tutubing karayom

2006-06-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

Jan 11, 2006. How to begin? They say Susan Sontag takes three pages to say that art is “_____,” a phrase I can’t remember. Nor am I sure it’s art she’s defining. And yet it was she who said that “Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambitions of others,” which made sense. The moral is, if Susan Sontag could make meaning rattle inside a can of words, so can I. Let me parse my life away.

A story somewhere begins this way:
It all started one quite ordinary day, the legendary day that begins all tall tales. So it was one day that waking up, paula found the leaves of the tall caballero tree by her window all streaming past, aboard an early wind. The leaves, tiny leaflets borne without a stir together with yesterday’s flyers. Paula sat back, agape, and then laughed at the sense it made. Leaves flying, flyers flying. Very early on an ordinary day. The large tree sat as paula had, bold and graceful beside the widow. You looked at it and just know it would erupt in blooms. Soon. Paula felt the same burning through the flesh, perhaps like stir of sleeping legs, pricking and goading, and she left her room thinking only “I am going away.” The sentence filled her mind and she blinked rapidly, stemming the excess. For you look at her eyes and read and see that she is going away. But nobody looked her way and the blaring sign on her eyes went unseen. She crossed the street, empty a it was everyday this early, rounded the corner, cut across the wild park diagonally (A blinking thought: the shortest distance between two points is a line. But it was weak and quickly dammed), walked against the traffic – traffic being a tardy truck, too late for last night - and stopped under a street sign. The sign was a lanky cold metal post and reflectorized aluminum sheet, a white arrow, and the printed word “Sintakan.” Paula imagined it instead to be three feet tall, wooden and foursquare, a lifted wooden hand with a weathered wooden plaque hanging by rusty chains, saying “To the Faire” pointing gone way, and another wooden hand “To London,” pointing the other. Milkmaids, pumpkins, dandelions, Little Boy Blue, cats frightening mice under the Queen’s chair. A small shadow crept from a distance which soon became a rumbling bus and paula stuck her thumb and hitched a ride. Hitching a ride was unheard of, but just this day, unheard of had no meaning, so paula gazed at the passing scenery, a continuous reel of shots. On a ricefield,a carabao flicked its tail at the growing sun. paula, imagining herself a foreigner, a tourist, thought, what a beast and quite sincerely longed for a camera. What does and American think of the rice paddies, the bent farmenrs, tiny crinkled men with small eyes, the sloping hills of citrus trees? Surely they cannot imagine one of these men, single him out, ascribe to him himself? And what to make of the beast? Do you ride it like an elephant? What fruits do those trees bear? The huts, the heat. Everything must be new. Paula imagined them to be new and glanced back at passing sights. How happy, she thought a foreigner must be on a new, on another country. She enjoyed pretending

And so did I. I’m afraid the last sentences would have to go. Uncalled for, ugly, a lot of reasons. They say ambitious people do not stop until they’ve reached their goal and reached it just so. I’d like not to stop, as an idea, but it is hard work, and that is another matter altogether. I am rereading Cloudstreet and already I can see that it is a good novel, while it rankled only the first time. What am I doing, reading in my sleep thinking of something else? Avoiding doing. “Words are deceits. They are just ways of avoiding doing” (Lovejoy).

Jan 13, 2006. Fri. I keep thinking I must follow this one through so it does not disintegrate. Yesterday, we were asked to choose between being pinakamatalino sa lahat ng bobo and pinakabobo sa lahat ng matalino. Ten of thirteen chose the second, myself included. Hmmm… Implications? As Dr. J says, form your own conclusions because I have already formed mine.
The cash prize for the short story writing contest L told me about is P100000. Enough for a laptop and notoriety. I wish I could write a story good enough to win that. The deadline is on January 30. Seventeen days to go. The Paula story won’t do because nothing happens there. What I need is something independent. That does not bleed. Can I do it? Break my heart.
Ate will be coming tomorrow, unless she loses her guts and changes her mind. Perhaps we’ll go to SM, buy some things. A whole day lost to merriment, lost to 132. Haha. So I’m hell-bent on finishing Chapter5 this evening and starting on my notes as well. To feel that something tangible was accomplished.
Coffee lifts my heart and lately, so does tea.
A poem I want to write. What should a poem be like? I suppose Guada could, should be finished. It has more substance. San ko ba yun sinulat. Wide sheet. Yes, the John Dillinger notebook.
I want to remember the story Dr.J. told us about. The Richard Speck xyy story. 8 nurses killed. 2 Filipinas. Shouldn’t let myself go by forgetting this as well as everything else.

