The plan to be self-sufficient was composed of many echelons, or steps to be taken in succession over time, as one might go from one place to another, from one condition to another.
We had already installed the solar panels and the batteries on the roof. Dug in a well in the volcanic strata and consolidated the first layer of soil with hollow blocks to keep muddy water out when it rained for days and days.
I hired CobraMan and Tbong to clear the undergrowth in many directions to the house, up the hill from the carabao path, to the exotic palms and primitive trees on the declining slope, towards the swamp which was once a rice field, and up in the opposite direction to Toni’s lot, where the view carried to the mountains beyond the lowlands and the white horizon above the Sulu Sea.
No bombed buildings, no war carnage or blood, broadcast live on TV. In short, free of the conventions of civilization and its never ending wars. A view I absorbed from where I came from, which mirrored the world I was in.
This was a neutral ground, at equidistant from east and west, with only creeping vines and grass and trees with exotic leaves cracking like dry wood, with colorful birds in the drizzle and indigo clouds.
A barbed wire fence was installed on the carabao path along the limit of the land, and as it was advised, I nailed “no trespassing” signs in two locations where thieves were likely to follow, bending over in the bamboo thickets on the trails of wild boars, visible on Toni’s sloping land, to sneak up from behind on the kitchen side and the water tank, where the dogs sometimes barked looking at that direction of the jungle.
The problem was the soil, the insects, the termites and the squirrels. We were truly in the natural habitat of the early stages and the instinct of undomesticated creatures, like monkeys and parakeets with shorter tail feather flying rapidly from tree to tree, and once in a while, the unexpected swish in the dry grass of a snake, a cobra perhaps, suddenly letting itself fall from the citrus tree, after inspecting nests in the high prickly branches.
To work on the land was a romantic idea, in as much as I missed the era when writers spent half a day thinking where to place a comma in a sentence.
It was not a studied plan to have fruit production for economic reasons, more than it was for an epicurean desire to go back in time to a taste before the invention of glyphosate, they talk about on TV sometimes.
Planting local fruit trees like banana, coconut and mango was easy. I just had to dig a foot deep hole for the seedling and cover it with a shovel of compost mixed with soil.
It needed no maintenance because these fruit trees have adapted to the Pacific climate, to the dampness, dryness and excess water during the rainy season. I noticed that after the seeds I bought from Paris to plant, of radish, eggplant, tomato and guyabano, when the stems liquefied and welted due to the Pacific humidity.
The fruits tasted better, because I planted them myself and waited for the trees to grow. It gave me the feeling that I was the creator, that from nothing, I now had two hundred bananas, three thousand pineapples, avocado, mango and mulberry all over the place.
The soil, composed of clay, was poor and dry, turning into dust in the wake of tricycles on the path, settling on the grass on both sides of the road like sprinkled slush on snow. It was an indication that we were in the middle of the dry season, which lasted many months.
The soil was slippery during the rainy season, and on the shady side where the sun did not go, it was covered with moss and fern on the footpath where the motorcycle left a foot wide lane of nude clay, eroded from pebbles and gravel, with veins of ore that could not sustain the weight, and we had to push the motor up the bend to get to the house.
“We need organic compost, and more bananas to plant”, I would say to Sheryll, looking at the rising smoke in the fields where the farmers burned the chaff to free up space after the harvest, the white feather levitating in the still air of noon against the backdrop of the jungle green, mottled in a variation of hues, drifting over the fields towards the coconut trees.
” I’ll talk to someone in the barrio, ” Sheryll would say.
We had bananas in clusters of the Saba family we consumed every morning with coffee.
It was cappuccino for Ivan and Voskian, sitting at the table in the freshness of dawn at five, freed of the yoke of the world, invested, as it were, into a Dionesean moment of continuity with the surrounding environment, something I was eager to show the boys, giving the example of the varieties of banana we already had, and the many possibilities nature
still offered.
“We need more Senorita,”Sheryll would say.
It’s another variety, sweeter and smaller in size, we had near the avocado tree by the barbed wire fence. Those we planted in the middle of the slope, didn’t grow as the ones in
the vicinity of the Nara tree, and had a stunted appearance, with smaller leaves and dwarf trunks, because the heat removed the dampness in the soil around it, during the dry season.
Sheryll also looked for a rarer variety but couldn’t find it, with purple-green leaves, the ‘Morado’ kind, common in Mindanao, the island on the Sulu side of the ocean to Palawan, Morado meaning ‘purple’, when the fruit was ripe.
The idea was to supplement the deficiency of the soil with the compost from the rice fields, because it was easy to transport and use, as we refused to buy fertilizers and insecticides, that would wash away with the rains, whereas the organic compost stayed in the roots of the seedlings where I planted them for a long period.
People picked up some jack fruits and pineapples growing near the barbed wire fence along the road, but the problem was the squirrels.
