Post by ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano on Jun 13, 2007 19:05:58 GMT -5
Good Intentions 101: SY ’72-’73
By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
JENNIFER Misa remembered the day that Martial Law was declared. (The dates of the signing of the proclamation, and of the actual proclamation itself, had differed for numerological purposes.) She was in the shower and the radio was playing Van Morisson’s Brown-eyed Girl with its lilting lyrics and light calypso beat. That was not unusual, except that the song kept on playing repeatedly as if on a time warped loop. Seven times, Jennifer counted—more than long enough for her to shampoo twice and let the strawberry scented conditioner soak through her hair roots. Then there was silence and nothing but the bewildered stutter and aimless crackle of static. It was the same on all the other stations on the AM band. The TV channels had also gone blank—just an enormous blind unblinking eye and a constant high-pitched electric whine that hurt the ears. Those were the first signs most people had that a threshold had been crossed, that things were somehow different yet irrevocably the same.
A warm muzzy sense of profundity washed over Jennifer as she stood in the shower and she thought, that this was what death must be like: naked and senselessly quiet. Her heart went thud. She was fourteen and her emotions were as graphic as comic strip balloons. Her favorite expression was Yikes! She had tried, “Fuck! Shit!” on occasion, but these just weren’t her. Now she said it: “Yikes! This is so boring.”
Big Brother was bouncing with excitement and wanted to go for a ride. He wanted to see tanks and the militia in action just like in Paris or Prague. He wanted to have one of those posters denouncing the President as the Mad Bomber for a souvenir before they were all scraped off or whitewashed over. Mother rapped him sharply on the top of his greasy head.
“Idiot! Stay home. It’s not safe.” She whispered harshly. It was as if she expected someone to be listening in on their conversations right there in their living room with the plastic covered faux Louis XIV furniture and the white and gold bric-a-brac of kissing swans and rosy-cheeked cherubim. “It’s better to be safe,” Mother said, waggling her eyebrows knowingly and walling her bright fearful eyes in the direction of Col. Poblete’s duplex across the street. Jennifer’s heart beat a little faster despite herself, a stacatto of little thumps and thuds. Arlene Poblete was her classmate. What if her father or one of his operatives had been listening in when ever she called that cute La Sallite using Arlene’s name instead of her own? She told herself that they must have better things to do than eavesdrop on a fourteen-year old but you never really knew for sure.
Mother compressed her lips to suggest discretion. She had been a little girl in Pampanga during the Second World War and still held close the bleak grey memory of fear, hunger and hiding amidst sudden death. Father had spent his War years as a high school student in Batangas, closeted in his room and reading when there was not enough to eat. The Japanese had passed through their town a few times but his most harrowing wartime experience was when they had used several of his Harvard Classics (a prize he had won for a national oratorical competition) as kindling. In general, the family experience of the military was not pleasant.
There was no school for a couple of weeks. The days flowed into each other with the seamlessness of water. It felt just like summer vacation except that it was late September. Jennifer and Big Brother could have slept till noon but there were no shows on TV, and nothing much on the radio to keep them up that late. They didn’t dare use the phone too often because of the awesome certainty that their conversations might pique the interest of Col. Poblete and his invisible minions. Jennifer didn’t remember on which day the President came on TV but it must have been around dinnertime. His eyes flashed fire as he made his announcement. Father and Mother listened gravely then Father got up from the table. He picked his teeth and sighed.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” he declaimed with the toothpick still stuck between his clenched teeth.
“What do you mean—’despair’—he got everything he wanted, didn’t he? the Great Dictator...” Big Brother mumbled, with head bent and hair canopied over his eyes. His boney knees wagged together rhythmically, a sign that he was really thinking hard.
