Inner Light

While Mick Basa, (perhaps, going through a phase) was trying to fathom the very depth and breadth of the existence of God, I found myself being torn by a dilemma between the devil and the deep blue sea; completely aware that whichever way I'd happen to choose, I’d end up fucked up and soul-dead anyway. The God question was the least of my worries. I told Mick, he would need a God to turn to one day when, he, too would be confronted by his own self because of his choice between the devil and the deep blue sea; because sometimes, he had to choose the devil and at times, the deep blue sea; and it’s terrible when he chooses the devil, and he's dead when he chooses the deep blue sea. Sometimes, when it's the devil, he’d find himself cast out by his own inner mirror, he'd run out of his inner light, a feeling so terrible he would very badly need a God to forgive himself. Because a dilemma is a dilemma. When you are faced with one, you had to decide as promptly as you can, I learned this from Prof. Ch. H.'s class, and once you’ve taken on a decision, hold steadfastly on to it and never look back. To look back and discover the “what ifs” would be to blame yourself; and once you start to do that, you’re sliding fast into the abyss. But I always have this tendency to look back and to blame myself. It takes a God to stop it—and save me from perdition.

Discovery

The Day I turned into an Ore

Until now, I still need to make sense of that experience; to arrange, to put (my mind) in order. As Karlos said, I can do my own debriefing. I can describe how it started and how it ended. I can begin the story right in the beginning; but I can also jump right in to the most important part, or go back again and again to something that I cannot explain, something that I cannot grasp, something that I found horrifying. The story was not about myself. The story was about itself. It began on the night we saw the body of the girl and the body of someone else carried to the town's funeral house by a dumptruck used to carry ores. The story continued with us, riding the same dumptruck used to carry the dead and always, the ores, in a gravity-defying trip up in the mountains of Pantukan, where we found people constantly battling the elements earth, fire, air and water; winning some and losing more in that battle; and still fighting odds of a different category, such as neglect and greed.

My Bitter Love

The first shoots of the real ampalaya leaves finally appeared before my eyes when I awoke this morning. The first series of leaves which shot up from the seeds I discarded from the kitchen and later planted in the pot appeared roundish and strange, and made me doubt, at first, if these were really my favorite ampalaya, until I inhaled the unmistakable sweet-bitter scent of its leaves.
From now on, I will doubt no more, my love; the bitter-er you are, the better.

Silenced

I did not write anything about women on the international women's day. I did not write anything for me. I spent the whole day running after stories after stories like a headless chicken and the stories had nothing to do with me.