I cut myself on the edge of light
Reaching for a hunk of cheese
That turns out to be rock.
The mice had it better, touching ground
While the child’s hand gets introduced
To distance a.k.a. eternity
a.k.a. “?”

Romantic.
The title is Fluorescent Dawn.

8pm. Today is SD’s birthday and I texted him a greeting. He said there was no need for a gift; our common interest in plants is more than enough. Why and why?
The Genetics exam was fine and I finished it on time. Should I say things are looking up?
The technique, perhaps, is to remember. Consciously and tenaciously. I’m sure there’s something there.
I bought Herzog. To Kill a Mockingbird was more expensive. It could wait.
If a story is written so easily, wouldn’t you want to write?
Is this a haiku or what? To quote the dead – and oras na sinasayang mo, oras ko din.

Jan 15, 2006. Sun. I write a number on my phone and forget what it means. I write it here so…3050. is writing a license to forget? There is something sort of a series of concretions: from thoughts to words to acts. What for?
As idea for a horror story: a shroud with a History, scavenged from an ukay-ukay shop? Store? Describe old manila, deceits, met. The razed building – old market, rain seeping, air brush painter. So what is the history? From somebody dead. How does it haunt the new owner?
How? How to keep it from sounding cheap? Ignoble.

Jan 16, 2006. Mon. Nothing to say. Hey. Got dreams not worth mentioning. What about the exam? I f you don’t mind talking about disappointments.

Jan 21, 2006. Sat. Sometimes things seem possible after all, on the verge of becoming. But they stay there. Won’t that make you impatient? Like storm clouds that would not fall, they hover.

What happens to Paula?
A man, young, boards the bus and sits beside her.
They talk, nut what about?

I can now see the point of writing with a computer. You could erase tracks and there’d be no trace left. Should you wish to erase. And should you have tracts to erase.

Somewhere, somebody wrote:
Only time, which by no means reveals everything, will tell.
Where? Who?

Pull up your socks.

Jan 25, 2006. Wed. I ask M for a loan of his laptop and cannot help imagining some romantic consequences. Incriminating names, as you might have noticed, are always given in initials.
No, horrors are not necessarily subdued by putting them in writing. Why the nervous tic, if they are?
I have a new idea for a short story for children. The Cyphomermyx, leafcutter ants. It would probably be better with illustrations but I don’t know how to draw. So make a bet. Will it be written or not?

- a heartbreaking update. M’s laptop is being repaired, ergo, unavailable. There goes a whole world of possibilities. Don’t exaggerate.
- Another update – on the upside. He asked C to lend me her laptop instead. So indiscriminately good.
If I should graph these episodes, this is what it’d look like:

Time

Tell me what would be the y-axis.
Jan 29, 2006. Sun. Between now and last wed, some important things have happened, which I swear to remember. Tuesday was especially rife. I have a scar to show for it.

