VirtusViews

Prisoners of Memory

2010-06-10T18:14:00.002+08:00

I thank Juaniyo Arcellana for this kind review. Gratitude to this gentle younger friend.

The Land Has Many Voices

2010-05-27T14:19:00.002+08:00

Asian Wall Street Journal, July 2-3, 1999

ROMEO P. VIRTUSIO

"Your husband is going to live a long life," Dr. Dioscoro Umali said to my

wife, Lulu. We had just told the late dean of the University of the Philippines

College of Agriculture about our purchase of a piece of farmland in Batangas,

home province of my father.

That was almost 15 years ago, not long after my father passed away. The

dean was a gentle intellectual and a man of the land--he understood and shared

my attraction to farming. Dr. Umali may yet be proven correct. Yes, I wanted the

plenitude of my allotted years. But that is up to God. It is not why I bought my

little acre. Nor did I feel the lure of the land in terms of crops or cash or

even the honor of the appellation. I never was going to be an authentic farmer.

Let me explain. My father died after 30 years of service in the national

prison system, where he did time as a prison guard and then a minor functionary.

But long before working in the prisons, as a young man, he had farmed in a

little village near the town of San Juan, Batangas. He was a sharecropper.

Somebody else owned the land, and he helped till it in return for a part of the

crop. He plowed the field with all his heart, but at the end of the season all

that he got was several cavans of rice.

So like most other young men of the poor families of that time, he left

his native village and tried his luck in a faraway province, in the Bicol

region, where he worked in the copper mines. Just before the war he worked as en cargado, or manager, in a big estate, this time back in our own

region, in the province of Laguna. Finally he ended up working in the prisons.

It was a rough life. When I began working in the city in public relations, the

newspapers were filled with reports of young punks making mayhem as pseudo

gangsters. The punks never impressed me. As a child I'd seen the real stuff in

the prisons, death-row convicts in orange uniforms that had the figure of the

black cross on the back, walking to the communion rail in our prison chapel.

All this time my father never stopped thinking about his birthplace.

Every year until the end of his life, he would go back to the barrio of

Palahanan. He would tell his cousins, I want to come back here, I want to plant

rice and things in my own small place here.

His life never gave him that opportunity. My father belonged to that

worldwide tribe of migrants who get up at the break of day to ride a bus out

into the provinces to see relatives whose numbers dwindle from year to year

until there are only a handful of them. He would insist that they too come for a

visit, and they would, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. There are many

like my father who spend 40 or 50 years in one place and still dream of going

home, back to the village that might have disappeared from the map or from other

people's memories, but not from theirs. All his life, my father pined for his

San Juan.

Now I have this piece of land in memory of my father. It is years since

we bought it, but I have only just recently begun planting it with mango and

vegetables, rice and beans, often without success. I named the land after Lulu,

who adores it, but it is really in remembrance of him.

Now the place is beginning to bloom. There is a cottage on it. The mango

saplings are growing branches, there are four neem trees from India, which the

giftgiver assures us will work miracles. There are many kinds of vegetables and

beans, as well as mahogany trees.

As we were building the cottage, old men ambled over to us and said to

me, indeed you are his son. They revealed small but vivid details about the

young man who went away. They described the way he lacked diffidence, or the way

he talked of stealing away to foreign lands. Now that I have settled here I plan

to seek out my father's cousins, the last half a dozen or so, to pay my

respects.

Even though I myself didn't grow up on this land, I know how to work it.

When I was growing up, the national prison reservation was a paradise of garden

plots. We grew radish, eggplants, cabbage, mongo beans, tubers, roses and

daisies. We children tended these plots in school and at home, helped along by

our teachers.

But for gardening I favored the guidance of the prisoners. The most

skilled were the Chinese inmates. What exquisite gardens they fashioned, robust

green plants on perfectly straight plots just outside their cells! From them I

learned how to punch holes in a tin can for watering plants, and for fertilizer

to apply horse manure from the animals that drew the calesas,

because that was before the time of the jeepney and the pedicab.

One of the first acts of love I performed for my family was offering

them those fresh crops from my gardens. And now much of what I harvest from my

Batangas farm will be given away to friends, or donated to some project for

other people. As for the mangos, with more than a couple hundred of these trees

yielding fruit in three years or so, my brother in law assures me I will have

some figures to tote up.

I don't care about the money, however. My farm calls me for other

reasons. I have a hoard of Marcel Proust, Federico Garcia Lorca and Anna

Akhmatova, and I will search amazon.com for all the Bella Akhmadulina that they

have. I will invite my old friends from the public relations trade to help me

make an oral history of PR practice in my country, or do a bit of pro-bono work

that might help San Juan win investors for its tourism-oriented projects based

on its fine sand beaches.

But mostly I will read. My decades of work have earned me this right, to

read without shame. In our house in the city and in the office, I was always

starting on two or three books, but I would end up finishing just one in half a

year. In our cottage on the farm, I shall be brazen, after planting and weeding,

delighting over Rizal, Balagtas, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, Pasternak--whose

Dr. Zhivago I translated to Tagalog when I was 21--Saint Augustine, all the

letters that have been written to me over the decades, all the histories that I

can lay my hands on of Batangas and its people.

When she began college years ago, my daughter said, please keep your

farm for me, I shall put up an orphanage on it. In college she was chairperson

of a Catholic organization that helps minister to orphans, children who are

terminally ill, cancer patients, and slum dwellers. I believe her when she says

she wants to make use of this land in the service of others.

She has just begun working for our firm, and is teaming up with her

mother, a sociology major and professional manager, in setting up a small

foundation working for the advocacy of the Filipino family. Our son, who,

uninvited, began working for our firm when he graduated from college five years

ago, is completely quiet about the land. I do not want to prejudge him.

My years with corporations are numbered. In time, I will stop receiving

letters, e-mails and phone calls that make me feel more important than I am. I

will have to yield the corner office to somebody else, who I pray will be my

son. I am exhilarated by that prospect.

I shall be ready to retire. The process begins with pondering what your

diminished powers will allow you to do. You plot it out with care, never in

fear, always in hope that the end of a career, such as it is, will mark the

start of another joyful life. In my case, I will try to do some good, but I

would like to do it on and with the land. The land totally enchants me. The land

has many voices, and one of them could be that of my father. Now they will ring

truer because they will be speaking to me when I, at last, will be ready to try

to understand what they mean.

please follow instructions below and nicely reformat, for my blog, etc. thanks!

Listening to the Land

Asian Wall Street Journal, July 2-3, 1999

By ROMEO P. VIRTUSIO

"Your husband is going to live a long life," Dr. Dioscoro Umali told my