When I was in Grade 1 we had a white fluffy puppy. His name was Yen, just a couple of months old and born on New Year. A dog from the neighborhood bit his forehead. Perhaps it was rabies or just infection but the wound had become a puncture of pus. Yen kept on crying the way babies would cry when sick. Only difference is these were animal cries…The way sometimes we see people crying like animals. That sound. I had lifted his forehead and tried to make him drink a Wyeth antibiotic.
In the province, in Naga in the ‘80s, there were really no animal clinics…Animal clinics like children’s clinics… So there I was crying, a child crying like an animal. Mommy had come out into the backyard and looked at me, asked, “Why are you crying?” I had ignored her, thinking that she was a cold-hearted idiot the way I had always thought of her at that age and even years after. She knew, felt, that her alien child--- too intelligent and knowing--- thought that.
She left me alone. I watched and stayed with Yen until he died. He was screaming and then the scream was just cut off. And after I never touched another animal again. Though I had buried Ribbon--- our cat--- in our backyard when she died years after. I don’t remember if she was run over or a snake had bitten her. I would put flowers I would pick from the subdivision on her grave everyday. I had buried her and she was still soft. I had buried Yen, too. He had still felt soft.
When Brownie, my dad’s dog, died years later of old age, Daddy was the one who buried him. I had watched Brownie die and sat by him as he was dying--- made him drink water when he could no longer move and was gasping. One day I woke up and he was no longer there. They did not say but Daddy took care of the body. Brownie whom I had cradled and kept calm in that jeepney when we moved to Naga from Iriga. Brownie whom I and my siblings had resented when he would get home faster than we did when Daddy would whistle for us to come home from playtime with the neighborhood kids. Daddy would beat us if were late. Brownie who had recognized Daddy first before we did when he finally came home from the States just after the ’86 Revolution.
We stopped having pets after... After Mel-May died and there was even a Blackie. No cats either, those cats that would sleep on top of the TV and swing their tails in front of the screen. We stopped having pets and those were the most violent of years and the violence is still remembered by me.
Until 2001 in our apartment in Masikap and it was a Saturday and there was a stray mix Spitz dog whom nobody seemed to own. Daddy had knocked on doors down the street onto the next and the next blocks looking for her owner. She stayed with us and it took a while before I even petted her. It was storming then and we took her inside. She made everyone in the family kinder: we are of fierce and angry blood, gentled then by her and hence more forgiving now.
Daddy, ever the realist, named her Saturday and Saturday’s second litter was born with congenital diseases. This was in 2004: we took them all to the animal clinic in Kalayaan, like children. They were my children--- the children of a young woman whom the doctors said should have children to be saved from cancer, whom could not conceive. One by one we took them to the clinic, hoping they would be saved. Hope. It took time. No one left the clinic and one by one they died. I was thinking that they died alone and I was not there to sit by them. No one should die alone. One by one they were taken home and we buried them in the yard. They were all stiff. One by one they made me accept grief from genetics.
Mommy had said then that if they could, then the family should bury them without my knowing. Mig paratangis naman. Like she had with Yen. And I would go farther away and may never come back. Mommy had fretted and had been a comforting strength when I had called her weeping.
The last ones who died had yet to be claimed. I did not have the money and I was waiting for my salary from my first full-time job. It had paid 10 000 pesos gross from teaching almost 8 straight hours a day these desperate nurses and employees and children and high school kids and college kids and parents and all kinds of students in 48 hours a week. The money came but I had learned that the bodies had already been claimed and were already buried.
The young man who had loved me had done that. And I had hated him for his love that had wanted to shield me from more pain, wept with the futility of enduring those painful hours of teaching. I had asked where the bodies were buried. None of them knew that I dug them up one night to see them. To see as a fact that they were dead.
And on October 16 2009, my cat Thirdy, just past one year, fell from our home on the 12th floor. I thought that he would already be dead as I was accompanied by the guard who had informed me that a cat fell and was taking me to where he was. He was still alive, thrashing and “clawing for air” was right there and I was seeing it.
I was told not to touch him but I did. Only then did he become still. I had stroked him, murmured soothing sounds the way you would to an ill child--- no hope they said and the cold core in me knew it but still I hoped--- until he began bleeding out and stopped breathing. I watched and felt that last breath. It all only took seconds, maybe 3-5 minutes. I had wiped the blood from his nose and white fur with my daster before my sisters and brother could come and see him. Before his daddy could see him.
There were 9 people I was supposed to post-test that morning and I did: not all were certified but all were eventually hired. I lost my wallet inside the office too that day. Persevered that day. And hated that I could for what I wanted was to be given time to bury my baby. And be there with his daddy who would be burying him. No one should bury a loved one alone. I had waited until he was already beginning to be stiff and only then did I let him go and leave for work. The punctuality of time has always been relative.
It is silly to most people, loving animals as if they were your children. Or giving your self to strangers the way people like me do so in teaching. But I have accepted the pain of the duty in teaching, the obligation of seeing people through the end. The pain as focus, impetus, energy--- it is like breathing to me. Until it becomes choking, like watching somebody die.
It is like that every time I have to let go of somebody I’m teaching after five days. Policy says I have to. It is like that and worse for I am watching somebody-- a person reduced to an animal--- I hold in my heart like my dead children, dying and being buried alive. And my hand that is forced to let go is that hand choking the breath of hope, my hand with the soil that says they are a failure, that consent.
There were two this time and so I had told them before they faced that panel--- They want to let you go. Fight. Stay with me. Let’s finish this. Don’t you goddamn dare give up. Fight. I will be fighting with you. All the way. For life. Fight.
I had not wanted to let go and I was told that I was being greedy and too ambitious. Because I wanted them to be given time to learn and turn into their possibilities? Fuck you. Watch it. Watch them turn, the way stories would turn and poems would turn to all fall and stop spinning unto place.
Mommy had said during the last days of May and the first days of June this year that I should go back to that seminar in UST for a re-learning of why people teach language and literature. I told her that in this business it’s called “recalibration”. The first time she sent me to that seminar was in 2007: I had stopped teaching and thought that I could never return to teaching again. And I had re-learned with the help of Cirilo Bautista and Ophelia Dimalanta--- Ma’am Ophie who had stopped writing a long time ago because she chose teaching. And teaching, if one really understands it, is writing on minds, these hearts, of bodies, in souls. She died last year, told me to keep on writing poetry and that one day I would be finally ready to let other eyes read it.
Last night I felt like I had betrayed my vows. Those two were released but I had not let go. Humans are never the lifeless numbers or phonemes--- which this business has tried to make me forget. So I will not let go. Junior said that we could not save everyone. I told her that I never wanted to save everyone, just one would be enough, and one within my reach. Last night there were two. And I will not let go. It is Dickinson whom I had read again and again in my vein: If I could stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain… So I will not let go.
Today my teachers would be happy that I am writing words again as plainly as my language can, as tears can. Count: there are 1740 for those two.
So you tell me:
What did we teach the present last night?
What are we teaching the future now?
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