G Spot
Citizen Clave
By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo
WHEN I woke up at 2:40 a.m. today, I suddenly looked at the phone. When Manong Jake Clave was a living presence, he used to call me around that time, and he would not let up until 4:00 a.m. He would talk to me about how he was trying to liberate the orientation of the Methodist Church towards more empowering paradigms especially as it affects women, how he wanted to help me organize the women towards that goal and why I should not write about his efforts at that time, so that the church will not chastise him for his work, and we could go on quietly, changing consciousness imperceptibly, until we were able to create a critical mass to achieve a tipping point.
I remember how I met him. I wanted to develop a working relationship with key leaders in the fight against the Bolinao Cement Plant Complex whose establishment was funded by a transnational consortium composed of Hyundai, Marubeni, and some other multinational companies. I wanted to meet people and organizations whose presence could influence constituents into a more unified movement for the preservation of Bolinao’s marine life and to stop the deprivation of livelihood among Bolinao’s fisherfolks. Two of the many guiding lights of the people’s initiative against the cement plant complex were Margaret Celeste of MBCCI and Jake Clave.
I literally knocked on his door, one morning, in his house in Teachers Village. It took sometime before the door was opened, and I understood this, the housekeeper had to check with him, he did not know me from Eve. Finally, the door opened and I was led to a place near a huge tree with a swimming pool that did not have water, full of decaying leaves. He must have noticed I was looking at the pool when he arrived because he started to explain why the pool did not have water in it. He shook my hands, smiled and requested me to sit. And I did. It was the longest conversation in my life, with a totally engaging person, and I only got up from my sitting position when he asked me to join him for lunch!
It was a story of friendship that at times I wondered, if I could have fallen in love with this man, had I met him earlier in his life. I told myself, men grow up slowly, and he was not this same person years ago. It takes years before men grow up to become lovable. And when they become lovable, most often, they are already taken. He was always nice, except one time, on 06 August 1996, after dinner, during the celebration for the victory of the movement at Sulo Hotel when he told me, without hiding his total disappointment, “You look ugly when you are drunk. Go home before any of those animals race to bring you home.” And he offered his driver to bring me home. I did not take his offer. For the first time, I was piqued by his intolerance, those were my first four shots Margarita after two years, I deserved them.
We became good friends after that. He would invite me to his home, and his wife would always cook the most delicious pansit (noodles) I have ever tasted, with different vegetables and fish catch from Bolinao. I became a fixture in his house. He was no longer uncomfortable with me seeing him being aided by a nurse to urinate through a catheter, and at one point, when the nurse was not around, I thought I was going to do it, but he looked at me with dagger eyes, saying, “Not you, for Christ’s sake!”
We had good times. He would talk to me about his “pinabli” (translation: beloved, most treasured), how relationships are so complicated, defying definitions, and how they haunt, at the most unexpected moments of our lives. I was, or so I felt, his best friend, a repository of his persona, that he wanted me to write his biography, “only if you have the time to write it”. And he gave me a box of his personal notes, when he was still able to scribble, before his wife did the writing, and signing, in his behalf.
Unlike the death of most of my close friends, I accepted his death long before he died. We always talked about death, and how death is another birth. The night he died, I dreamed of him, handing me a bouquet of very long strands of sanggumay flowers, and I saw myself refusing to accept them, and he was saying to me, “They are yours now, keep them blooming!” It was then that I noticed, his feet were two feet above the exposed root of the kaimito tree.
I will always love Citizen Clave, he was a true servant leader, as I will always love him for the person that he was, and still is, to me.
(For your comments and reactions, please email to: punch.sunday@gmail.com)
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