Baguio Connections 16

THIS week, we continue with that late lunch WITHOUT a table. Amid much mambunong and her assistants, a ceremonial black pig of girth meets its ritual demise with a wooden stake to its heart. Then its dead skin is seared to cleanse it of hair, the searing done with the help of a modern blow torch. Understand: in the olden days, the searing had to be done over a fire. Then the animal is butchered according to custom, after which the mambunong reads what portends the family via the pig’s liver, which serves as a sign of what the gods decree. The signs are good, we are told, and especially good for family unity and long life.

The cooking begins, and the pork is boiled. As this is going on, several of us note with amusement that a blow torch has certainly simplified a once arduous task, and I note with some bemusement that after the mambunong begins to pray, another sort of repeats her words and elaborates, prefacing all with that very Catholic way of beginning a prayer: the sign of the cross in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. I am also praying and quietly adding, “and of the Mother.” Talk of hybrid religious systems.

When the cooking is done, the food has to be blessed before we can eat. The mambunong prays again for the family, calling out our ancestors' names. She who prefaces as a Catholic echoes.

Then the meal is set, not on a table, but on the ground, or rather the stones on the ground. The metal plates gleam even as they are filled with rice and boiled pork, camote, sili, salt. I am whispering to someone that since the blow torch has been adopted quite comfortably, perhaps there really should be a table off to the side where the pork can be made into adobo, afritada, pork chops, asado, whatever. The someone agrees.

Everyone eats heartily except moi. I stopped eating pork decades ago, first dropping it from my diet in 1993. That makes some 25 years I have not touched said red meat. One of the cousins is teasing that I have turned Muslim. It does not help that I am not in native dress when all the womenfolk are. So lunch for me is essentially a sweet potato and tafey.

As with family gatherings, relatives catch