Jan 30, 2006. Mon. I read that coffee (caffeine) actually enhances brain function, i.e. it sharpens the mind by blocking adenosine receptors in the brain. Adenosine signals the brain to lower its activities. Isn’t that a good reason to buy a heater?
On the other hand, the payment for the yearbook (P900) is due tomorrow and I only have P1500 left.
I also read that passion actually ends; it often lasts only long enough for the pair to raise its first child to relative independence. The feeling of love, they say, is hard to tell apart form a mental illness – same chemical cause (dopamine) and perhaps similar symptoms (my guess). Affection and companionship, on the other hand, rely o oxytocin, the same chemical involved when a mother nurses he child. Does this mean that passion and commitment et al. are actually different things. Yes, I say. So what do you marry somebody for? The article also says that love/passion/… is actually not fuelled by the desire to build a future but to recapture a past. I can believe that. Something about simple, uncomplicated pleasures.

2005-12-11T18:15:00.000-08:00

THE DIARIES OF ZOYSIA MATRELLA

3rd eclipse, acmaea

they close the moat today for the festivities. the sailors take their masts off for the dance. eider and i, we went to the floodgates this morning, and the boats were naked, all lined up along the port. eider says he could take me on one of them, with every body gone. sail to the plover's island, he says. i remind him we need a mast and he only laughs. doesn't occur to him i might not mindb looking for one, just to sail with him. simply laughs, my beautiful eider.

orana tells me to forget him. "those blue curls," she says, "will lacerate your heart." where had she ever heard that something as lovely as this would cost the finder nothing? but i don't say anything, only laughs. the way eider does.

i can hear the praying people passing now, with the encyclicals. how is it that i feel like i should be with them? "lonely for my kind," orana would say. but they aren't my kind. tomorrow eider will take me to see the larkspur shower down at the heathrows. tomorrow night.
eider. i love love love love love eider.

pelter's day, acmaea

how can i ever forget this day? the chanters woke me up this morning, and i am alone again until tonight.

the bursting larkspurs burned the sky and burned my heart until i know i shall never ever forget them again. the raining of such brilliance, blinding brilliance, pelting me forevermore. it lasted half the night, so that the streets were paved with the fluorescing blooms that we kicked threw spilled at each other. i am glad thay do not smell like anything, not like the void that birthed them.

i let down my hair when i saw the first glint of the falling blooms, so that they would catch. and a thousand fire settled upon my head. eider and i paraded, circling the pasture. the girls stared at us. at my beautiful eider, mine alone, at my carpet veil of blooms. everything they want to be, i am. i am so happy.

.............

eider stole away last night. leaving me here. i don't know why. i didn't know he'd do this. where does this leave me? am i to die now? oh, never should this happen. eider gone. how can i remain? desperate, i am dreadfully desperate. they say when you are lacking you imagine better things. but why can i not dream in my sleep? why can i not sleep? why was i cursed to hurt this way? bleeding heart. my improbable red blood.

2005-11-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

Rosing

My mother stirs the soup. She does this slowly, poking the fire with a piece of wood.
"The fence gave in last night," she says. " Two of your father’s roosters flew away."
"You found them?"
"Only the smaller one, the red-breasted from your brother."
She bends down for more wood. "Poor bird got stuck on the railings." She covers the pot, shaking her head.
"Your father found it this morning. On the fern patch near the stream."
"And the other one?"
"Probably drowned. You should have seen your father looking for it." The oil lamp flickers, casting shadows on the walls.
"You’d think he never complains about his back. He even got as far as the mill."
"In this weather? You can never teach that man."
"It wasn’t so bad this morning. I went out to buy some bread myself." She sits by the lamp, paring potatoes. The skin under her eyes are loose, like some half-filled balloon.
"We thought it’s going to clear," She moves the oil lamp nearer. "I was trying to rake some leaves off the gutter when it started again."
"You’re lucky. It’s been like this all week in Mansalay. We had to brace the windows from the inside."
My mother chuckles. "You might have to do something about it soon. And go remove that soup. Your father won’t have it overcooked."
I stand from where I sat, groping in the near-darkness. My mother hums. Her voice competes with the raging winds, then blends. I make my way to the fire, the soup is cooking nicely. The wood is nearly spent, with only a splint or two remaining. The fire catches up, hesitates, then dies.