The Red Earth

The earth wept muddy tears the day after they killed Fr. Fausto Tentorio.
Huge balefuls of rainwater poured in from the sky, turning the dirt road of the neighbouring town of Antipas into a raging brown river, as if heaven itself was angry over the death of the Italian priest and the irretrievable loss it meant to the village.
The white van splashed through mud and gooey dirt, giving us a fleeting glimpse of rain-soaked wooden shacks through the window. Along the way, it felt like wading neck-deep through sorrow itself.
But this was only in Antipas, for in the town of Arakan, where his convent stood witness to his murder, the sun shone so fiercely it could burn the soul dry.
Pebbles and rocks turned death white along the road, hot as an oven, as we passed by an army detachment guarding the town’s entry.
Fr. Fausto was killed between seven to eight o’clock on October 17, 2011; a Monday, while a flag ceremony was in progress at the school ground across the church compound. When we arrived the day after, people were staring at the spot of red earth where the priest’s blood had dried underneath his car, some shred of broken glass the telltale signs of the incomprehensible violence that had shocked the whole town, the whole country and the world, prompting the Italian Ambassador himself to openly speak during the priest's burial against the prevailing state of impunity in the Philippines.
But here in the compound of the Mother of Perpetual Help parish, people were talking about the gunman and a waiting motorcycle; and what sorrow and what anguished and what outrage the tandem had left behind by killing Fr. Fausto, or Fr. Pops as he was called here, who must have probably been ducking his head to enter the car, when the gunman pulled the trigger, and the waiting motorcycle started revving its engine at a distance, the gunman sprinting toward it.
Women were debating about what particular time this thing could have happened. Was it seven or eight o’clock? Probably eight? one of the women guessed, because school teachers were saying their flag ceremony started late that day.
“Uhh, it could have already been past eight o’clock,” murmured an old woman, who showed me a handkerchief full of the reddish earth she scooped from where the priest’s body had lain, soaked in his own blood.
The woman said she was going to bring the bloody earth with her, a remembrance of Pops. She was a friend of Old Rosita, the cook, who did not hear the shot, not any shot at all, she said, shaking her head, the wrinkles around her eyes giving her a tired, exhausted look; her mouth gaping.
Old Rosita, the cook, was going out to throw the garbage when she saw a body lying beneath the priest’s car. She thought it was the driver trying to fix the engine. When she saw it was Pops, she thought it was a heart attack. Alarmed, she tried to lift the priest, and that was how the priest’s blood poured all over her.
Napundo, she said, referring to how the blood must have pooled around the priest’s chest after he was felled by bullets. “I called but no one came for help,” she said. She was a thin delicate woman of about seventy and her short hair was streaked with white. She shivered when she recalled the amount of blood all over her body. “It was here, all over me,” she said, shaking.
She said it took a while for the police to come. When they took him to the hospital, she would have gone along with them, too, except that she was a total mess, Pops’ blood dripping through her clothes from neck down. She couldn’t probably go to town that way, she said, shaking her head again.
They said he was a priest not content to just say mass when his people was in danger. Someone recalled an encounter between government troops and NPA guerrillas in one of the villages of Arakan, where one or two NPA guerrillas were killed. The story went that the soldiers held on to the body of the NPA fighter, zealously guarding it so that anyone who dared come close to claim it, was considered the next target. No one dared come out to claim the body. Fr. Fausto did. He sent word to the soldiers the church will take the body to give it proper burial and arranged for the barangay officials to take the body itself.
The old woman said some policemen and soldiers were in the school ground the morning Fr. Fausto was killed. There was a “bayanihan” at the school ground and soldiers were there supposedly to help the parents.
Fr. Pops was already dead when they reached Antipas. The whole town mourn for the death of the priest.

Justice

Is justice possible on this earth? Or is it merely an idea, one of the countless fictions invented by the human mind? Yet, if there is no justice in this world, if justice is merely fiction, what’s the use of the idea of justice after all? “All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice,” so, says the magistrate in JM Coetzee’s, “Waiting for the Barbarians.”
We have witnessed numerous political movements and political upheavals in our lifetime, the rise and fall of dictators, the strikes, the protest marches and the euphoric people’s uprisings; and then, we watch the old oppressors come back to rule again. But as we train our eyes toward these panoramic events sweeping humanity, we oftentimes forget that the most savage, the most barbaric, the most damaging, the most debilitating and the most monstrous kind of oppression is happening right within our private lives; right inside our bedroom. And we can't even talk about it!

Dreaming

Last night, I dreamt of Fr. Pops. He was still alive. We were all waiting for him in a veranda but he was whisked away by a group of men even before he could reach us. He was carried off on a boat. After a few minutes, a car full of Catholic bishops, still wearing their holy robes, stopped by where we gathered, observing us. We were still longing to talk to Fr. Pops. I was wondering whether the kind of priest that Fr. Pops was, was the same as the kind of bishops the bishops were. I sensed in the dream they were not. When I awoke, I realized that Fr. Pops was dead. He was killed by a gunman on October 17, 2011, inside his garage in the Mother of Perpetual Help church in Arakan.

