Old cars are lines in a poem. New cars just keep going until they break down. And when they do, you open the hood only to find under it a complexity much too difficult to comprehend.
There is a mechanical simplicity in the old car that makes it easier to take in. No computerized fuel injection and firing system, not too much plastic. When an old car breaks down you can almost always tell why and whether or not you can fix it.
But the true qualifier for the “old car” is not measured in years but by the quantity and quality of breakdowns. When they happen too often, you have to ask: Is it time for the scrap heap? Should I sell? Or spend more? Or, do I love it enough to keep it? Old cars are like people. Old cars are like husbands or wives.
Even when they break down, usually in the worst of times, you have to justify how everything is always fate or some act of God and how everything turns out well in the end and for the better.
He is sitting on a pillow by the roadside playing his guitar and singing Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.” The roadside is a bend on the road as you start the climb up the hills from Carcar City moving to Tan-awan, crossing over the hills to the southwestern coast of the island. There is a metal railing to mark the curve. The metal railing is held up by cement posts just big enough for one’s butt. They brought pillows for the sleep-over in Tapon, Dumanjug.
They were going to the fiesta there. He and his eldest son, Isagani, driving over to the old hometown with friends to attend the dance that night. Tapon’s barangay captain is his brother, Isagani’s uncle, Vicente. But his young daughter, Kara, is helping organize the affair. And it was as advertised by word-of-mouth as the biggest dance of the barangay’s history. Which was why Gani was going there by whatever means.
The Toyota Lite Ace runs on a gasoline engine. Its battery is charged by a standard alternator.
When this alternator stops working the engine’s ignition system runs purely from the battery, which in due time will run out until it can no longer supply the required 12 volts needed to fire the ignition system. The engine fails.
The engine failed first just as they passed by the Carcar Rotunda, near the gates of a school they call the “Academy.” Thankfully, it stopped under the shade of an ancient Sampaloc tree. They found a mechanic who went through the terminals checking the contacts. He got the engine to run again, they thought, for good. But they were wrong. A few kilometers down the road, it stopped again. The battery went absolutely dead this time.
They had a new battery but it was at the house. Their only rescue was for the wife and daughter to drive it here. The only reason they were not here in the first place was the afternoon appointment they had for a drawing session with friends. They would barely make it. She drives an Innova, which does not yet qualify as an old car. They will get here but it would take hours.
And so there he found himself, singing “Homeward Bound” by the roadside. He had for company, besides the son and his friends, Fiona. She is an Australian artist researching on weaving and Philippine post-colonial. She is searching for her art. She is lying on a mat under the shade of a serendipitously located drying rack for landang, a local farm produce.
By evening, she would be dancing to disco-reggae music set 75 percent of the amplifier capacity; but which, she observed, would invite a lawsuit “back home” as it was way beyond the safe range of volume for the human ear. She danced anyway. She was after all learning about the Philippine post-colonial. Old cars were not much different in Australia, she said. They broke down. We wait.
And so they waited. To its credit the car broke down at a beautiful bend on the road, cliffs rising on one lane and then falling at the other. Green trees everywhere. And there, in the short distance the orange burst of a Fire Tree against the bluest sky ever.
His version of “Homeward Bound” segues into a lyric about old cars. It ends, “Not so old, old car, broken down on a beautiful bend, on the road to where we go, I love you till the mechanic gets here.”
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