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Sunday, December 19, 2004
Tabada: Malady of stories
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
I COLLECT stories. It must be true for every collector that the specimens sustaining the fixation are neither the most perfect nor the most admired. They happen to be the oddest.
What is more unusual than a story without an end? A poem can go without punctuation; a photograph, without a caption. But can there be a tale if it does not come to a full stop, respecting storytelling tradition, the finiteness of mortal attention, the economics of contracting space?
Is a story less worth the telling if it is beggared by questions?
I recently visited again a center where children abandoned by their parents are surrendered to the social welfare agency. Many of them, specially the infants, are eventually adopted. But a few move in with foster families when they become too old for the nursery. Some, with serious disabilities, are shuttled to institutions that will sponsor the expensive and tedious medical interventions improving or prolonging their lives.
For these flawed few, no fa-mily ever comes to bring them home for good.
When I found myself outside the nursery, I searched for a boy I saw, more than a year ago, dragging a leg thinner and shorter than the other and dressed only with an open, engaging smile. But I was told that Jan (not his real name) no longer fit in with his younger and smaller companions, and now lived with a temporary family until adoptive parents could be found for him. The sleeping form I spotted this time turned out to be another child with cerebral palsy.
Will someone ever come for Jan? I asked Jenny who ma-nages the facility.
By way of answering, Jenny told me about her grandmother’s sister who took in a girl, a foundling. Unlike orphans who charm even the stone-hearted, this foundling was difficult to love: soot-skinned, fiendish in temper. Jenny’s family pitied their relative all the more when the foundling grew up to become even more wayward, carrying on with many men when she was not being treated in psychiatric wards.
Two of those affairs gave her two boys, whom she left with her adoptive mother when another nervous fit or a new man took her away. In time, the boys learned to call the old woman “mama,” which only angered Jenny and her relatives. When the boys bleated for the old woman, her family shushed them up. Jenny herself taunted the boys that the woman they regarded as their mother was not even kadugo or igbaho (literally, of the same blood or odor, meaning a relative).
Then the old woman met an accident that left her bedridden.
No one except her “sons” cared for her, from the hospital to the grave. Even up to now, Jenny said, the boys still go home to Ronda every All Souls’ Day to clean her tombstone and light candles. For Jenny, their devotion remains the turning point for her as a person and as a social worker tending children cast aside by their own blood.
“You can’t say you immediately see the effect of dimalas (misfortune),” Jenny muttered as we stared at the palsied child sleeping. I remembered Jan’s smile and a story that has yet to finish.
(e-mail:gguu@lycos.com/text 09173226131)
(December 19, 2004 issue)
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