From: Noel M.
Category: Philippine Culture
Date: 7/4/02
Time: 4:13:32 AM
Remote Name: 202.57.86.222
A touching tribute to one of the Philippines' great culture writers -- especially about Filipino food culture -- who passed away recently -- Noel M.
Doreen on my mind
by Edilberto Alegre (Pinoy na Pinoy column, Businessworld, 7/4/02)
I do not remember the last time we met. That was years ago. What I do remember is our first meeting. She came knocking on our half of the duplex where were staying in Project 2. It was mid-afternoon of a weekday.
She: I am Doreen Fernandez, a friend of Belinda. I received this letter with instructions to hand it over to you.
I: Thank you. (As she handed me the letter) I am sorry I couldn't ask you in. The house is a mess.
She: Oh, it's quite all right. I would have called you first, but the department said they didn't know your number.
I: I didn't give it to them on purpose.
I escorted her to her car, a maroon Opel. She was wearing a blue dress, indigo, to be more exact. The tinang asul (blue dye) shade, like the one my grandmother used on white clothes.
Belinda is Belinda Aquino, a classmate from my AB English undergraduate days in the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. We used to exchange notes about the books we had just read. That was circa 1957-58. She went on to Los Baņos (southern Metro Manila) for a writing job with the Philippine Community Development institute in Los Baņos. In 1961 I left for what would turn out to be a 13-year study of Japanese Language and Literature in Kyoto University.
Anyway, the martial law regime impelled me to go on self-exile. I ended up in Madrid. When on paper martial law officially ended in January 1986 I decided to fly back. I was told that Rome batted for such a conditionality for the Pope's visit to the Philippines.
I rejoined UP by way of the Creative Writing Center. In June that year I was re-hired by the Department of English and Comparative Literature. I read an item in Carillon, the publication on our alumni, about Belinda. She was with the Philippine Studies Center in the University of Hawaii, Manao campus. I wrote her to re-establish contact.
I go through all these because had I been in circulation in the UP academic circle I would surely have known Doreen. As it were, there was a lacuna of two in my "UP career". In a sense, I had just returned to UP after having gone through what then was the obligatory "study abroad" stint of aspiring young scholars.
Doreen belonged to the later generation of scholars. After finishing her undergraduate in St. Scholastica she married Wili Fernandez and became a housewife, as was expected. They did not have any children. She took up graduate studies in literature, eventually earning her Ph.D. from Ateneo de Manila University. Her dissertation was on the Iloilo (Western Visayas) zarzuela (music or lyric theater).
Though she was just a few years older than I, we belonged to two different generations. Mine was the SCAUP of 1959 (Student Cultural Association of the UP), founded among others by Jose Maria Sison (who established the CPP, Communist Party of the Philippines),forerunner of the student activist movement in the Philippines. Doreen's was the FQS (First Quarter Storm) of 1970.
When Doreen returned to the university, her two memorable mentors were Nicanor Tiongson and Bienvenido Lumbera, both deep into the nationalist movement of their time. These two were to be her close friends, specially after she joined the academe.
Anyway, Doreen would drop by my room in the Faculty Center (UP Diliman). We'd have coffee or light merienda near Ateneo. She had a network of friends and acquaintances in the FC. She actually knew more people than I did.
When I decided to do a public reading of the erotic poems which I had irregularly sent to Franz (Francisco Arcellana, founder and then director of the UP Creative Writing Center), she introduced me to three female students from Ateneo who were cool, very cool, about the entire enterprise. Franz termed the poems "venereal poetry", the primary meaning of venereal being "relating to sexual desire or intercourse."
Eventually, we resurrected a project which I originally conceptualized in 1971: interviews of Filipino writers in English beginning with the oldest, such as Jose Garcia Villa, Salvador P. Lopez, and Arturo B. Rotor.
Franz furnished the background; Doreen used her network to track down and establish contact with the interviewees; I immersed myself in the microfilm room of the UP Main Library reading up on our authors.
The "pre-production" took three years. The book (The Writer and His Milieu) was launched in 1984. As Franz wrote in his "Preface", the book "is, a 'first,', the first of its kind, a model of it. It is a tremendous work of collaboration."
The collaboration was between UP, Ateneo (that's Doreen's) and De La Salle (which published it).
Doreen knew almost all the writers. She went to New York and got an irreverent interview from the irreverent Jose Garcia Villa. We had to consult a lawyer-cousin of hers to find out the parameters for libel. The original tape is with the Ateneo de Manila University library. Doreen's mother graduated from the UP College of Medicine so she personally knew Angela Manalang Gloria. Dr. Arturo B. Roto's wife Emma was Doreen's teacher in St. Scholastica. Leon Ma. Guerrero and Wili appeared together on TV and the Ambassador fondly remembered that.
Our most memorable meeting though was with Paz Marquez Benitez who taught creative writing in the Up from 1916 to 1951 and, thus, taught many of the writers from UP. She refused to be taped so Doreen wrote a "memory piece" about her. Her youngest son was a friend of Wili and Doreen and that paved the way for the meeting.
It is in the essay on Ms. Benitez that Doreen wrote that she wanted to be like her when she grew old: "alert, enthusiastic, and involved. That was aging without growing old; that certainly was growing in wisdom, age and grace."
Doreen did -- age gracefully as her role model.
Research, field research specially, often leads to other passions and concerns. When we were in Bikol (southern Luzon) to interview Angela Manalang Gloria we were accompanied by Bienvenido N. Santos, who lived there for many decades. One of his former students asked Doreen for a list of restaurants which he could dine in next time he was in Manila. That led to our LASA series, a guide to dining in and outside of Manila. We wrote eight of these.