One day on Talicud Island

Tunnels

Reeling from shock, fatigue (at least, bearable now as the body begins to heal) and severe, almost unbearable "D" from the trip to Diat Palo, a mining community in Pantukan, Compostela Valley, just a ravine across from where the Diat Uno landslide occurred four days after the New Year.
I wish you knew the feeling. After the long trip on board a dumptruck used to carry ores from the mines, followed by an hour’s climb on a steep miner’s trail up an almost 90-degree cliff; and another ride on a Saddam (a reconditioned army truck from Iraq being used in Mindanao hinterlands), where I kept staring at the giant ferns above us to pull the heavy truck up the road so that we will not fall into the ravines bluish in their depths far, far down below. Seeing the desperation of people soaking their hands in mercury poison, cheerful at the prospect of money, inhaling toxic fumes just to extract gold to satisfy the First World’s craving. Saying yes to a boy, who asked, “Te, are you still coming back? Mingaw na mi kung wala na mo.” Nodding, smiling reassuringly at the boy but deep inside, feeling rotten. So, I just turned into a liar.
Had I been creative enough, I could have told him, “Don’t worry, Ondoy—for that was the boy’s name, not a typhoon’s—“Even if we are no longer here, we are staying with you in mind and spirit.” Just like Jesus. Perhaps, a lie like that can sustain the child for a number of years until he grows up and finds himself working in the tunnels.
Perhaps, he will not work in the tunnels, after all.
Perhaps, he will find a route of escape. Perhaps, he will grow mountain rice to fill gigantic warehouses to feed an army to fight the people’s war that will not fail like they did in in Russia and China. Perhaps, he will grow potatoes as big as Bernardo Carpio.
Perhaps, a different way of telling lies can transform them into truths to light his way out of dark tunnels.

Sun Rising over Diat Palo

Missing Gizzards

In times like these, I dream of Sheilfa, angrier than usual, complaining how some particular guy had attempted to steal her eyes and ears, had she not been too careful and alert. “Don’t trust anyone with your eye,” I warned her, vehemently, in the language of women trying to deal with typhoons and earthquakes every other day or of people on alert for those tropical storms that usually caused the swelling of the river Pangi.
When I woke up, I discovered I was already robbed of my gizzards. I looked for them under the pillows, under the bed, inside the shoeboxes, cabinet drawers, even in the freezer of the refrigerator where I stored my lipstick, but they were nowhere to be found.
I had a funny feeling from the start who the culprit was; and it grew even more stronger the more I confirmed my missing gizzards—the one who stole them was the father of my son!
But it was still in the early morning, when like all the others, I was still breaking my nose over the breaking news, there was no time for me to stop, take the gizzards and fight back. I thought I would find time late in the evening when the air was cooler and everything was written and done with, though, I thought, I would already be too tired and exhausted at those hours.
In the afternoon, I discovered my liver gone; and so were my small and big intestines, the entire 12-meter length of them, gone without a trace; and so were some parts of my brain. I declared it the greatest monstrosity to ever happen in my life! Somewhere deep in me, in some parts I could not locate yet, rumbles a slow burning rage strong enough to break the nose of the of the guy who robbed me of my gizzards, liver, intestines and brain; a rage so slow and protracted it could fuel a long running feminist revolution that would surpass all other world revolutions in time and scale.
So, in the midst of my cluttered room in Nova Tierra, and with the help of a rusty old laptop bought from a Korean junk shop in 2008, I began to track down the gizzard thief. A sneak into his Facebook profile showed a plump man with a potbelly, with partly greying hair and a receding hairline. Hah! So, do you consider that a vindication of years?! Going over some of the comments posted on his wall, I noted how almost everybody called him ‘Sir,’ in such a stupidly patronizing manner that makes me say, Yuck! Nothing about the man gives off an air of intelligence at all. All you can sense, when you take a closer look at his picture, was the sheer stupidity of the eyes and the awkward way in which he held the bottle of beer in his hands to show to the world he was a man. In fact, someone with a discerning nose would notice outright that the stupid guy was holding the bottle as a prop to cover from the eyes of the world the rotten dullness of his life.
Okay, I'm mean. But I'm just getting back here. That guy stole my life!

