‘Sorry the rice is cold, there’s little fish left. There was a time … do you like eels?’
‘I heard about your famous eel-catcher. And the terror of “the red ants”.’
She can’t wear his stare, so she leaves the table and looks out, tracing the shape of the old tree in the dark. ‘Time to cut it now … ’
‘There are stories, Mamay Dulce.’
‘When you crush its leaves, then you smell it … foul, ay, so foul … but only when you crush it.’
Major Ernie was having his usual siesta on the balcony of Gov Kiko’s chalet. He never woke up. Six bullets, the first to stop his heart and the rest to kill his dreams, from an old 45. Bolodoy found him. A waste of bullets, the new angel thought. A month later, he was not quite sure whether he executed a seventeen-year-old cadre for revenge or for the boy’s stupidity.
There are voices in the orchard. Someone clears his throat, another coughs. Mamay Dulce shuts the window in a flurry of singsong and drags the boy to the kitchen, behind the earthen stove. She shuts her eyes, she’s trembling, she’s strangling the boy in her embrace. There are voices under the window. She pushes him against the stove, clamping his lips shut, then runs back to her dead. She wraps it in the blanket, she covers it with the mat, she drags the table around the room, searching for a corner to hide it. Someone scratches on the door. She flings herself over her son.
‘Mamay … ’
Only her ears turn towards the voice at the door, she wants to be sure. She is so afraid to lift herself from her dead, lest it be snatched away.
‘It’s just us,’ Pay Inyo says. The gravedigger lays a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ve brought her home, Dulce … as I promised.’
She lifts her head slowly, peels herself from the corpse and faces the girl who keeps crying out, ‘Mamay … Mamay … ’
Mamay Dulce’s face sags into a query forever unanswerable, as she drops to the floor, legs and arms pushing out, lips stretched into a grotesque wound. Where it comes from, Miguelito will never know. The breast or deeper down, from the little toe perhaps or the soles that catch the singsong wail of the earth that might even wake the dead.
‘Ay, Eya, ay, ay, Eya, ayyyyyyyyyy … . !’
The infinite keening is muffled on her daughter’s hair, which comes undone, spilling around them like a pool.
Chapter 62
When we stoned the moon, it broke into fireflies that roosted on our arms stretched out in a crucifixion. No, my history is not about blood and gore. Violence is only the splitting of light, in turn exploding the night into a multitude of darknesses. Thus we get black only in doses, small and manageable.
But we wear them in the memory, like festering splinters.
I sat on the bank, arguing our case to the river, and it argued back. Along the water the dita trees wore the fireflies with conviction. How could they forget the floating hills from the water, even those that were unidentified? Bodies summarily buried, without due rites, because their kin were too afraid to claim them, and to be identified with the military or the insurgents.
Pay Inyo was a very busy man, taking on the rituals of burial. ‘Life is a miracle, death is a certainty. So let the dead go, let’s not implicate the living,’ and he shouldered his shovel in a gesture so casual and commonplace. But not at my brother’s funeral.
Bolodoy was buried without a word from Pilar. Mamay Dulce grieved twice over, going to sleep with the whispers of the living. ‘Ay, it was those people from the hills who murdered him, the sister’s army, don’t you think?’ ‘Of course, a reprisal for that young cadre’s death, don’t you think?’
My mother refused to think, but the accusations were too pointed. Two days after Bolodoy was laid to rest, she chopped down the fart-fart tree. ‘This foulness hides the light, we need to see the sun, we need to look up!’ And she did, but all she saw were the hills of the other daughter who did not come to the funeral.
‘Hoy, Pay Inyo, when I die, make sure I’m laid in this dress and no other,’ she instructed him. Mothball scented, her traditional church dress, the colour of Christ’s resurrection: maroon. ‘And don’t forget my scapular.’
For a week she kept up the routine. She rummaged through her holy accoutrements in the chest under her bed, then ran to the window to check if the hills were still there. ‘She did not come to the funeral … ’
‘Please, Dulce … ’
‘She knew about the salvaging of her own brother, just as she knew about the poor farmer that you found in the boat, remember him?’
