clan. At times like this I am sorry I don’t believe in God. I would kill him again and again – and rejoice in the eye for an eye. Oh! But I have killed him repeatedly. What were the ambush and the executions of the Ortigas Nieto all about? Don Cesar, you should have been there. All your blood kin torn to bits by the machine guns and then my men worked what was left of their corpses into pulp with our machetes. We hacked away heads, arms, legs, and feet. What a feeling. I am truly liberated.
His men walked out of the stream slowly. They did not wish to disturb whatever was churning in their leader’s mind. It was a wild and untamable thing. They shivered. The jungle was always dark and forbidding, like Victor.
Not only have I endured my bastardry, I had to swallow the humiliation of being a bastard son of those deranged, dissolute and depraved “failures in everything”, the De La Rama.
I was but a year old when Don Cesar, the Tycoon (how that word makes me gag to this day whenever I come across it in the newspapers) had taken over the De La Rama International Shipping Lines, all our warehouses, possessions, farmlands and plantations. By the prevailing laws of the period, which was American Law, Don Cesar owned the houses and properties we lived in.
The beau geste of Don Cesar after the terrifying typhoon of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 1912 wherein he legally transferred the houses of his father Don Rodrigo, his slimy uncle Don Cristobal and his “whatever you say Cristobal Uncle Diego” back to the De La Ramas made the poison too humiliating to swallow.
“Why do you abhor them so much?” his mother Leticia would often ask, referring to the Ortigas Nieto clan and Don Cesar, in particular. “If it wasn’t for Don Cesar, I would have had to return to my former profession as a dancer; we would have been homeless too.”
I know the story to vomitus. How the young Don Alcibiade had informed his mother, the cabaret dancer cum prostitute, addressing her as “Senora/Dona (Mrs. And Lady) several days after the typhoon, that the small house they lived in was being transferred back to her, the nobody, the poor concubine of Don Rodrigo.
“Would you be so kind, Senora, as to give us your formal names so that this transfer of ownership can be expedited?” Don Alcibiade had asked politely.
“Leticia Santos de la Rama, I mean Leticia Santos,” she blurted out because his unexpected kindness had disconcerted her.
Don Alcibiade pretended not to notice as he wrote down her name on a small leather notebook.
“It will take a little time to register this with the authorities. A courier will notify you. My uncle, Don Cesar, will see to the letter himself. I wish you a good day and a good year, Senora.” Don Alcibiade bowed slightly as he took his leave of Senora Leticia.
She had been packing alone in the small house facing the green meadows of Paranaque, a town close to Manila. When the news of Don Cesar’s takeover hit Leticia, she had been forced to dismiss her servants on orders of Don Rodrigo. How was she going to cope with dancing and caring for her infant son?
“I mean this Victor, you should be grateful to Don Cesar, I am – and will be – the rest of my life. Until that beautiful day Don Alcibiade gave me the news, I was so desperate I had been thinking about taking you to the Orphanage of Saint Joseph. I was prepared to give you up rather than see you suffer privations in childhood as I did,” the distraught Leticia told her son.
“You are a poor, crazy and foolish slut,” screamed Victor when he was about 13 years old. “I can’t stand to hear another word about the Ortigas clan.”
“Apologize immediately Victor. I am your Mother. I am no longer a slut. I make my living fairly and squarely as a seamstress.”
I’ll have to think of something quickly. Where would I go? Who will take me? The time isn’t right yet. So he apologized and simulated genuine shame and regret. His mother embraced him; he had to hug her back.
“Well …” he mulled, “perhaps you’re no longer a slut. I grant you that, but you are still a poor and foolish woman for being grateful to those robber barons, the Ortigas clan. Someday, I’ll get even.”
Don Rodrigo had recognized Victor as his legitimate son when Victor was nearly 18 and about to graduate Valedictorian from High School, Letran College.
“I know you’re my son, damn the devil! You are my cursing image, but my hated ugly wife now holds the purse strings since her inheritance from her even more hateful father. If we hadn’t been ruined and robbed by Don Cesar and his clan … you’ll have to wait until she dies, I pray for her death everyday – not to God, of course. What the damnation are you bleating about? I paid for your education at the best schools in Manila, did I not?”
At Victor’s furious silence, Don Rodrigo de la Rama repeated, “Did I not? I mean, I didn’t have to do that, but your intelligence since kindergarten was impressive and I thought it would be a shame not to give you the best opportunity I could afford.”
“Second best schools, Rodrigo De La Rama, second best. San Sebastian Elementary School and Letran are not the crème de la crème. You know that. I know that.” He spat out “Your children by your wife went to Ateneo de Manila, the Jesuit school for the elite. Your Alma Mater!”
“I have told you again and again, my father-in law paid for the schooling and other expenses for the children by my legal wife. Let’s be precise here. The other children I have sired have had to fend for themselves. But for the Ortigas Nieto clan, you too would have attended Ateneo de Manila,” Don Rodrigo declared.
