Bread of mercy
Curious as to how it looked, I sent the help to buy me a pack this morning. She smiled when she received the money, amused at my uttering a word not said in polite conversation, which is also the name of the bread.
Cebuanos use the term for “prostitute” and the Urban Dictionary lists it as such. The bread has nothing to do with its eponym, however. From what the help told me, it seems a cheap, humble fare, basically a pudding made of leftovers. As a human activity, concocting meals from leavings goes as far back into the past as eating. But if memory serves me right, the giving of the name in question to recycled pastry remnants must have happened at the latter part of the last twenty or thirty years, which roughly is how long that particular Cebuano word has been in currency.
Not having seen it yet, I can only speculate as to how the bread acquired its name. There might be something postcolonial in the matter of labeling baked products, in that instead of the foreign-sounding we now employ local terms. Case in point—bread in the shape of a boxing glove called “Elorde,” in honor of a Cebuano boxing hero. Contrast this to an earlier kind still in circulation, of analogous shape, taste and solidity, known as “Frances.” And surely, there can be nothing more postcolonial than assigning the local word for whore, instead of the name of, say, an American general, to a pie or pastry.
Soon the help announced that lunch was ready. Looking at my watch—two hours had passed—I asked her if she had bought the bread, whose name I did not mention, because already she was smiling, this time sheepishly, which I took to mean that she had not done the errand. Despite my exasperation, I fought the temptation to recount for her benefit Jesus’ parable in the Gospel of Matthew about the man who had two sons. The man went to the first and said, “Son, go and work today in the vineyard.” “I will not,” the son answered, but later he changed his mind and went.” Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. The other son answered, “I will, sir,” but he did not go.
I managed to check myself when I saw the lunch—chicken soup, stewed fish, brown rice and yellow banana—which though humble must have taken time to prepare, the reason she had not made the trip to the market. Besides, she had the item ready in less than an hour.
When I looked at it, I realized how wrong I was, and chided her for it. The help apologized for feeding me the wrong information, which she said she had heard from others. The bread was far from being a recycled item. In fact, it was a fresh pie with a red filling. Reflecting on it, I found it coincidental that Jesus should mention prostitutes in concluding his parable with a swipe at the Pharisees—“Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” The Pharisees were no better than the second son who did not deliver on his word, and failed to do what the father wanted.
As to the bread, I rather liked its taste. It was not great, but if I were a yokel short on bills but long on hunger, I could feed on the pie, on anything in fact, and be refreshed, and look up to heaven in gratitude for God’s mercy.