On the Road to Buluan

Buluan is one of those places I consider so near I could almost touch it; and yet, so far and out of reach.
It sat very close to my hometown, only two or three towns away; and yet, I never heard of Buluan until after three decades I was born. This won’t explain the whole story.
I first discovered Buluan in 2003, when I was part of the team tasked to document the proceedings of the Mindanao Peace Institute (MPI) workshops, where participants from conflict areas around the world spent a week or two learning about peace in Mindanao.
Those workshops culminated on a trip to the conflict areas of Mindanao. On the road, we passed by the Maguindanao town of Buluan.
The ceasefire with Moro fighters were on the papers when organizers boarded the participants in vans that travelled in a convoy to see, among others, the zone of peace in the conflict areas of Pikit, Cotabato and to interview people in Muslim and Christian communities affected by the raging war between government forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and even before it, the Moro National Liberation Front.
I sat next to a bunch of South Koreans, a Canadian and an American who kept talking about how they could never understand why Filipinos could elect Imelda Marcos and her children back to power; [[Are we short on memory or IQ? I was tempted to challenge them but refrained]]; and a young German woman who kept so quiet for most of the trip.
When the van left the Davao-Cotabato highway in Makilala to follow the road leading to the towns of M’lang, Tulunan and Buluan, I was aghast to realize that like the foreigners next to me, I was also traveling that part of Mindanao for the first time.
As soon as we reached Buluan, the first things that caught my eyes were women and men in the midst of a harvest, their clothes flapping like tiny bright specks in the distance; the nipa-thatched huts huddled close to the ground and a beautiful mosque in the midst of the green fields.
Later, in a town of Sultan sa Barongis, I saw egrets feasting in the swamp; and realized that like them, I, too, was a stranger there.
I would hear of Buluan again on November 23, 2009, when a group of journalists left and met their death on the way to Shariff Aguak. But this was another story.

Letter to Kathmandu

Dear Pratish. I tried to find the Nepali writer again; our Nepali writer, remember?
But going over my copy of “New Nepal, New Voices: An Anthology of Short Stories,” I felt lost, somewhat overwhelmed by all the strange sounds of the Nepali names; I could no longer recognize our writer among them.
But how could I forget? We have a much stronger claim over her than her father, or husband, or maybe even her lover! We were her sisters in life and struggle; her victories were our victories (or so, we’d like to think!) even if she never knew us, she never knew me, she never will. We were her readers; and that’s the most important thing of all, isn’t it?
The first time you showed her to me, and I read the first lines of her rapturous writing, I had gasped with delight. I tucked her name to memory; in a special place nobody could enter. I promised to read her again until she will become part of my body. We both promised to return to her over and over again, when reality is hard to bear; or when we were half dead struggling against the yoke of our daily coverages: the fightings, the wars, the politics. She would be our refuge, a sanctuary, a place so deep, so safe, no one could probably touch or harm us there; a place where our exhaustions vanish; a place where we start to forgive ourselves and we can be friends with the world again. But two summers afterwards, I have forgotten her name. Wasn’t she the daughter of a royalty who had once outraged her father by joining the street protests against the monarchy? Was she a recluse, who once retreated to the forest to write her first novel? Or were we just making up stories, turning up fictions to escape the tyranny of facts in our lives? I know that our link to our writer is made of a more lasting stuff. Even if I can’t remember her name, I still can still find her in her writings.

Sleepless at Esteban Abada!

EXCERPT FROM A JOURNAL
May 13, 2009—

We just entered our room at half past midnight after Pratish and I listened to Kevin, a young Tsinoy from Davao’s Juna Subdivision, discussing Heidegger. He’s taking up Philosophy at ADMU and staying up all night to do some paper.
“Are you, in any way, planning to be a priest?” I asked, just curious, when we first learned about his course.
“That’s the problem with Philosophy,” Kevin began, obviously flustered by my question. “People think that if you’re taking Philosophy…”
“She used to love Philosophy,” Pratish quickly said, turning to me, coming to my rescue.
“Yes, I used to love Philosophy,” I said, thinking only of Literary Criticism and Deconstruction during my Silliman University days.
Kevin nodded, surprised.
“She wanted to be a Priestess,” Pratish added.
Kevin’s eyes widened.
“Yes, I wanted to be a High Priestess, that’s why I asked.”
I did not say I wanted to be a Witch. And a witch doesn’t need Philosophy to be a High Priestess, anyway. All she needs is a pure heart, and that will serve as her compass; her ephemeris, and a blanket of goodness that will protect her against evil and will enable her to read everything—the present, the past and the future—! Pratish knew how often I struggle to keep a pure heart every day because my mind is always up to some particular mischief. I could never be a witch.
Kevin said, “Ahhhh!” nodding even more vigorously.
Finally, he welcomed our friendship and began discussing Heidegger. It was our turn to nod. Pratish and I couldn’t seem to fall asleep that night. We took iced tea with milk for dinner.

