SHOES OF THE TRAVELER

By Mauro Gia Samonte

BOOK THREE

DAWNING IN MANILA

CHAPTER I

NASCENT daylight served to illumine the city skyline as a locomotive, its horn blowing, chug-chugged from the Tayuman bend of the railtracks heading for a stop at the Tutuban Terminal Station of the Philippine National Railway. Streaks of brilliance shot up gently from below the horizon, just enough to create soft outlines of city features, like tall buildings and short shelters, neon signs, and electric posts that appeared to be giant exclamation marks that punctuated what otherwise is a yet grey, unlit sky. These elements made up somewhat an artful landscape for the end of the train’s journey – Maurito’s transition to the next phase of his life’s travel.

            Maurito awakened at the jerk the train made in coming to a stop.

            Impulsively, he joined the frenzy of passengers in hastily gathering their luggages and then hurrying to get off the train. The couple passengers with whom he had shared the train seat address him with concern.

            “Are you sure you know where you are going?” asked the woman.

            “We’re taking a taxi. We could drop you off,” offered the man.

            “Take a jeepney to Quiapo, Mamay Oliva had instructed me in her letter,” Maurito said.

            “Oh, Quiapo. We’re going to Sangandaan. Opposite direction,” said the woman.

             “Mamay said, alight at the corner of P. Gomez. Two houses from that corner is her apartment,” Maurito said, assuring the couple that he knew where he was going. “Only problem, where do I take the jeepney to Quiapo?”

            “After getting out of the station, cross Azcarraga. That’s where jeepneys to Quiapo pass.”

            Dawn was fast turning into day as Maurito walked out of the Tutuban station. He stood still for a long while, just glancing around, as though essaying the kind of life he was heading into in the city.

MANILA is the Mecca of every poor Calolbon boy or girl desiring to conquer the poverty of his hometown. No sooner that they graduate from the elementary grades than their families would pawn whatever valuable they have to raise transportation money for going to the city, there to slave for one year mostly as household servants, shop helpers, restaurant waitresses and boys, and street and market vendors. They would scrimp on expenses in their day-to-day subsistence so they would have some cash to bring home to the folks at home by which to celebrate the town fiesta, the feast of San Andres. What they save in a year, they spend all in a day’s ostentation, leaving only an amount unspent, meant for funding their next trip to Manila and start the cycle all over again.

            More than a manner of honoring a Catholic saint, San Andres fiestas have become an occasion for showcasing what rise households have gained in social level. The ability to send children to Manila, therefore, has become the measure of a poor family’s social rise.

            In Maurito’s case, coming to Manila was far from having to show off what had been gained from the city come fiesta time. It was a lifetime resolve to see his family rise above poverty. If it went to the extent of making his family join the rich class, then let it be. After all being rich is everybody’s wish. And Manila had become the promised land for making that wish come true.

            All his years in the elementary grades, Maurito had  heard only about Manila in stories by those who had gone to the city and had told tall tales about it upon returning to the town.  These stories made up with braggadocio characteristic of feudal culture had had a way of ensconcing in Maurito’s young consciousness an image of Manila as the ideal world.

            Now, as he stood there with the city finally in full daylight, Maurito for the first time got clear gilmpses of what Manila really was.

             The city was not quite the way people had spoken about it back in Calolbon.  Things didn’t seem to place well with one another: tall, concrete edifices here, cardboard houses there; horse-drawn calesas vying with gas-powered motor vehicles on the streets; man-pushed carts laden with fruits, vegetables and all sorts of dry merchandise racing with delivery trucks; people eating in  posh restaurants, others at sidewalk stalls; whole families with suckling infants making-do with an improvised shelter on the street sides; heavily-tatooed toughies ganging up on a man, with the street crowd making no effort to help.

CHAPTER II

INITIAL glimpses of the city would actually be a daily fare for Maurito in his eventual pursuit of secondary education at the Mapa High School for which Mamay Oliva had sent for him to Manila.

            At nights he deligted at the play of neon lights in advertisements at building tops, in signs of busisness establishments, particularly nightclubs, restaurants and movie theaters. These, while car headlights streamed on the boulevard all night long.

            In the day, he squinted at sight of squatter shanties on the esteros of R. Hidalgo, Arlegui and Echague, a big colony of slums in Intramuros, pickpockets on Carriedo and even right in the yard of Quiapo Church – not to mention Tondo, the perennial barometer for poor, wretched living.

             A  traffic policeman was rammed to death by an enraged  jeepney driver who could no longer take the policeman’s unending mulcting. Even at daytime, prostitutes plied their trade on the sidewalks of Misericordia and Raon while gangwars erupted nightly  among juveniles taking after the youth rebellion in James Dean movies.

