At Gallery MiraNila in Quezon City on Oct. 1, the hardbound volume “Encounters in the Arts” was available for sale at the registration corner for “Cecile Licad Up Close.” But the man behind both the book of reportage and the piano concert was elsewhere—quite out of character, being hands-on if not OC at each endeavor he embarked on.

The journalist, poet and impresario Pablo A. Tariman was then laid low by illness and immured in hospital, and the New York-based “pianist’s pianist” played to an enthusiastic crowd on that evening of intermittent rain, and in other performances in her native land thereafter, without benefit of his presence. In better times, as the cliché goes, wild horses couldn’t have kept him away.

Would have, could have. All academic now with Pablo’s passage into the Light, not unexpected but wrenching still, on Oct. 9. He had been poorly these past months—a condition announced by his no-show at certain events (Manila Symphony Orchestra pressers, say, and even the Salute Awards of the Philippines Graphic). 

If Pablo missed the Salute then he was ill indeed, having been a near-fixture at the annual ceremony of the monthly magazine devoted to prose and poetry. It was testament to his long-running romance with the written word that began when he was young and that continued when he, a journalism graduate, joined the staff of the weekly Graphic in 1971, a year before martial law was imposed and the magazine was shuttered along with others of its kind, such as the Philippines Free Press and the Asia-Philippines Leader. 

Pablo proofread and reported for the Graphic in those tumultuous times. Like the others of its kind, it featured a literary section to which he submitted short stories that, I told him one time, flinging teasing words at him across our senior associate Pete Daroy’s desk, offered a glimpse of his callow years in the sticks. He let loose with what would become his trademark loud laugh, except that he wasn’t amused. (We were young then, and occasional snide remarks were par for the course. The come-lately Tony Hidalgo, who had given up a cushy job to be a member of the Graphic staff paid not much more than the minimum wage, once told me that I didn’t know much about the people I claimed to serve.)

So Pablo’s grandson, Emmanuel Acosta, scion of revolutionaries, represented him at the Salute Awards late in August, while he watched the live proceedings at home on FB. Days later, having seen for myself how he had made himself scarce, I asked his buddy if it’s true he was unwell. Elizabeth Lolarga said yes, a bit testily, adding it was nothing that good nutrition, rest and meds couldn’t cure. She also said she couldn’t understand why he was “being overdramatic” and alarming his friends. (This is how love is expressed in exasperation and worry, I told myself.) 

I texted him nonetheless, inquiring about his unease. He responded the next day, thanked me for asking, said his condition was “curable, but looks like the end of the road.” (This is how one begins to say goodbye to an old friend, I told myself, being a believer that one somehow knows when the end is near, all of us being terminal cases whether young or old, sustained only by The Force’s grace and blessed by each new day.)

It had been a while since he and I directly communicated. Our connection had waned, and consisted of news of him and his productions mostly posted online or passed on by friends, or my child Liana saying she had sat with Tito Pablo at a presser (and was perturbed by the stress vibe he was conveying), or a piece he had written, in which case I gathered from his words not only what he intended to say but also what he didn’t say. I could read him, could tell if his piece was elaborate BS, or dashed off with an eye on the clock yet worthy of affixing a byline to. We had some history, after all.

In September 1980, Pablo wrote about the National Artist for Dance Leonor Orosa Goquingco for the fortnightly magazine Celebrity, situating his subject’s birth in Jolo in 1917 “when Vaslav Nijinsky’s star was waning far into the dark night of his soul,” and quoting some lines from her book—“I want to show them the pangs of creation, the agony an artist has to go through when composing… I will show you how we suffer, how we artists create”—to astutely drive his point home.

For the same now-defunct magazine’s special issue on couples in February 1981, Pablo spent an afternoon that segued into dinner with the writers Jose F. Lacaba and Marra PL. Lanot. Out of that long conversation with the poet and the journalist, also essayist and film scriptwriter, he produced a portrait of an unconventional marriage that would have begun—had not her mother firmly disagreed—with the bride saying her wedding vows in a red dress. 

Some years before the pandemic, he sent a piece to Inquirer Opinion about what had been keeping him busy. He had taken on the task of collecting his young grandchild from school and taking her home to her parents’ apartment. He had registered and been given an ID for his daily assignment: “Fetcher,” it read, and he wore it proudly, he wrote, standing in the designated space cheek by jowl with women also thus identified. (1 imagined him impishly holding his ground among them, perhaps their elbows in his ribs and the tip of an umbrella poking his foot.) Then the child would emerge, laugh happily at sight of her grandpa, and they’d walk off together—doubtless as rapturous a connection for him as those he had with Licad, Miricioiu, Plisetskaya, Salonga, Pavarotti, Espiritu…

On Oct. 5, patting Pablo’s hand as I sat beside his hospital bed, I sensed his spirit straining mightily to escape his mortal coil. I said I had attended Licad’s concert at MiraNila. He said he should have been there, too. I didn’t tell him I was too far from the pianist to watch the movements of her eyes, her mouth, her hands as she played (in the way I was able to do so in her long-ago concert at a Cavite resort which he had also organized), but that tears again welled in my own eyes when she performed Chopin’s favorite Ballade. I didn’t know how to say how moved I was, as much by the music as by the fact that he could no longer show up for the concert he had arranged.

But I found the words to tell Pablo that he had done what he wanted to do in his life. It heartened me to watch a smile form on his lips and reach his eyes. Of course, he knew it. 

Knew that he may never have been in the money, but there ain’t no room for regret. Knew that despite his lingering grief at losing his insurgent child Kerima (whom he named after his literary idol), he had managed to chase and grasp his dreams, to pluck poetry from sorrow and pain, to exchange thoughts and feelings with the performing artists he admired and whose success he basked in, to support those gifted with talent but without the means to make it shine—even to meet the challenge of bringing the magic of music to the sticks.

The going wasn’t always easy but Pablo kept the music playing. His progeny must be proud.

The family and friends of Pablo A. Tariman celebrate his life today, Oct. 14, at a memorial starting at 4 p.m. at the UP Diliman College of Fine Arts building.