“Stop talking like a Communist. This is brilliant what the man has done, a stroke of genius—or rather, one stroke of the pen and he has solved all the nation’s problems,” Father said. He tussled Big Brother’s hair, the only way he could show affection to him now since they had stopped kissing one another when Big Brother had turned eighteen, except at Christmas and on birthdays. “I don’t know what the Jesuits are teaching you—that de la Costa—he sounds like a Leftist to me. But God bless you, boy, you just don’t understand. You’re too young to have a sense of history, you half baked little potato... Ah, youth! It is wasted on the young.” He put a Ray Conniff record on the stereo and sang along while Jennifer’s little brothers capered about like wind-up toys.
Jennifer learned much later that seven and its multiples were the President’s favorite numbers. She wondered if there had been any special mystical significance about her hearing Brown-Eyed Girl played seven times on that fateful morning when it seemed as if time itself had stopped. Did the Brown-eyed Girl in the song perhaps refer to Inang Bayan? Try as she might, she couldn’t recall more of the lyrics, except that there was something in it about the day when the rains came.
Thus was the New Society come upon them all. Mother and Father whispered about how influential enemies of the state were given the courtesy of fleeing to the United States. Their assets were frozen though so, tragically, they had sunk to the middle class or even lower middle class. The Vice President, who was now the President’s enemy, was branded as the number one oligarch. That word was added to the vocabulary list for the Current Events portion in Jennifer’s Social Studies class. The Vice President was third generation sugar money, which made him old rich by Filipino standards. The entire hacendero family was officially denounced for having built their fortunes on the broken backs of the poor sacada, the itinerant fieldhand whose harrowing misery had been documented by a chubby Jesuit with Ilonggo antecedents himself. The sugar barons’ lavish ways were legend in the midst of bone crushing poverty. During the golden wedding anniversary of the Vice President’s uncle and aunt (who happened to be first cousins), it was said that Cristal champagne had flowed endlessly and sprayed iridescent drops of gold from a fountain as large as a small swimming pool. A full orchestra, flown in all the way from Boston, had played Broadway tunes. To punish the family, the contents of their ancestral mansion on Roxas Boulevard were auctioned off for charity. It was rumored that one of the toilet seats was studded with seed pearls.
“Ouch, that must hurt worse than almoranas when you sit on it,” Big Brother chuckled, his hunched shoulders shaking with mirth. “Those rich bastards don’t know what to do with their money. They should just give it to me.”
Father slowly growled, making them all jump. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Jennifer knew that he’d always wanted to be on stage, maybe even in politics. Selling insurance was not his avocation. Father went on:
“Just think about it, Boy—What could be more foolish than all these lemmings joining the Youth Nationalists when the parents are breaking their backs just to send them to the best schools they can afford? It’s like spitting in their faces. Oh how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a child’s ingratitude! For look ye upon this evil generation: it seeks a sign.” And his red face contorted with pain and rage as if he too were one of those unfortunate spat upon parents cursed with an ungrateful child. Mother massaged his forearms soothingly.
Big Brother just laughed at Father. He was always in such a good mood that Mother and Father never thought he would have the kind of focus and dedication one needed to be an activist. Admittedly, he had a rebellious streak. They had given up trying to get him to cut his hair. Then on the day of his high school graduation, he had shaved his head and put on a long wig. When he went up to get his diploma, he had bowed and raised his mortarboard and the wig along with it. The whole graduating class broke out into wild hoots of laughter, catcalls and cheers. It was some time before order was restored in the auditorium.
Father and Mother’s greatest fears alternated between Big Brother taking up his best friend Mokong’s dare to streak across the football field for a bottle of tequila, or his not finishing his engineering course but becoming a rock musician instead. They spoke loudly and frequently about how disreputable it was to be an artist or an entertainer, especially in a combo, even if one worked in Guam or Hong Kong. Big Brother pointedly ignored this and used his own savings to get a bass guitar for his last birthday. Almost a year had passed and still all that he could play were the opening chords of Sunshine of Your Love, Innagadadavida and Smoke on the Water. It didn’t seem likely that any rock band would take him in with such a limited repertoire.
