My Lost Siquijor
Now as the leader of the keeners drew her lungs out for the final bravura, mother pulled out her pristine handkerchief, and in the middle of that pestiferous sonata, she blew her nostrils off, making it all the more vexatious for all spirits dead, or half-alive lurking there in the middle of our out-flung barrio; the housemaid who appeared from behind the heavy maroon drapery which divided the keening room and the pantry, now teetered bashfully on some imaginary beeline with a tray full of locally-brewed ales and home-baked sandy cookies and waffles, was gloriously, gloriously affrighted by the cacophonic orchestration of the keener’s eerie elegy and mother’s grating nose-blow – the tray tilted to the left, glasses glided to that side, of course, disturbing the equilibrium; in an instant, the whole place was a mess – clinking glasses, girlish shrieks, and the sibilant susmarioseps of the toothless elderly. I closed my eyes. Mother half-aware of her little part in the melee tried to conceal her embarrassment by folding her handkerchief and dusting off the droplets of liquid on my repellent jacket. But when sooner she tried compulsively to wipe my face with the defiled hanky, I looked at her with a knowing look. She relented and whispered, “We’d better be going before the bamboo grove gets too dark.”
After an intermittent series of leave-takings with the folks who according to my mother came mostly not to pay respects to the dead lady, Inday Vacion, but to catch up on the latest thread of controversy surrounding the cause of the death of dame Salvacion Duhaylungsod, we trekked into one of the many mysterious a night in our lives as denizens of a remote barrio in the municipality of Larena in the island of Siquijor.
We traced our way back into the winding rugged trail and past the thick patch of reedy ipil-ipil trees. Under the silky light of the full moon, the shadow of the leaves on the back of my hand looked like frail extremities of some non-earthlings squiggling deep into skin.
“What can you say about the dead lady’s outfit? Don’t you think it’s rather outmoded? I mean, I will not be caught dead wearing that lacy frock!”
“Mother, how could you not be caught dead wearing an outmoded outfit like that if you’re already dead?”
“Junior, I’m telling you this and I swear under the divine penumbra of this August moon, have a conscience if you please with your choices of clothes for your dead folks. You being the eldest of my ruffians of a brood.”
The minute we stepped out into the meadow, I hailed a silent hosanna. Up in the sky, a dark cloud filtered the entrancing floodlight of the majestic moon. Just a few steps away, the bamboo grove was beckoning now with the impenetrable beyondness of the otherworld.
"Ma! Look!” I hung on tight to her rubber belt as a cold wad of wind wafted by with a cold hand barely touching my nape. A dog’s howl sliced into the silence; perhaps, even into the gallbladder of a cricket cowering in the bosom of the dark. The bamboo grove creaked and while mother quickly pulled out something from her bag, the tallest of the clump bowed down before us.
“We can trace our steps back and take the feeder if we want to, you know, but as the Holy Ghost is with us, we can pass by this witched place safe and unharmed.” She said with a firm voice. The wind grew harsh.
She opened her Gideonite Bible. And before she could commence with her litany, the grass, as if moved by a higher order, lifted itself up and before us was a silver-white coffin with a candle at its head. I hugged my mother and closed my eyes.
”The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” so she began…
---
“Shoo! Get out of my sight, you spawn of unbelievers!” My stepfather’s father was furiously driving away my playmates in the middle of some divination. The heckling youngsters scurried every which way at the sight of the naked old man hulking like a dispeaced turkey.
Known as the oldest living herbalist and spirit-conjurer in our barrio, I knew nothing could stop him from making that ritual even if mother showed signs of disapproval against such unscriptural spiritual ceremony. I just knew it because I saw him secretly pouching a few grains of salt in the small room before I went to sleep. Before that I also overheard him pestering my stepgrandma for four one-centavo coins.
“This is for the good of your beloved boy. I told you it’s beyond my wildest imagination why you had to give him away to a woman who has an English name for a god! And besides, what is there to make out of a marriage to a prefabricated mother? And do tell me, Pastora, how could you come to like her with that obnoxious boy of hers whose eyes always seem to burn you with unmouthed expletives?”
“Ram your words back down your tonsils, old man! You know she could well be the last hope for your thug of a son! Besides, tell me, dear Silverio, who else in this barrio has got a wife who reads an English Bible, huh? Well why, she even reads it with her son eh…”
"By our dead ancestors’ name, I swear, the ritual has never been shunned away like a horrible plague. Only this woman, only this woman; but since you seem to have been hexed by her as to immensely favor her to be our dear Julito’s wife, shush you old woman, nobody’s going to stop me from laying down the necessary ingredients with the foundations of their planned house. Now get me another centavo. I lack one for the west direction.”
“I will find one for you my king salmon…only you please please promise not to go through it without your decent habiliments on. It’s a shame to be doing it in the lowlands with those, uh, endowments of yours, you know…I swear it’s a shame now. Besides I’m sure the spirits would consider this just once. I mean, they sure would not take it against you if they see you spiffed up.”