“That’s a lie!” Victor roared.
“Don’t you dare call me a liar, you ungrateful and disgraceful half-breed wretch,” Don Rodrigo slapped his son so hard and so unexpectedly, he stumbled backwards and fell.
The tragedy of misunderstandings and quarrels is that sometimes, out of the rubble of prevarications, falsehoods and half-truths, unvarnished truths are spoken. This was one of those rare occasions. Of all his progeny (legitimate and bar sinister, the coat of arms drawn across the left side to denote bastardry), the brightest and most promising was Victor.
“Now hear this,” a foaming-at-the-mouth Don Rodrigo yelled at the stunned Victor, “the day La Sposa Fea (the Ugly Wife) croaks is the day you’ll become a De La Rama officially. You truly are ungrateful. Aren’t you enrolled in school as a De La Rama? Yes or no?”
Victor felt like beating up his father’s face and body to mincemeat but that would be letting off the detested “no balls, sin cojones” Rodrigo De La Rama lightly and quickly. Instead he wiped the blood seeping from his mouth with the hand embroidered linen handkerchief his mother had given him and meekly replied, “Yes, thank you.”
"That's better. Get off the floor and get back to your books. There's an economic depression in the United States and it is also affecting the Philippines. No one knows when it's going to end. You should kiss my feet for what I do for you!"
Don Rodrigo stormed out of Dona Leticia’s little house in Paranaque and slammed the door so violently the heavy walls reverberated and shook.
Having attained the status of Valedictorian at Letran College is an empty victory as far as I am concerned. Now, if I had been Number One in the Jesuit Ateneo, that would have been something to throw at my mentally average half brothers, at my father, my uncles, and at Society.
In truth Letran was an excellent school run by Dominican priests from Spain. Many of the so-called oligarchy sent their sons to study there. Alas! It was not the “fashionable” school it had once been under Spanish colonial rule. It did not have the snob appeal of the Ateneo de Manila or De La Salle because both these schools had many English and American priests. It was the “In” thing in those days.
My valedictory speech was eloquent and stirring. Even then, I had the perfect instincts of a rouser of the masses. My speech contained the kind of words the Establishment, the Elite and the priests, those known as "they" reveled in hearing. “ We must strive for political and economic Stability, the future belongs to those who work hard for their families, their country - the Commonwealth of the Philippines. We must hold our Benefactors and brothers, the United States of America in the highest regard. Long live our two countries! And then I clearly remember that I lifted up both my arms and looked to the center, left and right and boomed, "The Philippines and America."
Don Rodrigo was in the audience. He was in the first row solely because his son Victor was Valedictorian. It had been almost 20 years since a De La Rama had sat in such a prominent position in a public place.
"God and Satan damn Don Cesar and his clan, the Ortigas for all eternity!"
Victor, the only talented De La Rama, the one who had triumphed in a class of 150 students divided into three sections A, B, and C, could not receive the elite schooling he deserved.
“May idiots, monsters and defectives be born to the descendants of Don Cesar and every last person who has a drop of Ortigas Nieto blood in them. The more deformed and hideous their progeny the happier I shall be. At last! There would be something to feel good about.”
Don Rodrigo never reflected even for a moment in those 20 years that the De La Rama family's profligate spending, their abusive treatment of their staff and their employees, the family's pernicious addiction to opium (and he was one of the worst), their wasteful and self-destructive habits, such as obsessive gambling and constant womanizing, had inexorably led to the ruin and inevitable bankruptcy of the colossus De La Rama International Lines.
He forgot about the three attempts his family had made on Don Cesar’s life. ‘I shall never forgive myself for failing to kill him on that first attempt,” he confessed to Victor years ago when he had drunk more absinthe than he should have and his tongue was looser than usual.
My father has 15 children with 9 different women. I think it’s disgusting. Now he has virtually abandoned them because they are average individuals and he can’t be troubled to look after them financially.
“Well, the women went after me because I was rich then and my name was De La Rama. Fuck them. They asked for it.”
My Uncle Diego has stopped counting his children.
“What’s with these women? They could have refused to couple with me. But sordid and spurious sex with a De La Rama was just fine then. It’s not my problem.”
Only Uncle Don Cristobal, the Calculator, produced legitimate offspring ... but then he considered sex a duty at the worst of times; at the best, something banal, like a bodily need to fit into your active book of appointments and finish off quickly. Uncle Cristobal was a homosexual, who only lusted after adolescent boys. My stupid parents are unaware that I know some of the secrets of the De La Rama. I have heard comments here and there that the beauteous Dona Urraca, Don Cesar’s sister had been his first and last heterosexual love. I wondered what took place?
