And He Shall Call His Own By Name

Aunt Violeta lives on Cavalier Street. Somehow I always seem to forget that. Again, I had trouble remembering this when Joseph and I took a taxi there to meet Eduard. The driver was happy to let the meter tick. Joseph, I asked my cousin, do you remember which street they’re on? Maybe we should text Anchit. Of course, just like other minor and unexpected moments of salvation which we find occasion to celebrate everyday, by the time the North Fairview Homeowners Association welcomed us by way of a wooden poster stand, I remembered. Cavalier Street.

Eduard, by the way, is my cousin. Joseph is his younger brother. They are both Ascaños. Anchit is also a cousin of ours, the only son of Aunt Violeta and Uncle Perting. They are the Dungcas. My mother, Eduard and Joseph’s father (Uncle Joey), Aunt Violeta, and Aunt Josie are all siblings. Save for Aunt Violeta, the three were also on their way to Cavalier Street, via father’s white Mazda van, which was carrying five? six? seven people and a pile of aluminum foil-covered potluck dishes. They had to hold Grandma’s hand – the one without the rosary – as she pulled herself up and into the car, and they had to apologize to me and Joseph because there was no more space, guys, we think you ought to go ahead and hail a taxi as we cover this pancit palabok by the bilao.

So Joseph and I got ourselves a taxi. The fare eventually amounted to two hundred pesos. I had two hundred and fifty in my wallet, but – my PR instincts in full swing, not wanting to look cheap – I volunteered to pay. It was about five o’clock. I couldn’t really tell, but Joseph must have been excited. He lives and works in Tuguegarao, the capital city of the northern province of Cagayan where our parents grew up. We rarely see each other, and three years ago when family members who were living in Manila forgot to greet him on his birthday, he posted a Tagalog profanity as his instant messenger status.

Joseph rang the doorbell and we waited. I took a moment to look at the sky: to spot the stars and to contemplate the moon, which was, as I came to think of it, like a pale white slice of queso de bola on black granite kitchen countertop. If only my insides did not turn at the thought of meeting Eduard, I would have come up with a prettier metaphor. But nerves often get the best of us, don’t they, and it’s only when the feared times have come to pass that we stop to think how – well, how prettier, how slower, everything might have been had we mustered a bit more courage.

The gate was opened by a maid I had not met and who let us in without asking who we were. We walked into the room where family gatherings were normally held, a kind of parlor where one could look out at the children’s playground and the birdcages and which was furnished with gravely varnished wooden benches that looked like Biblical tablets on which Moses could carve modern-day commandments. The long dinner table was clothed, on it a stack of clean plates, and the aroma of garlic from the kitchen was pleasant, like a happy memory imposing itself here and now. Here and now: why not? The Dungca residence is one I have long come to associate with buffet trays, bedroom rugs, marble statues, and bad housekeeper retention. It’s a comfortable home, and it’s an uncontroversial family, and we – the rest of us – we all held an unspoken view that the Dungcas had money and things, much more than we did, so it was only natural that when members of the clan – the Dungcas, the Ascaños, the Caguioas, the Bassigs – planned on getting together, the venue was invariably North Fairview.

Eduard, of course, was also close to Anchit – still is. They are like brothers. Before they took dates seriously, before their dates became girlfriends, before their girlfriends became their wives, and before their wives became the mothers of their children, Eduard and Anchit spent weekends lifting weights at the basement of the Dungca residence. Or they rocked and rolled. Their band featured, if I am not mistaken, Eduard on percussions and Anchit on bass guitar, plus a couple of cool neighborhood dudes with musical inclination. I used to always want to join in, but all I had rehearsed then were (pre-emancipation) Mariah Carey’s singles and soundtracks to Miss Saigon and The Prince of Tides. These days, either Eduard or Anchit would wake up early in the morning to compensate for the time zone difference between Winston-Salem and Quezon City, and then they’d hunker down in front of Web cameras with cans of beer, pangs of nostalgia, and a saccharine fondness for the good old days.

We were sending Eduard off. It was going to be my first time to see him again, and yet we were already sending him off. He arrived two weeks earlier, and he was scheduled to leave the next day. He’d already seen and hugged most of us. Had I not been out of town and out of touch, I would have been able to show up for cocktails at Bagaberde, lounge with a group of our-generation-only relatives at Timog Avenue, witness a carnivorous midnight show somewhere along the shadowed areas of Quezon Avenue. But I was unavailable, intentionally. Nerves.

I had often looked back at when I last saw Eduard. It was six years ago. From Tuguegarao he flew to Manila, stayed at our house in Santa Mesa Heights for a week, and, on the day of his flight to America, hugged us all, out on the street, one by one, the Ascaños, the Caguioas, the Bassigs, even the housekeepers, Lisa and Joecy. Bye, Miguel, he whispered when it was my turn, and oddly, despite the fact that we never really knew each other, I struggled to choke back tears. Then he climbed into the front passenger seat of father’s white Mazda van and closed the door. His luggage filled the space at the back. As the car began to pull away, I caught my cousin’s reflection in the side mirror. He, too, was looking at mine, or at ours, those of us who were left standing there. We grew smaller, and so did Eduard, his face shrinking slowly into a glint of light on a sad afternoon and then disappearing as the van turned a corner.

Eduard was last to arrive at his party. I thought I heard that he had been shopping with Anchit. Joseph, quietly eager, rose from our table to give his brother a hug; they had seen each other only the day before. Then I went to hug Eduard, too. We were blocking the buffet table. How are you, he said to me, and I almost said, I’m sorry I didn’t see you earlier. You should be taking good care of yourself, he then added. And we talked briefly about his shaved head and my weight loss, his daughter and my recent whereabouts, all about the present stuff, nothing about the good old days and nothing about what would happen tomorrow.