One
of the favorite quotes I trot out for the delectation of my writing
students is something I’ve loosely paraphrased from a letter
of Mark Twain, in which he said, in effect, that "Of course,
fact is stranger than fiction; fiction, after all, has to make sense."
This came in handy
last weekend when I took a ship out to Romblon (I’ll tell you
in a minute where that is) with a group of fellow academics and student
writers to attend the 19th Cornelio Faigao Writers Workshop (and I’ll
tell you in another minute who Faigao is, or rather was).
Romblon happens
to be the province–that clump of islands after Mindoro that you
pass on your way to Cebu or Iloilo–where I was born 48 years
ago, a stone’s throw from the ocean. Its capital–on Romblon
Island, the smallest of the three main islands (the other two being
largish Tablas and heavily forested Sibuyan)–is also named Romblon;
clear enough? The province and especially Romblon town is well known
for its marble, which meets every one’s deep-down hankering for
a dependable almires and a respectable lapida, not to mention that
key fob with your name lovingly engraved on it, ringed by flowers.
It was the writer
NVM Gonzalez–himself Romblon-born, in 1915, before the family
moved to Mindoro–who noted that when Jose Rizal stopped by Romblon
on his way back to Manila from Dapitan, he found the place "muy
hermosa, pero muy triste" (so pretty, but so sad). That was also
the Romblon I remembered from my last visit to the island, in 1974:
a huddle of wood-hulled boats in a harbor, a town of old stone houses
fringed by hills of coconut-shrouded limestone. The sadness wasn’t
only in the desolate beauty of the scenery, but in the fact that the
island was slowly but literally vanishing, coughing up its guts to
supply the trade in marble.
I would write
about Romblon, slightly fictionalized, in my novel Killing Time in
a Warm Place (Anvil, 1992):
"Marble was
plentiful and cheap. I had seen Tigbawan Island across the channel
where the capital town of Santa Prisca lay, and it stuck out of the
water like a bad tooth one side of which had completely crumbled.
The whole place was marble, and generations of Tigbawanons had chipped
away at the rock beneath their feet. The men who worked for Marblex
sawed into the hillside with water-cooled chains and hauled blocks
of the smoky rock with elaborate systems of pulleys and planes onto
trucks which delivered them to ships in the harbor. These blocks,
I was told, would be cut into slabs, most of which would find their
way to Manila’s financial districts, to pave the floors and brace
the walls of banks; others would go to refurbish statuary in churches–the
larger ones with goldleafed seraphs on the roofs, swirling columns,
hardwood doors; some would have been ordered by the lapidarists whose
shops nuzzled against the churches alongside the flower and candlestick
vendors, whose electric drills rose above the Ave’s and Kyrie’s
with a shrill insistence on their deadlines."
Last weekend,
I returned to Romblon to do honor to another Romblon-born writer,
Cornelio Faigao (1908-1959), who did most of his writing and achieved
prominence as a poet and journalist in Cebu. The Faigao Workshop has
been held in his memory since 1984, and this was the first time the
workshop organizers–the Cebuano Studies Center of the University
of San Carlos, assisted this year by the Internet-based Romblon Discussion
List–brought the workshop to Faigao’s home province.
With me on the
panel were Erlinda Alburo, writer and director of the Cebuano Studies
Center; Resil Mojares, scholar, writer, and recently retired professor
of literature and history at USC; Mila Aguilar, poet and instructor
of English at UP Diliman; and Ishmael Fabicon, founder and executive
director of RDL-CLEAR (the "CLEAR" being Cultural, Livelihood,
and Educational Assistance fcor Romblon), now based in Elmhurst, Illinois.
The Faigao fellows–six from Cebu, five from Manila, and one from
Romblon–were Cherrie Lee de Guzman, Heidi Palapar, Michael Obenieta,
Arlaine Jayo, Henryl Moreno, Jeneen Garcia, Vivian Limpin, Erwin Lareza,
Michelle Correa, Gabriela Dans Lee, Roselle Pineda, and Abner Faminiano.
Writers Rosario Lucero and Aline Parrone tagged along as observers.
With the help
of other US-based Romblomanons, Ish Fabicon had managed to integrate
the workshop into the "2002 Sanrokan Romblomanon International
Convention"–sanrokan being the local word, roughly, for
"the virtue of sharing."