By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
JENNIFER Misa remembered the day that Martial Law was declared. (The dates of the signing of the proclamation, and of the actual proclamation itself, had differed for numerological purposes.) She was in the shower and the radio was playing Van Morisson’s Brown-eyed Girl with its lilting lyrics and light calypso beat. That was not unusual, except that the song kept on playing repeatedly as if on a time warped loop. Seven times, Jennifer counted—more than long enough for her to shampoo twice and let the strawberry scented conditioner soak through her hair roots. Then there was silence and nothing but the bewildered stutter and aimless crackle of static. It was the same on all the other stations on the AM band. The TV channels had also gone blank—just an enormous blind unblinking eye and a constant high-pitched electric whine that hurt the ears. Those were the first signs most people had that a threshold had been crossed, that things were somehow different yet irrevocably the same.
A warm muzzy sense of profundity washed over Jennifer as she stood in the shower and she thought, that this was what death must be like: naked and senselessly quiet. Her heart went thud. She was fourteen and her emotions were as graphic as comic strip balloons. Her favorite expression was Yikes! She had tried, “Fuck! Shit!” on occasion, but these just weren’t her. Now she said it: “Yikes! This is so boring.”
Big Brother was bouncing with excitement and wanted to go for a ride. He wanted to see tanks and the militia in action just like in Paris or Prague. He wanted to have one of those posters denouncing the President as the Mad Bomber for a souvenir before they were all scraped off or whitewashed over. Mother rapped him sharply on the top of his greasy head.
“Idiot! Stay home. It’s not safe.” She whispered harshly. It was as if she expected someone to be listening in on their conversations right there in their living room with the plastic covered faux Louis XIV furniture and the white and gold bric-a-brac of kissing swans and rosy-cheeked cherubim. “It’s better to be safe,” Mother said, waggling her eyebrows knowingly and walling her bright fearful eyes in the direction of Col. Poblete’s duplex across the street. Jennifer’s heart beat a little faster despite herself, a stacatto of little thumps and thuds. Arlene Poblete was her classmate. What if her father or one of his operatives had been listening in when ever she called that cute La Sallite using Arlene’s name instead of her own? She told herself that they must have better things to do than eavesdrop on a fourteen-year old but you never really knew for sure.
Mother compressed her lips to suggest discretion. She had been a little girl in Pampanga during the Second World War and still held close the bleak grey memory of fear, hunger and hiding amidst sudden death. Father had spent his War years as a high school student in Batangas, closeted in his room and reading when there was not enough to eat. The Japanese had passed through their town a few times but his most harrowing wartime experience was when they had used several of his Harvard Classics (a prize he had won for a national oratorical competition) as kindling. In general, the family experience of the military was not pleasant.
There was no school for a couple of weeks. The days flowed into each other with the seamlessness of water. It felt just like summer vacation except that it was late September. Jennifer and Big Brother could have slept till noon but there were no shows on TV, and nothing much on the radio to keep them up that late. They didn’t dare use the phone too often because of the awesome certainty that their conversations might pique the interest of Col. Poblete and his invisible minions. Jennifer didn’t remember on which day the President came on TV but it must have been around dinnertime. His eyes flashed fire as he made his announcement. Father and Mother listened gravely then Father got up from the table. He picked his teeth and sighed.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” he declaimed with the toothpick still stuck between his clenched teeth.
“What do you mean—’despair’—he got everything he wanted, didn’t he? the Great Dictator...” Big Brother mumbled, with head bent and hair canopied over his eyes. His boney knees wagged together rhythmically, a sign that he was really thinking hard.
