ManilaMailDC.Net - Kalinangan

THE RUINS of Intramuros in the moonlight." That is how I remember it. And a disembodied voice, at first breaking the gloom in the shadows of the old ramparts far to my right, mourning over the ruined city, "the noble and ever loyal city," it said in the darkness of the walls. When the circle of the spotlight began to glow around him, slowly like a dimmer, I discerned the man, distant, on the edge of a parapet, haunched in his dark navy pea-jacket, reciting, almost chanting, to the night his elegy on Manila, "this dear city of our affection." It was a magical moment, dramatic, deeply moving, never to be forgotten.

That gala performance of Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, at the southeastern corner of the "Sunken Gardens" – what had been the moat of the old city, intra muros, of Manila – was memorable for many reasons. It left you with some self-understanding: the realization, at once painful yet liberating, that the consciousness of the Filipino artist reflected not so much a tradition as a history of broken beginnings – Anchises borne into a new civilization on the shoulders not of his son Aeneas but his own. Rather than futility, nevertheless, it conveyed hope, evoking the image of the phoenix rising out of its own ashes, more vibrant and more resolute. It also showed the Philippine theater at the time, in its many dimensions, at its most creative and exuberant. Nowhere did you feel the electricity more immediately than in the presence of the family Avellana: Bert, the director, his wife Daisy Hontiveros-Avellana who played Candida Marasigan, and Jose "Totoy" Avellana, a younger brother, who performed as Bitoy Camacho, the "singer" of the song of "remembering."

It was the first time too that I saw Tita Sarah, and she infuriated me so, the character she played, I mean. She carried the role of Pepang well, the eldest of the Marasigan women, married and “thoroughly modern” if you know what I mean: hardened, “ambitious” and “cynical,” pragmatic and utterly unsentimental. And I chastised her in my heart, Sarah’s Pepang, for her insensitivity to the values of her sisters. I had heard of Sarah Joaquin before – she was not yet Tita Sarah then: I began to call her Tita only after I married her niece, distant yes, perhaps beyond the second degree of consanguinity, but close, even affectionate. I knew of her as the mother of a friend from Father Reuter’s drama workshops at the Ateneo de Manila. She was making a name for herself as a performer and a teacher of dramatic arts, principally at Far Eastern University and, with the Avellanas, in the Barangay Theater Guild. My father had already mentioned her several times as one of his college friends at the University of the Philippines in the mid-nineteen-twenties. I did not then know of her versatility, her resiliency, her ability – and determination – to endure. That came later, through the years, after my wife Cristina and I visited occasionally with her, and she with us, more frequently in her waning years.

Tita Sarah fascinated us with her conversation. Inevitably her mid-morning visits with us extended through the lunch hour into the afternoon, not without moments of rest, a quick catnap sometimes or a brief siesta, enough to fuel her through further chats into the last hour before sundown. She always insisted on getting home before the dusk. The Tagalog she spoke was of Laguna, neither quite as heavily accented as that of Cavite and Batangas nor as recondite as that of Bulacan. Her Spanish was, without doubt, Castillian, and her English, American north-mid-Atlantic. Her voice was husky, yet never harsh, perfect for stage whispering, decorously modulated at all times. We often started our day together in a game with tarot cards – she preferred it this way because, she said, she needed a fresh mind to interpret the flow of the cards. She would play at reading our fortunes as she dealt them out. Always positive, her “prophecies” were often uplifting too. We would drift afterwards in and out of a wide range of topics and issues: the little known sub-branches of our family trees; the character of certain districts of Manila, Paco, San Miguel, San Juan del Monte, Sampaloc; the differences between the American and the European styles of sewing; the war years – World War II – and the Japanese occupation; the Eucharist and prayer; and, of course, literature and drama. Her discourse reflected the richness of her experience. Once, when she talked of the months she worked, upon her arrival in the United States, as a governess for an American family who lived on Observatory Circle in Washington, D.C., in my mind I could not but express wonder at the good luck of those children to have had her as their guide and guardian. Beneath her conversation you could sense a radical thrust toward elevating humanity as much in herself as in society. Tita Sarah breathed culture without superciliousness.

Culture, or, in Pilipino, kalinang?n, comes not with breeding, which conjures visions of test tubes and Petri dishes, but upbringing: you breed orchids perhaps and roses, a Seabiscuit or a Man o’ War. Persons, however, you bring up. Quality time with parents, that is how, perhaps, we may speak of it today. Caring! Kalinang?n, culture, at its very core is caring. As “agri-culture” denotes the care of the earth to make it yield its fruits all the more abundantly, so culture is the care of person and community. We do not often enough stress the point, but it is caring which drives us all, indeed, to cultivate the earth or elevate humanity. It is what provides the ground for our respect of land and personhood. Rooted as it ought to be in care for the humanity within us and in others, culture heightens sensibility at the very moment that it expands the mind. Light and warmth and taste, these are the stuff of culture: enlightenment for mind and will, empathy for the heart, and, for the imagination, sensitivity to form and structure. Everything else flows from it: the humility, the intellectual curiosity, the zeal for understanding and practical wisdom, the polish in speech and languages, the civility, the grace in mores and manners. Without caring nevertheless all refinement is diminished to conceit and affectation, and elegance, to artful arrogance.

Before she came under the tutelage of Father Hartke at the Department of Drama of the Catholic University of America, before she felt the influence of Professor Carlos P. Romulo at the liberal arts college of the University of the Philippines, even before she cultivated personal, social, and civic virtues through several years at the Centro Escolar de Señoritas of Manila, Tita Sarah had, in a real sense, been prepped for culture.

Her parents had seen to it. In her upbringing, they had laid the groundwork, as it were. Oh how she exalted life, from early childhood in the farm community of Sta. Cruz, Laguna, to retirement at the tree-lined country drive on the southern edge of the city of Falls Church in Virginia: in the living, at its most intense as in its routine moments, in the crises of commitments, the struggling with the infirmities of our “too too sullied flesh,” in the forgiving and the being forgiven, the raising of a family, the engaging in professions amid circumstances in sometimes turbulent flux. Through all these she sought goodness and found enlightenment. By the time of her passing in January 2002 a quiet blessedness had descended upon her. Like the Portrait’s Marasigan home in Intramuros, she had “resist[ed] the jungle” after all. In all her ninety-four years, her touch was grace to every one, a distinct joy to the communities that received her. For she cared.

by By Antonio V. Romualdez