We leave the train with the sun still asleep and the small crowd unsteadily disembarking moves on muffled feet. There is a car that fetches us, but no sooner had it driven to the Centro when it stops, and we get out – Conrad is smiling. It’s New China restaurant, a favorite in high school for its toasted siopao and inimitable pansit. We love it here and it’s perfect at dawn for perspiring early birds. We walk fast into the restaurant and secure our seats. Between bites of breakfast and quaffs of coffee, we hear cheers outside and wonder only for a moment, then join the rush to marvel at the figures of the Naga College majorettes – something truly to behold under the first rays of an ogling sun as the ladies sway in their short skirts and their band literally bang away to their assigned place in the morning parade for Ina.  After some wishing, we get back to our happy meal and check schedules. We hardly notice that suddenly the entire city is teeming with people and pilgrims. This is Naga of Conrad’s predilection and passion during time of Peñafrancia.

We are in a hotel. A shadow of Lindez which was once the place to be seen. We saunter into Conrad’s commodious room, and he immediately relocates a table I had requested and lays out his laptop. I need to work a bit, he declares, deadlines to meet. When I leave, the room does not seem strange with him hunched over his laptop on a small table in the midst of an expanse with only a bed on one side. He is Kafka writing Metamorphosis. I must sleep. See you in about an hour, a voice calls out.

I am startled by repeated knocks. I unlock my door and Conrad is amused. “lakaw na kita, padi” (let’s walk around now my friend) and I look, it’s been more than an hour! I grab a pair, put my shoes on and we are off.

We walk leisurely along Barlin looking for old homes, but most are long gone. In their place are newer dwellings like strangers in a familiar place. There is Dimasalang, the street, not the pen name.  We turn and the stroll seems faster. This is where Conrad thought and was – for a time at least. In a house above the water. Half the year, the ground was muddy, or a bit flooded from rain captured within a lot that had no drain. Planks had to be erected above the ground so one could walk without muddying shoes or feet. The house, first floor of two, was humble but large enough for Conrad’s parents and three sons although the father passed away early. It was Conrad’s mother, a kind but strict widow, whom I always saw puttering around. She was a great mom to all, never once turning us away even when our barkada – four forever famished youngsters – would arrive and eat up everything on the table. She once just calmly, without saying a word, cleaned up the muck we could not wash away because we were too drunk from drinking a mix of beer, gin, and the pretense of coca cola. Conrad’s mom was a saint, bless her soul. But she didn’t like girls sidling up to Conrad. She thought it indecent. We kidded there was only one girl doing that. But she was not amused. She had a brother who was a priest, and he was the uncle who sent Conrad all those books that, to our class’s mind, gave him the edge in high school where he graduated at the top of the class. But I knew better, he was always earlier in borrowing books from the school library that was cavernous in our first year but became smaller and smaller until it was much too small for us and for him particularly. The books also became too familiar and often boring as we moved from first year to the fourth.

Our honors class was considered one of the nerdiest bunches at the high school and Conrad often looked the nerdiest.  He was into Mad Magazines, and it got so that he even sometimes looked like Alfred E. Neuman from a particular angle. But he also did attend the “Sociables” (our class name) parties. Not all the time, but some. He was interested in the skirts alright even if he liked to wear what he deemed to be a nonchalant, indifferent self-assured smile.  He didn’t fool us! But his running away from the girls was genuine. Conrad would remark: iyan, iyan, she’s very bright and pretty, pointing to one of the Collegialas in Naga’s Sta. Isabel.  But as soon as “she” would seek him out, he would run. In those times, afar was good. Close was too close for comfort. I liked to remember that, especially after Conrad would have met many, many women, and many more, had hailed him. But if there is anything he didn’t mind bragging about was that he could hold his own in the drinking binges. As I recall, there were only a very few guys standing at the conclusion of the high school graduation final and farewell drinking session.  No one ever thought of Conrad as a drunk or genius – just a regular, affable, book-loving sociable. We had practically grown up with him and viewed him not from brilliance but from the shy, intelligent boy who wanted to be a regular Juan.

