The bell pepper connection: Two otherwise unrelated ruminations

#1 How far removed are you from the source(s) of your nourishment?

I remember a time, not that long ago, when I could still identify the provenance of the food that graced our table. At least some of it, anyway. Rice from the family farm, plus all sorts of fruit in season. The occasional bangus from an uncle’s fishpond. Chicken, usually as payment for repair work from cash-strapped clients of my father’s motor shop. Pork? My mother raised pigs in the backyard. Malunggay — my aunt’s, next door. Tomatoes — the neighbor’s across the road. A river ran behind the house, its banks teeming with kangkong, but we weren’t that hard-up.

Fast-forward to the present, and compare. The farm promptly went to seed after my grandfather died two decades back, so our rice now comes from a dealership. Tito abandoned the fishpond when Tita found out that… but let’s not get into that; let’s just say we now buy bangus from the market, like everyone else. Chicken we can live without. As for raising swine, Ma decided it was bad enough eating pork without ruining her hips caring for pigs; the ones that end up at the local meat shop are trucked all the way from Davao. And my lola, if she were still alive, would have blanched at the idea of having to purchase tanglad or malunggay — that is, if she could get past the fact that her house is gone, the victim of a fire that razed half the block three years after her demise. It’s not the same neighborhood anymore. Most everything’s been taken over by concrete. The fruit trees at the back of Lola’s house? Nada mas. The neighbor’s tomato patch? Now a sidewalk. Even the kangkong have stopped growing along the riverbanks.

I’m not complaining. A week ago we harvested a handful of sweet bell peppers from the mini-garden at the back of the house. They were plump green specimens that miraculously survived the wet, cold weather and my less-than-stellar gardening skills. That made them something of a miracle. It was almost a shame to pick them off their stems, but my father, who’s not given to sentimentality, knew a good salad when he saw one.

It was like a scene out of those cooking shows on TV — you know, the ones where the host picks ingredients from an impossibly lush garden (presumably said host’s) and cooks it in an impossibly spotless kitchen — not that our garden and kitchen could be described as lush and spotless, respectively; it just felt like one of those moments, you know? Let’s be honest: We don’t prance barefoot around the garden, picking thith and that vegetable or herb for dinner — that’s Jamie Oliver, for crying out loud. And since when did cable set the standards for real life anyway? In reality, those peppers took all of 16 weeks to come into their own and we harvested a mere kilo of fruit from four hardy survivors. If you think that’s a paltry return on the time and effort it took to grow them, I can tell you we were happy we got anything at all. But you have a point there. I should brush up on my Gardening 101.

I have this idea: Why not try your hand at planting your own food? Wouldn’t that be something, huh? We have it so easy these days, with Thai rice, Ormoc pineapple, Batangas coffee. People are no longer keen on working the soil themselves these days — or so it would seem, and that’s a shame. You, on the other hand, strike me as an enlightened person. Yeah, you. Why not get your hands dirty the old-fashioned way? It’s really satisfying. Come to think of it, it’s a lot more productive than surfing for porn — not that I’m accusing you of anything.

#2 Good help is hard to find. Fortunately for Margarita Fores, the restaurateur, she knows exactly where to look for them. Not that her mother’s too pleased, or so I imagine: You wouldn’t be, too, if someone pirated people from your staff.

I did not make that up. I heard it from the woman herself during the MarketManila eyeball. “My mother would go, ‘O, ba’t ’yang si ano pa? Eh, ang galing maglinis ng bahay n’yan.’” Her mother’s too kind, if you ask me. I don’t even want to consider what mine would do to me if I pulled that stunt on her, although if pressed my best guess would be that she would skin me alive and use my tanned hide for upholstery. Ma hates seeing anything go to waste.

But I’m not here to criticize Ms. Fores’ hiring practices, unorthodox though they may be. I, too, hate to waste things. Like that gem of an anecdote, for example. That came in handy, no? That caught your attention.

Good — because the next anecdote involves someone you absolutely haven’t heard of. Once upon a time, see, we had this housemaid. I don’t know where Ma found her, but Yaya S. was a real find: honest, hardworking, genial. She cooked, cleaned, did the laundry, mended clothes, tutored my niece (she spoke perfect English — a bonus), and was equally efficient at all of them, too. We later learned that she used to work for an American serviceman stationed at Subic, only to find herself jobless when the US pulled out their personnel with the closure of the bases. (On that note, I would like to mention that we had this love-hate affair with Cory Aquino: We were grateful that she made it at all possible for Yaya S. to beat a path to our financially less-rewarding doorstep, and yet we could not quite forgive her for unleashing Kris onto the local entertainment scene.)

