PROLOGUE

 

         When one is a child, every adult from the age of twenty is “old”. My Lola was turning

sixty-nine when I was born, and so to me, she was always ancient.

         She had six children, and they all lived with their families in the compound in Mandaluyong. In the 60’s, the driveway was no more than a dirt road and between the six lots, the perimeter walls were no more than waist-high.  Hedges of lavender and white violetas marked off the front lawns, and gladioli, African daisies, and tiger lilies grew profusely in the shade of fruit-bearing trees – mango, santol, kamachile, kaimito, kasuy, langka, guava, pomelo and a few stray coconuts.  Throughout the year, our days were colored with blossoms of sanggumay and butterfly orchids, Doña Aurora, bougainvilla, poinsettias and yellow bells.

         The cousins were always disappearing into each other’s houses, or playing patintero, badminton, habulan, piko or hide and seek. We would climb trees and rooftops when the elders weren’t watching. The highlight of the afternoon would be the visit of Max, the magtataho.

         We knew how to make each other laugh – “Bung, Gary, nakaluwa ang mata”, or how to make each other cry, “uy, iiyak, iiyak”, or “Boy, ba-boy”.  But at the end of the day, when the bells of the parish church of Our Lady of Fatima chimed for Angelus, we each made our way home, because it was best to be indoors at dusk, and if not, Lola was sure to remind us of it.

         Lola.

         She was the thread that kept the tapestry of our extended family together, weaving our lives through the sheer strength of her personality.  She was the matriarch whose ever-pervasive force directed the lives of the younger ones who floundered, of the older ones who disappointed. 

         Our house was next to hers, barely two meters away.  Each morning we would awaken to the sound of her scolding, some maid or naughty grandchild being given a piece of her mind.  A little later, my Tia Nena would come by, sphygnomanometer in hand, ready to take her blood pressure, and spend some time till noon, chatting with Lola who would be sitting on her rocking chair, in the dimness of her room.

         In the mid-70’s, when my family had moved to Europe, and I had decided to finish university in Manila, I had to live with my Lola.  It was at this time she began writing in her notebooks.  When I left for school in the morning, she would be at her desk, her gold Parker pen in hand, slowly writing away.  When I returned at dinnertime, she would still be at it, unless she was watching Vilma Santos, who was her favorite movie star.

         I have no memory of my Lola smiling.  Maybe by the time I became aware of her as an individual, she had no real reason to smile. Sometimes, I would watch her from my room, her head bent over her notebook, by the incandescent light of a singular blue-shaded lamp. I wondered what she wrote, what was going on in her mind as she put to paper stories of a life that unfolded far away and long ago.  I imagined the vast plantations, the legendary rice harvests, the picnics, the gracious residences – having seen mere reflections whenever we spent holidays in Tiaong.  And yet, even as I tried to picture her life, in my mind, Lola was always old.

         When she finished her memoirs, she had it typed out, and photocopied, and gave each one of her four daughters bound copies of the three-volume work.  I never found time to read it, daunted by the Spanish, which I barely understand, and the sheer length of the volumes.

         Lola died on the first of July, 1990. A few years later, Mom told me she had attempted a translation of the first volume. It was not a direct translation, but a reworking of the narrative, and she gave it to me to work on.

         This is the result.

         Lola wrote her memoirs in script, in Spanish, at the age of 90.  Tia Es began typing it out, on a manual typewriter, but her work was interrupted when she had to return to America.  The work was continued by a niece of Ka Janing, my Lola’s long-time companion. The niece spoke no Spanish.  Eventually the notebooks found their way to my first- cousin, Angie Stuart-Santiago, who completed the typing of the manuscript.

         The volumes passed through at least three different typists, one who could speak, read and write Spanish fluently, another who knew no Spanish at all, and a third who learned Spanish in school, but never used it extensively in conversation.

         Mom took volume one and re-interpreted my Lola’s narrative. The original is in the first-person, but the English re-telling is by a disengaged narrator. This, in the hope that it adds a smoother recounting of events, and diminishes what could appear to be conceit if read in the first-person. 

         Some events, some rambling that is in the original work, have been removed. The narrative hopes to paint a picture of the manners and values of a place and a time, as seen through the story of a family, and so portions that delve in great detail into matters like the making of copra and the supervision of harvesting, have been shortened, so as not to stray from the story of the life of the family and Conchita.  A researcher interested in the intricacies of agriculture in 19th century Southern Tagalog would do well to read the original Spanish.

         The narrative, as re-worked by Mom, was encoded. In effect, after the original author, the three typists, and Mom, the encoder was the fifth person to handle the material. Knowing this, and keeping in mind the “broken telephone” game, how details may change in the passing on of information, I would try to go back to the original Spanish to check names, dates, spelling. It is this qualifier that I hope the nit-picker will keep in mind.

         For example, the name Zaballa sometimes appears as Zavalla.  The use of ‘y’ in the surname, and the shifting of surnames creates confusion.  Then there are several individuals with the same name, like Tinang and Tasia.  Sometimes it is difficult to discern whether Lola was referring to a “Tia” as her own aunt, or as referred to by her Mother, so in reality the “aunt” was her grandmother. With the multiplicity of names and the blur of a 90-year-old memory, it is sometimes difficult to determine to whom she is referring.

         An attempt has been made to provide a glossary, as best as possible, bearing in mind that many of the words are colloquialisms or adaptations of Spanish words. For example, while the Spanish term is carromato, the adapted word is carromata; the Spanish gollerias, becomes gollorias.  Some of the words are also regional terms, particular to the Tagalista of the Tiaong-Sariaya-Candelaria area.  Some of the words may have a different connotation in another region, or may be called something entirely different.  Also, some of the words may be unfamiliar even to the Tagalog speaker, as they have to do with farm matters – for example, cavanes dobles, fanega, ipa, picul, and it is hoped that somehow the glossary will provide some help.

         For my part, this began as an exercise in streamlining and editing a text, so Mom could pass it on to her grandchildren in a form they could read. But in the process, Lola’s pen wielded a magic that materialized old photos, browned, brittle letters, maps of unvisited towns; conjured the more fleeting echoes of wind stirring the bamboo groves and coconut fronds, and the fragrance of late afternoon bonfires and coconut delicacies being cooked on charcoal stoves.

          It brought me back to distinct memories of my childhood in the ‘60s – weekends  at the camarin in Tagbakin - watching fireflies flitting in and out of the gumamela bushes, counting moths that would fall into basins of water placed underneath gas lamps suspended from the ceiling beams, or waking up to the smell of sinangag, tugging aside the gauze mosquito net, creeping to the huge windows, pushing open the capiz shades to gaze at the birds swooping over the mist-covered ricefields.  And if so magical to me as a child in the 60s, what more, I thought, for my Lola, seventy years earlier when the land was more pristine, the air more pure and the people, more earthy.

         And so, the ancient matriarch sitting at her desk, pale pink knitted shawl around her shoulders, became a little girl with plaited hair, bent over her caton, diligently practicing her penmanship.

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Karen Berthelsen Cardenas

April 2000