Riverrun

by Danton Remoto

  After hearing this tale, I just bit into my aratiles. Its small, white, and moist seeds lay scattered on my palm.

  How I Spent My Summer Vacation

  HER ARRIVAL WAS signaled by the heat that seemed to quiver in the air. After my two quirky aunties had left the house, it was my cousin Naomi who stayed with us. For the first time I had a companion I could talk to, aside from Luis.

  My cousin Naomi was bright and sassy. My aunt had died just after she gave birth to Naomi. My uncle-in-law never got over my aunt’s death. He sank into drunkenness and despair so deep he would often blame young Naomi for her mother’s death. So since then, she had been shunted off from one relative to another. I really do not know how she survived, for my relatives had varying degrees of quirkiness.

  But that summer we took to each other, like two long-lost friends. Every afternoon, Naomi and I fed my father’s menagerie. First we would feed the pigs. We would mix the leftover food with the rice bran and water. Then we would pour the soggy mixture onto the wooden troughs made by my father. Upon smelling their food, Miss Piggy and her current lover, whom we called Kermit, would grunt the grunt of the truly hungry—their snouts sniffing the air—and would then rush over to the trough.

  Next, we would feed the chickens. We would dig our fingers into the warm lake of palay, dried rice seeds stored in tin cans of Fita biscuits. The seeds would be mixed with the poultry feed, which we would sprinkle on the narrow bamboo trough tied to the chicken’s cages.

  Finally, it was time to feed the ducks. We would mix everything—leftover food, palay, and poultry feed—and pour the mixture on the deflated car tires split in halves and set on the ground. Soon the ducks would waddle in, then dip their red and orange beaks onto the slop.

  The ducks excited me most, for they were not hemmed in by bamboo cages or by a pen. After having their fill, they would wander about the backyard for a walk to let the food settle. The ducklings would then follow their mother duck, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, down the slope, toward the stream running on the edge of our yard.

  But that summer, half of the duck eggs had not yet been hatched. “They must hatch soon,” I told Naomi one afternoon while we were playing Scrabble. “In a few weeks, the rains will fall and the eggs will start to rot.”

  Naomi always beat me in Scrabble, which was a feat because nobody in the neighborhood could. She looked up from the letters on the plastic green tiles that she had arranged on the wooden block before her. Her eyes flashed wickedly under her bangs.

  “Okay, come on,” she said, then hoisted her right foot over the wooden bench. I followed her quick, tomboyish gait out of the back door, then onto a hot afternoon in a world beginning to shrivel.

  We walked on and on—past the faucet where Ludy did the laundry, the wall where I sometimes pissed when my father was in the toilet and I could no longer hold it, the sweet potatoes with their leaves shaped like hearts, the taro and tomatoes and eggplants, toward a rusty roof as tall as me.

  Beneath the roof was a wicker basket full of dried banana leaves. And in the middle of the nest lay the five unhatched duck eggs. Naomi smiled to herself, then quickly licked the underside of her lips. It was a gesture I had already learned to read. In Scrabble, it meant she would put on the board a set of letters, carefully now, whose total score would be a double, even a triple. In school, it meant striding onto the stage at year’s end, to claim again the gold medal for First Honors, pinned on her blouse by whoever among our relatives was adopting her for the moment. In the afterglow of sunset, our Proud Relative would beam before the crowd, showing them that indeed, Naomi and himself or herself had come from the same gene pool.

  But now, Naomi and I sat on our haunches. She was holding an egg in her hand—a whole world cupped by her fingers. She touched the top of the egg, then slowly, slowly, she began to peel it. Her fingernail was as smooth and as polished as the egg she was holding. Intently, I looked at her fingers, holding my breath as the shell cracked, giving way to a tiny yellow head that was moist. The duckling’s head was covered with the softest of fur. Suddenly the eyes popped open—bright, wet eyes—and Naomi would smile. I would say something cheerful and stupid, as was my wont then and now. Naomi would peel away the rest of the shell until the whole duckling was free. Then, she would set the duckling on the ground. It would look up to us, to Naomi and I, and then it would flap its tiny wings merrily.

