RomblonWriter

Front cover teaser:

The memories of his past in a small farming village in Romblon resonate in his soul as he gropes for meaning in both his secular and spiritual struggles. The author hopes the essays in this book – in which he tries to depict human angst and foibles – will find echoes in the hearts of other people.

Book title:

The

Gypsy

Soul

AND OTHER ESSAYS

CASIANO P. MAYOR JR.

Acknowledgement

I want to thank Lyn Ressurreccion, my colleague at the defunct newspaper Today in Manila, for helping me collect some essays I wrote for the paper while I was compiling this book in Saudi Arabia. One of the essays she secured for me was “The Gypsy Soul” after which I have given the title of this book.

My gratitude also goes to Consul Jose Jacob, with whom I had struck a friendship when he was posted at the Philippine Consulate in Jeddah, for encouraging me to self-publish this book after the manuscript was ignored by publishers in Manila.

Also to Naomi Pepito, assistant principal at Badr International School in Jeddah, for sighting typo errors in the manuscript and for her valuable suggestion to prune some ideas I had repeated in two or more essays because they became “redundant” after the essays were bound together for this book. I heeded the advice.

To Romeo Reyes, a friend and a brother in a Catholic charismatic group, for sharing my passion to mix religion and science whenever I was assigned to make Biblical reflections for the group.

To my best friend, Orlando Fajilan, with whom I shared a passion for philosophy when we were in college, but who, unfortunately, lost his mental balance before he finished his undergraduate studies.

To my high school English teacher, the late Amelia Festin, for summoning me once to the faculty lounge just to tell me I had the flair for writing and for encouraging me to keep the writing torch burning. I deeply regret that she died before I was able to enter college.

To my philosophy professor at the Golden Gate Colleges in Batangas, Octavio Driz, and my literature teacher at the Lyceum of the Philippines in Manila, Anita Fileo, for theair influence on my reading preferences, and my English teacher Loreto Santos also at the Lyceum of the Philippines for trying to guide me through my great lifestorm when I was in college and for allowing me to skip her classes when I needed to write my column for a daily fronton newsletter where I had worked on the side.

To the Saint Ignatius community, spearheaded by Ahjid Sayas, and its umbrella group Kapisanan ng mga Katolikong Kristiyano ng Pilipinas, spiritually led by Francis Fuerte and Noel Buyco, for giving my family and me spiritual shelter while we were in Jeddah.

To all the people who have left deep imprints in my life: my cousins Diosdado and Jose Mayor, Manuel and Josephine Marino, my cousin-in-law Gloria Montojo-Mayor, Timoteo Malasa, Ladislao Malasa and family, Graciano Malasa and family, Lourdes Molina-Fernandez, Myrna Castro-Rosario, Jose Manzo, Violet Valdez, Victor Lagman, Rolando Mingoa, Louie Morente, Visitacion Contreras, Germilina Maestro, Nolita Marco-Quesmundo, Babette  Fusilero, Eugenio Peralta and family, Joey Orteza, Hernan Melencio and Ernesto Hernandez.

To my siblings in Christ at the Saint Ignasius community and the SKKP – Cleo and Melga Gorillo, Alex and Edith de Vera, Romeo and Erly Reyes, Tirso and Mayette Manalo, Raymund Davis and family, Edwin Gomez and family, Ferdie Lopez, Noel Navarro, Michael and Vivian Gepilano, Ed and Laude Marcelo, Rommel and Carmi Cabanella, Rene and Susan Caluya, Kherwin and Miko Masuhod, Jhun and Bing Mendoza, Edgar and Mimie Lapitan, Sydney and Josie Diaz, Jonathan Padua and family, Ben and Rose Hernandez, Fidel Hernandez, Godofredo and Liza Reyes, Pablo Medina, Greg Loteyro, Ronnel Sapungan, Romy Alegre, Jay Hilotin and a host of others who will take a long list to mention.

To my wife Marilyn, daughter Maria Angeline,  my father and mother, nieces La and Bernadette, nephew Al, my late sister Purita and brother Romeo for making my life worth living.