A Walk in the Park

While we were talking in a bamboo shed, a drizzle began and just as suddenly, the sky over the Philippine Eagle camp in Malagos grew dim. "Don't worry," Rolly assures me, "It's still early and it's still pure sun down there," he says, his lips, pouting towards the town of Calinan below. "It's just this way up here, the precipitation is high."
Just as he speaks, we feel the coldness of the jungle beginning to penetrate our bones. The chill reminds me of what I once felt in the forests of Makilala, Cotabato, a long, long time ago. The memory curiously mingled with the smell of damp clothes and bath soaps of a certain fragrance. I remember the feel of soft mahlong beneath my feet, I remember the sight of wet earth and the shivering frames of our companions as they rushed to join us, leaving their slippers at the door. I remember a particular look on a boy's face.

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

For years, I've been living beyond the fetters of Time. Maybe, this explains why I could never keep dates. I can only remember the "before" and the "after" of an event, never the actual event, itself. But this year, at least, I'll make a real effort to remember. I'll take note of beginnings and endings; of the ebb and flow of the tide, of the rising and the setting of the sun, of the appearance and disappearance of the moon, of the time for planting and the time for harvesting.
I'll try to follow the seasons.

Cubicle

I’m inside my favourite internet café in my favourite cubicle: an empty wooden desk near the glass wall looking out to one side of the JS Gaisano mall.
I used to love it here because the sight of the empty desk the color of maples reminds me of the cubicles of some libraries I used to love: the cubicles on the third-floor window of Silliman U Lib looking down into the acacia-lined green oval of the soccer field in Dumaguete city; or, the reading cubicles of the Rizal Library looking out into the dark limbs of acacia inside the ADMU campus in Quezon city. I used to think the mere sight of this empty desk at the internet café could inspire the deepest of my thoughts to come out of the dark dungeons where they lay imprisoned; could perhaps help break my fettered spirit free!
Until the guys next to me started their transactions on the phone; all with their booming voices and their tripping egos, announcing to the world they are certain-so-and-so's, berating someone in a merchandising department of some Tagum city mall, complaining why their dicer cannot get through.
I wonder what a dicer is. I’m sure she’s not someone who throws the dice, the way I used to see people playing dominoes. But the guy is very mad. His voice fills the entire internet cafe as he scolds the woman—I imagine someone on the other end of the line as a woman because of the way the guy talks; I couldn’t imagine him talking that way to a man!
I came here in my favorite cubicle, thinking I could be alone with my thoughts. Now somebody else is stealing my focus!