‘Past is past.’
‘She knew — she could have just pulled the trigger herself.’
‘Enough! Truly-truly, I say, don’t you implicate the living.’
Mamay Dulce’s faithful suitor was still around after all those years. Still swearing by the truly-ness of his old passion.
‘I can’t see beyond the hills if I don’t go there.’
‘What will you do — whip her?’
Pay Inyo never became our mother’s lover, but he was our father. He had always mediated for us at every reckoning under mother’s bamboo stick, which almost always landed on Pilar. Maybe that was why, among us, he loved her most — because he feared for her most. Because she had the least fear and the most anger. Her defiance was legend even if she suffered not only the stick but also the little blood-chillies, crushed and forced into her mouth by our mother. Long ago, such was the punishment for answering back our elders. And while the ‘execution’ progressed, in the kitchen, Pay Inyo grated coconut to salve the burnt mouth.
Ay, what side-trip have I taken again? In between corpses, allow me to also lay down the little reckonings and executions — what about these little griefs? They nibble around the edges till the self begins to diminish, bit by bit, till it completely disappears. Because the little griefs have eaten and summarily displaced it. Because they have conspired to become the new self. Watch it grow fat like an eel, slippery and uncatchable, until you sink your teeth into it.
This was why Mamay went to the hills: to sink her teeth into the history of filial love and hate.
Midsummer 1977. The guavas are fully ripe. In an absurd turn of sweetness, Mamay gathers a basket of the largest of them, muttering about Pilar’s favourite fruit. Pay Inyo says his beloved talks to the trees. He never thinks she’ll go, until she disappears one early morning. I am not there when she leaves. She packed me back to the city after Bolodoy’s funeral. To finish high school and perhaps start college, and be safe, she said. ‘Ay, you’ll have some education, then you’ll save us all, won’t you, padaba?’
Padaba — beloved. Now she goes to the hills to save another beloved.
It is not an easy trek, what with the weight of two casualties, a son and a daughter both lost to the war. Mamay’s journey echoes Tiya Dami’s flight to the hills in the Second World War, but this time Filipinos fight against Filipinos. After 1972 the martial force keeps time with its propaganda on television, in the radio, the newspapers, in our homes, in the streets. Listen to each slogan, the beat quick, like breath running against itself:
Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan — For the progress of the nation, discipline is necessary. On marching feet, in uniform, the shade of mildew, bile, or phlegm, take your pick, so you can feel right enough to sing:
Mabuhay ang Pilipino — Long live, the Filipino! Drive the Filipino out of the farms for long life, to the hills for something even longer, sweeter, just like the envisioned:
New society under martial law, emblazoned on the foreheads of our leaders. As brand-new as the gifts of Gov Kiko to his angels, vanguards of the people!
‘New. Such is the nature of this kind of love, this right-breast love,’ Pay Inyo had warned me before Mamay sent me back to the city. ‘But remember, it only pretends to be new. It dazzles, it’s savage in its passion, because it is desperate to compensate for its lack. Right-breast love, be very wary of it. Truly-truly, it’s love without the necessary organ.’
But full
of rectitude: Operation Search and Destroy. A War of Quick Decision.
The military is savage in their will to search and destroy any trace of communist aspirations. Pockets of encounters litter the hills. In the year my brother dies, the guerrillas are outnumbered and poorly armed, because the munitions pipeline from China has shut. The NPA is pushed further and further into the heart of the hills. Mamay Dulce, with her basket of ripe guavas, believes she hears it beating loud and clear. She has never read the little red book, but she’s intimate with the nature of a quick decision: adequate preparations … favourable terrain, and striking the enemy while he is on the move. She believes the guavas are adequate, oh-so fragrant under her arm, and that the terrain of the heart is unfavourable but fully mapped — and she knows too well that Kumander Pilar has been on the move since her childhood, away from her. A quick decision indeed, barely a week after she chopped down the fart-fart tree, when Dulsora Capas walks out of Iraya, and treks to the hills.