            This was the reality Maurito had to face every day of his existence in the city.

            He lived in Mamay Oliva’s apartment on P. Gomez Street, just a block away from Quiapo Church. He traversed this block on schooldays, crossed the Plaza Miranda intersection with Quezon Boulevard onward to Arlegui where the Mapa High School building was.  On Saturdays, he worked  in a dental clinic, also on Arlegui. where Mamay Oliva had recommended him to do errands including cleaning the clinic and religiously replenishing the glass vase on  the table in the reception area with fresh flowers which he bought from Echague.

            Mamay Oliva was earning some nice income working as theater checker for Sampaguita Pictures. At the same time, she ran a photo studio just across Quezon Boulevard from the Quiapo Church. She definitely had means to sustain Maurito’s schooling without him getting bothered about working for his allowance and certain personal needs.

            But she wanted to hone Maurito up early on the virtues of industriousness and self-reliance, and his working as a janitor-messenger-what-have-you in the dental clinic was part of such honing up. He earned 20 pesos per month, which meant an allowance of 1 peso per school day. That was not too small really at a time when you could buy Coca-Cola for 10 centavos and a stick of banana cue for 5. As for transportation, it was no problem. He walked that distance from P. Gomez to Arlegui. So if he were as spendthript as Mamay Oliva, he could even save a good portion of that 1 peso at the end of the day. On weekends, he could use the savings for watching a Marilyn Monroe  movie at Main Theater, which was just beside Mamay Oliva’s Boulevard Studio, a vaudeville at Clover Theater on Echague, or if Mamay was not really looking, a burlesque show at Inday Theater.

            That proved the irony of his Manila studies.

            On the one hand, he found himself gullible for the many pleasures the city offered.  It instilled in him a feeling of being set apart from multitudes of Manila folks to whom education even in public schools was a luxury. In the context of the struggle between the rich and the poor, this feeling tended to draw him more toward the former than the latter.

            It was quite a difficult feeling. He was not rich, yet he didn’t feel poor.

             Surely, there were poor people in Calolbon. The Samontes were themselves poor.  But none the likes of those in Manila.  Many slept on sidewalks, many of them young children, nearly among rubbish, and during the wet season, in the cold of rain,  nothing to warm themselves up with but  a piece of  cardboard, or none at all but their damp, greasy clothes.

            He was better off then when he was in Calolbon. There he knew he was poor, quite apart from the few that led affluent lives. But compared to the squatters and street dwellers of Manila, any of the Calolbon poor would rise many rungs higher. For this reason, Maurito just wouldn’t identify himself with the Manila poor, though he knew, too, he didn’t belong to the rich.

            It seemed unending, the dilemma of being neither rich nor poor yet the persistent feeling of having to make a choice between the rich and the poor.  If he chose the poor, he would have to live the wretched lives of the squatters and street dwellers of Manila; if the rich, indulge in the pleasures of the city. Either way, he wouldn’t finish his studies, which both Tatay Simo and Mamay Oliva believed the only way for him to lift the family from poverty, that is, the poverty in Calolbon.

            The only remaining option would be to leave the situation at that, which would be worst because he surely would get nowhere.

            Indeed, while he went along with slums youngsters in going around the Quiapo, Sta. Cruz and Sampaloc areas shining shoes or vending comics and magazines during weekends, he spent the money he earned from those callings in mixing with well-off classmates in their nascent pursuits of pleasure.

            For two years, Maurito privately bore with his torment.

            There was nobody to share it with in the Manila household. Mamay Oliva was always traveling in the course of her work. It seemed enough that she kept her obligation of providing for the subsistence of three nephews and three nieces in the household who, anyhow, all had sources of income on which to depend for their personal needs. Only Maurito was fully dependent on Mamay Oliva. This should be true for his moral and spiritual needs as well, but Mamay Oliva just didn’t have the time. Nor did his elder cousins. What togetherness they shared seemed limited to mealtimes, when listening to popular radio soap operas and musical programs, or when going to church by two among the seven.

            Maurito had the genes of his father as far as concerned his keeping his thoughts to himself unless provoked to express them. So to the many questions that harassed his mind, there just was nobody to turn to for answers.   

            He particularly began asking if God did exist. For if he did, why allow such disparity among his creations? No father with equal love for his children would bless one child with a life of luxury and the other with abject misery.

            He would often recall that in Grade 3, the highest grade he got was in religion. He was perfect in the recitation of the Apostle’s Creed and the Beatitudes.

            “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.”

            Wasn’t this blessedness concocted just so some few select people could wallow in the riches of the earth? If so, therefore, the Kingdom of God was no more than a ploy to fool the poor in making them accept their oppression and exploitation by the rich.

