The First Blooming of Dark and Light

In high school I had a friend in freshman year who singlehandedly changed the course of my life.

Francisco (his family called him Paking) was visiting his grandparents from Cebu. I believed him to come from a more illustrious, more prosperous family than mine. Back then I had a huge inferiority complex. I think his father was a successful attorney in Cebu City. I didn’t understand why his family had enrolled him at the cow-pasture campus of ICC but that decision put us two together. We became inseparable.

The friendship was like being in love. We wrote each other notes in invisible ink (milk that showed up when the paper was gently warmed over a candle flame) or with a special blue pencil we used just for writing those notes. Francisco had lighter skin. I attributed it to Spanish blood. I was thin, dark, with Chinaman eyes. To this day I see those two boys, one light, the other dark, in khaki short pants, sitting dangling their thin legs on a low branch of the big acacia tree near the Burgos Street gate. We were oblivious of the students passing below us. What we talked about is now lost to time but I remember the closeness, what I later came to call “being on the same wavelength.”

Without seeming to exert effort, Francisco soared to the top of the class. Students were assigned to classes by grades. We were both in the first class of freshmen. I wonder now if I was in that class only because my uncle was high school principal. I certainly don’t remember getting good enough grades at La Paz Elementary. There I remember just sliding to pass. My mother taught home economics to fifth-grade girls. She would ask her male colleagues to do my shop projects. I was a marginal student.

My admiration for my new friend inspired me to shine as he did. I wanted to be among the first to raise my hand in class with the right answer to the teacher’s question. I learned to love getting perfect scores on tests. I did not become more intelligent; I just studied harder. My older sister was two years ahead of me. Since we had the same teachers, her old notebooks helped but mostly I just put in more hours studying than the average student. I’d found a way to feel good about myself.

When Francisco left the following school year to return to Cebu I took over the class lead and held that position through graduation and into college at San Agustín. Scholastic honors became the foundation not only of my self-esteem but were the whole of who I was. The stratagem proved its core inadequacy when I moved from the small pond of Iloilo to Manila but that was six or seven years later.

My friendship with Francisco became the first of friendships that later on I saw in Herman Hesse’s Demian und Goldmund, the strange pairing of opposites that bring two people together. Boys and girls are as unlike as bugs and elephants but, in high school, hormones blooming in their blood stream like springtime in the Midwest, they discover in their differences that dangerous taste of intimacy. Thenceforth we search the world over and beyond to recapture our loss of innocence, our coming of age into a simpler, driven life as adults outside the gates of Paradise.