Unexpectedly, there is this apartment row confronting us where their house used to be. We turn around and head back towards Barlin.

At the end of the road is everybody’s cathedral – the Naga Cathedral. It had always seemed the equal of Manila and more so because it is the rock of Bicol. We are both happy it is the same dour, grey, old familiar mountain even though today it is smaller inside from the million pilgrims wanting to hand their supplications to the altar. I wonder if Conrad had brought a prayer too. I doubt it. If he wanted something from God, he would ask God directly, not wait to be in church. Many of us had joined the HS Sanctuary Society which meant you volunteered to wake up at 4am to be at the Jesuit community house and serve at Mass.  He didn’t. I think he didn’t want to give up late night reading for early sleep.

Beside the Cathedral is the Naga Parochial School that Conrad attended for elementary. The way I heard it, he was a real quiet boy there and religious enough. While his grades were excellent, he did not graduate as number one. But he apparently did not mind because as we walked, he retold with relish the adventures of his Parochial school classmates particularly the ribald ones with appropriate accompaniments of guffaws and laughter.  He was Tom Sawyer proudly telling the tales of several Huckleberry Finns.

Past the Cathedral, Ateneo Avenue seems like a narrowing road to Ateneo de Naga, in our mind the educational Olympus of Bicol.

I am hungry, says a voice as I glimpse the four pillars of our high school alma mater. Now? (But I was hungry too). Walking in crowded places requires a lot more effort. OK, let’s go back to the Centro .

I would have wanted more pansit and the pata tim we both liked at Crown’s but Conrad is adamant – there’s pangat at Biggs and there we go. Not bad when we are done, and I think we ate more than we should. Though the crowds more than the dish caused us to sweat. One never sees so many people walking in all directions at once except this time. I am sure the natives have some resentment at this madness of humanity milling around somehow for Ina. For us, Naga Centro is after all, the rotunda for setting off to one’s destination. To Manila of your dreams. To find your fortune, way South past the San Bernardino Strait.  Or, in those days, to rebel – down the river, through quaint towns and mysterious settlements, up on the foothills of an extinct volcano and beyond.

In the 70s, you rode a train to go to Manila. Conrad went to Ateneo de Manila when an American Jesuit figured the patrician Ateneo needed a cocktail of promdi and public school brights to moderate an emergent Filipino society that threatened to be skewed towards more things egalitarian than exclusive. With his Ateneo de Naga full-scholarship valedictorian belt, Conrad made things easier for the Jesuits to throw in a dorm scholarship, book allowance and some living expense budget. I imagine Conrad was ecstatic. And rightly so, he was getting arguably the best education in imperial Manila, and it was not going to cost his family, his mother, a peso.

But like many things in Conrad’s story, there are twists and turns. As it happened, there was this foray into the Jesuit house. I believe very, very few knew.  I know because I was there too. Neither of us told anyone, not even each other, and was thus surprised to see one another outside Fr. Phelan’s “recruitment” office in one of the waning days of high school. Later, when we compared notes, I shrugged: come back after your second year in college. Hahaha! I had been told the same thing, and he laughed.  So much for thinking first Filipino Pope. Nah, Conrad would think the most eminent Filipino theologian. T’was I the pope.

Then we found ourselves in the same writers’ workshop at Silliman.  Silliman was the first event where I saw Conrad join every activity outside of the formal program. He gamely raised his full glass in the beer gardens as he shared his thoughts on TS Eliot and Yeats. He held his own in the heated arguments among the likes of Willy Pascua Sanchez, Franklin Osorio, Ricky Lee, Albert Casuga, and Carlos Aureus wherever the bunch wanted to banter or insult. It was in Silliman where we met Bien Lumbera who became a lifelong friend. And of course, Ms. Edith Tiempo. Edith Tiempo had said the Silliman Writers Workshop will make you a writer or bust. Conrad never stopped writing after Silliman. He would not stop and swept the Palanca awards. He went on writing and garnered the National Book award and the Catholic Mass Media awards. He wrote and became one of the most acclaimed Filipino writers in English and more so as one of the best, if not the best, newspaper columnists in the country.  

