A series of vicissitudes aided by an unnamed Symphony, leaving only fragments, counting for days,
weeks, months, years, counting what cannot be counted, like the waves of time stretching across the South China sea of all eternity; this seemingly long but thriving in only a few hours. This dream. Beginning as a hazy, infant morning at the Malinis lawn, one summer night in a dream and ending as a mass of fog in my eyes and nose and throat.
I could vaguely remember—sensing the stillness, absolute stillness in the surroundings. Could remember hearing my own breath thinking it was from someone else. I could remember believing. I could remember surmising it was all real. Then, I found myself flying. Around the front yard, my body very lightly brushing the tips of the blade of the finely mowed Malinis grasses. I flew back the front yard. There was a familiar figure lying down on a foldable bed outside the terrace. Saw his face, (Daddy?), just a glimpse, of an emaciated, rigid, ghastly, powdered white face with eyes staring upwards into the offing above. My mind’s eye closing in on him. Here he was. In your vision.
The embalmed. The Possessed. The sleeping ghoul. The last image made me think of ashes. Ashes dwelling on his face. Ashes that I found all over the front yard one strange morning of 1991.
Funny, ashes are supposed to dissipate at the cough of a wind.
But not this one.
I believed in our dirty white, shoddy, low roofed bungalow house, its termite infested wood,
its old cracks and crevices, its wooden walls peppered with children handwritings. I believed in the lawn surrounding it, the dried up, ash coloured, impotent mango tree leaning beside it; the balustrade in the terrace surrounded by evergreen folks—San Franciscos, dieffenbachias, aglaonemas, pink and white roses, jungle geraniums, the pale yellow ones and flaming red ones.
In the terrace was a cheaply painted white bamboo set with blue mattresses with flowers for covers, your simplistic, provincial fancy for colourful and scented living things, mother. Here was the aluminium screen door and two brown wooden doors opening with a squeak and a creak; the interior was small but was teeming with a bit of everything: the surroundingfurnishing was blanched; some of the paint was peeling off the walls. The floors that used to get flooded during the blustering days of July and August and September were covered with crummy linoleums, hiding the grime and dampness underneath for so many years. And those were the capiz shell windows at the back of the couch. They don’t really shade the house from sunlight. They just soften them. When they were opened early, rays of light would scour the room turning each day into abiogenesis, rays filled with wriggling dust particles like microbes under the microscope. And out the window, by the cracked stone wall was a crumbling, hollow, sequestered tree. Shrunk into the disquiet. Who? What? The crumbling, hollow sequestered tree, I said.
Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. Alone, the last of its kind. Leftover of an infirmed past.
The walls behind the piano were decorated with a lot of framed pictures:
mother, brother, me taken from a studio; a picture of me sitting on a high chair,
wrapped in baby clothes and a bonnet, open mouthed and wide eyed with obliviousness;
picture of mother in a filipina gown, taken outside the parish church of Poblacion on a Flores de Mayo festival, the strain already set early on her youthful face. Was I already alive at that time, mother? Or I was just a part of your blood? If not where was I?
On the left side of the room, occupying the entire wall, hung an image of a pale grey horse of embroidered cloth, galloping on a vast and lush and self-indulgent green field where snow capped alpine mountains loomed and every time I saw that I’d have an inner wish to make a run for it there.
There was a mahogany sofa set in the living room, the picture of pink, squeaky comfort.
The piano of dark and varnished wood, facing the main door was passed on to mother by a dead and never seen grandfather. His face plastered in my brain from a single frameless, decrepit portrait painting
where he was wearing a military suit.
He used to be a travelling musician, a distinguished trumpeter, playing abroad in the swinging 50’s
mother used to tell me in passing and he was also a womanizer, and a bar drinker, and a man who was born to lose his money because of his constant gambling and failed business ventures,
and as he retired in his 50s he became harsh and strict to his three little girls he was weaning
where one of them happened to be mother; and due to his igneous temperament, he was claimed early by a heart attack, viewed as consanguineous by the elders and karma to some of the neighbours. Quite a character, that man in the painting was.
The top of the piano was littered with pictures:
dad, in front of a Norwegian cruise line, by a bench press with his muscles slightly bulging;
a picture of me in a rest house of a beach resort in Laguna,
holding a cricket in my hand, my eyes looked as if my hands were holding the world,
and I’d remember in jumpy and blurry images, how it was to be childer than a child
when everything around you looks after you and every step away from mother means anxiety
and every insect means all the wonderment;
and every travelling carnival is a firsthand experience of heaven and hell.
Between the couch, facing the SONY color TV set was a glass table, decorated with fancy plastic flowers on a pink vase, underneath were the photo albums, old yellowing pictures with a distinct sappy scent,
black and white, sepia, coloured, dotted, mottled; some exposed and ruined by moisture—Fermenting chronicles from the 60’s all the way to the 80’s.
Here I was bald and carried by grandpa Carding. He was looking down at me with a strained smile on his face, Grandma Amor smiling ever placidly, and next were the first birthday pictures, children crowding in the Francisco residence garage, aunt Lina with me, me feeling thrice as scared when aunt Lucy reached for me; she had a bizarre make up of a wicked witch. I struggled not to cry; mother, carrying me, with the look of someone who was about to wade on the shore blockaded by violent passing waves, the waves being the bigger children waiting for the lattice of goodies to come down from the ceiling.
“Ready, set, go!”
And off they went.
there was a burst of booming excitement all around us; it was a headlong introduction of life and its lessons, the chaotic run of it, the wilderness like code of it, the aching disappointment and unfairness of it, all the heck of it; it was an explosive riot, all of them, screaming, laughing, cheering, shaking wriggling the lattice and the goodies violently, snatching the chocolate bars, junk foods and plastic toys hanging from it, I braced myself and tried grabbing one. They were too strong, too many, mother seizing a chocolate candy, pulling it from the lattice, handing it over to me. I got one. And another one. Seconds later there was another one but someone grabbed it from mother. In another picture, I was the bald child, wearing white clothes, sauntering alone in the middle of a deserted park, in the background, was a white building with red gables, like a parsonage;large forehead exposed, eyes, like a sheep’s;mother and me sitting on the slide together. On the playground with the other children, sitting on the seesaw with her, a child’s face sticking out of the life sized painting of Superman; at the swimming pool choking in water and tears, being held on by her; standing by the fridge filled with swollen red apples, chocolate bars, Nips, Prunes, and boxes of chocolate drinks; me outside the house, riding my now nonexistent four wheeled bike, plants and trees forming like a little aisle; the sunshine amply landing on the path where I was and the path looked straight, the path looked fortified and sure; in the carnival with father and Edna and Yvette and the rest of the cousins, riding a boat, riding the merry go round with mother; here we were on the living room sofa, grandmother holding me, her eyes looking far across the chalk white shores though her vision was barred by the closed doors; Olga laughing while I was standing on the bed and gritting my teeth; me with curlers on my hair sitting on grandpa’s piano, mother dressed me like a little girl though I bore no recollection of the little girl that I was.
