Dear Sol,
I can say that silence is the same as emigration sailing under the false colors of nostalgia. This may hold true for every migrant. Or let us suppose that, at least in the words of Milan Kundera in Unbearable Lightness of Being, a living soul who leaves the place where she lives or her origins is an unhappy being. As in writing, as in art, feelings are an abstraction. I gaze from the tiny casement window. In the confines of this colorless room, I bury myself beneath a hundred tales of solitude…
*
Day 29
Dear Sol,
I awake too early today. Alone. Displeased by a recurring dream. I rouse from bed and brew coffee. And I think of stepping out, to sit along the vastness of your garden. I realize that right now you can get a glimpse of the view that I am staring at, but I also yearn for you to catch sight of my dream.
More than once, I have become the mother to my own youngest brother. Maybe that is why, despite our distance now, he still looks for me. Even if he turns his back on me, perching on a massive tree root that sticks out of the surface, I will be beyond doubt that it is him. Maghulat ko diri was his pledge to wait. I reminisce about the times when we were stray cats in the side roads of Cagayan de Oro, the city where we came of age. Deep in the night, we rest next to each other on a bench in the abandoned McArthur Park. Fewer and fewer pedestrians and vehicles pass us by. I sense his anxiety when he asks where do we come home to, “Asa ta mouli?” I let my field of vision drown in the stretch of Velez street. The arriving darkness takes her time in devouring the city. Like questions that do not have answers. “Mama is coming home soon. Maybe Tatay will come back.” It is true: the world is brutal. The wind that preys on the chest bites colder and colder. And endures on the concrete seat. My brother is crouched against the bench, hunkered down as if praying or whispering his birthday wish in the quiet. But teased ceaselessly by the jeering mosquitoes. It seems they do not want him to sleep. I sink my teeth into my lip. I swallow my own grief. He succumbs to slumber out of exhaustion or from all the waiting.
I get to grips with myself and want to know what and where is home. Do you know how many times I have strolled along Solitudestraße as if wanting to map the memories I bring? I cast my eyes far and wide tracing the horizon, the way to the other side. I stop momentarily when I hear a voice from the other alleys of your Castle. I scan every corner, every edge. I am all alone. I look up at your dome and whisper into the wind. How long have you been here? How many lives did you meditate on before I learned to tell my stories? Do you know my brother?
Out of the blue, I call to mind the time when Duterte declared his war on drugs. I was terrified. We may no longer be stray cats. But my brother might be mistaken for an animal. Might be stretched prostrate on the ground, thrown into a ditch. Thousands of them. A legion remains nameless. And never coming back.
In these lofty trees, halfway through a crisp morning, I determine what this quietude means or if things around here are just wrapped in some form of silence. I am convinced that they can travel to another world that we, too, can visit each time we close our eyes. So I look around as if there is a sign, and maybe I will find some answers. As if I am a mother searching for her little one and losing sleep over having to wake him up at the prophesied hour. The leaves have just sprung up. But the roots are firmly anchored on earth. The branches are refuge for the transience of insects and birds. I brush my palm against the bark for a moment. And wish to ask what is in her interior. Is she marking time too? I look skyward once again. A crow whispers. And wings its way out. Perhaps she is skeptical if I can lay hold of the answers. The heavens are filled with overcast. Like a window opened ajar, sunlight drifts through from the east. On the other side, away from the twigs and trunks, I still cast an eye over the face of the one who waits. Or perhaps I am merely being homesick for the times when we both awaited those who never came, those who never came back.
Tonight, I will settle under a tree along the expanse of Solitudestraße. Like a mother waiting for her little one to arrive home with dreams in his pocket.
*
Day 114
Dear Sol,
And just like the droves of nights past, deranged with nightmares and forebodings. Either I wake up too soon or I have not slept at all. At six o’clock, I rouse from bed and become an eyewitness to a daybreak that seems like a scene from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The reverie grows dimmer and dimmer a little while after. Then comes the thunderstorm. I remain persistent in wending my way along Königstraße until I land at a shack halfway through the thicket. I take refuge in there for some time. I listen to the breath of the wind, the hiss of the leaves, and the patter of the rain. I hear all of it. I hear all that has passed.
*
Day 132
Dear Sol,
Michael and I hike along Schloss Veitshöchheim once again. Idle our way around its grounds, gape at the fish in the pond, and marvel at the fount and the wealth of flowers encircling it. And like you, it has a sense of splendor, is in a class by itself, upon visits in artistic panoramas that safeguard their heritage.