I bought two traps from a hardware store in Taytay in the hope to catch one or two that would dissuade the others, if there were some sort of communication between them, I thought, like the dogs, answering one another in the middle of the night, when they barked back and forth.
But the idea filled me with remorse I didn’t expect I had, and after trapping a squirrel, which I drowned in the bucket of water because I didn’t know how to kill point blank, I figured I’d as lief leave some pineapples to the squirrels because this jungle is initially their natural habitat, and I was the one trespassing on their turf.
I had to show more resolve to combat red ants and termites. With the used oil of the Yamaha motor, I doused the Ipil posts and sprayed “Matalayon” diluted in water under
the house and on the wooden partitions of the walls, our domestic space, leaving the wilderness to the discretion of these numerous insects. It was like drawing a line in the sand, thinking the smell would repel them momentarily, before they came creeping from underground maze big enough for rabbits, established over many generations, everywhere
around the house.
In some other patches, the soil was composed of a top layer of soft, friable red and brown humus, accumulated over a millennia, where the pineapple, banana and marang were juicier and in bigger size.
These fruits had the sweet taste of a secret potion that took away the muscle pain of
body and soul, a holomorphic flavor of heaven and earth, that in Plato’s definition of the Forms “existed in the pristine region of the physical universe, located above the surface of the earth”, evolving, I might add, with Apollo, Dionysus, the Muses and Aphrodite, the mythological Gods of the sun, light, wine, and the desire of the flesh, the composition of the “Divine madness” according to Socrates.
A continuation of body and mind and the poetic elements of the wind and the rain and
chill of the moon, as we lay on the bamboo settee with Sheryll and had to pull up the bed sheets to keep the world of sensations to ourselves.
As we were nearing his house on our motorbike a little before the elementary school, Sheryll, at the last moment, decided to slow down after catching sight of him by the
fence, some newly planted bougainvillea that had not yet formed a hedge, and said
in a low voice before we stopped:
“He lost his wife last month, kidney failure. She was young.”
She probably knows his name and his entire family, and everybody knows us because it is a small barrio, and I was looking at the rice fields past his kubo house at the waterlogged canal by the coconut trees, the white Tagak birds flying like a bunch of kites above the reeds, thinking about death the beauty of the place did not prevent, life suddenly interrupted with unrealized dreams, two children and a lonely man.
She didn’t mention his name, but we hired him to bring the rice chaff from the valley on his carroza, the wooden rack attached to the carabao, farmers used to plough the fields or carry rice sacks to the mill.
“We have to pay him one thousand pesos, for ten sacks”, she said.
“Tell him we need the organic material that is already decomposing at the bottom of the mound, not the simple hay Tbong brought last year”.
They exchanged some words and I understood “bukas”, tomorrow.
“He will bring another batch of ten sacks when he repairs his carroza”, Sheryll said, and
as drove away, leaned to the side with the curve of the road as if she was talking
to someone standing there. His carabao was tied to the coconut tree near his cabin, and the carroza had a broken axle, lopsided in the grass.
The water buffalo, aka carabao in local dialect, is a slow moving animal with a menacing look when the mud dries on his horns, resembling the mask of tribal warriors of the natives of the archipelago during Lapu-Lapu days.
The owners of these animals need the strength to sift the muddy paddies, and when they are not at work, they let them to rest in mud holes to lessen the bite of the sun, and, also, because this is their natural habitat, immune that they are from leeches, insects and snakes.
This is a hefty beast but its meat is tender and red, like that of the turtle, unlike
porc or the lizard.
I remember Mike when he hung a turtle from its hind legs upside down until the creature died of desperation, wriggling its paws in the air as if it was swimming. He severed the head to drain its blood and opened the carapace with the machete. This was when we were building the house, when he brought it from the jungle where they logged the Ipil tree. He then sliced the scant meat he found inside and cooked it in the “adobo” style, with soy sauce, onions, garlic and black pepper, not grounded, but whole grains, that tasted like spicy soaked squib.
It’s a jungle in the full sense of the word, with some swampy areas in the valley converted to paddies. Some might say it’s a rainforest, but there is a difference in the etymology of the word, originating from the Sanskrit “jangala”, meaning rough and arid, with broad leaved evergreen trees forming a continuous canopy, whereas the rain forest comes from the German “Regenwald”, with a first translation of the word from English in 1903, a composite
of rain and forest, and a “forest”, by itself, means a wooded area that can be traversed, unlike the rainforest, which is impenetrable, as I was discovering.
For those who have nothing to do here, there is no reason to come.
Sometimes I see CobraMan, a machete on his waist, or Tbong driving his truck to deliver timber to the sawmill, or Uncle Ontoy sputtering on his motorbike on Sunday morning after playing cards all night in Norbing’s cabin.
We wave at each other when he reaches the Palkata tree at the junction where the path
splits right and left. One continues to the valley, the other to the barrio, which takes forty minutes on foot.
