On December 11, 2007, I visited my mother’s birthplace. It was the first time, so I requested Rita to accompany me. From Carmen, we traveled to Bugho.
Rita called out and the bus stopped at junction Bonbon. It was past ten o’clock in the morning. We haggled and got a ride to Sito Hiplica but at Bugho Elementary School, more than a kilometer away, Rita insisted that we proceed on foot. She was terrified by the motorbike ride on muddy and slippery road. I myself suffered cramps in my legs resulting from involuntary reaction to the waggling of the bike. The climbing and winding dirt road led us to the back of a blue-painted house at a hillside. We entered the fence off yard. An elderly man was working on what looked like a frame of a table. He was short and stocky. His brows wrinkled at the sight of a stranger, but broke a wide smile when Rita introduced me. We were ushered into the kitchen. Procopio introduced his wife, Benedicta, a short elderly woman with abundant black hair. Our gracious host served us a medley snack of ripe bananas, coffee, bread and rice cake. We started talking about our family lineages right in the kitchen. After the snack, we transferred to the living room.
A grandson was watching a movie from a 21-inch Panasonic TV nested at the carved molave divider. I noted that all the furniture in the house was of molave lumber, including the wooden sofa I was sitting. A man of Procopio’s built but much younger emerged from a room upstairs. The bungalow had two upstairs bedrooms, two downstairs bedrooms facing the living room and a master’s bedroom accessible through the dining room.
“Pito,” his father beckoned, “meet our visitor from Mindanao.”
“Welcome.”
Pito descended the stairs. He took my hand and called his wife who nodded to me in acknowledgment. Both of them were dressing up.
“Sorry, but we’re going out to the fiesta at Lita’s town. See you later.”
“Be careful of the motorbike ride,” his father called out as the couple exited through the dining room.
“It’s good that you came.” Benedicta took a seat near her husband. “At last somebody can claim your mother’s share from the sale of their land. All the others had taken their P60.”
I was not surprised about the money and the minuscule amount since Rita had told me about it.
“Well, I’ll gladly take it.”
I’ll keep the money as a souvenir. Sixty pesos can only pay for a round trip to Carmen.
“My father, Rufino Dante, bought the land.”
“When could that be?” I inquired. The sale could give me an idea of the year my mother’s family left the place.
“I can’t recall. It was a long time ago.” She glanced at her husband but Procopio was of no help there.
“You met my mother?” I asked Procopio.
Yes. But I was still very young then.”
“How old?”
“I was in grade school.”
I made some mental calculations. My mother was married in Carmen in 1944. So they must have transferred to Carmen anywhere from 1940 to1943. Was the land sold when the family left the place? (Postscript: I was able to establish the year of the sale, or thought I did, when I went to Kibawe to get Engrasio’s birth certificate. Lucia told me that his father visited Bohol in 1967, shortly after the death of his father’s father. The family of Blas migrated to Mindanao in 1961. His widowed father, Santiago, followed him in Kibawe in 1965).
We dispersed. Benedicta went to the kitchen to prepare lunch and Procopio continued his put off carpentry work. I stepped out and surveyed the surroundings. The two concrete water tanks that store rainwater couched near the cliff side of the building. From the roof gutter two tentacles of downspouts reached out to the water catchments. The front yard was matted with Bermuda grass and littered with wood poles bearing vandas and dendrobiums. A mix of bamboos, coconuts and forest trees lined the hill that overlooked the house. Outside the fence downside, stood the old family house. The wood structure had elevated flooring. Near it was a copra dryer, a creeping building darken with soot. Farther down the sloping land, I saw patches of bare rice paddies. Across the paddies was a backdrop of ascending land blanketed by trees and other vegetation.
We ate our lunch at a long table made of a single slab of lumber. Rita was not with us. He left before lunchtime, explaining that she had to take care of his tethered animals.
“This is antique,” Procopio explained. “The lumber is hand-sawed nipotnipot tree logged from a very deep gully. It took several days and many hands to bring the lumber to the top. This is one of the three tables from that nipotnipot tree. ”
“Nipotnipot tree? What is it?”
“This tree is now very rare but I have one near the house which I’ll show to you later. The tree is spread-seeded by hornbills we called kalaw and tausi.”
“This could be very old.”
“Yes. A hundred years. I inherited it from my parents.”
This table is an unusual heirloom, I mused. Quite massive and four meters long.
“In Bukidnon, antique furniture curved out of weathered tugas stumps and roots are quite expensive. How much would this sell?”
“Several years ago a collector offered P150,000. But I would not part it for money.”