            But Maurito was only fourteen. Deep thoughts like these occurred to him in vague terms and hence he was hard put to get clear answers to. Deep thinking confounded his youthful dilemma. 

CHAPTER III

THAT MORNING Maurito got up from bed early so he wouldn’t miss talking to Mamay Oliva who as usual was in a hurry to go to her assignment in a provincial theater. He showed her his shoes with soles peeling off at the tip.

            “It’s been days since I showed you this. Can I buy new ones now? We are auditioning for the Student Canteen this afternoon.”

            “A little glue will fix it,” she said, as she finished putting a blush-on on her cheeks and hurried to do the bun on her hair. Mamay Oliva was such a prim and street-smart woman who would not leave the house without doing her complete make-up and hairdo. “Use your allowance. I will replenish it later.”

            “Had it glued several times already. It always peeled off when I walked in the rain.”

            “Have it fixed for now.”

            Maurito began sulking inside.  

           

            Mamay Oliva finished her hairdo. She grabbed her shoes and put them on, saying, “Don’t I always tell you? Be frugal. Let every centavo count. Concentrate on necessary expenses.  Your shoes can still be fixed, have themt fixed. My own shoes need replacing also, but I bear with them. ”

            Her shoes on, Mamay Oliva made a last look-see of herself on the mirror of her  dresser, grabbed her bag and turned to leave.

            “I’m in a hurry. The theater in Cavite City opens ten in the morning,” she said.

            “Mamay, I’d be very embarrassed to wear my shoes to Student Canteen,” Maurito said desperately.

            “Don’t come to Student Canteen. You came to Manila for your studies.”   

            Maurito raged inside. Even before Mamay Oliva could walk out through the door, he beat her for outside, rushing in an obvious run-away.  Mamay Oliva inwardly took offense but spoke no word. She had always been accommodating of Maurito’s impulsive mood. His little tantrums, she attributed to his youth. In the several instances when the Mapa High School Guidance Counselor summoned her for conferences over Maurito’s certain misbehavior in school, she always came, even gifting the counselor with movie passes in pleading to give Maurito another chance to make good.

            It was not that Mamay Oliva didn’t care about Maurito’s running away. It was just that she felt Maurito had to be told that enough was enough, and if it needed that show of indifference to make him mend his errant ways, then  she did show it enough by not stopping him.

            Actually Maurito needed only to hear Mamay Oliva calling at him to come back and he would have easily turned back to the thouse. But she kept quiet, and Maurito in his young pride went on rushing, losing himself in the crowd.

ALL DAY LONG Maurito floundered in a sea of people flowing in frenzy in their respective businesses in every sector of the Quiapo district: shoppers, traders, vendors engaging policemen in veritable hide-and-seek in plying their trades on sidewalks, marketing folks, baggage boys, market kargadors, sexily-attired sluts posing as manicure girls on Avenida Rizal, pickpockets and snatchers, barge crewmen along the docks of Pasig River, pushcart boys scavenging in trash dumpsites, all sorts of students window-shopping in department stores, men crowding in a chess game on the sidewalks, elocutioners at Plaza Miranda debating on every topic under the sun no sooner than it would shine in the horizon.

            It was a phenomenon, Maurito thought, that such great movement took place among people of varying dispositions, pursuing objectives independently of one another yet never colliding in one another’s rush to their individual destinations. Some supreme single force must be directing all these mighty movements or otherwise people would have to end up crashing into one another.

            Again Maurito was fourteen and a long way off to intellectual maturity for crystallizing his thoughts. But already he was concluding that there must be one single mechanism that makes multitudes move the way they do and that if he could discover that mechanism, he could conquer the world.

            He cowered at this thought, realizing that it was way past noon. How crazy of  him to think of conquering the world when just for finding a piece of food to feed into his mouth he was utterly powerless.

            Walking aimlessly on, he avoided passing eating places by way of diverting his mind from hunger. How stupid of him, he thought, for having run away. With Mamay Oliva, food had been no problem. She made sure the whole household had three meals a day. He told himself,  he could have just borne with his old shoes, never mind if its sole flip-flapped at the tip, for still he had shoes to wear, unlike now that he walked on bare feet.

            His feet curled up in a vain effort to avoid the heat from the pavement veritably sizzling with heat from the afternoon sun. He was trudging up the MacArthur Bridge that spanned the Pasig River just off the point of junction with the Manila Bay. From the bridge, he crossed the Lawton Plaza and the Mehan Garden, ending up at the Luneta where he sought a nook for passing his hunger in a nap.  

            A long nap, he did take, still it was the pinch from his rumbling stomach that awakened him. He sat up by reflex, like getting up from sleep in his own bed, but for sheer want of a sure place to go to, he throw back into the grass, crumpling his body as he lay on his side. The cadence of engine motor sounds and the gentle rustling of bushes at touch of the wind became as music that lulled him back into sleep...