But before his evolution to becoming the eminent Filipino essay writer in English, there was the small matter of keeping one’s scholarship. Conrad had landed in college with another friend, who like him, was new to the ways of a student in imperial Manila, not to mention in one of its exclusive, affluent universities, with its abundant distractions and outright temptations. Or loneliness, the sense of being completely alone without your sanctuary of family or haven of friends. Conrad’s friend, another brilliant barkada, succumbed to one of the above. He left the campus for home in Naga, sick in many ways.  Alone, Conrad made new friends and studied on. As is his wont, he would borrow stacks of books from the library and read them in the dorm room. I was his roommate in senior year and had to become adept at navigating through mountains of books in and around his bed and nearby. One day, when I found him in the room reading when I was certain he had classes, I anxiously asked why he was not in class. His was just a plain, honest, even reticent reply: our teacher has nothing else to teach us, I can learn more from reading.  Even today, I remember well the absence of any hint of arrogance. He was simply being intellectually frank.

He is in his elements here in Naga.  He wears a smile, almost laughter, as we walk to a meeting somewhere along Peñafrancia Avenue. There is this teacher, she does not come alone. She wants to look her best, make up (overdone), costume jewelry (galore), even the hair has been set. Her companion who is also a public-school teacher is younger, wears a simple dress, has hardly anything on her and looks forlorn. They hope Conrad will tell their story. The tale is classic: they dared to oppose the machinations of a certain dominant politician during the last elections. Now she and her colleagues are being haled into court, and since their legal defense is not being covered by the school system, the expenses are squeezing them into submission. It is wrong that they are suffering for doing their job. The older woman is near tears as the younger suddenly comes out and softly, defiantly, states this. Truly, there is hope, Conrad told me later as he started pounding on his iMac. He would retell the story of the little teachers with a vengeance.  I knew why he must tell the story when it could have been picked up locally by big media. It is saddening since we have journalist friends here.    

We are fetched by an SUV in the early evening, and I thought it was funny of us to end up sitting side by side with politicians. Let’s just eat here, drink some wine, and we can go, he said. Here was sitting by a table in one of the banquet halls of a new hotel. He kept close to me, exchanging only pleasantries with the guests. A daculang tau (powerful person) came and went straight to him, put his arm around him, and looked around for his photographer. Thankfully, he is still somewhere outside. Wait a minute, he barked, I will get a glass. When he walked away, Conrad quietly said, Let’s go! And we slip away from the madding crowd. The challenges are acceptable, and I can write only what I want, but I often can’t stand the personalities – it is all he lets on as we waited for a car that was thankfully available.

But there were mayors, congresspersons, and senators he genuinely liked. Many campaign managers and political media officers were numbered among his friends. Public servants do their jobs. I wouldn’t mind if they accepted a gift at Christmastime so long as they do their jobs, first and foremost.  This ultimately was his basis for distinguishing the public servant from the politician.

There is consistency here. Conrad had been active in one of the cells of the underground publications in the time of Martial Law and his brother-in-law’s place in Marikina had been a hub of defiant writers and hardcore vanguard, the ideological kind. But the hustle and bustle just suddenly ceased, someone had been arrested and then others, and those remaining fled or hid or nervously stayed put. Thankfully, no one from the State came for Conrad. He felt relieved, I am sure, but he was practically jobless.  Then, Adrian, a friend, asked if Conrad would mind a government-like job where he could research anything and write about it. Hmm, of course, when Adrian needed a write-up on something he needed, Conrad would have to oblige. But he can still write anything he wanted even for those. Oh, by the way, the pay is really good. Eat in the palace without serving the man who would be king.