Above all, to God for the gift of life, no matter if I don’t understand our mundane existence, and for granting me the privilege to discover from experience that, indeed, Jesus is the light, “the way, the truth and the life.”

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to God, the Great Physician, my Healer

Also to my wife Marilyn, daughter Maria Angeline, nieces La and Bernadette, nephew Al, my late sister Purita, my brother Romeo and the migrant Filipino workers

                Contents

Foreword

Foreword II

Remembering Ginablan

The gypsy soul

The palace in the sky

Written in the stars

Snapshots of life

The poets among us and in us

Life is a beach

Memories of Papua New Guinea

The tragedy that befalls us

Between vanity and passion

A pipe dream and the TFC

Iraq war and our government’s buffoonery

Beyond Iraq

My brother’s keeper

Our passion for writing

The long road to Balad

Our culture of corruption

Journey to a lost culture

A tale of two women

An enigma named Kris

When a vacation is not a vacation

The devil and angel in us

Musings of peace on UN day

Our changing times

Nostalgia for simple living

A second hard look at Manila

Strangers in our own country

Pilgrims to the life beyond

Love in the age of neuroscience

When God closes doors

The Sarah Balabagan story

Facing a new war

Home is where the purse is

Foreword

 
I thought of launching a book of essays like this when I was still with the Makati-based newspaper Today. An essay I wrote for the paper about the Filipino poet Federico Licsi Espino when he was confined at the mental hospital in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, in 1997 sowed the seed for the idea. The essay was titled “A portrait of a poet as a gypsy.” I have changed the title to “The gypsy soul” for this book.

This book came about a decade after the idea struck me. It is mainly because I am not a prolific writer, a fact that I had acknowledged in the essay “Our passion for writing.” Most of the time I felt very lazy even to write letters to my kith and kin. Since I became a sub-editor for Today in 1994 and until I left the paper five years later, I had written only about five essays I consider worth keeping.

The idea of coming out with a book of essays was reborn in September 2002 when I started writing a weekly column for the Philippine page of the Jeddah-based newspaper, The Saudi Gazette, where I had worked as sub-editor since April 1999. I stopped writing the column a year later – again out of my laziness. But I had written enough articles for this book.

The essays in this book are mostly about our social and political malaise, the plight of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the Middle East and some personal experiences that I hope will find resonance in the hearts of other people. Although many of them have been outdated by subsequent events, the problems and general situations that I had wanted to point out when I wrote them have remained the same.

I have included in this book a feature article I wrote on the life of Sarah Balabagan, the Filipino maid who hugged the headlines of Manila’s newspapers in 1996 when she came home after being imprisoned for 10 months in Abu Dhabi for stabbing her employer when he tried to rape her, because her story underscores two key themes of this book – life’s uncertainty and man’s propensity to dream.

It is for the same reason that I had decided to include another feature story which I wrote also for Today about the plight of the Filipino Muslims who had been fighting a war of survival in Metro Manila after fleeing from the bloody separatist insurgency in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

I still feel an empathy with the ordeals which Sarah Balabagan and the relocated Muslim squatters went through when I reread them, although I wrote the stories eight years ago, and I thought that the articles will still touch the hearts of other people who may happen to read them here.

I have rewritten some of the essays in this book for sharper focus and have changed the title of the lead story to “The gypsy soul” to encompass my own restlessness, which I believe is shared by other people who have felt the angst of our existence.

I am a gypsy soul trying to seek refuge in God’s bosom after losing Him for quite sometime while I was pursuing a course in journalism at the Lyceum of the Philippines in Manila in 1967-71 and until a few years thereafter.

Casiano P. Mayor Jr.

February 1, 2004

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

2^nd Foreword

I first attempted to have this book published in summer of 2004 when my family and I went home to Manila for our annual vacation. I approached three publishers and was exposed to my first personal experience on how difficult it is to offer one’s book for publication. The staff of one publishing company even asked me if I had a PhD. I had none; I didn’t even have a college diploma. I was a school dropout.