  With her pulse moving in her temples, Naomi wordlessly peeled away the shells of the four other eggs. All of the ducklings were alive, and only when she had freed the fifth did Naomi let out a whoop and jump, her laughter waking the very air.

  By then the duck’s mother had come, Lazy Mama, Naomi would tease it, come to fetch her newly-hatched brood. The five ducklings were flexing their young wings, turning their small heads this way and that, while a faint wind stirred their feathers. Upon seeing somebody who looked like them—only much bigger—the ducklings would form a line and follow their mother. And then they were gone, spots of sun whose wings waved at Naomi as they waddled clumsily after their mother, who would go down the stream to welcome her ducklings to the world, with a grand baptism by water.

  Later two of the ducklings would die, carried away by the raging floods that came in the wake of the year’s first typhoon. And was she seventeen then—or eighteen?—when Naomi ran away from home with a classmate from her university.

  “Ingrata!” my relatives fumed. “How ungrateful!” Then they would add, “How stupid, too! What’s a good head for if she didn’t use it? She should’ve finished her studies first before falling for this tentacíon, the temptation offered by the city. The man himself was working his way through school, how would they then survive? Could love feed them every day of their lives? Could you go to the grocery and pay for a can of milk with love?”

  But Naomi did return home, after the man had left her. She did face the lash of words from my Tita Bella and Tita Armida and other Concerned Relatives, a firestorm that would have made a perennial villain of Philippine Cinema Zeny Zabala look like a nun. Naomi bore everything in stoic silence. Her belly became bigger. And she sank deeper and deeper in the swamp of her sadness.

  A week after giving birth to a boy, she just died.

  “Cancer of the cervix,” an uncle who was visiting us said, blowing on his hot cup of chocolate eh. “Ayan, that’s the problem with young people nowadays, they don’t listen to us older folk any more. See? She got that sickness because she had been tampered with at an early age. God doesn’t approve of such things.”

  Then he drank his cup of chocolate, my uncle who read the Good News during the Mass back in the province. I hope it scalds you, I thought as I looked icily at him. I hope the hot chocolate burns you, pours out of your mouth, your nose, your ears, the other orifices of your holy body.

  Plaza Fuego

  MY FATHER, MOTHER, grandmother, and I were watching the Liberal Party’s miting de avance on our TV.

  This was grand—and final—meeting before Election Day for the country’s new senators and congressmen. The Nationalista Party had chosen to hold theirs at Plaza del Fuego, that square beside Quiapo Church, its blind statues looking down at hawkers vending everything, from something green and swimming in a bottle of Tanduay Rhum, supposedly a potion for delayed menstrual flow (read: an abortifacient), to an old woman perpetually saying the rosary, her fingers on the red plastic beads, selling her prayers for your dear departed.

  Plaza Miranda was small, indeed, bordered on the north by a stand of decrepit stores; on the west by the Mercury Drug store, its tall white facade always backlit by hundred of fluorescent lamps; on the south by España Avenue, choking with jeepneys and their fumes. An Air Pollution Index was once installed on the fringe of the plaza, to dramatize the First Lady’s concern about the inhabitants of her new domain, the City of Man newly carved from the three cities and thirteen municipalities around Manila. But barely a year after this project, the Index had stopped working. Its pollution indicator had been fixed
at HIGH, the button light burning red, like the angry eye of a beast. In a stroke of fine irony, the fumes themselves, the toxic chemicals in the air, had turned the Index into rust.

  And so, we had on primetime TV the senatorial line-up of the Liberal Party, a melange of lawyers, academicians, libertarians, and landlords. No movie stars yet, no sports heroes yet, no beauty queens yet—that would come later, when the country had completely gone to the dogs.

  Speech after speech, words rising and falling, embroidery and fluff. While watching the proceedings on TV, I was already beginning to fall asleep on my grandmother’s warm lap. And suddenly, a sound like thunder came from the TV screen. I startled and bolted upright in my seat. On the screen, people were running; smoke was beginning to foul the air, and then darkness.

