By Rex Catubig

 

I’M the youngest in a brood of five. There is an eight-year gap between me and the brother who preceded me. But before my mother reluctantly bore me, (I was an unplanned child), she had prepared for this other baby boy.

I had not asked my mother how far along she was when by a cruel stroke of fate, she miscarried. But she must have been months into her pregnancy when she lost her baby. He must have been well-formed already, a flesh and blood life nipped in the bud of becoming.

 

Which probably prompted her to give him a name nonetheless, as acknowledgement of his nascent persona and to validate his identity as a human being.

She named him Antonio.

Who knows what reason she had for choosing the name. Was it derived from one of the heroes? Was she even aware it was the namesake of a hero?

But mother’s instinct is oftentimes uncanny. Folk definitions of the name ties it with phrases such “worthy of praise”, “of inestimable value”. Needless to say, to my young mother, Antonio was to her a priceless treasure. The boy who would have been her fair fifth and youngest.

But the name also happens to be an appellation with a tragic association. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the character Antonio bemoans: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one”.

Had Antonio lived, would he have proven his worth? But did he have a gambler’s chance to be born? And had he survived, would I have had the chance to be conceived? Would I have been the wild card? Was his untimely miscarriage from our mother’s womb, a precursor to another life meant to be? Was his misfortune my luck?

He could have been the playmate I never had, instead of my cousins who were my age.

In my twilight years, who could really say? And who would have second guessed? My years, my dreams and nightmares, my loves, joy and heartaches, have more than validated my existence and have superseded all questions germane to my pertinence. The rest of my life is a gratuitous postlude to the cycle of rebirth.

Shakespeare had this to say in As You Like It:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts…

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything…”

Perhaps, it does not really end that way. For somewhere, sometime, is a naughty, lustful gleam in a would-be father’s eyes. And yet another Antonio would mischievously wriggle in a would-be mother’s womb. And perhaps, on a lucky chance, a Ricardo.

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