BY NIGHTFALL, a pair of unshod feet shuffled on the sidewalk at the corner of P. Gomez  and Ronquillo. The evening hour is early and the windows of Mamay Oliva’s apartment are wide open, making visible the excitement of  three girls over the musical program from the radio set in one corner, while a boy sat at the window sill, engrossed in reading comics.

            Maurito took care not to be seen by those at the window as he moved about in the street corner. From his mannerism, it was obvious that he was planning to get back home but holding back on it due to pride or whatever it was. It wasn’t easy to return home just like that after that utter show of defiance to Mamay Oliva. Not that Mamay Oliva was an enemy but that at least a high degree of self-respect prevented him from swallowing back what he had thrown up.

            He stared as Manay Consoling offered a piece of food in a cooking spoon for tasting by the girls around the radio set. The girls tasted the food then signaled that it was okay, and Manay Consoling gestured that supper was ready. The girls hurry away from the window.

            Maurito knew what was taking place, and the thought made him extremely hungry.

            Indeed, when the girls got back in sight, they had a plate each filled with food which they ate, using their hands.

            Maurito ached at the sight.

            His feet shuffled away.

            Maurito found himself walking into the site of a Chinese restaurant where unlike the Jollibee or McDo of today had no guards to block street urchins rushing in to grab at leftovers as soon as diners signaled for the bill.

            Maurito would much like to do the same, except that he had not been cut out for the chore. Back in the province, he might be feeding on just kamote, cassava or some other root crop day in and day out, and partaking of soup of boiled kamote tops, but always the meal would be hot, freshly-cooked. Now he could only stand just outside the entrance, gulping nothing down his throat as the other kids gobbled up whatever were left in the plates. And he remembered a scene in a film documentary where laughing hyenas feasted on the carcass of a decaying beast.

            One boy who rushed out hugging a sizeable mixture of leftovers gathered in  newspaper page noticed Maurito staring hungrily.

            “What are you waiting for? Move,” said the boy.

            Maurito shook his head. “They got it all.”

            “Oh, well,” the boy said, tugging at Maurito . “Come.”

            The boy split the food as he sat against a post, prompting Maurito to join him, He gave one part to Maurito, then started eating his own  part voraciously.

            Maurito took time deciding whether he could stomach the mixed what-nots, so the boy nudged him with an elbow, at which Maurito finally matched the boy’s voraciousness. He must be so hungry that he finished his food much ahead of the boy. Noticing it, the boy gave to Maurito what was left of his food.

            “No that’s yours,” said Maurito.

            “I’m full, you’re still hungry. Eat.”

THAT WAS a low, low point in Ka Mao’s adolescence, or so he felt then as he bundled up against a post, while the other kids were asleep here and there against the wall. He was controlling tears of self-pity.

            Maurito must have slept late that night. When he awoke the next morning, the Quiapo sidewalk had begun teeming with early crowd. He stirred at touch of a stool on his foot.

            A young man in near twenties was arranging his paraphernalia for shining shoes.

            “This is my spot,” Fredo, the young man, said.

            Maurito needed not to ask what Fredo meant, as a man sat on the stool and placed his shoed foot on top of the shoe-shine box in front of it.

            “Be quick. I’m in a hurry,” said the man.

            And Fredo moved fast in shining the man’s shoe.

            Maurito got to his feet. He looked around aimlessly. He spotted something. A piece of lanzones had dropped from a vendor’s cart and had rolled into the gutter flowing with sewage water.

            Maurito hurriedly picked up the fruit, wiped it on his pants, and after half-peeling the rind off, pressed the flesh into his mouth. Fredo saw it and squinted inwardly.

            For a moment, Maurito just stood, deciding to himself which way to go. As he began stepping away, Fredo called.

            “Hey, boy!”

THE SUN was a red ball half-way down the horizon of Manila Bay when Fredo led Maurito into a shanty in the slums of Tambunting.

            “This is my home,” Fredo said, setting on the table the pansit he brought, wrapped in banana leaf. “Sit here. We eat.”

            Maurito took a seat at the table. Fredo proceeded to put rice in two plates which he set on the table for the two of them. .

            They began eating, using their bare hands.

            “You can stay here,” said Fredo. “I’m alone in the house anyway. And you can earn some money by helping me in my shoe-shine work.”

            “Fine,” agreed Maurito.

            “But I cannot send you to school.”

            Maurito stared.

            “Sleep here tonight. Tomorrow I’ll accompany you to your Mamay Oliva.”

            “She will get mad,” Maurito protested.

            “Has she ever hurt you?”

            “No, not ever.”

