Marlon’s World

First, the news. I’m in Spain already… which isn’t quite a news when you think about it, given that I’ve made so big a deal with this scholarship and all, and I half-suspect that I’m boring you to smithereens with the sordid details of the trip.

I’ve been meaning to write for so long, but no words would come out. That’s the case with me, I guess: Unlike other writers, I don’t blossom with stress. I am crushed with stress. I often find myself beginning a paragraph, only to end at mid-sentence, staring blankly at the monitor and ending up with a whiny hodgepodge. 

What to write, that’s the question. I’ve grown sick of writing about politics. It pains me that in the Philippines nowadays, commentaries end up as commentaries. Corruption stinks under our noses and still we prefer to savor the smell.

I’ve grown sick of writing about lifestyle either. In the end, no one can dictate how people should live their lives. People in Spain wear Zara, Benetton, Lacoste (a bargain if you could find one for 50 euros), but they don’t take a bath often. I, on the other hand, have a UP Maroon shirt that cost just around 180 (roughly 3 euros) pesos, but at least I take a bath daily and apply conditioner on my hair. The freezing cold can damage it, you know.

I’ve also grown tired of writing reviews on TV and movies and whatnot. When the person that appears on TV begins talking about kings and princes, and the favorite sport has now become futbol, you know you’re in a different universe completely detached from the one you used to live in. Besides, if I would watch, say, Harry Potter here, the price I would pay would be equivalent to a good meal in a restaurant, or two breakfasts of hot chocolate and churros. Multiply this price four times and you can buy a compilation of Pablo Neruda’s poems. And this I would shell out to watch Daniel Radcliffe speak in Spanish? 

So I rather write about dinner. I just ate dinner, by the way. The word "dinner," of course, is used in this context only as a reference to the time I ate the meal and not to what I ate. Should you bother to ask, it’s three pieces of sliced bread, a couple of shavings of Iberian ham, three sour gherkins, an orange and a glass of milk. In short, the meal was somewhere between breakfast and a half-crazed moron’s diet. Then I begin imagining all those OFWs who scrimp on and even forego dinners just to be able to send something back home. Probably, even for them, three pieces of cucumber would be luxury. 

On good nights, I eat with friends in a Chinese restaurant. We almost always eat rice. All those scenes from childhood of my grandmothers and my mother telling me to eat everything to the last grain come back haunting me. When you have so little, every morsel counts. Then it hits me: what if one doesn’t have even a little to begin with? What morsel is there to count? I saw Spaniards who are poor, who manage to go on living by picking up the leftovers that cafeterias throw away: a man, well-groomed, passed by a bakery, rummaged through the pile of refuse, picked out a loaf of hard bread, wiped off the dirt, put it under his coat and went away. But what’s there to rummage in Payatas?       

Spaniards who have grown fascinated with the Philippine diet (and have had enough guts to approach me) asked how Filipinos eat. I said, "eat Chinese today, then eat Spanish tomorrow, then eat American the next day…" Then they asked me about history, about language, about politics. It seems that the world knows nothing of us, and if ever they know something, it would always begin with, "So, how’s your country doing now?"

A Filipina nurse who is married to a Spaniard invited my friends and me to dinner. She beamed with Filipino pride and the night was spent in rekindling the flames for the country she long misses. With us were Augustinian nuns and for a brief moment, I imagined being transported back to Bulacan, where dinner tables are filled with laughter and smoking is definitely prohibited during meals, where people plate-hop and pick out food from their neighbors, where the hostess is the star of the show. Only when I realized that the patis and suka were nowhere to be found did I stop my excursion to distant lands.

Then we chanced upon a Pinoy who now tutors Spaniards in English. He’d never live in the Philippines again, said he over a plate of white rice and improvised scrambled eggs with tomatoes. The country hasn’t been kind to him, I guess. With all the traffic, pollution, graft and corruption, one would be foolish to go back to the Philippines. Odd, for even if the rejection was apparent, he still savored his humble Filipino dinner with gusto as I sat in front of him, listening to his erudite commentaries on lumpiang togue.   ###