The most repugnant thing Victor was forced to accept was the scholarship he had won for four years study in Scotland financed by the ON Foundation (Ortigas Nieto). His mother had gone to the Banco Hispano Filipino and implored Don Alcibiade the banker to consider her son Victor as one of the most likely candidates for attending Saint Andrew's University in Scotland, one of the oldest and finest schools in Europe.
Over the objections of his niece Dona Esperanza who served on the Board of Directors and Governors of the Bank - "I see nothing but hate in that young man's eyes," Don Alcibiade had heralded the opportunity to heal the long festering cankers between the Ortigas and the De La Rama clans.
“The young man deserves a chance Esperanza. Acts of kindness can never hurt us,” said Don Alcibiade who had never seen evil up close the way Esperanza had.
"So be it, Uncle," Dona Esperanza had acquiesced. "Since 1903 when the first attempt on Great Uncle Cesar’s life by the De La Rama, Don Rodrigo in particular, was perpetrated - we have recited the "success is the best revenge" adage - the resentment has increased. This young man is the next generation - it can only get worse. I fear this decision will come back to haunt us. I pray I am wrong.
Of course – she wasn't.
Book 5: The Indomitable Lucrezia
Chapter 5. Victor Vencer
“Hatred has kept me going all these years. I find that it has been good for me and my vengeful deeds today fill me with enormous satisfaction. Those who say that vengeance eats away at your inner self are wrong. Vengeance is the best armament to have and to hold. I could not have perpetrated this ambush without your dedicated support. You are the best guerillas in Asia. I will forever remain grateful,” declared Victor Vencer.
The Marxist –Stalinist guerillas that formed part of the PLA, the Philippine Liberation Army had gathered around him in the stream. Fully clothed they attempted to cleanse themselves of the blood and gristle, which had crusted on their clothes.
“This part of the Tanay stream is teeming with leeches and mosquitoes," he reminded his men.
The mosquitoes had gifted them with malaria and the leeches could kill you if enough of them sucked your blood. Their poisons thinned your blood in such a way that you bled to death internally.
Their expressions remained somber and impassive. It wasn’t easy to do your ablutions covered in blood from head to toe. They used rubber gloves and each of them held a smooth oval stone found on the banks of the river to scrape off the bloody remains of the Ortigas Nieto clan and their loathsome employees.
I am an authentic self-made bastard, mused Victor Vencer, leader of the Philippine Liberation Army (the PLA), natural son of Don Rodrigo De La Rama. This was not due to the fact that he was illegitimate, which certainly was not his fault – the only event in his raging life he had not been responsible for.
Victor Vencer de la Rama had spent most of his childhood, youth and adult life perfecting his hatred, rage, envy, frustration, and above all, his thirst for blood against the “Haves” and the “Mores” as he called and described “them".
The oligarchy and the small, middle class exhaustedly emerging from the bloody horrors of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, which had ended in February of 1946; needed to be eliminated from the planet.
I particularly loathe members of the Philippine Army, especially those officers who graduated from West Point. Chinese merchants are also part and parcel of the hit list of the PLA. All military personnel, government employees and Chinese merchants are the enemies of the Filipino people. What makes up the people? The poor peasants and farmers, and the workers exploited by the USA, their multi-national corporations, and the rich Chinese.
Victor Vencer nurtured an undying and ferocious rancor for the Ortigas Nieto clan.
The despicable Don Cesar whom I had never met ruined my father’s family – the De La Rama clan. At times like this I am sorry I don’t believe in God. I would kill him again and again – and rejoice in the eye for an eye. Oh! But I have killed him repeatedly. What were the ambush and the executions of the Ortigas Nieto all about? Don Cesar, you should have been there. All your blood kin torn to bits by the machine guns and then my men worked what was left of their corpses into pulp with our machetes. We hacked away heads, arms, legs, and feet. What a feeling. I am truly liberated.
His men walked out of the stream slowly. They did not wish to disturb whatever was churning in their leader’s mind. It was a wild and untamable thing. They shivered. The jungle was always dark and forbidding, like Victor.
Not only have I endured my bastardry, I had to swallow the humiliation of being a bastard son of those deranged, dissolute and depraved “failures in everything”, the De La Rama.
I was but a year old when Don Cesar, the Tycoon (how that word makes me gag to this day whenever I come across it in the newspapers) had taken over the De La Rama International Shipping Lines, all our warehouses, possessions, farmlands and plantations. By the prevailing laws of the period, which was American Law, Don Cesar owned the houses and properties we lived in.
The beau geste of Don Cesar after the terrifying typhoon of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 1912 wherein he legally transferred the houses of his father Don Rodrigo, his slimy uncle Don Cristobal and his “whatever you say Cristobal Uncle Diego” back to the De La Ramas made the poison too humiliating to swallow.
