How to Traverse Terra Incognita

by Dean Francis Alfar

  “Mateo,” she began. “Oh, Mateo, I will miss you. I love you so much.” This was all she managed, before she was engulfed by tears.

  She drew in a deep breath. “Tell Andres, tell your father that I miss him more with each day. Tell him that his house is in order, and how we managed to fix the roof, and how the hens continue to be good chickens and lay enough eggs for our needs, for my needs now. Tell him how I did my best to raise you as he would, even if we occasionally fight, even if you often choose not to listen to me, tell him how much I—Tell him, please tell him that I will be fine, that I can only look forward to seeing him, seeing you, when my time comes. Oh, Mateo, Mateo, will you tell him all this?”

  From Mateo’s lips, words escaped, so soft that they were almost imaginary. “Yes, Mother.”

  “You are a good boy, a good son,” Carmela replied. “I have prepared some things for you to bring, for you and for your father. For you, your favorite shirt and the slingshot you made yourself. For Andres, a pot of his favorite tausi chicken. Will you carry these with you, Mateo?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  When she was finished, Carmela gestured to Old Ambo, who stood at the doorway.

  The wrinkled man shrugged his shoulders. “Thank you, but I think I’ll see everyone soon enough.” He turned around and began to let each family representative in.

  Redentor Alonzo, childless and unmarried, left the coffin he made outside and stepped in the house. He paid his condolences to Mateo’s mother, then knelt beside the dying boy.

  “I’m sorry to see you go, Mateo,” Redentor said, clearing his throat. “I think you are too young, but I am only a coffin maker. Would you kindly look for my uncle Polding? You do not know him personally, he passed away before you were even born, but he looks like me, only sterner, and taller. Please tell him that there is something wrong with the trees that we use for our work, that they seem to be taking longer to grow, and that it worries me. Ask him for me for a sign on what to do, would you please?”

  “Yes, Tito Redentor.”

  One by one they came in with messages for their departed loved ones.

  “Tell Erning, Santing, and my mother Hilda that we are all doing fine, despite the fact that Tobias went blind since my last message, and we’ve had one more girl, Rosalia, because Tobias cannot keep his cock in his pants, and I would never consider denying my husband his bedtime privileges. But, and you must tell them this, Mateo, especially my mother—her name is Hilda, as I told you, so do not forget it: blindness is not enough to stop Tobias from his unspoken mission of populating the earth with my womb as accomplice, so they must send some other form of disease to further render him incapable of any amorous leanings; and that I am getting old and tired of all of this. And that the palitaw, of course, comes from me—but you may eat some along the way if you wish, just make sure that what I said gets to their ears. Will you do this for me, Mateo?”

  “Yes, Tita Selina.”

  “I chose this fabric especially for you, Mateo. The colors are in keeping with a better character than the one you exhibited just this morning, when you did not so much as greet me when you passed by my house. But I have no ill feelings toward you; you’re only a boy, after all, so it is not completely your fault. I have a message and a gift for my son Lucio, remember him? Of course you do, everyone does. No one else came close to his goodness, you know. Tell him that I love him and miss him and that his brothers who are both outside, who pale in comparison to him, miss him as well. We continue to be all the poorer for his absence. This bolt of cloth I wove is for him and him only. He can decide how he wants to wear it. He’s clever that way. Will do this for me, Mateo?”

  “Yes, Tita Menggay.”

  “Mateo, please give this coin to my brother Arsemo, and tell him that with this my debt to him is paid, and at last he can be at peace. Tell him I apologize again for marrying his wife after he died, but also that our love is as real as faith. As to whom she cohabits with when we both die, well, that is her choice—tell him I will abide with Anna’s final decision in that matter when that time comes, and that he should agree to it too. Otherwise, there will be trouble, and he should know by now not to pick a fight with me. Tell him I love him and that our brothers send their love. And Anna as well. Do this for me, all right?”

  “Yes, Tito Temio.”

