The Hour of Daydreams

by Renee Macalino Rutledge

  The road passed busy strips of scattered towns, where stoplights slowed down traffic and neighborhoods sprawled in the backdrop of restaurants, shops, and churches. In between towns, the fields that fed them twinkled with sunlight and auspicious bursts of green, proving that the mountains were a living, bountiful force. Higher up, temperatures dropped significantly, and for long stretches of the road the driver would be alone with those voluptuous spirals, fearing their treachery or moved by their silence to reflect on the twists of fate.

  After passing two small communities, miles of uncultivated land, several narrow turns overlooking rocky cliffs, with the bigger towns below visible in the far-off reaches, the road arrived at Manlapaz. It was not the final barrio on the route—from there the road would continue on to the other side of the range, reaching remotely inhabited lands that would eventually swallow it whole.

  It had survived countless storms, successive seasons of dry heat, lacerations from sharp rocks and heavy debris, the weight of a million vehicles, the heavier burden of loneliness, the chaos of music and voices arriving in a blur and just as quickly evaporating, the wearing grind of wind by night, the ceaseless beating of the sun by day. It had learned to outgrow the excitement of all things new and with time acquired the virtue of patience.

  With the devastating earthquake of nearly a decade past (after which a tsunami had licked a mile of Ogtong’s western coast bare), the road had also learned of ruin and the brighter consequences that unexpectedly follow. Six miles from Manlapaz, the mountain shook off a patch of its own dead skin, and the resulting landslide covered one of the road’s narrowest passages—blocking in the inhabitants with an impenetrable wall that was the height and width of a small fortress.

  After the quake, men and women busied themselves repairing torn roofs, sweeping up broken plates, and visiting from home to home to assess the damage and trade impressions about the tremor’s strength and timing and the deep, unnerving roar that had preceded it. Several days passed before anyone noticed that the mail was late and the seafood trucks had failed yet again to arrive and someone thought to leave Manlapaz, only to learn that the mountain had closed upon itself.

  Manolo and Dalaga’s love had begun with the build-up of cars that appeared in a row behind the landslide, with the tents that rose to shelter the villagers driven to begin shoveling from the first sign of daylight. For such an undertaking, everyone came together, working carefully in the areas just beyond the active landslide’s reach—women and children filled empty rice sacks with rocks the size of their fists, men teamed up in threes and fours to lift tenaciously clinging boulders. The farmers brought their kalabaw from the fields to help pull and relocate heavy loads of soil. Even the teachers postponed regular lessons to involve their classrooms in the character-building activity of disaster relief. The barrio they’d temporarily left behind began to resemble a ghost town as all other work came to a halt. Shopkeepers brought their wares to the roadside—hats and handkerchiefs for the sweaty brows, cold beers for long breaks in between shoveling. Food vendors set up hot frying pans over coals built into primitive stone pits at the side of the road. Others carried slings filled with bags of roasted peanuts, dried fruits, candies, pastries, and dried meats that they hawked among the crowds that either worked, watched the work, or entertained the workers and the watchers with circus tricks, comedic acts, or one-man shows. So the road, a transporter of temporary things, inspired a temporary city to come to its rescue.

  Manolo was one of the few who stayed behind during the clearing, along with the elderly, new mothers and their sleeping babes, shopkeepers who slept behind their counters because their customers were off to clear the landslide, and others busy preparing supplies or reinforcements for the workers who returned dirty, hungry, and tired each evening. Home from medical school and preparing for an exam, Manolo studied for hours after Mother and Father left in the mornings with a car full of neighbors to dislodge their city from isolation.

  In the quiet of the daylight and the emptiness, his mind free from the distractions of a complicated personal life, he was productive, a veritable memorizing machine—until the patients began to arrive. First it was a swollen foot, then a sprained ankle, then a case of severe dehydration. They arrived by way of Pogi, the town baker, who’d converted his van (normally used to transport pan de sal, chocolate rolls, and mango cakes) into the designated ambulance during the disaster effort. The first time Pogi arrived on his doorstep, pushing a man doubled over in pain in a rickety wheelchair, Manolo reminded him that he was not yet a doctor, but Pogi insisted that the barrio’s only other doctor was busy with emergencies, and therefore, Manolo had been unanimously voted as the next one in line.

