A boy’s view from under the engine of life

I – Fiction
One day Rika was busy rearranging the closets in their bedroom. She had just put down their wedding album: Rika and Restituto’s. Usually placed on the top shelves with family documents, this time the album was laid out on the bed so she could rearrange the space for more

materials. It was a small thin album , unlike the albums which carried the children’s and family pictures, which were placed on the coffee table in the sala, often shown off to visitors. Just then their five year old Joshua barged into the room excitedly talking about his father’s tinkering with the car’s engine and talked his father into allowing him to go, with the mechanic, under the hood of the car’s engine, an old Plymouth, and he asked questions about the parts and , and how each part helped in making the machine run.

“. . . Mama, what’s this album here?”, he asked while wiping off his hands against his shirt front.

“That’s the album which contains pictures of me and your papa when we got married.” Then Rika proceeded to lump it back with the other brown envelops , helping the Manang of the house to put it back on the top closet shelf.

“But, Mama, I’d like to see it. Why is it not in the sala with the other albums?”

This was the time Rika got scared of facing and answering her son, although she had known all along the time would certainly come, and yet she had not prepared herself to meet it. She recalled the two big albums which proved that it was not at all a dream, and she was about to burn them when her friend Benita came and said she would do the burning. She was sure the burning would also erase the memories and the questions she did not know how to deal with.

But pictures whether in black and white or are they in sepia ? do not deny the actuality of the past, which was a dream sequence to her even when retrieved in puzzle parts.

So many scenes in her past appeared now like the fantasy she read only in childhood fairy tales, complete with ogres and giants in human clothes, with human appetites. It was complete with a prince charming who scooped her out of the doldrums, only this time it’s the prince who turned into something uglier than a frog, for the toad had turned inside out in all it inglorious warts.

Rika then turned to her son and said, “Would you like me to get the book and read to you the story of the frog?”

“. . . that turned into a prince? I know all about that already, Mama. I’d like to read other stories . . . Let me see that album, maybe it has better stories.”

Just then Restituto came in and saw Joshua holding onto the album and the mother undecided whether to get it back forcibly, and thereby arouse the boy’s curiousity, who by intuition could see that his mother was not all pleased about his getting it. He saw the frown on his mother’s face, and his young mind would keep on asking for it. “Oh, yes, Josh, come on , let’s see that album together,” the father said.

Rika sighed in relief and Resituto winked at her. Still smelling of grease and gasoline, he gathered the boy on his lap. “You know, your mother was worried this album would be messed up the same way you are dirtying your pictures in the albums in the sala, with you and your sister’s unwashed hands.”

“My hands are clean, Papa,” Joshua put up his hands, “but your own hands smell of gasoline and your shirt is dirty.”

“Right, so I must have a shower first, eh?”

“Okay, but I’d like to see the pictures here.. . .Ha, Mama?”

“. . . Of course, Josh, sonny. It’s just that I’m so busy fixing these topsy turvy closets.”

 By the time his father was out of the shower, Joshua was going over the album the second time around. Restituto said, “Look, see how elegant and beautiful you are with your long white pants, and so with Barney, your cousin; isn’t so?” The two became quiet while going over the pictures.” Now you can see why your Mama wants to keep them clean and beautiful so that when you are bigger , you’ll enjoy looking at them still clean and beautiful.” The boy simply nodded, knitting his brows trying to recall the event when he was barely two years.

Restituto hugged the little boy a bit tighter than usual as he anticipated yet feared the boy’s next question.

Rika herself was nearby purportedly busying herself with the clothes and what-nots in the closets; actually she was listening intently to what was going on between the stepfather and her son. She would not know how to answer as matter-of-factly as done by her husband. He on the other hand could feel that the boy was wondering about some things for he was knitting his brows, running little fingers over the pictures, then he would look up to his father’s face with a quizzical look but the father would not venture to do the asking. He was waiting for the boy to do the asking. All he could do was to comment on how beautiful his Mama was in beige silk dress , and how his Papa stood so well in spite of the bow tie that refused to stay up straight.

“Where are Natasha and Juno? Why didn’t you bring them to the wedding?”

“No, they were not yet born.”

“Papa, not yet born? How about me, I was already big when you got married to Mama?”

“ You see, sonny, your mother was married to your first father when you were born.”

“I have a first father?”

“Yes. I’m your second father.”

“How about Tasha and Juno, are you also their second father.”

“No, I’m their first father.” Under his breath he muttered, and no second father, ever, so help us God.

“What’s that, Papa?”

“Oh, nothing. When you get a bit older you ‘ll understand better. In the meantime just remember we love you as we have loved you since you were a baby. “

“Just like Tasha and Juno?”