I shift my weight to the side and listen. It is still raining, but a weak shaft of light is peeking from a hole in the window. I sit up on my bed, my left arm hurting. I must be getting fat.
The room smells like storm, of fallen twigs and damp wood. I walk to the window, the entire panel is wet. The yard would be swamped and tiny fishes from the stream would be swimming in it, breathing their last breaths when finally, the storm subsides.
The wind lets out a prolonged howl, then beats on. I push the window panel a bit, the edge had gone soft, decaying. Cool, damp wind enters and I shiver. Poor chickens.

I go down to the kitchen. My father is hunched over his bowl of soup. His beer-drinking days left him with a few holes in the stomach. He lives on soups.
"Make yourself some coffee." His voice is different, more brittle. "It’s quite cold."
I sit by the table, in front of him.
"You’ve seen the tree?" he says, looking up. All leaves gone now. Your mother will have a fit when she finds out."
My father has mellowed. His features used to be sharp, his eyes sizing.
"I would have to cut it down soon," he says "It never fruits, anyway."
"Why not leave it be? Your hen perches there." I stand up and reach for the thermos. I pour the water into the cup. It is hot.
"You left the window open." My mother enters, a sheet draped on her shoulders.
My father smiles.
"I forgot," I say. They still have the same coffee.
My mother shuffles to the sink, her small frame indiscernible from the sheet.
My father stands slowly, his old joints creaking. He goes to the stove and lights a lamp. He places the lamp on the table, then gets an old copy of Liwayway. He settles down, peering at the pages. His eyes are watery and his face is softer, as if his age has blunted its edges. My mother makes her coffee, then sits beside him. They’re beginning to look alike. Like two grapes drying up.

The rains cease a little, blowing tiny sprays. I sit on the window ledge. My father went to the store, hoping to buy some kerosene. They still sell kerosene in cola bottles, lined on the store front. My brother and I used to take turns going to the store for kerosene. Then we would spend the change on candy logs, rolled by pairs. They don’t have the candy logs anymore, only the kerosene.
My father appears on the yard, carrying two kerosene bottles. He limps as he walks, his raincoat flapping. That raincoat has always been the same. It was the raincoat he was wearing the summer I was four, when typhoon Insiang hit the province. I remember waking up after the storm, the grounds clear and sharp, like a crisp shadow. The mango tree by the stream was nearly uprooted and the honeycomb on its branch was evacuated. My father entered the kitchen carrying the honeycomb, and we spent the next hour licking the honey. Our house was still quite new then, and we were young. That was what I know of the storms; the sweet, viscous honey, and the clear morning air.

A star comes up the sky, fading and then reappearing, like so much salt. It flickers like the oil lamp, shining its ancient, feeble light. A cold shoots through my back. I, too, am getting old. I had the good storms, and as my brother said the day we traded marbles, nothing is free. I look at the night sky, glorying at the star I’m not even sure is still there. The clouds are crowding up again, staring at me. I stare back. The cold, the storm, the stars. This is the closest to heaven I’ll ever get. Fin

2005-11-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

Divergence

When I was younger, perhaps four or five, there was a big old house where the copra shed now stood. A shallow pond lay between it and the stand of coconut trees below, as a sort of concession. On rainy days, the pond filled up with run-off from the old house's yard, and the muddy waters teemed with joyous frogs. Nights resounded with their everlasting croaks, tossing and pitching until morning, when the sun rose from behind the old house and revealed the clumps of their translucent eggs.

Some days, the magbabalut herded her flock to the pond, keeping them in line with a slender kakawate switch. The birds floated elegantly in the water, cutting the surface with their sharp tails. Three or four dived and, rising, bore unlucky snails on their beaks. The snails didn't seem to mind; mornings would find them clambering up the weeds that grew on the banks, on stalks made slippery with their spit. Or, they would be gliding on the mud-bottom, leaving narrow depressions like railroad tracks. The magbabalut let the ducks swim until before noon, and then led them across the fields and back to her yard.

