Going home

I felt an uncanny sense of déjà vu as I viewed images of flood-stricken Metro Manila and Central Luzon early this month.

While I was moving old files to the second floor of my apartment, pages from the slowly-getting-unbound files landed on the floor. On the pages of a 1972 issue of Graphic Magazine, now brittle, is my three-page pictorial essay titled “After the Deluge” and describing how Metro Manila looked after The Big Flood of 1972.

I have seen five presidents, several horrendous floods, variations of corruption, dozens of State of the Nation Addresses. Moving from one apartment to another through the years, I have gotten rid of useless beepers and Betamax machines and am now wondering if I can join the race for the latest iPads and cell phones. I have finally learned how to do Facebook after two years of resisting it, and someone has suggested that I try Twitter.

The other night, I saw a Japanese film about abacus and samurai.

I first saw an abacus in my hometown Baras on the island of Catanduanes. As a child, I watched a Chinese businessman use the computing instrument, and I was fascinated by the sounds it made.

As images of death from the recent floods engulfed me, I realized that I am now the only surviving member of a family from a Bicol island.

The ritual of announcing death in the family has become familiar: Papa is gone (a message from my brother, my only sibling, in 1996). Mama has passed away (a message from my brother in 2000). Dai na si Papa (a nephew’s text message last June 1, saying his father, my brother, has gone to the great beyond as well).

True, a death in the family is the only (and the usual) compelling reason for me to go home. Home is Catanduanes, just an hour away by plane from Manila.

In the past, I started my visit with a trip to the cemetery to visit my parents’ graves. But now, from the airport, I proceed to Moonwalk Village to view my brother’s remains. Seeing him in his coffin, I come to grips with another reality: I am the family’s sole survivor.

Meanwhile, I find that change has transformed the island in many ways.

The last few vestiges of the Alberto political clan are gone except for the town mayor.

Catanduanes’ poets, Jose Tablizo and Benito Bagadiong, whose work I used to read, are gone; the parish priest, Fr. Ping Molina, whom I highly revered, has passed away as well.

The Catanduanes Theater where I used to watch FPJ-Susan Roces and Charito Solis movies has disappeared—a victim of the CD and DVD revolution. In front of the site is the first Jollibee branch and the first Mercury Drug branch on the island.

The old building of the Farmacia Guerrero, the first drugstore in Catanduanes, still stands but has been closed for good by the surviving owner, Adelaida Guerrero Morales.

I remember typing my first articles for Catanduanes National High School’s paper in the old provincial capitol building where my mother worked as a casual employee.

With a week to go before my brother’s interment, I hasten to visit Baras, where I was born in a seaside barrio called Tilod. On the way there, I see that the roads are finally paved, and sari-sari stores by the roadside now sell cell phone load.

The old houses—notably of the Magistrados, the Vergaras, the Tolledos and the Josons—are gone, as are the houses by the sea where my family and our relatives used to live.

Only the small island we call Minabalay remains as a poignant reminder of the past. It was where we held our picnics. Every year a Peñafrancia procession was held around the island and tragedy often occurred: Boats sank during the procession and I would wake up to see bloated cadavers and wailing orphans by the sea.

In my last hour in Baras, I hire a tricycle and tell the driver to take me around.

As I observe the new houses and the newly painted church, I think of the Chinese businessman doing sums on his abacus, our boat rides to a nearby sitio to get drinking water, and my waking up early to perform my chores as an altar boy in the church. I relive the tsunami of the 1950s and the terrible typhoons of the 1960s, during which our neighbors got drunk to the tune of “Historia de un Amor.”

I suddenly have an eerie recollection of the cemetery on a hill overlooking the sea: In one All Souls’ Day visit when I was in grade school, I visited my grandfather’s tomb and, looking down, I felt my hair stand on end because my name was on it. That was so simply because I carry my grandfather’s name.

In the past I lived in Quiapo, Manila; in Albay province; and in Parañaque City. For now home is Pasig City where my only prized possessions are my three grandchildren. Now I am not sure if I miss my hometown or I just miss my past. I feel the urge to return and relive the past, but I know it’s not possible.

The writer Thomas Wolfe has been proven right over and over again: “You can’t go back home [again] to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Pablo A. Tariman, 63, has covered the performing arts in the last 33 years and has three grandchildren.