WHAT does one, an incorrigible lover of beautiful creations, do when one meets an old flame, a veritable trove of lifting and lilting memories, six years and two scores from their first meeting?
You may rest in the thought that the time gap would have put either in the bracket of what Philippine law would identify as the subdivision that had crossed the frontyard of the senior citizens block—and there may not be much left between the two.
But there are mortal loves that do not die despite the whip of harsh seasons. These loves—and there may be few and far between—give sense and substance to life that we know is from womb to tomb.
There may have been instances when the love, whose flame keeps dancing in the memory of the breathing lover, appears as a pleasant dream, when the stars are like strewn chunks of bars of gold in the sky, which sometimes play host to speeding asteroids and shooting stars.
There may be other instances when that love must itself take some rest, only to emerge beyond the midnight clock when the evening breeze is as soothing as a woman’s voice when the woman is in her most fertile moments.
And if the lover has, all these years, been faithful as faithful to a commitment he has been, how can the meeting 46 years later appear, when just the two of them, beyond the kibitzing eyes of a crowd, are in a room, recalling yet once more the first meeting they had in a younger clime?
Would they perhaps be absolved at once by a Benedictine monk or a Dominican priest who, on a Sunday dusk, after several confessions heard, would have ears pierced by a love that has not died, a love that has been properly concealed in particularly the man’s bosom where dreams are built and hopes are made from the beauty of sounds unleashed on weekends and holidays before?
Or would the man, who has enough of loves in his heart, be condemned to lasting perdition and perhaps hell, for his continuing love for the old flame he knows he will never turn his back to, the one love he knows that perhaps, if he were a sonneteer, would always be in his quatrains and octaves, sextets and couplets?
Would there be any difference if the man were me, a very loyal banana— as in bananas and daffodils, as I used to address my students at the state-run University of the Philippines—to things that carry and excite my passion, my soul and my system, which would include my flesh and bones?
Let me temporarily take a space from the pleasant highway of that preceding thought.
The other night, I was at the dining table with my wife, my son and his wife. In keeping with the tradition of the clan, the dining table was filled with plates replete with vegetables—we are vegetarians, or at least I am, after all.
As was usual in nights previously, the other night was no exception—with intellectual exercises that raise both the IQ and the EQ levels of members of the family.
One comment from Andy Lord elicited a raucous laughter that reverberated across the dining room, drowning the mother’s lighthearted comment that the father would hardly admit to anything that would not please his mental valleys.
Now, back to that old flame, whose sound would put to shame even the most soothing sigh of a woman in love, in her most seductive state when the night is young and the stars are most jealous.
I was a 16-year-old college freshman when I met Maria Bonita, whose sounds haunted me nights on end as I dreamed, first among the wooded hills of home in the chosen town of Pinili.
And then along the corridors of the Benedictine school where, during Thursdays, the skirted daughters of Eve shuffling feet along Mendiola towards the Catholic St. Jude church beside Malacanang, were trapped by admiring Bedans’ eyes, enjoying a break from their theology and philosophy classes.
But even the white uniformed Holy Ghost—later Holy Spirit—College girls were no match to Maria Bonita, God’s creation who excited in me, and perhaps in some other virile men, a love that would remain pulsating, with outbursts that healthy bipeds are familiar with, 46 long years later.
What a relief indeed it was when I found Maria Bonita once again, right before my eyes as in that first encounter when I had the strength of a raging stallion in some summer night back home.
As on the first encounter, Maria Bonita’s sounds overwhelmed me once more, and raised my soul several notches higher with the speed of an elevator rushing up to the 102nd floor of a high rise structure in some busy metropolis. An encounter it was that I would never, for the life of me, apologize for, jokingly—jokes are half meant, after all, aren’t they?—or whatever.
It is not in my character to apologize for God’s creations when they strum the strings of my passion, my humanity and soul.
I do not know where Maria Bonita was born. But perhaps she was born in Matanzas, Cuba, where Damaso Perez Prado, later called “El rey del mambo,” was himself born.
Classically trained to play the piano, Perez Prado concentrated on Latin music as soon as he started to become a professional in 1941 in the Cuban capital of Havana.
Incidentally, it took some time for music enthusiasts to realize what Prado, who also played with his orchestra the naggingly familiar Skokiaan, the African melody written by August Msarurgwa of Zimbabwe.
In another time this was also played by the Ray Anthony Orchestra.
Yes, I met Maria Bonita once again this year. And I am keeping her in the master’s bedroom. Very often, my wife and I would dance to its rhythmic beat when sleep is still off our eye bags at around 2 a.m., about the same time dreams can lift the soul up.
And then the very grateful wife and I would slide down to slumberland, dreaming of the sounds that Maria Bonita unleashed in an earlier clime and made me fall for her.
Such Maria Bonita indeed. The one Maria Bonita who can never inspire fear in the wife’s heart.
(HBC, a trombonist since he was seven years old, is a lyricist and songwriter; he was musical arranger of the Tiger Boys Orchestra, and 1st Trombone of The Mendiola Brass with the Bad Habits.)