Because I Said So by Boots Ma. Garcia-Sison
06/22/2009
THERE are a lot of cemeteries in the world that are tourist attractions because of their famous inhabitants. Once a celebrity is buried in a particular cemetery, expect it to gain some sort of fame, or notoriety. After all, a dead celebrity is still a celebrity. They still get hounded by very live fans who still can’t get enough of their fame. I remember reading about where the great Marilyn Monroe is buried – a cemetery where, everyday since her death, a flood of red roses are delivered and deposited on her grave. If I remember right, it was one of her husbands, Joe DiMaggio, who made such an arrangement. Obviously, death did them part but DiMaggio’s roses are there, for Marilyn’s very dead nostrils to appreciate 24/7, as she reposed in eternal sleep.
There are cemeteries in New York which are museums by themselves and where the famous lie in eternal rest, pomp and glory – given the ostentatious mausoleums they are housed in. Woodlawn is one such tourist attraction of a cemetery, where the industrialist and arts patron Augustus Juilliard is buried, the man behind the famous school of art and dance. In Green-Wood, another cemetery for the rich and famous, there is even a tour bus (or should it be called a tour train because that was how it looked like to me), and its renowned residents include the very dead Samuel Morse of the Morse code fame, and F.A.O. Schwarz, the creator of that famous toy store – the one featured in the Tom Hanks movie, BIG. In the cemetery of Paris, countless poets, authors, statesmen and rock stars (notably Jim Morrison) are interred, and tourists flock to their graves – perhaps to gawk, to stare, or hopefully to say a prayer for their eternal repose. There’s another cemetery in Paris that is equally famous, though it’s a pet cemetery, and it is where the remains of the great movie actor-dog Rin Tin Tin are buried.
It’s unimaginable though that these cemeteries will serve as living quarters for families. For one thing, they are very much gated and guarded, and anyone staying beyond visiting hours is bound to be shown the way out.
Here in Manila, our cemeteries also attract the living, but not just as visitors. A good number of people who visited such cemeteries came to stay, and to date are still there. They live with the dead. A newspaper article tells me that 10,000 families live in the North Cemetery. That’s a number not so easy to forget.
But then, that is a drop in the bucket compared to the poor families living in the cemeteries of Riyadh and Cairo. A quick surf in the Internet revealed that as much as two million families live in Cairo’s cemetery, while there is almost half that in Riyadh. Habib Trabelsi, the journalist who wrote the article in the Net, even mentioned a 33-member family of mostly children who call the cemetery their home.
That brought back to memory a family who lives in a Makati cemetery. That cemetery also has its own residents of the living kind. In one of my commercial shoots, I met one such family whose son we featured in a public service ad, and when I was told that we would be picking him up from the cemetery, I took a double take to make sure that I heard right. Of course I did, and on that day I met Junior* and his family.
Junior was in grade school then, studying in a nearby public school a few blocks away from the cemetery. He’s lived there all his life, and it’s not because they have a sepulturero in the family either. When we talked, he didn’t find anything incongruous in the fact that he and his family use a tombstone for a dining table during the day and as a bed during the night. Of course, he doesn’t bring home any of his friends for a lot of playdates or sleepovers, and neither does he talk much about his address. Baka po matakot sila, he told me, when I asked if his classmates knew where he lived. As for Junior himself, he is not an easy child to scare, for he plays alongside crypts and mausoleums, not caring how many skeletons are actually six feet under his feet. He talked quite casually about how lucky their family is for having an electric fan and a rice cooker, (they have electricity—illegally, I suppose) for their neighbors (the living ones, that is) have so much less. In fact, I realized from Junior’s musings that like an ordinary neighborhood, meaning one that is not cohabited by the dead right next door – much less right under you, even the living residents in their cemetery are subjected to and live with the same kind of inggitan, tsismisan, intrigahan and, happily, tulungan as the more regular neighborhoods you and I live in.