            “Surely she must be a good person for supporting you in your studies. School is the best thing that could happen to poor people like us. I didn’t have that opportunity. You have. Don’t waste it.”

CHAPTER IV

MAURITO was in third year high school then. After having been reconciled by Fredo with Mamay Oliva, he encountered no more serious hitches in hurdling the rest of the course, onward to a promising pursuit of a college degree. He was well on the way to an engineering degree in 1963. Two years more and Mamay Oliva could hold her chin up for having produced the first civil engineer in the Samonte family.

            But Jose had graduated from high school and now came to Manila to take the UPCAT or the University of the Philippines College Admission Test. He was hoping to get a full scholarship, because that was the only way he could pursue his college studies. Their parents’ supporting him in school was out of the question and Mamay Oliva was already into minding Maurito.

            Jose easily passed the test, but it did not help any in his desire for a full scholarship. The school stuck to its rule of awarding full scholarship to high school valedictorians.  Jose graduated salutatorian at the San Andres Vocational School in Calolbon, which qualified him only for a half scholarship.

            Still, for even just half of Jose’s college expenses to pay, their parents did not have the means.

            Maurito felt just bad. For days on during that summer, an idea kept on troubling his mind almost like torment. What if he stopped in his studies and gave way to Jose?  He had had college education enough to land him a job and go on self-support studies later. One or two semesters out of school won’t matter much. What’s important was that the flowering of Jose’s scholastic brilliance kept its momentum.

            As for the momentum of his own college pursuit, Maurito felt he actually needed a break. He had succumbed to the pleasures of the city, gallivanting with friends in beer joints, in billiard halls, or otherwise   dating a girl or two to movie theaters, or  partying every so often. Lately,    he  began doubting if he could finish engineering in five years?.

            It was no big deal, those pleasure sorties.  Boys from families not necessarily rich but with means in life could very well afford them.

            But for Maurito who had no means whatsoever and whose access to money was the meager allowance he got from Mamay Oliva, indulging in those pleasures, no matter how modest they were, was a big problem. Time came when Maurito began squandering his tuition money just to be able to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. To cover this up, he produced falsified payment receipts which though done on genuine school receipt forms were run through standard typewriter and not through the official school cash register. He would present the bogus receipt to Mamay Oliva to show that he paid the money she gave for his tuition fee.

            And Mamay Oliva would believe.

            Low-witted boys would have a hard time doing  the trick. For not paying their tuition fees, they would have to pass up the semester without taking the final exams thereby getting grades of Incomplete. That way, their paremts would find out their shenanigans.

            For Maurito, it did him good on the one hand. All he did was make real good in his studies so that he got exempted from taking the final examinations.  So for the meantime, he passed the semester without settling his back accounts.

            On the other hand, he would reel with worry at having to pay the past tution fee in order to be able to enroll in the succeeding semester.  For the second semester last schoolyear, Maurito  got through it by vending soft drinks and snack during shows at the Araneta Coliseum. He earned quite a sum so that he was able to pay what he had squandered the semester before.

            But toward the first semester of the coming schoolyear, Maurito had begun to worry. He was banned from vending in the the Araneta Coliseum together with his friends, because they had a rumble with a group of spectators during the Harry Belafonte show. He was beginning to doubt if he could earn money in time for the enrolment in June.

            If Mamay shifted his support to Jose, Maurito did not have to worry about having to enroll come June.

            So Maurito had a candid talk with Mamay Oliva. He told her that he had lost interest in engineering and would she instead please support Jose, who wanted to enter the University of the Philippines for a law course.

            “I want an engineer in the family.  You’re almost there,” Mamay Oliva said, betraying an inner ache. “In fact, you’ve got advance fourth year subjects already.”

            “I feel I’d be best in writing,” said Maurito. “Journalism.”

            “Start all over again?”

            “No need to. I can learn writing on self-study.”

            Mamay Oliva didn’t give any definite answer during that talk. Maurito decided to put it all out in writing. She confessed to  her how he had been cheating on her about the tuition money and that he did not wish to burden her any further. He told her that Jose wasn’t bad like he had been, would not ever commit the sin he had done, and so would she please support him. 

            Ever the magnanimous, benevolent, benign benefactor, Mamay Oliva agreed this time.

            Maurito would be vindicated in his decision. Jose was accepted at the UP as a partial scholar onward to finishing a law course and ultimately landing a top post in the legal division of Napocor.

            But was Maurito’s decision right because Jose became a successful lawyer?

            For a time, Ka Mao had been thinking so. He had this feeling of being a hero, some kind of a superhuman who can do wonders as much as sacrifices, like saving people in dire straits or carrying the burdens of the oppressed up his own calvary. Messianic complex, psychologists term it.

