wish i was braver.

Memoir

My brother is lying on a block in Guadalupe. Some papers have to be fixed before they can attend to him. We have just brought him home from Palawan. Waited for his body to be unloaded from the plane along with suitcases and crates of mangoes and fish. The world has reduced my brother into cargo and it makes me angry.

Father’s day 2003. Though it is a Sunday morning, I must report to work at the military press office where I will scan through reports of car thieves and bolo hackings and hope that somewhere, something more exciting happens before my 5o’clock deadline.

Riding in the passenger seat of the jeepney, I ignore my phone when I feel it ringing in my back pocket. I think it is the desk reminding me to send my slugs in by noon. The ringing ceases and I receive a text message instead. “Please call. Something happened to Vier.” It is from my oldest brother, Francis.

I stop the jeep and run to a side store along Cubao. Xavier has been living in Palawan for three months now with my mom and youngest brother, Miguel. I worry that maybe he has gotten into a snorkelling accident.

My brother answers the phone. “What happened?” I ask.

“I think he killed himself,” Kuya Franz blurts out.

I take the MRT back to our apartment. The trains are almost empty and I get a seat with no problem. It is not as empty as I would like though. Tears are starting to form in my eyes but have not yet fallen. I can wipe them away in an exaggerated performance of fatigue and disguise my sniffing as a cold. A lady in the seat across watches me.

In the hallway to our apartment, I meet Kuya Franz. We hug each other awkwardly. He tells me that the caretaker found Xavier hanging from his belt from a beam in the loft early that morning. We take a silent taxi ride to my aunt’s house. Mom and Miguel still don’t know that Xavier is dead. They are still in San Vicente, about five hours and a boat ride away from the city. Xavier had stayed behind for a night out with some friends. I think about my mom.

We arrive at my tita’s house. She breaks into tears when she sees us. She hugs us tightly. I have not yet completely absorbed what is happening and I stand numbly in her arms. My uncle is more aggressive and methodical, wanting to scientifically approach the situation. He asks for the caretaker’s physical description and then gets a belt and tries to calculate Xavier’s height until my oldest cousin shoots an angry look at him.

It is decided that Francis will go to Palawan the next morning and that I will follow the day after, once I prepare an extended leave at the office. We stay at my tita’s house until early evening when we finally get a chance to talk to mom. I ask her how she is doing but we are both numb, and she snaps at me. Francis and I return to the apartment and begin the task of informing friends. We retreat to different rooms where privately as the night grows deeper, the loss begins to crystallise – the utterance and conveyance of the fact delivering the unimaginable into reality.

The plane arrives in Puerto Princesa late morning, full of tourists and balikbayans excited to explore this last frontier and reunite with friends and family. Francis and mom are at the chapel and Cynthia, my mom’s secretary picks me up at the airport. We take a tricycle to the house so I can drop off my things. This occasion is my first time to see the house fully completed – our first house after moving seven times in six years after my second step-father passed away. It was supposed to be my mom’s retirement house. Her gift to herself after years of losses, her chance to start over and rejuvenate after the death of another husband left her with too much to bear yet again. It held the promise of hope and happiness and now, all I can think is that it is the house that dealt the cruelest blow.

I don’t notice its Indonesian inspired architecture with a wide balcony and high-peaked burnt-red roof. I want to see where my brother died. The caretaker takes me to the foot of the stairs on the landing that leads to the loft. Directly above the stairs, an office chair sits below a beam, slightly askew. It’s the chair he used to play video games in. I climb the stairs slowly and examine the area. The offending beam is just a few feet from the ground. The caretaker tells me that his toes were grazing the floor.

I try to imagine those last hours. What he was thinking and feeling as he stood on that chair and began to adjust the belt over the beam. I try to imagine what the caretaker saw when he prepared to wake the house up to the early morning light. Later, whenever I visit the house, I will find that I cannot climb those stairs looking upward.

I take another tricycle to the chapel and enter a room filled with people I don’t know – a Palawan life I have not yet been introduced to. There is our neighbour, Tita Susan who bakes cookies and runs a women’s cooperative. She waited outside on the street for hours for my mom to arrive so she could break the news to her before she set foot into the darkened, empty house. And there is Ria, a cheerful girl my age who sat with Xavier as he was being dressed in a barong and who scolded the mortician for not applying the makeup properly. My mom is seated next to the door surrounded by friends who greet me with an almost shocking exuberance that I don’t know how to react.

Xavier’s heavy white coffin is at the back of the room on a small stage. I had thought that the steps to take me to his body would be difficult, marked by tentative measures as my ascent up the house stairs. But I realise that I stride confidently, with a purpose.

