fiction

Flakes of Fire, Bodies of Light
by Carlos Ojeda Aureus

In the beginning there were not coldness and darkness: there was the Fire.
Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe

TANYA agreed to allow her husband to die at home, but when he lost consciousness, she panicked; she phoned for an ambulance.

“I can’t do it, Sid, she kept telling him inside the ambulance. “I can’t do it.”

The screaming wagon careened right and left as it weaved its way through the early streets of Naga City. When it reached the back door entrance of Mother Seton Hospital, Tanya disembarked first and supervised the transfer from stretcher to hospital carriage. She stood alongside her husband to make sure he reclined securely, steadied the carriage when the crew wheeled it noisily through the corridor, steadied the carriage some more when it turned a right angle, steadied it again as it rammed the swinging doors of the emergency room where Dr. Go, the resident physician, stood by waiting.

The dizzying activity of hospital business confused her. She found herself signing papers, taking down instructions, buying vials from the pharmacy. When she returned to the room, a surgical nurse had already swabbed Sid’s shaven head, neck, and chest with a disinfectant, then painted the entire area with tincture of iodine. Tanya was sure Sid had opened his eyes to protest what was going on, because at this moment the anesthesiologist lunged forward to knock him out with sodium thiopental.

After doing this, the team transferred the patient to the nearby catheterization section where they inserted a rubber tube through his trachea down to his lungs. Then they attached the same tube to a flexible hose fastened to a machine.

They punctured his body with intubated needles and drew long incisions in the legs and thighs, before they wheeled him into the operating room where the surgeon, his arms resting on green-draped armrests for maximum steadiness, gripped a scalpel, took aim, and slit open the patient’s neck right under the jawbone so the team could work directly on the insides of the throat.

The battle to save Sid’s life lasted till noon. As soon as they closed him up, Dr. Go emerged from the operating room and announced to Tanya the success of the operation: after extensive mouth surgery, he said, they were able to save her husband’s life.

At the Intensive Care Unit, Tanya asked the surgical nurse who monitored Sid’s vital signs why the shape of her husband’s face had changed. The nurse assured her the disfigurement resulted from the removal of certain affected parts. Tanya asked what these affected parts were, and the nurse named over the tongue, the larynx, the jawbone, some tissues in the neck; but told her not to worry but be thankful her husband was alive.

Why? Sid’s eyes said it all when he came out of sedation. Why? His head throbbed and his nose bled from the nasal tubes. Why.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Tanya kept repeating. She stroked his arm to explain to him what had happened, but he lapsed back into unconsciousness. Ramon, the electrician at the telegraph office where Sid worked, arrived, carrying a vinyl chair for Tanya. He checked out the bottles and tubes while Tanya sat and stared blankly at the encephalogram.

***

EARLY that year, after his biopsy had determined terminal cancer, Sid and Tanya had made up their minds to refuse surgery and further hospital treatment, and allow Sid to die at home. He told her he was ready: he’d lived a good life, and now that it was ending, like everything else must end, he accepted it and resigned himself to the inevitable. When the time came, he had entreated Tanya, his only favor from her was to promise him not to prolong his life unnecessarily—no surgery, no artificial gears—but to allow nature to take its course. He had no regrets, he had told her: the years they’d been together were the time of his life. “And to think everybody in Naga predicted our marriage would not last,” eh had quipped. “But look at us now—ten years and still very much in love.”

Nobody in Naga had approved of their relationship. Tanya’s parents categorically opposed the idea of their daughter marrying a man older than they. Her sodalist friends were leery of the old goat (Has Naga run out of young, eligible bachelors?). The Sisters of Charity frowned on the mismatch not so much over the age-gap but over this lecher’s wrecking the plans—better plans—they had laid out for her. Tanya had graduated magna cum laude from the Colegio de Santa Isabel, and the nuns had already groomed her up for the convent, an invitation she kept postponing even after graduation. In the meantime, she taught College Physics at the Colegio.

None of the Ateneans her age dared court her. Not that she had a wallflower face (the boys chased her classmates whose faces, according to Doña Choleng of the CWL, could stop a clock). Far from it. She had a clean, freshened-up face that required no make-up—a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Saint Catherine Laboure—and a whistle-bait figure (firm turned-up breasts, deliriously huggable curves, straight long round legs) not even her Mary-like dress could conceal. The boys steered clear of her because she found them trivial and corny—and she showed it. She had a talent for wearing that long, sack-cloth-and-ashes face whenever the Ateneo boys were around, and a genius for compelling everyone to act medieval whenever she was around. She had built a wall around herself that was as impregnable as the Colegio’s of the 50’s no Ateneo braggadocio nor Jesuit jokes could break down. To enter her required an inside job. Even then, it was no guarantee of winning over is Manhid.

They met because Sid’s niece Margot became Tanya’s student, and Margot had employed aggressive selling techniques to pressure her uncle dear to buy a sponsor ticket the nuns had dragooned each graduating student to dispose of for the school’s presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Tanya herself led the usherettes on gala night. She welcomed him at the entrance (Margot’s uncle? I’m very pleased to meet you, sir), praised his niece’s class performance (Took after her uncle, right, sir?), inquired about his huge private library and collection of 75 rpm records (Margot told me a lot about you, sir), and escorted him all the way down the front row of the CSI Auditorium. When he went home that evening, Margot wondered why her usually caustic self-proclaimed opera expert critic uncle mentioned nothing of the musical but bombarded her instead with questions about her Physics teacher.

