Fiesta: Fiesta memories

By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

IN TONDO during my high school years, one gauged the success of the fiesta by how raucous the sound system was: that meant a lot of people had gathered at the basketball court to watch the pa-Liga and were each trying to convert the game into a one-man comedy hour. Towards late afternoon, there would be the furious thump of running feet and the cacophony of raised voices, often slurred and querulous. “May saksakan! May saksakan! Si Mang Kwan, lasing na naman!” one eventually made out from the general hubbub.

Well, nothing really extraordinary for the occasion. The fiesta, after all, is an exercise in excess, the culmination of the Pinoy’s “bahala na” attitude where one made the most of present circumstance and followed expectations, never mind what comes next. For days on end, we’d be cooking assorted dishes, slicing onions till our eyes bulged with painful tears, polishing the good silver, putting up the good curtains and waxing the floors till they reflected our faces. Always, there would be too much food that we would dutifully try to finish in the days to come. On the third day, tired of all the reheated leftovers, we would heave them into the garbage pile, hoping that Nanay would believe that we had worked up a giant appetite to finish everything off.

It went on till most of us siblings got married, left home and started our own traditions which, thankfully enough, did not include a cooking and feeding frenzy also known as the fiesta. Wary of not leaving our children their own trove of Pinoy memories, however, we made room for summer holidays that revolved around the occasional fiesta — the Pahiyas in Lucban, Quezon or the Sta. Clara festival in Obando, for instance. Because they were seen as extra treats and not obligatory occasions, fiestas retained much of their colorful novelty and infectious good cheer for our kids. Should they expect much more, I can only hope they’d find vicarious enjoyment in my collection of fiesta memories, such as this:

Many many years before, in our pre-teen years, we would be packed off in a cramped rented jeepney for this obligatory trek to Nueva Ecija’s May 1 fiesta. It must have been a big deal then, at least for our parents who had rented a long passenger jeepney weeks ahead and counted off heads, trying to decide which relative to bump off from the limited seating space. Two other vehicles would join our motley caravan as it crawled past the backyard poultries of Bulacan and the ripening rice fields around Mt. Arayat.

Fidgety in our starched Sunday clothes, us kids amused ourselves by pointing to giant Aji-nomoto canisters, imagining half-asleep giants forgetting their condiments along MacArthur Highway. Talk of kapres was rife and rambunctious, but our elders drew the line at attempts to ride the jeepney’s running board. We generally kept our peace — until the road stalls came into sight. Suffocating from all that grown-up talk, we would race down to buy boiled corn on the cob, sliced melons and boiled peanuts that were the mid-60s version of cheese curls. If we got lucky and our parents were feeling particularly generous, we would stop at Sevilla’s for some pastillas de leche and chicharong may laman, those stroke-inducing, cholesterol-choked pork rinds that have remained our secret pleasure. At Baliuag, Bulacan, our reward for good behavior was a brown paper bag of sweetish pandesal the size of an adult thumb.

It took about two hours of often-dusty travel on the plains of Central Luzon before we got to my parents’ bustling hometown. Then the real fun began. Fiestas in those times were strictly participatory: you didn’t just stroll in and raided the household pantry. You offered to help stir the soup, cut up the sticky sweets or harvest banana leaves for plates. Kids were expected to cook a thin sticky gruel from Liwayway Gawgaw and use that to turn colorful Japanese paper into festive buntings. The older kids quickly tired of this routine and would mosey around the low-ceilinged ground floor that doubled as our lolo’s bodega, discovering packs of homemade cigarettes he would later peddle on market day. Experimenting with a puff and turning blue in the face from all that coughing forever cured me of any romance with smoking.

Shortly before lunch, just before the hordes of guests and relatives stormed the tables, the kids would be called to a mini-feast of all the usual fiesta dishes: small helpings of lechon skin, sinampalukang manok, tinumis (something like dinuguan, only meatier), and bowls of tamarindo, an odd dessert made of tamarind pulp that alternated between sweet and tart and which one ate by the spoonful or spread on pandesal for merienda. It was one rare concoction I haven’t tasted since my lola died.

Post lunch, we scurried off to the town plaza where a perya, a mini-carnival held sway, the plastic doodads given away as prizes holding our eyes. The best part of the fiesta, to my memory, was the carabao race, with everybody yelling themselves hoarse as the dressed-up beasts raised the dust. A procession of religious figures followed soon after and we would solemnly walk behind, until we heard our parents calling. Tired, sleepy and sated, we would straggle into the jeepney for the ride home, dreaming of next year’s fiesta and the perya prizes we would win next time.

But soon, much too soon, we grew up. And the fiesta became just another imposition.

Editor’s note: Photo by the author shows church with buntings heralding the start of the fiesta in Basco, Batanes.

For more insights, inquisitions and incredible fiesta photos, check out the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s May 4 issue.