By SHEILFA B. ALOJAMIENTO

I met Tonton at Noel’s kitchen, during the summer of 1995, a couple of weeks after the workshop. Gray and long-haired, tattered pants and hand-painted shirt, hunger in his eyes. He was strumming the guitar and was jamming it up with some jolly old chap from ULB who kept on mumbling between guzzles of beer about bringing his family from stinking Manila to placid Dumaguete where they may live forever and ever. He finished each burst of tearful talk with an eloquently rendered “What a sorry state of affair, oh what a sorry state of affair!”

The night before, I had slept at a bus terminal one shabby bridge over a dead river away from the city’s thoroughfare. I had unceremoniously left my last hovel, after a nasty quarrel with my sister, bearing only my bag of a few shirts. It was a wild idea: boarding the boat bound for Dumaguete.

Angst was the in-word in Dumaguete when I got there. Angst, it seemed, was what poetry was all about. I can’t remember where and from whom I heard it first, but before long, I realized that every poet and quasi-poet in Dumaguete was supposed to know the word by heart. Perhaps it was Tonton who said it first to me, but perhaps not. He was mostly quiet the first few hours that we met that I immediately respected him, no matter what ailed him then. Or maybe it was Jenny who said the word, for she it was who loved peppering her speech with in-words and in-names. Jenny chugged in while we were sipping coffee at Noel’s kitchen. So all-adoring she was. In ten minutes I learned what she had been reading over the past few months, what nastiness Siliman teachers were capable of, what terrific things Doc Ed said over the last piece that he trashed during which workshop. Whatever her faults were, I thank Jenny. Jenny helped me see that there was indeed a wonderful class of poets in Siliman.

It required a robbery before I could get my bloody transcript of record from the last school I attended even awfully beautiful years ago and finally squeeze myself in in that long queue of Silliman enrollees, but to make the story short, by June of the year 1995, I was among the handful of students who were congratulating themselves or having been taken in for an adorable English major. Whatever remained of the past glory of the English department (it was once the prima donna of Silliman, Ma’am Andre said), we were the cocks who crowed on its dung, to quote Hemmingway.

And if I was a cock, Ester was my mother cock. Ester was in her forties who graduated as a Nursing student in Siliman twenty or twenty-five years back. She was there again because…oh, the dunghill that school’s all about, she’d been teaching English in a State University in Mindanao for many years now, and suddenly her administrator, like all administrators, decided that English teachers, no matter how well they’ve been doing in their job, should be holding an English degree first of all.

We were best friends, Ester and I: I was her friend-in-need. I pity you, she always told me. You’re so deprived. Financially and emotionally.

Our friendship was not always mercenary though. It was also intellectual. Or rather, quasi-intellectual. Together we dug the library’s archives trying to salvage what scraps and dregs of human intelligence were there to benefit from. We took Shakespeare to heart, chasing after Lysander in the forest and doubling over with laughter at Kate’s hysterics. We cursed Iago and Othello, felt sorry for Shylock, and wondered in Bassanio was worth all of Portia’s wealth. How we raged against the gods who made sport of King Lear.

Ma’am Andre was happy. We studied our Vernacular Literature seriously, going to the barrios on weekends to retrieve songs and verses that would have died with our grandmothers. We learned by heart the Manuvu epic, knew the Ulahingan heroes by name, and would have staged a play if not for our lack of talent (mine, particularly: I could not dance, to Archie’s disgust and triumph).

I never thought of Silliman without Doc Ed and Ma’am Edith being there. I was therefore surprised not to see them among the faculty when enrolled in 1995. I had believed that what made every Silliman Creative Writing student possible was the Tiempos. Getting there in June and finding they were no longer with the English Department was puzzling. More puzzling was the passing references to them used by people. “The old man,” “the old woman,” they were called, not always in fondness, and sometimes, in a tone of anger. It was a curious thing for a young aspiring fool with unchecked notions about writers and poets.

“Have you met Cesar Ruiz Aquino?” Noel, then editor of the just-revived Sands & Coral, asked me. If it is poetry you want, he is the poet, or words to that effect. Up to that time, the only poetry that had stuck with me—beside a good dose of Latin American novels—was those of Eman Lacaba’s, Jason Montana’s, Alan Jazmine’s and from back in Dabaw, Don Pagusara’s. curiously male, it was, but that was as far as my education went in my literate NGO days.

