An Untold Story
First of Several Parts
Draft"And so the journey begins of one's coming back to a place where a stone thrown creates a ripple so slow..."
The pain in my toe has never ceased, it seems that whatever I took last night didn't work the way it should. I can barely walk, not even close to creating movements on my left toe. Yet tonight, I have embarked on a passage that I so decided long ago never to take – again.
The memories of growing up, or so I have told in previous web logs, have been otherwise than pleasurable. And this has in so far forced me reproduce a simplified version of that part of my life: the pains in every experience taken away, the unwanted memories totally omitted, and some unimportant characters deleted in my recollection.
But this isn't the first time in ten years that I have come back. The first time probably that I voluntarily decided to go home – without the constant pestering and beyond the expectation of my mother.
All those times that I did, I was enclosed in the comforts of the life that I worked hard for in Manila. I valued more the fact that I am not an original of Bicol since my father's ancestry can be traced back somewhere else in Southern Luzon to where I was also born and to prove that point, is my family name. And finally, I have coped up (or so I thought I had) with my overgrown intolerance of my mother's "small family" dynamics by staying some place else than the old house of the Brucelos. It has caused me a well-worth extra cash in efficiently taking myself away as the witness and a contributor to the emotional circus created by five adults related by blood but separated by three generations of beliefs, differences in upbringing, divergence in personalities and their lack of patience over one another yet the impossibility of totally denying affiliation from each one.
This time, I will be staying at the old house, with the people I am related to and constantly in conflict with and within less than two weeks, work on a way to finally move on but this time leaving all the anger and frustration I have been harboring with me through the years.
The Brucelos' house in Gubat, Sorsogon is located at the heart of the block in Dote Lane, where political families known in the opposition are residing comprising a meager 5% of the town's elite. Most are informal settlers living in an industry of pottery, using a method which is as old as pottery itself that has attracted the interest of archaeologists from the West. We belong to the middle of the social echelon in Paradijon. My mother's relations have been known in the field of public education from the past until the present.
"Tiago" and "Onie"
My grandfather has descended from a rich Spanish family of womanizers, gamblers and drunkards who were the first to settle in Santa Magdalena, another town in Sorsogon. He spent all his years establishing public schools in Gubat. He never wanted to be more than a public school supervisor however qualified he was at that time. He lived his life in simplicity – gave all his inheritance to his siblings and an array of half-siblings all from different wives of my great grandfather Pedro – to my grandmother's dismay. Up to this moment, every time I visit the places where he served, people would tell me stories of my grandfather's greatness as an educator, his firmness and incorruptible management styles unknown during the time of the martial law, and his coyness mixed with plain idiocy when he became intoxicated with alcohol.
"Si Sir 'Tiago, kun nahuhubog payt an pakarantaha san mga kabataan. Paurunahan man, kay may suhol na molido an makanta." [When he gets drunk, Sir 'Tiago talks the children into singing. The children do too quickly because he gives them sweet potato candies in exchange.]
I smile when I hear and recall stories like this. I imagine Santiago's face with his strong Spanish features turning crimson, eyes hardly able to open but a smile drawn with sincerity – showing me a 3-foot jar filled with Bagong Lipunan money that he would use to buy me the princess gown that he has been imaging I would use for the day I will be crowned as some beauty titlist. I never became one. I never saw the jar after his death a few years after that. But I can always envision him smiling from where he is now, convinced that I was better off - not a princess, not crowned and not in a gown.
My grandmother, Leonida or Onie to her contemporaries, is a retired public school principal. Public education has brought her and my grandfather together. They had pictures of all the national conferences in the 60's and 70's that they have attended. The picture depicted a couple of a happy household – and that was what they were for the time that they were together, until 'Tiago died in '87.
Leonida was from a poor family of farmers. Her mother, 'Tica was probably one of my family's greatest financial manager who – from stories I heard – has never been fond of Leonida for unfathomable reasons. From the small piece of land that they used to own, they were able to acquire more properties from the produce through the years of farming. As a middle child, Leonida was given the smallest property upon the death of her mother. All her other siblings got the bigger and more productive land.
In the time of her marriage to 'Tiago, they were able to acquire more land including the one where the Brucelos' house still stands. This was due to her exemplary skills in managing their finances which I assume she learned out of anger from her mother's unfair decision with the inheritance and my grandfather's obvious carefree life drawn to simplicity. At the end, she owned more properties than her other siblings, and to this day, she reminds each and everyone of them how unfair their mother was and how she managed to acquire everything from her own labors. She was truly a remarkably industrious and a very strong-willed woman. Her stories of survival during the World War II where they used to eat leaves of guava in the wild for several months, her life full of frustration with the laidback 'Tiago as she often refers to him, and the life of their daughter Ruth which later became also her own – later, including the life of James, their youngest child could attest to this. And an addition, her life during her second marriage in 2000, with her first love to whom she was separated during the war.
Continued...