“Why do you abhor them so much?” his mother Leticia would often ask, referring to the Ortigas Nieto clan and Don Cesar, in particular. “If it wasn’t for Don Cesar, I would have had to return to my former profession as a dancer; we would have been homeless too.”
I know the story to vomitus. How the young Don Alcibiade had informed his mother, the cabaret dancer cum prostitute, addressing her as “Senora/Dona (Mrs. And Lady) several days after the typhoon, that the small house they lived in was being transferred back to her, the nobody, the poor concubine of Don Rodrigo.
“Would you be so kind, Senora, as to give us your formal names so that this transfer of ownership can be expedited?” Don Alcibiade had asked politely.
“Leticia Santos de la Rama, I mean Leticia Santos,” she blurted out because his unexpected kindness had disconcerted her.
Don Alcibiade pretended not to notice as he wrote down her name on a small leather notebook.
“It will take a little time to register this with the authorities. A courier will notify you. My uncle, Don Cesar, will see to the letter himself. I wish you a good day and a good year, Senora.” Don Alcibiade bowed slightly as he took his leave of Senora Leticia.
She had been packing alone in the small house facing the green meadows of Paranaque, a town close to Manila. When the news of Don Cesar’s takeover hit Leticia, she had been forced to dismiss her servants on orders of Don Rodrigo. How was she going to cope with dancing and caring for her infant son?
“I mean this Victor, you should be grateful to Don Cesar, I am – and will be – the rest of my life. Until that beautiful day Don Alcibiade gave me the news, I was so desperate I had been thinking about taking you to the Orphanage of Saint Joseph. I was prepared to give you up rather than see you suffer privations in childhood as I did,” the distraught Leticia told her son.
“You are a poor, crazy and foolish slut,” screamed Victor when he was about 13 years old. “I can’t stand to hear another word about the Ortigas clan.”
“Apologize immediately Victor. I am your Mother. I am no longer a slut. I make my living fairly and squarely as a seamstress.”
I’ll have to think of something quickly. Where would I go? Who will take me? The time isn’t right yet. So he apologized and simulated genuine shame and regret. His mother embraced him; he had to hug her back.
“Well …” he mulled, “perhaps you’re no longer a slut. I grant you that, but you are still a poor and foolish woman for being grateful to those robber barons, the Ortigas clan. Someday, I’ll get even.”
Don Rodrigo had recognized Victor as his legitimate son when Victor was nearly 18 and about to graduate Valedictorian from High School, Letran College.
“I know you’re my son, damn the devil! You are my cursing image, but my hated ugly wife now holds the purse strings since her inheritance from her even more hateful father. If we hadn’t been ruined and robbed by Don Cesar and his clan … you’ll have to wait until she dies, I pray for her death everyday – not to God, of course. What the damnation are you bleating about? I paid for your education at the best schools in Manila, did I not?”
At Victor’s furious silence, Don Rodrigo de la Rama repeated, “Did I not? I mean, I didn’t have to do that, but your intelligence since kindergarten was impressive and I thought it would be a shame not to give you the best opportunity I could afford.”
“Second best schools, Rodrigo De La Rama, second best. San Sebastian Elementary School and Letran are not the crème de la crème. You know that. I know that.” He spat out “Your children by your wife went to Ateneo de Manila, the Jesuit school for the elite. Your Alma Mater!”
“I have told you again and again, my father-in law paid for the schooling and other expenses for the children by my legal wife. Let’s be precise here. The other children I have sired have had to fend for themselves. But for the Ortigas Nieto clan, you too would have attended Ateneo de Manila,” Don Rodrigo declared.
“That’s a lie!” Victor roared.
“Don’t you dare call me a liar, you ungrateful and disgraceful half-breed wretch,” Don Rodrigo slapped his son so hard and so unexpectedly, he stumbled backwards and fell.
The tragedy of misunderstandings and quarrels is that sometimes, out of the rubble of prevarications, falsehoods and half-truths, unvarnished truths are spoken. This was one of those rare occasions. Of all his progeny (legitimate and bar sinister, the coat of arms drawn across the left side to denote bastardry), the brightest and most promising was Victor.
“Now hear this,” a foaming-at-the-mouth Don Rodrigo yelled at the stunned Victor, “the day La Sposa Fea (the Ugly Wife) croaks is the day you’ll become a De La Rama officially. You truly are ungrateful. Aren’t you enrolled in school as a De La Rama? Yes or no?”
Victor felt like beating up his father’s face and body to mincemeat but that would be letting off the detested “no balls, sin cojones” Rodrigo De La Rama lightly and quickly. Instead he wiped the blood seeping from his mouth with the hand embroidered linen handkerchief his mother had given him and meekly replied, “Yes, thank you.”
"That's better. Get off the floor and get back to your books. There's an economic depression in the United States and it is also affecting the Philippines. No one knows when it's going to end. You should kiss my feet for what I do for you!"