  My father stood up and turned the am radio on, with its shrill, surreal announcers.

  There was a time when Mr. Domingo Langit was covering a student demonstration. In this country of very excitable radio commentators, he spoke the slowest. He asked one of the young boys what he thought of General V. The boy snapped: “Well, he’s a Goebbels.”

  Forthwith Mr. Domingo Langit said, with the whole archipelago tuning in, “I have a dictionary with me here, inside the station ABC-XYZ’s mobile van, but I cannot find ge-bells. Sandali lang, mga kaibigan, for a while, folks, I’ll just look up the meaning of the word.”

  Suddenly Mr. Domingo Langit was in full fettle, in his finest form. “I have breaking news. A bomb had just exploded in Plaza del Fuego,” he said, his voice looping faster than the usual slow spiral. “Many people are hurt. Senator Jovito Salonga seems to be in bad shape. One of the senator’s wives has her left foot in a horrible twist. With her fan she is waving for help. Blood is everywhere.”

  The body count came the morning after (five killed, 120 wounded, half of them in serious condition). One of those who died was the brilliant photographer Max Vicoy. The papers splashed the photo of this tall, thin man, his clothes soaked in blood, holding on tightly to his camera before he finally expired.

  Grains of Memory

  EVEN WHEN I was only ten years old, I was already an avid reader of the Philippines Free Press. My father would buy this magazine from the commissary every week. I read the poems and the feature articles, the essays and the stories, even if I could not understand all of them. But some things would remain with me, like grains of sugar left at the bottom of a cup.

  One day in January, the President delivered his State of the Nation Address. We were watching him on TV. Sometimes, the camera would pan the crowd of student activists outside, then back to the majestic halls again, where the President spoke.

  “But which nation?” The students massed in front of the old Congress Building must have asked that question among themselves as the President’s words boomed through the huge speakers.

  They were all there, the students from Manila’s exclusive Catholic universities for the elite, boys in thick eyeglasses, long-sleeved white cotton shirts, ties running down their chests. The girls also came, in their white blouses and blue dresses cut above the knees. For this “out-of-school activity,” they had asked their housemaids to fold and re-sew their hemlines the night before, so they could bare more legs.

  There were also students from Manila’s boisterous diploma mills. Boys in their Beatles haircut, Vonnel V-necked shirts, and tight double-knit pants. The girls came in bright minis that stopped a throb away from their knickers.

  Above these young people loomed the banners of protest, the voices that began being raised five years earlier, when President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped by Manila en route to Saigon, to finalize plans to pulverize the North. They were only less than a hundred, then, my mother told me, students carrying banners with the words: “LBJ, LBJ, how many babies did you kill today?”

  But now they numbered in the thousands, joined even by the workers from the working-class districts of Quiapo, Sta. Cruz, and Tondo and by students from Southern Luzon. Ranged against them were the cops and soldiers, bristling with wooden sticks, truncheons, and shields.

  As the President spoke of another country (less crime, more exports, democracy), the young firebrands also worked the crowd. One leader of the nationalist left, who needed no beer to loosen his tongue, carped against the rich: “The rich wear perfumes they store in gallons and have underwear of silk. We only have the detergent Tide and our underwear are recycled from cotton sacks that used to contain chicken feed.”

  And then the doors of Congress opened. First came the Secretaries, the Undersecretaries, the Assistant Secretaries, and their Manifold Assistants—the crows, the cockroaches, and the centipedes. Then, there was the President, with eyes like a pig’s, his face turning greasy with the years. And like Lady Macbeth, there was the First Lady, with her big and lacquered hair, her dress with its butterfly wings, her bosom heaving, overflowing with love for the wretched of this archipelago.

  Then from the student’s ranks someone threw a crocodile made from carton, right into the First Couple’s direction. The President ducked and pushed the First Lady inside the stretch limousine. Escorts herded the limousine past the crowd, and they soon disappeared.

