Libingan ng mga Bayani I once raised a little pup named Alphonse named after a Chinese Filipino ex-lover and given by an English lover who came a year after I & the Chinoy broke up. My Englishman lover sent me money for him and it came with a Chanel stuff because my ex said he couldnt find the pair of Anouks ( by Jimmy Choos ) that I Iike. Alphonse was one of the most photogenic dogs Ive seen. I have a Photo album here that brimmed with his pictures. In fact, we had a photoshoot together week after week during my rest days. Alphonse was innately smart & took after a dose of my unabashed narcissism. He was so smart he instinctively knew that he had to strike a pose at every click of my camera. In fact he knew how to catch the light & how to use it to his advantage. He knew when to smile & when to have a certain attitude. He was an intelligent model the one who had the art of looking good in photos down to a science. Unlike Coco who didnt take to liking being photographed, Alphonse basked in every photo opportunity, even preferring it to food. He always became over-excited every time I, all made up & dressed up, came downstairs to pick him up in his crib. I had to look my best and looked fashionable even in the laundry room or while I did the dishes became Alphonse wont stop barking until he got photographed. He somehow intuitively got the idea that he couldnt hope any photo shoot to happen if he caught me in plain clothes. Alphonse acquired my punctiliousness when it came to little details, and he seemed to like it that I know what I wanted and I always got it even from an uninitiated photographer like Angie who until then only knew how to supervise the general cleaning of the house & cooked the main menus of the houses pantry. I could catch Alphonse paying his undivided attention as I gave Angie photographic directions- my preferred angles, when Id like to have a worms point of view, how she needed to remind me if a certain side of my face caught just enough natural light to appear less soft, how I dont like any of my extremities to look amputated or contorted, how I wanted the photo to look like a legitimate Vogue editorial regardless if were using an ordinary camera in natural lighting. Alphonse knew that I was an artist, that my word was someones command. It turned out that Alphonse photographed very well, frame after frame, cue after cue, never missing where the aperture of the camera was, acting in a tacit choreography of his schizophrenic mother while Angie, the houses mayor doma, called the shot. But as soon as Angie called it a wrap, Alphonse morphed into a totally different dog- sullen, bellicose, distant. The kind youd beg love & attention from. He was so indifferent he rarely paid me any attention at all except when Id bring him his plateful of pork chops and favorite guava juice. He was never less than exhilarated everytime he saw me toting a DSLR. Otherwise, he refused to come anywhere near me even if I had to speak to him in French. He didnt like it when I spoke to him in Bisaya because that was how I reprimanded him in. This fastidious and even elusive attitude of Alphonse endeared me to him & made me never take his occasional attention for granted. Although Coco is herself a grandstanding diva, Coco is nevertheless affectionate. Alphonse was not a tad bit saccharine. He was a snob, if not a little belligerent. He cherry-picked and curated his company to only Coco and another well-groomed dog in the house. He never befriended all others in his snootiness. I guess that explains why Alphonse only had three friends on Facebook and it took him well over a month to accept my friend request. He was even so demanding he did not like it to be in my room saying it was too muggy there. The only time he obliged to be there was if I spritzed cold water on him every once in a while. I therefore had to end up buying a crib for him outside of the house, and a little hammock hanging from a branch of the tree house where he loved reclining in & spending the rest of the day reading Vanity Fair. There was this one time though that brought Alphonse to me on his own. One night when it was pouring hard, the rising flood water almost drowned him & Coco in their crib had I not come to their timely rescue. That moment I took them off their leash & helped them into a basket to safety must have meant very much to a very frightened Alphonse that he kissed me all over my hands while I toweled him & the equally wet & shivering Coco dry. From then on, Alphonse no longer had to dilly-dally everytime I told him to go to my room because it would rain. I had to make phony thunderclap sounds out of a sheet of aluminum in order to convince him that it would rain. He & Coco would then climb up to my bed & hid beneath the sheets beside me while I laughed quietly over the success of my canard & at having duped them into believing my bogus rain. Then one fateful Sunday afternoon it happened. A careless someone who I later asked the eviction of, left the houses main gate open & Alphonse went out of it and got hit by the rear wheel of a red car that almost left him for dead. X-ray later revealed that the accident got his left tibia broken. Alphonse had to sustain that leg in a cast for two weeks before he could properly walk without the limp & became a frolicsome little prince that he always was. I guess it was the trauma brought about by the incident that crashed his immune system & lessened his white blood cell count. His doctor therefore had to put off his scheduled round of protective vaccination for a week later. During that fateful week, however, one of my landlords un-immunized dog contracted a lethal viral infection. I didnt know Alphonse caught the parvo virus until my poor little pup miraculously came to me with this pleading look in his eyes begging me to try to help him about something. That morning, he never touched his food, nor drank a drop of milk from his china. At the hospital later, Alphonse puked blood & everything I saw about him hinted at his condition only growing worse even under intensive medical attention. Alphonse died five days later at the hospitals Intensive Care Unit and I got to know this heart breaking news only through a friend who I asked to call the hospital since I couldnt bear learning the ominous news myself. That afternoon it was so quiet in the hospital. I had in a box the body of my beloved dog that I chose never to see the way I chose not to check on him while he had these many IV tubes sending strong antibiotics to his frail, agonizing body, his extremities strapped to splinters, him excruciating in unimaginable pain inside my head. The thought that I was carrying the body of a now lifeless dog who could no longer respond to the click of my camera, much less my mourning, was more than I could stand. I was almost hit by a car while sobbing in the middle of the streets as I tried to carry Alphonses cold body in a carton casket he didnt deserve, like his untimely death. I later wrote a pained and loving obituary later that attracted sentiments from hundreds of friends, dog lovers and not alikr, even my bosses. I then had Angie bury Alphonse in this patch of land in the houses backyard. I only went to his tomb a day after with flowers and his photographs & cookies & creams. And a camera I could no longer use. Three years later yesterday I stood in front of Alphonses tomb in what I call The Libingan ng mga Bayani, named after the controversial cemetery in the Philippines where the late presidents are buried, this consecrated national memorial park with the priggish reputation as it refused to ensconce there the remains of the late President Marcos who the country thought was nothing but thieving kleptocrat. Yesterday afternoon, I was with Angies 6-year old son who I paid 50 cents to help me bury the little dead kitten that Coco ruthlessly murdered the other day. The poor little cat sustained contortions on her cranium, and broke a few columns of her spinal chord. She died from hemorrhage through a fatal puncture of her jugular vein, or so the autopsy revealed. For a day, prior to the interment, the remains of the slain kitten lay in state in the study area inside a makeshift casket made out of the box of Marlboro Classic cigarettes. In attendance were the murderess four-week old children - Hèrmès, Dior, Monet, and Renoir dressed in fur who barely had a clue that it was their sociopathological mother who premeditated the circumstance that led to the murder. An investigation conducted later unearthed Angie to be the mastermind. I learned later that Angie had always wanted to get rid of the cats who then trained Coco & enlisted her in Angies criminal syndicate & network of terror. I and the children then said a little prayer after I told the kids that the kitten died of a tetanus infection after getting entangled in a rusty barbed wire in her attempt to steal food from the pantry. She could have also died from uremic poisoning from eating too much salted fish paste. So the kids innocently accepted the twisted truth and sadly said goodbye to the murdered little kitten. Goodbye, Jennifer, said one of the kids as a layer of soil was thrown over the casket of the kitten that Cocos ninth in a series of the grisliest murders in Redgate Dormitory.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 10:17:40 +0000