The mosquito and the scheme of things

July 30, 2007

I woke up in the dark from the incessant buzzing
Of the mosquito hovering above me,
And immediately felt a sharp pang on my left arm
Undoubtedly from her bite.
As I scratched it, I looked down irritably
Towards the mosquito coil that was glaring red and
consuming itself up a moment ago,
And all I could see is the dark floor.

Ah!….right.

The mosquito continued buzzing,
Stupidly reminding me of the roar of planes
From some World War II black-and-white movie.
Then the buzzing suddenly stopped.
I felt pain on the same spot where I just scratched,
I made sure she had her fill then slapped my
Left arm a little harder than I would like,
And pray that she’s dead.
I waited for any sign that would tell me
If I didn’t pray enough,
And just when I almost drifted back to sleep,
Just when I couldn’t hold my eyes open anymore,
She started to sing again.
I can almost hear her laughing at me
As my arm had stung again to remind
Me of my futility.
I was thinking of turning the lights on
And lighting the mosquito coil but then I
Have to stand up, put my slippers on,
Find the match…

(not to mention walking across the room
Opposite my bed to where the light switch is).

So I just groped for my blankets and
Pulled it up over my head,
Totally covering myself.
Hah! There’s no way the vampire
Can suck my blood now!

Now I can rest…
If only I can do something about this heat!
Beads of sweat has started on my forehead,
My armpits are getting sticky,
And I’m starting to get really uncomfortable…
I’m sure there’s an apt metaphor to lend
Support to some philosophy or belief
About this situation,
But it escapes me at the moment,
Besides, I blanked out after that,
From too much thinking I guess….

 

 

 

In Bukidnon, Cows don’t Moo

April 18, 2007

I always associate Bukidnon with the Kalachuchi.

For what reason, I don't know. But even as I write this post, the smell of the Kalachuchi waft through the air and its overpowering scent disturbed the equilibrium of the room. The intrusion is not at all unpleasant. Like a friendly greeting from an old friend; or a slice of chocolate cake in the middle of a diet.

I was about 11 or 12 years old when my family spent a summer in Bukidnon. We lived with an evangelical pastor who was the partner of my father in a potato farm business a few kilometers from his house.

His house sits on a hill. No, it's more like a anomalous growth but the dirt road knew better than to cut through it and offend the sensibilities of a messenger from God. So the road snaked around that mound — adorned with fruit trees, bermuda grass, a small garden of gumamela, violets, baby's breath and shrubs — before it staggers and get lost around the bend.

At the back of the house stands the Kalachuchi. So huge it seemed to dwarf the two-storey house but that's not true, of course — its dimensions forever distorted by a distant memory. Without fail, right after daybreak, the pastor's little girl religiously fetched the goat from its pen and tie it to the Kalachuchi. A bald spot around the Kalachuchi where the grass couldn't seem to grow just shows how long this custom has been going on.

At night, the shadows seemed endless; fractured only by flourescent lights dangling precariously on creaky lampposts. You could count shafts of light in the main road before the darkness swallows the rest of them. As the light of moon pallidly touched the winding path, the flowers of the Kalachuchi perfumed the air, adding to the ghostly atmosphere.

"It's the moths," the pastor told me one night. "The Kalachuchi tricks the moths into thinking it has nectars to give and so the moths come back again and again."

Again and again. Quite a deceitful one, that Kalachuchi.

But this post has nothing to do with Kalachuchi.

It was our first night at the Pastor's house. I was lying between my two brothers in the sala. My father was in one room with my mother; my uncle and two other cousins slept in another room near the kitchen. In the dark, the ordinary furniture looked menacing. Naturally, we couldn't sleep. As the crickets and toads crooned, we listened… for strange noises, for a deviant clatter, even a familiar thud (the kind that falling dead bodies make when clumsy psychos stumble).

Nothing. Every sound accounted for. The hum of the electric fan, the rustling of the wind on the tin roof, my heavy breathing. I start to doze off.

Then suddenly. I heard a faint sound in the distance.

I listened.

"Mooo."

"Mooo."

I heard what a cow sounds like when it "moos" and I knew THAT wasn't a cow. It sounded guttural, like a raw wheeze from deep in the stomach; a drowning man struggling to breathe.

And it's coming from the kitchen.

"Mooo."

"Mooo."

The sound is defeaning. A pause then a moo. I pulled the sheets up to my head. My brothers followed suit.

Moo. Pause. Moo.

It surrounded the house. It swallowed the house. I didn't know how I managed to sleep that night. All I remember was waking up all covered in sweat. I went to the kitchen to drink Milo and walked into a conversation among the adults. Obviously, I wasn't the only one who had a difficult night.

"Sabaa ning Janwart oi! Sige lang ug Moo Moo, di ko katulog!" my cousin complained.

Apparently, when my uncle snores, he moos.

There's no moral to this story but nobody snores like my uncle. Nobody should have to. That's inhuman. You scare little children that way. Even cows stop to moo when they sleep.

The look

April 17, 2007

 

Growing up, we had a lot of dogs. Mind you, these were not the uppity kind that ate only doggie foods, or respond to any command, or be jumping with joy at the sight of water as shown on those cute Labrador commercials on TV. Our dogs have no pedigree at all. You know, the kind that rabid dogs don't wanna meet in a dark alley.

It's not unusual for us to strut around the neighborhood with three or four dogs behind us while the angry barks and growls of the other dogs trail us as we pass by. Our dogs would be lapping along, assuming a swagger that's not befitting their non-pedigreed askal (asong kalye) ass and unmindful of the commotion they were causing.

