Accents
Love is not blind
Rudy and I arrived at the Naia with nothing to declare, thus passing through Immigration and Customs was brisk. At the domestic airport, we were left with four hours to wait for our connecting flight to the City of Love, your Iloilo and mine.
How then to make the most of the waiting game? Being refreshed with a leisurely sampling of native cuisine was how it was with the many passengers waiting for their flight. For me that particular morning was to enjoy a one-hour massage by a blind masseur, and here's where the title of this column acquires relevance.
The massage parlor inside the domestic airport bears the name VIBES FOUNDATION and below it is printed the support of the Dept. of Tourism. It has been a ubiquitous corner in the domestic airport and, with time to burn, I was trying it for the first time.
Nenita was the masseur assigned to me. Her family name is Alzate, "spelled with a z not s," she clarified, and immediately I knew the masseur was not your ordinary blind woman with her palm open for alms. Now she is "Mrs. Tabaran," and thus began an interesting interview.
With every knead of the muscle, I posed a question. Nenita took up Braille, the touch system for the blind reader. She is a high school graduate, she said, and was into reading much. Her blindness was "in born" (her term). She is 37 and has a two-year old child under the care of Nenita's mother while she herself earns a living as a masseur.
On the next couch was her husband Ramon, also a blind masseur. Ramon was not born blind, Nenita said, but a convulsion fit when he was a baby led to his loss of sight. Ramon had to put away the walkman when a customer, a foreigner, was assigned to him. The couple makes about P800/day or thereabouts depending on the number of customers. The Foundation gets a share of their income.
Blind as they are, they said they would like their real names to appear in what I would be writing. OK, I told them, I'll e-mail the article and "Your Manang Remy [Remedios Orcullo, the Ilongga who helps manage the massage parlor] can read it to you." I paid P350 for the one-hour head-to-toe massage, thinking how all indications point to Ramon and Nenita being a happy couple. Who says love is blind? My friend Bill S. says so.
Every literature lover is William Shakespeare's friend who just loves to quote him. This writer is no exception and thus I exhume from one of his comedies, The Merchant of Venice: "Love is blind, and lovers cannot see/ The pretty follies that themselves commit/For if they could, Cupid himself would blush/To see me thus transformed to a boy [mere disguise, mind you, nothing surgical]." Let me zoom back to college literature when the class agreed that Shakespeare was talking tongue-in-cheek about love, else we would go metaphysical and perorate endlessly about soul meeting soul and shutting the door to the exclusion of all comers. Or, to disprove the Bard of Avon, we could cite every conceivable case where love sees all and knows all "beyond the depth, breadth and height my soul can reach," as Elizabeth Barrett Browning would have it.
There's more to the love angle when I checked out what was bannered at Iloilo City's Robinson's mall: FOR RELIEF OF MUSCLE ACHES AND PAINS CAUSED BY STRESS, TENSION AND FATIGUE VISIT BLIND MASSAGE (Home of Expert Blind Masseurs). In there, four blind masseurs are married! Mrs. Connie Bautista who manages the massage parlor showed me the pictures of the couples: Romeo who is married to Rowena for four years now, and Jason who recently wed Ester. Romeo, Rowena, and Jason were at work when I came. Ester was not around; she was in the blinds' boarding house because she is on full-term pregnancy. As for Romeo and Rowena, Mrs. Bautista said the couple lost their two babies at childbirth.
BLIND MASSAGE is supported by the CALL Foundation, CALL being the acronym for Center for Advocacy, Learning & Livelihood. Call this a plug for our disabled brothers and sisters who have overcome blindness to find fulfillment in their love life. Blind couples who tied the knot as binding as any knot could be by two people endowed with clear vision to take on the uncertainties of the future.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)