He nodded and hugged him again, rocking him gently back and forth, saying, “We really need a rocking chair here in the bedroom, don’t you think so too? Ask your Mama.”

 “Yes, we do need one,” Rika said, her back still to the two talking seated on the bed with the album still open.

“. . . Papa, where ‘s my first father?”

“He died when you were still a baby.”

“Oh? He died? Why?”

 “He got sick.”

“Papa, you said you knew him. Were you already a doctor then? When the father nodded, “ Then why didn’t you cure him?”

“No, I couldn’t. I was very far away when he got sick. By the time I got to his place he was already very, very sick. And you know that even doctors cannot help a very, very sick person anymore.” He wanted to add, especially a sick one who did not want to get well in the first place, but felt he should not.

Joshua closed the album and Restituto sighed in relief for he himself felt uncomfortable answering the boy’s questions. He knew, expected the boy would sooner or later be wondering about himself but he reckoned the boy would grow up first, early teens, perhaps, and not this soon, hardly five. He could feel the boy was more sensitive and perceptive for boys of his age. He was insecure himself for he was afraid the boy might alienate himself from him if he found out that he was only a “second” father.

Suddenly Joshua embraced his father and cried, “Papa! Papa!” with the urgency he would cry out only when he was hurt or scared, like the time when he had a nightmare.
“Joshua ! Why, my son, you’re trembling. What ‘s the matter?”

Rika approached the two, stared at them but said nothing. “Papa, will you stop loving me. . . even if I am only. . . ?

“Sshh. . . don’t say that. . .that you’re only. Of course not, I ‘ ll not stop loving you, Josh, my son. I love you as I love your sister and brother. Ask your mother here.” Rika then joined him , hugging the boy, until a few minutes later the boy calmed down, as he would when awakened from a nightmare and his father had come to his bed to comfort him.

Again the boy looked from one parent to the other. Restituto knew what the boy was aiming at, and he could sense that the boy was struggling hard to belong to a father he grew up with, one he knew very well, not to a father said only in name and only now. Yet he did not want the boy to reject this “father” or at most push him back into the recesses of nothingness. The boy did not have any memory of the man called “his father”, his mind not yet open to such niceties as ‘biological’ and ‘surrogate’ parent. Neither did his mother ever mention the man, not even showed his picture. It was his Papa, his picture with his Mama that he had seen, he had known ever since , the earliest of which was himself perched on his Papa’s shoulders, vaguely recalling the time when he held him in his arms while his Mama was crying, for his temperature was soaring to the 40s centigrade.

Even when he was growing up and had become aware of people and their relationships, his mother had never mentioned anything about this “father”, no picture of him at all. And now that his Papa mentioned a first father, the boy desperately wished his Papa would also reject this father. The boy became more confused when his mother after all the years of “non-mention”, which to his young mind was tantamount to rejection, now rushed to his defence. He could not understand yet he could not love his Mama less; he could love his Papa more. And somehow he got the message that his Papa thought well of the man he called Josh’s “first father” and that he should not reject this first father.

“Later on, you’ll understand fully what I mean. Right now, just keep on loving and trusting your father and mother, Okay?”

Joshua nodded and as they were going out of the room, the father whispered to him: “Let’s keep this a secret between you and me; you know what your father said just before he died?” The boy was wide-eyed in disbelief, shaking his head. “ He said, take care of my baby Joshua and his mother.” He winked at him and told him to go out and play with his sister. “I have to tell something more to you mother so she won’t be upset with me anymore.”

. . .“Now you understand why your Mama is keeping that album in the closet; she doesn’t want it to get dirty as those in the sala; some of them have torn edges, many of the pictures have chocolate smudges from your fingers.” The boy then looked at his hands and chuckled at the thought of his hands smeared with chocolate as he handled the pictures. Soon he was back to his secure self, smiling, recalling the funny poses he had with his sister. “Papa, do you think I should have a camera of my own?”

“Ah, yes, indeed; we’ll go buy one and I’ll teach you how to use the Kodak. You ask your Mama if it’s all right so we can go out to buy one.”

* * *

A view of life Thru the camera lens in black and white or sepia

II –Reality check
A Familiar Essay

. . . “Your stories are . . . ugh, corny.” This is my friend Lygeia’s magnanimous critique after reading this piece excerpted from a novel I was finishing, about a boy who discovers he is “only” an adopted son. Lygeia sometimes becomes my alter ego albeit grudgingly for she sees my writing with jaundiced cynical eyes. As a CPA her constant company is a desk calculator, and she finds me silly for still using my ten fingers when doing the balancing of my checkbook, in which 1.9 I enter as 2. I’m aware her world she sees through the camera lens of black and white and at its kindest in sepia. But our friendship is based on . . . ah, but that is another essay .