“Woman, what’s all these sudden vituperations about my stuff, huh? Hush it. I shall do the ceremony as I please.”
I was all drenched in sweat and squirming behind the dusty rattan hammock all throughout the short whispery verbal tussle. I didn’t have to tell mother, of course, she seems to know everything; so on second thoughts, I tipped on the incoming butt-show to my playmates, who waited hidden in the nearby bush of coronitas and cadena de amor.
“Shoo! Go back all you rascals to the woeful wombs of your heretic mothers!” The old man was mad. A giant bat glided straight to the dismal branch of the last unfelled dead tree in the middle of the lot where our future home was going to grow.
---
So we lived in a small nipa hut built out of folk beliefs and rituals in the middle of a coconut plantation where my kid brother, Levis was born many many months later after we three – mother, my stepfather, and I - moved in at three in the morning at the masterful behest of dear old Silverio. Three years later, when I was in grade four, wide-eyed, frail, and stringy-haired adopted sister Virgie joined us.
Afternoons were always like this. First mother would gather us around her after finishing up whatever staple provision was set on our plastic plates. So there was Virgie, Levis, and me, Junior – wiry all three like impoverished praying mantises as she led the afternoon prayers before commanding us to sleep.
But that was long before I discovered that the world had two dimensions – the divine and the diabolic.
The first, pure and sacred, memories of it were set against a white backdrop of white shirts, my stepfather’s white leather shoes, Virgie’s frilly white dress and those white ribbonets, Levis’ white belt, and mother’s church hymnals covered with white paper which she recycled from those large waxy Chinese calendars.
Saturday was the official day of the divine plane with Jesus Loves Me as its music theme, which to my childish cerebration, sounded more like elegiac than panegyric. I guessed it was due mostly to mother’s vocal gymnastics that lilted along the untuneful pentatonic octave – tintinabulatingly sopranic at its best, and gravelingly basso at its worst.
“Children, human beings are the only creatures gifted with a lot of faculties for praising the Lord. If you know you have the gift, hone it, then use it for His greater glory.”
“Mother, there is no greater glory in singing without a gift.”
“Look here, Junior, you would know you have the gift just by looking at how others close their eyes when you sing. I mean, have you often wondered how enrapt the whole parish had been since I started singing on top of my lungs?”
“Yes, mother. They wished some people would realize that some talents were not meant for public exhibition.”
“At least I’m giving them a classical side show with my sopranic renderings.”
“Mother, you’re not actually admitting that you were born for the circus, are you?”
“Hush, you giftless boy. Now kids, let’s move on to our next exercise on blending…You see…”
---
Mother was a stylist of a dressmaker, which as she would often tell us, was the most special of the gifts she had ever received from the Lord.
“Well why, I had never walked in to any formal instruction just to learn it.”
How she really made all those divine dresses for each and every customer fascinated me especially when I see them - even the most aristocratic of ladies in the high-end of our local caste system - looking for her just to daintily slither into a dress cut and sewn by her. When I told her that she had better focus on this one special gift instead of displaying teeth, tongue and tonsils in church, she sent me out to gather firewood in the forest so that I would learn to listen to the birdsongs which according to her were just as God-inspired as hers. I eventually stopped bugging her.
On days when the sun was up and yellow wrens twittered on top of our sagging eaves, I would see her tinkering with some man’s craft, say metallurgy, which was a bit dangerous because she would setting fire here and there while warning us kids not to come close to her within a ten-meter radius with that ubiquitous twig for a whip.
And on such days, too, I was the object of the world’s most stinging lashes, some scars are so stubborn a million baths in the river or the sea could not bring them to a complete healing, or worse, forgetting because along with them are memorable snippets now vividly etched in my sacred hall of precious memories.
“Come Levis, let’s go take a short dip before we go home. A little cooling would not be bad eh. What do you think?” I was trying to cajole him into swimming without mother’s permission.
“I will not be getting one her lashings anymore, Manoy. You can’t tag me along on a bite of your slimy toffee.”
“Yes you will come with me as I say. Besides who will look after you if you go ahead? Guess what, the bamboo grove is a little shady today…you reckon, little brother?”
“Err…I will not!”
“Yes you will! Here now, let’s go for a short swim without dipping our heads into the water. That way we won’t be giving mother a start…Brilliant idea eh?”
That day, an hour after lunchtime, on a hillock overlooking the sea, while a seagull is gearing up for a nose-dive, I received my first soul-splitting lashing that left me with an eradicable scar on my left leg.
---
Summers were always a welcome respite from the rigors of classroom works. It was always a time to temporarily abandon academic fetters and bury grudges toward a system made more insufferable for us by staid implementers inside our recycled school net-bags. Fortunately, mother made sure ours looked more presentable than those of my contemporaries - denim patches here and there whenever a part was frayed; eventually, our school bags morphed into psychedelic quilts - of swatches of rare fabrics, of our nothingness, of our dreams.
-more to follow-
Attention: AntiThesis
I was thinking of making this piece as part 2 of "Inroads"...What do you think?
River