  He began what he’d thereafter consider his first residency, learning with every cut he disinfected and every finger he bandaged how to enact the lessons his books had only illustrated in diagrams. Though Pogi only brought him the least severe cases, the interaction with these familiar locals taught him how to think and respond like a doctor. Many of these patients, whom he’d known since he was a boy and who felt like distant relatives, revealed a more vulnerable part of themselves once they were alone, so the simple tasks of wrapping gauze or taping a bandage felt intimate, and he performed them with the importance commanded and the concentration and finesse they expected. In return they updated him with news of the road and the work he did not get a chance to see firsthand. He learned that after weeks of effort, the road showed signs of clearing but the bulk of the landslide itself could hardly be chipped at, like a second mountain that would not be moved.

  The men and women continued to bend their spines and maneuver their already-aching arms and legs in the heat, but when days passed and their efforts showed little promise, the work days became shorter and the nightly carousing with drink and dance among a dozen bonfires grew lengthier. As the barrio’s supply of gauze and rubbing alcohol slowly disappeared, Manolo worried about their lack of self-sufficiency. The people of Manlapaz had been stranded in every sense of the word, with no choice but to clear their own rubble, rebuild their own houses, care for their injured, and little by little, shovel mounds of dirt from the one road that linked them to a tapestry of cities and towns leading to the capital’s money, bulldozers, and stockpile of rice and medical supplies reserved for such emergencies. Would the government’s bulldozers eat into the landslide and meet them halfway? More likely, they were too small to be bothered with, as good as forgotten and left to fend for themselves.

  He worried about supplies, villagers succumbing to heat exhaustion in alarming numbers, and Manlapaz falling to pieces—until Dalaga came to him on a stretcher with her head held high, and the worry was replaced by a different emotion.

  Palong’s sister had never entered his mind outside the occasions he saw her. He had known her since childhood. While he and Palong had been busy trapping fighting spiders in jars and tying string around lizards’ necks like leashes, she had been another little girl among dozens who filled the playgrounds and classrooms with the annoying wheedle that only a female voice could achieve. During the few years he’d been away in medical school, she had changed from the pesky little girl who tattled on her brother and expected her parents to spoil her. She was a woman now, in body as well as demeanor, with a chip on her shoulder to prove she was indeed all grown up and initiated into the better sex.

  The men assisting Pogi set Dalaga down while she was still sitting up on her stretcher. By this time, the living room of the Lualhati home had been converted into a makeshift receiving room for patients, with plastic laminate over the sofa and a small table of regularly used medical supplies at the ready. Manolo had exchanged Mother’s cloth-covered lamps for basic fluorescents and her colorful, hand-woven rugs for cheap mats, moving the decorative bowls and sofa cushions elsewhere. Rather than getting upset at her pretty living room turning into a drab hospital wing, Mother had been proud that her son was already performing the work of a respectable doctor. The men told Manolo he could f
ind them right outside when he was finished with Dalaga’s exam.

  He said hello warmly, still addressing her as he would a school girl to mask his curiosity, but her greeting was cold—a dismissive smile from a face that said nothing, so instead of asking after Palong and her parents as he’d intended to do, he began to examine her arm, gently pressing between her shoulder and elbow, then between her elbow and wrist.

  “How did you know it was my arm?” she asked, in so accusing a tone that for an instant, he thought he might’ve been mistaken.

  “I’m a doctor. I can tell just by looking at you.”

  “That’s a convenient excuse. You’re not a doctor yet.”