Here was a picture of me, facing the camera while pretending to play the piano; 2nd birthday, a clueless child before the dining table filled with party foods and a birthday cake, a phantom hand raised beside me, the hand of uncle Manuel, the half brother of mother, the incorrigible thief who was rumored to be mentored by Aling Delang and her sisters.
The wrapped gifts piled up before me. Around me were the cousins, the playmates, all sweaty, oily, smiling and laughing and teasing. The child in the middle holding a gift in the brink of crying.
Why? Why don’t you just open them?
Me and brother on the sofa, clutching some toys, holding some pet rabbits; I was trying to kiss brother on the cheek while he was hollering with glee and disgust; and mother even held my mouth to the birthday candle to help me blow it out. And here was their wedding, mother wearing a lace white dress, her face covered with a white veil, looking very pale and pretty and serious; father looking washed up, tired and sloppy—here was he eating a spoonful of white cake from mother’s spoon, father’s mouth opened wide, his mouth stuffed with it. Ha, ha.
Olga in the group picture of my parent’s wedding was just a little girl and so were the rest of my cousins. And the Francisco residence had no marble terrace yet. It was only a front yard. Now, where was I again during these days? What was I? A molecule? A cell? A spirit? A fox? A dust in the wind? A grain of sand in the beach? I was a rooster in Mr. Giron’s yard. Yeah. That was what I thought in the afternoons when the sky was an all out orange.
Here was the bookshelf containing a complete volume of encyclopaedia Britannica from 1 to 20 in no particular order, a litter of Chinese figurines and stuffed toys and VHS, and Betamax tapes, little framed posters: footprints in the sand; love is patient, love is kind...On the left side of the living room was a single stair spare room, and capiz shell windows with a view of the side yard, the custard apple tree standing by the wall; the antiquated bed noisy with its loose metal springs, full of dirt stains; but the most wonderful thing about it was that it had the smell of unwashed and damp fabric; a smell that indicates that someone had laid down and lived and got bedridden and died on it. Here was the closet of dark wood with the stuffy scent of mothballs. Just some of the hand me down furniture that might be older than mother. During afternoons this room would get breezy, and the bed would be covered with jumping and slanting sunbeams; the custard apple tree could be found swaying, casting its dancing shadows on the bed like an elderly lady playing around with her grandchildren, swaying and swaying, a tickling sound filling the air, her lightheartedness and many boned sweetness hiding and rotting, enwrapped in cobweb like aphids. The sounds of trees and the wind transform into lullabies taking me closer and closer into the lid of sleep. And there was a lot of waiting and waiting every moment seemed like a moment in a dewy, warm and glossy type of irrevocable third heaven.
The dirty tiled, dirty sinked kitchen was lighted extravagantly by the sunrays through the wooden jalousie windows. The wooden table was covered with cheap and thin linen cloth, a bit baroque; the kitchen cabinet glass stood against the wall and in it was the special plates and utensils that mother got from their wedding gifts. Antique wares. She would bring them out when special visitors arrive. And I especially liked the biggest plate with coloured designs on the rim looking like an ancient cipher wheel. On the top was the hanging frameless replica of Da Vinci’s Last Supper covering the cobwebbed bathroom window facing the table. A guide, a superstition, a 300 yr. old religious tradition that God is watching us how we avoid scrubbing a dot of grease on the plates to finish the dishes quickly and that God is always there dining with us at the table even if we are in the midst of a quarrel so help me God. Late mornings of old. I’d peek through the wooden jalousie windows overlooking the backyard to see if the river’s already getting high. Is it already high? Look, a boat’s passing by! Come closer! There! Chug! Chug! Chug! In Richard’s brain. Chug! Chug! Chug! Ripples made in his heart.
I believed in every morning that ever was; in that little time and that little space and those little dimensions occurring with it, where the smell of moist earth and moist leaves
were carried by the air, where birth, death, draught, rebirth, rain, distress, stir within the bleary visions of consciousness that you’d fail to distinguish which is which. Mum Saturday. Wake up, the crusty eyed phantom groping from the bed at dawn when the neighbourhood was hushed, entombed in reticence, and the sounds of distance were created by automobiles far beyond the river, declaring another day that we can find and break like a fresh egg; and the phantom crickets could be caught chirping from the unknown cracks and corners, and I would look outside, at a hole at the barred window in my room, look and see—a portion of a dark blue sky, day peeping at everyone, and me peeping at her. Holy, sleepy hour. The crickets would stop for another spectacularly unsunny realm of fulfilled quietness…
…Between telling reality and the untelling dream, which one tells the truth better? To the eyes of someone that I was, which one is transcendental? To the eyes of an older me and less eager me, which one is more succinct? It was glossy and grainy but indissoluble—a spacious kitchen, richly furnished interior, aunt, uncle, mother, conversing, eating, plates clattering on tiles of the table, utensils clinking on the plates; but amidst the sounds of all rightness, my brain would be conscious of a grass lawn from the sliding windows. “Don’t go outside or you might get lost.” an authoritative voice told me. But curious, I was. I sneaked out, opened the kitchen door, stepped out and there it was—a wide and deserted summer grass lawn presenting itself proudly before me. Strange and familiar terrain. Every dream is.
“And I looked around beyond the Grass Lawns that looked as though they were on loop, on tiptoes; ran on the grass, towards the houses similar as this house. Familiarity disappeared. Lost…I was. (Why did I let myself so?) I was impeccably lost. Among the familiar ones, among the serene looking houses and gorgeous lawns that were replicas of one another. I never came back. What’s with the tease? Why is fear so wrapped with desire? And did no one find me? I just went out with no Per mission! Find me? Help!”