In Fairness to God

I had struck a friendship with God sometime in our Reporting on Religion Class at the Asian Center for Journalism when Dr. Eric Loo in Sydney, Australia and Mr. Anwar Mustafa in Malaysia had asked us to do a profile of a noted religious leader for Christmas. I was in Davao, trying to find an Islamic leader for the story, but since the deadline was very close and I realized I still had so many things to learn about Islam, I decided as Christmastime approached, to track down God in a parish in Cotabato, where he had been saying mass at dawn in a remote village that was always in the headlines of newspapers because of the frequency of armed encounters between government soldiers and New People’s Army guerillas.
God’s story towards the end of the Martial Law years was both tragic and shocking but just a few months before I set our meeting, the convicted man out to kill him towards the tail-end of the Marcos regime was freed and the man went to him to say he was sorry. They both went to light candles on the grave of someone the convicted man had killed in God's place.
It took some time before I could find someone who could give me God’s contact numbers but with the help of friends I did; and when I called him, he was open to meeting a stranger and asked me to come meet him near the white statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a Sunday morning that week.
I hurriedly prepared for the trip because as usual there were simply so many things to fix at home during my absence. God had not yet arrived when I got there so I had plenty of time to compose my questions and to orient myself. When his old blue Isuzu pick up pulled up, I saw a tall, thin, fragile-looking figure getting off and walking towards me.
He led me to his office, where a yellow Royal typewriter sat on the shelf full of other documents. He asked me about my religion; and for a while, I was tongue-tied.
I had declared in class I was an “agnostic” and a “free thinker,” next to Jana from East Germany who declared she was an aetheist. The rest of our classmates said they were Roman Catholics; like Lilik from Jakarta or Bryant from Bulacan or even Debbie; or Muslim, like Yuri and Kurniawan, from Jakarta; or Buddhist married to a Hindu but who grew up under the tutelage of Irish nuns who taught her to pray the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Holy Rosary, like my dearest roomate Pratish from Kathmandu. Mukund Pandabhan, our professor for Media Law, had once asked me to define what a free thinker was and he did not give me any trouble with my definition.
But when God asked me where I got that notion of being a free thinker, he quickly put me back to the 18th or was it 17th century when the enlightenment and rationalism swept over Europe. “Jesus Christ is even more of a free thinker than you are!” God quipped, irritated, knocking his holy fingers onto my forehead.
God had taught History in a US seminary years before he was sent to the Philippines, where he ended up at the heart of Tondo on the eve of Martial Law. He remembered that the first mass he ever said here in this country was done inside a prison cell.
I first caught sight of God towards the end of my adolescent years which also coincided with my activism years when a friend pointed to me the first European I saw who could speak Ilonggo. He was fascinating to look at: a towering figure surrounded by lumad children who took their turn kissing his hands. In his book which recounted his trip from the Marco Polo airport to Manila, he noted what the Filipino tradition of kissing hands meant because the practice was quite new to him at that time, a source of his fascination. But now, surrounded by lumad children, I could swear he already looked like one of them if not for his skin.
He also noted with surprise how Filipinos loved to worship all those European-looking saints who peopled the Church’s altars.
Some of the images still stuck with me after that trip: God leading me inside a sooty kitchen, where he shared the offerings of the morning mass with the children, his old cellphone and its faded numbers, the old jacket he wore. How lovingly he brushed aside the dry leaves that littered the grave of a friend killed when God was hunted down by the killers and was nowhere to be found.
Back in his office, as he complained about the volume of paper works he had to deal with that week, as he crouched upon the stack of papers on his desk to find that document that could answer my questions, I was struck by how fragile and delicate God has become.
Maybe some people would say the suffering of God was nothing compared to the suffering of people he had served—all those mass of humanity toiling under exploitatively low wages, tilling the land of the haciendas all their lives in exchange of measly pay, the subhuman condition working in the mines, in banana plantations and in factories, those persecuted for their political, ideological and religious beliefs.
But knowing how God, too, survived death threats all his life for doing what he got to do; and how he is fast giving in to age in a land far away from where he was born, I still felt humbled.