But my first true encounter with Silliman poetry did not come with Cesar’s. It was from Migen, Franklin’s sister, who came to the Dumaguete workshop in the late sixties or thereabouts. Franklin was a classmate, beside Ester, in his fifties, also writing, and sculpting, beside a gift of circumlocution.

I cannot think of Franklin now without feeling bird droppings on my skin, but that’s not what I want to say here. What I want to say is, Franklin got a sister who wrote poetry better than T.S. Eliot.

Ester and I would go to Franklin’s quarters. Our common academic pursuit, namely Shakespeare and anything literary, sort of united us. Franklin would serve us with coffee or juice and his favorite French bread while we searched for literature from his hoard: a tumble of books carried over to Dumaguete from his theatre arts and scriptwriting days in Manila. When I read Migen’s poems, my school of poetry crumbled behind me. Migen heard hushes and laughter; saw gnomes, goblins and ghosts.

But nobody thought much of Migen’s poetry in Silliman. To each his own god, and Tonton’s poet was Sylvia Plath. He was also dying over Fatima V. Lim’s poetry, tucking with him The Wandering Roots/To The Hothouse wherever he went, along with Lina Sagaral-Reyes’ Storya. One thing which Tonton said, which made him grow tall and big in my esteem: The most important thing will be written by women.

Besides the graces of Ester, I needed the graces of God. My money from robbery was running out and my landlady was threatening me with a new rate or I will have to share the room with another starveling. At seven hundred a month, the rent was a luxury. I had clung to the place because it was near the beach, where I kept on going early mornings and late evenings, just for the need of sea water. It was a good life, except that one day she thought of raising pigs and made a hogstead right across my window. On early mornings, I would be awakened by the grunting of pigs and their smell. My head began to spin. By then, I was already taking my meals at the tiangge, at a carinderia called Tiaga’s, owned by Franklin’s neighbor, or rather, Sawi’s. Franklin was lodging at Sawi’s backboards and shared his front yard and his bathroom. The hunger that stalked his front yard and his bathroom. The hunger that stalked the land on account of delayed allowances and the like: Sawi took Franklin to Nang Tiaga to allow him meals in her carinderia on credit, and Franklin accompanied me in turn to her stall at the tiangge for my regular meal, also on credit. That settled the food question, but again, there was the lodging to look after and Franklin thought of a brilliant idea: He would saw his room off into two. Or rather, partition it so as to accommodate me. We would divide the rent between us, he said, and with Sawi in the neighborhood, we could talk poetry day and night. Just don’t mention it yet to Sawi, I’ll take care of that. Dr. Law, who was trying to find interest in people’s whereabouts, seemed perplexed. Ester was amused, as she always was, with ideas that didn’t get to her skin.

Enough with economics.

Jenny got high every time she spoke of Sawi. She was sauntering in Sawi’s class of senior citizens—a herd of MAEd students serving their second life terms in the academe in pursuit of professional advancement-and was having the time of her life watching Sawi hipping it up with the old cows. “Have you ever known love without hope?” Sawi, in inimitable grandiloquence would work the question on the dazzled cowheads, and Jenny’s heart alone, I imagined, bloated under the magic of his words. On my way to class at Villareal Hall, I would find Jenny’s poet seated on his table, knees spread apart, his heart leaping out of him. Some afternoons, he would be under an acacia tree, engaged with a clump of girls, his face dazed, Love Without Hope becoming him. Ester, indulgent mother and sympathetic friend, would shake her head every time a teener classmate confessed about Sir Aquino’s advances.

Love was what ailed the poets of Silliman. When Jenny introduced me to Lorena, I understood why Tonton should be so disheveled. So sharp-edged she was, from limb to limb. She was more devastating when she was upon the stage. Whatever role she played—battered wife, union organizer, ugly snob—she gripped you. What little space she occupied with her thin frame, she solidified with her being there. Perhaps it was her untranquil face; perhaps it was her carelessly done hair. Or perhaps it was her bundle of bones. But whatever it was, she was about one stage actress who could make her character come so strong.