Through the glass and fallen flower petals, I see my brother lying in a white barong. His makeup is heavy and uneven. One side of his mouth curves upward as if he is smirking at an internal and eternal joke, to whose truth only he is privy. His lightly closed eyelids lend him a quality of worried sleep.

Where is the brother who once lay down across a patch of thorns when we were children so I could walk over him like a bridge? Where is the brother with whom I would make home movies starring our Chihuahua-terrier as a superhero? Where is the brother who would walk a few metres behind me to make sure I got to our shared apartment safely, even though he didn’t think I knew? Where is the brother who was always my team-mate whenever we played two-on-one against Kuya Franz? We were best friends once. And then we had to grow older and grow apart. But when did we all learn to stop asking for help?

You were always the strongest one. The reliable one. The tallest one. The best looking one. The most charming. Everybody loved you. I took it with good humour when they said they expected this from either me or Kuya Franz, but not you. Because it’s true. You had it all. What didn’t you see? Or what didn’t we see? Do you know how mom fell apart at your funeral? Could you hear her cries? She’s never cried like that, so openly, so completely. Not even after Daddy Efren, Joey, Tito Bunny or Lola Ave. I think she always had to save some composure for our sake. But what’s the point when it’s her own child now being laid into the ground?

We will fly back to Manila the next day. Tita Susan, Ria, Cynthia and other friends will stand with their faces pressed against the glass wall dividing the waiting area with the street outside until we board the plane to bring my brother home.

At the morgue in Guadalupe, I sit on a monoblock chair alone with him in a room. Mom and Francis are making arrangements for the wake and burial. Miguel, to whom it had been gently explained that his kuya decided to stop breathing, is with his half-siblings. The mortuary people are supposed to touch up Vier’s makeup but there has been a delay. He lies on a cold aluminium table. No white coffin encloses him now. I’m not sure what I feel. I feel sad. I feel angry. I feel lost. But I think I understand him somehow.

I watch over him for a while from about three feet away. Slowly, I muster some courage to stand up and walk closer to him. I stand over him now. His expression has not changed. But I sense a helplessness in the slight arch of his eyebrows. Or perhaps, I detect my own helplessness. I just wish I could help him somehow. Do something for him. I think that if I concentrate hard enough, I can will his eyes open.

I want to let him know that I’m there. But I’m frightened. Even though he is my brother, I have never touched a dead person before. I feel like to touch him would be beyond my rights. But I also imagine that Vier will suddenly jump up and begin laughing, getting the best of me once again as he did when he once convinced me that he was a vampire when we were kids. I inch closer, lifting my hand above him before I timidly rest my palm on his leg.

His leg is not supposed to be this hard. It should not be like a slab of metal. There is no softness. No give of breathing flesh. I keep my hand on him. I feel first the rough cloth of his slacks and imagine his bare leg beneath. I wonder if he can feel me. My hesitancy at this too late attempt at tenderness. My touch is light at first. Frightened. Ashamed somehow, that it is only in this cold morgue that I have willed enough strength to attempt to express some affection. Then I grow more confident and hold him firmly.

Xavier will be laid to rest at the Heritage park. Kuya Franz’s second son, Javier, will never meet the uncle whom he is named after. Xavier will appear to Miguel in a dream telling him to burn that belt. Mom will take counselling courses, begin a grief support group and edit a book on parents whose children have gone before them. And as for me, today I have written this.

Autobiographical Essay

The President’s Premonition and the First Yawp
One rainy day in September 1978, President Marcos had a premonition. With his son and daughter flying from Laoag to Manila on separate planes, something made the strongman shake and place a call to his children's security detail. Within minutes a game of musical chairs ensued as, breaking protocol, the presidential children were transferred onto a single plane. My father, a member of the Presidential Security Group, moved to the ill-fated plane which crashed into a pond in Paranaque – beheading a young mother who was watching television as it plowed through a row of houses on its way down. Four months later, I was born and named after my Daddy Efren.

I’ve heard it said that the unborn child absorbs all the emotions of the mother while floating in the womb. Curled in her own little universe, the child is nourished by a banquet of joy, fear, sadness and all the other flavours of the emotional cosmos until she pierces the waiting world with a mighty yawp. Thinking of my mother, widowed all those years ago with two young boys and a bun in the oven, I think then that I may have been reared on a diet of uncertainty and tenacity.