Nevertheless, this time after dismissing the “dandy” in my story, Lygeia frowns and shakes her head propitiously, silently at the topic “adoption.” Then she tells me her stories with her two or three sentences camera-eye narration, which I retell, let me do a palimpsest, mustering enough aesthetic distance , I hope.

My nephew Ernie who lived with his family in Pampanga , last time came to our place here in Quezon City. Among my nephews and nieces he was the closest to us and his sense of humor brought laughter in addition to the usual Pampanga native delicacies. This time he was quiet and worried and we thought he must be worried about his job, a seaman-electrician whose ship drops anchor in Manila every about three months.

“No, Auntie Lyds, I’m OK in my job. I’m coming back in a few days with my daughter, and I’d like you to talk to her, to dissuade her from leaving us. You see, she, just after her 15th birthday , has found out that she is an adopted one. You remember , Auntie, that after Lina and I got married she had had an operation which left us both childless. We adopted a baby left by a woman who worked at a nearby Angeles beer garden.”

“Can you talk to her so she won’t leave us? I don’t need to tell her about how we her parents had to go through to bring her up and her sister, not only materially but emotionally,” he added.

So the next time when Ernie and his daughter came, he went on a buying errand and I had the girl by myself. Instead of making a tearful plea, I told her a story, a true one, ha, for I can show you the certificates, birth and whatever documents, if you want to verify.

 I have a sister, a younger one, who after getting married lived with her husband’s family in the Bicol region, now what’s that place where at a distance you can see Mt. Mayon, it slipped my tongue at the moment. We see each other a few times a year and when the last time she came with her second son, we were all surprised and happy for she announced she had twin : a son and a daughter. When my sister ‘s family transferred to Baclaran and her children grew up into their teens, my sister confided to me that her son’s twin was actually an adopted one.

You know, she said, in the province where it is the comadrona, the midwife who assists you in
childbirthing, she does the reporting to the municipio all regarding births. My sister in
connivance with the midwife reported the twin, her son and the baby girl born of a disgraciada young woman , a neighbor.

Now when this same woman went back to the City, she had progressed enough to found her own family, then migrated to Canada. She then asked my sister to inform the adopted girl and to tell her to follow her birth mother abroad. You know what the girl now in her teens responded?

“No way. My real mother is the one who took care of me since birth, saw me through schooling and other hardships, and the joys and jokes I have with my brothers and sister.”

Lygeia said these things to Ernie’s daughter in a camera-style narration. No frills, no appeal to emotion, to whatever separates the homo sapiens species from the genus in the animal kingdom. Of course, Lygeia also told of other instances she was familiar with, from her own family and relatives; facts, ha, not made up, not “culled from slapsticks telenovelas “ which I don’t waste time watching. (She’s following instead the daily progress of “phisics’ of the stock market, I ‘m sure.) Like this distant relative of ours in Dagupan, she continued, the adopted son of the family Dacanay; after the parents died, he is now lording it over the younger legitimate children for the carabao’s (no, not lion’s ) share of the properties.

 At the end of this session, my friend Lygeia suggests that I make a market-survey research on this “adoption” business, a racket she would venture to say. As for me, I would like to find out what finally happened to that adopted daughter—did she decide to stay with Ernie’s family or leave? For what I have in mind was a similar “adoption” occasion when a neighbor of mine in Paranaque told me in tears and often crossing herself, but no cussing, the departure of an adopted daughter, who she later found out went back to the oldest profession from which her adopted girl’s biological mother came. Is it the genes in our nature in domination against the nurture however loving your foster parents can get?

Make a field research, where you get a sampling from each region, of adopted children, from each social level and what each has attained, Lygeia tells me , she who enjoys handling figures cold and exacting , and the statistical analysis reducing the human element to a statistic.

My mind wanders . . . if the child came from an orphanage, would the girl or boy turned into a young woman or young man, be fired also by an intense desire to look up his lineage?

Research? No argument there, as if some foundation would be curious enough to fund such a field research, which I doubt. Anyway, silently I look at my friend’s profile , as she busies herself with the ledgers on her desk. I noticed her non-malayan profile features high bridged nose, dark eyes. Then I recall decades ago when we, Lygeia and I were still in college, she mentioned her grandfather’s name SINGH, and said casually, very casually, indeed, that in late 1890’s there was this community in Rizal on the way to Antipolo, was it Cainta? where a group of Bombays, the natives of India, lived.

As Frank Conroy intimates in his essay, “The Fifties”, to discover one’s ancestors is also to discover we are descendants, whether we like it or not. “Merely to flee our ancestors is to flee something of our personal and collective selves.”

 Was my friend Lygeia ever fired with curousity about her lineage, her ascendants, before her family adopted the name Dacanay?