But when it came to Poetry, Sawi was the mentor in Silliman. You can hear Mikki raving his name, from table to table, in every watering hole round the city. Younger poets, like Tonton, Gracchus, and Viktor, would rather cut him as a comic figure instead of the eternal lover title which the Sands & Coral generously gave him. It doesn’t help him, they say, half-sincerely, half-bitterly. But far from wishing him dead, they gave praise to Cesar when praise was due. They would hover over his poems and hunt for women’s names in the lines. Tonton, in solidarity with John Keats and all blighted lovers, would carry in his pack Word Without End as though it were a secret weapon and wield Sawi’s poetry like crazy:

Ultimately she couples with the sun
However axes retrace their way and heads
Roll by the blade
Of her eye

I mentioned Viktor. I first met Viktor in December of 1995. He was limping, or maybe it was the mumps on his face that gave me the impression that he was mobbed and sore all over and could hardly pull himself up. Anyway, Sawi dragged him to the Weekly Sillimanian office one late late evening while we were readying the Sand’s manuscript for the typeset (we were borrowing Weekly Sillimanian’s computer, thanks to Dinah, then Sands & Coral’s editor-in-chief, who was also editing the Weekly Sillimanian). With them were three other fellows, Gerard from Cebu, Mikki who loudly announced his entry through every door by his sheer bulk and grease, and Jared a faithful disciple of The Word. I didn’t mind them then, Viktor and Gerard. They both looked like a couple of catatonics straight from the urinal. All the time they just sat there, gaping and grinning at what went on before them.

While Dinah was rocking it up with Alanis:

I’m sad but I’m happy
I’m brave but I’m chickenshit…

If we had an anthem, she said, this must be it.

Oh the joys of editing. Late into the December nights we type our lived away: Bitoy, Dinah and myself, to the accompaniment of Jagged Little Pill. Dinah was unbeatable in her race to beat the deadline, which she herself set. It was mid-December, she said, and we should have gone home from the Christmas break, like the rest of the students, and not stuck there in front of the computer. Gracchus, our Poetry Editor, never showed up, after submitting his first try at a post-modernist fiction, “Ana Andrea,” which on third prize in the Sands & Coral Literary Contest, and a modest controversy. So ungraciously laced with pubic hair it was. Sawi tried to be useful by taking the manuscript home, deleting or changing a word or line here and there. Now, doesn’t it have more taste, he asked, after encoding his rewordings. Bitoy, our Essay Editor and lay-out artist, chuckled behind his thick glasses.

At a little after eleven, our stomachs would be grumbling, and we would leave our clutter and walk to the Engineering building, clambering up the fence behind it (the gates were closed by then), and landing right across the Burger stand beside Opeña’s where we would get our refill. Once, on our way back to the workroom, we almost jumped right into the guard who was lying in wait for us beneath the fence, cocking his gun. I laughed. He looked so ridiculous, lying there on the ground, as though poised for a surprise attack, like some idiot living his fantastic imagined war. But Dinah was quick, profusely apologizing over our infraction and calling him “Sir” several times over, promising we wouldn’t be climbing fences again without his permission. He looked appeased and he let us loose.

Viktor came back to Silliman like a recidivist, a year and half later, and occupied one of the seats in our English classes. He was a minor event, being a young returning poet. He joined a workshop one or two summers back and was enrolled as a Creative Writing student before he conked out. What a sight he and Sawi made as they walked around the streets of Dumaguete. Like a picture straight from Darwin’s Evolution of the Species, I would tell Ester. He was renting one of Sawi’s backdoors, just opposite Franklin’s door, and complained about his neighbor, who would knock at his door early morning bringing a tray of food. Does he think I need looking after? He would ask.

