WILL this be my last?
That was the question I asked myself when I got my new passport today. The document is handsome brown, compact, tiny and diary-like. The first page says it will expire in 2019. I will be a senior citizen by then, with 20-percent discount on medicines and movie tickets. It is short of one year before the Tokyo Olympics—the city, not the gathering of athletes, is my reason for having a passport. I was traveling to Tokyo when I secured my first passport: a huge, thick and more official-looking material. I only saw those kinds of passports when James Bond and other film sleuths faked their way to Lisbon and Istanbul, cities that seemed attractive for detective stories and elegant spying.
In the late 1970s, it was terribly difficult to get a passport. You needed to fake so many things, like having to show that you have voted (here, you went to the Commission on Elections) and have planted trees (you had to convince the barangay captain, who was not as powerful then as he is now).
I could not see my face on the page of the passport. The page has a particular sheen: you turn the passport around, and you see stars on the page. Very stellar. This is good for those who may not always like their photos on their passports. For some reason, no one is a looker on passports. Not even Brad Pitt. In my case, I look harassed. My hairline has receded. My sister always teases me about looking more like our father. I like that. I have always wanted to look like my father, be like my father.
The photo is a mug shot than a clear photograph necessary for one crossing borders and expected to return to where he comes from. For all the themes of globalization running across our lives, countries still keep their borders. Passports are the index to show that we need to keep to our side. Of course, we can cross every now and then, but—mark this—the world system can always find a way to return you to where you belong. Belong. Owned like a piece of property.
If there is one reason for the glitter on the page where your face appears, it is that feeling of elegance one gets from soft focuses. You are able to fake your youth, or its passing. Similar to that much-abused line about youth being wasted on the young, the passport wastes no youth, for we are all young on that page. One need not worry about those lines. I call them shadows. While lines are the judgment on our days on earth, shadows are merely the vain proposal that one is as good as the light that would allow us to look good. There is also something philosophical about shadows.
My passport says “Pasaporte.” After all the nationalistic hoopla, we still have not thought of a Filipino/Pilipino/Tagalog term for this tiny notebook. Pasaporte it is. I imagine ports of call, where streets glisten in the evening and blues play forever. I also see disease and violence.
I see no restrictions on my passport. My very first passport had so many restrictions, including not being allowed to travel to South Africa. Does this mean I could go to Syria or Afghanistan anytime? Not that I want to travel to those places. I am sensing freedom. And, yet, the passport is not a document of freedom. Read again. On the last page, we are reminded that the passport is the property of the Philippine government…even if we paid for it. Even if we were the ones who lined up the whole afternoon to go through the process of getting it. Even if we spent a fortune recovering data about birth facts that are not available anymore, because municipal buildings got burned down or the entire centro of the municipio disappeared after a typhoon.
I am careful of this passport. A bit anxious, even. On the last page, it alerts us to be careful in handling the document, because of the electronics in there. What if the electronics do not function? What if, somewhere in Bulgaria, I am not identified? What if that “thing” in there gives up on me, and refuses to yield any information about its bearer?
Those, however, are the least of my worries. What I am unsure of is what to write on the blank spaces that ask you to identify a person whom the authorities can approach when you meet an accident or die. On my first passport, it was my father. After he passed on, I filled out the blank spaces with my mother’s name…without her knowing it. My mother is 88 years old. Shall she still supervise my death or illness, at least, in so far as those blank spaces are concerned?
Perhaps, I shall leave the spaces blank. The authorities should understand. Passports are about crossing spaces. What is more appropriate in our life as we approach the final port of call than passports?
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.