Without the icing, please!

By Emmanuelle

Have you baked a calamansi chiffon cake? Or tasted one that had just slid out of a homebaker’s warm oven? Slice a tiny first piece, fork it on your tongue. As the morsel melts, feel your mouth juices burst, gush! Its flavor is as near as can be to orange or lemon, but calamansi cake has a piquant, tangy, tingly bite of its own.

No frosty icing needed. No sugar coating, please. Don’t spoil the taste.

This article is not a baking lesson; just a clumsy but fitting introduction to a true story told by another set of twins:

Kit and Kat carry the genes of the founding fathers of one of the oldest central Pangasinan towns. They had the fair skin, the brown hair, the thin up-turned nose of the Spanish mestiza. Both trained to be teachers. Kit chose to remain single while Kat married early a tall, handsome mestizo who was an enterprising agriculturist and a scion of another pioneer’s family.

This article is not about how to improve the genes, either. This is about dealing with life’s lessons – without the icing, please.

They have known each other all their lives, so when Luis proposed to Kat, he was so down-to-earth frank, simple, concise. According to Kat, Luis said: You are the only woman I would want to be my wife and the mother of my children. It is you I want to share and to spend with the rest of this life and what I make out of it. I imagine no other. If this is love, so be it love. You may reject me at this point, but I will never stop my pursuit until you have said yes. So say yes now, that we may start building a new life with our family and our home. We will have a son and we will have a daughter; one to take care of our bloodline, one to care of our years. Say it now or say it later, no matter. Your twin will always be a friend and a sister and she is welcome to stay with us, but I was born for you, and you were born for me.          

The words were so naked, so barren of romance – so clear and so unadorned. You can imagine the letters dropping out of his lips flying straight to Kat’s ears – pling, plink, splat! She can’t have a proposal any plainer than that.  

Kat and Luis married. And they did have one son and one daughter. Kit lived with them, was a great help with the kids, and her teacher’s income made sure she was never a burden.       

During their marriage, Kat, and Kit too, had adapted Luis’ matter-of-fact ways. When a child asked the mom or the aunt: where do babies come from? The child would receive an earful of biology, then physiology made simple. No ready-made stories about storks and Si Malakas at  Si Maganda. The onceness of life and death were never coated with sugared fantasy – one has this one in a million chance to be born in birth, so many chances to make good in life, and this one exit to end all chances.

Auntie Kit, was theirs a love match or just a marriage of convenience? The kids asked when they were a little older. Kit would answer: they must have. Love need not be said, you know, just shown, just felt. There was no other for your dad and mom. They only had each other, and now you.

The kids asked too: How about you, auntie? Don’t you want to get married and have a family of your own too? Kit would hug the little ones, and say: why would I need another family? I have you, and you are already too much!           

Although Luis has just died from complications of diabetes, this story has no sad ending. He and Kat had lived a simple but a happy and fulfilled life; and he did not leave her alone and lonely. She has the two kids, and she has Kit.

Where is the calamansi bite in this cake, you ask? Send me a message, give me a call through Sunday Punch. I’ll tell.  

(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/)

 

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