THE MOTORIZED BOAT DELIVERED AN ear-splitting growl, then a moan, and we were aground — the steer man, his co-pilot, and I — in the shallow water. I grumbled loud when I realized that we would have to wade the rest of the way out into the muddy seawater, with my camera gear balanced on my head. I surveyed the shoreline. The walk would take us only a hundred yards but it might as well be wading a hundred yards back in time. It wasn’t even mid-morning yet but the sun had already tanned my arms and face to a crisp. Two days ago I was debating whether or not I should come to Tingauan. The journey to the island from my hotel room in San Simeon, the provincial capital, was a long one, an hour on a motorized boat, with only a wind-beaten plastic tarp to shield myself from the blazing sun. As soon as we touched shore, I wished I were somewhere else — probably Siberia and its thick snow – not on this island. There was no going back now, I told myself. This island, so tiny that cartographers had marked the spot as an insignificant dot, still existed in isolation.
Squinting against the sun, I cursed myself for carelessly leaving my sun care lotion in San Simeon. As I stood there, alone on the small wharf undulating with each tidal slap, the boat that took me to Tingauan receded until it was no longer in sight. A horsedrawn cart stopped a few paces from where I was. A young man, not quite in his twenties, got off the horse and started to load my stuff into the cart.
“Hey,” I protested, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Aren’t you Miss Minnie Cacdac, the lady from the museum in Manila?” he asked.
“Why, yes, how did you know?”
“Oh, we always know when there are strangers coming,” the young man said as he lifted my camera bag.
“No, please don’t touch it.”
“Expensive stuff, huh?”
“V-v-v-very expensive,” I said. “I don’t let any one touch it.”
“Well, whatever you say, Miss.”
1
The cart had barely enough room for my things: a large canvas bag for my jeans and cotton T-shirts, an aluminum case for camera accessories, batteries, tripod, a waterproof can of films, tape recorder, and my cellphone.
“I guess I’ll just have to squeeze myself into all that and then we can go,” I told the young man.
“Better for you to ride the horse with me. Miss Cacdac. The ride on the cart will be quite bouncy,” he suggested.
“But I’m afraid of horses.”
“You’re afraid of falling off. When you’re on the horse’s back, you are the master of the beast.”
“Well, I…”
“Now is the time to get acquainted with the horse, Miss Cacdac, or you’ll get nowhere on this island.”
It sounded ominous to me, being unable to go around and do the research work which sent me to Tingauan. I let myself be helped up on the back of the animal. I felt my thigh muscles tense, having my legs spread on the horse’s back. I thought about my first boyfriend in college, at the dorm house where he sneaked into my room for my initial sexual education.
“What is your name?” I asked the young man.
“Eugene,” he said.
“Eugene O’Neill, the writer,” I said aloud.
“Oh, no, my father named me after Eugene Torre. We play chess around here a lot,” Eugene explained.
I arched an eyebrow. Chess? But then again, sometimes I would feel and admit to some vacuities in my mentality.
Eugene kicked the horse’s side and we started to move. Half a dozen of ducks in a pond of muddy water, their feathers silvery wet, paddled over to us, perhaps thinking we had some bits of food to chuck at them. Thankfully, it only took a little less than twenty minutes of trudging to reach our destination. It did not amaze me that Eugene knew which house to take me to. I was sweating profusely, my crotch was inflamed, my armpits were the smell of gunk. I could share a pond with a carabao right that minute. Tingauan is not a place where one could get lost easily, it being a one-street town. Its population, a very negligible couple of thousands, would fail to excite the provincial governor’s political statisticians. According to Eugene, he could only remember one or two elections when political candidates undertook to ferry the Tingauans to San Simeon to cast their votes, and that was it. I guess the candidates abandoned the effort because it was easier to influence the election results by some other inexpensive and less laborious means.
