As we passed his house on our motorbike a little before the elementary school, we stopped
at the door of his house to talk to him.
“He lost his wife last month, kidney failure. She was still young.” Sheryll said.
He was the man whom we hired to bring the rice compost from the fields in the valley on
his carrossa to the house.
The carrossa is a wooden rack attached by a yoke to the neck of the water buffalo, the “carabao” as it is known in the local dialect.
A thick, slow moving animal, with a menacing and ugly look with his horns, who doesn’t fear insects or leeches when it wallows in the mud holes where he rests after laboring the fields all day, but whose meat is tender and red, like that of a turtle, Mike cooked one day, long ago.
I remember he hung it from one of his hind legs upside down until the suffering creature couldn’t resist anymore.
He then severed its throat from the rest of its body and left it there to drain its blood. This was when we were building the house, when they came back from the jungle where they logged an Ipil tree. He saw the turtle and thought it could be an “adobo” turtle, tiny bits of meat cooked in soy sauce with onions, garlic and black pepper.
The compost is the remaining hay the thrashing machine leaves in the fields after separating it from the grains, usually left in situ to decompose and fertilise the soil, which is sometimes burned as it begins to form a mound taking more space in the fields, a fire consuming the soggy chaff for days with the wind pulling the straggling smoke towards the trees of the jungle in the lee of the surrounding hills.
The “chaff” is left on the same spot after each harvest by the thrasher machine on the soggy soil. It becomes an organic compost like mulch that I use to boost my banana and mango seedlings, the composition of the soil being clay, containing little nutriments, its desert-sand color drained of humidity, hard like wood during the dry season.
The poor soil is noticeable by the size of the pineapple, banana or mulberry fruits the trees are giving, reduced in size, stunted by the heat, the overwhelming humidity and the variation in temperature, on the front part of the land.
In the shade of the Nara trees, the clay is laced with red-purple ore veins, and there’s a layer of decomposing top soil accumulated over thousands of years, being a primitive jungle land where the locals trapped monkeys before, and so the fruits are bigger and we regularly harvest hefty pineapples, and clusters of banana, if the squirrels don’t get them first.
I ordered ten “sako” bags of compost. He will carry them from the rice paddy on the carrossa to the house, at one hundred pesos per bag, which he delivered last week under the mahogany tree. I didn’t see him nor his carabao, but the dogs barked at intervals, so I measured the time it took him to go back to the lowlands and come back with the load, and I guessed it could only be him.
This is a secluded area, overlooking the swathe of the valley and the opposite mountain range traversing the horizon north-south.
Days go by and I see no one, near or far. Sometimes I hear a passing motorcycle, mostly on Sundays, when newly wed couples, with the girl holding a baby at the back, come to visit their folks in Tulatulahan.
No one has a reason to come here. Sometimes I see Cobra Man, a machete on his waist, going to the barrio on foot. Or Tbong driving his truck, to deliver timber to the sawmill.
We wave at each other when he reaches the Palkata tree at the junction where the path separates right and left, one going further down into the valley and the other to the barrio and the National Road. It pleases me that I communicate with him in this fashion, an acquaintance to whom I am intellectually related.
I understand his position, his demeanor, his attire, his surviving aptitude in the jungle, as someone I want to emulate and learn to cope with the hardship of life, who knows the value of every grain of rice, corn, wheat or sand, and what it takes to accept the idea of “amor fati” of Nietzsche, that he seems to embody with dignity.
“We need ten more bags.” I told Sheryll, and handed him the money.
They exchanged some words and I understood “bukas”, in Tagalog, “tomorrow, next week, or when he repairs the carrossa”, sheryll said.
The carrossa is the wood rack the carabao lugs behind, used by farmers to carry the rice to the mill, or when they plow the fields after each harvest to weed out the stubble.
The carabao is a slow moving, clumsy animal. When the mud dries on its horns, it resembles the warrior masks of Lapu-Lapu, the chief who killed Magellan in the battle of Mactan and left his corpse on the beach, “to let the tide take him back where he came from”.
I look out the window at half past five to think of the places where I will use the compost, in the morning fog like a dentelle wrap around the trees, a time when “the clear vapor azures all the shadows” , as Goethe writes in his letter from Palermo on April 2, 1787.
Blue and green birds fly near the gutters hunting dragonflies.
These are the birds of paradise of the Quetzal variety, with blue, green and brown plumage but with a short tail, an example of camouflage in the foliage when looked at from below against the mottled environment of the surrounding undergrowth.