Learning to Dream in English at the Expense of a Spoon
My mother remarried a stern Israeli businessman a few years after Daddy Efren’s death and we transferred from Malacanang Park (upon whose banks we would chuck stones into the Pasig River) to a sprawling home in Paranaque. It was under Tito Eli’s rigid watch that I began thinking, speaking and dreaming in English. We would have to come to dinners prepared to recite a verse from Shakespeare or ready to expound on a newspaper article of our choosing. A casual evening consisted of a few rounds of Trivial Pursuit in between bites of falafel. But for all the cerebral gymnastics we had to contend with, there were some things that were harder to learn – I also remember being severely scolded for insisting on using a fork and spoon to eat my meals, especially as my brothers had already learned to master the knife. At the dinner table, my brothers looked quietly down on their plates as my step-father glared at me – close to tears from hunger and shame as I fumbled with that damn knife.

China and Two Revolutions
Tito Eli’s work eventually brought him to China where my mom found a job as a cultural attaché at the Philippine consulate. China offered an idyllic if not sheltered childhood. At our school, we were a bit of an oddity – the only Filipino family. I remember a line of students waiting to try our transplanted pedicab in which I rode to school each morning (weather permitting) with my brother pushing effortlessly at the pedals. It was also in China that I recall first being publicly praised for my writing by my first grade teacher, Mrs. Dugal, an Indian lady who wore flowing saris and who lived just a few floors above our apartment. Even though her audience was just a bunch of rowdy, uninterested children, the incident was the first time I had ever been singled out for anything and though I was slightly embarrassed, I grew more and more intrigued at this business of words. Because she was my favourite teacher, it became something I wanted to be good at.

China in the mid to late 80s was a country on the cusp of embracing capitalism, but I recall it as a child’s paradise. Beijing’s parks were expansive tracts of land filled with temples, lakes, caramel apples, dumplings and legends of lions and monkey kings that sent me into a tizzy. But I suppose for children, any place can be a playground. I was also happy enough to walk to school each morning, if only to slide across a good portion of the street which would freeze over in winter or make little books on folded pieces of paper about a dinosaur named “Speed.”

Back home in Manila though, things were brewing and changing as the People Power Revolution captured the world’s imagination and attention. I did not know what was happening, but I remember people (Chinese and foreigners) waving to us on the street and flashing us the thumbs up sign. “Go Philippines!” they’d shout. And it made me as proud as a second grader could be.

In the middle of everything, our teacher assigned us to give a presentation on our home countries with our parents in attendance. I remember insisting on wearing a yellow t-shirt saying “I stopped a tank with my heart” sent from relatives back home to the presentation – but more because I hated dresses and other formal wear than for any symbolic statement. As I recited my report, I unwittingly elicited laughter from the parents when I read, “Ferdinand Marcos is not famous because nobody likes him.” And again, I became intrigued at how words and their speakers could affect people. (Just a few years later, China would try its hand at its own people power movement – and I still get chills whenever I see that famous image of a lone man standing in the path of a column of barrelling tanks and remember how the little Philippines once achieved something so inspirational.)

Symptoms of Dis-Ease
We returned to Manila after a few years where I finished my schooling. While I focused my energy on sports, I still received some attention for essays and stories written as class assignments. One highlight came when a short story I wrote in the fourth grade was anthologised in a CCP publication featuring young writers. I remember reading the story at the launch, this time surrendering to my mom’s urging to wear a decent dress. Even though the story was silly (revolving around “smushed” chocolate cake and roller coasters), mom still likes to joke that I was a published writer before she was and it was my first experience that people other than teachers could be interested in stories.

Although I was an average student, I managed to win a partial scholarship to a university abroad where after careful deliberation, I chose to study International Development. It seemed a noble choice, but I was almost immediately taken over by a sense of dis-ease when I entered the lecture hall for the basic course in Development Problems. I could also not ignore the irony of learning “development” from one’s former colonisers. While I had never considered myself anything but Filipino, I began to realise that I was a weak voice to speak on behalf of my homeland and offer another perspective to my mostly western classmates, since I was just as westernised as they were. But at the same time, my heritage stood out and was mis-interpreted. I was once roused from my sleep by a bunch of Caucasian dorm-mates who asked if I could speak “Asian” to a Korean student and convince her to open her door.

I also recall being assigned Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve. The professor asked us how the Indian villagers may have perceived Kenny – the white doctor who attempts to build a hospital in their community. I remember one blond-haired boy replying that the villagers probably saw Kenny as “the land.” He was the provider from which life could flower and I remember the broad gestures of this boy’s hands as he expounded on his ideas. I wanted to speak up and say that I thought that the villagers found him more like the tannery – a foreign institution which had turned their lives upside down but to which they had to submit despite their mistrust. But I was too timid. And it was a moment of cowardice and insecurity that I’m still looking to amend.