Don Rodrigo stormed out of Dona Leticia’s little house in Paranaque and slammed the door so violently the heavy walls reverberated and shook.
Having attained the status of Valedictorian at Letran College is an empty victory as far as I am concerned. Now, if I had been Number One in the Jesuit Ateneo, that would have been something to throw at my mentally average half brothers, at my father, my uncles, and at Society.
In truth Letran was an excellent school run by Dominican priests from Spain. Many of the so-called oligarchy sent their sons to study there. Alas! It was not the “fashionable” school it had once been under Spanish colonial rule. It did not have the snob appeal of the Ateneo de Manila or De La Salle because both these schools had many English and American priests. It was the “In” thing in those days.
My valedictory speech was eloquent and stirring. Even then, I had the perfect instincts of a rouser of the masses. My speech contained the kind of words the Establishment, the Elite and the priests, those known as "they" reveled in hearing. “ We must strive for political and economic Stability, the future belongs to those who work hard for their families, their country - the Commonwealth of the Philippines. We must hold our Benefactors and brothers, the United States of America in the highest regard. Long live our two countries! And then I clearly remember that I lifted up both my arms and looked to the center, left and right and boomed, "The Philippines and America."
Don Rodrigo was in the audience. He was in the first row solely because his son Victor was Valedictorian. It had been almost 20 years since a De La Rama had sat in such a prominent position in a public place.
"God and Satan damn Don Cesar and his clan, the Ortigas for all eternity!"
Victor, the only talented De La Rama, the one who had triumphed in a class of 150 students divided into three sections A, B, and C, could not receive the elite schooling he deserved.
“May idiots, monsters and defectives be born to the descendants of Don Cesar and every last person who has a drop of Ortigas Nieto blood in them. The more deformed and hideous their progeny the happier I shall be. At last! There would be something to feel good about.”
Don Rodrigo never reflected even for a moment in those 20 years that the De La Rama family's profligate spending, their abusive treatment of their staff and their employees, the family's pernicious addiction to opium (and he was one of the worst), their wasteful and self-destructive habits, such as obsessive gambling and constant womanizing, had inexorably led to the ruin and inevitable bankruptcy of the colossus De La Rama International Lines.
He forgot about the three attempts his family had made on Don Cesar’s life. ‘I shall never forgive myself for failing to kill him on that first attempt,” he confessed to Victor years ago when he had drunk more absinthe than he should have and his tongue was looser than usual.
My father has 15 children with 9 different women. I think it’s disgusting. Now he has virtually abandoned them because they are average individuals and he can’t be troubled to look after them financially.
“Well, the women went after me because I was rich then and my name was De La Rama. Fuck them. They asked for it.”
My Uncle Diego has stopped counting his children.
“What’s with these women? They could have refused to couple with me. But sordid and spurious sex with a De La Rama was just fine then. It’s not my problem.”
Only Uncle Don Cristobal, the Calculator, produced legitimate offspring ... but then he considered sex a duty at the worst of times; at the best, something banal, like a bodily need to fit into your active book of appointments and finish off quickly. Uncle Cristobal was a homosexual, who only lusted after adolescent boys. My stupid parents are unaware that I know some of the secrets of the De La Rama. I have heard comments here and there that the beauteous Dona Urraca, Don Cesar’s sister had been his first and last heterosexual love. I wondered what took place?
The most repugnant thing Victor was forced to accept was the scholarship he had won for four years study in Scotland financed by the ON Foundation (Ortigas Nieto). His mother had gone to the Banco Hispano Filipino and implored Don Alcibiade the banker to consider her son Victor as one of the most likely candidates for attending Saint Andrew's University in Scotland, one of the oldest and finest schools in Europe.
Over the objections of his niece Dona Esperanza who served on the Board of Directors and Governors of the Bank - "I see nothing but hate in that young man's eyes," Don Alcibiade had heralded the opportunity to heal the long festering cankers between the Ortigas and the De La Rama clans.
“The young man deserves a chance Esperanza. Acts of kindness can never hurt us,” said Don Alcibiade who had never seen evil up close the way Esperanza had.
"So be it, Uncle," Dona Esperanza had acquiesced. "Since 1903 when the first attempt on Great Uncle Cesar’s life by the De La Rama, Don Rodrigo in particular, was perpetrated - we have recited the "success is the best revenge" adage - the resentment has increased. This young man is the next generation - it can only get worse. I fear this decision will come back to haunt us. I pray I am wrong.
Of course – she wasn't.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Another Restless Night
The Saga of Fray Paco
Book 5: The Indomitable Lucrezia
Chapter 4. Another Restless Night
Many jumbles of thoughts invade my mind in the silence of the night. I feel at ease navigating through these areas of blackness in my room. Like Fray Paco, I can see things better at night. The dark appears to project images as if I am in a movie theater. Dear Fray Paco must be slumbering soundly.
