Migs Bassig

Show me a McDonald’s that’s more than a few hundred metres away from a Jollibee. I’d be very shocked if you can. These two fast-food chains, they are so ferociously in love with each other. And here in Manila their inseparability stands as the marriage between American-style junk food and the Philippine taste for the happy and the sweet. As in any marriage, it’s not without a tinge of jealousy and competition.

But there they are anyway, as close as close can get, always within walking distance from each other, and their store fronts always alive and bright and arresting our attention with the antidepressant colours of red, yellow, white, orange, and purple, turning sandwich stores into pop art and opening their doors to serve us on Jupiter Street and Makati Avenue in Makati, on Retiro in Quezon City, on Quezon Avenue, on Greenmeadows and C5 in Libis, on Tomas Morato Avenue, Banawe Street, Katipunan, Commonwealth Avenue (in front of PhilCoA), E. Rodriguez, Kamias Extension, at the basement of EDSA Shangri-La mall, or of every shopping mall in Manila for that matter, strategically in front of high schools, colleges, and universities, and along major highways both north and south of the city.

And they are firmly fixed, too, in our lingo of merienda. Or lunch break. Breakfast. Dinner. How many times have Filipinos been caught in this swirling debate of where to eat? McDonald’s or Jollibee? You’d think that, given their omnipresence, making a choice would be convenient. The slightest hunger pang is enough to set us off on another one of those eternal gastronomic dilemmas, bulleted by neon text on backlit menus. “I like the Cheeseburger Deluxe better than the Regular Yumburger with Cheese, so let’s go to McDo.” “I need my Chickenjoy fix, and besides I’ve got a Double Go Large coupon for the meal.” “The taste of pickles in the Quarterpounder is revolting.” “Why does the Amazing Aloha’s sauce remind me of Caladryl?” “No one beats Jollibee’s fries.” “No one beats McDo’s fries.” Ratata-tata we go, and sometimes over the generosity of staff members with sachets of ketchup.

I’m not even going to begin talking about the mascots and the TV commercials. Let’s leave the discussion of a lipsticked clown’s semiotics and the social cognitive powers of an egg-eyed bee to the scholars and gurus of consumer marketing. Me, when I fancy a Jolly Hotdog, I just go and look for a McDonald’s. And when I can’t find a McDonald’s, I just look for a Jollibee. One can’t go without the other, they are partners intertwined, they make love and war, our city is their battlefield, and in our tummies is where a honeymoon happens.

Grandmother died at the Philippine General Hospital last Tuesday at precisely 9:21 p.m. May she rest in peace.

When we arrived in the evening, a group of doctors and nurses had crowded round her bed at the ward to make her last a little longer. The males among them took turns performing CPR, while the females pronounced numbers and marked things on their papers. Bed Two had become a makeshift emergency room: green curtains demarcated grandmother from the rest, several pumps and machines were plugged in, and everyone became pregnant with repressed agitation. Although it wasn’t quite as chaotic an emergency as I had expected it to be, nothing made any sense still. Maybe few things ever do.

We stood there watching the ECG monitor, or rather I remember I did, while father made phone calls and mother whispered prayers. The lime-coloured waves were drawn like an outline of a strange valley, and I tried not to observe what my siblings were doing. The other patients looked on solemnly, with pertinent curiosity, forgetting perhaps for a moment their own afflictions and cancers and injuries while searching, as we all did, for signs, or a sign, of life from grandmother.

But she only lay frightfully on her bed – legs open, eyes closed, mouth agape, all kinds of tubes stuck into all parts of her body. Nothing in her position was voluntary; she was a limp figure, a shadow of her former, healthier self. When I watched over her the previous night, she still had not remembered my name (Gerry? Michael?), though at one point, when I least expected any movement, she suddenly grabbed me by the shoulder with her two hands and kissed my forehead. It was a tender kiss that made an even more tender smacking sound.

As I write this, I am waiting again – along with father, cousin Jacques, his wife Neslyn, and neighbourhood kid Reyboy – outside, at the parking lot of the hospital, waiting this time for St. Peter’s Memorial Services to come fetch the body of Hermogena Bassig which lies currently at the morgue. It has been almost four hours since she “expired”, but father explains that we should stay here. We can’t let the other funeral parlours rove the morgue and take grandmother away, since mother, who stopped paying installments to St. Peter’s last February, just might reactivate and regain hold of her policy upon the main office’s reconsideration. It’s a business the kind of which is most painstaking at a time when to a person all kinds of business seem trifling.

So we wait. The engine of our white Mazda van is turned off while we dry some tears. The one o’clock morning air swarms with an obscene amount of mosquitoes; thus I am forced to climb the vehicle’s roof, where insects are significantly scantier and the breeze is a bit cooler and where I can oversee the flow of late traffic along Taft Avenue. There’s also a vague neon skyline I see of a couple of Manila hotels. And when I lie down I see nothing but the twinkling collection of scattered scars in the vast sky.

It seems too romantic, even for a tragedy, and my thoughts drift to all kinds of directions; I am reminded of a scene from About Schmidt in which Jack Nicholson talks to his deceased wife while seated on the roof of his big trailer. Whereas in the movie, it is a shooting star from which Nicholson receives cosmic tidings, mine is brought by the fullest moon I’ve seen in my whole life. It is divinely bright, and it shines with a thick outer glow at a distance that seems delicately close. I try to forget that grandmother’s life is over, and to think instead that she is, with her toothless smile, watching us from above.

The rather dilettantish occasions I had showed up in at the Instituto Cervantes Manila near Taft Avenue were interjected with less sophisticated visits to the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), which is along Taft Avenue. We’d decided, you see, that grandmother needed urgent medical attention.

Last weekend I made an unfashionably late entrance to the cultural center for the World Book Day Open House, and tomorrow I am scheduled to see a concerto by a classical trio from Taiwan. (I am convinced that the best things in life are free!) Today, however, I – along with family – had to drive yet once more to the student-populated area of Manila, an area noteworthy for its ugly and beautiful honesty. Of course, traffic today was terrible as usual, and the buses belched black smoke as expected.

My first impression of PGH, upon our arrival, was that it didn’t look the same as before – ‘before’ meaning about two, three years ago when I went to visit a terminally-ill aunt; thick tarpaulin banners (all congratulatory) now hung about the edifice; large old-fashioned murals decorated the walls; old plaques had been wiped clean and new ones, installed. Even the windows were now of multi-colored stained glass with round patterns, as in church, or perhaps really after the effect of church.

Did we enter an insufficiently-funded museum by mistake? I made these observations as I pushed grandmother on her wheelchair, ever so carefully, as if we were in an old park at which the renewed scenery was to be taken note of, if not admired.

And it was convenient (at least to my wandering eyes) that the Department of Surgery was located at the southernmost wing; strolling past the other units, I peeped at the slightly opened doors to see the Neurology ICU, where blanket-covered patients were sleeping restfully alongside their harboring IV drips; and the Plastic Surgery Department, where, at its reception area, a framed painting of a naked woman’s back (very Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets) was displayed; the psychiatric wing I didn’t need to witness.

Wheeling grandmother farther, I saw that the interior of the charity wards had now been painted with a very gentle caramel, and this sharpened the view of human figures lying on the white beds with their disfigured arms, throbbing heads, bandaged feet, and bleeding noses. Initially, I did mistake the renovated wards as the pay wards, though of course the overpopulation of the above-described patients plainly indicated otherwise. It indicated ‘charity’.

Grandmother’s checkup was scheduled to take place at the periphery of Ward Six. It was almost in a separate wing, dark, isolated, with paint peeling off, broken schoolroom chairs, candy wrappers dancing with the yellow leaves on the cold floor, peanut shells, plastic bags, two stray black cats. (I have no idea why a hospital would have two stray black cats inside its premises, regardless of its being a government hospital. What if someone superstitious accidentally passed them by?) But everything was peaceful and quiet. Along the hallway, I sat dangerously on the steel ledge to regard the new playground below. They said it was a project of politician donors for specially-educated children.

Not long after, grandmother was called to one of the wing’s clinics, though she just as quickly emerged from a very brief consultation. She was finally to be confined. Resident doctor of Surgery Department was to be there shortly. Father made some phone calls while appearing to need a cigarette.

And so it was that we waited by this wing’s hallway for over four hours, waiting anxiously and furiously for a ‘Hazel’ to see to us and hand over grandmother’s admission orders, waiting as the sun set and the dirty wind blew, waiting while grandmother slept through the seconds and the minutes and the hours. For my own amusement, I had brought a book, but I fancied that it was a little depressing to be reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in such a setting. I managed only a few chapters.

And then at last! The papers! They had not forgotten us after all. Quickly we rose to find out where grandmother would be staying. Ward Six, they said; another charity ward with caramel walls. Jorgen, my prodigiously athletic cousin, lifted our still sleeping grandmother to her new bed, and immediately her adult diapers were refreshed. Of course we had to lift a blanket to cover the scene: the patients’ beds were no more than just about twenty-four inches apart, making a tincture of privacy impossible and leaving between these short gaps a humble white table where one could put things and small towels perhaps damp with alcohol and such. As with others’, several tiny cockroaches slyly and rapidly crawled on grandmother’s table. She didn’t notice, though. She slept all throughout the initial admission procedures, with her eyeglasses on, as if it made her see her dreams more clearly.

Tomorrow, after the concerto at Cervantes, I will be walking to the hospital to tend to grandmother. I believe this won’t cause any inconvenience to any party. I will read, the nurses will be by their stations, and grandmother will sleep. I’ll enjoy her company. And perhaps I too will cherish imagining her dreams – come what may.

From the red bed where she lay all day, she is being carried by my father and a housekeeper straight to the dinner table. Between both her armpits are the anchors of love. But it’s a discomfiting scene: an aged, wrinkled, silver-haired woman, in disheveled clothing and adult diapers; with a stainless steel cane on one hand and her beloved purse on the other; reciting rosaries in Latin one minute then denouncing her fate in a native dialect the next. Her pathetically feeble feet are all but amputated. I observe with a helpless gaze and listen from the shadows of the stairway.