  She went on to question his character—practicing medicine without a license, doing the patients he worked with more harm than good, and finally, his lack of presence at the worksite, “holing himself up with his books and his pillows while everyone else toiled in the heat.” She seemed to believe he felt superior, and that the superiority was rooted years back when he first left the barrio to study medicine.

  “You know only books and nothing of real life,” she said, “Unlike my brother. I would consider him the nobler man between you.”

  At first he was offended, but at her vehemence his reaction changed from confusion to flattery at how strongly he moved her, and at how far back that partiality seemed to reach. He wanted to ask how she could convince three men to carry her on a stretcher for a dislocated elbow, but decided not to aggravate her all the more. Underneath the new and perfect breasts, she was still that pesky child—immature, hungry for approval, and too quick to judge. Besides, he was distracted—uncertain whether he could accurately perform the simple maneuver her situation required. He touched, fingers peeking through skin, at the displaced radius touching ulna, anterior band, and ligament, at muscle and tendon beside the connecting humerus. She was in evident discomfort and likely in immense pain, but made certain that her expression conveyed her disapproval.

  He’d encountered somewhat difficult patients in recent weeks—those whose smell filled him with disgust. A few overly modest personalities who made looking beneath the clothing feel dirty. Or the taciturn types who dragged the room down and made him feel disconnected from the world. Dalaga was the first who argued, from her first word—how—to the moment he snapped her elbow back into place and the loud crack of bone silenced them both. She remained quiet even as she panicked, as he crossed the lines of etiquette into the blurry cloud of childhood familiarity, where he held her close, shushed her, rocked her, cradled her head in his arms against the perfume of her sweat. Her breathing changed from quick gasps to slow breaths as she realized she felt no pain, and when the weight of fear left her body he reluctantly let go. She touched her elbow delicately and he moved her arm softly up, then down, feeling the layers beneath the skin with his fingers and announcing she was good as new. “You won’t even need a sling,” he said, his face an inch from hers. When she opened her mouth there were no more words, and Manolo fetched the men outside to retrieve her upon her stretcher.

  The following day, Manolo set up his own tent at the work site—four canvas sheets held up by clotheslines, another on top, its corners woven around poles—altogether enclosing two small cots, a table with three chairs, a giant cooler, and two cardboard boxes heavy with supplies. He called himself an EMT. His immersion into the worksite was instant and fluid; like a drop of medicine, the welcome novelty of his presence spread outward, energizing the familiar faces around him with renewed hope. He saw that the barrio had been transplanted. Pogi’s trusty van was set up beside a stand of freshly baked goods. Mother and Father’s card table waited beneath an awning for their midday game. And everywhere people and animals moved about, the smells of food, earth, and sweat intermingled between rows that had formed between stands, and foot traffic moved steadily on the streets that separated their worksite into sections. The landslide itself was messier than it was impressive. It was a hectic first day, as every day afterward would be. He had many conversations, several with Palong, who did the work of five men and still found time to designate tasks, direct idle hands, and pep-talk complainers into action.

  The two had been opposites from the start. Manolo had been the quieter, more serious one who obeyed the rules and sailed through pop quizzes. He’d never been a fast runner, but he was quick-thinking and could match wits when tested. Palong, who was as fast as he was coordinated, was always the first to be chosen on a team. With a strong, muscular physique and a baby face, he was an obvious favorite with the girls. He barely passed his classes, not from lack of intelligence but because of an uncontainable need to stay moving, jumping from one activity to the next, one idea to the next. In spite of his poor grades, Manolo had considered Palong an intellectual equal, and Palong was always coming up with ingenious adventures to prove him right.