Anyway, two of the three publishing firms asked me to leave the manuscript behind so they could take a look at it.

When I went back to Jeddah, I contacted them by email but got no responses. One reason probably was that I did not give a very good presentation of the proposed book. While on vacation, I discovered some typo errors in the manuscript and made ball-pen corrections right on the pages. I also made handwritten revisions of a few phrases. The second probable reason, I found out later, was that almost all – if not all – publishers in Manila are reluctant to gamble on a newcomer. They prefer known writers.

            I have once read an interview with prize-winning, US-based Filipino writer Ninotscka Rosca by a Manila newspaper wherein she commented that Philippine publishers do not have “acquisition editors,” or editors who read manuscripts and decide whether a proposed book is worth publishing. I surmise it’s the primary reason why Manila publishers go for established writers.

          I wasn’t a big gun, even as a journalist in Manila. The biggest achievement I have made was a major scoop I pulled in 1986 when I was still with the British news agency Reuters after the inquiry into the assassination of former senator Benigno Aquino Jr, the political archrival of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, had winded up. I got the minority report of the inquiry panel the night before it was released publicly, a small feat that nonetheless gave me a byline with the Time of London and a short-lived fame as a journalist. That story was carried by so many newspapers across the world.

          After failing to get a publisher in Manila, I shelved my dream of publishing a book, but only for a while. I am a person whose dreams don’t easily die down. When Filipino consul Jose Jacob, who was then posted at the Philippine Consulate in Jeddah, prodded me to self-publish the book, I browsed the Internet. While preparing the manuscript for self-publication, Saudi Gazette fired me and I was forced to look for another job. I got an office work in a construction company that paid a third less of my pay at the Gazette.

          With a lesser pay and after spending my service award while looking for a new job, my plan to publish this book went to the backburner once again. My wife’s salary and mine were barely enough for our daily expenses and our child’s studies. Nothing was left for savings, much less for publishing a book. My dream to get this book published got a second wind when Saudi Gazette rehired me in October 2007 to help launch the Tagalog section of the paper.

            In between the time I was fired and rehired by the Gazette, I had written two articles – “When God closes doors” and “Love in the age of neuroscience” – as part of my assignments for an online creative-writing course which I took with the Writers Bureau in London. I submitted “When God closes door” to Guideposts and the Catholic Digest but was rejected by both publications. “Love in the age of neuroscience” was carried by the Business Mirror in Manila on September 5, 2007. I have decided to include the two essays in this book.

            There was another damper that delayed the book’s publication. I lost my soft copy of the manuscript when I could no longer open my personal computer after it acquired a virus. It took me almost a year to retype the whole manuscript in my spare time.

            Dan Brown, author of the best-selling book The Da Vinci Code, has said that there are people who made a complete turnaround to embrace Faith after encountering a profound religious experience. I am one of them and that explains why I have dedicated this book to “God, the Great Physician, my Healer.” I was a former atheist who lost God in college after I took anthropology as an elective subject.

            In college, I found Darwin’s theory of evolution more plausible than the Bible. I wanted to use reason as my guiding light in life, but my depression, which started to develop after my father died, had taken the better part of me. I dug deeper into alcoholism and was forced to drop out of school a few months before I was to graduate when I vomited blood one night while at work as a security guard. I had contracted tuberculosis. My philosophy professor at the Lyceum of the Philippines, with whom I had a heated debate once, was right: you cannot put life – and God – inside logic.

            My life story is a good material for a full-length book. But since I have not even started to write that book, let me mention in passing that I lost my father when I was 13, a little more than a decade after my mother contracted leprosy and was forced to live in a leper colony in the central Philippine province of Cebu where she later got married to a fellow leper, with the consent of my father, and raised a new family.

            When my father died, I lived with the family of my uncle, my father’s younger brother, in Romblon, a province a little up north of Bacolod City in Negros Occidental where I was born. I hadn’t felt love in my uncle’s household and decided to run away a year after I graduated from high school. I went back to Romblon to seek treatment after I contracted TB but had to go back to Manila when I felt that I had become an unwanted member of the family.