Later, the old house was torn down and the copra shed was built on its foundations. Bits of old wood remained on the ground for years until somebody picked them up and used them as steps on the western slope of the shed, where the ground was always wet with water from the pond. The pond itself was never covered, and there it lay festering until the last sack of coconut shells leveled off its surface and dried up the muck. Its deeper end, however, was unmolested. My father lined its border with bamboo poles to keep the coconut shells from settling at the bottom. Then in the afternoons, he would tie our carabao by the pubescent talisay tree and let it wallow in the pool, the mud caking on its back as the westering sun wore on.

Our house stood just beyond the pool, on a small clearing bound by a perimeter of San Francisco hedge. My parents built it after they were married, with timbers hauled from Libas and bamboo from my grandmother's land in Subaan. It had wide wooden shutters like all the other houses, a silong below the bedroom, and a sagging batalan behind the kitchen. My father kept some hens on the silong for a while but the squawking kept him all night that he made them roosting crates and tied these to the kitchen post.

A worn footpath led from our house to the road, a narrow welt of rich clay that glittered with mica in the summer. It meandered half a mile north of our house, from the junction to the elementary school, cutting along its way acres and acres of rice paddies.

My mother sold kakanin - puto, pilipit, kutsinta, suman (when firewoods were plenty), and marhuya - at the elementary school. She would be up very early in the morning, grinding, frying, steaming, and stoking the fire in the kitchen while we slept. She would listen to the radio, an old transistor that required an occasional slap in order to work. The crisp morning news would flow rhythmically on, tempered only by the station id. When finally, my father and I would be up, a pot of coffee would be boiling, releasing its spasms of steam. My mother would iron our clothes with the heavy coal iron, primed with banana leaves so it would go smoothly over the cloth. I'd lie on the long wooden bench, hoping for the return of sleep. And the sun would rise on our kitchen window, as regular and inviolable as the news which, I came to think, must smell like coffee and burning banana leaves.

My father owned a rice paddy or two before his mother died and left him the coconut grove. This was, or so I was told, during the time when a cop named Dalida was beheaded in Mataas na Pampang. He was rumored to have had troubles with the coconut planters. One night, the townspeople heard a sound not unlike a coconut falling and then rolling downhill. In the morning, Dalida's body was found on the hilltop and, later that day, his head by the stream.
Mataas na Pampang was only a few miles away, and my father accepted his inheritance reluctantly. He sold his rice paddy, where he grew nothing but malagkit, to work on copra like most of our neighbors. The terror wrought by Dalida faded soon enough, and for many years after that, my father was never again without a shroud of smoke; copra smoke morning through afternoon, and cigarette smoke morning through the next.

He learned to smoke, he said, from his mother, a small woman of weak ears. She lived by herself in Subaan, weaving sasa from the river. We visited her once, after a particularly harsh typhoon. Words got around that the dam broke, and my father was afraid the water might have reached my grandmother’s house on the bluff. We went as fast as the carabao sled would take us, stopping once in a while to haul it off the deep mud. The river, indeed, was swollen. We heard it roaring even before we saw it. My grandmother’s house was, thankfully, well above the water level. We found her perched on a sack of palay, smoking her fat cigars. She greeted us loudly when she saw us and we shouted back our own greetings. Everything was fine but the sasahan was flooded. We sat for a while, watching the enormous river below, carrying a score of logs and some uprooted trees, and that smell of a thousand riverbanks from miles and miles away. We went home that same afternoon, leaving my grandmother with her cigars, trusting the bluff to keep her dry.

Until I was in Grade 2, my father smoked two packets of cigarette a day, a steady source of income for Ayang’s sari-sari store. But that year, he contacted a cough that lasted for months and startled the hens. When he was finally persuaded to see the doctor, he came back only after a week, with six liters of IV fluid in his veins (with another still dripping), an envelop of x-rays, and a smaller belly. He took four kinds of pills, which left him smelling like strong detergent.
He hobbled around the house for another month or so and my mother managed as well as she could. She went to the pasture and dragged the carabao to a thick patch of mutha. When the copra was ready, she negotiated with the biyaheros and asked Mang Karling for a loan of his cart. My father fed the hens. It was, perhaps, along this time that I started to imagine my father losing matter, sublimating before my eyes, until he resonated like an empty shell. I had no such qualms about my mother. I knew she would keep.