When I started going out with bayots, Ester and I had a falling out. Ester felt traded in for a bunch of bayots—or so I imagined, for unlike the company that I chose, Ester was not given to slander. Douglas just came to Silliman then, straight from an extended drinking binge in Davao, and I liked the bayot. I liked who he liked. Except Jessica Zafra. Like Viktor, he was enrolled at Silliman before. We were classmates in Sir Tim’s Fiction Class, so with Ester, Franklin, and Bobby. Except for Ester and a handful of spectators from the Philosophy and Math departments, we were mostly bayots. Sir Tim was freshly returned from U.P. then, and was dazzling us with great fiction. A happy class we were: Bobby spoke good English, quoting verbatim his favorite line from Lisa Minot’s “Lust”; Archie tienes-tienesed; Dennis laughed and cupped his mouth; Franklin trembled with feminist ideas. I was inarticulate with anger, as ever.

Among the boys, Dennis was a celebrity. You could find his name scrawled on the walls of Katipunan Hall, thanking him for his services. At El Amigo, he and Archie made a double attraction. Archie had only to open his mouth and Dennis had only to flick his lashes and guys would move over to our table. He had the saddest pair of eyes—or so he’d like to project—that went with the sexiest pair of legs. Like Archie, he was mean, but unlike Archie (who was always warm with fat), he could turn into an ice queen any moment and punish us with his trademark cold look on days without end, if we made the mistake of laughing at his hurt. He had this habit of breaking into a song. Douglas and I would often find ourselves conversing with ourselves as Dennis had suddenly transformed into a music box.

I don’t expect my love affair to last
For long…

Gay love oozed in the alleys of Silliman like God’s piss. Riding and walking around with Dennis he would point to me every room and ground where he made a good, or bad, lay. In my Religion class, right under the nose of our school pastor, my friends would show me pictures of Korean thighs.

Have you tried something like that?
It looks like ice cream cone.

At the cafeteria, men marched in through the glass door like a festival of food. See that guy in Coca-Cola shirt, Shielfa? He had nothing inside him. Look to your left, Shielfa, he’s the rapist I was telling you about. To your right, Shielfa. Hmm! Delicious! For a time, watching men had become a dreary occupation. The whole lot of them, it seemed to me, had been reduced to dangling penises. Others, though, did not agree.

Ellen gyrated like a boa. No I’ve never seen a boa, much more watch it gyrate, and Ellen was more knowing than a man-eating boa. Ellen lived a healthy virgin’s life: She was like Eve, when Eve chose the serpent.

How Ellen laughed, at men’s jokes, especially if they talked about women. She and Pinky would come to my ragtag of a house at San Juan Road (a new improvement from the last pigsty) to look for erotic literature from my trunkful of books, sometimes bringing with them an imbecile who would dare lay his hand on my Isabel Allende books, and never return them.

I loved Pinky. She introduced me to a boyfriend who later trundled up to me while I was peacefully sitting at the boulevard. Where is Pinky, huh? Huh? He asked. I sat there, shocked, while his knuckles kept on knocking against my skull. He looked like he was about to kick me, too. Like I was the bitch.

Life is a cabaret, said Pamela at a workshop in Tacloban, and for many late nights in Dumaguete, Dennis and I walked the streets like tramps. He would wear his fuschia pink shorts while I let my bra strap alone. (It kept on falling off my shoulder.) If I were not a teacher, I would have been a whore, Dennis would say. And earning, too, I’d tell him. We’d laugh through the highway, smoking, flaunting, and staring men in the eye. They would look away and give us right-of-way. We felt free. Like we could screw the world and get away with it, too.

Claire thinned down to half her last size as bulimia became the rage of the day. It was annoying: Ellen counting her calorie intake as though she were Nanette Medved or some other deity; Dennis, praying over his bilbil, his bilbil, while gorging himself with tarts and chocolate; Mark and Earl refusing to take beer lest they’d lose their shapes. But shape or no shape, they were hefty with talent. When the sky was dark and Katipunan Hall was quiet, Mark would gather his cast of post-England witches and stage a grand performance for a special audience, namely, faggots only. Together with Archie and other budding virgins, he would sing his incantation with a voice that could summon the burnt heroines of Salem back to life.