THE HOUSE WAS SMALL, AS were the rest of the houses in the area, but it was well-kept even if the interior trappings were uncomplicated. It was a one-room house: the living room area became the bedroom at nightfall. A small wooden table indicated where the dining area was. An old lady, the folks called her Inang Basil, owned the house. She was a tiny woman but was considerably quite strong for her ninety years because she could, in all seriousness, still pound the palay that her only grandson, Satur, harvested from their farmland. Inang Basil lost her daughter and her son-in-law, Satur’s parents, during a storm at sea on a boat trip to San Simeon. The tragedy happened many years ago, Satur was not yet quite the tall, dusky and muscular man who met me at the front of the house that Eugene took me to and which would be my temporary home till I finished my research work that the museum assigned to me. At nights, especially on very humid summers, the folks gathered at Mang Peding’s sari-sari store to talk about general things. And, due to Tingauan’s isolation, having not enough bad news, or good news, either, the topics gravitated toward other people’s lives, meaning, strangers like me who came to Tingauan for a pit stop, stayed for sometime and having acknowledged a dead end, left for some eldritch destinations. My first night in Tingauan was a warm one and despite the sea breeze filtering through old coconut trees planted on Mang Peding’s yard, the temperature still felt like a Saudi summer. Because my research on the courtship and mating practices of the Botongans — a most extinct tribe found only in the mountains of Tingauan — was to begin in the morning the next day, I decided to get acquainted with the folks I was going to inevitably meet during my projected two-week stay on the island.
They sat around a rectangular wooden table, their faces lit by two flickering kerosene lamps overhead them. Kid Mola, named after a horse he used to own, was the most famous product of Tingauan. He talked non-stop about the glory days and of the fight he almost knocked out Gerry Penalosa when the latter wasn’t a world champion yet. There was Mang Anto who hunted boars and deers and sold his sun-dried meat in San Simeon where they were considered delicacies. Eugene, too, was there, and so was Satur who kept glancing where I sat between Mang Peding and Mang Anto. A home-brewed beverage, crude cousin of gin, was making the rounds in a plastic pitcher among them. When the pitcher came to a halt before me, there was a murmur of hesitation from Satur.
“Inang Basil made me swear I’d look after you while you’re her ward,” he cautioned me.
4
“Aw, come on, Satur, this drink has never killed anyone, you know that,” Mang Peding said.
He nudged the plastic pitcher nearer to me with thick fingers broken with callouses, the muck showing under the nails. I reached for the pitcher. The men cackled in approval. Hell, what else would be new to me? It wasn’t like I were a virgin descended upon Tingauan to moralize. What can a home-brewed drink do? I sipped and egested. Rocket-fuel blast. Jesus. Mang Peding excused himself and came back with a plate of what appeared to me as burnt capon wings. At closer look, I realized they were grasshoppers. Now, I’ve sampled frog legs and found them good. Turtles, too, before eating them was banned. But grasshoppers…
“Come on, Miss Minnie, you’ll make Mang Peding happy.”
I felt a turn in my stomach.
“Barik! Barik!” they said to the stomp of their feet. “Barik! Barik!”
Rising to the challenge, and with the conviction of someone about to throw oneself on a bungee jump, I tossed one bunch of the grasshoppers into my mouth and bit twice. The thing crunched. I bit again, swallowed it and smacked my lips. I thought I was going to puke. I fried a day-old chick that tasted so much better, bill and claws included. But I had to show some good manners to these men; surviving the fried grasshopper meant I was one of them. We drank, passing the plastic pitcher of the lambanog, like victorious warriors after a plunder, and with each swig rocket-fuel liquid dribbled down their chins. The drinking session lasted deep into the night as six simultaneous conversations started, grew, atomized, and re-started. Kid Mola had fallen asleep, KO’d by the lambanog jab, a piece of the fried grasshopper leg sitting in one corner of his mouth. Eugene clean-jerked the pitcher of lambanog, the last bent elbow exercise of the night. I was dead-exhausted, and the drink gave me an immense headache. Satur helped me home where Inang Basil stood waiting. The lambanog had left me warm; Satur touching my breasts as his free arm held my waist had even left me eminently warmer.
INANG BASIL WOKE ME UP in the morning. Satur had perched himself on the edge of the dining table, a cup of salabat in his hand, his legs swinging like a pendulum, his eyes fixed on me in an uncrackable code. It was seven o’clock in the morning, late by Tingauan standard, and the temperature scalded. Satur rested my heavy-duty tripod on his shoulder. I carried my backpack and the skimpy necessities of my otherwise portable life: camera and lens, a palm-sized tape recorder, mint candies, and Vuarnet sunglasses. We were following a bending path, smoothed by feet of many generations, with the Tingauan mountains looming before us.
5
With each step we made, a small swirl of dust the fineness of talcum powder danced behind us. Satur stopped after about half an hour of walking and pointed to a farm across the clearing.
“That’s Inang Basil’s ancestral farmland. That is where we get the money to deposit in the banks in San Simeon,” he said matter-of-factly.
What was Satur trying to tell me?
