Mercado: Carol thieves, bullies

Saturday, November 26, 2011

SILENT Night is my favorite carol,” says our grand-daughter Kathie, 5. “I also like Kasadya Ning Takna-a,” adds her sister Kristin, 8.

Vicente D. Rubi composed “Kasadya” for the 1933 Cebu Carnival. Mariano Vestil scribbled the lyrics. Their daygon won hands down. A Manila recording company, in 1937, hijacked the carol into the Tagalog “Ang Pasko ay Sumapit” on a P150 down payment.

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Until his death in 1980, impoverished widower “Nong Inting” would shuffle to his door and teach startled carolers-—oftentimes kids banging bottle-cap tambourines-–how to sing his daygon.

In 2004, lyricist Vestil went to his grave, with only an inside-page-below-the-fold newspaper obituary, as credit. Tiene cara de hambre, the orphan tells the Crucified in the movie classic: “Marcelino, Pan Y Vino.”

“This is a country that boasts of the longest celebration of Christmas,” Bulletin columnist Jullie Yap Daza wrote in a 1978 Times Journal column. “(Yet) no effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol ‘Ang Pasko ay Sumapit’ to its composer: Vicente D. Rubi of Cebu.”

Indeed, carols are about a season that gives us “an array of luminous images that hint at all manner of annunciations,” the blasé New Yorker Magazine says.
Some go back, we’re told, to the 13th century. The old favorites endure: “Adeste Fildelis,” “O Holy Night” and others. But whatever happened to lilting Spanish carols like “Nacio, Nacio Pastores,” grey-haired “oldies” like us wonder.

Some recently tried to con a National Artist award for Rubi and Vestil’s daygon. That flies in the face of Christmas. But it’s par for the course in a country where a crass “elite” governs.

Then mayor Tomas Osmeña, for example, bullied thousands by blockading national government’s P7.6 billion six-lane Cebu South Coastal Road to spite Rep. Ed Gullas of the first district.

“He issued passes for a road his city does not own,” Sun.Star Cebu noted. "I will use that road only when it is open to all," Cardinal Ricardo Vidal said. The courts ended the bullying by ordering Osmeña: dismantle the blockade.

"Christmas is the only time I know of, in the long calendar year, when men and women seem, by one consent, to open their shut-up hearts freely," Charles Dickens wrote. "We must see people below us as if they were really fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Belated tribute of sorts came in 1981. Cebu Province and Cebu Arts Foundation adopted a citation for Rubi and Vestil’s, “priceless contribution to the enrichment of Cebu culture, in the field of music, through (the) deathless daygon: Kasayda Ning Taknaa.”

Some of Rubi’s unpublished songs are kept in a special box by daughter Ludvina Rubi-Navarro. “Some day, perhaps, (they’ll be published) to regale an audience more deserving of them.”

Christmas “array of luminous images” is “a happening for the deepest heart,” writes theologian Catalino Arevalo SJ. “It is looking at a Son who was born for us, who’d die for us, because we mattered to him, because we are infinitely cherished.…At the crib, the first task is to look, and looking to adore. Venite adoremus, the Latin carol says. “Come let us adore him.” “And the 1861 (?) carol says of the little town of Bethelhem: The hopes and fears of all the years/ Are met in thee tonight.”

Indeed, the unique grace of Christmas is that both carol writer and carol thief, bully and bullied, can say, together with kings and shepherds: “Let us go to Bethlehem and see what the Lord has made known to us.”

(juanlmercado@gmail.com)