There’s a house in Amigo you can move into, said Sir Tim, who somehow kept tabs of the poverty indices at the department. Something funny happened in my slimy San Juan neighborhood: My roommate a girl of nineteen uninitiated to the manners of men, happened to look into an eye one morning while she was scrubbing herself at our bathroom cum urinal. (My landlady’s husband and sons pissed there, when we were not looking). I stomped down the stair leading to the rooms downstairs, banged at the door occupied by the male lodgers whose faces I really never bothered to look at till then, and screamed obscenities. The landlady, subjected to more obscene beatings by his exhibitionist of a husband (he liked walking out of their room with only his briefs on just when we were going out to pee at night) just looked, unsure as to who to defend, her boys, or us female lodgers. The husband blabbered a little, then went about some carpentry work, mending holes and patching the floor. A couple of days after, my roommate packed up, fetched by friends and a relative. I received a notice of eviction, later. The room will be used by their relatives, my landlady said.

The house at Amigo was an artists’ den, with ropings and spider webs spun by human hands, and paintings of bats and creatures of the dark. At the latrine, a recognizable fellow squatted right before you, comfortably defecating. Rhoda, Sir Tim’s sister, was minding the house. She was a Creative Writing student and was back there to finish her thesis. It’s open-house for kindred spirits, she said. Vibes is all that is required for any would-be occupant.

Cleaning my would-be room upstairs, I struggled with a window that refused to open, feeling horrible at my incapacity to feel for the place. You’re not an artist. You’re a lunatic, I chided myself. When Ophie, Rhoda’s best friend and resident-hag of the house, wrote from Mindanao and said she’d be dropping by Dumaguete and would need the room I was to occupy, I found an excuse not to move in. Nahadlok ka, Shelf? Rhoda asked, smiling. The evening I was hauling my things out, Krevo, another resident-artist, just arrived from America and was distributing books. He brought us a vibrator, too, Ophie said to me. You want? Claire and Nino waltzed: Mikki, who happened by, talked and laughed; I was dazed. Later, when I told Nino I was afraid of their house’s spirits, he jeered. You should befriend them and not fear them.

Something did not happen in the summer of 1996. I was spending night at Andre’s house, over another idea after the stage play that never happened. One late afternoon Viktor came carrying with him his bundle of clothes. He and Sawi had a quarrel and Sawi threw him out of his house. Or rather, Viktor himself had sense enough to evacuate. Can I, he asked Andre, rather honestly, sleep in your sala? The sala was an open-air affair, nipa roofing above it, bamboo walls and flooring adjoined to the main house.

He came all the way from Cebu to sit in the workshop, staying at Sawi’s as was his tradition, but something happened midway through the workshop: Sawi’s heart was broken anew, I seemed. He fell for some girl from Manila, or this girl fell for him—whichever, it does not matter now—but in what looked like an inversion of Prufrock’s lament, he left her to a bottle of beer. The rest is history, said Viktor, and old Prufrock went home to his cottage. A couple of days later, Grace, an old friend, called. Sawi ordered Viktor to clear away, sat with Grace, then went to his room to catch on some sleep. When Viktor went out of his room to leave, he found Grace unattended (he knew her from his Silliman days), and so he sat down awhile to entertain her. When Sawi woke up, he found them talking.

A cute story it was, and Andre, a little humored, took Viktor in a couple of days later, the two gentlemen patched up, and Viktor went back to Sawi’s house at Purok Santan, leaving Andre a handful of books.

In a poetry reading later, during the fellows’ last night in Dumaguete, Sawi wore a barong and read a poem, in honor of women. The poem, he said, was written by an obscure poet, and he chose it because in that year’s workshop, the girls proved themselves better than boys. All I can recall of the poem is that it was about her who folds the sheets. So simple it was, and so quiet. And so was Sawi.

Nino and Andre thought of a Poetry Reading in celebration of Women’s Day, and of all venues, we chose the university chapel. The English and Literature family was all there, in full force. It as a gay affair, with almost everyone having a good piece to say. Tonton read his poem, about a rubber band that you gave, which ended with “You don’t even remember my name”; Ellen read Migen’s “April Wedding,” about wanting to be Cleopatra and putting sleep into God’s eyes, and ending with “And they unawares/Bore apes”; Pinky read Ellen’s “The Journey” about opening one’s thigh, and becoming the world.