After he was well enough, my father cut his supply of cigarette from two packets to two sticks a day. He compensated for the difference with menthol candies. Ayang’s store was at the junction, and I would sometimes be sent to buy his candies. I’d eat one or two along the way and surrender whatever remained to my father. I got tired of the taste in a couple of weeks. From then on, he was on his own. I collected the wrappers in a tin can, anyway, and used them as play money. My father was diligent; he filled my can and rotted his teeth at roughly the same rate. If my mother was annoyed, she didn’t show it. The sick sweet smell of eucalyptus was at least better than cigarette smoke. In any case, my father looked kinder without the front teeth.

We lived then a kind of stylized life, set in high relief at times, and fading on some places. It was years later that, with the luxury of hindsight, I began to feel the undertows of a different tale, which might have been there all along, but which I had never felt. Or, perhaps, it was the wearing away of a myopic memory, leaving everything, for the first time, with a terrible clarity.

* * *
The sky was dark and heavy with unshed rains. Great billows of cloud gathered and gathered until they covered the whole sky except on the horizon, sitting atop the fields like a giant lid. Swarms of dragonflies were dancing by the carabao pool, swirling in frenzied anticipation of the rain. My mother lighted a lamp and placed it on the table. The lamp’s dark smoke fanned out and suffused the room with the smell of kerosene. I opened the window to let the smoke out.
"Looks like a lot of rain," my mother glanced out the window and went up to get some candles. I could hear her striking the match, and after that smell the faint sulfur smell of spent light. A wave of thunder rolled, and large drops of rain burst forth in startled spates. The smell of wet soil was overwhelming
I eased back on my chair. "Have they loaded the copra yet?"
"Tomorrow, perhaps, or Wednesday. I don’t think they finished the first batch this morning." My mother placed the candle on the altar and pulled a chair beside me. "This rain would be hard on the cart."
"I thought they were going to dump some sand here. I saw Ka Roman last Thursday. He said they might begin this week."
"They would only cover up to the junction. That’s what they did in Tiwi. The foreman said the road was too narrow for the dump truck."
"That’s better than nothing, anyway," I said. My mother stood up and gazed at the window. From the pasture, I could make out my father, wearing his wide sawing and plastic coat, heading home. He was walking slowly, pausing from time to time to ease his boots out of the mud. Then he walked past the tamarind tree and disappeared from my view. My mother opened the kitchen door to let him in.
"You’ve tied the carabao?"
"Yes. This could last all night."
The rain poured on, rhythmic and monotonous, like silence itself. Small puddles formed on our yard, sending out branches that became tributaries of a gathering rivulet. I looked up at the sky, barely lit now to be seen. I closed the window; it felt like this could last forever.
But in the morning, the sun was up, and the barest clouds flitted. The air was thick with smoke from the copra shed. I removed the laundry from the clothesline and carried it to the backyard where another line was strung from the house post to the tamarind tree. The sun wasn’t as good but the tree blocked the smoke.
"Turn the woods over when you’re through," my mother called from the house. "We haven’t much firewood left."
I hung the last shirt on the line, which sagged from the weight of three days’ laundry. I took the pole from the side of the kitchen, and propped up the line. A slight breeze swayed the pole but it righted itself and was still. The sun shone through the sparse shade of the tamarind and heated my scalp. The clothes should be dry by noon.
I went to the front yard to check on the firewoods. A rooster was scratching the ground furiously, trampling off my mother’s young marigolds and filling the yard with a smell like cut grass. The woods were drying well.