Nobody in Naga had expected Sid to marry—including Sid himself. His former classmates in the Ateneo de Naga had all gotten married, many of them to each other, as evinced by the familiar pairs who attend AdeN Alumni Homecomings yearly. Marriage had never crossed his mind, not even during Fr. Bob Hogan’s Marriage Guidance class in the old days. He gave three reasons: First, because as a student, the Jesuits had taught him that God and studies came first: Primum Regnum Dei. Second, after graduation, because Ignatius of Loyola, whose own hour of grace arrived late in mid-life, taught him that late vocations to the Order were not impossible. And third, after he passed the “Cape of Good Hope”—and Camus had replaced Ignatius—because marriage was an institution, and only absurd people lived in institutions.

Tanya changed all that.

Sid knew nothing of Physics but a lot about old-fashioned tactics: he opened doors, stood up every time she entered the room, walked on the outer curb of the sidewalk. He came from a different world. He courted her with roses and haranas of Sarung Banggui under her verandah. He comported himself like an Atenean of the fifties, an Alter Christus who did everything for the greater glory of God, exuding good manners and right conduct that showed even in the way he dressed—the white bucks of Pat Boone—differently but immaculately.

This neatness in thought, word, and deed charmed her. He was different. He told her about the world where he came from, and it fascinated her. In the fifties, he said, they built houses in Naga with neither grills nor bars, and they slept with open doors and windows (this last one was beyond her). During their Saturday afternoon hiking paseos (the hell with Naga’s chismosas) on their way to mass at the old Peñafrancia Shrine, he’d point out to her the areas where the old sites once stood: Bragais Studio, the Esso gasoline station (put a tiger in your tank), the Macandog dormitory, Radiowealth, Tolentino’s barbershop, Bib’s tailoring. None of them stood in their proper places anymore. Then he’d tell her about the Hula-Hoop, Sarsaparilla, monggo con hielo at K. Mori, the Queen Anne lollipop, Tootsie Roll, the Howdy Doody comic books, Sputnik, so she’d get an idea of Naga’s past.

More important, during these paseos, he’d sing to her the songs of Nat King Cole, then ask her, between songs, if it were true “as they say” that he sounded like the Unforgettable Cole himself (smooth as silk ba? Soft as velvet ba?), and she’d say iyo na, sigue na emboldening him to sing to her in succession “Mona Lisa,” “Pretend,” “Once in a While,” “The Very Thought of You,” and “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” all the way to the door of the Church. One day, he asked her why she never sang along with him, and she said she did not sound like Nat King Cole. So he told her he collected other records too like those of Jerry Vale and Vic Damone and The Platters and The Four Aces and Tony Bennett (ah, that King of Broken Hearts); but she said how about the women singers, and he said he knew their songs too, so he taught her the songs of Doris Day and Joni James and Sarah Vaughan and Patti Page and Patsy Cline and Dinah Shore, and before long she found herself singing along with him “Que Será Será,” “Secret Love,” “It’s Magic,” “Crazy,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo,” “Days of Wine and Roses” as they walked to Church. On the way home, however, their signature song was always “Walking My Baby Back Home.”

He sang and he lectured. He seemed to know everything about what he called the good old pre-Conciliar Naga. Very soon she had in her fingertips names like Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson, Rogelio de la Rosa and Carmen Rosales, Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue—all the way down to John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps in Naga, Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson. His sense of history, however, ended in 1965, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, to be exact, when Vatican II came to a close and the Church started changing the liturgy.

This intrigued her because he would not explain why he refused to update his history after that; and the more she asked him about this, the more he intrigued her. He was like sin: at first she resisted, next she yielded a bit, then she liked it, finally she embraced it.

And so they got married and so they raised two daughters: Marlene and Lana. They rented an apartment in Barlin Street and designed the interior in the ambience of the fifties. He worked in the telegraph office and she held on to her teaching position at the Colegio. To augment their income, she threw Tupperware parties. Naga accepted the age-gap and allowed them to live as ciphers, but when they came home, they danced the Cha-Cha (move over Arthur and Kathryn Murray) and sang the songs of Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole and prayed the Rosary nightly—for thanksgiving, she’d insist, not for favors, for her cup runneth over.

That was why the diagnosis caught her by surprise.

It all started with a persistent sore throat and hoarseness. He relieved the sore throat by chewing lozenges in the office and gurgling warm water and salt at night. The hoarseness, however, would not go away. After a couple of months, Tanya noticed a swelling on the right side of his neck, but he paid no attention to it (just tonsillitis or mumps) until his nose started to bleed when he sand. When the lump increased in size, Tanya insisted they go see Dr. Go immediately.

The physician looked at Sid’s throat with a small mirror. When he used a laryngoscope to look deeper, Tanya’s pulse quickened. Dr. Go suggested more tests. After a series of X-rays and scans, they physician advised a biopsy.

When Sid awoke from the surgery, Dr. Go told him that the laboratory results would be in by next week. Meanwhile, he advised Sid not to worry because they had ascertained nothing yet, and besides, he assured the couple, most biopsies turn out to be benign.

They braced themselves up for the longest week in their lives. More important, they doubled their prayers. By the end of the week Dr. Go rang them up and asked them to come to his clinic immediately.

Dr. Go’s facial expression said it all. Sid’s condition was far more serious than he had feared: infiltrating squamous cell carcinoma, said Dr. Go. The leech had seized the epithelium of his jugular vein and slowly choked his carotid artery. The remedy: a series of cobalt radiations on his neck and head, and chemotherapy to contract the swelling, and later, within six to eight weeks, radical neck surgery to remove the malignancy. He also advised Sid to stop singing.

The first thing Sid thought of was the children. What would happen to Marlene and Lana? They were only in elementary school. To leave them this early would be cruel. In fact, together they had already planned up their lives: Marlene, the bookworm, wanted to take up literature, and Lana medicine (although the younger looked forward more to her forthcoming birthday party with the usual barquillos and ice cream and balloons and games and Daddy’s magic tricks). Apart from this anxiety of disappointing his little girls, Sid did not go through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression characteristic of the terminally ill, but accepted his condition in a spirit of total resignation that amazed everyone including Dr. Go himself who couldn’t help admiring him for taking it all, in Sid’s own word, philosophically.