Rake. The sounds of raking. Sound of a tool scraping a rough surface. A soothing hypnosis washing the unconscious brain. Sounds of the salt makers from the other side of the river; the tree sparrows chirping from the velvet apple tree. Quiet entrance music for the incoming symphony. Wake is up.
The sounds of clanking in the kitchen. Mother. Now awake, AM radio, on, static voices of daily news announcers heard all the way from the neighbours house, the compelling and unephemeral voice of Noli de castro in every radio of every house; urgently announcing the another wake of life; a ceremony between the speakers and listeners, where one crier speaks, everyone listens and take note of it.
The village vendors’ horns honking, taking advantage of the flowing human tide, selling sweetened soybean curd with tapioca balls, the sweets of morning; and there were also fruits and fresh fish, only the fresh, only the sour, only the sweet and none of the dry could partake of the morning. Not until later.
“Taho…Taho!”
Then, from the bed, I would hear the sound of the piano’s fall opening, the sharp creaking of its stool; father and his warm up drills, ascending and descending for a few minutes; a long pause…the sound of the pedal being stepped on, familiar tune would be played that suited the current mood ,a laidback beat with a flowery melody, comfortable, relaxing, like a nursery rhyme song; followed by another one, a humorous and charming melody, father’s hands softly and nimbly fingering the high notes, suiting the movements of a ballerina; there was a kind of quiet delight being propagated in the brain; instituting a desire to get up from the bed and wander about the house, the garden; getting up to feel the dusts in the sunshine; the warmth of the multifold beams. Then: Rest. Another melody flows; a slower beat, melody in minor, sombre, melancholic, visions of Sunday afternoons, without cartoon shows on T.V., only soap operas in sentimental music, no children playing out in the street; most of them where at the church or at home.The piano would play another song again, starting slowly with four rising notes before accompanied by the key of C. “Somewhere in Time”, the only song I knew by name aside from Chopsticks; it had a steady beat and an evocative mood; made me think of a lonely drizzling day peppered with some sunshine; it was played at grandfather’s funeral one sunny afternoon, everyone was silent and grim; the memorial park, so peaceful and beautiful, to entice us of the greener pasture which always conveniently lies on the other side.
I was lifted up and carried over the casket’s other side and back again along with my cousins—an obscure superstition; the close relatives gathering over the open grave, the reddened eyes fogged and closing, the legion of graveness rising, handkerchiefs wet and shapeless, dark sunglasses hiding bottomless waters. Going home smoothly like a meandering soul, already getting dark, the ancestral house looking empty, abandoned like there was nothing there. Like nothing ever happened there at all…And I looked across the kitchen and saw the maid sweeping what was left of the dirt on the kitchen floor.
Saturday morning now or never. Reverie dissipated like the forming dirt in the water about to make a crusade at the bank of the river but was quelled because of an incoming motor boat. Rush into the vegetable garden at the side yard at seven. Excited to see how my bean sprouts had grown—fascinating to see them grow from seeds into little shoots overnight; from tiny molecules of nonliving matter to fully formed fetuses. My first time to create something and there was no hardship or harshness only tenderness; and there were no rules. I was just the infant Creator. The Santo Nino. The little light green leaves shoot up like an outstretched new born infant’s hands. I reached out to them. Child to child. A few days after and I never saw them again. Forgot about them since.
Me and brother would do the chores at nine: washing the balustrade with laundry soap and water, mopping the floor, wetting it with a soapy mop, filling up two pails of water from the well, (making me spill water to the ground), watering all the plants, including the ones in the side yard, including the weeds. We would water the soil so it would not be so dusty when afternoon came. The mango tree, pale as shrunken as she was, would taste some of my water. Mother instructed me to include her. Why? Will it still matter to her? What does she need to bear her fruits and give us joy? What’s with death and infertility in salt water?
I believed in our river, murky and green, smelling dank and sodden; where its sand was stolen by people before I was born, leaving the repugnant mud behind; where it nearly drowned me when I was seven—a vague memory of our old hut by the bank...vision of me...peeking...from the wooden ledge, looking down at the water...vision of me, falling, head first into the water, the water so cold, so salty, water’s a living flowing being, a divine fairy entitled to kill and give life to anyone and for the moment, she held me on her hands and was in deep thought; the sky was chalk white, pale and unattached but steadfastly observing like some quintessentially absent quintessential Thing; such is the taste of the whole glory of salt water to a child, a vision of filmy peridot, catching a glimpse of the ink black pillars of the hut. The first lesson of life and death being sucker fed into me. I sunk down and never even thought of death.
I only thought of the water and the sky which was oh so white.
The rapid water flowing seaward. There was a screech from somewhere along the banks, “The child! The child! He is drowningggg!!!” There was a blurred vision of me, receiving resuscitation, vomiting water, mother whimpering next to the puzzle tree; blood dripping down to her feet as she saw me on the water. Pregnant with brother. He was shaken, and decided to opt out and welcome earthly life weeks earlier, his bloody birthday that he decided, in the 14th of September, with the themes of birth and death and peridot visions.
I watched her flow now, the tide rising up, deeply green, rays of soothing sunlight making diamond like reflections in the water. Outside the skanky kitchen, in the backyard where the soil was dark, grimy and full of powdered seashells, was I, crouching on the ledge. Feeling safe in the Now. The mangrove trees on the other side bathing from the balm of the nigh noon sun knew what was going on. It was now eleven. I delved into her chasm and she was delightfully heavy with her bags of tricks. A shining life. It was a sun god reflecting holy water. My eyes did worship. They were languid, mesmerized, deadlocked into the incoming scene—the washed out lumber floating to the east along with a bunch of uprooted banana trunks, fallen tree branches, driftwood, plastic bottles, odd slippers, floating at every glitter and ripple of the water—“when it goes to the east, it’s high tide; when it goes to the west, it’s low tide”—a flatlander’s philosophy.
