Fancy meeting you at the opera

Rushing into the University of Columbia’s Chan Performing Arts Centre lobby for my first cultural evening a few years ago, I waded through wafts of perfume and brushed my arm against the silk sleeves of an opera crowd in frantic search of Jan, the friend who got for us tickets to Rusalka, Antonín Dvoák’s widely performed work. 

I had felt lost, met by unfamiliar side glances—and then, I caught her shy, rather sad, smile. Standing behind a patrician-looking elderly woman in a satin opera jacket, the Filipina, obviously the lady’s caregiver, held on to the back handle of the wheelchair, signaling life only when she smoothed a stray hair, which couldn’t be possible from her tight pony tail.

I could have sidled up to her with a kumusta!, but Jan had found me, and shortly, the bells sounded for us to find our seats. Where we settled in the balcony before the lights dimmed, there she was, next to her lady among the choicest center orchestra seats, bent as if studying her hands. Soon swept in the wood nymph, Rusalka’s, ill-fated tale unraveled in Dvorak’s haunting music—with its heart-rending aria, “Song to the Moon”—steeping us in one long sigh in the first act, I had wondered, amid rousing shouts of “bravo,” how my kababayan fared; there below, seemingly oblivious, still focused on her hands.

Had there been other caregivers as fortunate, in my mind, as she somewhere close? I imagined Winnie, a rural nurse from Isabela, who used to stay with us in Manila before she left for Montreal to be a companion to an elderly lady, perhaps like the Filipina that evening, must have sat through a number of seasons of what to most could be improbable (operatic) scenes at the Opera de Montreal, and maybe some afternoons watched a French movie. What luck, or was it?

I recall how my classmates, thinking it could be an easy job, had packed the short course on Elderly Care, that I took long ago, at one of the caregiver training centers in Mandaluyong. We had dreams of being a mere bantay or alalay (like the Filipina in the opera), and, if needed, apply techniques in changing bed clothes and sheets, giving massages like tapotement (rhythmic tapping for air and blood circulation) or effleurage (sliding or gliding to loosen muscles). For me, how lovely to read to a lady, who would enjoy my choice of a book—we always pictured a female. But none of us, I learned later, had pursued such vague future.

Had I not met Cynthia in our neighborhood, maybe I would still mull over such imaginings, which according to her, vis-a-vis the truth, can only be but, “wish ko lang!” Her client, an 87-year old grandmother, suffering from mild dementia, would bite her like a child when not allowed her whims, like play with water.

She would throw a bowl or cup or any object within reach, accusing her of stealing, or when Cynthia hasn’t combed her hair right, which is never.

Cynthia’s mien would soften though, like one morning on the bus, when remembering Marie, the British widow who called her, “sweet,” who she visited at her condominium apartment twice a week to shampoo, bathe and take walks in a nearby park. She had confessed to having no idea what “a fine lady” meant before she worked for her, “Mayroon palang ganoon, Ate!”

That evening at the opera during intermission, as Jan and I lined up for tea, there again, in a crowd by then swirling in conversations about how grandiose the evening had been turning out, I watched the Filipina conscientiously attend to her gracious lady.

How tempting to transpose Cynthia’s recollection of Marie to their story, to which I may never be privy— but lacking Cynthia’s buoyancy as the Filipina again, smiled at me through a veil of weariness, as if supplicating.