Tanya did not. The death sentence crushed her. Morbid thoughts plagued her. Was God punishing her for turning her back on the convent? What sin had she committed that God was now robbing her of the only happiness in her life? Eventually she lost her appetite and will to live. She avoided socials and canceled the Tupperware parties. She also stopped singing to her husband. One night, returning home from school, she felt a black veil drop over her face, shutting from her the sights and sounds of Naga.

This numbness happened every night. Daytimes were normal, but as soon as evening fell, she experienced difficulty in seeing, as if she looked through a veil—darkly. Like night blindness. Like Naga’s brownouts. On really bad nights, even her hearing suffered: she felt as if corks were plugging her ears, as if she were listening to their old phonograph with defective speakers.

In the meantime, Sid acquiesced to it all: he wore a plastic mask so he would not move when they bombarded him with radiation; he sat through every new fitting to re-adjust the mask; he closed the lead door docilely every time they gave him the signal.

He put up with all the side effects of the treatment: diarrhea, fatigue, nausea, mouth and throat sores. The radiation burned one side of his face and dried up his saliva and caused his hair to fall out. His teeth decayed, and his skin peeled and changed color. He lost all appetite and vomited daily.

After a month and a half, Dr. Go decided to open him up. Sid stared at the X-ray photos showing the shaded areas marking the tumor, as the doctor explained to him the details about the forthcoming surgery: he’d remove the tongue starting from here, yank out the jaw bone under that area there, slice off the inner parts of his throat from here to there.

That was when Sid decided to die at home—in one piece.

Tanya opposed the idea. It is suicide, she unleashed her grab-bag of arguments inside the trimobile on their way home, life is a gift from God, if you refuse treatment you are transgressing God’s authority over life, the Church commands us to preserve life at all costs. The Church especially backed him up, Sid whispered back hoarsely when he reached home and found his reference books on the subject. He showed her Augustine’s Confessions and let her read the part where the saint pleaded for a keener awareness of death; he showed her Pius XII’s 1957 address to the International Congress of Anesthesiologists where the Pope said that although the physician had the obligation to use all ordinary means of preserving life, there was no obligation to use extraordinary means; he showed her the quotation from Paul VI who said that heroic measures were not indicated in hopeless situations; he showed her Iura et Bona and asked her to read aloud the last paragraph under “Due Proportion in the Use of Remedies”:

When inevitable death is imminent in spite of the means used, it is permitted in conscience to take the decision to refuse forms of treatment that would only secure a precarious and burdensome prolongation of life.

But none of the above placated her: it is not for lay persons like us to interpret Church teachings, she insisted, no person has jurisdiction over his life, our dominion over it is one of stewardship only, nobody has the right to end his life on his own authority because that authority is God’s alone who is the absolute author of life, and do not forget that Canon law imposes Ecclesiastical penalties on those who practice euthanasia. And what about Evangelium Vitae? You did not show me Evangelium Vitae.

“Then get Evangelium Vitae,” he said in a barely audible whisper.

So that afternoon, during her vacant period, she dropped by St. Paul’s Bookstore to buy Evangelium Vitae, the Pope’s latest and strongest encyclical so she could show to Sid how the Pope condemned the “culture of death” as a sign of the defeat of the culture of life. Sid read it avidly, then asked her to read aloud the second paragraph of section 65:

Euthanasia must be distinguished from the decision to forego so-called “aggressive medical treatment,” in other words, medical procedures which no longer correspond to the real situation of the patient, either because they are by now disproportionate to any expected results or because they impose an excessive burden on the patient and his family… To forego extraordinary or disproportionate means is not the equivalent of suicide or euthanasia; it rather expresses acceptance of the human condition in the face of death.

That silenced her. Her Church, the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Church that had promised to lead her back to heaven, had spoken through the Pope, and spoken out loud and bold. So he stayed home and refused all medication save the anodynes which a private nurse administered daily. The children, meanwhile, transferred temporarily to their maternal grandparents’ home. Unlike Dylan Thomas, he whispered to the tearful Marlene who liked modern poetry, he would not rage against the dying of the light; instead, he would go gentle into that good night.

Until that morning. Before the private nurse had reported for duty, he jerked and arched like a fish out of water. Tanya tried to stabilize him, but when he lost consciousness, she panicked and called for the ambulance.

***

SHE stared at the encephalogram. The small, luminous objects darting on waves along the dark background reminded her of the measured cadences of Sid’s old songs. She knew Sid missed the music from the old phonograph, but she could not bring the thing here: even private radios were not allowed in the ward.

She stared again at the encephalogram: the small, luminous objects darting on waves along the dark background hinted to her the transcience of it all. How short life is, she mused, as each flake appeared and disappeared on the screen so fast it hardly had time to say hello. One flake entered her life ten years ago and now this one’s going away so soon she wished she could hold on to it and stay its disappearance (for at least a few more years, perhaps? Until the children were grown up, perhaps?). Sid was a flake all right, but a very special flake among the millions, could the Fates and Furies make an exception just this once to a special flake whom she loved without reserve, absolutely without reserve?

Well, almost, she smiled amusedly. Two things she did not understand about him, two peccadilloes. The first was his sense of humor. Once in Farmacia Uy to buy alcohol, he had said to the saleslady in front of his wife: ‘Knock-knock. Who’s there? Alcohol. Alcohol who? Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” And he laughed out so loud Tanya looked sheepish trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing situation.

