IT'S always a pleasant surprise when one’s been found out.
A complete stranger. A passerby. The girl who sells siomai in a stall. A friend of a friend of a friend. Who by some keen sense of body language, or some sharp ear for tune and tone, speaks to you, from out of nowhere, sometimes even in a foreign city, in Cebuano.
As if a sudden secret’s been had, or an intimate possession ‘s been furled out into the open for the rest of the world to see, having a nameplate one forgets one’s clipped to the chest and to be first surprised, then relieved, that one’s name’s been called by a stranger. Bisaya ka ‘no? Just when you’ve thought you’d gone past the wide and deep cultural radar of: are you one of us or not?
This time around it’s the secretary from one’s department, that I’ve talked to before, worked with even, knew by virtue of this errand or that project, by name but not much more, who decides this morning, when the office is empty, and no one is there to overhear or intrude, to speak to you (who would have known!) in Cebuano.
And already a whole landscape’s revealed: you and Cebu, she and Davao, and the setting of this sudden and intimate encounter, land of the many and the lost and the mixed and the mixing and the slow and the congested and the everyone’s-just-passing-through-here tabi-tabi: Manila.
Unya kumusta ang mga bata sa workshop? She asks.
For the past few days, you see, I’ve been handling a workshop that in only the previous month I had the chance to give in Cebu, and now she was wondering if it was any different.
I say “They’re the same” of course “Pareha ra man”. Although sensing that she’s not content with my answer, I add, but only after a while, “They’re a bit harder to warm up to, and they keep to themselves, and although it’s just the first few days, it seems as if it will take such great effort or more time for them to open up and be friends.”
Which means, really, that I have a feeling this has something to do with the place.
Although this is a bunch of young writers and writers aren’t exactly well-known to be the friendliest and warmest of people (sometimes preferring the odd corner to the room, the quiet space of the crowd, to read a book, or to think, or to just watch other people go by.)
And these are teenagers, most of them fifteen to seventeen, and it’s not exactly the age when we’re most comfortable with ourselves, much less strangers.
But I can’t help but think that this difficulty of warming up, this hesitation to laugh, tumble, make a fool of oneself could be because most of them are from the big city—where the chances of coming across strangers are infinitely higher than that of meeting a friend, where it takes hours to get places, days to plan meets, months on end to determine a proper “game plan” for either work or play, because there’s just so much else to be worried about: commute, and traffic, and finding in the midst of a crowd, a friendly face. What’s the use of telling someone your whole life story when the chances of you bumping into him or her again is close to nil.
Better just keep to oneself, lest the rest of the room thinks automatically that you’re for some reason or other “feeling close.” Better just stare at the page, empty for now and waiting to be written on, than another person’s face that just might look away. Here on the page, at least, one can risk spilling a secret, telling one’s life, without having to deal with the possibility of an immediate denial.
To tell the truth in a way that meeting a cold aloof stranger will never really allow. Maybe for that reason alone, more than any time in our lives we need poetry.