Other women were there, too. Dennis read a poem that began with “You made love to me at a stockroom,” ending with “And laugh with your wife about the fag at work”; Bobby read a sexy piece about hot pizza and a boy he wanted to take home; Archie choreographed a dance, performed by his women at the Telun Theater, to the music of Elynia S. Mabanglo’s “Kung Ibig Mo Akong Makilala.” (Telun was Archie’s and Ma’am Andre’s reply to Siliman’s broadway culture).

Married women also chimed in: Hermie read Dinah’s poem about the laundry that stank o family; Chinky read a Tagalog translation of Padmapani Perez’s “Newborn,” a motherhood poem ending with “She is at once my life-saver/And my death,” which Mabanglo translated as “Siya ang aking tagapagligtas, at mamamatay ko”; while Ma’am Andre read a naughty piece from Lualhati Baustista, “Dyugdyugan,” about romance after marriage and motherhood.

Lorena’s piece was a n erotic poem, Jocelyn de Jesus’ “One-Way Samba,” which sounded more angry than erotic, Tonton said. Dr. Law read Emily Dickenson’s “I’m Nobody,” while Sir Tim read Adrienne Rich’s “A woman in the shape of a monster/ a monster in the shape of a woman/ the skies are full of them.” Ma’am Mel and Gina dramatized a dialogue between a middle-class Latin American woman and a working woman.

Noticeably absent was the resident-poet of Dumaguete, who was by then still lost in the woods of Dumaguete, looking for the Poetry Reading lights. Along with two other idiots, he went round and round Silliman, led by the Muse of the night, whom we realized later must have been a feminist. We learned that he, Franklin, and Voltaire ( a brother just came home from Canada), ended up reading their poems to the rocks at the Boulevard.

SUFA staged a strike in January of 1997. They couldn’t take it anymore, the sahod-sakada, to use Mr. Deriada’s words, and so they staged a strike. That was after months and months of roundabout negotiations with the SU administration. The front yard of the Guy Hall and the Admin Building blossomed with placards, pleading for Christian compassion and the like or demanding the resignation of this or that asshole, and the hogwire fencing the campus grounds on both sides of the Hibbard Avenue were draped with streamers screaming the hunger that plague the lovely country. The city of gentle people, as it was called, unaccustomed to labor unrest, stirred aghast at the sight of university professors waving placard and their fists in the air. Dr. Law was in his youthful best, manning the forefront, tirelessly running errands, sometimes with Ma’am Rose, who pedaled with him on their tandem bike.

The prudish and the ignorant were displeased. Isn’t it scandalous? they asked, University professors of Silliman? Behaving like laborers? When a member of the board came from Manila, the whole throng picketed at the airport, announcing to all those coming and going of their miserable plight. The tricycle drivers and porters laughed in wonder as they read the huge streamer that enumerated the teachers’ salaries. Mas dako pa diay among suweldo ninyo, Ma’am?

That was not the first scandal to hit the holy land though. In late 1995,  the air waves were shocked when fishermen at the Silliman Beach demonstrated in front of the City Hall after the tents that they constructed at the beach were demolished. The demolition was enforced (by the INP and Silliman’s Security Forces) after Silliman’s Ethics Committee decided that the shacks were a disgrace to the University. Students made out there; for the rate that the fishing families were charging was attractively low: twenty or thirty pesos per night. A legal tussle ensued, and Silliman was made to pay. The fishing village was economically dislocated, or so a fisherman told me one afternoon, in one of my mad walks to the beach.

The beach was combed clean, and the city was peaceful again. But funny things happened. In the campus, the guards was altered anew to new tremors on the ground. Condoms would be found littering in likely corners: deserted classrooms, stock rooms, including the backyards of the chapel and other holy places. A happy thing that was, which, we surmised, must have fired Gracchus’ imagination to write “Ana Andrea.”

Viktor called me a peripatetic. He had this habit of pacing up and down the floor as he ruminated. It ran in the family, he said. His brother back in Cebu would span all the three floor levels of their house, from the living room, to his bedroom, and down to the kitchen. I sit on my ass when I think, I told him. But you are a peripatetic, he said. You keep on going round and round just looking for a place to live in, without really getting settled in one.