In another instance, when Lana was doing her Biology homework, he asked his youngest daughter to use Anatomy in a sentence. None of her sentences pleased him, until she said “sirit” and he gave the “correct” answer: “Bring back my Anna to me.”

Tanya could not quite understand how a person his intelligence fussed over picayune jokes. He had a profusion of them. She could take Bob Hope or George Burns, but not this type of jokes. But nothing really puzzled her more than the ad he paraded in the sale one morning that showed a fair-skinned teen-aged girl inviting everyone to try this new skin whitener lotion because it had worked on her to the effect that she obtained dramatic results after only four weeks’ application. He laughed out so loud when he showed the ad to her he almost tore up the newspaper. Exasperated, Tanya asked what on earth was so funny about it. He said he gave up on her, but if he died ahead, eh wanted her to remember him for this particular ad, in fact he’d see to it, he said, his shoulders now shuddering in uncontrollable guffaws, that he’d come back to her in the form of that ad three days after his death—ha-ha-hala ka, Tanya—so she’d know he was alive and laughing on the other side and she’d stop all the silly mourning for him.

That was the first time he mentioned death.

The second thing that puzzled her was his attraction to Hinduism. Catholicism resembled Hinduism, he once said, inn color, fire, and ritual—until the Second Vatican Council denatured it. Lucky Hindus, he said, who never had a Council. Then he told her the reason why he refused to update his history beyond 1965: He never quite got over the changes in the Church, he said. He believed that ritual was sacred, and anything sacred needed a special language—Latin for Roman Catholicism—and special music—Gregorian—and special vestments to express itself. He disagreed with the reformers’ opinion that you had to understand every ritual in order to appreciate it. Do the Hindus understand their mantras? Latin was full of mantras, but it was not their meaning as much as the sound that mattered, for the idea was to raise one’s consciousness to an altered state of worship and not reach out and shake hands like the way the Naga Lions Club members conduct their meetings.

More important, he said, he liked Hinduism because, like Catholicism—and unlike Protestantism—it did not mind bringing God too close to nature, a tendency that made Paul Tillich very nervous. He likened Protestantism to Buddhism: pure, ineffable, simple, abstract, transcendent, dry. Pre-Conciliar Catholicism, on the other hand, with its fiestas and processions and angels and patron saints and stained glass windows, was baroque. So he was going to be faithful to Trent.

That was fine to Tanya as far as it went—until he brought up the topic of the Hindu practice of cremation. Only then did she realize he was that interested.

Sid himself designed the first crematorium in Naga. Ramon, Sid’s electrician at the telegraph office, installed the wirings for the blowtorches. In an interview with local newsmen during the ribbon-cutting ceremonies, Sid had specified the shortage of land in Naga, the exorbitant prices of burial services, and the overcrowded cemeteries as the reasons why he built the Naga Crematorium. Cremation, he said, was not only economical but also swift and hygienic, because there was no slow process of decomposition to worry about. For starters, he said, he had written a will requesting that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered in the Bicol River.

In spite of the fact that the crematorium had been completed months ago, no cremation had occurred in Naga. This surprised Sid especially when the local clergy had neither opposed nor encouraged the idea as a result of Vatican II’s lifting its prohibition of the practice as intrinsically evil and incompatible with Church teaching. Later, he discovered the real reason behind Naga’s reluctance: Nagueños feared that cremation might interfere with the resurrection of the body.

Tanya herself never visited the place. She listened to him and backed him up on it, but crematoriums were not her cup of tea. At any rate, during one of their last paseos in the centro after the prognosis, he bought a cartolina canister in the Naga Supermarket, and told her that that was where he wanted his ashes to be placed. Then he led her to the Dagsaan, the concrete landing under the Tabuco bridge where the Virgin of Peñafrancia begins her annual Fluvial Procession every September, and right under the ogee arch, as he hoisted her elbow to steady her steps, he told her where exactly to scatter his ashes before throwing everything, canister and all, into the river. And do not worry about the cartolina canister polluting the river, he joked, because it’s biodegradable. Apart from this “morbid” side of his personality—and the jokes on the corncob—she considered herself lucky to have found the perfect husband in the world.

And now this perfect husband lay dying.

***

DAY in and day out she’d sit in front of the encephalogram, preparing her Physics lessons. Next week she would be lecturing on Feynman’s diagrams. The chapter had always intrigued her. She would always start by looking at the reaction of one collision—a K-meson and a proton coming together:

Not much problem there, she would muse, because then she could work out what she did not find—

—using Feynman’s conservation of charge.

Then she looked at one diagram: an electron and a positron collide, mutually annihilating each other. Instead of disappearing, however, the impact created two photons traveling at the speed of light. Where did they come from? She looked at the other diagrams in the book. All of them followed the same process: the annihilation of initial particles in a subatomic event resulted in the creation of new ones. But where did these new ones come from? How she wished Sid could talk to her again and give her his usual “philosophic” answers. How she missed his lectures.

One morning, Ramon brought into the hospital the old buzzer set they used for practice in the telegraph office. He slid it under Sid’s right hand. Sid recognized it immediately. His middle finger pressed the key: di-di-di-dit dit di-dah-di-dit di-dah-di-dit dah-dah-dah. Ramon deciphered it: H-E-L-L-O. Tanya’s eyes lit up.

In the following days, Sid communicated to her via the buzzer. He asked about the kids, informed her where it hurt, and advised her what to do. Very soon, both of them cobbled their own “short-hand” conversation with Ramon acting as interpreter. It was like receiving telegraph messages over a long distance.

But the conversations always ended up with P-L-S P-U-L-L P-L-U-G.

