WALA LANG
I could and probably should have stuck to equities like San Miguel and Ayala Corporation. As it was, my savings have been going to paintings, books, and the open-ended list of what ex-friends called junk. Not that it was money badly spent. The Ang Kiukoks and HR Ocampos I got as a toiling teacher have brought me above the poverty line net worth-wise, although still useless-stuff-rich and cash-poor. I get my highs in places like Bangkal and Mabini, on eBay and Facebook, and wherever there’s a possible a great find.
Coins. While a graduate student at Stanford University, I dropped by a Palo Alto coin shop that had a kusing, our half centavo coin that I believe could buy an egg in the 1920s. My Eureka! coin find, though, is about a dozen piloncitos of various weights. These are super-rare gold pieces shaped like rounded sugar cones (called pilón) marked with the baybayin character “ma.” Early Spanish missionary accounts refer to them as granitas de oro used by our ancestors of the 9th to 12th centuries as medium of exchange. I found them at Ben Carpio’s shop (“Carben”) at Cartimar on Quezon Avenue and C.M. Recto that for years was my stopover on the way home. Ben said they were found in Pasig River muck.
CONNECTIONS AND INTERACTIONS - the Virgin of Antipolo modeled on an 18th century book.
Books et al. I was on my way to see the Rembrandts at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum when I happened to pass by a bookstore. They had nothing Filipiniana I could afford, but I had chanced on the famous N. Israel bookshop that had just published Carlos Quirino’s Philippine Cartography (second edition). That was all I could buy. I popped in again a decade later when I was higher up the income ladder and splurged on an 18th century Manila book authored by Pedro Murillo Velarde. It had a Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay engraving of Antipolo’s Nstra. Sra. de la Paz y Buen Viaje. Covid-19 arrived more decades later, giving me lots of Facebook time. It yielded another Eureka! find, the practically mythical first edition of Quirino’s book. Then last May, there on a Gallery Deus shelf at Padre Faura, was a santo of the Antipolo Virgin copied by the carver maybe 200 years ago from the de la Cruz Bagay engraving down to the last ribbon.
Painting. National Artist BenCab exhibited at Luz Gallery in the 1970s but his works were out of reach. I could not afford his paintings when they were priced at ₱5,000 and by the time I could they were already priced at ₱15,000, again out of reach.
CONNECTIONS AND INTERACTIONS - BenCab’s fishing village.
I saw Fishing Village in the mid-1990s and since it is nothing like the artist’s Sabels or Larawans, I wasn’t sure if it was genuine. The seller insisted it was a student work, but his body language was clear, he wasn’t sure either. The price was ₱6,000 and I decided I wouldn’t be too poor even if it were a fake and therefore made the gamble. Fast forward to 2007, I email a photo to BenCab and he confirms it’s his, done during his Mabini art gallery days (Yehey!). He says he did a few works of the same series, adding that at that time his work as publications artist was mainly in black and white, hence his limited palette, and that the other artists of the time such as Malang and Luz also did barong barongs and stick figures. I’ve lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Manila for a BenCab retrospective and it’s not on loan to the Yuchengco Museum.
Plants. In my Quezon City garden are an areca palm (the buñga that is chewed as ñga-ñgâ), a clump of MacArthur palms, caimito, avocado, langkâ, macopa, and santól trees, some vandas, dendrobiums and phalaenopsis, an ylang-ylang that perfumes my front yard, a tree from Bicol that bears clumps of little duhat-like fruits. I’m still hoping to find the replacement of a kamuníng tree and a tree fern that an anay exterminator killed with too much prohibited chemical. I love plants but have so little time that my place is a garden of survivors. It was my mother who was the indomitable plantita. She detonated dynamite sticks to loosen the hard adobe for her chico trees and bought sanderiana and phalaenopsis by the dozen straight from Mindanao and Palawan. Prickly night blooming cereus grew on her fence, giving me the memory of the one time they bloomed. This is the same event for which Crazy Rich Asians matriarch Shang Su Yi organized a grand flower-watching party.
Ceramic interaction. I dipped my toes into collecting excavated ceramics even as I was vaguely bothered by the thought that dearly departeds had been dug up to get at them. They were also out of reach with my tiny salary as UP assistant professor (₱1,800 a month). I gave up on seeing the Leandro Locsin and Roberto Villanueva collections and realized I could never come close.
CONNECTIONS AND INTERACTIONS An interaction work done 700 years apart
I put paid to my earthenware ambitions so all I have are common and badly restored pieces like the stoneware dish, 600 to 700 years old, from Vietnam (formerly known as Annam), with a fat fish happily minding its own business. One day I decided the ceramic aquarium needed jazzing up, took it to my friend Ang Kiukok, and asked him to do something. He added two barracuda circling the oblivious fish. So now I have an interaction work of a 20th century national artist and a 13th or 14th century potter.
Santos. I have a small image of Nuestro Señor de la Paciencia, Christ exhausted after being scourged. It was in the collection of the late Fulgencio Vega of Bacolod. Official work used to bring me there every so often and for several years, I would drop by to admire it each time I was in Bacolod, always hinting heavily, “When, oh when will you sell it to me?” I was minister of budget when, I suppose in exasperation, Fulgie blurted, “I’ll give it to you when you become Central Bank governor.” He said nothing when I did become Central Bank governor in 1981 and, while itching to remind him, neither did I.
In 1985, I received a letter from Mrs. Vega saying that Fulgie had passed away and had left instructions for her to give me the santo I liked so much. The next time I was in Bacolod was in February 1986 on the Tuesday after the weekend people power crowds began surrounding Camp Aguinaldo. The Manila airport was about to shut down, but EDSA or no, I wasn’t giving up my Vega inheritance. I made it back to Manila and since then, I have said a little prayer for Fulgie whenever I see the Paciencia.
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