Ga

When Toning met Karina, he was 55 and about to retire. Long had he become oblivious to friends’ banters, ‘Magduda man sad ta nimo, Toning’ or ‘Napan-us na jud ka,Toning’. This, added with his sisters’ quiet sighs. ‘Nangapo nalang tawon mi, manong. Wala gyapon ka, sa imong kapilian’. Now, they just met him with quiet acceptance and concentrated on training him to become doting lolo to their apos instead.

That soon changed when he met Karina. She made budbud for the Borromeo family Toning also happened to be the odd-jobs man for. He didn’t know what it was about her that attracted. Perhaps it was her doughy arms that gracefully rose like waves when she rolled the rice into the banana leaves. Perhaps it was how the mole in her forehead frowned as well when she was concentrating on tying and bunching them up. Or perhaps it was the quiet way she said his name with a Spanish accent when they met each other in doorways. Toñing. Toñing. She would soon call out when they first made love.

Nevertheless, he soon found himself sharing his home to two grown-up stepchildren and Karina. The modest house was scrimped but that was the price to pay for family and for not growing old alone, he guessed. He soon got used to calling his two sons and Karina ‘Ga’ for Pangga, a term of endearment that was handier than anything else.

Soon enough too, he found out he would not retire after all. He had hoped to park his bike finally and join his friend, Oscar, when he retired at the end of the year as they planned. But that was before he got married. He could not now. His two stepchildren barely contributed even when they ate voraciously, consumed electricity on videoke and spent the most in the bulangans. Somehow he had the feeling he was always being mocked at his back by the two of them.

And Karina, who seemed to achieve what she set out to do in the first place, to marry for convenience, had made it a point to merge with the scenery again, caring for her now ailing mother. Sometimes, her unobtrusiveness surprised him, so much that he didn’t even look up when she was around anymore. All he saw these days was her mole that grew bigger with time.

‘Naunsa naman ka, Toning, oi’, friends ask. His hands quivered. His face wrinkled. His body like a single bamboo shoot on his rickety bike. He was getting old. But never mind. It was the price to pay for family and for not growing old alone. He will be 60 soon.

On that particular day, he had felt a little more nauseous than usual. High blood perhaps or anemia. His stepson was there, sitting on their wooden stairs. ‘Ga?’, he says softly. He did not know what happened before or in between then. All he knew was what he could feel. A turned shoulder. A slapped face. A hand holding both his cheeks. A sucked–in stomach from a blow. And a voice, drunk and lyrical.

‘Ga? Ga? Ga!? Ga?! Ayaw ko tawga ana ha! Unsa pa lang huna-huna’s tawo natong duha!’

Karina stood there in the window. Her mole outgrew her face. She did not say anything. Toning takes his bike, as bent as he was, and flees.

In the morning, he would collect his things, those that remained in a house that was no longer his, sifting through the pile that accumulated when the family started. He looks for a semblance of his old life. His grandchildrens’ outgrown toys. Old clothes left behind by Amang and Papa. His own. His collection of work hats. Photo albums from his childhood days and those with his bosses and fellow workers.

He finds one of the two of them, Oscar and him in their early 20s, building a fence, laughing in the sun. His finger runs through Oscar’s younger face when he was still wifeless and carefree, and perhaps partly his. His thumb makes an imprint on Oscar’s goatee, blurred by moisture, and discards it in the box.

Somehow, through everything, he forgets what exactly it was he had been looking for. This ultimately, was the price of family and for not growing old alone.

Premonition

What drew her most about riding in a public bus with its molded seats and the remaining stench of chicharon in the air was the semblance of someone else, no one in particular really, but someone having taken the same seat as the one she is seated in now. In her mind, they formed a string of people that fell on the same path as she did. Minutes before. Days before. Months before. And how, long after they were gone, they left pieces of themselves for her to find.

She would take the colored candy wrappers shoved in the crevices of the seat’s spine and roll it around until she reached her destination, hoping this would somehow give her premonition to who they were, where they are now.

At times, she would try to guess whose life it was she was holding this time. A ripped off cardboard with scribbled prices probably belonged to a meat vendor hurrying off to haggle for livestock. A cigarette butt inconsiderably extinguished to a bored college student who takes the bus to and from his town to the big city. Frayed Ben 10 stickers on the metal wall credited to an irate child squirming in his mother’s lap. She would scrutinize them and hold conversations in her head all the while making sure her bag was placed in the seat beside her, consuming space she did not want others to have.

When the bus was full and she’d be forced to move, she would stay near the window to avoid conversation, look at the sea and think about the old man whose handkerchief had been left on the clasp. Today was one of those days. When she should have taken a more comfortable V-Hire or a faster EasyRide but again chose not to. Somehow she knew somebody was gesturing for her to move her bag even before she looked up. She didn’t look up. It was in her experience that talkers usually have an open grin on their face at the very start and she’d long feared to look back lest they mistake it for rapport.

But he was not a talker. He looked past the aisles, past the window even, and stared at something he could only see. His key chains, the one that hung from his bag, lay partly on her thigh and smiled back at her. There was very little space to work with but he moved away nonetheless. She knew then he was afraid to touch skin just as much as she was.

Afraid. The little girl had been too. Years ago, in that beat-up green Dodge truck, she would sit between the mother who was driving, arms gripping wheels, and the father, elbow propped in the sill looking at the corrugated houses far off. There was no conversation. Only grunts. And passing the message back and forth. At least, they could not accuse her of playing favorites, she thought. To pass the time, she would fold her shoulders the smallest she could make them, imagining herself to be a collapsible table. Or move the glass beads of her bracelet back and forth until they reached home.

At the side of her eyes, the man had not moved. His elbows were propped on the seat. His hand moved back and forth to his ring finger, searching for something he could no longer touch. His head moved sideways, and for an instant, she thought he’d look at her but probably not. In the other side of the aisle, two lovers slept, bumping heads. In the front end, a teenager holding a box with a rooster inside drummed with his knuckles. The conductor counted tickets. Ongoing chatter by officemates on the back. And her, careening to the left. Him, pushing farthest right.

She was almost home. The glass beads played in her hands, its frayed nylon stretching as she took it off. For once, she would leave a piece for someone else to find.