            I consider my survival from TB as a miracle. Because I couldn’t find a regular job due to my illness, I had hopped from one odd job to another and often missed my meals, at times two in a row. Although I took my medicine when I had the money, this was too far between. But I survived the years until I found a job as a proofreader with the Evening Post, whose owner and editor-in-chief, Kerima Polotan Tuvera, allowed me to continue working when my x-ray showed I had TB and let the company shoulder the expenses for my treatment.

            I hope this explains why many of my essays in this book have religious undertones. Although I am not the typical Christian who takes the Bible literally, I see many universal truths in it – truths that we can verify from our personal experiences. One of these is the Parable of the Sower with the weeds symbolizing the lure of mundane things that often make us neglect, if not abandon, the spiritual side of our lives and keep us away from living simple lives in our journey to the life beyond.

             I am Christian who believes in evolution as part of creation, in science not as an enemy of religion but as a window to take a peek at the marvels of God’s infinite wisdom. I am a Christian who use reason as my rudder and Faith as my compass. I cling to Faith when logic does not seem to make sense anymore. I hope I have aptly explained this in my essay, “When God closes doors.”

Casiano P. Mayor Jr.

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

October 3, 2008

Email:  casianomayor@hayoo.com

Espino’s tragic fate reminds me of life’s uncertainties, its emptiness, its mysteries and of our own insignificance, no matter how we bloat our egos beyond what we really are. It raises a big question on life’s meaning which probably many of us have tried to grapple with when we look beyond our daily grind. After we have achieved what we had hoped to do when we were young, what do we gain when death – if not insanity – overtakes us?

.

The Gypsy Soul

(Today, 28 January 1997)

A letter to the editor published in the opinion page of this paper last week stabbed me in the heart. It told of the Filipino poet Federico Licsi Espino being confined at the mental hospital in Mandaluyong. The pathos of his fate lingered with me for quite a while and made me grapple on whether to write about it if only to let go of some strong, strange feelings that usually seize me when I am depressed. It is at times like this, when I get emotionally charged, that I itch to write. For I love to write not from the intellect but from the heart.

         The day I read the letter sent by Leopoldo Ortega, I called up the poet’s brother, Romeo Licsi Espino, whose name and telephone number were listed in the letter. I wanted to get his address so that I could send small amounts every now and then, when my budget permits, to help defray the expenses for Espino’s treatment. He wasn’t at home, but a lady who answered the phone, gave me the address.

        I don’t know the Espinos personally. I have never met the poet but I had picked up one of his books of poems – the one where he wrote about “cornflowers” – when I once rummage the bookstores when I was still in college. I have high regards for poets since I was in high school. Although I often did not understand their poetry, I was happy to appreciate a line or two.

        In the case of Espino, I have never forgotten his verse on the wind being a gypsy. Probably it is because it brings back sharp memories of Ginablan where the gypsy wind roamed freely on my aunt’s corn farm on a craggy hill of San Pedro.

        Espino, as the letter said, was a six-time Palanca awardee for literature, including two first prizes for poetry, aside from being first prize winner in Spain’s Ramon de Basterra Memorial Awards in Spanish poetry in 1997 and the Enrique Zobel de Ayala award. But with what befell him what good will all his awards be, for him and his family? The high cost of his treatment, it was said, has left the family impoverished.

        Espino’s tragic fate reminds me of life’s uncertainties, its emptiness, its mysteries and of our own insignificance, no matter how we bloat our egos beyond what we really are. It raises a big question on life’s meaning which probably many of us have tried to grapple with when we look beyond our daily grind. After we have achieved what we had hoped to do when we were young, what do we gain when death – if not insanity – overtakes us?

       Shakespeare answered that question with his famous line about life being a “stage full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible says that all our achievements are meaningless, just like “chasing the wind.” Jesus Christ answered the issue with another query: “What does it profit man to gain the whole world and loses his own soul?”