Lucrezia had stubbornly insisted on a pure white candle by her bedside lamp rather than the usual night-light.
The flickering candle comforts me as I lie still with my eyes shut. I can make out and perhaps feel the flashes of light cast by the candle. If I listen hard enough I can perceive the sound of the flame going Tsaw! Tsaw! Tsaw!
Amah Ah Wei snored lightly across her large bedroom. She did not want to disturb Amah.
I must not make a sound; She has slept little since the Ambush. If I startle her awake for any reason and she finds me brooding and awake, Amah will immediately conclude she is to blame for my state of wakefulness.
There is a name to describe one’s inability to sleep at night but I can’t think of the word. Well never mind. I don’t want to think about the word, I like ‘state of wakefulness’ better. Where was I? Ah! Yes. Amah Ah Wei. She would start bawling, babbling and beating her tiny breasts. I hope she has the sense to do this softly. What if she doesn’t? She’ll surely rouse up the whole household with her wailing. The best thing I can do is to pretend I am floating on a pink peony petal, which is drifting in the middle of a warm and sunless green lagoon.
“Quiet stupida,” Lucrezia imagined Fray Paco yelling at the top of his miniscule lungs.
“Golly Gee!” She laughed and instantly opened her eyes to observe Ah Wei.
Thank you, guardian angel. Ah Wei has not stirred. When she snored, nothing woke her, not even the eruption of Mayon Volcano (the world’s most perfect cone). Mayon was beautiful to see. There was this faultless triangle surrounded by emerald green fields.
She gazed into the candle’s fire and tried not to blink.
The eruption of Mayon Volcano must be a thousand times worse than the ambush at Montalban. I must not be distracted by anything not even the most beautiful volcano in the rain forest anywhere in the world. I must go over every moment no matter how much it wounds me.
She willed herself to remember every detail, even those that seemed insignificant. Like a needle stuck on a flawed record, perhaps even cracked, which someone had placed to listen then rushed out because something terrifying had taken place. Yes! Like the eruption of Mayon Volcano or the ambush at Montalban. The record just kept on going and going.
I am going to live through the ambush again and again and force myself to remember all the sequences, which led to the slaughter. I have to do this. I have to. I don’t want to call it an incident as most of my relatives do when I’m around. It was a massacre. The newspapers called it a massacre (I sneaked out of my room during the night to read them all in the library). I agree. I was there.
Not one of the people in the Buick with me had any weapons. Uncle Artie, Auntie Betsy, Uncle Ben (he wasn’t a blood uncle he was Lito’s son, the late majordomo of my beloved Great Uncle Cesar whom I never met), cousins Carly and Sonny and Manong Koko, Uncle Artie’s faithful driver – none of them had any weapons.
In postwar macho Manila, weapons were as plentiful as rice. Senators and Congressmen bragged about their gun collections and packed them cowboy style. It reached a zenith when Congress passed a law by a narrow margin forbidding solons to carry guns inside the halls of Congress and in the debating and voting rotunda itself.
"This is an outrage! Our lawmakers are attending sessions as if they are about to engage in the Battle at the OK Corral. President Charles de Gaulle of France is right. The Philippines is not a serious country. We are an Operetta,” exclaimed the erudite and incorruptible Senator Claro M. Recto who campaigned assiduously against Lawmakers carrying guns and daggers inside the sacred halls of the Congress.
Gran-Gran disapproved of people who wore guns and displayed them openly. “Not only is it tacky, it’s uncivilized and dangerous. If you strap on a gun, sooner or later, you’ll use it.”
Oops! The candle was more then halfway consumed. Wow! Have I been thinking that long? There are so many disjointed events all coming together between sleep and wakefulness. I can’t be sure if I remained alert for a time. Perhaps I did fall asleep a little. But now I’m awake and I want to focus on what really took place in Montalban. I think I should not read the newspapers any more. They are all reporting, ”He said – She said- they said.” They must be inventing things. I am not talking and neither is Uncle Ben.
We were in the Buick. Manong Koko was driving and Uncle Artie was seated in front next to him. Auntie Betsy was behind Manong Koko. I was seated on her lap. Cousins Sonny and Carly settled down beside her. The radio was playing a romantic song (Auntie Betsy said so). I can’t remember what the melody was. I’m so good at these things. Never mind. Move on. The Buick was moving slowly like a turtle because there were people lining both sides of the narrow road. It must have been narrow; the people were stretching out their arms to shake hands with Uncle Artie and touch Sonny and Carly on the right hand side. It was the right, there is no mistake.
She raised her right hand to her eyes. I know this is so. I play the G cleft with my right hand and the A cleft with my left except when I play crossed hands but so far that’s infrequent.
