Sona bliss

Cebu Daily News
Raymund Fernandez

The former congressman Ysmael Bukad’s sigbin landed into the shadows of the House of Representatives. It wormed away and quickly disappeared into the mass of feet of a huge crowd that gathered at the chamber to hear the new President’s first State of the Nation Address.

Ysmael Bukad also disappeared into the crowd and found his place among the onlookers. No one recognized him but for the security man who guarded the entrance to the observation deck. He was a Bisaya with whom he traded the usual barbs. He noted the poor quality of the former congressman’s hairstyle. Bukad chided him for the effeminate elegance of his recently done fingernails. They delivered this animated exchange with the subtle sound quality of gay-talk. The impassive observer would have wondered if indeed they were gay or just old macho friends kidding each other. But you never know, nowadays. And the new Congress of the Philippines was a circus.

Senate President Enrile would share the same Congress with Imelda and the majority of the Marcos clan. The same would be true for the majority of the Arroyos although “Mrs. Big” herself took this occasion to travel abroad with her husband. No, it is not true that Mikey went to the Batasan in his security guard uniform as the newspaper photos will attest. But yes, in the tradition honored by security guards of his ilk, he slept through parts of the proceedings, as the newspaper photos will also attest. No one knows if he came to Congress riding a tricycle as he should have. But it is not true that he has any slight embarrassment for being here to represent security guards and tricycle drivers. He is sure he is only as pretentious and as hypocritical as everyone else in this room. Or this much, he declared in a recent interview. And so he is in the right place. It is easy for him to think this way. He needs only count the number of relatives he has here.

Why, even Ruben Ecleo is in the room. And what about Romeo Jalosjos? And why is it that right after looking at the two his eyes could not help but search out Manny Pacquiao and Lucy Torres-Gomez? It is perhaps because the human mind always perceives by contrast: light against dark, hard against soft, sin as against atonement and finally, guilt as against innocence.

This is the spirit in which the former congressman had to countenance the family names which assaulted him at the Batasan and he wondered if the sound of the names rhymed. He recited them to himself: Ecleo, Jalosjos, Pacquiao, Torres-Gomez, Sotto, Romualdez, Marcos, Revilla, Estrada, Lapid, Pangilinan, Belmonte, Enrile, Angara, Legarda, Cayetano, del Mar and don’t forget the Osmeñas and Garcias. These are the people who would save this country from here on. He could not help but feel an overwhelming sense of doubt.

But right after this doubt, quite unexpectedly, he felt a sudden pang of unmistakable bliss. This he experienced only rarely in the past. He closed his eyes for the occasion and remembered himself on the edge of sleep riding a red car as it travelled down the mountain pass towards Barili. He espied Barili town itself nestled on the shores of Tañon Strait. In the far distance, Guihulngan town and behind it the peaks of Mt. Kanlaon. A cool wind washed over his face blowing back his hair, and for a moment, he felt it and it stayed for quite a time. This was a feeling of unexplainable well-being, a sense of just feeling good, so immensely good that the rational motive for it become immaterial and unnecessary. He simply relished it, unthinking. All aches and pains disappeared, and in their place came a sense of time, immobile, for ever too short a moment, like a glitch, such a moment as sadly will not last forever. For if it did...

In the next instance, he was back watching the proceedings, listening to the new President reciting the litany of the previous president’s sins, the material memory of vile and ill-will which would also rationalize why we must continue to suffer from hereon and for a while yet. And all these we must use as good reason to keep struggling on and continue the “good” fight.

But we knew this all along. The problem was to feel good counting our achievements thus far and hoping to get “there” in the long run against adversity. “There” being the state of being better, of less hunger, less suffering, less injustice and against that, greater hope, despite the family names that now sit at the new Philippine Congress.

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