What to make of these past weeks, even of only yesterday when the force of the news first hit you?
Over a glass of red wine in a garden hospitable to confessions, a friend who had just come in from the south tells you, "By the way, tenor Dodo Crisol is dead. Immediate cause of death is complications from diabetes."
Same friend tells you that his life is complicated and sad enough for him to end his Friday by composing an obituary and sending it to a daily.
You switch the subject as is your wont when the suddenness of the news is just too much to handle, especially on an afternoon earlier marked with joyful joyful noises of children.
You each order another glass, and your night's conclusion is how blessed you both are to have grandchildren to keep you going. Otherwise, you'd each entertain thoughts "na hindi maganda," was his own wry assessment of your respective situations. That was yesterday.
Tonight, a Saturday, back from the hours of light and laughter spent celebrating with a couple married thrice (first in underground rites during their activist years, next in civil rites when they returned from exile and this morning, church rites, finally), you remember another guy with whom you spent some time during a dark period in your life--almost a month at a hospital basement when you were being treated for ye old depression. (Not Dodo whom you associate with his sister Gigi Dueñas but somebody else.)
It was the first confinement for you (other times you were being treated for same-old same-old ailment in your youth on an out-patient basis; the depression would hit you hard again in your early 40s, an episode that no amount of medication could relieve).
For that fellow Rico, the basement he had already long considered home. There he was sure of where his next meal would come from, where his next dose of medicine would also come from so he could have a full night's rest or some lucidity. When the government official who was paying for his confinement lost the resources to keep him there and the bills started to pile up, Rico was released to a family reluctant to receive him back.
By then, you were long released to the world, a year or so ahead of Rico, and you had rejoined the work force and re-integrated with family in the lowlands and in the highlands. You'd drop by now and then to visit him, claiming you were his sister or cousin in order to be granted a few minutes with him at the visitors' lounge. He appreciated reams of bond paper, reams of old smokies (Marlboro reds); he'd slip a pack into his back pocket and surrender the rest to the head nurse.
You'd share anecdotes like this with old comrade in arts and letters, Amadis de Guerre, a.k.a Sluggo, about how boring it was until your psychiatrist pointed out Rico's presence to you and suddenly, confinement didn't seem like such a raw deal anymore. Rico remembered you from the days when you both contributed to the same magazines in the '70s and '80s.
At the basement, you'd throw lines of poetry at each other and when you ran out, recited song lyrics, particularly "Windmills of Your Mind." Rico knew every line of that song by heart and sang in perfect pitch, not too loudly though or else you or he would be made to spend another time in the room with padded walls that locked from the outside.
Old Sluggo's shoulders would rise and fall as he giggled and said, "So, was it like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?"
Better than two hours in a movie house, you should have said.
Rico remained to his last moment a very considerate fellow. Federico Licsi Espino Jr., poet-playwright-fictionist, quietly passed away on Holy Wednesday this year with no one noticing somewhere in the city of Pasig. A relative remembered to call up Solidaridad Bookshop on the morning of April 28 to inform Rico's friends, Frankie and Tessie Jose, that Rico was gone. All the information they received was that his mortal remains were immediately cremated; there was no wake nor a funeral either as even the cemetery gatekeeper took a leave on Holy Thursday and Good Friday.
Rico had enjoyed renown for being able to write and publish literary works in several languages. Some of those languages he had taught himself to speak with and write in like Spanish and Iluko.
You remember him most especially for his infrequent angel visits to 39 M. Viola street, UP Diliman campus, when the Epistola couple were still alive and played vibrant hosts there. One time, Nieves served him slices of pear. Rico politely ate them, paused and said, in that same gently chiding tone, "But they're tender."
When he left, an abashed Nieves said, "That's the last time I'm gonna serve canned pears!"
What's the point in this delayed obit (at least for Rico)? Well, Dodo and Rico are connoisseurs of life. Dodo deserves a longer piece. You can almost hear his sister Gigi screaming across the ocean: "Manash, kuno syur!"
Too weary from this Saturday's and last month's unrelenting grieving in private moments, you search for something to sort of salute the guys you once knew. May this other connoisseur bite more greedily of life's dew.
The Connoisseur
When it came to happiness she was a gourmet,
a connoisseur of small moments and extravagance.
Like a hummingbird, free as jazz, she floated away.
She wasn’t immune to love. But her need to stay
on top of things meant she didn’t rate romance
when it came to happiness. She was a gourmet
of the ungraspable now, savouring on the spot, without delay,
what the rest of us reheat at a bitter distance.
Like a hummingbird, free as jazz, she floated away.
I envied her of course, which isn’t to say
her dance, her casual way, didn’t leave me in a trance.
When it came to happiness she was a gourmet.
To recognise contentment was her gift, her forte,
sipping the nectar from selected instants
like a hummingbird. Free as jazz, she floated away
from me with the old line: Is there anything I can say
to make this easier for you? Not a chance.
When it came to happiness she was a gourmet.
Like a hummingbird, free as jazz, she floated away.
by Billy Ramsell
from Complicated Pleasures
publisher: Dedalus, Dublin, © 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment