GREY skies and a little rain is nothing when one gets the chance to watch women in Basey’s Saob Cave weave their magic mats just as their mothers did before them.
I cross the San Juanico Bridge from Leyte to get to the other side with only one thing in mind – to visit the cave and see where my mother sourced the beautifully-made sleeping mat she brought me when I was a little girl. It is a green mat embroidered mainly in pink incorporating my name and figures of a bird, a flower, and what looks like (according to my friend Museo Pambata Director Maricel Montero) a birthday cake. The design is enclosed in a border that further embellishes the mat.
The mat was rarely used after the family demolished our weekend home to make way for our current residential house. The mat was then perfect for spreading over the bamboo floor during nap time for me and my childhood friends. We would be lulled to sleep by the sweet fresh sea breeze only to be woken up by our dogs biting our ears. Like all little children, I grew up and the mat was kept in the cabinet forgotten like a Velveteen Rabbit.
Lately, the mat became a sacred space that I would occupy during prayer time in an unoccupied room. It was, for a time, witness to my spiritual journey and caught the wax drippings of lighted candles as well as my tears. This year, I embarked on a physical journey to Saob Cave. It was also a mystical one as I tried to learn its secrets.
Just like the mats of Calatrava, Negros Occidental, the mats of Basey, Samar are woven inside a cave. A cave’s partly-dark, cool atmosphere keeps plant fibers moist and pliable. If mats are woven in the warmer climes outside a cave, the plant fibers become dry and brittle. Unlike the Calatrava pandan mats, however, Basey’s are made of tikog, a knee-high grass that grows in swampy areas. These are harvested, seeds removed, and dried for four days if the weather is hot. It takes longer, of course, to dry during rainy days. The women resort to airdrying if it rains but they swear that nothing beats the sun to yield good quality strips with no mottling. The grasses are segregated according to length and bundled. There are 200 blades of grass to a bundle, and it takes eight bundles to make a mat. Whew!
Banig patterns have names, I discovered. There is dama-dama that look like checkers, the mirubitoon that symbolize stars, and the bug-os bug-os that seem like bundles. I show the ladies the magic mat my mother specially ordered for me. They said that their mothers must have woven that. What I did not ask them was whether they can make another one like it. Anyway, plain, checkered, or intricately embroidered, each mat becomes a treasure that carries the skills of generations of mat weavers./PN
