(Unearthed Baguio stories)
Let me tell you how my friend Glenn and I were able to rent a room in this lovely old wooden bungalow sitting on Engineers' Hill when we were in our third year in UP Baguio.
We were knocking at the iron gate of the house when we were met by a short-built, Hispanic-faced lady. She said she's from Samar. As evidenced by huge statues of Sta. Rita of Cassia and Christ the King in one of her rooms that could be glimpsed from the iron gate, she must be a fervent Catholic. Our friend Rich had recommended her place to us.
“So, where are you studying?” she probed us through the grille.
“Sa UP po” ("In UP Baguio, madame"), we answered.
“Sa UP?” she asked suspiciously. “Ayoko sana ng taga-UP kasi mga nag-a-addict at lasenggo yang mga iyan. Member ba kayo ng fraternity? Ano’ng organization n’yo?” ("I swear to God I simply hate UP students! They are all rebellious demons! What's your org?")
“UP Student Catholic Action po,” we answered nervously and, ahem, calculatingly.
There was a sudden change in the weather, as in a good poem. “E, ang singil ko, siyempre gaya ng iba, one month advance, one month deposit, P300 pesos per month. Tapos ang bayad, every first week of the month. Kelan ba kayo lilipat?" ("So when are you moving in?") She tried to hide her feeling like she won the jackpot.
And so, our quest for a temporary domicile instantly drew to a close and, as if to affirm it with a dry seal, our landlady, whom we learned to call Tita Francing, remarked, “Gusto ko yung ano n’yo ha...ano ba ‘yon, Student Catholic ano?..”
Tita Francing became our foster mother for two years. Oh, to become holy and devoted servants of God. Ha-ha!
Glenn and I shared a room with Larry, a soft-spoken graduating student from Saint Louis University (SLU) College of Engineering. It turned out that we would be sharing this one-story affair with several others occupying the two other rooms for rent, plus our host family with its brood of five. It was a fairly huge house.
The motley crowd in the boarding house convinced me that Baguio City is sort of a melting pot. There was Salome, another student who was from Zambales and who talked in a curious dialect called Sambal, and the brothers Jessie and Benjie from Bantay, Ilocos Sur (Ilocano-speaking of course). Larry was another Ilocano from Dupax, Nueva Vizcaya. Tita Francing’s family were actually migrants from Olongapo City and her children conversed in Tagalog.
The cozy old cottage from the American era was almost identical with other such structures around Engineers' Hill. The only difference was that the present painting of chalk-white replaced the original pine tree color combination of dark green and dark brown.
One could sit on the porch in the morning to wait for the sun to rise and for the fog to slowly thin out. On the front lawn, Tita Francing maintained a terraced garden of marigolds, zinnias, anise (fennel?), and cosmos, assuring the yard of assorted blooms all through the year. From the porch, one could see the other cottages down the hill, one of which had been converted by the government into an office of the Department of Social Welfare and Development. Farther away is the unassuming spire of the Pink Sisters chapel and convent; one didn’t have the excuse to skip Sunday Mass for it was only walking distance from the house.
The porch was easily my favorite part of the house despite its ill repute of being a favorite “tambayan” (hanging-out corner) of a really ugly “kapre” (mythical ogre). The entire house itself was said to be haunted by spirits. This I'd never got to prove. What's important to me was sitting on the porch always gave a glimpse of the pine tree crowns huddled under a low cloud and tracing the road below, which bent mysteriously to nowhere, and the quaint unnanameable florals thriving luxuriantly. Even grasses bloomed here.
Near Pink Sisters is the Corfu pension house, where our wealthier classmates stayed. Here, I once saw a talkative classmate, Jinji B., typing a report using two ballpens. Intriguing! Upon closer examination, it appeared that she couldn't use her fingers because she was wearing those red, inch-long, faux (plastic) fingernails. Soon, I learned she's a niece of an auxiliary Catholic bishop, and that famous athlete with the same surname was her cousin.
Also nestled among the evergreen pine needles are the country-style summer vacation houses of wealthy lowlanders which are unoccupied the whole year but for one or two maids or caretakers. One postcard-pretty bungalow down the hill is said to be owned by actress Vilma Santos.
