Of how I came and why
THE AFTERNOON was almost ending. It’s half past a las cinco. Our merienda cena was being served, a tray of biscuits and cups of coffee were being put on the patio table where we were all gathered around, seated. My elder sister was on my right, my mother across me, and my lola was slowly approaching us with more biscuits and some sugar, as she carried them to the table. We were there to spend some time and visit her at the convent. She is a nun. My lola’s name is Rosario Sinco. She is the younger sister of my maternal grandmother, who has long passed away and left us because of colon cancer. I was in third grade when we buried her. Her name was Azucena. Lola Rose and my lola have four other siblings; and two more when their father, Eulogio Sinco y Serra remarried after his wife, my grandmothers’ mother, Manuela, died of an unknown illness. Manuela Bonitillo belonged to a prominent family of the town of San Miguel in Iloilo. Her family was believed to be one of the very first ones to settle in the said town, making her parents able to put up and build their home quite in the center of the poblacion, as was the house of her grandparents and their parents before them, and was conveniently near the parish church. Most of the tillable lands surrounding the town center, where rice is mainly grown and harvested by the townspeople come harvest season, were as well advantageously acquired by her family going way back, and have been religiously passed on to generations after generation, and with every generation that’s come, subdivided, to and among the children of the family. The farthest matriarch I could identify with would be Agustina Soteo, who was married dutifully to a Santander man, then to Petronilllo Bonitillo, after the former man died. My line traces back to Petronillo and Agustina. Now, anyway, Manuela and Eulogio had their share of the family’s land in the barrio of San Jose, a barrio just outside the town proper. With their eight children, they lived off their share of the land and maintained it as cultivated and growing with produce with as much hard work and management as they can. Spain was nearing the end of its reign in the archipelago then. The turn of the century was coming about and their lives were being shaken up by the rising revolution of the Katipunan in the country, and its local arm in the nearby town of Sta. Barbara, against the Españols. The Americans came. So did the Japanese. By that time, their second eldest daughter, my lola, had met and had already been swooned over by this town estranghero in the name of Gregorio. Gregorio’s family was a new settler to the town. His family is believed to have come from Leyte, seas and islands away from Panay, and was brought over by the wind to the town of San Miguel because of the nature of his father’s regular, periodical assignments, and reassignments, as a military man and her mother’s expanding business relations. His father was Felimon; her mother, Encarnacion. This young lad, carrying the name of Sensal y Safico, who was born out of the new era of Commonwealth in the country and grew up along with the growing fight against the Hapons, would soon become my grandfather.
He and Azucena lived together in his parent’s home in San Jose. They were blessed with five children, and then eventually had one of their sons adopted by Gregorio’s elder brother, then based in a military headquarters in Quezon province with his wife, for they couldn’t conceive one of their own after everything has been tried out. But later in their marriage, Gregorio and Azucena themselves would as well adopt a grandchild of his elder sister, Bonifacia, as a filial favor and would rear and regard the child as their very own. This child would grow up caringly and would grow in deep sisterly affection towards Gregorio and Azucena’s second daughter, Maria Carol, who is my mother. Carol would come to meet my father, Isaias, in her thirties—via a friendly letter of introduction through one of her cousins based and working abroad. My father and mother started as pen pals; to the very least, that could be said of their relationship’s beginnings. Isaias is a native—and proud—son of the province of Antique, a neighboring province of Iloilo in Panay Island. His father, Juan Cabañero y Mifa, was a revered police officer and figure of Dao town—their home turf. He came from a long-time family of farmers, tilling their own piece of land for subsistence, trade, and local enterprise. The farthest point that I have unfurled of my line tracing from my father’s side is only up to the parents of my paternal grandfather, Juan: his mother was in the name of Beatriz Mifa; his father, Julian Cabañero. Now, Juan is legally married to this lady of the local marketplace of the town, Lucena Cabrito y Magante. She, this time, is my paternal grandmother. Among the sweetest and most amiable daughters of Mariano Cabrito and Paling Magante (I never got to know her real name; not yet), my lola is the local sweetheart of the town, as stories of olden past from my aunties and uncles would tell me. Her father, Mariano, was as well an estranghero in the town, originally tracing his roots in the town of León in Iloilo, a mountain range far and away, with Mount Madja-as in between. Her mother, on the other hand, was the tradeswoman of the time, constantly on the road to trade her products in the growing number of markets lining up the coast of southwestern Panay, from Antique to San Joaquin town, up to the bustling trade center of Villa, Iloilo, then the crown of commerce and trade in the region. Much is yet to know about the line and my ancestry on the side of my father; and, as much as well on my mother’s. At points of my life where I find it vital and necessary for me to know where I came from and how I came to be, it is only of magnified value that I get to allot ample time and research to rediscover, and earnestly unearth, my roots and heritage—in talking about my and our family’s past with those family members who have gotten the time to live in some parts of those storied past. It is a treasure trove yet to be completely unlocked and yet to have its real value reassessed and re-valued. What I am is not without whom I was, and those who were before me. What I will become is left to Time still to pass me by.