It was during these “conversations” that Sid amplified his reasons why he remained faithful to Trent: Vatican II had denatured Catholicism. And he meant not just the sight of nuns in mufti or priests in civvies. His grievance went deeper than the cloying sentimentality or the brainless homilies by boy-priests, deeper even than Humanae Vitae or the Mass in shopping malls or Liberation Theology with its emphasis on social justice that substituted for genuine Catholic doctrine.

The whole issue, he said, was the loss of order. Because of the Council, Roman Catholic Naga suffered a sea change from order to disorder. In the past, he said, the riddles of life posed no major problems for Nagueños, for the Church gave purpose and meaning to everything. Even if they did not understand its complexities, Nagueños lived in a universe as children lived in their parents’ home, secure that the cosmos was in good hands. The Church was monolithic and the way to salvation lay not in ordering the world to one’s purposes but through aligning one’s purposes to Rome. If the Naga faithful hearkened to their duties—The Commandments, Mass and Communion, evening processions—they would reap eternal reward; but those who refused to do so would perish.

But suddenly this monolithic, inert, geocentric Church had changed. Suddenly the universe no longer pivoted around the liturgical cycle but around social activism and politically correct histories on one hand and upraised arms in Evangelical-charismatic emotionalism on the other. Speaking in tongues had replaced Tantum Ergo. Suddenly the Church had deconstructed itself.

He wanted none of this. He believed that if the Catholic Church were to survive, it had to sift the lessons from Vatican II and commix them with the best of Trent. Otherwise it would die a natural death as it crossed over into the next millennium. Post-Conciliar Catholics keep forgetting, he complained, that Christianity is more than social activism or group dynamics. Christianity, he added, is more than “Amen-Amen” or hand-clapping or tearful testimonies or peace-be-with-you greetings during Mass. More, he believed that the Church went deeper than doctrines and laws. The enduring appeal and strength of Catholicism was its sacramental experience, not dogma. Catholics remained Catholics not so much because of the Church’s doctrines and laws but because of its imagination and intellectual consistency, its mystery and rituals. If the Church went back to its roots, it could survive. He said he believed this because the Church was for spirituality, and not expression of community or Laconia psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, affirmative action, semiotics, hermeneutics, or other lintiks.

Tanya belonged to the future, not his past. Her job was to bring the richness of his past into the new century. He had given her a list of must read books—the best ever that have been written—to nourish her as she crossed over into the next millennium, for nothing beats a good book to plumb life’s impasses, he said.

But she had to release him and let him go, because he was dragging her down by his unwillingness to change. If Vatican II was not for him, he reasoned out, the next century would even be less so. If he were going to heaven, he was going there now as a pre-Conciliar Catholic or not at all.

His work was done. He’d given her a first-hand experience of how it was like to live in pre-Conciliar times so she’d appreciate the past’s importance as the Church moved towards the future. If she did not release him, she’d never be able to bring his past into the new century. That was the way it went: Moses had to fade out so that Joshua could lead the people to the Promised Land, Anchises had to die so Aeneas could realize his pietas and found a new Troy, the Precursor had to diminish so the Messiah could begin His Work.

So P-L-S P-U-L-L P-L-U-G.

But still, she could not do it.

In the days that followed, she agonized more than her husband did just watching him decline and transform flab to skin and bones. His independent nature rebelled against any form of assistance, and this time he could not even go to the bathroom or dress himself up. They had stuck tubes all over his body so that the slightest motion even to slide in the bedpan was torture. To sensor arterial pressure, they had attached an arterial transducer to his calf to make sure blood reached his toes so that he would not develop gangrene. In addition, wall-hung machines monitored his lung and blood and brain activities. Because he was unable to swallow solid foods, the glucose and fats and amino acids and vitamins and medicine from hanging plastic-packed colored liquids entered his system via a catheterized large wrist vein.

Meanwhile, the duty visits grew more and more stilted (You’re looking better, buddy. Back on your feet in no time.) And brief. After a month, except for Ramon who did the errands and scut work, nobody bothered to come.

Ramon and Tanya took turns watching the patient. Ramon remained in the hospital while Tanya checked out the house. Last week, three nights in a row, Ramon stood vigil because Tanya attended to Marlene, who had fever, at her lola’s house. Every time her temperature rose, she kept calling for her dad.

Tanya stared at the encephalogram: luminous objects darting on waves along the dark background. She greeted each object as it appeared and bid it goodbye as it disappeared. She tried to acquaint herself with each object to ask where it came from and where it was going, but they all moved on without pausing—darting in view and disappearing, darting in view and disappearing. They reminded her of the Venerable Bede’s stray sparrow that swiftly flew through a house, entering one door and passing out through another. As she stared at the encephalogram pondering on these things, she noticed something familiar: the luminous objects darting on waves resembled the shape and movement of the wriggling sperms of life.

Life is a flake of fire, she thought. So ephemeral. Where it came from and wither it will go she did not know. But it is there, she thought, surely it comes from somewhere and surely it has to go somewhere. What if it disappeared completely? No. The Feynman diagrams disproved this. Sid’s old songs disproved this.

Perhaps, not by holding on but by letting go lay the secret of life, she reflected, surprised by her sudden insight. Whatever she possessed she needed not cling to, for she could have it again and again: perhaps the eternal became possible only if she released the temporal.

Or perhaps, she should not grieve too much over passing things as a singer should grieve over the vanishing notes of a song, for she could always recreate them whenever she wished. Death was just the pause within the melody, the silence and apparent emptiness that each song needed to express itself with greater panache.

She looked at her husband. He had been gazing at her. She nodded at him and smiled. He smiled back. She did not have to tell him: he knew. He pressed the buzzer key. Ramon deciphered it: T-Y. She rearranged Sid’s pillows and guided his head to sink back into them. Dr. Go had informed her Sid would live for a few more days, give or take a few, after she’d have withdrawn the life supports. Because it was evening already, the hospital would give permission to discharge the patient early the next day, as soon as Dr. Go arrived to sign the walking papers. Once home, however, a private nurse was to continue administering a narcotic painkiller. That was the arrangement with Dr. Go as soon as she decided to make up her mind.