        My own search for meaning in life introduced me to atheism when I was in college. It made me appreciate the dilemma confronted by Albert Camus’s Sisyphus. It lured me into the world of Marx and I almost did follow him but for my reservation about his theory to create a “classless society,” which I thought was a utopia.

         I was more at home with the existentialists and, in the later part of my college days, had even prepared an epithet for my tomb, “Here lays the body of a man who never knew who he was and why he lived.”

         But if life’s emptiness and uncertainties made me stray to atheism, they also drove me back to my old religion, Christianity. In my wanderings since I left Romblon, I have come to realize that man has a soul longing for a home. His soul made Espino a gypsy like the wind wandering in his poetry. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, although an atheist, was no exception. He was a gypsy soul.

         Our soul has kept on driving us in search for meaning, whether we live in a craggy hill in some remote villages or in the jungles of modern sky crappers in some mega cities, probably to remind us that this world is not our home.

We left Tagaytay after a brief swing to the Picnic Grove where the three kids rode their horses with gleeful abandon. In the afternoon mist, the palace conjured memories of the Marcoses and made me ponder on the uncertainties of life’s changing seasons, like a sudden April shower that marked the end of one glorious summer.

The palace in the sky

(Today, 7 May 1996)

We caught the tail-end of summer at the Palace in the Sky on Thursday. The day was overcast but humid after the first rain ushering the late wet season had fallen the day before.

            I had longed to see the Palace in the Sky when President Fidel Ramos announced in January last year his government’s plan to renovate it.

            Curious to see its ruins before the repair takes place, my wife and I lost no time to go there, but the place had been sealed. I haggled with the policemen manning the gates to allow us to take photographs of the site, which is about a hundred-meter climb on a well-pave road that cuts like a coil along a rocky hill.

            My press card issued by the presidential palace could not move them to change their minds.

            Our curiosity to visit the palace, now renamed People’s Park in the Sky, was rekindled last week when the office prodded me to spend my unused vacation leave. On the day my leave form was signed, I immediately called our nephew and two nieces in Blumentritt to tell them of our plan to go to Tagaytay.

            Probably because we had been childless in our seven-year marriage, my wife and I had treated the children of her elder brother like our own.

            The kids were more excited about horseback riding at the Picnic Grove in the heart of Tagaytay City. We explained to them that a visit to the city on the ridge would be incomplete if we did not see the Palace in the Sky which the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos had envisioned as a family rest-house.

            Nestled on top of Mount Gonzales, the highest peak in Tagaytay, it provides a spectacular view of Metro Manila as well as the provinces of Rizal, Laguna, Batangas, Cavite, Quezon and the island of Mindoro.

            The Palace in the Sky was a reminder of how the Marcoses appropriated public resources for private use.

            The construction of the palace started in 1981 and was rushed in time for the supposed visit of then US president Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy. Unmindful of the high cost it would entail, the Marcoses pursued its construction feverishly round-the-clock for two years until 1983, in the time of disquiet that followed the assassination of former senator Benigno Aquino Jr.

            Besides the tremendous amount of money spent to build the mansion and the concrete road leading to it, the cost included the lives of three workers, I was told by the caretakers. One was said to have been blasted to death by dynamite used to blast solid rocks to build the road while the second died from a fall at the worksite. The third was stabbed to death by a worker who lost his mental balance owing to work pressures.

            When the Marcoses fled to Hawaii at the height of the People Power Revolt three years after Aquino’s assassination, the Palace in the Sky was left unfinished. The uncompleted project consisted of a three-storey bare structure on one side and two on the other, sprawling a 4,516 square meter of solid ground.

            What remains of it now does not give any clear hint on what it was envisioned to look like, but it gives away the reason for the Marcoses to pick it. The viewing deck on the top floor gives a clear panorama of all the places surrounding it, including the Taal volcano, which is said to be the smallest among the active volcanoes in the world.

            Beneath the palace, on the side overlooking the volcano, is a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a handy reminder that Marcos was suffering from an acute kidney illness before he died in exile in Hawaii in 1989. The pool is now home to freshwater fish and tadpoles.