Moving in heaps, I pulled it near to the embankment using a long wooden stick, inspecting for crabs, I grabbed a cheap plastic action toy figure floating amongst the garbage, one foot missing, I threw it back after a second thought; a seed of some plant John often used as earrings—I clipped it in my ear. And there. I was somebody else. I was something. I was some sort of a pirate. I reached and grabbed a hollow bamboo post with river moss growing on it. A brown colored crab darted out of it. I grabbed it as it started sinking. “Ah!” It clipped my hand. A generous, stinging pain bolted in me. I caught it with the dipper. The pain kicked my senses into life and I was even more excited and feverish. I was hungry for more.
Then there was a pig carcass floating with the water lilies. The coming party, the coming dead. I pulled it into my direction. Its rotting body bloated with white maggots, squirming feverishly, announcing Mardigras in the sun. It smelled like a mixture of many rotten things, living or dead, the odour was so dense and stinging like getting clipped by a crab claw. In the midst of death, ironically, there is life, not just one but many and not just many but the whole place where death has occurred is teeming with it. I pushed it sloppily away, It was too heavy, too strong. For me.
Noon was already here, fastening itself into our already tanned skins. Thin and olive skinned rascals from Eagle’s nest would flock at the vacant lot adjacent our residence. The drumming of the steps. Then “AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”
That scream which awakened the hell out of father who was taking a nap at the master’s bed with the lights off, and the daylight winking and sparkling at the crevice on the bathroom, and made mother come over to the wall and scream at them to scram which I doubt they heard. That scream which bolted out of nowhere and sliced the hot noon air into fine cutlets. That immortal scream coming from a mortal boy.
That scream. The scream of puissant summer! The scream of a life giving master in the melting wilderness! The scream kinda like a noisome, yoohooing bird, free flying like a Chinese emperor prancing around the provinces of his barricaded kingdom! That scream which warrants everything that is related to being alive and defiles anything that is related to its morose sibling. That scream which kinda poked me at the back of the head and rang something in me like a bell to tell me all the things that I had to know from that hour onwards until the day I die or I wished to so help me God. That incoherent scream that has given me a vestige of understanding in the most inhuman of hours I’ve spent in my life which, for example, was in the night of April 28, 2014 after the downpour and I wasn’t supposed to take the bus home alone at the early night of 11 and when I started seeing things as grey and pointless and dead and things rubbed out from their meaning like scratching consistently losing numbers in the lottery. That scream that smoothens the creases that divides god and man. That scream...that followed me down in the bleakest of hours when I was wasted and alone and sleepless past midnight in the drab waiting room without any waiting room mag waiting for the Dr. badum badum badoom! That scream that swallowed the eternity of me and had left crumbs of it in a form of its jumpy shadow that continually haunts me in the scenes of my dreams....
...It was harmonized by a pandemonium of juvenile voices and crazy clatter of steps pounding the pavement of the vacant lot. Sounding like someone’s wild and crazy and noxious heart. My heart. Something like: BAM BAM BAM.
They’re coming.
“Splash!” Someone finally started it. Spattering and splattering, and shouting and screaming and screeching and cursing and laughing and crying and sneezing—the naked bodies, the proud, shiny white chests and proud, shiny white buttocks glistening under the sun, the mangrove trees very involved now, the moving mosaic of arms and feet; hairs and teeth; twigs and leaves, clouds and atmosphere; the interminable liquid theatrical motion of diving, jumping, rolling, swimming, treading, paddling, floating; running on the mud and tripping. It was Something to reach the other side of the river. It was an adult thing, a cool thing. For some it was like Glory.
One of the bastards climbed up to the tallest mangrove tree and dove like a diving dove—head first into the water. A masterpiece.
They were eating green mangoes stolen from some lawn. Probably from the Malinis’. They were throwing the filthy mud at each other while having their snack. They were totally naked. And it was all fine.
“James dick is small!” “Ha! Ha! Ha!” spraying water, “Try doing that again!”, chuckling, “Idiot!”, “Give me that!”, a green mango floated, sound of water splashing and running feet, “You’re a son of a bitch!”, “I will tell you on my mother!” “Mama…Mama!” sobbing, some boy naked, crouching, a tall boy jumped, splash, free stroke, dogpaddle, head above and under the water, the water settling and unsettling.
Not so far from the banks, a kid was eyeing them a little too closely.
It was molten envy. It was molten summer.
“Richard!” a strained voice from the kitchen. Squeaking of the screen door.
Oh, mother.
One.
The river was almost stagnant. The kids at this point would leave, the water lower, the mud in the banks gradually becoming visible, the backyard empty, the river silent. Lonely happy. The neighbourhood including the salt beds on the other side of the river would be still. Siesta would be enunciated. And the sounds that could only be heard would be the sound of the trees rustling their leaves, and it would be followed by the sounds of berries trickling on the roof; and a single thuds of an unripe mango, and other fruits falling to the roofs of other houses, and then there would be an abrupt thud on the earth. It was a fallen coconut.
The radio would start blaring the reposeful oldies: the songs before us: the fifties, sixties and the seventies—the old fashioned serenades, the platters, the Bye bye love brothers, the rock and roll, the rusty, squeaky sounds of voices of who were already past dead.
There was a radio novella playing like this: a female voice on the verge of crying and mortal despair, pleading and begging for the manly, maudlin voice, to stop making trouble that would finally find him and finish him in form of the sound of a knife or a gunshot, the thick sound of a syrupy symphony orchestra playing in the background. The hosts were old men and women who used a premium language that was deep and sunken and might have been popular thirty years ago.
On the T.V. were the soap operas, soap of crying, sobbing, wailing, and arguing and celebrating love quarrels; dramatic and violent confrontations, women slapping each other, men punching each other, and other harsh human conditions; my mother, sitting on the sofa, sniffling from these crazy scenes, her handkerchief crumpled, her eyes, blushed and wet and her clowny nose comically clogged from moody sinusitis.
I believed in Television. The Bear brand’s charming grandpa’s story of how he used to dance with his grandmother in the sepia coloured 1920’s where he said I remember Yesterday the world was so young, Green Cross promoted by a famous moustached referee, Alaska evaporated milk and Birch tree Commercials. But the main theme of the afternoon was It’s my turn, a song played every time in Coney Reyes on Camera.
