Legs in Cebu Blog

Translations: German / Spanish

Hear Direk Freddie Santos

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I had just been circumcised (no picture available).

Normally, in a country as Catholic as the Philippines, this happens at birth but for some reason, several of my cousins and I did not have the operation until we were old enough to actually REMEMBER how dreadfully painful this process was. What good were legs when all you can do is waddle?

I soon learned that if you cover your sore genitals with a small Tupperware bowl, it would prevent your pajamas from grazing against your exposed…soreness. Of course, bowl and all, with a bump that big you’d have people lining up on the right but hey, that’s another blog…site.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t mind it when my father announced that he had been promoted to expand the bank operations into another city, Cebu.

Located in the mid-section of the country, Queen City of the South Cebu City was not big but its vibrancy was equal to the northern capital city of Manila any day. Of all the islands in the Visayas region, Cebu was highly challenged. Its soil was sandy, much of its shoreline was rocky and man, could it get humid there.

But this was where Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan planted his cross and claimed the whole country as property of Spain, ergo the name Philippines after King Phillip II. This is also where he was killed by Lapu-Lapu, Rajah of Mactan Island which sat across a small channel. The whole province, therefore, was of historical importance to the nation.

We transferred during the Philippine summer school break (mid-March to May) and by the time school started, my father had inaugurated the new Comtrust Cebu Branch, my mother had brought order to the new house, my sister Sylvia was enrolled at the nun-run Stella Maris College and I was enrolled at the priestly Sacred Heart School for Boys.

I made a friend while enrolling but it didn’t take long for me to realize that making friends would be the least of my accomplishments in school. I don’t mean that in a good way, either. I already liked drama and now was making the acquaintance of Music, Literature and Art. For boys of that age, there was no greater anathema than that.

Yet, though at war I may be with my classmates for not behaving like them, there was world peace at my house, musically, anyway.

In Manila, we sang liturgical hymns in church, listened to Mahalia Jackson do gospel and followed it up with Belly Dancing music and Connie Francis’ version of the Jewish classic, Hava Nagila. I told you, world peace.

Cebu was no less tonal…or pacific. The radio, excuse me, stereo, was always on with my father listening to Sinatra and my mother to Elvis Presley.

Cebu being renowned for its handmade guitars, my father and I took it up. He progressed to folk house level occasionally regaling us with songs from Trini Lopez and Peter, Paul and Mary.

I was more intrigued with poring over volumes of The Book of Knowledge, that is, until one summer afternoon in my 10th year of life.

Television had come to Cebu but just in trickles and our afternoon fare was a collection of some of the world’s oldest movies getting replayed with exasperating frequency. One day, they had a “new” film, one I had not seen yet. The title page came on and I recognized the music playing. It was “Till The End of Time”, a parent favourite, but, for some reason, this piano version had more notes and the melody had different strains that the hit song never had. The movie was A Song To Remember about the life of Polish composer Frederick Chopin and the music was his Polonaise in A Major.

For the next 75 minutes or so, I couldn’t move away from the front of that TV set. Scene after scene, the movie played one Chopin masterpiece after another and I, for the life of me, could not explain why I immediately understood why the music sounded the way it did, where the music would go to, where it would take me and why it needed to bring me there.

I do not remember how many times the TV station replayed that movie but I can tell you I watched it a LOT. This, this, not Pat Boone or Jerry Vale or Brenda Lee, this was my music.

And a year later, I would find my song.

Again, it was in front of that TV set, showing once more another ageless wonder, the 1934 film One Night of Love featuring someone I’d never heard of till that time, Grace Moore. Who she, I thought.

When she sang the title song at the start of the movie, it was just okay for me, reminding me of Tres Rosas (Three Roses), a trio of light sopranos who sang countryside songs in late-night television shows.

But then in the next scene, she sang a Neapolitan Street Song and I was like…what the…wha…what was that?!

Then she sang the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. Wow. Oh wow.

And as the movie neared its conclusion, she changed into a Japanese costume and I got intrigued. Will she be singing in Japanese?

Then she opened her mouth and out it poured, like mercury, the entrance song of Cio-Cio-San from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and I was transfixed, transported, transformed.

What joy is this, I wondered. How could the world have been explained in a single song? In a language I never spoke yet because of music, understood. Could this possibly go anywhere else?!

It did.

