Year 2004-2005

Barrio Tale: Too dead now
I don't get tired thinking about the barrio. In fact, when I feel exhausted from work and there is nothing to do except surf the net, I lean back and think about the barrio. I just feel so relaxed thinking of rice fields, especially when rice stalks are just beginning to grow. Apple green is their color. Imagine an endless carpet of apple green rice fields.

And then, in the middle of that endlessness stands a brown nipa hut and I hear my uncle Mang Yoyong calling his carabao. Beside his carabao, I see bamboos swaying and I feel the damp wind of the morning cooling my sun-soaked skin. I imagine many mornings like this - and more. Though today Mang Yoyong (is dead now) of stomach cancer, I still can remember him as strong and industrious as I saw him when I was a barrio boy. And Mang Yoyong died poor and penniless because his rice fields got sold to cover his medical expenses. The rice fields are gone now, converted into a subdivision. There are no more bamboos nor trees bearing guavas and caimitos and sampaloc and ah, but why should I think of the end when I can enjoy the middle of this story?

How can I forget with the power of memory? The barrio was my life, and even now, even after I've seen the glorious life I call South Beach living, I still choose to settle down at nights thinking of the barrio I used to know.

And I am referring to the barrio of my youth because just like me it is gone never to return. I am talking about houses wide apart from each others, where there were still brooks and rivers and I could still pick up flowers by the canal of Indang Gunding, (she too is dead now). She'd come out of the kitchen and tell me to go farther the canal where the camia smells better, and she'd laugh her giggly laugh, like a school girl, before talking about the neighbors she's always criticizing.

She says, "I don't understand why your father has to raise hogs, their shit goes through this canal and it's nasty-smelling."

I just bow my head and walk away because we can not afford not to raise hogs. It's the only way to supplement the meagre income of my family despite all the business ventures my mother had undertaken. But again, I don't want to think of the sadness of my barrio.

I'd like to imagine the fishpond of Apung Tita, (she too is dead now), with its very deliciuos fish, which nobody except us living in the barrio would eat. My aunts and cousins in the nearby barrio Concepcion would tell us, "We would never eat fish that were fished out of the fishpond close to cemetery. You know why they are delicious? It's because they eat the flesh of the dead."

Did that comment affect my appetite? Hell no!