It pleases me to communicate in this fashion, as if we have an intellectual bond.
I understand their demeanor, their survival technique and aptitude to scrape
a living, as they know the value of a cup of coffee, a glass of cold water, and the
labor it takes to get a single grain of rice.
Goethe wrote in his letter leaving Palermo on April 2, 1787, “The clear vapor azures all the shadows”, in “Travels in Italy”. I brought this book and another of Stevenson from Paris, thinking it’s a premiere in this jungle, on this side of the world.
Green birds of the Quetzal variety fly past the house and sometimes hit the wall and die.
Beautiful birds, still warm, smooth like silk, when I brush away the ants already on the blood stain of the eyelids, confusing the sky with the wall because it is painted bleu azur, when they come up from the valley between the trees and reach the hump of the hill to pass over it to
the other side. A sudden death, like the woman in the barrio.
Sheryll takes the boys to school and I stay by myself in the garden until noon.
It is not a “garden” in the classic sense of the word, like that of André Le Nostre of Versailles. It is a clearing of a hectare in the jungle, with huge trees and giant bamboos and creeping vine, and nests of eagles.
Nature creeps back to smother the house again, with plenty of ants in different colors and sizes, when the flora regenerates itself following the cycle of nature.
On Saturday, we go to Taytay to buy provisions.
In the square, we buy coconut juice with a salty taste, perhaps growing in the cusp of the mangrove and the brackish water where the sea fluctuates between the tides on the Malampaya Sound.
It is on the left side of the road, ten minutes before reaching the market, waking up in the silver haze of the morning, with farmer’s huts and their plantation on the slopes of the hills,
near streams of water, bamboo fences and Nara trees.
There are narrow wooden stalls where farmers come to sell their vegetables, cucumber, onions, garlic, calabasa, tomatoes, calamansi, sweet potatoes and ginger. Sometimes brown honey from the wild bees in the mangrove, in a plastic soft drink bottle.
The fishermen with their catch aligned under light bulbs, and meat quartered in bloody chunks.
The stench of the gory gutter under the chopping board on a hot day.
Local dogs come to the shade of the Charity van and the Three Queens jeepney in the terminal.
There are huts on stilts rotting on the banks of a creek passing through the barrio.
Nylon bags caught in colorful brush strokes on the dirty black mush, when the sea retreats.
Forgotten ruins, moss covered walls, sawali bamboo fences and more roaming dogs.
The flow of the dirty water in the canal is hampered by the rising tide.
The daily meander in the streets of everyday folks, that of the natives, seem to emerge from the bancas on the quay straight from another century, coming from those dark islands sitting on the sheet of silver water with the crowns of indigo clouds threatening rain.
In a cove, a handful of coconut trees the beach, and above it, the jungle mountain in
dark green, and nobody there.
A bangca sputters across the placid sea, coming in.
Busy fishermen load grain, oil, plastic tubes, cement bags to the islands.
A naive sense of “becoming” with no particular reason like the existential Pascal.
The mind, the flesh, the soul, leading to “alienation”, and the priest in the church was
there to talk of God.
On Sunday, he may go to one of these islands for a funeral or a wedding.
The exterior walls of the church are coated with white coral reef. The structure is consolidated with new cement pillars.
Sparrows fly in and out of the holy place whistling, away from the cacophony of the
market square and the smelly gutters.
The priest invited me to visit the adjoining convent on the first floor, two years ago.
His room was the last of the dormitory and had a separate entrance.
The rest of the doors were locked. Not many had the vocation to pray.
He showed me his room, and on the balcony, his two chihuahuas in a cage.
In a convent, in Taytay!
He had a picture of a young Pope John Paul II on the wall, and another picture, in black and white, of an older Pope.
Shiny satin scarfs on old wooden hangers.
A coffee machine on a shelf by the bed.
Two cups on a dentelle napkin. An old bachelor’s room. Approximate arrangements.
A leather sandal.
Old registers from the 17th century onwards, of deaths, births and baptisms.
A brief calligraphy of the manes of those who were born and have died on this land.
Originally named Paragua, near the Santa Isabel Fort, was built by the Spanish, like the church, centuries ago, when the island was populated by the indigenous tribe of Tagbanwa, the same who are now busy in the market, selling vegetables, fish and meat.
Taytay, a name derived from “Talaytayan”, a native word for pieces of bamboo arranged together to form a construction spanning a waterway, like a bridge.
The early inhabitants of this island were the Indonesians and Malays, “a slice of heaven,
a sliver of an island with exotic wildlife, quaint fishing villages …”.
Maybe he had an easel on the window to paint the blue sky and the purple dices of bougainvillea creeping on the coral wall, to while away the remaining time of the day,
day after day.
Paint enluminures of Saints, or read ancient manuscripts, thinking of peace or redemption, believing in the words of Christ, in this corner of the room.