“Tingauan is a place for peace and natural richness. I could plow and plow and plow endlessly and every paddy is as good as the other,” he explained.
He came to me as someone who had a too profound, almost irrational, belief in the benevolence of nature.
“In time the land won’t be just as kind,” I said. “The Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns?”
“The land will still be here, intact. I don’t have to see it in some quiet museum and computer disc the way you would preserve the Botongans.”
“Don’t make light of my job. I’m actually preserving life.” I said defensively.
“I think you have the crotchetiness of a single-minded, obstinate zealot. You’re not the only one around here who is civilized, you know.”
“Shut up,” I hissed at him. I wanted to kick him right in the teeth. The brute, actually, went to UP Los Baños; the museum people had arranged for an educated guide in Tingauan.
Satur glared at me balefully, as if he was daring me to say something for which I would be sorry. I stood with my hands clenched into fists, my eyes showering him with contempt.
“Go to hell,” I said and stormed off.
“Hey, do you know where you’re going?”
“Yeah, right, this is your turf and you rule.”
“The point is, Miss Minnie, you are not supposed to react like an insulted maiden.”
“Damn you,” said my mind.
6
TINGAUAN, I MUST ADMIT, HAS everything for a settled life — water from mountain springs, plenty of grass for the farm animals, endless supply of firewood, bamboo and nipa palms to build huts, and security — a very comforting predictability. The island had miraculously managed to come through the onslaughts of development that San Simeon, only an hour away across the sea, had failed to do.
The Botongans were settled deep into the Tingauan mountains. Not known to migrate, they stayed put in the small village where their old kins first settled, planting root crops and hunting for their food. They were gentle people, always ready to smile at me but were too shy to mix even with the likes of Mang Peding and Mang Anto so that their number did not increase much, preferring to mate with their own under traditional parental arrangement.
Midway in the afternoon when the sun was threatening to rest, we trekked back to Tingauan, having been assured by Kabu Olan, the Botongan village leader, that I could come back whenever I needed to get a closer, more intimate observation of their courtship and mating practices. Satur and I passed by a river called Anwa-i and stopped to rest my feet, as well as his, already aching from the long hike. In the summer, Satur explained, the river would be tranquil. During a long rainy spell, Anwa-i is dangerous, very irritable, its torrents raging. I took my boots off and went in. The icy water stung in my entry although it took no longer than a few minutes for the water to warmly envelop me. A few meters away from where I dipped myself, the orangey sun is caught in a prism from the tiny waves frothing over grooved stones near the river bank. I plunged my head and felt refreshed, as I bobbed out of it, by the water drops on my face. I was awestruck, listening to the sounds of Anwa-i and watching the waters by the riverbank, green with pako ferns, and by the mountain shrimps and other fish flitting around the exposed roots of the bakawan trees. Satur was asleep under the shade of a young acacia tree. As the afternoon sun bathed him with a bronze glow, my eyes caressed his taut, brown body. It wasn’t easy to overlook the spasmic heat inside of me. Not that I was especially drawn to him. At this moment I merely needed someone to be near me.
THE PROJECTED TWO-WEEK RESEARCH work in Tingauan stretched to three as I found myself, lulled by the haunting sounds of birds perched on the chico tree branches in Inang Basil’s front yard, settling in a vacation torpor. Like magnet, Satur had found me attractive, groped his way to me whenever Inang Basil got too deeply in her sleep, and stuck with me as if caught in a flypaper. Meanwhile, Eugene found a stray monkey, about a foot and a half tall, hobbling by the Anwa-i and took it home, bonding with the animal immediately. The nights were warm; every so often, sea breeze wafted through and fanned the heat. Mang Peding’s sari-sari store filled up with the usual habitues. Satur played excellent chess and vanquished everybody. I checkmated him once and that was because my free hand was busy under the table, up and down his thigh — that ruse learned from the
7
Book The Art of War. Mornings were busy in Tingauan—men went out tending the rice fields and fruit trees, pastured the farm animals, and checked that the irrigation canals functioned, women stayed home to do the household chores. Spending lazily the sleepy afternoons one would experience Tingauan certainties. Children, their feet thick with dust, played tag and hopscotch on the unpaved side streets; young men keening their guitar, a prelude to the night’s serenade; banana plants silently groaning under the weight of fruit ripening in bunches. I had memorized the trail to the Botongan village and hiked alone whenever Satur was busy on his farm.
