We lost Ate Elaine when she was thirteen years old. She was a blue baby. The doctors said she had a tiny, needle-prick-sized hole in the valve of her heart. Our parents told us later on, in stories during her wake, that the doctor gave her nine years to live. At that time, the medical procedure for the congenital heart condition gave the patient only a 50% chance of survival, at best. My parents did not want her to suffer through the open heart surgery with very little assurance of success. (Nowadays, my siblings tell me that the present technology allows the patient, easily, to live a long and normal life, post- surgery; it came twenty years late).
Ate Elaine’s favorite song, a number she had heard many times in church, was “I believe”, or “I believe… for every drop… of rain that falls…”. For those who are not familiar with the song, it is embedded here; a youtube video also follows the soundcloud pod; click the pod to stop the autoplay)
When she sang it, she put her palms together in a perfect prayer pose and gazed steadily at the space in front of her, she did not move her head or eyes during the rendition, and slowly sang all the lyrics from memory; and then burst into a big smile after the applause around her. She would sing it at the drop of a hat, anytime, anywhere, standing on our wooden tablả floor in the house, or on a stage in front of an audience.
Ate Elaine, my parents often told us, was the only one who rushed out the door to meet them everytime they got home from work or the market, and would shout “Mommy, mommy” “Daddy, daddy”, and gave hugs for a bar of Hershey’s, or Serg’s or Goya chocolate. She was the easiest to laugh and to please; the gentlest, and the least quarrelsome of the siblings. The only time she “scolded” me was when I fended off children who were milling around her.
She wasn’t allowed to run or to play in the streets without supervision because of her heart condition, but this did not stop her from joining a modified version of Chinese garter, pikὁ (“step-no”), and hide-and-seek, always within a two-block radius of my parents eyesight.
When i was four, and Teng was three, Kuya Junior and I headed our contingent of four children (Myra was a baby) and we broke out of the house, into the streets to play and throw rocks at the carabaos that were regularly brought to pasture in the lot in front of the house. We were expressly prohibited from doing this, we were required to sleep in the afternoons to grow tall. Our parents bolted the door and Mommy slept on a mat at the foot of the bed so we could not get out of the bed without stepping on her. We simply tiptoed quietly, got down the stairs, and stood on a small chair to reach the bolt of the door. We brought Ate Elaine, who was seven, with us. Like a band of prisoners, we were not going to leave her behind.
After hurling rocks at the carabaos, we ran out into the streets to see where they would go. In a minute, I looked behind us and saw the neighbor’s big dog, Judy, she was running toward us ferociously, and we shouted “si Judy, nauulol na” (“Judy had gone mad”), and Kuya Junior shouted, “may rabies yan” (“she has rabies”). We raced up the road, ran for our lives, and dragged Ate Elaine, then made a turn in the vacant lot full of talahib grass, where the carabaos had grazed, we dragged Teng so hard that he tripped on the talahib and had scrapes and abrasions, but we had to get out of there and reach home.
Mommy was furious. Ate Elaine’s skin color had turned violet. That was the only time I had seen her that angry –- the first and the last. She took a blanket , twirled it into a rope, wound it around us to squeeze us, and made us promise not to do this again. It wasn’t physically painful but we cried so hard because she was very angry. When I became an adult and reviewed this in my head, I realized she was probably… both angry and frightened because something untoward could have happened to Ate Elaine then.
But Ate Elaine never squealed on us, or blamed us, she never fought back, she won over.
We moved into a bungalow five years later, and it was three blocks from the church. That night, she and cousin Manang Linda were playing sungka. Ate Elaine could play anyone a mean game of sungka.Manang Linda was watching TV simultaneously, so, when she was not looking, Ate Elaine would scoop up all the shells and pebbles of all the houses and put them in her house (of course, Manang Linda knew and just laughed and let her); that night, she won all the rounds and her house was full.
The next morning, Manang Linda, Manang Nenette, Myra, and I went to early Sunday mass. Myra and I offered flowers at the foot of the statue of the blue Virgin Mary in front and at that moment i had two seconds of sudden throbbing in the heart. When we got home, Mommy was rushing out with tears streaming on her face, and said Ate Elaine had died. She was already in the hospital, Mommy came back to get documents and Ate Elaine’s Sunday frocks, she died from a blood clot that usually resulted from an irregular heart beat caused by her heart condition. Auntie Francing later in the day went to the stores and got her a white satin and lace dress for the wake and funeral.
Ate Elaine was the eldest.