Auntie Betsy must have been on the left. The people were giving me garlands of sampaguita and champak flowers. I thanked them in Tagalog; “Salamat po (a respectful thank you)” as I have been taught to say to everyone regardless of their rank and station in life provided they are older than I. That meant practically everybody.
Ah! Yes. The people all said I was very beautiful. Suddenly, the road turned sharply. Instead of people, the sides of the road were made of solid rocks. The Buick seemed to be climbing a steep ascent.
“Children! don’t look down,” cautioned Auntie Betsy.
Instead of paying attention I looked down and saw a precipice and then another and then another. The void danced before me. I shut my eyes quickly and tightly and leaned back against Auntie Betsy.
The tension was heavy and I had trouble breathing. And then I prayed. Dear Child Jesus of Prague, give me strength. I love you with all my heart and soul. Protect us from harm.
I remember the strange silence. None of us wanted to risk distracting our driver; the radio was inaudible because static was interfering with the music. I had a sensation of Auntie Betsy’s whispered prayers. But where was Uncle Ben (Flores), the Mayor of Montalban? The reason why I was on Auntie’s lap was because Uncle Ben was on the right hand side of the Buick behind Uncle Artie. That is the picture that I must keep in mind. Cousins Carly and Sonny sat between Uncle Ben and Auntie Betsy.
Amah Ah Wei turned and let out a soft fart. So long as she continues to sleep and doesn’t upset me, she can fart all she wants to.
The next part was the hardest one. What happened after that? No one has asked me any questions regarding the ambush and massacre. Did you see anyone? Hear anything? What do you remember? I have made up my mind. I am never going to tell. Never. Never. Any questions related to anything, which deal with Montalban now and forever will be answered with: “I remember nothing, nothing at all. I did not see or hear anything.”
There was Uncle Ben to consider. He was alive. He could give them more details. He was much older and nearly forty. He knew a lot of things. Uncle Ben was a Politico’s Politico; he knew how to reply to questions.
“I’m a child, and a girl at that. I have the certainty that anything I say will be viciously ripped apart! I might even be killed. They, whoever they are, will never leave me in peace again. I think that some things in Life are so unbearable that they must not be revealed.
Lucrezia remembered a great deal. She was endeavoring to bring up every detail as much as possible. It would be her way of honoring all the dead. From that day forward, Lucrezia always prayed for the dead of Montalban. She promised them she would do it as long as she lived. By consciously reliving it, she had begun to feel much better. Each night another picture flashed before her eyes. It was becoming less painful to piece the jigsaw puzzle. She found comfort in the darkness with the twinkling solitary candle.
The cliffs were thankfully behind them. The motorcade was out of danger. The car radio was no longer sputtering.
I think I recognized Uncle Matt’s (Mattias) rich baritone voice reading a letter from a student requesting a love song for his Innamorata. The radio program was called “Sincerely Yours.” Uncle Matt loved radio and television.
The Ortigas Nieto clan owned the radio and television network “Filipinas” which was broadcast throughout the Archipelago. That meant the three main islands, Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. Uncle Matt ran the network creatively and efficiently.
The radio network and the cinema houses had been the brainchild of the banker Don Alcibiade.
Because of the dangerous cliffs and the narrow roads on the way to Montalban, Uncle Artie had ordered their armed motorcycle escorts and the two weapons carriers with 15 heavily armed Sikhs to go full speed ahead of them. He made the decision to rendezvous in the huge clearing – actually a man made valley blasted by the Japanese during the war in the Pacific when they occupied the entire Philippine Archipelago. This valley lay just before the final ascent into the hills of Montalban.
So what took place? I must continue. As soon as the Buick entered the clearing, all of us heard volleys of shots being fired. I saw hundreds of these beasts. They looked like the Myrmidons in Homer’s Iliad, black uniforms with mountain masks and gloves. I could not see an inch of skin. I still don’t know if the beasts were white skinned, brown and yellow or a mixture of all three races. They surrounded the motorcycle escorts and the two weapons carriers. I can’t go on. It’s too painful.
“You can’t turn back. You must continue for your own sake and for your future,” whispered an unseen child whose voice was familiar to her. It’s me! How can that be? I must be imagining things.
The images flashed on the sheet music in her upright Steinway piano. They are being shown on one of my compositions just before the ambush occurred. “The Strawberry Waltz": in three movements. Strawberries are red, like blood.
I must force myself to look at them. Our Protectors made perfect targets because there was no cover. The Myrmidons fired at will. The men riding the motorcycles flew into the air like mannequins from the force of the bullets. All our valiant Sikhs fought back trapped inside the weapons carriers. But the black beasts outnumbered them. No! No! No! Our Sikhs are being slaughtered like seals.
“Ambush! We’re in an ambush!” yelled Uncle Ben.