I learned more about the couple as we talked over lunch. Procopio Salabsab Balbin was born on July 8, 1931; Benedicta Solena Dante on May 6, 1935. The Dantes were distantly related to the Salabsabs, so the two shared a thin bloodline. As US pensioners, having worked as janitors in Guam, the couple received a combined monthly pension of $600. They also derived income from their lands, mostly out of copra sales. A daughter, Perlita, was working as a domestic helper in Denmark, Europe. Agapito was the elder of their two living siblings.
At dinner we talked about the local fiestas and celebrations as we feasted on fares of carabeef and pork brought home by the couple Agapito and Lita. The time-honored tradition of giving out “bring house” food to fiesta guests is still practiced in Loboc, in fact in all places in Bohol. It could be cooked food or raw meat or both, depending on the capacity of the hosts. Nobody leaves empty handed.
“No fiesta is noteworthy without carabao meat so clusters of households contribute to a common fund to buy carabaos. The meat, entrails and skin are shared equally,” Procopio started the topic.
“Where do you get your carabaos. There is limited pasture here,” I asked, thinking of the “Carabao Act of 1992”, the lone legislative initiative of the then Senator Joseph Estrada.
“From other towns. And from Mindanao.”
The Boholanos are fortunate, I reflected. Mindanaoans prefer cows.
“How many carabaos?”
“Here, not less than three.”
“Families from different parishes also take turn in contributing hard drinks,” Agapito chipped in.
“Come here next December or January so you can see our Suroy sa Musikero,” Lita suggested. “The revelry is celebrated from December 25 to February 2. The home-grown band, equipped with trombones, percussions, bass horns, clarinets and trumpets, would make their daily rounds to play music and eat the food served by the hosts. The band would visit all their assigned hosts. We are one of the hosts. This is also the time when carolers render Christmas songs to the families in their designated areas.”
“The town also celebrates the ‘Feast of the Beloved Virgin of Guadalupe’ from May 15-24,” Agapito added. “This festival includes a pluvial parade at the Loboc River. Then there is the Feast of St. Peter in June 29.”
“I would like my children and grandchildren to visit Bohol in the near future.”
“You are always welcome here.”
“What happened to that unfinished bridge?” I deflected, remembering the town’s famous white elephant.
“The construction was stopped when the parishioners protested,” Agapito volunteered. “Cracks appeared on the walls of the church due to the heavy pounding. The works began in the twilight of Martial Law.”
Sounds familiar, I thought, remembering the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Plant, the county’s biggest white elephant.
Procopio, who was remarkably sprightly for his age, led the route of muddy trail. In about thirty minutes, we reached the lot once owned by my grandparents, a predominantly rolling upland with patches of flat areas. Creeping weeds, upright grasses and shrubs and netted brambles overran the low and level areas. Young second growth forest mantled the hilly areas. Procopio pointed to me an elevated spot where my grandparents’ house once stood. A closely-knit growth of trees had erased any telltale sign of habitation. He identified the trees to me: molave, paleta, badbaran, mapsa, tipoo, tagibokbok and hambabawod. These were the trees that I saw in the second growth forest in the neighborhoods of the man-made forest of Bilar.
“What crops did my grandparents plant?”
“Rice, corn, yam and taro.”
On our way back, we struck a conversation with Fructuoso Legaspi, 84 years old, who knew my mother. He was seated at the porch, hunched on a bench. He invited us to come up but we begged off since we did not have much time. I was leaving for Tagbilaran City. The path that passed near his elevated house was on the level of the porch so we remained standing at the hillside.
“Your mother studied at the Bonbon, now Bugho Elementary School, but I can’t remember if she graduated there or not.”
“How did my mother look?” I asked.
“Petite. Cute.”
“One who can easily fit a dress,” Procopio added. “That’s what I heard from my parents.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
As we hiked the remaining route, I visualized my youthful mother in her inexpensive but well-fitting dress, happily trudging the trails going to school, to church and to fiesta dances in open courts. I saw her beaming with joy as she swayed to the beats of Kuradang and Dalaga sa Baybayon played by the town musicians. I saw her as one of the carolers singing songs of the savior’s nativity with that meekness of heart and expectant faith wanting in these times of crash materialism.
It is said that when early missionary fathers came to this inland village, they approached a villager who was pounding rice. They asked for the name of the village. Assuming that he was asked what he was doing, he replied, “ga loboc”. Thus, the place was called Loboc.
I left the town world famous for its tarsier, the world’s smallest primate, with my heart pounding with joy at having finally visited the birthplace of my mother.
