When revolutionary poets Kerima Tariman and Ericson Acosta were summarily killed, I felt that the depth of Pablo A. Tariman’s grief, as father and father-in-law, was unfathomable. It would be a matter of time before his health would be compromised by these tragedies.
In a contemplative mood (Photo by Elizabeth Lolarga)
As a journalist, he could mask his sadness with his guffaws over bottles of San Mig Light, be objective, and go on with his days of meeting writing deadlines and acting as guardian to Kerima and Ericson’s son, Emmanuel. He wrote me one Christmas, “We survived, and that’s enough!”
A slender, younger Pablo Tariman with a full head of hair
When he turned into a late-blooming poet, it seemed death, or even just that lingering unhappiness, became a well he could draw inspiration from in his self-published book, Love, Life, and Loss During the Pandemic.
In On Being Caught Quoting Travolta’s Ode to Life, a poem dedicated to the late entertainment editor Ricky Lo, Pablo wrote of his early-morning discipline of writing:
A friend reminded me
You can’t live life
With a daily morning ritual
Of periodic soliloquy
That hangs precariously on hope
But ends mostly
In deep despair
In Ode to an Abridged Life, written for labor leader Dandy Miguel, who died at age 35, Pablo mused:
When activists die young,
I connect easily
Even if I didn’t share
A good slice
Of their abridged life.
Was that death meant
To spare them From more uncanny chapters
Of living a tedious, if longer, life?
I suppose
You learn the precariousness of living…
With grandson Emmanuel Acosta, before a painting of Kerima
At 76, Pablo felt that he had seen and experienced what the world had to offer. Early this year, when he started feeling uneasy with his body, he told me that he felt he was just pushing himself to finish 2025 for the sakes of his grandson and for Cecile Licad, whose last quarter of year Philippine performances he had a major part in making possible.
With his muse, Cecile Licad
He examined her venues (sometimes making back-breaking round trips to the provinces), looked for a reliable piano tuner, made arrangements so that the pianist would have good meals to keep her strength for the rigorous outreach that took her from Manila to Baguio, Antipolo, Quezon City, Iloilo, and finally, the impresario’s home province in Catanduanes. For each appearance of Cecile in each venue, he would ask his grandson or caregiver to monitor how many standing ovations she received and how many encores. Then he’d ask them to post the number of ovations on his Facebook status.
To the very end, he had her back as Numero Uno fan/supporter.
To me he was the cultural worker par excellence, setting the bar high for us, even if it sometimes meant dealing with accursed QR codes in Cecile’s Metropolitan Theater concert in March last year. He and his elderly patron friends confessed to being un-techy, thus they couldn’t download their QRs in their phones to show to usherettes. What he did was to print them all out and distribute hard copies.
Months in advance of Cecile’s Manila concert commitments, he’d plan what he called guerrilla events in the provinces. His usual partner here is Nueva Ecija’s public servant (and Numero Dos Licad fan) Nestor Alvarez. The audience isn’t the perfumed set; rather, Dr. Alvarez would ensure farmers would put down their plows, fisherfolks their nets, government employees their duties for a night of classical music.
At Pinto Museum, Pablo and I were mistaken for Cecile’s parents by a dressed-up woman guest. This was in 2003 in a reception for Cecile after a fundraising recital. The socialite came up to us, with Cecile and her mother Rosario just a few feet away, and asked if we were her parents. I wasn’t witty that evening due to my usual weariness. I should’ve answered her, “Ano kami, sinuswerte (What are we, lucky)?”
With Korean opera superstar Sumi Jo
That was the genesis of the long-running joke about Pablo’s and my conjugal bank account that has absolutely zero content, except heaps of laughter
There was a time a Bosendorfer owned by businessman-music lover Ray Sison that travelled from the Manila showroom to the Science City of Muñoz. After Cecile’s performance, children (mostly piano students) flocked to her and tinkered with the piano keys. Pablo, in his stentorian voice, said, “Not on my Bosendorfer!”