The boarding house was walking distance to just about every essential destination: school, church, downtown, mini-market, bus terminal. I couldn’t ask for more. We had decent housemates and a God-fearing landlady who raised a beautiful family. Her husband was a contract worker in Saudi Arabia, which explains the absence of a father in the house. Their eldest, Ana, was already married and living separately elsewhere in the city, and had a little lovely daughter nicknamed “Pangkra” (Mary Francis). Tere, the second daughter, was an accountant. Jun was a seminarian-on-leave who had apparently absorbed the disciplined, spartan life in the seminary. It always felt weird dealing with him because he seemed so distant. Cecil was a fresh and pretty-looking pharmacy student in SLU. Vincent (Teng), a high school student, was a budding musician who kept an improvised drummer set and a pigeonhouse full of white doves. Sometimes, we'd jam with him and other boarders, singing "With or Without You" by U2. Francis (Angke) was a high school student who served in the parish in Pacdal as an acolyte.
Every Sunday night, Tita Francing would knock on all doors for the family rosary. I wonder how the non-devout residents felt. (They must have felt violated.) Every feast day and family anniversaries, we would be invited to feast on her Vizayan delicacies: pinaksiw na isda (a tuna-like fish) which were dusted with bread crumbs and deep-fried, sweet and spicy alamang, ginataang bilo-bilo, and apple juice with floating apple slices.
Tita Francing regaled us with stories and stories: how she met and flirted with her husband, how she came to settle in Olongapo until Mt. Pinatubo's eruption drove them all away, etc. I can't remember the details much except that story about having lots of boarders before us. They all used to call her Mommy. One time, she recounted, she had an Iraqi student-boarder whose name was Mahmoud. So every time they saw each other, they'd exchange greetings this way: he: "Mommy!!..."; she: "Mahmoud!!..."
Tita Francing once intimated that her great frustration in life was to become a nun. She was an ardent member of the "Blue Army," which prayed hard for "the fall of communism and the conversion of Russia." She wore the brown Mt. Carmel scapular as a devotion and encouraged everyone to recite the rosary everyday. I didn't like Tita's rabid Marcos-loyalist politics, but I understood, and was convinced of, her urgent Marian religiosity. I could say this woman is influential in my current spirituality.
As if these privileges weren’t enough, the family’s sala had voluptuous, authentic black-leather sofas where we sat on to watch free American shows via FEN. Camp John Jay was virtually an American territory then, housing among other things, the Voice of America relay station. My classmates once went to the station, which was deep inside John Hay, and from there proceeded to play bowling, dodging golf balls on our way, only to find that the blasted place only accepted dollars, which we couldn't produce. Members of the leftist League of Filipino Students loathed the place like hell, but honestly, the rest of us simply loved the all-American Coney Island ice cream flavors, the quaint pet dog cemetery, the colonial cottages, and the rows and rows of pine tree groves which were left untouched and thus good for hiking and picnicking, not to mention the FEN station, which beamed to us really entertaining American shows all day and night.
The fact that we lived in a sturdy wooden cottage would prove to be providential in another way, one which we never imagined. In July 16, 1990, a terrible earthquake shook Baguio out of its wits, toppling water tanks off the roofs and making the Oblation at UP do the lambada.
What do you know -- Glenn and I came home from school to find our boarding house totally intact, unlike most concrete structures around. One neighbor found their gorgeous glass window in front hanging by a thread. Of course, a lot of plates and glasses in our kitchen were broken, which we shoveled by the sack and the cooking area was impassable because all sorts of cooking ware stumbled out of the cupboard.
But we couldn’t complain. Tita Francing rescued us from sure staarvation by feeding Glenn and I like family. (Come to think of it -- our boardmates at the time, all students of SLU, were in their respective hometowns due to a university-wide strike.) In gratitude, we helped in washing the dishes and cleaning up the whole mess, joined the family in sleeping under huge tents that were hastily set up outside, and shared the scant relief goods meant for American servicemen (courtesy of then Olongapo Mayor Dick Gordon). We prayed the fifteen mysteries nightly like we never did, like it's the end of the world.
Amidst all the immediate danger of aftershocks and objects falling on our head (remember -- we're talking of a hill here), Glenn and I were happy to be in the company of a good family.
When the time for graduation came, it pained me so much to say goodbye.
I am looking back now at everything eight years hence -- with much gratitude.
8.3.99
Posts