Mamay Dulce does not find her daughter; she is found. Beside the little toe of the river, as the rebels call it: the wellspring where the water begins. She’s been trekking for five days, disorientated and dumb, the guavas rotting in her basket. The lookout, a fourteen-year-old cadre, thinks she’s deaf. She does not respond to his interrogation, not even at the point of a gun. She hugs her basket and stares at young Nestor Ibay who feels she is searching for his soul.
The dwindling army is breaking camp when an old woman, smelling of rotten guavas, emerges from the kogon grass. Behind her, Nestor has no chance to explain. His captive finds her voice, addressing the Kumander with a weariness which all of them will wear on their backs for a long time.
‘It’s been forever, Pilar … ’
The group of six men and two women think they hear their leader gasp, then sigh, as she stays their guns. ‘It’s all right … I know her,’ she says, sensing the agitation among her diminished army.
But who is she? An advance party, a ploy? All seem to admonish and urge their leader at once. ‘Time to move, Kumander, no time to waste, there’s talk of fresh platoons closing in!’
‘Why are you here? Who’s with you? Does anyone know you’re here?’ The Kumander’s questions are abrupt.
‘Bolodoy … you know about his murder.’
‘You came — to ask me?’ The Kumander is silenced. Then she laughs, a short and bitter cackle. ‘To scold me, yes?’ Yet you never came when you heard of the gang rape, when I lost my child.
‘I came … ’ The old woman searches the strange faces for reasons, then suddenly turns away, burying her face in the basket, muttering some unintelligible singsong.
Kumander Pilar moves closer, eyes narrowed. ‘Mother…?’
‘I forgot … ’ the old woman mutters, throwing out the guavas one by one, trying to find something not yet rotten.
‘Mamay?’
The mother answers in gibberish, scouring her brain for reasons. She cannot help giggling, she forgot …
‘Kumander, we must go now,’ someone urges Pilar.
‘Take a new route then, away from the water, I’ll follow. Nestor, you stay with her — Mamay, are you all right?’
Nestor, the young lookout, sees the old woman growing more distressed over the basket. She can’t find what she’s searching for, ay, ay! Her voice is pitched too high, about to jump off a cliff. She is almost screaming, but Nestor cannot make out the words.
‘Ssshhh … ’ Kumander Pilar presses a hand onto her mother’s mouth, nodding to the young cadre to be on guard. The hills have ears.
Her arms are meant to encircle me, the old woman thinks, but she cannot remember why.
Chapter 63
I bless her for forgetting. Listen, it is not war that will kill us but memory. It is not war that will kill us but spite. My sister had a long memory. And the left and the right had memories too long for their own good. They caught each other in reprisals.
But Mamay Dulce forgot, so she was saved. Pay Inyo found her at dawn in the orchard, as if she had never left, as if the final meeting with her daughter had never transpired. Because she forgot, reduced in her final years to muttering unintelligible singsongs to her trees. Then she planted a garden of lemon grass where the fart-fart tree used to stand, to sweeten the air, to trick the smell of the dead. Not long after, she died in her sleep. The heart could no longer withstand the pain of forgetting.
Years later, during the Total War, her daughter disappeared. Iraya’s most famous guerrilla was salvaged by the military. No, she was executed by her own army. There was a purge. Or it was an accident. Or she died in an encounter. Contending speculations plagued the village, but no body was laid to rest. Her husband, Kumander Benito, who had become the press secretary of the country’s new President, never explained the disappearance. He had forgotten too. In the fold of the living, he even forgot how tightly her thighs had wrapped around him on all those nights of expedient love in the hills, as if in a clasp of the dead.
‘Even if we’re on the run, the blanket still heaves, and you hear that little gasp — you don’t forget that sound.’
‘And if we can’t do much, because the space is too cramped, we just lie in a single file. Just the soles of our feet touching. Some nights, all of life amounts to this.’
‘I woo my wife from the beginning, during and until death … and if we’re in different operations, the letters flow, like big currents, like you won’t believe it.’
I heard these stories from an old couple, once comrades of my sister. Strange, their verbs were all in the present tense.