  “Please give our regards to Papa, and give him these things. They are all new and unused, and he should like them. The bolo is sharp and comes with a good sheath, the pants are corduroy and fancy, according to the Chinaman, and the camisa is spotless, as he likes all his shirts. Please ask him, for me, when you are able to and only in private, if I can get married within the year, or even next year. Tell him my suitor is Emilio Osias, and that he is a good man. I am not certain if I love him, but he is a good man, and I am growing older each year that I wait for a sign. Tell Papa to ask Emilio’s mother herself about her son’s character, since she is dead like Papa, and he can ask her himself. Oh, please, will you do these things for me, Mateo?”

  “Yes, Ate Poleng.”

  “Mateo, kindly deliver these letters to my daughter Clara and to my wife Lina. You certainly remember them, don’t you? Yes, I know you do. Tell them to read these—everything I want to say is there. And please embrace them for me. I miss them so much. Please tell Lina that our son Emilio is looking to marry Arturo Macaraig’s daughter, Poleng. She seems decent and kind enough, and I think Emilio loves her. Please ask her to put in a good word with Arturo, will you? Will you, will you please do this for me?”

  “Yes, Tito Crisanto.”

  “I did not expect you to be the one to bring flowers to my sister Celia. I thought I’d be the one, frankly, Mateo. But do give these to her with my apologies. I would have had something better, but it is too early in the year, and these will have to do. Tell her thank you for her help, and that I am better these days. Can I expect you to do this, Mateo?”

  “Yes, Kuya Jose.”

  When it was Marilen Diokno’s turn, the young girl sat down among the gifts and letters and comestibles from the other villagers, cast away all the rehearsed words her parents had given her, and told Mateo only one thing.

  “I do, too, Marilen,” Mateo Nakpil replied, as the last bit of potency of Old Ambo’s herbal poultices evaporated.

  Mateo stood up from his deathbed and began the tricky process of ensuring that he carried everything everyone had asked him to bring. He balanced things on shoulders and arms and hands, employed his waist and hips, and began repeating softly to himself every word and message he was tasked to deliver.

  Then, very carefully, he walked over to his grieving mother and kissed her lightly on the cheek, and made his way out of the house, through the mass of people outside, who stood looking upward. He stayed a moment to watch his own coffin raised up to join the other coffins that seemed transfixed in time, before moving down the path only the dead could see, making sure to step only on the ground where the shadows of the coffins fell, and walked to the place of the dead.

  When Mateo’s coffin reached the prescribed height of suspension, when his mother Carmela stood with the tearful Marilen, the coffins began to move: Mateo’s at first producing a dulcet creaking, then, as it gently struck the coffin nearest it, emanating a tender ring, then louder and louder as the wooden coffins moved and swayed and brushed against each other, generating the sound of delicate wooden chimes, rising into reverberations of notes, percussions untouched by wind.

  Under the hundreds and hundreds of chiming coffins suspended by an equal number of ropes from innumerable fingers of stone that jutted out from the walls of the valley, the villagers of San Poblacion stood and sat and wept, each embraced by the invisible caress of syncopated music, at once communal and personal and true.

  In the joyous gulf of interpretation between sound and reception sprung fully formed expressions of endless longing and devotion; blessings, secrets, and instructions; words, maxims, and aphorisms of compassion, forgiveness, and hope; and an ove
rwhelming deluge of comfort and love, always love, forever love, from those who had lived and gone into what lay beyond to those who yet lived and walked in the sunlight.

  THE FACE

  MY FATHER’S FIRST love was chemistry, but his great love was my mother, and so it was that he abandoned his first love and his miserable pay as a teacher for the great love promised by my mother’s ample bosom. He became a baker, a more practical form of chemistry, forsaking beakers for bread pans, to prove to her and his father-in-law-to-be that he had means to place food on the family table on a daily basis. He told me that it was easy enough to make the choice, because nothing mattered more to him than her. It was because of his choice that I was born in a house that smelled of freshly baked bread, and grew up surrounded by its myriad shapes, sizes, and flavors. But first loves are never truly forgotten, so when I discovered my father’s long untouched trove of chemical apparatuses in the storeroom, he was more than happy to share his love of acids and alkali with his six year-old daughter—but always in secret, for fear of upsetting my mother.

