Scratch and Murmur
On drawing the neighbors' roses, the haunting of two fathers, and keeping my pencils sharp.
I.
I’d spent much of my early childhood with my maternal grandparents and two to three aunts. My grandfather still worked then as a mining engineer, his job often taking him from Metro Manila and up to Baguio—a circuitous trajectory that brought him close to his birthplace. After weeks away, he would come home from sites with his briefcase full of plastic bags containing a spectrum of minerals; he would have film photographs that he would splice together to mimic a panoramic shot. Plus the assortment of pens and mechanical pencils and oddly shaped rulers and compasses and calipers, all of them glinting and cold to the touch, plus the yellow pads and the pocket notebooks and the rolls of grid paper. All of these taking ownership of the circular dining table, the lazy Susan temporarily stowed away.
The rocks were of no interest to me; they were merely dusty and mildly colorful dirt, handpicked for reasons I waved off as belonging to the rules dictating living as an adult. But his assembly of his photographs—vistas and greenery and stretches of combed, naked ground—could keep me a captive audience at the dining table that could host him and his accoutrements. (The photos would be laid out, similar or same elements would be brought together, some logic would be deduced—where this tree branch cuts off in one photo would connect to a fistful of leaves in another. He’d take a freshly sharpened pencil to delineate and define, he’d take his metal ruler and his special knives to carve the required shape, and he would create something he had pre-planned as what was whole. The finished panorama would never approximate a rectangle; there would be right angles but at all the dissonant places, but I knew it satisfied him because it was correct and true to what he had seen. It was a pleasing geometry, and I helped him with confident confirmations of alignments.)
II.
At eight, two years before I was thrown into high school, I was reclaimed and went south to Cavite to finally live with my parents and my two younger brothers. Perhaps it was thought that my parents could at last afford a daughter.
And then I was in a cramped house, a house that looked like every other house in a subdivision that would not ever be finished being built—two straight roads of duplexes that did not think it necessary to aspire to more genteel pretensions. Welcome to Meadowville. (Within Bahayang Pag-asa, a translation of which is being worked out in my brain for the first time: Housing of/for Hope.)
My brothers had been given nicknames by our paternal grandparents who had taken them in further down south—nicknames that matched and announced that these two were a pair, nicknames asserting that an alien place (Batangas) and alien customs (a childhood not spent indoors, perhaps even with other children) had claimed them. Abeng, for Gabriel. Enteng, for Vincent. These were names I’d only hear on television, and only in ruddy reruns of Filipino films. My brothers carry all their names to this day.
I had no such folksy pet name. I was just Sasha. It was often mispronounced, auguring a lifetime phenomenon. Cavite would call me by my real name often, but that was unfamiliar to me as well. (In high school, peers would do away with my offering of names; I would be christened a name ending in the small-town echo that was -ng, but that was a christening that came about through usual childhood ridicule. When I returned to cities for college, I was ready again with and resolute about Sasha, along with my father’s surname that I did not truly legally had claim to back then.)
III.
For months, I have wondered about the neighbors’ wild roses, a scraggly bush taller than I am, swaying and spindly by the roadside. I finally caught it blooming-and-dying this week, flowers miniature and magenta. Too soon, too fast, though: Most of the flowers were open and beyond first blush, quite a lot were days away from falling off the stems.
I started studying tonal drawing in earnest last year, part of a personal curriculum to tackle the purgatory that is intermediate skill: no visible progress as when you’re a beginner, and the casualness of expertise is far beyond one’s reach. I do not enjoy the outline drawing (arguably, draftsmanship) that’s a requirement of competent and nuanced scientific illustration. I absolutely do not have the ease of a sketcher. As with too many things, drawing is a painstaking process bombarded with an accompaniment of neuroses. I can never just draw. It is always work.
So it was a curious development, that though line drawing still aggravates me, I would come to love continuous tonal drawings so much—the scratch and murmur of the graphite against smooth paper, the summoning of form with mark-making, the insinuation of values and hues with gradients of grays.
For those roadside roses, tonight I attended to my graphite pencils—whittling away at the cedar casing with a fresh blade, sharpening the points against a sandpaper block. It’s a tactile meditation. You have to expose a fair bit of the lead, turning the pencil in one hand while the other carved slivers off. This way, you’re lending the pencil a versatility when drawing: hold it vertically and you get accuracy, hold it at a slant and you cover more of the paper. It’s useful. Its usefulness lends it a peculiar beauty, I’ve had to admit.
Every time I sharpen my pencils, I think back on an eight-year-old me with a name no one thought it important to pronounce correctly, re-christened S—ng in a strange land that never got out of being under construction, missing her grandfather’s suitcase with its rocks and its tools, the hours invading the dining table before supper would drive us away then back again. In particular, this in-limbo kid missing the old hand-crank sharpener in a place of honor on the sideboard in the old house, The Before House, used by my grandfather when he came down from the mountains to study enough to go back up; used by my aunts and my mother as they scattered across four universities; used by me and the pencils I’d stolen from everyone else in my home.
I saw an old Reddit thread, asking people who’d grown up in low-income households what they’d learned early on, dogma rendered sacrosanct, that had taken a while to shake off, if at all. Someone said: Don’t ask for anything because you’ll never get them. Someone replied: Don’t ask for anything because you don’t want to put you or anyone else through the experience of saying no.
My father would sharpen my pencils for school the way I do now for art—crudely, I had thought then, lacking the polish of a proper sharpener, an indication that we were not a family that could care for school supplies. Gauche. Shameful. My father sharpened my school pencils the way he sharpened the old, old, old pencils he used for woodworking—a skill I thought all fathers possessed by default—and I felt my heart cringe with every sliver he peeled from the wood casings, the lead points he made starker with swipes against the kitchen whetstone. Crude, gauche, shameful.
I have not talked to my father in years. He is a flawed man, prone to spreading brokenness. I do not see a way I could tell him all this. No way I could say, “I never used those pencils you spent an evening sharpening;” no way I could cleanly puncture this possibility of conversation with, “I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned that I draw roses.”