And so it was that Conrad could buy me the occasional beer. He asked me this one time to be with him in one of Adrian’s meetings and somehow, I was not surprised to be in the din of a writers’ gathering. Adrian was head honcho and quite happy amid the cacophony of agitated, amused, angry, absorbing, accomplished, apathetic voices.

Then came February 1986. I had been doing my share, and events pushed me to be invited to work in a Presidential Commission. Serendipitously, Conrad had asked if I knew of any openings. We were all let out to pasture, he was serious. It was bad timing, but there was a little one. So, when my boss asked if I knew someone who could write and edit – oh yeah! I volunteered names at once. In no time, we were working together at the PCGR, and while he cursed occasionally, threatening to quit if anyone touched what he had written or done editing, I knew he was happy with the mottled mix we strutted and fretted with – poets, MBAs, ideologues, scientists, artists, professors, brains and beauties, geniuses and even a ho hum or two. The guys loved Conrad. Even when he was irritated and spewing sarcasm in the vintage, literate Conrad way. I loved the guy. He was the only person on earth who could drag me out of my home when I was resting already. He would take up the cudgels for me even when I thought I didn’t need them.    

There are no stars in the sky now. There are thick clouds. It might rain.

We are walking again in Centro through the fiesta mobs in Naga city, home of Our Lady of Peñafrancia. We are seeking “scramble” and “mani”, typical affordable Naga snacks during our high school night walks. Scramble is finely crushed ice with food coloring and sweetened. Mani is not your ordinary peanuts. These are Naga peanuts, small, roasted to perfection, and delicious. We believe you will find them only in Naga, though Conrad wondered aloud why there seems to be fewer carts selling them. Does it mean that the kids no longer have enough allowance to buy, or do they have much more now to buy other goodies. The survey says Bicol is as poor as ever, but then we are in Naga, the financial center of the entire region. Conrad and I, we learned well from an Irish American Jesuit, Fr. O’Brien, who rued the thought that his students might not care for the poor. We hoped the boys would have had more allowances now. Even if it meant the demise of scramble and mani.

There is a small park in the middle of Centro, named, of course, Rizal Park. But better known to the nerds of Ateneo de Naga as the city’s very own “Hyde Park”. Naturally, it had nothing in common with the London original but one – you could talk about anything or criticize anything under the Naga sun. It even had a specific space where discourse and debates were done led by a rather unheralded figure: the calamay vendor of Naga. Conrad remembered how we joked that in hotly contesting a point the vendor would leave his calamay unattended and portions would disappear as kids ran away. Many times, we came upon excited debates with our para-calamay smack in the middle of it. But he and his calamay are not here. There is no debate tonight, and I glimpse no disappointment in my friend’s demeanor. But he does ask: I wonder where our friend is. Perhaps he is gone, he answers himself rather sadly.

At some point before, he tired of intellectual debates. I am tired of them, Jun, he had confided to my surprise. Until then, he was debate personified. In college, he read and argued on Kant as well as Teilhard and many masters in between. At the Philippine Commission on Government Reorganization, he was at the forefront of the debates on the desirable philosophical foundations of institutions. Thankfully he supported the philosophy of decentralization I and others espoused – he would have been an impossible adversary otherwise. Woe to those who would think they could outlast him in polemics! But the intellectual was no longer interested in verbal intellectual sparring. Why so?  He didn’t say. Whatever the reason, I think it had to do with something he observed to me lately: Some Filipinos are the most selfless people in the world.  It felt to me like he was saying it’s simply the season for letting our humanity loose.

We jostle back to our hotel close to UNC through people marking their foothold in the space fronting the city’s permanent stage, now the venue of continuous shows in a marathon program for the celebrations of Ina. We stand for a moment looking. But nothing is happening, no strutting or fretting, no entertainment. It seems the program will commence later yet. Conrad is quiet. He is tired.  I at least got some sleep. We wish there were a place nearby to listen to a good band or a great singer.

