Ano ba!? Are we going to push through with this or not?” she huffed.
“Yes, dear,” I squeaked. I craned my head outside the car window and all I could see was an endless expanse of taillights along the South Super Highway.
“I told you we should have done this on Sunday morning instead of Friday evening!” she folded her hands and glanced out the window. “Look at the traffic! By the time we get to Tagaytay, I’ll be in menopause!” she growled.
“But dear, I asked you naman if we could change the date, di ba?” I replied in my best singsong Ilonggo fashion. “Because it’s the binyag of my barkada’s firstborn on Sunday morning?” I broke into a faint smile and reached out for her hand.
“Are you the ninong?”
“No.”
“Are you the father of the child!?
“Um… no.”
“Then you don’t really have to be there!” she fumed while brushing away my hand. “Your barkada will understand that this affair is more important to you than the binyag!” I edged towards the door, ready to jump out of the car in the event of bodily harm. “Yes, dear,” I exhaled.
“So why did you even bother to ask me!?”
I furrowed my eyebrows. “I shouldn’t have asked you anymore, dear?”
“Of course!” she roared. “You knew I didn’t want to change the date, but you still asked me!? Couldn’t you have been more considerate? Isn’t tonight important for both of us!?”
“But dear, you said you were okay with changing the date.” I bit my lower lip.
“Just because I said it doesn’t mean that I wanted you to do it! Haven’t I trained you better than that?” she folded her arms even tighter.
I bowed my head and thought to myself: “Lord, why weren’t men born with mental telepathy? I could have done without the chest hair.” That night, I learned that you do not use logic when arguing with your fiancée. Arguing with your fiancée is like arguing with a force of nature. You cannot stop a force of nature, you can only brace yourself for it, and hope that you can escape with all your organs functioning.
I looked out again into the traffic. “Well, your parents are on the way already, ‘di ba? Didn’t they call you to say they left the house? That’s good news.” I sheepishly grinned.
She sneered. “My parents do not think time is a linear concept. They think time stops for them. When they say they’re on the way that means they are just leaving the apartment!”
I groaned as quietly as I could. At least my sister, my brother-in-law, my baby goddaughter, my brother and his girlfriend were caught in the same traffic snarl that was moving slower than a government infrastructure project. Then my cellphone rang.
“Manong,” my sister greeted me in a voice dripping with PMS. “I know tonight means a lot to both of you, but your goddaughter has reached puberty while waiting for the traffic to inch forward.” She cleared her throat. “Can we just turn back and go home?”
The traffic seemed to move even slower.
I clenched my fists until my fingernails dug into my palms. Lord, give me strength. I exhaled. Why did the forces of nature conspire to make this the worst possible night for my pamanhikan?
Ah, the pamanhikan. It is a time-honored ritual in our country, much the same as the pagtutuli and self-flagellation during holy week are rituals. All these rituals involve some pain, some bloodletting and some close encounters with the loss of genitalia. However, remember that the pamanhikan is only the penultimate step in this ritualized hazing process. Before your potential father-in-law can even cock a rifle at your forehead, grit his teeth and blurt out “Ano ba yung plano mo para sa anak ko?” in front of your whole family, you must first undergo the background checks, the massive credit card loans, and the failed assassination attempts that form part of your panliligaw.
And, as all Pinoy men know, when you make ligaw a woman, you are making ligaw the totality of that woman. And that sum total includes her lola, her lola’s yaya, her titos, her titas, her cousins, her pamangkins (buy her godkids something that looks really expensive), her relatives within the sixth degree of consanguinity, her family friends, her barkada, her high school classmates, her college classmates, her officemates, her supervisor, her gym partners, her yoga teacher, her Pilates teacher, her kickboxing teacher (be especially nice to him), her church community, her father confessor (try not to go to confession with him), her barangay captain, her masahista, her manicurista, her hair stylista, everyone in the “Contacts” list of her cellphone, everybody who lives within a one-mile radius from her apartment, everyone on her Friendster list, and everyone who reads her blog. And, of course, her yaya (but make sure your own yaya knows that she occupies a special place in your heart).
But the really tricky part is making ligaw her siblings. Her male siblings.
I must confess, I have never been really comfortable with making ligaw someone who is the same sex as myself. Especially if you have to make ligaw men who have more testosterone in their pinkie fingers than you have running throughout your entire endocrine system.
How do I know that her brothers have more testosterone than me? Aside from the fact that all of them are twice my size, three times my physique and, most painfully, have a full head of hair, all three of her brothers are professional racecar drivers. This can be intimidating for a guy who was not allowed to drive a car by himself until he turned 21. Her steely-nerved siblings could negotiate a hairpin turn in a split second. As for me? I have difficulty parallel parking. Her brothers could probably take apart an owner-driven jeep, soup it up, and turn it into a racecar that they could then enter into the Asian Formula 3 Championships. If my car broke down in the middle of EDSA, the first thing I would do would be to get out of the car, lift open the hood, kneel down and pray. If my prayers didn’t work, then I would cry.
Her brothers were hardly satisfied when I tried to bribe them with engine oil and car fresheners and those dog bobble heads you put on the dashboard. But they did stop giving me a hard time when I started sending them love letters. However, the most emasculating process of my panliligaw was not when her brothers had my cellphone calls tapped, nor when they had me tested for drugs, and not even when they gave me a prostate exam.
It was making ligaw her parents.
Making ligaw her parents meant that I had to be more tenacious than chief executives holding on to their government posts. My fiancée warned me that the only way I could convince her parents that I was worthy of intermingling my DNA with theirs was by following the traditional Pinoy courtship rules or else it was back to more prostate exams from her brothers. Scared that I might start enjoying those prostate exams, I leafed through the book The Filipino Family and found out that my self-proclaimed good looks and fading boyish charm would not be enough to curry her parents’ favor.