My parents eloped because Mommy said her relatives wanted to marry her off with a provincemate, so she and my father eloped and they settled here in Manila. And so… you could say that Ate Elaine paved the way for the rest of us siblings. All along, we thought she needed protection but from the very beginning, even before birth, she had laid the bricks for the road we would take later on.
From the WordPress publishers today: Weekly Writing Challenge: Stylish Imitation by Erica on September 10, 2012 (or imitating the style of an iconic writer without losing your own voice):
“ xxx Better yet, you can tell us about your favorite writer’s tone, or you can take it a step further — after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Highlight a particular element of your favorite writer’s style, and incorporate it into a post of your own. xxx If you go this route, try writing about what you’d normally discuss on in your blog: personal musings, your favorite artist, your sports team’s wondrous victory. The only catch is that you’ll need to discard your own style temporarily in honor of the wordsmiths who’ve inspired you.”
xxx xxx xxx
Based on those, here is the blog post for the WordPress Weekly Writing Challenge: Stylish Imitation.
The iconic writer i chose is: J.D. Salinger. The style is: stream of consciousness. It’s been described as a “disjointed form of internal monologue” “characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that may sometimes make the prose difficult to follow”.
When i first wrote the post below, it didn’t have any punctuation marks, but i thought i should aid the readers by putting some commas. What do you think? Unwieldy? i should have done a traditional narrative? (Yes! stop experimenting — we like structured!)
A large part of J.D. Sallinger’s narratives rely on this. Alas, i don’t have it, maybe I’m just rambling on in this post below with no sense or coherence.
Anyway.
Ridges
While we were driving on a newly paved road, the senior law office partner mentioned that when he was a law student, these balmy acacia trees were just sapling. i was once told that the roots of a fully grown acacia tree were wider than a 200-square-meter house, its vast network underground was a labyrinthine of a city spread farther than its canopy of branches and leaves above. Years ago, in a meeting i had to babysit as legal counsel, there was a debate on what to do with the trees that have been uprooted by the typhoon, now just lying around, not breathing, in the expanse of the grounds, some of the trees were half-a-century old, and the botanist-consultants said there was a procedure to reconstruct them and bring them back to life, but it was a laborious and expensive procedure; the engineer-consultants said this was not cost-effective, and so, therefore, the board gave way to the chainsaw workers, carpenters and utility staff, the felled giants were sawed off and sold as lumber, the money earned was reported as profits, and therefore in the balance sheet of things it was shown that we did not lose anything. i watched them saw off the trunks, you could see the rings inside them, each ring equivalent to a year or two, the ridges equivalent to generations. Once we took a street inside a residential area and my colleagues at the backseat tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hala, ba’t ka dito dumaan, magagalit si Sir” (“Hey watch out why did you take this road, Sir will get angry.”) “Sir” being the senior partner, he was seated in front. And “Sir” of course said no, it was alright. i said it was a short cut – why, what’s wrong. And my colleagues said that when martial law was declared, “Sir” who then had a thriving law career in a prestigious law office and who had unprecedentedly won in a local election, one of the youngest, was going to get arrested by Marcos. He had to go on self-exile abroad, had to sell his house and all his properties, had to start from scratch all over again, study again, take the bar exams again in that foreign land and pass, eke out a living while helping in the anti-dictatorship movement in the Philippines. He bought this house because there were many trees, it was in the middle of the city, he and his family lived here and he had planned on raising his children on that porch, on this road that my colleagues have been avoiding as a route. i asked if this was true, and “Sir” said, well, yes, but it was a long, long time ago no sweat it was alright i didn’t do anything wrong, and my impertinent colleagues said, see – pretty soon tears would well up his eyes, they were ribbing him, and he was of course alright and he just said softly that he was sad that he never got back that same house because he liked living here. Before i learned to drive, i used to ride home with friends, and the usual designated driver, the executive director, always made the mistake of making a right turn at a certain crossroad when we were supposed to go left, everytime, he never corrected, he always turned there. We had to maneuver a U-turn in the middle of that road to go to the other side. Finally, i asked why are you always making a right-turn here, this is the hundredth time. And my friends, the other passengers, said maybe, maybe it was an old habit, see that bend, it led to a building where his ex-wife worked decades ago, he was detained when martial law was declared, they never got back together after that, even after he was released when the dictatorship fell, a new government took over. We think we know someone just because we work with them everyday. Everybody has an anthology of stories, in their trunk, at their core. Just like these trees.