The one on Baguio (Cordillera Administrative Region in northern Luzon) was all here. She, however, graciously included me in the authorship credit. I was not really into food when we were in Bikol. I came into food as a writing concern only in 1986. We were then into our second and last volume of interviews of Filipino writers in English -- the second generation (Writers and Their Milieu).
As UP salary was meager, she offered me her weekly column in Mr. and Ms. magazine for income augmentation. Eggie Apostol, who owned it, said though that I could just write essays and she'd publish them separately. I became one of the few men who wrote for a women's magazine.
In 1988 Mr. and Ms. put our food essays together as Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food. By then my concern was more anthropological and linguistic. Our next essay-collaboration book was Kinilaw: A Philippine Cuisine of Freshness (1991).
One of the abiding concerns of Doreen was Philippine food in history. She utilized sources like Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan's voyage, books written by Spanish friars about us, and dictionaries, such as that of Noceda and Sanlucar. She generously gave me the quotations on drinking from such sources for my book Inumang Pinoy. She furnished the historical perspective for that book.
In her writing room was a huge PC named Lanier, which I referred to as Sidney. She typed our first book on it. Doreen typed of my essays, columns, and books until I took permanent resident here in Tacloban in 1995. By then she was into laptop and Windows. I remained with my yellow pads and ballpens. She was my first reader, my untiring editor. She took away all the draining and sapping aspects of seeing written word in print: all that I had to do was write.
Our Friendship was nurtured by sharing. Work was only one area. We scoured Manila, and its environs (satellite towns and cities) for their local delicacies -- crayfish in Calumpit (Bulacan in Central Luzon, next to the railroad stop), quails in Marikina (eastern Metro Manila), an astonishing lugao in San Mateo, fried itik in Angono (Rizal, Southern Tagalog Region in southern Luzon)... Among our finds the most memorable was the Balaw-balaw restaurant of Angono. We were among the first to discover it and it's painter-owner Digon Vocalan who has remained to be a friend for all occasions.
Gradually I was welcomed to the many rooms of their house in Mandaluyong (central Metro Manila): the library with a cozy and comfortable sofa bed, their working room overflowing with books and Wili's jazz records, a room of their incomparable painting collections. If I were in town, Sunday breakfast meant sharing a huge table with Doreen's mother and her sister Della's family. She took me to Silay -- to the house where she grew up and to the friends of her youth.
That must be what friendship is -- sharing the many rooms of your life and the many tenses of your existence: inviting another to the spaces and times of your life. To invite, to welcome, to keep conversing there in your many and different worlds.
We visited my hometown Victoria in Tarlac province (Central Luzon). We went on a Maundy Thursday and Good Friday for a University of Hawaii musicologist to record the pasyon (the verse narrative on the life and sufferings of Jesus Christ) singing in several languages, Tarlac being the melting pot of Luzon. Ambeth Ocampo was a student then and he was shown the meticulous ways of the researcher-documentator by that professor. On the following Saturday an uncle showed Doreen how Ilokanos use all the eatable parts of a goat -- for we eat all except the mee (and hair and hooves). She was quite astonished by that.
She met my mother to whom she always brought flowers. I took her to our family plot in the Cementerio del Norte (North Cemetery). I accompanied her to her doctors. She saw to my confinement in a hospital for a heart condition. It was a sharing of many times and many places; and many concerns, many people: an interweaving.
Two weeks ago I was with Bernard Karganilla on the first year of the passing away of his wife Anita. I wrote about Anita, who died at 34, in this column. Two services were held at UP Manila where Bernard continues to teach and where she (Anita) taught Nursing.
The pastor asked Bernard to go beyond his grief and go on with his life. Bernard told me later that his life does go on and has been going on with the grief. The grief I think, not separate nor does it sunder one's life into a pre- and post-. The grief stays. The grieving never ends. That is, in the end, loyalty.
There are images which would never go. I remember Doreen on a boat in the sea wearing a red pair of shorts and a white t-shirt. Banyong my fisherman friend from Sagrada Familia, Hagonoy and his friends took us out to Manila Bay. On the way back we stopped at a beach they called Aroma for it was full of that thorny bush.
They cooked sinigang (sour broth) there -- newly caught fish soured with tomato. The tomatoes were not sliced; they were placed whole into the pot. After just a few minutes of boiling we were served our share. Each of us had a tomato which had now become soft. We broke our tomato on our place. Doreen and I never forgot that -- the way of the Hagonoy fishermen. I never forgot the redness of Doreen's shorts and the redness of those tomatoes. That was 20 years ago.
After each book we celebrated with blue cheese and white wine. One time it was with kippered herring. Another time it was with prosciutto. Several times we had jamon serrano. Then we discovered watercress and the blue cheese, mostly Roquefort, was sprinkled on its crisp, tiny leaves. On these occasions Doreen wore her favorite housedress, a kind of duster -- blue flecked with white flowers. Eventually it became faded with age, but she would not let go of it.
We'd spread our picnic on the red carpet of their library: blue cheese, white wine, reddish ham or green watercress. And Doreen's in her blue housedress.
The red of Hagonoy never occurred again. But the blue of the books which we wrote together recurred again and again -- in many arrangements and with small changes of basically the same joy and triumph.
I do not remember when we met last. But I do remember our first meeting. Doreen was wearing a blue dress.
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