The weather held for a week and we were able to load the copra. The price did not reach the thirteen pesos we were hoping for, but stopped at 12.30, a fair enough amount. I worked on the yard, mulching the soft soil around the dahlias and clipping the hedge that bordered the front yard. The dump trucks came with several loads of sand and the dirt road was paved with several inches of it, up to the junction. We could see the work progressing from our house, the dump truck slowly raising its back, until an avalanche of sand escaped.

My father was in good spirits. He joked and laughed with some of our neighbors at Ayang’s store. He was proud of our copra and was boasting of the good price we got from them. I learned from my mother that he had plans of building his own copra dryer beside the health center, so he wouldn’t have to rush his copra through the shed during harvest. I overheard him talking with Tiyo Manuel. "Perhaps half the size of our copra shed here. Just so we could dry them faster."
"And they’re working on the road, too," Tiyo Manuel said. "With another crop like this, you could buy a good cart next." And they laughed over that and drank until eleven.

Except that my father died two days later, in his sleep. My mother woke me up at two, shaking me gently. "Your father’s dead," she said the moment I opened my eyes, and I did not immediately understand what she was talking about. " I woke up to close the shutters because it was getting cold, and then I saw your father. He wasn’t breathing," she went on. "I didn’t even know," she said. Her eyes were large, oddly white and shining like they have lights of their own. She gripped my hand, and only then did I understand.

We went through the chores silently, as if trying not to wake somebody. We lit several lamps and I folded my blankets and mat. I removed the mosquito net over my father, careful not to let it graze him. I straightened the mat and pulled his blanket up, uncertain whether to pull it up to cover his face or not. I decided not to. My mother crept downstairs, and I could hear her cleaning a kettle, perhaps to make some coffee. I went to the open window and pulled a chair towards it, trying not to make a noise. I sat down and looked at my father. From this angle and with the soft light, it was possible to believe that he was only sleeping, perhaps even dreaming. I stood up and paced around the room. Outside, it was still dark, very few stars. I forced myself to stop, and crouched beside my father. I looked closely as a mosquito alighted on his forehead and settled. I couldn’t bring myself to slap it.

At five, I went down to take a bath. The rice was cooking over the fire. My mother used the large pot we cook with during harvest. By five thirty, I was on my way to Tiyo Manuel, to tell him that his cousin was dead.
What surprised me most about my father’s death was how little I seemed to care. I cried when I told Tiyo and I cried when I saw my mother when I came back. But that was all. I fell into the routine of practical things. I looked for clean blankets in my mother’s chests, and found a white sheet embroidered with yellow flowers, which I have never seen before. I brought it down and tacked it to the ceiling, to hide the ravages of wood the termites have left behind. We moved the chairs from a corner and placed the coffin there. I borrowed a tent from the health center and we set it up on the yard for the cardplayers. Some of the neighbors went to the poblacion to buy candles, coffee, cigarette, bread, six kilos of fish. I cooked and swept and offered chairs to the mourners, accepted their regrets, looking for a place where these may be kept. I tried never to look at my father, inert and unknowing inside that coffin. I nodded towards him when speaking with the visitors, but I kept my eyes averted. I was ashamed for him.

Towards midnight, my mother asked me to take her chair by the coffin so she could take a rest. Her eyes were tired, and I let her sleep. My mother dressed my father while I was calling on my uncle. My father had on his white barong, which he also wore on my cousin’s wedding. It was buttoned up to the neck but I could see the print of his shirt underneath. "Thiodan" in bold, blue letters, with a huge fist knocking down whorl maggots and grasshoppers. I stared at my father’s face, willing him awake. He looked like he could be my grandfather or my uncle, but not my father. "You fell right for it, didn’t you?" I brushed away an ant from the glass. I felt like a mercenary, like his confessor, knowing his last dearest dream, and knowing that he failed to get it. It’s pathetic, his certainty. Just so we could dry them faster. As if that would matter now.

