O Muerte, cuan amarga es tu memoria, it said there on the mausoleum’s facade going past me at eighty kilometers per hour. I looked directly ahead. The bus was travelling in the heart of coconut country; I was sure that if this was an ordinary bus, I’d end up smelling of copra after fifteen more minutes. There were not too many passengers with me on this trip, it being Wednesday and the day before people get paid.
I was not listening to anything right then, and it was really raining, or drizzling, as it was. Something about being on the southern tip of a mountain range, at the Ground Zero of two opposing weather systems, was driving clouds up Mount Banahaw and down to the plains. Indeed, there was a foreboding two hours ago, atop Makiling, which took us all of a hundred-odd kilometers to finally leave. In the 6 o’clock near-sun, something like a mushroom cloud had gathered around the summit. There was no rain, at least not yet; perhaps it was still too cold for the condensate to fall down. I liked the sight of it, even behind glass. Especially behind glass. When I’m indoors (or in this case, in-bus) and it’s raining outside, I feel safest. Warmest, too, even with the air-conditioning on at full blast. Two hours later and we were driving along the foothills of another mountain, another mushroom cloud, and there was no more drizzle, just Bebel Gilberto wafting through the headphones of my mind, in a language I can only pretend to understand.
I remembered all these while waiting for a bus going home last week. I get off work at midnight, take the bus to Cubao, then walk from Araneta Coliseum to EDSA, where there is a queue of buses waiting to load. As a matter of preference, I take the ordinary buses since it is no longer that hot at night and I like the feel of the wind on my face. They are more likely to be cruising down EDSA at that hour, too.
Just last week, I saw an air-conditioned bus going to Novaliches. Not Malinta Exit – Novaliches, mind you; this was SM West – Mindanao Avenue – Novaliches, the ones I used to take going to my ex-girlfriend’s place, only these were airconditioned. The last time I recall taking an air-conditioned bus from the area was when my mother and I commuted to Cubao to shop for Christmas Eve dinner a decade and change ago; after that, I never saw, much less took, another air-conditioned bus from Novaliches again. That day we went to Cubao, the electricity shut off and the whole of Luzon was plunged into darkness for what seemed like the whole day. The moon was bright when we got home and us neighborhood kids played patintero on the newly-cemented Sikatuna Avenue that passed in front of our house, every five meters or so still clearly defined.
It’s amazing, I thought that night I saw an air-conditioned Don Mariano Transit bus, that things I very much needed long ago suddenly appear when I need them no longer. I have no more reason to go to Novaliches. Not even to visit our old house, the interior of which has burned down and has been converted into rooms for rent by people we never transacted with (I wonder how they got the building permits? What price memory?), not even to get off at Rainbow 1 and walk all the way to my ex-girlfriend’s place. The only reason I have now is to visit my parents’ graves just across the road from our village, which is quite impractical given the time I get off work. They don’t even sell candles at the memorial park gate anymore. O Muerte, cuan amarga es tu memoria. Oh Death, how bitter your memory is. Or better, O Memoria, cuan amarga es tu muerte. Oh Memory, how bitter your death is.
Indeed. There are things I commit to memory — parents slow-dancing before breakfast, sadness over losing people I loved, jogging on early mornings after lighting candles at my mother’s grave with my father who has since passed on, air-conditioned buses plying the Alabang – Novaliches route — and there are things which will die to memory, bitter, buried under happier ones, never even happened — taking an air-conditioned bus to Novaliches one muggy night in May 2010, getting off at Sikatuna Avenue and walking through that door and waking up everyone in the rooms rented out by those people we’ve never talked to, sharing a cigarette with the neighborhood bullies who were by now full-time tricycle drivers talking in Jejenese.
Then again, riding on the ordinary bus to Fairview last week, I saw a shooting star, like the one I saw from our backyard at five in the morning as a seven-year-old, and failed to wish, Bebel Gilberto’s “Samba da Benção” playing in my mind. I understand now. Google solves everything. Bebel sings:
E melhor ser alegre que ser triste
Alegria e a melhor coisa que existe
E assim como a luz no coracao
Mas pra fazer um samba com beleza
E preciso um bocado de tristeza
Senao nao se faz um samba nao
It’s better to be happy than sad
Happiness is the best thing there is
It is like a light in the heart
But to make a samba with beauty
It’s needed a bit of sadness
If not the samba can’t be made
So there I went, playing a sad, somnolent samba in my mind, looking at the sunrise waiting to break out, seeing a mushroom cloud forming over the Sierra Madre, and finding my way home to happiness.