She held Sid’s left hand, while her other hand felt the chord. Ramon deciphered therapid di-dah’s in the buzzer set: A-M G-O-I-N-G H-O-M-E T-Y F-O-R E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G L-0-V-E Y-O-U.

“I love you too, darling,” she said.

And then she pulled the plug.

That night, at home, Tanya sorted out Sid’s bedside books from the heap of pajamas and shirts that lay at the foot of the bed. Tomorrow, when the hospital discharged him, she wanted to be prepared to read to him his favorite classics. She busied herself fixing up the bedroom. She dusted the cabinets, mopped the floor, deodorized the bathroom. She was playing Nat King Cole’s “Red Sails in the Sunset” in the old phonograph when the telephone rang in the sala.

“This is Mother Seton Hospital, the voice said.

***

THE necrological services started about mid-afternoon, three days after Sid’s remains had lain in state in the old Peñafrancia Shrine. During those three days, the casket rested on a wooden bier at the side altar, but Father Itos Cáceres ordered it transferred to the main altar for the final rites. Two officemates delivered impromptu eulogies to a rarefied audience composed of Tanya’s parents, her two daughters, Margot and her husband, Doña Choleng of the CWL, some nuns, and Tanya’s sodalist friends. Tanya herself conveyed her brief thank you’s to all those who helped Sid in life.

After Father Itos had finished the rites for the dead, the mourners queued up to file past the open casket for one last look at the dead. Tanya stood by her husband while the rest passed by to bid him goodbye. She looked at Sid inside his satin-quilted bed. The cadaver looked prim in Barong Tagalog. His cosmeticized face reminded her of the sun-tanned look of the groom ten years ago she caught catnapping after the hectic wedding reception, except this time the wrong shade of lipstick gave him away. The pallbearers shut the lid and carried the casket to the funeral coach outside the Church.

Tanya and her two daughters walked the whole length of the funeral procession along Peñafrancia Avenue. The others rode on a rented passenger jeepney. Along the way, Tanya remembered the areas Sid had pointed out to her during the times they had walked together to Church where once stood the old landmarks of Naga, and she wept uncontrollably each time she remembered the “Walking My Baby Back Home” Saturday afternoons.

The funeral coach played Schubert’s Ave Maria until the procession arrived at the Naga Crematorium.

The funeral director, in a gray-cum-dark-stripes uniform, unlocked the Cadillac’s tail end and lifted its humpbacked stern—his cue for the staff to move in and steady the casket that was now gliding easily toward the coach’s exterior ridge where a hydraulically operated porto-lift receiver caught the casket for the pallbearers who transferred it to an accordion-shaped, balloon-tired carriage which they wheeled noisily from the foyer to the center of the hall where Ramon and his officemates stood by waiting.

It was the first time that Tanya had seen the crematorium. The austerity of the building exterior would have provided her no relief if those narra trees at the back did not soften the architecture. She walked carefully as she entered the unfamiliar portico with its unrelieved uprights and horizontals. But her uncertainty quickly turned to awe and comfort as soon as she passed through the waiting room and entered the chapel that was both sanctuary and room with a view of a large crucifix outside standing as a beacon on a mound isolated from the building.

The tiled walls inside the Naga Crematorium proper exuded a spruce and sterile look—a cross between an operating room and an undertaker’s morgue, except that this place smelled neither of alcohol nor formaldehyde. Tanya noticed the absence of the usual scalpels and needles and tubes and congers and scissors and forceps and pumps she associated with unpleasant rooms. Ramon had obviously looked after Sid’s work and maintained it as instructed.

In the middle of the hall loomed the oven-shaped dome of the incinerator.

The pallbearers pried off the coffin’s lid and lifted the stiff cadaver from its narrow bed. The two officemates helped support the corpse descend and lie down in the flat metal sheet facing the mouth of the incinerator. Ramon opened the iron door. The mortician positioned the body by turning it slightly to the right so that it would not roll down the metal bed. Tanya came forward to check out on last minute preparations. She held her husband’s stiff arm. Sid appeared more like a gigantic wax-doll than a corpse, even if the right shoulder pressed down exaggeratedly to reveal the suture incisions in the carotid artery. A portable tape recorder kept playing “Immaculate Mother,” pre-taped for the occasion by the sodalists. Tanya checked out the Rosary in Sid’s left hand. On his right hand rested The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

When she gave the signal, the men inserted Sid’s body in the retort. Tanya took one last glance at her husband inside the chamber before Ramon clamped the iron door and bolted it, the solid clank sounding like a street manhole cover when a car runs over it.

Ramon pushed up the switch-bar. The cracked petroleum whooshed out the chamber’s interior ducts. Through the tiny observation vent Ramon checked the flame inside and saw the overhead blowtorch strike Sid head first burning all his hair. The side flames fanned out and enveloped the body. The crematorium worked exactly as Sid had intended it, Ramon thought. Then, his face aching from trying to hold back his sniffles. Ramon worked on more gadgetry. The plastic gauge above the machine sloped up as the heat kept rising inside the chamber.

Tanya peeped in the observation vent. The overhead blowtorch had bored a hole through Sid’s cranium, while tongues of flames clung tenaciously over the rest of the body. Fire consumed, fire purified, and fire lighted up one’s journey, she mused, as the chamber hummed. She looked up at the plastic gauge: 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. When she peeped in again, Sid’s torso had cracked open, exposing a luminous interior. From the depths of the pylorus, a swarm of glowing red spots, like burning red ants, lit up the blooming entrails and disgorged itself along the pelt-like furrows of the body. Suddenly Tanya saw flakes of fire jet out of the flame and dart out in all directions, spawning a conflagration of pyrotechnical objects that reminded her of the luminous objects that darted on waves along the hospital encephalogram.