2 was the number of unreasonable mellow sadness—wind chimes moved by the wind from the top of the screen door producing a dreamy music box sound; it was a continuous wandering song, what is timeless is wordless, what can be the shadows and the backgrounds of sounds should be listened to and remembered for all ages.
It was once a well remembered dream tinkling from a breeze coming from every which way; on the sofa, with the mattresses, cool, warm, snug beside the jalousie windows, the parallel glasses reflecting the softer lights, the ones striking the east now. Listen...it will not be so empty soon.
Half awake, walking in the moon, memory, dreams, reality, mixing,
Creating a smazy type of consciousness, faded sorrow sweet and starchy like a dried up fruit, mono visions at play, hair blowing, mind astray, distant and in sepia, nap on the sofa to a dream of splashing, the whining Hanabishi fan on number two; the passageway wrapped in glazing sunlight; the dusty mirror reflecting my face with eye bags, looking old from sleeping and dreaming, making me question who and when and what was I? Who is this face looking right at me? Will this change? Will change be that scary? Or that necessary? Will I know that I’ve changed once it occurs? Will I accept that when it happened? Will I look back? Will me still be me? Will you still be you?
The lights beginning at 3 knew no sorrow. And only knew how to run and pick on the flowers.
Cries of children, I heard. Coming from the basketball court beside the Giron residence. An orifice and a maelstrom of Euphoria, shaken and stirred.
Out, out, get out. A toneless, timberless, voiceless, compelling voice dictating higher up the ladder. It was known through the science and faith of television that the conscience is the soap. The conscience is Safeguard—the clear reflection of yourself making you free from the germs of your hands. Sneak out…carefully planning, carefully opening the eternally squeaking screen door. The terrace is shiny. Life is lying out there in a supine position and waiting. Ting! Ting! Ting…
Richard went out and found the front yard empty, the backyard empty, the vacant lot empty,
Mrs. Zapanta’s house nearby empty, the streets, of north, east, west, south has only one name—Empty. After all the waiting is Empty.
The world today was a seriously, quiet and distant place, an empty place and in this emptiness was where he found that queer substance. Comfort. Not independence, but something cheaper and unheeding: a rare earth magnet called Freedom.
Across the river, from the salt beds farther away, a man was crossing the yellowing pillars.
under the heat of the sun.
Glum, laidback. Alonely. Snug. Listless. The world is 8 years old. And it is left to me as a playground.
Looking around, the coconut trees swaying and bending and blending to the scene, threatening to let fall their fruits.
The garden—the red and pink and yellow jungle geraniums abloom, their faces sticking mightily to the liquid sun, plucking out their stigmas to sip a drip drop of honey; she loves me—flick; she loves me not—flick. All around the yard now, past the mango tree, the coconut trees, the star apple tree, our rusty double iron gates, the vacant lot with scattered leaves and driftwood strewn upon the rotten canoe. The fosse where the useless things lie and the last of their use is for the earth to satisfy the need for things to be buried.
It had been years since Uncle Mike Giron went fishing. Dad too. Had been too many years. Time had rotten both their canoes.
The yard was a guaranteed amusement...a constant discovery, every growing, ailing and dying plant was an enchantment to behold; every shady corner was a mystery to solve: reaching for the fruits of a cucumber tree attached in Malinis compound. The taste so sickeningly sour. The java plum tree, too high for a child to climb, asking for Mr. Malinis’ permission to give us some of its fruits. All for their sweet and bitter and tangy and acrid taste.
Getting the peas from the madras thorn tree, putting the pods in a puddle with my playmates. Waiting for them to explode in the water. Counting the seconds before they did. And the sensitive plants were really sensitive; their leaves would start fold like a botanical miracle when they get touched by a curious child. Their leaves closing like tiny hands—close, open; close, open.
Climbing the strawberry tree and tiptoeing on Mrs. Zapanta’s roof. The red and yellow green ones on a branch. On my toes, trying hard...to reach, just the tip of the branch. I sure knew what they tasted like. It was an incalculable obsession.
Stuffing a bunch them in the pockets of my shorts. When I got more, I’d put them on my shirt.
“What’s going on now?!” A shrill, high, exasperated voice intoned right under the roof.
The witch is awakened!
“Get down and you’re bothering everyone!” said she.
Up onto the roof, lying down, staring at the random images that the clouds made before the luminous blue of sky. Staring at the blue as if it would answer. Contented myself with the staring. The branches of the mango tree looked like a 90 yr. old lady’s arms. Shoosh...shoosh...The drying leaves detached from their stems would fall. It was very fine when they did. The roof half covered with the leaves. The Whistling. It was on and on and on, persistent as the involuntary desire to breath, timeless and unbroken as the ether of some pervading being.
The young leaves of the Indian almond tree were sliced cucumber to the eyes.
There was wistful serenity upon looking down the Old Ones, the Dried, the Crumpled, the Fallen.
I believed in them young and old. The slender and tender stems, their leaves piled up in the eaves, piled up in the fosse, the delicate verdant smell of botanical decadence flowering in space; and all the hollow, rotting smells of the geriatric trees were Something. They reminded me of an older time, older than this body; their height and texture, crumbling, towering, condescending—a being who already Was before humans populated the earth.
I checked out the moist, and moss grown blocks of stones distributed about the garden to act as a bridge. Lifted the blocks one by one, hoping to catch some centipedes, but there were only black cockroaches, earthworms who acted disturbed in their homes. I stood close the lichen blotched walls. The lichen. A bright yellow green who grew out of nowhere and possibly out of nothing, causing the rising smell of warm sylvan moisture. Tiny green trees up close. A jet flew by the tiny green trees and then it transformed into a giant figure walking in a form of a hand, and it jumped and breezed through the rocky mountains. Then it transformed back to a jet and ran very fast, flying past the mountain ridges—zoom!
The custard apple tree beside our house was next: there were a few unripe fruits in clusters, having cone shapes spotted with diamond shaped lumps, some of them white with aphids, covered with cobwebs, daddy long legs swinging on a spider web. They were only born to be eaten by animals and people and perhaps their only quest is to be clean before they go.
They were still hard and rough. The smell was still acrid. I yearned for its ripeness, that faintly sweet scent, and opening it would contain would be like unwrapping a gift, and the taste was bland but it was succulent and custard like, and I would spit out the black seeds that were shaped like black, fat raindrops. A tough exterior with cushions inside.
