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By N.V.M. Gonzalez
Who am I? What has happened to me? It is when
these two questions begin to prod us into self-assessments and
appraisements that we might claim we have a real measure of value. The idea came to me that morning in Romblon when, from the balcony
of an old schoolmate’s house by the harbor, we witnessed a
reenactment of how the town acquired El Señor Santo Niño for its
patron saint some four hundred years ago. Romblon commemorates
the event to this day.
For reasons quite unclear, there was this
magnificent icon of the Holy Infant Jesus on board a galleon bound
for Spain that ran into foul weather, this being the habagat season
in the Visayas. There are few harbors in the country that can match
Romblon Bay for safety; indeed, it is girded by three islands, and
you might judge the fury of the winds from how the coconut trees,
which cover the hills all around us, toss about every which way
though not a ripple could be seen to fret our waters.
There was a break in the weather after some
three days or so—the story goes—and the galleon prepared to
resume her voyage only to return just as soon as she had lost that
cover afforded by the surrounding islands. Six times she braved the
elements; and after yet another try, the southwesterly monsoon being
probably on the wane, it was decided that El Señor be taken to the
local mission church. It was already quite a ghost of a ship that
had slid back to the quay; nearly all her sails were in tatters; her
rudder had split, her foremasts splintered.
During the month that followed repairs were
undertaken; finally, it was the amihan season and, over all, better
weather for leaving Philippine waters. But El Señor could not be
moved from its temporary altar. Was this not a sign that El Señor
meant to stay? It was a question which one novena after
another eventually resolved, early in January, to this day, Romblon
celebrates that voyage to Spain that Si Habagat thwarted—in a
pageant known as biniray.
Not too long ago the icon disappeared and
inadvertently, our Bishop had a problem. The theft had been
attributed to a gang long known to have had successes with religious
objects of great value. We remember the Bishop discussing plans for
the pageant of the 1994 fiesta; he had gone the month before to
Manila and brought back a fine replica of the lost Santo Niño. It
was by one of Binondo’s best sculptors, a descendant of a long
line of Chinese Filipinos who have won renown for this kind of work.
We had been all ears as the Bishop tried to make
his position on the matter clear. It was not Faith but authenticity
that was at issue, he argued. An eighth turn in the harbor would
give expression not so much to our grievous loss as the certainty
that the original El Señor would be returned.
The entire town had literally risen to the
occasion. Since the break of dawn, the puffing and groaning of three
competing brass bands hired for the fiesta and their riot of
contrabasses, trombones, trumpets, cymbals and drums, had awakened
everyone and were soon at the Cathedral for the early Mass. If the
latecomers might have thought that they could have the High Mass to
themselves, they saw their mistake shortly; the devout from the
nearby sitios had poured in as well, taking pews that the local
gentry had reserved usually for themselves and finding the worn-out
kneelers handy to hand.
A procession materialized from the Cathedral
patio but enjoyed only a short-lived solemnity as it was transformed
into a noisy parade headed for the wharf area and the harbor, with
tribos and clans, with their names writ large on cloth banners held
aloft. Boasting costumes cut from fibers torn off the crowns of
coconut trees or stripped off the stalks of abaca, they trooped in:
the women wearing garlands of vines and wild flowers and weighed
down with necklaces of cowries and clams, the men sporting amber and
burgundy feathers of fighting cocks on their arm bands and chokers
with the tusks of wild boars.
As an expression of gratitude to El Señor for
their having survived, say, a near fatal illness, or generally for
yet another year of bounty, the devotees had come. This was one day
of honoring their vows to El Señor in gratitude. The good fortune,
that, in sum, had been theirs was well worthy, in any case, of all
the squinting in the sun and grinning from ear to ear.
To the beat of drums and the clash of cymbals,
might they not be allowed to be graceless in celebration and do
something closer to dancing than merely stomping around in the sun?
Tradition had given this a name: ati-atihan. An orgy beyond guile or
calculation, a gesture of abandon and sheer joy beyond the noise,
heat and the questioning crowds that it might amuse, calling it an
oddity, and so close to a regression born of collective anonymity.
But, no, it was in fact a transformation of faith into action. For
not one man, woman, or child had come but with invariably generous
dashed of soot of lampblack on their faces, shoulders and arms, as
if they had just come from their clearings where they had been
rooting for sweet potatoes; or from the swamps for clams and edible
snails. For it must be known to all during the year just passed El
Señor had not played favorites, bestowing more blessings on some
than others.
From my friend’s balcony, the azure waters of
the bay had become a stage. The MS Viva Royale, which was no visitor
to the port, being in fact on the Batangas-Romblon weekly run, had
arrived the night before. Now she had been chosen to have El Señor
on board and was promptly decked out for this morning’s pageant
with banderetas from bow to stern. She would lead some twenty
outriggered boats in good style even as the sea remained blue,
tinged with silver by the sun.
Would the MS Viva Royale, our 20th century
galleon, do the harbor seven times? People had vied for every
sitting or standing room available on the decks of just about every
vessel, large or small, in the harbor, some happy enough for the
privilege of clambering onto the shrouds or rigging as the morning
sun slowly came to a mild boil.
Presently the MS Viva Royale’s whistle sounded
high noon, and the pageant was over. The tide began to rise in
the brisk wind.
Where lay the connection on one hand between
that habagat storm four hundred years ago and, on the other, the
scraps and shards of history and memory that become the stories that
we tell? We began to wonder. There could be no weather so
perverse as to deny them a safe harbor somewhere.
This essay is the Author’s Note to A
Grammar of Dreams, U.P. Press, 1997.
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