“Stop talking like a Communist. This is brilliant what the man has done, a stroke of genius—or rather, one stroke of the pen and he has solved all the nation’s problems,” Father said. He tussled Big Brother’s hair, the only way he could show affection to him now since they had stopped kissing one another when Big Brother had turned eighteen, except at Christmas and on birthdays. “I don’t know what the Jesuits are teaching you—that de la Costa—he sounds like a Leftist to me. But God bless you, boy, you just don’t understand. You’re too young to have a sense of history, you half baked little potato... Ah, youth! It is wasted on the young.” He put a Ray Conniff record on the stereo and sang along while Jennifer’s little brothers capered about like wind-up toys.
Jennifer learned much later that seven and its multiples were the President’s favorite numbers. She wondered if there had been any special mystical significance about her hearing Brown-Eyed Girl played seven times on that fateful morning when it seemed as if time itself had stopped. Did the Brown-eyed Girl in the song perhaps refer to Inang Bayan? Try as she might, she couldn’t recall more of the lyrics, except that there was something in it about the day when the rains came.
Thus was the New Society come upon them all. Mother and Father whispered about how influential enemies of the state were given the courtesy of fleeing to the United States. Their assets were frozen though so, tragically, they had sunk to the middle class or even lower middle class. The Vice President, who was now the President’s enemy, was branded as the number one oligarch. That word was added to the vocabulary list for the Current Events portion in Jennifer’s Social Studies class. The Vice President was third generation sugar money, which made him old rich by Filipino standards. The entire hacendero family was officially denounced for having built their fortunes on the broken backs of the poor sacada, the itinerant fieldhand whose harrowing misery had been documented by a chubby Jesuit with Ilonggo antecedents himself. The sugar barons’ lavish ways were legend in the midst of bone crushing poverty. During the golden wedding anniversary of the Vice President’s uncle and aunt (who happened to be first cousins), it was said that Cristal champagne had flowed endlessly and sprayed iridescent drops of gold from a fountain as large as a small swimming pool. A full orchestra, flown in all the way from Boston, had played Broadway tunes. To punish the family, the contents of their ancestral mansion on Roxas Boulevard were auctioned off for charity. It was rumored that one of the toilet seats was studded with seed pearls.
“Ouch, that must hurt worse than almoranas when you sit on it,” Big Brother chuckled, his hunched shoulders shaking with mirth. “Those rich bastards don’t know what to do with their money. They should just give it to me.”
Father slowly growled, making them all jump. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Jennifer knew that he’d always wanted to be on stage, maybe even in politics. Selling insurance was not his avocation. Father went on:
“Just think about it, Boy—What could be more foolish than all these lemmings joining the Youth Nationalists when the parents are breaking their backs just to send them to the best schools they can afford? It’s like spitting in their faces. Oh how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a child’s ingratitude! For look ye upon this evil generation: it seeks a sign.” And his red face contorted with pain and rage as if he too were one of those unfortunate spat upon parents cursed with an ungrateful child. Mother massaged his forearms soothingly.
Big Brother just laughed at Father. He was always in such a good mood that Mother and Father never thought he would have the kind of focus and dedication one needed to be an activist. Admittedly, he had a rebellious streak. They had given up trying to get him to cut his hair. Then on the day of his high school graduation, he had shaved his head and put on a long wig. When he went up to get his diploma, he had bowed and raised his mortarboard and the wig along with it. The whole graduating class broke out into wild hoots of laughter, catcalls and cheers. It was some time before order was restored in the auditorium.
Father and Mother’s greatest fears alternated between Big Brother taking up his best friend Mokong’s dare to streak across the football field for a bottle of tequila, or his not finishing his engineering course but becoming a rock musician instead. They spoke loudly and frequently about how disreputable it was to be an artist or an entertainer, especially in a combo, even if one worked in Guam or Hong Kong. Big Brother pointedly ignored this and used his own savings to get a bass guitar for his last birthday. Almost a year had passed and still all that he could play were the opening chords of Sunshine of Your Love, Innagadadavida and Smoke on the Water. It didn’t seem likely that any rock band would take him in with such a limited repertoire.