I woke up with a stiff back so my mother took my place. I went to the sink and washed my face, and then I changed my clothes. A large kettle of coffee was already boiling. I arranged some cups on a tray. My father’s relatives from Batangas came after breakfast and they crowded around the coffin. When they finally settled down, my mother told them how my father died. "That was just yesterday morning, he wasn’t even ill." I went around handing out cups of coffee and trays of biscuits. My mother continued, "We didn’t notice anything. He was always talking with the men, same as before." Our visitors listened quietly, sipping their coffee. "We stayed out a little later that night." They had been patching old sacks. "And then I woke up at about three because it was getting cold." My mother’s voice quavered. I could not look away from her. "I was going to close the windows, and then I noticed he wasn’t breathing anymore." I was amazed at her tears, the way she could still will them out. She’s been telling the same story since yesterday, over and over like litany, to every new batch of sympathizers. My own grief looked insubstantial, even irrelevant beside her tears. "At least he didn’t suffer." The relatives, comforted by this thought, sniffed softly. "He was still so strong the last time we visited." "Who could have known?" "I just can’t imagine Kuya Inte gone." "At least he didn’t suffer." And they went on and on, how healthy he had always been, how young he still was, how unfortunate – like they didn’t know that a man could die, as if they took it for granted that he would live forever. "At least he didn’t suffer."

The wake lasted for three days. On the fourth, Tuesday, was the funeral. The sky was bright when we left the house. High unbroken blue. The men carried the coffin down the footpath to the junction, where the hearse was waiting. My mother and I followed it, I carrying some of the flowers from the house. Our relatives and neighbors followed, careful not to get past us. We were the bereaved. We walked briskly, coursing the firm ground between rows and rows of coconut trees. The day was calm. Light breeze rustled the trees and a coconut would fall, or a frond. We walked on, tainting, I imagine, the lucent landscape with our mourning. A woodpecker screeched and, suddenly, death seemed like an anomaly.

* * *
Nobody would have guessed we buried my father only yesterday, if not for the gouges on the ground the bamboo poles left. We have untied the sibi, returned the chairs, swept the yard, stacked the plates. My father’s relatives have gone, and my mother and I were alone again. We carted my father’s clothes on a box, his blanket, his jacket. I took the milk can with his candy wrappers and poured the contents on the box. "You used to keep those," my mother said. I smiled. I took the wick off the lamp and poured the kerosene over my father’s things. Odd, I thought, that we could keep these if we choose. I struck the match and threw it to the box. But not my father. It flared. Angry flames shot out and a thick cloud of smoke floated over our ruins. I stared at the fire. Tiny flakes of burnt ashes wavered in the air, unrecognizable now. We took the fire in, let it consume us, so that perhaps we may forget what we used to be, too.

* * *
We joined the exodus of planters to Tiaong, the wretched lot who feared the rumors of torrential rains that would drown the province. My mother sold our house to Kapitana Ising, along with the coconut grove. We left the carabao to Tiyo Manuel. I brought only a small bag, a few change of clothes, as if I am going for a visit, and not leaving forever. It frightened me that I could place all of my life in such a small parcel, like so much air. Twenty years that didn’t weigh a thing, except where it hurts.
It was drizzling when we boarded the ferry. The sea felt like a gentle wind, like the nudge of a happiness that never came to pass.

* * *
I come back after so many years. The roads are wider now, and a group of children stand at the corner and stare as I pass. The coconuts have long been cut to give way to the ricemill. Rows of shacks line the mill’s side, looking from a distance like a band of bright banners. A hot gust of wind blows, stirring the dust and the shacks’ flimsy curtains. No carabao bellows from the heat, and the beating of my temples fill my ear with hollow sound.
The copra shed stands by the solar, heaped to the rafters with sacks of rice. I look around, disoriented. What is there to mark where our house used to be? Or everything else, for that matter. I reel from the heat. Perhaps there is only this soil, to catch the burden of a thousand years, and of a thousand paltry hurts, the dirt by which I might weigh my memory. This might be coherence. Fin