Caraga 2009

Traveling to Caraga feels like you’re on a graveyard shift. You know the feeling. You struggle to keep awake at 12:30 in the morning and watch your seven year old son march off to bed, drowsy after the last show on television, you dial up the taxi that will fetch you from home in Nova Tierra, near the mosque, you say; and then, when everybody is snuggling comfortably to bed you brave the cold slap of the early November breeze on your face as you board the taxi to the terminal. You found a convivial listener on the taxi driver, suddenly a companion in this dead hours of the night, when all the living are asleep and you are headed for the terminal to catch the first trip to the town you only knew by name from some old travel brochures that featured the oldest church in Mindanao, built here in the 1660s, as an outpost of the Spanish forces who failed to conquer the interior parts.
Inside the Ecoland terminal, people sleep on their folding beds (for rent, at P15 to P20), with their bags on their heads. It takes quite a few pages of Milan Kundera’s “Slowness” before the bus for Cateel (which will pass by Caraga) arrives at one o’clock. You go to the Bachelor bus driver bound for Mati, just to check and counter check. I’ve never been to Caraga before. I never knew where Cateel was. It’s a strange place for me. I wonder, what will greet you when you get there? I stared at the Cesar Montano’s face on the bright huge TM posters above the signs overboard. Mati, Cateel, etc. I glanced sideways at the vendor selling cold eggs, cigarettes by my side. I wiped and blew my stuffy nose and wondered how long can I bear this—not the stuffy nose—but this, being treated like this, a worker without right, without voice. I kept wondering what this—this being yanked out of your sleep at the most unholy hour of the night—had anything to do with writing??! Or, book editing for that matter? When the Cateel bus arrived, I asked the driver again, I asked everyone I could talk to. I was excited (and tired) to go to that old place, that old Spanish bastion, the only one they were able to hold in Mindanao. Then, somebody turned off the bus lights. Everyone claimed the seat as bed. The woman across my seat stretched her legs on the bus aisle even as she asked her companion (a male) where he had parked the car. Park where?! Aren’t they riding this bus? Then, I claimed another seat too, and lay down listening to The Campaign Trail on The NewYorker, for this was the time when Barrack Obama was still running for President. Then, a woman-a hefty one—came aboard grumbling because everyone has been making every bus seat his bed. I got up, asked the woman if she wanted my seat because I wanted the old seat across, but seeing that somebody had already occupied the seat I wanted, I returned to where I was sleeping.
A brief talk with the conductor, telling him I had a companion waiting at the terminal in Tagum, the first stop. Then, in Tagum, seeing Allan coming up the bus aisle in the dawning hours before the bus moved on again; and a few hours later, a drowsy glimpse of Mati, where they fix something of the bus engine. Snaking around the sneaky mountains of Caraga, I was reminded yet again that the place where nothing happens is also a place where everything happens. Away from the newspaper headlines, everything happens in Caraga. You knew all about it during breakfast of nilagang baka and fried talong in a rundown torotoro along the highway, people lining up the weather-beaten dirty counter, waiting for the steaming rice, grabbing a greasy table across a woman in her late fifties, her hair unkempt, her old printed duster had seen better days. She, too, would have been beautiful when she was young. I wonder what she’d seen in these places. Everyone was talking about some encounter between soldiers and the NPAs somewhere beyond the mountains. We will pass by Tarragona, the one included in the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE), Allan kept saying. Later, what I saw of Tarragona was an abandoned wooden shed and an empty public market, I wonder where the people are, what they’re doing at that time of the day. Maybe, sleeping??
When we reached Caraga terminal, I was already dead tired. All I wanted to do was plop down somewhere, bed or no bed at all, but everybody kept talking. Then, I realized sleep was still out of question. We still had a far way to go. We boarded a crazy motorcycle to a village called Pantuyan and waited and waited for the people who never arrived. They were trying to settle some dispute somewhere, trying to avert a “pangayao,” what do they call it, a tribal conflict? I slept on a bench. Somebody handed me a pillow. I slept until my stuffy nose was gone. When it was five o’clock, they said, it was time to go. We boarded a motorcycle that climbed up a newly scraped road. The soil was rocky and limey, like what I used to know in Argao, Cebu, my mother’s hometown. But when I glanced over my shoulder, I discovered we were already on top of the world, the ravines were the deepest I’ve ever seen, I’ve never been in a mountain as high as that and I did not even know its name. We were still climbing higher and higher to I don’t know where: Pluto, perhaps, Mercury or Mars? The motorcycle ahead of us went overboard, its passengers laughing. How could they laugh?! All around us were forest; a weather-beaten shack would appear once in a while, with people staring back at us. Except for that and the jungle, I saw nothing else. Later, much, much later, we followed another rugged, abandoned road. I thought, we were already close to the place where we were supposed to go. But later, I learned, we were still very far. The skylab climbed down and up the mountainous incline as high as 85 degrees. I was bowling over. It was a journey that never ends.
But later, I was struck as soon as I saw the place: a thriving Mandaya community surrounded by forests. Looking down the bluish haze of mountains and outlines of rivers far below, I said, this is heaven, this is the place where I belong, I’m not going out anymore.
But as it happens, I still did.