At the time, we were both squatting in Ma’am Andre’s place in Bantayan, and I had just moved in and out of at least two other houses: the first after the room with peeping holes, a boarding house owned by an aging couple who kept a store downstairs and a kitchen upstairs that served galunggong everyday of our lives. The old lady hoarded bottles of all sizes, lined up to the wall and every corner of the kitchen, all filled with water. So we won’t run out of water, just in case there is going to be another drought, she said. Every night without fail, she counted her money on the table. It was so bizarre, like watching one of Dickens’ cartoon characters materialize right before your very eyes. If she found my book and papers on the  table, she would sweep them aside and replace them with placemats.

They padlocked the door from the outside, beside padlocking the gate from the inside. My housemates, who escaped the lahar in Pampanga, laughed when I said I cannot bear the disgrace of dying in fire with the couple as a company. The husband slept at the store downstairs and kept the keys around  his waist while the old woman occupied the room next to mine. I moved out after the tiny window of my room was blocked by a new building that rose right beside the house, letting the canal down below breathe right into my room, and after the latrine clogged and the old lady insisted on using the rod rather than calling the man from the sewers bureau.

I landed in a bowl-of-dust of a house right across Hibbard Avenue, occupied by girls who liked stuffing their used napkins into the holes of the bathroom walls. The day I tried cleaning the whole shit, I got sick for days. That was April, I had just finished another term. I moved all my things into the room, and escaped to Jolo for a summer job. By June, I was groveling at Andre’s place in Bantayan.

Andre was on leave, taking up her doctoral degree, and Diutay, her roommate, was commuting between the house and work in Dumaguete and the children in Bacolod. I played the housesitter and life was quiet and full of clean air, until it was time to move out again.

People went in and out of the house in Bantayan, The summer I was there, Neil and his poet-friends came, and Diutay played the flute. Tonton, who was at the time already employed in Cebu and was also into climbing rocks and mountains, came and talked about Kafka and The Hunger Artist. Did you know that once I had to cut down our neighbor’s banana tree, without her permission, just so I could eat boiled banana? he asked. I sent him out of the house, but walked with him to Bantayan Road, shouting I am walking with Kafka, which he took as a compliment.

I didn’t know that I would be sharing kitchen with Henry Miller, too. When Viktor barged again into the house with another story (he jumped down of Sawi’s window and broke his neighbors pots of orchid plants or something like that), my cramped life became more cramped. Viktor lived his life the uro-genital way, and annoyed me with stories about dying minotaurs rejuvenated by a good screw. Like Miller, he slandered every woman he knew and counted his erections. There would be mornings I feared going out of my room, lest he was having one. He let me Black Spring, a glorious book about the glory of pissing.

Diutay whose interest lay more on the esoteric and the extraterrestrial experience, wasn’t so pleased with Viktor. Beside fetching pails and pails of water and gallons of drinking water Viktor wasn’t very useful. He was like a stump of wood that lay there eternally on the bamboo divan, with his books for his pillow. It was a sad affair: the three of us without money, keeping to ourselves our bitterness—and our spite—while trying to be kind to each other. The only thing that connected us was Bob Dylan. Every time Diutay played my Bob Dylan tapes, the three of us jelled like brothers. One thing I would always appreciate about Viktor: The night I went down to burn my bale of letters, he helped me with the fire.

Doc Ed died. The news hardly hit me: I didn’t know the man; his life did not touch me. And I didn’t hear him speak to me, although at one time, I had thought he would be a mentor. I only saw him once. In the last workshop that I sat in, in 1996, which no one knew would be the last workshop he’d be sitting in. I saw him as an angry old man despairing at the world that stood before him. Had he talked to me, I might have misbelieved his words, must have looked him down, must have left him. In his passing age.

Until I saw him in his coffin, I did not know him, did not know his pain, did not know his battles.

In the next workshop the following year, Ma’am Edith’s voice wasn’t as strong either. And we sank in our seats when, after a fit of coughing, she begged off not to be made to speak any further. “Go on. Please go ahead,” she said to the strong and the healthy.

And they did.

I had my times in Silliman. They crown the heart.

[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]  

Shielfa B. Alojamiento was a Creative Writing major at Silliman University and edited the 1997 edition of the Sands & Coral. She has worked for various nongovernment organizations. She won the Palanca for the Short Story in Cebuano in 2002.