I’d hear something falling on the roof and I’d hurry to that old tree. Look up.
The sky—cloudy then blue, cloudy then blue, the berries clustered on their branches were shaking:
The wind blew its whistle when there was nothing wrong. The coin shaped leaves protested against it. The fruits finally began to fall. One by one.
Falling. Fell. Fallen. Time is stolen. Scattered, and we are its Pollens. I crouched down for the fallen berries, a bunch of them lying on the ground. I picked them up swiftly one by one unripe, overripe, crushed, yellowing, ripe—and ate them. The seeds ejected like a bullet from my mouth and so they hit the ground. Grow. If not, die. I picked more and ate them, munching, the after taste lingering to a certain point. I can’t explain. And so what’s the taste of something you’ve thought that you can deal with it not having for the rest of your life but when it reappeared, it felt like it was incredible to believe how you managed not to miss it all these years?
Richard smiled and ran away. Something must’ve caught his eyes again.
Thud! A fruit fell again on Mrs. Zapanta’s roof. The boy climbed up the roof through the coconut palm tree that was leaning against the wall armoured with broken beer bottles, carefully, he stood on the partition and used it as a bridge to reach the roof. Here were velvet apples sitting on the roof. Carefully now, he picked up the most concrete of them and stuffed the thing inside his pocket without touching the roof. His palms got tiny auburn hairs because of its hairy skin. A slight skin irritation or was it his imagination?
The fruit was still bruised but nevertheless fresh and whole unlike the deformed and rotted ones. A mild, cloying odour of rotten cheese seeping in the nostrils. Split it in half with a kitchen knife, a spoonful of pale, yellowish white flesh, moist , soft, nausea swallowed by sweetness, ending with tangy acrid aftertaste of something to be etched in the brain and never go really away—a spoon left on the veranda, dream memories, early afternoon moods gone, replaced with an uprising feeling of elation—the exorbitant desire to go about the dusty alleys of the barrio, to run, run, run, run! Conquer!
A faceless knife grinder riding his bike, beating his whetstone with a rod, crying out loud to attract housewives with rusty knives, cout loud to give him returns, perhaps, its voice already enough to give color and shape and identity and predisposition to himself. Just like the vendors who were earlier before him.
In the bike now, pedalling straight to a deserted dun coloured street, passing by the neighbours’ houses—some sleeping or just sitting languidly from their porches eating rice cakes or porridge for a merienda cena or just doing nothing.
Tried to make it faster, feeling good with the momentum, going left, passing by houses, the basketball court, he could hear—the sound of a bouncing ball, and the sound of the ring squeaking its loose springs, sounds of slippers slapping on the ground, walking, sometimes running, they were just either shooting some hoops or playing a lousy game of twenty one, afterwards, a lot of big boys would come and the real game would start, the electrifying and rhythmic sound of the ball being dribbled and then shot to the ring, the sound of shuffling feet, tense and alert, barking instructions and requests, eager to score. Wanting some more, wanting some more. An audible sweep of the broom in between the shouts of the callers.
A woman just woke up from her siesta.
Now, listen....“Driedddd fishhhhh! Smokeddddddd fish!” the age old drawling and crackling of the elder lady fish peddler I hear:(Smokedddd fishhh!) Through the course of the afternoon. (Drriiieddd fisshhh!) Across the spaces of brown, red, yellow, orange and green.Isn’t that life enough? Isn’t that already an answer to all life’s questions?
Richard continued the fantasy that he was speeding with his bike, being chased by imaginary foot soldiers until he reached Eagle’s nest. Pedalling more slowly. To an unfamiliar place, the streets filthy, smelly. There were ramshackle houses here and there, the people’s faces unfamiliar, sporting horrid, open mouthed stares; the children greasy, their clothes, frayed, mud stained, some run on the street with no slippers on. And their eyes, bold, low and directionless.
A child so much shorter than me wearing a dried snot on his nostrils grabbed the handle bars of his bike and glared at him. Flight, fight. He squiggled free and escaped.
Nearing dusk. 4. Or maybe 5. Who knows? Sunlight cascaded daintily through the trees, the high noon heat fizzled out. One last ride before home. One last ride, ok? Long day, soft is sunshine turning everything orange.
Richard’s eyes glinted. Sweat dropping from the side of his forehead as the bike squeaked home.
What is happiness? Happiness is that ray of light teasing your brow, the epigrammatic glint in daylight darkness, the one that doesn’t speak and give thoughts and opinions and speculations and arguments and misunderstandings or worry about what is beyond now. Happiness is another story. Happiness is just and is.
Returning from Aunt Susan’s house one evening
after a fun day of playing with John and Christian,
tiptoeing past the house where Dama de Noches
hung real thick, heavy and low, its scent abloom every night.
Pluck a handful of them for mother.
She loved. The scented ones. Scented ladies of the night.
In the darkness, the aroma was palpable
as I viewed the lamp light at the intersection. Trying so hard to keep it together.
I would walk the path straight home without thinking of ghosts!
I would walk the path straight home without thinking of ghosts!
Gently, slowly. Close your eyes. Run!
Father took me to the parish church one Sunday evening. Inside was depressing, congealing, foreboding, grave. Inside was perdition, petition, purgatory, a breathing, nauseous dream. There was a Weltschmerz sense of a world, the brick ceiling so majestically high and I thought that nobody could ever go up there unless he was willing to fall down and die while crossing the beams.