  After this, the Free Press said, came the madness.

  The police and the military swooped down on the students, their wooden sticks and trenches swinging wildly. They bashed heads, shattered arms and knees. In turn, the students threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, a rain of curses on the cops and soldiers. They held forth and only scampered away when the military began shooting.

  As dusk fell, shadows ran only to be mowed down by bullets. Like a tangled net the screams rose in the air. Some students managed to run all the way to Mendiola, cross the bridge, and gather in front of Malacañang Palace. They commandeered a firetruck, drove it straight back up, thrice—and then the gates gave way, the students spilled over onto the grounds, jumping with jubilation, only to be cut down by a hail of bullets from the Marines. Their sharp eyes picked out their targets as in a shooting gallery. Those who did not fall began to run, with the Marines chasing them, driving the students toward the other direction, at street’s end, where barbed wires, row upon row of the rustiest wires, awaited them.

  And so it was that the students who were running away saw before them the wires like black teeth. Some of them did turn around and raise their hands. But the smell of gunpowder and blood was in the air. The Marines cocked their rifles, took aim, then shot the students one by one. Seeing these, the other students just ran and ran in the direction of the barbed wires, then jumped blindly onto them, their elbows raised like wings.

  The Young Emmanuel

  EMMANUEL WAS a young man from the windblown island of K. After graduating valedictorian from the provincial high school, where he edited the student organ called The Mighty Pen, he applied for a Journalism scholarship at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas. He was accepted.

  Now the Dominicans had not yet fully recovered from the routing of the Spanish clergy at the turn of the century. Still, they walked about the sprawling grounds of the university as if they bustled about the old hacienda: everything, everything as far as the eyes could see, would be theirs. Still they hewed closely to the rigors of the old Vatican, closely monitoring the books their students were reading, making sure the students did not read any of the books proscribed in the Index. They grudgingly admitted women into the university because of dipping finances. The Dominican orders’ Headquarters in the Vatican had been complaining—in official meetings only, of course, with all the heavy doors closed—that the remittances from the Philippine Province were dwindling every year such that they had to make do with wines of poor quality and cheaper cuts of meat for their dinners.

  And so they accepted female students who, of course, were separated from the men. Thus, you had one university with two wings, for him and her, and a strict and bearded old Indian had been tasked with ensuring that no one talked to the women.

  Why an Indian?

  Perh
aps in the weird psychology of the dominant, er, Dominican Order, the men and women now strolling the university grounds were still just boys and girls who had grown up. In their minds they still feared the Bombay—tall, dark, hairy; a beard and moustache around the lips; eyes sunk in silence; a turban wound around the head. The old Bombay of childhood memory, the ambulant businessman whom the housemaids had said liked to kidnap children, put them inside sacks, and later sell them.

  And so into the vortex of that world the young Emmanuel plunged, finding the city as if it were another world. But soon he grew tired of school—of teachers who constantly asked you to parrot the answers, who completely and uncouthly ignored his questions in class, who gossiped scandalously about their neighbors one moment and stood still as saints in Mass the next.

  Moreover, the scholarship only paid for tuition, miscellaneous fees, and books, and he still had to ask for an allowance from his mother in K. His father had died when he was five, swept downriver by the typhoon on his way home, and his mother, a public school teacher, brought him up on her own. Even if she had only one child to raise, still she felt that every pay day, her pockets were holes into which her salary fell. She could only scrounge around enough money for the young Emmanuel by denying herself the basic things: she went to school in her old shoes, the patent leather beginning to crack; she ate vegetables she grew in her backyard, sometimes mixing them with hibe, those small dried shrimps in plastic bags she bought cheaply in the market; she had no television set and only listened to the radio for the announcement of another typhoon blowing in from the Pacific, learning this lesson keenly after her husband’s death.

  The young Emmanuel knew this, and so one day he turned up at the office of the Evening Express, then the country’s top-circulation broadsheet, and asked to see the Editor-in-Chief.