Prou(s)ted Mongo

Then off to another French author, Marcel Proust, then. Vigan seems to be perfect for reading him and I made the mistake of choosing “Swann's Way” as my guide. This is the passage when the suave kuno but very fawning Charles Swann confronted his lover's infidelity. I will never again ignore the innocent passage, “two or three times.”

“Swann had prepared himself for every possibility. Reality must therefore be something that bears no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one's body bears tot he gradual movement of the clouds overhead. Since those words, “two or three times,” carved as it were a cross upon the living tissues of his heart. Strange indeed that those words, “two or three times,” nothing more than words, words uttered in the air, could so lacerate a man's heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could make a man ill, like a poison he has drunk.”

Comforting at first but Proust being Proust had to go on stabbing himself with the pain inflicted by that “two or three times.”

I closed my book, thinking: Come off it. Two or three times? What about two or three years? This is the time of the Internet chat where I know friends setting their trysts there. What about texting? What a schmuck. There is a time to ponder on love lost and a time to push loving couples into the busy highway of Ilocos.

I walked along the cobblestones of Vigan barefoot. I read somewhere that some Northwestern US scientists discovered that walking slowly on cobblestones, shifting your weight to the unevenness can lower your blood pressure and improve your balance. They learned this from watching old Chinese people walking on traditional stone paths in the morning.

After that walk, I went to Plaza Burgos and ate empanada, the Vigan snack where an egg and sprouted mongo were wrapped in a bright orange batter and deep fried. There goes the lowered blood pressure brought by the cobblestones.

I also had pipian which is similar to the couscous, again rendered orange with a chicken made to drown on it.

Ilocano love songs are blared in the plaza even as I speak. Syrupy like tagapulot making everybody here drowning in slumber or make that amber.

Then there was a jolt and the empanadera made a sign of the cross and looked at me. Make that look through me because behind me is the belfry. There was an earthquake, maybe 3 in the Richter scale but only the empanadera noticed it. I asked for one more empanada and drowned the whole thing in vinegar and onions.

In the end, of course, Swann would make his final dive:

“And with the old, intermittent caddishness which reappeared in him when he was no longer unhappy and his moral standards dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: “To think that I've wasted years of my life, that I've longed to die, that I've experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type!”

Naman pala, e.

But I highlighted the phrase, “and his moral standards dropped accordingly.” I might need that someday.