The olden chandeliers, the aging yellow light, the electric bulbs shaped like candles, a crucified Christ made of wood hanging over the townspeople, his head bowed down, and then there were the Saints, and upstairs where the choir stayed were the many statues of Virgin Mary hid with the same pious stares, grandiosity carved in wood, resin and stones, fiber glass, cast marble—casting grotesque and dreadful fascination; images of red, the faint smell of incense and candle wax, the smell of eucalyptus oil, smell of something old, sick and in many ways decadent. So many untold stories on the walls where headstones of people who died when the church was still being built. Could there be a burial vault on the other side of the wall? High crosses inside the chamber, the chamber that could be built for the holy or vile, God, or the Devil; the candles being lit even during the day, for the living and the dead. The old ladies, wearing veils, sometimes walked on the cold stone floors reddened by varnish and wax, advancing while kneeling, genuflecting on the aisle, towards the priest, before the giant, melting, roasted, ever still crucifix, the locked gold plated cabinet, which kept the unleavened bread, the unleavened bread which was kept as the body. They would pray handful beads of prayers, beseeching mercy, luck, remedy over impending death or over a chronic sickness, wiping handkerchiefs on the feet of a fair complexioned St. Michael the Archangel, his left foot stepping on a dark skinned merman, Satan, defeated, Michael’s sword upraised in holy victory: “Iesus Hominum Salvator” The inscription read from the white painted windows’ metal designs, my tiny plastic race car floating with a bluish glow, up and down pew after pew, me, temporarily oblivious of the miserable stuffiness and the listlessness occasionally broken by hollow coughs, the organ blowing Psalms of steady mourning and joy, the choir lavishly praising, timorously pleading—“The lamb of the world that took away the sins of the world, have mercy, have mercy on us;” Father Victorino, his voice low, stately, and ominously ceremonious, talking in a slow, staccato and venerable fashion,waiting for his final words and the peace he would authorize to the attendees at the end of the mass. “Peace be with you, peace be with you.” Peace that was bestowed in a second and lost in the wavelessness of a not so mortal time.
And I could only nod; I couldn’t even look straight. I was very, very shy.
Heading straight to my grandparents’ house for a sleep over, I glanced at the T.V. screen when I heard the chilling orchestration of a horror movie where a priest was muttering something unintelligible to a man, the whites of his eyes exposed, growling like a monster, making demonic faces. I winced and withdrew. There was Darkness and the eerily sheltered smell of the interior carpet.
In the middle of night, I woke, the room, frosty from the air conditioning, aunt had turned it off, the whirring stopped with a wet sigh and there would be a long period of soundlessness. How strange and how beautiful was that vigil like pages of white paper running freely and once in awhile it would come across a few quotation marks, colons, which are the rising and falling sound of passing cars and jeeps and buses rallying in darkness.
When will it stop being nothing? When will everything restart?
One day, after school, I came home to find our house gone from where it once stood. The place was entirely dismantled. I came home without a home. It was a bulldozed nest and my dad’s the contractor. Stuffs were scattered outside. I say all of them. The old kitchen cabinet glass,the two wooden closets at the spare room, which were inside the house as long as I could remember, were now pushed out and freed; the fragrance of moth balls teasing the air with a slight tinge as it got diffused to be robbed of a secluded eternity; the totemic piano sitting there, like an upright, naked, rich old man sunbathing beside a young palm tree. What was supposed to be a rustic centerpiece became part of a holy, solemn, perverted Salvador Dali nightmare. The furniture sets from the terrace and the living room, the appliances, the kitchen wares, led into the open, pushed towards the immensity and the harshness of freedom, into the homeless truth giving truth a bad name. “We would build a bigger house, a better house with a higher ground so we wouldn’t get flooded anymore.” Father reasoned. And how should I know Reason at the undeveloped age of twelve? How should I know convenience? Or a mound of leaves constituting a raking progress? Or a bigger space farther off the solar one? Or a landscaped backyard or cleaner tiles that are made of marble and precious stones or even the yellow ones reminiscent of the brick road to Oz? How should I know modernity? How should I know the word better when I already recognized the former as heaven and as far as I knew that word can never be better, right?
So I walked around and the steps I took made a gentle crackling sound. Here. Are. The. Leftovers—the wooden doors, the squeaky screen door forever bereft of its squeak, the wooden wainscots containing the children’s handwritings, the scratches of what and who and how and when, the surfaces where the paint had faded, had given up, the thin ceilings containing the unreached cobwebs, the jalousie windows to where I’d check for a family member coming home or a relative stopping by or just taking in whatever’s left of the daylight to which I would always be amused at, and the Capiz windows that used to reflect the superfluity of the various lights of day were taken down. The mango tree that could never bear fruit? Down too. Down. The only way. Is. No seeds, no fruits to extend the rudimentary modality of one’s existence. The Last Supper on the kitchen wall became the last of the supper literally the previous night.
It was a Thief! The Thief! That thief! The one hinted at the Revelations! That faceless one that Aunt Susan and Pastor Dennis vivaciously spoke of! The one at the tabloids coming up almost every single time! The one that happened at a village somewhere at Maliksi district along Evangelista road where three family members were stabbed as reported by Noli de Castro.
Found myself looking down at Christ who was obtusely focused on dividing the bread while Judas, who was hiding in darkness, was pushed into the shameless light of day. Lost. Poor Judas.
Remembering the day when me, brother, Christian and John were taken to the Picnic Grove in the Tagaytay. Horse back riding in and out of the fences. Pastoral setting. In broken concentric circles, up and down and scary and funny and painful and wary of blunt head trauma while brother didn’t mind anything at all, his swift footed horse racing and outgunning the rest of us like his swift footed mind. And father’s horse was a donkey! Ha! An eternally mottled picture ruined by rain water. A comical icon of him and his self-deprecating comedy. Funny, so funny. That clackety clack on the pavement? The clean, quiescent road. Across the paisley cross patched fields overlooking Taal the grey, sunken breast of a volcano. Just as long we wouldn’t go downhill. But eventually, all of us did. In a manner of speaking.
So where was that pale grey horse dashing towards the field now? Had she left the pale grey cottage for the alpine whites? Don’t I remember the beast going the opposite direction? What was the Place and Time not revealed by the Artist? Could that probably be the plane where the Artist was standing at? His entire depth of field of perception cut out from the eyes of all to make art. To make what? To make us?
Don’t you think? Well, I failed to ask. Everything. Child’s hood. So many lost things.
The miscellaneous, the parts, the halves, the wholes, the Sigmas, The Zetas, the ancient runes, the cracked tablets, the unscrawled, the vandalized, the wares, the stored, the junked, the secretly kept, the thoughts, the intricacies, the crust, the core, the filament, the universe, the stigma, the petals, the flower, were all assembled methodically on the ground. Dead. I never thought that a house can be dead. The neatest trick I’ve ever seen.
(I thought it will always be like that ‘til we’re blue in the face.)