I remember that Junior looked wistfully at a grander tomb that we passed by when we brought him home. It was occupied by another family of tomb dwellers. The tomb was owned by a richer family – richer than the one who built the tomb that Junior’s family lives in. I was right when I assumed that Junior doesn’t even know the family who owns the tomb he dwells in. But his tomb isn’t so bad, Junior assured us, as it is big enough for him, his mother, lola and sister. His mother operated some sort of a sari-sari store inside the premises – and I jokingly asked: Do you get enough clientele, seeing as a lot of the people in the neighborhood wouldn’t have any use for yosi, mantika or kendi? Junior laughingly reassured me that, of course, they don’t sell to the dead; it’s the living that buy their wares, whether their own neighbors or the live ones that come to visit.
I discovered soon after that Junior hates three dates in the calendar: Oct. 31, Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Whereas other people would find it commendable, Junior laments the fact that religiously every year, the family of their dead landlord (I use this term loosely, though Junior’s family doesn’t pay him any rent), descend on their cemetery during those days, and they do not only come to visit or pray; they stay the entire three days and two nights. They also come to visit on their dead relative’s birthday and death anniversary, though happily for Junior, that doesn’t happen too often. On those dates, Junior and his family keep a lookout for their arrival, and as soon as they are spotted, the tomb dwellers scamper away to safety, having emptied the tomb of their own personal belongings days before the aforementioned dates. Then they have to scrounge for living quarters somewhere else, even as they pray the whole time for the living descendants of their tomb owner to leave as early as possible.
These people were so hard up that they had to move in with the dead. I met more of them that day. Junior introduced me to their next-tomb neighbors, a wiry, browned-by-the-elements little old lady and her apo, who told me that when lola was evicted from their apartment they had nowhere else to go and so came here. But the old lady obviously wanted us to cut short our conversation then, because it was already noon. A man in shorts passed by, obviously another tomb dweller, and he shouted at her merrily, Nay, anong ulam mo, and she shouted back, Ano pa, eh di pasabog. Catching her look at us from the corner of her eye, I realized that she was embarrassed for having admitted to such poverty. The poor are sometimes prouder than you and I. Taking that as our cue, we quickly said goodbye to the old woman so she could get on with her midday meal.
At the end of our shoot, Junior and his family received quite a lot of goodies from our production team, aside from some cash money. He was beside himself with glee. Only he told us to be very quiet about it, as it’s not good to announce your good fortune in their kind of neighborhood. Oh, I joked again, Baka magising ang mga patay, kaya ayaw mo mag-ingay? But Junior seriously said, Hindi po kami sa patay takot, kundi sa buhay.
That cemetery was definitely no Woodlawn or Green-Wood. It was, and is, more in the league of the cemeteries in Cairo and Riyadh where the poorest of the poor have decided, that for them to go on living, they must live with the dead. That day, we left that cemetery knowing that the help we gave Junior could not have lasted a week. Though we heard him tell his lola that for a few days, they wouldn’t have to eat rice and pasabog – the salt they throw on top of their plates of rice during meal times.
To this day, I can’t get the image of Junior and his family out of my mind, as they partake of their meals, with a tombstone for a dining table, eating from plates set right on top of their very dead landlord, and filling their stomachs with food freshly scooped from a rice cooker that is just a step away from their very dead neighbors.
(*names have been changed to protect individual privacy)
Boots ma. Garcia-sison is a wife, mother, soccer groupie, and advertising director and writer, more on some days than others. It was her son who thought of her column’s name. (For comments, please text 09178411062.)
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
My mother's memories
my mother is 87 years old. She has begun scratching the top of her head , almost non-stop, and has surreptitiously started plucking her hair off the site where her fontanel was. During the times i have caught her, she has blatantly denied doing so, believing that i am too myopic to notice what she's been up to. Seeing that very conspicuous bald patch now, i realize, at her age, she must feel entitled already to a little dash of craziness.
She was eighteen years old when the Japanese came to occupy Manila, and she recounts the days of running to bomb shelters when dogfights thundered over their heads. She remembers a young Japanese officer, one who stopped a foot soldier from robbing her of her ring. She had pretended that the ring was too tight to come off her finger and so the soldier had taken out his knife and her hair had stood at their ends at the realization that the man was going to end up with more than just a ring. When the Japanese officer suddenly appeared from nowhere and slapped that foot soldier to submission, my mother was grateful, and bowed low to that officer , though she didn't stay to chat or even say thanks, she ran all the way home, frightened that the foot solider would exact his vengeance. This incident she remembers with vivid clarity, together with the fact that my ninong's wife died during that war, and that my own father was conscripted by the japanese to fetch them water so they could all bathe.