In the opening scene of Act 2, Cio-Cio-San stood at the center of the stage, gazed out at a harbour view somewhere offscreen, and declared her undying, unquenchable hope to see the unhindered dawning of Un Bel Di (One Fine Day).

At song’s end, I went to my father and told him: I want opera.

And my Sinatra/Como/Platters-loving father obeyed. In three days, he had borrowed three opera albums and immediately proceeded to record them on his brand-new ever-so-technologically-awesome open reel tape recorder.

Bizet’s Carmen, Verdi’s Aida and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

– all of them featuring soprano Leontyne Price whose voice would serve as my personal standard of perfection for decades.

One thing that did strike me as very curious: when my father was taping Madama Butterfly, he was playing cards with my mother. Price was in the middle of singing Un Bel Di when at a break in the music, my father suddenly sang “Chi sara? Chi sara?” and Price’s voice immediately came out singing that same line. He knew the song! Why didn’t he tell me about this??!

Actually, if I had just bothered to find out what my ancestry was truly like, I wouldn’t have been surprised by this explosive turn of musical taste.

My curmudgeon of a grandfather was so emphatic about college degrees and what have you that I never knew what his other passions were.

That’s him in the white suit seated in the middle. My dad’s the dude on the floor.

Anyway, seems Tatay (father) loved opera, his sister was a concert pianist, his other sister a church soprano, my eldest uncle was a baritone, another uncle sang tenor, my aunt and godmother was a classical pianist and my other uncle, my father’s first cousin, Aurelio Santos Estanislao, was one of the greatest baritones the Philippines has ever known.

More on him, and how he helped me move AWAY from a career in opera, later.

Suffice it to say that at the age of 11, with opera playing in my heart, I had become a straaaange kid…and the weirdness didn’t end there.

By the time I was 12, I had read Les Miserables (broke my heart), The Confessions of Saint Augustine (raised my eyebrows), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (couldn’t stop crying), Homer’s Odyssey (this is fun!), Greek Mythology (fascinating) and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (gripping, just gripping).

Plus, I had fallen deeply, obsessively in love with cinema’s love goddess Rita Hayworth (Mmmm…Gilda).

Believe me, I had VERY few friends.

Although, thanks to those few, and a couple of cousins, I managed to get through some comic books of Superman and Batman, a hardbound, highly libidinous English translation of The Marquis de Sade which led me to my first sex, and I learned to smoke. The sex I’ve since given up.

That was also the time I started growing taller, my legs stretching out to the point I couldn’t wait to wear long pants in High School.

I became big enough for my age to be asked to join school plays that mixed the senior boys with girls from our sister school, Sacred Heart School for Girls (natch!). Older schoolmates Elizabeth Sy, Ramon Isberto and Mario King (big names now in the business world) accepted me without hassle and I got so comfortable doing these productions, next thing I knew, I flunked my Third Year and was handed my walking papers.

What?! How can you do this to me, beloved school of mine! I was in your productions! I won in your elocution contests! I was in…a mess.

My mind couldn’t fathom it and my body reacted accordingly. One inch short of 6 feet and suddenly, I stopped growing.

But I was so jarred by this turn of events I actually, actually, began to get my act together.

I took up Summer Classes (sorry, parents), transferred to the high school department of the University of Southern Philippines (thank you, friends of parents), became President of the Physics Club (surprise, parents!), and got good enough grades to warrant a scholarship to the United States (breathe, parents, breathe).

And if only to stress where my legs would next take me, before I left for America, I joined an independent stage production of The Promise by Russian playwright Alexei Arbuzov. Though only 16, I shared the leads with professional adults Joy Mockon and Alex Tantoco under the direction of visiting Brit Oriel Methuen. I got paid $2, my first professional fee in the theatre.

My legs were fine.

Direksions (especially if you’re 16):

1. Failure can lead to success. Go ahead and get upset and when your energies cool off, pick up the pieces, learn the lessons and do it better.
2. Enjoy movies…don’t live them. After all, no ending to any situation happens in a couple of hours. And oh, when you’re watching old movies, the people on that screen are not as young as you think. Or hope. I can’t tell you how it broke my heart when I saw how old Rita Hayworth actually was when I first fell in love with her.
3. Study sex…first. Find someone sensible (there are some) and DISCUSS it. Believe me, a dirty book makes for a lousy teacher.
4. Stillness matters. No matter how much I wanted things to move, it was those moments when my world lost impetus that I found my way.