            In the 75-day renovation that started in January 1991, the Ramos government has added new features to the complex – a large Hollywood-sign of People’s Park in the Sky, a row of picnic huts, an open amphitheater beside the pool, a giant replica of a pineapple fruit where guests usually pose for souvenir photographs, a wishing well and a 25-step shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a statue of Our Mother of Fair Love.

            The palace has become a major tourist attraction in Tagaytay City, a nascent boomtown being developed as the country’s second summer capital after Baguio City because of its association with the Marcoses who fell from power in the shifting sands of fortune.

            We left Tagaytay after a brief swing to the Picnic Grove where the three kids rode their horses with gleeful abandon. In the afternoon mist, the palace conjured memories of the Marcoses and made me ponder on life’s changing seasons, like a sudden April shower that signaled the end of one glorious summer.

That night was a capsule of life in which we are all competitors putting our best foot forward to gain the approval of others, sometimes to the extent of stretching our egos beyond what we really are because we always feel to be among the most important persons – if not the most important – this planet has ever turned out.

Written in the stars

(The Saudi Gazette,29 October 2002)

I often hear people say that the most memorable days in life were those we spent in high school. I agree. For most of us, those were the years when we start to dream of our future. I remember the dying days of our senior years when we had to write in the slum books of our classmates what we wanted to be or what was our ambition.

            Probably many of us did not become what they envisioned ourselves to be. I wrote in my classmates’ slum books that I wanted to become an engineer. I became a journalist. That convinced me that our fate is not in our hands, no matter if Shakespeare believes that our destiny is not written in the stars.

            I was made to hark back to high school days after attending on Saturday night the first day of the five-day foundation anniversary celebration of the International Philippine School in Jeddah (IPSJ) where our five-year-old daughter attends kindergarten classes. The activities flashed back memories from high school when we were full of hopes for the future.

           In college, life started to become a serious business of survival, particularly for us working students, who buried ourselves in books, which gave my first impression that life is a ritual of going to school, working and enjoying only the amenities that we can afford because freedom is not absolute; our freedom to choose has its own limits.

            Because my work starts at midday and ends shortly after sundown, I was not able to watch our child danced with her classmates in the calisthenics competition. But I was able to watch the high school students in colorful costumes perform with so much verge and enthusiasm as if their lives depended on winning the contest.

            The riot of colors gaily swaying with every movement of the students performing at center stage struck me as a metaphor of life when we are young and weaving a world of our own in a web of our dreams and fantasies. It is a time when innocence is bliss, a time when we feel like we are the center of the universe.

            The students were the center of the universe that night, displaying their best form and chanting at the top of their voices to get the attention of the board of judges and the audience that consisted mainly of parents beaming with pride as they watched their children from the sidelines of the basketball court in the school’s gymnasium where the competitions were held.

            That night was a capsule of life in which we are all competitors putting our best foot forward to gain the approval of others, sometimes to the extent of extending our egos beyond what we are because we always believe that we are among the most important persons – if not the most important – this planet has ever turned out.

            At home, after the curtain fell at the IPSJ gymnasium, I played back my life to my high school days when I wanted to become an engineer because I idolized my cousin who was an engineer. I dropped that dream when I found out later that, as a working student – first as a construction laborer and later as a security guard – I could not afford to buy a slide rule and the other instruments required for the course.

            My fate to become a journalist was influenced by my best friend who, after seeing my hopes to pursue an engineering course collapsed, suggested that I enroll in journalism instead because I knew how to write anyway, although my interest was more in creative writing than in newspapering.

            I went to bed that night happy for our child who had gone fast asleep beside her mother after dancing with her classmates to second place in the calisthenics contest. And I thought of my best friend who, despite his brilliance, ended as a dockhand in his hometown after he lost his mental balance while pursuing pre-law in a Manila university.

            I look at life as a fleeting shadow of our dreams and passion and perfectly understand that we, parents, consider our children as extensions of our own dreams because we know that even dreams cannot go beyond the limits of life.