A love that goes beyond Valentine’s Day

BENCHWARMER
Ramon S. Dacawi
(First of two installments)

Once in a while, a story comes along that needs to be told and retold as it’s one for all seasons . The story of Mike and Datsu and their four boys is one such story. It’s the stuff paperback novels and films are made of. It triggers retrieval, updating - and sharing again - of this piece done five years back. – RD.)

In her teens, Maria Paz “Datsu” Infante, a scion of the sugar magnates of Bacolod and La Carlota in Negros, gave up a life of ease to follow her heart. At the risk of being disinherited and disowned by relatives, she married Mike Molintas, himself a descendant of the old, once-landed Ibaloy clan of Gibraltar Barangay here.

Mike was one of the most accomplished pony boys ever at the Wright Park bridle path. He taught Datsu how to handle horses, first as a customer on her summer vacation, and, later, as a partner in life.

Like in the movies, Datsu was swept off her feet by a cowboy on a galloping steed. Yet she handled with admirable grace her transition to a world so different from where she never grew up in. So the Spanish mestiza learned to cut “sacate” and to raise cactus she sold to riding customers. She became the toast of the pony boys when she started renting out horses when Mike was saddled with orders for bridles, saddles and stirrups in his small leather shop.

They were blessed with four boys – Mike Jr., Mark,. Jules Byron, and Nino Joshua. They lost Charity Faith, their girl, just after birth.

Nino, christened for his striking resemblance to the Infant Jesus, was born with a life-threatening heart defect. The boy had a cleft palate and weak lungs. As he grew, scoliosis developed. He was confined for a kidney operation until doctors took another look and told Datsu surgery might no longer be necessary.

In summer, 2008, the boy, then 20, was again in crisis due to unexpected complications during a simple surgery for hernia.

“It can’t be; my son is a fighter,” Datsu yelled inside a hospital here where Nino had gone under the knife. She had collapsed when learned Nino’s condition had turned into an emergency after the operation. .

Datsu recalled how, at those critical moments, he would raise his thumb up each time his mother would yell at him to hang on. At the intensive care unit, he pulled off his respirator tube to prove he was alright. Asked what he needed, he asked for a bottle of cola. “Ayosnaakosa coke, ma,” he tried to say, again flashing his thumb up.

The gesture was pure relief, almost a funny balm to reminders from hospital staff about the need to pay bills jacked up by the unforeseen complications. Still, as folksinger Billy Dean noted – when it comes to a mother’s love, you don’t count the costs.

“You’re right; your son’s a fighter,” a doctor told Datsu during a check-up days after Nino recovered.

IIt was the latest in a series of trials befalling a family since Nino was born with a weak heart. Still, the seemingly unending ordeals and suffering somehow served to steel the family’s resolve to live up to a pact Datsu made with her four sons after Mike’s funeral: they will never give up on each other.

Nino has been in and out of hospitals since he was born. The couple was told then that medical technology could not yet cope with his heart ailment, and that corrective surgery would have to wait until he had grown older. Chances were, the doctors said, were that he would just succumb to the cardiac defect.

Datsu remembers how they eventually parted with their few horses to meet the baby’s medical needs. She remembers that time Mike came home without his prized cowboy boots. He had sold them, so he could buy Nino’s maintenance dose.

Mike worked in his makeshift leather shop well into the night, especially when Datsu herself developed heart ailment. He would hum and whisper country music, now and then belting out Hank Williams’ with which he regaled the younger boys during gin-laced bonfires beside the bridle path.

He and Datsu never knew he, too, had a heart condition. A sudden attack in July, 2004, proved fatal.

After the burial at the Molintas ancestral land, Datsu gathered their four boys for a joint decision. She asked them where they would like to grow up in – Baguio or Bacolod where she grew up. The boys decided to stay put, in their shanty near the bridle path. They wanted to be where their father raised and trained horses.

A few years after Mike passed on, a film producer offered to bring to the screen the Spanish mestiza’s unusual love story with the gentle Ibaloi pony boy. She refused. She said all she wanted was to see his sons grow, and to see Nino’s medical deliverance from the life-threatening heart defect and weak lungs, and to eventually undergo cleft palate surgery to improve his speech.

Joshua survived heart surgery in summer of 1997, when he was 10. The hyperactive boy recovered fast and spent the rest of his month-long confinement doing the morning rounds, like a doctor brightening up other patients at the Philippine Heart Center.

“Wala nang magulo ditto,” a nurse said, quite grudgingly, her eyes welling, at his release. Joshua, too, had melted the mended heart of an elderly patient who would prepare lunch in her Quezon city home during his post surgery check-ups.

“Mabuti pa si Joshua, ipinaglutonilolangmasarapnapagkain,” one of the woman’s grand-children observed.

Dr. Serafin de Leon, a Filipino heart surgeon based in the United States , performed the surgery when he came home for an outreach mission. Dr. EmerencianaCollado, a pedia cardiologist, supervised Nino’s work-up, making sure he was ready for the delicate operation. (to be continued.)