Music fills Conrad’s body and soul and I will wager turns him on too! The Beatles is our battle cry and Simon and Garfunkel is great cerebral singing.  There’s jazz and classical of course but that’s for listening. As to our watering hole… sometime in early 2000s, Conrad and I were enticed to join Joey Ayala, Gary Granada, Noel Cabangon, Bayang Barrios, Cookie Chua and others in a venture to put up a friendly place for Filipino artists: musicians, writers, poets as well as journalists, activists, philosophers, advocates, struggling students, priests, nuns, presidents, cabinet members, you name it. A cool, friendly place where artists and poets would hang out, do what they do, and be alright. To make it work, many volunteered their time. Conspiracy it was called. Tita de Quiros volunteered to manage the place at one time and put Conrad and myself to work. But we waited only this one night on cheering tables (I ended up also serving cocktails I concocted while Conrad served beer between drinking his favorite wine). It was fun while it lasted. Conspiracy succumbed last year, a victim of the economic ravages of the pandemic with too few able to support it for sustainability.   

We were goaded to go to Magsaysay Avenue. I am too tired to go, he said. Me too. Let’s just call it a night. Ok. We walked the distance to the hotel leisurely meandering through sweaty bodies and perfumed fashionables. At the hotel entrance, I remarked, what about tomorrow? I have to fly back to Manila, Jun. So, you really just visited for a day. OK, have a good flight then. I will text you in Manila in a week. We nodded to each other, and the day was done.

Conrad fell first nine years ago when a massive stroke laid him low while alone in his place near UP. He survived but barely and became non-verbal, a terrible blow for one whose faculty of speech was sharp as his pen. As if that were not bad enough, he also lost the motor functions of his arms and his legs. Therapy somewhat eased his disabilities. Still, he could no longer write nor wield his laptop. We never lost hope, though. One day, we believed he would rise again like Athena, fully prepared at birth to do battle against all those evil men and women who would be gods.

It was not to be. On the evening of November 6, after five days of struggling at the Quezon City General Hospital, Conrado de Quiros, journalist, essayist, playwright, poet, friend, and icon to so many young minds, suddenly sighed his last and left this world for another where he could drink his much longed for wine with many merry friends who had gone before him. I can see him happy with a goblet of Don Melchor. He is laughing and talking with close friends and smiles as he sees me: O Jun, join us! And pulls a chair for me. I look over the bottle of wine and pour myself a glass as Conrad smiles approvingly, and I holler, Cheers!

(Header composite image includes photos from OurBrew.ph and the Ateneo de Manila library)

About the author:

JUNIO M. RAGRAGIO was not just a high school classmate but a close friend of Conrado de Quiros throughout their four years in the Honors Class of Ateneo de Naga HS batch 1968. Alongside several other classmates, including the late Ronald Ruivivar and “vibrante” Divino Soriano, they shared a passion for MAD magazines, Beatles albums, and other teenage curiosities that defined the 60s. Their bond continued through college at the Ateneo de Manila University, where they not only became dorm roommates but also shared the same major in Humanities.

Life after college saw Ragragio and De Quiros accompanying each other through pivotal moments, from nerve-wracking encounters with their respective crushes to attending PETA plays. Their camaraderie grew deeper, eventually leading them to become compadres. In 1970, Ragragio and De Quiros achieved success as writing fellows at the Silliman Writing Workshop. However, like De Quiros, Ragragio was dissuaded from pursuing a path as a Jesuit priest by a discerning Jesuit.

Ragragio graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Humanities from Ateneo de Manila University in 1972. He later pursued a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Philippines in Diliman in 1981. Finally, he earned a master’s degree in Public Administration (as a Mason Fellow) from the JFK School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1985).