Bullets are verbs, transitive, always with an object of the action. Sure to be received, but the identity of the recipient is not as certain. So ten years later, when a passing jeep strafes Comrade Sabel’s store, the action is completed, but not accomplished. The true object, the prosperous tax collector for the people’s cause, has just walked out of the door for a siesta in the adjoining house. She will be saved in this first attempt on her life. She has a headache, she needs to lie down. Her niece, an orphan who lives with her, is happy enough to be ‘in charge of the business’, in exchange for a bottle of very cold Coke. It is 1987, the first year of the Total War.
Ading is small for a nine-year-old. She hardly reaches the counter, she can’t see much. But she hears the slowing down of tyres and feels flustered, ay, what with her baby brother asleep in her arms. She tries to lay him on the sack of rice by the door, when she feels her neck burn and her cheek and temple, and the baby wakes, wails, and stops. Everything stops, her arms, feet … but the jeep keeps going.
An ‘incident’. How we spoke of events like this, sometimes with the air of solemn knowing — that it was wise to look the other way or leave. For some families, especially those who had succoured the revolution or by necessity had assisted the government’s insurgency purge, each incident impelled departure.
‘Even inside the house, there’s shooting so we have foxholes under our bed, I’m tired of this … ’
‘When we see a gun, of course, we have to support its owner, we’re too afraid! We’re like overripe guavas, just hanging, shake the tree and we fall.’
‘If you get suspected as a red ant, what choice do you have, you just join the revolution. At least, you’re armed. Or you go UG, you’re safer then.’
‘Ay, going UG is nothing new. It’s the perennial story of spirits. Going Underground so you’re invisible. You leave your body on the earth’s surface and promenade with the spirits below. Careful though when you surface, your body might be occupied by someone else, a usurper, a walk-in,’ Pay Inyo used to say. He had an explanation for all incidents. They were his bedfellows. He knew them by heart as he knew the dead and spirits. ‘Ay, just don’t walk into them, safer to skip around them to avoid double-trouble.’
The old gravedigger spoke the sweetest platitudes. Rebels and soldiers alike could drink at his store. His advice was to stay safe. ‘If the rascal spirits trap you in the forest, say, they block your path so you los
e your way home, what do you do? You turn your clothes inside out, then they let you pass again peacefully, with no incident.’
Imperative turncoatism. Betrayals, reprisals. A neighbour turned informer, a shady lover of the right or the left ventricle, a whisperer of secrets. Then more incidents visited us and the river teemed with bloated stomachs and the fireflies came. Pay Inyo said it was our need for light that invited them.
‘Murderers are the most tormented of souls, because they have bad spirits walking around in their shoes. When bad spirits walk into another body like that, of course, the badness is multiplied. What we need is more light, so we don’t stumble into those monsters. When all the flying lights of the world come to save Iraya, then we’ll see clearly. And the war will end. Truly-truly.’
Fireflies. I think it’s the moon we have stoned, trying to re-gather itself. Like the way we collect our wits and play them to the fullest, miserably.
It is nearly midnight when a truckload of soldiers from the city arrive at Pay Inyo’s store, asking questions. ‘How was dinner? How late was it? You had visitors, friends? How much rice did you cook? For a whole platoon?’
The old man skips around the interrogation, his face locked in an ingratiating smile. He’d be safe. He cleaned up after the cadres left, even the blood on the floor. One of them was wounded, so he was called to administer his herbs, but he couldn’t do more, then he prepared a hasty dinner, ay, the men were ravenous. They left before the soldiers arrived.
‘So what’s your excuse, old man?’
‘No excuse, it was my cumpadre’s birthday party — would you like some San Miguel, Kapitan?’ Pay Inyo hands out bottles of beer in no time.
‘Ah, an answer for everything.’ The sergeant’s tone is disapproving, but in his heart, he’s flattered. He has just been promoted to ‘Captain’ by this ignoramus. Kapitan: it has a good cadence on the tongue.
‘We old people, we’re supposed to be wise — but you must be thirsty? What time did you leave the city, Kapitan?’
Fish-Hair Woman Page 19