  With Manolo back at home, the two had planned to go back to their old hijinks, but the disaster site was the first where they’d gotten the opportunity to reunite. Palong checked in on him every few hours to trade jokes and false insults, and Manolo could hardly believe his disappointment in the company of his dearest compadre, when he could not stop wishing that Palong were someone else, with curvier legs, supple breasts, and a sexy pout permanently fixed to her lips. He suppressed the suffocating urge to ask Palong his sister’s whereabouts. Toward sundown, as he packed up the boxes and folded the cots, she came finally, pouting even as she smiled. From that moment of relief and joy until the morning before a wedding that never took place, Dalaga and Manolo were inseparable. It would take him months to move on from the how to the why, to see that the road had always threatened to come between them. For her, it had been a way out, departure endlessly beckoning; for him, the road was a way back. As his peers from university left the islands one by one for better prospects of practicing medicine abroad, he’d kept his sights faithful and steady, always on the road and its promise of home.

  9. Stowaway

  They decided to take a trip. Just the two of them, without Luchie snorting at Manolo’s attempts to tell a joke or Andres’s fussing after Tala as if she were a little child, still learning how to tie the sash on her dress. Without Iolana around to watch them from the corner of her eye, wordlessly critiquing their actions, letting the occasional long sigh or coy smile speak for her. Because it was tradition to share their home with family and hired help, the lovers did not feel resentful of their lack of privacy or seek to have it any other way. They only rebelled with the occasional trip. Lately, with their long hours behind locked doors, rambunctious tickle fights, and carefree teasing in all corners of the house, it was a good time to go.

  The last time they had escaped was months before, on a day trip to a pineapple plantation a few hours north, with stops along the way to browse a small flea market and to lunch in a family restaurant on a farm, where the proprietors’ kids provided entertainment with songs they had memorized from the radio. Manolo and Tala had sat on a sun-bleached picnic bench in the yard, the restaurant’s sole customers, sharing a whole milkfish that they picked at with their fingers. The tomatoes mixed with onions and lightly doused in fish sauce were the juiciest they had tasted, and even the steamed rice seemed fluffier. As they ate, a row of clothes from a washline hung a few feet away, still heavy with dampness, with no wind to flutter them, and a couple of chickens bobbed about, occasionally weaving a crooked path between their legs. Water bags were propped to the tops of poles on either side of them, repelling the mosquitoes, and a row of ants crept along the ground in single file near one of the table legs. The green mountains appeared more distant on the horizon but ever-present, separated by miles and a misty vibration that was in fact the heat, causing Manolo to occasionally wipe the sweat from his brow with the bottom of his T-shirt.

  The couple enjoyed their meal, eating slowly, chatting about the pleasant scenery, the little projects they’d left behind at home, and hopes for the future, which included visions of future children returning with them to
this farm, climbing upon the table bench with their short, stubby legs, tugging at their shirt sleeves, or skipping joyfully to the adjacent field. They sat side by side, and every now and then, Tala leaned against Manolo’s shoulder and he rested his cheek lightly against the side of her head. After finishing a little more than half of their meal, they saw that the children who’d been peeking in on them separately or in pairs emerged altogether in a group of five. Standing near to the clothesline, they began to sing. It was completely unexpected, comical, and sweet. How the two eldest sisters assembled the three younger siblings, how the youngest, a boy, kept wandering away, only to be herded back in line, and how in spite of the fidgeting among the younger siblings and the patient orchestrations of the two eldest girls, their combined voices ultimately found cohesion. Manolo gave Tala a wink as the performance began. She listened to the children’s melody and nothing interfered with the purity of her joy.

  Memories of such excursions were unscathed in Tala’s mind as Manolo placed their bags in the car in preparation for a new adventure. Tala studied the familiar couple next door, who saw them off with a wave. “Don’t get lost!” they joked from their porch.

  “We’ll try our hardest,” Manolo replied from the driver’s seat.

  They seemed happy enough—Lasam with a beer in one hand and a beer belly to match, Lamata cooling herself with a green fan, her mouth slightly open in a half-smile. They had settled into middle age, bodies with a bit more sag, carried with an air of complacency.

  “Will we be them in ten years?” she asked Manolo as they backed up into the gravel road.

  “Our neighbors are like these mountains. They’ve always been here and they don’t change. Ours is an active volcano. It won’t go dormant for centuries.”