The sight fascinated her. She felt strangely drawn to it, as if an unseen hand held her in place. The longer she observed, the more the darting flakes reminded her of something else even more familiar: they left trails similar to the vapor trails of particle collisions in the bubble chamber photographs of her Physics textbook. A surge of strong emotion rose from inside her. She could hardly believe her eyes. Right in front of her unfolded an intricate sequence of particle collisions and decays. She saw negative pions dart out from Sid’s body of light, collide with the flying protons, and annihilate each other on impact. But instead of a vacuum, the explosion created a shower of positive kaons, negative kaons, and neutrons. The neutrons flitted off without a trace, but the positive kaons decayed into three pions each! Where did they come from? Then the negative kaons jetted out once more and collided with the flying protons, annihilating each other on impact. Again, instead of a vacuum, the explosion created new photons and lambdas which decayed into—again!—new photons and new negative pions. But that’s impossible! she thought.

Until that moment she “believed” in the mathematical truth of Feynman’s diagrams in theory only. But right before her eyes the diagrams repeated themselves over and over in sweeping curves of anti protons shooting up from Sid’s luminous body and colliding with the flying protons and creating positive pions flying off clockwise and negative pions flying off counterclockwise and pairs of photons creating electron-positron pairs of electrons curving counterclockwise and positrons curving clockwise. How is this possible? She stared in disbelief.

Stunned, she returned to her bench.

After two hours, Ramon turned off the heat. Then he unbolted the iron door to fast-cool the retort. Using iron pincers, he tugged out the hot metal sheet. The fire had reduced Sid’s remains to bone fragments. Ramon used the same pincers to segregate the burnt up shards of clothing from the bone fragments. The ribs caved in at the pincers’ slightest tap. He picked up a wooden bush hammer and pulverized the larger fragments into chalk-like pieces, then pulverized these geometric-shaped bits further until they evened off into a heap of powdery ash and white gravel which he swept into the mouth of the cartolina canister Tanya had provided him earlier.

Only a few visitors remained. Tanya’s parents had gone ahead to bring the others to the house for the novena. Tanya said she’d follow later, as soon as she had disposed of the ashes. Her friends respected her wish to do this alone.

Cradling the canister in her arms, Tanya flagged a trimobile and instructed the driver to conduct her to the Tabuco bridge. A certain apathy in her brain caused her to allow the trimobile to take its own route, blurring everything in view. The driver dropped her right in front of the arched Dagsaan, the concrete landing under the bridge Sid and she had visited during their last paseo.

She descended the concrete steps of the ghat, but teetered precariously when the high tide swept past the middle aisle and moistened her moccasins. The habit of counting upon his hand to hoist her elbow to steady her steps lingered. A gust of wind from up the river chilled her sodden feet, causing her whole body to feel prickly inside her husband’s bulky jacket she was wearing.

She uncovered the canister’s lid. This was the way he had wanted it: no tomb, no spot, no cinerarium, no marker to bind him to a focal point of sorrow. She poured out the contents in a scattering motion. The ashes gushed out and floated, then forked out in V-shaped formation. One prong journeyed toward a promontory of dune that jutted near the screen, while another lengthened toward the water lilies before a freak wave whirl pooled its crest down the river-floor.

She patted the canister’s bottom to release the clinging residue. The chalky particles flew off and blanketed the coruscating pebbles along the banks. A passing banca sliced through the now elongated bands of ashes and forced the nicked parts to wend their way under the houses on stilts until they crossed inlets where fingers of narrow gorges daubed them in mud.

She bent low and pushed the empty canister, mouth first, in the water. The vessel resisted. She tilted it, then thrust it deeper, causing it to gurgle and belch forth shampoo-like bubbles. After water had rushed inside the canister, she released her pressure and allowed the vessel to sink in its own weight. Won’t pollute river. Biodegradable. Sid’s words.

Meanwhile, the breeze had puffed the remaining ashes up the river. She watched the waves carry the chalky particles past swaths of grass and round the bends curving around marshes glutted with industrial debris. She watched them appear and disappear in the rows of sand dunes that tried to deflect their paths. Soon they were out in the open river, free at last.

The rim of the horizon shimmered like lit gunpowder, causing the distant ashes to emit a mineral glow. The brightness induced vitality globules to dance before her eyes, reminding her of the white dots in the encephalogram and the flakes in the crematorium. They danced to and fro as the afternoon sun hit the waters, forcing her to close her eyes.

When she opened her eyes, she felt as if the black veil had been lifted from her face. But the place did not look familiar. The surroundings had suddenly changed in appearance. Everything throbbed with life. The stones, the river, the trees, the air, all pulsated with life. She saw the sun’s rays spritz the earth’s atmosphere with a shower of energy. When they collided with the nuclei of the air molecules, they refracted in smithereens of secondary particles that sprinkled the earth and descended in powdery mist upon the river. She saw subatomic particles oscillate and flow through deer-like cloud-formations in the sky, and spin and spin inside the cyclotron-shaped cloud-accelerator very much like the collision experiments of high energy physics in her textbook.

Then she heard what sounded like the faint tweedle of sitars. The diacoustics came from the sky and sounded like the playing of a shringar Hindu raga. The sound grew louder and louder until the sympathetic effect of double violins enveloped all Naga. As she gazed up, she saw forming up the faint outlines of a strange figure with four hands and two feet tiptoeing in space. One hand held a drum. She could not look directly at the other hand because it held a flaming torch as glaring as the sun with flakes of fire jetting out across space. Then, half-squatting on balanced hips in what seemed like the motions of a dance, it slapped the drum with its third hand: the primordial sound stirred the figure to sway gracefully in rhythmic motion, its limbs moving like those of a giant centipede. The figure vanished as quickly as it appeared, but before it did, it looked at Tanya, smiled softly, and raised its fourth hand in a gesture of “Do not fear, all is well.”

