September in Naga is when all the people in Bikol are saved. En masse.
Or, that’s how I thought it was growing up in this small city in the 60s and 70s. The month of August is the anomalous month– it is neither here nor there, not summer and not wet season either. Old people say that when you get a wound in the month of August, it will be slow to heal. Unbidden, the month is a perfect month, well defined, albeit impetuous for a month that introduces the change in the direction of the wind. It is a season of feast. Unheralded, it hides no taboo. Only salvation.
I liked the idea of living in a city where salvation comes many times outside Christmas and Lent. It was as if we are given a headstart. But the salvation came with a tablet of rules. September was when I felt our home and city just had to welcome anyone. Let it be said that there were many months in those years when we, with my two brothers, had to sleep under the big dining table, with its top bearing not one but two other pilgrims. The bedrooms groaned with the rest. My memory is kind because I do not remember now where my parents stayed and where my grandparents slept.
September was a month of performances. In the old parochial school, September’s events were anticipated in the month of July. This was the month when the rehearsals for the singing of Salve Regina commenced. Voices were heard and separated. If you were in Grade 6, you just had to sing it. It was both a privilege and a punishment. For our unsophisticated ears, the melody of the Latin hymn sounded more like a dirge than an acclamation. It was a puzzle and a perplexity. No one ever told us it was used as a war-song of the Crusade, as later our history teacher would profoundly describe it. No one dared explain to us how old it was, perhaps our teachers fearing that if we were informed that it was a Medieval composition, our minds would shut off against it. An 11th century song and little Bikolano boys were chanting it!
When we were singing Salve Regina, the parochial school was still a small school. Its main gate facing the Ateneo Avenue opened to a cornucopia of dirty ice cream, and other forbidden offerings. They were our first taste of sins. After our graduation, something would happen to that gate. One day, the entire city woke up to the news that a young boy from the school was abducted and found dead. An eyewitness remembered that the boy was picked up by a car and he went along. They speculated that the boy must have known those men. That main gate, the place where the boy was last seen, would remain closed. Like a mouth that has ceased praying.
But we did not stop praying. Salve Regina became an event in the Jesuit high school. The entire regiment of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors would sing it. The rehearsals would begin in July and when August came, they were daily tortures. Our sufferings would pay off when on the day of the Jesuits, our Rector, Fr. David, would begin in his rich baritone the first line of the song. The voices of those in first and second year would come in, tentative first, and marshalling strength, move up and up, followed by the layers of tones from the juniors, and urged by the thundering of the bass from the seniors. Incense would fill the massive belly of the cathedral and we believed, really believed in what we were intoning. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria. Oh clement, Oh loving, Oh sweet Virgin Mary. We reached for those terrible notes, we bent to catch the tricky rhythm, we did everything to finish that prayer and hopefully get a holiday and a free movie. All for saving a city.
Not the falling apart of the hanging bridge and the death of hundreds, not the Martial Law and the disappearance of thousands, not the participation of the military in the procession, not the color-coding of the voyadores, not even the rules about the “appropriate” way to observe the fiesta from the institutional church, not even the fact that only men are allowed to carry Her, not the heat, and certainly not the rains, however, could stop us from singing our prayer.