            No! Ka Mao would protest to himself in his fading years.

            His decision was right not because Jose became a successful lawyer but because it made Ka Mao feel good doing it. The act of the boy in sharing his food with Maurito in that  experience with the Quiapo street children was right because it made the boy feel good doing it.

            Ka Mao had gone through so much travail in life  to realize that good  must never be measured in terms of effect on the recipient. Had  Maurito been such a glutton in that Quiapo experience and the boy who shared his food, in his scarcity. could not sate Maurito’s hunger, would that make the boy ungood.

            Fredo could make good use of Maurito as a helper in his shoe-shine work and Maurito was only too glad to do it, but it made Fredo feel good reconciling Maurito with Mamay Oliva for the sake of Maurito’s studies. Did Maurito’s not finishing his college course diminish the good intention of Fredo?

            For that matter, would  Mamay Oliva be less good in  supporting Maurito  in his studies all  because he failed to finish his engineering course?

            That would be injustice!

            Mamay Oliva went on in her innate selfless way by showering her  continuing goodness not only on Jose, in fact, but also on Violeta and Ellen. Violeta finished Education at the University of the East; Ellen, Medical Technology at the University of Sto. Tomas. Mamay Oliva funded all those studies with her income supplemented by modest earnings of a sari-sari store she set up in Blumentritt.

            Mamay Oliva died in 1994  in the house built for her by Ellen in Calolbon. She was so sadly alone.  Ellen was in Kuwait, working in a hospital; Violeta, at the National Housing Authority doing accountancy work; Jose was second top man at the Napocor Legal Division; and Ka Mao deep into filmmaking. Tatay Simo and Nanay Puping were secure in the house of Jose in Napocor Village whose amenities gave them a comfortable retirement that was quite a rise from  their poor beginnings.

            Only two of Ka Mao’s siblings were in Calolbon to have been at her deathbed when Mamay Oliva died. But Raul was out fishing at the time and Manuel had his own family to mind in another house.

            Raul and Manuel were also the only two among Ka Mao’s siblings who did not get any schooling support from Mamay Oliva. Yet all throughout that long period of Mamay Oliva’s  retirement in Calolbon, Raul and Manuel were the only two who gave their physical presence in  dutifully attending to her needs up to the time of her death.

            That must be what good really is. As Mamay had shown, don’t count costs, nor expect gains. Ka Mao learned  now, good is a thing in itself, immeasurable in its immensity, incapable of being quantified  by the recipient, much less by the giver.

            Did Mamay Oliva know just how much good she had done? She never said, she could no longer say now.

            But we, her good, live on, said Ka Mao to himself as Jose delivered his eulogy at her funeral services

CHAPTER V

OUT OF Mamay Oliva’s patronage, Maurito stayed behind with Manay Consoling in the M. Hizon Street apartment when Mamay Oliva moved to the Cavite Street apartment where she set up the sari-sari store.  Maurito felt he was mature enough to stop being Mamay Oliva’s burden.

            Manay Consoling herself had been a beneficiary of Mamay Oliva, who enrolled her at the Sta. Catalina College, as an intern at that. But the immaturity of youth took the better of her. At fifteen, she ran away from the school and eloped with a boy, whom she married and had children with, Buddy, Boboy and Eva. But when she was pregnant with Eva, her frequent quarrels with her husband ended up in separation. She had her children under the care of her mother in Calolbon while she worked in Manila, as an attendant in Mamay Oliva’s photo studio on Quezon Boulevard in Quiapo.

            Manay Consoling had been a doting older sister to the fresh elementary graduate Maurito when he came to Manila for his studies. She was Maurito’s  constant companion on weekends, sightseeing in Luneta, viewing movies, and on Sundays hearing mass at the Quiapo Church. Mamay Oliva’s apartment at the time in which all her nephews and nieces in Manila stayed was on P. Gomez Street, just a block away from the church; her photo studio, just across Quezon Boulevard.

            Manay Consoling had always been proud of Ka Mao’s brilliance as a boy. One time she brought him to a popular program on DZRH to join a spelling contest. He won with a prize of a case of Royal True Orange.

            When hard times came and Mamay Oliva had to close down the photo studio, Manay Consoling worked as a singer in a nightclub. She was very pretty and naturally seductive, attributes that made her a hit. She had a soprano voice, which in the fifties, when she must have been at her prettiest, attracted promoters who would offer her stardom. But she detested the idea of going out on dates in exchange, and thus she did not profit from the pragmatism which brought fame and fortune to many a singer.

           

            Anyway, she earned enough with her regular fee, commission from drinks and tips. When Buddy and Boboy reached high school age, she brought the boys to Manila where to continue their studies together with Eva. She earned additional income by spending her afternoons sewing clothes and rugs which were up for sale by vendors in the market.