I break the news about the massive fire at the Manila Central Postal Office, a neoclassical structure that had been a historical landmark in the Philippines. At your Castle, I remember the stringent rules and guidelines that all fellows and guests must follow to prevent fire. And any time an alarm rings (which automatically alerts the Stuttgart Fire Department) due to cigarette smoke or kitchen fire, a brigade of fire marshals will get there at once.
We move past Bücherschrank at the entrance of Veitshöchheim plaza. As luck would have it, I stumble upon Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel The Shadow of the Wind. Heading back to the parking lot, we cruise along Main River while savoring ice cream from a local Eissalon. There is a memory I have of the Manila Central Post Office, a memory that has been concealed from Michael. But I long to give you a glimpse of it, a short piece of prose from a few years ago.
I step out of the light rail transit at the Central Station. The train dissolves into the distance, and in my head, I summon up a place I have always wanted to visit. Just around the corner, I catch sight of the Manila Central Post Office. I pass by throngs of passengers in the queue at a bus interchange. Nearly everyone wants to go like lightning for home or wherever their destination is.
Lawton is the transport hub where the bridges that lead to Binondo, Santa Cruz, and Quiapo converge. From here, one can view the thresholds of Ermita and Intramuros. On its right side is an abandoned theater center. Its concrete walls fractured, the paint blistered. Seemingly a sign of a culture that is passing into oblivion and falling into disrepair. With other commuters, I make my way across the overpass from a highway crammed with jeepneys, UV Express, and buses.
A few tents inside the plaza are striking. Picket signs and placards are all over. In red calligraphy: NO TO MARTIAL LAW. NEVER AGAIN. PEACE IN MINDANAW. Monuments of protests and demonstrations of collective struggles, past and present. This remains as one of Manila’s four freedom parks where protests can be convened without government permit. In 1963, a statue, erected at the plaza’s center, has been named after Andrés Bonifacio, the Father of the Philippine Revolution.
I keep walking towards the postal service. Each step, I chase every second of the day, chase every syllable cried by activists. This very plaza bears witness to my waiting for someone to come home with. Once upon a time, I come face to face with him halfway through a protest. Once upon a time, we give and take each other’s embrace and kisses, joys and sorrows.
And two decades slip by, this plaza endures as a crossroad of the bygones.
*
Day 168
Dear Sol,
I choose not to return to your Castle on Monday. It is the last day of Michael’s Sonderurlaub so I decided to stay with him. While having lunch, we chatter about our childhood once more. He makes plans to prepare spaghetti marinara, seeing the bounty of the backyard tomatoes. Blendered and then ten minutes in the pressure cooker, and we have four jars, or a half-liter, of puree. My adobo, however, comes served at the dining table first. He never says no to the national dish of the Philippines. He spots the dip sauce on my saucer plate. “Your first love, fish sauce,” he quips. On almost all occasions, I have a dip sauce (made of fish sauce mixed with vinegar and chili pepper) on the side.
So I begin to tell him a story. In this story, I am six or seven years old when I first had my taste of fish sauce. We do not have one in our own kitchen. What we use for cooking and every so often, the viand poured into rice, is soy sauce. I remember that on weekends, Mama takes me to a huge house in the city where she is the washerwoman. With my tiny hands, I help her hand-wash and hang the garments to be air-dried, and after her ironing, I fold them neatly. Without fail, Mama lets me know, your Tatay’s house is not far off. If you get lost, look for the big sundry store with lots of ice cream. There, you will find your Tatay. We wrap up all the laundry past noon. We make our way to another huge house owned by the parents of Mama’s employers. In there, we eat lunch. We arrive only to be told that there is no food left, says the housemaid. On a lone plate is leftover rice. She hands it to Mama and asks me to sit. Mama remains on her feet. Her eyes foraging through the kitchen for anything she can feed me. Nothing is left really, repeats the housemaid. A saucer plate sprinkled with what seems like soy sauce and vinegar is offered to me. I dip my forefinger. My first savor of fish sauce. I help myself with leftover rice. Mama helps herself with a glass of water.
At nightfall, we head towards the jeepney interchange. Mama recites her story once more, your Tatay’s house is not far off. If you get lost, look for the big sundry store with lots of ice cream. There, you will find your Tatay. My memory goes around in circles in the labyrinth that is that street—even now, ten years later.
