Reading “Not Quite There” presents an experience out of the usual. The range of Chit Roces-Santos’ second collection of essays is wide and welcoming; it not only invites the reader to get a glimpse of a charmed life in this neck of the woods but also and in good humor provides leeway for the reader to pack detail upon detail into that glimpse—and to touch tenuous base with an era swiftly disappearing, if not in its last throes.
The author is to the manor and manner born, and concedes that a door has been firmly closed. “I am myself shocked to remember how life used to be,” she writes. “It belonged in another time and, yes, to another person, one I’ve long ceased to be.”
Forbearance may help while sifting through some of the details that animate the collection. At some points one may be moved to put the book down momentarily to give way to musing, “Not Quite There” occasionally coming across as truly removed from the sweaty nitty-gritty of the everyday. But then one wouldn’t have made an effort to travel early in June to the book launch at León Gallery and to inch one’s way through the packed, enthusiastic crowd to secure a copy had one been an impatient reader, or had one’s fundamental interest in her words, not simply her turn of phrase, petered out. (Her first collection of essays, “Personal Space,” was published in 2013.)
There was a time when Chit Roces-Santos was holding her own among the “S” columnists in the Inquirer under editor in chief Letty Jimenez Magsanoc. Though tardy to the writing trade, she was, as Inquirer Lifestyle’s S subsection required, “stimulating,” “sexy” and “sage.” Also sensitive. Sassy to a degree. In fact a “sharpshooting writer,” as former Inquirer Lifestyle editor Thelma S. San Juan describes her. (LJM, among her many gifts, was not one to exclude writers of a certain age from the public discourse. Even at Inquirer Opinion, to balance the bestseller subsection that was Youngblood, she introduced High Blood.)
The book’s title suggests the touch of irony that Chit Roces-Santos brings to bear on her writing. Almost always her candor is laced with amusement, as when she recalls episodes from a childhood untypical. For example, being served formally from the left by uniformed help and addressed as señorita. Or, barely in their teens, taking a train with a cousin from Madrid to Paris chaperoned by a Teresiana nun, and—mon Dieu—having to share a berth with amorous newlyweds heading to their honeymoon. Or being banished to Europe after high school graduation, to avert being swept by a seeming tsunami of youthful elopement.
Narrated stylishly, perhaps with a grin while she’s at it, anecdotes of the past jostle the reader’s imagination, with family members’ pet names sounding so like endearments: Enchay. Tuting. Ninit. One often finds oneself in a chuckle. Her account of her parents’ relationship in their declining years, marked by her Dad’s dalliances that he denied to her Mom to the exasperating end, is a nod to the wisdom of learning to live with the things you can’t change. (“You just had to love the guy,” she declares of her Dad, Titong Roces, the longtime representative of the second district of Manila.)
She laments her inability to realize her dream of owning “a small place in the country” and is cut to the quick by her husband’s bull’s-eye question: Who does she think will manage it, herself? She was enamored of the idea of a farm, of lush flora in it—plants, flowers, trees heavy with fruit that she will harvest, sell, or give away, all hers and not subject to the wiles of the bantay (the all-important hired help that would be trusted despite her, the owner’s, absence, to manage the land and its operations and not to filch or finagle its literal production). The city slicker has come to terms with this denied dream, with this…deprivation; she has accepted that, in its stead, she will travel now and then to parts overseas—Japan, say, whose people and their “respect for themselves” cannot but show in their comportment, and even in their vaunted public restrooms. (“Positively chastened by war,” she reports her husband as saying.)
Her husband, the journalist Vergel O. Santos, looms large in her life and her work. He is her opinion-making, tennis-playing, guitar-strumming, mouse-trapping man who is also her adviser and influencer, boot-camp sergeant in her writing projects and health-and-wellbeing efforts, co-conspirator in their food trips, primary instigator of their causes and advocacies, and companion in the social visits and protest marches and assemblies that they make it a point to show up for, along with the art shows, concerts, theater and other cultural events that, she writes, “deepen our understanding and appreciation of everything—of life itself.”
They attend the yearly commemorations, though fading, of the 1986 People Power uprising on Edsa. They came to be counted for the Trillion Peso March to protest the shameless corruption in flood control and other infra projects. They were Sunday regulars at the Camp Crame prison facility where the Duterte administration held the then senator Leila de Lima on fraudulent charges that the courts dismissed after almost seven years.
They break bread with friends, mostly oldies but goodies, as often as they can. They applaud the spinto tenor Arthur Espiritu whenever he’s in town to spin his soaring yet intimate magic. They faithfully tracked Pope Francis’ visit to the Philippines on television, from their living room couch, she following his message of comfort, delivered in Spanish, to the “Yolanda”-stricken in Tacloban. They give thanks to the Divine for their many gifts.
They were both presented the proverbial second chance when they found each other decades ago, and here they are, stoked for the long haul.
In her particularly personal way, Chit Roces-Santos confronts her politics and embraces the sufferings of others. She writes of her “angels of Edsa”—“legion,” she says, “if we include the sons and daughters who had been disappeared and martyred in those dark days of military rule, and similar more recent victims, Edith and Joe Burgos’ son Jonas, as well as countless others who sacrificed their lives and lovingly haunt us so that we may never forget.”
She writes of her gratitude for having come this far, pronouncing old age as “not too bad, really, as long as it happens in good company.” She can get sentimental. But matter-of-fact, too: If they’re aiming for the long haul, with more time for her to master “la vida techy” or catch Japan’s sakura, they have to be fully prepped for it, with cane or wheelchair if need be.
There’s a song that sings of approaching the winter of the year, and it may well be sung for Chit Roces-Santos—by Sinatra, of course (incomparable still despite his having turned Republican and a Nixon supporter): “And now I think of my life as vintage wine in fine old kegs/ From the brim to the dregs it flows sweet and clear/ It was a very good year…” CS
For copies of “Not Quite There,” visit its publisher, León Gallery, at the ground floor of Eurovilla I, Rufino and Legazpi Streets, Legazpi Village, Makati City. Or contact Rina Rose Formento at 0926 7902 409 or Ashley Bautista at 0933 4015 881.