(No. Only fools do think like that.)
(It’s better to be a fool than to be without a home.)
(Change is a wise man’s brick and mortar. Go pound yourself with that!)
(But I’ve never wanted to change!)
(If you’re an enemy of change, you’re an enemy of the world.)
The river, which was used to be blocked by the house, can now be seen all the way from the gate. Ah, the reveal! There you are! Nowhere to hide now. I started scooting around abstractedly to the place where it used to stand, pretending to walk on the little passageway to the bedroom where the full body mirror of old would’ve been facing me now and I would’ve solemnly swore that that whole part would be outpouring with a proleptical light coming from the western window; it could wash me down even with eyes closed, as the voices of children and men and women would generate a quietly spectacular sunny noise, destroying the shaded and monastic ideology of the early afternoon. I fantasized the last walk on the living room, the last tip toe on our bedroom, and the last single stair climb to the spare room, and the last clackety clack on the tiles of the kitchen, tiles like the dirty palms of someone old and graying and sporting already defined palm lines—they’re all together now in twenty steps, in one leveled space, in a limbo of rubble and firewood. All in one room called Oblivion. How poetic! How futile is Poetry! How comforting and spare the inner Shadow is! How small! How small our house was as it turned out. I looked up. The sky was grey and clear as if it already told everything. Not a bird nickered. The earth was windless. She was out, she that could’ve blown my half-mast soul away. Is out. Staring now into the Grey.
Over. Done. It was just like that. So sudden. Here I was, still a child, mute and invalid before the changing seasons, the changing reasons. The dumbest, wonderfullest wonder before the ruins. It was the end and the beginning and the present and the future and the dent and the cataclysmic reformation of something.
Earth mother, I’ve a question: When the foundations are gutted out, when the blood of the sacrificial rooster that was poured on them dries out and petitions vengeance, when the seemingly steadfast surfaces are taken out into the one eyed sun, on what earth could we still stumble upon? What earth?
I should have been upset. But there was nothing there. There was Nothing in There. Up. Sky. All hail the cloudless comfort. All hail the absurd clarity of nothing.
Dusts and woodchips settled down about my feet. No presence of wind. Still. So long. So short. Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si-do! in a jubilant unison of voices in my head. Madness. Madness. Then, silence. There was a wasted charm in it though, a beautiful and sad smile of someone so old and loved and already in the absurd and intricate process of letting go; and somehow, you know what? It felt funny. I dunno. It just felt funny, like running into solid air not knowing that it’s actually a transparent sliding door, and I bumped my face against it. I saw my comically stupid face. And then I found myself staggering and spiraling into wakefulness, my little Santa snow globe cracked open, turning inside out.
And everything that used to hang up there finally comes crashing down, in a great and incomprehensible speed, like some sort of eruption of lava and hot ash and mudflows, and gas spanning thousands of miles across that happened in ‘91, all beyond the hope of containment, the hope of wood, the hope of earth, the hope of something stable; the rubble, mud and grime mixing; break free and fall, the ground full of twigs and disentangled leaves, the red bark and branches, porous, brittle, splintered, powdered, a healthy temporary mulch for the top soil, its trunk, malnourished girth, still standing on its roots, but already decomposing; a living residue, filled with empty termite holes, ant holes, worm burrows; everything, ever thing, back to earth, acquiring the foul wisdom of the tree from where it came from; it being fully aware of its thick and twisted roots, bending, shaping like a hoary and gnarled and disgustingly naked man before a vile wind, yielding to its fate of barrenness, its trunk now Hollow, a nest for bats, containing jet black coals, white ashes, sawdust, now, being a victim of burning, not for timber but for sheer destruction; for it can no longer bear fruit, it can no longer grow its leaves and branches. And any tree that is of no worth is not a tree and that thing, which is no longer a tree, must die. (Wake. Awake again.) The phantom tree sparrows have avoided perching on the branches for they’re prone to breaking. It has exceeded its laws of value; it is undone, the health in it is lost. It is hard to cure the wood because it’s already dead inside; it cannot withstand the grain. It is a shriveled eyesore, a platform of drought and misery. It is only living for itself; no child or man or any living organism would ever benefit from it again; a waste of space, and space is precious, the town is populated, constantly needing spaces; and Time is a decadent progression where the useless, the graceless, fall behind, the short lived fete taken down, the child now dead, the youngster, dead, the consecrated meal cut to pieces and fed to dogs. One of them that bit me years ago; the demonic brother of the child demon Emmanuel who had bullied me tricking me into it. Betrayal, abandonment, that laughter without humor, segregation, pointing fingers, the fungi, the aphids celebrating in the pathetic host, procreating on its wilting leaves, the canker spreading from tip to root from itself to its present seedlings and forthcoming seeds, generations of growth festering and about to fester, colonized and unaware of the plagues. I threw Don’s slippers, far into the muddled water, as far as my little cruel arms could take, my throat filled with heinous laughter when they came to see the horror of what did, when they were out there bathing. Iēsous, Christos, Theou, Huios, Sōtēr. Does any rite still make sense these days?
I would still dream of catching fish. Triumphant only within it.
But I still won’t give up the chase, hoping it to be my meal on some bright, faithful day, even if it’s my last, now, that things are bound to fall between the cracks, that things are bound to push things between the cracks, destined to bend, curl, get twisted, get uprooted, fall, on the floor, the moisture, the sap and the juice drying, lost, severed from its branches, a mutual separation, reduced into ignorance without the bliss or the innocence, the old goat dictum, the eaters, the night and faithless sleep and turning over from side to side to court sleep or Death or Understanding which is far more cruel, coming over to feast and swarm and reek of felony and bruised and benumbed conscience, and reek of the magnificence of Gethsemane, the manifold pain, exquisite, reaching a new magnitude, experiencing a general numbness as the vital veins get ripped, grieving in whispers, staring stupidly at the divine fault, the saddest puzzle, a colder and sterner wind hushing it, “Swooshhh….” the phlegmatic season ringing its main stem, its stubborn, stubborn neck, its sentience and essence disappeared into the trickster’s hat; sunlight turning deadwood into dry animal bones—no more blight, no more pestilence, no more fire, no more storm, no more dearth, no more visitations; only dust, and then the ground, its layers only getting thicker.