My mother is old. she was mother to a student activist that she feared would die during the martial law years , but would live and migrate to canada, abandoning the cause she walked the streets for when first world opportunity presented itself. and just years ago, my mother recovered from a hypoglycemic attack, to live another 10 years, and to bury both her husband and her fifty year old son. She has shrunk in size, and her hands and face have become wizened. Though she was always small , she was never puny. I remember her feistiness, and her opinionatedness. Perhaps these two qualities were what precisely helped her reach her age today, as she defied diabetes, hypertension, even a heart problem she's nursed for decades.
My mom is Methuselah, I thought, just a few days ago during the Christmas holidays, when i was giving her a bath, after cajoling , coaxing and finally blackmailing her into stepping inside the bathroom.
I was high pitched in the bathroom. when she turned to me and asked why i was angry, i really didn't have an answer.
She's started walking nights. Fully awake, she was at the foot of my marital bed, at three o clock in the morning, and my husband and i were stunned into wakefulness, hearing her voice calling out my name. Rosario, Rosario, where is your Aunty Puring? I sat up in bed, and i snapped at her that Aunty Puring is long dead. No, my mother shook her head, she is in Bataan, and then she hobbled away and left, mumbling that Puring should have come to visit a long time ago.
I couldn't sleep after that. My son arrived at his school really early that day.
My mother didn't even notice it was Christmas. She has no fondness anymore for this Christmas or the Christmas before that when my sister came home from Canada.
But she remembers the family's first ever Christmas ... the very first Christmas she stopped buying a real pine tree and opted for a silvery-tinsel wrapped kind...the Christmas my father opened our house to the whole neighborhood.
She was eighteen years old when the Japanese came to occupy Manila, and she recounts the days of running to bomb shelters when dogfights thundered over their heads. She remembers a young Japanese officer, one who stopped a foot soldier from robbing her of her ring. She had pretended that the ring was too tight to come off her finger and so the soldier had taken out his knife and her hair had stood at their ends at the realization that the man was going to end up with more than just a ring. When the Japanese officer suddenly appeared from nowhere and slapped that foot soldier to submission, my mother was grateful, and bowed low to that officer , though she didn't stay to chat or even say thanks, she ran all the way home, frightened that the foot solider would exact his vengeance. This incident she remembers with vivid clarity, together with the fact that my ninong's wife died during that war, and that my own father was conscripted by the japanese to fetch them water so they could all bathe.
My mother is old. she was mother to a student activist that she feared would die during the martial law years , but would live and migrate to canada, abandoning the cause she walked the streets for when first world opportunity presented itself. and just years ago, my mother recovered from a hypoglycemic attack, to live another 10 years, and to bury both her husband and her fifty year old son. She has shrunk in size, and her hands and face have become wizened. Though she was always small , she was never puny. I remember her feistiness, and her opinionatedness. Perhaps these two qualities were what precisely helped her reach her age today, as she defied diabetes, hypertension, even a heart problem she's nursed for decades.
My mom is Methuselah, I thought, just a few days ago during the Christmas holidays, when i was giving her a bath, after cajoling , coaxing and finally blackmailing her into stepping inside the bathroom.
I was high pitched in the bathroom. when she turned to me and asked why i was angry, i really didn't have an answer.
She's started walking nights. Fully awake, she was at the foot of my marital bed, at three o clock in the morning, and my husband and i were stunned into wakefulness, hearing her voice calling out my name. Rosario, Rosario, where is your Aunty Puring? I sat up in bed, and i snapped at her that Aunty Puring is long dead. No, my mother shook her head, she is in Bataan, and then she hobbled away and left, mumbling that Puring should have come to visit a long time ago.
I couldn't sleep after that. My son arrived at his school really early that day.
My mother didn't even notice it was Christmas. She has no fondness anymore for this Christmas or the Christmas before that when my sister came home from Canada.
But she remembers the family's first ever Christmas ... the very first Christmas she stopped buying a real pine tree and opted for a silvery-tinsel wrapped kind...the Christmas my father opened our house to the whole neighborhood.
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