My mother can be quite the cynic. She once observed of Diana Krall, the jazz artist: “That woman’s so beautiful and talented; there’s got to be something terribly wrong with her.” Not that Yaya S. looked anything like Diana Krall. She was plain-looking but far from ugly, although something was definitely wrong with her. “Pa, come see Yaya,” my niece said one day, in that tone children use when they want you to see something they find really amusing. Little did I know. I found Yaya curled up like a fetus, slumped beside the sink. I asked if she was ill, tugged at her, but she would not speak or move. She just sat there, blankly staring off into space. That went on for ten-or-so minutes, after which she blinked, stood up, and, without missing a beat, carried on with the dishwashing. That kind of wrong.

You know what? You get used to it. You live with someone like that, sooner or later it becomes an “Oh, that? She does that sometimes” sort of thing. And as things stood, my mother was thankful enough for her good fortune, even as she constantly wondered how long it was going to hold. It wasn’t like Yaya was a raving lunatic or something that far gone — oh no. She was just eccentric, was the consensus. We knew how to deal with eccentrics, didn’t we?

Besides, a contented stomach could lull you into a false sense of complacency, and Yaya S. certainly knew how to take care of our stomachs. This, my friends, is where those bell peppers come in. Of all the scrumptious dishes that she made, it was her bell pepper salad that stuck with me. She would roast those peppers until they were nicely charred and let them sit in a covered bowl. Meanwhile she would hard-boil eggs, dice pickles, and prepare the dressing: a few heaping tablespoons of mayonnaise with a teaspoon or two of honey and a pinch of salt. When the roasted peppers were cool enough to handle they were divested of skin and seeds and sliced into strips. The eggs came last, shells removed, sliced into chunks. Everything went into a mixing bowl. “Gentle does it,” she would remind my niece, who always volunteered for the job. “And let it sit in the fridge for a while — it’s best eaten cold.” We loved her salad. We still do.

Alas, Yaya’s no longer with us. She’s not dead, grabe ka ha, just that she’s no longer in our employ. What happened was, Yaya fell in love. It made her do the damnedest things, messed up her mind real bad. We had no idea she was in a relationship, not that it was any of our business. (It wasn’t.) We learned of it sort of in medias res, when Yaya started getting the dry heaves, usually when we were in the middle of a meal. Ma, never one to mince words, asked her if she was pregnant. “Yaya’s going to have a baby!” my niece, her tutee, enthused. I was a bit more circumspect, thinking (uncharitably, too), Here we go: post-partum depression, infanticide, the insanity plea. Quickly followed by, Wait — Yaya has a boyfriend?

Indeed. Turned out she had been seeing this guy for some time, and now it appeared she had gotten herself knocked up, too. Like, right?

Ah, but she was such a thespian, our Yaya…

Don’t think me a cold, unfeeling asshole for saying that. The thing was, Yaya faked a pregnancy to get her boyfriend to marry her. The retching continued up until the day of the wedding, after which it came to an abrupt and complete stop. We all had a good laugh over that. Yaya did not even mind the ribbing about her acting talent; she was too busy being happy being married. If only she didn’t have to account for that one little white lie that got her married in the first place…

The ruse bought her two months’ worth of marital bliss. I knew the jig was up when she went back to doing her usual catatonic routine. If she had left it at that it would have been business as usual, but the day she came in with nicks on her arms — obviously self-inflicted — my mother had to concede that her luck had, at last, run out. Yaya had to go. One had to draw the line somewhere, and Yaya had finally crossed that line. Talking to yourself was okay. So was the occasional head-banging on the counter-top. But self-mutilation? Sorry but that just didn’t make the cut — no pun. “What if she goes totally cuckoo on us?” my mother said. “What if she stabs us in our sleep?” This was around the time Carlo J. Caparas came out with a string of massacre movies; doubtless Ma did not relish the prospect of becoming the subject of Carlo J’s next obra, not to mention the equally dubious distinction of having her name forever tied to the filmography of Kris Aquino.

As for Yaya S., she left quite an impression on our household. Those who succeeded her have had to live up to the standard she set, but someone has yet to succeed on that count. To be honest, I’m sure no one ever will, because with the passage of time our memories of her grow ever more diffuse, more idealized. It’s easy to gloss over a person’s undesirable side when that person has been gone a good, long while. Heck, I’m sure I’ll remember Kris with fondness someday. That’s if she doesn’t annoy me to death first.