Sealing The Deal
Serenade (Harana). Aside from threatening to slit your throat and pleading with your girlfriend’s parents that your life would become a meaningless void if they did not allow you to become their daughter’s manservant/personal eunuch, the harana or serenade used to be one of the more popular means by which a man expressed his feelings for his woman in front of her whole family.
The idea of serenading my soon-to-be-fiancée to impress her folks left me cackling with glee. This was like handing over a nuclear weapon to terrorists. Little did my fiancée know that karaoke was practically a religion in my house! After my dad and I imbibe enough alcohol to sanitize a hospital ward, we sumo-slap each other with our beer bellies to decide who will croon the night away singing the hits of Rico J. Puno. I was raised on a solid repertoire of beerhouse greats: Rey Valera, Basil Valdez, Nonoy Zuniga and the late great Yoyoy Villame. When my girlfriend was able to finally pin down her parents, bind them to a chair and gag them with a pair of socks, I barged into their home armed with my secret weapons: My Magic Sing and The Best of Jose Mari Chan. They were still conscious when I sang Can’t We Stop and Talk Awhile, but went slightly catatonic when I warbled Please Be Careful With My Heart. But by the time I got to the chorus of Beautiful Girl, we had to rush both of them to the emergency room for coronary heart disease. I have been advised to stay away within shouting range of her parents until their cholesterol levels begin to stabilize.
Go-Between (Tulay). The Filipino Family book recommends employing the services of a “go-between” to woo the girl’s parents if the suitor is nahihiya. However, the book is silent about employing the services of a go-between if the suitor is walang hiya. To be on the safe side, I tried to seek out a professional wooer to make her parents think that I had a concept of shame. I needed someone who was proficient in the use of flowery and metaphoric language. Someone whose persuasive power had a deliriously hypnotic affect among those around him. And since I couldn’t afford the Speaker of the House, I settled for the next best thing: Willie Revillame. But then I remembered that this Willie had also penned the hits Ang Cute ng Pokemon and ’Wag Mong Pigilan. So I ended up contracting the services of the backup dancers on Wowowee instead. They can speak metaphorically. Through dance. My girlfriend’s dad was quite amused as they wiggled and jiggled my message of true love for their daughter. But her mom was not. Oh well, at least watching the backup dancers to Aalog-alog would be more entertaining than watching the Speaker of the House dancing to Aalog-alog.
Manual labor (Paninilbihan). Finally, a job that I was as well-suited to as Lito Atienza is to the post of DENR Secretary. In the old days, Paninilbihan was when a suitor was supposed to perform a daunting task for the girlfriend’s family. Many of these tasks have become obsolete for most city folk, such as chopping firewood or fetching water (though I understand fetching water is pretty popular if you live in the Parñaque area).
I was quite worried about these daunting tasks I had to perform because any physical activity that was more daunting than typing on a keyboard tended to give me lower back problems. So instead of backbreaking labor, her dad thought that emotional trauma would be just as good as paninilbihan since it would give me the same degree of cardiovascular activity.
Back when my fiancée was planning to work in the US for several months, I asked her father’s permission to travel with her. But my fiancée failed to mention that the only permission I had actually been given was to ride with her on the plane to the States. I was not able to read the fine print of the permission slip, which stated, “If second party (boyfriend) travels with assignee (girlfriend) outside of the baggage claim area without asking the permission of the first party (Dad), the first party can turn the second party into a speed bump.”
When she had finally settled in at her new job, I returned a few weeks later and came home to a wax-sealed handmade card from her parents. I thought it was a nice “Thank You” card for accompanying their daughter to the US. But when I opened it, I found out it was a “Explain your actions with regard to my daughter or else I will be arrested for first-degree murder” card.
Following receipt of that card, I stayed home for a couple of days to grow some balls. When they were large enough to be observed by astronomers, I finally paid a visit to her dad. After each of her brothers conducted their prostate exams on me, I was allowed to show her dad a notarized letter from my parents, eyewitness testimonies, picture exhibits and an imprimatur from her father confessor to prove that we were under 24-hour supervision of God-fearing adults.
After several hours of examining the evidence, I think her dad could tell how sincere I was by how much I had soiled my pants. So he planted his right hand on my shoulder and uttered, “You will make a good husband someday.” (He never actually said that, but that’s what I hoped he would say. He actually said, “You won’t get away that easy next time.”) Then he grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me to his garage “Now let’s get you fitted for a chastity belt.”
Back in traffic on South Super Highway, I scratched furiously at an itch I couldn’t reach after my two-year-old chastity belt rusted shut. “We’re almost there” I choked. “I hope they didn’t cancel our reservations.”
My fiancée’s hand inched closer to mine. “Love, this is what it’s going to be like sometimes when we’re married. Things don’t always turn out as planned.” She slowly took my hand and intertwined her fingers with mine. “But it doesn’t matter if nobody shows up in our pamanhikan. What’s important is that you and I are there.” She nuzzled her nose against mine. “It’s a beautiful place and it’s a beautiful night. Let’s make the most out of the evening.” She kissed me full on the lips and I felt a tingle run down the length of my spine.
“Yes, dear, let’s make the most of tonight…” I bussed her on the forehead. “…But I want you to recall, you were the one in the first place who said that Friday would be much better for your family. I just wanted to let you know.” I looked into the deep pools that were her eyes and broke into a sly smile.
Then she squeezed my hand until my fingers popped like pimples.
* * *
Next column: “The Pamanhikan cometh.” For comments, suggestions or if you have survived a pamankihan, please text PM POGI <message> and send it to 2948 for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers. Or you can email ledesma.rj@gmail.com.