Sheryll takes the boys to school and I keep myself busy tending the garden.
It is not a “garden” in the classic sense of the word. It is a primitive jungle, with huge trees and bamboo and creeping vine, and plenty of insects and ants everywhere.
To leave it unattended, is to run the risk of letting the jungle smother the house again. The jungle is a giant machine regenerating itself, constantly rotting the decomposing fallen trees, into new shoots of life in its myriads of forms and species.
It can’t but be beneficial, anyway I look at it. Even staying alone and living on a diet, with the scarcity of edible fruits, meat or dairy products.
Sometimes I read for an hour, or take some notes, or look from the windows at the formation of clouds, the white heat, the Tagak birds, sometimes an eagle ascending in the heat draft. These are my new occupations, I have reached the end of the land, and there is nowhere to turn to but face destiny.
The only bridge left is that of Puerto, or when we go to the market in Taytay on Sundays, or to the sea in Santa Cruz.
Bukowski said “poetry comes when nothing else can happen”.
Prose also happens when one reaches a cul de sac, and words become the only possible reality. Like when you talk to yourself, repeating every word you write.
From Monday to Friday, the boys go to the elementary school in the barrio.
Voskian is now the center of attention. Everyone of his classmates wants to be with him. It pleases me that he shows positive signs to adapt and is happy in his new situation.
On Saturday, we go to Taytay to buy provisions, meat, fish and vegetables. In the square, we buy two Buko coconut juices. These are green coconuts cut open with a machete to extract the juice, which has a tinge of salty taste.
It is an opportunity to observe what is happening in these narrow stalls, where farmers come for trade. Cucumber, onions, garlic, calabasa, tomatoes and calamansi,
fish aligned according the species and size under light bulbs, meat in chunks on chopping boards where dogs wait, the huts on rotting stilts on the banks of the creek on low tide sunk in the dirty mud. Abandoned buildings with trees growing in the crevices.
Dreams, impressions, ruins, rotting bamboo fences and swali walls and roaming dogs.
The flow of the smelly dirty water in the canal is hampered by the rising tide.
The daily meander in the street, a walk back into the last century.
The exterior walls of the church are made of white coral rock torn from the reef. The structure is consolidated by new cement pillars.
Sparrows fly in and out of the holy place with their characteristic whistles.
I had been invited to visit the interior by the priest in charge of the adjoining convent on the first floor, many years ago.
His room was the last and had a separate entrance. The rest of the floor was closed. Not many had the vocation to a life of celibacy and prayers.
He showed me his room, and on the balcony, he had two chiwawas in a cage.
He had pictures of a young Pope John Paul II on the wall. Priest clothes in shiny satin colors and scarfs on old wooden hangers.
A coffee machine on a shelf, two cups on a dentelle napkin, an old bachelor’s room, in its approximate arrangements.
Old registers from the 17th century of births, deaths and baptisms, the written memory of those who were born and have died in this remote corner of the island, originally named Paragua, near the Santa Isabel Fort, inhabited by the indigenous mountain tribe of Tagbanwa, a name derived from “Talaytayan”, meaning a native word for pieces of wood or bamboo arranged together to form a construction spanning a waterway, 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 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site”.
I wanted to see the room of the priest, the physical and material surrounding, and guess what could animate this man or what could be the reasons for his devotion.
What could he gain in the middle of the ocean, clinging on this raft, like barnacles to an anchor.
I wanted to attribute a spirit of some sort to this place, apart from the mild market cacophony and smelly gutters.
Walking the market square, had its own peculiar charms. The charm of “thrownness”, Pascal talks about, the origin of existentialism and alienation, in its early development in the mind, the flesh and the thought, the three “substances” being different entities with different “attributes” as Spinoza thought of it.
You have been “thrown” here on this island since the beginning of time, in this “first class urban municipality”, “a former pre-colonial ancient kingdom” and why not somewhere else, you wonder.
Why would someone come here and devote his life to celibacy? Live in this room with his chiwawas. Maybe he had a “hobby”, an easel on the window to paint the view of the blue sky and the bougainvillea hedge creeping up the coral wall, to distract his mind out of this impasse when he felt restless, or painted portraits of the Virgin Mary, or read ancient manuscripts.
What was his idea of the physical world in general, apart from his devotion to God.
I wanted to see if he was at peace, with the reality of these facts, his unmade bed, clothes on the chair, ordinary plastic sandals, and how he spoke to me slowly in a low voice, carrying the gravitas in the tone of his chosen words, like a confident believer.