*
Day 193
Dear Sol,
Today is Friday. Michael comes home early from work. There are barely inspection schedules in his itinerary because of the promising rain. I am supposed to cook his favorite, adobo. Rather, he insists that we grab lunch from a Piazza Cavalli restaurant that we drove past on our first day here in Piacenza. So we resolve on taking out food. After that, we saunter into the main train station because we wish to be Milan-bound the next day in the hopes of a fairer weather. We lounge around in the café while contemplating the rainfall once more.
We chortle remembering the escapades during our Austrian vacation late July when we almost came face to face with a storm in Tyrol. And even last December in the Philippines when Michael takes notice of the flash flood and how garbage stays afloat in a resort hotel in Cagayan de Oro. He swears that plans for a sojourn in Milan are in vain because of the mercurial weather.
We broach the lecture of Charlie Samuya Veric at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study which was streamed online yesterday. My engrossment in it is largely owed to the autobiographical method that the interviewer made use of in discussing colonialism and decolonization in the Philippines after the Spanish Colonization and the ensuing American Occupation. I tell Michael about what I had written in my novella Kagay-an. Here is a brief excerpt:
I do not want to stomach a foreign language but I got the hang of it feasting on my tongue after time. This is the language of job applications. The language of higher education. The language of the heaps of holy grails I want to be in possession of. As if it was God, this language was bludgeoned into us by the Americans. And even these white people seem to have coronated themselves as ‘blonde gods.’
For all I know, the issues surrounding the English language, the educational system, and the US military presence in the Philippines are explained mainly by Veric, all the while an image of an edifice is shown onscreen: “This particular library, a special collections library, is located on campus. But it’s funded and run by the Americans, so essentially it functions like a US base in the Philippine territory.” He furthers, “So when the Americans came, they established the public school system and they made sure that the English language would be at the center of that program, and education in English was actually part of the Pacification campaign.”
Michael is all ears. I know he is beginning to realize his blind spots on our occasional arguments whenever I question one of our marriage visa’s requirements: that I learn the German language. “I have been colonized many times. I couldn’t even write my stories in my mother tongue. What is left of me?” “Ich bin hier, Mausi,” he reassures me, making me know that he is and will be here. His ways to express his affection make me all smiles each time. And to that, I ask for more, “Was sonst?”
*
Day 194
Dear Sol,
Michael and I decide against going to Milan because of the sunless weather. We are having second thoughts, thinking the rainstorm will catch up on us and we might wind up taking cover in a café or bar instead of strolling around the city. Instead, we stop by Genoa. Michael drives for one and a half hour from Piacenza. At noon, we arrive. And drop in on for coffee somewhere in Porto di Arenzano, next to Genoa’s wider metropolitan district.
We cast our minds back to the seascapes we have been to, from the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia where we lived together in 2019, to our weekly trips to Bahrain and our cherished UAE holidays during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Michael also took me to the Baltic Sea in Zingst when I first set foot on German soil and there, we greeted the New Year of 2020. Of course, in his visit to the Philippines, Manila Bay in MOA and Macajalar Bay in Cagayan de Oro. And now, here in Italy, we are breathing in the Ligurian Sea waves.
Along the shore, we sit next to each other. “We must visit the seven seas,” he tells me. I pick up my cellphone and hold it like a microphone as I hummed as I hummed the Eurythmics song, “Sweet Dreams.” And Michael belts out the chorus with me. He says, he feels better when he stares at the ocean. Michael’s Sun sign is Gemini. I, the Pisces, proclaim that I may be the reason. And then unreservedly, he takes me in his arms. I make him read a poem that constantly comes to mind whenever I am anywhere near saltwater. I think back of my high school Filipino language teacher who made the class memorize this poem. And chuckle as I listen to Michael’s awkward effort in reciting the verses in Filipino.
In the half-light of sundown,
We go run back home.
Foot sore with wounds
And skin burnt from daylight,
That’s how it should be.
Beloved, in the sea of delight,
Each thing, even the heart,
Festers bit by bit.
Late afternoon, we leave Genoa. Michael wants an overnight stay. But I tell him I did not bring my sleeping pills. “I am your melatonin,” he teases. We turn up to a crowded piazza in Piacenza. We have this impression of the place as tranquil and unfrequented or perhaps because it has been pouring down ceaselessly these past few days. Or because it is the weekend so a lot of people stepped out. Michael parks the car, and we walk around the city. With a wine glass of Aperol Spritz, we drink a toast to a blissful Saturday.