I GOT UP AT DAWN, the last day of my third week in Tingauan, forked my legs into a pair of beat-up jeans and went to San Simeon. The wind had started to kick up like a bratty child and dementedly whipped the boat I was riding in. They called it a summer storm. I puked twice that day — once right after rising from bed and the other time as the boat rolled at sea. As I looked back, Tingauan from far away was wrapped in thick, dark clouds. My eyes were covered by raindrops.
There was a definite sense of dislocation that I felt when I came in my hotel room. It was even smaller than Inang Basil’s house. The window curtains were a faded pink, the plastic anthuriums sat cheerlessly on the bed’s side table. Despite these attempts at decoration, there was little else to prove it was lived n, only the tangibility of transience, of people coming in the hotel room and out of it, then fading away. How mortifying. I snapped open my suitcase which had lain on the floor. It clicked two simultaneous pings, audible in the howling winds that came with the storm. I looked out the window; the sky was gun-metal gray. I thought of Satur and his storm-ravaged farm and wondered if the plants would have some worth for an early harvest.
The sun was back the next day to dry the mud on the streets. Dr. Leticia Purugganan told me to come back in an hour so I went inside a carinderia for breakfast to ease the wooziness that started to creep in again. Her clinic was a small room on the ground floor of a semi-concrete house which was not far from the hotel. She was about sixty years old. Dressed in a loose muu-muu, sleep still in her eyes, she ushered me into her clinic. Her Prognosis was not unexpected. It was something I needed to be positive about. Going back to my hotel room I felt several years older and more isolated. Honestly, I was angrier at no one except at myself for being so stupid.
For what seemed a long time, I sat on my bed in cold silence. A knock on the door jolted me and I leapt up to answer it. The look on Satur’s face when he saw me was that of a great relief — and then of tempered irk.
“How dare you leave just like that!” he snapped at me, his arms flopping. He moved towards me in his muddy boots as I instinctively stepped back.
“Stop!” I said, “don’t you ever try to run my life!”
“If I know you, you’re going to do what you wanted to do, anyway,” he sighed, shaking his head ruefully. “In this place, we call it the nature of the beast — not enough soul but a lot of fanged stealth.”
“Very well, you can call me a pregnant beast because that’s what I am, a pregnant beast.” There, I dropped the bomb for the kill.
“A pregnant beast…” said the smile that stayed curled on Satur’s lips.
Then he held me so tightly that I almost choked.
“Marry me,” Satur said, “we’ll be happy in Tingauan. We can spend the rest of our lives together, you and I and a lot of children.”
“Get off it, Satur,” I said as I wiggled myself out of his arms. “I am not what you want me to be. Damn it, has it ever occurred to you that I might want to be something else other than being a Tingauan farmer’s wife? That I am on this earth for some other reason?”
Satur stood by the window, looking out. He just stood there, his knuckles gnashing against the window still. Finally, he said “Well, I guess that’s it, then…” and began to move. Whether or not Satur was turbulent within him, the air of self-confidence in his voice would show no trace of it. He is not one to pull himself inside out.
THE BUS TERMINAL WAS BUSY with people waiting for the bus to Manila. The bus would not leave until an hour later, so I settled myself on one of the long wooden benches by the ticket office. Where the elements of a miracle romance — the kind that gets better with time — would not apply or where recovery from a failed love affair seemed far away, would it be kindness to settle for something less, or, for one that is as nearly as authentic, out of fear and insecurity? What is now so right with me that Satur, that Bill, and Ben, and all the previous men in my life would leave me so easily?
I watched around. A little girl with her mother asleep beside her was looking at me through big round eyes. She kept wrapping little curls of her hair around her forefinger. I aimed by Polaroid camera at her and clicked the shutter. I watched, squinting at the photo paper as it scrolled out of the camera and handed it to the girl who immediately woke up her mother. Across from where I sat, a man was smoking his cigarette even as he was coughing away in a nasty hack. The woman beside him threw dagger looks at him but said nothing. And then I saw somebody familiar. Standing by the road fronting the bus terminal were Eugene and his monkey. The animal barked madly when he recognized me. A few persons had milled to watch the animal perform the tricks he learned from Eugene. I remember recoiling at the thought that the animal, almost as intelligent as a human being, would be so cruelly kept in tow with a leash of nylon cord around his leg and taunted for the amusement of people. But watching Eugene, proud of having trained his pet so well, the kids and the monkey all in an unadulterated delight and the intercommunication between them, I sensed a deep consciousness of and the sensibleness of, at last, being purely connected.