  My mother’s first love was the Blessed Virgin, but she learned to love my father, her resistance eventually worn away by his resolute insistence that they were meant to be together. She never knew why he was so enamored by her, unable to guess that her physical endowments were a large part of the initial attraction. Her father advised against her poor suitor and told her that the Blessed Virgin took care of those who took care of themselves—advice that she took to heart and later passed on to me. She told my father that without means to support her, she could not, in good conscience, marry him. When he took on the baker’s trade, she accepted the fact that he loved her and, after agreeing to his proposal, concentrated the rest of her life on loving him, reasoning that certainly by the end of their days, she could look at her heart’s ledger and be satisfied by the accounting. But she never abandoned her first love, and so the implements of her faith became an inseparable part of our house, and of me.

  And so I grew up, eating my father’s bread and imbibing my mother’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin. After bedtime prayers, when he was certain my mother was asleep, my father would knock twice, softly, on my door, and together we’d explore the world of transformations, employing his secret stock of chemicals, but often also using materials from the bakery, such as when he demonstrated the miracle of fermentation of sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide by yeast. During the day, my mother would pass on to me all the prayers she knew by heart, as well as the saint’s names and holy days, and instructed me on the proper veneration of the Lady.

  Their worlds intersected when it came to painting the bakery, which my father undertook with a certain suppressed delight because of the opportunities to mix paint and thinner. My mother never disagreed, even when the bakery’s walls and paneling changed colors twice a year. She saw how happy it made my father and she’d take charge of us, making certain that everything was straight and even.

  I was nineteen years old when my mother exhaled her last prayer, told my father what he already knew, and went off to her reward with a smile on her tired lips. My father followed her soon after, for my mother’s absence had rendered him inert—it was only a matter of time before the rest of his body followed the example of his extinguished heart.

  The bakery was left to me, with the last coat of paint my father had brushed on. While I continued to bake all the varieties of bread, I proved dismal at handling the business side of my parents’ enterprise. I hired an accountant, a thin and serious young man fresh out of the provincial university, to handle all the money matters, as well as supervise our staff of two. With Mario at my side, the bakery managed to supply me with the necessities for daily life, as well as modest savings.

  It did not surprise me when, after two years, Mario knelt before me in the kitchen and, between flour-triggered sneezes, asked me to marry him. He had proven himself and his acumen to me, and through a slow application of his daily presence had already transformed my feelings from attraction to love. But before I agreed, I told him that I needed to ask the Blessed Virgin, for no marriage would succeed without her acquiescence. We were married not long after.

  In the next eight years, we had five children. We named our first child Maria Amor, for my love of the Blessed Virgin. She was followed by Mario Jr., whom we just called ‘Junior’, then Maria Socorro, and Maria Christina, and finally by Benjamin, each one of them a gift from the Blessed Virgin.

  As the children grew, the bakery likewise needed to expand, and so Mario performed the calculations, borrowed money from the bank, and made the needed changes. I stayed in the kitchen, working beside the growing staff for two reasons: there was a certain way to do things, and I knew my place was there. And so all my children grew up in the kitchen, amid the flurry of kneading, the heat of the ovens, and the perpetual thin cloud of flour.

  The Blessed Virgin gifted us with a handful of happy years, ending only when Mario caught a cold that seeped deep into his lungs. Prayers could not prevent our small savings from shrinking as Mario’s condition worsened. Then one night, he went to dwell with the saints, leaving me and the children behind.

  Amor was eleven, and Benjamin had just turned three when I surveyed the ruins of my life. I thought that I would follow in my father’s footsteps, and waited in bed to become inert and also pass. But my heart was not emptied by Mario’s leave-taking. It was filled with love for my children. I knew then that I could not be like my father.