Cecile Licad with her ‘mythical’ parents, Pablo Tariman and Babeth Lolarga
There was one year I followed Cecile and the outreach party from Philamlife Auditorium in Ermita to Dr. Joven Cuanang’s Pinto Art Museum in Antipolo and on to Nueva Ecija. I connived with the emcee to introduce Pablo as Pablo Caruso Tariman, which she did with a poker face. I can’t forget how aghast he looked and quickly corrected the emcee by saying, sounding flustered, that his mother’s surname is Arcilla.
Onwards we proceeded to St. Paul College Tuguegarao for another recital, after which we had a brief overnight’s stay at the Banaue Hotel in Ifugao—Cecile’s and son Otavio’s first visit there with film director Marilou Diaz-Abaya acting as guide.
The four ‘musketeers’ of music with Cecile Licad
With us was Cecile’s then special friend Jeffrey (or Geoffrey). When I turned to Pablo to ask who the American guest was with the impressive knowledge of Chopin, the irrepressible Pablo answered, “Oh, he just does Cecile’s laundry.”
In Banaue that evening, we were treated to a cultural performance—gongs, indigenous dancers, and the like. Then the rains fell non-stop all night. When we woke up the next day, it was to news that the mountain highway was blocked by a mudslide. I tried ringing up the Departments of Defense, Tourism, even the American Embassy to explain Cecile’s predicament. Her flight back to the US was scheduled that evening, and there was an American citizen (Otavio) in danger of getting stranded, too. Our objective was to get a helicopter to ferry them back to Manila.
First to respond by sending a van to await us where the mudslide had ended was Mayor Alvarez. I don’t remember how many miles of mud we walked with our pants rolled up, our shoes held high (as writer Chit Roces Santos quipped, even in emergencies, we knew our priorities). Cecile clung to the music sheets, which she held close to her chest, all throughout the walk.
Soon Pablo received a call from a concerned Irene Marcos-Araneta asking where we were. He said, “We are here in the fields singing Lawiswis Kawayan,” followed by full-throated laughter. To her credit, she got her connections going and after we had washed our legs and feet, Alvarez’s van dropped us in an airfield (I think it was in Cauayan, Isabela, if my geography isn’t failing me now).
A few minutes later, Marilou cried, “Listen! Do you hear the whirr of a helicopter?” Then there it was. We said our quick goodbyes to Cecile, her son, Marilou, while we rode the van again to take us to Muñoz where Pablo and I relaxed a bit before the ride home. He looked at our toes and quipped, “Mine are made for Swan Lake, Babeth. Yours are for Bayanihan Dance Company.”
That mudslide incident would seal our friendship, strengthened further when another of his recital venues, Island Cove Resort in Cavite, went up in flames after Licad’s recital that included Liszt’s Dante’s Inferno Sonata. Ray’s Bosendorfer was saved.
With renowned writer Butch and Beng Dalisay and music impressario Joseph Uy at Manila Pianos Showroom
Another year, super typhoon Glenda (signal number 3 was raised) threatened to cancel a Cecile recital at St. Benedict Chapel at Ayala Westgrove in Silang, Cavite. The show went on to great acclaim, but an antsy Pablo couldn’t relax at the dinner reception. He worried that the storm would make travel back to Metro Manila difficult. And it was hard driving through the lashing rain and wind.
The times I enjoyed most with him were hanging out with the other impresario, Joseph Uy, and visiting British-Romanian soprano Nelly Miricioiu. She addressed him with the endearment “Pablissimo.”
In her taped message before the fundraising concert last month for Pablo, she said, “When I met him, I had just come from Romania, a communist country with a lot of trouble. And Pablo was for me an amazing spiritual connection to a world I didn’t know. He helped me to go through that change in my life. For that and for many years of friendship, I’m coming to you now and hope every one of you will find a way to help him and to give him what he needs the most—friendship and love. That’s exactly what he has done for so many people. In the Philippines and internationally, Pablo is very appreciated. But now he’s in a time when he needs help from his friends. We all love him.”