“Let’s turn back!” Uncle Artie looked at Manong Koko. “Did you hear me? Manong Koko! Manong Koko!” he shouted, taking the wheel of the Buick and slamming it into reverse. Manong Koko was slumped against his shoulder. He must have known Manong Koko was dead or mortally wounded.
“Get down, children! Down! Stay down! You too Betsy!" screamed Uncle Artie.
“Buisit! Oh Dios ko!” Uncle Ben continued. “We have no weapons. We can’t fight back! Artie! Stop! Can’t you see all the masked men behind us?”
“We’ve been captured!” cried a desperate Uncle Artie.
Lucrezia could not be certain if she heard Uncle Ben and Uncle Artie or if she had read it in the ad nauseam accounts of the newspapers, including the ones in Spanish. How did the reporters learn of these details? If they have appeared in the press they must all be lies and their accounts of what took place are playing with my mind.
She reviewed the scene again. How did we all end up in the clearing or in the forest? When the terrified villagers came running, correct that. The clearing/man made valley was at least 20 minutes away by car from the town of Montalban. That’s what Uncle Ben said and he should know as the Town Mayor. It would have taken the villagers a good 40 minutes, walking briskly, to reach us. The nearest army outpost lay beyond Montalban. The Marxist-Stalinist guerillas had cut the telephone and telegraphic wires to and from Montalban as well as those in the army outpost. Lucrezia could not find any article, which gave an accurate time because all gave different times. But of course they would do that. Only Uncle Ben might know for sure. How about me, will I ever know? I suppose I could calculate the approximate time, when I am not so overcome with grief. When will that be? Maybe never.
The paper she had read last night said the Philippine Liberation Army (PLA), a Marxist-Stalinist group, had claimed responsibility for the carnage. In terse handwritten notes pasted into the heavy narra doors of the “Manila Bulletin” and the “Manila Times”, two newspapers representing the establishment, the PLA declared “We have executed the capitalists and those associated with them in our unceasing class struggle. This is a vindication of the oppressed. Long live the Philippine Liberation Army!”
Commander Victor Vencer, leader of the PLA, had boldly signed it in blood – the blood of the Ortigas Nieto.
“We have examined it Esperanza, this is truly monstrous. Vencer used human blood, most probably the blood of our relatives,” rasped Dr. Basilio Valdes in a tremulous voice. He was Director of the Lourdes Clinic owned by the Ortigas Nieto. Uncle Basilio had also served as General MacArthur’s medical chief of staff before, during and after the war against Japan in the Pacific.
“You used the word probably. Basilio this blood is ours. Never doubt it cousin. Victor Vencer’s hate would not be appeased with anything other than our blood,” hissed Dona Esperanza with equal measures of grief, rage and impotence.
Who is Victor Vencer? Why does he want to kill my family and me? I am not opening my eyes properly and I am not thinking right. Wait! Consider that all of the members of my family whom I was with on that day died. But I did not. Why?
As she pondered these unsettling questions, she fell asleep at long last at three in the morning. Empty and too grief-stricken to weep.
The brilliant sunlight streaming through the verandah of Santol Mansion struck Lucrezia. Now she was wide-awake.
Where’s my candle? Ah Wei had been watching her from a small stool by her bed. She was so tiny that her grandmother had ordered a special stool made for her. Her feet did not touch the floor on their other chairs.
“You sleep good, child. We all happy.” Ah Wei walked quickly towards her in her padded cloth and leather shoes.
Lucrezia smiled enigmatically but said nothing. If you only knew Amah. I was up most of the night.
She turned towards the golden Venetian putti (cherubs) holding up a clock in her bedside table,
Wow! It was nearly 11:00 o’clock in the morning. That’s it. The angels are letting me know that the ambush took place at 11:00 o’clock in the morning. I remember it well. To our relief, the motorcade had just passed the narrow road with the steep precipices when Uncle Ben said, ”We have very good drivers who never lose their calm nature. Thanks to them, especially Manong Kako, it’s 11:00 o’clock. We are right on schedule for our rendezvous point in the Valley.”
Lucrezia placed a pillow above her face and wept a lament and a wail so gruesome that it pierced the hearts of all those who heard it. Fray Paco flew in and laid his beak softly on the pina sleeve of her pink nightdress. Camilla sat on either side of her bed but refrained from touching her or speaking to her. Dona Esperanza stood at the foot of Lucrezi’a’s bed and wept. Ah Wei knelt on the floor beside Fray Paco and covered her mouth because she was trying to stifle her cries. Her loved ones stood around her bed and accompanied her in all her cries and lamentations.
“We may be robbed, tortured, mutilated and slaughtered; but the spirit which made us great and unafraid except of God and some times not even of God, will continue to propel us onwards. We will never be crushed,” affirmed Dona Esperanza through her copious tears.
Lucrezia heard her grandmother's words and the tears slowed slightly, ever so slightly as they sank into her heart and toughened her. I did survive. I will survive.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
