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.