Venancio’s ice cream factory
And yet, while he lived, Venancio led an interesting life. He was an extraordinarily funny man with a spring in his dance and a magic in his stories, which defined him.
Early in their marriage he lived with his wife, Consuelo Lucero Lozada, in her ancestral house. This stately house called locally dakong balay (the big house) was constructed some time in the 1930s. It stood along the national highway at the corner of Ylaya, Dumanjug municipality, 73 kilometers south of the city. The national highway then was only a narrow asphalt road.
It is easy to understand why the story of the sigbin is told and then retold in these parts. Here, the whole concept of travel and transportation is essential. It is equated with life itself. The story is told of how the late Don Vicente Lozada, Venancio’s father-in-law, found his wife Concepcion Lucero; how he, riding his horse journeyed over the hills to Argao at the opposite easterly part of the island.
Riding through the main street of the poblacion, he espied a young girl combing her hair by the window on the upper floor of the Lucero house. Then and there, he fell in love. As the story would have it, he came down from his horse and knocked on the door. One imagines a measure of family negotiation preceding the inevitable romance. But within days, Don Vicente returned to Dumanjug with a young girl astride his horse. She might have been crying somewhat from missing her own town. But here she would stay, founding a big family that would in time be scattered over the globe.
But at one time, they all lived here. The children went their own way to escape the war but returned soon after. For a time, Dumanjug would be their base for starting their fortunes in the big world.
Venancio for his part operated an ice cream factory back at a time when this would have been more a curiosity than viable business. But he was always good with machines. He loved them and they loved him back when he was not locking horns with them. And yes, he did have a personal, almost intimate relationship with them. His son remembers how he used to talk to his engines in the course of fixing them. He begged them in a loud voice not to break down at odd times. And he scolded them when they did.
Inevitably, Venancio would at the height of his life be a maker of contraptions which always worked wonderfully well even if not to the extent that they would earn anything much by way of money. His businesses were short lived though the memory of them lives on as epic tale among his children. They remember how he wired a World War II two-way radio, hanging up its copper wire antenna from a tall coconut tree so they might listen to the Voice of America and BBC. They listened to jazz music.
From the mid-1950s onwards, Venancio worked for the government. Though he started studying engineering in Manila, the war interrupted his studies and he never finished the course. But the interest in it never left him. He worked at a public works office in the city even as he lived with his family in Dumanjug town, which required him to commute 73 km daily by bus over what was then no more than a dirt road. The trip took over three hours. He rode the Autobus with a driver named Mameng and a conductor named Abdon.
He loved to travel. If he ever wished for a sigbin at this time in his life only his stories betrayed that desire to his children. He went simply and dutifully by the required ritual of his daily commute. He woke up at dawn. Drank his coffee. And was fashionably late getting to his seat at the bus, which invariably waited downstairs by the roadside honking its horns at polite intervals. It was well after dusk by the time he got home. For quite a time, this was his idyllic life, pastoral and quaint.
Yet inevitably by the 1960s, he had to move his family to the city. His children had grown to college age. The city would change him to some profound extent commensurate perhaps with the passing of the years. He grew older. He did not travel half as much. In time he would lose the spring in his dance. But down to the very end, he never lost the magic of his stories. Though his sickness would take away his voice, his stories resonate still in remembrance.