Finding a Thread and Another Revolution
My sojourn abroad however only lasted a semester. In the midst of the Asian crisis, I returned to Manila where after a year of drifting like a foetus in a harsh and barren womb, I enrolled at De La Salle University. Despite my mom’s concerns about my future, I chose to pursue a degree in Literature (which is ironic since she herself was a Literature graduate). To be blunt, I did not enjoy my university years. Older than most of my classmates, I had different concerns and preoccupations. For one, I wondered if my speaking, thinking and writing in English precluded me from being considered Filipino. My accent meantime compounded my natural shyness and I was uncomfortable speaking in class especially as it seemed to betray my westernised upbringing, which is precisely what I was struggling with. My goal was simply to get in and out of college as quickly and quietly as possible.

But it was in one of my major classes that I was first introduced to postcolonialism and where I felt that I had found a thread to follow in my attempt to reconcile my western upbringing with my being a Filipino. The ideas of otherness, neo-colonialism, hybridity, exile and subversion excited me and began to encourage me that I could be more than a vacuous voice with an amusing twang.
Meantime, in my final year of college the seeds of revolution again began to grip the country. This time, I was older and present and I wanted to be a part of history, rather than just a distant witness. I recall walking an hour from my house to the Edsa monument and joining the crowds in the rhythmic chants for resignation and at the same time worrying that the overpass would crumble from the weight of all the people.

During the first Edsa revolution, I had been a naive child in a different country. During the Tiannamen protests, I was still naive but could understand its gravity although again I was witnessing it from afar. But now, I was in the moment. And I recalled a paper I wrote for a Filipino History class in high school. Change will always happen, I wrote. All of us will be witnesses, some of us will be participants and perhaps one day, one of us may even be the catalyst that brings about that change.

Detours
After graduation, I naturally gravitated towards jobs that were centred around the written word. I got a job as a reporter at a broadsheet where I covered the justice and defence beat for two years. Again it seemed like a noble profession – to be history’s first witness. And I approached it with a certain degree of gung-ho. But the familiar feeling of dis-ease again began to creep in and I felt as if I was doing a disservice to the craft of writing and storytelling somehow. I became convinced that journalism was limited and by my experience of how media is practiced in the country, I again felt lost and disillusioned. Stories soon became quotas to fill before deadlines which were then quickly forgotten. Disasters such as ferry sinkings, bombings and typhoons were under my domain but the editor only wanted to know how many people had died and how many pesos in damages had been incurred.

One night, I had a dream that my colleagues were sitting on top of a dock in the middle of a grey body of water. Under the dock were bloated carcasses of people. My colleagues were eating them and calling me over to join them. I remember waking from that dream gripped with anxiety and guilt. It didn’t help that I was still grieving a personal loss and was physically overwhelmed after another bout with anemia that required my second round of blood transfusions. Burned out, lost and feeling like a failure, I eventually resigned.

I moved to a corporate investigative firm run by a former Israeli Mossad agent (possibly the only other Israeli in the Philippines after my first step-dad who my mom had long left). My stint in the defence beat had sparked an interest in security issues in me and I applied for the position of a writer whose task I thought was to analyse news reports. But on my first day, I was assigned to join a group of agents to conduct a surveillance on a target at a hotel. There we were in the parking lot, monitoring the target’s vehicle while another group was stationed inside the lobby. I stayed for two weeks but then again became uncomfortable. I was supposed to gather “dirt” on people for cases whose details I would not be briefed on and to use fake names to find my information. I remember sitting in the big boss’s sofa as I told him that I was resigning and returning my salary.

“Why would I care that you’re returning your salary? I made $1 million last year. People from the underworld have sat on that sofa. I’m not impressed with you. You’re never going to succeed because you have no sense of responsibility,” he told me as he leaned back on his chair. I don’t know how I felt about my chances of succeeding in life being compared to criminal kingpins, but I endured his tirade with tongue-and-cheek agreements, and then walked out and practically skipped down Ayala Avenue. It was my birthday. And the first thing I did was go to Time Zone. (While I emerged from the experience with an empty pocket and a bruised ego, at least I learned some techniques on how to evade a potential stalker – turn around and walk directly toward the person you think is following you. He will have to abort his mission. And how to tell the difference between a two-way mirror and a regular mirror – place your fingertip against the mirror. If the reflection of your fingertip touches your actual fingertip, it is a two-way mirror.)

