Many years back, in a great university, on Valentine’s Day, I met a colleague of mine in the corridor of our building.
She was on her way to her class, while I was on my way back to our department. She was rushing. I was not. I hailed her and shouted: Happy Valentine’s! She stopped dead—yes, dead—in her tracks, and pulled me to the side. Known to be a feminist-Marxist, she was more Glenn Close but with the squint of Dirty Harry, when she blurted the line: “Tito, you buy into that!”
I buy flowers, but I don’t buy into that, that day called Valentine’s Day. I greet people because I like people. But hey, I was never into any Valentine’s Day even if my cardiologist is the only one with a huge heart on the façade of his clinic.
And so, this column looks like a delayed paean to the 14th day of this month. But it is not.
As I write this essay, the flowers have wilted down and their prices, which had insanely gone up, are now down again, with the ground, where all blooms sprout from.
It was the 12th of February when the riot toward this day began. As all riots, there was a steady rise in the demonstration of feelings. People just had to express their emotions. Once more in bookstores, people were crowding before shelves containing cards with words and lines as old as this chain of school supplies.
Love is as old as anything. But it cannot be older than poverty. Both are about needs and needing. Both are supreme mysteries. Poets rhapsodize about love but never get to explain why we fall in it. Theories abound about poverty, but no one ever gets to provide solutions to it.
It was on that early morning, two days before this vaunted day of love that found me in the bus terminal, sleepy, waiting for my sister to arrive. She had sent messages regarding how their bus was crawling into the city and how she found herself on the other side of the city while I waited for her in the terminal on the other side.
The Edsa highway was before me. In the terminal, life never really stopped. The taxi drivers affecting the expressions of welcome common to those coming from my region were relentless in their welcome for the passengers. The buses were coming in quick. Skybus, some of them were called. It used to be one Skybus, but now there is No. 1 to No. 6. Our world has changed: Buses that were luxe because they were given the gift of Sky are now common.
As one bus turned around to park near where it entered, I rushed to it. There was no sister there. But there was an old friend, a poet, Romy Cruz, on vacation from the US. He saw me, and I saw him. We had to have a selfie. But there was no one to take it. He had a tiny camera, not a mobile phone. Selfies are taken with mobile phones. Strangers we hailed looked at his hand and backed out. They seemed to be saying: No camera, please. But we kept calling out for anyone to help these two sentimental fools, foolish enough to command anyone to take our photos. One was daring and held Romy’s camera. That business settled, we were off to catching up. “Your daughter also writes. Let us have a reading soon in ‘Savage Mind.’” We were talking about the newest cultural hub in our city. “I have a publisher already, Romy. I will publish the writings—the poetry—of those who were writing in the late ’60s up the late ’70s. Fine. Marhay man.”
Romy has not changed. He has a way of putting on this timid look, but he must be the most confident poet of our generation. Online, I caught one of his poems entitled “Dayangdang,” the street of his childhood and boyhood and my street, as well: During the final days I have kept those poems/inside the tin can and hid them in the kisame that/space between the ceiling and the roof/above as if I can get back to them when/they are yellowed like wine when they taste so/sweet after every year clip one leaf or branch away/to prune to shape it into something you desire much better than the alleys and the streets of naga/that look the same.
In his poetry, Romy Kerz, as we fondly called him then, loses the shyness and whatever analysis of confidence we attribute to him. What is left, as if poetry has this means of yielding our lives to the candid embrace of the universe, is a person who nurtures the vanishing because that is where he will find himself eventually. The poem goes on and ends: is there a point in waiting then after all these years/even as you have now forgotten their voices./you may have lost the directions to the house trying/to recognize their faces even as you try to recover/every single piece.
Romy asks if there is a point in waiting, but you know that deep in that heart, he believes in waiting. I could have talked about this poem with him, but a bus terminal is where the journeys of buses end. And waiting in the bus terminal is no poetry.
With Romy, fetched by his brother, Francis, gone, I resumed my wait.
Out there was the Edsa highway. Young men and young women, old men as well, were all rushing. Buses were not allowed to stop and pick up passengers in front of the terminal, but who cares about laws and regulations in this nation of ours? Not the enforcer and not the leader.
The rush continued. Faces flushed because of the running. Legs strong enough to hoist oneself to a running vehicle. These were the people of that morning, two days before the world crazily celebrated the day for loving.
Analysts write forever about how we are poor because we have a lousy labor force, because our young women and men are lazy. I looked at these workers of the nation running, some of them eating on their way to work, loving their work that did not pay much, loving their bosses that did not respect them as much, loving this nation that did not have them in the fake heart and false promises of their contemptible government.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano