Hermogena’s Twilight, I

    Migs

September 21, 2008 by Migs  
Filed under Migs

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.

About the Author:  Migs Bassig is a freelance writer and journalist with a background in Mass Communications. After working for a Manila-based advertising agency, PR firm, and events organizer, he now contributes to various locally published magazines and newspapers, and is one of the authors of Metroblogging Manila. A suburbanite commuter, Migs has lived all his life in the Philippines and loves scouring the Philippine capital’s rich patina of arts and literature.