Basta
Glenn Diaz
“Kasi you just don’t leave your stuff somewhere and expect it to be there,” I tell Scott, in a rickety bus from Pagudpud to Laoag. “This is a tourist
place. Someone will take advantage of you. Now we’re going to the ano, the police station. Basta.”
He had once called my attention to this “intervention of the native tongue,” a common stumbling block, he said, in the learning of a second language. Even so, when I talk to him,
“kasi” and “ano” and “basta” still litter my sentences, like pesky rocks on an otherwise powdery shore. In the years that we have known each other, he has
probably devised a system to deal with these pockets of unintelligible words, these “interventions” that working at a call center has been unable to remove. Now they become as
predictable as ou