This is my grandmother. Lola Nena. Her maiden name is Hermogena Saquing. She smoked cigars when she was younger.

They were once perfectly brown, her feet. But with the sudden siege of some debilitating disease – diabetes, blocked heart vessels, osteoarthritis, the toll of age, we still don’t know because the doctors haven’t completely figured it out yet – they had turned green. And then black. They resemble spoiled, hardened vegetables. The feet carry a heavy stench, too.

A wheelchair had been procured not more than a month ago, but we found out that grandmother was too weak to even allow herself to be lifted to the device’s seat. Her appetite has diminished; she has lost over forty pounds in less than half a year and the multi-colored pills seemed not to have helped any. All she eats is corn and cuchinta.

There have been nights when I sat here, at this very computer table, while everyone else slept, and she had cried out, Eddie, Eddie, help me, can you hear me, Eddie. It would be impossible for father to hear her, of course, with him sleeping upstairs and her managing only the faintest voice. Every single time I rushed over to her room, grandmother was sprawled on the floor wailing and waiting for Eddie.

Here now, here now. Are you going to the bathroom, Lola?

I was just on my way back. I thought nobody would hear me. Is that you, Eddie?

I’m going to carry you to your bed, okay? Then you’re going to be covered with your blanket and you’re going to go to sleep.

Thank you, Eddie. Good night.

It’s difficult to understand grandmother now, to say the least. The rest of us are embroiled in our attempts to make sense of her world. She asks for coffee all the time, always demanding a scalding cup in the middle of these summer days. And lately she has been having hallucinations, too. She had always mixed up her grandchildren’s names, like I went to become Francis and Josemaria became Miguel and so on and so forth. But now there’s an invisible child beside her daughter-in-law when they talk, and darkness in the brightly lit living room, and her husband – my late grandfather – appearing and waving at her during strange, esoteric moments.

Last week, on the morning of her eighty-ninth birthday, I saw grandmother sitting outside on a wooden bench under the shade of our tamarind tree. Just then a mustached taho vendor appeared, plying his trade in our street with an advertising howl. I bought a ten-peso cup, then stirred the bean curd, the tapioca balls, and the sugar syrup in much the manner of someone who meticulously wraps the only gift he can afford for a loved one.

Happy birthday, Lola. Now finish this here; it’s good for you.

Is that you, Miguel?

Yes, it’s me.

I greeted her again and ran my fingers through her silver hair. Using her free hand, grandmother took off her foggy spectacles. I saw that she wanted to wipe the tears that glazed her eyes. She appeared embarrassed. I didn’t know by what.

The sun in the morning of her birthday had diffused into twilight, and so, of course, as in the following mornings and those to come. Just as determinedly, however, I am not going to be counting her days.

I feel like an expatriate. Or I may be feeling like an expatriate soon.

Ha. And this very possibility is something I am surely bound to romanticize, given my admiration for a Hemingway, or a Henry James, or a Janet Flanner – literary figures whose careers flourished outside America, their home country. Not that I am leaving the Philippines –my home country– for greener pastures or a Parisian adventure; nothing as international and extravagantly operatic as that; more humbly, and on a smaller scale, I might move away from my home city, the place where I grew up and have lived my whole life.

From “Our Man in Manila” the title of my column here at Live in the Philippines is being threatened with a slight paraphrase: “Our Man from Manila.” From my northern suburban abode I may soon settle in a blessed island down south. 

Nothing has yet been made certain; everything stands as unofficial. I am still wrestling –mightily, too, I might add– with the question of whether or not I should move. But as to how and why the question is being asked in the first place, well – like in the case of some expat friends whom I know had moved to the Philippines owing to romantic accidents, I met someone. I met someone special, and wonderful, and golden, someone who has utterly rocked my former artlessly bachelor world but who lives several hundred kilometres away from it – in Davao City.

This should explain my capricious whereabouts, my flying back and forth, to Davao then Manila then to Davao again: a vicious cycle of budget airline tickets, turbulence, and flights before dawn. The distance is inconvenient but not impossible. One week, I am chasing the MRT train on my way to a client meeting; the next, I am walking leisurely amidst the fake conifers and sunken gardens of People’s Park – a city rat slowed down by the provincial, tranquil commonplace. I wonder if I shall soon find solid ground in the place where I discovered such unplanned joy, such serendipitous affairs.

While the adjustment that a strange land requires of a domestic traveller is not shockingly difficult compared to that required of foreign ones, it is also not insignificant. Oh, how many times I’ve pretended to understand the Visaya being spoken to me by Victoria Plaza Mall salesgirls and Basti’s Brew baristas. (“Sorry, hindi ko maintindihan, taga-Manila ako. Basta kulang ang sukli.”) The traffic-free roads still thrill me; the supposed “fast food” service still exasperates me. And until now it hasn’t sunken in, those seventy-five-peso movie tickets that cost just as much as a tumbler of popcorn in, say, Eastwood. Seventy-bloody-five! Now, there aren’t any IMAX theatres or cinemas with Globe Platinum Lazy Boy Seats, but I believe I can cope.

I have to, if I do decide to move. An expat’s transition, then: way too local though I may be, it is similar to what I am feeling. Unofficially.