We left Manila
all together on Friday, boarding the M/V Blessed Mother (whose sister
ship, no surprise, is the M/V Virgin Mary). The names led me to observe
that we were leaving on a ship and a prayer ("pangalan pa lang,
panalangin na")–a prayer, perhaps, to reach port safely.
As it happened,
the Blessed Mother was more than adequate, comfortably airconditioned
and well-appointed (a tad too well, with not one but two karaoke lounges),
hardly the seagoing sardine cans I remembered from childhood voyages.
Our outbound trip was quick and pleasant, a 12-hour glide across mostly
calm waters. We reached Romblon at 2 a.m., then took a jeep 11 kilometers
to our destination, the very tastefully designed Talipasak Beach Resort
run by NVM’s friend (and my distant cousin, as it turned out)
Mina Mingoa.
The workshop itself
went by swimmingly, with just a hiccup or two to break the smoothness
of the proceedings. I was deeply impressed by the quality and the
range of the work and by the critical sense of the fellows, from whom
I can only expect better things in the years to come.
It was, however,
our journey home that left the deepest impression on everyone’s
mind. Here’s what happened:
We waited pierside
in Romblon for our ship–as it happened, the same Blessed Mother,
inbound from San Jose–after paying the obligatory visit to the
town’s marble shops (and its one-and-only Internet café,
a touch of grace in a province without air service and an island without
a cell site). We were supposed to leave at 5 p.m.; the ship appeared
on the horizon at that time–but, saddled with a mechanical problem,
could not dock safely to pick us up. The ship’s owner, Romblon
Gov. Eleandro Madrona (another distant cousin), radioed orders for
the ship to send out its lifeboats for us.
These were large
boats, capable of taking on about 110 passengers each, and they came
out of the rapidly darkening distance to get us and our bags and our
mortars and pestles. Above us rose a swollen moon and a careless spray
of stars. The sea seemed gentle. We felt stirred by excitement, but
of a benign and beautiful kind. None of us, I was sure, had ever ridden
a lifeboat, nor did we really care to–but this would be an easy
adventure, an unexpected gift at the end of a long weekend.
It was 8 p.m.
by the time we clambered down to our boats and claimed our seat-space,
imagining what it must have been like on the Titanic, in a real emergency.
Here we had space and goodwill to spare. People introduced themselves
warmly and made friends, lending the beams of their flashlights to
latecomers finding space for their butts and baggage.
And then, at the
very last minute before shoving off, a tricycle drove up in a mad
clatter to the very edge of the pier, disgorging a distraught mother
cradling a very sick child in her arms; a man, presumably the father,
held up a dextrose bottle above them. Somehow, this family managed
to get settled in the boat, in the same fragile triangle; a nurse
shouted for us to wait for the oxygen tank, which had to be brought
in another tricycle. Blood dripped from the child’s nose through
a tube into a plate; in whispers, we learned that Lalaine had already
been declared dead of typhoid fever at the local hospital, but had
been revived, and now she had to be rushed to the city on the Blessed
Mother; Romblon could do nothing more for her.
Our boat pulled
out into the darkness, headed for the ship’s twinkling lights,
with another full lifeboat beside us. The sea roughened in patches.
Someone took a photograph somewhere. In minutes, the swell had worsened,
and when we reached the ship we realized that we were going to plow
straight into the waiting ladder–a heavy wood-and-metal contraption–at
ship’s side. People screamed and ducked as we went under the
ladder; sailors struggled mightily and noisily on both ship and boat
to couple the two quickly and safely, but we kept hitting the side
of the ship, the ladder, and the other lifeboat. Miraculously, the
dextrose bottle remained where it was supposed to be.
Finally the ropes
and latches held, and we clambered out of the lifeboat–leaving
our bags for later, and Lalaine and her parents first–into the
belly of the Blessed Mother. The airconditioning had conked out on
our deck, requiring quick rearrangements and a downgrade for most
to tourist class, but we were simply glad to be dry and alive; Lalaine’s
dextrose bottle hung above their bunk like an odd lantern, at once
a symbol of life, and of its passing.
The next morning,
over breakfast and tepid cups of 3-in-1 coffee, the fellows and I
came to the same inevitable conclusion: we’d spent the weekend
talking about the twists and turns of plot and character–but
still, and yet, fact was indeed stranger than fiction.
[Postscript: According
to fellow passenger Dean Pestaño, who took the photo here,
Lalaine died that morning on the way to Mary Johnston Hospital, not
too far from the pier.]