Then began a slew of half-hearted attempts at different jobs. Emboldened by my “confrontation” with the Israeli boss-man, I felt no urge to stay in a job that produced any uncomfortable feeling within me. Sometimes I think I was addicted to that feeling of freedom after quitting a job and I justified it selfishly. I worked as a speech-writer for the military, an English tutor, a news writer for two different organizations, a commercial PR writer, a web writer, and an analyst for two different companies – usually staying only a few weeks at each position. Convinced that I could not tolerate an office job, I went into freelance writing but soon found myself disillusioned by the formulaic writing that I was spouting. I blamed it on the magazines but I wondered if perhaps I had lost my voice or if I ever had a voice to begin with. Or if I did have a voice, was I even brave enough to be heard?

I cringed whenever people asked what I did for a living. I could not stomach hijacking the sacred title of a “writer” simply because my words had seen print and I was suspicious and resentful of people who did. Or maybe I just sucked at writing and all those praises were just flimsy memories of a childhood long gone. Finally, I went into transcription and content writing, where I could still “write” but not have to think.

The pay was good and it was work I could literally do with my eyes closed. But I knew that it offered no growth and was not something I could do forever. As a writer, I felt I had fallen to the lowest level. Reduced to a monkey at the keyboard whose only talent were fast fingers. Since I came from a family of lawyers, I thought I would apply to law school – another noble choice. But I dropped out after the first semester. I realised that while I enjoyed reading cases, I did not want to be a lawyer whose sense of right and wrong were dictated by statutes, clients, and decorum. I wanted a creative life. Plus, I was on the brink of failing anyway.

The Lion’s Den
It’s been about three months since I entered the MFA program. I’m still a little dissatisfied with my writing but it’s good to be back in an environment that cares about words. Slowly, I think I’m returning to the fold.

Looking back though, I know I made selfish decisions and justified them with the easy alibi of searching for one’s self. I made some decisions out of fear and some out of laziness. But I don’t know how I could have done it any other way with the limited store of strength and knowledge that I had then. I remember asking my mom once how she felt when Daddy Efren died and how she managed to get on with her life after such a loss. Her two pieces of advice are what I try to live by.

The first is that you have to make decisions and live your life in a way that you can sleep well at night. The second is that everything happens for a reason and though you may not see it then, there is a lesson to be learned that you will one day understand.

I wonder how different my life would have been if Daddy Efren’s plane had landed safely and he had disembarked to kiss his pregnant wife and rub her full belly. I wonder where I would be now if I had had the chance to finish my schooling abroad. I try to think of the reasons that things have happened and the lessons that I was meant to learn. And maybe the lessons I can share. I think about how all our personal experiences inform the vocabulary of our imagination and the pitch, treble and volume of our unique voices. How our experiences train our voice to tell our stories. And I brace myself for more lessons to learn.

For several years, I vacillated on pursuing an MFA. Although in the back of my mind, I knew that I would eventually follow this trail (wherever it may lead), I kept its reality at a distance and instead explored different avenues. I think I was afraid. It seemed dangerous to pursue it at the first instance. What if I learned that I had no business trying to string together words or that I had nothing original or interesting to say? Where would I go from there?

Instead I stayed in the realm of safe writing where I could still be among words. But dead factory-ensemble words that couldn’t talk back and were cold to the touch. Like components of a machine. No wonder I balked at calling myself a writer. I think I was more of a mechanic – a technician who knew where each part belonged to make the sum operate.

But I think that a writer’s task is more like a lion tamer’s. It requires mastery, courage and a healthy dose of insanity because you know that you are dealing with living things infinitely more powerful than yourself, things that can eat you alive. If you succeed in directing its movements, it is not because you’ve imposed your will on it but more through a rare moment of harmony. I imagine that lion tamers and real writers both conclude their feats incredulous that they’ve escaped with their lives.

I’m still a little afraid but at least I’m in the lion’s den. And now, 30 years after that first yawp, I think I’m finally learning to speak.

One winter afternoon by ee cummings

One winter afternoon
(at the magical hour
when is becomes if)
a bespangled clown
standing on eighth street
handed me a flower.
Nobody,it’s safe
to say,observed him but
myself;and why?because
without any doubt he was
whatever(first and last)
mostpeople fear most:
a mystery for which i’ve
no word except alive
—that is,completely alert
and miraculously whole;
with not merely a mind and a heart
but unquestionably a soul-
by no means funereally hilarious
(or otherwise democratic)
but essentially poetic
or etherally serious:
a fine not a coarse clown
(no mob, but a person)
and while never saying a word
who was anything but dumb;
since the silence of him
self sang like a bird.
Most people have been heard
screaming for international
measures that render hell rational
—i thank heaven somebody’s crazy
enough to give me a daisy