At high noon of Sept. 9 just wakened I read a message on my phone that said “We are being attacked.”
It came from Zamboangueño sculptor Willie Arseña, a friend from way back (early ‘60s), and that’s how I learned about the blaze in my hometown, whether wag the dog, as people were quick to wonder, or not. (The timing does intrigue, coming when the pork was real hot!)
I happened to be posting freshly-written poems in Facebook at the time so I suppose slow transition or shift was understandable.‘ Fiddling while Zamboanga burned’ was how a friend jokingly put it in a text.
I initially posted, still in FB: ‘It seems we are going international: first Naples then Missouri.’
Our house in Zamboanga was near Fort Pilar, enough for us to just walk it to the beach on a Sunday. The old seawall had long crumbled when, as a gradeschooler, I first came to the City in the ‘50s and saw the footprints in the ruins that, according to legend dating back to Spanish times, were those of Virgen del Pilar. The legend says that as long as the Lady of the Pillar is there, the City will never fall.
When in the ‘70s Zamboanga, thanks to Marcos’ Barter Trade idea, became a war zone and the streets suddenly crawled with Muslims who had come to live and find their fortune in the City, the Zamboangueños looked on helpless and dumb with dismay.
A veritable diaspora followed — Zamboangueños and Zamboangueñas off to the US, to Manila, Dumaguete — heaven knows where else — for a new life and a new existence. We left the City of our affection.
The old Zamboanga of October 12th and July 4th and Christmas splendor was gone.
Because the Virgin had left the City?
I left Zamboanga in May of 1972, four months before Marcos declared Martial Law.
The family eventually moved to Negros. In the late ‘80s, my stepfather, a retired police officer and World War II veteran, built a house in Dumaguete. I have lived in this house for two decades.
When I hear ‘Sta. Barbara’ I instantly have an image of myself joy-riding a bicycle from our place on Pilar St. to Fort Pilar to Sta. Barbara to Rio Hondo.
Even more, of evenings my stepfather would send me to buy tuba, while he and fellow cop Chu Fernandez waited in the house. I’d walk, carrying the two big bottles. That’s how close our house was to Sta. Barbara.
I don’t know when in the 1990s I noticed that my stepfather patterned or modeled the house in Dumaguete after the one in Zamboanga.
Sometimes way past midnight to the wee hours, I look at the house, the interior, with focus and when I half shut my eyes, it’s the one in Zamboanga I am in.
Perhaps if I focus harder, I will be there right now!
But who would do the opposite of evacuation from my City that they are burning?
Had he been a writer, Willie Arseña might have turned out superior to the more famous Zamboangueño Egmidio Enriquez who was always strewing flowers in his prose.
Willy would strew the streets of Zamboanga with candles for the dead, an image from a nightmare he told me he had. Amazing. It was the early ‘60s and Zamboanga was the cleanest and most peaceful City in the country. The name of its premier restaurant said it: ‘Peace Restaurant.’
All this was changed forever when, under Marcos’ martial law, Zamboanga became a war zone. It’s as if Willie was prescient.
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