            Maurito  voluntarily did the chores of a houseboy. He cleaned the house, fetched water from a hydrant a block away, did the marketing and cleaned the things he bought for Manay Consoling’s cooking.

            All these, as his way of paying for his subsistence.

            And yet Manay Consoling never asked him to do so, too. Like Mamay Oliva she did not count the cost of his stay in the house nor expected anything in return.

            Later on in her life, after surviving her own many travails,  when the task demanded of parents to secure the future of their children through whatever means no longer bore upon her shoulders –Buddy had finished Accountancy at the University of the East and had landed the post of a head bank accountant, and Boboy, Architecture at the Mapua Institute of Technology and got a nice spot in the architecture department of the Bureau of Internal Revenue; Eva had long joined her Creator owing to an enlarging heart that never got cured even before she could finish the elementary grades – Manay Consoling found herself shifting her natural gift for singing from the glitter of nightclub stages to the glorious enlightenment in a Born Again congregation in whose choir she sang dutifully every Sunday.

            In  recent times, Manay Consoling had gifted Ka Mao with two versions of the Bible and the book Purpose Driven Life; the former, he had grown the habit of reading, the latter he got done with only up to Chapter 1.

            “I always tell my congregation proudly that you are such an intelligent man and that if only you’d wish it you can be a pastor. I’d love to see you become a pastor,”

            That was how sure Manay Consoling was  with her words, Ka Mao mused to himself. Just like when she told him he could win in the spelling contest, and he won.

            But at this, Ka Mao would say if only to himself, “Look, the contest you are asking me to join is not one where to win a case of Royal True Orange to sate the thirst of our mouths. It is one where to drink  the water of eternal salvation. That’s not easy.”

SEEING how Maurito was wasting his talent and energy doing household chores fit for domestic helpers, Manay Consoling persevered in finding him a job. She had friends and they got connections. Sure enough, after a time, Manay Consoling enthused to him that she got work for him.

            “What?” Maurito asked.

            “Messenger,”she said.

            Fine enough, Maurito thought to himself. And he entertained visions of the job, he making the rounds of offices, delivering messages. Not so hard, he thought.

            The dresser that he was until then, he put on his white gabardine pants topped by a white shirt striped with blue when he reported for work for the first time. It turned out the travel agency with office in Binondo, barely had business. For want of any messaging for Ka Mao to do, the owner of the agency, a big womanizing man with such a sweet, sweet name, Dulcesimo, ordered him to dust the tables and chairs, sweep the floor, do a variety of menial errands  highlighted by his cleaning the agency owner’s Oldsmobile.

            The pesky driver of the parked car nearby chided Maurito, “You don’t have to show off in that attire. You’re just a carwash boy.”

            Maurito stayed in the job. The pay was good enough and already he was sure of enrolling again at MIT come next semester. Even as by this time, Tatay Simo started writing him for financial support for the needs of the family, including the studies back in the province of his sisters. Violeta was already in high school, Ellen, in Grade 6. Maurito figured out that after providing for the family’s needs, he would still have enough to sustain his self-support studies.

            The work was stay-in. And that’s what was best about the job. More than the free meals, he would have the office all to himself at nights. He had learned typing at the Gregg Voicational School, and now that he had a typewriter of his own, he gave vent to his urging for release of so many ideas in his mind.

            The first-ever piece that he got published was a letter to the editor in the Manila Times commending for a good action the then Secretary of Education Alejandro Roces had done. It never crossed Maurito’s nind that the guy he was praising was a Roces and hence would easily find favor in a newspaper published by the famed Roceses of the publication industry.

            As for his attempts at English fiction, a friend of the agency owner, named Jimmy, would size it up this way: “The only good thing about your writing is that you’re helping the paper industry.” At Maurito’s wondering stare, Jimmy would add: “Imagine the volumes of paper you waste. That’s income for the industry.”

            But Maurito wouldn’t be dismayed. True, he was getting rejection after rejection of manuscripts submitted to Weekly Graphic. What would keep him going was the constant encouragement by WG Literary Editor Vicente Rivera, Jr., who never tired writing inspiring notes on the slips that went with the rejections.

            “The best way to learn how to write is to keep on reading and writing.”

            Reading, Maurito thought as he pounded the typewriter for another piece, I have enough, if not much yet. I had not been most voracious reader in the elementary for nothing. But as for writing, maybe not yet, but just you wait, just you wait wise guy Jimmy.

            And he pounded the typewriter ragingly.

THAT AFTERNOON was just one of the many past ones he had spent scouring the newsstands of Rizal Avenue for a copy of Weekly Graphic.