The other times we enjoyed were working on his two books, the second being Encounters in the Arts: Essays, Profiles, Reportage, with designer-graphic artist and my hijada, Jenny Cariño. He listened to suggestions, to callouts on what was permissible and not.
With Teo, the youngest grandchild and Pablo’s lookalike
Among my favorites in Encounters… is his profile of conductor Luis Valencia. It evoked the old man’s youth and childhood in Aliaga, Nueva Ecija, and followed him through his successes as a financially struggling violin student in Vienna and later as pianist Van Cliburn’s conductor in an unrehearsed concerto at Araneta Coliseum.
Pablo, jail officer Jesus Ostulano, and son-in-law Ericson Acosta
When I last visited him at Rizal Medical Center, where he passed away on October 9, Thursday (details of the wake to be announced later), I had a chance to thank him for how he enriched my life, for the free tickets to dozens of concerts, for his shared confidences and jokes. I tried to repay him by reading a Palestinian poet’s work that stressed primary love is love of one’s own land, a prayer poem by Ruth Elynia Mabanglo, and a prayer of intercession to St. Raphael the Archangel. I even told him that the mythical conjugal account is officially closed, to which he smiled wanly.
When Joseph and I asked him if he would like a priest to minister to him and give him the final blessing, he shook his head, saying softly, “Huwag na lang (No more).” But then, when the possibility of Fr. Robert Reyes, a progressive, dropping by to anoint him opened, he was amenable, this time saying, “Gusto ko nang pagbayaran ang mga kasalanan ko (I want to atone for my sins)!”
Another writer friend, Alma Cruz Miclat, was able to connect a live video of Father Reyes blessing Pablo from her phone (he was on retreat in Baguio). He tapped a young priest, Father Gelo, who sang for Pablo. Then Father Robert requested his contact at the St. Jude Parish in Parish, Fr. Choi Gliponeo, to give the anointing personally.
As Alma showed the video to me, with a view of Pablo’s chest laboring heavily, I in Baguio and they in Pasig (Alma, Father Choi, Chit and Vergel Santos, Pablo’s wife Merlita, Emmanuel and his girlfriend Mao Lienne Fortaliza) were able to pray the Lord’s Prayer in unison.
Writer-jazz singer Gou de Jesus recalled her own adventures with Pablo: “One of my most vivid memories of Pablo was when he and I—and a drunk Arnold Molina Azurin—were crossing Quezon Avenue, near corner of Delta Theater, at 2 am after my set at GSpot (for real). Arnold was cursing in drunken English, eh may kasabay na tumatawid na lasing (another drunken man was crossing) who’d overheard him and started mimicking his speech. Of course, Arnold went after the guy—taller, bulkier—and Pablo and I pulled Arnold back to the point where all of Arnold’s shirt buttons came popping off.”
Gou continued, “Pablo and I also had several drunken late nights in Malate. But always, no matter how many beers he’s put away, he was always the sober—if ever laughing—one who made sure I’d make it home safe.”
Feminist Princess Nemenzo spoke for all of us when she said her own goodbye to Pablo via song: “I was shocked to see how much weight he lost, our dear Pablo! I talked to him, mentioned my name, and his eyes suddenly opened, he slightly leaned his head backward and stared at me for a few seconds! My heart ached in pain and sadness. I remembered what you said that he never forgot when I sang La Vie en Rose at Julie (Lluch)’s party. I sang it for him softly, followed by Pete Lacaba’s salinawit of the same song, in near tears, my heart breaking in sadness and gratitude for all the joys and generosity he shared with his friends and the Filipino people through his single-minded mission to bring art and music to everyone.
“I said, ‘Mahal na mahal ka namin, Pablo. I love you dearly.’”
Read more:
‘My entire body should help me tell a story’—Cecile Licad to PH media
Cecile Licad comes home for concert—her first without her dear friend Nedy Tantoco
Cecile Licad and Arthur Espiritu on Nedy Tantoco and how she worked for the arts behind the scenes
Witnessing Cecile Licad, American Ballet Theatre Studio Company wow Manila, Cebu, Davao
