I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER

Resil B. Mojares

My father dies last Ocotober.

It is a sentence at once so final and so incomplete.
At the necrological service in our old town church, my father’s friends paid tribute to his
many years as a teacher, and spoke of his love for learning and kindness. Above all, they
remembered his eloquence. He had such a gift for words, they said.
It was not of my father’s eloquence of speech, however, that I thought when, in behalf o f
the family, it was my turn to speak. I thought of his silence. It was not that my father was
a remote man. He was, in many ways, a caring and generous person. He was just not
showy about his emotions and was awkward about being intimate.
I would like to imagine (perhaps in a rather literary sort of way ) that it was because he
was an orphan. He lost his mother when he was only a few years old, then his father not
too long after. He migrated, grew up amid now rather vague relations, and worked as a
young teacher in what was then the lonely frontier of Mindanao.
It is strange I should know so little about him. I know the names of his parents—he was
from Negros and she was from a town in southern Cebu where my father was born—but I
do not know who they were, what they did, nor even what they looked like. My father
had a brother who moved to Manila and died a bachelor of his youth. The earliest
photograph of my father that I have seen is of him alone. He is a young student in pale
suit, seated on the grass in some plaza somewhere. Under what seemed a noonday sun,
his dark profile is turned towards the distance.
I do not recall his ever having spoken about his childhood. And I never inquired. I
suppose I am my father’s son in more ways that I can say—embarrased about being
drawn into intimacies, wary of confidences and secrets. It seemed more manly (or so I
thought) to be silent about such things. I grew up in a time when being inarticu lately wise
and sullen seemed the proper air wear about one’s youth.
It was a different thing altogether with my mother., a woman whose love for those she
chose to love was a tender as it was proud and fierce. She came from a large, well-knit
Cebuano family whose periodic reunions were almost always histrionic, loud, and rich
with laughter and lore. My mother was herself a very reserved lady, yet a person
luminous with emotion, the sort that filled a child with a deep warmth, and yes, a kind of
peril, too.
She met my father when they were both young teachers starting out in a villa ge in
Mindanao. The particulars of the story are not clear to me now (if, in fact, they ever
were), the story of what drew this frail, fair-skinned sojourner (for she did not plan on
settling down in that distant land) to the dusky young man of uncertain origins, who was,
to boot, a Protestant. (It took, in fact, ten years of marriage, and of us shuttling between
two churches on Sundays before he converted to her Catholic faith. He quieted all
questions about his apostasy with two simple reasons: it was important to keep the family
one, and nothing had changed, one’s relationship with one’s God is inviolably a personal
one). The earliest photograph we have of my father and mother together is a wedding
portrait, a mock-up produced by Manila studio, circa 1940, that shows, in pastel tints,
their formal faces, he in a painted white suit and she in what one imagines to be a
delicately embroidered gown.
It is both sad and strange how the imagination feeds on such as these —remembered
gestures, a look, an item of clothing, a piece of furniture, words scrawled on a piece of
paper, an old photograph. My father walking about the house in the dark checking that
all doors and shutters were shut, seeing that everybody was safe;ly asleep before he
himself went to bed; my father pecking away at his old Royal on one of his innumerable
manuscripts (I have done him somewhat better by typing with four fingers instead of
two); my father beaming when I won in a high school oratorical contest with a piece he
wrote (the title of which I still remember—Of Thee I Sing—a paean to Country, lyrical,
grand, archaic). And, sopmewhere in the back of the mind, half-remembered episodes—
the times he broke my mother’s heart, the times he made her so proud and happy.
I moved out of the old town, first to the university, then to raise a family of my own. His
vits and mine became more and more infrequent. It seemed we were always coming and
going., awkward moments when you felt there were things you needed to say but could
not because between men, there are certain things that need not be said. Such moments
always seemed graceless as with a show of impatience and irritation. Through the years,
we are schooled in the male virtues of rationality and restraint. Too often, it is our grief to
discover that, without our knowing, the mask of indifference we have worn has become
our face.
The last time I saw my father was three years before he died. I had come home for my
mother’s funeral. It was a tense and wakeful week. Through those days and nights, I
never saw my father weep. Sleepeless, tired, and sunk in his own grief, he seemd out of
sorts. He went through the motions of receiving the flow of people who came to pay their
respects, but mostly he kept his thoughts to himself. He ate little ad refused to sleep.
Then, late in the night before the burial, he snapped. He had inwardly chafed at the sight
of people gambling, drinking, playing games, and laughing in all-night vigil. Now he told
them of displeasures and asked them to desist from doing what he said was a lack of
respect for the dead. His anger pure, he virtually drove people out of the house. My
brothers and I got into a heated exchange with my father, telling him the customary
revelry meant no disrepect, that what he had done was unneighbourly, that it was selfish
for him to think that only his grief was real. We were our mother’s daughter and sons,
too, we said. We were all wired from stress and lack of sleep.
All of a sudden, we found ourselves in a half-empty, deathly still house. I don’t know
how we lasted the night.
On the day of the burial itself, they took my mother’s casket to the public school just
across the street from our house, there to lie in state for a few hours. This was the school
she loved (as teacher, principal, supervisor), the grounds of which she tended to like they
were her own private garden. Recalling the years, bent over her casket, I noticed—it
seemed for the first time—how thin and gnarled her hands looked, they seemed dead,
dried-up twigs. It was at the precise moment that I broke down and noiselessly, freely -
yes, gratefully—wept. My father laid a hand on my shoulder, a wordless gesture of
comfort.
It was clear my father had not yet worked his way through his own grief. He refused to
come to the church for the mass. At the cemetery, we waited for him. He eventually
showed up, dressed in an old barong, and asked that a photograph be taken of him
standing beside the tomb. He seemed almost light and collected. I never saw my father
weep.
Two days later, it was time for me to leave. He saw us to the gate and I put a hand o n his
shoulder and mumbled words of faith and reassurance. He said that everything was
alright, and, as we looked at each other, it seemed to me that this was one of those
fugitive moments when some warm understanding had been reached and a few words
were all needed to seal it.
That was the last time I saw him.
At the necrological service in his honor, his friends and his students spoke of his
eloquence. I thought of his silence, knowing it was there that his love was most eloque nt.
I was shamed by how puny and incomplete my words were when it was my turn to speak.
In the end, I could only say: You cannot contain in words the fullness of what a person
means in your life; you can only hold it in your heart.
I remembered the line from an ancient song—Listen, listen, listen to the heart sound.