            The magazine must have a way of selling fast, Maurito told himself.  He had gone to three stands already and all of them had their copies of the magazine sold out.

            For weeks on since he last submitted a story to the magazine, he had religiously bought every issue of it, since he had not gotten the manuscript back. Normally he would receive the returned manuscript through the  mail no longer than two weeks after submission..

            Finally, Maurito came upon a stand that  still had a few copies  of the magazine left. He grabbed the magazine, like beating an opponent for it. He quickly leafed through the pages, seized by an ambivalent feeling. He wanted to get fast to the Literary Section to see if his story was there, yet at the same time he did not want to get to that section, not wanting to find out that the story was not yet there. But he must know, and finally opening into the Literary Section, he gaped at a caricature of a young adolescent girl prancing in the sunlight while at a distance a young man carrying school paraphernalia in his hands watched in a happy trance.

            Maurito felt his heart skipped beats. The characters were so familiar. He moved  his eyes upward on the page, and yes, indeed! he yelled to himself.  The byline “Mauro Gia Samonte” was in bold, unmistakable fonts along with the title: “Forests of the Heart.”

            He made it at long last!

            He wanted to shout to the world, yell as loud as he could. Or jump and punch the air, even roll on the pavement and do a merry-go-round on his butt, with his feet kicking. The heck with people. They’re no writers. They don’t know how it feels for a writer to see his first creation ever getting published, his first ever byline in print. That feeling,   perhaps matched only by the exquisite joy of a mother hearing the cry of her first born. Maurito didn’t quite understand what Nanay Puping exactly meant that day she told him how she felt when she gave birth to him. Now, gaping at his own first born, Maurito knew exactly what Nanay Puping meant. It was heavenly.

            “Give me all those, “ Maurito told the newsstand attendant, a fortyish woman who had no predilection to smile.

            She kept that stoic mien on her face as she stared at Maurito.

            “I mean, all,” Maurito said with a smile that said,”Aren’t you glad I’m buying all those.”

            The woman gathered all the remaining copies of Weekly Graphic and gave them to Maurito, not bothering to bundle them up. 

            Maurito showed the woman to the Literary Section and pointed to the byline.

            “That’s me!”

            The woman gave Maurito one stoic glance then held out her palm.

            “Pay,” she said.

            Maurito eyed the woman chidingly as he gave her the payment for the magazine. He really took offense at the woman’s not matching his enthusiasm.

            “What a snob,” Maurito said to himself as he walked away.

IF THERE had been milestones in Maurito’s life, that first publication of his story was one of them. It did him many significant things. It  signaled his initiation into the literary field. Oh, the many wonderful things that he felt went with the honor. Particularly in Calolbon where your success was measured in terms of your accomplishments in Manila, the publication of his story must be a great distinction. Maurito knew of nobody else from the town nor even from the whole of Catanduanes whose English fiction saw print in a major national magazine.

            Above all, it gave him the confidence to persevere in writing as an occupation, a profession, a career, or whatever you may call it, but a calling that promised no little money when viewed in terms of economics.

            He was paid eighty pesos for the effort, exactly the amount he got for a month’s salary in the travel agency. It never occurred to Maurito then nor perhaps even to Vic Rivera that years after, the story would be worth much, much more. It was the story that Maurito would turn into a screenplay for the movie “Tag-Ulan sa Tag-Araw”, the first team-up of Vilma Santos and Christopher De Leon, directed by Celso Ad Castillo, who gave the movie title.

            But meantime, his euphoria over the publication of the story didn’t last long. Maurito realized shortly that, contrary to popular belief, story writing was not a creative process, meaning a process where a writer tells his brain to conjure up stories as he pleases. Rather story writing is living a story that inevitably transpires in the writer’s life, and because life has dynamics that work independently of the consciousness of the writer, the development of a story is not a  function of the writer but of laws of development that far from being a creation of the writer are laws over which he has no power to go against, alter or modify.

            If this be true, then everybody is a writer, because everybody lives through life?

            Yes, except that people vary in their grasp of words and nuances by which to express their visions and perceptions of the world. Only those gifted with a capacity for verbiage are necessarily only those who are able to communicate ideas – tell a story. By the sheer consciousness of your living, you become a writer, yet by your lack of tools by which to word your thoughts, you are unable to tell that consciousness. At best, then, creative writing refers to that technical aspect of literature that has to do with the capacity to express and communicate ideas, not with the creation of substance, which is a sole function of living.

            Simply put, therefore, Maurito could not  write stories as he pleased, and in the context of his current need to sustain the family’s livelihood back in the province and provide for the studies of Violeta and Ellen, English fiction could not be relied upon.

            When would  his next story come out in print, hence his next eighty pesos?

            The question was not for Maurito to answer then but for the next phases of his life that were yet to come.