Written by Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo
Three of my closest friends in High School defied admonitions of the nuns in my convent school, and went to the University of the Philippines after graduation. My parents insisted that I listen to the nuns, and go to the Royal and Pontifical University instead.
For a while I stormed against this, refusing to understand how two people who were UP alumni themselves should be so determined to keep me from going there. But, not being a rebel, I simply accepted that the battle was lost. And then I began to look forward to the University of Santo Tomas.
Fr. Dela Rosa (sixth from right) and the people behind the organization of the university’s celebration.
On the first day of school, we—myself and two other close friends, Bituin and Marzya, whose parents were like mine—made our way to España together. I even recall the dress I wore—a green-and-white checked, short-sleeved blouse with a full jade green skirt, fastened at the waist with a wide belt. We parted at the lobby. Marz and Bet were going to the College of Commerce; I was headed for the Faculty of Philosophy & Letters (the legendary Philets which ceased to be in 1964). I peered apprehensively into the classroom I was directed to, and found it already half-filled. To my surprise and relief, a girl waved to me. I recognized her as Dja Dja Sevilla—whom I already knew from the summer journalism workshops we had attended together in high school at St. Paul College—and slipped quickly into the empty seat beside her.
We had only begun to catch up when a cadaverous-looking elderly man walked into the room, and began talking about the amoeba in a low monotone. It took us a few minutes to realize that the man was Professor Surla, our General Science professor, and that we should be taking down notes because this was his first lecture.
UST PARADE Parade floats lace the campus grounds during the university’s first, and fourth centennial celebrations.
Initially, college seemed a bit like high school. The Dominican friars also believed in gender segregation, so men and women used separate entrances and exits, corridors, staircases. If Philets had not been such a tiny college, we would also have had separate classrooms, which was the case in other colleges. Men and women weren’t allowed to speak to each other on campus, on pain of having their IDs confiscated by the Dean of Discipline and their names posted on the bulletin board. We could, however, gaze at each other from opposite ends of the library counter, or across the barrier dividing the men’s canteen from the women’s canteen. (Members of the student organizations were exempted from these rules during meetings and activities. Which may have explained why all the orgs enjoyed rather large memberships.)
We had school uniforms, a different one for each college (although come to think of it, in my college the boys wore anything they felt like wearing); said a prayer before each class, rose from our seats when a professor entered the classroom.
I think of Professor Espinosa who could cite from memory chapter and verse of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and Professor Titus Gonzalez who absentmindedly thrust an eraser into his hip pocket while lecturing on Symbolic Logic; of Dr. Josephine Bass-Serrano explaining Colerige’s Kublai Khan, and Dr. Erlinda Rustia recounting the love story of Dante and Beatrice, and the poet Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta reading from William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens and Amy Lowell…
I heard Nick Joaquin speak for the first time during a symposium sponsored by my college; and at other symposia was introduced to Frankie Sionil Jose, Doroy Valencia, and Rolando Tinio, who had been Philets themselves. Many of my contemporaries, attended evening classes because they were already working for the papers and the ad agencies, having been recruited by our professors, who were all newspaper editors or advertising executives—Joe Burgos, Kit Tatad, Cesar Aguila, Andy del Rosario, Roy Acosta, Jaime Maidan Flores, Rogelio Sikat, Julie Daza (who was also the sorority’s Most Exalted Sister), Jean Pope (who would become the Varsitarian’s first woman editor)…
In between classes, we would walk to España, to have merienda at Eugene’s or Little Quiapo (which unlike the Little Quiapo in front of St. Paul College, was not forbidden to students); or to Wilfranor just outside the Dapitan gate. There was also Aling Mameng’s, which the guys claimed was an extension of Philets. But they wouldn’t take us girls there, since it served mainly beer and “stuff.”
And that campus… it was a place with a history, a place of romance and legend. The university was founded in 1611, and was thus older than Harvard. The UST Press, the country’s first printing press, was even older. The Arch of Centuries, standing just inside the España gate, was a piece of old Intramuros. The University Museum was full of shadows and spiders, and rare icons, vessels, pots, weapons, maps. There were even more treasures in the university library’s dim and dusty stacks. The Main Building had an elevator with a grilled door that one had to pull open and close manually. It creaked and clanged loudly as it moved slowly up and down as though it were being hauled with chains.
The ghosts of prisoners interned by the Japanese conquerors on campus during World War II kept company with the saints and philosophers and poets mounted on its roof, gazing impassively down on the tree-shaded lanes. There was an old, stone wishing well in the Pharmacy Garden, which we visited when in need of help from wood sprites or other benevolent spirits. Each evening at six o’clock, angelus bells would ring, and the blue cross would be lit against the darkening sky. Special guests—among them Juan Carlos, Spain’s crown prince, and his bride, the Princess Sophia of Greece, traveling incognito during their honeymoon—would be welcomed by the ROTC Honor Guard, with tall headdresses reminiscent of Buckingham Palace.
The entire Thomasian community came together in thanksgiving for 400 prolific years gone by, at the university’s 2010 Paskuhan celebration.
In my college we held frat balls and sorority balls. We went on picnics to La Mesa Dam, to the Picnic Grove in Tagaytay, to Matabungkay Beach in Batangas, to Cabcaben in Bataan. The entire university celebrated Christmas with a posadas, a belen contest, a lantern parade, and a Christmas Fair which transformed the campus into a vari-coloured carnivale. And of course there was the UAAP—the big league—way bigger than the NCAA.
Rita Gadi, Linda de Bosch and I joined something called Los Amantes del Español, which met regularly in its adviser’s house in old Sampaloc. Her name was Primitiva Cervania, and her house was all shabby gentility—complete with entresuelo, secret trap door, capiz shells shutters, wide polished wooden planks, furniture of carved wood and woven cane, crocheted table runners, grand piano.
Later, Rita and I also joined the Phi Lambda Sigma sorority (which had a brother fraternity, of course), along with Norma Miraflor. The three of us belonged to the staff of The Blue Quill, our college paper, and later, to the staff of the Varsitarian, the university’s news magazine, whose offices used to be on the ground floor and the Main Building It had old-fashioned, fat-bladed electric fans suspended from its high ceiling, and was equipped with wooden swivel chairs and old, heavy Underwood typewriters, sitting on even heavier and older wood desks; and its walls were actually doors which opened into grassy quadrangles. This room became our home away from home.
What did it matter that when it rained, all access roads to the campus went under water? That was part of the fun. We stepped out off our high-heeled pumps, bought some dirty ice cream, and went wading in our nylon stockings.