Maybe that's the reason why we were not as attached to our dogs as we should be like the owners of those cute Labrador commercials on TV. Bath time were always a struggle, both from the dogs and us kids who were ordered to bathe the damn mutts. To put into context where we place our dogs in our hierarchy of needs: one time, we gave (donated?) one of our sickly dogs which died that summer of many moons ago to the local bums in the neighborhood as their pulutan. That afternoon summer of many moons ago, beneath an overcast sky, I ate adobong Blackie that I downed with an 8-oz. bottle of Mirinda. The whole experience gave a whole new meaning to the word "Down Blackie." hehe (God, I crack myself up).

But this is not about adobong Blackie but another dog named Blackie — for lack of imagination and because we had too many dogs, we named them according to their color and other permutations: Brownie, Blackie, Whitey, Spotty, Tisoy/Tisay, Nognog, etc. — who unwittingly taught us unconditional love and all that crap.

Blackie didn't have any distinguishing characteristics apart from his short legs. Judging from his name, the dog was all black save from a white mark in the middle of its head that splintered his cranium in two. He had the same mark on the tip of his tail that was always bent upwards when he stood on all fours. Like a perpetual "fuck you."

That's exactly how he behaved. He possessed a fuck you attitude, always looking out for a fight with our other dogs, even his old pop. Nobody touched the old dog, a grizzled veteran of many dog fights which bitten a lot of friends' legs that we couldn't care to remember, except Blackie. No sir! Blackie seemed to have made it his life's work to provoke his pop to be the Alpha Dog and fuck you very much!

His coat did not have the luster of pure-bred dogs. The hairs were thin and coarse, almost prickly and they emit a musky odor like a combination of ash and burnt pubes. Not that I know what burnt pubic hair smells like. He was just like any of our dogs except for one: we sold him off for P150.00 to our neighbor to celebrate his birthday with his friends.

Just so everything's clear. Even at our young age, we knew what would happen to him. He would very likely be somebody's appetizer before the day is done. We even knew how it's done.

1. You tie the dog to a post or a tree and make sure the rope is about two to three inches between the post and the collar so the dog wouldn't have room to maneuver and the head is quite still.

2. You take a stick, about 1 1/2 inches to two inches thick, and you hammer in a 4-inch nail at the end of the stick and you have a makeshift death bludgeon.

3. Whack the dog with the stick until his ass don't yelp no mo'.

See? it's easy as one, two, three.

I remembered right after lunch, our neighbor went to take Blackie. The dog was unusually subdued. I had the uneasy feeling he understood our conversations about selling him and he knew he was going to the gallows. As our neighbor led him outside the gate, the dog looked at us with dejected eyes. It's not at all accusatory, rather a resigned look that says "I can't believe you just did that."

I have to admit that I pity the dog. I wasn't such a heartless prick. Nor was my father, in fact, who sold Blackie. There was just too much chaos in the house, with five kids and 10 dogs. He didn't need the aggravation caused by Blackie. I'm not making excuses here, just an explanation.

The house was suddenly clothed with a sudden silence, the unmistakable conspiratorial silence that follows after a great transgression. That's that. Blackie's gone.

Or so we thought.

Some 30 minutes later, we heard a commotion from outside the house and so we all went out to investigate. Blackie's escaped! He knew how to open our gate anyway so he went right in and hid under the stack of lumbers at the backyard. Our neighbor was close behind his heels, clutching a 2 x 2 stick.

When Blackie saw us, he emerged from his hiding place dragging the severed rope around his neck, sporting a nasty-looking lump on his forehead the size of Batanes, and licked my father's feet. It broke my father's heart and returned the money to our neighbor.

Blackie had the opportunity to escape and he went home instead. He knew that my father sold him off to be killed and if he had any doubts, the lump on his forehead quelled all that. I've heard and read stories about dogs being intelligent but coming home was just stupid. Home's what brought him to that mess in the first place. Home was his ticket to one-way street. Was it just animal instinct that made him go home? Well, yes and no.

I should probably tell here that after licking my father's feet, Blackie proceeded to lick all of our feet. Each of our damn, stinky feet. When I looked down to see him groveling at my feet, I understood why my father had to return that money. It's not the kiss. It's the look.

You see, when I look into Blackie's eyes, I saw nothing but forgiveness. That was what my father saw. That was what broke his heart.

Blackie lived on with us for many years until he died of old age. He remained as boisterous, brassy, loud-mouthed, and frenzied as before. He did become the Alpha Dog and not a single day pass by without him reminding us about this fact by being a major pain in the ass.

The cat in the beach (and it ain’t cute, either)

Speaking of Tawi-tawi… I think the beaches there are comparable to the best in the world. With powdery white sand that stretches on end, clear turquoise water, and the wind swinging freely. There are no resorts there, maybe because of its image as the preferred vacation spot for the Abu Sayyaf group or its proximity to Sulu, another hotbed for skirmishes, which isn't true of course, but that's another story.

The one good thing about that is you have the beach to yourself. And so, Susan (my companion for the project) and I vowed to wake up early for a swim.

Daybreak came.

The sun started to rise behind the open sea, tinting the coastline with a carroty blush. I started to strip while Susan was busy capturing the moment with her digital camera.

Off to my peripheral vision, I saw an old woman draped in malong emerge from one of the many houses lining the shore. We watched her languidly walked towards the shore, each step purposeful, catlike almost. She stopped at the wet mark where the waves left an imprint in the sand. She burrowed the sand with her bare hands. We continued watching her, mesmerized.

Then, she unloosened the malong draped on her waist, faced the ocean, and sat on the tunnel she just made. That’s when we realized that she was relieving herself using the malong as cover. The term catlike suddenly took a whole different meaning.

We never got to swim, that just killed it off for us right there.