When her surroundings returned to normal, she felt that all her fears had disappeared. With their disappearance came a strange understanding how simple and obvious the analogues for life have been. Why she had not seen all these before, like the illusion of death, for example, which was no different from the sun sinking in the horizon only to shine brightly in another part of the world, she did not know. All she knew was she needed not fear anymore because the God of Death was also the God of Life who never ceased Her/His dance of destruction and creation from subatomic particles to spiral galaxies millions of light years away. The soft smile from the dancing figure in the sky thrilled every atom of her body that she just stood there breathless with bliss, gazing at the river and the sky until the distant coconut trees darkened and the sun disappeared on the horizon.

***

WHEN she turned around, she saw that evening had fallen in Naga. She also noticed that her night blindness had disappeared. For the first time in weeks, she saw the centro light up for the night. First flashed out the headlights of private cars, next the streetlights, then the electric yellow bulbs of vendors along the sidewalks. Finally, one by one, other lights followed. She saw fluorescent lights peer out of the shops, kerosene lamps light up the second floor of the Naga Supermarket, glints of silver streaks perk up like tinfoil the dark facades of distant apartments—all blending with the suddenly switched on neon lights of Zenco Footstep and New South Star Drug and flood the centro with a motley of colors that looked like Christmas lights reflecting on polished vinyl table covers.

This sudden conflagration of light and color of early evening in Naga cuddled her and stirred her to stare off into space in wordless joy. The sky ad changed from red to violet, like a priest changing his liturgical vestments. Suddenly, the flapping of wings from a flock of salampati blocked her view. The cacophony of rush hour traffic had driven them from the mezzanine window of Fiesta Hotel to perch in single file onto the relative safety of the telephone cable in front of Benito Commercial.

She walked past Pacific and Atlantic bakeries, occasionally scrapping the mud-packed soles of her moccasins against the gritty stretch of the side road. When she crossed Padian Street she felt as if the corks of her senses had popped off, leaving her vulnerable to the sights and sounds and smell of the city. She picked up the minutest details: the click of billiards balls two blocks away across the din of traffic, casserole lids clanging inside Cosmos Restaurant, a toothpick-chewing man coming out of New China Restaurant and shredding a piece of napkin into tiny pieces. In the sidewalk intersection, a clutch of vendors compared wares. A tubercular-looking man butted in, flashing a broad grin, but he changed it into a frown when he realized his “wrong entrance.” A woman in Allied Bank uniform pushed herself through the slow-moving crowd and dragged along a reluctant Naga Parochial School boy on one hand and a roller of groceries on the other.

The smell of freshly baked mammon wafting from Madame Poon reminded Tanya to hurry home. She remembered that tonight the neighbors were joining the Sodality of Our Lady in reciting the Rosary and prayers for the dead. Her sodalist friends promised to bring the viands for supper, but Tanya said she would cook the rice. She thought of dropping by Naga Restaurant to buy wrapped pancit canton and toasted siopao in case more visitors arrived. After all, this was the first day of the cremation and some friends might stay late to keep her company during her first night alone.

Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, she’d give his clothes away to the Peñafrancia parish. In the afternoon, the Tamaraw from the Holy Rosary Minor Seminary was coming over to pick up the two balikbayan boxes of books Sid had set aside for donation to the library. All these, she promised him, would go.

All except the must read books. And the old 75 rpm records. She had asked to keep the records. She’d asked to hold on to them so she could play them over and over in the old phonograph: the cool and reassuring voices of Nat King Cole and Vic Damone and The Platters and The Four Aces and Jerry Vale and Patsy Cline and Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Shore and Doris Day and Tony Bennett. She’d asked to keep them because she’d need their company in the coming years and evenings ahead when she’d be reading, batch by batch, Sid’s must read classics beginning, this month, with Augustine’s Confessions and Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Teilhard de Chardin’s Future of Man and Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the other classics Sid had lined up for her to stand her in good stead as Naga crossed the fjord towards the Third Millennium—for she’d need the background voices, while she read, of the Four Aces singing “Three Coins in the Fountain” or Doris Day’s “Que Será Será” to bring her back to the kinder years that Sid had stood for to give her strength: the Naga years before the Internet and CATV and the Big Mac, the pre-Conciliar years when Naga was young and easy as the Underwood typewriter and carbon paper and mimeograph machines and stencils and bingo parties in the parish hall—those days of wine and roses so essential for the sudden epiphanies of Bicol exiles, in or out of Naga, who, like her, had put their faith in a Church that promised to lead them safely into the next millennium and, after this exile, all the way to the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body….

A burst of loud laughter broke off her train of thought. Outside Boning’s Trading a group of girls in UNC high school uniform were gawking at some poster the harried saleslady kept smoothing back in place at the glass display window, but the breeze kept flapping it off the masking tape. As draconian remedy, she drew out a long strip of Scotch tape and plastered it across the poster, there. The students’ fits were contagious. One girl, patently the class comedian, approached the poster and pointed a chubby finger at the printed testimonial. Then she twisted her rubbery face and mimicked the poster’s model’s come-on smile, causing the whole barkada to roll up and shake in uncontrollable guffaws. Tanya moved in closer to examine the butt of such irresistible hilarity. The poster showed a fair-skinned teen-aged girl inviting everyone to try this new skin whitener lotion because it had worked on her to the effect that she obtained dramatic results after only four weeks’ application.

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