Barrio Tales and Other Stories

Barrio

Iskang Bating-in



There will always be one in the barrio. A character called Iskang Bating-in. The reason she was named Iskang Bating-in was because during one fiesta, an American came to introduce a program called Vaccination for All. Iskang Bating-in kept grabbing the microphone from the American to "expound or interpret" what he was saying. For example, when the American was saying, "We are here to help you improve your health." Iskang Bating-in would grab the microphone and would add, "Just look how great these American friends are. They know how unhealthy we are and they are here to improve our health...." She would go on and on and on until the American got so pissed and shouted at her: "Stop butting in will you?"

So there! Iskang Bating-in became her name. She spawned many thories about her character that today we just laugh everytime we remember her. And if you just knew all the theories we attributed to her character! We thought she was at first an American agent, because she just loved to interpret and expound and promote Americans in the barrio. During the Japanese Times, we thought she was a Japanese spy, because she always penetrated every group of locals who were quietly talking among themselves. As if, so we thought, she came to make sure we never got a consensus among ourselves. You could not blame us for suspecting this because, when our group, for example, would say, we Filipinos must read books, she would butt-in and say, "How can you read books, you are not genetically endowed to read." When we would respond to her and say, "But we have been reading books since long time ago." She would say, "But you are not great readers like the ones in the West, oh you ignoramus people."

Of course some would get so pissed and cuss her out. And she would say, "This is why you are so underdeveloped. We can not make a single consensus among ourselves." (She would suddenly change her You to We).

"But we were about to have one until you butted-in into our group."

"Excuse me," she would reply, "You are not only underdeveloped. You are so impolite."

One would get so frustrated with her and say, "We would accept any consensus offered to us except the one offered by you."

"You are so sarcastic!"

And so on and on. In the end she succeeded in silencing us all. Because she would divert the focus to her disgusting voice everytime we were about to talk about something that mattered most to us. She would attack the idea even before it was opened for discussion. She would, in her grammatically incorrect language, offer genralizations and conclusions about anything. In a language that only she would understand. And when she would be hit, made fun of, cussed at, she would cry, oh yeah, she would cry some corcodile tears blaming all of us for not being open minded, that all of us are a bunch of idiots. Etcetera.

Nowadays, Iskang Bating-in is in the National Mental Hospital in Mariveles Bataan. God, we should have known. She almot got us there.

Iskang Bating-in was eventually left alone in her own schemes, hypertensive and tachycardic, becasue she was so stressed-out by all the arguments of her life, while the rest of the barrio moved along.

Alex Maskara

Barrio Tales