  With next to nothing left in the bank after settling the hospital and funeral bills, I took over the financials of the bakery myself, in addition to my regular responsibilities and raising the children. It was fine for a short period; such was the efficacy of Mario’s implemented systems. But when more and more challenges presented themselves on that front, I retreated back into the kitchen. I did not know enough to negotiate prices, and so just paid what was asked, in cash. When some of the staff asked me for loans, I granted them, fearing they would leave if I did not. I neglected paying certain bills on time, which provoked visits from the electric company. And when the bank representative came about the maturation of the loan we took out years ago when we expanded the bakery, I just gave him a bag of warm buns and told him to come back at another time. He declined the bread and told me how sorry he was for my loss, but that almost an entire year had passed since our last payment, and that failure to settle the debt would result in the loss of the bakery.

  I did not feel right about asking my neighbors for money. It ran contrary to my nature. I could work. But we could not survive on bread alone, especially since the very source of my depleted family’s livelihood was threatened. With five children to support and no other family to turn to, it was my mother’s faith that was my sole source of comfort. I turned to the Blessed Virgin for a miracle, begging her while I watched over my sleeping children.

  IT WAS AMOR and Junior who saw the face first.

  They both got up early in the morning as I did, and went through their routines prior to going to school, part of which involved getting the morning pan de sal started, while I shook all their other siblings awake and supervised their morning baths.

  “Mama! Mama!” I heard Amor shout.

  “Mama, come here!” Junior called.

  With Benjamin in my trembling arms, I rushed to the kitchen where Amor stood stock-still, one hand pointing to the floor next to the display counter.

  “Look, Mama, look,” Junior said.

  I set my youngest son down next to me and slowly fell to my knees. There, on the cement floor, blurred on the edges but still quite distinct, was my miracle—the face of the Blessed Virgin, her eyes radiant with love and compassion, her lips partly open, as if waiting to release words of grace.

  The first customers of the day spread the word, despite my efforts for them not to. By midday, there was a crowd outside the bakery, all of them trying to get inside to catch a glimpse of the Blessed Virgin. With the help of Amor and Junior, who had not gone to school bec
ause of the circumstances, and the three shaken members of my kitchen staff, we did what we could to manage the flow of people. We set up a low makeshift barricade of flour sacks and fruit crates around the face, to prevent the overzealous from coming too close. The already humid air inside took on a heavy quality, as people mouthed prayers and reverently traced the sign of the cross from forehead to chest, shoulder to shoulder, to chin. By late afternoon, the people parted to let Mayor Esteban inside. He took one look at the face on the floor before releasing a deep exhalation, then dried the tears from his eyes. Mrs. Casaje began a new cycle of hymns to the Lady, and the mayor added his voice to those of the faithful. Throughout the day, we kept working somehow, as biscuits, cookies, pastries, fruit tarts, sticky buns, flans, pies, sweet rolls, and every variety of bread of we had were consumed by the crowd that seemed to have no intention of leaving. It was a few hours past sundown, when I was finally able to close the doors of the bakery. But I could do nothing about the candlelit vigil outside. Exhausted on my bed, tangled in the arms and legs of my smallest children, I closed my eyes and thanked the Blessed Virgin.

  Early the next day, the bakery was visited by the parish priest, Father Bernal, accompanied by several veiled women who held their noses high. He told those waiting outside to return to their homes and prepare for their workdays, that there was nothing to see, that he was there to restore order. But the gathering crowd feigned deafness and ignored him. I welcomed him inside, and he immediately went to look at the face on the cement floor, oblivious to the whispers of the women who accompanied him. After a moment, he turned to me and began to ask questions, all of which I answered with great respect, for he was, after all, a man of God. But when his tone began to change, when the quality of his words shifted to that of castigation, I fell silent, unwilling to give in to the painful implications he articulated.