So here is the start of my big project -- an autobiography!! can't seem to get beyond age 5 though. Have had this since last year:
I remember walking along a muddy surface with our maid Beatriz, taking care to balance myself on whatever pebbles I could find, careful that my rubber slippers wouldn't slide off and make me stumble and get left behind by my older brother. This was our regular afternoon activity. I had barely started play school, and most of the hours of the day were still spent exploring the great, still unpolluted outdoors. Our house was situated in old Parañaque, and behind our house was the bay. No reclaimed area yet then. All we had to do was travel through that pebbly, muddy expanse of soil, and there we were -- perched on that meter high cement barrier that separated us from Manila Bay.
My brother Jomie always had a theory for everything which was bible truth for me then, as it still is sometimes now, after forty plus years. It was from him I learned during one of those afternoons that if you held a seashell to your ear close enough, you could listen to what seemed like the entire Atlantis. Actually, it WAS the entire Atlantis. I imagined a whole world inside that shell; I believed that mermaids lived inside it and that we were not to question the mystery of how a whole underwater world could fit inside two inches of this pearlized creation.
My forever grinning toothless middle brother was the localized Dennis the menace, getting into scrapes which the two of us older siblings were brave and swift enough to run away from. Such as that memorable afternoon when Puschinka our Russian named dog of German origin (a dachsund!), who had turned wild from being tied up in the laundry area all day for many months, suddenly turned loose and decided to attack us taunting children. Titoy the toddler was left behind in the garden and survival instincts made him scamper up the huge caimito tree, unable to come down for what seemed like the entire afternoon. The two of us older ones watched excitedly but unalarmedly from the bedroom window, knowing parental help was just close by. It was an idyllic sibling relationship among us three -- a warm and secure one, punctuated every now and then by the ubiquitous quarrels that would pit two against one until my third brother Pancho grew up -- which then evened both sides. Pancho the London born baby was for us then still a non-entity. In the old Paranaque days, he was just a wrapped bundle held by our mom all day, almost part of her anatomy; for us two to five year olds, he simply had no meaning yet.
My memories of myself are that of a crying child, a painfully shy child. Beatriz the maid -- I had memories of her too -- was a dark shadow to reckon with, her right thumb and forefinger forever poised to give the unavoidable pinch when I cried too loud or too long. It was either a knuckle pinch, which was good, since it didn't hurt so much when a lot of flesh was scooped between the knuckle of one finger and the nail of the other, or the dreaded nail pinch, where both nails did the job. But that all seems like a very faded photograph now; what I do remember most was my extreme shyness at school. I was shy and scared of the tall white lady in the white robe and black veil. She was the nun at Maryknoll, where Jomie and I spent our pre-school years. Jomie, being the extrovert that I envied, was one of the Three Kings at Christmas time. I believe he was Baltazar the brown skinned one. I didn’t even have the courage to tell anyone my name during first day of school. I didn’t know how to talk to adults since as far as I was concerned, I had never seen one, except for Beatriz and my parents. The white lady had to look at my Tammy doll lunchbox where there was a dymo tape spelling out Ma. Luisa Francisco. I remember not having the courage to ask permission to go to the bathroom when I needed to, but what happened after was not very nice to remember.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
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